1. I got my Jump scans pretty much on time last night, and both Naruto and Bleach were pretty short, so that made up for the fact that Bakuman was super long. (Three pages were sketches of the characters' manga, and each page had four of the mini manga pages, so there were essentially nine pages extra to translate. Argh!)

Oh, speaking of Bakuman... ( Very vague spoilers, but mostly fail discussion. )

2. Brizzly seems pretty cool for using Twitter via the web (I always use the web interface anyway). One nice thing it does is it unpacks shortened links (which on Twitter is almost all of them). I think it's new yet, though, because it seems a little glitchy (even more so than Twitter, which is already plenty glitchy itself).

3. I love this Wondermark to death.

4. It got warm again yesterday (I knew I would jinx it!), but it wasn't bad (nto as muggy maybe) and it still got nice and cold at night.

5. anatsuno pointed me to this call for submissions to a supernatural gay erotica anthology. She was thinking of a story I actually hadn't written (helens78's Jude/Ewan vampire fic; not a surprising mistake, since like 90% or more of the Jude/Ewan fic out there is indeed written by me), but I do have a formerly-LotRiPS one with a ghost that might fit. It's more horror than erotica, despite containing sex, so I don't know. But it's also a story I've already origified (apparently I actually submitted it somewhere three years ago, according to the date on the file) so all I had to do was send it in. The #1 reason I don't try harder to get published is that looking for places to submit stuff is a huge pain in the ass, so the fact that the story was already ready to go, and ana did the work of finding the call for submissions for me made it easy. :D It's only $25-30 if it gets published, but like I said, I didn't have to do any work, and $25 is better than $0.

There has been a lot of happy-making stuff in my Google Reader lately. Here are some of the highlights.

If you're not reading Fuck You, Penguin, why not? It's the blog that combines pictures of cute animals with snarky rants about them. If the babytalk cutesiness of sites like Cute Overload gets on your nerves, Fuck You, Penguin is the perfect antidote. I loved yesterday's post about the brushtailed possum:

Ummmm, Australia? WHY ARE YOU PUTTING COOKIES IN YOUR BACKYARDS? This is a classic case of Stockholm Syndrome, where Australians are the victims held captive by their kidnappers (mostly kangaroos desperate for another dime bag) and now they have fallen in love with the very animals that mean them harm.

Another must-read animal blog is Maru. I just love reading about his adventures in boxes and buckets and other small spaces. My current favorites are this video of him in a shoebox combined with this followup of him in an even smaller shoebox. 窮屈らぶ!

My First Dictionary is darkly hilarious. Each entry is a drawing from an old children's book accompanied by definitions such as "Burden: A burden is a source of worry and stress. Old people are usually burdens". I love the hush puppy one from last week.

Natalie Dee is a new addition to my feeds. I've known about the site for a long time and liked the comics when I saw them, but it doesn't have an RSS button anywhere that I can see, so I'd never remember to go back to it. But the other day when I was visiting, I had the bright idea to just plug the URL into Google Reader and see if it would come up with a feed. And it did! Huzzah! I love all the poor eggs worried that their chickens will come out.

Oh how I love Sinfest. The vast majority of the icons I've made in recent years have come from Sinfest. I'm really thinking of making an icon of the third panel here.

I still read I Can Has Cheeseburger and I Has a Hotdog, but I'm starting to tire of animals with funny captions. That Will Buff Out filled a need I didn't know I had, though, with its pictures of vehicles in crazy situations. Why, water, why!? ...I thought we were buds?

And I'll end with Wondermark, which is just delightfully bizarre.

This is not everything on my feed reader by a long shot, not even ever humor blog on my feed reader by a long shot. It's just stuff that particularly amused me recently and/or that I don't think I've recced here before.

1. I am really excited about the changes in the most recent Dreamwidth code push. Finally comments will thread properly in gmail! Also I'd given up on ever being able to import my LJ, since I waited too long and now if I did it there would be a ton of duplicate posts, but they've changed it now so that it recognises crossposted entries and won't duplicate them. Whee!

2. We had an excellent day yesterday. We rented a car in the morning and then did a ton of errands. Both Book Offs, Marukai, two Mitsuwas, Sanseido, Fry's, Target, Wallmart, and Smart and Final. Whew!

