Okay, I was having a very awesome day. My pay just came in, it's sunny, there were good buskers out in force, I had a delicious lunch and successfully recconoitered hotcakes, trousers and a copy of Fallout 3 (which is by the same people who made Oblivion, only unlike Oblivion it was favoured startlingly well by Yahtzee), and then I came home and my computer died. It died and would not restart. ANGST AND RUIN.

Thus, my computer is now in the hands of the campus computer man (God, I hope I'm still under warrenty), and I'm typing this up in the campus library. Thank God for the sparse population of summer students, is all I can say.

Anyway, now that Braca's in somewhat more capable hands than mine, my panic and woe is receding and I hope to hear back from computer man tomorrow, if not this afternoon. I should probably take this opportunity to go back into town, get my book o' nudes, borrow a DVD player from the office and watch good things with my flatmates. Sound like a plan? I think so.

In other news, Gmail now has themes. And by themes, I mean ninjas. Yay, now my stars are shurikens! \o/

Aaand on less smug news:

LJ, I have a dilemma. Having a job has given me a little disposable income, which I really should save for my Christmas holidays or at least Christmas presents (and believe me, I'm working on that), and I am trying valiantly not to blow on naughty things. However. There is this book. It is a gigantic, hardcover, beautiful book for drawing anatomy, only instead of irritating pencil-drawing instructions it is, basically, a big book o' nudes. It is exactly what I want, as I promised myself I'd work on musculature this Summer, and it's got all sorts of different bodies at different angles with emphases on different parts. It's normally about $95, but with a Staff Appreciation Day discount I'd get 40% off it, and I get paid this week, and I've been pretty good, but still, that's over $50. Thus I ask you:

Poll #1299787
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Alex's Big Book o' Nudes?

1. Today, I truly went over to the Marvel side of the Force. I went to Graphic on Cuba Street and saw this t-shirt and I... I bought it. SHUT UP IT IS BEAUTIFUL. I will wear it to work. I will wear it with such pride.

2. I have realised I can no longer see the acronym MMORPG without pronouncing it "mummorpaguh" in my head.

3. Wikipedia is too dry and dull for the likes of me, oh no. Instead, I spent two hours last night adding entries to TVTropes.org, which is a far more entertaining experience, but does leave one with the nigh-uncontrollable urge to include at least one link in every sentence.

This is what happens when most of my friends leave town.

Tonight's Guy Fawks Night, which meant that all of us still here took blankets and bottles and snacky things down to the waterfront and watched a very intense twenty minutes of fireworks burst over the water. Perfect night: cloudless, a crescent moon, and a huge crowd bursting into applause when it ended.

And, okay, it was especially good because I'd been grinning for the last four hours, ever since Sas texted me at work to repeat, with allcaps and a large number of exclamation points, that Obama had won the US election. (Jenni came in later, ostensibly to buy a book and tell me the plan re: fireworks and the watching thereof; in reality, she came pounding up the escalator, squeaked "OMG DID YOU HEAR?" and joined me in squealing and jumping up and down right there in the middle of the shop where I work on a really busy day. Hee!) My sincerest congratulations, all Americans on my flist, for your country not voting for another bunch of fundamentalist retards. I hope it only gets better from here.

Heart... suddenly thumping... hands... trembling... tea... still delicious...

Note to self: green tea is soothing antioxident-rich vegan-approved hippy juice, but it's still caffeinated. Stop after four pots in a row.

P.S: Yay! The accounting trolls have given me my tax number! It only took two and a half months.

Oh, not a good day. ( Cut for a gigantic paragraph of work-related woe. )

Anyway, that would have been bearable, because I knew that when I came home, I would be able to heat up my delicious leftover chicken tikka and it would all be cool. Then I opened the fridge.

SOMEONE ATE MY MOTHERFUCKING DINNER. THERE IS NOTHING LEFT BUT ONE HALF-CHEWED STUMP OF MEAT AND GOO. WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK, I AM GOING TO KILL SOMEONE WITH AN AXE.

Crickets: *chirp*

Night: *dark*

Flat: *empty*

...

