Ghostly

Supposed to be painting an assignment for school.
  -> Draw Pokemon fusions instead.

I’m back from Lahti… and I am surprised that I’m still alive. Those were really damn intense three days. In the evening I was always so tired that I just fell asleep without having any energy left to really do much else than just stay in bed and watch TV while dozing off.

Now I realise how exhausting it can be having to spend a nine hour day mostly inside your own head without the chance to talk with people while working on pretty intense, time limited, assignments. I’m usually the type of person who likes to toss ideas around with others while I work and take breaks to cool my brain down. This time I only got a lunch break during a nine hour day. Holy shit.

The final assignment almost made me give up. It had to be a 3 minute presentation with 12 pictures that changed every 15 seconds (on two large screens on both sides to where I was standing) and they had to somewhat present what you were talking about at that moment. We only got a morning to plan it, create it and the only rehearsal we could do was to silently read it out to ourselves at our desks where we put the slide show together. Holy fucking shit. Yeah, having to speak out loud in front of 40+ people while they evaluate everything I say and do? THAT’S MY FOBIA, THANK YOU VERY MUCH. :””DAFSdgdfh. I congratulate myself for having the courage to walk up there and not passing out with a “Nope.” (Or just quitting before having to go.)

I think… on average I did quite good? Maybe? I really don’t know for sure. Some assignments seemed like they went kinda badly and others seemed like they went really well, but it’s hard to know how they will evaluate them. But all in all, I’m glad I made it this far to be honest. The previous times I applied to schools I didn’t even get to the whole entrance exam part at all. For whatever reason.

Oh man. I’m so tired though, and I still have to prepare another assignment for Oulu because I was accepted to the second part of the exams there. I might give up on going to Joensuu as well at this rate. It’s getting very expensive as well, all this traveling. I think I would suffer emotionally for being so, so very far away from my roots in Joensuu as well if I got in.

But some final words about my trip to Lahti! The city itself seemed very nice for the part that I got to see it. The surrounding areas looked very scenic as the city was kind of set in a shallow valley type. All the people I met were really nice as well, very different and some had very strong and colourful personalities. The teachers that I got to speak with briefly seemed very nice as well and the kind of people I would love to work with. 

Leaving to Lahti city later today! Doing some packing up in a minute. Aaagh, exciting stuff. :D SINCE WHEN WAS MY LIFE THIS DAMN EXCITING? I DON’T EVEN. Help. Who am I.

I’m trying to keep my luggage to minimum in case I need to haul it around the whole of Wednesday, so I won’t bring my laptop with me even though my hotel room offers free internet connection. So tempting… so very tempting.

I literally tried the whole 5.2 ever since Pinnacle of Storms was released to get my shaman her fourth tier piece. (Either helm or shoulders.) Neither ever dropped. GG.

RNG good gaym desughn!

(Though, to be honest I don’t really care. I’m just happy we’re getting more content in 5.3. Also trolls. Fuck yeah, trolls.) 

Ahhh, back from our one day trip to Oulu for the first part of the entrance exams. (I literally woke up only a few hours ago even though I went to bed around 10pm. UNHEARD OF.) I’m so regretful for deciding to not take a camera with me, but I’ll try to give a short story of how it all went:

Tuesday 11pm; we embark on our mighty quest. We both have a backpack with some ready-made sandwiches, chocolate and juice for breakfast, pillows, papers for the school which may or may not be needed and not much else besides the usual essentials. We reach Seinäjoki city around 11:30pm, park our car at a relatives house and walk to the train station which is not too far away. The night is a bit chilly, but pleasant. I am excited as all hell. We poke about the almost empty train station, check the time tables, check the vending machine (which is superbly tempting for me because I’ve never used one of those which spiral your goods out), check inside the station waiting hall where there’s only two other people in addition to us. We make jokes about the self-service flower service booth which has a sign: “P.S: DRINKING FROM THE VASES IS NOT ALLOWED.” Our train arrives two minutes late and we take our seats. Attempt to sleep until 5:14 am when the train arrives in Oulu. Some other passenger across from us keeps coughing very sharply at 10 minute intervals. My nerves begin to shatter after the 20th time.

