I've started using my tumblr more and more recently, so if you have a tumblr, y'all should go find me. I'm phantomwise over there.

I am currently drawing a map of my fictional city, which is proving to be interesting. The damn thing is about 3.5 by 3 feet big and the scale is all off the walls, of course, but drawing in the streets is very zen in a way. Like doing a jigsaw puzzle.

( 16 A4 papers. Or thereabout. )

Nothing much else to report, other than that Ryan Ross is still one of my favorites, even though he has the intelligence of a flobberworm. I can't even amass the energy to be upset with him right now, mostly I'm just laughing incredulously and facepalming, because he's a fucking moron.

I was trawling fandom_secrets, as you do, and I stumbled upon this.



I actually surprised myself with how utterly, utterly fucking pissed I got reading this secret. The first part, sure, I can get that. I know a whole bunch of people who'd agree that chubby, grody Gerard was totally munchable. The second part, however, is kind of making my brain boil.

This? Is not okay. Not even as a joke. It just isn't. What this man went through to get clean -- that is enough to earn him brownie points for the rest of his natural life. Getting and more importantly staying clean, even if it's "only" five years since he got sober, is the most amazing thing this dude will ever do.

He almost killed himself, for fuck's sake. Does this mean nothing to some people? I don't know about you, but I prefer my musicians (and artists in general) alive, thank you very much, and if their music isn't to your taste, then listen to something else. Listen to Bullets again, do whatever, just don't get out there and tell him that he should start drinking again, because the music was better. I mean, if nothing else, it's not like Gerard is alone in writing the songs for their albums -- the band does have four other members putting their shit in there.

This isn't the first time I've heard about shit like this. There's a story about a Swedish musician -- inspired by Bob Dylan and about as adored nationally -- who was an alcoholic for a long, long time, with the slurry singing and weird-ass lyrics you'd expect. He got clean, found Jesus, and wrote a new album. The diehards were, unsurprisingly, not as happy about this as you might think, so when he walked out on stage that first night, the idiots by the fence held up signs and shouted up at him, "START BOOZING AGAIN, MAN."

Just. No. No. There is nothing okay with that.

I am actually too angry to have much to say right now, and I'm giving myself a rage headache. So, I'm going to c&p the important points.

From rhombal:

Summary: two talk show hosts on Sacramento's KRXQ 98.5 FM radio station went into a half-hour long diatribe against transgender children. They called them "idiots" and "freaks", advocated violence against them, and said things like "allowing transgenders to exist, pretty soon it becomes normal to fall in love with the animals". GLAAD's post about it is here; they have a link to the audio of the show, but I haven't listened to it because reading the recounts of it were enough for me. I don't think I could handle listening to the actual show.

GLAAD pushed for an apology and got "I’m sorry that you might find it funny — or I’m sorry that you might not find it funny that some people laugh when Arnie — who does not have a child — talks about throwing a shoe at his non-existent son. You know what? Some people do laugh and they know we’re not serious, that Arnie’s not serious and we don’t advocate for it." (from here) Excuse me? "I'm sorry that you might not find it funny"? What the hell is that?

Snapple, Sonic, and Chipotle have pulled advertising from the station, but there are still a bunch of advertisers who haven't done anything.

Some other links here and what to do about this fuckery, this irresponsible, nauseating intolerance here.

I need to go lie down now or I'm going to throw up.

What the actual fucking fuckhell? What kind of terrifying drugs are Amazon on?

If you were in any way unaware -- Amazon has been stripping sales figures and accompanying rankings of a bunch of erotica, LGBTQ books and romance, completely arbitrarily and without seeming thought. This means they won't show up in searches or whatever and it's being a royal bitch. To wit: the Playboy Penthouse something or other book featuring, I assume, half-naked girls in bunny suits is still there. Lady Chatterley's Lover isn't. John Barrowman's biography isn't. A queer YA novel isn't. Student lit and the history of homophobia isn't.

Somebody over at Amazon has shit for brains, so right now I'm helping out in hitting them where it hurts, which is their PR department. Amazon Rank over on Smart Bitches is where you can find more information on this crap.

This post brought to you by Smart Bitches and Google Bombing. Have good night all.

ETA: I just sent a pretty snippy email to Amazon at ecr@amazon.com. The sum of it was basically, "you suck," but I was actually a little polite. I only used the word "disgusting" once!

