a personal journal, that's also public - you do the math
Giving Against Me! A Try
I've listened to quite a bit of their songs, but am visiting a couple I never heard before, but have heard of.
Nix that, iPhone battery is about dead :/
I am feeling pretty good, caffeinated.
AVGN Time
I am watching the Castlevania series of videos (which are some of the best). AVGN, of course, is Angry Video Game Nerd on YouTube. My favorite one being Sword Quest. Pretty epic gaming adventure, there. Just spending the day inside, relaxing, watching the sun set outside my window. AVGN is one of my favorite series on YouTube, and I have been watching for 10+ years and proud of it! I haven't seen every episode, though, I admit – but the first 110 episodes I have seen, I think. I started in 2010 with Die Hard, then Metal Gear, then Castlevania 2 Simon's Quest (Cinemassacre's first video).
I haven't played the majority of the games he reviews (though I did have an NES back in the early-90's). The main ones for me were The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Bros, Metal Gear, and a hell of a lot more but I have never played a Castlevania game :/
Nowadays, I am not much of a gamer, at all. I have no consoles, nor systems, or even a television set. I was making a Pong game on Scratch 2, but other than testing that game, no gaming.
Another confession: I never owned an SNES or GameCube or Sega Genesis. I think all the systems I have owned were (in order):
I suppose I had a PC capable of playing games at one point (a Frankenstein of a tower) and played Sim 1, 3, and 4 quite a bit. I think I maxed out every skilland occupation for a single character on The Sims 3 at one point. HOURS lost on that game. Days, even.
OK, enough out of me. Be back in a bit!
Grocery Shopping: DONE!
Got a ton of good stuff. Plus Jimmy Johns. Was reminded of the band, Rise Against, who I haven't listened to in a long time. Now it will be a day spent inside, mostly.
Notion.so doesn't seem to want to work on the RPi anymore, which is fairly strange, but considering the app won't even launch on the iPhone 6, I am assuming it is something on their end. If I had Notion working properly, I would work on the “Prosperity” section of the untitled e-book I am writing. I already have ~4K words written, and there should be a bit more before itwill be ready to go as an e-book. But...yea.
Head out of here in 45 minutes....
.....for grocery-getting. Damn nice day outside, and it warmed up! The difference between yesterday and today in terms of mood is outstanding. Not in a manic/bi-polar way, just better all around.
Gonna try to “get stuff done” today, but other than grocery shopping, I will not have much else I need to do. I have to wait until January 2 to buy textbooks for STLCC, so I can't really buy them early and flip through them, and I will buy notebooks, pens, highlighters at that same time.
Officially Starting My Day
Like, officially, officially.
And I feel good about it! I am going grocery shopping around 2 which is good because I need food!
I got nothing else to say right now
7:37 AM
And I just had breakfast. Very cold morning in STL. Ironically, I just read that Greenland ice is melting at 5x's the rate it was in 1990. This opens up a lot of situations where there is more seasonal flooding, unfortunately. I know that Missouri (which is affected by proxy, if not directly by the ocean) reached “Flood Of 93” levels this past Summer (no mention of it on the news, of course. Global warming gets next to zero attention in the American media).
Speaking of media concerns – I basically never watch the news anymore. I don't have cable (or own a television set) and I don't look up news on the Internet. The news (which is all bad) doesn't penetrate the “happiness bubble” of Instagram, either. I just don't care for any news because all news is bad news (especially in the United States). They do so for a reaction. So you “talk” about their dumb clips and then people look them up on the Internet, see their (the news publication's) ads, they increase their “views”, and profit. That the bare bones “jist” of how it works. Pretty god damn awful if you ask me.
Anyway, be back in a bit
~ $280
...for the three (3) textbooks I will need for Spring 2020 semester at STLCC. I can have them shipped to me, but I will more than likely go and pick them up myself. Luckily, there are only three books for three classes (instead of say three books for each class!). General Psychology is the most expensive (of course) at $140 for a new book.
Of course these prices (and books) can change because of the reasons I stated in the previous blog post. Gonna be fun (the semester, not paying a lot of money for textbooks).
Books
In terms of the college textbook varietal – I need to buy (at least) three of them on or around Jan. 2, 2020. Jan. 2 is the deadline that the college profs can decide which books they are going to use for that semester. They are pricey, but I can get them used, so, not as pricey. I am going to look up what I will need in just a minute here (to get a ballpark idea, even though the prices and books could change).
Doing this now
Decided to...
....listen to all of Telepathic With The Deceased and have a nice sodie after a cuppa coffee and start this day off STRONG! Got my tobacco pipe going with D&R Vengeur tobacco, and just sort of having a music appreciation type of morning. A friend sent an old photo of me when I was 7 years old, wearing a black leather jacket, and some skull-type shirt and holding up an unknown cassette tape as he stood next to me holding up Motley Crue's Shout At The Devil and wearing a D.A.R.E. To Keep Kids Off Drugs shirt. It is a very 90's photo. Taken circa 1990. Little did I know of all the cool shit that was “underground” at that time because the Kerrang Magazine issue (from 92? 93?) that highlighted the Black Metal scene in Norway had not come out yet (obvs) and there was no Internet to speak of, so I didn't know of “Black Metal” and when it came to our musical tastes (me and my friend in the photo), we basically relied on the tapes his dad had, and the heaviest stuff (which we gravitated to) was Overkill, Motorhead, Black Sabbath, and Iron Maiden. No Venom or Old Funeral in that catalog, lol. In fact, I don't think I got into heavy(er) stuff until 1994 when I started with NIN and Marilyn Manson. My parents were completely mortified, but I didn't care at all. But Black Metal didn't come about (for me) until 2013 when a friend made a YouTube video called “Music Has Never Changed” – and in that video he said he listened to Black Metal (which I didn't know). So, I started Google-ing around and looking stuff up on Spotify and that is when I found Old Funeral “Our Condolences”, and Burzum “Fallen” soon after. It sort of grew (my tastes) from there. I listen to many genres, but metal will always be my favorite.