Today lysis_to_kill and I witnessed what looked like a robbery.

We were getting off the northbound Brown Line at Belmont when a guy ran past us, laughing. A girl sprinted after him on the semi-slushy platform, shouting for him to give back to her phone. At first Liz and I didn't really think anything of it; we figured that maybe they were friends who were rough-housing on the platform.

But as we descended the platform staircase, we could hear more and more of the desperation and anger in the girl's voice, and suddenly it occurred to us that we had just witnessed a robbery in the middle of the afternoon on a crowded platform, and that the person may have gotten away with it.

I seriously hope that girl got her phone back and the guy slipped and wiped out on the new tile floors of the station.

Done with the usual meme of taking the first line of the first entry of every month, because I'm too lazy to do actual post write-ups. There's a lot to post about but I never really feel like sitting down and writing/posting. That, and every time I come back with something to talk about, I never think it's really worth posting about.

JANUARY: An interesting article about how Obama seems to be dealing with his fame.
FEBRUARY: From Kotaku: Suspect arrested for threatening to blow up Hudson
MARCH: Just a quick post before I have to work on my HON301 paper, which, uh, I still have no idea what I'm going to write about.
APRIL: It's only the first week of classes and I'm skipping already, whoops.
MAY: I didn't make a lot from Artist Alley this year, but that was about what I expected.
JUNE: I want to win this contest on Tuts+ like Burning Fire Bomb.
JULY: Gonna start off with the Serious Business stuff this time before I babble about fannish things.
AUGUST: Summer never lasts long enough for me.
SEPTEMBER: On Reading
OCTOBER: I've had this link-o-llection lying around for almost a month now.
NOVEMBER: RE: NaNoWriMo 2009
DECEMBER: Look, author.

Hrm. What an odd collection of lines. Later I'll type up my list of books read over 2009. My first book of 2010 is Spell Games by Marla Mason, which I greatly enjoyed.

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Established in 1977 or so, Branko's is a family-owned sandwich stop just off of Fullerton, near DePaul University. It's run by a Macedonian couple who are super-nice and super-courteous. The food is standard American sandwich shop fare, affordably priced, but they make it nice and hot and serve it to you with a smile. It's excellent comfort food, and in fact I'm sitting here typing this entry while eating some fried cheese sticks that I got from there.

I started going there in my sophomore year because I kept on passing by it on my way to the art building. Its proximity made it ideal for me to pop in during a studio class break, get some minor eats, and pop back out to get back to class. Recently, I've begun stopping by the place after classes to get food to-go that I then eat at the school cafeteria while sitting with friends. Mr. and Mrs. Branko both know me by face now and have learned what my usual orders are (either cheese sticks or a regular hot dog with ketchup only and a side of fries, plus Mountain Dew), and so I sometimes get minor discounts for being a regular customer.

All in all, the food is good, but it's the service and comfortable intimacy of the small sandwich shop that makes Branko's a regular stop for me.

***

I'd wanted to finish up an ART224 project that's due tomorrow before going to ART113 later tonight, but the lab times are from 6-10pm. Which kind of fails considering that I have ART113 from 6-8:40pm. But since ART113 is a studio day today, I may possibly get away with leaving early to do stuff for ART224, since I don't foresee that the main part of my ART113 project is going to take too long. On the other hand, I could just do it during ART260 tomorrow (since I think that's another studio day). Decisions, decisions.

Two book reviews to go up soon. There are also some thinky thoughts that have been swimming around in my head about the consumption of music/film/books vs. the consumption of visual art and what that means for an artist trying to expand her horizons, and about my place as a second-generation Filipino-American and exploring the boundaries of where I'm Filipino and where I'm American, but I need to (attempt to) study for my ART237 midterm on Thursday as well as pull together something more coherent, so those will have to wait until I find more brain cells.

Also, Borders performance on Friday! Old friends may possibly accompany me again so I'm not so alone, though I do have a friend from college who wants a looksee. I think I had a working setlist floating around somewhere but hell if I can find it in my room (which, not surprisingly, is kind of a mess again!).

The Gods damn my Asian eyes and brown skin! It makes it more difficult to pull off the typical goth/punk makeup look that I really like. I seem to have succeeded in developing a generic smoky eyes look that works for me, but while I think it looks decent it's not as dramatic as I'd like it to be. (Not that I'd ever need it to be really dramatic except on-stage, but I'd like to start dressing up a little more for gigs and stuff.) I think I need a really thick, deep, black eye makeup or something. Or maybe I just need moar skillz, whatever works.

