Never been one to let the carrier drop

One of the things that I’ve been getting at least a little bit of enjoyment from lately is a bit of culture-jamming.

I have subscribed to a couple of the especially egregious conservative ‘mail-your-congressmen’ lists – and whenever they send out a request, I go to their site, edit the email so it says what I want it to say, and then send it. Somehow this is more fun than doing it through the liberal lists.. I get this feeling of subverting the system…

Their latest whine is about the sexual nature of recent Carls Jr. ads. Now I in general hate advertising, and so I haven’t actually *seen* the ads in question, but I have to ask: what sexually themed ad could possibly be worse than, for example, ‘Cops’? In terms of messages being sent, violence seems a far far worse one to me than sexuality, and I think it’s truly sick that there are so many people out there that disagree.

Then again, I’m oversensitive to violence. I’m still having trouble with various violent incidents that occured in my past – some of them in my *distant* past, others more recent – I don’t really understand why I’m not just completely over them, and it’s upsetting to me that I can’t just be appropriately manly, or at the very least forget them. But I think I do have to recognize that I am much more affected by violence than the average human and so probably I abhor certain types of violence in  fiction (i.e. the characters on Friends [or any number of other sitcoms] hitting each other) much more than most people do.

On the third paw, I read a book a while ago about abused men which had some astonishing statistics in it [of course, anyone can lie with statistics] so perhaps i’m not as alone as i think I am.

I apologize for the extreme weirdness of the past few posts. I’ve been wrestling with a lot of very dark thoughts – and I feel like bouncing a few ideas around might help me find the truth or falsehood of them, and also understand how I feel about them better. Please don’t take anything I say too seriously.

In other news, I am going to try to reduce the number of comments I put in LJ – so expect most responses from me to be via email from now on. I’m *very* annoyed at LiveJournal – I’m sad to see that my subscription doesn’t run out until March 2008..

Perhaps I should turn off crossposting, but then no one will ever read my journal 😉

I have no idea why I want to have readers. Perhaps because I want to think that my thoughts matter to someone. Perhaps because it makes me feel like a author, which is one of the professions I’ve always aspired oh-so-slightly to.  Who can say.

A addendum to the too good for this planet: And I’m not alone…

I’ve talked about thinking that earth is a really odd video game before, I think. I’m starting to think that the Forces Of Darkness [as I will refer to those who are intolerant, practice hatred, physically attack people, lock people up, fight wars over resources, or do Other Things I Don’t Like] are a software construct, intended to make the game challenging. Why do I think this? Well, even when I talk to my republican friends, they aren’t fans of the attributes I’ve listed above. In fact, I don’t know anyone who actually thinks they *should* be playing thug, locking people up for not using the same morals table they do..

Crazy? Heh. I’m just *starting* to let some of my darker thoughts out of the cage I tend to keep them in. Trust me, you haven’t seen anything remotely resembling crazy from me yet.

I would like to love everyone, regardless of race, gender, political leaning, or desire to throw me in jail / beat me / condemn me for who I am.  Unfortunately, I don’t seem to have yet quite achieved that level of detachment.  As a friend of mine once put it, I love half of everyone. I’m not very happy about that either. It’s a sad thing when you can’t even live up to your own ideals.

In other news, apparently LiveJournal has decided that they don’t care about losing users left, right, and center. I encourage any and all who are currently paying for accounts to notice the really horrid things LJ is doing and consider sending your $30 somewhere better – like a hosting provider? 😉 Or perhaps a homeless shelter, or a no-kill shelter for puppies, or your DVD collection.. or.. there have to be millions of things better to do with your money than giving it to a bunch of moralist, censoring.. never mind. I’ll stop now.

It would appear that once again, Kucinich is right down the middle for me. Unfortunately, that probably means he’s still unelectable.

At the risk of sounding like a arrogant asshole, I’m beginning to suspect I’m too good for this planet.. and I’m not very good.

This data is from Curious’s post, just formatted in a way I can grok better.

1) MSN movies got, I think, everything just about completely backwards. All the movies they hated I liked. Does this mean I’m atypical, or the reviewer is..

2) I’m temporarily in a cash crunch. It’s not a scary cash crunch (I’ve had far worse in the past two years), but it’s a little unnerving nonetheless. I’ve started to play the ‘no interest’ game of buying things on credit cards and then paying them off within 30 days.. we’ll see if it works out for me, or if I just end up with another stack of max’d credit cards.

