Climb to the Shrine, Right What Is Wrong

( Nothing of interest )

--( Recommendations )

Ah... right. My father took the family to a classical music concert tonight, where I heard Saint-Saëns - Symphony No. 3: "Organ Symphony", which is worth the listen... but muuuuch better in person. (Or perhaps it was just the interpretation - there was classical music to which one could headbang.) Headphones just don't give the same full-body vibration.

Aside from that... eh, not much? Airplanes aren't so bad if one isn't checking luggage, as it turns out. And the announcer for the plane was a real crack-up today - one of the benefits of flying Southwest is that they seem to have an unusual proportion of would-be stand-up comedians amongst their crew.

I also have a new sketchbook, so I drew a little. Mainly the Ashford brats twins, but I also mucked about a bit with trying to design some original-fic OCs. ...I guess my main problem on the writing front right now is that the events of 2012 altered my views on several fundamental facts of life and made me take a serious interest in re-evaluating and changing myself, and so I don't really know what I want in a protagonist any more. Villains, I can do easily, but - not heroes, right now. ...I'll get back to you on that.

Wish I could report more. ...Guess I need to do a bit less Tumblr reblogging (though I'll cut myself slack today on the grounds that I'd been gone from that site for over a week) and a bit more IRL activities. I've decided to start writing about real life more on my Dreamwidth/LiveJournal in order to motivate myself to take more of an interest in it. (I know that sounds absolutely ridiculous. Don't ask - just understand that I'm pulling my head out of fogs I didn't even realize it was in, and my resulting understanding of my surroundings has changed from 'I'm about knee-high in water, but wading along well' to 'I'M BREATHING THROUGH MY ****ING NOSTRILS AND TRYING NOT TO CHOKE ON WATER, WHAT THE ****'. Yep, welcome to reality at last, Guardian's Song. You've acquired some fascinating late fees...)

On a cheerier note, it's great to be off of the partial hiatus! I did get a few things done...

Certain math programs don't like factoring numbers when the prime factors go over 36 digits long.
Duly noted.

--

In commentary that will actually interest fandom people - Fire Emblem: Awakening is great, but I think my grinding was really a bad idea. Next time, I'll only unlock certain... features (avoiding spoilers) for people I use enough to get up to 20/15 - not, um, certain others. :\ So third run will basically be a really cheap run, focusing on just power-units. This one can be the one I go back to for postgame stuff. D|

Meanwhile, I'm feeling intermittently-inspired to write fic - I was churning out unfortunate amounts of badfic fic of dubious quality while on caffeine, but I went off it again due to sleepiness issues and mysterious muscle aches. As my mother had the same thing with much less caffeine intake, we're writing the symptoms off as a passing infection, but we had to be sure at the time. (If that was garbled - yes, I'll go on caffeine again, but I'm not on it right now.) My apologies for not producing much content of value recently.

(Edit: Actually, I looked up the side effects of Splenda, and it turns out that's probably the reason we start dozing off a few hours after ingesting Diet Coke with Splenda. Hm. :\ Guess stevia is the only artificial sweetener that doesn't give me issues...)

At any rate - sorry about not doing much recently. ...Today has not been my day.

Well, well. Turns out I'm not the only one who suffered side-effects for over two years after stopping Yasmin.

( Read more... )

Entries describing "Work on X for Y amount of time" completely fail to work, as I have extremely poor time-perception skills and the exercises thus mean nothing to me. ("Get a stopwatch"? Stop your crazy talk! :P More seriously, I... don't do well even with timers. Einstein's 'sitting with a pretty girl/sitting on a hot stove' comment really describes my varying time-perception.)

Entries describing concrete actions, however, motivate me like heck. So I'm going to switch the time-based To-Dos/Dailies/Habits to action-based variants, and see if things pick up.

...Ah, well. I'm calling this a brain deficit in need of correction and am going to focus on compensating for it in the meantime.

...Also, this is going to help as a reminder that I have a certain all-purpose notebook without any of the garbage from notes and doodles. I have the Russian alphabet in here! And a list of all hiragana + katakana! And math formulas! How did I survive when I misplaced this? :D

(Being finally able to admit to this deficit is possibly the best thing HabitRPG's done for me. I'll have to adjust my planning skills accordingly...)

