Slavegirl Scrawlings

Ballad of Chell

2009-09-04T06:02:25Z

Apologies in advance, I was in a weird mood tonight at work and this came to mind.

******

Come and listen to story of a girl named Chell
Worked in a lab and she did her job well
Then one day she was sleepy as can be
And awoke in lab with springs coming out her knees
Lab? Awoke in a cell, I mean
Concrete walls, Plexiglass windows

Next thing you know, there's a portal in the wall
And a computer voice says "Come on, step into the hall!
We've got a lot of testing and we've got to get'er done!"
So she stepped through the hole and then she began to run

Now Chell began to suspect that ol'GLaDOS's full of lies
Even though she found her own hand-held portal device
But she kept on moving through each new part of the test
Cause with the turrets firing at her she could not afford to rest

Well she ducked and she jumped, and she made it out alive
And GLaDOS went and freaked, "Hey, that's not what I contrived!"
She used her portal gun to try to get away
While GLaDOS did her best to make sure Chell would stay

Chell made it to the room where GLaDOS tried to hide
And waved her finger madly, "GLaDOS you shouldn't have lied!
Because you never gave me the tasty promised cake
I'm gonna drop your Spheres into a room where they will bake."

You know Chell got away and she left the lab behind
And you know Gordon Freeman is the man she's gonna find
And just in case you wondered if GLaDOS did survive
She'll sing a little song and say, "I'll be still alive."

Warning

2009-04-15T06:51:56Z

I do my best to use a headset whenever I'm using my cellphone. Either earbuds with a mic, a full headset, or on rare occasions, I Bluetooth it. I like having my hands free, my neck unencumbered, and my vision properly aligned instead of at an angle, or fixed straight ahead.

This is especially true when I'm driving. If I've been bad and forgot to bring my headset with me, often I won't even answer my phone while I'm driving. When I do answer it without a headset, I feel really, really bad about it and try to get off the phone as soon as I can.

It is for this reason I want to beat the living snot out of everyone I see driving in the city with one hand permanently affixed to their heads who aren't watching where the frak they are going.

The urge to pull them out of their car at an intersection and wail on them with a blunt instrument is very hard to squelch.

I know one day one of these people are going to crash into me.

And they will deny using the frakking thing while driving.

And then I will be going to jail for assault and battery, provided I'm uninjured.

Worried

2009-04-12T16:07:55Z

It's really hard for me to read news like this.

It seems to happen every 7 or 8 months or so, and it never gets any easier to read. I honestly don't know what should be done about it, the truth of any supposed corruption and the extent it may or may have not spread, or who the legitimate government of Thailand is. Democracy is a slippery item when the losing side will not accept loss as part of the process, and even more slippery when that process has been perverted by those who never believed in the process to begin with.

What I do know is that in 2003 I visited a foreign land called Thailand. I know that many of the people I met there were the nicest, friendliest people I could have met who extended a warm hand to an American who was largely ignorant of their language and their culture. I worry for those people. And I hope they are safe now, and that they are still safe when this is eventually resolved.

Food is gud fud.

2009-04-05T04:28:08Z

Tonight, I surprised novacheckers with a dinner by candlelight. Fresh salad, cinnamon-honey croissants, wild rice, chipotle-lime tilapia with pineapple, and my favorite Zinfandel called The 7 Deadly Zins.

This has been the best Saturday night at home in a long time.

Required Viewing for anyone who has read WATCHMEN

2009-03-06T02:10:05Z

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/485797

Little Magic

2008-12-21T05:58:52Z

There is something absolutely magical in taking a used aluminum foil chocolate wrapper and smoothing it out with a coin. The transformation from solid, crinkled, and rough beneath the fingers to thin, smooth, and slick is nearly sublime. Great care must be taken not to rip the foil as the folds vanish, great patience to ensure you smooth it completely.

