Who am I? Where am I?
Aug. 3rd, 2015 10:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sarea
Last week really took a toll on me. I'm so exhausted I barely even remember what happened. It was like a terrible nightmare that's on the edges of my brain, waiting for my conscious to acknowledge it. Or maybe... I'M STILL SLEEPING. /gasp
It seems that whenever I put off writing about something, stuff just keeps piling up until I get overwhelmed and put it off, then never write about it. This is a very bad journaling habit, and Future!Me hates me for it because then I can't use LJ as a way to remember when stuff happened. Sorry, Future!Me. :(
I will thus attempt to catch you all (and my future self) up on recent goings ons.
The 1D concert on July 15: Had a great time, but next time am just going to fork over more money to get better seats. We already had really good seats -- close to the stage (but on the side), and didn't have to deal with the crowd on the floor, but... seriously, if I'm going to go to a concert in person, I'd like to be able to watch the performers with my own eyeballs rather than on a freaking monitor. I had enough of that at Comic Con, and it was the same general experience at CenturyLink. ><
adelagia and I got there early-ish. The concert started at 7pm, but we didn't particularly care about the opening act (Icona Pop). We got there around... 6, maybe? We had some extra tickets to the concert that we weren't able to sell, which kind of sucked, but that'll teach us to get all ticket-buying happy in the future. We had dinner at the restaurant across the street from Safeco/Centurylink (why the EFF would you build two high-traffic stadiums right next to each other?!), but the food was pretty forgettable. We got into the stadium in time to catch most of the Icona Pop act, and it seemed never ending. Not that they weren't good, but they weren't who we were there to see, you know?
Little did I know that way more waiting was in store. I don't know whether they do this all the time, or whether they were waiting for the sun to go down (which, in Seattle in the summer, is late), but One Direction did not come onstage until 9pm. We waited for soooooooooooo long. And because it was open air at Centurylink, I got cold. :( I'd stupidly left my jacket in the car, so ended up buying a totally overpriced sweatshirt for $70. :/ (YOU'RE WELCOME, BOYS.) It's just a plain black sweatshirt that you could get at Wal-mart for like $10 probably. It has a logo on the left side, nothing too ostentatious -- it's not like I wanted their faces full-blown on the back or anything -- but seriously, if you're going to charge me that much money, work a little harder on the design.
But I guess they don't really have to; they sell all their wares, anyway. After the concert there was a giant mob that went straight to the merchandise area, creating a nearly unpassable blockade of people. I literally had to force my way through between excited fans to get anywhere. Had I fallen, I still would have remained upright, that's how closely we were packed together. Crazy.
Becauseadelagia and I are old, we obtained ear plugs from one of the ushers. They saw the desperation on adelagia's face and took pity on her. I would have been okay with just the music, I think, but the fucking screaming fangirls were intolerable. It is PIERCING. My eardrums couldn't take it. I removed the ear plugs when the boys were talking (except when they shouted "SEATTLE!!!!!!!" causing all the damn fangirls to scream) and during the songs I liked, but kept them in otherwise. (I had a scare about 10 years ago at a Green Day concert where I had ringing in my ears for days, and never want to go through that again.) Liam kept mentioning the noise record at Centurylink and how he wanted to beat it, and it was like OMG SHUT UP LIAM.
It was really awesome being able to see their specks in person (I tried not to watch the big screen too much, but really, I had no choice because I wanted to be able to see their expressions, and that was so not happening from where we sat). Unlike what came before, once they started playing the time just whizzed by. I was trying to record the first few seconds of every song in order to remember the set list that way, but my phone quickly filled up (since I hadn't taken any of the Comic Con stuff off of it), so that was a fail. Luckily,adelagia took notes.
The set list:
Clouds
Steal My Girl
Little Black Dress
Where Do Broken Hearts Go?
Midnight Memories
Kiss You
Stockholm Syndrome
Ready to Run
Better Than Words
Louis and Niall chat
Don't Forget Where You Belong
Little Things
Night Changes
18
No Control
Alive
Diana
What Makes You Beautiful
Through the Dark
Girl Almighty
Story of My Life
You and I
Act My Age
Little White Lies
Best Song Ever
It was a pretty good roundup, though I'm really disappointed they did not play two of my favorite songs from Four: "Fool's Gold" and "Fireproof." I'm not surprised by the former, but I am a little by the lack of the latter.adelagia has been keeping apprised of what they're doing at other concerts, and apparently they do switch it up, because "Fireproof" was played somewhere else. -.- Niall sounds good in person on "Where Do Broken Hearts Go?" which is awesome... they should always write songs for him in that key because DAMN he sounds good. Speaking of Niall, he seemed to take on the bulk of Zayn's verses, while Liam and Harry also did some... Niall did not sound nearly as good on those verses as he does with his own, so clearly it was an adjustment for him. Overall, I'm also a little disappointed that we did not get anything "special," like the Indianapolis (?) audience got, when they played their new surprise single "Drag Me Down."
