There's a great blog called Contrariwise that posts pictures and descriptions of literary tattoos. It usually makes me think, or kind of nostalgic. Some of them creep me out a little (like the woman who got the ashes of her dead cat into the ink for a "so it goes" tattoo with a picture of said dead cat), but by and large it's a cool site with some great tattoos.

And then I saw this.

A librarian got that on her arm because of Twilight.  TWILIGHT WITH THE SPARKLY VAMPIRES AND THE OVERLY CONVELUTED YET UTTERLY CONVENIENT PLOT POINTS.  Sigh.

I can't wait to see how many current teen girls name their kids Edward and Bella in a few years.

There's already a post here that was inspired bi Io9...it's this one.  One of the chicks that writes over there (I don't care if you call me a sexist on that one, these two are mostly women that I would love to hang out with but her post here makes her a CHICK) and I honestly can't find the link to this post...but she put up that KILLER picture of the God of War II concept art and...said it was cool.  Didn't recognize what it was, and while I know she doesn't work for Kotaku, that just frustrated me...women like her are the reason that I get laughed at in comic book stores.

That being said, Annalee (of Io9, keep up) wrote a post today that apparenly proves that the 1908 Tunguska Explosion Was A Comet.

This makes me really sad.  Tunguska was one of those things that I would find the National Geographic issue on the shelves in the den at the house I grew up in and look through those photos over and over again...because they were just so WEIRD.  Nothing could explain it.  There were all these THEORIES but nothing was for sure.  And I loved it!  It was a mystery of such epic proportions that my sugar and asthma medication fueled imagination high would go almost ANYWHERE.  That was the best part.  And now...it could be gone.

 

 

Science RUINS things for me.  WHY WON'T YOU LET ME KEEP MY MYSTERIES, SCIENCE?  Why does science hate happiness?

Seriously. I just don't know. In case you didn't see "Zack Morris" on "Late Night" with "Jimmy Fallon," here it is.

I really don't know what to say here. Part of my (the YRMC part) is saying NONONONONONONO and plugging its ears and hiding in the back bottom part of the closet where you have those zoomba pants your mom made you when you saw AC Slater wearing them THE FIRST TIME HE WAS ON TV. And part of me knows this will be AWESOME.

James Marsters just let the world know that there will be a Dragonball Evolution sequel.  You know what makes this worse?  That Marsters isn't just ruining my anime-infused teen years any more, oh no.  He (or rather the producers of this HORRIFIC film) are no ruining all parts of my life.  I can no longer enjoy Billy Idol songs.  Thanks.

is the same guy as:

which has now ruined this for me:

Bonus points: if anyone can name the Buffy episode where Spike claims to have met and inspired Billy Idol, I will give you a cupcake.

 

So...this one's new.

I'll admit to having watched both Dragon Ball and it's sequel/sister series Dragon Ball Z when I was younger and Toonami on Cartoon Network didn't make me weep. And it was on in the afternoon so it couldn't play Cowboy BeBop because kids would OF COURSE start running around pretending they had cybernetic arms and knew jeet kun do. And yes, Toonami does make me weep big fat tears now when I do see it, which means when I crash at my parents' house and can't sleep late enough at night that it's kinda sad. Because I miss the days when Gundam (not Gundam Wing, but the ORIGINAL Gundam) and the Knights of the Zodiac were on EVERY DAY and I could watch Outlaw Star to my heart's content and do my French homework while eating something I knew I shouldn't have. And my thirteen-year-old self was happy.

But that's besides the point. Dragon Ball Evolutionhit theaters on my birthday over a week ago (the 10th, for those of you who don't know...thanks for the cards). I haven't seen it yet, but judging by the cast and the fact that it is NOT A CARTOON I'm guessing it won't be as awesome tediously full of power-ups awesome as the cartoon was. Because there is NOTHING BETTER than watching a weird, 'roids-pumped dude scream that he's REACHING LEVEL GOOGLEPLEX and GONNA BE A SUPER SEIYAN SAYAJIN SAIYAN (again) and then his hair goes all blond and 'splodey and it's fun.

