Currents of Time

Oookay. Let's see how long I make it this time! I've gone through the worst of the weirdness (we're now in the overcompensation mode where I am aggressively cheerful but also exceptionally exhausted because faking having energy is dead tiring) so hopefully soon I'll start seeing some real, positive results. Also, I've started taking vitamin D, which is supposed to help? Cautious optimism.


(FFXIV alpha trials are underway here in North America! I am not invited, alas. Maybe next phase!)


Next week! At this time! I will be in CHICAGO. So excited. The "25th Anniverary of Final Fantasy" Distant Worlds concert is on Friday, and I am absolutely going to be there. X3 My trips to and from are a bit convoluted, but they are cheap, so that is okay. I know someone who lives relatively close to the airport there in NYC and she is letting me crash on her couch on Wednesday and Saturday night. yay! I should bring or obtain a gift to express my gratitude. Saving money is awesome. Holidays are coming up, after all, gotta be able to buy... anything.


Actually, I am hoping to make a little extra by selling off more of my Transformers collection (as well as a few Final Fantasy figures). A fair bit of movie and BotCon stuff, as well as other random offerings. More-reasonable-than-eBay prices! Watch this space, if you've any interest.


Also hey speaking of holidays, who wants a card? Please leave a comment here (screened) or PM it to me or something? :3 I do not have energy or inclination to do much in the way of making them myself this year, but I still like to send them out. I have a bunch of pretty designs and nifty stamps.

ahahaha oh, geez, I don't pay much attention to these things, but I just noticed that my 1,000^th entry was the cat hair apocalypse one. That's beautiful. XD (Well, on LJ. I posted a few unique entries to DW before LJ annoyed me enough to make me import and start crossposting. So I guess on DW it was the last entry from the first Uncharted game. But that's way less hilarious.)

Anyway, here's something I've meant to link for a while! When I went to the Distant Worlds concert in Chicago last summer, I couldn't find one of the songs they played on youtube. But I have since found a copy of the live version of You're Not Alone (from FFIX), and now I have finally put it up for other people. It's pretty fantastic. I recommend listening to it even if you don't play FFIX.

Today was the last day of my surprise three-day weekend. I had plans, but I didn't go through with a single one of them, because sometimes I am pathetic like that. INSTEAD, I spent too much time playing Uncharted 3, and now, to my sorrow, it is over.

( So here's chapters 13 through 22. And the dying. Always the dying. )

Here's a quick update on my cat. My roommate's sister is having to leave her two cats here with us for a couple weeks starting tonight, and poor trauma kitty's upset all over again. I've moved all her stuff into my room and have been keeping the door shut, but she's spent a lot of time sitting around and growling. Poor thing! Hopefully she adjusts to them. Otherwise this is gonna be a bit rough. Though I... think they'll be gone in time for my weekend out of town later this month, so that'll be good, at least. Oof.



... WELL, NOW WHAT.

No! Yes! ... Maybe!

I am only a little behind, geez, leave me alone.

Remember how I was all emo 'cause I suck and being social is hard and nothing interesting was happening and wah wah angst (the "Less Awesome" section)? It was pretty much all negated, which means I either jumped the gun due to fail!brain or that my whining broke the universe (I prefer the latter explanation), because over the weekend I was both invited to a Halloween party (WHAT) and the VT region posted a date, time, and location for a kick-off party / write-in aaaand it was a day I had off work! WHOO!

Also I Halloweenified the apartment, which was fun. I carved a pumpkin! I also strung some orange lights over the doorway to the kitchen and hung some fake cobwebs all over the fake tree. I was gonna put 'em in the stairway, but then you'd only see them when you went in or out and bah! BAH, I say! And the pumpkin stayed inside because one, none of us were going to be home until late, anyway, and two, I did not want it to get smashed by jerks.

The party was really fun! We played Scrabble (and I somehow won, which, uh, first time for everything, I guess) and carved pumpkins and ate ALL THE JUNKFOOD and then I had an epic sugar crash on Tuesday, the likes of which I have not seen in a decade or so. Oof. Also there were fluffy cats! And they liked being pet! So every time one came within proximity to the group of us (it was a small party, so I did not get oversocialised! And most of us did not know each other, so there was not the group of people and then one or two straggles who sat around feeling awkward!) a few of us dropped everything to give them belly rubs or ear scritches.

