snarp’s blog

From an email:

And [person] (at least I think that was her, I’m bad with names) left a sword with a cat (?) puppet on top of it outside your door. Just to tell you, if you were wondering. I don’t think anyone would have taken it but…oh well.

( . )

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The sender name on my latest spam is “Drogo Hills.”

Now I’m going to have to start a syndicated comic strip about politically-minded anthropomorphic animals just so I can call it that.

At work today, I needed to print out a little sign I’d made explaining to people how to use the new battery chargers. (I put Astro Boy’s happy face next to the “yes” diagram, and Astro Boy’s blank dead-batteries face next to the “no” diagram. I always encourage the anthropomorphication of technology, and thus also the violence that necessarily accompanies it.) They’ve been moving all the computers with the graphic design software around and turning their cables into Dadaism, so I couldn’t get at anything that could print right.

I ended up needing to go into a couple different locked offices, so for about twenty minutes I was running around with both of the supervisors’ key rings. I’m convinced that there’s going to be a corpse found in a locked room tomorrow morning.

Two classes today - one had five students, one had three. Both only got finalized a couple weeks ago.

So it was kind of a weird day.

The other four people in computer science were either sophomores or freshmen, all of whom had just finished up the prerequisite the previous semester/year. I took the prerequisite first semester of freshman year. Listening to the guy talk was kind of panic-inducing, but the actual text didn’t look at all bad when I started looking at it. This is the same set of reactions I had when I took the first class freshmen year, which was an easy A - I think it’ll be okay.

The professor was obviously worried about this random senior’s presence amongst his delicate little majors/minors, however, so I promised him I’d drop the course if it started to look like I was going to hold them up.

Modern East Asia, on the other hand, was very on-the-other-hand. It is being taught by a grad student who only signed his contract last Thursday - Professor Portentous, the usual East Asian history teacher, is out of commission for the semester for medical reasons, and the guy who was originally slotted to replace him had a family emergency. Hence, Grad Student. The class consists of:

* The Voice - a senior East Asian Studies minor, whose nickname I did not select at random, and who has been known to annex entire discussion periods even having blown off the reading. When I entered the room, he was earnestly suggesting to Grad Student methods of shutting him up, up to and including force.

* me - a senior East Asian Studies major who did a semester-long research project in Grad Student’s pet subject (the Japanese military medical corps) last semester. (project previously featured in this journal as “essaypocalypse”) Also, when Grad Student asked us to define “history,” I worked “constructed narrative” into my schpiel, which thrilled him - according to the people taking the early morning section of the class, this is his very favorite phrase. Oops.

* a guy who’s taking the class for a GE

GE guy looked very sad. I don’t know if they’re going to keep the class if he drops.

(Though Shorter-Than-Me-san, who’s in the morning section, said something vague about transferring over, which would be good. I really don’t want to rearrange my whole schedule again…)

Professor Portentous sent me a very apologetic email about how sad he was to have to be canceling his classes. (I think he sent personal ones to all the seniors.) This alarmed me slightly, and I reassured him that everything was just fine and he really ought to go back to bed. Now I kind of see why he was so fretful. His department’s not really prepared to lose both him and Shitty Art Teacher at once.

On the other hand, we do apparently have four Real Actual Japanese People on the faculty all of a sudden - I think we’d only actually planned for one, the Noh dance teacher, as of the end of last semester. The others are a replacement for Shitty Art Teacher (I have her class tomorrow); a second language teacher to take over the Intermediate class from Sensei; and apparently some kind of music teacher - I’m not sure whether she’s associated with the East Asian department or not, but she was in the library yesterday. These all seem to be older people (not grad students), which obviously isn’t a guarantee of responsibility, but hopefully their presence will help keep Sensei and Mr. Smuckles from overheating.

Ahh, yes. School is starting. Time to get back on a sensible sleep schedule - 3:30 AM to noon.

(Except not on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I guess. I need to talk to the dude about whether I really need that 10:00…)

(This text was originally posted on LiveJournal. It has been reformatted (awkwardly) for use on WordPress.)

I guess the internet’s been having Big Creepy Bugs Week or something? There seem to be more people than usual having horrible bug encounters on my friends list, and there was a thing on one of the _wank comms about people wanting bug pictures kept under lj-cuts.

In middle school I would always carry a thing of dental floss in my bag, which I would use to make little leashes for the preying mantises I beat out of the bushes at recess. That sentence should be giving you a pretty accurate picture of my social life at the time.

But it also means that I can totally look at those centipede pictures on FW and then go right back to my crunchy sandwich.

Today, however, I looked at Boing Boing. And there was the fucking hummingbird hawkmoth.

