world of nerdcraft

So I'm sitting at home, bored, and I haven't posted anything here in a while- clearly the best course of action is for me to write a blog post about world of warcraft! I could finish my lab report, but that's no where near as thrilling.

I used to play WoW early in high school using a friend's account. Though eventually he changed his password because only one computer can be logged in to an account at one time and I was playing too much. So about five years later I found I missed it. Hey! I'm an adult! I can make my own decisions and do what I want with my life! Time to whip out the ol' debit card to register for an MMORPG that will slowly drain away my money and my soul! Hurr hurr

It's not that I'm addicted to WoW (I forget about it fairly often) but it's a fun way to waste away a life. Instead of making my own life choices and working towards productive goals, I can work hard benefiting a fictional character! Yippee! But seriously, I have such admiration for Blizzard and the beautiful, evocative digital world they've made so that us losers can frolic like children. I am so cripplingly socially awkward that I'm too afraid to join a "guild" and interact with other players, so I spend much of my time trying to figure things out for myself instead of going to others for advice. Because of this, I've spent literally hours wandering across the land(and sea)scape trying to find my way around. I don't mind at all though, because this warcraft world thingamajig is so gosh darned gorgeous.

I would take screenshot samples of the beautiful environments, but it would take several hours to fly around on my silly little chimera-like mount so I won't bother. However, I'm not above spending the time to log in and out over and over again to get screenshots of my various characters!



This is "Wursten." So-named because that is Jack's favorite nickname for me, and I find it hilarious. Wursten is a troll, and is level 64 (to put that in perspective, the maximum level attainable is currently 85, though back in the day level 60 was as high as you could go!). Wursten is a warlock, which means shadowy evil magic, and the ability to summon demons. I specialize in destruction, which basically just means I light things on fire.

As a race, the trolls are awkward and hunched with 3 fingers on each hand and 2 toes on each foot, and they speak with jamaican accents. Though of course, Wursten is a girl-troll, and all the girls in WoW are designed to appeal to a hetero male audience. The female trolls are straight-backed, with big hips and tits.





This is "Gulsha." So-named because she is a draenei, and the draenei speak with russian accents, so I came up with a name that sounds sort of russian. Gulsha is level 21, and a hunter. Hunters use bows and guns, and tame animal companions to help fight and shit.

(I named my pet after Tony the Tiger...it was the first thing to come to mind)



As a race, draenei are basically goat people. I find it a bit ridiculous how lithe and sexy the female draenei are, seeing as how the males are hulking beasts!








See what I meant about the trolls?

























This is "Beldärin." Not named for anything at all. She's a worgen, which is one of the newer races. Worgen are basically werewolves, as they are "cursed" humans, and worgen players can transform back and forth between the wolf-like form and human form. Beldärin is level 11, and I almost never play as this character. She's a mage, which is happy friendly nature-related magic. Seeing as how my only mage character is level 11, I don't really know very much about mages beyond that...












This is "Çecilia." So named because I love the name Cecilia, and of course that was taken already, but I've found an easy way to get around such inconveniences is to replace letters with the option+ version of that letter (option+o = ø, for example).


Çecilia is a goblin. Like worgens, goblins are also a new race to the world (of warcraft). And they are ridiculously cute. Çecilia is a warrior, which means she fights up close and personal and gets to wear metal armor. Did I mention how cute goblins are? They are so cute.






This is Fiåna. Å in swedish is pronounced sort of like an O, so I used it in place of O in the name "fiona." Fiåna is a worgen, and she is a death knight. Death knights are the undead servants of some evil bad dude you don't need to know about. I don't play this character very much. I basically just included her because her armor is so ridiculous. Just look at that! What is going on with those shoulder pads?!









This is "Çhandra." Yes, I used the ç so I could use that name. Çhandra is a human, and humans are boring. Let's move on...





















This is "Rhöna." Rhöna is a dwarf. She is also a paladin, which means she uses religion and stuff as magic and hits things with hammers. I never really play this character... I'm terrible at hitting things with hammers.
















This is "Éloise." Éloise is a blood elf, which means she is way too skinny and sexy and, in my opinion, the blood elf race as a whole is laughable simply because they look so cheesy. Éloise is a rogue, which means she sneaks around and knifes people in the back, but she has terrible defensive skills and would be KO'd by a bunny rabbit if she had to fight with it fair and square.















This is "Cornëlia." Cornëlia is one of the foresaken, which means she is a zombie. But look, even the zombies have sexy boobs! How does that work?! She's also a priest, which means she uses religion and shit as magic, like a paladin only wimpier.














This is "Çeline." Çeline is a night elf, which basically means she is sexy like the blood elves, but not as skinny. Çeline is a druid, so she does nature magic and blah blah blah. The cool thing about druids is that they can turn into animals.












