You can't make this stuff up

BEHOLD MY CAT.

- I do believe his name shall be Mercury, unless I think of something better!

c

- ^ He helped me type this post :)

- Adorable quirks so far: only drinking water from a running faucet, and not understanding the concept of sleeping without petting him

- He is crazy affectionate and extremely well behaved: understanding of my various Cow Tools and that they are Not His, very gentle with his claws, scratches only things meant for scratching. I could go on. I am such a typical kitty mommy all of a sudden you guys!

So I'd like to be able to say I went on a great quest of self discovery or an awesome long vacation or something, but really I just fell off the Internet for awhile. During that time, some things happened:

n) My brother donated his Katamari games to me after admitting to himself that he will never buy another PS2 to play them on. And I fell in love with this song. It made me wonder what kind of backstage dealings, if any, are involved in getting your song placed in REALLY HARD LEVELS and benefiting from the increased exposure of a stage people have to play LIKE FIFTY TIMES to pass.

But the music is good!

Now I'm finally trying out Okami (I KNOW, I NEVER PLAYED OKAMI), and... what? What was this hype for? This game is Zelda in every respect, except that the decisions about where its difficulties should lie are wrong instead of right. Thanks, but I think I'll just play Zelda. Yes, it is very pretty, but my failure to love almost anything else about it made me finally notice I'm so familiar with running-around-games in general that I hardly see them as visuals anymore (a very helpful mode that I still can't get into with rhythm games)-- and even then, some people manage to do the 2d drawing effect without putting all the decorative field objects in camera-synchronous orbit. I may return it and get 3 of my 15 dollars back.

c) I am participating in MetaFilter's Mix CD Swap this year! I probably need to commit to a track list pretty dang soon, but the second half flows together so much better than the first half, and there's only one song with any words in it and I don't know if it's too jarring when you're halfway through the CD and someone suddenly starts singing, and these are the things that bother me :< ....So the booklet and packaging aren't finished either because of this, and yeah I have many woes, I guess.

c.2) Speaking of MetaFilter, I also attended the tenth anniversary party! I had a fun time despite my handicap of being completely unknown because I am a relentless lurker, and there was surprise belly dancing, and themed cake, and afterwards bardom* which I bailed on after about 20 minutes because that is how I roll, and the promise of a pool party which has not yet materialized and I need to stop failing at keeping in touch with the people I met!

The next totally awesome thing I will be attending is Dr. Sketchy's burlesque life drawing EXTRAVAGANZA, where I suspect I will end up being all "mm, fascinating, yezz, *drawdrawdrawmissthepoint*"-- but maybe not! And, hey, either way.

f) My old Mac died on Monday (the 3rd). I got it in 2003 to go to college with... I never named it. There just wasn't a name there, that I could find. But I loved it, until I kind of started to hate it, but I still loved it, just differently, like a difficult grandmother. I choked it with chat logs from IRC-- I know I should stop thinking of them as my boys since I haven't spoken to them in years, but I just can't-- and roleplays where I was a well-adjusted average human with no powers or anything-- I don't roleplay anymore, but if I did I can't imagine ever doing it any other way-- and ill-gotten cool things, as I learned how, and photos I took, exactly one of which I still think is impressive, and interesting free software to assist in hobbies I never developed. I'd sort of been willing it to go on and get out of my life for a while, with its no DVD burner and USB 1.0 (!) and less than 1GB of memory and no working left Shift key and only 15GB of empty hard drive space. But I'm not sure I'd even know how to process it if it turned out to be unrecoverable. I've made great progress this last year or so in letting things go and not fetishizing my personal history, but this I want to keep. My ever-cluttered desktop, the why-didn't-I-think-of-this-sooner Things To Put Somewhere folder, torrents in plain sight and stupidly highlighted in bright green-- even the Date Added metadata in iTunes, telling me when I started liking what. I must continue to have it.

r) Ugh, Calabash! Do something


*Hello?-- OH that's right I turned off spell checker on my laptop Firefox.

