A Little Bit of Everything

I came back to see the Snowflake Challenge started, and although I don't think I'll do most of the prompts this year (I certainly didn't last year), this one looked fun.



Challenge #12

In your own space, resurrect an old meme. Have fun with it! Which is the goofiest meme you can think of? Put on your party hat and be silly!! Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

I chose a few listed in the post and thought I'd give them a try. (Click the pictures for the full-size versions.)

Fail Cat

Not as bad as I thought it would turn out.

Desktop/Wallpaper Screenshot

It's a Wallpaper Engine sound-reactive wallpaper.

Nearest Book
I got The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett this Christmas, and I've been working my way through it, meaning I've left it on my desk next to my laptop. I actually hadn't read up to page 123 when I saw this challenge, so I used that excuse to read some more of it.

"Even in this violet light his skin gleams coppery. There is much gold about his person, in the form of anklets and wristlets, but otherwise he was naked except for a leopordskin loincloth. He took that in the steaming forests of Howondaland, after killing its owner with his teeth."

I'm assuming when people say the later books in the Discworld series are better than the first few, they mean there's less of the exaggerations/satire of fantasy tropes in them? I'm enjoying the book so far, but it feels more like a parody than anything else sometimes.

Music Shuffle
There's a decent amount of instrumental music in my Spotify liked songs and I don't really have a main playlist other than that, so instead of writing the first line of 20 songs, I decided to just list the first 20 songs that come up.

( The song list became a bit of a text wall. )

College work ramped up a bit, then those of us living in the dorms who could go somewhere else were told to leave in the middle of March (which led to me moving back in with my mom and younger siblings), and then adapting to online lectures put both students and instructors behind schedule for the last month of the term. I haven't had the time or energy to write anything that wasn't class-related since mid-February, I think.

I'm fine, my family's fine, and there haven't been any COVID-19 cases in my town (yet). Now that I'm not so stressed and exhausted, I'll probably be able to post more (and have more to post about).

In your own space, talk about your fannish history.

I don't really have one. I lurked on Tumblr for years, and before that I lurked at small anime forums (that I can no longer remember the names of - they're probably long gone) and FF.net, and before that I didn't know that fandom was a thing.

I know this is a relatively short post, but it's a relatively short history.

I just tried to compile a Word document, then wondered why the paragraph I was on turned into a heading. I'm so glad today was the last day of classes.

College isn't really overwhelming, but I have a lot less free time than I'm used to, so I have to adjust to that. And this is before the workload ramps up.

Apparently the math course is new, and it's pre-calc now. I did not go into this prepared for pre-calc. The beginning of the course has just been a review of what we were supposed to have learned in high school so far, so I've had to try to shake the rust off that stuff and re-teach myself some of it. On the other hand, I'm wondering how many of my classmates are either going to drop out or have to retake the class because they've never taken a pre-calc class before. (No, it wasn't in the prerequisites for the program.)

At least my other classes don't seem like much of a problem so far. Our Communications for IT class is really the only other difficult one, and that's more of the "why is writing 300 words so painful now when I can easily write over 1K in an hour for fun" type of difficulty.

Onto Dreamwidth stuff, I kind of want to try posting here once or twice a week. It'll probably be Mondays and/or Fridays, considering those are the weekdays when I have the fewest classes. I could post on the weekends, but I think I'd rather use my writing-related energy on fic rather than posts on those days. I'd try for about 200 words on each Saturday and Sunday, for a total of 400 words a weekend, which should be workable even when schoolwork ramps up a bit. I really want to actually finish and share something, even if it takes a while to do.

Anyway, I'd better get to sleep. Tuesdays are just ridiculous schedule-wise, and I don't really want to be tired by the last class of the day (which is math. Brilliant planning.)

I thought I might as well make one big catch-up post with all the stuff I meant to put here and then forgot to.

( Books )

( Games )

( Writing )

( Other )

And that's everything.

I managed to pick up my new computer today, after the Canada Post parcel tracking website didn't agree with the post office yesterday. I think they just didn't try delivering it to my street address and just spent the day matching the address to the mailbox, considering the parcel card had the box number written on it. That's not how I asked for it to be delivered, but at least it's here now.

I've been using it for few hours now, but I'm still not quite used to how the colours look on the new monitor. (The higher resolution also makes my default icon look terrible. And I could've sworn my squee icon was dark and light blue, not blue and green.) I actually kind of like it. My old laptop's screen was very pale and washed out, colour-wise, and this one is much better. The main thing I notice right now is that the Celerity site skin actually puts the post metadata/settings block into a block of colour, which my old computer didn't show (or at least didn't show well enough for me to see it).

Also, the specs are more than good enough to play all the games in my Steam library and (probably) all the ones on my wishlist! No more games running like they're underwater because the devs decided to link game speed to frame rates!

Ended up making a Twitter account under this username. It's aether_blue. It's also in my profile. I don't think I'll do much other than retweet things, but it's there.

So the staff elevator stopped working during my shift today. It's been a while since it happened last, so I'm not terribly surprised, but wow, that's annoying when it's the only elevator that leads where you need to go. I don't know how long it was stuck, but it was long enough for the old lights behind the call buttons to make the buttons uncomfortably hot. It'll probably be fixed by tomorrow, but I'm still glad I can use the main elevators tomorrow and just not deal with it.

I decided to try Waves NX for a bit, but I ended up uninstalling it today. It's advertised feature of tracking your head movements with your webcam in order to mimic a fancy sound setup didn't seem to do much, and all it really did was bork the audio on my laptop. I couldn't adjust the volume through Windows, and with some games it was way too quiet without headphones but painfully loud with them. I kind of regret actually paying for it, but it was $10, so it's not a terrible loss. I might have been stubborn and not uninstalled it right away because it was paid software and I wanted to make it work.

In other news, while I was rushing to the first boss in Transistor to check if an access point showed up after you lost the fight once (it does), I noticed one of the terminal ticker messages referred to a "Quarterly Solstice SkyVote"! Aside from implying that there's four solstices in a year, which could be a mistake on the writer's part (I've heard people refer to the spring and fall equinoxes as solstices several times before), it seems to mean that a solstice is something kind of important to Cloudbank's citizens, which makes the idea of solstices being recognized holidays seem a little more rooted in canon than I thought a few months ago. ( Late-game Transistor spoilers! ) That is, if I actually get around to writing out my thoughts on it.

I must have missed the tweet for the Nintendo Direct, because there was one today? People on Twitter seemed to be excited about the announcements, so I went and watched it myself.

( stuff about video games )