The Spam Thread!

[Angel]

My sister didn't come over. It made me sad, but I managed to bounce back and try to have a good day.

I hope you find the lullaby are you looking for.

[RAMChYLD]

I got lucky

Second episode aired tonight is indeed the episode I'm looking for.

Now to scour last night's recording and save up anything else I find worthy. In the end I went to bed at 2AM and ended up with almost a dozen episodes. Also, it warrants asking: Since when did Elvis' "Love Me Tender" become a lullaby? Am I that out of touch?

Edit: And here are the final listings of my recording:

• Frere Jacques
  
• Greensleeves, or, What Child Is This (sadly, my knowledge of the song ends here. The only lyrics I know to the song are those improvised by D.W. in the Arthur's Perfect Christmas soundtrack. And yes, I've never been bothered to look it up even though I have a bookmark which leads to a particularly great nursery rhymes and lullabies lyrics website).
  
• Hey Diddle Diddle
  
• Hickory Dickory Dock
  
• Oh, Dear, What Can The Matter Be
  
• Love Me Tender (I must've been out of the loop. Since when did Elvis' songs become lullabies?)
  
• I Dream of a Genie with light brown hair (funny how I could ID something as obscure as this)

And of course,

• My Grandfather's Clock

And as a bonus, Chopin's Nocturne. The song wasn't part of Night Lullabies, but was played on the Night time edition of Color Symphony. Nevertheless, I love that song too, so I decided to save up the audio portion of the episode.

I could not ID 4 songs however...

[Stella Grapes]

But hey, I'm still very looking forward for Bittersweet.

And I'm still shy about my writing and lack confidence in it.

I'm awake at 4am, I don't know why. Probably just because it's kinda comforting for me at night, even though I'm sorta afraid of the dark. It's a strange contradiction.

Ben used to feel the same, before he started taking medication that puts him to sleep by midnight every night. He would say it was because there were less people around in the late night, so he felt more significant.

Here's our lazy lazy informal review of a DVD. I'm purple. He's blue.

Puttin' On The Glitz
Berrily Lazily "Reviewed" by Purple Pie Man and Sour Grapes

"Come on."

"I'm still in my pajama underwear - I don't really know what I'm wearing."

"How does that matter? We're on the phone. This will take about ten minutes."

"It will take five minutes. Oh, bother."

"They don't use berrytalk in this DVD, folks. Heresy, I say. All right, well, the gist of the first episode is Lemon Meringue purchases a fancy salon chair to help run her salon and the machine replaces her usefulness. She feels depressed and tries to leave, and Strawberry Shortcake convinces her not to leave because a machine can't be a friend. There is a side plot about Mr. Longface Caterpillar's croquet lawn not being ready. The machine flies into the croquet lawn and makes it perfect, so Mr. Longface keeps the machine."

"And everybody looks exactly the same after they have all their makeovers, every time."

"Those aren't my idea of makeovers, but then again, a lot of people look the same after going to salons. Okay, this was the most annoying episode of the three in my opinion because of Mr. Annoying Longface. Let me talk about writing a depressed character. There have been depressed characters in every Strawberry Shortcake series, and there have been characters who got depressed in every version and at times justifiably in the newest version as well. Those characters all had reasons for their sadnesses. If you write a depressed character, give them reason to be depressed. Make them sad over things that would actually make people sad. Sour Grapes' sadness is explained the least, but there are still lots of hints for lots of reasons for it. Mr. Longface is sad because his grass isn't even. No one cares that his grass isn't even. No one can tell! Have you ever played croquet or miniature golf on perfectly even grass? Only if it's fake grass! Why didn't he just get fake grass? Why did he care?"

"Sometimes, characters in children's shows can be depressed without reason and it works. Eeyore is an example. Eeyore would be clinically depressed if he were a person."

"Eeyore has depression, Mr. Longface has OCD, and Sour Grapes has bipolar disorder."

"Everyone in The Hundred Acre Wood has a disorder. Tigger has ADHD, Rabbit has OCD, Pooh has - an eating disorder, Eeyore's depressed, Piglet has - um - fearfulness - "

"Anxiety."

"Anxiety. Owl might have something, and Christopher Robin is insane for imagining that his toy animals are acting these ways."

"Thank you for that. I'm going to guess that you were watching a Winnie-the-Pooh movie recently."

"Yes. I don't know what for."

