#fuck you hotmail

[bogleech]

I've had the same hotmail email address since 1997 or 98, hotmail is owned by microsoft, and yet some major websites now tell me I can't use it to verify an account at all. It's "not supported." That's not the way this is supposed to work you fuckfaces. Email is not supposed to have limited brand compatability. How fucking dare you make me log into a vile gmail account. I now personally hate you so much that I wish I was tech savvy enough to make spambots that use gmail accounts against you out of sheer spite.

[hyperazraphael]

So I had a FUN LITTLE DISCOVERY about Facebook today!

So today I decided to go ahead and private as much as my Facebook as possible. Why? Because the less I have to interact with it, the better. Literally the only reason I don't delete it is because I use it to keep in contact with my D&D group who won't use Discord for some cursed reason and I do have some old memories on there with a couple of friends that are nostalgic. And while I was referring to an article which had some steps for how to do so, I came across this little gem:

To which I said, "What do you mean OFF Facebook activity??? What OFF Facebook activity would FACEBOOK be tracking???" So I followed those steps and went in there and pulled up the list of information it had stored and LO and fucking behold! Apparently Facebook has been tracking a BUNCH of shit that I've been doing online EVEN though my Facebook is registered with my old-ass hotmail account and almost everything I do online is through my modern gmail. Also, I VERY INTENTIONALLY don't have FB installed on my phone, so it is VERY much separated from anything I do. And not just my searches, oh no no. It has been monitoring a WHOLE BUNCH of fun stuff including tracking my doordash orders, etsy orders and searches, shopping on zenintcg, the fact that we have insurance through Allstate, even my old fucking HINGE dating profile which I haven't even USED since like 2018 but apparently they've been getting updates on as recently as last year.

Seriously the ONLY thing Facebook should know about on this list is Grand Summoners, because it used to use FB to log in. NOTHING ELSE had anything to do with my hotmail, or FB. This is all information that FB obtained independently without my consent.

SO THAT'S FAN-TUCKING-FASTIC. I'm just... such a fan of that!

So for any of y'all who you know, DON'T want this corporation who is known for mishandling and selling user information to have information that it obtained about you without your consent outside of its platform, I suggest you follow those steps above to disable that. Currently it takes you to a secondary page where you you will need to follow these additional steps to Disconnect from Future Activity:

So yeah maybe spread the word because this is sure news to me and BOY AM I PISSED. Like I expect this from Google. Google tracking my searches or whatever makes sense in a hell on earth capitalist society way. Amazon tracking what you search on Alexa (or say within the same room as Alexa), sure. But Facebook finding my information even though it's associated with a different email address and not through its platform? THAT is just insane and malicious to me. I feel like a tin hat lunatic that's like "the social media's secretly trackin' me and stealin' my information!" except this time they actually ARE.

[unhelpfulfemme]

Making an account on a website and here are Google's automatic suggestions for the username:

The first one... Sorta makes sense (and is kinda funny)? I don't think I've ever typed out that exact string of words in my life but I DO consume a lot of content about him and talk about the series and am generally kind or obsessed.

The second one freaks me the fuck out because Trinity Sawyer is my W.i.t.c.h. OC from when I was 11-12. Which was like 18 years and 3 email addresses ago, the first of which was a Hotmail one. You need to understand that I am dead sure that I never mentioned the name or the character since then - I'm actually not sure if I'd have been able to remember the name on my own. (Now that my memory is jagged I feel like her name went from Trinity to Gillian at some point because we later decided that our acronym would be M.a.g.i.c.)

But somehow my online data is so well-connected across multiple accounts owned by different companies going back literal decades that Google just randomly regurgitated the name in the year of our lord 2024 and suggested it as a username and this gives me chills.

(Trinity Sawyer in all her Y2K glory under the cut. I don't know why her eyebrows are Way Up There either)

[tellthemeerkatsitsfine]

Here's a compilation I made of six different comedians (two per podcast) on three different podcasts saying something about different types of comedy, specially how it's different in Britain and American. Tumblr won't let me embed it even though I compressed it down to be under the max file size, so I'm using a Google Drive. It's just audio, but I made it a video instead of an audio file so I could add text to show what people and podcasts are playing at a given time.

I put those together and then I wrote down a bunch of thoughts about it, which I think start out somewhat coherent but get less so as I go along. It's a whole bunch of stuff I've been thinking about all shoehorned into one post just because they're all on a vaguely similar topic, like a hastily thrown-together Edinburgh show. The point is that I'm going to listen to Mike Birbiglia's albums. That's... that's the upshot. That's how all this started.

I found the chat with Hari Kondabolu especially fascinating, having heard a few of Hari’s comedy specials and albums, and heard him on The Bugle a lot over a bunch of years (also I saw his Problem with Apu documentary, everyone should watch that, and should know that he says all the time on The Bugle he doesn’t get royalties for it anymore so doesn’t mind how people find it, just watch it).

