I liek Squirtles

It's actually surprisingly nice! There are four here, all within ten kilometres of each other, I think. Different bases for different stuff. I live on a small, residential one with little else than the housing, a commissary, a woodwork shop, and a theatre (the stageplay kind!). The other three are all bigger and cooler. There's also a shuttle system that's constantly active and ferries you around from base to base according to a schedule.

I just finished a series called The Bone Season! It's hard to explain, but it takes place in future!London and it's heavily based around an RPG-esque magic system involving ghosts. The first book is a bit iffy, but the second one definitely picks up and is a lot better. They're pretty short, I finished them both within a week. Also, I'm currently reading Warbreaker at the moment, and it's really good. It's a book that takes place in another world where colour and human souls are heavily intertwined, and it has a lot of divine politics and cool magic shit. I'm really bad at explaining books, so you're probably better off googling if either of those blurbs sparked your interest. 8| Oh, also, the Mistborn series is really, really good. Silver suggested it to me, and it's what got me into Brandon Sanderson. It's about the magical manipulation of metal and it's also very RPG-esque, and it's just. Great. 10/10.

Well, I had to get two books, Everything's an Argument (basically a textbook) and Little Brother (an actually good novel). For EaA, I have to take notes on chapters 2-4, then I have to do three exercises in the back of the chapters, then I have to answer another question by our own teacher, then I have to gather 20 articles, tables, graphs or facts and write a paragraph description of each and how they relate to Ethos, Pathos, or Logos.
For LB, I have to read the book and do two of three projects
1. Make a timeline of the events mentioned in the book and write a 4 paragraph answer to 'Is history repeating itself in cyberspace?'
2. Write three journal entries as an imprisoned teenager describing what you think of freedom and security in the circumstances that you're in
3. Do a creative interpretation of the Biblical quote 'The truth shall make you free' (John 8:32)
And that's all due next Monday. Least I've gotten some of it done

Ideally it would be pretty cool, but I don't know a lick of German. I suppose that adds to the experience, and Germans are fairly forgiving about foreigners not knowing their language, especially around here since there are so many Americans. It's still pretty scary, though! I'm not used to leaving base alone.

If it's high fantasy you're after, I have lots of recommendations! I won't dump them all on you, but just about anything by Brandon Sanderson is pretty much gold.

Haha, yeah. It's somewhat astonishing how... oblivious people can be about all that. You don't even learn about Spanish or French explorers until middle school (at least, I didn't), and that results in a depressing amount of people with the assumption that Christopher Columbus is American, or some equally backwards shit. The fact that some people just aren't bright combined with underexposure to actual facts until it's too late to uningrain them generally leads to a lot of shitty misunderstandings.

Because I can actually go places here! The public transport is really good, both between military bases and around the downtown. I don't even have to have a car to get from one end of the town to another, which basically means I can go anywhere I want. Which necessitates a phone far more than did riding my bike to the PX once a week or something, which is how it was before.

Words of Radiance is the second book in the Stormlight Archive, and holy shiiiiit they are so good. They're a thousand pages each, but the worldbuilding is amazing and the characters are incredible and realistic and just. Fucking. It's the best book ever. I don't know if you're in to high fantasy/secondary creation, but if you are, the Stormlight Archive is a must.

I haven't actually read any of those, but someone recommended Miss Peregrine's to me some time ago, so I'll have to get on that. I haven't actually read To Kill A Mockinbird, somehow...? I think it's a required read for freshman English, but I never took freshman English, so I think I got the slip on that. Voyage sounds interesting and should probably be mandatory for everyone to read based on what you've said about it. US history books, I've found, are incredibly biased and try and make the United States look like the Good Guys in every situation and like... I don't know. I think an alternate vantage would probably be good for everyone. I still have friends that don't fully understand what we did to the Native Americans.

I'll have to check it out! I don't have a lot of money for games at the moment (I'm getting ready to buy a phone, since... I need one, now that I'm in Germany), but I'll definitely put it on the top of my list. It seemed like a really cool concept, and now that I know it's great even without multiplayer, it seems worth buying.

