This is gonna be the thread where we talk about stuff

Light them fireworks, son
it's about to get New Years in here.

fireworks are dangerous and firey. i would rather draw something on my brand new SAI which i have wanted forever.

Schazdenfreude awaaaaaaaaaaay

So my family returned to Christchurch after a short stint out of town, so we could all do our New Years Eve celebrating. My parents had a few friends over and were having a barbecue outside, while the middle sister (the one I don't get along with so great) had friends over and partied indoors (so as to avoid a repeat incident with noise control like what happened the last times she'd hosted one of her get-togethers. Bear in mind she's seventeen and thus her and likely 90% of her friends legally shouldn't be drinking alcohol. But apparently it's a normal thing, so eh.)

I did my share of the tidying up before I cycled out (half an hour or so being oblivious to weird looks from passing cars as I lip-synced with lustful abandon to Florence and the Machine (I still maintain Dog Days Are Over is my personal victory track to see off what was a shitty year for Christchurchians and friends of Christchurchians (like myself))) to my friend's place.

I had an excellent night, suffice to say. Crashed around 3am, woke up before my gracious host and tidied the place up, then used the brownie points to hitch a ride to the nearest subway. (I'm still debating whether meatball subs with all the vegetables are a valid hangover cure or if I was just hungry, but whatevs bros)

I get home around 2pm and get the drudge report from Mum about how things went down last night. Suffice to say a lot of complimentary comparisons about how my friends (despite having a predilection for partying in a caravan until you break the back chocks on it) are generally tidy, light drinkers - the kind that don't spill shit everywhere, bring noise control down on our arses, leave enough recycling on the property we're putting bottles and cans which won't fit into a wheelbarrow before the bin gets emptied out once, or somehow break the cover to the cistern (in a presumed effort to escape through the back window) or the handle of a drawer.

My somehow-not-disgraced sister didn't even make it to the Final Countdown, instead opting to take a kip with a handy dandy bucket as negotiations proceeded with the copious amounts of booze in her stomach; meanwhile her thirty-odd teenage friends exercised their questionable right to scream like stupid fuckers at every provocation. Dad apparently chased any sleepovering stragglers out the house late in the morning.


This was all generally enough to leave me quietly satisfied in a way that I couldn't rub in her face lest I be publicly decried as a nasty killjoy (because she was still curled up on the couch watching Glee re-runs when I finished a leisurely bike ride back home on this gorgeous midsummer day), but her Facebook comments today just made me radiate enough bitchy happiness to warrant whacking out this rather stupid several-paragraphs of yapping.

To the bitches in my house yestaday who cleaned out my jar of nutella. Fuck you all.

Considering this was the jar of Nutella she had given to the family as part of her "combined christmas present to all of us" (because she was too financially indentured to the task of buying new pairs of denim shorts, and too cool to even make silly presents for each of us), my overall assessment of her ain't exactly glowing.

Buuuuut I've had a fantastic New Years Eve and Day so I can't say I'm actually full-out disgusted at her or nuffin'. Here's to a peaceful and prosperous 2012 for all of us, bitches <3

i love you guys

the google doodle fr january 1st should be the google letters with a huge hangover

i'm prtetty sure i'm gonna be like that the next coupla days

happy calendar replacement

My New Year's celebrations consisted mainly of playing Minecraft with my brothers all day, going "oh hey, midnight," and then going to bed (two hours later) so we could get to the inevitably empty church mass this morning.

In other news the L in Google sort of looks like a stick of celery with peanut butter on top.

The L left his swag on all through midnight

So any cool resolutions?

Mine basically sum up to: Make choices I wouldn't normally.

my resolution is always teh same and I always fail: think of better resolutions

New Year's Resolutions are dumb and nobody should ever make them. It's just a way to feel better about yourself for a week then be sad for two months as you fail to uphold them then forget about them for ten more then repeat.

Also I was too sick to go to the usual New Year's party so boo.

I make plain New Year's solutions.

I have a liter of 0.1M NaOH in the back. Or at least, I think I do. Anyone wanna help me titrate it?

Resolutions are only dumb if you remain absolute about them. I mean seriously who is going to exercise every day that is just silly.

But if you exercise generally more than you did previously well hey! that's pretty great! You managed to take the boost of the new year and transition it into a real life-change. If you don't, well then no worries, you're not any worse off and and arbitrary end of year goal just wasn't the thing for you.

