Hay guys. It's just time to close this chapter, I think. I'm moving to paperover, friend over there if you want to keep watching. If you don't, it's a perfect time to take me off your flist. Though some of you don't get a choice, and are required to friend me back. ♥

In reality, I've moved back to my own domain at Antique White, but I know most people don't want to bother keeping up with a separate sites or signing up at my domain to view flocked entries, so I'm crossposting everywhere, more or less. If you're on Inksome, you can follow me at verily over there, lithium on Scribbld, and verily again on Insanejournal. It's all the same stuff, though, so don't worry about friending all of those. Just pick whichever's convenient.

Hey guys, Inksome (the site formerly known as "Scribblit"), is open now, and I have invite codes. Anyone want one? :3 Comment and I'll get one for you. People invited are getting free accounts, that I know of, which will include 100 userpics, though at the moment there's a glitch we're working on that is only allowing you to upload one-- it'll be fixed. (We are still kinda in beta, I think? So there's still some oddness with the site and not everything's automagic yet, but most things are working. And I am sorta helping out on the code-front to try to get things running smoother, so hopefully all that'll get ironed out.)

Paid accounts are also available, but you'll have to email Kit for that.

Edit. Uh, for the record, I'm Verily over thereabouts, if you want to friend me. ♥

If you click here, you'll find pictures I took of Australia: Sydney, Melbourne, Alice Springs, Uluru, Kings Canyon, Kata Tjuta, Cairns, Kuranda, Tjabukai Cultural Park/Museum, Magnetic Island, and Airlie Beach/The Whitsunday Islands/the Solway Lass boat tour.

New Zealand gets nearly no pictures. There's actually a couple on an underwater disposable that I have to finish off and then get developed for the snorkel/scuba dive pictures as well, but other than like, three from the last day at the beach, there's nothing, as I was a retard and lost the disposable camera I'd bought to replace the one that got stolen in my last leg stay in Sydney. So there'll be another batch coming in a bit, but have to get that camera fixed up first. And then see if there's even anything worth uploading.

These are mainly the pretty and/or cool pictures. I also have these couple just-for-fun ones, that're sitting on photobucket instead.

Briefly about the trip: It was fantastic, loved it, even if I was so very tired of living out of a suitcase by the end and I lost, to tally: my toothbrush, two towels, my digital camera, a disposable camera, and possibly other things I haven't yet realized yet along the way. Getting up early and rushing out of hostels is fail, for the record. So is being herded very quickly off buses. This is why I lost both towels and suspect losing the disposable camera and the toothbrush. The digital, of course ... was only my fault the first time it got lost. I did lose a few pictures with that-- mostly of ellipsisblack 's and my adventures in theme parks and the trip to Australia Zoo with wyrdite and dev_winger . Sad days. But at least I salvaged the ones I still have.

Weather? Very hot and either quite dry (loved that about the desert, though I could've done without the flies) or very wet (thank you Cairns and Magnetic Island for showing me what it's like never to be clean).

I met a lot of Germans and English, and a fair amount of people from the Scandanavian countries (Norway, Denmark, Sweden, if you're not geographically inclined... Finland too, but I didn't meet any Finnish), and a handful of Swiss and other Great Britainers (North Irish more than Scottish or Welsh). Oh, and also hordes of Japanese and Chinese, most of whom I didn't actually converse with, though one or two I did and they were quite nice.

Saw some cultural stuff, some tourist stuff, tried as much odd foodstuff as I managed to manage (brought back some vegemite, even, for anyone nearby who's curious). Held various wildlife. Got bitten by lots of bloodsuckers. Saw lots of pretty. Thought about lots of stuff. Read a lot of books. Watched a lot of Battlestar Galactica (courtesy of Elle <3). Was on a lot of trains and buses. Stayed in many hostels. Explained a lot why I don't drink, that I am not currently very knowledgeable of American politics, and I am indeed a graduate, possessed of a Ling & Japanese double-degree, thank you.

