UUH

Let's do some Dear Abby because I doubt I can handle the social justice on Martin Luther King Day.
Bunch of white wahms moaning about black people.

DEAR ABBY: I'm a high school senior. At the beginning of the school year, I agreed to drive my best friend to school in the mornings, and for a while it was nice.Last month she started to refuse to talk while I was driving. If I tried talking to her, she wouldn't respond. 

It happens.
No rhyme or reason for it. Just write her off and move on.

DEAR DRIVEN CRAZY: Your former best friend may have stopped talking to you on the way to school because she was too busy texting her boyfriend. She is ignoring the fact that you have been doing her the favor of transporting her and is using you as a private taxi service.
If she was frightened because you braked suddenly, the person she should have said it to was you. So stop "explaining" to her and tell her that if she wants to continue getting a free ride, she had better adjust her attitude or make other arrangements for transportation.

There you go.
Move on, amigo.

DEAR ABBY: My husband, "George," and I have been married for 13 years. Last night he dropped a bombshell. He told me that while he loves me, he isn't happy. He assured me he has no inclination to divorce me, but he pretty much laid the entire reason for his unhappiness at my feet.
I don't handle people well. I love George and our son, but I am most relaxed and comfortable when I'm by myself. I don't neglect them. We do lots of stuff outside the house as a family. I have no close friends, and that's how I prefer it.
George's complaint is that I keep him from having friends. I have never tried to stop him. In fact, I have encouraged him to cultivate friendships and hang out with "the guys," join groups, etc. He says he can't do that and leave me at home. I wouldn't mind his going out, but it's nerve-racking for me to go.
Abby, in 13 years I don't think I have ever looked George or my son in the eye. It's not something I'm comfortable with. My husband knew how I was when he married me. What can I do? -- OKLAHOMA LONER

Sounds like some sort of anxiety problem to me.

DEAR ABBY: I recently started a new job. One of the management individuals has taken a strong interest in me. He keeps doing favors for me that benefit me financially and I appreciate it. (I have never asked him to do this.) 

Why'd you do that?
Don't take favors when you know people will expect you to pay them back.
No sympathy here.

I have always been courteous and took his gestures as a sign of kindness.

>kindness
>people

DEAR ABBY: I am a 30-year-old gay man who works in an office with 20 women.

Mmm honey I bet that office gets catty.

In the five years I have worked here, many of my co-workers have either gotten married or had children.

Our office has a tradition of throwing showers for the lucky ladies, and I am always asked to contribute money toward food for the party or an extravagant gift.

While I'm happy to donate to a charity or help a friend in need, I wonder if a wedding or a baby shower would be given for me?

No.
Literally no.
You're a man. You don't have baby showers. Two men are getting married--
no one is going to care about that.
Sorry to say but this is one sided giving.
It shouldn't be like that but what can you do?
You know really the mistake you made was giving something now with the perhaps vague expectation that in the future you'd get it paid back.
This is why I don't do position trades in the stock market. If it's going to make money it better be soonish or it's all empty promises and fairy dust.
All you have to do is look at any ETF to see what I mean.
The sooner you treat people like stocks the sooner you'll realize what they're about.

Am I selfish for feeling hesitant to donate money or gifts when it's likely the favor will never be returned? -- MINORITY MALE IN TEXAS

Categorically no. Your emotions are understandable, even.

DEAR MINORITY: I don't think you are selfish for feeling the way you do. In fact, it's understandable. 

Thank you, Abby.
We are of one mind.

However, in the case of a wedding or baby shower, people give gifts as a way of offering congratulations and good wishes. And I would hope that, even if same-sex marriage isn't recognized by the state of Texas, your co-workers would do something to honor you if you had a spiritual ceremony, which some religious denominations offer.

Even though Abby was a little more positive she did say the magic word:
hope.
As it has been said: he who lives upon hope dies fasting.

