The Vent Thread

[gotegenks]

shit, and right next to a gas station....SHIT COULD'VE ESPLODEDD!

you're alright i'm guessing? any injuries? any passengers?

[MycathatesyouAMV]

Just a friend went to hospital for glass cuts, but they are out now.

[Castor Troy]

While I had a fantastic time at AX2012, there are few personal gripes I want to bring up.

I have massive trouble sleeping at cons. Period.
I've going to cons for 12 years and this has always been a recurring problem. I think the majority of the problem is that I'm really excited when I'm at cons and there's a billion thoughts racing through my head while I lie down like amvs, what I'm gonna say to people when I see them, myself running panels, etc. This literally lasts HOURS when I'm lying in bed and have my eyes closed and before I know it, the sun comes up with me not getting much sleep or any at all. During AniMagic 2002, I couldn't sleep for 24+ hours and my friends noticed I was swerving on the freeway on the way back home.

I also think it also has a lot to do with "It's hard to sleep out of my own bed" syndrome. I tend to turn and toss a lot when I sleep and having other people in the room really makes me self aware and restricted. I end up trying to settle in one position which drives me insane and I absolutely have to turn myself left or right several times before I actually go to sleep.

I tried to take some sleeping meds at AWA 2005 for this and they didn't even help one bit.

Con food is either disgusting, overpriced, and in tiny quantity.
I usually want to save money at cons and try to eat at the much cheaper places like Dennys. But this year, when Yue, Kisanzi, irriadin, and machina21 went to Dennys for lunch, the food was absolutely disgusting and it was a chore to finish. What was worse, was the terrible feeling in both my throat and stomach until we finally went to subway for dinner which washed it all out.

On the last day, we decided to have lunch at the food trucks and while the food was pretty good, IT WAS TOO SMALL which made me incredibly hungry until after we left the con.

I usually don't have a large appetite, but I was really concerned with how I was gonna eat the entire con especially with the 10 million amv events I had to go to. I was more concerned with the food I wanted to buy rather than anything from the dealer's room.

Anime fans are fucking assholes.
I mentioned this during the AX AMV Contest thread, but when I was watching the contest, there were 2 jackasses behind me saying how my video deserved negative votes along with l337meetwad's DBZ video. They also couldn't shut up the entire time during the contest and were constantly bashing other videos or fanboyingly praising others. You can only imagine how sweet my revenge tasted when I won Best of Show.

Anime fans tend to have this stupid mentality when they're at cons, they feel so high and mighty saying things that they wouldn't get away with in real life.

One thing I love about the con atmosphere is the fact that you can feel expressive about your fandom in front of thousands who share it. HOWEVER, being disrespectful in front of ANYONE, including fellow anime fans still makes you look like a jackass, con setting or not.

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Despite these rants, I still had a good time, but I just needed to vent these out.

[gotegenks]

i can't believe i posted here without seeing the massive college debate...

i think i am going to take a year off with a dead end min wage job saving up, i think it might be too late to get into an ideal school at this point anyhow.
also, i did community college the past year (i'm a year out of high school) and it was just meh. Was thinking a regular university would be different but i feel like it's something i can't go into half-assedly or lethargically if i'm going to be successful at it.

[Flint the Dwarf]

Community college is definitely "meh." Here are the things to consider from my experience, and the experience of those close to me. Community college is basically like a less annoying high school. It's not quite as boring most of the time, but it comes close. There are two main drawbacks for me. The first is that neither the students nor the teachers seem to care very much about it. You don't get a lot of good discourse, and teachers are either unreasonably strict because that's their style, or totally lax. The other is that it really isn't as much of a community as a college with a campus that most of the students and faculty live on.

