Look on my Journal, ye mighty, and despair

So I saw Faustus the other day! And because you're no doubt panting for it...

Sam's SYNOPSIS THEATER Presents...

( FAUSTUS, ACT I: MAKING FRIENDS WITH THE DEVIL, UPSETTING SOME POPES )

ACT 2 STILL TO COME. Happy times, yes?

Man, Hollywood is just hell-bent on making me wish I'd died at the age of ten, isn't it? A Johnny Quest movie starring Zac Efron? Escape "Race" To Witch Mountain, starring The Rock? What the hell is next, another "Star Wars" movie starring all the people who mocked me for my speech impediment in kindergarten? Or maybe just a video of all my humiliating moments, posted on a screen in time square.

Remember folks: being a solipsist means taking everything personally.

Well! Livejournal. It's been awhile, hasn't it. Of course this fascile little blogathon is going down faster than Paris Hilton spotting a shiny belt buckle, but really? The thing that creeps me out the most is that, apparently, there is this idea that geographic nearness is somehow a criterion for friendship. In the last couple of months I've been added by frankly horrific people whose sole reason for adding me is my zip code. Is this myspace, or something? I don't like the overwhelming majority of people I know, much less people I don't, and...what? I'm supposed to be interested in your life? Or not incredibly creeped out by the fact you're interested in mine?

Seriously, some of these journals make me want to scrub myself with a brillo pad to avoid catching smacktard. One of them? Here is her user info:

"I'm easy going, I LOVE meeting new people, I'm always open to new experiences....I'm also a student, I'm BI.... :-)"

Yes, this sounds like a person I want to be associated with. I imagine that previous line spoken in a kind of breathy, plegmy tranny voice. Hunter her down on my profile and look at her myspace. Go on, I dare you.

Another one instantly dropped me the instant I sent her a comment along the lines of "I don't fucking know you, fuck off" for some god-knows why reason. Dames! Too sensitive by far.

There's some fifteen year old poetry spouting lesbian who added me eons ago and who comments here sporadically despite me...never having met her. There's some faux-philosopher dude who writes nothing but long winded dissertations about his pedestrian conclusions about mankind and, naturally, how stoned he is, how stoned he got, how stoned he wants to be, ect.  It's eerie. It's like I'm a magnet for sundry moist defectives. Oh joy, oh rapture.

This entry is going absolutely nowhere, so I'm going somewhere. Later, peeps.

It has come to the attention of my mammoth space brain that this coming wednesday is the Christmas in february! Yes, my friends, it is the 21st anniversary of the day that my partner in many heinous crimes against the quivering pink Scions of Adam was expelled into this world! He emerged, hirsute and leering, from his mother's vagina, clutching a fatty boombattey in one grasping, foetal claw and a bottle of jaeger in the other, shouting "ACE of SPADES!" and stabbing to doctor who tried give him a breathing spank to death with a corkscrew. Yes, it is the birthday of Sam Rosenblum! I'd buy him something, but he's currently spending the year in Japan, where anything you desire is instantly made manifest by the telepathically activated matter compilers, appearing in a flash of soothing pink light out of pure platinum, where it gives you a polite bow as befits your station.

Hey, female friends! You should totally jump all over this guy. Seriously!  He's:

-Hairy! Like, lycanthrope hairy!
-In possesion of basically my exact sense of humor and personality, but he's prettier than me! So it's like, a net gain!
-Probably has some other nice traits!

There, Sam. I gave you the gift of western hemnisphere trim for whenever you get back. Many happy returns, because I swear to my dark kinky tentacle god that if you die before I do I am raising your goddamn corpse SO FAST.

Wait, Jews go in for cremation, don't they? No, wait, that's the Japanese. Don't die in Japan, Rosenblum! Don't die in Japan!

Chapter Two of the Epic Saga Nobody Reads!

( Ashlan: Break the Sky - Chapter 1, or the Planning Session )

Splendid!</p>

In honor of my Iceman.

( JENNIFER HEWITT: The Untold Story )

Well, personally? I'm just disappointed he didn't walk across the Patomac to get to the podium.

He's holding out on us this early? Shame, shame.

I don't know. Struck by sudden inspiration!

( Ashlan: Break the Sky - Prologue, or the Devil Doctor )

READ OR DON'T!</p>

Just a short story I dreamed up today. Read it, minions! Read it or suffer the wrath of Sam!

( Ashlan: The Drawing Board )

I don't know. Random!

