momiji

Stuff for AE, mostly, as that is next in line.

Super Sailor Uranus (which I have been working on all week)
-Back bow, collar and choker are all done
-Skirt is lined and ironed but not pleated and attached
-Front bow needs little heart charm, otherwise done
-Have (hideously expensive) leotard fabric, must find a store that actually carries Green Pepper or Kwik Sew patterns
- Boots and gloves - not started. Couldn't find any good base shoes for less than $30 at Payless, so it's thrift store time

Rufus
-Must solve wrinkly fabric issue QQ
-Black glove still MIA (if I have to buy a third pair of those I will be angry - first pair fell victim to mold in sketchy basement suite)
-Must acquire stuffed black panther to transform into Dark Nation (Jon finally solved the 'cat or dog?' Dark Nation debate - the answer is 'displacer beast')
-Shotgun - discover who has power tools I can borrow >___>
-Order blue contacts now that I know precisely how blind I am
-Low Priority - buy a real black turtleneck (while Rufus wearing TB!Subaru's shirt amuses me, it means I can't do any jacketless photos without looking silly), sew matching vest (Three-piece suit yeaaaaah)

Leon
-Buy a new leg holster buckle
-See: gloves for Rufus
-Belt pouches? Probably too poor for this summer, though
-chest strap and and knife sheath for the shoulder holster
-fake guns that don't look like crap (again, probably too poor XD)

Also, I am totally wearing Rufus to this because Rufus is awesome and classy and would totally go to fancy concerts with his bodyguard.

I went and bought stuff today \o/ Most of it planned, though a few little impulse items I know I won't regret.

-BPAL - A bottle of Thunder Moon (for $12!) and a bottle of Eanach Dhuin (which smells just like the wonderful and long-discontinued Dublin on me)
-Pair of black New Balance trainers (hopefully will help with the knee/back pain I had at work last summer)
-Lush bubble bath bombs
-Cheap posters (Two Zelda, one X, one FF7 and one FFX)
-New glasses prescription

...Okay, so I didn't quite 'buy' the last one, but I did have to pay money to obtain it. Apparently my left eye has gotten even worse, which means that there's pretty much one and only one brand of coloured contacts I can buy (The Acuvue 2 Opaques, which go up to -9.00 - my new glasses prescription is -9.25), although it seems like most of the normal ones go up to -12.00. I also got my eyes dilated for the first time, which was a deeply strange experience - I wandered around for about two hours afterwards looking like a grey or something - there was almost no iris showing. It's kind of worn off now, although my pupils still aren't changing quite right in response to light.

(Also, re: There is no homosexuality in Star Wars, I offer this)

You don't have to buy an expensive plane ticket to get that sticky eight-hours-in-an-airplane feeling! Getting five hours of sleep, spending two sweating over a huge exam, and then another four sitting in the same chair vegging afterwards does it just as well.

(and then I had another exam that evening, and one last one tomorrow afternoon - I'm feeling a bit insane right now, though I know getting some sleep and getting my last final over with will make me feel infinitely better XD)

I was trying to find some Rufus/Tseng doujin I thought I had, and found this essay on Rufus instead, which appears to have never been posted here. I'm pretty sure it's from the same time period as this essay on my love of cities, which sort of informs it a little XD.

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Because I am being a slacker about finishing off a real con report (it's started, I swear!), and I don't have all the photos yet (we're collecting a big batch from everyone in our party, so once that's done I'm going to a huge image dump from about five different cameras), so some quick notes here and there.

Wait at the border going down: 5 hours
Wait at the border coming up: 20 minutes

Despite having a full car, we managed not to drive each other insane (well, more insane anyway). I credit Freddie Mercury via my two Queen's Greatest Hits CDs. Stopped at a grocery store not too far past the border and me and the other American went a little crazy with the stuff we can't buy up here (my stash: two 12-packs of Mountain Dew, a bag of onion bagels, my favorite brand of cheap ramen, and five Paydays).

I managed to somehow not run into anyone I really knew that wasn't in the group that came down with me, although I saw a few cosplayers and dealers I've seen at other cons (the Twinbells Doujinshi lady is always so nice ♥). I also spotted Eurobeat King, although did not say hello as I strongly suspect he wouldn't recognize me despite one rather memorable night getting pulled over by the police in his car.

Cosplay was sort of a grab bag - KH, Bleach and Naruto were the big ones I saw, although there was a surprisingly large number of Sailor Moon cosplayers, which made me kind of sad that I didn't have time to do Sailor Uranus, but ah well, another con. Rufus turned out a lot better than I thought. The last week or so of detailing was misery, and I spent the whole time going 'Oh god this is so hideous and full of flaws ugh it sucks ugh ugh ugh QQ', because I am very good at seeing exactly what is wrong with my costumes, but it actually looked very put together once everything was on and ironed (for half an hour - stupid cotton twill). One of my black gloves went AWOL the night before we left, so I ended up having to borrow a tan pair from Jon, which looked okay. Turk presence was middling - there were a lot of Renos and a few Rudes, but not much else.