Also, found that mascara doesn't seem to do much for me. My lashes are already long and black, so I'm not sure why Mommykins told me a while back that I should have some of the stuff on hand. It'd be different if I had, like, metallic sparkly obnoxious colors of mascara.

Also also, I seriously need to find either more dramatic color or more opaque eyeshadow or something, because nearly all of the eyeshadows I have really don't show up that well on my skin. Or they look horrible with my skin tone. I really want to experiment with stuff from Urban Decay, but their shit is so expensive. ;_; Although I remember finding some cheap stuff from them on eBay. Still, no job = no money = no needless spending! I must make do with what I have. And, you know, learn how to apply makeup properly, with that foundation shit and stuff. Waaaah, that's worrrk.

***

Sorry for the silence. I got distracted with many things, including two vacations to Las Vegas, NV and Branson, MO. I'd like to get the pictures and some semblance of a coherent write-up done soon, but I'm going to wait until the memory upgrades arrive for my laptop - increasing the RAM from 1GB to 2GB and praying that it'll be enough to prevent my laptop from spontaneously combusting on me all the time if I don't have two fans trained on it.

I start classes on September 9. It'll be nice to see my friends again, but I won't have any classes with them and I'm not really looking forward to the senior-level work for A&D. (My feelings of inadequacy in both this area and other areas of my life could warrant a novel of an LJ entry, and while I probably should attempt to sort through that at some point...i dun feel liek it rite nao so dere.) Also not looking forward to what could potentially be a fight with the art department faculty to graduate on time.

-Reileen
wise men say, only fools rush in

In anticipation of summer break, which cannot come fast enough, I've compiled a list of things I hope to do over the summer.

*Language learning - Reviewing Japanese and teaching myself Cebuano in a semi-formal manner.

One of the things that I think has been making it hard for me to learn Cebuano (besides the weird-ass verb conjugations) is the fact that I don't have a textbook to follow from. I do have the next-best thing, which is a grammar handbook, but while there is some thematic organization to the book, it's primarily with regards to vocab (e.g., "fruits and vegetables", "animals", etc.) and parts of speech (e.g., "Nouns and How You Use Them"). That is to say, this book is not "practically" organized.

What I plan to do - and which may or may not break my brain even further - is to start reviewing my Japanese lessons, right from the beginning, and translates those lessons into Cebuano. Example - am I learning how to say where something is in a room? Okay, then I'll review how to say it in Japanese and then find the Cebuano equivalent. Have I come up against those pesky counters? I'll beat myself over the head with them and then do it again for Cebuano! Ad nauseam.

I also hope to finally finish up an amateur translation of a rare Golden Sun 4-koma anthology that's been in the works for a few years now. I'm over halfway done with it, and I'll have the help and enthusiasm of my friend kiirobon, who is way better than me at reading and translating, so I'm pretty sure that if I just apply myself (HA!), I'll be able to get this done.

My fandom cred will be OVER NINE THOUSSAAAAAANNNNDDDDD

*Career advancement - Freelance work, self-teaching, Artist Alley

Feeling bad that I did so crappy on my earnings from Artist Alley this year, Lauren specifically called me up on my cell phone one night a few weeks ago to tell me about the Alchemy section of that crazy site Etsy. Alchemy is where members can put up requests for custom handmade goods - with "handmade" covering the field of graphic design services - and then interested people can bid on the request. Uh, hell yes I'm going to do this! MONEY MONEY MONEY. Even though I looked at some of the requests and started emoing about how inexperienced I am and how I have no talent at all and there's no way they'd ever choose my designs over someone else's even if I offered it for free and even if I tried I'll totally do everything wrong and they'll hate me and blah blah glitterfries. Alas, I must get some experience somehow, so I'm going to attempt to dip my toes into doing freelancing work, since it's what I want to get into eventually. (I also kind of want to open my own design firm, but that's far in the future, if it's in the future at all.)

Another thing I'd like to do is to get more familiar with Adobe Illustrator. I love Photoshop to death, but I recognize that Illustrator is, like, fucking huge for things like logos and layout and typography and such. Which are all things that I'll probably end up doing for a while to pay the bills after college, so I'd best start making that program my bitch. I've already found this site and its Photoshop equivalent, which made me SQUEEEEEE so hard because LOOK AT ALL THE SHINY NOMG. I'll attempt to work my way through some of the tutorials so that I become more familiar with the workspace of Illustrator and so I can start finding my workflow for the program. I'd also like to learn Adobe InDesign because it's specifically for working with heavy text layouts, like in books and magazines, but I'm sort of afraid to install the progam on my arthritic heap of a laptop, so I guess that'll have to wait. Anyway, trying to learn Illustrator will be headache enough. And I'm also hoping to get more familiar with photomanipulation techniques, since, y'know, that's what Photoshop is for.

