I have just completed a renovation of sorts of my lounge room. Tax return money came in and it was decided that furniture, TVs and theatre systems needed to be purchased. I now have a 50inch plasma. 50 frigging inches! It was colossal when first setting it up, but now when we watch it we’re kinda like.. meh, it’s kinda small now.

Really, if you think a tv like that would be way to big in your lounge-room, believe me, after a while it becomes rather normal.

So I am so so happy about the way that room is set up now. I bought a mid level Yamaha system for home theatre, it’s nothing fancy pants but it is plenty for my non audiophile ears. I want quality sound, but don’t want to blow my neighbours heads off either.

The first thing that flashed on my pana plasma was Captain Jack, much nicer in full faced wide-screen 50 inch goodness mind you, very nice. It really is lovely. I feel kinda weird for loving my electronic equipment so much. I have no insecurities in getting over them and giving it a big squeezy hug, cept for the fact that it might get smudged. It’s still in a very fragile “new baby” state you know.

I am playing second finger notes on violin now. Still love it, although when I sound crap, I get pissed off with myself and want to sound amazing. I need to be ultra patient, I’m not that at all.

I am thinking about a change for shadowmuse, renovate the website, new wallpaper and stuff. I guess I go through phases with needing to write and I need to write more often now but this design and all this feels jaded. I need a fresh page.

Anyway what I wanted to say is that, as you may have already noticed, I only post once or twice a month these days, sometimes more. Hey I might just have a week where I’ll go crazy with an every day post but for the most part I post when I want to get a point across, or when I feel like archiving some part of my life. This website will probably never disappear because it’s my space (not to be confused with the combined my space which hurts my eyes and heart every day I hear another teenager has fallen victim to its tackiness) and my space is going to live here, on the internet, in a little corner and just exist.

If I feel like posting about something I will, If I don’t then I don’t. If you ever want to talk at me you know where to contact me, I’m always around.

I am on the computer every day. Don’t get me wrong, this is not a woe is me, my life is just too hectic and I don’t get a single second of time to get on the computer.. Hells no. I really don’t know what I would do without my beloved computer. Geezus I spent three grand on it, it’s loved.

But yes, I am online every day, and if there is a day on which I am not, then you will know that existence as we know it is over. I’m usually playing some form of MMO or simming or furiously writing.

I’m three quarters of the way through my tertiary prep course and hopefully that means 2009 will mean my enrolment to USQ.

Yeah I’m busy again. I like this busy though. It’s busy with all the things I want to do, finally.

Long live Nintendo, except for that Wii idea.. eh

So my first day is uneventful, as are all first days. I’m doing random stuff to pass time while I am assuming they are preparing to teach me what I’m suppose to be doing, no, not really.

All I did all day was file unimportant papers. The boss wandered around the room asking everyone if they had any work for me to do and everyone said no so they dug up the oldest dustiest stack of papers they could find and asked me to sort them…. Which took all of two minutes and I was back asking for more things to do. Boss looked positively bewildered

I went home that day accepting the fact that the first day is always a bit all over the place and things would be better tomorrow. Wrong again.

The next day I spend all day doing the same thing and the next. At one point I yawned 25 times in about 3 minutes. This was ridiculous, the place just had no work for me. I wondered why they even hired me, they seemed to just want a temp.

The bottom line came, when walking into bosses office, after a grueling two minute stacking task and asked if there was anything else they wanted me to do. Boss looked around the room, picked up a stack of papers and shrugged.

“Not really…”
Held up his mug and said
“How good are you at making coffee?”

What a joke..At that I left and I intend to give the employment “assistance” office a piece of my mind about these employers.

Besides that crap, I have taken up violin lessons. It’s something I have always always wanted to do but never “got around to it” . I bought a beautiful second hand 4/4 violin and I had a great first lesson yesterday. Teacher said she was shocked I had avanced so much during one lesson and that I was a natural *beams* That made me feel a lot better.

I absolutely love it and it does feel natural to me. I’m have a bit of trouble with bow position and not hitting other strings when changing notes but other than than, it’s amazing. Why did I wait so long to learn?

I have no aspirations to be a professional, I just want to be a professional in my own mind hehe. I want to be able to play and play well, just as a gift to myself.

There are a few things I don’t like and have become increasingly pissed off about in the past week but you have to remember, we are a couple of days past launch, there are going to be bugs, there are going to be place holders and falling through the ground and getting stuck between trees and stuff. Yeah I’ve done them all.

