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Below are the most recent 24 friends' journal entries.

    Friday, November 21st, 2008
    pishbadlarr
         		8:43a
    So, I've given up on NaNo for this year.

    I'm a little saddened, because I did feel like I was doing really well compared to normal this year. But last week I decided to leave the lazy and procrastinating Mr. Pish, so I've been spending all my time packing and trying to get my life in order.

    Oh, and Wrath of the Lich King. That snuck its way into my time somehow too.

    So on Sunday I'll be packing the computer up and Monday will commence the two-day drive from Washington back to Minnesota. It sucks massively, considering I have to leave all the animals behind and don't even get me started on the mess that is my car situation. Yesterday was so crummy I crawled in bed at 6pm and played DS games until I fell asleep.

    But hey, new start, right? New job, maybe being able to go back to school, rent-free and grocery-cost-free for as long as I can stand my mom's house, new-and-improved as she may be. And maybe I'll be able to get back to my NaNo project and keep working on it.

    ( In conclusion, a screenshot! )
    ashenmote
         		2:55p
    The 'German Joys' guy translated more Max Goldt texts into English. This is one that I have as an audio file and played 290 times, says Itunes. Never mind that I was probably sound asleep most of the time, that's still a proud number. At any rate, I like it, and it's the right time of the year for it too. The translation is maybe a bit clumsy in parts (I even think it's missing a sentence), but it's still better than anything I could do.
    On the Magic of Walking Past Sideways (Vom Zauber des seitlich daran Vorbeigehens)

    I'm gone for the weekend, catsitting. Take care and stuff.

    Current Mood: busy
    Thursday, November 20th, 2008
    sarajayechan
         		1:29p
    Is anyone else having trouble getting their journal pages to load right? The contents show up but not the style.
    stellar_dust
         		12:34a
    FIC: DW: Après la rose (Le Petit Prince crossover)
    So -- apparently? Me + exhaustion + movie about whale evolution = fic to go with [info]sailorptah's Doctor Who/Le Petit Prince art.

    ... also, it's in French.

    (I welcome vocab/grammar corrections.)

    .... ENJOY?

    (I don't know, either.)

    (Also, if this were my yuletide fic, I'd be DONE. Sigh!)


    Titre: Après la rose
    Auteur: [info]stellar_dust
    Ages: Tout le monde (qui comprend le français).
    Caractères: Le Petit Prince, le Dixième Docteur, le mouton
    Mots: ~1000
    Notes: Après ce dessin par [info]sailorptah.


    ( J'avais une fois une rose.... )

    Current Mood: weird
    Monday, November 17th, 2008
    stellar_dust
         		8:10p
    Charity special!
    Oh, right! Guh, I should have posted about this days ago. [info]sailorptah's epic Colbert Report/Doctor Who crossover of awesome comes with its own charity special! So, read it, and watch the actual Children in Need special/preview, and then help out some kids who need it.

    (... please? Considering we were prepared for a theoretical avalanche of donations, the response has been slightly underwhelming. *scratches head sheepishly*)

    Current Mood: hopeful
    stellar_dust
         		7:59p
    In which I whine about all the cool things I get to do. Yay me.
    Stephen Colbert - Another Christmas Song GO LISTEN RIGHT NOW. And then you can watch a preview of the special. :D

    So, eBay update. eBay thinks I've made $26. But after eBay gets its cut, and PayPal gets its cut, and I account for the fact that eBay cannot accurately estimate shipping cost for crap, it's more like $10. (I've paid about $11 more in shipping than I've charged. I should probably start adding handling fees to cover the difference.) At least I'm coming out ahead, but .. I don't know if it's even worth it to list the Star Wars stuff, considering the time and aggravation. ... maybe I'll make [info]melannen do it since she doesn't have a job. d-:

    I loved my laptop's super-bright screen .. until it started giving me headaches and burning out my retinas. I forced myself to crank out a TDR last night with suns exploding inside my eyes. It got better about halfway through, though, but then I've had a headache for most of today. ... and, yes, I HAVE now turned down the brightness, thanks much.

    My presentation isn't gone! So that's good! But I still need to review it and add things to it, and I keep procrastinating, and I'm probably going to suck just when I really should be making a good impression. Sigh. (I don't even know who the audience for this will be, actually. Students? Local professionals? How far do people travel to attend GIS Day at a community college, anyway?)