Yes, I know it's inane and kinda stupid, but the show is just fun. There's no reason to say otherwise, even if it were to protect my reputation. But this is just hilarious.

Thanks to I09

The French have held a funeral for Goku because us stupid Americans ruined it.

Seriously. I can't make this stuff up. Just look at the LOSS on those poor Frenchboy's faces. What can we do to make them feel better? Maybe we should start making YRMC trophies...whoever cries the most wins?

It's been a long day, and this just made it for me.

Thanks to Matthew Knell for the inspiration:

@MKNELL Oh cheeseits you're right. Awesome that my 2000th update was about speaking lawyer-speak...posterity here comes my posterior.

This is more funny if I don't fully explain it.

Jessica sent me an email with the subject line "My lil Caitlin" (at least she didn't put KiKi).

The included picture was this:

I don't know where she found it, nor do I want to.

My response: Thanks...so much.

Jessica: You don't want to be my Jimmy Olsen. :(

Me: He always DIES.  But sure, I'll be Jimmy Olsen.

Jessica: Good.

Me: I mean, seriously.  It always comes down to him and Lois Lane, and he's always the one that DIES.

Jessica: That's just because Lois puts out.

Me: Maybe if Jimmy just grabbed his ankles every once in a while, we'd all be better off.

 

My office is awesome.

(My response to Dennis of FourSquare, who commented on the last post)

Hi Dennis.  I love that you're "(totally stalking all the foursquare blog posts btw)." It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, and the customer service person in me goes all soft and mushy.  Which, given my penchant for avoiding soft and mushy unless kittens or pandas are involved, is impressive.

You might be "super scrappy right now" but I love (LOVE) your site and the app and have no doubt that everything will be even better by June 1, and only continue to improve.  The fact that you personally have responded to all of my concerns (line by line, which is EXACTLY like our head developer at work and makes me all soft and mushy again) makes me even more of an evangelist for your site.  I'm pretty sure at this point you could make it so I can see my point total, copy and paste your responses to me in the "help" section of the site and I would be such a lover of FourSquare that you could still put a flaming bag of buffalo poo on my porch and curse my first born child to have peg legs and an eye patch and I would still tell everyone I know on Twitter that they HAVE to use FourSquare because it's JUST THAT AWESOME.  Also, a pirate baby would be pretty cool.  So thank you, Dennis, for making my day and having such a cool product that I was motivated enough to write about it.

And now for today's YRMC

From BoingBoing: Replica Monty Python hand grenade causes bomb scare

Seriously.  Somebody thought that the weapon brought out to blow up a frickin' bunny was an actual bomb.  It's made out of the same fabric as IceCapades outfits.  It says "Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch" on it.  And someone actually thought that it was a genuine weapon.  IN LONDON. 

When I was a freshman in high school, when we started learning about the Dark Ages my teacher (Ms. Antonakos) played the very beginning of the movie, where the gits are beating their heads with boards, to show us the difference between flagellants and flatulence.

5 years later, I went to my geology class my sophomore year of college and watched a 280 pound man with a beard like a hippy and barely any hair on his head jump up and down and screech "CLEAVAGE" at the top of his lungs pointing at the magician Tim (John Cleese)...or rather, pointing at the cleavage in the rocks BEHIND Tim.  In the same world where Monty Python and the Holy Grail was used to teach me about the Dark Ages and rock cleavage, some silly man working on a fire hydrant in a major metropolitan area in the country that created most of the men in that damned movie saw a shiny vinyl toy and assumed it was a bomb.

As a great man once said "You silly English ka-nig-its.  I don't want to talk to you no more, you empty headed animal food trough wiper. I fart in your general direction. Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries."  And then they added "Thanks for ruining my childhood" but that part had to get edited out for time.

 Also, who wants to have pirate babies with me?

