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  1. I was playing Ocarina of Time 3D during my lunch break and was completing the trading sidequest, trying like hell to get the Cucco behind the high fence and failing miserably. I must've beaten it a dozen Times in the past but for the life of me I couldn't remember how to get back there then like an angel from Heaven a coworker came up behind me and said "oh all you do is float back there with another Cucco".

    I literally slapped myself in the face, I felt so stupid.
  2. So i saw Amazing Spider-Man 2 tonight. This entry is going to be about me, not the movie, but I must caution you for spoilers up ahead. Don't care or have already seen the movie? Then lets jump in!

    So there is a scene fairly early into the movie when Electro (Jamie Foxx) first discovers his new powers. He stumbles into Time Square where he eventually confronts Spider-Man (Andrew Garfield). Now Electro is how you say.... bat shit insane. He's obsessed with Spider-Man and is a man of great paranoia and nearly crippling depression. A man occasionally I find myself like. So basically, Spider-Man and Electro are in Time Square with police and civilians at the sides. Spider-Man, being the hero that he is, tries to calm Electro down to talk about his problems, and help him with his new powers. The police have backed away and things are working out. But suddenly, a sniper (squat teamer?) shots at Electro and freaks him out. Spider-Man reacts accordingly. The civilian crowd, now watching from the side-lines, starts cheering. "Get that freak, Spidey!" stuff like that. That's it. Electro full on freaks out and as he does i am reminded of past panic attacks that I've had myself.

    Okay so the scene was probably really cheesy to anyone who cant relate, but to me? It was definitely the most accurate representation of a panic attack i've ever witnessed. At least how I experience them. Electro's heart starts racing, filling him with rage and angst. Voices start chiming in, saying stuff like "They betrayed me" "they think your'e worthless" "they need to pay" etc. all while playing to the beat of the music. It's like a song, actually, a song i knew all too well.

    When i freak out like this, as I have recently on new year's eve. My heart starts racing. I start thinking these awful thoughts and they come at intervals that match my heart beat. Its really like my body is singing evil intentions to me. Looking back on it, it's actually quite fascinating, but in the moment its absolutely terrifying. Where Electro and I are similar end here, obviously, because he can shoot electricity at people and i just ran into the employee restroom and broke down crying. But yeah, Im sure I was the only one in the theater crying at that scene. Not full on tears but you know, a little jerk in the heart, a drop of water in the eye.

    The moral of the story is, despite not being a perfect movie, the Amazing Spider-Man 2 was really fun! I recommend it.
    PS- I actually cry at almost every Marvel Flick i see in theaters. When the Avengers all lined up for the final battle. When Cap fought the Winter Soldier. puppy even when Tony summoned all of his Iron Man suits. It just gets me right here!

  4. There are words here and there while reading that I'm not sure I understand properly, or don't know at all. Facial expressions and feelings, and words for places that I never knew before, or wasn't sure of. I would continuously keep having to take breaks to find definitions for things, and sometime into the book I felt like I'd begun repeating myself. I'd been looking up words, putting it into the scene in my head, and immediately forgotten what the word meant. I decided the best thing to do would be to write down words in a notebook as I read, along with their definitions. Since I started writing, however many pages ago, I've got 23 words. And here they all are, definitions included.

    *Noun
    **Adjective
    ***Verb
    Wry **1. Using or expressing dry, esp. mocking, humor.
    **2. (of a person's face or features) Twisted into an expression of disgust, disappointment, or annoyance.

    Niggard *A stingy or ungenerous person.

    Conjecture *An opinion or conclusion formed on the basis of incomplete information.
    **Form an opinion or supposition about (something) on the basis of incomplete information.

    Trepidation *1. A feeling of fear or agitation about something that may happen.
    *2. Trembling motion.

    Nonplussed **1. (of a person) Surprised and confused so much that they are unsure how to react.
    **2. (of a person) Unperturbed.

    Perturb ***1. Make (someone) anxious or unsettled.
    ***2. Subject (a system, moving object, or process) to an influence tending to alter its normal or regular state or path.

    Slight *An insult caused by a failure to show someone proper respect or attention.
    **Small in degree; inconsiderable.
    ***Insult (someone) by treating or speaking of them without proper respect or attention.

    Contrite **Feeling or expressing remorse or penitence; affected by guilt.

    Quip *A witty remark.
    ***Make a witty remark.

    Sullen **1. Bad-tempered and sulky; gloomy.
    **2. (esp. of water) Slow-moving: "rivers in sullen flood".

    Admonition *An act or action of admonishing; authoritative counsel or warning.

    Insolent **Showing a rude or arrogant lack of respect.

    Rankle ***1. (of a wound or sore) Continue to be painful; fester.
    ***2. (of a comment, event, or fact) Cause annoyance or resentment that persists.

    Lecherous **Having or showing excessive or offensive sexual desire.

    Sardonic **Grimly mocking or cynical.

    Earnest *A sign or promise of what is to come: "an earnest of the world's desire not to see the conflict repeated elsewhere".
    **Resulting from or showing intense conviction: "an earnest student".

    Droll **Curious or unusual in a way that provokes dry amusement: "his unique brand of droll self-mockery".

    Reproach *The expression of disapproval or disappointment.
    ***Address (someone) in such a way as to express disapproval or disappointment.

    Curt **Rudely brief: "his reply was curt".

    Placid **(of a person or animal) Not easily upset or excited.
    **(esp. of a place or stretch of water) Calm and peaceful, with little movement or activity.

    Ford *A shallow place in a river or stream allowing one to walk or drive across.
    **(of a person or vehicle) Cross (a river or stream) at a shallow place.

    Petulant **(of a person or their manner) Childishly sulky or bad-tempered.

    Retinue *A group of advisers, assistants, or others accompanying an important person.


    And this concludes Teto's first vocabulary roundup.
  5. So on my way home my car started wonking out on me. Thankfully I was able to pull off to the side of the road and call a tow truck. I was at the garage for an hour when they told me my transmission was shot and I'm in need of a new one and it gets better, it'll cost me $5,000 and it won't be ready until Monday.
  6. Thinking about character creation and conception. I’ve never really made many characters outside of roleplaying games (including making up personalities and moral codes for games like Skyrim and Morrowind). I’ve been thinking lately about personality, characters, and understanding other people.

    To start with, here’s a story about my dog. He’s a nice enough dog, and I love him a lot, but when he gets around other dogs he acts aggressively defensive. At first I just thought it was okay, and put it out of my mind or excused it somehow, but the last time he got aggressive with another dog, it made me take it more seriously. He’s aggressive because he’s pent-up. He’s more energetic than we have time to exercise out of him, and so he gets frustrated and acts out. Just because I understand him, doesn’t mean that I can let him off. I’ve reformed and decided not to let him off his lead when I’m uncertain of whether I’m approaching other walkers (on a woodland trail), because he’s a big scary thing and he can sometimes be not that nice. I used to only tell myself “he’s a good dog but he can appear scary, so I’ll be careful about other people” but now I’m more aware that not only does he look scary, but he acts scary as well, under certain circumstances. People he’s okay with. Unfamiliar dogs less so.