    (I've put off any long-term desktop-computer-fixing until at least Wednesday night. I might set aside the drive that I'm pretty sure contains one corrupt partition for now; I don't know if I want to reformat the whole thing and then trust it with data any time soon. Maybe I can pull the 80G one out of the external case and slot it in as a secondary internal ... must see if I have the right size hex key, though .. and this is all assuming the motherboard isn't fried, or anything like that ... yes, I'm working on my presentation, quiet, you.)

    .. finally, the obligatory yuletide flail: omg why did I say I would write in this fandom I have forgotten SO MUCH canon and it's so far outside of my comfort zone and I'm not worthy!!! Aughkhhhgh.

    Ok, let me have one moment of happy: Christmas socks and mint tea and a holiday Firefox skin and Stephen Colbert singing carols and snuggly kitties! Mmmmmm.

    I need more tea, and the last of my apple cranberry pie.

    Current Mood: Candy-Coated
    Sunday, November 16th, 2008
    pishbadlarr
         		1:25p
    Book meme
    From [info]tehrin.

    1. Grab the nearest book.
    2. Open the book to page 56.
    3. Find the fifth sentence.
    4. Post the text of the next seven sentences in your journal along with these instructions.
    5. Don't dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

    ( Read more... )

    Rather boring snippet of conversation from a collection of Guy de Maupassant stories, specifically The Convert.
    Saturday, November 15th, 2008
    melannen
         		6:46p
    ....my computer appears to be infected.

    When I do a google search, all of the search results get replaced with links to spam sites, *including* the googlecache links and "more from this page" links.

    This is *amazingly* disorienting for someone who has adapted to using Google as prosthetic memory.

    I did all the standard virus-and-malware killing stuff, and it keeps coming back, and since my searching is messed up (yay dogpile?) it's annoying to research it. I'm probably going to have to spend tomorrow backing stuff up and reformatting the harddrive.

    oh yay.
    aurussteelsword
         		12:42a
    Ooooh.
    My roommates and I are heading up to Portland in about eight hours for the anti-Prop-8 rally at PSU. I've volunteered to do some setting up and crowd control, and I'm so excited! Ahahah. And my mother sent me some money to get a new coat, since my trenchcoat is falling to pieces, so now I have a shiny new aviator jacket that is very warm and needs to be broken in. It was very determinedly on sale. I am pleased with myself.

    I've had Ryoushi in my head quite a bit, mostly because I'm working out the details of his life after the war, including promotions, an arranged marriage, famine, government conspiracy, a rebel army, his wife's death, and other stuff.

    Other than that, I have no fandom news whatsoever, mostly because of Greek. Nai.

    Current Mood: Shiny
    Friday, November 14th, 2008
    stellar_dust
         		9:30p
    Very Important Links
    The Most Important Greasemonkey Script, Ever

    Harry Potter Trailer!

    A roadside attraction full of anamatronic dinosaurs, stomping through the woods and nomming on Civil War dudes. Awesome thing, or THE MOST awesome thing?? Man, I wish I went that way more often. My co-workers who do are on notice to visit and report back to me.

    [info]stoney321 reads Twilight so you don't have to.

    The first female four-star general seems awesome.

    And finally, because it has been stuck in my head for the past two days:



    So, what became of that ridonkulous test? He passed it out, let us sweat for ten minutes, then turned it into a take-home. Whatever. And then he passed out evaluation forms and I slammed him. *eyeroll*

    I'm slowly moving my mp3s over, and I think I figured out how to migrate the playlists. There's just one thing .. I have a bunch of stuff on my iPod that I no longer have in any other place, thanks to all the catastrophic hard drive failures I've suffered, mostly videos and radio interviews and audiobooks and things like that. But they remain when I sync my iPod on the old laptop, because there are still placeholders in the playlists in iTunes. Of course, though, when I import playlists into a fresh iTunes install, it doesn't add any songs that it can't find. So .. does anyone know of a way to either a) copy the files gracefully from the iPod to the computer or b) fake out the playlists so I can at least keep the files on the iPod when I sync with the new computer?

    .. I like Vista a lot better than I expected to. The file structure takes some getting used to, but the only thing I've noticed so far that I'm a little worried about is that it may have some issues handling image formats? But I haven't done much with that yet, so we'll see. (So bright! So shiny! So many things work! So many things I can do! Eeeee!)

