What happens when I fail?

What then?

Kittens go here.

Two-tone, my beloved desktop, is getting steadily less reliable with every passing week. We are now, he and I, playing chicken with my deadline. Will he pack up before or after? WHO CAN SAY?!

I feel like death.

Post funny things here. I don't care what kind.

This entry brought to you by darkebon, who gave me:

( Monkeys )

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( Cohorts )

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( Magic )

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( Stripes )

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( Heroes )

Please give me them. Words. Things to talk about. I can't promise they'll be done immediately. But I need to write. Always need to write.

About to set off for Bradford. If I don't post again by midnight, avenge my death.

ETA: Back from Bradford. Cuts and bruises, mostly defensive wounds, nothing broken.

Last.fm educates.

That is all.

(See below).

So! I just had my first electric shock from the mains. It feels like a hardware geek rite of passage. Simultaneously, it feels like a numb ache down the length of my right arm and along the right side of my head and face. In truth, as rites of passage go, it probably wasn't as dangerous as many, but it was a hell of a lot more dangerous than, say, your average Reformed bar mitzvah.

That was maybe half an hour ago. My arm still hurts to use.

According to my dad, present at the time of screaming, there is no delayed damage from this: you just lose the hit-points and then you're fine. Well, that or you die. Guess I made my Fort save.

Hay guise:

I just impulse-bought a Gb of DDR2 for £13.17 (including p&p). I was going to ask around about how much RAM was, but frankly, my motherboard can only cope with 2Gb, and I have a Gb-card filling one slot already, so for £13, why not?

Just making sure: I checked first with the local parts shop, who told me it'd be £25 for a Gb of DDR2. Tech-types, which is more likely: have I missed a bullet, or is this new RAM going to catch fire when I plug it in?

(Eventual goal: Empire: Total War)

Some people are being bastards. There is a link, here, to stop them being bastards.

Detail:

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( Argument Beneath Cut )

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It is illegal, on the grounds of unwarranted discrimination, to refuse to treat gender dysphoria. The situation that this PCT's heads have set up flat-out denies treatment to people with gender dysphoria; they are only referred for treatment when treatment is unsuitable. As such, this petition, to cast it in its most innocent light, is an attempt to redress a broken legal situation.

In the cold, grey light of a Southern dawn, however, this is a situation which some people, fully deserving of treatment both in the eyes of the law and in the eyes of the rest of the country's healthcare authorities, have been fighting against for some years. In other words, some people are being bastards, and with nothing more than your name and email address on a petition, you can help to stop them.

Stop people being bastards. Follow this link for more information and this link to sign.

(If it's the xp you're after, I should point out that this does count towards your entry application into the Perfectly Ordinary Superhero prestige class).

I just saw this comic. Warning: surprisingly emotional, if very short, mention of domestic abuse.

Of course, it doesn't mean anything. Of course not. It's just something he saw on telly in the daytime. Must've been Doctors. Maybe Diagnosis Murder. His father's never done anything like that to him. I mean, you couldn't blame him, all the trouble he is, like the time he just wouldn't let go of his little sister's hair, but no, he's a saint. He'd never do anything like that.

God, the last panel of that brought the tears out.

So I was trawling the intarwubs in my usual artfag style, and I found an interview with the actress Rhianna Shakur which... well...

See for yourself.

Warning for content: it talks about suicide, so don't read it if you think you might be upset by that. Beneath the cut, my own thoughts on the piece.

(Thanks to oxfordgirl and cassies_file both for referring me to the piece).

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( Truth and Inspiration... )

So the other day I bought a headset mic. I didn't want the headset, just the mic, but it was the cheapest thing in Tesco's and I really wanted the damn mic. For some time now, I've tolerated shit speakers. They do speech just fine - in fact, they do speech clearer than my last speakers - but they have NO bass whatsoever. These new headphones, these £8.99 piecesashit from Tesco, feel like they have a bloody WOOFER attached by comparison (and, if I'm any judge, they're not bad on the objective scale either).

I've never heard The Beginning is the End is the Beginning sound so fucking beautiful before, because before now, I've only heard it on laptop-quality speakers.

Purr.

Edit: And the live copy of Wish You Were Here I picked up a while back.

Today, I feel, is an Active Day. Today, I will achieve Things. Today, inertia is my friend, for I am already speeding along.

If you thought it couldn't get more outlandish, you were wrong. Inspired by conversation with athenegenia and given form by this entry by bouteillebleu, it also involves themes relating to a previous character of newvani's in some way, for which I should say ta for starting me thinking.

If you want to read the full article, you'll need a subscription to the Seven Scrolls Journal of Medicine online archive. A lot of students should be able to get it through their Uni library websites; find someone in-channel and get them to download the .pdf if you can't access it. The Abstract (by which I mean, the piece) is available here.

(In real terms, this was an experiment in how convincing a format I could produce in a couple of hours. The majority of time was spent on the text; the interesting bit, I hope, is actually making it look (convincingly) like the front page of a journal article. Have I succeeded?)

What you see is what you get. This one's an idea that's been rattling, semi-formed, around my head for much of the time I've been on this week-long recovery operation on my parents' computer - an operation which, now, seems to be finally coming to a close. As I've been unable to write more than the barest of sketches so far, and have had no computer to improvise the whole thing in one go (which is what I've spent the last two hours doing in the here and now, running Firefox from a live Ubuntu install just to get the idea out of my head), it's come out extremely streamofconsciousness. This was intentional, but while it was intentional, I fear it may nevertheless have come out a little off-target. This is a stylistic experiment using a combination of two of the best pre-prepared worlds I had available as reference points: as such, commentary and criticism are very much appreciated. The questions: do I have adolescent self-hatred correct, have I done shock convincingly, and the unsophisticated moral outrage of the rebellious teenager?

