Current Ramblings
Monday, September 27, 2004
I need a bigger desk.
The sad thing is, a number of my friends won't even be impressed by this. I still have some glaring omissions that I'm planning to recitfy once I have more money. But the GaoGaiGar bookends in the background win me points. Also, Slugslinger's instruction sheet is twice the length of your average Energon Deluxe. He's crazy complicated.
posted@1:20 AM by:Trixter: 0 comments
Thursday, September 23, 2004
Damn, that's good tea.
I keep meaning to post about a great number of deep, insightful things, but I've been having a lot of sinus problems lately which means I'm almost always under the influence of psuedoephedrine hydrochloride, which makes my brain feel like it's made of pudding. In addition to being an effective decongestant, it's also a major ingredient of homemade crystal meth. Yay. So I'm going to just post some random things and hope they make sense.
It turns out that Steve-o was downright prophetic when, upon announcing that they had preordered me a red Jazz for my birthday, he suggested that I could differentiate him from the white non-variant one by calling him Zoom-Zoom. It seems that Takara agreed with him. It's almost kinda scary, given that was the nickname we gave him when he was just a somewhat-Jazz-looking guy on Mazda's web site. Though I think he can just be Jazz to me until I get the white one, to fill the gaping hole in my heart. I'm sorta curious about the currently ill-defined clone-son business, though, and I'll be awaiting clarification. A clone would seem more like, I dunno, like a brother. I have found myself with a facination with Transformer brothers verging on fetish lately. I don't know what it is, though I suspect it's just that, first year aside, it's not something that was usually done, so the reemergence of the concept in Dreamwave is one of the few almost truly new things they've added to the mix. And as anybody who has read any of my fanfic knows, I'm a sucker for anything, anything at all, that gives a character a reason to angst, and personal relationships are really good for that. Or maybe it's the twincest.
(Note: I'm just going to call him Jazz instead of Meister, sorry. Trust me, it'll be much more disconcerting when I start regularly referring to the Energon Aerialbots by G1 names, which Graham has already begun glaring at me for. But I think Takara's use of their G1 names gives it a lot of creedence, and Skydive's the only one who doesn't fit really well.)
Oh, and one last thing: I finally finished the last of the three Transformers adult novels today. I don't know if they actually got better toward the end or if I just got used to them enough that I didn't notice them still being quite poor. It was still quite poor by normal literature standards at the end, but it wasn't painful to read anymore, and I didn't actively try to avoid it. I will tell you that the first one is possibly the worst thing of any kind I have read ever, which would put it below an embarassingly long run of Punisher 2099. The only real victory I see in having accomplished reading these - or at the very least laying out part of my increasingly tight budget for them - is that iBooks is following them up with a short story collection featuring people who actually know how to write for Transformers. NEED MORE FURMAN TEXT STORIES...
posted@11:49 PM by:Trixter: 0 comments
Monday, September 20, 2004
Happy Birthday to Me
I guess some of you vouyers out there would probably like a run-down of my Super Happy Exciting Long Birthday Weekend of Joy in place of my usual philosophical ramblings about Mini-Cons. So I shall provide. Those of you who only come here to seek the deeper meaning of life as revealed by the Mini-Cons can skip this entry.
My weekend kicked off properly when I got off work Friday evening and went to see the extra-cool Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow with Graham, Walky, and Steve-o (and two of Steve-o's other friends). Graham and I even dressed up a bit and we went to the Arena Grand downtown to make it extra-shiny. I got a bad sinus headache shortly after getting home, though, so I went to bed early. But that's okay, because I needed to catch up on sleeping. I slept, in fact, through much of the next morning, until we had to get up because Graham's parents were arriving from Detroit early in the afternoon. We met them at their hotel around 2 and proceeded to W.G. Grinder's for a nice lunch. After that we went to a cookie place that was fortunately not in Westerville after all but was, in fact, right down the street and then went back to the hotel for some hanging around. During the driving around Graham's mom gave me my present from them, and those who have been reading this blog do not need me to reiterate how desperately I had been yearning for a copy of Pokemon LeafGreen. There was also a nice check for $40 that I promptly spent the next day. So once we got back to the hotel I spent a couple hours getting started in my game while everyone else watched sports, then Graham and I hit the pool before dinner. I had decided I wanted to try something new for my birthday dinner for once, so we went to the Cap City Diner, which is a pretty basic Nice Restaurant with a diner theme. It was pretty good, but we all ended up pretty much gorged, so it was time to call it a night.
Sunday was my actual birthday, so I made plans to get together with my friends again for gifting and all that. Graham and I were up early for breakfast with his parents at TeeJay's before they headed back to Detroit. TeeJay's is pretty good, but it's the sort of place where the handicapped spaces were all full on Sunday morning.
