Video game dream [01 Oct 2009|09:53am] [ music | My teacher talking about boolean operators and gates ] I had a dream about this really cool video game that negrek had apparently been talking about a lot. It was a logic/puzzle game called Purple Algorithm, strange as that sounds, and was for the DS. In it, you basically moved around this grid picking up little colored blocks, which stood for algorithms. You could then place them side by side on the grid and link them together to form a combined algorithm, or simply place them alone, and then tap any algorithm to run it. This somehow got you more movement across the grid, more different algorithms to pick up and thus more possibilities for new combined algorithms. There were these preset static white blocks around the grid that you would generally have to connect to the algorithms to provide a unique step in a combined algorithm (which could be to initialize a variable, or to give you a reward as a final step if the algorithm you connected to it returned the right output, or just to do something you had no actual colored algorithm to do). The first basic algorithms you got (such as a "blue algorithm", which was special because it just saved your current position on the grid and was usually not used in combined algorithms) were basically a single block taking up one square on the grid, but later there were algorithms that took up two squares, and later three squares (both forming a corner and a straight line), and presumably later four squares, which would form a complete set of Tetris blocks, although I think I didn't get to see any of those in the dream. Basically you had to not just figure out the right sequence of algorithms to create the combined algorithm you wanted, but also to fit them all together on the grid with all the white algorithms they had to use in the correct positions and so on. I'm well awake now and I still think this sounds like a really cool game. 2 comments|post comment

A dream... about vampires! [09 Sep 2009|07:11pm] [ mood | weird ] [ music | None ] I had an amusing dream. The first part of it (that I remember) was actually about watching the Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince movie, which was suddenly five hours and forty minutes, though I didn't know that beforehand and thought the climax had come along at some relatively early point where Harry was being prepared with knowledge of something by going to some sort of a beach cave with mermaids in it. I remember at that point I was talking to someone about how this was one of those obvious Chekov's gun setups, because that scene didn't look relevant to the plot but involved some sort of a skill or knowledge that I remembered from the book that Harry would need to use later on. A bit after that there was another scene I thought the same of, but I don't remember what that one was about. In any case, then the dream moved on to being about psychic vampires who for some reason felt lust when they heard good music, and thus playing something like Beethoven's ninth was actually used to distract them to get away from them at some point. And then there was this kid who was either a vampire or not, but he had psychic powers and used them to unpack some sort of a mini-sound system to connect to an iPod, which I think must have been for fighting off other vampires or something. But he was with this older guy who was all, "Dude, I don't care about your fancy tricks; are you going to help me or not?" Because apparently the kid had promised to help him participate in a race with hamburger-powered cars. No, really, hamburger-powered. There was this whole thing about putting a bunch of McDonald's hamburgers into a bucket and somehow using the heat or something to power the car, and the older guy was absolutely furious because the kid had actually started to eat one of the hamburgers, thus wasting their fuel. There was more, but I've forgotten it now. post comment

Stuff [21 Aug 2009|12:19am] [ mood | giddy ] [ music | None ] I had a weird, very long dream I only very clearly remember three bits of, which though they look completely unrelated were actually connected somehow. The first bit involved me writing some sort of a giant mecha anime. I don't remember much more than that; the only real reason I remember it was there at all is because I remember when I was telling Shadey about it (he had to get up very early and I managed to say that before going back to sleep). The second bit had to do with some great family get-together somewhere out in the country, which my brain definitely constructed from a wedding I attended the other day. The problem was that the farmers living in the area really hated my great-grandmother because of some past event, and we kept worrying that they'd try to ambush us somehow - we were sneaking between houses in the middle of the night, trying to hide her among many of us so that they wouldn't notice she was with us and stuff like that. The third bit involved a video game, something like Ecco the Dolphin (which I've admittedly never actually played) with Pokémon. I was pretty much button-mashing my way through the levels and was stuck in one level that had Lugia as some sort of a boss chasing you around through the whole thing, wearing a crown and shouting "I AM THE KING OF OMASHU!" I absolutely could not get out of the first room of that because I kept trying to move too quickly to get through the small gap on the right. After restarting a few times, the level suddenly had Kyogre as the boss instead of Lugia, and then I suddenly made it. I realized that the first time I'd played through that game, I'd gotten Kyogre in that level the first time, and concluded that it had to be chosen randomly when you started the level. In that game there was also a button on the title screen that one needed to press quickly enough to get certain items, and I didn't know this, so I missed some sort of a really rare item that was apparently a one-off thing very late in the game otherwise. And if you were going to ask about the "king of Omashu" bit, yes, I have been watching Avatar. Shadey and I had a marathon maybe a week ago at the most, though that was the second time I've seen the whole series. Still love it to bits; I think I liked it more the second time around, really, particularly the finale, which somehow felt more satisfying now, oddly enough. I think bending is my favorite magic system in all fiction, not that I'm extremely well-versed in fictional magic systems; it takes elemental magic, which I've never found very interesting before, and just does a bunch of cool things with it, gives it associations with martial arts, integrates it into the cultures, and gives it restrictions that work pretty well with the story. After the first marathon, I told Shadey I thought firebenders were kind of screwed over, since pretty much all they could do with their bending was destroy things, while the others could use it for more practical stuff like healing, transport, construction, obtaining water and so on (firebenders can light fires for cooking and such, of course, but just producing a fire is pretty simple without bending, unlike the useful stuff the other elements can do). On the second viewing I realized that Iroh has it down: create your own hot springs and insta-heat drinks. And on the subject of things I've watched recently, I was just watching Reservoir Dogs earlier tonight. The only Tarantino film I'd seen prior to it was Pulp Fiction, which I enjoyed but would probably need to see again to appreciate it properly. Reservoir Dogs, on the other hand, pretty much had me at the opening shot with Mr. Orange lying bleeding and crying in that car seat. Or rather, that's when I turned to Shadey and said it was off to a great start (we have something of an inside joke with slightly overplaying my love for fictional men in pain). Then it pretty much only got better after that. I mean, it's not every movie you get to watch a man bleed to death throughout more or less the whole thing. (That and if I had any slash goggles at all I would be shipping Mr. White and Mr. Orange. Hard. As it is I just think they're completely adorable. And the general storyline and how it's played out. And I really like the decision to make the big reveal early enough to produce dramatic irony in what remains.) After watching it, I looked it up on TV Tropes and after a bit of browsing around I found the script online, which I then read in its entirety, which provided some fun background that didn't make it into the film. Now I kind of want to watch it again. It may just be one of my favorite movies, although I always have difficulty ranking things in my head beyond broad categories of "really loved", "liked", "okayish", "so bad it's good" and "would rather have spent my time doing something else". And sometimes I feel like I wouldn't like some movie(/book/TV show/whatever) nearly as much if it didn't feature men in pain (e.g. Die Hard, which I would feel kind of stupid about classing as one of my favorite movies of all time, but damn if I didn't love watching Bruce Willis stumbling around on broken glass while retaining every single injury he got throughout), but Reservoir Dogs without any men in pain would kind of cease to be Reservoir Dogs, so it's hard to judge. I think it's only partly that, though. I mean, most of the movie Mr. Orange is passed out, and I didn't get bored. *is a shallow sadistic fangirl* 3 comments|post comment

