Woot! Samurai!

Oh my goodness, I have discovered the best anime ever!!! The club showed the first three episodes of Peacemaker Kurogane this evening, and I was so impressed that I copied several more episodes onto my computer when I went back to the club office. Waaaah! It's so cool! And Tetsu-kun is so cute. It's an anime about a kid trying to join the Shinsengumi, a group made popular by Rurouni Kenshin. Saitou shows up in this anime too, and it's just hilarious comparing him to the Kenshin-version. He's so laid-back - reminds me a lot of Naruto's Kakashi-sensei. Plus, Tetsu's brother Tatsu is voiced by the same guy who voiced Sanosuke in Kenshin... And their personalities are totally different. It's great. I definitely need to watch more of this. And keep up with Fullmetal Alchemist and Chrno Crusade too... Ay, I don't even have time to watch anime at all anymore.

This weekend is as busy as any other. I still have to finish up the Pfizer applications and I have to hold my office hour for the club. Ed brought in 50 new CD-ROMs tonight so I'm going to be busy cataloguing those all. Sigh... -_- Also, I really need to pick up more VHS tapes - we're out again. Aargh, and I didn't get reimbursed for the last set either. I also have to do some mad studying for my 6.170 test on Monday - it's going to be the worst thing ever! My dad's coming down here tomorrow too.... He's going to take me out to lunch, which is cool, but he said he'd be here between 10 and 11. That's usually when I wake up! Hm. I think he wants to come down early so we can go over the Pfizer stuff. True, I'm only free up until 3pm anyway. Darned office hour screwing up my weekends! Oh yeah, if I want to submit a dorm t-shirt design, I have to do that by tomorrow since that's the deadline. Aargh! Who am I kidding?! Absolut McCormick didn't work out at all, and I couldn't think of anything else. Still can't. Makes me mad. Amy's shirt design is cool (McCormick has two towers, therefore... a LOTR-inspired shirt with Legolas), but still, I don't know if I want a shirt with Legolas on it. Hm. Anime club folks didn't like my kanji-writing skills on the seal that I drew (for good reason - I can't write out kanji at all) so I went and downloaded a set of Japanese kanji fonts, and spent forever looking for just three kanji in a sea of 2500! Aack! Took a while. <_<;

Wow. This week was so frustrating. I had issues with my 6.170 p-set.... Abstraction functions are totally not cool. I was working right up to the deadline again. That's so annoying. I had an Organic Chemistry today too.... I didn't have nearly as much time as I would have liked to study for it. The test itself wasn't horrible, but it was too long and I didn't finish. Plus, I kept reminding myself to bring my molecular model kit along to the test, and then I promptly ran out the door without it. Oh well. Not like I really needed it anyway. Ugh, I need to remember to do my 6.004 lab. It's due Thursday, and those labs are kind of forgettable. I've been pretty good about doing them early though. So far so good... Now, if only I could do that for 6.170 as well... So I think this week should be pretty good... The test is on Monday, but after that, it's kind of... relaxing. Comparitively speaking, that is. 6.170 p-set isn't due until Tuesday, so I actually get more than a week to work on it! I hope it isn't too hard. Hah. That's a laugh. Orgo will just have a p-set again, and 6.004 just has the lab to do. Oh, and there's probably random vocab quizzes in Japanese and stuff. We don't have Japanese class next Friday! It's exciting. I love being able to sleep in until 9 instead of having to get up at 8. :P Ack, I got bad in Japanese all of a sudden. We've gotten to the point where there's so many different particles for so many different situations, that I mix them up all the time. Plus, it takes me forever to say anything, and I'm horrendous with numbers. Telling time is so difficult, and I keep thinking that it shouldn't be! @___@

Plans for the weekend? Well, the Chorallaries' annual Bad Taste concert is Saturday night. I went last year - it certainly was in bad taste, but it was also hilarious. We spent the day camping out in front of the room, just because it seemed like a fun thing to do. I certainly don't have time for that this time around. How sad is that?! Hm, I always think of things that I want to jot down in my blog, but when I sit down to write, I forget them all. Ah well. You probably wouldn't want to know anyway - I already write such long posts... o_o; Oh, scary note on the drawing front: I started to gothify Jesper and Thraxxin. Scary stuff. I didn't take it to extremes. My sense of goth is pretty lame anyway... Yeah, so I don't like how I am so amused by it. I also started messing around with Thraxxin's face - he looks so young whenever I draw him. So I'm trying to make him look slightly older. It's not too hard actually, I just have to move his eyes and ears up a bit. I think it's kind of interesting how much a face can change just by doing that. I'm so sad that I only doodle my characters everywhere. I need to draw something... nice. Aaah! McCormick t-shirt! Aaah! Okay, I need to go to sleep so that I can uh, dream something up! Right. I'll shut up now. o_o; G'night.