After they left I promptly headed out to spend that birthday money, specifically on the first Harry Potter DVD and this shirt, because I decided my life didn't have nearly enough Harry Potter swag. (I was sort of tempted by the shirt that had Ron on it, though. I mean, dude. It's RON. It's like the Dragonball Z shirt I saw once with Krillin on it.) After I went back home and played Pokemon for a couple more hours, Walky got home from work. Steve-o found it really sad that I had been planning to make my own birthday cake to take over to their place, so he went by Kroger while Graham and I were on our way over and picked up a really good carrot cake from the bakery. I opened presents while we waited for the dishwasher to provide us with clean plates: A really nice box with really good chocolate and lots of different tea from Windy, including a white chocolate Aero which I didn't even see when I was in England but I love white chocolate, a whole bunch of Ponies from Graham, and a preorder for the red Binaltech Jazz/Meister from Amenbo from Graham, Walky, and Steve-o together. I thought that was especially cool, since I hadn't seen anyone selling the red one by itself. Apparently Amenbo is the only site that'll guarantee you get the red one, or at least they would before they closed the presells. After the cake we watched the second disc of the first Invader Zim DVD set, which I hadn't gotten around to finishing yet, and then we watched the first episode because Steve-o and Walky hadn't seen it and it's just plain good. And then I went home and went to bed. :)
So that was my Super Happy Exciting Long Birthday Weekend of Joy, so far at least. It's still technically goign on, since I don't have to be back at work until Wednesday, but that's the part that anybody's likely to care about. Today I just had fish with Walky and helped him pick out a cell phone and searched foolishly for toys with Graham. And now I think I'm gonna make some of that tea and play Pokemon some more.
posted@10:27 PM by:Trixter: 0 comments
Wednesday, September 15, 2004
Poor cat.
The good news is, we seem to have beat our flea infestation without too much effort. It probably helps that we keep a somewhat closed environment here, so as long as we're careful not to bring fleas in off any other cats (which is almost certainly how she got them this time) we should be fine. And this time she didn't try to use my arm to climb out of the tub.
posted@1:01 AM by:Trixter: 0 comments
Sunday, September 12, 2004
Awesome the Sequel
Okay, so every so often I make a find at work that makes all the stress and the pissing me off worthwhile. Today's was an advance proof of Eoin Colfer's The Artemis Fowl Files, which isn't out for another month. I suppose it's still not as cool as if it were an actual proper new novel (which we also get in every so often, but never of anything I want), but it's still awesome. Add to that my discovery of the first Machine Robo DVD (that's Japan's version of GoBots, for those out of the toy-geek loop) in a box transferred from another store on Wednesday, and I've had a pretty good week for finds. Sure, most of the GoBots don't show up much in the first few episodes, but there's Jet and Drill! And Triple Jim! I'll just have to make a point to shop there a lot when I finish with school and get a real job.
posted@11:24 PM by:Trixter: 0 comments
Saturday, September 11, 2004
Awesome.
We were playing with Terraserver in #wiigii! tonight (which is one of the most fun resources on the internet, definitely up there with the IMDB), and I discovered that the most recent pictures they had for my parents' neighborhood were from exactly a week before I moved to Columbus. And they were really close up. And in color. IT'S MY CAR AS SEEN FROM SPACE.
posted@2:16 AM by:Trixter: 0 comments
Friday, September 10, 2004
England Moments #2: London's Natural History Museum
BIG update to the photo blog tonight, with a couple dozen pics from my visit to the Natural History Museum in London.
posted@10:32 PM by:Trixter: 0 comments
posted@1:26 PM by:Trixter: 0 comments
Thursday, September 09, 2004
Mmmmmmm.
I WOULD LIKE THIS NOW PREASE. *drool*
Also, I'm really starting to regret putting the new Pokemon game on my birthday list, because that means that I can't go out and get it once I get paid tomorrow, even though people in #wiigii! keep going on about their Pidgeys and Spindas. NEED SPINDA. It hurts for there to be a new Pokemon game out that I don't have. I thought it would be easier since it's a remake of the original two, so it would sorta fall into the category of Yellow and Crystal. (I did buy Crystal because it was the first one with a girl, but I ended up not being that interested in it since I had spent so much time with Silver.) But it's been long enough since I played Blue and the changes are significant enough that I feel my heart spilling over with need for it now that it's actually out. I have vowed to myself that if nobody gets it for me, I will go out on the night of my birthday and get it myself. And then stay up all night playing it. I think I might start with Bulbasaur, since I started with Squirtle in Blue and Torchic most recently in Sapphire. So that way it'll be different both from the first time I played and from the one I started with most recently. Maybe it'll be a good omen to start with a grass type like I did in Silver. I loved me some Silver.
posted@6:51 PM by:Trixter: 0 comments
Tuesday, September 07, 2004
Sparkplug! Light our darkest hour!
