The story begins with the hero strangling the villain on his own bed...



It's unfortunate that some of my best story ideas come to me when I'm under pressure to get eighty things done at once.

I'm applying to JET for next year, wish me luck!

Wow, when did it get so late?

I try my best to think through my online purchases before I reach for the ol' credit card, but my judgment seems to have fallen through this time, as I've spent an embarrassing amount of money on a huge box of incense scent unsmelled, only to receive it and find that it's not to my taste... and now I have 449 sticks of it.

Is anyone on my flist interested in buying a decently discounted package of Ka-Fuh Smokeless Bamboo Incense, 450 Sticks bulk package from me? I intend to burn two or three more sticks of it this week to make sure there's no chance of it growing on me, but if you buy it you will in all likelihood receive pretty much the entire package. (The original stick count is approximate anyway, if you're bothered by odd numbers.)

The only note is bamboo, and the scent is pretty accurately bamboo-ey, although it's achieved (apparently) through generous use of bergamot. So if you like bamboo and/or Earl Grey tea (I forgot that I didn't), you may like this incense. If you're wary as I should have been of buying such a huge amount of incense without sampling it, I can send you a couple of sticks in an envelope beforehand as a sample. I'm not a good judge of scents (apparently some of my favorites are considered unbearably synthetic and artificial by people who know better), but people who know better have judged this particular line of incenses to be natural and of good quality for the price. Furthermore, it is indeed smokeless or emitting so little smoke as to be negligible. This is a Japanese-style incense, so it has no wooden stick in it and turns entirely to ash when burnt. Also, the sticks are 5.25" long and burn for around a half hour.

The main reason I bought so much is that a) this scent is discontinued entirely and b) the site I bought it from only had this size left.

Again, I'm going to burn or sample out a few more sticks to potential buyers, but you will be receiving almost the complete package. If you like, I can throw in samples of any of the other incenses I have to make up for the lack.


I paid about USD$25 for this box including shipping, but I'm going to take reasonable offers. That price comes to about 5.5 cents per stick. I'm going to guess that shipping to you will cost around $3-4 if you're in the States. Additionally, if I can't get this off my hands as-is, I'll probably be willing to parcel it out in smaller portions. If I do that, it'll probably be in portions of no less than fifty sticks per parcel, and I'll roll them in paper by hand. I have a paypal account, but I don't think I can take personal checks unless I know you IRL.

My apologies for the gratuitous bold and pretentious phrasing in this post.

Street of a thousand blossoms / Gail Tsukiyama.
Teahouse fire / Ellis Avery.
Ramayana : a dramatic retelling of the great Indian epic / David Farr.
Mahabharata : a shortened modern prose verion of the Indian epic / by R.K. Narayan
( Way too ambitious, considering the summer's a month gone. )

Copypasta'd from my library account.

Okay, so I have an almost completely different for realz lulz class schedule.
TR 12:30 Intro to Sociolinguistics
TR 2:00 Pidgins and Creoles
MWF 2:00 Morphology
MWF 3:00 Computational Linguistics

And the tuition issue was caused by the registrar having me down as an undergrad (lolwat), so once I got that changed my tuition got fixed but then my aid package got rescinded temporarily 'til they can recalculate it.

I got all that incense in the mail and have been merrily burning it. It makes me so happy to be able to use the stuff after growing up with a mother hypersensitive to odors and fire hazards and then living in dorms for four years. I got:
Morning Star Jasmine, Sandalwood, Vanilla, and Lotus
Seiun Chrysanthemum (current favorite)
Ka-fuh Cypress (burning now)
and some Cafe Time Wine/Lotus cones which are apparently made for burning when guests are over, because they're quite small
Honestly, incense is hardly a fire hazard at all. I doubt it burns hot enough to ignite even paper without serious effort or serious stupidity, and if it comes in contact with anything hard it goes out. I went to Target yesterday and got a square paisley print dish to burn it on, as I'd been using an old steel baking pan before./

I've started watching The Wire via Netflix. It's about as good as they say it is! I love ambiguous morality in fiction so much.

