snarp’s blog

Tomorrow I shall depart for Japan. On a plane.

GAHHHHHHHH

I am writing this from my uncle’s house in Cincinnati, Mom, Dad, and thegeekgene having flown off to Reno earlier today. Somehow we ended up leaving from different airports? I do not understand this.

I need to turn off the laptop in a minute to make sure it fits in my backpack.

Friday through Sunday, I went to see Jenan in Pittsburgh. I learned that she inherited her figurine-collecting mania from her parents, who collect small ceramic shoes (her mom) and flags (her dad).

Jenan is much more concerned about my lactose intolerance than I ever am. I feel kind of bad about it. She had her Mom buy me soymilk, but I forgot it was there and didn’t even drink any.

We carefully examined the stock of a comics shop and a gaming shop, and deemed both sadly unsatisfactory, though she had a very serious conversation with the proprietor of the latter in which he swore to rectify the situation.

We went to the Carnegie Museum, and I made her stand around while I tried once again to get a good picture of Gustav Dore’s The Forest at Twilight. She mocked the modern art, and then tried to show me some stained glass she really liked, but they were remodeling and we couldn’t figure out where it was.

We also watched Death to Smoochy with her Mom. We were largely unimpressed. John Stewart’s character was only baaaarely in there most of the time, so it was kind of a problem when he abruptly became really important at the end. When we watched the deleted scenes, it turned out they’d cut out two or three scenes explaining his importance for “pacing reasons.” There’s probably a problem when something with the basic plot of Death to Smoochy meanders so much you start cutting out plot for pacing reasons. (The movie was also pretty sexist. Just throwing that out there.)

I also obstructed her efforts to roll a Star Wars RPG character over Skype with [people for whom I haven’t made up Secret Blog Names]. This was achieved via comments like, “So you could be an Ewok Noble!” and “What did many Bothans die for?” She eventually decided on a S–an (I completely don’t remember the name) rogue-type. I realized that it’s really easy to cheat on your rolls when you RP over Skype! Not that Jenan did. Of course.

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I read an abridged version of The Dream of the Red Chamber\The Story of the Stone on the bus. It’s a Georgette Heyer novel where everyone dies. I approve of this, though I acknowledge that I was slightly disappointed when I realized it wasn’t really going to have much in common with Barry Hughart’s The Story of the Stone past the prologue.

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There are a couple of practicum students at my workplace. One of them tends to make really offensive statements with an air of expectation that no one will ever disagree with her, like week-before-last’s, “She’s dating this Chinese boy, and, you know - no one ever thinks of their daughter marrying a Ching. No one thinks of their daughter becoming a Ching.”

Today’s, pronounced with massive vitriol, was, “His sexual orientation being what it is, I don’t think he has got any business sitting on the Family Court.” Her hatred for the judge was due, she said, to his order that she alert the court should she choose to get married again. (I assume there was more context to this; I don’t recall her saying why she was in court.) If I have the timeline right, she had just gone through either her fifth or sixth divorce when this happened.

She speaks of her teenage daughter’s physical development as if it were a particularly regrettable decision the girl had made - “a D-cup! Now do you believe that?! I have never been a D-cup in my life!” - and her seven-or-eight-year-old son’s ignorance as though it were a deliberate attempt to shame her - “So, be-cause he thinks the kids in Special Ed don’t have to do any work, he goes up to his teacher and is saying, “Well, I want to be in Special Ed so I don’t have to do any work!” My son saying he wants to be in Special Ed! It’s about enough to break my heart.” Her descriptions of her present husband might as easily be references to a puppy with diarrhea.

This woman is studying to be a social worker.

My Supervisor: That call a minute ago, was that a life or death thing?

Me: Death, actually. Mr. M - he’s, like, on the board? - he died last night.

Me: - That thing I just said was completely not funny…

My Supervisor: Oh, you mean he was on the board!

My Supervisor: Oh, dear, that wasn’t funny either, was it.

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Me: So I thought Achewood made up a word - because it does a lot, it made up some pretty convincing words about witches the other day - but then I googled it, and it turned out they did not make up a word. Want to know what the word is?

Mom: Okay.

Me: “Merkin.” It’s a pubic hair wig prostitutes wore when they had to shave to get rid of lice. It’s, like, a real actual thing that existed!

Mom: Yeah, I’ve heard of those…

Me: So there was a time period when guys were not afraid of pubic hair! They actually found it attractive enough that prostitutes bought little wigs, and I - Mom! This is an important discovery!

Dad: Big news, girls, big news!

thegeekgene: What.

Dad: We were out on the boat with Woofy - no, no, this is important girls - we were out on the boat with Woofy, and she did a very bad thing. Ohhh, she did such a bad thing, girls. She jumped off the boat, on to someone else’s boat, took a rawhide that was there, and jumped back! *deeply pitiful voice* She’s a thief! I’ve raised her wrong, I’ve been a bad father!

[later]

thegeekgene: So did you make any attempt to deter Woofy from this action?

Dad: What?

thegeekgene: Did you… punish her?

Dad: *deeply pitiful voice* No! I encouraged her! I told her to look for cash next time!

I got a job last week, which will end when I leave for Japan in a month. I took a phone call from a crackhouse proprietor Friday, and Monday 1) learned that the person had been a crackhouse proprietor 2) was instructed in our standardized response to phone calls from crackhouse proprietors. The response is “no.”

But I’m going to post about Second Life.

The thing about Second Life is that it’s the internet in 3D.

It is, basically, just some very large servers where people can make and explore public 3D areas, communicate with other users, and try to sell those other users t-shirts. You have to pay the company if you want to make your own area or upload something (like a t-shirt), but making an avatar and looking at other people’s stuff is free.

So they’re a web host, and like most web hosts, they don’t really mess with the paying customers’ content unless they stand to lose money. Hence stuff like an obsessively detailed reproduction of Midgar from Final Fantasy VII - no lawsuits yet, so it’s good to go! Recently they’ve been getting worried about the lolicon role-players, and they’re addressing this in ways fen will find familiar.

Because anyone with money can build an area (called a sim), and anyone at all can make an avatar, there’s a lot of crap in there. It is normal to encounter a six-foot-tall green penis sitting in a crudely-sculpted flying car with some audio looping in the background telling Craig how much he completely sucks. Craig will respond on his own plot of land next door, with an equally penis-positive Photoshopped image of Leonard Nimoy, and a recorded cuss that only plays once because he couldn’t figure out how to get it to loop. Noted guy Theodore Sturgeon predicts that 90% of the content on Second Life relates either to penises or to the question of how much Craig completely sucks. (The answer being, completely.)

So, you remember when you first got on the internet, and had no idea how it worked, and just typed stuff into Yahoo or whatever to see what showed up? I’ve been doing that with Second Life for a few weeks now. It is insanely addictive.

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