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July 9th, 2009
08:25 pm - Mental-Maps
So in the last year I've been learning out to fly. The dreams come more and more frequently (and I know that they're strongly influenced by playing NiGHTS) and I've gotten progressively better at it the more practice I get. The big accomplishment of the last couple months is that I no longer need any tools to fly. Each time I go to this world, I have a greater success-rate for getting air-born. After I was done with the tools (like a ski-lift or a boson's chair attached to nothing), I would take off with a little hop, at first about one-in-five times I'd manage to get into the air, then one in three, then about half the time, then I became consistently able to take off without trouble. Now I don't even need to hop, I can take off from standing still. Now the thing to work on is keeping my feet up, just like when I swim, my feet want to sink down when I'm flying; I'm also too heavy. It takes a lot of work and concentration to stay airborne; it's almost hard to pay attention to the scenery.
But I do get to look around a bit and the night before last I made a discovery, because I'd managed to fly much farther than I ever had before. I started out at the school, a place I've been a couple times before, and I took off east over the forest. I passed some power-lines, the kind that are really high up and strung between steal towers instead of just regular poles. I flew over trees on the east side of the lines too, but looking to the north I could see the university in the distance. The university is different from the school, and I've been there a few times before too. It never occurred to me that the two places were in the same world. I didn't go towards the university though, instead I kept on going east and when the forest gave way I found myself a dense city area. The buildings around me were mostly inner-city apartments with red-brick facades, but unlike the apartments of this variety that I usually see, they were twenty to thirty stories tall. Between them there were streets and alleys, some busy some not, and parking lots here and there. It was generally a very inner-city dynamic.
I wandered back to the school for some reason, but there were some jerks there and I ran away from them and flew east again. This time when I got to the power-lines, I decided to follow them south, rather than continuing past them. I followed them down over the dam, which is a fun but scary place I've been in twice before, and then out to the delta beyond that and discovered that the waterfront city (charming little place, but I don't usually have much fun because I'm getting stressed out trying to find the right bus to catch) was also part of this world. Tonight I mapped out the locations I now know the relative positions of... I also have a great suspicion that there's a small amusement park on a pier somewhere around here... I think it's probably to the east of the city but I'm not sure. Anyway, for anyone who finds my mental-mapping in the slightest bit interesting, here's the map so far.
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June 24th, 2009
June 22nd, 2009
09:39 pm - GENTLEMEN! BEHOLD!
Here is my new baby. I am so in business.
It's not just a toy! It's my future! I swear!
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June 20th, 2009
03:11 pm - Trashed-no-jutsu?
So, when I drank the 'pink panty-droppers' the girls made at Montague Manor, it was basically like a trashed-no-jutsu and I didn't have the chance to watch the stages go by. First I noticed was getting kind of ADD, the second stage was that I was salavating more than usual. The third stage was when my vision seemed wrong in some indefinable way and my eyes were getting a little watery. Last was that I started getting dizzy, not in a normal spinny way, but in an odd indefinable way like with the vision, where my internal gyroscope is slightly off-kilter, but I'm not feeling sickish. Now we've gotten back to Jesse's house, after our wine-tasting adventure, and I'm feeling dizzy and vision-odd, but the other effects have left. This is a lot more interesting than the trashed-no-jutsu 'cocktails' since I've been able to keep track of the stages. Also, because my mind hasn't split into the stupid, giggly half and the overly-critical and embarrassed half that his horrified by it, which is nice. I don't like it when I spend the evening going 'OH MY GOD, WHY AM I ACTING SO DUMB?!' So anyway, this is my summary of wine.
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June 19th, 2009
05:00 pm - Damn you Modern Marvels! Damn you to Hell!
I'm watching Modern Marvel's "90s Tech" and they just tried to tell me that the Sony Playstation was the first console gaming system that played disks! THAT'S A DAMN DIRTY LIE, HISTORY CHANEL! MAY THE GHOST OF SEGA SATURN HAUNT YOUR DREAMS FOREVER!
