24 Hours Later:

Sophomoric Semaphore

I just don't understand people, sometimes.
Normally, this doesn't bother me, but when it's someone I used to be able to read like a book, it makes me wonder what changed. When you're in a relationship with someone that you care deeply for, you get to a point where the slightest twitch at the corner of the mouth speaks volumes not in the slightest bit cacophonous or overbearing, but instead perfectly coherent. Maybe it's just familiarity and observation, but what does it say when that breaks down or, in my case, completely disappears? My only real guesses are it's either some kind of defense mechanism, or that you maybe weren't really reading them all that well in the first place and you've only just now worked it out. What's worse is that even when they're just speaking to you as they normally would, you wonder how you ever understood anything they said at all.
This particular person whose actions (and, most importantly, words) have led me to write this (after a few very stiff drinks... but that's another matter) has an almost schizophrenic approach to daily life, without actually having the condition. She doesn't communicate very well, and always has a ready excuse. To her credit, the last incident of note was because she had a cat in her lap that she'd just rescued from some negligent owners en route to the pound. Even still, her thoughts were elsewhere:

She: Busy? Have you ate?
Me: Yes, I just got back from eating. What's up?
She: Oh. 

These were text messages, and after sending that "Oh." the next line got its own text message barely thirty seconds later while I debated whether or not to answer or just wait for her to give me more information regarding whether or not I was busy:

She: Cause I'm hungry and mom's not stopping. 

Seven minutes later, again as I try to debate answering her. I mean, what am I supposed to do? Why is this suddenly my responsibility? Was it selfish of me to eat while she was out spending the day with her mom and sister (which I only learned of when I got home from work that day). Why am I supposed to pick up the slack for that? If that's not the case, then why am I being told this?

She: what do you get me from Hardee's? 

Then, while I'm typing the reply, working out that she convinced her mom to stop for food:

She: [my sister] and I are gonna stop there. 

Here's what gets me: she's in the same car with her mom and sister. If I wasn't trying to maintain what little patience I have left for her (things have not been going well for a few months, but I've tried to make the best of things), my reply would have been along the lines of, "No kidding." but with more colorful language. The issue is essentially one of either not getting enough information or getting so much that it's impossible to get a word in edgewise and move the situation forwards. I have to drag essentials out of her only to get multiple and fragmented messages about the logistics of satisfying impulses while carpooling. This brings us to today, as I'm driving home from work, having stopped briefly to gas up my car:

She: You have any cash? I need stuff from the store
Me: Like what?
She: Gallon of tea, [my sister's] coming over tomorrow, apricot scrub... something for dinner. 

So I get an appointment in the middle of a grocery list. Logically, I think this holds relevance, but the place it's wedged into immediately trumps that logic. Thus, I ask:

Me: So, should what I pick up for dinner be for tonight or for when [she] comes over tomorrow?
She: Tonight. 

Then why bring it up, least of all in the middle of a list of things to get? Whether or not she comes over has no bearing on what I do when I get home from work. Maybe there's a little bit of time spent on catching up with what's been happening with the family or some useless piece of trivia that turns out to be wrong

Short story: I have a blue light bulb on our porch because I like the color and it stands out, she tells me it's to signify a gay residence, I do research and find at least six "meanings" to blue outdoor lights, NONE of which have anything to do with the gay community apart from transvestites in Amsterdam. 

I just don't get how someone's mind can work this way when writing out a message. In casual speech, sure, it's easy to insert some random piece of information, but when writing a list...? Like I said, there are always excuses when I get messages like this, most of them having to do with being in the middle of an online multiplayer game and talking to at least one other person via Skype. Others often just have to do with not giving a damn about being understood, which wouldn't even be so bad if she didn't spew bile and rage when asked for clarification. Yes, it can be annoying to repeat one's self, but getting mad at someone else for not being able to understand you when you're barely trying to be coherent is like being mad at yourself for having your hands over your eyes and thus not being able to see in front of you.

All I want is some damn forethought.
All I want is some effort to at least give something a once-over before hitting "send."
All I want is a single, complete thought presented in one singular message.
All I want is the understanding that I'm not able to read minds.
All I want is to not to be treated like an interruption by the very person making the request of me.
All I want is to not have to answer 8 ultimately inconsequential questions before someone gets to the point and asks what they really want to know.
All I want is to not have to end an otherwise-constant string of second-guesses with, "BECAUSE I'M A STUPID F----ING MORON!" in order to make someone drop the issue of how I can make so many "mistakes" in responding to their own words.