Finally, to ask people who have ever written a diary for ideas: how do you convey to yourself in your diary-writing how time has passed between one line and the next? If you come back to the same entry, but you feel differently about something, how do you portray this to yourself in a way you'll understand when you read it in the future? It can just look a bit odd, like you're in the midst of violent mood swings. You'll know what I mean when you read what's under the cut.

(Of course, when I say "experiment", I lie a little: the style is, in part, based on my own free-associative late-night rantings at a similar age, and if I fear anything it's that this has come out a parody of that, with too wide a vocabulary and too narrow a focus. Although I never did what he's doing for stress relief).

It is titled "A Question Of Identity", and while, perhaps, presumptuous, certainly no more so than much similar output. The writer is in his mid-teens - if you couldn't tell - very much a citizen of the modern world.

Finally, I probably should put a "potentially triggering" warning on this, as it contains mention of self-harm, and a great deal of self-loathing.

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( Some time later... )

So I'm writing this from my brother-in-law's iPod Touch. Only it turns out that there really does seem to be no way in XP to perform the system-restore operation without using the System Restore GUI at %systemroot%\system32\restore\rstrui.exe - which is currently out of action along with IE, Firefox, Chrome and most of the other programs on this machine, a result of what looks like a problem rendering them. Or something.Please, if you know a way to perform that operation without using that program, text or call me. I'm not going to put my phone number on a public post but plenty of people at #maelfroth know it. Other bright ideas also accepted. If you can't reach me tomorrow it might be because I'm being dragged to the panto by my nieces; please post here so I know to get in touch with you back.

I have been saying this for years. This idea, universally promoted by an endless rolling sequence of romantic comedies by the same gutless, desperately unimaginative studios, pervades the minds of the young and impressionable with the same story, repeated over and over and over so predictably I've begun to suspect it's a scientific experiment. Change one variable at a time - He's black, she's white; She's black, he's white; He's rich, she's poor; She's rich, he's poor; He's gay, he's gay; She's gay, she's gay; He's an asshole - but keep the rest of the story so similar to all the others that there's really very little point rewriting the script.

The rules which these films must adhere to are classic fairytale stuff, but somewhere along the way the word's meaning changed. It used to mean something unrealistic and unattainable, and this was understood. It was couched in unrealistic terms, to make the truth less biting when it came: you're not a princess, you're a commoner, and no knight knows your name, let alone admires your pockmarked beauty. But something changed. Somewhere along the line the promise of what was unreal became indistinguishable from the promise of the real. Because these unrealistic stories started being told about real people, people who worked day jobs and lived in houses and apartments like the ones their audience lived in. And so it couldn't be a fairytale. If it were a fairytale, surely this would be a tragedy, a catastrophe of earth-shattering proportions; surely this would be the end of True Love!

Because it's been told so often and so formulaically now that the rom-com formula is the only thing a certain proportion of idiots spread across (at least) the last two generations are capable of understanding:

You Will Meet Someone You Hate (But Secretly Fancy)
You Will Spend Time Together And Get To Know Them
You Will Come To Understand That Their Problems Can Be Fixed
You Are The One They Have Been Waiting For To Fix Their Problems
You Must Fix Their Problems
You Commit Eternity To Solving Their Problems
End

When you meet someone you hate, there's usually a good reason. I've had an awe-inspiring display of the power of self-delusion recently, as a close friend clings to the promise of Stage Three, having been made to believe in Stages Four and Five. But the end of the formula comes far too soon, like all happy endings: the end of the formula comes with the promise, not the work. Because the work cannot fill screen-time - at least until Channel 4 decide its latest jaunt into public schadenfreude will include televised marriage counselling. It's boring, it's repetitive, it's often over nonsencially small things. You know why people in romantic comedies have affairs? Because arguing over the fact that he always puts the football on even when she'd like EastEnders on is boring and trivial. You know why these films end at marriage? Because despite the horrific statistics, we're still led (by the nose) to believe that marriage should solve all the problems.

The image of love portrayed in these films is of trumpets blaring, the people in question just knowing that they have found The One Who Was Destined To Be Theirs, and no further thought being given to the grotesque incompatibilities of personality which appeared as the initial obstacle, and which, in real life, do not go away permanently because you're happy on your wedding day.

I've always phrased the existence of the Hollywood Lie as "There is no One", but this article has made me understand how much more dangerous it is than just that. Anything that prevents people in relationships communicating properly is a divorce sentence. And given how the story ends at the wedding in these films, we don't get to see the aftermath, when she can't fix his problems, but alcohol can; when he can't learn to love her foibles, but Mark from work can.

I'm not saying there's no hope, and I'm not saying there's no chance. I'm saying: use your brains. Of course there's such a thing as True Love, but it's neither effortless nor predestined. If nothing else, the sheer accidents of history that are our friendship and peer groups should point that out. What I'm saying is that they should never have become a model for what to expect out of a relationship. They're a vile, oversimplified parody, and taking advice from them is like asking Punch and Judy for child-rearing advice.

Just remember, as you watch Ben Stiller walk up the aisle again, this number: 40%. Because for every five rom-coms you leave feeling elated, two of them missed off an epilogue: the divorce.