The Habitrail

This is my obligatory “it’s been a week and I haven’t posted anything” post.

Fanime is this weekend. I’ll be officially working karaoke for the first time, instead of just always hanging out in the room. I’ll try to take pictures.

This is going to be very random, but there’s a bunch of stuff I left out of my last post because I was tired.

First of all, a funny story. On Thursday, as I was waiting in the standby line for the Square Enix theater showing, after one batch of people was let in to the theater, I was in line about five from the front, basically guaranteed to get in at the next showtime. A guy from Blizzard, who was waiting in line way behind us, wanders up to the front of the line and asks us “Would any of you trade your spot in line for a slot in the World of Warcraft Beta?” And no one took him up on it. I just found that funny.

Also, I was looking for certain license plates all week, and I finally saw a “DRG” on the way back on Sunday.

Hmm, I just remembered, I have pictures I need to upload… but my laptop’s at home right now.

Okay, maybe not a “bunch of stuff”. I can’t remember anything else right now. I guess I can take this time to give the answers to the music meme.

Lyrics and answers

So, once again I drove up to LA from Yorba Linda, this time I tried an alternate freeway method suggested by my stepdad, which turned out to be completely horrible and involved way too much merging. By the time I got to the convention center, all the parking was full, so I had to part across the street at the Staples Center lot.

Thursday is a bit of a blur, but I remember the first thing I did was make a bee-line to the Square Enix booth to try and get a theater showtime button, because they said they ran out at about noon on Wednesday. Of course, I get there at 11:30, and they’re all out. They suggested trying the standby line later in the day, when it would be more likely for me to get in.

I then wandered back to the Wizards booth, but on the way, happened to see a few of the Invitational people wandering around in the hallways, so they were obviously on break. When I got there, a few were still around playing pickup games and such, so I hung out a bit, had a short conversation with Mark Rosewater where he apologized for making Skullclamp too good, and watched Zvi Mowshowitz look over the partial Fifth Dawn spoiler list. Once they played the 14th round, they were done there for the day, so I wandered off….

I could probably manage to remember where I went by looking in my bag for that day, but it’s still out in the car, and does it really matter, anyway?

Friday was a short day, as I had seen most of the show, and Dom only had one appointment, and after that we saw a few things that were left and left the show early. After I dropped him off at the hotel, I decided to drive back to my mom’s house, not realizing that it was later than I thought it was.

45 miles, 5 freeways, one burning car on the side of the road and almost 3 hours later, I got home.

First things first.

That out of the way, the first day involved mostly scoping out the place, meeting up with people, and preliminary shwag collecting. I saw the Nintendo DS presentation, but that was pretty much the only thing I’ve waited in line for so far, but I anticipate a bit more line-waiting in my future. I missed out on the Squeenix showing, but I hope to get in on that tomorrow. I also managed to completely forget that the Magic Invitational was taking place at the Wizards booth. I managed to completely miss the Wizards booth, even after being reminded that it was in there somewhere. Twice.

Via Dom, I hung out with a bunch of people afterwards, the majority of which are coincidentally also characters in online comics. I played shoulder grammar angel / surrogate brain for Dom while he wrote his rant and played Crystal Chronicles, then drove back to my parent’s house well after traffic had cleared.

Of course, I managed to hit the same stupid “3 lanes merge into 1” on the 5 that I hit on Monday. I will have to avoid that in the future, stupid construction.

The concert is over. I got to downtown LA a bit earlier than I expected, but it was probably for the best, as I avoided most traffic. The crowd wasn’t as badly behaved as they could have been, but the definitely could have been more composed. There are a few spots where, if they were to release a CD version of the concert, the overly-enthusiastic applause will drown out the orchestra. The song list, as I remember, and assisted by a post on the ign.com boards:

Song list and additional commentary

Drove down yesterday, drive was fairly uneventful, except until I got to Pasadena, where there was an accident on the 210. That tied me up for a while, got past it, then there was another accident. Welcome to L.A.!

Unfortunately, even though I’m at my mom’s house, my mom isn’t. She’s in Indiana with my grandma and uncle. So I went to the Angel’s game with my stepdad, got a bit of sun and got very tired as a result.

Tomorrow is concert, and I need to figure out what I’m doing after that. Well, there’s time for that later.

Only three more days until Dear Friends! I’m driving down tomorrow, and going to an Angel’s game on Sunday with my step-dad, because my Mom is in Indiana with my Grandmother. Then, I’m sticking around for E3. We’ll see what happens, as a default I’m driving 45 miles each way from Yorba Linda to downtown LA, so I’m not looking forward to that, and will definitely be open to crashing on someone’s hotel room floor.

On a side note, I made a deliberate decision to not take my PC with me. Yes, that’s right, I’m taking more than a week off of FFXI. Yes, it’s true that it’s sort of a cop-out, because I’m going to be spending my time at a Final Fantasy Concert and a Video Game convention, but at least give me a little credit! I can stop playing if I want to, right? I’m not addicted, right?

Grabbed from , reinstated back to 20 songs

On your current playlist, hit shuffle and pick the first 20 songs on the list (no matter how cheesy or embarrassing), and write down your favourite line of the song. Try to avoid putting the song title in the line¹. Then, have your friends comment and see if they know the songs.

(Personal note: I skipped any song in the playlist that didn’t have any lyrics. Anything else was fair game.)

