practicality

Dear Money,

Go die in a fire

-Me

So, after figuring out how much money I owe people, and then factoring in the lousy exchange rate, I realized I have $150 left to 1) buy food for the next week and 2) finish buying Christmas presents.

I also discovered my credit card won't authorize any more - I'm guessing it's a combo of Vanoc running the full amount of the Olympic tickets I requested for my Dad plus my mom putting a bunch of stuff on one of the linked cards.

I also want to play DDS2 more, but don't really want to spend $50 on a game I already own, and have tossed another $20 and a year and a half trying to get back into my possession (I'm not bitter at all, no). I know I can probably buy it again with Christmas money, but I'd really rather buy something I don't have already.

I'm angry and bitter and can't sleep, and nobody else is on for me to bitch to. Argh.

EDIT: I should note that this is not 'oh noez I am broke and going to starve' - I have money for food and rent for January (and already paid up this month). I was just hoping to have some left over after presents to buy some books or something for myself.

Oh Arts, how I love you ♥

I had these two papers I was really worried about the marks on - a paper for a third-year science lab (the one I was wailing about a few weeks ago), and a paper about portrayals of anarchism in The Secret Agent and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man for a fourth year English class. Both were super-bullshitty, and I felt like they were both C/D papers - not strong work at all.

I don't have the science paper back yet, although with 40% and 60% as my two previous paper grades, not looking good. The English paper? 78%. I laugh and laugh and laugh. And then cry a little, because there's no way I got 78% on my stats final this morning.

So hey, I haven't posted much lately >.> Mostly because I feel like I don't have any particularly insightful commentary to offer here, which, well, is the way I've been feeling most of the time lately - I'm a lurker on the message boards of life.

Part of this is the fact that depression has reared it's ugly head again, and while I know that I am not intrinsically worthless as a human being/my friends do not all secretly hate me (or do you >.>)/etc, it's still left me wanting to spend most of my free time either just surfing the internet, or curled up in bed asleep, both of which are somewhat counter-productive to getting things done, and makes me rather unfun to be around. Hopefully things'll get better after exams are all done.

Some random assorted thoughts, opinions and notes:

-WotLK is basically amazing. Northrend is beautiful, there's a lot of innovation in the new quests (less FedEx, more harpoon surfing!). The Death Knight starting quest chain is fucking awesome, and while I know like 75% of the DKs out there are all basically huntard2.0, I've been having a lot of fun leveling mine - she's Frost-tank specc'ed, so I've been making Olvia teach me the joys of tanking (ilu Olv <3)

-FFX-2 should really be subtitled 'strippers go on an adventure!', because seriously, while I roll my eyes at WoW's plate bras, if you've got a shirt on, most outfits are actually pretty covering, and nobody wears heels. C'mon Yuna, you're too smart to run around climbing ancient ruins in stilettos, really. It's actually pretty fun if I think of the game as a crack AU, rather than a genuine sequel, although I got two hours in and then remembered why I stopped playing Squeenix games - running in circles for twenty minutes trying to click on everything and everyone to get what the game wants me to do to actually advance the plot gets really annoying.

-My SR campaign looks like it's going to be ending a mission and a half in - we're probably losing the hacker, and possibly losing the street sam, come second term, and people are too frustrated with the rules to go through the trouble of resorting everyone's skills and stats to cover the empty spots. Quote of the game - 'his little squirrel paws move faster than the speed of sound!'. I'm going to try my hand at running Earthdawn, which I love as a system, and which is less reliant on having a particular group composition, but which is also a lot more plot-heavy (plot, my one weakness! *hides*)

-The Gamers: Dorkness Rising manages to be even more awesome and hilarious than the original. I highly, highly recommend it to all my tabletop-gaming buddies.

Having the inside of your nose anesthesized is a deeply strange feeling - having a fiber optic cable snaked through it afterwards, doubly so.

Also, CA, I'm disappointed in you. AZ and FL too, but I kind of expect this sort of bullshit from there.

A belated happy Halloween to everyone \o/ I dressed up as a zombie hunter (read: wore two-thirds of Leon), and went out to Rosie/Julie/Justin's Halloween party and got rather drunk and had a wonderful time. Also went to see Video Games Live on Wednesday, which was great fun - we went out for some excellent Italian before hand, and the music was amazing, although I felt it needed more Chrono Trigger and less random blathering from the host. The music was a nice mix of genres and ages - there was the typical Zelda/Mario/Squeenix properties, but also Halo, MGC, an oldschool arcade medley, Warcraft and Starcraft, Metroid, Castlvania, and a surprisingly beautiful piece from Civ IV.

In Warcraft news, my guild is now 3/5 in Mt Hyjal (which is hella fun as a mage, although it makes my graphics card cry), and we're heading into SSC tomorrow. I've also started playing Warcraft III, which is surprisingly fun, even if Arthas is basically the ultimate retnub, and all of the humans other than Uther and Jaina are total idiots. Lordaeron deserves a kingdom-wide Darwin Award, because their fall really is their fault.

