January 2007 Archives

Watched "Capote" last night. Interesting movie, actually. I think Philip Seymour Hoffman really deserved that Oscar he got for the role last year. Not sure what to say about the movie itself, I think the portray of the issues and story itself is an interesting one, though not really quite the type of movie I usually like to watch. I don't think it's so much a cerebral movie, as a subtle where you just kind of sit back when the credits roll and just go, "Huh, that was interesting."

Next up on Netflix, Red Dwarf. :3 Best. Show. Ever.

Also, I need to register for Star Wars Celebration IV. ¬_¬ It's $110 for four days. Way more than an anime con, but granted, it's way better organized, has way more guests, and way more things to do than a regular anime con, so I guess it's worth the price. Besides, how many times are we going to have Celebrations anyway?

Now the question is just to decide whether that price is too expensive for cosplay. -____-

If Darth Maul gets laid before I do, I'm going to be really pissed.

OMG I HAVE A NEUROANATOMY TEST TOMORROW WHY AM I STILL AWAKE?

EDIT: I think that was an earthquake. A very small earthquake. I like them, actually. They feel pleasant. I hope that doesn't mean The Big One is on the way. ¬_¬

EDIT #2: Rule 34, part b. Guess what the 'b' stands for. And of course, this is the first thing I see on 4chan's /y board before I'm about to go to sleep. My life is totally psychic. I hope it's still psychic tomorrow morning for the test.

Way to go, Japan. What a nice way to ask the Japanese women not to force you to change your immigration laws.

That said, I think I'm dropping Japanese class. It's supposed to be called, "Advanced Readings in modern Japanese" but so far the class is neither advanced, nor does it have much reading, it's just modern Japanese discussion bullshit. *sigh*

I need to find myself a language partner so I can still speak. :(

Watched Star Wars: Clone Wars with Andy last night. We were sort of heckling it, but with the acknowledgement that it's better than anything that directly came out of Lucas's hands. That's most likely because the ratio of action:talking is actually higher than in most Lucas productions, and because Genndy Tartakovsky rules.

Oh, and before I forget...OMFG, I NEED THIS GAME.

If you guys like British sitcoms, you should watch Coupling. It's like a mix of the best of Seinfeld and Friends, except totally British and totally about sex. :3

So...
Q10, Jeremy, and I have gotten Netflix in order to improve our movie and TV show viewing lives.

Q10 and I have gotten Babylon 5 because all our sci-fi friends talk about how awesome it is. Maybe I'm impatient, but I just saw episode 6 of the first season (the one called "Mind War" where Chekov Bester first appears) and I'm wondering, when does this show...

- stop being horribly acted
- stop being horribly episodic
- start getting some better dialogue
- stop making my ears/eyes/nose bleed with its badness
- start growing an interesting plot and story

Cause I'm going to give it until halfway through second season, and if it doesn't get better by then, I reserve rights to tell you all that B5 actually sucks.

:D Just made the requisite 1am run to Pink's. Having never been there before, it was quite a spontaneous adventure. I don't remember how Jeremy and I got on the topic, but all I remember was saying, "Dude, let's go." And we just up and went, right there, at 1:15am, and were back with hot dogs by 2.

There are some days that I really, really love living in Los Angeles.

I have discovered the greatest cure for motion sickness ever.

EAT SOUR PATCH KIDS.

Hey, any excuse to sit around at my bench in lab and shove candy in my face.

Also, I had the best lines in my dream last night:
"I mean, it's called Envy, you know, after one of the seven sins. What sort of sin is that anyway? Envy? It's so not a real sin compared to the rest."

Physical therapy is hella expensive. Stupid knee. Stupid falling on the lift. Stupid society and your monetary system and your paying of the taxes I have yet to figure out how much I really owe.

I feel so poor. :(

:3 Yaaay! Finally got to go back to kung-fu again today, and even with my bum knee making warm ups kind of hard, and even with me being 2 weeks behind everybody else I had immense amounts fun. X3 *fuuu* We're learning a staff form now, so I guess I'm now liscensed to beat up zombies with a stick, in addition to the broadswords I have in my room. Sweet. :3

There are so many weapons in my room right now if the zombie apocalypse ever befell us, I think I could arm the entire floor of my apartment complex. >____>

Now if only I had a green-screen I could grab my double lightsaber and challenge Stephen Colbert.