Look, guys, as ashamed as I am about the state of my kitchen right now, I am also kind of impressed at my own slovenliness. Seriously. It has not been this bad since... god, since I was in high school at the very least. Not once since I moved here has the load of dishes gotten to these proportions and I've lived here for 2½ years. Although, to my defense, a bunch of stuff (knives, a glass, the rolling pin, the motherfucking grill to the motherfucking oven) is shit the idiot managed to leave a mess when she moved, so.

( Here there be dragons. )

Feel free to be grossed out. I am.

I haven't updated in a little while, mostly because I don't feel like I have much to update on. Either I'm bored out of my skull, or I'm angry to the point of pain. As my Twitter and Facebook have noticed lately, I'm fairly bitchy and short-tempered, and for me, that means heavy sarcasm, heavy bluntness and some hidden rage.

Yes, I am about to kill my roommate, why do you ask? Look, I'll just say she's a moron and leave it at that, yeah? I've already bitched the girl out on LJ too many damn times, and I got thisclose to calling her an idiot to her face today when she decided to grill chicken in the oven and her idiot brain backfired so she just threw raw chicken on the grate and was then confused at why the smoke alarm went off. Moron. Or when she threw eggshells and other food items in the paper trash, even though I have told her -- again and again and again and... -- that I am allergic to eggs, yes, even eggshells, and that those bags are paper only.

In short, I live with an idiot.

But! All is not bad things that befall me! I called Steph this Thursday because it was her birthday and we had a long discussion on language and culture because we're geeks. And the day before yesterday, I went shopping. Now this might not seem like much to you, but there's a whole story here.

I'd gotten a coupon so the first thing I did was go buy myself a clock for my kitchen wall, which I've been missing. I like clocks. Also, I bought a birthday card for Dad, since he's 55 on Wednesday. Anyway. I went grocery shopping after that -- and I fucking love grocery shopping when I have money, okay, I will clear that store right out if I have half a chance -- so I ended up with kind of a lot. Now, I don't know if you guys do this, but here there's a charming little habit of selling two kinds of bags. The smaller cheap plastic ones for not a whole lotta shopping and the big expensive paper ones for much shopping. The problem with the paper bags is that they cost a lot, and you can only really use them if you have a car. The handles are LIARS, okay, those motherfuckers were not meant to be carried anywhere. Everybody knows this.

Now, I decided that since I had so much groceries, I would try my luck. This point is where every Swede I know start making "ouch" noises of sympathy at me. So I bought one paper bag and one plastic and started wobbling my way home. About three blocks from my apartment I noticed a fatal flaw in my packing: I had put the milk in the bottom of the paper bag. The milk had managed to tear through the paper and I held my breath and prayed that I would make the three blocks home.

No such luck. A block later, the bag goes riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiip and the entire bottom of the paper bag falls away, leaving cans of beans and all sorts of assorted groceries bouncing away on the path. So I'm cursing my head off, because hi, I may have two more bags, but I also bought myself a bag of flour and a kilo minced meat. I was just wondering how the fuck I was going to get all this crap home with me -- I could stuff some of it in the other two bags I had, even though they were pretty full, and maybe I could carry the flour and the meat on my other arm? -- when two guys, roughly my age, walk past.

"You need help?" one of them asks and my face when I looked up must have been the picture of bewilderment.

"Well, yeah," I say, sounding a lot like, duh, because hi, my groceries are all over the ground getting gross and I'm a little desperate. "If you're willing."

Turns out they are, so one of them bends down and helps me stuff the big shit -- minced meat, flour, etc. -- into his backpack, while the other takes the plastic bag now brimming with groceries. They ask where I'm going and then light up when I say it's just two blocks away, because it turns out they also live nearby.

I was fully prepared for them to just help me with the shit to my building and then shove me into the elevator and take off. Not so. They're moving on the fourth floor and the elevator is occupied, so these guys look at each other, shrug, ask me what floor I'm on -- sixth -- and start walking. Up to my front door. With my bags and shit. And thus they left me.

My knights in shining armor. I had to call Jennie and Bee and squeal at them for about five minutes that CHIVALRY AIN'T DEAD YET, BITCHES.

It helped, for a brief moment, to keep my mind off the idiot. Not much does these days.

Amazingly enough, I think I've actually found a person who is even grosser than I am. I didn't know it was possible, but here we are.

The Chinese roomie. I know I should be patient, because I know the culture shock's gotta be pretty severe, and she doesn't know how to do certain things because she has never been taught, yada yada yada.

