MLIA

''Last night some friends and I went to Toys R Us at midnight with about a thousand other eager Black Friday shoppers. Except we weren't there to shop. We were dressed as Spartans, and we walked up and down the line, and shouted out a speech encouraging our fellow warriors to stay strong and take heart in the upcoming battle for their children's happiness. MLIA''


I am SO doing that next year. 


Seriously.

Irony Abounds

I just tried to go to the blog of a friend of mine, but I got a page about the link being broken. The blog title starts with "Problematic".

Irony is a boundin' over the hills like a majestic jackalope.

I always thought that irony would look like a jackalope when it abounds. I think this came from watching that Pixar short about a jackalope called "Boundin'". I didn't really like that short much, though... I think that the one about a magic act that just came out with WALL-E is much better.

Me Online #3

#THREE: goulash

Last year I was bored so I tricked a music website into thinking that I was a band.

http://www.mp3.com/artist/goulash/summary/

I basically became an artist on the website by finding the one sub-sub-sub genre that requires the least talent and hard work ("lo-fi indy alternative anti-folk music", in case anyone's wondering) and then (badly) recorded myself saying very weird poems in a sing-song manner.

Now the website thinks I'm a professional artist. ... yeah. I also fooled PureVolume.com, a slightly more prestigious music site, with the help of my account on mp3.com, and gained an account there. Last.fm is a little harder, so I haven't bothered to get onto it.


This is the last in this series of posts, so if you guys were getting bored with hearing of my exploits, fear not. You're safe, or at least until I do something else significant on the internet.

Labels

I have added an option to let viewers see the sundry labels that I have used on my posts. They're really weird and random, so I thought I'd share the fun.

Let's play a game...

Quick! Think of the next thing in the sequence!

Pirates

Haunted Mansion

Lost Island of the Dinosaurs and Cavemen

Moon Journy

~?~

Merry Christmas

I'm thinking of completing those tags that I have as a Christmas present for you all.... What do you think? Too soon? Maybe I should wait until Easter.

Bartitsu: the Steampunk Martial Art

http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/mamatas_12_09/

Apparently, there is a type of martial art that modifies jujutsu to incorporate the walking canes carried by gentlemen of the Victorian era.

An except from the article explains it well:

"Bartitsu was the brainchild of Edward Barton-Wright, an English engineer who, while in Japan, was taken with a demonstration of jujutsu—itself almost a catch-all term for systems of Japanese grappling with a dash of striking. He quickly took up the art himself. After learning a smattering of judo (sport-oriented grappling) as well, he returned to England and soon set about making himself a public expert on matters of self-defense for the urban upper classes. Barton-Wright's earliest public demonstrations and publications displayed simple jujutsu skills, but soon he expanded his system. Adding boxing, savate (French kickboxing), canne de combat, and a smattering of Western wrestling styles to the Eastern arts, Barton-Wright unveiled bartitsu to the world in 1898.
One could call bartitsu the first modern mixed-martial art and it was certainly one of the first self-conscious attempts to mix Western and Eastern self-defense techniques. Barton-Wright recognized that fights have various ranges. The cane—and no gentlemen ever went without a walking stick of some sort—extends one's reach and lets a fellow defeat an opponent without dirtying his hands or coat. At a closer range the fist and foot come into play, and jujutsu and wrestling are necessary to deal with one's opponent’s boxing skills."

That's right, it's a real live martial art perfect for steampunk stories. I'll certainly have to incorporate it into mine...

These Pretzels Are Making Me Thirsty

They're all from Unrelated Captions.

I like 'em.

You Are Awesome

http://iamawesome.com/

11

I just noticed that according to my calendar, over in the right-hand column, I have 11 posts during the months of November and October. I also have 1 post each for August, September, and December.

Which struck me as oddly entertaining.

.

..

...

Well, you don't have to look so unimpressed. Gosh.

(Sadly, this post will make 2 for December, but I can always do another 9 after this one...)

Youtubers...

...are some of the stupidest people on the internet. It's like all the intelligent people know to stay away from posting on the videos. Instead, the only two types left are the stupid people who think that they're smart and the people who was just plain stupid. And three fourths of the time, they're simply insulting each other.

Now, one of the phrases that the ones who think they're smart are fond of repeating whenever the stupider ones complain about a video is, "If you don't like it, you don't have to watch it."

On the surface, this seems like an intelligent statement. But think about it some more. If that advice were followed, all the videos on Youtube would have glowing recommendations, regardless of how good they were. Telling people to leave when they don't like something doesn't actually make sense. People should be able to give their opinion, regardless of whether it said opinion fell out of the stupid tree and hit every branch on the way down.

So that's my rant on Youtube posters.

...

Actually, let me keep going. They have a collective intellect only rivaled only by garden tools. Their IQs are the same as the room temperature. On a cold day. There are enough idiots on Youtube to supply several billion villages. If you gave them a penny for their thoughts, you'd get change. Most of them have minds like a steel trap: rusty and illegal in 37 states. If you put one of their brains on the edge of a razor blade, it would be like putting a BB on a four-lane highway. They would all lose a debate with a doorknob, and you can tell by watching them arguing, since that's about how smart they are.

And I'm allowed to insult them because I do it in funny ways. >nod<

Don't worry, I'll try to make my next post a little less negative and condemning.