I have a long list of resolutions that I know for a fact I won't be able to maintain, but that I believe would have a positive impact on my life if I did. They aren't anything new either, just a collection of little goals that I've had at various times throughout the previous year that I've managed to put all in one place. And I'll keep adding to it! They're things that I think that, even if I just did a little bit, my new year will be better off for it.

Also I was working so I couldn't go to the cool parties. hoo.

New Years' Resolutions are kinda silly to me. It's expecting a change in your life simply because some arbitrary date has passed, basically - I'm sure a lot of people don't consider the effort many resolutions require to maintain, and those that actually can keep up their resolutions probably don't need the excuse of a holiday to make changes in their life. I mean, having goals in life is one thing, but one shouldn't wait until the end/beginning of the year to make a list and work towards 'em, right?

I figured out how hard resolutions are to keep a while ago, so I stopped making them. :x

Last year I made a New Year's Resolution to learn to draw better and to get more practice actually giving a shit about drawing!

I took a drawing class this semester, as well as generally practicing for the earlier part of the year, and on most accounts I'm considerably better than before!

( no resolution this year though because I have too much on my plate as it is and I don't want to fuck up my perfect batting average. maybe next year )

whenever I hear someone say "arbitrary date" I cringe a little. It's not arbitrary! We use it to pretty much determine how we live, and it's become a pretty well ingrained part of our tradition of just shutting up and having fun, and a new year is as good a time as any to at least mentally turn things around. Having the "you're a new you and it's a new now" behind you to support your cause helps a lot, at least for me.

'Sides, nobody calls thanksgiving "some arbitrary conquista."*

*I have no idea what you celebrate on Thanksgiving.

I think it's pretty arbitrary
We could have chosen to end the year after February instead and it would have made little difference

Thanksgiving is less arbitrary in that afaik it is celebrating some actual historical event, new year could really be any day of the year as long as it didn't move around.

Well yeah, but would you complain about making resolutions after february? The point is that you're not making an attempt to improve your life because it's the first of january, you're doing it because it's a new year. The date doesn't matter but what it signifies should mean enough that you're not just doing it for some arbitrary date.

I don't see why, if I wanted to make changes in my life, I would wait until New Year to do it

Well if you don't have to, I commend you, then you're probably the kind of person Nottles refers to when he says you're strong enough not to need support from some holiday. I am very much not, but then again for me it's really not about "because it's a new year I must now exercise" but more of a "time to throw out the old habits with the old year and actually get to it." It's hard to explain to anyone if you don't have that specific mentality, I guess, especially to you if you can get rid of a habit at will if you put your mind to it. But for me, it's not because of the date, but because what we just happened to link to it. It just gives me a boost!

When people see New Year as the day January the first and nothing more and say that because of that alone it's stupid to make resolutions, I think they're missing the idea behind it

Yes, i'm not against a good excuse to shut up and jambalaya, but it is an arbitrary date on a calendar. The phrase "new year, new life" is a good intended but ill executed mantra that basically teaches people that it's okay to wait until some date on a calendar to stop their bad habits. It's like having a forum thread when you're being shitty and you can't stop being shitty until you make a new one.

It's not because i'm 'strong' that i'm able to spot something wrong in my life and try to fix it at any given time, it's because it's the rational thing to do.

The thing about new year's resolutions is that you get that cozy group feeling, it is acceptable and even encouraged to (or at least try to) change your bad habits 'cause everyone else is doing it. It's part of the human nature to feel accepted by society, but you should not base your actions around what others do.

*I have no idea what you celebrate on Thanksgiving.

We celebrate the ability to cook turkey and get a lot of people together to eat it. At least, that's how we do it at my household.

Is there really anyone who says to themselves "Man, I should really start exercising more, but New Year's is still a couple months off, guess I'll wait till then."? It's not that people are intentionally putting off stuff that they know would be good for them until New Year's, they're just using the date as a chance to look back on their life and see what needs improving.

That being said, I still haven't made a New Year's Resolution cause there's really no point in lying to myself.

Is there really anyone who says to themselves "Man, I should really start exercising more, but New Year's is still a couple months off, guess I'll wait till then."? It's not that people are intentionally putting off stuff that they know would be good for them until New Year's, they're just using the date as a chance to look back on their life and see what needs improving.

That being said, I still haven't made a New Year's Resolution cause there's really no point in lying to myself.

and as usual a dragon says what I want to say but more eloquently

But if people don't save their meaningful changes for New Year then the date becomes even less meaningful itself.