    I started to more level-headedly consider his personality, and as I did so it dawned on me that I can’t rightly say what he’s thinking, nor predict what’s best for him. Like, I know he just needs more exercise, but as a philosophical thing the thought interests me.

    Moving on, I started to think about the fact that I had begun to build a personality for a dog. I had started to imagine the connections and meanings behind his actions, as you would with people. We get to know people directly through experiencing their actions; their words.

    And so I thought to myself, what about this as a possible method of character creation?

    Rather than fussing yourself over what their key aspects are and then using those aspects to predict their actions, do it the way you would with people: Predict their actions by knowing their personality, and know their personality by analysing their actions.

    Start with a blank slate character. A nothing. Then imagine what actions you want them to make, and then, from your own personal philosophy, explain their actions, and begin to build a framework of their personality. That’s the idea.

    It had me thinking also about how people understand fictional characters differently. People have their own philosophies about life and themselves, and from this they understand other people, by using their own knowledge of themselves and their own motivations. People who share your interpretation of characters will probably also share parts your personal philosophy, and so they’ll probably be the people you’d befriend, because they get that part of you and you share it.

    People often disagree with either the author’s decisions for the characters, or with other people’s interpretations and fan-made representations. I’d put that down to personal philosophy, and how people choose to relate to characters, thus shaping their understanding of them, leading to different predictions of the characters’ future actions. So don’t hate peoples’ interpretations, because it’s just them expressing a piece of themselves. Your interpretation is just as personal as theirs.
  7. I've had a lot of things floating around in my head lately. I say lately, I actually mean in the last few months. this blog, as an example, I wrote about a month ago. I suppose I've just been floating a few things around in my head, letting them percolate until I thought I could express them in a way that accurately represents how I feel about something. First came clarifying in my head how in fact I do feel about it. And I think I know, or at least I know how to get the ball rolling

    The title of this first blog entry is The Protoculture. Besides being a Macross reference, I think its a solid term for the kind of things I'm talking about. Just to warn anyone off from this topic before I get rolling, this is about politics, feminism, and a lot of topics that are pretty divisive, especially on this website.

    I have trouble with my political identity these days. In high school I liked to tell myself I was fairly moderate, but after a fashion I realized I was on the liberal side of things on almost every hot button issue, so I identified, and still for the most part identify, as a left leaning individual. At the same time I try to play devil's advocate when I can, try to see debates from both sides. I do this because, if all you ever see or read are things from the same perspective as yourself its easy to get stuck in your beliefs. At that point all you're doing is participating in a big circlejerk. I don't want that. I don't ever want that, I want to be able to see things clearly, to cut to the truth of the matter, if such a black and white thing can be found. I get the feeling, and this is just a feeling, if I'm wrong please call me out on it, that LL is much the same on that. Like, he shows up and plays the devil's advocate on all of the political threads that pop up, but If I remember correctly, he's even more liberal than I am, just going by those tests a bunch of us took before. So I say all of that, I guess as a guidepost for what I'm going to talk about next

    For a long time, it was my point of view that feminism was an artifact of the past. That people like Susan B Anthony and other suffragette’s succeeded, women having the right to vote, Title IX being enacted. In school they teach feminism as something like that, or at least they did when I went to school. So, when confronted with the reality, that De Jure, there is Gender equality, but De facto, there are still a lot of problems. And I agree with that. There are. Culturally, there are still a lot of rigidly enforced gender roles, I don’t want to get into ALL of that, people have spent their entire lives talking about it, and I don’t have that long, its 1:00 in the morning and I have a trip tomorrow. Whenever I think about Gender inequalities, all I ever get back to is that in order to effect any change you would have to change culture in a lot of fundamental ways, and you can’t make people nice. You can’t force civility on people, or you wouldn’t be civil yourself. Its so easy to get lost in anger about these things, but when that happens you so often become worse than what you fight.

    A big scapegoat on the internet is lumping a lot of people and things into Tumblr, this new “Protoculture” and blaming it for everything. Maybe its not scapegoating, maybe Tumblr is the stereotype, but I generally try to assume the best of things. And I have it on good authority that Tumblr is 90% porn, and I can get behind that. Thought i’d throw a bit of humor into this rambling wall of text. Regardless, what i’m getting at is that there is a movement that I am witnessing and I don’t know where I stand anymore. A new kind of Liberalism I guess, and I can’t just chalk it up to radicals shouting loudly because I know reasonable people, some on this very site, that are as much a part of it. I keep looking at myself and my political identity and I always ask questions, I constantly question myself, check myself, to make sure i’m standing in the right place. I think I am, but I know people, have seen people, who KNOW that they are right. Sometimes that gives me pause. So, any civil discourse on where we sit in the pages of history is most welcome. This wasn’t nearly as solid as I thought it was when it was sitting in the percolator, but I think I needed to exorcise it, get it out there. Please feel free to engage in civil discourse in the comments, if anyone feels like getting through this wall of nonsense.
  8. I've been thinking about posting some of the stuff I write. Heres a thing, more or less unedited. All feedback welcome



    A storm of dead leaves and sticks shot up, illuminated by the fitful gleam of a flashlight. Legs, tired from nearly an hour of this frantic chase still fired like pistons carrying Eric Grier through a dead forest. What was chasing him he could not see, but most definitely could hear, and smell, the awful stench of sulphur filled his nostrils threatening to send him into a coughing fit at any moment. But that would be death. Eric did not intend to die. Being a lifelong runner, and one of the most enthusiastic cross country athletes at his school had certain benefits. All the same, every moment he could feel whatever was behind him gaining, could hear the beat of its hooves against the damp, matted leaf floor of the woods.

    A scratching sound, that he would decide later to be a horrible laugh or chortle nipped at his heels. He looked at his watch, glow in the dark, raising his flashlight, and then immediately realized the folly of this. Without his main source of light, the detritus of the forest took its toll at last on Eric’s progress. A vine, a stick, it didn’t really matter what it was. What did matter was his footing slipped and his long run came to an abrupt halt, sending him tumbling, tumbling down. His flashlight left his hand and rolled a few feet away from him. Luckily, or in the current case, unluckily, the light granted him illumination of the thing that pursued him. He crawled backwards, sprawled out on his back, never letting his eyes wander from the slowly approaching...thing that had finally caught up.

    From the light he could see its legs, a goats, and as they went up the fur was replaced by flesh, and towards its belly it looked all the more human. It sauntered, clearly enjoying the thick radiation of fear from Eric, and its hands, each finger tipped with razor sharp talons dripping the blood of a fresh kill popped one at a time. Eric understood then that each sickening snap was the sound of his life ticking away.

    And then there was a beeping. At first Eric did not register it, didn’t even really hear it. as the beeps became more frequent he understood what it was. The victory bell. He looked at the creature, flexing the legs of its muscles to pounce, and with disgust spat at it.

    Then, a storm of things all happened at once. The creature sprung forward, a rictus grin on its bizarre hybrid features, and the screaming tones of “Thriller” blared from Eric’s pocket. Eric’s eyes shut in abject terror hoping he made his deadline. It wasn’t until Vincent Price began guffawing that he realized the loud thump thump he heard was actually his heart, threatening to crash through his ribcage. He reached his hand to his chest and took a deep breath and felt in his grasp, a card.