Best part is that between the $2 I got for taking our cans to the recycling center (yeah, now that we're not drinking soda anymore, there wasn't much to take!), the $18 I got for two bags of manga I sold at Book Off (I try not to think about the fact that it was 70 volumes for $18, ack! But it's better than nothing), the $23 money order I cashed (for some CDs and DVDs), and the $21 I'll get for some manga I bought for someone (I always charge her a little more than I actually pay), that will cover the cost of the car rental itself. And we didn't really spend too much money on ourselves, and what we did spend was for necessary stuff.

On the splurgy side, I got myself four volumes of manga that I have not been able to find scanned. Ppoi! 26 and 27 (26 was used, so $3), Nana 21 (I finally found scans of Nana the other day, but someone had edited some of the speech bubbles with nonsense! Why would someone do that!?), and IS 16 (I'm so glad the little shop at the Santa Monica Mitsuwa seems to be consistently carrying this now! They even got in copies to replace the ones I'd bought). I also got Kirino Natsuo's Grotesque (Japanese version, since the English version has bits cut out; since when are books censored?) and another Ishida Ira book, both on the dollar shelf.

3. I really love the second picture of Maru here and this Wondermark.

First off, follow up to a couple of recent failposts.

The 1000 Things About Japan woman is definitely a lost cause. After coming back with some stuff about how she grew up poor, so could never be privileged, she turned off (effectively deleting) comments on her blog. I still hadn't taken her blogs off Google Reader, because I was lazy and still slightly ambivalent, but then a new entry happened to link to her old personal blog, which was just...yeah.

In a post about wanting to move back to the US, she says, "I'm sick of thinking about civil rights and civil liberties and living in a country where racism is condoned" and "I just want to accomplish what I need to and get the hell out of here. I know America is a mess right now, but at least it's a mess where I won't be treated like a criminal for no reason".

If that's not privilege, I don't know what is. I deleted the feeds from my reader immediately.

Then there's that SGU casting deal. sheafrotherdon has a post about the plot of the episode. The disabled woman will bodyswap with the lesbian character and use her body to run around the ship trying to sex all the mens. The only way it could possibly get worse is if the lesbian character realises she's really straight after all that. (After Ellen has a good post about it, too.)


There has been a lot of fail going around re: healthcare lately, a lot of lies and fearmongering. liz_marcs has a post here where people can talk about their personal experiences. As someone who's only been insured like three or four years out of thirty-three, I posted my experiences here. I've been lucky. My health is good. If it weren't, I don't know what I would do.


And finally, I'm signal-boosting for someone on my flist. icarusancalion posted today apologising for spreading lies about her former Buddhist teacher, Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo, and the temple she used to attend, Kunzang Palyul Choling.

Reading her post was like looking in a mirror for me. My own experience had nothing to do with Buddhism or lamas (or llamas, for that matter), but the denial and anger, the lashing out, then finally the dawning realisation and fear, followed by unexpected and undeserved forgiveness is so familiar to me. It took me eight years to work through my own shit and finally get up the guts to apologise to the people I'd hurt, and I'm glad icarusancalion was able to do the same. Unfortunately her words were used to vilify this person and the temple, so she is asking people to link in hopes that word will spread that she has recanted everything she said.

My real name is Michelle Grissom, formerly Ani Dechen Drolma. I wish that I could reach every person who has read or heard of The Buddha From Brooklyn, or who has heard the slander I've spread through blogs and as Longchenpa on Wikipedia -- now being helplessly replicated everywhere against my will -- because I lied.

1. Got in a four mile walk yesterday and did a bunch of errands while we were out. First stop was Sears to return the shoes Bruce bought a week or so ago which turned out to be too big. I was afraid they might not take them back, since they had been worn a few times, but I don't think the woman even looked in the box (all that time spent scrubbing the soles for nothing!). So yay for that, too.

2. I wrote 500 words last night on my fic for mcshep_match. That is really a lot for me in one day! But I was on a roll, yay. Hopefully that will keep up, because it's like three weeks til the deadline and this looks to be a longer-than-usual one for me.