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June 16th, 2009
09:27 pm - Crap... that's not the right add-on...
I'm trying to find the Firefox add-on that logs you into livejournal accounts, so that you can switch between multiple user-names without having to go through all the log-out log-in process. Does anybody know what that was called or where I would find it?
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02:24 pm - Oh, BTW, I'm home for good now.
Now apparently I've decompressed from graduation and the move long enough to get bored. I've been cleaning the last three days and I've filled two large black garbage bags with stuff to trash and I'm on my second box of stuff to send to Goodwill now... It started out with just trying to fit the stuff from my apartment back into my parents' house for the next few months, then turned into a major purging. So... I'm going to have a lot less stuff by the end of the week... While cleaning out the vanity drawers in the bathroom, I discovered layers that hadn't been touched since we moved to this house when I was 14. I think I found even earlier layers in this desk when I excavated it last night. ... I have a lot of art supplies that I don't need! So I'll announce here first that i have an 11"x14" sketchpad and watercolor paper and bristol board half a pad of 18"x24" newsprint, if none of my artsy friends have uses for such things, I'll put them up on freecycle. And I'm sorry guys, but I think I'm gonna throw out Backface because she takes up a lot of room and what the hell am I going to do with her anyway?
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May 30th, 2009
08:38 pm - Creepy snacks
This is the Little Debbie bear. The company slogan is embroidered on her apron pocket; "Unwrap a smile."
Am I the only one who finds this combination of image and text REALLY UPSETTING? ... And then there's the cut-off warning there that I didn't notice until just now...
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May 20th, 2009
09:54 pm - Stoopid new mail thing at school
Hey, does anybody know how I make Windows Live forward email to my sand3.com address? It's got a horrible user interface and even when I search the help menu, it gives me 0 results for "forwarding." What the hell.
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May 12th, 2009
12:39 pm - More bus adventures
A really smelly guy sat down on the bus behind me this morning. I don't even normal human varieties of stink, this guy was fermenting. It was impressive.
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April 28th, 2009
10:31 am - The continuity! Where is it?!
I finally realized what's been bugging me about the new FMA opening. It's the sins, in the scene on the bridge where they're having epic fights, something was nagging me about it and I looked again today and figured out what it is. Gluttony jumps down on the bridge for epic fights and the bridge breaks epically from the impact, but Envy was already on the bridge and he's heavier than Gluttony! Like, a lot heavier! He's a couple hundred people worth of heavy! But I guess he is pretty agile... still, I think if that bridge was going to break it should have done already... And I'm arguing with the opening credits of an anime, wow. I need to... go to class or something...
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April 26th, 2009
10:04 pm - Oh fandom, thou ar't a great teacher.
This month I've found myself getting all upset about the Britney Spears phenomenon a lot. I think it may have been the show in Tacoma, I wasn't really aware of it before hand because I don't follow that scene, but while I was reading daily comics off of the PI's web page it showed a thumbnail from her show and I was intrigued by the ringleader outfit. I looked through the pictures and was rather surprised and interested to see an aesthetic in the pictures that I really appreciated. But it made me remember that since she got through the teeny-bopper faze, I have liked a lot of her costuming choices. And me, the little costumer, naturally I go seeing more artistic interest there than in her music...
But because I got to thinking about Britney Spears, I got to thinking about how much her whole situation pisses me off. "Leave Britney alone!" is a meme now, right up there with pedo-bear and invisible -bicycle, and drawing enough ridicule in its own right to have completely backfired. Hysterical Fan really mucked up there... South Park definitely made the point better there. And while getting into a fuss worrying about the poor woman and wondering how long until she kills herself somehow or goes Michael Jackson levels of broken-down (which I have little doubt will happen faster in her case, Michael didn't have to contend with the internet) it brought me back to fandom and a really upsetting theological issue I came to some months back.
