Last night, I watched Dancing with the Stars and Castle in the living room, right next to the fireplace in my home. There was a spare lighter there, so as is my wont, I picked it up to play around with it. (I am notoriously bad at keeping my hands to myself; I always like to pick up objects and fiddle around with them. Be it paperclips, pencils, pens, bobby pins, rubber bands, or so on and so forth.) It once again made me think of Marie, from Disease, who can manipulate existing fire yet not create it herself. (A bit like the mutant Pyro in that regard.) She uses a lighter to create the fire, though, and from there, she can expand it and manipulate it, even engulfing her whole body in it.

I was just thinking about how she'd make the most of it. Part of the setting is that many people share the same powers...yet they're separated in half into "scarce" and "dense", with "dense" being stronger and more raw, yet more exhaustive, and "scarce" being more precise and efficient, yet lacking in energy reserves. (Or to put it into trope terms, dense = UnskilledYetStrong, scarce = WeakYetSkilled.)

She has dense, obviously, in that she requires an existing source, but can do much larger-scale things with her flames. And I was just thinking about how she would be able to use pop-cultural sources of big-time fire users to grant her better powers, especially when combined with some scientific knowledge. In short, while a "scarce" user would always be able to more finely control the flames, I want her character to be able to make the most of the bigger-scale things that can be done, simply by having been made aware of what her power truly is. 

Which comes into play in a theoretical battle (and knowing me, theoretical battle = now that I've thought about it is near-guaranteed to become canon no matter how much I must stretch events to make it so) against a scarce pyromancer. I think the battle would be incredibly interesting--the scarce pyromancer wouldn't be protected from flames burning over their whole body (because that's too large a scale for them to control for a prolonged period of time), but would be able to prevent her from creating flames via extinguishing the small flames she makes before she can expand them. He'd be able to control heat on a microscopic level, yet he can't indefinitely create that zone control (via his limited reserves of energy). He'd also be able to, on a limited scale, control fire of his opponent, AND make sure that his flames can't be controlled by Marie...so much so, that he'd actually be able to pierce through her own protective engulfing flames and cause harm, the flames piercing into her body and erupting, like a blade puncturing with a poison that shoots through her body.

...Yet she's resilient enough for that to not kill her if it doesn't hit a vital area, and she can create flames that are dense enough to act as physical blunt force on impact, launching him back. She's also no slouch in the cutting department, if she has flammable material around. (Most things are flammable under the right conditions, mind you.) While he can also melt material, and can actually melt things better than she can, Marie can actually control molten material which he cannot do, and having liquefied steel slash at you is going to be nearly-impossible to deal with.

(She first displays most of her flame powers, by the way, in the desert, when being chase. By engulfing herself in flames and making intense enough flames to singe their pursuers, she slowed them down. She noticed, though, that the sands her flames were burning reacted to her, and that halted the chase altogether.)

The powers of the two would be nearly-equal, yet obviously, Marie gains the upper hand since she's not your typical blind-force fighter. In fact, the guy thought it'd be a one-stroke battle because he shut down every source of flame she had available, and knew he had complete control of his own...yet as he launched his attack, Marie was able to 'rant' at the flame, chastising it, and asked for it to grow much larger. It did, she controlled it, and the above resulted from it. (-Mancy means more or less 'speak to'. Hydromancers ramble to water, letting their thoughts drift away. Geomancers talk to the earth, engaging in meaningful conversation. Aeromancers more seem to muse with the air, listening to it yet not seeming to say much. Pyromancers snap at the flames, having a little bit of a vitriolic-buddies relationship with their element. Technomancers, by the way, do all four, depending on the circumstances.)

You might wonder why I speak about that from yesterday. That's because, other than some stuff about HotR, I have literally nothing to talk about from today. There was something, yet I'm not comfortable disclosing it. My day has been surprisingly (and alarmingly) short.

Literally the entirety of my day has been spent on entertainment and food. I woke up. I had breakfast. I got caught up on anime, from Attack on Titan to Bleach to Naruto Shippuden to One Piece to rewatching Gurren Lagann to rewatching Hellsing.

And from there, I went straight to watching the weekly movie night livestream with some CF friends. It was a comedy night. Got to see a short, The Life and Death of Tommy somethingoranother and someone Danger (I forget her name, and what Tommy's cliched last name is), and it was awesome. There was an episode of Impractical Jokers as well. A few standup acts, including an April Fools' one, and then, watching This Is The End. (I wasn't really watching the movie, though. I mostly do it for the interaction with them.)

