Hey, it's time for every weblogger's favorite pastime: making fun of the search-engine hits people have used to find your blog!
Unsurprisingly, the most common hits on my blog involve the word 'noises'. 'Cow noises' pops up a lot. So does 'cat noises'. Got 'train noises' once. When did I talk about trains?

Then there are the fun ones: the very first search-engine hit I got was some guy searching for 'girls sex noises'. Also, one for just plain 'sex noises', which wasn't quite as funny. Sorry, guys, no mp3s here.
I wondered about 'face noises' for a while, until I got 'head noises'... there's also one for 'dangerous noises'. Um... what exactly are you people looking for?
The hit for 'yaoi noises' doesn't count because that was me being smirky. Um, plus testing to see whether the tracker still worked with the new frame-y layout. Yeah.

Then there are the people who appear to actively be searching for something and got diverted onto my page by mistake. Two different people have wandered in looking for 'Sacajawea dollars'. Also:
-'liquid caffeine energy boosters'
-'trippy stickers'
-'"Left-Handed Sugar" Buy'
-'"animated gifs "+bits+chips'
-'cattle prod'
-'"how to draw anime hands and feet"'

I really feel sorry for the person who was looking for animated GIFs and came up with my rant AGAINST animated GIFs instead. And the cattle prod person... um... remind me not to go to any of THEIR parties.
posted by Mie Tsukikoushi at 7:12 PM

~Blather Back!~

Hm, okay, let's talk about profanity. Since you can't very well talk about profanity without USING profanity, let this be a warning to you - there are dirty words in here. Plenty of them. Deal or leave.

Essentially, most of the 'dirty words' that we know today are perfectly good, normal, everyday Anglo-Saxon words. Over time, these blunt words were generally replaced by French words that were longer, more oddly spelled, and euphemistic; words that pampered the spoiled, wealthy, overly sensitive listener who would just be HORRIFIED by the blunt, commonsensical Anglo-Saxon peasantry and their language.
'Fuck' and 'copulate' mean the same thing. So do 'shit' and 'excrement'. 'Piss' and 'urine'. 'Cock' and 'penis'. 'Cunt' and 'vagina'.
There are a few exceptions. 'Damn', however, is pretty much universal, and actively church-related. You all probably already know where 'bitch' came from. Same for 'bastard'. And 'hell'. Hell, 'bastard' and 'hell' are almost acceptable these days.
So, eventually, the old straightforward Anglo-Saxon terms became less and less everyday, and eventually morphed into actual 'curse words' that your teachers and parents would be horrified to hear you say.

Enough history. Let's talk about me now. It's what the blog is for, after all.

I probably knew all the common curse words by the time I was twelve. Late, I know, but then, I'm fairly old by Internet standards. All through junior high and high school, I and my friends used these words intermittantly, but NEVER without dropping our voice to a whisper on the word in question. You had to whisper, of course, in case a teacher or other Scary Adult was listening and willing to give you a lecture. If I were to write a typical line of high-school dialogue, it would look like this:

THAT damn MS. ROBERTSON GAVE US SO MUCH fucking HOMEWORK!

The occasional (or frequent) curse word gave me a feeling of power, and generally made my friends blush and giggle guiltily. I didn't curse in every sentence - far from it - but I used curse words whenever they seemed appropriate.
By the time I was a senior in high school, I was so comfortable with profanity that I occasionally forgot to whisper. My English teacher yelled at me once or twice for cursing out loud. Once for the almighty f-word itself.

But a funny thing happened. By the time I got to college, profanity was an accepted part of my life. Of ALL our lives. My friends and I all used profanity when it seemed appropriate. We were allowed to curse IN CLASS DISCUSSIONS. (I got away with calling a character in a novel a 'fucking idiot'. No one even blinked.) Our parents stopped pretending they didn't curse.
And you know what? The curse words immediately lost all their power. People ignored them. A hundred years ago, women would FAINT if they heard a crude word. Today, they happily use those words. Curse words don't shock or startle people very much any more, unless you use them in front of children or nuns. So what's the fucking point?
About halfway through my college career, on a major Kurt Vonnegut bender, I read his novel Hocus Pocus. It was an interesting book, although not generally my favorite of his; but there was ONE idea in that book that hit me square between the eyes and stuck with me, for YEARS. Allow me to paraphrase:

There's no point to cursing, really, because those words have stopped doing what they were originally meant to do: shock and startle people. All cursing does is allow people to ignore your unpleasant information because you can't startle them into listening. Nowadays, when everyone has such foul mouths and isn't afraid to use them, a simple 'zounds' will startle people more than every 'fuck' in the world.

