Oh, bother.

An open letter to a boy I'd very much like to date, but who, right now, is just plain pissing me off: 


You're a "sad panda," are you? Seriously?


Well, you know what would help with that? Talking to someone. Someone who really cares about what you feel and think and desperately wants to be there for you and help you NOT be sad. You DO realize that moping around and being sad on Facebook achieves two things: 1) It makes you look pitiful and 2) It makes me feel EXACTLY LIKE YOU'RE FEELING... except with some anger and active frustration mixed in. The only person making you a sad panda is YOU, because I sure as hell want to make you happy. I certainly cannot force you to be interested in me, but damn. You should be. It would sure solve a lot of our mutual problems. So give me a break and quit being an idiot. If you're going to persist in not being interested, the least you could do is man up a little and TELL ME you're not so I can quit wasting my energy being smitten with you. I feel like can't do any more than I already have: I drove a lot of hours to see you for not much time and support your endeavors AND give you presents... and I have heard nary a word from you since then. I think you are simply delightful and, frankly, pretty much everything I have ever been looking for, so QUIT BEING RIDICULOUS and whining about how no one cares about you and get with the frakking program. If there is something I should be doing that would make a difference, I really wish I knew what it was. I live to serve.



 -me






 
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Tattoo

As much as I'm not a super duper fan of tattoos, especially matching ones, this is pretty cool:





His is light, like a computer monitor or an LED.
Hers is like paint, primary colors and their combinations.


Very nerdy/cool.







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For the Horde!

Gah, I'm trying to find a way for this post to get nerdier, but I'm just not coming up with anything.

Seester is, as I type this, upgrading her Mac OS so she can play WoW with me!!!! I am irrationally excited for this. Irrationally... in that only fellow gamers can fully understand the pure, unbridled joy associated with getting someone you know hooked on the game.

Also- big life stuff going on! Good stuff! I'll fill you in, soon, little bloggatribe.

Time Management.

President: We're too late. Without the sword the players will fail.

Member 1: If we could get to a computer, we could sign on to the World of Warcraft and give the boys the sword online.

President: I don't have a World of Warcraft account. Do you?

Member 1: No, I have a life.

If you don't recognize that screenshot, go watch this immediately.

I am currently having a general life conflict. In January and part of February, I felt like I was in some sort of Life-Zen place. I was working out and waking up early every day, I lost about 20 pounds, I wrote my huge, awful, terrible paper, I did my last opera at OCU and my graduate recital and now... I'm sort of lacking in some way.

I wrote this post a couple of days ago, and I feel that a better word for how I feel is Slacking. I'm not waking up like I used to, I'm going to bed later... yada yada. After reevaluating my changes between then and now, the only significant one I can find is that I'm back on the WoW bandwagon. Here's the thing; I frickin' love this game. I love playing it, I love the holidays, pets, achievements... I just really enjoy the game. However- I can quit the game. I have quit it before, but I don't want to quit having a reason to talk to my best friend and her husband every day, because THAT is really important to me.

So the quandary is how to play the somewhat life consuming game and also be working out and losing weight like I was. Granted, not eating crap all the time will help (fell off that bandwagon a bit as well), as will working out. My problem has been finding the time, since before I did it in the morning when I woke up bright and early. Playing the game (AND keeping up with the Craigs) necessitates being tied to the computer during prime sleeping time. I will say that during January and my Life-Zen, I felt like an old lady going to bed at 10:30 every night. It is also not helping my time situation that I am working 8a-5p every day, and that wasn't the case before, either.


Anyway, I think I've finally gotten on the road to the happy medium. Still play, eat like I'm supposed to, but workout either right after work or before bed. Not the most ideal setup, but MUCH better than not doing it at all and I still get my game friends. :)

Still Alive

This is from one of the coolest games I have ever played, Portal. It's a puzzle game where you shoot a gun that makes a portal in the wal--

um...


Just read the article. It's sort of... involved. Anyhow, when you beat the game (which is SO funny and cool), it plays this song. The song is really cute sounding, but it ties into the game too, and it's so... sigh. I love video games.


Still Alive - Portal AI

...I feel fantastic and I'm
still alive.

