I finally received an invite code to Dreamwidth, and whoah, it’s bloody nifty! I haven’t been this excited about a new Internet “toy” since when I discovered Facebook several years ago, haha! Despite it being in beta stages right now, I’m liking it so far! I’m glad I got that invite code! I’ve been wanting to try it (and snag my username, muhahaha), and I certainly do not regret it!

Aside from this discovery, nothing exciting is happening to me, unless you count office drama and BS, which is not something I shall be writing about here (at least on this blog). Aside from that nastiness, I’m re-reading The Lord of the Rings, hanging out with friends, and am trying to fill this entry up with nonsense. XD Honestly, I only wrote this entry up so I could test JournalPress onto both LJ and DW.

Enough babbling from me. Time to click “publish”.

For those who are unaware, Amazon is being cuntastically uncool about stripping off ranks and eliminating GLBT-themed literature from their global search engines. Not to mention, when you do the “All Departments” search for “homosexuality”, the results are horrendously appalling!

Basically, any gay eroticas (apparently straight eroticas included, too), any YA books that have GLBT themes, are being discriminated upon. Not all are being discriminated upon, but a lot of them are. Some of the authors contacted Amazon directly about this, but they were basically told that adult-themed literature were being taken off of the global search and not ranked any longer. However, later, after many people contacted them, they said it was a “glitch” in the system . . . Glitch my arse. People can be stupid, but in this case, we know it’s not a freaking glitch.

Here are some links about the situation for those who are in the dark about it.

* Here’s a nice LJ entry that explains the start of it all.
* Here’s an entry — after you scroll down a bit — that has a compilation of major articles that are floating around the web about this whole #amazonfail situation. Also the entry has a link to a petition.
* Here’s an interesting theory about what may have happened with Amazon’s so-called “glitch”. Now whether it’s true or not, it is an interesting angle, but I don’t think it’s really true.
* Twitter’s storm about this whole thing. The real-time updates are — WOW. Talk about hard to keep up.
* List of books that are affected in this “glitch”.

As a long-time, loyal customer of Amazon, I have to say that I am pretty miffed about this. I depended on them to get stuff I could never get here, and I depended on them for the fact that they are one of the few online retailers to be NICE about shipping to US military addresses — which I have. To read and hear about all this is really disappointing. I do hope they fix all this!

ETA: So an explanation pops up. Great. That’s something. I can accept that it’s a glitch. What I can’t accept are the facts that this started in February, and that the authors received notification about their works being targeted because it was deemed “adult”. Bah.

Just give us a formal apology, especially to the authors/writers affected, and make sure this sort of thing doesn’t happen again!

In about a week, I went from being some video game nerd to the following: a Tolkien nerd and a Holocaust nerd.

How that happened was simple. About a week and a half ago, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers was on TV, and I ended up watching the last hour of it at work. That fuelled me to wanting to re-watch the extended version of all three movies, and that I did! Except my video tapes that have the copy of the extended edition are kind of in poor quality . . . so it was a bit of a pain to watch. Oh, and during that process, I received a new second-hand VCR. See, I was so afraid that my old VCR would actually eat my tapes, so I asked Daddy if there’s another VCR around the house. There was. A Panasonic one, with a remote! After not having a VCR remote for years, I am happy! On the flip side, though, now all my electronics — minus my game systems — are Panasonics. O_O;; I guess my parents like that company.

Anyway, watching the trilogy encouraged me to wanting to re-read The Hobbit and the first two books of the trilogy (I never finished the third one). However, I wanted a new copy of The Lord of the Rings — no thanks to my rabbit chewing parts of it up, oops — and so I scoured Amazon for a copy that wasn’t the crappy Del Rey’s mass market paperback. I ended up choosing to buy this edition along with two mangas. Yay! While waiting for it, I decided to re-read The Hobbit, but upon this reading, I found so many typos; thus I came to the conclusion that I needed to find a new (or second hand) copy of that book. Again, a copy that’s not the Del Rey’s mass market paperback version!

That’s what led me into a second-hand book store yesterday. I looked for about a half an hour, but they didn’t have what I was looking for. Instead, they had this gem, The Hidden Life of Otto Frank for 6,000 won = $4.50. That made my day. As a Holocaust junkie, a self-proclaimed expert on Anne Frank, I’ve been dying to read this, and now I am! I was a few chapter into the book when I took a break and surfed Wikipedia about the Frank family and their helpers. I stumbled upon Miep Gies’ official home page, where I was surprised to see that she’s 100 now, and that her book, Anne Frank Remembered has been through a revision for her centennial birthday. WAH! Now I must get that revised edition — never mind the fact that I have the original that I read practically every year!

