Finally moved into my new apartment, for a value of "moved in" which equals "all my stuff is lying around in boxes in my apartment." Pictures of the spacious awesomeness and the hideous carpet will follow at some point in the near future.

rathershady and courters28 came up to visit Tuesday night, and Wednesday they, iowayehudit (who lives downstairs from me), my friend Stephanie and me did the actual move. There were a few snafus along the way - most notably my own misjudgment as to how long it would take, my ex-landlord's pissiness when it did take longer than expected, having to warp space and time to get my couch into my apartment, and the A/C at my new apartment not being as powerful as would be ideal. Still, we got everything done, and things turned out fine in the end!

...however, I have decided that I am never moving myself again. Next time I move, I'm gonna pay some movers, no matter what it takes, because those boxes of books were FUCKING HEAVY. (And I'm aware I have no one to blame but myself, but STILL.) Also moving in a billion degrees sucks ass, as I'm sure most of you know already (in fact, I knew it already, from helping others move, but somehow it's worse when it's me who's the cause of it).

Anyway, Vinnie and Courtney headed home today, so now it's just me again. I've actually been having quite a bit of fun unpacking things and getting things organized, because my natural inclination really is to be super-anally-organized (of course you'd never know it to look at my apartments, but it's just that I've gotten very good at ignoring that side of myself over the course of my lifetime).

Also I HAVE CABLE FOR THE FIRST TIME IN MY LIFE, YAYYYYYYYY

OH MY GOD jokersama WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS TO ME

watch at least until a little after the limo shows up (edit: it's about 4 minutes in, so give it some time!), when it starts to get truly wtf

also, as Puu asked me, best gangsta booty video evar y/y

The packing, it nears completion...though the fact that I have boxed up considerably over 30 cubic feet of books is mildly horrifying (those of you who have seen the size of my apartment will understand why).

My big job for today is to go through every miscellaneous piece of paper in my apartment and decide what needs to be dealt with/needs to be filed/can be thrown away. This will also be an ordeal. But if I can do that and get the non-breakable kitchen stuff packed tonight, that will be the vast majority of everything that needs to be packed.

Really, my week ahead isn't that bad, though it will be a bit hectic in spots. I'm not doing shit tomorrow because it's my birthday (I will have reached the venerable age of a quarter century), Tuesday I'll just do the last of the packing and a brief workshop for my summer class before rathershady and courters28 get into town, Wednesday is THE BIG MOVE, and then after that it'll just be relaxing and hanging out with V&C (and also possibly unpacking books and junk).

Also, I have finally given up on fighting my hair's tendency to curl and be messy, and have instead decided to embrace it. To my surprise, with a little "contouring creme" (what-the-fuck-ever that is), it's looking less Tom Baker and more Adrian Grenier (i.e., not like ass), at least when I bother with putting that junk in.

Because I am a sheep (and because I imagine those of you who are interested know which shows/games/comics I am interested in), a fandom meme.

Tell me a canon and I shall respond with my...

1. One True Pairing Ship:
2. Canon Ship:
3. "If this happens I'll stab my eyes out with a spork" Ship:
4. "You are one sick bastard" Ship:
5. "I dabble a little" Ship:
6. "It's like a car crash" Ship:
7. "Tickles my fancy but not sold just yet" Ship:
8. "Makes no canon sense but why the Hell not" Ship:
9. "Everyone else loves it but I just don't feel it" Ship:

...so, new default icon and corresponding new journal theme. (Much as I loved Tatsuya and the red and the butterflies, I felt it was time for a change.)

Also this retrospective of Rob Liefeld's work is the funniest thing I have read in weeks. Though this gives it a run for its money.

Holy crap, they just added a buttload of Doctor Who stuff to iTunes...all three seasons of the show that have come out on DVD so far, various music, and audiobooks (both NuWho AND Classic Who, whee!).

