Swiss Miss be trollin'.

While at the store today I picked up a box of Swiss Miss "Marshmallow Lovers" cocoa, since I love me some marshmallows fermented in chocolate. A few minutes ago I went into the kitchen to make myself a late-night cup of hot chocolate, as is my custom, and even though I had a few packets of regular left I decided that I'd open the new box.


I heated some milk and tore the packet open, eager to consume the large quantity of marshmallows that had been promised to me.


See? The product is New & Improved! It has five times more marshmallows than the regular variety! I was excite.


Instead of spongy sugar heaven, however, I got this.


There was not a single marshmallow to be found in my cocoa.

Stop labeling me!

I went through all my posts and slapped labels on them. Because, you know, it would sure be difficult to find any particular entry in the sea of eight other posts!

Guess which label has already seen the most use? If you guessed 'whining about things,' you are correct. I am, after all, an extraordinarily optimistic and upbeat person.

Also, my computer is in the process of defragmenting itself and apparently my ninjalike ability to compress large amounts of data has blown its tiny little mind since it keeps finding space it didn't even know was there. I swear my C partition had 28 gigs free before I started the defrag, and now it has 30. And no, the fragmentation isn't even THAT bad. It was at 8% or something after my cleaning/shrinking adventure yesterday. Now it is at 2% and most of the little red squares in Defraggler have turned into little blue squares, which is all I need to know. Well, and there's also the patch of little yellow squares that represent my pagefile. They're kind of harshing on the nice blue color scheme I've got going and they're not even yellow yellow, more like a brownish, pukish shade of ochre that I don't like at all.

What? No, I'm not posting whatever comes to mind because I am bored and have nothing better to do until this is finished. Not at all.

...

I am freezing right now, but I can't be bothered to get up and shut my windows so for the past five minutes I have, more or less, been typing with three fingers while the others slowly blacken and shrivel with frostbite.

Ladies and gentlemen, you are reading the blog of the world's next great genius.

Edit: Okay, now my D partition, which was previously sitting at 19 gigs of free space, has 28 instead. I deleted nothing. I compressed nothing. Nine gigabytes have appeared out of fucking nowhere to surprise me, like David Hasselhoff.


I don't get it, but I'm not complaining.

I am the Super Space Saver of the Universe.

I need a bigger hard drive. I have already gone through and uninstalled all the useless programs I don't need, combed through my Downloads folder and nuked everything that has been sitting there for the past three years (well, almost everything...I'm going to install Arena someday and someday I will actually get around to moving my eBooks to their proper eBook folder, I swear!), and now I am left with the glum realization that I still have more things than I have space to keep them in. I've run out of stuff that I am willing to sacrifice for the impending Skyrim/Revelations explosion.

It's okay, though, because I have found the solution, and it is a simple, elegant one that allows me to keep all my stuff.

I am compressing everything. Everything.

7.30 gigabytes of PSD files? It is now 3.46. 3.81 gigabytes of Oblivion saves? No problem, it has been pared down to 933 megabytes. 1.70 gigs of Fallout 3 saves? Yeah, right! Try 675 megabytes instead. Exactly one gigabyte of who even knows what in my Miscellaneous storage folder? Err, well, it's actually still about the same size. It would be less, but images don't compress very well and my blog folders live in there and Allegorical Dullness alone is creeping up on 300 megabytes.

However, compress as I might, the stupidity of my hard drive's partitioning means that it is still not enough. Thanks, ASUS, for taking a 300 gigabyte drive and splitting it in half. That was really smart of you! Assuming, of course, that your goal was to make my space management experience a frustrating and impossible one.

So, yes, I need a bigger hard drive. At the very least I need a new external drive to play musical files with, but a new hard drive would be better since then I would not have to uninstall Sims 2 in order to play Skyrim. Remember, if I am forced to uninstall Sims 2 there will be no new Pyramidopolis posts!

Huh? What do you mean there will be no new Pyramidopolis posts either way since I last updated it sometime in the 18th century?

Err, well, um...

