The Prismatic Throne

I recently started playing Heroes of Might and Magic V again. I picked up the game some time ago and played it a little bit, but I wasn't quite enraptured with it, in part because I was initially comparing it to Heroes IV and was missing some of the things I had really liked about its predecessor. Heroes V also used to crash on occasion, which was irritating, but since I just got a new desktop (i.e. my brother's old desktop), it seems to be a bit more stable, at least as far as I've seen. Since I didn't play the game a whole lot before and haven't been playing it for very long now, I'm still in the "it's so new and shiny" phase of video game obsession, so my interest may still wear off in a bit of time. Nevertheless, I think I'm enjoying the game a bit more than I did before, so I'm glad I've given it a second chance (though I had been planning to do so at some point anyway).

From my recent playing of Heroes V, I did, however, come to a revelation... and that revelation is that I suck at the Heroes of Might and Magic games (and in fact, just about any strategy game, which perhaps is the reason why I play so few of them to begin with). This comes from the simple fact that my preferred strategy is not very conducive to winning the game. The obvious follow-up to this would be, "Then you should change your strategy." And my reply is that I don't want to change my strategy because I don't actually play to win.

I usually have an extremely non-competitive attitude when it comes to gaming and I am not a completionist by any means. There are probably some gamers out there who would think I'm absolutely insane for playing games without beating them (and not particularly caring that I never beat them), but I do it with extreme frequency. Even when it comes to RPGs, my favorite and most-played genre of games, there are more games that I've played and haven't finished than ones which I have. In fact, the most common scenario with me and an RPG is that I will make it to the very end of the game, where all I have left to do is a few sidequests and the final dungeon/boss, and somewhere at this point, I will lose interest in the game and stop playing. By the time I find myself wanting to play the game again, it's been so long since my last playthrough that I can't really bring myself to pick up where I left off and just finish it up; I want to start the game from the beginning to remind myself of what's happening and to experience it again. There are also games which I have beaten once or twice and which I like to replay on occasion, and I often will play them to some point near the end and stop without beating the final boss.

Thus, when it comes to video games, I really do have a philosophy that can be summed up as "it's about the journey, not the destination." I get the greatest joy in video games from two things: starting new games and new characters (in games where you can play different classes and character specializations, I like to try lots of different things) and building those characters up in levels. This is why I much prefer the early and mid-game to the end. At the beginning of a game, characters gain new levels and new skills and equipment much faster than they do later on. As you play the earlier parts of the game, you get a good feel for the progression of your character's strength. Toward the end, leveling slows down and you eventually get most or all of the new skills or good equipment that you can get, so there's very little change going on with your characters, and that is the point where I often begin to lose a lot of interest. I also don't get quite as bored as some people do of doing the same things over and over again, which is why I can sometimes play many different new characters in succession without being completely annoyed by the fact that I'm playing the same game from scratch countless times. But this also depends on the game.

So here is how I play a typical Heroes of Might and Magic game. I find a map in which I am isolated enough from the enemy heroes that I can play for a while without encountering any of the computer opponents. I enjoy my solitude and gradually build up my town and army, explore the nearby areas of the map, fight the stationary monsters, and power up my hero. Eventually, the enemy finds its way to where I am. Because the computer generally employs a strategy that is more aggressive than mine, his army tends to be far more powerful, and the most likely scenario is that as soon as he starts attacking me, he readily dispatches my poor hero and I quit and start a new game. On the off-chance that I get lucky enough to build up a strong army and can take out any assaults from the enemy as they come, I can stay in the scenario longer and get my hero to a very powerful level. Sometimes I will actually start to attack the opponents myself and aim for victory. More likely, however, I simply get a bit bored by the fact that I have no new types of troops to create, and that I'm gaining levels very slowly, that and I have so many good artifacts that I rarely change equipment, and that I have all the powerful spells that I'll ever want. So I quit and start a new game.

Honestly, the ratio of times I've won a Heroes scenario compared to how many I've played in total is probably so low that I should be embarrassed to even discuss it. And my track record against the computer opponents is so terrible that I'm quite glad I don't play these games against actual people, because then I'd probably get killed so fast that I wouldn't even have time to enjoy myself. But the fact of the matter is that I honestly don't care about actually winning in these types of games, and I doubt that changing my play-style in order to win more often would actually give me much more satisfaction. Since I picked the game back up, I've played about 5 scenarios (actually the same map, but playing as different factions) and I haven't won any of them. And yet, I'm still thoroughly enjoying myself and happily playing the game over again... and enjoyment is the most important thing about gaming.