Well, this is the lamest Hallowe'en ever.

It's 5:41 am; I should have been in bed many, many hours ago and I really don't know why I'm still up; I can only blame the internet. But the thing it, I've turned the light off because the sun is coming up, slowly but surely, and the view out my window, down the hill and over the rest of Wellington is worth it. The sky's a rim of orange around the bay, fading up to a greenish to pale blue to dark way, way above, and everything else - the trees and hills and buildings and birds in the sky - are still in silhouette, except for the orange lights of houses that are glittering in the distance, and the street lights that cast this peachy glow on the concrete tower blocks and make them, just for this brief while, beautiful.

I think I'll go to sleep now, before it gets too bright.

Ugh, that was dire. Okay, it wasn't dire. The first bit where you had to Name That Poem was bastard-difficult, but only worth 10%; I'm pretty sure I did much better on the three long answers. Er, providing the examiner doesn't mark me down for writing them on much the same stuff as my second essay, i.e. "mind-forg'd manacles" in Romantic poetry with a rather heavy concentration on The Ryme of the Ancient Mariner and Ode to a Nightingale. I LIKE KEATS AND COLERIDGE OKAY. First question was "mind forg'd manacles," where I basically repeated my second essay but hopefully not in a failable way; second question was about how Coleridge liked to put his characters in fantastical settings and then crush them with disturbingly realistic mental problems (I concentrated on Mariner again, and then Christabel, leaving out the lesbian subtext as much as I could stand to); third was Keats doing light and dark, and I basically just concentrated on his Odes to Autumn, the Grecian urn and the nightingale and how he liked finding the middle space between death and beauty - on that front, I'm really hoping they'll mark me well for depth instead of bitching me out for not expanding to other poems. ARGH.

In an effort to stop thinking about this, Sas and I are going to Lanes tonight, where we intend to drink frozen margheritas, eat pizza and bowl. Exams are over! TIME TO GET DRUNK.

I was always sceptical about green tea, for many reasons: the first being that all fruity teas I have ever tried taste like perfumed wax; the second being that I will not stand for such hippy nonsense, especially since everyone decided that it was the second coming of Christ and I kind of felt like the tea-loving communities of the world were nagging me; and the third being that there is perfectly good black tea that makes all other beverages redundant, so why even bother?

Then my stomach decided that, after 20 years of delicious service, it no longer required milk's services. It signalled this with horrible acidy pain after every tiny bowl of cereal. Thus, my intake of black tea with the requisite half-cup of full-fat deliciousness has been severely limited of late (I swear, I can only drink three cups a day now. The horror). I spent months wandering in the wilderness, looking for something hot and soothing but non-acid-making to fill the tea void. Then Sas' birthday happened, or more specifically, the day after Sas' birthday, when we went to yum-char; there I met my old nemesis, green tea, lurking in a teapot like the last boss of a game I had never bothered playing to the end. I was thirsty; it was on the house. You see where this is going.

And, okay, fine: it's nothing like the deliciousness of a strong, caffeinated, tongue-shrivelling cup of Tetley with gallons of lactic goodness on top. But it is hot, and soothing, and it doesn't taste like wax (much). In fact, it's a little like beer: gross, yet oddly compelling.

Anyway, long story short: tomorrow we have an exam on Romantic poetry, closed-book, and I needed something that would a) calm my nerves and b) not compound the roiling of the belly while I try desperately to memorise the works of at least three major poets. Thus, I stopped by Tazo and got a little thingy of Tokyo Lime and a steeping ball. Tea is consumed, nerves are calm, Keats is as well in mind as he's ever going to be. Next time, green tea. Next time.

I'm trying to be cynical about Watchmen, but the new footage is giving me nothing but inappropriate levels of joy and excitement at how right everything looks. Even rumours that they've changed the ending to make it more upbeat are failing to give me more than a brief feeling of horror, since while I am a great lover of Alan Moore, changes to adaptations are not necessarily evil and all for the bad - it'll just depend on whether the ending works and is in keeping with the rest of the story's tone. I know this is fangirl heresy, but the part of me that's had three years in Film sometimes just says, "well, fuck it, the point is to make a good movie first and a faithful adaptation second." One does not mean the other, is what I'm saying: look at the first two Harry Potter movies compared to the rest.

