Thursday, December 13th, 2007
So, stuff has happened. I just haven't been updating. I will now. I have a lot to say.
Oh em gee! I got a job. That's probably the biggest thing, even though it's newer than some other important stuff. I was offered a job by Scott the Anime Guy while visiting without Gabi. (I've been going without her there for a while, I like to hang around.) I get paid $25 for a 10:30 to 7:00 day, which may sound lousy, but in actual fact I turn right around and spend all my money at the store xD It's impossible to tell if I'm a shop assistant or just a crazy otaku who spends all day there. I have been questioned, I assure you. I got this awesome bag that looks like a Death Note, a Fullmetal Alchemist set (ring, pendant and pocketwatch), a $5 FMA wristwatch (which broke instantly) and an FMA wall scroll. I would have been in again and gotten more stuff -- now I have my eyes on that Batou (he's $30), a Tachikoma build-it-yourself kit ($35 and comes with a little doll of the Major, which hopefully you don't have to build yourself), and pretty much everything else in stock. We're not short of stock -- I was hired to help unload a new shipment of eighty cartons. But I kind of have to save my money to buy Gabi this set of L, Light and Misa. She likes the Light 'cause he has no shirt on, even though she's more of an L kind of girl. But it's $70 or $80, so I have to hoard me some monies.
Imma go sleep a bit more, it's kind of twenty past six.
-the one true Lizard Queen
Friday, October 26th, 2007
So, um. Today. (I always make such an encouraging start on these.)
I took the bus home today, because the car was going in for a service and I didn't want to be a pain, y'know? I've done it a couple of times and it's a load of fun. Today I got a small nachos from Spudnik and a cappuccino from this donut shop that actually makes excellent coffee. Then I sauntered down to a nearby hobby shop to say g'day to Scott the Anime Guy. I first met Scott the Anime Guy walking with my friend Gabi to her house after Saturday German, and he's a great guy to talk to. He sold me the Fullmetal Alchemist movie for only $10. He's a decent guy, that Scott the Anime Guy :3 He was with a customer so I didn't talk to him a heck of a lot (he's great to chat to, knows something about everything and tells a great story about every movie or show ever made), but in the absence of chatter I found myself mentally positioning the three-inch Batou figurine he has on my desk. How much can it cost? I was pretty convinced I would never want a little statue like the ones in Scott the Anime Guy's store but that Batou is just the kind of useless kitsch I desperately need. Then I went and caught the bus. It takes a special kind of person to ride a bus, the kind of person who can try to not encroach on the personal space of the person next to them and end up encroaching on everyone one else's personal space. I resolved the must-not-meet-anybody's-eye-while-on-public-transport unwritten rule by squeezing into a window seat, boxed in all sides, with my bag on my knees to hide behind and my iPod turned up loud. Unfortunately the woman next to me was one of those amazing people who can inflate herself in a well-meaning attempt to stay out of everyone's way, and I was pretty much pinned against the wall. If you're not deft enough in such a situation you'd leap from the bus without waiting for it to stop, but I simply mastered the art of changing songs with my elbow to survive the compacted trip.
We were stopped at the lights when I looked out the window and there was Mew, cavorting about outside as a shantungosaurus. He stepped on a car with one foot and sent an imaginary image of it shattering, then yelled, "Roar!" I was a little confused, but for explanation he said, "I'm a dinosaur. I step on things and roar." He was more subdued after that, curling up demurely as an eoraptor on top of my bag.
In school today I spent half the day drawing and the other half talking D&D. They're surprisingly exhausting things to do. I was initiated into the D&D nerds by playing a game of Magic: The Gathering. I haven't played Magic in three years xD I had to be guided through. I ended up playing two games, strongly guided by Tom (who could be a bus rider for all his sense of personal space), and the first game I actually lost, despite having the essentially all-mighty beginner's pack (the Sliths). The second time around I asked for a forest deck and got given a custom-made deck all about strong monsters and handy little instant cards. The DM was for whatever reason unwilling to continue the campaign (they're doing Queen of the Demon Web Pits, the new version), so Magic was played all lunchtime. They have assured me that a character can be created. I should be posting some notes on potential characters shortly. Unfortunately my sister's collection, mostly inherited from dad, has been robbed -- her Monster Manual III is missing. She offered lots of help, at least. I am that much closer to making a character. (I was thinking lycanthrope, whaddya reckon? Something interesting like an equithrope or ailurothrope or even a buteothrope, maybe. The online Monster Manual will help me decide :3) The stats in the old Monster Manual aren't very helpful D:
So today is my sister's birthday party. Her actual birthday is tomorrow but I have a photography class running all Saturday, tomorrow and the Saturday after. The set-up in the lounge room is amazing, mum's outdone herself yet again. The theme is spiders :3 I'll post pictures at some point. I got my sister some Ferrero Rochers, a hilariously tacky stapler that looks like one of those cheap-ass dragon statues, and a box set of Miami Ink. I'm not sure how much she'll like those... the chocolate went over well, but the stapler is at a fairly high level of kitschyness and she may be offended by it, and she's not mad over Miami Ink (unlike me she's adamantly opposed to getting herself a tattoo), she just likes the art. It's ten episodes, each an hour long, so I figure some art she'll like will eventually be on there and she can copy it, which she'll like. My mum got her some socks for me to give her. My sister likes socks.
