So, I've never been much of a comic book fan. I knew nothing about Spiderman, X-men, Batman, etc., until I watched the movies. And most of those didn't engage me quite enough for me to delve into the comics for more juicy canon.

And then I watched The Dark Knight and fell in love with Heath Ledger's Joker. Yeah, yeah, I know, just like a zillion other rabid fangirls. I know.

But that's not what I'm posting about.

In my wanderings through canon and fanon, I found... The Jokester. He's the Joker's good alter ego. No, seriously. He exists in a version of Earth called Earth-3, and he appeared in the Countdown arc for about four issues (plus one oneshot devoted to him). He is of the WIN AND AWESOME. Take all of the Joker's crazy, fun quirks, and take away the homicidal psychotic tendencies. This is a guy who beats down bad guys with a mallet named 'Lil Punchy', and who keeps a spring-loaded blunt object in his belt for punching villains in the balls with.

Must. Spread. The love. A universe with Good-but-still-crazy-fun!Joker will never cease to be awesome.

Here are some scans with a brief synopsis of the plot: overlithe.livejournal.com/35913.html

And here is a masterlist of fanworks: overlithe.livejournal.com/39672.html

So, it's 3:30 AM, and I'm not sleepy. This has been a recurring problem for the past week and a half. This time, however, it's not Lensmoor's fault. It's not the fault of FFX-2, either. Or Silent Hill 3. It's not even the fault of my brain's infuriating trait of not shutting up long enough to get sleepy.

No, this time, it's Avatar: The Last Airbender.

I watched the finale.

OMG.

( *SPOILERS* )

For hours on end, the battle raged. The outlook was dire, and none could penetrate the murky depths of the sinister Optics Take-Home Final Exam. Hair was lost, tears were wept, and naught a coherent smudge of graphite was to be seen upon the battlefield.

But lo! After hours of staring at the textbook pages, suddenly in a brilliant flash, all became clear!

Diffraction, thine mysteries hath been revealed unto thine foe!

And like a streaking blur the pencil flashed across the page, and the battalions of graphite letters and numbers marched triumphantly across the engineering paper! And the Final Exam hath cried: "Woe be unto me! For mine mysteries hath been conquered, and mine secrets hath been revealed! Here I lay in my dying throes, mine carcass now bleeding graphite upon the professor's desk!"

It is a very good day.

I killed that test. Oh yes. I slaughtered it in cold, merciless blood. And I was the first one to turn the damned thing in.

I win.

Shame? What shame?

[begin shameless plugging]
I've been on and off this MUD for about six years now. I wander off because of various issues, all of which have been resolved by now (never leaving again!). But I always seem to come back. Every other MUD out there, while some have shineys that Lensmoor doesn't, Lensmoor just keeps trumping them all. It's probably the people as well--HUGE nerd base there. After that fiasco in Alter Aeon...god, I love my fellow nerds.

The people there are pretty doggone helpful and nice, with some exceptions. But there are always exceptions. There's a large support base for newbies, especially now. You can pretty much always get help if you need it. The imms are helpful and interactive with the playerbase as well--something I've found very lacking in almost every other MUD.

So, if you like free online text-based roleplaying games, it'd be great if you'd come and have a look.


Port 3500

[/end shameless plugging]

God. There are SUCH stupid people in the world. Sometimes I forget how idiotic people can be, how ignorant.

I was playing a MUD a couple of days ago, Alter Aeon. And there was this guy, Axl, who was proclaiming loudly on the main channel some of his views on god--namely that since it couldn't be proven that god exists, he cannot possibly exist. Which was idiotic in itself, of course, but that wasn't what I had a problem with.

Noticing that quite a few people were irked with the line of conversation (note that the imms didn't do a damn thing, either, like they should have), I tried to steer the conversation away.

Into science.

I was successful, and part of me is still wishing that I hadn't been. The following are some of the completely moronic "facts" this guy and his friends were spewing. Most of my replied correcting them were either ignored or tossed out as 'wrong':

Oxygen has no energy--it's only the pathway for energy when burned.--Hello? REST ENERGY?!

Space is completely empty, devoid of anything, and has no energy.--Interstellar medium, anyone?

It is impossible to prove that something does not exist--God...THIS one was a particular headache. Myself and two other people gave a couple of examples, the main one being the (non)existance of a greatest element in the set of rational numbers between (not including) 0 and 1. The idiot claimed that 0.99999(infinite number of 9s) was the largest. When pointed out that this number is in fact 1, he said we were wrong, and when shown a proof, he said that the proof was wrong. And then, when I told him to find and read "Abstract Mathematics" by Bond, his reply was: "'Abstract'? As in: make-believe." Excuse my anglo-saxon, but what the fuck?!