He’s an interesting presence on The Bugle, an outsider as an American, who was there from the very beginning of their reboot in 2016, so you can kind of watch him figure out what this is in real time. At first he audibly has no fucking idea what he’s signed up for, and as it goes along, you can hear him settle into an area of “Well I still don’t really understand why you’re doing this, but I see what it is now and have found a way to do my thing beside your thing and that’s fine.” That’s partly a reaction to Andy Zaltzman, because no one really knows what to do with Andy Zaltzman unless they’ve had a long time to get used to it (except for John Oliver, I’m pretty sure they just met at a student comedy gig in about 1999 and instantly said “Oh look, my comedy soulmate”). But some of it is also a reaction to the British stuff. The references to British politics and history that you get on a topical and political comedy show, and the way they approach all their material. I like hearing Hari Kondabolu on there, an outsider perspective who can pick it apart a bit.

So I found his Comedian’s Comedian podcast interview interesting – honestly the whole thing is worth a listen, even if you don’t really know Hari Kondabolu’s work, as a good analysis of political comedy and the mechanics of good comedy bits and British vs. American comedy and the comedy industry more generally. But for this post, my interest is the British vs. American stuff.

I cut out a big chunk of their Brit vs. American discussion on that episode, and put it in the video above. I debated how long to make the clip, to create what was meant to be a compilation of people discussing British vs. American comedy, and ended up leaving in some stuff that’s a bit off topic where they fawn over Daniel Kitson. I realize comedians fawning over Daniel Kitson is hardly such a rare and exciting event that it needs to be preserved, but I particularly enjoyed hearing Stuart Goldsmith and Hari Kondabolu do it, so I left it in when cutting out the clip. I’ve heard Hari bring up on a couple of other occasions, as well, that he’s wildly impressed and amazed by the Hotmail address.

Anyway though, the Kitson stuff aside, the clip from the Comedian’s Comedian podcast is mostly Hari Kondabolu and Stuart Goldsmith discussing how the Edinburgh Fringe Festival shapes British comedians’ careers into something different from what they are in America. They have to write a new hour every year, because there will be reviewers there who saw last year’s hour and will catch them out if they try to recycle material. Also because it’s a smaller country, so they can only tour one show in so many places before everyone’s heard it and they have to do a new thing. Hari Kondabolu is impressed with the work ethic but mildly horrified by the whole thing, and can point out some aspects of the system that people who are used to it just wouldn’t notice because they seem normal.

I think there are two major factors that mark out the Edinburgh-influenced British model of comedy  careering building as being different from, say, American stuff: the new hour every year and the way each hour has to be themed and coherent and structured and preferably built around some story or message. In Hari Kondabolu’s podcast episode he mainly talked about the new hour every year thing, but also briefly touched on the concept of themes. Stuart Goldsmith mentioned that tides seemed to be changing, as it used to be that themes would make you different and interesting, but not anymore, so they’ll become less common soon. I’ve just spent three weeks listening to 38 shows performed at Edinburgh 2023, and I can say, I’m pretty sure that prediction was inaccurate. Themes and throughlines abound, and I’m happy about that. I like a good theme.

I do think there are pros and cons to it, though, and Hari Kondabolu points out some significant cons. If you look at the list of shows by any British comedy who's been doing Edinburgh for a long time, there are going to be some filler years. Some years when they did a show just because it's a new year and Edinburgh is up there so they'd better write a show, even if they don't have much to say. Hari is right to say that British comedians work fucking hard to turn over a new hour every year, but that doesn't mean the quality will always be top-notch.

Also, themes can be limiting. I'm sure there are some themed shows out there that would be better if they were just freestyle, if the comedian let themselves say all their best stuff, rather than cutting good material due to not being on theme. Or adding weaker material because it is on theme.

So that’s an American going on a British person’s podcast to tell them how fucked up the British comedy system is. I’ve made this compilation to compare it to a British person going on an American’s podcast, in which the American thinks the British system is great and in fact what he wants to do as well. Nish Kumar on Mike Birbiglia’s podcast, from just a couple of years ago. It’s an interesting contrast. A couple of people have told me before that Mike Birbiglia is like a British comedian but in the form of an American person. Including @my-excellent-bicycle, who told me ages ago that he's very good, and I said I'd watch him, and then I didn't, so sorry about that. Absolutely no offence to any of the people who'd already told me about him, but I have to admit, when the "Mike Birbiglia is so cool, he's like an American who does British comedy" endorsement comes from Nish Kumar, that does mean a little extra. Enough so I have now downloaded Mike Birbiglia's stuff, will listen to it next.

I can't really speak to the accuracy of what Nish Kumar said in that clip, since I haven't yet actually heard Mike Birbiglia’s shows. But I see what Nish means. He means shows that are built around one topic and/or narrative and/or theme and/or message, and stay on that, or at least around it and vaguely adjacent to it, for an hour.

Later in the 2021 podcast episode from which I took that Kumar/Birbiglia clip, Nish mentioned that actually, even though this is a generally British thing to do, he personally doesn’t tend to do it much, and he’d like to do it more. That was true, as of then. I’ve heard Nish’s 2014 (might have been originally his 2013 show, actually, whichever one got recorded for the Soho Live thing on Amazon Prime), 2016, and 2019 shows, and none of them were all that structured. They were coherent, particularly the latter two, which stayed on the topic of politics. Even that earlier one had some throughlines and underlying bits that kept coming back. But he didn’t do a really carefully constructed narrative show until 2022, the one that just had a video come out, Your Power Your Control.

