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Trixter's Ramblings  I need a new purse. The thing is, I don't really need a new purse so much as I need a man-purse. I don't use my purse to carry woman-y make-up crap, I use it to carry my gadgets, and women's purses all seem to be either far too small or under-pocketed. Or ugly. Also ugly. I'd love to just order a bag from a reputable online retailer, and I'll pay a premium for something extremely well-made, bonus points if it's American- or European-made. But I have no idea where to look for such things. So I turn to you, my gadget-conscious friends. I need a bag that's suited to holding my wallet, my DS, my PSP, my Zune, a moleskine notebook, a regular book (paperback, trade paperback, maybe hardcover), pens and pencils, my dice bag, and the assorted minutae that goes along with them all. My current laptop is a behemoth, so I'm not looking for something to carry it in at the moment, but I'm looking at picking up an Asus Eee 900 in the near future, so I'd want it to hold that, too. Being large enough for the occasional Pokemon strategy guide or D&D book is a plus. So...advice on a brand or a site to shop? It struck me as funny last year when the news started talking about how high gas prices would have to go before people changed their behavior. I changed my behavior dramatically when it started hovering over $1.50. When I first moved here I used to drive all over looking for toys, doing a sweep of the east side one night and the west side the next, alternating every night until new toys were found, starting up again a couple weeks later when something else was out. Now I settle for waiting for my nearest Target to get new things in, or occasionally visiting a Wal-Mart near work or when errands take me that way. At $4 a gallon (and more for the high-octane gas my car requires) Andrew and I have started driving to work together. The time shift is more inconvenient than the distance: It's a more-or-less straight shot down Bethel and then Hayden Run from MicroCenter to Nationwide's Tuttle building, but our shifts are an hour off so I'm up an hour early and he has to hang around an hour late. Still, it'll save us $30-40 a week, and even though we can technically afford it, we shouldn't have to. It'll only get worse the more people put up with it. We're alternating cars so they still both get driven on a regular basis, but two half-tanks is still half as much as two full ones. I may have mentioned getting invited to a D&D group by a coworker a few months back. We decided to convert our characters over to 4th Edition as soon as it came out, just rerolling them at approximately the same level and continuing on an adapted version of our campaign, but after we finished the campaign most of us decided we wanted to play completely different characters. That's just background, really. Once I get stuck on a good character concept I find myself drawn to reusing it a bit, not word-for-word but in a general sense. The sort of thing that's called a "literary theme" when real writers do it. I'm ditching the half-elf ranger I started with, whose character was never fully formed and whose name I took from my default WoW elf name, and trying a tiefling cleric. Much like with WoW, I find myself way more excited about playing now that I have a really solid character concept. She was born to a human mother and left on the doorstep of an orphanage, raised by human clerics who taught her that any redemption would be hard-won because she is at her core a tainted thing, but who still give her a chance at that redemption. I'm rolling her as a battle cleric, because despite being raised among humans she still has her people's dark tendancies; she's short-tempered and violent. And I realize she's got more than a little in common with my WoW character Meg, who tries to be a hero despite being a zombie. I suppose that's the literary theme I'm into exploring at the moment: Monsters trying hard to be good, without ignoring as a writer that they are monsters. For once I don't think this even reflects on anything I'm feeling about myself; It's just an interesting place to go. The tiefling's name is Penance, which I wanted to use (or at least use a variation of) for Meg's likely-possible fall back to the Scourge and being a Death Knight. Also because I am a 90s Marvel comics dork. I don't want to be mad at Larry Hama, but he messed her up so bad. I bought a used PSP for Disgaea, which I'm sure I also mentioned at some point, but I've found myself more often playing Jeanne D'Arc. I need to write a whole post on this game sometime. About the dubious historical accuracy of furries. Wall-E comes out this weekend! OMG. My car decided to remind me this morning that, while I tend to treat it like it's invincible, it's only nigh invulnerable. Yesterday evening while I was driving home Columbus was hit by what could only be described as a torrential downpour. One of the local stations has some pretty good pictures of it on their site. We weren't flooded as bad as I know a lot of places have been this week, but I ended up having to drive through deep enough water that only the momentum of 3,000 lbs of steel got me through. I could feel in spots, less than a mile from home, the car being slowly significantly by the water, and in some cases visibility became almost nonexistant just from the plumes sent up by passing cars (and buses!) in the other lane. When I was out of the worst of it the brakes squealed from being wet, but I made it home in one piece. This morning I started it up and half the damn warning lights came on. It's okay, actually; as soon as I backed out and put it in drive they all disappeared, apart from the pesky one pointing out that one of my headlights went out on Monday. Presumably the sensors were still wet, and actually using the brakes let the car know that they were, in fact, functional. There's just nothing quite as fun as getting into your car in the morning and seeing a big red BRAKE FAILURE light. If you did not see my last post saying that you are already on my WoW filter but you would like to be, reply to this and I'll add you. I like Barack Obama. As a 90s DC teen who cast her first vote, a month after her 18th birthday, for a second term for Bill Clinton, I might seem like a shoo-in for Hillary. But she kind of soured for me a few years ago when she started taking the sort of knee-jerk censorship stance on video games that I tend to equate with politicians who are trying to seem Good For Families without any real knowledge of or interest in the reference material. It's not that I'm against her simply because of her stand on video games, but it's a good litmus test for a politician's willingness to engage in knee-jerk pandering on issues they don't know anything about. Not that it's just that. Obama has shown a knowledge of modern issues that Hillary just hasn't. His web site is under a Creative Commons license, and he's requested the presidential debates be, too. Does Hillary know what a Creative Commons license is? Maybe it's not reasonable to expect that kind of savvy from our politicians, but it's ideal. And that's enough of that. Andrew and I went to see mc chris on Monday night. We declared that we're going to see lots of live shows now that we have someone to see them with, and we totally are. Andrew's the big fan, but I've been liking the new CD he's been playing. It was a great show, I bought the opening act's (The Age of Rockets) CD, and I just generally partied a little harder than I'm used to. I'm so very old. Jonathan Coulton is in town this Friday! And Andrew has declared that later in the month we are seeing Mindles Self Indulgence. Watch as I attempt to have some sort of life! My car is actually behaving pretty well, thanks for asking. It has this tendancy to run a little too hot every so often and I have to run the heater to cool it down, but that's actually kind of awesome because it makes me think of Battletech. All my WoW stuff has been going on the ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small} wow_ladies community, so you are spared. I will just say for the amusement of my #wiigii! friends that my warrior has an RP armor set I call her "Batman armor" and she's about to get a trinket called "Darkmoon Card: Vengeance". Because she's Batman.
