Beable and Observable

My profile page was crawled, ftw!

I will rebuild!

Hello Dreamwidth! I haven't been ignoring you , just mostly reading/skimming and spending more time in agonyaunts.

But I have not-Beable email that is worthy of good sport and I think at the very least foms will appreciate this one.


So today in the email of Not-Beable I received an email in French from somebody in Israel talking about logistics about some guy named Jeremy renting their short-term rental. It sounds like they were negotiating ancilliary charges such as cleaning, air conditioning and concierge fees. Where they were discussing money they used the abbreviation "sh" (for shekels).

Clearly this needs a reply (their email and a google translation will be posted in the comment).

I plan to send back the following. Obviously I also need to translate it into French - I have not decided whether it would be funnier to translate it into French and send them my crappy translation or to let Google do it and send them Google's.

Hi Jeremy,

You should try to call Not-Beable back again hopefully with more luck than sending me email because I have no idea what you are talking about.

I believe that if you are Jeremy the percentage is 30% and if you are not Jeremy the percentage is 40% but I cannot confirm the percentage since I don't know what you are talking about.

When you rent for 600 sh I think you need to get more librarians involved to do more of the shushing. I don't know why you took 320 shh away , maybe look for more librarians?

Librarians will work 10 days a week, except on weeks that include Shabbat in which case they will only work 6 days a week (or 5 and a half). Please do not overwork the librarians.

If nothing is left after paying for air conditioning you should move someplace cooler because I don't really think that air conditioning should bankrupt you.

Since I've never met you and have no idea why you are contacting me , I'm not sure that we are friends and we certainly not ancient collaborators (I am not that old).

But have an excellent day, which I hope will be less worse if you hire enough librarians to handle all the shhhh you need above.


Good day!

So one of the recent threads over in agonyaunt has been about midlife crises and I am strongly considering some midlife crises spending that I am currently justifying to myself as a combination of "my mortgage is done" and "I'm unlikely to get married anytime soon, so if I want to pick out a china pattern and have good dishes I need to do that myself".

I've been coveting CalamityWare for almost four years. Four years ago I didn't engage in this desire because shipping to Canada is hella expensive and I wasn't willing to travel to the US. I figured future me would buy some once the US had changed enough for me to be willing to consider travel again and I'd have a nice weekend in Syracuse or Ithica and use that to bring home my duty-free new dishes.
I also figured future me would wait until I wasn't spending tonnes of money on mortgage payments.

I'm not willing to travel to the US currently. I sometimes feel like I don't recognize the US currently, but I finished my mortgage last January and I still covet CalamityWare. I asked my mother if she thought it would be weird to buy nice dishes and use them for every day.

I think the part that feels weird is just unpacking some dumb unspoken rule that I apparently internalized about how "this is a thing people buy for you get married" and not "this is a thing you buy for yourself". But my parents have offered to cover the shipping as my birthday/Channukah present if I'm serious and I am 98% seriously considering it (the other 2% needs to look up the custom rules for porcelain to figure out whether the "these are the added costs I may be risking" feel worth it).

I am massively amused reading the comments on A03’s attempt to channel that, like, not every work on A03 is literally a Hugo Winner (link to Fairestcat’s post which has all the links: https://fairestcat.dreamwidth.org/662897.html)

But now I have a question for next year:
Would the following story count as a short story nominee or a related works nominee?

https://archiveofourown.org/collections/anonymous/works/20670977

May 17, 2018 8:00 am

Last night was my first Sunday visit to my parents since the car went away.

Because it's close by for them to collect me from Baseline station, we agreed that I would bus to/from Baseline and they'd pick me up there, rather than my booking a vrtucar and paying hourly for it to just sit in their driveway for several hours since I'm usually there for 4-5 hours when I visit.

On Saturday my mother called to confirm that they were picking me up at Baseline and driving me home. I corrected that to "driving me back to Baseline" and it turns out that my mother somehow hadn't realized that in the 15+ past years of living in downtown Ottawa, I walk places. At night. Like, for example, 1-2 blocks home from the bus stop. Or 800m from a friend's house :-D :-D

Although I did end up getting a ride all the way home last night after all: my parents have been trying to clean up their storeroom, and one of the things they unearthed was the small set of teacups/saucers my mom has been promising me for many years. They're now at my house, they are absolutely beautiful (if one is a fan of porcelain tea cups), and clearly I need to hold a tea party in the next couple of months to celebrate.

All my comments are belong to us!

