User:	kandigurl
	Date:	2009-12-16 19:47
	Subject:	LJ Idol - Topic 8 - Reprobate
	Security:	Public

My mother said that due to my poor showing last week, I should probably write about sex this week.

( Mother knows best! Very probably NSFW, unless you work in an unsavory place, like a phone sex office or the sewers. Also I'm kind of terrified of my mom reading this, but here goes nothing... )

(This post has been brought to you by therealljidol™)

	User:	kandigurl
	Date:	2009-12-15 01:55
	Subject:	Danny Wallace (and writing)
	Security:	Public

So I just ordered three more Danny Wallace books from Amazon. Through the magic of used, I got them all for around $15. It was the shipping that counted for most of the cost, due to the fact that I was ordering them from different shippers, but WHATEVS.

Listen, seriously, Danny Wallace is a fantastic author. If you like what I write, you should read his stuff because it is so much better. And on occasion, strikingly similar.

As an example, here's a short passage from Join Me:

"I could tell he didn't quite know how to react. I could tell this because he'd gone all quiet and was avoiding my eye, and he'd muttered the words, 'I don't quite know how to react to that.'"

GUYS SERIOUSLY GO READ A DANNY WALLACE BOOK RIGHT NOW. DO IT.

I am in author love. I want to be as awesome as Danny Wallace. That is my new Writing Goal.

SO CLOSE TO ALMOST DONE WITH GETTING PRINT VERSIONS OF BOOK FOUR AND THE OMNIBUS AVAILABLE. Once that's done, all of my attention is going to the llama book. I can't wait. I can't wait to do some hardcore revision. I've never really done that before, so I'm both terrified and excited, but I'm mostly looking forward to revisiting the llama books and transforming them into something new and exciting, but also very the same as before. Mostly I'm excited to not have to read a chapter of someone else's writing before I set to work on my own stuff.

OH AND. The voting for LJ Idol is up. If you liked my last post at all, or you like me at all, or you just don't want to break my heart, I could use your help. It's not my best week ever over there.

	User:	kandigurl
	Date:	2009-12-12 00:35
	Subject:	LJ Idol - Topic 7 - One Touch
	Security:	Public

I used to be able to teleport.

Yessir, with just one touch to my magic stone, I could pop from right in front of you to halfway across the world!

I also used to have hooves and a tail. And ride around on a giant purple elephant.

And I was also a carefully crafted collection of pixels.

And, okay, I was playing World of Warcraft.

My character, Jujubii, was a beautiful, white-haired, draenei mage that I had diligently and lovingly worked up to level 62. (If you don't play WoW, before the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, the level cap was 70.) This took me two years to do, for a number of reasons. Reason the first, I played at a friend's house, so my WoW time was limited to when everyone else was playing (otherwise I felt like a huge jerk for playing this game instead of hanging out with my friends). Reason the second, I would go for months at a time without playing, months I could have spent leveling, but instead chose to do far less productive things like working and interacting with actual human beings.

Jujubii and I had a very special relationship. I didn't like playing with other people in game, so it was always just me and Jujubii. When the world got tough and tried to keep us down, we'd just rub on our rune of teleportation and end up in a completely different place.

Teleportin' don't come easy. You've gotta earn it. You don't get the ability to teleport until you're twenty levels in. But once you've got it, you quickly learn how to mock those that don't. "Oh, you have to get on a boat to go to Stormwind? Well, I can get there in three seconds. Because I'm a freaking mage."

This was all blissful and fun, that is until Jujubii and I were torn apart. I don't want to get into all of the details, because some of them are pretty painful. Long story short, my reputation with the friends who let me share their account went from exalted to neutral to hostile.

All of my work, gone. Not just with Jujubii, but with the friendship, too. Suddenly I was out one gorgeous magical alien, and a whole group of people I'd grown to love. Also, I could no longer ride around on my giant purple elephant.

Fast forward a few months. I can't take it anymore. I miss playing World of Warcraft. So I bust into my bank account and spend money I don't have in order to pay for a Battle Chest, which includes the codes to play the regular game with the Burning Crusades expansion (which you need in order to play the Draenei race). In a fit of glee, I plugged in the codes and set up a new character. Jujubie.

