now all of china knows you're here
1. FUCKING SHARK HELL WEEK, DAY THREE: Not really pissed. More like, resigned to futility. LOL. I said it aloud-LOL. YAY!
2. Pondering how some OTC medicines for already embarrassing ailments have even more embarrassing names: Beano, Gas-X, Preparation H (which I guess is not embarrassing unless you know what it is for).
Me: Me, seriously, who likes taking PREPARATION H to the checkout aisle?
Mum: Well, there's always Anusol, that's not embar…oh wait.
Me: THAT WILL NEVER STOP BEING FUNNY.
3. Got a statement for a dental visit from a year ago from my old insurance company this weekend. Read THIS IS NOT A BILL and shrugged. Then today got a bill from my dentist saying "Sorry this is late! We just got the thing from the insurance company! LOL!" for $82. While I am told this might violate HIPPA laws, I'm just going to pay it. Still, just another reminder of the grinding wheels of humanity.
4. I'm still tired.
5. Finished Dexter a few nights ago. That blew chunks. And there's a HUGE plot issue that they either aren't going to address in the new season, or it will be the plot of the whole season, and I cannot wait to see which one it is. Either one will be fricking hysterical.
6. Had a good think about why plot issues and continuity don't bother me a great deal-little things, tics and twitches. I think it's because that's what makes a show amusing. Lisa's silver nails. The fact that every other bad immortal's name started with a K. THE IMMORTAL'S SWORD POCKET OF HOLDING. There were a few in Buffy that bothered people I knew but I never paid attention. The proliferation of the rape theme in Buffy that starts in season one and hasn't ended in season 8, maybe. This shit never bothered me. They were production things that were either mistakes (of conception-cyber bikini?) or oversight in a television series (I think it started as a few K names and then they realised they'd accidentally made it a pattern, and then they made it a joke), and I think it makes them better. It gives them character, like a knot in a piece of wood. It's a gift to fandom in some cases, these imperfections, things for us to rally around and mock (K'immie!), or explain in fic. I never understand people who froth at the mouth because of it.
7. I have also been reminded lately about how some people don't understand crack. I don't want to get into it. I remember a panel at Lumos that tried to identify it. But you either get it or you don't. It's not cut and dry like MPREG. Seriously, I know that it's hard to understand, but Jesus, CRACK? It's like porn, you know it when you see it. And where are you seeing it there? Fucking hell. Just because something is funny doesn't make it crack. Just because something is odd and self-referential doesn't make it crack. Just because a piece of humour has been inserted into something serious? NOT FUCKING CRACK. Jesus. (Note: I seem to have made a connection between the Son of God and Crack. THAT IS ALSO NOT CRACK.). So let's not bandy the word crack around unless you're talking about that big fat rock you have hidden in a vial in your underwear drawer, just in case.
8. This also reminds me that not many people understand how to write humour. At Muskrat Jamboree last year, I am told (because I couldn't go in!) that in the "writing humour" panel, someone stood up and said, "You can't have decent character development when you're writing humour." I don't know how many people in the room agreed with her, but apparently no one argued. Writing humour is hard, it's a gift, actually, and if you do it right, humour can be just as meaningful. This statement tells me that the author doesn't understand writing humour. Or writing character. I don't even know what to say to that except that it relates in my head to getting what crack is.
10. That leads into the fact that Random Shoes is one of my favorite episodes, and a discussion this week revealed that while it was not the favorite of the others in the group, some of them downright disliked it, and the reasons they gave were so fundamentally different from even my worldview that I thought, "Jesus, this is why you can't talk to people about meta, or plan anything. You're watching two different shows. I don't think I can talk about it anymore, but they are okay with their view and I am okay with mine, it's not that anyone is wrong, but it reminds me of the time when Tianyu and I realised that our fundamental stances on the future of humanity were so rooted in philosophical differences (I believed in a "Divine Plan", and I use that term loosely, and he was an atheist) that they couldn't be rectified. It was pointless to talk about anything beyond that point in the subject arena, so we had to just stop talking about it.
I wish I could draw a picture of that. I think it looks like XKCD's illustration of the character journeys in Primer.
