I would just like to say how proud I am that my story about my internet boyfriend netted me the second-highest amount of upvotes in my short and scattered Videogum career. I once got more upvotes for a joke about Jay Leno wearing a denim thong, so next time I'll try to work these two things together.
He pretended to die, and we had internet from the mid-90s on because my parents both worked in IT for a local university. Still, I had to wait something like 5 years or so for facebook to become a thing and get somewhat widespread before I had definitive proof the guy was alive, though I'd been pretty sure for the whole time (no obituaries, etc, other people who knew us both from the online community we met in never really believed it was real).
What's even better is, at the time that Internet Boyfriend was "dying," he "introduced" me to his "best friend," who happened to have the exact same grammar pattern and sense of humor he did, and that persona kept messaging me online for a few years after person #1 had supposedly died. Why, I still have no idea.
I wonder if it's going to turn into this: http://jezebel.com/kimi-kobayashi/
Also, someone on that Deadspin article left a comment wondering if Te'o's relationship with this fake lady/real dude wasn't in fact a really elaborate and poorly-conceived way of cloaking that the two dudes were romantically involved, which has me all "Michael Jackson eating popcorn dot gif"-ing it up over here.
I'm sick for the millionth day in a row and hibernating deep within my bedstuffs, but that's incredibly boring, so instead I'd like to ask if you guys have read the Deadspin article on Manti Te'o yet and want to talk about it, because a) it's amazing and b) when I was a young young person, I had an internet boyfriend that "died of cancer," which makes this story even MORE amazing for me personally, because I think that was already a gauche and transparent move 13 or so years ago. (To be clear, my internet boyfriend was a real person who did not really die of cancer, not a totally fake thing I invented in high school).
Same here. Sometimes, she likes to use her front paws as a death grip for my wrist while using her back claws to kick at me wildly, on top of the regular biting. She never seems to understand why I'm not having as much fun in this scenario as she is.
Kavalier and Clay is great! But I think Yiddish Policemen's Union is better? I really like the hard-boiled detective thing mixed in with (really) alternate history, and I think the structure/flow of it is tighter -- the Antarctica section + big time jump in Kavalier and Clay didn't work for me, even though the rest of it is great no duh.
I just finished Narcopolis last week-ish and I really, truly loved it. It's a novel about the life of a hijra woman in Bombay in the 70s-90s (hijra are India's 3rd sex, something I didn't know about before I read this book), and it follows her as Bombay experiences the end of opium and the entrance of heroin as the drug of choice for its addicts. It's heavy! But just really gripping and human but also sort of dreamy? I am bad at describing things!
My Christmas was the best one of my adult life perhaps? Everyone gave each other thoughtful gifts, one of my sisters brought her two adorable cats home with her, the other sister introduced me to the marvel that is her Slanket. And I only had one fight with my mom, in which I yelled at her loudly because she and my stepdad announced a plan to purchase guns in case the government outlaws having guns sometime soon. They are both intense new-agers (my stepdad works as a psychic, and I wish that was a lie but it is not), and my mom raised us vegetarian, so this whole "we need guns now" thing is incredibly illogical besides just being disturbing and stupid. But they aren't really people known for following through with the things they say they'll do, so maybe the gun thing won't happen, and everything else really was quite nice. I got a Kindle and it is the best thing I own, maybe.
YES YES YES YES YES. Oh my god, I love this game, and no one I know has played it through, which means no one else can sit down with me to cry about Boone. BOONE!
I remember the bounty hunter guys, although not as well as the Mos Eisley Cantina guys. I'd love to go back and compare to see which characters had the longest stories as compared to the shortest amount of actual on-screen time. I'm sure some other nerd has done it already, but that isn't nearly as satisfying as doing it myself would be.
In junior high, I read all of these books. All of them (that were published in 1996, anyway?), multiple times, tried to write my own at one point and badgered my other nerd-girl friends to help me with it. I can't remember to pay bills on time, I almost never use my cell phone because I don't remember to charge it, but I remember nearly every single plot line of those novels.
In that book, I really liked the story about the hammerhead guy from the pacifist nature-loving planet and the one about the guy with the horns who's an intergalactic criminal obsessed with music. And now I'm going to go shame-drown myself in a sea of alcohol.
My day so far has been mostly pretty good, even though earlier I nearly went crazy trying to find a specific shirt I wanted to wear to work; the shirt was in the shirt drawer, I almost didn't even bother to look there, and I am practically 30 years old.
