(To be sung to the tune of MST3K's theme song)

In a world of imagination
In Fantasyland
There was a dragon named Nelth
Whose life was on the mend

He worked at the wizards' tower
Just another minion without power
He did a good job keeping folks away
But his bosses didn't like him so they shot him between planes

We'll send him cheesy novels
The worst we can find
He'll have to sit and read them all
And we'll monitor his mind

Now keep in mind Nelth can't control
When the books begin or end
He'll have to keep his sanity
With the help of his magic friends

If you're wondering how Nelth eats and breathes
And other annoying facts
Then repeat to yourself: a wizard did it
I should really just relax

For Bad Fantasy Theater 3000

( Mysterious bottomless bags of holding. )

Three exams over. Two more incoming next week.

I'll get on with chapter 3 of the BFT3K once I've had my supper and a good night's sleep.

Or why I hate open book exams. I hate them. If I can get a D for this one, I'll be satisfied because it means that I won't have to retake the module, which is a core module and I can't graduate if I don't pass it.

Because open-book exams aren't just a matter of how much you studied, but also what you have available to you. Or the fact that it's often used as a justification to insert questions that more often than not are flimsily related to the syllabus. The justification for this is supposedly that one is expected to learn more than the syllabus--and I agree to some extent, but such effort should be awarded extra credit and not a requirement to even PASS.

If everything tested is going to be based on independent study and only related to what was taught in lectures and tutorials, then why am I paying the university thousands of dollars a year to give me my degree? Why shouldn't I just buy a textbook, read it up myself and get a fake degree from a degree mill? I still get the learning, don't I? I pay the university to teach me what is supposed to be taught, not to say "all right, go and read this yourself and we'll see you for the exam".

Of course, I'll freely admit it: I can't grasp thermodynamics well, either. I can grasp Fidel-Crafts Acylation and Oxidative Phosphorlyation and other crap like that, but I can't. Do. Thermo. Well. I just want a D so I can use my chemistry and life sciences grades to pull up my average and get on with life.

(To be sung to the tune of MST3K's theme song)

In a world of imagination
In Fantasyland
There was a dragon named Nelth
Whose life was on the mend

He worked at the wizards' tower
Just another minion without power
He did a good job keeping folks away
But his bosses didn't like him so they shot him between planes

We'll send him cheesy novels
The worst we can find
He'll have to sit and read them all
And we'll monitor his mind

Now keep in mind Nelth can't control
When the books begin or end
He'll have to keep his sanity
With the help of his magic friends

If you're wondering how Nelth eats and breathes
And other annoying facts
Then repeat to yourself: a wizard did it
I should really just relax

For Bad Fantasy Theater 3000

Yeah, verily, Avatar! The moment of truth has come! You can destroy the black gate but...um...whoops, wrong speech. </The Guardian>

( Discussing pixellated people is a traditional internet pasttime. )

(To be sung to the tune of MST3K's theme song)

In a world of imagination
In Fantasyland
There was a dragon named Nelth
Whose life was on the mend

He worked at the wizards' tower
Just another minion without power
He did a good job keeping folks away
But his bosses didn't like him so they shot him between planes

We'll send him cheesy novels
The worst we can find
He'll have to sit and read them all
And we'll monitor his mind

Now keep in mind Nelth can't control
When the books begin or end
He'll have to keep his sanity
With the help of his magic friends

If you're wondering how Nelth eats and breathes
And other annoying facts
Then repeat to yourself: a wizard did it
I should really just relax

For Bad Fantasy Theater 3000

( A taste of shit. )

Finally took a break from organic chem to finish up the rest of The Pearls.

Ow. Ow. Ow. At least Touched by Venom was fun to dislike. This isn't even bad. It's just inspid.

I've got to find something bad, really bad, yet not so stupid like Bitterwood that it inspires nothing but boredom.

Library tomorrow, if my shoulder eases up.

Fine. I'm going to book my remidial training--one of the consequences of missing my stupid fitness exam. It'll give me something to do during my upcoming one-month holiday anyway.

The standards are pitiful for someone like me anyway. 2.4 clicks is hardly anything to someone who does 6 clicks two times a week, and I can do more pull-ups than what's required of the highest fitness band.

Yeah, I get paid but it's a pitiful amount for a student, so...

