Rainbows are Whimsy Elementals

Hiyas

Thu, 24 Dec 2009 03:27:01 GMT

I'm back on Livejournal more or less. Going to stop stressing about this thing and just have fun. Forget making the perfect posts, the perfect comments, whatever.

I first started this journal as a way of recording my feelings and whatnot. But over time it's become more of a social thing. With my absence from LJ, I've been cut off from people I don't have much contact with by other methods. And honestly, I've missed that contact. So, hello again.

Ugh. Mice.

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 14:14:32 GMT

The mouse running around in my room's increasingly pissing me off. Those 'humane' traps my roommate use are useless. I'm seriously considering getting something lethal and putting it in my room.

Look, I know those mice didn't really ask for it, they're just trying to live and all, but they're really causing problems in this house.

Random polymorphfoldings

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 04:35:45 GMT

Dangerously angelic cats did therefore sing a beat, and it was gone with all lamentations.
And it was beauty, ringing out until the eyes ran with blood, crying joyfully.
Rainbows sharpened raining prismatic needles, until the sky fell piece by piece sprinkling fragile shatterings.
Reaching up to the sky, touching it until the warp and weave wrapped around ones hand, the cloud twirling into spiral maelstroms spinning out into the infinite.
Void-mice, eyes full and vastly empty glowing with would-not-bes, drifted quietly watching nestling each other.

Folding@home on PS3s

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 20:37:28 GMT

Those of you with Playstation 3's might find this interesting. Essentially, there's a client out that will enable your PS3 to perform equal to a supercomputer at calculating protein folding and such, allowing you to essentially donate your PS3s for the raw number-crunching of protein-related medical research.

The fun part: Sony actually developed this version of the Folding@home client, and it's available for official download on the PS3 itself.

The Main FAQ here explains what the Folding@home project is all about. There're clients available for other computing platforms as well (Windows, OS X, and Linux).

A ramble about crap manga, and the strangeness I love

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 06:02:58 GMT

So, I read a lot of Japanese comics. I do mean a lot. For an assortment of reasons (availability via certain sources online being one--I'm poor).

I run across a lot of stuff I'm just tired of. A lot of stuff with somewhat interesting premise that flat-out ruin it by thrusting tedious cliches in.

Example: A comics about cats having territorial struggles. Could've easily been interesting, whether it's done with full-out cats, or with catboys/catgirls. But this one I took a peek at just because of the premise had a magical collar everyone's trying to get, all kinds of silly powers, the Ultimate Wild Cat or whatever, a breed 'more wild than the norm', and the concept of a power-up just by tearing off ones collar. Essentially, it's a bunch of boring silly manga tropes with cat ears/tails tacked on.

Another example: a comic about a fairly nice person trying not to turn into a human-eating ogre. Except that it became increasingly evident that the creator was just following the typical Shounen Jump formula (i.e. Naruto/Bleach). I quit reading about the time the main character got tossed into the Underground Training Ground for a Training Ordeal.

On the other hand, there's some series that seem to somehow manage to pull off utter ridiculousness. Others reuse those tropes in a way that's at least somewhat passably tolerable, and their execution's at least enjoyable. But what I really want is the strange stuff. I'll enjoy some of the less 'out there' stuff, but it often isn't my favorite.

And while there're definite trends both visual and story/character wise in the stuff I've seen, there're some fairly different works. I've really liked a number of those. Stuff like Tekkon Tinkreet, Uzumaki, My Street (this one is Korean), Sexy Voice and Robo...

So, let's see. I wouldn't mind recommendations, actually. Not just Japanese comics, any kind of comics online or offline will do. Webcomics as well as printed comics.

I like surreality--not the bland "Look! Talking penguin, gamer girl, Satan as roommate!" crap found in so many webcomics, but more of a dreamy or hallucinative quality. I want stuff that arouse intense emotions in me just by their visuals, especially. FLCL, Kageoru, Listening to 11.975MHz, Tekkon Tinkreet, Milk Closet. (Not necessarily constantly trippy, but frequently so.)

I tend to like a certain macabre touch (thus my interest in the 'nice guy trying not to turn into flesh-eating oni' premise mentioned above and annoyance at its disappointing execution). Anything by Junko Mizuno, Higurashi no Naki Koro ni, Hellsing, stuff with amusingly grisly carnage or morbid outlooks. A number of the 'gothy' comics out there simply disinterest me, but Serenity Rose's an exception.