11. Back to Dexter. I read the first two books. I can see why the first one is boring if you have already seen season One, but it has some surprising fundamental differences in resolution, that are, whoa. And book two is so much better than season two that I cannot even fathom why they did that season, which is, IMHO, rather dull, whereas the serial killer in book 2 is FUCKING INSANE, no really. After reading book two, even series 4 was dull for me. Trinity, yawn, THIS DUDE CUTS OFF BODY PARTS AND KEEPS THE PERSON ALIVE UNTL THEY ARE A LIVING TORSO WITH NO TONGUE OR EYELIDS. IT TAKES WEEKS. WHEN THEY FIND THE LIVE BODIES, THE STUMPS ARE HEALED. I AM JUST SAYING. THAT IS DEVOTION TO ONE'S CRAFT.
12. I was thinking about the concept of disabling comments and that I hate doing it, because I see people do it when it's genuinely called for (death in the family, something stressful that you don't really need/want comments on, that's cool), but sometimes I feel like…I want to respond to comments because they are there, but I'm tired and I have nothing to say, and I don't. But I want to write in my lj. But writing in my lj then seems to initiate that I want a dialogue, and maybe I don't. Maybe I just want to write in my lj, you know? It's my journal, and if you have opted to read it, then that's cool. But Hrm. I dunno. It's strange how that works. If you make an entry are you obligated to answer comments? Does having an lj that people follow automatically obligate you to dialogue with them? It's not that I don't LIKE the people or anything. It's that sometimes there are a lot of comments.
I dunno. I'm one of those people who doesn't sign off on chats, so maybe I just don’t get netiquette. Or maybe I just don't get the false spreading of intimacy or communication mores on the Internet. I dunno. I don't filter my friends list, which is why I friend and defriend at random, and I don't understand friending someone and then filtering them out just so they can stay on your flist, unless you have some locked lj thing going on, and then of course you might have a read filter, because a billion people who just want to read your flocked fic are on your flist.
13. LJ's mutation of the word "friend" has created a lot of problems for my vocab and my perception of online relationships. I talk to a lot more people I would have never spoken with on mailing lists. On the bright side, I love using the word flist. It still sounds like a furniture line from IKEA. And I was rather like hrm, that other people went out of their way to tell me that they had reciprocally defriended me, and it confused me for a moment, because I don't get notifications. So I wouldn't have known in the first place. So either they purposefully wanted to alert me in a butthurt way about how butthurt they weren't, or they didn't know that I have notices turned off and they wanted to explain it, which is still confusing. I'll go with the latter, because sometimes life isn't All About Me.
14. I was thinking about fic and where I want to go, and I realised that I have nothing. Like, I'm not interested in porn, and I'm not interested in any of the fests, not because they aren't cool, but because I don't have anything to say. I have two fics in me after I finish the body swap, which, IMHO, I rather feel tired of. Those two fics are my season 4 and the fairy tale "Suzie Saves Wales" fic. I was going to do it for that tardis big bang thing, but they have a rule about finished drafts that I know I'll end up violating, and they'll want to kill me, so I won't bother them with it. But if I don't have a deadline I won't do it, so neither fic will likely get done. I don't know what that means. I might just be tired of TW. Or the fandom, or something.
15. I also feel bad because I have several fics I should read and comment on, but for whatever reason, I just can't. I open them, and it all feels very very tedious. I'm thinking of skimming and then just saying something like, "I loved it!" because that's usually what I say, and then I can fake the rest. But that's dumb, I won't do that because I hate that shit, and after a round of lame ass feedback on something produced lately that was both public and not, I'm feeling sensitive about that two faced shit, no matter how good intentioned. Does this go back to our sense of obligations? Do you ever feel pressured to read fics you're just not interested in because your friends wrote them? arsenicjade and I have a thing where we just don't read each other's fics. Even in HP, a fandom that we have in common (I'm not heartless, I have read some of them, just not all. And I never feel like someone SHOULD read my fics because we are friends. So if you are ever forcing yourself to read something I wrote because we're lj buddies or something, and you're not feeling it, dude, I'm not sitting here wondering where your comment is. Really, I'm not.).