Today is here!

Well, it's time, ladies and gentlemen. Time for the big, bad, final graduate recital. T-minus 3 hours until I need to be at the school setting up the crap for the live stream of the recital I'm hoping against hope works like it's supposed to. I am going to be very, very sad if it doesn't... but what can you do?


Ok, gotta go curl my hair... or eat a Cadbury Creme egg or something...

Don't Ever Change

Don't Ever Change - The Beatles



About six months ago, something significant happened in my life. Something that changed me in a very real way. Looking back, it seems almost stupid that this would have had such a profound effect on me, but out of this, I feel like I have grown leaps and bounds closer to understanding what it takes to be an adult and take care of myself. What happened?





I quit biting my nails.


I know, I know. This sounds just totally ridiculous, but let me explain a bit. I have been a nail-biter since I was a child. That's 25 years of literally everyone in my life harassing me about it. The ex-f used to say that he "wouldn't put a ring on hands that looked like that" (which is sort of funny, since he did). But now, every day, I look at my hands and barely recognize them. I watch them do things like pick up a pen or wash dishes and they don't look like my hands. They're pretty; they sometimes have nail polish, which I never used to do. I broke a nail at work and had no idea what to do, as I had never remotely been in that situation before.


Anyway, this may seem like a tiny change, but let me tell you- I never thought I would be a girl with pretty hands. To have positively changed myself in this way was a revelation, of sorts. It made me realize and see that it is possible to make changes to yourself, to your body, and they will last. You can break habits and change your lifestyle. I'm kind of drunk off the possibilities, actually. So as part of my New Leaf Program (the one in which I turn over a new leaf for the new year), I started waking up early (like this) and trying to not be fat (like this, this, and this) and so far, it's been... changey.


I'll let you know if anything crazy happens, like I start cleaning up my room for fun or something.

Nerd Girl Anthem

Confession:


I love Taylor Swift.



Call me cliché, but she just hits the spot with the girl anthem. I'm pretty sure that any band, choir, theatre geek can totally get this song. As my nearly 20 year old (ACK.) little brother said of another of her songs Love Story:

This is my jam.



You Belong With Me - Taylor Swift

To all you geeks out there...

...this is for you:






Yeah, I'm pretty sure I want to BE Felicia Day.


If you're into nerdiness, you can watch her Web Series The Guild and laugh harder at the video because the characters will make more sense. And for even more Felicia Day genius, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog is a must watch (It also has the amazingly talented Neil Patrick Harris and the equally talented and deliciously handsome Nathan Fillion).

Booze.

When some people get in a funk, they have to blog. They need to write down all of their emotional tribulations and get the feelings out onto the proverbial paper (or blog-o-whatever). This is not me.

Others need to physically work through their stress. They get on a treadmill and just run and run until they can't run any more and then they go lift weights. This (obviously) is not me.

Others still need to go out. They liquor up and party and either get out of their funk or at least forget about it for a while, since unless your problem is a pressing need to get wasted, drinking isn't going to solve anything. This is not me.

That forgetting for a while thing is pretty nice, though. However, I have come to discover that booze is expensive. I know. *Shocker*. But in my recent stretches of relative poverty, expensive isn't good. So I have to confess my current personal booze to you all. It costs about the same as 2 or 3 mixed drinks, and I can indulge for an entire month. When I get sad or in a funk or lonely or whatever, I can partake and lose hours to my inexpensive and delightful friend. And best of all (well, other than that it's cheap), even though I'm not reeeally, I at least feel like I'm accomplishing something.


If you haven't guessed by now, World of Warcraft is my booze. And let me tell you, a year ago, I would have been the first to say that it's stupid and awful and way out of my league of nerdiness. But last summer, I let a boy talk me into it, so I caved. It was actually my birthday present to me ("I'm so happy..." name that movie!!). He doesn't really play anymore (lame), but talk about the gift that keeps on giving. And the game is fun, actually. What's really interesting to me is the number of people that play that I would have never guessed. Once you give in to your inner nerd, you'll find so many more out in the world. It's like we can smell each other or something....


