momiji

I HAVE WATCHED IT. Oh god, two hours of my life I am never getting back again. It's like someone took an episode of Family Guy - the non sequitors, the gags that get old after one minute that run to five, obnoxious laughter - and stretched it out into a whole movie. And then made it about wookies. We had had an ooc chat viewing session (okay, so it was just two of us while everyone else lol'd at our spazzing) and decided that the two best things about this movie were 1) The guard who hates fish and 2) Boba Fett riding a dinosaur.

It was so...just. WTF. That's all I can really say.

On a completely unrelated note, I got new BPAL today, and Whitechapel smells awesomeeeeee. I think I have my new Rufus BPAL here. Just citrusy enough to offset the lilac and musk. SO NICE.

"I awoke in a panic, and had to remind myself that I do not, in fact, own a toaster oven."

(Perhaps I will elaborate on this later, but I feel almost as if it's more interesting to leave it out of context. Back to getting ahead on course reading~)

Roommate: I am officially a trap now.
Me: Huh?
Roommate: I went by the club today and four people thought I was some new girl
Me: *lols forever*

So I went back to the States for Christmas, and came back home for New Year's, and while it was all very busy I don't think much of note actually happened. The Museum of Science is still awesome, Finale is still delicious, and New England in winter is still fucking cold. Got to see some people I haven't seen in a while, which was nice - Winter and my grandmother, most notably.

Christmas gifts can largely be summed up as 'video games' and 'money which I used to buy video games', thus cementing my rep as a Huge Nerd. Am most of the way through Persona 3 FES and enjoying it immensely, and then Jon and I started Tales of Symphonia (go go multiplayer battle system!), which is also quite fun even if at times it feels like FFX - With Ten-Year-Olds! Seriously, Colette is so much like a teeny!Yuna, it's great.

Classes have started again - retaking the animal physio class I failed again (blah blah blah boring), Shakespeare and Children's Lit as online classes (interesting texts, not too much reading, but so much writing @.@ Weekly discussion questions and journal entries), Ethical Issues in the Life Sciences (mmm philosophy - also lots of writing), and Interdisciplinary Applications of Evolutionary Theory (mmm, memetics. And writing. And presentations).

MMO I want to be excited about but can't quite get worked up about - Final Fantasy XIV

(I tend to like Final Fantasy games in part for their worldbuilding - see Midgar and Spira - and I'm just not getting a feel for that from XIV. It seems so...generic high fantasy with chocobos :<)

MMO I didn't expect to be excited about and am - Guild Wars 2

(It looks gorgeous, and while the races play into some of the fantasy tropes they also all manage to look really unique. I want a cute little Asura already, augh. And the lack of extreme sexual dimorphism - contrast with WoW - makes me happy. Female cat people aren't hypersexualized, hooray!)

I also keep wanting to reactivate my WoW account, but most of what I want to do is raiding and as far as I know there are no non-shitty two-night-a-week raiding guilds, which is all I have time for right now. I'm an elitist bitch and I don't want to play with lousy players, but I think pretty much anyone who is a good raider is in a three-four raid a week guild which I just...can't do.

So I know a few of you still have your own domains - I'm looking to switch providers. I'm largely happy with my current plan buuuuut TCH only lets you have one domain per account (any additional ones are parked) and I uh. May have just registered a second one to have the most amazing e-mail addresses ever, so I need a hosting account that can provide that. My current plan is the silver plan here - I do not need nearly that much bandwidth, though I /do/ use my domain for a lot of image hosting/file transfers so I've come close to the 2.4 GB cap before. Any opinions, anyone?

Me: I have to say, trying to install open office dictionaries while you are doped on benzos is an interesting experience
Ced: Benzo'ed Rufus? I see photoshoots in that.
Me: Haha
Me: Yeah, of me walking into things
Me: Or falling over
Ced: Hey, it'd explain the wheelchair pretty nicely.
Me: Haha
Me: Well, if Geostigma induces seizures the way actual lupus does, he totally could be tripped up on benzos in AC
Me: Klonopin I think is mostly used as an anti-epileptic
Ced: Wikipedia says so, yes.
Ced: So, maybe we'll forego the breaking of legs for realism and just go for the sleeping pills and the wheelchair at the 'con?
Me: XD

I did actually manage to get the dictionaries installed despite my very short attention span. Final paper count was 3.1k words, ten pages plus an eleventh of bibliography. I'm now setting off into my second one, which is horribly boring but now one-fifth done.