3. I've read 40 books so far this year! That's double the amount I read all last year, and there's still five months left to go. Whee! (Meanwhile, I've read 151 manga. ^_^;;)

4. We've been having some delicious tomatoes lately. Though our plants are all very scrawny and the tomatoes are tiny (barely bigger than cherry tomatoes, even though they're all supposed to be much bigger), they taste omg so good. Too good to want to put in or on anything. They have to be eaten plain!

5. nixwilliams had a concern troll over on his blog who spewed out a huge chunk of text including the gem, "i am by no means a sexist but i believe that feminists are very bigoted in their beliefs, hardly recognising the injustices that can also befall men", so what did he do? He put the concern troll's words to music and made an awesome and lolarious song!

6. I discovered this blog yesterday. A woman who's lived in Japan twenty years and is planning on moving back to the US in 2012 is writing a list of 500 things she'll miss about Japan and 500 things she won't. It's neat!

The other day I had some fail links I was going to write up, but I'd already talked about it in chat and in other people's posts, so I just didn't feel like it. Then today there was a whole slew more and again, same thing happened. So here are some quick links without much commentary.

In which Harlan Ellison is (unsurprisingly) a collosal asshole.

Whitewashing for fun and profit. (Now with bonus fail from the publishers themselves.)

Co-opting RL struggles so you can see your favorite hawt mens onscreen is all the rage. (Now with bonus we're just like Martin Luther King Jr!)

There were others (so many others), but I appear to have temporarily blocked them out.

Oh yeah, I have also been wanting to make a post about my love-hate relationship with Bakuman (love the art, like the insight to the manga industry, hate the constant sexism, have started rooting for the main characters to fail because they (esp. Saiko) irk me so), but again, I just can't be arsed. I guess I'll save it for whenever the series is finished and I write a review of it. But it's finally been picked up for the US (unsurprisingly).

So to end on a happy note, go read this hilarious rant by thefourthvine on warnings she thinks should be included on fic.

WARNING: There's a lot more to this story, but I didn't feel like writing it. Or any plot or characterization or anything, really. Mostly I just wrote "cock" a lot.

WARNING: I don't really have any plot left, but I wanted to write another story in this series because it turns out I didn't get to talk about their Christmas presents! It's going to be a very traditional Christmas, even though one of my characters is a Jew and the other isn't from this galaxy.

As darkrose said yesterday, I think the moon is in asshole.

First we have this post from meganbmoore about a librarian who wrote an open letter to publishers saying that there aren't enough books about boys and that some of these books about girls could totally be made into books about boys, because the plot wasn't about being female.

So much wrong here.

1. There are a ton of books with male protagonists. I don't know where this librarian has been looking.

2. The protagonist can only be female if the book is specifically about "being female" (which, idk, means getting your period or something maybe?). But all other books should be about men.

3. Girls are expected to have no problem reading stories starring guys, but guys cannot be expected to read a book starring an icky girl.

4. I think I had another point, but I forgot. :(

Then I read this post by bossymarmalade about the movie He's Just Not That Into You. Which...sounds like it would be horrible just from the title. But apparently it's all about how women can never get men because they're just so icky and different and female and they need a man to teach them how to behave properly to please men. Which includes, apparently, having long hair because guys need something to grab.

And while I'm at it, that reminded me of this post by unusualmusic from a week ago or so about the show 10 Things I Hate About You perpetuating the trans panic bathroom myth (if you let trans women into womens' bathrooms, they'll assault you!).

UGH.

It's really sad how there are no stories of faithful dogs in western culture, isn't it? I mean, that must be the case, if they have to take a Japanese story and completely strip it of everything Japanese and substitute white people in a US setting, just to have a touching story about a faithful dog, right?

I just...I don't even know what goes on in people's heads. Seriously. Why is this okay?

ETA: Also in other total WTF news, Marvel has decided to try and market to girls by making Marvel makeup.

“With a branded line of make-up from Marvel, girls will be able to feel as if they are going from ordinary to extraordinary just like the super hero characters in the stories,” he explained. “There is also such a nostalgic undertone that either young or older girls are drawn towards because of the long history and brand behind the name Marvel.”

Oh yeah, and of the 28 costumes they sell, one of them is for girls! Of course, it's a sexy minidress rather than a costume based on any actual character, but so what, right? (Though this response is awesome.)

