Epic Doodle Game

"Judge not thy woodwind sisters, for you all have the same Director." - Rules For Brass Players, Volume XXI


Let it be noted that band people are amazing. If there's one thing I am going to miss about the end of the school year, it will be hanging out with all of them (although I'll actually see several of them for various things).


I'm sure all of the cheap restaurants near school love exam week, because all of the underclassmen are buying their food too. (I've gone out both days so far, and my chem teacher is buying us pizza next week).


After said band exam this morning, seven or so of us were sitting around and decided to create an Epic Doodle together. (This entails everyone choosing three colored pencils and then passing around a piece of paper, taking turns drawing. It began with seven stick figures.)


This is what happened:

The TARDIS is obvious, of course, but there's also Pokemon and Portal references, a ferret that shoots lightning, a man who regenerated into the Hulk version of our director, the Doctor, and a radioactive teddy bear in a protective bubble. Among other things.

And no, I'm not exactly sure what "Angles rule" is supposed to mean, but there you have it. (We did two other pages, but this one is the best.)

Anyone want to make up a story as to what's happening (and why)?

Review: Divergent by Veronica Roth

"In Beatrice Prior’s dystopian Chicago world, society is divided into five factions, each dedicated to the cultivation of a particular virtue—Candor (the honest), Abnegation (the selfless), Dauntless (the brave), Amity (the peaceful), and Erudite (the intelligent). On an appointed day of every year, all sixteen-year-olds must select the faction to which they will devote the rest of their lives. For Beatrice, the decision is between staying with her family and being who she really is—she can’t have both. So she makes a choice that surprises everyone, including herself.

During the highly competitive initiation that follows, Beatrice renames herself Tris, and struggles alongside her fellow initiates to live out the choice they have made. Together, they must undergo extreme physical tests of endurance and intense psychological simulations, some with devastating consequences. As initiation transforms them all, Tris must determine who her friends really are—and where, exactly, a romance with a sometimes-fascinating, sometimes-exasperating boy fits into the life she’s chosen.

But Tris also has a secret: one she’s kept hidden from everyone, because she’s been warned it can mean death. And as she discovers unrest and growing conflict that threatens to unravel her seemingly-perfect society, she also learns that her secret might be what helps her save those she loves . . . or it might be what destroys her." - Shelfari's Summary

I agree that the summary makes Divergent sound like just another Hunger Games knock-off. A bunch of teenagers thrust into a highly-competitive situation, with the bottom scorers being eliminated? And ooh, romance. That's what I thought when I started reading it, too. But no. Not at all.

I realize that over the course of the year, I've said "Oh, I loved this book so much!" for every dystopian novel I've reviewed, other than Delirium. Divergent was way better than Matched, Delirium, and XVI. I'm choosing not to compare it to Wither (which I apparently didn't write a review for-- I loved it to pieces), since they're both amazing in different ways.

I have another post in the works about the world in greater detail, so I'll just say that it wasn't just an "Ooh, creative idea!" sort of dystopian world. This was a "Ooh, creative and engrossing and fascinating idea!" sort.

The love interest, despite sharing some physical traits with Mr. Paranormal Romance (blue eyes, dark hair, long-fingered hands-- and I got to the part about the hands a few days after I wrote the post), is not annoying. He's not Mr. Perfect, and he's not Mr. My Flaws Make Me Perfect. He really is, well, flawed. And it's that, ironically enough, that made him my favorite fictional love interest in a long while. If it weren't for the fact that I don't want to spoil his identity for you (who am I kidding- it's obvious from his first scene), I would refuse to call him The Love Interest, because while that's his role in the plot, he seems way more real and...complete... than just that.


To quote from another review of the book, "Tris never had some sudden, life-changing experience and then suddenly became sure that she was in the right place making the right choices. She had terrible doubts through to the end, and her success throughout the book was to keep ploughing on through her uncertainty." That's true, and I love it.


Reading Divergent, while completely enjoyable in and of itself, also made me realize some of the flaws in my own novel, and has inspired me to get started on another set of edits. (It may help that there are two short scenes in Divergent that are pretty much identical to two short scenes in mine, and Divergent did it better.) That, I think, is one of the marks of a great book, though: it makes you want to do great things yourself.