16. I think I feel better having said these things. PMS honesty week is making me say things that I have been feeling for a while.
17. Am reading Starkey's The Six Wives of Henry VIII. I like it because right from the start, he's like, 'I have decided to allot as much space to the wife as she deserves in the narrative and not give all wives equal weight, because Anne and Catherine were the heavy hitters, and while Catherine Parr had some impact it still isn't equal to the first two women.' Thus Catherine has like 400 pages, Anne has 350 some pages and the rest of the wives get varying amounts. I mean, really, Anne of Cleeves doesn't deserve near the amount of study as Catherine of Aragon, and giving them the same amount of space is selling Catherine way short. In some ways, I'm enjoying him debunking a lot of the myth about Catherine: her Spanish looks, her maintaining of her innocence throughout the Arthur affair. And I really like where he takes previous historians to task for painting Parr as a nursemaid to her husband, a convention that wouldn't have been done and isn't supported by documentation, but was created for the image of Victorian wifely devotion. Well, actually, IIRC the first historian that covered it was a woman who had been influenced by the romantics. I can't wait to get there, because that lady was a funny hellcat.
18. Wanted to mention my kid's potty training adventures, but have been too scared to, as I was admonished for mentioning it elsewhere. Some warning about becoming "One of those mom's who is obsessed with bowel movements." Then I thought, you know what? Fuck it. I don't think it's a goddamn surprise to anyone reading this that I have a kid and that eventually she's got to use the toilet, and like training a horse or a dog, it's a full time thing. It becomes part of your routine. You are desperate for them to make the connection about the potty. You are so close.
So. My kid told me Monday night that she had to poop. This NEVER happens. We visited the potty several times, and then I brought it down and set it in front of the TV, because GODDAMMIT, she has to use the potty and she'll fucking sit on it until we have success. By god, we did.
This action has yet to be repeated, but some day, Pretty Princess McButtertears will use the toilet all the time. Some day. And then mommy can spend all that extra money on eight balls college savings. And bear claws. I want a bear claw.
That's it. Someone get me a fucking bear claw.
2. Pondering how some OTC medicines for already embarrassing ailments have even more embarrassing names: Beano, Gas-X, Preparation H (which I guess is not embarrassing unless you know what it is for).
Me: Me, seriously, who likes taking PREPARATION H to the checkout aisle?
Mum: Well, there's always Anusol, that's not embar…oh wait.
Me: THAT WILL NEVER STOP BEING FUNNY.
3. Got a statement for a dental visit from a year ago from my old insurance company this weekend. Read THIS IS NOT A BILL and shrugged. Then today got a bill from my dentist saying "Sorry this is late! We just got the thing from the insurance company! LOL!" for $82. While I am told this might violate HIPPA laws, I'm just going to pay it. Still, just another reminder of the grinding wheels of humanity.
4. I'm still tired.
5. Finished Dexter a few nights ago. That blew chunks. And there's a HUGE plot issue that they either aren't going to address in the new season, or it will be the plot of the whole season, and I cannot wait to see which one it is. Either one will be fricking hysterical.
6. Had a good think about why plot issues and continuity don't bother me a great deal-little things, tics and twitches. I think it's because that's what makes a show amusing. Lisa's silver nails. The fact that every other bad immortal's name started with a K. THE IMMORTAL'S SWORD POCKET OF HOLDING. There were a few in Buffy that bothered people I knew but I never paid attention. The proliferation of the rape theme in Buffy that starts in season one and hasn't ended in season 8, maybe. This shit never bothered me. They were production things that were either mistakes (of conception-cyber bikini?) or oversight in a television series (I think it started as a few K names and then they realised they'd accidentally made it a pattern, and then they made it a joke), and I think it makes them better. It gives them character, like a knot in a piece of wood. It's a gift to fandom in some cases, these imperfections, things for us to rally around and mock (K'immie!), or explain in fic. I never understand people who froth at the mouth because of it.
