[Most Recent Entries] [Calendar View] [Friends View]
Below are the most recent 25 friends' journal entries.
- All aliens are bad.
- Except the ones that aren't (O HAI THAR DOKTOR!). But these are very rare and probably out to get you in a more subtle way.
- If it looks human then it might be okay, but people who look different to us are Always Chaotic Evil.
- Discriminating against an alien on the basis of skin colour is Bad, but it is perfectly acceptable to do so on the basis of species (see 1 and 3).
- Humankind will one day be at the head of a vast intergalactic empire subjugating millions of alien races, but that's Good, because Humans are Good and Things That Look Non-Human are Bad.
- Friendship is important.
- Except with aliens, because they're probably just trying to trick you into helping them take over the world.
- Beware of aliens bearing gifts, unless they are doing so off-screen in which case they are giving you a plot device that will likely save your life one day.
- Only one supercomputer per household.
- Never kill a Slitheen in an enclosed space.
- You pay, you display.
- Horoscopes don't work, except they sort of do, but not when Luke's around.
- The Mona Lisa came from Lancaster.
- Under no circumstances is it right to use a robot dog to cheat at your test, but you might want to take him to school with you anyway because he'll probably come in handy for saving the world.
- Sarah-Jane Smith is the only person on the planet capable of stopping alien attacks.
- 2059 is when it all kicks off, baby. (Okay, so Doctor Who has a part to play in this one as well.)
| Saturday, November 21st, 2009 | ||||||
|
tetradecimal |
1:38p | Am I supposed to change my filter, or rinse it off and put the old one in :/ ? It says to change it every 3-4 weeks, but as usual, internet advice is different. Anyway, I got NEW PLANTS today, and spent some time planting them for the Gang. After the initial "OMG! ONOZ!" reaction, they started giving the plants little nips and zipping around curiously, so I take this to mean All Is Forgiven, Giant Hands. I am happy, too, because they shall have more stuff to poke at. So, here are my water test results: pH: 7.6 Ammonia: 0 Nitrite: .25ppm Nitrate: 20ppm I think I should keep an eye on that nitrate especially. I've been using this weekly water additive called EasyBalance that supposedly has "Nitrate Reduction Granules", but I think I'm supposed to have 0 of both nitrate and nitrite. Platies: http://www.flickr.com/photos/21334371@N Geese: http://www.flickr.com/photos/21334371@N | ||||
|
slythwolf |
12:58p | My Problem With NaNo, Let Me Sho U It So I have sorted out what my trouble is with NaNo and has been since 2005. Well, okay, I'm not entirely sure about 2005, because a large part of that was that November 2005 was the month I met Nigel, and I became preoccupied with the beginning of a relationship and having sex on a regular basis. But apart from that, my trouble is and has been that, after winning in 2004, I began trying to take NaNo seriously. This is a fatal mistake. While it is all well and good that I want to take on these big ambitious projects--the Lilith Davis Chronicles, the Pernfic, YA novels involving half-sirens and/or lesbian separatist werewolves--they are best attempted at other times and at a slower pace. November is for silliness. I realized I was taking NaNo far too seriously this year when ![[info]](http://www.journalfen.net/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} tresca_cho's suggestion to add ninjas and stir seemed like a bad idea. It's NaNo! Of course I should add ninjas!But, you see, it is the Pernfic, and I have specific goals for the Pernfic, and there are no ninjas on Pern. I am up my own ass about it this year. That's why it isn't working. The year I won, I padded my word count with comic relief pirates, gratuitous gay sex, and a song about rum 75% of whose lyrics were "rum". I also set the thing in a fictional world of my own devising, which saved me a lot of research, although my seamanship book was invaluable. This year I can't find my Dragonlover's Guide to Pern, which was a body blow to my writing effort, and I am trying too hard to write the thing in Anne McCaffrey's voice, which is a stupid idea in the first place. Also I am trying to write something actually serious, which never works for me. Possibly all my enormous unfinished projects need to be revamped and made more silly. The Pernfic will be finished eventually (with added silliness and flirting). It will not happen this month. I am abandoning NaNo this year, on the grounds that I am not in the right headspace for it. Next year I'm going to come back strong with Discworld-meets-Hornblower--and maybe even a ninja or two. Current Mood: chipper | ||||
|
atalantapendrag |
11:48a | |||||
|
atalantapendrag |
10:51a | It's Saturday, right? I just finished Unseen Academicals. I love Pepe so very hard. I have lunch plans with goddessgoddess, T., and their friend S. This is probably a good thing, as my food intake the past few days has consisted of a can of not at all good soup. A meal I can chew would be nice.Am wearing The Bra That Fits. At present there is only one. I have taken steps to remedy this. It is a front-hook. It kind of has to be. There are eight rows of hooks. Also wearing The Jeans That Fit, courtesy of hcolleen, and a not bad tshirt courtesy of some thrift shop somewhere. Smelly of the day as yet to be decided. I'm thinking Hungry Ghost Moon. Current Mood: mellow | ||||