These are just snapshots. Every morning I walk into the kitchen, this is part of what I encounter. Everything looks deceptively clean, but then you look closer and you notice the potato peels hiding in the corners and the sticky surfaces on EVERYTHING. And then there is this:

( Pictures of my morning aneurysms, right here. )

Ugh. Roommates, man.

Help me out here, native English speakers, what sounds best? Shadow walker, Shadowwalker, Shadow-walker, Shadow Walker?

To summarize: in my little world, I have an entity that people believe in called the King of Death and that up there is his colloquial nickname. We have the Grim Reaper, these people have the Shadow walker. Shadow Walker? Shadow-walker? Ugh, I don't fucking know.

Email sent to Bee last night:

"Now the question is, if one were to write a Matrix AU -- which I absolutely am not, because that would be silly, and I'm only plotting it for, um. Further use, yes -- who would you rather have? Because see, I'm enamored with both Ways as Neo, because they'd both work just as well.

Okay! So, they're both based on the same thing, right? One of them disappears at a young age, 16-17 maybe, because of some hacker related type business and the other spends the next ten or so years desperately looking for him. He's closing himself off from all the rest of the world, hating his soul-crushing job and spending every last penny he has on finding his brother. During his searches, he keeps stumbling over two things -- first of all the Matrix, which is something that his brother was obsessed with, and second the person known as, for lack of a better name, "Morpheus". Now he becomes convinced that this Morpheus person knows what happened to his brother.

And this is where he meets his Trinity. For Gerard, Frank. For Mikey... well. You choose. I could go either way (heh. Way). But either way, there would be lovely brotherly angst -- "what the fuck happened to you? You're not my brother anymore, I don't even know you!", "Fuck biology, we're still brothers and we always will be", "I believe in you. I always have" -- and people dying like flies, because it wouldn't be Matrix if people weren't killed. Which is sad, yes, but that is kind of the way you'd have to go with this. And then at the end, Mikey/Gerard dies (slightly mutilated) together with the love of his life, and Gerard/Mikey lives on in Zion (probably continuing to preach what his brother tried to tell people) with the love of HIS life.

Depressing. SO WHY AM I SO TEMPTED GODDAMMIT?"

*facepalm*

DUDE. Mormon fundamentalists are a little frightening, yo. Hilarious, but a little frightening.

True story: I really, really can't stand Tokio Hotel. I'm sick and tired of their music, I'm sick of hearing about Bill Kaulitz (I KNOW HIS NAME WHY WHY OH GOD WHY?), and the majority of their fans are completely batshit, possibly even crazier than the Panic fanbrats.

That doesn't stop me, however, from staring at pictures of them in morbid fascination and trying to figure out if that Bill Kaulitz isn't actually a girl.

( Of course, all of this is Bee's fault. )

I'm almost tempted to try and find slash, but I'm pretty sure the teenyboppers (and badly attempted twincest) would make me want to wash my own brain in a bleach bath.

I'm pretty sure my roommate hates my guts.



GRAH. STOP BEING STUCK IN MY HEAD.

Is it possible to get a hangover a full 36 hours since I drank last? Ugh.

In other news, am reading Macbeth and have been horrible at commenting lately, for which I apologize. This fucking play is messing up my speech patterns, soon I'll be speaking in iambic pentameter just for the hell of it. :/ Skimming through it in search for soliloquies, which is probably what will take the most time, since the actual assignment is only supposed to be a page or so. Hopefully I'll finish it, because I seriously cannot take the stress of procrastinating right now. *sigh*

The police preemptive riot control bullshit that's been going around my flist is both horrifying and pissing me off something fierce. What the actual fucking fuck, yo? The only thing I can think of is the Communist witch hunt in the 60's, and it freaks the fuck out of me. America is not a police state, guys. You know what, fuck it, whatever personal reservations I may have about Obama, I hope he kicks McCain's ass in the election. As much as this whole "I believe in Barack Obama, he's our Savior, glory glory hallelujah" reaction is freaking me out, the guy does at least seem passionate enough. (As an aside: how amused am I that Obama's middle name is Hussein? SO AMUSED.)

Funnily enough, I've never been this invested in Swedish politics. I think that says something about me.

Anyway, happy belated birthday, Ryan Ross. May you continue to be utterly ridiculous and may you always have a feather in your stupid hats.