1. “Bobby’s in the basement making his movie, He paints a little picture but not to be cheesy. He wants this little girl to believe in him easy”
2. “I thought love was more or less a given thing, the more I gave the less I got, oh yeah.”²
3. “Just put me in a wheelchair, get me on a plane. Hurry, hurry, hurry, before I go insane.”
4. “Omnia Sol Temperat purus et subtilis, novo mundo reserat facies Aprilis”
5. “Don’t you see she still thinks she’s married to you, you must tell her she’s not, she must hear it from you.”
6. “Now, the doctor came in, stinking of gin, and proceeded to lie on the table.”
7. “Sweet Loretta Martin thought she was a woman, but she was another man.”
8. “For as long as the sun shines in somebody’s eyes. I believe in you baby, so don’t tell me lies.”
9. “Tale as old as time, tune as old as song. Bittersweet and strange, finding you can change, learning you were wrong.”³
10. “She got a new apartment, it’s out on the escarpment, and in her glove compartment are my songs.”
11. “I’m just sipping on chamomile, watching boys and girls and their sex appeal, with a stranger in my face who says he knows my mom and went to my high school.
12. “And there’ll be no one else alive in all the world except for you and me”
13. “Sometimes I feel like I am drunk behind the wheel. The wheel of possibility, however it may roll.”
14. “Shadows will grow as we watch the coals in the dark. Tears of bliss, September. Till that day, all my love safe for you. Coming home again.”
15. “Aoi tsuki to kagayaku uchuu no hoshi. Sukoshi akai budouiro ni somete.”
16. “1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Break the doll and get out of here. Come with me now. Now we are goin’ our way.”⁴
17. “Then I hear the voices in my head, whispering to me: ‘KILL KILL KILL THE ICE CREAM MAN.'”
18. “Well work it on out now (work it on out) You know you look so good (look so good) You know you got me goin’ now (got me goin) Just like I knew you would (just like i knew you would)”
19. “And it may take some time to patch me up inside. But I can’t take it so I run away and hide. And I may find in time that you were always right. You’re always right.”
20. “koe wa denpa ni NOTTE anata no machi ni. Atashi no omoi wo todoke ni tabi nideru.”

1: This rule was bent once, and only once.
2: hint… this is a cover. Think about me, and possibly peruse my interests list.
3: If any of you don’t know this you are no longer my friend.
4: I am truly ashamed that this song came up.

First things first. I have, for the first time in almost six months, updated my photos page. Of course, I haven’t really taken that many pictures since then, so it only amounted to two albums.

There are two other miscellaneous pictures not in there, one I think I mentioned before. When I was moving upstairs, I tried moving my Lego Star Destroyer, but it fell apart as I moved it. So I disassembled it completely, then reassembled it upstairs.

The other is a bit more troubling. As anyone who knows me knows, I have never set foot within a Starbucks. I even was right outside the original Starbucks in Seattle, but didn’t go in. I’ve lived within a relatively Starbucks-free zone, but this is changing. Right now there are not one, but two Starbucks being built dangerously close to my house. I took a picture of one of them being built. They converted a Pizza Hut, and took out part of the dining room, to build it. The other is being built in a new strip mall.

To show you the precarious nature of the Starbucks encroachment, I have created a map.

Saturday was my “get errands done” day, and I started off by getting the alignment checked on my car. Rather than go to a random alignment place, I went to the mechanic I went to during my oil filter fiasco. (I can’t remember if I’ve written about that incident… perhaps I should someday. But not now.) It was going to take a while, so while I left the car there, I grabbed my iPod and decided to just wander around Sunnyvale. I ate lunch, visited some random garage sales, bought a book for 50 cents, and managed to get a slight sunburn on the back of my neck. When I got back, they were just about to start. When they finished, it turns out that the reason why the car was tending so strongly to the side wasn’t because of the alignment, but because one of the front tires was of a different brand than the other three. Now, these are the same tires that I’ve had on the car since I bought it, but that’s one of the problems of buying a used car.

The head mechanic said he noticed it right away. This is the same guy who noticed right away that it was the wrong oil filter in my original visit. Twice now, this guy has right away noticed something that other people have completely overlooked. (If they had noticed that the brand of tire was different when they rotated them, they should have said something dammit.) They rotated the tires around until they got it as balanced as possible, but I should buy new tires soon anyway, which should fix the problem.

So, out the cost of an alignment check that didn’t end up being necessary, I went two doors over to get the car’s smog checked. The operation was a new one, and it consisted of this funny old man, the very complicated and official looking testing machine that he was constantly griping about, and the testing wheels in the ground. It took a few tries for him to get the machine to keep reading the RPMs from my car through the communications port, and I ended up having to sit in the passenger seat and hold the cable attached while it went through the testing procedures. Hooray for audience participation!

Afterwards, I continued my errands and bought another set of shelves and new shoes. I now have four sets of bookshelves in my room (one of which is ‘s, but he does have about one shelf’s worth of books in there as well.) And I ended up straightening my room on Sunday, it looks a lot cleaner now. And last night, I managed to gain not one, but two levels of Red Mage. Woo hoo!

And today I’m sore — my feet hurt from walking and the new shoes, my legs hurt from walking, and I have a bruise on my arm from moving the unassembled shelf box upstairs.