Driving [07 Aug 2009|02:26pm] [ mood | accomplished ] [ music | None ] I got my driver's license today. It's taken a while; between my travels abroad and my driving instructor being busy, the driving lessons have been getting put back a lot for the past month or two, but then I finally got a lesson on Wednesday, and he told me he'd gotten a test ordered for me today. I had that one lesson then that went fine, if I didn't feel at all ready to get a license. Then yesterday I had another lesson where I managed to nearly crash into several cars, giving him visible doubts about the plan. He got me another lesson later that day where I nearly crashed into another car. I figured out that it's mostly because I don't like to stop because I'm always really slow to get going again. He gave me a final lesson at half past eleven to warm up before the test at one o'clock. So this morning I woke up to the realization it was about twenty minutes past eleven and was just sitting up when he called to ask if I was up. He asked how long it would take me to get ready; I said five minutes. That was enough to get dressed, pack my stuff (I was at Shadey's place, so I had my laptop, a couple of books, etc.), brush my hair and run out. When I told him I hadn't had breakfast, we ended up getting a hotdog for me, and then he used the parking lot outside as an excuse to make me park about six times. (My few previous attempts at parallel parking had not gone too badly, but I sure didn't feel like I knew what I was doing.) We drove a bit more. I was careful to stop being afraid of stopping. We drove to the place where the tests are, parked, he went very quickly over where stuff was under the hood, and then we went inside to pay for the test and wait for the examiner. It took a while. It was weird to actually hold the car key in my hand. A number of examiners came out to test other people who were waiting, many greeting my driving instructors. Finally a guy came and said my name, my driving instructor wished me good luck, and we went out to the car. First just as we came to the door, the examiner's cellphone rang. I wasn't sure if I was actually supposed to get in the car yet, since I think the questionnaire that begins the test can actually require you to check the oil or point to some parts of the engine, but I got in anyway while he spoke on the phone outside the passenger side door, hoping he wouldn't then tell me to get back out. Thankfully he didn't. He made me pick a card with questions, then asked me to tell him how to switch the high beam on. I sat there for a few moments staring at all the buttons and came to the conclusion this was exactly the only thing I'd forgotten. Then I happened to remember it just as he was about to write it down as wrong. Phew. So I started the car, and backed out, and drove extremely carefully for the next five minutes or so. Then I realized I'd been driving at thirty kilometers an hour where the speed limit was fifty and figured I should probably not be quite that careful. Again, I shifted my paranoia about stopping into paranoia about not stopping and that went pretty well. We drove around for a while, and after the beginning I think I got the speed down just right, and most of it went by without problems. At one point we entered a mostly empty parking lot in a slope where he told me to park anywhere I liked; at first I picked a spot in the slope and that went horribly because I kept stalling the engine and the car kept rolling backwards when I tried to use the clutch; then I picked another spot and it went pretty smoothly. After we'd driven the set course, we went back to where we started, and I managed to get it to stall at least two or three times on the parking lot there in ways that escape me. I did not fall into the trap he set up for me at the end ("And then just park over there," pointing innocently straight past a one-way exist sign), though. Then I stopped the car perfectly except that I forgot to stop the wipers. Oops. Anyway, he told me I'd passed, pointed out the too-careful bit at the beginning, how I should try to stop less suddenly, and I think he said some one other thing but I've forgotten. Hmm. That's not a good way to start, is it? Anyway, I got a temporary driving permit. I'll be able to get the license proper in something like ten days, but in the meanwhile I can drive with that in my wallet. Yay. (Fun fact: I am not good with driving-related vocabulary in English.) post comment

