Syntactic Sugar

ur doin it wrong

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 04:34:10 GMT

IGT, that is. (IGT stands for interlinear glossed text) My teacher made this cute LOLcats reference during class ;) Yay for tecchie teachers.

It turns out I may be able to do a project for my class which syncs up with something my boss wants me to research at work. How cool would that look on my resume? It would basically be doing something like taking some of our lesson text, parsing it out using an open source spell checker/morphological parser.

I took my hair out. Too many bums were stopping me on the street this time. I think the flower to hair ratio was too high. I may do something like curly dreads next time, but the downside of this is that you can't use hot water to wash your hair, so I'd have to always wear a shower cap and rinse my hair in cold water.

I've been really PMSy/weepy/grumpy the past week and a half. I have a bit of a feud going on with the barista at my favorite coffee shop, so I can't go in there anymore when he's working, and he's working all the time. I even called the owner because I was so upset over losing my beloved coffee shop, but it seemed to make things worse after she forgot the drink card she got me for my trouble and said barista starts going, "WHY WERE YOU TALKING TO THE OWNER" etc etc. It's silly, really. I guess Seattle/Portland are known for these sassy (read: hipster asshole) baristas who are way too cool to treat you respectfully. Honestly, I'd go somewhere else, but they have vegan scones and sandwiches and muffins and stuff and sometimes they are for sale for 1 dollar. Also there is white coffee, which no other Seattle coffee shop has.

I'm playing through KOTOR again and reading Wookipedia too much. I really should have been a Xenolinguist. Unfortunatley, only Star Trek did anything worthwhile with its languages. Huttese is basically BS and there's nothing rivalling Klingon.

I recently sent my Ukrainian co-worker this LOLworthy video. Apparently her (non Ukrainian) husband asked, "What language is that?"

<3 method. They have these dryer sheets and detergent called "Rice Milk and Mallow" that I looove. It's for babies so it smells maybe a little baby-ish, but who wouldn't want their clothes to smell like marshmallows! I also got a great product of theirs that supposedly smells like Ylang Ylang for cleaning your shower. My shower is no longer all scummy ^_^ Plus I don't poison the house and my cats with chemicals. And yet, I still wonder why people call me a hippie -_- sshhh...

I met someone who wants to learn Icelandic. We are going to try to learn it together but I'm afraid it may be sitcom worthy - a linguist trying to learn a language with a non linguist is Bad News.

Non-Linguist: "Gosh, that sound is funny!"
Linguist: "That's a pre-aspirated stop. (explains aspiration for 10 minutes)"
Non-Linguist: "Let's learn how to say hello!"
Linguist: *doesn't hear because she has an icelandic saga she is glossing morpheme by morpheme*
Non-Linguist: "I don't know when to use this case"
Linguist: *gets out a problem from undergrad syntax on case in Icelandic*

Actually, I wish I had that problem. I forgot what was so special about case in Icelandic.

My cat looks kind of mad. I wonder what that's all about.

Now for more KOTOR. Goodnight!

All you need is "Love"

Sun, 19 Apr 2009 02:45:53 GMT

I had some Baba ghanoush at a vegan get together a while back. One of the ingredients was "Love". When I went to whole foods today, I picked up some Baba ghanoush of a different brand, which was conspiciously lacking "Love" as an ingredient. Guess which one is better?

On Wednesay, I went to the writing group with Kim and her friends. One of them hauls junk for a living, and brought a scrapbook from some dead guy. There was a picture labled "Mashall Tito" and a picture labled "Shimida". Thankfully, we were all blissfully unaware of history and started making guesses about these people based on their pictures. We decided to write about different stages in these guys lives, and how they knew eachother. I, of course, wrote about some gay bar in Moscow. What a timeless love story! People do need to write more Tito/Shimda slash.

I have a small container of "cat grass" which is actually evil wheat grass. Wheatgrass makes me throw up, so I don't like it. But I guess that's the point for cats. Anyway, it's dying. I give it water all the time...I'm not sure what's wrong. I guess they don't really eat it, so that's fine.

Last night I went to an opening at The Henry. Some notes about Seattle art openings: TONS of queer girls. Tons of cute girls and boys. Tons of good food (foccacia bread and hummus) Note to self: Go there more often. As for the actual exhibits, there was a lame video one which triggered my apeirophobia, a wall of dart boards that people could just throw darts at, and cool charcoal animation as well as some 3D stereograms. Ok sorry just returned from a wikipedia excursion on Magic Eye type images. Moving on...Oh, and there was also an 8-Bit-Music DJ called Leeni. Good music!

I got a bitchin' messenger bag with interchangable flaps from etsy. My Nokia and EEEPc fit perfectly in there! Zoes Bags FTW, yo!

My coworker got deported (sort of), so work has been kind of crazy. She was in charge of all the scheduling organizing stuff, which I suck at. Work has also become a dangerous environment with all of the semiautomatics (nerf guns).

I told my dad that a worker at Whole Foods was "giving me lip". He then said something to the effect of, "I'd give a cute girl lip if I worked at Whole Foods". Apparently he thought it mean this guy started making out with me! I replied, ROFL (which he also didn't understand) and then related a similar story when I told my Japanese co-worker that I was going to "get medieval on his ass". He also misinterpreted this as some kind of fetish reference. (Thankfully, my coworker didn't do the same and just thought I was going to beat him senseless with a keyboard. Decidedly NOT medieval!) My other coworker liked my use of the word "nuke" as in "Nuke that feature", and everyone is surprised that I know (and love) the phrase "Pop a cap in yo' ass". You may ask why that's relevant in an office, but remember what I said about the nerf guns ;)

I've been replaying Knights of the Old Republic again as a light side jedi. THat's hard for me, because I get bitchy when whiny NPCs want me to go on quests for them. Oh, speaking of RPG stuff, I think I'm going to gaming meetup on Wednesday. We're going to get our DnD on.

I'm going to go feed my kitty some wet food I got her at Whole Foods. Bye!

I'm nobody's hippy

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 05:43:53 GMT

Some guy on the bus said he remembered me at Uwajimaya - "You know you're a hippy when you have flowers in your hair!". Then I was asked at a vegan gathering if I was a hula-hooper. I said I haven't picked up a hula-hoop in years. Apparently this is some Burning Man thing.

I'm not a hippy or a hula-hooper. I'm just me >_<

What non-confidencial activities have I been up to of late...I'm afraid these blog posts are becoming more and more cryptic to the outside reader.

I started another inside joke in my office. My coworker A was very tired one morning and walked in and sort of did a "zombie wave" good morning to another co-worker, M. I asked A over IM if she had flashed a gang symbol to M because I didn't really see what she did. She then confirmed to M that she hadn't, but she invented her own gang symbol and gang name (with something so obscurely geeky I can't even figure it out). Now there is talk of gang wars in the office, and J (head dev) will be our "drug" supplier because he has the "noxious weed". True story.

Weather in Seattle has finally gotten nice!! But I am working and going to school al day. Thankfully, I live right across the street from a mothafuckin' LAKE, bitches.

I'm starting my Linguistic Typology class tomorrow - I'm really excited because I do like typology quite a bit. Going to read my papers in just a moment here :)

I got my tax refund so I went on a mini shopping spree on Etsy. I am so addicted. There are days when I tell people about Etsy and I find that inadvertently everything I am wearing is from etsy. For example: Nose jewelery, bag, yarn in hair, silk screened shirt, wrap pants. Not to mention my magic lip gloss and stuff in my bag.

Oh, this will come as a shock to some people. I have learned to embrace lemon juice in things IF I like the taste. Yes, I *knowingly* bought Eggplant hummus at Trader Joes and ate it. Gasp! On the other hand, I only just realized that some baguettes I bought have rye flour in them. I never noticed that before but it really bothers me - that food is psychologically conditioned to make me feel sick as I was forced to eat it in Baja.

I so love my Nokia N810. Let me do some Maths for you. This is what it can stand in for (assume PDA or phone can also do internet browsing):

PDA
Phone
GPS device
Music Player
E-Book Reader

That comes out to about 45$ per function. All in one device! I also didn't mention that you could ssh into stuff. Wells Fargo gave me an Amazon gift card so I got a 16gb card so I can have all mai tunez with me at all times. *jams out to mario rap*

Now that I have a chunk-o-cash, I'm seriously thinking of getting a desktop box that I can run a mini server/SVN/Robot/webcam whatever on. Still thinking about it though. Should be able to get a cheap box somewhere...

My Japanese co-worker has this robot that tells him when to water his plant. It starts whining and whimpering and stuff if you don't give the plant water, but it's broken, so it whines all the time.

Somehow I haven't bought toilet paper or cat food in months and months. I live a frugal lifestyle :)

We got a new co-worker, S, who is Indian. She reminded me that I have a lot of bindis, so we decided to wear them more often. And of course, I looked on etsy..Oh my. I'm going to have to get some - there are really really awesome ones there, but it would be quite sad if I lost one.

Daiso is amazing. EVERY time I go in there they play a song that I know. And I don't know a lot of Japanese songs! They played almost all the Katamari ones and then last time they played Banzai - what a lovely interlude. I was even kind of singing along to it.

Sonja just went to sit in my lap. She smells a little bit like cat litter.

Time for reading!

Goodbye, anonymity

Sat, 07 Mar 2009 07:21:12 GMT

I just found out that if you type "syntax stacia" into Google you get my Linked In page with my full name, my MySpace, and this blog. Oh sweet Frida. And to think my fake email contains these words. I need one of those "qtiekitteh23423423@aol.com" type ones now.

I bought a domain name, but I won't disclose what it is, because worse yet the whois has my home address.

I am a total germ sponge. I catch any crap that goes around the office or the bus and smear it all over Seattle.