The NaNo thing was less awesome, but still fun. It was a weirdly huge group (never seen it that big, wow), which was fine, but our region leader had to bring his kids and they ran around screaming a lot, despite his best efforts. And the girls next to me were talking a lot and I kept finding myself eavesdropping on their conversation instead of working on my story. But whatever, they didn't seem to mind my occasional interjections. And I'm up to 2.5k (ish. I'm writing in two different word docs and I don't feel like doing any math beyond adding the first two digits of both numbers), which could be better but whatever, I spent yesterday in a haze and then I had stuff to do today and I AM REALLY GOOD AT MAKING EXCUSES.


In other news, I have really, really got to remove this song from my Video Game Remixes playlist, because every time it comes on, I end up going back and listening to it, like, a million times, because it is THE CATCHIEST EVER oh my god.

I do not have a picture of it. :< I WILL GET ONE! But for now, rest assured! It is hideous. And now we have proof. So, okay, see. My father has this awful tie that his mother bought him as a gag gift (thinking she'd raised him better than that. I'm sure on one level or another, she knew he would actually wear it, though...). It's white and orange and, I dunno, other colours. And fuzzy. It's the fuzzy bit that really sells its ... hideousity (new word!?).

Well, Periwinkles (a jewelry chain) had a contest for the ugliest tie over the weekend and, knowing he had a truly unfortunate tie, and tempted by the prize of ... some amount of money (apparently in the form of a gift certificate to the store and not just free money, which had been his hope), my father entered the thing and - as you've undoubtedly figured out already - his tie won! Which is exciting. So now I can say without doubt that my father has the ugliest tie in the area. Because, you know. Jewelry store contest is totally the standard, there. (It's still awesome, okay.)


Meanwhile, my head-cast is running away from me again. Rana has now joined Hisime in having her own Facebook page I NEED TO GET A LIFE. I really don't even know why I did that. Hisime there was at least had reasoning behind it. But now the two of them are going back and forth at each other even worse than before. XD (I've changed Rana's wall from "friends only" to "everyone" for the time being, just in case anyone wants to see some of the ridiculous things are going on. I can't edit the settings of the post Rana has, but you can see the other one. Maybe I'll get bored of it soon? We can hope.)



AAAA I LEAVE FOR CHICAGO ON FRIDAY MORNING I AM SO EXCITED. But also nervous. Mostly excited! (Kind of weird, though, haha, a month ago, I was more looking forward to Chicago, because I figured BotCon would not be as awesome as OH MAN YES FINAL FANTASY CONCERT, and then BotCon was basically the best thing ever, so I am now like, can Chicago even begin to hope to top Pasadena? We'll just have to wait and see! My money's kinda on no, though.)

dnsajklf Distant Worlds concerts, you are so close. Still, even if it is not as completely fantastic, I will still have attended both halves of the concert. And I have been wanting to attend one of these ever since they first announced it way back when. I mean, they had both "20020220 Music from Final Fantasy" and "Tour de Japon", neither of which I had any hope of attending, and then "Dear Friends" never came close enough for me to get to it, and then "Distant Worlds" has kind of made a point of not matching up with my money and availability limitations, but damn it enough is, apparently, enough, and so now I am throwing myself into a bed bug hotspot just for a video game music concert. (I am a goddamned lunatic.)


(Also I've had this Japanese song about frogs stuck in my head all day. I learnt it when I was 10! WHY IS IT STILL IN MY BRAIN and whyyyy is it rattling around all of a sudden?)


(GERO GERO GERO GERO GWA GWA GWA)

GUYS GUYS WE HAD A THUNDERSNOW LAST NIGHT IT WAS SO AWESOME :D :D

AND THEN THE PLOWS COULDN'T BE BOTHERED TO CLEAR EITHER THE ROADS OR THE SIDEWALKS THAT WAS... ALSO AWESOME. But I wasn't too late to work. It could have been worse! And since it was Superbowl Sunday, the customers were all even more lunatic bread zombies than usual there was free food in the break room! And it was very tasty. :3

ANYWAY I started playing Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days recently!

( You know what that means )

And while I probably could keep a death list for this game, I've found I haven't been. There aren't lots of exciting ways to die, just the mobs, so. Eh.


In utterly unrelated news, I CAN'T STOP LISTENING TO THIS PIECE OF MUSIC WHAT THE HECK HELP its pretty okay (I even managed to find a YouTube video that doesn't have that song with the minor spoiler in the title over in the suggestions bar!)

I went to a concert tonight! EXCITING. (I do not go to concerts often and, off the top of my cold-addled head - oh, right! It's just a cold! Not new seasonal allergies! Yay! - I have actually only been to three. The Beach Boys, when I was quite young, and that was with my parents, and then I saw Styx twice (and the second time we got to meet the band, that was cool) with my Girl Scout troop. And tonight I went to see Ingrid Michaelson, because she is awesome. On the way in, I got carded 'cause I apparently don't look a day over 13 so of course the guy at the door didn't believe I was over 21. (They have a bar inside, so if you're under 21, you get a big, black X on your hand. Considering I don't even drink, I should've just let him mark me rather than fumble for my license.) Also, there were several ukuleles.

