#36

I feel super scatterbrained today, wow.

I started playing DmC Devil May Cry the day before yesterday, and I like it a lot! It's easier to play in longer chunks of time, because you need a while to get the hang of all the weapon keymapping and various combos, but it's not too much of a hassle when you have time to get used to it at the start of a session. I love the soundtrack as well, and the graphics are gorgeous. I chortled so much at the white wig cutscene though, I can't even deal. The only thing that bothers me a bit is the language that the characters use. I don't have any problems whatsoever with swearing, but it sounds a bit pretentious in most of the dialogue - it seems like the scriptwriters just basically added a bunch of swearwords every once in a while to make the game seem more edgy and vulgar. Eh.

I'm going to see the new X-Men tonight! I'm pretty excited, although I'll probably have to wikipedia a bit for the major plotpoints of the previous films in the franchise - I haven't seen a single X-Men film to date. Which is a bit weird, because the premise of superheroes and strange creatures saving words and having personal crises is obviously right up my alley, but somehow I've never felt like I would particularly want to watch them? Oh well. Maybe seeing this one will change my mind. I'm looking forward to Mystique a lot, she seems like such an awesome character. Also McAvoy and Fassbender have such epic bromance I want to see how their characters interact so hatefully towards each other on the screen, haha.

I've made some progress on my school assignments as well. It seems likely that I'll have to finish the trainee report tonight after getting home from the movies, because I'm going to be in Amsterdam for the last 3 days before the deadline. I just found out that our flight is in fact not departing at 8.30 in the morning, but arriving at that time - which means that I'll have to be ready to leave at about 5am... and I'm going to the Sonisphere patrol with Saapas. Not a lot of sleep for me, it seems. I think I'll go buy myself an energy drink for the morning, or something.

The most major problem I'm having with the report is structuring the information I already have most of in my head. There's basically so much that I really need to get the general structure of the text fixed in my head, so I can write efficiently and concisely without repeating too much and so on. I also need to find some sources I could use for the theoretical stuff I've mostly been whipping up out of thin air... damn. Well, I have the books ready and some of the structure thought out on paper, so I hope I'll be able to finish it tonight? Fingers crossed!

Anyway, I'll try to get some more writing done before I head to the movies.

Bye!

#35

I went shopping! Yay! It was a lot of fun to spend time with J and her little sisters. There was quite a bit of shopping-related drama though, as expected.

I got me a laptop messenger bag, that I can fit the laptop in with cords and my Super Drive and external drives. It's still really slim though, which I appreciate. It's not blatantly obvious that it's a laptop carrier, but it's not humongous either. So if I know I'm going to a meeting or something, I can just bring that bag with my calendar and stuff, and won't have to pack a huge backpack to bring my computer. Victory! I also got some PC games, a Black Swan DVD, two pairs of shorts and a sort of blazer vest. And a case for my iPhone that has a cover for the front as well as the back.

Basically, I mostly got stuff that I actually needed.

I've done some assignments I had hanging over me, now I only have a few left to do before summer actually starts. I've been working on them consistently almost every day without stressing or tiring myself out completely, which looks good. It's a shame this good mix of energy and motivation only struck me about 10 days after the semester ended for the summer. I guess that's how it would go, right?

All I still need to buy, basically, is a bluetooth speaker by JHB (or something? I'm not sure if that's the brand I was recommended) and a Wii Mini since I don't have enough patience to fix the hand-me-down Wii I've been trying to work on... It's lookin' good.

A package arrived for me but I got home too late to pick it up from the post office today! Damn. I have to do it tomorrow - as early as I possibly can, hee hee.

Anyway, I can't think of anything else I'd like to write about tonight, so bye!

#34

Hello!

I managed to get my customised style packages for school assignments to work in Word for Mac. I feel super accomplished! Also, I actually have hopes of being able to complete assignments on my laptop now which is great, not going to lie. I even copied pretty much all of my files to the external drive in the past 2 days, and I had a pretty neat surprise coming for me on that front as well - my drive is formatted in fat32, which means that both a PC and a Mac can read the files on it and write on it as well. It made the whole data transfer business so much easier, I can hardly believe it.