Guess what? Dreams! [28 Jul 2009|01:37pm] [ mood | tired ] [ music | None, although "Most Beautiful Girl (in the room)" is echoing in my head. ] I had a nightmare about my cat going missing. Or rather, he was under some sort of general anesthesia and I had to move him somewhere, and for some reason I found it perfectly sensible to put him in a traveling suitcase that I was just really careful with (for some reason we were going through an airport). Except then I came to this odd escalator which was only for bags - people were supposed to walk down a normal staircase beside it. And when I put the bag on the escalator, it basically fell down, and then somebody took it before I'd managed to get down the stairs. In the dream, my friend's mom was somehow a vet and for some reason the go-to person for stuff like this, so we asked her to find all cats in traveling suitcases that had been picked up by the wrong person. Eventually she brought us back two cats and said that they were the only ones she'd found that had not been taken to their rightful owners, but neither of them was actually our cat. Then I suddenly realized that my cat had been registered to some evil guy and that he had probably been the one who took him to get back at us, and somehow we concluded that he had sent the suitcase to India because Indians hated cats and he'd probably be killed there. I can't really remember the further attempts to get the cat back; maybe they were just put on hold. In any case we were hosting some big party so we had that even while I was worried sick about my cat; for some reason, in that party I felt like my cat was somehow a shapeshifted version of Shadey, which made it even more worrying. The party was generally kind of odd; for the first part of it, I was in my room along with Tory from Mythbusters watching some sort of a special Dr. Horrible DVD (it was apparently called the "ADV. DVD") which included a completely new musical that was some sort of a Christmas special and had nothing to do with Dr. Horrible but was still pretty fun. For the second part of it, we were in some really strange house and I was in one of the rooms on my laptop trying to solve everything by reading a bunch of Carl Barks comics on the Internet; the one I was most hopeful about involved Scrooge McDuck in search of the ultimate storyteller, who would make him some money somehow by telling him the greatest tale ever told, but then it ended with him finding this ultimate storyteller, who ended up just telling him something about how the search for the ultimate storyteller was the real greatest tale ever told, and for some reason that ending did not work for my purposes, whatever I was planning to achieve with this. The last couple of frames had these little author's notes strongly implying that the real ultimate storyteller was Tolkien, but for some reason I was convinced that that had to have been Charles Dickens when the story was written and had just been changed to Tolkien in later editions of the story. In any case, once I'd finished reading this (it was on this annoying Chinese website that opened up a bunch of popup windows), I went back, and then it was suddenly our house again even though the party was still going, and I actually glimpsed my cat there. He was limping, but otherwise looked all right; I immediately went and picked him up only to notice that somehow all his teeth and claws had been broken off, presumably by that evil guy. At some point he transformed back into Shadey (who was not hurt at all), but I was still really worried about the cat form and whether the teeth and claws would grow back. As I was waking up I remembered we were going to take him to the vet today for some vaccines (which is true) and figured we could ask the vet about it. It took a while after I sort of woke up to realize every last bit of it had been a dream. post comment

Writing dream [06 Jul 2009|05:02pm] [ mood | bored ] [ music | None ] I dreamt that I posted the first chapter of a new fic on Serebii, but it was so bad that everyone assumed it was a parody. I remember looking at the thread again, sort of "...wait, when did I decide to make this chapter a few lines long and put smilies in it?" and somebody wrote a lengthy review praising it as a hilarious parody and then wrote a much longer second chapter seemingly just as a suggestion for how it might go on. Thankfully, though, I then remembered that I had posted it as a sockpuppet, so people wouldn't know that I wrote something that bad. The actual plot was supposed to be basically that it would be an OT fic about a simplistic ten-year-old on a Pokémon journey who is really being manipulated for some shady purpose (I can't remember precisely what, but it had something to do with an airship) by the regional professor. It was supposed to start out like a really generic journey fic and then get progressively more sinister as it went on. I think the shortness and smilies in the first chapter were somehow my attempt to write it really in-character. 3 comments|post comment

Tales of America, part II [08 Jun 2009|09:39pm] [ mood | tired ] [ music | None ] Now, where was I? Oh, right... ( More of my adventures in the States ) 4 comments|post comment

Tales of America, part I [27 May 2009|11:04pm] [ mood | amused ] [ music | The suspenseful music from Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney: Justice for All ] So! My first trip to anywhere in America. I must document it here and snark at the silliness of American culture. ( Oh, America ) 9 comments|post comment