Like this...


















OMG I'm a bear lol










And so ends the most lame (and boring) post I have ever submitted to blogspot...


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Day 21 — A recipe

What? That's even more boring than world of warcraft!

Something I've been wanting to make for a while (and, of course, Jack has expressed enthusiasm):
Olive Penguins!

AAAAAhhhhhhhhhh

ahhhhhhh = a sigh
aaaahhhhhhh = stress
AAAHHHHHHHH = a scream
AAAAAhhhhhhhhhh = the baritone of a singing quartet


Anyway,

I wanted to make a *~BLOG POST~* (`･ω･´)~
because I got an incredibly high-detail MRI scan of my brain from TMS lab at Beth Israel in Boston. I'm participating in a study for them (Jack and his father were my in, obviously) and they need a pretty darn detailed 3D image of a brain if they're going to do TMS on someone.

So they gave me a copy on disc, and I downloaded some freeware application that reads this kind of file. It's awesome. Great for studying the brain for my anatomy final, too. And because they only did it for a good picture of my brain, it means it flesh renders to this:









Hahahahahahahaha
You can so tell that I was blinking.









it's a fully-rotatable and transverse-through-able picture of my head cut off just below the level of the hard palate.





Also, even better, is noticing that my face is all smushed up from the padding they put around my head to keep me still!




















I had two square cushions pushing into the sides of my head (see the ears/cheeks?) and a plastic bar touching my nose ever so slightly. The cheek thing is my favorite, definitely.





On to the good stuff!




There's an enormous amount of cool things to see in an MRI scan like this, but for the sake of practicality I'll just illustrate a few of my favorites.



1.
















You can see the turbinate bones in my nasal cavity! The turbinate bones help warm air as it's breathed in, as well as humidify and filter. They are one of the synapomorphies of Mammalia. Woohoo!



2.
















This program yet again proves its worth by including the ability to see a varying degree of averages of all the images taken. You can see the arteries in my neck! Jesus christ!



3.














This is crazy. This is about half way averaged of all the images. It's interesting to see the brain nestled comfortably into a head. Its natural habitat, and all that.



4.



















Right before cutting into the eyes, the dorsal rectus muscle that moves my eye is visible, as well as some nice blood vessels.



5.



















You can see the optic chiasm perfectly! Half of the signals from your left eye get sent down the left fork, and the other half goes down the right folk. Same goes for your right eye. The optic chiasm is the name for the place where they cross over.
Also, you begin to see some of the squishing effect of the pillows lol.



6.













Going a couple centimeters deeper, it's those arteries we saw before coming up from either side of my spinal cord and snaking between my cerebrum and cerebellum. I'm assuming they're the carodids, but I don't know the human circulatory system as well as I do the shark...




I wish there was a way to turn it all into a gif animation, but I don't know how I'd even begin. Oh well.




EDIT: I just figured out you can do 3D multilayer volume rendering!! Check out my cheek fat! Hahahahaha



















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Day 20 — A hobby of yours


This totally counts as a hobby.

XXXO

I haven't posted in quite a while. Losing steam, perhaps.
I suppose that because all I do is read Reddit I've run out of downtime to ponder and kill time with a blog. I'm so sorry, legions of fans who read my blog religiously (there are so many!!!!!! I swear!!!!!!).


lol.



There's been discussion of me getting a tattoo in the past, and I'm still thinking about it.
I've added shoulder tattoo to the list of places I'd possibly get one done. I have rather round/wide shoulders, which I think would do well as tattoo perches. Also, I think that I'm not really the kind of person who could pull off a tramp stamp. There are only a handful of those rare individuals who look good with them. I'd rather not risk it. However, I think I would do well with a shoulder tattoo.

Placement example. I would not get this of course, it was just the easiest thing to stamp onto a photo quickly. I still like the wolf skull idea. Perhaps a wolf skull with some adornments on my right shoulder? Left shoulder? Don't know yet. Hmmm...













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Day 19 — A talent of yours

mmMMMMMMMMmmmm... B-)

Day 18 — Whatever tickles your fancy

I hate all this fancy tickling going on in this list... :C


Using my usual method of googling "whatever tickles your fancy":


This totally tickles my fancy.

Lamia

Ahh! I was just going through my monster project from comp lit and couldn't find this story on here! Did I forget it?
This is the Lamia story from my comp lit class...

+ + + + + + + + + + + ++++++++++++++++++ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +


For three weeks Adam had seen the ghost lingering in the back corner of his closet. She wasn’t a particularly threatening ghost, but still Adam would call his parents every night to come upstairs and tuck him in and turn on the nightlight.

“Adam, you’re a big boy now, aren’t you? Does my big first grader really need me doing this every night?” his mother would coo before kissing him goodnight. Adam would shrug and try not to look at the closet door.

