Non-Actionable Puffery

Rules: If you'd like your own questions, let me know in the comments! I'll ask the first five commenters five questions each. Answer them in your own journal, offer to give the first five commenters their own sets of questions, and let the cycle continue! (Meme originally from ursula.)

Questions from independence1776:

1. How do you not get annoyed by the fetch quests in SWTOR?

I'm sorry to say I don't have an answer to this one! I do get annoyed by the fetch quests.

Like many people, I got into gaming during Covid lockdowns, and I don't think I would put as much time into SWTOR if I started now as I did starting spring 2020. If I weren't already invested, the fetch quests might put me off, too. At this point, I'm playing each story expansion on my main as it comes out, but I don't see myself playing through any of the class stories again or anything; I look back at my past self, who completed all eight class stories and played through the consular storyline five times, and I really don't know how I did it. Escapism was a powerful motivator that year.

If nothing else, mindless fetch quests give you time to think about fic ideas?

2. Favorite Jedi who isn't Tionne?

…Indy, you know me too well.

After a lot of going back and forth, I'm picking Kam Solusar! I love Kam's perspective as someone who was a child in the old Order, was forcibly turned to the Dark Side and spent decades as Palpatine's enforcer, and is now trying to be a Jedi again, learning from Luke – who was never a member of the old Order – at the same time as they work to rebuild the Order. Kam seems to be an eternal background character, despite his incredible potential, and I sometimes wonder if Star Wars fandom would look a little different if behind-the-scenes drama at Dark Horse hadn't scuttled the planned Kam-centric graphic novel.

I'll confess that one of my ambitious, probably never going to happen fic ideas is to write my own version of the Lightsider novel, fleshing out Kam's backstory leading up to his official introduction in Dark Empire II.

3. Why did you decide to go to law school?

Until the summer before my senior year of undergrad, I planned to go into academia; I was a Classics major and Medieval Studies minor, primarily researching medieval Latin literature. But I realized that although academic research is worthy and important, I wanted to spend my life helping people in a more concrete way, and I thought law school would give me the tools to do that.

It's also worth noting that I do have quite a few lawyers in my family, and I'm not sure I'd have thought of going into law if I hadn't been exposed to the profession that way. That's not to say that there was any familial pressure to go to law school; just that I had a good idea of what both law school and (some areas of) legal practice were like, and could be confident I was decently well-suited to the profession.

4. Assuming all colors are available, what color would your lightsaber be?

Green! Not that color always corresponds to calling, but I'm 100% a consular at heart.

5. Favorite place in your hometown?

I was lucky enough to grow up on a beautiful part of the California coast, and my hometown has some magnificent beaches. No good for swimming – unless you brought a wetsuit! – but marvelous places for walking, wading, watching the seals and otters, and tidepooling.

Copyright exam Monday, Property exam Wednesday, Property paper due the 12th, two papers for my Crim Pro simulation class due the 13th...and I'm behind schedule for every single one of them. *headdesk*

I've been fairly absent from DW as things heat up at the end of the semester, and you'll see even less of me until exams are over – but I'm excited to dive right back into fannish things in the second half of May!

(A brief follow-up to these two posts about issues with the COVIDtests.gov rollout.)

Last month I theorized that the reason I (and many other apartment-dwellers) weren't able to order the allotted tests from COVIDtests.gov was that the determination of what was a unique "residential address" was based on the USPS database, and from the perspective of the Postal Service, a building with an internal mailroom is functionally identical to a single-household residence, since USPS itself is delivering only to the street address, not distributing to the individual units.

I recently had an issue with my bank that seems to support this hypothesis. I receive my bank statements electronically, so I never bothered to change my address with my bank from my mother's house (where I lived in the summer of 2020) to my university housing address when I moved here for law school. Then my bank contacted me to say they were sending me a new (tap-enabled) debit card, so I went to change the address so the card would be mailed to me here in NYC – and the bank website refused to accept my address with the unit number. The bank "verifies" customers' addresses with the USPS database, and the database contains only my building's street address, not the individual unit numbers.

Based on the bank issue, it looks like use of the USPS database – at least in my case – gives rise to exactly the same issue seen with COVIDtests.gov.

Two exams down, term paper submitted, and just one exam to go!

The paper was due at 11:59 last night. I turned it in about an hour early, and then spent the next four hours reviewing for my Evidence exam, which was this morning. That said, I'm feeling pretty good about both the paper and the exam! (I actually enjoyed the exam, believe it or not: Evidence was my favorite law school class so far, so spending three hours doing evidence problems wasn't a hardship.) Now it's time to review for Criminal Procedure – it's 9:30 AM on Thursday, so at 1 PM Thursday I'll be done with the semester, and halfway done with law school entirely! I'm flying back to California on Saturday, and I'll be there for three entire weeks with no reading assignments! (Though I am doing some editing work for a professor over break.)

