Climb to the Shrine, Right What Is Wrong

Start here...

( And here we go! )

So, I'd say we have quite the story here!

A reasonably average young woman with strained familial relationships gets a fortune foretelling love, then meets up with a spoony transgender vampire who looks like badfic!Harry Potter. As strange noises come from a minor protagonist's basement, the two of them liberate a giant laser to get a valuable business contract. Sparks fly as their wildly differing personalities clash; can they ever be together, or will they be doomed to become enemies?

...I swear those are the results I got...

Screw the high-powered medicine, this stuff works.

Also, anyone want these results from the Really Random Plot-O-Tron?

A geeky artist shrinks the planet and finds an ancient tome.
A mysterious vampire must aid the village with a snowmobile.
A talkative singer liberates another world with the help of a lost city.
A mighty queen decides to destroy a city with a map.
A talkative gelatinous life-form takes over the castle by finding an old friend.
A mad dentist kidnaps a monster and gets a technological breakthrough.
An ambitious elf sets fire to the king with a gaming system.
A spooky singer accidentally saves computer literacy with the kingdom.
A bumbling fairy steals an assortment of old computer parts and finds the ideal significant other.
A disgruntled monster from under the bed steals a set of mystical objects and gets a primitive country.
An untamed zombie decides to destroy the world by creating a magical weapon.
An angry troll decides to help the world under the bed with the help of an army of monsters.
A talkative Internet game critic accidentally discovers computer literacy and gets a mysterious power.
A punctual bard kidnaps a village with a time machine.

If you're not going to use them, I'm going to.

Also, this result from the Creepypasta Generator sounds badass.
One night, a boy and a girl create an eldritch abomination after listening to a cursed record.

Dear DJ Egg,

Forgive me not being able to find the "list of sites" you mention for uploading the file: I have an IQ of 147, and apparently it's inadequate. Now I can remux, recode and sync video; build websites; edit html headers; use DOS switches; flash firmware; write command lines for batch; even PGC; but I can't follow your directions. Sorry. 
[...]

Context.

I can understand the user's irritation, but gad that's funny. :D

(Note: the MIDI issue, as I recall, is caused by Winamp having TWO plugins attempting to run MIDI at once (!). For the life of me, though, I can't remember which one is the defective one. Ah, it's in_adlib, apparently. Yeah, in_midi is the MIDI player. ANYTHING else in WinAmp that wants to handle MIDI files is smoking dope and should be KOed. Just so you know. :P)

*You misread "Lensman Arms Race" as "Lesbian Arms Race"
*You are very disappointed when you scroll back up to check
*You wonder what that would look like

Also, this Markov-chain gibberish-generator produces some amusing results with Shutdown.

Richard explained that Asher gives up at her skin contact;
Oh, come on. Even I wouldn't say Anita is THAT repulsive. :P

I did we don’t know what to her, but I don’t know you to take a look empty.
Even Anita isn't sure what Shutdown was about.

I was too neutral as if they understand that story.
Anita is smugly confident that the readers don't know, either.

I was eight, and neither did force this was wearing.
Anita is unusually honest about her mental age.

“You abuse me, placing his whole life,” she said, and wouldn’t meet anyone’s eyes.
Ellen gives a very curt summary of the "e-special".

Bonus from a second reload:
It is submissive to blush at her.
Anita's neuroses about dominance reach a whole new level.

I'll never have to stop using my computer during a headache again

More seriously, this is nice. Bright light starts turning me into a hyperactive, unable-to-focus twit late at night, so this will do wonders for my concentration and ability to sleep.

Also, I never realized how bright keyboard LED lights are. Thank goodness for creative use of bottlecaps.

Fellow techno-insomniacs, download this application. Here, I'll even link you to the official site for download. I have no idea if its effects are real or just psychosomatic, but they're certainly pleasant.

The only problem is that you'll have to memorize where your less-frequently-used keys are on your keyboard. >_>

Or, in short, NaNoWriMo.

I will be gleefully working my ass off to save said ass, oh gad D: watching on with a glass of cranberry juice chardonnay, decadently braying like a donkey cackling at your anguish and frantic wordcount-padding maneuvers, reflecting on the fragility of all human endeavor.

Just remember, if you find yourself typing nothing but "ithurtsithurtsithurts" for long stretches at a time, that's your cue to take a break and try again next month. :) Short stretches are just useful word-paddiit hurts it hurts it hurts

(Alternatively, if your writing starts to make as little sense as 7 days a skeptic, you should seriously take a break. Though if you really only needed half a dozen words to go over your 50,000 goal at one minute to midnight, I suppose "I JUST WANTED TO GO INTO SPACE!!!" is as good a finishing sentence as any.