Time is absolute. The fellow (not one of the main morons) actually did retract this when I mentioned relativity, so he's not so bad. He gets respect for being open-minded. :)

And the crux of it all: "Axl is a physicist! You ought to listen to him because he's right!" Like fucking hell he's a physicist. Where'd he graduate? McDonald's Institute for High-School Flunkies?

What annoys me the most is that these...people...refused to listen to reason (even though they themselves claimed to be the epitome of reason) when myself and numerous other people told them that they were wrong and gave the correct science.

Someone. Anyone. Please, please laugh with me. I'm dying here.

I'm not sick anymore, but boy did I oversleep today. I stayed up later than I should have last night, on top of just getting over being sick. I wasn't really all the way better yesterday.

I got my new glasses in on Thursday! That was a definite pick-me-up. The lenses are shaped differently than my other pair, so it's taking a bit to get my depth perception back with these ones.

Well, excess dedication to astro lab does pay off. Even when the data stil refuses to work correctly. After eight hours spent working on the optical spectroscopy data, Dr. Hofner managed to hook up a printer to the good linux machine (le gasp!!) and I managed to deduce that it was not me screwing up the @add program in class, but rather the @add program screwing up. For some reason it predicts the deuterium lines perfectly (even gamma, which was not used in the calibration), but fails miserably for neon and all of the rest. We could identify the neon lines by strength and spacing, but the wavelenth scale between the lines was seriously on CRACK. Jason and I attacked it ferociously to no avail. He told me to take what I have and just do a write-up, since I'd worked hard enough on it.

The fact that I managed to struggle through it mostly on my own, though, has made be feel quite good about myself.

Went to El Camino afterwards with Margaret, and then stopped at Trowbridge's for Buffy. Buffy night! Woo! Thank god--season seven is so much better than season six. As Margaret put it, we've got the biggest bad of them all (the First Evil--the Evil that made all other evils), and Buffy actually seems like she's winning. She's not failing with real life like she was in season six (god that was a painful season...and I only saw the latter half of it).

Hmm...woke up today too late to go to painting, and feeling a little sick again. Meh. It'll go away.

And now I have a psych paper to write. Cheers!

Well, lovely. I think my head is going to split open ands fry my brains on the carpet.

I'm skipping class today. My eyeballs--they burn!

Heard as a snippet of conversation from two people walking down the hall outside my dorm room just now:

"So God told Moses to throw this dust into the air, and it, like, gave his enemies sores and stuff. So is that considered biological warfare?"

Best random quote I've heard in days (discounting Margaret's. She gives great random quotes as a rule, and almost daily).

Yes, this post is as random as the quote. Point?

This week is going surprisingly well. I'm slightly amazed. Quick, I must knock on wood so as not to jinx myself.

The Basic concepts test...didn't seem bad, really. I'm iffy on the first problem, but I knew what to do on all of the rest. Unfortunately, knowing what to do doesn't quite cut it in that class. Dr. Avramidi likes the proofs done with an absolute, rigid, specific format and wording, which is the part of abstract mathematics that I just don't get. So while I'm sure I did the other parts with the correct proceedure, I don't know if I did them correctly.

So I either failed the test or did brilliantly. We'll find out next Tuesday. O_o

I got my astro test back, as predicted. I did better than I'd thought, actually. Unfortunately, everyone else ('everyone else' being the other five people in the class), also did just as well, causing Dr. Young to announce that she thought she'd made the test too easy. -_- I don't know about the rest of the class, but personally I thought that being able to walk out of the classroom after the test without a cloud of despair hanging over me was a good thing. Oh well. I'll savour this one test while I can.

*gack* I need to update the Physics Club webpage. Oops. There's a Trebuchet BBQ out on the Athletic Field on Friday the 24th, starting at about four/five. Please come by, anyone who can!

The opening to Kingdom Hearts II is pretty. *dies and puts the cutscene on repeat*

Hmm. There's not much else going on. Dr. Hofner commented that the galaxy images we'd managed to take were 'beautiful'! Considering that we'd imaged these on a full moon, I am rather proud of our group. And for the first time in recollection, his lecture on Monday for lab was perfectly coherent.

The X RPG that had been silent for two months is finally starting to come back (I think). Speaking of which, it's my post...

Yeah, this is a good week so far. I'm hoping that it keeps this trend up!