IT SNOWED TODAY!!!

Well, okay, it started lightly snowing around 1 p.m., and it only lasted about half an hour. But it was snow, okay? And it was really cold, and I caught a snowflake in my hand and it stayed solid for a good four seconds, and everyone was running around outside and whooping and dancing and phoning people on the other side of town. Awesomesauce.

Lunch was gross. I'm really hungry.

Either my life is really uninteresting, or... okay, I can't actually think of a way to end that sentence. Maybe my life is just too confusing for me to pick out the interesting parts and write about them.

I participated in National Novel Writing Month this year, and wound up with... 16, 796 words. According to NaNo's word counting thingy. I'm not too happy about that, but it's definitely a step up from last year (1,771), so... yeah, okay, I'm pleased. But for a different reason. And now my verbal tics are showing up in my writing? That's no good at all.

The weather report says it might snow tomorrow! Since I don't trust my state at all when it comes to snow (and the lack thereof), I think it's just going to ice over, if anything out of the ordinary happens at all. And whatever happens probably won't until tomorrow morning, when it'll be too late for us to get the day off. Still, one can hope. The last time we had anything resembling snow (how many years ago was that? I don't even remember), we had enough of it for me to build a four-inch snowman on the hood of our car. So the snow NEEDS TO HAPPEN.

The vertical blinking cursor line thing just disappeared. I can guess its location by pressing letter keys, but now I'm making little errors like accidentally deleting the middle of a word because the line jumps around, and now that I can't see it, I can't even click in the right spot to fix punctuation. This paragraph? Is a big neon metaphorical sign that I am out of interesting things to say. My head hurts. I'm stopping now.

I had something to post about, dammit. Something semi-coherent. Of course, it vaporized when I actually sat down to type it up.

....

Here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kAymQ2QUMM&feature=related

It's somewhat related to the post I had in mind. Somewhat distantly related.

Um... WOW.

Okay.

I'm not dead, seriously; I've just been at a loss of anything to post about. I'm at a loss currently. So this short paragraph might end up being the whole post.

Um. So. Ah, here we go: I've picked up a new anime series. Code Geass is the name of it, and it seems to be one of those shows that becomes either really awesome or really goofy as it progresses. I've just started season 2, and I'm still seeing it as "awesome". The animation is consistently high-quality, the voice actors know what they're doing (in the Japanese version; I listened to a bit of the English audio, and it sounded pretty bad), and it's a pleasant shock that most of the English is coherent. Which is all well and good, but wouldn't mean much if the story and characters hadn't been written with such evident care. When the story is constantly surprising me and making me question my point of view, I figure it's doing something right.
( Short incoherent discussion with possible spoilers )

Tl;dr: Code Geass is not for those who like to have a clear line drawn between the "good" and the "bad" sides. The line is a wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey line that sometimes isn't there at all.

(Yaaaaaaaay I posted something!)

............

So, I managed to come down with a cold this week. Welcome to Hell, here's your tissue pack.

............

Last but not least - I learned something new:

&hearts &hearts &hearts &hearts &hearts &hearts &hearts

Something I just have to say right now, about the new Profile Page layout: WTF is up with the arrows. They are useless. I can't look at anybody's profile now, even my own, without becoming confused and quickly maddened by the Mystery of the Totally Purposeless Arrows. KILL THEM.

I seriously need a life, because this is pretty much all I can come up with for posting.

So, here are my quick mini reviews of all seven of the Harry Potter books. I figure it's about time I vented about them.

************

Sorcerer's Stone: Fun read. Mystery plot unusually sophisticated for a children's book. Red herring expected, but still surprising.

Chamber of Secrets: Also a fun read. Same mystery plot, but handled differently.

Prisoner of Azkaban: Very enjoyable. Plot seems straightforward until genuinely surprising twist at end. Adults in the series are established as actual characters.

Goblet of Fire: A bit slow, but still rewarding. Turning point, as it kick-starts the previously dormant series plot. Characters gain an extra layer or two of personality.

Order of the Phoenix: High point of the series. Tragic plot, in that Harry's fatal flaw leads to the disastrous battle at the end and the death of a loved one. Snape shown to be a victim of circumstance with enviable inner strength. Harry, Snape and Voldemort established as Very Important Characters. Moral shades of grey introduced.