EDIT: So I actually just won one scenario, because necromancy is crazy powerful.

For whatever reason, I generally dislike listening to other people discuss an exam in that period just before they are about to take it and the time between when it's over and before the grades are received.

As you sit in the classroom, awaiting to take an exam, you always hear several nearby students discussing what they studied. Often, I'll hear them mention some topic that I didn't actually bother to study. Of course, it's too late by then to look it up, so the resultant thought of, "Are we actually supposed to know this?" is nothing more than an additional nagging worry and no help whatsoever. Often times, the topic in question really is not on the exam and is no more than the concern of an over-achieving student attempting to cover all of his or her bases (which is not a bad thing, by any means... it is largely my unfortunate tendency to procrastinate that forces me to have far more selective methods of studying). Still, if I am to worry about my level of preparedness for an exam, let it be the night before, when I'm still able to do something about it. At the point in which I finish my last review of my notes, pack up my stuff, and go to class, I want to be able to put any nagging stresses out of my mind and say, "All right, let's do this thing."

Similarly, immediately after an exam has been taken, students congregate in the halls and talk to their friends about the specific exam questions, and if he got the same answer she got, and "Did you also get like 6 'True's in a row? Oh, good!" Discussions like this can make a person second-guess their answers, which is again a pointless worry, because the test is over and the answers cannot be changed. Of course, you can't always trust that just because a few students had one answer means that it was the correct answer, but that fear that you might have been wrong can still linger. When a test is over, I like to put it mostly out of my mind until I see the grade, so I don't generally care to discuss it with others or look things up afterward and start counting just how many of the questions I was unsure about I actually got wrong or right. I find I gain nothing from this, so it's just an extra source of unnecessary stress.

So I try to ignore the chatter of students when it comes to exams, even though it is often hard to avoid. On the other hand, I do have to wonder if I'd be guilty of doing the same thing if I had friends in my classes to actually discuss the exams with. Because, when it comes down to it, this behavior seems to be very much a result of human nature. And who am I to rebel against humanity?

I fail at this "weekly" thing, but I suppose any amount of regularity and progress in posting blog entries is good for me. This is going to be a relatively short entry because rather than trying to think of a specific topic I want to reflect upon, I'm just going to briefly mention a few things that have been going on in the past few weeks.

Fall semester started a couple weeks ago. Since I've taken care of all of my non-major requirements for graduation, all I have left are biology classes, so that's what comprises my entire schedule now. I feel that this is going to be a semester full of depressing subject matter, because I'm taking many such classes as "Cancer Biology" and "Molecular Basis of Disease." Even the writing course that focuses on reading and writing biological literature focuses on the topic: infections that can cause cancer. It seems like a typical pre-med student schedule and if I don't become a hypochondriac by the end of the semester, I'll consider it a win.

James is in Switzerland now, working at CERN as part of his graduate work, and won't be back until mid-November. So long-distance becomes even longer... or more distant... however you say it. Skype is an incredibly useful invention, however. In the meantime, he did lend me an external hard-drive with a nice media collection, so I've been taking some advantage of that. Mainly, I've been rewatching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which is my favorite of the Star Trek series. I started from the third season, which is where all the Dominion stuff starts and the plot gradually gains continuity. I love the way the series foreshadows itself at times, although part of that is just the pride I get for recognizing the foreshadowing.

Greg has been playing Star Trek Online recently. He's shown me some of it and often tries to convince me to play it as well, but as I watch him play the game, I find myself more or less uninterested. I could see myself enjoying messing around with character creation or just exploring some of the areas and being amused by various references to little details from the series, but I'm not sure how much I'd enjoy the actual gameplay, at least in the long-term. So I'm hesitant of the whole notion. Besides, at this time, you can only play as the Federation and the Klingons, and if I were going to play a Star Trek game, my first choice of race to play as would be the Romulans. And my second choice would probably be Cardassians. So if they introduce the Romulans as playable characters sometime, I might be more tempted by the game. Maybe.

