I Am Completely Serious

“The four vast duke houses Bezarius family’s next term owner, Oz Bezarius, a 15 year old who is being thrown into an abyss of darkness prison because of sins his body know not of when he was at the coming-of-age ceremony. Oz met the black rabbit(B-rabbit)which is stained by blood, which called upon the chain Alice, will the exchanging of contract help him escape the abyss successfully?”

- Peanut-Butter Monkey Pandora Hearts

I am determined to read this.

According to my referrer logs, over the past several months, this journal has failed comprehensively to help people with the following:

The Big Questions:

• can you show me some oof the food that pandas eat?
• ask jeeves who to talk to if i think someone has faked their own death?
• accidentally shoplifted should i go back to the store
• who is that lady walking in the crestor commercial
• what does it mean to play god?
• what happened in kare kano by masami tsuda

Bleeding:

• pineapple rectal bleeding
• when is rectal bleeding serious
• hives rectal bleeding
• hives and rectal bleeding
• rectal bleeding cat
• cat has rectal bleeding

Other Urgent Problems:

• worm accidentally in brownies
• true genius is never understood

Continue reading “I’m Not Going To Be Able To Help You With That”

New quick way to find music – google site:livejournal.com [whatever you're looking for]. Someone might have put it on YouSendIt or something for their friends list recently, and it’s faster than fighting with iTunes/Yahoo/Zune/Amazon.

Though maybe this only works if you’re looking for nerd music. So far I’ve only tried it with video game remixes and… uhhh… maybe something from the Due South soundtrack shut up sibling.

I wonder why I consider searching people’s LiveJournals for video game soundtrack remixes to be completely normal.

Worst thing ever.

I win at the internet.

People on BookMooch – this guy look fishy to you? He’s asked me for what I’m pretty sure is the most expensive book I’ve got up (and I remember that it wasn’t on any wishlists when I posted it), he doesn’t have his last name posted, and he seems to be trading back and forth pretty heavily with this one guy in the UK who also doesn’t give a last name.

Making up a fake foreigner and trading imaginary items seems like the best way to scam points; the Moocher only uses up two, but the Moochee wins three, so you’re getting them for free.

[after a minute]

And another thing, the book in question is a volume of the Akira manga, and there are two different sets of that – the nice big $25 ones from years ago, and the cheap Tokyopop-sized recent ones. He asked some questions about the book in his request, and I think they were meant to confirm which edition it was.

Oh. I just noticed. He supposedly sent three separate shipments to the one British guy over a one-week period. I really don’t think people ship internationally that way, IIII don’t think I want this guy to have my manga.

And pretend UK guy has never requested anything except from California guy. Translation: There is no actual UK address.

me = genius detective

(Edited to make public after a minute because I’ve decided he’s totally guilty and I don’t care who sees his account. And I hate flocking stuff.)

Popular entertainment is wrong about everything. It’s actually just really depressing and weird when people you didn’t get along with in grade school are on TV for stupid crimes.

(And I’m against the death penalty for whoever eventually murders me.)

And, uhhh… we took the puppy to the vet because there were living things in its waste, and during the two hours we spent in the waiting room with the woman who talked constantly to her Scottie I read an issue of Cat Fancy, and there were all these messed-up ads, and okay just what is this?

I guess it’s for if you’d like to keep a kinkajou in whom the force is strong, but the terms of your lease won’t allow it.

I’ve figured out what YouTube is for.

The other day I decided that sumi-e was cool to look at, but it was even cooler that they have to do everything right the first time, without going back to touch up. Which I then decided I wanted to see. So I googled “sumi-e video”, and found this guy’s YouTube videos, which were exactly what I was looking for.

It then occurred to me that, if there were people posting videos explaining such abstruse things as “how to properly paint a bird on a maple branch using ink,” there might be instructional videos for other stuff.

Make Rollsushi – Step 1 – Maku

Moshi’s way of making sushi

How to gut a fish

(I didn’t have the sound on for any of these, so don’t blame me if Al and Moshihino are hitting on you.)

But I got grumpy and distracted when I couldn’t find a good video on how to bread something so the stuff sticks when you fry it. So, uh.

Baby Pandas

THEY ARE SLIDING ON A SLIDE, PEOPLE.

And then,

Kefka one hit kill (Final Fantasy VI)

This actually isn’t that impressive – the game lets you get away with stuff like this all over the place – but it’s always oddly cathartic.

Knights of the Round (Ultimate End) (from Final Fantasy 7)

I guess I don’t remember that part of the King Arthur legend.

Maybe I shouldn’t complain about FF6.

Mario speed run

I think this is machine-assisted, but, still.

(Also, the person who posted it clearly didn’t do it himself – real speed-runners go on forever about the strategy involved in a particular run, and who they were influenced by (speed-runners have influences) and angrily anthropomorphizing places that gave them trouble on previous runs. This kid has one sentence, and there’s no punctuation, so maybe it’s not even a sentence. But he seems to be okay with letting equally clueless people think it’s his work.)

(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…)

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.

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.

(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)

Continue reading “AAAAAAAGH”

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.

Diabolical signature

There are a number of alleged demon signatures in existence, some or all perhaps faked.

Things are being changed in Kingdom of Loathing and people are VERY VERY CONCERNED.

• “They’re moving the cannon right next to Hangks to blow it up!! Hurry and get outta HC/ronnin before all you’re meat and or belongings are destroyed!”
• “it wont be moved
  it shall disapear forever”
• “WTF”
• “The scaffolding in the Right Side of the Tracks is a NEW BUILDING!!!! Look closely and you can its doors.”
• “The image name of the scaffolding is ohnoes1zomg.gif

  What’s that supposed to mean?!?!”

Some of them are ANGRY, even.

• “woah this sucks. >_> I bet tomorow we’ll get 1/64 of a cannon. >:(“
• “i swear. if its not gone tommorow… i mean its 1/32d of a cannon. you can just pick it up, put it in your pocket, and walk away with nobody noticing. just destroy it. it had it coming. its no use anymore. destroy it.”

Yet others, wiser, cut to the heart of the matter:

• “I hope it’s moving and for a new place to adventure for a limited time so that the items you get become rare”

I’m feeling kind of regretful that I let my two alternate accounts get deleted – I got bored and looked up KoL on eBay last night, and I could’ve gotten like fifteen bucks for my rare items. It just seems wasteful.

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

( Cut for offensive banner ad. Because I don’t put *ads* right out on my front page unless you’re *paying* me. It’s a *principle*. )

It’s been about ten days since I started writing this entry, and I still don’t have any conclusion aside from “augh!” (which is the title of the text file on the desktop), so I’m just going to post it now to get it out of my head, and go read Fruits Basket.

Continue reading “What is that thing you go home hats are good.”

It’s for a page called the “National Next of Kin Registry.”

…I don’t understand.

Look at this Wikipedia entry. Then look at its diſcuſſion page.

Haha, nerds.

Basenotes contains useful advice and information on perfumes and fragrances for men and women. Plus information on male grooming.

-ill-advised meta-info

Here is a lady selling jam recipes – which she will email you in PDF format – in the wristwatches section of eBay.

She is also selling some actual watches; in those auctions, she’s superimposed her name and some anime smilies in purple text over the photos, though she’s clearly borrowing them from somewhere herself. And she’s in the habit of affixing the word “stunning” to just any old thing. Like “Stunning Very Cute Cow Pin Brooch Enamel.” I wasn’t stunned, myself.

I broke my watch, is what brought this on. Hers are sadly all more than I’m willing to spend.