I've only read Watchmen twice: the first time was in Norwich, two or three years ago, when I borrowed it from the library at Becky's behest and found it mind-boggling but very enjoyable. The second time was two days ago, when I decided "what the fuck, my pay's coming in and I've got a 30% employee discount" and bought my own copy from Borders. The number of things I'd missed the first time around or forgotten since was staggering, like the bits in between the chapters about the Minutemen, the death of the first Nite Owl, and pretty much everything about Rorschach - I felt like such an idiot when I recognised the crazy guy holding the sign saying 'The End Is Nigh' and went "Hey!" Also the echoing of panels in transition, as scenes ending with one tableu open with another that is compositionally similar; it's a motif I noticed in The Killing Joke, and now I want to get my hands on some of Moore's other stuff and see if it's something he does all the time. I didn't notice it in Top Ten, f'rinstance, but I wouldn't say no to the opportunity to go back and check. As it were. *cough* Also, I wonder if it's something the director's going to work into the film, and how it would work if he did.

Anyway, how's everyone else feeling about it? Excited? Hopeful? Cynical? Frothing at the mouth in glee and/or rage? Talk to me, comics fans.

Christ, ever since I've gotten hooked on Zero Punctuation my internal monologue has consisted entirely of a stream of loquatious Anglo-Australian-accented invective chiefly concerned with pointing out all the possible flaws of anything and everything in the shortest time possible; this gives a disturbing doppler effect to my mental associations as I am imagining Ben "Yahtzee" Chroshaw's voice with one ear (obviously) and my brother's voice with the other, since my brother has been doing streams of loquatious Anglo-Australian-accented invective ever since he'd been in England long enough to possibly be described as "Anglo-Australian" and, given the precise accent he's had since before our family set foot in England, quite a bit before then. I'm sure this (and the resulting run-on sentences) will fade with time, but that time will have to be some point after I've stopped cacking myself laughing every time I watch Croshaw's review of, say, Metal Gear Solid 4 (a game that I have never played and probably never will since even I draw the line at shelling out $50 solely for homoerotic subtext), which is to say, some point after I'm dead. My point is, I have been sucked in like a hapless vacationing businessman at the littlest whorehouse in Texas and am now cursing whoever it was at SciFi club who put me on to the damn website in the first place. Please, somebody, for the love of God return my stream of thought to something resembling normal.

*deep breath*

In other news, I have finally been paid, and even though the incompetant accounting trolls at Inland Revenue still haven't processed my paperwork (yes, I know), two months' pay still looks damn good even with 40% lopped off it, and even though that also means it's been over two months since I applied for my IRD number, the thought of a tax refund some time in the distant future fills me with a warm glow that just about makes up for the past eight weeks of cocking about. Of course my first instinct was to buy anything and everything that had ever been sparkly enough to catch my eye, including several DVDs, PC games, the newest Terry Pratchett that I have been promised for Christmas even though that's aaaaaaaaaaaages away and it's in Borders right now, a cheap video camera, and a 120GB iPod to hold my (approximately) 4GB music collection, but I managed to reign it in enough to only buy the latest Empire, New Scientist and Sims 2 expansion pack, which all in all I consider a very modest booty. I will now go away before I give in to the urge to whinge about the various small letdowns of said Sims 2 expansion pack, reminding myself that I am not Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw and my realm of expertise is not video games, consoles and streams of hilarious invective but television, homoeroticism in popular culture and whining about my successful middle-class student life, so with that, goodnight.

Merlin is taking forever to download. Distract me!

( Ganked from Eliyes: )

HOME. Yeah, bitches, our internet is back and not wireless any more, so we can't get hacked. I agree with my brother: cables are where it's at. SQUEE HOME INTERNET! \o/

I woke up at 8 a.m. this morning, but not because I had to walk up to Fairlie Terrace before 10, no no. Instead, I wandered out into the living room, inspected the vast array of alcohol bottles left from the party, and then Kate put on Iron Man. So I watched Iron Man and drank a beer, on Monday morning, before 11 am.