I've been playing WoW, but in a way that I hadn't actually anticipated. I got my shaman to 80, which leaves two classes I still want to get 80 with, my hunter and my druid. However, instead of playing much on either of those characters, I've been leveling an undead rogue, which was rather unexpected since rogues and I do not always get along. I started playing the character mostly because I like being able to pick my own lockboxes and so it would be nice to have a rogue on each server I play. I also rather miss Horde, as I haven't leveled a Horde character much in a long time. And I don't know if they've made rogues easier to play over the years or if I've just improved in my skill at playing a rogue, but it's certainly not quite as painful an experience as I remember (once I got past the hurdle of the lower levels, where rogues simply don't have enough truly useful skills to survive many tricky situations). I just never thought that if I got attached to a new alt, that it would be a rogue... at least not until I played several other classes of alts first.

It does figure that now that I'm back to school, I'd get into all sorts of games and series to watch again, whereas when I had more free time in the summer, I found it hard to entertain myself at times, for whatever reason. So now I feel like I have so little time for all the things I want to do. I do multitask sometimes by playing WoW while listening to DS9 episodes, though. Sometimes I feel as though I've gotten so trained and used to multitasking that doing only one thing at a time can make me a little bored. That sounds like it could be a bad thing, potentially, but such a thing seems to be a side-effect of the Digital Age in which we live. I wonder if the younger generations have it even worse now.

Recently, I discovered that the messageboard Mary and I had created in high school for our own dark, devious purposes has vanished from existence. The old Ezboard site apparently switched over to something called Yuku, and while my account there still exists, the messageboards associated with it do not. The board Mary and I made was called "Depths of the Mind" or DotM, for short. We created it during our sophomore year in high school for the purpose of writing a tandem story, in which one of us wrote a portion, then the other one of us wrote the next portion, and so on. We had written one of these the previous year via email, but it was not the ideal medium, since subsequent replies messed up the formatting of the previous messages, and the story would have to essentially be read backwards, lest it sound very Memento-like. We began our second story by attempting to set up a Word document on a floppy disk and trading it so we could each add our parts directly to the story, but floppy disks have a tendency to get very easily damaged and then the work is lost, unless you back it up. (Also, I would just like to point out that using the words "floppy disk" is making me feel old.)

Both stories we wrote featured the two of us as the main characters and included other students or teachers from school, often with interesting alter-egos, in fantastical settings. Our first story, in which we continually died and traveled from one strange afterlife to the next, was largely a collection of random events as we tried to see how many inside jokes we could fit into each section we contributed. In our second story, however, we became characters in a D&D-style fantasy world. While it was still full of inside jokes, the story had a much more developed and consistent plot and the events in the story came together in impressive and sometimes unexpected ways. Ultimately, we were both quite proud of our collective work, and DotM became the place where this story came to life, as we not only wrote the story there but used the board to discuss and plan the direction the tale would take. Or to just comment about how much we liked one another's most recent additions.

Once the story was completed, DotM did not become abandoned, but instead evolved into much more. Laura joined in on our discussions, and DotM became a place where the three of us could chat, play games, share interesting links, or just complain about school. The three of us compiled a long list called "The Laws of Fate," which includes such truths as, "The more free time you have, the lazier you will become," "The less free time you have, the lazier you become," and "The amount of inspiration you have is inversely proportional to the amount of time or willingness you have to write." And, like just about everything else we did back then, it was filled with inside jokes. We also played a Fantasy Alphabet game on the messageboard, in which we alternated naming characters from just about any fantasy (or sci-fi) book, tv series, anime, video game, etc. that we could think of for each letter of the alphabet. In the end, I think we went through the alphabet six or seven times, because we all had so much to work with, although some of the letters became tricky after a few cycles. As high school came to an end, DotM gradually fell out of use, but the board became a haven of nostalgia for all of us; a symbol of all the fun times we had and of the friendship we shared.

Similarly defunct is my old Slayers messageboard from the old days when I maintained a Slayers website. Although it was never exactly popular, the messageboard community managed to attract a small group of people. I enjoyed managing the community, trying to come up with topics of conversation, and making layouts and banner images to make the page look cool. Unlike DotM, the Slayers board had been completely devoid of life for a long time now, and at a certain point, I had pretty much abandoned both it and my website, having lost interest in the venture. (Not in Slayers, but in the whole "fandom" thing.) Still, the whole experience was fun while it lasted.

