The Daily Adventures of Mercat

Crap, forgot to post b/c of GRE studying (and trivia night).

Lady Gaga is awesome. First and foremost, I actually like her music. It's pretty rare I like pop music, but I liked her music before I knew "who" she was. I do like techno and dance music (although I must say with no friends actively giving me any, I don't know much about that scene), so I think it was only natural to like her music. When I saw her Bad Romance video then, later on in the year, I was even more excited because it was very Halloween-y and fantastical. And then I found out she was very into fashion, and not only vogue, but being strange/being yourself/having fun. And since then she's shown up to be a voice for women's issues, sex and gender issues, all sorts of things. It would be crazy-awesome to work with her. But also, if I met her, I would firstly want to thank her for being an icon for our generation, and a responsible one at that. (At least so far.) Someone my own age I can be proud of rather than embarrassed by.

Also I loved her because she took her name from Queen. Um, yes.

So yeah, I didn't post yesterday because I stayed up until 5 working on a project. YAY ENGINEERING SOMETIMES.

My favorite Disney Princess movie... is probably The Little Mermaid, if you go by numbers. But I do enjoy the new Frog Princess. I've always thought being a singing mermaid would be pretty badass, though. Secret treasure fort?! FUCK YEAH!

Uggs: short for ugly.




Possibly coming up later: locked discussion post wherein I start with a joke and end up taking a horrible turn for the srs bzns. =/ I may or may not be taking things too seriously, BUT I CAN'T TELL. A personal crisis!

I think I am turning into some sort of weird math nerd. (I know, and you're saying, like I wasn't already.) No, but really, more than the interest in science and math I already have, I just bought a box of cereal because it had a very well-designed box with hexagons on it. It was a very sexy design. Sexagons.

...Or something. I'll just leave that there.

Even I don't know what that is.



THESE ARE HORRIFYING. I was looking up tiki home dec stuff on Amazon (yes... this is the sort of thing I choose to do w9ith my time) and all of a sudden JUST WTF IS THAT. Seriously. Would you put those in your yard? Only if you own a Fun House, I hope. Because everyone knows those are secret terrors. Places of Weird. And not in the good Neil-Gaiman-American-Gods way. Yeah.

So I think I got dehydrated over the weekend. I didn't have an unusual amount of mountain dew last night but fuck if I DIDN'T SLEEP. I felt like I was 90% asleep for five hours and when my alarm went off I felt like I was hovering in my bed, YES, HOVERING, because I felt so shaky. Wtf? I don't even know. But I felt sick to my stomach and sore and I couldn't sleep and it was miserable. So I skipped my classes (ugh, because like I need to be more behind) and tried to sleep and IT JUST WAS NOT HAPPENING because damned if today wasn't the day of all days Ohio decided to get warm. And someone's car alarm kept going off. And the guys upstairs decided to stomp up and down the hall or something. ARRRRRRGGGHHHH. I must have gotten at least some sleep though because there was a dream with an escaped mad monkey and a banana to catch him and a magazine article about Ted Mosby. idfk. To summarize, I felt like shit and still kind of don't know why. And spring break, of course, was not so great, with gramps in the hospital and the weather sucked and I feel like I got nothing done because I went through junk papers in my room and in total cleaned only about four boxes worth of stuff. Granted, they were giant boxes and I went through every piece of paper, but I feel like I had a miserable break over all. Idk. I need a legitimate break... from something. I don't know what that means. I don't know what I want anymore, and it's driving me crazy. Egh.

Anyway. I'm ready for Easter and St. Patrick's Day because they're at least theme holidays and I can go dress up in fun ways or something.

ANYWAY, enough of that, this entry took a sudden turn for the depressing. =/

Here! Have a cat playing a theremin. There is nothing about this that isn't awesome.



I feel like I want to go into my little rant of the moment about steampunk and my renewed love for post-apoc fashion and pirates but I feel like there's enough complaining in this post. Hahaha. (tl;dr version: is it just me or is there an overwhelming amount of "HEY I PUT SOME BRASS GEARS INTO THE DESIGN, ISN'T THIS COOL NOW"? Yeah, I just... not unless you started a bike club. In which case, yes, it very much is. OR YOU'RE BUILDING A STEAMPUNK SKYNET, in which case, YES IT'S AWESOME BUT WHAT THE FUCK WERE YOU THINKING?! YOU'VE DOOMED US ALL.)



How would that even work, a steampunk Skynet? Skynet doesn't activate "until" 1997. Idk. Clearly, I have weird thoughts sometimes. Weird, nerdy thoughts.

Speaking of which I need some good post-apocalyptic boots for kicking ass. They're hard to find.

So Geoffrey Rush was in a film about Peter Sellers life? I maybe should have bought it, it was $2 at Second Time Around, but I didn't feel like watching a semi-depressing bioflick. Even if Geoffrey Rush is super amazing, and Peter Sellers is even cooler.

