My Plea From The Dark

I watched a movie today.

(irrelevant but it was City of Bones. Let me know if you want a review cause that it a thing I can do!)

Besides making comments about the casting, singing songs that would have been super relevant to the scene and giggling at the puns made, my friend and I noticed a thing. And that thing was that it was really hard to see what was going in.

I kid you not, 1/3 of the screen was, in general, quite dark at any given moment. Yes, I understand that they're in a pre-electricity era mansion and that every single fight scene must be done in the dark and/or while it's raining but do you really have to make it so realistic that it is hardly possibly to tell that the protagonist's hair colour is red, let alone what she's up to?

At first we thought it could be the angle that we were viewing it from thus came the moving around the room and standing on the couch to try and get a better perspective. Which, in retrospect, would have been funny to walk into. It was kind of like Sherlock in The Blind Banker. And in that moment, we were Sherlock. (Can you tell that it is past midnight and I just ate a handful of those mini m&m's?)

well that was quite the tangent

Our efforts were futile and we were subjected to finishing the movie squinting at the screen and having to ask each other what just happened every 46 seconds.

To end this, I know that all the famous movie lighting directors follow my blog religiously so I'm talking to you guys. PLEASE make movies have better lighting. You can make it blue light to make everything seem all dark and depressing but please just give the viewers something to work with and let everything in the shot be visible. We came for a story, not to be awed by the realism of "it's pretty much exactly what it would look like if I was in a cave!"

Thanks.

Book Juggling

Imagine that literally?

In this case, I'm talking about being in the middle of reading multiple books at a time. This is a thing that I do. My average is 3 books at a time.

Why exactly I do this is because I have different moods for what I'm reading. Sometimes I just really want to breeze through a mindless chick lit novel while other times I am so down for complicated subplots and dragons. There are even times when the main character of a book will just be annoying me too much and I will set that book down and pick up another because there is never a shortage of books in my house.

Another reason that just popped into my head is convenience. I am the kind of person that will just start a new book if the one I was reading at the time was in my room and I was on the couch. This way, I can just leave a book in all my reading locations and not have to wonder where I set it down last. You could come into my house and find a book on the kitchen table, beside my bed, on the floor near the couch, in my backpack and even sometimes in the bathroom.

It almost feels weird to only have one book on the go but that rarely happens anyway. There's nothing worse than not knowing what to do with yourself once you've finished a book so being in the middle of two other stories makes the brain shift that much easier. Just as long as no characters have the same name, it's quite simple to keep everything straight in my head.

Question: what are your book reading habits? Are you a big book juggler? Do you have any weird reading locations? Please share in the comments!

Capslock Dilemma

I've done quite a bit of typing in my time as a human being. I've gained the power to type at the speed of light, have discovered all the shortcuts and have felt the pain of attempting French accents on an English keyboard.It's all good: the letters, the formatting, the keyboard. BUT there is one thing that has irked me since the dawn of time.

This thing is that you cannot highlight a portion of text then press a button and either capitalize all of it or uncapitalize all of it. This would be extremely helpful if you had capslock on by accident and didn't notice your mistake until after you had typed a lot already. In this scenario, you'd have to erase everything you wrote, triple check that capslock is indeed turned off them rewrite it all. Now wouldn't it just be super convenient if you could transform it into something else just like you can bold a passage or italicize a phrase.

Seriously, it has always killed me that this is a thing even though it can totally be fixed.

Books I'm Annoyed At Myself For Not Reading The Second They Came Out

This list is bigger than it should be. What usually happens is I'm super pumped for the book but the release date is in like 6 months and since I don't want to go through the emotional trauma of actually thinking about the book and its non-releasedness, I just shove it to the back of my mind and forget about it.

Of course, me being me, I go ahead and forget about the very existence of the book (unless it is constantly shoved in my face and reminders pop up everywhere AHEM John Green books) and it enters the world without me noticing. Suddenly reviews and people raving about it pop up and I'm late to the party. I have to order it at the library and then wait for it to come and then add it to my To Be Read pile and then I can finally join the club of "I have read this book and can now form an opinion about it".

Currently on this list:
Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell
Like why did I not just sit inside a bookstore with this book until I finished it on its release day not caring about the looks the workers give me?? Tumblr is obsessed with it and I am obsessed with Rainbow's books so it would make sense but not I'm just sitting here in confusion while the internet goes on about a Cath and a Simon Snow?

