rivka

lysana recently noted that Google Groups has filled in many of the holes in their Usenet archives - they now apparently believe that they have everything dating back to 1981.

This gives those of us with long-term histories on Usenet the cringeworthy opportunity to go back and see what kind of drivel we posted in our youth. For the most part, it's an opportunity I would rather have foregone (not that I can stop looking now, of course, it's like poking a sore tooth with your tongue). And yet, I also found this:

>: [My sister] felt that the reason that I wasn't happy or content in my job
>: was that I wasn't teaching the "gifted" kids. I guess she felt that I
>: should be using my creativity on "kids who can appreciate you."
>:
>: Do you think that people (teachers) w/ above avg intelligence should
>: use their creativity on smart kids?

>I think smart people have a duty to contribute as much as they can to
>society. (Just like anyone else.) For some teachers this would mean
>teaching smart kids, but for others it may mean teaching average, or even
>disabled (mentally or physically) kids.

Keep that attitude up and someone's going to roll over your toes with their
wheelchair. PLEASE, even among the nerd community, Stephen Hawking should have
made it quite obvious that PHYSICALLY DISABLED does not, in fact, preclude
some measure of intelligence. I was a crippled kid. I was also one of the
brightest kids ever to come through my (admittedly small-town) elementary
school. Now I am a crippled adult and a lot nastier, so don't make slurs
about the intelligence of disabled people or I'll whack you with my cane. [...]

Rebecca
The smartest cripple on rec.org.mensa

Okay, so it's needlessly hostile. And I'm surprised I didn't injure my bad hip further with the severity of the knee-jerking displayed here. Still, I kind of have to admire my feistiness.

I wrote this about six months after I'd been told by an eminent orthopedic surgeon that I would never walk without assistance again. I was struggling hard to figure out what that meant about me as person and a member of society. I was 20. It wasn't the most graceful struggle, but I'm not sure that anyone's would have been.

(1) I did something to my small arm in water aerobics, and it hurts like hell. Ow. Ow.

(2) Comcast.net finally noticed that, although I hadn't had a paying account with them in over a year, my password was still active and I was still using my webspace on their server. So all the little otter pictures on Respectful of Otters went away. (The blog itself is hosted on blogspot - I only ever used comcast.net for image hosting.) Fortunately, now they're back - courtesy of me getting off my lazy behind and setting up webspace on verizon.net, my current provider.

(3) Unexpected present out of the blue!! Yay!!

(4) I finally knuckled under to my dark side and put a cutesy little pregnancy tracker on my userinfo page. Please don't hate me for my temporary hormone-induced insanity.

Memo to myself: It doesn't matter how eloquent and beautiful and moving and even funny she is. Stop reading Chez Miscarriage while you're pregnant. No excuses. Just stop.

I'm continuing to have short periods of not-so-bad nausea. I am too smart to let myself hope that this might be as bad as it gets, but, you know, some women have very little morning sickness indeed. I'm just saying.

I have also begun to have a fair amount of fatigue. Wednesday night I napped on the couch in the evening and then went to bed early, but I still had trouble dragging myself out of bed Thursday morning. Last night I was exhausted and ready for bed by ten. Today I've been sleepy all day - it will probably be another early night. *yawn*

First read this post.

I used to just be sad in the morning, and after 11am I was okay. But in the last two weeks that okay period has been pushed back to 2pm and then to 5pm and now I am not ever okay. My nights are just as bad as my mornings. There isn’t a moment in the day that I look forward to. I don’t see an end to this cycle of stress, and I find myself asking much too often, “Why go on?”

Yesterday I saw a psychiatrist who prescribed me a combination of drugs. I wish that there were other ways that I could go about getting better, but you have to believe me when I say that this is way beyond herbal remedies or dietary changes. I exercise all the time and I have a very healthy diet (except for the pop tarts, but people, a woman needs her pop tarts). This situation is life-threatening. I am afraid of hurting myself. [...]

But there is one terrible drawback to this step I am taking toward sanity. The doctor told me that I have to wean Leta if I want to work up to therapeutic levels of these drugs. I have to stop breastfeeding in the next month.

Then read this response.

From the hysterically funny, yet painfully sad blog Chez Miscarriage:

I was on my cell phone, but I lost the signal when I got onto the elevator. That's why I overheard the conversation between the two men who were on the elevator with me.

"My wife hasn't lost her pregnancy weight yet," one of them complained.

"That's just lazy," the other commiserated, "I mean, what's she doing all day?"