If you'd like to know anything else in detail uh, let me know and I'll type up something. I think there were a few anecdotes I could share that I wrote down in a journalesque thing, but unless it's asked for, likely this is all you're getting. Planes are long. There's ridiculous amounts of things that need doing here for some reason, like my internet being totally borked and requiring to re-setup my computer anyhow and otherwise clear house and make things ready for a new life or something ridiculous like that.

So I probably won't be posting or reading the flist much for a while, unless I get more photos up. ♥

DEGREES CONFERRED:
BACHELOR OF ARTS DEC 21, 2007
BOULDER CAMPUS
COLLEGE OF ARTS & SCIENCES
MAJOR: LINGUISTICS
JAPANESE

I have officially completed my undergrad.

Uh, because I meant to do this a while ago, actually, when I implemented this all on my machine, but didn't and just remembered recently.

So, if you're on Firefox, you can use the Greasemonkey and Stylish plugins for nifty things, like changing layouts on sites you don't like the layouts for and whatnot.

( Stylish code for replacing user and community icons on: LJ, GJ, and IJ, and customizable for others if wanted. )

And someone created a Google Adsense and Sponsored Links Removal Script that gets rid of the ads on sites like IJ pretty well.

There's a class-adder for IJ that allows you to create Stylish/Greasemonkey styles for it, and there are some premade ones here, but ... well, personally I'm not fond of any of them, but other people have different tastes than me. Also, it seems to flash between the actual layout you're using and the style you put over it, which I'm not sure how to fix.

Things could be better right now, really for a lot of reasons. So I'll ignore those and talk about other stuff.

( Complaining about OSes. )

And the Golden Compass movie this weekend hopefully will be yay. The fog that was out on 93 when I was driving back home? Terrifying to drive in. Visibility was only about 50 feet in front of me, so I actually "got lost" and pulled into the Rocky Flats turn instead of 72 or whatever it is because all of the sudden the stoplight appeared and all I could think was, "I need to turn at a stoplight!" and there were no indicators that it was the incorrect light that I could see, until I turned in and saw the sign. Wasn't nearly as bad here. Also isn't snowing here like it was in Boulder.

Um, yep. One more week.

But with recent events on GJ and the funky issues we've been having with Scribblit (Uh, don't go there right now, it redirects to a personal ad site somehow?), holy cow, Squeaky on IJ is apparently like, super nice and helpful. And I'm just randomly pointing out that I'm impressed at his willingness to offer help. It's interesting, the contrast.

Disclaimer: Not really saying one is better than any other, since I think IJ still has a fairly small userbase compared to some of the others, which I'm sure affects the ability to give better service and whatnot, and I think Scribblit will be fine once we get through the weird beta issues, it's just interesting.

... is pretty terrible. I'm not having good luck with fantasy recently.

Randomly, people who snagged spots for that art meme I posted a while ago and didn't give me a subject then? Nope, I didn't forget. Let me know sometime before the 24th, if you can? I'm going to try to do them while I'm away so I'll just have to scan them when I get back. Or at least have some done or something.

I may be (almost) alone in thinking this but: Enchanted ruined. It was brilliant up until a point somewhere near the middle where they apparently forgot what the moral of the story they kept pushing was supposed to be and 180'd it with the plot. Also her dress near the end was hideous, especially surrounded by period clothing that was fucking amazing. Seriously made me want to rewrite it, but I won't because I'm lazy, I'm sure.

And... Angela? Why?

On the upside, Avatar is amazing animation genius.

Now for homework. I hate memorizing things.

Thesoundworksthesoundworks.

Kay. Now what else do I have to fix...

p.s. shoiryu, that recipe for Brussels sprouts was delicious.

ETA: HOLY CARP. THE MICROPHONE WORKS NOW TOO. BOOYAH.

Bah. The package updater was all, "You can upgrade to Gutsy!" so I was like, "Hmm... ... why not." Bad idea, really. So I think I'm on Gutsy, but to be honest, I'm unsure, really as nothing changed except the fact that my sound is broken and somehow during the process it deleted regular and italic Tahoma. Yeah. Um... way to go. I briefly tried fixing it, but I was getting a headache and solving nothing, so since I tend to listen to music on Jehanne now anyway, I don't forking care.