Perhaps the ultimate fusion for me would be cute, macabre, and surreal. The game Yume Nikki manages to combine all those elements as an example. Another example, Junko Mizuno's stuff is cute and macabre and often a little strange (a giant pig that sells meat cut off himself, Cinderalla wishing to become a zombie so she can join her beloved undead musician named Prince, just most anything in Pure Trance, and so on).

There're other sorts of comics I like, but those tend to be the types of comics I most want more of. I also wouldn't mind recommendations of movies/series/games/whatever in a similar vein. And, frankly, I'll sacrifice general quality in a number of aspects for something that stimulates me enough (though well-executed surrealism has its own challenges). This crazy shit energizes me. It's mental food for me. It fills my head with imagery. It excites me. I love it.

Gaming itches...

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 02:14:07 GMT

I just quit my Tuesday gaming group. The basic premise was that there would be several GMs all rotating active duty and running a different game every day. However, lately I had just one player sustaining constant interest in the settings and such I liked to make. One single constant, dependable player who would come week after week and play anything I ran, without complaining about not liking it.

It doesn't help that the player who created precisely the kind of character I wanted to see for one of my games (an eerie floating telepathically speaking god of forgotten things with bound limbs) had already left. I enjoyed some of their characters probably the most in the games we played in this group.

So now I want to do something. For an example, take Chant. Chant's a setting that's been in my mind for a while. It exists in a very uncertain way, built upon the walls of a seemingly infinite chasm formed within the mind of a now dead boy. Any minute, it could vanquish, and indeed, there're some working to keep it from doing so. For it's home to an assortment of squatters often too odd and misfit to fit elsewhere. It's got some fairly good interdimensional connections, making it useful for trade, but in terms of residence, it's pretty much undesirable. It's like sitting your city upon a volcano everyone knows might erupt any day, even if it's in prime trading position. So, lots of assorted transisent traders, but the permanent residents tend to be those with little to lose or who simply don't find reality itself disappearing underneath them a major problem.

Architecture was both highly vertical and subterranean--basically cliff dwellings with colorful building fronts stacked and stacked upon each other with long continuous stretches of balconies essentially forming the 'sidewalks' of the city, while the gap between the two facing (seemingly) endless walls were the street. Primary transportation methods: flight, walking, and elevators as well as trolleys gliding along some of the railings. Construction highly irregular due to no central planning.

In terms of technologies/magic, it was a mishmash of influences from multiple dimensions as well as some people who just can do weird stuff.

Two example NPCs for the game I ran, of native Chantians:
A plain brown-haired woman, in a brown suit, with brown glasses, with an inky black oozing hole in the palm of her hand.
A giant fangy frog-like creature named Crunchie-Susie, with an obsession for making pretty robots. As in white roundish shelled ones with lots of pink or purple decorative touches (curls and swirls and such).

Probably the single most cool PC from the game I ran was that god of forgotten things. Pretty much exactly the kind of thing I wanted to see.

Her description: "V'alei is a young girl, floating in the air, legs, arms, entire body, bound together by strong silver and black binds leaving no skin below her neck visible...the bonds are mystical in nature, leaving her unable to open
or even move her limbs. That which is not bound appears to be a leather-black-silver outfit, alternating patterns all over. The binds appear to lack any opening, leaving the question of how she gets out of it. Her skin, that which is showing, is pale with dark black tattoo-markings on it. Her face is young, innocent, cute¬Ö.ears long and pointed back, deep obsidian orbs rest in her head, silver pupils shining out."

One of her primary powers was to know anything that's been completely forgotten. Very excellent for archaeological purposes, heh.

So. Now that I've quit this Tuesday group (they were friends or friends of friends, but apparently not exactly with common interests in subject matters for gaming), I've been thinking of maybe running something to take its place. Something set in Chant, possibly. I'm also generally interested in any particularly fun games that others might be running.

Yes, I am looking for players. Probably real-time online (i.e. chats or another such mechanism), though if there's enough demand for play-by-post I will consider it.

To Advertisers on the Internet

Sat, 30 May 2009 14:09:22 GMT

Those of you advertisers who use shitty popups and nasty malware're ruining it for the rest of the advertisers. I have no problems with advertising in general, but there're certain behaviors making me reach for the ad-blocker though generally just to block the specific sites/scripts harassing me. This hurts the sites using advertising to support themselves, and it hurts the more well-behaved advertisers.