But in the end, every second taken to accomplish it is well spent.

over 105 million views

2008-12-11T06:12:11Z

How on earth have I never found this before. This is great!

ardenlyn @ 2008-08-23T00:35:00

2008-08-23T05:39:43Z

Dear Co-Worker,

You might have thought it was funny to remove the ink cartridge from my pen. I can't fathom why you did that. I know I left it on my desk, and that was my fault. If I'd have left it in my drawer you'd probably never have done it. But why the ink cartridge? Why not take the whole pen? If you'd have taken the whole pen, I'd have had a good one ready when I had to make a laundry list of things to do for the customer I was talking to when I discovered it wasn't working. Instead, I had to apologize, stop him from speaking, grab another pen, and then apologize again before asking him to repeat what was going on.

Taking the pen would have been understandable - you needed one and I left one out. Fair enough. But taking the ink cartridge? That's a pretty crappy thing to do. All it says is that you wanted to crap upon my day.

FUCK YOU.

ardenlyn @ 2008-07-16T12:31:00

2008-07-16T17:46:11Z

I know the days of progressive rock have come and gone, and that these days, only Rush and Dream Theater really seem to be carrying on with the style. Listening to most of what I hear today, even on rock stations, I can't help but mourn the loss of progressive rock as an means to which songs like this one might actually be heard by everyone.

This is an incredibly beautiful and mysterious piece of music, and it would be completely unsellable in today's music industry.

I feel like a old woman holding my fragile fist up in rage at the state of the world by saying this.

Wanna hear that song for the first time just one more time

2008-07-09T07:33:07Z

Last year, when we went to Japan, we found ourselves with a few hours to kill between leaving our capsule hotel and running to the airport. We decided to spend a bit of time exploring the Mecca of Japanese consumerism which is Akihabara's Yodobashi Camera.

While we were there, I remember wanting to get a good pair of headphones that were not ear-buds. All of the display models were tied into the same CD player. Every pair I tested out allowed me to hear the same gorgeous song over and over again. After some furious studying up and some help from Nova, I asked one of the men who worked there what the song was. Unfortunately, I wasn't confident enough to really push for more clarification, and the only thing I was able to learn was the artist's name.

Nakashima Mika.

Now, Yodobashi Camera had a Tower Records inside, and I listened to EVERY SINGLE one of her albums that they had on the shelf and not a single one of those albums contained the song. I've searched You Tube and every other resource I can think of.

Right now, I want to hear that song more than anything else, and I don't even know the name of it. I don't even know enough Japanese to tell you what a single lyric was. I just know it was primarily dark piano with low vocals and it moved like heavy waves on the ocean.

If any Mika fans out there are reading this, and you know what song was on Yodobashi's audio demo back in September of 2007, PLEASE let me know. I know this is a long shot, but I desperately want to hear this song one more time.

NYC

2008-05-31T21:45:36Z

So, I've been in NYC for a few days now. There were only a few spots I genuinely wanted to hit as far as touristy things go. One of which was the Empire State Building. I must, I'm extremely disappointed that they pull the Tokyo Tower crap, in that you pay one fee to get up so high and if you want to go ALL the way up, you have to pay again. We did not - we had a cosmology lecture we were running late for and didn't want to miss out. The traffic at the ESB was crazy busy for a Thursday night at 19:00, and believe it or not, we missed the rush at 20:00 that was out the main doors and around the corner. This is not including the two floors of line on the inside. We had to race up the last six floors on foot since the wait for the elevators from 80 to 86 was at least 30 minutes. Ironically, have three fans of Shoujo Kakumei Utena racing up a very long spiraling staircase only kept us amused for about four flights.

The second stop I wanted to see was the Statue of Liberty. As you can see, I have an affection for very tall famous spaces - maybe I'll manage to get to the Chrysler Building before I leave. I was up for even more disappointment there. The tickets we purchased at the Battery Park ferry are only good enough to get you TO Liberty Island. A monument pass is NOT available once on the island; you have to purchase that at least a week in advance or you can only wander around the fool statue and not go up the pedestal or inside it. Grrrrrrr.

I'm a freaking tourist, people. This may be my only trip to NYC I'll ever take in my life, and I've been denied access to the symbol of my country's ideology because I didn't think to book tickets a week in advance. I've never been to any site that required that much dedication to planning. I feel this says something about how liberty has actually been lost to us, even if there are practical considerations of traffic and space inside that have to be considered; the ferries carry around 1,000 people to and from the island every trip.

