eighthphase | Entries tagged with mindlessness

New layout, yeah! I really like this one, it's super pretty *____*

Yesterday I went out for Driving Lesson #2. (Lesson #1 was a while ago, and in the interim I've actually gotten my permit.) This lesson consisted of speedbumps and parking! I've gotten speedbumps down, I think; they were those especially annoying parking lot ones that I don't think my brother ever actually drives over, but I drove over them a lot. I only hit it really hard about twice, though, and then I figured it out. My car sits really low, so you need to go really slowly over speed bumps so that the suspension doesn't complain and so that you don't hit the exhaust pipe on the pavement.

I was slightly less successful at parking, though. I hit like five imaginary cars. /: This is because I'm not all that great at tight manoeuvring yet. (In my defence, the car has no power steering so you have to really yank the steering wheel to get it to turn. Unless you're my brother, apparently. But then he's driven this car more than I have, so it makes sense that he'd be better at it.) I also haven't really driven at normal speeds yet, either; partly because my brother thinks I need to learn to love the brake pedal and partly because I've only ever driven around in parking lots.

Still haven't beaten ME2 yet; I got the IFF and picked up Legion, and was in the middle of his loyalty mission when I learned that surprise! You have three minutes to get out and there are a ton of geth shooting at you, including a Prime right in the middle of your path! :D So that killed me. Though it was just as well, since my laptop was getting warm. (This is why I should buy a 360. Then I can play all three Mass Effect games without worrying about my poor computer not being able to handle them! And also Tales of Vesperia, and a few other awesome-seeming games that seem to only be coming out on 360.) I might finish it today, or maybe tomorrow.

I'm pretty decently into DQIX; I've got like three fyggs and am working on the fourth (but am lost in the dungeon, woe). I actually did get Shiki to buy a copy, but I haven't seen her since so I don't know how she's doing. I hope she's not further than me; that would just be embarrassing (although it would also be about par for the course; she often beats games much more quickly than I do). Maybe I should ask her...

I also bought another sketchbook, and another how-to-draw guide, since I'm so fond of collecting them. Between that and a thing I recently drew, though, I'm kind of despairing for my art. ): I know I can do better than what I've been doing; I just can't seem to figure out how.

Um, but enough of that. Someday, I'll stop doing catch-up posts! But today is not that day.

I learned, to my great horror, that my school has installed new internet filtering software. On the plus side, this means that teachers can now log in and circumvent the filtering instead of having to ask the students for working proxies. On the minus side, the filtering is stricter. Livejournal is now blocked because it has "unauthorised Friendship content". I do not know what Friendship content is, but the people who created the filter software must be very lonely if they think friendship is bad. Maybe they should watch My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.

(I am not going to say any more on the subject of My Little Pony, by the way. Maybe I've watched it, maybe I haven't. Only my internet history will know the truth.)

I have a super busy weekend ahead of me and I kind of hate it, a little. Today after I get home I've got to make tons of brownies, and sort through clothes, and go to the store and buy Hot Dog Accessories, and then go over to Mez's house and price things. (But not any of the clothes, because they just go in a huge pile, "Four for a dollar!") Then tomorrow I get to go back to Mez's house around eight in the morning, work the garage sale until two (fortunately Pinky and I are on Hot Dog Duty, which involves... cooking hot dogs. And not helping random people who can't read price tags, because I hate doing that). Why until two? Because then I have to get ready for prom! :D (That is not a serious smiley. I am not serious about it.) I'm actually going this year, and I have to be at Shiki's mum's house by, like, five. It probably won't take me three hours to get ready but at least I have them. There's an after party back at Shiki's mum's house but we all know it'll consist of us falling asleep in her living room.

Moving on. I've been meaning to take my laptop to school, because there's only one class where I have serious things to do and I'm terminally bored in the other three. Except that I don't have a case for it! It didn't come with one and I don't have a bag big enough that isn't just too big in general. I went to Staples yesterday but couldn't find a case big enough. ): (I don't believe Staples's advertising slogan. I have never walked in there and found what I was looking for, that's not easy at all.) Yesterday I joked that the only thing I own big enough to fit my laptop is the box it came in!

This morning I found out that was a lie. The box my tablet came in fits it perfectly, with room for peripherals. So I guess I've found myself a tablet case! I can inflict the ridiculousness of Atropos on all my friends once more.

Anyway, I need to update some files and make breakfast time, so I'll end this here. Om nom nom chicken leftovers.

Current Mood: hungry

Today was a productive day! First I drew cards for Pinky and Shiki - it was their birthday. Then I went to their party! I didn't get to stay long, though, because I had college orientation. I'm officially a college student now, btw. Classes are all registered and paid for! Now I just need to find out what books I need, and um, learn to drive, so that I can actually, you know, get to class. That might be kind of important, I think.