    Eric grabbed his phone from his pocket and, noting the missed call, used the backlight to look at the card. It was one of the Tarot, it read The Devil, but the picture on the card was strange. It showed a man, wearing the skin of an animal, half his body reflecting that animal, and half a twisted caricature of a man. It was the very image of the thing that pursued him, and even looking at it made him shudder.

    His phone rang again. Breathing heavily still, he answered, “Yeah….Its uh, its done. I made it. It was a skinwalker. Guess it makes sense given the card. You..wait what? Oh christ. Okay. I’ll be right over.”

    Eric was not the only one who ran for his life that night, just the only one who got away.

  9. The beginning

    By Steam.Core,

    So I'v been doing alot of looking around the internet for OoT texture packs and havent found many at all so my fiance and myself have decided to make a few of our own and we will also custom make a texture pack based on your style for intense my favorite game other then zelda is Skyrim so i decided to make a wolf based skyrim theme for my OoT ROM I'v been up for about 16 hours working on the main title screen and yound and adult link. However I could always use help if any one would like to be included in this project. Thank you and hope to hear from some one soon.

  10. Sweet Sixteen

    By Michael,

    Sixteen years ago, today, Hyrule.net came to life and sixteen years later is still around. While people have come and gone Hyrule.net has been a big part of a lot of our lives for the better or the worst, however in the end it has created a tight knit community who some may call their second family.
     

    Happy Birthday Hyrule.net!

  11. So.... Sup? XD

    By Migaru,

    As I said in the description thing, It's been many a years since I disappeared for good. And now? I'm back until something majorly dramatic happens and I'm forced to leave again, haha. 

    Anyways, I figured out why I was so... Emotional half of the time. At 21 years of age, I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, which explains why I was so cranky in the past. It was my blood sugars effecting how I lived and the way I interacted with other people. It's a blessing and a curse at the same time. *sighs* You're all probably wondering what I'm doing with my life. Simple: Not very much, LOL! I start working 5 days a week starting next week, but before then I was working 3 days a week, which helped out a lot due to the fact I spent a lot of money on things that I do not need - only wants. Wants are bad. Needs are good. Don't do what I've done in the past, haha. (Seriously, don't. It's bad.) 

    Hmm... Uhm... Well, as of 2013, I've been living on my own. I lost my dad due to unknown health issues. My brother rarely speaks to me unless I talk to him first. And I have a feeling I'll be spending christmas by myself, which doesn't bother me, I'll just send him some money so he can distribute it into the 6 of them. (Yes, he has four kids. No, I don't see them very often. :U) 

    Yeah, so, a lot of things have happened to me in my 27 years of life, and I very much doubt that people wanna hear about my sad, dark little life. Yeah, I have some secrets that I'm not willing to share unless someone asks me about them. Sometimes. 

    Anyways, that's enough ranting for today. Good night~
  12. I tend to be a bit philosophical and deep sometimes, so today I will share my words of wisdom with you. My words are a bit modern, so please bear with me.

    Today I have for you the following.

    "If you are bad, get good. If your good is not good enough, get gooder."

    What do you think?

  13. I found this (I assume) Russian site that has all the books available to read, in English. Norton Safe Web says it's OK, so no obvious danger of viruses. Cascade started on A Game of Thrones, and hasn't reported any foul play, in that it look like it's going to charge you money after you read to a certain point in a book.

    The site it self is here: http://www.litmir.net/
    It has plenty other books, if you search for them. I gave a go and found the Earthsea novels, and a couple Philip K. Dick books there as well.

    So yeah, the Game of Thrones books. Here they are:
    A Game of Thrones
    A Clash of Kings
    A Storm of Swords
    A Feast for Crows
    A Dance with Dragons
    If you fancy knowing how I found it, I just typed a random unimportant line from the page I had open in A Feast for Crows and it gave me the same page on the site. Magic.
  14. So FEZ is a game that's gotten a lot of controversy due to it's creator, Phil Fish. But we arent gonna talk about that. Instead, lets look at the game he's created.

    FEZ is a platforming game about a 2D being discovering that he lives in a 3D world. It's simple enough, collect 32 hyper-cubes (and an extra 32 anti-cubes) to restore order to his universe and keep it from imploding.... or something. The story is more of a charming prompt. Not too important, but satisfying non the less. The game play is also very simple. You always see the world in 2D, but as you rotate your perspective, the world rotates with it. Platforms that were unreachable from one view becoming easy stepping stones in the next. There is probably a metaphor in that as well, haha.

    But here is where the game gets really interesting, for me at least. It doesnt hold your hand. The game is very easy to play, but super difficult to master. Not because the game gets harder, but rather because it gets "deeper." Youll come across a room and have no idea what secrets it holds, you may find some weird scribbles on the wall. but what does it mean? Well, all the "codes" in the game can be found within the game. Ill give it away, there is a room that acts as a Rosetta stone, but even realizing that it is indeed a Rosetta is a puzzle in itself. Even without learning the new language, the game has so many secrets, its honestly amazing! Truly a work of art in its own right.

    And the game encourages you to figure it all out yourself! sure, there will be a few times when youll just HAVE to google it, but the game doesnt require you to at all. Its really a throw back to the golden age of gaming when there was no internet. You'd play a game, get stuck, and then ask your friend for advice. This game is complete homage to that. Im literally watching my friend play as I type this and he just asked me for paper and pen so he could figure out this puzzle.

    This game is not only beautiful, with it's minimalist pixel graphics and hauntingly ambient soundtrack, but its such a challenge! My first play session lasted 2 hours, but genuinely felt like 15 mins. I cant recommend this game enough! Please, despite all the controversy surrounding it's creator, look into this game for yourself. You owe yourself that much ;-)
  16. I recently read that MSN Is considering rebooting NBC's Heroes for it exclusive streaming service on Xbox. The New series Will be set in the same continuity but feature New Heroes.

    I like this idea....

    When it was on Heroes was one of my all time favorite shows (at least the first season). Heroes suffered greatly From the 2007 Writers Guild of America strike and never really recovered (I still have no idea what happened to Katlin).

    I love the idea of creating worlds within worlds, I've started quite a few fanfics set in the Heroes reality featuring Adrian Blake a Heroes character I created right here in a Heroes RP started in 2009 by Vadarth X (where are you Buddy?).

    With Super heroes as popular as they are right now the reboot Heroes could go far.


    One more thing, did they ever classify the Heroes? I mean Marvel has Mutants and DC has Meta Humans. Did they ever give the "Heroes" a snazzy name?
  17. I've been wanting to start writing stuff, seriously or not, and Necro is inspiring me to just write stuff and blog it. Here's the first part of a mostly unplanned story. The first line will do as a working title.

    ------

    My dreams were filled with wonders. It was as if, in sleep, I entered a world running parallel to my own. The responsibilities were more demanding, the toil less satisfying, but my life I lived in dreams was far richer than the reality. My waking hours I spent wondering what was happening on the other side. There were roads that stretched for miles, like fingers knotted together, holding in its palm the world it connected. The forests there were old; a great history of nature rooted toward the centre of the earth that we all shared. People took on more variety, embodying aspects of nature I thought only a shadow image never seen in full light, opposing my views of how people should be. New dimensions, new colour, new life.

