I Am Completely Serious

Today thegeekgene and I had to clear out an old cabinet so it could be replaced with a new cabinet. 90% of this cabinet's contents were old photos. After the heavy stuff was dealt with, thegeekgene and I sat down and started going through the pictures, trying to establish an equation to determine the size of Mom's glasses by way of her distance from the 70's and wondering why, as children, we had never once been arrested for indecent exposure. I mean, if these photos are representative, we maybe wore clothes 20% of the time, at most? Where were our parents?

Then I came upon The Photo. A great stillness settled about me. thegeekgene's running commentary on what Dad thought he was doing with that ice cream faded to a dull buzzing somewhere beyond the walls of my mind. Suddenly I understood everything I had done for the past eight years. All my sins and obsessions were laid out neatly before me, like sweaters that need to be air-dried so they're like on the table. Here was the foundation of all that I am.

It was a picture of me, at the age of one-and-a-half, sitting on a plastic toy horse and watching a cartoon called "Hashimoto in... Spooky-Yaki!"

I had not realized how early it had started.

...

I couldn't find that exact cartoon on YouTube, but I found another one from the same series. It's pretty cute. Apparently they were directed by a 1st-generation Japanese immigrant named Bob Kuwahara, and they're all about the Japanese mouse screwing with the American mouse's head.

Having just encountered what appeared to be freshly-posted kamikaze Harry Potter spoilers in the comments section of a news site, I have suggested to thegeekgene that, until her copy shows up tomorrow, she might want to refrain from looking at any site that might have unmoderated comments, if she can't bear to remove herself from the internet entirely. I think I may do the latter. I have a pile of books I've been meaning to finish here.

The internet should be hostile more often! It makes me all productive. Maybe I should switch back to IE and Norton.

(I unpacked all my books yesterday, spent three hours alphabetizing them by author on my freshly-assembled shelves - and then found a box I'd forgotten about under the bed. I don't know how I shelved until three AM without realizing stuff was missing, that was the box that had all my frigging Fruits Basket in it.)

Courtesy of zarla and the makers of Earthbound... the most meta dungeon-crawl ever.

The only thing you really need to know to understand those screen shots is that 'Brick Road' is a non-player character who is obsessed with user-friendly dungeon design, and Our Heroes have encountered his work in the past.

Commentary typed while reading chapters 120-150 of Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle:

( Spoiler Cut )

AND FULL OF ANGST YES

I graduated Sunday, went to a job interview Monday (I'll know by Monday next week), and have spent most of the past couple of days throwing things away. Not even primarily my things - I cleaned out the bathroom cabinets. I got rid of two bags of unsettling products intended for topical use only. I'm still not done, there's still the closet left. After that I'll start on my parents' bathroom.

And then, having so mentally prepared myself - I will start getting rid of books. Both mine, which will never fit in my room unless I remove my dresser (which I am seriously considering, just to avoid doing this), and the General Family Library, which is large. The local public library was unable to absorb our excess the last time we did this.

I decided a while ago to stop using BookMooch, because I didn't trust the people running it (they never did ban the scammer I caught, the design is really bad, there wasn't much communication or indication that the site wouldn't be abandoned by its creator(s) at any second), and didn't want the system going down when I had a lot of points saved up. I'm thinking of starting up again now, just because I've discovered that Amazon Marketplace is a really crappy way to sell the sort of books I need to get rid of, and they seem to be actually working to improve the system recently.

I'm going to start culling my BPAL and ridiculously-hard-to-transport essential oil collections, too. I wonder if it's poor form if your first post to bpalmarketplace is ten imps, one bottle, and thirty bottles of random essential oils? I've seen people do it, anyway... maybe I should just eBay all the really cheap stuff in one big lot, instead.

I have been thinking very hard about joining a commune and about Pokemon.

Went on exciting adventure to Chicago Saturday for the Amity job interview, got back today. Will probably have energy required for angst sometime late tonight, when I am supposed to be working on a paper.

Mom and thegeekgene went with me; thegeekgene toured two colleges and was the less enthralled with the one the further away. Courtesy of Mom's leet internet discount skills, we stayed at a place called Hotel Indigo. The room was extremely pretty, with a big blown-up photograph of pretty stones (slightly pixelated) on the back wall, and nice beds and furniture and all. Mom and thegeekgene thought it was awesome. But it was also small, a weird shape, and kind of crowded with unnecessary stuff - there were probably twenty little brochures, standees, and menus sitting around, all spread out in different and inconvenient places - leaving me not completely impressed with the design.

But the lobby was scented with several different combinations of essential oils appropriate for different times of day. The pattern seemed to be sandalwood at night, patchouli during the day, and something that reminded me of BPAL's Cathode (mint, moss, and fake ambergris) in the morning. And the patchouli, at least, was definitely moderately-good-quality stuff, though I couldn't figure out where it was coming from to investigate. Neither Mom nor thegeekgene noticed any of this until I pointed it out.

Apparently, if a company selling luxury goods/services wants to impress me, what they've got to do is demonstrate a knowledge of aromatherapy and a willingness to purchase fairly good ingredients.

Also, the little bottles of shampoo/conditioner/lotion were Aveda. I will not pay for Aveda stuff, but I will surely steal it.

I appear to have thwarted a book-thief all by myself last night.

( The story. )

( How to rob me without being thwarted. )

For the last few months, when I type a new kanji into the RTF files I'm doing my translation projects in, 90% of the time it comes out pointing left. My kanji do not know which way is up.

I thought at first that the problem was only with @SimSun, which is apparently intended mostly for Chinese, not Japanese, but switching to MS PGothic, which actually has "Japanese" as a language option, doesn't fix it. Anyway, they both used to work. And I've saved and restarted and reopened trying to right them, but nothing changes. This isn't disabling, since I'm lazy and I either romanize or kana-ize everything before I start the actual translation (the kana work properly), but it's really irritating.

Since I haven't installed any new Japan\China\Korea\etc.-related software or fonts during this time, I'm going to assume this is something one of the Windows updates did.

( Image behind cut )

(Edit: And if anyone reading this can tell me what the spine of the book in this image says, and what that title would probably be in English, I would be extremely happy. From the context it's obviously a children's book involving talking animals, and Charles Perrault's name is on the cover, and there's the phrase "boy(s) and girl(s)" in there.

Edit again: Okay, yeah, the book is "Puss in Boots," so the spine is probably a series name. (This is important, okay?!)

)

...was that the ending? Really? That was the ending?

Well, I mean, okay, but...

( Spoilers )

Anyway. The first half or so was awesome, and vocabulary was abused, so, I liked it anyway. But I would have liked it a lot more if the focus of the ending had been different.