Saturday, October 2, 2004

Live performances = suck.

Comment Commentary

Shin- Don't worry, it's all taken care of. I went to the confession booth and fixed everything. Catholic priest man: "A video game called Halo..? Does it spread the good word of Christ?"

Mimmi- Sen = trouser wearing, clipart junkies = miniskirt wearing. I certainly hope I didn't have to establish anything defining the difference.

Godel- Whoa, 93%. That's crazy. But with all that laser tag..

Solo- I'm really looking forward to the "remastered" version of Half-Life 1 that's coming with the collector's edition of HL2. It sounds like it's going to be the shiznite.

And that format is apparently a part of high school writing standards here. The teacher mentioned something about a high school exit exam..

Godel- Nocturne > 2 (Me + ToS) to the third power.

--

I feel like shit. Not physically, necessarily, but emotionally. I feel a bit nauseous, but that's probably not from the Chuckie Cheese-tasting Pizza Hut. Anyway, I won't go into details, and I won't bombard this mO with anymore angst and whininess than necessary. Let's move on.

--

My friend ended up spending the night over here. He played Halo for a while, as I was on the computer and half-watching from across the room, and we ended up watching the top fifteen most memorable Saturday Night Live moments. Because I enjoy SNL so much, it was interesting to see what they chose and where they chose to put it. Back on Monday, when Gumby (dammit) was 101, I knew things were bad. Gumby deserved better.

The Aerosmith Wayne's World episode ended up number one, and though I knew something like that was coming, I felt it was sort of a letdown. Oh well, what can you do, other than despise list shows?


Speaking of SNL, the season premiere is on tonight. I don't remember who the host is, but I'll be sure to tune in, assuming I don't fall asleep before it comes on.

After that we watched The Simpsons, and fell asleep on the couch and accompanying sofa-chair. We ended up with my grandmother's furniture, and she had some freaking soft couches. They're very easy to fall asleep on, if you take off the really bulky pillow that keeps your back from hitting the hard wooden frame.

We awoke this morning and went to Denny's, which sucked (I ordered scrambled eggs and I got sunny side up), and we wasted a few more hours on the computer. We watched Flash cartoons, mostly, and relived such great moments as the Spongemonkeys and the Courtney Love Schoolhouse Rock cartoon on Camp Chaos. He left around four, and I was pretty relieved. I don't like sleepovers. In fact, there are very few people I can stand spending more than ten hours with. Oh well.

--

Halo got old. The level designs all seemed sort of similar, and the fighting wasn't really all that interesting. It was just running and shooting, without many changes. Half-Life kept on doing different things, even with the same enemies. The only "dynamic" I found like that in Halo was changing altitudes. The sniping is cool, though.

Of course, it's not like I played through the entire game, so I can't really can't talk about Halo through assumptions like this. Oh well. Nothing about it really made me want to play more, so you could sort of base my opinion off of that. *makes the Half-Life power sign with his arm*

My weekend posts are lame. I should probably do a good rant tomorrow, to compensate..

Teh SillyCircus Day 48- Omfg Neji iz a bitch!!12
Comments (3) | Permalink

Friday, October 1, 2004

Water, water, everywhere..

Comment Commentary

Shin- I dunno. I hear tell that Mr. Hamill has quite a vibrant imagination.

Aleia- It's possible to overdose on cynicism, but it's extremely difficult.. Assuming you're a competent human being.

Syk- I haven't seen it in forever, but I thought he always had a shirt on.

Solo- I've gotten soft because of DVD image quality. When I went back to my Star Wars VHSes, I found the quality atrocious.

Mimmi- I know. I've gotten really, really depressed on several occasions because of "thinking of a time in your life.."

Godel- Uh.. I'm sorry, what was that? I'm watching Star Wars. :P

Solo- I'm too cool for conserving punctuation. *puts on shades*

Godel- :O

--

The five paragraph essay got finished easily enough. Once I decided on a topic, the only real problem was motivating myself to sit down for periods of more than five minutes and actually do the writing. Technically, it ended up as six paragraphs, but I didn't think that would be a problem.

But now I am worried that it would be. Our teacher didn't have us turn in the papers.. She just chose a person at random and harshly graded it in front of the class. We were supposed to follow the "five paragraph essay format," which means you have an opening sentence, three supporting sentences and a closing one five times. It was all right to add sentences, I guess, but apparently we were supposed to follow the thing to the littlest detail.

