Villains!

Wow, CATS and Ansem are head to head.

Not that I think Ansem would be that popular or anything, but CATS has done poorly in previous Character Battles and Ansem is at least Square.

So yeah, I submitted an entry for the Character Battle for the hell of it. Obviously, I haven't been doing very well, but I've been riding on the peak of the bell curve of points the whole time. Which is either scary or comforting, I'm not sure which. I mean, a plurality of people made the exact same predictions I did.

The first two people I got wrong were okay, because they're going up against strong people next round, including Sephiroth. But I got Ridley wrong, and I thought he was going to win against Bison, too, so at least by then I ought to start falling behind.

Looking at the contest stats is interesting. As in, "You mean there are actually people who don't think Sephiroth will win?" There used to be someone up there who thought Kuja would win. That made me kind of happy. As much as I love Kuja personally, I don't think he's going to make it past the first round.

I don't know gaming well enough to make these kinds of predictions, though. I don't know how to weight the obsessed fanboys versus the newness factor, like with the guy from Devil May Cry 3. [I really want to play the DMC games. After I learn how to handle those kinds of action RPGs (?) by playing Castlevania: Lament of Innocence. But that's a long way away.]

But I think Square kind of got shafted in the way some of their games ended up with the not-so-popular uber-uber-villain instead of the not-really-evil more visible manipulated underlings. I mean, Sin. Yay, random blob of clear fluid. But why not Riku or Maleficent (though I guess people would cringe at having a Disney character) instead of Ansem? And where are Edea and Seifer?

I'm most interested to see how Kefka does. Never quite figured out his appeal, but always had this vague sense that it was greater than I thought.

Aa, asa desu yo.

[Not sure what that comes from. It just popped into my head.]

Apparently Avery seniors staged a fake Ditch Day today. I'm not the only person who assumed it was just Scurves being noisy and went back to bed. It's nice to know that Avery seniors are doing fakes, I guess, although I wonder how many will have real stacks.

This is another example of where Avery is hurt by not having waited dinners, though. Prefrosh Weekend showed the two extremes. On Thursday night, they arranged a special buffet dinner, and invited a whole lot of profs to dinner and the reception afterwards. It was most impressive. My prefrosh spent dinner talking to Ken Libbrecht about the physics department, and then at the reception heard about humanities double majors from Warren Brown before being mobbed by people like Tom Tombrello, who offered to send her a DVD of Stephen Hawking if she emailed him, and Steve Frautschi, who were both full of stories about Feynman and Politzer and Pauling. The way some professors dote on Avery is definitely one of its strengths, and the turnout we get to these student-faculty types of things.

And then there was Friday dinner. Due to a miscommunication, the dining staff didn't even know prefrosh were coming and almost didn't let them eat because they kept insisting prefrosh were supposed to have some ID that could be swiped. [They'd done that on Thursday as well.] And since it was International Week and the food fair was outside, there were maybe three Avery residents around. Most of the prefrosh just sat and talked amongst themselves, although I managed to snag one before I had to get ready for the concert.

So the International Week thing was exceptional, but the Friday case is definitely closer to the "normal" Avery dinner. There is not this sense like in Blacker that I can just walk in and sit down at any random table and probably hold a conversation with the people there, too. And it's not like Avery can invite profs to dinner everyday during Rotation, so this is the side that prefrosh are going to see.

Then again, who knows how the joint dinners in Chandler will go.

Unrelated thing that I was going to tie in to the "morning" theme: I went to PCC this morning to collect rye grass for my research. It made me realize just how obsessed Caltech is with having meticulously kept lawns. Is this where our tuition goes?

Tomorrow. @_@

Aaaagh, Ditch Day is tomorrow and there are too many cool stacks and I won't be able to decide which one to do! Silmarillion, Harry Potter, or Pirates of the Caribbean? *head explodes*

[Sarah and I had been considering doing Silmarillion ourselves, since there's was a pattern of having a Tolkien stack every two years, and reusing this treasure chest from the Hobbit. But...but...Harry Potter...and Pirates and... @_@ *exploded bits of head explode again*]