It turned out that the reason why my phone wasn’t working all those months ago was because I had to get the sim card replaced… since apparently, by switching over my plan, it somehow died? I don’t know, I don’t get it either. So I had to pay $20 for a new card, thus losing most of the information I had on the old one. Great.

I haven’t really used my cell phone in the intervening period. Of that initial $50 I put on the phone, I still have like $48 left. The original plan was to have that money stretched out until I leave for Japan in November.

Then BAM, I get a text message from T-Mobile reminding me that my minutes are going to EXPIRE in a few weeks. lolwut? What is the point of prepaid minutes if they expire in a month anyway? I should have just stuck with my stupid fucking plan. At least then I wouldn’t have been hit with a $200 cancellation fee, and I’d have way more minutes to play around with. If anyone working at T-Mobile had told me that prepaid minutes expire, I wouldn’t have left my plan. ROAR. Thanks a lot T-Mobile support staff.

Fuck you, T-Mobile. Worst service of my entire life.

The first thing we ever bought with our points was My Pokemon Ranch. It’s surprisingly addictive, but not in the traditional video-game-addict sort of way. I can see why a lot of people out there aren’t impressed with MPR, but I personally think it’s enthralling.

First off, if you don’t have a DS and a copy of either Pearl or Diamond, this is not for you. You can still play with it by using Hayley’s (NPC) Pokemon. Every day she brings in several of one type of Pokemon, and you can influence what she’ll bring the next day by answering some vague questions. (Should I bring a white Pokemon? Fire Pokemon? etc.) Overall though, if you don’t have Pokemon of your own, it gets dull really quickly. Which brings me to my next point…

If you’re the kind of hardcore player who scoffs at the Pokemon side games and just want to get right to battling, this also isn’t for you. If you thought Pokemon Snap was stupid, you’ll hate this. There is actually very little user interaction: your main functions are to pick up and move your Pokemon, Miis, or toys around the ranch, and to take pictures. There are two camera functions that you can flip through, manual or auto, and there is the ability to arrange your Pokemon into a parade. But otherwise, the bulk of this “game” is to just watch your Pokemon hang out. It makes for a pretty great screensaver, but that still doesn’t hide the fact that it is indeed a screensaver.

The graphics have also been knocked for being PS1-ish in quality. It really depends on your preferences: my sister and mother love the cutesy style, and I find it tolerable. Perhaps our biggest complaint would be that they’re not to scale, meaning that our Igglybuff is 3/4 the size of Palkia. But it’s pretty understandable why that is: can you imagine 999 Wailords stomping around? Check out some of the screenshots below, and if you hate the graphic style, then yeah, don’t get this. But I mean, come on, cut Nintendo some slack: there are 493 different Pokemon, plus their various alternate forms (Shellos’ colors, Unowns’ forms, etc.). Multiply that by two to get all their shiny forms, PLUS render all their interactions with each other, the Miis, and the various toys, and then cram all of that into a 30MB download. I’d say that’s pretty damn impressive.

So why do I like this so much if there isn’t much to do? Because I’m not a hardcore battler, and I enjoy just hanging out and watching my Pokemon interact with each other. Surprisingly enough, each Pokemon retains their personalities from the games: if your Garchomp is adamant, like how mine is, it will go around and attack everyone around it. If your Alakazam is timid, it will be shy and stay away from others. Espeon, who is psychic and weak to dark, runs away from Umbreon and Tyranitar; meanwhile Milotic and Marill get along because they’re both water. There are different toys for them to play with, such as the microphone (if they talk into it, you can hear their cries from your remote speaker) and the pitfall (which is so squeeee adorable that I can barely stand it). They ride around on each other, pick each other up, use their various attacks, and run around and have a great time. Plus they can all interact with various Miis that you dump in your ranch. If Chiyoko dumps a Pidgey into the ranch, the Pidgey will have a tendency to hang around Chiyoko instead of Michiko. And every fifteen minutes or so, all the Pokemon and Miis on the ranch get together for some kind of photo op, which varies depending on how many and what kinds of Pokemon you have.

On top of all that, there is the Wanted Pokemon feature, which is where Hayley posts up on the BBS some Pokemon that you don’t have in your Pokedex. She asks for you to find them and then upload them to the ranch. This is a great way to motivate people into filling out their dex, as well as to add some variety to the ranch. Plus, there is a chance that she’ll ask to trade your Wanted Pokemon with one of her own, which often have hard-to-get egg/TM moves. At some point she’ll also trade you a Phione and Mew, which hasn’t happened to us yet, but we’re looking forward to it. I mean, a legit Mew alone would be worth the 1000 Wii points; everything else is basically bonus. There are some other minor features like Club Look-See, where you can visit another NPC’s themed ranch, and the ability to visit any of your friends’ ranches if they also have MPR.