If you have a paragraph based on, say, a verse in a poem you read, you would have to talk about your opinion on what the metaphor meant, then restate it at the end of the paragraph and in the end chapter. The whole thing is extremely rigid and, in my opinion, juvenile. You would figure a Lit teacher as young and cohesive as ours would not bother with such tedious formats. That's what you're supposed to follow in the high school exit exam, according to her, and by the time you're eighteen it must feel pretty silly, being forced to use such rigid paragraph structures. My friend ended up with a 53% on his, mostly because he lacked opening and closing sentences, and I doubt I would have done that much better. Oh well, I guess I'll have to put quality and fluid paragraph structure on the back burner and aim for what the school system wants me to do.

--

Ran 1.25 miles in nine minutes today.. There's really not much else to say about it, other than that I was tired as hell. Damn my need for a sweater, and damn overheating.

--

Today a small discussion was held during journalism about the number of pages we would need for the yearbook, and what layouts we should use for the mugshots. The clipartenites wanted to put the eighth graders in larger pictures than the seventh graders, which I didn't really think was a bad idea, but they spent the entire period fretting over how many pages we would need for the mugshots. This sort of frustrated me. They were working off of extremely loose, estimated population figures and trying to figure out what they could do to condense the yearbook into less than seventy pages.

After listening to that for about twenty minutes, I finally spoke up and explained what should be done. "At this point, only one month into the school year, many students are still leaving and entering the school. We should at least wait until mid-second trimester so we can get a better idea of how many pages we'll need, and until then we can just work on the rest of the pages. Getting it under seventy is pointless."

That shut them up.

Sometimes I really think that I should do my own version of the yearbook, sell it at lunch right next to the one that everybody else did, and see who sells more.

--

A good friend of mine came to my house after school today, after grabbing his Xbox and a copy of Halo he borrowed from a pleasant (albeit loud) classmate. Being the anti-Halo bastard that I am, I got rather verbal about it by the time he was playing, and I eventually convinced him to try out Half-Life and show him what First Person Shooters should be like. Instead of starting from where I'm at in the game, I went from the beginning, and the outdated graphics combined with the boring-ass train ride, he seemed a little turned off, but once the initial incident occured he got more into it. Desperate to prove to him that Halo < Half-Life, I showed him the HL2 trailer, and he was very, very impressed. He's still playing Halo, but if I were in his situation of having no Xbox games aside from Ninja Gaiden, I too would take whatever I would get.

We also went through IGN's E3 and TGS trailers for games including MGS3, Devil May Cry 3, and Resident Evil 4. He was really impressed by all of them, aside from Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and it was fun to get the excitement for all of these games rejuvinated again.

A strange little quote of the day: "I'm gonna go play Halo. :) "

Guess who said that. Me. I can't believe it. I believe seppuku is in order.

--

I'm sorry there's not a real rant or interesting topic today, but I'll make up for it tomorrow. This happens when guests are over. *runs off to watch Reservoir Dogs*

Teh SillyCircus Day 47- Trust in yourself and trust in your bretheren, but most of all, trust your keyboard.
Comments (5) | Permalink

Thursday, September 30, 2004

I want my scanner, I want my scanner, I want my scanner..

Comment Commentary

Shin- I don't know, can you rap during the closing credits, old-school?

Aleia- Or, better yet, you could be a medical professor teaching nursing.. In space!!11!

Mimmi- The underground rebellion has begun.. Excellent.

DDG- Propaganda, also excellent!

--

After watching the first presidential debate, I have several comic strip ideas, all of which I can use for extra credit in History, but it's not like I really need it.. I just really want to put them up here. It's fun to see how people to react to them. Even if nobody comments, it still feels good to mess around with topics through a medium that almost everyone has access to.

As for the actual debate itself, however, I am going to try to talk about it, but I'm not exactly the greatest political analyst to ever walk the earth. Forgive me if I sound extremely amateur.

I try to keep up with major debates and presidential addresses when I can. It's never really a number-one priority for me, but I still found myself running down the stairs and plopping down on the couch the second I heard this one start. Even if I can't vote yet, I still like to keep myself entertained through asking myself, "who would I vote for?"

Once I heard that the debate, I had a pretty clear prediction of how I thought things were going to turn out: Kerry attacking Bush about doing a poor job, and being rather vague about how he would do better, and Bush defending himself while accusing John Kerry of being a flip-flopper. That's rather generic, of course, but I developed better thoughts than that as thing started up.

I think Kerry had a pretty good start. He's a rather good speaker, though a tad vague, while Mr. Bush began roughly. I think his first word was "um," but I think he had more solid foundation than Kerry. As usual, though, I think Georgie was a little childish in his debating, but whatever.

You know what I would really like to see, though? An unmoderated death-match debate between the two candidates. They could have Don King one of the analysts afterwards and call the debate a bunch of funky adjectives.

