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I like memes that are random prompts to tl;dr. So have one, courtesy of ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
thebigkaboosh.
Leave a comment saying, "COMMENT" and I will give you five words I associate with you. Then post about what they mean to you, along with this at your journal.
EDIT: formatting fail also fixed; some day I will learn not to post long memes from Lynx.
She gave me Weddings, SCIENCE!, Video Games, Honesty, and Prose.
Weddings:
Well, the inclusion on this list is a clear sign I've been bitching too much. Heh. Yes, I'm getting married next summer, and yes, I'm stressing out about it. I was never the kind of girl who planned her wedding in her head; I was adamant that I wasn't getting married and I wasn't having kids, because I couldn't see wanting to settle down. For a very, very long time. But I am one of those people who did change as she grew up, and thus annoys all the people who did not by being the example that gets pointed to along with a singsong comment of "oh, you'll change your mind". So I'm planning this big event that has all these gender-specific stereotypes (if you hadn't noticed by now, a girlygirl I am NOT) and I am very worried I'm going to Do It Wrong.
Really, as long as I end up married at the end of the day, and the food is good, I don't care about a lot of the details. But I still have to pick something, and have a lot of future in-laws having my choices be one of their biggest impressions of me. Oh well.
So I apologize to anyone who doesn't want to hear me whine about weddings; I end up doing it more here than on my other journal because there's some etiquette rules about it being rude to whine about wedding planning to an audience that is mixed between people who are invited and those who are not -- we're only inviting our closest local friends as neither of us are enough of introverts to not want a huge party, so it's just family and close friends. There are lots of local friends we're not inviting that I'd love to have there -- I just can't handle all of them at once and spend any time at all with any particular person.
SCIENCE!:
My field. Specifically, aerospace engineering and then software engineering. My dad (also an engineer) and I are sometimes freakish braintwins when it comes to science stuff -- growing up I intended to go into physics, which is what he started out in, and I ended up switching to engineering also, though a few years earlier in life than he did (undergrad vs grad school).
Video games:
I have been a gamer as long as I can remember. (C.F. my father being an engineer above: we had a computer in the house when I was tiny.) I was playing video games at age 2 or 3, before I could read well enough to really play. And I'm never stopping. I'm mostly an adventure/RPG player -- from the days of Infocom, Sierra, and dungeon-crawling first-person RPGs that didn't even bother pretending to have a story, up through now. I haven't had nearly as much time to play since starting LJ-RP, though.
I had someone poke his head in my office yesterday and say "So I have this suspicion you might be a gamer..." My parents got me the classic Super Mario wall stickers from ThinkGeek this Christmas, and my office is now very colorful. There's a star over my name on the glass door, little Mario chasing a mushroom precariously off my whiteboard, and clouds above the fluorescent wall lights. It makes me grin. I'd been here for almost five years and the only decoration I had was one picture of me, my boyfriend and my sister, and a 12 inch dalek, which meant the office was deeply bare. Not any more. (Well, and I have my Godot mug, but as it just took the slot of another, less nifty, mug, it doesn't parse as decoration to anyone not-me. No-one has recognized it, though the Dalek gets commented on regularly.)
Honesty:
I try to be a very honest person. Not in the "brutal honesty" sense -- politeness is something I find important, and one can be polite without being passive aggressive. (Though that does sometimes lead me to think people hate me; the rules I grew up with were along the lines of "if you don't have anything nice to say..." whereas a lot of the internet silence means friendliness -- if they didn't like you, you'd be getting trolled/anonybashed/whatever.)
I do sometimes weirdly tell the dumbest little lies; like what I had for lunch or something ridiculous that only I'd know was a lie, and doesn't matter to anyone. I don't know why I do it -- it's stupid, and I don't do it often, but I've always done it and probably always will.
Prose:
Something I didn't think about at all until recently, and then have spent a lot of time deconstructing? I will admit I've cribbed a lot of my prose style from Neal Stephenson -- starting out because I was writing for S.T. so much, but I've seen myself pulling some bits into other writing. Not all of it; just parts that work for me. And then adding a zillion semicolon-separated clauses, because I loves me some semicolons. I have approached it like the engineer and amateur Classical scholar that I am -- pulling sentences apart into chunks, consciously assembling rules and rhetorical devices, and always looking for ways to improve.
I just uploaded a bunch of my old stories to AO3, and I could barely bear to look at them. I hadn't figured out where to break paragraphs yet -- especially since reading online has a different feel than paperback books. (And I know I went back and added more breaks to several of those stories a long time ago; but they still don't have the "where does a paragraph end/how does it flow" thing down, and I'd rather leave them alone now.) Dialog is something I've always felt weak at; prose was easier. It's starting to swing; I've had a bunch of tags lately where I realized I'd written nothing but dialog except for a "said so-and-so" tag and had to go back and flesh in some tl;dr if there was a good spot; if not, I just let them stand as dialogue-heavy.
I've also started noticing prose styles wherever I'm reading things; I loved poetry as a teenager and could talk endlessly about poetical devices in the Aeneid or some such, but I hadn't really tried to apply them to prose. (And I don't write poetry any more. The stuff I wrote wasn't bad for a high-schooler, but I stopped wanting to write it in college.) Now I see devices and style choices bubbling up all over, which is fascinating, if sometimes distracting from the actual story.
thebigkaboosh. Leave a comment saying, "COMMENT" and I will give you five words I associate with you. Then post about what they mean to you, along with this at your journal.