My fiscal responsibility hasn't come back even though my aid offer got withdrawn. I bought a telephoto lens for my film camera, and I'm sorely tempted to buy a banged-up old macro even though the first/last time I bought a banged-up old lens it had a jammy aperture mechanism.

Oh well. They'll give it back soon. And supposedly more, since I'm a grad student now...

Good god, it's hot in here.

Whoa, when did it get to be midnight?

EDIT: Also, on an unrelated note, I LOVE COFFEE MORE THAN LOVE ITSELF! \o/ Yeah!

I got my financial aid letter in the wall and it is sweet, but seriously, it's only been a few days since I got it but it's already nailed my fiscal responsibility to the wall and uh... yeeeeaahhh. I spent $50 on incense last night. I might also buy myself a computer chair and a cot pad. (Dunno if I mentioned this before, but that cot I bought during the evacuation is now my permanent bed. The cotton bedroll makes it comfy, but a proper mattress under that would make it even comfier...) Double bonus: most of the books I need for my classes are ones I already own. Difficulty: Tulane is attempting to charge me three times the tuition they're supposed to, and nobody is answering my emails. >.>

Classes start tomorrow. Dialectology, morphology (again lulz), computational linguistics, and sociolinguistics.

I need to go get my ID replaced, again. 

My 22nd birthday was a couple weeks ago. Didn't do much, baked cupcakes for myself and chilled out.

Other housemate has moved in.

I'm looking forward to learning some shit during the day instead of doing the same repetitive task an ape with a sheet feeder and a shell script could do. Also, dining hall! Shuttle! Friends back in town!

Suddenly I'm really into incense. I bought a package of basic Japanese-style cedarwood incense and I love it so much. The stuff I ordered last night is mostly the same brand, but in sandalwood, vanilla, jasmine, chrysanthemum, cypress, lotus, and uh... wine/lotus cones. I wanted to get some coffee-scented, but they're strangely more expensive for the same amount...

I think my plans for the future involve postponing the transition from shabby student to respectable professional for as long as possible. Well, in my head that's the ideal, but I'm not even thinking of a Ph.D program until I hit thirty-five. Now that it's classes time, I should be starting to work on applications for JET, Fulbright, and the Peace Corps. I should probably also think about other stuff to apply for. And invest some of my loan money in a suit...

I've been stewing over the big final arc in my Wellspring 'verse timeline. At this point, a good quarter of my named main characters are going beyond the impossible and kicking the weathermaker power classification to the curb. Even the lesser ones are achieving all-but godhead now because, well, this is where the story needs to go. Completely off the fucking rails of history and into legend. :D (Also, hee hee, I rewatched Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann this week and um I'm definitely going to throw in a few minor nods here and there, in unexpected places.) Right now I'm taking a break from hard-hitting plot points, mostly because I made and misplaced a timeline that reconciles what exactly happens during the postwar crisis, and musing about characters going about their quiet-but-endearing daily lives. I need to type up some worldbuilding sheets (note to self: the House of Talliser, the Yoke Cultures, the matriarchal culture of Phoenixwell) so expect those sometime soonish, or not soon at all if the week gets busy.

I did a write-up on TVTropes about a side-story idea I had in the spring. It has tentacles. I ended up calling it The Silker Family Saga for lack of a more awesome, RPG-esque name which I'll have to come up with later if I actually write it.

It's kind of amusing how my two favorite characters in Gurren Lagann are the most complicated guy Rossiu (I am addicted to morally ambiguous protagonists; also, I love his pre-timeskip character design THIIIIIIIS MUUUUUUCH and post-skip almost as much) and the least complicated guy Kittan. Also, Leeron is a close second especially during the run-up to the final battle when he takes a few levels in hot-blooded awesome too.

I watched Genesis of Aquarion before that and it's... superspecialawesome! Mecha anime drops a lot of acid then realizes it has a crapload of readings to catch up on for its sexual psychology class. I knew I was watching a keeper when I got to episode four, which is a thinly-veiled love letter to foot fetishism. And by "thinly-veiled" I mean "Nope this episode is about feet and none of the production team is going to apologize for it". It's kind of too bad there's next to no fandom for this show.

