Thursday, July 27, 2006

Six days
I have to go to the band rummage sale pre-set-up soon. However.
My birthday's in six days.
I'll be fifteen.*
o.o

And I have a new article idea. =D

I made the band website that I talked about in my "last-day-of-school" post. It's currently hosted at my domain, and none of the links work on the main page (haven't gotten any info), but still, it can be seen here. =3 Leave a comment if you wish. (And please don't spread around my real name.)

Birthday party is this Saturday from noon to 10pm. Teh whee. Stupid Ryu can't show up. WHY?! Grr.

*To Ryu and Haya: It's a well-established that I am indeed the youngest in the posse and one of the youngest, if not THE youngest, in our grade. Merph. :3
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Thursday, July 20, 2006

Here, take my card

And hell do I know how my hates will come under fire.
My views are as thus: If it's a fan thing, then the stomach churns.

And yes. Half the joke is that the oekaki piece totally doesn't belong. >_>
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Saturday, July 15, 2006

*screams*

Lelola's 5th Splash Image Contest

Honorable mention.

Judge's award.

I'm so happy, if you saw me in real life, I'd be running around screaming.

Rank on the Excitement Meter: Same level as going to ACen.

...

SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!
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Tuesday, July 4, 2006

Cue the explosions!
It's the 4th of July! Independence Day! For the U.S., at least.

I'm not doing anything today to celebrate - at least, not until later, when I'm lighting off twelve packs of sparklers and also one pack of three-feet-tall sparklers. =D

So what am I doing to spend my time? Finally finish "Star Ocean: Til the End of Time". XD

Oh, and of other important news, I'm now an Otaku Legend. Freakin' sw33t! I posted a comment over at Ada's, and when the comment box had re-loaded, my title was that of an Otaku Legend. :3 I have 152 comments now, which means I've commented on the news page 152 times. >_> So there Ryu, that's what you need to do to become a Senior Otaku. XD

I'm sore in my arms, and I'm thinking that's because I had a solid party weekend. Summaries:

Friday-Saturday: My friend Meghan's belated birthday party. Sleepover for the girls (duh). We swam for a while and stayed in our bathing suits for a long while. Then we got changed, performed some karaoke, tossed around a plush football, etc. My friend Brian and I finally gained control of the hammock after the entire evening, and sat there while everybody else was attacking with the water bucket for the pool (to clean off your feet) and the hose. I saw Haya come up to us with a water bucket, and I rolled out of the way just in time to avoid being majorly soaked...but Brian was drenched.
We went on the offensive, me taking over the hose and going after everyone. Then, after we were all soaked, we were just sorta like, "Let's jump in the pool. Clothes on." And so, we did. It was a straight procession - Haya, Brian, then me. All with clothes on. And I was wearing boy shorts, complete with belt, so I was soaking up about half of the pool. XD

Saturday: Evening was my friend Logan's birthday party. For a while, only me and my friend Waffles were there (carpool), then the Cooper guy showed up. At dinner, our friend Marissa showed. Much later in the evening, Haku (from ACen) and a friend of his showed up. Lots of swimming and throwing a mini soccer ball around. :3

Sunday: Haya's 4th of July party. More swimming, though the vast majority of the time was used playing four-square...with the basketball. XD Ryu was there as well...he just sorta blurbed it out in his last post, the majority of which he spent gushing over "Wicked".

No wonder I hurt.

Yesterday I went over to Waffles house, and we watched some Kingdom Hearts parody videos on YouTube. ^^;; Then we flew to the basement and played Pokemon Stadium. XD We did Versus matches for a bit, and I beat her all times.
After the Versus, we played the Stadium mode in Pikacup, and while she was busy helping her parents with stuff, I played. I beat the first three trainers using only one Pokemon each. I think, in total, I lost abou 30 HP the entire time, too. XD
After going down to the neighborhood's club house to set up for the party today, we came back and had a four-player versus mode. It was Waffles and her older sister Meredith versus me and the younger sister Sara. I groaned about that, but we ended up winning three out of four times. XD

Highlighst include:
Sara's tiny little Vulpix taking down Waffles's Charizard that was confused. He slapped himself to death. >_>
My poisoned, 38 HP Golem that took down two full-healthed Pokemon. The odds were totally against me, I was pissed, but Sara was like, "C'mon, you can do it!". And I did. =D
The argument about choosing Pokemon that can fly. And we decided "no birds". And Waffles chose Charizard, who could fly. I was pissed. >3

Ryu also gave me ten volumes of Rurouni Kenshin to read on Sunday. XD Minus volumes one and six, because Waffles gave me six as a birthday present. :3 I never really liked the RuroKen manga. I think what annoys me the most is the font. Eh. *shrugs* I'm currently on the fifth volume, about halfway through. Meef.