For those keeping score... Just got a call from the mechanic, he found a broken cable from the accelerator to the transmission that he suspects to be the culprit, which will be around $400-450 to replace because the transmission has to be taken off to reattach it. He's "cautiously optimistic" due to the age of the car, but while I'm sure it'll need a transmission rebuild someday, the way it was acting before this started makes me hopeful that I can put it off a little longer. If I get it back from them driving as well as it did 6 months ago I'll be thrilled to death. I fully intended to make a final BotCon post when I got home, including my last handful of pictures of Animated Swoop and Sentinel Prime and all that, and then I never actually did. Maybe I'll grab the pictures off my camera when I get home. In a lot of ways I enjoyed this BotCon more than I have in a while. There was a lot of really awesome news, both from panels I attended and stuff I heard second-hand from Friday. Animated is showing signs of being every bit as awesome as if not even more awesome than hoped. I spent most of the weekend hopped up on news that was more exciting than I had heard in ages, between new Animated character designs and new toys. I had a reasonable bit of money to spend, and even found a few good things to spend it on, though I went with quality over quantity. I got to be in the MSTF! Simon was there! Retail toy-hunting happened! And I felt like I could be myself for the first time since at least when I got involved with 3H, and I came away assured that I wouldn't actually be shunned as a frothing Raksha-like bitch for it. Not to say I didn't still have problems with the way Savage is running things, but they didn't ruin the convention for me. He only got $20 of my money, and I bought Jazz from Chip, so even that worked out. On Friday while waiting in line at Potbelly in Cincinnati I got a call saying Andrew and I (well, really I, since they wouldn't even look at him without having a job yet) had been approved for the apartment we wanted and could move in on the 2nd. Having that particular concern cleared up helped a lot. We're pretty much moved into the new place now, though we still need some more furniture. We've got the computers set up, but haven't gotten to much more than setting up the TV itself in the living room. We need a counch eventually, but that takes me to my next paragraph... I'm taking my car back to the mechanic tomorrow. It's payday, and I just got my government bribe money, so I can shell out for just about anything it might need short of a transmission rebuild. Hopefully it doesn't actually need a transmission rebuild. It's pushing 200,000 miles, but my last 240 was easily over 300,000 miles before the transmission needed major work, so I'm hoping I'll be able to go over 40 without it sounding like it's gonna have a heart attack soon. Andrew's willing to help, but I'll feel more comfortable about that once he has a job here. Maybe if I'm lucky we'll still have enough left afterward for that couch. I usually don't do memes, but this one is nice and short. Via sirsan.1. my username is________ because ________. autobottrixter, because Trixter has been my handle since way, way, way back in the fanzine days, when Transformers fans usually took an avatar character name for a handle. And "Autobot" at the beginning because just vanilla "Trixter" was taken, said avatar character is in fact and Autobot, and it's something Hasbro likes to use on toy packaging when they can't get a proper trademark on a name lately, like Autobot Jazz or Autobot Ratchet.2. my name is ________ because _______. Jennifer, because my mother, being named Ruth, was emphatic that her children not be named after some elderly relative and find themselves never having the same name as anybody but the lunchladies. She swears she didn't think it was so irritatingly popular in 1978. I blame my insistence on working in a male-dominated field on it. Nobody else at my tech support desk is named Jennifer. 3. my journal is titled ______ because __________. "Trixter's Ramblings", because I tend to write very stream-of-consciousness. 4. my friends page is called ______ because ___________. "Trixter's Friends", which is much more boring than my WoW character ladymeridith's, which, being a collection of in-character journals from the Thorium Brotherhood server, is called "TB Dramaz".5. my default userpic is _______ because _________. Gaz from Invader Zim, specifically playing a game, because I'm a portable gaming geek and also cranky. It would probably be an understatement to say that her tendandy to deter social interaction by burying her face in her Game Slave - also scowling at people - resonated with me.  Since I have 46 pictures to go along with this post, I went ahead and set up an album for them. Having been abandoned by all the people cool enough to prereg, Andrew, Scott, and I decided to scout Cincinnati for Animated toys. After scouring several Toys R Uses, KMarts, and Wal-Marts, we have...well, I'll just say anyone who wants a Bulkhead sure is set! Hey, I like Bulkhead. (I got a two-pack.) ( Two pics of Animated in stores and something else we found after the cut! ) |
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