Ramblings

Now that the assignment bit is over with...

A little bit about myself:

I love drawing and art, and I'm going to use this blog as a picture dump because I can. I also love to write, mostly fantasy stories, and of course I'll read any fantasy/sci fi I can get my hands on. Right now I'm in the middle of A Feast for Crows which is by George R. R. Martin. It is an excellent fantasy series, even for people who aren't that interested in the fantasy aspect. Honestly, it's mostly about a gigantic battle for a medieval kingdom, so there's lots of death, violence and politics. Feast for Crows is the fourth in the series, which is called A Song of Ice and Fire, and I would highly recommend them.

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Anyway! I guess you can tell from that I'm a chronic rambler. Actually, you might have been able to tell that from the name of my blog. I'm clever like that. Yes. Moving on... some other interesting things about myself.... I'm an animé fan. Yes there is an accent on that for those of you who didn't know, and I just finished my Spanish homework, so I've still got the accent codes fresh in my mind. I love Renaissance Faires, and just about any other excuse to dress up in a crazy costume. I usually go as a pirate. I'll be dressed as a pirate on International Talk Like a Pirate Day (September 19th, mateys). I was a Death Eater for the midnight release of Deathly Hallows, which was fun because I got to terrify small children. Unfortunately, lots of people mistook me for a dementor and kept casting expecto patronum on me, even after I'd flash the dark mark at them. That was pretty annoying.

I'm a Harry Potter fan. I'm in Penn State's Harry Potter club, the Three Broomsticks, and I'm in Slytherin, AND WE'RE BETTER THAN EVERYONE ELSE, EVEN THE SNOOTY RAVENCLAWS.

... Yeah. And if you're a Harry Potter fan who has not yet seen Potter Puppet Pals, it is pretty necessary for you to click here. And even if you have, watch it again. They're hilarious.

I've got a few other fandoms. Futurama is high up there and anyone who hasn't seen it needs to RIGHT NOW. I read a lot of webcomics, but I'll link them at a later date. A short list of my favorites would be: VGCats, Sinfest, xkcd, Fallen, and MegaTokyo.

On a separate but related note: FALLEN NEEDS TO UPDATE DAMMIT *tears out hair*

...

I'm slightly exciteable, but mostly harmless.

Ooh! And I haven't gotten to Batman yet! I am obessed with Batman. It's actually a little terrifying sometimes. I haven't actually read the comics (honestly, I'm terrified to start investing money in that, because I know I'll never stop), but Batman: the Animated Series is still one of my favorite TV shows, as are Justice League and Justice League Unlimited AND I DON'T CARE WHO KNOWS IT. I know they're cartoons, but they're very well-done cartoons, and they're funny and the characters are cool. And Batman -^_^-. I really do have a Batman problem, but that's okay, because THE DARK KNIGHT IS GOING TO BE AWESOME.

And I think that's it. *nodnod*

I HAVE REGISTERED FOR SPRING AND SO SAID ABBY: "IT IS GOOD!"

I've been busy-busy for the last few days.

Yesterday I trapsed around Walmart and got nice shoes for ProExpo, as well as a few new posters that I didn't actually have room for but got anyway cuz they were awesome!!!1one

I also saw Holy Grail with the Monty Python Society. One day I will go to one of their meetings. One day....

Anyway, today I achieved a personal best for longest distance walked in heels. It sucked. Hard. My feet are still killing me. Also, I learned that I am unable to walk in heels. It was kind of pathetic T-T.

ProExpo was pretty cool. Most of the people there were like "Oh you're a freshie! That's so adorable! Yeah, we're cool and everything, but we mostly take juniors 'n stuff. Try again later."

Little did they know that I was only in it for the free pens! Haha!

Srsly, it was very informative, and there might even be some internship oppertinities this summer if I apply myself. Worth looking into at any rate, for the experience if nothing else. The heels were still hellish though T-T. Not looking forward to putting those suckers back on any time soon.

Today was also awesome because I was nearly late to English due to watching Yu-Gi-Oh Abridged. That was fun ^^.

Happy International Talk Like a Pirate Day!

I'm enough of a nerd to think this is funny, so I'm sharing it.

I totally pwnz0red my homework.

Major overkill baby.

