"If you look for him, he will be ready to touch your star." - Fortune cookie I ended up NOT eating. Although I'm now on my new server and I have all these cool CGI options in front of me, I'm stickin' with good old Blogger. It's just too nifty. (Unless someone can find a way to link my comments button to my new message board, using Blogger or not...) What have I been doing this summer? Lots of things. Let's see if I can remember them all... Mainly, there's my summer internship at PlanetLink. It's a nice little company and I'm having fun working, but it's completely not what I expected. First of all, it's unpaid. I had expected to get big money this summer for a new computer, and to save up some dough for college. I was originally going to sign up to become a camp counselor. I had been a counselor-in-training for the past two years, and since I'm now 16, the time has finally come when I can get paid. My mom said, why not do something you aim to do for a living? So I almost immediately ditched the counselor idea, and went to my career center to look at internship possiblities. Terra Linda's School-to-Career (STC) liason showed me a list of internships. Only one dealt with computers - it was an Autodesk internship, where I would be redesigning their "Point A" website and getting paid $10/hour. (Autodesk is the biggest company in Marin, besides Lucasfilm, probably.) I was a bit too late to get all the applications done to complete my resume, so I let that one slide. My STC liason said that there would be many more internships coming in over the summer. Glee! Not so glee. What I didn't know was that that Autodesk internship didn't really have much to do with the school. I wouldn't have to check into STC much to say how it's going. It'd be pretty much like a real job. I'd get a big ol' paycheck. How do I know this? One of my good friends snagged the job instead. I was left with the new internship opportunities. It must have been written in the disclaimer somewhere, in very tiny letters, that I'd have to go to a freaking class in addition to my internship. And it must also have said that I have no chance of getting into Autodesk with the class I'd be taking. Let me explain: STC hooks kids up with up with internships all the time, but they also offer classes to go along with many of them. These classes are run by either Marin County Office of Education's Regional Occupational Program (ROP), or by the College of Marin (COM). I chose the ROP one, because it didn't seem like as much class time, and that there were many more internship opportunities. I shouldn't have picked EITHER. These classes are aimed toward poor kids not aiming toward college, with lessons on sitting up straight, opening one's eyes when they are talked to, and how to ALWAYS have one's fork on the left and knife on the right. That's why there were no Autodesk internships. No one loser enough to take the class would be at all qualified for it. So before the class started and when I was presented with my job openings, I was just a little suspicious that there was no Autodesk calling my name. Instead, there were not-very-close-by jobs that offered no pay, except for one, which was PlanetLink, which stated, "unpaid or paid depending on experience." Well, hell! I was experienced! I was being paid 40 freakin' dollars per hour the year before to work on a Flash animation! Of course I'd be able to rack in some serious dough designing websites and fixing computers. Nope. Not a cent since I've started. I should have paid a little bit closer attention to the interview, as my employer/supervisor/boss/president/CEO/ONLY PERSON IN THE FRIGGIN' "COMPANY", Steve, told me that it'd be "unpaid to start out with," but I'd be "paid a fixed amount once a new client comes in." Well you can guess that Steve hasn't always been the only person at the company. It's a dot-com startup. He's had hard times and has had to let a lot of employees go. This is because he probably hasn't gotten any new clients in a very long time. So summing it all up, no new clients = no money for Jeffrey. No new clients. Keep in mind that I haven't been blogging much because I don't have much to complain about. That means that even though I'm not being paid, what I'm doing is fun. I've designed a few websites for some "old" clients, and I've set up some Macs to run on his big ol' server. There's another intern here as well, Dan, and since he's more experienced with hardware than software (and me vice-versa), we're both learning new things. The class I have to attend? Boring as hell. I'm not learning anything. It's a waste of my time. Now that I actually have something I want to buy, I feel like I've been completely wasting my summer, and I can't get out of this bind or else I'll fail the class and get a bad recommendation. And that's all I'll really get out of this... a recommendation. As I said before, I want to buy a computer of my own, to which no one else can restrict my access or modify. I'm aiming for a price of about $1000; that means that it should be state-of-the-art or up to 6 months old. All my internet buddies are shouting out "build your own!" but I'm not very sure about that. For one thing, there are bound to be hardware conflicts, there will be no warranty, and no software included. That's why I'm aiming to get another Dell. (And it's also been said that I look a bit like the Dell guy. :P) No one's really convinced me that there are any better reasons to build my own, besides "YUO CAN PUTT IN TEH ASUSS P4S333-VM MOMBORED!!!!!~~~" which I really don't care about. (Addendum: Oooohohohoo, fellow intern Dan has introduced me to Price Watch. Although the sellers seem a little shady, they look like better deals than what I have been seeing recently.) I never said I wasn't getting any money this summer, though. My mom is starting up a little side-business, called Professional Matchmaking. She's getting me to install all the forms, tweak the design, and scold her about how much she should NOT have bought any package from Catalog.com. And I'm up to about $400 toward my new computer. I guess I'm on the right track, besides the fact that I'm saving up my money on PayPal. I have no idea why, but at least they're now owned by eBay and my money is somewhere in an FDIC-insured bank, so I'll probably be able to get all of it back in one piece when it comes time to buy. And last weekend! My friend Omid's 17th birthday party. It was fun, and not as structured as in previous years. Like, last year we went to the Metreon to eat, play DDR and watch movies. This year, we went to Chili's, I brought DDR over to his house and we just went to the mall for a movie. I also got to play Halo, GTA3, and Max Payne for the first time. They're great, great games, but I'm sorta glad I didn't buy them... they're not really my types of games. Shooty shooty bang bang. We saw Reign of Teh Fire really late at night. James and I tried to count as many clichés as we could during the film. We knew it was a bad movie before we started, but I personally didn't know what to expect. I'm not a big American media freak, so I don't watch TV or go to the movies often. James stated in his review that it was completely awful and ruined his summer streak of good movies, while I didn't really know what to think. It definitely wasn't as entertaining as Minority Report or Star Wars II, and I couldn't help but laugh out loud at Matthew McConaughey's character, who was more of a clichéd American than Duke Nukem, but it had a somewhat decent setting, as a post-apocalyptic Earth ruled by dragons. The shots of the dragons kicked ass, by the way... nice visual effects. I'm spending WAY too much time in #rpgcomics as the newest op. I have to leave it open in the background all day to calculate stats, but that means that it's a distraction when I sit down and use the computer. I've gotten barely any work done on my MIDIs, and I hope that my one paid requester isn't shooting himself thinking that he's been ripped off. I AM working on "Brian Wilson," however slowly. I have done a few other cute things, though, like that test, and my new buddy icon (that's a Matrix reference, not Viagra). Also, I have a confession to make. I, Jeffrey Faden, am a VOICE ACTOR. I've been VAing for a few months, and my voice has been featured in a few projects. The biggest one is The Echo Chronicles, which seems to be an anime show. I play a villain, Bass. Voice acting for me is strictly a side-activity, and it's only about once or twice a week that I check the Flava Board for new audition openings. It's not really my style because of all the Japanese influence (most of the projects are fandubs), but I do it because I just like acting with my voice. Maybe if I ever garner enough creativity to write (and finish) a story, I'll turn it into a voice show. And it'll have as little to do with anime as possible. As a sharp contrast to being an amateur anime voice actor, I'm also working out a lot at Gold's Gym. I've got a personal trainer, an ex-soccer player from Brazil (!) named Marcos. He's a really great guy. Not only have I been able to lift twice as much since I started about a month ago, but he's also been teaching me Capoeira, a Brazilian martial art that Eddy Gordo uses in Tekken 3, and also encourages playing DDR as much as possible (good cardio exercise). He's definitely worth it, and I'm beginning to grow out of my old shirts (finally a reason to get a new wardrobe). Speaking about DDR, I actually beat James at a dance recently. That probably means I'm getting better at it. Finally, my parents are requiring that I read for an hour a day, or else they shut off my internet for the night, or something like that. Although it's summer, I have a lot of preparing to do for next year. I'll be taking the SAT IIs in French, Writing/Literature, and Math. And then come the college applications. So I have SAT books to read and the like. I think it's a fair deal, although most people at #rpgcomics disagree with me. That's because they're all SLACKERS, you hear? GET LIVES, ALL OF YOU!! Or else I'll keep believing that you're all imaginary people.

http://www.jeffreyatw.com/cgi-bin/ikonboard.cgi Post 'till the cows come home.

WEOW!!! YOU MUST TAKE MY NEW TEST AND PUT IT IN YOUR SIGNATURE IN MESSAGE BOARDS!!!

I redesigned my #rpgcomics site with an even more ambitious layout. Before, it was a side-scrolling pop-up, and now it almost perfectly emulates the program mIRC. So check it out. I found out the one thing that makes me angry above all others. It's being ignored because I'm not superior. That's rather broad, but then again it's not the only thing that everyone gets mad about, and this, as far as I know, is the only thing that gets ME mad. I despise being laughed at. I don't like to be ignored. And most of all, I don't like being called a 16-year-old in context. I have such a 16-year-old mind. I'm only 16, I don't know what I'm talking about. That is pure CRAP. I guess the term would be ageism (but I don't like using that term since it's often used by pedophilia-supporters). It's where people are segregated because of their age. Ageism is all right in some ways, like limiting the driving/sexing/drinking age, but in freedom of speech, it's just terrible. When kids speak out with their opinions, they're always put in the "kids" category. We can't have our voices heard without an age attached to us. The smaller the number, the cuter we are. That's one reason I like chatrooms nowadays, because no one's dumb enough to ask "a/s/l" anymore. We just talk, no matter what the topic is. We don't say that we're so many years old in every sentence. Of course, it even goes farther than that. We don't show our gender if we don't want. We don't show our nationality. (#rpgcomics has many members who are male, female, older, younger, and in different locations than I thought for a long while). It's too bad that I still have to deal with the real world. God, now THAT just sounded scary.