The best moment at our concert came when Harry apparently couldn't hold it in anymore and called out this one couple who were, according to Harry, making out the entire time. Someone even did a GIF set of it, and it is glorious. :))))))
I'm definitely glad we went, though as I mentioned earlier, if I did it again I'd pay more for killer seats. Also, before Comic Con, I was happy about the idea that the concert was only two days later. "How convenient that I can just roll that into my overall vacation!" I thought. But actually, I really would have preferred for it to be later. It was just too much stuff to do in a short period of time; I could have looked forward to it more had I had more of a buffer.
I have Seahawks training camp tickets for this Saturday! Woot!
So this is the story of MY life... For months and months (at least six or so), I have been holding out for a really old iPad that I could do very basic things with. I didn't care what gen it was; I just wanted one so that I could play Pandemic on it and was willing to pay about $100. Only it turns out that even really old, used iPads go for more than that, so it seemed my search was for naught. I finally gave up last night and bought an iPad Air 2 (because that's how I roll -- if I can't get the oldest, most decrepit thing available for cheap, then I want the newest, most expensive one around :P). And guess what came through the sell-buy list at work this morning? That's right, a $70 1st-gen iPad, which was exactly what I'd been waiting for. SERIOUSLY, WHY DOES STUFF LIKE THIS ALWAYS HAPPEN TO ME??? (Edit: Apparently life was trying to save me from myself, and I wouldn't let it. I now have the iPad, and it turns out that I didn't do the necessary research. Gen 1 iPad doesn't support iOS 6 and up, which means that I am not able to use most of the apps at the app store, which require at least iOS 7. >< SIGH Edit 2: Actually, there's a way you can hack it, but it's no guarantee that every app will work that way, so I returned it for a refund. The guy was very nice about it. It was in really nice condition, too; really wish I could have made it work out.)
Saw Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation yesterday. I was not impressed. Disappointing because I thought the last one was really good, and this one had been getting stellar reviews. It was all right; not bad, but not great, either. Jeremy Renner was completely wasted. I don't know why they even bothered to have his character back. In MI5, Brandt proved himself to be a good field agent who shouldn't have been relegated to desk work, which was something he imposed on himself. Last we saw, Ethan was giving Brandt a field mission. But in MI:RN, Brandt was basically The Suit. He had no action AT ALL. WTF? Jeremy Renner is an action star in his own right, it was something they'd established for his character, and yet... nothing? He's just a desk jockey like Alec Baldwin? A big let down and also made no sense. The plot was kind of convoluted, the way Alias and James Bond plots are, but okay. I actually really liked Rebecca Ferguson, who I'd never heard of before this... but MI movies tend to do that with their female characters.
It seems that whenever I put off writing about something, stuff just keeps piling up until I get overwhelmed and put it off, then never write about it. This is a very bad journaling habit, and Future!Me hates me for it because then I can't use LJ as a way to remember when stuff happened. Sorry, Future!Me. :(
I will thus attempt to catch you all (and my future self) up on recent goings ons.
The 1D concert on July 15: Had a great time, but next time am just going to fork over more money to get better seats. We already had really good seats -- close to the stage (but on the side), and didn't have to deal with the crowd on the floor, but... seriously, if I'm going to go to a concert in person, I'd like to be able to watch the performers with my own eyeballs rather than on a freaking monitor. I had enough of that at Comic Con, and it was the same general experience at CenturyLink. ><
adelagia and I got there early-ish. The concert started at 7pm, but we didn't particularly care about the opening act (Icona Pop). We got there around... 6, maybe? We had some extra tickets to the concert that we weren't able to sell, which kind of sucked, but that'll teach us to get all ticket-buying happy in the future. We had dinner at the restaurant across the street from Safeco/Centurylink (why the EFF would you build two high-traffic stadiums right next to each other?!), but the food was pretty forgettable. We got into the stadium in time to catch most of the Icona Pop act, and it seemed never ending. Not that they weren't good, but they weren't who we were there to see, you know?Little did I know that way more waiting was in store. I don't know whether they do this all the time, or whether they were waiting for the sun to go down (which, in Seattle in the summer, is late), but One Direction did not come onstage until 9pm. We waited for soooooooooooo long. And because it was open air at Centurylink, I got cold. :( I'd stupidly left my jacket in the car, so ended up buying a totally overpriced sweatshirt for $70. :/ (YOU'RE WELCOME, BOYS.) It's just a plain black sweatshirt that you could get at Wal-mart for like $10 probably. It has a logo on the left side, nothing too ostentatious -- it's not like I wanted their faces full-blown on the back or anything -- but seriously, if you're going to charge me that much money, work a little harder on the design.
But I guess they don't really have to; they sell all their wares, anyway. After the concert there was a giant mob that went straight to the merchandise area, creating a nearly unpassable blockade of people. I literally had to force my way through between excited fans to get anywhere. Had I fallen, I still would have remained upright, that's how closely we were packed together. Crazy.