    I spent more time asleep than ever before. Some days I would spend a mere hour out of doors before escaping back to the dream, and before I became aware of it, I was spending whole days in bed. Days then turned to weeks, until I stopped taking note of my absence, and resigned myself to escapism.

    If my own world had been that much wider, perhaps I wouldn't have let it fall apart.

    An indeterminate length of time passed. My world pulsed back into view along with a low thumping on the door to my house. “Come out!” a voice called, “You've been holed up far too long! Everybody’s worried, and we need to know you’re okay!” The voice was frantic. Frantic? Fear and anxiety were never prevalent here before. It’s part of what made reality that bit more boring; that it lacked these features of human nature.

    I pushed myself out of bed in interest. I shambled down the stairs, a little disoriented from the shock of waking life. Peeking out the window, I saw naught but the ocean, and silence in between. The lawn and path were overgrown with tall reaching grasses and weeds, bent by the ocean breeze such that they seemed to reach toward my house.

    I pushed out the door, and a cold smoky air washed over me, sucked into my front room as if keen to escape inside. The air settled until it was unnervingly still. I’d never felt so uncomfortable stepping outside of my home. The world was quiet around me, but a sense lingered that I wasn't alone. The air in all its eerie stillness buzzed with a latent energy, ready to burst out.

    But it didn't. Nobody was there. In all my tiredness it hadn't registered who it was that called me, and now nobody stood in front of my house to answer the question. Still I felt tense, as familiarity met with a new unwelcoming atmosphere, putting me at unease. There was definitely something wrong, in a world that had always been right before.

    I struck out to fix my mind, wading through the heavy overgrowth, long left out of check by myself and, as it appeared, everybody else. It seemed the thick grasses covered everything, and the once youthful trees seemed greyer, older, though not too much time should have passed. How long can someone possibly sleep?
  18. So I started typing this out in response to Cirt's about buying a new mouse in the Post Yourself thread, but it became more of a blog.

    I have been conditioned to do everything in my power to make my computer operations efficient by owning crappy computers. First, I couldn't right click things because doing so froze my computer. So I mastered a slew keyboard shortcuts and features. Then, I was frustrated at navigating menus in order to find things, so I mastered navigation techniques. Eventually I was just fed up with having to move my hands to my mouse, so I learned various text editing skills. In other words, keyboard shortcuts at all times. I also have made sure I have efficient computing by closing all my processes. At first manually, by going through my list of processes, hitting the Delete key, then hitting Enter, and then down arrow before it reset my cursor position to the top of the list, and rapid-firing this motion until all the processes I could close, closed. Then by the monument to convenience that is GameBooster. I use Windows Classic theme and my taskbar collapses to maximize screen space. This mentality pervades any routine that I do. Efficiency is important.

    One fateful day, my mouse fell out of my backpack while running to catch a train. It was promptly run over by cars, and I discovered its remains the next day. I didn't really use it all that much because of the keyboard shortcuts, but sometimes mice are good for something. So I've learned that having a trackpad is actually very useful when your hands are so close to it all the time, and I've trained myself to use it with brief thumbstrokes, as if it were a set of joysticks. Tapping is your friend in a case like this.

    This is my battle stance.





    My computer's G, H, ', Backspace, Print Screen, many of my function keys, Escape, and rarely, my O key, all malfunction. My Windows key flickers constantly between pressable and not pressable, so if I hold it down, the Start Menu flickers on and off, and it wrecks all my Win key shortcuts. It is living hell to type anything of length (most of what I type), and it's because my computer is in bad shape. Why, you ask? It fell to the ground once when my backpack's arm strap actually snapped, causing my backpack + laptop to fall. That splintered the guard on one of my hinges, but it didn't do too much damage. Later, it took a separate fall from about chair height onto my carpeted floor, and now it looks like this:





    The screen's hinges are mostly broken, so I have to lean my screen against something in order to keep it upright and angled. Another peeve I've always had about the screen is that it's not indented in at all, so there are many permanent scratches where the screen has come into contact with the other half of the laptop. But the keys malfunctioning is easily the most horrible thing about its degeneration. In order to combat the problem, I bought keyboards. The first was frustratingly hard to type on, the second is perfect in concept.





    It's a lightweight, waterproof, flexible silicone keyboard that rolls up and fits in a compact tube that I bought for cheap at Monoprice. This keyboard, in concept, is the best keyboard ever. It's supremely portable, its keys have good tactile feedback despite being easy on the fingers, it's probably the most silent keyboard in existence, and it's stupidly easy to clean. Monoprice sells top-notch stuff, mind you, but this thing has a few fatal flaws:

    1) It is too hard to type on; you need perfect accuracy and just the right force to get a keystroke across.
    2) Its key placement is atrocious.
    3) It absolutely needs a surface under it that is at least as flat and sturdy as a keyboard.

    What's one of the least desirable things to happen while backspacing? Hitting the Home key, probably. Where most keyboards have at least a sliver of difference in between Home and Backspace, this thing has Home right up next to it.





    Since the keys require force to press, and since the keys are flexible, I bump into other keys a lot. What's annoying is that I have to type relatively harder to get the keys to work normally, but a light bump when backspacing will activate the Home key, bringing my cursor back to the beginning of my line. Where there isn't anything to backspace. I thought my keyboard was malfunctioning at times, because I wasn't deleting anything when attempting to backspace, but no, it was because my cursor had left me after I bumped into the Home key. It's the same for most keys, actually. If I try to use the Arrow keys at all, I bump into EVERYTHING. Also, the Function keys (F1, F2, etc.) don't have any space in between either, and they're not particularly aligned, so I can't tell which function key I'm hitting unless I'm looking right at it. They're all so tiny, even for Function keys.

    Also, the Space Key. Not Space Bar. The Space Key. Where Alt should be. Right next to the Space Bar.





    Sigh... I keep hitting this thing trying to Alt + Tab. The only reasoning I've heard for why this even remotely makes sense is for gameplay that requires rapid Space pressing, but in order for the actual Space Bar to work, there are multiple buttons underneath it all arranged in a strip right next to each other anyway, so what the hell?

    So I use my laptop keyboard much more frequently, because when it works, it works well. But when it's being particularly horrible I break out my floppy keyboard. If you're wondering how I'm getting all this information to you with constantly malfunctioning keys that only work 20% of the time, it's because of the aforementioned efficiency-sticklerism. This is what my screen has looked like the whole time I typed this:





    So every time I need a certain character, I thumbstroke what I need with the trackpad, making sure to keep the cursor close to the keys I need on the on-screen keyboard. It's a tough life. I also don't Backspace much anymore. I have to Shift + Left Arrow to highlight over the last thing I typed that I need to erase, or if I decide that it's too far back, I just Ctrl + Shift + Left Arrow to highlight the whole thing to take it out and start over, because it's slightly faster than pinpointing the mistake.