( It just goes on. And on. )

Welcome to fall break. We're cleaning house for the upcoming Thanksgiving-with-the-Professor deal. Ahahah.

If you're interested in Scribblit and don't mind donating, you may want to think about getting an early contributor account now/before the 18th when they stop selling them. They're going for 30 CAD, so it's not an outrageous sum for what's more or less permanent account features.

Mainly just know at least one or two people on the flist were interested in getting scribblit accounts and might be interested in the opportunity for the extras. Carry on?

So it's a little bit of a pain in the ass, requires you already have Photoshop installed on a Windows computer to export the activation key, but hey, it works. I tried both just copying the already-installed Windows version and installing from the disk... both ways worked in terms of starting up the program, but until I upgraded wine to the current version (0.9.47), it kept getting hung up on the "Initializing..." phase, but after the upgrade, worked perfectly to open.

The pain in the ass bit was mainly the activation, since CS2, of course, requires their new system of activation and directly through wine, it doesn't let you. Won't let you attempt the phone-activation either, hangs up saying there isn't enough disk space and closes. So I followed the outline in this tutorial and it works. For the record? If you're on Windows Vista (or rather, if the original version of Photoshop that you are exporting the activation key from is installed on Vista), apparently using recode is unnecessary. It refused to work for me using the encoding types suggested so I just tried inserting the file as is into wine's registry, and when I booted up Photoshop again, the activation dialogue went through without a hitch.

A few things are quirky: when opening files, I've had it stop allowing me to type a file name in, focus to a specific internal program window doesn't always function without a second click, and minimizing (individual pictures within the program) seems to be impossible. As the button is missing and at least at this moment, I don't know a shortcut for that. Zoom shortcuts were also not functioning briefly, though I'm not sure if this was just symptomatic of full-out not recognizing keyboards or not, which could have been the issue-- I didn't test the text tool or anything at the time and a reboot of the program solved it. And of course, it doesn't look quite as pretty. Which means some menu functions have what I'm finding to be a usual wine issue of having odd sizing issues, etc, but everything I've looked at is fully functional.

Except, I think, tablet sensitivity. Haven't tested that yet, but I remember reading about wine not supporting tablet sensitivity. Would be nice if it did, because if I remember correctly, it isn't working in openCanvas either, and I don't like GIMP for drawing.

Last note, it does take forever to load up, and sometimes rendering window resizing seems to be kinda slow, but it's not too bad. The splash kinda spans all workspaces, though, which is annoying, since you can't move it, so you sort of just have to wait for it to finish. Doesn't actually hang up the rest of the OS to have it do that, though so if you can work around the slight annoyance, it's not so bad.

Seeing as I could not figure out how to function with GIMP without a huge learning curve even with GIMPshop installed that I'm not willing to deal with at the moment, and Pixel is still in very unstable development, and I'll admit I was just lazy to try Krita... I think this'll do for my image editing needs. I'm still working on the drawing bit, because that is most highly unsatisfactory.

Because I'm fecking collecting the decent ones I find, as they seem to be so rare. Or at least, I am so damn picky about it.

This journal is linguistics, linux, and Ender's Game anymore. Ha. When school's out I'll start drawing again and you won't have to see my babble as much.

I really want to do a comic of this. Like for 24 hour comic day or something. And/or expand it into a full (written) story. I am actually in love with the Queen. Though the soldier is sweet. She just fascinates me.

OMFG. What the hell. (Scroll down a ways.) Just... Sam has bright red hair? John looks like he's 20? None of them look like they could hit a wiffleball, nevermind fight demons.

And Dean, with baby Sam, saying, "Hey look, Sam, there's milk! Uh--" and apparently ... dropping Sam. Just, wow. I think I'll stick with the show...

( Here. )

Way to go, Cheater McGee.