Because
adelagia and I are old, we obtained ear plugs from one of the ushers. They saw the desperation on adelagia's face and took pity on her. I would have been okay with just the music, I think, but the fucking screaming fangirls were intolerable. It is PIERCING. My eardrums couldn't take it. I removed the ear plugs when the boys were talking (except when they shouted "SEATTLE!!!!!!!" causing all the damn fangirls to scream) and during the songs I liked, but kept them in otherwise. (I had a scare about 10 years ago at a Green Day concert where I had ringing in my ears for days, and never want to go through that again.) Liam kept mentioning the noise record at Centurylink and how he wanted to beat it, and it was like OMG SHUT UP LIAM.It was really awesome being able to see their specks in person (I tried not to watch the big screen too much, but really, I had no choice because I wanted to be able to see their expressions, and that was so not happening from where we sat). Unlike what came before, once they started playing the time just whizzed by. I was trying to record the first few seconds of every song in order to remember the set list that way, but my phone quickly filled up (since I hadn't taken any of the Comic Con stuff off of it), so that was a fail. Luckily,
adelagia took notes.The set list:
Clouds
Steal My Girl
Little Black Dress
Where Do Broken Hearts Go?
Midnight Memories
Kiss You
Stockholm Syndrome
Ready to Run
Better Than Words
Louis and Niall chat
Don't Forget Where You Belong
Little Things
Night Changes
18
No Control
Alive
Diana
What Makes You Beautiful
Through the Dark
Girl Almighty
Story of My Life
You and I
Act My Age
Little White Lies
Best Song Ever
It was a pretty good roundup, though I'm really disappointed they did not play two of my favorite songs from Four: "Fool's Gold" and "Fireproof." I'm not surprised by the former, but I am a little by the lack of the latter.
adelagia has been keeping apprised of what they're doing at other concerts, and apparently they do switch it up, because "Fireproof" was played somewhere else. -.- Niall sounds good in person on "Where Do Broken Hearts Go?" which is awesome... they should always write songs for him in that key because DAMN he sounds good. Speaking of Niall, he seemed to take on the bulk of Zayn's verses, while Liam and Harry also did some... Niall did not sound nearly as good on those verses as he does with his own, so clearly it was an adjustment for him. Overall, I'm also a little disappointed that we did not get anything "special," like the Indianapolis (?) audience got, when they played their new surprise single "Drag Me Down."The best moment at our concert came when Harry apparently couldn't hold it in anymore and called out this one couple who were, according to Harry, making out the entire time. Someone even did a GIF set of it, and it is glorious. :))))))
I'm definitely glad we went, though as I mentioned earlier, if I did it again I'd pay more for killer seats. Also, before Comic Con, I was happy about the idea that the concert was only two days later. "How convenient that I can just roll that into my overall vacation!" I thought. But actually, I really would have preferred for it to be later. It was just too much stuff to do in a short period of time; I could have looked forward to it more had I had more of a buffer.
I have Seahawks training camp tickets for this Saturday! Woot!
So this is the story of MY life... For months and months (at least six or so), I have been holding out for a really old iPad that I could do very basic things with. I didn't care what gen it was; I just wanted one so that I could play Pandemic on it and was willing to pay about $100. Only it turns out that even really old, used iPads go for more than that, so it seemed my search was for naught. I finally gave up last night and bought an iPad Air 2 (because that's how I roll -- if I can't get the oldest, most decrepit thing available for cheap, then I want the newest, most expensive one around :P). And guess what came through the sell-buy list at work this morning? That's right, a $70 1st-gen iPad, which was exactly what I'd been waiting for. SERIOUSLY, WHY DOES STUFF LIKE THIS ALWAYS HAPPEN TO ME??? (Edit: Apparently life was trying to save me from myself, and I wouldn't let it. I now have the iPad, and it turns out that I didn't do the necessary research. Gen 1 iPad doesn't support iOS 6 and up, which means that I am not able to use most of the apps at the app store, which require at least iOS 7. >< SIGH Edit 2: Actually, there's a way you can hack it, but it's no guarantee that every app will work that way, so I returned it for a refund. The guy was very nice about it. It was in really nice condition, too; really wish I could have made it work out.)
Saw Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation yesterday. I was not impressed. Disappointing because I thought the last one was really good, and this one had been getting stellar reviews. It was all right; not bad, but not great, either. Jeremy Renner was completely wasted. I don't know why they even bothered to have his character back. In MI5, Brandt proved himself to be a good field agent who shouldn't have been relegated to desk work, which was something he imposed on himself. Last we saw, Ethan was giving Brandt a field mission. But in MI:RN, Brandt was basically The Suit. He had no action AT ALL. WTF? Jeremy Renner is an action star in his own right, it was something they'd established for his character, and yet... nothing? He's just a desk jockey like Alec Baldwin? A big let down and also made no sense. The plot was kind of convoluted, the way Alias and James Bond plots are, but okay. I actually really liked Rebecca Ferguson, who I'd never heard of before this... but MI movies tend to do that with their female characters.
