I didn't know what this blog post would be about when I started typing it and I still don't.

So, I'm not really riled up about anything at the moment so this post is going to be more a logging of miscellany. As much as I'd love to do part two of last time's conversation ("Having minority characters does not make you diverse"), I'm going to hold off on it because I had a really good conversation about it in private and... unlike complaining about female characters, when I start talking about race people start looking at me like "You're white, shut up." So it's going to wait. Along with a discussion on why claiming certain people don't have the "right" to write certain character types is bullshit. All that and more... in another post.

I'm kind of amused that, two weeks later, most of my pageviews are still coming from links posted on fansites... but also mildly weirded out. Are you guys reading the rest of my posts? Or are you just looking at that same post, OVER AND OVER AND OVER again??? Because, um, if you're just using that link to get back to the blog so you can read other stuff... I have two separate methods of following in my sidebar that don't involve inflating the pagecounts on one post. And if you are just reading that post over and over again... is it really that fascinating???

I finally actually started to do some serious revision work on Like a Dog in Space yesterday, figuring out where I can add things back in and what I need to do to get it back to somewhere around its original length. Because I cut so many characters, I've got significantly less to work with in general, and changing the structure for the better means my opening moves faster - but also that I've just got stuff that used to take fifteen pages to happen happening in about seven. Which is good, because it gives me more time to mess around once that does happen... I just have to think of things to put there! Ivan and Valeri can only have so many awkward conversations, and the biggest thing I need to bulk up is their connection... which I actually think I need to build up before Ivan even comes to life.

The other thing I can do to take it back out to full length and put some coherency and world background in is add some of Mister Papers's long speeches back in, but that's easy. He likes to talk and even if I had to start over from scratch, he'd be easy. I could write that character forever. He'll probably turn up in another play given enough time. He can do that.

(Sometimes I try to think about how any of my plays would be connected/in the same universe. But there's no overlap between Florida and an unspecified town in New England, so it's like... even if Other People's Garden Gnomes and Allan Chang is a Totally Bogus Ghost were in the same universe... who would ever know?)

Anyways, I'm planning to do a more work on that today (Lies. When I don't have deadlines, nothing gets done.) and also figure out what kind of cool adventure we're going to have on Friday. I've wanted to go down to the Space Center for a long time, but I went in fifth grade and after looking at their website I'm not so sure if it's worth it... it kind of looks like it has't changed much since 2002. I think they're even still playing the same IMAX movies. But the price has gone up! So... maybe it'll be the Alligator Farm again. We haven't been there in a while. Or perhaps the Zoo.

Unless anyone has any suggestions about adventures? :)

Also this amuses me.

I'm flattered, guys. I really am.

What. What. What is this.

This is more hits in a single day than I usually get in a month. From more countries than I have ever been viewed in. And lets talk about that bizarre spike. I mean I know why I have so many hits and it's because those pictures and not because of me but this is seriously unreal. Because over 600 hits. In a day.

I'm flattered. Really.

But I know that it's temporary.

Dreams within dreams within dreams

Last night was the first night I ever remember things getting kind of inception-y, and even then... They weren't really. Well, someone was sending me packages across time. I kept opening my door to find confused delivery boys with very specifically adressed boxes for me. Like, time and place. It was weird. I also recall I was trying to sleep, and in my dreams I was having a conversation with my grandmother who died when I was like eleven, who honestly seemed a little bit confused about where we were and how old I was, and at one point I recall waking up in my dream and telling someone to shut up, I was trying to talk to my grandmother.

That was weird.

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.

Thoughts:

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

Numbering I do not understand

Why do

Korabl-Sputnik 5

Корабль-Спутник 3

Ship-Satellite 3

Vostok-3KA No.2

And

Sputnik 10

All refer to the same space mission?

SOVIET RUSSIAN RKA, I LOVE YOU BUT YOU CONFUSE ME SO MUCH WITH YOUR REDUNDANT/CONTRADICTORY NUMBERING SCHEMES.

Where are all these people coming from?

