stunt_muppet

Wanna feel very short-sighted? Watch the episode of "Through the Wormhole" on what time is and whether it really exists. Watch your Christmas shopping list suddenly feel very insignificant.

Also, yeah, the new commenting style is exactly as ugly as I thought it'd be. And the anonymous icon with a bag over its head is kind of creepy-looking. I realize I don't pay for my LJ and thus they couldn't give less of a shit if I leave, but can anyone point me to the Dreamwidth journal importer? I couldn't find it and I want to get started importing as soon as possible since I figure it'll probably be backed up.

Also does the importer bring comments with it? There's a lot of nice stuff in the comments of my journal. :(

Day off tomorrow. I should spend it shopping, cooking, beading, and wrapping presents but I mostly want to spend it writing and drawing. And napping. And listening to doom metal to rinse the endless repetition of the same 3 holiday CDs out of my head.

Contrary to the title this entry is not whining about retail. It's still pretty sane here in the shop, and every day I praise the Patron Saint of Retail Workers that I am not working at Best Buy and have not had to break up any fights.

Nah, this entry is whining about actually for-real failing Organic Chem. I mean, I tried, the night before my final, to finish all the work I had to make up, I really did. And I studied. And then I got my third test back and saw I'd gotten a 42 out of 110 on it, which is somehow worse than I did on the test I didn't even finish.

And so I just said "fuck it" and hid in my room for the rest of the day until it was time to go to work and didn't even check to see if my professors e-mailed me because I just wanted to forget I'd ever taken that class.

In all honesty? I'd be okay with taking it again. It'd be kind of a waste of money, but I've saved up from working the holidays. What I'm most worried about is what kind of lie I'm going to tell my mother. I'm not looking forward to the freak-out "what's wrong with you, I thought you were getting better, you're so much better than this" business. I get why I failed - I was working plus taking care of her while she did her schoolwork plus taking care of my grandfather plus applying to/fretting over grad school plus getting sick plus not giving a crap about the class after the halfway point. But given that she wants me to go to grad school so bad I'm afraid she'll make me quit work, and I don't want to do that before I get another job. I need an outside job to feel useful, to feel like I'm doing something with myself, and also I hate having to borrow money from my parents.

I wish I still gave a crap. I hate not giving a crap, especially about grad school. As much as I hate the idea of it I feel like I don't have a choice, like if I don't have that impetus of "go to grad school" I'll have no direction and just sit around my parents' house and wallow. Even if I know I wouldn't.

Oh, and the mouspad on my computer stopped working, in more first-world-problem news. I need to try to scrounge up a USB mouse to make sure that it's just the mouse and not the whole computer suddenly, which I don't think it is since it boots up okay. Uuuugh. Why is everything kind of bollocks right now.

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On a completely different note, listening to nonstop holiday music at the shop seriously makes me want to write about the various religions and psuedo-religions and gods and celebrations in my various fandoms. Like hey, wasn't Time considered a goddess in Doctor Who secondary canon? Odd, given the fact that Time Lords are supposed to be a highly advanced scientific society. Is this a sign of their decadence, or of how far they've fallen, that they attribute what they formerly had mastery over to the supernatural? And hey, maybe there's even a James Frazer "Golden Bough" thing going on where because so many sophisticated minds believe in this godlike force and as such that causes her to be real and time to stop behaving rationally.

Or hey, even Transformers. Primus/the planet/the creator is referred to as a god, but how does one worship or express faith in something that you know is currently extant and beneath your feet? What about the Thirteen, do people know about that? Are they like saints? Or Homestuck, with the obvious parallels between The Sufferer, the Dolorosa, the Disciple and the Psionic to Jesus, Mary, Mary Magdalene and Peter - and given all the dinners my family eats over at the Cuban place with all its Santeria candles I ended up thinking about the history of Marian devotion and how strongly Mary is represented in syncretic religions and hey, I wonder how that would go when not only is the Mary figure still alive (because she doesn't get killed till Mindfang's time) but the whole faith is sort of underground and secret and if any of the Sufferer's secret followers have a branch of Dolorosa devotion and I'm thinking about this too hard again aren't I.

Of course, this is sometimes this is the only think keeping me from punching someone in the face the 500th time I hear "Rocking Around the Christmas Tree", so there's that.

