Routine Booking Procedure. Move Along.

I either started at the beginning of this year or the end of the last, but I've been reading before bed every night and it's honestly one of the smartest decisions I've ever made; for a couple of reasons:

First of all, as an English student, but also as an adult, I struggle on a daily basis to find the time to read 'for fun' and I know I'm not alone in that annoying guilty feeling you get when you know you haven't been reading as much as you want to and you feel bad for doing yourself such a disservice.

Second of all, it's been going around the internet for a long while that you should avoid screens, specifically LED light, before going to bed. Supposedly this light suppresses some chemical or something that makes you tired, so you it's harder to get to sleep coming straight off of a computer screen and/or you don't get the best rest that you could. But no! Stop right there! This is hearsay! Don't trust what's going around on the internet! Be a responsible individual! That's right, guys- let's hit the literature.

*Funky 80's Montage Music*

The literature agrees! I read a few studies and they all seemed to concur that blue light suppresses the production of melatonin, which makes you tired. I'll reference a couple of the articles I read at the bottom of the post if you want to check them out. So there you have it! My second reason was sound. The blue light coming off of your computer, phone, and I would imagine handheld gaming devices is bad news for sleep cycles.

I don't think reading before bed will make a huge difference, but I think I enjoy it even if it isn't helping me sleep. I just like spending time with these cool cats-

I like to have a couple of options when I snuggle under the covers. Mostly I'm reading Don Quixote, but for those nights when all you want is Shakespeare, I have William Shakespeare's Star Wars to provide my fix. Occasionally I'm in a weird mood and I just want to read something really simple, so I like to keep a kind of 'dumb' book ready. Right now my stupid book is shockingly not Star Wars but A Princess of Mars on my Kobo. Oh, Edgar Rice Boroughs. Finally, because it's the end of the semester and sometimes I go to bed panicking about how much work I have to do, I keep a 'work book' next to my bed so that I can go to sleep researching if I need to. Right now I'm working on an essay about The Time Machine, so I'm reading the critical essays in this edition I borrowed off of a friend. Normally I wouldn't read things for classes before bed (the idea is not to think about school) but sometimes it can't be helped.

I also keep a mechanical pencil by my bed because academia has ruined me and I can't read without making notes in the margins anymore...

The moral of the story is, if you're not reading as much as you'd like to be, try giving it a go before bed! Some nights I can barely make it through one page before I'm off to snooze-land, but others I'm up for ages just reading. I even found, once I get really into a book, that I've started to go to bed sooner and earlier so that I can read longer before going to sleep. I don't know if its helping me get to sleep faster or get a better sleep than if I jumped off the computer and under the covers, but I do know that I'm finally finding the time for books I have been waiting years to pick off the shelf.

REFERENCES:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2869.2005.00463.x/full

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v497/n7450_supp/full/497S13a.html?goback=.gde_3084791_member_244253435

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1389945711001651

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.