I also unleashed this crime against humanity.

It has been a good day. ... Night.... Morning. 24 HOUR INTERVAL

So I finally have a Facebook.

... I feel incredibly unclean. I have jumping on the bandwagon issues, and it did not help that just about every single one of my friends posted "haha, you finally caved" on my wall within one day. I guess there is absolutely no reason for them to assume it was a class assignment. In fact, it would be incredibly strange if they did. Doesn't make the reaction any less obnoxious.

See, I have this problem with things that are "popular." They just rub me the wrong way, you know? Like it's going to rob me of my precious individualism or some other such nonsense. That's why I've always liked LiveJournal. As I have seen, it always seems to be characterized in a much more nerdy, quirky way than MySpace or Facebook.

Ugh, thank God we didn't get to making a MySpace in class on Tuesday. I don't think any number of showers could have made me feel any less unclean if I'd actually made one. Hopefully there will be no reason to anymore.

I know that was melodramatic. It's just frustrating, you know? I just really prefer smaller little cult sensations to whatever's popular at the time. It doesn't bother me as much if I join early, and then it becomes a big deal, but Facebook doesn't really seem like anything special to me.

I'm probably just being stubborn though. I should give it a try and I might actually really like it or whatever.... But I really don't feel like figuring it out right now. Maybe some other time when I don't have so much homework....

I feel like I should have had links in here somewhere. Maybe I'll come back and edit this later tonight with some justification for what MySpace makes me cringe.

So if you guys want to waste some time instead of doing homework, I will recommend the OTP Generator.

OTP stands for One True Pairing, and this thing includes EVERYONE. Like, Poland is in there. I love this thing because you can tell how much of a nerd you are by how many of the characters and/or historical figures you recognize. And I can really tell I'm a dork by how many I think are funny. It's entertaining though.

Yeah, I've been kind of MIA lately... but now that I really should be writing my narrative for English, this seems like a much better alternative!

Highlights of the last week: On Saturday, I went to my first tailgate, though I did not attend the game. Tailgating was cool. I got to hang out with my dad.

Next day was Ren Faire! The Three Broomsticks took a trip to the PA Renaissance Faire, and I managed not to spend ungodly amounts of money, which is a first for me, because I'm weak-willed like that.

And then on Monday I woke up, looked at the clock and though "damn! I missed Calc!" So I rolled over, thinking I'd get some more sleep, right? But then slowly I realized "wait... Calc is at 9, not 8... Crap." So, on the bright side, I did not miss Calc, but I didn't get to sleep in T_T.

But it got better after that. I was so disoriented while I was leaving that I magically forgot to bring my wallet, which has my ID card and my room key. This is the... third time I've been locked out of my room. But I think I can safely say that I am a getting back into my room ninja after Monday. I managed to get into Simmons to get a locked out key, and I got right into my dorm without my ID card and with no waiting around for people to come by.

So, even though I felt like a moron, I at least have complete faith and confidence in my ability to get back into my room without key or ID. Yarr.

It did get me to wondering if there was a better way to do the swipe in thing. Like some method that can't be lost, stolen or left behind. But typing in your number wouldn't work, since people could steal and use it, and I don't really think anyone wants a barcode tattooed onto the back of their hand. Fingerprint or retenal scanning would be teh awesome, but that's completely impractical. Or we could pull a Hogwarts and have sekrit passwords XD. That method isn't exactly moron-friendly either though, though I don't know if it's more or less vulnerable than the ID card system. I mean, srsly, you don't need an ID card to get into a dorm. I guess the RAs are on the lookout for intruders, but I've been outside without my ID card like, three times now, and almost without any waiting involved, I have always been able to get back in.

I guess the moral of the story is I need to remember my freaking keys and ID card, and if I get locked out, it's my own damn fault -__-.

Well, all the Ning stuff today was cool, but I'll talk about that later, because OMGSIMS3WTF.

I know it's far off on the horizion, but work is already being done on Sims 3, which makes my soul cry. Anyone who's ever played an EA game, especially Sims knows that EA Games is the devil and their games are created with the sole purpose of stealing peoples souls. The games Sim City, Sims, Sims 2 and all the like are a marvelous feat of videogaming in that, there is no end. There's no final objective to be reached. There's no levelling up, no monsters to beat, no bosses to defeat. Literally, it can just go on and on forever. And I don't even want to think what Spore is going to be like.

