Justwritecat

Now, the weird thing I that I can’t find the origin of this thing.  Naturally, google is polluted from all the people passing this thing back and forth, making it really difficult.  I tried tracking the linking back, but got bored at the 7th or 8th link.  My suspicion is just that it’s a benign chain-letter type thing – and it does have a positive effect I think – making you aware of blogs you might not otherwise be aware of, spreading blog-love and all that.

The award part is that someone chooses you to receive it.  The meme part is that it doesn’t appear to be an actual award, and you are supposed to say 7 things about yourself.  The chain letter part is that you are supposed to pass it on by tagging fifteen (!) other blogs.  That’s the part that makes me wary.  15 is silly overboard.  I probably barely read 15 blogs, in total.  And they are supposed to just be ones that you have recently discovered, or something.  I guess people have waaaay more time than me.

Alright, so… things about myself.  Since I’m not going to link to 15 people, I’ll just do some extra facts.

1. I have IBS.  Awesome, I know.
2. My favorite music act/group/whatnot was Starflyer 59 for most of my musical life, but these days I don’t have one.  Not as much time to get into music, and not really liking the stuff SF59 is putting out these days.
3. I’m fucking clumsy.  Especially when it comes to my poor little toes… it’s a miracle there’s any nail left on them.  Sometimes there isn’t.
4. Driving puts me to sleep.  It’s incredibly annoying.  Usually I chew gum to stay awake, but for a long drive I don’t have much choice but to dip into the energy drinks.
5. I’m more than a little OCD, mostly the D.  Wait, no, I mean the C.  I frequently have to go back and make sure the door is locked, even when I just locked it seconds ago.  Which causes my poor wife no end of annoyance, I’m sure.  To get around it, I try and “lock” the sound of the door clicking locked in the front of my memory until I get out of range.
6. I have a BA & MA in Linguistics, but I do IT work in the construction industry.  Go figure.
7. I’ve seen Top Gun more than 30 times.  Ish.  When I was in junior high-ish – my aunt used to live with us, and she was in love with Tom Cruise.  That and we didn’t own very many movies.  I lost count in the 30s.  Amazingly, I do not know all the dialogue by heart.  I can probably sing the “baby baby I’d get down on my knees for you….” part.  Poorly.
8. As implied above, I’m a horrible singer and dancer.  You would be hard pressed to fake appreciation convincingly.
9. I opened every single can of coke (and by “coke” I mean “soda” or “pop”.  Bonus factoid!) that I drank between 7th grade and my 30th birthday with my teeth.
10. I’m for the death penalty, which tends to upset/confuse people that I would otherwise line up with politically.
11. I spent the middle 10 years or so of my life as a pretty serious Christian.
12. I have had a doctor (and the young doctor-in-training with him) laugh at me when I described a issue to them.   If you want to know what the issue was, you’re gonna have to ask me in person/email.
    O.O
    Yes, I immediately switched to another doctor.
13. I don’t think I’ve read any of the Lord of the Rings books.
14. DS9 was my favorite Star Trek, although I loved the finale to TNG.
15. Uncanny X-Men 234 was the first comic I ever bought.

And now for the passing of the torch portion of the post.  Since it looks like the practice is not to award it to folks who’ve already gotten it, I can’t like to Jen or Bethany.   Most of the bloggers that I read are “names” in that they are published writers or agents or something, and I’m assuming the point of this thing is not to get people reading blogs they are already reading, so I’ll shoot for the “common man” type stuff.

1. Fearless Gamer : A great League of Legends oriented blog.
2. A Girl and Her Books: “M” is aspiring writer (like myself), although she posts about non-writing things as well.
3. I’m From Driftwood: Coming out stories from around the world.
4. Clients From Hell: “A collection of anonymously contributed client horror stories from designers.”  Funny stuff.
5. I AM FUEL, YOU ARE FRIENDS: I think this may be a bigger name type blog, but I just recently found it.  Music focused, and lots of new music info.
6. The Portland Housing Blog: Updates on the local housing market.  What can I say – the older I get the more I follow the economy.
7. Color Me Katie: She does some cool things with color/artsy stuff.

Note that if you’re actually curious as to what I read regularly… check the links on the right.  Those are like awards of awesomeness that I give out every day.

How to Destroy the Government in 3 Easy Steps : The conservative strategy, or so I’m told.

Was Lincoln racist?  An examination of his changing political & social views via the Root.

Fact and Fiction on Gay Marriage Polling.  This comes up often in enough in debates with anti-gay marriage folks that it’s worth having the link around.  YES, support for gay marriage is trending up across the years.

The Importance of Stupidity in Scientific Research.  Morale booster! ?

Video of Bonnie Bassler on bacterial communication.  Evidently this is some kind of crazy breakthrough.  It certainly sounds fascinating.  No, I haven’t watched it yet *blush*.

I want to see this documentary on the Funk Brothers: Standing in the Shadows of Motown.  Who doesn’t like the Motown sound? It’s so hard not to smile/dance/sing along to those tracks.

