Eldrad must live

Squeenix has a new teaser site up, with a dragon, a number 4, and a counter counting down until July 6th. Judging by the Gameboy-esque music and the black-and-white picture, I'm betting it'll be SaGa 4, especially since this is the 20th anniversary (hard to believe) of the first SaGa game, for the original Game Boy. WiiWare, DSiWare, mobile phone, or next-gen system?

Anyway, I'm heading out this afternoon for 10 days in London with my friend Stephanie; I'm hoping to update my LJ a little more frequently while I'm there, and certainly I should have a buttload of pictures upon our return. But if I don't update while I'm there (due to lack of time/wi-fi/whatever), see y'all in a week and a half!

Well, back in the U.S. of A. - currently in Memphis, at my brother's house. Didn't get to hang out with Yasmin because I couldn't get ahold of her...she'd left her phone at a friend's and so had no way to contact me. So I just saw Wicked that day, then chilled out and packed to leave. Fortunately the Glasgow car bomb the day before I left didn't particularly affect my plane trip back, except in making me glad I'd arrived at the airport 3 hours before departure time. Today, just chilled and saw the Memphis Zoo with my brother (he got off work early because there was a small fire in his building and so they sent folks home), and then we went to East Memphis for some tasty Memphis barbecue (at Corky's).

Heading back up to the IC tomorrow evening...I should be uploading at least some of the pictures within a few days after getting back, so expect those soon. I've been reviewing some of them, and a few have turned out quite well. :D

Back at my customary spot outside Waterloo. Spent yesterday hanging out with Ollie (satsu), who introduced me to the wonders of curry ketchup and Vodka Revolution (which are two entirely different things - a condiment and a cocktail bar - just in case you were wondering). Also tried some delicious Dutch sausages with an unpronounceable name and tasty fruity beer that he recommended to me. However, hitting three salubrious drinking establishments in five hours or so meant I had entirely too much to drink - unfortunately I am not able to hold my liquor as well as your average Brit, it seems - so I was a bit of a drunky tard, but I don't think Ollie minded that much (I hope?). XD

Speaking of drunky tardness, I totally spaced the fact that I had a Globe ticket for yesterday when I was hanging out with him...I didn't remember until this morning when I woke up. Still, it's probably just as well...at 7:30 I still had enough alcohol in my system to make standing and watching a play rather difficult, I imagine, though perhaps more authentic to the experience of your average soused Elizabethan laborer. XD

Anyway, today I went and saw Hampton Court, which my Tudor-loving self enjoyed immensely (even if I did end up getting lost in the hedge maze, thanks to my craptastic sense of direction). I also spent entirely too much at the gift shop (I had no choice! It was like ALL TUDOR ALL THE TIME), though in my defense it's not ALL stuff for me. However, my mom, as the only other person I know with both as large a range of interests and as ardent a case of Anglophilia as myself, is gonna get a crapload of souvenirs and stuff next time I see her. XD

Plans for tomorrow are to get up at the buttcrack of dawn, take the train/tube to Kings Cross, take an 8 a.m. high-speed train from there to Durham, hang out with my former flatmate Colin for a few hours, head back about 6, get into London around 9 or a little after, and meet up with another former flatmate, Yasmin, and hang out for a few hours. Then Sunday pretty much all I'll be doing is heading to Gatwick and saying goodbye to England (at least for a while). D:

I actually have quite a bit of time right now - I'm just waiting for an e-mail from Colin to confirm things so that I can make the train reservation - so I think I'll probably subject y'all to some observations on nostalgia and place, inspired by having returned to England for the first time since my year here.

( Cut for navel-gazing )

Hope that made sense...it's taken a while to type, and I'm almost out of time, so I'll sign off now and post it.

Another mini-post...I'm currently at the computer at the Tourist Centre in Kingston-upon-Thames, and I only have 10 minutes left of my allotted half-hour. (I also sent e-mails to satsu and my former flatmates Colin and Yasmin to see if they want to get together sometime while I'm here.)