DEAR ABBY: I am turning 60 and naturally looking a little "worn." My man friend keeps telling me I need a facelift and to lose 10 pounds, so I'm starting to save my money. Something tells me he wants a "hot chick" and thinks he'll have one once I get these procedures done. It's expensive. What do you think? -- LOOSE-FACED LOUISIANAN

Ave Caesar.
While your desire to please your mate is admirable you are also completely stupid.
60 year olds should be pleased with the way 60 year olds look. I hear this time and again from people my own age: "yeah but in 20 years she'll be ugly"
like yeah and in 20 years I'll also be old and ugly so what's the problem?
Further I think if he wants the procedure so bad he should pay for it.
If you're willing to do it that's your business but clearly as the man in the relationship he should be the man and also pay the bill.
Such is life.

DEAR ABBY: My family has been keeping a secret from my grandmother. I have a 17-month-old daughter that she doesn't know exists. I wanted to tell my grandma from the start about her great-granddaughter (her first), but I am afraid to. My family thinks that telling her will cause too much stress on her. No one in the family takes my feelings into consideration.
I think my grandmother should know she's a great-grandma. The problem is, I don't know how to tell her. She's 90 years old. I'm afraid if I say something now, it really might be too stressful for her. Also, I'm afraid that if I reveal this secret, it will start a family feud.
I want a relationship with my grandma like I used to have. I cry every time I talk to her on the phone because I have to lie to her about my day-to-day life and why I can't come to see her. I am really starting to resent my family. Please help.

What?
Why the secrecy?
Are you 17 and had it out of wedlock?
Also good Christ your grandmother is 90 years old. I think she can handle a little controversy.
Like I'm sure at 90 she hasn't seen some shit.
She has seen and done everything under the sun. Don't even be worried about it.

DEAR ABBY: I have a dear friend who I have been friends with for years. However, there is one thing I can't stand about her. It's her vulgar language. Every sentence that comes out of her mouth includes the F-word. She's not a soft-spoken individual, so others can hear her. It embarrasses me and makes me not want to be around her in public.
How can I tell her she embarrasses me when she talks that way? -- SOFT-SPOKEN FRIEND

Grow a set.

 A THOUGHT FOR THE DAY, COURTESY OF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN: "He who falls in love with himself will have no rivals."

Whoa I just quoted Benjamin Franklin.
My quote was better though.
Abby we are on the same page tonight.
In fact let's depart with some more wisdom from ol' Ben:

Kings have long Arms, but Misfortune longer:
Let none think themselves out of her Reach.

Truly a wise man.
The song of the now.

2pro

Let's take a break from all these women blogging and go for a guy blogging.
You know what I say: all guys with blogs are gay.
Read this shit. I can almost see the fedora through the monitor.

I was in despair, I tell you: utter despair. There had been no sightings of any feathered beings anywhere near any of my feeders, bar only Black Phoebe the Tyrannical Flycatcher posing on the hanger while she watched for insects to massacre; I quite thought all my efforts to be in vain. Spurned, I felt. I did.

But I was just making a cup of tea, in the classic British manner, when I happened to glance out of the window - and lo! Hummer! Zooming around the feeder, trying the sunny side and the shady side alternately (I was worrying at five o'clock this morning, whether it would get too hot for the little birdies under our relentless sunshine), pausing on the hangar, being entirely darling. So that's okay.

How much money do you want to bet this queer is American?
And fat?

Today's good news: the bottle of vanilla extract didn't break, tho' it fell from a great height and not much like the gentle rain from heaven* upon the plates beneath.

Today's bad news: those plates. They did break.

M'wife says "So fucking what?", but, y'know. I get so sick tired of dropping things and breaking things and so forth, and yet I continue to do it.

He never says "my" it's always "m'" which really leads me to believe he's tipping his fedora every single time.
Like run through this thought exercise with me:
"my wife"
"m'wife"
"my lady"
"m'lady"
What do you think?
"My wife" = man with wife
"my lady" = knight
"m'wife" and "m'lady" seem like an incomplete thought. The clause needed to finish the thought would be "he said, tipping his fedora."

