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Super-Secret Meme [2nd of Sep 2008|12:02am] [ music | Noriyuki Iwadare - Objection! ] Instructions: Step one: Next to each number, write only the answer, making sure not reveal the question. Step two: Don't tell the questions to anyone not doing the meme. ( super-secret survey ) 7 counts of brilliance plus your comments

25/25 Vision [25th of Aug 2008|08:31pm] [ mood | content ] 8 counts of brilliance plus your comments

Footsteps [23rd of Aug 2008|12:39am] [ mood | distant ] [ music | Operator Please - Two for My Seconds ] My family and I went to a small gathering tonight with a few other families. Wine and cheese was served, as well as a great many snacks. It was an enjoyable night, but I would not have mentioned it were it not for one event. I brought along a miniature graphics tablet to lend to my friend Andy, who plugged it into his computer while we watched, and soon a few of us were drawing pictures in Microsoft Paint to amuse ourselves. Hemi was drawing a picture of me as a costumed juggler, and, when he reached the feet, Nadia suggested that he draw out-turned feet to indicate my usually-bouncy way of walking, and someone else added that this is a topic of discussion amongst others. I do not recall this being mentioned to me since high school. I used to get laughed at for walking more on the front of my feet than the back, but I imagined that I practised walking normally and that this had all been resolved. I appreciated the unintended honesty, but the reminder itself didn't feel too good. And now I feel like some sort of pariah. I feel like "Man Realizes Fly Has Been Down For Entire Life". It's making me question whether this is my defining character trait to nearly everyone. I certainly hope that I'm thinking about this a lot more than anyone else has, but I'm not so sure. 5 counts of brilliance plus your comments

Endangered Widow's Peak [20th of Aug 2008|11:49pm] [ mood | creative ] [ music | Piano Rocks - I'm Not Okay (I Promise) ] It seems like five weeks, not five days shy of a year, since I claimed that my hairline was "proceeding rather than receding", but this has turned out to be not true. This reversal is a mixed blessing: I don't want my hairline to recede, but I also don't want hair sprouting from my forehead. I have a slight widow's peak, and this is thinning slowly. I would've preferred it to slowly march backwards so that I could maintain a uniform density, but I doubt that my fringe hears my bellowed demands. I had hoped to avoid this whole situation because, y'know, because this is a sign of age, and girls are like regular humans when they subconsciously see such signs as undesirable. Still, Monday being the day it is, age is inevitable. For some reason, I've been thinking about next year's Rabbit Hole Day a lot for the last couple of weeks. I usually don't feel inspired to write an LJ post four months before I plan to post it. I had the idea to make the fifth instalment a series of thirteen appendices to the second instalment, which would make them thirteen short stories that could unify to fill in some interesting side stories and plot holes. But the second instalment covers such a narrow time period, and it's ostensibly written fourteen months after the events of the first instalment. I have to be careful not to contradict myself. Also, the main plotline hasn't advanced significantly since the second instalment, and Lara Halden needs a lot less mystery. That only two people will really understand the ten thousand words—and this paragraph—restrains me from getting too worked up about it. But I did have an new idea involving a fictional stenographer that I'm intriguing myself with. I can't bear to end an entry with a preposition, so there is another sentence here looking pithy. 1 count of brilliance plus your comments

French Cooking [14th of Aug 2008|11:41pm] My mum bought a Nintendo DS and a copy of Cooking Guide: Can't Decide What to Eat?, which is an digital cookbook that explains each step of a recipe. I had the first use of it on Tuesday night, when I cooked sigir güveç. I have no idea how that's pronounced, but it's a Turkish rump steak stew that I had never eaten nor cooked before. The cooking went fairly well. The instructions suggested that it would go well with pasta or bread, but I didn't cook anything else. It was quite tasty, but there wasn't enough of it without anything to supplement it. However, the voice recognition was terrible! Maybe it's just that catering for different accents is difficult, but I could not get it to recognise that I had said "Continue!" unless I used a thickly-stereotyped French accent. Sometimes not even this worked, prompting a few cries of sacrebleu! Retreating one step is done with the call "Go Back!", but apparently *whack* sounds close enough. Cooking is not a silent activity, so my pseudo-French was in high demand. Had you been there, you might have even heard a mon Dieu or a quelle catastrophe, but such is the toll of fine cuisine. 2 counts of brilliance plus your comments

