This is my journal.  If you want to comment or friend me, go right ahead.  I'll friend back if we've traded comments a few times.

I'm active on scans_daily  and metaquotes .  I watch and comment on them and cap_ironman  and wraithsquadron .  Should I ever join/become active on others - really active, not just looking like at rahmbamarama , obama_daily, capt_america , animorphs, weepingcock, and (dead) brains_in_a_jar ,I'll list those too.

Last week the neighbors left and had us dogsit their remaining Rhodesian Ridgeback, Nina.  They had another one, but he was old and cancerous, and they put him to sleep a few weeks ago.  This was the first time since his death that Nina was without her owners for any length of time.  She's a nice enough dog, always happy to see me.  Couple years old.  Fawns a lot.  And after the first couple days, every time we put her in the crate for the night and let her out in the morning, she crapped it.

Yuck.

We ended up getting her antidiarrhea medicine, which seemed to work.  But then one evening she went and encountered a skunk.  Came back reeking and with a scratch on her muzzle.  Getting all the ingredients for the shampoo together and then getting it on her wasn't fun.  Oy.  Oddly, skunk isn't quite as bad as it's hyped up to be.  Nasty, yes, it smells partly like something burned.  But not what I'd thought.

Their house still reeks of skunk, though the dog herself no longer does.  The neighbors were extremely apologetic.  We had to take Nina to the vet to get her another anti-rabies shot, but fortunately that went on the neighbors' account and not ours.  They cut their vacation short and apologized some more.  Sooner or later we'll get paid.  Everything went wrong.  *laughs*

The day before we left for Chicago - we just came back - I had my brother drive me to the nearest haircut place, two miles away, to get my hair cut.  The line was long, so he went home.  My cell phone decided to break.  I walked back, and the experience has taught me that sandals are evil.  Seriously!  They are not designed for any amount of walking.  I ended up with all these blisters.

I still dislike my Chicago cousins, but we didn't stay too long this time.  Since I am apparently the only one in either family who wants to go, we did not see the Chicago Field Museum.  Again.  This also happened last year, when there was a temporary exhibit I really wanted to go to.  That year they went to the Botanical Gardens.  In what universe are gardens better than dinosaurs?!

This year we did at least go to this tiny reptile conservation place, which had some accomodating staff and a few reptiles that didn't mind being touched.  It's odd how soft and slick they were.  There was a rhinocerous iguana that apparently loved being petted.  She'd stand up straighter and close her eyes.  Her tail was a lot harder and rougher than the rest of her body, probably because of how iguanas use those tails as defensive weapons.

So that wasn't terrible.

( Youtube spam )


Dragons.

I saw "Up" last week.  Good movie, certainly.  I saw it with my dad and my brother at the Michigan Theater, which is an old movie theater that used to be a theater for plays.  It's a nice place - they only ever have one movie playing at a time, but it's nice.  Really good popcorn.  The guy taking tickets had a mild harelip.  On the way there we passed through campus territory, and I saw a lot of graffiti-ed "Who?" things.

That Ellie sequence made my cry.  It's a good movie, but that part was sad.  On unfunnybusiness they noted "Pixar grants girl's dying wish, makes entire Internet cry".  This, too, is sad.  It's good of them not to make a statement about that.

Crowdsource Tarot.

Is it possible to get a writer's high?  Possibly in conjunction with an artist's high?

Because damn if this doesn't feel good.

Anj Kincaid.  I like him.  He is fun to torment, and not hard to write.  ...And yes, his face is vaguely based on mine.  I don't know why I didn't Google for facial expressions.  Eh, done is done.

I swear I dropped into Flow when I was writing.  I love flow.  It's this rush, and rather than browsing other tabs and being blocked I'm typing furiously.  Being me, I'm still going back and editing as I do it, but I'm getting paragraphs done and things are progressing, one to two to three.  Is that what it's like to be manic?  I wanted to stop, but I felt like I had to reach a certain point first, so I kept going.  This happens sometimes when I'm writing - I want to get a little bit further and stop, but then I see another point I have to reach.

When I write papers, the ones that everyone loves are the ones I enjoy doing.  And apparently people do like my papers.  When I'm enjoying a paper I get sardonic, I don't lose my threads, and apparently I am very good at rephrasing.  Writing stories is a little like that.  Just different in every way.

The computer is being a failure.  "Argh!  You want to watch a video/type something?!  I CAN'T HANDLE THIS, IT'S TOO MUCH!  *Firefox is not responding!*  MUST ADD MASSIVE LAG TIMES!"

I hate that.


Here's a link dump.