Based on this debate and past knowledge, I still don't know who I would pick between the two of them. If I were to pick right now, though, I would just pick Nader so that I know my vote didn't contribute to anything. Haven't I said that before?

--

While in Best Buy yesterday, I saw the Star Wars DVDs for the first time. The shiny gold and silverness quickly caught my eye as I was milling about in the anime section, and I ran over just to run my hand along the embossed logo and image (though I don't quite recall Mark Hammil being that muscular).

..Yeah. I just wanted to say that.

--

The really, really final deadline for the newsletter was today, and I spent all period moving things around, trying to get titles to fit without automatically centering themselvse for some reason, and pasting in things that hadn't been inserted yet. There are still a couple articles missing- the Street Racing Syndicate review I didn't do, and the four-star Resident Evil: Apocalypse thing- but all in all, I think it turned out better than I had expected. I think it's probably because I ended up going over every page individually, unhindered by the clipart-addicted others who go on ego trips because they were taught how to paste things in.

Tomorrow, I guess, we begin work on the november issue. I think it's rather silly to do reviews of movies that will be seen in four weeks, once the subjects are entirely off the cultural radar, so I might propose spending two weeks on the newsletter, and two on the yearbook, to keep the newsletter more up-to-date and to give the yearbook equal attention.

--

Bleh, I have to go write a five-paragraph essay now. The topic was of the kind that I despise with the utmost intensity- we had to look back at our life, think of a time when something went wrong, and write five paragraphs about it. I hate doing things like this for several reasons:

A) My life is boring, and no crazy misunderstandings in my life are worthy of twenty-plus sentences for a grade.

B) I hate looking back at most of my life. Even if the memory itself is happy, it only leads to depressing ones, and it gets me depressed.

C) It's not creative enough. Give me a genre of fiction and I'll crank out an essay faster than you can type up a rant.

I've decided to BS it and talk about some imaginary time when I was trying to hook up a computer, or television, or something, and how I overlooked the simplest mistake. I guess it's rooted in fact, but it's going to be a lame, made-up story. Hopefully injecting forty CCs of cynicism can save my grade.

Teh SillyCircus Day 46- Shaman King manga just keeps getting cooler, end of story.
Comments (8) | Permalink

Wednesday, September 29, 2004

TWO comments? Aside from one and zero, this must be a new record.

Comment Commentary

Shin- Yeah, I know what you mean about Mr. Black. Can you imagine him being the Green Lantern..? I shudder at the thought.

Aleia- Oh yeah, Mulan. That one was good.. I'm pretty sure Disney did it by themselves, but again, I'm not an expert on the subject.

--

I was in a lot of pain today. Those 100 situps and 100 pushups didn't really bother me that much up until I woke up this morning- it was a challenge to just sit up in bed. It hurt in the usual places (Abdomen and upper arms), but for some odd reason I felt a tense strain in my neck as well. Apparently it's because I'm "lifting with the neck and not with the abdomen."

Well good news! The actual pushup examination was today, and I ended up doing thirty-five of them, if you count the three that were sort of weak. I felt that I didn't do nearly as good as I could, but it turns out that I was second only to one other person in the class, only by a margin of two.

But who wants to hear about my thoughts on pushups? Let's move on.

--

As I mentioned a couple days ago, I looked through my mom's list of USC (Or is it UCLA?) magical tome of all optional courses for the semester. Most of the classes were what you would expect.. Foreign languages, C++ and Java primers, as well as a Photoshop class. It costs $875 for twelve hands-on sessions, which led to me fantasizing about being that course's instructor and getting ungodly amounts of money for teaching people what Ctrl + V does.

The real purpose behind talking about this, though, is to rant about how skimming through the book got my mind back onto the topic of career options and my future after high school.

It's a little early for me to be finalizing my choice for a college (in the end, doesn't it come down to who gives you the time of day?), but my goal has always been Stanford. How much of a slacker am I, aiming for the ninth greatest school in the country according to USA Today? I could at least say Princeton and then say that I'll "settle for Stanford if I have to," but nope. Not even I feel ambitious enough to "aim" for Princeton.

But how in the world would I get into either of those schools? According to the magazine, you need a 4.3 to even be considered for Stanford, and I believe it was 4.9 for Princeton. Then comes the essay, referrals, SAT scores and extracurricular activities, among other things.. If I keep piano, yearbook-ness and newspaperness going through high school, they would most certainly help, but you can always do more. What exactly I could add to that is beyond my thinking at the moment, but whatever.

And as for majors, I suppose there's a few things I wouldn't mind going into right now- psychology, journalism, education or perhaps even some sort of art major, but I'm not leaning in any real direction right now.