There are rumors on the wind that Tulane intends to expand the main library either by jacking it up two more floors or tacking some kind of annex on the back of it, which means Special Collections would move back across the street.

I envision this going about as well as all of their other construction projects have gone. Currently, McAlister is still pretty much a road, albeit fenced off and torn up, rather than being a grassy pedestrian walkway like they said it was going to be. Classes start in two weeks, so I sincerely doubt they're gonna finish it in time...

I really wish I could take a few extra days off before classes get rolling.

Tulane has charged me three times what my tuition ought to be. Imagine my shock and horror when I received a bill for $20,000 instead of around $7,500. D: Yeah, and accounts receivable told me they couldn't do anything about it and I'd have to go to my department head. Who is that now anyways? Dr. M said it ain't her anymore, and she's out of the country anyway.

It's too hot to go do grocery shopping. I finally biked up to Rouse's on Tchoup, and it's almost completely worth the trip because I easily saved $10-15. The produce is decent, the prices are good, the selection is fabulous -- but it's fucking 100F out and riding that far back with a backpack full of heavy shit is hard. It's three weeks 'til the shuttles go...

The Good:
I made it to most of the panels I attempted to attend. There was even a Matsumoto Leiji panel, but the guy who was supposed to run it abandoned it to his less knowledgeable friend. There were actually a couple people in the audience who the poor guy would have been justified in calling up to help him out. (With all modesty, I wrote a paper about a Matsumoto film so I could have led at least one slide's worth of material. xD)

Very little schedule conflict between stuff I wanted to watch. Watched D.Gray Man, Katekyo Hitman Reborn, and Heroic Age.

Weekend had reasonable weather and I managed to coordinate my activity to spend as little time outside in the heat as possible. Also managed to coordinate my activity to minimise pointless walking.

The new rooms in the hotel were cool, albeit a long ways away.

I got my malt.

The Bad:
Umm, dubbed anime in the rooms with the high screens and subbed anime in the rooms with the low screens? When does that start making sense? Also, I haven't looked through the whole schedule, but it seems like dub showings outnumbered sub showings to the point where only one thing I saw was sub. The Gundam 00 dub is 80% decent, 20% narm. "THE BUS JUST EXPLODED!" *snicker* But yeah, they had enough high screens this year that they could very well have split the screenings properly to solve one of the perennial Otakon complaints.

The "Anime's Craziest Deaths" had to shut out half of its line (self included, grumble).

There wasn't much really gripping in the Dealer's Room.

As ever, random schedule changes are really annoying and usually target something I super-duper wanna see (Soukou no Strain) and replace it with something I've seen and hate (Claymore).

The Ugly:
Driving, parking, paying to park. Driving. I hate driving so much. Sweet Jesus. The first garage I parked in encouraged you to pay at the kiosk before you retrieved your car, then charged you for an extra hour if you took too long to find your car. Even if you already paid the max day rate. I had dad drive me in on Saturday, but then the place I parked today charged $25 for anything longer than three hours. Laughable.

The Swag:
Stickers for my new computer: the Ohtori Academy emblem and a Zaku head
A 0079 Gundam artbook
Four Saint Seiya mini-posters.

The Future:
Where am I gonna be living next year? How can I save money on parking (besides the perfectly reasonable solution of asking for a ride from my folks, who refuuuuuuuse)? How many of the artbooks I passed over can I find scanned on the interwebs?

Uggh, first day at work as a new graduate was a bucket of fun. When I wasn't hauling heavy crap up into rare or down into manuscripts, I watched the bruises on my body from yesterday and the day before turn funny colors...

Oh, yes, let us start at the beginning.