I just recently discovered that I can actually see where in the world the hits on my blog are coming from, so I decided to check out what kind of international fanbase I've got. For some reason it will only show me things from the last six months or so, but it's looking like people are checking in from the US, Canada, Israel, Brazil, Argentina, the UK, Japan, Latvia, Norway, Thailand, and...

...Iran.

I am so confused right now. Who could possibly be watching my blog from Iran? Did I flag their government search engines or something? I mean, I can account for some of these hits based on where I have family/friends/where people I know have traveled recently, but I have really got no idea how I pulled in hits from Norway and Latvia.

It's cool, though. :D

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.

A cocktail brewed of equal parts win and what the fuck.

This would appear to be a 50-something Christopher Lee singing a villain song production number in a 1980s movie called The Return of Captain Invincible. From the looks of it, it is the spiritual precursor to such great works as Doctor Horrible's Sing Along Blog.

Or maybe not.

Either way, I really want to find the whole thing and watch it.

EVERYTHING ON VENUS IS TRYING TO KILL YOU.

THAT'S NO MOON.
This is Mimas, and by all accounts, it shouldn't exist. For one thing, that crater on its surface is proportionally bigger than Canada. (Which is to say, it isn't actually bigger than Canada, because Mimas itself is probably smaller than Canada, but if you took the ratio of its surface that is covered by the crater and applied it to Earth... you get the idea.) An impact capable of making an impact that big should have just ripped the thing apart, but instead it made the moon look like the Death Star.

Also, while Mimas is outside the Roche limit, Saturn has moons /inside/ its Roche limit. Theoretically anything orbiting inside the Roche limit gets ripped apart, and thats why rings form. But Saturn has "shepherding moons" - moons that orbit inside the rings. What the hell, man?

I also find it weird that Pluto is now classified as a "Plutoid" and a "Plutino," which is like saying something is "shaped like itself." First rule of descriptions is to not use the word in the description, you know? But, then, Pluto has moons and things that aren't really moons, because Pluto and Charon and Hydra and Nix all orbit around a common barycenter and not around each other. They're just called moons of Pluto because the IAU hasn't got a definition for binary/triploid/quadruple dwarf planets or what have you. So in short they don't really have any idea /what/ this thing is, just that they have some weirdass felony bigamy going on in the outer solar system.

BUT BACK TO THE TITLE. You know Venus? Average temperature is a balmy 800 degrees Fahrenheit. Surface pressure is about a hundred times Earth's, the atmosphere is 100 times denser, and it's made of 99% CO2 with periodic bursts of hydrochloric acid and volcanic ash. Sounds like a real nice place to visit, right?

We've only got one real picture of the surface of the place, as opposed to radiographic imagery, because within a few minutes of landing the probe was burnt/crushed/melted. Because the surface temperature is so high, the crust is always a few steps away from molten, and you know plate tectonics? Forget everything you ever knew about plate tectonics because Venus is too hot for that shit, son. You need water for plate tectonics and Venus never had water, ever. No, Venus has Plume Tectonics which basically means volcanos can erupt wherever they damn well please. The whole surface of the planet is made of volcanic rocks like basalt and pumice.

There are theories that Venus used to have moons but that it fucking /ate/ them.

Well, shit, son. Everything on Venus is trying to kill you dead.

Who do they think I am?

Wait a second!

YOU ARE TEARING ME APART, LISA.

Coconut bubble tea.

Is delicious at the time but for the next four hours you'll pretty much feel like you've just drunk a bottle of sunscreen.

You mean these don't come standard?

Apparently "pre-Yom Kippur" dinner as defined by NYU Hillel is "pizza and bagels." Now, being a true Jewish young adult, I have absolutely no problem with pizza and bagels constituting a meal: however, if it is my last meal until 7:45 the following night, I would really like something more substantial than that. Like chicken. Or briscuit. Anything that, if I eat it, I won't be starving again four hours later. This menu just seems like they're making life unnecessarily hard on themselves. At any rate, I decided to go to the hillel thing instead of an Undergraduate Anthropology Students Association thing because I wanted a real meal, while as it turns out they will be serving pizza at both and so there really isn't a difference. :|

Pondering if I shouldn't just make chicken for myself here...