Dream and the Nature of Fiction [20 May 2009|04:57pm] [ mood | hungry ] [ music | None ] I had a dream last night where my school had been building up a lot of excitement for the school play (which seemed to alternate between being a play and a movie as the dream went on). It was an original musical and they'd gotten some known actors/singers (including Neil Patrick Harris!) to have cameo roles and so on. Finally it was the day of the first showing, and pretty much the entire school had shown up (for some reason I have the figure ten thousand people in my head, even though my school doesn't have nearly that many). It started with some sort of a parody of the opening of The Dark Knight (with the clowns and all), but the main characters were actually these three teenage boys who were smoking pot behind some building and having quasiphilosophical conversations, while the songs came randomly out of nowhere in between scenes (Neil Patrick Harris was some sort of a vampire who appeared for one song and did not appear to have any relation to the rest of it). It was supposed to be a comedy of some sort but it just didn't make enough sense to be funny at all. By the time the intermission came along, I was thinking, "Oh, dear, this is kind of bad" and through listening to what others were saying around me and talking to a couple of people, it was clear that everybody hated it. I started sort of defending it anyway ("Well, some of the songs are kinda catchy..."), mostly because I felt sorry for everybody involved in it since they were getting bashed to high heaven. As it turned out, more or less everybody left, and when I got back in for the second act, there were only maybe fifteen people with me in there at the most, while the director (who actually is at my school, but is not involved with plays in any way to my knowledge) stood on the stage looking awkward. They had rearranged everything: now we were just sitting at three tables watching the play on a laptop. Sometime in the middle of it, I think I asked the others at my table permission to go on the Internet for a moment; we paused the "play" and I opened an Internet window. I went to the student council's website and found that a guy who was in my class in elementary school and was now sitting at one of the other tables had written a thread on their forum about how the only reason he was going to stay was because of me - apparently, I had read an early script sometime long before and posted somewhere that it looked really promising. I'd forgotten that, and now I wasn't sure just what I had said and what the script I'd said that about had actually been like, so I wanted to find my original post and that early script. First I searched online, but couldn't find it anywhere, so I ended up just running out to catch the next bus home, promising my table that I'd come back so we could finish watching it. I don't think I actually ever found it at home, but I was in a rush to go back since I didn't want to keep the rest of my table waiting, so eventually I just ran off to the bus stop. For some reason I didn't go to the nearest bus stop, but another one farther away. When I was almost there, I suddenly realized in panic that I'd forgotten my Pokémon (I think I was referring to having real Pokémon, as I remember thinking of an actual Pokéball belt), and knew I had to run back and get them or I could be arrested and charged with neglecting my Pokémon, but I didn't want to run all the way back and that would mean I'd keep the people at the table waiting even longer. But then Shirley Schmidt (from Boston Legal) came out of nowhere and offered to defend me in case of a lawsuit, so it was going to be okay. Then I woke up. The end. ------- ( Ramble about the nature of fiction ) 4 comments|post comment

Double Standards [18 May 2009|04:33am] [ mood | tired ] [ music | None ] Fandom feminism is interesting. As much as we would like to believe that it's all about equality, there is an awful lot of inevitable double standards when feminism is applied to fiction. There are basic feminist ideas that are all fine and dandy - for instance, it is very reasonable to lament the fact that fiction features male main characters so abundantly more often than female main characters (here I mean the main-main characters - the Harry Potters, if you will, but not the Hermiones) and how the fiction that does feature female main characters has a tendency to be about subject matter considered, well, girlier - lots of romance, down-to-earth everyday life of mostly down-to-earth everyday women, and relatively little action or excitement. Women frequently write male main characters - heck, an overwhelming majority of what I've written in my life, despite being a woman and brought up by a feminist mother, features male main characters - but men seem to fairly rarely do the opposite. This is all true and deserves to be noticed and hopefully eventually fade into more appropriate equality as the ages go by. However, fandom feminism is about a lot more than numbers. There is the concept of 'Women in Refrigerators', for instance: when a female character is unceremoniously killed off solely so that her death can have an impact on a male character. There are all kinds of ideas about devices that must not be applied to female characters lest the feminists start frothing at the mouth: if they're tortured, it's fetish fuel; if they're raped, it's trivializing or even sexualizing real rape; if they die, they're expendable or plot devices for the men; if they're shy and passive, they're weak. We see fictional women whose lives seem to revolve around men and we cringe; we see strong women then go on to fall for men who have always treated them like dirt and we will rant about it. Often these concerns are reasonable, a result of the frequent inability of male writers to write decent female characters with some semblance of emotional depth who act anything like real human beings would. However, what would we honestly think if any of this were applied to male characters? Women in refrigerators are a particularly interesting case. Something about the concept has struck me as flawed since I first heard of it, but it was later that I realized that, well, even though we don't see male characters getting killed off to motivate females very often, that's really only because these things tend to happen for the sake of the main character, being one of the more powerful dramatic elements you can pull, and as I noted above, main characters in the kind of fiction that includes death and murder are overwhelmingly male. Meanwhile, male side characters die to motivate male main characters all the time - the mentor dies so that the hero can learn to be great on his own merits, the father or uncle dies to force the main character to embark on his heroic journey, the brother dies to make the hero seek vengeance, the best friend dies to make him realize it's a harsh and cruel world out there. The girlfriends dying to inspire unstoppable grief are only a special case, necessarily female because most of the male main characters happen to be straight. And, interestingly, what if we had boyfriends dying to inspire grief in the female heroes all the time? What if we regularly saw Alice sobbing over Bob's limp body and screaming her rage to the heavens, swearing vengeance against those responsible? Well, ironically enough, we would probably decry her for letting her life revolve so completely around a man as to overturn her emotional stability when he dies. She'd be weak, dependent - women shouldn't be that way. The thing is, fictional men are put through a lot of crap. We still have this idea that men in fiction are strong, calm, rational and emotionally detached, but really, men are repeatedly tortured, broken down, their loved ones murdered, and though some respond like your stereotypical action hero who never flinches, fiction today really tends to make them frightened and hysterical, their lives revolving around the women they love and ruined when they're taken from them. And that's fine. We don't mind; of course we don't. They feel more human when they can feel emotional pain and we celebrate that. On the other hand, a strong woman can't be broken down and beaten up, and her motivation for badassery most certainly can't be the loss of a boyfriend or husband. Men can be overly clingy, or passive, or fall in love with utterly irritating women just because they're that damn sexy; they can be genuinely psychologically disturbed in a way that makes them what we might call weak. Women, well, can't. Of course we all want female characters to be given better representation in fiction, to stop being token love interests and get some actual characterization as independent individuals with their own motivations. But condemning certain plot elements when applied to female characters in general? Really? Why? Yes, there need to be more genuinely strong female characters, and when there are so few females it is sad to see the average woman be so lacking, but for any particular instance of a woman who dies for the sake of developing the incidentally male main character, do we really need to cry misogyny? Do we need to be annoyed at every individual woman who is passive and obedient? Hate the trend and the glorification of the image it upholds, not the individual instances of realistic, non-idealized characters who happen to fit it. Fiction should be fiction; fictional characters should first and foremost be characters. Directly limiting what kinds of characters they can be beyond demanding realism and common sense cannot be productive for fiction as a whole. It's six AM and I'm writing this on spur of the moment in one sitting before going to bed, so forgive if this is rambly and doesn't get my point across properly. It's so damn hard to disagree with any sort of feminism without coming off as sexist in some way or another. 4 comments|post comment

