amanda_lodden

Today, I want to talk about assumptions.

I've encountered links to this video several times now. Probably, you have too. God knows it's been passed around a lot. But there's never really been any explanation of what it is, other than "it's funny, watch it". And the title doesn't really help-- "Vader Dances To Hammer You Can't Touch This D[the rest always gets cut off]". I'm left to either watch it to figure out what it is, or guess.

Previously, I'd opted to guess. I've been to science fiction conventions; random geeks dressed up as stormtroopers and sith lords is nothing new to me. If you've ever wandered into one of the dances at those conventions, you know that people tend to forget what they're wearing and just dance, and it's not uncommon to see Legolas dancing with Superman. Also, I've seen the sort of crap that Hollywood is passing off as funny, and I don't find it funny to watch others make fools of themselves. So every time I'd encountered this, I'd shrugged and said "I don't care to waste my time watching some poor geek dance poorly while wearing a costume."

I don't know what finally made me click on it this time. And that's when I realized how completely and utterly wrong I was in my assumptions.

It's not a single geek getting his groove on, it's a choreographed dance. And it's not done poorly; the moves are pretty good, especially for the song. And yes, it's funny. But the humor comes not from watching some poor schmuck who doesn't know he's pathetic but rather from the dichotomy of a serious character doing a not-at-all-serious dance. And from hip-hop stormtroopers. Especially from hip-hop stormtroopers.

If you've been wandering around on the 'net for any length of time, chances are you've read something by David Wong. I first encountered him when someone forwarded a link for The Monkeysphere, which helps to explain why we go nuts when something bad happens to one of our friends but we shrug off something that kills a couple hundred thousand people halfway across the world.

That led me to poke around on his website (which, alas, is no more, but a lot of his work has been moved to cracked.com), where I found Ways Online Gaming Will Change The Future which was eerily accurate when I read it almost two years ago and is even more so now. Equally disturbing-because-it's-so-damned-true is his 7 Reasons the 21st Century Is Making You Miserable.

But the best article, the absolute pinnacle of "my God I *love* this man", is 10 Things Christians And Atheists Can (And Must) Agree On. This article says everything I've ever wanted to say about differing belief systems but have been too inarticulate to spit out. I can't count the number of times I've backed out of a debate that I felt strongly about because I didn't trust myself not to go on a verbal rampage of everything my opponent held dear; it's exceeded only by the number of times I *should* have backed out of a debate but stayed in long enough to stay something stupid and hurtful that I regretted saying, something that I didn't even mean but got too emotionally charged, something that turned the whole "difference of opinion" into "all-out war".

Shamelessly stolen from Wondermark

My bookmarks overflowth.

Since I use Google Reader to keep up with things I read routinely, my bookmarks end up being one-use pages. Usually, I bookmarked them because I wanted to remind myself to do something-- there's craft projects and recipes bookmarked, and some articles that I think would be useful but not right then. Sometimes, I bookmark pages that sparked an idea for a journal entry, but often they just end up being one-or-two paragraph responses from me, hardly enough to warrant a full entry of their own. I'll get to those some day.

Sometimes, I don't know why I bookmarked them, or I bookmarked them for fairly simple reasons. This post it about THOSE bookmarks.

I don't know exactly why I bookmarked RedBubble. I'm sure I bookmarked it for the T-shirts, because I have a funny-T-shirt fetish, but it seems to be more of an art site where you can get T-shirts than a T-shirt site. Nice artwork, though.

Meeting Jesus isn't in my bookmarks, but that's because I just found it while I was writing this. Pastor Alan is an old friend of mine from college. He leans a little towards the odd sometimes (he has said it himself, using "Come on, I can find God in a cheeseburger!" as his proof), but the story is lovely.

I'm very fond of Just One Club Card. I borrowed Brian and Julianna's laminator, and have been making double-sided key fobs to replace the single-sided (and much thicker) ones. I started doing it because the ink had worn off on my Staples card, but I discovered that I like the double-sided-ness part a lot.

Bug Me Not is a nifty idea, though I confess that it's been rolling around in my bookmarks for years and I've never actually remembered to use it. However, I like the concept of shared logins for places that demand them for no good reason. Mostly I deal with it by ignoring the site (or giving in and registering, and then spam-filtering any email that appears from them).

These Star Trek Inspirational Posters make me laugh every time I revisit them. Some day, I'm going to get a nice big poster-sized print of the Technofear one and hang it up in the office.

I am absolutely certain that I am not Green Enough To Go Gray. I started going gray when I was 20, and I'm still too damned young to have earned as many gray hairs as I have. However, I probably bookmarked this to remind myself to look into Aubrey Organics and see if I liked their hair color enough to use it. I did, and it turns out that they only have two colors, both of them much darker than the color I use. Ah well.

I'd really like to master the art of only one carry-on. I did fairly well on my last trip, using a single suitcase plus carryon for 2 and a half weeks, but I still ended up with a lot of things I could have left home. My new backpack laptop bag helped considerably though (it was the carryon), and as I get used to using it I suspect I could pare down its contents even more. It does have the best packing advice I've ever heard: "If you think something might come in handy, leave it at home. If you know you can't get along without it, bring it."

One of my ongoing projects has been to clear out the excess clutter surrounding me. One of my worst guilty pleasures is magazines-- be it fluffy gossip rags, "women's" magazines full of articles on cleaning and recipes I'll never use, or homeowner magazines full of articles on building a woodshop and home-improvement projects I'll never do, I just can't resist them. They generally don't include any information I didn't already know, but there's something soothing about reading through them just the same. As a compromise, I'm trying to stick with digital versions of them.