I have a new cell phone! The current one I've got is one I've had since the beginning of senior year, so I wasn't too sad to see it go. :3 Now I've got myself a shiny, new Motorola RAZR from Sprint. X3 I wanted one of the colored ones, but they only had the grey/silver ones, so I figured "what the hell." :3

And of course, I've already tricked it out with nice wallpapers and ringtones. Aaaaah. *loves on it*

For the record, one of my favorite asshole things to do is make fun of animal rights protesters in front of our neuropsychiatric building. I like to talk loudly in their vicinity about how much I love to club baby seals, how much I love to eat kittens and protesters, and all the latest types of nailbats available on the commercial market that meet my complex clubbing-seals-to-death needs.

I hope those protesters never use medicines or any medical technology that have been tested on animals, and they sure as hell better be vegans. If I see a hippie protester wearing leather Birkenstocks I am so going to punch them in the face for being a hypocrite and a hippie. Cause I hate hippies.

Sometimes first fandoms really are the best fandoms.

I really wish I had reached the writing stage of my life when I first got into Sith Academy. I also really wish I had a sense of humor that was more than bad puns and moments of my life suddenly flashbacking to The Karate Kid.

EDIT: I really should be studying fandom instead of neuroscience, shouldn't I? Nah. I just dissected a rat spinal cord for the first time day, and it was bucketloads of fun. :3

We, the Hypersonic Tomatoes, the neuroscience graduate students who play dodgeball, FUCKING ROCK. Or the opposing team was just kind of full of suck. ^^;;

10 games, we won all of them. Every single one. >____> Their team was made of up short, timid girls and only one small guy. The Hypersonic Tomatoes is mostly sporty grad students and with a few asskickin' girls thrown into the mix. Even when it came down to me (and my gimpy leg, I really should've have been playing today but I did anyway) versus the other guy left on the team, I still managed to get him. Oh well, easy victory for us, hopefully next week will be another victory, with a little more fighting. :3

Also, there are some neuro guys who are just plain nuts. I have seriously never seen dodgeballs go that fast. @_@

Next week: awesomeness again. :3

The topic of this quarter's Japanese 101A class is "globalization" or in many more words "reasons why Japan is racist." And the sad thing is, it's totally true. Japan is TOTALLY racist, and anybody who's ever visited and tried to interact with the Japanese has experienced with racism at some point or another.

Eventually, this spawned many stories after class of our experiences of being shunned by the Japanese people.

Next class, the Japanese are still racist.

I went to Ross yesterday to help my roommate buy a blanket (cause it's cold as hell here in LA) and I bought myself STAR WARS SHEETS.

Now my bed is covered in STAR WARS. How awesome is that?

Well, Mystery Hunt is over. O_o About 36 hours, it hasn't been this short in 5 years, I swear. =_=;; Daa~mn. Hunt was won by the Palindrome team who was under the moniker "Dr. Awkward" this year.

I think we probably saw about 60-75% of the puzzles this year, which is slightly less than what I'd hoped, but not so bad for a smaller team like us. I felt much more useful this year than years past, having contributed significantly to a good number of puzzles. Whee!

Now to bum around on Sunday and actually get work done. Goodnight everybody, it was good. :D Shout-outs to all my ACME peeps, and special thanks to C. Scott who really did everything organizational this year. You rock.

note to self: tipping over your chair + knee injury = BAD

Don't do it again. :( I blame that chair for being really light and tipping over easier than the rest of the chairs in lab. Ow, my knee.

I think I may need physical therapy on this knee after all. It hasn't really been improving for the past 3 days, which worries me. I'm usually incredibly active, which also worries me. I want my knee to be good enough to play Softball in the Spring and keep doing kung-fu.

After talking to some colleagues on lab, one who is former gymnast (and therefore very sensitive about joint injuries) and another who is former physical therapist, they're suggesting to me that I try to get some physical therapy for me knee ASAP. It'll ensure that my knee heals the right way so I won't need surgery or get injured again in the future. *sigh* Because my progress these past couple of days has only been minimal, I think the stupid sports medicine doctor at Utah wasn't thorough enough, and it's possible that I may have more damage on my knee than I originally thought. It may be time for an MRI and weeks of physical therapy. ;___; *sigh* The neverending saga of knee injuries.

Mystery Hunt is THIS WEEKEND. I am so pumped.