Apparently the moon and Belgium are more readily available as a bundle than any one of these simple wishes.

I give up. I give the Hell up. I'm through being a remedial English teacher to a native speaker who throws a temper tantrum at 3 in the morning because their "grammar check" plug-in won't work with their browser. That statement is equally metaphorical and literal.

Good night, and good luck.

Perler Pong

Junk Mail Filler

I don't know very much about biorhythms or ever took much stock in them to begin with, but somehow fall is always a rather hectic time for me. I remember one day, just after I'd graduated college, my dad said to me, "This is probably going to feel very weird for you, huh?" When I asked him what he meant, he observed, "This will be the first August since you were maybe five years old that you won't be getting ready for school." Maybe that has something to do with it, along with the changing of the seasons (Seasonal Affective Disorder), the onset of the holidays (including my birthday, my father & mother's birthdays, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's) and all their incumbent stress.
The point is that I realized how long it had been since I made an entry here and in my frustration I'm trying to find a rational explanation for it. Years ago, all the way back on the now-defunct Yahoo!360, the first weblog I ever had, I made something of a promise that if I was going to have an online journal and build up any sort of audience or circle of friends, I should try and aim for at least one entry a month, my thinking being that my journal was like any other regular periodical, namely a magazine as I never really focused on anything topical so as to address an issue with urgency.
Another reason is that a few weeks ago I hurt my back really bad. The short version of the story is that I slept wrong. The slightly less short version of the story is that I slept wrong and my computer chair wasn't helping. In fact, said computer chair is in a dumpster and couldn't have gone that way sooner. As such, I didn't have a way to sit at my computer for long periods of time, thus making even the shortest journal entries a bit tedious. I managed to work around some of the issues this presented by hooking up my keyboard to my Playstation and using its internal browser to handle most of my networking, especially on DeviantART. I also got a new phone with a decent data plan and a fairly robust browser. The trouble with both of those is that the Playstation's text entry mode has a character limit (much like the PSP), and the phone's touchscreen keyboard is a little hard to work with.
Luckily, I've managed to inherit an old computer chair from my roommate which is just bearable enough to let me bash out a few entries here and there, particularly on my DeviantART page. That's why I'm going to be relatively brief here and just present a series of videos I'd posted to YouTube over the past few months about some junk mail I'd received... repeatedly.

The first time:


The second time:


The third time:

Sketchbook II

Think of this as a "Greatest Hits" video, showing the sketchbook I've made a number of my most recent gallery uploads to in its entirety (plus two bonus sketches... that are so damn terrible this video is probably the only place they're ever going to be seen).

The Buzzing of Flies

It really hadn't been a great few days prior to the 10th of July, but on that day, an amazing thing happened that normally I wouldn't be proud of in the slightest. There's no real pride in getting negative attention, despite what Oscar Wilde might have said about saying anything. However, when said negative attention comes from people whose ire and scorn is the direct result of being caught in their own stupid, moronic lie, the feeling I get may not exactly be pride, but I don't feel the slightest bit of guilt, not in the slightest.

I don't want to repeat what I wrote in my DeviantART Journal, so here's a summation with an addendum chronicling the subsequent events:

* A user posts ZIP files full of celebrity photos they found in Google image search to their gallery, offering them up as stock images for people to use however they see fit despite them not being her own work in the first place.

* I call her out on it in a comment on one of her photos.

* She says that her father is a professional photographer who took many of the photos that she posted, and therefore has permission.

* Some quick searching shows that the photos belong to several photographers, many working for different websites, the most prominent one being StarTraks.

* I proceed to ask her a simple line of questions about her father's "body of work," such as if he has his own personal online gallery or portfolio?

* She says she doesn't understand the question.

* I rephrase the question: Why would a professional photographer need his daughter's DeviantART page to post his work instead of his own website?

* She repeats that he's taken "many" of the photos she's posted.

* I ask which ones are his.

* She doesn't answer and blocks me from leaving further comments on her page.

