Day Six, No Observable Change in Behaviour

I've been hermiting. I think the last time I left the house was... last Tuesday. Don't get me wrong, as I've said before, I do enjoy being at home, but I do sometimes enjoy, y'know... other things.

I did have a lot of fun last Tuesday. Sort of. I went to Trinidad on the Ferry, which wasn't fun, so that I could go to the dentist, which was even less fun, but then I spent the afternoon with my Mom which was very fun indeed. We went down to the Port and hit up the Hyatt and I got a Mojito that was just delightful. Minty minty goodness.

We even got to watch Dad come in on the boat! Boats really aren't that exciting.

And so yeah, since then I've... pretty much just sat here. I read 1984, pondered that for a few days, completed the main story for Arkham Origins, cleaned some stuff. It's certainly been relaxing. Too relaxing?

My brother also surprised me with The Amazing Spiderman on steam, which is surprisingly really good! I think the last Spiderman game I played was Spiderman 2 for the gamecube, or possibly PS2- rest assured that you can still attach web to clouds and swing through central park! But I should be fair, that does happen far less frequently and most of the time there is an effort to attach the webbing to buildings, which actually makes you swing at a weird angle that kind of makes it really easy to get turned around and confused. My theory is that maybe that's more realistic, because when you think about it, from Spiderman's perspective he is just constantly flipping and going upside down and what have you. Either way I'm quite liking the game. The fighting mechanics are enjoyable, but repetitive, and I am comparing the game to the Arkham series in that regard. Spiderman always seems to use the same move to slam enemies heads into the pavement, 'knocking them out'. The other thing I noticed is the weird difficulty settings. I set my game mode in the beginning to "superhero" which is their version of hard mode, because I'm hardcore like that and they presented it like a challenge. But instead of the enemies being more skilled or tougher to take down, it feels like Spiderman is just incredibly weak. He takes a few hits and bam, he's dead. There is a kind of silly health regeneration to balance that out, but I can't help wondering if this is their version of higher difficulty. But, on the plus side, the game looks great, feels very expansive and the story seems cool so far. There also seems to be a lot of different ways that you can go about using Spiderman's powers, which I really like.  The most impressive thing to me is that it really doesn't feel like a video game based on a movie. The story actually takes place I think a few months after the movie and many of the characters are in very different situations than before. Overall I'm enjoying what I've seen so far, which is I think around two hours of gameplay.Impromptu first impressions review!

YOW to YYZ to POZ to TAB - An Experience

I'm in Tobago! Still sort of trying to figure things out here. My parents moved (again), but not out of the same area just to a different condo...thing. Basically we're on the second floor now, but the floorplan is basically the same. It's kind of weird because it feels like the same place... but it's slightly different. The best part is that the ceiling fans in this place work really well so we don't really need to use the AC! This is preferable not only for power consumption, but also because air conditioners make me sneeze. I don't know if this is an allergy thing or if we've just had poor AC units for the past five and a half years (what is time??), but where air is conditioned, I will sneeze drastically more than usual. Truth. I'm pretty sure everyone in my high school must have thought me incredibly diseased. Maybe that's why I had no friends! Ha... Ha...

We did find a comfy spot in YOW. Plus coffee.

The flight down was pretty alright. I actually really like travelling and flying. Something about going up into the sky using nothing but the POWER OF HUMAN INVENTION always seems magical. Although for the six hour overnight leg of our flight I did have an empty seat next to me. Bonus! Although being short, I actually don't really have a problem with leg-room. Oh! A secret comfort tip I have for long plane rides is to lay on the foldy tray thing in front of you. It seems weird, but it really helps, especially if your back is getting stiff and you need to be in some sort of a position that isn't sitting in an airplane seat. And if you usually sleep on your stomach then it's kinda nice laying your head down in your arms. The only problem is that it can sometimes be kind of a tight squeeze depending on the type of airplane, and obviously having a smaller torso helps, I guess. Try it out! Don't worry about the fact that it kind of looks weird to those around you.

I didn't really sleep on the plane for more than an hour maybe? That was unusual, but I got caught up reading Animal Farm, and then they were showing The Desolation of Smaug. Who would sleep? It did leave me pretty dead on Wednesday, though. Ah, overnight flights...

So now I'm just relaxing for a bit before getting into the heavy work ethic mode where things are actually accomplished. I've been loving just sitting outside and reading or playing video games. I guess I haven't really been doing very much, but that was sort of the plan, at least for a few days. Overall I'm feeling good, and things are going pretty darn swell.