That made sense to me. So I decided to try it. The next time I would have said 'Shit, that sucks', I instead said 'Crikey, that sucks'.
I'll be darned if it didn't work like a charm. Everything stopped. People looked at me. One guy asked me, 'holy shit, did you actually say 'crikey'?' Of course, no one blinked at the 'shit'. I had broken through their little shields. With a non-foul word.
For the next four or five years, I hardly cursed at all. 'Crikey', 'poop', 'zounds', 'phooey', and 'gadzooks' entered my vocabulary and stayed there. So did 'jeeng crine', a 'Jesus Christ' phrase I lifted bodily from a short story by James Thurber. And every single time I used those words in front of a new person, they looked startled. Startled as... well, as phooey. Even though my friends got more or less used to it after a while, it still startled them, just a little, every time. Which was exactly the effect I was after.

These days, I do curse a little. I still say 'crikey' a lot, too. But, seriously, sometimes there's nothing so appropriate as a good curse word. One well-placed 'fuck' can express and therefore relieve a LOT of anger. (Double entendre entirely meant, thank you.) I do find that, when I'm incredibly angry, just stopping and shouting 'FUCK!' at the world will actually, seriously calm me down. 'Crikey' can't do THAT, alas.

Try this: the next time you find yourself involved in a flame war, or even watching one, see which person looks more intelligent: the person who spouts lines filled with profanity, or the person who writes with little to no profanity. If you have the need to flame someone, try doing so without using curse words at all. I find that 'whore' has a MUCH larger impact than 'bitch', but you don't even need to do that. People who flame by spouting lines of curse words are hiding the fact that they don't have much to say. Don't let the flamee ignore your unpleasant information. Don't hide that information behind lines and lines of those same boring ten or eleven curse words that the eye just naturally skips over. Piles and piles of curse words are the hallmark of the adolescent, the hopelessly immature, and those people without a point. 'Crikey, are you too stupid to type unsupervised?' will get you a lot more attention than 'fuck you you shit-eating bitch'.

Unless you say it in front of your teacher, of course.
posted by Mie Tsukikoushi at 11:45 PM

~Blather Back!~

So the cats were doing their usual ankle-twining routine while I was at the sink trying to wash out my orange juice mug. They kept looking up at me and mewing piteously, demanding to be fed RIGHT THIS INSTANT and some steak would be nice but they'd be happy to accept the hard brown nuggets in the overhead cabinet.
But their bowl -was- about one-eighth empty, so I got down the bag and topped it off to stave off kitty panic time. Then, accompanied by the sound of two happy kitties snorkeling food like a pair of Hoovers, I put the bag on the edge of the sink to roll the top down.
As I closed the bag, I read the text on the front of it idly. "IAMS. Active Maturity Formula. Ages 7 and up. Ages 5 and up, Large Breeds."

... wait. Large breeds? How big do cats GET? Visited by visions of horse-sized riding cats, I read on...

"Premium Dog Food."

Oops.
I finished rolling down the top of the bag, put the bag away, looked down at the still-happily-snorkeling cats, and laughed myself sick. If they can't tell the difference, I'm not going to tell them. It would ruin their day.
posted by Mie Tsukikoushi at 4:28 AM

~Blather Back!~

I've always loved animation. It's the paradox of my existence that I've never been able to drag my butt out of bed in the morning, yet when I was a kid I would wake up right on the dot of 6am every Saturday and watch cartoons for five straight hours. I loved cartoons then, and I love them now.
I remember, every morning before school, I would watch He-Man and eat my chocolate Pop-Tarts. I never liked She-Ra, for whatever reason, but I was MAD about He-Man. And then, every afternoon, I would race home from school to watch Speed Racer. I thought Speed Racer was the coolest cartoon in existence.
And I demanded that my mother tell me what her favorite Looney Tunes character was. She didn't have one, really, but I didn't believe that, being eight... so finally she told me her favorite Looney Tune was Tweety Bird. (Daffy was my favorite, of course.) For years after that, every time a Tweety Bird cartoon came on, I would yell for my mother to come watch, because it was 'her favorite'.