But I'm not so sure about Sims 3. According to this article the sims are now going to be much more customizable (liking TV or not liking TV?), which is cool I guess, and more socially aware, which could have some funny results. I guess it's the fact that they're going to be more aware of thier own ambitions is what bothers me. Like, part of the point of the sims is that they need someone poking them around into doing things because they literally can't take care of themselves. They'll be dying of starvation, whine to you about it, and then go watch TV. Some of the fun of it comes from the fact that they're like nauty children: they'd rather play with toys than do homework, or write in their diary instead of studying to get more skill points. If they do that kind of thing on their own, what's the point? There's even less of a game if it plays itself like that.

I guess what I'm saying is that just because the AI can do these things on its own, doesn't mean it should.

So, last night I went to the Drag Show, and boy was that an experience. There's nothing like cross-dressing to make you really appreciate how gender boundaries totally don't exist anymore. Of course, most of us don't see men in dresses and too much makeup prancing around on a regular basis, but we've all seen people who really and honestly could be either. You know you have. In fact, I spent half of my junior year of high school wondering what gender some kid was before I saw him walk into a boy's bathroom.

The simple fact of the matter is: it's just plain hard to tell anymore. Long hair, flat chest, pants, earrings, even makeup... they just don't mean anything anymore. They might all hint one way or another when added up, but nothing's definite anymore.

The internet makes this even more difficult. You've got to take the person's word for it, which I must imagine makes online dating rather exciting. I remember in a Pew Report on online dating that I came across way back when, it talked about how relatively few people are availing themselves of the service. Still, everyone has heard the big names: Yahoo! Personals, eHarmony, Match.com, Chemistry.com, and out of those four, only eHarmony restricts its services from homosexual people.

It's all just very interesting. But anyway, the drag show was fun ^^

So today in English we were told to think of someone who we argue with all the time, and think what about arguing with that person really makes us angry.

This was an unfortunate task for me, since I'm generally a wrathful, enraged person, and thinking about something that has made me angry in the past just makes me angry about it all over again. I really need to learn to let things go, but that is not the point of this post.

The point is that miscommunication is so very, utterly obnoxious, and the internet exacerbates this problem exponentially. The lack of emotion conveyed by type is a problem. Emoticons have fixed it to a small extent, but there isn't really anything to be done for sarcasm. Like I need to be able to type [sarcasm][/sarcasm], or hit Ctrl+Asshole on my keyboard, and that would solve about half of my online communication problems. There just has to be SOME universally recognized, visually conveyed method of experessing sarcasm over the internet.

Well, I finally slept through calculus, which is annoying, but whatever. I'll just really have to read the book to make sure I don't fall behind. Hopefully he'll still be doing examples tomorrow, and I have a friend I can get the notes off of.

Also, on a more amusing note, I'm so glad that these are my targetted advertisements:

So the internet knows I like Batman. I don't know whether to laugh or headdesk again.

Hey, for those of you who don't know, November is National Novel Writing Month.

I know this is kind of late notice, but anyone who's always wanted to write a novel: this is a great experience! It's a lot of fun, even if it does kind of drain the life out of you (50,000 words in one month means 1,667 words a day, and that may not sound like much, but when you get behind, it adds up fast).

Anyway, that's why I'll be dead for the entire month. Anyone who cares to join me, it's not too late to check it out. One of my friends started a week into November one year and finished a week early, so it can be done!

All I can say is thank God for the internet, or else craziness like this would not be possible. That counts as a link to technology, right? Oh! Automated word counting. That helps too ^^.

Okay, given, Adobe Reader is a great product. It's free, it's conventient, blah blah blah.

Unfortunately the little bastard reformats all of my zipped folders into Reader files, and then can't open them. I don't know how to change this setting, and eventually I just get so frustrated that I uninstall Reader. Does anybody have a better solution? Please? Hopefully one that doesn't involve buying WinZip? Because apart from really desperately disliking WinZip, I don't feel like shelling out the $.