Again, not much time, but I've spent today visiting Kingston and having loads of fun seeing all the places I went regularly during my year here. Current plans are to do something in central London tomorrow (Oxford Street, maybe? I'm going to try to get some kind of day-of tickets to that Othello production, as I couldn't get them through the service I originally tried), and visiting Canterbury on Wednesday. I want to see the cathedral (as it was one of the two archbishoprics, and Becket of course was killed there), and I guess they have some delightfully cheesy reenactment of the Canterbury Tales which sounds awesome (the reenactment of the Miller's Tale alone should be great, especially since it promises to let you "experience the sights, sounds and smells").

Plans after that are a bit more amorphous, but I'm definitely visiting Hampton Court while I'm here, and paying another visit to the British Museum and Library (on my last visit to the Library day before yesterday, I saw 2 original copies of Magna Carta, so I've now seen 3 of the 4 surviving ones). Also the aforementioned get-togethers will hopefully happen too. So I'm definitely keeping busy. XD

Anyway, I have like 2 minutes left, so time for me to sign off. Expect a detailed description of my trip, plus lots and lots of pictures, once I get back to Memphis next week. :D

Welp, I'm mostly packed and almost ready to go...right now I'm washing up some dishes and trying to tidy up my apartment. Before I leave I'm going to hit the Burg for a substantial breakfast, drop off some books at the university and public libraries, make a bank deposit, then pick up some snacks for the road before I pick up my shit and head to the bus station. I'll have Net access at my brother's, so if anyone wants to leave their addresses on the last entry for a postcard, feel free to do so until, say, Wednesday night. (I'm not sure how early we leave Thursday exactly, but just to be on the safe side.) After that I will actually be out of touch for a while, but hopefully everyone has a great couple of weeks!

In related news, I'm currently at the inquiry stage for a ticket to the Globe production of Othello, which makes me giddy as a schoolgirl. My big regret is that Ian McKellen's King Lear ends three days before I get to England; I would sell a KIDNEY to see Sir Ian as Lear. (It reopens again later, I think, but in November.) ;_;

Well, my brother has booked our European vacation sensation. ( Our itinerary )

Honestly, even though we will be crossing some of the same territory we saw last time we went Eurotripping (during Christmas break of my year in England), I don't mind at all - all the Italian cities are new, and I certainly have no problem seeing Lucerne and Paris again, since I loved both of them last time and there's plenty I didn't see in both cities (and it will be nice to be in Lucerne not on Christmas Day, so things will actually be OPEN). And of course I want to live in England eventually, so even though I've seen lots of London before I know I won't get tired of it (and then I'll hopefully be visiting Colin, so I'll get to see a new part of England too!). I'm not entirely certain where I'll be staying in England, but I've been checking out inexpensive places to stay; fortunately in London you can pretty much get anywhere from anywhere, so it really doesn't matter that much, though for sentimental value I kind of want to stay in Kingston. :D

And BY GOD I AM GOING TO HAMPTON COURT THIS TIME...I lived like 5 minutes away from it for 9 months and was too lazy to go see it until the very end, despite being a huge Tudor freak and it being a major Tudor site. Then at the end ended up not being able to go as I'd planned because I had to leave a week and a half early to go home for my dad's funeral. (Another reason I'm glad I'm going is that it'll be nice to have my most recent memories of England not be sad and tragedy-stricken.)

...In unrelated news, I've finished my Beowulf paper and final (verdict: paper not bad but not fabulously intelligent either, final didn't go great but could have been a lot worse), and now all I have to do is finish my grading for my Rhetoric class and implement the suggestions my prof gave for finishing my seminar paper. The problem, of course, is that my seminar paper is now moving at approximately 1/10000 the speed of molasses. I'm hoping to finish it tonight though, or tomorrow at the latest. (I'm also going to start my grading tonight; it'll be so nice to not have to focus on writing amazingly fabulous comments except for the few who specifically gave me a SASE or asked for comments. ZOMG SO MUCH FASTER.)

