rejecting your reality and substituting my own

I get emails from GOPUSA. I have no idea why - I certainly did not sign up for it, and I can't imagine anybody I know doing it for me. Most of the time, they sit in my junk folder, ignored, but sometimes I see a subject line that makes me read it. I figure, I'm secure enough in my beliefs that it doesn't hurt me to see what the other side is saying.

Unless, of course, what the GOPUSA is saying makes me go repeatedly slam my head against the nearest wall. Like this one, reproduced in its entirety:

( Act Now: Fight Back against Barack Obama's anti-religion agenda )

If you haven't done the research, fine. But don't lie.

Ignoring the race issues (omg white people everywhere but the Fire Nation, wtf), TLA is about on par with the movie Eragon: better than Seeker: The Dark is Rising, but actually worse than Twilight. No, really. "Katara" narrating half the plot instead of MNS showing things happening and the idiotic bending behaviors actually puts it just below Eragon in quality. That said, it was not as bad as I thought it would be (not good, mind, but not as bad).

Anyway, I starting writing down my thoughts rather early in the movie, so here they are! Needless to say, spoilers for the movie.
-scrolls? in a library?
-Sozin* is less creepy [than his cartoon self]
*apparently my brain was not working, as I meant Ozai here but wrote Sozin
-S&K aren't v. good friends to Aang
-Kyoshi's statue looks male [and since they never used a pronoun for her, so only fans of the series realize that's supposed to be a woman]
-WTF no family? [I'd run away too :P]
-oh Zuko &hearts
-Zhao has eyes! [sees what kind of bending Aang is & isnt doing]
-Blue Spirit looks dumb
-ok, practice area looks neat
-Iroh &hearts &hearts
-why is Appa swimming? its the Arctic circle! [dear God Appa and Momo both, their designer(s) should be shot]
-Northern Water Tribe = pretty
-show dont tell KATARA
-bending = still lame
-that doesnt look like the Fire Nation
-plz 2B showing Katara competence
-why does Pakku have red hair? [my hand to God: his hair was mostly white, but his mustache still had some color in it, and that color was RED wtf]
-CLOTHES = pretty
-aw, worried Iroh &hearts
-white ppl everywhere!
-Iroh, kick his ass! BEFORE he stabbed the fish, you were right there!
-WTF are you telling her to kill herself
-Iroh & Zuko &hearts

Like lots of other people have already complained about, the good main characters (and a good chunk of the extras for the Northern Water Tribe) are played by white people, which yes I have complained about repeatedly because it is wrong for the A:TLA world. Yue was about the only actor who actually looked much like the character she played (and she was still too pale to completely sell me on it).

Katara's pwning by Zuko wasn't as curb-stomping as I'd been led to believe, but it was still rather pathetic compared to the cartoon; movie!Katara in general comes off as pretty pathetic compared to cartoon!Katara. Since I was going "eee Katara!" whenever I wasn't fangirling Zuko or Iroh in the cartoon, this soppy girl depressed me.

Also: It is pronounced EYE-row not Ear-oh, Aang not Ohng, and Sock-ka not Soak-ka. Ahhvatar just sounds dumb when said by people using generally American accents. I call the Eragon character 'Murtahg' because I think it sounds nicer and I don't care that CP says 'Murtag'; if I had done the movie I'd pronounce it the way he says it's pronounced unless he said he didn't care. Changing the way their names are said is stupid, arrogant, and disrespectful.

Now, the thing that really floored me, and is the other bit besides the racefail that makes me wonder just what the HELL was MNS thinking??, was the part near the end where Iroh tells Yue to return the life-force the Moon Spirit gave her. Or, rather, IROH tells a young woman to kill herself because he was too much of an idiot to do more than stand there and tell Zhao not to kill the fish.
In the cartoon, Yue comes up with this plan of action on her own. It's touching and heartbreaking, and yeah it sucks that she has to do it - but she comes up with it herself. Movie!Iroh telling her to do it is creepy and, in my opinion, badly ooc.

Also: the bending sucked.

http://cleolinda.livejournal.com/841629.html

Because I lack anything besides a school computer at the moment, a link for later consideration.

Left the other book I wanted to read at home, somehow. Very annoyed.

I have a book, Keepers of Balance!
"Ithlem, Beryn, and Kyne are shocked and devastated when their guardians and mentors in the Keepers of Balance are brutally killed. Now they find themselves alone and with three goals: return to the safety of the mountain compounds, discover who is behind the violent attacks, and stop them from killing more Keepers. But first they must escape the clutches of the True Guard lurking in Ithlem's home town - a task more deadly than it seems."