ETA II: Electric Boogaloo: Even more WTFery. A Harvard professor locked himself out of his house and his neighbor called the cops when he was trying to get in.

Friends of Gates said he was already in his home when police arrived. He showed his driver's license and Harvard identification card, but was handcuffed and taken into police custody for several hours.

Of course I'm wtfing at the cops, but I really am not surprised. I'm pretty appalled at the neighbor, though. This was broad daylight. She couldn't recognise her own neighbor? Just thought all black men look the same, so he obviously must be breaking in? Even though he's an older man with, apparently, a fucking cane? WTF, neighbor lady!?

This post from Sociological Images is pretty neat. There's a 1981 ad for legos featuring a little girl, plus she's dressed in jeans and t-shirt.

Whenever I see all the hyper-gender-segregated toys (and clothes and furnishings and everything) that are on the market today, I think "it wasn't like that when I was little". Of course there were "boys' toys" and "girls' toys", Barbies and cars and all that. But it wasn't this crazy, not by a long shot. And there wasn't the princess craze or the "everything must be pink" business. There was a lot more inbetween. And seeing that lego ad is reassuring that it's not just some nostalgic reimagining on my part. You would never see an ad like that today.

I also liked this post about a bizarre new Tampax ad campaign that reads like fanfic. A teenage boy wakes up with a vagina and uterus and all that one day and gets his period. It could be interesting in theory, especially if they addressed the fact that some guys really do have "girl parts", but instead it's, well, rather like your typical fanfic "genderswap", where the guy magically starts liking shopping and fashion and stuff just because he has a vagina.

This and this are some interesting posts about Avatar and how some white viewers may genuinely not see the Asianness of the show at all because they're so ignorant of Asian culture. To them it reads as completely made-up-from-thin-air fantasy. As sad as that is, I think it's probably true.

1. Cold continues getting better, though slower than I had hoped. :-/

2. Jump scans were posted early, so I got everything done last night, including Bakuman, which usually never gets posted early. So tonight I can just relax!

3. I like yesterday's A Softer World (it's not a happy comic, though the rollover does turn it from serious to funny).

4. wyomingnot made an awesome Leverage vid. It's Parker! Set to And She Was! I had to click. :)

5. Speaking of which, there was new Leverage last night! I didn't get to watch it yet, though, because of the early Jump stuff.

6. I have chapter 6 of Saint Young Men done and ready to post as soon as I write up the chapter notes (so sometime this afternoon after I wake up).

1. I don't know if it's that I've been drinking so much of this Emergen-C stuff or what, but I was definitely feeling a lot better yesterday. Still like crap, but better than Sunday. (It probably helped that I was finally able to get more than four hours' sleep, too.)

2. We checked over at the college again and they finally got in the fourth of Bruce's five transcripts. I had asked the outstanding one to be faxed, thinking that would be okay, so I just happened to ask about it today while we were there and the guy said they don't accept faxes, so I guess that's the reason for that one still not being in the system. So we filled out another form and put it out for the mail today. Hopefully that will be taken care of fairly quickly as that's the only thing holding us back from our money now!

3. A couple weeks ago when we had friends over for a BBQ, I was talking with Mimi about walking and stuff and she said she takes these glucosamine pills and they really help your joints. Specifically, she said she used to have really crackly knees and after taking it for a while, her knees don't crackle at all. Well, mine are pretty horrible, so I decided to give it a try. After just a couple weeks, I can really tell a difference. They still make some noise, but not nearly as bad.

4. I finished watching season two of Avatar last night and started on season three. I was really disappointed that Zuko didn't join them at the end of season two. He was so close! Iroh has just gotten more and more awesome, though. I hope he's okay. Also Aang is adorable with hair.

5. If you liked BoA's US album, check out this post with a bunch of remixes and mashups of the songs.

6. This is a cover of Janet Jackson's Nasty by a "Tampa public-access star from the late 80s / early 90s". You have to click. Words cannot do it justice. Really.

1. Had a nice walk down to Barnes & Noble last night to use the gift card I got for my birthday. Just over four miles round trip. We had dinner at Fat Burger and I got one of their delicious banana shakes.