Life Continues Gloriously and I Play Video Games. Fantastically.

Well now, blogging kind of escaped me for a while there. I had nothing to talk about. Lots of lovely nothings to fascinate and enthrall you all, as usual, and I'm sorry you've missed them. Should I do another run down about what happened in the last month and a bit? Stuff happened. I finished my first semester of third year, and I think it went really well. Possibly my best semester yet, not because I worked especially hard, which I certainly did not, but because I didn't have any courses that were impossible to do well in. Not only were all my professors good (or goodish, anyway) but I actually liked all of my courses. This semester was important for me partially because it was the first semester where I didn't have to take any of the courses I chose, and by that I mean that they weren't prerequisites for either my degree or another course I wanted to take. All five of my courses were chosen by me, for me. And it actually turned out really well! This was especially significant for my science course, because I'd previously been very disappointed with my grades and lack of enjoyment in my bio courses, and this semester I got to take a course that I didn't have to take and in a specialization that high school Ronnie would have never, ever, in a million million years, have taken. Turns out not only do I enjoy botany, but I'm actually pretty good at it as well.

But now that's all over, and as sad as it sounds I am still a child and I cannot wait to get back to school with a fresh attitude and work ethic in January. I know. Where is my slacker student spirit? Lost forever, I can only hope.

Not to say that I'm not looking forward to my holidays! Oh, I so am. I'm back home now, in Tobago, and it's been lovely. I feel like I haven't done very much at all, but it's early days. I have a few plans and of course, some work to get done, but all work that I enjoy and am generally looking forward to. Can this be life forever? Fingers crossed, because I don't see why not. Also can you see that picture??? Google figured out it was a Christmas tree and so naturally IT MADE THE LIGHTS TWINKLE. What is this brave new world that has such programs in't???

If there is one thing I could complain about, it would, so ironically, be the weather. It's been so windy lately! I mean yeah, it's warm and all, and to be honest I like a nice breeze more than anything down here. Hot weather and I don't generally get along without one. But this is gale force winds! And that was an exaggeration! Still, it's been too windy to sit outside and read a book so that means too windy for me. Mainly I've been sitting inside, playing Animal Crossing, doing some baking, and showering a lot. Is that weird? I've been showering a lot. I swear I'm not dirty, I'm just really loving cleanliness? Maybe this is an indication that I want to hit the pool. We shall see. I was going to take some pictures of my baking, because I was so excited, but it was actually a monumental failure. I hadn't realized how out of practice I was, and it did take me a couple of trays to get back into the swing of things. Naturally my ego and I had been playing up the occasion of Christmas baking quite a bit, so the ol' pride took a bit of a hit, but I'll make up for it. The next seven days are going to be so fucking festive, I'll make this family cry. Cry for more cookies, that is. I'll keep you updated.

I also made an alt character in Animal Crossing! I know. God, I know. I have been playing too much. I wouldn't even mind if I'd been playing some other games too, but I haven't. I haven't been playing anything. Just AC...

This is my new character. I'd tell you his name, but I'm assuming I don't have to. When I told my mom I was making a male character, she didn't even need to ask... I did love that he was already wearing a red shirt, though. And that hair style. Suddenly my town looks like the setting for a perfect self insert. I'm okay with that? I needed the storage!

Ocnophiloidea regularis

Found this little guy crawling around the patio table the day before yesterday. He's kinda hard to see but I think that was sort of the point. 

Eventually he settled down into his stick stance, shown here, where he straightened out his two front legs and antennae while letting his tail flick about in the breeze. It was very stick-like. After some research, I'm going to say that this is probably a 'Trinidad Twig', the Ocnophiloidea regularis species of stick insect.

CARINA Cantina

One of the best ways to find a good book is to ask the people who never read. While avid readers can list off dozens of books that you know you'll never have the time to read, a few of the non-readers will tell you that although they don't have the patience/time/interest to read much of anything, there was this one book that they couldn't put down. There was just one book that caught their eye, and was wonderful. That's why I love people who don't read even more than those who do. For a book to catch their eye, it really has to be something special.

Of course, as an avid reader with no time to read, I'm reading the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov, which I of course recommend to anyone interested in one of the best examples of great storytelling in existence.

