Robust McManlyPants on Average Display

mrh has started what is basically the coolest thing ever: a blog that tracks pundit predictions in order to gauge the (in)correctness of pundits. Today he lines up a couple of posts about Apple’s now-present-future and some older political predictions we can now properly measure.

Do you want peace of mind?

Then don’t randomly look up your nephew’s MySpace page on a whim.

Just FYI.

Watch this.

But don’t watch it at work, or at least wear headphones if you do.

(Oh shit!  It’s Dr. Tran!)

I can’t remember where I first saw it, but I really enjoyed reading a Lovecraftian response to a 419 scammer.  Little did a realize it’s a bit of a cottage industry in its own right…

These four things are the keys to happiness, I think. Oh, and high-speed Internet access. Oh, and books.

And gaming.  Kittens, too!  OK, so I have a lot of needs.

Saturday afternoon we rolled over to Bascha & Kath’s place to start off the grilling season in style. Bascha’s enormo-grill was in full effect (she has mastered the use of a chimney to get it going quickly, something I should learn to do at some point) and Kath had a spread going before we’d even gotten there. We cracked open some wine, The Boyf marinaded some ribeyes for me to grill, and several pounds of meat (I’m not exaggerating, really) later I was laid up on their couch while the rest of the party got their fun on. One nap and a few Tums later, I was well into my second wind.

You know you are in good hands when one of your hostesses tells you that the other hostess has Advil in her bathroom and when you go check said bathroom there are both Advil and Tums sitting out, ready to be used by those who need them. Gods yes. They have great grilling parties, I am here to tell you.

Speaking of good friends and fun times, those of you who know fiend must check his new digs: Geek Nanny (FYI - fixed the link; that was weird). It’s good reading. Follow along as he twists young minds to his evil purposes!

I’m from the mountains, so I am well-accustomed to the sort of things that happen deep in shadowed hollows where the same genes have mixed and mixed again for generations. But when MAC alerted me to this story, even I was surprised. From Haywood County News:

WAYNESVILLE – At least six men traveled from across the nation and South America to have their genitals mutilated in what Haywood County authorities described as a sadomasochistic dungeon.

Three Haywood County men are now in jail on felony charges of castration without malice and practicing medicine without a license.

OK, um, wow. I didn’t even know “castration without malice” was a crime. I mean, wow. Some legislator, somewhere, must have had a fun time hearing about it in the cafeteria after they proposed that one.

Also, you really must visit the link for the mug shots. Damnation. No one, and I mean no one, in their right minds would walk into that house, drop their pants and hope someone produces a knife. Additionally, you have to respect a media outlet that captions the photo with “CASTRATION HOUSE,” then helpfully provides a map to the place in the same story.

They asked a neighbor about the guys, and got this:

Kurtz said the men kept to themselves, rarely waved and never spoke.

I hate to say this, but in the mountains that is every bit as good as putting a sign at the end of the drive that reads WE ARE DOING SOMETHING FREAKY HERE. It shouldn’t be that way - people should have a right to ignore each other all they damn well want, and I remember well when a neighbor accused a gay couple in my neighborhood, back in the ’80s (no, really), of being “drug dealers, or something,” because they didn’t talk to others in the neighborhood and occasionally had out-of-town guests. Still, if the allegations are true, maybe it turns out that even a stopped social clock like that one can be right once in a while. And I find it somewhat heartening that her suspicions were not raised by more than one unmarried man living together, but about their lack of neighborly ways.

My favorite part of the whole article, though?

The victims met the men through a locally produced Web site that published photographs of men engaging in sadomasochistic behavior.

Of course there was a website.

Yahoo! shut down the site in December 2004. The castrations took place last year beginning in March and continued through November, according to police documents.

The case is the first involving willing castration in the county and could be the first in North Carolina.

“This right here beats everything I have ever seen,” the sheriff said.

That’s the mountains, for you.

Are you reading Achewood? If not, you totally should. It is a webcomic about the hard lives of animals who live in the secret underworld of a California suburb. It’s not like Gaiman, it’s not like Disney, it’s like if John Steinbeck and Joss Whedon had gotten together to write Six Degrees of Separation and it had starred cats and stuffed animals.

The current storyline is basically my favorite ever. Start here, and read forward. It is awesome.

I sleep on my stomach. I awoke at one point very early this morning to find that Didi & Gogo were sitting on my butt - square in the middle - wrestling each other. I peeked over one shoulder and there they were. They noticed me looking at them, paused briefly to stare at me, then went back to wrestling.

Kittens are so weird.

Also, I am never reading Penny Arcade late at night again. Last night I dreamt that Patrick Swayze was conned into marrying a morbidly obese midget. The Boyf and I had to make the case to free him from this unwilling matrimony.

You see this guide right here? This is how Setherax, my level 31 Dwarven Hunter in WoW, is going to get to 225 Enchanting in a night. An expensive night, potentially, but a night well worth it.

Then I’ll turn into one of the channel-spammers who stands around in Iron Forge wasting four lines of text explaining that they can do all the same enchants as everyone else. And I’ll get rich doing it.

