I learned to make webpages in approximately 1995. The problem is, that's where my web-skills are still at. So I thought, the other day, "Huh, maybe I should learn some CSS so that I can make pages that are actually nicely laid out." I was thinking that I kind of missed having a website; if nothing else, I could put my fanfiction on it. (Plus, NearlyFreeSpeech.NET looks like an awesome host, in a crazy libertarian kind of way. Also cheap, as I do not expect to be insanely popular.)

So today I have a CSS book (Beginning CSS, by Richard York) and I looked at some CSS tutorial sites and proceeded to make myself a webpage with a navigation bar down the side with pretty colored borders. Embarrassingly, most of the time was spent fixing my own HTML errors. *facepalm* And, yes, I know katemonkey has a site template and lim has an awesome set of templates and themes, but I think I should make myself less appalling in terms of personal knowledge. Plus if I learn CSS I am told it will be of use making pretty layouts on Dreamwidth.

(On a slightly unrelated note, does anyone know if the GMail feature that lets you link two accounts and pick which one to reply from links your two addresses in any way other than that line in the header? I know about the header. Am considering switching fannish address to GMail, and while I don't care if fen learn my RL name from the header (though I wouldn't want it the other way around), I don't really want there to be some Google page blaring that Your Name Here owns the following email addresses, you know?)

As no one has offered any opinions on what I should be for Halloween, I thought I would ask a different question. See, I was having this conversation yesterday, and I wondered why more people in fandom do not dress up as their favorite fannish characters for Halloween. lysimache told me that it was because fandom is girls and they don't dress as boys, even for Halloween. The only girls who might are the queer ones.

And this really surprised me, because, well, why not? It's Halloween! Go for it! It means exactly as much about your gender as you want it to! (Aside from some straight boys I knew in college who liked to wear dresses to the dining hall, I don't think I've seen anyone male-identified cross-dressing, even for Halloween. And I would say that it's because we come down hard on gender-nonconforming (straight?) men, but if (straight?) women won't cross-dress for Halloween either, there goes my point.)

Plus, when I think about it, many of my childhood Halloween costumes have been male, even the ones where I wasn't being fannish characters. I mean, one year I was Data, the next year I was Spock, but there's a picture of me at, like, age seven, as a pirate. A male pirate, because female pirates probably don't have beards and mustaches. (I didn't remember I had facial hair drawn on until I saw the picture a couple years ago.) And apparently the straight girls don't do that. Or so I am told.

I gather the lesson society was supposed to teach me about Halloween was that I was supposed to dress up as a Sexy Person, like a Sexy Witch or Sexy Nurse or Sexy Cthulhu. The lesson I apparently learned was "whee! crossdressing opportunity!" (The lesson lysimache learned was to dress up as Kick Ass Chicks like She-Ra or Sappho, so I guess we both failed.)

So, really, what I want to know is, am I weird? It's poll time!



Halloween costumes count. Roles in theater count. Stealing your boyfriend's shirt doesn't count unless you were in some sense pretending to be a man while wearing it. Further rules clarifications available on request.

Also, for the edification of my fellow UCSC alums: Man arrested in Santa Cruz with beer keg, harmonica, wet suit, hallucinogenic mushrooms. Oh, Santa Cruz. Don't ever change.

The OTP nostalgia meme, from lysimache, of course, who did it first here. Come on, everybody do it!

Name your true OTPs, in the order you discovered them. Starting with your very first OTP, maybe from back before you knew the Internet existed, and going up to your current fannish love, these are your *real* OTPs: the ones where you reread the archives every few years, keep the icons, own the DVDs, know the canon backwards and forwards, and absolutely cannot stand to think of them paired with anyone else. :)

For each one:

1. Post a picture.
2. List one reason you still ship them.
3. List one canon moment you can't forget.
4. List one fanfic you read again and again.
5. List one vid you love to bits.

Okay, here goes. All my pics are LJ-hosted. Clicking 'em takes you to my ScrapBook page where you can see a bigger version.

