Lots of Monkeys

The nice part about Street Fighter IV is that if I want a human opponent, I can just go online and find a human opponent.  The not so great part is finding out that my Street Fighter game has degraded since I was putting quarters up on the lip of the screen at the Yellow Brick Road arcade in University Town Center.

I’m a poor player.  My crossups are non existent.  My distance awareness is poor.  Execution is not so great.  Bread and butter combos feel difficult to pull off.  And the timing, well, don’t get me started on my timing.

That said, I’m having a really good time playing online.  Even if, after the consecutive losses people start selecting their second and third (and sometimes fourth) tier characters.  At least I haven’t lost to Dan yet, but I’m feeling like someone’s going to pull that on me at some point.

I’m sticking with Ryu, since at least I can feel like I’m somewhat competent.  At least the move list is familiar.

Through the losses I’m getting a better feel for the styles of play.  By the third match online I was reading the throw setups and escaping them at least some of the time. There were a couple of opponents that were well matched with my skill level, but since I wasn’t playing in ranked matches, I was getting a wide variance of players and styles.  I’ll head in to ranked matches at some point.

It’s kind of embarrassing, I put my quarter up and I’m not even there for three rounds.

But then I put my quarter up at the end of the line anyway, compelled to see if I can just get a little bit better next time.

And this time it doesn’t cost me money.

Well, after purchasing the 360, and the Street Fighter IV, the Tournament stick, and the Xbox Live Gold Membership.

Man.  I’ve got a lot of quarters to catch up with.

I got my Google Voice invite a few weeks ago, but only got my account set up last week.  I was hemming and hawing about the area code I wanted and just did not decide for several days.  When I went back in to check on it, they had added Washington, DC so I went ahead and got one of the numbers they had available.

I have to say that it’s pretty neat.  Being able to screen my calls is a great feature.  It’s like having a robot receptionist.  If I don’t want to take the call, I don’t have to.  And they are even screened for me.  It’s nice having all of my phones called at once, since I generally only have immediate access to one of them at a time.

I gave the number to my mother and had her leave a message.  So far, in my extensive tests, the voice transcription has a 100% rate of success.  This is for the one voicemail that she has left for me.  Also nice is the ability to log in to voice.google.com and just read the text of the voicemail or play it back.

Overall, very cool and interesting, but I am hesitant to throw myself fully into using the new number as the primary method of contacting me.  I know that limits its usefulness, but getting everyone to change to a new number is something that I am not ready to do at the moment.

In the meanwhile, I am content to use it with a select group of people as a test of the technology.

I have a large carboard banker’s box.  Within this box are hand written journals that I’ve kept since high school.  I haven’t written in a journal consistently over the last couple of years, and I think that’s a great loss on my part.

Without knowing where I’ve been, how can I see how far I’ve come?

Reading through them is often a bittersweet experience.  Especially during the high school years (Season One) where everything was melodramatic, characters were really shallow and character development took years.

But they are inspiring, and I’ll try to use some of them in the coming posts.

If I have to talk about Spa World, I have to talk about nudity.  This is because nudity, while not the focus of the facility, is a crucial, unavoidable detail of the experience of Spa World.

Spa World is a Korean style bath house facility, and if you go, you will get naked.

And it is awesome.

I had a great time.  I didn’t think I was going to have a great time, I had my own cultural conditioning, hangups and body issues to overcome.  But it was the last chance to hang out with a friend who was leaving the country and I wasn’t going to miss out on seeing her before she left.

When I first got to Spa World, I wondered if we had come to the right place.  It’s two mirrored doors in a strip mall with a garish “SPA WORLD” sign hung up on the front of the facility.  Once I stepped inside, it was a different story altogether.  It is fancy.  No lie.  I was greeted by a long hallway that led to rows of small wooden lockers.  On the other side of a counter that had giant rocks in it, friendly hostesses greeted us in both English and Korean.

I looked outside at the black tarmac of the parking lot, and looked back in towards the dark wood and marble floors.  I walked towards the counter, in towards the spa, and left an entire culture on the other side of the door. Continue reading →