2620: Night Tide
Gad, I know, I know... Neojank. Hey, I have an excuse though--I have nothing of significance to do, nowhere of significance to go tomorrow, at least until Char is done with work, which might be early [and, depending, will be when I wake up anyway], and what I'm doing on Neojank prolly until the end of December is hitting the Advent Calendar at midnight NST and grabbing anything with really good turnaround while it's fresh. In the event of a good prize like today's, it's better to take advantage of the market before everyone wakes up than to scramble to get the last scrapings of the barrel. I just have to remember where the cutoff point of diminishing returns is, though it DID get me back up to a mill+ NP this past week.
...so pathetic... =/ but, money itself is really just a placeholder of value anyway, so what I find value in is what is valuable [nyeah!], and I currently find an annoying amount of pleasure rebuilding my Neohome [itself a money pit, virtually and otherwise]. It'll only be a problem if I can suddenly afford a Sword of Sardsken without tapping my saved retired unbuyable books =/ [11 mill+]
Unfortunately even when I turn in when Char does, I still end up tossing and turning until at least this late anyway, even with the electric blanket on high, due to the unfortunate circumstance of science! [Perhaps I should try putting the blanket under the foam, so the comforter AND the mattress will be warm without being uncomfortable to sleep on...?] So, I end up pushing the day back by that lunar calendar crap, without any regulation to my schedule otherwise. I mean, the most that got me up this week was worry I wouldn't hear the phone and, when that wasn't a worry anymore, them banging on the walls [which, I've noted in the first apartment, is unaffected by earplugs].
So when I dropped in Borders earlier tonight [er, yesterday evening] it was during late night rush hour, apparently =p though I took the back route where at least there was less traffic than 355. I ended up spending over an hour going through random books--maybe only a third of my time in the manga section, as opposed to my usual visits. There's this annoying influx of manga/anime books about Japanese culture as written/illustrated by Americans |:' and stuff like "Moe USA"* that's... ugh. What I got through of it read like a fangirl's travelogue but put to comic format. I'm trying to imagine what it is besides really bad Japanamania propaganda, especially since there aren't nearly the number of English speakers in Akiba as were portrayed \:' [an ad for Manga University's kanji learners?]
*mow-ay, rhymes with "no way": sort of like "love at first sight" deliberately built into a character's design... like the "ZOMG CLOD STRIPE SEPHIROSH *drool*" Final Fantasy pleather fetish bullshit
There was also one of those books like the Sorcerer's Companion: An In-Depth Unauthorized Big Ol' Thesis Thingie about All the Crap in the Harry Potter Books That We Thought Might Get You to Buy Our Book, but about Death Note. It reads as a big long FAQ about the Death Note series, including that the Shinigami seem like they served humanity at one point but are now so unmotivated to do their job [what Light took upon himself to do] that the human population exploded and crime and murder and so on ran rampant. I mean, obviously, if the Shinigami killed all of humanity, they would eventually die, because their lifespans feed directly off of excess human lifespan, but if they let humans kill each other, they get no benefit from it.
So, in Death Note, Death Gods exist... to help humans flourish. o_o
One of the more interesting bits was what I realized myself: a human's lifespan, visible above that person's head through Shinigami eyes, is that person's natural lifespan and does not change if that person is fated to die via a Death Note. The only way it changes is if the natural way that person was to die was altered through a Death Note's use [non-spoiler: killing a Shinigami, though incidental Death Note use might have the same effect] or if that person becomes a Death Note owner and gets the Shinigami eyes.
The Death Note FAQ is not an FMA novel, though, and it doesn't really add much to the series, so I don't think I'll pick it up.
I did see a book I liked a lot, Drawing & Painting Fantasy Landscapes, but though it was a really nice guide to help me stage the ideas in my head, it wasn't $21 nice. Maybe after Christmas with that Borders Rewards coupon I got. [...so... $16.80 nice. Hrm.] Instead, I picked up a slightly cheaper one of early medieval designs I can steal fromuse for inspiration, since I'm having some trouble making convincing medievalish designs besides "this is a griffy" and "this is a lizard thing" and "flat cloth texture" 8p
Most of my time was spent in the puzzle book section, though. I didn't find a lot, unfortunately, since actual riddles and brain teasers are much harder to make than the eleventy billion Sudoku books they crap out with a Sudoku generator, prolly, and once you've done one of those, you've done 'em all =/ Instead, the closest books to something that interested me were
Do we have a bet?
This one's the first one in the book, and something of a gimme. It's a standard lateral thinker, though, and a lot longer to explain than it seems it should be. Maybe that's from all the bizarre riddle answers I've asked of y'all 9_9
Also saw a Dan book, The Zen of Zombie XD "Gay America! Zombies understand your pain! Do zombies choose to be flesh-eating undead monsters? Do they become zombies looking forward to being fired at with shotguns and attacked by torch-bearing mobs with pitchforks?" =B and such inanities I don't quite recall verbatim.
