waider

Not only was I rickrolled in my dream - which was vivid, at least partially lucid, and is now completely forgotten - but when I woke up the damned song was still in my head.

OUT, OUT, YOU DEMONS OF STUPIDITY!

I tried that "which celebrity do you look like" website that's doing the rounds.

7 of the 10 matches it came up with were female.

"Resistance is futile"

"You have no chance to survive make your time"

"You have to surrender. ... There is no point in resisting."

My livejournal is subtitled "just this guy, y'know", with all due respect to DNA, because at some point either I or some one of my college friends decided that it fit me.

My folks just sent me a link to the Subservient Chicken.

I was going to participate in the usericon meme, but, well, I've got 4 icons and three of them are built with the South Park Portrait Toy (which I think I have a copy of on my hard drive somewhere) so there's not a lot to say about the icons except that the basic South Park one is actually surprisingly recognisable. The leftover is a crop from a photo taken at my graduation, which I imagine the keyword gave away anyway.

I was discussing the book meme with Lockhart over the weekend, and came to the following conclusions:

• I can't remember much of what I read 20 years ago. I can name three books that I know I read before I was 12 - Islands in the Sky (thanks, Lock!), The Alligator and his Uncle Tooth, and The Hobbit - but I was a member of a book club, and we had a fairly crammed bookshelf in the school, and my dad is a marginally less avid reader than I am, so I've always had a slew of books available to me for as long as I can remember, but I can't recall the individual titles.
• I don't think I've ever really been shocked by a book. Some of Robert Anton Wilson's stuff opened my head a bit more than I expected, and Zen and the Art... had a pretty big effect on me, but I read The Wasp Factory and American Psycho, to name but two, without blinking, so to speak.
• I'll read pretty much anything. I have a small stack of books on my pile at the moment that I've been reading for at least a year now; Burrough's The Soft Machine, a miserable sociology book called The Hacker Ethic, a Baudrillard title, and a book on the workings of the brain, all of which have stalled for various reasons. But I've always finished books, no matter how long it's taken - Godel, Escher, Bach took me two years, and I've never reread it fully - and no matter how distasteful I find the books I'll stick with 'em until I'm done.
• My current sense for what I like in a book is pretty much the same as it was 20 years ago, with a single exception: P.J.O'Rourke's Holidays in Hell made me laugh in 1992, and disgusted me several years later with its parochialism. And that was before I started following American politics.

And that's all the memery you're getting.

Participating only as much as I feel like...

What is the meaning of your LJ user name?

Well, duh. For the record, the origin, which would have been a better question, is Motorola's username policy in the Cork office. Before that I had a wild assortment of pseudonyms for use on computer systems. Some people don't quite get the fact that I sign off informal emails with my username, and thus refer to me as Ronan Waider. Some people who Should Know Better have done this, too.

What 3 LJ friends have you known longest?

Honestly, very hard to say. I met the bulk of my friendslist in New Mexico in 1995 at the extravaganza that was HOTT.BOB. I've known odaiwai since childhood, as he's a cousin. I think eejitalmuppet is probably the one I first met in person.

Do you have LJ friends you've never met in real life?

Indeed I do.

Do you have friends you met first on LJ, then in real life?

Nope, not yet anyway. Currently I'd have to visit San Francisco (again), New York, or New Orleans (I'm refusing to count mistersleepless) for that to happen. Most of my friends list were known to me online before real life, though.

Does it hurt your feelings when someone unfriends you?

Not in the slightest, nor should it. The loading of the mechanism with the word "friend" is the stupidest thing about it; slightly less stupid is the lack of an easy way of differing between "people I'd like to read about" and "people I'd like to see the things I consider semi-private".

What would make you unfriend someone?

I'll quote pobig on this one: "Being boring, annoying, or lame.". Although that's a little more harsh than I intend; basically if I find that I'm skipping posts a lot, I'll just punt that user off my friends list. The whole point of the list is a page that's of interest to me. And I'm quite unfair about it; I am frequently terrifically bored with other peoples' daily whining, while indulging in my own share of same with gusto. Bottom line is that if you take my unfriending personally, you do really need to seek some help - either with your life, or your writing, or both.

Do you discuss personal information in your LJ?

Yes, but if they're sufficiently personal I make them friends-only. I've made a single private post, which I recategorised friends-only once I'd edited it - I'd only half-considered it and wanted to keep the draft until I'd thought it out properly. Making friends-only personal posts is a nice way of bitching about my personal life to people who are far enough removed that it's not going to affect them directly. Such as my recent return to adolescence, which I now appear to have sorted out.

I have this flag on my desk right now: http://www.jollyrogermerchandise.com/images/jollyrogerrackflag.gif