As with most of my bad habits and character flaws, come to think. I read once that short-sighted people are often clumsy, and I drew solace from that for years, decades; but solace wears thin in the end, I find.

Anyway. We get to buy new plates, yay?

Also I am instructed that I should point out that m'wife is taking shameless advantage of her inside track, and has posted a list of my award-eligible stories on her blog. Hrrumph.

(Also also, I hadn't realised quite how little I published last year. Good grief: what happened there?)


*Which, I might put out, we are still waiting for, here in NoCal.

>NoCal
>faggot doublespeak for "Northern California"
Got you you motherfucker.
You're not British. Stay where you belong, Amerifat.

Actually, at the moment I'm quite in favour of lists.

British spelling.
Do you hear that? It's the sound of neckbeard rubbing against double chin.
Actually I just found out his irl name (Chaz Brenchly dude what) and if you google him you can see he does indeed have a neckbeard but appears a reasonable weight. Also he's wearing a baseball cap but I feel that's just a replacement for the fedora.
Inside it's all fedora.

In my backpack I have put changes of jeans, of shirts, of underwear. I have a small pharmacopoeia of chemical aids and bathroom appurtenances. I have my phone, the Laptop of Utterable Delights and a spare little bag full of cables. I have my sunglasses and my reading glasses. I have a book and my Kindle (and, again, my phone: now with Kindle app applied).

I do believe I may be ready for a day and a night in the city. 

"laptop of utterable delights"
"laptop filled with porn"

So I have all this lovely goose fat, which as we know is yummyscrump for roasting potatoes. What I'm wondering, though, is how else I might splendidly use it. I don't really have enough for a pot of confit, alas; but in any case, I'm thinking of more general uses. F'rexample,

I'm sorry, can you run that by me again with none of the pretention?
Oh that's right you can't because you just seriously asked Dreamwidth how to use goose fat.

I came home this morning with a lovely piece of skirt steak*, which I am browning for tonight. Is it wasteful of me to be browning it in goose fat, or will that make a blessed contribution to the complexities of flavour...?

I did also come home with small quantities of various rices, for purposes of playing with the new toy. And yet, and yet - we are not eating rice tonight. This is because I am an Imp of the Perverse, and I want to make beef stew in a pumpkin. Because I can.


*The word "steak" is added here purely to obviate and head off at the pass any tendency among my readership to go "fnar, fnar". Or local equivalent.

 I'm going to need a minute to decompress after reading that.

Redefinery: where crude language is converted into smooth innocuous prose. Lede-free.

 I'm going to need another minute.
In fact brb I'm going to play a game of League of Legends and take this out on hapless idiots.
Jesus that didn't even help.
Uhhhh.

M'wife has the sleeping sickness.

Isn't that seriously fatal?
How'd she get that?
You only get that in Africa.
Like deep Africa.
Like the Congo.
What's happening?

Down to the farmers' market this morning, for the usual round of fruits and veggies - strawberries, raspberries, broccolini, fennel, kale, brussels sprouts, beetroots, Chinese beans, chocolate from the nice Vice lady* - and also to drop in at Leigh's bookstore, where she was hosting three local foodie writers.

The note is talking about chocolate being a vegetable.
But it's not. It's a seed, technically.
I know because I just googled it.

I just spent a thousand bucks on lumber for the fencing.

I should like it noted, though, that at least I did it in American. Bucks, you say? Lumber? Very well...