Awesome dream! [23 Apr 2009|05:20pm] [ mood | bored ] [ music | None ] Okay, fine. It makes no sense and is creepy. But it was ridiculously fun while it lasted! Basically, Joss Whedon apparently threw an annual... costume party, you could say, at some hotel in Denmark, where mostly people who had worked on shows with him would participate, though anybody else who happened to be staying at the hotel would necessarily become involved as well. Basically, everybody would dress up in any costume they like, use any weapon they like, and then they would run around indiscriminately killing one another (in accordance with dream logic, they wouldn't actually die because it was just a game) and taking the dead for slaves and something like that. My family and I were there for some reason, although they all disappeared at some point. I didn't find out about the thing until we were there, because it turned out there was this Firefly marathon (along with a previously unpublished musical commentary) going on and I asked around there. At least, I left that and only had a few minutes before the thing would be starting, so since I didn't have a proper costume, I just put on some bathrobe I found in my room and armed myself with several forks which were also there for some reason. At first I was just waiting and sort of hoping nobody would notice I was there because I didn't want to be killed, but then Nathan Fillion barged into my room with a katana and started chopping away at my fingers, which kind of hurt, and then stabbed me somewhere so that I collapsed on the floor (I said something about loving Firefly and he just sort of smiled and left). Eventually a whole lot of other players barged in, wearing the strangest of costumes, and started fighting. Somebody noticed me and was going to take me as a slave, but I managed to stand up and started stabbing a whole lot of people in the neck with my forks and ran off to some other room. There was some sort of a green goblin, apparently named Buck, who was fighting with a hatstand, and he knocked me down; I'm not sure if it was him or somebody else, but at least they killed me, so I had to just lie there until it was over. Then a bunch of Pokémon came (there was a Weavile and a Spheal and some other Ice Pokémon, I believe), looking for dead people to take as slaves, but the Spheal looked at the back of my neck and said, "Oh, she's a Southern Baptist, so we can't take her." Apparently, Southern Baptists were some sort of faction, unique in that slavery was against their religious beliefs, so all Southern Baptists who were killed could not be taken as slaves. Therefore, they somehow turned me into a Seel or Dewgong (by this point the dream was starting to look more or less like Pokémon Mystery Dungeon) and dragged me out to some sort of an airship dock, where they talked to my family. Apparently, the Pokémon were Swedish, but they thought it would be much nicer to belong to a religion that was against slavery, so we agreed to take them with us to Iceland and let them join our church. And then I woke up. That was all kinds of fucked up. Then I fell asleep again and dreamt that I was watching Doctor Who (which I have never watched) and that it was about some sort of piratey guy, supposedly the eighth Doctor, traveling through space with his crew, consisting of teenaged siblings and one other character whose role I don't remember. Apparently, it was the second last episode of the season, and they were approaching the spaceship of the bad guy, who was called Doctor Evil. They had found out that all planets in the universe except Earth considered fireworks the most evil objects in the world and thought that this was thanks to Doctor Evil. Then they landed on some planet which was very dark and depressing, and the teenaged siblings had to dress up as Bugs Bunny and prove their identity through karaoke, though the boy didn't actually know the lyrics. They succeeded anyway and went on to Doctor Evil's spaceship. The end. I remember finding it absolutely hilarious and thinking my boyfriend would probably really like it for that. 1 comment|post comment

Random rambles [06 Apr 2009|01:24am] [ mood | sleepy ] [ music | None ] It's confirmation season - that annoying time of year when one is dragged to at least one confirmation party every Sunday to kids one hardly knows. ( A lengthy ramble about religious ceremonies and pretentious parties ) *** Last night I dreamt that House, as in the TV show about the snarky vicodin-addicted jerk doctor, was based on a series of books by Astrid Lindgren, as in the person who made Pippi Longstocking. There was also to be an episode based on a specific chapter in one of the books, revolving around a soup that, in a twist at the end, turned out to have been made by adding ingredients to a bowl of cornflakes with milk. The other day I also had the most awesome geek-dream I have ever had, involving top quarks being Unown (shaped like a lowercase t inside a circle). I wish I remembered more of it. *** Fandom feminism makes my head ache. I was brought up by a feminist mother and have always considered myself one, but in fandom all feminists seem to do is overanalyze individual works instead of focusing on general trends as they should. You can lament the tendency for female characters to be weak and shy and non-assertive, but individual female characters are still not automatically bad because they happen to be weak and shy and non-assertive any more than a male character with the same qualities. Characters should have a life of their own, and if this character from this background in this world probably would be weak and shy and non-assertive, then for God's sake let her be that way, feminism of our world be damned. Female characters do not need to be role models any more than male characters do. 4 comments|post comment

