Captain Speedypants

Sun, 31 May 2009 06:12:19 GMT

Oh hey look I have one of these things. Great!

Note to self: starting to drink at 10 in the morning is pretty much a stupid thing to do. Need to go be miserable now.

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 23:17:30 GMT

I VOTED.

(...a couple of days ago because I care about Seattle politics more than Chicago/Evanston. Absentee ballots, hooray!)

Definitely had a screaming argument with my parents about it. When I told them how I voted (for Obama, for not discriminating against transgendered people, for the governor I wouldn't be embarrassed by) they accused me of being unamerican. Apparently loving my country and wanting to fix its problems is exactly like being a terrorist. Ha ha ha, it is to laugh.

Also, my dad accused me of being sexist because I wasn't voting for Palin. I mean, apparently voting for the lady is more important than voting for the one who doesn't shoot wolves from planes. idk, guys.

I need to study for a physics midterm, but I also really need to keep refreshing FiveThirtyEight and checking the Google election map. We'll see how this thing turns out.

In which the italics tag is abused

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 04:45:50 GMT

I'm back at college.

I predict this quarter will be somewhat unpleasant. I'm taking Korean, physics, statistics, and (joy of joys) differential equations. Math and I have a somewhat tenuous relationship, and I fear this may strain it to the breaking point.

(Also, my computer still is in transit. I weep.)

That's all boring, though. I want to talk about Twilight*.

Holy shit, guys, this book is epic. It's the literary equivalent of Hostess cupcakes -- I know they're bad for me and I know they'll make me feel sick and kind of queasy in the morning, but I can't stop reading.

Seriously, guys, they play baseball. In thunderstorms. Because their strength is the strength of titans. And Bella's blood is like ambrosia, and she smells like freesia (hee, freesia!). And when her undead lover kisses her in the hospital her heart literally stops.

I'm going to buy New Moon tomorrow. I am so excited.

*To my mild horror, one of my new suitemates thinks Twilight is well written. I don't really know how I feel about that.

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 07:00:21 GMT

Much to my dismay, I can't upload pictures to my temporary computer at all, thanks to my own stupidity/forgetfulness.

I only have a few more days in Korea, and they're going to be a little crazy. I'm going out with a friend tonight, then I have to finish buying presents*, then I need to help my mom's friend move, and then I have to find the exchange student who's going back to Seattle with me and make sure I don't lose him on the way home.

Other than that, I've experienced a ridiculous outpouring of fannishness over the last week or so. I just finished burning through the Legion of Super Heroes reboot and doodling fanarts of various legionnaires.

Alright, so: I think I'm going to buy a tablet when I get back. I'm not a professional artist/design monkey/etc, I just want to be able to colour on the computer without crying. Do any of you lot have suggestions as to company/size/brand?

*I hate buying souvenirs for people. I know folks are satisfied just getting a little "I didn't completely forget you!" tchotchka, but it bugs me when I can't find something sort of meaningful.

I opened up my spam folder to discover...

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 17:49:59 GMT

Britney sues vagina for divorce.

Heading for a custody battle for the ages?

Media

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 02:53:41 GMT

I just finished watching even more British TV.

Why, with all the hype about Torchwood, did nobody tell me that the Sarah Jane Adventures are pure, unadulterated awesome? The characters are smart and charming, the monsters are genuinely pretty scary, and nobody has to be the stupid one or the incompetent one just to let ~~RTD's Mary Sues~~ the heroes shine.

Furthermore, instead of wangsty manpain (i.e. Voyage of the Damned, which I found completely hilarious), when the characters are hurting I want to take them home and make them cookies, not slap them until they stop being so self-centred. "The Lost Child" made me go D: a lot, in a good way, and I definitely cried all over the ending of "Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane?".

And boy, after the icky misogyny in Doctor Who, I am really appreciating that the lead is nearly sixty and still an epic badass. The whole Harriet Jones "don't you think she looks tired?" thing still makes me angry every time I remember it.

(Also? Elisabeth Sladen is smokin'. And I kind of covet her fuzzy purple jacket.)