( Also Youtube spam. )( Read more... )

I scanned one of the leftovers from the sheet of the picture that's on my newest passport.  My hair has grown out a bit and at home I tend to wear glasses, but that's what I look like.

No one ever told me how fun it is to mess with the characters you're writing.  It's weird.  I hate the vast majority of comedy, since I don't generally see the humor in property damage, injuries, and the whole "I thought things were going well, and now everything is ruined!" schtick.  In fact, those things tend to make me cringe instead of laughing.  But here I am writing "Walker, Imperial Ranger", there's someone who turned into an AT-AT and is Not Liking This At All, and it is incredible fun.  It is sick and twisted fun.

Also I just finished a drawing of Anj Kincaid, who started the story as a woman and then got genderswitched, checking and staring out of the paper in horror, and I grin like a maniac every time I look.

Of course, since I used myself as reference for the drawing, now he looks something like me.  But I'm androgynous enough to rock the Red Guard armor.

So Shadows of the Empire had a soundtrack of its own.  Not for the game, for the novel.  Huh.  Youtube has this soundtrack.  Unfortunately the person who uploaded it is the type to whine about not liking the prequel trilogy in the "more info" box.  SotE has nothing to do with waah I don't like these movies!  So I figured I'd just embedd them here.

( Ten embedds )
Hmm.  I know Shadows of the Empire has a lot of mixed reviews, but now I really want to read it again.  I didn't think it was half bad, previous times I read it.  And I like Steve Perry's other work, on the MedStar duology and Death Star.  The guy he worked with for those three, Michael Reaves, is... well, no, not bad.  But I think they're better together.

Tags: writing

I watched Star Trek on my birthday.  It was pretty awesome.  I liked Sulu the fencer.  And Spock.  Kirk was kind of a jackass, but he was all right in the end.  Overall I really liked it, and am currently suppressing the desire to track down episodes or the older movies.  Those are in a different timeline now anyway.  That part was sad.

Still like Star Wars better, though.  Trek just didn't seem as epic - yeah, planets destroyed, big enemy ship, but the scale seemed a little smaller overall.  Plus, Trek didn't have anyone quite like Luke, and I love that farmboy torn between the longing to leave and do great things and his duty to stay.  Angry rebellious people don't have so much appeal to me.

So now I'm twenty.  Just as predicted, it's not like hopping over a fence into a different world.  The difference is all in my head.  Twenty.  Wow.

...I'll keep not thinking about that.  Instead, I'll exposit about a dream I had a week or so back.

I'd been watching a Let's Play of Earthbound 2, and I'd finished watching, which meant getting to the end boss.  Giygas.

Eeek.  He's that image here on Nightmare Fuel.  That's the background.  It changes.  He has some unbelievably creepy lines.  For various reasons, he's highly unsettling, and so naturally I started dreaming stuff visually related to that.  Lots of bloody distended jaws and so on.

I was sort of half aware that I was dreaming, decided that I didn't like where the dream was going, and applied the trick I developed for those times when I'm awake, it's dark, and my imagination is going "Monsters!".  This trick is "Have Captain America show up at the same time as the monsters."  ...And it worked, he showed up and hit something with his shield, and then went through the usual protecting-a-civilian sctick, turning the dream from nightmare to merely kind of tense.

Also, at a couple points I worried that Cap would go all nightmarish, until Wedge Antilles showed up too.  I don't know why.  I had some flimsy reason for why he was in the immediate vicinity - his X-Wing had crashed and he'd ejected - but not why a pilot from Star Wars was in the same dream as a Marvel superhero.  I suppose because I heart them both.  He did seem confused about whether he was Wedge or Carth from KotOR - he sometimes had two blaster pistols, sometimes just one.

So that was interesting.

Dragons.

  

Tags: capslove, dream, star wars

I remember discovering that I am very pro-vaccine.

It happened some time in grade school, when I was watching some program, I don't remember why or for what class, where there was a large family that was choosing not to vaccinate anyone, and wouldn't take them to the doctor when they were sick.  Because they didn't need medicine, God would take care of them.  But the schools wanted them to vaccinate their kids before admitting them.  And that was against their religion.

I just remember getting so angry.  I had those fevered revenge-fantasy style daydreams of Swat teams rappelling in and injecting them all.  Or of them all dying of the flu while whiiiiiiining that God would save them.

Looking back, I suppose that incident had something to do with the contempt I hold for anyone who points to God as someone directly guiding them and protecting them from harm.  You know, the ones for who medical treatment is against God, the ones who think a being that created the universe would care what someone eats or who they have sex with or the specific details of worship.  Or that every accomplishment is God's doing; human effort had nothing to do with it.