Awesome dream [14 Mar 2009|12:28pm] [ mood | giddy ] [ music | The sound of Shadey in the background playing Crisis Core ] So I just had an absolutely awesome dream. Or at least it was to me. Basically there were these new Pokémon games, with sorta Ranger-ish graphics (i.e. good 2D with more proportional character sprites than in the main series), that had a really awesome plot; I don't remember much of it except that Blaine was one of the bad guys and at some point you walked into his Gym and he tried to kill you or something like that. Anyway, somehow these games turned into some sort of huge alternate reality thingy where I was trying to warn everybody of a huge sea serpent Pokémon that was going to emerge out of a volcano and something like that. While everybody in the game was also playing some sort of MMORPG, so I had to walk between houses to talk to people. I don't remember quite how the plot went, but the sea serpent destroyed the North Pole while everybody fled. Then somehow that seagued into some sort of an animated movie called "The Little Unicorn" which, despite the name, was a pretty mature sort of medieval fantasy about plots to assassinate the king and so on, and although I didn't really like the plot (I found it confusing, at least), it was a musical and the songs were just frigging beautiful. So I was thinking, "God, I must buy the soundtrack to this somehow," and then I started waking up and thought "I must remember to buy the soundtrack to 'The Little Unicorn' when I wake up!", and it wasn't until a few seconds later, just as I was awake and thinking about looking it up on Amazon, that I realized that it didn't even exist. Damn. I still feel like I'm just inches away from recalling the melodies. Most of the awesomeness of the dream was about trying to save all those people from the sea serpent, which makes it annoying that I can't remember much of that. Anyway, I am now up-to-date on Pokemans! I just went out and bought both Mystery Dungeon 2 and Ranger: Shadows of Almia. For a fortune, mind you; the economic crisis is bad for Icelandic importing. Not that I won't be behind again the moment Platinum is out. 3 comments|post comment

Evolution [03 Mar 2009|11:47pm] [ mood | giddy ] [ music | None ] ( The theory of evolution ) 5 comments|post comment

Life [04 Feb 2009|02:53pm] [ mood | exhausted ] [ music | None ] My P.E. teacher this semester provides a sharp and unpleasant flashback to elementary school, reminding me just why I so hated physical education back then. He is of this school of thought I had nearly forgotten whose doctrine seems to revolve around the belief that 'warming up' until you can barely stand on your feet anymore and then starting to play sports is a good idea. It might make sense in elementary school, when the entire point of the class is just to get everybody as exhausted as possible within the designated period of time, but I signed up for a badminton course and really can't help feeling that running back and forth in between doing fifty of at least fifteen different impossible freak exercices for more than half of the class and then getting the opportunity to play a little badminton once you can't feel your legs is not much of one. Or maybe I've just been spoiled by the teacher I've had for the past couple of semesters, whose badminton class had a short warm-up followed by either badminton or badminton-related exercises. Initially I was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt in that maybe it was supposed to be possible to get out of the warm-up alive and I was just too wimpy to do it, but all the girls seem to agree that he is absolutely nuts. I wonder what he'd do if one complained. I had my first driving lesson yesterday. In Iceland we can get a driver's licence at seventeen, but I've been a bit late with it. It still really, really freaks me out that the first driving lesson would involve being told what the pedals do and then being asked to just go and drive somewhere. I know he's got extra pedals to stop me crashing into the car in front of me and will grab the steering wheel before I hit a lamppost, but that doesn't stop me feeling severely like a danger to myself and others. I also find it utterly impossible to look off the road directly in front of me, to shift gears without looking down, and to remember to use the coupling while doing so. The fact the car continues moving when I take my foot off the gas freaks me out, no matter how often I try to tell myself that it's a basic law of physics. The insensitivity of the steering wheel freaks me out. (How in the world do you even have time to turn it all that way before you hit something?) The sheer number of times you need to shift gears freaks me out, especially since I can't seem to do it in the first place without fudging it up somewhere along the way. I'll get used to it eventually, obviously, but good God. 9 comments|post comment

Dr. Horrible squeesquee [13 Jan 2009|09:56am] [ music | None ] So I preordered the Dr. Horrible DVD in December before it came out. First I thought shipping was supposed to take 8-10 days. Then it didn't arrive, and we checked the status of the order on Amazon, only to find that it was supposed to arrive on January sixth. Then it was the twelfth of January and it still had not arrived, I had been driving Shadey nuts with my "I WANT MY DVD D:" whining, and I happened to go with him to the local nerd shop. They had it! They had the freaking Dr. Horrible DVD BEFORE my pre-ordered copy arrived! Amazon.com exclusive, my ass! After literally dragging Shadey over to the DVD section while blabbering incoherently in rage, he decided to get, ahem, a copy for himself. (Or rather, he was there with his friend so that they could get late Christmas presents for one another, and he got the friend to "give" him the Dr. Horrible DVD.) We went to his place and watched Commentary! The Musical, as well as all the normal commentary, the other extras, the ELE applications, and the easter eggs. And later I watched the normal version again while he slept. Commentary! has no subtitles, which is a problem I plan to try to amend. (Currently writing up the lines, yet to do all the timing.) I really think subtitles would improve it, since a lot of the singing is fast, which jumbles up the extremely amusing lyrics, and it can be hard to tell who is saying what. I enjoyed the beginning, particularly 'Strike!' and Neil barging into '$10 Solo'; most of 'The Art' was a bit incomprehensible, but amusing where I got it. Then I thought it sort of went down a bit, at least musically; the songs stopped being as catchy, and it became mostly just following the lyrics along, until 'Heart, Broken', which I thought had a kind of pretty melody (and lyrics I had seen being discussed on doctorhorrible.net). And then... 'Neil's Turn'. OH MY GOD I LOVE THAT SONG SO FREAKING MUCH and it's so not just because it's Neil Patrick Harris' only song in it! It is so absolutely adorable and I want to marry his voice and I love the way it sort-of syncs with the movie and he is so cuuute. <3 Made the entire thing worth it! I dreamt something about Captain Hammer being a prince and making Penny a princess while Dr. Horrible did something cute and desperate that I can't remember. Before falling asleep, I had this cracky thought about Jesus Christ Superstar starring the cast of Dr. Horrible, and now I can't stop really wanting to see that. ETA: Commentary! gets better on repeated listens. 3 comments|post comment