My ears began to bleed and a thousand shrieking harpies flew out of my head and violins screamed in a menacing augury of harrowing wrath.

"She's busy fabricating false rape statistics and disseminating lies about employment discrimination," I replied. The two men stared at me. The cell phone was still against my ear. "Are you talking to us?" one of them asked. I shook my head and mouthed "NO," then pointed to the cell phone. They smiled in uneasy relief.

"It's really had an impact on our sex life," the first man whispered, moving his face close to his friend's ear.

"Well," I said into the phone, "That's because you're the most boring lay imaginable."

The two men looked at me. I smiled at them and shrugged helplessly. "SORRY," I mouthed. Then I theatrically turned toward the elevator wall, covering my free ear with my hand.

"She's just gotten so big," the first man murmured.

"What do you think pregnancy is, a play date with the Betty Crocker Easy Bake Oven?" I said into the cell phone.

The two men stood there in angry silence.

"Okay," I said into the phone, "This is my floor, I have to go." I threw the phone into my bag and smiled politely at the two men as the elevator doors opened.

Then I quickly turned around before the doors closed and pointed at the man who had been complaining about his wife. "And by the way," I said sweetly, "Those rolls around your waist aren't exactly made of moneybags."

The elevator doors closed on their furious and astonished faces.

Yeah, that's right. Touché, asshat. Although your wife's best friend can't be everywhere, there are hundreds of women willing to step in for her at a moment's notice - all of whom ride elevators, and one of whom has recently had more hormone injections than an entire herd of U.S. cattle.

I just spent an hour writing a happy travelogue of my weekend trip with

wcg, and my browser ate it. I'll try to reconstruct it later, but I make no promises. Argh.

But I had a marvelous time.

I'm rarely interested in memes, so how come there are so many fun ones going around all at once?

The "interests" meme: I got it from

elynne (eighteenth century clothing, ella fitzgerald, emma bull, english country dance), but I saw it earlier from

serenejournal (science fiction, science fiction conventions, seafood, sewing, singing, single malts, social justice, soft barking, steven brust, sushi).

The "enter your name into a Google Images search and pick the first interesting image" meme: I think it's a tie between this and this for "Rivka." Images for "Rebecca" are generally less interesting, but this one is marvelous.

Your boss lets her nine-year-old son hang out in your office sometimes, when she's working in the evening or on weekends. When he's here, he uses your computer. (And never puts the mouse back on the left side, but that's beside the point.)

You have Internet Explorer set up to clear the history file every day, but IE also keeps track of URLs which have been directly typed in - you can access them from the address bar. One of the ways you can tell that your boss's son has been using your computer is that sites like cartoonnetwork.com and nickelodeon.com appear in the address bar menu. Okay. But one morning, nakedladys.com is right in there with the addresses for cartoon websites. You click on the link to make sure it's not an ironically-named site for kids. It's not.

You have no idea whether your institution monitors Internet usage for porn viewing, although it's pretty obvious that no one is checking to see how much time you spend on non-work-related sites in general.

Do you tell your boss? And if so, what do you tell her?

Disclaimer: This post is probably going to piss some people off. I'm not doing it just for the fun of hosting a Sacred Cow BBQ. I welcome negative comments as well as the other kind, but if you can't stand to hear alt.callahans criticized at all, then probably you don't want to click through. Contrariwise, if you're not even slightly interested in alt.callahans or the place it used to have in my life, then probably you don't want to click through either.
( Read more... )

My weblog apparently comes up as the number one Google search for how to be respectful.

Wow. I hope the person who clicked through doesn't get into trouble for adopting any of my, um, respectfulness methods.

I can't believe

curiousangel didn't post about this first.

If the slightest possibility exists that Bruichladdich distillery on Islay is a threat to world peace, we need to know.

For it has been revealed that Ursula, a spy with the US Defence Threat Reduction Agency - "Our mission to safeguard the US and its allies from weapons of mass destruction" - has been monitoring the island distillery.

Apparently, it takes just a "tweak" - her words - in the process of making whisky and Bruichladdich could be churning out chemical weapons.

Orbital Mind Control Laser FAQ.

(via Electrolite.)

Warning note:

curiousangel tells me that this site pops up a spyware thingy that automatically tries to install itself. I didn't notice, because I'm using a popup blocker, but y'all probably want to be careful.

Baby panda webcam.

(courtesy of

truepenny)

rivka:
> > Did you intend to insult me with the "Piled Higher
> > and Deeper" part, or did you not realize that it
> > refers to *shit* being piled higher and deeper?

