As has become traditional, we’re making you wait for the theme and illustration of this month’s Random Thread. But you don’t have to wait to post — au contraire, go to it.
Patience, Please
This site is under reconstruction and will look strange for a while. We regret the inconvenience.
Harbour seals make the most hilarious noises.
54 hours 45 minutes and three finals until freedom. And so much studying. And only maybe 18 of those hours asleep. Off to get 6 of those hours now.
First post?
Heh, sftdp, but it’s cracking me up how the software says “do your comment” when there’s no posts on a thread. Clearly a sign that I need sleep, if I’m this easily amused
DAWNGUARD
DAWNGUARD ALL THE TIME
At least, that’s what I would be saying if my little brother would stop hogging the Xbox. *glares*
Wow, I can’t believe it’s already July. Pretty soon I’m going to have to go to *gulp* high school.
Off to Tahoe! See you guye on Wednesday!
My family is taking a week-long vacation in the mountains, and yesterday we spent the day in Asheville. I got this amazing little thumb piano at a drum store there. It plays an octave in the key of C and sounds sort of like bells. (Actually, what drew me to it is that it sounds like an instrument in the ATLA soundtrack). I have no idea what I’m going to do with it, but it’s exciting!
ASHEVILLE. <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3
Oh whoops here on the ‘blog you actually have to make an effort to get legit hearts. Forgot about that.
♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ & hearts; ♥
I am a failure and my life is void of meaning. -_____-
(I’ll stop spamming now, sorry.)
Haha awww a least your angle brackets didn’t eat your post!!
This is in response to Kai’s post 228.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1 on the last Random Thread:
You have a point about MBers mentally being adults.
I guess it makes sense for there to be a distinction between long-standing superstitions versus television-induced ones. I’m just not sure what it is/what you would call it.
Didn’t she call it ‘organic’ versus ‘invented’ superstitions?
Yeah. I really like that distinction as a concept.
Yes, but I think that those names are misleading, since technically every superstition is invented.
Yes, but there’s ones that people kind of grow up with and there’s no direct source, versus the ones we know from media and whatnot (like the silents, of fear of pink, bunny-like objects/animals).
“Organic” vs “media-invented”, maybe?
“Received” vs. “introduced”?
I think either of those work well.
Happy Canada Day! Remember, when you die in Canada you die in REAL LIFE.
Happy Canada Day!
I was writing a post on an external blogging site about how much I love seeing the Tingmissartoq plane that Charles and Anne Lindbergh flew around the world in the early 1930s and how precious they were before their son was kidnapped and so much horrible cake happened to them, and, while searching to make sure I’d spelled the plane’s name right, I found a song that somebody wrote about them.
And it is SOOO good…
I’m glad somebody else ships them.
*on computer* dad walks by: “weren’t you cleaning your room?”
“I’ll get to it.”
Later I was off the computer and starting to pick through stuff (but hadn’t gotten any noticeable difference yet aside from picking up one catalog from the floor), dad walks by again.
“Hey, it looks better already!”
“………”
“Doesn’t it?”
*facepalm*
THE POWER OF SUGGESTION, FOLKS.
In other news, my friend/roommate isn’t coming back in the fall, because she’s extending her internship. Which is exciting and I’m super happy for her because she says she’s really enjoying it and she really likes where she is and all, but….I’m not going to know what to do with myself without my lovely. She’s one of my best friends. And also I really like living with her.
I’ll be in a suite with two of my other good friends, so that’s cool. I don’t know if I’ll end up with a single or whether I’ll have to find or get assigned a roommate. Mergh. Either option is kind of daunting. If I get a single I’ll probably just hide alone forever. And I dunno who I’d want to live with that doesn’t already have a housing arrangement. I lucked out, pretty much, my first assigned roommate, but….bah.
I had a really weird dream about moving dorms last night too. In it the rooms were TINY (by which I mean tinier than they actually are) and in a strange configuration and not at all what was expected.
I think I’m more worried about moving across the bridge and now having to figure out who I’m living with (again) than I was last year about college life at all.
That’s probably not true, but at least the housing aspect I’m more worried now than then.
Poop.
Back from Maryland! Our family had our annual crab feast. ‘Twas fun.
Aaaand everybody else is still on vacation. Oh well! Time to practice!
Finally got my copy of Narrow Road to the Interior today. I read two and a half pages and had to put it down. I think this is the most mind-blowing thing I’ve ever read. I’m finding it hard to wrap my head around it–it’s so overwhemingly simple, but through its simplicity it’s enormously profound, and so I can only digest a little at a time. Two and a half pages, but it’s so immensely beautiful and delicate and overflowing. It makes me want to–I don’t even know what. Travel? Write? Study? I don’t know. The translation (Sam Hamill) seems superb, and I think I can see some of the true beauty of the poems and the prose both. I think I’m going to make some tea and read those two and a half pages again.
Things muselover has done recently:
– Received his signed copy of C418’s 72 Minutes of Fame
– Purchased Minecraft and set to work on a mural of C418
– Finished BioShock with a sense of awe
– Started a new game of Diablo III with his dad after finishing solo with a different class
– Received possible confirmation that he might be home/unschooled next year
– Started reading The Book Thief
…and some other stuff. Gotta love summer.
Oooh, I loved The Book Thief. We had to read it for English class last year. How far are you?
POKEMON WOO
my friend has been streaming his nuzlocke challenges online the last few days, so I’ve been in a pokemon-sort of mood. Glassboro and I watched one of the movies simultaneously over the internet and now I’m watching the series from the start XD
Also been working on getting better with watercolors while I do it. Yay!
DA POKEEMANS. I LOVE DEM.
2 finals down, 2 to go. 97.86% in Bacteriology, and 98% in Pathology (gotta love extra credit, I accumulated 18 points of that along the way, otherwise I “only” would have had 94.7).
Just immunology this afternoon, and genomics tomorrow morning, and so far this is looking to be my best block yet. Because in previous blocks, my A grades have usually been low As, like 90%….
23 hours until freedom
Let’s pie her some momentum, everybody.
You have SO GOT THIS! YOU’RE SO CLOSE, YOU CAN DO IT!!
BLOW THEM ALL AWAY!
Love you guys!
Got 100% on the immunology exam this afternoon, so only genomics left–and I only need 56% on it to keep my A (and it only covers 3 lectures), so I think I’m going to take a much needed nap before getting started on studying for it.
aaaand, 2 points ripped away from me on our immuno exam, because he miskeyed one of the answers into the computer. So only 68/70 on the stupid test. will still have an A in the class, but it’s obnoxious when you think you have one grade, and then end up with fewer because your teacher miskeys the answers.
BUT STILL! ONLY 2 POINTS OFF!
AND YOU ARE ALMOST DOOOONE
True. It was just more irksome than anything. I mean, I got an A in the class, so…
And yup, just one more to go. 12 hours (or possibly less, I doubt the exam will take the whole hour) to go
Napping is underrated
I just found out that former astronaut Alan Poindexter died in a Jet Ski accident yesterday.
And this affects me strongly, not just because I have an interest in the space program, but because I have a personal connection to STS-122, Mr. Poindexter’s first flight as Commander.
My birthday is February 26th, so my family usually celebrates over the Presidents’ Week school vacation. In 2008, for my 15th birthday, we went to Mystic, Connecticut. We woke up early, drove to the ferry port, and took a ferry across Long Island Sound. There was a TV room on the ferry that was showing the news, and in the course of the 2-hour trip across the sound, I watched the STS-122 landing and most of the pre-landing prep.
The TV host, bless her heart, thought the landing was important enough to have half the screen show the NASA TV feed while covering other stories, and to cut into another story to show the landing when it to (I think) 2 minutes to go.
And, I will never forget this, in the NASA TV feed, after landing, the CAPCOM said, naturally enough, “Nice landing, Poindexter.â€
Now, someone in the TV studio didn’t know that was the Commander’s surname and assumed the word was being used in its popular sense.
“He insulted the pilot!â€
I laughed my head off when I heard that. (And, in homage, “Nice flying, Poindexter!” was the tag I added to my name for his next mission, STS-131, as can be seen in my posts from April 2010.)
And later that day, February 20, 2008, I visited Mystic Aquarium and saw all of their awesome displays about underwater archeology, and I watched the magnificent total lunar eclipse that night. It was the best birthday celebration I’d ever had, and nothing would top it until last year, when I went to see Discovery’s final launch for my 18th.
So thank you, Mr. Poindexter. Thank you for giving me a great 15th birthday, and Rest in Peace.
I heard about that this morning and immediately thought, “Oh, Kai will be sad.” But I’m glad he gave you a laugh and a pleasant memory.
So you know what’s fun?
Accidentally kneeling on a pincushion.
I now have six small holes in my leg and it is all sort of throbby though that’s less actual injury and more psychological I think. Ow.
In other news, I must be a proper seamstress now! That’s a rite of passage, right?
My mother is going to send me a blouse pattern so this weekend I can learn to make a blouse! Yay! In the meantime, it’s Fun with Overcasting for Alice… Also, I need to work on my patchy pants which is actually fun.
I feel weirdly insecure today about my summer, like I’ve squandered my free two months in loneliness and ennui when I could have been doing more awesome things. I leave on Monday to go do fieldwork for a month, and while I will definitely be working hard at rewarding things, and be knitting a striped green-and-purple triangular shawl, it marks the end of my un-planned-out time, and I wish I had been less of a hermit, and sewn more and learned to drive and gone to visit my home town.
And I just talked to my mother and we were talking about sewing and how I’ve picked a direction (we’ve talked about this before–focusing on getting good at one thing as a cure to my restlessness), and somehow that just kind of freaked me out like by putting my energy in one direction I am closing doors on EVERYTHING ELSE and even though it’s probably not true it scares me. It’s like how some people are scared of commitment in relationships…except for me it’s with hobbies.
So…I was randomly “stalking” people who are entering in the Class of 2016 (I’m avoiding studying), and so one of the girls is from Ann Arbor, MI. As in, home of the Starkids, as in, if I wasn’t in a relationship, I’d totally try and see if she could hook me up with one of them, lol.
So, studying, I should probably do some mroe of that, huh? exam in 8 1/2 hours….
Luna! By my calculations, by now you are free! Celebrations! *throws confetti*
Yes, I am (was) indeed free. And it’s lovely. First night free i slept eleven hours, and then yesterday spent 4 1/2 hours in the pool at my boyfriend’s family’s house, and then stayed up until 3am last night playing lego potter with the boyfriend.
Heh, most of my extended family lives in or around Ann Arbor. I had no idea it was a source of such excitement.
It’s five in the mooooooorrrrrrrrnnnnnnniiiiinnnnng! And I got *maybe* 5 hours of sleep last night. *giggles uncontrollably*
Um.
I’ve been looking into 4-year institutions* that offer online classes to high school students. I’m making a list. Most of them only accept juniors and seniors, but I finally found one that I guess forgot to put that in.
I know that I have pretty much no chance of them actually letting me take classes from them in the spring of my freshman year of high school (I don’t even want to do it in the fall because I don’t know yet if high school will even leave me time for it, and I don’t want to take that chance), but for some reason I’m wildly optimistic and thinking of actually applying.
If it was free, I’d do it no matter how unlikely it was, but I’m saving my money for really amazing summer experiences. On the other hand, the more credits I have, the more likely it is that I’ll even be accepted to aforesaid experiences.
Applying would also be work; no essays are required, but I’ve already decided that if I apply at all, I’ll go the whole hog and write 3 (the maximum they allow). If I can’t write 3 good essays by November (the deadline), I probably can’t handle extra college coursework anyway (I say extra because I’ll already be taking one class via the arrangement mentioned in the footnote).
Of course, before I do that, I should actually talk to adults about this. My mom knows I’ve been looking into opportunities like this, but she may not realize I’ve kind of already started an application. And since it’s summer, I don’t even have a guidance counselor yet; I’ll want ens advice, of course.
I don’t even know what I’d take. I guess I’d see if they have one equivalent to AP Environmental Science? That’s something I can’t take at my high school or local community college, which is a problem because I want to take all 8 math and science AP exams and get all 5s and get thousands of dollars in scholarship money–which I’m sure won’t happen because no matter how hard I work, only 2 people in the state will actually get the scholarship, so if more than that get all 5, one’s out of luck, but hey, it’s worth trying. But would they even let a freshman take the AP EnviroScience exam?
My school has you take a college readiness test until you pass it; I take it for the first time later this month, before school even starts; hopefully I’ll have managed to pass before the semester ends. Maybe then I’ll have an actual chance of being accepted.
AGHH I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT’S WORTH HOPING FOR AND WHAT ISN’T
*I know community colleges do that, too, but I already have an arrangement with one. It’s giving me 60 credits for free. I’ve checked, and 60 credits is usually close to the maximum amount you can transfer to 4-year institutions from community colleges, and I don’t want to put in extra work for credits that probably won’t transfer, so I’m not interested in programs at other community colleges.
I don’t know where you plan to eventually attend four-year college, but my college at least barely allows any transfer credit and counts all credit from other sources as transfer — so my APs were mostly for placement (I took four of them in high school, aced them all, and got nine credits from it — two classes’ worth), and after I went to the office two or three times to explain that I took my community college courses on a college campus and not through the high school, filled out the form, and got the CS instructor’s signature for the CS course I took, my community college credit is still counted as transfer credit and as electives that I can’t use for requirements, except for the CS course, which is so low-level as to be useless.
tl;dr if you don’t want to put in extra work for credits that probably won’t transfer, either plan to attend the college you’re taking correspondence courses at or consider whether it’s something you’d want to do even if you don’t get credit
also check with your guidance counselor when you get one about your school’s policies on taking AP exams they don’t offer, that can be tricky
Yes, I agree with what tetra said. At my college, AP’s are mostly placement and count as credits but don’t count towards major requirements. They can still be really helpful in exempting out of low-level classes though. There’s a lot of regulations on transfer credits and stuff though, that vary by school.
Thanks to both of you. I don’t actually know where I’m planning to eventually attend 4-year college, either, but I think transfer credit policies are going to be a big priority. It appears that some colleges would accept most of the credit and let me enter as a junior and get a degree early and even not make me take general education courses because I’ll have an associate’s degree, and others would consider me a freshman and not give me any credit and even make me repeat classes–and of course most places are in-between. I’m focusing on options on the more accepting side of the spectrum.
I would seriously consider attending the class I’m thinking of taking a distance course from in the spring; it is definitely on that end. It’s in my state, so I know which courses transfer from the community college that’s giving me an associate’s degree and 60 credits–and it’s virtually all. Some will even go towards my major or minor, and I’d be pretty much done with general education. Furthermore, it has an excellent zoology program and offers amazing classes and even lets you do research outside of your department, so I could do research in biology and natural resources and anthropology (let’s hope the primatologist in that department stays for a while yet) and plant and soil science (let’s hope there are still some professors focusing on ecology by the time I get there). I don’t know anything about it non-academically, though; I’m not interested in that yet. But I know for a fact that I’ll be admitted if I choose to go there because it guarantees admission to anyone in the state with at least 24 college credits and at least a 2.25 GPA–I may not have started high school, but that sounds pretty low and doable.
And thanks for the advice about the AP exams, because I don’t know how many are offered. For Biology, for instance, everyone at the school takes either the majors or non-majors version at a community college and gets credit for AP Biology. I don’t think the exams are taken at all. Hopefully, I’ll find a way to take them; I’ll see.
Any thoughts on Simon’s Rock?
Oh, it sounds amazing! But the thing is, if I don’t do it, I can get just as many credits and the associate’s degree for free. Simon’s Rock sounds much more awesome than what I’m doing, but it’s thousands of dollars. It’ll probably be worth applying to when I’m old enough, in case I get a really good scholarship, but I’m not sure my parents would spend thousands of dollars for me to move all the way across the country at 16. I don’t know if I’ll even be CAPABLE enough; I’m not especially independent. There’s another residential early college program in my state that also sounds awesome, isn’t at a community college, lets you do actual research, et cetera, and it costs less than Simon’s Rock, but it’s still expensive, and I just don’t know if either will happen. Of course there’s the argument that if I hadn’t found the free program I’m doing, they’d still manage to send me to 4-year college, so they could afford to pay for as much of 4 years in these circumstances as they would in those. But then I’d still probably have to pay more money myself per year, and then graduate school. And my brother will be going to college himself the year after this one; it would definitely be easier if I didn’t have to be paid for in the year immediately following. So we’ll see, I guess.
Also, thanks, because I’d actually never heard of that until just now, so it was good information.
Andy Griffith died today. I wish I could have seen more of his show when he was alive.
No fireworks this year
For the first time I can remember. There hasn’t been noticable rain (2 drizzles for a minute on two separate occasions) in two months. I’m pretty sure the rain we were supposed to get this summer was delivered to Paul instead 
Back from Tahoe! Gosh the water there is GORGEOUS
And the little waterfalls and the pretty mountains capped with snow and the emerald colors and the lovely sunny beaches and the beautiful trees
Sooo my mom mentioned that I should try to get my GED next year (I’m unschooled and 15) so that I can start taking college classes.
Well, I’d better start studying…
Oh, man. I’m staying far far away from that until I’m at least 16.
It scares me.
You have to be at least 16 to take it, anyway.
Well, that solves THAT problem!
i am homeschooled so i won’t go to college
Why does being homeschooled mean you won’t go to college?
Ducky and Castle are home-schooled, too. That’s why they’re talking about a GED. Most people get a high school diploma when they’re old enough for college, but if you’re home-schooled, you take a test to get the GED (General Education Diploma) instead. Colleges and universities accept it juts as readily as a normal diploma.
If you think you’re going to be home-schooled for college, it doesn’t really work like that. There are online degree programs, but not nearly as many as normal degree programs, so if you decide to get one, your options might be limited. And if it’s your parent(s)/guardian(s) that say you have to be home-schooled, I’m sure they’ll understand if you say you want to go to a physical college or university. The vast majority of home-scholars do it, and after all, you have 8 whole years to convince them! Actually, it’s more than that, because if you don’t manage to convince them until you’ve already started on your degree, you can take the rest at a normal college. But I expect that if you ask right now, they’ll say you can do it. Besides, by the time you’re old enough for that, the law will let you go to college without the permission of your parent(s)/guardian(s), although they aren’t obliged to help you pay for it.
We have the option to take the GED. It’s not the only high-school level diploma out there, but it is the most widespread. Unfortunately, it’s generally not as respected as a high-school diploma.
My mother, though, being on the papers as my teacher, can issue me a high-school diploma, meaning that, while the GED is still going to be a fantastic idea if I don’t attend an actual high school for my junior and/or senior years, it will also be helped along by a high-school diploma.
I plan to go into some form of career in digital art and graphic design. History and music are also very relevant interests of mine. I have a surprising amount of friends in the digital art and graphics industry, and I have several close (and impressive) friends.
One (I believe I am allowed to post his name – he’s in his mid 70s and is an author and was a journalist), named Edward Ricciuti, has written an impressive amount of books on dangerous animals and the like, and was a world-roaming journalist for many years, and was a boxer and a marine and calls upon me for research assistance.
The other is an author of several books on learning games and simulations. He wrote a book called Unschooling Rules and has developed simulation games. He’s been a friend of the family since before I was born.
I can get recommendations from both of these people, and I believe they will carry a decent amount of weight.
All in all, there’s a lot of options that either heavily support the GED or can be used in its place, though the GED is the main thing that we use.
Last Saturday I saw the Addams Family musical. Er, twice. It was all kinds of amazing and then after the evening show my roommate and I talked to the understudy for Gomez, Brad Nacht (who was incredible) for like half an hour at the stage door. (Well, technically we saw him [and, like, everyone else] at the stage door after the matinee, but everyone was rushing to get dinner before the evening show so it didn’t count really. Although we did almost immediately run into Mal/Martin Vidnovic at Walgreens and it was… kind of super awkward. And amazing. I love live theatre so much)
I am probably going to have “When You’re An Addams” stuck in my head for the rest of eternity. It was so awesome.
Also, the Buell Theatre in Denver has some of the most perfect acoustics ever, I love it so much.
/fangirling
They found a Thing!
After spending squillions of dosh and digging miles of tunnels, and that nail-biting few months when they weren’t sure if they’d found anything at all, they’ve nailed it. It exists.
Now they have to spend a couple of years deciding what it is, and checking that it’s what they were looking for in the first place. Science is so exciting.
I got up to watch the webcast. Applause! Higgs was so moved. He wiped his eyes. I just missed the screen grab.
The very first thing I saw this morning when I woke up was Paul’s post. How right it seems that this is how I heard the news.
Heheheeee! I heard about it late last night (or, very early this morning) before I went to bed but it wasn’t an offical announcement. Should have stayed up a few more hours!! This is awesome.
My dreams were a weird combination of random elements, yet all definitely traceable to things I saw or thought about yesterday.
For some reason I dreamed (indirectly) about failing the oral matura. Again. When will my subconscious finally acknowledge that it’s over and that I passed with excellent success and straight As?
