Waterfalls and Moss

Evva's story takes place partly near Portland, Oregon.
Which is where I am right now, visiting family.
Some day I want to drive north, following the trail that Evva takes during her training. It will give me a good sense of what the land and towns are like. Right now, I only have a scattered picture of that route.
We went on a hike today, up near the Columbia River. There are so many waterfalls, and the trees look furry, because they're covered in so much moss. It was a beautiful hike, and I got some good reference pictures. I'll see if I can post some when I get home.
It's the kind of valley that will make a perfect setting for one of the scenes near the end of the book.
Research trips are the best~

Logan

I've written about every other X-Men movie that came out, so I'll continue the trend.
Spoilers for the movie Logan.


I actually saw this a couple weeks ago.
It felt very... tired. You know, aside from all the blood and gore.

I wish the X-Men movies were more cohesive. Professor X dies, then comes back (theoretically in a different body, but it's not a different body). Wolverine goes back in time and rewrites history, and we never see what the new world is like. And in this movie, pretty much everyone is dead. They don't go into any detail about that either.

They sure went to town with the slashing and blood in this movie. Even though this movie had a ton of kids in it? It was like the directors suddenly felt like they had to make full detailed use of Wolverine's claws to make up for lost time.
It was unnecessary.

Laura confuses me. For the first half of the movie, she's shown as basically an animal with no social or communication skills. But then abruptly we realize that's not the case?
Still, I hope all those kids find somewhere safe.

Whyyy did they have to kill everyone?
Aaw man, Wolverine... TT^TT

And to think, just a couple days before, I saw another of my favorite characters "die."
(Seemingly random change in topic)
In Doctor Who, David Tennant is definitely my favorite Doctor.

As I was watching the show, I finished the season with Donna, which was my favorite season . And then moved onto the next season, where there was a new Doctor. It didn't say how he had regenerated, or anything.

I looked online, but I didn't see any special episodes listed between those seasons. So I went on and got caught up with Doctor Who.
Then a few weeks ago, I discovered that there was indeed a couple of special episodes that I had missed (This folks is why wikipedia is NOT a valid research source).
So I checked it out from the library, and finally discovered what happened to my favorite Doctor.

So, First I watch my favorite Doctor "die" and a couple days later, I watch another of my favorite characters die.
Yeesh.

When your Head is Discentegrating

Blehh, I'm sick today and my energy/motivation is very low. I've got several long blog posts that I've been working on, and I've tried to finish one of those. But I can't wrap my head around anything right now @_@ My brain feels so blurry.
But I also don't want to break my 10-post limit again. Heh. So I've got to write a couple more blog posts before March is over. They might both be movie reviews, just because I have fun ranting about them.

Last time I was sick was in Europe. At least for now I'm able to rest for a couple days. But I'm leaving for Portland soon, so I'd better be recovering by then @_@
Every time I get sick, my nose is like a faucet that never turns off.

How can I be so old?

Today is my birthday.
Dad took me to see the live action Beauty and the Beast.
It's one of my three favorite Disney cartoons (musical ones), so I was hoping for this movie to be great, but I was also doubtful.
It was well made. It was very pretty to watch.
But it was pretty much exactly like the cartoon?
There wasn't any original spin on it. The scenes, the dialogue, the songs were almost all exactly the same as the cartoon.
For the new scenes they did add, it felt like they were shoved in there just to try to make you emotional. Which isn't necessarily bad, but it felt forced because they didn't change any of the rest of the movie.

I loved Maleficent because it was different. The creators did their own thing.
But this one wasn't new at all.

I am biased toward the old Beauty and the Beast. And I think I tend to lean toward animation.
Especially since the cartoon gave Beast the potential to be more animal-like than he was in the live action. His animated expressions seemed much more vivid to me (And the ending transformation scene of the cartoon is my favorite).


Whyyy didn't they give Beast his name in this version? It's Adam, right? Call him Adam! Belle was there for a week and she never learned his name?
And Lumiere, Cogsworth, Mrs. Potts and co don't really work as well in live action as they did as a cartoon. (Maan, I so did not catch that was Ewan McGregor @_@ )
I don't think anyone will ever beat the original Mrs. Potts. But I did like the design of Plumette.

Heheh. They addressed the random snowfalls that appeared in the cartoon.
But why did the wolves roar like lions? Those are not wolf sounds.

My dad loved it though. He likes it more than the original cartoon.