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I plan on doing very little but sleeping tomorrow. 

---- 

It never fucking fails. Our homework is due by midnight tonight, and the website we use to do said homework is down.

Oh well. Means it's not my fault if it's not finished, then.

Ugh, organic chem, guys. I know my mom will be pissed off at me if I fail this class, but you know what? I won't be pissed off at me. Actual scientists that I give job interviews with have failed Organic Chem and had to take it twice. It'll suck to have to pay the tuituion again, especially since it's all coming out of my pocket, but...well, hopefully Mom won't kick me out if I fail, because then I would be fucked, but other than that I will not spiral into inferiority and depression if I have to take it again. And that is what I am most worried about.

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On another brief note, if you guys were to do a fanmix, would you go with music the character would like, or music that fits them? And what about if the music that you think fits is really popular, because I hear people complaining all the time about Top 40 music being on fanmixes and them all being the same.

To bed now, my batteries are running low.

1. Write a whole bunch of John/Karkat specifically to piss everyone off.

Hey, hey, fandom, come over here I have something really exciting to tell you. Are you listening? Are you ready for it because I think you aren't it might just blow your mind right out of your face.

Ready okay here it is:

There is no such thing as an inherently bad pairing. Or an inherently good one, for that matter. There is no intrinsic moral or utilitarian worth to be had in any pairing given that they're all just ideas/devices for us to have fun with a media source on the internet. You don't have to like any particular pairing, but your feelings about them do not make them good or bad.

Now shut up and sit down and stop throwing fits about it. Cripes.

2. Sign up for Yuletide. Last time I tried that I defaulted and I'm pathologically incapable of doing much of anything on a deadline so it's pretty well covered why it'd be a bad idea to sign up for Yuletide but it always seems like so much fun and I am a greedy bastard who likes getting presents. :(

Plus, last time I signed up the fandoms I volunteered for (and the one I ended up getting assigned) included the movie The Fall, which is so unceasingly flawless that when I tried to write for it I tied myself in knots trying to construct Meaningful Symbolic Magical Realist Blather that equalled the unbearable perfection that is The Fall and predictably enough didn't get anywhere.

If I was going to sign up this time, I would sign up for movies like Van Helsing and Priest, because yes, there's a category for the Priest movie. The thing is, much as I enjoyed them, both of those movies were complete bollocks that I went to see mainly because there were pretty people in them. I would feel much less pressure writing for them.

Although I suppose if I wrote for Priest the recipient might expect me to know things about the manhwa and I really don't, so...

Also the Gabriel Knight games are on there and if I had played the last one I would sign up just to write that, MORE GABRIEL KNIGHT LOVE YEAAAH.  

3. Make some icons out of the pile of fanart I've right-click-saved from Tumblr. Oh wait I already did that.

Six Homestuck (mostly Equius and Equius <> Nepeta), 5 Transformers Animated (Sari, human!Wasp, Blackarachnia), and one random humanized Pinkie Pie because I can. Oh, and one Tarman from Return of the Living Dead, because the picture was funny.

( Icons! )



Don't make fun of my amateur icon skills. :(

4. Join Tumblr, for that matter, given that about a third of LJ seems to have moved there. Where are you gu~ys?

But I'd feel weird being on Tumblr - there's no real way to post fic or blog on there, you just have to reblog from other blogs, and I can't figureout how one's supposed to hold a conversation of any kind. Also it seems to be primarily fanart focused and while I've been going to the open model sessions at our local arts center I'm still not good enough to have any kind of consistent offering.

5. Spend an hour on the computer making a post when I should be doing something productive like cleaning my room or getting ready for work.

OH WAIT.

> Plan to go to bed early so you can get started on your homework and finally catch up after the worst knock-down-drag-out week in ages.

> Stay up an additional two hours right-click-saving shit on Tumblr.



FUCK YOU TUMBLR YOU ARE EVERYTHING THAT IS WRONG WITH MY LIFE.

;__;

Why does being up late make me feel drunk? And not even the productive drunk where I write stupid fanfic that no one cares about, although that's dubiously productive. Just the disorganized and cotton-headed kind of drunk.

