Sadly Familiar Behavior

Before I delve into my latest tale of my sadly predictable behavior regarding sleep, let me set the stage a bit with some background information. The weekend of Easter (I forget if it was Saturday, Sunday, or Monday) I on Chipple crafted my final piece of the Shadow's Embrace set; which was the goal I’d been focusing all of Chipple’s attention on in WoW for more than one month. Last Tuesday patch 2.4 went live. When I got home from work, I logged onto WoW, got the patch, and like basically everybody else found almost all of my mods no longer worked. I sat in front of my computer thinking to myself, “I really don’t have anything I’m trying to do with Chipple right at this second, and I don’t want to play without my mods, and I really don’t want to spend the time to update them right now.” So I logged out of WoW, and started watching some anime.

I started off with a few episodes of Pretty Cure Max Heart, but eventually moved on to starting two new series: Rental Magica, and KimiKiss ~ Pure Rouge. Rental Magica is about the escapades of a company called Astral that rents out magicians and other magically inclined individuals to people who require some supernatural assistance. As you can probably guess from the name KimiKiss is a romance anime based on a dating simulation game. After work on Wednesday I didn’t log into WoW at all instead I continued watching mostly Rental Magica, and some KimiKiss. On Thursday I finally updated my mods, and spent some time playing around on WoW. I also finished off the final four episodes of Rental Magica. This brings us to Friday my last morning shift before having the weekend off.

A brief aside here. I’m sure I’ve said this before, or at least I’ve described my sleeping habits enough that this probably won’t surprise anybody, but I stay up later than I should when I work 6:30am - 3pm shifts. Since I get up around 5:15am I should really be going to bed at 9pm, but generally I’m up until midnight. I mention this mainly to illustrate why it isn’t terribly shocking that very nearly the first thing I did upon getting home Friday was fall asleep on my couch. I woke up somewhere in the neighborhood of 8pm, and logged onto WoW and played until a bit after Midnight. I then started watching KimiKiss. I watched four or five episodes and was through 13 of the 24 episodes. It was now somewhere around 3am I did this odd combination of going to bed, but also started burning files onto DVDs. Basically I’d start a DVD burning, and go lie down on my couch where I’d fall lightly asleep, but wake up when I heard my DVD burner open up. I’d then start another disk and repeat the process. I think I was on my third disk when I finally stayed asleep through the burner opening up.

I woke up at 10:28am. I remember this because I looked at my clock, and my first thought was, “well I guess I can’t get breakfast at McDonald's today.” I’m not really sure why that was my first thought, I’ve probably eaten breakfast at McDonald's five time in the last year, so it’s not like this is something I do on a regular basis. I goofed around on an alt on WoW until about noon, got myself some lunch, and burned a few more things onto DVDs.

At about 2:40pm I left to goto Matt’s for his BESM campaign. The actual gaming portion of the evening got started sometime after 6pm. It was a really good session (not that any of them have been bad sessions, I’ve enjoyed all of them, but this one was especially fun); Dan, Paul, and I each had one really awesome idea during the course of the evening. Another aside here this time to talk about the BESM campaign. In Matt’s chaos campaign we’ve dubbed the current world we’re running around in the anime world, and we’ve picked up a magical girl NPC (which is fitting since we got a cyber-enhanced troll NPC from the Shadowrun world, and a halfling cleric NPC from the D&D world). Matt has also tossed in a few references to my last BESM campaign. Namely Obo, and the bag of never ending homework.

Originally Obo was the main character of the comic The Path, which is the comic whose setting I used for my last BESM campaign (and promptly advanced the timeline 150 years, and altered the tone well beyond anything recognizable in the original comic). My Obo started out as a Buddha like figure, but evolved into a GM device for inserting comic relief, plot hooks, and useful bits of information. Every time the PCs encountered him he was in a different guise - the head of a monastery once, a cashier another time, etc.. He was also responsible for giving Matt’s character the bag of never ending homework. Matt’s character was a high school student, and it only seemed fitting that he should have to continue his studies while running around a fantasy world collecting magical artifacts. The name is a bit of a misnomer as the bag didn’t create an endless supply of homework, but was really just an inter-dimensional link between where ever Matt’s character was at, and his school back on “earth.” Obo arranged for his class work and homework to be delivered through it, and returned to the school once Matt’s character placed the completed work back in the bag. Matt must have liked the idea, as he inflicted it upon the magical girl NPC.

