The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

The tabs in Chrome are getting so small that I can’t even make out the little icons of the pages. That’s kind of crazy. Maybe I should leave some links for you here, so I can close some of these windows.

Do you like bananas? Do you like sculpture? Maybe these creepy sculptures would be up your alley, then.

If you answered yes to the second question, and not the first, than this might be more your style. The detail in this thing is kind of stupid.

If you’d like to attempt to explain why this picture of Applebloom cosplaying as JoJo exists, I would really like to hear it.

There’s no need, however, to explain the joy someone can receive by looking at Hulk Hogan’s face.

these are insane computer time’s we live in
wow.

I’m unsure why this wasn’t thought of sooner, really.

Computers in pop culture are amazing to compare.

Prepare for raddness.

Finally, Deptford continues to be hilarious with his comic. Do take a look.

Whew! I can see my tabs again! Thanks linkdump post! You saved the day again.

Ha, you came here, thinking you’d get content, but instead, you just received a list of links! This is the best April Fool EVER!

I dare you to stop watching this animated gif.

I dare you to watch this video involving ponies that has been stuck in my head since Val linked me to it and will not get out of there.

Wait, you wanted funny jokes? Maybe you’d like a humorous png image?

This says so much about Reginald’s outlook on the world.

This says so much about the world in general.

This image is posted without comment.

Oh, right, people were really mad at Scott Adams for being an amazingly sexist idiot because of this. I remember that now. Man, that tab has been open for awhile.

Very good – Attractive

Have a lovely Foolish April Day and remember: Friendship really is Magic.

Talking to Cara over a Tendercrisp Chicken Sandwich, I realized I don’t give a shit.

Okay, wait, no, let me try that again.

Talking to Cara over a Tendercrisp Chicken Sandwich, I realized that I don’t much give a shit about what other people think.

I’m sure I’ve said this before, but I am very based upon my own little world, my own little sphere of influence. If you’re in that sphere, man, I really care about you! You’re awesome. Ask me for favors, and hugs, and so on and so forth. I’ll do what I can. If you’re outside that sphere, though, I’m going to be polite because I am a polite person, but if you disagree with what I’m doing and it isn’t actively fucking you over, well, you can go die in a fire.

As real, actual changed based upon my gender shit nears actually occurring in my life, I find myself worrying like crazy about things like clothes. How am I going to look feminine? How am I going to project to every person I pass on campus that I am, in fact a woman? Thinking about this makes me sick, really. I have no idea how to dress like a woman. I don’t even particularly want to.

See, that last sentence is important. I don’t really particularly want to. I’m only doing it because other people expect it of me. And who are these other people? I don’t know. They certainly aren’t in my circle. Those in my circle don’t give a shit, because they know who I am. I don’t have to dress up for them. I mean, you know, as long as I’m not embarrassing, it’s not a big deal. They get it. I can be casual and comfortable.

Here’s the thing: now that my identity is not in jeopardy, I’m much less down on “masculine” styles and shit. The idea of being a woman who wears more “male” sorts of dress clothes and things has an appeal, whereas before, when I was more in a state of panic, the idea of doing that would have made me cry. Plus, I mean, fuck, what do other girls who play video games, blog on the internet, and play board games wear? Exactly what I wear on a daily basis, although maybe the t-shirts are, sometimes, of a different cut.

There are still some clothing-related things I need to get in order, but seriously, it’s not worth freaking out about something I don’t actually want to do. A huge part of the reason why I am doing all this stuff is because I want to have control over my life. Why I am letting my bid for freedom be caught up in having to adhere to completely different rules is beyond me. So let’s not do it, yeah? I like you, I don’t like wearing super-girly clothing, let’s go play You Don’t Know Jack. (Did I do that right, Advice Hot Dog?)

I am someone who enjoys a twitter or two. I mean, I look at my twitter all the time. I have a monitor partially dedicated to just displaying tweetdeck at all times.

Flipboard is quickly becoming my favorite way to look at twitter.

Okay, so the webpage and the demo video seem pretentious as fuck, and I’m sure anyone who has had an iPad before me already knows about Flipboard, but seriously, it’s kind of amazing. Twitter is, in many ways, the way I get the news that I give a shit about. I follow cool people who link cool things, and Flipboard will magically lay out a whole day’s worth of tweets and all the articles and pictures within it and make it easy to browse and see what I missed. I can tap on the blurbs to pull up the articles in the app, tap on pictures to make them full screen, and tap on videos to play them. It even, somehow, knows which tweets that don’t include content are the cooler ones, and will just put little statements in big boxes alongside the articles to make me chuckle. I have no idea how it does this. It rarely highlights tweets that aren’t amazing. Everything is laid out in a nice-looking way. It is really kind of magic. You just don’t often see a lot of thought being put into the design of things that aggregate content like this.