So let me tell you about League of Legends.
I suck.
Then I get a bit better and a magic number in the game starts matching me with better people.
Then I suck again.
Until I learn--
Then the magic number goes up and I suck again.
I can't see this number but it must be there because I'm facing increasingly tougher competition.
It's like Caesar says. Better first in a village than second in Rome but okay, at this rate I can be first in Rome.
But whoa hold on. I was used to everyone sucking so hard they couldn't even buy their own champions so I'd just play all the free rotation once and I'd at least know what everyone was going to try to do a bit.
But now I've rotated up enough that people can buy their own champions.
So besides the usual free rotation (because they're not that good yet to just not use free rotation) I'll encounter at least 3 people using shit I've never even seen.
Like spike turtle man. Apparently named Rammus?
Then Vlad the gay vampire who is surprisingly not bad at all--
And nothing prepares you for this. You just get in range and hope you don't die to a move you didn't know existed until five seconds ago.
Meanwhile half your team is screaming at you for dying too much because you've never even seen half this shit before and you're too busy telling them how you're going to find where they live and staple their lips to their own assholes if they don't shut the fuck up about how bad you are because you've only been playing this fucking game for a week and I'd like to see how fucking good you were the first week in--
it's all very stressful.
But if you go 14/7 with Ahri because you've been studying a lot about how she works no one says a fucking thing.
Basically the quest to not be a scrub lord is intense and fraught with screaming middle schoolers.
Much like teaching.

That may be the first time I've ever fried a strawberry.

Welcome to Freedom.
So what the fuck am I supposed to do for the song of the day huh
All I've been listening to all day is gay Korean pop.
So I guess it'll have to be that.
Oh by the way don't get excited and think the girls are going to kiss at the end. I've seen this video 197 times and they don't.
So let me explain to you what this group is about.
Much like all pop bands created by committee they're all the same so the thing to set this one apart is they're all slutty.
You'd think someone would try a group that can sing.
That's ostensibly The Wonder Girls (I know a lot about Korean pop, ok) but the thing is they can't sing either so I don't know what that's about.
I guess they did have that song Nobody from like 2003 or something but that doesn't count because I don't think any of those members are still in the band.
Then there's all the bands that kind of blend together in their mediocrity.
KARA
miss A
Girl's Day
Afterschool
These are real. You can look these up. It might sound like I'm making up but I promise you I am not.
Then there's all the single singer spin offs from previous girl groups like Hyuna and Gain--
am I going insane?
What am I talking about?
Then it gets really confusing when the Korean girl groups cross over with Japanese has beens or never weres--
like when Afterschool did a song with Namie Amuro.
That's a thing I listened to.
That's not even the most obscure Asian music thing I know. I have a CD of Matsubara Miki's greatest hits in my car.
That's a Japanese bossa nova singer who had a couple of minor hits in the late 70s and early 80s.
That's a thing I know about.
Is this being a weeaboo or is this neurosis at this point?
No wait that's not the most obscure thing about Asian music I know.
Midori Kinouchi's 1979 one hit wonder Yokohama Eleven is.
That's a song you can listen to on Youtube if you want.
89 people have listened to it.
How do I know this
am I going insane?

When the shit jumps off what the fuck you gonna do

Holy shit Elder Scrolls Online
I signed an NDA saying I wouldn't talk about it or they'd ban me but who gives a shit
being banned from that steaming pile would be the greatest favor anyone has done me in the last year.
I don't know what the fuck they're thinking like holy Christ on a cross.
Character customization in an Elder Scrolls game?
Fuck off. We can just have the same 5 boring MMO jobs and dress it up a bit with skills that level independent of each other except not really because who will use healing staves as a thief--
no one.
Also the game has bad controls.
I know that seems impossible because MMOs are maybe the genre where controls matter the least but this game has bad controls.
I swear it's true. I have never played an MMO that felt floaty before.
 And remember I was addressing the plot and how it makes no sense to give it any sort of mystery because we know for a fact none of this shit matters because the games that have already come out don't even mention this supposedly important event when they still talk about Arena which was literally 15 years ago real life time and in game it was hundreds?
Yeah they further cripple themselves by having the typical "you are fated to save the world" plot.
Like how is that even possible?
Is everyone playing this game fated to save the world?
How?
If I'm fated to save the world why all the tension?
It's going to happen.
God fuck that game holy shit I'm so disappointed
ANOTHER GREAT GAMING SERIES RUINED BY THE LURE OF WORLD OF WARCRAFT MONEY.

