The Daily Adventures of Mercat

let's talk about the little things I am enjoying seeing crop up in Prometheus discussion:

1) Crystal skull/von Daniken/etc. tie-ins

2) my association of the apparently "ampules" to canopic jars

3) my terming of the Engineers as Titans/Giants

Basically, history and art history and mythology all tied up with science fiction. SO INTERESTING.

2 & 3 particularly because everyone I'm seeing is terming them differently. Interesting associations.

Also, dancecat89 turning to me at the end and saying "I feel like I should have seen the Alien movies before I saw this one". Recorded for eternity.

Also-also, ( spoilers )

Despite my general feeling of melancholy lately-- and, oh, how I hate that word-- melancholy, ugh-- (and I do mean, literally, the word itself, not how it is defined or used or anything, I just have this bizarre intense dislike for the spelling and sheer existence of its sound) I also feel rather victorious the past few days.

I don't know which one of these to post last, because I am a save-the-best-for-last person, because three out of four of these just make me stupid-smiley-happy.

...I may have also been spending too much time on Tumblr being all internet-y and fandom-y so my brain is kind of running in that mode lately, too. So... sorry. (Also, damn, there is a lot of problematic posts on tumblr. But you know what? I deal with enough shit everywhere else, I can't turn that epic little corner of crossover jokes into another space where I get mad at people. I just can't deal with that, bleh.)

(Also, there was an adorable episode of the Simpsons with a Pixar parody and a Wallace and Gromit parody and they were SO well done and cute.)

(Umm, and Taco Bell has an ad with Pagliacci and I feel like with all the Phantom of the Opera I've been seeing and possibly going to see the limited showing of Les Mis that I should go see some real opera again? I think the last one I saw was Aida, and I always liked Carmen, and I just HAVE NOT SEEM MUCH THEATER LATELY I would even go for some Shakespeare. As long as it's not Much Ado About Nothing or As You Like It? I can't remember which, but one of them is terrible. But mostly I just feel like I should see a real version of Pagliacci because everything I know about Pagliacci is from Spike Jones. And possibly Merry Melodies/Looney Tunes.)

I aced my interview for Pier 1 today, so I am now seasonally employed. And it sounds like it's not many hours, which is good for me. You can't see my face right now, but I'm giving a sort of evil smirk, because sometimes I am a little conniving and I hate myself for it, but the little kid who read the entire Hardy Boys series is so proud of any time I am successfully involved in subterfuge.

Uhhhhh and I found out that when you put your dvd codes into Disney's Movie Reward program you also get a "digital library" hosted on their site which is PERFECT for while I'll be in Hawaii because I'll be taking maybe like two dvds with me. (Buuuut a lot of books. Like too many.) [EDIT: Actually, possibly, it might be only a discount to a streaming version. Which is a little skeezy IMO.]

Yesterday I found out that a few of my friends told some epic tales of me to the rookies this summer, and that just made my month. I miss the Troop so much. <3 WHY ARE ALL MY FRIENDS OUT WESSSST

Uh, also, I forgot how good horizontal stripes look on me and can I just say this sweater looks fucking great? And it's Hufflepuff colors. (And so are my socks.)

HUFFLEPUUUUUUFF

Okay and then I made a ridiculous joke yesterday on facebook, it was so great, and it just made me feel really awesome because my seat partner from last year was being a smartass about it and I feel the joke's quality is on par with the stuff the rest of my family (read: mostly my dad and uncle) crank out. It's a bit... audience specific, BUT! Here it is:

The set-up: a drum corps' tuba section has to break into their friend's dreams on a long overnight drive states away in order to save him from making a terrible tour-goggles-induced mistake. The title? C O N T R A - C E P T I O N


Oh my god my brain is in meme mode I'm so sorry.






:D

Let's start things off right; I watched a bunch of Chuck episodes to catch up this week, how about the CIA World Factbook article on Turkey? This could potentially be hilarious if that read "The CIA World Facebook". Change one letter, CHANGE THE WORLD

The menu for 2010:
Potatoes
Peas
Stuffing
Broccoli
Rolls
Gravy
Rutabaga
Squash

(Guys, that is what the internet should be like. One great big Monty Python sketch. I want to add more foods to the menu but I CANNOT TOP THAT SITE.)

For dessert, a pecan piecosahedron! Puns are delicious.

