The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

He is a real dude, with real body parts who lives in a real house and everything. It’s true.

When I went, I was kind of assuming that it would be magical. My point of reference was the first time I visited my ex-girlfriend. It was exciting. We had only knew each other a few months. We went to a science museum. Everything was new. When I got there, I didn’t really feel that with Brer, and I wasted a lot of time wondering why. It took me about a day to figure it out.

I’ve known Brer for like 6 years. This isn’t a “honeymoon” period for us, like it was at the beginning of my relationship with Natalie. Of course it isn’t mind-blowing to spend time with him. I’ve been talking to him forever!

Once I figured that out, and stopped worrying, I let myself have a good time. A very good time. It consisted mostly of sitting around, playing video games, watching movies, and so on and, frankly, that’s exactly what I wanted. I got to spent quality time with him. We played a ton of You Don’t Know Jack. I showed him L.A. Noire. We played EDF: Insect Armageddon, which he liked, much to my surprise, since he hates the idea of playing a shooter on a console. He cooked me crazy meals. I ate a salad for dinner. We looked across a river to Canada. We snuggled up on a couch. It was very mundane. There was nothing wrong with that at all.

If I had any doubts about how much it meant to me, the last night, his birthday, when I realized I should start packing up my stuff, I started crying. It happened a few more times. Brer’s been such a big part of my life, and him being there in person… it was right. It was how it should be. He still annoys me in a lot of ways, as I’m sure I annoy him, and he’s far from perfect. But he’s mine. I didn’t want to leave him. We both pulled out of his driveway on that last day (he was going to run an errand as I drove off) and as we turned separate ways I started sobbing. It’d be months until I saw him in person again. Totally not fair.

Were there fireworks? Nah. We’re past fireworks. But I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all. I’m comfortable. He’s mine. I love him, every part of him. I am going to steal him away and keep him. Come on, love. Come to me. I’ll be here, typing on my stupid blog and playing my video games and waiting for you, okay? Get the important stuff done, and then let’s go. Let’s start our lives together. Okay?

I gave up soda.

Yeah, me. I did that.

Can you fucking believe it?

In any case, I drank straight water for awhile, and while that was fine, it also felt very forced. It didn’t replace the feel-good that came from cracking open a Pepsi, since it wasn’t all that enjoyable. Thus, I started making Crystal Light Lemonade, because I had enjoyed that in the past. (Of course, I always used twice the powder back in the day. I used the recommended dose this time around.) It was a good substitute, and while not water, was way, way better for me than soda.

Of course, the pack of lemonade mix we had from who knows when eventually ran out, and I went to the store to buy some more. When I got there, though, I noticed that the Schnucks brand was like… way cheaper. Three for the price of two cheaper. I decided it was worth a shot. However, there were three lemonade variants available: A “Natural” Lemonade, a “Natural” Pink Lemonade, and a Raspberry Lemonade. Of course, I bought all three to give them a try.

The first one I went with was the Raspberry Lemonade, because that seemed the most interesting. I love citrus, love lemonade, and rather enjoy things that are raspberry flavored. However, past experiences with Raspberry Lemonade had been poor at best. They just tasted like shitty weak lemonade that someone dropped a raspberry in.
This, however, didn’t. It was a rather strong lemonade, which I appreciated, which just had a little bit of raspberry on the back end to cut the sour slightly. It was rather good, but it’s not something I’m going to drink every day. Still, I had high hopes for the normal lemonades, as that one turned out quite well.

The standard lemonade wasn’t nearly as good, though. For whatever reason, it just tasted artificial. It had that sting that artificial sweeteners have. Granted, this is supposed to have artificial sweeteners, but I kind of hate that taste. I guess the raspberry was hiding it in the previous mix. With nothing to mask it, it was out in full force. It was drinkable, but not optimal, by any means.

The pink lemonade, though, is probably the one I will keep buying. It undercuts that artificial flavor with the sweetness of pink lemonade, and does it without, you know, making it not taste like lemonade like the raspberry does. It’s a solid and cheap drink mix. I like it.

Overall, though, these are pretty decent products, which surprised me. For example, I have bought the Schnucks generic Chex Mix before, and that was a god awful mess nobody would ever believe is Chex Mix for a second. Tasted horrible. These are fine, though.

Yeah, I wrote about drink mixes. I dunno, it was on my mind.

