Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

I usually don't do memes, but this one is about books, and I'm having a seriously hard time getting my brain back into work mode, so here goes!

Questions stolen from irreparable. 40 of them, but I'm only going to use the ones I like, because I'm totally a rebel that way.

1: Currently Reading

Space Station Rat by Michael J. Daley

2: Describe the last scene you read in as few words as possible. No character names or title.

A super-intelligent rat is trying to learn enough to survive on a space station.

4: Quick, you're in desperate need of a fake name. What character name do you think of first?

As Warchild is still eating my brain, Jos is the first name I thought of. I guess that's a good enough fake name, as it could pass for a real one, and for male or female.

6: Public library or personal library?

Technically personal. Nowadays, as I'm broke, all of the books I read "fell off the back of a truck" -- I download (pirate) them. Rarely I buy one from Amazon, when I love an author enough that I want to support them. One day I'll happily go back to buying more of them.

7: What is the most important part of a book, in your opinion?

The very beginning -- the first line, the first paragraph, maybe so much as the first page. Hook me from the start and you'll have my heart.

8: Why are you reading the book you're currently reading?

While I have another book containing a short story from the Warchild author, I felt the need to read something lighter. I tried a collection of short stories from someone else, but I'm not going to finish that book. A book about a rat on a space station seemed perfect for "lighter".

9: If you were to publish a book what (besides your real name) would you use for your author name?

Hmmm. I wouldn't use my real name for sure (I hate it). I don't like cute fake names either though... I'd probably come up with some general name, likely male. David [something that doesn't start with D]. I've loved the name David since I was a young kid.

10: Do you listen to music when you read?

Oh god no. Silence please. Even people talking (like in a waiting room) makes it hard for me to lose myself in a story.

11: What book fandom do you affiliate yourself with the most?

Hrm. None really... Now and then I read fanfic for the Avengers, so I suppose that, but sadly I'm really not active in fandoms anymore. [Edit: Oops! I missed the word 'book' in the question. If I had to pick a book fandom, Harry Potter, though I'm all but out of that fandom. Rarely I read fic based on it.]

12: Tell one book story or memory (what you were wearing when you were reading something, someone saw you cry in public, you threw a book across the room and broke a window, etc.)

I read the end of the Stephen King Dark Tower series at work, which was a big, big mistake. It was so good, I couldn't wait a whole day to finish it, but the series had such a sad ending. I had to read a line, stop and do work, then read another line to try to keep from sobbing at my desk. I should have just waited and read it that evening.

15: Post a shelfie.

I'd love to do this one! Sadly last night I packed a box of books up to donate, and I don't have even a whole shelf left of physical books I'm keeping. Imagine a picture of my Kindle here. :P

16: Rant about anything book related

Oh like I need an invitation to rant about this? Self-published books that are full of typos/spelling mistakes/sucking writing, etc. While there are a few good self-published authors out there (*waves to the ones on my friends list*), the vast, VAST majority of self-published books are complete and utter crap and not worth paying a cent for. (This is a big part of why I feel okay with pirating books. Sorry, real authors.)

17: What do you think about movie/tv adaptations?

I try to consider them a completely different thing than the book, though it's hard. I keep wanting to compare the Game of Thrones TV series and books, for example.

20: A character you like but you really, really shouldn't.

While I can't think of a specific example, I often like the characters we're not supposed to -- the bad guys are often more interesting to me, and minor characters often snag my attention hard.

21: Do you loan your books?

As I deal only in ebooks, yes. When someone mentions looking for a book, if I have or can find a copy, I'll email it off to them.

Back when I was a teenager, I loaned a beloved series out to someone, and never got it back*. That soured me on loaning physical books. (*Though I believe it was fully my fault. I had lent it to a volunteer at a con, then stopped volunteering at the con myself. The person likely had no way to get it back to me, though I was too young to realize that at the time.)

23: Did your family or friends influence you to read when you were younger?

No. I was, by far, the biggest reader in my family -- no one really read other than me. I had very few, if any, friends when I was a kid, and I don't think any of them read. Basically I just had my nose in a book all the time.

24: First book(s) you remember being obsessed with

rathacat's Ratha and Thistle-Chaser series. I saw it first on one of those CBS Storybreak Specials on a Saturday morning, then hunted far and wide (or as much as a pre-Internet kid who couldn't drive could hunt) to find the book it was based on.

I've used Thistle-Chaser as my online name for decades.

25: A book that you think about and you cringe because of how terrible it was

Just one? Really? The Taken by the Swarm - Seduced by WEREBEES one was awful, but so bad that it was amusing.

Zoo (The Enclosure Chronicles) was the first really, really bad self-published book that I had read, so it stuck with me.

