sugardeath

There appears to be a new version of the Star Wars Roleplaying Game. I did not know there was one to begin with, but I am not at all surprised. There is a freaking LEGO Roleplaying Game.

Reading through the linked review, it sounds like a very simplified d20 rule-set. But it does sound very cool. I dunno though, what is more appealing to people? The Star Wars universe or a fantasy universe that you make up on your own? I mean, yes, you could make up a completely brand new story in the Star Wars universe. Fan fiction, anyone? Every single one of those Star Wars books? The fantasy realm just seems easier to play with though, from a creative stand point.

Now I am debating what to do. I originally wanted to start up a small little Dungeons and Dragons group here for the summer. But this new Star Wars book looks pretty good..

Did I ever find my dice before I moved out of the dorms? Crap.

I know. A BrikWars campaign that pits the LEGO Star Wars universe against the old LEGO Wild West universe. Now I just need to find all my minifigs. We used to have so many, but they are all lost now! D:

So those screw/bolt things on my license plate were a total bitch… Finally got them off, though, and put on the new plate. The new plate would totally suck (stupid new design) were it not for the fact that it says SUGRDTH on it

Rock on.

Took the car for a drive today, psych was canceled. Lots of traffic. Hate busses. Saw gas prices ranging from $3.07 to $3.29. What’s it like in the D-Town?

Went to humanities… fell asleep. Generally I try to be inconspicuous about my sleeping (though I’m sure the professors know damn well when a student is sleeping), but when I saw a kid sleeping in the front row, I gave up on trying to look awake and just passed out.

Registered for classes at Linda’s urging.

CS331 (Databases and Algorithms or something?)
CS350 (Assembly! WHOO!)
MATH148 (precalc… stupid retakes…)
ITM460 (Some computer multimedia class. Or more web oriented. I was looking at this one and 461, but 461 interfered with one of my classes)
SOC200 (sociology something or other)

16 credit hours.

Doing my schedule for next semester kinda makes ya think about this semester, ya know? I could have done sooo much better… I got a 62.5% on the bio exam I took a week or two back. The average was a 69%, but I totally could have done better if I studied sooner… The final is gonna be a bitch. Gotta know all twenty-four chapters. And do damn well. It’s worth 60% of the final grade. For everyone else. 75% for me. I missed the very first exam, but the professor was nice enough to help me out on that. Awesomes… Gotta do well…

I was trying to look at Macomb’s class schedule for the summer (to find a class that might take the place of Math148 and 149, so that I could go straight into 151 next semester), but I could barely navigate their website… I could totally take summer classes here at IIT. Work at the River East 21, maybe. Where would I live? Wouldn’t get a cheap CTA Card, either (I’d actually have to, gasp, PAY for each and every train ride). Summer housing on campus is ridiculously expensive… Doubt I have the money for an apartment. Plus classes here are also ridiculously expensive. A class at Macomb would be cheap.

And the Forum 30 knows me. They’ll give me hours.

Also, friends. Those people at home who like to hang out with me. Weirdos.

There’s my little bit of emo for the day. Valid reason for it, too.

Played some Halo with Jason, Phil, Toro, Kevin.

Played some TMNT (I BEAT THE WATER LEVEL, ON ONE GO).

Played some Prey. I seriously hope I’m not on the final boss already. That would be way too quick (I’ll have to install Doom 3, next. Never did get past the first level of hell.).

Hung out with Linda for a bit (crap, still gotta buy my formal ticket… table 33, I believe? I seriously hope we don’t have to dress up like we did for Ford’s homecoming… I don’t have a coat/jacket thingy, and I think Pete may actually be going, so I may not be able to borrow his again..). She had an… explosive episode… (I declare innocent bystander status!)

Alles gut.

Jeremy has had his computer copying Windows settings and shit from one harddrive to another (through Windows’ Transfer Files and Settings application thingy) for over a day and a half now. Probably two. I think he’s got three harddrives in there now, or something. Just stick everything you think you’ll ever need on a separate harddrive, and wipe the other(s). Start fresh with whatever operating system you want, and never move those files from that drive. Store everything that matters to that drive. Applications? No. Music and movies? Yes. School stuff? Yes. Other personal documents? Yes.