Well, my morning's been hectic. Hal900 had a minor breakdown as far as the video went, but I'm REALLY hoping we'll be able to work it out within... the next half hour? Oh well.

In the mean time, I have been entertaining myself with this website. It's actually a pretty spectacular example of internet video. The format is very well done. If you go to the timer, it shows you when whatever has been placed in the microwave begins to melt with a clickable tab that says "meltdown." When you click this tab, it skips immediately to when the thing begins to melt.

This is a great example of what can be done in Flash with more than mediocre Flash skills.

All I can say is thank God for the interent.

Without it I would not be able to escape my roommate's incessent need to make out with her boyfriend. Seriously, I understand that they're in "love" or whatever, but does this need to be going on while I'm trying to do homework!? Or in the room! At all! Penn State is a huge campus! There must be somewhere they can go cozy up to each other where I am not.

Fortunately, the internet lets me go do work elsewhere while they're up to... whatever it is they're up to in our room -__-. Bastards.

Yeah! Check out that whole week where Abby didn't post! Awesome!

Check out that entire month where Abby made no comments! W00t!

I apologize for the inevidable flood of comments on backlogged entries I'll be making in the not so distant future. But break was awesome, and I'm glad to be back. Also, my parents are awesome because they sent me back to college with leftovers ^^.

I would totally eat those.

Elion, eLiving http://www.eliving.psu.edu/and Health Services all need to CURL UP IN A CORNER AND DIE.

Within the space of a week, I have had to struggle with all three of these websites, and the POUNDING HEADACHE they gave me was a lovely addition to my hacking cough and sore throat! Most recently, I have expericent the return of my old rival, eLiving, which almost makes me want to live off campus just so I don't have to deal with it! The site is just as annoyingly vague as I remeber it being (from my epic battle with it over the summer, but that's a story for another time) and currently I'm experiencing the familiar feeling of wanting to TEAR OUT MY HAIR.

I can only imagine how much more hellish this must have been when it was done on paper. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go play a game where I can ACTUALLY KILL THINGS *gnashes teeth, rages and fumes*

Well isn't this special. None of you can see it, but I'm gnashing my teeth right now. Oh well. I suppose it could have been worse. It could have been out during the dance party. I guess we might have wanted to check the planned outages calendar before deciding on a time. Then again, I doubt anyone had any reason to forsee that kind of necessity. I guess it just goes to show that you can't plan for everything.

Also, I find it funny that Second Life uses Google Calenders. I'm not entirely sure why, but it makes me chuckle. Then again, why wouldn't they use Google Calanders? Those things rock out loud.

Well, I need more links (I think. I still can't really tell what counts and what doesn't) so I'm going to totally linkdump while complaining about LJ at the same time.

I'm sure no one really wants to hear me talking about LJ anymore, but for once I'm not singing its praises! LiveJournal is a great free blogging site. With a basic account, users get a journal, can upload up to six user icons, and watch news, friends, comments and the like. Also for free, users can upgrade to a plus account, which puts advertisements on the journal, but offers more of the basic features, as well as allowing photo posts, voice posts, custom mood themes, polls and surveys, and other nifty features (a full list of accounts and features can be found here). The community is great, and a lot of fun, but more recently there's been some weirdness going on as far as content is concerned.

See, a while back there were some people upset about some of the user generated content on LJ. Recently, LJ has decided to implement a flagging system (for comparison, here is YouTube's flagging system). This post outlines the changes made, providing this quick summary:

- Adults will remain able to see all content on the site unless prevented by the exisiting security settings.
- The primary goal is to give you the ability to mark your own content so that kids aren't seeing stuff that is meant for adults.
- You now have the option to flag other people's content that you think is inappropriate for users under the age of 18. However, nothing will happen to that content unless multiple people flag it. Only then will it be sent to the Abuse Prevention Team for review.
- If your content is flagged by other users, adults will still be able to access it as long as they have the appropriate permissions.

Meanwhile, LJ users are sitting around rolling our eyes. It's hard to take this flagging thing seriously. Lj_biz posted some clarifications, but reading the comments makes it abundantly clear that most of us think it's stupid. This led to the creation of lj_policy where users could discuss and give feedback on policy matters, as well as the formation of a LiveJournal Advisory Board which at once brought up the question of how people are elected/appointed to this board and mostly caused more resentment than ease.