I'M OFF TRIPOD. FINALLY. I was introduced by a certain "RD" to a service called Freeboost, which offers an insanely good deal of 500 MB, 50 gig/month, and 50 email accounts, all for $50/year. Not to mention their ultra-fast and secure connection, and the various languages they offer. And $8.50/year for domain hosting. And instant PayPal charge. And on and on. It's just an amazing service. So goodbye to NameZero and goodbye to Tripod. With all this space I could start something that would rival The AVC, heheehaheha. All the main pages, though, have been changed from ".html" to ".shtml". So I'll just set up a neat dealy to forward you to the correct page in case you've bookmarked them. Hee hee, I'm stoked. Oh and it's 12:05 as I write this, so HAPPY AMERICA DAY!!! America's my favorite country because I never visited Canada.

My webcam is broken. Star Wars II was good.

The following blog, like many others of mine, deserves a disclaimer. My opinions can get so radical sometimes that the average person would just blow it off as stupid drivel. Although it could very well be that, my opinions are original and they are OPINIONS, so there's no sense in proving them wrong. I was talking to my friend Hannah today, and we got to the topic of love and hate. Hannah says that "love makes you feel not so infinitely small," and I agree with her. But the thing is, I can't confirm that from first-hand experience. Of course I care for my friends and family. I care so very much. But is that really love? Is that really devoting one's life to another? Do I, or have I, really ever felt love? This can also go the opposite way. I don't think I've ever felt hate for anything - hate being an emotion so strong that I'd devote my life to the destruction of another. Fortunately, hate isn't a very widely felt emotion these days. What is it I feel instead? I think the proper term is "care." That's about in the middle of hate and love. In both hate in love, you care about what you're doing to the other person. Yes, you care, in a way, even about the person you hate. If you just brushed them off and completely ignored them, you wouldn't really hate them. I can most easily express a lot of my feelings, or lack of them, with a common example: the attacks of September 11 of last year. What did I feel when I first saw the attacks? Not sadness, not happiness. Not hate, not love. Not even caring. All I really felt was excitement from all the following hype. (Just so you don't kill me over lack of sympathy: another online friend of mine was practically rejected from his drama class because he stated that he "would have done the same thing if he was in bin Laden's shoes".) My drama class definitely wanted to act because of 9/11, though. They believed the administration gave almost no notice to the attacks. So they put on a Memorial Project, where they would share their feelings and thoughts about 9/11 and make a play, or a series of skits, about it. Both presentations (there are two drama classes) turned out beautifully. But before we even started in on talking about the attacks, we went around the room, asking if everyone was comfortable with the project. Everyone said they were, except for me. Why did I decline to do the project? Well, I seemed to be the only one who showed a lack of emotion. I couldn't really put my thoughts and feelings in, because I didn't think much about it. My view on human nature had been so simplified to a point that it almost seemed natural. The religious extremism, the loss of life, the outpour of patriotism, the following war... human nature. I wasn't surprised, happy, sad, angry, hateful, or loving one bit. I decided to keep my mouth shut (although I didn't have much to say) and make the backdrop for the project, which ended up measuring 16'x8'. People appreciated my effort and were moved by the imagery, but all it was was another art project to me. Another MIDI, another comic. I cared about it just as much, and just as little. So that's my weird state of emotions. What persuaded me to write all this? No emotion, that's for sure. I just feel pensive, that's all. Hope you understand what I mean.

So everyone was over today. I threw a party and every local internet person I know came. And 80's and Jeff and Lauryne too. We started off by watching "Kentucky Fried Movie." It was like SNL, only it had lots of boobies and wasn't as funny, and it made everyone uncomfortable. It had a pretty good Kung Fu movie parody, though, probably better executed than Kung Pow!, but then again I've never seen that movie. Afterwards, we watched the AMAZING VIDEO OFFER~! that James compiled, and that was funnier. Then it was time for burgers and garlic bread and ham+swiss roll thingies oh my. And then we played muchos DDRz0rs. I sort of forgot that Mikosi could play DDR so well, and Bryan beats me at everything. So we all did well. And everyone there played at least one game even if they didn't know how, so I applaud everyone. *clap* *clap* *clap* *clap* *clap* *clap* *clap* *clap* James also gave me that CD-R of every DDR song known to man for Dance With Intensity. Whoooo now I get to try ultra-hard 7th Mix songs. So overall it was a blast and if you weren't there then your only excuse is that you live across the country but I said that every local internet person was there so everyone has and excuse.

I'm too busy with my free time activities. :P So there's a PARTY AT MARK'S JEFFREY'S HOUSE on Saturday. And everyone's invited. Should be fun. We'll watch a "movie" and then play some DDR. And there will be BEEF! And Paul is coming. I finished a MIDI of I Love You by Faith Evans. Ugggh. How dare Brian request that song just to show how gay he is. And my job? Good. Pretty generic, but I'm having fun. And now time for DDR and MIDIs!

"OMG NO LTRBOMBZ OR 231 X ATW SEX0R THX BYE" - Almasy Marquis So we got our first out-of-state payment from Almasy. I told him I didn't get it and he needs to send it again... when just then I noticed a letter waiting for me upstairs. So yeah, I hope he gets the message before we get two checks from him. James would probably cash the second one as well, that CAPITALIST. Heeheh, I made it sound like I was really mad at James today. We're not on speaking terms! So my internship starts tomorrow. I wonder what I'll be doing. Even more importantly, I wonder if my employer will remember that he's hired interns. It feels like a really laid-back position. But just as long as I get to sit down and design websites all day, I'll be fine. And now for random stuff... I beat FFX and FFIX for fun today. FFX is easy, while FFIX is comparably NOT. And the graphics are somewhat overdone on FFIX. I mean, while Flare in FFX is just a little flame spouting out, Flare in FFIX is A BIG MONSTER RED EXPLOSION KABLOOEY DEAD OUCH. My arms are hurting less today. They will hurt more tomorrow when I get back to my personal trainer. He used to play soccer for Brazil, so he's rather strong, and damn, he gets me in positions that Brian wouldn't even dream of. <Sketchee> Oh I have, Jeffy, I have. And I leave you with this parting word: BUY JOLT COLA ENERGY RUSH SORBITOL MINTS NOW.

For those of you in Central Time Zone, Happy Father's Day. I got my dad a headset for his cellphone, and a fake report card, saying I got all A's, and on the back it says I got an A in "Manipulation of Report Cards." Har har har. And I finally submitted and got one of those spiffy LED lights... and God DAMN are they bright. And it says they last 110,000 hours or something. Weird shit. Speaking about shit, there was that South Park episode where they said "shit" 162 times. Fun stuff. And I'm throwing a party next weekend, probably on Sunday. I'm telling everyone to bring their DDR pads, yay. I can't really type anything massive because I can't stop thinking about my arms, which are in tremendous pain right now. I started working out with a personal trainer yesterday, and his upper body workout is a killer. No pain no gain. But OUCH.

School's out. ... SCHOOL'S OUT YAY W00T WHEE HAPPY ROFL PANTS WOW JOY CELEBRATE DIRGE YGGDRASIL I have never been so happy about summer vacation. I have so much spum to do this summer, and now that school's out, I'll actually have all the time to do it. First of all, I get my internet priveleges back, finally. Hello World! I can start back up on my MIDIs. I've officially stopped accepting free MIDI requests until I get all the other ones done. It's mainly to get the pressure off my back of having 14 people waiting on me. But I'm still taking paid requests, so that's k3wl. My internship starts next week. W00! I hope they give me some fun work. I wonder what exactly I'll be doing with their websites. And I can now play video games again! That means DDR all summer long. And maybe I'll get Gitaroo-Man or something... music games are funfun. Well, now it's off to my dad's house, where my sister has probably been playing DDR all day (she got out of school yesterday). My Chemistry final? Well here's another analogy: GAME OVER. But at least it's at the end of the game and all my friends let me see the ending. And I leave you with a sad thought: my class of 2003 is the first class to become seniors after 9/11. *cry* *cry*

Studying for Chemistry. Best way to describe it is like leveling up for a final battle. Furthermore, there's a song from DDR Konamix that's also in Zone of the Enders! While I never thought of DDR having/sharing music from/with ZoE, it seems painfully obvious once I notice they're both by Konami. :P I'll find out the name of the song tomorrow, when I can legally (according to my parents) play the thing... because school will be out.

Wow. When I jump and land at full force, I create an instantaneous blow of about 500 pounds. Check today's webcam for more details.

