The Last Bastion Of Absurdity

If you've been reading my journal for a while, you're probably used to my dropping off-radar in the aftermath of big events - I usually spend about a week feeling like I can't post about anything else till I've posted about the event, and after that I feel like I shouldn't post until I have enough time to write a massive catch-up entry. I hear Dreamwidth may be implementing a multiple-draft-queue new entry page, which might alleviate this problem somewhat. (Also, I could just use notepad files, it's only a few extra steps. Passive barriers: consistently surprisingly powerful.)

Anyway, in this case uni started right after I came back from Melbourne, and I am always a twitchy messy wreck the first week or two as I'm forcibly reminded that real life involves constant interaction with people who are not close friends or otherwise people I can assume like me, but I'm settled in now so here's that belated post about Soundwave! And, uh. Highlights of. The next. Month or two? I'M SORRY. This post has been accumulated in bits and pieces, so excuse any chonology weirdness. Under the cut, of course, this is going to get long.

( so fasten your seatbelts! or something, idk )

So that was my Soundwave trip! It was pretty great, overall, despite the cold, which opens up whole new vistas of me actually leaving Sydney ever, provided I am not doing so alone. Hurray!

Since then I have been:
-procrastinating heavily on university, despite the fact that all my classes this semester are BRILLIANT
-going to parties and being my hilariously awkward self
-making out with some people despite this
-doing TROUTS and WriteSoc things (more on this later! this entry is long enough already)
-going to MOAR CONCERTS (ditto!)
-failing to go to other concerts because I fail
-obtaining a ~boyfriend (!!) (funnily enough, neither airplane dude nor one of the people I made out with at the aforementioned parties)
-buying things from the internet, including a T-shirt depicting A CAT WITH LASER EYES, FUCK YEAH
-&c.

I'm going to try to actually post things here more often. Since my Grand Return coincides neatly with the beginning of Three Weeks For Dreamwidth I think I shall disable comments on LJ for these three weeks. Don't worry, LJers, I still love you and OpenID is very simple :D

*sidles in*

...hey guys.

/o

So my inevitable long unanounced hiatus for this year is nearly over. I didn't want to post anything until I had time to do a long catch-up post, but surprise! One of my assignments for this semester involves writing a (long, LONG) blog post and submitting it with commentary. Nobody's specified where it should go, so I'm going to post it here and link my teacher to it, and I thought I should warn you guys before I do so. Uh, because it's due at 5pm today :P

Please only comment to that post with discussion on the topic, any welcomes back, ear-boxing, cat macros etc should go here or be saved for the catch-up post :)

PS I totally missed you \o/

Augh. Okay, that essay is done and dusted. God, I feel so much lighter now! Only the short story revision left for Thursday, that doesn't inspire quite so much gut-wrenching terror.

So I totally owe you guys a massive post about the last two and a half weeks, a poem and a shitload of links, but it's late so I'll just throw in some of the latter:

Everybody and their mother must have seen the Total Eclipse of the Heart Literal Video by now but just in case anybody hasn't, do so - it is pure gold. Literal tears of lol, seriously.

astridthemighty linked me to this piece of Star Trek related lulz (feel free to skip through the first bit, Letterman is not that interesting). SET PHASERS TO FABULOUS. I want to make that my new journal subtitle :D

I've been neglecting b3ta but the latest question of the week is full of win.

Also via b3ta, an epistolary tale of animal husbandry.

Pheeew. That essay was more of a bitch than it really ought to have been. Thanks, weird psychological issues!¹ Anyway, now I'm done done done and I washed my hair and it is a lovely day and I have another week of holidays left to actually be holidays!

B3ta's weekly newsletter is out and hilarious as always. I am particularly amused by We Didn't Start The Flame War and of course the Question of the Week has some great answers, mostly involving alcohol. I'm Captain Oblivious over there, incidentally.

I got a Dreamwidth invite code! Random draw of validated OpenID accounts, it turns out.