I must confess to starting off shipping Riker/Troi, before the internet. I no longer remember why I liked them. Okay, it was because Troi was pretty. And then came the Internet...

( Kirk/SpockCollapse )

( Ivanova/TaliaCollapse )

( Iceman/GambitCollapse )

( Jim/BlairCollapse )

( Fraser/KowalskiCollapse )

( Joe/BillyCollapse )

( Mulder/KrycekCollapse )

( Kaylee/InaraCollapse )

( Starsky/HutchCollapse )

( Bodie/DoyleCollapse )

Whew.

I was thinking the other day that I might like to start MUSHing again. Sadly, Elrood/ROM is no more, which is a shame. Granted, I don't think anyone did much besides hang out in their rooms and make snarky hilarious comments on the channels. (I am told there was an exodus to ATS, which seems relatively promising if not for the fact that I wouldn't have the faintest clue what to play, and they seem to have an awful lot of, well, mandatory coded stuff to learn. Also, probably less hilarious. I am considering. Because then at least there'd be people I knew to play with.)

It seems like a lot of the other old gigantic MUSHes are gone, although, creepily, their webpages from 1995 are still around. Like, TinyTIM? Probably not up anymore. But its site is. LambdaMOO is apparently still around, but teeny. My usual standby for RP MUSHes (I've had, what, three characters over the years?) is PernMUSH, which is (a) down temporarily and (b) probably mostly dead these days even when it's not down. Which is a shame, because one of these days I'd like to have a character Impress. (Ha. Never gonna happen.) I guess the sort of thing I'd probably want to start to go back to (because man do I not remember anything) is like the old Living Fiction MUSH, now defunct. It was a really low-key social MUSH where you could hang out and pretty much mess around building stuff to your heart's content and there were a bunch of smaller themed-RP areas as well. I liked it. But it doesn't exist any more. Hmph.

But I guess everyone's on Second Life or WoW or whatever. Though I guess I shouldn't be surprised that the current most popular MUSH is Shangrila, which usually has 500 (!) characters connected. The theme: BDSM. Oh, boy, all TS all the time. Thanks, but no thanks. But I guess that's where all the MUSHers are.

Like, seriously, guys. I want an iMac. If the Computer Fairy were handing out computers I'd take one right now. And also one of those Eee PCs, because they look cool, yay cheap ultraportable, and I've always wanted to try Linux.

I wish to explain why it is important that I want an iMac. Because, you see, I hate iMacs. I hate them so much.

( To save your friends page, the saga of me and the iMac follows...Collapse )

I may have done, like, no work this weekend, but I feel I have accomplished something: I made Pong work. In color.

See, Jen acquired her family's Atari 2600 (black, 4 switches) yesterday, but when we first plugged it in, it would only output black and white. (It has a switch for whether it outputs color or B&W. Also there is a switch on the back that controls difficulty. Bwah. I think all video game systems need to have such a switch.)

My family never had an Atari, but I always wanted one (I used to collect 80s video/computer game books and drool over them. No really.), so I find this very exciting, and I think this makes Jen totally the coolest person ever.

Getting it to output in color required three trips to Radio Shack. The first store sent us to the Electronics Boutique, who *laughed* at us. The second store had much more knowledgeable (and cuter) employees, who had us come back with the Atari, I suspect because they wanted to ogle it, and suggested cleaning the contacts. Anyway. One can of electronics cleaner later, the output now shows up in color. We r0x0r.

And we can play Pong. Video games don't get better than this. You probably think I'm kidding, but it is awesome. There's really nothing else one needs out of a video game.

And now we can buy more games from Ebay, for, like, 50 cents each. I personally want Breakout, Space Invaders, and Missile Command.

Yay pong!

When I was little, my mother liked to watch Mystery on PBS. Other than thinking the opening animation was very creepy, I never actually watched it. I figured that it was all very very boring.

But now I've watched Inspector Morse for the past couple weeks, and it's actually kind of fun. Plus, the new Inspector Lewis tonight was pretty fun. Whee!