And now, I'm listening to a live Black Keys concert being broadcast over the radio.

Soyeah, really nothing has happened. (Mind you, what has happened might be massively entertaining to some, but that doesn't change the fact that it's not much of anything.)

Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god...
FACEOFF.
FINALE.

Oh my GOD, FaceOff's finale.

It's just...I mean, I'm not going to say anything in the astronomically-small chance that there is someone who reads this blog, is interested in the show, and yet has somehow NOT seen it.

But just...OH, MY GOD, IT. WAS. AWESOME.

Every season, FaceOff does its best job to up the ante from previous seasons. Some with success, other times not as much. But I am telling you, I'm not sure how they can top this one because...JUST FREAKIN' WATCH. However you find a method to, doesn't matter; you need to watch it because...words fail to describe it. The advertisements for it vaguely hinted at something cool, but they for once did their job at hiding just how EPIC the finale was. It really says something that if that had been the SERIES (rather than just season) finale, I'd have been perfectly content because it was just. that. good. It was a finale that was worthy of the name.

...Now, granted, I have full faith that they'll be able to pull it off, topping it off next season. They seem to have a knack for it, after all. But just...wow. It was incredible. The person that I went in thinking would be the weakest actually started out with the strongest concept, and I thought that up to the very moment the winner was announced, they could actually take it all and win. The person I was favoring to win and wanted to win, I was deeply concerned wouldn't win, but they managed to actually earn a well-deserved win. And the third--while easily predictable as not the winner--was no slouch, either, with a killer makeup.

You really have to see it to believe it. I'm in awe. So I do apologize for the potentially-minor abuse of language. (Depends on your beliefs and your strictness, I suppose.) But truly, those words were the first to enter my mind once anything coherent at all was in there: Oh, my god, it was incredible.

So I forgot to mention why I didn't make my blog post yesterday in detail, and the reason why is because I was dead tired.

And let me be honest with you: I am now. Monday has been a VERY long day. Let's start with me almost being late for Kickboxing, because I needed to fill out the homework assignment I didn't do.

Then, I had my dialog with my partner in my communications class. Then, I discovered that most of the work that I had done for my group presentation in said class was probably going to be worthless, and that we would have to hash it out after class.

And it took several difficult communications before we were able to pull that off, too. (Turns out, I should be able to use enough. It's writing the speech I'm worried about.) But it gets worse. I discovered that today, my midterm paper was due...and I was not prepared for it, at all.

If that wasn't bad enough, I ALSO had a quiz due today in that same class! (Fortunately, electronically-submitted, butstill.) The quiz wasn't easy, either, being the wostly-worded one since the first quiz. And the midterm paper I didn't finish until Jeopardy was finished, and I'm still not sure it was coherent.

...Needless to say, today's been a really, really rough day. Busy. But some good has come of it! I decided to just throw together a scene from Disease. (Well, technically, its sequel.) It's one of the most powerful scenes, and I think that for throwing together writing on a whim, mentally writing the words as I was transitioning between classes and had a distraction in the form of having the text from my partner in mind, that it is phenominally good.

I'd link to it, but it's hosted on my private site. ("Huh? I thought your blog was." No, my blog is public. Just nobody knows about it! The site is private, by link only. And only my original, ORIGINAL circle of internet friends* got the link.)
*Actually, that's a lie. They weren't the original. I had another group before that was more associates, and another group which WAS friends, but there was bad blood between some of the members. This is the first group of well and true, proper, online friends; we even did the internet equivalent of going out to meet each other at locations, like a getogether!

But I digress. The point of this blog post is that I'm probably going to have issues keeping my blog up to date for the next...well, while. My classes take priority, and I do have rather the active life. So the info unfortunately might get slightly put on the backlog until I can actually sit down and type it all up.

...That having been said, today's the *perfect* day for me to make up for something!

I watched Dancing With the Stars tonight, obviously, along-side watching Castle (and reruns for half of DWTS via a recorder for my sister), but while that was happening, I was eating my cheeseburgers.

You know, the ones that I wanted to mention earlier but never got around to?

Yeah, them. So you have to understand, I am not the one cooking the hamburgers. (Though I imagine it's one of the few foods I could easily learn to perfect. After all, my dad learned how, and it doesn't look *that* hard. I just don't, since I don't need to.) However, I AM the one who prepares my own. The process starts with squirting a large amount of ketchup onto the burger's more well-done side, the less-well-done side facing down on the burner.