Half-Blood Prince: Enjoyable on first read only. Plot like butter scraped over too much bread. Harry's previous character development thrown out a window so that author can write excessive Harry/Dumbledore slash. Most characters replaced by two-dimensional caricatures of the type commonly seen in bad shipping fanfic.

Deathly Hallows: Utterly puketastic. Dead chicken poses as wafer-thin plot riddled with cliches. Most characters mauled with a blunt chainsaw, most glaringly Snape. Harry continues to obsess over Dumbledore and not dead godfather. Bad parenting glorified through Lupin and Tonks. Disturbing moral message given that Gryffindors can make all the bad choices they want and still be labeled "virtuous", but Slytherins are damned before they get a chance to screw up.

************

Phew. That makes me feel better.

...I need to eat something.

I've started reading The Catcher in the Rye. So far, it's really interesting. I like it.

.......


I finished Tomb Raider: Anniversary a few weeks back, was very impressed, loved it to pieces, and forgot to post anything about it. In a nutshell, it is really, really good.

The puzzle-solving was quite challenging and thoroughly enjoyable, as was simply moving Lara through various environments - she has so many moves that she doesn't feel limited like in previous games. The artifacts and relics are really tricky to find, as they should be. The combat, however, is a bit lackluster - enemies pop up in unnatural places and become really annoying.

( Spoilers )

.......

And a brief reaction to the revelations of Tsubasa chapter 201 and xxxHoLic chapter 167: HOW COULD YOU, CLAMP.

I'm messing around with a Tomb Raider: Anniversary pic to make Lara look like a glowing, purple-skinned... something-or-other. It's a nice way to familiarize myself with the obscure workings of Photoshop - I'm learning how to adjust layers to make amazing stuff happen that I didn't know was possible.

It also puts some space between myself and that CG piece I've been working on for the past few days. (Said piece is coming along nicely and I'm actually happy with it, yay.)

I just found a hand-held radio in my room.

It's SO COOL. There's, like, feedback. And it isn't like an iPod, which is a static music storage that you can access at any time - it's listening to something that's being broadcast right now, in the present, that you might not be able to catch at the beginning. It's like when you realize that someone in the back of the bus has pulled out a guitar. Which is making me feel all connected to the world and everything.

Oh my gawd, it just gave me the weather forecast. :DDDD I'm so disconnected.

So, yes, I'm combing through my JPEGs and creating userpics on the fly because I forgot what I originally wanted to post about.

It's mildly entertaining.

So I bought Assassin's Creed around the beginning of this month. This forced my computer to acquire a new power source, a new video card, extra memory, and a dual core processor in order to make the game work. (My computer is similar to my dad's, so we can usually swap parts if something like this comes up.)

I'll type the more spoilery information in purple font.

( Read more... )

Disjointed and hardly coherent, I'm sure, but I want to say something about the game now that I've played it.

I constantly see people misinterpreting Hitsuzen, a philosophy expressed in xxxHoLic, as the idea that our fate is predetermined and that the future is fixed and unchangeable. I can only guess that this comes from the popular tendency to translate "hitsuzen" (a word with no direct translation) as either "fate" or "inevitability" - people assume the conventional meanings of the two words and miss the point.

Hitsuzen is the belief that people make their own fate.

It is stated in volume 1 of the manga that Hitsuzen "... [is] a naturally foreordained event. A state in which other outcomes are impossible..." (volume 1, pg. 12) This is Del Rey, so the wording is a bit clumsy. But throughout the manga, both the plot and the characters reinforce that the future is not predetermined at all; there are a myriad of possible futures available at any given time. However, only one of these futures can actually become the present. Which future actually occurs is determined by the choices that we make. (Yuuko says as much on page 139 of volume 11, although Del Rey words it a bit strangely.)

Hitsuzen, therefore, is the belief that we have the power of choice. The "inevitability" part is because when we make a choice, we exclude the myriad of other futures that would have occurred if we had chosen differently.

.......

Did that make sense? I'm going to be shameless and say that one really should read xxxHoLic itself to get a better grasp of the concept.