As I played through the starter levels, I realized something. Running around without my elephant, without my arsenal of kick ass spells, without being able to touch a stone and teleport? It was hard. It was obnoxious. It was slow.

Which is kind of what it's like whenever you make a new start. I found myself at a new starting point in my real life, discovering who I was without these friends. Exploring the opportunities I never thought about before, because I worried about what they might think. It's been hard. Occasionally it's been obnoxious. And it's definitely been slow.

But sometimes, you've got to start from scratch and rebuild. You've got to take the chance to reset yourself and create someone new, a new character, even if it seems like you're spending all of your time dying at the hands of murlocs that just want to throw javelins through your chest. Because you'll get there eventually. You'll get back to that point where you feel like what used to take forever now takes just a snap of your fingers, or a rub of your rune stone.

Someday, I will be able to teleport again. And I will have earned it.


(This post has been brought to you by therealljidol™)

	User:	kandigurl
	Date:	2009-12-07 17:02
	Subject:	YAAAAAAAAAAY
	Security:	Public

I just got Join Me by Danny Wallace in the mail!!

I'M SO EXCITED TO READ IT OH MAN.

So I don't think I posted it to my lj, but I put all of the books I have yet to read in alphabetical order and told myself I would only read them in that order and any new books I got after that I would put behind this pile, also in alphabetical order, to read once I'm done with the ones I've already got.

I'm making an exception for Join Me, because Danny Wallace is effing brilliant and I want to read something effing brilliant right now.

Danny Wallace is the dude who also wrote Yes Man (which later became a movie), which I was interested in reading but only became increasingly more excited about reading when I found out two things: A) It actually happened, to Danny Wallace, who decided to say yes to EVERYTHING and then wrote about it, and B) That Danny Wallace is BRITISH. And HILARIOUS. Hilarity is always multiplied by a pretty big number when the hilarious person turns out to be British. Trust me on this.

I loved Yes Man so much that even though that's the only of his books I've read, I deemed Danny Wallace one of my Very Favorite Authors and promptly put everything he'd ever written on my wishlist on Paperback Swap.

It took FOREVER but someone finally had a copy of Join Me for me, which is a book he wrote about a cult he inadvertently started. AMAZING. I CANNOT WAIT TO READ IT.

I love Danny Wallace because his books are about crazy things he did on random whims, and how they turned into something greater and more awesome than he could have ever hoped. They are REAL STORIES about a CRAZY GUY. I love it to pieces. I kind of want to meet this man.

( Now is probably a good time to list books I've read since the last time I listed books I've read! )

	User:	drninja
	Date:	2009-12-07 04:22
	Subject:	Starbucks and Their Music
	Security:	Public
	Mood:	frustrated

So, Starbucks has a CD player for the overhead music. Unfortunately, it won't work with standard audio CDs. It uses MPEG. But not MP3. No, MP2. Not just any MP2. MP2s compressed in mono. At 44100 kHz. At 80kbps. And not just any 44100 80kbps MP2s, but they have to be arranged back-to-back in a headerless format as one big file named playdisc.AUD. They also have a text descriptor file that requires, in a very specific format, the artist and song names along with their byte offsets and lengths.

It's not like I can't figure out how to make the files. They're just making it real hard on me. I've been trying to look over other people's work, and both bits of code that have been written are incredibly sloppy, poorly commented, and produce less than functional results. I know exactly how the results are wrong, but I'll be damned if I comb through a hundred songs to dick around with the text descriptor. I've even got the audio formatted, no problem, but this text file is annoying as hell.

There is only one thing in this world more annoying than having to install Eclipse and Visual Studio to look over other people's shitty source code.

Starbucks Christmas music.

	User:	kandigurl
	Date:	2009-12-06 14:08
	Subject:	Chandler Nash and the Jingle Bell Run
	Security:	Public

The Bella Cullen Project's very own Chandler Nash WON the Battle of the Bands in Ft. Worth, so she got to advance to the finals in Dallas. Which were held at The Club Formerly Known As The Gypsy Tea Room (but is now The Door). So not only did I get to go support Chandler in friggen' Dallas, I got to go to one of my favorite clubs from back in the day even though it's a little different now.

MAN, was that interesting. Brought back a lot of memories, including TMBG and Rasputina, as well as hanging out with Aaron, Anne, Jacob, etc. Miss those days.