Oh. *snaps fingers* I went book shopping last Thursday, and returned with Full Metal Alchemist volume 8, MegaTokyo volume 4, and .hack//Another Birth volume 1. I also got a Yuki bookmark. xD

After reading FMA 8 and seeing the preview, I was practically wetting my pants, so I went online to a manga viewer. And...well, let's just say that I'm not going to like volume 9. Especially Mustang's actions. I was royally pissed. I mean, what little I liked about Roy has now been reduced to nothingness. You bastard! WHY THE F%$& DID YOU KILL HER?! I actually liked her! (She also remotely looked like me.) Ugh! Yeah.

The main reason I went to the online manga viewer was to see if my suspicions could be confirmed. And, well, they weren't, but I still have this awful feeling that they might. See, in last month's issue of AnimeInsider, they talked about how radically different the Homonculi are in the manga, how some of the identities are different, and how "friends and foes" can't be distinguished anymore. After reading in the manga viewer, there was only one more Homonculous to be revealed. And...I have this feeling...I have this feeling that Maes Hughes might be the final Homonculous. *cries* Which is the last one left? Pride. 'course, that's all my suspicion, but at the rate the manga's going, it's entirely possible.

...Guess I should go check up on the manga viewer. X3

Have a happy and safe Independence Day, everyone! Except you, Katsom. T.T

...XD
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Tuesday, June 27, 2006

Samurai or Pirate?
Bye Bye Mr. Battousai
You drew your sword and saved the world and now your manga's run dry
And Sanosuke will drink his sake and cry, sayin' "This'll be the day that I die
This'll be the day that I die...*

The epic Rurouni Kenshinn is drawing to a close in the 28th and final volume of the manga. That's...depressing.

...I never got past volume 1/6...Ryu, I'm stealing your manga when I can.


Well, to anybody who's interested (this pretty much means you two, Haya and Ryu):

Waffles and I are making plans to get a nice group together to go see "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest" next Friday, July 7th, at 12:40 in the afternoon. It's the first airing of the movie at the Elgin Marcus theater, so we thought we'd hit that.

Rule: You must dress in a way that relates to a pirate. It's pirate cosplay! And Haya, no, don't wear your pirate-skeleton T-shirt. >_>

Time: We figure this is going to be packed, so arrive at the theater at noon - NO EXCEPTIONS. :3 We can't exactly save you a seat, you know.

And yeah. Updates will be posted/relayed to people as they come. Times are so subjected to change it isn't funny.

* I ripped this from AnimeNewsNetwork. Not mine. The reviewer is mean; I would never say something like that about Rurouni Kenshin. X3
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Saturday, June 24, 2006

Ouran Host Club, King Tut, and the mysteries of ImageReady
First note, I'll probably never finish the Nashville post. Sorry. >_>

Second note, to bellpickle: How are the first two debate articles coming along? Do SOAPers get to see 'em before they're posted? XD

So yeah.

If you read the comments from my last post, you can see bellpickle screaming about how I have an Ouran High School Host Club avatar. It's of Mitsukuni "Hunny" Haninozuka, my favorite charcter from Ouran. ;_; I can't help it! I seem to have a kawaii boy fetish. >.< (First it was Momiji, then it was Hunny...it's not blonde boys, I can tell you THAT much. >_>)

Anyways, I've seen up through episode 7 of the series on YouTube. This is the first time I've ever seriously watched a fansub series - as in, you know, actually wanting to watch the series. With that said, I went screencap crazy (not really), capturing any scenes that cracked me up.

The following animation was made with five frames from the Renge episode. Hunny's glomp attack just cracked me up:



^^;; I know it sucks. It's hard to capture all the frames on YouTube!