Also why is my room so cold. On the list of things that can fuck themselves is winter. One day I will move to Florida and then I will probably die in a hurricane or get all sorts of horrible diseases from mosquitos or get my head bitten off by a crocodile but dammit, I will be warm until that happens.

I had a cleverer title but I forgot it.[Poll #1792990]

2. If I named a fic (or a chapter of a fic) "Faaip de Oiad", how many people, approximately, would know what I was talking about?

I do on occasion hate the small reference pools fandom can inspire.

(It's Enochian for "voice of God", and a track on the Tool album Lateralus that samples a hoax caller to the Art Bell radio show. You can hear it here!)

Anyway I'd been tossing it around as a name for the Holy War AU on the occasion that I ever actually write the damn thing which looks increasingly unlikely, but there was one time back in middle school when I suggested a friend name one of her fis something in Italian and she ended up getting no readers because everyone thought the fic was in Italian. But I suppose if you don't know the reference, "Faaip de Oiad" just sounds like a nonsense phrase.

3. Hot damn does Homestuck make me want to start drawing again. I mean, Transformers makes me want to draw again too, but I have an excuse for being bad at it because they're all robots and I've never drawn robots before. (Except that most of the fanart I want to draw is of the humans trololo) And now all the characters here are humanoid, or at least most of them are, and as such I've got no excuse.

I feel like I almost need to go back to drawing because writing has become so listless and chore-like lately, like "Nobody likes what you write and you write boring crap nobody cares about and in a few years it'll all be useless because this isn't getting you a career or doing anything productive with your time bluh bluh", that kind of feeling. Drawing is still by that criterion a waste of time, but at least it's a waste of time that more people seem to be responsive to and thus more willing to give my sad ass validation. What with Tumblr and the fandoms I'm in being cartoons/comics (and thus imitable in artwork, whereas real-life people are harder to do fanart for), I seem to be in a more and more visually-oriented corner of fandom and sometimes I can't help feeling like I'm being left behind.

And yet every time I even try drawing it all ends up looking stiff and stilted and unrealistic and I get frustrated and scribble over it and YOU GUYS MAKE IT LOOK SO FUCKING EASY I CAN'T EVEN. *pouts*

Any...advice, I guess, on how to get better? Or at least not feel like crap about being bad at it and post it anyway?

4. What makes up for my lack of drawing skills is the fact that over the weekend I have made some incredibly kickass jewelry and I am gonna post pictures in the next couple of days and you are all going to be wildly jealous or something.

5.  Fandom seems determined to make me want things I thought I didn't even like. Oh, you don't like enemy ships/FoeYay? Surprise, Doctor/Master! Now you do*. Oh, you say that doesn't count because they were so polite to each other when they were Three and Delgado? Have some TF Prime Optimus/Megatron. Changed your mind? Oh, and you know how you were talking about not liking doomed and unhappy ships? I brought you some Animated!Optimus/Sentinel/Elita. Now you do.

What's that? Pseudo-incest doesn't bother you but biological incest ships aren't your bag? Surprise Dave/Rose motherfucker.

I am almost afraid to state out loud that I don't like furry or vore or other fringe stuff because I'm terrified of fandom somehow twisting itself around to prove me wrong and I don't want to like them.

*Of course, if I'm really looking back into my fannish history, even before I got into Doctor Who I still shipped CSI: Miami Horatio/Stetler really hard. But then again, Miami was kind of weird.

...you don't get to judge me, okay.

6. So, lets say a hypothetical fan who was definitely not me was writing a Transformers fic with the original thirteen Primes in them. And when she started writing it, there were only a few Primes named, and while there was talk of there being one female Prime she wasn't actually named yet. So this fan picked a new name for her Prime (Volta) and went about her fannish day without ever actually writing this damn fic.

Fast forward maybe a year or so. The list of Primes is much more complete, and the name of the one lady, Solus, is now public knowledge. And it's pretty official that she's the only girl.

Does the hypothetical writer who is in no way me:

a) Change the name from Volta to Solus, even though that requires a little more canonical justification?
b) say "fuck it" and keep the "second" female Prime because screw that, let's have us More Ladies?

7. Ravens, what are you doing, how do you blow a lead like that? :(

8. Aaaand I didn't do my homework again. Bleh. Do it tomorrow. I had a busy busy week last week and I have earned the right to goof off this weekend.

So. Here's the thing.