- Flykyr Skysong

Current song: L'Arc~en~Ciel - Fullmetal Alchemist OP2 - READY STEADY GO (Waaaaiiiii! This song rules!)
Current mood: Sleepy again. Why am I still awake?!

Out of Sorts

Ack, I've been wanting to write in this all week, but I haven't had time for it at all. I was actually going to go straight to bed tonight, but I felt like writing some stuff down instead. I went home last weekend, and it was great. Except for reinstalling Windows XP again on my laptop because it had issues. It was so stupid though because the virus checks that I ran didn't turn anything up, so I didn't know what the problem was. I suspect it was a virus after all though, because as soon as I got back to school, it came back. Wasn't as horrible as the first round, but still annoying in that it kept shutting my computer down every now and then. Spent many many hours trying to fix it - can't get rid of it, but at least it's quarantined, and my computer's been behaving pretty well so far. I oughta try to BitTorrent something though to see if it's still messing that up.

This week was the worst week ever. I was behind in stuff because of being home all weekend, and I stayed up way too late for most of the week. Getting five hours or less of sleep in a night is really bad, and it's even worse if you do it for three nights in a row. >~< So I got through the week all right, but this week looks just as bad. I really want to get ahead of my work, but it seems to be quite impossible. Today was a total waste work-wise - I spent three hours in the anime club office trying to check things in. Oh yeah, looks like Jack Florey is a member of the anime club since he checked stuff out this week. What the heck! And I couldn't check up on it because Liang still hasn't restored officer permissions to me for the member database yet. Aargh! That annoyed me for the whole afternoon. For you non-MIT folks, Jack Florey is a pseudonym that the hackers use... It's kind of like 'John Doe'. So yeah. Ring Premiere was tonight too... Standing out in the cold for 20 minutes kind of sucked, but hey so did everything else. Well, the ring's pretty cool. I do have some issues with it though. Like those frat letters on the side, and the Stata Center showing up in three different places on the ring. Aaah! But I really liked the Mars/shooting star part, and I like how both IHTFP and ILTFP both showed up in the ring (I hate/love this f***ing place). ^_^ And Ring Delivery is at the Top of the Hub (top of the Pru), which is really really cool. Just have to think about ordering a ring now... Heh heh.

We went to go see Lost in Translation tonight. It had no plot and it had Bill Murray (ew!), but it was still a really great movie. I can really appreciate the culture shock these people must feel when they go to Japan... I was also highly amused that I could understand about half of what the cameraman was saying in the beginnning. Hooray for knowing bits and pieces of Japanese! :P I really liked the movie, and not just because it was about Japan! The short before the movie was quite good too, so it was a nice thing to finish off an otherwise depressing day.

After that, we went to the Third West Mardi Gras Party over at East Campus. They had the best music that I've heard at a party in... a very long time. No hip hop at all, what a relief! But ugh, I got spacey again... That always happens when I'm around a bunch of people. I kind of drift off and feel all distant, and it's all so very stupid of me. People go to parties to have fun, but I don't really understand what that means. So there's music and you dance, and that's cool and all, but... well, I'd feel kind of stupid if I let myself stand there and actually think about it. I've found it's better not to think too hard. And then you try to talk to people and the music's too loud... And then when there's no one to talk to, you just sit around and feel alone. I don't know. I'm not good with people. I'm not outgoing at all, and it's always been like that, and it will always be like that and what happens when I'm finally out on my own and I'm alone and all of my friends are gone? Looking at the future is such a frightening thing. Which reminds me that I still have to write cover letters so that I can find a summer job so that I can do something useful with my life and not feel like such a worthless fool who can live only from p-set to p-set. There's got to be more to life than what I'm living right now, because it sure feels pretty damn empty.

Well, look at that, another evening pulled down into hollow misery because I'm stupid like that. All in all, it was a rather nice evening, and I did enjoy myself, even if Jim thought I didn't. He seemed really worried about it too. o_o; I did have a good time, I'm just very bad at expressing myself. I keep telling myself I need to change, but it's a really hard thing to do. Owari da.

- Flykyr Skysong

Current song: None
Current mood: Feeling very small... ._.

The Flykyr is Happy.... Something Must be Wrong!

