So, Bathurst this weekend! What are my plans?

*loves this week's How I Met Your Mother like you wouldn't believe*

I had cool dreams last night. Some friends and I went into an English lecture, but we turned into the Yugioh characters and were sitting down to watch a duel. Of course, I'd seen the entire Yugioh series, so I knew everything that was supposed to happen. But I was Yugi and my friend sitting next to me was Joey, and apparently it was our duel from the Duelist Kingdom arc. So I kind of froze and said to Joey, "Holy shit. I have to win this one! Can you, like, let me win?" It was really dark in the room, so when I was choosing my cards, I couldn't read what most of them did. Thankfully, though, it was Duelist Kingdom, which meant none of the rules actually mattered anyway. Damnit, Yugioh's fun.

I went onto fanfiction.net last night. I don't do it often, but I really have to remember that I won't miraculously find something good. The only thing I ever find is story after terrible story so horrible that I instantly get the urge to write my own, just because I know it would be better. Really, all I wanted last night was one story about Joey and Kaiba that started with them actually hating each other and not each secretly thinking the other one's hot.

So I spent a good deal of today watching Yugioh Abridged. I therefore spent a good deal of today looking at Bakura and Malik. It made me want to look at fanfiction and stuff again. Fanfiction.net is one of the windows I have open right now. It's astonishing how bad people are at life on this site. Somehow I keep forgetting.

So on a whim, I opened another window and went to another site: Atemu Uprise.

It's... such a happy place. I never realised the extent to which I missed it.

Birthday = Awesome.

Can't wait to see pictures, Lan :D

That is all.

I will potentially be in Bathurst in six weeks' time - any Bathurst people feel like doing something?

Oh, also - the final destination on Amazing Race was a place in Maui called the Kamehakameha golf course. Who gets it? Billy and I found it hilarious.

It's my birthday in... fifteen days. I totally didn't realise it was so soon. I don't want to be nineteen! You really know you're heading for a mid-life crisis of epic proportions when you freak out about nineteen.

I think my October is completely booked up by other people's birthdays, which kind of sucks. I didn't have an eighteenth, and even though I don't like huge house parties or bars or clubbing, doing something would be nice. Can someone just organise me a surprise party for, like, the end of November?

TAMMY AND VICTOR WON AMAZING RACE! WOOOOOOOOOOO!!

So happy about that. They've been my favourites since the beginning, and it's so nice to back the winners for once! Usually I end up going for the people who come third or so.

And in other news, I really like Glee. When the ads first started showing up, I was intrigued, but turned off by the idea of it having music. I suddenly expected High School Musical with more swearing. But it's really funny! Even my parents laughed at some of the jokes. Poor, poor Will.

If Tammy and Victor don't win Amazing Race, I'm going to be so crushed. Usually 'the Asian team' gets eliminated really early on, but these two are freaking awesome. Margie and Luke aren't bad either, but I've loved Tammy and Victor since the beginning. Plus Victor looks like Mashimo, my awesome Jap tutor. If Jaime and Cara or Kisha and Jen win, I'll have to kill something. Kisha and Jen will probably be eliminated next week because they completely failed the last challenge, because it involved swimming. Living in Australia, in Sydney, no less, the idea of not being able to swim is absolutely insane. But all of them except Victor - and Margie, a little bit - were absolutely atrocious. They couldn't do freestyle, and they were out of breath after a quarter of a lap. They only had to swim 200m each, and it killed them. Jen had to wear floaties, for god's sake. And she was holding onto the plastic lane markers, and she had a nervous breakdown and cried for about twenty minutes.

Tammy was awesome this week, because they were in China, and she and Victor spoke Mandarin. So while Kisha, Jen, Jaime and Cara were screaming, "Why doesn't anyone speak English?!", Tammy was making friends with the airport staff and asking them very nicely to give all the other teams seats right up the back of the plane, so that they would take ages to get off.

I love this show so much.

Billy and I are thinking of suspending our degrees next year. Concentrating on martial arts teaching, writing/woodworking, whatever other interests we have. And for some reason, thinking all this has made having my job tolerable, because it means that after about eight weeks, I won't have to worry about anything as much as I do now.

And Tess - did you see that Field of Dreams was on TV last night? XD

Does anyone else think that Ginny looks exactly like Sally from Coupling?

Okay, I really have to say this. Out of curiosity, I just looked up reviews for Kingdom Hearts 2, to see how the general public compared it to the first one. Because all I'd heard previously was praise, praise and more praise: how wonderful the sequel is, how it's improved all the flaws of the original - but I didn't like it. I thought it was an embarrassment compared to the first one.

However, even the reviewers disagree with me. Apparently I'm just wrong, and KH2 is the best thing since sliced bread.

Since it's midnight, I'm sure I won't be able to manage a full rant about this, but I'll mention as many points about why I didn't enjoy KH2 as much as KH1 as I can.

1. It was too freaking easy. I love video games, but I wouldn't say I'm one of those crazy experts at everything. But there were only two points in the entire game where I died repeatedly - fighting Demyx for the final time, and fighting Xemnas, during the brief period that you control Riku instead of Sora. In the first game, I died so many times that I just wanted to hurl the controller at my plasma screen. It was infuriating, but that's what gaming is! That's the only way you can feel a sense of achievement properly! Defeating Cerberus? Defeating Ursula? Defeating AnsemRiku? Finishing the Olympus tournaments? I was so freaking proud of myself. I had none of that in KH2.

2. How linear it was. The structure of the game was so rigid that you couldn't even go into other parts of a level if the storyline didn't take you there. Getting lost was not an option.

