So my mom drafted me to do facepainting for the kids at her coworker's party today.
I was kinda scared because I first painted my sister's face and if I screw up, well, what the heck, but then after that I'd be painting on other people's kids and it's like, I don't exactly have much experience with this. XD
But it turned out okay, I quickly got the hang of it, and the kids really didn't need a masterpiece to make them happy. It was nice seeing their smiles when they looked into the mirror.
Some things I just find kinda odd, some things I find really annoying.
For one thing, I've never seen the "this program was brought to you by the following sponsors" message subtitled before until now. Very odd, considering... you know, it's not really part of the show.
I've also never seen the "when watching [show], please brighten the room and watch at a distance from the TV" blurb subtitled before this, ever. I mean, when it's got an actual lil' animated scene to go with it, like in Hay
From my Global Studies textbook:
... fail.
For those who don't know Chinese. The Huang He is not "sometimes called" the Yellow River. "Huang2" (黄) = yellow. "He2" (河) = river.
You'd think they'd at least have researched... *sigh*
I should probably also stop worrying about my Global teacher mangling the pronunciation of most names when she's lecturing in class, for that matter. I've yet to hear a non-native speaker with properly accented Chinese.
Actually, at this point, I'm so o
Kinda occurred to me today one of the shifts in the tone of classic and modern sci fi... of course it's not a catchall rule, but the sort of "in general" feel of it...
In essence, it seems to me that classic sci fi offers a more utopian view of the future, whereas more modern sci fi offers a more dystopian view of the future.
Like I said, by no means completely generalizable. I mean, you've got the classics of dystopian literature in 1984 and Brave New World and whatnot. But a lot of the s
As stubborn and frequently unable to handle certain ideas that friend of mine is, he does ask some good questions.
Today he mentioned that he'd heard that in either Chinese or Japanese, the past was referred to as "forward" and the future as "backwards," while the opposite is true in English. At first I was all, "What are you talking about?" but then I though about it for a second, and I realized, hey, technically he's right, that's true for both languages, although when used in context of ti
Is what it feels like I just biked through. Twice.
Should have taken a Claritin. Should have taken a Claritin...
Today. Is. Really. Freaking. Hot. Tomorrow. Will. Be. Even. Worse.
As my friend put it in Comp Sci this morning, the weather's been like winter winter winter winter winter winter spring summer summer summer summer... I mean, this time last week I wouldn't wander out without two layers and a jacket, long pants, hood up, hands shoved in my pockets... today I'm in shorts, T-shir
So today it really hit me how much easier it is to read Japanese than Chinese.
Kana are wonderful things. Truly.
Despite that, however, in an hour to an hour and a half (I didn't really time myself) I managed to get through a whopping 8 pages. Go me. I skipped/guessed a bunch of Kanji, too, since if I looked up every Kanji I didn't know I'd have been there all day. Managed to essentially understand what was happening though.
I wouldn't be attempting this in the first place if I didn't h
Posted here so as not to clutter up the topic. Author's notes after the jump.
Final Author’s Notes
You really don’t have to read this. This is just my rambling and random facts about the writing of this story.
To start off: I don’t believe I finished that.
This is not like finishing a short story or a drawing or something, this was huge. How huge? In case anyone wants some statistics, as of this writing (I might do a couple more revisions) the story proper, minus my notes, stands a
And I keep forgetting to mention them in favor of posting random ramblings. I wonder why.
First off a classmate of mine was elected to the school board! Pretty cool, eh? The day after the elections everyone was congratulating her so much I think she was utterly sick of it by the end of the day. XD English class kept getting interrupted. We received like five phone calls and then a photographer (with a really loud rapid-fire camera) from the Star-Ledger came and snapped photos for the last hal
Went to Columbia's Days on Campus today. No excuses anymore, I've been to all the campuses and I've got basically all the information.
I have to decide which college I'm going to.
... AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH THIS IS SO HARD.
Goshdarnit if college would just have the decency to be free this would be a much easier decision.
Can't link it here since it's a blog and will occasionally, casually use strong language... but I recently found something that's hilarious and relevant to my interests.
I'm sure everyone here knows about Engrish. Basically, people in other countries, usually Japan and China, botch English in horrible ways. Well, one ethnically Chinese blogger decided to turn the tables on that and point out the many stupid ways Westerners use East Asian languages. The blog has actually been going since 2004
Well, in actuality, not quite. There are a couple things I want to tie up with the epilogue, and I'd like to end on a bit of a different note. The epilogue really could have been just chapter 21, but considering that it's less than half the length of any of the other chapters, and all the main story threads were concluded...
In any case, final chapter of 52-pickup.
Although I thought I was done writing it over spring break, I ended up still making several revisions last night as I thought
AKA I went out to practice driving for the first time today, with my dad.
Yeah, I realize I coulda gotten my permit two years ago. I was just really lazy and kept putting it off. ^^;; But now I have it! So my dad drove me to a parking lot and I got behind the wheel for the first time.
He says I did pretty good, though I tend to be overly-cautious judging turns on the right side and always end up making the turn like five feet away from the curb. And if the parking lot had been full I think
My dad asked me if it would be cool to have a Blackberry and I said, "Yeah, I guess so," so he bought me one. O_O
On that note there is now a growing number of wires strewn about the floor near my computer. Cords for the external drive, the cord for my MP3 player, and now several cords for the Blackberry.
I was hoping this one gadget could replace my MP3 player though... but that's not gonna happen until it gets more storage space. 240 mB is... not a lot. I don't listen to much music, but
I've never seen someone blush on the back of their head before.
Mou chotto dake!
On a completely different note.
Is there anything these cell phones can't do? O_O
Today was my last day of high school gym.
EVER.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Okay, granted, it's getting replaced with Health, but I can sit down in Health, don't have to go through the hassle of changing, can doodle, and possibly sleep.
Also, National Latin Exam results are back! I got a gold! That makes four years in a row, which means I get the fancy $70 Oxford Classical Dictionary for free! =D The other two kids in my class who were also in the running for the dictionary (3 years in a row) al
Thy name is college decisions.
Okay so I've got it down to 4, basically... Columbia, CMU, Maryland, and Rutgers.
Columbia and CMU are both about 50,000 a year. Maryland is... 30,000 or 20,000 I think, and Rutgers is free.
Columbia, obviously, is an Ivy. For CMU I got into Computer Science and CMU is definitely among the top for CS... but I have to know I really want to do CS because you can't really pursue anything else but CS with a CS degree. I also can't say I'm too hot on Columbia's
So we had guests yesterday and so today my parents were drinking the leftover wine.
And my sister was like, "That's beer!" and I said, "No, it's wine," and then as a joke I added, "It's like what you do all the time."
And then my sister said, "There are three kinds of wine. There's the wine that you drink, the wine that's in the jungles, and the whine that's like waaaah, waaah."
And then I'm like, "... the wine in the jungles?"
Oh and I also forgot to mention that my sister lost her
I think there are still twenty-ish Easter eggs at large. Out of a final count of about eighty, it seems.
We'll be turning them up from the nooks and crannies of our house for days. Not even I remember where I hid them.
... and since I may as well chapter 19, the penultimate chapter of 52-pickup, was posted earlier today.