So I found it interesting to hear Nish Kumar in 2021, just before he wrote Your Power Your Control, say he’d like to do more narrative-type stuff. And then the next year, he did it. Good for him. Nish Kumar just did a new episode of the Comedian’s Comedian podcast as well – it was recorded very recently, to go with the release of his latest special – and in that one, he mentioned that he was pleased with the way he managed to Birbiglia-fy this show in a way he hadn’t done with previous ones, making it a structured narrative the way Mike Birbiglia does. But actually, the way most British comedians do, and apparently this one American guy that it’s time for me to check out.

Then I added a clip of David O’Doherty from a very recent podcast, in which he talks about getting backlash from Americans for not being what they expect, which is just a bunch of unconnected jokes. I added that clip to the conversation because he brings up Hannah Gadsby and Nannette, and I think that’s an interesting point.

Hannah Gadsby got a huge amount of backlash for Nannette, and most of it was misogynistic. Not all of it, I guess. I guess it’s technically possible for someone to just really not like Hannah Gadsby’s style of humour, and they hated Nannette for perfectly legitimate reasons. Just like probably, some of those people on those cesspits of toxicity that were those Josie Long-related comedy message board threads in 2007, just legitimately did not share her sense of humour. Maybe one or two of them. But mainly, it’s the misogyny.

However, DO’D makes an interesting point about Hannah Gadsby’s show. Most “Edinburgh hour”-style shows do not get as massively world famous as Nannette did. So they got hit with misogynistic backlash, but it was fueled by the fact that it was being seen by a lot of Americans who are not used to that type of comedy, and just don’t understand. They thought Hannah was taking the respectable genre of doing 50 punchlines in 20 minutes, and making a mockery of it. Just because it was the first time they’d seen a comedy show with some sad bits. They thought Hannah Gadsby was doing comedy wrong.

So many people – mostly American people – who saw Nannette didn’t realize that ending a show with 10-15 minutes of sad bits is so commonplace in certain comedy circles that it’s also common to make fun of it. You hear comedians all the time, make jokes about the standard hour that’s funny for a while and then has a sad bit. There’s even a term for it: dead dad show. A dead dad show isn’t just a show about a dead dad. It’s any show that’s funny for a while but also poignant and touching and sentimental and has sad bits at the end and wants to make you cry as well as laugh. People joke about it because it’s been done a lot, it’s been done in some hack ways and some bad ways, it’s also been done in some brilliant ways, it runs the gauntlet like anything else.

It’s fine for people to say they’re not into that kind of thing. But Nannette got so big that people who’d never heard of that genre started seeing it, and they had no idea what they were seeing. So that’s how they ended up saying Hannah is not a comedian, this isn’t comedy, Hannah tricked a comedy-expecting audience into seeing a one-woman show! How dare you bring trauma into a comedy show? As though comedians talking about trauma aren’t a dime a dozen in Britain and Australia.

And I think that has pros and cons too. I like a show that works some serious stuff in, that has some deep personal or political message. But also, sometimes, people have a point when they say a comedy show has focused so much on the personal or political messages/trauma dumping that it forgot to also be funny (not with Nanette, though, people forget that Nanette had lots of good jokes in the first 45 minutes, it was a funny show, people just watch clips that have been cut from the last little bit and are then say this so-called comedy show isn't funny). And I guess it's up to each individual comedy audience member how much humour they'll allow a show to sacrifice for other stuff before they get sick of it. How much sad stuff or angry stuff or introspective stuff or educational stuff or heartwarming stuff or philosophical stuff or narrative stuff a show can have at the expense of funny stuff, before they'll say, "Okay, I need more comedy than this in my comedy shows." But I think it's a pretty shallow view of what comedy can be if you're not okay with a show that has any of that other stuff.

I am conflating Britain/Ireland and Australia/NZ quite a bit in this post, and that’s because I think when it comes to this sort of thing, they’re very similar. I’m also conflating Canada and the US, because I think they’re similar, in that neither of have this tradition that I’m pretty sure developed at Edinburgh and MICF. And I’m not talking about any other countries because as far as my comedy knowledge goes, those may as well be the only ones that exist (sorry Anuvab Pal and Aditi Mittal, I do know a couple from India too, but as far as I can tell, the special type of comedy they do in India is “say some stuff and hope you don’t get arrested for it”).

There is an obvious reason for that: Australia has a festival that’s similar to Edinburgh. British and Irish (and Irish, sorry for having forgotten to add “and Irish” in the earlier bits of this post, I just saw Dara O’Briain’s newest special – called So Where Were We, just released by the BBC, by the way, I recommend it – and it’s chock full of trauma, proving the Irish can do dead dad/never met my dad shows with the best of them) comedians develop their careers around Edinburgh, and Australian/NZ comedians develop their careers around the Melbourne Comedy Festival. North America doesn’t have anything like that.