So I take it back. Mystery is cool after all.

So today my dad asked ifI wanted to go down to Santa Cruz, and I did, so off we went. I suspect he likes Santa Cruz. So we ate at Saturn. Hooray for grilled cheese with avocado. Plus I ate most of a Mini Madness, so that's enough chocolate for about a month. I was craving chocolate; I'm not anymore. (The Mini Madness is the smaller version of the Chocolate Madness, which is chocolate ice cream, chocolate mousse, a brownie, hot fudge, whipped cream, and chocolate chips. I think the mousse is what pushes this into the category of "chocolatiest thing ever," since I've had similar desserts elsewhere, but none of them have the mousse. Mmm.)

While eating, I perused the local alternative paper, in which I discovered that Santa Cruz is having an elaborate downtown parade with lost of costumed people and stilt-walkers and puppets, fire dancers, etc etc. Sounds normal, right? Well, they don't have an event permit, apparently because they're expensive, so they're just all hoping to show up and parade down the street. The paper suggests that this "combines two of the most popular pastimes in Santa Cruz: dressing in costume and resisting authority." Aww, Santa Cruz. It's good to know it hasn't changed.

Also in the paper, I found an interview with the author of The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl, a SF novel about a manager of a Santa Cruz coffeeshop (apparently based heavily on Caffe Pergolesi) who produces an eponymous comic book about a weird fantasy Wild West. Her fantasy universe somehow manages to invade Santa Cruz. The tagline: "If primal evil wants California, it's going to have to go through her first." Doesn't that sound fun? I thought so. So I walked all the way down Pacific and purchased it at Bookshop Santa Cruz. No, of course I couldn't go to the Borders that was closer -- it's Santa Cruz, duh. (Okay, okay, I coulda gone to Logos. But I only ever like their used book selection.) I'll let you all know if the book is any good.

I'm wondering why people around here are all bundled up like it's cold. I see a lot of people wearing scarves (like, winter scarves, not fashion scarves), Ugg boots, and long coats. Generally not the same person for all three things, but still. I thought it was warm enough to wear a t-shirt or at least a long-sleeved one. I understand that one might want a jacket when it rains, but it's 65 F -- you don't need a heavy wool coat, dude. I'm not wearing cold-weather clothing unless I have to, and here I don't, but I guess I could see how it might be fun if it wasn't actually mandatory.

My mother's been knitting me a whole lot of scarves, which I appreciate. She seems to be treating them as fashion, which is certainly how people are wearing them -- she and her two friends were all wearing scarves she made at the museum yesterday -- and I think I'm treating them more functionally. She asked me how long to make them, and I kept saying that longer would be better. She held the one she was working on up to me and showed me that I could just loop one end around my neck, but I said that no, even longer would be better, and she told me that no, look, it looked nice. I think she finally understood my view of scarves when I said that I wanted one that could wrap around my neck enough that if I pulled it up to cover my face my neck would still be warm. Because it gets that cold. I guess I just really don't understand fashion scarves.

I miss lysimache. Sad, I know. I mean, I'm flying home in three days.

Aww, the Mortal Kombat movie was just on TV. I saw that in the theater when it came out. I [heart] me some cheesy SF movies. It has Christopher Lambert! Who, when I came upon the movie, was talking about immortals, so I figured it for Highlander, but no. (I'm still sort of confused as to how the immortals can be recruiting mortals to fight other immortals and how they expect the mortals to be able to kill them, but perhaps they explained it and I missed it.)

Oddly, the only part of the movie I actually remembered was the part at the end where Sonya was kidnapped and tied up and they removed much of her clothing. Because I was totally a straight girl. Um, yeah.

I should point out that Mortal Kombat was totally my fandom in about 1994. I played the games all the time; I even sent away for the comic book. I always played as Sonya in MK1, and I think I even beat the game; in MK2 it was generally Mileena or Kitana. Because who wants to play as the boy characters, I ask you?