And somewhere in-between, I have to find time to work on stuff for Artist Alley! Although I'm not even sure I'll do it next year, because 2009-2010 is going to be my senior year (oh, Gods, please let this be true) and therefore it's going to be jam-packed with all sorts of academic goodies to swallow whole. I guess I oughta at least start working on original illustrations, like for my Teng Shui series and for Shiroko.

*Wasting time - Playing video games, continuing to perform at Borders, writing fanfic and maybe some minor work on original fic.

I totally lost my gamer cred years ago, which is why I'm going to attempt to regain some of it by completing a few of my dust-bunny-covered video games when I can. Contenders include Baten Kaitos (...although first I have to actually purchase this game, oops), Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World (and maybe I'll even re-play the first game as a refresher! And maybe Hudson will actually do a reboot of Bomberman 64: The Second Attack), and Xenosaga.

I...actually have no idea if I'm going to be able to do any music over the summer. I was thinking of trying to hit up another Borders closer to my home in addition to the LaGrange Borders, but I'd like to get some new songs on my repertoire before then. In particular, I'd love to be able to get "Eidolon" done, because I think this has the makings of something relatively epic (for me, at least, I don't know if that'll apply for other people). And I'm starting to get a little bored with "Gospel of the Shadow of Nobody", which I guess is a good/bad sign that I really need to be working on new things. Might be nice to get a better arrangement for "One Day" as well. Oh, and I oughta finish up "No Longer Yours Truly", too.

...uh, yeah. Writing. Uh. Me write pretty one day! *thud* When I get some real talent and not the adulterated bland stuff I've been sniffing for the past couple of years.

Speaking of writing, I'm not sure if I'm going to do NaNo this year, what with having to focus on school and such. If I do decide to tackle NaNo again, I'll probably lower the goalpost to 25k and do a fanfic instead of original fic.

*Real world - Getting a part-time summer job.

Mostly because I'm feeling really guilty over making my parents pay for a lot of my stuff, including the non-necessities. Also, I have been watching lippy_addicts and other goth/punk-fashion related comms and sites and have been wanting to revamp my wardrobe something fierce. But I would feel really bad if I made my parents pay for this stuff...not that I think they'd pay for that kind of stuff in the first place, anyway. I just started getting apps and turning them in a few days ago, and I have to follow up on some things. I also need to check out more places downtown and on the North Side near DePaul, since I got the A-OK from the 'rents to look for work there. If I have to, though, I'll go back to Gamestop (shudder) or resort to McDonald's (SHUDDER), because like hell I'm going to make my parents pay for...

*Livin' la vida loca - GOING TO MOTHERFUCKIN' LAS VEGAS!

Even if that trip does happen to fall on my birthday weekend.

Yeah, so the story goes, me and a bunch of friends decided we wanted to do something crazy over the summer, so we're gonna fly out to Vegas for a weekend and generally be, uh, crazy. And...stuff. The hotel rates are relatively cheap now because of the recession, and since there's going to be a fair amount of us going, the hotel fare will be split up into manageable portions. We'll be staying at a tower suite at the Stratosphere, I think?

The main problem for all of us is the airfare, which going to and from Vegas ends up being around $340. There's no way I'd be able to make that kind of money freelancing, so I gotta face the real world and go get a job. I hope I end up with something tolerable - I did the math, and even if I worked a slacker schedule of only, like, 10 hours a week, if I worked from the middle of June through July I'd still have enough money to go to Vegas with some left over for extraneous expenses.

***

oh dear gods my ART264 .psd file is fucking huge. That's what she said! I hope my computer can handle it, because I'd hate to have to be stuck at the computer labs just to work on this. I know, I know, that's probably what the majority of on-campus design students do, but dammit, if I can help it, I don't want to be at school any longer than I have to! Even if the Mac computers in that one lab are some badass muthafuckahz. I'm really leaning towards getting a Mac as my desktop!

Anyway, gotta do some Japanese (which I actually mostly completed earlier in the day, YAY FOR BEING A RESPONSIBLE STUDENT WHEN IT'S ALREADY THE END OF THE YEAR AND NOTHING REALLY MATTERS ANYMORE) and then this three-page peer review paprt for ART227 which I totally forgot I had to do.

