Well, the e-mails saying, "Hey, Wendy! Are you still alive?" have started to trickle in, so I thought I'd better post something.

I am most certainly still alive. They've been keeping me quite busy at the new job, and it's been a bit of an adjustment. I'm enjoying it, but from 9 in the morning till 8 at night most weekdays, I'm either at work or commuting. Lots of things that I used to do at little odd moments during my day now have to be done during my time off. Hence my schedule has been somewhat in disarray.

However, I get every other Friday off, which is pretty darn civilized. Actually, this whole business of having real weekends, much less real three day weekends, regularly, is kind of weird to me. When you're a grad student, even when you don't go into the lab on a weekend, there's a little guilt voice in your head saying, "Well, you should really go in and do that experiment." And my advisor was incredibly fond of scheduling meetings on Monday holidays, so it's been ages since I had a real three day weekend.

Not that I really expect to spend this weekend slacking. I have plenty to do. There's a bit of freelance proposal editing to be polished off. A short story to be worked on. Computer software to be updated. Dry cleaning to be picked up.

And, of course, there's Final Fantasy X: The other major reason why you haven't heard much from me lately. I'm still so impressed by this game. It's probably the first game that I'd be willing to apply the term "interactive movie" to in a non-pejorative sense. It has the production values and storyline of a good animated movie, with the interactivity of a game. In fact, the mid-to-late part of the game, when plot revelations start coming thick and fast, is pretty watchable as a movie. A couple of times during the past week, Daniel has just sat and watched me play for an hour or two.

I'm now at the stage where I've played through 90% of the plot, and now have the option of wandering around the world in a relatively freeform way, tying up loose ends and doing side quests, or triggering the final showdown with the boss baddie. I'm tying up the loose ends, partly because I think I need to get my party buffed up before the final showdown, and partly because I'm not ready for the game to end yet. I'm enjoying it too much.

And besides, I totally have a crush on Auron. But wouldn't you?

Scary thing that I came upon while googling for the above pic: Final Fantasy X slash fiction. Final Fantasy X Auron/Rikku slash fiction. Eeeew. That's Just Wrong. Rikku's not even old enough to be legal.

You know, we put the internet to some funny uses: Personality quizzes. Trading smutty stories about computer game characters. Dancing hamsters.

Next thing you know, people will be posting long rambles about the mundane trivia of their lives for total strangers to read.

Okay, must go: Daniel has a question about Cascading Style Sheets. Later...