* She writes a pleading journal, blaming me for getting an old account of hers banned (a power that, sadly, I don't actually have, and I only left one comment on that page a full day before it was banned), and calling on her friends to get me banned by...

Before we get to the quote, it's probably best to give a little context, just so you can fully grasp the sheer ineptitude. It's entirely within her power to file a formal complaint against me with DeviantART's administration for harassment. Whether or not it would be acted upon is entirely up to their discretion, and most likely nothing would be done given that she's already blocked me from her page, but the point is that there exists a legitimate and specialized avenue available to her for reporting me. Despite that, however, she thinks the only way to get me banned is:

"Entrá alguna deviantion (sic) de esos usuarios y dale click a "Report Deviation (right)" que está abajo de las estadísticas de esa deviantion (back to sic). De esa manera los pueden bannear."

Which translates to:

"Enter any deviation of those users and click "Report Deviation" which is below the deviation's statistics. We can ban them in this way."

So, rather than using the Help menu in DeviantART's support page to file a complaint she is technically well within her rights to file, she's telling as many people as she can to go to the drawings, paintings, and photographs in my gallery and report them for violations of DeviantART's Terms of Service.

Report them for what, exactly? I don't know, and it turns out neither does she. In fact, one of her watchers asked her what to file the report under (permission issues, explicit content, malware, to name a few). This question has received no answer. As to why she's given no answer, I can only hazard the guess that she has absolutely no idea how the site works and doesn't want to expose her ignorance.

This is ignorant for three important reasons:

1) It assumes that DeviantART's moderators do not actually read violation reports against uploads or at least check the work of art in question to make sure the report is legitimate. After all, not every report is for something offensive or harmful; being in the wrong category is one of the options, that just gets something moved to another category suggested by the one who files the report.

2) It essentially takes me out of the equation and tries to turn focus onto something completely unrelated in the hope of achieving the same result. In other words, I said something that offended someone, so they're taking offense and expressing displeasure at a drawing I made long before any of this happened, and is therefore irrelevant to the situation. Even her straw man is a lie.

3) It assumes that this "false witness/faux straw man" tactic will work despite her putting this plan

in writing

in a journal

on a public website

viewable by anyone

including but not limited to, the moderators and system administrators who will have to make a decision as to the legitimacy of the claims before taking any action.

Of course, there is the distinct possibility that the moderators will, as history has sometimes shown, jump the gun and go along with this crackpot scheme, hence my writing a journal on my page keeping everyone appraised of the situation so there's no surprise if my gallery should disappear. It's been two days, and the result of all this has thus far been:

A little, tiny spike in my pageviews that lasted all of around 24 hours (for my main page, strangely enough; I haven't seen any similar spikes for the stuff in my gallery).

A pair of apologists offering feeble excuses for why they have a right to post other people's work (with fair civility, I'll grant them).

A death threat (this makes two for me, pardon my yawn).

And a comment from someone calling me a gringo (a word I heard once living in New Mexico for 17 years).

I've filed a report against the one who wrote the journal (the one who lied about her father's profession, then lied to get everyone else to lie for her) for ban evasion, not harassment, and if she's reading this by chance, here's a message for you:

Pase lo que pase, yo gano, y no eres un artista. Lidiar con eso. 

Good night, and good luck.

It's not been a great couple of days...

I'm sitting here in the office with the keyboard in my lap because the edge of my desk hurts my wrists after a few minutes. I'm wearing my headphones and playing Nine Inch Nails Ghosts album on a playlist in an attempt to drown out the noise that I practically deal with 90% of the time I'm home.

I was going to write the next part of this entry as a handful of posts to my Twitter feed. I did it once before, but it was back when I had next to no real followers (just the usual follow-back types), and I was on vacation with only my phone, so it was actually very practical. Now, though, Twitter's a different animal for me, and in a good way, albeit it means sitting at a desk for writing longer entries.

These last few days have been very stressful for me for a number of reasons. In all, the months of April and June (with the surrounding months) haven't exactly been on my good side for a number of years. June of 2000 was when my parents divorced, and April is when I've lost most of my past jobs, even the ones I really liked. Seriously, when I was given the news by the cell carrier I worked for, and they asked if I had anything to say before they showed me the door, I honestly said I wanted to go back to my desk and return to work, that's what a simp I can be sometimes. As such, it's also around this time I end up moving, which has been at least every year or every other year since 2000.

