Well. I decided to make an anime-planet account. You basically tell it what anime you've seen and then it tracks how much of your life you have spent on anime. :P Far too much.
You can make specialized little banners too, it's pretty neat. That one's from "The Girl Who Leapt Through Time," a great movie. I think I've posted a review...
Not much else to report. I'm slowly moving to vampire time, which is interesting. I was up until 6 am this morning. It's hard to sleep during the day...
Adion is currently listening to: Coheed and Cambria - Wake Up [3:36]
Alright yeah I hate Youtube for taking the video down, but they still let me upload more junk so... I have a new one. It's my apartment, for those who care. Quality is terrible, but it was recorded on my phone so big surprise!
Nothing much else to report. Joined a forming fansub group on the boxtorrents forums. Current goal for us is to translate Cosmos Pink Shock, which sounds like a hentai but I assure you is not. Video quality is alright, but I think it's a VCR rip at best, probably a TV recording ripped off of VCR so... Yeah. Seems like it'll be fun. And something productive to do over this summer. :)
Adion is currently listening to: Supercar - Alright [3:37]
Edit: alright so I'm going through one of my email accounts I never use... Apparently the Tokyo Broadcasting Company filed a C&D with the video so they took it down. Fair enough, Youtube. Fair enough...
Those overlords at Youtube took down my video from Clannad 5. Well. Sempai's video. The jerks. They didn't even notify me that they did it. I just was looking through youtube and I was curious if anybody else commented on my videos and noticed one was missing. Jerkfaces.
Adion is currently listening to: Prana Presents Xian - Pachinko (Chab Dubb Edit) [7:47]
I'm a moron. My parents birthdays aren't for another like two weeks. At least I got my other objectives completed. Got a gift for dad, still need a card for mom...
It was nice to be home. The shower actually has some water pressure! The food isn't easy mac and cereal! I got lucky and even managed to get my mom to buy me foodstuffs. :) So now I have a lot of food. And a bag of marshmallows, yum :)
I bought a CD off of ebay a while ago, maybe three weeks, and it finally came in sometime when I was gone. So I grabbed that and started listening to it. It's B by Supercar. It's actually pretty good, and I decided to be nice and write a short review on Amazon for it too. It's not what I was expecting but overall I think it'll be another good addition to my small and slowly growing collection of CDs.
It was also nice to get power strips, now I can watch TV and play Wii or PS2 without switching power. There's still a lot of food in my car I need to get out sometime... Applejuice and soup I think... I'll probably do that tonight.
Adion is currently listening to: Supercar - Love Song [3:50]
So... I downloaded the Rosetta Stone for Japanese, level 1. It's really freakin' awesome. I kinda wanna buy it now. But I don't know if I have $500 lying around to buy the 3 levels they offer. It's almost dumb to buy it in any other form, $210 for level one alone, or $240 for level 2, $260 for level 3. I feel like I'm learning a lot, and I've only gone through a little bit of the first level. I'm sure an actual class would teach me more, but this is really fun for me. It even teaches some hiragana, katakana, and a smidgen of kanji. How to speak it... It teaches everything :) Benkyou benkyou benkyou...
Hmm. I went to a concert Sunday, Pointfest. Was pretty big. Lots of big name bands I hadn't heard of, but I had heard, if that makes any sense. Had a good time, got a little bit tan. Met some new people too.
I'm still adjusting to living by myself. Need to get out of the apartment and find where food stores etc are, 'cause I need bread and other foodstuffs. I also need to just clear out the fridge and get some space for actual food. Right now it's a bunch of like, crap, really. There's more stuff in there for alcohol and coffee and just... not food... than anything else. I haven't bothered looking in there for a while because there's nothing in there I'd want.... Okay I just looked. Two dozen eggs, a package of hamburger buns, two bottles of hard liquor, and a whole lot of condiments in addition to leftovers. The fridge isn't very deep either... None of it's mine though, so I don't want to just go shuffling around and throwing things out or whatnot. Those eggs will probably go bad if nobody uses them though, maybe I should make eggs for breakfast tomorrow...
