Dear half the nation:

Shut the fuck up already. I'm talking to you, hectoring LJ friends list. I'm talking to you, people who start threads on every remotely relevant board on the NaNo forums. I'm talking to you, everyone who thinks they have the right to tell me what to do with my vote. Just shut. The fuck. Up.

What are you, my mother? ^*It's none of your business whether or not I vote. It might be possible some years to just forget about the election. This ain't one of them. I'm going to vote or not vote how and because I want to. All nagging me about voting is going to do is make me go "don't you goddamn tell me what to do!" And the "don't mess this up for us" crowd? Oh, hell no. You don't get to decide where my vote goes. If I'm writing in a third party candidate, it's because a) I don't like any of the main choices and b) one of the nice things about America is that no party gets to automatically claim my vote. If they wanted it, well then, they ought to have run someone I wanted to vote for. I'm not taking a vote away from anyone, because they don't own it in the first place.

I have an ideological crush on Washington and Jefferson, but I have to come out and say it: no, it is really okay to not vote. I would much, much rather have the people who aren't interested in voting stay home and leave the system alone instead of just going out there and picking somebody without doing any kind of research on the issues or having any opinion. The popular vote doesn't matter anyway; it's the electoral college that decides it. Or, to be very cynical, the courts. Just look at the 2000 election. Gore won the popular vote, and who did we get stuck with?

I am so glad it's today, because I'm sick to death of being harassed over my vote (I'm 29, live in Ohio, and I'm an Independent. I've received six calls in one afternoon between Obama volunteers and pollsters). At least that's over, but I am still going to scream if I hear one more word about the goddamn vote unless it's "Your new President is ___!" It's made me annoyed to hear from Jon Stewart, for god's sake.

^* Actual mother who wandered through the room and asked if I was going to go vote while I was tabbing back and forth between ranting and reading the League of Women Voters' issues guide gets a pass on this one.

Yes, I did. I even compromised my principles enough to vote for Obama in case he needs the vote instead of writing in the third-party candidate I wanted, which is party of why I'm such a cranky, cranky bitch right now.

Now, I am not one of those jingoist "America: fuck yeah!"/"love it or leave it"/"these colors don't run" patriots. I'm the kind of patriot who goes around quoting Theodore Roosevelt, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and all. You know, the actual good leaders who really understood what the whole American experiment was about and who would probably cry if they were informed of the shenanigans Bush has been up to the last eight years. I don't really get national pride. I am not ashamed to be American. When I hear of other Americans doing something really kind/classy that reflects well on our country, I'm pleased to have people like that representing us. But I think of pride as something that you feel after actively doing something that was hard, or doing something well. It's something you have to work for. I like America, I'm glad that I was born here instead of any number of other places. I've traveled extensively across the country and pretty much every city I've visited has nice people in it and something about it that is pretty or interesting about it. Just the size and variety of this country amaze me. But why should I be proud of the fact that my parents lived in the United States when they had kids? I have no control over where I was born. I did nothing to accomplish it.

I especially don't get the defensive, anti-other-nation requirement in modern I-is-a-patriot-ism. I'm half-Canadian on my dad's side. I don't mind America, but I think I would be just as happy to go live up there. Or in England or New Zealand (I'd give Australia a try, but I have such a phobia of venomous animals). For that matter, I'd also love to live in Seattle or Portland or Santa Fe, or Boston or even Cleveland. They're all fantastic places, and there's no collective pool of awesome that means, say, Ireland has to suck because America got all the, um, whatever it is people mean when they say that America is better than every other country in the world. It isn't. They all have their good points and their bad points, and, I think, average out to pretty decent. There's enough Nice Place to Live to go around.

That said, the comments toward the end of this unfunnybusiness entry are really starting to piss me off. Whenever I try to explain why I think that I end up sounding really hypocritical--"it's okay for me to knock my country since I live here, but not for them because they don't"--and I'm not really comfortable with that. And it would be inaccurate (it would be just downright stupid, actually) to say that American internal politics aren't the business of people who don't live in America. Shyea, when we insist on playing Mr/Ms 1600-Pound Orangutan That Wants to Sit on As Many People's Heads as It Can, they damned well are. With the globalization of the world, I'd say everyone's politics are everyone else's business, because you can't get away with ignoring what's going on around the other side of the globe anymore.