Feeling: jealous Listening to: My new Winamp Top 50 list Boy, am I jealous. Of just about everyone. I often feel this way, but I'm usually just too proud to express it. I know I have a lot to be thankful for and lots of things that people would envy me about, but all of it's material. First of all, I'm jealous, and have always been jealous, of Ian. He runs, what, three webcomics simultaneously, and is the greatest internet teen success story I've ever heard of. I still get to talk to him since I'm big in #rpgcomics, but he's just so... famous. I wonder if he really appreciates and *wants* all the fame he's getting. Hu... Then there's everybody at Safety Monkey's cam portal. They're all in their twenties, they drink a lot of vodka, and have established positions on the net, blah blah, but I want on. I have a webcam. And a SNAPPY webcam. Yessirree. And Bob. He's always been a better writer, has always been able to keep up his little quirks (has been wearing a black hat forEVAR), and always seems to have a much more interesting life, according to his Livejournal. At least he has many more female friends than I. Or friends in general. Speaking about that, there's Steve and his new condescending, Max Payne worshipping, Slashdot-readin' posse. I'm always in the wrong place when he and Felix and Billy and Simeon and lots of other names you don't care about stay up all night having an all-out ORGY, as far as I know. Am I jealous and do I want sex? Heck, everybody does. But I don't really plan to have sex as a teenager, and I'd rather have sex with someone I've actually KNOWN for more than one night. They could just be bragging sons of bitches being immature and whatnot, but I doubt it. I mean, virginity fades away from more rambunctious at my age... and that's that. Furthermore, they all love their PC games. I don't own ANY PC games. I'm on a budget for one thing, and I don't really want to go around shooting polygons with my polygons. Everyone I've mentioned is nice and all, but it may be just too much to reach out to them. I'd have to change myself into something I'm not to be recognized. I guess I don't want that... all it would do is boost my ego and make me elitist. it's probably just better to keep on doing what I'm doing, making MIDIs, and relating on a better level to people like James. I'm still jealous of all those bastards, though. EDIT: And Indogutsu, DAMMIT! Although his self-esteem's too low to admit he has superior composing skills.

Boy, am I excited. Although it may not seem so by my writing because I'm not overusing exclamation points, nor am I writing everything in capital letters, but I'm typing this on a laptop, which I'm currently swinging over my head while jumping on my bed, listening to Britney Spears. You get the drift. I'm excited, okay? It's because I've finally been set up for an interview with a company for an internship through the Marin County Office of Education's Regional Occupational Program, and it's the company of my choice. It's called PlanetLink, a company in neighboring Novato which offers website design and hosting. While the design for their own site is nothing to brag about, examples of their clients' sites are pretty sweet. It looks like I'll fit right in... just as long as I don't stutter during my interview. I've heightened James's self-esteem so much in the last year that I've forgotten about myself, and I've transferred the stutter from him to me. Hence, certain morons in some of my classes at school like to make a scene by banging their heads on their desks, while I'm trying to let something out in words that I could just easily type up here. Eh, but I'm going off-topic. If the interview works out, that's what I'll be doing over the summer - getting job experience. I'll be able to see how my skills compare with actual paid workers. And in my free time (which I'll actually have), I'll be getting to those MIDIs, teaching Tiya piano, and exercising (mainly through DDR). And all this is just around the corner... right after I bomb finals, screwing up my junior year so I don't get accepted to any colleges. Fun times. And NOW for the latest news about the Voice of Troy. Seems that idea about publicly posting my original blog about the Voice of Troy has been overblown among the Journalism class. My mix of insults and constructive criticism has been narrowed down to just insults, and although freelance work is supposedly accepted, they've almost pushed me to the point of joining the class to get any serious response from them. Just for the record, I am not joining. Joining on the basis of revolutionizing the newspaper could result in failure of my goals, and then I'll just be contributing to what I've been trying to stop. And I'll announce it loud and clear for everyone to hear (right, like everyone at school reads my website for fun): I was WRONG in my article. I said that the Voice of Troy has been online for ONE year. I meant that I haven't been reading the online oxymoron for TWO years. Now that I've corrected my mistake, I guess I'll go along with my plans to create an alternate and better-known school news-PAPER.

GOD BLESS AMERICA! Now everyone MUST agree with my ramblings, or else they'd be unpatriotic (or not American).

Well, my little opinion (2 blogs down) is being considered by the current members of the Voice of Troy, and I've decided to take Journalism next year to help out with my goals. Yay. But right now, I bring you a quick little book I put together this morning. I'll put little captions under each image if they're unreadable. (It's a double entendre. You'll get it in a second.) "There once was a boy." (Get it? Pop-up book? Pop-up ads?) "He discovered the wonder of the internet." "He surfed it all day and all night." "One day, he came upon amazing free services." "The free services went down the tube." "The boy started succumbing to pop-up ads." "He became the internet's bitch!" AND THAT BOY... IS MEEEEE!!! BOOOOO!!!

For Tenbuki With Love. I never knew I could have so much fun (and ENCHILADAS!) feeling the homeless! And feeding them was good, too. This minister of the, uh, soup kitchen (who reminds me of Voldemort from the Harry Potter movie which I saw yesterday and by god is this a long parenthesis) welcomed me and sent me off to the head cook, who told me to make sandwiches for 3 hours, then to peel potatoes, de-vine-fy grapes, and cut out all of the rotten parts of old cantaloupes for re-use. Although it sounds like slavery, it was rather fun, and I'd rather get credit by doing community service with foodthtuffuth then getting credit by doing endless math assignments. So when a giant bell was rattled back and forth and it was time to SLOP THE HOGS!, I-- Insert break here meant for you to forget the atrocities committed in the previous incomplete sentence, and to move on while retaining sanity Homeless people are really nice. I exchanged smiles with most every one of them, and even though many of them had probably been here every day for a while, they showed gratitude to us volunteers. So I served dessert (pies, cakes galore) for a few hours. Mr. nice minister man gave me 8 hours of community service. Hooray! Then I drove around looking for James and ended up playing some DDR alone. And I went home and ate pizza. And then... nothing much. And... DAMMIT I'VE LOST THE ABILITY TO BLOG COHERENTLY

(Note: I plan to publicize the latest blog at my school, so please don't mind if it sounds more professional than my usual drivel.) In the past year at Terra Linda, my school's newspaper, the Voice of Troy, has made the jump from printed to online. All of the stories written in Journalism class have been placed on the school's website for the whole world to see. The mistake Journalism made? They nixed the offline version. Biggest mistake in the paper's history. Because the stories and reports are now open to the whole world, not only has this change made them vaguer, but it has erased virtually all opinion from them altogether. In fact, the Opinion section is gone, and has been replaced by restaurant reviews, and touchy-feely stories on basic high school social concepts (like "senioritis"). Also, barely anyone reads the paper anymore since it's not shoved in their faces, giving the writers and editors more freedom to do less, since no one cares anymore. The Voice of Troy has become one of the most trivial and bland parts of TL's student creations. It wasn't always this way. This realization that the Voice of Troy ultimately sucks was spawned when my U.S. History class came across old issues of the Voice from the 1970's. We were amazed! In fact, even though none of the information had any significance to us, we all thoroughly enjoyed the papers. Why? Because there was charisma, there was style, there was opinion, and there was motivation. The articles covered everything from the nicknames of the JV soccer team members to poking fun at dehydration problems facing the school. There was at least one opinion page in each issue (published 8 times a year), and a comic to go along with it... a really good comic that stole no punch lines from other comic strips or lame jokes, like I've seen in more recent student comics. Maybe this was because of the revolutionary attitude of the 1970's, or maybe it was because the internet wasn't around to sap the creativity from all of our writers. Now I wouldn't just put this opinion out without some course of action, or a least a suggestion, seeing that I haven't signed up for Journalism next year. Revamp the entire Voice of Troy. Start over, if needed. Adopt a new philosophy of localization, which will make the articles more interesting to read since they touch on things that directly affect us, the students. (The most recent Voice of Troy has an article about Lisa Lopez's death. How about an article about the Dixie/San Rafael District unification issue?) Get more students to help out. Accept freelance work. Take photos. Have interviews. And most importantly of all, PUBLISH the damn thing. And I know in this day and age, publishing funds may be hard to come across... well, accept advertisements from local companies like the Voice always did. The ads actually worked, while making the publication look even more professional. Being a webmaster who prefers to type up everything and publicize as much stuff on the internet as possible, I am not saying the Voice of Troy should scrap its online version, but if the printed version completely changes its look and feel, the online version should act accordingly. Does this sound like too much work? Well, I know of dozens of people who would be willing to help out with publishing to paper/web, as well as many other things I've already suggested. Maybe TL can show how it feels by doing something other than electing "Candidate #1" over "Candidate #2" for Student Official Who Has No Effect on What Administration Does. To support my point, I'll give an example of an article which definitely wouldn't be published in this sort of Voice of Troy we have now. Anyone heard about John Wang being disqualified from senior class elections for having risqué campaign advertisements? Probably not. If the Voice of Troy had one more issue to make this year, I'd be damn sure it wouldn't TOUCH the issue. The sheer mention of it would cause a stir in the administration and the student body, and let everyone know about something they may have cared about. In this NEW Voice of Troy I propose, that's the exact reaction I'd expect from the article. It'd be a perfect cover-page story. Would the administration hate it? Well, yeah, the administration always hated the Voice when it touched on "sensitive" issues like these. But hey, this is America, and we as its inhabitants are entitled to our Bill of Rights.