I got accepted to the University of Western today! Exciting, I know. Although happy as I am to finally be accepted to a school that I can actually afford going to, it's still sort of bittersweet knowing that Guelph, where I really want to go, has yet to let me know the time of day. Still, you never know, I certainly wouldn't mind going to Western, so maybe you'll see me posting about my life in London, Ontario six months from now (so close!), giving you the ups and downs of majoring in Animal Behavior.

While on the subject of schools, my course-load for the last semester of grade 12 has been really quite nice lately. I have only three courses, two of which are Communications Technology and Earth and Space Science, so the only hard subject is Chemistry. Although I do suspect that my lack of work is due to the fact that we're doing Organic Chemistry right now, which is incredibly easy (and therefore I love it). That and Carnival, easily the biggest holiday in Trinidad, starts this Monday. I'm hoping to see it this year before I go. I don't really think that being in anything is something I'd enjoy (not even going 'on the road'), but I do want to see it. The majority of Carnival I'll leave for another post. It's a five day weekend.

More exciting right now is the trip that my Earth science class is going on! I'm going to a star party! My art teacher (I love it when art gets associated with something awesome like space) is involved with an organization called CARINA, the Caribbean Institute of Astronomy, which already sounds awesome, and they host these parties on a regular basis from what I understand. Trinidad has got to be one of the best places for seeing stars. You may remember earlier postings of the wonderful mountains that are literally everywhere you look here.

I remember first coming out of the airport and thinking "FUCK it's hot" right before jaw-dropping at the mountains. The site we're going to is atop one of these majestic beauties, at an old tracking station that my Dad tells me was built by the Americans in WWII. The sky should be clear and free of interfering lights from towns and such, and the best part is that Mars and Saturn are supposed to show up. I'd be upset that my favorite planet, Jupiter, is a no-show, but I've seen Jupiter before, and Saturn should be cool (just not as cool as my main man). One of my brothers left an old telescope in his closet, which I stole before finding it broken, but this led me to the discovery of my Dad's binoculars. I adore finding old things from my parents. Like when you're a kid searching through old drawers of stuff that you never knew existed. Finding the binoculars was like finding the slide rule all over again. Only they didn't require hours of Wikipedia to figure out how to use. So, I spent the day watching people at the local grocery store, and investigating the houses on the mountain, waiting for some sort of catastrophic event to take place. No murders occurred, so I didn't get to go all Rear Window, but it was still a lot of fun. I can't wait to use them next Saturday at the star party. We're supposed to show up in time to see sunset. I love sunset because there's that certain time where the sky turns that one colour that tricks you, and for just a moment you're on Tatooine.

And yes; eventually everything ends with Star Wars.

It's Amazing the Things you can Accomplish Between Semesters

So my mother recently started buying me all those little Nintendo-themed tins with cheap candy in them. My favourite tin is the bombbomb (which isn't actually a tin) and my favourite candy can in the little mushroom. By far the most disgusting was the Wii remote gum. The pepperminty flavour lasts a few seconds but the puke-like aftertastes goes for the whole shot. I look forward to filling it with juicy fruit. As a side note about gum, I cannot see, smell, or taste Big Red without instantly going back to my first years back in Canada after living in Scotland. Never in my life had I tasted so much cinnamon power.

The main point that I was getting at when I started this post actually had nothing to do with gum. It occurred to me last night that while I'm totally fine with video companies making me candy, the fact that Dove makes chocolate is utterly disturbing. Where did they even come up with that? It's like SyFy showing wrestling. It just doesn't sit right. Toothpaste people coming out with a chocolate. That might make more sense. Get some minty flavours going on.

Another thing my mother started doing is playing solitaire on my DSi. I love buying on there from the shop. I do it when I've spent the day on the internet looking at all of the cool games that I can't afford. They're cheap, and you can buy like three of them in one pop, so it's just great. Plus that little present that shows up on the menu is just adorable. One of my favorites is Art Style: BOXLIFE, which I heard of from Kotaku. It's basically a game about cutting up nets to make cubes, but it's done really well has adorable music. It's set up as a sort of office room-style game; if that makes any kind of sense. I highly recommend it though. I like Extreme Hangman as well, which has the awesomeness of replacing the noose with a army of zombies; luckily you have a shotgun, but when you make a mistake, the zombies take a chomp out of your arm. And that's just one of many scenarios like ninja attacks and profanity filtering killer chalk erasers. The only problem is that I'm worried about running out of words. It does have a few (but not enough) cool genres, like Comics and Comic Heroes. And Doctor Mario is just generally nice to have.

I keep wondering about those music game's they've been pushing lately, but I don't want to waste my money. Anyone know anything about them?

