snarp’s blog

(I will finish responding to email and comments and stuff Very Soon Now.)

Intangibles:

- plane tickets
- Mom and thegeekgene driving to Chicago to pick me up because several of those plane tickets were for planes that were not ever actually real
- totally inappropriate email from elongated_tito informing me that I am actually having the time of my life in Chicago O’Hare (she also killed me and ate me in Facebook Oregon Trail)
- Parents’ friend’s boyfriend in Chicago buying me lunch and taking me to parents’ friend’s mom’s apartment to sleep until they got there (United wouldn’t pay for a hotel or anything), plus bonus cultural education regarding the awesomeness of Chicago (particularly the hot dogs) and Mexico (particularly the peppers and papayas)
- services of Lawyer in demanding United pay up *
- services of Aerospace Engineer in replacing my iPod battery **
- large quantities of meat
- tuition

* Dad. Though I technically had not retained him as counsel in this matter. It also might have been more impressive if Mom had done it, since we have different last names.

** Uncle Tall. The battery and toolkit were only $15, but given how much it costs to hire Uncle Tall to take your stuff apart for you, his involvement puts the gross cost of the whole operation a lot higher than my initial estimates suggested. (It took like forty-five minutes to get the thing open. The YouTube videos are terribly misleading about the capabilities of those little plastic pry-bars.)

Tangibles:

Read the rest of this entry »

The good luck charms failed.

But I’m home now, and we will not speak of this again.

Tomorrow thegeekgene gains the ability to vote and buy porn. That she has possibly already written some porn we perhaps also will not speak of.

She is watching Tin Man for the second or third time or something right now. I have threatened to kill her for this several times. It is absolutely terrible. Happy ChristmaBirthday, thegeekgene! Enjoy your terrible movie!

Dad has a horrible cold and poor social skills. We went to dinner at friend of his and Mom’s house, and he made inappropriate jokes and didn’t eat the food she’d made. He stole the stuff her daughter had made for herself and ate the store-bought cheesecake. And he won’t take his cold medicine, and lies about it when Mom and I ask if he has.

One of elongated_tito’s presents seems to have disappeared at some point during the time of which we will not speak. Goddamn it. I got her a bunch of other stuff, and it wasn’t like it was expensive, but it still makes me angry.

I have not answered any email or comments or anything for like a week I think. I apologize for this. I am kind of dead.

Tomorrow I go to the United States of America. On a PLANE. Four days before Christmas. I have like five or six good luck charms I got people as presents in the bag, though, so I should be okay.

I realized after class was over today that they never returned my brilliant story that I wrote ten minutes before it was due last week. The assignment was to write about what we thought the future would be like. Mine was called “Uchuu Kara Kita Kuma,” or, in the Common Tongue, “The Bear From Space.” Spoilers: The bear eats us. I made this really detailed diagram and everything.

Man. I want that thing back.

The writing assignment before that one was to describe an “embarrassing mistake you made.” Mine was written from the point of view of Heero Yui. If airport security were ever to get hold of this exemplary work of fanfiction, I would never be allowed to fly again, and would probably become the subject of hideous military medical experiments. “She exploded a plane full of pacifists, blew herself up, and didn’t die? While dressed really badly?!… The United States needs this capability.”

Did I mention I’m kind of nervous about this Christmas plane thing.

Yes, I could have bought it off Amazon.co.jp, but where’s the challenge in that? Anyway, I now own volumes 1-4.

I also bought my back-to-Japan plane ticket yesterday. Procrastination is magic - the price had dropped $150 since last time I checked, and there was a flight with only one connection. It’s Northwest again, though. I hear if you collect enough We’re Sorry We Suck vouchers from Northwest, they give you one of those little carts they use on the tarmac!

I have presents for everyone but Papaw. It is impossible to buy presents for Papaw, especially in Japan.

-

There’s a mangaka called MATO I like, because she did the art for the weirdly-dark but still-insanely-cute Pokemon comic Pokemon Adventures and shut up I hate you all. And a while ago I was looking blankly at the doujinshi section in Book-Off, and somehow - despite the fact that I still haven’t memorized the kanji for Okano Reiko, despite the fact that I’ve expended a lot more energy on her - recognized MATO’s name on one of the spines.

This was a Gundam Wing doujinshi called “Kaze no Yukue”/”Where The Wind Is”. I’ve also been very slowly watching Gundam Wing recently. So I can affirm that, in context, this doujinshi is extremely hilarious. There are slight Quatre-related spoilers under the cut.

Read the rest of this entry »

The iPod problem appears to be the battery. I am pondering my options.

Read the rest of this entry »

This morning, while walking to class listening to my freshly-downloaded sea shanty playlist, I randomly thought: “You know. It would be really annoying if my iPod died.”

This afternoon, my iPod died.

…

I listened to a Decemberists song called “Cautionary Song” today. This song is an extended exploration of the timeless theme that Your Mom Is A Whore. According to a random LiveJournal person I found via the google, the lead singer has been known to start giggling during the last verse.

Not actually relatedly, I found this webcomic the other day, and it is very awesome. Now I understand panel #5! I aspire to find a situation in which it would be appropriate to use that phrase.

-

I have now watched twelve episodes of Gundam Wing. Episodes 11 and 12 take place mostly in China, but for some reason they very carefully avoid ever actually calling it “China.” And we find out that Sally Po - who last time she showed up was in the military and lived in Europe somewhere, like, with the Delta Knights maybe - is no longer in Europe, but rather in rural China, coordinating a guerrilla-warfare rebellion against some bad guys we have never met before! Some guy apologizes that they are welcoming her home with all this killing, in the single line of dialog explaining her sudden change in locale!

Did I mention that it is completely impossible to identify people’s ethnic origins in this anime unless someone says it out loud? Sally has brown hair and blue eyes. A lot of the insurgents do.

Anyway, I’ve been trying to take the elements of these two episodes and impose some kind of a plot on them. Spoilers, I guess?

Read the rest of this entry »

Today I went into a Sanrio Store. It was without a doubt the most harrowing experience of my life. You’d better appreciate it, sibling.