Obviously North America has yearly festivals too, but not ones that are so big that every single comedian in the area wraps their whole career around it. I think the only one big enough to do that around here would be Just For Laughs, but Just For Laughs isn’t nearly the same thing, since people have to audition for it. You can’t just set up a show and show up. People can’t start writing a show in September with the assumption that they’ll take it to JFL next summer, because unless they’re already very famous, they can’t be sure they’ll be accepted into JFL’s lineup.

I found the David O’Doherty clip interesting, as he lists storytelling shows as just one of the many things that are, in fact, comedy, but get called “this isn’t comedy” by mostly Americans on the internet. But also, it’s not like all Americans just do 50 punchlines in 20 minutes and that’s it. They do lots of stuff! They have alternative comedy there, and at this point I’m getting out of my depth, because I have a sort of idea in my head of what American alternative comedy means – the vague idea involves things like Eugene Mirman and Fred Armisen and Kristen Schaal and improv shows in New York – but I don’t really know what I’m talking about. This post would be better if I knew what I was talking about more.

I guess the basic rule I’m working with is: British/Irish/Aussie/NZ do a new hour every year and it has themes and throughlines and narratives and coherent structure and they workshop it all year and then take it to Edinburgh and then scrap all that material and do a new one. And American comedians just write one joke(/bit/funny story, not just the classic type of one-liner “joke”) at a time, and at any given time are performing the combination of their best crop of jokes, and whenever they write a new joke it replaces the worst one in their set, so they evolve that way. I’m trying to understand why that difference exists, and part of the problem with my efforts to understand that is I don’t really know what I’m talking about, and the other part of the problem is that stating the difference that way is a massive oversimplification. It’s difficult to understand why a phenomenon exists if that phenomenon doesn’t really exist in nearly as simple a way as I’ve stated it here.

I know there are exceptions to that rule I just stated, even though I’ve not listened to any Mike Birbiglia yet. For a really famous example, I watched John Mulaney’s new show Baby J earlier this year (fuck him for the Dave Chapelle thing, the divorce and addiction are his own business and people who don’t know him shouldn’t have tried to get involved in his personal life, but fuck him for the Dave Chapelle thing, I didn’t watch his new show in any way that could translate to view count/profit for him – but I did love all his previous shows and was curious about what’s in the new one so I watched it), and that was pretty much all around one story. Even Hari Kondabolu’s new-ish special has a little bit of a theme, about being political while having a kid. And there are plenty of others, so it’s not like this stuff doesn’t happen in America. And there are plenty of British comedians who just do one joke at a time.

I don’t know – I’m not completely making this dichotomy up, right? That’s why I made that compilation in the video at the top of this post. Other people talking about that thing I’m talking about and proving that it is somewhat based in reality. It would help if I knew more about American comedy. You can’t really compare British and American comedy unless you know quite a bit about both, and I don’t know nearly enough about American to really understand this.

That’s why I asked my brother about it the other night, because he’s been doing comedy in Canada for a long time and most of the comedy he watches/likes is American. I asked him if he knows what I mean when I talk about this dichotomy, and why it may or may not exist. And he didn’t really know what I’m talking about, which means 1) the difference is so significant that someone who mainly follows North American comedy doesn’t even know about the dead dad Edinburgh show so can’t compare anything to it, and/or 2) I didn’t explain it very well. Because we had a whole conversation where at some point I realized we were talking past each other. He was using the word “alt” a lot, and it meant one thing to him and a different thing to me, so neither of us really knew what the other was talking about.

That in itself is interesting to me, because it shows that comedy is too big to really make these generalizations. You can’t talk about “alt comedy” as a coherent thing, because it means wildly different things in wildly different places. You can’t talk about “British comedy” or “American comedy” because Britain and America both have a lot of people in them who all do wildly different things.

At some point in my conversation with my brother, I said that when I say storytelling comedy I mean “like the thing Mike Birbiglia does”, and he has seen some Mike Birbiglia but says he doesn’t think what he does is particularly different from what most American comedians do, and I couldn’t refute that because I haven’t actually heard Mike Birbiglia yet. All I could say on that was… well one time I heard Nish Kumar say Birbiglia is like a British comedian, so that’s probably true, right?

So I really don’t know what I’m talking about well enough to understand this, or even explain it. Then again, my brother told me that he thinks British comedians write regular jokes in a way that American comedians don’t, and I said no, I think of the opposite as being true, and when I asked him for examples of why he thinks British comedians are like that, he said Jimmy Carr and Ricky Gervais. So he may not know enough about British comedy to know what he’s talking about. Is it possible that no one knows what they’re talking about? That’s kind of interesting to me too, I assume anyone who actually does comedy must know everything about it. I mean, I try really hard to know about comedy, but I don’t know nearly enough about it to properly do it. So the people who do do it know way more than I do and understand everything. But my brother’s been doing it 13 years, had traveled to perform in the States and nearby cities somewhat often, never made enough money from it to quit his day job but has made quite a lot of money from it over the years, and he may also not know what he’s talking about.