I gradumacated on Saturday and the rain kept me from moving my stuff out while my folks were here with the rental car. They got all sappy on me when they left, but I forgive them. :p

Then on Sunday I had to finish moving, which entailed one last truckload of crap and then I spent like four hours scrubbing down that room... at the end of it I had two heavy crates of cleaning supplies and the contents of my fridge and a vacuum cleaner to tote around in opposite directions. So I've been sore and achey ever since then, and now have some impressive bruises on my hipbones and knees.

Then, even though I was shattered with exhaustion, I didn't sleep very well! >>;

So yes, today was buckets of fun. Carrying heavy three volume boxed sets of art books up to rare, trucking heavy cartons of papers down to manuscripts -- made my aches worse.

But I'm all moved into my new apartment, and the menthol/camphor patches are really going a long way to banish the last remnants of the damp odor. I just gotta resist the urge to slap the stupid things all over my body. They're really great for taking the edge off of the really deep bruises.

Grades out. The professor who was the most inflexible about deadlines was naturally the last one to turn grades in, a week late.

Cryptography : B (deserved it, homework was good but final was terrible)
Language and Thought : A- (didn't deserve it, my final was six pages of nonsense)
Language and Gender : A (deserved it, that last paper could probably be made into a thesis)
Anime and War : B+ (deserved it, homework was mediocre but I'm proud of the last paper, the one I said was a love letter to space opera)

So, spending seven and a half hours a day doing quality control on my image file scans is... excruciating. I'm glad I have a different project for the summer.

Rotten morning today, but the rottenness hasn't stuck. Found that my front tire was completely flat, and then struggled for twenty minutes with the air pump while having my leg eaten by insects. Arrived at work sweaty, itchy, irritated, and late.

I haven't had a spare moment to go grocery shopping, so now that the mess hall is shut, I get to starve or spend ludicrous amounts of money on eating out -- really?! nine dollars for a crepe and coffee?! Once I move into my new place for good, I'm going to start packing sandwiches and a thermos to work.

I am in the process of wasting $200 on a Wii. Thankfully, I'm still allowed to work between the end of old payroll and the beginning of new, so I can pay for it without dipping into rent money. Wait... why the hell am I buying a Wii for $200 when I could be getting a gfx card and a motherboard for my new computer?! The world may never know.

It thundered all of yesterday evening, but didn't rain. It thundered again this afternoon, but I don't think it will rain either.

So uh, I've run through my entiiiiiiiire list of Things To Do On The Internet While Pretending To Write The Last Paper of My Undergraduate Career, and... here I am at "Update your livejournal, for chrissake."

So

Hi.

I think I've done this before, picking up where I left off months ago with an awkward hello and a blank look.

I'm graduating in a week now. If I can finish this paper tonight, I think it might even go smoothly. (Insofar as things ever go smooth.)

After months of counting down, Star Trek is finally here. I saw it in Imax yesterday. :< Eeeeee~ So much awesome. So. Much. I want to go see it again this week, but I lack transportation to a theatre. New Orleans used to have the highest number of movie theatres per capita, and now it seems we've got to schlep out to Metairie every damn time.

I probably mentioned asking about a summer job last year, but I managed to nail it all down. I'll be scanning and OCRing Favrot collection materials for the summer at a considerable pay raise.

I've also managed to find digs for the summer (actually, a twelve-month lease, so it's for the year) in a great little converted basement on Oak St. It's about a block from the streetcar and the Rue de la Course. I do love the Rue. I got a sweet deal on the room, too. It's a tiny little den with a tiny little window, but the apartment itself is considerable. The rent is $450 with all of the services folded in, so effectively $350.

I've told just about everyone this, but the first and last papers of my undergraduate education had nothing whatsoever to do with linguistics. Rather funny how things like that work out. Of course, they do end up serving as nice bookends to my life... the first one was a lit review of gender psychology, and the last is about space opera. The first one opened my eyes to the manifold benefits of becoming a trap, and the last one... is pretty much a love letter to my genre

I want to throw religion out of politics once and for all. I want it to land awkwardly on hard pavement and break a few fingers when it does so. It should bounce a couple of times on the stairs and get some nasty bruises and some abrasions covered in grit. It should have to scramble out of the way of an incoming bus when it comes to its senses. Nobody in the street should help it up because it looks like a crazed hobo.

