Ocean

Custom friends filters established! I have five categories.

1. Open. This will be writing/essays/stories and occasionally pointless, uninformative entries, like things I'd like to put on a T-Shirt or webmemes.


2. Friends. This will be generic posts involving things like requests for advice, slightly personal comments, and possibly general rants. I don't really rant that often, but this would be where I'd do it. I may also post bits of writing that I don't feel like sharing with the world at large here.


3. Angst. Just what it sounds like. This is where I BARE MY SOUL to the harsh and cruel world, by which I mean a largely inaccessible blog post screened to the few people who I feel safe accepting criticism from and don't mind listening to... well, angsty whining.


4. Magical thought. Because sometimes I go all woo-woo and talk about how God is a broken mirror surrounding the universe, or how I talk to invisible people, or how many angels can dance on the head of a monofilament wire. I think it's n-1, where n is the number of angels who can dance on a duofilament wire.


5. Gaming. Systems and random thoughts for board, tabletop, and computer games.

I'll be posting to each filter in turn shortly, in order to allow people to see what I've pre-selected for them; if you want on a new filter, post here (comments are screened). If you want off an existing one, post here or in the filter post; I'll screen comments to those as well. The pre-assignments are really just what I think you'd want, much more than an indicator of my personal feelings about your worth as a human being. Unless you're flattered, in which case I'm totally doing it because I think you're the best person ever.

Those who:

1. Create online petitions.
2. Correct grammar incorrectly.
2a. Assume intellect from dialect. This includes netspeak.
3. Confuse constitutional rights with private rights.
4. Create needless work for others to make themselves look/feel busy.
5. Tell other people pet peeves unprompted.
6. Over-indulge in self-referential "humor."
7. Can't follow a Terry Gilliam movie.

this is the story of the face i thought of last time i sat in mcdonalds and saw a skull
it was painted on a man with brown skin sitting in a river filled with filth
he drank for purity in that river of shit
i ate for health.

This is my Ganges.

Oh, I'd love to wear a rainbow every day.
And tell the world that everything's OK.
But I'll try to carry off a little darkness on my back;
'till things are brighter, I'm the man in black.

I'm unusually conservatively-aligned among my group of friends. I'm in favor of gun and weapon rights for civilians and yet a little bothered by violence in the media. Violence in video games bothers me because it's a simulatory form, and violence in movies bothers me because it's so glamorized -- characters are usually on one side of a strict fence that separates "ass-kicking" and "dead."

I think I have an answer: we need more violence in movies.

More violence, less killing. Wincing, bruising, hospital stays, casts, prosthetics... Heroes and even villains who are genuinely appalled at the thought of killing somebody, and who, if they've lived a life of violence, look like they've lived a life of violence. The realism doesn't have to be gritty -- I think, on average, Tarantino (whose movies are hailed as exceptionally violent) does a better job of what I'd like to see than, say, the directors of the Transporter series or the Die Hard series.

But the best example yet, of course, would have to be OldBoy.

Let's face it; supernatural monsters are as strange and varied as American root vegetables, Amazonian insects, or venomous Australian... everythings. Zombies, werewolves, vampires, witches, ghouls, chupacabras, kappa, psychotic leprechauns, mutant poisonous koala bears (because there weren't enough things in Australia that could kill you already)... and every single one seems to have its own special way of being dispatched. It's like taking on a thousand Superman clones, but each one is only vulnerable to a particular shade of Kryptonite. (Ah, Superman 742! Fear the wrath of my #8f22c9 kryptonite!)

But it's possible to simultaneously simplify and diversify. This is an old tradition -- medicine men would carry bandoleers of dozens of types of herb and root, each proof against a particular sort of critter. But this is kind of unwieldy and not a little smelly... and doesn't even guarantee being able to put whatever's slavering after you down, just ward it off. So here I present to you a modern and updated catalog of tools Guaranteed Lethal Against Just About Everything. Just don't get poisoned by a platypus.

• Fire.


• Hollow point silver bullets with a holy water reservoir.


• Cold iron chainsaw.


• Flaming crossbow bolts.


• Blessed liquid nitrogen.


• High-power laser array, operating in the ultraviolet spectrum.


• Incendiary grenades.


• Pipe bombs with silvered shards of holy relics for flechette.


• Garlic and vitriol tear gas.


• Lava.


• Molotov cocktails.


• Napalm.


• Flamethrowers.


• Seriously, though, try fire first.

As always, when in doubt: Behead, cremate, and salt.

And good luck, monster hunters!

I am so glad the Harry Potter franchise is only a few years away from ending, at least until the prequel trilogy.

How To Raise a Dragon, a game I've been enjoying lately. It's a very simple multi-path game done in an 8-bit style, but definitely fun. As the title suggests, you control a dragon though its juvinile, adolescent, and adult stages. There is very little explanation provided, but hints (in the form of the encyclopedia entries of some kind of dragonologist) guide you along... part of the fun of the game is figuring out what things do.

My amusement at today's featured Wikipedia article proves I am a mature and sophisticated individual.

Watched an episode of Merlin on Hulu with Jess. It's a truly awful show as far as the writing goes, butchering not only Arthurian legend but generally lacking quality even in the stage combat and attention to "historical" detail that this genre of bathtub televised LARP typically shines in. The acting is substantially better; the lines are delivered with straight faces well over half the time.

The episode we watched was "Lancelot," in which we learn that Camelot... or, as I prefer to call the setting of the show, "Camelotte," to distinguish it from the Camelot of lore to which it appears to bear only coincidental similarities... has perfected chainmail but failed to discover archery. Or spear-throwing. (And here's one for the lore buffs. I might be paraphrasing slightly, but the exchange goes pretty much like this: "So, Lancelot, are you of noble birth by any chance?" "What, me a noble? No, no.") Also, griffons, one of the three most widely-used beasts of heraldry, are completely unrecognizable to learned sages of this time, place, and wtf-index.

This is perhaps the singularly most MST-able show I've seen in recent times, and my greatest sorrow is that as Jess does not share the passion I have for awful television and movies (and I mostly only watch shows with her), my well-deserved mockery will fall only lightly upon it.

This was recently shared with me and, like so many other similar voyerisms of the Internet, I'm fascinated. At least for now. I originally meant to just be content with the chaotic snapshots of the english-speaking world, insofar as it appears on livejournal, but I broke my own fourth wall and began adding people as friends so I could continue to follow their journals. Every dozen or two reads, I'll find someone whose viewpoints I wish to assimilate. And so I follow them, in this weak and digital way.

Inevitably most of those people will notice and come here and probably read this.

Hello.

I am selfish and have no expectations.

Instructions on altering your posting security level can be found here.