After dozing off for almost two hours, we wake up to our alarm set at 5am and the train is about to arrive in Oulu. There’s been some rain during the time we were asleep, but the clouds are now clearing and it seems like it’ll be nice weather from now on. The sun is about to rise. Initiate excitement.exe

We get off the train around 5:20 and wander our way to a large map set across from the train station and right next to the bus station. We wonder if the morning buses have even begun their routes yet and if we could just walk our way over to the school. We have approximately three hours to kill before the exam, so we decide to walk. It’s not that far away either and the weather is pleasant although chilly after the night. We zip our coats, pull up our hoods and bite into some chocolate as we begin making our way down the street which we hopefully presume is the right way. We barely see any other people about yet, but there is increasingly more people walking their dogs, jogging or passing us by with a car here and there as time passes. The sun is now well above the horizon and blows away the chilliness. (Accompanied by the fact that we’re getting warm from the walking.) Our mighty quest is getting better all the time. We pause for a bit to look at another map by a bus stop and confirm our suspicion that the morning routes only start around 6:30am and it’s still another hour until then. We’re almost half way there now anyway, so we continue on walking. We come to an underpass which more or less confirms us that we are not lost but actually managed to find our way right where we were supposed to. Right after we climb a bit of a hill and see the school establishment right in front of us. It’s only about 5:45 so we decide to nip to a nearby gas station for a coffee. It’s right across the street from the school building, so the location couldn’t be better.

Around 7am, we wander back out and go to see the school up close. We find some info on the door about the upcoming exams as well. We circle all the way around the building to it’s front and back again to where we started. There are some benches here, so we decide to sit down and enjoy us some sandwiches. Sitting down and waiting for the doors to open causes us to get a bit chilly again because we’re no longer moving around. The gas station was really warm too, so the morning begins to feel chilly again in contrast. Near 8am a few more people show up, presumably for the exam as well and soon after the doors are unlocked and we head inside to see the lists for classrooms and such where we are supposed to take the exam at 9am. Not much happens during this hour. We wander around the school and find both of our classrooms which end up being different ones. Mine is in the second floor, Flimsy’s is in the third. We sit around waiting on the second floor in a sunlit corridor. (I make a remark to myself how nice the school itself seems so far.)

Just before 9am we are let into our classrooms and the exam begins. I am really not sure at all if it went good or bad for me. I think I managed decent, at least. For some odd reason I had a sudden rush of nervousness right at the start. My hands were shaking and my heart was racing and I don’t know if it was because I had some bad flashback from being in school or just my general social anxiety or maybe just being nervous about the test itself. Regardless, I start with the writing assignment which is marked as the second assignment but “fuck the police” I think to myself and begin writing. I think it took 30minutes tops probably, at least I felt I wrote it pretty quickly. I’m not sure how much time I spent just staring at the papers and trying to calm down. I have a lot of time left until the deadline to finish the other assignment, which is to draw a pendulum. (Not quite a pendulum exactly, but close. The finnish word for it has a much broader meaning.) We are given A3 size paper for it. I’m a little disappointed there is no “doodle paper” at all, so fuck the police again and I go doodle my ideas down behind the assignment description paper. (I could probably scan them when I get home because I was allowed to take them with me!) I finish a little after 11am and I’ve well ahead of the deadline which was exactly at 12. I’m not sure if it’s a good thing or bad thing to leave early, as it were, but I check and re-check my papers and go hand them in. I leave about 11:15 and head down the stairs to the main hall where we agreed to meet up with Flimsy afterwards we were done. I don’t find him there, so I decide to sit down to doodle in my doodle book and listen to some music from my 8 year old mp3 player which I painstakingly got to working the day before. Miraculously, even.

I sketch a lot of the people who pass me by in the hall. There’s some young lady working on a laptop near a large info-display, presumably preparing it for some event that is about to happen later. She is now sketched twice in my sketchbook. I notice Flimsy coming down the stairs just after 12 and we meet up by the bench. We share our experiences from the exam and turns out they were given doodle paper. I show him my makeshift doodle paper in exchange.

Meanwhile the day has turned sunny and a little windy outside. We begin our walk back to downtown for something to lunch on. I notice that I was probably running on adrenaline during the morning because now I am getting really tired and my feet are sore and getting blisters. (I am not the sports athlete type. Yeah.) We head back the same way we came from and stop briefly for some fresh ice cream. The first of this summer. We declare it’s now officially summer. The city is much busier now and there’s lots of cars passing by, loads of buses, loads of people. Someone is walking a very playful dog and we make remarks of how cute it is. (MRR. MANLY ADVENTURES IN OULU CITY. GR.)

We wander a bit before we find a pizza restaurant where we stop for our lunch. I pick mozzarella and Flimsy picks kebab. We trade slices for each other as well. Mine is delicious as heck. The kebab one is a bit too spicy after being awake pretty much the whole night and starting to be a bit exhausted at this point. It’s really delicious still. After that we visit a local comic book store and I manage to find the chapters of Yotsuba that I’ve been missing before. I buy these two and a Starcraft novel for Flimsy.

Now our magnificent quest comes to a close as we head to the railway station to find a train going to Seinäjoki which is supposed to have already left but is delayed for some reason. We hesitate but jump aboard for our way back home. All in all, it was really nice. The exam itself was fun after I got over my nervous tremblings. The weather was great, the city was nice and everyone we met were really polite to us. I wouldn’t mind going again, which I will if I am chosen to the second set of exams which will then conclude if I am accepted or not. Before that though, the entrance exams for Lahti university of applied sciences is coming up. Next sunday, another epic quest begins!