In non-law-school-related news, my copy of the first volume of the official (ha!) translation of Heaven Official's Blessing (Tiān Guān Cì Fú) arrived in the mail today! (I ordered the Kindle edition of the MDZS translation, but I love TGCF so much that I just had to have a paper copy.) The physical book is an absolutely gorgeous object, and both the cover art and the illustrations are amazing. I'll make a post with pictures of the book and some thoughts on the translation itself sometime in the next few days, but I'm so excited I absolutely had to mention it now! Now I just need to resist the urge to dive into it between now and the exam....

And finally, you may enjoy this video of a dog who is having a really good time in the snow.

New liturgical year, that is – it's the first Sunday of Advent.

And speaking of candle-centric celebrations: Hanukkah sameach! It's lovely that the lunar and solar calendars, plus the 7-day week cycle, all lined up this year so that so many people would be lighting the "first candle" on the same night, even if it's for two very different holidays.

atamascolily's comment the other day about not having expected MDZS/The Untamed to become the next juggernaut fandom reminded me of the summer in high school when I went to music camp and everyone else there was obsessed with that Coen Brothers movie O Brother, Where Art Thou?, which I had literally never heard of before.

It was a Celtic trad music camp, primarily instrumental, but we also did a couple of (American) shape note singing workshops. The instructor announced that we were going to do "Go to Sleep You Little Baby" from that movie…and everyone absolutely lost their minds.

The camp was in an isolated area in the mountains with no cell service, so I couldn’t just google what the heck this movie was. And I was an awkward teenager unwilling to admit I hadn’t seen the darn thing. So it wasn’t until I got home that I was able to look it up, and uh...it’s a loose retelling of the Odyssey set in the South during the Great Depression. It’s good, but not what I would have expected a bunch of teenagers to go nuts over – though teenagers attending a trad music camp are admittedly not a representative sample.

So now I'm curious: What are some things you've been surprised by how much people love?

...and I'm profoundly grateful for air conditioning.

It's been a while, hasn't it?

I started my summer internship at the DA's office three weeks ago and it is amazing.
( job stuff )

You know how I said I wasn't going to do an exchange this summer because I had another idea I wanted to focus on? Well….I signed up as a potential treat writer for tolkienrsb, looked at the gallery, and saw an artwork I absolutely had to claim. I'm very excited about this fic! I'm a little nervous, though, as well – you'll laugh, but 5k will be the longest single fic I've ever written, and it's definitely far more than what I could throw together at the last minute, so I'm going to need to be disciplined about working on it.

I'm also working on a shorter fic I hope to be able to finish in time to post it for Jedi June. I have so enjoyed reading people's fics for the fest this year!

And, of course, Happy Pride Month!

I have my second final exam on Friday afternoon. What did I do last night?

(a) Finished reviewing my notes, like I had planned,

(b) Took a practice exam, like I had hoped, or

(c) Watched the first few episodes of Rebels, read both volumes of the Kanan comics, and started in on A New Dawn.

...yeah, it was option (c). I'm not exactly a paragon of responsibility.

I watched the first few minutes of the Bad Batch episode (even though I said I wouldn't), but didn't really get into it. Then I saw what Indy said about it, and somehow that led to me watching the first episode of Rebels (after seeing independence1776 talk about it for years), just to try it out....

It was so good. I was not prepared for it to be that good. I was five episodes in almost before I realized it, which practically never happens for me with TV shows. And the Kanan comics are amazing! Now I know what I'm doing when exams are over! (Hopefully I can hold off until then....)

I have exactly two weeks before my first exam, and I am going to need every minute of that time if I'm going to be anywhere close to ready. (And my fic for maythe4thbewithyou is due a week from today....) I've been insanely busy the past couple of weeks, and things are only going to get more hectic, but at least then the semester will be over and it's on to summer...which will also be busy, but at least it will be a different kind of busyness. And it will be so, so nice to be back in California, and to see my family again!

I'm getting my second vaccine dose a week from Tuesday, and I can hardly wait! It's wonderful to watch the vaccination numbers climbing - right now, 40% of the population of New York State has had at least one dose, and the same for California, and 30% of adults in the entire US are fully vaccinated! There really is a light at the end of this very long, very dark tunnel.

One of the fics I wrote for the maythe4thbewithyou exchange last year was a fluffy and vaguely cringy quarantine fic (of the sort that were multiplying like rabbits on AO3 right about then). It's equal parts amusing and embarrassing to look back on; I hadn't yet fully grasped how devastating COVID would be, and how long the lockdowns would last.

The Internship Hunt is at an end, and I'm over the moon! I got basically my first-choice option: I'll be working at a DA's office in a lovely city in California. The office has a structured program for 1Ls, which is pretty fabulous; the location is great; and it's close enough to home that I'll be able to see family - for what will be the first time in 10 months! (I went to undergrad close to home and saw my mom every couple of weeks, so it's been a big adjustment.) The internship is full time, so that plus the research assistantship will keep me very busy, but I'm excited for both.

(The brief I mentioned on Saturday is also, thankfully, done, though I left it far too late and it was frankly hellish. The less said about that, the better. This was only the initial draft, but at least I have a little while to relax before I get feedback and start revising.)

Anyway, I'm really looking forward to the internship - and knowing what I'll be doing this summer is a huge weight off my mind.