The Last Bastion Of Absurdity

So anyway, I have clearly not kept up with my good intentions of updating lots. I should really stop waiting for my life to calm down to do stuff like this - all signs point to not any time soon, so I may as well figure out how to work around ALL THE THINGS for blogging. I have been keeping up on reading blogs, but not really commenting - sorry guys, I'm always either feeling like I have nothing relevant to say, like you've forgotten who I am since I haven't updated in so long, or like it would be awkward to comment because the post is two or three days old in the time it took me to read it. But I am reading! I have reverted to lurkerdom. Sorry :( I'm going to try to both post and comment a bit more, but we know how that has turned out in the past :P

I'm writing this first bit chilling at a dinner party on someone else's laptop while I wait for stuff to happen. By stuff I mean food. Since the last entry I have had a fairly solid block of social life and work.

( rock and roll! )

( tattoos! )

( parties! )

( extremely nerdy pursuits! )

( work! and dashing about madly! and more work! ...and then moar social life, this time more sedate )

So yes, that was A LOT OF THINGS. I have conveniently split them into sections using The Magic Of Cuts (although it will be of most utility to DW users on their reading page or anyone browsing bliumchik, because of Dreamwidth's handy little triangle cut thing). It has been a fun week, but I am also glad now that the weekend is appearing sedate. There was a party on Friday as well, but I had to babysit, so instead of flailing at people on a beach I played scrabble with a sevenyearold. And I lost, because I kept telling him what words to use. It's just really frustrating to play against someone who keeps putting down "at" :P

I'm just gloriously lazing around my room and immersing my brain in the internet, while outside my window my new neighbours yell incoherently and splash about in a kiddie pool with all their housewarming guests.

SO, PEOPLE WHO INEXPLICABLY STILL READ MY BLOG: if you have gotten this far, or even if you have skipped all of the random anecdotes, Answer Me These Questions Three!

1. I am submitting a sample Advice Column to my student magazine, hoping to write a monthly one this year! Give me sample questions to answer in it. They can be serious or humorous, preferably some mix between the two - you can post them screened if you like. LET ME ADVISE YOOOOOUUU MOOHOOHAHAHahem.

2. Who wants to volunteer at Armageddon Sydney? I'm not sure if it's too late or not, but the form is still up on their website... I'm thinking of applying but obviously it's more fun with friends!

3. What hilarious horrifying yet realistic tattoo shall I tell my dad I'm thinking of getting before revealing my comparatively classier one so that he doesn't freak out about it? (nothing will stop my mum from freaking out :P)

Today I googled myself and made the SHOCKING DISCOVERY that I am not the only Captain Oblivious on the internet! The more well-known one is Rob McDonagh, who doesn't sound all that oblivious to me! *pouts*

This makes me sad. I liked that nickname. I even made an urban dictionary entry for it. And the whole reason I googled it was because frostickle claimed I was contagious :P so I decided he would be my sidekick, Awkward Lad.

*shakes fist* MCDONAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!

Anyway, the upshot of all that is I need a new Internet Moniker. Suggestions?

So the other day I was thinking about that whole SF/F racism kerfuffle again (people who are sick of it feel free to skip this post) and about trying to unpack some of my own unconscious issues. (I would like to note before I start that I am not holding my hand out for Nice White Lady Cookies here, seeing as people have been accused of that throughout and often rightly so. I'm just trying to verbalise this for myself and guess it might be food for thought for somebody else too.) ( cut for rambling )

Good afternoon livejournal! How goes it with you? The weather here continues scorching. I have a small temporary tattoo of a bat on my hand. My dad and I went to the Kingsford market to buy me jeans and left as usual with half a dozen other things!

The Kingsford Sunday markets are totally awesome for clothes and completely random stuff (also, fruit!) as I shall now demonstrate. We did of course buy the jeans (after arguing over measurements for a bit - why must everything be so laaaarge) from a friendly Russian lady who upon realising we had only found two pairs that could possibly fit me on the rack began to empty out the sacks into which she had been packing away the jeans at the end of the day. We eventually found some nice black ones, yay. Then as my dad paid I wandered across the aisle to the guy who'd apparently bought a bunch of ancient PC games in bulk and was now selling them for $2 apiece. They were really really old. He joked that he ought to just buy a bunch of old computers with Windows 95 on them and sell those with a hundred games each, for people who wanted to play stuff that was obsolete on Vista. Then he looked sort of wistful and mumbled that nobody had that many old computers to sell him. I bought a game called Plague (from 1996!) in which you have to perform virtual neurosurgery on the victims of a bizarre virus, which manifests as a crumbling Roman villa that you have to fix while killing monsters. Also from 1996: CyberJudas! (the word Cyber was in fashion back then.) You play the president of what is described as the most powerful nation in the world so I assume it is meant to be futuristic!america, the world is on the brink of chaos and there is a traitor in your cabinet! I shall try these out and report back whether they a) work on XP and b) are fun and/or as hilarious as they sound.

After that we had a wander around the market, looking at the stalls full of stuff we had absolutely no justification for buying but which was indubitably awesome. These included a set of napkin-holders which were adoooorable black ceramic/mosaic-y owls with big eyes, a camera-holder from 1920 which looked wonderfully Steampunk and another which looked a bit less awesome but contained an actual 1950s camera (obviously nonfunctional) with all these random knobs and dials. Also on the steampunk front one of the watchsellers had fob watches on chains! Not old ones, though, "authentic-looking" ones. The stall with the old camera box also had a bunch of other old things, including for some reason a riding crop.

Along the way a couple of skirts caught my eye as well, a $3 denim one with hilarious patches on the back made to look like it used to have back pockets but somebody ripped them off, and a long white one with really pretty bright red designs along the bottom. I was a bit skeptical about that one because white skirts don't really work on me, but I was seduced by the possibility of putting something over it, perhaps in navy blue if I want to look particularly Russian, or... anyway we shall see. And I bought a $3 CD as well, because the cover looked cool and I figured it wouldn't be too much of a waste if the band turned out not to be good. This principle is how I discovered Matchbook Romance, and so far The Chaperones sound pretty cool. To the internet! ...okay it is NOT these guys. Aha, here we go. Of course that just leads back to their myspace, but then there's this. I sort of agree with the guy that they need a bass player :P but they're not bad. Just try and google your potential band names before you settle on'em, eh kids? 1960's Doo Wop groups presumably not being among this lot's influences.

Whee, cheap things. Now off to some sort of BBQ thing!