At some point we got talking about recorded comedy, and he said when he listens to audio-only comedy, and then watches a video of those people, he’s often surprised because he was picturing someone young and hot but it turns out to be a balding man in his fifties. I said that often, I can hear hours and hours of audio-only comedy by someone, and have an image of them in my head, and then see a picture of them, and I’m always surprised by how different the picture looks. Because I’m always picturing a person in their forties or fifties, maybe a bit overweight, slightly balding if it’s a cis man, and then I’m often surprised to learn they’re actually around my age or younger (many exceptions there too, Kitson is currently mid-40s and balding but I tend to picture him the way he looked in 2003, though I’m sort of updating my mental image of him now). Which I’m pretty sure says something about the difference between the comedy I watch and the comedy my brother watches, that we have such different images in our head of the “default comedian”, what we picture when we don’t know how someone really looks.

This may or may not be related to the fact that my brother recently started putting clips of his own comedy on Tik-Tok, and has things to say about how the engagement is going that make me despair at the soullessness of humanity. So what does he know? At some point I worked out that when he talks about writing jokes in a classic way, he doesn’t just mean one-liners, he means anyone who actually writes their material instead of just doing crowd work and “comedian destroys heckler” videos for social media. Apparently doing anything besides that is old school now, and he thinks British comedians do more old school stuff than American comedians, and again, I despair at the soullessness of humanity. But to be fair to America, I’m sure there are plenty of soulless British comedians on Tik-Tok too.

That’s part of it though, isn’t it? That my brother thinks of Tik-Tok-type comedy as American and British comedy as stuff that doesn’t do that. You can’t cut out a clip of a good dead dad show and put those 90 seconds on social media. I mean, you could, and I guess some people do, but that’ll ruin it. The British Edinburgh hours need their context, the good ones aren’t nearly as good without it. But maybe American comedy can be clipped more easily, since it’s not written to all flow together. But also, British comedians cut bits of their show out all the time to shoehorn into their twenty seconds of screentime on a panel show. Stewart Lee had a whole thing about that like 15 years ago, how no comedian can be that funny if their set can be cut up for a panel show. But, you know, we can’t all be Stewart Lee (though it’s my understanding that many people have tried). I’m pretty sure this is the sort of thing Stewart Lee knows about, and has strong opinions about. That was my mistake, asking the wrong comedian. I asked my brother, I should have been asking Stewart Lee.

So I still don't have an answer to who invented the dead dad show. I mean, I think I might know that one, Russell Kane may have invented the shows about dead dads specifically. But I don't know how the storytelling comedy with sad bits and themes started, or why it took off in Britain/Australia and not in North America, or if it's even true to say that happened. I feel like Kitson invented it, because it feels a bit like Kitson invented everything, but I know he didn't. I feel like Stewart Lee knows who invented it - I don't feel like he invented it, because he's constantly talking about the alt-comedy godfathers (gendered term there, but they were mostly fathers and not mothers at that time, that is an issue) from the 70s and 80s on whose shoulders he stands. And I don't really know anything about those people, so that doesn't help.

There's a guy named Oliver Double and I think he knows. I just got paid again, my bank account is looking a bit more stable than it did a little while ago, I think I'm going to buy his books. I'm also going to listen to Mike Birbiglia, I'll let you all know if he knows anything. Maybe most people don't know anything. Maybe everything has a smaller cause than I assume and we'd all be living in a radically different comedy world if Russell Kane's dad were still alive. Maybe it's fine to think the British comedy style is to write classic jokes because Jimmy Carr tours arenas and therefore gets to be their representative. Maybe the storytelling/pure joke telling comedy dichotomy doesn't even matter anymore, it's all about the dichotomy between improvised stuff on Tik-Tok and anyone who actually writes material now. Maybe improv just means crowd work now? But I hope not.

...This was going to be a post about how Hari Kondabolu thinks British comedians should scrap the concept of "recycling material" being bad, and just tell their best jokes even if they don't all fit a theme. Then I had a conversation with my brother the confused me and now I don't know. Does anyone else know anything that they want to share?

[bophia]

Gay as fuck to have hotmail in your email address like why are you concerned with hot males 🤨

[cdyssey]

New Tech (1.04) Rewatch:

The linguist in me has ALWAYS loved this cold open. Looooove regional colloquialisms.

“This is a classroom, not a hoagie stand.” QKQKWKDJSJ

Damn, last time I was up this early was to cuss out the mailman. I don’t need all them bills comin’.” SNSNSNS. Ugh, Ava’s fits are always immaculate—those high-waisted white pants.

“Ah, tech has its place—like when you haven’t been with a man for a few years.” JESUS GODNDIWJSNSNS. OKAY, freeze frame this shot. There’s Jacob’s reaction up front and Gregory staring straight into the camera in the back. BUT ALSO, there’s the extra next to Gregory straight up LOSING it.