Are You Serious? [7th of Aug 2008|12:18am] [ mood | curious ] I emerged from The Dark Knight far more disappointed than delighted. I watched Batman Begins for the first time the other week, and I liked it. I enjoy watching the small triumphs of good, and one is guaranteed a few of those when a movie has a big budget and characters with good intentions. The Dark Knight had a sprinkling of the small triumphs of good, but they were outweighed by the unsettling and frequently-violent antics of a motive-free villain. The fact that I didn't like the movie isn't a big deal; I can't expect to like everything. I'm also used to movies that I don't like being lauded as brilliant by reviewers and the box office. I just don't understand why my friends list likes it so much. Do you really think that it was that good? Even if I ignore the parts that I don't like, was there enough to redeem it from mediocrity? I will concede that Heath Ledger did a better acting job than I'd seen from him before, but that still doesn't mean that I liked his character—or the movie. Whatever happened to simple greed followed by comeuppance? 16 counts of brilliance plus your comments

Hackneyed and Formative [28th of Jul 2008|11:50pm] [ mood | hesitant ] I've been reading metacritic.com for reviews of games that I've been thinking about buying. I've been reading the excerpts from each game's lower-rating reviews to find out what flaws the games have. The site has an amazing power that I never realised: it can destroy any interest I've have in any game! For instance, one that I was interested in "isn't that great a video game. It revolves around a one-button system in which you position [your character] near an enemy and repeatedly mash the X button". For another, "you can't escape the fact that the plot is hackneyed and the gameplay formative." How can I buy anything when somebody somewhere thinks that it's rubbish? With abandon? I've been really tempted to gamble lately. Being virtuous and whatnot, I haven't ever. Also, I know the odds. The odds of getting a winning lottery ticket are slim to none. Still, something says to me, "You could win!" Peer pressure isn't supposed to come from internal voices. I've told krs2510 and isikenai that I'll go to Amaranth, the anime ball, in September. But I've attempted dancing only thrice, and I am increasingly hesitant. Also, it's not free. Quandary! If only dancing revolved around a one-button system in which you positioned yourself near other people and repeatedly mashed the X button. your comments

Hayden, 24 [15th of Jul 2008|10:57pm] Hayden, 24. Australian male. Etymology and pigtails enthusiast. Last known alias: ianiceboy 5 counts of brilliance plus your comments

One-Week Vegan [10th of Jul 2008|11:34pm] [ mood | accomplished ] As of today, I've been temporarily vegan for one week. I had barely begun this dietary experiment when I accidentally began chewing bubblegum of mysterious origin last Thursday, but I've been seven days since then without any meat or other animal products. I hadn't been enjoying milk or cheese for couple of weeks beforehand, but I was worried that a meatless existence would be crippling. That was unfounded given that my mum, who also tried veganism for the week, cooked eight tasty meals that didn't need meat to be complete. The meat-hater's pizza was probably my favourite, but that is partly because home-made pizza is decidedly a rarity. Also, I liked the name of it. It was the most difficult at the Fusion Latina shoot on Sunday. Free chocolate was on offer—delicious chocolate—but I resisted successfully. At first, I had been planning to eat celebratory food when it was mid-morning today: M&Ms, cream biscuits, and the McAfrica burger. But the day came and went with me having had none of it; I don't really feel like eating it. There is a particular type of wine-imbued chocolate that I like to have a few squares of and I could probably go for a McChicken, but the extravagant face-stuffing that I envisioned doesn't really appeal to me like I did. That could be because I like to continue a streak, like the non-gambling streak that I maintained while in Las Vegas. It would have been so inexpensive to gamble one single penny, but my twenty-one year streak would've be gone! Incidentally, I maintained exactly the same weight for the entire week. It's at sixty-five kilos at the moment, which is three to four less than when I was working at the hospital, running up five flights of stairs several times of day. Surely I don't snack that much less than then. Did you know that vegans don't eat honey? I suppose that it makes sense, but I'd never thought that deeply about insect-related foodstuffs. 12 counts of brilliance plus your comments