But those sort of "Wow! Your elections are really messed up! America sure does suck!" statements just provoke in me this irrational bristling that is a close cousin to "don't you go picking on my kid brother." It's the same thing I felt as when an Australian ex-LJ friend insisted back in 2004 that all the Americans on his friends list owed him an apology for elected Bush. When I said that I wasn't going to apologize for one solitary thing because I'd just stood on line for two hours to vote against Bush and I thought that was an insult to the fifty-one percent of Americans who didn't vote for him, he said something to the effect that he thought it would be a nice gesture since we'd inflicted McShrub on the rest of the world for another four years. Then things went downhill from there, resulting in the "ex-" at the beginning of the paragraph.

But, while the result of the elections are the rest of the world's business and people all over the place are involved, at the same time stuff like that leaves me with the same sort of "butt out and mind your business" as if some friend had tried to meddle in a family fight. Since I'd been eying my options to go to grad school in Canada and stay there, I'm mildly peeved that bastard Harper won the election, but I'd feel like a nut demanding an apology from the people of Canada if he managed to ban same-sex marriage before I settled up there and met a nice girl. I mean, it would suck, and I'd be pissed off, but I am not a Canadian citizen. I don't have a vote there and thus do not get to dictate their politics to them. (not saying that's what they're doing over there, these are just thinky thoughts that have been in my head a while already that are related to the topic.)

I think part of it is that they seem to be taking such gleeful horror in bashing American politics. I mean, "And I thought things were dirtier and shameful in my wee third world country, we have nothing going on compared to America"? Really? I... have trouble believing that. aerobot, who I've seen show up in what seems like a lot of posts about something bad in America to tell us how terrible America is and how glad s/he is that s/he doesn't live here, especially rubs me the wrong way. Yes, the American two-party system is a terrible mess. It's a good thing that Australia has never ever had any political problems. Wouldn't life be better if it were illegal to abstain from voting instead of picking the least of the evils without having done any research into what it was you were voting on?

The United States will survive this election. The world will survive this election. It is not the end of the world. We've been in worse fixes politically and socially and come through them not much the worse for wear. I mean, the same as I tell all my friends in the real world running around like the stars will come crashing to the ground if one candidate and no one knows which one it is: give us some fucking credit.

(for the record, I can't stand either major candidate and I'm probably going to write in Joe Schriner. I don't agree with his "let's go back to the 1950s!" idea--but it doesn't matter, because I have a better chance of winning the mega-jackpot lottery without entering through computer glitch than he has of winning the election--but I love how passionate he is about social justice and how his goal in running seems to be nothing but helping as many people as he can.)

( Handwriting meme )

( Why I won't finish NaNo: )

Apropos of nothing:



( The happiest kitty in the world )

Memey memes!


Take a picture of yourself right now. Don’t change your clothes. Don’t fix your hair. Just take a picture. Post that picture with no editing. (Except maybe to get the image size down to something reasonable. Don’t go posting an eight megapixel image.) Include these instructions.



(though I did cheat slightly and just copy the code from an LJ entry I made last night instead of running upstairs to use the computer with the webcam to take an almost identical picture)

* Put your music player on random.
* Post the first line from the first 32 songs that play, no matter how embarrassing the song.
* Let everyone guess what song and artist the lines come from.
* Bold the songs when someone guesses correctly.
* Looking them up on Google or any other search engine is admitting you have a tiny penis, even if you're a lady.
( Under here )

Speaking of strange old men that I like watching, I'm developing such a crush on Craig Furguson (not that he's particularly old, but then, David Caruso isn't either. Would you believe the man's only 53?). I started watching his show regularly in the last week or so. Really, he's better than any of the other network hosts by far. He's funny and smart and cranky and honest and... *sigh* Not half-bad looking, either.

Oh dear god. I had been feeling a little weird talking to other geeks I know because it seems like everyone loves either Torchwood, Dr. Who, or Supernatural in the nerdy circles I run in, and I'm not really into any of them.

It turns out, though, that I think I might be a David Caruso fangirl. I was actually disappointed that without power, I didn't get to see the reruns of the season finale that I've already seen. But Horatio just makes me happy. I've just killed an hour or so watching CSI parody videos on YouTube, but the related clips of interviews with the actual David Caruso make me even more gleeful.


(David Caruso School of Acting

Horatio Caine impressions by the cast of CSI:Miami

David Caruso and Adam Rodriguez promote last season's finale)

The show is wonderful because it's so terrible; it's hilarious because it doesn't seem to realize how ridiculous it is. But it's wearing a little thin on me. It isn't quite as funny as it once was. But David Caruso just delights me. I see him out of character so rarely that it's rather novel. He's such a good sport about the fact that people make so much fun of him, and there's just something kind of odd about him. Maybe it's that the show has either seriously supersaturated its filters or he's started dying his hair a truly strange shade (it used to be the buttery yellow-orange-brown of my ginger cat's coat in the reruns I've seen of "NYPD Blue" and early episodes of "CSI:Miami", but now it's, like, Lucille Ball-and-anthropomorphic carrot's-lovechild orange). Or maybe it's the fact that his weird Horatio raspy whisper seems to be his natural speaking voice, but there's just enough Horatio mixed in with what seems like a personable man that watching him talk is just fascinatingly weird.