I don’t know if I would have paid for it before I tried it, but now that I have, I really would drop a few bucks on this. I don’t have to, of course, but I would. It is a fantastic way to read web content, to the point that I find myself opening it to look at what’s going on on twitter when I’m sitting in front of the computer here. I kind of wish I could plug in straight RSS feeds into it to create a separate little Flipboard magazine of all the blogs and stuff I read when I remember to. That would also be awesome. I’m not sure how to do that unless those blogs have twitter posts, though. Maybe I’m missing something. Maybe it’s just a different app for that sort of thing. Maybe I just need to follow the twitters of more blogs I like. But I wouldn’t enjoy just a straight stream of links… hm.

In any case, Flipboard is made for the platform, works flawlessly every time I use it, and is totally free. If that’s not a reason to grab it, I don’t know what is. I’m sure I’ll keep using it at least once a day. I mean, we’ll see of course, but yeah. Solid.

I guess I’m older now.

This is the second year in a row where I haven’t actually known what my age is at my birthday. Let me do some math… hmm… okay. 27 is the correct answer. I am 27. I think. Okay, I just double checked, I am definitely 27.

Milestones like this are normally either places for pep talks or pity parties on my part. I do that shit because it’s my blog, and I can do what I want with it. Doesn’t make it less stupid, though. I don’t think I want to do that this time, but who knows what’ll happen by the time I get to the end of this post.

This year, I did and am doing things for myself. I cleared my schedule so I’d get to relax on my birthday. I bought myself the gift I wanted. (Yes, that’s the stupid iPad.) I schemed ways to make sure Grandma was still involved.
Basically, I did what I needed to in order to make the day feel like something special. It wasn’t going to do it by itself. Nothing in life is going to just happen. I made it happen.

Trust is good. Depending on others is not good. There are people I trust more than anything in this world, who I love very much, but I learn that I should not depend on them. I should do things myself. I should make things happen myself. A job done by someone else is rarely completely right. There is always room for disappointment. The important things in life are those you tackle yourself. What you go after. What you create. What you are. Nobody else can figure that out or do that for you.

Is this a pep talk? Oh well.

Today is my day. I am making it as such. This life is my life. It will be as such. I’ll go back to working on that now. Have a great day.

I am totally writing this on an iPad, you all. I am living the dream.
Granted, the iPad is way more typeable than the iPod just because it is bigger. But I will not be making a habit of blogging from it. Especially since I am sitting in front of my computer as I write this blog post. I am awesome. But, you know, first night with it, gotta go with the gimmick.

Basically, I’m not having buyer’s remorse yet. The iPad is doing exactly what I wanted, and even more. It is a fun little time wasting device.

One thing I kind of forgot about was the multitasking. That should maybe be in quotation marks. Since my iPod can’t do it, I forgot about it. It works… Okay? Mostly it just seems to make me have to manually quit apps from the task manager.
There is one benefit, though. I can be on a Skype call and actually use other apps. It works in the background like real multitasking! This is the thing that shocked me when I found it out. I thought it would just work with the iPod and Pandora and have the fake switching for everything else. I was proved wrong.

That thing with the task manager is really my only complaint, though. It has scaled up all the iPhone games I’ve thrown at it so far like a champ, which is something I expected, but wasn’t sure about. The iPad games I have also work really well. I bought the iPad Plants vs Zombies for charity, and goodness, if I didn’t know better I would say the iPad was the lead version of that game. Multitouch makes the game a dream to play, and it was fantastic enough to begin with. I also splurged on the iPad version of Words with Friends. It’s kind of stupid, but is really is easier to play when you don’t have to zoom in on the board. Plus, I have a unified account, so I can play my turns on whatever is handy, which is how it should be.
(An aside: why aren’t more apps as good at multiplayer as Words with Friends? Developers have a model to copy! Make it happen!)

I will admit, as I write more on this keyboard, I am getting into a groove. It’s not going to replace a keyboard or anything like that. Not going to write a short story on it. But this is pretty solid when in landscape, really. I’m doing something similar to touch typing with not too many typos.

Anyway, there are some day 1 impressions. I am sure I will be writing more about the thing in the future. Sorry if you don’t care for that. It will probably be game reviews, though, so that’s a thing, yes?

Here’s the problem: I finally got my post to twitter thing fixed, and now I’m going and doing a stupid linkdump because I don’t have anything interesting to write about! I’m doing it all wrong! Oh well. At least tomorrow I’ll have some HORRIBLE iPAD IMPRESSIONS to bother you with. For now, cool links! Let’s empty those open tabs!

Mr. Nedroid Man is too hilarious and amazing, and this tumblr post proves it. Also this twitter post. Basically, anything he does.