(Also also? Mr. Smith's giant fanfare will never, never stop being funny. Every time he starts up I nearly weep with laughter.)

printf("Hello World!");

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 18:53:18 GMT

Wow, I haven't posted on this thing for ages and ages.

So I finished my first year of college. It was interesting. I think I might be transferring after next year.

I'm in Korea right now, visiting the ancestral homeland. I'm mostly having a good time, but right now it's too hot and I can't sleep.

How's everybody doing?

In which I whine about my grades like a whining thing

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 03:21:44 GMT

I got my grades today.

Hello there, lowest grade I have ever received in a class.

(C+ in math? Jesus Christ.)

To understand why I'm kind of aaaaaaah about this (considering this quarter was like being stomped on by large men in hobnailed boots), my mother switched from business to engineering by getting a perfect 4.0 for three years and memorising her textbooks cover to cover. She's a super-intense Korean lady who gets disappointed when I get B+'s instead of A's. I'm pretty sure if I failed or dropped a class I would just never be allowed to come home again.

...

On the other hand, I got my grade in orgo up from a D to a B, so that's good, right? Right?

D:

OH! I'm also in New York right now! It is filled with very pushy people! Spring Awakening is awesome! I went to two museums today and now I can never eat again!

Is the Devil in your Laptop?*

Wed, 23 Jan 2008 17:45:32 GMT

One of my favourite things about going to a Big Schmancy University is that there are people with flyers out and about. I find many of them unintentionally hilarious to the max, and was kind of sad when it got too cold for them to wander around, inviting me to Bible study.

So it's snowing and miserable and the LaRouche Political Action Committee is out. It's like winning the loony lottery! A veritable cornucopia of half-baked logical fallacies and confused thinking!

(Just remember, kids: if you use Facebook, you'll kill your friend at a Halloween party and go to prison!)

*Yes, but praying didn't work and holy water shorted out my keyboard. What now?

A quick note to someone who needs it:

Mon, 21 Jan 2008 19:35:02 GMT

Dear Roommate:

Chew with your mouth closed.

And set your goddamn alarm clock.

No love,
Sarah

...yeah.

So after playing the weirdest game of Axis and Allies ever, one of my friends found a site that allows you to play Axis and Allies via email, thus allowing all five of us to play without trying to get all five of us into a single room.

Yeah, that's not going to be dangerous to my GPA or anything.

Unfunny business

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 04:17:11 GMT

I remember a news article written a while back in the Seattle Times that was talking about the lack of reparations for Korean comfort women. Imagine my delight to find a random paragraph in the middle about the bloodthirsty canine-killing culinary habits of Koreans.

Cute canine interlude! Look at that handsome face!

Now, from the quarterhorse wank:

I would rather live in a country that has some sense of humanity than someplace like that garden spot, Korea, where they slaughter and eat dogs.

Right on!

And by right on, I mean fuck you. Jesus.

Bleach ch. 291

Mon, 24 Dec 2007 04:22:43 GMT

Does anyone else on my flist read Bleach?

Because... well, damn. ::excited flail::

In other news: an article on cursing.

Mmf. Back to holiday baking. Help, I'm drowning in pies D:

Meme o'clock

Sat, 08 Dec 2007 08:23:40 GMT

From pishbadlarr

Go to Wikipedia home page and click random article. That is your band's name.

Click random article again; that is your album name.

Click random article 15 more times and those are the tracks on your album.

Band: Lapdance

Album: apsyeoxic
Subtitle: Maritime Football League

Tracks:
1. Portrush
2. Julio Alberto Moreno Casas
3. List of asteroids/69601–69700
4. Ciliate telomerase RNA
5. bidiagonal matrix
6. BAT keyboard
7. Siskiyou County
8. Considered harmful (Go To Statement)
9. TVR Sagaris
10. Andrew Dykes
11. The Shakespeare Fellowship
12. Bodenwöhr
13. United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea
14. 1925 Cincinnati Reds season
15. List of American ODI cricketers

Why, yes, I will be in the coolest nerdcore band ever. A solid 6 out of 18 random articles are directly math or science-related, and an extra two for language and linguistics. Sweet.