Anyway, the Iron Man 2 trailer is out, and awesome, despite how lame Whiplash looks, and I CAN NOT WAIT. More hot engineering action? Oh, you know it. If only they hadn't dumped Terrence Howard, there really was no reason for that.

Total moral quandary: on facebook, I cannot decide if my profile pic should be Ancient Mew or Blastoise. BOTH ARE AWESOME. BOTH ARE HOLO. Breaking news: I am a nerd. ngl it makes me want to pull out all my old cards. I probably will when I get home.

You know another reason I love Troop? Everyone there is freaking HUGE NERDS. I swear to god every time I meet up with Troop people we have at least one small discussion involving Pokemon. Idek why, it just ALWAYS HAPPENS.

So there's been that video going around of the octopus using a broken coconut as a tool, you know, disregarding the fact that octopi at aquariums break out of their tanks all the time to eat other creatures, or spit out their night-lights, or crack puzzles to get to snacks. I HATE CEPHALOPODS. D: Dear Discovery Channel, thank you for horrifying me with your future-of-evolution special about how octopi/squids/whatever will climb out of the seas and live like monkeys and become the next intelligent beings. FUCK. YOU. Not to mention their texture is terrible for eating.

So Adidas finally released their Star Wars collection, and... it looks horrible. I mean, good on you if you like skater shoes or REALLY LIKE DARTH VADER or even x-wings. And the stormtrooper ones looked promising before... But the Princess Leia ones? *gag* Really.

Sadly, the only ones I'd probably wear would be the Falcons. =/ And they're not even that interesting. Sad day. ([EDIT] I LIED, I found better pictures, the Falcons suck too and the coolest ones are the TIE fighters.)

Interesting article about technology and relationships, although, it is from Cracked so take it as you will. ngl I'm kind of excited for psych 101 next semester. (Somewhat unrelated, I know.)

Anyone have one of these lying around somewhere? I kind of want one. To match my flashlight. And because it's adorable. yesssssss

I am rather horrified Lady Gaga is going to bring back shoulderpads.


I hope not. They are horrible for everyday fashion, just like hers is not really functional. Now for characterization... that's a whole other story. Shoulderpads do wonders in drum corps unis. :)

I would love to see her collab with Billy Joel though. They are both piano talents... It would be INSANE IN THE AWESOMEST WAY, I'm sure.

New layout. Christmasy. Have been wanting to use these retroish ones for awhile, but they're all Christmasy, so I figured now is the time. =)

I am in a mood. I have been listening to my iTunes for the first time in months, especially since I lost my ipod. I have it turned up to drown out my brain, it's working pretty well, if I do say so myself.

I am also now officially a fan of Lady Gaga. I've liked Poker Face and Bad Romance since I heard them (Just Dance and Love Game are not so great though) and I love that her style is totally out there. I made a wacky-clothes comm once and never updated because, let me tell you, fashion like that is hard to find, especially when you're nowhere near being a part of the fashion industry. (Not buying Vogue ever rather makes it difficult.) Although if you're interested you should look up the blog Haute Macabre, it does a decent job. Who knows, maybe I will actually start posting things in my old comm.

Anyway, she seems to kick ass as a person, not to mention I rather like her music and her style, so, yeah, I am a fan.


Plus she kicks ass, and today, that's about all there is to it.

HOLY CRAP AN UPDATE.

Look, I know, I've been busy. I hate it. I am so, so tired of my classes. And sadly they will just continue on through next semester... Ugh.

I got a 50% on a test today, it was not pretty. There's a chance the lowest test grade will be dropped... I just don't fucking care anymore. I'm tired of spending three hours a night three times a week doing homework assignments for methods I will never, ever have to have memorized again, and in fact WILL BE RUNNING PROGRAMS FOR. Yes, it's important to understand what the program does, but the hours upon hours upon hours IS KILLING ME.

Anyway, the real reason I am here is rather an accident. Over on ontd_political someone reposted an article about racism in Glee from the mothership.

Here is the deal. In the past few months, I think almost every band kid/music major/drama club kid I know has become obsessed with this show. I saw the pilot episode, like... a year ago? Idk. I did not like it. One, it was not that clever. Two, it seemed like people just trying to make money off the sucesses of High School Musical, which is an embarassment in its own regard.

I could not articulate exactly why I didn't like it, except that it felt cheap and embarassing. Anyway, today, someone posted this:

"This show feels like nerd culture appropriation.

By which I mean, it feels like somebody who was NOT a nerd in high school tried to take Cliff's Notes on all the things that supposedly compromise the experience of "uncool kids," and then filtered them through the Mass-Media Screen of Marketability, so that they could sell this shit to the "popular people" while at the same time insisting that geeks should love this show because "it speaks to us."