Fusion Latina [8th of Jul 2008|11:49pm] [ mood | content ] I got a text message from isikenai on Saturday morning: her sister was looking for a fill-in production stills photographer for the taping of two dancing segments for a couple of episodes of Fusion Latina, a Latin America lifestyle show that screens on community television Channel 31 Melbourne. Corinne, the sister, had seen the photos that I took of Magdalen, and, since their regular photographer was unavailable on the Sunday, it was a safe bet that I would be better than no one. I was pretty apprehensive, but I'm now confident that I was better than no one. I decided not to shave so as to blend in with how I pictured a television crew and Latino dancers. This is in contrast to the reason that I didn't shave while taking portraits last Tuesday: I was just lazy that day. I took the new Eastlink road to the dance hall in Abbotsford, leaving myself plenty of time and arriving a good forty-five minutes early. I'd had my headlights on since the Eastlink tunnel, and, as I listened to the last three tracks of the Arcade Fire album I had playing, I drained my battery. Almost all of the car trouble I've ever had has been my own fault. It was a good day. The crew were friendly, I enjoyed the novelty of seeing a television show being shot, and I thought that one of the dancers was cute. Movement indoors is a difficult thing to photograph, but I think that I did okay. I had my ISO on 1600, so all of the photos have grainy noise, but there's not really much that could be done about that. The regular photographer stopped in for a brief time, and he had his Canon L lens on ISO 1600, so I didn't feel so bad. He was a friendly guy, though the fact that his lenses cost more than my whole camera was intimidating! It was good experience for me, especially since I had to process a lot more images than usual to send to Corinne. ( here are a few of them ) 8 counts of brilliance plus your comments

Public Transportation [4th of Jul 2008|11:25pm] [ music | Coldplay - I Bloom Blaum ] I invigilated again on Tuesday, requiring the typical one-hour train trip into the city. Due to power outages and fallen trees—both caused by this winter breeze—it took me three and a quarter hours to get out to the station to where I was meeting my mother and brother afterwards. I would have spared you this paragraph, but it leads nicely into the following anecdote. About two and a half hours into the return journey, I was waiting for a bus at Box Hill shopping centre. Waiting near me was a weary mother of about my age with three sons in tow, eight, three, and one. The three-year-old, Joshua, declared, "I need to go to the toilet." Then, without further warning, he dropped his pants and doused the concrete in front of him. While this distressed his mother, everyone else waiting for the bus pretended not to notice, even as she tried to cleanse the ground with Coca Cola. I was amused and only slightly splashed. I was back in the city again Wednesday, as krs2510 (Chris) and mandby (Lily) agreed to let me practice taking photos of the pair of them; basically all of my practice thus far has been with only one person at a time. Since we made these plans less than a day in advance, I was surprised that I managed to secure inflightdata (Miki) for the latter part of the morning. Things were going my way! I am a law-abiding person. I don't work off the books, cheat on my taxes, or cross while the red man is flashing. I paid full fare for my train tickets during the two hundred and fifty or so weekdays I worked in the city last year, never once paying the concession half-fare that I am no longer entitled to. I had my ticket checked once in that year. On Tuesday, I paid full fare again for my ticket, but I lamely justified paying half-fare yesterday and saved myself $4.80 so that I could afford some lunch on my little means. Of course, that means that when I got off the tram at the University of Melbourne (where I was meeting Chris and Lily) an Authorised Officer stopped me, confiscated my ticket, and took my details. A fine will be mailed to me in four to five weeks. Darn. Chris and Lily and I sought places for photos, but it was raining, and all of the buildings that I'm familiar with were being renovated. I misheard Lily say that it was drizzling, and I thought that she said that Guitar Hero was "drizzlin'", as in awesome. Henceforth, anything described as drizzlin' is awesome. We did manage to find some places for photos, and I present the results thusly: ( photos of Chris and Lily ) We all went to Flinders Street Station, where I met Miki, and Chris and Lily met other friends. I got flipped off by clydev, which makes any day complete. Miki and I went to Center Place, a laneway off Flinders Lane, and we got some really good photos. While I'm fairly unversed at taking pictures of two people, I'm definitely getting better at this single person stuff! I told Miki that she looked like she was in an airline commercial and that was neither praise nor criticism, but I later realised that that is praise: people in airline commercials are cute! I had a warm Belgian waffle with icecream with the money I saved from my train ticket—the best $167 waffle I've ever eaten—and then I followed Miki to the State Library and then Borders because I didn't know what to do with myself. I read a book about digital photography for two hours before heading home. ( photos of Miki ) My thanks go out to Chris, Lily, and Miki for the drizzlin' photos! I owe you one! 2 counts of brilliance plus your comments