It's sort of funny. When I was in second grade my goal was set: Astronaut or bust. Over time, though, as reality set in, that goal faded away, and now I sort of lack a strong direction. Possibilities, maybe, but one true passion, no.

Bleh. I still have five years to think about it.

--

Adobe Pagemaker can be such a pain in the ass sometimes. The image margines and column markers get in the way all of the time, and even if a test box is blank you still can't put anything over it. That, of course, results in a lot of blind clicking so that you can find the problem. If the program used layers, I would be a very happy guy.

And to top my frustrations with the program, I had to type up captions for the fashion "article" today. Whoop-dee-freaking-doo.

The article, if you can call it that, consisted of a bunch of too-small-to-see pictures of the same three or four girls wearing things, along with captions. Not knowing which captions to put where, I asked if the fashion "columnist" could write down which phrases go where.

She covered the screen in sticky notes. I only had a quarter of the screen to work with for a while, and as I bobbed my head around so I could figure out where the hell the mouse was, I got extremely frustrated with the whole deal. The backspace key took quite a beating today.

*looks at the page layout for the yearbook* It's almost as if they're trying to make it suck..

Teh SillyCircus Day 45- Who needs A1 steak sauce when you can get F6 for eighty cents less?
Comments (4) | Permalink

Tuesday, September 28, 2004

Yesterday's Post 2.0

Comment Commentary

Shin- Both, actually.

Syk- They don't even do graphic design. They're just happy with clipart, and inserting it into every blank space on the page.

Aleia- November.. Fifth, is it?

Godel- I blame Canada's school system for not pretending that everybody is on the same level of intelligence.

Only in America. :P

Godel- I see.

--

Bah, yesterday's post did not live up to its full potential, because I had ten minutes to write it, so I figure I may as well go over some of that material today, with an hour and a half time limit, so that Pixar doens't feel left out of my blog, which I'm sure the whole world reads.

--

I have always enjoyed Pixar films. In fact, even with my limited knowledge I feel confident in saying that the only good Disney releases in a while have been the Pixar films. They do rather well for several reasons, and for the sake of space-taking-upping I shall rant about them individually for a bit.

The most important aspect to Pixar's movies, I suppose, is the for-all-ages appeal that most of their movies give off. Unlike a lot of Disney films, there are many instances in Finding Nemo, Monsters, Inc. and the rest that people above ten can find good as well. That's not to say that other Disney movies don't have those moments as well- I just happen to think that Pixar does it in a way that makes it particularly appealing..

Which leads to my next aspect, the amount of dedication put into each film. My family has several of the hardcover artbooks from Pixar (my favorite being the one for A Bug's Life), and it's amazing how much research and thought is put into everything. A lot of it isn't very noticeable if just see the movie without really paying attention, but they spend so much time getting the atmosphere just perfect- from the way the light showed through leaves in A Bug's Life to how the particles in the waters of Finding Nemo float about. From an artistic standpoint, I find it inspiring.

They are also, in a way, revolutionary with their ideas. I've talked about this before, with various other films: You can take a relatively simple or cliche storyline and make it an amazing movie if you are clever. It happened with Kill Bill, and it happens with Pixar. Come on, it's movies about talking toys, bugs and fish. We've all seen that before, but Pixar adds a heaping layer of charm and originality which keeps things simple yet enjoyabale.

It bothers me how Dreamworks tends to "copy" Pixar. Their answer to A Bug's Life was Antz, Shrek to Monster's Inc. (I don't really find that a good example, actually), and now, on the coattails of Finding Nemo, comes Shark Tale. Antz lacked the heart and charm of A Bug's Life, and perhaps that is why we don't remember it as fondly.

Shrek, I love, and of course I haven't seen Shark Tales, so forgive me if I'm being ignorant. Feel free to point any of the obvious (yet nonexistent to me) holes out.

--

My mom began taking an Interior Design course at USC with my great aunt and second cousin-in-law yesterday. She complained about waking up so early (twenty minutes after me), and went off after I did, and came back so happy to be back into the "college experience." It's nice for her to have something to keep her occupied, but it's nothing really all that amazing to me- unless she gets a second degree there and becomes an alumni, I don't really care.

Today, however, I decided to look through her big book of class options in the car, just for the hell of it. It was interesting seeing what sort of classes they hold there, along with prices and names of instructors.. There were a few Japanese courses, a Photoshop I class that I could probably teach (not well, necessarily, but I could) along with some other stuff. That got me into thinking about the future and what I might consider majoring in, but that's a rant for another day.

What's my point, you ask? Well, quite honestly, there isn't one. I've really got to go and do my homework, so I'll talk about career options tomorrow.