I will admit to getting distracted and obsessed with things. Especially shiney things that are unexpected. So when my friend John told me about FourSquare, which premiered while we were in Austin for SxSW, I assumed I would love it for a little while and then move on with my life. But I'm still having fun with it.

That being said, there are some issues that I feel really need to get hashed out before I can promise that I can will continue to use it. A lot like when I was still using Blogger and other free (eventually all Google-owned) services to host and put out my blog, I find myself struggling with the question of what I can reasonably expect to get for no money and what I would like to get.

FourSquare is put out by some of the makers of Dodgeball, which was itself bought by Google, then shut down and the workers were free to start doing what they wanted again, for which I'm very grateful. FourSquare is the best parts of Brightkite, with some Yelp and Girl Scouts thrown in. By checking in at locations, you earn points, which earn you "badges" (the Girls Scout part) and the rank of "mayor" of your city. You can create to do lists in all 12 of the cities that the site and iPhone app support, as well as "I've done this" lists of tips about places you've gone before, including info about what's good at the location, what times it gets crowded, and so on. Every time you check in you can shout it to Twitter, as well as you friends that are use FourSquare. Over all, it's a lot of fun and it's pretty cool.

There are bugs and glitches, as one would expect, and some of them are bigger than others. For example, I can't find out anywhere on the site (or most places on the app) how many points I have. I know I've got over 30 for the week...but no idea the total. And my friend John (the same one that told me about the app) is one of the Mayors of Chicago...twice.

How does that happen? And how is it that I'm in the top 5 Chicagoans for the week, but I'm not one of the Mayors? I still don't know how many points I have total, and how many points away I am from getting my next badge. It's hard to stay motivated when I don't know where the end is.

Perhaps a bigger issue is that the points system is apparently kind of arbetrary and I can't find a real guide to it on the site.  With the caveat the Travel and Bender Bonuses are turned off between 8 am and 4 pm local time on Monday through Friday, here's the break-down:

+ Newbie Bonus: Checkin to a place you haven't been to before = +5
+ Travel Bonus: Hitting more than one place in a night = +1 (number of places)
+ Bender Bonus: Going out multiple nights in a row = +1 (number of nights)

But I got some points that I didn't understand (and can't look up again later).  And I didn't get some points I should have, according to their own scheme.  Besides which, does going out to lunch on a workday count any less than going out for drinks afterwards?  And if you are the one that added a venue to the site, you don't get any points.  But if you check in on the iPhone without creating the venue, you do get the points...what?  I don't even know if that's actually the way the system works or if it was just a bug in the system.

There's another issue that may be a larger one: FourSquare is by definition social.  You're supposed to be able to communicate with your friends by FourSquare alone, to be pinged when you show up at a place where people you know have already checked in (I honestly haven't seen this work, but I haven't looked for it to work, either).  I can search FourSquare for people I know on Twitter just by giving the site my twitter name, and I can search for them by name or phone number.  But not by city.  I would love, like you can on Twitter, Facebook, or even Yelp, to find people I don't know yet and see what they say about venues I haven't visited, maybe eventually meet.

Please make sure you understand that NONE of this is anything other than constructive criticism and wishlisting for the fine folks that make this really fun, excellent product.  I enjoy using it, try to find excuses to use it constantly.  I just really would like to be able to do all of the things I think the site is capable of.

But I work at a free website too (WeSeed, you know that already), and I know it's hard to balance the demands of users against what you can conceivably give.  Like with Blogger, it is a free service.  But it's also a free service that is built and operated by two people that clearly love the project and are motivated to make it the best it can be.  Any feedback I've submitted to them either through email or their GetSatisfaction.com have been dealt with quickly and professionally, like you would expect from a much larger and better funded operation.