7. I have also been reminded lately about how some people don't understand crack. I don't want to get into it. I remember a panel at Lumos that tried to identify it. But you either get it or you don't. It's not cut and dry like MPREG. Seriously, I know that it's hard to understand, but Jesus, CRACK? It's like porn, you know it when you see it. And where are you seeing it there? Fucking hell. Just because something is funny doesn't make it crack. Just because something is odd and self-referential doesn't make it crack. Just because a piece of humour has been inserted into something serious? NOT FUCKING CRACK. Jesus. (Note: I seem to have made a connection between the Son of God and Crack. THAT IS ALSO NOT CRACK.). So let's not bandy the word crack around unless you're talking about that big fat rock you have hidden in a vial in your underwear drawer, just in case.
8. This also reminds me that not many people understand how to write humour. At Muskrat Jamboree last year, I am told (because I couldn't go in!) that in the "writing humour" panel, someone stood up and said, "You can't have decent character development when you're writing humour." I don't know how many people in the room agreed with her, but apparently no one argued. Writing humour is hard, it's a gift, actually, and if you do it right, humour can be just as meaningful. This statement tells me that the author doesn't understand writing humour. Or writing character. I don't even know what to say to that except that it relates in my head to getting what crack is.
10. That leads into the fact that Random Shoes is one of my favorite episodes, and a discussion this week revealed that while it was not the favorite of the others in the group, some of them downright disliked it, and the reasons they gave were so fundamentally different from even my worldview that I thought, "Jesus, this is why you can't talk to people about meta, or plan anything. You're watching two different shows. I don't think I can talk about it anymore, but they are okay with their view and I am okay with mine, it's not that anyone is wrong, but it reminds me of the time when Tianyu and I realised that our fundamental stances on the future of humanity were so rooted in philosophical differences (I believed in a "Divine Plan", and I use that term loosely, and he was an atheist) that they couldn't be rectified. It was pointless to talk about anything beyond that point in the subject arena, so we had to just stop talking about it.
I wish I could draw a picture of that. I think it looks like XKCD's illustration of the character journeys in Primer.
11. Back to Dexter. I read the first two books. I can see why the first one is boring if you have already seen season One, but it has some surprising fundamental differences in resolution, that are, whoa. And book two is so much better than season two that I cannot even fathom why they did that season, which is, IMHO, rather dull, whereas the serial killer in book 2 is FUCKING INSANE, no really. After reading book two, even series 4 was dull for me. Trinity, yawn, THIS DUDE CUTS OFF BODY PARTS AND KEEPS THE PERSON ALIVE UNTL THEY ARE A LIVING TORSO WITH NO TONGUE OR EYELIDS. IT TAKES WEEKS. WHEN THEY FIND THE LIVE BODIES, THE STUMPS ARE HEALED. I AM JUST SAYING. THAT IS DEVOTION TO ONE'S CRAFT.
12. I was thinking about the concept of disabling comments and that I hate doing it, because I see people do it when it's genuinely called for (death in the family, something stressful that you don't really need/want comments on, that's cool), but sometimes I feel like…I want to respond to comments because they are there, but I'm tired and I have nothing to say, and I don't. But I want to write in my lj. But writing in my lj then seems to initiate that I want a dialogue, and maybe I don't. Maybe I just want to write in my lj, you know? It's my journal, and if you have opted to read it, then that's cool. But Hrm. I dunno. It's strange how that works. If you make an entry are you obligated to answer comments? Does having an lj that people follow automatically obligate you to dialogue with them? It's not that I don't LIKE the people or anything. It's that sometimes there are a lot of comments.
I dunno. I'm one of those people who doesn't sign off on chats, so maybe I just don’t get netiquette. Or maybe I just don't get the false spreading of intimacy or communication mores on the Internet. I dunno. I don't filter my friends list, which is why I friend and defriend at random, and I don't understand friending someone and then filtering them out just so they can stay on your flist, unless you have some locked lj thing going on, and then of course you might have a read filter, because a billion people who just want to read your flocked fic are on your flist.