Boy, do I love Fark. And, uh, since I can't put a link inside a link, here's Fark. Over the weekend, James, my dad, and I went to Ye Olde Movie Theatre to see what James calls "Spider: Episode Man." I quoted him because you need to go to his site right now and because I can't think of a better parody title. I thought that it was the best comic character adaptation I had ever seen. Spiderman wasn't bent on bringing love and happiness and flowers to the world for no reason like Superman, and was a cooler representation of a black little skinny thing than Batman. It's probably because Stan Lee produced the movie that it had such a realistic feel to it, but kept the comic book attitude (the movie X-Men was also a good work of his). I thought the action scenes were amazing, mostly because there was a lot of emotion in each one. (Especially the one after Uncle Ben DIES. That's not a spolier, since you're supposed to know that from the comic... I did.) Of course, I was a bit disturbed with an explosion at a freaking NEW YORK LANDMARK, and I found it cheesy to have him grasp an American flag in the last scene. But eh, that's the movie industry. Also about movies, we finished Metropolis in my anime club, meaning that the club's over for the rest of the year. I'm getting a lot of support from members of the club, so I plan to continue it next year (even though I showed all the really good ones this year). And I've already got a list of animes... Princess Mononoke (which I'd promised not to show this year because of a dare), Spirited Away (by the same people), and Barefoot Gen (the most brutal anime I know of... and it's historical fiction). Hooray for anime!

I completed another MIDI this morning - Piano Bar from Cowboy Bebop requested by Hellfire104. I really enjoyed making it, especially with the help of my piano. Now it's off to China Camp Beach where my family and I will do things!

Random blog time! And today it's about my dad. Well, he's in an interesting position at work. I don't know if this is classified or not, but economically, Sun Microsystems is SUCKING. My dad, having worked at the company for 13 years, has had nothing to do for almost a year now. His project, Trusted Solaris, has been put on hold by the company, while in the meantime, governments from around the world want him to teach them how to use it. It's rather screwed up. But my dad's not depressed, he has more fun stuff to do with his time. First of all is his new Palm Pilot. It's a Samsung phone/palm hybrid, with a color screen and other assorted goodies. He's bought lots of shareware and spiffied it up to perfection. So I can often see him playing a rousing game of Vexed, or Bejeweled, or whatnot. But when he's on his BIG computer, he's having fun making a Java program for his friend, Dan Gilbert (whose site I helped design). Dan is the creator of Triazzle, a puzzle in the shape of a triangle, with triangular pieces. The object is to fit each piece, which has a half of an image on each side, in the correct spot at the correct angle. Maybe you should just visit his site to see exactly what I'm talking about. Well, Dan's been content with having just one solution for each of his puzzles, but recently, he's been wondering if there could be any puzzles with more than one. So he's asked my dad to create a Java program that would run in an infinite loop until it found a combination of 16 pieces that could be rearranged in more than one way. So far, the computer's been running for an hour, and it hasn't found anything. Wish it luck. Also, what I find the most touching: my dad's in love. Even though he's married and everything, he's been recently reunited over email with his first girlfriend, who he hasn't talked to for almost 30 years. I can barely imagine how amazing and emotional it is to talk to a loved one you haven't heard from in 30 years. It's rather touching. I heard that my dad cried, hee heh. But the best thing about it is that my stepmom doesn't care at all... she also feels that it's rather amazing... but the other woman's husband probably would have a fit. Unhappy marriage on her part, I guess. That's too bad. Well, back to "studying Chemistry!"

w00t There's a big generic "w00t" for all of you out there who are visiting from RPG World. I hope you like my guest comic. I guess it's made me a celebrity for a day. And it's actually well drawn (for my standards, that is). And yes, just to contrast with the completely reasonable clichés that Cherry is pointing out (a night town is from Seiken Densetsu 3 if nothing else), I've added in a stupid "chickens" punchline for everyone to laugh their asses off at. Yup. Damn, I have nothing to say. I guess babysitting sleeping kids for hours really makes everything else seem much more exciting than it actually is.

Okay, assheads. Here's the deal. We're making this completely insane offer that you would be rather lazy (and STUPID) to pass up. You get a tape of James, Steve, Felix and me running around Marin talking French for $3 (this includes shipping which probably costs more than that)... and when you're done with it, you get a free videocassette to record over. I mean HELL, taking off the shipping costs, this is a completely free tape, with completely free footage. Now why the hell WOULDN'T you want this? Tell me, please. I mean it, give me a comment with a coherent explanation. And I'm telling you, the footage is FUNNY. James is even probably going to include some MvC2 footage. So just click the little PayPal button and lay down 3 measly dollars along with your shipping address, and you'll recieve the tape. Just consider it a must-have for the even casual JeffreyAtW reader.

Really different kind of day today. The day started off with me titling the design of this site "OBEY," because it is reminiscent of the Obey Giant. My drama/choir teacher wasn't there, so for 2 periods we basically fooled around and accomplished nothing toward our final projects for the year. I got to play on my old crappy keyboard I brought to school. I actually turned in all of my required assignments for English, because my teacher wasn't sadistic and didn't add anything extra to the whiteboard at the last minute of class or anything. Then came the big turning point - 4th period. The entire junior class was excused that period to go over to the gym, where we listened to all the candidates rant about how they'd accomplish EVERYTHING if they got elected to some stupid position like "Treasurer" or something. Now the problem with this was the choice for Senior Class President - only one candidate. It wasn't always this way. Now John Wang, my former Pokemon-type rival (while Ash and Gary fought with Pokemon, I fought John's predisposition with Pokemon), had originally been running against Jena McRae, the other (winning) candidate. John is a genius when it comes to self-promotion. Garnering up the required self-esteem, John placed posters all around school, exclaiming "VOTE WANG," followed by a random capture from a Pokemon episode, and some subtle sexual innuendo (like "A Bonafide Leader" or "Ask Not What Wang Can Do For You, But What You Can Do For Wang"). It was genius, and soon he was hailed thoughout the school, and it was almost a unanimous decision throughout the school that he would win. This is where John decided to take it one step further. His next round of posters boasted "got Wang?" followed by a picture of him with a milk moustache, holding a Pikachu doll, and molesting random ferns placed throughout his house. He, along with some of his friends, even started wearing the famous Penny Arcade "got wang?" t-shirt. Seriously. Seeing this, Mrs. Bader, the advisor of the Associated Student Body (ASB), went nuts. She disqualified John from the elections, and ensured Jena the role of Senior Class President. Well, people complained, even taking things to the point of accusations of racism because of the simple appearance of John's last name in his advertising. A petition even went around (started by James), but to no avail. Come election day, today, not everyone knew about the circumstances behind John's getting pulled from the election. So when Jena finished her "victory" speech, a few kids got riled up and shouted "what about Wang?" Bader was probably ready for this, as she pulled the students from the gym and prevented them from voting. The period after the results were called, people walked out of their classrooms to find posters pasted throughout all of the halls, reading "MRS. BADER IS A FASCIST." Scary, huh? Well, come to think of it, the kid who put those posters up sounds right. Mrs. Bader disqualified an appropriate candidate, she deprived students of free speech AND the right to vote, and she discarded all Scantron ballots with "Wang" written in the margins. What a sorry state of affairs. I hope the message got to Mrs. Bader before the posters were torn down. Oh, and also, the vice president I had supported lost also. He lost fair and square, but his advertising campaign was also really good. I actually designed the posters and stickers for him. His name's Max Kuperman, so I just stuck his face on a bunch of pictures of Superman, and created a fancy title saying "SUPERMAN KUPERMAN!" ...And then I babysat kids and played Chrono Trigger with them for the whole evening. Fun fun fun!

As you've probably noticed, I also changed the type on the top of the page (although it's not really type anymore). I think it looks pretty cool - it's the usual way I type, along with the same words loosely sketched behind them for a rugged look. Tell me what you think.

5/22/02 - Everyone says that this kid Mark Lee looks like Garfield. By the way, I wasn't looking at any other drawings while making this, so it's sloppier than it could be.

Note: the following opinions are largely uneducated and reminiscent of Jim's rants from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Last week, America was sad. They were in a complete slump. So far, we haven't been successful in finding Osama bin Laden (awww, I'm shedding a tear), and the war on terrorism has been yielding widely unsuccessful results. Boo, hoo, hoo. This week, some MORON in the media feels like changing everyone's attitude and puts the blame on Bush, saying that he could have EASILY prevented the crap that happened last September. He knew EVERYTHING. He knew the NAMES of the people who would sabotage the planes, he knew the EXACT time and place, and he even knew the number of people who would die. (By the way, I'm kidding for God's sakes, but you get the idea.) All of a sudden, the media is filled with anti-American slush about "WHAT BUSH KNEW." And all of my "smarter" friends are starting to rant on about how the whole attack was a conspiracy and a coverup all of a sudden - like Bush wanted the attack to happen. This is completely STUPID. No elected official in a democratic government - let alone his administration which actually does all the thinking - would martyr 3,000 of their own people for no reason. And so now we're thrown into this state of mistrust of the government - a phase that should have passed by months and months ago. This is a perfect example on how the biased media can so easily move the public from patriotic to anarchist with just one week of press releases. One last note - it comes as no surprise to me at ALL that U.S. intelligence knew about these attacks. Threats are made all the time - they have been made before and after 9/11. And even though it may seem surprising that the government didn't take many precautions to prevent it, keep in mind that these threats were made BEFORE the actual attack happened, and the country went into such a state of high alert. Now of course AFTER the attack, a false threat towards bridges on the west coast is responded to by a flood of National Guard troops. Of COURSE there wasn't much effort made to stop the attack.