I have been dipping my toes into Homestuck. Mostly because I somehow found myself clicking on a link to Rex Duodecim Angelis and discovering that the music for Homestuck is actually pretty great, if you like video-gamish stuff (given the nature of Homestuck all of those links are probably spoilery in one way or another, or possibly not due to sheer fandom osmosis). And then I discovered that there were a few nifty fanvids, and thanks to spending way too much time on Fandom Secrets listening to the deluge of Homestuck fandom wank I already recognized a few of the characters, and then I wanted to recognize them all, so I went on the TV Tropes page, and...well, and from there I wasted about three hours reading All The Tropes and watching out-of-context [S] vids from Acts 4 and 5. Because, even if I don't know precisely what's going on, the animation and artwork are still really quite impressive.

But. Um. I've been peeking at the plot in the TV Tropes sections, and it sounds so aggressively confusing that I'm not sure if I'm up for actually reading the comic. I mean. Even before we get to the enormous cast in Act 5, there's still what looks to be two simultaneously-ocurring timelines, plus alternate selves who may or may not be dead, and also people who travel back in time and become their own grandparents. Or something. And then there are interactions backwards in time - look, it's not that I'm a particularly stupid person, give me themes and meta and stuff and I can handle that, it's just that I'm not particularly good at keeping track of simultaneous alternating backwards timelines that contradict and occasionally reset each other. IDK.

So, folks who read Homestuck, is there a particularly good place to start? Should I read Problem Sleuth first? Is there a flowchart I can use? Is it not really as complicated as the trope pages make it look? WHY ARE THERE SO MANY TROPE PAGES

Also why do I have such a girlcrush on Mindfang for no particular reason, is this common.

The real reason I'm so reluctant to get into it is because I am finally learning to manage my horrifically short attention span and the last thing I need is a weeks-long archive binge that will cause me to forget school, assignments, job applications, the touch of sunlight, and human contact.

Looking through the movie reviews in this week's paper, I realized that the media I'm most excited about at the moment are
a) the season finale of Transformers Prime
b) the next episode of My Little Pony c
) the pending release of the next chapter of The Silver Lining d
) Real Steel, which looks to be about as thoughtful as a box of rocks but fuck it, I don't care, Hugh Jackman and boxing robots.

...and now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go and read Finnegan's Wake or something so I can pretend I'm still any decent kind of intellectual. I'm going to an exhibit of sound in art this weekend! And there's a very meaningful and thoughtful movie about pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago that I want to see! My brain hasn't completely atrophied, please believe me. :(

Of course, reading the movie reviews also brought to me the disquieting discovery that one of the city's art theaters is actually playing Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence. Like on an actual screen and everything, as if it were a real movie and not an enormous Aristocrats-joke-turned-horror-story.

Yes, I said Human Centipede 2. There's a sequel.

If we were in the movies this would be the point where I would start to sob, and then my sobs would slowly dissolve into deranged laughter as I at last went mad from the revelation.

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On a real life note: On the one hand, I actually quite like spiders, and am very grateful to them for eating other bugs that we consider pests, like stink bugs and mosquitoes. On the other hand, our backyard is getting covered in cobwebs and it's getting a little spooky back there.

Ganked offa bodyline , because this is totally what I should be doing with my time:

List 50 of your fandoms including your favorite characters (and pairings).

Except in this case "fandom" is defined as "something that I have either written or sought out fic for" and  "favorite" means "whoever I think of first" because fuck picking favorites, meme, you don't tell me what to do.

( Fifty Freaking Fandoms )


Why do I have so many fandoms you guys. ;___; 

Nothing much, just two comms I've set up because some people on the most recent Fandom Secrets anonmeme wanted them. Also this will hopefully serve as impetus to resuscitate the 1000_robots  comm!

adventurers_cap : For Eighties and Nineties graphical adventure games, text-based adventures - all the nostalgic games of your youth. I remember a couple of you were Myst fans back in the day? And I've been rambling at you plenty about King's Quest, so...there's that too, yeah.

comm_ofthe_dead : For all things horror - horror literature, movies, video games, TV, music, online content, anything. Meta, recs, fic, anything you like. Surely there's people out there who like horror, right?

And now my batteries are dying and it's time for me to go to bed. Night, flist.