little ducks all in a row

i may be a terrible person

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 10:11:00 -0700

During my little brother’s graduation, there was a woman who would not stop talking about everything that upset her. (Which could also be said as “would not stop talking about everything.” Because that’s what upset her — everything.) While she snarled and cussed her way up through subjects like ‘who got to straighten whose jacket’, and then over through subjects like ‘what direction chairs should face’ and ‘who was an authority on towels’, I eventually tried to distract her by asking her a question about herself. Unsurprisingly, this offended her.

I decided that, since I couldn’t think of anything nice to say after that, I wouldn’t say anything at all. She resumed her diatribe, and her sister (the silent audience this whole time) continued listening wordlessly. (I heard one sentence out of her later, when Angry!lady introduced her to someone else. That was it, I think.)

Instead of talking, I took a notebook out of my purse to doodle in. I may or may not have drawn people being horribly dismembered. Strangely, she (and her silent sister) left for other seats partway through the ceremony.

Sometimes I end up doing the equivalent of doodling mustaches...

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 12:02:29 -0700

Sometimes I end up doing the equivalent of doodling mustaches and effacing srsbzns photos when I have Photoshop open. There isn’t a mustache doodled here, but this isn’t exactly how this photo/screencap started out.

I did the whole “Senpai noticed me” thing, because by the end it looked like that kind of a face — even though technically I probably ought to have put something like “Kohai noticed me” (Senpai being an upperclassman, Kohai being an underclassman, if my memory serves. And the ‘kohai’ in question would obvs be Stiles. Because reasons.)

Maybe this is a Derek Hale that is dealing with a time travelling Stiles?

In any case, this is basically me sharing random absurdity with the interwebs just because I can.

tl;dr, have some fangirling!Derek

yuroran: Requests done! (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧ Thanks for helping me...

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 01:45:00 -0700

yuroran:

Requests done! (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧

Thanks for helping me practice~

LOOK AT THIS. LOOK LOOK LOOK.

(I’m in here~! I was drawn! I am the happiest Ducky ever. You don’t even know.)

Stiles is a ladybug, basically.

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 16:56:46 -0700

Stiles is a ladybug, basically.

‘One of These Links is Not Like the Others’. Or,...

Sun, 02 Jun 2013 01:21:05 -0700

‘One of These Links is Not Like the Others’. Or, ‘If You Can’t Talk About It Comfortably with Your Garden, You Probably Shouldn’t Be Doing It’, featuring Judgmental Carrots.

There was this infinite-gif-maker site. I’m not madly...

Wed, 29 May 2013 00:38:00 -0700

There was this infinite-gif-maker site. I’m not madly impressed — none of the borders ever really got rid of the square-frame bit — but I thought I’d share the random resulting infinite-Stiles-gif just the same. Woo.

Even my dreams are borrowed. I’m not filled, but instead...

Mon, 20 May 2013 11:46:00 -0700

Even my dreams are borrowed. I’m not filled, but instead hollowed out.

++++

Ahahahaha playing with ReciteThis, seeing if it actually *works* nowadays, and it looks like the answer is ‘yes’. (Before, it always stuck at 99% and didn’t budge.) Figures that it’d work when I was putting in a terribly emo blurt. Woo look at my emo hipsterism, CLEARLY TUMBLR IS WHERE I BELONG~

(tl;dr, playing with ReciteThis)

Bronte by Gotye I clicked on this video when I was listening to...

Tue, 14 May 2013 00:19:00 -0700

Bronte by Gotye

I clicked on this video when I was listening to random things while emptying the dishwasher, so it was just idle curiosity — I saw Bronte and thought Brontë like the Brontë sisters. It wasn’t the Brontë sisters. It’s a video that makes people sad, but weirdly (weirdly only because i cry at like, everything) I was so caught up in the my-neighbor-totoro references that it didn’t strike me as sad.

Lotsa people in the reviews mentioned crying, though. [ETA: read what the song was written about. Now crying, but might not be if I hadn’t had my parakeet put to sleep a month ago?]

