An Actual Post About Stuff

Hello people. I know there are at least a couple of you out there, because the majority of the hits on this blog are from the US instead of Russia. (On the subject of blog hits, someone got here using the search 'scared I drank mold.' I am, of course, the premier source of information on what to do if you're suffering from mold poisoning. Obviously.) You three are cool.

My musical is going more or less swimmingly. I love it. There's an awesome review here. I'm not mentioned, because I don't have a huge part, but still. And everything said in the article is true, and everyone in the show is awesome (especially some other people who weren't mentioned - Kitty, Claire, and Andrew, you are all too cool). I'm going to be taking pictures of my costumes tomorrow and doing a post with pictures, because the costumes are amazing. And I sort of want to buy the party dress for a Homecoming outfit, just to see how people would react, because I love it.

I'm quite happy right now, is it obvious? I've gotten enough sleep for the first time since dress rehearsals about two weeks ago, so I'm on my own little natural high. Wheeee!

I've discovered during the course of the shows so far that I'm possibly clinically oblivious to certain normally obvious things, like when I'm being flirted at. However, someone is beating me with a metaphorical cluebat, which is appreciated, and I will have updates on that later, I hope.

No, please use it! I'm so confused!

Later today, I'm going to a movie to see off one of my best friends, who's going to college in four days. Then tomorrow or the day after, I'm making random pancakes with Kitty and her girlfriend, to see her off to college. I'm in a bit of a Peter Pan state, therefore, covering my ears and going 'lalala I'm never going to grow up you can't make me lalala.' Very mature. But since I've been writing college essays in between doing Camp NaNo, it's not working very well. At least I can reuse them once or twice. And then I have to write my resume and get senior pictures taken tomorrow and apply for scholarships and go on a final college visit and figure out how to take Creative Writing as a class (thereby making NaNo a legitimate use of my time) and survive five more shows and audition for the next play and...

You know, excuse me. I'm going to go and watch childhood cartoons for a while and pretend I'm six.

YES.

I Accidently Tagged Myself

This is the Top Blog Award, given by Miss Vixen. I accidentally awarded it to myself when I commented on Liam's blog, which means that I lay no blame on him for this other than making it self-awarding. Alas.

In any case, The Rules:

-You must take my answers out of the questions and answer them for yourself
-You must nominate your favorite top 5 bloggers
-You cannot nominate the person who nominated you
-If you have already received this award before, you don’t have to do it unless you really, really want to


-Top 5 likes:
Chocolate, reading, sleep, old books, and new music.

-Top 5 fears:
Free fall, losing the regard of my family, failing out of school, getting less than a 4.0, and not getting into the colleges to which I'm going to apply.

-Top 5 wishes:
To be able to have a real career in music, to have a real nakama, to really know who I am, to be able to be who I am, and to get a really nice computer and sound system.

-Top 5 favorite animals:
Frogs, cats, horses, smart dogs, ravens

-Top 5 favorite foods:
Chocolate, tabasco flavored cheezits, apple-cinnamon pie, pumpkin pie, vegetarian chile.

-Top 5 books:
Oh god. Um. Good Omens (Gaiman and Pratchett), HHGTTG (Adams), The Gone-Away World (Harkaway), everything else by Pratchett, everything else by Gaiman.

-Top 5 movies:
Much easier. Mirrormask, Curse of the Black Pearl, Benny and Joon, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, The Matrix. 

-Top 5 dream vacation spots:
Paris, London, New York, Chicago, or somewhere I could see the stars.

-Top 5 favorite people:
Thomas Jefferson, Thadeus Stevens, Neil Gaiman, Sam from Benny and Joon, and Aaron whose surname I shan't post.

-Top 5 favorite fruits:
Cherries, apples, lemons, mangoes, and papayas.

-Top 5 favorite flowers:
Jasmine, roses, daisies, lilacs, and the little yellow things that look sort of like violets, but aren't.

-Top 5 future careers:
Music performer, music technician, sound woman, writer, stage hand. (There's a theme here.)

-Top 5 girls names:
Heather, Elizabeth, Hermione, Marie, Catherine

-Top 5 boys names:
Thadeus, Nicholas, Gregory, Christopher, Adrian

-Top 5 things you’d rather be doing:
Sleeping, writing Camp Nano, singing, playing piano, and hanging out with friends.