News from life in Trinidad: I went outside today! I'm not going to lie, it was scary. The outside world is a strange and frightening place. But it was well worth it for what I saw. I went to the botanical gardens in Port of Spain and took some great shots. They even had what I like to call (since there was no sign) the retro 80s tree.

You see how I shit you not. The only thing it was missing was a big leg warmer wrapped around the bottom of the trunk.

Does this trunk not look like a giant octopus? Because it really was GIANT. See the menacing eye? It's watching you.

In the fanfiction world, I finally finished a new AU science fiction Zelloyd for the Tales of Symphonia section. It was a birthday present for Thingbe. Last April. But it's done now, and should be up tomorrow or the next day. I'm quite proud of it. It's pretty long, which is pretty short for me, and focuses a lot on the characters and their relationships with each other in this cool, post apocalyptic world. I started it a few months after I finished reading 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?' by Phillip K. Dick (Blade Runner if you don't know it, and it's an awesome read) so you'll see some influence of that in there. All you really need to know is that Zelos has a pump action shotgun. Oh! And that Yuarcy's in it. Yuarcy being the pairing of Yuan and Forcystus; it and science fiction Zelloyd are both my personal contributions to the ToS fanfiction page. The other scifi Zelloyd (currently the only one) is a one shot I wrote about moon colonization. It's called Founder Effect. And if you like my writing, Touche is an AU crossover high school fic that I'm collaberating with Thingbe on, and although it updates slower than molasses ever could, it's got a great plot coming. And because I'm going links crazy here, this is an AU 1940s fic (also ToS) written by Thingbe, it's called Carry On. I love it.

sinX = Holiday Celebration?

Oddly enough, yesterday was a more satisfying Friday than today was. Yesterday I felt the sweet release of all responsibility, and yesterday I felt that any homework I had could be easily ignored until Sunday.

Today I just feel tired.

Not the nice, lazy, cozy sort of tired that comes from fuzzy pajamas or a nice couch-nap, but the cold, worn out, threadbare energy that comes from school. I'm tired.

I walked into math class on Wednesday this week- you may remember it as the day before Remembrance Day, to find the ceiling of my math class adorned with the baubles, garlands, and weird wreath things of the holiday season not nearly here yet. Everyone in the class was very excited, whereas I was sort of annoyed. It was Wednesday. You may remember it as the day before Remembrance Day, which is to say November, or no where near Christmas yet.

Anytime before December is just silly to be putting up Christmas decorations. Silly like how early Dollarama switches their holiday isle. However, there is one fact I had to consider on Wednesday (the day before Remembrance Day) before giving my math teacher a good ol' WTF stare.

This is Trinidad.

West Indies, Caribbean. A place where Halloween is sluffed off for the Hindu festival of light, Diwali, and Remembrance Day is a couple of sentences over the PA system. Christmas, though... That's a big deal in Trini. Stores down here make Dollarama look last minute in their holiday preparations. I think I saw Christmas stuff down here as early as September. The thing is that Trinidad is made up of an incredible amount of races, and they celebrate basically all of the holidays associated with the different peoples and religions. That's why I get days off for Christmas, Eid, Diwali, Easter, and Carnival (that's another post). But this is because there are people here who want to celebrate these things. North American holidays like Halloween are just starting to appear in Trinidad (although I'm not sure if they'll ever catch on), and Remembrance Day was only mentioned because

I attend a Canadian Private School. So in Trinidad, it's really not that strange for Christmas decorations to immediately replace the Diwali ones.

Having lived here for a little over two years, I understand this, but I still settled for an annoyed look at the ceiling every now and then.

While we're on the subject of holidays, I celebrated Diwali for the first time this year! By that I mean that I lighted the little Diwali candle thing (called a diya- thanks wiki.) The picture isn't mine; I wasn't that forward thinking (it was Guy Fawkes Night, I was watching V for Vendetta and wishing there were fireworks) but it's similar, and me and Dad enjoyed lighting it. Apparently that was me welcoming Mother Lakshmi into my home. I'm so sorry to any Hindu's who read this- I'm quite sure I butchered the holiday and it's meaning.

I also had some sweet flour Diwali treat things and they tasted pretty good. My math teacher's Hindu (which is how I got the candle). Normally I hate her but she was in a nice, no-homework mood on Diwali, so it was cool.

So it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas, I guess. Right now I'm going to focus on some weekend Chrono Trigger.