That kind of person... well, their God is meddlesome and mean-spirited, and I hope to hell that I'm more right than they are.  If I have a religion, it's Deist.  Someone, someones, or something either created the universe or set things up so it could form, maybe meddled somewhere down the line, and then backed off to either watch or went away to try something else.  I believe that there is something after death, and it's far less codified and far stranger than the Heaven/Hell/Purgatory thing.

Anyway, vaccines do not cause autism.

( Always with the Youtube spam )

Tags: real life

Wrote part of an ontological mystery - four people break out of eggs in a darkened room in hostile territory - set in Xanadu.  Unfortunately I don't actually know why they're in that darkened room or who the hostiles are.  Leaning towards SHODAN - I've hinted at her being a menace before, but we'll see.  I'm putting it here so that if the computer fails (again) I'll still have it.

Nathan awoke slowly in total darkness, curled tightly with his legs curled against his chest, his arms wrapped around them.  Space was tight.  He felt warm and wet and drowsy, but all temptation to linger evaporated as he realized that his mouth and nose were stuffed up by something, and he wasn’t breathing.

 

By raking his fingers across his face, his elbow scraping across something in the process, he managed to catch and pull out the ropy slimy stuff that had gotten into his mouth and nose, gagging and coughing as it slid out of his throat, wrapping it around his hand and wrist.  It wasn’t really an improvement.  There was air, but it was close and damp and very warm. Now there was a nasty taste in his mouth and nose.  When he tried to straighten his neck and get his face away, he realized that there wasn’t space.

( Born from an egg in a darkened room )

( And of course some Youtube spam. )

Tags: writing

My dragons.  ...Maybe I shouldn't have gotten a Lizardus.  They're the ugliest when they're Ancient.  Then again, Ancient comes at level Seventy, and my oldest is at Sixty.

It is summer break!

When I work with clay, I tend to make dragons.  I've been making a ceramic dragon skeleton with little holes in each bone.  Bisqued them, applied light oxide, fired them, and strung them together with lengths of thin, flexible wire.  ...I'd post the stuff I've made, since it's been uploaded onto the school's artlist thing, but it looks like the server's still wonky.  Boo.  Well, maybe later.  Some of my stuff is pretty awesome, if I do say so myself.

... This is an excellent time to weed my bookmarks!  Okay, so Let Me Google That For You.   Dead At Your Age (hey, I've outlived Secretariat for about five months, and Joan of Arc by about six).  Two on waterboarding; I'd seen them before and hadn't saved.  Why We Immunize.  Robert Ebert viciously mocking "Expelled".  Think that's all the ones I'll actually want later.

Have been going through Villain Song, which is fun.  Picked up a lot of Youtube embedds.
( Lots and lots of Youtube spam. )

Tags: click to grow, linkspam, real life

This weekend, instead of going home I'm staying at Adrian for the Not For Sale conference.  They're here, apparently, because Adrian is some kind of abolitionist hotspot thanks to the people who lived here around the time of the Civil War.

Because somehow slavery still exists today.  A lot of it is because lots of foreign cops suck horribly and are so corrupt they might as well not exist, if the book is accurate.  Sigh.  Reading that book is... well, I know it's trying to push my buttons and spark my righteous outrage.  These days, though, I think I'm too tired for righteous outrage.  The world just sucks, and so do a lot of the people.  You can think of yourself as a good person and still do nothing.

This is probably what getting old feels like.  A little more than a month from now, and I'll be twenty.  I still don't know what I want to do with myself.

Drew a Cyborg Flu picture.  Sort of a mediocre likeness of me, but I wasn't really at my best anyway.

Tags: real life

I am diseased.

( Cyborg Flu )
Now is the point where I would type in binary if I wasn't going to head into my bunk and switch off right now.

Tags: click to grow, dream

I spend a lot of time when I'm not near the computer thinking about what I'd like to be typing if I was.

Sunday night, for instance, I couldn't sleep at all.  I was thinking about something passive-aggressive to my insomnia.  Monday a teacher said that I was pretty good at paraphrasing, so I was thinking about ways to brag about that.  Naturally the phrasing I came up with for both of those has totally vanished, and I'm not up for finding it again.

Tuesday, though, I was mostly thinking about the five-page essay in Least Favorite Class.  I typed three.  Oops.

But damn it, I discovered theursulav  journal and was entranced.  Grr. 

( Youtube spam )( Youtube spam )</div></div>

Tags: dream

Tags: writing

This was a post back on s_d.  I rightclick-saved and rehosted these from the backup.  Whoever originally scanned them, thanks!
( Read more... )
Anyway, the little trumpet on the statue emitted knockout gas and Zemo showed up to kidnap Cap, and later in the issue we got Giant Girl wearing a giant mecha like armor.  I'm fond of these early issues.

