I want a netbook.

You know, the tiny little computers?  If you aren't aware, netbooks are basically the by-product of an attempt to provide cheap, durable, functional laptops to poor kids worldwide.  The resulting computer ran mostly freeware programs, had something like an 8" screen, and a battery life on the order of 6-8 hours.  of course, it used years-old processors and  had a keyboard so tiny it was only suitable for children, but hey, I can deal with that for a super-portable notebook.  Also it had only 4g of hard drive space.  oh.  Well, the point is that people bought these things and shortly afterwards the major PC manufacturers decided it'd be cool if they made some too.  so now Vaio and HP offer 9- or 11" beasties whose stylishness is undeniable.  As it turns out, most of my time on the computer is spent online doing stupid things like posting to LJ and listening to the mellocast.  neither of these require 4 gigs of RAM or more than a couple dozen gigs of disk space.  So it is entirely plausible that I could be happy with a netbook, if a little slower to stream 4 tabs of youtube and niconicodouga while running photoshop, illustrator, and Homeworld. 

and therein lies the problem.  the reason I have a 17" monster of a laptop with sportscar-grade internals is that I do occasionally need them for things like ilustrator and photoshop, which I like to run concurrently.  Somehow I just can't see myself doing very wll with editing 40" posters on a 10" screen with a keyboard the size of my mousepad- if photoshop will even boot.  still, the idea of having a pocketbook-sized do-anything companion strikes a chord with the sci-fi geek in me.  And if you know me, you're aware that sci-fi geek is a rather large portion of the whole- so, i'm browsing amazon, liliputing, sony, hp, Asus, and laCie.  lacie isn't a laptop maker- they're a laptop accessory maker.  i doubt sincerely that i could do with even 50g of disk space, but I think I could do pretty well with no disk drive.  So I'm looking into either getting an external drive [was going to anyway] and finding a netbook with no disc drive or possibly replacing the exissting drive in a stock netbook with a larger HD.

I'm in my second quarter of official college-dom and thus far all that's happened is I've missed my girlfriend a lot and I've realized that in comparison to some people I don't get out much.  
Which is to say I don't party much.
which is to say I don't drink much.
which is to say I don't drink at all.
which is to say i'm not saying i wouldn't if given the chance and a good reason to, but since i don't really go anywhere where drinking out of stuff other than red 1-gallon coolers happens, no drinking happens.

Also i don't talk to my cross-country friends much.  I do empty my text inbox just about every day- 95% of it is the girlfriend.  Somehow after four years of what amounts to barely communicating with each other in the current social climate, we've managed to start not only talking daily, but also about the incredibly inane sort of boyfriend girlfriend stuff we're probably supposed to talk about. 
Really its because we finally found a form of communication one [or both] of us doesn't fail at.  well, much.

I need to watch more miyazaki but feel weird doing it by myself.  well, no- I just don't feel motivated to do it by myself.  2001 a space odyssey, for example, I'll eagerly watch alone.  girlfriend wouldn't be very interested, or many others, really.  So i watch it alone and enjoy it alone.  Spirited away, though..  I kind of want to rewatch it, but I just feel like its the sort of thing my friends need to be there for somehow. 

Glassmen have officially announced the 2008 show- see the website.  ( http://glassmen.org/main )
We'll be in Toledo again on the 12th [of April] for the TSO concert, which will be best described by combining any number of the following words in any order via hyphens.

hyper
fly
ballin'
ultra
audio
bitchin'
two-fisted
undeniably
superfly
uber
pwesome
triple
optimal
extra
sweeet


In other news, I'm slowly but surely completing my housing information for UC.  Also I'm reviving my previous attempts to pick up some basic breakdancing skills.  I have way too many hobbie-type things going on already, but I need something for Rookie Talent day.  Besides, how could I not be able to breakdance?  For some reason about 65% of the people I know think I already can.

Today the local UNSSU (united snow shovelers union) is going to speak out and ask for an equipment upgrade. 

We have sat idle for several months despite the rumors of immense ice storms and three-foot powdery dumpings, even as some higher-ups promised us newfangled bits of useless technology.  They are attempting to appease us with a 'snowblower', a device which, although inarguably possessing certain qualities which lend to it a most useful nature in certain climates, is to us at most a hindrance.  The regional wintry precipitation usually consists of a few inches of snow topped by a few inches of ice.  This necessitates the employ of a broad, sturdy, and thinly arched metallic shovel, the likes which we possess only one.  We also are occasionally forced to employ a unique and patent-pending ice-breaking device known as the 'garden hoe', which works marvelously when forcefully shoved under the edge of an existing icepack with the flat part of the blade parallel to the horizon.

Updates as our lead negotiators in the summit bring them to us at lunch break.

... on youtube.