Reasons I love Seattle:
A chunky dude in a green cape on the bus.
A soccer mom in an SUV blasting indie music or something really loud.
A lovely man with purple and pink hair and beard in a ravishing velvet dress that came into Sureshot.
The guy who gave me a purple scarf he had knitted himself on the bus one day.
Finding a pamphlet called "Chicken with penis"
A Buddhism pamphlet which talks about the joys of "urinating and defecating"

I bought a plastic bowl from Daiso for 1.50 which somehow fits PERFECTLY in my toilet. I filled it with cat litter in hopes the cats would start using it and then start using the toilet, but all they do is fling it around and get it in their water. Which is ok, since they never use it, but annoying. One of these days I am going to accidentally not take the bowl out in the middle of the night for a bathroom run, and probably just think "to hell with it" and dump it like normal cat litter, along with a slight annoyed feeling because I treat that stuff like gold. It's that expensive.

I'm going to Teavana in Bellevue next week with a co-worker. I don't really like Quan Yin teaouse - well, it's a good atmosphere and convienent, but the tea itself is quite boring. Good, but boring. Remedy Teas is also good (it has Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron!), as was Sureshot when they used to have the crazy herbal teas for when you got sick.

After talking to another Co-worker, I found out that the pad of the month club with trix rabbit menstraul pads is no longer on Etsy. Booo. But hand crafted nose studs are?? Sign me up,

The Season finale of L Word is this Sunday, but I think I'll have to make it to the one on Monday instead. I guess Dollhouse is going to be my new TV series now, although me and my friend Krista are still a little unsure about it given the whole kind of prositution vibe.

For this weekend, I have to allow adverbial predicates, but only negated ones, not denoms, I have to add a causitive semantic predication that WORKS, I have to fix my copula, and some other crazy stuff. I wish I could bring Mr. Derbyshire back from the dead. I have a bone to pick with him about verbal coordination. And ADJECTIVES, for Frida's sake.

I told people at work that I'd translate lessons for them into Sanskrit. I might have made a mistake on that one.

I posted a Craigslist ad this evening and got some totally redonk responses. I love how people respond when they are blatantly the opposite of what you said you were looking for in all respects. Some of them are so humorous that I'd love to post bits of them, just like the person who posted all the responses to that anonymous sex ad (I still don't morally think he was wrong at all, even though I believe he got in legal trouble), but I don't quite want to elaborate on what types of ads I'm placing. Er, that sounds ominous. Nothing bizarre, I assure you.

I will probably have a movie night with Vicki sometime soon. I'm kind of appauled that I've only shown one Seattle friend Conspirators of Pleasure.

I really have to start DOING more things in Seattle. Like going to shows, movies, etc. I have not been to one movie theatre since moving here. I do want to see Coraline.

Ruby programmers are really snotty.

It's a dangerous thing when Trader Joe's candy cane oreos are on sale for 99 cents! I bought one case, but I think I'll have eaten the whole box shortly. Even with all this junk food, I don't think I could top the following non-vegan foods.

I am noting an alarming tendency for wanting to introduce drama into my life. I will (hopefully) proceed with caution.

This post is a bit of an amalgamation abomination, but it will have to do. 6 days late on my montly post...

new year's resolution

Sun, 01 Feb 2009 07:57:01 GMT

Well, if even my mom can pledge to blog more for the new year's, I should be able to too. (With 30 mins before the end of the month, for me. Nice!) Not sure why I stopped, but at this point it's getting a little weird to post, and I don't want to do a digest type style talking about all the things that have happened to me. I suppose I could go the route of Oliver's relatives, and write a terrible poem:

In Seattle I live overlooking Greenlake!
I've been eating lots of vegan cake.

I've got two kittens.
But I still don't have any mittens.

I work at a web-startup in Bellvue.
What about you?

I test software and report bugs.
I even got a free company mug!

I'm going to school at U-Dub.
Hang on a sec, my cat needs a belly rub.

I'm studying the HPSG grammar.
Now, here's MC Hammer.

I used the Grammar Matrix to customize Hixkaryana for use with the LKB
That's pretty cool, you see?

I redid my hair in pink.
That's pretty cool, don't you think?

I guess using tag questions like that is cheating.
Let me tell you about the people I've been meeting!

I met lots of friends online.
Hanging out is where I spend most of my time!
Chillin' out maxin' relaxin' all cool
And all shootin' some b-ball outside of the school
When a couple of guys who were up to no good
Started makin' trouble in my neighborhood

Oh wait....

My mom came to visit last weekend. I am now 24, an old lady practically. We had lots of fun, and you can actually see the pics on facebook, since she's all cool like that now. I'm going to try to get her to have Twitter, but even I don't have that, so that might be a little bit too bleeding edge. She's so cute: After seeing my resume, she made the following comment: Badboy, Python, Windmill, and Ruby I started laughing cause it sounds like either a bunch of cats or a motorcycle gang. I'm a gangsta, all right! Have you heard the joke about the computer scientist's wife? She heard her husband talking about Ruby and Pearls and was upset when she didn't get any bling. *badum-tish*

There was apparently an earthquake here that I totally slept through. I didn't even get to duck and cover :( Maybe honk-shuu and cover (with blankets)

Was going to go to Teresa's band thing tonight, but man, it was starting at 12am, and I've been working my tocks off all day. Instead I've been working on my mom's website and trying to get the final ending for Shadow of Destiny, which Lindsey sent me. Who would have known that to end up with the girl, you have to tell her you're RELATED to her. And you might be her dad anyway. Weird shizznit.

My dad got me a Happy Lite (tm) for my birthday, otherwise known as a Light Therapy Box. Since Seattle is cloudy sometimes (but hasn't really been that rainy, it's a myth :P ) I figured it might be good to have. However it turns out I was ODing on it because on Thursday at work I totally crashed and had to go home. I bought myself a Sunlight alarm clock which turned out to be a rip off for how much I paid for it, but wv. Anything that helps me to get out of bed, even in the slightest, is invaluble at this point.

In a couple of weeks, I'll get my shiny new Nokia N810, which has just started to go on sale due to a new one coming out soon. Everyone here has a damn I-Phone, and while I a) don't have enough money to pay for the subscription and b) refuse to use Mac products, the ability to just whip your phone out and check bus times is pretty appealing. Granted, this doesn't have Wimax so I won't be online all the time, but it will be easier to whip out and connect to a network than my EEEPc. I'm such a gadget Junkie. May be able to use it as my MP3 Player too, if that works out.

Now I gotta figure out predicates in Hixkaryana. Oh shit oh shit it's almost Feb1, gotta post

false morels

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 04:48:20 GMT

We moved into the new house! The cats are back! Oliver and his family came to visit!

Damn, I found the most awesome book trolling Wikipedia for information on posionous mushrooms. Its theory is that Christianity was a sex/hallucinogenic drug cult and Jesus WAS the mushroom. OMG! Too bad it's so hard to get a hold of.

I bought The Ultimate Uncheese Cookbook and I've basically been gorging myself on cheez. I am apparently "doin it wrong" because the agar (vegan gelatin) set up and it turned into a tasty but very uncheeselike spread. Also I have yet to get the right balance of lemon juice to citric acid, and my mozzarella turned out very sour...eww. The chedda had more or less the right amount of citric acid but it was still a little overpowering so I'll definitely cut down the next time I make it. I'm also an idiot and I don't know what cheese tastes like so I'm like "Whoa this tastes just like cheese!" and apparently it doesn't. I'm almost out of my nutritional yeast and my pee is turning neon yellow from the crazy B-Complex. Also, flax seed (not oil) is a LAXATIVE. Be aware.

The new house is pretty awesome. It's located really near everything and it's not on some twisty road in the mountains...I get my own bathroom and the cats have stopped fighting and love eachother again. Yay! I bought a desk from Craigslist so the only downside now is that I have a million boxes in my room and I have some nasty-ass bruises all over my legs....

It was really great having Oliver and his family come to visit...we went to hike at this place called Sugarloaf mountain and then went to Pearl Street and kind of passed out from the heat...

I was lonely after he left, so I put an ad on Craigslist looking for friends...I actually got one response from a pretty cool sounding guy so we might have coffee this weekend. I've also gotten a response from "grababootienpinch" and two guys from Texas, one of whom thought that Bubble tea was a Texas phenomenon. These have been quietly shoved aside. It's kind of embarrassing posting on Craigslist or whatever, but I figure if things go terribly wrong (a la my "showing Conspirators of Pleasure to a group of people I hardly knew" incident) I won't be in Boulder again for some time. So take that, bitches!

My mom brought home a CD today and asked if I knew the band. At first I thought it was Amandine and I got super excited, but then I realized it was the Arcade Fire album Funeral with an album cover I wasn't familiar with. So now my mom is turning into an indie snob, just like me! Although, I'm not sure if she'll honestly like them...She'll probably think they're bad singers.

Oliver lent me a book called Summerland which is sort of like American Gods for kids with baseball. The baseball is kind of turning me off, but there was a pixie in it, so I kept reading. We'll see if the faeries outweigh the baseball. It actually has kind of a Sam Snoozle feel to it, which I like (no one is gonna get this reference so just keep on movin'.)

Roger, over and out.

heylerhe

Fri, 23 May 2008 02:33:04 GMT

Whoa, this post is way overdue.

I survived the last week of school and finals (or should I say "final"), drunken senior week, and graduation (with honors!).

Now I'm just chillin'in da hood (Boulder) wif my mommy. We're living in this studio apartment and sleeping in the same bed which is funny because she always used to hate it when I came in after getting scared in the middle of the night. Apparently I'm a lot better to sleep in the same bed with, and *she's* the one doing the honk-shuu-ing.

The only thing of note during Senior week was the infamous Booze Cruise. People were getting super silly and screaming and stuff towards the end and my laptop battery died, but it wasn't as boring as I thought it would be. I wore a silver dress that I found in the donation pile in Kirk - they were going to throw it out, and it was never worn and had a 90 dollar price tag on it! I got lots of compliments and I didn't have to worry about getting booze, river water, or vomit on it.

Oh yeah, and me and Oliver went to a Laura Veirs concert. Here's the funny thing, this is what I thought she looked like. And this is what she looked like in real life (my mom commented "She looks like a soccer mom") Actually she looked cuter than that but nothing like the publicity photos they take of her. She was so adorable and said cute things, and I loved her even though I was supposed to hate her since she went to Carleton. Oh, the opening act was kind of crazy. Liam Flynn, I think? The songs started out fine but then he'd do this crazy looping thing and distorted guitars and screaming...it was actually quite funny. But anyway Laura Veirs was brilliant and she sung a lot of stuff from her new album I hadn't actually heard (if you check me out on Last.fm you'll see that I'm listening to her way too much now) I really liked Pink Light, Nightingale, Drink Deep, and Cast a Hook. I was gonna talk to her on the way out but a stupid indie idiot was all introducing her to his DAD and stuff so I chickened out and left.