Fictional Canon for Fiction [1st of Jul 2008|01:41pm] I daydream about the Final Fantasy X prequel that will never exist. Oftentimes, these daydreams are the reoccurring kind, developing for themselves an intricate canon. For instance, an unrelated story entitled Surfals that I once began to pen: I scrapped it because, despite having developed the fictional technology concept extensively over most of the last decade, my accompanying narrative sucked. (I hope that I write it properly one day, because the idea has such potential.) So, in my FFX-0 daydream, Jecht the protagonist goes for a swim and ends up on the coast near Bevelle, where he is arrested. Braska and Auron bail him out, and the three of them set out on Braska's pilgrimage. I suppose that it would play a lot like FFX with different faces. To complete the party, Maechen could cast instead of Lulu, some Spiran blitzballer could replace Wakka, and maybe Rikku's mother could tag along at various points. Kimahri could join too and build a rapport with Auron, and his horn-related event could make for an important side-story. Cameos by little Tidus, Yuna, Lulu, Wakka. Chappu, and Baralai would fit quite easily. Meeting little Seymour on his own pilgrimage with his mother would be very interesting! After the fight at Zanarkand, I guess that the game could conclude with Auron discovering how to travel to Dream Zanarkand. Guild Wars still consumes my nights. I like it, but I see similarities with Progress Quest. 6 counts of brilliance plus your comments

Feelings [23rd of Jun 2008|11:36am] [ mood | unknown ] I've been plagued by feelings recently. These were not the standard feelings that come in cans labelled "happy", "sad", "confused", "wanted", "forlorn", "hopeful", or "melancholy"—they were the inexpressible type without accompanying words. The kind where you see a picture of a beach or of urban decay—or both—and some nondescript emotion grips you with a feeling of something. Do you want to go there? Not really. Does it look like a nice place? Meh. Can you associate this feeling with any pre-labelled emotion? Don't think so. Some films have a definable gravity, and the plot tells you how to feel. That was sad, or beautiful, or unjust, or fitting closure. But beachside/urban neutral groaning is mysterious and repeatable, and if thrill-seekers exist, then I imagine that there must be beachside/urban neutral groaning seekers too. It seems as though being affected by stuff is what some people live for, that something that seems to mean something is a rush to be found and experienced, not understood. I firmly believe that things that I do not understand are more than a chemical reaction with an unknown trigger. 1 count of brilliance plus your comments

Top Commenters, June 2008 [12th of Jun 2008|09:21pm] Top commenters on ianiceboy's LiveJournal: 1 keeleyaurora 197 2 shmennivie 174 3 fiwaceth 155 4 kamiawolf 135 5 post_anxiety 129 6 battlescarred 123 7 jedi_amara 119 8 winterabbit 99 9 miakaxevolved 89 10 takplayer 81 ( 11-100 ) Who doesn't love comment notification e-mails? 18 counts of brilliance plus your comments

Paper Napkins [9th of Jun 2008|10:48pm] [ mood | curious ] I woke up on Sunday morning having had the following dream: For reasons unbeknownst to me, I travelled to the city wearing nothing but four half-unfurled paper napkins. I also do not know in what manner they were affixed, only that two banded my chest and that two banded the region below my hips. I chanced upon meeting Diego, the husband of a former co-worker, and we sat on low concrete wall and had a meaningful discussion. Upon exiting Fountain Gate, a shopping centre much closer to my home than the city, I chanced upon meeting a family member, at which time that I realised that four paper napkins were not nearly enough to cover a person modestly. I sincerely hope that this does not promote negative inference in connection with the condition of my psyche. 2 counts of brilliance plus your comments