I'm going back home tomorrow (today, now) to get some laundry done, get a real meal, get stuff I forgot, and wish my parents happy birthdays. Come to think of it, I don't have anything for my dad, although his is coming up and not actually tomorrow. I think I missed my mom's, but I have a gift... I'm so bad with dates. I don't know my bothers birthday either... But that already happened so I'm okay. May... 5th? Hmm...
Maybe I should look into getting one of those programs that lets you type out romanji and it finds the katakana/hiragana/kanji for you so you can copy paste it into text fields... Drive people who don't have the Japanese language pack installed crazy :)
I finished watching Clannad this morning. Was really good. Funny and serious, shifting back and forth, and I think that was probably it's weakest point, too. One episode would be drop dead hilarious, and the next would be so serious you're not sure what changed. Then it would reverse again. Still loved it though. Next up is probably Kimikiss Pure Rouge, or maybe Saikano.
I started playing Hitman 2 yesterday morning. I bought it in a collectors pack that came with Hitman: Blood Money, because I had already beat Blood Money and felt I should support them. That was maybe a year and a half ago now... So far it's interesting. It's confusing me though, because BM sorta wants you to avoid killing as many people as possible, and killing some people can cause you to fail the mission. But these older versions don't really care who dies as long as the objective is completed so it's more or less self imposed trouble when I restart every time I accidentally get caught and get into a firefight and kill everyone. Because you can still finish, but that's not as challenging I don't think. I have more fun trying to sneak around and not get caught. Finding out who you can sneak past in what uniform and so forth is fun. The part that I don't like is that there are just some points where you have to kill and there's no way around it. The knockout methods they give you don't even knock the guy out for more than 10 seconds, I don't know why they're even included. Still enjoyable, just gotta find a new playstyle.
Maybe a week ago I was reading dogentricks.com and he posted this really really touching story he had. It's a couple posts back now, "Dream". Anyway, I just thought I should share that with you all because it's such a good story. I cried. I'll admit it. Also, I really like that band, Softball seems pretty awesome. Akiakane too. Mmm. I found this guy's webpage because he's a friend of a friend. Everything he posted is true. Anyway, I'm really envious of the guy because he's spending a year in Japan as an exchange student. He's basically living my dream, only it's his too. Check back a couple months and you'll see some sweeeeet videos of him traveling. Coastlines, railroad trips, views from hotel buildings... I want to go...
I guess I should get some sleep. Think I'll be coming back sometime Sunday. Sayounara!
Adion is currently listening to: The Postal Service - Natural Anthem [5:07]
So... I moved. Place is pretty big, more than enough space for all my junk. And then some. The apartment itself is pretty messy, though. Not sure if I have enough food to last me for a week before people I know around here come back from their breaks they're taking back home in a week. I forgot a couple things at home and so the current plan is to come home sometime Saturday and meet up with the 'rents and wish them happy birthdays (ones is this week, others is next). Mmm. Think I'm really going to like it here. Need to find a job though, as the game testing job seems to have fallen through, as I received no reply from them. For now I'll enjoy all the free time. In fact, I'm going to a concert now. :) So I'm gonna go get ready for that.
Well. Tomorrow is my first final at 8 am. Going to be rough getting up and getting there on time. I need to make a powerpoint presentation for it, roughly 3-5 minutes, and she apparently prefers the shorter side of that. I have to use only visuals to describe why the sources in my last essay are... good. Basically. Which is going to be interesting, because it was about robotics, and only one of my sources will really have any good pictures for it in particular. I could easily find 3 minutes worth of pictures and videos to show, but I don't think that's quite what she's looking for.
Need to finish writing another research essay hopefully tonight, so I can turn it in tomorrow too. It's for my humanities class, and she is basically being extremely nice to me and letting me turn it in late. So I'm trying to do her a little bit of a favor and get it to her before she has to grade all the essays we have to write for the final. After tomorrow I basically am set though, the rest of my finals should be a piece of cake.