My dad and Shaeri came on the Thursday before Sunday graduation - unfortunately my mom got sick and couldn't come *sad meow*. We had a pretty fun time - we went to a tea/coffee shop and saw live music with Oliver and all had dinner together with Oliver's parents at that Thai place. I don't think I've had more photos taken of me in my life!! Thankfully my hair was behaving so I looked pretty good. Oliver's dad is totally old skool (respect!) and he brought a film camera. I got the prints in the mail the other day and uploaded them here along with uploading the few photos I took on the riverboat cruise. Enjoy! And I apologize for the stuff on the scanned photos, apparently our scanner has some dust on it or something -_-

We have been making tons of vegan food here. I bought a cookbook (The Whole Soy Cookbook - deceptively vegan) with my dad that I had stolen a recipe out of before because it looked like it had more stuff in general that I'd like than the Veganomicon. We made curried tofu with mango-pear chutney, and picked spinach out of the garden and put peanut sauce on it (that wasn't in the book, I stole it from the Thai restaurant on Selby). Both were super good. We tried an alfredo recipe that wasn't in the book because it looked interesting (it had tahini in it) but it also had some beans in it which made it weird. It was good but not alfredo-saucish enough. Tonight I made this pizza thing where I took a whole wheat tortilla and put some soy sausage and marinara on it with a few chunks of soy cheese. When they say "it melts" they lie. Big time. I had that shit under a broiler and it only looked a little gushy. Anyway that was pretty good and easy to make.

I'm sure there's more to write about but I am very tired out - I'm not sure why. We're moving into the house on the 28th and the kitties are coming back YAY! More news then. xoxoxo

Duck Duck Gray Duck

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 04:52:38 GMT

Still getting complements on my hair *swishing hair sound*. BUY THE HAIRDRYER NOW LIEK SERIOUSLY.

We played Duck Duck Goose and Duck Duck Gray Duck (!??) in Sociolinguistics today to educate the international students. Epic lulz were had by all. Have you ever done that in your classes? I didn't think so.

I am becoming quite proficient (and I use this term loosely) in Python. What the hell kind of language does not output a string unless it's concat'd to something?? It was giving me a memory address instead and I was like "Geeze what the hell"... On Caturday I'm going to work on it a little more with Seth but I think we have this thing DOWN.

I got to chat with Megan today in the first time in forever...so awesome. I hope we'll get to chat more often!

Cafe Mac has started going crazy. Good thing that I only have a few more weeks left here, BWAHAHA. They have turned Tuesday into "Guilt Tuesday" where they hide the trays and make you feel bad about leaving any extra food on your plate that happened to taste shitty. Not only that but they don't serve bananas during lunch and dinner anymore because they are "high carbon" - which has nothing to do with an actual diet but has to do with the environment. Fuck that! Honestly, I guess it's good that they're making an effort but it's really stressing me out, and I don't think it's right of them to dictate their own weird moral/ethical choices into the food we eat. Today they even had some huge plea about how they spend 20 thousand dollars a year replacing broken cups - IS THAT THE WAY YOU WANT MAC SPENDING UR MONEYZ OMG??? Stop guilt tripping us! I'm paying you, stop complaining.

The Tallest Man on Earth just came out with a new album. It's cool, but I think "It Will Follow the Rain" is still their greatest piece.

Coffee Pervs

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 17:45:27 GMT

Damn yo, there are like only 2 or 3 weeks of class left. That is crazy!

I took out my purple yarn because I was getting sick of how messy my hair looked all the time. Amazingly I didn't have to cut them out and my hair is completely back to normal! I really should make a detailed blog post on how to do the yarn so everyone can have fun with it. You can wash your hair and leave it in for 3 months+ and your hair is still fine at the end. Those Goody hair bands that you can buy at Walmart are teh shizznit - I can even reuse them!

This is going to sound silly, but I got this awesome new hair dryer on sale at Walgreens for like 10 dollars. It has a non-tangle brush attached so you can style as you dry your hair and it has that funky ionic technology. I think my old hair dryer was too hot and was damaging my hair, since it seems like I don't have as many wirey hair with split ends. Also I got good comments on my hair today so I give it two thumbs up. Buy it!

I was going to blog about this for a while, but it's so damn prevalent that I have to blog about it NOW. So, apparently pervs in Seattle are too fancy for Hooters. OK people, think...Seattle...what do people want? I know! COFFEE! Naked girls + coffee = profit.

I first heard about Chika Latte on Craigslist. The site looks innocent enough, but check out uniforms. Holy shit. You get served coffee by half-naked ladies wearing a football outfit that says "69" on it. I wanted to go to the one in Ballard but then I found out it wasn't a sit down place - they are just drive throughs (with a glass window so you can see the A of T&A, natch). Lame.

Apparently Seattle is a lot more depraved than I thought, because there is not one but THREE different companies who cater to these coffee pervs. There's Natte Latte and The Sweet Spot Cafe. Both of these have bios of the girls who work there and the Sweet Spot even makes a pin-up calendar with their girls.

I must admit I have some sort of morbid fascination with these places, but I don't think I could bring myself to work there. You'd think you could only find this thing in Japan, but I guess Seattle is trendy enough and/or close enough to Japan so as to catch those crazy perv waves.

On Friday night I had my Svankmajer shorts party. I cooked a vegan cake and strawberry pie, both of which were super super good! The pie didn't even need to be baked and was super healthy but it was sooo good. The cake was OK, but kind of nothing special, and it creeped me out that I had to put vinegar in it. Ewww.

We watched some of his best short films and then started Alice. I thought we might want to watch Lunacy but everyone seemed to want Alice...turned out to be a bit of a mistake because I forgot how tedidous that film can be. There are totally brilliant bits in it, but in other parts it just drags. By that time it was too late to get that far into Lunacy, so we just kind of chilled and looked at silly Craigslist posts.

I felt kind of awesome since I pulled off hosting a party that had edible food and such. I don't think I had ever done that before, so yay!

I found out on Friday that Owen and Stephanie will be in Seattle too. Awesome.

And that's about it. Bye!

I was just thinking about how amazingly, incontrovertibly, irrepressibly PIMP I am!

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 20:36:52 GMT

Interlocutor: But how pimp are you, Stacia? How pimp are you??

Well, I'm not pimp enough to factor numbers into their constituent primes or spit the dopest rhymes, BUT I did get into University of Washington's Computaional Linguistics department! :D I was thinking I'd have to wait for a few more weeks, but Emily just emailed me last night with a really nice subject line: "Good admission news!"

So I'm gonna be in Seattle probably around mid-June, and I'll get to hang out with Joseph and Oliver, AND my mom said she'd visit me a lot. So cool. Now I'll just have to find a place to live...

To celebrate, I think I'm going to have a Svankmajer shorts party, which I'd really been planning for some time. My mom is going to give me some good vegan goodies recipes and maybe I can even make a cake or something fancy.

I bought some shells on etsy last night that I'll probably put into my hair along with some green yarn for graduation. Woo, it'll be all mermaid-ish.

Here is the most bastardized version of "Pavane for a Dead Princess" that I could find on youtube, but it still made me laugh. I have to admit the cello was kind of cool, though.

That was a joke, haha, fat chance.

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 20:52:41 GMT

I forgot to mention that there is really a business called "Black Mesa" in New Mexico. They sell coffee, and I never had the pleasure to have coffee there - I should have cosplayed as Chell in front of the coffee place or something. But I doubt I'll be in NM for quite some time. I prefer Aperture Java, anyway ;) Don't be alarmed if you don't understand any of this.

So I called the Ling. department at UW today and they were all "bloop beep boo we need more time to process the applications, we will email you in some indeterminate amount of time, kthx". To top that off, I got an email that said "Computational Linguistics Masters" which was just from SUNY Buffalo (Haiman was right, I did get in).

I'm kind of holding out on the chance that maybe the lady was talking about the people who applied later...? I'd think they would send some sort of email about taking so long, because they're going to get a lot of crap come tomorrow about not getting back to the applicants on the date they promised!

It started sleeting and snowing all crazy today. I actually can't remember a time when it was so snowy out that people got all wet and dripping, but it's like that today. I think it's letting up a little.

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 03:16:46 GMT

I am a total nervous wreck. I'm supposed to hear from UW "by" April 1rst, whatever that means.

Recently it was "X-On-A-Stick" day at Cafe Mac. Apparently there was some chicken shishkabob thing smothered in peanut butter and fried Mac'n'Cheese balls. I had the "Mushrooms-on-a-stick" which were probably much healthier and less offensive than the other choices.

When I was in Boulder, I had breakfast at this bagel place. A little girl, maybe about 3 years old, looked at me and said to her dad, "Daddy, doesn't that lady have the most beautiful hair?" That really made my day.

I've gone to two concerts in the past week, one by the Boredoms which involved Japanese guys screaming and pounding this wall of guitars with sticks, and the other was the Mekons. The Mekons were pretty awesome but they invited this asshole rock critic and annoying-ass radio personality. She kept asking him questions to which he'd respond: "No, I don't feel that way at all". Then I ended up getting Bob Dylan and Bob Marley mixed up and then Lennon and Lennin. Oops.

I got my story reviewed in creative writing last Wendesday and a lot of people really liked that. A bit of an ego boost but I'm not sure if they'll be that into my next story.

I hardly got anything done this weekend. I feel so lazy and useless but I guess that's senioritis for you.

Here are two funny videos I've seen this week: link 1, link 2. Enjoy.

hit me up on my mufuggin' LJ

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 04:35:42 GMT

Apparently people are already living up to the "Girls Gone Wild" spring break stereotype. I heard the bell ring (a sign that someone lost their virginity) quite early in the day and then several times after that. Sometimes that gets irritating.