"My god, man! What have you done, Dr. von Acheson! By the blood of the martyrs and the bones of the saints, you madman, what have you doooooooooooone!?"

"AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!"

[sound of large switch being thrown]

Explain your LiveJournal user-name to me. How did you settle on it? What is its significance to you, if any? Bonus: Explain your journal's title and, if applicable, its subtitle as well.

Ashendi is the name of a capricious, nasty-minded wind demon in my Amazing Fantasy Epic That Will Be Enormously Popular and Mean I Never Have To Work Again, also known as World-Breaker. This is my third livejournal username, following samael_elsinore, named after a capricious and nasty-minded mage from another amazing fantasy epic, which followed taaerlyn, the name of a capricious and nasty-minded evil cat demon thing in, you guessed it, yet another amazing fantasy epic that, in this case, happened to take the form of a Final Fantasy IV RPG.

Title: Look on My Journal, Ye Mighty, and Despair - a modified quotation from a oft-quoted Victorian poem about the laughable hubris of human narcisissm.

Subtitle: My Purple Hell With the Seven-Breasted Cannibal Women of Chubley is a direct quotation from the faux about-the-author written for Alan Moore for the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, volume 2.

So, livejournal! What is up, my friends? Not much, you're probably saying. I here there are dire things afoot in LJland, but you know, I was on this site when it was like three college students with an uncomfortable goat fetish and I'll be here long after society crumbles and I'm a crazed derelict living in the ruins of an internet cafe, skinning the deadly Ur-Mice with a leatherman and writing my blog entries in ink made from my own blood and the dried dung of the mighty velocimammoth.

Life's doing okay. Foothill is, no joke, draining my will to live like some sort of vampiric reverse enema. Oh well! UC Santa Cruz better be damned greatful to have me around.

I have nothing to say to this crude forum, so, uh, later.

Check this out, peeps: at work, my manager received an e-mail pitched, basically, like this: because the holidays are so very, very hectic, if you happen to come across a store in your own time that needs help, well then, you should help them! For free! For "from a few minutes, to a few hours".

Now, don't get me wrong --I do, in fact, enjoy my job. But...not so much that I'd do it for free. What really gets my goat though is that every starbucks, regardless of business or location, has had hours shaved off their schedule. So, in order to compensate for one stupid decision, we should, uh, work for free?

I can just imagine the reasoning.

EXECUTIVE A: How do we cut costs, but maintain efficiency?
EXECUTIVE B: Hire people to work for free!
EXECUTIVE A: Brilliant!

The life of a pro bono barrista does not appeal, I'm afraid! I have no such sense of community that would lead me to work for nothing. For chrissakes, I made them pay me twenty dollars to clean up kiddy vomit just last week.

Geeeeeez.

-December 2008? Can suck a bag of dicks.

-If you seek to move a 15 gallon fish take across your bedroom and up onto your dresser by yourself, it's a good idea to empty it first.*

-If you put Chris Lebedeff and I into the same room, we will almost instantly begin talking in some sort of nerdy variant on the freemason's code because we are, basically, the same person.

-I'm sorry, James Macavoy, but you don't make a convincing action hero. I hate to be the one to tell you.

That's about it for today.

*please note that I did, in fact, successfully move this fishtank due to my mammoth strength. It was simply...unpleasant.

The people have spoken!

Please note that it's been awhile since I read the book in question: not for all the blowjobs in the world would I willingly descend into the depths of masochism necessary to actually re-read this goddamn thing.

So with no further ado...

( Sam's SYNOPSIS THEATER Presents Eragon, Part 1: Or a Boy and His Dragon )

I decided to divide this little exercise into two parts because

A: Bugger it's long and
B: Scouring my brain and realizing just how much of a shitty book I read once six years ago I remember exactly is more than a little creepy.

Merry Christmas, darlings!

ATTENTION, SUPERFRIENDS!

Since my recent excursion into literary criticism (re: outright mockery) jettisoned me to heretofore unknown heights of power and manliness, I have decided that Sam's Synopsis Theater will be a permanent, weekly addition to this blog. Hopefully, within four to six months, bitches will be lined up outside my bedroom door, and I'll type one handed while chugging from a bottle of the finest brandy as dusky lads with smoldering eyes fan me with palm fronds. I will recline on my writing divan for hours at a time, in a room heady with opium-smoke.

Or not. In any case, I REQUIRE SOMETHING FROM YOU. Let's put it to a vote, shall we?

Poll #1314873 NEXT VICTIM!
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 12

What should Sam shamelessly lambast next!?