    It's a good thing programming is mostly making tiny corrections and searching through lines of code for tiny mistakes, or my current practices would be totally awful.
  19. While taking my mind off the struggles of life, I recessed into musics and programming rather than sociability. This started out as a post that had a kind-of sequence, but wasn't really in chronological order. So I'll try to make this as organized as possible, despite it being disjointed and pasted together. But as the title implies, it's pretty much all about music.

    After some tumultuous events, I picked up my guitar again so as to relieve stress. I named it Gitaa, after Yui's guitar, from K-ON!. Back in high school when I played it, I didn't practice enough to know even basic chords, and I never got calloused fingers. After about three days, I knew more than I ever had and had more to show for it.



    So that's been cool. I can play basic chords and I'm learning every so often. Somewhere along the way I just started buying things though. For awhile now, I've felt guilty for pirating music. I vowed to buy up all the music I stole one day, for multiple reasons. Some of the mp3s I've downloaded have shoddy quality, and I eventually got fed up with it, so I figured I'd cut out the middleman and buy vinyl, which has the capacity to have a nigh impossible-to-match audio quality compared to compressed computer formats. I was planning on buying Sebastien Leger's We Are EP first, because his French House track "We Are" is amazing, though my mp3 has horrible sounding quality.

    Though while browsing Facebook, I saw that a guy who famously used to do French House, Louis La Roche, had 300 leftover promo vinyls for his Supersoaker EP from an event back in 2010 that in the end, didn't need them. So he sold them off for about 15 USD, all hand-stamped and numbered. I couldn't resist how tempting that sounded so I bought one. He signed some, but when I got mine it didn't have a signature. ;< I got 45/300 though, so at least I got a record in the top 50 and stuff. It took literally a month to arrive at my house, so I thought something might have messed up, but it was just because it was shipping from Europe. While I was waiting I bought Sebastien Leger's We Are EP. It arrived well before Louis La Roche's record. We Are sounds amazing through a good sound system, but I think it was misprinted or something because there's a part where it always skips and it bugs me like the dickens.

    After I ordered the Supersoaker EP, I started wondering what I'd listen to it on, because I don't have a record player. I asked my dad about our broken turntable, and whether or not we could fix it, but it turned out to be unnecessarily because he coincidentally had a USB turntable, which I bought an RCA male to 1/8" TRS female adapter for. So, the red/white cables plug into the back of the turntable and allow me to plug in regular headphones, rather than listen through the crappy built-in speakers on the front of the device. Unfortunately, there was no preamp for using external speakers, so the weak signal didn't play very loudly through my headphones, and I couldn't adjust the volume. Coincidentally, my dad has a preamp as well. I didn't even think he was that serious about these things. There's some weird problem though, so all my House music gets turned into super-distorted Hardcore. Or maybe it's just the Make Your Move EP I bought. I haven't tried with any others. To put that into perspective, Hardcore music started out as House music playing really really loudly really really fast, with all the drums and percussion being extremely distorted from the high volume.

    Anyway, I bought four vinyls so far. Five including my preorder of Daft Punk's Random Access Memories. I'd been looking for a physical copy of Dave Armstrong's Make Your Move that I only knew through a Youtube video at 240p. (the one that used to be linked in my signature) The video was labeled the "original mix" but it was clearly not the original mix. I bought a record completely dedicated to four different remixes of Make Your Move because the timecodes on one of the tracks vaguely matched what I had and the remix on the record was likewise shrouded in mystery. There was literally no other way to tell, and the seller was just a distributor who couldn't open the product, so I bought it for like 12 dollars. (Vinyl is surprisingly cheap) It turned out to be the wrong record, but I later bought the original. I finally learned that the remix I'm looking for is the Chris S. remix, but it's even harder to find. It's labeled as the original mix on the album it comes on, supposedly, but I can't, for the life of me, find it. Not that it being called the original mix narrows it down very well. Still, I think it's kind of exciting and magical to have to actually hunt down the music you're looking for.

    Anyway, here are the records I bought:

    Louis La Roche - Supersoaker EP
    Sebastien Leger - We Are EP
    Dave Armstrong - Make Your Move EP, Euro Mixes
    Dave Armstrong - Make Your Move EP
    Daft Punk - Random Access Memories

    As some of you may know, I make little musical blips every once in awhile. I really want to do cool stuff wit music, so later, in the wee hours of the morning, I bought a MIDI keyboard. M-Audio's Oxygen-25, for 25 keys; there are Oxygen-49s for 49 keys and so on. It doesn't have its own synths; it's purely a controller for software that has its own synths. It has eight knobs and two modulators (the circular up/down things in the picture), with other various controls that I can mess with. One modulator defaults to the center, and has good tactile feedback when you push it up or down, and defaults in most software to pitch bend. In other words, when I press it up, the synth assigned at the moment gets higher pitched, and when I press it down, it gets lower pitched. It's neat. I inadvertently figured out how Skrillex probably produced one of the synth parts in Bangarang with it. I felt slight shame for only having that track to relate the instrumentation to.



    On the left, up to down: Dave Armstrong's Make Your Move Euro Mixes and his Make Your Move EP. On the right, up to down: Sebastien Leger's We Are EP, and Louis La Roche's Supersoaker EP. The top shelf has various informational books I have bought over the years, the middle shelf has the M-Audio Oxygen-25, and the bottom shelf has my Numark Mixtrack. For any of you that haven't seen it, the Mixtrack is a DJ software MIDI controller. It's essentially like turntables, but it's all digital. It is not what I use to play records. But back to the keyboard.

    The other modulator is loose to the point of feeling broken. Since I bought this thing used, I have no idea if it's supposed to be that way, but it probably is. All the controls are assignable. I got it for about 70 dollars. I have unfortunately not found much time to mess with it, but I have been wanting to learn piano and various swing/funk styles as always. But guys. No matter if you think it's repetitive or uninteresting or whatever, funk is so hard to play. ): Speaking of music production though, I have a circle of friends that is very music-based.

    A bit of background on this guy I hang out with. His name is Matt, and he's the chairman of the local anime convention (Natsucon) that I first did my Hero of Time panel at, and he's a pretty cool guy. Him and our mutual friend Tim are pretty deep into the electronic music scene. They both DJ, Tim to a greater extent, and they for the most part, listen to all the stuff they can. They respect me for my tastes and ability to find good tracks and they've even tried to recruit me because they want to make musics with me. *~* They both very sincerely liked I'm No Straner, despite the piss-poor mastering. They've asked if I want to throw down on a sampler so we can make coolio stuff together.