I guess I'll just have to putter around in the midst of fat, balding men and make them wonder why the fuck I am here when I do sixteen pull-ups in their faces. XP

And it has, bringing in plenty of rain from the South China Sea in addition to what convectional rain we usually get by virtue of being an island. The sky tends to be overcast most of the day, temperatures have dropped, and people in the university canteen have taken to ordering hot congee (thick rice porridge) instead of chilled fruit juice.

That's us dang tropical islanders for you--just like bananas, can't take a slight chill.

I'm being ironic, of course.

Turned up at the chem lab to realise I was one week too later and the slot was for another group instead of mine. I could have sworn it was weeks 4, 7 and 11 instead of 4, 7 and 10, but what the hell. At least I cooked up some story--I'm a really bad liar under pressure--and the lab tech found some spare fumehoods to do my experiment in. The last lab session had me cooking up two samples of impure organic compounds--one yellow and one white/clear--and this experiment was purification by recrystallisation and identification by determination of melting point range.

Well, it got off to a great start, seeing as how I managed to decompose my neutral (yellow) compound by accidentally overheating the ethanol solvent, and instead of retrieving the crystallised compound most of my stuff hardened into blackish-brown lumps.

Yeah, oops. Scratch, recover recoverable reagents, retry.

Ended up with 0.03 grams of neutral compound as opposed to 0.6 or so grams I was supposed to have.

Still, there was enough to fit into the tiny glass tubes used for melting point comparison.

Now there's another lab report that has to be written...

If anyone here played the girl version of HM:Friends of Mineral Town, at least they'll get this joke. It was worth a chuckle or two.



The art style is hilarious. Yes, I know I haven't been posting many "serious" posts lately--I'm considering doing one on the excuse of "taste", but that's still more or less in the works.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'll have to run off and plot on a certain message board about which of the latest bunch of pixellated ladies I'm going to get my in-game character to marry and debate their merits. Right now I've eliminated Airheaded Flower Girl, Rich Bitch, Dreamy Artist, General Store Worker, Money-Obsessed Stereotypical Oriental Lady, Tomboyish Fisherwoman with Overprotective Big Brother, Glutton and Witch. Or Unicorn Half-monster, for that matter.

...That leaves a tie between Bathouse-running Siren and Cold-Shouldered Half-Elf Blacksmith.

...Yeeeeaaah. Maybe this should say something about me, but I'm not sure what it would say. Maybe that I'm crazy. Or have no life.

I WANT THIS.

SO BAD.

MASSIVE IMPROVEMENTS OVER RF2.

Please please please let XSeed be doing the US localisation so I don't have to wait for a year for it to come out in english, complete with translation errors, game-breaking bugs, horrible english VA, people sometimes calling you by your child's name instead of your own and vice versa--

Understanding Chinese means I can read some kanji, but katakana might as well be Greek to me.

Natsume, you SUCK. BIG TIME.

But...

FUUUUUUUUU--------

I WANT THIS.



Fanservice swimsuit shots of both guys and girls LOL--

*Ahem*

*Flails*

And look! The inn actually has random faceless NPCs visiting! LOL!

*Foams at the mouth over improved NPC-NPC interaction*

(To be sung to the tune of MST3K's theme song)

In a world of imagination
In Fantasyland
There was a dragon named Nelth
Whose life was on the mend

He worked at the wizards' tower
Just another minion without power
He did a good job keeping folks away
But his bosses didn't like him so they shot him between planes

We'll send him cheesy novels
The worst we can find
He'll have to sit and read them all
And we'll monitor his mind

Now keep in mind Nelth can't control
When the books begin or end
He'll have to keep his sanity
With the help of his magic friends

If you're wondering how Nelth eats and breathes
And other annoying facts
Then repeat to yourself: a wizard did it
I should really just relax

For Bad Fantasy Theater 3000

( Purity Sues are like candy. They make you sick. )

As the title suggests, image-heavy.

This one won't be f-locked, since there're no pictures of my ugly, scary face.

( We go take a hike. )

So some of you who actually read this (I frankly have no idea who can be bothered to read this thing anyways) may know that I'm planning to go backpacking sometime next year in the May-August period, which happily coincides with summer in the northern hemisphere. I already have a few rough ideas of where I'm going and what I want to do there, only that some things are going to crop up.

