...why I bother talking to my mother. Every single thing I say, three sentences later she's yelling at me for something unrelated. Every. Single. Thing. Eventually, I think, I am just going to put a vow of silence into place.

Rage was home sick today (I hope you're feeling better, sweetness.) so the day was pretty long and tedious. My foot was sore from the moment I walked in the door, which is... not a good note to start the week on, put it that way. Sold my first real coffee machine today, but I'm not counting it as a real sale as pretty much all I did was tell the guy we had them and how much I was going to give it to him for. For the record, there is a FUCKLOAD of margin in the Gaggia Titanium at the moment. Not forever, but John clearly bought them when Gaggia's only other option was to suck cock for money. Just saying.

Um... yeah, words are leaking out of my head like the air from a punctured inner tube. Might be a better idea to just... stop talking.

For the Wickedest on my flist, I hit Liir today and while I like the characters well enough, the guy's writing style and scene choice is CONSTANTLY BEMUSING TO ME. I'm currently bored and hoping things improve. I'm sure it surprises no one that I am most interested in Tibbett and what the hell happened to put him so far below the radar, aside from being tied to a Tiger in a club. Going to keep struggling on, and suspect it takes a few reads, but dfajsdahsj. Do I have to?

...yeah, okay, so my mother should stop talking to me now.

The end of the book left me stone cold furious, and then I read the acknowledgments and discovered that Alasdair and Chad are/were partners and just about had a fucking coronary. (They are both tutors. I did not know this. I feel like I should know this. Except that I heard stuff about Chad breaking up with whoever last year or the year before and this was published two years ago and, anyway, this isn't important.)

What is actually important is that I spent the whole book dreading the ending for a reason and that the ending was pretty much exactly what I expected and exactly what I did not fucking want, and underlined pretty much every single fucking reason that I hate people. Well done, Alasdair. You know what you're talking about.

...doesn't make me any less pissed off, though.

( Spoilers, not that anyone will care. )

I really don't think I'm going to be coherent for that tutorial. Really. I should probably just not go. At this point, with this reaction level, I am liable to wind up in tears in the classroom, and that never goes down well in enlightened discussion.

CLEARLY THE BEST TRANSFORMERS ANIMATION EVER. SERIOUSLY, WATCH IT OR I WILL KILL YOU. SO YOUR OPTIONS ARE TO DIE OR TO DIE LAUGHING - MAKE YOUR CHOICE! XD

(I listen to this song with startling reglarity, and now I am never going to be able to get the video out of my head. Tee hee. Also, I love the little things you can see in this. XD It is adorable and epic and must be saved, except I've lost the link for that.)

Also, ow, ow, cramping, I hurt. I think I will cycle this afternoon. :\ Or I'm still going to leave myself a tiny window for getting the shot, and knowing the clinic, that's a bad move.

And now I want to watch TF again. XD Dammit.

Also, this review of Twilight amused me, purely because it has a count for each individual piece of hilarity. (HIS INCANDESCENT CHEST. I SHIT YOU NOT.) Man, I was doing the Borders competition thing the other day - they're running a children's book promo where you can win shit - anyway, Twilight is on the wall and as I was playing all I could think was please don't let me win Twilight. As it turned out, you only won vouchers to buy things for cheap, and I won a voucher for The Very Hungry Caterpillar which I neglected to print as my family as a whole has... four copies of that book, three of them intact, and one of them hardcover. XD That book was fucking awesome.

What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, italicize the ones you read for school, underline the ones you started but didn't finish (or are on the shelf waiting for a free week).

( The Book Meme. )

I find it amusing that there are three Gaiman novels on there, and I've read at least ten percent just through my university. On that note, it is high time I made a list of the books that I own that need reading. Or rereading. >_>; We all know how I am with the Farseer Trilogy.

[EDIT] Official funniest iTunes moment ever:
"It'sa me! Mario~!"
Immediately followed by "Blood Rave" from Blade. Now I can't stop thinking about plumber vampires.

[EDIT] How does~ she know~ that you love her~ (OH, DISNEY, I HAVE MISSED YOU AND YOUR SAPPY SONGS. :'DDDDDDD)

This post makes me pretty sure that reading Twilight would make me want to kill myself.

My stomach is being a bitch this morning. I really, really do not want to be on any jury. C'mon, Amera/Leviathan/assorted god/esses of fortune! Don't desert me now!