I have been doing absolutely nothing all day except for going out to BreadSmith/Jamba Juice to get some food. I recently have gotten hooked on Jamba Juice's Chunky Strawberry smoothie, but the workers there are absolutely inept. I have to watch carefully to make sure they really DON'T put yogurt in it, and a worker helpfuly informed me that "it has peanut butter" when I made it really clear that I don't eat dairy. I thought he was just being, well, an idiot, but afterward I realized that they might actually put dairy in their damn peanut butter. I mean, they don't have the greatest track record.

I am looking forward to being able to make my own damn smoothies with no dairy within a 10 foot radius. I'm leaving in the morning, hopefully unmolested by some stupid race that is going through Snelling during the day sometime.

Oh yeah, I know why I'm posting. Well, I wanted to go upload some cat shelter photos but realized that I haven't been using Flickr since my Pro account ran out and it started eating some of my pictures. I asked Matt on the bus ride back from the cat shelter yesterday if he knew of any good Flickr alternatives, and he didn't (not sure why I asked him in the first place, actually). I found a lot of candidates, like SmugMug (pay service? No thanks), Zooomr (too many Os and a MySpace wannabe) and some other random crappy sites. It took a while for me to find Ipernity, which is sort of like a refuge site for Flickr users who have been censored. Apparently it doesn't cut off after 200 pictures on the free one and has a monthly upload limit of 200 mb...that and you can upload movies and sound files, which I certainly had some fun with. There are a lot of private files, so if you want to see them hit me up on my mufuggin' MySpace. Or just leave me a comment :) I did upload some sound files that I recorded in 7th grade during class...I'm kind of torn on whether I should make those public or not, because they're hilarious, but I don't want to condemn those involved.

Anyway, my account is here, so enjoy the stuff that's publicly available. I'll be deleting my Flickr account soon. I also put a music video on YouTube that I did with Megan and Geneva a zillion years ago. It's kind of hilarious.

I died for your papers

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 04:36:46 GMT

I feel bad that all my friends have a ton of work to do tonight, when I am sitting alone twiddling my thumbs. I kinda wish I could be the academic Jesus and die for their papers so none of my friends would be sad anymore. Or at least have such a big paper thrown at me that I might as well die!

I'll let you in on a secret. If you go to the Grille Sunday night at 10:30, you can get free cookies. Once I got free sandwiches but not this time. (actually, I might have already blogged about this, but I'll let that slide for now). I wish I had known this back when I could actually eat that stuff. If that isn't dedication, I don't know what is...speaking of which...

Friday night was Founder's Day. Somehow I managed to be oblivious to this event until now, my final year. You get to dress up all fancy and drink "Mocktails" or get into the "bar" to see some of your Profs get drunk. There are lots of little goodies and cake, and dancing, and a funny guy who will take a professional picture of you and your friends downstairs. I left all my fancy clothes back at home, or so I thought, but then Matt made me remember that I have my blue Duckie Yukata that I never wear. I put that on along with some black tights, high heeled boots, and of course my Velcro closure Obi from Muji.

I got lots of compliments on it actually, but some guy called it a "bathrobe". Keep in mind that a lot of guys there were in very bad drag and looked a lot more ridiculous than I did! Anyway, they had all these custard things and chocolate things and so on. I just ended up picking raspberries, blackberries and blueberries from the plates to keep me busy. Now that's dedication!

I didn't do much dancing, but I got to take a very silly picture with Ola and Oliver...I was draped across this chair while Ola was in my lap and Oliver was holding his hat in this really silly manner. Looking forward to getting copies of those sometime soon, hopefully.

I went to this really awesome play today with Oliver called Arcadia, by Tom Stoppard. It's kind of hard to describe, but it has this awesome math element in it that I could really relate to (also, it was really funny). Strangely enough, as much as I know about iterative algorithms, I had no idea about the "chaos game" which Tomasina was drawing in her book. I vaguely remember writing an algorithm to create a Sierpiński triangle Freshman year, but I used the kind of basic: Start with a triangle, decompose it into 3 smaller ones, rinse and repeat...but apparently (despite stealing and reading a book on Chaos mathematics) I had no idea about the Chaos Game. I probably already gave it away but start playing it on this page and read the wikipedia article when you're done. The wiki shows an example of a leaf, which is what Tomasina did in the play.

One last thing...peeps, you have got to try andLinux. I read about it on Digg a while ago and then forgot about it, but recently I've been having to use Linux more and more - for example, Pyrobot is apparently a bitch to get running on Windows. I tried to get Cygwin working, since it seemed to be a popular option at UWashington when I sat in on their class. However, you have to recompile everything and it was just really messed up on my computer. So I'm like, screw this, let me try andLinux. The first time I installed it my computer totally messed up. However after reinstalling and rebooting a fair number of times it's back to normal. But now I'm in love with it! It's basically a little Ubuntu system which runs seamlessly in Windows. Which is great, since I was seriously thinking of switching to Linux because of all of the software I need for academics, but honestly I just play too many games and stuff on Windows, and 90% of the software that I use does have a good Windows port. So I recommend it, even if it does scary things to your computer when you first try to install it.

public static final String TEXT = "Sigh";

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 04:02:04 GMT

Accepted to Indiana. Don't want to go. I'll find out if I got into Washington sometime before (or possibly on) April 1rst.

So there was a power outage Sunday night. I stayed in the dorm for about an hour with only the light of my computer screen, LED candle, and cell phone. Then some lady came by and said that the backup lighting was about to go off and for safety's sake I should go in the Campus Center, which was still somehow all brightly lit. I thought it was funny because I knew some kids were going to ask for extensions on stuff due to the power outage, and sure enough, they did (an extension on their extension!).

I got sick about a week ago, not as bad as my mom or Oliver, but still a little bit. I guess I have crazy willpower when it comes to getting sick during school since I barely suffered at all. I'd mention my "super healthy vegan diet" as a probable cause, but the truth is I'm probably malnourished and on the verge of getting scurvy and so on. It's all Cafe Mac's fault! Damn you for not having Peanut curry this week, and for running out of that Country White bread all the time.

My creative writing class has helped me because the stuff I read, I dislike so much that I go off and vow to write something better. That's one way to get your creativity back! Please note that I didn't like my first story very much, and I dislike most of the "professional" stuff as well. The professional story I had to read for tomorrow really pissed me off since all of the characters were absolutely despicable and it gave animal loving vegans a bad name (as well as meat eating men, I suppose). I'm getting sick of reading stuff that I dislike so much that I get really worked up about it and have to stop reading stories for a bit.

I also still am feeling a bit sad that she wasn't more interested in Interactive Fiction. I have yet to actually write one yet.

Our robot kicked ass on Monday - people with all the fancy sonar sensors in servo motors got "served" (bad dum tish) by our ghetto lil' robot. It's held together with shitty green masking tape and has wires sticking out everywhere. Anyway we decided to show off wall following and it didn't make one embarrassing mistake! Even the really fancy algorithms were doing kind of goofy stuff. Which I guess is inevitable once you have fancy code...sometimes simpler is better!

For our Barbie Jeep robot, I'll be working on researching Speech Recognition, Text to Speech, and NLP processing. Fun stuff that I really have no idea about, but I already bookmarked a fair amount of sites. One of them apparently does TTS with "emotion" which should be fairly hilarious if we get it working ("I'm SO excited to tell you that I'm running okay!") Or I guess we could go all GlaDOS on it. That would be redonkulous!

Also, there is no God(dess) (sorry, Frida.) Colgate owns Tom's of Maine, Clorox owns Burt's Bees and Honest Tea (a nice cheap tea drink you can buy at the grille) is owned by COCA-COLA. God lord, people.

I wonder if I'll ever get around to writing my Sanskrit morphology parser in Java. We are doing strings, not yet arrays...I guess I could technically do it now with what I know about strings?

My next project on Soico is to stalk people in public and find out how they say "bag". This sounds boring so I'm going to figure out something that speakers in Colorado or New Mexico do and research it over spring break. I don't really want to be the 100th person to present on my "bag" findings. It's just not *my* bag, baby. Unethical studies, here I come!

I'll mention in passing the Karaoke party I went to a week or two ago, mostly because they had "Dragostea din tei", "Yatta" and stuff by Modern Talking. They should have had the Rick Roll song - then I could video tape it and send it to friends. A personalized Rick Roll!

I still have to post a vid of some cute kittens I ran into at the cat shelter with Matt. Also our fave cat Shannon is back (who apparently is a boy cat!). They should all be adopted by now, but I have the videos to remember them by.

Sorry for this disjointed post. It's probably from reading all those disjointed stories in Creative Writing...

Ohio, is it too late?

Fri, 22 Feb 2008 06:53:29 GMT

I'm listening to Dan Deacon's "Ohio". A couple days ago Ohio state rejected my application, so the irony in the chorus "Ohio, is it too late? Ohioooo..." has not escaped me. However, it is not THAT ironic, since I didn't want to go there.

Best "X of the Month" club ever!

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 07:11:52 GMT

I have a very strong desire to sign someone up for this club, which lasts for one year!

You might even get one with a Trix Rabbit design, which is personally my favorite choice of fabric to bleed on.

Also, The Tallest Man on Earth is a pretty awesome band. It's like all old-timey and stuff, but when you watch the guy playing, it is really just a skinny indie guy from Sweden? I'll probably buy the MP3 album in the next few days when I get around to it. If this guy were from the south and was a farmer or something, I may have been uncomfortable, but a Swedish indie boy appeals to my intellectualism and snobbishness.

N is for NO SURVIVORS

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 06:00:12 GMT

For some reason I have that song from Spongebob stuck in my head.

F is for friends who do stuff together
U is for you and me
N is for anywhere any time at all
Down here in the deep blue sea!

And then Plankton does his crazy version. Better than having the Glaucoma Hymn stuck in my head. By the way, Oliver somehow found old pics from the Viennese Glaucoma Ball, which is one rawkin' party.

Another surreal chapter in my life - my mom got me this hat for V-Day that has pom poms on it. It feels really funny when you move your head around. Anyway, me and Matt were taking the bus when this rasty old dewd came up to us and said,

"I hate to interrupt, but damn, your hat has more pom poms on it than a 75' Mexican Chevy!"

