We Are Not Troglodytes...

If you ever approach me to admonish me with the use of the word “shaming”, I will...

Fri, 24 May 2013 06:50:47 -0400

If you ever approach me to admonish me with the use of the word “shaming”, I will immediately stop listening to what you have to say.

Slips you a note in history class Kate Sanders stuffs her bra.

Thu, 23 May 2013 16:56:12 -0400

*Slips you a note in history class*

Kate Sanders stuffs her bra.

Has no one realized that “The Happening” is basically “Birdemic” except with...

Thu, 23 May 2013 16:19:20 -0400

Has no one realized that “The Happening” is basically “Birdemic” except with plants and a Hollywood budget?

Speaking of aesthetics that I appreciate and my affinity for faceless figures, this would be a good...

Thu, 23 May 2013 06:22:56 -0400

Speaking of aesthetics that I appreciate and my affinity for faceless figures, this would be a good time to reiterate how hopelessly in love I am with the art in Mo No No Ke.

In the very first arc, Zashiki Warashi, rather than being given simple nondescript features, the background characters are literally distinguished as being indistinct and “faceless” by having bright, spinning flowers, over a stark black or white canvas in place of actual faces.

The result is just as effective as it is visually gorgeous.

Similarly, the Noppera-Bo arc centres entirely around a different and convoluted sort of facelessness. But I won’t go into it in detail here.

The last arc of the series, Bakeneko, has faceless masses made up of literal mannequins in place of nondescript background characters.

Though my very favourite arc in the series is Nue, the aesthetics of which I think to be absolutely flawless. Its story concerns a number of suitors, competing against one another to win the hand of a woman who is the heir to a very specific and coveted “school” of traditional incense making. As such, incense plays a massive role in the episode, and is brilliantly visually conveyed. Set in the dead of winter, the Nue arc is largely in shades of grey and white. What colours do exist are all muted.

However, this only becomes very apparent during an incense game, after each of the suitors takes a whiff of the incense sample before them and colour seems to seep into their bodies for a moment.

And then, of course, there’s a bit at the very end of the episode, which gives reason for everything being so dim and grey and sapped of all vibrance, but…I won’t spoil it for you who those who’d like to see it yourselves. I highly recommend that you do.

I’ve come to accept that I definitely have a thing for faceless or one-eyed...

Thu, 23 May 2013 05:35:40 -0400

I’ve come to accept that I definitely have a thing for faceless or one-eyed characters/figures.

My contacts came in the post! They’re actually extremely comfortable, for contact lenses,...

Wed, 22 May 2013 07:19:22 -0400

My contacts came in the post!

They’re actually extremely comfortable, for contact lenses, which I tend to have problems with in general. And they are surprisingly easy to see out of.

They do cast a whitish haze over everything, and they make everything in my field of vision a bit fuzzy, but they certainly don’t obscure your vision in the way you might expect.

Now I’ve only got to be careful not to tear them or get them dirty…

If you search “Cayman Islands” on Google images, all that you will find are pictures of...

Tue, 21 May 2013 19:38:02 -0400

If you search “Cayman Islands” on Google images, all that you will find are pictures of beaches and the sea and the occasional stingray. Mostly the sea.

Because that is very literally all that my country has to offer.

So I’m studying for my Developmental Psychology exam and going through a series of slides...

Tue, 21 May 2013 15:58:00 -0400

So I’m studying for my Developmental Psychology exam and going through a series of slides about the various stages of life and the change that occurs in them. And nothing seems out of the ordinary at first.

Infancy is represented by pictures of babies. Logical.

There are children on the slide for childhood. Fair enough. This makes sense. Everything seems fine so far.

But then…

…What the fuck is that?

Evidently my professor feels an image of some horrible spectral demon-girl emerging from a toilet accurately depicts adolescence.

I’ve literally never had any interest in Audrey Hepburn.

Tue, 21 May 2013 13:53:07 -0400

I’ve literally never had any interest in Audrey Hepburn.

Before you truly love someone or something, you must be able to completely take the piss out of it.

Tue, 21 May 2013 10:43:23 -0400

Before you truly love someone or something, you must be able to completely take the piss out of it.

Kaidan Restaurant Desserts: "Bells from the Afterlife"

Tue, 21 May 2013 09:12:56 -0400

“So, do any of you believe in the afterlife…?”

Two friends, who had known each other all their lives once had this conversation.

“Hey”, one had said one afternoon as the sun painted the sky with smears of gold and red, “do you think life after death exists?”

“I don’t know”, answered her friend from beside her.

The first had a flash of inspiration then, and playfully suggested, “If either of us dies before the other, we should let the other know. If there’s an afterlife, I mean.”

“Huh? How?” her friend had asked “It can’t be a ghost. I hate ghosts”.