    Anyway, Matt took me out to the city to a bar after I told him I'd signed up for another Hero of Time panel since no one else would come with him. The bar has an interesting practice. For five days out of the week the back room manager guy charges like 5 dollars per person to go to the back room and listen to the local DJs that play there, and then on Fridays or Saturdays uses the money he gets to fly out someone who's of notoriety, who people then pay 8 dollars to see. Our city has had big name artists like Skrillex at this place called Club Europe, but that place is supposedly a little douchey, though it didn't seem bad when I went there for a techno night. Anyway, Matt paid me into the place to see the guy they'd flown out; this time it was B. Durazzo. I'd actually seen
    by him months before, so it was really cool to be that close in such an open atmosphere. He's a pro at using samplers called MPCs to and instrumentals live. He was there with a Californian rap group, and he did his stuff while they rapped, with the MPCs tilted towards us so we could see. My phone camera is horrible, especially in dimly lit conditions, but I took a picture of him with it since it was all I had on me:


    Unfortunately, including the bartender, only 12 people showed up. It was the weirdest thing. I wanted to talk to him since I'd probably never get the chance again, but I was a bit scared to talk to the guy while he was sitting at the bar with one of the guys he flew out with. I was literally like two meters away from him, and I was like "Matt, should I talk to him? I mean, he's just sitting there. I know he won't bite, but I feel so awkwarrrdddd. Do you think he'd be cool if I just called him Durazzo? That's what the doorman called him." and he was like yeah man go for it. Eventually I was like "Okay, I'm going to go talk to him. Remember, Matt... YOLO." and he laughed. I went over and was like "You're B. Durazzo right?" and he was like yeah, and he seemed pretty cool. I shook his hand and we talked about the video of the little girl. "Yeah man, she killed it." Supposedly her dad paid him to do a little summer camp thing, with that end result being a final project for her.

    After the local DJ played they did their schtick, and when they were done they started taking payments for their CDs. They're on the pay-anything bandwagon, and started talking about how harsh life is when they're constantly touring so much, trying to take the stress off themselves and stuff. So naturally they made marijuana references a lot and said "How about this. You can pay with anything that's green." Right after he said I could pay anything, however, I reached in my pocket and pulled out all the metal/paper objects I had, which Matt burst into laughter at. I had five Malaysian ringgits(?), six cents, and a screw. "A fuckin' screw, hahaha." I informed Mr. Durazzo of what I had, and I tried to give him all of it, but he didn't want the change and the screw, so I felt bad for trying to give them to him. But he took the ringgits, which seemed like a good enough use for the souvenir my mom got me from when she went to Malaysia. So now I have his Beats Vol. I CD that he personally handed me. So cool. *-* I really want to listen to it, but I'd rather not compromise its pretty packaging, as I don't have a CD drive, even though I have a turntable for vinyl records.



    Flash forward a week or so. I have a new friend from physics class that I gradually started connecting with pretty well, and we bonded a bit over some Modest Mouse songs in his car, and we talked about Franz Ferdinand, who he recalls liking, but he supposedly used to listen to them with his ex-girlfriend so they're unpleasant memories or something. I've had long talks with him about Daft Punk and other artists I respect, various sociological happenings, science news, philosophy, conceptual reasons for why we like music or art forms including video games, and we talked about personal life stuff. I introduced him to Daft Punk by talking about R.A.M., which he later encountered the teaser for on SNL and was legitimately, as he informs me, for the first time, enthralled by a television advertisement's music, being shocked when "Random Access Memories" came on the screen because I'd just talked to him about it. I lent him the Discovery album, as well as Bleu's Electro-Lyte (just to introduce him to more electronic music, even though Electro-Lyte isn't super great) and Franz Ferdinand's You Could Have Had It So Much Better album. So literally all the CDs I own minus Beats Vol. I. We're both pumped for R.A.M., and I've offered to let him borrow my records or even put some music on his flash drive.

    Anyway yeah, that's been my music-related for the past month or two. I've been back to programming recently, but I can't keep myself away from the stuff. I hope I can just stay focused and make something really cool. But I want to get a part time job so I can support myself financially to an extent as well as get money to buy computer or musical equipment. So yeah, hope you enjoyed this stroll through my recentry. (:

  20. More problems

    By Sahaqiel,

    So I've got problems and drama as I'm prone to have. Problems, things to update you guys on, and so forth; it's going to be long, but I'd appreciate it if I felt someone related to my experiences. This might be a multiple-trip read for you, I'm not sure how long I'm going to keep this going. I hope it's at least interesting for you. This is mostly stuff I've talked in chat about, but not here. There's a lot of stuff I'm leaving out.

    It's really late at night and I wanted to sleep a few hours ago, but I started messing around trying to polish up a track before I finally, but it ended up making it worse, Mediafire distorted the audio or something, so I posted the version I made last November?, it looks like. Five months then? Yeah. I didn't feel too mad about the lost time, because I guess I always found that version about as satisfactory as I felt I could make it at higher volumes or through better sound systems and I didn't add anything significant to the appended version.

    A lot of things have happened, some I'm too ashamed to detail to a general public, but I've been on a rollercoaster of emotions, ranging through existential dread to writhing anger. I can start with the more trivial aspects and detail my actual problems if it'll make it easier on you. But each of my stories contributes or detracts a little from my stress, and it's all coming together into something I can't control very well, which is why I made this for you. I'll summarize before the problem part, but if you'll oblige, I'm offering a deeper understanding of my misery.

    Trip to U of I




    My Remaining Friend




    Parental Stress




    Potential, Shortcomings, and Inability to Take Action





    Associate's Degree





    The Head of the Problem





    Anger




  22. Before this year, I've not been much for reading books. Several years ago I read the His Dark Materials series by Philip Pullman, which consisted of The Northern Lights (aka The Golden Compass), The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass. I must have read those in 2008, having got three copies of The Northern Lights for Christmas in 2007, following the movie adaptation, and since then I've forgotten what happened. I have brought one or two things home from them, but basically just the idea of a knife so sharp that it could cut through any material with great ease (the subtle knife itself). Besides that, I've forgotten the books for the most part.

    At some point I read through all the Harry Potter novels as well, though evidently I must have read them pretty carelessly, since I didn't realise Snape was a good guy after all at the end. But I did read them all, maybe sometime between the Order of the Pheonix movie and the first Deathly Hallows movie. I must have enjoyed them to get through them all, though I don't distinctly remember any parts I enjoyed.

    I also chose to read Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë for an essay at school, though I only read the first half. I later read Animal Farm by George Orwell from Septemberish of 2011 to sometime in the early summer/late spring of 2012. I read Wuthering Heights for the fact my mother could help me analysing it, and Animal Farm just for the fact that it was a school book that I'd never read in class before, and wanted to say that I had read it.

    That's a brief history of what I consider ancient history, before the point where I really enjoyed books. A history of half-experienced books that I either wasn't invested in, or didn't pay the proper attention to in order to get the most out of them.

    The next book I read was one I'd considered reading for a while, and chose out of a long-standing interest rather than any other shallow reasons like 'bragging rights' (in the case of Animal Farm alone, really). That book was A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin, inspired by the fact that Tales from Earthsea was such a mediocre movie compared to any other Studio Ghibli movie I'd watched. I'd heard that the author was unimpressed by the movie, and that fans considered the books to be much better (as book-readers unfailingly do). So I read that, from October 2012 until January of this year, and enjoyed it a lot.