However, I feel like there's a line. A nerdy line. Like, if my Alyssa friend and I go to Taco Bell and discuss dungeons and gathering professions over cheap tacos, that's one thing. Or if I go to Tulsa to see some friends I made through the game (AND a mutual friend) and hang out for a day, that's cool. But you know the people... the ones that make you uncomfortable with their commitment to their own exhaustive nerdgasms. These are the kids that have a picture of their character as their Facebook profile picture. Just because we both play this silly game does not mean that I want you shouting it across this room filled with people. Too much, kid. Just calm down.



Anygeek, I would just love to be playing now... but Tuesday mornings are dark because they do maintenance on the servers. It sucks especially on days like today when I both want to play really bad, and have a lot of time.

So instead, I'm going to watch some South Park! This episode is so spot on.


Voidwalker, Warlock and a Healthstone

pic via http://blog.sina.com.cn/maidemao (I can't read a word of it, but her little figurines and pictures are SUPER cute!!)

YATTA!!!

This was me about 20 minutes ago

Y'ALL!! Ok, so I'm a bit of a big ol' nerd and I just have to tell everybody that I feel like a frickin' genius right now.

I have been trying to get SimTower to work for quite some time. It was sort of a cycle where I would remember how much I love to play old DOS games and I'd play the one or two that I have made work reliably (either with the CD I still have or that I downloaded) and I get on a mission to make SimTower work again. Like I said the other day, Dosbox has been the coolest thing to work with because it seriously is taking me back 15 years to when I was a kid in the 90s playing on my dad's computer. Everything from the way the directory structure and navigation handles to the sounds (oh! The sounds!!) is just totally perfect. But I could never make SimTower work because it would give me an error message that said it needed Windows to run. I use a MacBook Pro, and I wouldn't have had access to Windows installation disks... ever, much less have a way to run them now. My mom inadvertently gave me the idea to try to find the game FOR Mac, but because I have an Intel based Mac, it doesn't have the Classic OS already installed, so I would have to run Classic OS through an emulator, too. After barking up that tree for a while, it was back to the drawing board (read: I came home and took a 4 hour nap, which is really more of a baby-sleep than nap, anyway).


Well, ladies and gentlemen, after my nap, I resumed the quest and while reading forum after forum after thread after whatever, the knowledge was bestowed upon me that I can INSTALL Windows 3.1 (My 1990s original OS) and run it through my Dosbox.

this is incredible.

The best part is that I can sort of manipulate the file structure from OSX, since it's all housed in there anyway. What would have taken FOREVER in a copy, paste command cycle just takes a second. And I can back everything up... like the entire OS. Shoot, I FUBARed it up the first time I tried to install SVGA drivers and just delete the whole folder from OSX and started over. It's GREAT!! I figured out how to make the sound drivers work and everything. I installed and ran SimTower and it WORKS!! Suffice to say that tomorrow at work will be consumed by this game.

so. excited.

Sorry about all the technobabble. I hope at least some of you out there will be able to get what I'm talking about.

I'm not, however, sorry for the Heroes 'ence.

What? You don't know what "ence" means? I'll blog about that later. The rest of this was too important to wait until morning.

Time Vortex

I have been listening to the Battlestar Galactica Season Four soundtrack all day... and it has put me in a weird mood. It's all GLORIOUS and sort of sounds like what the Titanic soundtrack would sound like if it had a drumline in it. This is okay with me, really, because I have always liked the Titanic soundtrack, too (judge if you must).

So in my own personal time vortex, it feels like it's about 5:30 in the afternoon, but I keep looking at the clock, and it keeps saying 2:38pm. Ugh.

I have also been playing SimCity2000 all day. If any of you Mac people out there want to play old PC games (and have them run better than they ever did on your old PCs), just let me know. Dosbox will absolutely change your life. It's basically amazing.

Hm. Actually, today has pretty much kicked ass.

Here's a song and a picture for today:



Gaeta's Lament - BSG Season Four Soundtrack



Yeah, so what if my city is called Fusion Watermelon... kiss my ass.

**EDIT: I guess I should have specified that this day has been had at work. All of the game playing, Battlestar listening and the subsequent blog post are all from my desk at work. I'm not making that kind of money, but still... not too bad.