It does damage my faith in humanity that CSI:Miami is the most-watched show in the world, though. Seriously, "Firefly" and "Arrested Development" die young and "Pushing Daisies" seems to be just barely getting by, but the show that has people drown in an elevator while robbing a bank during a tsunami (which they planned to do because Miami was empty following the world's most orderly evacuation) lasts six seasons? Oy.

I guess that one of the good things about my not having a paid account here is that y'all don't have to listen to me whine over the phone about having no electricity. Of course, my phone battery died yesterday or the day before and I don't have anything to recharge it with and I don't even know if JournalFen does phone posts, but it's the main thing I can do with LJ right now.The remains of Hurricane Ike did a number on Ohio and Kentucky, so now we're on our fourth day of no power. The rumor going around our cul-de-sac is that it's going to be Sunday before Dayton Power and Light gets to us. That's what they're telling everyone, anyway. I've seen ToledoEdison (Ohio's a heart shape; Dayton is down toward the point on the left-hand slope and Toledo is in the upper left lobe)trucks about and the paper keeps running headlines about how fifty thousand people got their power back the day before every morning this week, but I only know two people who have had their power restored.

No major damage done, just some trees down, but I'm down to using the public library for Internet. It raises my blood pressure because of the stupid kids who don't get that strangers don't necessarily want them cramming into the space between computers to look at MySpace with their friends, and I have to kind of chew my tongue to keep my librarian instincts in check and not yell at people for talking on their cell phones when they sit right in front of a "no cell phone" sign or fuss about having to wait their turns for reservations. I'm not getting paid so I shouldn't worry about it, but oh does it ride my last nerve. But I guess I have running water at home and it's actually pretty nice out even without temperature control, so I could have actual things to complain about.

I actually feel a little foolish. I was a history major. I run around with people who pretend it's no later than 1790 for fun. I know what people did at night back then (they went to bed). I know what they used for light. I even have characters from stories with pre-Industrial Revolution settings in my writer-brain who go "...you have candles, yes?" when I wail about how much I hate sitting around in the dark. But I'm still stuck in "how did people live back then? It's too dark to do anything after, like, 9:00! Woe, I die of bored!" mode.

So it's whiny, but damnit, I want my power back.

Someone else has turned up using my icon.

Well, not my icon. I do not own "The Treachery of Images." But it's the same image at the same contrast and saturation, just cropped a little differently.

I'm one of those rare people on LiveJournal and JournalFen who barely notices icons. I've had this one the whole five years or so I've been here, and I just changed my default on LJ for the first time in years. I make other icons, but I never remember to use them. But I guess I notice them them more than I thought, because this completely weirds me out. The first time I saw it, it confused the hell out of me until I noticed the different username, because I didn't remember making those comments.

I have to admit that it always surprises me when people say things like "Oh, I've always liked you" or "I know who you are, yes" when I'm talking to them on another service, because I'm not really that huge a presence in most of the popular communities. But I also did worry a little about other people thinking that was me like I did.

I have this vague urge to make a new icon from another of Magritte's paintings--there's nothing really special about the Magritte theme, the loon just makes me laugh--but then I would have to buy a rename token to complete the joke, like use an icon of "La Reproduction Interdite" and call myself dont_reproduce_this_either.

I know I've written about this at LJ, but I neglected to say anything here.

My 19.5-year-old cat died yesterday morning.




RIP Bandit, January 1989-August 31, 2008

He was old, he'd been sick (but he was getting better). I knew it was coming, but I never really expected to be here for it. I always made a point of saying goodbye to him when I went back to school after breaks when I was in college because I didn't expect to see him again. I figured when I moved away for grad school next fall, that would probably be it. But I was walking through the dining room getting ready to go somewhere Sunday late morning, and he was stretched out on his side in the living room. He slept like that all the time, and when I nudged him with my foot or bent over to pet him, he would go "Mrrr?" and stretch and wriggle around on his back. Except... he didn't.

I'm staying with my folks right now, and since he sort of became my cat over the years, I get to handle taking care of all the arrangements. It's a holiday weekend, so the vet and the funeral home's pet crematory were closed today. He's been in the refrigerator in the garage for the last couple days since it looks like he went Saturday night or early Sunday. And I'm.... kind of stressed.