Not that any of them will read this. Just venting, really.

Tales of a Social Moth

Sat, 16 May 2009 09:28:17 GMT

In large part, I'm inherently socially flaky to some extent, I think. Socialization is something I do for brief periods in between moments of extreme absorption. I often like having a general sense of people around but don't always feel like interacting directly with them. I do try, though, as thanks to those people who accept my sporadic interaction.

As an aside, I think this is a really cute icon. I seem to live for the fusion of the adorable and the warped, creepy or simply mutated.

Gasmask face! For some reason I love that name.

Words, words, how best to express ones feelings?

Sun, 10 May 2009 03:34:38 GMT

I don't really have a natural language. Not in the sense that is generally meant by language.

All words are difficult to me. The pictures described by the words do not match the pictures that are in my mind. The pictures in my mind are far more colorful and charged with emotional energy than words can manage to for me.

ASL, in some senses, is easier than English for me. But my ultimate language would be environment manipulation. Warping the very surroundings around me to convey my message, making an experience. An experience that would sometimes confuse or disorient most people, heh.

Something like this might be the kind of message that I might communicate. Or something easier to grasp, it's not like my mind's a total maze of surreality. But those more mundane matters're what regular words suffice for, since words were after all created to describe the realities largely shared and comprehensible by most humans. It's the stuff for which there are no words that I'm frustrated over being unable to communicate.

Especially when someone asks me how I'm feeling, and I have no real answers I can give in words. Or I just reply with something absurd like:
"I'm a moon!"
"Pink."
"The world is marble."

When I give you a reply like that? Mostly it's my grasp of language breaking down and spitting out random silliness instead of coherent meaning.

Even if I gained the types of communication abilities I desired, I think there would still be a part of me generally incomprehensible to most others.

In the meantime... I might try anyway. I'm often too silent, I don't voice the thoughts on my mind nearly enough.

Thu, 07 May 2009 10:57:52 GMT

I really should clean my room more often. I found stuff worth at least $100 just over the past few days of cleaning. Counting the check and items that would've cost me money to replace. Oh, yeah, and more estrogen than I realized I had--I thought I was running lower than I was. Phew.

I'm really glad I've been spending the time doing that cleaning. Very worthwhile.

Capsule Replies

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 02:17:38 GMT

Thinking of starting up a file of capsule replies to comments that annoy me just a little, so I don't have to waste time typing them up every time. Like this example, a reply to a comment that a particular artist must've been on drugs:

"It takes less drugs to come up with stuff like this than most people think. You just need a really, really weird mind. I'm saying this as someone who's been accused of being on drugs when I was just saying what was normal for my mind.

Not to say that they aren't on drugs. Sometimes they are (not that I find anything wrong with that). It's just not the case for every single work you happen to find really bizarre."

Mii.

Sat, 04 Apr 2009 15:16:13 GMT

Mii.

Mobile Phones and Data/Texting Only Plans

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 09:04:00 GMT

So, while paying my mobile phone bill that I had run up due to inability to pay it for a couple of months, I just checked on some things with my mobile phone company. They don't have anything cheaper than the data/text only plan I'm on. $30/month unlimited data, 300 text messages. In fact, it's not even available to new customers anymore. They said it was a promotional offer.

I was thinking of dropping down to a cheaper plan, like something with only texting or something, but T-Mobile doesn't seem to offer that. And I've found that stuff like Google Maps on the go have often been invaluable--helped keep me from getting totally lost on occasion.

Hmm. I guess I'm sticking with my current Blackberry Pearl. Did I mention that this plan only applies to Blackberries, and I cannot get any other kind? Every Blackberry upgrade option offered by my provider would cost me at least $49.

From what I've been reading, there aren't too many options for affordable data/text only plans. Hmm. Do any of you know of any? Though I've had a nothing but positive customer service experience with T-Mobile, and I've heard bad things about some of the other carriers' customer service.

Apparently there're other deaf people out there who aren't too happy about the limited options in general.

April's Fools...

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 08:52:40 GMT

I tend to have a hard time with this holiday, as I tend to take jokes at face value except when it's absolutely and obviously ridiculous enough it's more likely a joke than not.

