Crimsonietta.net

01. “High school” drama

I’m getting rather tired of this phrase being tossed around, and I know I’m not the only one. It personally irks me (and not just because I’m a high schooler, because I’m getting close to graduation myself, whoot) when people feel that they should classify all immature behavior as “high schoolish” because that is Drama Central.

Now, if that’s not a stereotype, I don’t know what is. I’ve gone through four years of high school, and I can safely say that most of the “drama” I’ve experienced is with people who are currently in college. My high school classmates have been sane for the most part, and even when we have drama, we are able to be mature children and put it aside for another day. Just take theatre as an example. The drama department is not without its drama, but everyone tucks it away and doesn’t let it harm the organization as a whole.

I’m not here to give a lecture on why drama is bad or why drama is good. I’m here to simply rant about the fact that the use of the phrase “high school drama” is terribly stereotypical and hypocritical in some cases. Why not just own up to the fact that drama exists everywhere, and “drama” isn’t something that can be exclusively linked to high school? Maybe I’m just living in the wrong area of the wrong state, and all the drama happens to -not- plague my school? I don’t know, maybe my high school is missing out on something?

02. Sekai no Melody troubles

I really don’t know what to do regarding SnM either. I have no idea what happened. I’m usually OCD with my security measures and my organization, I don’t know what caused there to be some sort of exploit or corruption in my databases or server or what-have-you. And right now I am at a complete loss of what to do. What -can- I do… leave it up and be hacked over and over, or take it down right away and lose everything? It’s not a pretty sight. Goodbye all my hard work, and everyone else’s hard work besides. Goodbye all those project plans and threads we worked our asses off to keep track of and write. Add 2 months’ delay onto our next releases, forget V-day. All you groups out there who love to flame me or SnM or a combination of the two, are you happy now? You’d better be, because this is the only time you’ll ever see me this pissed off.

There are two topics I’d like to touch on today:
1) server problems, and
2) why guys are more fun to hang out with than girls

01. Server Problems
So I get home today and see that my SnM forums are rolled back to about January 10th because of an IPS Driver Error that was irreparable, so we had to pull outdated backups. This immediately causes panic as I have a lot of important files and signups and etc. that are from -after- January 10th that needed to be preserved. Unfortunately, our site was also hacked later today, and the entire server where my site is hosted seems to be a bit unstable as of late. Either way, I’ll need to be moving SnM and possibly Crimsonietta to a new host server. No worries, though, the domain name will stay the same so I won’t run the risk of someone else registering under my domain names.

I’m actually not scared of the main site going down - I have hard copies of all the php files and etc. saved right here on my hard drive. I am scared of the forums going down, however. It’s one of the integral parts of SnM, and if it disappears we’ll have to rebuild part of our community and resources. I feel bad for the new Gen12 members who have to go through this on their first few days here, and I feel even worse for project leaders who haven’t saved their things (myself included). I’m still not sure what will be happening so I’ll keep everyone posted on that.

I just hope this is for the better. When my Compaq crashed, I used it as an excuse to wipe my Windows partition and install Kubuntu (only I kind of messed that up). Since my forums are going down, maybe I should be optimistic and think of this as an excuse to revamp and make it better/more organized? Being a pessimist, though, I’m finding it hard -not- to worry. SnM is one of the dearest things to me, and I don’t want anything to hamper its chances of success =<

02. Why guys are more fun to hang out with than girls
“But Vivi!” you’re probably protesting incredulously, “you’re a girl yourself; isn’t this the most blatant display of hypocrisy ever?!”

Yes, maybe it is. But I’ll tell my story and you will listen, sound good to you?

I used to be very feminist, you see. In 9th grade I was convinced that guys were the scum of the earth. I was convinced that most guys were jerks, that they were insensitive, that they were either lazy and stupid or nerdy and weird. I swore I’d never marry. I swore I’d never ever like a guy in my life (that’s not to say I was lesbian either, mind you, I simply had no preference towards either gender). I would casually throw derogatory looks at the random males traversing the hallways between class periods.

That was freshman year. Fast forward to today, second semester of my senior year, and most of my close friends are guys (or scifair people, but that story will be left for another day). At least, most of the close friends that I actually enjoy hanging out with. My CS class, my Physics class, a couple others affiliated with said classmates, etc. And -why- do guys make such better companions than girls? Well, the answer is simple:

They don’t make a big deal out of things that really don’t merit it.