I seriously don’t think you should click on that link. ( You probably shouldn’t read the rest of this, either. )

Oh my god that thing is awful. It took me a second to realize it wasn’t a hummingbird. That’s what’s so bad about it. Hummingbirds are nice, and big moths are okay, but a really big moth that looks like a hummingbird, with a thick body and a bunch of ineffectual little tapered legs with no feet - that is Lovecraft. And its eyes aren’t where it looks like they are, and its front half is shaped like a vibrator, and it would be the worst thing ever to have come flying at your neck because it’s so much more fragile than a bird and its little proboscis-thing would break off and it would be hurt so it wouldn’t stop flying around and shit.

And I’m not going to be able to fix this by fucking looking at kitten pictures, either, because I’m going to suddenly became convinced that one of them is actually a freaky bug that only looks kind of like a kitten, and its eyes are actually infrared bits or sticky traps for smaller bugs. Please, someone tell me that a mad biologist bioengineered that thing, so I can go kill him for it.

Before, the only Boing Boing person I had conceived a personal hatred for was Cory Doctorow, because he shares my basic politics, but fills them full of a kind of viscerally unpleasant self-absorption and paranoia. But now I hate Frauenfelder, too, for the much sounder reason that he thought the creepyfuck bug was pretty and just slammed the picture up on the main page with no warning. I want to slap him really hard.

I had a nightmare a few years ago about a computer virus getting printed out, and getting up off the paper as a really big, really thin, translucent bug with a lot of wings that it didn’t actually use to fly - because it was a program, it was immune to air, so you couldn’t wave a magazine at it to blow it away from you, so it just kept coming. This moth is actually worse than my made-up dream monster. I would still hate the moth if you told me that every last one of them had died last night because of air pollution.

-

Also, here is a webcomic.

(edited a couple times to correct the date and put a cut in)

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I met some stupid deer today.

There are some football players in full uniform out in the tall grass, looking puzzled. Either they lost a ball or they fell from the sky.

Mike Nelson and Kevin Murphy are doooooing thinnnnngs!

I’d actually been thinking that people should be doing podcasts like this - heckling voice-over tracks for new episodes of TV shows and stuff. It completely dodges the whole copyright issue.

I want to do a fake commentary track for a slasher movie:

Director: And here you’re running away again. Like you were a minute ago… you got tired, doing all that running away or something, I guess?

Girl Who Played Final Girl: I don’t know! It was really fun!

Director: And here’s the killer again - in that spooky mask again! Damn, that mask was pretty spooky! Was it, uhhhh, was it pretty hot? Uh, in the mask?

Girl: I don’t know! It -

Director: I was talking to, uhhhh, the other guy, here -

Guy Who Played Killer: Uh? Uhhh… you fell down again.

Girl: I did?! Oh, you mean in the movie - ahahaha, I get confused, I always get -

Director: See, I liked this with all the falling down, I mean when we were filming, because it was very, uhhhh, it was very allusive, you know, to the other movie, and uhhhh, I like Hitchcock, he is sort of my mentor in a way -

Guy: You fell down again.

Girl: Ahahahaha! I don’t know!

Director: …but maybe it was too much… I put my son’s birthday on that sign, I like that. For the viewers, nice little thing… I think I might’ve… I got it wrong, though.

I accidentally shoplifted today. Jenan and I went into the drug store so I could buy some arch supports for my sad feet. (Jenan’s allergy to her own eyebrows makes it impossible for her to safely mock me for this type of purchase.) We got absorbed in a very major conversation about something, and I walked out with the insoles in my hand.

After a couple minutes, I thought, “Hey, it’s kind of SuperNerd how I’m carrying these arch supports through town without a baggie -” And then I said, “Shit,” alerted Jenan to my criminal activity, and ran back to the store. It didn’t look like the guy was on to me.

There could be no dumber thing to get arrested for than Accidentally Shoplifting Orthopedic Insoles.

In related news, I think XXXholic just dumped a pretty major Cardcaptor Sakura spoiler on me. Damn you, CLAMP.

Rigsin was in the doorway, breathing hard, his steel eye drifting dazedly. It took him a second to summon up language: “There’s a demon outside. I’m a little confused.”

Everyone looked immediately at Teo. He had slammed his book closed. Illogically, he snapped, “I don’t know why you all think it’s about me -”

“’s not about me!” protested Rigsin. “I asked. (I don’t like talking to demons, you know.) You need me to distract it and you go out the back?”

“- no, I don’t need - I didn’t do anything, damnit -”

Scowling thoughtfully into space, Lyssa asked, “Do demons care if you do something else with bird hearts, do you think?”

Teo stared at her for a second, then said carefully, “Perhaps you’d better stay inside, just in case. I’ll go,” he told Rigsin, standing with a wince and pocketing his book. “It talks?”

“Not so good at it -”

As Teo closed the door, he heard Scarlet saying, blank with hysteria, “‘Something else?’”