So, a week or so before Christmas Mom finally convinced me to use Lulu to self-publish Keepers. She just came back from the post office with it.

So there you have it. I am now officially published.

And Michael thinks I need to get an ebook reader. I like my dead tree books :(

Unpopularity is a communicable disease; kids too nice to pick on nerds will still ostracize them in self-defense.

And suddenly, the possibility of Lily being better than she looks in SWM/TPT has gone up.

...Not sure I like her any better, though.

Why nerds are unpopular.

As a side note, if I was unpopular in middle and high school, I was too much in my own head to notice. Wasn't bullied, and I can only think of one time (9th grade) when I was teased over my (horrendously bad) acne. Of course, I also had no idea who the popular kids were or that the gossip mill was anything more than a theoretical construct.

I have 2 custom neighborhoods on my sims game - the one I'm currently playing in, and the one I used to play in until I got annoyed at how I lost 99% of my custom content and made the new one instead (plus, things lacked drama because the major family there started with a selfsim, and I wanted to try a family that didn't have me in it). So yesterday I thought it would be nice to go and see about tweaking things around to fix the loss of the cc.

I sketched out the family tree of 'my' family, realized I was too attached to the memory of these sims to sit and watch them die, and so I'm stuck with this neighborhood I don't want to play but can't bring myself to delete. Bah.

I realized I've only supplied the info for any imaginary readers of this blog to infer that I've seen the new Star Trek movie. I did see it. I loved it. I loved the actors, I loved the ship, I loved the 'ship, I just generally all around have nothing bad to say about the movie. I talked Mom into letting me get the audiobook version of the novelization of the movie read by Zachary Qunito wheeee omg he does awesome voices and noises for it. I want to see it again repeatedly.

Having survived 5 Harry Potter movies and Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy, I'm not terribly surprised that I didn't give a flip about ST:TOS canon being messed with - especially since the only episode I'd actually seen of it before watching the movie was Trouble with Tribbles. I'm a Next Generation fangirl - Picard will always be my favorite captain, though this movie has made me ♥ the KirkSpockMcCoy trio. (Oddly enough, I don't find myself shipping K/S, despite its status as 'origin of the term slash'. S/U, all the way.) Anyway. Point is, while I am now trying to watch all of TOS, I'm not bothered by the bits of the movie that don't fit canon or common sense reality. I don't think I ever expected to have the latter one bother me, because its Star Trek, for God's sake.

( cut for spoilers )

It lets me have so many icons! And I'm so picky about what I upload, I've only got 27 with these new ones.

Topazera on LJ has some beautiful icons from the new Star Trek movie - if you've seen it, go look!

Also, the pair in my new icon from there? Totally my new OTP. I don't usually do OTPs in my fandoms, but I ♥ them muchly.

What *would* it take to build the Enterprise?


No smartass answers about needing more money than God, plzkthx.

I think I'm going to switch Meque back to its origins as Steam Punk-istan, but keep all the other changes I've made to it.

Also, Pyre Ridge is no longer in the Arctic circle. Let's give Julie issues a way to get over her dislike of the place by forcing her to visit it repeatedly!

True or False: The victim shares in the blame of the rape.

According to Choosing the Best Life: An Abstinence-Focused Curriculum, the answer is true.

*throws a rage-induced fit*

God, I hate abstinence-only education.

*goes off to seethe*

So yesterday on my way to pick Mom up from work, I got pulled over by a State Trooper in a big truck. Seriously. I've never been pulled over before, so I'm freaking out. Had no clue what was going on - I was pushing the speed limit, but keeping it less than 5 miles over (speed limit at the time was 65, I tend to wobble between that and 70, but I'd noticed the big honkin' truck with lights so I was sticking closer to 65 than 70). It didn't help that I had run into Zack from Dunbar (God he grew up tall), and he'd told me this story about being tazered by a rookie cop after being pulled over when he reached for his wallet to get his lisence.

So we get off the interstate and pull over and she goes off with my lisence and insurance (which, to my mortification, Mom discovered later expired in January). She comes back and tells me...the car's registration is expired, and had been for too long to just let me off with a warning. I get to go see a judge...but the expired stuff isn't my fault.

Also, she called me ma'am. I got called ma'am by a woman older than I am. It was weird.


On a completely unrelated note, the butlers in Sims2 suck. Who programed them to be so full of fail?

Teen allegedly bites 11 students; father blames "Twilight" movie.

When police contacted the boy's father, he said that his son didn't mean to hurt anyone and that he was biting other students because of the movie "Twilight."

13 year old boy goes around biting his classmates because of a movie? There's something wrong with him, not Twilight. Most kids learn not to bite other people before they get out of kindergarten.