Big holiday wishes? Big holiday wishbone. Plus, dinos. So that's more than good luck, it's... Awesome Luck? (Unrelated to Pot Luck.) (THANKSGIVING JOKES DERP)

And last but not least, the timeless yams.


Old Thanksgiving posts:
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009

Holy crap seven Thanksgiving posts?! I've been around longer than I thought

Happy Thanksgiving, all! Despite my abundant blog-love for this holiday and its OBVIOUS underappreciation by internet society as a whole, I truly appreciate all you as my friends, conversation sharers, fan buddies, and (un)willing audience.

(DON'T BE THE BLITZ)

[EDIT] Found this picture, and since I didn't have any funny pictures like I normally do, I thought I'd come back and add it.

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I paid $2000 (roughly) three different summers to do drum corps.

Oh wait, you mean, someone's paying me?!











Also it only takes about a week to suffer drum corps withdrawal. You start missing living with all your best friends.

If you watched Hawaii Five-0 tonight and saw a red-headed girl in the photos in the house they raided, that is my good friend Kim. :D

Have you seen this article about the college essay writer? It's so fucking depressing, on so many counts. That these students are okay with it. That the school isn't catching them. That they're so inept in the first place, and getting no real help. That entitled people are just paying their way to a degree. My only recompense is that they likely won't be able to get or hold onto the jobs they think they deserve, which is actually sad for the people who have just been forgotten and pushed through the system. ANYWAY. Poor ethics piss me off and if I ever meet a person who admits to using a service like that I... will no longer be friends with them. And will probably be paranoid. (An easy solution though, honestly? It looks as if these teachers just had in-class writing assignments they would probably be a lot more suspicious, at least based on the communications supplied in the article.)

Also, this metafilter comment wins for the Sneakiest Use of Xkcd in Serious Discussion Without Drawing Attention to the Fact:

If you pretend that the degrees are evidence of your mastery in some subject, and that this mastery will allow you to produce good work in some area that you could not without this mastery, ie, that colleges are not a waste of time in general, then this is a misrepresentation of your abilities to your future employers.

Imagine you buy a chair on e-bay, and it has a certificate of Being a Chair, and instead, it was a bob-cat who hired someone to forge its certificate of Chairitude. You have essentially had your money stolen. If you try to sit on it anyway because you also forged your certificate of Being Able to Tell What a Chair is, you will sit on it anyway and it will RUIN your butt.

Cheating on papers is ruining the butts of society.
posted by EtzHadaat at 6:38 PM on November 14

(The title has nothing to do with anything except that I just took a practice GRE and "gremlins" was the first word to pop into my head starting with "gre-".)

Forgive me for just nearly missing the daily-post--deadline by a few minutes, because I just finished a GRE practice test. How sad is it that engineering has made me excited to take a standardized test?! I work well within boundaries and certain expectations, or no boundaries at all, apparently. I don't know how well I am cut out for slightly-open-ended design work. Which is not good, because that is pretty much anything engineering is. I mean, there are the laws of physics, and the laws of the land, but the problem is that the former is very mathematically complicated and the latter is just very convoluted and you only come to know it really through exposure and experience. Neither of which I really have. And not to mention, mayhaps my brain just doesn't work that way, because I never seem to know where to find the equations/set-up I need for engineering projects. Which makes working in groups good for me because then the other people are good at starting the project, and I'm good at checking things and thinking (maybe a little too far) outside the box.

So... menial desk job or very creative in-charge job for me, I guess. Strange. ANYWAY. Onto the prompt.

My favorite meme of the moment... I don't think I currently have one. Being gone all summer I kind of missed Double Rainbow and Hide Ya Kids and I don't really... "get".... either. Although I think I saw Antoine Dodson a while back but never saw the Bed Intruder Song? I don't know.

Does Rally to Restore Sanity/Fear count as a meme? Because it was probably more that than real political activism (or anything) and I kind of liked that (despite people being bitchy for it). However, it's not quite as wild as Anonymous' protests, so idk.

I guess I don't have a favorite meme right now, so I hope something comes along soon. In the meantime, I'm always a sucker for EFG and since the 5th of November was just a few days ago, let's say that. Even though it was nothing to do with anything, legitimately.

