My milk was purple and my face was red

For the first time in my life, I REALLY HATE MY COUNTRY.

Stupid Imperial measurement system! Converting measurements is such a pain in the ass... Everyone who provided me with loads of links has been ALL SORTS of helpful, but my brain is just on hiatus or vacation or something. My muse, my brain, and any other required components cannot be found. Please click refresh and try again.

Okay, so somehow I converted the U.S. measurements in cups to grams. -.- I thought this was the standard measure for dry cooking ingredients (flour, sugar, etc.) in the metric system. WRONG! Cups and the like are a measure of VOLUME or CAPACITY. Grams are like pounds, they're a measure of WEIGHT. -.- So I had to go to the FFnet version of WDKY6 (the chapter that is causing so many problems for poor li'l me) and get the U.S. measurements again.

Worse, I have no idea where I got this recipe for sugar cookies. I have TWO cookbooks that I use on a regular basis, and the recipe I use in WDKY6 isn't from either of them. And apparently I didn't bookmark it either. I tried to find it, but of course, looking for exact recipes isn't easy online-- fractions and word count limits... *sigh* Pain in the neck!

And then I'm converting everything, tra la la, it's all going good... when WHA!? All of a sudden 1 cup of sugar (by U.S. measures) has inflated to 2 2/3 cups! There's this whole SCENE revolving around 2 2/3 cups of sugar, and that's WAAAAAY too much for any sugar recipe. That's the amount of flour, but Téa specifically says she's talking about sugar. So I must have had a massive brain fart when I wrote that AND NO ONE HAS NOTICED. Until now, of course, and I'm publicly embarrassing myself by putting it here... HEHEHE.

So WDKY6 is undergoing what I consider some major revisions. -.-;

I still need some help, though.

( Metric Heroes! SAVE ME!! )

*sigh* In other news...

1 - I hate how people contort existing things to their own warped visions. Of course I'm talking about fanfiction. The latest example is someone who posted a "oneshot" that is barely a paragraph long. It also has incorrect tense. -.- I can't review fics like that, even if they're posted by people I admire and like, because it's such a friggin' violation of the TOS, and anything I'd have to say in a review would inevitably end up sounding like a flame. I just don't have any tact, apparently.

Okay, maybe oneshots and drabbles are different, but last time I checked, drabbles weren't technically allowed on FFnet. Drabbles were created for the Usenet, Mailing List, and LiveJournal world. On FFnet... *shrugs* I don't know, they seem like a waste of space.

2 - BEA is still stuck. I can't add members. I'm going to try to go into phpMyAdmin and see what I can do.

O_O Ideas, ideas, ideas! Watching "Ghosts of the Abyss" today got me wandering back to this old S/A fic idea I had, "Deep Blue." But I have to FINISH at least ONE of my currently open fics before I can start a new one. That is my rule.

Speaking of other DVD movies I scored at DVD Station...
(1) Girl With The Pearl Earring -- But Steph and Tobey never called and came over. -.- I realize I slept in super-late today (and worse, I kept sleeping... and I went BACK to sleep after GotA), but now I have to pay an extra $3 for the next day rental. I suppose it's not so bad since the first rental gives me $3 credit, but I still wish I'd known about the expiration date on the DVD Station Cards, Then I wouldn't be worrying. But hey, I thought expiration dates had no effect for gift cards and the like in California? HEY!! >_<

(2) U-571 -- TEH SHIZNIT Submarine Movie. I called Mike (Cooper, yes, he is back in town) to see if he wanted to swing by and watch it; instead, he invited me to go see Shrek 2 with his mom. ^_^ His treat too, so I was like YAY! I smuggled my bag of popcorn, and we went to the Kabuki. I discovered that Naveed no longer works for AMC-- he works for some sort of gaming company now! O_O GO NAVEED! Shrek 2 was all sorts of fun... and afterwards, his mom dropped him off at the house and we watched the movie (pausing a lot to talk about random shiz, mostly college and how I'm the "typical freshman," not wanting to live in dorms and having these grandiose plans about grades...

And noooow... I have to arrange for my plane tickets for Kara's wedding in New York. Mom says I can take Friday off of school and thusly leave Thursday night, which means more time in NYC and less time freaking out about arriving on the same day as the wedding (Sept. 4th). But I can't take JetBlue *sniff* -- I have to take something that flies out of LAX to JFK. Preferably non-stop. Finding such a flight is not easy. Hopefully Mom will get hotel ROOMS (emphasis on ROOMS-- I do not want to have to deal with HER and GARY) close to JFK Airport.

There's still the matter of what I'm supposed to wear, too. -.-;

Anyway, stuff to do, fics to kill...

Straight is for lines.

Hi.

I'm bi.

Sexual, that is. But I also have bi-opticals-- two eyes! Or something like that. Anyway, I've come up with this interesting thought that might spark a debate. And you know me, I love a debate. I hate being proven wrong, but I love a debate.

I'm still a bit lost on whether being straight or gay or whatever is a matter of choice or something you're born with (i.e. something in your genes). But I've noticed a lot of things...

* More "straight" females seem to like male x male relationships (i.e. in fanfiction). Why? I was under the impression that people liked to fantasize about themselves (or maybe the Mary Sue faction *is* distinct from the yaoi fangirls!?) in relationships with the "hawt bishounen dudes," but there's a greater prevalence of yaoi/slash fics as opposed to the Mary Sue x Bishounen fics.