We kind of sat there for a moment, not sure how to respond. And then he continued, some sort of random story about finding a 20 dollar bill outside the bank. At some point he made a reference to Hamilton being on the 20 dollar bill. I knew this was wrong, since I remember the part about "dropping Hamiltons" on the Lazy Sunday sketch, but it didn't really matter. Suddenly some guy with a batman cap at the front of the bus gets all offended and shouts at us, "It's JACKSON! JACKSON." The hat really didn't help his credibility even though he was right.

oh god how did this get here i am not good with computer

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 00:17:48 GMT

Just kidding. This post is for the masses. Time for an update *singsong*

So as of several hours ago, I have gone to all of my classes. Here's a quick summary:

Robot Class
We get to create a pink barbie jeep robot which can navigate through campus on its own. INSTEAD OF THE FINAL. How cool is that? I'd say "Enough said" but even cooler we haven't done any scary stuff yet and only watched this hilariously bad video of the DARPA Grand Challenge. The puns in it were horrible and the played disco music whenever this one car came on, and all the grad students were like, "Yeah I don't have any friends but I'm cool with that".

Java Class
Ok that's a bit of a pun. HAHA I am so funny. I crack myself up. I'm such a bitch - I took all the prereqs before this course and have experience with Eclipse and everything so it is pretty easy for me now. So far the classes have been like "OMG why the hell won't novell log in here?" and the professor calling people "turkeys". The class is taught in a big computer lab so I can finish the Java stuff quickly while the rest of the class time is spent with the teacher trying to get everything to work. But back to me being a bitch - she asked if anyone knew what an IDE was, and I idilly raised my hand and ended up having to explain it while using the super complex term "compiling" which she had to then explain. Hope it gets harder soon - and we don't have an individual final project so I asked her if I could do a Sanskrit parser and she said that'd probably be cool. Sweet.

Sociolinguistics
I was the last one on the waiting list to get in the class. Talk about cutting it close! I needed this badly for my Domestic Diversity req and it should be awesome since I think I can do a project on LOLcats.

Creative Writing
The teacher is a sweetheart but it sounds like it may be a lot of work...Or not. I can't tell yet. I'm just scared I'll start writing shit since I haven't had any inspiration. My idea so far is maybe to continue with my dialogues or write fake myths, or something surreal like my fave interactive fiction games - try searching for "So Far". I wonder if she'd accept IF as an assignment? Or maybe I could use that for my 4 hour a week thing - awesome!

So I had to go run some errands last Monday which required me to go down to Apple Valley. After taking a complicated bus route late at night, I realized with horror that the busses stopped going back into Civilization at 6:00 - it was already 5 or so. I was just about ready to call a cab and spend a ton of money to get back in town when a bus driver told me that if I walked about half a mile I'd get to a bus station that took busses to the MOA, and from there I know how to get back to Macalester. Thankfully that was before it was like, -10 degrees every day. I took the bus going in the wrong direction and was horrified when I pulled back to the SAME stupid transit station, but I got to MOA, and Mac, in the end. Yay. I really hate the Metro Transit website.

On Tuesday I didn't realise it was double stamp discount madness day at the Tea Garden until late, and somehow I coerced Matt to go with me. By then it was so cold that I felt like I had a migraine when the cold wind was blowing in my face, and Matt was so bundled up that I hardly recognized him. We got some loose leaf tea and (surpirsingly) a cold drink - to be enjoyed after we got home.

Thursday I headed over to Joseph's house, which is actually quite close to Oliver's house. We had Thursday off since all the linguistics weenies in our Socio class were busy learning about vowels and generally getting pwned. Anyway I brought over some random food from Whole Foods and met his cat Katie, who sat in my lap for a long time. It was quite enjoyable and I hope we have the chance to hang out again soon - maybe we'll watch some more Svankmajer.

On Friday me and Matt headed down to the cat shelter...it's only been a month or so but all of the cats we knew are now adopted out (except for Wayne, who goes on food strikes when he's adopted). There were so many gray cats there, someone had posted a small algorithm on the board on how to find out what their names were. I guess all the supposed "kittens" from last time had already grown up or we weren't allowed to see them, which was too bad. Before we walked in, we noticed this punk-ass Opossum who was just sitting near a drain pipe and staring at us like, "What?" We thought it might be sick but I guess it was just used to city life.

So recently I had a Java assignment that was talking about Virtual Machines. I mentioned that I thought ZCode used that kind of system, which it does. This, and the fact that I'm taking a creative writing class, prompted me to look up the Inform language for writing Interactive Fiction. I figured maybe I'll learn it this time around. I was pleasantly shocked to find out that the language has been totally revamped and is now written using "Natural" English. In theory this should make it easier for me to learn but sometimes natural language seems to get in the way. We'll see where it goes. Writing complicated code is just as bad (if not worse) than a regular programming language, but the plus side is that n00bs can write very simple stories with no experience! This is great, and they even have written a whole IDE that runs on Linux too. I am very pleased. I've spent most of this weekend trying to make my way through the Inform manual without going insane.

It's a funny thing - I've run into this twice now with two different professors. These are people with PhDs. Granted, not in Computer Science, but still...People really, really overestimate what computers can do. The first example of this was in my Syntax class in the UK where I showed the class PHPSyntaxTree. The teacher looked worried and said, "You are free to use this program on your assignments, since I have no way of checking, but remember that you will have to produce trees on your own on the Exam." This program just draws a tree if you give it a bracketed structure of one. If your idea of the tree is wrong, the picture is wrong. Simple as that. If computers could actually reliably parse English, there would be no need to employ part of speech taggers for the evil Penn Treebank. I think there are computers out there which can do this fairly accurately, but it's not just some random script that someone put out on the web somewhere.

And this is the most recent misunderstanding: I really botched explaining interactive fiction in an email to my creative writing teacher and she thought that the program WRITES a story for you. This is a step beyond parsing, even. Several steps. If computers could actually do this, I think a lot of people would be out of work. So the answer is - no, they can't. Why do people think that computers are so sohpisticated?? Grrsh.

on my way

Sun, 27 Jan 2008 16:02:29 GMT

Whenever I ride on small airplanes, I'm reminded of Zak McKracken and that stupid puzzle while you're on the airplane. You have to put an egg in the microwave, plug up the bathroom sink with toilet paper, and open all of the damn overhead storage cabins. Of course the thing you're looking for (an oxygen tank, I think) is in the last one you open. Thankfully, I'm not doing any of those things. As technologically advanced as Zak's society was, I don't think they gave into this tazer mania we have these days.

So - minor hiccup. Yesterday I missed my flight since we got confused about when it was leaving. I'm not used to taking flights with transfers back to St. Paul, so we ignored the part that left from Abq and just looked at the departure time from Phoenix. Oops! I got really stressed out and upset for no real reason, as I would have gotten in around 8pm and slept until the time that I'm getting in today anyway. I'm on a plane now. Ah, the joy of the eeePC.

Time for lag central. As some of you may know, I went to Seattle a couple of weeks ago to visit Oliver and check out Uwashington. I am really psyched about Uwashington as a grad school. I got to sit in on two classes, one about building grammar parsing machines and one about the evil Penn Treebank and CFGs. The grammar parsing one was kind of hard to understand but I actually understood way more than I thought, and some old dewd came up to me afterwards and was all, "Shit man, I don't understand this class at all so don't feel bad". Apparently there are a lot of mid-life crisis guys in that program who want to change careers or something. The second class was taught by a computer science guy and had me and the other linguists in the class groaning. I felt like such a pretentious bitch - I really wanted to correct him on a lot of things but considering I was just some random undergrad visiting the class, I kept my mouth shut. I just hope I get into that program, because it makes so much more sense than the other programs. You can stretch it out over 2 years but still be doing it part time while they get you an internship or you find some other job to support yourself in the meantime, and compared to other programs it's really reasonably priced.

Not to mention Seattle is super awesome! It's got coffee shops galore (that word is from Irish, btw) and tons of awesome events. Near the college there is a book store that has a bunch of kitties living there so I can get my fix if I'm on campus. I went to a Children's theatre production of The Neverending Story, which I was super excited about. The effects were awesome and there was a really hilarious scene where Atreju is riding Falkor and this 80s music is blasting in the background. However since it was a children's thing they dumbed down some parts and made Bastian a real pussy. He was always saying stuff like, "Gee whiz, why am I talking to a book? OMG I gotta pee...bye bye book...stay safe!" I had a pretty good chuckle when he screeched "MOONCHILD" and was lifted up into the air. Also I was wondering why "The Land of Fantastica" sounded so stupid until I realised it's supposed to be Fantasia (with a voiced palato-alveolar fricative, like my name!).

For the most part people in Seattle are really cool. I met a neat girl on the bus who started drawing me and told me about a magic cat she had. I wanted to hang out with her later but she never called back...Nice otherwise, though. And then I met some timid medical student with flash cards of anatomy. They were all old fashioned and looked kind of like my mom's art so I asked him if it was for a gallery opening or something. Oops.

I did meet a creepy ass guy who followed me into a cool gallery/etsy-ish store. As I went in this other guy was all, "Dude she is so into you" and I ignored it..he ended up following me into the store after a while and trying to buy stuff for me to impress me (yes, he actually SAID that). Anyway that store is awesome and I got a conjoined bunny squeeky doll. There was also a lady at the airport too who probably would have tazed me, which kind of sucked. I stepped back towards the scanning machine to asked hat they were doing to my bag and they freaked out.

Seattle is really vegan friendly, which rawks. This neat cupcake store I went to isn't, which is sad, but I bought a shirt there that says, "Legalize Frostitution". A lady in Phoenix during my layover asked me with a very serious face, "What's frostitution?". Otherwise it's pretty neat...one doesn't assume that most places are vegan but they turned out to be anyway. Went to the market place...Pike? Capitol Hill...And best of all, Archie McPhee, where I picked up a ton of stuff for my mom. I got her some taxidermy eyes and a hamster wheel, among other things.