There are basically three categories of cartoons for me:
1. Things I hated then and I hate now. I never liked the Smurfs, for example.
2. Things I loved then and I don't love so much now. Like the aforementioned Speed Racer. Thundercats. Scooby Doo. I haven't seen He-Man in fifteen years, but I expect it would be a lot harder to watch now.
3. Things I loved then and still love. The primary dichotomy: I love Transformers, and I love Jem and the Holograms. A boy-y show about big metal robots shooting at each other, and the ultimate in girl-y shows, about fashion, music, and relationships. Heck, they both sold toys.

Speaking of girly shows, does anyone out there besides me remember a fairly awful little show called Beverly Hills Teens? It was a cheap attempt to cash in on the success of Beverly Hills 90210, studded with a cast of fashion-conscious teenagers with immense amounts of money. I used to watch this show in HIGH SCHOOL. It wasn't terribly well done, but for some reason I was fascinated by it.
Anyway. My love of animation extended into college, where I got a degree in Communications largely on the strength of my grades in their Animation History courses. I used to watch Tiny Toons with my friends, and of course, it's in college that I was first introduced to anime. We spent seven hours in some random person's dorm room, majorly tipsy on wine coolers, watching untranslated Urusei Yatsura and laughing our asses off even though we didn't understand the dialogue. That and an untranslated copy of Robot Carnival were the first two anime I ever saw. Well, except for poor little Speed Racer, and all the other animes disguised as cartoons.
Now that I'm older and have a little money, I've splurged and bought lots of fun stuff. The entire run of Betty Boop cartoons in a box set... does anyone else love 'Bimbo's Initiation' as much as I do? A copy of 'Gertie the Dinosaur'... it's still amazingly watchable. My much-watched copy of 'The Brave Little Toaster'. Felix the Cat, Flip the Frog, Fantasia. As many fansubbed Lupin IIIs as I could find, and a bootleg copy of Rock 'n' Rule. (Nelvana rocks my world.)
And you know what? I still love Bugs Bunny.
posted by Mie Tsukikoushi at 5:42 AM

~Blather Back!~

WARNING: The following blog was written expressly and intentionally to cause people searching for weird/kinky stuff to hit my blog and leave interesting tracks on my tracker. The loaded phrases will be capitalized. You were warned.
If you're one of those people who came here from a search engine... I'm sorry to disappoint you. But I hope you stick around and read my stuff anyway.

So, anyway, I was talking to my friend the other day about DIGIMON HENTAI. And she said she generally prefers DIGIMON YAOI, being female, and had I seen that new DRAGONBALL Z YAOI site?

Now, I don't usually care for DRAGONBALL Z. That and SAILOR MOON are two anime that I could do without, in most cases. I do like GUNDAM WING, however, because it has more of a plot and plenty of CUTE GUYS.
Not very many CUTE GIRLS, though. Speaking of CUTE GIRLS, why is there a CUTE GIRL POSING COMPLETELY NAKED in the GUNDAM WING deck of cards? I don't even know who she is. I sure wish they'd put in cards of the GUNDAM WING BOYS NAKED too, though. If they can put in GUNDAM WING HENTAI, they can put in a little NAKED DUO, can't they? What about NAKED TROWA? NAKED QUATRE? C'mon! I'm a SEX-CRAZED cow!

In my opinion, the world NEEDS more GUNDAM WING YAOI. I know there are plenty of people out there who disagree with me, and that's fine.

But, getting back to my original point, that new DRAGONBALL Z YAOI site was kind of disappointing. My idea of a good time isn't GOKU NAKED. Too MUSCULAR. NAKED VEGETA doesn't really do much for me, either, although TRUNKS might look better NAKED than his father. I like PURPLE HAIR.

Speaking of PURPLE HAIR, why is it so often accompanied by RADICAL PIERCINGS? I don't mind a nice understated NOSERING or EYEBROW RING, but TONGUE-STUDs are just a bit too much.

PURPLE HAIR is nice, though. I also like BLUE HAIR. And TATTOOS, if they're tastefully done. I'm not much for TATTOOS that say things like "Kiss Me, I'm HORNY!" or "Watch Out, I'm JAILBAIT!" or "The More DRUNK I Am, The Less UNDERAGE You Get!"