Enter the Fantasy World

Awesome video about the impact reading can have on you:

Books Books and More Books~

We did a bunch of cleaning the past few days.
My dad got rid of about 80 books as we were organizing. And you can't tell at all, which says something about haw many books there are in our house.

I fished through them, and found a few that look like good research for future ideas. For my endless supply of ideas.

My family really like books. Dad's been saying today how he'd love an extra floor on the house to have our own library.


I agree. We have enough books already to fill our own little library.
It would be so nice to have the space to organize them and see them neatly shelved XD

~Some day in my own house, I shall have a huuge library~

Until then I will sell a bunch of these on Amazon...

Anyone Want to Write a Guide Book?

There was this great book I got a while ago, called "The Writer's Guide to Psychology."
It explained things in a simple way, so that a writer could include accurate information in their stories.
Because it's very frustrating when you're reading a book with information that is blatantly wrong.

Books like this a fantastic idea.
I wish they would have a book like this for every topic.

Especially for cultures.

I stumbled across a Youtube channel where there's a married couple, and they talk about the cultural differences between their homelands. I've learned some great stuff from them.
They explain simple differences, which I have not been able to find in books.

The books I've found will tell you about history, or locations, of architecture, ex.
But they never explain how the people react to certain things, or their interesting views on different topics.
That's what I really want to know more about, since there are plenty of books about locations and history. It would be such an awesome resource in portraying other countries.

Plus it's always great to try to understand people who are different than you.

Giving a Speech

Wow, I just got word today that I've been accepted to give a speech at school.
I applied about a month ago, with the topic I covered for graduate talk/thesis defense. And I guess they liked it.
I don't really know how big it will be, or who will be there. I don't really know anything about it, actually.
My talk will be about 12 minutes. And I've pretty much got it written. I just need to cut down on my grad talk.

This will be interesting.

When Story-Telling Invades Your Mind

It's amazing how much we're influenced by the stories around us.

There have been a couple times where someone told me a story that I could clearly picture. They probably overlapped with my own experiences, making the images all the more vivid.
After time had passed, I got that story somehow mixed up in my own memories. For a brief while, I thought that it had actually happened to me.

Alternatively, I've had a couple dreams where I'm having a very clear conversation with someone. It's so clear that I wonder if I actually said any of it in real life.

How unreliable memory can be. @_@

You Know You've Been Playing Too Much Breath of the Wild When:

-You wonder how much stamina it takes to get to the top of that hill
-You see something on the ground and think it might be a puzzle
-You want to cut down that patch of grass

Wow, Breath of the Wild is so different than what I expected. I haven't seen any trailers, except the first one, so it's all a surprise.
I haven't gotten this addicted to a videogame in a long time. When I go do normal stuff, I can't stop thinking of the game.
I sucked at figuring out the controls when I started (because some of it was at odds to a game I'd been playing previously). I'm a lot better, but I still push wrong buttons all the time. There are so many buttons...
And I've died so many times.

It's awesome having wolf Link follow me around~

Aah, I love the horses so much @_@
When you get to the first stable, this guy says "I can see you're crazy about horses. It's in your eyes." He was right.
I looked up a bit about taming horses (I've looked up very little about anything so far), and I'm glad I did because otherwise I would have lost my first horse to the digital void (a pretty red pinto I named Poppy).


Shortly after, I got a solid black one, named Rider, and he was trickier. He kept trying to buck me off.


Then by accident, I jumped down into an unexplored desert and ran across a huge black horse with red mane and tail.
I brewed up a storm of stamina items, and I needed all of them, because he did not want to be ridden. But finally he warmed up, and I got Flint. He has no speed, but he is a freaking tank. @_@



I want to register a bunch of horses, but I hear the max is 5. So I'm leaving the slots open for other special horses like Flint. I've heard there's at least one more.
I seriously want one horse of every color.
I'm tempted to try to get Epona, but I kind of want to find my own horses @_@ Though It would be awesome to have Epona...

I want to ride all the different animals too, but that's hard. I can never get all the way up to a goat, no matter what I do. But I did temporarily tame an elk, until I came upon a giant skeleton, which terrified my elk to buck me off and flee.

After I found out I can only have five horses, I started thinking about taming all the horses in the field, so I could ride them whenever. But then I discovered that they respawn, so my pretty black blanket appaloosa disappeared. TT^TT
I would seriously have tried to tame every wild horse in the game...