How have I missed this for two freaking years? Really. Short stories. Enderverse short stories. Six of them. Though I will read the others later, of course. Eeeeeeeh.

Create your own Friend Test here

Took it from paintedkirin. Take it, rar. Or else.

It's like slightly more informative hitchhiking.

I think I'm still leaning towards the train. And hostels.

Huh. This layout is seriously screwy on Internet Explorer, and I never knew. Crap. Sorry, if anyone's reading on that, but uh, I'm not fixing it. Not right now anyway.

One midterm down, two to go! :D I actually ended up with more to say on the Ling one than I thought I would. I ran out of damn time and dear god was it shittily put together.

Now I get to fail at take my Japanese midterm. And Classical tomorrow omg. Now if only I wasn't ill, what the hell.

Calcifer pwns you. Yeah. Those little monsters up top? Totally my quicklauncher.

I need a new uber-geek icon. This icon is geeky, but not quite in the correct fashion.

NATHAN.  STOP BEING A HOBO.

If anyone considers this a spoiler, I'm sorry, but really.  This is too retarded and minor to cut.

Writing about YAOI now.  For class.  I'm a bit dead on Classical.

The weather's strange today.

THE FIRST 10 PEOPLE WHO RESPOND TO THIS JOURNAL ENTRY WILL GET A FREE SKETCH preferrably human (but not porn)... animals require way too much research for me right now for free sketches.

The fine print:
a) If you make a request, you must duplicate the offer in your own journal. It shouldn't be too hard if you really half-ass it.
b) Don't be shy in your request, but do understand it will probably be just a loose pencil drawing.
c) You might get your sketches ages from now, but you will get it eventually.

SLOTS FILLED. x)

YAR. Yeah, that bit about getting the sketch ages from now? Very true. I'll try my best, but chances are, I won't be actually sketching much until mid-February of 2008 as this semester is hell. However! I take promises pretty seriously, so if you request something, you'll get it, dammit. Just don't bug me about it until then, at least, please.

( The Waiting List )

Sweet. Too bad it won't be implemented until I no longer need it.

Last week, because I never get to writing journal entries quite on time, on the first day of class in Perspectives, it was brought up that language is tied to culture in such a way that you cannot have culture without language.

I think I disagree. Or at least, don't agree in the traditional sense. The professor asked if anyone was bi-cultural, and though I was a little hesitant to raise my hand for that since I was unsure how he was defining the word, I really do think I am. I was raised with half-Chinese culture and half-American, and feel very tied to both. But I don't know Chinese. A few words, and the idea of it-- how it's structured, how it sounds, how it influences the speakers, I sort of understand that. But I can't understand a conversation solely in Chinese like I can in (American) English.

And there are other culture-systems that don't have a "language" in the sense most people would define language. There is no "geek-language" in terms of it being a language with different phonemes or morphemes or grammar, just that there's extra jargon that sometimes makes speech between geeks unintelligible for outside listeners. In that manner, I do have a different "language" for my Chinese culture. Many terms and phrases and ideas I only know how to express through Chinese.

So in that sense, it's true, and I do have another "language" for each culture I am part of. I guess the main gripe, then, is whether by "bi-cultural," it's intended to mean the cultures of two fully separate countries or whether mixture-cultures or subcultures count as making a person bi-cultural.

Expect more of these ramble-y sorts of lingnerdiness over this semester. We're required to write journal entries for the class and I figured what better place to put them than where I already ramble on the subject. Lucky you people.

I'm a bit of a nut, but I've got some things working that I'm kind of happy about.  First on the list is:

( Semagic )

( RSS Feeds: V. Long )

That all said.  Personally I'm looking forward to seeing what ScribblIt comes up with.  If their features turn out as nice as twocorpses initially posed as a plan, I may jump over there when they're open/I've run out of paid time on LJ.  I've always wanted a watched list in addition to the friends list for one.  Holding out to see what happens with the ToS business, though, since it's still a little up in the air.  Do like that she's being more open about it, though so there's always that at least.  And hey, little penguins and cats.