And holy cow, it takes them a month to get on the ball and get him to stop biting? Mom would have pitched a screaming fit the minute I got bit, and I'd be pitching one right behind her! Hell, there was (apparently) some little boy that went after me with (kiddie) scissors in pre-k or something, and she did put a stop to it.

Just- arg. Grow some balls and stop blaming books/movies/video games/tv for your kid's screwups and/or serious issues. If your kid can't find the line between reality/fantasy, it's your job to ensure they don't hurt others. Stop trying to get other people to parent your kid.

It's pretty bad that one of the events in my story can be blamed on either the gods or bad guy, and I'm not sure which I want to do. Maybe both.

On a semi-related note, now I need to look up indigo children.

Think I'm going to drop the Meque world from the story, unless I can come up with something else for that world. If I can't, they're just extra characters cluttering up the multiverse :P Much as I want to keep them, it's not a good sign when I'm feeling the need to number my Julies. If I do cut Meque, it gives me just three: Li, Julie, and I think the new one's going to go by Anne, their middle name.

Also, I'm debating at least outlining Li's backstory. She's 3000 years old when she meets Julie. Help.

It just randomly occurred to me that there is a very interesting similarity between Harry Potter and Star Wars.

Padme and Merope both die just after giving birth, for no apparent reason (beyond plot).

I know that they are about as opposite types of women as you can get, as are their sons. But that strikes me as a very interesting thing for them to have in common. And their deaths, in a way, can be attributed to their respective husbands to a greater or lesser degree.


Don't ask why this suddenly occurred to me. My mind is a weird place.

tamry: *has hysterics at*
tamry: puppy likes to shred things
friend: uh oh
friend: what he shred?
tamry: I dont know if you know this, but I tend to work on my stories in little spiral notebooks, and type them up whenever I get the urge
tamry: and I keep things like timelines and notes on language in the front pocket, along with some school stuff
tamry: I dont know how he did it, but he ripped up the back cover and the language paper I had in front, and tore in half a timeline
friend: you remember it enough to remake it?
tamry: the language thing I've already got on an excel sheet on my computer, and the timeline's together enough that I still know what's where
friend: k good
tamry: but oh God I've got a new story started and a bunch of notes about other stuff in there what if he had gotten those instead of things I can just toss?
tamry: *resumes hysterics*
friend: gatta puppy proof the place
tamry: it was on the bed!
tamry: on top of my school binder with my map of the new story!

I'm working on cleaning my room, or at least I was. Unsurprisingly, I turn up a little spiral notebook that's only been written on the first handful of pages (I have a lot of those). What was written on those pages did surprise me, if only for a few moments.

Apparently I wrote emo poetry in my early teenage years. Yes, you may laugh.



At least two of them I remember why, though the second one kinda scares me now (holy shit was I really suicidal? I didn't think I was, but I don't remember writing these...). Hell, sometimes I still feel that way.

I'm debating sharing this discovery with anyone.

Ever get those events where you hear about something - a book, movie, piece of information, or anything else - and you pay almost no attention to it at first exposure, but then sometime later you come across it again and just go WTF? Funny story - Mom's owned Ilse Witch since 2000 at least (that's the copyright in the front cover), but I wasn't impressed by the first few pages when I looked at it. A few years later I turned up Elfstones of Shannara and haven't gotten enough of the Shannara series since.

Anyway.

Earlier today, instead of working on my paper like I should, I went to wikipedia to look up information about Obi-wan's first actor, Sir Alec Guinness. I then went back and started reading about Obi-wan himself, which led to me looking at the page for Jedi itself (I was curious as to the ranking system).

The Jedi page led me to the Jediism page.

I remember, last year, hearing about how a couple of the guys from a "Jedi church" got attacked by some guy, but I don't even remember going O.o at it beyond the attack bit.

Believe me, I'm going O.o now. I got Mom doing it too.

Ok, she's actually just saying how stupid it and Pastafarianism are. My point stands.

But, after looking around the Temple of the Jedi Order, I'm wondering what makes us so quick to reject it like that, practically a knee-jerk reaction. Is it just because of its origins in a bunch of sci-fi movies? The Temple up there doesn't give me the offhand impression of people who are Taking Star Wars Way Too Seriously, they give me the impression of people using a fictional concept to put their beliefs into words.

I've done that, to be honest. Some of the heavier influences on how I look at the world come from fiction, and only one of these sources is blatantly Christian-based (and none are actually "Christian fiction"). I don't consider myself so far out in left field that I can't see the saner areas. So why the automatic rejection of the Jedi?

If there's anyone actually reading this, I would love to hear your thoughts. I'm not here just to ramble to myself.