OKCupid just sent me three guys in a row who looked REALLY similar. (By similar, I mean "cute in a generic nerdboy way," but sadly also "If I had just met them, all other things being equal, I could probably not tell them apart at a party and would embarass myself by forgetting which one I had had what conversations with.") Their profiles were:

1. Sounds like he would be an okay friend, but nothing that makes me especially want to message him. There are likely a thousand other girls who would, though.
2. Funny, biology geek, fantasy geek, no giant wall of bands I've probably never heard of or Ayn Rand novels. (Odd lack of science fiction, though.) Maybe we'd get along terribly, but I'd like to meet this guy.
3. Profile begins with a joke about rape, then a sentence acknowledging that rape jokes are super awkward and he hopes we don't think he is, like, some kind of rapist or anything. I would not like to meet this guy.

Lesson: don't begin your profile with a rape joke. ...Also, probably don't include a rape joke at all? Although actually no, if you really like rape jokes, include them so I know that we can never be together.

(And yes, I did just check to make sure they are all actually different guys, and not one guy trying to game the system with three different profiles. THEY LOOKED THAT SIMILAR.)

Oh man oh man so I finally got caught up with the latest season of My Little Pony I finished watching "A Canterlot Royal Wedding" and EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE. There's adventure, romance, a great villain, amazing songs, it's thrilling, it's adorable, it's, it's, eeeee.

(I have basically been squeeing since they started singing this song. THAR BE SPOILERS.)

Anyone else seen it?

...Also, I am kind of shipping Rainbow Dash/Fluttershy. >_> Anyone else?

Just got hit on by dude with "Message me if... you want to be my muse" in his profile. And he linked to his tumblr full of crappy misspelled poetry about being alone forever and loving ladies who just don't understand what's best for them the way he does.

TAKE ME NOW, DUDE. MAKE ME YOURS. I TOTALLY DON'T WANT TO WRITE OR DRAW, I JUST WANT TO PASSIVELY INSPIRE YOU TO WRITE MORE TERRIBLE POEMS. God knows the world needs more writers who can't tell the difference between "heroine" and "heroin."

...Oh my god these poems are awful. CLOSING THE WINDOW NOW. AUGH.

Have you ever realized how horrible your characters' backstory really is upon inspecting some dry notes you wrote for yourself and realizing their implications? It's like Fridge Horror + Word of God. Fridge God? I DON'T KNOW.

( Minor spoilers for later Founders stuff: worldbuilding ramblings + feeling sorry for Alioth Nigellus, whose life sucks offscreen )

Mostly unrelated, but I just found this in my research: "The legendary Michael Scot used to feast his friends with dishes brought by spirits from the royal kitchens of France and Spain and other lands." I feel bad for the house-elves. Well. Worse than I did before, in any case. What a waste of arithmancy.

From copperbadge

1. Go to page 77 (or 7) of your current ms.
2. Go to line 7
3. Copy down the next 7 lines – sentences or paragraphs – and post them as they’re written.
4. Tag 7 other authors. I don't know how many people on my flist have a "current manuscript." I know a few people who are always working on something, a couple who are usually working on eight things at once, and many who aren't writing much fiction that's seven pages long because they're too busy with RL. If you want to post, post.

This is from the seventh page of the tentative 28th chapter of the Founderfic (which actually I ought to split into two chapters now, but I want to finish the scene I'm working on first). This whole plotline has been a fucking horrible shapeshifting monster to write (you know, the kind that is normally a pile of skin-shaped goop, but then it morphs into your favorite relative/bff/love interest while you've got the shotgun trained on it AS IF BULLETS COULD HARM IT, but you can't shoot whoever it looks like because TRAGICAL BACKSTORY and/or REASONS! so you shed a single crystaline tear down your grimy bloodstained cheek and then it eats you. not the sympathetic kind of horrible shapeshifting monster that gets its own single crystaline tears.) and it will be edited lots. I am so sick of it that I have even stopped bothering to do research and just stuck in placeholders when I need them. Which I never do!

Anyway, this scene was actually funny, and led up to some plot, so it'll probably make the final cut:

( Discussion of religion in the wizarding world. Also, Rowena is really immature. And water is wet. )

Oh MAN, you guys, I found the best¹ way to get revenge on my noisy downstairs neighbors: Urban Rebounding Workout System.