I can't help but wonder how many of these small sites, run by passionate individuals, will be continuing to provide incredible service like this, though.  Twtapps, the makers of the Twtvite system used in my last post (PARTY INVITE), make some fun, useful stuff.  But the code for that widget is broken (clicking on Yes, No, or Maybe doesn't work, you have to use "See who's coming"), has been for a while, and they haven't gotten back to my feedback email.  This certainly does not mean that they never will, nor that the code will be broken forever, nor that I will stop using Twtvite.  But it is annoying, and it does make me look around to see what other options are out there. 

Every day, I spend at least part of the day working with feedback from our users at WeSeed.  I love that part of my job more than almost anything, mostly because it's always a pleasant surprise to see how people are using the site in new and different ways than we ever expected.  And it is the responsibility of any team that gets this kind of feedback to address it, either by redesigning the site to better suit the needs of those users or by clarifying their site's intended purpose to attract users that will use it the way it was "designed to be used" (I don't feel comfortable typing that without the bunny ears around it).

But how far do companies that provide free services have to go?  How accountable can we hold them?

Not even I know the answer to that one.

(Also, sign up for FourSquare and look for me, Caitlin Rosberg.  I want to be your friend!)

So, as of this very moment, not only is the favicon for YRMC.com working (look at the little picture to the left of the URL, even if it is very small) BUT we can also now be made into a web clip...which means you can have a bookmark that will take you to YRMC.com sitting on any home screen on your iPhone.  AND I DID IT ALL BY MY LONESOME, THANK YOU VERY MUCH.  So if you were to actually look at either of these images, this is what you would see:

  My sidekick, Little Bats.  He is suspicious, but he likes you.  I hope.  He is the Bat-Mite to my Bruce Wayne.  Well, maybe more like early Bat-Girl, before she got all damaged and had to live in a wheelchair and had all those issues with the first Robin because they couldn't get it on like they wanted to (especially because they both had so many daddy issues). But she was annoying, even then, and I'm not sure I want a bombshell redhead with a motorcycle showing me up on my own website. Particularly a fictional one.

So there you have it. The 15 minutes of work I've managed to get done on the site today. Even if Safari did keep spazzing and the Wysiwyg editor UI did keep crapping out on me. I GOT IT DONE. More later.

Todays You Ruined My Childhood (see what I did there?) didn't actually ruin my childhood.  The first time I saw erotica of James "Logan" (aka Wolverine) Howlett and Remy (aka Gambit [really did they have to spell his name Remy?]) LeBeau alternately ruined and rocked my childhood.  But this was just too much.  And I know other people have posted this, but I wanted to share:

Image via Gizmodo's Wrongmodo

Seriously.  This actually exists.  And it is awesome for existing.  Though I think it makes a better bachelor/bachelorette party gag gift than children's toys.  Imagine the geeky fun that could ensue.

So, as many of you probably have already heard, my freind @brandonzeman (aka @chicagotweetups) and I will be attending most of SXSWi this coming weekend.  You will probably say "And why, Caitlin, does this matter to me?"  And I would say in response "Shut up, do you not understand that I am going SXSW?!?! Have you been living under a ROCK?"  Then I would walk around for a few minutes, sit back down and apologize to you, buy you a cup of coffee to make up for my bad behavior, and smile REALLY sweetly.  And then I would say "Because, my dear, sweet reader whom I love and would bail out of jail, this marks the beginning of a new era here at YRMC.  I will be working harder to update more frequently, and I will be living up to the YRMC name, starting with giving you, my wonderful, incredibly sexy reader, more of my sense of humor, as well as things that ruin my childhood.  Like this:"

 

'NeverEnding Story' gets new beginning

 

REALLY?  REALLY WORLD?  This is what you're going to spend MILLIONS of dollars on?  Dollars that you earned from me when I paid to go see the Dark Knight in theatres like 45 times?  Why would you do this to me?  Are you really that hard up to make money that you think you can get nostalgic saps like me and small children to go see a NEW Neverending Story?  Because it will somehow be better than the original?  Not only are your ruining MY childhood now...not even just the childhoods of people my age.  But you could also be ruining the childhoods of actual children, who will never know the joy that is the original.  Sigh.

