Reileen van Kaile

What Reileen Ate Yesterday
Breakfast: Half a can of Mountain Dew.
Brunch: Two small packs of Welch's fruit snacks. Eaten during JPN104.
Lunch: Two fried breadsticks stuffed with pepperoni and a Mountain Dew from the soda fountain.
Lunchinner: One package of Maruchan pot ramen, chicken-flavored. A small bottle of water, followed by a bottle of Mike's Hard Lemonade.
Dinner: One hot dog with ketchup. Finishing up the bottle of Mike's Hard.

What Reileen Ate Today
Breakfast: A bag of regular chips (Miss Vickie's brand, yum) and a bottle of Mountain Dew. Consumed during ANT120.
Brunch: Another bag of regular chips; still working on that bottle of Dew.
Lunch: Five pieces of crab rangoon. Finally finishing up the bottle of Dew.
Dinner: Will be pasta, apparently, and another can of Dew.

I'm not sure why I thought this would be interesting to post, but there you go.

***

Despite staying up 'til 11:30pm working on an ANT120 lab report that I'd wanted to finish earlier and waking up at 6:00am grumpy and groggy as hell, I actually found myself less likely to want to nod off today. This may have been in part because 1) I had a lab today in ANT120 that actually required me to do work and to stay for almost the entire scheduled time of lab, and 2) I went to Chinatown today to stock up on incense, which required train travel and ambulatory travel. I bought sandalwood, cinnamon, strawberry, and "fragrant forest", and the total came out for around $11 for all of it. Yay.

Received my "specialty area" for ART233 today: it's Classical Greece, of course. Although I have to admit I was also leaning towards Sumerian or Babylonian art as well despite the fact that I skipped the lecture where the professor actually talked about these areas. I think I'll probably look those up on my own. Also, I'm wondering if there's a book or a few out there that deal specifically with studying temples from all over the world. In class today, we were looking at the temple of the Egyptian queen Hatshepsut, and I was "dfkljaldkfjaldkf GLEEEEEE!" I love temples. I can't articulate why, exactly, beyond "OMGCOOLANDPRETTY!", but I love 'em. If I'm in a game and we're exploring temples or temple-like areas, it's likely that I'm going to spend a large part of the game with the character just looking up and around at the exterior and the interior of the place. (The Temple of Time in Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess makes me squee. Am also fond of many of the Sephiroth points in Tales of the Abyss and the Spirit Temple in Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.) In short, I am a whore for nearly anything that evokes ancient pagan temples.

(...would that make me a "temple whore"?)

Anyway, I think that's it for interesting things from Reileen's life (which tend to be few and far in-between), so onto the link-o-llection!

***

Kit Whitfield blogs about depression and children's fiction, comparing depictions of depression in Harry Potter, Avatar: The Last Airbender, and in Antonia White's novels. Hefty, but a very interesting read. In particular, I love her interpretation of the Fire Nation royalty in Avatar in the context of depression-running-through-families. She also nails down the strength of Zuko's character in the show - and by strength, I mean not only how Zuko himself would be a strong person if he existed in real life, but also what makes his character from the show so memorable. He struggles; he despairs; he makes mistakes; and ultimately, he grows. I was pleasantly surprised at the care given in drawing this portrait of him throughout three seasons of the show.

Here's a set of candid shots of Barack Obama taken before, during, and after the debate in Oxford, Mississippi last week. My personal favorites are this one, this one, and this one.

And here's Build-O-Bama, where you can cut and fold your very own Obama paper doll for...some...reason!

For every comment made on this blogpost, Tyson Foods will donate 100 lbs. of food to food banks in the Bay Area. Easiest charity since Free Rice. How do these types of things work, though? Technically speaking, this strikes me as a more charitable version of "Give me five reviews and then I'll update with the next chapter!"

Artist builds "temple of science". Let me tell you, I've got at least two characters in my headspace who are going all drooly-mouthed and starry-eyed at this idea. (For background, they're both scientists - or as much of scientists as a scientifically-handicapped person as myself can write - of strong divine heritage.) And now I'm tempted to see if I can build a "religion of science" in a novel. I can already see places where I'd be running into problems, but it would be a fun thing to play with.

kaigou recounts an interesting anecdote that reveals insight into why a person might seem gluttonous when eating. She also now has a post up of 348 personality quirks that could be worked into a character, which would be an excellent reference for all the NaNoers out there.

