I'm gonna look cool

So I finally ordered a pair of these.  Close-quartered apartment living + writing/reading/thinking = frustration.  I also got a nice white noise app for my phone, which has also been helping, but my little earbuds are just not enough to drown out the children environment.  (Seriously, this is not a playground.)

I just hope they ship fast.  I’d been using an iPod stereo as my computer speakers, and about a year ago the knob responsible for the power and volume stopped working.  Luckily it came with a small remote that still worked, but yesterday I dropped it in my cereal, and of course it’s not working anymore.  I fiddled with the knob enough to get it to turn on again, but the volume is too low, and my efforts to take it apart and look at it were foiled by my screwdriver shaft being too thick to get to the screws.  Even once I get it open, though, I’m sure I can’t fix it.  It’s a shame, because the sound is excellent for such a compact device, and it would really, really pain me to trash it when technically it still works fine.  In fact, I’d probably just store it just like my old Canon camera, taking it with me from apartment to apartment.  Thanks, companies of the world, for making piece of shit equipment that only lasts a year before taking up space in a landfill.  Do you know how many millions of people there are, trashing up the planet?  Stop making things that break.

In other news, we should all cross-dress more.

So earlier today I was talking to cryogenia and I was reminded of the comparison between the way we commonly refer to the two halves of the US: “back east” and “out west.”  Even if you’ve never lived in the east, you are likely to refer to it as “back east,” likewise even if you are from the west you might refer to it like it were still pioneer’s land.  Our collective American history is built into those short phrases: our common origin on the eastern coast and the gradual spread to the far-flung coast in the west.

And so I got to thinking that a person in the early west would have a very different social context than a person in the early east, and what better way to focus on this than to daydream about a romance between two such disparate boys colliding.

So now I have a bunch of library books to read.

• Bad Land: An American Romance
• The Human Tradition in the American West
• The American Mind; an interpretation of American thought and character since the 1880s
• Historic Cambridge in four seasons
• The End of American Innocence; a study of the first years of our own time, 1912-1917
• Winning the Wild West: the epic saga of the American frontier, 1800-1899

and last but not least,

• The Crimson Letter: Harvard, homosexuality, and the shaping of American culture

We’ll see if anything comes of it, but somebody’s got to want to read about a cowboy and a Harvard student, right?

I think I was only able to post regularly back in the day when I had no one else to talk to. Now there’s peeps to chat with and I have less to say.

But today, maybe I have things to say! Not all of them are so great though.

Family

In the beginning of April, my grampa had a heart attack and fell and broke his ankle, then had another heart attack while in the hospital. The fam agreed not to resuscitate if it happened again, but then it didn’t. My parents were going to cancel their trip to come out and see me since his condition was so unstable, but he didn’t stick around. A few days later he passed away. He was the last of my grandparents. It was rough not being on the east coast, and it’s still unreal because I’m so far away, but I don’t know that it would have helped to be there. There’s not much I can do with the concept of death.

After the funeral and its related transactions, my parents did come out for their trip as planned. We spent about three days in Disneyland and California adventure. It was a good time; good to have them in SoCal, and I think it was a good break for my mom. This was also my first experience with paid time off.

Cosplay

I think, if I can kick myself into action, I’ll be attempting Ishbal!Roy. I should have just enough material left to make the coat, but I will have to make my own bias tape trim, which I am none too excited about. I do however have the ring and some extra collar plates. I would need to make a new jacket, belt (maybe), over-jacket belt, and overcoat, and I’d have to buy gators to go over the boots.

This is unfortunately the best reference of the uniform I can find at my disposal:

But let’s focus on this one instead:

Nom.

Starbucks

Today they didn’t charge me for the soy in the London Fog I ordered because I’m there so often. I love our Starbucks. I love the people who work in it.

That’s it.

Writing

I haven’t been able to write consistently since college, but recently I’ve been doing pretty well in terms of dedication. I’m steadily plowing through Unconditional, which is the longest fic I’ve attempted, though that’s not saying very much. Anyway, it’s got me actively writing and interested and I’m glad people seem to like it so far because I think I’m so emotionally invested in it that I’d cry if they didn’t. 8D

Gadgetry

Before my parents’ visit, I bought a new camera. I hope it works forever. It’s delightful. It’s a Canon Powershot SX200. Here are the things that make me geek out over it.

• Need to mute the sounds, but can’t beep beep beep your way through the menu to do it? Fear not, with the right button combination you can mute all the sounds on the fly at startup.
• It has a cute little stand-alone clock on it.
• You can temporarily increase the screen brightness without digging through the menu.
• There are two time settings: one for home and one for travel, and you can flip between them.
• There’s a timer setting that will wait for you to enter the frame, then it will take the picture.
• It can automatically detect the scene mode based on its composition.
• It can automically correct red eye, or in playback mode afterwards.
• When photographing people, it will alert you if someone’s eyes were closed.
• It’s blue. I got the blue one.