I wasn't fired this year, fortunately, which makes this the longest job I've held since the retail gig I had in high school and the first half of college. However, while I won't be moving, I did have to renew my lease, which involved disclosing a lot of personal information to the landlord (and landlord's bosses) to make sure my roommate and I aren't wealthier than we claim to be so we can stay. In fact, my roommate got a call from them asking about an "inconsistency" we've clarified for them twice before. Here's the tweets I would have sent (with a few embellishments due to character limits):

* Renewing my lease was a huge pain because my roomie's finances are an enigma wrapped in a conundrum and the only reason it's like that...

* is because she leaves all her money matters to her sister who, to put it nicely, is a financial moron with sticky fingers (borrows, then swears to pay back, but only will when practically bullied) and borderline paranoia.

* Couple all this with the sheer annoyance that is my roommate's inability to speak at a normal volume during her daily 14hr Massively Multiplayer Online Game sessions...

* and I have virtually no sense of personal space in my own residence. If I really want it, I've got to turn off my phone and get in my car.

* though that's hardly a temporary respite because she's co-bloody-dependent and can't do hardly a damn thing for herself unless I scold her like a child.

* The worst part is I held off on renewing the lease because I was seriously considering my options for kicking her out.

A few weeks ago, we had a discussion about trust in the wake of an incident in which it was basically trampled because she has no self control, and any attempt to confront her about any of her more unhealthy behaviors and try to discuss them end with her insisting there's nothing she can do about it and that I essentially have no choice but to accept them. While we did manage to reach a reasonable compromise that would serve as a stepping stone to full reconciliation, it recently broke down again and I found myself playing a parental role to someone older and more life-experienced than me, which doesn't help my long-held sentiment that I'm not father material.

To cap it off, her sleep cycle has reached that point where her day is my night, so my sleep has been interrupted through the night by screaming and yelling that isn't at all muffled by two doors and at least as many walls. This also includes the span of time when I get home from work (where I wear earplugs because I'm an arm's reach away from a bay of industrial presses).

If you're wondering exactly how someone gets to this point in their life where they're in this kind of living situation, I'll sum up the pretext by saying it's a long and complicated story and that the important thing to walk away with from it is that simply uttering the phrase, "Shape up or ship out!" to those it applies to isn't as easily done as said in the worst possible way.

I feel a little better now. I'm almost considering not publishing this, just letting it serve as catharsis and hopefully getting a decent night's sleep, ultimately waking up feeling completely fine. The only reason I'm going to go ahead and post this is because I've fallen into that trap before, and I've decided it's not healthy to just ignore and bury things that bother me (SEE PREVIOUS ENTRY).

The best part is that I talked myself out of a drink before coming in here to write this for a change. I consider that a moral victory.

Goodnight, and good luck.

Oh, Not Funny When It's You

So, some time ago, Star Wars Kinect was released for the XBox360, and it was met with what could charitably be described as mixed feelings, with most of the negative feelings strangely centered on a rhythm and dance portion of the game wherein much-beloved characters dance in well-known locales to popular songs made into parodies by a slight tweaking of key lyrics. "Princess in a battle" instead of "genie in a bottle" is one example.
As to why this has many fans outraged, there's no official answer, but if one were to be culled from the general consensus of the gaming community, it's that Star Wars Kinect is an officially licensed Lucasfilm product. In other words, Star Wars fans can make fun of their beloved franchise to their heart's content, but heaven forbid the people behind it have a sense of humor as well.
I could get into the psycho-socio-cultural underpinnings of this phenomenon, but The Escapist's MovieBob already did, and in reading his analysis, I remembered something from my own childhood that perfectly exemplifies the situation.

