So today I re-watched the fifth season of Lost. Also, I had ramen for lunch, I launched a new trope page, and I arranged to go visit a couple of potential places to live for next year. 

Lost is okay. It's kinda weird because you can tell they were making everything up as they went along, especially early on. But by this point it seems like they figured out what was going on. I think the show, overall, was better towards the tail end because of it. It bothers me how lax all the characters are about gun safety, though. I mean, at least three or four people died because nobody in the entire show could be bothered to pay attention to basic precautions like "Look at what you're aiming at before you shoot."

Ramen is also okay. Cheap stuff, but it's a meal.

5 bad things about 5 good things

The bad thing about donuts is that they're sticky, so your hands get all sticky when you eat them if you're not careful.

The bad thing about chocolate chip cookies is that when they get cold, their quality drops dramatically. There's a big difference between a cold cookie and a warm cookie straight out of the oven.

The bad thing about the comics page is that you have to subscribe to the whole newspaper to get to it, so the whole rest of the newspaper is a waste of money.

The bad thing about nice warm weather is that if I'm not wearing my coat, I don't have any pockets to carry my Kindle in.

The bad thing about warm laundry fresh out of the dryer is that it's all staticky and it sticks to things and makes your hair stand up.

20 Things You Can Do with a Potato

1. Cook it and eat it
2. Cook it and don't eat it
3. Put eyes and a nose on it and make a Mr. Potato Head
4. Cut it in half and make a stamp thingy
5. Leave it in the fridge, forget about it until it rots, find it again when it starts to smell, then throw it away
6. Use it as a baseball and see how long it takes for it to explode
7. Get three of them and practice juggling
8. Keep it as a pet, like a pet rock, except a potato instead of a rock and you have to throw it out when it starts to rot
9. Plant it and grow more potatoes
10. Plant it, forget to water it, and end up growing no potatoes
11. Make a potato battery
12. Use it in your Chell/GLaDOS Portal 2 cosplay outfit
13. Make a potato gun and use it as ammo
14. Get a sack of them and use it as ballast for your hot air balloon
15. Carve a jack-o-lantern face on it for Halloween to save money on pumpkins
16. Use it as a prop in a period piece about the Irish potato famine
17. Give it to an enemy as a crappy Christmas gift to save money on fruitcake
18. Sketch a still life of it
19. Prop up a wobbly table
20. Throw it at something you would normally throw a rock at, except you ran out of rocks so you're using a potato instead

My homework for Music Theory is to compose a short piece of music. I'm thinking I'll take an existing piece and arrange it for SATB. I have my eye on the Pokémon main theme, which is a lovely piece of music, but that's tentative. There are a couple of Shining Force battle tunes on my short list as well, and the Soulcaster II theme.

Soulcaster II has a great soundtrack. Definitely an underrated gem.




I only learned that the Soulcaster games existed because I got them in an Indie Royale Bundle. The nice thing about these indie game bundles is that a. they're cheap, so it's great value, and I love value, and b. they introduce you to great games you never would have even heard of otherwise.

I mean, a lot of people see advertising as the enemy, like, "Oh, it's advertising, they just want your money, resist the influence!" But I don't think that's fair. Like, they make their pitch, right, yeah, but it's not like you have to buy it. The Steam ARG events, for example, are something I really liked. What they did for their winter sale was they gave out free gifts for anyone who got certain achievements in various games. It was a blatant ploy to advertise the games (which were always 75% off when they announced the achievement, of course). But it's fun. Getting free gifts is exciting, and the thing was, thanks to those indie bundles, I had a whole bunch of the games in my library already that I hadn't even installed yet. So it gave me an incentive to unwrap all the goodies I had lying around and try them out. And some of them were actually really fun! Like And Yet It Moves, The Binding of Isaac (another geat soundtrack there, BTW), Killing Floor, Spiral Knights, Rise of Immortals, Trine, Revenge of the Titans...well anyway, it's basically win-win-win. Steam gets buzz or whatever, game developers get money, I get quality entertainment at low prices. I hope they do something similar for spring.

Anyway, so I'm looking at Soulcaster or Pokémon or Shining Force music.

When I walked out of the house this morning, I put my hands in my pockets and realized that I had a glove in my left pocket and no glove in my right pocket. This is a terrifying thing because it means that one of my gloves fell out of my pocket. So I spun around and looked on the ground behind me, but I didn't see anything. This is also terrifying because it means one of my gloves fell out of my pocket and I have no idea where it is. Now, the ideal situation is that it fell out of my pocket when I tossed my jacket on my bedroom floor. But by this point I was halfway to the bus stop, and if I turned back, I'd end up missing the bus and have to bike to campus instead, and even then I probably wouldn't have time to comb through the bushes searching for a missing glove.

So all day long I'm at school and I keep putting my hands in my pockets, and every time I do, I feel the empty space in my right pocket and I'm grimacing because I have no idea if I'm ever going to see that glove again.

I had a cup of soup for lunch. Clam chowder. Heated it up in the microwave at the MU and sipped it on my way to my Sociology lecture. It tasted like clam chowder. Those little soup cups are nice because I can heat them up in the microwave at the MU and drink them while I'm walking to my Sociology lecture. Bought a plate of rice and spicy chicken from a food cart for dinner. It tasted like the sum of its parts. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't very good value either...seven bucks and it's mostly rice and lettuce with a little chicken. Tasted fine, but I'd rather have the value. This is why it's better to pack a lunch. If you don't pack a lunch and you get hungry, you have to buy food on campus, and the value is so much worse. One bagel sandwich at the CoHo is like $2.50, but you go to the grocery store and that same price will buy you bagels for a week if you're willing to spread the cream cheese yourself.

