snarp’s blog

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

This semester, I’m in two classes in which I’m the only girl. One’s a history class, which has six students, and the other’s a computer science class, which has five. Both have male professors. I’ve had other classes where I was either the only girl or seriously outnumbered, and while that obviously sometimes gets awkward, it’s generally not so ba

( I abandon all disclaimers THE COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT CAN’T DEAL WITH WOMEN. )

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This part of the book is written in language so Ancient, so Forbidden, so Unspeakable, and so Evil that you can’t make heads or tails of it.

Luckily, you’ve got your trusty English to Ancient Forbidden Unspeakable Evil dictionary, and you’re able to translate a little bit at a time.

You learn how to manipulate pure evil, and adapt it to your own particular method of spellcasting. Neat!

You gain a skill: Fearful Fettucini

You put the dictionary back on the shelf, for the next guy.

-

Using the skills taught to you by the Asian Vandalism Master of ??????????? Fu, Steve, you expertly dress ’s with the flowing white sheets of your ancestors. This reminds you of a haiku:

Burning cherry tree
Ev’ry blossom is aflame
Uh, here come the cops.

-KoL

I just saw the three Wunder-Deer again. They were standing out in the parking lot in front of one of the dorms, eating something on the ground. Mama Deer and Baby Major starting moving away when they spotted me - but they didn’t stop eating, so that they were kind of dragging their heads along the ground licking at it as they stumbled - they weren’t looking where they were going, this was very stumbly movement - into the bushes.

Baby Minor didn’t move until I clapped my hands really loud at it - then it stopped eating and looked at me. After a couple seconds of that, it looked around, appeared to realize it had lost its family, and darted into the yard after them. As I opened the door to my dorm, I saw a puzzled little deer head peek back up out of the bushes.

It probably ought to be adorable, except I just know I’m gonna see one of these guys’ bloodstains on the road sometime soon. I wonder if they even know about the whole “winter” thing? Where did they come from?

Incidentally, I was coming home 3:30 AM on a weekday morning because I had been coding, and had needed access to a Linux machine.

(Addendum: I’m never looking at an FMA community again. Are there people who don’t understand the “spoiler” concept? Gahhh! They’re just cheerfully going into posts by people who have only read up to volume 9, and having nice little conversations about major plot points in volume 11. Does drinking alcohol make you forget stuff that happens when you’re sober? Maybe I should drink alcohol… no, I’ve got work tomorrow… I’ll hit myself in the head! That’ll do it! Where’s a two-by-four, housekeeping left a random two-by-four in my room last year…)

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

( Cut for major spoilers. )

Also, in nitpicky news, it looks like they forgot how they were romanizing some of the names, and left some formatting errors in there again. There’s a really obvious wrong-word-balloon thing right at the beginning. I didn’t notice any others right off, but one of the squinty guy’s longer conversations was really awkward, so maybe there was some switching in there that was tricky enough I didn’t notice it.

A good thing is that the characters have pretty distinctive voices, so you can usually tell when something’s gone fishy with the formatting. If there’s mis-attributed dialog in, say, Vampire Game, you just can’t tell - the sneaky Princess, egomaniacal Prince, much-put-upon royal bodyguard, and haughty vampire king all sound like fourteen-year-old South Park fans.

…not that I don’t appreciate the lines about lube and dirty limericks the translators stuck in there (I’m sure this makes me a terrible person and a failed Serious Manga Reader), but it’s kind of jarring when an extremely stodgy character suddenly says something really snippy. Shock potty humor works best when it is a shock. It shouldn’t be coming from all directions at once, especially if you’re trying to fit a semi-serious shounen-ai story in there, too. Ishtar and Yujinn making buttsecks jokes, sure; Vord and Duzell, some of the time, fine; but not Darres. And I’m sure he was using distal-style most of the time in the original, but you couldn’t tell it here.

Unless I’m midjudging this and they completely scrapped the original plot. I don’t think they did - they’d have dumped more of the politics - but I’d say it’s possible that Ishtar was originally dumber, and Duzell’s angst more obnoxious. Which thought saddens me.

…I wish more people read this manga. It’s good! I mean, the art’s awful and the plot’s infuriating - but - well, it’s good anyway! It has a better cross-dressing- heroine- surrounded- by- guys- who- are- prettier- than- she- is- yet- whose- egos- she- constantly- deflates than Ouran Host Club! It has a haughty immortal vampire king who looks exactly like said heroine (due to magic… things…) and whom she immediately wraps around her little finger and starts sending to deal with her unwanted suitors! And he looks all ominous and serious all the time while thinking stuff like, “Damn that princess, tricking me into seducing her pretty, evil, incest-fetishizing uncle! He’s not even my type!” (Though this may be bullshit translation.) It has no idea how suspense works! It has no idea what shoulders look like! It has two palace guards whose original dialog was apparently so pointless that the translators could replace 90% of it with dirty jokes that don’t fit their facial expressions! It has horses that don’t work!