Like, I went to the Fair at New Boston this reenactment of a fair from around 1800, this weekend. I tried these really good 18th century cookies called Shrewsbury cakes there. Sugar was really expensive back then, so they were mostly flavored with nutmeg and a little citrus, I think, and they were wonderful. I had two of them that I wrapped in a napkin and brought home with me. I had to come upstairs to rescue the dog from a sanitary pad she'd pulled out of the bathroom trash and chewed up, getting her foot good and stuck in the adhesive so that the whole mess trailed her around and scared her.  I started wanting a Shrewsbury cake wihile I was up there. So I went out to the dining room, and there was nothing but an empty napkin on the table. It took me a minute to figure out what had happened, because Bandit was the reason we could never leave baked goods around. The little pirate loved cakes and bread. I put it together that the dog who had already eaten three pads and not touched her food had taken the cakes and not left so much as a crumb, and I completely lost it, just crying and screaming at her because I wanted those cookies and she took them, she was such a greedy little brat and a bad dog and I won't be able to get anymore until next year and could my day suck any more? (poor kid, we got her from an animal rescue and I'm almost sure she was abused in her old home. She had such issues when we first got her, and she's still flinchy when she hears people shouting and screaming on TV. But she's a mother hen too, and she likes to comfort people. She demands to comfort people. If someone is sad, she climbs all over them and tries to lick their face. So she just didn't know what to do with me both crying and shouting at her.)

I've been staying away from anything argumentative on the Internet lately because I'm pretty sure I'd get all  crazy and weird again given my base level of upset right now. But I'm also noticing that my incidence of "wait... that didn't make any sense, did it?" statements has spiked dramatically in the last few days. So if I say something strange, there's your reason and yeah. Sorry about that.

I've been trying to avoid posting too much writing stuff in my LJ, because it's mostly non-writing stuff and I'm just weird enough that I worry I'll look like I'm dull or obsessing if I talk about nothing but the fictional people in my head.

But holy shit, you guys. It's two days to the end of August. And then it's September. And then it's just two months until November and I still can't decide which story I want to do for NaNo. ::flails::

I have three or four of them in my head, and I have reasons why I don't want to do each of them.
( The other reason I try not to talk so much about writing in my journal is that I have trouble stopping once I get going talking about my writing. )

Oh boy, it's my day to have the "wait, that's a friend of mine in the wank!" weirdness.

Not the wacko, fortunately.

But over in the little_details semi-wank? and_be_blue in the first few comments is someone I used to roleplay with in AOL's RDI chatrooms when we were in high school. I bought her a present when my family went to Venice. I was a few years older than her and we drifted apart while she was in college, after I pretty much stopped RPing. I still have her name on my AIM friends list, but I haven't talked to her in years. I didn't even think she was still on LiveJournal. I'm kind of tempted to go say hi.

Buuut, going over there like "hey lady, what have you been up to in the last five or six years?" would still be really weird even if it didn't count as getting involved in the wank, ne? *sits on hands*

I've never been much of a slash fan. Not in the sense that I dislike it^*, but that I'm more interested in genfic. Don't care for most het, either. Angsty romance just isn't something that appeals to me.^**

So I suppose that part of it is the night I had at the library last night. The system I work for stuck reference with the public computers, because apparently "*scoff* Why can't I use my sister's card to spend another two hours hogging up the computer?" is a reference question. We were so busy last night. It was almost all people who would look at me like I had asked them if they wanted hot wax with that computer reservation instead of whether they knew how many books they're allowed to check out^*** and then tell me that they don't know. They don't use their card for that. I like my job, I really do. It sometimes really grates that I went to college to spend my day helping fourteen-year-olds look at MySpace without a parent around and coaching people through clicking the icon to open Internet Explorer, but there are worse things to do for money.

And that was pretty much what I did all night last night. We had a bunch of really needy people on the computers last night. Not just needy, selectively deaf, too. "Okay, go ahead and make a new reservation and we'll see if we can get that printed" and "I'll make you a new reservation and/or print it for you from my computer" don't mean the same thing, but apparently some people find the difference confusing.

Of course that was the night the gremlins were out in force. The reservation software was making people reservations for forty minutes after we closed. The laptops wouldn't let people use the Internet. The games computer over in the kids' section wouldn't login passwords. Not the reservation numbers that patrons put in to start their sessions--the passwords, so that we couldn't log on even in the staff profile to see why it wouldn't let us log the general user profile in for patrons to use. Also we had packs of unruly kids running rampant through the library all night so that we couldn't step away to try to fix a computer, because they'd start screwing around again if we didn't watch them every moment.