We Wear The Same Bow Tie

"More of me comes out when I improvise." - Edward Hopper


Having gone to the beach for the weekend, I thought the 6 combined hours of sitting in a car would make for an excellent opportunity to catch up on a couple episodes of Pop Culture Happy Hour (and then be bored for the other four and a half hours in which I did not have another episode).


One of the people on said podcast was talking about how excited he was about Kung-fu Panda 2, and I'd seen on his Twitter feed a few days before that he apparently cried more than once during the movie. I love this for a couple of reasons.


1. This is a grown man who is legitimately excited about Kung-fu Panda, unrelated to the fact that his kids probably also wanted to see it.


2. This is a grown man who is willing to admit that not only did he cry, but that he cried during an animated movie.


I don't particularly care whether you're a person given to crying. Some are, and some aren't, and that's fine. However, it makes me very happy when people (especially guys over the age of 13) admit that they have/do, regardless of how frequently. So yay for Stephen Thompson.


There's this weird cultural thing going on where crying is associated with weakness, and fragility, and irrationality, and a lack of masculinity. Which implies that a) emotions are bad, and b) emotions are not a manly thing to have. Both of which are absolutely ridiculous.


That being said, strong emotions certainly can and do have negative side-effects. They can cloud your judgement, consume your mind, and utterly destroy your ability to empathize.


And that's what I think it is: the temporary loss of empathy. It's not that you're being irrational, strictly speaking. You've just undergone a significant shift in priorities that says "I do not freaking care what's going on in your head. I'm not even going to try to see things from your point of view, because what I'm feeling is far more important." 


It's just an evolutionary thing-- emotions are there for a reason, and our reactions to them are there for a reason too. We "irrationally" hate that which causes us pain, and we get "irrationally" upset when something we value is taken away. The hate drives us to get as far away from the pain-causer as possible, and the loss we feel drives us to replace the stolen thing- or steal it back.


Once the strong emotions subside, empathy returns, along with our "rational" mind. (Hold on...there's more to the world than just Me?) The trick is to be able to recognize what's going on, and to keep from acting on it until it's passed.


It's not a weakness to be sad, and it's not wrong to have powerful reactions sweep you off your feet. What is a weakness is to not be able to cope with it in constructive ways. Emotion is probably both the best and worst part of being human. It's perfectly natural, though, and I think that if more people really believed/accepted/understood that, there'd be less hard feelings across the board.


So I apologize for any and all past and future cases in which I have failed to empathize with any of you. I don't condemn myself for it, since I do believe that it (in the type of situation discussed above) is an unavoidable part of life, but all people deserve the respect of being viewed as a fellow person trying to make his or her way in the world. 


And because I am a massive nerd, I am now deciding that it shall be my new goal to remember that we all wear the same figurative bow tie, which is cool. Because bow ties are, and always will be.

Two Quotes (As I Procrastinate From My Last Lab Report)

“To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it’s because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that’s where phrases like ‘deadly dull’ or ‘excrutiatingly dull’ come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. Admittedly, the whole thing’s pretty confusing, and hard to talk about abstractly…but surely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or tedious places anymore but now also actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarkets’ checkouts, airports’ gates, SUVs’ backseats. Walkmen, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can’t think anyone really believes that today’s so-called ‘information society’ is just about information. Everyone knows it’s about something else, way down.”

- David Foster Wallace, The Pale King


"Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn." - Benjamin Franklin

Mr. Paranormal Romance

Meet Mr. Paranormal Romance. He won't pay very much attention to you at first, but we fully expect that the two of you will become quite good friends. Or even **waggles eyebrows** friends.


Mr. Paranormal Romance is English. He is tall and dark-haired and ridiculously good-looking (unless he is a werewolf, in which case he will be muscular and tan). His good looks rest mainly in the region of the hair, which is dark. He is also rich. He plays piano and composes his own music. He has great hands, which will be described as smooth, flawless, and long-fingered. He is a loner, but comes out of his shell when he meets you, Miss Reader.


