March the 27th and 28th: I found awesome knitting patterns today
Funny, I didn't get a regular post up yesterday but I did manage to get the anime review up. And that was only because of Earth Hour (love the idea but I wish it had been a little earlier, with no lights, candles or working flashlights the only thing I could do was work with the power my computer already had and I'm not sure if that was in the spirit of things) so a bit of catchup.
Yesterday involved senile bus drivers, a stalkerish car seat, and the realization that my cell phone is possessed by a demon. The car seat one actually started Friday, I was walking to Japanese when I found a car seat on one of the driving circles, thought it was odd, but couldn't think of what else to do so I kept on going to class. After classes I was doing my laundry and found that the car seat was now in the elevator. And then, even later when I was running around, I found that it had made it to the seventh floor stairwell landing. If that thing gets any closer to me I will probably flip out and have a hard time explaining myself over it.
But that's nothing compared to my cell phone. On Friday it was working just fine but on Saturday morning when I turned it on it didn't seem to turn on. I'd just charged it on Friday too so I was really puzzled, but figured out after a few tries that it was turning on but the screen had almost no power. So later I plugged it back in and tried again, and now it comes up but the main screen is completely tinted red with black stripes (instead of a purple and yellow swirl) and it doesn't have enough power for me to read the screen for texts and stuff. I have no idea what happened overnight that made it like this but it's quite creepy, going to see if we have any holy water when I go home.
As for the actual "adventure" of the weekend, it all started out rather normally (like they all do, I want a bumper sticker that says "I didn't meant for today to be an adventure!" or something along those lines). I got to the bus stop, messed with my phone, Angela showed up (in a costume of her own character, she loves taking every opportunity she can to dress up and apparently walked right in front of a tour group on the way over), Chynna came, and then we waited for the bus. Somehow, even though it had only been a few minutes off when I saw it heading for my dorm (like, two or three? So pretty much on time) it was more like seven minutes off when it got to the circle. No biggie, we weren't in a huge hurry and set out. We got to the point in the route where the bus was going to go in one loop and then go back through the Walmart loop (oddly enough, I've never been on the other loop) and the other loop had the stop near the National Guard Armory with the mini con. The bus driver completely ignores convention and goes down the Walmart route instead and it only took about a minute for Angela and I to notice. No idea why he did so (or why he missed the people at the McDonald's stop TWICE, it was pretty clear they were waiting on the bus too) and so we end up where we started. Okay, round two! By this point we've ridden nearly the full route and he goes a different way again! This time it's to the bus headquarters to switch out, and once we get there he gets a call on the radio reminding him that his replacement is out at the off-campus parking lot. We groan, head out, finally get the new guy, and leap off at the next stop for a longer walk than we expected over to the mini con.
There aren't a lot of anime fans in these mountains as I suspected, but since the flyer had said "anime" on it I was hoping there would be one seller there and I might be able to pick up something neat/old. It's rather funny to see how the comic nerds and the anime otaku really are two different groups than two sections of the same group. I still hold the elitist view that the anime crowd is better, if for the sole fact that we look nicer most of the time (in my mind, good appearance=you care enough about yourself to take the time to look decent/you understand how appearances work in the world, therefore you have social skills). Angela, and maybe Chynna, didn't get how I didn't like comics as much, even when I cited the art style as the reason. Angela said something about how I wasn't looking at the right era of comics or something, but the art style really grates on me. To be specific, I loath American comic book style shading with an intense passion. I figured out recently that I judge how good/poor an artist is by how well they can grasp the concept of shading so I do gravitate towards the more realistic of the comic art. For American comic books, the shine on the spandex is understandable but for everyone else it looks like they are wearing shiny cheap satin (and to paraphrase DramaCon, I can go out and kill whoever told them that was a good fabric choice). Plus, I read the magazine Cricket for a long time so I really like the illustration style more in many comics (don't like it in Natsume and the Book of Friends but that seems to be the exception). Also, since I look at plot first in stories (and have a preference for overreaching story lines which knocks out almost all of the comic books as well), I tent to gravitate to either slice-of-life or historical (a lot of times as a combo or even with fantasy elements) and those shows have a much more realistic style as well (D'Eon and Moribito come to mind). So I do have a lot of mental reasoning for my dislike of American comic books, and this doesn't mean I'll dismiss any Western comic out of hand. I love dozens and dozens of Western webcomics and a lot of those are some combo or other of Easter and Western art styles, I'm certainly not trying to be a snob over here.