Grrrrrr. As I said the other day, there has been some sort of mistake with my application for the courses this fall. The woman I talked to said she'd call the woman in charge and get back to me that same day. That was yesterday. It's 4 PM right now, and I still haven't heard a goddamn thing. FUCK. The thing is, since I don't know if I'll be able to take those courses I can't talk to the people at CSN (student loans thingy) and sob my way into getting paid, and if I don't get money soon I can't pay my rent and I also can't buy that swanky new cell phone I'm DYING to have instead of the old ugly-ass fucker I'm dragging around today.

Grrrraaarrrghh. >.<

There is so much stuff I need but I can't buy anything, because I'm too afraid to waste money. I need to get a new ID card, because the old one has expired three months ago without my noticing, and I need to buy course books which I know nothing about since I haven't got my schedule. Not to mention that I really fucking need to switch cell phone because when I get it, we're going to cancel the land line and switch broadband operator which effectively will cut our bills at least in half.

Despite that, things are looking up a little. When I'm angry I forget to be anxious. I'm still jittery and nervous and fidgety, and I still eat and sleep weirdly, but at least my head doesn't feel like it's going to pop at any second and I don't feel like screaming all the time, so hey, bonus points for that. I'm still kind of... you know, so Thing post forthcoming. Seriously, it's like therapy on its own. Kick me when you start to get bored with it.

CANNOT DOWNLOAD CFOB MIXTAPE. THIS MAKES ME CRANKY. >:(

So, since I decided that Zac Efron is my favorite part about Hairspray, I decided to give HSM another shot to see if I like it any better this time around. Yeah, no such luck. I'm sorry for the consequent bitchiness, if you like HSM this is possibly not the post for you.

( Things I can't stand about High School Musical: a list. )

Okay, so this is getting ridiculous. Bee is entirely within her rights to mock me for my newly acquired love of Zac Efron. I've now seen Hairspray three times and every time that boy shows up on screen I go ♥______________♥. It feels a little skeevy (Disney, dudes), but luckily he's only like six months younger than me, so I don't feel too bad about it. And I still don't like HSM, so there.

Only I've been trying -- in true fangirl fashion -- to recast the fucking thing with various bandom boys, but since I'm so incredibly OTP oriented, I mostly end up giggling hysterically. Could you imagine Gerard and Frank as Tracy and Link? Yeah. Brendon could make a decent Tracy (or, ooooh, Penny!), but then I have no idea who is supposed to be Link -- I can't imagine any of the Panic boys exhibit the self-assurance of Link. Or the hair. Or the moves. Patrick would fit on account of being short and chubby, and also having a kick-ass voice, but he's too shy to be Tracy. Also, Pete as Link? Yeah, I dunno. Which leaves me with Gabe and William, and that's just. No.

On the other hand, I've been tentatively plotting Panic genderswap (yes, again) with Aly, based on the premise that Brendon is gayer than a maypole and his life would be so much easier if he was a girl, because then nobody would raise an eyebrow if he flirted with all the cute boys. Cue, Brendon waking up as a girl and his band freaking out, while he mostly goes, "eh, whatever, I'm a girl, it's not like I've got tentacles." The whole thing is probably going to end in gsf, because this is me we're talking about, and it's not like Aly objects.

Seriously, I AM this predictable. Throw me a musical and some genderbending and I'm all there. Also, I'm debating if I want to dare the depths and horrors of fandom and try to find some Hairspray fanfic. ARGH LINK LARKIN WHY WHHHYYYYYYYY? *headdesk*

ETA: I just mentally put Ryan Ross in Link's hair and blue suit, and I may never stop laughing. "And I'm... *hippy moves* Ryan." *laughs forever*

Seriously. FAIL FANDOM.

The one person in all of bandom that has openly dissed the "pornfiction" and you make him hold a fucking SIGN? WHERE does that get okay?

Oh, my God, I can't even take it, GTFO.

Chris and I are discussing religion and Mormonism, and he linked me to this: the LDS FAQ. I'm alternating between "OMG RELIGIOUS PERSON BRINGING THE LULZ" and raaaage. I also feel so, so sorry for Brendon Urie and Bert McCracken.

But on the other hand, they don't have problems with mimes. Which some religious people do. Fundies Say the Darndest Things! is hilarious in an EXTREMELY brainbreaky sort of way.

In other news, Twilight still taunts me, but Bee has gotten Chris to start reading it, which should prove to be fun. I don't know if I can finish it myself. Stabbity.

I have an overwhelming need to toss my laptop across the room and scream. Augh, I hate Bella Swan with a fiery passion, and Edward Cullen is almost worse.

Bee finds this very amusing though, so at least one of us gets something out of this.