| exdee | 9:03a | Why did nobody tell me that they are squirting the kids with water on Modern Family? We have been doing that for years! (I love Modern Family so much.) But seriously, it seems like statistically Barney from HIMYM should have an STD by now. At least herpes. | ||||
|
dreamer_marie |
10:53a | Let's Meme! Put On Your Red Shoes and Dance the Blues... In which SECOND: Tag eight sexy people. Don't refuse to do that like a pansy. Unless you really don't want to of course. And if you're not tagged and you want to do it, then do! | ||||
|
notjo |
2:36a | Oodles of Ood I watched Doctor Who: Waters of Mars! Behind the cut is my summary of the episode, my reactions to "next time on Doctor Who", and my random theory on what will happen next series, based only on having seen photos of Eleven and his companion. ( Cut cut cut cut cut! ) | ||||
| Friday, November 20th, 2009 | ||||||
|
ruaki |
11:58p | Guys, I totally forgot I had this picture of this INCREDIBLE Persona 2 cosplay of some of the Personae, from Akon XIII. (That's in 2002!) I thought some of you might enjoy it. I wish digital technology was around back then (instead of me relying on disposable cameras) cause HOLY SHITTTTTTTT You know, looking at the stuff I had, there seemed to be a lot more variety in things people cosplayed? I dunno, maybe I'm just not hip with the new things people are into, but you didn't run around into clones that often.... and just looking at the series, so many different series were represented... | ||||
|
tetradecimal |
6:40p | If anyone knows what the hell is up with KIBA, I would love to know. I stopped watching because (a) I was pretty sure it was all going to end in tears (see also: Wolf's Rain) (b) As each successive episode aired, it had me asking, "What the fuck is going on?!" (c) It's kind of derivative, like that Avenger thing about Mars or something and then no one could have kids and WHAT WAS UP WITH THAT SHOW? KIBA is about a kid named Zed who is kind of an asshat and then he is transported to a Magical World (TM) with magic, where he is still an asshat. He also has a super powerful spirit named Amil Gaoul who is awesome and kills things but mostly it's about Zed and his annoying uke brainwashed friend Noa, who is so incredibly annoying and brainwashed he spends a good deal of time contributing to a false sense of dramatic tension by murdering people because... um, someone told him to? It's kind of like Miaka and Yui, if Miaka was a power-hungry jerkoff with absolutely zero social skills. But they are BEST FRIENDS AND YET ENEMIES. It gets to a point where they're constantly introducing various half-explored characters and countries and then something happens and everything explodes, but then for some reason Zed (who goes through 51 episodes and is still, somehow, an asshat) merges with Amil Gaoul or something. I watched a full half of this series and I still have NO IDEA WHAT IS GOING ON, which I guess happens a lot when you mix together a bunch of things you liked from other cool anime shows but actually have no idea what you are doing. Stop trying to blow my mind, Japan! It never works! | ||||
|
dreamer_marie |
11:16p | Meme time of Doom... From 2. Two Harry Potter characters: one to accompany to you a desert island, the other to push off a cliff. Who are they? 3. What is your favourite flavour of ice cream? 4. I recall that you posted a lot of about U.S. politics for a time, so, at the risk of inspiring a rant or two, do you think that Sarah Palin will run for president in 2012? 5. If you could elope with one fictional character, who would it be? | ||||
|
slythwolf |
5:05p | Yes, Worgen Are Werewolves They don't follow certain standard werewolf tropes, like the whole full moon thing. So what? "Werewolf", from "wer wulf", meaning "man-wolf" (where "man" stands in for "human"; we all know that shit pisses me off, but that's language for you). Even if they didn't shapeshift, they would still be werewolves, because the worgen form is a combination of human and wolf. | ||||
|
slythwolf |
3:00p | On This Day Today is the International Transgender Day of Remembrance. On this day we remember those we have lost to hatred, who have been murdered because their gender presentation did not fit the kyriarchy's cis*normative standard. Here is a list of the trans* people bigots have murdered since last year, that we know of, with as much information as is known about each victim and each case. We remember these people using the names (where available) and pronouns corresponding to who they really were. We remember that they were murdered for being true to themselves, because in a kyriarchy only cis* people have the privilege of self-determination, and because who trans* people are is considered wrong, scary, dangerous, deceitful, and a mental illness.1 Trans* women are my sisters. Trans* men are my brothers. Trans* people of non-binary gender identity are also my siblings. The family of my heart is a little smaller this year, the world a little poorer, a little less beautiful. I remember you, my sisters, my brothers, my siblings. I will keep fighting. | ||||