ETA: I maintain, though, that the best bandname ever would be PISASTER DISASTER. How cool would that be? Heavy-metal and eco-friendly!

Ways in which I have failed

Mon, 03 Dec 2007 03:13:33 GMT

-I failed at counting carbons, had to do corrections, and now my lab notebook looks like an angry tornado
-I failed at observing things.
-I failed at obeying Conservation of Mass, and somehow managed to get a 191% yield in a reaction.

...I broke physics?

While watching Avatar 3.05 --

Sun, 28 Oct 2007 05:36:18 GMT

-- oh, Azula. You're such a freak. :D

icon meme

Tue, 23 Oct 2007 00:33:56 GMT

Meme from harrylovesron

User pics - we use them, we love them, and love to admire other's. Let's dig a little bit deeper into this...

Comment on this post. I will choose seven userpics from your profile and you will explain what they mean and why you are using them. Post this along with your answers in your own journal so others can play along.

-- calculus will pwnz0r you

The icon itself was made by thefunkyicon on LJ as part of a set of definitions taken from Urban Dictionary.

In high school I skipped precalc and went straight to BC calc as a junior -- that was the year I took six academic classes, including two senior-level electives. Most other classes were manageable, at least; calculus nearly broke me. I find it mildly hilarious and fairly true that calculus, when used as a weapon, is a formidable foe.

-- Get those funky broads!

I loooove the early issues of Generation X. I cried when Jubilee was depowered (and I cried when Chuck Austen happened. Just... fuck you, Austen.) and I gaped and threw things when Jono was depowered (WHAT. I still get angry when I think about that particular decision).

Jim Mahfood, who is a rad artist, did an issue called the Generation X Underground Special. This and Tales from the Bully Pulpit are my favourite one-shots ever.

-- missed the butt :(

This doesn't have a story. Panthea posted icons made from a phrasebook with truly goofy English phrases. I figured "missed the butt" was the arty foreign reply to surprise buttsecks.

-- oh em gee emo D:

Same with this. Grrliz posted icons made from the summaries of stories in the Pit and this one was particularly appealling in its ridiculousness.

An open letter to someone who needs it:

Sat, 13 Oct 2007 03:44:22 GMT

Dear fellow res college chix0r,

I, too, am not terribly overjoyed about my period. The airy-fairy fluffy nonsense about bleeding and red tents and childbirth leaves me cold, and I don't really get the joy and happiness of being a cramped, bloody, angry mess for several days to a week. And yes, balancing a used tampon and a new tampon and a purse and keys and everything else is kind of a hassle in a cramped stall.

That being said, whoever is leaving wadded up tampons and pads in the toilet? I will end you.

Have a great day! :)

Love,
Sarah!

Signs you may need to go back to the gym

Mon, 08 Oct 2007 21:31:02 GMT

Today I carried a 17' CRT monitor two blocks and up four flights of stairs. My elbow hinge feels too loose and typing hurts.

In other news, my advanced crazy-cat-lady-hood seems a little less fun without the cats. Damn you, allergies!

Wed, 03 Oct 2007 22:43:39 GMT

I feel kind of crappy and headache-y, so I’m filling out the book meme instead of doing my orgo homework.

bold what you have read, italicise that you started but didn't finish, and ~~strike through what you don't ever plan to read ever again.~~ Add an asterisk* to those you've read more than once. Underline those marked unread on your lt.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell – reading currently
Anna Karenina (loved this book)
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
~~Wuthering Heights~~ - I kept waiting for it to get better
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses -- in all seriousness, does anyone actually read Ulysses? And not for class?
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre*
A Tale of Two Cities
The brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods*
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius – currently reading
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a Memoir in Books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex – read most of on and off last year
Quicksilver
Wicked : the Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a Novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man -- I don’t think I’ll ever finish this
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World*
The Fountainhead
Foucault's Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange*
Anansi Boys*
The Once and Future King*
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a Novel
1984*
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables -- the unabridged version, no less! Yay for Parisian street names?
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
~~The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time~~ -- oh, I hated this book.
Dune – reading now
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492 - present
Cryptonomicon*
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners -- for class
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five*
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
~~The Mists of Avalon~~
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
~~The Catcher in the Rye~~ (shut up, Holden Caulfield)
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame*
Freakonomics
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down – reading now
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit*
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers*

Oh, wow! Tags!