“I had to potty train myself.” :((

“Okay, who do you gotta bang to get into the analytics annex?” AQkqkwkswkKWJSNS. Two sex jokes in less than two minutes. Mel is on a roll

Love Mrs. Barbara Howard lying and plastering a huge smile onto her face. <3 go, girlboss. Repress ur insecurities

“I love how you guys will just park anywhere.” lmao

“Now who took that picture of me…” ANSNSNS

“Got a hotmail. I once even rode in a Tesla.” i fucking love her

“I’m a little behind on my hotmail correspondence…sssss.” AJQJJSSN

“No, not Kaleel. Everybody knows that little dork can read.” QHQJWHJWJ

HILLIAM GETS ME EVERY TIME LMAO

“A car full of women.” ANSNSNSNS, never change, Gregory.

“Like, you wanna run up the Rocky steps, but you can’t take a punch in the face!” Love this whole monologue, but especially the part where she’s like it’s a respect thing. This is the kids’ history and to sanitize it is to do a disservice to them.

The kid plays William is sooo cute.

“Sometimes I wonder if I put you on too high a pedestal, but then I think it’s not high enough. I say, ‘Janine, she’s a person just like you…’” Ughhshhshshshs, oh, this dialogue always gets me because that’s exactly the crux of Barbara’s insecurities. She has been lofted to a high pedestal—by both her own design and the admiration of others—and feeling as though there’s a gap between where she is and where people perceive her to be absolutely GUTS her. It’s the curse of the perfectionist.

The shot of Melissa smiling before William starts to read is so wonderful.

“Normally, I encourage cheating, but girl, you gots to let me know.” AJDNSNSN

“It just made me feel like I was being pushed out to sea.” :((

“Are those jellybeans on your belt?” AJQNDNW, I love when Barbara is mean. God.

“Basically, I was a jerk.” / “I wish my ex-husband could ever admit that much.” UGH!!! UGHHHHHH. UGH!!!!!!!!!!

“This is who we are—the good, the bad, and the ugly.” 😭

I really do love Jacob and Mel’s relationship.

“You’re gonna sell those, aren’t ya?” / “And what would you rather I do, Melissa?” AOQKQKAKWIWOWNANSNA. Now kiss

Barb and Janine dancing with little William. 😭😭

SHDNSNSN, great end stinger.

[okami-zero]

OC Name Meanings

I appreciate the tag, @kittynomsdeplume! xD

Rules: Google and post the meaning of your OC’s name (if you made their name up or they go by a nickname, post an explanation of how it came to you)! bonus if you can find something for their last name too.

I believe I shall tag... @elveny, @vasheden, @greyias, @traveleorzea, @autumnslance, @kunstpause, @sasslett, @clockworkdragonffxiv, @karoiseka, @yzeltia and anyone else who see this and wants to join in!

Okay, so one thing to note about most of my OCs, is their names generally just pop out of the random mess of alphabet soup constantly simmering in some corner of my brain. Not ALL of them (for example, Akagi's family name), but most. Or are inspired/pulled from other places. I will go with my big three main MMO fellas, and my two 100% original OCs. Also, have a cut cause I, uh, got carried away. ^_^; (And I am sorry this took so long. >.<)

Zedd Overkill/Zed'rika Ov'redis- Okay, this guy. My half-echani smuggler in SWTOR, who is based on the original I made ages ago (and who is the descendant of the SWTOR one, after some revisions/additions/etc.) The OG is Zedd Overkill, inspired by my favorite Power Rangers villain (Lord Zedd), the head agent from MiB (Zed, as in the letter) and with inspiration from Hackers (Crash Override), a dash (heh, pun) of Dash Rendar from Shadows of the Empire and a maybe just a hint of Han solo. The name popped into my head after watching Hackers and was trying to think up a cool email during computer class (back when Hotmail was still Hotmail xD). The name was repurposed with a smuggler character I made with a friend when we were just making up neat Star Wars OCs for a maybe story we were writing. Story never got finished, but Zedd stuck around. "Overkill" is more a nickname now, as his preferred method of rapid problem-solving involves liberal applications of thermal detonators. x3 Rav Masahiro & Marshall O'Donnell - These two are my second oldest persistent OCs after good ol' Zedd. There is technically one that is older (in fact, old enough that he used Zedd's moniker for a while, back when folding an OC to fit any AU was my MO), but he's kind of only half-baked, for the most part. Rav and Marshall are next in line, and are, by and large much more polished. The story they were to be set in was very grand in scale and scope, considering it was kind of a series of AUs where things in various realities were being fucked with, and they are two of a team of six who are sent out to deal with such things. If this sounds like a certain popular video game franchise from a prominent Japanese publisher, you'd be right in there being some similarities, I guess, but they predate it by about a year. Well, technically Rav predates it, Marshall didn't crystallize until about a year or so later. Powersets are very shounen-ish, I guess? Little bit of henshin and other stuff thrown in for flavor (and things have been tweaked and appended over time). Anyway, Rav's name comes from a reworking of my own name, as he is kind of my self-insert-ish guy. His last name comes from my at-the-time rampant obsession with Japanese culture (yes, yes, I'll say it, I was a weeb. The interest remains, though tempered by time, experience and education). I thought his last name meant something else, as Googling in those early days was... a crap shoot. And the fact that Masahiro is a given name in Japanese hasn't deterred me, as embarrassing as it might be, it just... is a thing now. xD (The other half-baked OC I mentioned has a similar nomenclature goof). Marshall's name kind of just, popped out of the ether, but it flows well and it fits. She does let people close to her shorten it to "Shall" (sounds like shawl). Do NOT call her "Marsh", "Marshie" or "Marsha" or she'll deck you. Like, lay you out flat with one punch. Moving on!

