snarp’s blog

There were some up north really early this morning, but if they hit Okazaki at all, it wasn’t even enough to wake me up. So don’t freak out if it ends up on the news.

Heteronormativity-san, because he is apparently about twelve years old, enjoys shoving persons of the feminine disposition. He hasn’t tried it seriously on me for a couple months, because I’ve been known to kick. But today at lunch I passed him in the stairwell, saw that he was smirking for reasons that were doubtless extremely heteronormative, and made a face at him. So he pushed me, and threw me off balance enough that I fell down and landed on my posterior in a manner that I’m sure was very amusing.

After ascertaining that I was all right, he felt it necessary to explain the situation to me: “It wasn’t my fault! That was not my fault!”

“I’m going to kill you.”

“It wasn’t my fault!” I’d been going down to the first floor pick up my mail, so I threatened his life again, and limped tragically on down with my hand on my abused posterior.

(Incidentally, I have since examined it and discovered extremely visible bruises. I seriously do need to hurt him about this.)

He was in the classroom when I got back up to the classroom a couple minutes later, so I hit him over the head with my envelopes. He wailed, “It wasn’t my fault! It was your own fault!”

And everyone else in the room (except Fuzzy-san, who was playing his stupid PSP like always) all said in pretty much the same moment, “It was Heteronormativity-san’s faullllt!”

It became obvious that he had run straight up there to explain to everyone that yes, I’d fallen down the stairs, and yes, he’d pushed me, but it wasn’t his fault.

So what we have learned today is that lack of fluency in a language leads people not only to express themselves like children, but also to behave like children! I am not ashamed. It was completely his fault.

we had another earthquake last night. The Japan Meteorological Agency site says there were intensity-1 quakes in a bunch of nearby cities at exactly the time I felt it, but either Okazaki’s seismographs didn’t pick it up, or it was too weak even to count as a “1″ here. When I asked today, no one else had felt anything. Maybe I’m a geomancer.

I don’t think you can! The door is still open! The service window is still open! The machine itself is still turned on! The problem is not obvious until you put your crazy moon country debit card in, and it spits it out at you and says it can’t process the card! It doesn’t say that it’s past ATM bedtime! And then you panic, and you think someone’s got into your card in the forty-eight hours since you ordered those Moomins books, and you’ve only got like 6000 yen in cash, and you email Mom because she probably knows what to do!

Actually, now that I’ve managed to find and use a non-closed post office ATM, I’ve realize there was one other symptom - the button saying “visitor withdrawal” didn’t show up when I clicked through to the English language screen yesterday, which it should have done, and did on my successful withdrawal today. Maybe they close visitor withdrawals extra-early during Golden Week, but leave the other options open until normal-early? It’s a mystery!

In related news, I’m thinking of taking the shower curtain out of my shower because it smells weird.

So take the sum of 5337 and 7793, then google it, and examine the second result.

…

This isn’t evil! I already own the books I’m using it for! This maneuver merely conserves fossil fuels by making it unnecessary for me to have the physical items shipped across the Pacific! I see nothing wrong with that! (There regrettably seem to be no torrents containing Moomins books, so my brain’s recent insistence on re-reading has led me inexorably to Amazon.co.jp.)

Anyway, I’ve just reread The Ship Who Searched, which is a collaboration between Anne McCaffrey and Mercedes Lackey in McCaffrey’s brainship universe. Brainships are spaceships with a very intelligent bodiless human brain attached to them, generally one of a congenitally deformed infant who would die if not kept hooked up to complete life support all her/his life. Brainships travel around space having adventures with a human partner, called a “brawn,” preferably of the opposite sex.

What will Mercedes Lackey do with this premise? She will make ambiguously freaky sex out of it. That is what Mercedes Lackey will do with every premise.

This was one of the books I read over and over and over and over when I was in middle school. I think I actually re-read this more than I did Dragonsong and the Valdemar book where the pantsless furry kept raping the Native American stereotypes. (Yes, I totally read the “Mornelithe Falconsbane” book many, many times. I am not proud.) Something about the combination of McCaffreyan benevolent autocracy and Lackeyan sexual dysfunction is deeply soothing.

That said, Read the rest of this entry »

This is what I do with a four-day weekend.