*ahem* Yesterday, I went to the Field Museum in Chicago to see the King Tut exhibit. I finally suceeded in dragging my now-junior friend Erin along after five people said they couldn't come. o_O;;
The coolest thing about the exhibit was that you were only mere inches away from relics 3,000+ years old. There it was, right in front of you, seperated only by a case of plexi-glass...
My favorite item was the golden dagger Tut had on his chest when he was burried. It was shiney, and a knife! Two in one! I wanted it, badly. XD

The only fault with the exhibit was what kept people in through the entire thing. In order to get to Tut, who was, of course, the last exhibit, you had to sift through all his relatives. It was annoying, but it was for the sake of all his relations. ^^;;

What I really hated, though, was the people with the audio tours. >_> They'd just walk right in front of you (when you were, you know, five inches from the case), and after a while, I was supressing thoughts of murderous rage. X3

While waiting in line before the tou, I was talking to Erin about whatever, my back turned to an open hallway. She suddenly said, "He must be important. He's on a Segway."
And because we had been talking about King Tut, I just blurted back, "King Tut's on a Segway?!"

Hence this following animation:



It's incomplete, but it works. There's a few more frames to be added, but you don't really need those to get the full (idiotic) joke.

We explored the rest of the museum after lunch. Me and Erin had a field day in the "Evolving Earth" exhibit, because after every period there was this red corner where a large grey plastic thing would procalim, "MASS EXTINCTION #(1)", etc. The two of us would line up on one side and dramatically put our feet down in unison, saying, "Mmmmmass Extinction!" ^^;; Fun!

[Whilst in the dinosaur room]
Katana: "Hmm...Erin, we haven't encountered a Mass Extinction in a while."
Erin: "Well, there's one coming up. We have to get rid of these guys somehow."
(Minutes later)
Katana: "Wow, this is a big Mass Extinction. The red-lighted tiles go on for like ten feet."
Erin: "Well, we have to make sure we get everyone."


The mysteries of ImageReady!
Just some total randomness.

I was trying to save the animations as .gifs in ImageReady, but it would always want to save them as .jpgs. So I popped them up in Photoshop and went to the "Save for Web" option.
They were set on .jpg.
So I set them to .gif.
And went back to ImageReady.
Sure enough, they were saved as a .gifs mere moments later. >_>

Lesson: Don't be afraid to explore, especially when you think you have a dumbass thought!
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Saturday, June 17, 2006

Nashville, gone and away...

That's a great way to put it.

I am so fscking brain dead, I can't think properly.

And why?

Well, from Tuesday through Friday, I was on a band trip to Nashville, Tennesee (can't spell :3). We left at 5:45am on Tuesday, and pulled in to the middle school at about 1:30am this morning.
I was going to make a really short, three-sentenced post Tuesday morning, but apprently my brother had woken up with us and "couldn't" get back to sleep, and apparently there's something "wrong" with his computer, so he was hogging up this one.
Well, in any case, I got to see the 4:00am re-run of Paranoia Agent. XD It was the one with the fake Lil' Slugger, the video game RPG-esque one.

My alarm went off at 3:51am, and "Passion" (Kingdom Hearts II) woke me up. I was up and dressed in an instant, donning my Haruko-ramen-eating 'Yo!' t-shirt, jean shorts, and sandels. At one point a little after four, I peeped outside and saw nothing but navy and the full moon. Damn. >_>

My parents dropped me off at around 4:45am at the middle school. The sun was beginning to rise, but you could also see the moon in the opposite direction.
One of my friends, whom everybody just calls Cooper, was yelling at me for how I was so chipper that early. "C'mon Cooper, it's only 5:00am!"

So yeah, we left at around 5:45am, and Meghan was my only posse travelling companion. (*gives evil glares to Haya and Ryu*) The two of us conversed for a while, then popped on the music and read/drew.
The chaperones (parents) put on four movies (in a row). The volume was LOUD. And what were the movies? Top Gun, Flubber, Men In Black (the only good one), and some obscure, 1980s live-action Disney movie, Iron Will. Blech.

Stopped for lunch at this buffet place called the Golden Caroal. Had chicken, rice, corn muffins, and coke, then pie. I swear, the corn muffins wanted me dead.

We finally pulled in at around 6:00pm to our hotel, the Double Tree suites. We were also two hours behind schedule by now, due to mis-calculations and traffic jams.

...