Yes, I was a complete geek. I didn't get into the RPG-type video games until the end of high school; it was the fighting games all the way before then. My second-favorite fighting game, though I don't believe it came out until a little later, was Primal Rage. You know, the one with the dinosaurs. I had to go all the way to Fashion Island, the deserted shopping mall with the ice-skating rink, to play it -- the only other thing there was a big arcade. (In retrospect, my parents must really have loved me, huh?)

Speaking of my parents, my mother will be here Monday morning and the apartment is a total mess. Eep.

Today my family decided to go to Muir Woods, because it was discovered that I had been neither to Muir Woods, nor to Alcatraz, and Alcatraz makes you buy tickets. So we went up and spent a couple hours wandering around the trails and taking lots of pictures of redwoods. I turned one of them into an icon. I have helpfully indicated myself and the tree, so that you know which is which. (The other person there is my little brother. I probably shouldn't call him little when he's clearly taller than me.)

It's a really pretty forest; I had a good time. I like redwoods a lot. I suspect having attended UCSC makes my view of them a little different than most people's. I think you're supposed to be looking at them and thinking things like, "Wow, look at these amazingly tall old trees. Whee, the awesomeness of nature. They sure do have some big trees in California," and not, "Aww, hey, this is just like walking to the library." Which was actually my first thought.

(Speaking of "awesome," now my mother is criticizing my impoverished vowel system. We were looking at the trees, and she asked me if I was awed. I said, "Yes, I'm awed." She looked annoyed and said, "No, not, 'odd,' 'awed!'" It's not my fault I only have the one vowel.)

At the gift shop I purchased a tacky magnet listing fun facts about the Coastal Redwood, and a tree. Yep, I bought me a redwood tree. It's, like, two inches tall. It's so cute. It is in a small tube. It has to be kept inside for two years, and it's at least five before I could actually plant it, not that I have a place to do so. I'm thinking it's going to be an indoor tree anyway, because I'm pretty sure it won't like winter in Massachusetts. Or summer, for that matter. The clerk who sold it to me swore that they could grow there and showed me pictures people in Massachusetts had sent of their redwoods and sequoias thriving outdoors. I'll probably kill it in a month, though, so I shouldn't get too excited.

I leave on Sunday. I think my mother doesn't want me to go.

Clarissa Explains It All, I have discovered from the DVD set, is actually still rather watchable. I was worried it wouldn't have aged well. It's fun. I think I've seen most of these episodes. I always thought Clarissa was so cool; I wanted to be her or be friends with her. (It's hard to tell, sometimes, yeah?) Her room was so neat; she had a TMBG Flood poster on her wall. How much cooler can you get?

Sadly, I still think she had some pretty spiffy clothing. I know it's all left over from the 80s, but I thought it was so cool. The leggings! The funky shirts! The large earrings! The headbands! I really wanted to dress like that in middle school. I only ever stopped wearing leggings in high school. My mother bought me a new jacket every year or two, whenever the old one wore out. When I got a new jacket in 7th grade, I wanted (and got) the one that was a patchwork of lots of different brightly-colored and patterned fabric scraps, with gold trim. Perhaps this is why I had no friends until high school.

Speaking of high school, I felt like playing a computer game (as I did in high school), and decided I wanted to play a roguelike. So I downloaded the latest version of NetHack yesterday, and so far have died stupidly three or four times. I've never been very good at it, alas. I tend to do stupid things. Like try on everything to see if it's cursed, eat everything, attack all monsters, and drink from fountains. I generally last only a couple of levels.

Perhaps I'd be better with a less random, more plotty roguelike. I've seen people on my friends list (possibly isabeau?) reccing ADOM, but that doesn't appear to have a Mac port yet. I used to like Omega a lot, but there don't seem to have been any new versions since I was playing it way back when. And the only Angband I liked, PernBand, appears to be unavailable due to Anne McCaffrey's team of lawyers. Boo.