|
tetradecimal |
2:23p | |||||
|
akk |
7:06p | FM-PMS current chapter word count: 5317 less, because Mariko-scene now happens on the lawn, the kids are finally playing, Seiran is on the phone, and Subaru no longer steps into the sand more, because of an author note reminding me to close the Omi-thread properly here or in the epilogue amount of chapter now in continuous text: 50% (discounting two small one-line-gaps and a bit of tinkering for effect) scenes written: everything in the East Gardens except the ending of "When did you plan to tell me?!" (that's next) character who is not inclined to take the new information calm and with a grain of salt: Subaru character about to learn the hard way that Subaru can make scenes: Seishiro interesting by-product of that: reality infusion for elder Makoto regarding the temper of the Sumeragi head. quote of the day: "His wakizashi is still hungry." This entry has Please comment there using OpenID. Current Mood:  tired | ||||
|
charamei |
5:12p | Things I Have Learned From Sarah Jane Adventures As S03 winds down and Sarah-Jane tells me about the power of Friendship and humankind's ultimate destiny of a vast intergalactic empire based on Truth, Justice and Certainly Not Imperialism, it occurs to me that I have learned many invaluable lessons from The Sarah Jane Adventures. Here are a few: Can you tell that the constant comments of 'Well, maybe one day we'll meet a nice alien' have been getting on my nerves this series? I still want to know why nobody thought to call in U.N.I.T., too. | ||||
|
atalantapendrag |
11:02a | Just sort of blankish Thankfully I am not tempted by BPAL's Naughty or Nice Inquisition. There are a few scents that sound nice but most don't appeal. It's rainy and I'm stiff and kind of queasy. more sleep is called for. Current Mood: blah Current Music: Terry Pratchett - Unseen Academicals 09 | ||||
|
gem225 |
12:23a | goodbye to the home that was I said goodbye to the house in which I grew up and was abused by my father, walked around, went to my favorite place to hide and play, remembered the good stuff. May this make my life easier, yes, please, yes, PLEASE. Then I bought a Cookie Monster stuffed toy to sleep with. So OK, NOT doing that well after all, but that's how it goes, right? Yeah, that's how it goes. Current Mood:  scared | ||||
| Thursday, November 19th, 2009 | ||||||
|
tetradecimal |
4:53p | |||||
|
tetradecimal |
12:03p | Okay, I just saw a listing with a HUGE DARK STAIN on the hardwood in two of the pictures. "Not a short sale or foreclosure"? I could believe that. It looks more like someone bled out all over the floor. I don't even know if I WANT to buy a place. Up to $300,000?! That's like more money I've seen in my life! (And you should see some of the crazy shacks people want to sell for $250,000, let me tell you internets) Argh, housing is such a pain. The real estate agents, and the lost weekends, and the... ARGH. So, to summarize, here are the reasons for and against moi buying a house/condo/townhouse:
And wouldn't you know it, the thing I am most excited about is decorating and more fish. I don't really like the idea of owing people things. I don't think I've ever bought anything I couldn't pay for, but since housing is so monumentally expensive, it'll be 30 YEARS until I can pay it all off, and how do people take the pressure? Jeez. On the other hand, I guess it's better than paying rent. I mean, either way you need to pay something monthly, but at least you own something at the end of it :/. You know what would be hilarious, though? I would probably have to... ...get a roommate. LOLOL I hope the market's better than in New Haven. | ||||
|
charamei |
6:23p | Day of the Blathereen! ( Spoilers for SJA: The Gift part 1 ) That is all. Oh - except, Clyde's drive-by alien racism is hilarious. | ||||
|
akk |
6:07p | FM-PMS current chapter word count: 5461 scene worked on today: Seishiro - Makoto scene complete? no character learning more than she wants about runes: Makoto character learning more than he wants about the wakizashi: Seishiro character busying himself to keep both interlocutors alive: Ameru quote of the day: "No body to bargain with." probable issue for later: relocation of the Mariko scene in order to avoid portraying Subaru as an reckless fool This entry has Please comment there using OpenID. Current Mood:  better than this morning | ||||
|
atalantapendrag |
9:35a | Dealt with, for now. Thanks to doombuggie's indispensable and much appreciated aid yesterday, I was able to get the paperwork I needed. Bright and early this AM I took my quivering self to the office, where the manager made copies of everything to take to the caseworker (she said she was going in this afternoon) and put a "recieved" stamp on all of the originals.Nothing I can do now until December 18th. My hands continue to shake. The cats have been doing their job, though. Last night there was some contention between Anya and Molly as to who would curl up on my chest. Being Boss Cat, Molly won of course, and Anya snuggled up at my side. Current Mood: drained | ||||