Around midnight the door would slowly creak open, sometimes waking Adam up. On the nights it did, he would glance over at the source of the noise to see a woman hunched in the closet. She was fairly young, with long, tangled hair. Adam couldn’t tell much else about her, because she was always balled up into a fetal position and rocking back and forth. Adam was torn between being afraid and pitying her. She was obviously distressed, but he was too scared of the ghost and he didn’t dare approach or try talking to her.

After almost a month of this, Adam awoke to a new sight. The ghost was no longer in his closet. Instead, she was sitting in the shadow between the closet and the dresser, much closer to his bed, still rocking back and forth rhythmically. Adam barely managed to keep from crying out. He shut his eyes as tightly as possible, willing himself to sleep.

Adam hadn’t been able to sleep, and while his mother was pouring the orange juice he nodded off at the breakfast table. Annoyed, his father looked up the newspaper—he’d been reading an article about the bloody murder of a local high school girl driving home from a concert—and raised an eyebrow. His mother was furious. She knew “the ghost lady” keeping him awake all night was just another way of saying “playing videogames.” Adam was sent to bed early that night to prove a point, and locked in his room to prevent him from sneaking back downstairs to his Playstation.

Adam was petrified. He mimed sleep for a couple hours, and when the soft creak of the closet door pierced the silence, he opened his eyes. Adam didn’t even have time to scream before a soft, cold something covered his mouth. The woman was kneeling beside his bed, hand over his mouth, other hand brought in a hush motion to her lips. She was very beautiful. Her tangled hair fell in mossy curtains around his face and he saw that she was crying.

“Why are you crying?” he whispered when she lifted her hand. “Are you sad?”

She said nothing; she opened her mouth, moving her lips in what appeared to be the motions of speech, though she made no sounds. She closed her mouth, shaking her head. She continued to cry, dripping fat clammy tears onto Adam’s cheeks. She bent forward, kissing his forehead.

“You don’t have to be sad,” he whispered, “I’ll be your friend. You seem like a nice ghost. Let’s be friends.”

She only cried harder, bending down to kiss his cheek and then his neck. Adam turned slightly to look at her. She raised her head from his neck and he saw his own blood spilling from her mouth, running down her face. Adam screamed once and then the house was silent.

rawr

I've not been very good about posting lately, so here's this.




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Day 17 — An art piece (painting, drawing, sculpture, etc.)



Drawn on my folder during Autreat.
(If it's too illegible, those are the lyrics to Light My Fire...)

Autreat, Autism Speaks, Blah blah blah

Disclaimer: This is a really long entry. Sorry.


So I just returned from Autreat, a sort of "autistic retreat."

I met plenty of interesting people and promptly forgot their names.
One of the many things I observed were the apparently stark differences between myself and those with more pronounced symptoms (I would say "low functioning," but I've learned that many regard that as an offensive term). What was curious about that aspect of my time there was that I can see myself so clearly in these individuals.

As I explained to Steve Silberman of Wired magazine, to an outside observer, it would appear that someone like me is very different from those further along the spectrum. I pride myself in my ability to the imitate speech tone and inflection, body posture, gesticulation and facial expressions of "neuro-typicals" (though I hate that term; no one is truly "NT" in my opinion), whereas many people at Autreat were much more noticeably autistic. Lack of tone variation, expression, coordinated motion, etc combined with what is referred to as "stimming" and verbal tics make many autistics stand out from the crowd, so to speak.
This is the reason people like me (high functioning autistics, aspergians, or whatever term you want to use) often go undiagnosed.

However, autism really is a spectrum deal. Many of the traits that are thought of as classic "low-functioning" autism are traits that I share, just to a lesser extent. I "stim" quite a bit, though I save the obvious stuff for when I'm alone (bathroom breaks, red lights, etc). Anyone who's spent time around me knows that I can't help cracking my knuckles, playing with my hands, rubbing my palms up and down my thighs as though I'm cold, squinting my eyes tightly and blowing air out my nose. These aren't nearly as odd as hand flapping, hence the necessary bathroom breaks. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, and public hand flapping, or spontaneous moaning and squeaking noises warrant attention.

And even though I am able to imitate inflection and expression, there's a substantial difference between my communication and the communication of someone who the autistic community would call an "NT." I didn't even fully recognize this myself until attending Autreat and seeing the few NTs amongst those with ASD. The difference is astonishing.

There's a sort of flow that accompanies NT speech that even the most practiced autistic seems to lack. Voice, facial expression, body posture and gesticulation are all smoothly integrated, and seemingly as unconscious as coughing when food gets caught in the wrong pipe. Watching two NTs having a conversation is like watching a well acted film, or like music. There's a noticeable rhythm, an ebb and flow, that can't be faked. There are no breaks in the conversation, at least not the kind that accompany an autistic conversation; there are no hesitations to calculate cause and effect of an action. It's really quite amazing to watch.