* There aren't enough gay or lesbian writers. I would honestly like to see a yaoi or yuri fic written by people who KNOW WHAT THE HELL THEY ARE TALKING ABOUT. The emotions, the attractions, the sex... (seriously, 14 year old virgins have no place envisioning wild kinky peanut butter sex with Heero and Trowa.)

* On that same note, why aren't there more prostitutes with Internet access? Or former prostitutes, or... I don't know, pick a realistic-but-angsty-past type profession! I hate how people use real situations as "devices" when they don't have the slightest clue (even through research or speaking with survivors/victims/that kind of thing) what they're writing about. Write what you know.

People wonder why I write fics with death and angst and romance and stuff in them-- it's because I HAVE LIVED IT! I know what I'm talking about! And when I don't, I DO NOT BULLSHIT. I ask around, I research. Even in fandoms where things can be magical and sparkly and wonderful, you still have to keep a sense of realism with the characters-- readers need to, on some level, connect with the characters.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand.

The question I wanted to ask was-- is there really such a thing as being STRAIGHT? As in, you ONLY like one sex/gender, EVAR?

I don't think it is. Everyone of every gender (and did you know that in the '50s, being lesbian or gay was called the "third sex?") has to know what they're up against-- competition wise. It's why some women will admire Tyra Banks, but others will say that Cindy Crawford is the epitome of beauty. How do other women know what is beautiful? How can other women judge what is attractive or not unless they sincerely LOOK at another woman "in that way?"

I'm not saying everyone on the planet is bi as in they're willing to go after people of either gender (like me ^^;) but I find it hard to believe that someone can go through life never looking at someone of the same gender and deciding whether they are attractive or better or not.

In the world of fanfiction, I stand by this creedo:

• If they are gay in canon, they shall be gay in fanfiction. You cannot un-gay someone. This applies to such fandoms as FAKE and Gravitation.


• If they are not stated as to their preference, they are bi. Not straight, not gay, but BI. This means everyone has equal rights to screw around with the characters, so long as they KEEP THEM IN CHARACTER. This applies to every other fandom on the planet.
  

So the guys in Gravitation won't suddenly jump ship and lock lips with the nearest girls they find. But the guys in Yu-Gi-Oh might. In any fandom where romance is NOT a prime factor of the story (and that means ignoring many bishoujo fandoms, like Sailormoon, Hana Yori Dango, Pretear, Full Metal Panic: Fumoffu, etc.) then it's safe to assume that the characters can swing either way, but you still have to make their decision to do (whoever) plausible within their character constraints.

*THIS* is why Kaiba/Jounouchi yaoi bugs me so much-- not because it's yaoi, but because it's never justified. It's ALWAYS OOC.

I'm prone to thinking that there just IS no such thing as being Straight. You can go your whole life only being sexually or romantically attracted to people of the opposite sex, but does that mean you NEVER look at people of the same gender and think "Hey, they're attractive," if only for the sake of measuring YOURSELF up to them?

*shrugs* I don't know. Say something.

Oh yeah... 98% of the teenage population does/has tried pot. If you're part of the 2% who hasn't, copy this in your journal.

Proud to be drug-free, baby!

Urge to kill... rising

I have a dagger and I know how to use it.

Where's a good carrot when you need something to CHOP!?

And you thought I was pissed off with PHPFanbase before. That does NOT compare to this morning, when I very nearly threw my mouse out the window (after chewing the cord to shreds with my teeth and turning the track wheel into mechanical goosh).

None of that actually happened, and thank goodness, because I only have one mouse with a track wheel. I need a new one. Can someone give me a mouse with a track wheel?

*sigh* Anyway. So I got sick of not being able to add the latest batch of members who were all SHOWING up in the Admin Panel of BEA. The page just refreshed every time I tried to add them, and though several other people have come up with this same problem, no one at CodeGrrl.com has been able to formulate a reply. Call me impatient, but I would have expected ONE email by now. Sheesh.

Then, I discover that there's two sets of United States listed-- one for United_States_of_America and another for United States of America. I had to go into the join.php page and change the underscores-- then I had to copy the corresponding flag image to make sure the PHP call had something to find. Then I had to go into phpMyAdmin (which SUX, by the way) and change the 8 members with the underscores to the normal one. This was harder than it sounds, because every time I tried to make SOME sort of change in the database, the friggin' thing would refresh and then "This Page Cannot Be Displayed" on me. -.- It was very annoying, but I finally got it done.

If I get carpal tunnel, it'll be because my fingers are so damn twitchy-- keyboard corrections, super-hard mouse clicking... ;_; Nothing has mercy on me anymore. Not even WDKY.

Well, I hope that when more people join BEA, I'll be able to just click/admin panel add them. I don't even know if the recent string of people I added got approved emails, but they are officially listed, hallelujah. We now have 116 members! TEH JOY. And even better, akaVertigo made *more* banners... and she gave me the nickname Boss Lady. Hehe, I feel like a Mob Queen now. :)

So aside from the hour-long bout when my head nearly popped open, I'm doing good. I'm on a whack sleeping schedule now, but whatever. And as for breakfast...? Geh, I'm stuck with whatever's NOT cereal, since I just ate the last of it last night (when my Milk Was Purple).

I can't get over the fact that Tristan Taylor can SING. I'm in shock.