The reservation software serves the whole county system, I think, so our computers are marked with the first letter of our branch's name. Z-01, ZLAPTOP01, etc. Except for the games computer, which is YA. We used to have two or three, until one became fatally borked and we started using it as a catalog. So our remaining games computer is YA01.

I didn't notice what that looks like until last night, seriously. And I had to really bite my lip to keep from laughing when I happened to sit down at the other librarian's computer for a minute and saw that she'd started an email to our tech guys asking "So what do you think about YA01?"



^* Except for Aziraphale/Crowley in Good Omens fandom. That pairing drives me nuts. I don't begrudge people writing what they like, but I just don't get that one. They aren't even male! How?

^** Except for the NaNo project from 2006, because I could never quite work out how my main character and his gentleman friend found time to actually move the plot forward with all the angsting and screwing they did. I've made a few attempts at editing that story, but I'm having problems with it in that Charlie and Nicholas are the only characters I feel like I have a really solid feel for, and all I can get those two to do is comment on other stories of mine and porn it up all over the place.

^*** Informational footnote: when someone gets a new card with us, they're allowed to check out two items. When they bring that back, the limit goes up to ten items. I forget how long that's in place. It's either when they bring those back or for a couple of months. Once the limit-ten period is over, they're allowed to take out pretty much whatever they want. If you use your card at all, you know which you are. We have laptops that people can check out to use for two hours if they've passed the limit-ten. When people start bitching about the wait for a computer, we offer to let them do that instead, thus the question "do you know how many books you can take out?"

Two things that are good that I previously had not expected to be good or just had not thought much about:

1. the new Doctor Who



2. chocolate-cherry Diet Dr. Pepper
   

1. Firefly, and how the episode "Objects in Space" still makes me really uncomfortable with it having this violent, very dark-skinned black man threatening to rape the cute white girl in a series that Joss Whedon claims to have based on the Confederate states after the war



2. Whatever it is that makes me find Kingdom of Loathing really annoying lately



3. These guys, the cute little toy stormtroopers
   

Damn, I always forget to do something for Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day until people mention that it just went by and nobody did anything for it. Thus, here are excerpts of the things I'm working on right now.

( My current project, sort of historical fantasy )

( An urban fantasy story I've been trying to write for years that never quite comes together )

If I were the queen of the world for a day, I would institute some sort of "slug bug" style corporal punishment for people who use the word "bling." Like, "Poser blows-er!" or something. I don't know. Whatever, just so long as they got smacked around a lot. Double hits for people like "Good Morning America" anchors who use it.

I hate that word. I haaate it.

"Rickroll" is rapidly gaining on it today. Goddamn, does that word get on my nerves.

I got into a discussion over in a "hooray! beefcake!" thread on one of the posts about the crazy lady who thinks that Firefly is Joss Whedon's thesis on how to rape puppies. My initial impulse had been "know what this needs? Naked Mal!" but then I started to wonder whether network-safe butt nudity was the same thing as SFW computer viewing, so I deleted and reposted the comment.

My new compromise is to put them here and link from there. Not right in the middle of a thread and I can put more in a post than I can in a comment. Thus:

( Read more... )

I've been trying for a week now to get Dad to watch Firefly, because I know he'd like it. The first movie I remember seeing in the theatre was The Empire Strikes Back, and we went mostly because he wanted to see it. I can't think why anyone would think it was a good idea to take a three or four year old to see that movie--if only because of the unending obnoxious "Who's that? Why is Darth Vader bad? Are they in space now? Where are they going? Why did he do that?" questions you'd probably get from a kid that age about the movie--but when we were discussing it once, he only shrugged and said "Well, you liked it."

He's still invested enough in the Westerns he grew up with that going to the Little Bighorn Battlefield a few years ago with him was really, really embarrassing. I turned down a cruise to Alaska this summer mostly because I can't afford three or four weeks off work, but also in large part because I can't even imagine going up around to First Nations towns with Dad and his born-again brother and their uncle who's never left northern North Dakota but is still an expert on what people of Middle Eastern descent are like.

I've told him how awesome Firefly is, I've had it on whenever he's around, but he just watches for a minute and walks off.

Mom, however, I have interested enough in the show that she'll ask me to put it on for her just by virtue of Mal being so goddamned hot.

Also, my cat is trying to sleep on the side of my laptop case despite the fact that my laptop case is sitting upright. It's not going that well. He doesn't have two brain cells to bang together, but he's persistent.

Second-graders in my mom's class understand why the electoral college is stupid.

Seriously, if eight-year-olds can point out to you the flaws in you political systems, that's something that needs taken care of fast.