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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
Dvarin's LiveJournal:
| Tuesday, May 22nd, 2012 | |
| 6:10 pm | A weekend of things and stuff Weekend visit from dr4b, which was consequently containing things I don't usually do, such as: - Walking to, then dining at Chinook's. For lunch, which is even more rare. - Karaoke (apparently several Disney movies have been translated into Japanese, and their songs are in Rock Box's catalogue. Attempted to sing "Be Our Guest", but lacking the actual sheet music I couldn't tell when syllables were supposed to be contracted to make it fit the melody. Though in general, I think I'd find sheet music helpful for karaoke.) - Dining with jweill. In Capitol Hill. - Going to a musical. In this case, Damn Yankees. I very much disagree with dr4b's "starts out strong and then flops" evaluation, mostly because to me it seemed about the same level of mediocre throughout. As a whole, that is--I must stress that the production quality was quite good and almost all my issues are with the story. For example, the plot was exceedingly sketchy, I think more so than usual for musical theater, probably due to the majority of musical numbers being plot-irrelevant and the handful of times they don't even try to excuse something that happens for no good reason. Given the selection of moralistic bits it was also pretty obviously written in the 50s, but I can deal with that, and I didn't find the non-cheating thing unbelievable because Virtuous Protagonist is still a standard trope. Some of the other things (Man, that homesickness was fast. Also, man is Applegate not evil at all.) irritated a bit though. - Getting up at 6am |
| Sunday, May 20th, 2012 | |
| 7:52 pm | |
| Friday, May 18th, 2012 | |
| 11:29 am | 潰れる運命 Talked with Japan recruiter again. He asked me why I wanted to work in Japan. Unfortunately, I haven't thought about that for two months and so I was %@#$ed for what answer to give him and ended up rambling on and on about things very unconvincingly. Sigh. He asked about my Japanese ability, I mentioned the JLPT and that I usually had few problems with conversation if it was directly to me rather than, eg, two Japanese girls chattering to each other at lightning speed. Afterward I got a call from one of his Japanese teammates, who... talked at lightning speed. Or possibly it was normal speed and I just didn't understand well because it was a bad phone connection. (Certainly, my cellphone has an earpiece which cuts out randomly, and putting the person on speakerphone adds another level of garble, so I was actually just losing segments of the conversation. People should just use Skype.) Regardless I was in a state of high panic the entire time and only caught half of it. Several times it was also extremely apparently that I was only catching half of it, alas. We'll see what happens. |
| Tuesday, May 15th, 2012 | |
| 7:09 pm | Completing the Avengers background movies, watched The Incredible Hulk. I liked that it wasn't actually an origin story--apparently it's familiar enough that they could get away with an opening montage and some backreferences for that. The ending as a little weird in that it seemed to imply he was trying "control" instead of "abolish", but how Banner shows up at the beginning of Avengers with his general depression and antipathy toward the green guy is not entirely consistent with that. Though I guess he could have given up and gone back to completely hating it during the interim. Vaguely wonder what happened to the overly enthusiastic professor. Also what the reversion trigger is. Have been getting these from Amazon Instant Video. Mostly because OMGConvenient. Though I do know Amazon is kinda evil to its suppliers, in this case the supplier is Hollywood, so... [Side Comment on Iron Man] Post-Avengers, we had a conversation to the effect of "Iron Man was actually conceived of during the 60s as a giant FU to the antiwar movement, intentionally incorporating traits they hated, but designed so that they'd love him anyway. He's an aggressive narcissistic ass with a heart of gold." My response to that was, "...which he keeps in his secretary." Though that's not actually accurate--on reconsideration it's actually just his social cooperation ability that he keeps there. |
| Saturday, May 12th, 2012 | |
| 12:04 am | Watched Cptn. America. It was 95% of a pretty good movie, though not quite as great as the others in the series. The second half seemed a bit rushed. The remaining 5% is the WTF-this-makes-neither-logical-nor-narra I kind of wonder how they did the pre/post transformation bit. Like, did they have two actors and somehow CG them together so they had the same face? |
| Friday, May 11th, 2012 | |
| 4:40 pm | 馳鳴 Just spent far too much time looking up the old Japanese ateji for every country I thought might have it. Surprisingly, there's ateji for some cities as well. I found 羅馬 (Rome), 倫敦 (London), 巴里 (Paris), etc. Apparently I currently live in 華盛頓州, the state of flower heap stopping. And I come from 紐育州, the state of rearing string. Of countries, moderately amusing ones are Ireland (愛蘭), which loves yew (or possibly allium), Germany (独逸), which escapes alone, Egypt (埃及), where dust will reach you, and Belgium (白耳義), where they perform the Rite of White Ears. |
