Romii

Katsucon. A bit late to be talking about Katsucon 16, but who cares! It was amazingly fun! The maid cafe went (more or less) well, and luckily I had none of the “bad” customers. My poor friend had a drunken table and handled it pretty well, from what others have said in comments. Other than that, I don’t think we really had to escort anyone out of the cafe itself! Yay for behaved otakus! The panels I was able to go see were pretty interesting too; they had one on Vocaloids! There were a lot of things that could be improved, but hopefully they learned from this year and will work on it next year! Oh, and it was at the Gaylord National Harbor Hotel! It’s such a sweet, expensive, and beautiful place! Stressing on expensive though…it was hard to find a cheap meal anywhere!

Apartment hunting. So it’s apartment-hunting time, only this time I’m all alone on it. I’ve looked into one place in particular so far, which is a “room in the house” type of setup, and it’s really nice, not too far metro-wise, and cheap. The people are friendly too – one of them is a long-time worker on campus in the Construction and Planning department. It’s going to be an arrangement until the end of next year (aka. when I graduate), so…my original plan of living with a friend went flop because her mom doesn’t want to do that. Let’s hope for the best!

Spring break. It’s spring break! So I’ve been playing games and NOT doing the work I should be doing for classes. Hah fun!

Time Hollow. Remember the Nintendo DS game I bought a while back? I finally played through it once. It was interesting – what you chose in the very beginning strongly affected the path you took for the rest of the game. That being said, the rest of the game wasn’t as dynamic as that – once that path was chosen, you were kind of stuck on that path. It wasn’t bad, but it’s not a game that I would play through over and over and over to see the many endings I could get…as I don’t think there are that many to begin with.

Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine Online. Just started playing this MMORPG – it’s pretty fun. It’s like a mixture of an actual RPG (with cutscenes and a specific story plot that you must follow) and an MMORPG, where you battle with friends and have side quests and whatnot. I like it so far – people have been extremely friendly and helping me learn the game, which I find somewhat rare in a lot of MMORPGs I used to play. Plus, it’s based off of Persona. Gotta love it.

Persona 3. I bought Persona 3 for the Playstation 2 the other day, which also came with Persona 3: FES, the “add-on” game. The only reason it came with it is because the used copy I was buying didn’t come with the soundtrack it was supposed to, and we (the store employee and I) had no clue what FES was. So she threw it in for me in case it was the soundtrack – but turned out to be another game. Pretty nice overall though. So far it’s been pretty straightforward – cut scenes and automatically following other characters. Supposedly the place where I stopped playing is where the real action and choice-making begins, so I’m looking forward to picking it back up when I get the chance.

Suikoden Tactics. Also bought Suikoden Tactics, but haven’t played it yet. I’m looking forward to it though!

Skate or Die 2. My boyfriend and I were playing the original Nintendo game of Skate or Die 2 last night. For the ramp mini-game that’s in it (not the main storyline), we were making the high scores over and over…kind of. The highest we made was around 66k, and then next one down was 65k (both by me). That’s around 4-5th place on the actual high score list for the game, but apparently better than 3rd place on the Twin Galaxies scoreboard. That kind of made me happy. One day we’ll actually videotape our runs and try to get on Twin Galaxies! But for now, we just took a picture of the screen near the end of the night…though he has the picture at home.

Yes folks, The Catholic University of America has been closed since Friday. This is our fourth day with classes cancelled! I get the feeling that we’ll have to make up all the snow days at the end of the year, but currently I am totally goofing off and not doing any work at all. Terrible idea, I know, but still! Snow days!

I’ve also been considering getting back into the scanlation world. I used to be an editor primarily for ShoujoMagic when I was in high school, and I tried doing editing jobs with other groups too…but eventually quit when the workload from school got to be too heavy for me to handle the workload from editing. I’ve applied as a Quality Checker at one place that I like so far, so we’ll see how that goes. Hopefully my photoshop skills haven’t gotten rusty in terms of editing…heh.

Speaking of which, I was contemplating switching to Habari as my blogging platform. WordPress is great and all, but it is a bit bulky for me and I don’t use a lot of the awesome features that comes with it. It might encourage me to actually design the next theme for my blog too. Who knows how long we’ve seen a design from me now? Over a year?

In any case, let’s hope that the snow ends soon. It’s a bit tiring to just see white through my windows all day.

Yes folks, Washington, D.C. has shut down and been snowed in! You have no idea how much fun a group of my friends and I were having yesterday running around Maryland in Brendan’s small family Impala before the blizzard got too bad (and even then, we cut it very close at the very end of the craziness), and having snowball fights and wars and whatnot. Here are some pictures I just took from my window…it’s STILL snowing! You can view larger sizes by clicking on it; the images are posted on Flickr.

Yeah. I have to say, yesterday was so much fun, minus one very angry and terrible event that we all felt slightly obligated to go to. I really wish at this point that we didn’t go. Really wish it to be honest. I felt a lot of malice toward one particular person that had I not restrained myself, I would have done some really nasty things to him during the snowball fight we all had really late at night. Just that ruined that part of the night for me, because I spent most of my time during our second snowball fight avoiding this guy just so I wouldn’t feel urged to smash a really icy snowball in his face multiple times. That was how bad it was. I’m glad I was able to restrain myself, but at the same time I knew that if I didn’t restrain myself and did something like that, I would not feel any guilt at all for it. And that’s the part that scared me enough to restrain myself even more.