Most of these things might be standard nowadays, but it’s been a few years since I went camera shopping, and the camera has definitely endeared itself to me. It also seems to take decent pictures, the LCD on the back is ginormous (to me), and despite its relatively small size, it has 12x zoom. (It also has that neat little feature that lets you choose a color, and it will desaturate all other colors.)

More Importantly

In other news, our lease is up. ;lajd;flkajdf

I can honestly say that progress is being made on the results of my writing request meme!  Currently I’m working on a response to crazyloststar’s “This Side of Me” prompt, but there will be more to follow, for crazyloststar, Bootses, and KalamityKat. 8D  THANKS GUYS.

But my excuse for being slow is a good one: YCON IS IN LESS THAN A WEEK HOW DID THIS HAPPEN.  I think everything is coming along, though.  Most of what we don’t have yet needs to be bought from a store, so that’s not as alarming as it could be.  Through the hurry and stress, though, I’m still so wildly excited about this year’s convention.  So many people I have connections with will be there.  It’s just a shame that it’s only three days!  How are we ever going to fit everything in D:  I also get to debut a new cosplay, which I haven’t done in a long time, and it’s very appropriate, so I’m extra excited.

In less joyous news, our router burned itself out, so we’ve been having to trade off the connection.  It throws off my normal rhythm quite a lot.  I do get the Internet all day, I just tend to want it most just before bed, so I end up staying up late to do that.  YES THAT IS MY EXCUSE FOR NOT SLEEPING ON TIME.  Maybe we can pick one up this weekend, but I definitely didn’t want to have to spend money on replacing something that wasn’t even that old.

And we need that router.  We need it because we have no cable and the new seasons are all starting up.  WE NEED IT NAO.

In other news, I’m hoping the new temp agency I signed up with will prove helpful, since the old temp agency never contacted me once about anything.  Urgh.  But mostly my thoughts are consumed by YCON.

And I’m not doing very well with the standard fare.  So I’m going to try this instead!

I NEED YOUR HELPS.

1. You upload a song for me.
2. You name a fandom I’m familiar with and a pairing/character.
3. I write a drabble or more on #2 inspired by #1.

The song can be something you’ve associated with #2 before, or just a song you like.  And I only really feel comfortable writing in the FMA fandom for now, so I hope you have something from FMA in mind. 8D;

SO LET’S TRY IT?  8DDDDD;

I’d need a cigarette.  I just ended up submitting a fic at 11:59pm on the day it was due and my nerves are shot.  It’s my own fault for procrastinating, but I really didn’t expect its final stages to take quite that long.  MUCH THANKS TO LACIDIANA  FOR BEING MY AWESOME BETA-ON-DEMAND.  I think I ended up with something at least cohesive and interesting, I just hope I didn’t somehow disqualify myself by submitting it so freaking down-to-the-wire.  I also hope I didn’t overlook something egregious.  And that I followed directions when I submitted it.

But even if something did go wrong, and it can’t be entered, at least I wrote something.  It’s something I can’t bear to look at for two months (until the contest is up), just in case I see a mistake I want to beat myself for, but I haven’t written anything of worth in so long that I’m glad I forced myself to do it, and with an idea that isn’t terrible.  Confusing maybe, but not terrible.

Now I need to go relax, kick back with some Jon Stewart and maybe a little Dick Van Dyke, and definitely some cookie dough.  I thank hulu.com for those first two, but I get credit for the last one.

So I’m back from y-con, have been since Tuesday morning (despite Monday trying to ruin everything), just haven’t popped over here to say so. My y-con post is coming soon, with pictures! Other than that, NaNoWriMo starts IN AN HOUR but I won’t be doing anything about that until tomorrow night. This month is going to be insane for me and I’m really irritated and frustrated over it, but . . . let’s see how it goes.

To recap, there’s NaNo, GRE’s to take on the 19th, and four applications to fill out for grad schools, including writing samples I don’t have. I also need to prep my profs with stuff for their recommendations, and probably some other huge thing I’m forgetting. Oh, transcripts. Yes.

Gonna be fun.

Or: how javascript pwns (and may not work). I did test it on Flock/Firefox and IE 6, so I hope it works for everybody. If it doesn’t, uh, I can’t fix it. :(

I’m now in the process of compiling a master fic list.

What took me so long? Glad you asked. See, I never knew how to organize a master fic list. By pairing? By length? Rating? Should Havoc*Roy go after Hughes*Roy, or after Havoc*Riza? Yes, these simple questions held me at a standstill. There was always the option of just listing it alphabetically, but then it’s hard for people to find the pairing they like, especially if the list is long (not that mine is).

SO, I had a workable solution by bookmarking all the fics and tagging them, because by clicking on tags you could find the pairing you wanted out of the list. But Blinklist was cluttered and they removed the cross-referencing of tags, which was why I had the list there in the first place.

BUT BEHOLD I have made my own filter using javascript I stole from sources credited at the bottom of the ficlist. It’s an alphabetized list of my fics, but it will filter itself when you click on characters you’re looking for, or the rating you want to read, or the length type, or whatever.

I’m still populating the list (as I move fics over here to WP) but there’s enough there now that you can play with it. :D TRY IT OUT.

> > > My New Master Fic List < < <