More seriously, if anyone reading this saw My Neighbor Totoro, did any of the sequences make you think of it?

confession time

Sat, 11 May 2013 17:49:41 -0700

I actually love videos with makeover montages/sequences.

Which covers a lot of ground, actually. Legally Blonde, Miss Congeniality, Mulan, She’s the Man, and so on and so forth.

Even when I don’t like the whole movie, I usually like the makeover part.

I’m not a very feminine/girlish person, I just love watching people transform. And have a low attention span, so — montages!

Yeah.

The truth is out: one of the real reasons I don’t watch...

Sat, 11 May 2013 16:57:15 -0700

The truth is out: one of the real reasons I don’t watch movies is because my attention span is rubbish. I started trying to watch mean girls, and one character, Damian (whose best friend described him as “almost too gay to function”) wanted to have hair the same colour as Kady, another character (also seen here, in the blurry foreground).

Naturally, this meant I had to pause, screencap, and give him a quick photoshop mockup of a potential hairstyle using her haircolour.

I think his hair would look nice in her colour. Just saying.

And then Adobe Made More Bad Decisions, to Everyone's Horror

Thu, 09 May 2013 00:11:16 -0700

And then Adobe Made More Bad Decisions, to Everyone's Horror:

in my (not so) humble opinion, Adobe has been making some pretty crap marketing/publicity decisions lately, (I’ll take ‘Ducky can’t install her legally purchased software on new computers because Adobe disabled its activation’ for 500, Alex), but now it looks like you can’t buy the software anymore. Just… rent it. Perpetually.

Quest to Find the Language: Vashta Nerada

Wed, 01 May 2013 01:17:00 -0700

“Vashta Nerada” (from the Dr Who episode Silence in the Library) theoretically means “the shadows that melt flesh” in some language. So I’m trying to find which one it is (if any at all — it could be a conlang) and posting my random finds here, because Reasons.

✖ Bulgarian: Vashta Nerada → ваща нерада → executing narada; however, by itself, Vashta (ваща) translates to offsetting

✖ Chinese: when Nerada is put into simplified/Pinyin, Nerada (though the emphasis is different: Nǚ’ér ā dà) becomes 女儿阿大, which apparently translates to ‘a large daughter’

✖ Croatian: Nerada translates to inaction / idleness

✖ Czech: Nerada translates to hate

✖ Esperanto: (speaking of conlangs) translates Vashta to vast / extensive

✖ Greek: Vashta Nerada → βασητα νεράδα, which translates to ‘base Nerada’. Alone, βασητα translates to ‘basis’

✖ Hebrew: trying to roughly phonetically transliterate into Hebrew, the resultant mess translated to Gift A Voice Please Re/Rose de; simply typing in ‘Vashta’, or בשיטה, translates to method

✖ Hindi: dividing ‘Vashta’ into ‘vash’ and ‘ta’ (वश ता, pronounced Vaśa tā) translates to ‘quality control’

✖ Japanese: a rough transliteration got me 場したねらだ, pronounced ‘Ba shita ne rada’, which translates to ‘I’m from the field’

✖ Korean: a rough translitaration got 바시타 나라다, pronounced ‘basita nalada’. Nalada (나라다) translated to ‘countries’

✖ Latvian: ‘Nerada’ translates to ‘not’ / ‘does not’

✖ Lithuanian: Vashta Nerada → ‘We have not found Vashta’

✖ Persian: Vashta Nerada → وشتا نرده ; only ‘Nerada’ (نرده ) translates, becoming fencing / railing

✖ Russian: вашта нерада ; Nerada (нерада) translates to ‘neglect’

✖ Serbian: вашта нерада ; Nerada (still ‘нерада’) translates to ‘inaction’

✖ Slovak: Nerada translates to ‘hate’

✖ Slovenian: Nerada translates to ‘reluctant’

✖ Tamil: வஷட நேரட Vaṣaṭa nēraṭa → Nerada translates to ‘clearly’

✖ Ukrainian: Vashta Nerada → вашіта нерада; Nerada translates to ‘disinclined’

✖ Urdu: Vashta Nerada → وستا نرادہ , where ‘Vashta’ (وستا ) translates to vista / pregnancy

So I haven’t yet found whatever language it is supposed to be in. Anyone else been more successful?

don't pay attention to this, it's [still] not ready (pt 3)

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 12:02:53 -0700

continued from [here], beginning [here]. Same deal as before:

This is just me, typing things out as I go along so that I don’t look at it written in longhand later and go “oh god I don’t want to type this up, why didn’t I do it in pieces?” and so on. not necessarily something that people should read. It’s WIP (and very-much-going-to-change) bits of fiction. So, uh, move along, unless you’re dying to see it, b/c it’s nothing awesome.