    Man, so glad it's the weekend. Unfortunately, I still have to pull together a presentation for the GIS thing next week, drop off a package at the post office, and get gas. Not to mention Yuletide and school applications and anthropology paper, but shhhhhhhhhh.

    ETA: .. dude, when did JF get embedding?? Awesome!

    ETA2: In honor of my new vistaputer (her name is Bastet, by the way - Norse gods have ceased to bring good luck to my computers - and among other things, she has a remote control *loves*):



    Current Mood: amused
    Current Music: Hardy Drew and the Nancy Boys - There's No One As Irish as Barack Obama
    Thursday, November 13th, 2008
    stellar_dust
         		8:22p
    Ok. So my new laptop came, and I'm still getting used to it, but it's awesome.

    It came with a fingerprint reader.

    Are there some people who are physically incapable of using fingerprint readers? Because after running through the tutorial, like, ten times, my fingerprints are stil "not good enough." ):

    I could never get it to work on [info]melannen's laptop, either.

    Wah.
    limyaael
         		7:05a
    Sorry for causing such worry!
    I only now realized how long it's been since I updated on either JF or IJ. A number of circumstances combined to make that true, but once I found my way back onto the Internet, I should have started updating again. I'll try to update at least once a week from now on.

    ( Short explanation of what happened )

    Sorry, again, for worrying anyone.
    Wednesday, November 12th, 2008
    aurussteelsword
         		11:58p
    Checking in!
    Finished The Lathe of Heaven last weekend. That woman is fucking brilliant, and I love her, and that's the gist of things right now.

    Excalibur is a rather upsetting film. Among other issues, having sex in full armor? Owww. That Merlin miniseries is much better in comparison, though I was really bothered by their version of Morgan, and a lot of things felt like very stereotypical fantasy-movie-for-TV tropes that they could easily have avoided with a little more care.

    (Yes, my roommates are on an Arthurian legend kick. They're writing something gigantic with it, apparently, which I can't wait to see.)

    Ancient Greek is taking up far too much time, but we're translating some Herodotus, and it's great fun, especially if you're an intellectual masochist, as I apparently am. Five and a half weeks until the end of the semester, and then a month of freedom and boyfriend before I submit to the ultimate mental lashing that will be my thesis, and if I survive this purging by the holy flames of my academic advisor's wrath, I will have a B.A. in Classics, and it will be awesome. *poses*

    Current Mood: Dramatic
    stellar_dust
         		12:10a
    Yuletide!
    I have my yuletide assignment! Squeeee! :D I can only really do one of them but I THINK IT WILL BE AWESOME! (And now I get to be all omg-flail-I-don't-know-what-to-write! and augh-do-i-have-time-to-reabsorb-all-the-canon! andandand...!)

    Anyway, ( Dear Yule Goat: )

    ETA, in case you look here instead of LJ: Alltel has its own YouTube channel with more canon! Feel free to use that if you want. :D

    Current Mood: excited
    Current Music: TDS!
    Tuesday, November 11th, 2008
    melannen
         		3:29p
    Yuletide assignments are out!
    ...time to go reserve some books at my local library.

    And, a note for my Yuletide writer!

    This time, I'm asking mostly for things I've requested before. (Okay, I'm asking mostly for things I requested last year.) So, here's my last year's letter, and most of the things in it still apply, especially the part about how I'm largely unsquickable and just want anything in these fandoms. At all. But I'm going to write a new letter anyway, because I am not passing up a chance to squee about my small fandoms!

    And last year, my writer ended up writing in a canon she'd never heard of before. I am *all about* encouraging that, so if our matching fandom doesn't inspire you, dip into the others! None of 'em have much you need to learn, and I've put mini fandom intros in this letter.

    ( Tek Jansen )

    ( Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler )

    ( Cadfael )

    ( The Left Hand of Darkness )

    1 .cbz files are comic-book-archive files, readable with cdisplay, the free comic book reader, among other programs. If you aren't into that you can also just change the suffix to .zip to get at the individual image files for each page.

    Current Mood: Dangerous
    stellar_dust
         		1:13a
    Anthropologically speaking --
    I like cladistics. I think it's elegant and powerful.

    However. Scientific names are assigned phylogenetically. They are much easier to memorize when presented hierarchically. At least, to me.