[Poll #1386096]

I'm sort of sick of maggiebloome since it was my preferred pen-name circa 2002? But changing it might make me harder to find. On the other hand I intend to post a link to my dreamwidth account on LJ and vice versa anyway.

Judicious research already has me going :/ because the read-LJ-flist-on-DW feature is still in "figure out how the hell we can implement it" stage. I really don't want yet another friends page to check all the time, so if that comes online I'll probably shift over there permanently, provided of course that a significant portion of my flist is there. Until then I'll just use it the way I'm currently using my OpenID, except with icons and a profile and stuff. Speaking of which, how do I cross-post? I totally intended to figure out how to do it back when I got an insanejournal (...I don't even remember what my username is there now, I just use LJOpenID) but my computer was sort of dying at the time and I didn't want to install software and figure out how to use it only to have it collapse on me.

Anyway, upshot of which is I am not abandoning you, LJ people! I'm just hedging my bets :P

Also I'm totally pwning at Facebook scrabble, but the site hangs up at inconvenient moments. Like, say, for the first minute and a half of my two-minute turn. STOP IT, FACEBOOK SCRABBLE.

¹Goes something like this: Wow that sure is a lot of work to do I might fail it ADRENAL RESPONSE OF DETH oh look solitaire OH SHIT DEADLINE now I really will fail it MOAR STRESS HORMONES OF FREAKING THE FUCK OUT ahhh calm relaxing solitaire. Rinse, repeat. In a further delightful twist, there is a peripheral system in which I cannot, while in the throes of alternating frantic typing with desperate stress-avoidance procrastination, do anything ELSE that might actually be useful or even particularly fun, beause that is like admitting I give up. If I'm just playing solitaire I COULD STOP ANY MOMENT and go back to the work I'm avoiding.²

And that, boys and girls, is why I have not updated my livejournal for a week and this morning I found a spider in my shower. It went "running water?? In the SHOWER? WTF WHY WOULD THAT HAPPEN THAT NEVER HAPPENS AAAH" and then ran up the wall and glared at me.

²Weirdly enough knowing exactly how my issues work does not actually help me not have them does this happen to anyone else?

Oh gosh, soooo much internets to catch up on. I managed the People filter (skip=160) and half of the Fandom filter (skip=280 to skip=100, augh) but I haven't even got started on Comics and Misc. And that's just livejournal! So here is a partial list of cool stuff wot happened while I was away.

In the World, blah blah economy blah blah, yes, I know, that is why my dad is currently alternating between staring gloomily at Seek.com's Engineering filter and answering phone calls from angry Boost Your Stamina customers who want their money back because they totally failed to read the fine print. But at least our government hasn't collapsed yet - hey there Iceland. Well, it can't be that bad if the headline eschews economic references for details of the new leader's sexual orientation, eh?

In Fandom there was a Porn Battle in which James Bond featured with a) Michael Weston and b) Jack Harkness but not, alas, both at once. Possibly for the best, as I fear the screen would melt from the combined testosterone even trapped in prose. Also, bandombigbang closed writer signups! I can't wait till the end of April when I can get started on my mixing madness!

Musically speaking, we have: Amanda Palmer Does Radiohead (in a cab) and My Chemical Romance Does Bob Dylan (in a punk rock Watchmen dystopia) and both of these are wonderful in completely different ways! (Whenever I mention that last one to RL people, it's even odds they know/appreciate Watchmen OR Bob Dylan OR My Chemical Romance, but combinations are unlikely...) (Double entendre? I'd read both!) (...time travel, not zombies) (...zombie Bob Dylan would actually be kind of awesome, you know... in a non-slashy context :P) (and I'm going to see Amanda Palmer in a few weeks!)

...for crying out loud, this post wasn't meant to be Maggie's Queerish Bulletin. Oh well, as long as it's turned out that way I'll just tack on that I miss my girlfriend, Stephen Colbert gets more flaming by the second and I'm to be one of the "security" (read: traffic-directing) volunteers for Mardi Gras in March. They keep sending emails round going "you guys we still need moar people :(" so does anyone want to tag along? That's pretty much how I got involved :P - Cassie's friend Jack said essentially the same thing and I went "why not?" (my life philosophy!) I'm told there are discount party tickets involved, or something.