Interesting dream (why, yes, those are all I talk about) [07 Jan 2009|09:20am] [ mood | bored ] [ music | The idle chattering of my schoolmates ] So the other day I dreamt that this guy e-mailed me. He was apparently a fan of my site, and he was starting some sort of a Pokémon wiki project (I am not sure how it differed from Bulbapedia, except that in fact nothing seemed to suggest that it really was user-editable, but it was supposed to be a wiki anyway), which he wanted me to help with. I said sure, and he started sending me regular e-mails about the project, asking me to use stuff from my site in it and so on; apparently he was so careful to ask because "thanks to copyright laws, this is not precisely legal" (here he was referring to the very idea of a Pokémon wiki being illegal, which I found kind of funny, but went with it anyway). He was a pretty nice guy and I became semi-friends with him throughout the whole thing. There was a competing Pokémon site, one with a particular dark color scheme that no major Pokémon site I know of actually has, that I checked regularly, and I think there were some discussions on there about the project, but I don't really remember that part very well. In any case, eventually the guy asked me if he could come over to my house and copy some Pokémon sprites to a USB drive, and I said sure. He came; he looked like a particular actor whose name I don't know, and was accompanied by a huge buff guy with sunglasses who didn't speak (I didn't find this suspicious, seeing as it was a dream). They started copying while I waited. The display on the monitor, funnily enough, looked like computers always look in movies, with the whole "show each individual file as it is being copied for the aid of the viewer" thing. I was just sort of idly walking in and out of the room, waiting for it to finish, when I suddenly realized, "Wait a minute. He isn't copying the files. He's deleting them." So I thought, shit, the guy was a fraud all along, just doing this to get me to let him come over so he could delete my website. While he didn't have the password to the server, so the actual site was safe and could be retrieved to my computer again with no problem, he was also deleting all my Word documents, PSDs and so on. It was too late to really help that, but naturally, I couldn't let them just walk out of my house afterwards. I didn't want to make them think I knew what they were up to, so I just sort of told them, "Hey, while we wait, could you come over here?" and took them up to where my parents were; then I wasn't sure what I could do to communicate with them in a nonsuspicious way, and although I should have thought of something, I ended up just blurting out, "Can you help me catch these guys?" They were well prepared for this, and the instant I had said it, they bolted for the door. We went after them and chased them on a car, but somehow they were fast enough to get to their destination just before us: the pond in downtown Reykjavík. Now, note that in reality, the pond actually is just a pond, closed on all sides, but in the dream it was full of boats, and they got on this small yellow air mattress and just rowed away into the distance. Damn. And then something woke me up, annoyingly enough. It took me a few minutes afterwards to realize that my computer had not actually been wiped. 1 comment|post comment

Epic dream! :o [30 Dec 2008|03:06pm] [ mood | groggy ] [ music | None ] So I dreamt that I was going to a special school to study mathematics. This school was actually supposed to be the school stage I am finishing this spring, but in the dream I had only been put in my current school as a temporary solution because I was a year ahead, and this was the real deal. The school was this creepy old castle somewhere which was all rather dark and stuff. My first class was some sort of advanced chemistry (which seemed to be considered a mandatory part of studying math), located in the dungeons, which were still pretty high-tech; there I got to know my classmates, of which there were only about five or six. My partner for the experiment we were doing was this short, goth-ish girl who I became friendly with. The headmaster of the school was this young, sort of vampirish man called something like Viktor Kent (the last name might have been something else, but it definitely started with a K, and the first name was definitely Viktor). He was very handsome and my friend had a major crush on him, although he was always talking to me (about what I thought of the new school, my grades and so on) and never paid much attention to her. Now, the school grounds were this... black gravel with bones scattered all over it, reminiscent of a video game. And this went on for miles and miles around the school, because I could never see any normal environment while I was there. In various places in the grounds, there were "traps", or various holes you could fall into which contained some sort of an elaborate mechanism made of stone which would either kill you or get you out of the hole, depending on what you did. Somehow my goth friend and I landed in a series of these as we were trying to find our way back to the school from somewhere I've forgotten - I remember we strongly suspected that the headmaster had put us up to this as some sort of a test because we were his favorite students. This wasn't that bad, because this was some sort of a video game at the same time and I kept saving every time we landed in a hole so that we could restart if we messed up. We got out of one hole after another, actually without having to restart, but that kept catapulting us into other holes. Eventually we got to one which I think we knew to be the last one, containing a huge hammer-like thing that was in the way between us and the way out; my friend was getting really annoyed at this point, and she just pressed F3 (which made me think "Hey, I didn't know we had save states") and then threw a rock at the hammer, which made it just fall down and seem to break so that we could go on past it. I thought that part of the reason she did that was just so that the headmaster would notice how badass she was. Well, then we reached the castle again, and Viktor was standing in the doorway and grinning, which I thought made him look pretty hot, and then he started going on about how this movie would definitely get an Oscar for sprite work, which made me realize that all the traps had been sprites instead of 3D-rendered, and then I spent a lot of time wondering if the rock that my friend had thrown had also been a sprite. ...And then my grandmother called, which woke me up. Damn. post comment

