The Perfect Movie

Angelina Jolie & Matt Damon. Something about WWII, who knows...anywhoo, yes.

I just...yeah...I'm that shallow.

More On Katrina...

"The White House reports that President Bush will be cutting short his vacation to the ranch in Texas to oversee the government response to the Hurricane."

Jesus christ, why don't you just say: "The Secret Service dragged him out kicking and screaming on the orders of his press secretary. They're going to lock him in his office to spin around in his chair."

Quiz!

Okay, i'd like to take a quick poll. For the 100th time in the last few years, a disaster, natural or manmade, has taken place and the world is crying out for justice and salvation while I sit idly watching; usually with a chuckle.

Perhaps it's the desensitization of the American people or perhaps it's just that I place a higher value on certain things than I do on human life; but I've seen the Coast Gaurd pluck that guy out of the hole he chopped in his roof at least ten times and I feel absolutely nothing and yet, while trolling the internet, I keep seeing the words 'gut wrenching,' 'heart breaking,' 'moving,' and 'miracle' quickly following commentary on that footage.

Am I horrible or is everyone else just as disenfranchised and disconcerned as I am? I damn near cried when O'Conner resigned but this has no impact on me whatsoever.

I'm horrible.

Edited To Add: Hey, I do have feelings! I was watching footage of Mississippi and I saw a middle-aged man in tears (always a trigger for me) crying because his wife was swept away when the water rushed in and he hasn't found her or her body yet. Sad. :( Course, any sense of greif was lost the moment that they announced the name of the town; Possum Hollow. Oh the chuckles.

9/13/05: It Returns

After finally deciding to brave the spoiler sites; i've discovered the date to the first epsiode of the Sixth and not final season of The Gilmore Girls (yay!) and i'm going to stop being a crazed fangirl.

I missed Logan.

Sharing Your Talents

I've anyone reading this happens to be any good with mixing, i'm prepared to beg, plead, and...well, okay, beg and plead to get "Cozy in my Rocket" by Psapp remixed. It's just a little slower than i'd like it.

The internet has truely spoiled me. Where I used to have to deal with a desktop or an avatar in a way that I didn't quite like, now i just fix it. Where I used to have to listen to a song in a substandard fashion, now i just beg until someone fixes it.

Delish!

Internet Saftey

I am not a parent. I am, however, a child who grew up on the internet. My time was never censored, my path was never tracked, i was never watched. I'm sure that my parents probably tried but, lets face it, one of the perks of being a kid in my generation was that we were better at the internet than our parents and getting rid of things is way too easy when the people looking for it wouldn't find it unless it smacked them on the face. Anywoo, for what must be the 16th time this summer, the local news had major coverage of that nasty nasty internet and all of the bad things it can do to your kids so I want to ask any parents out there that may or may not read this; when your child was old enough to walk, did you let them cross the street right away or did you wait until you were sure that they were responsible enough to handle it? Did you teach them to look both ways, never to dart out from in between cars and, when it doubt, wait? Sure you did. And when they were ready, you let them cross and, behold, your child has survived! When your daughter started asking to go to the movies or the mall with friends, did you make sure she knew about 'stranger danger' and let her know where to meet you afterward? Sure you did. Your entire job as parents is to teach your children the lessons they need to learn to be productive, competent, responsible adults and a lot of that involves developing their judgement and then trusting that you've done a good job.

On what planet did the internet become an alternate universe where all of your parenting practices disappeared? You teach your kids to do the right thing and arm them against the world and then you let them go. There are no more perverts on the internet than there are in real life and they are no more aggressive. Sending a child into a chatroom is the equivalent of letting them wander into a porn shop or a strip club but you only have two choices; either your child is responsible and mature enough to handle the situation appropriately or they need to be watched more closely. If I here one more stay-at-home-soap-opera mom on television in tears bitching about all of the hazards that the internet brought into her home and how she had no idea, i'm going to have to go on a killing spree. This is insane. Of course the internet can be a dangerous place but it's not dangerous if you're not an idiot.

