practicality

Some photos and stuff from the last week or so, because I am sleep deprived and it amuses me.

- lol geostigma nectarines (that was the second thought that crossed my mind, the first being 'ew, this nectarine has pus D:' - for some reason the juices from the bruises were seeping up through the skin to the outsides)
-My beatiful heirloom tomato display at work (I know, it would be more picturesque if they didn't have the code stickers on them)
-My awesome new phone 2 - first is locked, second is my main desktop (yes, that's Midgar. Yes, I have the victory theme as a ringtone. And a seperate Turks theme remix for my Turks - does Bree want in? - and the menu confirmation blip as a notification ding. Yes, I am a huge, huge nerd.)

Also, Desai fills me with happiness and glee, thank you Kara ♥

BONUS! Amusing convo with Jon as I was typing this up:

Me: ...Some day I'm going to get 'stigma' and 'stigmata' confused at the wrong time, and it will be very bad
Jon: heh, social stigmata
Me: My brain always thinks 'geostigmata'
Jon: ... isn't that kinda the last stage of the disease?
Jon: You start showing the signs of the messiah?
Me: Ahahaha XD

So I got the HTC Magic today, and it is, in fact, magic. Unfortunately, I failed to save the contacts list on my old phone to my SIM card, so I had to redo them all by hand, which was not magic, but. It's done. Also yaaaay apps. I think I may have gone a little app-crazy, but I guess I can always par things down later. It also took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out how to mount the phone on my laptop to transfer ringtones and wallpaper over ('embarrassing' because it's outlined in the user manual rather simply, I just skimmed it and missed an important step), but I persevered, and I now have a Midgar wallpaper and an FF victory music ringtone, because I am a nerd.

I will probably post some photos of it later, but I've spent all day furiously RPing and flipping through Android apps and sites, and now I am sleepy. I also have an Earthdawn game to plan for tomorrow ffffff.

1) Con photos are up - general gallery here, photos from the Final Fantasy Fight event here. I will probably do a highlights post later, but for now, have me in a senshi fuku

2) Can someone confirm a quick and dirty Japanese translation for me? (And by 'quick and dirty' I mean 'I pieced this together out of the kanji I was looking up to transcribe and Babelfish'). It's the text at the bottom of the ShinRa ID badge, I _think_ it reads something along the lines of 'This certifies that the abovementioned person is an employee of the Shinra Company', but a slightly more accurate translation and a slap upside the head if I screwed up in my transcription would be lovely. Transcribed text is '上記の者は”神羅カンパニー”、及び神羅グループ
系列会社の社員であることを証明します', you can see a photo of an original here

3) My teeny cheapass Samsung is finally starting to bite the dust (the pick-up mic has died, which means I can't actually talk to anyone on it), and I think I may upgrade to a smartphone. The iPhone is super-sexy, but I don't want to sell my soul to Apple. I'm looking at the HTC Dream as an alternative, although I suspect Android has a lot less neat apps avalible so far. I'm also a little worried about the battery issue - dunno about the iPhone, but the Dream apparently goes about ten hours without a charge which seems like a lot, only I'm used to charging my Samsung about once a week >.>

4) I'm reading A Long Hard Road again. I may secretly hate myself. Also, I figured out how to read fic on my mp3 player 8D

-Turks doujin! One old-school gen Turks one, and then one AC humor one, Rufus-centric

-Cute Neptune at the Sailor Moon photoshoot who wanted lots of pairing photos, which totally makes up for how hellish the boots were. Ugh, heels.

-Marluxia: "Mmm, smells like yaoi." *hipthrust*

-Assorted dinner shenanigans and planning for epic Turks group, including plans to have Reno slapped by half the con, and painting Shinra logos onto cheap fans so Reno can fan dance.

So! As apparently I missed a ton of cool people at Sakuracon - who's going to AE, what are you cosplaying as, want to meet up, and does anyone have a bathroom I can steal for half an hour at two pm on Saturday to change >.>

My cosplay schedule is looking like

-Rufus - Friday, Saturday morning and evening
-Super Sailor Uranus - Saturday afternoon, Sunday

So, at 9:30 this morning, as I was on the bus to work, my dad called me to ask me about furries. I am totally serious. I'm not sure what's more terrifying, the fact that my dad assumed I would know about furries, or that he was right. (Background to this - apparently some super-creepy dude my dad met while working a previous job several years ago has apparently been arrested on charges of pedophilia, and it turns out he's a panda furry).