The reason I thought to check up on DotM several days ago, only to discover its demise, was that Mary told me that the colors of our blogs were not working because LiveJournal no longer supported the S1 style system that we had been using for our journals since the dawn of time (well, the dawn of our time at LiveJournal, anyway). So after I switched to S2 and selected a new layout, I gave it a purple and blue color scheme that I had always been fond of, because it was the same colors that I had used for DotM in the past.

Now, unless you're viewing my blog from your own LiveJournal friend list, you will see that some very interesting changes have been made to the layout. Unless you are completely colorblind or very oblivious, your eyes were probably drawn to the crazy color-changing scale background (after which, you may have been completely mesmerized or have now gone blind). I used this background on DotM, and after I had learned that the board was gone, Mary suggested I use that background here instead. (She also suggested I make the new icon I'm now using, as this was from a banner I had used for DotM as well.) Not only is the background pure awesomeness and goes quite well with the title I use for this journal, "The Prismatic Throne," but it has such a nostalgic and sentimental significance for Mary and me, that after I put it up, it was promptly decided that I am "so totally keeping this!" So from now on (until perhaps some future moment when I decide I feel like changing things up), let this layout be an homage to dear, deceased DotM. And to happy memories, entertaining stories, and old friends.

I haven't updated in a little while, which is something I can attribute to both busy-ness and laziness, including a few subsets of said laziness, such as the fact that I spent some time getting my shaman in WoW to level 80 and decided to replay Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, a game that I tend to replay every few years or so just because it's that awesome. However, since things have actually happened in these past few weeks, I have no "I couldn't think of anything to write about" excuse. Now, my only possible excuse is that I was waiting until I could consolidate two things into one entry (which wasn't true until a few days ago), and it's nothing but procrastination from here on out. Still, it is nice to be able to put two related items into a single entry, and those two items are a couple of small day-trips I took, which separately perhaps lack the substance for a true journal entry, but together might be just enough to make a nice, hefty blog post. Or perhaps I'm wrong, and this post will just end up being far too long for anyone to bother reading. Either way, I shall endeavor to sum up my experiences in a fun fashion.

( One trip, two trip... )

I saw an article in Reader's Digest in which the author described a number of common grammatical errors that people make. Being the fan of proper grammar that I am, I found the article very interesting. As I read through the various grammatical blunders that the author chose to detail, my reactions ranged from "Yeah, that bugs me too" to "Huh, I didn't know this one... interesting" to "Seriously? Who actually cares about that?" Once I finished reading, I also wondered why some of the grammar errors that bug me didn't merit mention in this article. And so, upon reflection, it occurred to me that any person who considers himself to be a stickler for proper grammar has that handful of rules that truly irritate him and others that he just doesn't know or care about. Even the strictest of grammar nazis probably let certain mistakes fall through the cracks.

I, of course, am no exception. Indeed, there are certain grammatical errors I hear that make me cringe and automatically correct the speaker. At the same time, there are other rules that I am familiar with but am not bothered by when they are broken, and I'm likely guilty of breaking them myself from time to time. Although improper grammar irritates me at times, I don't consider myself particularly strict about it. For me, grammar is more a matter of self-improvement. In the past, when I've learned of a particular grammar rule that I found interesting and which was commonly broken, I tried to internalize it so that I would essentially be conditioned to use it correctly, without even having to think about it. People often use the excuse "it sounds better to say it this way" when making a grammatical error, but many times, when one trains oneself to know the proper usage, that usage starts to sound better and more natural, while the error just sounds very wrong. And so, in the spirit of the Reader's Digest article, I have decided to list some of the grammar rules/errors that I personally try to watch out for.

1) Good vs. well and other adjective/adverb misuses
If ever you are speaking with me and you hear me quietly say the word "well," it's probably because you said "good" when you shouldn't have. I think this is the grammar mistake I find most irritating because I hear it so frequently. Good is an adjective and modifies a noun, as in, "She is a good dancer." Well is an adverb, so verbs must be modified by it instead, as in, "She dances well." Though good/well is pretty much the most often mistaken adjective/adverb pair, it's pretty common for adjectives to be incorrectly used where adverbs should be, such as, "He eats slow" when it should be, "He eats slowly."