13. LJ's mutation of the word "friend" has created a lot of problems for my vocab and my perception of online relationships. I talk to a lot more people I would have never spoken with on mailing lists. On the bright side, I love using the word flist. It still sounds like a furniture line from IKEA. And I was rather like hrm, that other people went out of their way to tell me that they had reciprocally defriended me, and it confused me for a moment, because I don't get notifications. So I wouldn't have known in the first place. So either they purposefully wanted to alert me in a butthurt way about how butthurt they weren't, or they didn't know that I have notices turned off and they wanted to explain it, which is still confusing. I'll go with the latter, because sometimes life isn't All About Me.
14. I was thinking about fic and where I want to go, and I realised that I have nothing. Like, I'm not interested in porn, and I'm not interested in any of the fests, not because they aren't cool, but because I don't have anything to say. I have two fics in me after I finish the body swap, which, IMHO, I rather feel tired of. Those two fics are my season 4 and the fairy tale "Suzie Saves Wales" fic. I was going to do it for that tardis big bang thing, but they have a rule about finished drafts that I know I'll end up violating, and they'll want to kill me, so I won't bother them with it. But if I don't have a deadline I won't do it, so neither fic will likely get done. I don't know what that means. I might just be tired of TW. Or the fandom, or something.
15. I also feel bad because I have several fics I should read and comment on, but for whatever reason, I just can't. I open them, and it all feels very very tedious. I'm thinking of skimming and then just saying something like, "I loved it!" because that's usually what I say, and then I can fake the rest. But that's dumb, I won't do that because I hate that shit, and after a round of lame ass feedback on something produced lately that was both public and not, I'm feeling sensitive about that two faced shit, no matter how good intentioned. Does this go back to our sense of obligations? Do you ever feel pressured to read fics you're just not interested in because your friends wrote them? arsenicjade and I have a thing where we just don't read each other's fics. Even in HP, a fandom that we have in common (I'm not heartless, I have read some of them, just not all. And I never feel like someone SHOULD read my fics because we are friends. So if you are ever forcing yourself to read something I wrote because we're lj buddies or something, and you're not feeling it, dude, I'm not sitting here wondering where your comment is. Really, I'm not.).
16. I think I feel better having said these things. PMS honesty week is making me say things that I have been feeling for a while.
17. Am reading Starkey's The Six Wives of Henry VIII. I like it because right from the start, he's like, 'I have decided to allot as much space to the wife as she deserves in the narrative and not give all wives equal weight, because Anne and Catherine were the heavy hitters, and while Catherine Parr had some impact it still isn't equal to the first two women.' Thus Catherine has like 400 pages, Anne has 350 some pages and the rest of the wives get varying amounts. I mean, really, Anne of Cleeves doesn't deserve near the amount of study as Catherine of Aragon, and giving them the same amount of space is selling Catherine way short. In some ways, I'm enjoying him debunking a lot of the myth about Catherine: her Spanish looks, her maintaining of her innocence throughout the Arthur affair. And I really like where he takes previous historians to task for painting Parr as a nursemaid to her husband, a convention that wouldn't have been done and isn't supported by documentation, but was created for the image of Victorian wifely devotion. Well, actually, IIRC the first historian that covered it was a woman who had been influenced by the romantics. I can't wait to get there, because that lady was a funny hellcat.
18. Wanted to mention my kid's potty training adventures, but have been too scared to, as I was admonished for mentioning it elsewhere. Some warning about becoming "One of those mom's who is obsessed with bowel movements." Then I thought, you know what? Fuck it. I don't think it's a goddamn surprise to anyone reading this that I have a kid and that eventually she's got to use the toilet, and like training a horse or a dog, it's a full time thing. It becomes part of your routine. You are desperate for them to make the connection about the potty. You are so close.
So. My kid told me Monday night that she had to poop. This NEVER happens. We visited the potty several times, and then I brought it down and set it in front of the TV, because GODDAMMIT, she has to use the potty and she'll fucking sit on it until we have success. By god, we did.
This action has yet to be repeated, but some day, Pretty Princess McButtertears will use the toilet all the time. Some day. And then mommy can spend all that extra money on eight balls college savings. And bear claws. I want a bear claw.
That's it. Someone get me a fucking bear claw.