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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.
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