Hi! By the time you read this, I’ll be on my way to spend a week with Brer. This is both totally awesome and totally scary, but I know the trip will be worth it. It should be relaxing and lovely, and I’ll finally get to see him, finally. At least once before he moves down here. That’s good, right?

That, of course, leaves the question of this blog. I don’t really want to do a week-long hiatus because I like things posting. That means I’ve got to build up a back catalog of posts to post over the week! That’s what I’m doing now, in the past. I’m going to try to write enough to keep things rolling. That doesn’t mean I won’t maybe break in and write something different, if I have time and feel inspired. I can always push those older posts forward even more. Why not?

So, yeah. Basically, if any of this stuff seems kind of old news when you read it, that’s why. It’ll all be new content, as far as the site is concerned, but who knows, I may have already talked your ear off about it by the time you read it. So be it.

Now I’m going to go enjoy my trip. You enjoy the week as well, yes? New old content begins tomorrow.

Time to dump some links on you all. I’m about to travel, so these tabs need a little clearing out to lighten my load!

Tim Schafer is awesome. Doubt it? Well, just look at his latest bit of promotion for his newest game. Yeah, awesome.

But is it as awesome as animated gifs starring cats? That’s hard to say.

The utter insanity of this piece is something that has to be seen to be believed. Wow. Who would have spent so much time on that? Bravo, though.

Just watched some Harry Potter film? Need a recap to help you make sense of it all? Well, these comics are pretty badass, and can do just that. Give them a try!

Finally, I will admit I haven’t had a chance to listen yet, but this podcast thing seems an amazing idea, and I can’t wait to give it a listen.

Okay. I feel good getting those links off of my chest! Well, I’m off! Later!

I am doing my damnedest to edit my manuscript and get it in a working state. All the work I’m totally is totally helping, too: it’s been really useful. Things are improving. Man, if I did this kind of work every day, who knows what kind of poetry I’d be making! Maybe once everything settles down a bit I can try to set a schedule for myself that has some dedicated poem time.

The edits are taking awhile, though, because having gotten the thing out to a slightly larger group of people I trust, Dee’s character just wasn’t showing through. Of course, as the writer, I know exactly who Dee is. She’s a hardcore dominant who doesn’t believe in actual romance, but finds herself in one anyway. Okay, that’s really narrowing her down, but still. I get her. I love her. You have to love your characters.

However, Dee is a real bitch, to be quite honest. She’s selfish and violent. She treats Steven like shit while talking herself up. Steven is alright with it, but nobody could see the person behind Dee. Her motivations were not inherent in her actions. My poems from her perspective weren’t revealing her human qualities. You knew she was an evil bitch: that was clear from the Steven half of the book. I didn’t need to emphasize that. I needed to emphasize what makes her tick as a person.

I think I owe a lot to how I’m editing things now to Vriska from Homestuck. Vriska is a bluh bluh huge bitch, to use the Homestuck meme. She’s just a flat out terrible person, who screws over perspective friends just to prove her dominance, and does things like try to screw over all the living trolls just so she can have the honor of being the one to kill Bec Noir. If I met her in person, I would hate her, a lot, for not being a team player and for being so insanely selfish.

As a character, I love her to death.

Hussie has been smart enough to let us see a lot of the doubt and unsteadiness that comes from adopting a persona that’s so in-your-face my-way-is-always-right. Vriska doubts. She worries. She makes huge decisions on whims, such as helping John just to spite Terezi. Basically, she’s not an evil overlord bent on world destruction who makes mistakes because otherwise, how would the heroes win? She’s a terrible person who makes terrible mistakes by using her power so liberally. She’s nobody you’d want to be friends with, but she’s real.

Dee was lacking that, and as I go through, remove a lot of the super-cryptic language that I was using for her, and focus more on her desires and motivations, her character is becoming more clear. Having analyzed Homestuck to death, I could see where I was making some mistakes with a character I loved in sharing her with the world. Of course, I didn’t apply this immediately. It was mostly subconscious. But I was driving home, listening to Killed By BR8K Spider!!!!!!!! and it all kind of clicked for me. It was exactly what I was doing! It’s working out well.

I have been watching Game Center CX a lot with Brer recently. It’s been fun times. However, it did get me thinking a little bit about why I’m willing to watch what’s basically a Let’s Play in Japanese about games I don’t care about when there’s so much quality Let’s Play entertainment out on the internet right now.

Earlier today, though, I feel like I finally figured it out.

