This was done from a ref pic. What'cha think! He's got muscles... ^_^

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Well I finally finished Twilight today. W007!

Twilight is the first of the bestselling series which knocked Harry Potter off the charts. This fact, as well as the combination of two of my favorite genres (horror and romance), I decided I would give this young adult prodigy a try.

The book is about a girl who, decides to move to Forks to be with her dad because her mother is off traipsing around the country with her new baseball player boyfriend and the girl doesn't want to ruin her mom's fun. Forks, as it were, is supposed to be a miserable wet little town (which actually exists btw: Forks) that the girl and her mother both hated... with a passion. She goes to school and is immediately the talk of the town. Every guy is after her and every girl wants to be friends with her, but alas, the hottest untaken guy in school, Edward Cullen, suddenly and irrationally hates her guts. But why? And why do we get the strange suspicion the Edward is a vampire? Oh that's on the jacket! Sorry, sorry, my mistake.

Did I like it? Well actually I'm ambivalent. The plot is good. It really does have some solid interesting characters and some real opportunity for these characters interact. We have the structure for quality teen angst, deep superracial conflicts, doomed romance and general gore throughout.

I just wanted more. I know there are two other books and that's definitely not what I mean. What I mean is that I want to have more substance. It's that old adage, "show, don't tell". Often, I would come up to an event or a scene where I was feeling, "Oh... wait we were building up to a something!? Shoot! When did that happen?!" Then there was the leading couple... They had this conversation a lot:

"Hey, stop harassing me."

"I was just protecting you!"

"I don't need you to protect me."

"I should really be protecting you from me. Or yourself, whichever comes first."

"But I don't want you to protect me from you!"

"But I'm EEEEVIL!"

"But I LOOOVE YOU!"

"I love you, too. In spite of myself, I love you, too."

"You aren't going away are you?"

"No."

"Really?

"Really."

"REALLY REALLY?"

"Really!!!!"

"Damn you're hot."

"You're hot, too."

"No I'm not! Not like you! You're perfect!"

"You just don't get how hot you are."

Blah, blah, blah. Okay, we get it... he loves you, he's perfect, you are doomed to be madly in love, now change the subject! ... or just make out... that's what ordinary annoying couples do... right?

"Hiiiiii."

"Hiiiii."

They hold hands...

"Tee-hee"

Face mashing ensues.

So, in conclusion... I don't know if you'll like it. In spite of its little quirks, It was a fun read. I'm really just poking fun. I might actually gear myself up to read the other two, just because I like werewolves and they did entirely too little with them in this book... hehehe.... weeeerrreeewolves.

In other news, this is the CUTEST picture of a CIRCLE I have EVER seen:

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Well, last night I went to Anime Club. I think I will go back. It was much much fun and all the people there were very nice.

Anyway, we saw a couple different anime's including Black Lagoon, Lovely Complex and another one with school girls AND mechs AND people dressed up like Penguins! Go Figure, eh? Last but not least we watched Sushi Oji... which was funny... LOL ROFL... It is a live action Japanese show where there is this guy who was like a sushi protegy. He quits making sushi after his father (and some other guy) get jointly skewered on the end of the nose of a GIGANTIC swordfish (lol... that was a funny shot). Ever since then he has this "fish-eye phobia" which makes him go totally nuts every time he sees a fish-eye. Meanwhile he's been raised by this crazy old lady who is teaching him the art of... some sort of martial arts, but the secret of this martial art is that it is based off of the techniques of sushi making and Sushi Oji is supposed to inherit the tradition! Oh my! So she goes off and drowns herself and he has to inherit it, but the sushi chef guy doesn't think he's worthy and makes a tuna roll out of a leaf and poo... generally it is TOTALLY CRAZY! Which is what makes it TOTALLY FUN! So yeah, Anime Club may or may not be showing stuff on Monday and won't on Friday because of NDK, Which I may or may not go to. Regardless, much fun and very exciting ^_^

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I called it, it's mine. I figure I deserve the title since I've had to live through it. Blegh... So, seeing as my system has been ladened with cold medicine (mmm, grape) I have drearily catching up. I finally saw John again. Apparently he has Fridays off, too. He of course also has Monday's off. I also saw Rebecca, who's Werewolf I've been attacked mercilously on facebook, but I haven't seen recently. She also seems, well. After that I went and worked on my chair for a while which will be a halfsized model of the real thing. It fits in a bread box. It will be cool. Overall things have been well. I am hoping to join up with the Anime club later tonight. I will write about how that goes later.

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My dad has been telling me about declaring a victory. Declaring a victory is when you look back on your life and you say, "Okay, I'm good enough. I don't have anything left to prove". I would now like to declare a victory.