Disgrasian wonders about where the hell Asian Barbie is in Mattel's current line of Dallas Cowboy Cheerleader Barbie Dolls. Meanwhile, Reileen wonders how it's possible that Barbie has gotten skinnier over the years.

At the Temple of Kraden, a Golden Sun forum (that I actually am on under my fandom name), there's a thread going on in which people post funny pictures, and others reading the thread try their best to get as far as they can without laughing. Man, I didn't even try that - I just wanted to see the lulz. Which there is a fair amount of. (Be warned, though - that thread is 38 pages and counting.)

Quoting ysabetwordsmith for Major Fucking Truth from here: "In each faith are found strange and subtle truths. The study of comparative religions is learning the shape of the Divine by groping your way all around the elephant, in the happy company of other blind people."

Also quoted for MFT is this excellent post from dien about writing fanfiction vs. writing original fiction:

So when you remove fandom from the equation, you're removing exactly what people came to fandom for in the first place: the characters and the worlds. You've got to create your own. And maybe writing in someone else's world has been like training wheels, maybe it's shown you the kind of thing you're going to need to do for yourself. Without having actually written narrative fanfiction, I still look at what JK Rowling's said about her process in terms of planning out a long series. What do you give away, how soon do you give it away--her decision to move Horcrux info from Chamber of Secrets to a later book, that kind of thing. But you're also in danger of having steeped in someone else's world for so long that you write your own thing, and it's like everything everyone's already seen.

Yes. Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.

Eerily enough, look at dien's list of things you learn writing fanfiction vs. what you learn writing original fic. Replace "things you learn writing fanfiction" with "strengths as a writer" and "things you learn writing original fic" with "weaknesses as a writer", and those two lists describe me to a big fat T. My strongest points are easily dialogue, characterization, and "the power of well-crafted language" (at least I'd like to think so). My weakest points are plot (which I quickly found out doing NaNoWriMo for the past few years), stories with staying power (again, NaNoWriMo pointed this out to me), and stories that matter.

Also, check this interesting analogy in the original entry from ETA 2: "...we might think of fanfic versus original fic as two different musical instruments-- you can learn how to play music on either a guitar or a piano, but learning how to play one doesn't necessarily mean you will automatically be able to play the other."

-Reileen
your eyes tell of a star's death

THINGS I LEARNED IN ART233 TODAY

• If you microwave a donut, you'll end up with just an empty, dried out husk of a pastry.
  
• If you microwave a bar of soap, you can get it to expand and become all foamy and shit.
  
• Sex on the beach (referring to the actual act, not the drink) is not as romantic as movies etc. make it seem.
  
• The professor will be displeased if you go out and rob a grave in the name of scholastics. She will be very pleased, however, if you decide to have a beer and pretzel in the name of scholastics* (only applies to those over 21).
  
• Oh, yeah, and some guy named Sneferu had an obsession with pyramids and stuff.

ART233 is an interesting class, and the professor is knowledgeable and friendly, drawing amusing modern analogies to things she's talking about from history (see the first starred point at the bottom). And it has given me the interesting definition of art as "valued visual culture."

The problem is that, after waking up early to attend my 8:30am Science of Archaeology class, I'm freakin' dead after that. I was planning to have that chunk of time (3.5 hours on Tuesdays, about 5 hours on Thursdays) as a "Well, I'm already downtown, so let's good off around the city while I can!" sort of thing, but I totally underestimated how tired and lethargic I would be. I think I just need to get used to being up that early and actually being active, but it's still really disconcerting.

***

When I wasn't busy obsessively refreshing webpages and falling unconscious at the computer lab, I was lyric-sketching. I got down two songs, one of which is tentatively titled "life: notes from your mistress", but that needs a hella lotta work before I can think of even showing the rough draft (and I'm seriously contemplating relegating it to the "failed experiments" bin). This one fares better; I only half-hate the lyrics. The sentiment behind it is similar to Evanescence's lyric "I want to stay in love with my sorrow" from their song "Lithium", in that the narrator of this song (whoever s/he may be) is unwilling, for whatever reason, to give up that which isolates them from life, love, happiness. (Actually, now that I think about it, the narrator of this song could very well be Aya Asia from the Nougami Neuro series. Fancy that.) I have a vague inkling for how the music might go, but I'm still not sure if I want to go through with turning this into a performable song.