Of course, this is only what I've obsereved. I try to stay out of LJ politics myself, since, as you can see, it's a rather messy business. Every so often my friends page features some of the latest news and controversy, but as far as I can tell, it doesn't affect me much, so I'm staying out of it. Call me lazy, but it really isn't my problem.

Well, if that doesn't put me over the required number of links, it at least gets me close XD. I'm gonna relax with some Mahjong Titans.

Well... what can I say about my first semester at college? Penn State is amazing. I'm glad I'm here. But that's enough of the Miss America answer.... I think my first semester gave me a good foundation for what I can look forward to. Hopefully my teachers will all be as amazing as they were this semester, because I firmly believe that the teacher makes the class. I got a lot of requirements over with, so now Freshman Composition, Calculus, and my foreign language requirement are out of my way, and I was even able to start right into the introductory IST course.

I learned a lot this semester, not just from my classes, but also about college, and about myself. Getting out and doing things is a very intimidating prospect for me. At home in my dorm is my comfort zone, and I really need to work on getting myself up and out more often, or I'm going to miss out on things. I already missed a lot after only one semester, and even thought I've still got a lot of time here, that semester is time I'll never get back. My workload isn't much harder for me than it was in high school, so there's really no excuse for my sitting in my room all the time.

For the first time in my life, I screwed up a grade that actually counted. I failed my Calculus midterm badly, but I should still be able to redeem my overall grade. In the long run, I think this experience will be good for me. It should at least teach me that I am not invincible, and there are going to be things in life that I will actually have to work for instead of just gliding along.

Spanish reaffirmed my knowledge that I really dislike Spanish. It took care of my language requirement though. Maybe I'll try something else--I've been considering Japanese--but we'll see. At least I am no longer required to commit myself or my brain cells to a different language. I have enough trouble communicating with people as it is.

Although I had trepidations, I'm glad I ended up in English 030. At first I was very distressed that I'd clawed my way through AP English in high school only to have to suffer more of the same, but English 030 was nothing like that. It gave me new respect for English as a subject, which is good, because I really have no right to be judging a major I'm not in.

My First Year Seminar and IST 110H both managed to further convince me that I love my major. Everything I did in both of those classes was really cool, which gives me high hopes for the rest of my time here. I hope I'll be able to take more honors classes in my major as well, because I think that contributed a lot of my positive experience.

I loved this class. And the few parts that I didn't love about it, I think were good for me.

If I had any doubts that my major should be IST (which I didn't) this class definitely confirmed that I am where I want to be. The subject material was interesting, the projects were interesting and challenging, and the class just overall made me really excited.

I think overall my biggest challenge in this class was group work. I'm not sure if keeping HAL 9000 worked better or worse for us overall, but it was certainly an experience. I can't reasonably deny that we had a lot of friction toward the end, but by then it was really too late to do much about it, and not every group gets along, you know? Sometime you have to work with people who you don't see eye to eye with, and that's something valuable to take away. I don't think this particular class helped me at all with my tendency to micromange my teammates when I'm working in a group, but there will be other opportunities.

Also, even though Second Life has been really horrendous, it was a good mental excercise, and although it wasn't fun, we had to do it. Life won't always be fun, but you've got to play with the hand you're dealt and make the most of it. This whole blogging thing has been a bit of a chore too, but I like to blog, and it's been a good way for my parents to keep up with what I'm doing, so I'll probably keep it up, or at least try to.

I'm really glad I took 110H. It may have been more work, but it was definitely a good choice.

So I was totally ready to confront my roommate, work out the boyfriend issue and all that nonsense. I was ready to do it. And so she came into my room, we got through the awkward greetings between two people who really could care less if they ever see each other again, but have to pretend to be glad to see each other for politeness' sake...

And she informed me that she was moving into a recently vacated space in her friend's room, so I now have a single.

I'm like, floored right now. It was pretty much the most amazing thing ever. Except possibly seeing the Oscar Myer Weiner mobile driving down the highway that one time. Mmmm... even that.

So yeah. I've pretty much been enjoying the solitude. Not that I haven't been chillin' by myself for the last week, but this is different because I HAVE A SINGLE NOW.