A pair of guys calling themselves The Guggenheim Grotto opened for her (I'd checked out some of their stuff on YouTube earlier, so I already knew they were going to be pretty good). Here are two songs by them, both of which they performed. The Universe is Laughing and Her Beautiful Ideas (I really like that second video). I will probably buy some of their music at some point, but I have not got around to it yet.

After they left, we stood around for half an hour... no idea why, that was pretty lame. Then Led Zeppelin's Immigrant Song came over the speakers and while we were all going "bwuh?" Ingrid Michaelson and her band came onstage in cloaks, which they then proceeded to throw off and scream along with the song, and it was all a bit weird, but then they got on to the actual concert and it was a lot of fun!

Also at one point she managed to get us all to suck air in through our teeth (she did it and then started talking about how weird it was to do that and next thing you know...)... and then it became some weird conducting the audience thing and it sounded really weird. And apparently we sounded like a rainstick, see subject line.

At the end, haha, before their last song, she told us that after this song, they were going to just hide onstage rather than walk off and then back on for an encore. So we just stood there clapping and cheering while they huddled together under one of the cloaks for a while, and then their actual final song was a punk version of "The Way I Am" which was... amazing. Seriously, if they ever decide to actually go and do an Eliot Loves Cheese side project, I will totally buy the album. (Here is an... acceptable, anyway, video of that.)


It was a lot of fun and I am glad I was able to go! (And glad that my mother really likes her stuff, too, because she provided the ride that allowed me to go, since the bus service cuts off long before concerts ever get out, and I am absolutely not walking all that way back home, especially not later on at night, and doubly so not when I am sick...).


And it's National Coming Out Day, so, yay! I am having angst about related things, though, so mostly I am feeling cynical and grumpy. (Dear World; Asexuality exists. Please stop telling us we're wrong. And, look, GBLT/QLTBG/[acronym of choice] groups? Coming from you, who have also been told that you don't exist? That really annoys and really alienates me. And, yes, I am allowed to say it alienates me because I identify as pan-probably-leaning-towards-homo-romantic rather than heteroromantic, and, yes, I know there's debate on whether heteroromantic asexuals qualify as queer, and that is not what I am talking about here in this paragraph. [in short BLAH BLAH BLAH STOP BEING JERKS TO YOUR ALLIES, and yes that includes, say, the bisexuals who 'don't count because they can be in a straight relationship and thus pass as heterosexual' and transexuals and EVERYTHING ELSE. I don't really feel any loss from being left out, but some people could probably be quite upset by it] ... and, no, it's not just trolls on the internet I see/hear spouting things like that.)

Aniko has improved a lot in her Silent Hill-ing since changing her strategy to RUN AWAY UNSUCCESSFULLY (usually including doing things like running into the monsters and running into walls and running past the target door and usually ending in death) to RAAARGH KILL IT. We've been through the hospital, and I've taken to entertaining myself by, you know, being annoying (BUSINESS AS USUAL).

Also, I renamed the Air Screamers as "shenanigans birds" after running away from a flock of them and hollering that I didn't have time for them and, I don't know, it made sense at the time.

ANYWAY, my new hobby is queuing up inappropriate music while Aniko is running around. Last time we played, I kept playing "Rufus' Welcoming Ceremony" and then pausing it and restarting it randomly. Then I stuck to just playing it when she had the map open, and playing the victory theme whenever she found an item... and the YOU LOSE! death music every time she died (which was probably a bit mean, but also hilarious). I also had a track for whenever I messed up and gave her the wrong instructions. Once or twice I played the fight music when she was swarmed by monsters. I had a whole selection. It was pretty fun and also kept making us (or at least mostly me) giggle.

...Actually, it is still in Winamp. My list of songs included: from FFVII, Continue, Rufus' Welcoming Ceremony, Fighting, Still More Fighting, Fanfare, Trail of Blood, Chasing the Black-Caped Man, Crazy Motorcycle, and J-E-N-O-V-A. From FFVIII we have, A Sacrifice, The Loser, The Winner, The Man with the Machine Gun, SeeD, Waltz for the Moon, Find Your Way (she asked if I had a track for wandering hopelessly and I said, "actually..."), Junction (that was the save music), Shuffle or Boogie, Slide Show Part 2, and Silence and Motion. From FFIX, not too many because I was getting sick of pulling up files, Slew of Love Letters and Black Mage Village, and from FFX (same story), Prelude, Mi'ihen Highroad (Harry does not bounce in time with it, thank goodness), and Bevelle's Secrets (though technically that's from FFX-2).