-

World of Warcraft Registration Error 202

-

Apparently, when you try to upgrade World of Warcraft from a trial to a normal registration using the “Upgrade Online Now” button (possibly also when entering an authentication key), while,

1) using an IP that maps to somewhere far away from the billing address you’re using (say, if your IP says you’re in Japan and your billing address is in Kentucky)

or

2) not on one of the continents supported by the version of WoW you’re trying to set up (say, if you’re in Japan and trying to set up the North American version, or in the US and trying to set up the Taiwanese version)

you’ll get an error message saying “Error 202: We were unable to process your request with the information provided. Please contact our Billing and Account Services team for assistance - (800-592-5499).”

I post this here because if you contact Blizzard about it, you will get an unhelpful form email that doesn’t explain the problem, because their system got creaky and ended up giving this error to lots of non geographically-unconventional people when Burning Crusade came out and their servers couldn’t handle it.

You could theoretically get around this by using a proxy located in the appropriate country. However, there is a problem with this proposition.

-

Free Proxies: They Are Probably Not Really Safe

-

When someone wants to access something through a proxy, they generally google something like “free proxy” or “web-based proxy,” go to a list like this one, and pick a proxy at random.

This is a short guide written by a middle- or high-schooler explaining how he set up a web-based proxy to steal his classmate’s passwords*, using a piece of free GNU software called PHProxy and a shared hosting account.

I’m pretty sure the kid’s not the only person, or the most technically advanced one, who’s thought to do something like this. Nor do I see any reason to believe that the people running those big proxy directory pages run background checks on the maintainers of every single proxy they list.

(When you’re talking secure connections - the kind over which one generally sends credit card information - I’m not sure at what point the encryption goes into effect (ie, whether or not it’s encrypted before it hits the proxy and only unencrypted after it comes out the other side), but the proposition seems iffy enough that I don’t really feel comfortable attempting it myself.)

If you want a web-based proxy to use at school/work/etc., probably the absolute safest thing to do here is to set up PHProxy or CGI Proxy on your own webspace. Making one of these do SSL right is my new project.

-

* How this works: The kid’s school, like many, uses filtering software to keep the kids from playing on MySpace or whatever. One can bypass these filters by using a proxy. The kids will generally find these proxies using one of those huge lists I mentioned above. However, the companies that run the filtering services also look at these lists, and go around blocking the proxies on them as quickly as they find them.

The way out of this arms race is a private proxy not listed on any of these sites and only used by a few people, so that the filtering company never knows to block it. So, Villainous Kid gives all his friends/enemies the address to his private proxy, and off they go.

(Villainous Kid is my new evil hero. This is such a perfect con. It works by taking advantage of its victims’ desire to Do Something Bad! If the victims catch on, they’ll be unlikely to report it because of their guilt over the Something Bad! It subverts the larger authority (y’know, the school) by taking advantage of a policy said authority implemented to make the kids more safe to make them less safe! If the authority catches on, they’ll feel horrible because of course their policy was going to lead to this, and they’re just lucky it wasn’t worse! Blame splatters everywhere and makes everyone all sticky! It’s perfect.)

If I were a school staffer/parent/employer using filtering software, I’d be considering whether it’s really worth the risk, given what people seem to be doing to get around it. If the point of the filters is to make your network/users more secure, I’d say a policy that encourages the use of proxies is counterproductive.

If the purpose is merely to keep them from fooling around on the internet, however, I think you would probably be happiest with a filter in place, for in my childish mind a person opposed to fooling-around-on-the-internet is just the kind of heartless bastard who would be pleased to see a kid lose her savings to a PayPal hacker as punishment for using Facebook at school.

Technological Advances I Could Do Without = scented toilet paper

On YouTube I found a video of the Hemulen from Moominland Midwinter dying horribly. I have no idea what they’re saying, being as it is in Swedish Finnish, says the person in the comments, and all.

Also, this guy’s YouTube channel seems to have the entirety of the felt-puppets Moomin show. It is nice and creepy. “And the Lady of the Cold left the squirrel for dead, frozen stiff on the ground. Little My said, “Not to worry, we can give him a lovely funeral!” And so the horse of ice carried the squirrel away to their own frozen world!”

(It calls Too-ticky “he.” She’s a girl! She’s based on Jansson’s wife! Apparently people get confused because Swedish doesn’t have gendered pronouns?)

I walked all over Osu-Kannon today, and also I am in the middle of my routine bioform cleansing, so random places on my body feel cold and others feel like they have already fallen off. But I have acquired The Items. I hope the post office is open tomorrow.

BPAL’s “Catherine” starts smelling like Queen Helene Mint Julep Masque after a while. This is not a pleasant smell.