    If you've ever seen Tales from Earthsea, or indeed if you're a fan of fantasy novels at all, I recommend reading the Earthsea novels a lot. Maybe I'm inexperienced as a reader, but they're very well written and easy to love, as well as quite short. If you've ever seen the Tales from Earthsea movie, then you'll known the character Sparrowhawk. The Earthsea novles are all connected to him in some way. The first, A Wizard of Earthsea, follows Sparrowhawk from childhood to young-adulthood, as he finds his magical ability, goes to wizarding school, which serve as an introduction to the greater part of the book where he embarks on his brief work as a wizard, and then onto his journey to fight a curse he brought on himself during his time at the wizarding school. The second book, The Tombs of Atuan follow not Sparrowhawk, but a girl who meets him, and how he involves himself in her own story. The Farthest Shore serves as the basis of the movie Tales from Earthsea, but I haven't read this one yet.

    So yes, I highly recommend these books. They're a quick read, and accessible too. And it has magic (Knuckle).

    I read A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan one after the other, the latter being read much faster than the other, but still at quite a slow pace, taking me about a month or so. At some point, there was an episode of Psycho-Pass, in which Makishima Shogo remarked that the world of the show was similar to that of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick. Since I was thinking on what to read next at this point, I took note of the title, and ordered it shortly before I finished reading The Tombs of Atuan. So continuing with the habit of only finding books through anime, I got it and read it over the course of two weeks. Another good book, though it didn't resonate with me as the Earthsea novels had. I recommend it as well, though less enthusiastically.

    I'd been contemplating for a long while, ever since I fell out of touch with the TV series, that I might try reading Game of Thrones. Having read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? so much more quickly than the last books, I figured I can trust my commitment to reading enough by this point to take on as large a book as Game of Thrones. I read it in a month, loving it all but not being blown away, since I was mostly covering old ground that I'd seen in what I'd already watched of the TV series (episodes 1-8 + spoilers people had given away online already).

    Between that and Clash of Kings, I fitted in A Murder of Quality by John le Carré just to spread out the series. My dad is a great fan of John le Carré, and I figured it'd be nice to give these books a go to see if I can get into them. It was a good enough book, but not nearly enough whimsy for me. Still holding hope that I could get into this sort of stuff, I planned ahead to go back and read Call for the Dead (which I'm currently reading), and read all of the George Smiley novels, since I did enjoy his character, and he could serve as a bridge into this new ground.

    Back to Clash of Kings, which took me another month of reading, while I moved from Dundee back home. New unspoiled territory. At some point while I read it, the Red Wedding happened, and the great boom of internet chatter got the bare bones of the events to me, and spoiled the important details of 'who' and 'what'. Understandably irritated, this fueled me to finish Clash of Kings, and then read both parts of Storm of Swords one after the other in just over two weeks. I passed the spoiler about 130 pages into the second part and plowed through to the end.

    All through it, I thought how sweet it would be to be free from the threat of spoilers on the internet from the TV series, and instead have the advantage once I passed the point covered by the TV series. Instead, I've found that it's just instead frustrating not being on the same wavelength as other people. I'm behind most of the book-readers, and ahead of those watching the TV series. I'm not experiencing the book alongside other people, and I've realised that's something that puts me at a certain disadvantage. Everybody watching the series is on the same wavelength, while I'm somewhere between the two points of completion, with few people who I can relate to right now.

    So while I would say that the books are absolutely completely undeniably superior to the TV series, I have to say that if you're particularly invested in the social experience that comes with experiencing the TV series with other people, then don't bother reading the books. It's not very fun for anybody if one person watching the show knows what's going to happen next, hanging over the others' shoulder waiting for a reaction to something you're looking forward to. So if you're willing to take it on as an individual experience for a while, or if you aren't as picky as I am about it, then stick with the series. Nothing wrong with sitting waiting for next episodes year after year, having a huge number of people experiencing it alongside you. That's a good way to be as well, maybe better.

    So that's that, and now I'm here. I've been reading Call for the Dead by John le Carré since I finished Storm of Swords last week, and been enjoying it well enough, and slowly. Being a bit more moderate with how much I read again, but my casual reading is a lot better than it had been while I read Clash of Kings and those before it. I would read a bit every day or so with Game of Thrones, and The Tombs of Atuan was something I read at night before sleep, while A Wizard of Earthsea was only ever read under rare circumstances; train journeys mostly.

    I have a pile in my room for books I've finished, and another books I've yet to read. Sitting in the former are all the books I've mentioned here, and the latter, A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick, which will come after Call for the Dead. That, and the two books I got today, Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes, and A Feast for Crows by George R.R. Martin.

    Which leads me to the reason I even started making this vanity post; this picture of those two books. Look at me, I read books now.




  23. [Ash's] Primeape VA's
    J: Hiroshi Otake
    E: Michael Haigney
    ______

    King Boom Boo VA's
    J: ???
    E: ???
    ______

    Sonic Adventure 2: Battle VA's:
    *uncredited on info.sonicretro.org

    -Japanese VAs-
    Junichi Kanemaru - Sonic
    Kouji Yusa - Shadow
    Atsuki Murata - Tails
    Nobutoshi Kanna - Knuckles
    Taeko Kawata - Amy
    Rumi Ochiai - Rouge
    Etsuko Kozakura - Omochao
    Yuri Shiratori - Maria
    -Kinryu Arimoto - The President
    -Mami Horikoshi - Secretary
    -Tohru Okawa - Flying Dog Pilot -
    -Kouji Ochiai - Big Foot Pilot
    -Kaori Aso - Tikal
    Tomoko Sasaki - Chao
    Chikao Otsuka - Gerald Robotnik / Eggman
    -English VA's-
    Ryan Drummond - Sonic
    Scott Dreier - Knuckles
    David Humphrey - Shadow
    Conner Bringas - Tails
    Jenny Douillard - Amy
    Deem Bristow - Eggman
    Lani Minella - Rouge / Omachao
    Moriah Angeline - Maria
    Marc Biagi - Gerald Robotnik
    -Steve Broadie - The President -
    -Sue Wakefield - Secretary -
    -Elara Distler* - Tikal -
    -Shelly Fox - Menu voice



    Continued search yields no further success. I can find no connection between the voice of Primeape from Pokemon and the voice of King Boom Boo, the ghost boss from Sonic Adventure 2. Neither Hiroshi Otake or Michael Haigney appear to have been involved in Sonic Adventure 2, and so it's unlikely that they loaned their voices at any point. Given that King Boom Boo has no lines, and only grunts and gurgles, it's unlikely that he has any noted dedicated voice actor worth speaking of, and so I cannot come to any conclusion there either.


    Voice actor information for Ash's Primeape taken from here:
    http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Ash%27s_Primeape

    The lists of voice actors were taken from a reading of the Sonic Adventure 2 credits, and given characters by using the following sites:
    http://info.sonicretro.org/Sonic_Adventure_2_credits
    http://www.behindthevoiceactors.com
    http://www.imdb.com/

    Thus concludes my search. King Boom Boo shall forever remain an enigma.

  24. I'm in Poland

    By Teto,

    It's going okay. When I was about 13 or 14 years old we met a Polish couple who lived in Scotland for work. They were expecting their first child and they lived in a small flat in the nearest town. We met them through my brother, who worked at a hotel with the soon-to-be mother. My parents were fast friends with them; and remained friends as they raised their first boy, and then their second child, a girl. We've known them for 7 years. When their first child was 6 and their second child was about 3, they decided to move back to Poland. They stayed with us for two weeks while they readied themselves for the journey back home.