Dealer's room swag:
-Unwired (shut up it's cheaper in the US okay :<)
-Munchkin Cthulu 3
-Six shirts of epic win (see backs for additional win - to really pile the win on, the Cthulu one glows in the dark)
-Two DMC doujin, both Dante/Vergil fluff by Cardinal - one very short one, and another longer one
-One FF7 doujin - Turks, by Wasab'z - I may attempt to bribe a weeaboo at the club with Mountain Dew to translate it for me, as it's actually a fairly lengthy story.

So I woke up this morning from an anxiety nightmare, where in I was ten minutes late for my last animal physiology midterm, not because I had forgotten about it, or failed to set my alarm or anything usual and mundane. Instead, I dreamt I was late because I was at the post office attempting to to mail a package of uncooked ground beef. And the problem wasn't that the clerks objected to me mailing raw meat, it was that I hadn't brought enough paper to wrap the whole thing in.

Of course, I did end up being five minutes late to the midterm, but for the rather more boring reason that the first bus passed my stop was full and couldn't pick up any more passengers, so I had to wait for the next one.

Also, two unrelated moments of planning fail which more or less neutralize each other - realizing that the convention is in two weeks, not three (with costume still unfinished), and then realizing that the 3-4,000 word paper that I thought was due Wednesday is actually due Friday. Luckily I don't have too much left to do on the costumes, and I had already started in on research for the paper, so It all works out in the end.

I drink a lot of tea. I think I'm on my fourth cup of the day - third, at least, as I can't quite recall if I had a second mug during the OS-25 raid I did earlier. School is busy busy busy, and I am tired of ending up in charge of things (in this case, group projects) just because I'm the only one who doesn't want to do it all the night before.

Also, I can drink legally in the US now! Which is very anticlimatic, as I've been able to do so here in Canada for two years now. Made Jon take me out to Coraline 3D on Friday, which I enjoyed immensely despite the fact that it gave me strange dreams about mirror world, and there was a six year old in the third row who kept talking.

Blizzard has decided to forgive me, I think - Naxxramas went amazingly tonight. We one-shot eight bosses, and two-shot a ninth, and I got two awesome upgrades. Hopefully the Construct Quarter and Frostwyrm Lair will go as smoothly tomorrow.

In other gaming news (as gaming is the only interesting thing I do - everything else would be whining about school), our Hunter game dissolved because one player left, and we didn't have a very cohesive group, and has been replaced by GURPS Alpha Centauri. When we left our party, the Spartan bioroid and the decommissioned Peacekeeper cyborg were about to get into a bar fight, with the small, angry, humanity-hating ex-University computer genius caught in the middle, while the empathic, electrokinetic detective meets with a client at another table. We'll see if we get through session two without party deaths.

My Earthdawn game is set to finally start this week - I'm both excited and very nervous, because ED is such a story-heavy system and I am not always so good at story. So, fingers-crossed. I've also decided to keep an in-character log of our Tuesday night Earthdawn game, mostly as a characterisation exercise, as I've been having trouble finding a voice for Isak. It's up here - there will probably be some exposition in the next few days, as Isak is aware that he's writing for an audience as well,given that his IC reason for keeping it is to provide a counterpoint to that pack of lies Dawnstrider calls a journal.

Question for more techy people on my flist - desktops and wireless networking, how do you do it? I expected it to be an add-on card, but after searching New Egg, I can find no such thing. My last experience with desktops and networking was something like seven years ago, installing a ethernet card in an old Dell, so I'm really behind the times.

The reason for this is that I'm planning on using my income tax refund to build a media box/NAS, because I have 250 GB of disks scattered across my desk, and am tired of my roommate's PS3 refusing to play any of my older AVI files and mucking up sound decoding on some of the newer ones. My basic plan is to install MythBuntu to provide a video front end, and then use Samba for file sharing - if MythBuntu won't let me install Samba, I'll probably go for a normal Ubuntu build, strip out the extras and then toss in MythTV and Samba.

The two biggest planning hurdles so far are aforementioned wireless networking - I have absolutely zero access to the router in the house, so wired is basically out of the question - and trying to find a motherboard/CPU/graphics combo that's both cheap and space-efficient. The big flaw there is that this system will run fine on a 1.8 GHz single-core CPU and integrated graphics - but I need an S-video or composite video out. And it seems like integrated video + s-video or composite = nonexistant. Which means putting in a cheap dedicated card, which is 1) more space and 2) another $30.

Also, another sign that I haven't touched desktop stuff for a while - my jaw dropped when I saw that you can buy a DVD burner for $25. Mostly because I remember being excited when I bought a CD burner for $60 in like...2001.

There was an alligator in my biology class today, and I got to pet her. Alligators have surpisingly supple skin, and are unexpectedly cold (which makes sense, as they're cold-blooded, but some part of my brain reads animal = warm).

And then I came home and made cheese and cheesecake with Jon, which was totally awesome both for the 'OMG I'm making cheese' factor and getting to use my new mixer and food processor, which were Christmas gifts from my mom. Photos to come, as the awesome must be shared.

Downside: I am still totally not prepped for the game I'm supposed to run tomorrow, oh god oh god oh god. And have classes pretty much right up until game time.