Maester? I hardly know 'er!

So I've just finished the third Song of Ice and Fire book, A Thing of Stuff. Some thoughts, of course spoilers:

-Going into this, everyone tells you not to get attached to anyone. Right now, the only narrator characters left alive are the ones I do like. Tyrion, Arya, Daenerys, Jon Snow, and Jaime are all cool, and I am holding out for Sansa's developing backbone. I did like some of the non-POV characters who have died, but besides Ygritte I don't really miss anyone. I guess getting into them is a bad sign going into the fourth book.

-Too much stuff happens off-camera. You'll be going along, and someone will be all "hey, did you hear that Balon Greyjoy died and now there's a big fight over his stuff?" No, I hadn't, actually! Not seeing Robb for like, pretty much the entire time? What is this? Also where even is Theon? I think he's dead but I'm not super sure.

-The titular song of ice and fire has been mentioned, but we still don't know what it is.

-The first one ended enough for me to take a break, but the second one just sort of paused, so I got the third one immediately. I think there's enough of a stopping point here to take another much-needed break. I really don't want to catch up to the unpublished point in the series, to be honest. I like having them in existence but unread better. From what I've read on Wikipedia there's a big jump from the first three to the fourth one, so it seems like a fine place to put the series down. Maybe check out the show.

-I've always hated the sci-fi/fantasy "kind of real person names but slightly different" thing and this series drives me up the wall. Also, whenever they mention Joffrey all I can think about is Geoffrey from Strangers With Candy.

-See also crap like "southron" and "ser."

-Also can we stop calling them "teats?" Please?

-When I was a kid we used to go to the La Brea Tar Pits a lot, and they have that room full of dire wolf skulls. It was pretty awesome. Those tar pits are amazing and if you're near LA you should go, cause it's probably better than anything you were going to do in LA anyway.

-Daenerys looks like the Lady Amalthea.

-I always read Jaime like the Spanish name, and I really hope Lysa isn't supposed to be pronounced like Lisa.

Shooting range

So I had an idea for a hilarious business today, as I am wont to do. We were talking about shooting ranges, and I thought it would be funny to open a derringer-themed shooting range. I've never been to a range period, so I don't know how they work. I have the feeling that mine would be the mini-golf to its regular, full-sized golf. The theme goes all the way. It's all Victorian looking and you have to rent costumes and derringers (unless you brought your own) at the door. There are different shooting galleries, like maybe with sinister men tying girls to railroad tracks or ladies on fainting couches (I want a fainting couch for the new house SO BAD.) The coup de grace is the Lincoln room, where you get to walk up to a cardboard Lincoln in a replica Ford's Theater and assassinate him as a cardboard cutout of Mary Todd Lincoln looks on in horror. There's a souvenir photo set up and every thing. (TOO SOON?)

Then with the Lincoln thing came a yet greater idea: a presidential assassination themed shooting range. There's the Lincoln room, the JFK room, the William McKinley room that no one cares about, and the Reagan room. As soon as you fire at the cutout of Reagan, a cardboard Secret Service dude jumps in front of him.

Superlemons: Gettin' Way Too Personal

Getting to know people is so strange. They learn about the present you, but the way people drift in and out of your life, they never really know the whole you.

When I was in the eighth grade, I just sort of...stopped being able to deal with people. I didn't want to do school work any more, I didn't want to see anyone, I didn't want to leave the house. My parents let me do the homeschool thing for the rest of the year. No psychology was involved. I decided that if any of my friends really cared about me, they'd call me. For the most part, they didn't. (Although two of them did come by my house once. I served them pumpkin pie which I didn't realize had gone off. (Sorry!) I've lost contact with one and am "facebook friends" with another, but I'd like to say thank you for your visit, it meant a lot more than you know.)

So the short version is I decided to remove all my childhood friends from my life, and I started over fresh in high school. If they remember me at all, it's as an awkward weird kid with a dry wit and strange outbursts. I'm sorry to them, I've been suffering from anxiety problems for quite some time now. It's too bad that they won't get to know the me who is trying to get better.

The people who know me now mostly know the me who had figured out that something was wrong and tried to act normal. How successful the façade was I may never know.

And those of you who read this are probably my best friends trying to humor me, who probably know that I have the social anxieties. And I thank you for reading. I really am feeling much better these days.