I mean, why do I keep dreaming about failing a test I already passed?
I don’t know, but there’s no guarantee that you’ll stop. I still have dreams in which I’m back in college and have completely forgotten to attend a required course for which I was registered. I think it’s fairly common.
My dreams last night were weird and kept going to dark places
I was in a weird school that was impossible to navigate and they kept changing my locker and a scary professor yelled at me and threw things at me and threatened me with shards of mirror because I got lost and missed the class. After more dreams within the stupid weird school I had one where I accidentally killed my pet fish 
I’m pretty sure it’s because it’s been so hot here, I can hardly fall asleep. And both my mom and my sister went to sleep in the basement last night so I couldn’t even go down there.
Dreams? You mean you SLEEP?
Unwilling sleep
We host a 4th of July party at our house every year, and there was something about being “rested for the guests”
NOOOO! NOT THE FISHY!
next time you dream be sure to feed the dead fish to your kitten. at least it will be a good cause
That’s an idea. I don’t have a cat in real life but I’ve had dreams where I’ve had a kitten, so I’ll have to make sure the kitten’s also in the dream if it happens again.
KITTEH! IN YOUR DREAMZ! STEALI’N YOUR HEARTZ!
If the Muse of the month has yet to be decided, may I suggest Bo-ly? I think it fits.
When I’m an adult with my own house, I plan on sleeping in the basement.
If we can’t have Sepwtember, though, SeptemBor or would be nice. Septmimimber would do, though. But Chadjuly is at least better than… Chaudgust? Septchadber?
Mimi doesn’t fit anywhere but September, though, so maybe we’ll have to have Bo-ly and Chaudgust.
The only other month I can think of where Bo might work is Bovember. But I think Chad is best for Chaugust or Chadtober (and that’s stretching it a little). Septmimiber would definitely work.
I don’t think we’re even using October or November. There are only 9 Muses, and so far, we’ve been using them all at once. Bovember is good, because the v reminds one of ‘bovine’, et cetera, but I find it unlikely.
I thought SeptemBor kind of worked, though…
But then where would Mimi go? And what about this month?
I suppose Mimi really doesn’t fit anywhere else; you’re right. I think it should be Boly, then.
My dream wasn’t unpleasant, just embarrassing. It was about FDR going to the Soviet Union to negotiate in the winter and writing the song “White Christmas” while he was there–probably the most historically inaccurate thing ever. I suppose it’s slightly amusing that I managed to forget so much while asleep, but I can’t help wanting to shake myself.
I would consider that amusing rather than embarrassing if I were you. The lack of accuracy doesn’t mean you forgot, it means your sleeping mind made a bunch of random connections. I’m under the impression that random connections like those are the key to the success of at least a few great comedy writers.
It’s a dream, it’s not supposed to be accurate. You’re lucky it actually made sense.
I just heard a nine-year-old boy, who reads Muse, say, “I ship Aeiou and Chad.”
Well, they are software and hardware… But I still call that an “um…”
Doesn’t everybody?
Where did a nine-year-old even learn that word? I didn’t know it until I read the Nick Magazine Avatar issue when I was… 13 at least.
At least en didn’t say “Aeiou and Kokopelli.”
No, no, it’s Urania and Kokopelli.
In Kokopelli’s dreams.
As Pwt said, Kokopelli will never have offspring.
Pwt/Crraw
Any two people with hat much mutual tension between each other definitely have something going on underneath the surface.
/shipping parodyDo you remember the issue about the oil spill? I think it was the December 2010 issue, but I might be misremembering. In the Kokopelli and Company comic strip that month, Pwt finally did catch Craaw, but she didn’t kill/persecute him in any way… What did happen is what first gave me the idea of shipping them. Before that I’d thought of them more like not-quite-siblings.
I thought that Bo/Mimi was the obvious ship.
Interesting, certainly. But obvious? Hm…
And here I thought the most obvious Bo-inclusive ship was Bo/Feather…
crraw/feather… it makes sense for two birds to get together
Museshipping would be kind of squicky in any case. Seeing as Chad, Urania, and Pwt are human, Bo is a cow, Feather is a birdlike humanoid, Crraw is a bird, Aeiou is human-ish but with horns and noodle-sleeves, Mimi is an Australian mythical thing, and Koko is … some sort of chaos-wreaking entity who exists in the second dimension.
I read that the non-Muse Magazine Kokopelli is thought to be a fertility deity that was physically a beetle with a pronounced proboscis that over time changed in appearance until it became what we recognize today. The change in appearance was supposedly brought about in the same way that stories change over time; namely that one person copies the story/picture inaccurately, and later someone else does, and so on.
R101: Kokopelli is looking less and less like a beetle now, even in native American art. (It was a native American tribe in the southwest–quite possibly Arizona, Kokopelli’s birthplace [he was definitely worshiped there, anyway]. One major difference between our Kokopelli and theirs, though, is that the ‘original’ Kokopelli still nearly always has a hunched back. Some of Larry Gonick’s older drawings of him were slightly hunchbacked; I notice, at any rate, that one most often inserted into Kokonspiracy Photoshop projects is. (He is usually shown sliding in these projects because the Muse fandom doesn’t think of him as a hunchback, and it seems indeed that this condition has gone away, because he’s now completely upright in many comics). But there are some similarities; the fertility deity was a trickster, although I haven’t read any myths in which he threw pies.
Rainbow, I’ve always thought the horns were part of a headdress. I could be wrong, though.
Bibli- The proboscis evolved into what looks like a flute, or a pipe (the musical kind) and I always assumed the tunes and tricks came from associations with the Pied Piper. A pie in the face being the oldest trick in the book.
And about Aeiou; I once made artwork based on her, so I had to look very carefully at her to copy her accurately. The closer I looked, the less sure I was whether the ends of her feet are black shoes or hooves, so maybe the horns are real.
um… i thought Urania was one of the old Greek muses… how could she be human now?
All of them are superpowered beings of some sort by virtue of being muses, Catwings, Rainbow just means that Urania is human in appearance and body shape as opposed to some of the others.
URANIA/CHAD FOREVERI do.
We just watched “Hugo”. I’ve read the book, but the movie was so sweet and gorgeous and wondrous and made of, oh, dreams and magic and starlight. It was a story built on the things I believe, that art is important and that everyone exists for a purpose and that happy endings really do exist. It made me want to learn about early film, and also to draw and write and make something beautiful. I feel as though I could hug the whole world.
Happy Independence Day, fellow American MBers! Math math numbers lines math numbers study forever.
Brooke and Megan and I went to the Salvation Army and tried on the best clothes ever because they were old and ruffly and 80’s, and then came home and watched Drake and Josh and ate Ramen, and when it got dark we jumped into the lake with our clothes on, swam to the middle and watched the fireworks.
Perfect day? Yes, yes, yes.
Did the clothes have jabots? *has to admit that I’m asking less because I care as because the word jabot is awesome and should be used at every available opportunity*
Watching fireworks in my own backyard is quite satisfying. I like not having to go anywhere and still being treated to a show.
It’s not real fancy, but since the fireworks are set off by various neighbors it’s like we’ve got a 360 degree view of fireworks. and then we spend lots of time running around the yard trying to pick which direction the next big firework is gonna come from.
It was a nice evening. I still spent some of it thinking existential thoughts about the morality of celebrating freedom when so many others in the world don’t have any, and are fighting for it right now. In some other part of the world, those bangs that light up the sky are bombs.
I had the most wonderful time at Fiddler’s! We saw her house and farm, and had a barbeque, and made our own fireworks by throwing bamboo pieces into a fire, and I tried spinning poi, and there were fireflies everywhere… it was great.
Kai is talking about the Fourth of July Kokonvention at Midnight Fiddler’s house in Maryland. It was great fun. I’m at work and don’t have time to describe it now, but here are a couple of photographs I took of the MuseBlog crowd present — Red-tailed HAWK, Midnight Fiddler, Purple Panda, and KaiYves — standing in front of a tall, dark, dense bamboo grove.
(By the way, did you know that bamboo explodes when you put it in a bonfire? I didn’t.)
Sounds flamablamablous
Indeed it was. MBers, MB parents, fresh ears of corn roasted in their husks, and exploding bamboo — who could ask for more?
Ohhhhh that is the BEST way to eat corn. Sounds great!
Does bamboo explode because of air/water pockets expanding? That’s my hypothesis, but someone please tell me whether I’m right!
That’s what Midnight Fiddler’s father told us, and it’s his bamboo.
Yeah, the moisture in the sections expand them until they explode. If you bury them under coals when they pop they send up a bunch of lovely sparks. It’s quite exciting.
(It’s amazing natural selection hasn’t gotten my family out of the gene pool yet…)
I figured. I’ve done similar things with japanese knotweed.
Four Musers Deep in the Jungle.
Hmm! The Preview button has moved!
In other news, we didn’t get to see any fireworks here because there was a ban in case they started more fires, but I don’t really mind.
…I just accidentally did some kind of key command which made the Google page I was on rotate several times before going back to normal.
I have no idea what it was and I’m kind of terrified now. I didn’t know webpages could do that.
… do a barrel roll?
Or maybe in this case a death roll?
my brother says the tardis is an animal.
Is he right? David Tennant was the best doctor!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Welcome to MuseBlog! I suggest you visit the Welcome, Neophytes! thread if you’re new here.
No idea about the TARDIS. I haven’t watched the old series, so…
ALSO YOU’RE TOTALLY RIGHT ABOUT DAVID TENNANTNo, to be fair, all the Doctors are amazing.
Except Colin Baker but I haven’t seen him so I wouldn’t know he seems like a total prick thoughYour brother is sort of right. The TARDIS is supposedly a machine that can think, but several references are made (mostly in Matt Smith’s series) to non-mechanical aspects of the TARDIS.
SPOILER SPOILER THE DOCTOR’S WIFE SPOILER SPOILER
Evidently, TARDIS’s are grown, not made, and in one episode the TARDIS is temporarily able to speak, and “she” (the TARDIS refers to enself as a she, and The Doctor refers to her as such too) refers to all other TARDIS’s as her sisters.
I think Randomosity pretty much nailed it via your question about the TARDIS. Also, David Tennant as the Doctor will always hold a special place in my heart. “The Girl In the Fireplace” is pretty much my favorite episode of all time.
I packed a duffel bag with clothes today. I’m going to have to unpack and repack into a larger one though, because I need to add a sleeping bag and a pillow somehow or other into the “soft” bag. Then somehow manage to get books and purse and ditty bag and stuff into a backpack, and then also bring two instruments. All with a “Two carry-on pieces of luggage” rule on the train. Whoops. I can pass off a backpack as a purse and a concertina case as a….uh, secondary purse? That’s a thing, right? Just hoping that if I can carry everything by myself nonchalantly it’ll all be cool. *sigh*
Anyway, I got my ticket today, so 5:25am on Sunday it is.
This is going to be a crazy weekend. Saturday I’m doing a workshop at the prison, then going to a picnic at a friend’s, then loading the car and sleeping and then waking up at ~3 to go into DC to catch my train, arriving in NYC around 9, and joining up with Clearwater. Because nothing says “sailing is fun!” like starting already sleep-deprived. Yay!
Is this train Amtrack? In my experience they are surprisingly lenient with the luggage rules. Good luck with all this packing though!! I am sure you will have a great time
Yes. I’ve ridden Amtrak before, and never noticed a baggage policy at all. So yeah, pretty sure if I can carry all my stuff by myself (which I’m going to have to be able to do anyway) in a competent manner it shouldn’t be a problem.
yes this
granted I usually only take Amtrak for weekend trips home so I’ll only pack one (extremely large) backpack
but there was the time I also brought the duffel bag full of squid
some trains allow checked luggage and others don’t but I’ve seen people carry huge rolling bags on the no-checked-luggage trains
tl;dr as long as you can carry your stuff and fit it somewhere like above you or by your feet you will be absolutely fine! good luck ♥
YES I HAVE BEEN MEANING TO ASK YOU
how did you get your squid on the train
a duffle bag? I am not sure we have one that big
BUT TRYING TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO MAKE THIS WORK
It seems to me those squids could be duffel bags. Leave out some or all of the stuffing, put a zipper in the bottom, and boom: cephaluggage.
New sewing project, someone else take him up on it.
Oooh, like the crocodile mummy backpacks the Met sells.
Robert, you come up with the best words.
I went to the local army-navy surplus store with my squid. They have lots of large duffel bags and we found one that she fit in.
Going to Warped Tour right after work! My friend gave me an extra ticket yesterday for free. I’m so excited!
…minus the fact that it’s supposed to be over a hundred degress. Let’s hope I don’t pass out.
Drink lots of water, and then tell us all about how it went!
asdfghjkl; it was AWESOME. My friend Hannah and I stood practically onstage with We The Kings for the entire show, then got to meet them backstage and hang out with them. It was amazing. I’m sunburned, sweaty, dehydrated and exhausted but soooo happy.
Also I went to the new science museum yesterday with my sisters and aunt. SO MUCH AWESOME. And Sunday I leave for summer music camp! Hooray! I’m excited!
Sounds great!
I’m back from Poland!
It was beautiful. And practically everybody there hates the USSR.
(Similar here. It’s a sort of eastern Europe thing.)
“So what do you do for a living?”
“I make money.”
“Well yeah, everybody does, but what do you do?”
“I make money.”
“Yeah, but how?”
“First the paper gets printed with the security features, then they add the colors and watermarks, then comes the intaglio process–”
“Oh! I see, you work at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing! You make money!”
“Well, duh, I wouldn’t work for free!”
(Joke adapted from “Wow Canada!” and told to my classmates when we visited the BE&P today.)
Digging through my drawers, closets and fishing around in other miscellaneous spaces where clothes have been known to accumulate, I found that I have at least seven sundresses (at last count), possibly more.
…
I don’t wear sundresses. But my socks have been disappearing in equally horrifying numbers- perhaps they’ve mutated somehow?!
Perhaps socks are the larval stage.
That’s odd. My socks seem to turn into t-shirts in colors I never wear. Could that be a pupate stage?
Possibly. And the unattractive colors could be an evolutionary adaptation that keeps you from wearing them out.
My socks turn into awesome jeans that don’t fit. It’s the saddest thing. EVER.
I’m so glad that I’m going to be on the water soon. It’s been way too long.
So I made a squid hat.
Out of RAINBOW CLOTH
(since I didn’t have enough/the right fluffy fabric and was too lazy/moneyless to buy some)
Just got back from my trip to Chicago!
So.
Much.
Fun.
Glad to have you back!
i’ve been through Chicago before, it may be fun, but not if you’re driving through. My new pet peeve is toll roads.
Newest addition to Tess’ instrument family: a guanzi! It’s a Chinese double reed, related to the duduk (provides the sound for a tsungi horn on A:TLA). I semi-jokingly asked Adam to keep an eye out for one for me while he’s there (most of my friends are in China this month…) and he emailed me yesterday to say that he’d ordered me one. As a gift! I’m extraordinarily excited about this.
On a rather less cheery note: A girl who was in color guard my freshman and sophomore year, who just finished her second year of college, was hit by a car while biking and died. I found out from my newsfeed. I didn’t know her well, but we were friends in afterschool one year of elementary school and were friendlyish in band. It was shocking to hear about. It’s a little unreal somehow.
My condolences, Tess.
But the guanzi sounds great.
Woohoo! I’m at #42!
…On the Who’s posted how much list, that is. *celebratory dance* I don’t think I’ll hold my position for long, but till then, I’ll enjoy being at the answer to the life, universe and everything.
Well, it only took me approximately three years of everyone on the internet and off yelling at me to check them out — I finally started watching StarKid.
Not just AVPM. Everything. In the past four days I have gone on what is probably the most intensive StarKid-watching spree in the history of the internet (those musicals are really. caking. long) and it has been amazing and I am completely in love with them.
Aaaaand I just now finished watching A Very Potter Sequel and suddenly have nothing more to watch. So I am just sitting at my desk all alone at 1:09 in the morning listening to Abney Park and feeling sort of alone.
I think I would like a cookie or something.
*cookies*
*gives cookie!*
What are your favorites? I like all of them (except Holy Musical B@man), but AVPM is probably my favorite.
Whoa that was a huge thunderstorm. We were without power for a while, and one of our Bradford pears broke. They do that– in strong weather, they’ll just split in half.
The laptop worked on battery, but Internet was down.
Now to go pack for band camp! *hyperexcitedness*
Yeah, about 99 percent of the trees that were broken were Bradford Pears. That’s why I hate them; they’re weak and their flowers smell like rotten meat.
Have fun at band camp! Tell us about it!
My squid hat can now also be used as a backpack.
You had better not make it any more awesome than it already is. I’ve heard overexposure to awesomeness in its pure form can cause people and objects to spontaneously explode.
I wanted to spend tomorrow, the 1st anniversary of the STS-135 launch, at Arlington with the Challenger and Columbia memorials, but it will be dangerously hot, so I guess I have to settle for the Air and Space Museum.
Still leaving flowers, though.
Wooo Saturday is sewing day!
Sure, sure, so is every single other day but after my 4th of July dressmakin adventure I felt myself sadly drained and only had energy to do tedious handstitching–which I then didn’t do enough of but today I want to CONSTRUCT THINGS.
My projects:
Princess-seamed sundress, based off the green one I am currently wearing. It’s loose and floaty and light and I am a coastal girl who badly needs more sundresses to survive this far inland. The fabric I have to make my new one is quilting cotton, whereas the existing one is made out of rayon, so we’ll see how this goes…
Blouse, heavily inspired by this one (http:// www. colettepatterns. com/shop/violet/). I’m not sure how I feel about the “gentle loose fit” so I might make something based on that and then dart it heavily in like sixty different ways. It would be great if I had more high-waisted skirts but I don’t and I don’t have enough fabric to make any more.
ALICE I NEED YOUR SEWING EXPERTISE
I have this grey fabric that’s sort of diagonally knit like denim or twill I forget what that’s called except this fabric is polyester or something, it makes noise when you rub it together and doesn’t stretch and it’s very futuristic — I have about 1 yd + 30″ because remnant
and I want to make it into a dress
the bottom half is probably a simple gored skirt with some ruffles of black lace and grey see-through fabric beneath it
but I want the top half to have straps and a sort of heart-shaped top — what’s that called, a sweetheart neckline? I know next to no sewing terms
and I want interesting use of the fabric’s grain, like maybe cutout panels that are diagonal differently from the rest of it
and I have no idea how to make that
I can’t figure out darts on my own either
any suggestions? have you ever seen a pattern that looks like this? I am going to go to the fabric store to look at their patterns in the next few days but I’m not hopeful
tl;dr HELP ME SEW
Hmm most dresses that are dresslike take a bit more fabric than that, and if you want to do fun things with grain that is extra. It’s probably possible to get something similar to what you want, but you will have to be creative.
I haven’t seen any patterns of that sort, probably because I don’t look at patterns very much–with the exception of Colette patterns, which I look at like twice a
weekday because they’re lovely.Pattern Review is a useful site when it comes to patterns, but I can’t see an easy way to search for patterns based on things like type of neckline (yes, that is called a sweetheart, by the way).
If I were you I would probably wing it a bit. Maybe do princess seams because honestly they are my favorite things ever and prettier than darts–but darts are really not very hard. I always make the bodice, then pinch it up in places until it looks right and then sew the pinched places together, which is unprofessional, as the correct thing to do is make the darts in the paper fitting. A bonus with the princess seams is that they require panels, and it wouldn’t be hard to cut out the fabric so the side panels had interesting things with grain–I think you would just cut them facing in opposite directions. You could also have a seam down the front of the bodice, which would let you have fun with chevrons.
I would probably make it strapless to save fabric and sew on straps of a different fabric–something that matches the underskirt, but I don’t know exactly what your vision is.
Speaking of the skirt, I’ve never made a gored skirt, but the internet could probably tell you how–it seems pretty straightforward. One thing, though–because you have a limited amount of fabric, I would probably make the gores a different fabric, but again, that might not be what you want.
thank you you are the best ♥
I know it’s not much fabric, I also found from the depths of my house around three quarters of a yard of black satin-type fabric which I think will go well in case of emergency. I think I can make it work.
I think princess seaming was maybe what I had in mind but forgot the name for, will have to consider chevrons as well
Gored skirts are the best thing, I haven’t made a pleated skirt (the first type of skirt I learned to make) since I learned how to make gored skirts a couple years ago. They’re all the fun twirlyness of a circle skirt without wasting as much fabric turning rectangles into circles.
interesting point with the straps, I may just get some wide ribbon at the same time I’m getting the zipper and use that
once again, many thanks
Problem: Maybe 1/2 hour to pack for trip- must find summer clothes!