What I think it's good for is just getting the boring, easy pre-reqs out of the way at a fraction of the cost. The only difficulty is making sure ahead of time that those credits will transfer. That's not difficult if you've got a good counselor who can help you out, but you might not be very lucky with that. For example, this helped my brother a huge deal. He took a few semesters of community college, combined with some online classes (including some wildlife certification stuff). He was a high school dropout with an awful GPA who later got his GED. Taking these classes at community college bolstered his credentials, putting him near 4.0, and getting him into a a pretty good, reputable environmental liberal arts college at a severely reduced cost (although he also has a wife and kid, which federal aid takes into consideration).

Not saying it works this way for everyone, but there is a pretty big difference between community colleges and universities. It just seems, from a financial standpoint, much better to utilize community college to get rid of those pre-reqs, and then transfer to a more serious college.

[Qyot27]

While I'm not really one to talk since I've had to put any and all higher education on hold since the end of 2006, it would probably greatly help in the case of a community college to find one that actually aligns itself with local universities. The one I attended (even though it had expanded to a full four-year college a few years before I went there) has partnerships with a whole slew of universities in the state, but the most prominently highlighted partnership is the one they have with USF.

[lloyd9988]

i can't believe i posted here without seeing the massive college debate...

i think i am going to take a year off with a dead end min wage job saving up, i think it might be too late to get into an ideal school at this point anyhow.
also, i did community college the past year (i'm a year out of high school) and it was just meh. Was thinking a regular university would be different but i feel like it's something i can't go into half-assedly or lethargically if i'm going to be successful at it.

So we both have the same idea, then.

However, I think I was talking with my brother about this, and despite how much he pushes me to go to a university, he did say something that was helpful

"Do the thing that will save you more money down the long run"

Basically, go to a university if you believe it'll save you more money and you can finish it on time. I don't really know much myself since I'm in the same position as you but I know that I want to go to a university and come out of a university with a degree I like and a job that I enjoy and see myself doing for most of my life. Well. . . I'm glad, at least, that I'm not the only one who is thinking the same thing

[dj_ultima_the_great]

Although I had a fun day out yesterday, I just can NOT take this heat. My friends and I went to Madison and up to State Street. I've never been there before, so when my best friend said, "walk State Street," I did not realize that this meant parking in a distant garage and trudging up inclines in order to get to a long sun-baked street. It was in the upper nineties, and out-of-shape, fat-ass, low-tolerance-for-heat kind of person that I am, I was pouring buckets of sweat before we even decided where we were going to eat upon arrival. It was the stifling kind of heat where you feel like you can't breathe, and trying to climb hills really does take your breath away on top of that.

Then, of course, when I'm overheated, I can't eat anything, and so I ended up getting a mango smoothie and that was about all I could manage. All the while, I'm trying really hard not to get angry at my best friend, because she didn't realize that I didn't know State Street's setup, and it's not like she purposely picked a hot day. So, attempting to keep all of the irritation out of my voice, I simply said that if she wanted to do this again and it was similar weather, count me out.

I just hate when something you can't control ruins an otherwise perfectly great outing. I looked and felt disgusting all day after that - and that was pretty nasty, because I was out until 3:00 AM due to attending a midnight showing of Spider Man.

I really fucking hate summer. Give me bitter cold winter any day.

[Ileia]

I really fucking hate summer. Give me bitter cold winter any day.

A million times this. Our apartment has been an average of 100 degrees Fahrenheit for the past week. Right now it's 12:36am and 101 degrees. I am absolutely miserable and I can't do anything about it.

I'll take one blizzard, please.

[dj_ultima_the_great]

You're in the Chicago area, right? So you're getting the same weather as me, pretty much... except probably worse, because big cities friggin' suck like that.

You know, back in the old house, before the central air was fixed last summer, I used to do this thing where I would take one of those gel packs that you put in the freezer and use for icing down injuries, and I would wrap it once in a towel and then just sit on it. (That was the lowest maintenance way I could think of to use it, since it doesn't really require re-positioning or balancing on the back of the neck, etc.) It helped relieve some of the misery. Of course, it only lasts about an hour or two, but we had a bunch of the things.

...reading that back to myself, though, it sounds a little weird. Icing down my ass for weather relief.

Hey, it worked.