Man, I'm so ready for this semester to be over. Unfortunately my summer class starts Monday, and I've already been assigned reading for the first day of class. This is not an auspicious beginning. D:

Let's Positive Linking!
- MadTV does The Wizard of Oz. (From jokersama.) Actually quite good; the best part is that the chick playing Dorothy totally has the Judy Garland intonation down, even when she's throttling Glinda or calling the Tin Man a homo. XD
- The opening movie for Final Fantasy Tactics: The Lion War. ZOMG DO WANT
- Squeenix announces Star Ocean/Star Ocean 2 remakes for PSP, Star Ocean 4 in development. As a confirmed tri-Ace whore, my immediate response was to start salivating like Pavlov's shota dog.
- The most offensive piece of statuary I've seen in a while. Honestly, is this what they think all comic readers want? (Of course we must all be male, because we all know girls CAN'T read comics, and if they do it doesn't count.) Seriously, it's like June Cleaver meets Daisy Duke. Now, MJ is a sexpot, but still! The exposed cleavage, the fact that she's barefoot (though not pregnant, that might prevent her from having a26GGG figure), the VISIBLE THONG, the PEARL NECKLACE...WHAT THE FUCK. (And we're not even going to get into the fact that I'm sure, given the crap Spidey puts that costume through, that I'm sure it's machine washable, and that MJ is practical enough to do so.)
- Bobby Brown claims Osama Bin Laden wants to kill him and marry Whitney Houston. Yes, you read that right. On the plus side, Osama x Whitney would be an AWESOME COUPLE. XD

Well, I'm throwing in the towel for today; though I didn't hit my ideal pagecount, I finished a respectable enough number of pages that I can go to bed without feeling guilty.

And that's in spite of having spent an hour or so surfing Rome tourism sites and London bed-and-breakfast sites, and getting physically homesick for England; when I think that I'll be back there in less than two months at the latest, I feel excited and happy and impatient all at once. Seriously, I have needed this for a while now.

In the meantime, I have some browser tabs I need to close, so without further ado...

Let's Positive Linking, Making Up for Lost Time Edition!
- Enjoy this fanfiction, featuring Princess Peach x Wendy O. Koopa. (From jokersama, of course.) Not only is it a rather sweet and fuzzy yuri fic, but it also contains discussion of their respective female reproductive systems. A note to the author: 1) I never needed to know about Princess Peach's first period in graphic detail, and 2) I'm fairly certain turtles don't actually go into heat, bad TMNT smutfic to the contrary.
- MadTV takes on Heroes. Highly amusing if you've seen the series, and no real spoilers if you're past like episode 4. (The Niki/Jessica bit is especially hilarious, because that's TOTALLY what I'd do if I had an evil mirror twin.)
- Strawberry margaritas are now a health food. I believe the proper reaction that is OMG FUCKING WAHOO, but then I also enjoy frozen strawberry margaritas frequently.
- Which is worse: eating still-squirming octopus tentacles, or eating whole (but miniature) live octopi? (From rathershady.) Honestly, I can't decide, except I'm pretty firmly on the side that NO SQUIRMING TENTACLES ARE GOING IN MY MOUTH KTHX.
- Metal Giko Solid...quite possibly the pinnacle of ASCII art. (Seriously, this shit is kind of amazing.)
- Was the destruction of the Death Star an inside job? (From sixteenbynine.) This isn't the conspiracy you're looking for~
- God of War II European launch party features decapitated goat, offal-eating. Animal rights activists, and people with taste, understandably protest. (Nevertheless, there's a small part of me that thinks that is hella cool, and certainly more historically accurate than canapes.)
- Speaking of wacky Europeans, Scottish Queen's Guards are videotapes half nude, spanking each other and grabbing each other's willies. Of course, The Sun is there. (Where would we be without tabloids?)
- Finally, a SomethingAwful Photoshop Phriday that's actually consistently good. The assignment? To create an 70's exploitation-style grindhouse movie poster for any film. All of 'em are at least decent, and some are GREAT.

Well, one presentation down for the week (which sucked, but honestly I'm beyond caring), one to go...specifically, tomorrow afternoon I have to give my presentation on modern appropriations of Beowulf. I was hoping to hear back on whether I'd have a DVD cart tomorrow by 5 today, but I didn't...hopefully they'll let me know early tomorrow whether I will or won't, so that I know whether I need to try to hunt up something else or just forgo visual/audio aids altogether (though I sincerely feel that at the very least I HAVE to play part of one of the musical songs, and ideally I'd like to show a snippet of Grendel, Grendel, Grendel's pastel-colored crack as well).