Solution: Bring ALL the
clothessundresses.Yes, I found another sundress. (and some more mismatched socks, but beige is pretty close to white anyway)
Contents of my closet:
-some killer heels with pink flowers on them
-a Hogwarts robe
-an orange vintage blouse form the seventies
– full bright yellow foul-weather gear from my crusing days that’s only a few sizes too big (though the boots have gone missing)
-a flowery dress that my mother wore to my baptism (16 years ago)
-a few blouses (too small, Madonna-style, plaint-splattered and too small)
-a few skirts (too small, meant for ballroom dancing or no longer matching to anything else I own)
-two winter coats (one that I wore all the time, of which the lining has gone AWOL, and another thick light-brown one that might fit Hagrid)
-ski pants
-a size 1 ballgown
-a pair of capris
-a pair of grey/black jeans that’s always been to big for me
-a roughly 4 meter high-tech (plastic-fiber-y) rope perhaps for rock climbing? (a little short for sailing)
-assorted sweaters/thick jackets in the self above my closet, including the lining for an anorak (no sign of an anorak)
-a warm sleeping bag …”for up to -20°C”
-some shoeboxes (too afraid too look inside, probably containing fossilized convers) and plastic/paper bags
-a plastic bag with french writing on it (“made of recycled matierials, Géant casino”)
…I keep trying to think of what sort of conclusions people might draw from this…A tendency to camp in cold, rainy areas and then scale buildings wearing ballgowns/eveningwear and steal plastic bags from french casinos?!
Interesting. Open the shoeboxes!
The weather in my area of the country has been doing very strange things recently. Up until yesterday, it’s been about 60 every day, and June as a whole was significantly cooler than usual. Tomorrow it’s supposed to be 100.
Lovely.
I’ve started packing away the things I’m not taking to college (did I already tell you guys this? I don’t remember), which is making the whole college thing seem terribly real.
I’ve spent the last couple days doing intensive genealogy research for my grandpa. My grandmother’s family (where my research is concentrated) is all Norwegian, and all of the Norwegian census data for the 1800s plus all the parish records for the time are available online. The census data is searchable, and very useful, albeit all in Norwegian. The parish records are scanned, handwritten pages, still in Norwegian. I’ve spent quite a lot of time squinting at the screen, trying to make out what on earth they say. My eyesight is probably deteriorating because of this, but my Norwegian is definitely improving! (Not conversational Norwegian, I suppose, but if someone were to ask me to take a census in Norway I could do it quite competently.)
That is the opposite of me haha
and I am QUITE PLEASED
upper 90’s all week I am begging for the low of 75º tomorrow may bring
I wouldn’t mind if the earlier weather came back. I’m currently transitioning from cool, rainy London to today’s high of 99 or whatever it’s supposed to be, and that does not seem like nice conditions in which to start playing soccer and getting in shape again. Good for the lake, though, so maybe it will all work out.
I made a sundress.
It is so boring.
It is no more shapeless than the one I patterned it off of, but that one has DRAPE whereas this one is stiff and a-line and DULL.
It’s a pretty fabric, sure, and it’s definitely a low-stress garment and small without being immodest, which is what I wanted.
And really I didn’t expect it to work so I’m not that disappointed. It’s just…boring.
Have you thought about adding embellishments to jazz it up? I don’t know if that’s your thing or not, but adding something extra would be pretty easy and could give it the visual interest that you feel is lacking.
Well I sort of don’t have any. Little sleeves or a collar would make it look nicer, but I am just plain out of fabric. It’s okay when I belt it or tie it (though still not great) and I felt better when I put on my straw hat. If I had a few little cute orange buttons, maybe. Hmm hmm buttons. Or like, trim or something. The thing is I am just starting out as an independent person and can’t mooch off my mother’s sewing things anymore but I’m also totally utterly broke (seriously, I think I have seven dollars in all the world, and I’m saving them as an emergency fund).
I can see how that would be an issue. I’ve got lot’s of little doodads like that, but I can’t exactly send them to you.
Well, keep an eye out for free things. I once scored an entire roll of ribbon from these people who were using it to decorate for our club event. And I know that at Jo-ann’s they sell the ends of ribbon spools and suchlike very very cheaply–there isn’t a lot, but it might be enough.
Or you could take buttons from something old that you want to get rid of. Every blouse that’s ripped and that I’ve outgrown, I clip the buttons form an save them. I’ve got a whole tupperware full of them. And good luck with your project, whatever you decide to do.
I’m about to go take a bath and then to bed, since I have to be up at 3 to get to Union Station to catch my train at 5:30.
And then to NYC! terrifying.
But boat! I am SO EXCITED to be going sailing again.
I dunno how much internet I’ll have for the next month, so this is bye for awhile, my darlings! ♥
Hm, I just remembered something that I meant to write a while ago but forgot. (Warning: rather less than cheery.)
A week or two ago my parents, my grandma and I drove out to see my grandpa’s grave now that everything’s settled down. The headstone’s still being made, but we double-checked that we had ordered it facing the correct way and everything. He’s buried in this old country cemetery about half a mile from the house where he was born and grew up, just down the road from the church he attended. The church, Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, was built in the late 1800s by Polish immigrants who came here and founded a little town for themselves, Paplin. They built the church and cemetery and houses and shops and everything was going fairly well for them despite the difficult Nebraska weather. They were raising livestock and crops and families and were carving out a new home in the plains far from their old one. But in 1892 and 1893 a diphtheria epidemic swept through Paplin and devastated it. Most of the adults were able to recover, but basically every child in the town passed away–I’m not sure how many, but it’s in the hundreds at least. I’ve heard stories about families coming back from the graveyard after burying one child only to find another one had passed away back at the house. The graves were marked with wooden crosses since that’s all anyone there could afford, and those were destroyed a long time ago. One section of the cemetery is not available for any more interments, and if you squat down and look along the fenceline you can see a long series of dips in the grass where the ground has caved in over the caskets. A handful of the graves were marked with actual gravestones sometime before the wood crosses were lost, and I took a walk around to look at them. They were small white stones, about eight inches wide, six thick, and a foot above the ground, inscribed in English on both sides (most of the other old stones were in Polish). I realized that the little stones were a set–the Baker family. I checked one–Elizabeth, age 13, died on July 12, 1893. The next day her sister Mary died. A week later, brother Leo. Joseph was 18, and he held out until August before he died. Several more stones were too corroded to read, but I could tell they were Baker stones as well. Within the space of a couple weeks, at least eight Baker children died. I don’t know what happened to the parents. When the epidemic had taken everyone it could, the people in Paplin had to just abandon the town they had built. The church and the cemetery are still kept up, but there’s no other evidence of the town left. I wish I could go back and hear their stories–not just the last stories, but the dreams and aspirations they had in 1891. But now it’s just cornfields and rusting iron gates. Though once in a while I guess they do get a new resident there in Paplin. I’ve already decided I hope to move there in a long while from now. It’s not a bad place to rest.
Wheeee San Francisco is the coolest of cool places. Went there today with our French exchange student (did I mention we have a Frenh exchange student? She’s been here for a week and is staying until Sunday) and a couple of great friends and we rode the buses and went to all the places and found the most excellent cafes and went into this gigantic and completely beautiful church. Seriously, it might be worth converting to Catholicism just to go to that church.
Choklit’s guide to San Francisco on $8: walk everywhere and eat only at tiny dim sum cafes and bubble tea shops.
This week I’ve also gone hiking in the redwoods and gone to a 4th of July fair (during which the mayor described the inhabitants of my town as “the greatest people on Earth”) and I set off a lot of illegal fireworks, which I know is bad but who cares dear god I love explosions.
Oooh! I’m going to San Fransisco this summer!
REALLY?
WHEN?
^my exact reaction
LBK, BLOGSIS, COME TO ME
*seconded*
YOU MUST TELL US WHEN OUR VISITS MAY COINCIDE!
*flails* I’ll be in San Fran (that’s how the cool people abbreviate it, right?) from August 4th until the 8th, and I will bring my blue baseball cap that has an HPB on the front.
THAT IS PERFECT, I THINK R101 WILL BE IN TOWN AT THAT TIME TOO
*thrashes around like an excited Magikarp*
NO
NONONONONONONO
I will be at violin camp from the 5th to the 10th and I’m getting back from Singapore on the morning of the 4th.
Please say you can do something on the 4th.
HOLY CAKE
IS THIS ACTUALLY HAPPENING
OHMIGOD YOU GUYS
Okay, the 4th. I’ll talk to my mother.
LBK- HOLY CAKE, THIS IS TOO PERFECT. I’LL BE IN CA FROM THE 3RD TO THE 10TH. KOKON! KOKON!
CO- Didn’t a mutual off-blog friend of ours already invite us both to something on the 4th? She’s let me invite Cskia too, so maybe we can meet up with LBK then? It wouldn’t be strictly a Kokon, but WE CAN MAKE THIS WORK.
European cathedrals make me wish I was Catholic/religious. Behind the intricately carved facades, away from the heat and the crowds of tourists, they’re cool, dark, peaceful, and as quiet as any spaces occupied by so many humans. Prayer in those places seems so pure of an action: kneeling or bowing your head, simple giving thanks to the Lord or telling Him your dearest hopes. Not being religious, I would have felt intrusive going through the motions of praying, but I still enjoyed that sensation of being in a reverent, sacred place and experiencing peace and connection with the cosmos.
I saw Brave today. I cried. I didn’t realize I was one to cry at movies? My eyes tend to well up with tears but but but flowing tears? Meeeeeeeep the movie was not quite what I expected but I enjoyed it so it’s all well
Also, apparently the Preview button has vanished from my kindle when I comment on MuseBlog for some reason.
the button is at the top of the comment now! Right above “name”
The preview button’s actually above the Name box now.
And also I almost cried at Brave too. But I cry pretty much every time someone else is crying, so…
Huh, when did that get there? Anyways, thanks!
Internet on the train!
NO SLEEP.
I got maybe around 2 hours of sleep? And now I feel like I should really try to sleep for the 2 more hours I’ve got on the train, but I’m not really that tired. Oh well. A little exhaustion never killed anyone. Much.
I am leaving for music camp in an hour and a half or so, where Hippie and I will play music and eat gelato!
Signing out for a week- au revoir, MuseBlog!
I lost the medical history form and my mom was all like “I believe you can find it so I will not take anything you say seriously” but I printed out another and filled it out so It’s all Good.
So this means my lazy Minecraft summer is ending and giving way to my Summer Of Doing Things. Next week I go to Indiana and then there’s freshman training for marching band and then I go to the lake and then I go to marching band camp and then summer’s almost over.
Wow.
I AM SO EXCITED FOR MUSIC CAMP
I HAVE LOST MY ABILITY TO PATIENTLY WAIT AN HOUR AND A HALF
alright! good luck with school! and the week-long vacation you are taking! b-bye
This morning I went to Mass. This is not unusual; I do so every Sunday. What was unusual is that there were forty priests from around the world at Mass as well. I and three other guys served as torchbearers (normally a role played by 7-9 year olds) while the other positions were filled by priests, and several dozen more priests packed into the sanctuary as well. Most of them spoke French and a fair number spoke German–not much English. It was interesting trying to communicate with them to be able to do what needed to get done. Lots of gestures. They’re in Nebraska for the general meeting this organization has every six years, and apparently someone wanted them to see what a typical American parish is like, and we were chosen to host them for today. I think now they’re going to a few museums and our zoo, and later they’re going to go bowling and eat pizza. At the luncheon we had for them a priest from Ottawa sat by us, so it was neat talking with him. My parish is run by a group called the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter, a group founded in 1988 to help propagate the 1962 form of the liturgy–i.e., everything in Latin. So even though we were all from different parts of the world with so little in common, everything in the Mass is exactly the same–you wouldn’t be able to tell whether it was in the U.S. or in Germany or China. Obviously you can pick up on a French accent in Latin, but beyond that it’s identical no matter where you are. It definitely makes the world seem a lot smaller. That’s one of my favorite parts of Catholicism.
Very cool, Piggy!
I don’t know if your parish is typical, but it sounds pleasant.
Having such a large gathering of priests at a parish church is very atypical, and the fact that this parish only does the Latin Mass is fairly unusual as well (though there are hundreds more that are run the same way), but other than that we’re pretty normal. Though I do think we’re unique in that the parish also owns a bowling alley. That’s always a conversation piece.
After a week in Cornwall with the family, we have now arrived in Austria! Salzburg, specifically, which is a lovely town. And then this week we’re cycling our way to Vienna. It’s nice to have some sunshine again after the endless rain in England (wettest summer there for 900 years, I heard), although it is raining at the moment, worryingly. Anyway, hope everyone’s having a good summer!
*Sings loudly* THE HILLS ARE ALIVE WITH THE SOUND OF MUSIC…
LA LA LA LAAAAAAAAA
(That’s all I know…)
WITH SONGS THEY HAVE SUNG FOR A THOUSAND YEARS
THE HIIIIIILLLLLSS FILL MY HEART WITH THE SOUND OF MUUUUUUUUUUUUSIC
(Okay, that’s as far as I can sing it. Does anyone actually know the entire song?)
MY HEART WANTS TO SING ALL THE SONGS IT HEEEEEARS
I GOOO TO THE HILLLLS WHEN MY HEART IS LONELLLLLY
I KNOOOW I WILL FEEEEL WHAT I’VE FELT BEFOOOOOORE
MY HEART WILL BE BLESSED WITH THE SOUND OF MUUUUUUUUUSIC
AND I’LL SIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIING ONCE MOOOOOOOOOOOOOORE
Yes, I skipped most of the song… Oh well.
lad de da buh dah duh daaa!
(i don’t even know the song i never heard it before but i am singing it… why?)
Ooh, I love Salzburg! When we went there, we considered taking the Sound of Music tour, but then realized that most of the locations were within walking distance of our hotel.
Have you had Mozartkugeln yet? Or been to the playground with the scarily steep slide? Or had wienerschnitzel at Zum Fidelen Affen (The Funny Monkey) or had ice cream at the place right near there or GAHHHHH MEMORIES
Sorry, I loved Salzburg. We discovered days before we left that Bobby McFerrin was having a concert there the day after we left, and seriously considered delaying our trip to Dubai so we could go.
You know what, I need to write a record of my trip down sometime. Jadestone and axa both suggested it, but I never got around. Perhaps a year later it might be even better than immediately afterward.
Hmm.
HEY GUYS
This is just a friendly reminder to everyone to check your computer for the DNS malware that infected a lot of computers last year!
If your computer has it, after tonight you will not be able to access the internet on your machine. You can read lots of articles about why this is/how it came about just be googling DNS virus/malware.
If the GAPA(s) allow it, here is a simple link that tells you if you are infected or not. If the background is green, you are fine, if it is red, you have it:
http ://dns-ok. us/
I was holding my breath as the page loaded, but my laptop appears to be safe. Phew.
Mine works! Yay!
it’s green *wheew*
I saw Brave again today with Casey. I hadn’t seen her in about a month, so it was really wonderful to see her again. We did a lot of hanging out in her room and talking, and she showed me the marching band music for next year and our band director’s idea for the drill. And apparently the first football game is before I leave for college! I’m relieved, because I’d thought I wouldn’t be able to see the show this year, which would have been sad in any event, but even more so since she’s the drum major and also one of my closest friends.
I’m rewatching Avatar with my sister. She has a bizarre ability to predict what’s going to happen the instant it’s foreshadowed, but her guesses otherwise are entertainingly off the mark. (“I think Iroh is going to DIE. DOES AZULA KILL HIM? SHE DOES, DOESN’T SHE!?”) If she guesses the end, though, I give up at everything.
I’m pretty in love with this show.
I left them at the shuttle model in the Moving Beyond Earth gallery. Four orange roses, two white. (Yes, I counted Enterprise.)
You’re the sweetest person ever. But why four orange and two white?
Orange for the surviving orbiters, white for the lost.
Right, sorry. Speaking of that, I drew a few sketches of the humanized DiscLanVour siblings. I should send them in …
Certainly!
Hi, MuseBlog! I’m sorry for disappearing for two weeks; I can’t actually remember whether I said goodbye or not. Anyway, I drove all over the place with a youth group in a bus and slept outside. It was wonderful. We saw the fireworks on the 4th of July over Pittsburgh and they were definitely some of the best I’ve ever seen. Nevertheless, I am happy to be home. And to sleep in a bed. And to take a shower. I haven’t taken a shower in five days. Also, I haven’t slept in a bed in a week. I’m really terribly excited to go to sleep tonight.
So how is everyone? How was your Fourth of July?
Oh and is anyone excited about the discovery of the Higgs Boson particle? Because I am.
Welcome back! It’s good to see you; I’m glad you had fun!
As for whether anyone’s excited about the discovery, well, there’s a whole thread about it. There was also some discussion of it on this thread.
Thanks! And…ooooops I missed that thread. I would blame it on sleep deprivation but it was like 9:00 when I posted that so I don’t have an actual excuse. I’ve definitely been geeking out about it for a couple of hours.
I don’t feel as excited as I probably should, given my interests and knowledge. Probably because part of my brain is like “whatever, tiny particles, boring” even if rational!MathsLover finds particle physics important, and partly because I don’t know a huge amount about how the Standard Model works, which is something I’m working on changing.
I finished Squishy last night! And I have officially named him They Might Be Giant Squids. I’ll send in pictures later today.
Just got back from the trip to Michigan! I mourned the loss of internet connection. Also, I have decided to make a giant space squid too, because squids are kinda cute.
Kinda? KINDA!?
Squids are the most adorable creature ever to exist, except possibly cats.
And cuttlefish! *waves tentacles around*
And tardigrades!
Correction: Squids, cats, cuttlefish and maybe tardigrades ( I’m not sure what they look like.) are extremely cute.
And weevils! Don’t forget weevils! I like to think I’m not particularly susceptible to cuteness, but I can (and have) stare at them for hours.
I’m not so sure about the weevils.
Judging by the things people often do to/say about weevils, I get the impression most people don’t find them cute or indeed think they have any worth at all. I do, though.
I always mention my love of under-appreciated creatures, for you never know when you might find that you are less alone than you thought. (You and I are the only people whom I know for sure duly appreciate them.)
Well, I admire your courage there. I admit that personally, I actually avoid mentioning it, for the most part, because it’s caused me too much trouble with other people. Back when there was a recess, people would actually deliberately seek out and kill insects because I hated it. I expect your peers are more mature. Maybe mine are, too, now; I’m afraid to test it. My mother does say it might actually be better to tell people when they’re not about to kill something, because I’m so upset at those times as to apparently sound unreasonable, and she speculates that people might be more understanding if I told them at a time when I was calm. She may be right, but I haven’t been able to make myself do it yet.
I did read a book once about how insects should be appreciated more than they are that had a whole chapter on beetles and even mentioned weevils specifically at least once, so we’re not completely alone. I also found a blog at one point of someone who supported deep ecology that had a whole entry on how that applied to insects and they have value and should be treated thus, although it didn’t mention weevils in particular.
And baby manatees!
I just found a picture of a tardigrade (water bear), and they are cute the way seals are: fat and squishy!
I’m not sure why I didn’t think of this as soon as you said you didn’t know what they look like, but my avatar is one.
My science teacher last year was obsessed with baby manatees.
My science teacher is obsessed with turtles AND otters.
Otters are obviously very wonderful.
Hello MuseBlog! I have returned from an approximately two week trip through Italy, France, and England. I had a fantastic time, and now I must attempt to catch up on everything that has happened here in the meantime! What have I missed?
I finished my squid! And also, I am going to San Fransisco and possibly seeing Cskia and R101!
And possibly Chok and Cat’s Eye as well.
Ahh fun! Once again I am to envy all of you Californian MuseBloggers!
LBK: Yay, more squids! Have you chosen a name for yours?
They Might Be Giant Squids.
I am considering Fluffy or Johannes Squidbastian Bach as a squid name
Equal amounts of sleep and flute playing? Sure!
(BAND CAMP!)
YAAY for band camp!!
*sigh* Band camp was much too short.
As I said on the Quotations thread, did we go to the same band camp? Because it sounds like it was the same week. Was it in NC?
I miss band camp
Anyways, stories…I was climbing the Eiffel Tower during the Euro Cup final and there was a huge crowd of French people in the square across the river watching on giant screens, cheering, singing launching fireworks, and, if I saw correctly, starting a fire at some point. Mind you, the game was between Spain and Italy, so it just goes to show how incredibly passionate European soccer fans are if they get that worked up about games that don’t even involve their own countries.
There happened to be parties almost everywhere we went. Our first night in Rome, a tourist group from Poland (or so we heard) asked the hotel if they could have a DJ host a dance party outside by the pool. The hotel room I was sharing with three friends had a balcony, so we went out there on our pajamas and danced along to the music, which was in Italian, English, and, for some reason, Spanish. We danced to YMCA and the people down below saw us and invited us to come down, but we really needed to go to bed at that point. That was the first moment we really felt like we were in Europe. Our one night near Florence happened to be the birthday of the town our hotel was in, so there was an enormous block party with street performers, concerts, stores open late, and a free dance hall with a strobe light and English music. Then there was the Euro Cup in Paris, and the Fourth of July took place while we were in London, although we didn’t do much specific celebrating of that. Honestly, all of the Olympic preparations in London felt like one big party. I know I’m going to be a pain watching the Olympic broadcasts and saying, “Oh! I was there! I was there, too! I saw those flagpoles before they had flags on them!”
