MOOP!

This will be moved to Top-post in the near future, and remain there until the end of May. It was last updated on 2011-04-19 1028

WEEKLY
Monday: Internship from 0730-1430, SCD from 1930-2300
Tuesday: Internship from 0730-1430, Class from 1430-1800, possibly Diesel, Squares from 1930-2300
Wednesday: Internship from 0730-1430, Class from 1600-1830
Thursday: Internship from 0730-1430, Class from 1600-1830
Friday: Ind.Study from 1245-1400, Class from 1430-1600
Saturday: Off unless specified below
Sunday: Off unless specified below

"Private" is used to denote something that I have been invited to, but do not know if it is open-invitation, so you probably can't come with me.

"Mine, things" means that you can ask for further detail as to what exactly I'm up to that night, but I don't at all have to tell you.

JANUARY
27-28: Mine, things

FEBRUARY
03: Dinner at JoshZed's
06: Private party -- Empanadas, 2000-2300
07: Tentative date
10: Date!
18-20: No Such Convention¹ at Vassar
25: Mine, things
26: Private party -- Hot Foods

MARCH
4-6: Complicated spring break things possibly to include Veronica in Boston
7-10: Complicated spring break things possibly to include being in Maryland or Chicago
11-13: Complicated spring break things possibly to include Shan in Boston
17: Mine, things
18: Mine, things
18-20: Vericon
25: Spark in the Dark contra at the Masonic Temple across from Porter Square
26: Lesley stuffnthings
27: Goin' to the museum with jere7my

APRIL
1: Mine, things, bikes!
2: Private Party -- Dog's birthday!
8-10: Hanging with Matt, then Mine, things of varying sorts
13: Cupcake Camp: Excuse for cupcake makers to hang out in a building. Free to the public. Probably delicious!
15-17: NEFFA dance festival
20: Mine, things
21-26: Mine, things, Atlanta
29: Gotta give me that, oo, shlock treatment... (Shlock Therapy night at j7y's.)

MAY
7: Free Comic Book Day (wanna wander the city with me?), Highland Ball
8: Mine, things until mid-day, then might try to get to Steampunk City
13: Mine, things in the evening
14: MTEL --all day standardized test for teachers
16-20: Senior week during the day, Mine, things during the night. Also, packing.
21: Commencement? *crosses fingers and hopes*
27-30: Balticon

All is subject to change and update, I'm probably forgetting many important things, please feel free to remind me of them.

I'm gonna get a job, because I want a place to live, which is going to destroy the hell out of this schedule. But that's okay, we can live with that.

And did you know that "Veronica" and "Vericon" are _practically_ anagrams? Also, if I'm going to go to Vericon, I really must work on the appropriate cosplay. Sunshine, ho!

1: Dude, NonCon is _such_ a terrible name for it. But I've been wanting to go since, oh, 2005.

(Subject line ruthlessly stolen from rm)

Some stuff that has caught my eye lately:

*ms_hecubus went to the zoo! I found this report of hers deeply hilarious. Warning, it might not be safe for work, depending on how stringent your work is about animals fulfilling their biological imperatives. And pictures of thus.

*&y linked to this collection of ads speculating how modern technologies would've been advertised in 1977. Pretty stuff!

*As part of my regular discussion of everything in the entire world¹ with JoshZed, he mentioned that apparently Insane Clown Posse has declared war on science. Impressed by the concept that anyone could be so utterly stupid, I begged him to make a blog post. Highlights include the quote "We feel like these haters[scientists] are the big dumb, popular jocks ganging up on the little class clown scrub." I only laugh because if I think about it too hard, I'll start sobbing.

*Apparently the Vatican has endorsed The Blues Brothers as being a Catholic classic. I am not making this up.

*The first law of Rock-Em, Sock-Em Robotics: A robot may neither rock nor sock a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to be rocked or socked.

