I'm working on deleting duplicated posts that occurred from importing my journal from LJ, and came across one from about 4+ years ago which talked about... well, now I might call it the opposite of "first world problem"... "first world gratitude", maybe?

The thrust of the post was about what taking a shower here ultimately involves: take 20-40 gallons or so of perfectly good drinking water, contaminate it with things that make it undrinkable (soap, etc.), and then cast it off as waste.

I mean, wow.

Mindful that the so-called "third world" is certainly not homogenous, but in any case I get the idea that supplies of clean water are still a major problem in many areas of the world. So, um. In tumblr analogy to "my creys", perhaps "my gratitudes"?

100 _1 Hooks, Bell.
245 10 We real cool : ǂb Black men and masculinity / ǂc Bell Hooks.

I find it interesting and somewhat irritating that cataloging practice apparently denies bell hooks her preferred capitalization of her name. I can understand why perhaps the authority file, which controls the form of the name found in the 100 field, needs to be standardized on the "usual" capitalization for data-entry-conformity reasons (as indeed the Wikipedia article I linked to capitalizes "Bell" in the URL). But the statement of responsibility (the part after "/ ǂc" in the 245 field) is supposed to be as on the item, with the exception of dropping titles (only names as such are used). It's lowercased in the LC Cataloging-in-Publication block on the back of the title page, which is where the data for these fields usually gets initially slurped from, which probably means someone in the train DLC ǂb eng ǂc DLC ǂd UKM ǂd BAKER ǂd BTCTA ǂd YDXCP ǂd OCLCQ ǂd DEBBG ǂd OCL ǂd OCLCQ ǂd RV8 changed it at some point.* Pfeh.

I wonder if the upcoming switch from AACR2 to RDA**, which is really big on "transcribe what you see" to the point that people transcribe TITLE PAGE STUFF IN ALL CAPS JUST THAT WAY MAKING IT RATHER HARD TO READ, will allow "bell hooks" in this instance.

I think I may change it in our local copy of the record anyway. If it was good enough for LC when providing the CIP block, it's good enough for me.

--

* Except for "eng", which is a language code, these are called "OCLC symbols" and identify various cataloging institutions.

** Sets of cataloging rules. Don't worry about it.

I've heard of the dawn chorus, but the crow population of De Anza College - or at least that part which occupies certain trees near the corner of this building - seems to have taken up doing a dusk chorus raucous.^* ruckus.^**

(I was about to say "you could almost set your watch by..." until I realized that it wasn't the fact that it was 6 PM, because a few weeks ago this was happening at 6:30 PM. It's that the sun is setting. Dur-hay.)

It's kinda neat.

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* BE AMAZED as arethinn daringly nouns adjectives!

** edit: Duh. There was already a suitable noun. And "dusk ruckus" is assonant and sounds cool.

"Despite a lack of natural ability, I did have the one element necessary to all early creativity: naivete, that fabulous quality that keeps you from knowing just how unsuited you are for what you are about to do."

--Steve Martin, Born Standing Up

Trufax. All the better experiences of my life that I can think of over the past ten years or so were born from not having any real clue that I might be Doing It Wrong.

(it's best not to inquire too deeply about our current screen names.)

T-Rex FlavrCrunchZ 2K10 says:
the internet is like the mirror of erised

The God Damn Echo Locating Nocturnal Mammal Man says:
oh?

T-Rex FlavrCrunchZ 2K10 says:
but instead of giving me neither knowledge nor truth, it gives me neither love nor worth
and men have wasted away in front of it
...or gotten quite fat, but you know what I mean

Re: http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=1448

Man, I know just what Marten's talking about with that scene where Judge Doom sticks the cartoon shoe in the Dip. I don't burst out in tears, but I want to. Mostly I just can't look. Something about the oh god please no of she shoe's expression always hits me so hard and I have to hide my eyes and try not to listen.

I've been perusing PDF's I made of my old high school zine Lucida 10 as I combine them into one-PDF-per-issue rather than one-per-page (and the scans are kind of bad, too; I can only assume I must have saved them as PDF from Photoshop at a time years ago when I didn't also have Acrobat and didn't know about PDF stitching software), and came across this perplexing little dedication in the masthead of issue 3:

This issue of Lucida 10 is dedicated to the memory of Lisa (Wh. Wiz) and Mike (Bl. Wiz), who turned themselves to stone, and Miranda and Morrey, who got fried by Nyarlathotep.

The part about Miranda and Morrey, although I don't remember this specific instance, is almost certainly a reference to a game of Call of Cthulhu, which we played a lot of in high school. (Miranda, I think, was Sarah's character's name. Morrey was probably one of the guys, Mike, Aaron, or Ehren most likely since Jeff was the gamemaster -- what do they call it in CoC -- "Keeper"?)

The first part is what is confusing me. On one level it is obviously (at least, nowadays I think it is obvious; at the time I wasn't into console RPGs in the slightest) referring to Final Fantasy IV where the twin kids Palom and Porom (black mage and white mage) do this to save the rest of the party's asses. I think it might still be referring to a Cthulhu game, in which I suppose my character and Mike's character got petrified for some reason (probably shortly before Nyarlathotep did his frying), and either at the time or after the fact someone made a Final Fantasy reference out of it. Or it might be the case that someone had an FFIV game going and had either renamed the characters thusly (can you do that in IV? I forget) or they were getting so referred to (why?) among the group of people watching the playing (which probably included me, although the game apparently made no impression on my brain).

In short, I really no longer know what's going on there. It's a part of my history simply lost to memory. Nor can I fathom why I would choose to write it into the masthead (aside from the major crush I had on Michael).

Does anyone ever do (very) "pre-natal" horoscopes based on a person's date of conception, vs. birth? Aside from the fact that you can calculate one for any moment in time you like -- I mean for personality analysis or anything else astrology is usually applied to. It would always be approximate, but I'm sure for some people their date of conception, and maybe even time, could be pinpointed rather accurately.

The mind may go, but the heart endures long, and knows the best truths.