And as promised - My glasses in action! Another bus-stop camera phone photo, this one far less cool-looking than the last.

I love you even as you break my heart over and over. Seriously, only game to actually outright make me cry, because while the ending is 'good', it's also very bittersweet - you are keenly aware of all the sacrifices that are made to get there. I know FF7 has Aeris, but somehow her death doesn't have the scope, the impact that seeing Yuna perform the Sending for a row of bodies in a half-destroyed village does. Death is more present in Spira, and while the game may have it's little romance plot (I don't really want to say subplot, because while it's subtle it's very important to the story), the focus is really on the balance of life and death, of sorrow and hope.

Part of me wants to like, write a super-long post about Braska and Yuna and why I love them both so so so much, but I don't think I could adequately capture it in words. They're both such complex characters - even though yeah, Braska is in the game for like all of ten minutes total. I don't think I could ever really write FFX fic for the same reason - I could never narrow the focus enough. I can handle Braska in RP, though I don't think I could pull of the hint of uncertainty in herself that Yuna still has through much of the game. I guess I will say this much - I'm pretty much an avowed atheist, but writing Braska gives me a glimpse of the strength and power of belief. And yeah, I am not totally unaware of the irony that my dad's belief system is in some ways very similar to Braska's, although their personalities are, uh. Definitely a bit different. And some of it is that I am kind of a snarky asshole and I play a lot of snarky assholes, and they're all great fun, but there's something both calming and cleansing about writing someone so kind and so certain of himself as Braska.

(Guess who spent like two hours tonight watching FFX clips as a refresher for a Braska app, and then followed it up with horribly depressing FFX fanfic. I feel like I need to do a scene of Braska being totally fluffy with his pet ninja boy or having tea with Minato or something now, to make up for it.)

-Increased dose of Wellbutrin does craaaazy things to my brain. Anxiety as a side-effect + pre-existing anxiety disorders = five hours of me fidgeting compulsively and being totally unable to focus on anything. Hopefully it'll even out after a few days but whoa, that was a bit intense

-Have gotten mostly caught up on Merlin S2 (haven't watched tonight's ep yet, but soon!), and oh BBC, I love you and your iffy script-writing and bad special effects. Best moment so far was the incredibly awkward not-hug which I will be laughing about forever.

-I still hate 18th century lit ahhhhh.

Okay time to try to sleep :|

Suit sewing is a go - I have two weeks before I have to start in on term papers, so I am using them to my cosplay advantage. I am already sick of welt pockets, but ah well. I will be able to add suits to the list of 'sewing projects I could do in my sleep' (other entries - hakama, kimono, and vests) after this, I think. Ced and I have been scheming recruitment and photoshoots, which is always fun, although it's all still planning right now.

Related to that, more Case of Shinra is up - there's canon confirmation for two fanon assumptions (Rufus's mother's death, and the Turks helping evacuate Midgar), evidence for my 'President Shinra is less of a dick than we thought' theory (he uses his son's birthday as his passcode for everything), and Tseng in a Hawaiian shirt. I am kind of loving it.

And not at all related to that, I put up Halloween photos - they're here, I'm too lazy to embed right now.

-Zombies were a success!
-So was the fudge and marshmallows.
-A+ comment of the evening from Julie, when I showed up with my hair slicked back: "OH MY GOD ARE YOU ZOMBIE RUFUS?!" Tragically no, although that'd be an awesome costume
-Best costume, by far, of the night - the guy who dressed as George Harrison, came with a nice classic electric guitar, and played Beatles songs all night.
-Watching a shirtless man in leggings and a luchadore mask singing Rock Band songs at the top of his lungs is awesome

My plan for the rest of the night is to upload and edit camera images, and zen out to the sounds of my roommate playing Katamari Forever while I read more Nabari no Ou and get something to eat that isn't packed with sugar~