timepiececlock

My family is currently holding an informal competition for the iPod Touch game Flight Control.* This is insanely addictive, and I just tonight came up with the idea of lying on our new sofa chair (renamed the Air Traffic Control Chair) and playing it with the sound turned off and my own MP3 player going with an audiobook. (Christopher Moore on vampires; hilarious!)

So, my dad bought this app for his new iPod about a week ago, and since then, all of us have been hooked. My dad was scoring in the thirties and my mom in the twenties, then they let me try. By my fifth game I got up to 58. Later that night, I got to 60! My parents were both soundly annoyed, as until I had arrived their average score was 13 planes landed, and now my gleaming 60 shone from top corner of the screen. They smelled a challenge. Over the next couple of days, my mom was into the thirties with a personal best of around 45, and my dad had managed to get 63, jumping about 25 points now that someone had given him a goal. I played it a few more times and got stuck in the late 50s, then I got 68. Irritated again, my dad spent a few more days furiously wasting time at it, got to predict the patterns in the game's programming, and scored a 74. He told me I was banned, jokingly.

Today I got hold of it, and beat his score. Mind you, at this point I'd probably played 1/6th the number of games he's played, maybe less. I called him up on his cell:

Rashaka: "Are you driving?"
ShakaDad: "I just stopped."
Rashaka: "Great!"
ShakaDad: "What is it?"
Rashaka: "Seventy seven."
ShakaDad: "Dammit!"
Rashaka: "Love you, bye!" *hangs up*

My mom finally got hers up to 59 this afternoon. I asked to play it just now, for half an hour, before going to bed. He relented and said he needed it back when I was done. So I sat, listened to my audiobook, and trounced the competition in less than 10 more tries.

Rashaka: "You can have this back now."
ShakaDad: *groans*
ShakaDad: *looks at the 90 pt. score*
ShakaDad: "Suck egg dog! ...I wanted to get a hundred."
Rashaka: *hug* "You know I'm just the catalyst to spur you on toward a more challenging future, right?"
ShakaDad: "Go to bed already. You're definitely banned from the Air Traffic Control Chair. There may be a reset in this thing's future."



* Ha! Youtuber says: "I've been playing this for hours, literally. Hours." That guy's high score is 41 after hours and hours? Heh. I've probably spent maybe an hour and a half in total--and that's rounding up--and my score is more than twice his.

Brother: "I'm gonna start watching Dexter's Lab."

Rashaka: "Um...are you sure you mean Dexter's Lab? I only ask because Dexter's Laboratory is a cartoon on the Cartoon Network."

Brother: "Whatever. It's about a serial killer."

Rashaka: "That'd be just Dexter. Because Dexter's Laboratory is about a wacky kid scientist...Admittedly they're both sociopaths."

Brother: "What?"

Rashaka: "Nothing, have fun with Dexter! Good show. So I hear. Um."

Duplicated from everyone on my flist: When you see this, post your favorite poem in your journal.

by Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)

Résumé


Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.




Of all the famous American writers, I'd choose to have her silver tongue. I've already decided that if I ever write a book that's either A) a murder mystery, or B) a vampire novel, I will absolutely title it Among The Roaring Dead.

I want this shirt.

Description:

We decided to make a shirt in tribute to one of the first traumatic experiences in life -- the visit to the pediatrician. It involves hanging out in waiting rooms with sick kids, toys you're not allowed to play with because other sick kids have been touching them, and an oversized children's Bible as the only reading material for folks under 3 feet tall. When you finally see the pediatrician, he does something to distract you so he can give you a shot, and all you get in return is a lollipop. Not a fair trade.

Our 100% cotton black shirt features the phrase "You Never Forget Your First Doctor" under an inexplicable picture of an old-style British police phone box with a white starburst behind it. We have no idea what's going on with that.

I'm also waiting for the day that someone makes an external hard drive that doesn't look like a book or a modem, but...looks like a TARDIS. Or like a miniature model of Minas Tirith. Or something else profoundly cool and geeky. You think it's a generic desktop decoration...BUT IT'S A HARD DRIVE! Awesome, neh?