I suspect you can all tell when I've been swallowed by a book, because when I'm reading I don't waste time online as much (although, when over-excited, I may log in purely to have an outlet for my hysteria). In any case, I am now done with the Doctrine of Labyrinths series, as far as it has been written, and have just spent half an hour writhing in mortal agony that there is not another awaiting my consumption. Not until 2009. I don't have the strength for this. D:

I think I enjoyed Mélusine best out of the three of them, but I fully expect that the next one will be full of everything I want out of the series, given the end of The Mirador, so I'm on tenterhooks. Mehitabel's voice messed me up a lot in The Mirador and I spent the first half of the book annoyed at her because I liked her better when I wasn't hearing from her, but she is awesome in her own way and I hope to see her again in the next book, although not necessarily as a narrator. I really missed Felix in this book. I spent large chunks of it thrashing and demanding that the book tell me where he was and what he was doing, particularly toward the end, because we just weren't hearing anything from him. Not really.

( Things I consider spoiler-worthy. )

No, wait, let's get into that again: BITCHKITTY. A great word or the greatest word?

Anyway. Now I need to go back and read them more slowly and assemble, I don't know, a DoL lexicon. Or at least expand the Wiki for it a little, because the world is fucking amazing, yo. ♥

But not until I've done some actual work on this proposal, I think. At least my hands are better today.

[EDIT] Well, after visiting Sarah Monette's LJ, anyway. I just had to come back and mention this, because it happens to me all the time. XD I love stories.

[EDIT] ...all right, and also this. Which also happens to me all the time, although it is largely crushed under the weight of university at present.

(Although not entirely, because Sanga is incorrigible, and Hiru has the greatest puppy eyes in the world. Take, for instance, Friday night at work. I was working. I was thinking about Mildmay. Then I became aware that Hiru was sulking about that.
Me: Hiru. Darling. I love you. I really do. I wish I had more time to work with you, but--
Hiru: You seem to have plenty of time to flutter around after Mildmay.
Me: I-- That's-- He's Mildmay.
Hiru: *sniff*
Me: You cannot possibly tell me that you don't like him.
Hiru: I most certainly can.
Me: Pfffft. Not without lying like a lying liar who lies.
Hiru: ...........
Me: Not even a little bit? *appalled*
Hiru: *cautiously* He is very sweet.
Me: AH HAH--!
Hiru: Butthatdoesn'tmeanhegetsyoutohimself!
And with that, he stomped off into a corner of my head until I coddled and reassured him that Mildmay could never replace him in my heart or head, because, c'mon, lovely character who is not mine, or lovely character who is mine and talks to me all the time and makes me want to pick him up and carry him about and is small enough to allow me to do so? No contest.

Besides, I would look an absolute tit trying to carry Mildmay.)

Or, I Love Mildmay with the Fire of One Thousand Burning Suns,
Or, Fuck Me Sideways 'Til I Cry Because from Mildmay I Will Like It

So, I just finished Mélusine by Sarah Monette this morning, and I would like you to understand something about this book, which is: I want to eat it. I want to eat it and absorb it and release little particles of it into the souls of my offspring. If you have any ability to get your hands on it, do so immediately. The world is just. Gah. Rich and full and amazing and there are accents and languages and did I mention the differing schools of magical philosophy yet, because oh god, I love it when magic is treated like a real university subject, and, and dialects. And legends and stories and folk beliefs, only not folk beliefs in the measured, sober way that Fitz talks about them in Robin Hobb's books - folk beliefs that filter in and make you wonder, folk beliefs that are never explained but sound amazing, and there were only three mythical creatures in the entire book and fuck me sideways 'til I cry if they were not amazing every single fucking time. The Kalliphorne! I WILL ALWAYS LOVE THE KALLIPHORNE. And the fantôme was just... and Felix's reaction to the fantôme...

You get the idea. I am incoherent with love of this book. But this is a rare kind of incoherent, an awed and vaguely fluttery kind of incoherent, and, okay, I am always fluttery, but this book is amazing and I think I have to read it again before I even think about moving on to The Virtu because I want to drown in it. Put it over my face and just suffocate in it. So good.

And if flamika is reading, then there are likely to be spoilers in the comments, so keep an eye out, there, the rest of you. XD Although 'Mika is pretty good about that, so maybe you can all just dance around our cryptic but enthusiastic arm-waving.

