Since sometime this past summer I've been slowly watching the anime Shoujo Kakumei Utena. Last night I finally got to episode twenty, and discovered that the song that plays during the duel scene is about Neoptolemus and Priam. OMG AWESOME. The Trojan War is everywhere!! xD

Book:
23. Every Living Thing: Man's Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life, from Nanobacteria to New Monkeys, Rob Dunn
Oh my gosh I loved this book. It's similar to Night Comes to the Cretaceous, which I read earlier this year, in that it discusses scientific discoveries, but with a strong focus on the lives of the scientists who made those discoveries. And the subject is so interesting and the writing style is so smooth and beautiful~ haha so yeah, I would definitely recommend this book. I continue to wish though that I had a brain for science ... I finished this book ten minutes ago and I already feel like I've forgotten most of it. :(

Movie:
52. The Princess and the Frog, 2009
GUYS. 2-D Disney is back and I could not be more thrilled!! princealia's review and the_wykydtron's review pretty much cover everything important that I wanted to say about this movie, but if you want to hear my nitpickier (and SPOILERIFFIC) points, then ( read on ... )

Edit: Just read the Kills Me Dead review, which offers a different opinion (although I agree about the songs). I am ridiculously stoked to read all the different opinions of this movie! Oh, Disney. It's been way too long. <3

~ First off, if anyone cares, I edited the answers to my movie quiz into the post. And now I am stealing ( another meme. )

~ I should probably mention at some point that I have kinda-sorta-mostly dropped out of NaNoWriMo this year. In a previous entry where I was freaking out about my ability to finish NaNo and pass the JLPT, the_wykydtron correctly pointed out that I would be more upset if I failed the JLPT than if I failed NaNo, and ... there it is. I'm glad I made this decision, because I have definitely felt less stressed since I made it, but at the same time I'm really bummed and really frustrated that I let myself get so behind in both tasks that in the end I had to drop one completely. I shall just have to do lots of writing in December to make up for it, I guess! :3 (lol, but remind me to change my excerpt before it's too late! I'm not sure I like the current one enough for it to be up for an entire year. ^^; )

UGH though, the amount of work I'm having to do to protect my precious little study time! It's like as soon as I decided that studying was my number one priority, all of my co-workers have a desperate need for me to take their shifts. Often because they have exams to study for, lolariously enough. Well too bad, I booked this time off and it is MINE. :P

~ My mom's work is doing this thing through the Salvation Army where each employee is assigned a child in need to buy a Christmas present for! My mom was supposed to buy a gift for a five-year-old girl, and so yesterday she and I went and bought a bouncing Tigger board game sort of thing (and the necessary batteries) and a Dora the Explorer puzzle. (lol, yes, a puzzle - I'm totally going to be one of those adults from whom no kid wants to get presents, haha!) So that was fun! Mom asked what my work is doing for the holidays and I kind of laughed at that. Like, one year I think they did a can drive, and that's about it. I don't have a lot of faith in the humanitarian spirit of this company. :X

~ November has gone way too quickly, what the heck. :|

Titanic: The Experience

I can't decide if I think this is awesome or awful (you can get married there???), but either way, I kinda want to go!

For some reason, lately I feel like writing a lot of random posts about music I shamelessly enjoy. Having said that ...

HOLD ONTO YOUR HATS AND HATERS TO THE LEFT

THIS IS A ~*~MAKI GOTO APPRECIATION POST~*~

( cut for a lotta youtube )

So I'm gonna go against the grain a bit here and say that if I had a time machine and was going to use it to go back and watch performances in the past, forget concerts! The first thing I would do is pay a visit to Elizabethan England and watch one of the very first productions of a Shakespeare play. I know there's a reproduction of the Globe now where they perform plays of the era, but oh man so not the same as actually being there! Theatre etiquette was totally different back then for one thing, hahaha. So yeah, that's first.

After that I would actually answer this question properly and go watch a Mozart concert or opera.

And then I would find out the truth behind the Trojan War!!

And then I would join the majority of my friendslist and go and watch pretty much every concert on the Bad tour, lol. xD

Things that are not awesome:
1) NaNoWriMo ends in nine days and I have only just now passed 10k. I'm not even really sure why this year is going so pathetically for me ... it just is.

2) The JLPT is in fifteen days and I am so completely unprepared. I am starting to seriously feel like I am going to fail. One of my co-workers asked me what will happen if I fail, and I replied with "Nothing," but ... I still don't want to. I'll really hate myself if I do. I don't want to have to wait another full year to take Level 2 again when it's already been five years since I passed Level 3!!

3) The above two points are frustrating me very much right now. :( I feel almost as if I should give up on NaNoWriMo so I can focus completely on the JLPT, but at the same time I intensely don't want to. ffffffffff I dunno. My next couple days off I just gotta BUST IT. And I have to ignore the temptation to fill up my days off with social outings, because I've just had an awesome four days off, but I definitely did not get any work done. :/

Things that are awesome:
1) I woke up this morning to a Christmas card from firecrackerrrr! <3

2) My co-workers being their ridiculous selves.