Leez.

They have space ships but no sonograms?

Ten things about the Star Wars New Trilogy that just bug me:

1. The horrible acting.

2. The horrible script.

3. How Padme seems to have gotten to eight and a half months with twins with absolutely NO pre-natal care. Lady, I know you're doing this whole "secret pregnancy" thing, but you live in a high tech society. See post title. You and everyone you know is referring to your fetuses in the singular right until the actual moment you give birth, and it is absolutely ridiculous.

4. Why no one ever listens to Yoda's advice.

5. How we are expected to have never seen the original trilogy and be so damn surprised when Palpatine is the emperor or Padme gives birth to twins, when the surprise element of the original trilogy relies on having never seen the new trilogy.

• Darth Vader is Luke's father.
• Leia is Luke's twin sister.
• This isn't spoilers, you should just know this already.

6. No Harrison Ford.

7. No Mark Hamill.

8. No Carrie Fisher.

9. No one in these movies is even trying to act besides Ewan McGregor. Also possibly Liam Neeson. Natalie Portman, I thought you were nominated for an Oscar once upon a time! Like really, Obi-Wan Kenobi is the only character in this movie who emotes in a believable way.

10. Jar Jar Binks. Full stop.

(I love Star Wars. But I'm watching a marathon of the new trilogy and just kind of picking it apart.)

Customer disservice

The phone does not work. I spent an hour on a friend's phone with a customer service agent, who changed my plan to the $20 unlimited, which is the only one that works with the 2G, which no longer officially exists, and added a surcharge of $20 for changing plans, and assured me it would work in "five to ten minutes." It is now two hours later. It does not work. I am going to go to the AT&T store tomorrow and demand they fix it, at which point they will tell me I "can only activate it from my home computer." I will tell them I have tried this. They will tell me I am fucked and should have a nice day.

I will pull out my laptop and show them the error message. They will laugh in my face and tell me to go home and cry.

Also when I switch to Ellen's phone, the unlimited data plan will stop working and they will charge me $20 to go back to the $25 limited plan. So basically I am being raped by the cell phone company.

Also, the reason I was given for not being able to use the 2 gig plan with the older phone? "The 2Gs need a smaller data plan."

YES. This is EXACTLY why you just changed me twenty dollars to switch me to and UNLIMITED plan that still DOES NOT WORK.

:|

Really, AT&T? REALLY?

(In her defense, the customer service agent was very understanding and really did try to help, it just didn't do anything.)

Part of this post is excerpted from an email I sent my mother. Her response? "I laughed. So did Dad." With parents like these, it is really a wonder I'm not a serial killer.

Well this has jumped the shark.

I never really watched Dancing with the Stars in the first place, but really?! Bristol Palin? The Situation? These people aren't celebrities, they're hicks with overly televised private lives. I would also like to point out that there's a difference between a "Star" and tabloid fodder.

At this point, they should just change it to "Dancing with D-List Socialites, and the occasional singer/actor/comedian from the 1980s."

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.)

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.

These people are disgusting.

I'll just leave these articles about "celebrities" behaving badly here.

At the low end of the "horrifying" meter, Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston Want Full-Season TV Deal. Uhhhhh... are you guys high?

And at the totally opposite end of the spectrum, the nuclear bomb formerly known as Mel Gibson continues to explode in slow motion, and things are still picking up, according to this piece: Mel Gibson's Alleged Triple-Murder-Suicide Plot Revealed. Really, I don't know how much of what's been said is and isn't true, but the tapes themselves are pretty damning, even if this turns out to be a fabrication. The guy seems like he's gone off the deep-end, and needs psychiatric evaluation, followed by being committed to an inpatient facility or doing jail time. Either way he gets locked up.

And I'm not even going to start on Lindsay Lohan.

Swimmer's Itch

Once, my dad told me that you get itchy when you swim in the ocean because of little tiny baby jellyfish, and some of them can slip in through your pores and grow inside your bloodstream.

It terrified me for the longest time.