Gate leading nowhere:

Stairs leading nowhere:

I have been kind of vaguely thinking John Scalzi might be irritating for a while now. Now I just don’t like him:

I’m not defending plagiarism, mind you. It’s bad. I’m just asking whether the question of which is more egregious, blatant theft of character or quiet theft of text, isn’t like asking whether cake or pie is the better dessert. Ultimately, they’re both still dessert.

“Blatant theft of character” = fanfic; he’s saying is that all fanfic writers are morally on a level with Cassandra Claire.

This suggestion makes little sparks come off my head.

COLLEGE.

I’ve been moving the stuff I did on the laptop over to the desktop. I found a .txt file called “ohcomeon.” This file contains the character description of someone who attacked me in that vampire game a while back:

Werewolf Jade Shadow Wendigo

Clad in black pants that fit around her curvaceous hips, broadened dramatically and were straight legged from the buttocks down. Her twenty hole docs were completely concealed within her longer than average, wide legged pants. Various chains were hanging off of hooks which were randomly placed on the pockets and sides. Neon teal thread outlined the excessively large pockets and other cloth dealy-bobs as well as the seams. A honey colored complexion gave her a rather exotic appearance. Youthful and athletic her body was muscularly toned to perfection. A rather voluptuous chest was being held up by a black leather garment that looked like half a corset. It was so tight, not only did it seem to be a second skin, but it left nothing to the imagination. Cut short just above the bottom of her rib cage, it showed her rather attractive torso. Golden eyes peered out behind lush lashes. Silken tresses flowed in raven waves around her frame, ending at the small of her back. Her hair was usually pulled back into a pony-tail or braided with the bangs free to frame her face. She wasn’t the tallest of creatures, standing at 5’5″.

She is kind of a Frankenstein’s monster of subtly clashing Mary Sue cliches.

She is “curvaceous” and “muscularly toned to perfection” at the same time! Her breasts are “voluptuous” on their own merits, but just for good measure they’re also “held up” by a garment that “not only seems to be a second skin, but leaves nothing to the imagination” - those are completely different ideas, there! Hence the “not only, but” sentence structure!

And her torso is “rather attractive,” I don’t know if we’d made that clear enough or not. She has “silken tresses” that can also do the “raven waves” thing, excellent. Oh, no, her skin is “honey colored” and her eyes are “golden,” that seems like a bit of an oversight.

I don’t know if you’re supposed to call this person “Jade” or “Shadow” or “Wendigo” - I’m just calling her Wendy. I hope Wendy doesn’t go at me with her torso or with a tress or something.

And I just realized, she’s clearly not a fucking werewolf.

My wires are all crossed, apparently. Today I had a hideous muscle-spasm in my foot - which I thought for a half-second was a dog-attack, and which Mom terrifyingly informed me might be my arch trying to fall - and sliced my finger open while involved in onion-related activities. Both times, I cursed for about thirty seconds, then started giggling.

Giggling really hard. After the foot spasm, which hurt worse, I actually had trouble breathing. This was chain-lightning giggling, the giggling of Thor.

This isn’t a new thing; thinking back, it’s happened every time I can recall getting hurt the past few years. I even laughed when I was in that car accident, though I was crying at the same time, so I didn’t scare anyone that way. I do remember freaking out Jenan with it at some point, and one of my supervisors at the library when I banged the cart into myself. This always happens. Having two different injuries in short order just made it more obvious.

…

And I just realized I’ve been laughing, for no reason whatsoever, the whole time I’ve been writing this; I’ve been thinking about injuries, see. And it’s not really funny. It kind of tends to piss people off when, you know, they hear a scream and rush back, and find you sitting there cracking up, with a box of stuff knocked all over the floor. Suppose I’m ever at a crime scene or something?

My punk endorphins are seriously going to get me in trouble one day.

We’ve got a pile of terriers on the screened-in porch right now. One of thegeekgene’s friends asked us to come get them out of the road near her house, because we have apparently taken over the local animal shelter. There are three puppies and two adults, apparently a little terrier family.

I have named one of the puppies Emperor Vomitorius, for reasons that are very good. Poor little Emperor Vomitorius got very carsick.

We kept them long enough to dip them for fleas, but they’re going to the shelter tomorrow, so if anyone wants a vomiting terrier who is in charge of Rome, speak up now.

Dad bought a laptop to take lawyering with him today. He took me with him to help, because He Knows Nothing. From what the office’s computer guy was saying when this idea first came up, Dad basically just needed something with a wireless connection, so I pointed Dad to the cheapest thing there. He said okay, and we asked the guy to go get one.

The guy came back and said they were out of stock, at which point I suggested we go to a different store, to find something in the same price range.