Done!

I tag anyone who wants it.

Final Preparation

So Camp Nano 2012, August Edition starts in eleven hours and twenty minutes for me, as I write this. I'm hoping to start at midnight, for that all-important head start. And so, if I'm very good and/or very lucky, I'll have 3k words - perhaps an entire chapter! - to be posted sometime tomorrow afternoon. My average wordcount goal is once again 2k a day, but it never hurts to have a buffer.

In other news, Mame opens in a week and a half. So I've got an entire other thing to be freaking out about, so non-story posts may be a little thin on the ground until I stop hyperventilating. Sorry. Go watch me dance (I'm the one with the pale, pale legs) or read TVTropes. Or read about zombies.


Link to Portable Solar Panels

Willis Haviland Carrier Deserves a Medal

Today's topic: air conditioning. It is a very, very good thing.

Currently, it's 90 degrees out and 'feels like 96,' according to Wunderground.* This is not exactly a normal temperature for June in Wisconsin. Not unexpected, and not completely abnormal, but still. The mid-eighties is the normal max, and therefore the state is unprepared for this heat wave. When it's that hot outside, your body practically doesn't even need to do anything. You can hibernate. You just lie there, preferably not in the sun, and try to keep your body's processes from raising your internal temperature more than six to eight degrees above the air temperature. It is not a temperature for having to actually do anything in, because sheer friction will cause your skin to start combusting  in a relatively short period of time.

So it's just my luck that I have to go work out at the YMCA for roughly two hours three times a week. The local one is having some issues with the heat, and so I show up and discover it is literally hotter in the lobby than it is outside - at least there's air moving outside.** My prognosis: death by heat stroke within an hour.

Even more unfortunately for myself, the cardio room is on the third floor, and heat rises. As I go up, so does the temperature, until I'm becoming seriously worried about both my health and whether the paint on the wall is going to start melting and getting me and my stuff all drippy. By the time I hit the landing at the top floor, it feels like I'm in an oven, and I'm relatively sure that the dust bunnies in the corners of the floor are actually the ashes of other patrons, who've spontaneously combusted. The paint is definitely beginning to look drippy.

And then I open the door to the cardio room, and it's like stepping into an ice bath. I can breath, the rubber soles of my tennis shoes solidify, and I swear I can hear angels singing in the background.*** I then proceed to work out for the allotted two hours without any death by heatstroke or spontaneous combustion at all. And that is why air conditioning is awesome.****




*And according to every living thing outside, except the ones complaining it feels way hotter than that.

**Blowing at 18 mph, no less. Weird, weird weather.

***Turns out it was just Freddie Mercury. Same difference.

****Then I had to leave the air conditioning and walk eight blocks to the library, of course, but the point still stands.

Why I Don't Code Often

So today I finally switched from Windows to Linux. I went with Fedora, not for any overly pressing reason. It has a nice graphical interface, something that I highly appreciate, and doesn't seem to hard to get a handle on. So far.

• Issue the first: Get internet connected.
•  Solution: Type in wireless connection's name in all caps. Unsure why it worked, but it did. 
• Issue the second: Get Flash installed
• Solution: Still working on it. SO MUCH CODE. I'll deal.
• Issue the third: Figure out how to shut the computer off with new interface
• Solution: Logout. Look, there's a button now!
• Issue the fourth: Second attempt at solving Issue the Second:
• Found out that I was missing an all-important dash in my code - unknown if it worked, but it seemed successful in the terminal. BRB, I'll check.
• UPDATE: Nope
•  UPDATE: Restarted, stil nope. Firefox isn't recognizing it in its plugins. To Google!
• I don't even know what's happening right now. Seriously. I might have just summoned Cthulhu.
• Crap, my computer just started chanting something about R'lyeh.
• Restarted, seems fixed.
• Wait, no -
• In his house at R'lyeh, dead C'thulhu waits dreaming 
•  Stop -
• ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn

The Old Ones will Rise

The Dead Ones will Live

The Live Ones will Weep

I'm sorry

ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn

How Not To Choose a College

Today, I was going to do something productive, like clean my room or try to plot out a story using songs on Spotify, but I was distracted when the mail came. A while back, I got a scouting letter from Yale, one of those mass mailings sent out to everyone in the top ten percent of their class or something. I get a lot of college junk mail, so the only reason I noticed the Yale one was because, holy crap, it's Yale scouting me. I ignored it though, because none of the East Coast schools are super high on my list of potential colleges; I joked about it, in fact, saying that if I got one from Harvard, I'd race the two letters to see which one won, and that would be the elite school to which I'd apply and from which I'd be rejected. Well, the Harvard scouting letter came today, and I remembered that I kept the Yale one, just in case. So today, instead of being productive, I staged a grand experiment: Which School's Paper Airplane Will Win?


Now, I'm going to do this right, because: A) I'm really bored, and B) I think it's funny. So. Here's the experimental log.

The Great Paper Airplane Race

• Goal: To see which airplane flies furthest
• Necessary Materials:
• Two (2) scouting letters, one each from Harvard and from Yale (each letter having two (2) pages)
• Two (2) plain sheets of printer-quality paper
• One (1) kitchen scale
• One (1) tape measure
• One (1) large, open basement in which to fly the planes.
• Procedure
• Weigh all sheets of paper, to determine if there is a bias towards either of the schools or the control. Not for any real reason, just for kicks.
• Take one (1) sheet from each scouting letter and one (1) sheet of regular printer paper, and fold all three sheets into a normal paper airplane, like so.
• Take the remaining sheets of paper and fold them into a different design of airplane. (I chose a slightly modified version of the Dart, the difference being that I folded the wings to give them a larger surface-area to weight ratio)
• Carefully throw all six paper airplanes across the basement.
• Measure after each set of throws and see which airplanes went furthest.
• Results
• (I'm going to record my thoughts here - bad form, I know)
• Harvard's paper weighs in at .010 pounds per sheet, while Yale weighs .015 lbs each and printer paper weighs again a light .010 lbs. This may result in a bias against Yale. Sorry, Yale.
• So, from a steady position  kneeling on my couch and leaning over the back, I start launching paper airplanes. First up were the normal planes. 
• Test One (Normal planes)
• Yale went first, with an unfortunate distance of ten feet, and an odd spin as it fell to the ground. Poor show, Yale
• Harvard did the exact same thing, however, with a worse showing of six feet. 
• The control went last, and did a loop before landing upside down, a somewhat better fifteen feet away.
• At this point, I realized I'd folded the planes oddly, a mistest was called,  and time was taken to correct their wings.
• Test One-B
• Harvard was thrown again, with better results, but was batted from the air by a rogue cat before the flight was completed. Second mistest called.
• Test One-C
• Harvard successfully flew twenty feet, with a graceful twirl and upright landing
• Yale successfully flew a surprising twenty-four feet, with a smooth landing and subsequent skid
• The control went roughly twenty feet, but ran into a box before it could skid further.
• Test Two (Dart planes)
• After numerous mistests, the causes of which included but were not limited to: planes circling around and flying essentially negative feet, planes falling open and drifting to the ground mid-flight, another rogue cat, and a plane circling around and hitting me in the head, a stapler was procured and one (1) staple was added to the tail of each of the three dart planes, for structural support
• Harvard flew a disappointing fourteen feet and landed upside down.
• Yale flew a somewhat better twenty feet, landed upside down, and pulled a 180 degree spin upon landing.
• The control did a nosedive, only flew eight feet.
• Discussion
• I should probably have thrown the planes several more times, just to make sure I achieved scientific rigour, but as the point of this experiment was mostly to entertain myself for an evening rather than actually prove anything, I'm not going to. 
• Mean Distance Flown
• Harvard: seventeen feet
• Yale: twenty-two feet
• Control: fourteen feet
• I'm thinking that the control's paper, not being of the nice, high-quality, quite-possibly-parchment stuff that the colleges' paper was, didn't have quite the lift that they did. Or maybe I just threw it weird. I don't know.
• Conclusion
• Yale wins!

So much for choosing what elite school I want to be rejected from in a mature, adult fashion. Huzzah for paper airplanes!