I really like European food. All of the dinners in Italy started with a pasta course, which I could get used to. EF, the tour company, arranged all of our dinners and we each got the same food, but that meant I tried a lot of things. And I got dessert every night, which is unusual for me and probably means I gained weight during the trip. We tried to eat street food for lunch as often as possible. For anybody who is every in London on a Saturday, I HIGHLY recommend eating at Camden Market. There were food stalls from just about every part of the world, and everybody could eat something delicious and different: curry, falafel wrap, Peruvian rice and chicken, fish and chips.
I went on about a hundred times more trains in the past two weeks as I have my entire life, no exaggeration or anything. We took a night train from Milan to Paris, and that was a major experience. None of us were expecting the compartments to be quite that tiny! Six bunks with maybe a yard between the two columns. It was even worse when the weather was really hot and the air conditioning didn’t work for the first two hours of the trip. Fortunately, I was with five good friends, and none of us will ever forget that journey. Our transportation between Paris and London was also by train (through the Chunnel!), but most of my train rides were on the metros in Paris and London. My proudest moment was when four friends and I planned out our entire free day in London, from King’s Cross Platform 9 3/4 to the British Museum to Camden Market to Speaker’s Corner to Harrod’s to the meet-up place for dinner, successfully taking the metro all by ourselves numerous times, not panicking when the last line we really needed to take was randomly closed for Olympic improvements, and still making it to the meeting point two minutes early. But oh my goodness, now I know just how tightly people can pack into a metro car. “Sea of humanity” is a mild way to put it.
Also, theater! On consecutive nights, I saw The Taming of the Shrew at the Globe Theater as a groundling and Wicked on West End. Very, very different experiences, but both were at the top of their genres and were absolutely brilliant fun.
It’s good to be home now, but I sincerely hope I get to go back to Europe many more times in my future.
Oh! I was in Poland during the Euro Cup finals.
Unfortunately, as both my band directors are very Italian, we did not have the best concert the night after the final.
Aww, that’s too bad. My tour director was Italian, but she was very nice about it and forgave us for kind of wanting Spain to win.
I mean, not a lot of people in the group cared either way, but he and therefore everybody was kind of in a bad mood.
That sounds amazing!
Wow envy that sounds fantastic. I’d love to go to London and Paris and Rome!
Got home from Yellowstone today. Spent the entire four-hour drive back listening to Legally Blonde: the Musical. “Positive” is never leaving my head ever.
Blood in the water…
OH MY GOD, ohmigod you guys!
Love that musical. As my friend told me the other day, it’s like candy: syrupy and oversweet, but so much fun, and I just can’t get enough of it.
If all fluff were that good, the world would be a better place.
also, Kate Shindle high belting ♥I got chased by an elk once at Yellowstone. If you saw an elk there, did you say hi?
We did not see any elk, but we did say hi to about ten buffalo as we skirted past them on the roadways.
Painting magic cards again! I am slow but it is nice and makes me feel like I’m doing something with my time while I sit on the couch playing Magic online with friends and watching x-men movies
Okay, Chok, Cskia, R101, and Cat’s Eye, my mom is on board with the plan. On the 4th [Keep the planning specifics off blog, please. —Admin.]
LBK, do you think you can have your mom email the GAPAs?
Oh yeah, I suppose that would be a smart idea.
I spoke to CO’s and my mutual friend, and you have a standing invitation to come with us in San Francisco on the 4th. Just a warning, there will be three people who aren’t MBers, but they are Muserly and I know you’ll like them.
SFTDP. GAPAs, can LBK, Cskia, CO, me, and anyone else who will be in San Fransisco at the same time email you so we can set it up like a miniature kokonvention?
Your parents may.
That’s what I meant.
And thank you.
I AM THE VERY BEST, LIKE NO ONE EVER WAS
Got my pokemon badges in the mail today *dances*
AHHHHHHHHHHHH POKEMONNNNNNNNN *flails*
From which region?
Kanto! They are made of brass, colored appropriately, with gold-colored edges/dividers between colors. They’re very shiny, and the best quality I could find online–they were about $30. The place I got them from (Sanshee) also makes the other regions, though some are PVC instead of brass. I’m waiting for the brass (in gold or silver tones) for the other regions before I get them, and I’ll probably wait till xmas when I can convince my family to get me Johto XD
EEEP the cuteness!
Bad news-
National Geographic: “This watch costs 100 dollars.”
Me: “Okay, why?”
National Geographic: “It’s synchronized with the official US atomic clock, the hands glow in the dark, and it gives date, day of the week and military time.”
Me: “Cool, I’ll take it!”
National Geographic: “But we don’t sell it at our museum gift shop, just by mail order and online.”
Me: “Nuts.”
Swatch Shop: “This watch costs 100 dollars.”
Me: “Okay, why?”
Swatch Shop: “It’s silver and very shiny.”
Good news- Heavy rainstorm = free shower.
Yea, swatches (especially the non-plastic ones) are mystifyingly expensive. Maybe they are made out of the same material as ink cartridges.
This one is mostly plastic, and it’s nice-looking, I just think that for 100 dollars, they could have put glow-in-the-dark paint on the hands.
That’s weird. Even my $50 Swatch has glow-in-the-dark hands.
One of those “fashion-over-function” deals, I guess.
That’s exactly what Swatches are about. Back during the era of cogs and mainsprings, Swiss watchmakers used to emphasize precision engineering. When electronic watches suddenly made mechanical ones obsolete, Swiss watch companies floundered until they discovered that they could sell style instead of quality — a radically new idea to them. As I understand it, the Swatch saved the industry.
(*remembers when it happened*)
Yes, I remember reading an article back then to the effect of “how do you convince people to pay premium prices for a 35¢ mechanism?”
I wouldn’t mind having both… Well, this one seems to be quality so far, I guess I should say I wouldn’t mind having style and functionality together.
If I had the awesome watch, I would probably lose it within a week.
I guess that would be one of the few situations in which looking for it in the dark would actually be helpful.
Agreed.
Dear Nuclear Waste Guy on CSPAN,
I’m not like some people who hate seeing Comic Sans anywhere at all, I think it’s prefectly okay for things that are supposed to fun, silly, childlike, comic-book related or some combination thereof.
But it is really not appropriate for a presentation before Congress.
– Kai
Something I dislike about the internet is how it takes genuinely awesome things and metaphorically beats them to death, until no one wants to hear about them, and they’re associated with annoying people who try too hard to be crazy and random. Dinosaurs, ninjas, Harry Potter, bacon, Nutella, lightsabers, Pokemon, classic Disney movies, etc.
I know what you mean.
Last night I was procrastinating on something/taking care of other plans first, as I have been for most of the last few days. My mum said some insulting and mostly inaccurate things, so I decided to delay my plans and listen to “The Quantum World” as I’ve been planning to.
Download ALL the Symphony of Science videos(that I didn’t have)! Drool over ALL the physics! Check out ALL the physicists!
Hey peoples! I’m in England!
So hows it going? Anything new or anything interesting happening?
What has Cskia been up to? Has she said anything about me?Yes! She really, really misses you.
SWALAREOHAWK! *GLOMPS*
There’s been a lot of new cephalopodiness!
England is awesome, but the food (aside from curry) is mostly really bland and tasteless.
hey! how’s the weather there?
I’m in New York on the Hudson River!
Not currently on a boat, because we had too many passengers in this group and had to leave some people ashore, which is why I’m able to internet. But details.
It’s so good to be sailing again. It’s so, so, good.
You’re on the river without a boat? How do you manage that? I’d be in the river, I strongly suspect.
Maybe she’s a giant space basilisk lizard/water strider.
I’m actually 40% certain fern is actually a selkie or half-mermaid (I have seen her with legs but I SUSPECT a tail as well)
Must be a metamorph.
Seals and mermaids do tend to be in rather than on water, though. I suspect Kai’s onto something.
Or, rather, on to something (two words, as in “catch on [to what’s going on]”).
Sorry.
No need to apologize. We’re all here partly to learn things, aren’t we?
Besides, the language is changing. Fewer and fewer people are writing that someone is “on to” something, and more and more are writing “onto” in sentences like that. Eventually (actually fairly soon, I suspect) “onto” will be the standard, and nobody will remember “on to” except a few ancient GAPAs. Then we’ll die, and that will be that.
*bringing you more cheery thoughts about the future*
I wasn’t being gloomy; that’s how language changes. For example, my grandmother’s generation (which included a few of my elementary school teachers) insisted that one “is graduated from high school.” I grew up saying that one “graduates from high school,” which no doubt sounded barbaric to Grandmother. Now younger people say “graduates high school,” which sets my teeth on edge but sounds perfectly natural to them.
Or take the word “obsess.” Once upon a time within living memory (mine), either something could obsess you, or you could be obsessed with it. Then, around the early 1980s, a lot of people started saying that they were “obsessing on” things. The subject and object had switched places except for a tiny preposition, and that’s the dominant usage now. (In Soviet Russia, object of obsession obsesses you.) It still sounds odd to me, but I can either get used to it or get out of the way. Or go Elizabethan like Paul, I suppose.
I wasn’t referring to the changes in language—I’ve given that speech plenty of times myself over the years when the pedants started lowing—only to the tone of the comment itself, or as it sounded to me at the moment of reading. Perhaps I was just feeling too much like an ancient dead GAPA at that particular moment.
Oddly enough, I remember being told by someone as a kid that “graduates high school” was, in fact, the proper phrase and that adding “from” was a barbarism. But it was only a one-time encounter, and I can’t remember the source.
Maybe she can walk on water.
i’d think she’s either skiing, or walking on stepping stones going across the water
…hold up I live 20 feet away from a small lake what am I saying, why haven’t I been swimming all the time what am I doing here
Woke up at 4:30, gassed up the car and made small talk with the guy at the gas station, then drove to [college city]. Bought doughnuts, put them in the car, and walked six or seven blocks to my favorite coffee place. Took my breakfast to the forest I like to hike through. I think this was the thickest I’ve seen the woods there–it hasn’t been raining much lately, but I guess there’s enough moisture around the creek to let things grow pretty vivaciously. Some parts of the trail I didn’t even recognize. I hiked a few miles and then stopped on an old railroad bridge to take a break–my leg’s been hurting the past couple weeks, though the new arch supports seem to be helping quite a bit. Wrote a bit, read a bit, and then headed back. It’s a neat old bridge–back in 1894, a train went off the tracks there and killed eleven people, and the police discovered that the tracks had been intentionally sabotaged. The crime was never solved, and the bridge hasn’t been used since. But you can clamber up there and get a nice view of the creek and a break from the mosquitoes. The tension that’s been hanging over my head the past few days is gone now, thankfully. I hope it stays away.
You all are having too many Kokons. Don’t any of you ever come to Nebraska?
Intriguing. Sounds like the setup for a mystery story.
Played tennis this morning with my friend! It’s finally cooler this week so I’ve been able to actually go outside wihtout melting (the last time we played it ended up being 95º out by the time we finished x_x
also uhg trying to make PLANS and stuff and fitting everything in. And everything happens AT THE SAME TIME why D:
I beat Akinator five times in a row, which makes me feel very smart.
(Akinator is a website game where you think of a real or fictional character and a cartoon genie tries to figure out who it is 20 Questions style. It’s pretty sharp– it knows George Mallory and Hiram Bingham, but there are some people it doesn’t know, and I hit on five in a row.)
Whee, that’s fun! I wonder if he knows Crraw?
I just beat him with Swalot, one of my favorite PokemonI admit, I’m impressed. I’ve played programs like this before, but this is definitely one of the better ones.
SFTDP. It took two tries for it to get Jamie Hyneman from Mythbusters.
It guessed Professor Grubbly-Plank on the first try. It doesn’t know characters from obscure books, though.
It only took ten questions to get Jamie when I did it just now. xD
The series of questions which made me realize I was sunk:
“Is your character a TV host?”
“Does your character like building machines?”
“Does your character live in California?”
“Is your character bald?”
“Does your character have an iconic mustache?”
I was doing Lucas from Mother 3. It guessed Ness (Earthbound) and then its next question was “Does your character have blond hair?” Good one… Obviously it got Lucas on its next try.
I thought I had it with Zaphod Beeblebrox after it guessed Jorah Mormont but then question 29 was “Has your character ever run for president?” Then I knew I was sunk.
I am apparently the first person who has ever asked about Lorenzo Ghiberti.
Did you add en? When that happens, I like to not add them, because I like knowing there’s at least one person Akinator doesn’t know.
Interesting, I never thought of it that way. I did add him, but I’ll consider not adding people in the future. However, I think it’s also pretty cool to see how many other people also thought of the same obscure character/person that I did – I wouldn’t want to deny the next person to try him that strange sense of cosmic connection.
It’s weird, it got Gabrielle Giffords even though it marked two of my correct statements about her incorrect– she isn’t working anymore and she does wear glasses.
My encounters with trying various Musers/Muse-related things:
I did Robert, and it asked me “Has your character ever used a flamethrower?” That one stumped me, so I said Yes. Then it asked me if he was ever referred to as a chicken. I didn’t think Prussiania was very avian, so I said no. It guessed Slenderman. Congratulations, Robert.
Rebecca: Well, it guessed the bus driver from that bullying video that went viral. Figure that one out for yourself.
Rosanne: It asked me if she was a writer, and I thought it had her, until it asked if she liked dead things and then guessed Wendy Mass, the author of A Mango-Shaped Space.
Paul: Almost immediately, it asked me if he was associated with narwhals. So of course I said yes. Then it asked me if he had a mouth, and then if he fought with an instrument. Yes to both, obviously. At that point it said I’d defeated it, so I looked at the suggestions and said he was Merlin.
Hot pink bunny: It asked, “Is your character very small, yet dangerous?” Yes yes yes yes. “Does your character have the power to control people?” Yes. “Is your character an animal?” Yes! “Are you hoping to get together with your character?” Um. Then it guessed a chupacabra. Close.
I eventually did tell it what an HPB was. It asks for a name and a “simple indicator” so it won’t get it confused with homonyms; I said, “chartreuse lapine harbinger of DOOM”.
Someday Akinator will merge with Cleverbot to become the world’s biggest bore.
I guess a chupacabra is pretty close to an HPB. (Except that HPBs are real while chupacabras are mythological.)
Didn’t know Screwtape from The Screwtape Letters, but it did get Li Mu Bai from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which I thought was pretty impressive.
Ooh! Okay, a few rounds:
It got Eugenides (from books by Megan Whalen Turner) right on the second try. (I was shocked it knew him at all.)
It got Bloody Jacky Faber (from books by Louis A. Meyer.)
It got Howl Jenkins/Howell Jenkins/Howl Pendragon correct, but as the film character, rather than the Diana Wynne Jones book character.
I beat it with Lloyd Alexander’s Vesper Holly! Whoop! (It guessed characters unfamiliar to me, who seemed totally unlike Vesper.)
It did get Susan Sto Helit.
Okay, since I beat it with Vesper, I’ll wickedly pick another Lloyd Alexander character! A more obscure one! Keller, from the Westmark trilogy…. It guessed Butler from Artemis Fowl; Count Volger from Leviathan; and “The Persian” from Phantom of the Opera. Beat it!
Okay, if I want to beat Akinator, give it Lloyd Alexander characters.
It guesses Mr. Henshaw, which at the time that I tried it had 3 previous plays.
It also got Brigid Tenenbaum disturbingly quickly, with some really vague clues.
It guessed Harriet Vane on the first try; I was impressed.
mpressive! I think I beat it once last time. And as I recall, the list it gave me for another try did include my character (Bayta Darell from Foundation). It figured out Spock quite easily.
It guessed Cleverbot on the second try.
SFTDP: I did Pwt and it guessed a trollface.
I’ve been thinking about halloween costumes (it’s easiest for me to make them over the summer since I’ll be at school) and I think I’ve decided on Jesse from Team Rocket. Mostly because my friend at Oberlin has a pet boa constrictor that I can carry around and pretend is Ekans
Severus Snake isn’t purple but he will be awesome ♥ I could make him a purple/yellow sock but I don’t think he’d really like it hehe
I’ve had one volunteer for James so far… the idea there is to draw Koffing features on a purple balloon, hehe.
Great idea!
I’m working on a costume too, for my camp’s annual Time Traveler’s Ball. Though I’m still in the planning stages, I am pretty sure that I want to be a female scientist – probably Rosalind Franklin or Lise Meitner.
Oooh, Rosalind Franklin would be cool.
And your Jessie costume sounds sweet.
If I’m going to be Amelia Earhart like I was planning, I’ve already got the goggles, boots, and flying cap, and I can get the canvas pants and leather trenchcoat by rummaging through our closets when I get home.
Coincidentally enough, I was Amelia Earhart last year for the Time Traveler’s Ball!
I assume you’ve heard about the latest events in the search for the plane and her and Noonan’s bodies?
I’d heard some of it, but I’m with the NASM docents in doubting that they’ll find a smoking gun after this long.
I was thinking of taping Smarties onto my University of Minnesota sweatpants and topping it off with a U of M sweater and a Cat in the Hat hat BECAUSE I CAN. You get it?
… Your camp has a Time Travelers’ Ball?
KIDNAP ME
YOU ARE ALL CORDIALLY INVITED!
(I’m only half-kidding; last I heard there were one or two more spots available for registration. Anybody want to spend a week in eastern Washington?)
But seriously, if MuseBlog were a camp (by the way, Tess, when are we making that happen?), it would be like this camp. It has fantastic, intelligent people who can carry on great conversations, fun and quirky classes (mine this year are about knowing your rights, drawing with charcoal, and archaeology), and epic evening activities like the Time Traveler’s Ball, at which everybody including staff dresses up like time travelers or people from different eras, we eat a variety of food, and then we do dances from a bunch of different time periods – and everybody actually dances. (phew, that sentence finally ended!) It’s one of my favorite places/communities in the entire world.
That is a great idea! How will Meowth be played?
The boa constrictor might work out just as well as a Seviper, though, whose James counterpart is Cacnea/Carnivine, which may be preferrable to a balloon Koffing because there is a purple balloon Pokemon already (Drifloon). But those are just ideas, so.
Are you going to speak in rhyming couplets?
I will even try to suppress my hatred of puns to stay in character. I need to work on my Jesse-voice though XD
Last year someone I sort of know dressed up as Pikachu, and if I see anyone else doing the same I will CARRY THEM OFF and then set them down because I am small and it’s hard to carry people very far. Definitely also going to pop out of bushes/behind furniture
I already have the main motto memorized (got that down when I was 8), and I’m going to memorize the 2 variations on it they do in season 1 and possibly more from there ^^
Definitely going to memorize the one from Pokemon Fashion Flash because it’s funny:
Jessie: To protect the world from boring fashion!
James: To dress all people with flash and passion!
Jessie: To give all Pokémon pretty faces!
James: To extend our art to outer spaces!
Jessie: Jessie!
James: James!
Jessie: Salon Roquet! When it comes to chic we know what’s right!
James: Surrender your taste or prepare to fight!
Jesse: We’re Team Rocket and we fight for what’s wrong…
James: For mayhem, and madness, and rare pokemon
Jesse: Iiii’m so goreous
James: I’m always the man
(Ash’s mom): You’re just players in his master plan!
Jesse/James: Jealous?
TEAAAAAM ROCKET’S ROCKIN’
WALKIN’ TROUBLE
TALKIN’ TROUBLE
DOUBLE TROUBLE
BIG TROUBLE’S
GONNA FOOOLLLLOOOWW YOUUUU…
WE’VE CAPTURED PIIIKACHUUUU
…anyway. I have one volunteer to be James right now so there’s one person who might go with me at least!
Cskia: Not sure what to do about Meowth! Maybe there will be a volunteer? If so I could probably help with the costume for them if they needed it but I’m not sure who might want to do Meowth for us yet.
And I haven’t really seen the episodes with Seviper/Cacnea yet!! I am watching through pokemon right now but am still in season one (although I am 47 episodes in–over halfway through the season!!). That’s a thought though. I’m going to make the white-based Rocket uniform though, so if they have the dark colored ones by that season I probably will stick to Ekans.
Forgot to mention I made a pair of clip-on green half-sphere earrings for the costume. They’re a bit lighter than in the comic, but they were pieced together from parts in my box of costume jewlery so it’s not bad. I might go over them with a dark green nail polish to make them darker (but still shiny, unlike paitn).
How about your hair color?
I’ve been thinking about that. My hair is naturally medium dark brown, and waist length, so I’m good with length. I don’t like wigs because I don’t like buying expensive things and they feel weird on my head, also it’s hard to hide my hair under them because I have so much.
