I think I must have been really over-tired and kind of loopy last night, because when my roommate handed me a packet of cold meds I apparently proceeded to look up every single active ingredient, proclaim, "THEY ALL DO MAGICAL THINGS," go downstairs to take my pills, and sing about how "Advil is my one true love, it always makes me feel better."

I also dimly recall proclaiming, earlier in the night, "OH LADY GAGA, YOU ALWAYS KNOW EXACTLY HOW I FEEL," which I can only hope made more sense in context.

I also didn't notice that we had a huge new television in our common room until after I'd been watching spanish talk shows on it with my roommate, who was explaining to me who the hell all these people were, for ten minutes.

"WAIT WHERE DID THIS TELEVISION COME FROM?!"

At least the cold seems less terrible today.

On the downside, they're testing the fire alarm so it's been turning off and on since roughly 7 AM. :|

Tempura fried everything

I keep saying to myself that I'm going to do some serious writing this summer break, which is hard because I don't know where to begin. I try to psyche myself up, assuring myself that I always have a few false starts when I work on a project and if I just power through them I'll punch through the other side and make something wonderful, but really... without deadlines, I'm not getting much done.

I went out for sushi and tempura tonight with a friend, and we spent about an hour talking about how we looked a lot like hipsters (Me with my bangs and what he called a "hipster bun" and a cardigan, him in horn-rimmed glasses and a very hipster button up) but weren't hipsters... I'm pretty sure if you spend an hour talking about not being a hipster, you by definition now are a hipster, congratulations.

And then I had the bright idea of putting an entire tempura mushroom in my mouth, which ended about as well as putting an entire tempura mushroom in your mouth can ever end. (Hint: it burns.)

We played hot-potato with the leftovers before passing them off on one of the guys working the night shift at Gamestop, who is a friend of my friend, and who he is buttering up in hopes of scoring a job, and then grabbed bubble tea while trying to stall before driving back. It was raining pretty hard, but it showed no sign of stopping so we decided to bite the bullet and head in. It was like driving under water. I was doing ten to fifteen under speed limit on the highway and for once no one cared. The lightning was INTENSE.

And then when I got home it happened to be the one place in the city where it was merely drizzling. But then the rain started a bit later and it was a frickin' monsoon.

A typical June in northeast Florida?

Pretty much.

'Ships passing in the night

This is fandom blabber that's not going to make sense to basically all my readers.

Reading the fanfiction recommendations on TVTropes usually just makes me sit back and go ...PEOPLE 'SHIP THIS? Like, why is the most popular pairing in Titan AE Korso/Preed? It doesn't make sense. Or why do whoficcers 'ship Doctor/Donna? She's the only companion you can't make a case for pairing him with. And, I mean, it gets worse. Shipping wars can tear a fandom apart.

Of course I shouldn't really say anything because I used to 'ship Jacen/Nen Yim back when I was ficcing in Star Wars.

But really, who in their right mind 'ships Trotsky/Stalin?

OH WAIT WE JUST MADE THAT ONE UP.

Awkward turtle?

The guy who lives next door to me can never remember my name right, which is awkward because he really does try and usually winds up calling me some variant of "Allie." This is only made worse by the fact that I actually do always remember his name.

The biggest thing I miss about freshmen dorms is actually knowing the names of 80% of the people who lived on my hall, and actually hanging out with them.

The worst feeling in the world

Is getting a load of critique and then being told, "But you're done for the semester! Don't edit this right now! Don't even think about it! In fact, I expressly forbid you from editing!"

Asdfghjkl;;asd

I am literally sitting on my hands right now trying to not do rewrites. Sunday I'll start on my paper for cinema studies and hopefully forget all about my pressing need to TYPE TYPE TYPE DELETE DELETE DELETE WRITE LIKE A MANIAC.

But seriously giving me critique and telling me not to do anything with it is sadistic, man.

TVtropes is down.

Oh my god I don't know what to do with myself how did I ever live before TVtropes. :(

EDIT: And then it came back and I went back to wasting my life on the internet forever.

Unrepentant dorkatude

My idea of a perfect day is getting up at nine AM, printing off an assignment, and hopping a C train uptown to the American Museum of Natural History, a place I am alarmed to say I am beginning to understand the floorplan of. To me, the AMNH is like Hogwarts. For one thing, it's basically a castle. For another thing, it seems like the layout is constantly changing. You take a twisting hallway and two staircases in search of the entrance, and you wind up in an exhibit hall you've never heard of or seen before.

I spent a whole day there today - an hour or so in the hall of human origins, followed by lunch (following a tip from my anthropology TA, I tried the brownies in the first floor cafe - delish!), followed by an IMAX documentary about the hubble space telescope (absolutely amazing), followed by something like four hours in the Hall of Vertibrate Origins, the Hall of Dinosaurs, and the Hall of Mammals and Their Extinct Relatives doing an assignment for Evolution of the Earth.