I'm on the fifth Song of Ice and Fire book now. I just finished the part where King Joffrey forces Robb and Arya Stark to duel to the death. I can't believe Arya would cut off her own brother's head, just like that. Did not see that coming. Oh, sorry, I guess that's a spoiler.

Anyway, I got home and my other glove was on my desk. Phew.

Huh, I just looked at the theme this thing had and it was super-high-contrast white text on a black background. Ew, that's awful. So I tried this white-on-darkgrey instead. Better, but...eh, it's...meh.

I don't want white on black because that's awful. I don't want black on white because that's almost equally awful. I sort of like the cyan, but that's kind of Twittery. I'll try this cloud background and see how that looks.

This has been an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the production of things that I wrote in this place.

Okay so this is a blog.

Why am I writing this? Because fuck you, I wanted to write it.

You know, I always feel a little uncomfortable casually writing "fuck you" like that...the more you use strong language in casual speech, the less powerful it becomes, and when I write a cheap gag like that it feels like I'm desensitizing myself and anyone reading it, and then when I'm really mad and I need to cuss, what am I supposed to do? So I try to avoid the biggest expletives. The problem is, sometimes, especially when you want to be concise, it's just hard to effectively convey that same emotion with a bowdlerized alternative like "screw you". Imagine I wrote "Because screw you, I wanted to write it." It just doesn't sound right, does it? Sometimes you can get creative with things like "Holy flying garbage pails", but then you end up sounding like you're auditioning for Cheesy Batman Sidekick. Or you can think of something that sounds obscene without being explicit, like "Stick your head in a blender, donkey vomit." But that doesn't work because first, it's ridiculous and usually stupid, and second, I didn't think of it. Well, I thought of it now, but it's too late, I'm already explaining this whole thing.

Anyway, the point is, I'm writing this because I don't do enough writing. I like writing. And if you want to be good at something, you need to do it a lot. Like, I skimmed the Malcolm Gladwell book, but really it's just common knowledge. You have to practice to be good at something. Practice makes perfect, whatever.

Like, last quarter I took a writing class, right? And every lesson we had writing practice, where we had a prompt and we wrote something for it. Like not even a free write, just a creative exercise like "Write a short story that uses no punctuation" or "Write a short story that uses no adjectives." Well anyway, that was all fiction, but that's not important. I mean, I could write fiction if I wanted. I'll write whatever I like, fuck you. There, see, I did it again...it was weaker this time, wasn't it? I mean, it was a comma splice (unless you're the Asian gal from the Austin Powers movie with the cheap pun name, in which case you can pretend I was talking to you, assuming you're using a text-to-speech program to read this and you didn't see how I spelled it) which could weaken it, but anyway.

Okay, so I have a blog already, that being the one over here, but I pretty much only use it to write about RuneScape, right? And that's what the people reading it are expecting me to write. This is mostly in my head because as far as I know there are only, like, one or two or three people who actually follow it faithfully, I dunno, I mean I'm not really that great and I'm definitely not famous or anything so it's not like I have a loyal fanbase...but it's on a RuneScape website and it has "RuneScape" right at the top and all the posts are about RuneScape and the fact of the matter is, I don't really have all that much to say about RuneScape these days. I mean, maybe I have things to say, but nothing interesting. Or like, maybe it's interesting, but it's still boring, you know? It would just look like this. Like this right here. Except about...some RuneScape thing instead of whatever this is. Which isn't inherently bad except that none of my other posts look like this. Except the first one. This is my first post here too. Maybe it's only the first post that looks like this. Who knows. But most of my posts are actually, like, real-looking. Like, I could send them to a RuneScape, like, magazine, or something, and I wouldn't be embarrassed if they published them. Mostly. Like, they're actually clever. Or if not clever, then funny, at least a little bit, or maybe even informative or opinionated. Whereas this...well, this is just a brain dump, right? Pretty much. Hopefully that's obvious by this point, if you got through the third paragraph.

The real point is, I need to write more. Or I want to write more. Or whatever. I'm going to write more. And so this is a blog. I guess. It's this place where I posted this thing. And I'll post some more things. And they could be things about anything, so if I'm not playing much RuneScape right now I'll just write about something else. Whatever.

Drinking game: take a drink whenever I say "whatever", "I guess", "anyway", "so yeah", "stuff", "y'know", or the adverbial or hedging forms of "like", or start a sentence with a coordinating conjunction. Yeah, it's gonna be like this.

Y'know, people think "like" isn't a real word, like, that it's just thrown into sentences at random without any meaning. But that's really not true. It's an actual thing with actual grammatical...stuff. There's, like, research, and...see, now that I wrote the thing about the drinking game, I'm all self-conscious about saying "stuff" and "whatever". But anyway...damn...anyway, it's an actual real word. And it's actually really old. It's been in common usage for, like...drink...ages. Like centuries. You can look this stuff up. (Drink drink.)

 So yeah. Writing. Things. Whatever. I'll post again later.