26: Do you read from recommendations or whatever book catches your eye?

Both. My tastes are kind of picky, so lots of times a recommendation doesn't really fit for me, but sometimes they do.

27: How/where do you purchase your books?

When I purchase, Amazon. I'd like to link to the download site I use, it's outstanding (hundreds if new ebooks available every week), but I can't recall the name of it, so I can't find it in Google... I have it bookmarked at home. Leave a comment if you want it, and I'll link you later.

28: An ending you wish you could change

Warchild's. I'm not a shipper, but as the kids say nowadays, I need that pairing like burning. *pushes the two main characters together* Now kiss!

31: Do you day dream about your favorite books? If so, share one fantasy you have about them.

I'd be surprised if people who enjoy reading don't daydream about the stories...

One thing I like to do is to pretend the character is in my world and seeing all this for the first time. Like driving Alya from Clan of the Cave Bear around in my car.

32: OTP or NoTP?

Usually no OTPs, though rarely there's an exception. I'm not big on romance in my books.

33: Cute and fluffy or dramatic and deadly?

Darker is generally better for me. Not horror, not gore, but dark and sad and emotional and heavy.

34: Scariest book you ever read

Hm. Though I do read Stephen King, I don't really like horror/scary books. His 'The Long Walk' scared me on a 'what humans are capable of' level. I'm sure I read some books that scared me as a kid, but I don't recall any now...

35: What do you think of Ebooks

This one is pretty much answered by now. :P Because of the font size options, they mean I can read a lot more than I'd otherwise be able to. Also, I LOVE being able to carry my entire library around effortlessly. I believe I have 100+ books in my To Read pile, and I can take them all with me wherever I go with no additional weight.

36: Unpopular opinions

I wish there were some kind of control on self-published books. I can't say "I wish self-publishing didn't exist" because there are a few good books/authors out there, but the vast majority of self-published stuff is crap.

If Amazon could do more about the paid/fake reviews, that would help a little. Also, I wish people would be more honest in their reviews -- touching on the bad is just as important as mentioning the good parts.

37: A book you are scared is not going to be all you hoped it would be

Warboy (Warchild book #4). I'm expecting so much from it, I'm worried it just won't be able to meet my expectations.

38: What qualities do you find annoying in a character?

Perfection. Give me flaws. Lots of flaws! It makes characters more realistic and gives them a chance for growth.

40: Has there ever been a book you wish you could un-read?

Lots and lots of them, so I could reread them again for the first time.

I usually hate memes and lists of questions to answer, but this one amused me. It was written "for the OLD PEOPLE on tumblr", and while I'm not a tumblr person, I spotted it on isiscolo's LJ, so I'm borrowing it.

1. How many jobs have you had, and which was your favorite?

Quite a few. My first job was as a floor person/cashier at a discount store named Cheap John's ("Where the prices are INNNNNNSANE!"). My favorite one was working at Alta Vista (the top search engine of its time, before Google existed).

2. When did you first connect to other people via computers?

1992, the year I graduated college. Graduating college? Pshaw, nothing special. Discovering I could talk to other fans and RPers from all over the world? Life changing.

3. Were/are you on AOL? Compuserve? LJ? Dreamwidth? A Listserv? Other?

All of them, including the net before AOL existed.

4. If you went to college, does your major match your career/current job?

No. Psych degree, and now a technical writer.

5. Have you had a mammogram? Colonoscopy?

Yes, no.

6. When did you get your first cell phone? What was it like? (Did it have a screen? Could you text? Was it a brick or flip?)

I don't remember the year. I've only ever had three cell phones, and I kept my original one for as long as I could, but the carriers stopped supporting it (it was analog). I described it as a brick. My second one was a flip phone. My third and current one is an iPhone and the first one I could text on or use as a camera.

( 7-21 back here )

I have a bad history with memes. Even the best ones never get completed (I loved that a haiku a day one, yet still lost track of it and never finished it).

Maybe doing it as a group will be the trick to finishing one! So join in if you like! Leave your answer in a comment, post on your own LJ, or write it on the palm of your hand.

The first question is easy/boring, but the list gets better as it goes along.

Get Fridays off or get Mondays off?

Whenever I'm in that situation, I always take the Friday off. For me, it means I can look forward to the day off all week, instead of just getting another one after two days off. Having a Friday off makes it feel like a four day week, having a Monday off doesn't.

Oh heck, that was such a boring question, let's do #2 as well!

Find true love or 10 million dollars?

That's a harder one. If I had ten million dollars I could stop working and spend all my time looking for someone I could fall in love with. I'm not looking for love, though I don't suppose I'd kick it to the curb if it showed up, so I guess I'd take the cash. I suspect I'd be in the minority by doing so.

