Homestuck Notifier - Spades Slick

 If you've been following me on Tumblr, you know that lately I've gotten interested in a webcomic called Homestuck. It's made up to feel like an old school text-based video game, and it incorporates a lot of audio, flash animation, and even a few flash mini-games (making it a sort of multi-media webcomic). I wont bother trying to summarize the plot, as it's a bit complicated, but it's a really intriguing storyline and I'm hooked.

The comic updates regularly, generally on a daily basis, so sometimes fans have to constantly check the site to see if there's a new page. Luckily, one such fan developed a program called the Homestuck Notifier, which checks the Homestuck RSS feed regularly, and when there's a new update, a sound will play and an image will pop up above the computer's taskbar.

The Notifier cycles through a bunch of preset fanart, but the READ ME explained that you could upload your own image or sound to the program's macro folder. Obviously I had to do this, because the preset images didn't include one of Spades Slick, one of my favorite characters.

How to get an Affectionate Kitty

This is for all you people asking.

Haha just kidding, no one's been asking. But I do have a super-affectionate kitty, and I know people whose cats aren't so affectionate. I've always wondered why this is, so I got to thinking about it, and now I've made a set of super easy-to-follow instructions on how to get a kitty just as affectionate as mine!

Things you'll need:

• A kitty (male or female)
• Cat food and a place for the cat to do their business
• An animal shelter or friends willing to take on unwanted kittens
• Older siblings (3+, 4 recommended, males also recommended)
• 10+ years

Book Survey

Someone I'm following on Tumblr linked to this book survey on her main blog. These are 65 questions about books and things in books, and I'll try to keep it interesting (ergo, my answers my run a bit long). As I've read a lot of books in my time, I may not be able to think of the best answers for some of these; unless I have a specific example otherwise, I'm going to try to stick to the books I have on my shelf. The rule stated that you couldn't use the same answer twice, so as much as possible I'll try to follow that.

(EDIT: Also, I realized halfway through that I could count my manga as well, but since I'd already filled out most of the answers I decided not to. Just note that if I'd realized this earlier there would have been some Rurouni Kenshin or Death Note references.)

New Classes (again)

Spring semester has finally started up again here in the desert, so here comes my obligatory 'new semester' overview. We've had quite a long break between Fall and Spring semesters (in the past I believe there was a short Winter quarter in there, but with budget cuts that's now gone), and I know I'm not the only one who's pretty relieved classes are up again. Break is nice, but when I'm not looking for work I'm sitting around the house with nothing to do.

My schedule this semester is pretty full; I'm trying to make up for having a pretty meager selection last Spring. Not only am I at the college for a longer period of time this semester, but I'm also having to familiarize myself with parts of the campus I've never been around before.

Happy Chinese New Year!

This is the year of the Dragon (Jan 23, 2012 – Feb  9, 2013), according to the 12-year Chinese Astrology cycle! Factoring the 60-year elemental cycle, that makes this the Yang Water Dragon.

I hope you understand that today's blog is a total cop out. I was going to do today's week Tues/Thurs until I realized I needed to wish you Happy Chinese New Year today; essentially, regular posts coming on their regular days this week, excluding today.

Romances to Suggest

This is just a minor list of novels sitting on my self that have a romantic leaning (whether it's the main plot or not) that I would like to suggest. Some of these may be getting full reviews later. These are in order of how they appear on my shelf (by author's last name):

-Sense and Sensibility
A Jane Austen that I think everyone's heard about. It's a bit less famous than Pride and Prejudice, which is also on my shelf but isn't being listed because I think everyone knows about it. Though Austen's style may be a bit unfamiliar to some, it's a really good story if you can get into it, and I might just like it more than the other famous Austen, though mostly out of spite (they're both really good novels).