For all you Battlestar Galactica fans

2008-04-30T06:00:01Z

The individual who writes this needs to negotiate a deal with SCI-FI channel to have it collected and published after the series is finished. This collection of writing about the show is arguably better than the show itself, and I swear that the writers of the show read this religiously enough that his observations have made it into their planning. It's either that, or he's got a brilliant way of making them seem like geniuses.

Television Without Pity's review of the new Battlestar Galactica

Start at the miniseries, and work your way forward.

Rewind

2008-04-26T05:32:36Z

Today, I took the day off after assisting with Bring Your Child to Work Day yesterday. Doing this usually means getting off at 22:30 and then having to be back at work at 08:00. Sometimes, they offer to let me work a split-shift the day before so I can get home earlier. This time, I refused, because honestly, letting me off work a day earlier is not going to get me in bed any quicker. Most people can't go from late-shift to first-shift in a day, or even a day and a half.

So, not surprisingly, I slept in this morning. A little too long, and I was the unfortunate recipient of one of those headaches that come from too many hours in bed. The kind that do not go away as the day progresses, and often, have to be killed by taking yet another nap.

Said nap occurred as novacheckers was supposed to be returning home from work. She had called earlier to let know she'd be bringing home Rib Crib for dinner. When she got home, she phoned me to let me know she'd need help carrying in everything, except I missed the call. I ran to my phone to call her back, but as I was doing so, she was already at the door. I apologized for not getting to the phone soon enough, and helped her bring in the food.

We sat down at the kitchen table, and she described the goings on at N!Prime, and how certain players who hadn't posted on the new forum in quite some time were going to be getting a reminder notice that they'd been inactive. We began to talk about the characters they had developed, which ones we liked, and were hoping would become active again.

I heard someone coming up the stairs, so I went towards the computer room to take a peek at who was outside.

Just then, the front door opened, and novacheckers walks in. I'm on the sofa, and I wake up. She had just then returned home, and Rib Crib was out of the food I'd ordered. She kept trying to talk to me, but I had to try and focus and try to forget the past 10 minutes of my life, since they hadn't happened except in slept-too-long-have-horrible-headache-must-take-a-nap-land. On top of that, since I woke up in the middle of a dream, it was twice as hard to regain my conscious cohesion.

It took about 30 minutes to realign everything in my head.

Rewinding your life is hard.

This way ->

2008-04-13T20:20:47Z

The Cake is a Lie
The Cake is a Lie
The Cake is a Lie
The Cake is a Lie

sigh

2008-04-08T18:01:46Z

I've always known that my cat is big. We used to joke about him being a 20 pound blob that lays around and meows, but that was an exaggeration. The truth is that he is a very long cat, and a cat that size is going to be large.

Despite that, I've always known that heavy cats are prone to diabetes and I've been careful to keep him from over-eating. I've given him the healthy-weight management food that is higher in protein than other varieties. We keep the other cat's food out of the way so he can't readily get to it.

This weekend, we noticed that he was walking a bit oddly on his hind legs. After 2.5 hours at the vet's office, I'm still in shock.

My poor kitty got the dreaded D word after all my effort to keep him from getting it. Some cats are just predisposed to it, apparently.

Special diabetes cat food - $40 for a 12 lb bag.
Insulin - $20 bucks for a 50 dose bottle
Holding the poor little guy down while I prick him - heartbreaking.

Having him leap up on the bed at night and snuggle on top of me - Priceless.

I love you, you silly lil'furball.

Even though you broke my foot back in '04.

Grrrrrrrrrrr

2007-12-19T16:48:17Z

Two nights ago, I dreamed that I was a in dimly lit club of maybe 100 people. The tables were candlelit and there was no standing room. They were all positioned in front of a small stage. I was very excited because Michael Stipe was due to give a a rare solo show without the rest of REM and we just happened to come to this club on the night it was going to happen. We didn't plan it in advance; we just enjoyed this cozy little spot and decided to get out of the house that night.

