Archive for June, 2009

Lazy Saturday

Saturday, June 27th, 2009

Since it’s mother’s birthday, and I stepped up to cover dinner… Pizza Hut, because mother likes her Stuffed Crust extra cheese pizza!

Yes, I’m a no-good two-timer when it comes to pizza. I can’t decide ultimately who I like better. >_> (This, also ignoring that there a bazillion local pizza vendors here. :P) Now, if I had to pick just on pizza alone, I would instantly hand the prize to Papa Johns, but because I also factor side items and such into the decision, that complicates things a bit. Papa Johns has some damn tasty cheese bread and mana chocolate strudels, and they include the garlic dip by default, but Pizza Hut’s P’zones are mega-chewy compacted… things that blossom in flavor mid-nommage. Oh, it’s hard to choose…

Anywho, while I figure out how else I can tweak and add to the Ayarane Project hub (and later on, work on Sleepover), omnomnom while I watch Simpsons torrents! Slacker mode RESUME!

Power Down

Saturday, June 27th, 2009

SO on Tuesday, SoCal Edison is going to shut off the power here pretty much all day for maintenance. Booooo! Mother has decided that this means I get booted from the house for the day and told me to pick someplace to hide, preferably somewhere that has air conditioning and is in reasonable walking distance of food. (Mother’s trying to find a bar that she can dump Evil Stepfather at… XDDD This needs to not make me imagine a Simpsonized Evil Stepfather yukking it up at Moe’s. )

Fontana library is my first choice, because for the longest time I’ve been meaning to haul Dinah and camp the general nonfiction section to dig up all the weirdest stuff I can find for the day. (When you work in Circulations, you find books on the most oddball subjects. And I do mean REALLY oddball.) That and it has free wireless that DOESN’T block YouTube and such. While power outage means no Slingbox access– dammit, this is one of those times in which I wish I had Verizon MobileTV — there is, of course, YouTube and Hulu/Sling.com, and I’m going to cram as much of my Simpsons torrents as Dinah’s hard drive will allow. >_>;

That reminds me, I need to steal back my bluetooth headphones from Robert. @_@

Also hi today is mother’s birthday and… I think the 3rd anniversary of me getting my A+ certification? (I intentionally took the exam on mother’s birthday because I could never remember if it was the 27th or 28th.)

Her loot (which is part of my most recent ThinkGeek order) won’t get here until next week… but, uhm… I’ll figure out something? Probably having to do with food, since lately I seem to be picking up on that end. Dammit, I wish I had use of the Yoshi Car right now.

A gigantic Oof moment if I’ve ever seen it.

Thursday, June 25th, 2009

Ayarane: one thing’s for sure
Ayarane: on top of all the stuff that Michael Jackson’s accomplished, he can now added “made the internet blow up upon death” to his karmic resume
Xenosphobatic: Truth
Ayarane: I’m trying to think of some other celebrity who was able to do that
Ayarane: …I can’t
Xenosphobatic: Me neither

—-

I will admit that my fandom dropped off in the mid-90’s, but after that I was more or less indifferent rather than derisive.
Major, major “Oof” moment. *watching the live coverage on MSNBC*

For the record, I don’t have a particular favorite, but I recall Scream being pretty freaking awesome. Speaking of YouTube… his channel‘s getting flooded with viewers and comments. Holy smoo!

Spaceship Tectonics

Thursday, June 25th, 2009

The great irony of Ayarane Project is that this hub and all its offshoots is one ginormous vanity show… this despite my fervent HATRED and utter aversion to being perceived as self-absorbed. I am not a secretive person (and I’m far too boring to have much that is even secret-worthy, the few things that ARE redacted and obfuscated are merely done so as a courtesy to others who would object) but at the same time I am not the type to actively shove every mundane detail of my life in others’ faces.