Anyway, now that the important business of the day has been dealt with, I'm off to have a shower and get myself set up for a day of intense Half Jack conceptualisation. (When I stagger back to the computer in four hours, completely bewildered by the elemental physics of my own universe, you can all point and laugh.)

(OH GOD MILDMAY. UNF, UNF.)

[EDIT] I am a terrible person.

But.

There is a Judge Howell in the court that I'm going to, and, eh heh. :D; I kind of hope I don't get into that court, purely so I don't crack up laughing at random intervals. XD

I'm going to spend the entire time I read Mélusine rewriting this presentation in my head as new information comes to light. |D;

But I think I have plenty in the first four pages of the book to give a pretty excited talk about worldbuilding and how to go about it. Sure, it'll only apply fully to three people in the class, since we appear to be the only ones who care about actually creating worlds of our own, but I think worldbuilding and grounding a story in a setting applies to everyone, so the rest of the class can suck it.

Sometimes I wish I weren't educated, just so I could read a book without automatically beginning to analyse it. What the sentences are doing. How everything is working together. What deliberate and interesting choices the author has made about the tense that their characters speak in, and what this might say about the character. (Mildmay - or at least the introduction - is written in present tense; Felix is written in past. Both are first-person narratives. This automatically makes Felix shadier. He has the ability to colour his story while he recounts it; Mildmay's version is likely to be more honest and immediate, but because Felix is looking in retrospect, he doesn't have to do that. I love that I notice this stuff now but I also hate that I notice it. XD Sometimes it is nice just to read.)


There are tiny voices in the back of my head going: pata pata pata pon pata pata pata pon pon pon pata pon pata pata pata pon. Seriously, a game based on rhythm and adorable little voices chanting war cries? I want Pata Pon. XD The concept is awesome, the music is just interesting enough not to drive me into a coma, and visually it is fucking gorgeous. *_* Do want.

[EDIT] LOL, NASA. Way to be outmath'd by a teenager.

[EDIT] Dear Everyone, I Fucking Love Mistful's Book Reviews. Also, I should never be allowed to read book reviews because they make me want to read, desperately, and this is a terrible thing when one has a (still-unwritten) presentation and a (still-uncoded) website due tomorrow.

James: *watching trailer for End War*
Me: Y'know, you should read Ender's Game.
James: What's it about?
Me: War.
James: What kind of war?
Me: Semi-futuristic war.
James: There's a spaceship.
Me: It's excellent.
James: Well...
Me: It's. Excellent.
James: *sigh* Okay...

He'll thank me for it later. >:3 Or he'll spend the first two chapters failing to work out what the hell a Third is and he'll throw it at me when he gives it back. XD

---

This is going to be the greatest header ever. :3

FF.Net's advertising is getting ridiculous.

I am so tired. Srsly. Most draw one more storyboard before bed. One day I will actually write the first part of The Conductor. (It shouldn't even be that hard. :( I don't know what's wrong with me.)

[EDIT] Okay. As a distant beacon of hope, I have ordered Sarah Monette's Mélusine, The Virtu, and The Mirador from Amazon. They would have been another, god, forty dollars? with Borders, which was the only place that would order them for me. They probably won't get here until June. This is a good thing. If they don't get here until my holidays, they won't distract me until my holidays, and also I can stop thinking about them and searching for them on shelves across the country like the OCD freak that I am.

I am growing increasingly concerned about actually being able to afford Singapore and whether such an expense is really a good idea given that it's my last year of university and I should probably be saving for a) a new computer or b) life, but that might just be my natural cynicism and aversion to travel talking. |D; Besides which, I really want to see squeakelala, ignite and howl_for_words, and this overcomes aversion to... well... anything. XD

[EDIT] Also, I want to make icons for Howl's Moving Castle. I don't know why that just occurred to me. XD But there you are.

[EDIT] *HOWLS WITH LAUGHTER* I DOWNLOADED THIS AGES AGO AND DIDN'T LISTEN TO IT FOR A LONG TIME BECAUSE I WAS TOO BUSY DYING OF LAUGHTER AND NOW I AM BACK THERE AGAIN AND HAVE TO SHARE MY OVERTIRED HYSTERIA WITH THE REST OF YOU.

スクアーロのグルメレース from Katekyo Hitman Reborn (Sukuaaro no Gurumereesu, and no, without knowing the fandom I have no idea what that means. Squallo's Something-Race, I suspect.)

IT MAKES ME HAPPY, AS ALL SHINI-GOT MUSIC DOES. Just trust me. (And turn your volume down.)