When Michael came out on stage, he made a little show about bringing Billy Bragg up on stage with him, complete with asking the audience, "Do you wanna see Billy Bragg on stage with me?" and asking for cheers to get Billy out of hiding. I thought, being a fan of Bingo Handjob's song "Tom's ?" that he was bringing Billy Bragg up on stage to do that, and apparently so were a few others in the audience.

Instead, Billy played something slow and haunting on his acoustic guitar while Michael sang very dark lyrics. It was an amazing song. The audience were all singing softly with him, and this made the song even more haunting than it would have been. I had never heard it before, but I was singing along with it, too, since that's the way of dreams.

I remember waking up with the chorus still in my head. I kept thinking, as my cat meowed and meowed that it was breakfast time, that I had to have heard the song on the radio in my sleep as the music alarm went off, cause there's no way I could have dreamed all of that on my own. Then I realized that the radio station on the clock is only playing Christmas music now.

And now, that beautiful, haunting piece of music that I had pulled out of the dream with me is teasing me by staying on the edge of my memory - just enough so I remember the last few sounds of the chorus, but not the words and not the melody.

Damn it all.

Damn it all.

Damn it all.

I want that song back.

This is not the first time this has happened.

I should buy a mini-recorder and leave it near my bed so I can save whatever fragments I can after waking from now on.

HEROES

2007-12-04T08:06:34Z

Normally, I try to be reasonable about decisions made in the writers' room of shows I love that I happen to disagree with. Sure, they might miff me, and I'll complain about it, but most of the time it really doesn't bother me like it did tonight.

I am so pissed off at Heroes right now. I want to say that I won't watch it again after tonight, but I know that would be a lie. But even all the even storytelling and missteps during this past season didn't bother me as much as tonight's crapper of finale.

I feel broken.

Dreams and stuff

2007-11-11T19:26:28Z

I had a dream where I was trapped in the mother of all haunted houses. Just going into the place guaranteed your death in seven days, ala THE RING/RINGU and the creepy girl coming out of the TV. That makes for an interesting moment when you realize you've actually found a way OUT of the damn place, but that doesn't really matter, cause you've only got a week after that before your time is up. I only saw about four rooms of it before we realized our "escape" route meant climbing down the side of the building - and somehow after four rooms we were about five stories up without ever using the stairs. There were fire escapes mind you, but instincts told you that they would collapse or there would be sections missing. It couldn't be that easy.

The interior was apparently like the movie CUBE - where some of the rooms would outright kill you. We took this so seriously that if there was any cryptic writing on the wall, we refused to read it as it might summon something to kill us, or drive us mad outright simply by giving voice to whatever was written.

To further emphasize how terrifying this place was supposed to be, none other than Freddy Krueger himself was willing to make a truce with us so HE could get out of the place alive. It rather amusing when you walk into the room where something in your subconscious comes out in holographic form to scare the crap out of you. When asked what Freddy saw, he said ashamedly in a quiet voice, "Wesley." We were dumbstruck. "Do you mean from Star Trek or Angel?" "Angel," he said in the same voice.

Fred Krueger scared of Wesley from Angel. Hey, you have to admit, when he went dark, Wes was pretty bad-ass.

Still, the idea that Freddy was scared of Wes was amusing. Until his predictable and quite expected betrayal, upon which I found myself fighting him with both his own razors and two whiffle ball bats. For the record, it's not easy to hold a whiffle ball bat while wearing a razor glove. I was quite pissed that none of the other people in the dream were helping in this fight, mind you. They just seemed quite content to watch. Which they shouldn't have been so content - horror movie rules being what they are, the stupid glove would probably corrupt me and then I'd come after them for not helping.

I woke up before that happened.

Lucky them.

Well, I say...

2007-10-07T08:04:39Z

This is an actual spam mail I received this morning...

Have they ever told you this, "Gush! Your penis is so small!"?
Didn't you feel stupid?
Don't let women prefer dildo to you ! Megadik will make you a real man ! You should simply rely on this magic preparation!
"Wow! Your penis is unique!" IsnÂ�t that what you just love to hear?
Soon you'll be the only one women will dream about! Megadik is your real cure!