Took my new MP3 player to work today so I could listen to it while I vacuumed before we opened. It's really, really hard not to dance in some way to The White Stripes' "Hotel Yorba".
I had some terrible dreams last night, and I think I'm going to blame it on a co-worker's suggestion yesterday that getting contacts "gets you hit on more". Y'see, I don't wanna be hit on more. Sure, I may get the cream of the crop at conventions, where just being a girl geek gets you points, but in the real world the only men who hit on me are in some way creepy. They're all either way older than me (and I'm not saying older guys are creepy, only when they're hitting on me) or clearly..."mentally challenged" in some manner. I don't mean dumb. I mean special ed. Maybe normal guys my own age realize that I'm so nice to them because I'm at work and I'm getting paid to be nice, so they don't assume I would also be willing to give them my number. Maybe normal guys my age are, much like me, spoken for. I don't know what it is, but I know that more male attention is exactly what I don't need. Which comes back to my nightmares. The first had me alone in a house at night, housesitting or something. There were creepy stalky things happening with other guys as a buildup, but the part I remembered well, the part that made me wake up, was a creepy man outside a sliding glass door insisting that I give him my driver's license so he could find out everything about me and saying he would come by later, and howling "Noooooooo!" at him was what made me wake up. There were definite overtones of defenselessness and potential rape to all this, maybe because when I'm at work I can't really tell these dirtbags off. (I did have my boss run off a particularly creepy one once, though, who wanted "a female assistant" for a "computer project".) The second one had me visiting a friend in a sprawling single-story apartment complex that was plagued by an older professional-looking man who tneded to stare in people's windows. I ended up sleeping in this friend's room because I was crashing at his place for the night (none of that dirty stuff, now), and I laid there mortified by a shadow behind the blinds that had to be this peeper. I can only assume the second dream was a leftover from the first, but it all serves to remind me of why I absolutely must get through school and get out of retail. (It also reminds me why I was so keen to get a third-floor apartment rather than ground floor. The door has gouges from when somebody tried to break in 20 years ago, and there's no other way in without a tall ladder and a lot of attention.) I spent most of my high school years disguised by the androginy of grunge and alt-rock fashion primarily to ward off unwelcome male attention. I just need a way to moderate between looking acceptably in-style and presentable to myself and looking hot to dirty men. Most of you have seen me. I don't exactly dress like a ho.
But at least one of our ClearChannel stations here - a useless AM station that played redundant oldies for people who didn't have FM tuners - just changed formats to progressive talk radio, complete with Al Franken's show and one or two others from Air America Radio. That was nice.
posted@8:29 PM by:Trixter: 0 comments
Friday, September 03, 2004
Acquisitons.
Yesterday was certainly a day for acquiring things. To begin with, I got the package my mom sent with my birthday present, being a shiny new MP3 player. No, it's not an iPod, it's a nice little 256mb flash-drive-style number from Virgin Pulse. I'm sort of an easy mark for anything Virgin puts out. Even my phone is through Virgin Mobile. It can pretty much be traced back to Richard Branson's inexplicable cameo in the TFUK comic, which I admit is probably the single geekiest reason to have a brand preference for personal electronics ever. (And yes, I'm going quite mad with the hypertext tonight. It's the wave of the future, baby.) It also helps that this particular player has a couple features that digital cameras made me fond of, like a standard AAA battery and a built-in USB plug so I don't have any cables to lose. If I'm in a position where really need 8 or 9 hours of entertainment, I probably already have a backpack to stash my CD player in. This'll be really handy for exercise walking and trips up to Target.
I also discovered that Target has the new Tokyo-A-Go-Go Bratz on a really amazing sale, so I gave in and bought one. The outfits are pretty cool in a kinda wacky punked-out way, but there's just something vaguely wrong with selling Japanese teen-girl culture to little girls...
At least she didn't come with any yaoi dojinshi.
And once I actually got to work yesterday afternoon, I found the most amazing thing while taking out the trash. Under some crappy audio-cassette sets of, like, motivational seminars there was a tape set of the BBC Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio show. Which I had never, EVER seen available in any form but the book of the scripts. A little research since then has shown that it's available on CD right now in England for around £30-40, but that's a lot of money, and it still doens't seem to have ever been sold in the US. It was in the trash because the plastic clamshell case had split along the side into two parts, so I totally got it for free. I'm going to send it to Malin and see if he can put them on CD for me, since I no longer own a tape player.
Today was less exciting, though I did get a new pair of jeans.
posted@10:20 PM by:Trixter: 0 comments