journal for 2002-09-10

animal crossing

There’s a second verse to Kapp’n’s song.

They’re best ripe and raw
or with some cole slaw.
Please bring me two or three
that I can gnaw.

I don’t know how many songs he knows, but I get the impression that he should know more. I’ve already heard a few of them two or three times, and after months of playing, I’m sure I’ll know them all. If the game is going to have crummy graphics, they could at least load it full of text. I mean, how much space did they really /use/ on that disc?

Animal Crossing is still way fun, but it really plays like an N64 game. I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised, but given the changes that Eternal Darkness saw during its port, I guess I expected more.

I paid off my mortgage, after stuffing my island animal with apples. It’s neat that she’s a virtual money dispenser, but I’m hoping there’s more to playing with Animal Island than that. If not, it’s not much better than a hassle that gives me money. Tom Nook was pleased to hear I’d taken care of the loan, and he said he’d expand my house, which will be good. Everything is totally cramped, and I need to move things around too much. What I really need is a cabinet that can hold more than three things; I wonder if such a cabinet exists.

I made a yinyang pattern, which is OK for a first try—it makes me wish I’d developed some icon-making sk1llz back in the days of Windows. I’ll probably try putting the pattern making tool on my GBA and see how that goes. I’d kind of rather not spend a lot of time designing AX patterns when I’m unable to get to my Cube. If I’m at work or out somewhere, I probably have better things to do.

work

Today, there was another handful of layoffs. Of the departed, one had written a few little database applications and two were the goto-people for their department’s ERP problems. This means that now I get to reverse engineer and support someone else’s databases and start directly supporting more ERP issues. This ERP system just makes me angry and depressed. I feel like it was designed by space aliens, and we’re trying to figure it out so that we can extend it; meanwhile, we’re not paying any attention to the fact that it’s designed for use by aliens, not us.

It’s probably got some kind of space radiation, too, that’ll give us cancer. But I digress.

Layoffs are always a little depressing, too, and I liked all of the people we canned yesterday, which makes it even moreso. I wish they’d just get it over with and then announce an end. They haven’t done that, and it seems like the implication is that we’re to expect more layoffs. I don’t know how we’re expected to work with this air of doom.

Written on September 10, 2002