Your penis is unique...wow...I think if I'm telling a guy that, it's not because of it's size...

No Words.

2007-09-21T07:17:17Z

I just found out that a friend of mine from high school died in February. He was only 3 years older than me.

I have no idea how it happened.

His daughter posted this at the funeral home's guestbook:

its not been long since you left me but i miss you so much already. i'll never forget the chocolate pudding i put all over your face when you was sleeping. all you could do when you woke up was smile at me.i'll always love you and remember my proudest times with you. i love daddy.

We had not spoken in years - life just moves people apart sometimes.

Nonetheless, I've been crying for the past 20 minutes.

Updates soon

2007-09-04T03:53:49Z

Sorry about the lack of updates. The inability to post pics really spoiled blogging for me when I was overseas.

We're back home now, so I should be posting more trip details soonish.

ugh

2007-08-30T12:45:48Z

break in journal until I figure out a way to get around my shortage of space on my server for images. I can post without images, but that requires me to go cut all the links out of the text I've saved and right now I don't have the time.

Anyway, I'm in Kyoto right now and will try updating with pics when we are in Hiroshima.

Day One After the Flight

2007-08-27T14:57:56Z

The most useful bit of advice I can give any new traveler to Japan (at this young time) is to learn the Kanji of the train station closest to your hotel. So long as you know it, you will know how much it costs to get from wherever you are back to your room, and stand an excellent chance of being able to make it back there. Many of the trains now have digital displays which tell you in romanji what station is next, with bilingual announcements to accompany them.

After waking up early, we headed out to go exploring. novacheckers took me to the Akihabara area before it truly woke up. Even then, though, people were waiting around for stores to open. A pastry shop was putting fresh wares out into their window, and I wanted one badly. Unfortunately, it was also closed and wouldn't open for another forty or so minutes. We continued to walk, eventually getting to Kanda. One of the things you need to prepare for is that you will walk a lot, and that at least in the Ochanomizu/Akihabara/Kanda/Suidoubashi areas, there are exceedingly few areas where pedestrians can sit down.

We eventually made our way to Shibuya, where we spent some time checking out some of the arcades. It's rather interesting that most of them seem to have the exact same game selection even if they aren't the same chain. There are Mech-Warrior style games here in excess, many of them full-on pod simulations where an entire floor of the establishment is nothing more than a multiplayer environment for mech combat. I did enjoy getting to try out Tekken 5 (I don't believe it is out in the US yet), and both of us have had a blast playing Power Smash 3, which is essentially the next iteration of VirtuaTennis.

You really have to see the UFO catcher games to understand how cute Japan can be. Some of the plushie prizes are adorable to the point of trauma, and the figure prizes are so frakking good that you can waste hours and coins trying to finally get some payout. Luckily, Nova turned out to be a master at one style of them, and she netted us four Evanglion mini-figures in just a handful of tries.

In the afternoon, we met up with our friend Marianne (a fellow Puzzle Pirate) and her husband, Per, from Norway. We trained down to the Tokyo Dome, where they have a mini-amusement park called La Qua. La Qua has a roller coaster called the Thunder Dolphin that I wanted to ride from the moment I saw pictures of it online.

Once I saw it in person, it was a lot more intimidating. You really need to see it first hand to get the scope of this ride; it hugs the roof of the nearby shopping complex (about six stories tall) and zooms through a hole in the side as well as through the middle of the "hubless" ferris wheel. Further more, unlike most American coasters, this one didn't have a "car" so much as it had a seat with a belt and a lap-bar; you weren't sitting inside anything that had walls or elevated sides.

I hope some of the pictures give you an idea of the scope of it.

The four of us took turns playing different Bemani games in the La Qua arcade, everything from Dance Dance Revolution to Taiko Drummer (which, like everyone who plays it for the first time has to say, is incredibly fun).