Rana'c cusa pek hafc - so sus kud y haf jarelma. Huf caaehk dryd so sus'c paah ihasbmuoat vun y vaf suhdrc, uha fuimt dno du lid pylg uh dra cbahtehk ihdem yhudran zup bucedeuh fyc calinat. Pid so sus ryc fyoc ynuiht dryd - zicd ica ran nadenasahd viht! Cu cra kuac yht pioc y keyhd DNILG. Ed'c y Heccyh nat dnilg fedr vuin caydc, yht po Kut, ec ed sycceja. Pid rana'c dra faentacd bynd - cra'c hud kuehk du camm ran umt lyn, y badeda Ruhty Lejel, du syga ib vun dra $40,000 cra'c zicd cbahd. Ehcdayt cra bmyhc du keja dra lyn du so cecdan eh vuin oaync frah cra'c umt ahuikr du tneja. Famm yeh'd dryd tyhto? Vundihydamo, tacbeda ryjehk hu zup, cra kadc y cdayto ehlusa vnus so tyt, fru kejac ran $2000 lremt cibbund ajano suhdr ajah druikr E tuh'd meja drana yhosuna. Cra'c icehk dra suhao du byo uvv ran sundkyka. Kaaw.

Yeah, so I downloaded Episode 2 this weekend - it's been getting tossed around the internet for a while... and I must say... wh0a I mean, it's completely freaking amazing! You've got to see the motivation of all the characters... and the action scenes are perfect! I like the chemistry between the lovebirds in the movie, actually. It's quite touching. Definitely a leap over the last one... I'll tell you that much. Now I won't give anything away, but I will say that the movie comes to a thrilling climax. I know the movie's been getting rave reviews, but no one's really mentioned the musical score to it. Isn't it great? I especially like this line in the main theme: "HE'S GOT IT AAAALLLL, YES HE DOES..."

This weekend has had its share of sucking and rocking. Periodic Table of How Things Are:

Suck Su 4.006

Rock Ro 16.033

Su₂Ro - Disuck Roxide 1g Su₂Ro = 8.012 amu Su, 16.033 amu Ro % Su = 33% % Ro = 66% Thank you, thank you. I started off the week by buying earrings for my mom, since it was her birthday. I liked them - they were sterling silver with 5 different colored stones - and they were half off at Macy's, so they were only $25. I met her at Fresh Choice, a west-coast salad bar, and had a small birthday party with some of her other friends. Rock. Then we were off to Terra Linda High School, where my good ol' drama friends were putting on the last production of the year - Bon Bons From the Bard. It's an original play written by this supergenius student, Jesse Brownstein, in which an English acting company is forced to put on the worst "Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors" EVER under the direction of an American, uh, director. It was hilarious, and the funniest part is that my sister actually laughed more than I did. Oh wait, maybe that means it's childish. Or it could just mean that I have no sense of humor. Yeah, that's it. Rock. After the play, I met some of Steve's friends. They all planned to go watch a movie, and I volunteered to drive some people. They ended up deciding not to go see a movie at the last minute, and I was stuck driving out of my way to drop people off at home. Suck. But I got home, and the internet was cut off by my dad, as usual. Isn't that barbaric? He sees that as the only way for me to succeed in life, or something. But fortunately, I had downloaded Clerks a while ago, and got to watching it. And I'll tell you, it freaking Rocked. The next day came my Japanese final, and I did much better than last year (in which I took a look at the damn thing and forfeited the class). It was really an in-and-out procedure - I took the test and that was the last I'll ever see of my Japanese class again. Farewell, I guess. 3Ro₆Su₅?? Can't balance equation!! YOU GET AN F BLAUGHLAUGH I stopped off at TL again where Pride Day was going on. Pride Day is where kids get community service hours (and work off detention if applicable) by renovating the school's courtyard and repairing other random stuff around the place. I was only able to stay for an hour, because Japanese class has overlapped all the Pride Days for the entire year. Suck. So I went to my mom's house and helped her paint some window sills. I then went back to TL where James was waiting for me. We in turn would wait over an hour for Steve and Felix, who said they'd been waiting for us somewhere else, or something. Suck. But our plan was to drive over to the nearby city of Larkspur, where we'd eat at the upscale French restaurant Left Bank. We'd speak French the whole way through, though, and we'd film ourselves. This was for a project in James and Steve's French class. Some sort of extra credit thing. But unfortunately, Steve's tape he brought was defective, so we had to drive over to the nearest Good Guys to get another one. Suck. But when we finally got the tape and went to the restaurant, God DAMN was the food good. We all ended up having Onion Soup au Gratin ("wit de grated cheese y0"), and I had this weird but GOOD bowl of shredded crab with cheese and breadcrumbs. And we got to shout "Vote Wang" into the camera (I'll talk about that later). Rock. But were our adventures in film over? No! We filmed this amazing chase scene on the freeway where I passed Felix's car, and in turn, I smashed into the wall and died. Very much fun. We arrived in Downtown San Rafael and danced our asses off on DDR. I have footage of Steve dancing - and seeing that he's Steve, the Max Payne lookalike who looks down on anything coated in a shade over 50% luminosity, it's a big step for him. Steve and Felix showed James and me this new place that I'd never seen on 4th Street - this LAN game center that charges only $5/hour. Maybe I'll try it out if I get the hang of Counter-Strike. Rick. And then my dad called and wondered why I didn't come home at 1:00 like I promised. I got home and wasn't allowed to go to my friend Jeff's birthday party the next day. Sock. And today, I woke up bright and early to take a tour of the Ex'pression Center for New Media in Emeryville. WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW. It was as amazing as I thought it would be - if not more. It has its own 3-D motion capture studio, state-of-the-art computers completely owned by the president of the school, and simply amazing professors that know, like, EVERYTHING about what I've been doing for the past 5 years. I showed a few of them my website and they liked it (although they were probably just being nice). The only problems are: 1) it's not a real college and 2) it's DAMN expensive. $32,900 for a 14-month program in which you may or may not get a Bachelor's degree depending on whether you've had general education or not. So I'll probably just go to a regular college and major in digital graphic design there. Alas, poor Ex'pression Center... But anyway, ROCK. SCISSOR. PAPER. And then I went home and "studied Chemistry" for the rest of the day. Suck. Anyone tired of the one-word analysis after each paragraph? Well, good news. This blog's over. Rock. Just kidding. Suck.

What Parents Say: "NO SMOKING POT!" What Terra Linda High School Students Hear: Anyone who wishes to kill me for the horrible joke will have the opportunity to do so during this intended period of time that follows:

And if you could really kill me during the time that it took me to type "<P>" and paste it a few times, then I must commend you for your agility and mad skills.

I finished my first MIDI in a few months. Hellfire104, who requested the song, originally thought it was from Final Fantasy, so I must emphasize that this request did not come from any infatuation with Dragonball Z, which he may or may not have. It's Gohan's Theme, and it's an 8 minute piece complete with tempo and dynamics. I'm never doing anything that long AGAIN.

My dad was showing me some old albums dating from 1960 - 1985, albums I'd never seen before. They included pictures of my dad as a kid (he looked just like me), pictures of my cousins as infants, and lots of pictures of my grandpa, who died 15 months before I was born. The last picture in the photo album was of me as a newborn. Also inserted in the album was a eulogy of my great-grandpa, written by my grandpa. I learned a lot about my family's work history - both my grandpa, his brother and dad were furriers - they ran a company called Faden Furs. Another interesting fact that my dad told me: my father's father's father's second wive's daughter's ex-husband is Neil Diamond. That makes me his ex-step-grandson in law. I'm DAMN famous now.

I changed the colors of the site a bit. Now the light blue matches the rest of the background, and the dark blue matches the blue border around the whole site. Now, I need to submit my site to the fair before Friday, or I won't be guaranteed a Best of Show in the Marin County Fair yeehee. My dad is forcing me to be responsible and completely cutting off my internet connection during the afternoons, until he returns home and monitors me like a hawk. I could easily find the cable modem and plug it back into the wall, but instead I think I'll obey his totalitarian rules and do offline things instead, that I can put online when I have the chance :D I will please the geek universe by making a model of a caffiene molecule. I've already put it together with proportionately sized styrofoam balls and sticks. Now I just need to paint it, and turn it in to Chemistry for 10 whoppin' points of extra credits. Hooray. M - I - C you later! - K - E - Y? because YOU SUCK M - O - O - S - Eeeeeeehhhhh because meese are Canadian and WTF goip gome-owf, wef.

Check out this week's My Turn in Newsweek for an article on Marin County (where I live, you dolt). The writer Jim Kennedy defends Marin, as we all have, against recent accusations that Marin's "hideously" tolerant atmosphere is breeding ground for terrorists, like John Walker Lindh (whose family's next-door neighbor was my sister's babysitter!). He does so in a nice fashion, but I'd take his standpoint even farther. I don't live in Fairfax, where Lindh grew up, but rather in the county's capital, San Rafael, and I barely see any signs of extreme liberalism at all. The two schools in San Rafael are as normal as can be. While there may be a few more Democrats than Republicans, almost everyone pigs out on McDonald's and Jamba Juice and listens to the same stuff as anywhere else, and we have as many communists as in any other school, tee hee. And while I can't back this up since I've never gone to any other school outside the San Francisco Bay Area, I can say this: our school's facilities suck. But maybe that's just because everyone spends too much money on SUVs :D (Damn, I just completely ruined my point, didn't I?)