In closing, no, this isn’t really a game. Don’t go into it expecting to do a whole lot. And if you don’t have the DS titles, then you should probably skip this one. If you do have the DS titles though, it’s a handy way to store an additional 999 Pokemon and get a legit Mew, as well as watch your creations romp around and act all adorable and whatnot. Graphics are okay, controls are basic, and interaction is minimal, but probably the worst limitation is that you can only withdraw Pokemon from the same cartridge that you deposited them from, which means no trading either locally or over the WiFi. If you have two carts but only one DS, sorry, you can’t transfer Pokemon from Diamond to Ranch to Pearl. Furthermore, if you erase the original DS save file, the Pokemon you deposited to the Ranch are there forever, as there is no way to withdraw them.

There are definite reason why this game is getting low scores from many major review sites. But if you can overlook all these flaws, you can get a lot of simple enjoyment from watching your Pokemon play together.

What worked:

1. Legit Mew!!
2. Mii integration
3. Controls and functions are easy to understand
4. 999 storage space
5. Pokemon behaving in surprisingly unique ways, based on type, species, nature, etc.
6. Wii-to-DS functionality is highly intuitive
7. Picture-taking abilities and opportunities, as well as sending pictures to friends or to the Wii Message Board
8. Able to pull from 8 different DS cards, so if you have other family members who play, you can see your Pokemon interacting with theirs

How it could have been so much better:

1. Able to transfer Pokemon from different DS save files (a la Pokemon Box)
2. Having even the most rudimentary of interactions such as petting, feeding, or grooming
3. Gain some kind of reward for leaving Pokemon on the ranch, such as leveling up happiness or luster
4. Some kind of trading, either GTS-style or among friends
5. Having a mini-game or two
6. Different environments for the different types, like a pond for the fish
7. Better graphics
8. If nothing else, at least make this title $3-5 cheaper to compensate for the aforementioned limitations

FINAL SCORE: 4/10 if you have the DS titles, 1/10 if you don’t.

Okay, maybe I am horribly nerdy.

Anyway, so this upgrade gives me an excuse to talk about a lot of things that have happened in the last few weeks or so. IN LIST FORM!

1. My joint grad party with my sister was about as awesome as it gets. Considering I rarely celebrate things like Christmas and my birthday and whatever, this was pretty incredible. My RL friends and family don’t read this place, but I’ll say it anyway: thanks for making it the best day of my life.
2. I’ve been asked to write the cover story for this fall’s issue of Malamalama. Nobody cares, I know, I just thought I’d toot my horn some more. The story is about the myth that UHM students can’t graduate in four years. Hooray?
3. FFTA2 is kind of crappy. I mean, it’s okay, it’s just… FFTA all over again. Which, I don’t know, doesn’t really justify the $40 price tag. Plus there are just some really stupid, bogus things about it, like how the plot doesn’t exist and the main character is about as interesting as salt and you use “magick” instead of traditional “magic.” I haven’t touched the cartridge in over two weeks after one of the characters said “akademy.”
4. Less than four months until I leave Hawaii.
5. Finally had a chance to watch every episode of The Office in order. It’s pretty great, but I think the show got less interesting the longer it went on. Season 2 was definitely my favorite, but I do like S4 because of Andy. :P Michael is awesome, Jim is funny, Dwight is… wow. Dwight is probably my hero.

Screw you, T-Mobile users.

I got suckered into signing a two-year contract that would charge me $45 a month for 300 minutes, as well as having that Top 5 crap. I didn’t get mobile-to-mobile because the monthly bill was getting to be ridiculous; whatever happened to T-Mobile plans with unlimited minutes being wayyyy cheaper than Sprint?

Then the dropped calls. OH MAN. There were so many dropped calls. I can’t even begin to tell you how many dropped calls I’ve had with T-Mobile. Sprint spoiled me by never dropping any calls whatsoever. Then there would just be weird bullshit stuff. At least a third of my calls through T-Mobile would have this weird echo effect, where I could hear what I was saying a split second after I said it. What the hell? I never had this problem with Sprint, or indeed ANY other phone service.

Whenever I e-mailed T-Mobile about these complaints, they’d send me a generic “Thanks for the feedback!” letter and not do anything about it. When I tried to actually call T-Mobile support to find out what the hell was going on, I’d get routed through several different recorded messages, none of them taking me to a flesh-and-blood human being. In the end, I never got the echo effect to ever go away, I just learned to deal with it the best I could.

Then yesterday at noon I decided to end my plan with T-Mobile and just switch to prepaid cards. Since I moved back in with my parents, I can just leech off of their land line and not have to really use my cell phone except for emergencies and whatever; why pay $45 a month when I can just pay as I go, like the commercials say? I called their support and somehow, against all odds, I managed to get in touch with a human being. This is the absolute first time that it worked, and it will probably be my last.

She told me that since my contract ends in April 2009, I’d have to pay an early cancellation fee. “What?” I asked. “Why should I pay a cancellation fee? It’s not like I’m ending my T-Mobile service.” Well, you’re ending your contract early, so you need to pay the fee. “But… I’m not really ending my contract, am I? I’m still with T-Mobile.” Ma’am, I don’t think you understand. You are ending your contract that includes your Top 5 and 300 minutes a month, so that means you’re ending your contract early, which means you need to pay a fine.