Have fun, guys!)

Free logic-puzzles site. Good for a brief distraction.

Also, I haven't given you guys MedicalXpress links for a while... let's fix that.

Staph infections and eczema: What's the connection?
(*sourly* This is now relevant to my interests.)
Mind over gray matter: Placebo improves both pleasure and pain
How video gaming can be beneficial for the brain
(i.e. the one everyone will want to throw in the faces of family members XD)
THE POPE IS CATHOLIC AND BEARS DEFECATE IN THE WOODS - er, "Manipulative and empathetic people both adept at reading emotions"
(In all seriousness. Yes, if one of your interest areas is, to be euphemistic about it, "win friends and influence people", OF COURSE YOU'RE GOING TO CULTIVATE UNDERSTANDING OF SOCIAL SIGNALS AND THUS LEARN TO "READ" THEM MORE ACCURATELY. Did this really need to be STUDIED?)
What makes creativity tick?
Study explores the cost of creativity
[opinion: the reason why the creative students had more trouble recalling details/big picture is that their brains were more prone to fabricate plausible-seeming alternatives from shifty data, whereas the non-creative students had more stable recollections.
Not that it was a significant difference in the study - 9% error versus 2% error, seriously? - but similar phenomena are sometimes a %$@^! for me, so I'm guessing that's why.]

...It's an MS-DOS game, we'll just put it that way. On the bright side, I actually learned some Command Prompt commands!

So far, the world has had two amphibian civilizations, one reptile civilization, one (euthanized) human civilization, and one... carnifern civilization.

"Carnifern" is the game's term for carnivorous plants.

...That's right, the world is currently ruled by sentient venus flytraps.

Ah, crack. What would virtual worlds do without it?

Wintour told Fawkes of their plan to "doe some whatt in Ingland if the pece with Spaine healped us nott",^[3]
[...]
On the evening of 26 October, Lord Monteagle received an anonymous letter warning him to stay away, and to "retyre youre self into yowre contee whence yow maye expect the event in safti for ... they shall receyve a terrible blowe this parleament".^[33]

The more I see of writing From Olden Times, the more I grow more kindly in my mind to the misspelling-plagued authors from fanfiction.net. Perhaps we are the perverse deviants, not they.

*grimaces* Also, if you need quick text for any passwords, just grab any bunch of Scots text from the Casket Letters. No one will recognize it.
This is deplorable. Any fool with Google at hand can find half a dozen plaintext copies of bestsellers on blogs of dubious repute within five minutes and half as many search pages, but the only copies of the Casket Letters are in Google Books and Archive.org?

Honestly, one will find nothing more like a tabloid-trashy epic in Renaissance times than the story of Mary Queen of Scots, princess of a savage realm raised amongst the grandest court in the land, ( ...who then proceeded to make an epic mess of the rest of her life, as only a Tudor-blooded royal could... )

...Okay, mother of all run-on sentences, but you know something? I did not make any of that shit up.
Did I mention that she managed all those shenanigans in Scotland before she was twenty-six?

Historical epics only work so well because the underlying material is so ridiculous and over-dramatic. Historical-fiction writers are really the same as movie-novelizers, or the video-game-novelizers that abound on fanfiction.net. It's just a dang sight harder to get hold of the original canon for that "fandom" than it is for a movie or game in current distribution.

I must admit, I don't like history for the more reasoned and humanistic undercurrents. I like it for the completely trashy and tabloid-like aspects, which are really central to a good deal of historical works which have survived from antiquity (hullo, Tacitus, hullo, Suetonius, hullo, Dio, hullo, Plutarch, hullo, Thucydides...), presumably because the scribes copying them out by hand didn't fall asleep drooling on their copies... and which always seem to be downplayed by the Great Intellectuals reporting on them, rather possibly because the Great Intellectuals dislike admitting to the hoi polloi that they could possibly enjoy anything so common as trashy melodrama writ large. :P

(Incidentally, check out the Song of Roland sometime. A noble and dignified song of war, as written by those infinitely cultured people, the French.
( Cut for gore. )
Yes, tell me again how our desensitized, depraved media is the first to EVER popularize and glorify unrealistic levels of gore! *rolls eyes*)

[Also - look! A non-Pokemon-related post! On this journal? Surely it's the End of the World as We Know It! (And I feel fine.) :P]

Considering that the next-highest Special on my team, on Reservoir, is 77. And he's three levels higher than Yulong.

