| The Alpha |
[01 Aug 2007|04:42am] |
Today ![[info]](http://www.journalfen.net/img/userinfo.gif) thegeekgene and I had to clear out an old cabinet so it could be replaced with a new cabinet. 90% of this cabinet's contents were old photos. After the heavy stuff was dealt with, thegeekgene and I sat down and started going through the pictures, trying to establish an equation to determine the size of Mom's glasses by way of her distance from the 70's and wondering why, as children, we had never once been arrested for indecent exposure. I mean, if these photos are representative, we maybe wore clothes 20% of the time, at most? Where were our parents?
Then I came upon The Photo. A great stillness settled about me. thegeekgene's running commentary on what Dad thought he was doing with that ice cream faded to a dull buzzing somewhere beyond the walls of my mind. Suddenly I understood everything I had done for the past eight years. All my sins and obsessions were laid out neatly before me, like sweaters that need to be air-dried so they're like on the table. Here was the foundation of all that I am.
It was a picture of me, at the age of one-and-a-half, sitting on a plastic toy horse and watching a cartoon called "Hashimoto in... Spooky-Yaki!"
I had not realized how early it had started.
...
I couldn't find that exact cartoon on YouTube, but I found another one from the same series. It's pretty cute. Apparently they were directed by a 1st-generation Japanese immigrant named Bob Kuwahara, and they're all about the Japanese mouse screwing with the American mouse's head.
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| The hacker organization known as Anonymous |
[28 Jul 2007|11:36pm] |
If you haven't seen that Fox video, you need to watch it right now. I didn't believe it was real until the announcer's name showed up at the bottom and I paused the thing to Google it - he actually does work for Fox.
I haven't seen a transcript yet, so I made one myself. You will thank me.
( They call themselves Anonymous. )
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[22 Jul 2007|07:19am] |
Ha! Finished!
Now I wonder if I will fall asleep.
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| He who controls the Spice, controls the Spice Girls. |
[21 Jul 2007|01:32am] |
Having just encountered what appeared to be freshly-posted kamikaze Harry Potter spoilers in the comments section of a news site, I have suggested to thegeekgene that, until her copy shows up tomorrow, she might want to refrain from looking at any site that might have unmoderated comments, if she can't bear to remove herself from the internet entirely. I think I may do the latter. I have a pile of books I've been meaning to finish here.
The internet should be hostile more often! It makes me all productive. Maybe I should switch back to IE and Norton.
(I unpacked all my books yesterday, spent three hours alphabetizing them by author on my freshly-assembled shelves - and then found a box I'd forgotten about under the bed. I don't know how I shelved until three AM without realizing stuff was missing, that was the box that had all my frigging Fruits Basket in it.)
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| Lunge x HIS HAND OTP |
[14 Jul 2007|01:15am] |
Grimmer x Tenma OTP!!!
I actually seriously need doujinshi for this.
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| Urrrgh. |
[12 Jul 2007|01:20am] |
Gynecological exams teach one interesting things about one's reactions to pain. Apparently, my default curse word is "shit;" once I get started, I do not feel the urge break up my rhythm with other, less-privileged terms; and when the source of pain disappears, I start giggling.
Nurse M clearly finds my low threshold of pain worrying. Doctor C is merely very deadpan. She holds the implements where I can't see them and asks when my sisters are going to be coming in for their HPV vaccinations.
The past year or so, I have acquired a slight facial hair problem. To be extremely precise, I have acquired a goatee. It is a pretty respectable little goatee if I don't shave it - all I need is a flannel shirt and a disgusted expression and I can major in cinema. My goatee was the main reason I went to the gynecologist. My testosterone levels have always been off a little, and this seemed like it might be turning into more than a little.
Doctor C didn't think it was significant; she talked about someone who'd come in the other day with "worse hair than you," and gave me a prescription for some cream. This is fascinating. Are there lots of female goatees out there? Should I leave it in place for some kind of empowerment purposes? Well, no, because I don't like it and I'm breaking out underneath. But it's useful information. I bet I can use it to make people I dislike uncomfortable.
I went online to research the cream when I got home - it's called Vaniqa, though Doctor C's handwriting is so bad I had to type a couple variations into Google to get what I wanted. Apparently the drug's manufacturer at one point ceased production because its main use is in curing sleeping sickness, which mostly affects people without any money. People in Africa, specifically. But then, a miracle occurred, and it was discovered that it could be used in topical form to retard hair growth! And thus they restarted manufacturing. Us rich white women have saved Africa again.
I'm feeling kind of ambivalent about this.
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| Why I Have Pretty Much Stopped Playing Pokemon (Though I Still Read The Manga?) |
[09 Jul 2007|03:10pm] |
I captured my Dialga which was a really nice feeling of accomplishment. I decided to try taking my new an improved crew online via Battle Revolution to see if the addition of an ancient dragon with the power to warp space and time would give me the edge I needed to win. Turns out no.
- Mister Gabriel
Well, among other reasons. (Seriously, given how hard it is to catch some of them (LATIAS), the Legendary Pokemon aren't always that -ing great. My Espeon always got more use than my Lugia.)