He is very charming and will smile devilishly. He has an ironic sense of humor. He probably has a leadership role. He is intelligent. Actually, he's something of a genius. He's also ridiculously good-looking. And English. 


All of the females (and token gay men) at his school or workplace have been in love with Mr. Paranormal Romance at some point or another. However, strangely enough, none of these people are jealous of Miss Reader after he begins to notice her, unless one of these people is one of Miss Reader's close friends.


Mr. Paranormal Romance has some sort of inner darkness or pain, or a secret that can only be overcome with the help of Miss Reader. This is probably supernatural, or involving his mysterious past. It could be a family curse or he could be of a race far hotter than human despite the fact that humans are by far the most attractive race, since all of the non-humans seem to want to mate with them. 


Have we mentioned that Mr. Paranormal Romance is both good-looking and English? 


Just to make sure that Miss Reader is aware of those two Very Important Facts, Mr. Paranormal Romance will be shirtless for some reason or another fairly soon after she meets him. He may also give a speech or tell a long story so that Miss Reader may lose herself in his voice.


Miss Reader's life will gradually grow to center around Mr. Paranormal Romance. This creates a lot of danger and tension. Mr. Paranormal Romance knows this, and will either attempt to leave in order to protect Miss Reader from his inner darkness, discover a fear of commitment, or assure her of his love. If Mr. Paranormal Romance chooses one of the first two options, he will eventually return and their relationship will be even more serious and passionate than it was before. If they are still in school, they will become engaged before it is culturally expected for their ages. If they are not, their engagement period will be abnormally short.


If he chooses the third option, however,  Miss Reader will discover Mr. I'm Even More Awesome Than That Other Guy Who I Hate And You Should Too. This guy may be Miss Reader's childhood friend, or the Nemesis from Mr. Paranormal Romance's Past. At this point, Mr. Paranormal Romance becomes the villain, due to the revealing of his secret . This dating and/or engagement period will be longer, because Mr. Paranormal Romance will have left Miss Reader with doubt, which will eventually be healed by extraordinary patience and consideration from Mr. I'm Even More Awesome Than That Other Guy Who I Hate And You Should Too.


Pity. Mr. Paranormal Romance was so English and good-looking.

(Post inspired by both The Tough Guide To Fantasyland by Diana Wynne Jones, and Maureen Johnson)

Geek Day 2011 (alternate title: In Which I Am Arrogantly Awesome And Rub It In A Bit)

"People, let’s hear it today for being single. Exploring the world, finding adventures, and scoping big scenes are hallmarks of being cool with being you. Because look — falling in love is great and falling in love is nice but that doesn’t mean going alone can’t also be sugar and spice. Good days and bad days, setting suns and shining stars, it’s all about perspective and focusing on who you are. Because if all you need is love, and all love needs is you, then it’s great to relax and enjoy… just being you with you." - 1000 Awesome Things Blog

"Everything is a word, and words make people." - my 7th grade poetry notes which I found while spring-cleaning


May 25th is apparently Geek Day, for some reason involving Star Wars. It's also Towel Day (Hitchhiker's Guide reference), and this year, it's also Harry Potter Day in my school's Unofficial Spring Spirit Week (yeah, you guys wish you weren't homeschooled- haha).


So when faced with the decision over Towel vs. Potter and being deprived of a Potter Towel...I immediately grabbed at the excuse to pretend I was at Hogwarts for a day. White shirt, black skirt, and the Gryffindor tie from the Hermione costume that won me a prize at the Half Blood Prince release party when I was nine (9 year-old me and 11 year-old Emma Watson look astonishingly alike if I'm not wearing my glasses and I've braided my hair the night before. The resemblance isn't huge anymore, though). I just wish all of my Ravenclaw stuff worked in May-- a sweater, scarf, and robes don't mix with 90-degree weather terribly well.


