having survived the closest thing Ohio shall ever have to a hurricane, i can safely say that people who stayed behind in texas are Morons. i’m sorry, but when you’ve got the national weather service telling you that you should leave, that’s when you need to recognize that material possessions may or may not be replacable, but your life is certianly in the NOT column. get the hell out of dodge. the other thing it made me realize is that i’m glad i don’t live across the street. the entire other side of the street will apparently be w/out power for the rest of week. also, we’ve had dress down days at work all this week because half of our employees don’t have power. so, not all bad there. (^_^)
what is all bad is
osu’s new site. they finally managed to fix the bloody thing, but i was trying to log on to pay my bill yesterday and their bloody password protocol was broken. they recently redid their site, and i get the idea that parts of it are randomly passing out. now if only the portion of their database that says i owe them ~$1300 would decide to delete itself. (T_T)
in other news, work continues of the fabled bookbag. i fear it may warrent a capital letter by the time it finally gets finished. turns out class doesn’t actually start till wednesday, which i suppose is a good thing, considering that leaves me two extra days to try and sew my fingers straight off. the problem is that the thing is huge. it’s 11 by 5 by 8, which sounds rather puny for a bookbag, but then you have to remember that EVERY INCH of the thing is covered in stitching. i’m basically creating a new fabric with a plastic substrate, and i’m doing it over 454 square inches of canvas. … okay, i just whipped out my calculator to figure that out, and i gotta tell you, i’m as shocked as you are at the largess of that number. no friggin wonder this thing is taking me so bloody long. (T_T)
speaking of things that seem never to end, i joined my brother on our first foray into the world of free MMORPGs, via something calledÂÂ
asda story. well, frankly things were going alright (once i gave up trying to install it on my
netbook and put it on my desktop instead) until we got to a certain point and ran out of quests. well, not completely, but there comes a point where you are required to be past your second job class before anyone else will even talk to you, and i was half a level short of being able to get that second job class. i had died a few times (each time stealing about 10% of  my exp) and so suddenly i had literally no choice but to level grid the (boring) old fashioned way if i wanted to be able to do any quests at all. so my party and i found a dun_eon with plenty of enemies (dungeon being a word flagged as inappropriate by the game’s expletive filter, a thing which probably warrents a whole seperate post) and set about slaughtering. the problem? well, the problems? a) there seemed to be about a 50% chance that one of us would be unable to target an enemy upon entering the dungeon. b) there seemed to be about a 50% chance that one of us would be unable to target our own party members upon entering the dungeon. c) once we could, all three of us, safely attack and safely heal, there turned out to be no point to doing these things, as killing the entire dungeon netted us only ~11% exp. in other words, we would have to complete the entire dungeon roughly 10 complete rotations in order to gain a level. given that one trip through the dungeon takes ~ 30 to 45 minutes, that would have been 5 hours for half a level. now, i know that there are people out there who will gladly level grind for days on end in order to beef up their characters, but a) i am not one of those people and b) the game was leaving me with no other choice, because there literally NO OTHER AVAILABLE QUESTS until i got my second job class. this? is the essence of poor design. i don’t know if the people who run the game are lazy? or poor game designers? or if they just came out of beta way waaay too early, but either way, i’m glad there’s nothing tying me down to that game. tomorrow night, my brother and his
randomNPC cohorts shall act on an invitation they received from a game called
La Tale, so hopefully they’ll have better luck with that one. the translation certainly is much better. i swear, i couldn’t even understand some of asda story’s quests, the translation was so bad. please, people! i know this is a free RPG, but i DO have some standards.
not that the game was all bad. before the lack of quests, it was super fun running around with my buddies and killing everything in sight, and the soulmate system is fairly original. certainly it added a whole new dimension to the party that made it more interesting. on the other hand, i do not have 10 hours a day to go about playing this game.
NaNo IS soon upon us, you know. they send out their email the other day warning everyone of the impending forum revamp, and mercilessly teasing us with mentions of the cool new features they’ll have this year. actually, it’s great timing, because i just realized the other day what i will be writing for NaNo this year: Blessing the Troops. that’s right, again. the same story i did in 2006 (zomg really!? 2006!?) i will be writing again. this time? i’m actually planning. my goal this year is not simply to write 50,000 words in 30 days. my goal is to write 50,000 readable words. or at least 50,000 words that all relate to the plot. i’ve begun editing my original draft, and while a) it doesn’t suck even half as much as i remembered it sucking, b) the manuscript’s only half as big w/out padding. towards the end i got desperate and ended up putting in entire church services to fill my word count (it’s a semi-medieval britain setting, so it was appropriate at least) and now that i’m taking them out, i’m left w/ only like half as many pages. plus there were a bunch of scenes where i changed my mind about the whole plot motivation halfway through, and scenes where i’m like, yeah, i was super struggling w/ this relationship, and other scenes where i’m like, zomg this is uber trash. i’ve made a special book just for this story, and it gives me something to do during the 15 minutes in between calls at work, so at this point, i would say it looks like a good plan. we’ll see as we move toward the end of October if i still think trying to write a medieval british fantasy about loyalty and friendship with a self-deprecating cynical main character whilst simulataneously working 30 hours a week and attending a class on modern 20th century british literature is really a Good Idea.
yeah, we’ll see.
Labels: craft, facts, NaNoWriMo, school, tech
English 543, 20th Century British Literature, or I’m So Giddy About This Fancy New Computer System in my Classroom That I Shall be Treating You All Like Sixth Graders. i? am not a Class Participator. i? do not “do” group projects. i? also cannot stand james joyce. a portrait of the artist as a young man? makes me want to End It All. and of course we’re starting out with it. what i’d like to pick on at this particular moment, however, is the item featured in the photograph to the left. that? is an $80 piece of cardboard. my attitude towards this Cardstock Wallet-Raper was not aided by the NSYNC/Backstreet Boys/Savage Garden/insert-random-boy-band-here blaring out of the speakers mounted to the booths outside the transportation building (which the bus wanted me to know Is Bevis Hall!).  what is it? my OSU parking permit. for the right to park half an hour from my class and be rudely awoken two mornings a week by a newly En-cheered Bus, i pay $80 a year. why? well, mostly because i don’t have any choice, but also because the parking permit for the closer lot is like $200 per annum. and frankly, the fifteen minutes it would save me are JUST NOT WORTH IT.