The closest comparison I can think of is learning Latin. Imagine learning Latin in high school; learning to translate, memorizing roots and vocabulary, guessing at pronunciation. Then the high school Latin students are transported back in time to ancient Rome for a day. Would they be able to communicate with the Romans? Probably. Would they be able to communicate like the Romans do? Probably not. The might be able to understand a conversation, or at least the literal translation, but they would have a hard time creating a natural, native-sounding response.

I know that body language and facial expression, etc, are all obvious parts in communication, but I'm using only language here because I feel that language is a larger part of communication.
I've read over and over that non-verbal cues are "98% of communication," but personally I think that's bunk. If that were the case, deaf people wouldn't need sign language, and Ariel would have been able to woo Prince Eric no problem. Perhaps it's just because I don't even think about others' non-verbal cues, so I don't consider them essential. Perhaps it's because I'd like to think that I'm not only picking up on 2% of what people are saying to me. Though I do think that even the most charismatic, well adjusted "NT" would disagree with the 98% thing; it's probably closer to 30%.


I also learned that a large portion of the autistic community absolutely hates Autism Speaks. I understand their reasoning; Autism Speaks' method of raising donation money is to play off the pity of NTs outside the autistic community. They put much weight on a "cure" for autism, and even the front page of their site reads, "Autism prevalence figures are growing. We need answers," as though autism is some sort of infectious problem or a disease.

Autism isn't a disease. People think of it this way because it is called a syndrome, but a syndrome is "a pattern of symptoms that characterize or indicate a particular condition." It doesn't have anything to do with whether a thing is a problem or not, it's just a collection of traits shared by a group that can be named.

Autism probably can't be cured, and if it can, it shouldn't be. It would be like curing men of being male, or curing people who like high-fructose corn syrup. It's not like depression, which has only a handful of causes and a handful of effected areas. Autism effects so many parts of the brain that, to quote a classic autism slogan I'm fond of, it's not a processing error, it's a different operating system.

However, this doesn't mean that we should cease all research into autism treatment (TMS, for example). "Treatment" and "cure" are very different things. A treatment wouldn't get rid of autism, it would simply help ease some of the problematic symptoms. I can understand the autistics who take pride in their identity, but autism isn't quite like homosexuality. If you asked a gay man if he wanted treatment, he would probably ask, "for what?" If you asked an autistic if he wanted treatment for, say, sensory issues, he would probably accept. I for one wouldn't mind no longer being terrified of and made sick to my stomach by loud noises, or being blinded by normal daylight. I'm sure non-verbal autistics would love to be able to communicate. Many autistics are labeled as "retarded" despite being incredibly intelligent, simply because they have trouble communicating. If you know me, you know I'm pretty clearly verbal, but it would be very nice to figure out how to ease whatever block sometimes exists between my thoughts and my speech. I can't imagine struggling with that daily.

I think that demonizing Autism Speaks is a bad move. What we should be doing instead of protesting them is talking with them. The majority of their staff aren't autistic; they have autistic family members, but it's very different from living it. As long as Autism Speaks uses pity to raise funds, they are going to be hated by many autistics. All they need to do is change their advertising campaign. Autism Speaks is a huge organization, and throwing away a valuable resource like that without trying to cooperate is simply immature and reckless.




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Day 16 — A song that makes you cry (or nearly)


Hard to Concentrate - Red Hot Chili Peppers

Hustle Bustle
And so much muscle
Our cells about to separate
Now I find it hard to concentrate
And temporary, this cash and carry
I’m stepping up to indicate
The time has come to deviate and

All I want is for you to be happy
And take this moment to make you my family
And finally you have found something perfect
And finally you have found…

Death defying, this mess I’m buying
It’s raining down with love and hate
Now I find it hard to motivate
And estuary is blessed but scary
Our hearts about to palpitate
And I’m not about to hesitate

And want to treasure the rest of your days here
And give you pleasure in so many ways, dear
And finally you have found something perfect
And finally you have found…
Here we go.

Do you want me to show up for duty?
And serve this woman and honor her beauty?
And finally you have found something perfect
And finally you have found
Yourself
With me...
Will you agree to take this man into your world?
And now we are
As one.

My lone ranger,
The heat exchanger
Is living in this figure 8
Now I’ll do my best to recreate.
And Sweet precision.
And soft collision
Our hearts about to palpitate
Now I find it hard to separate.

And all I want is for you to be happy
And take this woman and make you my family
And finally you have found someone perfect
And finally you have found

All I want is for you to be happy
And take this woman and make you my family
And finally you have found someone perfect
And finally you have found…
Yourself.