Britney Spears brought me back to fandom because I realized that she is not a person, not to "us," she is a character. She is a character like Dr. House or Sara Sidle and we love watching how she's going to destroy herself this week. It's not a hate, it's closer to love, really. I've been writing fanfiction since I was in high school, and in writing it I find myself the most engaged by putting characters in situations where they are pushed to their emotional breaking-point. It's a way of exploring my own emotional responses, figuring out where this stress is going to take the characters that I've invested myself into. And I have, I didn't make these characters, not their canon selves, but when I write them, I have to get into their heads and make them my own, because when you can't do that you get cardboard characters with fake emotional responses. Writing a character through a crisis gives me surrogate emotions, like a tough work-out for the soul. To exercise the body, you go to the gym, to exercise the mind, you play sudoku, to exercise the soul, you submerge yourself in fiction. And we are hideously abusive to our creations! Now you will be addicted to heroine! Now you will be abused as a child! Now you will be raped! And we don't do it because we hate our characters, no, we adore them, love them as the vehicles through which we feel.
Britney Spears is a character in the drama of American pop-culture. America loves her, even people who say they hate her (people who obviously haven't meditated very long on what "hate" means) are people who make her a part of their lives. She is a part of our lives because we all know who she is and she has become the common character for American fandom to tear apart. We love her and so we want her to suffer so that we can muster just enough empathy to feel vicariously thrilled by her triumphs and failures. And it's the failures we like best, they are what give us a taste of the rawest emotions, the dark ones that are a guilty-pleasure to dip our feet into and revel in the intensity of it. "Sublime" is the term. Coined during the Gothik period of art, it refers to the idea of increasing the overall pleasure of an experience by heightening intensity, the stress, and reaching into more primal emotions.
I did mention theology earlier, and I swear this does relate. The big issue that seems to separate a lot of Christians from a lot of other Christians is whether God makes bad things happen. Did He create the world and then sit back and watch, letting us make our own way? Or does He poke things around and start wars and things? I'd always automatically thought that of course God didn't control these things or set bad stuff upon us because He is a loving god and a loving God wouldn't do that, so obviously he was simply letting us make our own decisions. It was during a discussion on writing with a few friends that this idea wavered. It had started with a friend complaining about another writer online who always pushed for happy endings with babies and rainbows and sunshine and how it made for bad stories. Naturally, I agreed, I love angst in a story, serious emotional turmoil is what I look for most in a fic. It's not a deliberate attempt to abuse my characters; I love my babies! It's because it fleshes them out so much, makes them so much more real and beautiful to find out how they'll react to the shit I throw at them. I want them to have happy endings eventually, but I can't just give it to them or they would be boring and stupid. Then as I took a shower that night (I seem to do a lot of thinking in the shower, I've noticed) I suddenly connected that whole train of thought to the idea of a loving God. Why would a God that loves us make us suffer? Because we are created in God's image and we do the same thing to our fictional creations.
So then I get into these moods where I think about God as a writer and can't help but think, I wish Disney were steering this ship. Good-guys, bad-guys and a happy ending sounds awfully nice...
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April 16th, 2009
11:24 pm - I have NO IDEA what just happened.
Cel: Actually... I NOMED all the original characters in their sleep, but you don't know that yet... soon my Mad Cow Disease will destroy you all!
Sand3: .... i thought we had to nom *you* to get the mad cow?
Sand3: you've got it backwards!
Cel: ....
Cel: I have...
Cel: SPECIAL MCD
Sand3: it no longer requires the rogue prions?!
Cel: My MCD is soooooo MAD, I bight others to give it.
Sand3: ... that's rabies, dood.
Cel: No! MCD... mixed with EBOLA and ASIAN BIRD FLUUEEEUEUEUEUUEUEUEUE!
Sand3: no! it's the bities not the shakies!
Sand3: *throws bats at you*
Cel: The wiffle, not the woffle, and the DOWNNNNNN-ward press.
Sand3: UPWARD! UPWARD!
Sand3: WHY MUST YOU BE SO CONTRARY!
Cel: Because down is better.
Cel: Better leverage
Sand3: down is for loosers! all the cool people go up!
