Halloween makes me happy

For those of you who don’t know, Halloween is my favorite holiday. Not cause of the free candy/stuff, and not (well ok, a small part) because of the massive costume-wearing. It’s cause of the atmosphere of the idea of the holiday. I mean, seriously, if you look at what Halloween really is today, it’s a chance for people to give out candy/stuff for no adequate reason and/or dress up in bad costumes and have parties. I guess what I’m saying is that I don’t like the real Halloween, but instead I like the …oh, nevermind, I don’t get it myself. Anyways, the best part is, it’s on a Saturday this year. I hate it when Halloween is on a day I have stuff to do, cause that sucks. Obviously.

Anyways, I try to draw stuff for major holidays as practice for various drawing techniques (well, kind of. It’s partly to keep my skills fresh, since I usually don’t have time). As of now, I have just a sketch of half of the final image, but I should be finished by… probably tomorrow or so (aka 11-1-09). I know it’s stupid to start so close to the deadline, but hey, that’s how I work. Actually, it’s probably the only way I can really work. Anyways, here’s the current sketch:

Hmm… I didn’t expect it to be that huge a png file… Anyways, I already know there’s a bunch of stuff that needs work. They should be fixed by the time I’m done. It’ll also be in color and there’ll be a second person, too. I’ll also change a few things… Lots of stuff to do… But hey, it’s fun, so I’m not (really) complaining.

Behold, the zombie lamp! (or mummy lamp, or whatever)

Behold, the incredible feat of rubberband-and-sticks engineering!

So the other day, I was busy procrastinating horribly when all of a sudden, my lamp decides to break. It’s the kind that has two sections that have springs, made so that adjusting one section adjusts the second one in only certain ways. You know what I mean. It’s the cool kind. But as it turns out, mine was cheap cause the joint that connects the two sections broke. It didn’t just fail at clamping the sections hard enough to move, it broke completely. As in the right side of the joint separated from the left. That was bad. Springs flew everywhere.

So yesterday, I decided to fix it. I didn’t have any glue, and I doubt that would work anyways. What I did have was a huge mass of rubber bands… Long story short, I fixed it up by binding the joint back together with rubber bands. And chopsticks. And various writing utensils, for support and stuff. If I had duct tape, I’d use that too. Actually, I’m beginning to think that duct tape + rubber bands can solve just about anything.

The result? It looks amazing. It’s seriously like a work of art or something. I took some pictures so you can enjoy, although its full majesty cannot be understood without an in-depth description of how everything works together and how I built it and stuff. But that would probably be boring to normal people.

Oh, screw it, I don’t want to sort through my stuff. I’ll just upload all the files I have.

is it break time now?

I just finished my last midterm this afternoon. It was weird, cause it was so incredibly easy. I’m kind of scared about that. I just have these programs to do which were pushed back twice (They were originally due yesterday at 11:59 pm, but now they’re due tomorrow at that time). Midterms may be over, but I got to get serious about work now. Not class work, I have almost none of that, amazingly, but more like writing and drawing and blogging for hsa and stuff. And getting 100% completion in my castlevanias. Yay.

 

Actially I had another reason to write this, but I forgot it and it hasn’t come back yet. Oh well.

Time is the worst thing to lose

I don’t know what happened yesterday, but apparently I lost a whole bunch of time. I had the day set up so I’d actually get stuff done, but somehow that didn’t work… It’s kind of funny though. To accentuate this, I accidentally powered off my Animal Crossing game without saving, and the last time I saved was like half a day ago, so that was bad. I lost so much progress… it’s almost exactly like what happened in real life.

Well, on the plus side, I’ve got this awesome microphone I’m going to test out and stuff. And I also have delicious food in the refrigerator which I’m about to eat. The problem is, I somehow slept until a few minutes ago, and I have enough work as to make it so I won’t have time to do much. Hopefully, things work out.

Oh, and I found out I can control squirrels. Either that or I’m extremely good at prdicting what they’re going to do.

I shouldn’t be writing this…

I’ve got 2 midterms left now. One’s tomorrow and one’s on tuesday of next week. Fortunately, these should be the easiest midterms for me. Unfortunately, I haven’t studied at all. I’ll probably go to sleep soon and wake up at night and just study and work until it’s time to take the tests. Not that good an idea, but it should work.

Anyways, there’s some other interesting stuff that’s happened recently.

First, I remembered that Microsoft Word came with a speech recognition engine. I found that for Vista, it’s been expanded to a general program thing that works for all things. I mean, XP had this too, but it wasn’t so watered down. This thing sucks so incredibly much. I mean, it’s convenient if you don’t want to type but it takes forever to do anything. It also likes to spell-check “cancel” when I say it to cancle out of stuff. That means I end up saying cancel about a billion times. Not fun. I guess it can be atributed to both my tendency to talk out of the “good” range my mic driver can detect and also the program not being used to my voice yet. If I can get it to work for me like I want it to, I’d really like to try.

Second is I got copies of the two DS Castlevania games I didn’t already own (I beat them when I borrowed them from a friend), Animal Crossing DS (of which I’m now an addict), and some other stuff I haven’t really gotten into yet. That = bane of studying. I got them last Saturday I think, and in Dawn of Sorrow, I’ve already gone through the game once with 100% soul completion. That was fun. I need to beat Julius mode now (couldn’t beat that last time, Soma’s too hard), as well as hard mode + insane succubus glitching. I oversoul’d so many things last time, and it was incredible. I need to do that again.

I also got caught up in a bunch of manga. Most notably I completed Code Geass: Knightmare of Nunnaly. I think the end was rushed a bit, but it was ok. A bunch of stuff happened really quickly without much exposition, and wasn’t implemented much. You’d kind of need knowledge of the anime to get some of it. I think it included some data on the akashic sword and related stuff that wasn’t explained in the anime though, so that’s interesting.

Finally, I realised earlier today that I’ve become so used to eating sandwiches and burgurs and tacos and stuff that it feels kind of weird to hold a fork. Not a good sign.

And now that I’m done talking about this stuff, I should be able to concentrate better on studying.