My eye is fine now. The bloodshot bump went away all by itself. I swear some good fairy must have cast Regen on me as a baby. I may be impervious to bullets; I have not checked. So, based on that, and the way it gradually got less uncomfortable, all I can conclude is that it was... maybe... a mosquito bite? On the surface of my eyeball. Does that happen? I'm just glad, but surprised, that having this theory has not made me more afraid of bugs.

Speaking of which, you know what's a great mosquito repellent? It sounds like a joke because it makes so much sense, but I find it to be true: swatted mosquito. Just get the first one, and display it (smearing as desired). It feels very war-painty to me.

Moving the salt shaker just out of arm's reach worked great, until I started writing this very entry. But it's back on the shelf again now, since I got to this paragraph, looked down, and felt shame. (A tiny bit.)

And that girlfriend I mentioned-- scratch that; apparently we are friends. :c I actually raised the issue with her intending to confess that I wasn't sure about the relationship and I didn't know why, but before I could get there... I found out why! It was all very friendly though, and she went home and I lay around going "o_o..." for a little bit before taking a walk and angsting into my paper journal about my shortcomings in human relations. Then I came back and instead of taking stock of how I needed to grow as an individual person and all (as I'm sure you all can tell I should do), I instantly hit up OKCupid~ =_=

I think that mood may have passed again already. But there needs to be a more casual outlet for the need to be hugged and have your hair petted.

( Continue for remarks on entertainment media things referenced last time )

Hi! My name's Brenna. It actually really is.

As I said somewhat more Internet-tastically on my LJ, I had some trouble deciding what I wanted my username to be, which is a problem I'm sure a lot of people can relate to right now. I've had this problem with choosing names for kind of a while, and I'd really been getting tired of the two I've relied on forever. I was starting to feel really silly, and not in a good way, about being called something I made up myself to sound cute, or clever, or pretty, because it always just ends up sounding dumb-- eventually, to me, and probably immediately to others. I didn't even try very hard to come up with anything, if we're talking straight, because I just didn't trust myself to.

I wanted to avoid looking like this or that-- like the kind of poser who's clearly just looking for Internet Points, like I have a true spirit name but when asked about it, I only say "eh, I just made it up" because I haven't felt forced yet to separate what I'm serious about from what I'm embarrassed by. But I decided I couldn't just worry about looking like that, because one of the big things I've been telling myself lately is to give people credit for their perceptions. It's standard to refer to a negative impression as "the wrong impression," but not everything negative is a mistaken assumption on other people's part that I helpfully go and correct for them. Knowing this about myself, that unflattering truths come gently disguised as tactical considerations about how I "might seem," I decided I probably wasn't going to succeed in finding the perfect amusing short phrase or fantasy name or reference-- the one that would satisfy my desire to have an amusing phrase or fantasy name or reference but, oh noes, wouldn't give the wrong impression-- after all.

So that seemed to leave only things I didn't choose for myself. I've only ever had one real nickname, and if I ever tell the story you'll know why I don't identify with it. (It's not a dreadful tale of abuse and woe; it's just entertaining.) That pretty much left my own real name. Well, it happens to be pretty. I obviously have a history with it. It feels like it'll help connect what I'm actually like with what I'm willing to talk about-- something I'm really wanting to bring about in myself. I've always been an amazingly private person, and it's only lately I've been realizing how little of that is for good reasons. Finally, it's arbitrary-- and yes, I ended up thinking of that as a positive. How can you possibly do a good job of naming yourself meaningfully, permanently? I know I can't.

My only doubt was that I wouldn't use it enough, or well enough, to deserve to be THE Brenna. But whatever. Even if I don't: such is life! This, what I'm doing, is called assertiveness, and it is awesome.

And so it came to pass. I need to get my style figured out. That's another thing I was counting on having more time to put off figure out. Anyway, Dreamwidth! Here's to -- oh, forget it, I can feel the legion of jinxes staring at me. Let's just all friend each other. We know what we mean.