So, that being said, anyone who's been wanting to give the show a try, now would be a good time, since you can buy a single ep for only $1.99 rather than having to buy a $60 DVD set, or trying to hunt it down at a rental shop/library. (Of course, you could always still download it for free I guess...arrrr, etc.) If you're only going to watch one episode, though, I recommend checking out the season 3 episode "Blink," which is genuinely pretty scary and also just ridiculously awesome. You'll never look at statues the same way again. XD

Also zomg but they have the audiobook novelization of "Robot" read by FREAKING TOM BAKER. If you're gonna have anyone reading aloud to you, Tom Baker is who you want to do it. :D :D :D

Edit: AHAHAHAHA, listen to the free preview samples of the audiobooks narrated by David Tennant. His Jackie Tyler and Donna Noble impressions are SO AWESOME, YESSSSSS I CLEARLY NEED TO BUY THESE

The depths of my geekery are now truly known. D:

Man, Hellboy II rocked SO HARD. I love most of Guillermo del Toro's stuff, and it never fails to amaze me what he can do special effects-wise with so much less money than other directors. (The CGI looks better than your average Spider-Man movie, and you KNOW this was made for like fifty million less.)

Anyway, I've mostly been chilling lately and enjoying myself: I beat Mana Khemia (a fun alchemy RPG that you will enjoy if you like that sort of thing) and have moved on to start making some actual progress in Persona 3: Fes. I've also been reading Margaret Frazer's Dame Frevisse series of medieval mysteries, which are GREAT, and also have some cracks about Lydgate that I'm finding very cathartic (as he's the subject of my thrice-bedamned comps article). I've also been working on a second draft of my comps article (or more accurately, working as little as possible on it, but since it's due Tuesday I probably need to buckle down).

Also! Something that may be of interest to those of you who will/may be helping me move: the people who live there now have moved out (so, iowayehudit, if the folks in #9 are the ones who you kept thinking were moving, they're gone now), so I can move in whenever. However, assuming I don't want to pay prorated rent for this month, I have to wait till the 28th, which is no biggie for me. (In fact, the 28th is my birthday, so that's a pretty awesome birthday present...a shiny new apartment!)

rathershady and courters28, I'm sending you guys an e-mail seeing when you want to come up, but basically anytime at the end of the month is fine, since I have that entire period from the 28th to the 30th to move (I have to be out and have everything cleaned by noon on the 31st, but that shouldn't be a huge deal).

Also, now I can start working on getting utilities/etc. transferred over (and in the case of phone/internet, switching from Qwest to Mediacom so I can get phone, internet AND digital cable all together), and all that other crazy miscellaneous moving stuff.

...YAYYYYY NEW APARTMENT WHEEEEEE

Edit: Okay, so after conferral with Vinnie and Courtney, moving day is now scheduled for the 30th. So now that I have a date, anyone else want to sign up to help with the moving? (iowayehudit, are you still in? Also anyone else in the area who wants to show up will be welcome...the more people help, the fewer of the many boxes of books each will have to carry.)

I'm gonna see if I can get a U-Haul, and then everything will be good to go (well, aside from the billion boxes of books I still need to pack...and I've already packed SO MANY, GOD, WHY DO I HAVE SO MANY BOOKS).

Okay, my very belated thoughts on the Who finale:

( Thoughts on Doctor Who, 'Journey's End,' in which I overuse the word 'awesome' - bigass spoilers, obviously )

Re: the season finale of Doctor Who, OMGWTFBBQ

ALSO, I CRIED

A LOT

........er, more detail to follow when I have more time. But suffice it to say that episode was made of fanservice and awesome, and was Russell T. Davies at his very very best.

( A poll on tipping for my flist )

I'm just curious about the art of tipping; I'm well-versed in the art of restaurant tipping (having grown up with "home cooking" being various Kansas City restaurants), but I'm always unsure when it comes to those other kinds of tips how much I should give. (I usually end up going for the high side of what I think is acceptable, because I'd rather err on the generous side, but then I wonder whether I'm tipping TOO highly.)

Note that I ask for "on average"; what I mean by that is, how much would you tip for acceptable to good service in this area? Also, if any of these results don't apply, or you have other thoughts about tipping and such, post them in the comments!