    That was last year. This year I and my parents have come to visit them, in their two-room house in the country 3 hours south-ish of Warsaw. The first two thunderstorms of the year occurred on the first two days we were here. The time at the house I've spent reading or talking to the older 7 year old boy, who is insistent on playing LEGO, and built me an army for which he hasn't stated a purpose. He just likes putting together different people I suppose.

    Back at home in the UK, bigots complain about the Polish taking their jobs, while scratching their asses and playing candy crush. In Poland the economy is such that it's four times more difficult to pay for anything, and if that was the case where I lived, I'd give a go at making money abroad as well, even if it did mean moving to a country where I didn't speak the language and couldn't locate a pharmacy.

    However, despite the economic troubles, it doesn't appear to be as poor as it is. Driving through the countryside the roads are lined with new-looking houses of eclectic variety. Houses of varying colour and size sitting comfortably next to one another. This old two-room house doesn't seem so out of place across from a large two-storey house built orange and white with balconies and elaborate iron fence. Each house is different, and so none are out of place.

    The thing is, in Scotland we have a wealth of council housing estates. Large areas occupied by identical houses attached to one another to fit as many people as humanly possible. Grey houses with grey roofs with small corner shops dispersed throughout to keep people from starving to death or running out of cigarettes. Whereas in Poland it's all private property, which has it's downfalls too, despite how much more interesting it is to look at.

    The family we stay with have two children, and they don't expect to have any more. There is some kind of population problem in Poland, and the government insists on families having more children without actively encouraging them. Financial assistance for families raising children can be about the equivalent of £50 a month, and that doesn't make much difference for the raising of a child. People just can't justify many children.

    There's a heavy religious presence here, and shrines for prayer are built what seems like every mile or so through small villages along single-track roads in the country. I can see one from the house. Abortion isn't legal here, yet when we stopped at a gas station on the way from the airport, I noticed they sell condoms at the counter where in Scotland they would probably have chewing gum or chocolate.

    The countryside is mostly forest, with wild berries and such like. There are plenty flies and mosquitos, but nothing worse that I've encountered yet. Curiously, the mosquitos don't even bite me. Plenty days out without any kind of repellent and I'm unscathed while others swell up from minor allergies and scratch legs dotted with bite marks. Maybe I'm too sweet.

    The family we're staying with keep chickens, ducks, a dog, and two alpacas. Alpacas are pretty gentle creatures that shy away from most contact with people or other animals, besides each other. They don't spit like llamas or camels are said to. They're incredibly gentle, timid animals. Good to have around.

    Over the past couple days before now, the chickens' eggs have been hatching. So far there are three chicks hatched, and they're being kept in a box in the house where they're being fed, to save the mother the dilemma of whether to feed her chicks or keep warming her eggs. They were quite alright in their shallow cardboard box for the first few days, but the largest one with black feathers took to hopping up and out of the box. Thanks to him, all of them have been put in stricter confinement to keep them from running off. If a chicken can jump twice it's height at 3 days old, I shudder to think what incredible power a chicken of 100 years would possess.

    Out here in the country most people make their own food and fields are divided into strips for individual people. People sell berries and local produce out of wooden boxes, sitting in overtaking lanes on the main road. For all the talk of crops without pesticides and chemical enhancers, it all tastes about the same, including the meat. Some things are the same though, like the presence of Tesco and Lidl stores. Lidl is much the same here as anywhere else; cheap, cold, uninviting. If the signage wasn't in another language, I wouldn't know the difference from Lidl in Scotland.

    On the first day, before the thunder started, we escaped out for a drive around the nearby countryside with the kids, to escape the neighbour who didn't warn that he was planning to kill a pig very noisily that day. Besides that, nothing particularly shocking has happened, though I wouldn't call the pig slaughter particularly shocking either, unless you're 7 years old. We relaxed a few days and lost track of time, as you should when you're on holiday. It could be 2pm or 6pm and it would make no difference to how we spent the day.

    So far we've visited Warsaw, Radom, and a small town dedicated to art galleries and medieval-themed touristry. We went for the art galleries. Warsaw was a nice enough city. We visited the Copernicus Science Centre, which was so much better than any science event or centre I've ever been to before, full of interactive exhibits. If only it was in Scotland so I could visit it again. Radom was just a smaller city, barely a city when compared with Warsaw or Krakow, but it was nice to visit and walk around in. We met the family of our friends there, and while I kept quiet and didn't make myself much for conversation, I memorised all the names I could. There were a lot of them, and most of them knew a little English to either understand or speak it.

    Interestingly, when going over the many names of the family, I noticed that all the women had names ending in the letter A. Dominica, Veronika, Victoria, Asha, Basha, Anna, Paulina, Maya. I brought up the observation to Veronika; the one we met in Scotland all those years ago, and she told us that this was in fact a general rule. I'm not sure if it's heavily enforced, but she also told us that, when they have children, they must chose names from within a range of generally accepted names, You couldn't just pick up any old noun like Raindrop or Helicopter and give it to your child. I'm not sure how great a custom this is, but it's interesting. I can't imagine it being any real problem. There is no such naming rule for men as there is with the A ending of womens' names, unless perhaps mens' names never end in A, but I've never asked about that.

    The 7 year old boy, Macek, who periodically pursues my attention, is a nice sort. As he grew to the age of 6 in Scotland, he learned English as well as any Scottish child might have. He lost some of it over the year living back in Poland, but he can still communicate with me well enough, and served as translator briefly when I met his friends from the village. One, a stocky lad who stood grinning with a large snail he found, proudly told me in full English "My name is David!", though I'm sure that's all he knew, and he had to ask Macek how to say it first. The second was Kuba, crouching and quietly watching as he was introduced, his left arm in a sling from some accident. I didn't ask about it. The more time I spent with Macek, the less English I spoke out loud. I found my internal monologue changing to the same subtly fragmented English spoken around me by our Polish friends. Of course they spoke it well, but there were some grammatical slips which, while noticeable, were hardly noteworthy.

    There's plenty to be learned from the conversations of others. On long drives between destinations I've learned plenty about Poland and the people here. Most of what I've learned and presented here was gleaned from the discussions had by my mother and Veronika. With all that Veronika chats and translates, you'd think she spoke the most English out of the two of us, as I stand in the background smiling sympathetically at everybody and everything, pretending I'm not foreign.

    Despite all the romantic hopes and dreams I have for my future self, on this holiday I find a reminder of my lack of confidence. I worry terribly about how to communicate with people in shops or on the street, and instead take a back seat while others guide the tour of my day. Though it's not so bad and powerless as that.

    I'm sure there are other observations and whatnot I could bring up, but this is all there is for now. It's another week until I arrive home on the 28th, in the comfort of a country which shares my language. I'm killing flies in one of two rooms in this two-room house, while my mum sleeps with a book on her chest; and my dad walks through the village taking pictures of the houses and their many colours. The alpacas are grazing in the back garden with Nero, the 14 year old dog, looking on from the shade, his lead fastened to a tree. It might rain later, it might not. I think it's Monday, but I'm not sure.
  25. And this is what I found in the morning...

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