If I do it again, I'll undoubtedly add more.

I mentioned in the second post about Mexico that during our first night in Querétaro, we had some people perform for us, and that we then were given a copy of their CD. HERE IS THAT CD, if you were interested.


Las Enaguas - Los Besos que te di


(It's a homemade CD, so odds of you finding this anywhere other than where the two of them are performing seem pretty small.)



Strange and unrelated comment: my laptop seems to disrupt my radio. I start getting static when it's on.

.... my laptop is a monster from Silent Hill?

Amazon's mp3 library is probably one of the worst things that has ever happened to my wallet. (Well, uh. THIS ONE WAS FREE, AT LEAST. Don't look at me.) (I think I need to just stop browsing YouTube for music videos, because then the amount of new pretty music I encounter will drop off by at least half...)

TODAY WAS MY MOTHER'S BIRTHDAY. She made a cake and it failed miserably*, so then she made a second cake, which came out nice until she dumped a lot of icing on it, and then it ... kind of collapsed in on itself. It was hilarious and I'm not entirely sure why. You could literally watch it slowly slump more and more... We ended up scraping it all back off and putting it in a bowl. So now you have to put it back on if you want any.

* While I was at work, my brother and my mother put half of the first cake in the blender and made "cake balls." (The second half followed later that night, and then Mom melted chocolate all over them. STRANGELY DELICIOUS.)


This morning I had a melting-brain moment. Mother was talking about how she likes a radio bit - think it's called World Cafe? - and how they play pretty much anything. They went from a pretty foreign language song to "Love Shack" right then, so I laughed and said, "Yeah, that's quite different."

Except it came out as "that's quite that's quite that's quite that's quite that's quite that's quite - different." It was the strangest thing. I could not stop repeating myself. Then I went around all day feeling extremely off my mental balance.

ALSO JUST ONCE I WOULD LIKE TO HAVE A DAY AT WORK WHERE MY CUSTOMERS DO NOT EITHER (a) CONFUSE ME TERRIBLY OR (b) MAKE ME WANT TO MURDER SOMETHING.

I'm probably going to overload the portion of my brain dedicated to keeping track of what I'm watching and what's going on in it, but that is okay. We will just all it making up for lost time. You see, after Beast Machines finished showing in, oh, what, late 2000? Jecca didn't watch anything on the TV until, um. Well. Heroes, actually, though there were a few things she watched on DVD in between, primarily while she was at her first college, in the 2005-2006 school year. So, if anyone had been wondering, how is she simply not aware of any of this? THAT IS WHY. (And it's not like she watched much beyond ridiculous robot cartoons for a few years before that, anyway...) (She has since caught up on many things through the internet and reruns, and now she watches House, and occasionally CSI because it is hilariously stupid.)

And, you know, am only plugging away at three different shows right now, anyway, which really isn't so bad. And only one of them has a Sam in it so far! Yaay. Shows in question now: Supernatural (which is progressing VERY SLOWLY, since my mother doesn't have a lot of free time), Lost (which I'm not entirely fond of - it is hard to like a show when you're not overly fond of the main character, but Aniko asked me to so she could ramble at me about it, so, you know... I committed to this one before the others! And then I figure, hey, halfwayish finished, may as well. Possibly I'm masochistic), and now Buffy the Vampire Slayer (which has been sadly predictable so far, but I've been told Season 2 is where it really picks up or something or other with wording that implies it becomes awesome and I always give things more than three episodes before I declare an actual opinion, anyway). (Bonus Fun Fact: without me telling my mother I was considering watching it, she started talking about Buffy. She's not seen it, she was just drawing a comparison or something, but I thought that was kind of weird and amusing.)


I got more Final Fantasy XI music! (Technically my mother did, as it came in her name, but whatever. I stole it from her. AM THF. ME STEALY.) So! Wings of the Goddess expansion soundtrack is MINE and so now I have Ronfaure In The Past (which they call "Autumn Footfalls") STUCK IN MY HEAD. But it's pretty and I love it muchly. And I got a copy of the piano collection, which came with a harpsichord for my Mog House! Shiny.


Here is a strange revelation about myself I keep having and wanting to share with people but never do because I am always afraid I will sound so lame. Shut up, fear.

( But I'm still putting it behind a cut. )

FASCINATING.