Also, brought back memories of NEVER BEING ABLE TO FIND THE FUCKING PLACE. I don't know why it's so tough to get to when I've been there a million times.

Anyway, I got there early enough to talk to Chandler for a while, and I had a terribly revelatory conversation with her wherein I found out that she hates Edward Cullen (!!!) and thinks Twilight is poorly written (!!!) and that the lyrics to "Sexy Vampire" were silly and ridiculous (!!!!) and all sorts of things that we actually totally agree on. Not that she's knocking the BCP's songs, but she realizes they are silly, and I thought it was great to not have to worry about maybe hurting her feelings and we could talk like people who are equally entranced yet appalled by the Twilight phenomenon.

Then, when Ally and Tori showed up, I found out that they were both NERDFIGHTERS. FANTASTIC.

Guys, did you know that the cool way to dance these days is to fling yourself about wildly, like a complete spaz, slinging your arms and legs in every direction and potentially kicking people in the face? Chandler called this "Tae Kwan Dancing". It's kind of amazing and hysterical.

Waited through four "screamo" bands while hanging out with Chandler and her friends. Felt old and kind of awkward, but I felt better since Tori's mom was hanging out with us. These girls are hilarious and adorable and it reminded me so hard of being in high school and going out to a club and people watching. Miss it. MISS IT. Want to do that more often. Where is Aaron? Aaron, we need to go to a fucking concert. I don't care who it is. It can suck. Want to hang out with you and laugh and have a frivolous time. OKAY?

So when Chandler finally went on, she was a) the only girl and b) the only non-"screamo" act and c) freaking amazing. She kicked ass, and sounded fantastic, and I wish her set could have been longer. Also found out that she'll be playing at some coffee shops closer to home, so that will be cool. :)

TOPIC THE NEXT: I RAN A 5K YESTERDAY

I've been doing the couch to 5K program for a while now, not even sure. When I started it, I only did it because sparkly_aria was doing it with me and it was her idea, and also because I needed some sort of exercise since I hadn't been doing much other than hooping. I never, ever, ever intended to actually run a 5K.

When I was in elementary school, they used to make us do the Cowtown 10K every year, and it was one of my most miserable memories. I remember hating that thing, hating the practice for it, wanting to die while I was walking it (because I didn't even try to run it, are you kidding?). So running has never really been linked to good things in my brain.

Even when I got to the point in C25K where I was running for 30 minutes three times a week, I still wasn't sure if I wanted to do a whole 5K. But I was intrigued by the Jingle Bell Run, because it's in Downtown Ft. Worth, which is a beautiful city (in my opinion) that holds a lot of memories and good times for me, and also, YOU RUN THE WHOLE THING WITH JINGLE BELLS ON YOUR FEET. Every single runner has JINGLE BELLS on, so everyone is jingling the whole time. Which is pretty awesome. :)

What I didn't realize until I got there is that everyone also dresses up all Christmas-y. Mom tried to tell me, I guess, but I didn't really realize the scope of the dressing up. There were people in all sorts of goofy costumes, running. I've decided that next year I want to run it in a Christmas tutu and stripy tights. BECAUSE COME ON, AWESOME.

ANYWAY. I did it. I ran the whole thing, without stopping to walk at all. And it was actually fun! I felt pretty proud of myself, and as soon as the race was over I went from being proud to wanting to climb into bed and never get out again, and this morning I'm really sore, but it was a lot of fun and I'm glad I did it. Something I never, ever expected I'd be able to do. :)

YAY HOORAY!

This post is over now!

	User:	kandigurl
	Date:	2009-12-05 10:37
	Subject:
	Security:	Public

I just, I should just resign from LJ Idol right now because this guy is going to (AND SHOULD) win: markmade

I don't think I've read any of his entries before today (THERE ARE JUST SO GOD DAMN MANY ENTRIES, GUYS), but his take on this topic was a hilarious sequel to Twilight called "Sunrise".

With cyber dinosaurs from the future.

WHY DIDN'T I THINK OF THAT????

I hate myself a little. It was so obvious.

And his "Bearing False Witness" entry was a proposal for a television show called "Bear: False Witness" (This Show Is Rated TV14, With Scenes Of Intense Violence, Sexuality & A Bear)