It's a lot like my goal to have a 30 inch waist by the end of the summer. You may be glad to hear that I completed it, but then again, it was sort of by error. I was working on my weight, exercising, doing the right things: I was looking a lot better and my 39 inch waist was decreasing a little. However, it was frustrating and I wasn't quite sure it if would ever actually happen so, one day while bemoaning this fact, I ask, "Where DO you measure your waist." It turned out that I was measuring at the wrong place on my torso and I was already at my goal. Neat trick, hunh?

Well, tonight I went to Navigators, a christian group on campus. There is a verse in the bible: Matthew 22:37-40 "'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments." I always thought, "Okay, so I love my neighbors as much as I can, I can handle that, but the loving God with your whole heart? I don't love God like that, I don't know if I'll ever love God like that." So, for a time I despaired... a long time. It just seemed ridiculous that my heart would tremor at the sight of Him, that my face would flush and my words get caught in my mouth. It seemed absurd that all I would want in life is to hold Him, more than anything else in the world... Well it turns out that I could have been right, but the fact is THAT is not what God was talking about. As they explained at Navs tonight, there are two different kinds of love: the romantic, kissy face, 'I melt when I see you' love and then the unconditional, reliable, dutiful love. The second kind of love is what God commanded of us and the one that we should be striving for. A wash of relief fell over me. I could DO that. I WAS DOING that. So it was that I declared a victory over vocabulary, or as the christians say "a victory over death."

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I am back from the gaming convention. All said and done, it was really a lot of fun. I saw a lot of people that I hadn't seen in a full convention cycle, so that was pretty interesting. Conventions are a really strange thing, I guess it's kind of like a great big family reunion without the awkwardness. It's none of this, "Hell, I haven't seen you in a year why don't you call me." It's more like, "Wow! Have you grown? It's so nice to see you." Not to mention you all like the same thing so you can either game or talk about gaming, the only time you get lost is when the army vets start talking weapons.

I think I liked my last slot the best, which is ironic since it was the only one I DMed. I found that I really like DMing. It's good to have a break here and there, but frankly, I like being in charge and I like using my own worlds. This slot is actually a special game where the players show up and a DM is chosen out of those players. Then the DM has to throw together a module while the players throw together their characters and they are in two different rooms so there is a chance for delightful miscommunications. I think it was the last time I played it, the players decided they were all snails, unfortunately the DM got that information halfway through his planning period. We heard his screams of frustration from three rooms away. Since then they have put in measures to prevent such things.

In this game the players chose the genre and the time period. It was the "Heist" genre in the near future, so, at least for me, it was easy to hammer out a Ocean's Eleven-like plotline in a couple of minutes. I drew diagrams out of the ying-yang, wrote little scripts, looked up page numbers, pulled out my dice and stole heavily from things I had already done. End result? Everyone seemed to have fun. Ironic since more than half of them died. There was one trigger happy guard that generally wasted everything in sight (including my own guards at the end of the hallway) which gave us three dead people right near the end. The only two people who weren't dead were the techies in the getaway car below. One of the techies came up to save the one guy who was just mostly dead. He FINALLY killed the last guard failed some checks to stablize the mostly dead guy and made a critical failure when trying to safely getting him into the harness. It didn't confirm though, so the guy just took a little bit of damage before they all repelled down the building to the waiting car. Looking back, it did have all the essential elements:

Easily accessible character stereotypes - to make roleplaying easier (They chose these)

An strong motive for following the plot - If you're really roleplaying your character and they have no reason to be somewhere... then you're screwed. You have to just think, "Okay, as a player I know my DM wants me to go here. Now, if I could just convince my character..." (The characters were all part of a mob family. The Boss asked them to steal something for her. The Boss gives you amazing goodies if you succeed, you die if you don't! Simple enough?)

A real threat of danger - You can't just WIN! That's no fun. If there was no struggle then the ending would mean nothing! (This one... I suceeded a little too well. There was such a real threat that everyone DIED!)

So yeah, I'm pleased. In other news, I am feeling more and more confident about Graphic Design... or maybe it's just my listening abilities. As it seems, I am the only person who sucessfully followed the project guidelines. Not only that, but I was one of the few people whose AD was actually PG. Yeeeeaaah. Of course I got a toy plane... other people got like... twisty ties and telephone chords, cups, plasitic gloves... I got lu-cky! Our next project is a group project. I hope we turn out with something classy. I know art doesn't have to be classy, in fact it is becoming less and less classy every single day, but when I do art, I want class, so that's what I'm hoping for.

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