| Sunday, May 6th, 2012 | |
| 1:47 am | [Movie] Pretty sure that's not actually a tesseract... Saw Avengers! Was pretty fun. Only a couple Thor/Loki scenes, which means only a few places where watching Thor was unbearable. Also, they seem to really like destroying Grand Central Station, given how often something was crashing into it. There was a bit of plot-induced stupidity at the end, but it resolved quickly. Conversation afterward about the difficulty in making sure each team member had a moment to shine, despite that clearly Hulk and Thor were at such a higher power level than the rest of them. Well, that's what was proposed--after some thought, I'm going to claim that Stark is actually the one with the highest power point total, it's just that he's spread them out to become a sort of Red Mage type rather than a straight-up demolisher. Hawkeye is the worst off since his abilities are a strict subset of Stark's, though they played him up by having no one else perform accuracy tricks. Cpt. A. got the least playing up, to his detriment--although the scene where he meets Thor was pretty fantastic. Edit: Also, fridge logic moment: Shouldn't the giant portal into space have been sucking out the atmosphere pretty rapidly? |
| Saturday, May 5th, 2012 | |
| 4:29 pm | One-liners Going to see Avengers later; hopefully the irritating stupidity of the Thor characters will be diluted in the rest of the cast (though I've not seen Cpt. A. nor Hulk, so who knows). Have switched from mocha to macchiato recently; unfortunately these mostly lack the ability to be drunk continuously over two hours. The internet is a great way to waste time--for example, I am writing this entry instead of doing Japanese reading I really ought to be doing right now. Still really bad at looking for work in Japan, something which is not helped by the fact that I currently have a stable and unobjectionable job which does not induce my usual jobswitch motivation of "OMG I can't take this any longer." You may wish to be reading the following webcomics: Aikonia (story, dramatic fantasy), Strays (story, adventure fantasy), Invisible Bread (one-offs, daily-life comedy), Widdershins (story, Victorian fantasy comedy adventure) I think this icon is becoming my new default. |
| Saturday, April 28th, 2012 | |
| 10:12 pm | [D&D] In which we desperately wish for a cleric The party bashed its way through the door at the top of the castle's giant scorpion dungeon in order to end up in the kitchens. Where apparently, the cooks were all zombies. With giant cleavers. And a hunger for brains or something, as they attacked us. The fight wasn't as horribly deadly as last session's fight, fortunately--the littler zombies went down with not that much trouble (though they subsequently got back up and had to be smacked down again once) an the bosses only knocked two of us unconscious (one of whom was the ranger, who at this point we kind of expect to charge in and then fall over in the second round). Right, anyway. The kitchens cleared (although now much messier, and you probably don't want to eat the stew) we proceeded down a hallway, where we were quickly caught by the sounds of screaming children coming from behind a large door. Party response was approximately: "Hey, the kidnapped children. We should rescue them and ransom them back to their parents." "Their parents are probably poor. We should just give them back." "Or we should sell them to slavers instead!" ...right then. Anyway, while trying to disable the arcane electrification field that was preventing us from approaching the door, the floor collapsed (...oy) and dumped some of us into a room full of spectres (...aieee!). It had long, thin parallel wall segments, almost as if it had been designed to be especially useful for incorporeal beings fighting corporeal ones. Funny that. Anyway. Lack of healing continues to be something of an issue, so I actually am considering picking up cleric or shaman as a multiclass or something. (Also, the current rogue multiclass thing to get stealth isn't going so well, just because melee + stealth don't work together smoothly.) Of course, that means that I'd be recreating a previous character to some extent. Which the fighter is already explicitly doing and the mage is thinking she'll end up doing. I'm beginning to think that on the Player Type charts, we're all ninjas*. *The player type that, no matter what the genre or system, will create and play a ninja. Or barbarian. Or mechanic. Or medic. Or whatever. |
| Tuesday, April 24th, 2012 | |
| 7:21 pm | Dear SLF4J: Die. No--I take that back. Go back in time and annihilate yourself before you're ever published. Dear people who use SLF4J: Please stop. It's a %#$%ing integration headache because of its classpath scanning and then bitching about there being multiple binding jars, even if they're all exactly the same jar. Yes, yes, if everyone set things up exactly correctly then such a situation would never happen. Guess what? They don't. |