And then I would smile at you, hand you a tissue so you could cry with me over the death of something so beautiful as a brilliant eighties film.  I would whisper quietly "Well, at least I hope that's what will happen, but don't hold me to anything because I clearly suck at this updating thing," and run quickly away while you were distracted so you have no chance to yell at me.

 

P.S. I will punch someone in the FACE if they kill that damned horse again.  I don't think I cry harder at anything than those three minutes of movie magic.

If you don't get at least a little teary-eyed, I will wonder how it is that we are friends.

Megasizzle was kind enough to host me again, this time with some of my recent political (and personal) epiphanies.

Thank you Ted Stevens for making a meme. Even though you probably think that's a water heater, or a knitting pattern.

EDIT: upon reading this, Kristin added "Or he thinks it's an abbreviation for mimeograph...I do hate those carbon copies...always getting on your fingers."

 

I watched two very magic things yesterday. First, this country transitioned power peacefully and quietly (besides the cheering) from one person, one group, perhaps one half of the country to another. Regardless of all else, you really do have to respect our ability to do that. Nobody died, nobody got shot (that we know of...) over our new president. That’s magical, even if you don’t agree with Barack Obama, his administration’s ideas, or the people that voted for him. Yay for us.

Even more magical, I watched @kbarrick my roommate sit with a friend in the hospital last night. Our friend had gone in for routine surgery that went incredibly well by all accounts. I met Krisin at Prentice Women’s Hospital in downtown Chicago (which is an amazing facility, by the way) and walked up with her to see our friend, who Kristin knows much better than I do. She (our friend) was tired and a little dopey with all the pain meds floating through her system, but as I sat with them I really wished that my camera had not died last week. I could have snapped scores, maybe hundreds of pictures of Kristin and others just hovering, caring for their friend and making sure that she was not alone when she was (infrequently) awake and cogent.

The heart (or one of them) of what our president has been arguing for of late is personal responsibility. I have long been convinced that one of the biggest failings of our culture in regards to most of our children is the fact that we (I’m speaking in the BIG we) don’t teach many of them how to take care of themselves or responsibility for their own actions. I know that I’m guilty of not always blaming myself when it’s needed, but I like to think that when something serious is up, I do what’s right and lay claim to my own issues and mistakes.

And last night, I watched two women come to the side of a friend who was bed-ridden and in pain, bringing her lotion that smelled like her home, her favorite chocolate, flowers, and the gift of their own company. No one was patting them on the back for this, as often happens with those who care for others. No one was paying them in any way, and they still did it. This is really what people need right now, in a time of uncertainty and almost infinite, inexorable hope. Turning together to support one another in tough times.

This is not the same thing as circling the wagons. Not at all. Kristin and her friends were not excluding anyone from the community, support, and love that they were offering one another. They were embracing and welcoming. They were happy to bring more people into their fold.

I wasn’t sure how to write about these moments until just this second, but here it is: there are times when every group, every person, every project, every government needs to lay down, get a morphine drip, and try to heal. It is the duty of the people who love and honor this wounded thing to gather around it, to create the same environment and effort that Kristin and her friends did. I am ashamed to say that I have sometimes failed at that task, but in realizing that, I hope it will only make my resolve to meet the challenge in the future that much stronger.

This is a bit of a heavy post, and I’m sorry for that. But it was needed, at least for me to write it so that I could feel as though I’d gotten it off of my chest. I’ve said it now, that we all need to buckle down and get ready to work with one another. At my job, in Chicago government, down in Springfield, in DC and everywhere around the country. That’s the only way we’re going to get anything done around here...where ever "here" is.

Thanks for your patience...I’ll get you something a little less serious soon. So here, in the words of BoingBoing writers here’s a unicorn chaser.

(If by unicorn I mean an AWESOME picture of God of War II concept art with a fire-horse and lots of things-that-could-kill-you-ness)

Hey look!  My good friends over at MegaSizzle.com have lowered their standards enough to let me do a guest post.  I liked it so much, I think I may have to start writing more like that over here.  Who knows, hopefully it will help me keep updating more often, which certainly has been a struggle of late.