Wow, I sure am rambling. I wonder why that could be?

Anyway, enough blogging for now. I'm off to read my new TRIGUN YAOI DOUJINSHI and have some DR. PEPPER. Happy HENTAI, boys and GIRLS!
posted by Mie Tsukikoushi at 5:40 AM

~Blather Back!~

Have you ever been on IRC or a BBS and seen something like the following?

GOTHYCHIK: I'm so depressed. My life sucks.
NORMAL1: ... I'm sorry to hear that.
(pause)
GOTHYCHIK: My best friend got beat up by a bunch of jocks and no one understands me! Life is so BLEAK! Why me?
NORMAL2: Poor Gothy, that sucks.
GOTHYCHIK: I'm just going to KILL MYSELF. No one cares! No one will ever love me! My life is so screwed up! Goodbye cruel world!
NORMAL1: Don't do that!
NORMAL2: Yeah, it's not worth it.
GOTHYCHIK: You guys are sweet, but you don't understand! My life is shit! I should just END IT NOW!
NORMAL1: No you shouldn't!
NORMAL2: There are plenty of reasons not to kill yourself!
(and on and on, ad nauseum)

In psychiatry, there is a syndrome known as Munchausen's Syndrome. Munchausen's Syndrome involves the sufferer deliberately hurting herself to gain attention. There is a related syndrome called Munchausen's Syndrome by Proxy, in which the sufferer hurts others to gain attention (usually mothers/fathers hurting their own child in some unobtrusive way, so they are credited with being long-suffering/wonderful parents to this obviously sick child).
I am firmly convinced that I am the first to document a new variation on Munchausen's Syndrome, called Munchausen's Syndrome by Internet. Sufferers of MSbI specifically 'injure' themselves in chat rooms, calling themselves horrible names and threatening to commit suicide, solely in order to garner attention and sympathy from the hapless chat members who feel obligated to talk them out of it.
MSbI sufferers are never, ever happy. In order to gain the attention/sympathy they so desperately crave, they frequently 'act out'; complaining about depression, failed suicides, how badly life sucks, how much their parents hate them, and how (inevitably) they're going to kill themselves and no one can talk them out of it.
But well-meaning people in the chat try to, and inevitably succeed in, talking them out of killing themselves. The sufferer has her fix of attention now, and is pleased for a day or so; and then the cycle begins again.
Psychiatrists take note! When you publish your paper on Munchausen's Syndrome by Internet, I want a footnote, dammit.
posted by Mie Tsukikoushi at 4:15 AM

~Blather Back!~

WARNING: Footnote-y.

One of my biggest pet peeves is perfume. I HATE perfume (and cologne and aftershave and all that scent-y stuff). I've always had a really sensitive nose*, and perfume nauseates me. I remember in one art history class, the same girl sat in front of me every day. She was one of those weird people who wore full makeup and skirts and pantyhose to every class (in Texas! In 100+ degree heat!**), and she had apparently bathed in one of those awful sickly-sweet flowery perfumes.
The girl smelled like a funeral home blew up on her. It was AWFUL.*** And most perfumes smell like that, too, have you noticed? Maybe they smell okay for the first ten minutes or so, but after that, it's all the scent of 'florist shop burning down'. The only real difference is the 'spicy' scents, like Opium or Obsession... they smell a LITTLE better, but after about ten minutes they usually smell like you're wearing moldering sawdust. I can't imagine why women pay hundreds and hundreds of dollars for stinky water that looks like piss****.
Aftershave and men's cologne usually smells a little better, since it's supposed to smell 'manly' and not 'flowery and helpless like a little girl'. I do like the scent of Drakkar Noir, in theory. But most men who wear cologne wear it like sunscreen: everywhere. Damn, that reeks.
Shit, why do we need MORE stinky stuff in our lives? Think about it: your shampoo and conditioner both add scent to your hair. Your deodorant is probably scented. If you use mousse, gel, hairspray: scent. Soap, body lotion, hand lotion, moisturizer: scent. I guess you need the stinky stuff to cover up all the OTHER conflicting smells.*****
My own personal scent is: Speed Stick Original. Yeah, the men's deodorant. I think it smells good, and since I only use it AS DEODORANT, I don't smell-bomb anyone******. Plus Boyfriend likes my scent. If I like it, and he likes it, that's what's important! I'm not out to 'impress' those poor people ten feet away from me. You know, the ones that would be having violent coughing fits if I had perfume on.