3. This meant that there were never any hidden treasure chests or anything along the way, like in the first one. They were always in plain view, and you never had to scour the scenery for anything. But that was okay: there were no trinity marks or dalmation puppies for you to look for anyway.

4. Atlantica. I never thought I could hate that place more than I did in the first one, but wow, was I wrong. Getting repeatedly lost and fighting ridiculously hard enemies is luxurious compared to X-button Guitar Hero of Little Mermaid songs.

5. The camera. The fact that it went from being controlled by L2 and R2 to by the right analogue stick. All the reviewers are raving about how this is such a drastic improvement, but I hated it. I need my right thumb to, you know, press buttons so that I don't die. Not worry about the camera angles with it!

6. The irrelevant characters they included just because it looked cool to have them there. Why the fuck did they bring Maleficent back? You don't ever fight her! She appears, she fails at some vague plan to take over Disney Castle, she gets eaten by Nobodies, she comes back. Then... apparently it doesn't matter what happens to her next, because the game's over. And Sephiroth! Why did you bother introducing him? He had no relevance to anything, anything at all. Also, I believe Cloud described him as 'having spiky hair', and from that, Sora recognised him. Every single character in this and ANY game has spiky hair - you couldn't have, you know, mentioned his freaking demented wings or something? Not that it mattered. He appeared once, then never again. And those little FF-girl fairy things - I could go on forever.

7. Organisation XIII. Perhaps it would have been better had it been Organisation V or something. Apart from Axel and Xehanort, I don't remember ever hearing any of the others' names, and only knew them from pressing pause and seeing as my objective, "Defeat so-and-so." I never had any idea who I was fighting, nor why. And the battles themselves! Why did I turn into a die while fighting a guy who could turn into a playing card?

8. Reaction commands. They were a neat little idea, but in the end, all you had to do to win any battle was press X a lot, then press Triangle when it told you to.

9. The Gummi Ship. I know, the original's Gummi Ship was terrible in terms of its aim. I know, the second game drastically improved this, along with the graphics. But in return, it made the Gummi levels much longer, and much harder. Forget what I said about only having died in two places - I died in every single Gummi level. And I gave the controller to Billy's little brother every single time so that he could do it for me. Because you know what? I'm not playing Kingdom Hearts to get stuck on the Gummi levels. They're intermissions, nothing more. They should not kill you.

10. The fact that they bothered to put in the PotC quote, "You'd best start believing in ghost stories, Miss Turner. You're in one!" but they changed it so unnecessarily to, "because for tonight, you're in one!" Why bother saying the quote at all if you think you can improve it so much by adding those three extra words? I was insulted.

11. The fact that the Hollow Bastion defense system attacked you as well as the bad guys.

12. The fact that, when either swimming or controlling the Magic Carpet, going up or down was controlled by the right analogue stick.

13. The Underworld tournaments. They didn't give you any experience, and the longest one has the rule where not only can you not die, but you have 500 golden orbs, and each time you get hit you lose a bunch of them, and you lose if they reach zero. And you can't recover them. It's ridiculous to have to pay attention to both health and orbs.

14. The complete lack of strategy in boss fights. In the first one, you would have to be so patient, and only attack minimally within a tiny gap between their ridiculously constant attacks. You really had to pay attention to what the enemy was doing or saying, in order to judge what move they were going to do next and how you should avoid it. In this one, all you had to do was attack, at all times.

15. They changed Thunder from hitting multiple targets to only hitting one.

I'm sure there were more. But of course, there were good things about the game too: they gave you the option of skipping cutscenes. That was a blessing. In the original, I watched Sora yell, "There's no way I'm gonna let you take Kairi's heart!" so many times I could have cried. I think I did. In the second one, there was no such pain. It's such a shame I never died, so there was no opportunity to use the 'skip cutscene' option.

Other than that... well, I guess I liked the actual pirates in Port Royal. It was good that you could only hurt them when they were in the moonlight, even if it didn't make sense.

Changed my timetable to fix up my linguistics tutorial, and this has made it so that I don't have to be in till 12 on Wednesdays, but I have to be there until 7 on Thursdays. Ugh. Well, it's still worth it. It's a great timetable.

I met someone today who has 300 bottles of nail polish. Take that, Lan.

Dad asked if our doorbell still worked, and I told him I turned it off months ago because it just kept ringing for no reason. Now he's decided he has to test it. The noise is going to make me cry.

At the uni enrolment, I had to show a woman some photo ID when I handed in my Prohibited Persons form (saying that I plan to work with children, so I'm not a paedophile). I gave her my licence, with my photo from when I was 16. She looked at it for a long time, then looked up at me, then back at the photo. She said, "Well, I guess it could be you."

I smiled and said, "I've lost a lot of weight since then."

She said, "Ah... well, not wanting to make any personal comments, but... yeah."

So it's official. I was so much fatter then, that my ID doesn't look like me. It's a good thing I'll be getting my Ps soon.

Made a new LJ user today - reniera  - exclusively for anything story/fanfic related. I don't know where the name came from.

I also re-read my extension 2, and am really, really proud of it now that I can read it almost objectively. I did, however, find one typo - in the reflection statement, and not really noticeable, thankfully: I said 'emphasise' instead of 'empathise'. A stupid mistake, but one that can possibly go unnoticed. I'm just a little bit crushed that I went through the whole thing so many times looking for mistakes and I missed one.

One more quick post:

JUST GOT YOUR GIFT, BREE! I LOVE YOU! WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!