Today is Saturday. Alas, it rained all day. Mostly I was asleep. But we are going to go see the Hitchhiker's movie at 10, which should be fun. I know I may not look like much of a fan now, but I have a tape of the bad miniseries somewhere, and I bought the Infocom text adventure of it. (Starship Titanic was fun too. I wonder if they ever made a Mac port of that, and if it will still play on computers these days.) I recall enjoying the Long Dark Teatime books as well. It's been years since I read the Hitchhiker's books, and I don't really recall what happened in which book, which probably will make the movie more tolerable.

I was channel-surfing just now, and I came across a channel with a guy playing an accordion. "Huh, accordion. Red," said my brain. (Yesyes, like Arthur Dent and yellow. I know.) This was followed a second later by "That guy looks a lot like John Linnell of They Might Be Giants," and a bit later by "Dude, he's playing 'She's an Angel.'" Yep, there was some TMBG half-hour concert promoting their latest kids album. That was nice to see. Random acts of TMBG make me happy, especially when said acts involve "Twistin'' and "Don't Let's Start." It's a a shame I don't like their newest kids album as much as their last one. But yay, TMBG.

I found my box of blank checks. It was in a plastic box of stuff under my bed. Also in the box: a starter box set of the Babylon 5 CCG (Centauri vs. Narn), a couple decks of the Illuminati: New World Order CCG, a bunch of floppy disks that I apparently used in the computer class I took my senior year of high school, my 12th grade ID card, notecards for the half-hour presentation of my senior exhibition, blank audiotapes, an uneaten mint Aero bar (yes, eww), a huge flashlight, a Netscape mousepd, a pair of Vulcan ears, a Star Trek pin, a little touristy booklet that I got in Assisi, and a perfectly nice fancy bar of soap with a picture of a moon and a star on it.

If there's an organizational theme to that, I don't know what it is. Probably "things I put in a box at the end of 12th grade." But yay for geeky card games. I have a lot of those sitting around. The other day I found my Magic card collection, my Star Trek: TNG card game collection (which I had completely forgotten ever owning), and a deck of Wyvern cards. I think that game was about dragons.

Lots of unfortunate things happening this week, huh? A tsunami, and now Jerry Orbach is dead? I am saddened. Also, my condolences to cmshaw.

I have a vanilla It's-It. Mmm, It's-It. Bestest ice cream sandwich ever. It's weird, the things you start craving just because you can't easily get them where you live. (I also just had a burger at In-N-Out Burger. So there.)

I have just discovered the official It's-It website. Mmm, It's-It.

I could have sworn there was a strawberry flavor, but the website only offers to sell me chocolate, vanilla, mint, and cappuchino. Hmph.

That is all.

I [heart] this song so much. It was one of my favorite songs, like, sophomore year of high school, and I still really like it. Bouncebounce!

So far today my mother has bought for me: one iPod case (iPod is already scratched, but oh well), screen cleaner (my laptop is no longer smudgy! Hooray!), and a battery for my cell phone. Now I can talk for more than three minutes at a time. It is very exciting.

She must have really missed me, because she bought tickets to the Nutcracker (SF Ballet at the War Memorial Opera House, of course) for tomorrow. She always used to take us every year, but then she stopped. Jen took me last year (because she is the bestest girlfriend ever, did I mention?), to which my mother's reaction was "I'm glad somebody else is going with you, because if I had to go again I'd throw myself off the balcony." But she got tickets. For tomorrow. Yeah, she must have really missed me.

Of course, I have nothing to wear -- I stared at my nice new black dress yesterday and debated packing it, but did not -- so I will have to wear my mother's clothes. Which are Too Large. Hmph. Plus, the review in the Chronicle tells me that it's a new production and they changed everything and set it in SF and took out Drosselmeyer's nephew and now Clara does the dance at the end instead of the Sugar Plum Fairy. Not fair. They shouldn't be allowed to change anything ever. Everever. (Can you tell I am not a fan of change?)