“Deaton knows… a lot of stuff. Like, mountain ash? But also other stuff that I didn’t know I could do until he told me about it. Isaac, too. He has us doing stuff that Isaac says Derek hasn’t even mentioned as a possibility. It sounds kind of like – I mean, from what Isaac says? – like Derek is mostly throwing them around to teach them how to fight, and keeping them contained o the full moon, and that’s it.” Scott’s face pulls to one side in a brief grimace. “That’s weird, right?” I mean, even when I got bit, and he was looking for the alpha, he had advice. I mean, not that I listened a lot, because… yeah. But it sounds like he’s not telling them very much. So seeing Deaton and learning from him – it’s pretty important, y’know?” Scott’s face was almost painfully earnest.

“I think that blurt was almost me-worthy,” Stiles told Scott with a fond shove. “So, to summarize: Isaac recovering from post-bite hulk tendencies to join Club Vet, Deaton remains mysterious font of knowledge, sources still at large?”

“I think you mean fountain.”

“I really don’t. Unless that’s supposed to be a metaphor where the information is the water and you shouldn’t drink it because you don’t know what’s… been – wait. You were totally fucking with me just now!” Stiles shrieks shoving an unrepentant, cackling Scott with much less gentleness than before. (He was a werewolf; he could deal with it.)

“Deaton-lessons aside, though – Isaac? Like, new-wolf-’roid-rage Isaac? Is this strictly a tutoring and text-ual relationship, or what?”

“More like an ‘or-what’, I guess,” Scott admitted, fiddling with his phone in a fidgety manner more typical of Stiles’ habits than his own. “But for right now, it’s… this is mostly it. I might bring him over to my house at some point, if Mom’s okay with it, but we aren’t really there yet. I mean, he seems more… stable, by now? But that doesn’t mean I want to be in a situation where I might have to fight with my new friend to keep my mom safe because the full moon’s too close, or anything.”

Stiles nodded his understanding – having only one parent meant being more cautious with them. While he might get a little more involved in the Beacon Hills’ crime investigations than his father (and his father’s colleagues) would like, he tried to make up for it – he kept an eye on his father’s diet, and may or may not have made a standing agreement with their family practitioner that kept him appraised of any worrying changes in his father’s bloodwork involving cholesterol. (He’d tried for bloodsugar, as well, but the doctor had apparently decided to keep the breaches of doctor-patient confidentiality to a bare minimum, Stiles’ arguments about the parameters of the Hippocratic Oath notwithstanding.)

“So – where in this new relationship do the concerns about graffiti come from? Because I love you, but if you’re thinking of starting up your career as a tagger without me, we are going to have words. Many words. Words like ‘friends don’t let friends commit misdemeanors alone,’ and also words like ‘remember how you couldn’t get your stick figures to look right and the kindergarten teacher wanted to send you to therapy because she thought it looked like you were drawing pictures of your mother stabbing people’, and possibly many other words, none of which are the kinds of nice things you normally hear from me,” Stiles warned.

“Stiles, you don’t usually say nice things to me.”

“I do! Even my criticisms are done with love.”

“The part where my jaw is weirdly uneven?”

“A statement of fact. Also, not said to your face!” Stiles defended.

“Said where I could hear it.”

“Only because of your freaky werewolf powers!”

“Your compliments are going to go right to my head, Stiles. Really.”

“Hey! Sarcasm is mine. You have unfair biceps and a set of abs that I’m pretty sure you didn’t work enough to deserve – you don’t get to use my specialty against me!” Stiles crossed his arms mock-defensively across his chest with an exaggerated huff.

