When MixxZine started up, way back in 1996, I was so excited. I subscribed right away.

When they expanded to have an online store, I was excited. I tried ordering things from them.

And then began the long, painful process of realizing what a crappy, messed up company they really are.

They have an unsatisfactory record with the California Better Business Bureau because of my complaints! Ha! I take credit for that.

They bought Miracle Girls and proceeded to treat it poorly.
They bought Saint Tail TV, the end of which has yet to see the light of day.
And now…

I think I’m going to be ill.

Mmm. So we saw CoS on Friday night. There were parts I liked very much, parts I missed, and parts that made me fear greatly for poor PoA. (There was also a very strange Coke commercial prior to the showing, which was discussed in some of the comments below.)

The method of adaptation for these movies continues to trouble me. It troubles me more that critics keep claiming that the movies are so very close to the books. They’re not. They’re not at all. For all that it made pretty large omissions and alterations to the story, I would consider Fellowship a far more faithful adaptation of the text. (The first version even; the extended is obviously so.) When I watched FotR, I felt like the spirit of the book was there. When I watched SS and CoS I felt like they had decided to illustrate random scenes that were loosely strung together. Once again with CoS they have become bogged down in the frantic struggle to include as many incidents as possible and lost sight of the fact that character motivation and a coherent plotline are far and away more important. I swear I could hear them in my head: Dessert scene - check! Escape scene - check! Flying car scene - check!. I can forgive them for paring down the characters — secondary characters are secondary, after all. But to drop a central issue of the book — namely, Harry’s issues with his celebrity, which come back to haunt him in both book 3 and 4 — was a mistake. I also have to wonder at the Knockturn Alley sequence. If Harry wasn’t going to see Lucius and Draco down there, why bother to include it at all? Just to give Hermione an excuse to try and get arrested for underage magic? They never played up on the fact that Hagrid was down there, nor did any of the Weasleys appear to care. Overall, the movie was horribly disjointed. What was there was done well, but what was missing…

… you stare stupidly at your computer monitor, wondering why it doesn’t show anything, and only after nearly a minute realize it is not turned on.

Ugh. I simply could not work up the enthusiasm needed to leave the house yesterday, and as a result just vegged around for the entire afternoon doing little of import. The problem came when it was time for me to go to sleep. I had eaten too much sugar and so was not able to fall asleep right away, and thus started reading. And then kept reading.

Blah.

ohmygodohmygod

Douglas Adams! Sean Biggerstaff! Doctor Who!

*dies*

During my weekend of sloth, I took the time to watch GTO, loaned to me by the lovely Mei-chan. It was good. There were of course, a few undeniably slashy moments (Aside: Is the tendency to slashiness inherent in everything, or is it actually caused by the desire to find it? Kenpi and I were talking last weekend about the amazing slash potential of the New Testament. Some of the translations, you’d think that was what they were writing. Perhaps it is just our inability to separate platonic from sexual in text because the words are the same — but then, the words are the same for a reason.) , and the fangirl moment when I stared at the screen and said “hey! That’s Hikaru Midorikawa! And Seki~~!”, but overall the show is just kind of satisfying. Since the main character is the teacher, you actually get to see the teacher deal with all those annoying bratty children who are so often the main characters themselves. And deal with them he does XD.

Not going to run out and buy it, but I have a hankering to see the rest. Will have to work out how to do that.

We have a new computer in our office.

It is running Arabic Windows 98.

Nobody here knows Arabic.

Everything is BACKWARDS.

And next week we’re going to start trying to figure out how to write tests for it.

But more importantly, it’s Friday of an incredibly hellish week. It started out quite well, as I had a long weekend. But long weekends are deceptively long, and they are not conducive to getting work done when you are a procrastinator of my caliber. So instead of taking advantage of the extra free time it instead was suddenly Tuesday instead of Monday and I had an insane amount of things to finish by Friday at 10:25am.

Tuesday: Normally I work 10 hours on Tuesday, so I am loathe to miss the day — it’s practically half my work week, so if I don’t go, I’m not going to be very productive. So I got up at 6am to work on the programming project that was due that night at midnight. At about 7:30 I decided two things: I was too tired to work effectively, and I was going to have to skip work. So I sent my boss an email and proceeded to take a nap. After I got up again, I worked on the project for the rest of the day. My pace, however, was not great and I had trouble concentrating; I managed to get it working to what I consider a bare-minimum standard by 11:55pm, which is when I sent it in. But there was no time to stop and fret over that, because…

Wednesday: This day was deceptively unstressful. I got up at 7am to work on the Algorithms problem set which was due on Thursday, then switched to the Japanese kanji practice which was actually due that morning. After a Japanese quiz, I adjourned to the computer lab, where I worked on the other set of problems due on Thursday. Algorithms class followed, and after that I needed to speak to my adviser so I could sign up for classes — and sat around waiting for her for an hour. Luckily by the end of that I pulled out my work and started playing with it again. Got home after several more classes and a TA meeting to install software necessary to complete the Computational Biology problems. Then I decided to go to bed.