Nevertheless, I will probably enjoy it immensely, as it is the Nutcracker. I hope the flowers are pretty. The review promises me so. One year I saw it, one of the flowers fell over. Anyway. I'll let you all know about it.

My dad misses me too. He bought me lunch. At Denny's. His very favorite restaurant.

It's so warm here! Warm! Warmwarm! It was t-shirt weather today. Yeah, happy solstice. Not that you can tell. Mm, warm. And the air has the appropriate amount of moisture. My skin loves me again. I think I will have to buy a humidifier.

I finished reading Joan D. Vinge's The Summer Queen this afternoon. It was decent -- not as good as her Psion books (Psion, Catspaw, Dreamfall), I think, but certainly worth reading. It's certainly, um, epic. She's really into having characters with mystical/technological communication -- the sibyls in these books, the psions in the Psion books. Ah, well, it's one of my favorite SF tropes, so I'm not complaining. Sometimes reading the Hugo/Nebula winners feels more like they picked the best of an average year than that they picked a wonderfully brilliant dazzling SF novel.

Checking through my Vinge books now, apparently Summer Queen didn't win a Hugo, or so the cover says. That would explain why it felt a little sub-Hugo. Also I seem to have a copy of World's End (the one that comes before Summer Queen) that I never finished reading; no wonder I never remembered reading all the backstory they talked about. Huh.

I don't know what I was thinking not bringing any of the books Jen gave me back with me. I want to read them now.

I have in the past had a hard time believing in the queerness of famous people. Chalk it up to internalized homophobia or what have you. For example, I did not know, in high school, that the Indigo Girls were gay. One might think that somehow I missed hearing it, but it was more that I managed to rationalize my way around it or just ignore it.

I remember at one of the GSA meetings the teacher (who was incidentally a very cool person and who I picked to be my advisor for my senior exhibition project) gave me a newsletter for queer youth, and it hd a whole article about how an Indigo Girls concert was cancelled at some high school in South Carolina or somewhere I like that.

"Oh, how sad," I thought. But it didn't occur to me that that could mean they were, y'know, gay or anything.

Also, about that time, the radio station I listened to a lot (Alice 97.3, one of those corporate-run alternative rock stations that's also supposed to appeal to women in that it tries to play more female artists, and, yes, my senior exhibition in high school was about the music industry), they played the Indigo Girls' "Shame On You." A lot. And this song happens to mention "beautiful ladies" in the lyrics, which I had memorized, and sort of gives the impression that the narrator likes women.

Did I think that meant anything? Nah, see, a lot of popular songs are about women being pretty and all, so they were just, you know, singing a regular pop song, because popular music is supposed to be about pretty girls. Nothing strange about that.

I have since been told that, no, really, the Indigo Girls are gay like a gay gay thing. I think I'm willing to believe it now.

The other night, precipitated by the fact that I had no idea Allen Ginsberg was gay until I read a poem yesterday all about the things he's had in his butt, lysimache found me a big list of non-straight famous people. I had absolutely no idea about a lot of them. I'm willing to accept that, okay, every person from antiquity I've ever heard of wasn't straight. Especially Agathon. But James Dean? Really? Really really? I thought he was, like, an icon for rebellious young (straight?) guys and women looooved him. Which I guess doesn't preclude gayness, but you'd think someone would have told me that before now. And Amelia Earhart? Okay, okay, the list says "speculation," but dude. How could I not have heard of this? I suppose it's not the thing children's biographies of famous historical women like to say, which also explains why I didn't know about Susan B. Anthony. (I liked to read a lot of books about famous women when I was a small child. I must have read my library's book about Nellie Bly, oh, many many times. I thought she was the coolest.)

I think lysimache was willing to forgive me for my ignorance until I got to Boy George on the list. I didn't know, honestly. Was I supposed to assume he was gay? Maybe he was straight and just liked looking like that. I didn't want to assume. I also didn't know about Liberace. Jen has permission to hit me the next time she sees me, because apparently I really should have known that one.