Gyarados, you big ball of murderous fluff! C'mere, darling~

Will do Fighting Dojo first to level Monarch and Yulong if Monarch gets overly weakened, then move on to beat Sabrina's Gym.

I've also found out that, for a sufficiently strong Dugtrio and/or a sufficiently bulky Blastoise, using Dig is a viable method to pass/survive Selfdestructers. This makes Koga's Gym possible, and I plan to snipe any Venonat/Venomoth-line Pokemon with LEERSPEAR.

Huh. The game may be survivable after all.

(My HUGE difficulty hump will come at Elite Four, as I have nothing specifically dedicated to killing Water-types/Ice-types. At best guess, I'm going to making Yulong a Thunderbolter (since Gen 1 allows him to use his massive stat for BOTH attack and defense~), then bulldozing Lorelei's Pokemon with OHKOs/Bolt+Bite for THKOs. I need to OHKO two more Pokemon [the double Gyarados on Lance and Champion], so... 15 PP should be enough. The only trick will be keeping Yulong alive, which... shouldn't be TOO hard, since he's got decent defenses. Given the lack of Electric-type attacks, his only weakness will be Rock, and I have Reservoir to cover Rock-types.)

Image post coming pretty darn soon!

*laughing head off*

Oh, I missed fandom wankery
I mean, the designations of OOC!badfic characters alone
PILLOWQUEEN!ROBIN

( Read more... )

Good to know.

I'm also greatly amused by all the Edward-bashing - he deserves it. :B (Jasper, strangely enough, does NOT get bashed. Apparently it's not a 'kill the spare' situation so much as it's a genuine dislike of Edward. XD My good man, these are people who are willing to tolerate the concept of BELLA who hate you. You have an astounding gift for making enemies.
I'M SENSITIIIIIVE, WHY DOES NO ONE CARE ABOUT MY FEELINGS? OH, ANGST! OH, MY DELICIOUS SUNDAE! OH, BEIGE! OH, HEROIN! OH, CARLISLE-
...One that really shouldn't have surprised me.)

Mainly, I'm trying to figure out how to run an entire story off of Author Appeal, since such stories may be distinctly mediocre (and unnerving as a glimpse into the author's psyche) but at least get written. At best guess, it's going to involve a narcissistic, ehem, protagonist who manages to break a dystopia through sheer selfish hatred of its ugliness and wastefulness, only to get harshly called out by a Purity Sue of dubious judgment* for their methods, and eventually be vanquished by the Forces of Goodness... who uncomfortably reflect afterwards that they might not have been able to bring about a better world without the protagonist's fucking around in the first place.

(*Along the lines of 'Why do you think a sweet man like Sir Obvious Ulterior Motives would have any interest in manipulating me? :D' and 'My Righteous Plan is backfiring massively? ...Clearly we need MOAR! That will take care of all its problems! >:D'. Sadly... you think I'm making up those examples as a deconstruction? No. And lifelong-Humilation-Conga no. Though Mary Queen of Scots was more a walking deconstruction of Heart-over-Head than Purity Sueism, Mary of England was an intelligent, good-hearted woman with a painfully tragic adolescence, capable of great courage, generosity, and charisma, who is best remembered for sending nearly three hundred people to die in agony at the stake over five short years. Um. Yes. Moving on...)

Of course, the problems are obvious. Hideously preachy, for one; trying far too hard to be ~nuanced~, for two; possessed of dubiously-sympathetic characters, for three...

Well, it's an idea, at any rate. I can figure out how to make the potential audience less likely to pelt me with rotten fruit later...

Happens loads and loads of times in Fan Fiction, where, because Most Fanfic Writers Are Girls, the usual genders are most frequently seen flipped, with the female getting double-teamed by the two hot male characters the fic writer can't choose between.
Dear TV Tropes: consider that OT3s are sometimes not a matter of "can't choose", but rather CHOOSES BOTH.
No love,
Guardian's Song
(And yaaaaaay, totally handwaving every fic where it's two OR MORE girls and a guy! I totally imagined all those Harem Fics on FF.net, guys!)

My apologies, but I've shifted over the years from automatically mocking the "fanbrats" to regarding the more "enlightened" fans with as much suspicion as their simpler counterparts. There's an awful damn lot of talking down to female fans when male fans are let off with a smile and a wink, for one.
--

I also note sullenly that the Rooting For The Empire page looks an awful lot like the Draco In Leather Pants page from the other side of the strawman. Take that as you will.
Though it does have at least one wonderful quote.
"[...] Twilight features the three tracker vampires who are trying to kill Bella, which is seen by some as a sympathetic aim. "

And this linked page (http://flyingmoose.org/tolksarc/theories/arag_arw.htm) has one very amusing quote:
"How would you react if the descendent of Charlemagne showed up in Paris today to claim kingship over France, bringing in the shroud of Turin as the evidence?"