Mario is Stoned is NO MORE. Why? Many reasons. ...Well, more like 3 reasons. 1) "Mario is Stoned" doesn't look good on resumes. Heck, it doesn't look good anywhere. The average highschooler asks if I'm "high" every time they visit the site. And yet again, I DON'T DO DRUGS. 2) I'm planning on submitting the site to the Marin County Fair, and I don't think "Mario is Stoned" will really be a good message to shout out on every Awards list throughout the whole fair. Although I've come to dislike the competition (I lost Best of Show to a clip-art-infested page with unorganized lists of NASA data), I still feel like winning a little money for my site. Maybe it'll go towards, uh, new MIDI stuff. Yeah. 3) Like any meme on the internet, I've sort of outgrown the Animutation-infested secret life of Mario. Yes, the little picture of Mario pulling on *something* is funny, and I've kept it here for your enjoyment. For the people that actually visit my site to access the content and read the journal (rather than, uh, pointing and laughing at the title of the site all day), rest assured that nothing else on the site will change. I haven't added anything new or taken anything old away (yeah, yeah, except the rotating Mario heads). So enjoy the new layout (I think it's freakin' sweet - and it only took a few hours) and hope that I succeed in life now that I seem a bit more professional... Oh, and yes, those are MY eyes staring you down. Muahahaha.

THE K CHRONICLES IS THE BEST COMIC EVER. It's a local (San Francisco) comic strip that I've been reading for a few years in Marin's free paper, the Pacific Sun. Keith Knight's amazing - he gets me to crack up in every strip he draws. If you go to "About the Strip" you can follow a link to Salon.com, which has archives from the past few years. Although Salon.com's archival system isn't that great, it's worth it just to read them. I guess I should buy one of Keef's books.

My parents are going to LOVE me. It was a regular day in Advanced Algebra land. My teacher, furious as always, was going through her daily rounds of "YOU KIDS! IF YOU DON'T STOP TALKING THERE'LL BE A QUIZ!" It was just then that I noticed... even roots in ratios in geometric sequences can be both positive and negative! My teacher's massive stomach, still heaving from her previous outburst, slowly came to a stop, as the expression on her face changed into an ominous grin. "Jeffrey, please see me at my desk. Now." Most students in this situation would receieve gasps and other expressions of horror from the classmates around him. He was in for at least 3 days suspension, or even expulsion. Me, on the other hand - I don't speak out much in class, so I'm considered the teachers' pet, since when I do talk, it's a correct, complex statement delving deeper into the subject we're studying. So people just gave me dirty looks. They were right in doing so, since my teacher had a surprise. Not enough people had signed up for Honors Pre-Calculus for next year, and THERE YOU HAVE IT! I've been instantly admitted into Honors Pre-Calc without having to take any admission tests at all. When my parents hear the news, they'll be sure to exclaim, "Jeffrey, we knew you could do it! Now about Chemistry. Get to studying. NOW."

Annoying version: OH MY GOD, THERE'S A URL IN MY UNDERWEAR. Well my day pretty much kix0red. Started with everyone in the whole school seeing my sketch of WANG towering over the campus like some totalitarian leader. Seems he plastered up some signs of his own, spouting "got wang?" accompanied a picture of him with a milk moustache. I was just waiting the whole day for someone to draw a giant PENIS next to his mouth, destroying his whole advertising campaign. Heh. Maybe I'll do that. This stupid Russian kid in my Chemistry class, Ilya, keeps shooting "speetballss" at people (as he pronounces it). A few of my friends are going to drag his ass out after class and kick the living daylights out of him. Then we'll shove the straw he uses up his... let's continue. After school finally ended, I was free to go wherever I pleased (having a car kicks everything's ass), so I stopped off at the arcade for some DDR. Hell yes, I passed all six-footers. And the owner, being the great guy he is, treated me to a free game. Hell yes. Well I believe I'll make MIDIs for the rest of the day. I've got some damn serious catching up to do. "No one cares" version: I've learned to manage my time much more wisely recently. Considering the amounts of free time I have each day of the week, I've devised a corresponding schedule, provding adequate times for work and play. This way, my parents will have a greater appreciation of my initiative, and I won't have to procrastinate, like I have in the past. People around school have enjoyed some campaign posters I've made for my friend, John. He's running for Senior Class President. Sharing these posters will earn me greater respect among my peers and superiors, enabling me to succeed socially and academically. I'm so glad that I can use my drawing talent for such a cause that will benefit my friends. I've also decided to drink larger quantities of water, since I often find myself with a dry mouth. This will improve my performance in and out of class, as well as improve my physical shape, preparing me for a long summer of balanced activities, like jogging and internships. Now I'll complete my math assignment, which my teacher has begun to display online. Here is my school's website, if in case you're interested. See you later! You-Go-Girl (YGG) Version: OMG it was the besssssssst day today! ^_^ I drove to school in my cute lil' car-car and I saw Ashley there and she was wearing such a cuuuute tank top with amazing heels! I was like "look at my website everyone" and they were sooooo amazed by it!! I think Brent smiled at me because of it!! (HE IS SUCH A HOTTIE) Jamie... you da' girl! Your soooo good at track! OMG you should try out for the state competition or something! ^_^_^ I'm SUCH a good drawer. Joan is like so psyched about her president thingy and I made some cute drawings for him! OMG they're sooo cute you HAVE to see them. It was like sooo cool to see everyone look at them and they're saying stuff like "wow it looks just like Joan!@ It's amazing!" Amanda, I hope you winn also! Go team! ^_^ So I was drinking Evian (for my complexion - I need face lotion sooo bad, I think I'll go to Claire's :D) and Paulina and Marcia were all like "wanna go to the arcade?" And I said no, it's too dorky! Geeky dweeb nerds go there! But they said that there's a dancing game! ^_^ So seeing how I'm such a hip-hop angel, it was soo cool because the nice guy there liked me so he let me play more!! I hope daddy doesn't find out because he'll freak and get mad! :( But now I'm chatting on AIM with HipHopAngelDevill and Sk8erGod345 and they're sooo nice. You should takl to them! They're sooo nice. Oh that's the phone! I think Bebe is going to call about Brent! <3 <3 <3 Lamer Version: stfu my day 0wned urs

Sunday was rather laid-back. Along with doing an SAT II practice test and all of my homework really early, I created a website for the chat room I frequent, #rpgcomics on irc.nightstar.net. I like the site design, but it doesn't come up perfectly on Apple computers, or probably Netscape. Check out the site here, and WATCH OUT FOR THOSE ADS! *crash* I went for a real pixellated approach, so I used Silkscreen and Courier almost to a point of excess. But it's fitting for something as simple as a chatroom. But even cooler, the whole website only has 4 documents. Although there are 7 buttons to different pages on the site, they actually just point to different locations on one page - and those locations are spread out horizontally, not vertically. Kicks a lot of ass, but still doesn't look perfect on Apples. Damn Mac users making it hard for designers. Soon Netscape 1.1 users will start to complain.

And just because my camera kicks so much ass, I have another photo gallery to present: Mario is Stoned presents (god I have to stop saying that) Jeffrey's average day at school! By the way, because of the amazing flash capabilities of my camera, everyone I've shot looks really, really drunk. My car - a 1991 Honda Accord LX. It kicks the ass. Is even posting this picture legal? The first picture-dodger of the day: this girl Ashley who all my friends follow around. Evan, the artist, and Jeff, the pants enthusiast. Evan gives the proper treatment to a frazzled Mike, who wears sunglasses indoors. I often hang out with Jeff and 80's Guy, who likes the 80's and makes buttons, before and after school. My choir gets ready to SING~! and Darren (left) smells something that I didn't let out. It's break in the computer lab! I swing the camera towards Paul Chun and an angry computer lab supervisor, who advances to execute the final blow. (More Paul can be found here!) James is at the computer... AS ALWAYS. James shows off buttons he requested from 80's Guy: "They misunderestimated me," "I believe you have my stapler," and "CANADA!" Tiya, the resident anime artist, who should be drawing my comic right now. :P DAMN! Mark Lee dodges the camera! I'll get you yet! (More Mark Lee can be found here, here, and here.) Bradx0r, the Canadian who enjoys Final Fantasy. James is interested in his sister. Asya, who I've known for a while. Unfortunately, she hangs out with Felix the British Ladies' Man, who intends to get her in the sack. Mark leaves the lab. I'll get you, my pretty, and your little dog, too! My school burns down! You can see Paul enjoying the fire drill in a white sweatshirt, Mark to the right of him avoiding the camera in a gray sweatshirt, and James and Steve (who needs no introduction) in the distance on the right. Adam the Stoner declines to show his face. It's all good. Simeon informs me that what I'm doing is illegal. An AWFUL turnout at my Japanese Animated Movie club. Chip, center, wants to give you cunnilingus. I settle with a profile shot of Mark in Chemistry. Good bye, Terra Linda... I'll miss you...