Number one: getting someone to come along. I already pretty much had an idea of who I wanted to bring along with me; I'm not the most social of people and there aren't very many people I'd trust if the shit hit the fan a quarter of the earth away from home. At the same time, I'm not stupid enough to try this sort of thing myself--as the TF2 sniper says, "have a plan". Problem is said guy is in medical school, and that means that his holidays are highly erratic--which means I can't count on him being available during that period, although he says that he theoretically should be available for a two-week period during that time.

I really, really don't like leaving things to "the powers that be", if you get my drift. I know two other guys, but one has a full-time job and the other's slated to be drafted anyways, so there's a no-go for that. There's always the ultimate fallback plan of asking my dad to come along, but although he's expressed a willingness I see no reason to unnecessarily take a 61-year old man with hypertension and gout out on this kind of trip. I don't think he really understands what I intend to do.

Number two: A quick look at the map of Europe quickly establishes that I can visit Prague, which has enough sites of interest clustered in one location to keep me for the seven to ten days I expect to be puttering around, or Norway, which is a little more spread out and will involve some more travel within the country, probably by rail. Lenka reassures me that there is a reasonable level of english proficiency in Prague due to tourist volume, so I can more or less drop that concern. Since this is my first time doing this sort of thing, admittedly I don't want to have to deal with the hassle of taking a connecting flight between two countries, and I can buy a return ticket from the same airport if I visit one location.

And after some calculations it seems I won't have enough time to visit both places anyways to the fullest extent I want to, even if I went and bought an Prague -> Oslo connecting flight. (Besides, I wanted to travel by rail. Stupid geography.) So it boils down to whether I want to see old cathedrals and other historical sights more, or if I want to go see lakes, valleys and fjords.

Decisions, decisions.

Pity they don't make soundtracks like these anymore.

Really epic.

I've complained about the stupid portrayal of a lot of religious characters in the genre before, and since we're having a rather obnoxious example on the current BFT3K I thought I'd stop to share my thoughts on this matter.

Besides, there's absolutely no one on MSN to talk to (where is everyone, dang it? =P) , and I'm bored but can't sleep.

First off, I'll list three novels with examples of religious characters (both protagonists and antagonists) which I found relatively pleasing:

1. The antagonist missionary (I can't remember his name off the top of my head) from Brian Sanderson's Elantris.

2. Brother Honesty from Mickey Zucker Reichert and Jennifer Wingert's Spirit Fox.

3. Brutha and Vorbis from TP's Small Gods.

I believe that the main problem surrounding such characters is that all too often the author is tempted to make an Issue out of the character, resulting in said character being a mouthpiece for his or her (and by extent, the author's) (dis)belief system. What the above three examples share is the face that while their faith may be an integral part of who they are, they are still people and not some single-faceted carticarture designed to prove a point.

Of course, it always helps if the people believe what they claim they believe in and aren't in it just for the power/money/to be an evil misogynist/what have you. It's not absolutely necessary, but it really does help in taking that first step away from eye-rolling oblivion. As a lot of Christian or new age-y fiction proves, mindlessly promoting a belief system isn't amy different than mindlessly attacking it.

The Christian Church rip-off in Elantris is clearly corrupt and teh ebil, but individual people who adhere to its tenets can be good. Brother Honesty is one of the most virtuous religious characters I've managed to come across in the genre and both the Christian and Celtic rip-off religions have their good and bad points. When he's challenged on matters of his faith, he carefully re-examines it and both changes his viewpoints, as well as reconciles it with what he knows. As for Brutha and Vorbis, TP manages to effectively convey that abuse of religion is often more about the people who make it up, rather than the religion itself.

But most importantly, as with a lot of other things, it boils down to treating people as people.

(To be sung to the tune of MST3K's theme song)

In a world of imagination
In Fantasyland
There was a dragon named Nelth
Whose life was on the mend

He worked at the wizards' tower
Just another minion without power
He did a good job keeping folks away
But his bosses didn't like him so they shot him between planes

We'll send him cheesy novels
The worst we can find
He'll have to sit and read them all
And we'll monitor his mind

Now keep in mind Nelth can't control
When the books begin or end
He'll have to keep his sanity
With the help of his magic friends

If you're wondering how Nelth eats and breathes
And other annoying facts
Then repeat to yourself: a wizard did it
I should really just relax

For Bad Fantasy Theater 3000

( Chapter 5: )