All right, smart guy, what do YOU think?

Remember, democracy is apparently a good thing! So vote your bastard brains out!

Later, lovers. Merry Christmas.

Alright, can you guys answer me something? Why the hell have I seen the begginings of three news cycles about Oprah's ass? Seriously. Yesterday and today, each station was doing some kind of piece about how, tragically, Oprah has gained forty pounds.

WHO. FUCKING. CARES.

Well, actually, that's an easy one. Apparently lots of people care. My question is: why? I mean okay yes I suppose Oprah does nice things every so often but in what sense is charitable work precluded by having an enormous ass? I just don't understand.

Other women gain forty pounds and we never hear a word. Hell, the prom queen from my high school has done it several times consequitively.

Oprah gaining forty pounds is not a tragedy! Let's reserve that word for, say, Mumbai, or something.

Do you guys ever get that feeling while watching television, that feeling of "I don't know what the fuck demographic this is catering to-- just that it isn't me?"

Saw the Conservatory Children's Show yesterday! It was an...interesting take on the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Highly abdridged, and, of course, like all Conservatory child-friendly productions, written by some form of ham-handed lackwit. Here is my modest effort to perhaps retool this children's show for future conservatory productions.

( The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: A tale of love, honor, and interspecies sex )

I AM A FUCKING GOD.

Well, Blue is dead. He stopped letting me feed him and could barely open his mouth, so we had him put to sleep yesterday.

It was absolutely the right thing to do. In the next few days he would have suffered unbearably, and I couldn't do that to him. So I let him go. It was the right thing to do.

Of course, that doesn't stop me from feeling like the biggest asshole in the world.

It really hurt this morning when I opened my eyes and didn't see him curled up next to my head, or sleeping on my heater vent, biting my mouse cord. They'd been longtime enemies, you see.

Fuck, man. I really tried.

To say I've spent the last week cleaning my room is to do the thing no justice. Say instead I have spent the time assaulting my bedroom, whose megalithic piles of crap are performing a valiant rearguard action against my efforts. Call it a siege. A Blitzkrieg, even. I have perpetrated a cleaning atrocity; a Holocaust against dirt and clutter.

The most marked difference is now my bookshelf contains fifty percent fewer magical, sarcastic talking animals. I just have one bookshelf, and 500% too many books, so some things had to go. Goodbye, David Eddings! Your nineteen novels of Red vs Blue are with me no longer. Mercedes Lackey, you knew this was coming; not more of your stupid horses or your stupid Heralds or your stupid elves or your stupid talking nympho griffins. No more, I say! No more.

Steven Brust, you may stay. I love you yet. Neal Stephenson, the two awesome 3/4s of books I enjoy may remain, but you may consider yourself on probation. No more tweens getting raped by mutants, please. I'd appreciate it. All of my lovely vertigo comics, you have a shelf all your own; Lucifer, you're going in the bin as soon as I get all of Ex Machina or Fables. I'm sorry, Lucers, that's just how this has to be. You should have used your infinite will to suck a little less.

Kitty Update: Feeding him a third of a liter through a tiny plastic syringe is still no fun, but he seems to be doing okay I guess? Aside from not eating, he's pretty much the same cat plus drool. I'm deeply confused.

And now, since it is OFFICIALLY december...

( Sam's Christmas List; Spend Money On Him You Cheap Fucks )

So, apparently, they're making a Thomas Kinkaide Christmas movie.

...what?

Fuck this shit, I'm converting to Islam.

(Note: I am delighted that my spellcheck wanted to make "Kinkaide" into "Kink Aide" because man does that set the imagination alight!)

So apparently Twilight sucks! Is anybody honestly surprised? I think in the next film, they should team up with BelEragon and his Magic Telepathy Dragon Who is Blue and Therefor Named Sapphira (GET IT? GET IT? IT'S CAUSE SHE BE BLUE) and fight Emperor Galbasomething until Anne Rice and David Eddings join forces and explode them all to death.

Maybe they can help Tom Hanks solve a mystery vaguely involving the Catholic epistolatory hierarchy and gain the illusive "triple crown" of crappy book fad movies. 

In Vatican City, they are joined by a telepathic barmaid and her Vampire Lover, who as a contrast to the two swoony ones, spend all of their time talking about how difficult their relationship is and having unbelievably kinky sex because you can do that on HBO.

Let's have Peter Jackson direct it so it'll be four hours longer than it needs to be!

Hooray!