15 posts tagged “friends”

Ok.  So I've not done much blogging lately.  Not really sure why, guess I've just been distracted with other stuff.  Quick run down of the goings ons.

1.  Years over.  I probably got a 4.0 this quarter, or something close to it.
2.  I'm back in Kennewick for the summer.  I have an internship starting Monday that's going to make my summer a lot like school, only worse, however.  I get paid, though.  About .48 cents per second, so I guess I gotta look at the bright side.
3.  My grandma died.

Guess that's the major events in my life.  Sharese is moving back to town on the 16th... which is exciting.  Potentially, anyway.  She might decide not to associate with me and mine, in which case it's pretty boring.  Linda, girl from middle school, joined the military and is going to basic in a few days apparently.  So... that's big for her.  *shrug*  Pat's missing, but he took some big actuary test on Tuesday.  Haven't heard anything since, so maybe it killed him.  Ody and Keston and Mike and all those kids graduated.  Ody has an internship job thing.  Donny walks today.  Or walked.  I dunno.

D&D starts Tuesday.  3.5 Eberron stuff.  Hopefully my 4.0 books get here soon and I can start working on running a 4.0 campaign. 

Gonna try to sleep but first a few words.

Avatar

I've finished the first 2 seasons of Avatar: The Last Airbender.  (That means I'm where you are Sid)  Totally awesome.  2nd season is better than the first.  Funny, cool, I like it.  The best part is that the character most like me (sarcastic, non-magical, logical) is also the stupid guy who gets hit with things a lot.  Also, for the ladies, there are lots of cute animals.  Like sabertoothmooselion cubs.

Also, Dimitri informs me that the crew isn't visiting on account of them being afraid of water or something.  I think that fear is a natural response to ignorance.  Too bad none of them have taken biology of chemistry.  :P  Actually it's a flood warning.  So that simplifies and borifies my life.

It's been 3 days without exercise now.  We were on such a roll.  This time is at least partially my fault, as I was watching Resident Evil 3 when Donny decided to break from learning the minutia of Ethiopian wine production.  I feel like I've gotten to the point where I'm used to exercise.  I'm kinda extra active now that I haven't in a while.  I did pull ups on the stairs and stuff.  Not normal.

Final tidbit, I accidentally set my alarm for PM last night and would have missed my test, except I woke up in time randomly.  Incidentally, I don't think I did very well.  There was way more ML programming on it than I thought there would be.  /shrug  I did pretty well on my Linear Algebra test I got back today though, so :P grades.

I will probably blog more in the coming days as a way of procrastination.  Oh how I despise you Tech Writing.

The guys are having a little trouble lately though.

Kim is cool.  She came over and let me play Guitar Hero.  Actually, we had to go to Aaron to get it, and then we played there, but she came over and got me.  Aaron was lame and had to sleep and stuff, but what can u do?  He hates Guitar Hero on principal.  The point of the story is that now I have Guitar Hero at my place.  :P  For a while anyway.

Also, just so everyone knows, if Kim was going to leave Aaron for one of his friends it'd be me.  XD  So, ya know, more points for her.

Also points for Lauren and Sidney for updating their Vox's.  Very nice ladies.

Pat is being lame.  He's taking care of his sister who for unknown reasons had a tonsillectomy somewhere other than home.  For unknown reason's it's Pat's job to take care of her.  For unknown reasons she can't survive a couple hours as a passenger in a car.  Basically I dun get it.

This isn't really Pat's fault but he should either explain it better or get out of it.  /shakes head

Tomorrow it seems like I'm going to be going to Gar's to observe some D&D playing by the local kids run by Aaron.   Maybe entertain the misses.

I have to write a Christmas letter and don't want to.  Bah humbug etc.

Donny's doing ok, but I didn't see him today.  I suspect he'll be working too much to be getting too many Gene points as usual.

/shrug this post kinda sucks

Made it past where I was last time.  One try.  I was going about killing the griffon all wrong previously.  Very exciting.

Andrew stopped by.  He's been gone all summer.  He's in town for a while.  Going to San Fran soon.  New college. 

Aaron stopped by after that.  Took me to watch Death Becomes Her.  Well, it wasn't really his intention, but girls took over the tv.  The movie is pretty sucky but I'd already seen it.

Bet my GPU is still in Portland.  X|

Yesterday was a pretty good day.  I finished Ancestor, that online book I talked about.  So now I'll do some reviewing.

I listened to the book in its podcast form which is a different experience than what one would get from reading it oneself.  This is mostly because of pacing and the voices.  All the voices are done by the author, I think, which gives everything a really nice B movie feel.  I am all for the entrepreneurial low budgetness, but one cannot escape the cheesiness.  I'm going to say this all neutralizes for me, but for some people I'm sure it would be very difficult to get over the voices.

The book itself has several issues.  The writing, while decent, is not of a style very attractive to me.  The author takes time at the beginning of the book to explain basic scientific principals and techniques used in the book, emphasizing the science fact aspect.  This is fine, except that I'm pretty sure in order to actually make his exciting horror novel, he is messing up a lot of the science later on.  He also makes a few either little misspeaking errors, like referring to bacteria as creatures of only a few thousand chromosomes.

About a quarter of the book is romantic development between two of the main characters.  That's probably not true if you are counting words, but if you exclude all the filler stuff, it's the impression I got.  Most of the rest is plot development, little bit of character development here and there.  That's a decent formula, except I would have left out the romance and worked more on plot.