It was educational.

For example, did you know that reptiles aren't a scientific clade? A clade includes a common ancestor and all of its descended species. Since the reptile category excludes birds, who are descended from dinosaurs (and technically dinosaurs themselves, because the entire definition is based around a shared hip structure). This kind of thing makes me geek out unrepentantly.

I also really wanted to smash some heads together in the Hall of Human Origins.

Guy looking at an exhibit:

"So which one of these is the human arm, and which isn't?"

His friend, pointing to a chimpanzee's arm bones:

"That's the human one. It has an opposable thumb." (Pointing to the human arm) "That doesn't."

Me, interrupting because I think they're dumbasses:

"No, that's a human arm, and it does have an opposable thumb. All primates do."

The first guy:

"Thanks. Man, I told you so!"

The same guys, later:

"So, why didn't all the monkeys evolve into humans?"

And then I went over to the Space Center gift shop to see if they had any books that might be useful to me, but they didn't - I think I got the last copy of Two Sides of the Moon (book review is PFAD... when I finish it, but it's terrific so far) and they just never got more Astronaut Biographies in after that, or else they restock their book selection less often than every two weeks. I thought about getting some Astronaut Ice Cream because I haven't had any since I went to space camp in fifth grade, but then I decided that if I wanted to eat stale marshmallows I'd just eat stale marshmallows, and I didn't want to eat stale marshmallows just because it was nostalgic to me.

(Do real astronauts eat astronaut ice cream, or is it just a space center gift shop gimmick? I might need to investigate.

But all in all it was pretty awesome, and then later when I was waiting for the subway home I somehow managed to get into the same car as my roommate's boyfriend. Don't ask me how, but when the train stopped there was this white guy with dreadlocks sitting right in front of me and I was like, "...Bez?" and he was like, "Hi." New York is surprisingly small once you start to know and recognize people - you run into the same group of people everywhere, even when you least expect it.

I see what you did there.

NASA logo (USA)

RKA logo (Russia)

Starfleet logo (Star Trek)

Thoughts:

Strawberry yogurt and diet mountain dew don't go together.

Things that shouldn't bother me but do:

Please learn the difference between a monkey and an orangutan.

Orangutans, Gorillas, Chimpanzees, and Bonabos are not monkeys - they're great apes. Neither are Gibbons or Siamangs - they're lesser apes. This refers to their relative body sizes, not to imply that great apes are better than lesser apes. Furthermore, Lemurs, lorises, and galagos aren't monkeys, either. They're strepsirhines. Furthermore, monkeys aren't apes! They're monkeys! I just went through this entire damn album titled "cute monkey faces," and of twelve pictures, only four are actually monkeys! The others are a lemur, two gorillas, a chimpanzee, and four orangutans!

All of them are primates, but primate is not synonymous with monkey.

And then, Aliza had a Twitter

I resisted! I fought the good fight! And then Caleb made me do it!

But since I made it I might as well share.

https://twitter.com/#!/GoGoAliza

The latest batch of No Love letters

Dear harried soccer mom in spinning class,

Please tell your children that staring into the classroom window and signalling frantically to you that they want to leave every five minutes will not make the class end sooner, and in fact is just uncomfortable and distracting for everyone.

No love,

Me

Dear hopelessly out of touch spinning instructor,

Having two music mixes that you alternate every other week does not count as variety, it counts as "I have been coming to this damn class of yours every week for three months get some better tunes." Your "fake-out" endings of songs are not "cute" or "funny" and they only make me want to stop pedaling and get off my bike and strangle you every time you chuckle and say, "Bet you thought we were done!"

Also please do not refer to events that nebulously happened in class "last week." We were all there. It did not happen. We were there the week before last week. It did not happen then, either. You are an exercise instructor, not a stand-up comic.

No love,

Me

War of Attrition

Loading dishwashers in my house is as follows:

• Someone runs the dishwasher and doesn't unload it, because they walk away while it does its thing.
• People pile dishes on the counter, either because the dishwasher is full, the dishwasher is running, or the dishwasher is clean.
• NO ONE LIKES TO PUT DISHES AWAY.
• The clean dishes sit there for a day and a half.
• It becomes a war of staying power: Who will buckle first and change loads?

My dad plays dirty. He eats the smelliest leftovers in the fridge and leaves the dishes on the counter when he goes to work, effectively forcing my hand. If I want a kitchen that doesn't smell like old fish and stale milk, I have to unload this dishwasher in order to get the dirties off the counter.

When I go to school I am going to wash stuff by hand when I am finished using it so I will not have to deal with this.

I don't remember what I was doing online at eleven...

But it certainly wasn't this.