Unfortunately, because BookMooch was down, I hadn't been able to make a list of books I wanted, so I just kind of wandered around looking at the shelves and wasn't really seeing anything. There are a lot of books I want, but I don't know that I want any of them enough to pay $15-25. But I have the gift card, so I have to use it... D: I ended up buying Ian McEwan's The Child in Time, which is one I've had on my wishlist for a while and never seen any copies of. That was $15, so I still have $10 left on the card. Will go back again once BookMooch is working and I can get an idea of what I might want to look for.

2. Here's some stuff I liked today:

The US Finishes "A Strong Second" in Iraq (the Onion)

Lego arcade games (check out other videos by the same person for more awesomeness)

Today's xkcd

I really want this!

This is an interesting article about a thirteen-year-old boy who used a walkman for a week instead of his iPod. He didn't realise at first that tapes had a second side! D: But while it's tempting to laugh at him for being stupid...why would he automatically know that? If he has been exposed to tapes at all, it's probably been VHS tapes...which have only one side. But really, at thirteen, he has probably only been exposed to DVDs, CDs, and intangible media.

*

This is a good post about sizeism, springing from discussion of a fic written for spn_j2_bigbang. I saw the story when it was first posted and the summary was enough to make me want to stay far, far away. It was about Jensen being really fat and being sent to a fat camp sort of place, where he meets Jared, a trainer, and loses weight and falls in love. Oh yeah, and he's a thirty-year-old virgin. And he's in really bad health. And the reason he's fat is because he stuffs his face all day and is lazy and never exercises.

Yeah...that sounds awesome. But of course it was a huge hit.

The idea that fat people would be thin if only they exercised and didn't eat so much is so pervasive, but it's just not true. Skinny people are not necessarily skinny because they don't eat much, or because they eat healthy food, or because they exercise all the time. Sure, some do those things. So do fat people.

I have been fat almost all my life. I have also been very active most of my life. When I was a kid, I rode my bike everywhere. When I was in high school I played sports (and still rode my bike all the time). When I was in college I walked a lot and rode my bike (UCLA is built on a mountain; going to school there will guarantee you a lot of exercise). Through it all, I was in great shape, but was still fat, and not just a little fat, but "obese". The only time I have not got a lot of exercise is the ten years or so that Bruce and I had a car. You know what happened then? I got out of shape. Being out of shape is not the same as being fat. Being in shape is not the same as being thin.

Now that we don't have a car anymore and are walking a lot again (we are now walking an average of three miles a day, and the better shape we get in, the longer our walks are getting), guess what? I am in so much better shape. I have also this past year or so made it a goal to eat healthier, and have been keeping to it really well. I have never eaten a lot. When we have family meals, I am always the one who eats the least, less than both fat and thin relatives. I only eat when I'm hungry, not for "comfort eating" or because I'm bored. I drink water almost exclusively.

Despite all this, while Bruce has lost about thirty pounds, I've lost maybe five or six. I exercise a lot and eat well, but am still over a hundred pounds overweight.

Of course I would love to be thin. I would love to just weigh less than I do now, even if I never got actually thin or "normal" weight. But I am not going to go on a diet, because diets are the worst thing for you.

And I resent the idea that I should starve myself because if I only ate less I wouldn't be fat! Eating healthy food isn't enough. Eating only enough to fill my stomach and stop it from hurting isn't enough. I'm really not fit to even eat at all. That's the message that it sends when people say all you have to do to lose weight is eat less.

*

But enough ranting. Now for some of those interview meme questions.

From helens78:

( click! )

From mikotokun:

( click! )

And from bell:

( click! )

1. Excellent walk yesterday. Four miles, plus we got lots of errands done while we were out. The main errand was to go down to Sears and see if we could get Bruce's glasses fixed. On Saturday he found they were suddenly bent out of shape, though he didn't remember doing anything that could have done that. He was able to wear them, but they were askew and pressing into his nose and ear uncomfortably. Thankfully the woman at Sears was able to fix them right up. I had several packages for the post office, so we stopped in at the main post office while we were down there. Whole Foods is just up the block from there, so Bruce got some more of the 99 cent popcorn he loves. Then we walked back home, stopping at Arby's for dinner because we were both really, really hungry. Oh, and while we were down there, we saw there is a Penzey's Spices in Santa Monica now! We didn't go in as it was on the wrong side of the street and we didn't feel like going back down the block and crossing, but we will probably walk down there sometime soon.