-Reileen
hear me out, I'm not your enemy

Vienna Teng and her crew gave an amazing performance at Schuba's on Friday, as they always do. (I have video evidence of this fact, but alas, it doesn't even begin to capture the magick of the moment.) I stalked caught up with her later and got her to autograph my copy of Inland Territory - yay! She also thanked me for my review of the album, which I think she found through the forum - double yay! And I found out that the reason they haven't played "Augustine" live yet is because they haven't really found an arrangement that they really liked for it. So now I await with bated breath the fateful day that she gives a live performance of "Augustine."

The opening act, Ben Sollee, was pretty damn amazing too. I'm not sure if his music, which could probably be described as "country on cello", is my thing or not, but lemme tell you, he's damn good on the cello.

After the performance, I crashed at lysis_to_kill's place with Lauren and Melissa. We watched Crash, which isn't exactly a "fun movie night" kind of film, but I'd heard about it back in HON301 and Lauren had brought it with her, and no one really cared which movie we watched so I just took charge of the viewing materials. (I'd say that this is such a typically Leo thing of me to do, but then, Melissa and Lauren are both Leos too...) Crash is an incredibly uncomfortable film to watch because of the way it takes on a lot of major racial issues in America, and the characters of the large main cast fall into a lot of grey areas. Some are more redeemable - or redeemed - than others.

By the time we finished this movie, it was getting kind of late, but somehow we decided that we wanted to watch something else, so we popped one of the DVDs I had for the first season of The Big Bang Theory and watched the first episode. Much lulz were had. I seriously need to watch the rest of this series; it's flippin' hilarious and I love all the geek jokes even if I can't understand half of them. (Tangentially related - I also need to finish watching Firefly - I think I'm on the second DVD of the boxset that I got for Christmas two years ago. I'm so bad with sitting down and just watching shit.)

Despite the late bedtime, all of us were up before 8:00am, WTF. However, the early wake-up was sweetened - literally - by a pack of cook-it-yourself Cinnabons that Liz managed to pick up in the fridge aisle at Jewel. OMG SO GOOD AND SO UNHEALTHY FOR YOU. I'm afraid to find and buy these for myself, because I'll probably be eating them all. The. Time.

***

So, the final chapter of Majin Tantei Nougami Neuro was released on Friday. I'm sad that MTNN has to end, but if we had to get an end, this was a pretty good end to get. And Matsui is supposed to be releasing a new series this July - I'm not sure if it's a new ongoing series or a one-shot, though.

( These minor spoilers are on the tip of my tongue. )

Fare thee well, Majin Tantei Nougami Neuro. It was sweet while it lasted. Now if only someone would pick up the tankoubon for English localization!

-Reileen
I run but it stays right by my side

Writing this while taking a break from attempting to make sense of the cacophony of my room (spring cleaning, what), eating a bowl of Apple Jacks with milk. Even though it's 6:30pm. Ye-e-s. And I kind of have a craving for chicharron again, too.

I uploaded a new icon (see this entry) and replaced my music one. Yay? Still haven't figured out my tags - I've only been tagging lately for link-o-llections and not content. I'm also thinking of adding a section for links to various online stores in my profile, since I seem to have accumulated a decent amount of them. (Plus, it also makes it easier for me to get to those links, haha.)

***

Link-o-llection!

I think everyone's familiar with the "make your prom outfits out of duct tape and get a $3000 college scholarship" contest. It sounds silly, but you'd be surprised with the awesome shit that people come up with, such as this steampunk-esque pair. I mean, that would be amazing with justregular fabric! (In fact it looks like PVC at a glance.) Be sure to check out the other outfits through the official site (linked in the entry).

Via vyctori, my fellow musicslut, I bring you a cover of The Offspring's "Pretty Fly For a White Guy" sung in bad Engrish by what sound like pre-teen Japanese schoolgirls but which are actually anime voice actresses. OW. OW OW OW. I resolve to inflict this on the otaku corner when I get back to classes.

5 Awesome Sci-Fi Inventions That Would Actually Suck.

Dragonshit: De-Evolution Dragonball: Evolution was reviewed in advance over at Anime News Network. Part of me wants to go see it for the lulz and sneak in some Mike's Hard Lemonade, but then I remembered that getting into the movie theater would require money, which could be better used to pay off strippers.

What really sucks about Dragonball: Evolution - I mean, besides some obvious points like the fact that GOKU AND CHICHI ARE WHITE WHAT THE SHIT - is how it turned the original story, which was based loosely off one of the four great classical novels of Chinese literature and originally featured an innocent, childlike protagonist, got mutilated into loser fanboy wish fulfillment crack. And it's not even the good crack, it's the kind of crack where the dealers mix in three parts baby powder and two and a half parts Chlorox bleach to make their original crack stock last so that they can con more suckers out of their greenbacks. Lord Almighty on a hellbound moped, after reading this review I think I'd rather watch the Twilight movie multiple times for 24 hours straight than subject myself to five minutes of Dragonball: Evolution.