Speaking of which, at some point I'll post up the stuff I used to change all the usericons/community icons on LJ/GJ/IJ (mostly did it for the last one because I abhor those icons, but then it was just fun). I'm for some reason too lazy to post them on userstyles or anything wtf.

Wasps should die. I know they're supposedly necessary for the environment somehow, and I'd probably regret it if they were dead, but I hate them so much. My arm is in pain and all I wanted to do was drive the truck out of the side slot so I could move the generator into the shed. Three stings! Whole swarm of them came at me, because they apparently decided to nest in the sideview mirror of the truck! And because it's all a bit hot here, it being summer, I had thought it would be a good idea to roll down the window. BAD IDEA. VERY BAD IDEA.

The most amusing part was I was actually very calm up until my mother was not answering me and I was trapped in the truck and wasps on one and and the generator on the other side, holding the door shut. I was barely small enough to squeeze through that. And upon doing so and rushing back into the garage, broke into tears for no particular reason. My arm hurt, but not nearly enough to warrant it, I was just freaking out.

Anyway, now I can finally park my car in the garage again. Mmm, covered.

This is just getting sillier and sillier.

Undue is not the same as undo. You cannot cause "undo pressure," unless you're, in fact, undoing the pressure. And then it's still bad grammar. Professional website, mate! Get a proper editor. And I sort of mean that both ways, because hell, that design sucks and whoever did the design for you the first time apparently doesn't know the very simple idea that you don't use dithered .gif files for pictures. They become bizarre and grainy.

( Few other phrases that I see misused and spelled wrong constantly. )

That said, a facility with 75 tigers stuck together seems sorta... odd. They're kinda solitary and all. Do all these animals really have enough space? I mean I don't know, but there's what, 155 animals total they say, and all are predatory and territorial.

Also the billboard ad is bizarre. "There's tigers out on Colorado's plains!" My first thought was, "That would destroy our ecosystem, get them out? Wtf, why isn't this on the news?"

Okay, what's up with the servers, dreamhost? The moodthemes section is dead right now, but Antique White itself is perfectly fine. I can hardly log into support, but your main page loads up fine. The reason I changed to you is because of reliability, dammit. Give it over.

Time for the annual not-so-sekkrit!fandom post, as this is the only thing I've seriously considered myself a fan of and most everyone knows that.

Um. I'm not sure how I feel about this. We all know I will, of course, purchase it. But really, just what? I'm slightly afraid. And who is this Zeck kid? I'd make a comment about the name, but I'm sure it's a nickname, like half the kids. It's just things like what I wrote in the title that make me rather unsure how I will like this book.

I've this slight tinge of paranoia that this will ruin the tone of the Battle School books for me. I'm not sure I ever really wanted any more canon!Battle School from Card. But it does seem to be somewhat short at least.

In other news, they're potentially going to ruin it with a movie, too. Only potentially, as I swear, this is the third time I've heard "We're making an EG movie!" and stuff seems to still be very up in the air about it (as usual), despite the supposed release date of 2008. They have no cast yet, apparently the script isn't done, and the director may have changed again. But people freak me out about it anyway, as I'm going to be horrendously picky about the casting, let alone the script and costume design and um, everything.

However, I found the comic in my icon a while ago and it's hilarious to me. And from the same comic, but not at all related to the Enderverse, have a map of online communities. Xkcd is win.

So, two nights ago I had a nightmare dream that obsidianfawn was telling me I wasn't nerdy enough because I don't remember quotes.

And this morning, I had a dream I called in sick to work (probably because I woke up a little early and was considering it when I fell asleep again). I kinda wish I had. Instead I was just very late.

But I have banana bread. Sorry, I don't have a limerick for it this time.

( D: )

You know, the funniest thing about the whole LJ bannination thing is... I can't remember/don't know if I've put up anything that could potentially get me banned or not. So uh, if I disappear, I apparently missed something. I mean, they seem like they should all be down now, seeing as the drawings were rather old and whatnot, and so I hate them with a passion therefore think I took them down and I don't think any of it was underage anyway (unless it's just y'know "ARGH PR0N, KILL IT," in which case..). But it's me, so it's possible I forgot something.