I can has new iPod, yay!

My first iPod - my mother's pink Mini - had a previously unnoticed power storage problem; even when fully charged, the power would drain away in a matter of minutes upon disconnection from the power source. (Recently, I've heard that this is a defect that a lot of Minis suffer from. It could be true.)

This new one is a black Nano (NaNo?), also from my mother, and I'm very happy with it and I'm using it... a lot, actually. Right now I'm listening to "What Is Love" by Haddaway, which has had nothing but positive connotations for me since the first time I heard it on episode 11 of My So-Called Life. Seriously. This song = Best Moment of the World Happiness Dance.
.......

The xxxHoLic scans aren't up today. Darn. Maybe they'll go up tomorrow.

I woke up this morning with congestion, which is bad because I have to sing today. Time and shower steam have done wonders for my condition, but I'm still a little hoarse.

.......


My new scanner works! Yaaaay!

The "WTF" icon is finally scanned and in progress... but it's kind of on the back burner, because I'm coloring a self-portrait from way back in 2006. I'm trying to make the coloring realistic enough to be able to abandon the lineart entirely.

There will be no userpics for a while because my scanner is refusing to work for me. No amount of experimentation so far has solved the problem - it scans, but the resulting document is blank white.

That "wtf" userpic won't show up for a while, by the looks of it.

...

I read both CLAMP's Tokyo Babylon and most of X online last weekend, and now I'm wondering "why does Tsubasa look so ugly, especially when compared to X?" X is fabulous. So beautiful... but the manga itself is very gory. I can't quite absorb the fact that CLAMP actually published this in a magazine for young girls, since dismemberment and/or decapitation by either explosion, string, or karate chopping is more within the boys' manga zone... one would think.

Although it's very girls' manga as well, what with all of the in-depth characterization, angst, questions about the human condition, angst, fluffy love, angst, tragic love, aaaaaaangst... maybe I'm exaggerating the angst. No. Wait. I'm not.

Going through both Tokyo Babylon and a good chunk of X in two days was not a good idea - the screwed-up and twisted what-the-hell-do-you-call-it between Subaru Sumeragi and Seishirou Sakurazuka has been completely overloading my anguish and tragedy sensors since volume 7 of Tokyo Babylon. It's also the main reason I moved on to X - and then nearly cried when I read volume 16.

I will probably obsess over this for another month, because it takes a lot to work something so emotionally powerful and traumatic out of my system.

...

*lets out breath* The season finale of House will be on shortly. I need to eat the leftover pizza.

No, Olwen, you may not play the Computing Cat game. *stares* You may not. *will wavers, then dissolves completely* Oh, fine; just stay back from the monitor and don't climb on the keyboard, 'k?

I don't believe this.

There have been previous chapters in Tsubasa where fans have claimed that their brains were "broken", but to me those chapters were either highly emotional or made of crazy plot twists. Not brain-breaking. I didn't think brain-breaking was even possible.

Well, I was mistaken. Thank you, CLAMP, for allowing me to know firsthand what a brain broken over somebody's knee like a stick feels like.

http://su-chan.livejournal.com/199797.html

This finished chapter had better be good, because at this point it's either going to be really awesome or really stupid.

...

Where is that "wtf" image I said I was going to draw?

Stupid, stupid Del Rey! Why is it that the online fans who translate chapters in a matter of days can make so much more sense than a licensed translation company with months of time on their hands?

I can't give any more xxxholic volumes to my mother until I get ahold of a gluestick and begin fixing the damn mess.

...


I need a userpic to go with "OMGWTFBBQ" as well. I'm missing many core userpics.

I used to be uninterested in the xxxholic anime. I love the manga, and since I read (note *read*) that the anime had left out the story arc popularly referred to as the "Spider Arc", I assumed that it was as low as the Tsubasa anime (which is apparently made cheaply and badly in order to gain money and is a fine example of the scum-sucking elements of Western civilization. Or something.).

But apparently I misunderstood the "no Spider Arc" bit. Now it's clear that the first season just didn't get to it, instead of deliberately leaving it out.