Today I reread Moominland Midwinter and my brain felt better.

If Anne Bishop wants her book to be about magic cock rings and some hot dudes named Saetan, Lucivar, and Daemon, then by Jove, that’s what the book’ll be about. And if she maybe wants Saetan and Lucivar and Daemon to have pretty wings, and incest, and venom sacs, and zombie priests, and accidentally end up roommates with an assassin-wizard-prostitute named “Surreal”? Then that’s just how it’s going to be.

…

I knew about most of this stuff going in and everything, and I’ve read Kaori Yuki and Mercedes Lackey and that Tanith Lee retelling of Snow White where everyone-including-the-mirror gets raped, but, I mean -

At one point it’s Christmas Time In Hell.

Saetan gives presents to all the dead children in hell and weeps because the children are dead and in hell, and he gets a present for the first time in a couple thousand years and he opens it on Christmas Eve because he can’t wait because a little girl has taught him how to feel joy again and I swear to god the book is absolutely not joking. This is an actual thing that Anne Bishop thought of! And felt should be in her book! The magic cock ring book! Which also has at least three separate castration scenes, possibly more, and one of them is on the fifth page and in another one the hero demonstrates his gallantry and angst by rendering the guy unconscious and stalking off to cover objects in ice! The ice represents his soul.

I had read all these reviews talking about how insane the book is, but none of them even bother to mention the part where it’s Christmas Time In Hell. I think they just forgot about it! Because it doesn’t really stand out that much, I mean, next to the thing with the rats, and the other thing with the hospital and the leg, and the main POV character being a two-thousand-year-old prostitute warlord who’s in love with a seven-year-old and oh John Ringo no.

I have no idea why this book exists and I am going to buy the rest of the series.

(ETA: The title of this book is Daughter of the Blood. I forgot to say that.)

I climbed up a mountain, and walked down the other side to find the world empty. The hedgehog men had all vanished. The velociraptors, too. I thought they must at last have gone home, numb with the final, cold realization that they were not, perhaps, setting-appropriate to the Serengeti.

Thinking this was part of some kind of scheduled event (though it completely threw me off that the music didn’t change - the music always changes when weird stuff happens in games!), I explored for five or six minutes before realizing that the items, NPCs, and other players were also all gone.

Then it shut down and told me I’d been disconnected.

One of today’s exercises involved a sentence construction for explaining a law or extremely important social custom. I claimed that in Kentucky, it is required that one always carry a gun.

Heteronormativity-san, mildly surprised: Really?

One Of The Other Americans: *snort*

The Other American + The Rest Of The Class: *clearly see no reason to doubt this*

Several new and bewildering comments appeared on the entry where I made fun of a Second Life build and the designer and one of her employees showed up to respond. I thought at first they were a real person, but now I’m wondering if they might be some kind of spambot. Turing tests are either funnier or sadder now that we have the internet to show us how often people fail them.

Apparently I go to bed and get up earlier than anyone in my class. This is completely hilarious.

We all had to do an interview with Sensu-sensei to make sure we didn’t think the school was awful or anything. My only comment was that kanji is kinda hard (she agrees - Sleep-san corrects her sometimes), so we got side-tracked after a minute. Sensu-sensei likes CLAMP (particularly Tokyo Babylon), Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou, Yoshimoto Banana, and Yukio Mishima. CLAMP and Yoshimoto cause her to sigh in a dreamy manner. She also likes Murakami and isn’t too sure about Mushishi, but I will forgive her these sins.

Also, much of Fretful-sensei’s self-introduction consisted of a list of the shounen manga she likes, with Bleach and Naruto at the top. Why suddenly all the otaku teachers?

Warning: This is a post explaining that I walked a lot and am tired. It is boring. Do not read it.

Read the rest of this entry »

They make you do this when you get a student visa, I guess to make sure you’re not smuggling in any tuberculosis. (If that’s actually why they were doing it, I think Bruce Schneier would have words. It’s not like the god of tourists protects recipients of tourist visas from disease.) They sent some trucks with X-ray machines around for this, the trucks sat in the school parking lot and people formed whiny lines, and I took my bra off ahead of time so as to get the whole thing over with as quickly as possible. I’m very grumpy about this.

As apparently I do not yet waste enough time on video games, I set up a World of Warcraft trial account last weekend. I have been running around being an Orcish warrior with a purely mercenary interest in geology. World of Warcraft espouses the controversial idea that orcs, however much that Tolkien guy went on about them, present an only slightly greater threat than does the cunning and ruthless zebracorn. That’s kind of a zebra-unicorn, I don’t know if you caught that.