Oh my, I've been so insanely happy today that it's nearly ridiculous. When I finished up my homework last night (the last method in 6.170, evil acid and base stuff for 5.12, and new vocab for Japanese), I felt completely free. For me, everything is due on Thursdays, which makes Wednesday nights stressful, but I don't have anything due on Fridays! This just makes me so excited. ^^ Tonight I'm going to be productive and do my 6.004 lab, but I'm also not going to worry about it too much, and I'll probably go hang out at the lab with Sarah and Vikki. Yay!

5.12 is the strangest class. In lecture on Monday, I nearly cried because I was sitting there and doing my best to try to make sense of what was going on and I couldn't understand a single thing that came out of the lecturer's mouth. Acids and bases, ugh... *shivers* But then I went to lecture on Wednesday and she talked about alkanes and stuff and it was all so simple and clear. I got so excited and the end result is that I'm really looking forward to tomorrow's lecture. o_o; For the first week, I was all 'I suck at chemistry', but now I'm thinking 'Hey, I can do this.' Haha, watch the next lecture be horribly confusing again. I love Professor (Doctor?) Tabacco - she's so excited about what she's talking about. It's kind of like Lander and biology - the excitement is infectious. Plus, her notes are really good, and now that I've started taking notes in pen, they look gorgeous. I'd actually be tempted to go back and look over them. :P On the flip side though, both my 5.12 and 6.170 TAs are useless. In 5.12, they don't really want us to switch around if we don't have to, but I really think I need to find someone else... And in 6.170, we can't switch at all, which is really sad. Ooh, but finishing the 6.170 p-set was really great. After filling in all these methods, they combined together into a poker game. And it's a really nice one too, with graphics and everything. I'm glad we didn't have to do the graphics part though. ^_^ I'm going to have to show it to my sister since she sent me a copy of the one she wrote for her Java class (she's in high school)... This one is probably 1000 times more advanced. I'll be interested in hearing what she has to say about it. :P

Woohoo! I am going home for the weekend as soon as my classes let out tomorrow. Which is at 2. ^^ I get out at least by 2pm every day, which is great, although classes start at 9, which is rather annoying. I like having my afternoons free though, even if I do work three out of five days of the school-week. Work was easy today - I just had to take about a million books, scan them in, and make sure that the online entry matched the book. Then I stuck them on a shelf. :P I didn't finish all twelve boxes that were available, but I did nine, so that's pretty darn good. I could've gotten through more if I didn't sit down to write in my blog, but that leaves more for next time, right? ^^;

Ah, interestingly enough, the suggestion for an anime-ted MIT seal came up again amongst the club officers, which is... convenient, to say the least. So now I definitely have to finish up the final touches and scan it in. I wonder if people will like it. I feel bad for Steph though - the whole topic got started because she was thinking up a logo to put on stationery, and I don't really want to overshadow what she was working on. Oh well, who knows, people will probably hate it, or start arguing and it will be sad again. :D In any case, I'm going to stick it up on my site, so it should be up in a couple days. I actually updated the site the other night because I had scans and I felt so bad about totally neglecting the site for what, a whole semester? >_<;; I keep telling myself that I'll update more often, but it's hard to do when I don't draw all that much and don't have access to a scanner. I used to draw a lot on the computer last year, but with my new laptop, I can't because the touchpad is way too sensitive, and the mouse doesn't like to obey my commands. I'm actually starting to think that it's time to look into getting a tablet. Though I probably wouldn't use it as much as I could... My sister has one though, and she absolutely loves it. She can produce some really nice stuff with it too! I tried using it once, but it was difficult, and the picture that I was trying to draw came out horribly. I think that a problem like that would be solved by time and practice though. Hm, it's worth thinking about. Haha, now that I've wasted 20 minutes on this, I can go shelve the last of these books and then go home and print out my next round of p-sets. Aaah! It's okay though - I'm actually kind of looking forward to it. ^_^;

- Flykyr Skysong

Current song: Ragnarok Online - Through the Tower (I'd nearly forgotton how much I love the music to this game!)
Current mood: Whee! ^____^

Complain... Complain... Random Happiness! Sound Familiar?

Aaah! I am so close to being finished with my 6.170 p-set! I only have one method left to fill in, but I've no idea how to go about it. It's driving me nuts. Guess I gotta wait 'til tomorrow when the LAs get on duty. Grr. I wanted to play poker too! Heh, well, my sister sent me her version last night, and it annoyed me to no end because I could play hers but I couldn't play mine! Hm. Lots of exclamation points. o_o; Well, it was either that, or work on my 5.12 p-set. I actually did a few more problems in that - I sort of understand resonance now, so that's cool. 6.004 is still sleep-inducing. It makes me mad. Japanese is awesome, but I still screw up everywhere.