| Sunday, April 22nd, 2012 | |
| 8:34 pm | |
| Saturday, April 14th, 2012 | |
| 10:22 pm | Man, I should have done my taxes last month. Apparently working only half the year + education credit = moderate refund. Mostly because the the half-the-year part, which means that the withholding was too high for the bracket I ended up in. --- Saw The Cabin in the Woods. It was very much a meta-horror movie, so I think I missed a bit by not being familiar with the horror genre. Not bad though. Gratuitous injury was kept to a minimum--mostly it was a lot of stabbing. --- D&D today. Party almost got completely killed. We had to spend 16 hours casting Raise Dead because two party members actually died-died as opposed to just going unconscious. (Fortunately the one of us with the RD ritual was not one of the two.) Basically, 4/6ths of the party took 50 damage each (plus daze, to add insult to injury) on the second round from six archers all arrow-spraying at once, and it just went downhill from there. Almost every enemy inflicted Dazed, which was... not fun. Summoned animals continue to be unimpressive, although they soaked some hits. Not really worth a daily slot though IMO. At one point during the fight a deus ex machina showed up in the form of an ancient and half-forgotten death god known mostly for making deals with mortals. (We'd seen his work in the form of a deathknight guy we'd fought earlier.) His offer was: he would make sure we survive, and in return every soul of anything we killed in the next thirteen years (but not ours) would go to him instead of to the deceased's patron. Our opinions were divided roughly as follows: Yes["Sounds useful, and I don't like dying. We should do it."]: 2 No["You do know what my alignment is, right?"]: 2 No["Thirteen years? Much too long to commit to."]: 1 No["Ha! I don't need yer stinkin' help!"]: 1 (Ironically, one of the ones who we RD'ed later.) In as much as a yes needed to be unanimous, we turned him down. So he slapped us all with 5 ongoing necrotic just to be spiteful. Jerk. (I was one of the alignment-based objectors--redirecting souls is seriously not CG. But even aside from that, as a druid I really don't want to have anything to do with undead-creation (much less, that of myself), and the entire deal is just really sketchy-sounding.) |
| Thursday, April 12th, 2012 | |
| 1:12 am | [WoW] Number of times recently that Misdirection has been used to help me keep aggro: 0 Number of times recently that Misdirection has been used because the hunter is impatient and wants to force a pull with no danger to himself: Rather more than zero. Dear Blizzard: Please remove Misdirection from the game, or at the least, give me some way to opt out of it. Also, same re. Tricks of the Trade. Thanks. |
| Wednesday, April 11th, 2012 | |
| 7:00 pm | The Power of Phlegm After waking up on Monday with a runny nose that suddenly stopped this afternoon, I think I've figured out why I've not had many allergy problems since I moved to Seattle. Basically, because it pretty much rains five days a week during the spring, the pollen gets washed out of the air too frequently to build up to problematic levels. (What happened this afternoon was, it rained for the first time in like four days.) I've always kind of been in denial about having allergies in the first place, mostly as a reaction to growing up with a mother and brother who are much more pollen-allergic than I am and the special attention and pushing of medicine attendant to that. (eg: "You're sniffling, don't you want an allergy pill?", "This pollen is killing me, are you sure you don't need anything?") It also doesn't help that although there is a clear correlation between "not enough sleep" and "starts sniffling", I can never tell whether it's a cold or just a lowered resistance. (I usually say "I'm allergic to getting up early." It's kind of true.) In Pittsburgh, I think I was mildly allergic to the Pittsburgh Black Dust. Which is unfortunate because you really can't get away from it. Completely irrelevantly, I am currently drinking espresso for like the third time in my life. It's weird because I think that I'm okay with espresso (when drunk in very small sips), I just can't stand americano. |
| Sunday, April 8th, 2012 | |
| 12:26 pm | A: "Hey guys, let's go show our disrespect of social conventions and the Capitalist Establishment!" B: "Yeah! ...but how do you wanna do that?" A: "Let's... hmm... graffiti something!" B: "Sounds great! Nothing says 'I reject your illusions of property' like minor vandalism!" C: "But guys, wait, we're in Fremont! People might look at it and just think it's an art project, and take it as an endorsement of the permitted self-expression potential of contained urban frameworks! That would be bad! We need some way to make sure people know it's actually graffiti." A: "No problem! I've got an idea for that..."  |
| Saturday, April 7th, 2012 | |