I definitely ought to pick a day to just do not-Internet stuff, though, as much as playing crap Neojank games does vaguely give me the sense of "earning" my stuff, rather than just spending, spending, spending. Maybe if nothing's going on Sunday, there's my "straighten the closet" time. Them plushies ain't sortin' themselves! XP
No, no LJ-cutting for you! Go exercise that scrolling finger of yours. *shoo*
...so pathetic... =/ but, money itself is really just a placeholder of value anyway, so what I find value in is what is valuable [nyeah!], and I currently find an annoying amount of pleasure rebuilding my Neohome [itself a money pit, virtually and otherwise]. It'll only be a problem if I can suddenly afford a Sword of Sardsken without tapping my saved retired unbuyable books =/ [11 mill+]
Unfortunately even when I turn in when Char does, I still end up tossing and turning until at least this late anyway, even with the electric blanket on high, due to the unfortunate circumstance of science! [Perhaps I should try putting the blanket under the foam, so the comforter AND the mattress will be warm without being uncomfortable to sleep on...?] So, I end up pushing the day back by that lunar calendar crap, without any regulation to my schedule otherwise. I mean, the most that got me up this week was worry I wouldn't hear the phone and, when that wasn't a worry anymore, them banging on the walls [which, I've noted in the first apartment, is unaffected by earplugs].
So when I dropped in Borders earlier tonight [er, yesterday evening] it was during late night rush hour, apparently =p though I took the back route where at least there was less traffic than 355. I ended up spending over an hour going through random books--maybe only a third of my time in the manga section, as opposed to my usual visits. There's this annoying influx of manga/anime books about Japanese culture as written/illustrated by Americans |:' and stuff like "Moe USA"* that's... ugh. What I got through of it read like a fangirl's travelogue but put to comic format. I'm trying to imagine what it is besides really bad Japanamania propaganda, especially since there aren't nearly the number of English speakers in Akiba as were portrayed \:' [an ad for Manga University's kanji learners?]
*mow-ay, rhymes with "no way": sort of like "love at first sight" deliberately built into a character's design... like the "ZOMG CLOD STRIPE SEPHIROSH *drool*" Final Fantasy pleather fetish bullshit
There was also one of those books like the Sorcerer's Companion: An In-Depth Unauthorized Big Ol' Thesis Thingie about All the Crap in the Harry Potter Books That We Thought Might Get You to Buy Our Book, but about Death Note. It reads as a big long FAQ about the Death Note series, including that the Shinigami seem like they served humanity at one point but are now so unmotivated to do their job [what Light took upon himself to do] that the human population exploded and crime and murder and so on ran rampant. I mean, obviously, if the Shinigami killed all of humanity, they would eventually die, because their lifespans feed directly off of excess human lifespan, but if they let humans kill each other, they get no benefit from it.
So, in Death Note, Death Gods exist... to help humans flourish. o_o
One of the more interesting bits was what I realized myself: a human's lifespan, visible above that person's head through Shinigami eyes, is that person's natural lifespan and does not change if that person is fated to die via a Death Note. The only way it changes is if the natural way that person was to die was altered through a Death Note's use [non-spoiler: killing a Shinigami, though incidental Death Note use might have the same effect] or if that person becomes a Death Note owner and gets the Shinigami eyes.
The Death Note FAQ is not an FMA novel, though, and it doesn't really add much to the series, so I don't think I'll pick it up.
I did see a book I liked a lot, Drawing & Painting Fantasy Landscapes, but though it was a really nice guide to help me stage the ideas in my head, it wasn't $21 nice. Maybe after Christmas with that Borders Rewards coupon I got. [...so... $16.80 nice. Hrm.] Instead, I picked up a slightly cheaper one of early medieval designs I can steal fromuse for inspiration, since I'm having some trouble making convincing medievalish designs besides "this is a griffy" and "this is a lizard thing" and "flat cloth texture" 8p
Most of my time was spent in the puzzle book section, though. I didn't find a lot, unfortunately, since actual riddles and brain teasers are much harder to make than the eleventy billion Sudoku books they crap out with a Sudoku generator, prolly, and once you've done one of those, you've done 'em all =/ Instead, the closest books to something that interested me were
- a book of heavily mathematics-based puzzles by Martin Gardner [considering, as personal reader more so than something to regurgitate here for riddlemethis],
- the usual reading-heavy "five-minute mysteries" books, the only problem from which I read involved a dead man who the detective suspects was killed by a man because the victim was too polite-minded not to have stood up for a lady, as the sand indicated he didn't \:' though I think he could have fallen asleep and not seen a woman killer approach, and
- a book of bar bets.
Do we have a bet?
This one's the first one in the book, and something of a gimme. It's a standard lateral thinker, though, and a lot longer to explain than it seems it should be. Maybe that's from all the bizarre riddle answers I've asked of y'all 9_9
Also saw a Dan book, The Zen of Zombie XD "Gay America! Zombies understand your pain! Do zombies choose to be flesh-eating undead monsters? Do they become zombies looking forward to being fired at with shotguns and attacked by torch-bearing mobs with pitchforks?" =B and such inanities I don't quite recall verbatim.
I definitely ought to pick a day to just do not-Internet stuff, though, as much as playing crap Neojank games does vaguely give me the sense of "earning" my stuff, rather than just spending, spending, spending. Maybe if nothing's going on Sunday, there's my "straighten the closet" time. Them plushies ain't sortin' themselves! XP
No, no LJ-cutting for you! Go exercise that scrolling finger of yours. *shoo*