2. Speaking of mailing packages, they were all from BookMooch and one was nineteen comics and a book. That takes me down to just thirteen comics left out of a whole box full. I remember when I first put the comics up, I was wondering if it was even worth the effort. It was such a pain in the ass because comics don't have ISBNs, so I had to hand enter them all, and because they don't have ISBNs, that means it's less likely that people are going to be looking specifically for them. But I guess a lot of people do search BookMooch for comics in general, because I have been getting steady mooches ever since. About half the box was Star Trek stuff and I've definitely seen a boost in Trek since the movie (both comics and novels). So yay for that. Always glad to get rid of stuff!

3. The best part of waking up is Folgers on your butt.

4. I found this awesome webcomic yesterday thanks to Bruce (which is how I found most of the comics I read, actually). I really like this one and this one.

5. Also Dinosaur Comics is hilarious as usual.

1. OMG NEW MARIO FOR THE WII IS A SIDESCROLLER!!! Awesome video here! Apparently a key feature is that you can play simultaneously with up to four players, but that's not a draw for me (I don't have friends to play it with and even if I did, it would be more frustrating than anything; I am all for taking turns, but having my gameplay limited by what someone else is doing onscreen at the same time is so unappealing; this is why I am totally uninterested in MMORPGs). Thankfully single-player mode is an option as well. I'm so excited about this! I know what I want for Christmas. :D

2. Got myself signed up for mcshep_match. The slots filled in like five minutes, so it's a good job I was there refreshing the page until signups opened!

3. I LOLed.

4. amadi started up transfic, a comm for posting fic about transgender characters, both those who are trans in canon and those who aren't. Whee!

5. This, too, is awesome.

6. I got my Remix assignment! I have two fandoms in common with the author, so there should be plenty to choose from. I also, oddly enough, have a random idea for a fic I clicked on, but for which I am not at all familiar with canon. There's plenty of time to acquaint myself with canon, though, so I'm considering it.

1. puritybrown said she had an extra copy of Skim and would send it to me! I've had it on my bookmooch wishlist for a while, but no sign of it (and there's like 29 other people who've wishlisted it), so I'm pretty excited about that. :)

2. Baby otters!

3. I made a cake tonight 'cause we're having my mom and Tom and my grandparents over for my mom's birthday tomorrow. Haven't made this cake in years and forgot how good it is.

( Recipe for cake & frosting )

1. I posted fic! This is the first thing I've written (well, finished writing; I do have snippets of unfinished stuff on my hard drive) since yuletide. I'm really pretty excited about it. It feels good to write! Unfortunately that's pretty much all I did all day... :-/

2. This is the preview for the upcoming Sherlock Holmes movie with Jude Law and Robert Downey, Jr. It looks hilariously bad. They've turned it into an action movie! XD Every scene in the preview looked like a ripoff of every other popular action movie. idek. Not enough lulz in the world, man. But Jude looks good and I will no doubt watch it when the time comes.

1. I had never heard of Amy Sedaris before reading this, but all I can say is wtf?

2. I have been somewhat following news of The Princess and the Frog since I first heard of it, and was pleased that there was going to be a Disney movie with a black girl as the princess (though I knew it would surely be faily in various ways, and it does indeed seem to be so). But then I saw the preview and apparently she's a frog for most of the movie? D: I'm sure all the merchandise will still be her as a human, but was it really too much for them to have her on the screen the whole time? How disappointing.

3. rpf_big_bang seems like something that might be of interest for folks on my flist. The minimum word count is only 15,000 words, and any RPF fandom counts.

4. One of our tomato plants has worms. :( Teensy tiny green things that are actually pretty cute, but they have been eating up the leaves pretty bad. Anyone have any good suggestions for organic/do-it-yourself pesticides? I'd rather not use chemicals if I can help it.