All I have to say is... I facepalm'd.

dammit, I swore I'd never watch it.

So I'm also accepted to Kent State now, in what appears to have been less than a week processing time.  OSU, however, is still 'evaluating.'  The housing forms for UC are already out- is it really that much more of a deal for you guys, OSU?  I mean, I applied a month later for you, but if you wanted to you could've made the deadline in the previous fricking august. 

I spent a solid block of time in the basement today, mellophoning and modding those tiny NERF pocket blasters. 
also made potstickers.  they were delicious in a sense that was almost godly.
I'm suddenly extremely concerned about the possibility of no george foreman grills in dorms prohibiting me from ever having potstickers again.

oh, the many forms it cometh in.
extended cuddle sessions, three panel soul, 4chan housecats and their playthings...

mostly, though- finding an old 1 gig memory card for one's PSP and discovering that it contained not only Lumines, whose dazzling melodious puzzlings were the soundtrack of my next three hours, but also Taiko no Tatsujin Portable.  So, after a Lumines session, full of swirling colors and rotating blocks were probably best described as "techno-trippy", I returned wholeheartedly to that most cutesy of Japanese rhythm games.  The PSP version comes with no 'drum' controller thingamahoozits, and is decidedly lacking in plastic 5-button guitars, but there is a sleek and inspiring charm in just using the face buttons - see DJ MAX for evidence.  After blissfully discovering that a few J-pop-y tracks i already knew were on there (Orange Range, mostly) I recalled that there had been somewhere an article involving donwloadable content for this "taiko" game....   of course, the thing was issued in 2005, and seeing as the most robust online content I was familiar with (wipeout pure) was already long gone, I had little hope for anything significant....

I found the website (entirely in japanese) and managed to stumble upon the tutorial (also entirely in japanese ._. ) and then retreated to gamefaqs for aid.  Lo and behold; instructions, in english no less!  with clear, precise commands such as  " Scroll past the illegible blocks of Japanese and hit the second button on the left."    ooohhhh, yes.   There awaited a treasure trove of not two, not four, not even TEN, but TWENTY-TWO downloadable bonus tracks!  They came in two cutesy parts, and the downloads... still worked!  amazing! 

And so I sit, blissfully banging away at two brightly-hued barrel-drums, getting scores of 95% accuracy on the soundtrack to Soul Calibur and ignoring homework.

-approximately matt

So after coming off of the glorious 5-day weekend, I was basically cold-clocked by the common cold.  In a period of 6 hours I went from bubbly weekend-bliss-hungover to just plain hungover-ish.  18 hours of sleep in a 24-hour period was about the best thing that happened in the past few days, and I'm still exhausted.  Good news is that it appears to be clearing up just as fast...  ....  

... just had one of those weird mental-picture moments that involved my nose running ... backwards.  

.... anyway, other good news (?) is that the Nerfers at UC got  officially accepted as a university group.  qwn.  This is nerf as in the root of the interweb term...  I suppose it's kind of sad when you have to specify.  At any rate, I mean that people are running around shooting each other with highly modified Nerf brand dart blasters, not that there's somehow a group of people who make things less unbalanced powerful in MMO's.  Though that would probably be just as awesome..  I mean, a university subsidized group of MMO admins?  qwn. 
      

HOURS 1-8

after dropping off the significant other at her place of residence ...


....

....

you know what?  So much of whatever it is you're reading is determined by the first sentence.  And that was a shitty one.  *cleansing breath* aaand start over.


HOURS  1-8

After dropping off the girlfriend I headed home and flopped on the computer chair, where I remain to this instant, meal and bathroom breaks excepting.

In the past six hours or so I've made a viable career out of webcomic reading; I've covered over one hundred thousand panels of artwork and something like 22 years worth of pages across titles such as striptease (just to catch back up), Loserz (apparently I'm not the only nerd with an obscenely good-looking black girlfriend), Girly (um.  I have very few to no excuses to save my masculenity on this one.), reread megatokyo (you don't honestly need a link to that, do you?) VG Cats, of course, and one I can't recall the name of ...  it involved an upright cat and a girl as the main characters, they lived in NYC and talked about lots of communism-related things.  rawwwwrg.

At any rate, i've made the connection that, aside from the stuff I was already well aware of (MT and VG Cats precisely) they've all involved some sort of .. how does one say...  lesbian intriugue.   goddammit, how does one spell that word... not to limit it to lesbians, though.  plethoras of gay/bi comicness.  I'd maybe be more intruiged dammit! by this trend if i weren't overloaded with deus ex machina and the burning desire to find the goddamn communist cat.


edit:  found it.  spacecadet kid, have you ever seen this one?  Cat and Girl (it's always the obvious ones.)  Bringer of much bizarre humor. And inventor of words - "homeownersexuality."