For example, one of my friends, Michael, attended the first GSA (Gay-Straight Alliance) meeting a while back. Everyone went around the circle telling why they were there, and when it came time for him to introduce himself, he said, “I’m Michael, I’m here for the lulz.”After the meeting, three girls came up to him and lectured him on being rude and blah blah blah. Wow, okay. You can’t handle the fact that someone came to your little GSA meeting for a few laughs. Boo-hoo. I’m going to slit my wrists now, I’m so oppressed and pressured.

Girls in general (not saying all) seem to take more offense to “hurt feelings” and exaggerate beyond belief. Girls do not know how to poke fun at things for the lulz. Whenever I try to strike up conversation with my female friends, it sucks because we’re not even on the same wavelength. Not saying anyone’s less intelligent, but our interests and depth/breadth of conversation is not equal. In CS, though, for example… we pretty much spend the entire class period either 1) collectively complaining about how unjust our teacher is in making us do useless programs, or 2) insulting everyone else. But we all realize it’s in good fun, and no one takes offense to the insults (at least, not in a whiny or exaggerative tone like girls do).

As an HK drama once said, “You can provoke anyone except a woman; they are loud-mouthed, easily angered, vengeful, gossipy, and downright terrible.” Nicely said, nicely said. Until I have more faith in the female population as a whole, I’ll just stick with the few who do not exhibit those traits and the guys in my CS class and beyond, kthnxbai?

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.

Today was a fairly typical day, I suppose. During 6th period we attended the COOL (Career Opportunities on Location) Week training session in the lecture hall, which was a good waste of about 20 minutes. The only thing I learned from the little session is the fact that we have to fill out a little workbook while we’re on site. Right, so I have to fill out homework while I’m supposed to be concentrating on job shadowing and internship? Uh-huh. Anyways, I’ll be working at Sony Online Entertainment with Cassandra Hart, a student from Cedar Park HS, and one from Leander HS. Unfortunately, we don’t get to stay the entire week; we just get two days of oh-so-exciting fun. Apparently we’ll be working with video game development (even though that’s one area of the industry I’d rather -not- join; I’m looking more at network security or software programming), although with two days I don’t know how much we’ll be observing. It’s a 10-3 job, so nothing major.

During 7th period, my French teacher and I continued our reading of Moderato Cantabile (by Marguerite Duras). I noted that I’ve gotten very good at reading French rapidly and the impression of fluency. I still don’t like the novel very much, however. It’s very short and abrupt and would be suited for screenplay much better than a novel. It’s almost too simple, too fake, too humdrum and somber. But hey, I didn’t pick the required AP Literature reading lists. If such was the case, I wouldn’t have put the Death of Ivan Ilych on the English Lit. one either.

Speaking of the Death of Ivan Ilych, my answers to the worksheet for English ended up being rather lengthy! I hope this seriously helps my grade, because right now I’m not doing so well in my classes. I don’t know if it’s because senioritis is finally kicking in (despite my habitual 3am-7am sleeping pattern), or if I decided to focus attention only on science fair and nothing else. My bet is a combination of both. For example, my grades are currently: 108 (Calculus), 93 (Biology), 50 (French), and 87 (CS2). Not exactly the best way to start out my 4th six-weeks grading period. I still need to make up a ton of work too, including the Calculus test (which I’m ready to severely fail) and the Biology test (guaranteed fail).

And yet here I am, sitting on the computer still reading up about Scientology, listening to music, downloading web resources, colour-coding SnM assignments… I can’t wait until its the summer and I can actually do all this and more -without- feeling guilty about the fact that I -should- be doing schoolwork. During the summer I can just sit back and read Slashdot and Digg articles to my heart’s content, Photoshop the days away, mess with my laptop (can’t install Kubuntu; I need XP for recording, rawr), and download all I can get my hands on.

Ahh, if only graduation and summer would hurry up.

Let’s see, when is the next major holiday… that would be Valentine’s Day, right? Or Singles Awareness Day, which I will be celebrating with all of my friends =) For some reason I kind of can’t wait for it to come so I can get chocolate from people and speed up graduation, but at the same time I don’t want it to come so fast because SnM V-day things aren’t anywhere CLOSE to being done!

By the way, is Last.FM working for anyone? It stopped scrobbling my tracks about 6 hours ago, at “DJ Mystik - All My Heart”, but since then I’ve listened to 35 or so tracks that haven’t appeared, including all the music I downloaded off Steven’s torrent. Actually, according to the”Recently Played”tree on the Last.FM application, I’ve been listening to Infected Mushroom’s “The Missing Symphony” for the past hour and a half, give or take a few minutes. There is something about that song that is terribly addictive and I really don’t know what it is.

P.S. Affiliates, sorry I haven’t been commenting back lately - I promise I’ll return all your comments this weekend when I’m NOT swamped with homework to do! Thanks.