|
also_not_a_pipe |
5:01a | I don't have much to talk about lately. Everything I have to say seems either trivial1, interesting only to me 2, or both3. I remember seeing a meme a while ago where the question was something to the effect of "Hey, we sure don't know each other as well as the Internet makes us think we do. If there's anything you've been wondering about me, feel free to ask." I'd been going to post that one, but I can't find it now. So, hey, we sure don't know each other as well as the Internet makes us think we do. If there's anything you've been wondering about me, feel free to ask. 1 I get to work twelve hours next week! I'd have got to work fourteen hours this week, but I had to wait around to let some inspectors into the house of a neighbor who had to move back to Mississippi and is trying to sell her house today. I honestly don't mean that in any kind of snide way. I really like my job, I just don't get hours anymore. When some librarians retired this summer, the system replaced them each with two part-time staff. I was stupid and didn't apply because I wasn't sure I'd make enough to cover driving out to Xenia twice as much, and I was pretty sure I was about to get a full-time job out on the east coast. So now they're all covered and only need a sub a day or two a month. My choice this week is to cancel Rhapsody or go to a couple of NaNo write-ins. The Panera near me is hiring and I can't say I'm not tempted. 2 I did the math and I'm nineteen thousand words behind schedule for NaNo. Yeah, I'm not recovering that. I can't type quickly on the AlphaSmart--I did 579 words in ten minutes on Write or Die using the desktop downstairs the other night, which is on the slightly high end of what I can do in an hour on the AlphaSmart--and my laptop is out being fixed. Partly I'm stuck around 12K because I have to do something I really don't want to do to a character and so I'm avoiding it. I borrowed him from from the bad high school writing from which I scavenged my NaNo idea, and he wasn't native even to that story. He goes back to the very first story I wrote for a creative writing class, where his name was Adrian Blackburn and he was a Gary Stu so good-natured and sweet that he'd hurt your teeth. I feel kind of bad abut all the things I'm putting Adrian through, because he is a nice guy, and he's not really in a position to defend or help himself until about halfway through the story. He's one of the characters who keeps hanging around in my head, so I keep using him. This is about the third story in a row where I just kick the crap out of him (fourth, if you count the old free-form RP character I played in the White Wolf-based rooms on AOL). Because I was raised Irish Catholic, I feel guilty about that. Also I've been giving myself nightmares. The story I'm working on is a combination of ideas that I scavenged from really bad old stories I wrote when I was in late high school and early college. One of the ideas I kept was of a world populated by characters who were the embodiment of trope characters--the Wise Woman, the Charming Rogue, those sorts of things--and have powers of a sort based on their tropes. So far the most active villain in this story is a beast that's the affable-but-vicious pair of villains like Croup and Vandemar or the "hands of blue" guys from "Firefly." It calls itself the Dyad. I've been playing in the "rate the above poster's excerpt" threads on the boards a lot lately. I haven't planned it, but my last few excerpts have been scenes involving the Dyad (this is the one I'm using now) and generally what people have to say about my excerpt is "oh my God, that thing's horrible! Oh, and also your writing's pretty good for NaNo." I don't remember exactly what I dreamed last night, but I know that the Dyad was there, and it was horrible. I had to get up and put on some lights and futz around on the Internet for a while, it freaked me out that badly. When I went back to sleep, I had another really vivid dream about my other story that scared me awake. When I stall out on my official NaNo story, I write Charlie and Nicholas fluff, so they are still loud in my head. The story I started for NaNo 2006 and have never been able to write looks like it runs to two books. For a while I was thinking of killing Charlie off near the end of the second one because I just didn't see any way that he'd make it through. Then I decided that the reason in-story wasn't good enough to justify that, it would probably come out as one of those things that make the reader throw the book across the room. I still have no idea how the story actually ends. I don't remember exactly how this dream began, but it involved Nicholas discovering that his Charlie had been murdered, shot through the back so that his heart and chest were gone. The two of them had been fighting about something and hadn't talked in a few days. Nicholas already had a bad feeling because he couldn't get hold of Charlie, and he was absolutely devastated. Then the frame of the dream switched, and instead of just watching this all from some removed third-person perspective, I was Nicholas in the dream and I think the horror and grief and helplessness he was feeling was what woke me up. Yeah, I