This is a pig wearing boots. That’s really all there is to it. Just enjoy it.

I watched this neat little video that flies you through the history of titles in movies. It’s pretty cool.

I always give my students a useless link to look at to help them procrastinate every week. This was this week’s. It’s also Shauna-approved, so that’s lovely as well!

I don’t know if this is a real ad or not, but fuck, it really should be.

Finally, bringing it back around to the iPad world, here’s the best review of the iPad 2 I’ve seen. Mostly because it’s cute as fuck.

Have a good day, everyone.

Yeah, depressed bitching today, move along, nothing interesting to see.

There’s a saying along the lines of “work expands to fill the available space.” I kind of feel that way about my depression. If I have more time, it expands outward to fill all available time. It’s more diluted that way, of course, and not hitting me as a strong wave of panic or other issue, but it can still totally wreck my shit. I’ve had free time this week, and that’s nice, but I’m mostly spent it feeling awful, getting nothing done, and generally wanting to give up on life.

I’m just not sure what I can do. I tell people I don’t feel in control, and they tell me I am in control. I tell people I feel like I’m going to collapse in on myself, and I’m not on solid ground, and they tell me I am. I tell them I can’t do anything right and they tell me I do all kinds of things right. Do I really feel like shit? Surely not. I’m sure they’d tell me otherwise.

You can’t get anything done without smashing things. There’s no nice way to get anything done. Everyone will see you the way they want to see you unless you punch them in the fucking face, shatter their reality bubble, and force your way of thinking onto them. Maybe that’s justified sometimes when the reason you’re doing it is good. When you’re trying to make things better. When, in the short term you make people bleed so that in the long run they can be safer and happier.
But when what you want to change is people recognizing your weakness, and that you need help, well, what do you do? You can smash, but what’s the point in that? You’re weakening those who can help you for selfish purposes. It’s stupid. It serves no purpose. So you sit, isolated, and rot, unable to do anything.

I don’t know why I was using the second person there. I’m obviously talking about me.

Nobody can pull me out of my funk and fix my life but me. That’s obvious. I’m not wanting a magic wand, because a magic wand simply does not exist. However, how can I confront something everyone thinks doesn’t exist? How can I get advice and support in fixing things nobody else can see? How can I face up to what I need to do when everyone denies I need to do anything?

I have no idea. It would be nice to know.

Here’s a tale of me being super stupid.

So my birthday is coming up, and the more I thought about it, the more I just wanted to get the stupid iPad and be done with it, so I can have fun fucking around with my expensive toy. All the reviews of the iPad 2 suggested that it was a nice upgrade, but not super necessary, so I started thinking I should just grab a used iPad 1, save some money, and still get to play with my stuff. I mean, my iPod Touch is 2 generations old now, and is still playing games just fine (though they take awhile to load sometimes). The iPad 1 is playing iPhone 4 level games with no issues, so it should be fine for awhile yet.

Where do you buy used electronics? Well, eBay, I suppose.

So I went to eBay, and I started looking at stuff. Prices were about where I expected, or so it seemed, so I started bidding. However, I soon realized that people on eBay are at least as awful as I remember. With 20 seconds left, the price of every one of these used iPads would jump up 40 bucks instantly. Still, I kept trying and trying. I even started bidding on the 32 gig models, figuring they’d actually be less in demand than the 16 gig cheap ones. I was right on that one, but I still kept failing.

38 failures later, I was kind of frustrated. However, I was angry at it, and that meant I couldn’t give up. I bid on a new auction, and it immediately shot up to my max price, but stayed there. “There’s no way that one won’t get sniped for 5 bucks more,” I thought, “I’ll just bid on another one then and call that one a loss.”

You can see where this is going.

Of course, with my luck, I won two iPads at the same time.
I could hear Essner’s voice in my ear mocking me for owning not one, but two iPads.

I pounded my head on the desk, and started doing damage control. Things will work out. I can either resell it, or if negotiations with the seller go well, I’ll just pay them a small fee and not buy the second iPad. But man, it’s just another stupid mistake on top of everything else going on in my life.

I guess it makes a story, though.

I feel like shit right now, and instead of writing a bunch of depressing bullshit, here’s some links! Everyone loves links, right? It’s the very backbone of our modern computing age!

This is the best chainsawsuit of recent memory. Really made me laugh.

I was also very pleased by this picture, though it has bunnies and foxes, so I’m kind of biased.

I don’t think there has ever been a more accurate comic created than this one right here.

In times of depression, it’s important to remember cuteness. Incredibly savage, bloodthirsty cuteness.

I’m not much of a fan of CollegeHumor in general, but when you make a fairly accurate and wonderful-looking Wes Anderson Spoof about Star Fox, well, I am there.

Mary Worth, however, does not approve.