"Henrietta don't we got flowers for you..."

Nice picture, good morale.

Never play D&D with a creative person at the table.

And the sign said Long Haired Freaky people need not apply.

As per request, here are The Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism, a quite fascinating listen, and it's got 13 parts, so don't expect to get through them all at once.

This is an emotional entry

On top of the lovely and extremely demanding semester exams...

One of my dogs had to be put down on Friday. He was almost 15 years old. My mother and stepdad adopted him three years ago so he wouldn't have to die in a metal cage.

It hadn't really hit me that he had to be put down until I was skimming an old blog post by my mom about the goofy things he did. Loosing a pet sucks, a lot.

Now I'm getting really paranoid about my cat. Red has lived with my father and myself for the past 12 years. Right now she's sleeping on my ankles.

...I'll stop emoing it up all over the blog now.



Required Link O' The Day.

"I don't wanna set the world on fire... I just want to start a flame in your heart!"

I listened to that song while playing as a Pyro on Team Fortress 2 the other day. The irony hurt. Apparently though the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. My grandfather listened to this music when he was alive. Interesting, I guess.

Anyway, another quiet day today, it's basically too cold to do anything big outside, although I'm thinking of asking my mom to drive me down to the Movie Gallery, which is having it's closing sale.

"I fought the law and the law won, I fought the law and the law won."

The next two exams went off rather easily. No problems in sight, really. Although we'll find out on report card day next semester. Oh well.

Been playing a lot more Fallout 3, and admittedly, some joy is having.

GW is quiet lately.

Nothing else to report...

"Heaven easy, heaven free."

One exam down, two more to go. Today was the English exam, which was mostly an Essay, although there were also 30 Multiple Choice questions. Easy, mostly. Got to the essay and received an unpleasant surprise. We were to make our own Thesis statement on the spot, and that's not that hard. However we were attacked by a Bible Verse in our exam, and we had to formulate a thesis around that for a comparison essay. Let me give you the work load, as well as the time frame. The exam is 2 hours long, and the MC questions likely will take 10 minutes or so, depending on your use of the English Language and memory for things you've read.

Then comes the essay. It's very structured, meaning it has to go:

1. General Opening statement or hook.
2. Incorporation of the authors/books
3. 3 General argument summaries (Of which we were only using one in this essay, but needed to formulate 3 anyway)
   
4. Thesis Statement.

Now, take that, and then include the fact that our thesis needs to roll with the idea of "Let the person among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone" and it kind of throws a wrench into the works. Free thought is halted and we have to adapt our arguments into a three clause thesis which will work with that biblical statement. So, as it was decided in class a few weeks before the exam, the perfect 2nd clause is "problems continue to arise", which I'm sure the majority of the class used in this essay.

Next up is the argument paragraph, which needs to span all three clauses for each book, and then write a paragraph comparing and contrasting an English King and an Afghany Boy. Now, as a reminder of the time, this likely took you 20 mins to hammer out your points and arguments, leaving you with an hour and a half to write a several page, formal, coherant essay. (Can you tell I ran out of time?)

English is a terrible subject to inflict on people in school.

In other news, wankers cram-- I mean Writer's Cramp all round!

"I need a gun to keep myself from harm. The Poor People are Rotting in the Sun."

So, yeah, today was interesting.

See, there was this rumour going around on the weekend about how my school flooded. The Computer labs along the south side of the building had apparently lost their ceilings to the Bio labs above them, who's pipes burst sometime Friday night. As such, the floor apparently melted, and got all the Yearbook computers wet. They're still assessing damage.

My opinion: Yearbook just got fucked over a little bit more.

WHAT

200 Orgasms in One Day and More

I am so jealous of that first woman.

I have found what I describe as Steampunk Muzic (Hat tip to Kire). It's quite interesting, and I'll be looking around for an album.

Humanwine

When working in a resturant

Keep the following things in mind:

• You WILL be on your feet for long periods of time. Invest in a really, really amazing pair of shoes. Tonight I wore an old pair of sneakers for 5 hours, to the awesome result of having bruised and blistered feet.
• Customers will generally be rude and demanding. Get used to it.
• No matter how nasty a mess a party may leave, you are not allowed to gag as you're cleaning up the table. This will get you mocked.
• Tips are awesome but don't expect them to pay off a car.
• Never ever EVER snitch food. That's disgusting, stop it.
• If your boss offers you free food, however, eat it.
• Waitresses are your friend! If they look like they need help carrying something, offer. They may share extra tips if you.
• No one follows the dress code exactly. Ever.
• Don't piss off the dishwashers. You're wearing a white dress shirt and they have a hose.
  

I hate college, and I haven't graduated from High School yet.

I started my first official college class today. "Business Etiquette and Professionalism" through one of the local tech colleges in the area.

After going my (relatively) short chapter reading I decided to get ahead of myself and take the quiz, which needed to be in by next Sunday.

10/12. 83%.



C-

GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH

Holy no updates, Batman! I think I might be going it alone at this rate. So, I beat Fallout 3 today, and it had it's ups and downs. The ending rather hits you hard, and you can't play after the end, because SPOILER! Your character dies of radiation. You, the player, is treated to a slide show documenting your journey with a voice over. The End. Then my game stopped working.