Given that the recent TOS isn't just the usual "who reads the TOS" stuff but has the potential to cause real harm, I will no longer be cross-posting to LJ, or actively reading it much.

Specifically: LJ is now fully housed in Russia, and the most recent TOS affirms that it operates under Russian law - including laws restricting LBGTQ content and political discourse.

(https://boingboing.net/2017/04/08/six-to-end.html )

I'm beable on Dreamwidth and have been cross-posting for awhile.

Setting up a Dreamwidth account is easy, the interface is similar to LJ, and you can import your LJ into DW if you want to preserve a sense of history for your journal.

I encourage you all to come join me there.

I feel so retro posting a meme!

Gacked from dagibbs and indirectly from sabotabby - sabotabby had a bigger list of questions, some of which I found more entertaining than the subset that dagibbs posted.

( Insert cutting remarks about following memes here )

So My friend S and I had the following conversation by SMS at lunch
today:

S: I just got catcalled? Praised?? LOL
S: On my bike, waiting for a turn signal, and I hear "hey girl", I turned my head before I heard the rest. Saw the person in the car pull up next to me with a big grin and thumbs up and realized the rest of it was "way to use your hand signal" hahaha

Me: Praised sounds like an oversell.
Me: Actually that sounds humourous enough to be less creepy.

S: Well apparently my hand signals are noteworthy.

Me: Hey girl, you breath oxygen like a pro.

S: Lmfao

Me: Hey girl, you're mitochondria is really working it
Me: Hey girl, entropy ain't got nothing on you!
Me: I think I should start marketing my mad skillz to pick up artists

S: I can tell this is gonna be a meme

Me: We need art! Get me the best photo shoppers in ALL the land!

S: So long as I can be in your marketing video. LOL
S: We could do it with the great masterpieces ... Birth of Venus

Me: Lol does the birth of Venus breathe?

S: Hmm, good point, I don't think so. I'll have to think on this project awhile.

Me: Hey Girl, you keep being your hydrated self and visiting that portapotty!
Me: #IKnowSexy

S: I'm gonna choke on my lunch.
S: Hey girl, you pressed that elevator button like a pro.
S: Hey sexy, I love how you showed up for work today.
S: Hey sugar, way to go dipping that fry in that ketchup

Me: I think we need to stick with Hey Girl
Me: It's classic for a reason

S: Hey girl, the way you flinch when I call you girl makes my heart soar
S: Hey girl, your ability to spot a classic meme is on fleek

Me: I am so not cool[1]

S: Hey girl keep being your awesome not-cool self

At this point we diverged a little into talking about where each of us was having lunch (not included because of identifying information), and in the course of that, S speculated that the reason the 3 guys one table over had so far managed to refrain from commenting on how awesome her mitochondria was because they were clearly members of the clergy.

Me: Girl, they don't know what they're missing.
Me: You gave the bestest mitochondria
Me: Have. Damn autocorrect.

S: I literally in the literalest sense am lmfao in this restaurant
S: Gave works even better it sounds naughty

Me: lol. We are so awesome we need to sell this awesome.
Me: T-shirts

S: Hey girl if only you were a boy

Me: Jewellery
Me: Thong underwear[2]
Me: Thong sandals

S: Stawp. Stawp or they're going to kick my ass out.

Me: I'm laughing so hard I can't breathe
Me: Postage Stamps?

S: Well you can trademark sayings and them sell all that stuff on redbubble
S: Maybe not postage stamps
S: But miniskirts yes

Me: Postage stamp sized skirts

S: I can add these sayings to the banana skirt!
S: Ok I'm stepping away from this phone now

Me: Ok seriously if I remove identifying info can I post this to my blog?


1: I'm not, because I blinked at the word fleek
2: This got lost in the visual transcript because scrolled to overzelously in my phone

( Alternatively, our SMS Conversation in a series of screenshots )

There a bunch of things that I've been meaning to post about: general life update, recommending and reviewing Sense8, my cousin's wedding in California, and my own trip to London and Dublin this past September.

This is not any of those posts. You see, this morning in the shower I started thinking about Anne Shirley: The Vampire Slayer. And it occurred to me that while it was perfectly obvious *to me* that Anne's watcher had been Marilla Cuthbert, that there may many (wrong) people out there who believe that because Ann and Matthew are kindred spirits, that Matthew was her watcher.

Kinda like the whole "there are 10 types of people in the world. Those who make dumb binary joke comparisions, and those who don't." But I digress.

SO I have decided that finding out what other people think about who Anne's watcher was is of the utmost importance, and hence deserves a poll.