The funniest was getting wedged between a ritual sacrifice stone table and a tree limb, right in the middle of where the big boss spawned.. nice.

I will try to manage some screenshots this week. I’ve been so obsessed with it that it hasn’t really crossed my mind to document anything. You know I was fretting that I would have to reluctantly go back to WoW for my mmo fix recently but thank god.. Not that I don’t love the WoW, it’s just getting monotonous.

Tabula rasa was my flavour of the week for a while also but I’ve cancelled that account for now because I can’t really afford to pay for three

Aaanyway, I have more updates n stuff but for now I’m going off to lunch.

Some people are getting a little crazy about it. There’s the hardcore PVPers who are tearing their hair out trying to figure out the best way to get to the top the fastest so they can strut around proudly displaying their virtual biceps, pounding their chest, you know the drill. I wonder how many people will be killing themselves to 80 and wondering why they can’t remember any other details in the game other than a whole lot of blood. Eh, each to his/her own.

I myself am just eager to get in there and find out what the fuss is all about. I hope I’m not disappointed, I don’t think I can take much more waiting. I’ve been waiting forever for the Enhanced edition of The Witcher to come out before even installing the game back onto this PC. The date keeps getting pushed back, bla bla.. There’s always a pushing back of the dates!

I’m also looking forward to Spore and Disciples III. I try to occasionally play the original Disciples on this PC which is quite amusing, everything moves at light speed. James is dying to get his hands on Fallout 3 but has a bit of a wait for that one too. >_<

So I’ll just keep trying to not get killed on Crysis for a few days until I can begin downloading this gargantuan AoC file. Hopefully internode mirror the AoC client so I don’t waste three quarters of my dl limit

It’s funny, I can play Crysis with almost everything on high but my Sims 2 game now has a lovely stutter in it, which I believe is something to do with the dual and quad core processors and that Eaxis are aware of the issue. Hope they get to fixing soon!

It’s like I’m six again and it’s Christmas eve. Gah, where is that download link!

I had a job interview today. I had to call the job centre to find out what the business name was because yep, I forgot to ask So I finally find the place and go through the motions. I hate interviews. I sometimes envision the occupants of the room to all start singing and dancing a-la “Once more with feeling”. Sometimes of course that makes things worse.

This time I must have been exceptionally boring as the manager interviewing me kept glancing out the window, lost in his own world. I felt like perhaps if I answered his question of why I want the job with “because my life is meaningless without you” followed by a lingering kiss blown his way probably wouldn’t even have swayed his attention from the obvious riveting shrub outside the window.

It was the same old. Where do you want to be in five years, why do you want to work for us, tell us about your life.. Don’t you just love those questions? If I get this job I’ll be shocked, but hey, it wouldn’t be the first time.

With a $581.96 price tag

I seem to have decided that my motto in life will now be “Get them before they get me” I don’t let anyone get close or allow myself to be unguarded in case I get hurt. I really don’t want to be any more hurt than I am so I strike first and give everyone a reason to avoid me. That way, I don’t get hurt and I believe I have won the battle.

It was hard mapping out the first quarter of my life to the psych this morning. I had a lump in my throat the entire conversation and the tears almost came. It feels cliche and old, but it has to come out.

He seems kind enough but distant enough for me to spill out the pain, let him sort through the mess. So far he concludes that most of what I do is self-inflicted, but I knew that already, that’s why I keep doing it.

Depression is really pissing me off. I have absolutely no control over what these chemicals in my brain decided to feel at any given moment. My mum called me to go for Coffee a week back. I was fine, feeling great, looking forward to a Cappuccino and a talk with my mum. As soon as I got to the plaza I felt like shit. I felt like everything around me deserved to die. Please don’t be offended by what I’m saying, the things you feel and think when you are feeling that low can’t really be reasoned with, its demented.

The world melted around me into blurred windows and hallways and my vision never swayed from that immediate spot in front of my left foot. My conversation with my mother was monotone and uninteresting. I felt sick, I felt like the coffee I would order would make me ill so I ordered tea and a gluten free chocolate muffin.. which made me feel sick. I wanted to cry, scream, throw the tea at the fucking window. Destroy everything around me and curl into a ball, let the darkness envelop and take me away from it all.

When I left the plaza, half way home, I felt great. The feelings of hopelessness faded and I started to use some positive tools to help me push everything back and see clearly. It was a facade of course, but it works to get through the ugly until I actually did feel great again.

I can’t finish anything. I can start it with enthusiasm but it never ends. It just sits there idle and unimportant until I realise what I’ve neglected and feel terrible. It’s destroying my world from the inside out again and I need it to stop.