Cel: No, the cool people actually go up just to get high.
Cel: I like to stay down, if you don't mind
Sand3: then you'll never be part of the in-crowd!
Cel: Down is where the emo's go, and watching them commit suicide is SO MUCH FUN!
Sand3: your life is meaningless!
Cel: I Out-Sourced the In-Crowd
Cel: We're so PUNNY!
Sand3: better than puny
Sand3: aw...
Sand3: i'm too puny to be an american gladiator....
Cel: We're scaring them away with our 1337 jokes and historical references...
Sand3: that'll teach them to front!
Cel: So, shall we take this comedy show on the road and have Everyone, ROLL OUT?
Sand3: Let's blow this popsicle stand!
Sand3: this ain't no hay-ride! let's move it out of here!
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April 15th, 2009
02:33 pm - Crap, I'm getting old...
I just proved myself a stupid adult by condescending to one of the neighbor children. He was running around on the lawn with a push-toy (like the kind that they make for children to learn to walk behind) and he ran into my path on the sidewalk so I smiled and said "Wow, are you mowing the lawn?" He looked at me oddly and said "No." Of course what he meant to say was "Are you stupid? This is a toy." God damn, I'm turning into one of those stupidly condescending adults like the old lady I saw at the Fred Meyer the other day who grinned at one of the children in the car shopping carts and exclaimed "Look at you! You're driving!" At the time, I thought 'How annoying, she's freaking the kid out by being a crazy, yelling stranger and she's making a fool of herself." And then I just did the same thing. Damn it.
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April 9th, 2009
09:10 pm - And the pirates go "WHHRYYYYY?!"
Well, I think Funimation officially wins the Most Intelligent American Corporation Award. It's a week since the first episode of Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood was released in Japan. Naturally, fan-subbers had it available with English translations by Sunday. I expected, as is an industry standard, that I couldn't expect to see legal copies of the show for at least a year. But surprise surprise! One American studio has caught on to this newfangled internets thing! Funimation, who holds the American distribution license for FMA and FMAB now has the first episode up and streaming on their web page for free and is not only making money off the ad-space, but is also likely making a lot of people go. "Oh. I can wait a week. Cool. I don't have to do illegal things to get my stories." It's such a novel idea! Legal industries nearly keeping up with illegal ones! How to stop piracy: provide an alternative option.
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March 10th, 2009
07:45 pm - Damn it, SEGA! What the hell!
I just watched the trailer for the new Sonic game. I don't know why, I guess I just had to make a crappy evening worse. (The evening is crappy because I got stuck downtown in 30 degree weather for an hour and then after I finally got a bus back home, I tripped crossing the street and hurt myself.) I'm all annoyed with SEGA and their need to throw random-ass gimmicks into Sonic games. I really thought they were turning around with Journey of Dreams because that was really GOOD! But apparently they've totally lost their hedgehog mojo. In the new game, Sonic is in a D&Desque landscape carrying around a fancy sword that's bigger than he is. Dude, Sonic fights robot world-domination! What the hell do you need gimmicks for! People love fighting hell-bots! It's like zombies but with guns in their heads! Stop with all the stupid fantasy crap already!
On a happier SEGA-related note, however, I dreamed I was NiGHTS last night and it was a pretty bitchin' dream. I always appreciate floaty dreams, but making it NiGHTS-centric makes it ten times as good.
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February 12th, 2009
10:59 am - It must be spring, I feel the urge to write about stuff.
Concerning buses:
Yesterday was an unfortunate day for mass transit... Every bus I got onto (I think I took six through my journeys) I ended up behind somebody who's understanding of personal hygiene did not mesh up with the Western norm. The worst was from Sunset to Cordatta, where I spent the entire trip trying to subtly find a way to position myself where I might find a little hint of air-flow; pressing my face right next to the window seemed to work best. The worst part was that I watched the guy pull the 'I get off now' cord as we were coming into Bellis Fair and I suppressed a cheer, and then he didn't get off. He continued on until Cordatta Station after that. On the bright side, this was my first time going through the new Cordatta Station and it is very nice. The man in front of me for the last leg of my trip wasn't washed so much as American society usually demands, but there wasn't more than a week's worth of... smell on his clothes like the previous man...