The first girl giggled at that. “I know. I do too”.

They sat in contemplation for a moment, until the first girl held aloft her phone, which had a small golden bell hanging from its strap.

“I know”, she said, “How about we ring bells? Bell chimes sound nice.”

With the sinking sun dyeing them red against the evening sky, the second girl laughed in affirmation. “Sure! Let’s do that.”, she agreed.

Both of them were half-joking as they made that promise.

But one year later…

…One of them died in an auto accident.

And then, it happened, at her wake, as her best friend offered incense in her memory.

A sound from above. As faint and light at first as the breaking of dawn on a windowsill. Bells. It was the ringing of bells.

The girl gasped, taken aback for a moment. “It’s her!”, she found herself thinking. “She kept her promise…So the afterlife really does exist.”

Listening to the gentle, silvery ringing of far-away bells, she felt a certain warmth and comfort wash over her. Closure in that her friend had moved on, but not before making sure to come back one last time to fulfill her promise, and let her know that she was well in the afterlife.

But her serenity was short lived. Steadily, the chimes grew louder, and nearer, and faster and louder still. It grew into a deafening, frantic klaxon from above, ringing out ceaselessly, rattling the walls and ceiling of the room, throwing the room’s occupants into a panic as they sought the cause of the piercing, otherworldly din.

It sounded as if she was suffering and desperately sought help.

…I wonder what the afterlife is really like…

Did you know that as a child, I had improvised my own MP3 player before I even knew what an MP3...

Tue, 21 May 2013 08:56:00 -0400

Did you know that as a child, I had improvised my own MP3 player before I even knew what an MP3 player was?

This was a few years before the rise of the mp3, beginning with Zunes, unbranded 10-song devices, and the earlier forms of the iPod. Originally I went through whatever hand-me-down CD players were laying around my house, which served my purposes for listening to music on CD. However, this was also around the time that I discovered Youtube and AMVs, which opened a door to a whole new world of music that I still, sadly, think is the grooviest. I had no way to get these songs onto CD, since I was about ten or eleven, and downloading music to burn to CD was still a strange and foreign idea to me. It was something high schoolers like my older sister and her friends did. In her group of friends, only one of them had this mysterious CD burner of legend—a boy called Marcus— and they would make group pilgrimages to his house, arms laden with CD cases, so that he could create custom CDs for them on his mystical and sacred burner.

I remember Cordelia telling my mother about how she was walking to Marcus’ house after school to check out this amazing, new-fangled CD burner that he had, and in my mind’s eye I imagined a sort of altar. A construction of stone with what appeared to be a scale on top of it, both arms of which held wide-mouthed flaming mortars into which I supposed he must put the disks, then call upon some otherworldly force to have the flames scorch new music into the plastic.

Since I did not yet have this technology available to me, I had to improvise. Which is how I wound up wandering around for about two years with a dictaphone in my pocket. There were a few around our house—my father used them for business, and had shown me how to use them. Initially I had been charmed by their novelty and had simply used them to record goofy conversations, or imaginary talk-shows and roleplaying games with my friends. And then I realized that they could serve a greater purpose.

I began using the dictaphone’s to tape poor quality, crackling recordings of songs played on Youtube from my computer’s speakers. Soon I had an entire small collection of 15-or-so songs on the thing.

For about two years I would walk around in public plugged into a little silver dictaphone, jamming out to Skye Sweetnam, with no-one any the wiser. Damn I felt resourceful.

Then of course, the rise of the MP3 player began, and my dictaphone was quickly replaced by the new capacity to download music from Limewire onto my huge, primitive iPod mini.

But sometimes, for nostalgia’s sake, I’ll plug the batteries back into the dictaphone, which still sits in my bedroom dresser drawer, and listen to an aged, crackly recording of Cascada.

Another thing that annoys me is the use of the phrase “I’m a(n) _____ blog”. No....

Mon, 20 May 2013 22:17:26 -0400

Another thing that annoys me is the use of the phrase “I’m a(n) _____ blog”.

No. No you are not. You are not a blog. You are a person who posts things on a blog. You own a blog. You run a blog. You are not a blog, nor should you, as an individual be defined by the content of your blog. You define it, not the other way around.

Something that aggravates me is that the tag “Character of Colour” is a thing that I see...

Mon, 20 May 2013 21:55:21 -0400

Something that aggravates me is that the tag “Character of Colour” is a thing that I see occasionally used on Archive of Our Own.

Aside from my hatred of the term “person of colour” (everyone has a “colour”, you little idiots), being “of colour” is not a plot point. It should not have any bearing on the character’s personality or relevance to the plot in in such manner that you have to fucking point it out in the tags. (Unless it’s say, a story about slavery in America or something, in which case you would think it’s pretty much a given.)