-The Wolf Hunt
A historical fantasy/romance by Gillian Bradshaw, highly recommended by me. This is an adaptation of the earliest known werewolf story, Bisclavret, which is a French epic poem about a man with the ability to transform into a wolf, who is betrayed by his wife, trapped in wolf form, and taken up by his liege king as a sort of pet until he is able to get his revenge. It's an awesome story, and the adaptation adds a bit of romance with a female protagonist; very historically accurate, from what I can tell, and, as I mentioned before, highly recommended.

-Enchantment
Probably one of the lesser known Orson Scott Card novels, which Card himself said was one of his favorites. A Russian-born American travels back to his homeland and gets trapped in an ancient Russian fairytale, a Slavic version of Sleeping Beauty in which he and the princess must fight the evil witch Baba Yaga while Ivan, the protagonist, struggles to figure out how to return to his own time. Very much an OSCard novel, with smart characters and an intriguing plot, but an unexpected romance all the same.

-Paper Towns
A big break from the previous titles on this list, Paper Towns in a modern day YA novel by John Green. The protagonist Quentin (known as 'Q') is called out for a night of adventure by Margo Roth Spiegelman, a girl who has always been an fascinating enigma, only to discover the next day that she had disappeared. He spends the whole rest of the novel trying to balance searching for her and keeping up with his own High School life, and the conclusion makes this definitely one of my favorite YA novels.

-The Fault in our Stars
The newly released John Green novel, about a girl dying of lung cancer, the boy she meets, and the adventures they go on. This one is getting a full review next week, but I'm adding it here because it's definitely a good read; be prepared to laugh and to cry, though.

-The Phantom of the Opera
Gaston Leroux, this one is being added to the list just because I don't think many people have read it. It took me a bit to get into, but it's very goof and definitely a recommend for everyone who loves the play/movie(s).

-Much Ado about Nothing
By far my favorite Shakespeare; Shakespearean in writing but hilarious and wonderful. Beatrice is a smart woman who has refused to marry; Benedick is a sarcastic bachelor who loves his 'freedoms'; both are tricked into falling in love after a series of conspiracies between their friends. Catherine Tate and David Tennant recently acted the lead roles in a stage version, which I would have given anything to see (still hoping for a Region 1 DVD release; fingers crossed!)

-The Importance of Being Earnest
Recommending this particular Oscar Wilde play because it'll probably be the easiest to get a hold of (Colin Firth and Rupert Everett did a version recently that was wonderful). Jack fakes the name Earnest when going into town to pursue the affections of his love Gwendolyn; his friend Algernon, after hearing this, goes to the country and pretends to be Jack's fake brother Earnest, to pursue the affection of Jack's young ward Cecily. Other wonderful Wilde plays include Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, and An Ideal Husband).

New Year's Traditions

I may be a week late, but Happy New Year everyone! 2012 is a year that I know many people have been looking forward to.

Personally, I'm not very big on New Year's Resolutions; everybody jokes about how we all forget them within a couple of weeks, and it's true. I agree that goal-setting is a worthy activity, but waiting until that specific day to start them seems a bit arbitrary.

As a family, we've also never been pretty big on the whole 'New Year's Eve' thing either. I hardly ever remember staying up to cheer on the New Year, or watching the ball drop in New York. A friend introduced me to the idea of eating black-eyed peas for good luck, but I don't think my family has ever done anything of significance for luck in the new year. Generally, I'd stay up late (as a normal teenager on break) and listen to our neighbors making noise before finally nodding off an hour later.

December Update

Now that NaNoWriMo is over, I should be back to regular updates this week! I already missed Monday, however, so we'll see how far that goes.

Regarding NaNoWriMo - I won! Again. This was my fourth year in a row winning, and my final word-count was somewhere around 100,211. In case you're wondering, that's about 139 single-spaced pages on my word processor, which might translate to about 350-400 pages in a paperback. It's very, very rough, with copious misspellings, grammatical errors, and plot points that I only remembered to add in halfway through, and are thus out of context.