Then, I place cheese over the top of the burger, and then place the lid on top of the grill. This traps the heat from the pan, and the cheese is melted by the ambient temperature. (I imagine, anyway. This is me, BSing an explanation for something that I have only my best guess as to knowing. The point is, putting the lid on makes the cheese melt; I don't know the specifics. I thought it was just steam, but steam's not a requirement I recently learned.)

While the cheese is melting in the pan, I retrieve the buns, paint ketchup onto them, and then place potato chips on the buns. Once the cheese is melted, I take the lid off, if the frying pan is plugged in and/or on, I unplug it (often, it already is), place ketchup on both cheeseburgers again, put one burger on, place chips on it, put the other burger on, place chips on it, and then close it up, for a crunchy cheeseburger sandwhich.

Now, this might seem unusual. But it's a process that's built over time. The pan part is because microwaved cheese just doesn't taste the same. Originally, it was a small bit of ketchup below to add flavor, but I increased that later. (See below.) Said bit of ketchup helped a great deal with cooking, flavor, and texture. The ketchup on the bun painted is to make sure there's always ketchup, and no "dry" spots on the bun pop up. 

The extra bit of ketchup on top was there for tradition, since before the bit below the cheese was added, I had always done a bit above the cheese. It's the standard which is traditional for any who use ketchup on their cheeseburgers, so I've kept it. (I've got practical reasons for the double-dosage now, though--see below.) That near-ritualistic process built up and was practiced for years, until fairly recently, when I added in the chips. Simultaneously, the chips caused more ketchup.

What sparked the change? Inspiration from a staff meeting at work. Someone there had a McDonald's cheeseburger, that they stuffed with fries and then dipped in barbeque sauce. Now, I don't have any of that sauce around, nor do I have fries. But I do have ketchup and potato chips a plenty.

Besides, it wasn't that huge a leap--I put potato chips on my sloppy joe's anyway, because they add texture AND help to keep the goods inside the bun, so to speak, preventing spills. So I tried it out...and really, really liked the change.

Soyeah. There you have it. That's how I have my double-cheeseburgers at home. They're absolutely delicious. (A common trend, you'll find, is that I make foods that are lazy and easy to prepare, but put an extra spin on them--which takes extra time, but makes 'okay' food taste like heavenly food.) Now that I've fulfilled my blogging requirement for Monday, it's time for bed. (Well, not quite. Still got gaming stuff to take care of.)

Did I say entry II? Make that entry 3! Entry II was typed ten minutes ago, posted, and yet, DIDN'T ACTUALLY POST. Oh, it made a post, alright. It's just that literally every word of the post was deleted, meaning that the whole blog entry was effectively wiped out, and what you see here is me frustratingly retyping up the old entry from memory.

But with that said...I'm tired. Like, really, really tired; it's been a bit of a long, arduous day. (And, honestly, I think my mental health may be influencing how sleepy I am.) I'm also hungry; the time I was planning on spending eating I ended up spending rewatching the last minutes of FaceOff. (The show. Not the movie.) Which means no eating for me until after I finish my homework assignment...that is due tonight. (Oh, you can add frustration from a lost post to the list of things making today an "uhg" day. Honestly, I'm a bit worried my medication may not be working, given how little sleep I felt I got last night and my overall mood.)

...Hey, I did tell you earlier that I had important stuff I needed to get done; that assignment was one of them. I realize it's not exactly the healthiest of habits, no matter how typical it is for a college student, but that's the price I pay for slacking off.

On that note, got to get to work! (Actually, no, not quite yet. I'm going to play Heroes of the Realm first, then do the homework. I know, I know. I have a messed up set of priorities.)

So that other thing I said I forgot?

Well, I remembered what it was. I forgot to bring my cell phone, when I was expecting that there was a strong possibility I would need to get into contact with some fellow students. And, awkwardly enough, I was right; I...needed to get in contact with them, but since I left my phone at home...that's gonna be a bit of a pain.

So I'm upgrading the "d'oh" I assigned it earlier to a "D'oh!" now.

In other news, I'm home, so that means straight back to work for me. Got lots to get done, and not a lot of time to do it, what with Jeopardy, Dancing with the Stars, and Castle all on tonight.