I’d consider dying my my hair semi-temporarily, but temporary dyes can last longer than expected… and my hair is so long it would take forever to grow out. I’m not sure about one-wash removal dyes (basically like painting your hair) because it would get all over everything and the costume is mostly white x_x
Mel suggested getting an ombre (hair is natural colored at roots, fades to lighter color at tips) with the pinkish purple color because then it would grow out faster and wouldn’t look bad growing out since the roots stay the same but I am afraid of having my hair dyed permanently, especially because my hair’s dark enough that bleach would be required and I get afraid all my hair will fall out.
On the other hand, this is the one time I will be in college and not have to worry about my hair being weird colors for jobs and professional reasons and what not, and I’d like to do fun things with color to it sometime in my life.
What I have done in the past (oddly enough) is use colored markers to give myself colored streaks, which worked WEIRDLY WELL but that was when my hair was lighter and also that would be a lot of markers.
TL;DR I am not sure about hair yet! I have NO clue on how to make it that shape. My hair is naturally straight and I don’t think hairspray could hold that form together…
Maybe you’ll just have to go for it and be Jessie forever.
ALSO AN OPTION
That sounds awesome!
As far as I’ve seen, they’re always in the white Rocket uniforms, not the black ones, so don’t worry about that. I hope you find a volunteer to be the Meowth! I really love that cat.
Haven’t seen Pokemon, but anything involving a live snake has to be awesome.
I’m going to be the Space Core from Portal 2. Black T-shirt with the yellow eye painted on the front and “Aperture Science Space Core” on the back, layered over a long-sleeved yellow shirt, with silver bracelets and either goggles or aviator sunglasses. My only worry is possibly dying of heat exhaustion in the layered shirts …
If you’re worried about heat, you can always cut the sleeves off a cheap yellow shirt and tape the duct tops to the inside of your portal shirt! Same effect, less actual layers and heat stroke.
I’m taking a programming class (Java) and it’s actually a lot more fun than I anticipated! All that fiddling around with TI-83 calculator programming in middle school kind of paid off.
I like that you like Java! I like Java too!
I’m going to an Android workshop this summer (in basically a week :DDD) and then when I get back I want to take an APL class that’s being held locally. I’m also building myself a website in HTML and CSS (and a little PHP). So those are my languages for this summer. (Android’s basically Java and XML though.)
I’d like to go to Java, but it’s very far away.
(Yes, that was a joke.)
I might go to computer science camp this year. Fingers crossed!
I spent much of today running down hills in San Francisco, waving a scarf around and singing Bollywood songs.
San Francisco story: while walking down a street near Ghirardelli Square, I saw one of those orange LED traffic signs- they usually flash things like, “Construction ahead; use left lane.” This one was flashing, “Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
And finally, I bring you the greatest way to get a black eye ever: I walked into this huge, beautiful Catholic church- full of stained glass and carvings and a gold altar at the front- and the woman next to me, who happened to be wearing a lot of large rings, crossed herself very emphatically, and her hand hit me in the face.
Today was just one of those days when the wind is blowing your hair in all directions, and it’s worth walking up the steepest hills you can find just for the view, and street performers give you violin advice, and signs flash Macbeth quotes at you. Plus, I think I have a new Funniest Injury story.
You have increasingly ridiculous encounters with the religiously affiliated.
I heard there was one in Texas that flashed “WARNING, RAPTORS AHEAD”
Maybe you should stand farther away from strangers.
I’ve officially finished watching all of the Lord of the Rings movies! I finally see what the big deal is about LotR…I’d read the first book before, but it failed to captivate me. Also, what is up with Frodo and Sam? There was so much bromance. And opportunities for slash. I think there were about five times in the last movie alone where I thought they were going to kiss. Even if Sam did get married. Whatever.
I dyed my hair with henna a couple days ago; it’s red now. Has anyone ever had any experience with henna? It’s cool but I don’t really get how to do body art with it.
I got a small henna tattoo at the Festival of Nations on the inside of my wrist for three bucks.It was about the size of a fifty-cent piece. to get a tattoo you just draw a pattern with a tube of henna. It also will have to dry. When it’s dry you can flick it off. That part felt weirdly satisfying.
Yeah, and the Internet took all those oppprtunties for slash and ran with them.
Henna is one of the funnest substances ever! So, I know for hair-dying purposes it usually comes in powder form, but for body art, you want the kind of henna paste that comes in a cone or tube. It’s available at a lot of Indian and Middle-Eastern shops. Basically, you just squeeze the henna paste out of the tip of the cone in various designs on your skin, like you’re frosting a message onto a cake (you may want to draw them on first with a pencil dipped in water, or there’s a trick where you can print out a design, trace it onto wax paper, rub deodorant onto it, and then press it onto your skin to use as a guide).
After you’ve applied the paste, let it dry fir a couple of minutes and then squeeze lemon juice onto it (that makes the design darker). You should leave it on at least a few hours, but I highly recommend overnight. You can scrub off the dried henna with water, and then you should dry your skin and rub olive oil onto it. Don’t ask me why, but it works. The design should last for up to a month.
Henna for body art is quite simple! I have some poweder in my room right now, ust waiting for a good time to make some to do tattoos with.
Henna for hair dye is usually to large-grained to use as body art henna, which is typically a much finer powder.
To make your own paste from the powder, you mix the powder with a mixture of water/sugar/lemon juice (or any other acidic liquid–I prefer lemon juice, but in a pinch have made it with extra-strong tea in place of the water/juice mix). The more acidic the juice and the more you use, the quicker the henna will be ready. The trick to henna is to apply it during it’s “dye release.” That’s when the pigments seep out of the plant matter, and if on you, soak into your skin. Warmer temperatures and acidity accelerate the dye release. To keep henna paste from going bad, sticking it in the fridge/freezer when not in use will keep the dye release period open longer. The powder should be mixed with parts lemon juice and water, with about a tablespoon of sugar (which helps make the paste smoother), until it reaches the consistency and smoothness of toothpaste. The aim is to get a mixture that’s liquid enough to be easy to pipet out of a tube or bag but solid enough to hold the design you want without dripping or smearing.
Henna is a lot of fun! I get small bags of powder from a bead store in my college town. The lady who runs the store makes several trips to India every year and it’s one of the supplies she brings back. It’s good quality and very cheap–$5 for a bag that gives me two small bottles worth, enough for about 50 tattoos. I usually mix half at a time, because if I’m doing henna It’s usually for a fundraiser (I always offer to sell henna tattoos rather than bake things to sell, and we raise a LOT of money by selling small ones for $3 and larger for $5. Everyone’s been very happy with them that I can tell!)
Like Choklit orange said, dabbing lemon juice on a dry design darkens it, because you’re stimulating the dye to release even faster when it’s already on your skin.
What everyone else said. I’ve done henna lots of times, but never my hair. I think I’ll try it soon though.
I squeed when I saw this post, so I guess I’m a fangirl now. I see where all the Sam/Frodo comes from, though I don’t actually ship them. For the movies, Aragorn and Legolas are hot together, and Google seems to agree. I’ve started Return of the King, and still ship Legolas/Gimli. I have a thing for elves I guess?
Prussia, Choklit, Jadestone, FantasyFan: Interesting, thank you. I tried to do body art, using a powder-lemon juice paste, and I think I did do things right. I may have not gotten the right consistency, though–it ran a little, and was hard to work with.
Maths Lover– I agree. Legolas is one of the most attractive humans I have ever set eyes upon.
Except for the tiny fact that he isn’t human.
I meant the actor, but I wrote Legolas instead. *Typo face*
Your original statement is still true if you change “humans” to “humanoids”.
Or “Children of Ilúvatar”. That would exclude dwarves and hobbits, though; I don’t if that changes things or not.
Holy cake. Leaving for 2 week overnight camp tomorrow. In Canada. Holy cake holy cake holy cake holy cake. *panic attack*
Mmmmm, mom got a gift card to one of those fancy cupcake places, and now I am eating some! Well, splitting iwht my sister, so half a pink lemonade cupcake (it has gold glitter on top!) and dutch chocolate.
Just ate the lemonade one, and am starting on the chocolate. Mmmm.
Nom nom nom… Wait, pink? Uh oh.
Mars Day at NASM was incredibly fun! Got to talk to so many scientists, touch meteorites, and look at 3-D images! And they added a *ton* of new stuff to the Moving Beyond Earth gallery since last Sunday.
Off to a beach/lake for the day! I’ve got my book and my pokemon game, so I’m all set XD
but also actually I’m excited to possibly try waterskiing, I’ve never done it before
Beach/lake yes! I just returned from my first swim on northern Lake Michigan — the water is so warm and beautiful this summer!
Just got back from music camp! Well, I got back last night.
So there was this sign on one of the doors in our dorm, and it said “Keep Calm and Blame [Fred]”. Hippie and I (who were rooming together) thought that was really funny because [Fred] is the first name of the Musical Overachiever, who, despite being a really great guy, is hard not to hold a grudge on because of his extreme musical over achievement. (First chair all-state bassoon, etc…) We thought that was funny, and then a few days later I looked at the sign up close and saw that there was a picture of a bassoon on top of the sign. Hippie and I were laughing so hard at this.
Then I asked one of the girls who lived in that room what the sign meant, and she said, “[Musical Overachiever]! He’s a better bassoonist than me and he beat me into All-State!!” Hippie and I were in hysterics. We told the girl that he went to our school.
Hooray for gelato! And our band director was really funny.
Sounds like you had a lot of fun!
So I am considering doing the buying thing to a Canon Rebel T2i. I’ve used them before and I quite like them. Does anyone here have experience with them? Any crippling problems with it? Recommended lenses? Best place to buy one?
The Canon Rebel series is the official camera of MuseBlog.
Mine’s a T2i; I’ve been very happy with it so far. Was there something specific you wanted to know?
What lens would you recommend to me as a beginner, and should I go with the T2i? A pros and cons list would be quite nice if you have the time. I trust you far more than I trust Amazon reviews.
I don’t know very much about cameras in terms of hardware. I can use a manual camera, I can take a decent picture, and I’m looking to learn how to do it better anyway, so it’s a pretty good investment.
As stated above, though, I don’t know very much about lenses and bodies. I understand the basic concept of lenses – some are wide-angle, some aren’t, some are designed for very close photography, some for far, but I wouldn’t really know what was what if someone handed me two different lenses.
The lens that comes with it is a pretty decent zoom lens, that dials to a wider angle than even my old film SLR had. This was very handy for photographing the small rooms at the museum where I used to work. I also bought the telephoto zoom as part of a package deal. That was worth it to me because I photograph a lot of zoo animals and birds. Anything more specialized than that is not in my budget at present.
I’d heard good things from Jadestone about her camera–the one that kicked off the Canon brigade–but that model wasn’t available at Christmas when I was buying, so this was the closest match. The main difference is that the T2i has video. The point-and-shoot camera I already had was also a Canon, and I wanted to stick with the brand since the labeling conventions were already familiar. In general I’ve found that the layout of Canon’s controls is more logical than other brands I’ve played with, and I can manage it with one hand when necessary. Further research didn’t point out any significant advantages among other brands that would persuade me to switch.
I haven’t encountered any serious cons. I’ve taken thousands of photos in all sorts of lighting conditions, and the camera hasn’t let me down yet. The battery held its charge through a full day at the National Zoo during which I took over a thousand photos. When I was doing the research, I noticed some other brands had a few bells and whistles the Canon didn’t, but I’ve forgotten what they were and haven’t missed them. The multitude of of controls, menus, and stuff to keep in mind can be a little intimidating at first. That’s probably true of any dSLR, though. For me, it helped that I’ve always used manual settings instead of automatic, so I knew my way around the fundamentals.
Anyway, that’s my basic take. I’ve been very happy with the camera and very glad to be able to shoot in raw at last. With the raw format Photoshop and Lightroom can really bring out the best in a good photo and sometimes even perform miracles on photos that were taken with the wrong settings.
I have a Rebel T3i, and I think the T2i makes an excellent beginner’s camera. Rebecca’s experience has been true for me as well, although I’ve done a lot more flat art reproduction than wildlife. If you can shoot in RAW and there’s room for expansion, I don’t really think a lot of the minor details camera manufacturers brag about matter.
I have a Canon Rebel XS, which works great for me. Do you have a local camera/photography store? If they don’t carry them, they would probably know a good place to get them (online, too). I just use the kit lens, but Fiddler has a really cool fisheye lens that I’m sure she’d love to tell you all about (when she’s done sailing, of course). Jadestone has the Rebel XS, too. Join the club!
I have the same camera as Jade and Pan (the Rebel XS), and yes, I have the kit lens and also a fisheye lens that I got from Lensbaby. I really wanted a fisheye and it was the most affordable one. I like it a lot, it’s really fun to use. I’ll probably see about getting a zoom lens next.
WOOO CANON CLUB
I, Panda, Rebecca, Fern, Allegra(Kiki) all have Canons in the Rebel line. Mine’s an XS.
Rebecca said most things I wanted to say?
Lenses: If you are getting the kit lens and the zoom that seems to come with most canon bodies I’ve seen being sold, I would stick to those for a while.
The main lens is pretty quality, you won’t get one wiht noticably better quality unless you are willing to shell out the big bucks for professional ones. It’s worked well for me for portaits and some macro work. Mine focuses wonderfully at close range, better than I expected for a not-actually-macro lens.
And the zoom is AWESOME. Take that thing out at night and look at the moon with it. You won’t be able to get good moon-pictures with it unless it’s carefully adjusted for time and on a tripod like all cameras but it lets you see details equivalent to binoculars. I find it really useful.
I would only suggest buying more lenses AFTER you plan around wiht the ones you get with the body (assuming they come with it, and if not, I recomend these two/can give you more details). Wait until you really know what kinds of pictures you’re going to be taking, and what you really need a lens for that these can’t do.
ALSO if you want an exposition on ISO/shutterspeed/other things in the manual mode I can type up a monster post on them.
Also I haven’t tried the 2Ti, but it doesn’t sound much different from the XS apart from video.
That would be very nice. I took a photography class a while back, so I have a pretty basic idea of aperture, ISO and shutter speed and their relation to each other, but I’d still rather hear it from you than somewhere else on the internets.
Alright I’ve gotta eat/mom’s draging me to the mall for shoes but I’ll work on a post later today
Someday there needs to be a kokanonkon.
Ahaha yes please!! There would be so much documentation of the event!
Agreed!
This morning I attended an Eco-restoration workday at a park to remove invasive species. This isn’t my first weed-out, but it was my first time working with woody shrubs like honeysuckle and buckthorn, using those lopper things and saws.
Hoo boy. Was it ever hard work. At first I was just using the loppers, which wasn’t that difficult, and only targeting the smaller shrubs. But about halfway through, after our break, I included myself in the “experienced volunteer” group and split off with about three other guys to finish up the stretch we were working on while the other, larger group of people headed off in another direction. It was then that I had to start sawing through honeysuckle as thick as my fist. One of the other guys gave me tips–don’t cut all the way through, just halfway, and then lean on the branch until it splits. Then cut the thinner part. Mind you, in one case I was hanging like a monkey form on of the trees and it still wouldn’t split and fall.
I apparently earned the respect of the people I was working with, whcih makes me proud. Not everyone comes to these things and actually works. wI can get that, because in all honesty I liked working with the second group better. Some of the other people…I guess they were there with a group or something, but they were complaining about the littlest things. Seriously, why are you volunteering outside if you are that scared of spiders? And complaining about bugs in their hair, and how sweaty they were, and all of that stuff is to be expected when cutting brush int he woods, so why did you come if you hate it so much?
One incident comes to mind. Someone jabbed me in the back. Why? To warn me away form the spider. I look down. There’s this daddy long legs about a foot away. Me: -_-‘ You bothered me for this. That type of behavior doesn’t get that much–I dunno–respect or patience from me. I try. But I worked alone for much of the first half. It was easier that way.
Then when I got home I slept for four hours, because I’d had to get up about four hours earlier than I usually do. My biological clock is pretty good at making up the exact time I missed in naps.
Wooo! Successful Soyuz launch!
I had the good fortune of spending some time today with a red-tailed hawk. Not Red-tailed HAWK, just one of his feathered cousins. MuseBlog reminders seem to follow me around…
There’s a red-tailed hawk that lives around our house and eats squirrels.
Whoops, haven’t been on this computer in forever. -__-
A trio of Cooper’s hawks decided to hang out in our backyard the other day. One of them was munching on some tasty little animal, but the other two were still looking for a meal. All of the other animals seemed to disappear pretty quickly when the hawks arrived.
103- Hawks! Awesome! Was it just hanging about near you, or was it in a rehabilitation place or something?
The lake house was fun! I tried tubing and it was cool. My first attempt, the rope broke after a sharp turn and I fell off, but the second try I made it all the way around the lake which was cool. Also watched the Aquanauts waterskiing show for a bit and spent lots of time in boats. Yay!
The day started with a poetry workshop at the NC Zoo, led by the week’s poet-in-residence who was also invited to read one of his poems in conjunction with a keeper’s talk. We stood only a few feet away from the bird—named Braveheart—and the talk lasted almost half an hour, allowing us to get a really close look at him.
Tubing! Tubing is so fun. My friend goes to a camp on a lake, and sometimes we go tubing. It’s awesome.
6AM fiddling on the roof tomorrow followed by Anonymous Neighborhood Distribution of Surplus Zucchinis and cookies!
I imagine it must be kind of unpleasant to live in the same city as me.
That sounds like the opposite of unpleasant.
You would think that until you saw the pile of zucchinis I need to get rid of. I don’t know if we even have enough neighbors.
I sympathize, my friend.
Uck, don’t talk about zucchinis. When I went to science camp, I had a bag of zucchini slices for lunch one day, I had one and hated it. So I put the baggie in the little pocket of my new backpack, and left it there for a week. BIG MISTAKE. I almost had to throw away the backpack.
Could you donate some to a nearby food bank, or are the rules too strict at the one(s) near you? What about selling it over the Internet to people far away who lack zucchini-growing neighbors?
Almost, but not quite entirely unlike unpleasantness.
I am currently trying to bake an approximation of a batch of oatmeal-raisin cookies using a bunch of overcooked quinoa and some rather old dried blueberries as my main ingredients (I’m not supposed to eat raisins, and we just had a bunch of leftover quinoa that needed using up). I’m not quite sure yet whether they’re going to be a rousing success or a complete disaster. Using no nuts or oil might have been a bad idea; I shall report back when I can tell what they’ve turned into.
hi guys!!! it’s lilly who changed her name
sorry i havn’t been on in such a long time. Mom was going through and deleting some bookmarks we didn’t need and accidentally deleted Museblog. now i was kind of sad so we searched but some other site was ALSO called museblog so that kept coming up. then i was going through one of my old Muse Magazines and came up with the link! i am happy to be back on here! Basementkitten i see you changed your gravitar! it’s neat. just in case you forgot about me i had many names… “Catwoman” “BattleCatra” and “Lilly C. Cat” i am now Catwings The Winged Cat. in case you are wondering No i did not finish the squid (cats are lazy that way) i didn’t even get the stuffing yet. still on the tenticles, ‘better get out meh sewing kit and get worki’n ‘eh?
glad to B back!
purr purr purr
Welcome back, Catwings!
Welcome back! And for future reference, MuseBlog can’t be google searched and museblog dot com will redirect you to the actual site.
i didn’t google it. i have Yahoo Search installed on my computer.
thanks anyway.
It can’t be Yahoo’ed either; the GAPAs make an active effort to hide us from the greater Internet so that the general unpleasantness that tends to reign unchallenged there doesn’t find its way into our community unless we bring it ourselves. We’re sort of like Lothlorien that way.
It can’t be Anything’ed, as a matter of fact.
It can only be found by those who already know where it is.
“If you have to ask, you’ll never know. If you know, you need only ask.”
Today I went to a music festival in my town. It was fun. Loud, maybe, but fun. Some really good people played–it was mostly blues, but there was a good portion of rock, too. Has anyone ever heard of Ana Popovic? She played; in my opinion, she was the best.There was a street festival yesterday night too, where a bunch of bands played in the street. It went past midnight. IPicture a giant, town-wide dance party. Actually, bigger than town-wide, because people come from all over the state for this festival, if not all over the Northeast. Though the crowd wasn’t huge this year. Anyway, it was exciting and stuff.
sounds cool! i don’t go to many concerts. i went to one yesterday though! it was really fun (no, no one famous)
GAPA’s please consider this carefully…
maybe we could have a “storybook” thread (like “Bunny Apocalypse” and the ever famous “Great Pie War”) for instance
someone on this thread could post something like this:
.
as i run away from the (pink creatures or pies) i could hear my heart beat as i ran. my partner (me for instance) Catwings flew oferhead dodging (pies or pink-cannons) as i run through the fog we come across an abandoned ghost town. trying to lose (P throwers or HPBs) we both duck into a barber shop. the (PT/HPB) walk right passed us. we were safe… for now.
so what do you think? (bloggers reply if you like the idea)
Catwings:
This sounds like what we call a “Round-Robin ‘Riting” (RRR) thread. You can find other example by searching on the blog. We haven’t had one for a while, but they were fun. Is that what you have in mind?
yes! exactly! another RRR thread would be nice! maybe another pie war or something!