::looking out over a hilly area covered with grass and wild mustard, and one little buidling tucked into the greenery::

Shaka: OOh! Oooooh oh oh oooh! *bounces*
Mom: What?
Shaka: *spreads hands wide* Shaka imagination time! See that little building?
Mom: Yeah.
Shaka: The wire fenses, and all the brush... Now picture, just behind there, are the raptor cages.
Mom: I was thinking it would be a nice little place for a house.
Shaka: Do you think that says something about us personally?
Mom: Alright, maybe it's a mad scientist's laboratory. Like Dr. Moroeau.


*My mom doesn't know that I once had a horrific dream where I spent hours hiding from velociraptors in a setting that reminded me of Girl Scout summer camp, Alien movies background music, the jungles of Predator, and a military complex/my neighbor's house being overrun with gaseous jungle plants. Now that I've spent several months in Louisiana living quite literally next to swamp levees, these things take on new and interesting realism. But so far I've never dreamed of gators. I guess raptors and zombies scare me more.


And, from two weeks ago, this is one of the best things I've ever heard another person say, courtesy of the first time I met my brother's girlfriend:

"Yeah, I know who you mean. Ohh, I hate his posture."

I just finished reading The Last Unicorn (oh why did I wait until my 20s to read this?) and later today I'll read its coda, Two Hearts. But I was browsing the back of my hardcover, which has an index of Peter S. Beagle's published work, and what do I find listed under essays but this?---

"The Good Vampire: Spike and Angel", Peter S. Beagle. Five Seasons of Angel, 2004.


OH MY @$&)*#&$*()#&(@!.

So, not only is the book every bit as amazing as I remember the film being, in fact better times about 10 because the descriptions are just as wonderful as the dialogue, and not only was I reading it the whole time thinking of both my childhood, my dreams of how to write fiction well, and how I know somewhere in my bones that at least one of the people who made Princess Tutu must have watched/read this story, but now all that is topped with the pure and untainted joy of realizing that the author is a BTVS fan.

Who wrote an essay about Spike and Angel character analysis.

That was published in a collection.

That I can hunt down and read in the bookstore.

This is a freaking great morning already! I love discovering fellow fans, even if I don't interact with them personally. Just knowing that someone whose writing I now admire ardently also loved my all-time favorite tv show enough to write an essay about it twists the plaits of my heart. So I will top this joyous entry with an icon that calls to mind another great fantasy story with the words of another great fantasy song: truisms both.

ETA: ( some of rasielle's comments on Princess Tutu and The Last Unicorn, spoilers for tLU but not its sequel, spoilers for PT, long ramblings on similarities and reincarnated fictional characters and why Schmendrick=Fakir=Peter S. Beagle in my head. )

I keep picturing the Tenth Doctor, on the TARDIS bridge, hunched in front of his little monitor screen watching Planet Earth and getting orgasmic over it like the little science-loving schoolboy that he is.

Doctor: Rose, look at this! Come on, lookit!
Rose: What is it now? *has been called over 6 times already*
Doctor: Look at all the penguins marching single-file across the ice! Look at them, with their little wobbly feet! Ooooh, we have to go see them! Let's go see the penguins, Rose.
Rose: Um...
Doctor: Don't want to see penguins? Right, course, very cold in Antarctica. How about alligators then? Alligators are brilliant!

On laptop trouble,

"All I want to do is email, listen to all the music in the known universe---and some typing. 'S not much."

Rashaka: "Someday when I really want one, you'll give me one of the cold Diet Cokes in the fridge with your name on it. Maybe not this week, maybe not next week. But someday."
ShakaDad: *looking dubious* "Better ask first. You have a long history of abuses with the cold Cokes."
Rashaka: "Don't worry, I'll ask! Think of it this way: I'm Rumplestiltskin, and you owe me your firstborn Coke."
ShakaDad: "Anytime you want to tally up favors, we can sit down and..."
Rashaka: "Whoa, whoa...cold Coke is in it's own special category, I think."

That's great, it starts with an earthquake...