A crazy mod for Civ 4 that I’ll check out…someday.

NPR interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates.  About his book I think, it’s been a while but I did actually listen to this one.

Grow Tower, and other awesome flash puzzle games.  I think I linked to this before, but it was still in my list, so here it is.  Check them out, very cool.

Editorial from an FBI interrogator.  Relevant to the current media storm.  Evidently the FBI wouldn’t participate in the torturing, so the were cut out of the interrogations.  Money quote:

There was no actionable intelligence gained from using enhanced interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah that wasn’t, or couldn’t have been, gained from regular tactics. In addition, I saw that using these alternative methods on other terrorists backfired on more than a few occasions — all of which are still classified. The short sightedness behind the use of these techniques ignored the unreliability of the methods, the nature of the threat, the mentality and modus operandi of the terrorists, and due process.

Alyssa Peterson - the soldier who killed herself because she couldn’t/wouldn’t be a torturer.

Are running shoes pointless?  Looks that way.  May even be bad for you.

At least one right-winger comes out against torture. Not counting that Shep guy’s F-bomb on Fox recently.  That does count though.

A visual guide to where your Federal Tax dollars go.  Very cool.  Information can be fun!

Are there any hipsters in DC?  MAYBE.  If not, Portland has plenty.  Take them, please.

A nice bio article on Andrew Sullivan.  Not many gay catholic conservative ex-Bush supporters weird the kind of net-currency that he does.  In general I’ve always found him an interesting guy – even when I disagreed with him on most issues, so it was fun to find out a bit of his background.

Brandon Sanderson on his writing process and on “Why We Publish Hardbacks“.  Pretty much anything he writes is interesting, but lately I’ve been more interested in the processes and results of writing (duh), so these were extra useful/interesting.

Zork is back!! I guess it’s a flash game or something.  Haven’t had time to check it out yet.  Goddam grues.

Republicans get mad when the surveillance programs they thought were a good idea under Bush are turned against them.  Hey, I’m against all this surveillance too – but you weren’t crying about it when they were spying on lefties were you?  Karma’s a bitch.

Matt Taibbi on the “peasant mentality” and these seemingly infantile “teabagging” protests.  Yeah, I know, they picked a pretty stupid name didn’t they?  Or are they that ignorant of the “common usage” meaning for that phrase in todays < 35 crowd.

Sarah Palin never stops making herself look stupid.  Ever.

Interesting watercooler fodder for those of you still wondering what the hell happened on September 11th.

And now, of course I want more.

I love finding new (old) online comics, because then I have years of story to process.  Unfortunately, at 2-3 strips per week, even 5+ years of comics goes pretty fast.

Oh, where are my manners, link:

Megatokyo.

It’s way anime, way geeky and way game geeky.  Like someone put on a cosplay suit and raped penny arcade.  Then added in a multi-layer uber bizarre reality warping plot & and tons of boy/girl relationship drama.  You know, standard anime fare.

I really didn’t think I would like it, and put off checking it out for a long time…a few years at least.  Which was good, because it gave me more to read at once ;_).  Buuuuut now I’m caught up and that is kind of a bummer.  Now I have to forget about it for a few more years so I have another decent slice to process.

Here’s an amusing strip which will probably make very little sense of out context.  This series has context in effing spades.  Some of it still makes no sense to me, but I kind of like that. The writer/artist appears to have devoured and processed literal tons of anime to have arrived at this place.  Which wouldn’t be as surprising if he was Japanese, but I’m pretty sure he’s American.  Thankfully I don’t feel like googling him.

This colored illustration is pretty groovy too.  Power lines, go figure.  In general though, I skipped though the non plot stuff- and there is apparently a bunch..a bunch of weird stick figure stuff from the merch guy or something ???.

PS.  SO MUCH SHIT that doesn’t make sense…or doesn’t get followed up on till years later then suddenly everything falls together.  Part of why it is great.

I wonder if this is a high demand job…like all the young dudes want to get assigned to porn perusing, or if they only let cranky senior citizens take the positions.

Letting children sue their parents for punishment – and win?
And you thought American courts were getting meddlesome…this is crazy.

How are parents supposed to oh, I don’t know, PARENT with the threat of legal action from their child hanging over them?

Thankfully this is Canada…hopefully it will be a warning to our system and stupid cases like this will get thrown out/ignored/whatever.

If kids are indeed getting more and more unruly (as older folks are always keen to lament), it’s BS like this that’s to blame.  That and how afraid people/the media/etc. are of blaming parents for oh, BAD PARENTING.  Like…when there’s a school shooting they go on and on about blaming video games and music but never go off on the parents for being ignorant, out of touch, or just plain shitty parents?

Lame.

It seems obvious now that they point it out…

Anyway, so I didn’t even realize PETA was part of the animal shelter/rehousing gig – but it turns out they are, and they really suck at it.

Looks like he was into it more for the event than the story.  Chin up Barack, all good stories have to end, even if they end poorly.