I cannot think at all. I'm gonna contine/edit this post later. o.o
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Tuesday, June 6, 2006

Let's count all the pretty sixes...
So today's the fabeled day of 6/6/06. And really, if you think about it REALLY hard, those numbers don't form 666. They form 6,606. Hehe.

For today to truly be the day of the devil, it would have to be June 6, 6 AD (or something like that).

Sorry, I just like screwing with these horror days.

Is there any way I can relate today to another slew of sixes? Um...Close, but no.

- It's my fifth day of summer break
- It's seven days until my Nashville band trip
- My birthday is in fifty-three days (Just HOW is that close?!)
- It is currently 5:02 pm, central time zone...and in 24-hour time, it's 17:02
- I just finished up my eighteenth CG.
- Today I bought seven travel-size hygenic products for the Nashville trip

Okay, I need to try REALLY hard here...

Yeah, um, I can't think of anything. >.>

My summer project has been assigned to me. Not only do I have to read "The Scarlet Letter" for sophomore honors English class, but Struyker (my band director) has commissioned me to do the music department's website. x.x
His words of advice? "Make it cooooool."

Boo (from the OB) suggested a layout like an old jukebox. I thought that was cool, but I really can't find any decent reference pictures.
Anything is possible as long as I can make it using Photoshop and ImageReady. They can generate HTML, so it's not a big deal. As of now, the site is looking like it'll be using iFrame codes.

Ergh...

The fact that it's summer break has not set into me yet. Last night I went to sleep going, "Hey, MythBusters will be on tomrrow." That thought came from the fact that the Discovery channel almost always has a three-hour marathon of MythBusters on Sundays. I thought yesterday was Saturday - the weekend.

While I have accepeted the fact that I'm now a sophomore, it hasn't hit me yet that my former-sophomore friends are now juniors. I'm just kinda like "...no they're not". ¬.¬ It's not that I'm in denial - I just think that, because I was a freshman, I was so used to learning the whole order and organization and ranks of things. Now that I'm a sophomore, I find it hard to break those ranks and push them one year higher.

...-_-;;

So if anything bad (like, BAD) happens today, on June 6th, 2006, please tell me. I'm awaiting to hear them. ¬_¬;;
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Thursday, June 1, 2006

And the peasants cheered at the sound of it all
June 1st, 2006.
10:55 am.
Tick tock. Tick tock. Tick tock.
Announcements.
Bell.
"WE'RE SOPHOMORES!"

Rejoycing and cheers rang out around the high school building. Whether in the gym or the commons, classrooms or hallways, an army of high schoolers gave a hollar at the best holiday of all: Summer.

For some it was a promotion to senior, for others to junior, and still others, sophomore. The graduating seniors were pushed off to college.

It was a weird, odd day. It didn't feel like the last day, but you knew it was, but you still didn't think it.

Finals were taken and finished, good-byes were said and received.

Summer's ahead, school's behind. No more homework, no more teachers, no more tests, no more early wake up calls - for three months.
Three months that will shine in glory.

And even after all this, it's still not settling in.

Katana has been speaking in the third person all this post. Strange. She has a picture to post up once her scanner works again.

Edit: She's fixed the scanner, and has fixed up her piece. So here is her end-of-the-year piece - Au Revoir To Freshman Year.
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Tuesday, May 30, 2006

~o/They can dance and sing, often at the same time. They are a people who need people.\o~
Well, it's Tuesday. Four finals down, four more to go.
...
*dies a little on the inside*'

Sunday, me and my family went to Chicago to see the traveling return of "Spamalot". And even though we were seven rows from the very back wall, things were bloody excellent.

My favorite character turned out to be Sir Dennis Galahad. His actor was a babe. xD But I can't find any pictures of his real self outside of Spamalot. ^^;;

The music was awesome. The gags were awesome. The actors were great. :3

AND I SERIOUSLY CAN'T THINK RIGHT NOW.

My biology final was today, and my worst finals 0 German and algebra - are tomorrow. Actually, I think German and bio are my absolute worst, for the mere fact that...it's...hard...
I had my Naruto music headband wrapped tightly around my forehead.
I breathed in and out.
I was calm.
And then, "You Won't Succeed On Broadway" pops in my head and stays with me for the ENTIRE BLOODY TEST.

I'm stuck with my next entry for Round 2 of the OtakuBoard's handicap battles. -_- I'm going up against Ezekiel...I'm so screwed. X3
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