NEVER use the Documents and Settings folder (or the My Documents folder, for those of you running older versions of Windows), unless you are mounting another harddrive or partition over that folder (which is a pain in the ass to do in WinNT/XP).

Example: I had a T (guess what it stood for) drive in Windows. I stored everything important there. Never had to reinstall Windows in the two and a half years I had it, but if I ever had to, there would be VERY little backing up to do. When I migrated to Linux, I just installed over the Windows partition (which \was on a separate harddrive from my personal stuff), and all my stuff was still on the other drive. Untouched, perfectly usable still. Mount that drive as my /home directory in Linux, and ALL of my personal settings are stored there. For every application. Automatically.

If I need to reinstall openSUSE or wanna try out Ubuntu or anything else, all my stuff is intact. Opera will still have all my bookmarks, Gnome will still look EXACTLY the same (which is totally fucking awesome, so much time has been spent customizing it), and there’d generally be very little to do in regards to making the computer mine again.

Same idea if you mount a drive as “c:\documents and settings” in Windows (though you’ll have to worry about the registry, which is another pain in the ass on its own).

…

Um… end rant… <_<

Yeah.. I’m totally a CS major… what tipped you off?

(The “My Documents”/”Documents and Settings Folder” is such a retarded idea.
Besides, what’s easier to work with:
“c:\my documents and settings\satoshi\local settings\my music\evanescence”
or
“t:\music\evanescene”)

Linda lent me The Atrocity Archives a week or two ago, and I just finished it a day or two ago. Very cool book. Very nerdy. I enjoyed it (When magic and the occult meet technology, which then meets interdimensional travel, which then meets Nazis and Hitler’s face carved into the moon, you know you’ve got a good book.)

Ending this now. Need to. Class at ten.

I ordered all of my books (and a few extra things) off Amazon.com.

Here’s the breakdown:

• HUM104
  • Dialogues Concerning Natural Religions
    David Hume
    ($9.95; $5.10 at IIT used)
  • Frankenstein
    Mary Shelly
    ($4.95; $5.95 at IIT used; never did read this in 12th grade, yay for AP English)
  • Darwin (Norton Critical Editon)
    Charles Darwin, Phillip Appleman
    ($12.35; $13.50 at IIT used)
  • Therese Raquin
    Ãmile Zola
    ($9.13; $8.25 at IIT used)
• BIOL115
  • Human Biology
    Sylvia S. Mader
    ($80.32; $90.50 at IIT used)
• LIT328
  • Favorite Works of William Blake
    William Blake
    ($9; $11.25 at IIT used)
  • Short History of the Printed Word
    Warren Chappell
    ($14.68; $18.70 at IIT used)
  • Another E.E. Cummings
    E.E. Cummings
    ($5.49; $11.20 at IIT used)
  • Norton Anthology of Poetry
    Margaret Ferguson
    ($48.50; $50 at IIT used)
  • Ariel: The Restored Editon
    Sylvia Plath
    ($11.16; $10.45 at IIT used)

Total: $205

I listed the IIT Bookstore’s used prices for reference. A few of the books were a tad higher than the used prices on-campus. I neglected, however, to list the prices for new books. The store was asking $120.65 for the bio book. I think it’s a win no matter what, really.

I also already had the Java book I need for CS116 and the Psych book I need for PSYCH221.

I also ordered:

• Brave New World
  Aldous Huxley
  ($9.64)
• Fahrenheit 451
  Ray Bradbury
  ($6.99)
• Lord of the Flies
  William Golding
  ($9.99)
• 1984
  George Orwell
  ($7.95)
• Crime and Punishment
  Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  ($6.99)
• V for Vendetta (the graphic novel)
  Alan Moore
  ($13.59)
• East of Eden
  John Steinbeck
  ($15.90)
• The Dollmaker
  Harriette Arnow
  ($2.25)
• Stargate (Ultimate Edition) (the original 1994 movie on DVD)
  ($4.91)

With these items, and shipping/handling, the total came to $309.20.