I suppose the existence of Ayarane Project would also constitute a happy medium– lay everything out, but don’t feel pressured to go parading it about. Of course, there’s the question of “what about potential employers?!” because, of course, it’s expected that in applying for work you’re bound to be Google’d and such. To them, I say “do your worst.” There are many, many reasons for this… among other things, the biggest would be that it spares me the incredibly uncomfortable burden of having to talk about myself LIVE. (Fellow social phobics, PLEASE tell me you understand what I mean.)

And, of course, I do not drink, smoke, use drugs or otherwise participate in things that are blatantly illegal or would make me look bad-silly. Hooray?

In all seriousness, though… one of the secondary purposes of this hub is to identify, itemize and archive the otherwise intangible aspects of me. This is both for your amusement (or lack thereof) and as part of an ongoing process of self-discovery/identification/blah blah blah. Years ago, most people would do something along these lines by stringing together a bunch of pages and calling it a “personal site.” (If you’ve followed Ayarane Project WAAAAAAY back since I first bought the domain, you would certainly recall my many attempts at those.) But in this NEWER era of blogs, Twitter, YouTube and the like, to get the same point across requires a distinctly… different form of execution.

Hence, we have this current form of Ayarane Project, a WordPress blog that pulls the bulk of its fodder from my LiveJournal (if only because I am too lazy to write the same thing for two separate spaces, and it’d be redundant anyway), but integrates the rest of my presence on the internets via the many widgets on the sidebar. I like widgets– I’m not the type to add them willy-nilly, but occasionally I’ll find one that would, you know, actually make sense to loot and deploy here.

This, of course, does not pooh-pooh or otherwise rule out the use of separate pages. (See that “about yoshi” link up there, for one. And, at the way bottom, you’ll find another that profiles my two machines Blastoise and Dinah.) There’s still quite a bit to identify and catalog… it’s a matter of figuring out how best to do it. And yes, I’ve actually entertained the thought of doing it as a wiki, if only for the whole “interconnected” thing.

Also: The YouTube channel’s not seen much action lately… I know I still need to finish the captures of the Phase battles from the first four .hack games, except I appear to have misplaced my GameBridge. o_O;;; I know I lent it to Bren a few months back but I also know she returned it… But, I’m not too worried since I’m considering getting this capture box since it can do HD and appears to be the only HD-capable capture device out there that isn’t HORRIBLY-obscenely-priced. Beyond finishing those captures, I’ve some penciled plots on nefarious things I could post but nothing coherent to elaborate on yet.

Anywho… other recent tweaks to the hub:
– The title is now a graphic, just because. For the curious, the handwritten font is “Tony Steidler-Dennison,” and I looted it off some blog several years ago. Based on the name, I would assume the font was constructed based off someone’s handwriting? (Presumably, this guy.) Googling shows that the font is no longer available for download anywhere else, and I love to use this font as a header, so this is one of those rare files I take EXTREMELY special care to back up whenever rebuilding my machines. The pixel font is another one that I looted from a free font repository long long ago… It doesn’t so much have a name but some alphanumeric code: “04b03,” if you feel like googling for it or others like it.
– New widgets: Randomly Yoshi-Factual displays a random detail about me, just for the hell of it. Then there is also The Eternal Poll, which is an ongoing query about how you like your Yoshi fix.

Uhm…

Thursday, June 25th, 2009

WTF, yo. I transferred downstairs because my internets went out, and piped my cable stream to the Slingcatcher so I could watch Countdown while waiting for food… and after that, I was going to go back upstairs since internets came back, but I was waiting on a commercial to do the switch.

One extremely bizarre dream later (something involving a mass bus transport of old high school and college acquaintances to the Montclair mall food court for a bigger-than-Xbox pizza party, even though everything else suggested that some big disaster had just happened that demanded massive evacuations), and I wake up to my cat curling up next to me… and Morning Joe is on the TV. Oh CRAP. o_o;; Did I really sleep through the entire evening? Argh…