Is this what had Bush, er, I mean, Dear Leader so worked up about human-animal (manimal to those in the scene) hybrids?

It’s worth noting, because I haven’t yet worked out a good color for links and also because it is so fun to say it: by “this” I mean “that the characters depicted on DHS’s own ‘readiness’ page for kids are in fact human-animal hybrids.”

You know that shrill whinnying you hear in the distance? That’s me laughing my ass off at this.

Or is it…? After all, it could be a maniacal manimal!

Nay!

(First pointed out by the totally-worth-reading Overcompensating.)

So it’s 4:26pm, and I don’t have much to do at the moment. I don’t have it in me to be creative, despite desperately needing to write an update for PAGP - I’m two sessions behind. My excuse is that I need (again) to have Pants Wilder tell me a particularly cryptic thing we were told two sessions ago so that I can record it accurately. The truth, however, is that at the moment it just seems like a lot of effort to produce something original when I can, instead, merely consume the work of others.

So here I am.

I’ve already read apostropher and The Poor Man and checked fafblog and run through the Technology section of MSNBC.com and I even slipped and let myself read 8-Bit Theatre hours before my normal late-evening comics whirlwind I use to round out the day. My days are usually quite busy - slap full of things to do, frankly, and I am A-OK with that - and so I generally try to squeeze all my browsing and whatnots into one highly amusing twenty minutes or so at the end of the shift.

But, not today.

And what do I realize? That I need more to read. Not poliblogs, because my belly aches with hate as it is and I just don’t need something new to worry about. I want fluff. I want comics. I want another Fark - not as a replacement, just more of it. I want my DS, which is out in the car awaiting my dinner break.

So what should I be reading? Comics and amusing blogs of a non-political nature that you read are most welcome. Comments will be turned on for this post as they usually are - on the last one, I just didn’t want to put people in the position of feeling like they were expected to say anything, or anything like that, so I turned off comments for that one post. I was (am?) feeling emotionally fragile enough as it was; weird-ass latent guilt over foisting my mourning onto others via the interwebs didn’t need to get added into the mix.

At any rate, recommend something to me. Something hilarious! I like hilarity.

Or, talk about Battlestar Galactica. Gods, yes, talk about BSG. I’m already in two online conversations about it and they are not enough.

So, one of my absolute favorite blogs, Republic of Dogs, is currently hosting a bake-off. Their entries have been mailed out to their judges, and I am deeply envious of those who will get to taste these creations. I have spent a goodly portion of the afternoon just staring at their entries. I have to share this one in particular, from the blog’s host, Res Publica. He describes the following:

5.) Chocolate Macaroon Sandwich Cookies - I heart these in a way that some might consider unwholesome. I could easily stand in the kitchen and eat the entire batch. If you love chocolate, these will be a near-religious experience. The cookie itself is a chocolate-almond macaroon that comes out crispy on the edges and chewy in the center. They get sandwiched around a dark chocolate ganache with just a touch of coffee flavor. After sitting for a day or so, the cookie and the filling just sort of meld together into one extremely, severely delicious mouthful.

It is terrible and wrong of him to inflict such thoughts on the world and not share the recipe. So, I’ve emailed him to ask for it. In the South, asking someone for a recipe is basically the highest compliment that can be paid, and it is a sort of sacred rite. To ask for a recipe is to compliment the chef and pay high honors to their work. To receive the recipe, on the other hand, is in some ways an even higher honor. When my mother sent me the recipe for her cornbread after hearing about my own disastrous* attempt at a “Mexican” cornbread, it was both a gentle ribbing for my results and an endorsement of my skills by sharing a recipe she’s been asked for many, many times.

Not to put any cultural pressure on him or anything.

UPDATE: Res is a scholar and a gentleman, and sent me links. Whee! I’m going to make cookies tomorrow! Thank you, Res!

–
* “Disastrous” only in a purely orthodox cornbreadishness sense. As stuff-in-a-bowl, it was delicious even if I do say so myself.

This?  This is just about the funniest thing I’ve seen all week.  Heck, maybe in several weeks:  The Nameless Dread, aka The Lovecraft Family Circus.  My personal fave is this one, though this is a close second. 

Many years ago I was a regular reader of Spinnwebe’s old Dysfunctional Family Circus.  Yeah, yeah, the Keanes don’t like it, I’m sure, et cetera.  I still find it hysterically funny.  Thbthbthbthbthbthpth!

Speaking of Lovecraft, I read The Annotated H.P. Lovecraft a few weeks ago.  I’d never read "The Rats in the Walls," but I had read "The Colour Out of Space" and "The Dunwich Horror" previously.  "At the Mountains of Madness" was a reread, as well, but it had been so long that I remembered almost nothing of it.  The stories aren’t great by today’s standards - they are obviously the early ancestors of today’s horror and science fiction stories, with rough edges and Lovecraft’s patented opacity as a wordsmith - but they’re a lot of fun to read and I find it very interesting to read a story and at the same time dissect what about it was supposed to be explicitly horrifying and what was left unsaid to let the reader create their own dreadful circumstance or description.  I am fascinated by taking those sorts of oblique horror stories and juxtaposing them with, say, Christine, a book that includes a lengthy description of how when someone is crushed to death in the back seat in an auto accident, the driver’s first impression is that they’ve been doused with a bucket of warm water because of all the blood hitting them in the head.