A really interesting thing to do is look at bulletin boards in cities. For example, if you look at the bulletin boards in Santa Fe, say at Trader Joe's, you'll find that it's mostly oriented for a much older audience. Sure, there is some "new-age" type stuff, but it's all oriented towards people who want to spiritually cure their arthritis and Alzheimers and stuff. In Seattle I saw stuff like a personal vegan chef and so on...oriented for a MUCH younger audience. I suspect St. Paul would be like that too but I haven't really checked any of the bulletin boards there yet.

I should do some sort of tutorial/how to/tips on putting wool in hair. The horse rubber bands didn't work so I bought some small Goody rubber bands that are much stronger and don't ever fall out. I'm getting a lot of compliments on my hair lately (people like the flowers, I guess) and my Bogs rain/snow boots that I bought in order to brave the winter in Minnesota. Super comfy and no animal hides involved.

Now for something a little different - posting about something that is actually recent? I can't believe it. My dad and Shaeri came to visit for my birthday and we hung out in Santa Fe. Too bad there is um, nothing to really do here. We went out to eat, went to good old Java Joe's (for the free wifi), and saw Juno - which is a super awesome movie. I liked the soundtrack even though I've heard it was too cute or something. I didn't want to see it because I thought it was going to be some morality thing about pregnant teens but it somehow ended up bypassing that whole issue. Too bad CapAlert doesn't have a review on that film yet.

What did I get for my birthday...A webcam, a necklace, some socks, a cool marimba, and of course my eeePc. I also bought a lot of junk with my eBay money which I'm pretty happy with.

Just think, in 2 years I can have a quarter-life crisis!

I am becoming so l33t I cannot stand it. I installed eeeXubuntu on here, mounted my SD card as /usr, installed some debs without dependencies and got aptitude to stop yelling about it by editing a file, compiled some webcam drivers from source to get my Slutz dolls webcam working, and put in a few eee specific hacks for function keys and shutdown issues. I'm such a geek.

But it looks like the plane is landing now, so I'm signing off. I never did find that oxygen tank :(

Death by Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 23:55:28 GMT

Would you believe that some girl I knew in 3rd Grade chose "pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis" for her spelling quiz? Believe it!

Anyway, me, my mom, and my cats have been breathing Mica all the time. In my mom's case, she even grabbed a spoon covered in sparkle mica and made eggs with it. They didn't turn out very sparkly though. Anyway, I ordered a bunch of random powders online and we've been making body powders and eyeshadows. It's fun, if not really messy.

I've been really bad about updating this blog, haven't I? Well, I'm in a new (ish) coffee shop in Santa Fe. Now that I have a lil' EEEpc (which I have yet to name) I can go to these places. Not nearly as cool as Seattle or the Twin Cities by several magnitiudes, but bearable.

I'm in exile from my house since there's a house showing today. This morning I was feeling sick and I thought I would almost have to stay there groaning in bed while people checked out the house...But thankfully I perked up and was able to go out.

Blah, it looks like this shop is shutting down the router. Lame! I was going to use this opportunity to write about Seattle but I suppose that will have to wait. *sigh*

Yesterday's news

Fri, 11 Jan 2008 23:22:13 GMT

This post is slightly outdated, thus the title and the separation from the other post. Most of this seems trivial now but I promised myself I'd write a little bit about my Santa Fe Goings On. Santa Fe seems like a distant memory now. Oh well. Fasten your seatbelts for a disjointed and random post. Ready? Here goes.

So what was I doing in Santa Fe? I've been learning how to cook vegan stuff. Let me see if I can remember what we made. We learned how to make peanut sauce, mango curry, pumpkin brownies...I even made some coconut pumpkin risotto on my own and modified the recipe! I made a list of all of my fave foods and have been trying to incoroprate them into the dishes I make. As you might have guessed I'm on a real pumpkin kick lately.

I made about 600 dollars selling crap on ebay and I've been recklessly spending it on Etsy stuff and other random things online. Somebody stop me! It seems like it will go pretty well but some idiot tried to stick me with a paypal chargeback even though I have more "AS-IS" disclaimers than you can shake a stick at. I feel bad that the item didn't work, but on the other hand it's really his problem. I also hate it when people try to go through Paypal without contacting you first, although he might have tried to - I'm in Washington right now and check my mail sparingly.

I also forgot to write about going to the Frida Exhibit in Minneapolis at the Walker. I went two days before I left, mistakingly thinking it was my last day. I'm glad I got to see it! It had all of her famous stuff...the big one with the hearts, the broken pillar one, the monkeys and cats one, the deer one, the hair cut one...much more, even a a few I haven't seen. It even had the original photo of Frida dressed like a man that was "previously unseen" (which is BS. If you have a good memory you might remember that I used to have this as an icon before I stopped paying for Livejournal). In any case it was awesome seeing the original. Then I walked around the museum a little more and looked at the modern art BS. There was a singing security guard and a guy who did a little dance for me. He was like "Do de do I'm a performance artist!" which was kind of hilarious.

I ended up watching a made for TV Spongebob movie featuring the voice of David Bowie. I thought it would be pretty awesome, but they always seem to mess up their movies royally. Not that the show is brilliant to begin with, but they always tend to "dumb down" the movies. (The question lingers: Can you "dumb down" Spongebob?) The alien David Bowie played had different colored eyes, which was a nice touch.

My mom got a box of dismembered baby doll legs and arms in the mail recently for an art piece she's working on. This may seem unusual to you (this is common fare at our house), but the really funny thing is that it included one of those "Check this box here if you want to be saved" pamphlets. This is pretty much the most awesome place I've seen one of those. Imagine: "I didn't see the light until I opened up that box of dismembered baby parts and there was a photo of Jesus staring up at me!"

Something I also wanted to write about. At the end of last semester I was messing around trying to waste time when I suddenly thought of good old Dr. Sbaitso. I read this hilarious article, which has a download at the end. Surprisingly, it works on XP, and surprisingly it pronounces my name right. Actually, it was pretty impressive Speech-To-Text technology given the time. Dr. Sbaitso never helped me with this, but he did have a big "parity error" in the middle of the night when I was studying. Damn, that is loud. I should have known but I never remembered the swearing thing and I wanted to try it out. Oops. :)

So, I did my hair just before I left for Seattle. I used the whole skien of purple flower yarn I got from etsy interspersed with the Colinette point 5 dready locks. We used some horse hair braiding rubber bands which were pretty strong. This time we used the double ended braid technique, which is pretty solid. However 3 of them have fallen out. I guess the bands weren't quite as strong as we thought - much stronger than salon bands though. I'll put those back in when I get back.

Disturbing video which will make you turn vegan. Don't thank me :) (note, have not watched this one since the old one was deleted, but it should contain "the scene".

I'll write about Washington/Seattle/U Washington etc etc later, perhaps when I get back.

New Year's Roundup: Best Flash Games, Best PC Games, Worst PC Games

Sun, 06 Jan 2008 09:27:24 GMT

EEE I forgot to add Princess Maker. Will do when I have time.

Favorite Flash Games
(listed roughly in order of preference, from lowest to highest)

9.
Desktop Tower Defence
This is one of those games where you have little monsters running around and you have to set up towers to destroy them. They get stronger each time they come through and you get money from killing them, which you can use to buy more towers or upgrade the old ones. Surprisingly addicting, although I've only played it on the easy level.

8.
Grow, Grow Cube, Grow RPG
Of course this could come from nowhere other than Japan. It's very hard to describe, and the concept is very simple, but it's very fun. You select different objects and as they grow, they affect eachother. You need to choose the right order to get the maximum growth on all objects. I like the three versions listed above: The original, Cube, and RPG. Very かわいい.

7.
Fancy Pants Adventure
This game is an adorable little flash platform game. Think Mario but in a cute hand drawn world with some interesting physics. I played a demo of the sequel once but I don't know if the creator has continued development. Highly recommended.

6.
Samorost 1, Samorost 2
These games have awesome graphics and remind me a bit of the Little Prince or something like that...little creatures living on an astroid...Haven't played them in a while so I'm not qualified to explain them, but I remember loving them at the time, as any good adventure gamer should ;)
This guy also made The Quest for the Rest!! Who knew? I should have known though, since it's so similar.

5.
Winterbells
This game is very very simple, but very cute, relaxing, and almost zen. You control a little rabbit hopping up into the sky on bells and birds. That's it.

4.
Monster's Den (Alternate link)
This is a pretty good RPG! I actually have only played it up to level 10 on easy but you can play it past then getting more equipment and so on. I wish there were more spells but it's just a flash game.

3.
Flow
This game is brilliant. I imagine it's sort of like an artist's version of the cellular ("Tide Pool Phase") level of Spore. You control a little worm (and later other odd geometrical creatures) and eat tiny bits of food or consume other creatures, going down deeper and deeper until you fight a boss like creature and get to start life over as a new creature. It's mesmerizing and beautiful.

2.
Nummyz Dating Sims
These games are so adorable and female friendly. I love dating sims and kind of grew up on them (esp. Tokimeki Memorial) but playing as a guy kind of threw me off. That's why I liked Meine Liebe so much once I figured out I couldn't win the game if I was anorexic. Anyway, the Flash dating games are a bit of a twist on the traditional ones: You have "hit points" or activity points or whatever, and you can use them doing activities like working or talking to your potential dates. Your relationship with them grows and you can give them presents to up the relationship and so on. Then you get an ending with your closest date, like in the traditional games. I haven't played all of her dating sims, but I intend to. I'm also a real sucker for games with lesbian romance. Hell, that's half of the reason I decided to play KOTOR I and why I want to play Mass Effect. Anyway, these games are cute, adorable, and friendly towards women and gay people. She also has a link on her site to other cute games if you're bored. I started playing the Pizza one and got pretty far but it's a bit infuriating. *gets distracted playing fairy dress up*

1.
Aggressive Alpine Skiing
This game is really, really stupid. But it's also really addicting. I haven't beaten it yet, despite playing it many times when I really should have been writing a paper. The music is unusually catchy and the voiceover is just hilarious ("OH NO!!" "RANDOM BONUS!!"). Extra points for switching the music over to the dorky German folk musician Heino towards the end.