Then the politicians should scream at the top of their lungs at it until it cries, and then proceeds to slink out of town on the Greyhound bus, sitting next to a just-released sex offender who smells like sour milk. Wherever it goes, I hope it gets dropped off alone at 3am in a very bad part of town and loses its luggage. It should spend three months living in a crapass hotel until it finds an overpriced apartment, and then its roommates should be nudists and jerkweasels who come home howling drunk at 3am and have loud arguments with their whorish significant others. The roommates pay only part of the rent ten days late, and get their utilities (and internet) cut off an average of three times a year.


That would be pretty nice.

Wow, look how long it's been since I posted? I'm not going to sum up. Art history has left me in despair, classes are hard, work is boring, I'm not doing NaNoWriMo but instead working on lots of worldbuilding stuff.

Obviously, I'm pleased by the outcome of the election. The win percentages in the run-up were... astonishing! But nobody who's been politically aware through the last eight years can possibly entertain any certainty about a Democratic win, even in the face of such statistics and projections. I'm pissed that I didn't get a copy of the Times-Picayune on the day of for saving.

I came up with an Ironic Hell for grammarians. They should be forced to diagram Sarah Palin's sentences for the rest of eternity. I'm pretty certain she was the nail in the coffin here, and so I'm currently waiting for her to get booted off the national stage once and for all. That people are pushing for her to run in 2012 fills me with dread and confusion.

My grad school and work problems are postponed until next year. Tulane, unbeknownst to me, has a linguistics 4+1 program, and my boss at the library offered me a summer post. The only really unfortunate part is that both the primary linguistics professors here, Dr. O and Dr. M, are both rumored to be going on sabbatical at the same time next year, and my boss at work is retiring this year. Sssooo...

The weather is boring. I'm getting bored of my weekly routine too. Looking forward to Thanksgiving.

I've registered for next semester. Twelve hours (nine until I do some prof-bothering), Tuesdays and Thursdays off. I do have morning classes, alas. Can't win 'em all. I almost got duped into signing up for another one of those art history classes cleverly disguised as a regular history class. They're so tempting! This one was "Aegean Bronze Age", so I thought it would be awesome, but then I saw that it was taught by the same prof as the Egypt class I am currently being mauled by. I have nothing against her; she's very fair. But art history is not something that I can succeed at.

This weekend, I really would prefer to spend all of my time playing video games (Tales of the Abyss, woo!) and watching Yoroiden Samurai Troopers in the original Japanese, but instead I have a scary art history test on Tuesday. Rawr!

Not much time lately for journal updating, and the things that have been going on haven't really been worth writing down (although that's a silly attitude for me to take, since I use this journal for external memory anyways).

I've been angsting mightily about my prospects for grad school and The Real World, but I've sorted out both in the last week. It started out being a grind of papers and tests, but on Thursday and Friday I learnt many things and made up for the lack of sleep! :D

I now have a job offer on the table and the prospect of doing a 4+1 in linguistics right here at Tulane, which is fuckawesome. The job offer is a full-time summer posting at the library I currently work at as a student lackey.

I've got a new side-story on the burners right now. It's a novelized approach to the JRPG genre which takes Story and Gameplay Segregation and turns it on its head. The 'verse is pretty basic, so it won't be one of those things that gets bogged down in the worldbuilding. If I were going to do NaNoWriMo this year (which I ain't), this would be the plot. It's kind of too late in the game to even be thinking about NaNo, though, because I barely have characters at the moment, and 18-hours-all-upper-division doesn't lend itself well to NaNo. I will be taking this NaNo as an opportunity to grind out a workable prototype for a novel project, however. Imperiverse goes on the back burner for now!