I've learned that the other 6.170 lecturer is not so great. Miller isn't bad, although his board technique could use help, but that other guy! Heh, I don't even know his name, that's so sad. But he spent half of lecture today talking about specifications in Java. It was so stupid. I can sum it up in just a few words: fulfill the preconditions and the postconditions will be guaranteed to hold. That's really all you need to know! And he did it all in PowerPoint too. Powerpoint is stupid unless you have lecture slides to follow along with. It's not nearly as good to sit through lecture and not be able to jot down notes, then have to run off and print out a copy of the slides later. I've had prior experience in 6.042 - that technique just doesn't work!! Oh, and while I'm ranting, perhaps I should mention that I had to reshelve books on the third floor on Monday. Aargh! That's the worst place to reshelve. I dislike the LC books most of all. Roar. Mostly because there were tons of new books and I had to rearrange lots of stuff to make them all fit. So annoying. >_<

Hm. I am starting to understand random chunks of words in Japanese songs. That's kind of exciting. Oh, you know what else was exciting? The Museum of Science trip. It was a cold and windy day, but it was totally worth wasting the whole afternoon and not doing work. ^_^ I did finally find Mike and his friends, though it took an hour and a half of sitting around... Hey, at least I brought my sketchbook and I managed to finish off the MIT seal parody. All I need to do is sign it and scan it in! And I'm going home this weekend too - how fortunate! It was cool to see Mike after what, four or five years. He's not so short anymore. Makes me sad. :P I felt really weird to be wandering around with a bunch of middle school kids though. Hey, at least they weren't like Kelsey's friends. I don't think I could stand an afternoon of that. At all. So after they all had to leave, I got to wander around the museum on my own. It was great - I haven't been there since last IAP, so that's more than a year. And admission is free for MIT students, whoo! After that, I went to the Galleria to the Borders there. I looked at the new manga for all of ten minutes, then left, since I have a bazillion Barnes and Noble giftcards, but none for Borders. You hear that everyone?! I don't want Barnes and Noble giftcards! They do me no good - Borders is much more convenient for me. Actually, what I really want are Kinokuniya giftcards. If only they existed, and if only the store were closer. Hahaha.... That would be really bad for me.

I finally got ahold of the second opening and ending songs for Fullmetal Alchemist. I loved the first ones so much, but these are even better! Every time I listen to them, I feel like I'm going to explode with happiness. Well, not really, but they do make me really happy. I really like the lyrics in the ending song. ^_^ Hm, the past couple of days at work, I've been trying to formulate a backstory for Thraxxin. It's hard because I have all sorts of things I want to include, but there's holes galore, and it's really hard to tie everything together. But I'm working on it, and I get plenty of time to think at work, so maybe I can get things settled and write it all down sometime! More drow story-fodder that will never be put to any use. :P But yay, Thraxxin is cool, but it's really hard to develop a convincing story (or any story at all, for that matter) for a character that I merely created because I wanted a cool-looking guy with a gun and pointy ears. Eheh, yeah. Just wait until I get around to Jesper - a cute guy who has absolutely no purpose in life other than to stand around and look cute/sad in all my class note margins. Oh, and to trick everyone into thinking that he's a girl. You people just do not understand!! o_o;; I am such a weird person. Ha. I wonder if everyone wonders that about themselves all the time. I think I worry too much. Anyway, time to sleep so that I can wake up and not be late for class! Aaah! Oyasumi nasai. ^_~

- Flykyr Skysong

Current song: Koda Kumi - Come With Me
Current mood: Annoyed

MIT Mayhem

Wow! It's February already. Classes have started up once more, and I'm already behind in my assigned reading. Typical. *sigh* Well, so far, I'm rather enjoying 6.170 - my Lab in Software Engineering. Our p-sets consist of writing Java programs, and I'm really excited by that. I've already spent quite a bit of time on the first one, and yeah, it's taking me a long time because I'm stupid. I'm so stupid sometimes, it scares me! Yeah. But the p-sets are hard too. I can't imagine taking this class without knowing Java beforehand (like Sarah - I feel really bad for her) - we've even got Iterators on the first p-set, which confused me when I first learned about them during my summer Java class. Man, I'm glad I know the basics of Java, but there's still a ton of stuff that I don't know about. It's a little bit frightening. Organic chemistry is scary too. The first p-set is all on hybridization and resonance - two of my least favorite chemistry topics. *shudders* Haven't really started that yet - it's not due 'til Thursday. Actually, everything is due on Thursday this semester. That includes 6.170 p-sets, 5.12 p-sets, and 6.004 labs. Aargh! How annoying. Guess that means I can't leave everything until the night before it's due. Ha. 6.004 is boring so far. It's been basically a review of 6.002, only less specific and more dull. I hope it gets interesting soon - it's supposed to, at least. I guess we start our first lab for that class next week or something. Wonder what it's about. Bah. Classes are so annoying to have to refer to by name. It's so much faster to use the numbers... So hm, I guess I'll just stick with that. If you're confused, I'm sure I detailed stuff in earlier posts. I'd add a link, but I don't really know how to do that, and I'm too lazy to try to figure it out right now. o_o; Ah, it was the post before this one. Ha. Go find it yourself. Japanese is scary - we're moving really quickly and the sentences suddenly got really long. Plus it sounds like we're actually going to have homework this term, but I don't know what that entails. Guess I'll just have to wait and see.