Also, on a separate note, all three Christmas cards I received at school from my friends made me sad. Kathy's because it had been ripped up by some kind of evil mail demon, Allison's because I'm a sappy, overly sentimental dork, and YC's because she drew it in GOD DAMN CRAYON. WHAT THE HELL GROW UP IT'S NOT CUTE ANYMORE. And she says things like "I don't want to be seen as 'cute'" and then does things like THAT. Maybe the reason she's so difficult to deal with is because she's FIVE YEARS OLD *seethes*

... That's about it though. I'll be watching anime in the dark for the next three hours.

So I've been using a few new features to the intarweb lately. I've got a Yahoo email account, so my handy little Yahoo tool bar tells me when I've got new mail. Also, to keep better track of my LiveJournal, I've got a little function at the bottom of my browser that tells me when my flist updates. All in all, it's pretty spiffy. It lets me see what's up with my friends and what's going in in my inbox RIGHT AWAY OMG. However... it's left me somewhat lacking. Now in that down time when I've finished doing something I can't just go check my email and then have a look at my flist. Well I mean, I CAN, but I'd have to be a moron to do it since I'm automatically alerted when that kind of thing changes. Seriously, I don't think I even have to have a window open for the internet. My computer dings at me and a little alert box comes up with a link to my flist and everything.

It's not that I'm complaining. These features are really cool. It's just disrupted my internet habits somewhat, and I'm having a bit of trouble adjusting.

So Setsucon is this weekend, which promises to be a lot of fun. I get to do an art panel, which is super cool. I signed up for security, but they've given us less than no information about that, so we'll see if I actually end up doing it.

Other than that, research seems like it's going to be awesome, or at least very interesting even though I'm going to have to drag myself over to the IST building Wednesday mornings to meet with Dr. Clark T_T. Oh well. Walking's good for me. I could try to explain what I'll be researching, but I'd rather just let Wikipedia do it for me.

Um... also arts I guess.

This picture is awesome and I love it to death

It's only Tuesday and I'm already sick of people. I don't know how I'm going to make it through this week T_T.

Also, I need to stop over-committing myself.

Well, straight up: I miss my parents. It's kind of depressing to think that the soonest I'll see them again is Spring Break. I'm already overbooked for Spring Break as it is too -_-.

Life hasn't really been pulling any punches lately, and frankly I'd like to be able to sit still for once. I really miss my hat, as stupid as it sounds. I noticed it's absence especially today, what with the bitter cold and the biting wind and everything. By Friday, if my hat does not turn up in the lost and found at the HUB, I will proceed to find myself a suitable replacement.

Also, I'm apparently supposed to be making something like 8 dollars an hour on this research bit, so that'll be kind of cool. I miss making money. It made buying things for myself easier to justify. It's nice to have a monthly budget though, since it's taught me that my natural instinct is to hoard money as much as I possibly can instead of spending as close to my limit as I can without going over. I think I'd feel like a colossal jerk if I did that.

Anyway, I'm definitely procrastinating right now, so I should get back to work....

Guess who has both her finals on Monday? Guess who's done her first semester of college on May 5th at 6:30?

HELLZ YEAH *victory dance*

My parents rock out loud

So I have worked things out with Brad, and I will be subletting his apartment over the summer. I will be alone, have internets, furniture, and a parking space, all at a very reasonable price. Unfortunately, he needs me to move out a week before the summer session is over T_T. So I'm going to have to figure that out, but as far as I can tell, this is the best deal I can possibly hope for, and I should be able to figure something out for one measly week within the next three months. In fact, it might not even be that big of a problem, especially if it turns out that my class doesn't have a final, in which case I might not even have to stay for that entire week.

So here's hoping I haven't used up all of my living situation voodoo on getting myself a single for this semester.

This has only tangential relevance to what I'm doing right now, but this idea is way too interesting for me to ignore it.

So I found this site that's basically giving an overview of how different sci-fi stories envision the future. Unfortunately, this site is like, bare-bones and barely informative, which SUCKS because that's about the most interesting concept I've ever heard of. Like, it almost makes studying literature seem like a worth-while endeavor. I almost want to propose it as a research project to someone. It would, if nothing else, be a great excuse to read a whole heap of sci-fi.