Also, I've started digging around in Warcraft fanfic, because apparently I hate myself. Illidan/Kael is really deeply fucked up, but also interesting and pretty hot >.> I'm ashamed to admit that yes, I ship it. And kind of Thrall/Jaina, because it's sweet and a little silly, and they're both made of epic win, even if Thrall likes leeroying, as Olv so eloquently put it XD

...Although I'm remembering now why I don't go to FF.net any more - I just found these little gems:

Arthas and Thrall: Homosexual Lovers by

After years of having a loving relationship with Thrall, Arthas feels he needs to end it.

Tamed

A young Blood Elf male Hunter goes to Ashenvale to catch himself one of the elusive Elder Ashenvale Bears, but when he finds a rare, purplish bear, the young Blood Elf gets much more than he bargained for. Yaoi, MM, Slash, PwP.

...And, of course, assorted other self-inserts, as they are very, very easy in an MMO-verse.

Posting this here, as I don't want to actually get involved in the wankfest, but aaaaargh must say something somewhere *froth* Basically, WoWInsider posted a short interview with a GBLT-positive guild on US-Proudmoore. There were a surprisingly large number of positive comments, but of course the inevitable internet wankfest occured (complete with Godwin!), and in among the back and forth, there was a special little comment that got looked over in the general melee, and made me seethe with rage.

( internet stupidity and my unposted reply to it )

....There, that feels a little better now. I almost want to go roll and alt on Proudmoore, because that guild sounds full of win and awesome, but I have too many alts, and I don't think I could leave my awesome DotA gals ♥

1) The PS3 can play AVIs off of data DVDs. No more hunching over my little laptop screen!
2) My tv remote works on both televisions (likely because they're the same brand)

This makes up for dealing with arguably the club's biggest asshole - not J (surprisingly!) but George. He doesn't come by much, but he came for the icebreaker tonight, and Christ, I don't have the words to describe how much of an asshole he is. He gets his kicks fucking over as many people as possible.

Man, I kinda want to punch whoever set up the club's hosting plan (I think I know who it was, and I won't _actually_ punch him, but it's tempting). I know my host for T-T.org here can be problematic sometimes (usually about billing - never had tech problems), but seriously, I'm getting roughly ten times the features for the same price the club pays. I was trying to install Gallery, so we can have some online photo albums of events, and discovered that I couldn't install Gallery2, because trying to add a second MySQL database (the first is used for the forums) failed because "The total cost of the resources you are trying to purchase exceeds your credit". So I went back to Gallery1 (less awesome than 2, but still awesome), and then discovered I had to install an image processing library myself, because the host has no image processing libraries installed - I don't think it has any Perl modules installed at all.

I did finally get it all working, though, and it has reminded me of two things - 1) I have gotten really rusty at webstuff and 2) despite that, I still enjoy working on webstuff, and the satisfaction that comes from fixing all the problems with something.

Because the only other thing I have to blog about is school, and there's not much to say about that - genetics is win, biostats is easy, everything else is alright. So, gaming it is!

Earthdawn: Managed to escape almost certain death with only a Horror mark and an ancient ritual written on metahuman skin >.> The ritual may help us accomplish our goal of sealing away one of the nastiest Named Horrors in the world, but it may be all lies. We haven't killed J's warrior yet, but only because we need the meatshield.

Shadowrun I: has been canceled in a fit of fanboy rage over the newest book, to be replaced by...

Mage: We haven't actually started playing yet, but I'm excited. We've got a pretty cohesive group going, aside from perhaps the mixed martial artist (J, again).

Shadowrun II: We finally got through the first adventure! And also witnessed the opposite ends of the fixer spectrum - Predator's gang contact, Jorge, and Harlequin's high-class fixer, Byron (yes, he looks somewhat like the Byron. And hangs around gentlemen's clubs).

World of Darkness: Soon to be a Hunter: The Vigil campaign! My character's lab has been infested with evil rats who are stealing lab equipment and brewing things in the fume hoods at night :<

World of Warcraft: Hit 70, started raiding. It's fun! Not much else to say than that XD

Mostly just an excuse to post the photos, which are here, as I am way too unfocused (and have been for most of the year x.x) to do a nice blow-by-blow recap, and it would probably boring as all hell anyway. I ended up going to barely any events because all the ones that looked like they might be interesting were at times where I was getting really tired, really hungry, or both. So I spent a lot wandering around looking at the costumes and having photos snapped of me (everybody digs Leon!). The cosplay was pretty average - nothing really terrible, not too much really great - there were a few gems there, which I tried to get photos of. The one 'con' event I did go to were the two Academie Duello workshops, longsword and rapier, which were both really fun - I'm really tempted to sign up for lessons there, but it's pretty expensive :<

Dealer's Room swag:
-Tokyo Babylon 1 & 7 in English
- Fruits Basket 12-15 in English (slowly catching up!)
- CCS doujin "Honey" - a Tomoyo-Sakura friendship story, and a shorter Touya/Yuki romance story. The art is super-cute, although it's pretty short.

...Yeah, not a lot. The dealer's room was actually pretty well-appointed, but I've seriously cut back on my merch-buying, and all the series I want stuff for are super-old in terms of anime and nobody carries stuff for them any more (hence why I snatched up the CCS doujin)