Ugh. [26 Nov 2008|07:04pm] [ mood | tired ] [ music | None ] One of the worse days of my life, and it happens to be my oldest friend's birthday. Not that I haven't had some pretty bad days before, but I don't think I've ever had one quite so... stressing. And annoying and wasteful and every damn thing goes wrong-like. Some background: For my drama class, I have been practicing two scenes with two girls, but we've had too little time with the scenes, even though we're supposed to perform them tomorrow. I spent a couple of hours yesterday evening finally memorizing all my lines for one of the scenes (let's call it scene A, which has a lot more dialogue for my character than scene B). This meant I went to bed at three AM, which may have contributed to my general mood today. I've developed a kind of aversion to practicing scene A, not because I don't like the actual scene (I do) but because I've been finding it really difficult to work with the girl who's with me in that scene; we have very irritating differences in our interpretations of the characters in the scene, with her wanting to insist that her (to me) hysterical and desperate woman is "numb" (she's really not a bad actress when she's trying, but I've gotten the general impression that she's kind of insecure about her perfectly good ability to emote; she sometimes seems to go out of her way to interpret all characters such that as many as possible of her lines can be delivered completely flatly). At least yesterday I memorized all my lines for scene A. Scene B went really well on Monday and I know all my lines for that already, so I wasn't very worried about that. So. First class this morning was English writing workshop; while I finished the piece that is to be put in the publication we will make, I was also in the "publication committee" which was very stressing because we only had an hour and a half to get all the pieces to be published, design a front page, decide what order we wanted them in and generally figure everything out. It wasn't that bad, and kind of fun, but several times during the whole process I just thought, "There is no way in hell we are going to manage to do this within the space of one class." But eh, we made it, just about. My drama class was... more problematic. Today it turns out that the girl I'm doing scene B with has just completely not memorized her lines (to be fair, she has a good bit more of them there than I do); now that she is trying to do it without the text in front of her, she keeps confusing the order of them, which botches all my cues, and in general it's just not working. She promises to try to memorize it all. Then I practice with the other girl, and she has not entirely memorized all her lines either; or rather, she has, more or less, but she still insists on doing it all while holding the text, which severely inhibits our ability to act out the dramatic final (in which she is supposed to be dangling an infant over the balcony railing and threatening to drop it). I was mostly just worried that she was still clinging to the text; we really couldn't do the scene properly with her holding that, and after all we were supposed to be performing tomorrow. At least, class is over, and we agree to meet later, at which time she promises she will try to do it without the text. Now, it's eleven o'clock, and I'm hungry; I'm having gym class next, and wanting some energy for that while knowing I'll be at school for quite a while, I buy lunch and then proceed to gym class. It's not until I've already changed that I realize that nobody is there; turns out my teacher is sick and I didn't see the notice. Worse still, I've already missed the bus home by this point (now the next mandatory thing I have to show up for is an extra drama practice at half past three, and I am tempted to send the girl in the scene a text message about practicing after that practice instead of at half past one as we had planned). I change back, take another bus home, and waste some time on TV Tropes before taking a nap; I've set my alarm to wake me just before I need to go to catch the bus for the drama practice at half past four. I wake up and am still tired, but get out of bed anyway, and am about to leave when there is a call on the phone. It's a really slow-speaking woman looking for my mom; when I've managed to hang up, I run out for the bus, but the delay has made me miss it. So I go back and am taking out my bike when I notice that the back tire is completely flat. Great. I take it back in and end up taking the next bus, fifteen minutes later; I send my drama teacher a text message to say I'll be late. Now, this drama practice is supposed to be the final one, showing the polished versions of the scenes, but we start with scene B, the girl informs me that she hasn't had an opportunity to try to memorize her lines since the class in the morning, and it subsequently goes absolutely horribly; she gets confused and skips a considerable portion of the scene, as well as skipping another cue for me and then going right on without noticing that I've yet to do what I was supposed to do, which makes things really awkward, and she starts laughing at how she can't remember what she's supposed to say, and that makes me laugh as well, which is about the most out of character thing I could possibly do; the scene is obviously ruined, and because we were first, the fact that almost nobody else had actually memorized their lines completely had not yet come to light. It just couldn't get any worse, but then during the critique, Shadey calls me, and he starts tempting me with the promise of lasagna and an interesting new episode of House, which sounds like a very nice way to end the day and somewhat make up for what a disaster it has been so far. Then the girl I'm doing scene A with has a breakdown before we ever get to it, and says she should never have chosen that scene, and it's just too difficult for her because, as it turns out, she is clinically depressed; and naturally we have to drop that scene. And obviously I shouldn't precisely be annoyed at her, since she can't help it, but that still makes one hell of a lot of my time and sleep wasted once and for all. ...and then my friend calls to invite me to a birthday party, which, as much as I like her, still meant that my plans with Shadey had to be canceled for it, and I still hadn't eaten anything, and blargh. So yeah. Bad day. I'm going to the party now and hoping I won't bring the mood down with me. post comment

Science [26 Nov 2008|01:00am] [ mood | annoyed ] [ music | None ] I find it quite disconcerting how easy it is to stumble upon creationist websites (disguised under titles such as "All About Science") when innocently Googling something like "origin of life" for a school assignment. If I were a teacher of biology or geology, after this experience I don't think I would dare to make students do internet assignments without explicitly mentioning to them beforehand that no matter the credentials and sources the site claims, it should be ignored if it says anywhere that evolution either violates the second law of thermodynamics or involves the Big Bang, the formation of heavier elements from hydrogen, anything at all related to stars or the origin of the first life. At least Answers in Genesis doesn't try to hide the fact that they're fundies. 2 comments|post comment

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