    Or, you know, just pick an order. Any order. Please. One big chart instead of five zillion little charts would be nice, too.

    (Actually - surprisingly - I'm not doing to bad with the names, most of them have some kind of mnemonic I can hang on them well enough to answer multiple-choice questions. I'm having more trouble with the dates.)

    Also? I think it's sad and tragic that I can probably rattle off at least 50 dinosaur species but I've never heard of Oligopithecus. Or Gigantopithecus. That's - we know all about our twelfth cousins seventeen times removed, but we haven't met our aunts.

    Oh humans. Ouch. I wish we weren't so afraid to look at ourselves.

    (May not be failing as badly as feared. One chapter to go! ... tomorrow. Hopefully.)

    (Kitties have been cuddly recently. D'awwwww!)

    Current Mood: *thud*
    Monday, November 10th, 2008
    stellar_dust
         		6:45p
    Why you should always agree to beta when asked:
    You might get omgamazingwonderful presents like this.

    ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥!

    (If you're a big ol' sap like me who can't read Le Petit Prince without sobbing, make sure you have extra tissues on hand before you reread it with that picture in mind. *loves, & has a new desktop*)

    -------

    While I'm here:

    Obama positioned to quickly reverse Bush actions. Oh, thank goodness.

    They didn't read my letter on the Bugle this week! Alas.

    I called the person who won my puzzles on ebay - she totally forgot about it, still wants them, and is going to pay asap. Yay for resolving issues, and extra yay for talking on the phone without dying!

    What with all the fossil primates late last night, I completely forgot about [info]thedailyreports. Oops. Shall do that as soon as I post this.

    ... I'm so going to fail this test, but whatever - so's everyone else. (So far behind where I should be tonight. 2 chapters Saturday, 1/2 chapter yesterday, 1/4 so far today - arg. I wish there was time to give this material the attention it deserves!) (Shall try to find someone in the Sociology department I can complain to tomorrow.)

    My Halloween costume. And, bonus, you get to see my cubicle at work! I asked and he said it's okay to share, so -- I guess it's okay to share. Enjoy. (Ignore my expression and huge chin. At least it looks like I *have* a chin, which it doesn't always.)

    Dr. Horrible soundtrack (mp3) is only $5 on Amazon. THIS is how to combat piracy: cheap, easy, fast, and DRM-free. I approve.

    Oh, so much to do, so much to do. Guess it's better than being bored.

    Current Mood: appreciated! :D
    pishbadlarr
         		3:00p
    Why the fuck is this in metafandom? And not [info]otf_wank? I mean, aside from it not being particularly funny. That's way more wank than 'discussion'. Or UFB, whatevs. My point, let me get to it: metafandom kinda sucks.
    Sunday, November 9th, 2008
    melannen
         		8:24p 
    MÁRGARÉT, áre you gríeving	
Over Goldengrove unleaving?	
Leáves, líke the things of man, you	
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?	
Áh! ás the heart grows older	     
It will come to such sights colder	
By and by, nor spare a sigh	
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;	
And yet you wíll weep and know why.	
Now no matter, child, the name:	   
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.	
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed	
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:	
It ís the blight man was born for,	
It is Margaret you mourn for.


    Guess what I spent all weekend doing! Ah, the joys of being a grown-up with your own place.
    stellar_dust
         		7:13p
    Things.
    1. My water's back! Yay!

    2. Buy all my Rainbow Brite crap!

    3. Halloween pictures! Stay tuned. Cat pictures! ( cat pictures )

    4. I can barely keep modern primates straight. I am supposed to know all the *extinct* ones, too? With names like Telihardina and Rooneyia and Catopithecus (meow) and Branisella and Homunculus (awesome) and Mahgarita (yum)? None of which I have ever heard of? By Wednesday? Riiiiiiiiiiggghhhht. Or not.

    5. I'm making pie! Mmm, pie. I hope it is yummier than it is weird. (It called for two cans of apple pie filling & a cup of cranberries. I substituted one can of apple filling, a random number of cranberries, some fresh-but-old apple slices, and a can of strawberry filling. ... it smells yummy? We shall see.)