Honorable mention:
Alter Ego
Not exactly a flash game, but it's online (copyrights be damned!) This game is adapted from an awesome DOS game of the same name. You play out your life in a stereotypical American fashion while an annoyingly male Psychologist nags you about your choices in life. Last time I told someone "Don't worry about the pedophile, he can't kill you", they ended up raped in a ditch. Oops :( So - DO watch out for the pedophile. And if a crazy old lady comes up to you talking about Jesus and stuff, don't stop talking to her, and accept the envelope.

Best PC Games
(listed *very* roughly in order of preference, from lowest to highest. Very hard to "rate" since they are from very different generes.)
Games with a Star next to them get extra points for portraying females in a positive light.

12.
Drakan
Okay, the dialoge, plot, and ending were lame, and it featured a slutty looking heroine. But come on, you got to FLY A DRAGON!! And wield really bad ass swords. Although sadly you only got to use some of the most bad ass weapons at the very very end of the game, and others turned out to be more effective anyway. Playing on the LAN blasting eachother with dragons was so cool, though.

11.
Noctis
Play this game while putting on the music from Philp Glass's "Metamorphosis" piano compositions. Then relax and go explore an infinite universe. For some reason it doesn't make my apeirophobia kick in. It's hard to figure out how to make the game work for a while though. It's free, so download it.
BONUS: Though you never see yourself or another person in the game, you're supposed to be a feline race!

10.
Sacrifice
I really liked this game when it came out. I actually like strategy games quite a bit, it's just that I'm either a) hoplessley bad at them or b) don't find the setting interesting enough. Stuff like Civilization and Simcity is fun for a while but it gets boring fast. Sacrifice had a neat setting - a traveler comes to the aid of 5 different gods. I love stories where people can interact with gods/goddesses so that was cool. There's a lot of flexibility so the game is very replayable. The plot was okay too. The only thing I didn't like is that they felt like they had to fix the player's avatar, which was kind of goofy. And a lot of the time I don't like playing as a male anyway (especially not a male who has a voice like Batman's stupid voice in the recent movie). Lots of spells, creatures, tactics...mini-management could be a pain but it was okay. Recommended!

9.
Porta l*
This game is short, but it has fun physics and a very funny and creepy computer system. Also the song "Still Alive" is awesome. My apeirophobia kicks in a little when you create two portals that can see through each other like a mirror though. I hope the cake was vegan.

8.
Omikron
This game is really original...it tries to combine a lot of different gameplay elements (some might say unsuccessfully) in a really unique world. I loved the feature of being able to possess other people's bodies. Don't want to play an ugly old dude anymore? Reincarnate into that hawt chick at the bookstore. The ending is a little goofy and makes a large assumption that the player is not a straight female, but otherwise was okay.
BONUS: David Bowie plays a singer of an illegal rock group and a sentient AI named Boz or something.

7.
The Dig*
Although this game was not rated very well, because it was "serious" as far as Lucas Arts games go, it was haunting and beautiful to me. I idolized Maggie (the xenolinguist!) at the time - prophetic, no? I thought it portrayed an alien world in a non-goofy fashion, which is a definite plus. The music was great and it was just really haunting and a moving game for me.

6.
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic I*
As I mentioned before with the dating sim flash games, I'm a real sucker for in game Lesbian love. I actually had not heard of this game until I read an article on Wikipedia about homosexuality as depicted in games and decided to check it out. I did end up with Juhani on my first try even though I was a bit of a Dark Side bitch :) I've heard ladies who say that the Carth romance is also very rewarding, but I thought he was a bit of a goofball and his son was snotty (this is why it was kind of fun watching him flip out over trust issues when you betray him). The storyline can be kind of linear when compared to the second game (IMHO) but it was really well written and had an awesome plot twist. Really gets you into the Star Wars universe.

5.
Daggerfall
You may wonder why I'm listing Daggerfall here instead of Morrowind or Oblivion, which I've both played. In fact, Morrowind was one of the reasons I was begging for a new computer to replace my 400 mhz Dell (which I've gutted and sold, by the way). Morrowind is actually one of those games that you can't just play...You have to know what you're doing when you create a character. The first time I played, I went with a primarily Magic using class. I didn't want to focus on Alchemy - I hate this feature in all of the games, since it's not fun for me. Unfortunatley if you don't know it in Morrowind you are kind of screwed. I remembered scrounging around for all and any health potions I could find and running out of mana and not being able to attack further. The second time I played, I was smarter about choosing a class and actually got pretty far. However I lost interest. When I started Oblivion, it was like a breath of fresh air. I had no idea how much that stupid fatigue bar was detracting from gameplay. Needless to say I prefer Oblivion. Anyway this isn't about either of them - it's about Daggerfall.
Daggerfall was fricken huge. It was about 60 thousand square miles with over 15,000 cities, dungeons, etc to explore. Note that most of these were randomly generated, and Morrowind's 6 square miles (and for that matter Oblivion's 16) were all hand created. However, there's really something to be said about this - say you find a "secret" in Morrowind or Oblivion, and you're very proud of finding it. Well, tough luck - due to the size, everyone and their grandmother will have found it. But in Daggerfall, when you find something like the Rusty Ogre Lodge (where you can find tons of Daedric weapons hidden away and steal them for a huge profit), or good old Peore's pawn shop (where you could buy things from him and sell them back to him for more than he sold it to you in the first place), that's something to be proud of. The randomized dungeon crawls took some getting used to, and I used to avoid them like the plague, but after a while I began to find them quite cathartic.
And who couldn't love those randomized quests? I remember fondly doing some nobles quests where I had to deliver an enchanted brassiere to some random guy. You see, since the quests were randomized, any piece of clothing could have been used, and since as a female character you could only find or use female specific clothes, sometimes these male nobles requested odd female only clothing. And he'd have a very straight face and strictly diplomatic words for you when you went to deliver it.
The customization of your character (skills and attributes wise) was the most sophisticated of any Elder Scrolls game to date. It even allowed particular languages (Daderic, Spriggan, etc) to be skills, which the other games silently removed. This led to the creation of the beloved Linguist Class, which I would like to play the whole game through with one day.
The sheer number of proviences and factions you could join were amazing. I remember being a very loyal Wayrest girl for reasons I forget. I also liked Orsinium area due to the weird witch quests there. And I'd always pop down to the Alik'r Desert for good ole' Peore every time my wagon filled up. In Morrowind and Oblivion, you've mainly got the Tribunal Temple and the Imperial Cult, as far as religions go. In Daggerfall, you had the choice of several Gods or Goddesses to follow. I usually went with Julianos or Akatosh, since these actually mirror who I'd follow in real life. Sometimes I'd join Diabella because I thought all the naked people in her temples was pretty hillarious.
Bonus points: if you read enough books in Daggerfall, you'll come across this yiffy story, which was subsequently "censored by the Temple" in Morrowind and Oblivion.
I've never finished the game, because I got so caught up in the side quests, but I intend to some day. I could go on and on but I think I'll stop. God I wrote too much about this - you'd think it would get the top place, but it did get tedious at times.

4.
Beyond Good and Evil*
This game gets mega points for portraying a female protagonist in a positive and realistic fashion! Her green lipstick is very cute, too. The game has this kind of cute cartoonish element but not enough to be silly. You work as a photographer, so you get to take pictures of wildlife for extra money and points. Sometimes this is really silly as you can take a picture of your friend's fat pig ass and send it to the lady who goes, "Wow this is a great specimen" and pays you highly for it. The plot is engaging and there wasn't any forced romance as far as I could tell. The game play was sort of a cross between adventure and action, and it blended perfectly. The gameworld and creatures were really unique. Looking forward to a sequel if they do one!

3.
Heroes of Might and Magic Series (esp. HOMM III with the WOG addon ;) )
I've been playing this game for years, ever since HOMM II, with its beloved Sorceress town and "No Opera" feature. I never played 4, but 5 is pretty fun. However the absolute classic in my mind is HOMM III, especially with the "In the Wake of Gods" addon. Unfortunately if you played the built in scenarios with WOG on sometimes weird bugs would happen but it really brought new life into an old game. Very complex tactically. My fave city was probably the inferno, and I hated the stupid Castle city. You really have to think some battles through and sometimes have to replay them several times to get them right. Very cool tactics game.

2.
I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream*
I didn't play this game when it was released because it isn't really a children's game (then again neither is Freddy Pharkas), but when I heard about it about a year ago I was intrigued and had to play it. It's based on a crappy ass sexist sci-fi story but the game is neither crappy-ass nor sexist. It's this really intriguing look into the psyche of these 5 people whom this computer tortures. It includes a lot of very surreal and nightmarish elements which I like in any kind of medium! I guess I do really like "serious" adventure games more than the classic funny ones. Of course those are great, but the serious ones like these seem to impact me more.

1.
The Longest Journey 1* and Dreamfall (TLJ 2)*
These games were both very very awesome. Some of the most beautifuly done and plot engaging adventure games ever done, both with likeable and believable female protagonists. It's set in a very unique futuristic world which is intertwined with magic - both things that I love! You might say that TLJ 1 was more "adventure-y" and involved more puzzles than TLJ2. TLJ2 was more like an interactive movie but I also really enjoyed it, just in a different way. I haven't played TLJ1 for years, but I plan to do so before the release of TLJ3 so I can be up on the plot again. I'm a fantasy geek so I loved the magical elements that were built into the technological world. Play these now!

Honorable Mention:
Spore
This game is not actually out yet and is kind of becoming infamous vaporware (hence the honorable mention bit), but it looks really really awesome. It's the ultimate God game. I can't wait to create awesome little creatures with huge noses that drag on the ground and have 7 eyes.

Worst PC Games
(listed roughly in order of awfulness, from lowest to highest)

5.
Grim Fandango
I'm kind of torn on this game. In fact, I plan to play it again soon to make sure I'm not just crazy. The puzzles in this game really pissed me off. I distinctly remember some puzzle where I had to give this guy a pair of stockings with a run in it for a gun. Maybe I didn't talk to this guy enough but this just seems like the most random FedEx quest ever.