Thursday: Perhaps this was a mistake; I should have stayed up and continued working. But in any case, I did not manage to fall asleep until nearly 4am and got up again at 5:30. Did yet more homework and then went to work. Wrote up a short presentation for a meeting I was having that afternoon. Came home and spent more time on the homework. Took a 30-minute NAP. (Thank god.) Got to school at 4 in time for the meeting and seemed to get through that all right. Then I hurried back down to the computer lab for another TA meeting. (Sigh. They are never ending. And I’m not even a TA.) Workworkwork and finally pull in to class 10 minutes late, but with a completed problem set. Then I came home, completely exhausted…

Friday: Get up early again, because the week is not yet over and today I have a sakubun due which has not even been started. But there was a pleasant surprise in store for me: The boxed paper Tufts uses has not nearly so many boxes as Harvard’s. I wrote out what I figured might be a page or so and it was more than two — and that was all we had to do so I stopped. Vocab quiz. Off to work. The week is over. Huzzah.

Work has been kind of a mess too. We finally shipped off the Japanese product to one client last week after months of endless, nitpicky and occasionally ridiculous review.

The final straw — the last round of review contained the following ‘complaint’: We request that you please make the - (long vowel symbol in katakana) to not look like a minus sign.

So we looked at the graphic in question, and sure enough, in the word, the - did not have the little uplift on the left hand side that it often does. This was, however, because the text was VERY SMALL and none of the characters looked quite right. It’s a matter of resolution, people. You can’t get that much detail into so few pixels! Poor C. had to go through all the graphics by hand and color in a little dot on the end so it looked different from a minus.

But it doesn’t matter. The week is over. It is the weekend, and unlike this week, I have absolutely nothing due next week but random Japanese busywork. (Why? I don’t know why. Because professors have a sort of collective mind which causes them to have everything due on the same 2 days.) And the nice long Fellowship of the Rings DVD came in the mail from Amazon yesterday.

Now if the box from France would show, I think it would quite make up for everything.

This was a great article. And so true! I think it really explains so much about why I’m not a fan of Harry. He has angst, but he doesn’t have any real obstacles in his life. (The exception being Voldemort, who is so incompetant he had to hire Peter Pettigrew.)

Yet another quiz. But I haven’t done one in a pretty long time.

Linguistic 40
Mathematics 49
Visual/Spatial 37
Body/Kinesthetic 40
Naturalistic 32
Music 36
Interpersonal 23
Intrapersonal 38

From here. It’s not as vague as some have been, and it seems more or less on target.

Today was my youngest brother’s confirmation. I went, because my mother would have been upset if I hadn’t, and because it’s also Jeff’s birthday tomorrow (aside: he’s 16! That’s not possible. He’s still just a little teeny baby.) and I had to give him his present.

More family than I expected to be there was there (Grandma, 2 aunts, 2 uncles, 2 cousins, other brother) and before the service we all went out to a restaurant. Whilst grandma (who is 80) and my uncle attempted to outdo each other telling off-color jokes, Jonathan plowed through his salad, Jeff’s salad, half a basket of rolls and his entree and then raced back to the house so that he could watch a few more precious moments of the Patriots game. >_<

One of my aunts gave me 2 new Tupperware things. Apparently the thought that I’m going to be getting married has made her think I need it. Nevermind that we’ve already been living together for 4 years. Nevermind the fact that we have 2 cabinets FULL of Tupperware. They’re so overfull that it tumbles out onto the floor whenever we attempt opening the doors.

The confirmation itself was 90 minutes long. It was. That’s about all I can say about it. Thankfully, Jeff is the last of us, so there won’t be any more to go to until my cousin’s daughter Madelyn is old enough to be confirmed — and she’s only 6. It was essentially an extremely elongated mass, complete with sermon. Obviously tailored for the high school students being confirmed.

Bishop: *blah blah blah* Britney Spears commercial *blah blah blah* television movie *blah blah blah*
K (to cousin): He sure watches a lot of tv.
Bishop: *goes on about how life is wasted if you don’t attempt to spread faith, hope and love* “… and if you see someone discriminated against because of their sex, what do you do?”
K: *chokes* … says MR BISHOP of the CATHOLIC CHURCH.

Now, I’m not going to go so far as to call him a hypocrite. It’s entirely possible that this dude is one who is attempting to change the church. But I found the statement pretty ironic.

I also spent a while last night and cleaned up my regular webpage. It hadn’t been overhauled since 98 or 99, so it seemed like it was due. This does, of course, leave me with much to do tonight, given that most of today was eaten by travel and family foo.