I looked into the Oval Office today!
Let me guess…it’s an oval. Cool!
Anyway I made a squid today! It is almost too cute for words cute. Will send pics ASAP.
Picking out curtains?
The RA at our building works in the White House, and she’s authorized to give West Wing tours on days when the President isn’t in, so she gave a tour to some of us from the BU DC program.
When I turn 26 (and a bit), I will have been on MB/the Gaboomba for half my life.
Wow.
Wow
29 for me.
I don’t want to think that far ahead…
About 19 or 20 for me.
22 for me.
I’m already at more than a third, which is cool.
Well, it won’t take me long to get to 26. I’m 22 now.
im 10… i am a baby
Don’t worry. I’m almost 13.
just like my friend Jennifer. she’s 13 but i think… you are a boy arn’t you
no
oh…
then you are a girl then… right?
I came here a month or so before my 12th birthday, and I turn 14 in 2 hours, 13 minutes (and counting). I guess I’ll be almost 24…
It’ll be twenty-six for me.
Twenty-eight for me. That’s what happens when you wait until you’re fourteen to find MB, I guess.
23, I guess.
I thought you were almost 13? If you were 12 when you first arrived, you’d be 24 when you’ve been here half your life.
I was on here a bit a few years ago. Does that count as a half year?
Oh–maybe so. Never mind.
Only 18-19 here!
i here is some possibilities for the month!:
chajuly (chad)
juranuly (urania)
buly (bo)
that’s all i can think of now
We’ve already used Urania, but that may have been before you were on MuseBlog. As for the 3 Muses left (Chad, Bo, and Mimi), R101 and I had a discussion at https://musefanpage.com/blog/?p=11985#comment-459387.
WOOO
80 episodes of pokemon season one down
2 TO GO
gonna finish tonight and then I dunno probably start season two
awww yeah I’m a cool kid for SURE
I KNOW
I’LL USE MY TRUSTY FRYING PAN
AS A DRYING PAN
AND THEN YOU REMEMBER BROCK IS STILL THE MOST SANE AND COMPOSED OF THE LOT
bookgirl_me: I’m back in Vienna! And, more importantly, I just met Selenium!
Selenium: We’ve just had a very nice walk in the park; Vienna is a lovely city. This must be the first European Kokon, I think, which is very exciting for both of us!
bookgirl: Yes, it’s pretty awesome. (Now that we’ve cleared up a misunderstanding about times and I don’t have to explain to her dad that I haven’t kidnapped her. Phew)
Selenium: I’m having quite a lot of difficulty with this Austrian keyboard, but anyway, bookgirl is even lovelier in person!
bookgirl_me: Yes, next time I should probably finagle a computer from non-austrian relatives/acquaintances/victims. Selenium is even more flamablamablous than I thought possible!
Selenium: I feel very lucky to have been able to meet members of the MB community on three different continents!
bookgirl_me: So, we kind of have to run now (kidnapping charges and somehow I ended up with someone else’s cell phone and they want it back) but you know, Vienna is a great place to visit *hinthint*
Selenium: To put it less subtly, come to Vienna and meet bookgirl, she’s definitely worth meeting!
bookgirl_me: And buy another plane ticket for Selenium so that she can come too! Now, to find the ever-elusive preview button that keeps trying to hide from me…
A squid on a kokon post?! Is squidding me some sort of thing now? I thought that privilege was all Piggy’s.
Hey, it’s celebratory! Actually it was completely accidental.
In that case, face heel turn, yay!
SFTDP:
Oops, sorry, wrong comment in the wrong place. What I wanted to say here was that of course squids are welcome!
AAAAAAAHHHH my day is made.
I’m so glad this happened. Both of you are absolutely wondrous people.
Wow, awesome!
What are Austrian keyboards like?
i think they are in a diffrent language
They speak German in Austria, so the keys like ‘shift’ and ‘page down’ would be hard to figure out if you don’t remember where they are on the keyboard. There aren’t too many of those necessary for typing, though, so that probably isn’t all. The German alphabet is the same as the English one (the letters make different sounds, and they have different names, but they look the same and are in the same order), so most keys would be the same. Maybe the keys are in different places! Even in America, there are different ways of putting the keys; most of us use the one whose front row begins with QWERTY, but some use one whose front row begins with DVORAK. I’ve heard that the switch is confusing; that and shift keys labeled something else would be doubly so. I’m just speculating, though, because I’m in a very speculative mood; I might be completely wrong.
Close, very close. Actually, German has four more sort-of-but-not really letters: ä, ö, ü and ß; ß is on the ? key, ö and ä are where , and . usually are and ü is next to P: also, are on the same key (dunno if that’s the same on US keyboards).
To add to the confusion, z and y are switched, because “y” is a pretty uncommon letter in German, so I technically have a QWERTZ keyboard. Perhaps there are more differences, but, quite honestly, I’ve always had computers with German keyboards so I hardly noticed.
But yes, in a way, Bibliophile is correct. Technically, since ö is oe, we use and learn the same alphabet: the words that start with umlauts are just in the sections of the letter of the umlaut. For example, in my dictionary, Österreich is right between Osternacht and Osterschinken. Since no words start with ß, it doesn’t really have a place in the alphabet. It sort of evolved from the old way of writing sz or sf in cursive and is just basically one of the three was to pronounce the letter s (s, ss, ß).
Yep, German spelling can sound whacky, but in exchange you pronounce it the way you spell it and (theoretically) spell it the way you pronounce it (except when your regional accent muddles the pronunciation).
</things you never wanted to know about the German alphabet
Anyhow, I'm starting to learn how to write in old German cursive, i.e. even more illegibly than ever before. And, believe it or not, they didn't yet have a letter for "s" (there were two shorthand combinations for the different types of ß) or any captial umlauts, using Oe instead of Ö.
Does anyone write legibly in old German cursive? From what I remember of my German professor’s demonstration, the letters were indistinguishable except by whether they had ascenders or descenders.
I don’t really think it’s meant to be legible… But since attention to detail has never been my strong suit, m, n, e and r are a sort of completely indistinguishable sideways zig-zag. On the other hand, this is probably a pretty foolproof way of making sure no-one reads my diary. Including me, unfortunately.
SFTDP:
For some reason, “Elephant” looks a lot like “Gormenghast”.
…I think I’m doing something wrong.
My aunt speaks German. I’m really glad it’s related to English
Actually Dvorak isn’t the way the keys are laid out – it’s named after the guy who came up with him.
Fun fact: Dvorak the keyboard layout isn’t pronounced Duh-vor-zhahck like the composer, it’s pronounced Duh-vor-ack.
today’s plans:
stay up untill morning and go for a morning hike with the dew.
take a nap untill i catch up with my sleep.
work on Bob The Squid.
bake something… anything! (getting sick of not baking for awhile i need to be in the kitchen).
watch TV for awhile.
go on some of my favorite websites for awhile.
when dad goes to town imediately expect Dad to bring me something.
eat what i’ve baked.
watch TV sommore.
stay up untill morning again.
there’s my whole day planned! now you know what i do for a living
That sounds pleasant!
I’m off to Indiana for a week! Bye, MuseBlog!
Good-bye! I hope you have a nice time!
I’m going to Louisiana tomorrow with my church! We are driving, so we’ll have to stay somewhere in Alabama for the night, but that’ll allow me to add two more states to my list of states I’ve been in!
Downside: I have to be at my church at 6 a.m. tomorrow and no MuseBlog.
I’ll probably sleep on the bus.
Browsing steampunk items online.
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
I always kick myself because nothing I hand-make ever looks that good… and how do they even find those parts?
If you do it for a living, you have lots of practice, lots of parts, and lots of tools. Whereas everybody else finds charm in things that look homemade. Don’t give up!
My hat is nice, I like it pretty well, but compared to what I’ve seen other people do, it just looks shabby. I do have a pin I want to make as soon as I get home that I think has a chance of turning out okay, though.
I am attempting to teach myself to use MS Paint with an actual mouse instead of a touchpad… Eep.
Yesterday, I was so focused on logic and rationality that I didn’t get around to visiting MuseBlog at all. I had finally gotten around to reading Eliezer Yudkowsky (the author of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality)’s intuitive explanation of Bayesian reasoning, you see. It was very helpful, except that there was a part that I couldn’t understand because it involved logarithms. I’ve only taken math up to Algebra 1 so far, you see, and he kind of assumed everyone could find the logarithm of a ratio even if the base was 10 and the ratio was something like 8:25–could someone please explain that, by the way? It seems really important for a lot of common, important probability situations, but no-one in my immediate family could give me any information. The math I could do took forever, but it was really fulfilling, definitely worth it. I learned so much!
I also went outside that day. I was delighted to find a live, uninjured, adult cicada in plain view! I hear cicadas in my yard all the time, but they’ve all been hidden. The few adults I do see are injured or dead (and they always happen to have been hit by cars or something similar, so not only am I sad to see they’ve died, the corpse isn’t even in good enough condition to go in my natural objects collection. This one looked completely fine, and it was right there on a tree in plain view, so that was delightful. It didn’t even try to flee when I stroked it (but it was capable of such movement, because I saw it walking around afterward). I stared at it for probably at least an hour; it was really fascinating.
This morning, I went to the natural history museum. It was amazing; I’d been there before, of course, but because it was my birthday, I could go wherever I liked without having to hurry because other people were bored. I spent most of my time in the Hall of Paleontology. I learned a plethora of minutiae, and it was just awe-inspiring to realize that the amazing world around me, in all its splendor and beauty, comes from a completely different one millions of years ago that was incredibly different but equally beautiful–and that comes from the time period before that, and so on. The world is different in each moment, and it may not seem like much if you only watch a lifetime’s worth of worlds, but if you can investigate what it was like before, it’s just incredible. And you’re a part of it now, but you couldn’t have came into being if not for infinite past events that in themselves may seem insignificant, the vast majority of which you don’t even know about, so all of it affected you, personally; “there’s an unbroken thread that stretches from those first cells to us.” And if you go back to a part of the thread that branched off, you’ll find something new that you also are connected to, and in fact, there is nothing that you cannot get to if you turn at all the right places in the forks in the thread, and this is getting to be an awful metaphor, but I don’t even care. “We are all connected: to each other, biologically, to the Earth, chemically, to the rest of the universe, atomically.” (And yes, I have been listening to Symphony of Science lately, and yes, pretty much everything at the museum reminded me of at least one of its songs. I was sorely tempted to sing them all then and there at the top of my lungs, but I don’t know all the words).
Also, I knew college students get discounts, but apparently, they define ‘college student’ as ‘someone who is taking any classes whatsoever at any institution of higher learning and has received an ID from that institution’. I’m going to an early college high school next year, and I’ll start taking classes right away. I’ll get an ID before school even starts, so the discount will apply to me! It’s not my money that’ll be saved (that’s too selfish, and I shouldn’t think that way, but I’m working on it, and in the meantime, I might as well be honest about it), and I doubt it’ll mean I can go much more often, but how many 14-year-olds get museum discounts for being college students? It’s just an awesome concept.
Anyway, I’m not allowed to open anything until my dad comes home, but I was allowed to open the one from my immediate family because the money they were going to give me was in a separate container. (I’m saving up for a really amazing but really expensive summer camp in somewhere like Maine or Costa Rica, so I asked for money instead of gifts). It was very sweet; the note from my brother was especially nice because the things he described are exactly how I feel about him.
I also was given permission to open my grandmother’s card because there was a possibility she would call me (she already has, now), and we thought it’d be convenient if I could thank her for her card and money when she did. She gave me 100 dollars, which is really nice, and I’m delighted! The message itself, though, is a bit strange. She invited me to visit her, but she says not to bring a book. I don’t know why she cares about that, since it isn’t as if I read it instead of talking to her. It’s actually possible that there isn’t a reason; she has schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, so she sometimes says things that are even more illogical than the things said by most people. She also sometimes hallucinates and gets false memories, usually negative ones; maybe she thinks that I was ignoring her the last time I visited, in which case her remark would make perfect sense. I… don’t think I can do it, though. I can’t know that something unsettling won’t occur when I go on a trip, and it is extremely comforting for me to have a book in my hand. My mother says that it’s alright, that I can bring a book when I visit. I certainly intend to do so, but I hope she isn’t offended.
All in all, though, it’s been an excellent day so far! I am really looking forward to my dad’s arrival, but I’ve plenty of enjoyable things to do in the meantime.
Sounds like your birthday was quite flammy.
um exuse me…
could some of you people explain what your user-names are all about? some of them i don’t understand the meaning of. a TV show? science? i don’t know.
for inctance
Biblophile. i never heard that word untill i came to museblog
and Dodecahedron… yours either
*Cskia yours too
Mikazuki (wasn’t it something else before?)
Selenium… you too!
everyone else has names i can understand (Bookgirl, Castle, Jadestone, Agent lightning/hippie) y’know
I suggest starting with a dictionary.
Bibliophile: A person who loves books
Dodecahedron: A twelve-sided object
thank you
Post-holer: for digging holes for posts
when i read this in the recent comments sidebar at first i thought you said “Biblophile: a person who loves Dodecahedron”
Hey, I love dodeca too!
I feel so loved ♥ love you too!
ps: A dodecahedron is a three dimensional shape with twelve sides — like a twelve sided die, for example. Other shapes can have twelve sides as well. For example, the dodecagon is a two dimensional shape with twelve sides — like a stop sign would look if it had 12 sides instead of 8.
Yes the 3d aspect was what I was going for with “object,” but even then that word’s a bit ambiguous.
Might I say I love the prefix dodeca-?
Well, your name strongly implies that you, too, are a bibliophile, even if you can’t be the one.
I would like to make it quite clear that my name is not derived from the show Castle. I have only ever seen one episode.
My name came about as a desire to change from eragon, the original name I picked because I had just finished the first book in the Eragon series and was short on imagination. I had just finished watching an episode of The Simpsons or something, and I saw the very end of a Castle (the very first episode) teaser.
That is where the inspiration for my name comes from. Interestingly, it’s one of the few things that I’ve ever chosen for myself that I still feel reflects a part of me despite being arbitrary at the time and despite me picking it years ago. I usually tire of my username after a matter of months.
Castle, however, has really stuck with me everywhere I go. I use it on everything I can, and sometimes with an HCP tacked onto the end if Castle is already taken (that acronym actually started out with meaning behind it).
Aaaah, names.
I think I have a pseudonym with rather blurry origins, since I did splice it together. The original idea was that skia is Greek for “dark,” and skia was also close enough to “sky” to remind me of that. (I was very very fond of Hades and Hermes, as well as Dark and Flying Pokemon.) Then C is my favorite letter (I came to the blog as Crazy Titan Nerd, which later became CTN) so I added that to the beginning of the pseudonym and decided it would be a silent consonant.
The little asterisk is just a symbol in front of the name. Every time I return from a hiatus from MuseBlog it gets changed, and I just haven’t left since the asterisk came along, so. Plus it looks shiny/fluffy/cute.
I have to say, though, for a name, I really identify with Cskia more than CTN for some reason. Cskia makes me think of blue sky and white clouds and peacefulness and trees and life, whereas CTN reminds me of orange orange orange green aliens orange. CTN had a really nice ring to it, but it still made me feel a little squirmish whenever I heard it said in real life. Cskia I just have to correct pronunciation on.
(Ever since becoming Cskia, no one has mistaken me for a boy again. It also seems harder to imagine me as, say, a bunch of squiggles (*coughLet’sGetPhysiognomicalcough*).)
/long semi-explanatory incoherent post?
WOW you were CTN huh
WONDERS NEVER CEASE and apparently finding out people were also other people will never cease also
You know, most of that information is on the Who’s Here and MBers, Chronological Order pages.
I glance through that every now and then and am always surprised. They never seem to sink in! I have probably had this same realization at least twice before XD
Is Reasons. a newer museblogger? It feels like she’s an old soul, but I don’t see her name on Who’s Here. I’m also assuming en’s female for some reason…
Hm–I’ve been thinking of en as male, but I don’t remember any evidence either way, now that I think about it. I’m pretty sure en arrived here sometime during the spring.
Reasons is male and used to call himself The Mole. He returned to the blog after a long absence in May.
Oh–I’d forgotten he’d been here before, mostly because I wasn’t here then.
I LOVE OLD GREECE LITERATURE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
SFTDP
but how DO you pronounce that name? i pronounce it *see-ES-ka* but i don’t think that’s right
Yeah, I’d been pronouncing it along the lines of “SIS-key-a” in my head, but apparently the C is silent. Good to know!
Skee-ah, I think.
“SKEE-ah” works! Although “SIS-key-a” is common and “see-ES-ka” sounds really nice! (This is one of the the first things that gets cleared up every time I Kokon with someone.)
I’ve always pronounced it “Ks-KEY-uh.”
My name comes from KAIulani, a princess of Hawaii, and the famous ocean explorer Jacques-YVES Cousteau, two people I happened to have read about around the time I was chosing my name.
(My full online name, then, if you’re curious, is Kaiulani Yves-Cousteau.)
Heh. Mine is probably one of the least thought-out, since it was my first screen-name “evar” when I discovered the internet at age 13 (though spelling & grammar were still foreign concepts).
The “_me” part stems from another site, the first I registered for, where “bookgirl” was already taken and the name generator suggested variations such as “bookgirl_17”, “bookgirl_45”, etc…
I felt an instant repulsion vis à vis the numbers, feeling they didn’t express me, and voila, a new name was born without so much as a thought. I have considered changing it, but since I find most name changes aggravating I’ve decided to stick with my original, erm, creation. Besides, it’s sort of amusing.
You’re you, a girl who likes books. Short and to the point.
My name took almost no thought at all. I was originally Qwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnm, and abandoned that name (and the blog – *sniffles*) for being too nonsenseical and hard to shorten. The blog is a little nonsensical. When I came back on MB, the anime Hetalia popped into my head. Everyone says Prussia is awesome, so I originally tried “prussiaisawesome” , and I didn’t even post with it because it sounded so wrong . So I just used the equals sign.
if you had done “prussiaisawesome” i probably would have pronounced it all wrong like: “pr-USS-aia-sis-AWE-some
or “Prusiasis” (SFTDP)
I will tell you ALL ABOUT my name even though it falls into the “pretty easy to understand” category. Guess what my favorite genre is? I was very nearly DragonFan, though, before I decided that I liked other things like griffins and magic to much to exclude them form my moniker.
The punctuation marks came form me misunderstanding a glitch in the blog’s coding when I first arrived. The glitch made ?|? appear after everyone’s usernames. I thought it was on purpose and didn’t want to be left out, so I ended up putting the question and exclamation marks after my name.
I haven’t changed it. Maybe added a few things to the end, but I’ve always been FantasyFan?!?!. At first I couldn’t think up anything cool enough, and then I just got used to it.
‘Mikazuki’ means ‘crescent/new moon’ in Japanese. I liked the sound, that’s all. It was never anything else before, um, whatever you mean.
Mine is pretty obvious, I think, especially in conjunction with my gravatar. A tesseract is a hypercube, or a four-dimensional cube. You’re likelier to have heard of A Wrinkle in Time’s tesseract, although that’s really more like a wormhole, or a trip through spacetime in the fourth dimension.
It’s also not where I derived my blogname from. In the spring of eighth grade, about five months before I came to the blog, my friend and I did a project on theoretical physics for an end-of-year math project. We got really into it and still discussed it frequently for about a year afterwards. So when I joined MB in… oh, October of ninth grade, I believe? Tesseract was the name I picked.
Then at some point that got truncated to “Tess,” which is what most people seem to call me, and which I like.
Mine’s an abbreviation for Zanna, arrived at because my mother used to call me Zanz. I thought it up when I first came to the Internet, and have just… never changed.
Although if you want to call me Zanna instead for whatever reason, then by all means you may, and now I think of it I might actually start using Zanna all the time here now – because I do identify with it more, of late, than I do with ZNZ, and in fact feeling a little uncomfortable with ZNZ. So possibly, I don’t know.
This is an interesting conversation, so I’ll join it:
Well, I was 12 when I joined MB, and immature in many ways. (Weren’t we all…) I had the phrase “mean lean ___ machine” in my head, I think because the phrase “mean lean green machine” is in Shrek, which I’d watched. I liked the dancing-fitness classes I went to, and MLDM seemed like a good acronym at the time, but I wanted to put something else in the name, so I made it Insane MLDM. I capitalised it because I was new to internet forums and social networking, so I naturally wanted to type with proper grammar.
Then when I’d got to know the blog, about a year later, I decided I wanted a better name. I couldn’t think of a random made-up name I liked, so decided to base it on something I cared about, so I picked math. I think muselover gave me the idea to put it in “___ Lover” form, I added the capitals and space to distinguish myself from him, and wanted to add a symbol. I kept it as Maths Lover (Formerly Insane MLDM) for a while.