I sort of feel like this has been my hardest NaNoWriMo yet, though I'm sure I've felt that every year. Still jobless, I doubled my word goal from 50k to 100k, and managed to work away at it pretty easily for the first week or so. During the second and third weeks, I remembered that a particular video game that I had been waiting for would be coming out before the end of the month, and in order to give me some days off to play it, I averaged about a thousand words extra every day.

Week One with Skyward Sword

I don't think I'm going to be blogging this entire game, but I definitely wanted to give you all my week one reactions, especially since, a) I've been waiting and saving over two years for this game, and b) I know quite a few people who haven't been able to play it yet, and have been asking me what I think. This'll be long, and I apologize in advance - but there are many pretty pictures to look at!

NaNoWriMo '11

Happy Halloween, dear readers! I hope everyone's having a great time dressing up, trick-or-treating, going to parties, or whatever it is you do to celebrate!

Halloween marks the last day of October, as you well know, and the last day before the writing craze NaNoWriMo begins. I don't mean to detract from Halloween here, but NaNoWriMo is a bit higher up on my list of priorities - and by 'a bit' I mean that I've been planning my novel for months, while I don't even have a Halloween costume this year (in case I need to go out, however, I can just grab my Hufflepuff scarf and say I'm studying charms and herbology).

HUFFLEPUFF.

Trip to Oregon: Part III

There was no blog post on Monday, because I spent the morning coming home from a week-long stay in Portland, Oregon. We flew up there last Thursday to attend the Saturday wedding of one of my older brothers, and, as you might image, it was wonderful and fun and amazing!

Wisdom Teeth Extraction

I got my wisdom teeth removed today. They're gone. I'm not 100% sure what they were doing there in the first place, since it seems like everyone just wants to get them out eventually. I'm sure a five minute Google search would lend me an answer, but I find I don't actually care enough to go look it up. Ah, 21st century.

I got to the dental surgery place a bit early, after driving myself and my dad there in his truck - which is a stick-shift, by the way. Remember how I said I never wanted to have to drive manual transmissions? It's because I hate them, and I think I'm going to either die or kill someone else when I'm in them. A few minutes ago, I looked up "pros and cons of learning to drive stick-shift," and you want to know what the best 'pro' reason was? "A lot more fun to drive."

It's totally not.

Wake Up Juice

Getting ready for the school year to start became official last Sunday, when I turned on my phone's morning alarm tone. The particular tone I use has gone through some changes in the past year, and since I'm doing my 'back to school' special, I wanted to highlight a few of them.

When I started school last year, I didn't have a phone, so I woke up using my favorite little Bob alarm clock. I got it years ago from Brookstone, after seeing a friend use it at summer camp, and I always thought it was super cute. Unfortunately, it emits a sharp, repetitious beep in its attempt to wake me up, and listening to that day after day, year after year, was grating my nerves.

First Day

About a year ago, I came onto my local community college campus to start my first day of classes. It was a truly terrifying experience.

For starters, I had to take the bus to campus. The college campus is a 20-30 minute drive from my house, and since I didn't have my license at the time, one of my parents would have to drop me off on their way to work (which, by the way, is in the opposite direction). Instead of taking me all the way out to campus an hour early just to get to work on time, they dropped me off at a local bus stop. My first experience riding a bus was that first day of school, and I had no idea what to do. I managed to deposit the money and find a seat without too much hassle, though I ended up sitting in the same spot for almost the entire semester.

No Excuses

This is my, 'I could have written an interesting blog today if I'd isolated myself in the back room and limited my internet access, but instead I hung out with a friend this morning and coordinated to give another friend a wig I'm still not sure why I own' fill-in blog post.

I will be posting today's blog post tomorrow instead. It'll be good - I'm reviewing a pretty subversive book - but it'll take quite a while to write, and I'm already several hours behind. Luckily, with the two week break I took, I've got a good list of topics to write about in the coming weeks.

