Internet

Cleverbot is supposedly a chat AI that 'learns' to make more clever, human-like responses as people type to it. Very entertaining to talk to, even though sometimes I half suspect there's real people typing back. The fun/amusing thing is that (unless someone's debunked it, and I'm pretty sure Jon would've found it if they did, hehe) I'll never really know!

But it's a fun diversion. You'll find that it's pretty well-versed in internet memes already -- for example I think it can follow along with almost the entirety of Rick Astley's "Never gonna give you up" :P and it knows about things like "over 9000!" and "This is Sparta!" too. Totally useless but amusing knowledge.

And lastly (for tonight), here's some amusing "lookit us be stupid on OpenRPG!" screenshots.

Where da Hoot? - named so 'cause of the shoop da whoop face Jon and I drew and my monocle (suspiciously missing an ORLY owl.) This was the result of us testing out the whiteboard and degenerating into intarweb lulz.

Entertainment and Ataraxia - proof that we did, indeed, use OpenRPG to play hangman. I would've only saved one example of this, except "Ataraxia" amuses for being both Kalli's hangman word and the name of her Maple Story guild that she ran. XD Dork points! (I think Jon got his for recognizing the word as one of Raja's skillz in Phantasy Star 4. Mwahaha.)

I have no other words for this. Except the three of us ought to get together to play stuff online some more. XD

Why am I up?! well, at least partially because I'm waiting on email from HostForWeb, they're adding a reverse DNS record for my server's hostname, since it kept resolving (in certain apps) as 'unknown.hostforweb.net'. I am kinda DNS-dumb so I ended up asking the techs to do it for me. ^^;

Ah, and I got the email just now. Working with HFW has been painless more often than not for me, so I'm always glad to see their customer service continues to be swift.

Meanwhile I was helping my sis test her shell and FTP accounts (they work fine! woo!) and poking around at Anonymous / Scientology protest videos. It's interesting seeing how many people have gathered together at those protests, and the dedication of Anonymous to continue them. Who knows who will come out on top.

One of the videos I saw had this awesome song called "Heavyweight" by Infected Mushroom, an Israeli trance band. This song is 8 minutes of pure awesome to my ears. I want to hear more. I have my eye on their new album now. ;.;

I also recently got Diamanda's Guilty Guilty Guilty, more impressions when I'm not so sleepy / busy.

Actually, I was (nearly) caught a couple times for April Fools.

But I mostly just spent my time away from anyone and anywhere I'd be fooled.

The IGN Zelda trailer got me for a few seconds. :P

The other one is on PSUPedia, they actually had a post there claiming two things: that the JP and US/EU servers would be merged (yeah right) and that there'd be a Guardians arena mission called "Guardians Rivalry" (neet idea, but I didn't buy it, since I never heard of it happening on JP servers).

So... I guess my April Fools was pretty boring! :D (and thanks for the heads up on the new Hero's Journey info.)

Lately I've had this little habit of amusing myself with Answerbag. My nick there is an unrecognizable one (part of my desire to create a sekrit online persona.) I just randomly answer stuff on a whim, usually social, depression, sometimes sexual related questions. I haven't really posted questions, don't seem to have much luck with it.

It's an odd site. It's sort of a message board, and sort of a Q&A, sort of a community to meet people, sort of a self-help group... All the answers get rated, and I was boggled when I got a negative rating on something because I (very gently, I thought) suggested that a poster not use "ur" for "your" or "urself" for "yourself".

Actually, it bothered me quite a lot because it tanked my positive % for a while. Arbitrary voting, I think, might not be a good idea. After all, if a person decides they're insulted by you they can just go around negative-voting everything you write. I suppose that's what the mods are for, though.

Dunno if it's something I'll stick with doing, but it's at least distracted me from being depressed now and then. Mmm, but I should get to sleep so I can catch the bus to Montreal early, and more importantly rested, in the morning.

Well, later today (as in 1 pm or so) I have an immigration meeting. Jon said it's just to give them more documents. *sigh* Still slow as ever. But it's better than no progress at all, I suppose. I hope we will get some good news besides that, but I'm trying not to get my hopes up. :/

Meanwhile, I've been thinking (too much in my head NOT to write, lately)...

I wonder sometimes if my site is worth all this trouble. I mean, I always have to be careful of spamming and hacking. I've put so many measures to prevent that.

But this is just a little site that is nothing but me rambling about hobbies and how much life sucks. I get a lot of traffic on this site, for something that's just a personal thing. I think sometimes that I ought to set up robots.txt to remove my site from Google and other search engines. (I still need to finish reorganizing my tags in the first place, though. Gah, lazy.)

I think that fandom has changed a lot since I really got into Breath of Fire fandom back in 1997 (and subsequently burned out so bad I never went back, heh). And I'm not sure all those changes have been for the best.

I miss the days...

...of old fanpages and character shrines, where pages were often fugly, but had more personality. People wrote what they wanted to about their favorite series, even if it was stuff other sites already had -- and if it was unique? it was a gem to find.

...when 'shipping' (as in relationships between chars, not always canon) wasn't the primary thing that kept fandoms going. It's as if people have to have a favorite 'ship or OTP or whatever to be interested at all any more.

Ha ha hahahaha, danbooru is dead. Good freaking riddance. Ahahaha. I can just imagine people whining about the loss of their junk bin of hentai images (where you can't look for a simple pic of a girl with a sword without there being hentai, lol) and I say to them -- too bad for you!! NYAAHHH!

Seriously. I think tagboards could be a good idea if people could actually be TRUSTED to be consistent with tagging. Or properly marking their hentai as NON-SAFE. I know I sound like some sort of old fogey whenever I get on my high horse about this, but there are just some people out there (and not even necessarily under 18) who shouldn't be having such easy access to pornographic images. At least put some proper warnings beforehand, or even better, a questionnaire:

I just had some crazy nightmare that all my teeth started falling out. Just... all coming apart in my mouth into my hand. It was quite frightening. They were all bloody and fragmented and I kept spitting them out but more came. I remember showing this handful of bloodied teeth to Jon and crying that they wouldn't stop coming out and that I looked horrible... then I woke up.

Jon wasn't there for me to hold onto when I woke, he had to go out for some errand... ;.; But when he came back, he told me he dreamt about teeth, too. That's so odd. Makes me wonder if we're entering each other's dreams. Probably not, but it's a fun thing to consider, kind of like why yawning is "contagious" (which we were talking about while Jon was playing the GBA in bed and I went to give him snugglies!)