Current Ramblings
Thursday, January 27, 2005
Gngh.
I was wrong. My life is a painful series of losses, changes, and heartbreaking choices.
I took my car in today, and naturally the horrible thwacking noise can only be silenced by about $400 worth of repairs, because of course it was the struts, what with the idea of it being something simple like the brake pin being laughable to Fate. I think I am simply not meant to save money. When I am broke, these things do not happen. Nobody breaks into my car, random parts of it do not start rebelling, I do not get horribly ill and have to buy bottles and bottles of assorted non-generic antibiotics because my doctor is a retard. One could say (if one were Graham) that I should be happy that I have some money saved when these things do happen, but the way I'm starting to see it, having money in my bank account is some kind of bad karma magnet. The universe clearly feels that if I have a couple hundred dollars saved and a bonus check on the way, nature has gone out of whack and it must do something to restore the status quo of me being poor. I'm not entirely sure I want to see what horrible things are going to befall me once I'm out of school and have a well-paying job. Most likely I will simply have to die.
posted@1:38 PM by:Trixter: 0 comments
Tuesday, January 25, 2005
To people who know more about cars than I do:
I hit a rather nasty pothole tonight (naturally I had to encounter it in the dark when I couldn't see just how bad it was) and for the rest of the trip there was this rattling sound when I drove over anything vaguely bumpy, like something plastic shaking vertically and bumping into something, right around the rear passenger-side wheel well/gas tank sort of area. Everything visible and easily poked seems firmly attached. Anybody got any ideas as to what I knocked loose and how much I'll have to go into debt to have it reattached?
posted@11:24 PM by:Trixter: 0 comments
Monday, January 24, 2005
Randomness and a little angst.
I probably shouldn't even be getting started on this, what with how early I have to be up in the morning and all, and how I always end up taking forever to actually write these while I multitask, but I just wanted to post about some stuff. Call me an addict if you must.
A few days back Walky posted a link in his own quite prolific if usually less verbose LiveJournal to the blog of the guy who's scripting the new Transformers movie. He apparently got so many hits from that link that he e-mailed Walky to thank him. Life is frightening and surreal.
Ron called me yesterday while I was on my lunch break to remind me of the existance of Alternators Windcharger and to ask if I wanted him, since he had found one at the Wal-Mart north of town. I told him I definitely wanted him to pick him up for me, especially since I just don't have the time to go toy hunting much between work and school and Alternators distribution is shit. But I've put a little thought into my feelings on the toy since then. (No, Ron, I'm not saying I don't want him. :) ) I really honestly haven't had any feelings on him. None. It's an apathy bordering on denial. It's just that, in a series dedicated entirely to reviving old characters, many of them ones I've been especially fond of, I don't know what to do with a toy like him. He was clearly, obviously designed to be one character (that being Overdrive), is even being released as that character in Japan, and yet because of trademark issues and what have you, he has been declared to be another character (being Windcharger), who he does not resemble in any way except for car color, certainly not to the degree that every other toy in this line has looked like who they were supposed to be. Presented with this paradox, my mind simply shuts down, denying the existance of such a thing. I cannot form an opinion because I cannot accept the existance of it. It's like asking me how I feel about being my own grandmother. I'm sure once I've been presented with the undeniable existance of this toy, this...Alternators Windcharger, I will eventually be able to come to terms with it. But if he is Windcharger, he won't be the one standing by Grimlock. Not after that Find-Your-Fate book...
I have come to realize lately that all I ever write is angst. Ever. I can't even start to think of how I would write a happy story. I write the occasional decent fight, but it's usually an excuse for later angst. Thinking about it, my last two actual finished fanfics ("The Last Mini-Con" and "Patrol", if you're so inclined) both started with pretty good fight scenes in which one character is rescuing another and then decended into angst and varying degrees of survivor's guilt. (Actually, that's worrisomely similar... I am in a rut.) I have this habit of writing whatever I feel like and then later going back and psychoanalyzing myself with what I've written, but am I just a miserable person? Do I really see life as a painful series of losses, changes, and heartbreaking choices? I can be happy, so why am I so against letting my characters be happy? Even Walky has managed that much. And is all this a key to my persistant writer's block? I've written, certainly, but all I've been able to produce have been snippets of larger stories involving pain of some sort. Am I just the Lurlene McDaniel of Transformers fanfic? I don't know. And goodness knows I don't have the time to worry over getting out of my funk with all my schoolwork.
(Yes, to any book geeks reading this...I totally made a Lurlene McDaniel reference. I need to get out of Young Adults ASAP.)
posted@10:53 PM by:Trixter: 0 comments
Thursday, January 20, 2005
Need...Stimulation...
Being snowed in is making me feel restless tonight, Blog, so I'm gonna talk to you for a bit.