Glee is to nerd culture what modern-day gangsta rap is to urban black culture - it's a bunch of oppressive outsiders to the culture trying to tell members of that culture what they themselves are supposedly like, via insultingly inaccurate and reductive stereotypes."

This. So much this. I feel like people are trying to take something I live every day (well, to an extent) and sell it back to me.

Bull-fucking-shit.

One, I refuse to let people sell me a lifestyle, period. Two, I refuse to let hollywood and the media dictate what things are. Three... it's not even clever. I haven't seen any more episodes but someone else pointed out that the writers have some odd sense of hipster-ironic humor... which is actually twice as painful. Twice as embarassing because they are trying to be ironic in their insults and stereotypes which just shows that hipsters fail to realize that most of the time they come off as insulting, not ironic. It's really, really difficult to imply irony well. Which is why hipster emos deserve to be slapped in the face as well.


...But emos are a story for another day.

Really not trying to belittle other minorities/scenes in that, but, let's face it, emos are lame as fuck.

Idk why but I've been tab-hoarding for weeks. As a result, running roughly 220 tabs was causing firefox to crash constantly. So, here is several days worth of tab writeups, which might mean whatever I wrote sounds a few days old. That would be because it is, but it's probably not too important.

( LOTS of articles )

( a second set, many more articles )

...I read a lot.

Sci Fi (Star Trek) and fashion. First of all, this article led me to discover that my mom watched Star Trek growing up and never told me. I never would have suspected! She keeps to quiet on some things, and then just BAM out of left field come these things that I would have just liked to have known earlier in life. Like, haha, the first (and only?) time she got drunk in college, and the band teacher had to drive her home. Oh, mom.

Anyway, my point on this article is thus: One; I can see where the directors are coming from. Trust me, sci-fi and "nerd" movies would not be as popular as they are if they had not been serioused-up a bit, in my opinion. I mean, they'd do fine, I just don't think they'd be quite so successful, get what I'm saying? Look at Fantastic 4, for example. Not... great. Decent, but not great. Dark Knight on the other hand? Fucking blew me away.

Now, if you're looking for fashion in sci-fi, as one commenter pointed out, there is Firefly. Which is like sci-fi meets steampunk, sort-of-kind-of-ish-not-really. There's also this thing called cyberpunk, you may have heard of it. It still exists in things like the Queen musical and that sort of jazz. (Or not jazz, as it so may be.)

A letter from a slave to his owner. It is awesome and full of pwnination. And what do you know, the guy lived in Dayton and is buried in Woodland Cemetery. Next time I'm over there I'll have to go hunt him down and give him a high five or something. =)

Well, all in all, a very good weekend. Also, I must admit, I am very lucky to have my parents as my parents, because they buy me nice bike stuff when I need it. Found a spring rain jacket and dad found the PERFECT sized messenger-bag purse at Pearl Street Mall yesterday, one of which is appleish green and the other bright yellow. And both waterproof. :D Plus we found this awesome bike store called University Bikes and they have EVERYTHING. Including several-hundred-dollar mock-vintage jerseys that I would kill to own.

Anyway, some quick links.

For the record, I do hate Comic Sans. A lot.

BIG FISH TRIVIA! I love this movie so much, it's just such an excellent movie if you are at all one of those people who daydreams the most random shit. =) But it's also kind of sad for me now, too, because it was only the second time we watched it (mom and I, I mean) that we watched it with Nana before she died. =S And, I mean, I cry watching the Lion King, ffs.

Let's talk about jeans. I, for the record, love pants. However, I lament the fact that jeans are more fashion-quality these days than actual heavy-duty, and THEY ALWAYS RIP ON ME IN THE SAME PLACE BEFORE I ACTUALLY WEAR THEM OUT. Efffff youuuuuu.

On a more serious note: I love retro fashion. I'm also extremely practical. So yes, I know when to dress up, and I know how, and it kills me to see people going to the symphony in jeans. However, day-to-day stuff? Who really cares? Work isn't about fashion unless you work in the fashion industry. Dressing up nice for interviews and stuff, that is sensible; wearing a dress suit to everything? Not so much. Then again, I should also say I wish guys dressed up more for dances. Shirt + tie doesn't really cut it, for me. BUUUUUUUUUUUT then again I kinda dgaf because I only dress up when I have to/want to. There's no daily in between for me because 1) I frigging love costuming too much, so "dress up" for me is basically retro-costuming, and 2) my fashion is one of comfort. Let's see, biker-bag purse and running-jacket spring jacket? (Also, new laceless chucks, yay?) Yeah, that's more me.

See also: move to Hawaii, compleeeeete comfort. Mmmm.


ALSO MY NEW BAG FITS MY NETBOOK OMG YAY