Cold

it's so coldly warm in here
don't want to migrate to tropic minds
where the sun will burn me
turn me aside
love, please don't cry
there's no need to melt my frozen heart
with the white-hot of your sorrow

I'm all right, I swear
bathed in the ice of my despair
embraced in a blizzard of
that which speaks to deepest blood
all that glitters is only cold

pleas in the air freeze before they die
you tried to save me from the winter storm
but found that I've only ever loved
the eternal snow

I'm all right, I swear
bathed in the ice of my despair
embraced in a blizzard of
that which speaks to deepest blood
all that glitters is only cold

nothing you can do will set me free
from this prison of eons old
come closer and you will see
all that glitters is only cold

nothing you can do will set me free
from this prison of eons old
come closer and you will see
all that glitters is only cold

-Reileen
behind the door, should I open it for you?

---

*Apparently a common food offering to the dead in ancient Egypt was bread and beer.

I should get a DePaul-related icon on here...

Wonder of wonders, I actually managed to get a hold of one of the art & design professors! I'll be meeting him tomorrow between 12:00-2:00pm to see if I can do any credit transfers from my animation classes. (Thinking back on it, I wonder if I could get my History of Animation class to count for art history credit, but I think the point is rendered moot, seeing that I'm, um, taking an art history class at the moment and it's too late to switch classes and no way am I going to withdraw.) Also need to ask him about employment/internship opportunities mentioned in a newsletter I just got last night from the art department. I'm starting to second-guess the wisdom of this, though, seeing as it wouldn't really be a good idea to overexert/overstimulate myself when I just got back into classes after a year off and am still trying to adjust to a non-vampiric schedule. *flail*

(And as if I needed more ways to procrastinate on my homework, we now have virtual bubble wrap.)

My Japanese professor suggested that, to get the most out of Japanese class, we should study the language for at least two hours a day. Which I don't have a problem with, technically speaking. It's figuring out how to use those two hours that's the problem. I'm not a very studious...er...student, and I don't have a particular system of studying that consists of anything other than "I'll read through things and maybe something will stick in my mind." Possibilities for Japanese study time include:

• reviewing stuff from the Nakama I textbook (holy shit I need this soooo badly, you have no idea)
  
• going over what we're currently studying in class (as of this entry, it's weather-related things - oh joy)
  
• keeping a journal in Japanese (I started doing this around JPN102 or JPN103 but tapered off on it for obvious reasons)
  
• doing translation work (under my fandom name, I translate 4-koma anthologies for Golden Sun and Bomberman, and this week I'm supposed to start translating the Weekly Jump raw chapters for Majin Tantei Nougami Neuro ("Come, slave, it's translation time..."))
  
• IMing with a friend who, while not a native Japanese speaker, nevertheless is more knowledgeable about the language than I am

I'll probably attempt to re-distribute the hours a bit, though, considering that I come home later on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and it seems that myself, lysis_to_kill, and mia_noire have established Monday as "Monday Movie Matinees", which means that we probably won't be productive on that day at all. Speaking of Liz...

***

After watching The Silence of the Lambs at lysis_to_kill's apartment (excellent movie), I caught the season finale of this sitcom called The Big Bang Theory, which is basically the webcomic XKCD in sitcom form. F'rreal. I am dead set on finding the first season and watching it, because the geeky win is clearly over 9000. (I guess in numerical form, the sentiment could be described as win/9000...)

***

A piano instrumental currently called "Bacchanalia" has taken a hold of me over the past few days. I've been adding little bits and pieces at a time ever since I first created the main riff randomly while working on "Wasted." I really like it - and I hope Dionysos does too, because this is a song I've owed Him for a few months already. Whoops.

In far more productive news than my own, it seems that Miss Teng is pretty damn near close to finishing recording her fourth album. I am excited liekwhoah. I have to wonder how many songs will be on it, since at the moment we're aware of thirteen new songs:

White Light
Kansas
Antebellum
Grandmother Song
The Last Snowfall
Stray Italian Greyhound
No Gringo
Augustine
Olive Tree
Radio
In Another Life
Watershed
St. Stephen’s Cross

If all thirteen were on there, that would be so fucking sexy. :D

***

Okay, I needz foodz before I hop on the train to go back home.