I am a classy, classy lady. A classy lady whose semester is over. \o/

No, I swear, this post will contain absolutely no emo distress. I swear on my stuffed cuddly tiger that is older than I am. I am in a good mood. I am hoping this continues.

People, I said I'd be sweet by Saturday, and, well, it's Friday afternoon and I'm just about there. My last Film project: done. (And also funny. C'mon, I got to make a soundtrack for the sequence of The Incredible Shrinking Man where he gets chased all over the house by his kitty! Do you know how much fun I had making the cat hisses sound like scary King Kong-style dinosaur roars?) My last English essay: done. (And I realised that Heidi had actually managed to imbue me with a genuine liking for Romantic poetry, which makes her an awesome professor. Well, except for Wordsworth - I'm convinced he was a complete wanker. But Coleridge and Keats? Awesome) And the mumbletyhundred dollars of my share of the phone bill: deposited. (And I even have enough left to eat with!)

Sas' big burlesque party is tomorrow, and it is going to be awesome because this semester is over, and that's twice the reason to celebrate. Woo! \o/

Skipback=240. That is all.

... Okay, that's not all. I still have a really horrible cold, but I am solvent, have paid off my rent, my most important essay is finished and in on time, and I've been given an extension on my Film project. I still have not talked to Inland Revenue, but I think that can wait until I've gotten the really urgent stuff out of the way first.

If I can just make it through this week, I think everything will turn out okay. Also, if I can just schedule time throughout the week for regular internet fixes. *twitches*

In brief:

Some shithead hacked our internet and used almost double our cap, so now we owe Telecom many, many hundreds of dollars. I spent half an hour on the phone with them this morning, and it turns out that being sympathetic and being able to do a damn thing to help us are two very different things. We're a bit screwed. In other news, it's Sas' birthday on Monday, so you can imagine how sanguine she is right now. Happy birthday, dude: here's our phone bill.

I called Inland Revenue again today, and instead of stuffing me around with non-answers and wait-and-sees, this lady told me that I should have gotten it a week ago, but now I'm not even on their records. So I have to do it all over again. For those who came in late, I can't get paid without an IRD number; I've now been working with Borders for over a month. Well, when I finally do get paid, it's going to be pretty epic.

Last week of term is coming up: everything's due, there's stuff-ups with scheduling sound equipment which means everyone's panicking about our last Film assignment, and I still have to get in my last English essay.

Now have to go and ask Bernard what the hell I'm supposed to be doing in the sound suite. Then I have to go to work. All I really want is to scream and punch multiple people in the face, very hard. Is that an impossible request?

I'm better now. Rent is paid, sun is shining, food is in fridge. And as long as three seperate telemarketers haven't lied to me (... much), I should have an IRD number now, just in time to be paid this week - but even if I don't, I'm still solvent, mostly because the National Bank of My Parents came through for me. In fact, my dad actually called me up at 6:45 am (about midnight his time, if I'm not far off) on Friday to ask if there was something wrong and if he could do anything about it. His parent-fu is strong.

In other news, I have re-uploaded The Sims 2 on Braca, and am working to build the utopia I spent months planning while Simless. (You think I'm joking. I think I have three notebooks full of Sim house blueprints and character stats.) Not only am I once again hooked on it, but I've gotten Sas hooked on it too, and now she plays whenever I'm at work away from the house for more than an hour. Poor Sas.

It has not been a fantastic week; actually, it's been kind of really crappy and stressful, but a few things are better as of this evening, and I've been hoping things will start looking up soon. Agh. Maybe lists will illustrate. Cut-tagged lists, so you may pass this over.

( Things that were causing freakouts vs. things that aren't much of a change, but might be better. )

Right. That is probably much more than your recommended intake of gah for today, so I will leave you, and I promise not to post again until it's something awesome.