MetaAnomie

Just finished up our last recording for the new, upcoming fit EP. We also managed to decide on the album title, song order, etc. Next up is mastering, the jacket design, and production. At the moment we are aiming for a December release. We should be hitting our mark pretty much head on.

Not too much other stuff going on really. I watched “Mamma Mia” with the wifey last night which I thought was decently cute. We took the princess on a short boat ride today, namely because in the past couple of months she has been going nuts ever time she sees a damn boat — and she keeps repeating “fune noru no!” (”I wanna ride on the boat!”) over, and over, and over, and over again. Now of course, she just repeats “fune notta wa!“” (”I rode on the boat!”) over, and over, and over again, so apparently it didn’t really help our situation out too much (*sigh*).

Oh, and I finally finished fucking Super Mario Galaxy… only to find out that there are more levels to play.

The grid control UI is up and functionality for grid plane enabling/disabling is working. I’ve also done a shit load of icon creation for various controls in the application as well as some miscellaneous bug fixes, primary dealing with the docking panes. I did end up having to rewrite the implementation for keyboard input because it just wasn’t doing what I wanted it to. In short, I wanted to be able to control the plotter window via the keyboard regardless of pane focus within the application, but C# is just a little bit too high-level for my needs. I ended up having to access an external system dll to poll key states instead.

As for my to-do list, I plan on implementing the remaining functionality for the grid controls first, and then start working on the 3D point selection tool. From there I can start setting up a tool window and working on my first primitive drawers.

But you gotta love it.

Left 4 Dead Teletubbies Mod — game play video here.

I just got finished reading the original version of Peter Pan for the first time as an adult (to my daughter of course), and was rather shocked to find out how much of an insufferable bitch Tinker Bell is.

For lack of any good ideas for food last night, I threw together some “Chinese” stir-fry, the word being in quotes considering I bought the sauce at the local supermarket and I’m sure it’s more of a Japanese variation than anything else — far from authentic. Not like I have ever been one to care much though.

Turned out like this:

Not horrible.

We went out to Shibuya the night before to meet up with an artist who may be doing the artwork for our upcoming EP. I’m super excited. He was sketching some stuff on paper as we talked over beers and even his “rough sketch” (that took him maybe all of five minuets) looks utterly fantastic. I’m so envious of people who can draw — and sing.

We took the princess out to the aquarium yet again:

She loves that place so much that we just ended up getting a season pass.

About 2-3 weeks ago, we were all sitting down eating dinner when all of a sudden, the princess gets totally freaked out. She’s pointing to the kitchen saying “kowai, kowai” (”I’m scared, I’m scared”). The wifey and I look over and of course we see nothing, but the princess is just staring and pointing like something is there — and this goes on for like three minuets in total.

Weird.

Anyhow, yesterday morning while we were eating breakfast, the same thing starts up again except this time she is pointing out to the stairwell hallway. The wifey and I of course see nothing. I get up calmly and close the sliding door. She calms down, but she keeps throwing up the occasional glance as if she is making sure no one is coming in.

Really weird.

Now for all intensive purposes this is probably totally unrelated, but this morning, right about the same time as the princess freaked out yesterday, I pulled out a glass from the cabinet and filled it with coke. As I was walking back to the table with it, it just kind of — well, fell apart. Notice by the way I didn’t say “break.” The bottom of the glass just went plop and fell to the floor with all the coke following it — no glass shards or anything. It was the damn weirdest thing I have ever seen:

Is it just me or is that fucking odd?

This isn’t really the first time this kind of mess has happened, and it’s not just this house. I had a really creepy experience at the last apartment we stayed in as well:

I was up late, maybe a little past midnight, and I went outside on the balcony to smoke. I noticed the lights flickering in one of the rooms in the apartment building directly across from us. At first I didn’t really think much of it, but when I got to thinking, it struck me as a bit funny. It wasn’t like TV flicker; it was like the main overhead light. And I’m thinking to myself, why in the hell wouldn’t they just turn it off if the bulb is busted — that’s got to be annoying as shit.

So anyway, the next night I go out, and this time the same thing is happening — but in a totally different room. “Huh,” I think. Then it stops and the lights start flickering in a different room. Then that stops and it happens in yet another room. And needless to say I’m getting a bit freaked out.

Finally it stops completely. I just kind of pause there looking for a second and then just shrug my shoulders. I reach down in my pocket to pull out another cigarette and –

The light in our apartment flickers — directly behind me.

I fuck you not.

Shouldn’t we have learned better already?

One more month and counting — sleep is overrated anyways.

I finally got around to putting together and painting the wooden step we bought for the princess a couple months back:

I’m so domesticated.

That actually sums up my past week to be honest — just doing the random odd chores I have been putting off doing. I wrote myself a little to-do list and tried something different with it this time. Namely, I purposely forced myself to pick one, and only one thing for a particular category (for example, one item for reading, one for writing, one for studying, etc.) and promised myself I would only focus on the items I had down before I allow myself to move on to anything else. It worked pretty well actually. It wasn’t all that overbearing because it wasn’t that long, and I got a lot of stuff done that has been consistently getting pushed off.

I wrote up another similar list last night but I really haven’t dug into it much yet. I have a rather eventful weekend coming up so I assume it’s going to be around Monday before I can really get to it.

This is a little figurine/statue that is in front of the apartment building across the street from me. The guy who owns it has all kinds of plants and figurines laid out around the outside but this one always catches my eye — it’s crazy realistic. I rather like it. It puts me in a good mood for some reason.

I spent the first half of last week being super productive and the latter having pretty much no motivation at all. After moping around for an hour or so feeling sorry for myself yesterday, I somehow managed to convince myself to go downstairs and shave, and from there things have been progressively better. Funny how it works isn’t it? As long as you can get something done, regardless how trivial, it does wonders for your mood. I should know that by now but somehow I always manage to forget it.

Well, I did finally drag my lazy ass outside to weed around the house — it was turning into the amazon out there and I had really been putting it off being it’s been so hot. Got killed by mosquitoes though. And am half amazed we even have mosquitoes in Tokyo, but then again we could have a nuclear holocaust and mosquitoes and cockroaches would be the only surviving creatures I bet.

Except they would be eight feet tall and feed off our rotting corpses.

Anyhow, I have once again resorted to writing myself up a short to-do list and plan to try pounding through it in the upcoming days. From experience I know I will probably abandon it pretty soon, but hey, as long as I can get a day or so of motivation out of it, I figure it’s worth it.