Distracted

Exams are going pretty well so far. Otherwise just looking forward to next Friday when my senior year will be over.

To be honest, I don't think having a time limit on selling alcohol is a religious law. Something similar was passed here recently where night shops can't sell any strong liquor after midnight, in a country that's mostly secularized and that's lost its faith in the church years ago. It has more to do with trying to limit alcohol consumption late at night to avoid people drinking too much at a late hour, when they've probably already had quite a bit to drink.

Learn something new everyday.

whoosh (seriously I've had that as my location since early-mid 2010) Today I hinted to my boss that if I get shorted the $200 the company owes me I'll be "legally obligated" to be pissed off. Gave me a maniacal smile as I clocked out and walked away from the chaos of a sunday night. (Crossing my fingers he plays ball, cause then I'll have made $1,012 USD alone this week) So now I'm home, hoping that something interesting happens. If it doesn't - I can always play some Injustice. I've logged maybe like 6 hours of gameplay since I bought it last month. Now's a good time to enjoy it. Yeah but I only just learned that you can't do that in Jersey You can't pump gas in Jersey?

Those dumb image macros with some teen heartthrob saying something like "Nothing's hotter than a girl that studies" or whatever.

My final exams start next Wednesday. The system here is that we basically have 1 to 2 exams each day for more than a week, so it's pretty much one of the most bothersome weeks of the school year (the other one being the Christmas exam period). On the bright side, the weather's getting much better (finally), and in exactly two weeks I should be completely done with high school. I guess we're lucky here in Belgium, universities will accept pretty much anyone. The only exceptions are medical studies (specifically, only doctors and dentists), which require an incredibly hard entry exam, and certain artistic studies, which require some kind of test before you enter to show that you're artistic enough or something. A classmate's doing the latter and I think she just has to make some photos and draw a picture or something.

There should be more hours in a day. Or alternately, less hours in a good night's sleep.

I was in a photoshoot today. Was really chill, just four of my friends and me walking around town, enjoying free food and doing whatever while some guy takes pictures of us. It helps that we had some great weather today. We saw the sun for the first time in weeks, which is really abnormal for this time of year.

We ended up second in the battle of the bands, with just one vote difference. Apparently the band that won (they played before we'd arrived) was comprised of 15 year olds and played really well. The band that came in third was, I felt, much better than us but they had less than half our votes. It kinda sucks to know we were so close to winning it, but it's a great motivation as well, especially considering we barely knew anyone there, so most of the votes were people who didn't know us.

Best of luck to you, Maddy, and condolences to RPG. All this sad news all of a sudden. On a happier note, happy birthday Kalphite. Tonight's that battle of the bands, looking forward to that. Also, one of my best friend's girlfriend's mother works with an advertizing agency, so sometimes they do photoshoots for ad campaigns. For the latest one, they needed a foreigner to be on the picture so, so my friend invited me for a photoshoot on Sunday. Apparently the picture's gonna be on billboards, and I get paid at least 75 euros, possibly more, to be spent at a store of choice (literally any store). That was a pretty strange twist to my life all of a sudden.

I guess, but we were still good enough that some guy saw us and was so impressed he decided to sign us up for a battle of the bands a few months later in the first place. I'll take that as a compliment by itself. I don't really expect us to win, but who knows. Oh well, we'll see, que sera and all that.

It's official now, we're participating in a battle of the bands next Friday. Judging from the e-mail conversation I had with one of the organizers it's pretty amateuristic, but it still looks like fun nonetheless. According the guy who signed us in in the first place, we actually have a chance of winning: he says the other bands aren't that good. I'm curious, that's for sure.

Just went to see Fast 6 with a few friends. Great film, and I really enjoyed it, but it was probably a bad idea to watch it considering I was in an accident two weeks ago. After we got out of the theatre I suddenly felt incredibly tense and nervous. We were by car but I had to skip the car ride a bit and I walked to catch up to my friends who were on their way to grab a drink before heading home. I still feel really strange.

Apparently a guy that lives in this town who's a bit younger than me (like a year, maybe two) committed suicide today. I don't know him at all, but it's still pretty strange to experience. This guy was even at the same party I went to last Friday, and now his whole Facebook page is filled with people that just can't grasp what's happened.

I don't get this part, touch screens are great for skipping to a certain part. My friend convinced me to start playing LoL. I played two rounds against bots yesterday with him and I think I'm gonna get hooked to it. Edit: Thought this was the today thread.