--

TL;DR - TV Tropes is at its best when people aren't opining on things, since it's not exactly objective, despite all pretenses. Fortunately, I was mainly on TV Tropes to read through the Yandere page... :D Wish there were more examples of two-way yanderes, but I suppose one has to do that oneself.

( Discussion of Bella and Edward, Fail!Yanderes (and briefly Alice, a not-so-fail!yandere...) )

My screen does seem bizarrely more comfortable to view now... So I would recommend it to reduce eyestrain.

Also, this is a hilarious piece of FE sprite art. :D

 Yes. I know how stupid that sounds. Am seriously considering that many difficulties in "gifted" people come not so much from being ~different~ in a world that ~doesn't understand them~ so much as being able to function for an abnormally long time while lacking basic life skills and any grasp of many Obvious Things, such that no one (including themselves) realize that they are hopelessly dysfunctional time-bombs just waiting for a challenge that they can't bullshit their way through off of raw potential alone.

I am dumbfounded at my own stupidity. 

(Before you ask what I was doing BEFORE - try "looking at the exercises, nodding, and going off to do my own thing based upon them". I really didn't understand, for instance, that step-by-step instructions in How To Draw books are meant to be COPIED rather than used as occasional reference. And math textbooks? ...Don't even ask. Good GAD, I am stupid. I literally want to run back and apologize to every professor in every course in which I didn't get an "A".)

This has kind of been the Summer of Self-Help for me. I've been doing a lot of navel-gazing -Er, introspection- to get my act together, and... I think it's helped. I'm more organized, more internally motivated, and generally much further along to being the Great American... Moderately-Independent Adult than I was at the start. *fidgets* Now I actually have to put that into practice. Oh, bugger...

You didn't see how full of fanfic tropes her work was BEFORE?

I enjoy Mercedes Lackey's writing, but good grief, it could not be more obvious that if she'd been born later, she would have been a Harry/Draco BNF. And it's also fairly obvious that she went through fandom during a phase before the anal-retentive "This is Sueish! This is unrealistic! This is preachy!" era, because she's not exactly subtle. 'We have telepathic magical horses, and soulmates, and angsty angst angst, and lots of very pretty gay men (and a corresponding dearth of lesbians), and lots of Camel-Case MagicalTalents, and random awesome stuff thrown in because the author felt like it, and...'

Not freezing every time I click a button is one of the things I ask.

I'm going to just have to run this thing in Internet Explorer so I can do OTHER things in Firefox. All I can say is that I'm glad it didn't hold the days I was gone against me. That's arguably a bug, but... it's not like I'm about to complain.

Though I'm probably going to have to quit when I go elsewhere, because I don't know how much bandwidth its defective scripts are chewing up.
*facepalm* It literally froze while just scrolling up in the chat. Well, okay... maybe it's just having issues because it got an influx of new users from the podcast. However, from the bottom of my ad-hating little heart, I would willingly accept ads at this point so it didn't freeze up for >5 seconds whenever I clicked anything. D|

It used to be incredibly fast, so I'm not sure why it's... gone down the drain. Anyway, I've updated myself, so I'll go away for a bit. Maybe its errors will work themselves out once they upgrade servers or somesuch.

CHECK IT OUT. I got a really good dragon from the Abandoned pile. Grab some while you can! I've seen tons of Nebulas and Seasonals, if you're new and missing those!

So yes, I am now a sane internet user again. :D;; Hooray, hooray. So that is one major thing I accomplished yesterday!
(Had several dozen math tabs open since the spring semester because I'd committed to reading them, but never got around to it. Now I have. So it wasn't 'I got around to reading every single page on TV Tropes! :D' or anything like that.)

For the easily-distracted, here's a Flash animation I found on Tumblr.

Anyone want to see a few dragons?


Also...

HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY, EVERYBODY!!!

*copies stuff off* I don't need to have one bajillion tabs open! :D

Certain math programs don't like factoring numbers when the prime factors go over 36 digits long.
Duly noted.