In the meantime, have some doodles:

( Almost done with all the gift art. )

lollercoaster.

Working backwards... random episode of Utena on the television just now.  That stupid recap episode where Akio's talking to Dios and there's all the stained glass windows with French written on them.  Right before the Black Rose Saga.  But I tuned in and was just like, "WTF, Saionji all over the place and in recap-form, why?" for like, two minutes before they moved onto Miki and I realized what the heck.

( I like my personal bubble to stay personal. That means with you not in it. )

Beyond that, I got the most horribly pink, Cheshire Cat cell phone strap ever.  I'll have to take a picture of it sometime.  I also have this really awesome goldfish one wherein the goldfish is made out of a carved rock, but anyhow.  And today was hilarious, not only for the people, but in that I went to Shinjuku to exchange some money, since it's a pain in the butt to do it at the bank in Shonandai and... I'd found a Travelex or whatever they're called last time.  But I'd found it last time on being awake for over 24 hours, randomly walking along a street.  So I got out today and went, "Okay... which way did I go?"  And went about five different wrong ways before I finally found it again.  On the bright side, I found a few fun shops to wander in while I was lost.

Um, yeah.  I'm not too good at updating.  Or replying to comments, sorry.  I'm kinda failing in all arenas right about now, and it's disgustingly humid, and I'm meeting someone tomorrow so I'm just going to poke at CCS or something and go to bed.

Edit: Rofl. I walk away for a bit and go back to the TV and it's PoT, talking about Andre Agassi. Kay.

Just a minor note... I snagged the username corvidae a while ago.  Decided to rename my journal with it... so all you people going, "Who the heck is corvidae?"  Yeah.  I used to be inamoment.

Edit: Well that was interesting... this entry was accidentally backdated. Win.

日本語のインプットが使える！できた！

So. HI. I'm in Japan. And have installed Ubuntu again. Hence the excitement over Japanese input. Took forever to get that working for some reason, I don't know why. But yes. My OS fucking pwns Windows Vista. I'm kinda in love with the way Beryl switches workspaces with that cube. -spins-

Also Kopete is an awesome IM client. And AmaroK is amazing.

But yes, despite the fact that my OS is what's more interesting to me right now, I'm sure the fact that I'm in Japan is actually more interesting.

So far I've just met with people at Nihon Daigaku, where a few people and I have exchanged mutually broken English-Japanese conversations. Got shown the museum on campus, where food's at, etc. Met a friend of my grandmother's and otherwise, have been sleeping. Found a wireless connection in my grandmother's complex to leech, so I'm kinda on that for now. If it disappears, though, I can get online at the university as well.

And I got a Japanese cell phone, wee. And of course, have been installing linux, because geekery is like medicine to me. Heh. I'm vaguely afraid of starting up windows again, though, because last time I did it, it rather killed GRUB, which kinda has to run for me even to pick an OS, so I　couldn't start linux either, except from the boot disk.

Plus everything's functional on Ubuntu now, except maybe my microphone, which is next on the list to get working. THEN　I　CAN　SKYPE. My mother. Since none of my friends use Skype. Unless I can just get my bluetooth headset to work with my computer or something. That'd be pretty awesome.

But yeah. Other than the mic and ... well Ubuntu isn't working to write files to NTFS, so I can't edit junk on Frederick (little external harddrive I've got). So I　have to fix that too. OTHERWISE. It's just dandy. And now I'm going to attempt to translate my resume. Maybe. And take a shower or something.

At World's End is lovely.  At least I enjoyed it quite a bit, despite minor annoyances.  Seriously want that song sung at the beginning.  No real review because I suck at those things and I need to pack right now.

I have fucking canoodling children-sized feet.  This makes it very difficult to find nice (adult-styled) dress shoes, believe you me.

In other news, I'm almost finished moving back home.  Unpacked is