--

Journalism update: Bah, nothing special. We're beginning groundwork for the second volume of the newsletter (with many people not even done with their work for the first), and I'm probably going to end up doing a Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne review. The only catch to that, however, is that I'll need money to buy the game. Bleh.

And crappy-page-design syndrom has been sweeping the class again this year. They're jamming a thousand pictures into the fashion column, all of the same three or four people. It seems they don't comprehend that pictures that small on the screen are equivalent to very small pictures on the paper.

You can sort of tell which articles I edited and which ones I didn't, heh. If there's one or two tastefully placed pictures and no double negatives in the article, it's mine. If it has 8,000 pictures the size of M&Ms and quintuple-negatives (I exxagerate, sue me), it's not mine. Haha.

Teh SillyCircus Day 44- Washed up? I think not!
Comments (2) | Permalink

Monday, September 27, 2004

Dude!
It's like some sort of miracle. Laptop works, desktop doesn't.

Comment Commentary

Shin- Sadly, I don't remember much of Rocko, so we're at a standstill. :/

Ben- *has the first two in mint condition, albeit opened* :)

Godel- I thank Calvin in Hobbes for teaching me that large heads + spacing through panels = humor.

Aleia- Yeah, let's go with that. :P *doesn't want to explain*

Aleia- You are forgiven.

Solo- *revels in the glory of his ancestor*

Syk- God dammit, those are Catholic halos!

--

..Yeah. Our phone and DSL lines have been acting funky, with static and slow connections and stuff like that. Today I came home and nothing would connect.. Needless to say, for the sake of Teh SillyCircus, I was afraid. Just ten minutes ago my brother pitched the idea of using the laptop.. Bless his little heart.

Now on to the bulk of the post.

--

In retrospect, I don't think I had a very good day. Nothing interesting happened in class, though due to a few things that were said I was in a rather bad mood for most of the day. It sort of wore off by journalism- either that or I was kept too occupied to really care about it. After fixing a few things on the damned fashion column, and defragging yet another floppy drive, the teacher's daughter and their close family friend were writing up a yearbook page layout. Interested to see what they were messing up on, I leaned over and found that they only had one page for art again. Last year all of the art was either so pixely it was an eyesore or too small to even recognize (My submission was a hint of both). I pointed that out, they got rather defensive, and I simply walked away. Later, I heard one of them saying something along the lines of, "We have to get this chart done! We're running the yearbook, after all."

What. The. Hell.

I was the one who sat at that computer for hours on end after school, freezing cold because the janitor turned off the heater, tweaking every detail, fixing every typo, uploading every picture and this year they're the ones in charge because of all the work they did last year.

Well good for them. I hope they have a nice time being put in a blender and being used as Satan's shampoo (he uses it in places other than his head). *cough*

I'll still end up doing all of it, and I'm pretty sure they'll get the credit. As usual.

On a nicer note, however, the yearbook representative lady from the Jostens Yearbook company, whom I had only talked to once, ran up to me and said that she was glad I didn't move over the summer. Heh, I didn't expect her to even recognize me. That was cool.

We're now, what, a week past the deadline with almost one half of the thing put together. Great.

But now, to break that depressing, unnecessarily angsty commentary, I think I'll talk a little bit about my progress in Devil May Cry.
I have recently made a ton of headway in the game, and much to my content I didn't need to beg Azure for secrets (in the past couple of days). I picked up the final weapon, which is spiff-o-licious, and got into the underworld. I must say, I never really expected DMC to get as creepy as it gets. It's all very surreal by mission nineteen, in a beautifully artistic yet disturbing way. The enemies are getting really, really eerie as well. I'm starting to wonder if this is what Silent Hill is like to play..

--

Pixar's upcoming (and last?) Disney movie, The Incredibles, really hasn't floored me yet. The character desigs are rather weak, I think (Grr, I hate that little kid), but the humor itself seems spot-on. While Finding Nemo's trailers didn't really get me to laugh, I found myself giggling (in a very masculine way, of course) at a few of the gags. I'm sure I will end up seeing it, possibly just so I can compare it to Finding Nemo and Monsters, Inc. on mO.

Heh heh.

It's not like I'm that much of a Disney fan, really. I guess I like a few Pixar movies, but for the most part I don't look back on, say, Bambi or Beauty and the Beast with such fondness as some people do. Pixar's movies are my favorites, partially because the humor isn't all aimed at small children, but I mostly admire them for their visual expertise. The scene where the Incredible dad guy (I forget his name) is landing on the forest-laden island looks pretty jaw-dropping.