5. My hip hurts. :( :( :(

1. Had a great day yesterday. I had to stay up to go out to breakfast with my mom, and then I ended up not going to bed afterwards, so Bruce and I walked down to McDonald's to get him some breakfast (since he hadn't come with us, and our kitchen was unfortunately smelling like disgusting ant spray, so neither of us felt like making anything for him at home). We stopped at Albertson's on the way back and...they had Mountain Dew Throwback! Finally! I like it better than the Pepsi. When lunchtime rolled around, the kitchen still smelled like ant spray, so we walked over to Tacos Por Favor and had delicious lunch.

So not only did we have a great lunch, but we got two good walks, and it wasn't too hot and sunny (quite overcast in the morning, actually).

2. Mother Lover is the a sequel of sorts of Dick in a Box. I can't even count how many times I've watched it since last night. (The link goes to the SNL site, which is unfortunately region locked to the US and they keep deleting copies off youtube, but for the moment this one still works, for those who can't access the official site.)

Note: Neither the link nor the following conversation are at all worksafe. The link is not particularly sanitysafe, either.

me: http://www.luriddigs.com/2009/05/09/the-problem-with-poinsettias-in-may/ WHAT. THE. ACTUAL. FUCK

darkrose: DOT

darkrose: DOT

darkrose: ( DOT )

1. I had an awesome doughnut this morning. It was a white cake doughnut with chocolate coating, topped with a two-inch-tall swirl of white frosting (that thick sugary frosting like on cakes) which itself was coated in chocolate. It's not something I ever need to have again (not only was it hard to eat, but it was too much sugar even more me*), but it was awesome. I wish I'd taken a picture!


*Not that long ago I probably would have been able to eat it with no problem, but the past few months I've seriously cut down on sugar and sweets, so my body's not used to that much sugar in one go.

2. I did take a picture of dinner. omg it was so good. We stopped in Marukai this morning and they had samples of curry, just the usual House Vermont kind we always get, but it was so good, so we bought a box and then I had an idea! Instead of adding chicken to the curry as we usually do, we should cook up a couple shake 'n' bake pork chops and have katsu curry! It turned out really well, too. The shake 'n' bake coating is not as thick as tonkatsu coating usually is, but it was a good enough substitute.

3. This video is so awesome! It's yet another Supernatural parody of a Lonely Island song, this time I'm a Boss. I am not usually a fan of fandom vids, but I love humor vids and this is hilarious.

4. Man, speaking of crack, asknosecrets reminded me of boytaurs (totally not safe for work or for your sanity). I think sax is the one who originally introduced me to that site, and if it wasn't her, she's getting the blame. It was someone back in those halcyon days of JournalFen and The Establishment. Anyway, it's so bad it's good, because there are few things I love more than hilariously bad manips and that site is full of them.

1. The $300 I transferred the other day from paypal to bank cleared yesterday, so I could pay bills since I still haven't got my check from work (I emailed him last night asking for a stop payment/reissue, because this is kind of ridic). Very glad we put up the CDs for sale when we did.

2. New chapter of Tegamibachi last night (well, I dunno when it was released, but I downloaded it last night). I love this series so much. *_*

3. Ugly Betty was pretty awesome. I figured it would turn out to be Wilhelmina's baby after all (though I'm not 100% sure she didn't fiddle with the test results). Poor Christina, she's really got attached to the baby. I also have the final ep of Pushing Daisies, but I only watched part of it before remembering I had stuff I had to do (like betaing busaikko's lgbtfest fic which is due tomorrow!).

4. Going to walk up to Enterprise in a bit here to pick up our car for the weekend. It's by a doughnut shop, so doughnuts for breakfast! :D (Gotta work off those calories from walking up to the place somehow!)

5. We had Foster Freeze for dinner last night and I got their chicken strips which are the best ever, even better than KFC, which is saying a lot because I love KFC like burning. Anyway, I can usually only eat two or three of the four, and this time it was three, so later I was like man, I wish I had more than just one chicken strip left, I'm hungrier than this, and then I got the idea of chopping it up and putting it in a salad, so I had a yummy fried chicken salad om nom nom.