The book doesn't get going in the horror aspect at all until the last third of the book.  After that point things speed up quite a bit, and the author seems to be on ground he knows.  Things seem to flow better, and I found it much more entertaining.  I'm not a horror fan, but I do enjoy gore and death, so in this case it worked out.

Overall I'd say the book is close to a average published book.  There are a few of the hallmarks of quality books, little threads that come back throughout the story, quirks that allow one to relate to characters good and evil, a few humorous points to remember, but it is unpolished.  I sorta get the feeling that if Sigler wrote another book or two I wouldn't be able to tell the difference from the books I pick up off shelves.  It's a really good free book, but I would be unimpressed had I actually payed for it.  When I buy books I'm too used to Tad Williams and Orson Scott Card quality.

I like the authors idea of trying to insert real science into a fictional book, but he doesn't succeed very well in my opinion.  More research would be nice, and a less heavy handed and concentrated approach to delivering the science would be beneficial.  I also don't approve of it always being the scientist's fault the world is ending, but I guess you can't really avoid that with this type of book.

I'd be curious what an avid horror reader thought of the book.

Art_preview_20

A final note on the book is that his horrible ancestor creature pretty much already exists in my head as a card from Hecatomb.  This didn't detract and I don't mean this an a negative, just an interesting note.  This picture doesn't really do justice, they're better described in the Hecatomb storyline.

In other news Dimitri has moved into my room for the rest of spring break, except for sleeping.  He's gone right now because he has a headache or something.

I talked w/ Sharese again, so she did manage to keep her word a bit so far, so that's exciting.  I talked to Pat too.  He won a Wii on ebay.

John and Dimitri and I are working on doing a bit of d20 Moderning, post apocalyptic variety.  Haven't actually gotten started but we have done a lot of talking.  My new hecatomb deck kinda sucks.  I apparently have not enough good red and green cards.  /sigh

I want to have a big BBQ, LAN, s'more making, sundae making party while Keston is gone to punish him for leaving, but Ody is the one with a real house and he's sick, so we have to wait for him to feel better.  QQ and gg and such.

Eight days until the end of this term.  Whooo.  I have to find a video of a concert and watch it and write a paper sometime in there.  Booo.

Some stuff has happened.  I played a game w/ Dane and Ludwig and Matt yesterday/the day before.  It was a long game.  None of us had played before and we played with like 4 expansion packs.  Can't remember what it's called.  Stupid long C word.  I think it is a pretty good game.  I won.  But I think I like it in concept, even excluding the victory.

We had a showing of Night Watch today, LRPC that is.  Almost nobody came, but that was stupid of them.  Bunch of people came to see Mazes and Monsters, which sucked, and this movie was actually good.  I liked it anyway.  Modern day good vs. evil fantasy epic struggle in Russian.  Apparently there are 2 more coming.  Check it out if you're into that sort of thing though.  Everyone around here kinda missed it when it was originally released from the talk I heard.

Had a LAN just now.  Played DotA and this new game that's a lot like DotA.  Short LAN this time cause one of the guys has work at 5 am or something.  /shrug Just as well though.  We're all getting sick of the games we play, and none of us are thinking of anything better to do.  /sigh  I tried to think of some good games for quite some time... like minutes, but I was not successful.  Maybe I'm getting too old.

That title doesn't really have anything to do with the post, just a general statement.  Don't construe it to mean that I believe anything I write about in this post to be particularly positive.

I did all the work today I set out to do.  So that's cool.  I'm so proud of myself.  Luckily there wasn't much to get done.  I wrote a letter to grandma, but now I remember that the only envelope I have is the one she sent me that's supposed to be for a card, and I don't have a card.  And if I wanted to get a card I'd have to do it at the time that I'm supposed to be interviewed by the SUNY guy.  There was some confusion that led to rescheduling.  Anyway, I dunno if I should wait and buy grandma a card, thus delaying the sending of her letter, or if I should just send the letter in the card envelope.  I dun like buying cards.  Kinda like buying anything.

I'm not looking forward to going to class.  I need to figure out a way of doing something while he's talking without getting in trouble for it.  I could listen to music, but I don't think that would be entertaining enough.  I might have to settle.  The room is like a concert hall type place, so the seats are all elevated so I can't just sit behind people and not get seen.  Otherwise I'd read or playing my DS.  /sigh

Did D&D stuff.  Online and not.  Gonna get some gaming going.  Weeee.  Also, there's an episode of Eureka that was broadcast like 4 hours ago and it's still not up on the internet.  Not that I can find anyway.  This is a travesty.  Where are my good friends the uploaders?

My sister and my gambling addict both made Vox's in like the last two days.  It's craziness.  Anyway, comment and encourage them to post.  They're shy because they don't love themselves.  I understand, it must be hard to love yourself when you're not me.

I'm home in Kennewick.  I spent today finishing my grad school stuff.  So now I get a big long break.  Wonder what I'll do with my freedom.  So far I've watched that pirate video a bunch and caught up on some of my webcomix. 

Pat is going away, or has gone I guess, to go skiing in Canada with some of his friends from college.  They'll probably be drunk and retarded the whole time, but hopefully they survive.  Anyway, I'm without Pat for a while, and I've not heard from anyone else except Andrew, who apparently has to go back to his school to straighten out some financial stuff.  Being alone wouldn't be horrible. I have lots of games to play and tv to watch and stuff to listen to and comix/books to read.  Plus Aaron will probably show up.

Apparently my sister is flying in tomorrow night.  Not that that will contribute to entertainment much.