*And lastly, I've been following a parenting blog written by one of my math professors and her wife. They just had a rehaul, and have up an adorable new header. Go see! (And the best part is definitely that they do look more or less like those pictures, which is just so cute it makes me want to squee.)

~Sor
MOOP!

1: We seriously do talk about nearly everything there ever was in the world. This is why I've started writing down what our dinnertime conversations were later, because they cover such a broad host of subjects (okay, fine, mostly math and world domination, but a *lot* of math and world domination!)

Okay. We're gonna start this entry by pointing out that I am smart. Not necessarily in the traditional genius knowing a lot of things about a lot of highly complicated nuclear science etc things, but in the heaps of common sense and a pretty good ability at figuring out how things work, and understanding explanations, or at least knowing what I need further explanation on way. More Feynman, less Einstein is my general goal¹.

Being a smart kid, I tend to be interested in reading things that are also smart. I'm not saying I want to go pick up a half-dozen Highly Academic texts and plow through them, but when it comes to things like my fiction, the more I find myself saying "c'mon, *really?!*" to the characters, the less inclined I am to enjoy it. The whole horror movie "don't go in there alone, you moron!" thing? Yeah, that. I find characters with no common sense to be frustrating and uninteresting --in general, the more clever a character is, the more likely I am to enjoy watching them interact with their world.

Every once in a while, I find a character who has more common sense than I do. Not just pragmatism or enough common sense that I never go "don't do that, you moron!", but a character who I honestly feel would, if reading my story, have a fair number of moments in which he or she said "don't do that, you moron!" to me, --not just stupid moments, but things which I thought made perfect sense at the time.

Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres. Is one such character.

And he's still flawed as hell. There are multiple other characters in his universe who are just as or differently intelligent as he is, and they are saying all the "don't do that, you moron" things that I don't even comprehend because I just don't even realize that they're a "don't do that, you moron" thing in the first place!

Flawed characters are interesting. We want them to get better, to learn more, to become more intelligent, clever, closer to perfect without ever actually reaching it, because perfection is boring. And so, a flawed (therefore, interesting) character who is flawed in ways that don't make me want to grab them by the shoulders and shake them?

If HJPEV was a real person, it is extremely possible that I would be a little bit in love, and more than a little bit intimidated by that fact. Hell, just looking at the way I interact with the people in my life who *are* decidedly smarter, and I know that I would have just about the hugest crush possible you can have on an individual without ever speaking to them (because I wouldn't know what to say!)³

For those of you raising an eyebrow and going "Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres??", ah. You must not follow me on twitter. You haven't had to put up with me for the last six weeks, throwing in quotes and lines and just *buckets* of squee about what really is, the single greatest fanfiction I've ever read.

It is called "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality". The author's description on fanfiction.net is "Petunia married a scientist. Now rationalist!Harry enters the wizarding world armed with Enlightenment ideals and the experimental spirit... "

It was first brought to my attention by ncarraway when he twote the line "What part of 'get fitted for robes' sounded to you like 'please cast a Confundus Charm on the entire universe'!?" with a link, and I was intrigued. My first quote was from the fifth chapter, I wound up practically *devouring* all seven that were then up. By the end of the seventh chapter, I had decided that this was a hilarious way to look at the wizarding world, and was enjoying all the intelligent ideas floating around.

It was probably somewhere around the tenth chapter where I realized that the intelligent ideas were a part of it, but more importantly, I cared about the characters and wanted desperately to know what they did next.

The story is currently up to chapter 20, and while the intelligent ideas are still intelligent, and the characters are brilliant and wonderful, I now want desperately to know what the *plot* is going to do next. Especially after reading the spoiler-tastic author's notes for chapter 20, because the provide insight to a Voldemort who has actually read the evil-overlord list and is clever enough to understand it.

Oh.
My.
Gods.