You see, your normal let’s plays fall into some categories. You have people who are Let’s Playing things because that’s what you do, and those are awful and terrible and you shouldn’t watch them. You have people who are using Let’s Playing as a medium for humor, jokes, and entertainment. Those are the ones you should watch.

Game Center CX is none of those things. It doesn’t feel scripted, of course, but it also doesn’t feel forced. Arino is fucking genuine in everything he does. He is not great at games, but you can tell he has a passion for them. When he does things like read the dialog that’s on the screen out loud, it really feels like he’d probably be doing that, even if the cameras weren’t running. He’s a nice guy playing hard games. You want him to succeed.

It’s this genuine nature around Arino that makes it different than any other LP I’ve watched. Let’s Plays where people are dying over and over again and cussing games out and whatnot are kind of boring, and one-trick ponies. You don’t give a shit about the suffering, you know? (Unless, I dunno, it’s a dude I like like Brickroad dying all the time on Bomb-omb Battlefield.) With Arino, you do. You want him to win. You know he’s a nice guy who deserves to win. I mean, he’s willing to sit there and try for hours and hours for this show. He wants to enjoy and finish these games. He’s so charming, you feel for him.

That’s really the difference, I think. Whether that happens through solid show editing (which is possible) or just with Arino being awesome, I’m not sure. But it’s certainly a different experience, and one that I enjoy having.

I’m just going to write about stuff today, I think. Rapid Fire Go!

I recently updated my blog. You know, gotta keep it updated and safe, because I am the target of SO MANY HACKERS! Not really, but, you know. Might as well be safe instead of sorry. I update it, and it changes around how all the menus look on the back end that you all can’t see. For the most part, they’re nice little cosmetic changes, but the one thing that really gets to me is the fact that they changed the font in the “write a blog” box. You know, the one I’m typing in right now. It’s now sans serif. Which is just… why would they do that? It just makes it harder to read and proofread. I mean, it’s a nice enough font, but come on: I write so much bullshit, I need to be able to look it over. Anyway, I’m not a fan.
And then I look at my main page and realize that this is the font my blogs normally display in. Awkward. If I had any clue how to change that font, I probably would! It’s been awhile since I really fucked with the guts of this blog. Maybe I should do that sometime.

I’ve been taking hormones for awhile now, which is fantastic! My body still feels like it’s adjusting, though. Recently, I have been feeling incredible fatigue. Today, especially, I was just exhausted, all day. Not tired, just… worn out, you know? Like my arms were so tired it took effort to lift them. Maybe it’s the fact that I got little sleep and got up so early to work at Kohl’s. Maybe it’s the fact that I gave up soda and sweets, and that’s been raging hell on my body at the same time. I don’t know! I just know I’m tired, and going the fuck to bed after I finish writing this.

It is almost time for me to go and see Brer. I’m really nervous as fuck about the whole thing, though looking forward to it. I don’t feel very prepared or anything. I’ve been trying to scrounge up some audiobooks to listen to for the drive, and think about what all I want to bring so we have things to do, and so on. I also need to do a lot of poetry editing and rewriting before I leave, so I hope I am good and work on that like I should. I don’t know. I know in the end, it’ll be okay, and it’ll be worth it to go. I know it’ll be wonderful. But I’ve got so much invested in him, I’m scared something is going to get fucked up again. I don’t know. I’ll just do the best I can, I suppose.

I couldn’t help myself. I watched the first episode of The iDOLM@ster anime. I just had to know what they were doing. It was as terrible as I expected, but it also seemed really badly conceptualized. Like, the player character from the games, who is you, is in this show. Dialog just appears on the screen for you to say, like you picked it from a menu. All the characters talk at the camera like it was a character. But it’s also supposed to be a real camera, and also a film crew, but they don’t even pretend to make the shots look like an actual documentary crew could take them. (At least they pretend to do so most of the time on The Office.) Sometimes there’s camera wobble and movement, sometimes not. I just really don’t know what the person making the game was thinking. Probably something like “The iDOLM@STER is so popular and I am going to make so much money time to bang some shit out!” Something like that.

Nichijou, which I have been following and enjoying, has a new opening. It’s interesting, because in a lot of ways, this opening fits the show a ton better than the original. It’s energetic, and crazy, and the visuals are all the fuck over the place. The original opening had a “sitcom opening” moment in the middle with a title card, and almost looked like maybe it was a normal show, like a normal person would make. Which it isn’t, of course. It’s an interesting comparison. I also am surprised that Nano is going to the high school now, if only because it makes a level of narrative sense and creates coherence between episodes that I didn’t think the show would ever show!