We finished up there pretty fast (I got worried that Angela was going to stay for hours and go through every comic bin they had though!) and Angela and Chynna accompanied me over to the mall (erm, the main mall) to try and find A Conspriacy of Kings at the Waldenbooks. It came out this past week by a semi-well known author who has won awards so I figured it would be in, plus I had a 40% off coupon.
So of course I had no luck and you can't apply coupons to items you order so I had to give up on that dream. Now I have to wait until I'm both at home and with at least a 25% off coupon again since I can't/refuse to pay full retail price for books. It's silly but I just don't feel comfortable paying $18 for a book, even a full length novel (unless it's one of those enormous coffee books but I only ever buy those when they're on sale). It does make me briefly go "Am I being 'disloyal' to this author?" by not buying the book immediately and being part of the hype, but I just go "screw it." Is it bad taste to say that you haven't read a book yet since you're waiting to get it at the library? I suspect it is so I try not to say so, but I hate blind buying anything. Probably because I'm so used to this library/online/on tv approach to "previewing" a story, but I only started buying novels on a regular basis two years ago, more like a year ago when I decided I was going to stop buying paper backs that fell apart.
Plus, part of this is that there isn't as much pressure for me to buy the book straight out. Now that I follow author blogs there is more (I swear, I hate it that the blogs are pretty much just a marketing thing, I love just reading about people's random, every day lives!) but there isn't the level of fandom that I find in anime. Part of it is because books aren't serialized and in those fandoms (anime, manga, ATLA, heck, it's one of the main reasons I loved Cricket) you have to keep up with the story if you want to talk about it at all. With books? Eh, it's going to take the author at least a year, more like two, to get a new book out so there's no rush. Who knows, maybe you'll have forgotten about them/not like them any more when the new book comes out too!
Wow, two rants and technically in the same day, I swear Saturday wasn't that bad a day too! I mean, Chynna decided to get HeartGold after this and I decided to do a blind buy on a manga called Yokai Doctor (special case here, scanlations for this must be very well hidden so I couldn't try it out at all, and it ended up not being special enough to buy the rest of and the next time I cull my anime collection it's heading to the used bookstore). Headed back to campus then, had lunch with them, and then lost myself in the internet for the rest of the afternoon/evening. Already mentioned Earth Hour, I finished up the anime review then and also watched a little more Romeo x Juliet there (my gawd, forgot how much of a moe bishie Romeo is ///// ) and shader got on skype a bit later. Had her look over some piano sheet music (since it just occurred to me yesterday that since Sam has a piano now I can try and teach myself how to play anime theme songs on it) and ended up with more basic musical knowledge than I started the day with. She was home for the weekend and her dad took her to a shooting competition there. She said that she was "with 12 master class and above military snipers," who not only taught her how to shoot better, but she was about average in the group. O_O XD My high school friends and I fit into such odd tropes, but I can't imagine one of the guys in our group being the master sniper instead of her.
To describe Sunday is simple. Chilly, wet, and "oh my god, is that hail?!?" It was still pretty dark in the room when I got up around 10, it was the sort of day when you go "Ehhhhh, there's nothing to do, I could go back to sleep and not miss much....but what's the point of sleeping more either?" I was worried my roommate wouldn't get up for a while and I wouldn't do anything but she was up in an hour or so. I headed out to the library since I had a book on hold but it didn't occur to me that the library would be closed. I got there around noon but it didn't open until 12:30 so, despite the chill, I decided against walking back to the dorm and then back to the library again in the rain and skimmed the New Zealand travel guide I was returning. Nasty weather all around, later I was talking with Olivia when we hear thunder and a few minutes later the rain really picked up. We went into the hallway to see heavy it was coming down (easier for both of us to look out the hall window than to lean over the microfridge in her room) and realized it was in fact hail coming down. Not very big, more like tiny pellets that were two or three times the size of a pin head, but it kept up like that for a few minutes.
And I've accomplished almost nothing today. I did get another chapter read in my history book (another 40 page-er too, @_@ ) and got the quiz done online and I'll get around to my Japanese homework after I finish this episode of Bakemonogatri (gah, Russian websites almost always have English subs but take freaking forever to load). And after dinner I'll take the practice pieces I cut out for Erika's dress, sew them, adjust the fit, and hopefully get the real pieces cut out! So, signing off, hope everything else goes well today.