--

In commentary that will actually interest fandom people - Fire Emblem: Awakening is great, but I think my grinding was really a bad idea. Next time, I'll only unlock certain... features (avoiding spoilers) for people I use enough to get up to 20/15 - not, um, certain others. :\ So third run will basically be a really cheap run, focusing on just power-units. This one can be the one I go back to for postgame stuff. D|

Meanwhile, I'm feeling intermittently-inspired to write fic - I was churning out unfortunate amounts of badfic fic of dubious quality while on caffeine, but I went off it again due to sleepiness issues and mysterious muscle aches. As my mother had the same thing with much less caffeine intake, we're writing the symptoms off as a passing infection, but we had to be sure at the time. (If that was garbled - yes, I'll go on caffeine again, but I'm not on it right now.) My apologies for not producing much content of value recently.

(Edit: Actually, I looked up the side effects of Splenda, and it turns out that's probably the reason we start dozing off a few hours after ingesting Diet Coke with Splenda. Hm. :\ Guess stevia is the only artificial sweetener that doesn't give me issues...)

At any rate - sorry about not doing much recently. ...Today has not been my day.

Right here.

On the same page, I found myself both wincing and cracking up at the description of the "Guru" bully. Having seen several of those - I'd say that the 'autism' point is more relevant than the website guesses, though only that of the high-functioning variety and admittedly of an antisocial type (in the 'sociopathic tendencies' sense, not the 'doesn't like socializing' sense).

From observation, I'd suggest that the personality in question results from heavy cultivation of a talented but emotionally troubled young person with Asperger's tendencies during childhood or young adulthood. (And, to be crude about it, the personality appears more often in males because people have a greater tendency to fetishize boy geniuses.) God-complexes go together... spectacularly with functioning difficulties. Not spectacularly well, mind you. But spectacularly.

Sorry, just rifling through a few online-fraud sites due to the topic of Thanfiction. He's rare as far as non-consensually LARPing to such an... extent - but not as far as the deceptions themselves go, unfortunately.

French is essentially a mispronounced version of Latin after a whole bunch of people got really drunk and decided to throw in "x"s, "z"s, apostrophes, accent marks, and silent letters in everywhere.

(That said, English is what happened when Latin and German got married, then had a vicious divorce and proceeded to shuffle the spawn between each other every week while telling the spawn that the other parent was filthy pretentiousness/coarseness and that only their words conveyed any emotional feeling/intelligence at all. And then the troubled adolescent language slept around with every language that would give it the time of day, and the rest is history.)

I have to update a Harry Potter fic of mine on AO3 one of these days, but to procrastinate get inspired, I ended up making a playlist themed around the (future) plot, so... Here goes?

( ...Yeah, can you tell this isn't a fluffy fic? :\ ;; )
So that I'm not just boring you guys - what songs do you associate with your stories?
 

Also, gewd gad, who's the sadist at GPXPlus who keeps inserting the 'Get 100 people to feed your Pokemon a certain berry! :D' tasks? Bleh...

I would place the most important aspects of psychopathy as a lack of remorse, an absence of strong morality, and a fascination with deceit.

Why am I omitting the lack of empathy? Simple. I believe psychopathic behavior can occur in people who claim to be perfectly empathic if they have the above three traits. I also believe that psychopathic behavior will not occur in people with low empathy who are remorseful, moral, and honest. True, it's in one's best interests to practice the "Locks keep honest men honest" attitude around them. But they don't pose dangers in the way that those with the above three traits do.

--
( The three points. )
--

As a final note, it's sufficient for "empathic" people to have the first two traits to render them capable of some of the least empathic behavior you'll stumble across, luck permitting. The fascination with deceit, however, seems to be what enables psychopaths to deal massive amounts of damage. 

*climbs off of soapbox and ends amateur analyses*
Sorry if this isn't very well-written. I'm feeling a little under the weather today and I'm hitting the caffeinated beverages. *shrug*

 Sarajayechan, what's your Tumblr, again? Sorry, couldn't remember. I'm beast-of-the-sea.
...Let's just say I'm not going to use anything but Dreamwidth/LJ as my main blogging platform soon. *bangs head on dashboard* *tries to figure out how to be Tumblr famous* *trips over theme buttons* *bewildered as to appropriate tagging etiquette* 
#incompetent #confused #fail 

( cut for image )

Yes, I died. You know why I died? BECAUSE YOUR SERVER WAS DOWN FOR MOST OF THREE DAYS STRAIGHT.

I'm just glad they redid dying to only drop you one level, because that was absolutely ridiculous.

---

Anyway, I'd like to tell DragCave users that the Abandoned Cave is stuffed to the gills with 4-day eggs. Grab them if you have spare spaces, because even rare eggs are cropping up on the list. (On the other hand, you have to fight ~100 users for them...)
As for me... er. Can you tell what my current favorite breed of dragon is? :D;;



Also, Tale of Dragons is going pretty well.