Livejournal Post: http://beable.livejournal.com/787914.html

bunsen_h figured out what the pop-rocks plant actually was:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acmella_oleracea

Imagine if the aliens from Galaxy Quest had watched the Mad Max movies instead.

So this is a thing that happened:

http://www.cbc.ca/m/news/canada/montreal/chris-lloyd-conservative-candidate-messing-with-party-1.3069653

(Edit: or http://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/conservative-candidate-resigns-intended-to-mess-with-federal-tories-1.2370216 for a newer article covering this, since that first link seems to be not working)


I think my favourite part is not that he was vetted with this being missed, or that he became the president of his local riding association. Although both of these things are awesome.

No, my favourite part is where he has apparently been writing a letter a day (http://dearpm.blogspot.ca/) to the Prime Minister's office since 2001.

Now in the past, others who used to work with government correspondence and I have had many conversations on the importance of making sure one's communication with one's government is taken seriously.

For example, a letter hand-written in crayon shows that extra effort that a printed letter (could be plagiarized!) - or worse an e-mail - simply cannot convey. Also crayon is harder to write with, so it will be taken even more seriously than a letter written in marker, pen, or pencil.

However, one should never use more than two colours of crayon, because then they will just think you are a crackpot and won't take you seriously.

So I want to know:

1) Has Chris Lloyd been diligent in writing his letters to the Prime Minister's Office in crayon?
2) Has he resisted the urge to be overly dramatic and kept all his letters to two colours or less?

While each election would have given him a clean slate of staff handling his letters, it doesn't take long for a name to become familiar and I'm sure he wants his daily letters to be taken seriously, so these considerations are even more important.

[Poll #2009049]

My dad cc'd me on the following e-mail he sent to ambiviolent:

Thank you for your get well card. You were entirely correct in your assumption that a card portraying a bear would be less scary than a personal visit; this is particularly true for me as we characterize my beloved wife (beable's mom) as a bear.

Unfortunately I saw your return address on the envelope and I immediately became so scared that I was unable to look at or read your thoughtful card. Best wishes.

beable's dad

Any conversation that includes the question "aren't you glad you phoned me" is definitely doomed.

I just phoned my mother back, and among other things she has found a new place to go for eyebrow waxing run by a nice Russian Jewish aesthetician who was as gentle with her skin as that nice lady at the salon in Toronto when my mom first tried eyebrow waxing a few months ago.

Anyways, so the aesthetician has a son-in-law, a nice Lebanese (or it might have been Portuguese) boy, he also works in IT, also downtown, and maybe I know him? (Answer: nope, didn't recognize the name)

This nice son-in-law has a friend, a fine boy, who, after quizzing my mom about her lovely daughter, the aesthetician thinks would be perfect for me (the nice IT worker who lives in a condo downtown) so my mom wants me to go get my eyebrows waxes at this salon so that I may be fixed up with this good boy, this fine boy who is friends with the aesthetician's son-in-law and would be perfect for a lovely downtown-dwelling, independent, IT worker such as myself.

She (the aesthetician) also apparently makes very good perogies. My mom thinks I should go for the perogies if nothing else.

This is why I'm doomed. Not one, but TWO! TWO! Jewish mothers involved. (Although one is technically the mother-in-law of the friend rather than the mother).

On the other hand, perogies! I wonder if this nice boy, this fine boy, would enjoy the irony of going to House of Targ for a first date?

Make one joke about paramilitarized queries on my Facebook page (well ok, it was one joke on mine, and a bit of Blade-Runner related silliness on someone else's^[1]) and suddenly my advertising column filled with a bunch of Canadian Armed Forces recruitment type of links.


Clearly I need to use the new-found power to see how weird I can get my advertising profile to be.


- -

[1] I have seen things you people wouldn't believe. Paramilitarized queries on fire off the MySQL library of Python. I watched indices wither to dust near the tables. All those databases will be lost in time, like my application. Time to vi.^[2]
[2] What is it about unix admins that causes them to immediately think of vi when trying to rhyme or replace die?^[3]
[3] I shot a man in Reno, just so I'd learn vi.
My name is Inigo Montoya. You kill -9 my process. Prepare to vi.

According to my dad, that was a Nixon thing, not a JFK thing.

FYI.

If you have ever wander what a dancing artillery canon would look like, I present:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgBhntKnGdE




The dance is Saint Barbara's Canon: a canon named after St Barbara (the patron saint of artillery).

specifically a new icon specific to *headdesk*ing at other people (as opposed to myself).