I still haven't been able to figure out the mail servers, but my dad knows something about those apparently, so maybe he'll be able to help me at some point.

I've gone a little shopping-crazy after I got the money from my grandpa. I have about 6 or so packages coming for me from online shopping - I have two raffle prizes, 5 Tolkien books, some Swamp Family memorabilia, Hiddles movies, makeup, and the last book in the Mortal Instruments series by Cassandra Clare on the way at least. I also went to KCM yesterday, and bought Coldplay's new album Ghost Stories and two movies: Rush and the one about wikileaks, I think it's called... Fifth State? Or something to that effect.

Anyway, we watched Rush with my parents last night, and it was insanely good! I hate motor sports, but the cinematography and casting and the pacing of the story altogether made it really impressive and touching. For my parents, there was obviously the extra dimension of having watched F1 in the mid-70's - they already knew who the characters were and pretty much what happened to them. I was so caught up in the suspense I actually had to google the real-life stories of Niki Lauda and James Hunt, because I couldn't bear to wait until later in the movie to find out, haha. Also, Chris Hemsworth was obviously flawless and glorious, and I really like Daniel Brühl after this as well. I mean, I had a sort of grudging respect for him after watching the Inglourious Basterds, but his character was such a douchebag that I really couldn't make myself like him too much. The struggle is real.

I'm still on the hunt for a region 2 War Horse DVD that doesn't cost 30-something dollars. Also, I want to buy The Gathering Storm and the British versions of Wallander because - and I'm sure you've guessed it by now - they star Hiddleston. At some point we are going to have the Hiddles marathon of our dreams, God damn it!

Anyway, I think it's a good place to end this entry. I'm really lazy about adding pictures to my posts - I'll try to work on that.

#33

I'm more excited about Game of Thrones today than I've been for a while! Today's episode was so. Good. I can barely handle my adoration for Oberyn right now, is basically all I'm saying. His epic decisive monologue brought tears of righteous joy to my eyes, basically. Also, I think it was yesterday, I saw the extended 5 minute trailer for CW's upcoming Flash series. I'm really excited about that too! It features Oliver and others from Arrow, though, which probably means I should get to watching more of that too. I tried to start watching it a while ago but I think I got bored of it maybe halfway through the first episode... maybe it'd get better later, if I kept watching? I need to try, just to be able to pick up on the Flash backstory bits, hehe.

My phone's internet is apparently conked out tonight, which sucks. Our home Wi-Fi is also working pretty sporadically, which sucks almost as much. Also I can't for the life of me manage to configure the outgoing mail servers right for the Macbook Mail App. I'm so frustrated!!

Also, if the mood change that happened in the middle of this post seems weird, it's because I didn't finish it before leaving for Megazone (which went great, but apparently I lost my score printouts on the way home. Boo.) and now I'm all sorts of angry at all of the technologies. Oh well.

[Came back 15 minutes later]

I still can't get the Mail App to function at all with outgoing mail, which basically renders it useless. It's pretty annoying, because I like how it works - now I guess I just have to go online for my mail like I've done on the PC. Or maybe I can get my dad or someone else to figure out the servers for me. Oh well.

Anyway, the Wi-Fi seems to have resurrected, which soothes my self-inflicted burns of technological impotence. I suppose I'll live. I was going to start moving some of my files from my old Windows laptop to my external hard drive tonight, but it's running so slowly......... we'll see. I think I just manages to sync my phone (something I wanted to try in case it would fix the phone's 3G/non-Wi-Fi internet connections... I'll try to survive.

Bye!

#32

Hello!

I'm typing this on my new Macbook Pro, which is crazy! I noticed that at the time of the previous post (literally 11 days ago) I was just complaining about "I should soon be thinking about upgrading my phone" etcetera, and now I've had both a new phone and laptop since Thursday. I feel kind of bad when I tell anyone I bought them, because it seems so much like bragging about money to me, you know? Although the only reason I could even justify buying such a ridiculously overpriced laptop was because my maternal grandfather keeps sending me and my family money, because my mom doesn't want to talk to him. I guess he wants to help anyway, but I feel kind of bad using the money since he basically isn't getting anything for it - my mother still refuses to talk to him or keep in contact. Well, whatever. It's not my problem. If he has money enough to throw at us then let him have at it, I think.