4.
The Lost Mind of Dr. Brain
Don't get me wrong, Island of Dr. Brain was brilliant. I learned about Logic gates, conteporary art, math, chemistry, and a lot more from that game. It was also done in classic Sierra game fashion. However, this "sequel" introduced this bitch that was supposed to be his cousin or something called "Dr. Elaina". I hated her with a passion. Her ugly smirking face was in the corner of EVERY screen and I ended up putting a damn post it on my screen so I didn't have to look at it. The game itself wasn't as good as previous games...not TERRIBLE, but more for little children - as evidenced by the fact when I typed in swear words as my username, Dr. Brain pretty much flipped out ("OOOH!! That's a NAUGHTY WORD!") If anyone remembers my Pirate KNP game that I made, you might remember an easter egg - in one submarine level, pressing a button would cause a distorted version of Dr. Elaina's face to appear, which you could shoot and get 100 points for.

3.
Titan Quest
This game was buggy and generic as hell. I uninstalled it without finishing it, it was so bad. Also whenever you reloaded the game, all of the monsters respawned...I guess that's good for getting extra XP, but annoying if you didn't happen to get to a good "save fountain" or whatever they called those things.

2.
Fahrenheit
Ok, I loved Omikron, so I thought that maybe I would enjoy this "revolutionary" game. It's more of an interactive movie than a game (although one could say that about Dreamfall), but the plot was soo ridiculous and the interactive parts were poorly done. I ended up coding a macro into my game controller because I kept loosing the "mash the keyboard as fast as you can" interactive parts. The mouse movement thing was inovative, but ridiculous sometimes: in the very first scene I tried to get Tyler to pick up a damn cup of coffee. He spastically started to pick it up and then put it down because I wasn't doing the movement right. I had to do this several times to get it to work, which was just unrealistic as hell. Or maybe he was really tired...
It started out interesting but it just got really ridiculous really fast and the romantic thing at the end was really random. Also, Tyler was such a "token black guy" that it hurt.
Question to scientists: Can a zygote (pre-Zygote, really) really be affected by radiation/a magical force?
Extra points for one of the hilarious "bad" endings: "Well yeah it's been like 3 months, we're trying to cope and stuff. Uh, like, nothing is really different but um...I *know* something bad is gonna happen now that the Orange Clan has taken over. Just give it a few more months?" The other "bad" ending actually had pretty bad consequences for humankind.

1.
Ultima IX: Ascension
This game was hillariously bad. I had never played an Ultima game except for one when I was very young which I barely remember that we returned. The game is full of bugs and the main character talks like a surfer ("I'm the Avatar, dude!!") It starts out with a movie of a farmer guy who looks like John Lemon getting crushed by a pillar. Then you wake up in your underwear and do quests such as...FINDING YOUR CLOTHES!
The game had some hillarious Easter Eggs/bugs, such as being able to poison Lord British with some rat poison bread and downing a "sexual enhancement" potion before going to bed with this hooker on the shore...when you wake up, the hooker is nowhere to be seen and there's just this grizzly old pirate there (which I killed). Anyone who has played this game will also remember that old bitch in Britain who yells at you for crossing the street when she's sweeping even AFTER you heal the city. Needless to say that woman answered to my summoned demon.
This site also gave me lots of laughs - I wish that I had played the game through this way. You can do things like finish the game leaving the main villain alive and other ridiculous stuff. It turns out that you can make bridges out of spell scrolls and staffs, as well as hop across the ocean on loaves of bread. I should try getting across the Pacific sometime using that technique.
I actually finished this game...when I got to the last scene, I used the buggy "teleport" spell to get past the locked gate and finished the game early. Oops. I only realised afterwards that there was a whole dungeon that I missed out on, so I went back and tried it (it was actually quite hard).
Bonus: The ridiculous DUN DUN DUN noise whenever an enemy was nearby, even when it was a rat stuck behind a million boxes. You'd stumble around for a minute or so actually trying to find the bad guy.

Honorable Mention:
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2
This wasn't actually a bad *game* - indeed, the interface was improved - but it had no real romance like the first game, as well as having a crappy ass ending. The development was really rushed, so I expect this is what happened to it. You can read more about it on the Wikipedia entry.

You are all my children

Wed, 12 Dec 2007 05:19:58 GMT

Today I lost my keys AGAIN (how this is possible in a room smaller than my mom's closet escapes me), causing me to miss class, and then went to Uptown to work at the Planned Parenthood there. Damn that was fun! They have some really old machines there...I'm like a kid in an animal shelter...I want to adopt them all and turn them into DOS Boxes or DivX players or Linux Powered Cat Feeders. There was a 286 with a turbo button - man, I remember those! And some Dells that looked like the one I had for years (Win 98, 400 Mhz, 256 Mb RAM, 32 Mb video card), which could apparently not have its hard drive filled up by a teenage girl (I think I did so in a few months). My supervisor pretends like he's old but then goes, "Shit man, this laptop has like 16 Mb of RAM, that can't be right!" That was on a little laptop that was so old, the power brick was built INSIDE of the computer - I was looking for the power brick and thinking, this can't be right, but Andy told me that it's how old laptops used to be. I really wanted to adopt that one, but it's a real brick and I'd probably have to run Grey Cat Linux or FreeDOS, which would be fun but not really necessary. If I were at home, I'd probably snap some of these up, but as it is, I don't have much room. I got to do really hacky things, like boot up Puppy Linux on a machine in order to write a floppy image of DBAN for the machines that couldn't boot from CD. I think Andy was impressed. I had fun, can you tell?

Best yet, towards the end of the day we started getting hungry and Andy said he'd order food for me and the other lady working there. I was thinking, "Well very nice but I doubt I'll be able to eat anything being vegan and all..." Not so! He called up Pizza Lucé, a very vegan friendly yummy restraunt I'd never heard of! I was all, "no cheez kthxbai" but then they were like "oh hai u can has soy cheez" and I was like "omg u r full of win!!". More or less. I haven't had pizza in sooo long, and it was delicious...the soy cheese didn't even taste like soy cheese, and I noticed that it wasn't greasy and gross like real cheese pizzas..you can really feel healthy while eating a vegan pizza. I remember as a kid some people would take their napkins and "blot" their pizza pieces over and over to get the grease off...Yuck! Anyway, they just opened one in St. Paul on Selby so maybe I'll go there sometime. It's kind of sad, actually...I wish that ALL places had vegan options. It's like when it happens you do a double take, WHOA! Veggie options are pretty common, but soy cheese is pretty rare. They were even offering some weird nut cheese I hadn't heard of but since I'm a "good vegan" (yeah right) I didn't eat it - it had casein. *angel halo*

Food was a perk, but this is even better: They ended up having an LCD projection panel downstairs that I can have! That means if I whine on Craigslist for a free (or cheap) overhead projector, I can put together a basically free projection system! I already have one cheap ass panel I got off of ebay but the projector I bought was this thing out of the 60s and it almost burned the house down. Well not really but it was making some funky burning smells so I threw that thing out. Anyway I'm guessing this will be slightly better quality than the one I have and I also have top pick of any old crap I find in the basement...Too bad they don't have any Librettos, I would be all over that in a second.

Then I kind of wandered around uptown and bought some really cheap ass "magic" gloves at Ragstock which are supposed to be one size fit all, but actually they DON'T fit my hands, and my hands are pretty small. I took the 21 back since I needed to hit whole foods and didn't want to transfer to the 84, and on the way there was a super crazy guy on the bus. I recorded him on my mp3 player..I may put up a file later, but it was pretty bad quality. At least he was shouting so you can actually hear it, unlike other crazy people I've tried to record.

Finished up the day (well, not really) by getting my weekly Tuesday tea. Hopefully this should keep me going through the night, as I have half a homework to do for tomorrow. I'm feeling strangely mellow for having so much work due. Perhaps it's because I was feeling like Francis in this PVP comic all day!

Since I've been getting very little sleep over the past few days, my dreams are plentiful and feverish. I just wanted to post about them before I forget, since one was so wrought with symbolism it just MUST be important, but I'm not sure why.

Dream 1:
I was standing outside Oakwood school, where I went to for K-Grade 2, not sure why. I got a phone call or was contacted in some way by a middle aged guy and went to meet him about a job he wanted done. He ended up looking a lot like my Japanese Lit teacher, but that's besides the point. Anyway, he told me that he needed me to take care of two animals in cages: One tiger, and one crow. I could apparently train these animals by using a silver figure of a duck turned upside-down. I was very scared about the tiger and it seemed dangerous, but the man assured me it was safe if done right, and then said that if I did commit to training the animals and backed out, he would hunt down my friends and kill them. I think I was already too far in at this point, so I said yes, but I was scared. In the end I ended up taking a flight to Japan to get away from everything and selling the meat of the crow and tiger in a bento kit. I don't remember killing the tiger or the crow (and I would never do this in real life) but I distinctly remember this bento kit that I was selling in my shop in Japan with tiger meat and crow feathers.

Bonuf lol dream:
I had a weird sort of dream where I was an eternal ghost who saw these fake brothers of Oliver growing up...some of them were real asses! Anyway it is hard to remember but it was kind of cool since I got to see this alternate commie reality: PvP (Player Versus Player), the webcomic that I reference earlier in this post, was now CvC : Comrade Versus Comrade. That really made me laugh when I remembered it. I'm also laughing because that looks like a potential generation string for a language (consonant vowel consonant). I'm such a geek. You should have heard me and Joseph talking to dinner last night...This is not far off from the actual conversation:

Me: "I've never really gotten palatal stops, you know? In Sanskrit they're supposed to be stops but everyone says them like affricates. And to complicate things there's an aspirated version too."
Joseph: "There is a difference but I'm bad at it too...When I looked at Hungarian, they had both as separate phonemes as well as a t with a palatal secondary articulation..."
(keep in mind I'm not even a phonetician!)

We also talked about the evils of SIL. Now that I read their Wiki, I feel more sure of their evil motives. We thought it might be fun to sabotage them by documenting the language in such a way that the output Bible would be downright blasphemous.

Well, now it is "goodnight" - although my night has only just started. For all x such that x=Stacia, then that x has to do her damn homework.

To Imagine a Shirt is to Imagine a Way of Life

Sat, 08 Dec 2007 02:22:23 GMT

OMG, someone impregnate me so I can make my bebeh wear this shirt. I don't think babies pass over anything in silence, though.

Too bad my Philosophy teacher's kids are all grown up now.