I grew up online. I was one of those golden children who doesn't clearly recall a time before there was a PC in the house and i've had the internet since...forever... Maybe because then fewer parents were terrified of it, maybe i'm just smarter than your kids but i've managed to make it 20 years without running off with some registered sex offender who propositioned me in a chat room. That's not to say that I haven't been propositioned in chat rooms; if you want to protect your kids from that you might as well just cut the ethernet line because thats just part of being on the web kind of like whistling men is part of walking down the street. You just have to learn to cope and isn't coping one of the skills you're trying to teach your kids?

Furthermore, there is more to the internet than chatrooms and if your kids are spending a lot of time in them, there's a reason. No child online has ever been coerced into a conversation about sex that they weren't interested in being in for some reason. One of the greatest things about the internet is that you can always close the window and move on. They don't put those block buttons there for nothing. Yes, that's right, I would allege that if you've found little Susie in the middle of an NC-17 conversation with Chester the child molester she probably walked into that in some regard.

The funny thing is that you assinine parents seem to miss the key point in the interviews they do with all of these kids who've been recovered from internet abductions; they went willingly. Yes, they were lied to. Yes, this person probably told them that they wanted to help them and care for them and love them and be their friend and thats probably not what they were interested in at all but at some point you have to own the fact that the reason your kid got duped into this is that they weren't happy at home and at some point you failed to impress upon them that most people on the internet are perverts.

I find it unbelievably frustrating that the media lays all the blame of a 'dangerous internet' on perverts and doesn't ever say "you fucking dolt! you did the equivalent of letting your kid wander the streets at three am without the aid of the friendly police officer and it never occured to you to talk to them about it first? Maybe explain that on the internet everyone lies just as much as they do?" Jesus christ. I'm not saying that any child who has ever been lured by an online pervert is to blame for their situation or that the parents could have prevented it but don't you think you owe it your kids to try? And, seriously, when they're three you tell them not to take a piece of candy from someone that they don't know; maybe we should just start throwing "plane ticket" on that list, too.

Really, I think that a lot of this boils down to sheltered kids. I look at my brother who isn't allowed to watch the nightly news because it's 'too violent' and that's fine when they kid is 6 and the only place he goes is from home to school to soccer practice and he's attended by a parent or a teacher the entire time but before you let your kids out into the real world - and the unsupervised internet is the real world - you have to let 'em watch the news because it may be violent but the world is really that violent and letting them out there with nothing but youth and naievtee not only makes them unprepared it makes them targets. Give your kids the information and have some faith in them.

The internet is a great tool and an amazing resoures but i'm fucking sick of a bunch of retarded 15 year olds who don't feel like their suburban parents pay enough attention to them running off with sex offenders and giving 'the web' a bad reputation.

News flash: it's been over a year since I felt the need to go into a chat room. There is more to the internet.

Wisdom Teeth

I hate my wisdom tooth. It has spent the last few months popping out bit by bit in these tantalizing jumps upward and, lemmi tell you, if i have to spend one more week with painful and broken gums to have it split two millimeters of flesh and not move again for a week i may have to start crying.

Dance 360

Today I had the distinced pleasure of channel surfing onto a show called 'Dance 360.' This is really not the kind of thing that would usually attract my attention but the kid from All That was bouncing around with the worlds skinniest white guy who looked like he was about to make a huge fool of himself. -- He was. --

Seriously, this is one of those moments when I wish my TV pumped into my PC so I could share the moment with all of you. Alas, I cannot, but it was still funny.

Don't Ask Questions!

Don't ask questions! Don't ask questions! Don't ask questions!

This is what I repeat to myself every day and yet I continue to ask questions. Tonight, I was cleaning out the history files from AIM and ran across a screenname I didn't recognize so and a completely non-descript conversation history. I figured i'd give the SN a shot and see if it was still active. Oh, it was. Prico (who remembers him?)...yeah, his roommate. And guess what else, he remembers me. "Tiny tot!"

Never ever ever ever ever ever ask questions!

Two hours later and I still haven't managed to shake him but I suppose anyone who roomed with Prico for a semester would probably be a bit nuts.