The basic details of the current plot in Matt’s campaign would be our group of inter-dimensional travelers had stumbled across something utterly ancient, and alien beyond human understating buried in Antarctica on the anime world (from Matt’s descriptions of it I keep picturing a huge robotic looking thing - 20 stories tall if I recall correctly, but the theme and tone he is clearly, and successfully, portraying is Lovecraftian in nature). We were trying to get it dug out of the ice, without waking it up, and moved to the nearby inter-dimensional portal leading to its realm.

It woke up. One truly epic battle ensued. We were succeeding in destroying it, but it became apparent to us that upon its destruction it would explode with the force of, as Matt phrased it, a few nuclear bombs. Dan’s wizard had the idea to create some Portal style portals between the about to explode alien monstrosity and the inter-dimensional portal leading to its realm. So we got it out of the anime world before it exploded, but we were unable to get the inter-dimensional portal closed before the explosion happened. Fortunately we have a sentient NPC ship capable of traveling between the dimensions (we call it Bob) we could hide in, unfortunately we knew from prior experience with these things, they can hurt Bob. This is where Paul’s great idea came in. One of the magical items we picked up in the D&D world was Lyre of Building. One of the neat uses of a Lyre of Building is protecting a structure from damaging effects including such powerful effects as disintegration. Paul’s character used the Lyre of Building to reinforce Bob before the massive explosion. So instead of being thrown through inter-dimensional space-time in a heavily damaged, and unconscious Bob, we got thrown through inter-dimensional space-time in basically unharmed Bob (his sensors were fried, but easily repaired). However we were still lost, and adrift somewhere in the multiuniverse. This is where my idea came in, as I realized our magical girl’s bag of never ending homework was linked to the world we had just been blown off of. With Bob’s sensors repaired it was an easy task to follow that link back to where we started. That is were we ended the session.

Now back to my tale.

We finished up with gaming around 11pm, and proceeded to play some Super Smash Bros. Brawl until after midnight. Paul and Matt continued on after that, I played around on the Internet. Paul and I left Matt’s well after 4am (somewhere around 4:20am I think). I arrived back at my house just a few minutes after 5am. I thought to myself hey since I was thinking about breakfast at McDonald's when I woke up, I’ll stay up until 7am and actually eat breakfast there today. So I start watching KimiKiss again. I didn't just stay up until 7am, I finish the series all 11 remaining episodes. It was now around 9:30am so I went to eat my breakfast at McDonald's. And I noticed that Across the Universe was available to rent at the Redbox there. I got home a bit after 10am, and I watched Across the Universe (really, really good by the way). Once that was over it was somewhere between 12:15pm and 12:30pm and I was still feeling like watching a movie, so I put in Hott Fuzz (if you haven’t watched that, you should really put it atop your “to do” list).

Now it was roughly 3pm Sunday, and I’d been awake since 10:28am Saturday. Did I go to sleep? Nope I started watching another new anime called Kekkaishi. This is a 52 episode shōnen action series with a supernatural theme. I continued to watch it until I fell asleep sometime after 6:30pm. I woke up at about 1am. Did I go back to bed? No that would be reasonable, and intelligent, I started watching Kekkaishi again. I did this until about 8:30am - 9am Monday morning (at some point in there I did pause to watch the movie Smokin' Aces which I found to be kinda meh) when I decide that since I needed to take the movie back to the Redbox at McDonald's I might as well eat breakfast there again. I came back from breakfast and again started in on Kekkaishi. I continued this until about 1pm when I needed to get ready for work. All in all I watched the first 35 episodes of Kekkaishi (basically 14.5 hours of anime).

That is my tale of foolish behavior. A few general notes on anime. In addition to those I’ve mentioned above, I’ve finished Oh! Edo Rocket, Clannad, and Spice and Wolf. I loved all three, and with any luck I’ll have some more to say about them soon. But now I’m going to see if I cannot finish off the final episode of Rosario + Vampire before I have to leave for work today.