Excuses, Excuses (Irish Edition)

Rest assured, dear reader, that I would love to recount my adventures of the past few days to you. It is a fascinating tale of airplanes, exhaustion, and whiskey marmalade, but, unfortunately, even though I've been taking careful notes, they kind of degenerated into random scribbles once the jet lag set in. As soon as I remember what I did yesterday, I'll finish up writing a blog post.

Today, however, I'm going to a butter museum. A better butter museum. Betty Botter bought some butter, but the butter was too bitter…

Ta!

Sleep Deprivation

So I'm in Ireland. Wheee… It's only 10:15, and I am just dying for a good night's sleep. I will post the adventures of my first few days out of the house once I've stopped lying on the floor, making sounds like a leaky balloon.

For some reason, computer is vibrating or something, and it's making it hard to type without touching the laptop itself. When you do touch it, it's incredibly painful and stings. Stupid computer, I do not understand you.

Platypodes and Anime Vampires

Yeah, that's basically what I dreamed about last night. At the beginning I was at some sort of jungle-themed summer camp, and for some reason I brought my fat, fluffy, orange pet platypus. But—oh noes!—pet platypus was injured in some way that was never really clear to me! Maybe it was her foot or something…?

So I took her home (which didn't, in any way, resemble my actual house) and put her in my room, and then I went and sat on the stairs while my younger sister (???) was watching TV. Apparently, she was watching an anime about weird vampire romance. At first I thought it took place in some sort of dystopian future world, but no, the vampires lived in Missouri. Lovely.

And then my mom woke me up and my cat jumped onto my bed. Good morning.

Barcodes Are Easy

So, I couldn't sleep last night. Partly because of my own 'recklessness' or what-have-you, partly because I knew I had to get up in the morning, so, of course, I couldn't sleep.

BUT! One good thing came out of my insomnia. I can now read barcodes! It's easy, really. Kind of like binary, but not at all. And now I will teach it to you.

…

There are fat black bars, skinny black bars, white fat spaces, and white skinny spaces. The skinny white spaces are just the spaces between the numbers, so don't worry about them.

Skinny black bars represent 0's.
Fat black bars represent 1's.
Fat white spaces represent dashes.

At the beginning and end of every barcode is an asterisk. (Like this: *) Asterisks are represented by a series of bars, or 1's and 0's, that are identical at the beginning and end of the barcode. So, the easiest way to figure these out is to compare the beginning and end of the barcode. Take the fat bar/skinny bar combination from the very end and find an identical combination near the beginning. From that place on back is the asterisk, so you find the matching combination at the end and take those away.

Really, just throw them out. We don't need them. They're on every one.

Now you just have the plain barcode. My advice is to write out the 1, 0, and - combination, and then make a mark every 5 numbers. This doesn't include dashes. Actually, if you do it right, there will be two digits, a dash, and then three digits every time.

The combinations are arranged like this:

• 0 is 00-110
• 1 is 10-001
• 2 is 01-001
• 3 is 11-000
• 4 is 00-101
• 5 is 10-100
• 6 is 01-100
• 7 is 00-011
• 8 is 10-010
• 9 is 01-010

(If I ever get a tattoo, it will be of the above list.)

This is only the most basic and common form of barcodes, and it doesn't work on packaging. You can't read your mail wrappers like this. At least, that's what the Wired website told me. There are a few other kids of barcoding, but my arm started hurting after that, so I just went to bed. 

And now you know. 

Happy Father's Day! *waves random flag*

(*Go back to the instructions, you moron; this isn't a footnote!)

A Stroke of Brilliance

So, earlier today I watched the first two Star Wars films. By which I mean, A New Hope (IV) and The Empire Strikes Back (V), not…the other ones. BUT! During the scene In V where Han Solo flies the Millenium Falcon into an asteroid field, I took note of Leia's line, "You don't have to do this just to impress me." I knew that in my current writing project (Untitled), Han would have most likely retorted, "Because I'm obviously trying to impress you," or something along those lines.

HANG ON A MINUTE, GIRLFRIEND.

Lily—Han—Hatter—Leia—Crossover—Sweet zombie Jesus! (Aheh. Heh. Random Futurama joke inserted for your confusion.)

• I had the brilliant idea to rewrite the Star Wars Original Trilogy with my characters. 
• Kitty, the slightly annoying younger sister of my MC's friend, as Luke 
• Hatter (yes-it's-Alice-in-Wonderland-themed-why-you-ask?) as Leia
• Lily, his fiancee, as Han Solo
• Allie, my MC, as R2D2
• Arthur, Allie's friend and Kitty's older brother, as C3PO
• The magician Dune, Kitty's former mentor, as Obi-Wan Kenobi (I had to invent a couple of characters, but now they're actually making the story better!)
• Bianca, Lily's mother and Arthur and Kitty's aunt, as Lando Calrissian (another invented character, but I swear she's gonna be great.)
• Anatolia, the main Big Bad and owner of a company that makes toasters, as Darth Vader
• Maurice, Anatolia's lame-ish brother, as the Emperor
• Aaaand finally: Parker, Allie's boyfriend and a complete geek, as Yoda

I've written just a little bit, but it's already hilarious to everyone who's read the original story. (Including me, that number would be one.)

I am such a geek.