It’s great, I promise!

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Martha Wells is posting her book The Element of Fire on her LiveJournal, and that means you must read it, your only excuse for not having previously done so being its Impossible-To-Find status. (link via kate_nepveu)

Aie!

“Oh my god this show is so terrible - ohhhh, god, no, that kid’s got blue hair, he’s going to be a protagonist! We’ve got like fucking seventeen protagonists already, I can’t -”

Good work, Spark!

“OH GOD IT’S TRUE his name’s Spark oh please someone kill him! Before he matures!”

He reminds me of someone, Parn. He reminds me of you… when you were a boy!

“OHHHH GODDDDDD I’m going outside.”

I bought some manga, and requested some manga off ILL, and also bought some other manga.

It’s important for my senior research. It is.

(The astute viewer, who decides to go into Flickr and zoom in for some reason, will note that I have been puzzling the Quebecois again - I had to order the Pokemon and Princess Knight in French. These are some of the ones I actually seriously needed for research, which makes Sensei unhappy because he’s having to take my word on what they say.

Anyway, I didn’t realize Misty’s French name was “Ondine.” That’s pretty cool. I am, however, far less enthusiastic about Gary being “Regis.”)

Also, apparently the signs were, in fact, the work of a fraternity - it was apparently supposed to stay secret even after the meeting, but someone told Link. I mentioned the subject to him last night, and he admitted he knew, but claimed the only hint he would give me was that the organization started with an “f.”

He then immediately caved under the intense pressure of me deciding he was talking about FLAG.

“Okay, so it is after midnight, so it is now Talk Like a Spider Day. So we will all just be like, “…,” okay?”

“Yarr. Yarr be all I know how to say, me droogy - damn, see, I’m completely crap at this.”

I named my program “randread” because if you read it wrong it looks like “van dread.”

Sleep deprivation

(this post originally written around 6:00 AM yesterday)

Shorter-Than-Me-san and I were in the kitchen cooking stuff a few minutes ago. She was making something complicated involving a rice cooker and leeks and water chestnuts, and I was making macaroni from a box. Deciding that my bubbling macaroni looked sadly monochromatic compared to her thing, I chopped up half an onion and put it in there, then still dissatisfied with its hue, went to get some green stuff.

Her: “Is that spinach?”

Me, dropping a handful in the water: “Yeah, do you need any?”

Her: “No, no - I heard that spinach was bad. My brother was watching TV and saw that people have died from eating spinach.”

Me: “…can you watch my noodles for a minute while I go on the internet?”

Her: “Sure, okay…”

So apparently there’s E. coli in the spinach. My lack of a television or radio meant I’d missed this. Fine. Damnit. I got up to go throw away my poor macaroni and onion, but then a brilliant thought struck me - shouldn’t boiling kill E. coli? I sat down again and inquired of Google, and Google said yes.

Feeling extremely smug, I returned to my spinach, which had now been boiling for several minutes - my problem, in perfect congruence with my rich-girl expectations, had taken care of itself. I reassured Shorter-Than-Me-san of my immortality, but tossed the rest of the deadly green so as not to creep her out.

Now I’m wondering if I’ll get a refund if I take my receipt down to the store - I only bought the stuff within the past two days, I’ve probably still got it somewhere. That spinach was the expensive organic stuff, I want my $5 back.

Yeah. So extremely minor brushes with death are funny.

(previous Stupid Signs post)

These signs went up everywhere Wednesday:

(That’s a list of the words-of-the-day down at the bottom.)

Also, these slips were put into everyone’s mailboxes:

“Monty Python Enthusiasts?” So these dudes are trying to take credit for my brilliant emeffing signage? Screw them. I didn’t go.

I don’t know anyone who did, actually. Thursday evenings are really busy - even aside from all the papers and tests you get Fridays, and the people who start their weekend drinking early, there are always a lot of assemblies and club meetings scheduled on Tuesdays and Thursdays. If I’d dragged myself out to anything yesterday evening, I’d have gone to hear the speaker the East Asian department had.

You really need to give people a reason to go to your thing, if you’re having it at eight PM on Thursday. And you’ve got to at least reassure us that you’re not the white supremacist group - you don’t cover bullshit like that with excitable question marks expecting it to fucking intrigue.