I am aware of what they are trying to do, but this is the way it actually reads:

“OOOOOH. BE AWARE GUYS. THERE’S AN ASIAN IN HERE. WE GOT SOME BLACK PEOPLE. KEEP AN EYE OUT FOR THE OBLIGATORY HAWAIIAN NATIVE THAT FEATURES IN THIS STORY DESPITE THE FACT THAT, LIKE ALL OTHER CHARACTERS IN THE STORY, THEIR ETHNICITY IS VERY LITERALLY IRRELEVANT WITHIN THE STORY’S CONTEXT. WE’RE BEING POLITICALLY CORRECT AND INCLUSIVE BY LISTING PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT WHITE AS AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT CLASS OF CHARACTER, WHICH IS GOOD AND NOT AT ALL OTHERING AND IRONICALLY ALIENATING.”

If this is a thing that is done with the specific intent of being “PC” or anti-racist/oppressionist/whatever these little shits are calling it on the internet nowadays, the parties responsible should reevaluate their actions, because their attempts at being open, aware, and helpful are actually counterproductive.

My mother just messaged me this picture with no message attached; I’m laughing really hard,...

Mon, 20 May 2013 21:00:58 -0400

My mother just messaged me this picture with no message attached; I’m laughing really hard, oh my god

But why would you ever even want someone’s balls touching you, much less in your mouth? How?...

Mon, 20 May 2013 15:31:00 -0400

But why would you ever even want someone’s balls touching you, much less in your mouth?

How? How can this be a thing people find desirable?

Why would you…

I don’t…

Gracious…

It's Quiet Here...

Mon, 20 May 2013 11:39:02 -0400

xxbrightdownxx:

homestuckprom:

Too quiet.

Where did everyone go?

Are you not hyped?

Is this not why you are here?

Or are you just all at school?

Wisdom tooth coming through, no sleep last night, constant agony, ibuprofen no longer working, fucking ouch :(

Ugh. My sympathies. The same thing happened to me earlier this month. Now I’m loaded up on antibiotics and syringe-ing my gums with hot saline every day. Have you tried flagyl? It helps the infection, and indirectly the pain, I’ve found.

We should really talk about the fact that there is an entire episode of Ghost Adventures that...

Fri, 17 May 2013 13:24:31 -0400

We should really talk about the fact that there is an entire episode of Ghost Adventures that features Zak trying to hook up with lonely female ghosts.

In high school, our equivalent of “Prom” was something called “Dean’s...

Fri, 17 May 2013 09:02:46 -0400

In high school, our equivalent of “Prom” was something called “Dean’s Dance”. It was as close as a tradition-based overly-formal school like ours got to your average prom, and as such, people went all out in preparation for it.

So one year, while all my classmates were out taking limo rides, or attending dinner reservations at fancy restaurants, I decided that I too would have an elegant evening.

And so, I got dressed in my “prom” finery, (including sliver-tipped oxfords, sunglasses and a crown), and walked arm in arm down the street to Wendy’s with one of my friends, where we spread a cloth and a fake candelabra, stolen from the props department, over a table and dined in style, eating our nuggets and fries with proper silverware.

This is a joke, as I have never gotten a single hate-mail.

Wed, 15 May 2013 20:26:33 -0400

This is a joke, as I have never gotten a single hate-mail.

We Are Not Troglodytes...

If you ever approach me to admonish me with the use of the word “shaming”, I will...

*Slips you a note in history class* Kate Sanders stuffs her bra.

Has no one realized that “The Happening” is basically “Birdemic” except with...

Speaking of aesthetics that I appreciate and my affinity for faceless figures, this would be a good...

I’ve come to accept that I definitely have a thing for faceless or one-eyed...

My contacts came in the post! They’re actually extremely comfortable, for contact lenses,...

If you search “Cayman Islands” on Google images, all that you will find are pictures of...

So I’m studying for my Developmental Psychology exam and going through a series of slides...

I’ve literally never had any interest in Audrey Hepburn.

Before you truly love someone or something, you must be able to completely take the piss out of it.

Kaidan Restaurant Desserts: "Bells from the Afterlife"

Did you know that as a child, I had improvised my own MP3 player before I even knew what an MP3...

Another thing that annoys me is the use of the phrase “I’m a(n) _____ blog”. No....

Something that aggravates me is that the tag “Character of Colour” is a thing that I see...

My mother just messaged me this picture with no message attached; I’m laughing really hard,...

But why would you ever even want someone’s balls touching you, much less in your mouth? How?...

It's Quiet Here...

We should really talk about the fact that there is an entire episode of Ghost Adventures that...

In high school, our equivalent of “Prom” was something called “Dean’s...

This is a joke, as I have never gotten a single hate-mail.

Slips you a note in history class Kate Sanders stuffs her bra.