snarp’s blog

Something *hideous* just happened to me when I was Googling “bug butter.”

LONG LOST FRIEND
He snuck in and called Love Bug, Butter-Cup, Jimby, Racoony and Razzle. Paddy said
to his friends,” Please come to the horse stable. …

I have seen the face of evil. It *smiled*.

I’ve just spent twenty minutes trying to download a copy of Arial Unicode for my Japanese dictionary on my brand new (really old) tablet.

Microsoft is afraid you’ll like, pirate Arial and do nasty things to it. Like rape the letters that have holes in them or whatever it is you stinkin’ pirates do. Pirating all the time.

So Arial Unicode is only available with Works, and can’t be downloaded from their website.

The tablet has some ancient, bizarre version of Works installed, but it somehow apparently didn’t come with the font. I have a newer copy of Works sitting here, and the library has the very newest one, if I wanted to walk over there - but the tablet doesn’t have a CD-ROM drive, so I can’t install either of them.

So in short, I have, theoretically, legal access to three separate copies of the damn font, but I can’t use them. I feel justified looking for other places to download it - actually, it doesn’t even occur to me yet that I need any justification, I mean, this is *Arial* we’re talking about.

But Microsoft has apparently sent C&D’s to every website that was offering the download. I just checked a couple of BitTorrent search engines. Didn’t find anything, of couse.

And so then it kind of hit me - I was just reduced to trying to download an illicit copy of FUCKING ARIAL off of BitTorrent. And I FAILED. And I wasted TWENTY MINUTES of my time TRYING and FAILING to acquire ARIAL.

Which Microsoft is afraid that PEOPLE ARE GOING TO STEAL FROM THEM WITHOUT *PAYING* OH THEIR POOR BAAAAABY.

ARIAL.

If I ever meet Bill Gates, I am going to kick that stupid little wuss-face so *hard*.

Rooms tend, when they reach a certain stage of cluttering, to become occupied by the Chairs that No One Should Sit In. They insinuate themselves close to the doors, gathering piles of papers in their seats in an attempt to pass themselves off as genuine office equipment. They may later, once secure in their position, begin to eat the paper, though this has never been observed firsthand; they may also make more of it. The lights tend to stop working properly once a Chair has moved in - and if they were not flourescent before, they become so.

The Chairs are always black or brown, and often naugehyde. They have headrests, but they are positioned badly, and sometimes spin all the way around. They are set low to the ground with seats that are tilted inwards and backwards in ways that subtly bend the laws of physics - it is impossible to draw an accurate image of the Chairs as seen from above. It is, in fact, very difficult to position oneself above the chairs, as their structural peculiarities become contagious after a certain amount of time, making other furniture in the room too unstable to climb on. In particularly extreme cases, the occupants of Chair-infested rooms have been known to stick cardboard under all four legs of a table. It is assumed that the Chairs are attempting to bring other things down to their level; there is evidence that they are a type of mushroom.

The inexperienced will sometimes, upon the introduction of children to their workspaces during a particularly hassled moment, feel the urge to clear off a Chair and tell them to sit in it and wait. The child will be reluctant to do so, not being able to see to the bottom of the chair, and if forced will become surly and throw up in a car fairly soon afterwards, and possibly, if exposed for long enough, bring home a C later in the week and refuse to talk about it. It is not clear what benefit the Chairs derive from this interaction, but as they all do it at least once in their lifespan, it is assumed to be important.

There is only one proven method for removing a Chair, and that is cleaning up the damn room.

“A Tale of Two CIties was so stupendous, just reading the back cover I knew this wasn’t just another corporate haiku. -DS”

Seriously, I don’t know what the fuck is wrong with the SparkNotes people. I can’t tell if they’re stoned all the time or just stupid in kind of interesting ways.

Oh, my god. Anything bad I’ve ever said about Lois McMaster Bujold, I take it all back. I am going to have A Civil Campaign’s crazy gender-bending test-tube clone-babies.

When they do obituaries for people who have done something big and important, the fourth paragraph or so starts, “It all started with [a story his five-year-old daughter told him/an idle thought during a TV show/a slight sports-related urethra injury/other innocuous things, I’m tired right now, okay].” I was reading one today and not totally paying attention, and thought the “it” in “it all started” meant the guy’s death, like the “casual comment made by his wife” set off a disturbing chain of events that culminated in the discovery that his life had been meaningless, and he declined, shattered, into a state of gray apathy fading into a dry death indistinguishable from any other moment.

Haha, that Junichiro Tanizaki sure was a funny guy. OMGWTF. I actually couldn’t remember what that acronym meant for a second just now.

So what do you think, is it really in character for the Imperial Wind Dragon to *help* bury the Mad King alive? I’m still thinking he might back off and leave the mafiosi dude to it, not dirty his talons and all.

“The truth is, Red,” Marsowen said confidentially, leaning closer to Scarlet, “I really don’t like you much.”

Scarlet’s first impulse was to say, Well, I guess I’ll just have to live with that - but abruptly he realized that that was something like exactly the opposite of what Marsowen was saying.

He dropped to the floor just in time to avoid the pointy clockwork ferret jumping at his ear.