A-Z Topics Collectorium [6th of Jun 2008|12:43pm] [ mood | hopeful ] This memetic jaunt arrives via inflightdata and atlashrugged. It begins with a list of all twenty-six letters of the alphabet. Comment with something for me to talk about that starts with one of those letters. This can be something simple like TV shows, actors, actresses, food, or something more creative. One topic per letter—it's like a claims list! I will mark taken letters as topics appear. (One letter per customer.) I will post a new entry talking about all twenty-six topics given to me. ( I need still topics for the letters B, D, F-M, O, P, R, T-V, X, and Y ) Please comment and help me fill this list! 13 counts of brilliance plus your comments

I'm still alive [27th of May 2008|12:18am] [ mood | impressed ] [ music | Ellen McLain - Still Alive ] I have been writing a lot of LiveJournal entries in my head over the last few weeks. They were masterly-woven pieces of literature replete with flitting thoughts detailing fitting subjects. Had these entries ever spilled out from my mind to my keyboard, I'm sure that you would have enjoyed reading them. Though they are rare from me these days, voiceposts and video posts are easier ways of breaking an unplanned silence, because, whether or not I arrive prepared with an anecdote, it is so much easier than writing extemporaneously. Instead, I retreat to a semi-formal style, both because it's easy and because I read it back to myself with a lilting and distant cynicism in my voice that makes my own writing seem almost comedic. I recommend it! Tonight, most of my family huddled around the computer screen as we completed Portal in our third sitting. It was, in accord with all reports, great. I highly recommend that you buy it, if only to befriend a certain Weighted Companion Cube. (It's $25 and far closer to PG than MA.) 9 counts of brilliance plus your comments

Life As Mario [10th of May 2008|09:05pm] Having collected 122 power stars, flown to the centre of the universe, rescued Princess Peach, and eaten the heads of several delectable Toads, I am becoming increasingly qualified to write about Super Mario Galaxy. One evening, coinciding with a suspiciously-timed meteor shower, Mario receives an invitation from Princess Peach promising "a surprise". What she intended that surprise to be one can only speculate, but Mario is surprised nonetheless by Bowser's missile-totting space-ships. After taking one such missile squarely to his person, talking stars introduce Mario to an attractive stand-in princess who convinces him to collect living stars to feed her galactic space station's engine reactor. I enjoyed the game—especially because playing it co-op with my mum was great—but so many levels made me think, "I'm so glad that that level's over!" Also, it bothered me that Peach was mailing me dozens of 1-up mushrooms when she could have been using them to escape; I've played Melee, so I know that she can certainly take care of herself, and she's an intricately-attired fighting machine in Brawl too, or so I read. I just don't know what to think. And now I have the prospect of playing it all again with ice on my soles, as though I didn't have enough trouble staying away from black holes. 7 counts of brilliance plus your comments

Newsflash: Spartan Archaeological Dig Excavated! [30th of Apr 2008|12:25am] [ mood | satisfied ] [ music | Fatty Acid and sephfire - Final Fantasy X-2 Under a New Moon OC ReMix ] Though 'twas once the Thirtheenth Labour of Hercules, it was Hayden who completed this epic task, despite the dragons that here be. The bedroom was clean, and there was much rejoicing. ( Now in colour! ) Images of unearthed artefacts and various whatnot forthcoming! 11 counts of brilliance plus your comments

Mortal Enemies [20th of Apr 2008|07:05pm] [ mood | determined ] I feel as though I have to come back with something powerful—a masterpiece, a narrative, or a great photo. Or maybe I could get away with a thorough update, because while it may not be too interesting to read about Supers both Scrabble and Mario Galaxy, they have certainly been the highlights of my days. Perhaps an incredible insight would suffice. If I'm missing for a time, I feel as though my connections to many of you are eroding. Eroding! ( I have none of those things. ) And here's a photo. 11 counts of brilliance plus your comments

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