In the end, though, I’m trying to figure myself out on whether I’m that flighty and easily distracted because of my short attention span, or that’s just how I deal with things when I have such varied interests. I know, for sure, after I read that book about Otto Frank, I will move onto Angels in America — it came in an Amazon package with the book, the DVD adaptation of the play, and a new DS game.

Yes, apparently, I have plenty to keep myself occupied with — although next thing I know, I will be jumping onto the 1920s mafia bandwagon or something. Merlin knows what I’ll be interested in next!

Here’s a real entry that’s not . . . related to gaming (sort of). Keyword: SORT OF.

$2 Bill Came into My Possession!
Thanks to a friend, I finally got a $2 bill, something I cannot find in Korea! Whoo hoo! My mother wouldn’t give me hers, so I requested my friend to get one when he went off to Cali, and so he did. :D Of course, I showed it to my mother, and she wanted my friend to get more for our relatives. Apparently, it’s good luck to have that bill in our wallets. However, I had to tell her that my friend isn’t going back to the states any time soon, so too bad, Mother!

Riding the KTX to Gumi
I rode the KTX for the first time this past Wednesday. It wasn’t bad. It certainly was fast! $23ish bucks for a regular train ticket to Gumi, which took two hours? Not bad at all. Gumi was interesting . . . very small and boring. ~_~;; I don’t think I could live in a small city like that. No way, Jose. I’ll stick with metropolitan cities like Seoul or Tokyo.

Cate West: The Vanishing Files
I beat this game today, making me beat two games in two weeks. I’m on a gaming roll, haha! Anyway, this game wasn’t all that great. Then again, I am not the type to enjoy “Where’s Waldo” type games. It was okay. The plot was sort of decent, but it was strangely predictable. Wow.

Snack Time!
I acquired some Tim-Tams and giant strawberry Pocky! I be happy!

Conclusion
Okay, I think I’m still suffering from my anti-blogging mood. I have other things to do!

I received my copy of Suikoden Tierkreis last Monday. I beat it today. I played about 42ish hours (in reality, I probably played over 50 hours) in nine days. I was on a rampage with this game, woot! Here’s my review of the game.

The Goods
- JALE, BUSCHE, and ATRIE <3
- Roberto, Asad, Liu, Luo-tao, and other awesome characters rock my socks!
- Marica, Minen, Sophia, and Diadora are awesome female characters.
- The story itself was interesting. Quite deep for a DS RPG.
- The anime character designs were gorgeous.
- Jale/MC, Atrie/MC, Tsaubern/Busche, Liu/Luo-Tao, Sham/Taj, and MC/Roberto are practically canon. :D My yaoi-dar is happy!

The Bads
- Maybelle. UGH. She’s like this version of Nina (from Suikoden II).
- The character’s walking speed aggravated me.
- While the anime character designs were awesome, the 3-D sprites looked fugly.
- The menu interface was a bit clunky and not organised. Prime example was trying to search for your characters to buy equipments for — 90ish of them and they aren’t listed alphabetically. AUGH.
- I wished they had an option to turn the voice acting off. X_X;; Some were okay, but some where just BLARGH.
- How come no “new game +” feature?!

The Uglies
- The enemy encounter rate was ridiculous. Fans say Suikoden IV had the worst encounter rate of the series. I beg to differ. At least with Suikoden IV, you have an accessory that will prevent you from encountering low-level enemies. In ST, you just had to spam your escape button.
- The main character’s voice was hideous. He talked like he was stuck in accelerando mode almost all the time.
- Recruiting Namna pissed my brains out. I hated that . . . THING.
- THE DUNGEONS WERE AWFUL. Combined that with high encounter rate, many twists and turns, and many DEAD ENDS that had no treasure chest . . . Yeah, I nearly wanted to throw a bomb at the game designer for this annoyance.
- I wished it had some obvious connections to the main series, like recurring characters and whatnot. I missed having Viki for instant teleportation!

Conclusion
All in all, I was satisfied with the game despite certain flaws that made me go BUH. Now I just hope the next Suikoden game Konami brings out goes back to the main series universe, PLEASE.

Final Note
A “normal” entry (not game-related) will appear soon since I actually have stuff that had happened to me within the last week as well. :D