 Holy shit, something about the way my life is going right now is making me constantly hungry! It's driving me batshit crazy because I can't buy groceries (lack of available funds, lack of time to go shopping), and I live on the ass-end of campus now! Every three hours like clockwork, I'm starving. What's worse is that it comes on suddenly... I feel like I'm still full from lunch, then twenty minutes later my belly is screaming for a meal. I went for a cup of coffee, finished it in the bookstore, and came home for a nap... now I'm craving one of those delicious chicken carbonara subs Quiznos has. I was just there, dammit!

I am so far behind right now it's unbelievable. Reading, getting in touch with folks, organizing shit, cleaning up...

 Hooooome again. Or rather, school-home.

Wooo~

We had to load out at like six AM, so I'm not exactly awake, but here's a basic rundown:

Me and about 250 other car-lacking suckers spent the week sleeping and kicking around (but mostly sleeping, seriously) in an over-refrigerated gym at the ass-end of JSU campus in Jackson, MS. There weren't any cots (so I bought my own, lol! always wanted to see what it's like to sleep on a cot), and the floor was carpeted plywood, so the first few nights were uncomfortable on my hipbones and the spines of many others. Before landfall occurred, some of us occupied ourselves with helping to set up the special needs shelter all the way on the other ass-end of campus and put in about 150 man-hours of labor getting about half of it put up before the old ladies started to arrive. Once the hurricane made landfall and proceeded to GTFO, the remainder of the week was basically "Durr hurr! We have nothing to do! Let us spend lots of money at the mall!" and many games of the boardly type, the solitairely type, and the cardly type were played over and over again. Nerf guns were bought, tents were erected indoors, and while it rained most of the week a forest of umbrellas sprouted up.

JSU's dining hall, which served meals on one theme and one theme only ("Southern Fried Random"), earned the moniker "Soviet Bruff" by virtue of its soulless concrete bunker construction. JSU's students seemed to enjoy staring at Tulane's hobo-student-shelterees, particularly once we started rewearing our two days' worth of clothing repeatedly. JSU's campus is rather newer and "nicer" than our campus, lacking the multitude of out-of-code buildings not refurbished since the 1950s, but there happened to be a lot of eerie parallels, such as "Soviet JL", "Soviet Sharp", and "Soviet Butler" (which was actually their admin building, so many comments were made about it being the evil overlord's spiky tower of dictatorly doom). I am uncertain as to the origin of the whole "Soviet this, that, and the other" bit. >.>

There was rarely any coffee to be had for the whole trip, which damn near drove me batshit, and what coffee there was happened to be horrible coffee. I spent the first three days withdrawing badly.

I and the friends sleeping in my vicinity ended up acquiring a game of Axis and Allies and proceeded to spend at least twenty hours over three days fighting about a third of WWII. I now want to reread Corelli's Mandolin. We didn't actually finish, but another group who also bought the game (and seemed not to have picked up on some of the rules, lol) played through at least one whole game.

So, in all, it wasn't bad. I'm bothered by the fact that I ended up spending $120 while there whereas if Gustav had fucked off I would have made $120. Additionally, we're going to have to make up some classes, and then Ike is sitting there trying to bust its way into the Gulf of Mexico. Totally thrilling weather. >:\

Also, I stored my camera on high ground and didn't bring it, so no pics per usual.

EDIT: Also, Google Chrome is quite perky, but it needs adblock before I even think of using it full time.

I want coffee so bad I would gladly trade the prospect of some kind of mattress for a guaranteed supply of coffee for the duration of this adventure.

We are here until Saturday at the earliest.

Landfall has occurred, but IIRC most of the bad news about Katrina took about a day to filter up anyways.

I got a little carried away moving all of my stuff up onto the high surfaces in my room... and put my kitchen cart on the sink. My roomie is going to come back and WTF for at least an hour (assuming she gets back first, which, given that I'm evacuating on the Tulane buses, is likely) when she sees all of my stuff practically duct taped to the ceiling.

I would post pics except I put my camera up with my buddy who lives in a second floor room.

The bad part about having pared down the stuff I move with to the handful of things I actually care about is that... I actually care about all of this crap, so stashing it is a bit of a problem.