I don’t want to be always sad, I don’t want be afraid of voices and what they are saying about me or of approaching anything or anyone. I don’t want to have random thoughts about horrible accidents and the many ways in which one could no longer exist. I don’t want my world to completely fade out and be left only with a fantasy and illusion.

I get scared sometimes that I’ll never get back. I hope something comes of this, and I am sorry if it bleeds through to this blog, which of course is unavoidable. I just want to see it laid out in front of me, pick through the pieces and choose what I want back, banish the rest, and live my life.

Dante

Jacob

Connor

Rhys

I think I might throw many a video on this here site, or come what may. Wow having a total ADD moment and now picturing Ewan Mcgregor singing lovingly in my ear.

I also thought I might take this opportunity to totally pimp my new rig. Yes I’m a girl and I love building computers possibly even a little bit more than playing with them. So I had a little money to spend, ok a lot of money to spend, because let’s face it, if it’s between eating for a week or having a new GPU cooler, then I’m going for the cooler. Rather ironic considering my last post about the hypocrisy of supermarket spending, but you get hat.

So I took pictures, yeah, I was actually going to take pictures of all the boxes the stuff came in, then I thought that to be a little overdone, however now not having pictures, makes me kinda wish I did take them. So, right, Pictures. This is he and some random pics of the desk and room because I got snap happy. Excuse the angle of internal pics, I was over moving the case on this particular day so didn’t get too good a shot of what’s in there. Don’t get down on me for the mess of cables, I am yet to tame them

These are the specs
Case - CoolerMaster Stacker 832 (loving on this case so hard)
MB - Abit IP35 PRO (as with the case, I am yet to find something that isn’t amazing with this board)
CPU - Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 775 3.0Ghz with Thermalright Ultra-120 cooling and Scythe 120mm (Yet to overclock its brains out but at the mo temps max out between 38 and 40 celcius)
PSU - Corsiar 750watt TX (because its power we crave)
RAM - 4GB Corsair (2 x 2GB Xms2)(Standard decision really. was going to go with the Crucial ballistix but wanted to get everything from the same place, trust issues you know? So went with Corsair)
VID - EVGA 8800GT 512MB Superclocked Ed.with Arctic Cooling Accelero S1, Rev2 and Turbo Cooling Module (My temps on this card never go above 38 degrees celsius. Even with photoshop, Bioshock and Itunes running simultaneously.)
HD - Samsung Spinpoint 500GB HD (I love these drives, quiet as a mouse)
DVD - Samsung 16x DVD Writer (eh, I broke the black faceplate off my Liteon drive so had to buy a new one)
Other stuffs
Standard floppy (it fills a void)
2 x Arctic Cooling 120mm PWM fans plus 2 standard coolermaster blue led fans (fans are ultra quiet. The whole system is, even with the stacker’s mesh sides)
Vista Home Premium 64bit (because I wanted to utilise directx10)
Sound - IP35s HD on-board sound - it’s as good as and sometimes I think better than my creative cards I’ve had before.
Viewsonic 20inch widescreen monitor
Logitech g9 mouse
Razer Mantis speed mat

I also have to plug the stores I bought from as they are always really good to me.
PC Maniacs - for being the best customer service on the net.
PC Case Gear - for having everything I want whenever I want something, at a good price, with cheap cheap express shipping and always without fail, getting it to me next day.
Digital Yes - Bought the majority of my stuff from them. They are always fast and always good with the contact. When I ordered this system the E8400s were on back order everywhere in Australia and didn’t look to be coming in until a month from order. A couple of days later I received the first package with almost everything in it, then a second with both drives AND my 8400s.
ITS Direct - I haven’t shopped there that much but I’ve seen the guy around a few forums and he seems genuine and always willing to do good by the customer. I bought the 8800s from here. My experience with these guys so far has been nothing but good. Fast and direct.

The other two stores that I look at buying from occasionally are Centrecom and Mwave. I have bought from both in the past. Always fast postage from both although sometimes I pop things in my cart at Centrecom and have to cancel and buy from somewhere else, simply because the postage would be waaay too much for me in a regional area. They are great though, constant contact and fast service.

James’ computer is almost identical to mine but he preferred the Antec P182 case and a slightly smaller HD. The Antec is really squishy so be warned that just with the Ultra 120 and GPU cooling in this it is really cramped. There’s only one drive in there but I can’t imagine what it would be like with three or four.

Anyway that’s it. Just a bit of a window into my obsession