(And damnit, I really hope no one actually thought I was a goddamn Wingless Angel. There were all these people who saw me hanging the things up that night…)

The Epilogue: There is now at least one sign up saying, “My hovercraft is full of eels.” I’m an inspiration.

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

Cardcaptor Sakura probably fosters really unhealthy attitudes about honesty. There are all these scenes, particularly in the last couple volumes, of which the moral is basically, It’s okay to deceive your loved ones if you feel like it’s for their own good. Particularly if the loved one is Sakura. She will totally thank you for it - tears in her eyes, screentone with bubbles and flowers, the works.

( Facetiousness continues, but with slight spoilers. )

But it is so cute that I don’t actually care. I guess Sakura is the only completely heterosexual protagonist? I don’t even know if you can count Clow, he has this thing about keeping extremely pretty men around. Well, maybe Kero’s straight. It’s not addressed.

Ohhh, wait. Miss Mizuki. Okay, so two.

My brain hurts from library. There were four people on my shift for some reason, and all of them but me were new.

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Last week, I decided to mirror copies of my LiveJournal posts over onto my website for paranoia reasons. I think I’m pretty much done now. I don’t know if I’m going to bother making the mirror keep up with the LiveJournal perfectly unless I can find a way to do it automatically.

Anyway. Notes on exporting stuff from LiveJournal to WordPress:

* Make sure the WordPress content directories have their permissions set up all nice before you start. It might not work right anyway, though.

* Set the correct time zone in WordPress before you start. WordPress and LiveJournal don’t communicate well about this - all your imported posts will end up with the wrong time stamp if you’re not in the time zone WordPress thinks you are.

* * And apparently Daylight Savings doesn’t sync up right no matter what you do. What the hell.

* It’s the XML export option, not the default CSV one.

* LiveJournal-specific code - lj-cuts and user- and community-names - won’t go through right. It just gets erased. (Not the stuff under lj-cut tags, just the tags themselves.) For user- and community-names, I just uploaded the little graphics to my server and manually put in fake tags. This will be over-labor-intensive for people who write more than I do.

There’s no WordPress equivalent to an LJ-cut; I eventually ended up manually setting up fake cuts that led back to the LiveJournal. This won’t work for people who write more than I do, or are planning to erase the LiveJournal. (I also made invisible posts containing all the cut text, to keep all my data nice and safe.)

* Apropos of the invisible double-posts - you can *have* two posts for exactly the same time, but only one will show up at a time on a list-page that should show both. My solution was to set the double-posts’ times one second back.

* Tags (”categories”) won’t transfer over, either.

* The “Uncategorized” category doesn’t disappear automatically once you’ve, you know, categorized a post - you have to actually remove it. And WordPress has no mass-edit options.

* In WordPress, “publish” means “make visible to all” - if you’ve set a post to “private,” hitting “publish” will undo it. Hit “save” instead.

* When viewing the blog while logged in as an administrator, there’s nothing to differentiate private posts from public ones. There doesn’t seem to be a way to view only the private posts, either. This is annoying.

* If you’re changing the permalink style and WordPress says, “You should update your .htaccess now” at the very top of the page, scroll down to the very bottom. There’s a box down there that explains what it wants.

* It’s kind of messed-up how the LiveJournal spellchecker doesn’t recognize “LiveJournal,” “LJ,” “blog,” “permalink,” and “href.”

I wish Tomoyo was there, though. And Syaoran was more fun when he had no social skills and exploded all the time.

I accomplish nothing.

The Aforementioned Red Bull Mole Encounter:

On Tuesdays and Thursdays I have the 9:00 PM-to-midnight shifts at the library. This is obviously not ideal, but Jenan grabbed the midnight-to-2:00 AM shifts, so, you know, what are you going to do. The other person on the shift is presently a sophomore who only just got hired. Which isn’t a problem, because she’s not a crazy person or anything, but I’ve still got to answer a lot of questions and show her how to work stuff and all.

Little did we know that there was another new hire in the library Tuesday night. Little did we know that we stood, that evening, under the same buzzing fluorescent lights as the Red Bull Mole.

Or as they dub it, “the student brand manager“.

The Mole waited until after eleven to make its move. It struck at a moment when the senior supervisors had retreated into the back office to do computer stuff, and the junior supervisor had gone to the bathroom. It might well even have been listening in, earlier, while I was explaining cargo procedures to the new girl, marked which was the senior student worker, and decided to wait until she was too engrossed in her gigolo comic to take notice of its unseelie shenanigans.

At any rate, it was she who turned to me and said, “Oh, wow. What do you think this is?”

