I just read a fic that managed to do a crossover between Pirates of the Caribbean and Firefly, with the pairing of Norrington/River, and it was actually pretty good. Crack pairings FTW. (Another crack pairing I read recently: Tseng/coffee. Then again, most pairings that involve inanimate objects end up being amusing one way or another.)

I've also been on an icon-making spree. I've discovered the wonderful world of brushes, and it's about on the same level of awesomeness as when I discovered textures and LOL GRADIENT FLARE YAY. I'm also experimenting with different methods of coloring rather than just hitting "color enhance" which is what I used to do because I was lazy. Needless to say, this means I've uploaded some new icons, one of which features a brush that I made myself. I'm rather proud of my mad GIMP skillz.

Meanwhile, when I haven't been being somewhat of a geek I've had my first three days of life as a high school senior which is pretty awesome. Most of my classes are great. AP English 12 pretty much pwns AP English 11, I've decided... although we haven't really done much so maybe I'll have to withhold that judgment? Although the fact that we took three tests over the first two days of school was not fun. Latin continues to be awesome; there are only 11 of us and since when is Latin not awesome anyway? Contemporary American Studies is also a lot of fun; today in that class I learned that our generation's children are going to be hippies that will probably hate us. Awesome.

I've also recently discovered that I have somewhat of a fetish for guys with books, which suddenly explains my love for Zexion, Sawyer, and Genesis. And I suppose Desmond, because of the whole "Our Mutual Friend is the last book I'm going to read before I die" thing. And Ben, although I don't love him in the sense that he's attractive. (I still can't think of anything that explains my irrational love of Sephiroth, though, except for the fact that he was actually a pretty nice guy before he went batshit.)

... Yeah, why am I talking about things like that when nobody cares?

Now I've got to take a shower before going to the senior class lock-in, which will be loads of fun because what's not fun about hanging out with your class all night with games and such? 

So here's what I did while putting off finishing my homework:

( colorbars! )They're surprisingly easy to make; the hardest part is resizing all the images (especially for the FFX one because I had to capture all the images from video files). Then after that all I had to do was go into GIMP, adjust the colors/brightness/contrast if needed and then run a rainbow gradient across it. Stay tuned; I may be making more.

I've also uploaded a couple of new icons that I made this weekend, including a new default one. I'm rather proud of my texture use on this one, and also that on this particular batch of icons I refrained from being all LOL GRADIENT FLARE YAY!

Only five more days left of school, and then exams. This year has gone by so fast. We should be getting our schedules for next year this week. I'm taking AP English Literature, Honors Latin IV, Honors Precalc, Honors Physics, whatever the quarter-long senior theology courses are (I know two of them are World Religions and Ethics), Contemporary American Studies, and Anatomy, in case anybody wants to know.

I also went to graduation yesterday. I was part of the water crew which was pretty much the best job ever because we were under a tent and surrounded by water coolers so we could have a drink whenever we wanted, and we got to socialize with a lot of people. Except we were the one job that didn't get any recognition over the announcements this afternoon thanking all the students that helped out with graduation. PEOPLE WOULD HAVE GOTTEN DEHYDRATED IF IT WASN'T FOR US, DAMN IT.

Over the weekend I found a good site for watching movies online. It pretty much has every movie you could ever want to watch, except it directs you to brightly colored Asian websites to watch them. So on Saturday I watched Serenity (the movie sequel to the TV show Firefly) and it was pretty awesome, except WASH FRICKING DIED and then right after it happened I had to go eat dinner... it was almost as bad as the time I had to go on a tour of the Ben & Jerry's factory in Vermont right after Dumbledore died. Anyway, next time I have a large chunk of time free I'm going to watch Fantasia, which I haven't seen since I was probably between the ages of 8 and 10 and pretty much one of the only reasons I want to watch it is for the Nightmare Fuel-inducing "Night on Bald Mountain" segment because let's face it, that song is awesome. (& of course there's the Sorceror's Apprentice segment with Mickey Mouse and the moving brooms.)

Oh, and I started organizing one of my storylines into an actual story. Let's see how far I can get with it.

Oh, Mr. Twain, you are quite the hardcore snarker: Mark Twain offers some literary snark on James Fenimore Cooper and the Broken Twig Series Leather Stocking Tales. Hilarity ensues.

Also, my computer has twice tried to convince me that it is infected with viruses, but I know that it is lying because the dialogue boxes containing said information include phrases such as "WARNING!!!!" which makes me know it is the internet playing tricks because any self-respecting program would not abuse punctuation like that. Yeah. I can see through your lies, Mr. Internet.

I've also uploaded some of my own userpics just for a change. & I make much better icons in GIMP now, so I thought I'd make use of them.

I downloaded myself a new image editing program, GIMP, which works kind of similarly to Photoshop but it's FREE. So I've spent the past 2.5 or so hours making icons, mainly experimenting with textures and lighting effects. I haven't uploaded any of them yet because I suffer from enough icon ADD as it is, so maybe once I get tired of my current yoinked set of icons I'll start using my own again. But I can share them, icon-post style!

( shinyyy icons )
Also, I've discovered a shiny new (well, not so new since it only aired in 2002) show called Firefly, which is a sci-fi show that tells the adventures and misadventures of the crew of a transport ship called Serenity. It's pretty awesome and has some really amusing moments. Also, all of the characters are awesome which is good too. Anyway, I was going to watch an episode before going to bed, but it's getting rather late and I don't know if I can stay awake.

I switched up my userpics again because I have a short attention span. They're almost all yoinked icons now, if you haven't noticed, because making my own with Paint seems so insignificant now after having worked with Photoshop. (Want a gift idea for my next birthday? Photoshop please!)

Well, what's new with me. I got accepted to the St. Paul's Advanced Studies summer program, which means that I'll be gone for the second half of June and all of July. I'm taking a class on Ancient Greece, which was my third choice I think but should still be fun. But don't fear, I will be around in August.

I also finally managed to trim down my junior speech to under three minutes (it clocks in at around 2:40, which is very good because now I don't have to worry about going over the time limit). It took so long to edit it down (I ended up having to cut about two minutes out of it, after having it be over four and a half minutes when I read it in class for the first time), so I'm rather proud of this. I read it for my family today and they liked it (except my mum was all, "You use such big words! What does misanthropic mean?" and I'm like, *facepalm*). So yeah.

I really hope my brother isn't using the Playstation right now because I've been having major Final Fantasy X nostalgia moments lately and I kind of want to go on my partial file which is somewhat towards the end of the game and play just for the heck of it.

I think I have icon ADD. It's just that I keep finding new shiny icons that I can't help but use. (This particular one reminds me of being on Splash Mountain with Andrew last summer: during the part when you're going uphill before the big drop, and it's all creepy & glowing eyes & darkness & DANGER TURN BACK, and he says to me, "I bet this is your laughing place.")

Also, I hate slow downloads. Or big files that take a long time to download. I want Photoshop NOW. I don't want to wait an hour for it to download when this is supposed to be good internet. I also have a feeling that it's all going to download and turn out to be really crappy and/or not what I want. I am not a patient person, mmkay?

Last night I had the sudden epiphany that there is part of my brain that still thinks that it is 2005. Don't ask me how I came to this realization, because I could never tell you how I reached that thought, but it makes total sense. I mean, when I think about people and how old my mind thinks they are, it's always approximately the age they were in 2005. But 2005 was a really good year. I'm glad part of me still lives then.