I have to pay a freaking cancellation fee even though I’m still going to be USING YOUR SERVICE? What the hell? Okay, well, whatever. I tell her I’ll pay the fine. She gives me the website to go to in order to put minutes on my phone, tells me I’ll be able to keep my phone number, says that I have 5 minutes of time on my phone so that I can set up my voicemail, and says that everything should be switched over within 24 hours. She recommended that I put some minutes on my phone so that I wouldn’t be left in the dark once the switch was made, so I went to the website and put down $50 for prepaid minutes.

Within an hour of that conversation, my phone’s signal completely died. I thought that was pretty weird since she said that I had five minutes or whatever to set up my voicemail, and I hadn’t used them yet. I figured that it was because they needed that 24 hours to get set up or whatever.

Fast forward to this evening. Right now it’s after 8pm, a full 32 hours after I had that conversation with the woman at T-Mobile. My cell phone still has no signal. I used the house phone to call T-Mobile’s customer service line. The automated message asks me to enter my cell number, which I do. It then routes me over to the T-Mobile prepaid hotline, where I am again asked to enter my cell number. This time, however, the system tells me that there is no record of my number in the database. WHAT. If there is no record of my number, how did you know to send me over to the prepaid department?! I ask to speak to an operator, except that for some genius reason I can’t speak to a representative unless I enter a legitimate T-Mobile number, and the automated system wasn’t accepting my number. ARGH!!

I call my cell phone from my house line and get a “The number you have dialed has been disconnected” message. WHAT THE FUCK. That woman from yesterday said I’d be able to keep my number, but all this bullshit does NOT look like I’ll be able to. Plus, where the hell did my $50 go?!

I call the T-Mobile number again from my house line and ask to speak to an operator. After being put on hold for twenty minutes, I get disconnected. This is actually the kind of thing that used to happen to me all the time back when I would first complain about the echo effect. I tried again, and after being put on hold for another fifteen minutes, I was disconnected again. ROAR.

So now tomorrow I have to catch the bus to the T-Mobile store and pray that someone there will be able to help me. I’m so pissed about this. I never had any problems like this whatsoever with Sprint. I wish I hadn’t switched over. If they tell me that my $50 is gone forever or that I can’t keep my phone number, I’m going to throw a fit, demand refunds for everything, and take my business back over to Sprint. I don’t care if Sprint’s plans are ridiculously expensive in comparison. I’d rather pay a little more for quality than skimp out and get bogus service with T-Mobile.

Fuck T-Mobile.

But then again, saying a few swear words in exchange for a damn good time isn’t a bad trade-off.

It always amazes my parents that I watch such vulgar, low-brow television. “You’re an educated individual! You should be watching artistic movies, dramas, shows with intelligent dialogue! Anything but this crap!” But I hate all of those shows because they’re so laden with stupid weepy drama, amateur (and often overgeneralized) psychoanalysis, and INTENSE pretentiousness. The thing is, once you’ve read enough literature, EVERYTHING that appears on TV looks retarded in comparison, and so if EVERYTHING looks terrible, you might as well watch the stuff that at least makes you laugh.

Plus, who are they to talk? They watch soap operas, reality shows, and CSI. All three of them belong in the category of Absolute Suck.

The #1 most accessed entry is my entry on Kawaii Kon, which makes sense since I plugged this entry the most, it has a lot of search-engine-friendly terms (mostly anime titles), and is probably the most relevant thing I will ever blog about. But for some reason, the second most accessed entry is “My Goddamn teeth.” And the Google search terms that lead to that page are just really bizarre:

• my teeth are wearing away
• the enamel of my teeth feel weird
• am i brushing my teeth too hard?
• when i dont brush my teeth i clench
• my tooth turns sideways
• strange feeling to top teeth after gnash
• kill the root of my tooth
• god damn cavity pain
• i bit my teeth too hard
• i can see my jaw bone in a line on my gum
• not sinus problems but gnashing teeth

And my personal favorite,

• i have a great pain when i clench the butt cheek

Hehehe. I love how these are all little statements as opposed to strings of search engine terms. When I stick them all together like that it looks like a poem full of mundane human suffering.

I’m also getting a lot of hits to the entry about my Pokemon team because people are searching for “pokemon porn” and “pokeporn.” Guys, sorry, there is no porn here. Why the hell are you looking for Pokemon porn, anyway? I mean, what the hell? I also got a few hits to my Kawaii Kon entry because people were looking for “unrealistically huge boobs” and “anime boobs bigger than their head.” The Internet is a strange and somewhat disgusting place. BUT SO AMUSING!

I got the call back from the good folks at the Aeon Corporation, and they have offered me a position in Niigata City. I’m supposed to leave November 6 and arrive in Tokyo for a week and a half of training, but I might leave a bit earlier so that I can visit my family up there first. Everything is still kind of up in the air, but that’s okay since I have five months to sweat the details.