So, let me just point out that I cannot recommend this fanfic highly enough. I love it enough that I actually went and reopened my account on ff.net, just so I could get e-mails whenever a new chapter was up --and believe me, my heart has soared every time one has. Foster and I just spent a highly enjoyable 20 minutes discussing the plot and ideas. I linked it to JoshZed, who has linked it to people, and at one point came to me with the ethical conundrum of "this has changed my thinking and the thinking of friends, is it wrong to link it to someone with the underlying plan of trying to change *their* thinking?"⁴. I gave it to @AlBri (SCD-Alex) one night, and he came to me the following Monday at dance to squee about how brilliant it was, and how he kept wanting to read more, rather than sleep.

This fanfic? Is really really good. I've been recommending it all over the place, to people in real life and on Twitter. Now it really is time I link it to all of you.

So go read. It really is worth the time.

~Sor
MOOP!

1: Not that I'm ANYWHERE close to either, of course, but what I know of Feynman, means that I pretty much want to do his taxes free of charge², and yes, I don't *care* that he's dead now and doesn't have taxes to do.

2: Warning, feminism.

3: See also Sean the suitpunk boy who was in my math class and who rendered me utterly tongue-tied, because not only was he a form of gorgeous I really like (suitpunk: rumpled hair, multiple piercings, t-shirt, vest and jacket, also, skinny as a rail) but because he was not only smarter than I am at multivar calc, he managed to nerd-snipe our teacher for a class period, which was hotter than hell.

If he's somehow reading this, hello, want to go get coffee sometime? I promise I will try not to babble at you too much!

4: It was a little more complicated than that, but without permission, I don't think I feel comfortable going into details.

COMMENT POLICY: No spoilers, please. Feel free to link squee-worthy lines of dialog (that was almost what this post was, just dozens of those) but don't disclose plot elements in here right now. Catch me on IM instead.

ETA: Jesus *Christ* that got long fast. Sorry guys. But the fanfic is JUST THAT GOOD!

ETA2 (11:11, 2010 05 10): I forgot to point out (and I feel like a dick for doing so) that there absolutely needs to be a trigger warning for chapter seven of the fanfic --a bad guy talking casually about rape specifically.

THOUGHTS WHILE PACKING:

1548:

Man, my folder of worship is getting *awesomely* full. One Comedity print, original art by Randy Milholland, Randall Munroe, and Jeph Jacques, a random commision of a dinosaur I bought at AnimeBoston, Hiro's milk mustache ad, the picture of me that Dominik used as a print for his portfolio, and my still alive index cards.

And that's not counting the Maryland folder of worship which contains an obscene amount of KattersArt, and my original sluggy art.

(For reference, the folder of worship is basically full of everything that goes on the wall of worship. So, not real posters, but Other Cool Things. I should put the ST article I ripped out of a magazine in there too.)


1557: Dude, that's James Bond? What the hell is James Bond music doing in my iTun...ohyeah. Thanks Talia!

1636: Unrelatedly to anything (I'm fine today, just a little stressed out) I find it really interesting that, one of the things I do when I'm trying really hard not to start crying in public, is to begin seeing how much of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy I can recite.

Granted, this somehow backfires as I originally began to learn hitchhikers as a self-masochistic way to illustrate the 2718.89 miles between me and my clone, and if I think too hard about that I'll be depressed, but still, just as a "shit shit I need to distract myself from everything in real life" it works like a charm.

1925: ...Ohyeah, I was working on this. Well, I mean, Ria was all "doof?" and dhs was all "I'll bribe you to come to Diesel with the offer of giving back your clothes" and so I went and got dinner with Ria and Mando (who recently dyed his hair BLUE and so now looks not unlike a character of mine) and then went to Diesel where I stayed for like...an hour or something. On the wicked plus side, I was finally properly/formally introduced to sunspiral, which is exciting. *adds him as a friend*

Now all I need to do is properly meet Cthulia and I'll be able to officially consider myself a Boston based fen.