Anyway, I decided to have a look on YouTube for the first episode of xxxholic: Kei (a.k.a. season 2); and so far I am completely blown away by how awesome it is! The voice actors are shedding SO MUCH LIGHT on these characters. Yuuko's voice is much more feminine-sounding than I imagined originally, Watanuki's sounds more like a young man's voice would sound, and Doumeki's is very very deep. And very very stoic. For Heaven's sake, the boy speaks in monosyllables. It's no wonder that Watanuki flies off his handle so often.

This seemed weird to me at first - incongruous with what I've read - but now I'm sure that Del Rey is behind the confusion with their superfluous over-elaborating and over-simplifying, seemingly at random, and pulling pronouns and exclamation marks out of a hat. Del Rey's Doumeki has probably turned out much more fluent and light-voiced than the real one.

I'm seriously considering going back through the volumes with a pen and replacing out-of-character sentences with whatever the fan translations on the net are purporting, the way I've edited my Tsubasa volumes. Because now it's been made clear to me that character identity is at stake.

...

Reasonably, but disappointingly, the English-subtitled episode has been removed from YouTube. It's a bit weird watching it with Spanish subtitles.

Well, Spring Break should be fun. Take note that the word "should", being subjunctive, means that the desired situation says nothing about the reality of the situation.

Spring Break would (more subjunctive) be more fun if Tsubasa and Holic had not chosen to oversleep and take a break. Again. Although since CLAMP is working on three comics at the same time, this is excusable. It doesn't make me any less disappointed, though. :p

It'd also be great if I didn't have to write both an "argumentative essay" and a "community service report" during it.

And Thief would be great if I weren't sick and tired of this highly annoying Escape! mission. Urgh... in terms of gameplay, The Metal Age is largely preferable to this. I also like Garrett a lot better in TMA, because in The Dark Project, pretty much everything he does is motivated by self-interest and/or revenge (he doesn't care if the whole City gets swallowed up by the Maw of Chaos or not - all he wants to do is screw with the Trickster for double-crossing him. Saving the City was a side effect.) In TMA, though, his working with the Pagans and eventually destroying Soulforge isn't done out of self-interest. Certainly, he refuses to assault Soulforge at first, but only because he thinks Viktoria's plan is too risky; the fact that he's considering a plan at all is significant, since he really has nothing to gain from it. Soulforge is bereft of shiny things.

But my aim in this post is not to write an essay about his character. In fact, I'm not sure what the aim of this post is other than to complain about all that won't be this week.

Oh, yes, and Daylight Saving Time. Completely useless and only serves to screw up my sleeping schedule, which was messed up enough already.

In Guild Wars, I'm jammed in this one mission called Aurora Glade. It consists of retrieving pretty white crystals and taking them to three pedestals before your opponents, the White Mantle, get their own pretty white crystals set up. The thing is, the Mantle are sending out swarms of combatants, and the pedestals are so far apart that I can set up two, then be running towards the third one right when the Mantle reclaims the second; and while I'm headed to reclaim the second, the Mantle takes back the third. And so forth.

While I can position my AI henchmen to guard the central path, I cannot divide their group in two and send one to guard the most recently converted portal, nor can I give a crystal to one of them and thus set up two pedestals at the same time. The only way I'm going to get past this point is by teaming up with at least one other player. I'm rather skittish about forming teams with sentient beings in such a manner, so I'm killing time in the Battle Isles.

I have to work my way through the Random Arenas and the Team Arenas in order to reach Heroes' Ascent, so that I can earn a Celestial Sigil and get myself a Guild Hall. The Random Arenas were kicking my Ranger/Mesmer's butt until I realized that I was mostly getting killed by Assassins; at which point I decided to adjust my build for Assassin takedowns and make a rule of targeting Assassins first. After that decision, I made five consecutive wins with a randomly generated team of awesome players who "lol"ed when I told them that Olwen was blocking my screen and were very chatty and companionable, asking me how I liked their builds and things like that. And I probably won't run into any of those players again, unfortunately.

Well, I'm in the mood for either a mug of Hibiscus tea or a square of minty dark chocolate. I'll figure it out after dithering a bit. Then I'll reconsider the idea of illustrating my Guild Wars characters and making userpics of them.