Combined with the fact that I have very little sense of dates (I typically forget about holidays), and this leads to a lot of confusion.

At least the first webcomic I read today that pulled an April's Fools stunt made it plain and obvious. Actually for the most part those webcomics've been reasonably obvious.

Still... this holiday can be a little annoying for me in general.

And jokes told with a straight face... really annoy me. I hate believing people and then finding out they didn't mean what they say--I'm bad at reading into the subtleties and nonverbal cues. I do try somewhat, but it's difficult. So spare me, please. Or tell your jokes with a crooked face. ;)

Though, actually, the most amusing webcomic prank I've seen so far was an artist switching the characters of two of her webcomics around, so that each webcomic featured the other webcomic's characters saying the dialogue meant for the real characters. Heh.

Macbook issues

Sun, 22 Mar 2009 15:44:18 GMT

So my Macbook's suffering from a problem right now. It started last Thursday. It seems that if I try to do too much, programs begin exhibiting spinning beachballs and the wireless connection craps out. Furthermore, those programs will always lock up after that, even though they will function fine on a regular reboot if I don't run too much at once. Not sure what might be causing this. I can do far less at once than I could before.

For example, my torrent program now causes this just from running it.

It's notable that I'm not experiencing this issue on the Windows partition, so it seems most likely to be software rather than hardware related.

Does anyone have any thoughts?

Break the Rules of the Universe, Bend, Warp Them

Sat, 21 Mar 2009 22:59:31 GMT

Had a dream in which my grandfather was alive. That really messed with me. See, to me, death seems like a monstrously cruel thing to do to living, especially sentient, beings. It's on the top of my list of (many) reasons I bear much hatred for the underlying mechanisms of the Universe. Yes, I hate the very laws of physics. I know they can't help what they are and it's a kinda pointless hatred, but I hate them anyway.

Video chatting for ASL win!

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 09:00:32 GMT

I've decided to start trying out video chatting. See, the thing is, I've been concerned about getting out of practice with sign language since I don't know where to meet deaf people, and I tend to have a hard time interacting with the majority of people for any great length of time anyway. The only people I really sign with is my family... which I visit a few times a year.

So! I'm going to try video chatting. Maybe I'll start going out more eventually, but for now this will be easier. Besides, my laptop has a built in webcam anyway, might as well use it. ^.^

So, any of you know sign language and want to talk with the Kaja? Let's see if we can set something up!

Nasty TF Booth Dream

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 07:45:40 GMT

I had a very nasty dream. Not really a nightmare, but fairly disturbing now that I'm awake.

There was this transformation booth in the courtyard of a hotel. It had buttons for turning the occupant into stuff. There were some stuff like "Baby" and a few others that I had the sense of not being that bad compared to, well... the buttons like "Dead Baby" and other such fatal transformations.

Someone found a dead baby in that courtyard.

Listening to 11.975MHz

Sun, 22 Feb 2009 12:18:20 GMT

This will help you understand me a little more. Or not. ;) I'm just being silly.

I do like this webcomic, though. I find it pleasantly soothing, especially with the nonsense language. I like language when it has purely aesthetic value without much meaning. It's kinda relaxing.

In short, it's about a french-gibberish-speaking anime-styled girl with Pacman deely-boppers in a dreamworld that's mostly in art styles like assorted old Western newspaper strips. Not much plot, though some small amount of continuity (like her moving into a house with a bunch of similarly anime-styled friends met in the dreamworld). The girl's pretty much just as strange as the dreamworld. Random stuff happens.

I feel comfortable with the world of this comic. Overall, it's a very relaxing webcomic to me.

The creator's contact info is instructions on how to reach them by CB radio. I find that kinda cute.

Abomination of the day: Tso Veggie Stir Fry

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 16:11:12 GMT

Brown rice, frozen veggies, Tso sauce. Hee.

In other news, it's been quite a while since I last posted, or for that matter, read my friends page. I'm going to get to catching up on my friends page. And I'm going to work on being better at doing some of everything I want to do (just the most important things to me though!) instead of just focusing on one thing to the absolute exclusion of all others.

See, I have this problem. I get utterly engrossed in one thing, and focus utterly on it. And I can do this for days or even occasionally a couple of weeks. And that one thing typically doesn't include, well, basic household chores for example.

It took a vision of who I wanted to be to make me step back and think about paying more attention to what I actually focus on. I need to remember who I want to be and use that to guide my actions.

