That didn’t pan out, and  now I’m doing technical support for a living again.

That’s not really a complaint, mind you.  It doesn’t pay terribly well compared to some other gigs I’ve had, but it’s a job that lasts from 8-5, 5 days a week, I’m not stressing out about hitting a release date, nobody’s expecting me to put in any unpaid OT or work the weekend and honestly it’s usually pretty fun.  I genuinely enjoy it most days and that’s a crazy thing to say about a job.

The other big thing about being out of school for five months, of course, is that my student loans are going to start coming due in a month.  Fortunately for me – less fortunately for my lenders – I was taking all my paychecks from my student job and sticking them in a checking account and generally not touching it in anticipation of this.

So I have one of my loans completely paid off – the one that didn’t get consolidated and that was still being held by one of the sleazier student loan companies – and as of tomorrow I’ll have all the interest paid on the remaining loans and I can get started chipping away at the principal.

Mind you, that’s still 35 grand worth of student loans to pay, but I did some napkin math and figure I’ve saved myself something like 12 grand over the course of a ten year student loan, but I won’t have a ten year student loan because I’ve also cut about four years total off the time it’s going to take to pay the thing off.

I am inordinately proud of this, even though it DID completely wipe out that account I’d been carefully sticking my paychecks in to AND wiped out the first three  paychecks from my new job.  I’m still looking at years of debt, but I feel like I’m actually tackling it head on.

A gap of a month or so between posts usually means that I’ve gotten back into MMORPGs, and this one is no exception.  I’ve been sucked back into Everquest 2 with the release of the latest expansion, Destiny of Velious, which is basically a massive nostalgia fest for all of us poor bastards who were playing EQ1 back in the 2001 time frame.

Good gods, that’s been ten years.

Anyway, Destiny of Velious is only a half-expansion so far (they’re releasing the other half in a few months) but what they did get out the gate has been a lot of fun, even if I had to do a lot of leveling to catch up to the content.  It’s a complete gear reset sort of expansion – within about an hour of entering the first Velious zone, I’d replaced almost everything my character was wearing – which gives the developers a lot of freedom; they have established a sort of baseline of “this is what your character should have” which allows them to develop content accordingly.

Oh, and they added flying mounts, which is a massive game-changer for going back and doing any earlier content that wasn’t designed for players to have control over their Z-axis.

On the other hand, it’s designed exclusively for characters who are at least level 85, and even at that level you’re going to have significant problems until you reach the level cap of 90, so it’s not really a “bring people into the game” expansion.  By way of contrast, while the EQ1 Velious was a “high level” expansion, “high level” at the time meant that it was designed for people who were at least level 40 (with a cap of 60)

Oh, and I graduated from college.  That happened too.  And I got hugely sick twice, which wasn’t a lot of fun; my finals week consisted of me going into my Japanese final while running a massive fever and cough while sleep-deprived from too much EQ2.

Needless to say, I pretty much bombed the final (74% or so) and my term grade was a fairly pathetic B+

Still, it’s over and done with and now all I need to do is find a job.  I’ve applied for several technical positions at the local university and not had a great deal of luck, which is a pity – they’re pretty much the whole of the local economy – but the process has given me the motivation I needed to get my resume up to slightly higher standards and to take a hard look at the way I write cover letters, so I guess you can say that it’s been a positive experience.

Not the Japanese professor, mind you.  She gives out perfectly normal assignments – they may make me feel really really dumb, but they’re perfectly normal.

But I digress.

Anyway, one of the assignments she got was to take the contents of someone else’s backpack or purse and make something out of them, and that led inevitably to me upending my backpack onto a table in the middle of our student union.

OK, see, so this is why she’s an artist and most of us aren’t:  I had an umbrella, a pair of gloves, some books, a couple of gaming systems, some fruit snacks and a stapler, and if you told me to make something out of them I’d probably have glued them all to a piece of poster board and prayed for a pity grade.  I might even have added some glitter.

What she got out of them was this:

I will at this point point you in the direction of both her DeviantArt page and the webcomic she’s been writing and drawing for the last seven years, because it’s some pretty keen stuff and you should go look at it.

I did also take a term of statistics, but that was as an elective.

On the other hand, I have an Asian studies class that’s taught in the math building and which meets directly after a calculus class.