Hm, now I'm tempted to make a rant about Pixar movies some more. Oh well, I guess that will have to wait. Time's almost up.

Teh SillyCircus Day 43- Look, ma, no wires!
Comments (5) | Permalink

Sunday, September 26, 2004

Google is a neverending source of entertainment.

Comment Commentary

DDG- That must be the purpose of my existence. I can die now.

Shin- In retrospect, I don't know why I liked it. I don't really remember ever laughing at it..

Godel- Did you bash Flower's head in with the butt of your gun? :P

Shin- Rocko's Modern Life > Any pre-Zim Nickelodeon show.

Aleia- Enlightening! :o

Juu- I always forget about Hey Arnold, for some reason. Even today, I find that show funny.

--

Hm, nothing eventful happened today, and that's how I wanted it to be. After running around for a week, and going places the last few weekends, it was good to just sit around doing nothing. I feel nice and refreshed now.

I think I found why my computer kept on disconnecting for no apparent reason for the past few days. It turns out that my brother had plugged a phone into his room. Being the little genius child that he is, he forgot to tell me, and I spent an entire day trying to pinpoint the problem.

DSL filter. Haha. I'll kill him.

--

I decided to do a google search on my screen name today, just because, but instead of typing in "OtakuSennen" as I usually do, I just put "Sennen" in the search box to see what would happen.

Apparently, there's a cove in South West Cornwall dedicated to someone named Saint Sennen. That, of course, sparked my interest, so I set out to learn Saint Sennen's story.

Amazing!

Apparently I'm the reincarnation of a lazy saint who followed on the coattails of some other saint who liked exercising his salivary glands. Who'd have guessed?

Cool story or no, he was a saint, so I decided to tell the story to the world in a way that will change the lives of millions: A crappy comic.

Eat your heart out, Mel Gibson.

..Yeah. I really, really want my scanner back.

--

This doesn't count as Torture Your Funny Bone #3, because I simply didn't draw it. It's just something I put together in half an hour. I don't understand why the borders on the word bubbles look so blocky.. Oh well.

I'm sure tomorrow's post will be longer, but probably not as historical. Stay tuned.

Teh SillyCircus Day 42- I eat this Ho-Ho and pour this malt liquor on the sidewalk in honor of Saint Abdon. Rock on, dude.
Comments (7) | Permalink

Saturday, September 25, 2004

Life is changing as time stands still.
Comment Commentary

StarBound- Eh, I've written longer. :P

DDG- That's why I have the day counter in my posts, instead of in the header. It's killing two birds with one stone.

Shin- I hope to make her brain explode by the end of the year.

Mimmi- *nods* I still like to make my head hurt, for some strange unexplainable reason, though.

Aleia- ..Whoa, they make clear duct tape? I thought it was always brown.

Solo- Bah! Excuses, excuses. :P

Godel- Just make sure those four-year-olds don't have laser rocket-propelled grenades while your orbiting laser Black Hawks are flying rather low.

--

Today's been a little reminiscent for me. I was a little bored earlier, so I decided to go through all of my old myOtaku posts. I wasn't going in chronological order- actually, I was going backwards- but it was interesting to read what I had to say over a year ago. You can sort of identify different periods of my life by what font colors I had. The colors themselves really don't reflect the tone, but dark blue was early and noobish, orange was a tad better, and green was the golden era. I really enjoyed reading the green section. At that time I actually had things to talk about- it wasn't just me doing what I am today. I was introspective, though occasionally whiny, and I did it with humor and grace. It had personality. I don't really think my mO is like that today.. Of course, I didn't feel this way about the green posts back when I was making them.

Oh, and Catdog was on earlier. I loved that show when I was younger. It's not even remotely funny anymore, but it was enjoyable to remember when I was little and laughing at Dog's.. Um.. Mispronouncing of things?

--

The prospect of going to Six Flags Magic Mountain with friends has come up recently. Out of nowhere,
the subject was brought up, and I was invited. I would really, really love to go for several reasons (I haven't been to a theme park in forever, and going with friends would only make it even more awesome), but the odds of me going is about fifty-fifty. Again, the gender barrier is the major problem. When I ask about it, I'm going to bring up how my brother, two years younger than me, got to go to Hurricane Harbor with his friend recently, but his friend wasn't a girl. Hm. I'll still try as hard as I can, though. I'm yearning for some theme park goodness.

--

A week ago I was employed as the "Unoffical Graphics Designer of Journalism Class," after I threw together that wicked awesome yearbook cover, and I was asked to put together "Journalism IDs" the other day. I started working on it today.. I'm pretty sure I know how I want it to turn out, but it's been a pain finding a good font. The original goal was to find a text that emulates the look of the New York Times logo, but it was nowhere to be found. I eventually settled for some other font, and I'm about halfway done. Once it's done, I'll put it up here. It's certainly not going to be the end-all image, but it's nice. I like the picture of the eagle I put in the background.