MOVING ON. I was thinking about password access, which led me to think about where you keep that kind of information so that it's safe with you but easily found by others in the case that you were to die. Which led me to think about wills, and the fact that while my mom has every once in a while talked about what she wants (donated organs iirc) and my dad has mentioned his wants (a big party), they don't really know my beliefs in terms of my... lack of faiths... (BUT NOT LACK OF MORALS... byuh) ANYWAY. I don't need any kind of fancy burial, I'll be dead. I've kind of always been about pragmatism, and even when I was really young (early gradeschool) I remember considering the pros and cons of cremation. So this is my current set of considerations: (And let's not call me morbid here, because I honestly approach a lot of what most people would consider "morbid" as just purely interesting. Death is the natural extension of life. Morbid for me is a whole other level. Perhaps I disdain that word... I'm more of a naturalist than a goth? And science is nature, so. )

1. If there's any hint of foul play just preserve as much as possible. Not that I expect this to happen but being slightly paranoid from reading too many detective novels and watching too many crime shows, if there was any hint of foul play I hope there's a really good twist! Which probably means exhuming the body at least once. (...Maaaaaaybe that's morbid. BUT SO ARE CRIME SHOWS)

2. If not, donate any usable body parts to organ donor programs and/or to science. Basically get as much practical use out of it as possible.

3. Bury any remains in a manner as natural as possible because it seems pretty pointless to be dumping lockboxes filled with chemicals into the ground just to sit there and be preserved for... ever.

3b. Plus this ensures that I will never be Undead. (Zombie, vampire, etc.)

4. Possibly do something awesome with the remains such as:
a) use the bones for something awesome such as art, Yorrick's skull in a production of Hamlet, a modern reliquary, et cetera,
b) include them in a treasure hunt/puzzle or as a geocache (WITH ONLY AWESOME TREASURE INSIDE. If I am to be a buried treasure, I fully expect it to be a goddamn bitchin' one.)
c)...et cetera. Basically I think skeletons and eyes are pretty cool things from a design aspect and have many interesting and beautiful (if slightly morbid) options. (BUT I'M OKAY WITH THE SLIGHT MORBIDITY HERE. AT THIS POINT THE MORBIDITY BECOMES MORE WUNDERKAMMER-CURIOUS THAN NATURALIST-CURIOUS BUT IT'S STILL AWESOME.)

5. A really cool headstone. Some classic-and-slightly-creepy design, with a totally clever and awesome epitaph. Like the headstones at the Haunted Mansion, with their Victorian-Gothic-slightly-disquieting style and the totally awesome epitaphs (at least out front--I've never studied the epitaphs inside the ride).

OKAY TOTALLY DONE WITH MY MORBID MOMENT NOW, for those of you who may not like that sort of thing... er... sorry for the lack of warning... =/

At any rate. I have a rant but I don't really want to rant about it right now. Let's just say, between people going back on my Halloween party invite, and being whiny about the party, and my friend failing to do the one thing I asked him to do for the senior show (i.e. leave an appropriate mid-movement moment for the dead-bug), which I told him a month ahead of time when we were planning it as a group, but do people just blow me off when I make comments a few months in advance? BECAUSE I HAVE ACTUALLY THOUGHT THESE THINGS THROUGH, and I mean them. If I change my thoughts, I WILL ALSO BRING THAT TO YOUR ATTENTION.

Do I just... scream "IGNORE ME" or something? (Heh.)

Yeah. Anyway.




...Also I went to trivia tonight for the first time in a good while and I wore by awesome retro-rainbow Star Wars shirt that I bought from Target's boy section last year. The usual awesome trivia guy wasn't there, and the girl taking his place was not as fun. Plus, a lot of the questions were wrong tonight. "A one-note instrument made popular at the world soccer games this summer"? Vuvuzela, except that like all other objects with a natural frequency, if you halve, double, or otherwise multiply that frequency you will get other notes. Octaves, for simplicity, or perhaps... partials... if the instrument is more complicated. Say, like a trumpet. Speaking of trumpets, "a cornet most resembles this musical instrument". Maybe a cornet? It's actually a legit instrument.

And then Pat, being his normal uppity Classics-major self, called out the trivia girl on the question "what famous temple site on the Acropolis?" by screaming "Which temple do you want?! There are at least nine different ones!"

However I also learned that the F22 Raptor can go supersonic without having to use its afterburners which is called "supercruising". Also, the evil wizard on Smurfs is Gargamel and the cat is Azrale. (NO IDEA if I spelled those right, also don't care much.) And the compact disk was invented in 1965 (we guessed floppy disk).