It was really hard for me to make friends after I moved to New Mexico in 1991. There's a lot of reasons for this I won't go into, but probably the most important one was that my sense of humor didn't gel with everyone else's. I understand that friends take digs at each other, call each other names, and even play mean little tricks on each other. Really, I get it; it's part of the trust, it's something you can do because of the comfort zone. The thing is, where I saw it as being "part" of the whole "friendship" paradigm, some people saw it as "the whole" and that struck me as just downright conceited. I kid you not when I say that I actually lost a really good friend because I told him to stop calling me a certain name because it genuinely bothered me. For years afterward, I thought there was something wrong with me because I just couldn't take a joke, I couldn't separate "laughing with" from "laughing at." Years later, I got a second opinion. The good news is that there wasn't really anything wrong with me, that sometimes people were just jerks. The bad news is that the number of jerks turned out to be higher than I'd thought.
My 7th grade history class had some class clowns in it. Trouble was, it was a de facto role as they weren't very good at it, as most of their jokes relied on me to be their punchline, whether I wanted to be or not. How exactly they made fun of me or laughed at me or generally had fun at my expense varied and changed almost daily. For about two or three days, though, the fixation was on the fact that I was the only boy in the class who wore glasses. Right away, I thought, "they're really desperate for a laugh." Seriously, the last months 7th grade, a year between us and high school, and I felt like I was living out an uninspired episode of Full House.
Anyway, we were all doing some sort of art project that I don't remember any details of, except that we'd have to stop about five minutes before the bell so we could all go wash up in the bathrooms. So, here's the scenario: everyone walks a little faster than me so they can get there first. When I step in, everyone turns away from the sinks and starts flicking their hands at me so water beads on my glasses, carrying on until I literally can't see and have to take them off to wipe them clean, and the process repeats when I put them back on until I get out of the bathroom, my hair wet enough that I can slick it back.

This goes on for two days. I don't get angry. I don't lash out. I don't confront anybody about it. I don't say a word.  I just stand there and seethe quietly to myself, because it's the seventh bloody grade, we're in our early teens, and flicking water at my glasses to where I can't see is the funniest damn thing in the world to these guys. On the third day, I figure that maybe I'm taking this too seriously, that I'm not having fun with the whole thing. So, I decide to give this "laughing with you" idea a shot. Again, everyone walks a little faster than me to get to the bathroom first. Before I step in, though, I take my glasses off and put them in my pocket. I make sure not to squint, because that would just give them something to laugh about. I walk in, knowing what's going to happen next, and I'm smiling. It's not a toothy, ear-to-ear grin, it's more like a Mona Lisa, at the risk of sounding pretentious. The funny thing is, I'd never felt more confident in my life at that moment. The sad thing is, no one else found it funny, made apparent when they turned away from the sinks with hands at the ready.

Awkward silence.

I'd see some turn away from the sink and watch a smile disappear almost like someone flipped a switch. Instead of knowing nods, playful shrugs, or even indifference, I saw, despite the blur, frowns and eye rolls. I hadn't gotten in on the joke, I'd ruined it. I'd ruined it by not ignoring them or getting angry or annoyed or anything like that. I'd ruined it by wanting in on it and playing along. They weren't making fun of me to be friendly or chummy, they were making fun of me because they were that desperate for a laugh. How dare I, apparently.

Maybe I should have grabbed a fire extinguisher before going in instead.

Frightened, but Brave

Just got back from Snow White and the Huntsman, and I'm not even going to make a comment about Mirror Mirror leaving bad taste in my mouth and this being the cleansing swig because it's an unfair comparison.

In short, loved it. Awesome. Highly recommended.

In the interest of full disclosure, let's address the elephant in the room: I have never seen the Twilight movies. Actually, that's a lie; I've seen five minutes of a scene with two groups of vampires comparing notes on feeding habits and it pretty much told me all I need to know about what I'd be in for if I stayed and watched the rest. I bring this up because my roommate has seen the Twilight films and as such her biggest hangup about seeing the film was Kristen Stewart, fearing a wooden performance.

I think she gets a bit of a bum rap. Granted, the only thing I've seen her in prior to this was Zathura, where she played the older sister of the two boys. Not much meat to the role, but I liked her in it.

Something most people will probably notice right away regarding performances, hers as well as others, is that dialogue is rather sparse, and given that Stewart has a fair amount of screen time in the first act, people might be led to believe that her part was toned back because of fear about her ability to deliver dialogue. This really isn't the case; overall, it's a very visual film with very long passages of silence. I think that's one of the film's greatest assets, not feeling like it has to hold the audience's hand or keep spouting little throwaway lines of expository dialogue. What little dialogue there actually is serves almost as padding. Seriously, this would make a dandy silent film.

