EPIC TECH FAIL

My parents just spent like one and a half hour on long-distance phone trying to teach my grandpa how to use Yahoo Messenger to call us with his computer. We tried Skype before; he couldn’t get it – so now they’re trying Yahoo Messenger because my dad recently discovered that LO AND BEHOLD, YOU CAN HOLD CALLS WITH PEOPLE ONLINE AND SAVE MONEY!

I even had to create an account for him. And after we got past the login screen, we got stuck at the ‘adding contacts’ stage.

Seriously, how idiot-proof can software get? Guess we’ll have to wait another twelve months (that’s when I go back to China) before we can get the VoIP going.

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LoTR Marathon

Went to Sugi’s house yesterday for a LoTR marathon, which we sadly did not quite get to complete.

Her set is a cool Extended Edition boxset that comes in a wooden case. And being EE it has (apart from extra scenes) what it calls “Appendices”, which are basically extra things like behind-the-scenes interviews, mini-documentaries and things like that. I borrowed all 6 (each DVD comes with two of them) of these discs from her and watched a bit of the first one yesterday.

Part of the Hobbiton set.

The Appendices have cool stuff like pre-viz animatics and galleries of storyboards and stuff. Of the bits I watched last night there was even some footage of Alan Lee/John Howe sketching concepts for Hobbiton on location.

Alan Lee (at least I think it is) sketching.

Some of the designs – like costume designs or concept art – I’ve seen before in The Art of… books. I’ve read The Art of FoTR and TTT but have yet to find RoTK at any library. Our school library only has FoTR, and I’ve found a couple of copies of TTT at Queenstown library, but searching the NLB’s database I can’t find much.

Says Sugi:

krysjez: Legolas is gay!
Marshy and me: WTH? We thought you fangirled him!
krysjez: *shrug*

krysjez also dislikes Legolas’ lines, apparently, because they sound silly or something. But I love them, probably because I adore archaic English lol.

But I like archaic English! (sort of.) Can you imagine their lines sounding like they were taken straight out of a badfic? I know, my brain just splinched too. And I do fangirl* him.

Also copied from Sugi is a favorite-scenes thing. No <!–more–> because I’m lazy. But I don’t think it’s going to be very long because I haven’t really watched them that many times. I think 3 times for the first two and one-and-a-half (didn’t get to complete yesterday) for the last.

FoTR:

• Gandalf rides to Isengard.
• Gwaihir rescuing Gandalf scene.
• Rivendell panorama(s). It’s so pretty and the thought that half of them are matte paintings/minis makes me feel utterly inadequate.
• Merry and Pippin throw rocks at the water at the gates of Moria.
• Dwarrowdelf hall intro.
• “We cannot escape”.
• Entering Lothlorien, from the running thing onwards to pans of Caras Galadhon.
• Legolas thinks of Galadriel’s gift. (insert fangirl*)
• Boromir dies ):

TTT:

• “Riders of Rohan! What news of the Mark?”
• Orc pile (after the attack by the Riders of Rohan) and discovery of Hobbit tracks.
• Treebeard’s introduction – the blink.
• “Little orcs!”
• “Your words are poison.” (she should totally have slapped Grima D: )
• “I don’t usually hold to foreign food, but this elvish stuff, it’s not bad.”
• Gollum and Sam arguing about the rabbits.
• Legolas argues with Aragorn.
• Archery!
• Shieldboarding! (well, not really.)
• Aragorn and Gimli leap onto the causeway.
• 270-degree-horseflip! (I can’t remember which one it was from, actually.)
• Samwise the Brave.

RotK:

• “Welcome, my Lords… to Isengard!”
• Drinking game
• “Game over.” ♥
• From the ashes a fire shall be woken/ a light from the shadows shall spring/ renewed shall be Blade that was broken/ The crownless again shall be King.
• Gandalf and Pip riding through Minas Tirith.
• “In fact, it’s better if you don’t speak at all, Peregrin Took.”
• “All shall fade…”
• The lighting of the beacons. It was like the Great Wall or something, only infinitely cooler. Music was awesome too.
• Rohirrim arrival and charge.
• “By all that you hold dear on this good earth, I bid you stand and fight, Men of the West!”
• Peter Jackson the pirate.
• “What about side by side with a friend?” – it’s a bit lame, but kinda cute.
• Frodo reunites with the rest of the Fellowship.
• I didn’t like anything after that except Bilbo asking after his old ring, because it was like 30 minutes of tearful goodbyes. I know, I’m totally insensitive :V

*Can I graduate from fangirl now? I want to be a fan.