-Reileen
our innocence is all the worse for fears

I bought sunflowers (3 for a dollar) at the farmer's market going on in the plaza near City Hall downtown today. It made me oddly very happy, even though I had to carry those poor things around with me for a couple of hours before going home - I bought them early in the afternoon because Liz had told me that the farmer's market closed fairly early, and since I had a late afternoon class I didn't want to miss a chance at getting some greenery. I gave the flowers to Mommykins, who cut them and put them in a vase on our kitchen table. The thought of them still makes me happy.

The thought of going to Japanese class tomorrow in the rainy morning, however, dampens the sunniness a bit.

***

I did some minor edits to what I had of "Wasted" from a few days before. Save for one line that is bugging the fuck out of me, I'm pretty satisfied with this current incarnation of the lyrics, and will keep them unless musical constraints demand that I do more rewordifying. (I swear, I need to learn to write shorter songs...)

Wasted

The things I pack in the suitcase of my heart
Don't always fit like they should
Ancient locks forced on unfolded dirty laundry
And stubborn mementos eat up space
That should be reserved for necessities
Of a future time and place

I'm just one face of many in your life
But I can't face being incognito in your eyes

Because the words that I've spoken
Would end up broken upon the ground
The tears that I've cried
Would only chide me for my grief
And the bitterness I've tasted
Would just be wasted on you

I'm ready to ditch this dusty hotel
Gonna leave it behind and hit the road running
Thoughts of you cut straight and true
To my heart and leave it bleeding
But that's okay, I can walk it off
I'm still breathing

There's something to be said
For leaving you for dead

But I know, I know
I'd plant the seeds of hope at your grave
And that's how the road to hell would be paved

Because the words that I've spoken
Have been broken upon the ground
The tears that I've cried
Have chided me for my grief
And the bitterness I've tasted
Has been wasted on you

Does he know that she holds what he wants to find?
Does she know how to forgive an innocent crime?
Do they know, do they know
Do they know, do they know
Do they know, do they know
Do we know if it's all been wasted?

The words that I've spoken
Have been broken upon the ground
The tears that I've cried
Have chided me for my grief
And the bitterness I've tasted
Has been wasted on you
On you...
On you...

Okay, cool. My musical conscience is now free to work on minor things, like the homework that's due for Japanese tomorrow. To borrow a sentiment from Emperor Peony IX of Malkuth for my own purposes: "Pfft, kanji! Who needs 'em?"

Dude, vyctori, Peony has a Facebook account. I just found this out when I googled his name to double-check which number Peony he was in the Malkuthian royal line.

***

EDIT: The PV for Yousei Teikoku's new single, "Weiss Flugel"! I love how, instead of the electric guitar, this song - which is a slower one than the previous single, and a slower one than "Wahrheit", which was the first YT song to have a PV - has Takaha Tachibana rocking out on violin. Badass.

-Reileen
you, in somber resplendence, I hold

ART233 - Ancient Art
A survey on the principal works of architecture, sculpture, painting, and the industrial arts created in the Mediterranean basin and in Europe from the Paleolithic times through Roman Empire.

JPN104 - Intermediate Japanese I
Intensive practice in the use of Japanese through listening, speaking, reading, and writing, and continued enhancement of the cultural awareness intrinsic to those skills.

ANT120 - Science of Archaeology
Archaeology spans the academic worlds of the physical sciences and the social sciences. In this course, the physical science qualities of the discipline are introduced. Students explore the various ways archaeologists use model building, statistical inference, and evidence analysis to reconstruct past human experiences. The course includes two hours of lab and two hours of lecture/discussion per week.

JPN104 is my first and only class on Wednesday. I have the same teacher and the same room (I think) as I did when I first attempted the class last year. It's like I never left! [/sarcasm]

***

Went to the drivers' facility place or whatever to get my license renewed. I is nao organ donor. \o/?

While I was waiting for my number to be called, I began working on the vague, hazy threads of a song that I am currently calling "Wasted," which is, mind you, not about going out and getting trashed or high. Images are coming into view, sliver by sliver; the story is much more stubborn in coming out.

-Reileen
love your hate, your faith lost