The first issue of the newsletter is going to be four pages, with my video game review on page two, but I think it will grow to at least six pages soon enough. Once the yearbook starts going into production, though, I'm afraid the quality will take a nosedive, to the point of suckiness that dwarves even what we have now.

Teh SillyCircus Day 41- Internet problems! Oh my Gawd!
Comments (6) | Permalink

Friday, September 24, 2004

Three comments? Just three?

Shin- How efficient. I wish I was a bastard child of science, too. :(

Aleia- I smell a new craze.

Godel- I don't remember what exactly she said. I'm lame like that.

--

I played DDR for the first time in forever yesterday. When we were waiting for Sky Captain to start, we wasted a few dollars in the in-theater arcade. My dad did that gatling gun game, my brother and good friend played Virtua Cop (They say it's really, really awesome), and I predictably drifted toward the MAX2.

And, predictably, I did horribly. I don't know what my problem is with arcade DDR. I do amazeringly at home, and yet when I get in the arcade, I start overstepping things. It's crazy.. I'm beginning to think that the arrows being a tad deeper than the rest of the stage could lead to some problems, but that doesn't make too much sense. I'm just glad nobody was watching.

So I decided to pull out my home pad and practice a bit when we got home. When you consider how long it has been since I've had a real "session," I did amazingly well. I broke records on almost all the songs I played, with little breaks made up of AIM conversation inbetween.

And my pad developed a rip. Out of nowhere, there's this cut along the down arrow, and it strangely matches the pattern on the pad. I'm rather worried, so I haven't played it today. Fixing it with duct tape would look really, really lame, and I'm not about to spend seventy bucks on another good pad, so who knows what will happen next in my amazingly interesting and post-worthy DDR legacy?

--

My science teacher ended up vaguely answering my question today, with a satellite picture of a galaxy far above another galaxy. Not as thought-provoking as I had hoped, but more unanswerable questions came up throughout the lesson. The one I remember most vividly right now is about how black holes supposedly absorb and use the devoured stars' gravity. It was also said that there are no black holes anywhere near our solar system, but.. If one were to eventually gather enough gravity, the distance wouldn't really matter as much. Considering that I'm only in eighth grade, being taught basic astronomy, and there are so many college folk out there, I'm sure there's something I'm missing. Let's move on.

--

I've been using headphones on my computer a lot recently. Normally I just listen to my tunes via lame pre-packaged Polk Audio speakers, but ever since my brother started playing The Sims with the volume pretty high up on the desk next to this one, I decided to harness the amazing power of those Bose headphones my dad won in a raffle a while ago. Nobody but me ever uses them, anyway, and their over-ear design really helps in drowning out Sims music. On the downside, of course, I can't hear anything else going on around me, which has led to a lot of yelling. Oh well. *rocks out to music on a brightly colored background, ala the iPod commercials*

--

Weekend. Woot. I'm doing nothing. Woot squared. I'm sort of looking forward to just laying around the entire time- I twisted both my ankles earlier this week and all the running we have been doing has not been good for it (Complain to the teacher? No, no, no). I would like to get some drawing done tonight, and some Half-Life playing tomorrow. As for Sunday, that will be left up to fate.

Teh SillyCircus Day 40- It's only six and I want to go to sleep.
Comments (7) | Permalink

Thursday, September 23, 2004

Will Smith should not be immortalized as a fish from a Finding Nemo knockoff- he should be a gopher in a Caddyshack knockoff.

Comment Commentary

Mimmi- The solution is only seven digits away, but it seems HP Customer Support is based in Bangladesh and all have really thick accents..

Shin- Uh.. Early bird. Wow, that insult sucked.

Godel- I sort of look forward to it, because we can run around restricted school areas in the dark.

StarBound- I blame George Bush, because I blame him for everything. :P

--

Ooh, a lot to talk about today. Let's hope this post turns out better than the last one.