( 28 days/questions back here )

I don't usually do memes, but this one was amusing. Original guidelines:

Make a list of all the characters in your icons. (Although you may have more than one icon of a single character, they only go on the list once.) Alphabetize it. Take the first two people on the list; that's your first pairing. Second two people; second pairing, etc. Treat us to some commentary once you're done.

I'm going to skip the alphabetizing part. I have too many old anime characters who I don't remember the names of. So mine will be in order of them on my user page.

( Lots of icon pairings back here! Questionable relationships, ahoy! (Image-heavy-ish. 20 or so icons.) )

Which is the less likely to be the real subject line?

Trick question! Both are right!

Barack Obama Singing Born This Way by Lady Gaga. I just wish this were longer!



And I don't usually do these silly meme things, but this one is short and non-spammy and amused me.
Pick up the nearest book to you. Turn to page 45. The first sentence describes your sex life in 2012.

"When playing with a cat or kitten, always direct its playful aggression towards toys."

First off... cats! D: Secondly, I think kitty claws would be hell on those kinds of toys. c.c *cough*

From hamburger: Bad Translator! What you do is take titles from some of your LJ posts and run them through 50 languages of translation.

The results I got were pretty darned amusing.

"Great news: I can't stop peeing!" becomes "The good news: you can write!"
...in the snow?

"Every now and then I need to poke myself in the eye to remember that I don't like doing that" = "Now look in your pocket"
This one seems vaguely threatening...

This one amused the hell about me. This was the post about the video about the condom fairy... Guess people didn't listen!
"Just a few days late: Little Taiko Boy" becomes "Son"

"The Walking Dead, walking in Sunshine" becomes "Walking Dead Democrats"
D:

Meme of the Day: Post the first lines from each month of the last year, Twitter reposts excluded. I avoid Twitter like the plague, so no worries on that part!

January: Really, really bored on WoW, I got to thinking. I hate fighting DKs more than anything, and I have one already rolled... what would it be like to play on that end of things? So I sent him into AV and OMG I loved it! All the annoying crap from fighting them is a whole lot more fun on the other end! Even though I basically facerolled (I have zero idea what my abilities are or what I should be using -- need to work more on that!), I rocked!

[The real first post was a locked one that I don't want to quote outside of a lock, but it was about RL (work) instead of WoW. This quoted one amuses me because I've come full circle: I learned to play DK, then forgot how to again! So, one year later, I'm in the same exact place! Not to mention that Cata ruined DK for me, so...]

February: What's that period in life called, when a woman suddenly MUST HAVE BABY NOW? That's me, but it's cats and not babies. Three nights in a row now (THREE!) I've had dreams where I somehow ended up with a lot of cats. And by "lot" I mean 6-8 of them.

March: Man, and I really posting less than once a week now? It's been ten days since my last update! Perhaps good news on that front: The random LJ image sites have started working again! Woo woo! Perhaps I'll find some wild and wacky stuff to post.

[Amusingly, I'm making this post now because it's been a while since I last posted!]

April: Google changing its name to Topeka (because Topeka changed its name to Google as part of its bid to become one of Google's high speed test cities) killed me.

May: Have the last two eps been typical of Glee? I remember watching an ep early on and it did nothing for me (which is surprising, because I love musical TV shows), but I really liked tonight's ep and last week's.

[Again, the real first one was locked and I don't want to post it unlocked. Bitching about my apartment management.]

June: Yesterday I mentioned how small the BK ribs were? I found a picture:

Also, pricing info that I didn't have yesterday: "They offer a $5.99 6 piece meal and add 2 more for $1.00. You can also add 3 pieces to a value meal for $1.99."

[The title of this one, "I blog about the most important things", made me laugh!]

July: I bought a new bed today. Even though mine is 13 or 14 years old and kills my back (sometimes it's hard to even stand up in the morning), I had been putting off replacing it. The idea of laying down on beds to test them while other people watch made me really uncomfortable.

[Ha ha, I have the same back pain with my new bed, so it must be me and not the bed!]

August: 8. What's your favorite genre to write? To read?

Serious, dark, "deadly" stuff. I generally don't enjoy light, fluffy RP, or that "crack" RPing. Gimme torture! Pain! Betrayal! Character death! Darkness! Doom and gloom!

[Ha ha, my failed RP meme! I tell myself I still intend to go back and finish it one day, but that's looking less and less likely.]

September: Grrr mumble. My 17 button MMO mouse arrived today, woo! I opened the shipping box and found... the mouse. Loose. No mouse-box, no paperwork, nothing. Just the mouse loose in the box. A quick bit of googling showed it does indeed come in a box (and a rather spiffy one at that). So, confused and a tad annoyed, I emailed the company it came from. It's refurbished.

