So class is over and summer is just beginning. Sure, I’ve got papers to grade next weekend, but this weekend (and this week) I’m free!!! So what’s a girl to do with all this newfound spare time? 1. Eat copious amounts of tasty food with friends. 2. Finish Twilight Princess. 3. Learn how not to get my ass kicked at wii Mortal Kombat. 4. Watch anime.

It should come as no surprise that I am making good progress on #1. Today proved to be full of fantastic dim sum goodness, and tomorrow brings the promise of a kick ass barbeque! Yay!!!

I have also managed to succeed at #2. Even though I have decided that I really still dislike Zelda games, I managed to suck it up and finish the game Friday evening just out of spite. And now I know that no matter how many positive reviews the next Zelda game gets, I will not fall prey to it’s obnoxious dungeon-puzzle-solving with annoying sidekicks who give the most useless hints ever and a rambling plot-line with craptastic voice acting! No sirree, I won’t buy into that again. I still love you, Nintendo, but Zelda can stuff it!

I will, however, buy into the gimic of waiving my hands in the air wildly trying to perform some kind of bloody fatality on my friends in Mortal Kombat. An afternoon’s trial of the game today suggested that despite thinking motions would somehow be easier than button-mashing to pull off the tricky combos, Mortal Kombat is still hard and I’m remarkably bad at it. I take some consolation in the fact that local game-master Jason could do little more than just kick people in the groin repeatedly in his efforts to produce fatalities, the fact that he still got to even attempt to execute the fatalies way more than I did speaks to my need to practice.

As an added bonus, the Game Stop visited after Target left us Mortal Kombat-less was also having Final Fantasy XII on sale. So of course, an impulse purchase was made. Not that I’ve been very good about keeping up with the series of late. The last one I played to the end was VII. I got about halfway through VIII, which I actually did enjoy, but got distracted by the card game crap and never finished it. Then I never even tried IX, started but again never finished X, and never was interested in the online aspect of XI. So XII must surely be the lucky charm, right?

Finally, I expect to work in some more Bleach watching this weekend. I’ve also been watching some of the old Black Jack series as well, although the medical component of the original series is a little less interesting than I would have hoped. But if I ever had kids and didn’t want them watching the schlock that passes for Saturday morning cartoons these days, I’d probably plop them down in front of Black Jack, just to make sure they got the proper doses of ueber-nerdiness in their routines.

Thus concludes my weekend update/post-that-makes-me-sound-like-a-13-year-old-boy. I guess it wouldn’t help my case to add that I also watched game 3 of the Stanley Cup tonight, huh? Yeah, that’s what I thought… forget I said anything!

Alas, my hours of mindless video game playing have finally been curbed by intrusions from the real world. Some intrusions have been annoying, like writing applications for TAing positions and grading the final exams from my course. But other intrusions have been pretty good. Sparrow-sitting for example. Turns out Trev’s advisor has a soft spot for just about every living creature on the face of the Earth, and so when this little baby sparrow needed some help, he took him in. But then he had to leave town, and our dogless, catless, and ratless home seemed a good place for him to spend his final days before release into the wild. Not that I’m wholy convinced that he’s ever going to be quite ready for that–he’s exceedingly tame. I guess we shall see.

His Highness, Sparrow William

Another pleasant intrusion: seeing the new anime film from Satoshi Kon, Paprika. I actually didn’t expect to like this film all that much, since even the most positive reviews seemed to just say the movie was trippy and visually interesting, even if it didn’t make any sense. I generally don’t prize artsy over coherence. But honestly, I didn’t think it was that confusing, or that weird really. It was weird. But it was about dreams, so in a way, for all it’s weirdness, it was actually more believeable to me than a lot of other more mundane films. And it was actually visually really interesting, in both really good ways and in disturbing ways. I can, however, understand that people who have never seen an anime film before might be really lost. The film definitely draws both on Kon’s earlier work, as well as on a lot of tropes that are standard in anime, but just plain weird if you’ve never seen them before. And personally, I would have ended the film a little bit earlier. It’s not that the there’s anything especially wrong with the ending, but I feel like it al ties up neatly at one point and then just goes on to belabor some of the main points for a little longer. Overall though, I thought it was a really interesting and generally satisfying film. So ha to all you critics who say I never like any movies! ;-)

Okay, back to watching William and maybe sneaking in some FF. Later!

I know what you all were thinking. You were thinking, “Oh sure, Batty gets FFXII and never posts again. What a douche!” Well, you are wrong. That is, you are wrong about the dearth of posts being video game related. In reality, I have been unexpectedly working my buns off this week. Part of the problem is that I decided at the last minute to take a French reading class this summer. I know, I know. Hell hath finally frozen over if I’m learning French. Be that as it may, I am really taking French and the class meets 4 days a week, 3 hours a day. And I’m also working 2 five-hour shifts in the library, meaning that I have two days a week that I’m on campus for 9 hours. Ugh!! Fortunately, the French is only for 3 weeks, but they’re going to be brutal weeks regardless.

And on top of it all, Sparrow William is still residing with us. I called some rescues last week to get a little more info on the likelihood of his ever being released, and it sounded very promising at first. At some point, he’s supposed to get tired of taking food from us. He supposed to want to eat seeds on his own instead of gaping at us for dogfood mush. He’s supposed to want to grow up! But does he actually want to grow up? Nooooo. He just wants to chirp and cry until one of us drags ourselves out of bed to feed him. And he wants to keep chriping as long as anyone’s around because he wants our attention. And he wants to sit on our controllers and peck at our fingers when we do have one day off for playing video games. What’s a bird-mother to do?

Who would have thought that I’d be screwed over by a Harry Potter movie? It’s bad enough that I have to hope against all hope that the Order of the Phoenix will come out better than the last craptastic film, since the 5th book is my absolute favorite so far. But now I have to worry that people are going to think that my purple hair is a bad imitation of Tonks! Damnit, I was purple first!!! ME!!! Wasn’t her hair pink in the book? Like, bubblegum pink? Why must they release photos of her hair all cool and purple? It’s a conspiracy.

More recently released photos at http://www.slashfilm.com/2007/06/22/75-photos-harry-potter-and-the-order-of-the-phoenix/

Whew! What a day. First, I went to the eye doctor to get my bleary little eyes checked out. I swear if I don’t finish grad school soon, I’ll go blind! But until then, I look forward to seeing the world anew when I get my new prescription early next week. Yay! Although what I dont’ understand is how it is that I had the first appointment of the day, scheduled for 9:15, and they still didn’t actually see me until 9:40. I mean, the 9:30 appointment was there and waiting. How can you get behind first thing in the morning?!

So after that I tried to catch another hour of sleep before having to feed HRH William again and shoving off to Ikea to get some bookshelves. Ah yes, surely the fact that I need more room for my books is completely unrelated to the fact that my poor little eyes are slowly deteriorating. Anyway, Ikea was pleasant as always, although they did not have spare shevles for my bookcases, which annoyed me. But at least my triceps got a workout hauling those Billy bookcases in and our of Trev’s gf’s car. And at least I got tasty meatballs out of the journey as well.

Trev and I were also lucky enough to later discover some delightfully bad Canadian tv program playing on some equally delightfully bad Chicago tv station. If you ever wondered what the Canadian bastard love child of Law & Order and Sue Thomas: F.B.Eye would be, you should watch Cold Squad.