Also-also I cleaned my room today. Go me!

Yep, late again. Still working on this damn reinforced concrete footing design spreadsheet. THRILLING, I KNOW.

Hilarious: watching Australia before or after watching VanHelsing. Also, Nicole Kidman kind of bothers me in this movie.

WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS SHIT NOT AGAIN. It says they did it to Phantom in '09 (?) but I don't recall off the top of my head. (Then again, Red Violin... nobody cared? I didn't say that, haha) There's a strong wave of response to this on my facebook. Is Troop responsible for the video rights? Is DCI? No one seems to know. Anyway, this is CRAP. However, they still have the music rights, so... buy the mp3, rip the video, mash them together. The worst part about the stupid thing is, though, that I'm pretty sure Wanted is the song they didn't get rights to. Which means: no intro, no outro, AND NO CLOSER COMPANY FRONT. Goddamn that's ridiculous.

I'm also a little depressed because just a few days ago my wall was a flood of people registering for camps and buying plane tickets. I miss everyone dearly. I'm starting to wonder how crazy the scene is in Japan, maybe march a summer there or something, huh? That would be crazygonuts awesome. (March with Tatsu and Aya? haha)

ANYWAY, once again, two days worth of prompts while I procrastinate on my other homework some more:

My closest friends... I have a lot. People from high school, college roomies, and corps people. I'll keep it simple for the sake of people's sanity. (Roughly 850 facebook friends ensures this is not a simple answer.)

Three favorite colors? ALSO A LOT. Haha. Generally I lean towards (surprise!) really bright colors, but I also lean towards blue, green, and purple. And then orange, and also pink, and in particular any of these colors with gray tones. Classy.

me: "you _______"
jon: "your mom __________"
me: "that's what she said."
jon: "Oh, she told you?"



melissa: "nip nip nip nipnip nip nip"
me: "...nippleodeon."



Yeah, our apartment is awesome.

So I think I also forgot to mention yesterday that one professor is making us write an essay on ourselves. So yes... definitely feel like i'm back in fourth grade. Drove down to UC to see Anna. The medicine didn't work so they don't know what they're going to try next. She's in good spirits but very tired and sore bc she's not allowed to move and her clot is causing severe headaches & neck pain. Damn, though, her mom is a wreck. =/ Also saw Sherlock Holmes tonight. It was good but I'll write more tomorrow when I have a real keyboard. I realized it is a dreadful oversight that though I've seen both Wishbone's and carroll's Hound of the Baskervilles, I HAVE NEVER READ HOLMES. Considering my propensity for detective stories, I'm appalled. This must be rectified. Also I like the word "gambit". This keyboard needs more pointer control, too, editing is a bitch. Anyway I'm glad "swagger" is coming back into use because it reminds me of "swashbuckler". Also I need to make a Stan Wars gif bc that word still confuses me, yet it would be hilarious.

(Well, fuckyou, lj app, you deleted my entry. Let's try this again.) So in addition to what I wrote earlier, I forgot to mention that those two Carroll kids died so everyone's feeling the Young Death morbidity right now, Mandi is essentially getting kicked out of school for the semester, the last month seems to have really desired to up the level of drama, and I guess with all the economy talk and engineering talk and graduation talk I've just been worried I won't be able to find a job I'm actually interested in. (It's kinda been like this since I looked at Disney's site; they encourage competing in a competition but I wouldn't want to give them my ideas "for free" essentially, and even though I have a head up for the internship with being an engineer... I can imagine the competition is pretty stiff.) =/ BUT, Anna came out of surgery pretty well, they put small catheters in her artery and vein (or something) to medicate the clot to try to break it up, and if it's not broken up today they're going to go in and try to remove it manually. So... idk. It's not good, but it could definitely be worse, I feel. Trivia was good. The No-Clue Nazis didn't win, and we tried our best and did not win (nor did we lose, unfortunately, but we only kind of threw the game). They played Billy Joel so I felt successful in being able to name the 70's artist. Not a complete waste, haha. I think I wrote something else here before the internet ate it. Idk. Then we went to Lara's and watched Return of the Jedi, good times. Also I'm completely obsessed with my new ipod. There are wireless networks everywhere and it's AWESOME~