[Well, I do still use and like the mouse, it's the most comfortable one I've ever had, so I guess it worked out in the end?]

October:
Keen's party wiped. On Coren Direbrew.

Damned idiot moonkin started the fight. Idiot DK tank decided to let us all die to "teach us a lesson". 30 second fight turned into 20 minutes of endless arguing and cursing, the two blaming each other when both were at fault.

[Yeah. And this is why I still avoid random instances like the plague. The majority of WoW players are horrible, awful, nasty "people".]

November:
Haken the Death Knight
Likes origami, painting
and killing people

[Nano Haiku! Another thing I never finished! And I still hate that one, it just doesn't work.]

December:I was feeling stressed, but Google made it better. (RL, locked)

Alt text: "55th Anniversary: Rosa Parks refuses to move"

December is always a bad month for me, but this year it's especially stressy.

---

There! A meme I completed! It's easy when you do it all in one sitting. ;)

There's surprisingly less WoW in this than I would have guessed, sometimes I feel like it's all I post about.

I need to post about Harry Potter at some later time. I finally finished Mark Reads Harry Potter and I feel like I've reread the whole series myself (and I kind of feel like I want to really reread the books now and maybe some fics).

I knew going in that this thing would have a giant learning curve, but I didn't know how sharp and how long it would take. Based on reviews, it takes 17-22 hours of use for it to become natural (but once it does, it's better than anything).

I'm not certain I'm seeing a benefit in it for me, at least for the very limited use I'm using it right now (moving, mounting). There's a number pad on the side of the mouse, for use by your thumb. 1-12. I have 12 for auto run, 11 for turning right, 10 for left, and 9 for mounting land mount, 6 for mounting flying mount/flight form. Oh, a picture will make this easier, and can make use of my new camera!


Holy cat fur, Batman! (The picture doesn't do it justice. It's sleek black, with the number pad, wheel, and logo glowing a deep blue. Pretty!)

12-11-10 is a way more natural movement for my thumb than 12-9-6, that's why I set up running that way. Still, I'm really not sure if it's easier to move that way than to have my hand a few inches over and using the number pad instead. Plus, during my hour or so of use, it makes my thumb/hand cramp up. (Once I get used to it, I'm guessing that'll stop, since right now I'm holding it really tense and trying to remember where buttons are so I don't run into walls endlessly.)

Once I'm used to it, once I can use it without thinking and for more than just moving, I think it might be a good thing. I find myself falling back on using the keyboard to move though, I have to remember to make myself use the mouse and even then sometimes I just don't feel like it!

Photos! A non-LJ friend and I were talking about how many notes we take for MMOs. That made me laugh, as I had five or six notebooks filled with FFXI notes and for WoW I have... one page. Compare the two, and see my sucky handwriting, too! It's hard to tell, because the inside back cover is white, but that's the last page of a 500 page notebook (Easter egg tracking on FFXI!). The top notebook, the WoW one? That's the one and only page I used. :P (And yes, I need a new desk. Likely will get one soon.)

Last picture, and an answer to one of ani_mama's meme questions: I'm glad I bought a sofa, my cat loves it. She uses it 37492147014701 times more than me, ha! It's a perfect sofa for a cat, leather and really smushy, so when she rests on it she sinks in. From the back, she can look out the window!

And on the subject of memes, I mentioned the '30 day IC blog post' one, but I decided not to do it on the very first day. I really don't like feeling like I HAVE TO blog every day, once a day. I think that's the same reason I never went back to the RP one (yet?), it annoyed me that I had to write every day...

I usually avoid memes like the plague, but one that involves posting (sort of) random images? I'm so there!

The rules:
1) Post ten of any pictures currently on your hard drive that you think are self-expressive.
2) NO CAPTIONS!!! It must be like we're speaking with images and we have to interpret your visual language just like we have to interpret your words.
3) They must ALREADY be on your hard drive - no googling or flickr! They have to have been saved to your folders sometime in the past. They must be something you've saved there because it resonated with you for some reason.
4) You do NOT have to answer any questions about any of your pictures if you don't want to. You can make them as mysterious as you like. Or you can explain them away as much as you like.

Rule #1 amuses me -- I found the first nine images in one single folder, let alone having to go to Google. For number ten I looked in other folders just because I knew what I wanted for it (though I ended up not finding it and went with another).

I'm going to ignore #2, so there all-caps!

( Ten images back here! Most are reasonable sized. No naked bits, though one has an adult theme -- I'd call it work safe, but YMMV. )

Edit: 1) I resized the two large images because side scrolling sucks! 2) No one's life can be summed up in ten images, so I hope no one feels bad about being left out or something we used to do (or currently do!) being left out!