3) After many faithful years of service, the Sceptre my parents gave me as a birthday present is being relegated to the garage to use as a monitor for the workbench, replaced by a 21″ diagonal Viewsonic LCD. It’s soooo pretty – and cost a pretty penny less than the sceptre did, too. Finally, more pixels – which, when doing Flex development, I really need – even having a desktop driving the sceptre and a 17″ laptop driving it’s own display wasn’t enough. I’m a li-itle bit worried about how well it’s going to work with my favorite video games, since it’s not 4:3, but hopefully it’ll be okay. If not, I think this graphics card supports multiple displays.. but unfortunately, my desk doesn’t. I suppose I could move the DJ mixer over to the far wall or something..

4) I continue to work on my proficiency with the XL-7. I’m seriously thinking of a WSHR broadcast, but I need to figure out a good time for all 3 of my listeners. Perhaps I will post a announcement in news on brig..

I was sad that no one took me up on my “pay it forward” response to Coriander, offering gifts to three people. I was thinking it was because my informational-in-nature gifts are perhaps not the most sought after chunks of data on the ‘net.

Kayti thinks that there were mitigating circumstances, and thusly we have a bet.

I have agreed to  double the potential gifts to six if six people (including her, so five others) will admit that they did want a gift from me, but didn’t post because they had already made the “pay it forward” offer in response to someone else, or refuse to post to live-journal as themselves, or didn’t want to commit with coming up with three gifts of their own, for any other reason that has nothing to do with not wanting a gift from me.

If six people including Kayti come forward saying that they want gifts from me now that the need to pay them forward is lifted, I will indeed make and give these gifts, which will again be informational in nature — stories or music or such-like — and send them to the email addresses these six people provide at some time during the next twelve months.   Send your requests as comments on my wordpress, on LJ, or as email.  You have two weeks from the timestamp on this post.

The Five Love Languages

My primary love language is probably
Physical Touch
with a secondary love language being
Words of Affirmation.

Complete set of results

Information

Unhappiness in relationships, according to Dr. Gary Chapman, is often due to the fact that we speak different love languages. Sometimes we don’t understand our partner’s requirements, or even our own. We all have a “love tank” that needs to be filled in order for us to express love to others, but there are different means by which our tank can be filled, and there are different ways that we can express love to others.

Take the quiz

So, recently I’ve been playing with this theory.. okay, so I play with it repeatedly and excessively, but recently I’ve been taking it to new heights..

I think I’m my own worst enemy.

Time and time again, I see places where I could have achived far more than I did, but I failed because I sabotoged myself. I mean, we start out with some of the more obvious things, like assuming that anyone in the ‘real world’ (as opposed to the network one) that tried to pick me up when I was single was actively hostile towards me, intending to make fun of me, use me as a foil for some really nefarious plot, or worse..

then we look further, to all the progress I could have made on the battery management project (and still can..) if I wouldn’t keep losing momentum right before a key/breakthrough point..

Then we look at my constant belief that I will be fired from any and/or all of my jobs at any time..

Well, okay, so that’s more expecting awful things to happen.. but sometimes it seems like I (inadvertently or not) go out of my way to make bad things happen, and I don’t want to.. I also don’t want to be so negative about everything.. recently, I was complaining about a rebate not being honored because one of the requisite pieces of paper wasn’t included because it wasn’t given to us at the store, and I mused aloud about whether the Sprint employees got bonuses for every rebate that couldn’t be collected because of missing paperwork, and a friend asked me if I got paid extra for every paranoid theory I came up with.

Well, maybe.

But, really, I find it really frustrating when people have nothing good to say about anything, and yet, I’m one of those people who never has anything good to say about anything. And I don’t like it, but I don’t really know how to change. Just once, I wish I could spend a few hours honestly – not self-kiddingly or because I thought it would protect me from the wrath of some higher power – looking at my life and appriceating the beauty, and the good spots, etc. I mean, I have wonderful toys, I have friends to play with (admittedly, I don’t see them very often, but..) there’s a good chance someday soon I’ll have a dog, or a cat, or both.. I’m even slowly getting my life to where it doesn’t bowl me over whenever I look at it funny.. but still, like Mr. Tanner, I only see the flaws.

I don’t want to be so negative any more.