But in short, I spent the day feeling totally awesome. Rocked the clarinet solo in "Godzilla Eats Las Vegas". Shared grins with all of the other costumed people. Communally bought a couple pizzas with my lunch people, which we ate outside the band room. Had a couple little kids outside Dairy Queen stare at me like "Wait...does she go to Hogwarts?" Made Dr. Horrible and Portal references in Facebook comments after I got home. Finding a new place for my Rubik's Cube collection, mourning over the lack of a new Doctor Who episode this weekend...I'm making sure to celebrate Geek Day to the fullest.


Because apparently in today's high schools (or at least mine), you don't get teased for dressing up like a wizard. This makes me very happy.


But then this bitter, spiteful part of me that I try to keep bound and gagged goes "Pfft. Those people. They think they're Harry Potter fans. HA!" At which point said little voice starts listing my Potter Nerd Credentials. And while said credentials are kind of impressive (or perhaps just sad...), the rational, polite part of my brain kicks in and goes 


Nice part: Hey. Just because they don't go to wizard rock concerts or have a Harry Potter bedspread or know how many Valentine's Day cards Lockhart received in 1992 (46 as of breakfast), or (etc. etc. etc.) doesn't mean they don't genuinely like it. Let them be fans in their own--" 
Bitter part: *cough* INFERIOR *cough*
Nice part: "Excuse me. In their own perfectly valid way."


Bitter part exaggerated a bit for your amusement, but there you are.

Fail Blog (Post)

"I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on
frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond
words... When I was young, we were taught to be discreet and
respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly
disrespectful and impatient of restraint."
-- Hesiod, 8th century BC


Check out that date. Not much has changed in the past 2.5 thousand years, has it?


Today I just wanted to share with you some...ridiculous...things I've overheard recently. (And on that note, how was everyone's Rapture? Did you have to wait in a long line to get into Heaven? Did you form up a Scooby Gang to fight all of the demons? I had a perfectly normal day...because apparently Camping miscalculated and we're all going to die in October. After midterms, but before Halloween. How lame is that? At least I'll get a few weeks to find out what being sixteen is like before I need to worry about eternal damnation. Pity I'll never get my driver's license, yes?)


So I walked into Civics on Friday and this guy adamantly told his friend "A buffalo is just a male cow."


Then this morning in Latin, the girl who sits in front of me asked "Burning things doesn't pollute the air, right?" I said actually, it did. And then I thought about it, and realized that burning hydrogen just makes water vapor, which isn't really pollution. She turned to her friend and said "See? Told you I was right." Well, that's not exactly what I meant...


And finally (this is the best one), my sisters were baby-sitting our neighbors earlier this afternoon. The kids are 6 and 4. They're home-schooled, and the 6 year-old has apparently been studying the "story of the world" (I have problems with the singularity of "story," but I'll let that slide for now). Point being, he knows a bit of history.


So the kids say "Let's play World War Two! We'll be the Germans, and you can be the bad guys!"


Yep. You read that correctly.

Spring Cleaning

"What worries you, masters you." - John Locke. The one who wasn't on Lost. Yeah, there was another one.


As I'm sure absolutely none of you guessed from the title, today I began the massive ordeal that is thoroughly spring-cleaning my room. This was not helped by the fact that it rather needed to be normal-cleaned anyway. Ha.


I opened boxes that hadn't been opened since we moved here 3 years ago. There was some weird stuff in those boxes. I also, however, found some lovely surprises-- things I'd thought had vanished long ago but turned up anyway, like the clay model of my clarinet case my best friend made for my birthday several years ago (there was a clarinet too, but it was accidentally crushed awhile back-- whoops). 


I still have a bit of work to do, but having cleaned most of the day and still being tired from playing over 5 hours of Portal 2 with NotVeryCharming over the weekend...I'm blowing the rest of it off for now and writing a blog post about it, because cluttering up the internet with even more words is definitely productive in terms of cleaning.


(Here's the YouTube video that's my source of motivation. Go watch it. Seriously, it's really interesting/funny.)


I used to save everything. Random bits of ribbons, washers I found on the street...yeah. I threw a bunch of that out when we moved, but there's still a fair amount of it left over (which I threw out). But then there's the stuff that I threw out...and I have no idea why. Like the outline for The Clockwork Experiment which hung on my wall all through November 2009. It was 23 pages long and I'd written all over it. It's something I really, really wish I had...and I don't. 