I have to say, though, that while Dragonball: Evolution sounds bad (HA UNDERSTATEMENT OF THE EON), I'm not sure that I'd pass on it if given a choice between watching it multiple times for 24 hours straight, or either piercing my cervix, piercing my ass crack, or tattooing my eyeball.

Relatedly, here's an interview with the cervix-piercer, who is interested in the dynamics and implications of post-gender existence. It's...an interesting read, to say the least.

***

( Talking about school: winter quarter grades, spring quarter musings )

***

( Talking about life: 3/20 celebratory dinner at a Korean BBQ place with the folk from Japanese class and their pals, with a hefty appetizer of introspective teal deer ('REAL TEAL DEER') )

***

Aaaand this post took me longer than I thought, so I'll post more stuff about music, reading, and manga in my next entry tomorrow or something.

-Reileen
through the fire and the flames we carry on

---

*There's a whole spiel I could go into here about why I tend to produce more fanwork for smaller fandoms than I do for larger fandoms, but the basic gist goes that, in larger fandoms, there are more people doing more things, so I have less of an incentive (personally) to do what I want to do.

It would appear that an English version of Custom Battler Bomberman (called Bomberman 2 for the English release) has finally been released. This English version is also, bafflingly enough, a Europe-only release, much in the same way that Bomberman Story DS was. I'm hoping to eventually get my little pink spherical hands on this game, since it looks like it'll be a hell of a lot more interesting than any of the Bomberman Land installments. I'm not sure what the hell Hudson was thinking in releasing a Bomberman game like this, and especially only in Europe, but at least it's not Act Zero.

Where in the world is my copy of Bomberman Story DS, anyway? I was whoring it out to other Bomberman fans...I think kiirobon still has it?

***

You know what kind of book I really need to get more of?* Coffee table art books.

It's true that you can just go on the web and look up inspiration almost instantly, but there's a visceral satisfaction for me in physically having a book to look at. And art books tend to be designed interestingly as well, which definitely colors (pun intended) the experience. I just bought Art Now: Volume 2 while shopping for art supplies at Blick today - it's one of the smaller and tamer volumes in the world of coffee table art books, but it's a good start. And anyway, I don't currently have the money or the shelf space to be dealing with Gigantor Coffee Table Books of Doom at the moment, sadly.**

***

Speaking of books, my old JPN104 professor, Miho-san (well, that's what I tend to call her now that I don't actually have a class with her), is going to get me a copy of Bad Girls of Japan, as a thank-you gift for helping her design flyers to advertise her Queer Japan class being taught next quarter. I, uh, was totally not expecting anything like this, since it wasn't such a huge deal to come up with the flyer designs, but she was insistent on paying me back somehow, whether it was buying me lunch or something else. So hey, I can has another book! I'm really excited, though, 'cause I read a chapter from the book that Miho-san photocopied for a class she's teaching this quarter on geisha, and it was really interesting.

I also asked Miho-san on Facebook for translated novels by contemporary Japanese authors. She gave me some recs, but also invited me to come down to her office to look at her shelves there. So I went today, and left with a bunch of books and even two DVDs. (Because clearly I don't have enough stuff to read already...) She didn't have one book that really caught my eye, though - Grotesque by Natsuo Kirino. Still, I expect I'll be occupied in the meantime: I started reading Naomi by Junichiro Tanizaki (he's actually an author from the '20s and '30s, I think) at the lunch table today, and I'm intrigued. I'm on the fifth chapter, and the setup of the story reminds me, in many ways, of Nabokov's Lolita, seeing as the plot revolves around a 28-year-old electrical engineer having a romantic relationship with a girl who's 15 at the start of things. It would be interesting to compare Lolita and Naomi, since I already know about one point of divergence (the man actually does get married to Naomi, quite early on in their relationship, and is still married to her, it seems - not a spoiler, he specifically mentions this at the beginning of the book). Depending on how I feel and how much of my brain cells get killed in this last week and a half of winter quarter, I may talk more about this book.

(I'm sure the analysis has been done a million times before, but it'll be good practice for me.)

-Reileen
I want more wenches, more wenches and mead

---

*Well, all kinds of books, really. I want to eventually have a bookshelf full of different religious texts, such as various translations/versions of the Bible, a copy of the Qu'ran, the Ramayana, the Upanishads, etc., and I have ideas for how I want to expand both my fiction and non-fiction sections.
**I think I'd sell my soul to be able to get shelf space like this.