We all settled in for dinner at Denny's. (Yes, DENNY'S.) As Nova is fond of saying, Denny's in Japan is not Denny's in America. Traditional American food is almost absent from their menu, though you can still get pancakes for dessert if you'd like. Per found this rather amusing, as he pointed to the big white letters adorning the trim at the top of the wall that said "Denny's Hamburg" but yet, there was no hamburger on the menu.

After, we headed back to Akihabara. At this hour, it had become a congested mass of pedestrians, and it was quite a sight to behold under all the neon lights. Unfortunately, we'd arrived a few minutes before most of the shops closed for the evening, so our visit was cut short.

More to come as I find the time to write. Japan is an exhausting experience if only for the humidity and the amount of walking you end up doing. I'll touch upon that in another entry, but on most nights, it's all we can do to make back to the room and clean up before collapsing.

Getting to Tokyo

2007-08-26T12:39:44Z

(apologies for the lack of updates, our room doesn't have wireless access so I'm unable to send them at the day's end)

No matter how many comforts they try to throw at you, thirteen hours in coach seating on a plane is still thirteen hours in coach setting. Which makes it all but impossible to sleep (though the gentleman to my left seemed to have no problem at all sleeping upright for about eleven hours of it - I have no clue how he managed it), and the sparse hour or so I managed to get only resulted in an extremely crimped neck.

On the other hand, we did have approximately 295 movies available to us as well as some fairly cheap knockoff games. This allowed us to see both The Bourne Identity and The Bourne Supremacy in one sitting, something we'd been unable to do the previous week back home due to the third Bourne film having just been released. So now that we've done our homework, I look forward to seeing The Bourne Ultimatum when we return to the United States.

The airline food, in my opinion, was surprisingly good compared to the last time I flew across the Pacific. It was also fascinating that half the crew appeared to be Japanese, and that all messages given over the PA were spoken in both English and Japanese. This was not something done on my last flight to Narita Airport; although this flight was on Continental and not United. As well as the bilingual announcements, we were given chopsticks with our meals and I made it point to use them regardless of how American the food was. Eating scrambled eggs was a fun challenge.

By the time we arrived at Narita, I was starting to get borderline hallucinations from exhaustion. I held it together well through immigrations, customs, the currency exchange, and the purchase of our train ticket to Tokyo proper. (Which, coincidentally, was the first time I was able to use some of the Japanese I'd been studying for the past few months. It felt really good to know that was time well-spent, especially considering how little I was actually able to learn.) After, the train ride on the Narita Express gave me my first non-airport view of the country.

The first thing you learn about Japan is that somethings you see in anime are NOT make-believe. In Evangelion, Misato and Shinji lived in some immense apartment building that, not being native to Japan, I figured was the result the overpopulation of the Tokyo-3 area as one of the few habitable spots after the Third Impact. It's not make believe - just on my trip from Narita to Tokyo I saw several clones of that structure and several more larger than that one.

We got off the train at Ochanomizu, where our hotel was just over the Hijiribashi bridge. After checking in at the hotel, where my minuscule knowledge of Japanese was obliterated in the face of words I'd never heard before, we ended up collapsing in very small room we'd reserved.

It was only 5 pm local time. But, after having been up for roughly 40 hours with only a one hour or so nap, I'd sleep for about twelve straight hours.

(pictures are coming - I need to get an FTP client on this machine and then maybe we'll have some here)

The Great Japan Getaway, Prelude

2007-08-23T12:08:29Z

It's now about 7 am CST, and I've been up for 21 hours straight. Which means I'm getting a bit slappy as I write from the lappy that novacheckers purchased for our trip overseas. On our way to drop of my beloved Saturn with my parents, we stopped at a Quik Trip where I purchased the necessary uber-coffee and banana to sustain me long enough to get us here. While there, I spotted a pancake, egg, and sausage hot sandwich which proved to be absolutely heavenly for convenience store food. I might have to try eating another after I've slept to get a better opinion.

I can feel my body winding down little by little; it won't last long once we get in the air. This gives the whole experience a bit of a dream-like quality, in that I'd almost believe that this wasn't happening at all.

Next post will probably be after we arrive in Tokyo. See ya on the other side of the world, LJ friends!