It's not even like there's all that much snow. Back in Houghton, a day like today would still have likely ended in a trip to Marquette. But here in Columbus apparently the idea of this thing called a "snowplow" is still foreign to them. It's like they have just enough to keep the major freeways sorta almost clear and that's it. So while it wouldn't be completely impossible to get to, say, Wal-Mart tonight to look for my other two sweet little Energon Aerialbots, I'd really rather not risk it for something that will likely not even be there. Risking your life for toys is one thing, risking your life to come home empty-handed is quite another.
I got a really awesome new coat on a really good pre-clearance sort of sale at Kohl's the other night, plus I had a gift card that covered it. I just wanted to mention that, because I like it a lot, plus I've gotten immediate use out of it.
School is going pretty well. I got 100% on my last algebra quiz, and I feel really confident about the exam I took earlier tonight. I'm realizing now that the actual test questions are always easier than the homework, because by only giving you a couple questions on each topic they don't get bored and start throwing in weird shit like the textbook. Computer class has now taught me a deep hatred of Word's grammar check, because my conversational writing style is far too much for its tiny applet brain to accept. I'm sure it's wonderful if you're not the sort of person who could teach a grammar class. I also think my teacher is coming to terms with the idea that most of us already know at least the basics and he doesn't have to do things like start the class by reviewing how to create a new file folder.
I've started reading a new manga series that I'm really enjoying so far. It's called Tsubasa, and it's sorta like Marvel's Exiles. Or, well, Sliders, for that matter. It takes a lot of characters from previous CLAMP projects and shows them in other universes and settings, starting with the cast of Cardcaptor Sakura and touching on Chobits, X, Magic Knight Rayearth, and the also-current XXXHolic just in the first book. I've found myself with pitifully small pulls on comic day now that Dreamwave's gone, so I've started spending that money on manga. I'd rather give it to CLAMP than Dreamwave anyway.
Now that I've started up Pokemon Box I'm feeling compelled to move ahead and put together my Super Ultimate Final Team, by which I mean the team I'll be taking to fight the second round with the Elite Four in LeafGreen. I'm thinking I want Jirachi in there, but I'm not sure who else. I'd like to know if storing them in Box and then putting them into your other cartridge will change their level of attachment, because I've read some other trade-based changes (specifically evolutions) don't occur with Box. I don't want to send my Blaziken over to LeafGreen, for instance, if it'll make it not like my Sapphire trainer anymore, but I do have a Torchic I already bred that I can level up and use if I need to. I'll have to research that. I'll probably just level up some of my best Pokemon and then compare the stats between ones with the same types.
I've been meaning for a while now to just give a quick shout-out to people who have e-mailed me in regard to my blog who are not people I otherwise know. It's always surprising to me when people outside my own little circle come across this, because I rarely write it for any sort of large audience. I can only hope they're still reading it and I haven't bored them to death yet. It's really a lot of what convinced me to work on making the blog the focus of the main page of my site, though that's still being worked on. I don't mean to be snotty in not replying to e-mails, I'm just horrible at actually doing it when it requires more than a quick answer to a question.
And I think you're all quite ready for me to shut up now.
posted@10:46 PM by:Trixter: 0 comments
Saturday, January 15, 2005
Get off my lawn!
Yes, it's been right on a week since I updated, so clearly it's time for me to start whining and bitching like a crotchety old woman.
(Sorry for the no-update, but while the combination of work and school seem to be working out pretty well stress-wise, they're conspiring to keep me offline. Poor Fang thought I was mad at him when he realized how little we'd talked lately. <:) I probably just won't update quite as much as usual until I get a handle on things.)
I finally went and joined this new Master Collector Transformers club tonight. I have to say they drive quite a hard bargain, and one I'm not really thrilled about. The whole thing strikes me as really Barger-y. (Backstory: Dennis Barger ran BotCon '96, with far, far too much emphasis on the dealers.) Now I did join, so I can't even say that all this is enough to make me stay away, especially with the prospect of exclusive stuff and extra Vector Prime. But then again, I actually paid money - money I could have been spending on things like tasty food or My Little Ponies! - on Dreamwave's sometimes-atrocious TF comics, so it clearly takes a massive amount of suck for me to not spend money on Transformers. The thing about this club is that it feels far too much to me like what they're really selling you is a subscription to their "indexed Toy and Doll trading newspaper with several thousand classified ads each month." "Your newsletter will come every other month stitched in the center of your issue of Master Collector." "During the in-between months, you will receive your Master Collector and a small insert with upcoming shipping and ordering information." My issue of what now? Oh, and look! "With your club membership you receive a FREE 30- word ad each month that will be placed in the print version and online version of Master Collector." Yay! Because all we care about is the bling-bling! There's no such thing as a Transformers fan, just a legion of Transformers collectors out there for toy sellers to fleece! (And I do consider there to be a difference between the two, largely judgable by your concern about the "value" of your "collection".) I really wonder if they get to charge more for their ads for getting this club. I'm glad to have something going on, and I'm looking forward to the actual bimonthly Transformers content, but I don't have any interest at all in looking through their little ad-sheet. I've been at this game so long I have just about all the non-current toys I want, and bought them at retail for half the life of the line. I'd be just as happy not having more dead trees in my mailbox, thanks. Or as my Aussie friend Fin, who has to pay $89 versus my $40 for living overseas, put it: "See, that's the only thing making me hesitant about joining. The whole 'shitload of postage duty on a heap of trader magazines I don't give a fuck about.'" I guess I just wish it had gone to some people - even another professional company! - that didn't need a volunteer fan panel (Ben on it or not) because they understood the people who were here for the love of it as much as the people who were here for the bling.