So yeah

I haven't posted in a while WHAT ELSE IS NEW? It seems as though the blog is transitioning from a nerd culture report to a crazy person's photocopied newsletter. I'm not sure I mind. I'm not quite well-versed enough in the unknown and bizarre to run a gig like the late, great Encyclopedia Obscura, and I don't really feel like I'm bringing much to the table comics- and gaming-wise. My instinct is to once again delete all that has come before, except that this time I feel that the writing is a couple tiers above terrible, and the post on Spy Groove brings in something like 90% of the traffic. Unfortunately, obscure MTV cartoons provide only so much mileage, and anyway I've only seen one episode of The Head. Does anyone remember the old Superlemons? The one that actually used the Meta-Cookbook review system? I thought not.

So yeah, I've had a lot going on recently. Coming up, probably a series of posts about going sane and having to rethink all assumptions.

A frequent element in my dreams is smoking. I have an overwhelming desire for cigarettes but am unable to get any for some reason. I get so desperate as to consider smoking half-finished ones I find in ashtrays. When I wake up, I think, hey, I can just go out and go buy some. Wait. Eww, I don't want to do that. My friend Kyle is getting all Freudian about it. Sidebar: when I was with Ben he was always a huge jerk to me in dreams and would try to get me to smoke, but I didn't want to.

Thousand Cranes

I've been through some sad times lately. As flippant as I am about it to others, I really don't think I'm dealing with it very well. Usually, people say that you need to cheer up, do things that make you feel better. That didn't feel right to me. I don't want to slather over my feelings with a layer of cheap happiness. I wanted to do something to really express my sadness.

I settled on making a thousand paper cranes. I don't suffer any illusions that it will grant my wish. It's really more about the process. I make ten cranes every day, no matter what else is going on. I'm about 450 cranes in at this point. I think what it's come to mean to me is that by working every day at a larger goal I can really accomplish something. It's a small change, achieved not through huge effort but through persistence and patience.

Small changes, followed through with, are what's going to make my wish come true.

Here's the first hundred, pictured with the knitted corkscrew of doubt and the blackwork pomegranate of shattered dreams (and pants).

Dream Diary III

The names of people I know in real life have been changed to save myself the embarrassment of it getting out that I dream hooked up with them. They will have different soap opera names each time to add a level of obfuscation. So Chad from last time is not necessarily Chad from this time.

Dimitri and I were married and we lived in a huge mansion in Hollywood. We had a lot of children, who all had soft hair and pronounced smile lines like their father. Dimitri and I were both high-profile lawyers.

We were having a large party at our house. There were some men there demonstrating some fancy novelty cigars. During the demonstration I was seated next to an African man. When it was over, he got out his wallet, as if to pay for the show. I tried to explain that it was a free demonstration, and I saw a pink flyer with a strange symbol sticking out of his wallet.

Suddenly, the mansion was under attach by people waving banners with the same symbol on them. These sorts of attacks were a frequent occurrence at our house. We were often the victims of terrorist attacks due to our work.

Afterwards, I went to check in on the children. They were unharmed but very upset about the attack. They asked me why we didn't stop so that the attacks would end, and I told them that the people just needed to know that Star Wars was a good movie, and Dimitri and I were the only ones preaching that particular gospel. I showed them a clip of it, and they agreed that it was good, but they weren't sure that it was worth risking everything for.

Dream Diary II

The names of people I know in real life have been changed to save myself the embarrassment of it getting out that I dream hooked up with them. They will have different soap opera names each time to add a level of obfuscation. So Chad from last time is not necessarily Chad from this time.

I was the main character in some kind of survival horror game, a man trying to save his daughter. The game was developed by an American game developer in English, but it was loosely based on an anime. Very loosely. It was poorly designed and buggy. I kept getting stuck in the geometry and none of the weapons really seemed to do anything. You had to rescue other characters in order to proceed but it was very difficult since their AI and pathing was so bad. In order to get new abilities, you had to beat Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz in a jump rope challenge. At some point, a hint appeared in enormous stone letters on a building in the distance, but they crumbled to dust before I could read them. I waited patiently for the animation to loop so I could read it, but I kept getting distracted and missing it.

When I wasn't the character from the game, I was also me beta testing the game. During this process, I was wandering through a building crowded with people who belonged to two opposing factions. The occasional fight would break out, but mostly they stayed in separate rooms.

During the dream, I "woke up" and decided to log this in my dream journal. I was using a highlighter that had a bit of black ink on one side of the tip. I was writing it and trying to conceal what I was doing from a man who was my lover. I was afraid to tell him about my dream journal, but when the truth came out he didn't really care. I woke up and had to write it all over again.