I just returned from camp about an hour ago! It wasn't very tiring - I slept well and there were night "guards" so the other camp leaders didn't have to stay up. The young-leaders-in-training were mostly great too. There is a random group who aren't even going to be young leaders at camps this summer though, who just wanted to come to the training camp because it's a camp...? They wreaked some havoc but it was only like 5-6 kids so it was okay. Even they did their duties pretty diligently, and all in all everything went well and fun was had by all. I also bonded quite a bit with some people I hadn't talked to a lot before, and it was a lot easier to feel like a leader/worker at this camp because the only role I've had when working with that church's workers has been the role of an employee, basically. I still have to struggle a bit with it in my own congregation.

All in all this trainee period has made me grow a lot as a "professional"... I feel a lot more confident about various responsibilities that go with the career path I'm basically studying for. The rise in confidence makes it a lot easier to work and have a good attitude even though I stress about things a bit in advance.

I was going to go to a movie tonight with M, but he apparently broke himself a bit at a bar last night. Ouch. Oh well. I might go see my friends' theater production later this week, and then I already have the first "city days" of the summer's first confirmation camp! Whoa!

Anyway, I'm gonna be doing some schoolwork before that. Bye!

#31

I haven't wanted to post 2 days in a row since, like, the Christmas holidays... wow.

I found out there's three and a half seasons of awkward. in total. Whoa! More for me. I spent way too much of my phone's battery watching as many episodes as possible on my way to Cola. Today was a lot of fun because the youngun's actually wanted to talk to me! Or at least a few of them. It feels just a little bittersweet to be leaving so soon, but I guess it's good. 

They chose the other trainee from my school to work at the church for the summer. I don't feel too disappointed, I was pretty sure I wasn't going to get the job anyway. Oh well. I thought about it and I think a big reason for why neither my own or this church wanted to hire me for the summer is probably my immaturity. Also my complete lack of ambition and vision. And I'm not trying to be fake-depressed or self-pitying, I think I'm being genuine here? Trying to put out an indifferent air makes me feel indifferent about a lot of things too. Eh. But at least "needing to grow up" is a surely fixable issue. 

I really want to go for the series 5 iPhone soon. My 4S is getting seriously glitchy, and even though it's probably a lot due to how full I keep the memory, it's still annoying as crap. Because of the money I received, I could maybe even go for a 32GB iPhone 5S.... DO WANT. We'll see.

Bye!

#30

I'm watching awkward. and it's pretty awkward alright. But not as bad as it could have been.

I've been procrastinating all of the things again. Also, I feel like I'm Jenna now, because about half of the episodes' runtime is her writing blog entries in scenes with voiceovers. But meh. Anyway! I have the trainee report to write, I need to interview my mentors for a bit, I have that one assignment that I've been putting off that was already late (its original due date was back in January. I'm such an accomplished student, eh?), and we have another group assignment to get through, too. Sigh.

I'm sure I can do it though, I think I'll start with some online research tonight. Granted, it's already 9PM, and as soon as my mom arrives we're probably going to watch TV or something together, but the online part shouldn't take a very extravagant amount of time.

We went to Tampere last weekend, and it was pretty fun! My friend couldn't make it back from her sister's hen party in time to meet me while I was in town, but that's okay. It couldn't be helped. The one "youth" we had with us has the same logic as me for a lot of things, so we got along pretty well, too. At some point, we watched a bunch of Tita Auntie's diary in our room and kept going "DROGO, DONDE ESTAS?" for the rest of the weekend. Also, I had never made the connection between Khal Drogo from ASOIAF and Frodo's dad (also Drogo). Weirdness.

I think I'm going to try and rescue my Animal Crossing town now, it's been weeks! Wish me luck.

Bye!