My level-twelve orc has been repeatedly killed by level-thirteen zebracorns. This is in part due to my refusal to believe that I actually just got killed by a goddamn zebracorn, which means I have to go back and fight another one to make sure. They don’t even use the horn! Using the horn is basic unicorn strategy! They just step on you and snort, and I’m wearing all this armor and some of it’s magic, and it’s just really inappropriate.

The game has a lot of weird and unpleasant ethnic stereotypes. For some reason the trolls all have pseudo-Jamaican accents and a lot of voodoo-related catchphrases. Also, comical witchdoctors. The Tauren, who are big cow people, are supposed to be Native Americans. Their catchphrases are all seepy comments about living in harmony with nature, and they have placid-stoned-ish-sounding voice actors. There’s also an opportunistic merchant race with big noses, big ears, and nasal voices. The men have catchphrases like “Time is money” and the women say “Like see you later” in valley-girl-speak and appear to be wearing too much makeup. I wonder what that’s about.

The artist of Emma made some comics entitled “The Kind of Maid Series I Really Hate”. Being a connoisseur of maid-related manga series, as she is!

(I suffer some mild suspicions regarding her gender, largely due to the immense androgyny of her pen name.)

I suffer from a wide and exciting range of nervous symptoms, which come and go in cycles. For a few months, I’ll know I’m too stressed out when I find myself clasping my hands and touching my forehead with them. Then one day, thinking about American fiscal policy, it will occur to me that I have covered my right eye with my left hand - never my right hand, even when I’ve got a cup in the left - three times in the past ten minutes, and have not done the head-ducky thing at all for a week, maybe two. These twitches helpfully alert me to the need to read a book about misunderstood teenagers and the telepathic animals who love them in ways suffering from massive and ambiguously Freudian power imbalances.

Generally, I have a cluster of two or three symptoms at once. I know I’m feeling really bad when I go past the nervous habits, the things people are supposed to have some control over, to the things we theoretically don’t - the phantom pains, the patches of skin that feel cold for no reason, and the nausea. The chest pains are a strong contender for my longest-running nervous symptom, though fortunately they don’t happen very often. I’ve had episodes of them once a year or so since I was about thirteen, I assume because I had a blood test around then that said I had high cholesterol, and I tend to take blood test results very, very seriously, being as they involve blood.

Over the last couple of years I’ve developed what I feel to be my most hilarious stress indicator yet, that being: sometimes, I forget to breathe. This symptom naturally makes me fear that I may be the secondary female character in Georgette Heyer novel. I may at any moment acquire an unsuitable love interest with an interest in a) poetry b) alternative medicine c) pursuits that are in my mind permanently coded as gay, like cock-fighting, scientific wrestling, and a fascination for iconic male figures of the time period/setting. I must be on my guard against pretentiously tied cravats.

For reasons inexplicable, today seems to have been a terrible day. I didn’t have anything to do, and so read a lot of manga and ate junk food. Nonetheless, all day I was irritable and doing my latest twitch - taking of my glasses and scraping the edges of the nosepieces - with regularity, periodically finding myself light-headed due to lack of oxygen. Maybe the earthquake disturbed some kind of important magnetic line and screwed up my chi. I don’t know.

For earthquake-related reasons, this afternoon I decided to rearrange my shelf. Before, I had my dishes on the top two shelves, which is a bad idea because heavy/sharp/breakable things shouldn’t be kept on high shelves. So, I moved them down and moved the books up to the top.

Having done this, I abruptly and again for no reason whatsoever began to feel better.

After about an hour, I realized why - the books were where I could see them.

Apparently, it is extremely beneficial to my emotional state to set up my room so that I can’t walk across it without seeing Moomins and Patricia McKillip. Considering the five different dorm rooms I stayed in during college, I think this has always been the case - the two I think of as the “best” were the ones where I had a bookshelf right in the middle of the room, where I couldn’t help seeing it.

This is a very important discovery. I need to test if putting my BPAL somewhere visible has a similar effect. Possibly also the bag of hot chocolate mix.

I do not yet have shell access to my brain, but it may be that I am getting closer.

I just woke up and realized the room was shaking. It only lasted about fifteen seconds.

ETA: Yup. 1:00 AM, intensity 1 in Okazaki.

And I didn’t even understand what it was this morning.

Read the rest of this entry »