Anyway, I am going to rest. Fuck yes. Later.

Yeah, this is a pretty lame song to get stuck in my head, but here we are.

I was linked this video showing a pre-alpha build of an upcoming My Little Pony fighting game. Yeah, so, that’s a thing, certainly. But what really got to me was how well-done even this pre-alpha was. All those sprites of Applejack are custom, but look extremely true to the show. Same with the background.

What really caught me, though, is the custom song playing behind it. It’s really kind of amazing. It is, at the same time, completely perfect for My Little Pony, having some similar little musical cues to songs from the actual show that you can pick out if you’re as lame as I am. At the same time, this is clearly, clearly a fighting game track. It has that light into heavy bouncing energy that a good fighting game track has, like, say, this one. It just works. You tell me this music is from a MLP fighting game, and I say, “Of course it is.”

It’s also catchy as fuck, too, which is why it’s been stuck in my head the past couple of days. Oy. Ponies. Amirite?

I saw Ok Go in concert, and I’m going to immortalize that in a blog post.

I’m not a huge band-going type. Ok Go marks the third band I’ve actually seen in concert, the others being They Might Be Giants many a time, and Franz Ferdinand once. They Might Be Giants is all about being fun, pleasing the crowd, and interacting with them. It’s a damn good time. Franz was very “we are playing music now” kind of band, and was less fun, even though I enjoy what they do musically.

Ok Go was much more in the fun side of things.

Seriously, not only were they rocking all the songs I loved from their earlier albums, thank goodness, but they really went out of their way to put on an entertaining show. They played a song completely on a set of handbells, which they described as “God’s Instrument.” They pulled a little kid out of the crowd to dance on stage, and a dude in a “Pugs not Drugs” t-shirt to play the guitar part in a song. A song was played right in the middle of the audience, an arm’s length away from me. They really seemed like they were in it for the fun, and really wanted to be there, which means a lot, because that energy is infectious. I started the show feeling kind of ill, to be honest, but when they really got going, I was really into it. It was fantastic.

Seriously, though, what really stands out is the amount of confetti they used. They literally had like an inch thick of confetti on the stage by the end of the performance. They were shooting off confetti cannons twice, three times a song. It never ended. Confetti. It was crazy.

But yeah, would totally see them again. A ton of fun, to be sure. Fun times all around, and I’m glad I took off to go and enjoy myself and watch. I’m also glad Jonathan did all the driving so I could sleep in the car. Thanks, Jonathan!

I spent a lot of today writing my final paper for my final grad school class. (I also spent a lot of today fighting with my parents over me wearing a bra, like I had been for the last week, but them just noticing! So that was exciting. But let’s not deal with that right now. I really don’t want to rant about that.) Basically, it was a really shitty situation! It was frustrating! I was frustrated.

I can write papers like nobody’s business, to be sure. Hell, it had been my job for awhile to teach people how to do just that. I like to think I’m good at it. But there was certainly a time when I hated doing it, and that was when I was letting the sources do the talking for me, instead of talking myself. It was always so painful to have to gather all the sources, and try to come up with a way to make them not sound like shit while having no control over what’s being said. I hated it. Then, I learned the secret of fun paper writing is to have control over what you say. Suddenly, papers were fun again! Well, as fun as homework can be, anyway.

This assignment basically has me stating an opinion, but I really need to back it up with tons and tons of facts and research. Now, I’ve done sources and shit in papers before, sure. But they work so much differently in a literary paper. I know the tricks to get around what sources I have and still say what I want to say. Things are more flexible. That’s what drew me to such papers in the first place. But here I’m arguing for a better educational system, sort of. This is the sort of thing that I certainly would want facts behind, if I were reading an article. Yet, I am just not knowledgeable enough to know where such facts would be located in this field. I’m finding stuff, but it’s not quite the right stuff. It’s like I’m back as an undergrad, not knowing how to work sources and bend them to my will, and banging my head against the desk in frustration that I don’t have ownership over what I’m writing.

I’ll get it done. I’ll move on. It’s my last paper! I’ll do it. But there’s no doubt that there’s some frustration involved in the whole process. Best get some sleep so I can bang out a finish to it tomorrow.