Also, I just remembered that I should probably do our regular translation for tomorrow as well, eheheheh...fortunately it's not too long (only 70 lines) so it shouldn't kill me time-wise.

In other news, the scheduling for my and my brother's European vacation is now up in the air. We were originally looking at sometime in June or July, after my three-week summer class, but my brother (who's been applying to new jobs so that he can move back to Kansas City) was just informed by one of the places he applied to that they want to hire him, and would want him to start within four weeks or so of their offer. Even the earliest date we were looking at, in June, would still put him at six weeks before he could start work with them. Now if they wait a couple of weeks to make their official offer, we'll be fine as things stand; however, if they don't, we'd probably need to go earlier than that.

So he asked me what the absolute earliest date I could do was, and I poked around on ISIS and double-enrolled in another, more normally scheduled summer class (specifically, Kathleen Diffley's doctoral workshop). I'm double-enrolled now - obviously I'll drop whichever class I end up not taking - but that means I could have those three post-finals weeks in May free. My brother said that would work great, but the only London-to-Rome tour that would fit into that schedule would take place May 17th through 27th.

So I find myself on the horns of a dilemma. It looks like this may be the only way my brother and I can do our trip, and as a bonus it would not only be cheaper - as May is still off-season, I guess - but it makes me ecstatic to think of being in Europe in less than a month, and this final crunch period of the semester would be much easier to bear with that in mind. On the other hand, I just RSVPed a couple of days ago for the wedding of my friend and former W.C. coworker Janie, which is scheduled for May 26th, and I want to go so that I can see her and my other W.C. peeps (especially since Janie was the only one I didn't get to see when I was home over Spring Break).

I hope they take a couple of weeks to make the offer and so we can go with our original plan of early June, and that way I can both go to Europe and go to Janie's wedding. Otherwise, I will HAVE TO MAKE A CHOICE AUGH WHYYYYYYYYYYYYY

Let's Positive Linking!
- It's sad that this is happening in 2007. I mean, it's great that they finally integrated the prom (though why is there still a need for a "white prom," then?) but it's only like 50 years overdue.
- Final Fantasy XIII no longer PS3-exclusive. (This is old news, I guess, but I hadn't heard.)
- My Little PH-tan. This manages to be both ridiculously awesome and mildly creepy. Much like Robbie the Rabbit. XD
- Wow, this is one of the gayest music videos ever. (From naruto_nerd.) It's an oldie from 1979, but it nevertheless manages almost to outgay the Village People.
- What the fuck? Honestly, why in the hell would this teacher get fired? It sounds like he didn't really do anything at all objectionable, except physically acting out how someone with a gun could have stopped things earlier (which might be slightly tasteless, and I disagree with him that that is the solution to the problem, but whatever). It's especially bad since it sounds like he didn't even really get much of an explanation as to why he was fired.

...man, I'm finishing up the Christopher Lambert Beowulf right now, and it is so bad it awes me. It's actually a lot like the Mortal Kombat movie, only with worse writing (if such a thing is possible). It's like suck squared, then squared again. SUCK TO THE INFINITE POWER

Last night I had the weirdest dream. I only remember the last little bit of it before I woke up this morning.

( it lies within, if you DARE )

...Is it sad that now that I've discovered that Tanya Huff has an LJ, I totally want to friend her except I'm afraid I'd seem like a creepy fanboy? (Though I guess I totally am; not creepy - I hope - but a fanboy.) Though the fact that she likes both Charles de Lint AND Joss Whedon shoots her way up in my estimation (and she was already pretty high in it).

Also, I just joined antiacademia, a community for grad students to vent. And now I'm sitting here like AUGH WHAT HAVE I LET MYSELF IN FOR? And given my shyness and less-than-social tendencies, why did I choose to enter a profession that centers around interpersonal relationships and public speaking? AUGH.