Fri, 28 Sep 2007 04:08:20 GMT

Okay, so I wasn't really super-thrilled with how my school handles intro-level engineering classes (answer: a bizarre smush of a class that tries to teach programming, linear algebra, and physics and sort of kind of succeeds not really), and I'm really not super-thrilled with my instructor, but I am seriously happy that I get a free sticker with my student version of Matlab.

It's pretty rad. I'm going to have to stick it ironically onto a bike helmet or something.

Thanks to the magic of Craigslist, I may be able to resume learning C sometime in my lifetime.

Wed, 26 Sep 2007 04:46:38 GMT

Since starting college, I've developed a drinking problem.

I can't get water from the Nalgene into my mouth. It's getting really embarrassing really quickly. I mean, I got into engineering at a schmancy university, it stands to reason I'd have the spatial reasoning skills to hydrate responsibly in an earth-friendly manner, but all signs are pointing to NO.

Also, I have an 8:00 organic chemistry class. I have fear.

(Also also, I watched the "Heroes" premiere. Am excited for next week. Must acquire fellow nerds for viewing parties, yes.)

Tue, 18 Sep 2007 00:21:50 GMT

Woo, so I blew through Heroes in a couple of days and finished this morning. And the new season starts soon. Hooray!

(Whee, Sylar!)

I’m glad I watched it in one straight shot on DVD, though. I don’t think I would have stuck with it past the third or fourth episode otherwise; I felt like once all (or almost all) the characters were introduced and set, the show really took off.

I really enjoyed watching the big arc develop. All of the plotlines all wove in together really well, and I particularly loved watching House Petrelli develop.

I wasn’t expecting to like Nathan and Claire as much as I did; by the end I wanted to squoosh them both and squeal like a tiny child every time they appeared on screen. Aw, Claire! Nathan! You both try so hard!

I am totally jazzed for the new season. Will Jessica be back? ‘Cause Jessica is rad. More importantly, will Ando be back?! (Hiro and Ando are my platonic hetero buddy-flick OTP, for reals. I would totally watch a series of nothing but them having Wacky Adventures.)

(Why isn’t there more Sylar/Peter? Hello there, cracked-out OTP! (Fortunately, Sylar/Mohinder is a close and shiny second, so.)

And, whoever came up with Pylar and Mylar? I will end you.)

RTFM

Fri, 14 Sep 2007 22:04:07 GMT

I'm trying to knit a hat with a band of black-and-white checks. I've been struggling with a bizarre modification of intarsia that has left me with approximately a million ends to sew in and it is really awkward to do.

Aaaand of course now that I've taken the time to actually look through my knitting books, I could have used fair isle. In fact, if I frogged what I have and started over with fair isle, it would probably look better and work better. But if I frog it now I will have to kill myself argh.

I've been watching Heroes while I knit. I'm not sure how much I like it -- it's so self-consciously comic-book-y, and I kind of want to slap a couple of the characters. But every time I really get fed up Hiro and Ando show up and make everything better again, hooray!

Sun, 09 Sep 2007 15:51:57 GMT

Hey, look! I have NaNo characters! And now tha I have the characters, I have a starting point for worldbuilding! I'm going to have to pick up a book on card tricks and start mucking about with existing magic systems and things.

In other news, this is part of the gun attitude that freaks me out. "When I am angry at the world I find relief in dropping a clip into the air"? Yeah, that's a terrific idea; after all, the bullets just puff out of existence once they leave sight range!

Go to a range, people. Go to a range. (And as a bonus, you can draw vikings riding dinosaurs on the paper targets, adding the spice of defeating the invading hordes. It's pretty rad.)

I love the internet

Thu, 06 Sep 2007 17:29:47 GMT

This might be the most amazing bridal-related patent ever.

Godawful Wedding Crap. Amazing.