Tomorrow: tales of drunken scrabble, malevolent waves and snakes on a plane!

\o/

I'm sunburnt! But I now own a pair of long black socks with faux-stitching on, and a set of skeleton gloves which are somehow simultaneously loose at the wrist, tight in the knuckles and long at the fingertips. I think they were made for a small Ent. I can totally solve the fingertip problem by just cutting them off though. The gloves', not mine.

Been sending off resumes, argh why must cover letters be so traumatic. But employment is hopefully on the horizon! Goal no. 1: an actual working PC. Goal no. 2: a schedule that works out to ~$400 a week so I can hopefully try moving out of my parents house sometime this year. Goal no. 3: Tattoo. I want to put that earlier on that list but frankly my mother has had three separate meltdowns this week and this shit is just not on. Oh dear, excuse me while I find my headphones. *sigh* Goal no. 4: Backpacking! Europe! With a backpack! These plans are vague to the point of consisting entirely of one conversation with Maria that pretty much just went "oh my god backpacking through Europe would be so awesome!" "oh my god I know!" "neither of us is employed :(" "oh my god I know :("

ALSO been remembering dreams lately (...non-metaphorical ones, I mean) but... not WHOLE dreams, just really vague images. Three nights in a row now! First Jamie from GWS and her gay-above-the-waist...ness. The next night featured the rhythm section of The Used, one of whom had to help me talk the other down from a tree, and I can't remember why... and then there was probably sexytiems, because why wouldn't there be. But the next one was TOTALLY NOT SEXY AT ALL as it involved really realistic and really CREEPY gaping flesh wounds that looked like papercuts until you tugged on them gently. WHAT IS ALL UP IN MY BRAIN, GUYS. IS IT THE HEAT. I THINK IT IS THE HEAT.

Sooo my dad totally disconnected my internet again. Until I remove the large pile of clothes from my floor. If he's hoping it's going to get done for lack of anything better to do, he's forgotten that I'm not finished reading the Vorkosigan books yet. They're awesome, by the way. Anyway, expect me back urgh sometime this week when I can be bothered :P

LIVEJOURNAL. I am up at this UNGODLY HOUR on CHRISTMAS MORNING (not that the christmasness is all that relevant, we don't really do it at all... we're secular Australian Russian Jews... we kind of conflate it with New Year? But I opened my girlfriend's "strictly not to open until christmas" present anyway? :P) (it's a kerchief and a hat <3) AHEM NINE IN THE FUCKING MORNING IT'S A TRAVESTY in order to HIE US FORTH unto THE LAND OF VERY SLIGHTLY MOAR SUN, SURF AND BUSHWALKING THAN HOME by dint of there being buggerall else to do OTHERWISE KNOWN as Port Stevens OTHERWISE KNOWN AS SHITTY TOWN ON THE PRAIRIE COAST. *deep breath*

So I shall most likely be incommunicando until Saturday evening! Or possibly Sunday evening depending on the vagaries of family friends' transportation.

*hums* Iiiii'm dreaming of a duuuull Christmas...

Okay, thanks to that EW article I have spent the last FIVE hours webhopping Colbert and Stewart links.

You guys. Why was I not informed and where can I find this!?

So, maggiebloome, your LiveJournal reveals...

You are... 24% unique (blame, for example, your interest in viscous sarcasm) and 16% herdlike (partly because you, like everyone else, enjoy writing). When it comes to friends you are popular. In terms of the way you relate to people, you are keen to please. Your writing style (based on a recent public entry) is intellectual.

Your overall weirdness is: 52

(The average level of weirdness is: 27.
You are weirder than 91% of other LJers.)

Find out what your weirdness level is!

Still ded on lj but would like to note that a) Lofty Words was reasonably successful and b) Panic/TAI/Cobra tonight!!!

PS: it is raining SO FUCKING HARD - I hope it clears up by this evening but at the same time squee!