Anyway, then I went out with mum and bought myself a new tablet. It's an Intuos! :D It's so fucking gorgeous, I'm still giddy about it. Then we went to Fridays and I... didn't actually eat all that much, really. Mum insisted on potato skins, and I tried some with sour cream, which was weird. It was, like, an anti-flavour or something. Then I shocked mum by getting my cheeseburger with lettuce and tomato on it - and with a side salad! (I basically have a total vendetta against all vegetables - tomatoes are actually my second most mortal enemy, you know.) The salad actually had cherry tomatoes but I let mum have those; it was just as well, because I couldn't quite tell if I liked the tomato on the burger or not. I'll have to try it again sometime. There was also some cucumber, and I got the chance to taste it without seaweed. It was kind of weird, but not in a bad way, I don't think. Like I said, though, I didn't eat very much - all the salad (though it was pretty small) and about a third of the burger. I just wasn't very hungry.

I'm ravenous now, of course, but we haven't got much easily-snackable stuff except for chocolate, and I... don't really want chocolate right now.

Also, I thought my day was great! Then I got home and found both cats on my bed - normally not a bad thing - and also that one of them decided to use my bed as a litter box. |:< I needed to change the sheets anyway, but still. Not how I wanted to do it. And then I got my lovely Intuos all set up, only to find that GIMP had apparently decided to save my most recent piece with a compression mode that it can't read. I spent hours on that - I had to basically draw the entire thing in GIMP, because the scan wasn't finished and wasn't very good, either - so I'm pretty pissed about that.

I need to think of a name for both my new tablet and the flash drive I bought with it. (I must have, like, six flash drives at this point. I can actually find three of them! That is, oddly, amazing.) I have no idea what to call them, but I'm sure I'll come up with something.

Current Mood: bored

I bought Mass Effect the other day (actually, the day before it went on sale - but that's neither here nor there). I want to like it. I really, really do. But I'm having issues with it that just make it impossible for me to play the damn game!

First I can't get it to run. I fixed that. Then I couldn't use the HUD, because my touchpad won't work if you're holding down a key on the keyboard. So I got a USB mouse (well, borrowed, anyway). Now the camera is all weird! It's really floaty and doesn't respond well at all. It is literally impossible for me to aim with the sniper rifle, and extremely difficult the rest of the time - when the mouse doesn't decide that a nudge to the left is a strong flick upward, anyway. I played around with the ingame mouse sensitivity but that only either made it worse or didn't do anything at all. /:

I'd like to think that this is a problem that can be fixed; I mean, surely the camera controls weren't designed to be bad, right? I think a mouse pad might fix it, if it's something to be fixed, but either I don't have one or I just can't find one. (Actually I did find one, an ergonomic one, but there's something weird on it that makes it a bad idea to use.) So I can't test it and I can't play the game in the meantime. I think the universe might not want me to play Mass Effect!

(I considered the idea that I'm just really bad at this game; I mean, I've never played a shooter on a computer, ever, unless Portal counts, and I'm not really all that great at Portal - although apparently using a touchpad instead of a mouse wasn't helping things. And I guess that could still be the reason, but I'd like to become the kind of person who encounters problems and doesn't immediately decide "I'm just really bad at this, is all" is the reason for those problems, so... yeah. For the sake of my self-esteem I'm trying to find a mouse pad.)

Also, I took an AP test yesterday! It was the only one I was signed up for this year and I'm really glad that it's over. I don't really like standardised tests like that, but the proctors this year (VP and new AP) were an improvement over last years' (college centre advisor and new AP) so that was cool. (Those are two different AP I mentioned - the one from last year left to go be principal of the nearby junior high school, so we got another new one this year, and she's much nicer.) I don't think I did as well this year; I wasn't anywhere near as prepared as I was last year. But I still think I did pretty good.

Which reminds me of something that my study guide said. I took the English Literature test, right? And when discussing essays, the study guide said there's always one where you choose a book off of a supplied list or a different one of "similar literary merit." It also suggested that you should probably only choose something you've read in AP English. This is true, especially since you've probably already analysed the shit out of them for class anyway. But the guide then goes on to say that a good rule of thumb is, if it's on the best sellers list or something like that, it means you shouldn't use them. After all, those books might not all be "escapist pulp fiction," but that doesn't make them literature. But then, you probably already thought that, because you wouldn't be taking the test if you didn't believe that some works have more intrinsic value than others in the first place!