2137: Did I really just spend the last two hours reorganizing my friends lists, again? Fuck. Me.

2224: You know what I want to know? I want to know how long it would've taken me to meet and become friends with Janny without the sluggy.net link. I think the only other person on my friends list who I could say pretty confidentally that I would meet without however I met them having happened is dan4th. And maybe very vaguely possibly Magus, but only insomuch I would've started to meet him at Balticon '06 rather than Origins '04

I'm attempting to clean out my gmail inbox, ie, archiving everything I'm done with. I had 1209 messages from 2008 sitting in my inbox waiting to be archived and about 4500 overall, I am *hilariously* bad at this, and not just because of the several hundred comment threads of doom I'm ignoring with mek.

OH! And I might be going to GenCon this year!! Mom's going, and if I can get the time off from wherever I will be working, there was an implication of me being able to booth babe for Joan. :D!

2237: So, something Tristan asked me right when we found out we were both virgos¹ was "So what's your neurosis?" I can't remember exactly what I answered --almost certainly my default compulsion, the fact that I clean my glasses overly often, and every single time I ever get into a conversation about OCD or neuroses. *speaking of which, cleans 'em now. Sigh*

But I think my current big one is the neck thing. I hate hate HATE having my neck touched, it freaks me out. Occasionally, I'll just freak out about the fact that I have a neck for no good damn reason which pisses me off, especially when I get the "ohgodohgod, need to have nothing near my neck, RIGHT NOW" Necklaces and collars I can take off. T-shirts are harder. Skin is impossible.

I was idly thinking about this, and about the fact that, when doing the cuddling/petting/caressing fan situation that I seem to find myself in a lot, if someone gets their hands too close to my neck, I will invariably move their hands down.

At some point, I am going to inadvertently move their hands down to far and accidentally cause someone to grope me. Stupid fucking neuroses.

2301: Oh, bitches!! So, I'm looking at my class schedule, and the creative writing class I really wanted to take because hey --Sorcy likes creative writing!-- takes place on Thursdays. From 6:45 to 9:15 PM.

Yeah, when is Concord based contra again? What's that? Exactly that time? What the fuck Belanie. What the fuck.

(So now I have to decide if I'm going to try and find another class to take instead or if I'm just going to not start doing contra up here until next January --I suspect one of the deciding factors in which I choose will be how much contra I get in over the summer.

Still though. Bitches.

0019: QUOTE OF THE DAY:

JoshZed:
this is more of the strong evidence that I'm really a 1 on the Kinsey scale
or close to it
I mean, if Randall doesn't do it for me, who will?

(Good lord, has the concept of sexing up Randall Munroe become a *theme* in my livejournal? That's either terrifying or awesome.)

Also, I am amused that I started this as 'thoughts while packing' and haven't actually packed anything in seven hours or so.

0101:

NEW Quote of the Day!

"Do I want to know why you are interested in my lovelife?"
"Because human interactions of all sort fascinate me."
"Any sort of interaction is fascinating if it involves cherry-flavored lube!"
[Immediate follow-up comment] "...........I did not just type that.........."

0112:

OHMYGOD.

Does the world love me? I don't actually know. But the world might!

But...not being at movie night.

But Satanic motherfucking Mechanics!

Ohhhh, I should not be forced to have decisions like this...

0222: Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, Sor? Fuck you. Go do your paper. Like...now. Just because you know damn well you're not going to be sleeping tonight is no reason to not get the paper done early.

P.S: What is your plan, to sleep on the floor or something eventually? You're incredibly fucking stupid, I hope you're aware of that. Also, a week of sleep-dep? What makes you think you'll even be able to potentially *begin* to make it to Rocky? Yeah, that's what I thought. Tell your terminal optimism to fuck off.

Allfornow

~Sor
MOOP!

1: heh, I almost wrote that as 'virgins'. Oops.

[Poll #1146113]

For reference:
Danica
Riemann

~Sor
MOOP!