Xanotos Delkai - My Warrior tank in WoW. Another lad who went through some changes. xD So my first character in WoW was a human hunter back in the...alpha or beta, whenever it was they were originally playable before getting nixed. His name was Thanatos, inspired by the character of the same name from a Sega CD fighting game Eternal Champions: Challenge from the Dark Side. He was a typical Grim Reaper-y Death (as Thanatos was the personification of death in Greek mythology, and a psychopomp, I believe). I liked the name. However, the character was nuked after the alpha or beta or whatnot. So, when I remade the character for the full version, I rolled up a Warrior and named him Xanatos/Xanotos (depending on the server), or Xano. Now, I have remade and moved this character many times over the years. Delkai became his surname at some point, and when worgen came out, he was race-changed to worgen, and his backstory was shifted and fleshed out further. Fun fact: the Gargoyles TV series was the farthest thing from my mind when I made this toon, and was for many years. It wasn't until... just before or around Legion, I think? that I realized I had named him the same (if spelled differently) as Evil 90s Will Riker. xD

Akagi Obinata - And now we get to my most recent and most prevalent MMO OC, Akagi. Paladin, Tankfriend, tol dragon/lizard man. So, sadly, this boy is the third I have given a Japanese-style name to, and borked the order of, because Akagi is a freaking surname. >.< Now, I am aware that Hingashi (he was born and raised in/around Kugane) is only kind of Etheirys-Japan, but... I am just...moving on! The inspiration for his given name is one Akagi Shunsuke (or Shunsuke Akagi, in Western fashion) from the anime Dai-Guard. It is an absolutely insane super robot show and I love it, and I see a lot of myself in one of the protagonists (the aforementioned Akagi Shunsuke). So, in honor of a favorite character, I chose that. Forgetting, or blindly ignoring the fact that just because everyone in the show (save for his one relative we see) refers to him as Akagi because it is a cultural thing, and not because it is his given name. >.< What's done is done, however. His surname, thankfully, is one from a list of suggested surnames from the raen au ra lore I could find. It means "blades on waist", and I figured that there were samurai in his family line far enough back that that was the name they took. Akagi, by the way, is if I am not mistaken, "red castle", and well, he IS red. And the Paladin LB3 is a freaking castle WALL, so... it fits in a retroactive kind of way. xD (I was not thinking of his coloring, nor was I aware of what the LB3 looked like when I made him. ^_^; )

And that is it! Do I have more OCs? Yes! But they are all kind of self-contained to different things, and their names are more of a kind of mental slot machine than these goobers (plus the one xD). Hopefully I didn't ramble TOO too much, but I get excited about my homemade blorbos, y'know how it is. Thanks for reading!

[always-a-slut-4-ghouls]

Every time I let my guard down, I’ll get one of those fucking texts. “Your package couldn’t be delivered” THE USPS DOESN’T SEND TEXTS LIKE THAT, THE USPS WEBSITE HAS .gov AND YOU ARE USING A FUCKING HOTMAIL ADDRESS! You thought you could catch my ass when I was waiting for a package, no, I actually double check with the usps website. You thought you could take advantage of my slight panic response, and you almost got me ONCE when the text woke me up, but i caught on… I have forgor how to report these people though O_O I reported the first guy out of spite for waking me up but now it’s such a pain

[cezulian]

omg what do you mean by The Misfortunes

My email got hacked and it was a hotmail account so like the way hotmail was set up or at least mine was was that even when I went to reset it I couldn’t like get back i to it because I had to confirm it from WITHIN THE LOCKED EMAIL???? It was so fucking stupid but there was literally nothing I could do.

And tumblr had just done its whole “oops you need to reset your password from the email we sent the account linked to this one” So for MONTHS I was corresponding with tumblr trying to figure out how to get back into my shit without access to the email. Like I literally even talked to a specific guy and said “listen man. Lets homebrew this. Here is the link to my account’s tag with all the pics of my face I ever posted and anything mentioning my name. And now I am going to take a picture of my driver’s license and then one of my driver’s license next to my face. I made posts about where I worked too. Here’s a picture of me with my license in my work uniform. You ask for another specific and I will give it, I’ll take a picture with a handwritten note in the same room of my house that the other pics of me were taken, just give me my shit back PLEASE” and they told me they couldn’t.

I get that these guys had their hands tied like I don’t blame them, they were trying to abide by policy to keep their jobs but like. I had friends from that account, two in particular who remade all the time, and I can’t ever find them again. One of them I met at a Homestuck thing and we’d been friends for like 6 years by that point and now they’re just gone. Fuckin bullshit. I had some friends on there who I was maybe in a rough place with too and was gonna try and patch stuff up with but nope. Goodbye forever. And this was when I was still a teenager so like I didn’t have contact with online friends bc I didn’t want my mom to know so its not like I had anyone’s number or anything. Thus, the Misfortunes.