The annotations are mostly interesting, but occasionally they’re just nonsense - some of them are simply unnecessary and some of them are pointless.  For example, I’m pretty sure someone who’s sufficiently into Lovecraft to seek out annotated versions of these stories is also going to know what a cyclops is in mythology; similarly, I do find it interesting to learn when Lovecraft has named someone or something after a friend or pointedly sought out and made use of old surnames common to the settings, but do a few instances of such necessitate dithering over every name in the book?  Let me tell you, I have named a lot of characters over the years.  Some names were meant to be significant - Roderick was intended to be a clear allusion to "The Fall of the House of Usher," of course, with his disastrous ancestry and his long descent into a subtle but insidious madness masked by his more overtly "crazy" characteristics - but some were simply the names that occurred to me.  Pitrick Thatcher was named that because the Standard Fantasy Names Act of 1927 requires that fantastical first names sound almost but not exactly like "normal" names and his trade was, in fact, making/maintaining/repairing thatched rooves in his rural village.  One of Pants Wilder’s most memorable characters, Berol Musgrave - doomed priest of a dead god chosen as the temporary avatar of another prior to its birth as a more beneficent and respected power - was named after two brands of office supplies that happened to be present in the room when he was rolling up Berol’s stats.  So, really, when someone who’s a very minor character and might as well be named Villager #3 pops up in a Lovecraft story, I don’t really need a footnote that wrings its hands over being unable to explain why that character is named what s/he is named.

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I read this article at Escapist Magazine (produced, it appears, right here in beautiful Durham) on Sunday.  It is a collection of fascinating experiences one woman has had online, from IRC to running a raid instance in World of Warcraft.  Her conclusion, based on what everyone tells her, is that she does not exist.  There simply are not, she is told, any women on the Internet.  What fascinates me is the childishness so universally exhibited by the boys she encounters; when they find out she’s a woman, they demand pictures.  When she refuses to send them pictures of herself, they insist she must be a guy.  When they think she’s a guy and she mentions a guy being "hot," they think she’s a gay guy and get freaked out.  And yet, as she rightly points out, there are plenty of female characters running around. 

What I don’t get is that their expectation that all players are male must mean that they also expect all female characters are being played by men who are doing electronic drag.  She points out, again quite rightly, that some of these people actually offer to tip female characters if they dance for them.  And yet, they think the person on the other end of the keyboard is a man, and yet they are homophobic.  If you hold your breath for a moment, you’ll hear my brain pop as it tries to process this.

Bottom line, though, It’s not that I’m shocked that there are silly boys or desperate and socially unskilled men online (I’m not - there are also socially unskilled and desperate women online, and that the Internet and a life that can be filled with one’s immersion in same come more easily to the poorly socialized of either gender should shock no one), it’s that no one really seems to step forward to treat her like a person.  Assholes are common enough in the world that I think the more fair-minded among us are accustomed to at least trying to separate ourselves from them when we get the chance.  I’m talking about things like her guild leader telling her he thinks her guildmates were immature.  Where are the other people out there who, if they won’t slap the offenders, also won’t hold out their hand in friendship to the offended?  Admittedly, her guild leader does step in and thank her for speaking aloud on Ventrillo and asks her to try to expose the boys in her guild to a woman on a more regular basis in hopes it will make them more mature, and at least he’s thinking along those lines, but I’m not entirely sold on the idea that using her as a teaching tool, like any other stuffed and mounted animal, is really "equality" - and no one will ever convince me that it’s fair to expect her to spend her personal free time doing what amounts to workplace equality training.  Her guild leader should not expect her to pay $15/month for the privilege of spending her spare time training twelve year olds not to be assholes.

That entire issue is about women and gaming, and well worth a look-see.  Given that it was a woman who convinced me to try World of Warcraft, I find it stunning that people are so bothered over the idea of women as gamers.  That said, I’m also at least twice the age of anyone who’s that big of an asshole.  At least, I hope I am. 

While looking for that story, however, I wound up on a different website with "Escapist" in its title.  This one is definitely funny, though (and you will need a good laugh if you read the story linked above).  Bottom line, this guy does some pretty solid scientific investigation into Harry Potter’s and D&D’s abilities to teach us real-world sorcery.  If you have a mom or dad or aunt or minister who rails against the demon-worship inspired by Dungeons & Dragons, they might find this sort of empirical data interesting.

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Courtesy of The Onion.  An example:

Roddenberry (April 22�May 13)
You’ve never encountered a problem that can’t be solved by the combined
mental and spiritual resources of the enlightened people of the galaxy
or by swinging from the doorframe and kicking people in the gut.

Beautiful… (more…)