“More seriously, though,” Scott admitted, returning to the previous topic, “I don’t’ know what the graffiti question was about.”

“You gonna ask?”

“I was about to, actually.”

“Well, go ahead,” Stiles said magnanimously, stabbing a straw into his juicebox with exaggerated relish. “I actually had some questions for you, but I can eat while you get your text-groove on. Lemme know what he says, though.”

They spent the next few moments in relative quiet, the sounds of other students a low hum around them, punctuated by the “beep-boop-beee” noises from Scott’s phone and the gooey chew and slurp of Stiles making his way through both his drink and the contents of his plate.

“He says…” Scott squinted at his phone, “There might be a pack of alphas?”

Stiles stared. “Do you think it’s an autocorrect issue?” he managed at last, voice hopeful.

“No, I – maybe?”

The phone chimed another incoming message, and Stiles snatched the phone from Scott (who was obviously humoring him, because – werewolf) and impatiently speed-thumbed through the new information.

“They wrote… some kind of… sign? On –”

“Derek’s old place,” Scott finished or him, reading over his shoulder.

“Dude, that doesn’t even make sense,” Stiles complained, shoving the phone back towards Scott in exasperation. “That’s like – a group of control-freaks. They’d be butting heads all the time! Like trying to form teams on a player-vs-player system. It shouldn’t even work.”

Scott was frowning at his phone like it had played a part in this ridiculousness, and was somehow responsible for the baffling contents of its message.

“I’ve run into some stuff while researching – just actual wolves, though – that suggests that our concept of wolf-behavior is skewed,” Stiles offered after a few moments, “That – like, the wolves people had been studying were thrown together without any kind of shared history. So the idea that maybe we believed too much in alphas, and fighting stuff out to figure out who went where on the fuzzy totem-pole – when normally the structure was more like a family and less… gladiator-style.”

“Yeah, but I’m pretty sure alphas are a Thing with werewolves. Red eyes, turning other people, delusions of grandeur…” Scott countered, frowning.

“So maybe it’s kind of right. I mean, there’d still be a kind of head pair in wolf packs – it’s just that they’d be parents, and not small-scale dictators. And I’m kinda unclear on what officially makes somebody an alpha. Derek said something about you being one, but I haven’t seen you all hulked out and red-eyed. If you were just some sort of ‘honorary Alpha, and it didn’t mean anything, I feel like you’d be reverting to an omega. And you’re not, right? You’re just… beta-y.” Stiles paused, sliding his fingers back through his (starting to be too long) hair in frustration. “Which reminds me – do alphas have a set ‘alpha’ form? Peter was just huge and ridiculous, like the film-version of Lupin on steroids – but with Derek, he’s just… himself plus red eyes. And his sister was a wolf-wolf, but that was after she was dead. And only half of her. Ugh, what would a pack of alphas mean? Our sample pool tells us absolutely nothing. I mean, not counting you, we know that it means red eyes. Except that’s actually only two out of four, because I’m only guessing that Laura’s eyes were red before… Peter.”

“We haven’t really gone over that stuff with Deaton,” Scott admitted.

Stiles felt a faint pang as he realized that the ‘we’, in this case, meant ‘Scott and Isaac’, not ‘Scott and Stiles’. Which was stupid – Stiles didn’t really need werewolf lessons. He’d tried magic, and that’d seemed awesome up until the barrier he’d made out of mountain ash had almost meant that Victoria ‘Mommy Dearest’ Argent got to poison Scott without interference. (And Derek had been the one to save him. All Stiles had done? Was momentarily delay that. His shiny magic spark hadn’t seemed all that awesome, then; it hadn’t even contained the kamina.)

Stiles didn’t need Deaton’s lessons. He just wanted the man’s information. Forget notions of Sparks or being special; Stiles just needed to know about werewolves. He could then strategize accordingly. He’d gotten along fine before Deaton had started his Rupert Guiles routine.