By the way, I DID take calculus in High School, but I failed two terms of it and they politely suggested that I probably shouldn’t take a third, so I have a bit of respect for anyone who can get through calculus with their sanity intact.

Today I was walking to my seat and had to fight my way through a throng of students who were clustered around the math professor.  From the gist of their questions, I gathered that they’d had a mid-term last week and received the results today.  Fair enough.  I sat down, got out my notebook for my class, and waited for the throng to disperse and for my professor to arrive and start talking about the rise of Confucianism in Korea in the 13th century, which is every bit as exciting as you may imagine.

Anyway, one of the last students to get an audience with the professor had a question that I imagine every professor hears quite often.

“Will you be grading the exam on a curve?”

The professor seemed to think about this for a minute before replying.

“Well, I can.  I certainly can.  But, like I said in class, the class average for the test was actually 85 percent.  Do you still want me to grade yours on a curve?”

The petitioner’s face went blank.  He seemed to know he’d walked into a trap.  There was a beautiful pause before he came up with:

“Uh, I don’t know.  Do I?”

Calculus, people.  This was in a calculus class.

A couple of weeks later, I got a call from one of the school’s departments asking if I wouldn’t mind coming in for an interview please.

The interview was basically “uh, we don’t get many people with twenty years of experience asking for jobs as a technician, are you sure?”

It’s been pretty fun, really, most every day brings something new and delightful, partially because our default computer OS install is 64-bit Windows 7 and I’m finding that some software companies still haven’t gotten past the idea of coding for Windows XP and partially because I’m working with a building that’s about half full of gigantic egos.  I mean tenured professors.  No, I meant the first thing.

Anyway.  Today’s “new and delightful” was getting to overhear a professor asking to book one of our larger labs for, as he put it, a “make-up session”, because his entire class was going to be absent on Monday and he wanted to have them make up that day.

They’re going to be absent Monday because it’s MLK jr. day.

I think the guy doesn’t really know what “federal holiday” means.

An awful lot of them were anime or manga fans, and many of them had bought into the whole “Gross National Cool” meme; they expected anime merch to be crowding the aisles in every store and dancing cosplayers in the streets of Akihabara.

Reality was Somewhat Different.

To their credit, after the initial shocks wore off, they mostly adjusted to the grim realities; that they weren’t any more in the mainstream in Japan than they were in America and that Akihabara was just a big shopping district largely aimed at guys who were refusing to grow up… oh, yes, and that there was quite a lot of porn for sale, and that shops weren’t shy about putting rather risque stuff front & center.

Even more to their credit, even the most rabid of fans seemed to follow a basic pattern: They’d have one massive binge buying session early, and then they’d realize that they had to get all this stuff HOME somehow, and their purchases would suddenly start trending towards Very Small Things.

Lest you think I’m putting myself too far above them, I will just say that I planned my binge shopping to occur near the END of my trip to Japan, and I elected to ship stuff home instead of trying to make it all fit in my luggage. 

Anyway, the overall effect was that a whole bunch of people went over to Japan with crazy ideas of how Things Would Be, and came home with a better picture of How Things Are.  If they can just spread some of that sanity among their peers in their home country, the world will be just a little bit better for it.

There is a reason for this, and to my mind it’s a pretty good one: I realized, after about two weeks of studying in Japan, that I needed to do a lot more study and a lot less fun stuff, and one of the fun stuffs that I had to put aside was updating this site.  I wound up getting a decent grade after the program was over, anyway, so I don’t regret it that much, though I can see from my site logs that it’s cost me about half my traffic.

In theory, I should spend the next couple of weeks posting nothing but pictures of 2D characters in compromising positions to bring that number back up, but that would be base pandering, and I don’t think anyone really wants that.

…

On the other hand, most of the hits I get from search engines are people looking for “naughty anime ” or “cat girl wallpaper” so maybe some base pandering wouldn’t be too far removed from the spirit of whatever it is this blog is all about.  Nevertheless…

So.  Two months in Japan, and now I’m back.  Actually I’ve been back nearly two weeks, but I spent the first week dealing with a truly righteous case of jet lag and the next few days down with a cold, so let’s pretend I’ve just returned home.

That was two months taking classes in an immersion environment, which I think was quite helpful.  It was also two months living in a dormitory with about 40 other people from various countries, which was a good bit of fun.  I was older than anyone else in the dorm by a good 10 years, but I managed to find my own little niche as the slightly creepy old guy and it all worked out OK.