Well, to say my game stopped working is a little unfair, it merely said that Fallout3.exe has performed an illegal operation, and must be shut down. So, I suppose I'll review this game, and maybe do a game review once a week til I run out of games that I own.

So, FALLOUT 3~!

Oh, this will contain spoilers. Beware.

You, a shiny eyed Vault Dweller, from the Vault that never opens it's doors (200 Years since the end of the Nuclear Holocaust, and still they don't come out to play) stumbles bleary eyed out of the vault you've known your whole life. Now, a Vault can be described as a sort of Appartment building built into rock and expanding down to shelter the population inside from Radiation.

You happened to be part of Vault 101, a social experiment to see what happens when people are sealed away for long amounts of time. IE: Isolation. Your father left before you, and you're out to track him down now. The game is very open ended, allowing you to decide the fates of many things. For example near the beginning, a man approaches you about detonating the undetonated Nuke lying in the center of the nearest town to Vault 101, Megaton.

Proving what a pansy I am, I vouched for not blowing up the city whose residents all seem to like me, and I can buy my ammo (Believe me, you're going to need to buy a LOT of ammo). This set me on the path of a do-gooder. I took most of the quests that put me in a good light, and eventually found myself opposing the Government super Computer cum President, President Eden.

I was now aligned with The Brotherhood of Steel. I like them, they had their heads on straight for the most part. Anyway, I suppose this is why some people LOVE this game, and others find it to be a good play, but not entirely rewarding. See, most people enjoy sandbox mayhem games, like Grand Theft Auto, or Saints Row. I've come to the conclusion I don't. Why? Because I don't like hurting people.

It's a strange thing to realize, but I tried to play Fallout 3 as close to my own personal values as I could (Although I didn't have a Y chromosome, and I was ironically named Cynn), and found that to make the same choices in Fallout 3, I actually talked my way out of bad situations, reasoning people to point their guns elsewhere. I even saved a Super Mutant who was trapped (And was rewarded by him aiding in my escape later in the game) in a chamber. I was the ultimate fighter of good. My Pip-Boy (Sorta like a PDA on steroids) Karma indicator took on the form of Jeebus.

In sandbox games, most people have fun running people over, or causing mayhem and destruction for amusement. I can't do that for some reason. I feel empathy for the poor people being mutilated and brutalized. This leads to self righteous games, games where yeah, in the long run, people survive and prosper, but You get very little reward beyond losing more ammo.

Wrapped up in this is a recommendation of sorts. It is a fun game, although sometimes the lack of ammo can really be a drag. Have fun kiddies.

Well now!

Apparently blogger isn't blocked at school anymore. Originally it was. Of course, this doesn't release Quotulatiousness from it's blocking heaven. Not too much to report beyond getting a phone call on my cell phone this morning ni school. Thank goodness for loud hallways!

Cheers!

America lost the War on Drugs. Shhh, don't say it too loud!

I was looking for articles for my Social Issue report, and stumbled across this little bit from the RollingStones. Here's the link: America Lost the War on Drugs

They were, says John Coleman, then the DEA's assistant administrator for operations, "filled with DEA reports" - internal documents that laid out, in extraordinary detail, the agency's repeated attempts to capture Escobar.

"He had shelves and shelves and shelves of these things," Coleman tells me. "It was stunning. A lot of the informants we had, he'd figured out who they were. All the agents we had chasing him - who we trusted in the Colombian police - it was right there. He knew so much more about what we were doing than we knew about what he was doing."

Where does a vacation go? I have to go back to school on Monday, and I haven't got anything important done. I still have to write a ten to fourteen page Social Issue report for Monday, which is quite important. So now I sit with one of those really annoying sinking feelings in my stomach about having to go back to school tomorrow.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not one of those people that chronically hates high school. I just don't want to go back and deal with my classes. I'm bored of them. My English class is quite frustrating, and since we're only doing presentations until the end of Semester/Exam Review, it's going to stay frustrating. My Yearbook class doesn't end until the end of the school year, which means nothing is happening at the moment beyond normal stuff. Math is easy, and History is easy and boring!

My dad once described sitting down at a job for the first time, and then realizing that this will be your life from here on out, and it was the most depressing thought he'd conceived in a long time, and I'm starting to feel the same. The end of this month can't come fast enough. I would honestly just take my final exams now, despite missing the last 2 weeks worth of knowledge, confident I could pull a good mark.

I think what really brought it home to me today was that I had to dedecorate the tree/living room, and that left a lot to think about. The vacation itself, have I had as much fun as I could've? I could have done all my homework at the beginning, and spent the last few days relaxing! But that's not the way I work.

Oh well. Signing off 'til next time.

It occurs to me that now Lycoris looks a lot more like it's been established for a large amount of time. Of course, this is all a matter of opinion based on my definition of "Long". Quotulatiousness would laugh at me about that, claiming that until I've been around for 3 years, I'm not old, however the blogger template makes the blog look much older than it is.

May I direct you to the right slightly, where it now says 2008 and then 2009. This tickles me somewhat.

Cheers.

Happy New year for all our "Faithful" readers! 2008 was a good year, and I hope 09 will be good too! More to come later.