Sky's Crack news

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 05:23:26 GMT

Working on Sky's Crack more lately. But I've given up on writing it sequentially. Scenes keep coming to me out of chronological order. This means that you likely won't see me resuming serializing it until I've written the whole thing then and then edited it (for ordering among other things), when I'll serialize the second draft from the very beginning.

This time of year...

Thu, 25 Dec 2008 04:44:39 GMT

Wishing you all a happy time of year. In the end, that's the only thing I care about for the holidays, that you're all happy. Life doesn't always make it easy, so that's okay if you're in a situation where you find it too difficult to be happy.

Just remember that all of you are beautiful souls to me.

Gaming pet peeve: Slow turn-based combat

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 16:14:30 GMT

So a while back, I tried Anachronox because I heard it was an overlooked game with a very good story and all. What I played of the game looked to have potential. I got up to those ancient alien ruin tunnels (so relatively early on, like the second dungeon if one counts the Junkyard as a dungeon).

Then I quit in frustration. Why? You can probably guess from my post title, but in short: Anachronox's a Western game, but it appears to have taken inspiration from JRPGs in its combat system, and not in a good way. The problem: every single attack has an animation time of several seconds at least. This combined with the painful combat interface was somewhat irritating (having to click hard-to-identify icons to select both actions and targets). Not to mention that it was one of those time-based battle systems which, really, mainly combined the worse attributes of both action-based and turn-based combat--having the timer tick while you decide on then select your (hard to identify) action but not letting you have full-time control of your action like you would in a more action-based game.

But it really came to a head when I came to a particular fight in the aforementioned ruin tunnels. This fight had more enemies than any prior enemies (I think about six). Not only that, they were the tiny hard-to-hit sort (translation: high whiffage rate). So we got a long dragged out tedious fight where I spent far, far more time watching the overly lengthy animations than actually getting to select any courses of action. It was so bad that I actually quit the program in frustration before the combat finished.

A short time after, faced with a shortage of space on my Windows partition, I decided to delete Anachronox. It might've had very good merits otherwise, but the combat system simply killed the whole experience for me.

I prefer my attack animations fast and furious. Some of my favorite turn-based combat systems actually didn't have much in the way of animations (I'm looking at you, ancient PC games), but real animations can be done in a way that's fun for me. Actually, I'll mention one of my most favorite combat systems: Suikoden. I'm focusing mostly on the combat system in my discussion here. I won't really cover the series' other qualities here (my full opinion on them would be another post entirely).

What I liked in the combat system of Suikoden 1 and 2 is simple: they had a system where you selected all of your party members' actions for the turn and then the turn ran in initiative order--both your and the enemies' turns running at the same time. Not only that, but very frequently multiple combatants would act at the same time, so you'd get a barrage from one or both sides and/or a few meleers hurdling themselves all at the same time. This made battles far more zippy than other JRPGs with comparable attack animation times (and the animations weren't excessively long). If you selected the auto-battle option, battles could be over in a brief time (great for breezing past weak enemies).

It gave the battles a chaotic impression where it was hard to keep track of every single attack (not that it was really necessary), but that just made it more fun for me. The most important overall elements were evident.

Those Suikoden combat systems were fairly standard JRPG systems in other regards, but just those elements served far more to make the games a pleasurable experience than most of the systems that had more intricacies.

Mental samplings

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 22:49:39 GMT

Samples of the kinds of phrases/imagery that pass through my head:

"The world is marble."
A chorus happily and cutely singing a single obscene word again and again (it varies).
Zigzag landscapes. Or the world just warping into strange patterns, such as zigzags.
Silvery shimmers representing silvery vibrations.

A lot of the time, the inside of my head looks like one of those zany anime openings. Or even odder (especially in the case it's filled with nothing but colorful patterns).

I don't talk much about what I'm thinking, because often it's hard to put it into a form that makes sense. Sometimes those things are fun, sometimes they are a pain. But it's often the case that I can't really stop imagining/thinking them.

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 03:33:04 GMT

Infection vector shatterstripes
* Grab the book nearest you. Right now.
* Turn to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post that sentence along with these instructions on your LJ.
* Don't dig for your favorite book, the coolest, the most intellectual. Use the CLOSEST.

It also makes a tasty dressing for a green leaf salad.