Because I do this every year!

In 2009, I:
-Got a credit card
-Got a smartphone
-Failed a class
-Finished a JRPG in under six months!
-Got back into LJ RP (and how)
-Made a suit from scratch

...Not a very eventful year for new experiences, haha.

MMO I want to be excited about but can't quite get worked up about - Final Fantasy XIV

(I tend to like Final Fantasy games in part for their worldbuilding - see Midgar and Spira - and I'm just not getting a feel for that from XIV. It seems so...generic high fantasy with chocobos :<)

MMO I didn't expect to be excited about and am - Guild Wars 2

(It looks gorgeous, and while the races play into some of the fantasy tropes they also all manage to look really unique. I want a cute little Asura already, augh. And the lack of extreme sexual dimorphism - contrast with WoW - makes me happy. Female cat people aren't hypersexualized, hooray!)

I also keep wanting to reactivate my WoW account, but most of what I want to do is raiding and as far as I know there are no non-shitty two-night-a-week raiding guilds, which is all I have time for right now. I'm an elitist bitch and I don't want to play with lousy players, but I think pretty much anyone who is a good raider is in a three-four raid a week guild which I just...can't do.

- Actual CBC news broadcaster ticker seen yesterday while I ate cheeseburgers in McDonald's: "Its Way Way Too Cold Out"
- We got an inch of snow! Which means everyone was driving like an idiot yesterday, and today it's all melted again into the occasional puddle of slush on the grass
- Daiso is a magical land of small, cheap, useful, Japanese things that you didn't know you needed until you saw them. I had to talk myself down to twenty dollars worth of stuff (everything is $2 each, so :<)
-Corollary to above - I now have the perfect case for my BPAL imps! it's a bit plain, but it has little perfectly sized compartments.
-The Delly has a new culinary invention - the potato chop. It's an inner core of ground beef, onions, peas, and carrots, surrounded by mashed potatoes, rolled in breadcrumbs, and deep-fried. It's delicious.
-Apparently sleep-dep makes me poetic. I ended my eight and a half page 20th century lit final (a discussion of how Watchmen and The Matrix represent fears of technology current to their time periods) with "Scientific progress moves forward while the the ethical debate surrounding its use lags behind, and we are left in uncertain territory apt to breed nightmares."
-Eleven page paper of doom netted me a B+/A- and and admonishment to proofread. I did skim it once, but I was a bit tripped out on the clonazepam and really sick of looking at it, so there's a few word switches, half the 'it's' should be 'its', and I stopped editing a line mid-sentance.

So I know a few of you still have your own domains - I'm looking to switch providers. I'm largely happy with my current plan buuuuut TCH only lets you have one domain per account (any additional ones are parked) and I uh. May have just registered a second one to have the most amazing e-mail addresses ever, so I need a hosting account that can provide that. My current plan is the silver plan here - I do not need nearly that much bandwidth, though I /do/ use my domain for a lot of image hosting/file transfers so I've come close to the 2.4 GB cap before. Any opinions, anyone?

All my papers and the two worst of my finals over with, which is a relief. I dunno if it's the stress or the cold snap we've been having or both, but I've been feeling more like a bitter, angry husk of a human being than normal the last few days, ugh. I'm halfway tempted to take hiatuses at my games so I can just hide inside alone and play PS2 games, but I'm also grumpy about my inability to get characters active and involved in plots right now so it's kind of a no-win situation. I am a crankypants right now and feeling miserly and annoyed at other people having fun, which is not really a great state of mind for social interaction.

tl;dr my life is unsatisfying right now

Me: I have to say, trying to install open office dictionaries while you are doped on benzos is an interesting experience
Ced: Benzo'ed Rufus? I see photoshoots in that.
Me: Haha
Me: Yeah, of me walking into things
Me: Or falling over
Ced: Hey, it'd explain the wheelchair pretty nicely.
Me: Haha
Me: Well, if Geostigma induces seizures the way actual lupus does, he totally could be tripped up on benzos in AC
Me: Klonopin I think is mostly used as an anti-epileptic
Ced: Wikipedia says so, yes.
Ced: So, maybe we'll forego the breaking of legs for realism and just go for the sleeping pills and the wheelchair at the 'con?
Me: XD

I did actually manage to get the dictionaries installed despite my very short attention span. Final paper count was 3.1k words, ten pages plus an eleventh of bibliography. I'm now setting off into my second one, which is horribly boring but now one-fifth done.