Friday is my last day at Home Depot. I only told maybe 3 people, which was basically upper management, and already almost the entire store knows. I suppose I should be more surprised how long it took before this happened. Not that I'm upset people know that I'm leaving, I'm just bad with goodbyes and I didn't want to make this huge. It's tough to talk to people when they keep being like, "so you're leaving, huh?" I want to say, yes, but I'm still here for now so don't make it hard for me to talk to you for the next week. Or something. It's just awkward, I guess. There's a new girl in garden that's pretty cute, Melissa, kinda sad that I won't really be able to see how that goes since by Saturday I'll be in Urbana. So it goes.
The video game testing job emailed me back on Thursday asking for more information. Sweeeeeet. It was basically a full out essay application, I felt like I was applying for college again. I finished that all up and snail mailed next day to them because they wanted it "sooner the better" or in person. Since I'm working every day since last Thursday to next Friday I couldn't make it in person. I hope that job goes well. I would love to have it. Seems like everything I could ask for. Full time, pay is better than what I make, and even though there's no benefits, I don't use the ones I have with Home Depot anyway so not like that changed. I'm hoping for an email reply back today or tomorrow. It's already 4 o'clock so I think if I'm going to get one soon it won't be today. Fingers crossed.
Been keeping pretty busy recently. Between working I've had all these essays sorta attack me at once, and when I'm not doing anything I've been reading for fun. Almost finished another book in the "His Dark Materials" series, which starts with The Golden Compass; it's been really interesting so far. Like it a lot. I picked up another series at Borders the other day too. It's called Crossover: A Cassandra Kresnov Novel, the back seems like it'll be a good read.
I'm starting to look at all the stuff to bring down with me to Urbana. I'm not quite sure what all I'll need to bring, so I'm going with the stuff I know for sure I'll need for now. Clothes, sheets, and some stuff that I've talked to Mark and made sure, like plates and cups and junk. I'm excited to go, I think it'll be a great experience.
About all the major news for now.
Adion is currently listening to: The Slip - The Soft Machine [4:20]
Finals are coming up. Essays are due soon. Work needs to be getting done! Luckily, most of it won't be that hard. The hardest part is finding sources for some of these essays. I hate finding sources. It'd be nice if teachers would just accept that the internet owns the world now, instead of requiring usage of archaic institutes centered around antiquated technology known as books. This is the new wave! Embrace it!
Other news... Put in my two weeks notice, and the store manager told me anytime I wanted to come back I could so that's good news. The managers between him and me are asking for dates that I'll be back and all that. Good to know I'll be missed. :)
I'm running around applying for places online. That video game testing job I mentioned a couple posts back is for a company called Volition, which has made a number of games I have loved in the past. Applied for that. So far that's the best looking job, but I don't know about the highest chances. That ad appears to be pretty much always ongoing, so either the turnover rate is huge or they keep kicking people out the door. Seems like the best job though. Still need to go apply to a few other places, shouldn't be too bad. With luck, by the time I get there I'll have a job already lined up.
I got a new keyboard for my birthday, it's nice :P Quiet and has backlighting, so... good bye light switch for my room! Not that I needed the light to see the keyboard, just... Now I have all the extraneous lighting in my room I'll need. I also got a 4gb memory card for my phone, so I've been using it as an MP3 player in the car. The speaker on it is surprisingly good. And it's nice to be able to listen to more than an hour of music without switching CDs. The included headphones are nice, too, but I don't think I'll be using them much. Just don't need them. Hmm. Other things... I got Resident Evil 4 for my Wii, loved it and beat it in two days. My sister got me the Zapper for my Wii. Fun. Think I'll try using it in RE4 and seeing how it goes. in general, that is its purpose... Might be good for Metroid too. When I have time...
I need to spend some time talking to counselors at school about transfer stuff. I hate the idea though, they generally are worthless. Perhaps if while I was down at UIUC I talked to their academic counselors... Wonder if I can, as a nonstudent.
Plans for the summer include abusing the fact that I still have a UIUC ID and working out at the CRCE. Hopefully I'll stick to that. I'd like to get in better shape, I'm not fat or anything, but I lost what stamina I did have. And some arm strength. Would love to go climbing again... About all I can think of for now.
Adion is currently listening to:the pillows - Waiting At the Bus Stop [2:11]