I haven't! I just checked it out, and they don't have the book I'm looking for (*soft weeping*), but it definitely seems like a cool site. Maybe I'll finally be able to get my hands on a copy of Words of Radiance. They never have it at the bookstore. I've already read it, though.

Relatedly, read any good books lately?

Hotdish=casserole.

Usually it's a meat and potato dish, sometimes noodles, baked in the oven. It's straight up comfort food, and there are so many different kinds. The most known is tater to hotdish which is ground beef, corn, cream of mushroom/chicken soup, and a layer of tater tots over it all.

Oh, that is nice! I haven't gotten to play Splatoon yet, how is it? Would you recommend it?

Yeah, it especially hurt seeing as it's the only English bookstore within a reasonable radius, so I have to order all my books online now. I was really pushing to get the two most recent volumes of Noragami, since I already have volumes one through three, but I really... don't trust Amazon, for some reason? Normally I don't have a problem, but with something like books, it's really easy to get away with lying about the condition.

How's it been treating you so far?

Ah, no. She's American, but she's also military, so she ended up here, too. (Relatedly, I asked her if she wanted to meet up, and she was conveniently busy the whole time I was in town. They also took the book store out of the PX there so it was just. Shit. I was really looking forward to that fucking book store. :u)

:D Thank you~ you're a super person~

Yep.

It was a regional air pistol match, so shooting~
My category was mostly younger kids though, so I felt really tall and awkward standing next to all of them ^^"

The lack of Hamtaro music is the very reason why I set out to create my own arrangements.

The Vermilion sheet is all three lines that are actually in the song... arranged so they're playable. If you wanted to simplify it, you could probably get away with just cutting out the top line in the treble staff until measure 11, and then using only the top line starting there.

I cannot wait to see that one go onto the main site :D it's been submitted but the next update won't be for almost a month I bet :c

Knock yourself out!
I have a variety of other game music arrangements (mostly from Hamtaro games but I also have a handful of G/S/C stuff) if you want any of those! Actually lemme just link you to my thread it's here

Ah, wait, you ended up getting a WiiU, then?

Uhh, it's going fairly well, I guess. We're in a hotel in Germany at the moment, I think we're moving in this week. I have the grand pleasure of going to the town where my ex-girlfriend who apparently hates me now lives today, so hopefully that won't be shit. I kind of want to see her to... talk things out, since I'm not actually 100% on what the fuck she's so upset about, but something tells me she doesn't really want to see me.

...Oh, whoops. It appears to be on the WiiU, too, so I can probably get it anyway. Conquest is pretty cheap now, and I hear it's really good! I'm really bad at Ace Attorney, though. I recently bought Zoo Tycoon DS for five dollars, which was my first DS game ever, and then bought it for the PC. The nostalgia feels are strong.

Oh, right, whoops. It sounds like fun, still! Even if you're not doing a whole bunch of interesting stuff, you're still making money working at a camp you enjoy, so that's pretty cool.

Oh, I'll have to check it out! I need a new DS game, I've resorted to Plants vs. Zombies. Which admittedly is a fun game, but I've already beat it a million times...

Huh, that sounds really interesting! (Somewhat relatedly, I just saw a bunch of tightropers. One of them was on a motorcycle. It was pretty cool.) If you're staff next year, what will you be instructing?

Thanks!

Hey ILS, we're going through and dealing with old dead referee test battles, and yours is one of them. Since MF's gone we're just going to be closing that one, since even if you were to resume it, replacing him would make things a bit messy. Could you close the battle as a draw in the database? Pick the option for the battlers agreeing to end the battle partway through, and check off the Pokémon that did participate.

Yeah, we were just talking about that yesterday. Like, my great grandpa is twelve years older than his wife, which... when you're like ninety, is okay. But if he were to say something like, "I met your great-grandma when I was twelve!"...

/tongue clicking
Gaming marathon, huh? What was that like? Also I'm curious about the show.