'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.

Because the world always needs more memes.

I think "Smug Gagarin" needs to be a thing. Sort of like Fuck Yeah Anthropology Major Fox. (Which, by the way, posted my submission!!!)

Anyway, this is inspired by my friend S. trying to argue space history with me. He lost the argument, btw. ;)

I've been typing my facebook statuses in memespeak lately... they seem to be a hit. ;) Frantically rewriting Like a Dog in Space from 78 pages to 45-ish. It's hard but should be rewarding!!

Meanwhile, listening to a lot of Chameleon Circuit. They call themselves Trock, which is like Wrock, but substitute Wizard for Time lord. anyways it's hilarious. Here's the website with everything else on it.

Giga Puddi

Is there much I love more than Weird Japanese Stuff? (Oh. Wait. Rockets, Neil Gaiman, dogs, and chai lattes. )But I do love strange Japanese confectionaries a whole lot. Mochi ice cream? Daifuku? Pocky? Bring that shit on, son. Delicious! And, fortunately, yours truly lives near one of two M2M Asian Grocery Stores in all of New York City. So if this stuff exists anywhere in Manhattan, it should not be too hard to find.

I propose we make this stuff, and do a reaction video. It'll be fun!

ALSO, Christoph Waltz as an angry Austrian Jew in the Water for Elephants movie? Be still, my fangirl heart! Oh Hollywood, you have redeemed yourself from the curse of Robert Pattinson in this truly wise casting choice. Christoph Waltz is a perfect August, all suave and debonair. I am now officially excited to see it!

You are fair game if:

• You know I blog.
• You read my blog.
• You are related to me.
• I have known you for an exceedingly long amount of time.
• You are famous.
• There is a noteworthy event involving you.
• You are involved in amusing anecdotes I feel comfortable letting my mother read.

I will not blog about you if:

• You don't know I blog.
• You don't read my blog.
• I just met you and you are not famous.
• You don't read my blog yet but might in the future.
• I think you would be kind of weirded out if you knew I was blogging about you.
• You asked me not to.
• Anecdotes involving you are not mother-appropriate. (Like, if we got drunk together... I wouldn't blog about it.)

So, basically, by reading this post you are FAIR GAME.

Also Jesus Christ on a cracker, the roomies and I watched this tonight and it is amazing. I want to make movies like this.

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.

Politically incorrect maps

(Click for big!)

So my friend Caleb (credit where credit is due) forwarded me this:

And said, "It's perfect, except it's missing a reference to 'The rent is too damn high.'"

So a few minutes later, he sent me this:

Let it be known that my friends are awesome.

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

And then, Aliza was a superhero.

So my friend Caleb of the newly-minted and absolutely fantastic Does This Make Me Look Hipster has given me a blog award. A sort of tag thing, actually, I think, but it comes with the condition that I fill out an interview and tag more people and stuff like that so hey, let's have at it! It'll be fun!

1. Thank the blogger who gave me the award.

Hey, Caleb, you are pretty cool! Thanks for being a friend and an inspiration for crazy and a source of great stories and one of my biggest fans. You rock!

2. Sum up your blogging philosophy, motivation, and experience using five words

Here today, gone tomorrow. Maybe.

3. Pass this on to 10 other bloggers that you feel have a substance in their blogs.

I don't /know/ ten other bloggers, but I'll give it a shot.

Max @ Jumbo Sized (uhhh... my brother.)

Ryu @ Eldritch at Home

James @ Arbitrary Musings

Roma @ Roma's art blog

Snikki @ Snikki's Say

I made it halfway to ten. That's good enough!

We had a fire drill tonight. Excellent way to start Halloween weekend. Not.

They fight crime!

Try this website:

theyfightcrime.org

And let me know some of your best results. :)

He's a deeply religious neurotic astronaut on the edge. She's a warm-hearted wisecracking research scientist in the wrong place at the wrong time. They fight crime!

Bromance is officially in the dictionary.

Along with these other bits of lingo: Muggle, blamestorming, Gaydar, Grrrl, Threequel, Mini-me, Screenager, Cyber-slacking (what I am doing right now - sort of), Lookism, Frankenfood, Riffage, Bouncebackability, Prebuttal, Ego-surfing, and Meatspace.

Now, I can sort of see a use for muggle as a word, but I don't totally like the way they've chosen to describe it - having heard it used to describe "non-theater people" in the company of "theater people," I would rather see it defined as "an ordinary person, as opposed to whatever exclusive group that is describing them." Or something like that.

But really - Meatspace? Riffage? Threequel? Grrrl? Most of these words are such transient internet slang that in ten years no one will even remember what they mean! Let alone imagine using them in an actual sentence.

Metrosexual had better not be in the dictionary. Or at least, if it is, please let it be listed as a synonym for "fop."

Also, their definition of "gaydar" does not explain why it is also possessed by like 90% of straight women. (C and I have narrowed this down to a factor of natural selection - possession of gaydar assists in selecting a mate; back when our ancestors were living in caves and couldn't waste energy courting a male if he was more interested in playing Hide-the-Salami with another dude it was helpful to know in advance. I wonder how you say "homosexual" in Neanderthal?)

Clarification: I know that modern humans are not direct descendants of Neanderthals. (Most of us, anyway.)

XKCD is so true, so often.

Sometimes I wonder why I got out of Star Wars fandom... But every time I wonder, I realize I don't have the energy to get back in. I haven't spoken to most of my friends from those days in ages.

(I kind of miss them, but when some of them IM me out of the blue and I realize how much people change in five years, I don't miss them as much.)

Earworms

Does anyone know how to get a Scissor Sisters song out of your head? It's been playing on repeat for the last two days.

No?

Well, have a youtube video so you can hear the kind of hell I've been in. Catchy, catchy hell. Not to mention possibly the strangest music video I've ever seen... well, maybe not. Maybe Mika and Lady Gaga are weirder.

But that was pretty strange. No, really, I have no idea what I just watched - do you? The song is still stuck in my head, though.

Today I read the entire archives of the webcomic Girls With Slingshots. Definitely worth a read, good stuff.

Three weeks until I move back into university housing! Four until classes start! HOORAY!

Saying have a nice day but meaning fuck you.

I really want to master this skill.

Dear you,

Why would you send a bitchy letter at 2 AM when you "just haven't been in a good mood for much of today," when you could just as easily send it the next morning when all your energy is not going towards being a fun-killing plot nazi? It was all I could do to not respond to your condescending piece of Bawww and Whining with some condescension of my own.

No love,

Me.

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.

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.

:(