Just a forward; I'll be having my wisdom teeth taken out in a couple of weeks. It'll be a Tuesday, so I'll try to pre-write that Wednesday's post, and hopefully I'll be healed and lucid enough to write that Friday. After that, school will be starting for me, so there's a chance I may miss a day or to. I'll try to keep you all informed. Thanks for reading!

Vacation Time: Results Show

Monday, August the first, my parents and I set out for our official summer-vacation-get-away thing. The goal, I believe, was to visit my brother in Utah, see a few people in Idaho, and get to know said-brother's future in-laws in Oregon while we scouted out places to eat in Portland for the upcoming wedding. My own personal goals, meanwhile, were to work through some of my 'to-read' backlog, figure out our new car radio, and drive at least one leg of the trip without mom yelling at me (she's a very nervous passenger).

The drive to Utah took about ten hours, and I drove the first three. The road goes straight through the Mojave Desert, which is relatively pleasant to look at but pretty boring to drive through. Add that to the fact that I didn't know where I was going, and I was kinda stressed (I'm not used to using the overdrive button, so there were a few people riding my tail, and mom was finicky throughout), and by the end of my shift my back was sore and I was ready to stop.

Like this, but with no clouds. Ever.

Vacation Time

This is a short update to you guys know that I'll be out of town for the next two weeks with sporadic internet access and probably minimal time to write. I'm hoping to be able to post at least one blog each week, and there are a couple of things I want to talk about (including a review on Cowboys and Aliens and a book I've been reading), but I can't make any promises. I'd suggest subscribing to my RSS feed or, if you have a Google or Blogger account, 'following' my blog to see when I update with new posts.

I hope you are all having a wonderful summer, and I'll be back to regular thrice-a-week updates when I get back!

Apologies

For anyone looking forward to my blog, this week has probably felt a bit like a cop out. On Monday, I just posted a list of facts which you may or may not have been interested in. Wednesday there was no post at all. I can console myself with the fact that I don't really have a huge readership yet.

As some of you may know, I'm taking two summer courses at the local community college, one of which just ended this week (I think). For my final, I had to give a ten-minute presentation, which I'll use as my excuse as to why my blog posts have been infrequent as of late. There was also an exam in my Psychology class as well, so I had to balance studying and preparing for my presentation at the same time; oddly enough, I ended up doing really well on my Psych test, only missing three question after barely studying, while previous tests with more dedicated studying had gotten lower scores. Hmm....

My presentation was on Internet Subcultures, and how they're forming the 'Modern Myth' (it was a Myth and Legend English course). It was an interesting presentation to prepare, and apparently everyone really liked it, even though I felt like subject was too broad, and I definitely had a different point of view than what people were expecting.

For today, however, there's really no excuse as to why there's no post. I spent the morning alternating between working on a puzzle with my mom (which you will definitely hear more about in upcoming blogs) and watching Netflix. Around noon or so, Mom and I decided to head outside and do some shopping, because, in all honesty, both of us needed to get outside a bit. I got some Animal Crackers from Target, which was exciting because I haven't had those in a long time.

Then we got back at 4:30 and I realized that I hadn't written a blog yet today. Instead of working on something substantial and posting it late tonight, I decided to give you, dear readers, this cheesy apology post and a promise to write something interesting next week.

Looking at my Blog Idea Book, however, I noticed that I'm running out of interesting ideas. I have a bunch of old ideas that don't seem nearly as interesting anymore, and a few reviews I need to write as soon as I finish what I'm planning on reviewing, but other than that, there are just a few mildly interesting 'Personal Opinion' pieces. If anyone has something they want me to talk about, please leave a comment below. If there's anything you'd like to hear my opinion about, any books or movies you want me to review, or anything else, I'll be glad to take any suggestions into serious consideration. Thanks in advance!

Monday the Fourth

I don't have a main topic for today's blog, so even though there are several things I'm going to go over, it'll be relatively quick.