2) The hypothetical "were"
This is one of my favorite more obscure grammar rules. In a hypothetical statement, generally one using the words "if," "I wish," or "as though," you must use "were" instead of "was." Though it sounds awkward at first, it is correct to say "If I were..." "I wish I were..." and "As though it were..." Interestingly, I've heard this rule used correctly several times on Star Trek: The Next Generation, which made me very happy, and my nerd cred subsequently jumped several points.

3) Who vs. whom and other subject/object pronoun misuses
I think this one is fairly tricky for most people, so I don't blame them as much for getting it wrong. Who replaces a subject noun or pronoun and whom replaces an object noun or pronoun, so the easiest way to know which is right is to take that portion of the sentence and replace "who" with either "he" or "she" and "whom" with either "him" or "her" and see if it sounds right. Usually, people incorrectly overuse "who," but lately I've seen a few people who seem to overcompensate and think that every sentence takes "whom," which tends to sound even worse when it's incorrect. Then there are people who misuse subject and object pronouns in general, but instead of getting into why the phrase "Me and her went to the park" is painfully wrong, I'll just lump errors like that into this general category. The more obscure (and more excusable, when used incorrectly) part of this is knowing how a phrase like, "He likes her more than me" differs from "He likes her more than I," and knowing which is appropriate when.

4) Affect vs. effect
The fact that many college professors misuse these terms is part of what bothers me most about this common error. On the surface, this actually seems like a simple thing to learn. Effect is most commonly used as a noun meaning "a result" while affect is most commonly used as a verb meaning "to influence." Since noun vs. verb is easy to remember, this is a pretty good way to know which word you should be using. However, both effect and affect have noun and verb forms, and although these other definitions are far more obscure, it is worth knowing that effect can be a verb meaning "to bring about" and affect can be a noun that is commonly used in psychology to mean "a mood or emotion."

5) Lie vs. lay
My most recent grammar project was to learn and pay attention to the proper usage of lie and lay. I find this kind of fun because of how confusing it is. The more simple part is that lay involves a direct object while lie does not. Thus, you lie down, but you lay an object down. The really confusing part kicks in when you consider the past tense and past participle forms of the two verbs. It's lie, lay (past), and has lain... and lay, laid (past), and has laid. I'm still learning the intricacies of it, but I'm getting better at recognizing when a form is being used incorrectly, though it does take me a moment to think it through sometimes.

6) Where + at
I don't really care enough about the rule of not ending sentences with prepositions enough to bother enforcing it (because it can be very hard to rephrase sentences properly and still have them sound reasonable... and at times I've tried), but a phrase like "Where are you at?" bothers me because the "at" is entirely unnecessary. "Where are you?" is perfectly correct and saves a syllable.

I know I have more rules that I'm critical of, but I can't think of them at the moment and this entry is quite long as it is. Perhaps, someday, I'll make an addendum to this. For now, I hope this has been interesting and informative.

Well, a week has come and gone, and much as I expected, I could think of no topic worthy of blogging on. As a result, I am afraid I must subject my readers to a topic that I am very good at rambling on and on about: World of Warcraft. I know, I am disappointed too, for I had hoped to have something far more exciting to speak of, but putting off blogging until I think of something interesting to say has failed me in the past, so I feel I must say something, rather than maintain an extended silence. If, however, you prefer silence to my discussion of a video game that you may or may not know/care much about, feel free to ignore this particular post.

As always, one of my primary goals in WoW has been to reach the maximum level (currently 80) with at least one character of each class (currently 10 classes are playable). Of course, since I'm the type of person who far prefers the journey to the destination, I have not been speeding toward this goal, or I would have reached it already (and my brother already has). However, since I have been playing WoW for a long time and play it fairly often (except when I take several-month breaks from it because I feel like playing a different game), I have been making steady progress toward this goal. The fact that I no longer run instances or raids and don't PvP makes this progress even easier to achieve.