And as promised - My glasses in action! Another bus-stop camera phone photo, this one far less cool-looking than the last.

A brief digression away from uploading things (mostly of the musical variety), term papers (Friday's paper - 7/8 pages, 1 secondary source out of 5; Tuesday's - 0/6, but at least I have a topic), and maple brown sugar bacon (still delicious), because omg, I bought stuff this week.

First and foremost was replacing broken electronics - the DS cost me $85, but it was a Triforce one and came with a one year warranty, so I can't complain too much (apparently my old one was fried past the point of fixing? Hooray for Nintendo's guaranteed repair, though). Headphones cost me a half hour of my time while things were deliberated over, and having to take a slight downgrade (oh no, they don't fold up any more, I am so put out /sarcasm).

I also bought new screen protectors for the DS, and 358/2 Days because Squeenix owns my soul :( I haven't actually gotten past the introduction, though, because my gametime lately has been devoted to Persona 4. And then I went to IKEA and bought a full-length mirror, and carried it home on the bus in the rain. This would have been okay if my house wasn't three blocks from the bus stop. Mirror is fine, but arms were definitely sore.

And finally! I bought these a few weeks ago, but just got to pick them up on Saturday, but new glasses! (And why is that that I can look way more intense and evil in a random one-off shot I took on my phone at the bus than I can in cosplay photos? Sigh). These were my old pair, for reference. If it is sunny again tomorrow and I remember I will try to get an ~action shot~, because they are Transition lenses and are seriously awesome. My glasses are like, from the future, guys.

I love you even as you break my heart over and over. Seriously, only game to actually outright make me cry, because while the ending is 'good', it's also very bittersweet - you are keenly aware of all the sacrifices that are made to get there. I know FF7 has Aeris, but somehow her death doesn't have the scope, the impact that seeing Yuna perform the Sending for a row of bodies in a half-destroyed village does. Death is more present in Spira, and while the game may have it's little romance plot (I don't really want to say subplot, because while it's subtle it's very important to the story), the focus is really on the balance of life and death, of sorrow and hope.

Part of me wants to like, write a super-long post about Braska and Yuna and why I love them both so so so much, but I don't think I could adequately capture it in words. They're both such complex characters - even though yeah, Braska is in the game for like all of ten minutes total. I don't think I could ever really write FFX fic for the same reason - I could never narrow the focus enough. I can handle Braska in RP, though I don't think I could pull of the hint of uncertainty in herself that Yuna still has through much of the game. I guess I will say this much - I'm pretty much an avowed atheist, but writing Braska gives me a glimpse of the strength and power of belief. And yeah, I am not totally unaware of the irony that my dad's belief system is in some ways very similar to Braska's, although their personalities are, uh. Definitely a bit different. And some of it is that I am kind of a snarky asshole and I play a lot of snarky assholes, and they're all great fun, but there's something both calming and cleansing about writing someone so kind and so certain of himself as Braska.

(Guess who spent like two hours tonight watching FFX clips as a refresher for a Braska app, and then followed it up with horribly depressing FFX fanfic. I feel like I need to do a scene of Braska being totally fluffy with his pet ninja boy or having tea with Minato or something now, to make up for it.)

I actually meant to do this meme the first time I saw it on Julie's LJ a few months back, but oh well, round two works too!

You know how sometimes people on your friendslist post about stuff going on in their life, and all of a sudden you think "Wait a minute? Since when were they working THERE? Since when were they dating HIM/HER? Since when???" And then you wonder how you could have missed all that seemingly pretty standard information, but somehow you feel too ashamed to ask for clarification because it seems like info you should already know? It happens to all of us sometimes.

Please copy the topics below, erase my answers and put yours in their place, and then post it in your journal! Please elaborate on the questions that would benefit from elaboration. One-Word-Answers seldom help anyone out. (:

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-Increased dose of Wellbutrin does craaaazy things to my brain. Anxiety as a side-effect + pre-existing anxiety disorders = five hours of me fidgeting compulsively and being totally unable to focus on anything. Hopefully it'll even out after a few days but whoa, that was a bit intense

-Have gotten mostly caught up on Merlin S2 (haven't watched tonight's ep yet, but soon!), and oh BBC, I love you and your iffy script-writing and bad special effects. Best moment so far was the incredibly awkward not-hug which I will be laughing about forever.

-I still hate 18th century lit ahhhhh.

Okay time to try to sleep :|