While I was never exactly "well-supervised" in my online privileges, I like to think my parents knew what I was up to for the most part. I got my first (and so far, only, since we've switched to Bellsouth) AOL screen name when I was nine, and I remember mostly using my connection to

1. Look up Pokemon stuff.
2. Troll Neopets (in the most innocent sense of the word "troll).
3. Read Digimon fanfiction.

By the time I was eleven, I'm pretty sure I was using it to.

1. Troll Neopets (still in the most innocent sense of the word).
2. Obsess about Star Wars.
3. Sneak into boards.theforce.net under-age and write shitty star wars Fanfic.

I don't think that parents need to be "helicopters" monitoring every second of their children's online time, but I do think they should be aware of what their kids are up to. In the case of "Jessi Slaughter," her parents were clearly not only clueless but also oblivious - where does an eleven year old learn to talk like that?

The other thing is that these kids place a huge emphasis on being "e-famous." When I was eleven, there was no such thing. Blog was a neologism, webcams were $100, "YouTube" hadn't been invented yet, and we were all on dial-up. Giving someone your AIM SN was a big deal: it meant that no matter "who" you became, they'd still be able to contact you.

We were sort of like the dream-hackers from Inception, but instead of layering on dreams, we were layering on identities and shedding them like snakeskin when they were all used up. A friend of mine admits to pretending to be three sisters sharing an account on Neopets, chalking it up to being "a lonely only child." I would usually claim to be twelve, which I found people would typically take more seriously than my actual age (somewhere between nine and eleven) but would still allow for the occasional moronic jag or horrendous spelling mistake. We made user names, sock puppets (back when they were called sock puppets and not mules), more user names... It was easy to abandon one, pick up another, and the social circles were small enough that even on the same site, no one would ever realize you were someone else - you might not even ever encounter someone who knew your other self, and even if you did, they'd never know.

This was a more innocent time to internet. Your mistakes could be erased just by changing your username. We were warned to never give out personal information, so we didn't - instead we made up varied and vast alternate personas and explored who we were and who we wanted to be. No one was counting how many "friends" we had, how many "view" our profile had accrued, or how many "comments" we'd racked up.

And then came Myspace. Originally, when I joined, it was mostly used by high schoolers as a way to communicate (and also stalk that cute boy in your algebra class.) By their official rules, you must be fourteen to join "social networking sites" like Myspace and Facebook. Most parents don't know these rules, and most kids don't follow them. In this late day and age, Myspace is populated by "scene" kids - rich suburban kids deeply steeped in self-isolation, listening to shitty electropop, dying their hair neon colors, and painting their nails "black as their souls" while they carve their favorite bands names into their arms. T

hese are the same kids who get into trouble on Stickam, who inspire the ire of the so-called "internet hate machine." Their focus on "e-fame" starting in their early tweens, combined with the amount of personal information they disclose through their nicknames, their photos, and their videos, builds a paper trail that most of us weren't ready to handle at that age. I'm not saying Ms. Slaughter can't re-invent herself, but it will be harder for her to abandon her old net presence since she's made such a racket.

At age eighteen, I use the internet to:

1. Research useless information, read People, and lurk on reputable news websites.
2. Browse Facebook.
3. Waste time on Gaia/TVTropes/Various webcomics.

America, what are you doing to your youth?

Didn't own a webcam until late 2008 and has probably only used it three times since,

Leez.

PS. This week, Onemanga shut down its servers and Hulu announced that they're turning into a pay site. It's the end of an era, ladies and gents.

prediction:

Tomorrow morning I will have a huge bruise in addition to a scrape on my forearm.

I'll keep you posted.

I am a human pincushion

It is easier to get a camel through the eye of a needle than it is to get an accutane prescription filled.

Today I had to do routine blood tests. They took me back, set me up, and stuck a needle in my left arm.

No blood.

So the lab tech takes it out, gets a new needle, re-sets me up, and sticks a needle in my right arm.

No blood.

So she says, "huh, weird, I'm going to go get the other lab tech."

I wait ten minutes, the other lab tech comes in, gets a new needle, sets me up, sticks it in my right arm again.

Blood on the first try.

So now both my elbows are sore.

STOP. WHINING.

A while ago, I typed up a really bitchy post complaining about certain persons in my general vicinity who need to grow a pair and stop complaining about things that, in the grand scheme of things lasting more than three weeks, are totally insignificant. And then I realized that was a dumb idea and I shouldn't post it. However, you really freak the shit out of me when you come into my room and scream about me about "WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO HOG THE INTERNET?!" and then go back into your room and crash into things screaming about how your life sucks and why do bad things always happen to you?

Please slow down and remember that you are a foot taller than me, of significantly more muscle mass, and that you could probably break my arm with your bare hands.

Yeah.

You're that scary.

No love right now,

Leez.

:(