3) I've finally written over 8,000 LJ comments!! bahahahaha. >xD I'm pretty sure the last like 2,000 of those are entirely from July till now.

4) This song.

NEW MEME! List all the Shakespeare plays you've read/seen on film/seen live!

( je te trouverai, roméo, je te tuerai, roméo )

I don't have an appropriate icon for this post so I'm just gonna use my sparkling new New Moon icon. :D Now off I go to work on the shirt I'm gonna wear to opening night!! (Exit, pursued by a bear.)

Yay, I got interviewed again!! :D This time the questions are from frauleinfrog. ( News travels fast in Vienna. )

In other news, tomorrow I am going to This Is It for the second time in three days, and a Twilight t-shirt party for the second time in eight days. ahahaha, my life this week is so ridiculous but I love it. FANDOM ALL OVER THE PLACE!! xD Hopefully I can fit some studying in here somewhere. D:

I busted out 2,300 words just now, making this the first day I have actually met my word goal, hahaha saaaad. xD Ridiculously enough, after confessing I find it so much easier to write longhand, I owe these 2,300 words pretty much entirely to the web site Write or Die, which punishes you with annoying colours and sounds if you stop writing. Apparently the threat of my screen turning red is enough to keep me going - who knew? :P

Anyway, so yes, I posted a new (and short, oops) excerpt. My total word count right now is actually probably somewhere around 4,300, but I have yet to type up the scene I wrote last night which is why I am officially only at 3,831. KEEP MOVING FORWARD!

Completely unrelated, I am pretty frustrated at the prospect of another week of avoiding TV. And just earlier today I was thinking about how when I was a kid I used to be frustrated that you could never see anything about MJ on TV?! HA IT IS TO LAUGH.

I have done this meme twice in the past but I love it so much I am doing it again!

List seven songs you are into right now, no matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they're not any good, but they must be songs you're really enjoying now. Post these instructions in your LiveJournal along with your seven songs. ( Read more... )

For those of you not in the know, I shall be spending the first Sunday of December writing Level 2 of the Japanese Level Proficiency Test. I took Level 3 in 2005 (I can't get over that I last took this test FOUR YEARS AGO -- pretty sure I didn't intend for there to be such a huge gap) and passed with 80%, but now we are less than a month till I take Level 2 and I am pretty well FREAKING OUT. Like seriously, I am cutting down my work schedule quite severely just so I have more time to study. D:

Anyway, I was going through some kanji on Read the Kanji, and I figured I would post ( my Level 2 kanji grid! )

In conclusion: BRB STUDYING!!

lol sorry this post was kinda pointless. x)

Uuuugh my sleeping habits are sooooooo gross right now. I had to FORCE myself out of bed at one in the afternoon today. I hate this. D:

But in other news, I just watched this unsubtitled Morning Musume interview and understood quite a large chunk of it, so yay! :) (And yay for Aichan talking about Disney Sea. xD )

Answers to yesterday's book meme:

1) The Elephant Vanishes, Haruki Murakami, and I'm kinda surprised no one guessed this just because I was under the impression that Murakami's so hot right now. I don't love his writing but I like it well enough; mainly I keep this book around because I find collections of short stories somehow really inspiring and motivating. x)

2) The Odyssey, Homer. I thought this would be slightly less obvious than if I had gone with The Iliad but perhaps I am incorrect in that assumption.

3) Full Frontal Feminism, Jessica Valenti, although the_wykydtron is correct, I ignored the fact that there's an introduction.

4) Notre-Dame de Paris, Victor Hugo. Guys, what's the point at which you recognized this one? I'm curious. xD

lol, one non-fiction and then three translated fiction. Actually I think most of the books I own these days are non-fiction, and a lot of those are language textbooks ... I don't think this meme would work very well with those. :|

In other news, it's Friday night and I hope This Is It sells out tonight because it still hasn't yet!! Meanwhile we have nine showings a day of A Christmas Carol, what is this madness.

Stolen, complete with pretty formatting, from chroniclers:

♦ Take four books off your bookshelf
♦ Write the first sentence
♦ Write the last sentence on page fifty
♦ Write the second sentence on page one hundred
♦ Write the next to the last sentence on page one hundred fifty
♦ Write the final sentence of the book
♦ Let your friends guess what book it is

( Read more... )

Man, I really feel I don't own many books that could be guessed like this!

In other news, I really hate this time of the year when the sun has set before I even leave for work.

Today SUCKED but now it's OVER. Let's do a MEME! I love these interview memes, hahaha. This time it was athena_crikey who asked the questions. ( Read more... )

Feel free to ask me to ask you five questions! x)

So I feel like I should actually post about the reason I updated my movie list when I did ...