To balance out that moment of utter weirdness, on my way to 7-11 on my lunch break to buy a bus pass, I found a five dollar bill all by it's lonesome in the middle of the sidewalk, so I used it to buy delicious organic fairtrade chocolate bars and shared with the rest of the department.

Also, you know you are a nerd when you are ripping concert DVD audio tracks from the commandline in Linux. It's actually fairly simple, but the order of chapter tracks on this DVD does not appear to be the same as the tracklisting on the case, and at least two tracks have disappeared off somewhere (it's an eight track DVD but attempting to rip higher than six results in a huge encoding of all the tracks). Still, omg omg omg, live VNV Nation = epic win (I bought Reformation 01 and seriously, one CD and one DVD of live tracks, and another CD of unreleased tracks and remixes was totally worth $20)

Dear momijizukamori,

The LR10 (small) were temporarily out of stock. We have more on the way, and hopefully will ship by the end of next week via USPS Priority. I apologize for the delay. Please let me know if you have any other questions.

fffffffffff I HATE YOU WORLD. It's like life wants me to have crappy Rufus gloves for all eternity. (Con is June 12-14th, International Priority is going to be a week minimum, probably closer to two because Canada Post is full of failure)

BRB drowning my sorrows (metaphorically) with a bubble bath.

So, started the day kind of unhappy because Crazy Buckle Vest is still at an impasse, and I haven't recieved a shipping notice for the fingerless gloves I bought on Friday, and Canada Post has been hella slow lately, but I went out to Value Village in search of shoes for Uranus, and came back with many things!

-First and foremost, I did actually find the perfect pair of boots to cover for Uranus - pair of three-inch stiletto heel, just-short-of-midcalf brown leather boots. Really nice, I almost feel guilty about the fact that I'm going to be gluing blue satin all over them.

-Movies! Because I realized it's actually cheaper to buy the $2 VHS tapes there than to rent a DVD. Grabbed Galaxy Quest, To Wong Foo, Terminator (which I have never seen!), the Star Trek 25th anniversery special (it looks to be cheesy, but hopefully awesomely so), and The Secret of Nimh (my childhoooood)

-Books! Which I can get for free from the library, but they had a few I actually wanted to own - Abhorsen, Angel of Darkness, and then a copy of the Moosewood Cookbook from the mid-90s and a bartending guide from 2004

-And, last but not least, a shot glass chess set. Bought it for the sheer WTF factor because it was only $8 - not sure it will ever actually used to play chess, as, to quote Jon, "After I lost about four pawns I think I'd just give up and drink the king," but it's still pretty awesome.

Oh hai, maybe I should actually post something here. Still making up my mind what exactly I want to do, but in the meantime, have con photos!

Full SC'09 photos gallery is here - it's compiled from five different cameras so it is massive and, unfortunately not in chronological order because each camera had a different naming scheme and I didn't get around to figuring out how to give them a consistent naming scheme. Highlights below!

( There are kind of a lot of highlights >.> )

Posted mostly for the edification of Mara-cookie, who understands how I feel about these things, but also because eeee fancy fabric. So. Fabric I've bought so far for AC!Rufus (yes, I am going to make the absurd pants):

- 2 yards of black cotton/linen blend
- 2 yards of white pure linen
- 5 5/8 yards of ivory tricotine wool
- 1 yard of heavy black satin
- 1 yard of heavy black polyester lining

It turns out AC!Rufus's suit jacket has a subtle white-on-white pinstripe - so subtle that you can only see it in a five second shot in the high-def version of AC. I decided that there wasn't any real way of capturing that in the real world (if the pinstripe is there it's going to be really obvious), not to mention that finding a fabric like that would basically be impossible, so I am skipping out on it, though it makes my accuracy-minded soul burn. I also think I'm going to do a very narrow zipper like the Turk suits have in the interests of preserving my own sanity (the jacket appears to have no fasteners at all in the few clear shots of it)