    6. Why did you let me go to Petsmart? Cute kittens! Need homes! Waahhh!

    7. Speaking of adorable? Joe Biden is that. ♥ my new VP.

    8. Would it be lame if I didn't send Christmas cards this year? What if I just sent post cards like Mom does? Would that be extra-lame? I'm talking about in general, not just to internet peeps. Hmm.

    .. off to clean the kitchen, now that there's water!

    Current Mood: crazy
    Current Music: Ben Folds Five - Ben Folds Five - Kate
    stellar_dust
         		12:12p
    Ugh. A water pipe burst last night, so my community has no water until 5 PM today, when hopefully they'll have fixed it. No shower, no dishwashing, no laundry, no macaroni'n'cheese, as little toilet as possible. Ugh. I'll go shopping later and eat lunch somewhere with a toilet, but ugh, I feel gross.

    I ordered a new laptop! And it's shipped! It has a 500-G hard drive! (Or at least it better do.) Yay! Can't wait till it gets here!

    Re: new LJ profile pages: I've been beta-testing for a while, and it has a few annoying things, but overall I like it a lot better than I expected to.

    Anyway. I'm gonna try to get the rest of the Rainbow Brite stuff on ebay today, and post halloween pictures, and plow through at least one more chapter of my anth book.

    I keep trying to write fic, but my brain does NOT want to work that way.

    Sigh.

    Current Mood: blah
    Saturday, November 8th, 2008
    aurussteelsword
         		1:31a
    Mind: *blown*
    I just picked up LeGuin's The Lathe of Heaven.

    I have no words. None. This book is AMAZING.

    Current Mood: Bitch Slapped
    stellar_dust
         		2:02a
    Now for something completely different
    My anthropology teacher is OUT OF HIS MIND.

    Last week, he had to cancel class.

    This week, he showed up twenty minutes late, after half the class had walked out. He had been sitting downstairs the entire time. He forgot what time the class started.

    He started discussing our paper topics, and couldn't remember what he'd told us to do: couldn't remember how many pages it's supposed to be, couldn't remember that he'd told us it could be anything anthropology-related.

    Then, he almost started to lecture, but was shocked - SHOCKED!! - to discover that we were only up to Chapter 6 (Chapter 6 being what we should have discussed last week, during the canceled class). But the midterm is next week, he wails! We should be finishing Chapter 10 by now!

    So he decides that next week's midterm will be on chapters 7 through 10. Chapters that we have not yet read or discussed. Oh, you will be fine, he says. He will email us all a study guide, and these are easy chapters, and he will lecture for the first half of class next week, before the test!

    Then he said, no lecture tonight, if you have a paper outline to turn in, show me it, then you can go home!

    The study guide that he emailed around is seventy-four pages long.

    Keep in mind the following things:
    - half the class was not there when he made this decision;
    - a quarter of the class failed to get his email cancelling last week, and so also probably failed to get his "study guide";
    - there is bound to be considerable overlap between the previous two points;
    - I say it again: we have not studied, discussed, read, or seen this material up to A WEEK BEFORE THE EXAM;
    - THIS IS A COMMUNITY COLLEGE COURSE. (I could almost excuse this behavior from a grad school prof. almost.)

    He has to be insane, right? Whatever emergency made him cancel class last week is stressing him out and driving him crazy? Surely that's the explanation?

    .. anyway that's why I spent tonight writing a massive political post, instead of reading the APPROXIMATELY TWO HUNDRED PAGES THAT I HAVE TO UNDERSTAND BEFORE NEXT WEDNESDAY.

    *headdesk*

    These chapters are about primate behavior, fossil primates, and early human ancestors - topics that I haven't studied or haven't studied much. (1) Why couldn't this have been stuff that I *know*, like the basic genetics and evolutionary theory from chapters 1-5; (2) I was looking forward to the lecture and discussion! So that I could learn! Things!

    SO MUCH FAIL.

    Current Mood: annoyed
    Friday, November 7th, 2008
    stellar_dust
         		11:36p
    My very long post all about why I'm happy.
    Download mp3: Frank Sinatra - The House I Live In

    Let me tell you about the America I grew up in.

    ( Let's talk ancient history. )

    And THAT, America, THAT is why I rejoice.


    click for a free sticker


    (I intended to write a blow-by-blow account of my Election Day, for posterity. It, um, kinda got away from me. Maybe later?)

    Current Mood: optimistic
    Current Music: the purring of a snuggly Darcy-cat!
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