Someone else, not the original poster:
> Of course; it's a geometric progression (or worse):
>
> BSc -- Bullshit certificate
> MSc -- More shit certificate
> PhD -- Piled higher and deeper.
>
> Felicitations and salutations -- nobody will ever know
> what agonies you went through for that worthless piece
> of paper but you. Treasure those happy memories for they
> will sustain you in the trials to come.
>
> I'm not good at this sort of thing, as you may have surmised.

rivka:
If you were aiming at taking me down a peg, undercutting
my pleasant sense of accomplishment, or devaluing eight
years' worth of hard work, you're on the right track. If
that's not what you meant to be doing, well, maybe next
time you should stick to "felicitations" and leave it at
that.

I know I'm supposed to take this as all in good fun, but
I've spent eight years of my life working very hard,
earning very little, forgoing many pleasures, and postponing
other significant life goals. I don't know what prompts you
to tell me that my degree is worthless and my work is a
shitpile, but forgive me if I don't really have a sense
of humor about it.

Okay, I feel as though I've completely lost my shit here - or at least, my sense of perspective. But these comments just feel hostile to me. I'm sure he thinks he's just teasing and I know I'm supposed to be a good sport about it. And maybe if I weren't still so tired from the whole ordeal I would be a good sport about it. Or if it was someone I knew so well that their supportiveness could be taken for granted, and we had a pre-existing teasing relationship. In the absence of those factors, I feel as though I'm being told not to get above myself.

Current Mood: pissed off

Recovering needlework addicts should not click through. Really.
( Read more... )

Current Mood: geeky

serenejournal asked which non-LJ weblogs people read. I read a lot of them, so I'm going to choose ten good recommendations. I hope this is a meme that spreads - I'm always looking for more things to read.
( and the winners are... )

Current Mood: geeky

The Periodic Table of Desserts.

Current Mood: impressed

...except maybe

geminigirl. I just found out about a guy named Chris Companik, who does HIV-themed comic strips. Some of them make excellent educational points, and some of them are absolutely hysterical.

Mike Piazza guest-stars in one of those Sprint PCS commercials.
Charlie Brown visits the peer counselor (five cents please).
The 100 T-Cell Pyramid.
Thank you for not smoking.
"Have you tried Fraudulex?"
This one is really not going to be funny to anyone but me.

Current Mood: amused

I'm so angry about this I don't know what to do.

AIDS, which while a horrible thing that we should all be political about, is not by and large a female sexuality problem? (I think this is why we're so loathe to include it--by and large, and my deepest sympathy to anyone who is an exception to this, this is not our problem.

One of my female patients died this week. It's a good thing HIV isn't a women's problem, isn't it?

I'm just sitting here shaking.

Current Mood: furious

Teresa Nielsen Hayden has an inspired post about - what's the opposite of optimizing? pessimizing, I guess - pessimizing Google searches for bad fiction. For example, "She loved him. She really loved him" is a very efficient filter for bad stories of all kinds. Someone in the comments suggests "steely blue gaze," which also seems to work well. "That fateful day" and "a new star in the" are recommended as bad poetry searches, but neither one is quite as efficient as a simple search on "poerty."

Recommendations for bad fanfic searches are in the comments. Teresa recommends, to good effect, beautiful shyly phaser as a search string for bad Trek fanfic. mirrorshades black leather gets you trite imitations of William Gibson. I hit pay dirt for Harry Potter fanfic (although it might have been too easy) with american transfer student hogwarts. Goodness.( excerpts, plus even yet still more horrific finds... )

Current Mood: silly

Profile

rivka

April 2017

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
						1
2	3	4	5	6	7	8
9	10	11	12	13	14	15
16	17	18	19	20	21	22
23	24	25	26	27	28	29
30

Syndicate

Page Summary

Style Credit

Style: Blue for Motion by syntheid
Resources: Wordpress Motion

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Jun. 30th, 2025 08:56 am

Entries tagged with internet

From the mists of time.

Misc.

(no subject)

A rush of pure fury

(no subject)

(no subject)

More meme-y goodness

Sixty second hypothetical.

Memories of havens past.

Goodness gracious.

(no subject)

(no subject)

Insane cuteness.

Grr.

Ooooohhh.

Non-LJ weblogs.

Speechless with admiration.

Okay, I don't know if these will be funny to anyone else...

(no subject)

Find bad (fan)fiction fast!

Profile

April 2017

Syndicate

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags