| Various objects for sale |
[25 May 2007|11:37pm] |
I'm selling a bunch of stuff trying to get my room less ridiculous-looking. This batch consists mostly of my collection of blank journals, at least one of which I've had since grade school (it will be evident which), which I think deserve to be written in. There's also some art I bought at cons, and some witchcraft.
My hopes don't really hang on selling anything from here - this post is more of an inventory for my own use - but I thought I'd go ahead and make it public, in case anyone wants to go ahead and buy something and cut Amazon and eBay out of their commissions. I accept all major forms of internet currency, including PayPal, BPAL, manga, and meat. I am serious about all of those. (Also, BookMooch points. That sentence's meter didn't allow it.) Shipping info and links to my feedback profiles at various sites can be viewed under the first cut.
( Blank Journals )
( The Most Important Blank Journal, which you seriously should look at even if you're not buying anything. Merely gazing upon its image will change your life. )
( Other Stuff )
( Sold and Shipped )
Also, I'm going to start putting some of my books up on BookMooch at some point, but they're mostly still in boxes right now, and will probably remain that way for at least another week. If anyone wants to stake a claim on anything now, they're under my "for sale" tag on LibraryThing.
ETA: Also, I'm selling a bunch of BPAL and essential oils here.
|
|
| Local news |
[25 May 2007|05:38pm] |
|
"Rockers ZZ Top are missing some jewelry after it was stolen from their room during a concert at the Eastern Kentucky Expo Center -"
|
|
| Hi, Dad. |
[25 May 2007|04:25pm] |
DAD: Do you want one of these steaks?
ME: No.
DAD: Are you sure? I'm making these steaks.
ME: I ate about an hour ago.
DAD: - can you say that? Is that grammatically correct?
ME: Yes.
DAD: Are you sure? "I ate an hour ago?" I don't think that's right, honey! Shouldn't be... "eaten"... "have eaten" -
ME: Dad, do you need to go see a doctor?
DAD: No, honey, is that correct? Are you sure? Don't make fun of me, honey, I don't know.
ME: Yes! It is correct! You know that perfectly well -
DAD: I don't know. Do you know where I'm from? I'm from The Bronx. We don't talk the same there!
ME: You still say "ate" in The Bronx.
DAD: No! We don't talk that way. In The Bronx, we don't say, "forget about it," we say "fuggedabouddih." It's one word. I'm gonna go cook these steaks.
DAD: It's mango lemonade. This juice has got a lot of - vitamin C - no, it's only got 15%!
ME: That's because it's mostly not actually juice -
DAD: Oh, I'm very disappointed - I'm very disappointed in this juice - okay, here, look, honey, I'm going to mix in some real - I'm putting in some orange juice, see, look what I'm doing!
ME: I see -
DAD: - and it's not going to cause a bionic catatonic reaction, is it, honey?
ME: No, it's not going to cause a bionic catatonic reaction.
DAD: It's gonna cause a reverse-emulsion compulsive animatronic caronic...
ME: Okay.
DAD: It's gonna cause an angioplasty.
DAD: These steaks came out really good! Do you want a piece?
ME: No.
DAD: Because you have eaten an hour ago... you ate an hour ago... you may be right.
|
|
| At home. |
[16 May 2007|12:49am] |
AND FULL OF ANGST YES
I graduated Sunday, went to a job interview Monday (I'll know by Monday next week), and have spent most of the past couple of days throwing things away. Not even primarily my things - I cleaned out the bathroom cabinets. I got rid of two bags of unsettling products intended for topical use only. I'm still not done, there's still the closet left. After that I'll start on my parents' bathroom.
And then, having so mentally prepared myself - I will start getting rid of books. Both mine, which will never fit in my room unless I remove my dresser (which I am seriously considering, just to avoid doing this), and the General Family Library, which is large. The local public library was unable to absorb our excess the last time we did this.
I decided a while ago to stop using BookMooch, because I didn't trust the people running it (they never did ban the scammer I caught, the design is really bad, there wasn't much communication or indication that the site wouldn't be abandoned by its creator(s) at any second), and didn't want the system going down when I had a lot of points saved up. I'm thinking of starting up again now, just because I've discovered that Amazon Marketplace is a really crappy way to sell the sort of books I need to get rid of, and they seem to be actually working to improve the system recently.
I'm going to start culling my BPAL and ridiculously-hard-to-transport essential oil collections, too. I wonder if it's poor form if your first post to ![[info]](http://www.journalfen.net/img/userinfo.gif) bpalmarketplace is ten imps, one bottle, and thirty bottles of random essential oils? I've seen people do it, anyway... maybe I should just eBay all the really cheap stuff in one big lot, instead.
I have been thinking very hard about joining a commune and about Pokemon.
|
|
| I FUCKING GRADUATED |
[13 May 2007|09:20pm] |
|
I MEAN WHAT THE HELL
|
|
| Important BPAL Information |
[09 May 2007|09:53pm] |
Dear internet,
Sequential Tart people are talking about BPAL here. Please scroll down to the very bottom to see brilliant new-perfume ideas by Shaenon Garrity (that I do not understand, but they do seem fairly brilliant).
Thank you,
me
|
|
| [Brilliant Idea Goes Here] |
[05 May 2007|01:03am] |
I am going to start a new book-reading tradition for, when I remember it. Whenever I am on page 128 of a book that has, uhh, substantially more than 128 pages, I will make a prediction about it.
Because there are spoilers from the first 128 pages in here (and also because I'm a genius and assume I must be right), I'm putting it behind a cut.
( The Queen of Attolia, by Megan Whalen Turner )
|
|
| I Didn't Get The Job |
[02 May 2007|04:39pm] |
Went on exciting adventure to Chicago Saturday for the Amity job interview, got back today. Will probably have energy required for angst sometime late tonight, when I am supposed to be working on a paper.
Mom and thegeekgene went with me; thegeekgene toured two colleges and was the less enthralled with the one the further away. Courtesy of Mom's leet internet discount skills, we stayed at a place called Hotel Indigo. The room was extremely pretty, with a big blown-up photograph of pretty stones (slightly pixelated) on the back wall, and nice beds and furniture and all. Mom and thegeekgene thought it was awesome. But it was also small, a weird shape, and kind of crowded with unnecessary stuff - there were probably twenty little brochures, standees, and menus sitting around, all spread out in different and inconvenient places - leaving me not completely impressed with the design.
But the lobby was scented with several different combinations of essential oils appropriate for different times of day. The pattern seemed to be sandalwood at night, patchouli during the day, and something that reminded me of BPAL's Cathode (mint, moss, and fake ambergris) in the morning. And the patchouli, at least, was definitely moderately-good-quality stuff, though I couldn't figure out where it was coming from to investigate. Neither Mom nor thegeekgene noticed any of this until I pointed it out.
Apparently, if a company selling luxury goods/services wants to impress me, what they've got to do is demonstrate a knowledge of aromatherapy and a willingness to purchase fairly good ingredients.
Also, the little bottles of shampoo/conditioner/lotion were Aveda. I will not pay for Aveda stuff, but I will surely steal it.
|
|
| A Confession |
[24 Apr 2007|05:32pm] |
I sometimes feel the urge to hurt Alanis Morissette emotionally.
I wish to point out the logistical inconsistencies in her songs, list all the GRE-words she has ever used incorrectly, and lay out all the evidence of her transparent emotional dishonesty. I also want to hit her.
I am aware that this interaction would do neither of us any good. Thus, if I were ever, through some bizarre circumstance, to meet Ms. Morissette, I would not attempt to harm her. I admit to this flaw in my psyche in an attempt to acknowledge its irrationality and, eventually, free myself of its toxic effect upon my soul.
From here I can only move forward.
|
|
| Happy Made-Up Internet Holiday! |
[23 Apr 2007|07:08am] |
(What, is it the Feast of Boris again yet?)
In honor of International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, I give you a thingie. It's presumably not publishable-quality, seeing as no one's published me yet, but I'm posting it anyway because I think I'm done with it for a while, and it's distracting me from working on other things.
It's the prologue to The Nebulous Video Game In My Head, "The Ashdocks", which is kind of a puzzle-RPG - the plot involves boats, ghosts, swamps, fairies, and people being political, and the gameplay involves a few standard turn-based battles, and a lot of puzzles where you manipulate plants and fungi in various ways to affect the environment, hurt people, heal them, and create new items. You get a limited number of certain types of seeds/roots/etc per stage, and can buy more of others, and all that good video-game-economics stuff.
Because this isn't Harvest Moon, you can also manipulate the passage of time to get the plants to grow immediately, though there are sometimes side-effects to doing that - grow too many explosive mushrooms in a certain place in such-and-such a space of real-time, and you wear out your soil so that it's only fit for growing zombies for a while. Which you may or may not want, depending on who you've killed recently and what level you are.
(Except that I don't know how this system works yet, hence the word "nebulous." This is why I'm never actually going to be a video game designer. The "game" part kind of stumps me.)
( If this hasn't all scared you away, the script is behind the cut. )
I hope you found that a nice, macabre way to start your Monday!
|
|
| Bone, by Jeff Smith |
[22 Apr 2007|02:28am] |
I just finished reading Bone.
What this means is that there isn't any more of it.
And, I learn, Smith hasn't really done anything else.
I am very, very upset right now.
I am all suddenly empathizing more with the opium-addict parts of the Lymond books, which-had-previously-irritated-me-so. I'm off to frighten abused children with my withdrawal symptoms.
|
|
| Retired? |
[20 Apr 2007|08:07pm] |
eBay: It is weird.
|
|
| Weird Honors Program Email of the Day |
[19 Apr 2007|06:16pm] |
"The trip to Putnam County Spelling Bee has been cancelled due to lack of interest!"
-
I have a job interview with Amity! After having been turned down by JET and ECC, this is very exciting! Exclamation points!
Angst.
|
|
| Confucius Hates You |
[19 Apr 2007|04:14am] |
On Monday, a bunch of us in Renaissance Lit took a trip to a prison to see the Shakespeare Behind Bars guys from this documentary rehearse, and talked to them afterwards. I didn't find out about the shootings in Virginia until we got back at about 11:00 at night. I'm kind of assimilating the whole visit and probably won't post about it more than this.
Apparently, though, I do feel comfortable talking about shitty news coverage of the shootings.
Professor Portentous let us get slightly off-topic in Confucian Classics today (yesterday), presumably because, you know, we're mostly East Asian Studies majors in there, and we'd darn well better have an opinion. Inse said he turned Fox on to see just how horrible their coverage was, and apparently O'Reilly said something along the lines of, "Exactly how did a South Korean get hold of two guns?" O'Reilly is big on the gun control. He feels it is an important issue worthy of serious thought. He also knows the difference between South and North Korea, and the state of the US's diplomatic relations thereto.
Prof. Portentous then got us back onto the subject of, you know, the Confucian Classics, and asked whether we could connect The Guy's behavior to any specific failure to follow Confucian guidelines. Silence. I say, "No." "No?" "No. We can't know that. I mean, we don't need to know that."
I'd looked at some of the links posted on BoingBoing and suchlike, but - this is why I need to stop reading BoingBoing. It fetishizes tragedy the same way the mainstream media does - why did I say mainstream. This is BoingBoing. It is mainstream. There are always a few good links in there when they're covering a developing story, but they're mixed in with a lot of shit, some of it insanely journalistically irresponsible.
For instance, they linked to some poor guy with a slightly similar name's Flickr page, and several students' accounts of what had happened on their personal sites - and some of these kids were clearly pretty rattled and only really posting to let off stress and tell their friends they were okay. They don't need this kind of exposure right now. And I like how, in the midst of her own reveling in tragedy, Jardin sanctimoniously links to this guy's discussion of the harmfulness of obsessive television coverage of school shootings. Nary a synapse fires in her head.
Okay. Anyway, I'd looked at some of the stuff posted on BoingBoing, but only some, and wasn't totally sure what the guy's nationality was. I did look at some of his creative writing. It looked like something the Something Awful guys would write.
In an attempt to change the subject (because I did not want to sit there listening to people vaguely talking about mass murder in terms of "ritual propriety") I brought this up in class. I said that whatever his ethnic background, his writing style indicated that he was "pretty assimilated into American culture," and that therefore the journalists who felt it necessary to constantly refer to him as "the South Korean shooter" were engaging in "rash speech" and "careless thought," and thus were failing to uphold their responsibility to society.
It's weird using Confucian vocabulary to say stuff, you sound very glib. (Unless you're Professor Portentous, of course.)
Aside from asking me to explain Something Awful, and asking for the URL on learning that it "satirized American culture," he then let me off the hook for a while, and other people cheerfully expressed their own dubiousness of Bill O'Reilly's chances of achieving authoritative conduct at this late point in his life (see Analects 9.22), and the sadly low likelihood of Fox president Rupert Murdoch's being recognized by all men as a sage king, and being followed as water follows the slant of the earth.
But I was serious.
(On the subject, I'm glad -ing Imus got fired. Mom, tell Dad I'm glad -ing Imus got fired. Dad did stop listening to him, like, a couple years ago, right? Tell him I have expectations of his taste.)
|
|
| GRAR! LIBRARY! |
[15 Apr 2007|08:30pm] |
Graduating seniors who work at the library are supposed to pick out a book to be put on display at the end of the year, with our photo and an explanation of why we think the book's important. When they take it down, they put a little plate in it with our name and year of graduation. It's kind of stupid, because they don't let us pick out a book for the library to buy - we just choose one they already own - and nobody can check out the book we recommend while it's on display.
But, yes. I decided to donate my copy of A, A', by Hagio Moto for my book. I gave it to the woman in charge, let her take my picture, wrote my little tagline, and left.
That was a couple months ago, and it's only in the past few days the books actually went up. So I have no recollection as to why "my" explanation of the manga's import might read thusly:
A,A' Prime: a Graphic Novel. It's the only book by Moto Hagia, without whom, modern Manga, wouldn't exist in English.
...I WILL KILL YOU SO HARD WOMAN ohhh this is character assassination.
Even if she can't form a coherent sentence, she could at least have made the effort to spell the author's name correctly.
My assumption is that she had a comma spasm and lost the meaning of the original sentence, which I guess was something like, "It's the only book by Moto Hagio, without whom modern manga wouldn't exist, available in English."
I got my supervisor's permission to make myself a new sign. I've got a fairly well-behaved version finished - it's slightly snazzier than the original, with a less clashing color scheme and a better photo of me (that's important, too!), which I think I deserve after having such words put in my mouth. But I'm still teetering on the edge of adding something horrible. I wonder if they'll take it down if I use one of my Nekozawa Halloween photos. Or just a screenshot of Haruhi's mom's iei. Or a picture of Hunter S. Thompson.
|
|
| Microsoft! |
[15 Apr 2007|01:03am] |
For the last few months, when I type a new kanji into the RTF files I'm doing my translation projects in, 90% of the time it comes out pointing left. My kanji do not know which way is up.
I thought at first that the problem was only with @SimSun, which is apparently intended mostly for Chinese, not Japanese, but switching to MS PGothic, which actually has "Japanese" as a language option, doesn't fix it. Anyway, they both used to work. And I've saved and restarted and reopened trying to right them, but nothing changes. This isn't disabling, since I'm lazy and I either romanize or kana-ize everything before I start the actual translation (the kana work properly), but it's really irritating.
Since I haven't installed any new Japan\China\Korea\etc.-related software or fonts during this time, I'm going to assume this is something one of the Windows updates did.
( Image behind cut )
(Edit: And if anyone reading this can tell me what the spine of the book in this image says, and what that title would probably be in English, I would be extremely happy. From the context it's obviously a children's book involving talking animals, and Charles Perrault's name is on the cover, and there's the phrase "boy(s) and girl(s)" in there.
Edit again: Okay, yeah, the book is "Puss in Boots," so the spine is probably a series name. (This is important, okay?!)
 )
|
|
| thegeekgene! |
[11 Apr 2007|04:57pm] |
Bring this up in Christian Ed next week! Your teacher will surely have many insightful things to say!
(Or you've got to at least leave a copy of the article on his desk, if you're worried about the whole grades thing.)
|
|
| OH BOY |
[09 Apr 2007|10:42pm] |
I know that it is spring because there is a large stinging lump of unknown provenance behind my left ear.
And the huge furry yellow millipedes are back and dodging under my bed again.
And my face is breaking out.
I HATE EVERYTHING
|
|