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Today was the first official day of classes. People came back to the dorms Saturday and Sunday, and it’s now very populated on campus, unlike the past week where it seemed like a ghost town. Fortunately for me, I don’t have classes today. Unfortunately, I have all my classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, one after another. Fun times. You can check out my schedule here: Spring 2010 Schedule.

As you can see, classes on Tuesdays/Thursdays start at 8:10am…and I am very much not a morning person. I get breaks in between for lunch and dinner. My last class ends at 8:50pm (I mistakenly thought it ended at 10pm and was lamenting about it to everyone…oops!). I will have another time slot scheduled for Art 596, which is my Independent Study course (Digital Arts II), but as the professor is being very slow in getting back to emails, I’m not sure when that’ll be.

My work schedule might change a bit too so it matches Brendan’s a little better (such as working until 6pm instead of 5pm on Mondays/Wednesdays). I’m hoping that I’ll be able to stick to the work schedule and make 19 hours every week…which is the max number of hours you can work on campus. Thankfully I’m not necessarily constricted to the 9:00am-5:00pm, as some work assignments can be done from my room.

To explain the classes a bit though since no one would know what the numbers stand for, here are the titles/brief descriptions:

• PSY 379 – Life Span Development. Lecture. This is a psychology course I’m taking to fulfill requirements for a Psychology minor. Children and development are some of the topics I’m interested in…other than art and its relations to psychology, of course. Unfortunately they don’t have many of the art/technology-related psychology courses offered, so my choices are a bit limited. I don’t know much about Professor Monaghan, but hopefully she’s good.
• TRS 390 – Taoism & Confucianism. Lecture. I don’t care much for sitting through Christianity courses such as “Introduction to the Old Testament” and whatnot, as I’ve already learned a lot of that in high school. I’m really interested in other religions, and even though this really doesn’t fulfill any requirements (and actually kind of sets me back in my Theology requirement as this doesn’t fulfill the last slot I need to get done), I’m kind of excited for this class. I heard Professor Jones is good, so we’ll see!
• ENG 301 – Creative Writing:  Fiction. Lecture. I want to improve on my writing, especially within the realm of fiction, so this is a good course to take to fulfill my English minor requirements. I know nothing about the teacher, however, so I’m a bit worried.
• PHIL 313 – Philosophy of Human Nature. Lecture. Eh, it’s philosophy. I could care less, to be honest. The only reasons I chose this class are because 1) no other courses fit my schedule/fit the last requirement slot, and 2) I’ve had Professor Tassone before. He’s a nice professor and a fair grader. His course load is a bit heavy on the reading, but not too bad in terms of writing assignments. The only problem I have with him is that his lectures are a bit on the dull side.
• ART 362 – Making Your Mark: Experimental Drawing. Studio. This is replacing my “ART 202: Drawing II” course requirement, as that originally conflicted with my Digital Arts II class (though it doesn’t anymore, but let’s not sweat the details). All of my art professors were praising this class, so I’m hoping it’s as good as they say. It sounds interesting at least…come on, experimental drawing? That’s got to be awesome! I’ve never had Professor Kretz as a teacher before, nor have I ever heard of her, but we’ll see how it goes.
• ART 596 – Independent Study. This is the independent study class that I’m doing with Professor Navarrete, the only Digital Arts professor we currently have. It’s supposed to replace the “Digital Arts II” class that was canceled due to low enrollment. Fulfills my Digital Arts concentration requirement. I had “Digital Arts I” with Professor Navarrete, and he was a good teacher.

So we’ll see how I survive my first day of classes tomorrow. I’m hoping the pile-up of 6 classes in one day won’t kill me, but it might…ah well! That’s life!

There is no heat in my dorm room at all. I’m at work now, but last I checked the thermostat, it was at 57 degrees – two degrees warmer than what it was yesterday. Keeping the lights on at night helped a bit.

What I don’t understand is how they could allow early arrivals and not have any intentions of making the dorms a livable temperature. They knew I would be staying at the dorms starting Monday since before winter break started. How do I know this? Because I have to request for their approval so they can reactivate my student ID. Our student IDs are designed to swipe us into our dorms, and they deactivate them over the winter break to make sure people aren’t sneaking in and out.

It won’t even hit 60 degrees! I can live with 60 degrees because that’s what my mom keeps the house at, and the heater jumps on every now and then to warm the place up. But there’s no heat. At all. And they didn’t inform me of this when they said “hey, you’ve been approved to come back to campus a week early so you can work!” Now they just expect me to accept things as they are because they didn’t think to inform the poor student that they will not turn on the heat at all until Saturday.

The other bad thing is that it’s prohibited to have space heaters because it’s a “danger to the dorm and the student”…at least, that is what they’ve written in the student handbook. I think it’s more of a danger to not have heat and to allow someone to live in that kind of condition. Had I known I wouldn’t have heat, I would’ve disregarded the rules and brought a space heater from home.

I might still disregard that stupid rule and buy a space heater…