Ouch!

There goes all that money from work I was talking about.

Half of the order was to be shipped on Feb. 20th due to Brave New World being out of stock. I ended up cancelling that book so that the order would ship on the twenty-fifth of January instead and just reordered a cheaper version of the book that also has some extras (and is in-stock!).

The only book in that list that I have not yet read is 1984. All the others I read in Honors English 10, 11, or AP English. It’s been a while though, so I figured it’d be good to read them again, seeing as how I enjoyed them quite a bit. V for Vendetta was just a little something I’ve been meaning to get. I love the movie and I wanna read the original story.

I also found out that my amazon.com login/password is valid on amazon.de, the german site.

• Der fernste Ort
  Daniell Kehlmann
  (€6,07/$7.87 ; €20,07/$26.04 with shipping/handling)

I saw a review of the book on everything2, and it looks pretty neat. Plus it’s in german. It’ll be a challenge to read, but it’ll be a fun challenge. I need to keep up with my german anyway. And what’s better than reading? The reason I love the english language so much and am pretty good with it is because I used to constantly read books that were rated for highschoolers and the like in elementary school. It’s the same principle with german.

Speaking of everything2, today marks two years since I signed up as a noder. I have only written three things in those two years, so I decided I’d post the sonnet I made for AP English. I’m wondering what kind of reception it will garner. We’ll see.

I should write more. I have an idea in the back of my head. It’s been there since the summer, I think. I forget when I started it.

All of the books should be coming right around my birthday. It’ll be like a gigantic birthday present followed by a bunch of smaller ones (that’s the way the orders are broken up; there’s like ten items in one order, and then one in each of the rest) and then finally one from Germany. I can’t wait. There will be much literary goodness to come.

So I installed Ubuntu on the empty partition on my main drive yesterday. One of the first things I did was set the OS langauge to German 8), but I also, accidently, put a little program called “fish” into the top panel. It’s some sort of random quote thing or something. I clicked the fish (or fisch as the Germans would say it) today while trying to change the default boot partition for Grub and the following quote popped up:

Well, anyway, I was reading this James Bond book, and right away I realized
that like most books, it had too many words. The plot was the same one that
all James Bond books have: An evil person tries to blow up the world, but
James Bond kills him and his henchmen and makes love to several attractive
women. There, that’s it: 24 words. But the guy who wrote the book took
*thousands* of words to say it.
Or consider “The Brothers Karamazov”, by the famous Russian alcoholic
Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It’s about these two brothers who kill their father.
Or maybe only one of them kills the father. It’s impossible to tell because
what they mostly do is talk for nearly a thousand pages. If all Russians talk
as much as the Karamazovs did, I don’t see how they found time to become a
major world power.
I’m told that Dostoyevsky wrote “The Brothers Karamazov” to raise
the question of whether there is a God. So why didn’t he just come right
out and say: “Is there a God? It sure beats the heck out of me.”
Other famous works could easily have been summarized in a few words:

* “Moby Dick” — Don’t mess around with large whales because they symbolize
nature and will kill you.
* “A Tale of Two Cities” — French people are crazy.
– Dave Barry

I really like this one due to the Dostoyevsky reference. I had to read Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment for AP English this year. It was a good book, but very long. With Crime and Punishment, Dostoyevsky is basically asking if there are people in this world that rise above social law. He speculates that these so-called “Supermen” are able to get away with things that normal people are not. Of course, it’d be easier to ask the question than to write such a long book on it, but I guess that’s what authors do, ya know? I suggest you read it, it’s very good.

Apparently the dude who does 8-Bit Theater is coming out with a book, entitled Nuklear Age. Interesting. If 8-Bit is any indication as to how this book might be, I absolutely have to get the book :tongue: 8-Bit is hilarious, and he says Nuklear Age should be along same lines (a group of super heroes who can’t do what they’re supposed to very well, compared to a group of heroes who can’t do what they’re supposed to very well… hmm). Hm.. First item for my Christmas list! w00t