I also didn’t get how points worked, so awarded myself random ones and at one point introduced my wung Ferelda. ^&^
Prevailing seasonal winds often have names. In the US the Santa Ana wind is the most famous. Out East we have Noreasters but that’s a type of squall, not just the wind. The Vendaval is a stormy southwest wind found in southern Spain and Portugal. I am a sailor, and my local prevailing wind is SW.
Selenium, I’m assuming you know, is an element. I can’t really remember why or how ‘Selenium the Quafflebird’ popped into my head (the last word must be a Quidditch influence) but it did, quite randomly one day, and I liked it. Doesn’t mean I’m necessarily really into chemistry or anything (actually, I’m not, at all) but I think it sounds nice, and seems to work okay as a name, so why not. Also, lots of you call me Sel.
Hey guys, I’m back after forever.
My life has been mainly school until now, so I’ve been really busy. I’m spending my summer LARPing, for those of you who don’t know what it is , please look it up. I even went to a camping event on an Island.
I hope to be posting more often, considering I’ve been away from the blog for I think more than a year.
Welcome back! Your summer sounds fun, the school part not so much.
Is your gravatar Voyager? Does that happen to be your favourite series?
looks like the Enterprise from Star Trek
It’s supposed to. I was referring to the ship from Star Trek: Voyager, which has a different design from the NCC and NX models, including the Enterprises themselves.
My own gavatar shows part of an actual Enterprise, specifically the Enterprise NX-01 from Star Trek: Enterprise.
Hello! Welcome back! I don’t think I ever got to know you, if you were here when I was at all (if you weren’t, then you must have been gone at least 2 years, since that’s about how long I’ve been here), but I’ve definitely seen your name.
I haven’t been posting a whole lot lately either. Probably due to the fact that it’s summertime and life has been pretty slow-paced and uneventful. This evening my mom and I went to a Solemn Pontifical Mass at a Carmelite monastery out in the country since today is the feast of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel as well as the 450th anniversary of the dedication of an important Carmelite monastery in Avila, Spain. It was beautiful, of course–the small Spanish-style chapel with mosaics on the ceiling and the voices of the nuns chanting behind the iron gates to the side of the sanctuary. The drive to and from was great, too.
And now I’ve ordered boots. Expensive boots. My mom agreed to pay for half, but nonetheless they’re very expensive (for me, anyway). Eek. But they should be fantastic! And last me for a couple decades maybe, as long as the break-in period doesn’t kill me. I have to figure out how to take care of the leather, too.
This weekend we’re going down to Oklahoma to visit some family. It’ll be the first time I’ve been down there to visit them, so it should be interesting. They live on an acreage and have horses and on that. I’m hoping to have all seven kids’ names down pat by the end of the visit, but I’m not holding out much hope. And next weekend our family’s going camping for the only time this year. And then pretty soon I’ll be moving back to college. Alas.
Did anyone else hear that they’ve found a fifth moon around Pluto? I think MuseBlog should see if we can snag naming privileges. I’m sure we could come up with something good for it.
I also haven’t been posting much, but that’s mostly because I don’t think I really have much interesting to say. I’ve been continuing to work at Staples. I’m leading in selling Back to School savings passes, so I think I’m supposed to get some free meals or something. Even though I don’t feel like I’m doing anything extraordinary, I’m still a bit proud of myself.
AP scores came and I somehow pulled a 5 on Mechanics and a 4 on E&M for physics, which is incredible. Really, really proud of that one; physics gave me trouble all year, and I felt like the exams didn’t go that well either.
My sister and I are almost done with Avatar (my second time through, her first), most of my friends are still in China. Same old, same old.
Packing for Singapore! That is, I’m diligently hiding under a table about five feet from my suitcase, which is next to a pile of clothes and books. I call it “packing by osmosis.”
Tennis skirts: unreasonably expensive >:[
But I WILL FIND ONE, it will be the perfect Jessie skirt. Bought more materials for the costume today. SOON.
looki’n for the “Daisy Duke” style?
Somewhat like C.O., I’m also packing. I figure if I wait long enough, clean clothes will eventually come to me and land on my bed (since all other horizontal spaces are occupied).
Then, at some point, I can dump them all into my duffle bag which I didn’t really unpack after Croatia, so it’s probably got whatever stuff I’ll need in it anyway. And then I’ll stuff in all the books that fit and hide the rest of ’em on my person. Except that now my bed is full of (ironed) clothes I’m not supposed to lie on, so I’ll have to move to the carpet which smells like wet dog, presumably because there’s usually a wet dog sitting on it giving me reproachful looks for torturing him so.
Last night I dreamed that on Museblog, we were playing hide-and-seek. Because, you know, we’re just a gravatar with some letters attached to it, it was a bit different form the usual game. We each had to go and find an unused thread to post on, and without using the recent comments bar, the person who was “it” had to find out which thread.
And then the game devolved into an argument between Piggy and Rainbow*Storm about the stylishness of leather trench coats. On a thread that used to be about China. Wildly off-topic, but who cared?
…Would anyone be interested in playing this in real life?
YESYESYES!
Someday, we shall have a massive kokon and invite ALL the MBers and watch Dr Who and Buffy and Torchwood and make giant squids and bake cakes and play hide and seek and talk about tardigrades and HPBs and and and…
And have a pie war!
oh i would love that but sadly my parents don’t have the money for travel and i don’t lke doctor who that much so i can’t be there
but i do like old movies old black and white ones but most of you guys don’t so if you go through with it i won’t be there 
You’re not the only one; if we could all afford to go all the way around the world/country to meet each other, then believe me, we’d have done so long ago. However, it’s really fun to imagine, because it would just be amazing! (If you’d prefer to imagine it without Doctor Who, that’s fine, too; you’re not the only person who doesn’t like it, although I’ve noticed that the vast majority of people here who aren’t fans haven’t actually watched any).
It’s extremely unlikely that this will actually happen in the near future. We just like to think about it.
I hate to sound like a complete and total idiot, but what is Doctor Who ?
A British sci-fi show involving aliens, time travel, and the like. It can be cheesy, terrifying, hilarious, and adorable, often all four in the same episode. Very popular here on MB.
Re: names – My name comes from the Warriors book series that I loved when I was younger. It was originally Rainbowstar, but then I decided having a Clan leader name was too conceited and changed it to a regular warrior name. As I grew out of my Warriors phase I added the capitalization and asterisk. Also now that I’m a brony, it sounds vaguely like a pony name, which I like.
Wait, aren’t female fans called pega-sises?
I thought it was pegasisters.
Some people use “pegasisters” and some don’t. I think it’s easier for everyone to be bronies, since there aren’t gender-segregated names for any other fandom.
“Brony” is a gender-neutral term despite the etymology.
WHEN THE DAY OF CUPCAKES COMES, IT WILL NOT MATTERONLY THAT WE ARE LOYAL SERVANTS OF PINKAMENA
SHE WAITS BEHIND THE FOURTH WALL
Seeing this in the Recent Comments bar, I assumed this was about the HPBs. Even now that I have seen its context, I doubt it’s unrelated. In fact, I’m rather worried that MLP is being infiltrated.
Pinkie’s my favorite pony.
no! me no like pinkehz. me like applejackz and da fluttershiez and da derpz
I love them all, but I have to say Pinkie is my favorite. Adorable, random, has cute outfits and awesome songs. Which is why I am occasionally an insane cult-worshipper of EldritchAbomination!Pinkie. Just whack me on the head if I start asking for blood sacrifices.
Pf, that’s a weird way of spelling “Rarity”.
I think it’s spelled “Twilight Sparkle”, actually.
I can’t imagine how you misspelled “Fluttershy” so egregiously.
How is Doctor Who related to My Little Pony?
Prussia – I’m sorry, it isn’t related. I just mentioned MLP in the same post, which set off this whole pony discussion. Sorry.
the short and simple explanation
its about this guy who goes to the toilet and time travels
That sounds like a fun idea! If we do, who wants to be “it”?
Obligatory airport post! This will be my 16th time crossing the Pacific.
I’m in New York! Musers are the best friends, because they come to visit you when you’re anywhere near their area. Anyway, Glassboro, Dodec, Penguini, Vendeval, and Dark Duke of Darkness are all here! It’s glorious. They were super sweet about hanging out at the laundromat. (That was Fiddler)
Hi guys! I’m still alive and things! Good times on MB, I hope, etc. <3
Hi everyone!
Hey umm, this is Daniel—Dark Duke of Darkness. I'm also quite alive and such.
Hey everyone; Vendaval here! We've had a great time exploring this small town from the waterfront to coffeeshops, especially Fern's tallship! She's a beautiful sloop, I can't wait to see her again. Lots of love…
Hi guys! penguini here. Everything is really wonderful and these people are really /really/ cool.
Hi everyone! Dodec here. We're having lots of fun in not-really-upstate New York, which is known for their plethora of coffeeshops. Or something. We also saw Fern's tall ship — it sails the Hudson, so it's actually the same ship that I went on once when I was a little girl scout. One of Fern's shipmates said that now she would imagine all the little girl scouts who they educated as turning into me, so I guess I'm starting an army now? It'll be great, but not as great as seeing everyone is.
Fern again! Now we're calling all the musers we have numbers for and passing the phones around so we can all talk.
The guy at the table next to us just said that we all have the greatest hair. It's true. Dodec's got blue/green hair, Penguini's got a green and orange mohawk, DDOD has long curly blonde hair, Glasseh's is long and has an undercut, and I've got dreads. Vendy is normal looking. It's kind of cramping our style, but maybe we'll dye it later or something.
Sounds glorious! The hair description makes you all sound like a touring band I met at a B&B in London many years ago.
(Vendaval explained to me that his “normal” hair makes him the weird one in this group.)
I hope somebody is taking pictures.
Glad to hear from you all!
Dodec, you must be Legion, for you are many!
Hey! Sounds great!
All the vicarious joy! (I suppose I could say that I’m envious–but I’m enjoying your account too much for the implicit irritation of envy.)
I’m glad you all had fun and are quite alive. (Including those of you who have no idea who I am.)
That sounds like an excellent assortment of hair–and I hope you did nothing to Vendy, since he was plainly the most radical of the bunch!
I trust they spent part of the time working on world domination. It isn’t all fun and follicles.
They called me! I was fairly busy that day but I still got to talk some!
Re: 106 — Cookies turned out to be a mixed success. They made me slightly nauseous, but my mom really likes them, so at least they won’t go uneaten. *shrug*
Today was the second day of my annual summer theatre camp. We’re getting two weeks instead of one to put on a production this year, but we’ve got two separate casts both performing every night, so we’re basically cutting Twelfth Night into two separate one-hour versions. I’m not particularly thrilled about this, as it means some of my favorite scenes (such as Malvolio’s darkroom scene) have been cut out entirely, but I guess you can’t have everything.
I’m Sebastian, and I really love my Antonio, who (squee) gets all the gay subtext without me having to tell her. (We’re the only two crosscast characters in either cast, which is sorta…. interesting; as soon as I heard I was Sebastian I pretty much decided that I was going to have subtext!subtext!subtext! with my Antonio no matter what, so I’m happy I don’t have to force her.) Everyone’s so nice there — I think we’re all going to be really close by the time the productions roll around, and of course actual productions only make people closer. Yayz.
i once dreamed i was in my front yard with Dodecahedron. and we played fly tag. where i flew overhead and she tried to squirt me with a water squirter. and every time i dodged i got hit with a pie from Jadestone. and Jade wasn’t even there but somehow i knew it was from her for some reason…. does it mean anything?
Sendin’ pies from WAY FAR AWAY
NONE CAN ESCAPE MY MIGHT
MWAHAHAHAHA
I had THE weirdest dream last night. And that’s something. I dreamed that I mispeled ( how I spell misspelled ) a post. I supposedly had a capital I at the end, after the period.
you dreamed about spam?
I guess, but I don’t even remember the comment.
FIRST I SHALL INFILTRATE YOUR DREAMS
THEN I SHALL RULE THE WORLD
AND I LURK IN THE SHADOWS, OUT OF SIGHT, ANNIHILATING THOSE WHO ESCAPE YOUR WRATH
apparently
SJDHFHG
JADESTONE IS SHADOWLURKER
IT ALL MAKES SENSE NOW
SHADOWCLAN!!! RIVERCLAN ATTACK!
HISSSSS BITE CLAW POUNCE
On very old Warriors RP forums my “Jadestone” cat character was in fact a member of Shadowclan XD Deputy on a few occasions.
I LOVE RIVAH CLAN!!!!!
even though the warriors book i am currently reading is all about the Thunderclan i still like the riverclan cats! especially Willowpaw! my favorite lightningclan cat is Jaypaw (i am reading the book where he becomes an apprentice)
I always loved RiverClan, too! Willowpaw my also my favorite; I identified with her. Jaypaw kind of annoyed me, though. A MAJOR SPOILER IS IMPLIED IN THE FOLLOWING SENTENCES; I DON’T REMEMBER WHICH BOOK OR EVEN ARC IT’S FROM: It’s probably because he had so much in common with his father. Actually, I kind of found every single cat in WindClan annoying, Crowfeather most of all.
Man, it’s been forever since I read those. I stopped partway through Omen of the Stars because I was sick of all the prophecies and superpowered cats, the original series is still quite awesome though.
I used to do so much RPing and fanfiction … One time the people on my fansite decided the entire Power of Three arc was terrible, so we wrote a three-part epic “Alternate Power of Three” with different protagonists, a completely different storyline, and no magic powers. Fun times.
I second the first paragraph. The extent of my RPing, though, was joining/forming imaginary Clans and interacting with everyone else–no superpowers, though, although I think there was a prophecy every once in a while.
I stopped reading Warriors midway through the Power of Three miniseries because I looked up Erin Hunter on Google and found that she was a PSEUDONYM and FOUR DIFFERENT AUTHORS!! (They’re Kate Cary, Cherith Baldry, Tui Sutherland, and Victoria Holmes) That’s why some books were worse than others Also, the books were getting boring. Who names their kid Cherith anymore?
I knew someone named Cherith! She’s a year older than me.
Also didn’t it used to be just three authors? I don’t know.
and then those bunches of authors got together and made “Seekers”
with bears
That actually isn’t why some books are worse than the others; it’s not like one person writes one book and someone completely different writes the next (like the Nancy Drew books). They collaborate and each write different parts of each book. It did used to be just 3 authors; Tui Sutherland joined in late.
I’m a bit confused, though. Why would you stop reading a series because you learned it was written by more than one person? It’s still exactly as good a series as before you knew that.
It was getting boring, and that was kind of like when you’re a little kid and you figure out who “Santa” is. It felt exactly like that.
I got to eat at the National Geographic Society Headquarters today with some nice women from their outreach department who wanted to know what I thought of the organization’s various productions and how they could be improved.
IT WAS SO FLAMMY!
Have we heard from SudoRandom recently, or RQ? I was going through some old threads and it seems like forever since I’ve seen either of them.
Same here. I’m not even sure if I know RoseQuartz outside of old threads, but she seems awesome.
I’ve seen SR in real life….He doesn’t post much here any more, I guess.
Thank you for showing up. I was just wondering how you spell “pseudonym”.
And SBF! Gaaah, I don’t know where she’s gone!
I’d like to hear from Sudo. Since RQ was posting at the same time as me I’d like to know how she’s doing.
Well, there’s a lot of people I’ve known who aren’t on the blog now, but I’ve been wondering about Clare de Lune.
I was wondering about Clare too. She’s pretty much disappeared. I hope all these people are doing all right!
Clare’s been pretty busy lately, which I think she should tell y’all about, but she’s doing quite well. She and I are going to camp next week.
The Sympathy Jones studio recording was released today and I’ve just spent the whole day squeeing over how brilliant it is.
It’s so brilliant it’s making me speak in runons.
THERE IS SUCH A THING
AS BEING A “PROFESSIONAL MERMAID”
oh my god I need to be one right now
if I can make a tail I can practice in my lake and it will be awesome I just need this to be a thing I have done in my life
okay so details
I’ve found a tutorial on how to make a simple/cheap tail out of just swimsuit material
which will work until I can make/buy one of better quality
I can practice swimming with my feet (lightly) tied together in our lake this summer, making sure my dolphin kick is synchronized
then next summer when I have time or the last two weeks of this summer to make the simple swimsuit fabric tail and practice with it
POSSIBLY PRACTICE IN MY COLLEGE’S POOL? maybe
I could have my roommate take pictures with her underwater point-and-shoot camera if so that would be really cool
I DON’T KNOW WHAT I WOULD DO WITH THIS (modeling? entertaining children at birthday parties?) BUT I WANT THIS TO BE A THING I CAN DO IF I WANT JUST FOR FUN
You could be a synchronized swimmer, and/or do water ballet!
This idea comes straight from the late lamented television program Pushing Daisies, which included, as secondary characters, a pair of retired synchronized swimmers who had once been known as the Darling Mermaid Darlings.
maybe you can puit the pictures on the internet and tell everyone you saw a mermaid
Good suggestions!
Right now I’m reading about how some mermaids use it as a way to be a spokesperson for ocean conservation which sounds REALLY COOL and RIGHT UP MY ALLEY
It’d be a long time before I was in any position to do that sort of thing but that would be an AWESOME WEEKEND JOB man I am way to excited about this
but I found a great video-tutorial for a tail pattern (that includes a video of her swimming in it after she made it, and it looks and fits fabulously). The biggest cost seems like it would be the monofin to put inside the tail. They look like they’re about $50 but that SEEMS PRETTY WORTH IT
Are you talking about the mermaid shows at Weeki Wachee Springs in Florida? I thought they stopped doing those years ago. Live and learn…
No, actually! I’m mostly reading about people who do it independently. The one I first found calls herself the Mermaid of Halifax, she’s from Canada. I heard from a friend just now about those shows, I haven’t read anything about them yet.
The Halifax mermaid does mostly children’s parties and entertaining stuff. Another I’m reading about promotes conservation. Both also do modeling, and one does some photography herself.
Some would consider mermaiding a step backward.
Hehehehehehehehe.
Well, first I wished I was a mermaid, then I wished I was a giant (space) squid
so maybe to BECOME the squid I first must BECOME a mermaid
gotta figure out how that metamorphosis is going to work soon, just wishing to be a squid hasn’t done the trick quite yet
you could be a mer-squid that has tentacles but a mermaid tail!
like a mer – Davy Jones from pirates of the caribean
Or just a person with tentacles instead of legs.
or you could be a person with tentacles instead of legs!
We had the same idea! I guess you didn’t see post 136.2.1.1.1.1.1, which said basically the same thing, but that’s alright! It’s interesting to see that we each though of it independently.
i saw it i was trying to joke. maybe i could get you to make a joke like “i couldn’t have said that any better”
Sounds lovely.
Hehe. The thing with tentacles instead of legs is where would my legs go? Until I can find a way to answer that I’ll probably wait to build an underwater squid-suit.
PHOTOSHOP!!!
My brother’s new laptop arrived, so he took his Razer Deathadder mouse to use and I have to get by with the one that came with our computer. And it’s really uncomfortable and there are no back and forward buttons and it clicks SUPER loudly… argle. </petty-complaints>
Now I have boots. Red Wing GT’s, specifically, in the black cherry Featherstone leather. I have never before realized how bony ankles are. Ow. But they fit! That’s a good thing. They’ll be painful for a while until the leather gives in, but once that happens they should be fantastically comfortable. I’m not sure how I’m going to handle the break-in process–I can’t exactly wear these with shorts, but it’s been at least 100 degrees here every day for a couple weeks (with no cool weather in sight). Maybe go for walks after sundown? I’ll figure out something.
Tess (134)- Last I heard, RoseQuartz had pretty much disappeared from the internet. I don’t know what’s up with her. Hopefully she’s just busy having the adventure of a lifetime.
You know a person or thing is awesome when you can answer questions with “Because en’s Derp Derpington, that’s why.”
Guys! Next weekend I get to go to a DCI performance in a nearby city! Live! With the Cadets and Santa Clara Vanguard and Phantom Regiment and Crown and lots of other corps and OH MAN I’M SO EXCITED.
here is something for you to puzzle over. i got the idea from a Muse magazine!
let’s just say someone named Bill said: “I am lying to you right now!” think about it…
if Bill is telling the truth but he would also be lying. he would be telling the truth though. but he would still lie because he said he was lying but if he were lying he would be telling the truth but if he told the truth he would be lying. but if he WAS lying then he would be telling the truth… see?
Paradoxes are fun.
So there’s an island, and on this particular island, all men shave their faces. It’s against the law to grow a beard. However, it’s a pretty small island, so there’s only one barber. The barber shaves all men who don’t shave themselves.
Does the barber shave himself?
Just because the barber shaves all men who don’t shave themselves doesn’t mean he doesn’t shave anyone else.
Well, you didn’t say that the barber shaves only men who don’t shave themselves, so he could still shave himself.
Why does the barber have to be male?
Why? Because he was referred to as ‘he’. It’s possible that’s referring to gender identity rather than biological sex, though–or maybe he’s a really skilled child.
The only time a male pronoun was used with reference to the barber was in the question, which could be misdirection, or it could be assumption based on societal norms.