I currently have seven characters at level 80: a warlock, a death knight, a priest, a paladin, a mage, a rogue, and a warrior. My druid has remained at 70 since long before the current expansion. My hunter I played briefly in Northrend, leveling her from 70 to 72, before leaving her (and beloved pet crab, Pinchy) in favor of some other alts. Now I'm working on my troll shaman, a character left virtually unplayed for so long that one might think I'd permanently abandoned it. However, WoW is one of the few games where I actually do come back to old characters rather than starting anew, and since my shaman was already in the 60s, I felt I owed it to the character to give her those extra few levels. Besides, this shaman happens to be my only high level character of the Horde faction and also boasts being the first character I leveled to 60, back in the days when that was the level cap. Though I've played Alliance for so long and became very accustomed to it, I always found myself missing the Horde somewhat. It is certainly a refreshing change to be playing through the Outland and Northrend areas from the Horde perspective, and even though many of the quests are the same or very similar, there are enough differences to make things a bit more exciting... especially considering that this is my eighth time playing through those zones.

Cataclysm, the next expansion, is coming out sometime in the near future. How near into the future remains to be seen, and so far my only estimate is that it will be released sometime after Starcraft 2 and before Diablo 3 (which isn't saying much). Though I know the very basics of what the new expansion has to offer, I actually make it a point not to read into the details of upcoming releases too early, because I feel there's no point in getting too excited about something that may not come very soon or to start planning things that may still be subject to change. Still, I do know that in addition to getting my characters up to level 85, I will also be making characters of the two new playable races, worgen for the Alliance and goblins for the Horde. (Alts are the one thing I do like to plan in advance, at least somewhat. What can I say? I enjoy character creation and the early stages of game leveling, and not just in WoW, but other games as well.) My worgen will be a feral-specced druid (wolf-bear-cat!) and my goblin will be a beast mastery-specced hunter. Somehow, the idea of creating these characters is more exciting to me than the prospect of leveling my current characters to 85... but then, knowing of my alt addiction, this is hardly surprising.

Actually, I am far more excited about the eventual release of Diablo 3 than I am about Cataclysm, but I must take these things one step at a time. It seems Blizzard will possess my soul for many more years. It's probably a good thing that I don't also play Starcraft, or there would be no hope.

When I last posted in this journal (which was a great many months ago), Mary and I had made a pact to attempt to blog daily. The plan proved to be a bit too ambitious, so when we recently decided to renew our pact, we changed the terms to involve blogging just once a week. This should prove to be far easier to accomplish and probably much better as well, since we're both the type who like to put a good deal of thought and time into our entries. So here goes my second attempt at a regular blogging schedule.

My problem is the fact that I often find myself with little that I want to say. Gone are the days when I used to blog about every little occurrence, thought, or feeling that came into my head. Now I've become much more selective about what I actually want to talk about in this journal, always thinking, "Is this something anyone would even care about?" and often responding to myself with, "Probably not." Whether that is a correct answer or not, however, I may well have to modify this mental filter of mine if I'm going to fulfill my contractual obligations. Unfortunately, though there are a number of noteworthy occurrences in my life, I find that there are more topics that I DON'T want to say much about than those that I do.

For instance, I don't really want to talk very much about school, and specifically about my plans for the future, because I get asked those questions all the time by all sorts of people. I don't much care to repeat myself and for the time being, there isn't much to report. For now, I can say that I just finished my two summer classes last week and am now free until the fall semester starts in late August, which gives me the longest break I've had since enrolling at UT last summer. I also should be graduating this fall (assuming all goes as planned), and even though I've long expected this would be the case, it still feels all too soon. Certainly, once the fall semester starts up, I'll have things to say about my classes, but in general, I don't anticipate speaking too much on this subject, except when I have something particularly noteworthy to report.

I also don't like to talk much about relationships in a blog. This is largely because there are two people involved, and I generally don't like to discuss other people much in a public forum such as a blog. I'm also not the type of person to say things like, "Oh, my boyfriend is this or that" unless I'm specifically asked. Of course, a significant other tends to be a... well, significant... part of one's life and is someone whose name is likely to come up in one context or another. Thus, for those of my readers who don't already know and are curious, I should probably provide some brief background information and state that James and I met online, and since he lives in Michigan (he's a grad student there) and is a 1.5-hour drive away, we only see each other in person about once a week. We've been dating for about four months now.