But! Besides that, I had a kale-feta-sundried tomato pastry thing for lunch from my local hipster cafe, work has been great because my office mates are both in Korea for the whole month, and tonight I'm seeing two old friends and also seeing Labyrinth Ear, who are the people behind this awesome song/creepy music video that's basically just a creepy old Betty Boop cartoon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBwrdHOu6vQ
Anything Gary Oldman, but specifically Dracula, because it's so goddamn pretty and oh my god you guys I am an adult woman who is currently obsessed with a vampire movie. But think of how much fun we could have mocking Keanu Reeves together!
He totally is just fleeing the law by joining a traveling circus populated with strange characters who will teach him the meaning of his strange supernatural powers, right? RIght?
She's going to be Ygritte in this season of Game of Thrones, so you don't have to miss her for much longer. (You meant Gwen, right? If you didn't mean Gwen, this information is of absolutely no use to you and I should just end this comment quickly and never look back.)
Also, if any of you guys want to make friends with a 19-year-old AI programmer from Olympia, WA who also programs all the advertising stuff at Earwolf, I think the position is open.
Haha, yes, he did tell me about it! I kind of hear about everything that happens over there, since my roommate is a fresh transplant to LA and doesn't yet have other people to talk to. I think my boyfriend and I and the owner of "Karma Tobacco and Gifts" are the only non-work/non-comedian people my roommate interacts with right now.
By the by, I heard somewhere (could've been anywhere) that that store is just straight up selling pot brownies, which are all lined up at the register for impulse pot-brownie-buying. Which, oh, this city.
This is true -- I pick very weird things to be cheap about. If I was being fiscally responsible, I would live inside an elaborate series of milk crates and dress in wet paper towels, though, so I might as well see more comedy/find and personally heckle Moshe Kasher for that time he didn't respond to my OK Cupid message.
If I had known studying programming would let me become friends with all the best comedians, I would have spent a lot less time writing papers about The Wasteland.
My new roommate works at Earwolf and I have a hard time not begging him to take me to work with him every day. If I didn't have my own job, I would go whether he wanted me to or not. He had an actual conversation with Tom Lennon yesterrday, in which they made fun of the Sklar Bros! Matt Besser considers him his personal lackey! Goddamn your luck, new roommate...
There are actual Segway tours in Beverly Hills (maybe you know this?), who I used to see grouped up wearing their little helmets in a tiny park on Sunset. I think I hated those helmets the most.
I LIVE BY THAT GUITAR CENTER. Well, a few blocks away from that Guitar Center, and also Meltdown, where I would go to all the comedy shows if they didn't make me pay for them, and probably should go to anyway. If I do, Kumail Nanjiani might talk to me one day! That would be the best.
Awesomely, the place those monkeys are is literally "Hell Valley Wild Monkey Park." Which is more fun-sounding of a destination than "Jigokudani Yaen-Koen," right?
Ahh, but I think there's a big difference between ever having taken a sick day for your period and doing it monthly -- I mean, most people's accrual rate for sick time is one day per month, so that's a whole lotta periodin' happening in the office generally.
I also think, too, that it's tricky if we allow the standard for appropriate/productive workplace behavior to be a sort of dude standard; that men don't have periods and thus don't take sick days for them, so women shouldn't either, even though they do. Obviously it would take extra work to get your boss to see that his position isn't the right one just because it's been the dominant one for so long, but maybe you can lock him in the conference room and have "9 to 5" looping on the projector screen.
(That solution to workplace sexism is almost *too* perfect, good job amywinsagain!)
Uhh, what the fuck, your boss? Why was that something he felt was acceptable to ask his female employees to begin with? If you feel like shit and take one of your sick days so you don't have to feel like shit at work, I think that's something we can all agree is okay, no matter what kind of female trouble our uterii might or might not be up to.
I think you're right but also disagree, if that's allowed. In terms of her work, a ton of it is very introspective/inverted/navel-gazing, but what sets her apart from Allen for me is that her work points out the very real horror that everyday life can present. Her writing about living in LA during the era leading up to the Tate murders, for instance, for me perfectly replicated the feeling that life is senseless, brutal, and overwhelming; a feeling that perhaps I can't describe in words well but that I've experienced many times over during my life as a person with chronic depression. Of course, that makes my feelings about her writing even more subjective than they already are. For me, though, Allen's work (up until 1979, let's say) is about a neurosis that no one is meant to take seriously, while Didion's personal essays approach the void that I've often thought was going to swallow me whole.
Ronan Farrow is the Übermensch, I swear -- read his Wikipedia article if you want to feel overwhelmingly mediocre for the rest of the day. But, his work humanitarian work (along with his mother and on his own) is amazing.
Can I tell you all that I saw someone at a party last weekend definitely, totally, unironically wearing a replica "Drive" jacket at a party? In Los Angeles, which somehow makes it even sillier? He claimed to have left his driving gloves in the car, and confided that the jacket had been his Christmas present to himself. I am still a little bit dumbfounded.
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