Medical Feats

Ya know, there are things in life that are just odd. Take me, for instance, (oh yeah, you knew it was coming.) My entire family suffers from insane high bloodpressure - they always have. I consume as much salt, etc... as they do and probably excercise less, and yet, my blood pressure is perfect. But before you say that it's because i'm young; it's not. My brother is 12 and he has the same problems as they do. I'm flummoxed. It's as if the guy who was putting a pinch of the this and that into the gene pool developed carpal tunnel when adding my defects and just left that one out. Seriously, I got EVERYTHING ELSE, but missed that boat.

Ah well, maybe it will kick in later in life just to spite me.

Bonsai Kitten

I saw this in the profiles of one of our users and assumed it was one of thsoe candy-doll esque things where you pick up a cute desktop buddy and I clicked the link to inquire. After sifting through a few hundred horrible fics to put into a reccomendations thread I ran across this site and was confused when I saw it. I looked a little bit further into it and I have seldom been so disgusted in my life.

BonsaiKitten.com

I'm not one of those crazy PETA people but this is beyond the realm of "I went away for a weekend and left my dog alone. This is beyond the realm of "I was moved to a nursing home and left my cats in the house. By the time someone found out, there were 200, but I left them with a way out and acess to water.

Sunday Night, I'm Turning My Cellphone Off.

I don't like my cell phone anymore. I'm not answering it. It can die.

Update: This Week I'm Hating...

i'm adding C-Span and people who tell you about things and don't include links. Fuckers...

'Unique In Your Own Way'

So, this week, I'm hating every who says this.

Happy Birthday To Me!

*waves*

Peter Jennings Is Dead

So Peter Jennings died tonight. Care to know how I found out? Some pud whose name escapes me interupted the broadcast about the shuttle. I know he was an ABC news caster and i'm watching ABC but i would prefer not to have Come On Eileen from space cut into for that

Skin-Aholic

I like this one better :) It has colors...ya know, like..more than one :)

Is Everyone An Ass Today?

What the fuck? You answer a user question you've answered 200,000 times that is clearly answered in the FAQ's and this is what you get in response. The fact that I don't thwallop the shit out of them every day is a miracle of Mother Theresa proportions.

I answer the questions "where's my password" and "where's my rejection letter" at least 25 times a day and the answer is usually "lost in cyberspace where AOL sends all of the e-mail they think is spam." and that usually confuses the fuck out of our users so i say "While we always send e-mails, sometimes they don't make it past the evil goblins that operate spam filters. You might try checking the detailed rejection list in the Terms of Service."

And, by way of response instead of, "Thank you, I forgot to read the bold, underlined and capitalized message at the top of the relevant FAQ's and ignored the note in the submission guidelines and asked anyway."

I get: "whatever your just talking nonsense because you don't know what is going on i bet you give that reply to everyone huh and how old are you? and you still belive in goblins? hahaha"

I'm just not popular today...

That is my screenname. WHy is that my screenname? Because i'm not. Because I just had Brian forcibly removed from my property and the words "disturbing the peace" and "resisting arrest" were included in that exchange. Because apparently i'm runing everyone elses lives by doing very little and because, in my attempts to convey the previous points to Mike the pervasive theme of "Today is going to be a bad day" stuck it's scaley thumb into the cake batter and i've three shades of pissed him off.

Its now there am and I am awake, though only in the academic sense (eyes open, limbs moving, brain functioning on some level 2 iotas above REM)

As a matter of interest, I am also not popular with Beka for my previous post. Well, you probably picked a shitty day to complain about that because my empathy dispenser is straight out of fuel but you'd probably get a simmilar response if it was fully functional. You had to know, at least on soe level, that when you posted a screename as snarky and presumptious as that with an {SP?) in it that someone was going to have to do the giggle and point manuver. It's part of coexisting with as many pretentious intellecutals as you do. That said, the truely funny part of this exchange, in its entirity, is that I wasn't laughing at your spelling - you spelled it correctly - i was laughing that you posted a screenname so completely cocky, thought you had a spelling error and didn't spell check it. Trust me, hon, every typo and misspelling I have ever made has been picked out and stared at by someone, then pointed out with a chuckle. I cannot spell. The trick is just getting comfortable with yourself and not takng offense at it; if they're not making fun of you its because they're not paying attention. Everybody is always doing something stupid, it's part of the human condition.