Anyway, so I’m back and I should have some content coming up over the next few days.  Hope you enjoy it.

At one point, in order to illustrate some points the teacher wanted to make about Edo period lifestyle, she decided to show us part of an episode of Samurai Champloo.

I wasn’t familiar with the show.  I mean, I’d heard of it, but I’d kind of lumped it into the “action anime, no cute girls with glasses, no bizarre love triangles, no real reason to watch” category.

Anyway, I don’t use words like “squee” much, but it’s the only word that appropriately describes the reaction from the women in class when the teacher started the episode.

Put lightly, it’s big with the ladies, and it’s not hard to see why.  It’s got the ultimate bad-boy-who-just-needs-to-be-mothered, a silent-guy-with-a-tortured-past, and a perky girl, also with tortured past, who can eat her own weight in unagi without gaining an ounce.  The main characters are all orphans, they all tend to get beaten up or kidnapped or tortured on a regular basis, there’s tons of pure angsty goodness for, well, fans of angst.

So, yeah, it’s a Chick Show, but I found myself quite enjoying the first episode.

A few weeks after that, I was in Fry’s electronics and noticed that they had a DVD box set of the entire series for 45 bucks.

I picked it up and weighed the pros and cons of buying it.  I mean, I’d liked the first episode despite myself, and I was curious to see where the show went from there, but it was 45 bucks on a largely unknown quantity.

So, I checked the price on Amazon and found that it was about the same price on DVD… but only $38 on blu-ray, and that seemed like a good enough deal that I decided to take a chance on it.

I’m going to say that the chance paid off.  It DOES have a couple of real groaner episodes, but the series as a whole was good and the fighty stabby bits more than made up for the fangirl-fodder angsty bits.

It’s also, surprisingly enough, rather educational.  That is, it’s not terribly educational on its own merits, but if you’re studying Edo period literature or history it’s a pretty good way to have concepts reinforced through visual example.  Obviously you need to be careful to separate the actual period stuff from the tacked-on stuff.

Didn’t: actually get any studying for my JPN301 midterm done.  At least I still have four hours until class.

Did: attend the football game.  My school’s team was winning at the halfway mark and it was starting to rain, so I decided to leave and beat the rush.  Turns out we won, which is good inasmuch as it puts everyone in high spirits. As a side note, it took two hours to play half a game.  If they could somehow get the whole game done in that time, I think that would be better; I rather enjoyed the time I spent there but I can’t fathom the concept of spending four hours watching the same event.

Did: Attend the Halloween events on-campus both nights, including going to both dances and participating in the costume contest; didn’t win mind you but when you’re 15 years older than most of your classmates, you get a certain sense of accomplishment from simply being able to keep up with them. 

Didn’t: manage to do a long write up of anime recommendations.  Once I started the task, it grew huge pretty fast.  It’s still a good idea for a post, I’ll get back to it.

Overall, more done than not done.  A good weekend.

1) Write a 3-page REL101 paper.

2) Study for JPN301 midterm

3) Attend a football game.  Yes, you read that right, an actual sporting event.  No, I don’t know the actual rules to the sport, but if I’m paying $3000 a term I’m going to take advantage of a free ticket.  Also, inasmuch as I’m attending a, if I get the term right, a “Pac-10″ school, there’s a good chance that the simulated violence on field will be echoed by actual violence between the players off the field, which should be entertaining.

3.1) For the record, I understand most of the rules to baseball, so I have at least some slight claim to being a man.

3.2) Except the infield fly rule.  I used to know that one, but I’ve forgotten it.

3.3) Look, I was on the chess team in high school, all right?

3.4) Mind you, I was kicked off the chess team because it was – officially – a sports (stop laughing, you) team, and my GPA was less than the minimum GPA required of (again, quit with the laughing) student athletes.

3.5) No, really.

3.6) At least I wasn’t on the debate team.

4) Attend at least one Halloween party at school, again for much the same reason as the football game.

5) Write up a big gosh-darned list of anime recommendations for the blog, because it will let me reminisce about the good old days when Artmic ruled the OVA roost and Gainax actually knew how to write a half decent ending.  So that’s been a while.

6) Sit here feeling rather smug about spelling “Reminisce” correctly on the first go.  Wait, I’m already doing that.  One milestone down!