About a week ago, I preformed a system restore on my dad's old laptop (which I've informally adopted) to clean it of any malware. For some reason, after the software reset, the 'Control' key fell off of the keyboard (In case there are any computer illiterates following along: there's no reason that something in the software would effect the keyboard hardware). I was unable to click it back into place, so instead of wasting the opportunity, I decided to sew the 'ctrl' key onto a bracelet that I could wear around, because the symbolism was too good to pass up. I don't know if I'll ever actually wear it, but it's pretty cool looking.

In other news, this past week has been pretty interesting. I managed to make all three of my blog appointments last week, so I'm really not doing too bad, but last Monday was a pretty late update (surprisingly, according to my stats, my post on the 27th got an unexpected amount of hits. Who knew people were so interested in hats?) I blame Monday's tardiness on my mom's compulsive desire to catch up to me on Psych.

Manual Entertainment

I really need to start writing some more blog rough drafts in advance. I only have one semi-ready, and it would require me to download some pictures off my camera (which of course requires me to find my camera, first).

Today's the third day of Summer Semester at Generic Local Community College. I take the bus there and back (about a 20 minute ride), so I get to experience the great desert outdoors, something that never happens during break, or the days I happen to not have class. I don't have a car, nor do I have my driving license yet (we were all very late with it, in my family), so I'm also getting my exercise, walking home from the bus stop - almost two miles away - while my parents and their vehicles are at work.

The first day of the semester, I left my keys at home. I was in such a rush to get out the door, making sure I had all my books and knew where my classes were, that I decided I wouldn't lock the door behind (left Dad to do that for me) and didn't even realize I'd need the keys to unlock the door later. Luckily, my mom works at an elementary school between our house and the bus stop, and she just happened to be heading out for recess duty when I called her cell phone to ask if she had hers.

When I got home and recovered my complexion (my face gets a bit red when I'm exhausted from exercise), I posted on Facebook:

"Not that I'm complaining, but why isn't it 100 degrees outside? Stupid global climate change means I no longer know what to expect from anything! Next, they'll tell us we don't have to pay taxes anymore, and we'll have a ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE!"

In the Southern Californian desert, in June, it's kind of expected to be really hot. I know I've mentioned this in a blog before, but it's been unseasonably cool this year. I figured, if a hot summer is no longer guaranteed, who's to say that anything in life is certain anymore, even death and taxes!? Of course, it's still in the 90s here, with a cool breeze, so elsewhere in the world they'd say it's pretty hot, but in a bona fide desert, we're used to 100 to 110 degrees (Fahrenheit) and hot air blowing.

It was hotter on Tuesday, and I remembered my key. Today, I forgot my key again. I got all the way to the house before I realized I needed to turn back and get mom's from the school. This blog is a bit later than I expected because of how tired and annoyed I was when I finally got into the 82 degree house.

Along with the start of Summer Semester, this week is also E3 - Electronic Entertainment Expo! It's an annual trade show of video game related technology and hardware, and a major geek fest! All the major companies give presentations on the work they'll be doing and releasing in the next year, and tech companies show off some of the newest, highest quality technology for people in the industry to see and get ideas from. Only people in the gaming industry are allowed to attend, so normal geeks who want to go have to get engineering degrees and get hired by a developing company.

Last year was the first year I actually watched one of the presentations; namely, Nintendo's. I was surprised by how fun it was - these aren't boring, 'here's some numbers and things to expect in the future' presentations, they're exciting, humorous, of geeks for geeks by geeks. Yesterday was this year's presentation by Nintendo, where they unveiled their new Wii successor system. Unfortunately, I had a ton of homework to do, so I wasn't able to watch it live.

As soon as I finish this blog, however, I'm going to go over the the E3 website and watch the tape. In case anyone's interested, I'll write my feelings on what happens as a blog post for either tomorrow or Saturday. I may also watch Sony's presentation, depending on how I feel.