FUCK YOU HURRICANE. D:<

I just want to get on with my soul-crushing 18 hour courseload.

Everyone has mixed feelings about this one. Either the chances of it hitting and doing as much/more damage than Katrina are extremely long and everyone's totally overreacting, or the locals are scared shitless and planning for the second goddamn coming.

Either way, I am pissed.

Mandatory evacuation is wacky fun!

Poll: Should I go to my morning classes tomorrow before the uni officially closes? (Y/N)

Is it just me, or do the lines make even less sense than usual?

I don't mean in terms of logistics.

I mean in terms of the laws of physics.

Okay, so, someday I absolutely must go to SDCC. Won't always be the case that I live right next to Otakon, so maybe what I should do is make sure I move to a place where there's a good-sized convention to attend yearly. Yes, at this point in my life, one of my chief priorities for where I live is making sure my nerdly needs are not neglected.

We bought a new coffeepot after the old one died. The new one also grinds and brews the coffee automagically, but it's a Cuisinart and the grinder part is not combined with the filter part, and you can actually buy replacements for every moving part in the whole assemblage. The old one's function hinged on one irreplaceable blade-grinder/filter which didn't hold up very well to daily and twice-daily use. Also, as it turns out, my family chronically undermeasures coffee, so from now on I'm going to weigh it.

We've finally made progress on counting, pricing, and moving dad's comic book collection out of the basement storeroom. As expected, there's very little down there worth any money. It's a bit depressing, but them's the breaks. Maybe there will be a second renaissance after the old generation of collectors gives up entirely and then the industry moves to entirely digital distribution? I still can't decide if that's going to happen or not.

I got around to buying the second TPB of Nextwave. :D Yay Nextwave!

I'm excited as hell that this has been and continues to be a wonderful year for movies. The Dark Knight was pretty much one Crowning Moment of Awesome after another and I went bananas over the Watchmen trailer even though up until then I didn't really care about Watchmen much at all. (Yeah, yeah, I know; paragon of subverting the genre, etc.) This might be THE decade for superhero movies. I really hope TDK can knock that turd Titanic out of its spot once and for all.

And if Marvel can keep tapping whatever gave us Iron Man, we might just get an Avengers movie for me to treasure for the rest of my life.

I finally got the boxes I mailed myself from Japan.

I've got plans to be in New York City the 15th through the 17th. evil9, her boyfriend, and I are going to spend two nights in a hostel and do whatever for the weekend. We're taking the train up early and leaving late. :3 It's gonna be fun times.

You know you've picked a good class when half of the required reading has been on your Amazon wishlist for at least a year already.

Woo, looking forward to this semester. :D


I had an idea for a pick-up line. It's too meta to possibly pass up. "So, would you mind if I tried out a couple of corny pick-up lines on you?" I'm just dumb enough to try to use it, so when I get a chance I'll let the world know how it turned out.

There's something that really amazes me about writing, and that's how little one needs to change in a stock plot to make it new and interesting. And how infrequently writers actually use this principle to their advantage. I mean, yes, it can get pretty complicated... but real life is confusing. Am I sliding too far towards "realism" in my fiction at the expense of having coherent storylines? I used to think that all I needed was to dress up the monomyth with some unusual characters and elaborate worldbuilding, but I've gotten so far away from that attitude that I hardly know what to think of any more. Individual character arcs can be shoehorned into the monomyth, but the novel-shaped plots are all subversions or inversions of stock plots. I think it might get to the point where I'm pulling a Thirty Xanatos Pileup on everyone and even the characters can hardly figure out what's going on. Although I like to think that I can write it well enough that readers won't have too much trouble.

Actually, it could just be my most recent novel plot which is doing this. Some of my novel-shaped plots are actually pretty straightforward. Or at least, meandering rather than tangled.

Ugh, insomnia is really making life difficult lately. Ma says I need to get some exercise, but most of the time I'm too sleepy to want to do anything at all, let alone go out for a stupid walk to stupid nowhere in our stupid "neighborhood" which has nothing worth walking towards.