Clockwork Princess by Cassandra Clare
This I'll admit I have just been lazy. I'm not too obsessed with The Infernal Devices books but still, it's the last book in the trilogy. Is it that hard to pick it up, power through the 500 pages and finally get an ending? And then I can make a judgement on whether the ending was too vague and non-conclusionary or completely perfect and two thumbs up. (I'm a major critic of endings. They must be just right or I will be grouchy. Maybe I should delve into that in a later post.)


Inheritance by Christopher Paolini
Again with the endings thing. This is the last book in an intense series so why don't I just read it? It's literally been out for years so the library line can't be that long but I still cannot manage to make myself do it. This one has a common sense reason: it's too long. Yes, I am funny capable of reading something of that length but do I want to expend the effort it will take to read it? Do I want to get stuck in the rut where I've read more than 300 pages yet I'm still not halfway done the book? Or worse, do I want to get sucked into the book and disregard the rest of my life just so I can devour it? The answer is no. My brain is rationalizing all these thoughts and it really doesn't want to go through all the effort and I don't blame. What I'm thinking is that when I have zero responsibilities aka once this semester is over, I will jump into this book. For sure.

I Hunt Killers by Barry Lyga
I literally know nothing about this book except that it's semi popular and it sounds like it would be Dexterish which is a thing that I like. But even though it really intrigues me, I haven't picked it up mainly because I don't know what do expect. Most books I read have been read by many other people that I know and there is usually a general consensus of what to expect from the book. Maybe I haven't done enough research but this book really isn't popping up on my radar enough for me to get the gist of what is going to go down in it. I will read it some day because I would be so upset with myself if I didn't discover a major good book in my own without just sheeping it out and reading the latest bestsellers only. (Example of this happening was Graceling by Kristin Cashore which was one of the best decisions I ever made so doing it again with this book would not make me sad at all.)

If you want to know more about me and my relationship with books, check me out on Goodreads and Booklikes!

New-niversity

I am so pleased with that punny title. Let's all take a moment to appreciate it.

*appreciation*

A thing has happened in my life. I thought it would be a scary thing, but it's not as bad as I imagined. I might even like it!

Frosh Week: Couch Carry (I'm the blonde girl on the right)

My life as a first year mechanical engineering student started four weeks ago and so far it was been going great. I participated in frosh week and got to do weird things, met friends and even made it on the local news! I don't know how it is wherever you are but here, the engineers are crazy and slightly full of themselves. Our frosh leaders painted their entire bodies purple since purple is our unofficial colour throughout many universities and we got to do weird activities such as a picture scavenger hunt with a couch.

This whole experience is exponentially different than high school! For one, I have 5 classes per semester (0 electives though, engineering is that kind of course.), not 4, and they happen sporadically throughout the week with 2 hour and a half lectures plus an optional but super helpful at times discussion and then a three hour lab on top of that for some courses. Making my schedule almost made me cry. Seriously, it was so hard to fit everything in and not have like five hour gaps or super early or late classes. But I managed to have an average of three classes per day, which is a crazy amount, especially compared to literally all my friends who are in some kind of arts program (communications, psych, history, etc.) and complain about their one day with three classes.

Woah, tangent. Anywho, other differences are not having set hours for class. For example, I managed to get most of my classes to start at 11:30am which lets me sleep in to a wonderful time and also get things done in the morning hours. And then there's the thing of my place of education NOT being under 10 minutes away anymore. I used to literally roll out of bed half an hour before class started and get there on time but now I have to check the bus schedules and plan my life around that. The bus takes about half an hour to get to university which isn't actually that bad compared to other people that live at home as well.

Speaking as a shy person, I was immensely pleased with myself for how many friends I made! I think it helped that nobody knew each other; the pre-made cliques were non-existent. Still, I was a little worried since I wasn't living in residence that I wouldn't make any friends but I managed to prove myself wrong. You end up talking to the people around you in your classes, usually just about the teacher and stuff, but then you walk out of class together and realize you have a break together and suddenly you're always sitting together and have each others' numbers and bang: friendship. And before you ask, those phone numbers are pretty much all girl numbers. Just because there's way less girls in engineering doesn't mean that I'm suddenly a hot commodity.

So this concludes my happy post. I'm sure everything isn't going to be this easy going for my full five years but I really don't mind it being this nice right from the beginning.