Aleksandra the Great’s Exploits

The title really says all I wanted to in this post. I feel really guilty about not posting in so long. Soon I will write about the first semester of college and break thus far, but not tonight.

[Note: Those opposed to knowing anything about a game before playing it probably should not read on unless already familiar with FFX-2.]

This past weekend I started a game of Final Fantasy X-2 with my little brother. Stephen wanted me to do the Luca mission so he could see how the city was doing since X, so I obliged him and went to discover “the truth behind the music.” Most of the mission is a flashback, but, as usual, the player has to actually complete the memory. Yuna is dressed as a moogle, and at one point in the mission someone hands her balloons and says she needs to hand out ten of them to the people in the plaza in order to promote the concert.

Without Stephen there (he had already gone to bed) to point out the painfully obvious tenth person seated right next to one of the kind people who had accepted a balloon, I spent twenty minutes talking to people repeatedly in the hopes that their response would change on the fourth or maybe seventh try. No luck. The little child running around in a circle wouldn’t take two, and the grouchy engineer only said, “Do I look like someone who wants a balloon?”* So I gave up for the night, and in the morning it took Stephen about ten seconds to find the other person. He’s got younger eyes.

Anyway, one of the people who accepted a balloon did so with a comment about having to fill quotas. Yesterday, as I hurried past a Quiznos Sub sign and a man thrusting a coupon at me, I realized that I should have taken the paper from him. It wouldn’t have mattered to him if I ever looked at it; he only needed to hand out a given number of them and probably shouldn’t have gone home until he did. I don’t imagine that most solicitors on the street really care whether the coupons and ads they hand out do anything. They were just given the job of standing on the street corner in the increasingly cool New York fall handing out papers. So I’ve decided, thanks to FFX-2 that I should take whatever people eagerly present on the streets, not necessarily because I’ll actually use the coupon later, but because they just need to get rid of a certain quantity of papers.

*Not necessarily exact quotation.

Welcome to my real blog. Aleksandra the Great’s Exploits is made possible by Mike, Christina, and readers like you. Seriously, though, none of this would exist if Mike hadn’t set it up. The amusing title and tagline are his doing, as well. They’ll probably stay that way for a while. Christina very kindly let me use her website as my subdomain. I feel much more like a real person, now. Thanks a lot, guys!

Three things: 1. I will have photos from college on flickr (link coming soon, when I upload the pictures). It seemed a really good idea to have the photos in a blog setting, but Christina has already done that, and I don’t want to copy her too much. 2. It appears I already am copying her title style by not capitalizing every important word, but that goes back to Spanish and the good old days of The Acorn. 3. Right now, and it might stay this way, the category for my non-blog links is Sites, like on Mike’s blog. I’m not trying to copy him, either, although I’m sure it was subconsciously ingrained in my head that Sites serves as a good name for such links. If either of you (or anyone else who feels I’m cramping his or her style) is upset about how things are so far, let me know and I’ll consider changing it.

Eventually, Christina might come all 103 blocks down to my dorm to help me change the way this page looks. Until then, I’ll probably have the default settings. See you next time!

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