*I've always had terrible eyesight, and minor hearing loss to boot. I think my body overcompensated, because my sense of smell is VERY good. But, honestly, that's not generally a good thing. You think smokers bother YOU?
**Not that this is totally unusual. Texan women ALWAYS overdress, and they have 'fashionably late' down to a science. I was reminded of this when I went home a couple of weeks ago and spotted young women in skirts, hose, and high heels at the museum. Egh.
***I couldn't move my seat, either, because the class was completely full; but I did kind of like sitting up against the far wall. Art history classes are conducted in semi-darkness, after all, so it's quite nice to be able to lean up against the wall and go to sleep. When I wasn't running to the bathroom to grab a mouthful of breathable air.
****Okay, so it's really stinky rubbing alcohol that looks like piss. Picky picky.
*****Yeah, I know you can get most of that stuff in unscented versions. But a lot of people don't, and that's the problem. Ew.
******Either with my perfume OR with my body odor. I'm so nice to you people.
posted by Mie Tsukikoushi at 9:02 PM

~Blather Back!~

WARNING: PISSY.

Hm, a quick diatribe against 'free verse' and 'abstract art'.
For me, free verse is a lot like abstract art. It CAN be done well. It HAS been done well. (In some cases, by people I know. Hi Mercutio, you rock.) But the overwhelming majority of free verse AND abstract art is CRAP.
You see, free verse and abstract art don't have any rules, so the misguided practitioner just writes any angsty shit that comes to mind, adds odd carriage returns and margins, and calls it 'poetry'. Or they splash paint on a canvas, carefully draw a square with their own blood, and think up a really convincing angsty explanation for the 'meaning' of the 'painting'.

It's so much easier to write/paint when you don't need any real skill, just the ability to puke your guts up onto paper/canvas.

And while I'm at it, let's talk about the attitudes these 'poets' and 'artists' get.
For 'poets': "I just write about what I feel, and it's so liberating. My poetry is the hallmark of my soul. Real poetry doesn't need all these confining rules."
Well, okay. That's great. But free verse, for all its liberating qualities, is NOT EASY. Here's a clue: if the only people who like your poetry are people who think just like you, you're not very good.
And really angsty poets can't bring themselves to say 'hallmark'. It makes them feel ill.

For 'artists': "That's not art, it's illustration." This statement is the mark of a true idiot.
Why the hell are art 'cognoscenti' so bigoted against recognizeable forms in art? Who the hell are they to judge? Are they really so nervous about the fact that art school didn't teach them anything beyond splattering paint and then making up a good story about what it 'means'? Or are they jealous that others in their school can actually DRAW?

Now, to reverse everything I just said.

"Art" cannot be confined by your stupid little quibbles, or mine. For example, Scott McCloud says that EVERYTHING that is not directly related to survival or reproduction is, in fact, art. Now, that's pretty damn wide, and I can't say I completely agree. But illustration is art. Crappy Goth poetry, no matter how bad it is and how much I hate it, is art. Paintings called 'A Field Of Brown' are art. Fanart is art. Limericks are art. Pottery is art. Computer code is art. Websites are art. Refrigerator doodles by four-year-olds are art. Even those stupid, inane 'articles' in local newsletters are art.

Shit, by that argument, even copy/trace artists produce art. And they do. They're just EVIL, WRONG, and making crap out of whatever natural gifts they DO have.

Art doesn't have to be angsty or meaningful to be art. It just has to BE. If you don't like something, that doesn't mean it's not art. It just means that you don't LIKE it. If it's not very good writing or painting, it's still art, it's just BAD art.

If it required ANY amount of creativity, no matter HOW small, it's art. I don't care if you did it for your job, or for school, or to save your fricking life. It's ART.

"That's not art!"? Fuck you.
posted by Mie Tsukikoushi at 4:00 PM

~Blather Back!~

Something I did not remember until I went home last week:
When I was six, I named my guinea pig 'Jimmy Carter'.

Was I being patriotic (he was then president, after all) or was I making some sort of subtle statement?
Actually, since I was six, it was probably just a random whim, like eating spray cheese straight out of the can.
posted by Mie Tsukikoushi at 12:55 AM

~Blather Back!~