[sparkinthedarkuk]

@theundertakeriscoming asked and so I shall answer!

The 52nd sentence in my current fic runs thus:

“It can be done but it can also be risky - only needs one person to spot it happening and call the police; next thing they’ve got a BOLO on the truck and you’re looking at a whole bunch of admin.”

First online fic… I think the first one that I actually published (AO3) is called The Captain & His Favourite Toy. It’s still not finished because I ran out of steam on it and also I had the ‘bright idea’ of writing a Character x Reader fic where it wasn’t revealed whether the reader was male or female. Fucking nightmare. Stupid idea. But I still love Captain John Hart.

My first fandom was Buffy the Vampire Slayer - mainly because of Spike (of course).

I do not remember my first email address but I do know that it was Hotmail.

Have I ever been to a Con? Oh, goodness SO MANY. Mostly UK but have also been to one in Amsterdam and fun fact - my first EVER con… I flew over to Louisville, KY for that. I’ve been to regular signing cons - including the hell that is London Film & Comic Con (I only do that one if they have someone I’m desperate to meet and that doesn’t happen often), right through to tiny little affairs in small villages. I’ve also done cons where the event is dedicated to one particular show - the most off the hook one of those I ever attended was Starfury’s Miracle Day 2 where the organiser had basically the entire main cast of Torchwood, plus James Marsters. I would try and explain the things that took place that weekend but I’d only fail to convey it properly and you probably wouldn’t believe me anyway. The most recent convention I attended was Monopoly Events ‘For The Love of Wrestling’ back in April - they had a lovely mix of guests there and already looking forward to their March 2024 event - they have pretty much said that they are trying to bring Takes over (they are the only UK event organiser to have ever brought him to the UK).

One trope I hate… probably good vs evil. Guaranteed to make me tune out.

Favourite season - Autumn, without a doubt. Cooler temperatures, pretty colours, the smell of fresh, damp soil and bonfire smoke in the air - I adore it!

[thirst2]

There’s a larger, more personal post I want to do that’s more just ruminating on open-source, in general, but this crap right here absolutely infuriates me.

Not just because it conflates brand with a product or because it penalizes the user for something the recruiter will never have to experience (all features of GMail are entirely user-facing; it’s not like it has an iChat-like feature that only fellow GMail users will be able to see) or because it furthers the monopolization of Google or because it further pushes what was supposed to be a service anyone could setup not just even further into corporate consolidation but into a single company’s further consolidation.

It’s because they want to punish the job applicants for, essentially, not being tech.-savvy enough when having even remotely a knowledgable grasp on what E-mail is would mean you’d know that all of E-mail uses the same open protocol (that’s why anyone (in theory) can run their own E-mail server or run their own client to handle their E-mail (even for corporation-run E-mails like Yahoo or AOL or Hotmail); they handle the E-mail server but you don’t have to use their interface: you can use Outlook or Thunderbird or any E-mail client because the protocol is all the same – and openly public!).

You can’t have “modern, up-to-date technology” because – when it comes to sending and storing and deleting and creating E-mails (the thing these poor applicants think they’re fucking doing when they reach out to you – you know, using E-mail to communicate) – they all do the same damn thing. It’s sending a message to someone else.

Fuck you.

[clarenecessities]

yahoo made me login because i haven’t checked my email in a while, but one of their verification options is my dad’s hotmail account, verified 17 years ago & like. yahoo i don’t know how to tell you this.... the man’s dead? the man fucking died? as did hotmail???

[transienturl]

pro tip: if your hotmail account simply will not receive password reset emails from a site, check if that site has been mysteriously added to the domain blocklist in hotmail settings.

the fact that this can be the case leads me to assume that somewhere in the hotmail UI, where you would expect there to be a "delete all emails like this" button or a "mark as spam and spam-flag all emails like this" button, there is instead a "I never want to see emails from this domain ever, not in the junk folder, not at all, just delete from from fucking existence" button

this seems like a Bad Decision

[mayzsdoghouse]

@staff

fuck you i dont wanna use yahoo or hotmail,..... pleeeeeaseeee just let me post whatever without banning me

[medicinemane]

Ok, people talking about phishing scam emails has made me think how fucking ass outlook is

See, I have an old hotmail account that's basically my burner at this point. It's filled with so much shit, any time I need to sign up to something new but don't want to give it a real email, that's the email it gets

There's literally no function that's like "flag and report" on there, where as... I swear gmail (which I also want to get away from at some point) does have that, but I don't know because my inbox is something other than wall to wall phishing (your amazon account has exploded from .fasdhufhasioufhiashfioh.com)

Fuck you outlook, hotmail, microsoft... whatever you want to call yourself

They're literally probably the worst email provider around, or at least one of the worst, and they only exist as a burner for me and they still suck

[alwek]

Swear to fuck if my identy gets stolen because my dad didn't understand "the email is exactly the same except instead of 'Xexample¤hotmail.X' it's 'Y and Y, example¤hotmail unchanged" im gonna be so fucking pissed.

Gonna get mad at me because you didn't understand basic instructions, shit