Or maybe the barber is a robot with a male AI.
well since the barber shaves all men who doesn’t shave themselves then if he would shave himself he would be going againsed his own rules and shaving someone who shaves himself and it’s againsed the island’s law to grow beards so the only way that would work is that the barber has his own island apart from the island in question above and the people from the “Hairless island” as we may call it row a boat out to the barber’s island to get a shave!
Well, you said that “all men shave their faces”, so…
That’s a good point! I guess the barber is out of work, since he can’t get money from shaving himself (ZNZ and I came up with one way he could do so; Lizzie came up with another). Or maybe he just cuts hair.
I was sparring with my friend a couple days ago and he whacked me in the nose by accident. It’s such a unique feeling, being smacked in the nose. It’s pretty sore today, but it seems like it’ll be okay. It made a lovely cartilage-crunching noise.
In other news, I have finished Lost (pretty much the best show that anyone has ever made) and started Breaking Bad. I’m on season 4, trying to catch up to the new episodes.
My new musical discoveries include Frank Zappa and Sublime. They are massively fantastic.
I have a small green tennis ball sitting on my desk that expands into a towel when you stick it in water. I can now carry my towel with me anywhere and also throw it at people if I need to distract someone.
I started reading The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. It is most interesting.
mmmmnomnomnom corn chips
My relationship issues are really weird. I might post them on their designated thread at some point later.
Today’s seriously random random post brought to you by Castle.
Ouch, I’m sorry you got punched.
It’s all good. It was a decent learning experience.
Frank Zappa is the absolute best and I wish I could have gone to one of his concerts.
Yessss.
Yeeeessssss.
His son’s cover band is playing in a festival right near my town. I’m saving for a camera, some RAM and a Nexus 7 tablet (because I don’t have enough gadgets already, of course), and the camera and RAM are actually pretty important to me, so I’m a little hesitant to spend the very last of my money on tickets.
They are totally worth it, if you’re still considering going.
In Singapore. It’s monsoon season (I don’t think it’s ever not monsoon season here, actually). Also, there are once again geckos in my shower. But the food is good. Speaking of which, we were once again marooned in the Narita airport due to a long layover and flight delay, and I ate at the last two noodle shops there that I hadn’t already been to. So now I can write a definitive guide to food in the Tokyo airport.
I watched Footnote three times in a row on the flight, and I’m still confused, partly because the subtitles were pretty bad and so is my Hebrew, and also because the plot is really tangly. Has anyone who’s seen it explain to me who the old lady Eliezer was with in the garden was? Is she the same one who popped up in the library? Also, how did the journalist know about the prize before Uriel got the letter?
I read the 3rd sentence as, “Also, there are ones against geckos in my shower”–as if it was a coalition formed to keep them out, even though it’s probably none of their business. Granted, I do live in an area with laws against keeping uncultivated plants of a certain height in ones own yard… Let’s just hope the coalition doesn’t arrive at your shower for its gecko-fighting missions while you’re in it.
Oh no, since this is Singapore, they’d have a National Shower Gecko Commission, with task forces for every district. And there would be anti-gecko advertisements in four languages on the sides of buses, and animated commercials on TV with evil cartoon geckos, and banners everywhere proclaiming that Singaporeans were working together to eradicate the terrible scourge of shower geckos.
Whereas in the United States, Michelle Obama would go on The View to talk about how important gecko-free showers are to a healthy childhood. Then the President’s political opponents would declare that geckos are a patriotic symbol on a par with the bald eagle and that attacking them is practically un-American, not to mention shockingly frivolous at a time of quadrillion-dollar deficits with trillions of people out of work.
“A chicken in every pot; a gecko in every shower.”
I’m picturing my mother’s reaction to this.
I don’t think I’ll ever be able to say the word “gecko” around her again without feeling suddenly anxious, irritated, and confused.
Better shower geckos than outhouse cobras.
(And nobody who hasn’t read “The Curse of the Pharaohs: My Adventures with Mummies” is going to get that reference…)
I admire Dan Burbank for spending six months on the International Space Station, and I admire him even more for putting up with me yesterday when I came back to bother him two times after saying goodbye.
(I asked for a hug and then left, then I realized I hadn’t gotten a photo, so I got one, then, when I was leaving, I found where they kept photos for him to autograph, and I’d promised to get an autographed photo for some kids my workplace has been in contact with, so I went back and had him sign it, and, bless his heart, Mr. Burbank put up with all of this and complemented me for wearing a pin for his Expedition 30 mission.)
Whenever I do things like that to a random person/ someone I admire, I say Thank you for putting up with my weirdness.”
I left for the last time by saying “And now I promise I won’t bother you anymore.”
Aisha Mustafa, 19 year old Egyptian student, has invented a new type of space travel based on quantum physics I don’t understand. Her university was so impressed they helped her patent it.
…What am I doing with my life?
I know that feel
I have it every day
Guys.
I have seen an actual Dalek.
I don’t believe it!
Where is it? What do you think its plans for takeover are?
Is it in league with the trashcan ones I saw in Italy three years ago?
Okay, so it wasn’t an actual Dalek, but it’s the closest I’ll hopefully ever get to one. It was a Imperial Dalek prop used in Resurrection of the Daleks, which was part of a science fiction exhibit at a local museum-ish place. There was also concept art from Portal, Captain Kirk’s command chair, a bunch of uniforms, and so on. It was really cool.
That. Is. So. Awesome. Please transport me to that place? Now, preferably?
My school schedule is more and more resembling Hermione’s from her third year*.
Does anybody know how I can apply to the Ministry of Magic for a Time Turner?
*Though not in subjects, unfortunately.
They were all destroyed during the battle in book five, remember?
It’s been seventeen years; surely they could have managed to make some more?
Ah, of course! You’re probably right.
Exactly! Do you think a letter would be a good start?
Okay, guys, I need some advice. This year, my parents turn 50 within a couple months of each other (September and December), and their 25th anniversary is next August. My sixteen-year-old sister and I want to do something nice for these events.
For my mom’s birthday, we’ve nearly settled on putting all of our nondigital family photos (a couple thousand probably, sitting in boxes in a closet) into albums. This is something she’s been talking about doing for years and years but has never done and is likely never to get to. I’d also floated the idea of mailing all the photos off to be digitized so that we’d have files for all of them, but we decided albums would be more meaningful.
(A big point for my sister is that they’d be more affordable as well. My feeling is that since I have the money and this is a big year, if spending a decent sum is necessary to do something really really nice for our parents, it’d be worth it. I want to do something really special! I’d prefer to not spend a ton if there’s something as nice or better we can do for less, obviously. But I’m willing to pay, is what I’m saying. Still, I can’t make her see the same, and since she isn’t 18 yet she doesn’t have access to her bank account anyway, so I’m a little tied down here.)
We still can’t come up with anything for my dad. He’s less vocal about things that he wants, and most of the things that I can think of that I’m pretty sure he’d like are either of a much smaller scale than what we’re thinking of for my mom (like art projects, which we do frequently–I spent forever on a collage for him last year) or are purchases without much sentimental value. For example, he asked my mom to get him nice speakers for his car for his birthday. Sooo we need to come up with something for him.
Additionally, I’d kind of like to throw them a surprise party. I know my dad doesn’t care particularly much either way but my mom would kind of like a party, and that both of them would really enjoy it. They have a good number of friends that don’t live around here (we’ve only lived in NC since 1998) who I’d like to be able to have a shot at coming. I think that this would either have to be next summer sometime (…no idea how I’d make sure my parents didn’t schedule anything for that time) or in January when I’m on winter break.
Every MLK weekend we meet some of my dad’s college friends in Washington, DC. I had the idea of since we’ll already be there, and that’s a lot closer to my parents’ non-local friends than NC, we try to have it then. The adults all go out to dinner Saturday night already. We could conceivably reserve a group of tables and have everyone surprise my parents there. It would take a lot of organization. I’m generally pretty good at organizing events and such, but this would be very complicated. My primary concern is coordinating all of the people and addresses and so on; my sister’s is the cost of paying for everyone’s meals. (Would that be a required thing?)
I know this was pretty long, so cookies if you read all of it and even more cookies for any suggestions or advice!
My mom and I threw my dad a surprise party at a restaurant for his fourty-fifth birthday. The guests paid for their own meals.
did he have a good time?
)
(oh and tell him “Happy Birthday from some person named Catwings on this Museblog site you sometimes go on LOL
Oh, no, haha, that was a long time ago. My dad’s fifty-three now.
WELL TELL HIM HAPPY BIRTHDAY ANYWAY!!!
SFTDP
(P.S. my dad is fifty-four and i am way younger than you!
Well, people have children at different ages.
Tell him I want to wish him a Happy Birthday, too.
Thanks, CPM, that’s helpful to know.
Batman
Batman my love
my first superhero and my favorite
…
just got back from The Dark Knight Rises, wow what a rollercoaster. I dressed up with my friend. I had a mask, cape, my Starkid Batman shirt (can’t find my real batman shirt, it’s in the Lost Box from college
), and a pin. Also had my Batman hoodie to wear int eh theater when I got cold.
We took a picture afterwards with a guy in a full batman muscle suit (which was not the costume’s first appearance–that apparently was at the Avengers premiere).
Then we drove home blasting the Batman theme out of the car.
I have so many feelings.
HOLY BATMAN LOVERS JADESTONE!
In case anyone wasn’t aware, at a Batman premiere in Aurora, Colorado last night there was a shooting. A gunman came in and killed several people, injuring many, with seemingly random fire.
It is so sad, and shocking. Movie theaters are where people go to suspend their belief, and let themselves be vulnerable to the emotions and actions of those onscreen; a refuge from the real world. For someone to take advantage of that to willfully kill and harm others is sickening.
My thoughts go out to all the survivors, and the friends and families of anyone in the theater.
They caught the guy while he was still in the theater, he put up little resistance. Right now the mystery is why he did it.
maybe he was hired to kill someone!
maybe he was holding a grudge againsed someone!
maybe he was keeping a promise
maybe he wanted to go to jail!
maybe i watch Elliot Ness too much
Maybe he really hated Batman.
SFTDP
i just heard about that on the radio! it’s always so scary when that happens isn’t it?
It is. It’s scary and saddening.
I went to the DH2 midnight premiere a year ago with Zinc, and it was one of the best experiences of, seeing all the other obsessed fans lined up with their House scarves. I can only assume the Batman fandom is similar. That someone would take advantage of an event like that … *hugs and squid to everyone*
That’s awful.
my friend was in that theater, on a date :-/ he’s unharmed though.
He… oh… I don’t know what to say.
I’m glad he was unhurt, and hope he’s not too shaken/recovers from the experience okay. As well as his date
just yesterday i lost a tooth and my parents y’know bought me something to place under my pillow. they got me some toffee candy. and another one of my teeth were loose. so i ate some of the toffee and while i was chewing i heard a “sucking” sound. i didn’t pay much attention to it. but then i was chewing and i felt something in the toffee. and i was like “why does it feel like there is a rock in my toffee?” so when the toffee dissolved it was still there and i took it out of my mouth and it was my tooth. apparently the tooth got stuck in the toffee and the “sucking” sound was the tooth coming out
place witty saying here
Haha, that’s ironic. More candy or other gifts for you I suppose!
I had a tooth come out in a bagel once.
I had a tooth come out in a piece of watermelon once.
I had a tooth come out while eating cereal once.
I had a tooth come out while eating rice once.
“Why is this grain of rice so hard?? :x”
(imagine that smile is gap-mouthed)
*takes it out of my mouth and drops it on the floor*
[hours later]
*realizes I’m missing a tooth*
*realizes the “rice” was my tooth”
*gets whole family to searches the [white carpeted] floor*
*finds tooth!*
My brother punched out another of my teeth. It wasn’t even loose at the time.
I had a crown come off while eating Dots once.
…What? It’s sort of like a tooth.
Then I couldn’t get to the dentist for two weeks and the gum grew over where the crown went and they burnt it off with a laser. Fun times.
eew
^^ C-C-C-COMBO BREAKER!!!
I have braces, so I once had a bracket come out while eating dots.
Ways I’ve lost teeth:
I fell on my face and lost my top two incisors.
I bit into an apple and loosened a previously fine tooth. It fell out a day later.
I lost one in a bowl of white rice, which turned into red rice.
I waited so long for one to come out on its own that there’s a slightly larger-than-normal gap where it used to be.
My mother asked me when it was finally going to come out, so I said “Here.” and handed it to her.
I swallowed one in my sleep.
Two have come out while brushing my teeth, one on purpose.
I was eating a Jolly Rancher and then realized that the candy had been finished and I’d been trying to eat my tooth.
My father lost one in a Milk Dud once, at the age of 45 or so. My father and I share a sweet tooth, although unlike him I’m decent at managing it.
I was innocently sitting on the playground when some ridiculous fourth-grader decided to walk backwards and crash into me. I was seven at the time, so I hit the concrete hard and face-first, chipping my two front teeth.
Later the crowns on those teeth came off because I bite my fingernails too much.
I squidded that because of the punching bit, but I’d have pied it otherwise.
Anyway, I had a tooth come out in a piece of raw cauliflower once. (As a child, I absolutely refused to eat cooked cauliflower but loved it raw).
watermelon’s are not hard or squishy. i can understand one coming out in a bagel bot some watermelon?
watermelon is almost see-through!
I had a tooth come out in mashed potatoes once… I don’t even know.
The instant I read that I heard a sucking noise…..
43 years ago today, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the surface of the moon. The following year, Australian songwriter John Stewart (no relation) wrote a song called “Armstrong”. A slightly modified version was performed by Geoff Robertson on the 40th anniversary of the event, and it goes like this:
“Black boy in Chicago
Playing in the street
Not near enough to wear
Not near enough to eat
But don’t you know he saw it
On that July afternoon
He saw a man named Armstrong
Walk upon the moon
Young girl in Calcutta
Barely eight years old
The flies ’round the market place
Will see she don’t get old
Don’t you know she heard it
On that July afternoon
Heard a man named Armstrong
Walk upon the moon
Heard a man named Armstrong
Walk upon the moon
River’s getting dirty
The wind is getting bad
War and hate were killing off
The only Earth we had.
But the world all stopped to watch
On that July afternoon.
Saw a man named Armstrong
Walk upon the moon.
Watched a man named Armstrong
Walk upon the moon.
And I wonder when the world will be
Like that July afternoon.
When we were one man
Walking on the moon.”
That is something we can be happy remembering about today ♥
My head listened to this to the tune of Lady Madonna.
I’m back!
Remeber me?
No, probably not.
So, yeah. Hey. -awkward wave-
Of course I remember you, Pie Girl! Welcome back! How have you been?
Pretty good. Embracing my title as the QEUUEN OF TYPOES. Also screeching because I bought the wrong color of fabric.
Whats been going on in the blogiverse?
( also, i spelled remember wrong )
i don’t really i am new here but nice to meet you
I like you, Catwings.
that sounded so creepy
i also really like your bedsheets, but the window changes the color a little bit
I mean I’ve been reading your posts, ad I think you are alao a vcp.
( VCP means very coolperson )
( oh nooooooooo
could the html gnome please fix the strikethoruoghs in that post?))
*strikethroughs
i only have 1 bedsheet and no windows in my room.
your hair is black
my room is like a hallway so…
you are not as creepy as you meant to be
Welcome back! I remember you. It’s good to see you again!
Ramadan Mubarak!
I know most of you guys aren’t Muslim, but I’ll wish you one anyway.
Ramadan Kareem!
I hope the holiday goes enjoyably for you, too!
12 hour car ride tiiime
the game I was downloading overnight didn’t do it properly and I am going to be so boooored and tiiiiired and now I have one less potential thing to distract me D: CURSE YOU INTERNET
hopefully it can finish overnight in the hotel for the 8-hour drive tomorrow…
I leave for Google Android Camp tomorrow! I just finished packing slightly over a week’s worth of clothes into a comparatively tiny bag to carry onto the plane because I’m scared to check luggage. It’s a six and a half hour flight, but I have to arrive at the airport two hours early, and it’s a two hour drive from home. I’ve never flown without the rest of my family before. The TSA website is not comforting at all, but the camp directors are, so I guess I’ll be okay. I have to go out shopping today because I added wings to my sweatshirt and Mom thinks the wire that holds them up will not get through security. She cites a time when my father, an electrical engineer specializing in fiber optics, had a fiber optic cable confiscated from him. (have I mentioned that I have an awful fear of security guards since last March when the school’s guards threatened to call the police and forced me to go to the hospital. flying is second only to hospitals in my fears, not because I don’t like planes but because of the security theater. I’ll get through it somehow though, it will be worth it to be at Google headquarters learning)
Those TSA security guards are kind of unnerving. It must be something about how they look at you. More like through you.
The Google headquarters are spectacular! Go see the giant sculptures of dessert- there’s one for every operating system. And the Google bikes. And Shoreline park is the best. Wait, how long will you be there? Because that’s definitely within Kokon distance.
Your sweatshirt should definitely get through security. I think it depends on where and when you fly- sometimes they let me through with scissors, but when I went to SoCal right after the underwear bomber, they confiscated my crotchet hook and went through the pockets of my sweater, despite the fact that I was a 12-year-old travelling alone.
i am watching batman right now and the villain is Catwoman!
I don’t know, “villain” is a pretty strong word. I felt like she was a pretty morally ambiguous character, personally; she definitely committed crimes, but her motives were pretty sympathetic, and while she hurt Batman, she definitely helped him, too. I quite liked her as a character.
She just said she was watching “Batman”, there are dozens of Batman TV shows and movies, and Catwoman is not portrayed the same way in all of them.
the one i watched was when Adam West was Batman and Burt Ward was Robin. that isn’t very accurate but on this show Catwoman kissed Batman!
“Holy Mush!”
Oh! okay. I just assumed you were watching The Dark Knight Rises, because, y’know, it’s the Batman with all the hype recently.
“Some days, you just can’t get rid of a bomb…”
LOL
I’ve just been reading Gene Yang’s graphic novels basically nonstop over the past week, and holy cake, he is just so good. Everything in my head right now is alien spaceships that fly up your nose and Pac-Man ghosts made out of broken promises and abusive money-obsessed frogs. Apparently he used to teach math at a school some of my friends go to. I cannot even handle how much I like his work.
American Born Chinese was good, but I don’t love what he’s doing with The Promise. His characterization seems kind of off and the whole thing is slightly inconsistent with the canon for A:TLA. I think that’s partially probably from the strain between him trying to adhere to the characters and trying to exercise his own creativity, though, so maybe I should try some of his other works. What do you recommend?
I haven’t read his A:TLA things, only heard of them. (Broke broke broke broke. The day I have money for comic books will be the day I lose it.)
I’d recommend Level Up, which is really enjoyable and original, and the Eternal Smile was nice. Additionally, there’s the first things he published, Gordon Yamamoto and the King of the Geeks, which goes along with Loyola Chin and the San Peligran Order. As well as being pretty funny, those two are also interesting and thoughtful. That’s all I’ve read so far.
in a hotel in nebraska after 12-hour drive
family went to sleep around 10-10:30. I don’t understand.
I’m just sitting in the corner hunched over my computer. I’M SO AWAKE. We have to get up at like 7 or 8 but I CANNOT SLEEP
internet forever forever awake
.I’m leaving tomorrow to go to Quebec for four days. asdfghjkl excitement
The one friend who doesn’t swear: hardly noticeable in books/movies/TV, painfully obvious in real life.
Depends on the audience for the work, of course.
I wouldn’t say my friends notice that I don’t swear, they’ve never commented on it at least.
GAPAs…
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MORE PIE WAR THREAD!!!!!!!
Okay, guys. Kindle Fire: good idea or bad?
One of my trusted friends is saving for one,so I’d say good, but keep in mind that this is the same friend that has two phones.
Bad. Bad bad bad.
If all you plan to do with it is read ebooks and play the occasional game of Angry Birds, it should be fine.
Otherwise, get the Nexus 7. SAME PRICE, quad core processor.
Basically, it’s a lot faster and better in every way possible. Also, Amazon’s brand of Android is based entirely around Buying Stuff From Amazon, so it’s more like a very convenient tablet-store than an iPad.
Nexus 7 is the fresh-off-the-press $199 tablet. Go with that.
what will you be using it for?
If it’s opposed to a regular Kindle, then yes. As opposed ot any other tablet, no.
What, no part 2 yet?
I FINISHED MY SQUID!
) i accidentally got the head backwards so the background material is in the front but it’s OK.
i have decided to name her “Dodecasquidron” (Dodec, you should have named your squid that
too bad my darn camera is not working! i would have a pictuure on here now!
Congratulations, Catwings! When you do get a chance to take a picture of your squid, we’ll gladly add it to the gallery.
After a weekend of writing two essays, here I am back at work… sometimes I can’t believe it’s really summer…
I never thought I’d get to a point where Maroon 5 songs became so relevant to my life. And I’m not sure how I feel about it, either.