So, yeah. I am embarrassingly oblivious. But! I knew the Beatles' manager was gay!

Also, I have just watched a South Park episode which had what I think was the first cartoon gay orgy I have ever seen, though I could be wrong.

I am posting now to note that three years ago today I created this LiveJournal, on this day March the 11th. One thing that is particularly good about that is that today is a very important day for Due South fans; "Call of the Wild" (the final episode) has a lovely monologue about it. Yes, I am a big geek, but you knew that.

So, yes. They have called this day the eleventh of March . And whosoever of you gets through this day, unless you are shot in the head or somehow slain, [...] you will get excited at the name March the eleventh. [...] Those who are not here, be they sleeping or doing something else, they will feel themselves -- sort of crappy. Because they are not here to join the fight, on this day March the eleventh! Ahem.

Anyway. It has been an excellent three years of LJ. I originally came in with the bindlejournal crowd, many of whom seem to have disappeared from LJ. Some of you are still here, though. *waves at antigone921, simplelyric, and versaphile* I also bugged a bunch of my RL friends to get journals; slyviolet got one pretty quickly, but it took eruthros a while, after which m_shell followed, I think. Then came the rest of the SC crowd, represented on my friends list by ryca and fiatlouis. Somewhere along the way I refound kirianth and bennybot, who I met on the now-defunct Living Fiction MUSH approximately 8 years ago. Whoa. Now I have bunches of ROM folk on my friends list, too.

Without LJ I would not have met lysimache, and I am quite glad I happened across her journal. When I friended her about two and a half years ago now, I had no idea that anything like this would happen, but I am very pleased it did, even if it did take me a year of IMing her every day for hours and hours (because, y'know, she's so so so cool and fun to talk to) to figure out that I liked her like that. What can I say, I'm slow sometimes. But, yay for LJ for bringing us together. I love her so. (Did I mention I get to see her again in nine days? Eee.)

Most of you, of course, I never knew first in RL, nor were you Bindlepeople or MUSHers. And you've been plenty fun. I started to name names, but I'd feel bad if I left people out, so I won't. You know who you are. Yes, you. The people whose posts I comment on. The people whose posts I don't comment on, but I still read every word of. (Really, I do read my whole list.) The people I've been IMing for a while. You're all wonderful.

Today I seem to be seeing a lot of people who, from afar, look like people I know. Like, across the street I see a guy who looks sort of like my former classmate Farouk, or a girl who looks like Nefte who sat next to me in 10th grade English. Upon closer inspection, however, it's fairly easy to tell it isn't them. I was thinking this was kind of odd.

On the bus back here just now I saw someone who looked exactly like eruthros, sitting a few people in front of me. Approximately her height and build, with her hair color and length (which is fairly distinctive, I think), glasses like hers, wearing clothes she would have worn, keys and ID clipped to her hip, and carrying a backpack of the same style, manufacturer, and color that I think eruthros has. I nearly said hi when she got on the bus; it really looked like her, even up close, and it took me several seconds to realize that it wasn't her, because eruthros is, as far as I know, on the other side of the country.

The universe is playing tricks on me today. Help?

It's a 3.9 near Berkeley. They had it down first as 4.1, and that so didn't feel like a 4. The USGS listing of recent Bay Area earthquakes is the first bookmark on IE on my iMac. I think this is a good idea.

My idea of good earthquake response apparently involves glaring annoyedly at the ground and saying "Stop it, you stupid quake." I think maybe I need to work on this, in case a more serious earthquake should happen. In that event, I would be doing what one is supposed to, 'cause one can kind of tell how serious it feels. Unlike people like eruthros and my mother, I am not as precise a guesser of magnitude, but I'm getting better. I blame my inadequacy on the fact that the first quake I ever noticed happening was Loma Prieta, and that probably skewed my judgment of them.

The random LJ thingy just got me my own LJ. Um.

Also, yay phone calls to lysimache.

Also also, you know what's weird? Running into old elementary school classmates whom you haven't seen since 8th grade is very weird.