At the risk of sounding like I'm gushing, and going back to what I was saying about Kristen's performance, I think she's one of the best female leads I've seen in a fantasy film. She's got a very rare quality that I first heard leveled at the late Elisabeth Sladen by former Doctor Who producer Barry Letts. He said of her:

"She could be frightened and brave at the same time. Most actresses can only do one or the other."

This is also how I felt about Naomi Watts in the Peter Jackson remake of King Kong, someone who has a confidence and inner strength, but is also a human being with a full emotional palette. On that note, I think my favorite scene in the film (stop reading if you don't want any spoilers) is one where she stares down a monstrous troll that's just made a rag doll of the Huntsman and sets its sights on her. Admittedly, it waxes incredibly silly, but it made me smile and, frankly, if I made a fantasy film, you bet I'd have a scene like this. It's Dorothy slapping the Cowardly Lion, but done better. It speaks to her character, saying, "Look, I'm cold, tired, and terrified, but damned if I'm going to run now!"

Sure, not a terribly deep review, more just first impressions, but it's a very good first impression. Again, highly recommend it.

This Is What I'm On About...

I've been called a Grammar Nazi, but I'd rather think I'm more like a Grammar Sheriff or Constable. In other words, my bar is actually set very low as far as what a typical person's grammatical skill should be, more "move along" than "no soup for you!" In the interest of full disclosure, if you'd seen me in second grade and bore witness to the spectacle of me trying to keep "woman" vs "women" straight in my head, you might laugh your head off. In my defense, while I wasn't personally aware of it, this was around the time when "womyn" was becoming an acceptable spelling in certain circles, which would have probably cut the hassle I was having in half. Also in my defense, this was second grade. I was 7, maybe 8. Of course, I don't expect perfection at that age; the English language is full of little idiosyncrasies and inconsistencies that, for a young mind, are hard to comprehend.
The Escapist, meanwhile, requires its users to be a minimum of 10 years old. Yes, that's only 2 or 3 years from the age I was at when I was confusing plural pronouns for the fairer sex, but there's a world of difference between words that are spelled one way and pronounced another, and a mark of punctuation used to shorten the overall quantity of words.
The point is, in the end, I've taken a quality vs. quantity approach to how people write. When I read a novel, even one from a big name publisher and well-established author, I expect a typo or two. When I read a weblog entry that's more than a paragraph, again, I expect a few run-ons and "teh"s and the like.

When the title is misspelled, however... that's just pathetic.

The title, the damned title, is only two words, yet made three by an extra vowel and punctuation mark that changes the very nature of the pronoun its attached to.

Many years ago, on YouTube, there was a video circulating around called, "Get Want You Want." it was about self-manifestation, and quite a few others copied the title for their own respective takes on the subject. The sad thing is, people must have just copied and pasted the title from the original video using a mouse and key commands, because I swear I saw more "want"s than "what"s to the point of utter infuriation. I genuinely started writing a message to one of the video makers trying my best not to berate them for not even double-checking their text before hitting "submit." Luckily, it was eventually changed.

Yes, there are people with learning disabilities that make simple confusions like that into debilitating obstacles, and there are people for whom English is not their first language, but I'd argue those instances to be much fewer and farther between than politically correct types would have you believe. More often than not, it's just someone not thinking, not taking that extra half-second to give what they've written a once-over before hitting the "send" key. Sure, I've made my mistakes here and there, but to bring the second grade reference full circle and use school as an analogy, I'd say I generally averaged out a B student. Most people out there on the internet, though, most likely wouldn't even get F's. Rather, they'd get "See Me," which, if you ever got one, you know is far worse than simply a failing mark. It's essentially saying, "Not only did you completely fail this very simple task, but you failed so miserably that you need to be told in person."

Look, to all you out there who make these kinds of "See Me" gaffs and wig out when people point them out to you, it's not about following rules, it's about presentation and making an impression. When you see someone writing this way, what are your first thoughts? Are they positive? No, you probably think they're a damn moron and you're just waiting for your dialogue with them to reach the point when you can bring up their inability to keep possessives and contractions straight, even though you've probably got the same problem most of the time. That's right, Pot, Kettle, you're both black.