Just when I thought game developers were done with making confusing sequel names, Microsoft comes out with the Xbox One.

Might as well post a little update on life. Thursday and Friday we had our senior shows, one for the younger students of our school and the other for the parents. My friends and I basically formed a band at the start of our senior year with the final goal in mind that we would perform at that show, and those two days we finally did just that. There were some faults in the technical department (especially on Friday, where my mic wasn't even on at the start), but we played a hell of a show anyway. Then we went to one hell of a party on Friday night to celebrate. The rest of the weekend was spent bored out of my mind.

If only everyone would ask themselves this question before they opened their mouth.

I discovered something new about the speedometers in cars though, on the way to that holiday home. Apparently, older cars tend to have inaccurate speedometers that always add some speed. The GPS is the one that has the correct speed, and it's almost always exactly 10 km/h lower than the speed on my speedometer, so speeding isn't an issue. And the insurance company doesn't even really have something to pay for: the car's lost but that's the only damage that's been done.

I just had the most surreal day of my life. Some context. I spent the last three days at a holiday home of a friend of mine (holy crap, TIF went down?). It's a 45 minute drive there, and in the middle of nowhere, so a pretty nice place to relax with a bunch of friends. Had a great time there. But then this morning came, and we had to drive back to the town I live in. I had two friends with me, and I was doing the driving. While we were driving down the highway at about 125-130 km/h (the limit is 120), the GPS fell off the windshield and into my lap. I got startled and distracted, and while I was trying to get the GPS off my lap, I started going to the left slightly. We were on the left lane, so when I noticed we were heading for the separation of the roads in the middle, I immediately tried to fix it by turning the steering wheel the other direction. At that speed, a sudden movement like that is impossible to control, so I ended up slipping a bit. I tried to quickly fix it back to the left, but I lost control and we went straight for the separation of the highway in the middle of it. This separation was basically a small hill (about 2 meters I'm thinking) made out of dirt. Our car drove into it, made a flip in the air, landed on the side and then fell down to its wheels. The engine was smoking so we immediately left the vehicle. We were just incredibly lucky to have ended up where we did. We could have flown over that separation right into oncoming traffic, or have veered back into the lane we were driving in. We all somehow left the car completely unharmed, except for my front passenger who hit his head on the windshield and got a bruise. The car itself is lost though. Somehow, a fire truck passed by us only half a minute after the accident. They were on their way to another accident, but they ended up stopping and helping us first. Holy shit you can't believe how happy I am to still be alive. There's a bunch of annoying consequences to it, and I really dread the moment my parents come back from vacation tomorrow to find a car missing in the driveway, but in the end, I feel all that matters is that we were all ok because this accident could have been a hundred times worse.

Today I heard the new QOTSA song. Holy shit.

I have not a single idea how the hell he's envisioning it in his head, but I have images in my head of us all playing in their bedroom while they're getting it on. They're frankly not really making me lean towards accepting the deal. To be honest though, I doubt anything will come out of this. I'll ask the rest of the band for their opinions, but I doubt any of them would be looking forward to playing private jukebox for a couple of love birds.

I don't really know what just happened. An acquaintance of mine just messaged me on Facebook. He said he'd watched some videos of our band performing and really liked it. So far so good, I thought, we might have another gig lined up. Then he asks if it's possible for us to give a private concert to him and his girlfriend. And he asked whether it was possible to play some intimate music to get her in the mood, winking face. And he said he'd pay us a 100 euros for an hour. I have no idea what just happened, but it makes me feel like some kind of prostitute.

Either way, pulling out is a horrible contraceptive.

I just heard the band I'm in might suddenly be participating in a battle of the bands kind of thing. Someone who saw us at our last show seemed to have been so impressed he talked with the organisers to see if we could participate. This comes out of nowhere, and since we haven't been able to rehearse for a while it's kind of scary. On the bright side, we've finally started working on songs of our own. Well, song, we only have one so far, but more are sure to come. I don't think we'd win if we participated: I think we're pretty good, but not great. We have pretty good chemistry but we still have a long way to go before we sound excellent: there are too many imperfections and little mistakes being made still. Anyway, next gig should be our senior show, which was one of the main reasons we motivated ourselves to get together at the start of this school year in the first place. We still need to do an audition for that, but I feel pretty confident about that; I've seen worse things pass that audition in previous senior shows. And that's basically my update on the band I guess. Otherwise not much going on in my life.