And in Kingdom of Loathing-related news, I don't like a lot of the writing for NS13 - some if it wanders perilously close to serious, and there's all sorts of stuff that's much wordier than it needs to be, particularly during the Holy MacGuffin quest. (I'm also annoyed that the battle queue changes broke KoLMafia, but I can't exactly blame other people for my botting addiction.) And there are still lots of places that are either buggy or just really user-unfriendly. I'm particularly annoyed with all the heavily-nested island maps where you click a place you can't get to yet, get taken to a "No-no" screen, and aren't given a link back to the last part of the map you were looking at. No! Incorrect!
...and the Black Forest is problematic.
Oh, and I clicked wrong buying the paint and accidentally bought a second exotic parrot egg. It should not be possible to do that. That's just vicious.
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| Yellow jackets are tools. |
[09 Jul 2007|12:23pm] |
I have a longer post where I talk about caves and anime hair, but the anime hair part has gotten really long and philosophical so I'm going to just go ahead and post about the yellow jackets.
Basically, I am not going to go for walks in the park before noon anymore. I've never seen many stinging insects going out there in the late afternoon, but I ended up having to take two detours to avoid the yellow jackets today, and had to run once when a bunch of them came up on me all of a sudden.
There seem to be at least two different focuses of activity - one in one of those springy horsy see-saw things, which has been surrounded with yellow caution tape, and one in one of the half-buried tires, which hasn't. These are are across a path from one another, and there's a lot of... intercourse between them. I had to get off their path.
I guess they were bringing some kind of abandoned food from the tire to the see-saw, or else establishing a new queen in her nest, though Wikipedia says it's early for that. Yes, I came home after my yellow jacket encounter and began researching yellow jackets.
I also learned that the Schmidt Sting Pain Index is hilarious:
2.0 - Bald-faced hornet - Rich, hearty, slightly crunchy.
2.0 - Yellowjacket - Hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine WC Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.
BPAL needs to turn this into an LE line. Possibly some soaps - exfoliating soaps. No, it's brilliant! Unless I just hate people and want to hurt them.
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| Hatshepsut! |
[28 Jun 2007|10:25pm] |
She was "obese."
In an interesting psychological twist, this destroys all reluctance on my part to eat the fondant.
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| Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle ch. 156-158 |
[28 Jun 2007|12:34am] |
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( Spoiler-cut )
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| 'There is always a useful item at the dead end.' |
[18 Jun 2007|04:33pm] |
Courtesy of zarla and the makers of Earthbound... the most meta dungeon-crawl ever.
The only thing you really need to know to understand those screen shots is that 'Brick Road' is a non-player character who is obsessed with user-friendly dungeon design, and Our Heroes have encountered his work in the past.
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| I went to great effort to get caught up on my CLAMP today. |
[10 Jun 2007|11:40pm] |
Commentary typed while reading chapters 120-150 of Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle:
( Spoiler Cut )
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| To-day |
[08 Jun 2007|06:59pm] |
I made korma, Mom's PayPal got hacked, and I maybe have a throat infection.
Dad got me a Barney ice-cream cake for my birthday. I think it may have been a bootleg Barney ice-cream cake. I'm sitting here trying to decide if eating a piece of it would make my throat feel better.
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[06 Jun 2007|01:30am] |
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My period started a week and a half early just to make my birthday special.
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| HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME |
[06 Jun 2007|01:28am] |
I accept all major credit cards and categories of confectionery.
It's just occurred to me that Dad has smuggled a party into my birthday. He invited a bunch of volunteer builders from the low-income housing group elongated_tito is working for over to the house to use the pool this afternoon. He then forgot to tell Mom, got sick, left all the car windows open during a thunderstorm, and wouldn't drink the tea he'd wanted because it was all hot.
GANBATTE, OTOU-SAN! Go for the gold! Find a way to run over your own foot with the car! Drop your office's digital camera in a bowl of potato salad! Accidentally eat something with onion in it!
(I assume he'd actually just forgotten that that particular Wednesday was my birthday. MATA GANBATTE, OTOU-SAN! I will require many exceptionally dangerous electronics if I am ever to recover from this crushing incident of parental neglect.)
I wonder if anyone's remembered that the pool, like, needs to be cleaned? I have no idea if we even have that vacuum for it anymore, and it was raining and Dad was dead to the world pretty much all day today/yesterday, so I didn't try and figure out. I should probably go to bed now so I'll be up early enough to remind people of that in the morning.
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| Hobbies For People Who Still Don't Have A Job |
[03 Jun 2007|11:14pm] |
1) Reading the same books over and over.
2) Throwing away Dad's coffee mugs.
3) Looking up people's Amazon wishlists.
People whose Amazon wishlists you should look up:
* College professors (they want you to buy them research materials and lamps!)
* Science fiction and fantasy authors (they all want the really pretty LoTR box set!)
* People you kind of know whose names you selected off Facebook (they probably don't realize other people can see the list!)
* Local politicians (some of them have taken them down since last time I tried this! I wonder why! And some of them want a bunch of Shakespeare stuff and nothing else! I wonder if they actually want a bunch of Shakespeare stuff and nothing else!)
4) Developing stomach problems.
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| (I knocked a couple of blogs off my reading list.) |
[27 May 2007|10:26pm] |
Recently I find myself feeling that it's unfair to think of some people as human beings. This is because I believe that human beings have free will. If they do, then some of them evidently deserve to have their carcasses refashioned into useful things such as pencils and bags.
Maybe I will feel better if I go eat some spaghetti.
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