had to fool around on the computer a little while after that one too. Nicholas has always been really close to me. Charlie's dashing and boisterous and charming (even I'm charmed by him), but Nicholas is the one in whom I see a lot of myself. His voice is easier for me to write than Charlie's. I... don't know how I came to be that wired into him, though. What's weirder is that last night wasn't the first time Nicholas has showed up in my subconscious; the first time I saw "The Talented Mr. Ripley," he turned up that night to tell me how much the movie upset him. And I don't think I'm going to do any better tonight because I just spent about twenty minutes looking up clips from movies like "An American Werewolf in London" and "The Howling" for a post I started to write and decided I ought to do some other time (like when it's light out), then I YouTube-wandered into some parts of "The Shining" and now I'm kind of spooked out. Also my second order from Adagio came today and I tried all of them, so now I'm all caffeinated to hell and back. 3Jack the cat is my shadow lately. When he thinks I've stayed up too late, he tries to lead me to bed. When I kept getting up last night, he didn't like that at all. There's a step stool sitting next to the computer desk for some reason. Every now and then he'd put his paw on my knee and when I glanced over, there he would be sitting on the stool and glaring at me like a little schoolmarm. And if I didn't get the picture and go back to bed, he would dig his claws in and scold me. Current Mood: restless Current Music: Urinetown Original Cast - Follow Your Heart | ||||
|
charamei |
1:31a | I swear that Solitaire's the one good thing about it Well, with a connection speed of roughly 10kB/s when it's working at all and a chain of hardware and software fails as long as my arm it's taken roughly two weeks, but I have prevailed over lousy Internet connections (seriously, BT, fix our damn phone line already), impossible networking problems and crappy ancient monitors that no longer support basic functions such as displaying output from the graphics card, and I have rebuilt my poor laptop. That's right, Canonical. Everything you screwed up, I have fixed. Eventually. I feel obliged at this point to mention that this is the first time I have ever had a problem upgrading an Ubuntu distro in five years of use, but really, it does prove how closely Ubuntu - and presumably other open-source OSs - resembles the little girl in the rhyme. When it's good, it's very good. When it's bad, it's five hours of tearing your hair out and screaming things like, "Yeah, and you know why it's called bash? Because THAT'S WHAT I'M GOING TO ****ING DO TO IT!" before finding out that the problem existed between the keyboard and chair and basically amounted to you consistently mis-spelling 'sudo'. I exaggerate, but not as much as I'd like. ( Windows has encountered a teal deer and needs to close. ) In happier open-source news, today I also discovered Mozilla Songbird. I've been looking for a replacement for iTunes for ages, preferably something that I could use on both Windoze and Linux, with little success until today. Songbird uses the same basic back-end as other Mozilla products, in that it saves a nice profile that I can copy from one hard drive to another and thus preserve my playlists. It imported from iTunes without the slightest fuss, loads about five times faster, has a really, really nice layout for the library with a search bar and a quick, simple way to change your sort criteria... and a built-in browser. No, I don't fully understand that last part either, though I assume it's to do with downloading music, but it made finding extensions much easier. The default theme is a little plain, but since it's open-source, that's easy enough to change - there's even a By comparison with Banshee, which is what I was using on Linux, Songbird does less spectacularly than against iTunes - but mainly because iTunes has become so terrible of late. Mostly it's in a better state of development; Banshee had a couple of really irritating bugs, including one that caused it once to drop all metadata from all tracks. Given that Banshee's library was unmanageable without that metadata and I'd already risked RSI setting it up once, I wasn't happy. As a final insult, when I uninstalled iTunes it did not clean up properly - left all of its shortcuts behind, and goodness only knows what else. Since I'm going to have to reinstall it to strip the DRM off my purchased files, though, doing its housekeeping for it is a problem for another time. Say next week... Current Mood: accomplished Current Music: Amateur Transplants - Information Technology | ||||
| Wednesday, November 18th, 2009 | ||||||
|
ruaki |
6:55p | OH HO HO HO HO HO GUESS WHO DOESN'T HAVE TO WORK TOMORROW GO ON GUESS HA HA HA HA AHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHA seriously guys, i shouldn't be so happy that i fought for tomorrow off but i am when you work six days a week, i guess it makes you appreciate the extra day off more XD; orz: Under Heaven Destruction says: D: don't mock my lack of punctuation i'm typing like someone on twitter Komik says: nothisissomeonetypingontwittersowecanfil | ||||