Anyway, my sister's seventeenth and I'm wearing a tee and jeans... should I change and shower? Hmm. Let's think about that.
Oh, hey! As a sort of PS before the post is actually signed off, I talked to Frau Nathan today. She advised that the school in Germany I intend to go to will be a lot happier if we do an exchange rather than just sending an inept Australian student there. I wonder if my sister would like a new sister? I'm sure there are plenty of Germans raring to go to a suburb they've never heard of in a city they know zip about in a country nobody seems to consider doing exchanges in (what's wrong with Australia, other countries? Sobsobwail).
Well, later days, everyone.
-The queen of the D&D nerds
Thursday, October 25th, 2007
Um, hi, everybody! Woo-ee, first post. Um. Here goes.
So I downloaded Firefox in order to create these pages. (Macintosh's default browser, Safari, is not accepted by Google. Shame, Google. Shaaaame.) I must say, I'm startled. I was pretty ignorant to Firefox and remain so but it took about ten minutes all-up to get absolutely organized and is pretty comfy. It's no slower than Safari and has all my home comforts prepared for me. That seems pretty good in my books.
Today I was kind of irritable, I guess? I've been feeling a lot less social lately. I assume it's a result of being a teenager. I listened to my music up really loudly and got annoyed when people kept pulling my earphones out. I plan on wearing my giant earmuff-style headphones. That'll get 'em. Anyway, I sat in a corner and allegedly sketched during lunchtime, but really I was just listening to Over My Head by Lit "on repeat" (the new Shuffles may or may not have a repeat, I certainly haven't found it yet). I was kind of apprehensive about how afternoon classes would go after I had snapped at some friends but we worked all through History and I was pretty much fine by English. We were doing Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and I was Brutus. We were instructed to write our own emotional line to say as we stabbed Caesar (is that a spoiler...? xD), and I picked, "Fall to pieces so Rome can have peace", but apparently it wasn't that good. I should've gone with the D&D nerds' suggestion of, "I rolled a critical fail on my Will save".
I recently went on Philosophy camp, and for some reason I was thinking about what my teacher Ad Van Beers had told us, and it occurred to me that at one point he had said the exact same line as Dumbledore uses in one of the Harry Potter books. I was duly puzzled. My somewhat-famous Danish Philosophy lecturer doubled up as an elderly fount of wisdom in a book about wizards? I guess it's universal logic. I guess.
I also watched the Fullmetal Alchemist movie a short time ago -- last weekend, I think? And, y'know what? It could have been better. Really. I love the series so much and the bar was so high, but the movie limboed instead of vaulting. I was a little confused and hurt. It couldn't have been much better but I don't care to differentiate... Well, that is to say... It was brilliant, certainly, as you would expect, but not as brilliant as the series, when a movie should be more brilliant. I was pretty confused at points, which wasn't thrilling, but I didn't really expect any better, and I downright laughed at the gypsies traveling through Germany singing in Japanese. I wasn't really happy with how Al turned out looking like Ed's girlier twin but on the other hand I really loved his special alchemical skill, because it always kind of bugged me, realistic as it was, that Ed was so much better and more talented at alchemy. All the characters were a little disconcertingly different, but, hey, the series and the movie were several years and parallel universes apart, so fair enough. I didn't get the Wrath scene; I figured out the narrative logic eventually but I didn't understand why there had to be a fight and everything, or even what Greed was doing there. I actually own the movie, so I'll watch it a couple times. My family reckon it's bootleg but it's just Japanese... the reversible cover has, for no reason whatsoever, "Kerero the Moive" written on the side instead of "Fullmetal Alchemist". It's even got a picture of Ed below the incorrect name. And it's not even spelled correctly o_o
My sister's new (psycho) cat Gideon is gone for a couple of days. She's riddled with disease, this one, and yet she is constantly active and loud, like a rabid klaxon on legs. First she had cat flu when we went her to get desexed; then after she got desexed she tore out her stitches while still at the vet's and had to get them redone; today her stitches were due to come out but they discovered internal bleeding so she has to stay at the vet's for a while. It didn't even slow her down, honest. My sister claimed she didn't mind being picked up but I didn't, 'cause those stitches were like three-gauge wire and all gnarled. I can hardly blame her for picking at them. She had one of those plastic collars but being an Oriental she's so strangely shaped that it had no effect whatsoever.
I recently exhumed the outlines of one of my many, many, many never-to-be-set-loose-on-the-world characters and dusted it clean. It should be the first addition to the Minor Characters folder, when I get around to it. A couple of recent doodles include this guy so I figure I'd better hop to it. I've been having fun with him, hopefully I'll get some stories down :3 As an update on the story status, well... I've written about three paragraphs that are meant to go in the center of a short story called Arrival. It's about my major character Donar meeting my main character Blacky (yes, it's that way round, because Blacky arrives on the scene after Donar). The story they actually belong to is never going to be, in all likelihood, so such short stories are the best we've got.
I have gone on for quite a long time so I'll stop now.
-Your friendly neighborhood psychopath