Finally, I don't with to speak much about the condition of my grandfather, who has had a number of unfortunate occurrences since October, has been in constant pain, and has had to receive increasingly more and more personal care. A combination of bad luck and being almost 90 years old obviously complicates things. A lot has been happening on this front, but I won't go into any details here right now. As another one of those subjects that comes up frequently among my family, it's hard enough to speak on at those times that I don't need to dwell on it any more than I already have.

So the list of what I do find worthy of blogging about is very small, considering that the rest of my life is pretty dull and uneventful. Hopefully, in a week's time, I'll find something interesting to say. If not, you might just have to put up with me rambling about my WoW characters or something. Either way, you can just be happy to know that you might get to see me blogging once again.

I am pleasantly, but confusedly, surprised by UT's class cancellations. Tomorrow is Veteran's Day and we have no classes. Since I don't recall ever getting Veteran's Day off at Case or in grade school, I do find it interesting that it's being observed. And we didn't have Columbus Day off a month ago, which surprised my brother who didn't have to work that day, so it isn't as if the university is observing all the holidays.

On the plus side, since my Genetics lab holds a section on Wednesday and the holiday interferes with it, lab was canceled for the entire week, so I get the afternoon off today. My Organic Chemistry lab on Thursday was canceled as well, which is pretty odd, considering there is no Wednesday section for the holiday to interfere with; the sections are on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. The logic behind the cancellation was that back when we had fall break on a Monday and Tuesday, the Tuesday lab section got canceled but the Thursday/Friday sections remained, which meant the Tuesday section was a lab behind. To make up for it, Thursday and Friday sections get the week of Veterans Day off. Which is great and all, but I honestly don't understand why they didn't just give everyone the week of fall break off and not have to worry about this balancing act. I guess the chemistry department just likes to complicate things. Still, as a result of all this, I have a nice little break in the middle of the week with Wednesday off and only one class in the morning on Tuesday and Thursday.

The other odd thing is that instead of the customary Thursday and Friday off for Thanksgiving, UT is also giving us that Wednesday off for whatever reason. And because this interferes with the sections of Genetics lab again, my holiday weekend will officially begin that Tuesday at 9:15 AM. Can't argue with that.

I can't really think of anything to say, but I haven't updated in days, which is a direct violation of my contract. Simply waiting around for inspiration and motivation leads to nothing but rather long periods of waiting, as can be evidenced by the past few years of this journal's archives, so if I am to fulfill my aforementioned contractual obligations, I have to take the initiative and motivate myself.

The problem, of course, lies in my procrastinatory nature. Most of my free time occurs during the earlier part of the day, when I'm on campus, sitting at my laptop between classes (and occasionally during classes). However, at this point, I am fully aware that most of the day is still ahead of me and am in no hurry to start pondering what I might be able to write about in my journal, much less to actually do said writing. But by the time I get home, it's the latter part of the afternoon and I have things to do and my parents sometimes have things for me to do, and on some evenings, free time is a bit harder to come by. It also doesn't help that I find myself getting sleepy earlier and earlier. Daylight Savings was no help on that matter, and the extra illumination in the morning hours doesn't seem to be helping me wake up any earlier either, although it's certainly welcome during my morning drive.

I'm not even looking for seemingly interesting topics to write about (especially since "interesting" is such a subjective term anyway) and these posts don't have to be long or anything, although it certainly helps to have something with a bit of substance to say. I'm just surprisingly bad with open-ended things; I can never seem to just pull random ideas out of my head. Vague questions like "What's new?" are almost always answered by "Nothing much." I'm terrible at starting conversations, because I can never think of something to say.

So I don't know, does anyone have anything they want me to talk about? Feel free to try to inspire me so I can continue to post often. Unless you're getting tired of my constant updates and enjoy the moments of silence. Of course, I'm not forcing anyone to read anything I write, so if you're sick of it but still reading, it's entirely your own fault. But if you enjoy my random musings, I hope to continue to entertain you.

P.S. If at any point my writing starts to sound in any way reminiscent of Terry Pratchett's (or just slightly more British-sounding), it's only because I'm rather engrossed in Discworld books at the moment, and I have a tendency to temporarily absorb bits of personality and style from things and people. If I'd actually been updating this journal during any of the times I was watching Firefly, I probably would have thrown in a few "ain't"s somewhere, despite objections from my Inner Grammarian. As long as I don't start speaking in capital letters, there should be little to worry about.