Viva Forever

Yay Minchin. This clip is only 1 minute and 52 seconds long, so I highly recommend watching it. Pure lolage.

I haven’t been blogging much, been a bit out of it online-wise lately. I’ve joined a second awesome D&D campaign where I’m a halfling ranger. I’m also more than halfway through Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince and I’m baffled by the amount of teen drama exploding throughout much of the middle of the book. The imagery of Ron spending chapter after chapter basically just sucking face with a girl non-stop is a little nauseating. Hopefully the plot would pick up soon. I loled when one of the “random” passwords into the Gryffindor room was “abstinence”. Real subtle, Rowling. Also, I’ve started a new crafting project, fingers crossed that it’ll turn out to be a success.

In response to the last entry, here are the answers:

Kaylee asked:
If you were given a million dollars, what would you do with it?
Donate a good chunk of it to research, give a good amount to my parents to live off, give another good chunk to them to invest for me.

How did you envision your future as a child?
I can’t remember! I think I may have wanted to become a high court judge at some point… not any more, too much work. I’m not THAT dedicated to law. :P

Amanda asked:
You and Tim seem to have a really close relationship - have you ever talked about making it permanent (e.g. marriage), or even moving in together?
Moving out is likely though I need to finish my degree first (another year to go!) and get a job first. But it would be nice to be more independent. I don’t think either of us hold ideas of marriage being this sacred union of two people… it’s basically just the law recognising your relationship, and financial consequences that stem off that. We would like to get a civil union instead (cos that just sounds way cooler) but I think only New Zealand allow civil unions between heterosexual couples. =/

Chantelle asked:
If you could have your picture taken with any living person, with whom would you choose to be photographed?
Stephen Colbert. :3 If not him, then my grandma from my dad’s side. I haven’t seen her in so long (she still lives in China) and she’s quite old now… it’ll be nice to see her before she dies.

What kind of law (if any) do you want to practice?
Intellectual property or cyber law. I haven’t done the latter yet but I’m so interested in how the internet interacts with our legal system I would love to have my career based around it.

Rilla asked:
If you weren’t doing law what do you think you would do?
I would say psychology because I have a strong interest in it, but I don’t think I’d be a very good therapist; I don’t think I deal with other people’s problems very well. Otherwise, I actually wouldn’t mind a common office job (with friendly work colleagues) that pay okay. I don’t think I ever had a strong interest in massively developing a career, I basically just want enough money to live comfortably so I can pursue my hobbies.

What do you think is the purpose of your life?
To be happy!

Sarai asked:
What was your inspiration for this layout?
I… didn’t make this layout. ^^; Credits in the footer! But I liked it for its simplicity, however, I recently found I don’t like light coloured text on very dark backgrounds at all. I hope to change it soon.

So there you have it. Also I finally installed the threaded comments plugin, so now people can reply to each other! Oh and one last thing, this is the most awesome thing I saw yesterday [source]. It’s in no way practical I know, but… it looks awesome. *__*

I was at the library today, doing research for my intellectual property essay on copyright, and I was reading through the book The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination by Paul K. Saint-Amour. One of the chapters mentioned a type of poetry work I’ve never heard of before, called a Cento, which is basically taking verses of existing poetry and putting them together to create a new one. Apparently, this has been around for ages, and it demonstrates how this is an example of how copying and remixing to form new works has been around for years.

Anyway, the book quotes a particular cento that I found to be positively charming (if not a bit frivolous). It is quoted from another book called Gleanings from the Harvest-Fields of Literature A Melange of Excerpta, Curious, Humorous, and Instructive by C. C. Bombaugh, first published in 1870 (this book sounds quite interesting, I must try to find a copy) of an anonymous cento involving a rather dramatic (albeit a bit confusing) retelling of a love story. I’ve taken the liberty of researching for the author of each line to their original works, and linking to them when I could find a source (this took much longer than expected).
 

¹ Spelt “Alice Cary” in modern days.
² Not too sure on this one, lots of Brownings who write literary works and none I found that exactly match the line.
³ Maybe a miscredit? I couldn’t find anyone by the name of “Hervey” having written that line, but Aldrich did use that line in his poem written around that time.
⁴ The line that Wordsworth uses is actually “The sweetest thing that ever grew”.

I’m no English major but… is it just me or does the content of the poem refer to the (presumably male) protagonist successfully wooing a lady he fancied with… alcohol?

I watched Amélie today and I really enjoyed it! It was probably the most quaint and delightfully imaginative thing I’ve seen in recent times. The directing was superb, the music was charming and Amélie is such an adorable, unique and interesting character. If you take all the adult themes out, she strikes me as a character that Roald Dahl would write in his children’s books. Lots of funny and clever moments. The movie gave me a happy, warm and fuzzy feeling, and a strong desire to eat a croissant.

Also, Tim bought me Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell the other day, I’ve heard lots of good things about it. It’s a dauntingly big read but I plan to get around to reading it soon. The idea of magic portrayed in a tongue-in-cheek way in times of Napoleon… that’s appealing in its own right!

Also I’m planning to implement a tag cloud plugin (on a separate page). That way I can make my categories more broad while getting to tag the many topics I blog about.

Edit: Ack sorry for the multiple entries, I didn’t realise that it had posted so many times (database was going screwy when I was trying to post it).

Two assignments down, one more to go (due Friday). Ran about 50 steps today to get my essay in under high stress conditions, couldn’t run any more, heart absolutely burned like nothing before. Note to self: exercise plzkthx.

Finished watching Heroes as celebration tonight. GREAT SHOW OR GREATEST SHOW?! (Hint: it’s the latter)

Received volume two and three of “Spider-man Loves Mary Jane” from amazon.com. Speedy service, excellent packaging but it stings that shipping from the US costs more than the two comics combined. Ouch. Won’t be able to read till Friday though.

Lulz from this tempts me to try the Legacy Challenge. Also would have to wait till after Friday.

Too much l33t speak in this entry.

Exhausted!