UPDATE: As @coyotesqrl reminded me, you can find the episodes of the original prisoner on AMC's website here, courtesy of the guys making the new one!

And in the time it took me to write that title, he got five more tweets.

This will not be a long post, or a pretty one, but it's important.

In three hours, David Armano has raised over $6000 for a family in need.  He has also received offers for better jobs, babysitting, help with city services, clothing, toys, and translation, just to name what I have seen personally.  I'm sure people in Chicago would also be happy to help Daniela and her family with furniture, moving their belongings, and much more, if given half a chance.

He did all of this with Twitter and his personal blog.

Especially after all my anger and frustration about @domesticdiva's daughter's situation, this is a blessing for my confidence in people, in social media, and in the internet at large.  It is so amazing to see what a few hundred people can do when they put their minds and their resources together for a great cause.

Thank you to everyone who donated their money, time, or effort to Daniela and her children.  I am sure that this means more than we will ever know.

And in the time it took me to write this post, 63 more tweets have been sent about this miracle of generosity.  As of writing this post, $6567.31 had been raised, 131% of the original goal.  I hope they double it.

 

I...

am a penguin.

If you looked at the video in my last post, then you may be starting to understand what I mean when I say that I am a penguin. Despite years of associating myself with coyotes (for their resourcefulness, loyalty to themselves, and goofy grins, among other things) and magpies (for stealing shiny things and talking too much, among other things), I have decided that occasionally associating with another black and white bird is just dandy. And here’s why.

Penguins are adaptive, and highly so. Though they all live in areas that get chilly if not downright cold, particularly in the water they fly through, penguins are capable of surviving in warmer weather, as long as they still have cool liquid to get into when they need. Besides which, they adapted to be able to survive in some of the most barren and difficult places in the world.

Penguins are family oriented. Not just in terms of themselves, their mates, and their young, but penguins are all caught up in their community, all the time, in order to ensure that as many of them as possible survive. Without cooperation, they wouldn’t survive (ever seen March of the Penguins?).

Penguins are clever as hell. This is anthropomorphizing the poor things, I’m fully aware of this, but let’s forget that for a moment, shall we? If you still haven’t watched the video I posted, please do so. That penguin is smart. He knows that those orcas will get his butt if he goes back out into the water, and that the humans think he’s cuter than a baby monkey riding a puppy with a cowboy hat on. So he just chills, and hops around like a demented but adorable little hobbit and keeping himself safe.

Penguins, on the other hand, are fast too. Watch that penguin jump and dodge the orca pod until he gets on the boat. Flitting about like an acrobat, if it hadn’t been such hard work, he probably could have outrun those hungry predators for a while.

Penguins are agile. I think the above explains it a little, but the fact that the penguin could really fly was only helped by the fact that it could turn on a dime, too.

Penguins are awkward. This shouldn’t really need any further clarification, but just look at the way that penguins move out of water. They have a natural environment that they thrive in, and while they can certainly survive out of it, they certainly do look very odd sometimes.

Penguins are obstinate. I’m sorry if that sounds a little harsh, but it takes not only a massive set of balls to balance your kid on your toes for a few months at a time to keep it from freezing to death if you let it hit the air for a little too long, it also takes a certain amount of pigheadedness, determination, and perhaps stupidity.

Last, but certainly not least, penguins are cute. (That doesn’t need any more, does it?)

Penguins are, of course, not hurt by the fact that they represent Linux nor that one was featured in a favorite webcomic of mine.

So, despite some penguin haters out there, I chose to imagine myself as related to the sometimes clumsy, often stubborn birds. I can’t really think of another animal that manages to so effortlessly sums up the general appearance of social media writ large. Anybody else feeling the penguin connection?

Well, even if you're not convinced, check out how cool these penguins are.