Uhh. Okay? What am I supposed to do about it.

I don’t even know what to answer.

chirart:

Real talk: if you never actually watched Neon Genesis Evangelion all the way through, everything you know about it is wrong.

Although for that matter, even the people who watched it all the way through are wrong about it.

Let’s talk about the creator: Hideaki Anno, and why he’s happiest when you are angry.

Read More

I always thought the ending of the original TV series was a little weak, or vague but I didn’t rage about it. It’s consistent with Shinji’s character arc, I think? I don’t really understand why the then hardcore fans would’ve raged so much about it. Maybe I just don’t understand because I’m not the sort of person who gets super passionate about fandoms. (For better or for worse.)

Regardless, I loved the completely insane and absurd form End of Evangelion takes. The imagery is something else. It stuck with me for a long time. I drew a lot of Eva inspired things as a teenager.

Also, I fucking called it. The new character in the rebuilds? SHE IS JUST TITS AND BLAND ONE LINERS. I FUCKING KNEW IT ANNO. I KNEW IT. YOU GENIUS BASTARD YOU. :D She still annoys the shit out of me though. Because blatant fan service one-dimensional characters always will.

In preparation for the entrance exams I’m going to have next Wednesday, I will be leaving later tonight and will be briefly back for the weekend before leaving again on Sunday for the following week. I’ll try to pop online whenever I can, but I can’t promise much.

Wish me luck! I’ll see all of you wonderful internet people again later!

AAEEELslghj<hj fkjhkljalwöfroi!

I’ve been invited to the entrance exams of the university I recently sent my assignments in! EEEEE- HOLD ME I AM ABOUT TO BOUNCE OFF THE WALLS.

✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:* \(◕ヮ◕✿)/ *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧

Take defeat in stride,
celebrate every victory. (Regardless of how insignificant it might seem at the time.)

Contains spoilers, probably.

I almost managed to make peace with the newest Rebuild of Evangelion movie. Almost.

The whole series rubs me kind of wrong, because it just seems to me as if the character arcs are a lot weaker and they give much more effort to “cool effects” instead. Which would be fine, if I was watching a movie expecting just cool effects, but what I liked about the original NGE (as silly at times as it was) was that the characters were much more defined, their actions had motives and their thoughts weren’t baseless, emotionless drivel which is seemingly justified with “well this is how this character is supposed to act, right?” They used a lot of time, for example, to mecha-porn over the new ship. Which, again, is fine if the movie is going for it, but isn’t really what I thought Evangelion is mainly about. Really. Much of that screentime could’ve been used for character development. We got to see the ship a lot anyway? Well. I guess you needed to push in the adverts for your new figurines somewhere.

Most of what irritated me happened in the third act though, and before that things stayed pretty decent and I didn’t want to rip my eyes out at all actually. I could even say I enjoyed it for the most part. In the third act, Shinji goes full retard mode. Honestly. It bothered me a lot. He’s set out to do thing X, which supposedly will lead to doing good. During doing thing X the person who he earlier said that “is really wise” and “knows everything” tells him to stop and not do thing X because something is wrong. Asuka is also telling him to not do thing X and going as far as rather kill Shinji than let him do it. Shinji disregards all of this and does thing X anyway. Thing X goes horribly wrong and everything turns to shit. Shinji then says: “Is this my fault?”

…. I DON’T EVEN… YES! Yes it is you fucking idiot. Is this character capable of logical thought? No? Alright. Let the partner character tell him that “no it’s not your fault desu ^-^” because that makes sense somehow and we’re supposed to be siding with Shinji and feel sorry for him for no reason whatsoever. His character, at this point, is completely unlikeable and unreasonable. Once again, the whole “all of this is my fault!” dialogue seems to just be coming from the originals because ‘that’s how the character is supposed to act right? These are the lines he says, right?’ but they’re so out of place here, because instead of being used by someone else, say NERV or SEELE, he himself decided to go on even though everyone around him told him not to and there were no motive or reason for him to do otherwise. Besides if the character is completely idiotic and cannot reason that “something bad is going to happen” means that something bad is probably going to happen.

I just really, really hope they have some continuity to this in the fourth movie. That this ridiculous plummet is part of his overlaying character arc and they’re making the highs and lows ridiculously over exaggerated. (And a little stupid because they’re trying to simplify it too much.)

I’m not even going to discuss what’s-her-face pointless new character whose most memorable scene was that her boobs jiggled in that one shot. Yeah great. To be honest I really did not expect much more from this character anyway. Let’s just agree she does not exist and we can go on with out lives.

Hyouka was really good. The only thing I dislike about it is that it uses the annoying anime format where you get no closure on character relationships in case they decide to make more seasons.

Please make more seasons? :|