Deaton could give all the magical little wolfy lessons to Scott and Isaac he wanted; Stiles obviously had no need to be a part of that. Stiles could fulfill the role of token human, researcher, and strategizer without some sort of personal supernatural tutoring from the local vet. He had a copy of the Argents’ bestiary, and between OCR software and Google’s (heh, alpha) Latin translator to help him, he could at least get the gist of the contents.

Research was made somewhat easier by the possession of at least that one source. While combing through internet forums and archives (as well as some of the Beacon Hill County Library special collections) was like searching out needles in haystacks, at least he had enough theoretically reliable knowledge to recognize the proverbial ‘needles’ when he found them.

“So. Pack of alphas. You’re already set to see Deaton this afternoon, so if Isaac doesn’t bring it up, you can. Let me know what he says about it. This is your official job for the evening. Do not forget. If you do, I reserve the right to mock you ruthlessly and put post-its on your forehead detailing your shame. Okay?”

“Yeah, okay,” Scott agreed, “Sounds good.”

“And I am going to go through the bestiary wherever alphas are mentioned. Which is probably ‘a lot’, unfortunately. Call me with what you figure out, and we’ll – hopefully find out that there’s nothing to worry about. Well, nothing other than your grades. Sound good?”

Scott nodded his assent. Once Stiles started plotting, it was easier to go with his chosen itinerary than not. Scott might have pseudo-alpha status, but Stiles had been dragging Scott alongside him long before Scott had picked up a fuzzier alter-ego. Even in situations where arguing with Stiles’ plans would’ve likely been a lot safer than following them (like going in search of half a corpse on a whim, or learning control by resisting the urge to wolf out in the face of unjust punishment via a misinformed mini jock-squad seeking retribution for marred automotive enamel), Scott’s loyalty often translated to a willingness to follow along through even some of Stiles’ more harebrained proposals.

tumblr: stop being a butthead

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 04:57:00 -0700

Tumblr keeps eating my mini meta-essays when I try to insert a ‘read more’ link to avoid giant textwalls on the dashboards of friends. I am too tired to write out the most recent one a third time. Sadness. (I’d be frustrated if I had the energy, but mostly I’m just bummed about losing the content repeatedly. I’ll be copying the text into a handy notepad file or something before hitting anything, next time, so that I don’t have to do this again. Blah. Meanwhile, sleeptime.

Something’s wrong with Darl, one of my parakeets. One of his legs isn’t moving....

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 11:37:59 -0700

Something’s wrong with Darl, one of my parakeets. One of his legs isn’t moving. We’re taking him to the vet this afternoon. I just really want him to be okay, and I don’t think he’s going to be.

people from renka's livestream yesterday

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 20:29:22 -0700

Heya! If you were one of the fabulous people enjoying Renka’s livestream art yesterday, this post is my way of collecting any and all usernames I missed. Basically, if you didn’t announce your username so that I could follow you, (or if you did, and I missed you somehow) please feel free to either use an “ask”, or in answer here, okay?

I am absolutely not as terrifying as I sound. (I think.)

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 17:23:01 -0700

I may have accidentally given the impression to a research librarian that I am currently attempting to raise the dead. Oops?

pretty sure it's not like "you can have X carry-on items"

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 10:04:03 -0700

So, I could probably look this up, but I’m feeling incredibly lazy. What does it mean when people say “check your privelage?”

“Stiles” becomes “Styles”? (Also: vote...

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 13:11:00 -0700

“Stiles” becomes “Styles”?

(Also: vote for sterek; they’re behind)

augh computer why

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 10:12:00 -0700

So sometimes the computer decides to creatively interpret my actions. Most recent shenanigan was that it decided that when I scrolled, I clearly meant I wanted to click and scroll at the same time. To, y’know, drag a clickity-clicking mouse down a screen.

I was on the screen of “people you follow”. Cue minor chaos and a hurried series of clicks “Nonononono re-follow, re-follow!”

So if anyone is confused by seeing a notification that I’m following them when they’ve seen my username as a follower before? That would be the thing that happened. And. Yeah.

(Also, augh, that means the window before which I can send proper ‘fanmail’ instead of asks has been reset. Boo! Ducky Does Not Approve.)