I went for a nice long hike today at the park. About three miles, just me.

It felt great.

You know what doesn't feel great?
The Elder Scrolls Online.

In a fit of nostalgia (or maybe just to pull myself out of the desert of non-fandom things) I've been having a resurgence of love for a lot of fandoms. Last year was the first time Cowboy Bebop was Yuletide-eligible and I got a great Bebop/Go the Fuck to Sleep crossover. This year I requested and offered Bebop.

Cowboy Bebop has a great soundtrack.
Great animation
great story.
10/10 would watch.
You know what's a great idea for a show principally about loss, wandering and not finding your place in the world all set to blues music?
Tons of poorly written fanfiction.
You know, because the show with these lines:

The real folk blues
I only want to know what true sadness is
Sitting in muddy water
Isn't such a bad life
If it ends after the first time

in its ending theme is really going to lend itself well to a bunch of bints writing xDfanfic!!!
That's one of those shows that was such a masterstroke of storytelling sometimes I can't even fucking believe it.
You watch all of the episodes and you want more but at the same time you don't because there is absolutely nothing further to add to the story. It did exactly what it should have done.
In conclusion why the fuck are you writing fanfiction about it?
The characters can't be fleshed out further. It is literally a character study of about 7 people.

So who's finished reading Allegiant and what did you think?

ETA: expect spoilers in comments, naturally.

I'm a grown adult so I don't read books for children.
Sorry m8.

A tiny rant first:

So what is the deal with these twitter spammers favoriting old and irrelevant tweets? The profiles are ridiculous. Check this one out:

I'm a SPED teacher/coordinator in the Bronx. I provide interesting links on education, sustainabilit

redmond, washington. usa

Okay, last I looked, Redmond is nowhere near the Bronx. 

I have no idea what any of this means.
Who cares?
Is your life so devoid of problems you have to resort to finding issues with people on Twitter?
Good for you, then.
Your life is amazing.

It's interview time.

In a never-ending quest to get to know my original characters better, I'm opening two of them up to be interviewed. The year is 2001, they're both 20-somethings, one male, one female. They're not a couple, although they do know one another. Will you come play with them? Here's what I'd like:

- direct the question to one or the other, either the male or the female.
- ask a question, any question. Nothing's out of bounds, although depending on who answers, there might be a slight sense of propriety about it, I won't know until I get there.
- you can of course ask more than one question or ask questions of both characters, just let me know which one for which question.

I'll answer from them, in character, and thank you profusely for your time.

What the fuck why

People have no idea how to write, do they?
I mean Jesus fuck me that is not how you create a character.

Mac or PC? It's finally time for a new laptop.

4 comments. Let's see what wins (Mac)

Mac, I've got a MacBook Pro and love it so very much. Its lighter, faster and all around better than the various PC laptops that I've had over the years.

Wow what a shock.

This is so great. Everyone who's responded has been firmly on the Mac side. I'm leaning so far toward it I might just fall over now.

Is the response. Keep this in mind.

It sounds like you've already decided, but I need to vote PC anyway

Says one person who cares here's her response though:

Au contraire, mon frere (that makes no sense, I know), I am surprisingly neutral still.

What?

>leaning so far towards Mac you could fall over

>surprisingly neutral

>leaning strongly towards something

>neutral

?????

 How old is too old to learn to ride a skateboard?

Opinions, please.

9.

Failing that: you have a kid old enough to leave home alone.

You're too old.

Fuck.

Anyway this blog is really boring and I don't give a shit about any of this fanfiction crap.

It's just a bunch of bullshit stories written by wahms who don't know the first thing about anything

I'm going to bed

fuck