Tags: capslove, comics

A bat got into the dorm tonight, and alternately clung to a wall and swooped and fluttered in a panic.  It was tiny whenever it was clinging and surprisingly large but silent in flight.  Some of the people screamed, others didn't.  It was in the main stairwell, up at the third floor where my room is.   I was one of the ones who were annoyed at the frightened people.  It was a bat.  It wasn't going to attack.  I lent a girl my chair to reach a window so she could open it and let the bat out, but there was a screen.  We used a broom to try and scare it out of the stairwell.  It collided with the glass once and recovered; eventually we got it out into the hall, and it zipped down to the boy side.  They tried to catch it with a blanket, but it dodged and swooped around.  Even the guys flinched.  The bat fled into the secondary stairwell.  The door there is always held open.  We changed plans and decided to open the door at the bottom and let it escape.

It huddled on the floor and we realized that it was getting tired.  One of the boys tried catching it with an empty trash container, and it fled up to the well around a window.  The boy with the container started raising it after the bat, and the bat climbed higher, wings unfolding a little bit.  Seeing that, every girl in the corridor said "Awww!" in unison.  The container caught up to the bat and it fell in, but he tilted it down while lowering it and the bat flew out again.  We resumed chasing it down the stairwell.  Not far from the bottom it landed again and a girl threw a light blanket over it.  Immediately the bat started squeaking in blind panic.  I say "squeaking" with reluctance, because the word that came to mind when I was there was screaming.  But I guess it really was a series of punctuated squeaks, surprisingly loud.  We freaked a little at the sound, and after a few seconds a boy cautiously bundled up bat and blanket and we got it outside, where it flew away.  Then we applauded.

I'm told that this wasn't the first bat, and they come out of the attic.  I hope they can make it.  It's still fairly cold outside.

   
I now have three dragons.

Also,


dorcas_gustine  drew a slashy Steve/Tony pic to my over-exacting specifications.  I like dog tags.

.( Obligatory Youtube spam )

Tags: capslove, real life

I know it's not the season for it, but reposting is all the rage, and I like this one.  It was also possibly the only one I have which I don't have to pick through trying to decide which pages to eliminate; yes, this story is posted in its entirety, but it's certainly not the only story in the special.  There was also one with Namor in a Santa suit and one where the Fantastic Four help out a random mook.  ...Not sure where it went, I've been disorganized lately.

I really like this issue.  Fluff, you know?

( Who made this? Ah, no-yeah, I mean-who made this, it's the bomb! )( Read more... )

Tags: capslove, comics

  



Surfing baxil's flist, finding this, deciding why not.  But putting a cut, 
because that is long and I dislike really long entries.  Why did the text change?  Stupid computer.

I found L-space and the Annotated Pratchett File.  ...Where did the time go?  My spring break ends tomorrow!

Tags: other people, real life

  

So scans_daily  has been suspended because some comics creator whined.  Great.  
Nothing else has gone right this month; why shouldn't this happen?



There's noscans_daily , but I don't see it becoming popular.
  It's tailored for the whiner!  No scans, no spoilers.
  There's always Insane Journal's version.  Aw man, do I really have to 
make a new account?
</lj>

Tags: comics, other people

I'm not very happy right now.  I'm angry, actually.

So on Friday morning, my laptop decided that it hated me almost as much as I hate it, and it crashed.  Froze completely, and whenever I turned it off and on again it gave me the Blue Screen Of Death.  My dad looked at it, told me the warranty extended until July, called tech support, and determined that I needed a new hard drive.  Because the old one no longer works.

It's in the mail.   Supposedly it could have arrived on Saturday but, naturally, it didn't.  No, it'll arrive on Monday, when I am at Adrian, despite my sibs in grade school having Monday and Tuesday off.  And when it does come, the laptop will have total amnesia which will not be cured by reminders or blows to the head.  Because all the memory is on the hard drive.  Which committed dishonorable suicide.

Technology, never commit suicide around me.  It does not result in me reexamining my life and feeling bad.  It results in rage and desperation which is not going to stop me, damn it, and I will not light anything on fire despite the little voice urging me to do so, nor bite myself, nor scream.  See, I have two papers due on Wednesday.  They were on the damn computer.

I did not put them online because one, where the hells would I do that (private-locked entries here on LJ, yes, thank you hindsight), and two, I did not know that hard drives enjoyed SPONTANEOUSLY DYING ON ME.  Fortunately when I emailed one of them in rough draft to myself I used my Hotmail account, and the "Sent" thing keeps attatchments.  Still angry.  Stiiill angry.

And the home computer is slow and used by both sibs.



 

Tags: real life