For only a hundred and twenty bucks, YOU TOO can buy a tiny trampoline for your tiny apartment! I SEE NO FLAWS IN THIS PLAN.

ETA: AHAHAHA and I couldn't help but poke around on the website a little more apparently this miraculous little trampoline promotes "growth of the long bones," among other things. This is listed as an anti-aging effect, but I am fairly sure if you're old enough to be seeking out anti-aging effects, you aren't getting any taller.


1. From the Kaesa English Dictionary:
best, adj., most hilariously stupid and terrible. Remember the time we accidentally awakened an ancient cephalopodic deity by reading aloud from the ingredients list on a package of non-dairy fat free half-and-half? Man, that was the best.

So I have had this playlist sitting around for a while, for hypothetical future sharing. This weekend I decided to actually share it, and have been wrestling with iTunes, SendSpace, Semagic, and (oddly), Windows Notepad, to get it to work. As is usual for my playlists, there is pointless self-centered blather; in this case it's actually more self-centered than usual because the theme is the Foundersverse I've been writing at tamarindchutney. So if you read that and like it, here's music you may also like, and plot insights. And if you don't read it and like it, well, everyone likes free music, right?

( Thirty-three songs for the Founding of Hogwarts. )

You Didn't Thank Me For Punching You in the Face. Go read it. It's about the nonsensical way parents/teachers/caretakers tell little girls who get teased and beaten up by boys that "he just does it because he liiiiikes you!"

And. Fuck that shit.

In preschool, I had a "husband." Yes, really, me. I was the first girl to go to my particular daycare/preschool, and so all of my friends were boys, including my two best friends, one of whom I referred to as my "husband," because we decided we were going to get married. (He moved to Iowa in kindergarten. I was completely devastated and remember that we tried to talk his parents out of it, and I said YOU SHOULD RUN AWAY FROM HOME AND COME LIVE IN MY BASEMENT, but alas, no. I have not seen him since. I can only assume we're not going to get married for realz. Oh well. This is probably for the best, because I can't remember if his name was Bryan or Ryan, or what color hair he had. Young love is fleeting.) There were many things I liked about my preschool husband. Among them:
1. He was taller than me! So he could reach toys on shelves that I couldn't, because I am and always have been very short.
2. It was really nice to always have someone to be partners with during partnered activities.
3. We played Ninja Turtles and Land Before Time together! And cops and robbers. And house. And animals. And sometimes we mixed all the games up so that I was a Mary Sue OC turtle (I think my mother floated the name Artemesia? she would.) married to Leonardo and our other friend was Michelangelo, and we were defending our house from Shredder, and also we were dinosaurs instead of turtles.
4. He introduced me to stuff he liked, and I introduced him to stuff I liked, and hey, there was new stuff that we both liked!
5. We made each other stuff during art time.
6. He was always there for me when other kids were mean to me.
7. He had ALL the action figures, Nerf guns, etc. that my parents never got me. It was amazing. I fucking love Nerf guns.
8. I remember thinking his house was cooler than mine?
9. He was nice to me! We had fun!

My list of Things I Liked for my other best friend, Kevin, was pretty much the same, except he was shorter and funnier than Ryan, and we weren't usually partners. Also, he wore glasses. This cemented my feelings that glasses are cool. I was so proud to get glasses in third grade, and it is because Kevin was so cool about them in preschool.

Later in preschool, I also had a "boyfriend." I would like to emphasize that unlike my "husband" and I, this designation was made by my grandparents and parents. They referred to him as my friend or my boyfriend, and I would shout back that I didn't like him and that he was mean. This is what I did like about him:
1. His haircut.
2. Sometimes, about one day in four, he did not hit me or call me names.

That is it, guys. This kid beat me up and called me ugly, and my grandparents insisted it was because he was in love with me and thought I was pretty. Having been told this, I went out of my way to be nice to him (even though I didn't like him) in the hopes that he would stop. Sometimes that worked, but sometimes he would hit me anyway and call me names some more, and I lost my temper and fought back, and we both ended up in timeout. My preschool/kindergarten teachers, thankfully, never insisted that he was my "boyfrind," although occasionally we were put in time out together when we got into a fight, and asked to talk through our differences. I do remember during one of these times I asked him what I had done wrong and he tried to explain to me why he felt the need to hit me, and it boiled down to "It's not that you did anything mean, I just like hitting you." Ladies and gentlemen, perhaps he was in love with me. Perhaps he thought I was beautiful. But you guys, he told me to my face that he enjoyed hitting me, and after I heard that, I tried to resist the adults' attempts to get me to be nice to him, because I didn't like being hit.