From zerochan, the Square Enix teaser site for a certain game. HOLY CRAP, DO WANT. I suppose the question is, will it be a remake of the first game, or a new entry in the series? (I'm inclined towards the former, just because the clock ticking noise is exactly the same sound effect from the original game. Still, it would be worth it to have all the bonuses of the PSX version, and more, without the crappy-ass PSX load times.)

Either way, it had better eventually come out over here in the US, and ideally sooner rather than later!

My oh-so-composed thoughts on the latest episode of Doctor Who:

( Major spoilers for 04x12, The Stolen Earth, plus one commonly known casting spoiler for next week - do NOT read unless you want the completely WTF ending of this ep spoiled for you )

...is it can be next Saturday nao? ;_;

The Big Read thinks the average adult has only read six of the top 100 books they've printed below.
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2)Italicise those you intend to read/read part of but never finished. (If I italicised the books I want to read, everything would be italicised.)
3) Underline the books you LOVE (or at least really, really liked a lot).
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them.
(Extra rule from supplanter: strike out the ones you disliked.)

( My list )

So, 37/100? (Plus a couple unfinished because they sucked so much.) Not bad, if I do say so myself...though it feels a little unfair, what with me working on my English lit Ph.D. and all. Though to be fair, NOTHING from my actual time period (medieval) turned up on the list...wtf? If they had room to put Hamlet and the first Narnia book twice, then they freaking had room for something like, oh say, The Canterbury Tales? Or Gawain and the Green Knight? Or hell, even Malory's Morte Darthur (or one of the derivations thereof, like T.H. White)? In fact, I think the only things on this list pre-1800 are Shakespeare and the Bible, right? Admittedly, this seems to be in step with a lot of the way literature is taught and perceived in modern society, but pfeh on that, I say.

I just got an e-mail from one of the professors in my department, who's away at Stratford for the summer - every year she sees pretty much every major Shakespeare production in England that takes place during the summer, including the RSC.

And I just realized that THAT MEANS SHE'S TOTALLY GONNA GET TO SEE DAVID TENNANT AS HAMLET AND BEROWNE AND I WON'T, ARGH ;_;

In the past few days, I've discovered Ugly Betty...it's one of those shows I've always been meaning to watch, if for nothing other than it has a lot of Latino/Latina actors working on it, and I finally downloaded and got around to starting season 1 a few days ago. And it's kind of AWESOME.

( More about the show )

And in other news, I hate reading jargon-filled papers, argh. :(

Edit: Also, my headphones finally gave up the ghost. And I followed sergiekins' lead in buying replacements. (Yes, I'm aware of how geeky it is...this level of geektastitude should come as a shock to no one who knows me, though.)

From pretty much everyone on my flist:

You know how sometimes people on your friend’s list post about stuff going on in their life, and all of a sudden you think “Wait a minute? Since when are they working THERE? Since when are they dating HIM/HER? since when???” And then you wonder how you could have missed all that seemingly pretty standard information, but somehow you feel too ashamed to ask for clarification because it seems like info you *should* already know? It happens to all of us sometimes.

Please copy the question below, erase my answers, put yours in their place, then post it in your journal! Please elaborate on the questions that would benefit from elaboration and feel free to ask for elaboration from me as well!

( If you were wanting to know more about me )

Okay, back in my own apartment today...according to the news, the river seems to have crested a couple of days and a couple of feet early, so a lot of the stuff they were thinking was in danger of flooding is now pretty much not. While it'll get better very slowly in the areas where it is bad, it's pretty much not going to get any worse. And fortunately, as it stopped when it did, my apartment is still dry. So everything's as hunky-dory as can be (for me, at least; a lot of other folks in Iowa City weren't so lucky).

...And on the plus side, I've done a lot of the packing I need to do anyway for my move at the end of July. :D

Finally, for some reason my phone isn't working. Which is weird, because my DSL is working fine. At least I have my cellphone. :/

Am now chilling in West Liberty with lordtravis and teachingmusic. Not much change in flooding news, though.