I'm so thrilled to actually be able to spend time in my room. Last semester, I spent a lot of time downstairs because we all had to work together on our homework. And IAP was just ridiculous. I spent more time in the 6.270 lab than anywhere else. So tonight I celebrated my evening in by properly hanging my paper lantern (finally!). It looks good as long as you don't look at all the packing tape that's holding it up to the ceiling. ^_^; I did some of my p-set tonight, but then I decided to take a break and try playing Majora's Mask for a bit - I beat Ocarina of Time yesterday. I was so sad, it was such a great game! But I was all excited at the prospect of another Zelda game... I ran into a bit of a problem though - I can't access any of the items in the item menu, so I only got a few minutes into the game, where I had to get an item out of my inventory to give to someone, and I couldn't reach it! Aargh! I was so upset that I set off to make my new PSX emulator work. No luck though - it's alternatively too fast and then too slow, and the sound quality is hideous. So that was a disappointment - I wasted more than two hours on that. Plus, my BitTorrenting ability has been severely crippled because everytime I try to torrent something, MITnet kicks me off the network. I'm not sure if it's MITnet or my computer that's at fault. DeadAIM has been giving me some trouble recently, so I'm wondering if something's up with my poor laptop. Hm. That's pretty sad.

I downloaded 1000 mp3s the other day. *gets pounced on by the RIAA* But they were all game remixes from OCRemix, so they're not exactly 'mainstream'... I've tossed out more than 50 so far, but I've probably listened to nearly 150, so that's not such a great space-saver. Thing is, so many of those songs are so good! I'm really impressed. ^_^ Plus, I'm not going to run out of new music to listen to for quite some time. I just wish I had an mp3 player so I could take them to work with me. Yes, I'm still working at the library, and I even took more hours than last semester so I get to spend even more time barcoding! Heh, at least I get paid more... And it's easy work. Except for reshelving. I hate reshelving with a passion. It really strains my eyes - the lighting's really bad in places, plus I'm always staring at all the ID numbers as I walk along so I get dizzy. Sad, isn't it?

Mike's birthday was a few days ago (Happy birthday! :P) and he and some of his friends are going to the Boston Museum of Science tomorrow... Which is within walking distance! So... It looks like I'm going to wander over there tomorrow and try to say 'hi' to him. Hm, what a weird concept. And I forgot that there's a house meeting tomorrow and that I ought to be present because they're doing budget allocations and I requested some money as the dish closet chair. Aargh. Might not work out. I feel a little bit annoyed that the dragon I was going to give to Mike is stuck back at my house... But who ever thought he'd come down here? Hm. Inconvenient it is. I just mailed his birthday present the other day too. I could've waited and saved $4 postage, darnit! Oh well. Too late now. I just hope the mail system doesn't screw up with it... My my... Me going to try to meet up with a bunch of middle-schoolers. This has got to be one of the strangest things that I've ever set out to do. But hey, I managed to manage a New York trip, right? This is going to be a million times easiers. Just gotta remember to charge up my CD player batteries so I can keep myself entertained on the walk. It's a good thing that MIT students get free admission to the museum too. It'll be nice to head over there - I last went last IAP, so it's been a while. I used to go there all the time when I was in middle school, heh. It was a popular place! Guess it still is for the middle school crowd. <_<; I'll bring my sketchbook too. I need to draw again. I've actually been working on the MIT seal parody - it's starting to look really nice. I'm almost done, actually. Not sure what to do with it though - the t-shirt debate died down long ago, and I don't think I want to stir it up again. It might make a nice submission to the club newsletter though...

Interesting bit of news - LSC is having Fred Gallagher from MegaTokyo come speak here at MIT sometime later in the semester (March? April?). It sounds interesting - I'll definitely have to remember to go!

- Flykyr Skysong

Current song: Perfect Blue - Ai no Tenshi (Whoa! I thought I'd never find a copy of this song. o__o;)
Current mood: A little bit frustrated