Now, the original plot sucked so much I can't even begin to tell you, almost none of it is leftover now and a lot of what little there is will be deleted in the next month when I do more editing, but...still. It would have been a great thing to save. 

I had two reasons for undertaking the Epic Quest of Spring Cleaning. The first being to...well...clean my room. The second is more symbolic. "Out with the old and in with the new." Cleaning out my mind via association. Trying to make the past the past rather than an extension of the present.


My afternoon hasn't all been reorganizing and throwing things out, though. Some stuff migrated down the hall to my sisters. A fair amount of it went into keepsake boxes- things I want to remain a part of me, but not in such an immediate way.


And now I think I shall take a nap. Happy almost-summer to all of you (unless you either live in the southern hemisphere or just hate summer in which case...six more months. Hang in there.)

Why Is Today Awesome?

"Never cut what you can untie." - Joseph Joubert. That's probably one of my favorite quotes I've posted on here in awhile. Then again, ripping Band-Aids off quickly seems to be less painful. Thoughts, anyone?


I have this journal that I call my Why Today Is Awesome Journal. I try to write a one-two line entry every day, and on the days I don't, I go back and fill them in later. The idea is to focus on the positive things in life, and to celebrate the small stuff.


And you know what? Some days it's hard to think of anything to write in it, since I have a rule about timey-wimey things like "Today is awesome because tomorrow __________." It's good to look forward to tomorrow, but the whole point is to enjoy today, because if something isn't good about today, then something needs changing.


I also try to avoid things like "Today is awesome because __________ didn't happen." Because that's just saying "today sucked less than most other days" rather than "today was legitimately awesome."


Sometimes the entries are random little things like "Today is awesome because I watched another episode of Buffy," and sometimes they're about more fulfilling, more awesome stuff like "Today is awesome because I spent the entire afternoon with my best friend." It doesn't really matter (although it can be useful for measuring my general emotional state, but that's irrelevant) how big or small the awesome thing is, as long as it's there and I know it.
"Today something good happened, and here is what it was." 


I recommend that all of you try it for at least a few week and see what happens. I've been doing it since early January.


So today is awesome because I found out that I got a really good grade on my Latin project.

An Abundance of Quotes Part 16

"Are inprefections is which make we grate." - Craig Benzine

"Sometimes debugging things all day doesn't result in solving the problem even when attempting the most optimal paths which should lead to success." - my dad.

"I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong." - Bertrand Russel


"We are each of us angels with only one wing, and we can only fly by embracing one another." - Lucretious


"True strength is delicate." - Louise Berliawsky Nevelson. 


"Nobody got anywhere in the world by simply being content." - Louis L'Amour


“You never get to ‘beat’ life. Knowing that I get to decide for myself what success is, that’s one of the most important lessons I have ever learned; and I learned it by playing simulation games.” - Hank Green


“Hank, watching people write is boring, and in my case at least it doesn’t even involve that much typing, but writing does, at least for me, require quite a lot of concentration, and to concentrate you must be prepared to face the terrifying spectre of boredom without fear. In that respect, at least, both the reading and writing of books have become kind of countercultural activities in the social media era. Books don’t lend themselves to multitasking; they don’t automatically update. And as much as much as I love the Internet, I’m happiest when I’m writing.” - his brother


1. Craig is hilarious, yet his videos about creative productivity are actually filled with good points/advice. The most recent one is "The Most Limitless Video On YouTube" (which is about why it's important to set limits for yourself.)


2. Very true, and very disheartening.


3. I agree that dying is a extreme in many cases, but I would argue that there are probably some things worth dying for. However, I don't think I'll know what those are unless it were to actually come to that. Although since Bertrand Russel wouldn't die to uphold that sentiment...I guess I don't need to bother arguing it. Ha.


4. The quote I include more for the gorgeous imagery than the message, but that's true enough as well, I think.


5. This one I love. I'm not sure what it means quite yet, or if I even agree with it, but I love it nonetheless.


6, 7, and 8 just some things to think about.