Urgently need to update The Hand once the semester is over. Ooh dear, looks like I have people awaiting updates. D: On the bright side, I do have over 1K of the next chapter written... I just need time. About 10 hours worth of it, since I am a complete slowpoke and have a maximum writing speed of 1K per hour...

Also need to spork - yes, I know I am terminally overdue on sporkings. It's not that I'm forgetting fandom, it's that I haven't been doing much, period. ...Well, you guys probably guessed that from my mentions of looking up ADHD coping tools and newfound love for Habit RPG. And my distinct wonkiness in forgetting to answer comments - I'm sorry for that, and I'll try to get to them eventually.

And I need to urgently get school things done, and all that good stuff. I'd try to say more, but I'm working on stopping my emotional-windups before they start.

...I think beating Shining Force was good for me. Silly as it sounds, I've just been looking for signs that things I've enjoyed are still there. ...This hasn't been a bad year like 2012 (THANK THE HEAVENS, AND AMEN), but it's been in a sort of fog of translucent neutrality. Time to tank up on the coffee and forge onward into the fog.

(Don't mind this post. *insert "LiveJournal: Because Everyone Wants To Hear About Your Cat" icon here*)

>Browses through an old textbook for kicks
>Sees that it has a problem identical to one which gave me trouble earlier this week
>And that the style of this book gives more hints for tricky problems
>Resists urge to bang face against open palm

Hmph. I really wish I had the power to turn my hormones on and off at will. It would do wonders for my motivation & such.

That "withdrawal" headache you get a day after dosing up on caffeine and taking no booster-shots afterward?

It almost disappears if you don't look at anything either bright or white.

*sigh* Well, at least I found a use for Windows 7's "Magnifier -> Turn on color inversion" option.

(And also, the new interface on Codecademy should be shot, flogged, then shot again for having bright white next to pure black, so that you can't win either way. D| ...The programmers themselves can get off with just being smacked around the head and shoulders with a codfish, but the interface should be shot. C'mon, I'm sure people with actual migraine issues use Codecademy, too...)

[Also, for those who still use LiveJournal? If you don't know about the Magnifier -> Turn on color inversion option, please try it out. It's under "Ease of Access Center -> Optimize Visual Display -> Turn on Magnifier". ( Here's a sample of the LJ feed, colors-reversed. ) See? No more shockingly white entries...)

I really need to get back to homework and real work.

Spring Break was fun, but... aaaah. D: Man, I've been... readjusting for a while.

With that in mind, let me resolve to do several important things, such that I have a reminder online:

1) Exercise (weights, finger-gripper contraption) every day.
2) Derive that silly recursion relation. (Simple matter of replacing a Shining Force playing session or two with work. I need to slow down my Shining Force progress enough so I don't smash through the game in a week or two, so this is actually beneficial to my hedonism. *desperate appeal to own slacking tendencies*)
3) Do homework regularly. Homework done early = more time to laze about later. More importantly, it equals time to laze about continuously later, which - yeah, yeah, I'll get to it! D:
4) Run cases for research. I may be baffled somewhat, but I need to work on it more to figure out what I'm most baffled about. *sigh*
5) Get to sleep earlier. Earlier sleep = less sleep = more free time.

Let's get to it...

Need to sleep.

...Need to do homework due on Tuesday... and research, due probably last week... D:

Ah well. Now that I realize I need to get my rear in gear? It's time to stop fooling around with other music and settle down to Livin' On A Prayer (Power Remix) and Alex Rentz's MIDI of the Rayquaza-battle theme*. ...To those with auditory sensitivities, I should note that both tracks have a constant drumbeat going on in the background - which is what makes them work for me, but may be counterproductive for you. It's covered up by horns and flourishes and such, and is not in the foreground of either track, but if your brain doesn't like the beat, it cannot be helped.

For me, however, those tracks cause an increase in "goal-oriented behavior", as the fancy medical articles put it. So here we go...

Need to put both of them on my iPod, darn it...

*The actual track doesn't work because it alternates ears. That's nice and all, but the constant drumbeat is what drops my brain out of la-la land.

And each vertical stack of apartments shares the same circuits.

Whee, subsidized housing. D|