47. Michael Jackson's This Is It, 2009

... but instead I think I'll just link to the FourFour review (spoiler warning, obviously). I like that he writes that "there is little to intellectualize here"; it makes me feel less dumb for so far not having anything to say about the movie that isn't a variant on "omg I loved that part!" x)

I already kinda hate working at a movie theatre while this is playing, though. Not gonna lie. :|

~ I just had a surprisingly pleasant five days of work! I say "surprisingly" because I was in box office the entire five days, and so it could easily have gone worse, but I don't think I had a single frustrating guest the entire time! Faith in humanity: RESTORED!! I also sold a bunch of tickets to This Is It, including once while "The Love You Save" was playing over the lobby radio (I still don't quite understand how that song has made it into our Top 40 station, but it's cool that it has!).

~ I studied Japanese for an hour today, awesomesauce!! :D I learned a couple new grammar points, so that was awesome. I basically cannot explain how happy studying grammar makes me. Anyway, for much of my JLPT studying this year I've been doing the exercises in this book, but now that I'm very nearly done it I decided to shake things up a bit and start doing the exercises in this book, which just arrived for me this week. :3 WHY YES that book is all about learning the Level 2 grammar points in a mere forty-five days! We are getting close to test date and I am getting nervous. D: I also got another book that's all for learning the Level 2 vocabularly in fifty days, hahaha. Too bad I no longer have fifty days!!

(Man I do love my growing collection of foreign language textbooks. xD I definitely also own a textbook or two for languages I'm not even studying ...)

In conclusion, I fully expect my November 2009 to be all about NaNoWriMo and the JLPT, and not much else. I am looking forward to a month of obsessing over studying, it reminds me of when I was studying around the clock for the AP Spanish exam and pretty well lost my ability to understand English. xD WORTH IT.

~ In other news, Facebook just told me I should reconnect with a co-worker I saw every day this week and last saw four hours ago. Oh Facebook, you know me so well.

So tonight I discovered Cleverbot and found it way too amusing. ( Read more... )

In other news, today I played the new Kingdom Hearts game for two hours and then had to stop because my hand was cramping up. I don't understand how you are supposed to hold the DS in order to allow this to be a comfortable experience! Have I been spoiled by playing so many games that only require the use of the stylus? :(

One little compliment can make you feel amazing. So give me a compliment, anything in the entire world, even that my shoelaces are pretty. Put this in your journal. And once you get some comments, put that entry in a memory or tag and when you are feeling down, just go to that entry and this will remind you of how great you are.

lol, watch this get no comments. I will be all "What do you mean, no one wants to stroke my ego??" xD xD xD

So I definitely used my carbon tax rebate in exactly the way it isn't supposed to be used, but I was in the mood to throw money at two of my favourite web sites. xD For the first time ever I have a halo on my NaNoWriMo profile, woohoo! Maybe this will act as motivation to actually finish this year ... but I doubt it. :P

I am also taking bets on how many of my thirty-five icons I actually use, and how soon I regret purchasing them, lol. xD But oh well, going out and collecting them all provided me with a couple hours of distraction last night that I would've otherwise spent just whining about how sick I am. So. :D (Hilariously enough, I think I've actually used like half of these icons before, but I never keep icons so I had to go out and find them all again!!)

Nothing much else to report except I watched Dead Man's Chest the other day for the first time in an unusually long time, and so now Pirates is back to being my favourite thing ever. <3 I have Pirates of the Caribbean on my nametag at work (we have our favourite movies on our nametags), and the other day a guest asked me why I like it so much. I was just like, seriously, I could write an entire book on why I love this trilogy so much, don't ask me such a question when I'm trying to keep the line moving!! xD <33

With all apologies to athena_crikey, I've spent tonight watching more K-pop videos on YouTube - but in my defense, it was only through searching for something totally different than I happened upon what is currently my most favourite video ever:



Here we have K-pop group Girls' Generation (whom I first learned of through their song "Gee," which made the rounds a few months ago in a "Look at the crazy stuff you can find on YouTube!" sort of way) performing on a show that is apparently called Star Dance Battle. First they do Super Junior's "Sorry Sorry," which is awesome enough in itself because, while I don't think I ever mentioned it here, earlier this year I was OBSESSED with this song for like an entire month. (I discovered it through a Morning Musume fanvid that I can no longer find, but conveniently enough there's another one!)

BUT THEN THEY DO "SMOOTH CRIMINAL" AND IT IS SO FIERCE AND I HAVE WATCHED IT A BAZILLION TIMES ALREADY OMG. Seriously, that move at 1:35? FIERCE!!! And I totally lol at the "MOON WALK" text that appears onscreen, hahaha, this is not a video game!! xDD

I also found this video in which a few members of Girls' Generation dance to a mixture of "Jam" and "In the Closet," which is kind of amazing!! It's only for the first thirty seconds of the video though. When I was a kid, a group came to our school and danced to "Jam," and as I recall it was the highlight of my week. xD

In conclusion, I know I have asked this in two MJ communities already haha, but if you come across any videos of international artists dancing to his music, feel free to send them my way! I will watch the heck out of them. :D