Since then, literally every time I was bullied by a boy, until I started getting death threats from a kid in my fifth grade math class, my parents and grandparents would reassure me that it was just because they were in love with me. (Well, okay, my dad did try to teach me to fight back a few times, but eventually he declared me too weak, and I believed him for ages.) And you know what? After a certain age, I never believed them. Because even back then I knew that was fucked up. But I worry for girls who do believe this, either because their parents are less obviously fallible than mine were, or because their bullies are capable of niceness more often than mine were. So don't do this?

Look. Brain. I know researching this fic has taken you to some scary places.

But that is no excuse for indulging in a TV Tropes binge and finding yourself an hour later on Know Your Meme looking through Dancing Spider Man videos.

A brief excerpt:

( A boy, his best friend, and an argument about consensus reality. )

So I was idly researching a silly little short story I want to write about a seven-year-old living in 1950s London (Ben Croaker, FYI? Yeah, he used to be seven years old. In the '50s. HARD TO IMAGINE AND KIND OF DISTURBING I KNOW, but hey, everyone has backstory.) and came across some awesome links fellow history geeks and writers might like, and wanted to share. Not all are totally relevant to what I was looking for, but hey!

Join Me in the 1900s isn't quite what I needed, but I will definitely come back to it because I have another WIP that needs a lot of '30s-'40s daily life research. The webmaster and her mother mother give their own firsthand explanations about daily life as they experienced it from the 1900s through the 1950s. A lot of it is particularly about what it was like to be a child at the time -- and I feel like I noticed way different things about, say, the late '80s and early '90s than the adults in my life did, so that particular perspective is really useful. There are also testimonials from site visitors who wanted to add their recollections. I think my favorite one of these comes from this page on rationing and British Restaurants in the '40s:

I went to a British Restaurant in Edgware once but all I remember was the very runny custard.

--Christine Tolton

I have memories like this. My trip to the UK when I was five or six is a blur of pork pies, grumpy parents, and thinking that because the place we were staying at was called the Robinson Crusoe Inn, it was owned by Robinson Crusoe himself. And when I went to Pittsburgh for a week a few years later, the only thing I can recollect is surprising my grandfather, trains, the Carnegie Mellon campus, and the entirely pink outfit I wore one day. (This was just before my anti-pink phase, I think.)

Exploring 20th Century London has omg everything. PICTURES. ARTICLES. ORAL HISTORIES. On tons of topics! Organized by decade! This makes me very, very happy. For example, there is a nice little article on Jewish London with related articles linked, and a similar article on the smog. (Actually, I'm kind of surprised the Great Smog of 1952 doesn't warrant its very own article, because when we learned about it in college I was like HOLY CRAP THAT'S PEA SOUP FOG?, but there's one on Wikipedia for the edification of all.)

One thing I do need to know that I haven't yet figured out, is whether the Balawat gates would have been set up similar to the way they are now. I am guessing the arrangement has changed a little since then, but it does look like some of the layouts in other galleries rooms were reasonably similar to the way I remember them being. But my memory is awful, and a lot of the pictures on Wiki are vague drawings or bad photos from the dawn of time, so if anyone has better information, do tell. (I think the current layout is GENIUS, because it made me walk totally past the Rosetta Stone, which is probably always surrouned by a swarm of people and hard to get at, and straight to OMG LAMASSU.)

I'm starting to wonder if maybe I write weird niche fic because I like to research absurd minutia, and not the other way around. (Did they even do school trips to museums in the '50s? They played on the roof to prevent rickets? They'd never let kids do that now. Wait, Ding-Dong-Ditch is called Knocky-Door Ginger? That's a totally awesome name, but... why? Oh look, here's Croaker's childhood tube stop! ...It's totally a shack. BRITISH MUSEUM WEBSITE, TELL ME WHEN YOU ACQUIRED THESE SPECIFIC EXHIBITS OR I WILL DO SOMETHING DASTARDLY oh thank you, Wikipedia, you are much more informative.) Either way, now I know even more useless trivia!