Concerning lectures:
Sitting in the computer lab during my two hour break between Nationalism/Cultural Identity and Visual Cultures of Islam and I'm excited by this morning's lecture. We were discussing the 1893 Chicago World's Fair today, which on the world stage was Japan's big coming out and my prof knew the fair pretty well but not Japan's side of things, which I had a better grounding in, so I was pleased and she was pleased. It came into discussion about how during the fair, Japan was referred to as the 'Great Britain of the East' and I chatted with the prof after class a bit about how that was the very goal of the Meiji restoration and Japan itself had made a very deliberate push to put themselves in that light. To explain, this fair was a huge deal to Japan and they put a lot of energy towards it, even though it's a different country's World's Fair. They handed the fair committee a huge wad of cash prior to the fair, which certainly helped bump their status. At that fair, western culture and progress and technology was displayed in the main fairgrounds, the 'white city' (it was called that because of the plastered buildings, but, yeah, you can apply the double-meaning to it.) and the ethnographic displays were relegated to the Midway, carnival-type area. Irish culture was even displayed down on the Midway rather than with most of the European progress model, but the Japanese display got onto the main fairgrounds rather than the Midway, putting their palace right up there next to the Romanesque architecture of the White City. So, yeah, Japan put a lot of effort and money into 1893 and got a lot of praise and popularity from whitey because of the results. And, well, I got excited with it because I knew the Japanese side of it but I didn't really know much about the rest of the fair and the prof was on the opposite side of it. It was a fun class discussion.
Concerning clay:
I spent two hours yesterday trying to figure out how to make a nautilus shell out of clay. It ended up smooshing over every time I'd gotten it through one turn. I was not amused. Further progress will have to wait until next week, as I'm going back to Seattle for the long weekend, but I've decided to stop trying to make it open the way a pot is and instead make it segmented like a real nautilus shell. That will make it more structurally sound, and if I make the segments separately and then let them firm up before putting them all together, that should make it doable. And a lot more complicated than I'd originally imagined...
Concerning hot-glue and feathers:
Raargh!
Concerning progress:
I've declared a General Studies major and am on course to graduate in June. Wave the banners. I've pretty much worked out my living arrangements for next year and I'm excited about it, (I looked at Ballenger Village day I rode the bus to Shoreline and thought it looked too expensive for a first place, turns out, it's not.) And I'm just gearing up on where I'll be working. I'm trying to start a dialogue with the costumer departments for the Seattle Opera and/or the Pacific Northwest Ballet. Alternately, I think I might like to work in an art gallery again. I'd be much more competent to chat art this time and it would be nice to work in a gallery with a bit more foot-traffic than Artforte got when I was there. But then, that may have been a 'it's winter and it's really cold and nobody's strolling' thing.
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January 25th, 2009
07:14 pm - TV choises
I just witnessed my room mate choosing to watch a make-up infomercial over Law & Order SVU. I'm having all sorts of culture-shock.
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January 24th, 2009
10:04 pm - Lulu
So, somebody may be commissioning me to make Lulu's dress for Sakuracon. Because of this I'm looking up pictures of said dress and figuring my way around a pattern to modify, which has me looking at how the dress is put together. And now I'm angry because there's a seam down the front of the skirt right where nobody would ever put a seam because it looks tacky! So I'm sitting here going 'Who the hell designed this!' It shouldn't be a difficult modification to make, it just annoys me because it's wrong.
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January 20th, 2009
11:20 am - Where did they find that guy?
Was anybody else having a hard time taking the inauguration ceremony seriously because of the announcer? Seriously, the guy's voice was more cartoony than 'ATTENTION! DUELISTS!' It's like when he was five-years-old he said 'I'm gonna be an announcer when I grow up!' and cultivated the most stereotypical voice possible.
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