EDIT: formatting fail also fixed; some day I will learn not to post long memes from Lynx.
She gave me Weddings, SCIENCE!, Video Games, Honesty, and Prose.
Weddings:
Well, the inclusion on this list is a clear sign I've been bitching too much. Heh. Yes, I'm getting married next summer, and yes, I'm stressing out about it. I was never the kind of girl who planned her wedding in her head; I was adamant that I wasn't getting married and I wasn't having kids, because I couldn't see wanting to settle down. For a very, very long time. But I am one of those people who did change as she grew up, and thus annoys all the people who did not by being the example that gets pointed to along with a singsong comment of "oh, you'll change your mind". So I'm planning this big event that has all these gender-specific stereotypes (if you hadn't noticed by now, a girlygirl I am NOT) and I am very worried I'm going to Do It Wrong.
Really, as long as I end up married at the end of the day, and the food is good, I don't care about a lot of the details. But I still have to pick something, and have a lot of future in-laws having my choices be one of their biggest impressions of me. Oh well.
So I apologize to anyone who doesn't want to hear me whine about weddings; I end up doing it more here than on my other journal because there's some etiquette rules about it being rude to whine about wedding planning to an audience that is mixed between people who are invited and those who are not -- we're only inviting our closest local friends as neither of us are enough of introverts to not want a huge party, so it's just family and close friends. There are lots of local friends we're not inviting that I'd love to have there -- I just can't handle all of them at once and spend any time at all with any particular person.
SCIENCE!:
My field. Specifically, aerospace engineering and then software engineering. My dad (also an engineer) and I are sometimes freakish braintwins when it comes to science stuff -- growing up I intended to go into physics, which is what he started out in, and I ended up switching to engineering also, though a few years earlier in life than he did (undergrad vs grad school).
Video games:
I have been a gamer as long as I can remember. (C.F. my father being an engineer above: we had a computer in the house when I was tiny.) I was playing video games at age 2 or 3, before I could read well enough to really play. And I'm never stopping. I'm mostly an adventure/RPG player -- from the days of Infocom, Sierra, and dungeon-crawling first-person RPGs that didn't even bother pretending to have a story, up through now. I haven't had nearly as much time to play since starting LJ-RP, though.
I had someone poke his head in my office yesterday and say "So I have this suspicion you might be a gamer..." My parents got me the classic Super Mario wall stickers from ThinkGeek this Christmas, and my office is now very colorful. There's a star over my name on the glass door, little Mario chasing a mushroom precariously off my whiteboard, and clouds above the fluorescent wall lights. It makes me grin. I'd been here for almost five years and the only decoration I had was one picture of me, my boyfriend and my sister, and a 12 inch dalek, which meant the office was deeply bare. Not any more. (Well, and I have my Godot mug, but as it just took the slot of another, less nifty, mug, it doesn't parse as decoration to anyone not-me. No-one has recognized it, though the Dalek gets commented on regularly.)
Honesty:
I try to be a very honest person. Not in the "brutal honesty" sense -- politeness is something I find important, and one can be polite without being passive aggressive. (Though that does sometimes lead me to think people hate me; the rules I grew up with were along the lines of "if you don't have anything nice to say..." whereas a lot of the internet silence means friendliness -- if they didn't like you, you'd be getting trolled/anonybashed/whatever.)
I do sometimes weirdly tell the dumbest little lies; like what I had for lunch or something ridiculous that only I'd know was a lie, and doesn't matter to anyone. I don't know why I do it -- it's stupid, and I don't do it often, but I've always done it and probably always will.
Prose:
Something I didn't think about at all until recently, and then have spent a lot of time deconstructing? I will admit I've cribbed a lot of my prose style from Neal Stephenson -- starting out because I was writing for S.T. so much, but I've seen myself pulling some bits into other writing. Not all of it; just parts that work for me. And then adding a zillion semicolon-separated clauses, because I loves me some semicolons. I have approached it like the engineer and amateur Classical scholar that I am -- pulling sentences apart into chunks, consciously assembling rules and rhetorical devices, and always looking for ways to improve.
I just uploaded a bunch of my old stories to AO3, and I could barely bear to look at them. I hadn't figured out where to break paragraphs yet -- especially since reading online has a different feel than paperback books. (And I know I went back and added more breaks to several of those stories a long time ago; but they still don't have the "where does a paragraph end/how does it flow" thing down, and I'd rather leave them alone now.) Dialog is something I've always felt weak at; prose was easier. It's starting to swing; I've had a bunch of tags lately where I realized I'd written nothing but dialog except for a "said so-and-so" tag and had to go back and flesh in some tl;dr if there was a good spot; if not, I just let them stand as dialogue-heavy.
I've also started noticing prose styles wherever I'm reading things; I loved poetry as a teenager and could talk endlessly about poetical devices in the Aeneid or some such, but I hadn't really tried to apply them to prose. (And I don't write poetry any more. The stuff I wrote wasn't bad for a high-schooler, but I stopped wanting to write it in college.) Now I see devices and style choices bubbling up all over, which is fascinating, if sometimes distracting from the actual story.
