semester #2, sophomore year of high school... begins tomorrow.
bring it on, motherfucker.

some things that made this vacation one of the most awesomely relaxed ones of my life thus far:

- murakai's reaver
- riesen chocolate
- jesu, "silver"
- my new g'tar
- insomnia
- endless youtubed renditions of aerith's theme on piano
- bothering people to listen to bands they don't care about
- long, convoluted conversations on msn and xfire regarding everything from asian women to delay pedals to the downfalls of employment to turgid pop culture ejaculate
- drives into the mountains
- infrequent morning showers
- depressing short stories about death
- failing out of Panic Attack at the intro 6 times before passing it and bathing in euphoria
- avoiding writing what should have been written long ago
- skype voice chats
- cold stone creamery
- arguing on band forums and making exaggerated claims and then regretting them afterwards, resulting in their deletion
- the california driver's handbook
- the realization that i can go several days without showering and still make myself presentable (and not smell bad)
- my cat
- explosions in the sky t-shirts
- opening my window at 9am in an attempt to wake myself up... and then going back to bed and waking up at 4pm to find out that HEY IT'S FUCKING COLD IN MY ROOM BECAUSE MY WINDOW IS OPEN.
- pondering the installation of vista
- recording more shit
- mediafire.com
- water, and lots of it
- dabblings in chinese traditional folk music
- falling asleep with headphones on just as my sister wakes up to go to school
- the ending of "ode we will bury ourselves" by moving mountains

... i'm out of ideas

hmmmmmmmmmmphhhhhhhhhh.
well i got a slightly extended winter break. the reason for this is... well... because my school district is fucking retarded and likes to be "different", i guess. i return to school on monday, which leaves me about 3 and a half days of freedom left. i have mixed feelings about returning... but meh, when it gets down to it i'd much prefer another week off.

this has been the laziest break of my life, hands down. i literally accomplished nothing. it was a lot of fun, though. i rekindled my addiction to Guild Wars in a big way, and naturally this has taken a lot of my time up. i bought Factions and Nightfall and i'm working on both of them already... and i'm 3 missions away from beating Prophecies. i could probably finish Prophecies today if i form a well-balanced party and fight through all three missions, but i don't feel like doing so today. i want to experiment with builds more first.

so this is pretty much the best birthday ever







was NOT expecting that at all.
the only reason i got this was because one time at Guitar Center i pointed this guitar out to my dad and said "that is the sexiest thing i have ever seen in my life."
and turns out... it's MINE NOW.
OM NOM NOM NOM FUCKING NOM
I LOVE YOU 2009

aaaaaaw fuck i'm 16 today :-/
i hate birthdays.

oh well.
hope everyone had a great new year and, uh, didn't get too drunk.
i have a lot of things i want to accomplish in 2009... but frankly, those can wait until a later blog.

i'm OUTTTTTT

started off great, i got a mere 3 hours of sleep though. opened up all of my gifts and was pretty pleased with them overall. here's a shortlist (yeah, i got a lot of stuff... i'm not sure why):

windows vista

this is basically your obligatory happy holidays blog. merry christmas to all. :)

i guess an update is due.
i finished Final Fantasy VII. it was incredible. i think i've talked about that game quite heavily in my last few blog entries and my opinion of the game has not changed much. although it's been 11 years or so since the game was released, i still found the game far more immersive than pretty much anything else i've played from this current generation (except for maybe Oblivion, if that even counts as a game from this generation)

wow. it felt indescribably weird to type that. in fact, the strange feelings began this morning in first period when i was writing the date down in the top right hand corner of my paper, half asleep... and then i looked at my scrawl a second time to realize that indeed, it is december, the month when that mythical bearded male flies through the sky on his magical sleigh pulled by unwilling reindeer slaves to deliver presents to the unsuspecting sleeping children around the globe.

it's a happy time of the year, i suppose. but for the cynically minded, e.g. me, the happiness is marred slightly by several irritating flaws.

firstly, christmas music. to give you a vague idea, this is what my house is going to sound like for the next month.

yeah, that's right. christmas music to me is the most vacuous and intolerably moronic form of music on the planet. gospel, hair metal and bluegrass don't even compare to the level of personal annoyance that comes along with hearing a choral rendition of Frosty the fucking Snowman. so y'know, i just like to play pretty questionable forms of music very loudly to drown it out. e.g. Pelican, quite wonderfully featuring in my YouTube Doubler experiment there. song is "Dead Between the Walls" and it's on the album "City of Echoes", if anyone was interested. buy it, love it.

second... christmas lights. i understand this is a way for everyone to get into the christmas spirit and such, but illuminating the exterior of my house with the most cliched glimmers of failure ever conceived by man isn't my idea of fun. as a result, observing the PRETTY LIGHTS even though they're the exact same extravagant arrangements on display every fucking year just irritates me in ways i can't even begin to explain. in the end, it just disintegrates down to a neighbor-hood competition (protip: whoever has the highest electricity bill by the end of the month wins) just like National Lampoon said so.

but whatever. i'm not one to rain on your (or anyone's, for that matter. including my own!) parade. christmas is a great time of year!  it just bothers me that people insist on bringing around the same age-old traditions that got old, ahem, about an age ago. i don't really get the christmas spirit, to be honest, although of course, just like everybody i enjoy spending time with the family, exchanging and receiving gifts, and not having to go to school. that's the legit side of christmas. the cornier side of christmas is one that just doesn't sit well with me, i guess.

now, on to the important stuff! or the stuff that i consider important, anyway. christmas is still 3 and a half weeks away or something, so we can save all that for later. i'll be discussing the games/technology i'm getting for christmas at a later date.

now FUCK GIANT BOMB HAS DELETED MY ENTIRE BLOG POST.

i originally wrote a bunch of crap after this and i didn't copy it into wordpad, so i'll just go over it briefly:

• my computer is fucked and i'm overhauling it.