Additionally this is a not-so-subtle reminder of how much my own bed SUCKS.
Take this for reference: Lately I’ve only been able to get about 4-5 hours a night there, and I wake up in weird positions, like… rotated counter-clockwise so I’m all scrunched up against the wall? WTF. Or I’m sitting up and… why am I brushing my hair? And like yesterday, it took being touched by my cat to fully revive me.
I mean, I know my mattress is pretty freaking old, half of it’s sunken from years of sleeping primarily on one side (and, yes, because I’m a blubbertard, but I’d like to think that it’s not possible to INSTANTLY cause these things), but… wow. o.O I’m getting a pretty crappy quality of sleep here, and while my weight is surely a factor (I really am trying to figure out a fix for this at least on the activity side of things, one that DOESN’T open me up for massive amounts of mother’s drama queenery), my bed isn’t innocent either. Of course, like most furniture-related matters here, I’ve gotten the shaft with my bed, too.

In a perfect world, I’d have something like the gigantic, bigger-than-kingsize guildmaster bed in Ragnarok TWILIGHT. Canopy with purple sheets and all that, and a curtain, hell yeah. But, sadly, such a thing would never fit into my room, not even if I had pushed to have mine merged with the almost-never-used guest room when the house was being built.

Side note: I seem to have this thing about… enclosures within enclosures or something. Canopy beds, yes, but also tents. Why, just a few days ago I was looking through the camping section of R.E.I. and I caught myself nearly drooling over the gigantic tents and considering buying one just to store in the Yoshi Car in case I get stranded in the middle of nowhere or something, just like the time I checked the Survival Cooking list of best coolers even though I was not planning on going camping. I thought this was influenced by a particular scene in RT involving tents, only to remember that I’ve always had this weird fixation.

Memories of reference: as a kid, in addition to the usual “yay pillowforts and blanket forts!” thing that nearly all kids partake in at some point… well, because I wanted a canopy bed so much but we couldn’t really fit one in my room, the next best thing I could get was a bunk bed with the upper bed almost never used, so I would actually tuck half of a blanket between the upper mattress and the lower frame and pretty much make my own curtain of sorts.

We have decided to stock only quality products. The comparison of tomahawks we offer you will stand the test of time and won’t let you down.

I think I kept this up until I got my own TV midway through 8th grade. :P Also, in just about every Universe that I either wrote or have considerable influence in, the main character has a canopy bed or something resembling one. I think currently the only exception is Black Star, simply because circumstances there would have made it impossible without a bunch of needless plot hole-fu.

I’m sure Pigeon or someone with an eye for psychology could yank out some extremely technical explanation for my “space within a space” thing. Or, more likely, there’s some really simple explanation that I’m overlooking BECAUSE it’s that simple and I’m a dork for trying to make it more profound than it really is. One thing’s for sure… whenever I get the hell out of here and into my own space, I’m freaking commissioning a carpenter or someone to construct my ultimate bed. o_o

Oh, where was I? Ah, yes… I need a new bed. Or at least, a new mattress. I’ll have to once again put off ambitions of upgrading to a canopy in favor of something that won’t have me shifting positions or waking up in weird places or something… also I only have $2700 available and I need to make that last until January (unless spoony pigheads actually give me back the contents of my Magic Coin Block that I repeatedly bludgeoned to save his ass… well, I was just going to write that off as a one-way thing but he insists on paying it back, so I gotta play the part :P) so it can’t be TOO expensive. Hm. Somewhat tempted to go with that NASA-grade foam-core stuff this time, depending on how much it costs. Also the ability to adjust/recline might actually be awesome, considering how easily I fall asleep on couches and chairs.

I keep recalling bits of a commercial for that freaking store that sells all kinds of beds. WTF. I’ve practically the announcer’s script memorized and yet I can’t remember the name of the store! ARGH. He rattles off a list of brands (Sealy, Spring-air, Serta, blah blah blah) and at the end “our advertised price or your mattress is freeeeeee!” Yet the name of that bloody store eludes me. BOOOO.

…Hi, long post is looooong. Might go back to sleep until noon-ish, when I need to shower and such because today is Thursday and thus library service. This I could probably get away with my actual bed for, since it’s crappy quality will, again, at most give me 4-5 hours at a time. :P