posted@1:10 AM by:Trixter: 0 comments
Saturday, January 08, 2005
NEMESIS STEREO.
Unable to bear the sound of my own thoughts any longer, I set out today to replace my car stereo. I was partial to the one I lost, JVC's KD-G200, and Best Buy still had it listed on their web site, so I started there. They still had it on display, but the closest store that actually had one they could sell me was in Dayton. The guy there suggested I try H. H. Gregg, which is a local-ish chainabout on par with Circuit City. They didn't have the exact same model, either. What they had - and what I ended up buying - was the KD-AR200. I have dubbed this striking and clearly evil mechanism...Nemesis Stereo. It's almost exactly the same stereo, but significantly...more black. (Aside to my non-Transfan readers: A few years ago Takara started this thing with making evil black versions of Optimus Prime. The first one was dubbed Scourge in the US, but subsequent ones have had the somewhat more descriptive moniker of Nemesis Prime.) It's also part of this "Arsenal" subline that I don't quite understand. Graham pointed out that JVC is a major sponsor of Britian's Arsenal soccer team, but nothing on the site suggests a relationship with that. So who knows. I like it, though, because it doesn't stand out so much from the rest of my rather subdued center console. And it was on sale for $20 less than the first one.
And I am proud to say that I rejected paying $60 for installation and installed it my own damn self, despite the old man who rang me out asking if I was going to get "a friend" to install it. I really, really hate shopping for anything vaguely technical because of that sort of crap. I just won't even go in Radio Shack anymore. Yes, it was a big project of a kind I hadn't undertaken before, and I really didn't quite entirely know what I was doing, but that didn't mean I was going to just go whining to some man to take care of it for me. I hit a couple stores, found what I needed, discovered it was going to be much more complicated than I realized...and then I got in there and figured it out. I hadn't appreciated that you got a plug with the stereo with wires coming out of it, and a seperate set of connectors with wires coming out of them for the car, and then had to match all the wires up and splice them together yourself. But I managed without any help, and now everything works exactly like it's supposed to. I was actually impressed by how unpatronizing the guy I talked to at Wal-Mart about splicing stuff was after dealing with the guy at H. H. Gregg. Maybe he was just more used to women who were willing to get their hands dirty.
On the subject of shinies, I came to the conclusion in class on Wednesday night that it wouldn't hurt to invest in a flash drive for my computer class files. I had intended to spend around $20 and I was hoping to find a 64mb one for that. I was using my parents' credit card since it was for school, but I didn't want to spend more than I would if it was my own money to buy something fancier than I needed. But while the best Target had was a pair of 32mb ones for $28, Staples had one of those compound sales where sale + rebate = sick discount. So for what will be a mere $20 when the $10 rebates arrives, I got a super-slick 256mb SanDisk Cruzer Micro. I don't know what I'll do with all that space, but now I have all the files I need for this quarter safely on my hard drive. I'll want to use the school computers to print, since we only pull the printer out here on an as-absolutely-necessary basis, so at least I won't have to worry about smashing floppy disks in my backpack. And the blue LED is beautiful.
posted@12:47 AM by:Trixter: 0 comments
Thursday, January 06, 2005
Life.
None of my insurance is going to cover any of the break-in from yesterday. I'm not thrilled about having to blow a chunk of my savings to replace my radio, but at least I have savings. It turns out Best Buy dropped the price of the stereo I had a little, which is nice, and they have some on sale that might be worth looking over. The body work, well...I guess I'll just have to do an ugly job of it myself. Every time I went somewhere today I was struck by how small the area that was damaged actually is. The initial shock and horror of the moment has seared it into my mind as an inch-thick pool of glaring bare metal. I might put up a pic tomorrow, but it's really only maybe a centemeter out from the plastic around the lock and handle. It's already rusting, so I'll definitely need to do something, but if I can put some primer and a coat of plain black (if I can't get a closer match) over it it won't be too obvious. I hate the prospect of doing body work in the winter, but if I leave it 'till the weather's warmer there won't be anything left to paint.