| 2:17 pm | Yellow Brick Road Last Sunday I ended up at a non-PAX geek convention of Seattle. ...no, not Sakura-con, that's this weekend. I mean Emerald City Comicon, which I went to as a sort of trial for whether it was worthwhile for me to go, given that I don't actually read American print comics and would mostly be there for webcomics or cartoons. I think the answer is "yes, but don't buy a three-day pass". Accidentally got into a panel of voice actors, which was pretty amusing, especially because it was full of demonstrations. (And I am now aware of "International Talk Like William Shatner Day.") There actually were a surprising number of webcomics on the floor, but alas, though I recognized most of them, the only one of them I was actually enthusiastic about was Girl Genius, where I bought a pin and got into a discussion with someone whose name I didn't catch about how GG was produced and comics generally, followed by a discussion about the effects of Amazon and Barnes & Noble on the bookstore industry. Interesting overall, but not quite what I'd been expecting. (Also, my chance of recognizing Phil Foglio wandering around Ballard has now improved from zero to very-slightly-more-than-zero!) I wrote down the names of some of the interesting-looking things I'd not seen before, a few of which were print comics that turned out to be obtainable in digital format. Though after actually reading them, I was reminded of why I don't read traditional print comics, which seems to be because of the issue size. Apparently there is some sort of pressure to make the issue boundary a break in the story, which results in either nothing much at all happening or else a miniarc being crammed in disjointedly. |
| Friday, April 6th, 2012 | |
| 1:37 pm | Today's unfortunate perl discovery: use constant FOO => 'bar';
my %hash = ('FOO' => 'bad', 'bar' => 'good');
print $hash{FOO};will print "bad". Apparently this is because the hash-deref will quote its bareword contents before it will check that it's actually a constant function and evaluate it. This is reasonable considering how hashes are used, but man does it make defining constant keys annoying. |
| Thursday, March 29th, 2012 | |
| 5:46 pm | Triptych of the Completely Unrelated A while back the Tully's at Market & 22nd left after landlord disagreements. What's moved in is Ballard Coffee Works, the second branch of Seattle Coffee Works, which I rate as follows: Mocha: D (Moka's 'signature' = A+, Tully's 'intense dark' = A-) Chai: B (Taste of India = A, Trabant Spicy = A-) Baked Goods: C+ (Macrina = B, Besalu = A) This makes it the only coffee shop I've been to which fails the Mocha test and passes the Chai test--usually if one is failed it's the chai. Weird. Google Chrome has been kicked to the curb and I've gone back to Firefox. It's been moderately irritating this whole time, but the final straw was when I opened a page with some Flash widget that immediately started burning 90% of my CPU. Okay, sure, that happens sometimes. So I close the page. ...and it's still burning CPU. Huh? Well, whatever, I quit Chrome. Except that it's still burning all of my CPU. I have to kill it in Process Manager. For some reason, I've picked up Darksiders again and started replaying. Not entirely unexpectedly, Apocalyptic difficulty is... kinda hard, because everything has twice as much health and does thrice+ the damage. Some challenge rooms I die several times before figuring out the necessary trick well enough (on normal difficulty, you could just bull through more often) and for some opponent types I _still_ haven't figured it out and my only choice is to trump with Chaos Form. |
| Monday, March 26th, 2012 | |
| 3:52 pm | Started the reading for this quarter's Japanese literature class, which is short stories written in Brazil in the 30s. Consequently they don't borrow English words a lot of the time, but rather Portuguese ones, which makes things interesting. Additionally, this particular story has so far shown an irritating tendency to both use rare weirdo kanji for modernly-kana words (eg: 遠離る(とおざかる), 何処(どこ), 何時(いつ)) while putting words where the kanji would be actually helpful entirely in kana (eg: うとましい、おっぴらく、のびた). And here I picked this class because I thought it would be not that much work... |
| Saturday, March 24th, 2012 | |
| 5:12 pm | Stayed up too late and caught a cold. Sigh. At least I have a bit to get rid of it before spring quarter starts Monday. My MacBook apparently assumes that, if there is no ethernet cable plugged in when it wakes up from sleep, there will never be a cable plugged in until the next time it sleeps. If you plug one in during this time, it will not connect or show carrier. My previous one did not do this. Teh internetz reveals that this problem has been occurring erratically since 2009. Sigh. I guess they're not making heroic efforts to get it fixed since the workaround is only slightly inconvenient. [WoW] Been levelling a druid. This is actually the first character I've been through the new 1-60 zones with, and some of the lore they added is interesting. There are also some pretty silly quests, including this series with a druid named Zen'kiki in WPL... And after that sequence showing Illidan in Felwood, my esteem for Malfurion is reduced even more than it was previously. |