(Aw, isn’t that cute. BUT IT’S WRONG)

She asked me if I thought she should go find the person who’d dropped them off, since she “didn’t see anyone go outside, so they must still be in here somewhere” - but I’d remembered the fliers that had showed up around campus at the end of spring semester, soliciting applications for the exalted position of Denison University Red Bull Student Brand Manager. I assured her that this was definitely an intentional Red Bull “drop,” calculated to addict people who might be falling asleep towards the end of their shifts, and that much the same procedure was used by cocaine dealers to addict affluent suburban ten-year-olds on Halloween. Or maybe I didn’t say that second part. I then, immersed in my own fuming anti-consumer bigotry, asked what the person had looked like. She said she thought it had had been “just some girl.” My holy quest to slap a person in some way associated with the marketing of soft drinks had been thwarted… for now.

She asked if I thought we could keep them, and I told her they were all hers, but asked her to wait to dismantle it until I’d taken some pictures. And that is the tale of My Red Bull Mole Encounter On Tuesday.

[nerd]

So apparently Final Fantasy XII just bots itself?!

…

The way I play turn-based RPG’s? This is excellent.

Hahahaha, somewhere someone with a Y chromosome just felt a great disturbance in the force. And also completely bled all over himself from the ears.

[/nerd]

I got weird and hyper and then sick Tuesday night. This is what I did with the hyper - there have been some annoying signs going up around campus recently, which look like this:

They went up in waves over a few days, with “Honor” the first day, then “Pride,” then “Passion.”

Leaving work Tuesday night, I started thinking genius thoughts, and went back to my room and made some better signs. I finished them in about an hour, and went back to the library all brimming with enthusiasm to print them out and apprise Jenan (working the desk) of my plans. She was not entirely enthusiastic, and concerned by my energy at the (to her) late hour of 1:15 AM. Bah, I said. I went out cheerfully in the damp and taped signs up. Sometime later, logical deduction tells me, I must have gone to bed, though my memory of this time is imperfect.

Anyway. My signs:

(The last couple of sets I was careful to put up in and around the Computer Science building, as I felt I could not rely on their being understood elsewhere.)

WTF Internet Moment: The Keep by Jennifer Egan, reviewed by Donna Bowman on the Onion AV Club

Jennifer Egan should adopt a nom de plume - “J. Egan” would do quite well. An unfortunate side effect of the popularity of chick lit and poetic, memoir-ish “women’s novels” is that a woman’s name on the cover creates a certain expectation about what’s inside.

…yessss. This unfortunate preconception is common in many demographics, for example the yeti, orcs, Snorks, amphibious robots from the original Johnny Quest, and that bell that hides the Easter eggs in France. Which is to say that that it is a problem mainly among imaginary pretend people.

Isn’t The Tale of Genji generally considered the first novel? What with it being by a woman, and things. I think the reviewer is under the impression that women writing books is somehow a new thing, started mayyyybe in the early 90’s or so. Whole thing couldn’t have pre-dated Oprah, anyway.

And Egan subverts that expectation as thoroughly as any woman writing today. Her previous novels pigeonhole themselves in typical women’s-fiction categories by their synopses (model finds self, teenage girl finds self) and cover photos (youthful female faces).

First sentence: “Egan subverts stereotypes about women’s writing being navel-gazing crap!”

Second sentence: “(And by the way, I apparently believe that women’s writing is navel-gazing crap.)”

Her muscular, lively prose achieves a haunting effect closer to Chuck Palahniuk than Marilynne Robinson - not the tenuous, lacy phrases of fragile introspection, but the stark honesty of action arrested in stop-motion.

OH MY GOD THAT IS SO CRAZY, THAT IT IS CRAZY. I don’t know who Marilynne Robinson is. Is she the archetypal woman writer now? I was not informed. I was tolerably happy with Jane Austen’s performance, did her term expire? And why the hell wasn’t J. K. Rowling’s name on the ballot?! Step up and do your duty to the community, woman!*

Also, stop-motion is for Christmas specials.

That’s my harmful preconception.

(Skip skip skip - awkwardly-worded and confusing synopsis - aaand here -)

And the immersion in these high-stakes psychological tightrope acts gives The Keep a page-turning horror.

Immersion in… high-stakes… tight-rope acts.

Oh my god that’s the best bad metaphor ever.

Just as well that the publishers didn’t slap a girl’s face on the cover; if they could take the “Jennifer” off, too, Egan might get the kind of masculine (or at least gender-neutral) reading her outstanding novel deserves.

…holy shit.

I feel like I should read the book just to apologize to Egan for having been reviewed by this person. I guess Bowman must have read it, but her mind was clearly on something else. Is the stuff on the AV Club usually this bad?

* And is Palahniuk really the archetypal male writer? It seems like a lot of women read his books.