I took great offence at that. I mean, the books that we're reading now, that are considered to be literature in the canon, were essentially the best sellers list of their time! And anyway, it's not like anything written recently can't be analysed for things like theme and rhetorical strategies just as well as anything in the canon. I'm not saying that escapist pulp fiction doesn't exist, but that doesn't mean that everything written after the 1930s is devoid of value. (Or, for that matter, that everything considered literature actually has any real value except "it's old and somebody liked it enough to pass it along through time," which really doesn't mean much at all.)

I've rambled on enough, though; I'm kind of hungry and I think my brother might have a mouse pad for me to try, so I'll shut up now.

Went out today! I'm definitely going to feel it in the morning, but I got what I needed and I had fun, so that's okay. And I got a pair of Skullcandies! If I'm really really lucky I might even have them for more than six months!

While walking to the hub with Shiki and Pinky, I said some stuff about the new Panic! At the Disco CD (I'd burned Shiki a copy of mine, since I don't have the actual CD for her to borrow). I thought about it again later, and realised that I wasn't exaggerating, it was actually true. Basically, Vices and Virtues feels a lot more like their first album, and I think that only benefits it. There's not a song off A Fever You Can't Sweat Out that I don't like, where Pretty Odd had a few I really wasn't all that into (and by a few, I mean something more like a third of the entire album). But not only does Vices sound more like Fever, there isn't a song on that album that I don't like. I mean, maybe Nearly Witches. If I had to pick a song I don't like, that's probably the one I like the least. But I still like it!

Also went out to dad's today. It was pretty chill, so that wasn't too bad.

I submitted a secret to fandom_secrets last week and it got posted today. So I went to read the comments, like you do. And then I cried a little, because I hadn't expected such nice comments ;___; (Actually I hadn't expected any comments, but all the ones I got were really nice ones.) I wasn't having a bad day by any means, but they still totally made my day better.

Day of nothingness tomorrow! I'll probably spend it alternately working on the keys and this one plotbunny that Shiki gave me and that Pinky encouraged shamelessly. Then on Thursday mum's dragging me off to work with her, because it's Take Your Kid To Work Day and she works with a bunch of editors and hey! I want to be an editor. (Plus she's taking the day off and there's always tons of cool activities set up and I usually always come home with armfuls of free space posters, so there's that, too.) I might even be able to walk by Thursday, so I will probably enjoy myself, even if I can't take my phone or iPod with me. (Man, I remember when having a cameraphone was the coolest thing ever. Now if your phone doesn't have a camera people look at you funny.)

Current Mood: bored

Happy Easter, everyone! This is not an introspective post because I am absolutely tired of writing introspective posts. Instead, this is something of a random things post.

For example! Without even trying I'm subconsciously picking out songs for characters of mine. I've got a Mao song (Starlight), a Haru song (Trade Mistakes), a Mao-and-Haru song (Star Gate Heaven), and a Noemi song (Bad Apple). (I don't think I've ever mentioned Noemi by name, although recently I've talked about the issues I've had actually writing her story. Part of this is probably because, while I know Noemi really well, I don't know Luke very well at all, and I'm supposed to be actually introducing him into the story.)

My nail polish is finally starting to chip off, after two weeks of nearly perfect nails. It's weird, because the stickers I put on are coming off, too, from underneath the topcoat. So then I have a petal-shaped hole in my topcoat. It's really weird.

Hopefully getting out to the craft store on Tuesday! I've planned to go with Shiki and Pinky but I don't know if their mum will let them. /: If not I might try asking Ruchia, and if that doesn't work then I'm just going to have to ask mum. /: I basically need a whole ton of stuff for making the keys: clay, paints, paintbrush, gloss, wire, pliers... I'm also after a new pair of earbuds, as well - I want some Skullcandies, but they're always "locked merchandise" and there's never ever anybody actually in the electronics section, so I'll probably end up with another pair of the Sony ones I have now. But really, I just want a pair of earbuds that doesn't hurt my ears and doesn't start doing weird staticky stuff after four months, is that really too much to ask?

Also, I really don't understand this. List of Apple Software I Want: iTunes.
List of Software Apple Apparently Thinks I Need: iTunes, Safari, MobileMe, Ping, Genius, VoiceOver Kit, GraceNote, and Kerbango.

You'll notice there's only one thing common to both lists. The really ridiculous part? With the exception of Safari and MobileMe, the rest of that all comes with iTunes. But I don't want any of it. I don't even need any of it! I never use it! So why do I have to have all of it just to get freaking iTunes?

Which reminds me, I've got about four months' worth of Grammar Girl and Are We Alone? to listen to, as well as those three audiobooks I never finished. Who wants to listen to Tim Curry read Sabriel? I do! :D (Plus I've had a raging headache for three hours. I think getting off the computer and indulging in some awesome Skullcrushers might help.)