I'm also trying to decide whether or not to ask for Friday off, but since I took extra off days for Christmas and I've been lame lately... *sighs*

I think I'm going to do my best to solve from lab. ^^;;

So I accidentally did the Relm sketch glitch on my SNES version of Final Fantasy III/VI. :( I put Relm in my party, sketched an enemy, and crap, GLITCHED. What I didn't notice from the Sketch glitch before I saved my game was:

- Edgar's chainsaw disappeared
- Shadow disappeared

I'm not particularly sore about the first one, but I am REALLY sore about the second one. :/ Well, there goes 20 hours of game time cause I can't get Shadow back anymore. CRAP. CRAP CRAP CRAP.

Here's more updates about the much anticipated H-game, Koihime Musou. Like Sangoku Musou (aka. Dynasty Warriors) it's based off of the ancient Chinese Three Kingdoms period, but has the twist where most of the characters are girls instead of guys. Typical of H-games you have your characters ranging from jailbait loli to mature, big-breasted women. It's pretty obvious from just a glance that this game is targeted at a male audience. I mean, it's an H-game for crying out loud. Of course guys are going to play it.

So what surprised me the most today is that they announced two new characters: Zuo Ci and Yu Ji who were both mysterious sages in the original Three Kingdoms novel, who messed around with Cao Cao and Sun Ce respectively. Interestingly, in Koihime they're actually male and voiced by Midorikawa Hikaru and Koyasu Takehito.

o___O WHAT?!

These are two of the biggest names in the male seiyuu industry, and being large names they're known for being FANGIRL MAGNETS. Any fangirl worth their salt knows who they are and what they sound like. (Incidentally their names aren't officially annouced with their characters, but I can tell who they are from the voice samples. If there are two voices I can pick out of a crowd...it's Midorikawa and Koyasu. I stake my little fangirl soul on it.) So if they're such fangirl magnets...why are they in an H-game? Unless they're gay for each other, or the main character you play as (Liu Bei) can be gay for them, you're not going to pull in much of the fangirls.

...I think the developers of this game are just trying to cover all the bases. Not that I'm complaining you know.

So...my knee today is worse than it was yesterday. Last night I could at least walk on it, at least it would support my weight. Today, Mom had to find me a stick to use a cane or I wouldn't have been able to maneuver around at all. =___= *sighs* None of the orthopedic specialists we saw today had any appointments open so tomorrow I'm going to my family doctor and see what he says. I think I'm just going to have keep my knee iced and just have to wait it out. =___= *sighs* The good news is that I've postponed my return to LA cause if I was leaving tomorrow I'd probably kill my knee even more trying to get from place to place.

Oh well. In the meantime, I think I'm going to finally do some of that writing I've been meaning to do.

I just killed my knee. Went snowboarding, was getting off the ski lift, planted my back foot on my board to prepare to slide down the little ramp, and my foot slipped I fell, landed on my knee, and it dragged behind me a little bit in a very awkward and painful position...and voila! INSTANT KNEE INJURY.

I'm sure I pulled something, as to whether I really tore it...that remains to be seen. I'm going to putz around until I go back to LA and see how the injury develops. If it doesn't start getting a little better in a week or two I'm going to have to hobble to the UCLA hospital and tell them to look at it.

So now I can't make fun of Andy and his terrible knee problems, because now I have terrible knee problems. I don't even know how I'm going to manage to carry my suitcase up the stairs when I get back home, because I can barely walk and barely put weight on my knee as is. :( Goddammit. I have kung-fu on Sunday too. .___. I don't know if my knee will be well enough to even allow me to drive.

Why is it that sometimes late at night I feel compelled to write femi-nazi manifestos about the symbolisms in Utena, its subversions of the fairy tale, its reflections of sexuality, and how it teaches young women that in order to be truly free they have to cast off the burden of traditional gender roles and simultaneously reject the definitions of masculinity and femininity?

...
well, there it was in a nutshell.

I feel like I'm on the edge of either a self-revolution or a lengthy mental journey of self-discovery which will land me right back to the place I started.

Food for thought on the slopes tomorrow when I munch snow after failing to snowboard properly.

HAPPY NEW YEAR, everybody. :D

I think some of the neighbors down the street were setting of fireworks...really big illegal ones. I've never seen them that up close, not even when I was in Japan. :D They were slow in coming, but really nice to watch from the comfrot of my living room. ...that is, until I saw the police officer drive by and they stopped shortly after.

Busted. :/ No more fireworks for me.

Oh well. Let's not forget the most important thing about New Year's day...

GO MICHIGAN! BEAT 'SC!