School is going really well. I'm taking two classes, Beginning Algebra and an intro computer class. The computer class basically covers Microsoft Office 2003, which is good because office suites are one of the computer applications I know next to nothing about, but bad because it's not something I'm particularly interested in. Learning how to use Excel does not equal programming. But I suppose we all have to start in the same place. I was put into the algebra class by the placement testing, but the class seems to be jarring my memory more than teaching me things. It's good, though, because I'm finding it easy to relearn things I once knew. Both classes move a bit slower than I like, but that's been par for the course for most of my life in the educational system. I just have to work very hard to resist the things that brought me down in my younger years, i.e. writing fanfic in the back of my notebook and playing Tetris on my graphing calculator. And it'll probably be for the best if I pick computers facing the teacher so I'm not tempted to take advantage of that. I feel really good about this so far. It'll be a lot of hard work, but I think it'll be easy enough to understand. I haven't been this enthusiastic about school since kindergarden.
posted@9:31 PM by:Trixter: 0 comments
Wednesday, January 05, 2005
Well, fuck, pt. 2
School is going really well. Maybe I'll post about that tomorrow or Friday.
My car was broken into while I was at work today. About a year and a half ago two of my coworkers had their cars broken into behind the store, but since we changed to letting everybody park in front of the building, several spaces out, we hadn't had any problems. As far as I know, I'm the first person to have their car broken into in front of the shopping center, though I could be wrong. Still, it seemed safe enough to leave the faceplate on my stereo, which is a mistake I will not make once it's replaced. Fortunately, the stereo was all they got. I was worried for a bit that they had gotten the CDs, too, after running back into the store to call the police immediately after finding the lock mangled and the console hanging open, but they weren't clever enough to find them under that hat on top of the emergency brake. They looked hard enough for the CDs that the compartment between the seats looked like it had exploded, but apparently lifting that hat took too much thinking. I hope they like the Journey cassette they found in there. I didn't like the idea of trying to replace that Ash CD I got in England, or any of those anime CDs. So I'm going to call around to the insurance companies tomorrow. My car insurance should cover the body damage at the very least (it's a pretty bare-bones policy), and we have renter's insurance in case they won't replace the stereo. And if not, well, that's not what I had in mind for the money I saved over the Christmas season, but at least I have savings. Not enough for the body work, but I need music badly.
I hate to just post to bitch, but between this, and getting sicker than I have ever been in my life over Christmas, and having one of my favorite coworkers leave the store, and having to spend an entire day getting shuffled around an airport, these past couple weeks have been pretty horrible.
posted@10:51 PM by:Trixter: 0 comments
Monday, January 03, 2005
Oh! I feel it! I feel the cosmos!
So I told Matt at work I'd try to update tonight, since he was pointing out to me today that it had been almost a whole five days since my last post, but I have about 20 minutes and there's just been so much going on I feel kind of overwhelmed. Everybody made it just fine for the New Year's shindig, even though Walky had to drive to Cincinatti to pick up Maggie and then Maggie went to the hospital. If I had realized that people would be arriving as early as the 29th I would have taken more time off work, but you live and you learn. Next year I might just have to take the full four days off, if we even have it in Columbus again. We spent an inordinate amount of time at Walky and Steve's playing Katamari Damacy, which Steve got Graham for Christmas. If you don't know what it is already, well, the folks at Penny Arcade will do a better job of explaining than I. I also did some real-life lurking and got through Feel the Magic on my beloved DS. I picked up Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles at the game shop we went to on 5th Avenue, but that turned into McFly and Chip and myself sitting there getting heckled by five other people, so we didn't play a lot of that. DDR never quite worked out, either, and as best as any of us could tell, including Maggie, who reads Japanese, you needed multiple carts for Pokemon Dash's multiplayer. But three of us did sit around Steak and Shake sending crude drawings of genitalia to each other with PictoChat, so we got to do some DS multiplayer. And Katamari Damacy was good enough to overcome everything else. We didn't take any of the consoles (other than the omnipresent handhelds) to Ron's for NYE Proper, but I took my tape with a couple episodes of Challenge of the GoBots on it and we had Steve's Headmasters dub set. I had forgotten just how bad the spot of, erm, unfortunate animation in one of my episodes of GoBots was. Three of the Renegades are clearly gang-raping Leader-1. I have been told a clip of this is readily available on the internet, which I suppose isn't surprising. But it's really even funnier when you're drunk. And on Sunday we played Paper Telephone, which is always a comedy goldmine. Especially when, like me, you use it as a chance to make fun of Pat Lee.
Okay, I should really get to bed. I start classes tomorrow, and I still have to throw all my stuff in an appropriately large backpack. Wish me luck, I'll let everybody know how it goes!
Damn, I hope I haven't forgotten how to learn...
posted@11:12 PM by:Trixter: 0 comments