Screw you, gentle reader! Stop hamstringing me with your logic!

Look up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's...a plane!

For the past hour I have been hitting up all the usual travel websites, attempting to locate cheap airfare from Philadelphia to DFW. Planes confuse me; ticket prices fluctuate based on the day of the week, the time of year, the phase of the moon and I thought that Wednesday was the time to get inexpensive tickets but it is actually Tuesday OR IS IT? Nah, it's Thursday. OR IS IT? Fortunately, the travel websites make your life easier with options like flexible departure dates and result-sorting by the lowest price to the highest. Put in your destination and a vague idea of when you want to get there and it will find the best deals for you!

Unfortunately, when the best deals to be found are in the range of $350-$450 for a one-way ticket, that's a bit discouraging. Actually, it's a lot discouraging. It's even more discouraging when you realize that the airline companies are determined to take what ought to be a short three-hour flight and turn it into a twelve-hour nightmare.

Yes, you read that right. Some of these flights are twelve hours long. Well, eleven hours and forty-some minutes, but the fact remains that you can get there in three, so what is the plane doing for an extra eight hours and forty-some minutes?

I found out when I began to check the connections.

At first I had a reasonable expectation that my itinerary would look like this:


How foolish I was! I quickly learned that instead of ferrying us from Point A to Point B, my pilot would be dragging myself and all the other hapless travelers aboard on a grand adventure through the United States. We would be going from Point A to Point D to Point L to Point X to Point B for no logical reason, in the process burning an unreasonable amount of jet fuel and destroying every last vestige of our sanity.

Yes, that's three connections. Three. You hop on this plane, and it takes you to Washington, Charlotte, Orlando, and then, finally, if you have not bashed your skull in against the window out of sheer frustration at the stupidity of it all, you might arrive in Texas and your bags may or may not arrive with you.

Expedia didn't actually specify which Washington you go to, Washington DC or Washington-Washington, so my itinerary could look like this:


Or, even more ridiculous, like this:


Then there's the nine-hour flight that goes to Orlando and Denver!


I'm not kidding. I wish I was kidding.

Perhaps the airlines are run by a cabal of sadists, or perhaps it is all a nefarious conspiracy to cheat innocent men and women out of their frequent flyer miles. I don't know, but, guys, if you really want to mess with your customers I have a better idea. Why not sweep us away on a fanciful tour of Alaska while you're at it? Actually, why don't you add even more connecting flights? I don't think we're angry enough yet!

Observe: 17,299 miles of fun, wonder, and efficiency!


You're welcome.

I am going to go bang my head against something sharp now. Maybe airline logic will then make sense to me.

Well, there goes NaNoWriMo.

The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim is coming out on 11/11/11.

Assassin's Creed: Revelations is due on 11/15/11.

y u do htis 2 me, u gaiz?!

AutoCorrect

Badoopdoop, I have my writer's face on and am innocently typing away. Wait, OpenOffice, why are you attacking me with squiggly red lines?

Oh. You don't know what to make of this name. Well, I'll just add it to the dictionary so that you'll shut up and--wait, what are you suggesting as a correction for it?


Dyne. Wayne. Ankle. Lime. Lime. Wtf do ankles and limes have to do with this story?

"But stupid writerface," you say, "I'm just word processing software with an American dictionary! You haven't even updated me for a billion years! How could you possibly expect me to recognize a name like Santa Ynez?"

To this I point out:


Yes, you are word processing software with an American dictionary. And you can't even spell the name of the second most populous city in America.


You also can't spell "unbothered." In fact, not only have you proposed that I might want to change seemingly unbothered by the cold to seemingly bothered by the cold, you have modestly suggested that I ruin a coherent sentence by turning it into one of the following:

Seemingly untethered by the cold.
Seemingly ingathered by the cold.
Seemingly bothersome by the cold.
Seemingly unbridled by the cold.
Seemingly unburied by the cold.

Do you see the problem yet?

Badoopdoop, I have my writer's face on but before I can go back to typing I have a million custom entries to make in my dictionary.