It's a busy Sat'day! It started off with the usual Japanese class. We learned how to say "I don't like to scale buildings and shoot webs from my wrist with my friend Tanaka-san," and I had pennies thrown at me by resident anime fans. Those anime fans, along with Prinzess PMS, along with Batjew, along with Greg Dean, all went to Fanime 2002, whilst I was stuck in my Japanese class learning how to make katanas out of origami. But I showed them! After Japanese, and a shot of Rockstar, I was off to the new arcade James and I had discovered on Fourth Street, downtown San Rafael. It's called "Star Base 1," and it recently celebrated its 20th birthday (hence the cheesy name). It's got a hell of a lot of great games, including Tekken 4 and Tag, Aliens vs. Predator (Capcom), BAD DUDES VS. DRAGON NINJA (not), and of course, Dance Dance Revolution 4th Mix Plus! For only 25 cents a dance (75 cents a game), James, his friend Hayato, and I danced our asses off for 2 hours straight. Amazingly enough, even though Hayato Wong is half Japanese and half Chinese (making the ULTIMATE ASIAN), James was even better than him at DDR. A picture gallery (mostly of James - bleah! :P) for your enjoyment: Hayato and James start off. Not sure what song it is, but according to the bar, they must really be sucking. While Hayato is great, James is GODLY. Er, perfect. James begins to break a sweat! James goes wacky with the camera and shoots me playing "Have You Never Been Mellow" (not). Trick! Yet again, while Hayato is "PERFECT!" James is "PERFECT!" "Duaaah... I step on the buttons." An amazing 4-step combo! James, bathed in sweat, chooses from a million remixes of "Paranoia." Hayato takes a break, and learns to breathe again. "He's a MANIAC, MANIAC, on the pad." James's lucky number. My camera has a really fast shutter, but trust me: James is breaking the speed limit with his feet. OH MY GOD, I'M PASSING ON TRICK. James goes Double. Wow. My camera, like, kicks a lot of ass. Tee-hee... a 0-combo. "ARE YOU A MONKEY?!?" James starts off on Non-Stop Mode, has written a will. A momentary rest between songs... Sweaty backs are the style this month. MOVE JAMES! FOR GREAT JUSTICE@~!~ The owner of the arcade, once a devious youth like us, adjusts the bass and does a little dance. So that was like the best way EVER to spend a Saturday afternoon. After that, I was very uptight, and a shower was so relaxing! (I did it! A River City Ransom reference!) I went with my mom to this church, where the "Field of Dogs," and organization that owns a field... for dogs... had a meeting. My mom gave them some moneys because like all free organizations, they're eternally financially strapped. Then it was off to Dominican University, a nearby private school, to watch their orchestra and choir sing Mozart's "Mass," and "Requiem" by John... Sutter or something. There are too many composers out there named John.

OH MY GOD. Talk about censorship in action. Some of my favorite songs are on this list. Imagine, Jumper, Chop Suey!... all on there. Wow. And then there's Project Censored, providing amazing stories from halted book signings to Daniel Pearl's Israeli citizenship. I think I've found out a whole lot more of America to complain about.

AND IF YOU ARE VISITOR 12222, PRINT SCREEN, SAVE IT, AND TELL ME. The counter is over to the left, below the main button bar.

Okay. The GIA's gone. Where the heck is my Gameforms?

And Ian J. gets a link because his lower-budget comic completely ROCKS. (Go back to #50 if that's not the most recent comic.)

I shouldn't be laughing at this, but it's time for Mario is Stoned's MISSING CHILDREN PHOTO EXTRAVAGANZA^TM! This is where I find pictures of kids on the internet that have been gone for 5 or more years. Using the FASCINATING technology of "age-progressed photos," the police have released photos of what the kids probably look like now. This method involves taking the head of some older kid and putting the missing kid's face on it. By the way, you may be very offended by this cruel form of, uh, cruelness, so why don't you start off at Cliff Yablonski or Fat Chicks in Party Hats to laugh at people who are actually safe at home eating their asses off. Let's look at Wisconsin's current list. Good face reconstruction... FOR ME TO POOP ON Um, although she's DEAD, she might or might not be wearing glasses. It's MISPLACED FACE ON NEAR-BALD HEAD GIRL FROM "GEEN BAY!" Anyone with the same dopey hairstyle and goofy grin should be questioned immediately. I've already run out of snappy comments. And now for MissingKids.com... Aheha. I think the eyes were taken from the Microsoft Clip Art Gallery. DON'T STARE INTO THE EYES Which one would look more like Margaret Thatcher with any more progression? I wonder what "give up" means. She's not age-progressed, but either way she's the most pleasing to look at. I should have planned this better. I've already run out of really good photos, but those terribly done jobs should tide you over for a while (except for that last one, which should tide you over for a while anyway). ...God, I'm an awful person. Oh, by the way - this is a note for James - I found a DDR machine on fourth street it's in the wonderfully titled "SPACE PORT 1 THAT IS RAD TO THE MAX"... or something. Believe it or not, it was established in the 80's. But, I can see the DDR machine from the street, but I don't know how much it costs because my dad won't let me play it until I get better grades (uh, okay). But it's THERE! You don't have to ask for directions, because I'll post the obscure directions here for no one but you to understand! It's on the opposite side of the street from Bananas At Large. It's really close to Pier 6 Chinese Food, where we ate. Um, if you don't know where either of those are, it's on the opposite side from Double Rainbow, and WAY up the street. Just look for a dumb name and stupid paintings of spaceships out front.

Well, I got my dad to watch Metropolis with me. What probably persuaded him was the four stars that Ebert gave it (Ebert likes anime), and the quote on the back of the DVD case by James Cameron, calling it the "new milestone in anime." Or maybe he just wanted to be a good dad... ugh. Well, Metropolis is unlike anything I've ever seen. It's created by Tezuka, Written by Otomo, and directed by Rintaro. What does that mean? Well, it means it's got do be damn WONDERFUL. While it's the most cartoony and simple things I've ever seen, it's also the deepest and best animes I've ever seen. It's... like... really hard to explain. Metropolis is a four-layered city. At the bottom are robots who work on powering the city. On the level above that are the slums, where revolutionaries live. Above that are the bourgeois, in a city much like ours today. On the surface level is the model town of Metropolis, with giant buildings and the "Ziggurat," a giant tower acting as a direct reference to the Bible (Babel Tower). Seems like any other four-layered city you might think of, right? The characters are very, very cartoony. They don't look like any other anime characters I've ever seen. They've got big noses, giant moustaches, they're all super-deformed with short legs, and they all speak in a cartoony voice (both dubbed and Japanese). More like Warner Brothers characters, or something. But they've still got a lot of depth. The main generic good-guy Tezuka character, Kenichi, accompanies his uncle from Japan to Metropolis, where they're investigating a crime. Kenichi finds himself stuck with a half-human, half-robot creation that, unbeknownst to him or the robot, is destined to rule the world through the Ziggurat. All they care about is their survival, as they're chased around by Rock, an orhpan child of the Duke of Metropolis, who keeps chasing after them and trying to shoot them. Even with these odd characters, everything in the film is just rather wonderful. Oh yes, and the music added a lot to the movie, too. Actually, at times, it defined whole scenes. Most of the movie was accompanied by 20's flapper swing dance whatever tunes, making Metropolis feel even more like the "big city." And if you watch it, just wait until you see the placement of "I Can't Stop Loving You." I won't give much away... but just think of the ending of Dr. Strangelove. I'm currently showing Jin-Roh at my school, borrowing the DVD player from my generous dad, and Metropolis will be next. Since Metropolis barely has any Japanese feel to it, it'll be a great way to end the school year (even though there will probably be time to show some more stuff afterwards). I actually planned to invite all of my friends to go see Metropolis in theaters, but it went out of theaters the day that we planned the party. Well, I finally got it, and Ebert and Cameron are right.

Speaking about chocolate mints, here are some wacky directions that came with them. Watch as I MST the passage. Go ahead, enjoy a special moment ...Ah, that was fun. Now I can start eating the mints. Indulge yourself with rich, smooth chocolate, kissed by a refreshing breath of cool mint. If I've been breathing on people my whole life, does that entail I've been kissing them? Its unique square shape fits perfectly in your mouth. Yeah, seeing that my mouth is square-shaped, and one of these mints is big enough to fill every crevice in it. Feel it glide across your tongue and glide back again. Wow, it eliminates all friction imposed by my tongue altogether! And don't forget to make it glide back. That last part is important because it's italicized! Now, just sit back, relax, and enjoy your smooth, chocolate mint experience. Uh oh... that's where I break the law. I'm eating a mint as I'm typing this. Is multitasking not part of my smooth chocolate mint experience? Oh dear! Welcome to Velamints. Oh no... does this mean I've joined a cult? Experience a world of smoothness in a little chocolate mint. It fills my mouth, it's as big as a world, it's little... I'd tell the writer to make up his mind, but it DOES qualify as Engrish, so I'll let it pass. Ah... MSTing brings back memories. Not that I am or ever was good at it.