6. Yash linked me to this video, which is so awesome. Then that reminded me of Jizz in My Pants, which is also awesome (especially the Supernatural version), and I saw they actually have an album WHICH ALSO INCLUDES DICK IN A BOX!!! Guys, you don't even know. I have been wanting a proper mp3 version of Dick in a Box from the moment I heard it. Anyway, so I downloaded the whole album. Haven't listened to it yet, but I am hopeful that the other songs are as good as those three. I will upload it sometime soon as I already have a ton of albums for a post.

7. Maru is still awesome.

I think there was some other youtube stuff I was going to link, but now I don't remember. :(

1. Sold some more CDs! But there are still plenty left! Later today or tomorrow I might search for some communities to crosspost the list to.

2. I wasn't sure I'd be able to hit 25 books read by the end of the month, but I managed to slip in one very short one in time. :D So I am totally on track for 75 books by the end of the year! I'm wondering if I can read 300 manga by the end of the year, too. It's a nice even number to aim for, and I am at 79 now, so not too far behind to meet that goal. (Not that I really need to read more manga, except that I have so much on my to-read list, it'd be nice to get through that much!)


Now here are some links to stuff I liked:

xkcd on the Twitter swine flu hysteria

Possibly the best song ever (it's about tabbouleh!)

Yesterday's "a softer world" (I won't lie, Joey Comeau/Ryan North is totally my webcomic creator OTP)

A very catchy song about Transformers (also with Beast Wars edition)

1. Finally, finally Bruce is able to go to the dentist and get that abscess worked on. ( wow, this got long )

2. We went to the store today and I got an orange to eat while walking to the bus stop and it was really delicious. It's not orange season anymore so we've been pretty disappointed with any we've had lately, even from the farmers' market, and I wasn't expecting much from this one since it was on sale for 50 cents a pound and produce on sale at the grocery store nearly always means it's not that good (sometimes if you're lucky it's rotted already or has spiders in it!). So that was a very pleasant surprise. I only wish I'd got more!

3. Yesterday I finished the doujinshi I was working on. I'm pleased with myself that I managed to do it in two days and not stretch it out forever. I'd told the person I was translating it for that I'd have it done by the end of the week and I finished before the deadline I'd set. Go me! This hardly ever happens!

4. I started writing fic last night. If I can finish it (we'll see if I can get my momentum back after setting it down) it will be the first thing I've written all year. I'm hopeful! (Also I have a fic due for lgbtfest due on the 30th, ack, so maybe this will get me in a writing mode.)

5. My mom came over yesterday to put stuff in our garage and took our piles of charity stuff while she was here, yay. And tonight we cleaned out another drawer in the kitchen.

6. This new Maru video makes me very happy.

7. Angie Zapata's killer was sentenced to life in prison without parole. Her killer was also the first person convicted of a hate crime against a trans person, which is a sad state of affairs considering how many trans people have been the victims of hate crimes, but hopefully a sign that things are changing for the better.

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And now it's time for one of those user interests memes. Let me know if you want me to ask you to talk about some of your user interests.

From blueswan:

( avatar/eggplant mike/hollyweirdos/jensen's swaggering manliness )

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I watched SPN and Pushing Daisies tonight.

( Supernatural )

( Pushing Daisies )

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Hey, here are some links, too.

Ugh, ugh, ugh. I have been following this mess from the beginning and thought it had died down, but no, apparently people are still going on about how Erika Moen is awesome and trans people just need to stfu because they have no sense of humor and shouldn't they be concentrating on more important issues anyway? There are some good comments in there, though (including a couple by a poster named Grace who is totally not me, but is saying good things!). (This is unrelated to Erika Moen's comic, but is more trans fail from white cis feminists, who are apparently falling over themselves to agree with Focus on the Fucking Family about the evils of trans women using women's restrooms.)

alchemia has an awesome, link-filled post about autism rights and the portrayal of autistics in fiction and non-fiction. I think I will link it on Facebook, too, since just the other day someone on my flist there sent a message to all her contacts about an autism walk she was participating in to raise money for NTs Speak to Other NTs About Autism While Silencing Autistic People Autism Speaks.

I saw this Stephen Colbert one a few days ago. And now there's this one with Lance Bass and George Takei and a bunch of other people, some of whom are vaguely familiar which is pretty funny. There are also a ton of parodies on youtube, but tbh, most are not that great (though I did like that one had a talking dog afraid of gay marriage).