After posting yesterday, my mother ordered that the final modifications to furniture moving needed to be made- we've had my grandmother's computer desk blocking half of the piano sitting space and our old television blocking half of this room for quite some time now. We moved this room's couch out to the curb in hopes that somebody would take it overnight (which they did), dragged the computer desk in here, and set up the PS2 and Gamecube. That's right, there's a television sitting behind me (with no cable, but whatever) with both consoles at my disposal. Get me a toilet and I could live in this room. o.o

After playing a little bit of Devil May Cry and Half-Life, it was time to jump into the car and head over to the school for open house. By the time we got there (legal) parking was incredibly hard to find, so we had to drive for a while into the wild unknown neighborhoods to the west of the school. Walking through was nice, I guess. Unlike a lot of streets in that area there were lots of big trees and the houses were fairly decent, though there were a few shady characters. We got there at the end of the principal's boring speech thing, and then it was off to tell my parents where to go. Both my parents, especially my mother, know where all of my classes are except for two, and I clearly explained where those rooms were, but I was dragged along anyway. I saw quite a few familiar faces, but there was little galavanting until the fourth session. That was when we were getting bored, and a lot of us went outside to talk. Soon enough there was a small group of us running around on the "forbidden" half of the field. I know it sounds sort of immature, but it was truly enjoyable, if you try to not think about the crazy skater-punks that were but one hundred yards away.

There was a meeting for the advanced students after most people left, in which we mainly discussed the plans for GATE this year. I'm starting to get really, really anxious about that two-year self improvement project, which nobody has even touched. I hope it doesn't come to this, but I'm probably going to end up making a bunch of trash up at the last minute, pretending that I did actual work.

After a bit of conversation afterwards, talking with a close Juniper alumni about past on-campus deaths, we were kicked out of the school and I went to bed soon after. I was exhausted.

--

I got a little angry today when discussing the universe with my science teacher. We're constantly shown images of the universe from side and above angles, and I asked one of those unanswerable, thought-provoking questions about what lies beyond what we know. It was something about the universe and if it spans off in all directions, instead of on a two-dimensional plane pictures in textbooks lead us to believe, and how there could possibly be a second universe far above ours, and stuff like that. I wasn't expecting a solid, well thought out answer, just something that seemed slightly informed. Instead, she answered a question I didn't even ask, which hardly related to anything, and that left me sour. Oh well.

In journalism I was ordered to type up a Resident Evil: Apocalypse review someone wrote.. They gave it five out of five stars. God, it wasn't even a review, but more of a lame-ass summary recalling all of the "awesome" events. I didn't bother editing it, because other people needed to use the computer, but it hurt every time I typed a double negative.

--

Ugh, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow was a disappointment. I was informed after school that we were going to go see it, and I went along with it because I have been really interested in the visual style they have put to use.

At times the whole 1930's theme was cool, such as seeing Times Square with old-time neon advertisements, but stuff like the circular radio waves flying at the audience was lame. The dialogue felt rather rigid, spare a few humorous lines, but a lot more could have been done with it. The acting wasn't spectacular, either. While Jude Law wasn't so bad, Nicole Kidman didn't fit the "Classic Film Leading Lady" role (I was hoping she'd have that accent everybody back then seemed to have), and Angelina Jolie was just meh. They seemed to cut her out of the story rather quickly, and it might have been interesting to see tension between Kidman and Jolie's characters heighten.

The visuals, of course, were snazzy. It looked exactly like a colorized movie from the golden era of film, aside from maybe the island at the end, but it was definitely the best part of the movie.

But the plotholes! Oh, the plotholes. It's supposed to be comic book-esque, I know, but there were so many little things that didn't make sense in it. I can't really say much without spoiling anything, but there were many times where I asked myself, "Why doesn't he just fly over that?"

Perhaps I should write a newsletter review for it, but it's so hard to put a score on it. On one hand, you can praise it for revitalizing classic film, and on the other you can criticize it for being so unoriginal. Kill Bill's story, when you think about it, is extremely clear-cut and typical, but the amount of style Tarantino threw onto it made it a great movie. Sky Captain, not so much.

Bleh.

--

Teh SillyCircus Day 39- No homework, whoo!

...

*goes to sleep*

EDIT: Oh, look at this. See that laptop on the right-hand column? Yeah, that's amazingly cool-looking, and it's tricked out. *crosses his fingers and hopes he wins it*

ANOTHER EDIT: My thoughts on Donkey Konga summed up in one conversation snippet:

OtakuSennen: Grr, I want to throw things at whoever pitched the idea of Donkey Konga.
OtakuSennen: The selection of songs blows.
OtakuSennen: Nintendo tunes including the infamous DK rap, plus Blink 182's "All the small things."
OtakuSennen: >:o The hell is that?
Xz verOxz: Haha
Xz verOxz: they should throw in a Pokemon song for the heck of it.
Xz verOxz: :-X
OtakuSennen: They did.
OtakuSennen: o_o
Xz verOxz: omg
OtakuSennen: And the Kirby theme song.
Xz verOxz: what losers.
Xz verOxz: Lmao
Comments (3) | Permalink