WLM Beta

By some horrible twist of fate i have managed to inflict the Windows Live Messenger Beta upon myself and I can’t uninstall it!

So, like, it’s really big and clumsy and ugly. And Plus! doesn’t work on it. And I can’t even change the color of the conversation windows. Did I mention that when you sign in, your display picture border turns a disgusting shade of neon green? The only thing I like about this is those little status indicators next to your name – much prettier than the green/gray men of old.

Block Tests 2: Day 1

Bah, humbug!

I’m hating this second round of blocks. I had IH, LA and Physics today. Daily or semi-daily reports will follow. Got to go do Math and start memorizing BSP facts after this.

LA

I’ve attached the poem after the jump, read it if you want. So the first question what “What do you think of the mother-child relationship? How does the poet create this impression in you?” or something along those lines – all unseen questions are the same anyway – and I wrote some junk about it being “loving” and “caring” etc. etc. I think I used like a quarter of my synonym bank for “loving” today. Either that or I kept repeating words. Either way, gave that about a page or so. Proceeded to mention something about the mum being “protective”, which I think I didn’t elaborate properly on, and some tripe about how the mum sees “hope and joy” in her daughter. Those two combined was half a page.

Second question was “What does the poet think of the mother’s role in society?” and I can’t remember what came after that sentence. I said the poet thinks the mum has a really important role in society, holding the worlds of their children (and maybe indirectly everyone – see last line of poem) together, fixing them, etc. etc. I tried to reference the repeated imagery of worlds but I forgot to mention something about cycles. Uh, in hindsight, cycles wouldn’t have been a very smart choice either. Oh well.

Screwedness Comparison with Rest of Class
I think we’re about on the same level. I hope. Most people wrote about the same as me, 2-2.5 pages (without leaving lines) and the ones who left lines wrote 4-5 pages.

IH

I tried to keep in mind the way I wrote my Sri Lanka essay (I’m still in shock over the marks I got for that even though it happened last term). We had to write on the importance of the education system + 2 other factors in the Northern Ireland armed conflict. My factors were employment and voting, though I am really regretting writing about voting. I mean, the big factor was the divided loyalties thing, and I totally forgot about it. Evidence was hard to find for the voting factor, highlighting is fun… though still fudge-able for education and employment. (I had numbers. Imprecise numbers, but numbers nevertheless.)

My conclusion was pretty rushed but I included the stuff about long-term factors. I tried to weigh the factors but sadly I could only get in a short paragraph of about five or six sentences before time ran out.

Screwedness Comparison with Rest of Class
Everyone’s always screwed for IH. Nothing new there. Though Zinc and was it Nicole? used more paper. I think they’re actually superhuman Seborgan androids doing undercover work for the Ministry of Education over there. Especially Zinc.
PHYSICS

Today was the first time in my schooling history that I ever ran out of time for a Science paper. I mean, I’m me! I don’t run out of time for Science papers! Anyway, the test was really heavy on lenses and optics and things. I couldn’t do the last page and a bunch of the MCQ questions were really weird. I think the Physics teachers must be giggling their heads off now over our responses.

By the way, if anyone has a ray diagram incl. image positions, etc, for a periscope, post it in the comments.

I think I use the letters etc too much. Maybe I’ll go etcetera, etcetera next time.

Bah

Because I am an egotistical idiot who’s not particularly happy over having missed 26 minutes edit: almost the whole of RoTK trying to redo my references properly in an essay (that and my painting is not drying)…

This is to mollify myself. It doesn’t even compare with the stat graphs of some of my friends – that is, if they even have stat graphs.

Internship: Day 4

I like food. :/ Lunch first:

3 people let me go with them to this prata place near the office. I think it’s called Cheese Prata Place or something. My first time eating roti prata  and mee goreng (well it was maggie mee goreng, but whatever). I feel so un-Singaporean sometimes. Total $5 (plus iced Milo, probably $6-ish). Now I understand what they mean by getting decent food for cheap in Singapore. Maybe $6 isn’t that cheap, but apparently it’s a pretty good price for the “outside world”. (I rarely eat out because I take pretty much all my meals at school or at home. To friends: this also explains my akwardness at hawker centres.)

tl;dr – I ate prata and mee goreng. It was nice.

It’s pretty fun going out for lunch with people. I should do this more often at school.

Anonymous wasn’t there this morning because she went somewhere to conduct training, so after they got the suboffice unlocked I did some concepts for the remaining months. Supervisor wasn’t in the main office, as usual, so I dilly-dallied and touched up the previous ones (after finishing concepts) until whenever, when I went to get the remaining ones approved.

Did designs.