All right then... you can still see the Pants Trance Dance if you missed it. I actually made that a long time ago and had to restrain myself from showing anyone. It was hard. Well, actually, the people of Bouncy Fish took a peek at it, but I should let them brag about it. And James saw it too. Whatever. Before I start on my obligatory Chemical Brothers/Sasha/Digweed/Paul Oakenfold/Pete Tong concert recap, let me give you a short summary of my fellow travelers: James - It's James! He's mellow, tall, looks nerdy (w/ glasses and freckles), stutters, and runs really fast. He owns the Midgar Swamp. Felix - A British ladies' man born on the same day as I was. Known in my inner circle as the "other guy" from Midgard Supposedly gets a lot of tail. Steve - Currently in a Matrix phase, Steve came to the concert dressed as a mix of Neo and Max Payne. Of course, he always dresses like that. Now let's see. We all met at San Rafael High School (our rival high school) where James was kicking ass in a track meet. Steve, Felix and I exchanged numbers since we all brought cell phones and PDA's, being the major techies we are. James got 5th or something in the 2-mile, and we were on our way. After eating crap at McDonald's (which I haven't done in years), we arrived at the Cow Palace. We didn't have to wait on any big lines, but they had a hell of a time searching Steve since he was wearing a leather trenchcoat. No cameras, cigarettes, or of course drugs were allowed in the Cow Palace, but that didn't stop anyone from bringing them in and using them in front of the security guards all night. This was my first electronica concert, so I didn't know what to expect. What it turned out to be was a giant rave, with your run-of-the-mill candy raverZ with their beaded necklaces, tank-tops (men too), and pacifiers. And yes, they asked us a lot for water. We stuck together pretty much the whole night, and sometimes went up into the bleachers to rest our legs. We didn't dance, per se, but we jumped and shouted when we needed to. Steve stayed on the dance floor pretty much all night, so my cell phone came into use when I had to call him from the bleachers (not that we could hear each other). And the music? Pretty damn good the whole way through. The concert was from 7 PM to 2 AM, and we were there for 5 out of those 7 hours, so I believe we may have missed Sasha and Digweed. But we did see the Chemical Brothers put on one fantabulous performance. At one time, James and I got up to the very front of the crowd to watch the current DJ do his duty. I think that at this time, James was completely stoned from some second hand smoke of some powerful marijuana, because he kept asking me where everyone else was. He'll argue this as he has been doing, but still I think that some of the drug usage there influenced him. I believe this concert was to signify the end of all the artists' tours, so the Chemical Brothers went all out with a light show, great mixes of their songs, and one wild crowd. Paul "Perfecto" Oakenfold came up afterwards, and he... uh... sucked. He didn't mix his own music most of the time, and his lightshow consisted of some music video repeating itself in the background. His performance drove us to shout "Oakenfold, show us your titties!" and then to leave. Well, it was time to go anyway. As my first rave, it was pretty damn fun. And I got home before 2 AM so I'm not completely tired today. This day being the first day that I wear shorts. Speaking about today, I bought Metropolis, and chocolate mints. I plan to watch Metropolis, and eat the mints. Not the other way around if there's any confusion.

Yes, I actually wore this to school today. And yes, I got lots of dirty looks from nonbelievers. And yes, almost all of my posters were RIPPED DOWN. (All they did was promote universal love and peace with the message "HAPPY PANTS DAY!!!"... jeez!) But I still had fun today. In this picture, I'm wearing four, count 'em, FOUR pairs of pants. And the buttons, commissioned by my friend 80's Guy, say "Happy Pants Day." Axer got himself some space in this blog for showing me Raver Pants. I'll be sure to sing this to and from the event we're going to today. I mentioned it before, but James, Steve, Felix and I are going to A RAAAVE... HOPING HIS PANTS WILL BEHAAAVE... AND HE'S GONNA DANC-- ...er, sorry. We're going to a giant mufukkin' concert at the San Francisco Cow Palace with the Chemical Brothers, Sasha, John Digweed, Paul Oakenfold, Pete Tong, and more. It'll be amazing if no one dies. I gotta give a shout out to James's mom (Word to your mother!) for offering to drive us in both directions. I guess she's glad that we (at least I) paid her back $40 for going to this thing. Yes, it's rather expensive to see these guys. But it'll be worth it. It'll be THE PANTS TRANCE DANCE. Oh yes, and other people did pants things as well. My friend Jeff wore a Levis Hard Jeans shirt and crossed out "Hard Jeans" and wrote PANTS on the shirt for some reason. And he wore pants with buttons all over them. And my friend Simeon wore two pairs of pants (but that's because he's a big fellow, and the first ones have a rip in them, so he has pants under them). And even though 80's Guy didn't wear pants, he gets credit for making me those Pants Day buttons. What did YOU do on pants day?

PANTS Yes, friends, it's Pants Day! Because of this, I give you an extra click to get into the main page, and a smaller webcam! Celebrate the joy! Tomorrow morning... uh, that is... THIS MORNING, I will be trotting around school with multiple pairs of pants on! How fun fun! Uh, yeah, I'm bored, so it's time to go to sleep. Yup.

Since I made it tonight for an upcoming internship position, I thought I might as well put up my resume for people to gawk and gaze at. For the full effect, download the Silkscreen font (or Mini7 font), as the titles are typed in that font. It's that "mini-type" font that's become popular on the net... it's eye-catching. Also, what do you think of my color scheme on the resume? I sure do like blue...

Although barely anyone who hears my MIDIs on the net know who really made them, it's always good to come across my work being put to use. I guess my FFX Piano Theme MIDI was needed so badly before the game came out that some fool put it up as a converted MP3 on KaZaA. Without knowing it, I had it on my drive for a while. (I know it's mine because it's got the same imperfections). So if you're bored, you may be able to find my piano version converted by some person. It's called "Nubuo Uetmatsu - Final Fantasy X Intro Theme" (and remember to mispell Uematsu's name... whoever converted it was illiterate). Although I don't mind that my work is so popular without my having proper praise for it, I'm glad that I copyright my work and give each MIDI a signature so no one else can take credit for it. (I enjoy hunting down those who do.)

Yet again... FRIDAY APRIL 26 is NATIONAL PANTS DAY. I'll be in #rpgcomics on server deepthought.nightstar.net tomorrow on April 25 for the Grand Countdown at 11:59. Then everyone will put ON their pants (or two) and celebrate the glory of PANTS! There'll be a surprise on the site on Friday.

It's the little things... This whole website is funny - The White House - but check out the History page. This isn't big at all, but it made me crack up - look at the last picture in the little gallery. Tee hee!

I finally redid the sidebar and title images, and I added a Links page. Whew. I often mention pages I like, or there are your own personal pages. If I didn't put them on the links page, please tell me.

My evening was cleverly spent. I've been neglecting Mr. TV for a while, since, uh, programming on TV SUCKS, but today since I was bored I decided to flip through the channels. I landed in the Wonderful Channel of 8, one of those channels that has different programming every day. On weekday afternoons, it's the California Music Channel - like a radio station with music videos... not like MTV which doesn't even show music videos anymore. Other times it's a shopping channel. And sometimes, it's Fuji-TV, a Japanese programming channel! Huway huway! So believe it or not, I switched to channel 8 and Fuji-TV was on. What caught my attention was a SANRIO DANCE PARTY. Dozens of fat Japanese kids and multiple people in Hello Kitty and Keroppi costumes were dancing to the beat of this guy dressed up as a plastic cow. A 3D model of the same plastic cow guy danced along in the corner of the screen. It ended, and I was time for the next show, which I like to call... FIVE MEN IN HAMSTER COSTUMES YELLING AT EACH OTHER. These hamster costumes only covered half of their body, so from under the stage, their hands controlled the hamster costume's hands. This girl quieted all of the men down and started a three-count beat. With each beat, she named a random color ("Midori! Aka! Chai!") and in the next three beats, one of the Hamster Dudes (TM) had to name three foods that were of those three respective colors. This went on and on until one of the Hamu-Foo's couldn't think of any food, and everyone else started yelling at him. By the end of the show, this one guy missed so many food names that he was smashed though a giant plastic cat's mouth at high speed, with cake frosting smothering his face. My sister even persuaded her friends to take a look at this. Then it was time for THE BATTLE OF THE ASSISTANT DIRECTORS, which I think was the actual name of the show. The assistant directors (AD) of each show on the network were competing in some sort of "Land of the Lost" elimination game show, where in each round someone fell down from being spun around too much. In the first round, four contestants were spun around really fast in these chairs while being presented with a Roman or Japanese symbol. When the chairs finally stopped, they had to walk along this catwalk, push a button at the end, and say what the symbol was. But since everyone was dizzy, they all fell off of the catwalk into some weird white powder (Anthrax? Guh-huh-huh) below. Nothing can be more fun than watching dizzy Japanese ADs coated in white powder and trying to pronounce "R." The second round was like tug-of-war. With their hands tied behind their backs, two contestants had to wrap a rope around themselves. Whoever wrapped half of the rope first and touched the flag in the middle won. Of course, this too was very hard for all of them, as they still had Anthrax all over themselves and they kept tripping over the rope and landing flat on their faces. Ouch. The third one was a test of STRENGTH~! and ENDURANCE~! Four contestants were lying on this this giant glass pane, which started to tilt vertically. The weirdos had to stick onto the thing as best they could, trying not to fall into the pit of balloons, angered seabass, and sharks with laser beams on their heads below. I didn't watch the whole thing, because without warning, the TV station switched to... THE STUPID CHINESE GUY TALKS ABOUT WHAT HE THINKS IS NEWS! Which I didn't watch. Well, the moral of the story is, Japanese TV is the only reason I plug the TV cable into the wall. And also, there are better ways to experience pure idiocy without taking drugs, especially on 4/20.