Upon being placed in a shopping situation, Dad’s brain begins a countdown. None but Dad knows when the countdown will end, and even he knows not where… but when he reaches zero, an item must be purchased. Dad did not want to take the two-minute trip to the other store. He wanted to buy a laptop now. He wanted the one that said “satellite” on the box.

Loud, Cheerful Upper-Class Businessman (Dad): Oh, I like this one here, honey!

Waspish, Ungrateful Daughter With Nasal Voice (Me): You want - do you like it because it says it’s “satellite?”

Dad: Yeah…

Me: Do you know what it means that it says “satellite” on the box?

Dad: No.

Me: There’s no - I can’t even find the specs for this, there’s no little card -

Dad: Yeah, I’m getting this one here, please. This one here, please!

Grasping, Villainous Best Buy Employee: All right, I’ll get it out for you, if you’ll just sign -

Me: No! Stop signing things - I’m calling Mom! Don’t sign anything! Dad -

At this point, The Plot Thickens, for the computer that Dad had pointed out to the salesman was not in fact, the “satellite” computer. Dad, presented with the information that he had just asked for a completely random computer, said again, “Yeah, this one here’s fine.”

This laptop turned out to be basically the same laptop that I had suggested to him before, but with a slightly beefed-up processor and hard drive, and more RAM - it was about $200 more than the other. The guy asked us whether we wanted a service plan. I’d had to send in my laptop to be worked on twice, and since Dad is not precisely reverent of his electronics, it seemed likely that he was going to need it, too. He said he didn’t want it. While we were going up to pay, Dad muttered darkly that he wasn’t going to pay $250 for a service plan!

I have basically been ranting the whole day.

Oh, honey, we’ve got corn! You didn’t tell me! We’ve got corn…

-Dad, intensely tragically

The group of New Jersey children Mom and I were doing house-building stuff with is leaving tomorrow. That kid never spoke inappropriately intimate French to me a second time, but I did have a conversation with a girl who was really bewildered by our outlandish Kentuckian customs, like having bite-sized graveyards. There are three small graveyards in the area around where we were putting a house together, and apparently the New Jerseyans all found this excessively macabre. This girl was particularly struck by the fact that a lot of the graves were decorated (the stuff was left over from Memorial Day), including some really old ones.

I told her that they were privately-owned plots that got kept in the family because, you know, you can’t exactly sell a graveyard that easily around here, when there’s all this less coffin-ridden land available for the few people who actually want it. And if you own an old graveyard, you might as well bury your new dead people in it, too, right?

But she missed the financial bit and just sat there being floored by the idea of Private Family Graveyards, and I said, yeah, we’re very spiritually close to our dead and all that stuff, us Kentuckians.

She took this suggestion seriously.

She was also concerned by the by straight pipes; by the fact that some roads that clearly should have been one-way were not so marked (HAHAHAHA); and by the fact that some of the houses they’d worked on had had piles of garbage around. She was kind of stunned when I told her that there wasn’t garbage pickup up all the hollers (they all had trouble with “holler”), and sometimes people had to haul stuff off themselves, or even wait until someone who has a car can do it for them - she had just barely accepted that no one recycled, but I think she assumed it to be a character flaw, rather than lack of opportunity. She was extremely nice, but had some pretty specific Ideas Of What Constitutes Civilization.

The organizers were telling Mom that the New Jerseyans were one of the better volunteer groups to show up recently, which I can see - they were all pretty frighteningly energetic and cheerful. Apparently there was a youth-group from the midwest whose minister had told the kids that the people they’d be dealing with all lived in houses with dirt floors and no plumbing. He felt extremely personally betrayed to find that this was not so. He had been prepared to bring civilization to the savages, and so was unready to take advice from any of the organizers, who all had more experience in construction than he did. Thus, it took this group two weeks to build a shed. I am not sure how the minister felt about the proximity of the Wal-Mart.

There were a lot of kitties running around the place today. This became very interesting whenever anyone wanted to sit down.

I decided I’d might as well figure out how YouTube worked. I uploaded this video of Dad’s huge Saint Bernard grooming thegeekgene’s cat. The dog does this often, and to every amenable cat she encounters, but she and this cat in particular share a special bond; the white cat is the only one I’ve yet seen groom the dog back. Or stand on her back and give her a massage.

You can hear That Show With Undertakers in the background, and the video goes on about twenty seconds after the dog stops grooming, because I’ve tried three video editors and still not convinced any of them to both cut and save the file properly.

Temperature: 98°

Temperature With Humidity: 105°

?Temp/Day: +3°

Summary: It’s hot.

Notes: Global warming proceeding satisfactorily - 99% of responsible people building houses in Middle of Nowhere, KY expected to be eliminated by target date. Possible exception in unnaturally perky middle-school boys who are proud of their knowledge of French but call me “tu” instead of “vous” (they totally shouldn’t) may be correctable through Other Means.