Yesterday involved senile bus drivers, a stalkerish car seat, and the realization that my cell phone is possessed by a demon. The car seat one actually started Friday, I was walking to Japanese when I found a car seat on one of the driving circles, thought it was odd, but couldn't think of what else to do so I kept on going to class. After classes I was doing my laundry and found that the car seat was now in the elevator. And then, even later when I was running around, I found that it had made it to the seventh floor stairwell landing. If that thing gets any closer to me I will probably flip out and have a hard time explaining myself over it.
But that's nothing compared to my cell phone. On Friday it was working just fine but on Saturday morning when I turned it on it didn't seem to turn on. I'd just charged it on Friday too so I was really puzzled, but figured out after a few tries that it was turning on but the screen had almost no power. So later I plugged it back in and tried again, and now it comes up but the main screen is completely tinted red with black stripes (instead of a purple and yellow swirl) and it doesn't have enough power for me to read the screen for texts and stuff. I have no idea what happened overnight that made it like this but it's quite creepy, going to see if we have any holy water when I go home.
As for the actual "adventure" of the weekend, it all started out rather normally (like they all do, I want a bumper sticker that says "I didn't meant for today to be an adventure!" or something along those lines). I got to the bus stop, messed with my phone, Angela showed up (in a costume of her own character, she loves taking every opportunity she can to dress up and apparently walked right in front of a tour group on the way over), Chynna came, and then we waited for the bus. Somehow, even though it had only been a few minutes off when I saw it heading for my dorm (like, two or three? So pretty much on time) it was more like seven minutes off when it got to the circle. No biggie, we weren't in a huge hurry and set out. We got to the point in the route where the bus was going to go in one loop and then go back through the Walmart loop (oddly enough, I've never been on the other loop) and the other loop had the stop near the National Guard Armory with the mini con. The bus driver completely ignores convention and goes down the Walmart route instead and it only took about a minute for Angela and I to notice. No idea why he did so (or why he missed the people at the McDonald's stop TWICE, it was pretty clear they were waiting on the bus too) and so we end up where we started. Okay, round two! By this point we've ridden nearly the full route and he goes a different way again! This time it's to the bus headquarters to switch out, and once we get there he gets a call on the radio reminding him that his replacement is out at the off-campus parking lot. We groan, head out, finally get the new guy, and leap off at the next stop for a longer walk than we expected over to the mini con.
There aren't a lot of anime fans in these mountains as I suspected, but since the flyer had said "anime" on it I was hoping there would be one seller there and I might be able to pick up something neat/old. It's rather funny to see how the comic nerds and the anime otaku really are two different groups than two sections of the same group. I still hold the elitist view that the anime crowd is better, if for the sole fact that we look nicer most of the time (in my mind, good appearance=you care enough about yourself to take the time to look decent/you understand how appearances work in the world, therefore you have social skills). Angela, and maybe Chynna, didn't get how I didn't like comics as much, even when I cited the art style as the reason. Angela said something about how I wasn't looking at the right era of comics or something, but the art style really grates on me. To be specific, I loath American comic book style shading with an intense passion. I figured out recently that I judge how good/poor an artist is by how well they can grasp the concept of shading so I do gravitate towards the more realistic of the comic art. For American comic books, the shine on the spandex is understandable but for everyone else it looks like they are wearing shiny cheap satin (and to paraphrase DramaCon, I can go out and kill whoever told them that was a good fabric choice). Plus, I read the magazine Cricket for a long time so I really like the illustration style more in many comics (don't like it in Natsume and the Book of Friends but that seems to be the exception). Also, since I look at plot first in stories (and have a preference for overreaching story lines which knocks out almost all of the comic books as well), I tent to gravitate to either slice-of-life or historical (a lot of times as a combo or even with fantasy elements) and those shows have a much more realistic style as well (D'Eon and Moribito come to mind). So I do have a lot of mental reasoning for my dislike of American comic books, and this doesn't mean I'll dismiss any Western comic out of hand. I love dozens and dozens of Western webcomics and a lot of those are some combo or other of Easter and Western art styles, I'm certainly not trying to be a snob over here.
We finished up there pretty fast (I got worried that Angela was going to stay for hours and go through every comic bin they had though!) and Angela and Chynna accompanied me over to the mall (erm, the main mall) to try and find A Conspriacy of Kings at the Waldenbooks. It came out this past week by a semi-well known author who has won awards so I figured it would be in, plus I had a 40% off coupon.
So of course I had no luck and you can't apply coupons to items you order so I had to give up on that dream. Now I have to wait until I'm both at home and with at least a 25% off coupon again since I can't/refuse to pay full retail price for books. It's silly but I just don't feel comfortable paying $18 for a book, even a full length novel (unless it's one of those enormous coffee books but I only ever buy those when they're on sale). It does make me briefly go "Am I being 'disloyal' to this author?" by not buying the book immediately and being part of the hype, but I just go "screw it." Is it bad taste to say that you haven't read a book yet since you're waiting to get it at the library? I suspect it is so I try not to say so, but I hate blind buying anything. Probably because I'm so used to this library/online/on tv approach to "previewing" a story, but I only started buying novels on a regular basis two years ago, more like a year ago when I decided I was going to stop buying paper backs that fell apart.
Plus, part of this is that there isn't as much pressure for me to buy the book straight out. Now that I follow author blogs there is more (I swear, I hate it that the blogs are pretty much just a marketing thing, I love just reading about people's random, every day lives!) but there isn't the level of fandom that I find in anime. Part of it is because books aren't serialized and in those fandoms (anime, manga, ATLA, heck, it's one of the main reasons I loved Cricket) you have to keep up with the story if you want to talk about it at all. With books? Eh, it's going to take the author at least a year, more like two, to get a new book out so there's no rush. Who knows, maybe you'll have forgotten about them/not like them any more when the new book comes out too!
Wow, two rants and technically in the same day, I swear Saturday wasn't that bad a day too! I mean, Chynna decided to get HeartGold after this and I decided to do a blind buy on a manga called Yokai Doctor (special case here, scanlations for this must be very well hidden so I couldn't try it out at all, and it ended up not being special enough to buy the rest of and the next time I cull my anime collection it's heading to the used bookstore). Headed back to campus then, had lunch with them, and then lost myself in the internet for the rest of the afternoon/evening. Already mentioned Earth Hour, I finished up the anime review then and also watched a little more Romeo x Juliet there (my gawd, forgot how much of a moe bishie Romeo is ///// ) and shader got on skype a bit later. Had her look over some piano sheet music (since it just occurred to me yesterday that since Sam has a piano now I can try and teach myself how to play anime theme songs on it) and ended up with more basic musical knowledge than I started the day with. She was home for the weekend and her dad took her to a shooting competition there. She said that she was "with 12 master class and above military snipers," who not only taught her how to shoot better, but she was about average in the group. O_O XD My high school friends and I fit into such odd tropes, but I can't imagine one of the guys in our group being the master sniper instead of her.
To describe Sunday is simple. Chilly, wet, and "oh my god, is that hail?!?" It was still pretty dark in the room when I got up around 10, it was the sort of day when you go "Ehhhhh, there's nothing to do, I could go back to sleep and not miss much....but what's the point of sleeping more either?" I was worried my roommate wouldn't get up for a while and I wouldn't do anything but she was up in an hour or so. I headed out to the library since I had a book on hold but it didn't occur to me that the library would be closed. I got there around noon but it didn't open until 12:30 so, despite the chill, I decided against walking back to the dorm and then back to the library again in the rain and skimmed the New Zealand travel guide I was returning. Nasty weather all around, later I was talking with Olivia when we hear thunder and a few minutes later the rain really picked up. We went into the hallway to see heavy it was coming down (easier for both of us to look out the hall window than to lean over the microfridge in her room) and realized it was in fact hail coming down. Not very big, more like tiny pellets that were two or three times the size of a pin head, but it kept up like that for a few minutes.
And I've accomplished almost nothing today. I did get another chapter read in my history book (another 40 page-er too, @_@ ) and got the quiz done online and I'll get around to my Japanese homework after I finish this episode of Bakemonogatri (gah, Russian websites almost always have English subs but take freaking forever to load). And after dinner I'll take the practice pieces I cut out for Erika's dress, sew them, adjust the fit, and hopefully get the real pieces cut out! So, signing off, hope everything else goes well today.