"Well, Eeyore does have reason to be depressed. He doesn't have a real home that could shelter him from the weather and no one thinks to offer him such a real home. Mr. Longface could have gone and gotten himself fake grass if his uneven grass that he never realized was uneven before he measured it several times saddened him so much."

"Yes."

"Part 2! In something of a retelling of Mind Your Manners, Plum Puddin' thinks all rules are silly, then makes up silly rules for her dance studio, and so other characters make up... silly rules to teach her a lesson. Strawberry doesn't approve of this passive-aggressive behavior, and the others eventually recant their rules. Plum recants all her rules for her dance recital, among them her first rule: no heels on the dance floor. Apparently her dance floor is pathetically flimsy and gets punctured easily. So, the inevitable happens and Plum learns that rules have purposes."

"I have never seen a dance floor get holes in it from heels."

"Me neither. I've seen dance floors that could be damaged by heels, but I've never seen heels do as much damage to them as all that. This is why there should be a rule about strong wood."

"So... Are you going to talk about something else, or will I?"

"Well, the Berrykins tried to swim out to a boat on four sandwiches for their picnic and weren't very smart because they didn't realize that was going to ruin their picnic food."

"They had other sandwiches."

"It still ruined a lot of their food!"

"Could they swim?"

"I think they were stuck."

"I think they were stuck, too, but they never made it past the dock, so I'm not sure if they were stuck in something or couldn't swim."

"I have no idea."

"Plum Puddin' and Raspberry Torte reminded me of you."

"I'm callous and passive-aggressive?"

"Not quite. You're carefree and silly."

"When I want to be. I could say the same for you."

"Eh, only around a few people."

"Part 3! What even happened in the last episode? I don't even remember. My brain jumped out of my head."

"They had musical manicures that never shut up."

"Oh, right. Lemon Meringue gave her friends 'glamicures' which were - exactly what my brother just said. They played music constantly whenever one moved her fingers. When I was watching that, I was instantly talking about how annoying those would be."

"I was thinking the same!"

"The girls got annoyed quickly, and they started hiding their glamicures with gloves and oven mitts. Of course, they didn't tell Lemon about their feelings until Strawberry initiated doing so. Lemon wasn't upset, and she took up ideas for new and improved glamicures with an off feature. This episode was crazily annoying, but I do struggle with telling people if I'm annoyed by something from them or something they do."

"I don't."

"I know."

"Prue said it all when she said the episode was crazily annoying. I couldn't get the music out of my head for hours - and I muted most of the episode!"

"We're not the target audience. Kids - most kids, not you-when-you-were-a-kid - have high tolerance levels for annoyances."

"I can't argue there."

"So what did you think of this, overall?"

"The colors were too bright and... it was all right. It was, like we've been saying, annoying, but it was all right."

"What do you think about the emphasis on girly-girl culture?"

"What do I care about the emphasis on girly-girl culture? Far be I from the most masculine man in the world."

"But you have a daughter and you have nieces, all growing up in a more stringently defined era of female identity."

"Um. I thought you liked - manicures and things."

"I do. I want my daughters and your daughter to choose for themselves what they like, not think they have to do what grownup women do for the world's silly ideas of beauty."

"The world's silly ideas of beauty that you follow."

"That I follow. Our girls are little. I don't like it when people try to encourage your namesake to 'have pretty nails like her mommy'. She wants to make mud pies and ride bikes. I'm not the mother I thought I would be."

"That's nice."

"You're bored."

"Not quite bored. I'm going to get something to eat."

"Bye bye."

"Bye, Sis."

All right, so I overtook the conversation. It was my idea and he was tired. C'est la vie.



I think a raincloud over ones' head is a lot more sad than uneven grass, too!

EDIT because he called me back:

"I think cartoons and Aspirin are partners."

"You think cartoons are made to be as headache-inducing as possible, so people will buy Aspirin?"

"Precisely."

"But that's like saying, 'I think life and Aspirin are partners', because headache-inducers are everywhere."

"I think you and Aspirin are partners!"

"Like you can talk! You were the one who hammered nails into a wall next to my head after I told you to stop it several times, and I chased you and you still wouldn't stop it!"

[This was shortly after we moved into the house I'm in now, in late 2008.]

"Ha ha ha ha ha... "

Pffft. That's not the end of our conversation. We are talking right now.

[Blackberry Bun]

And I'm still shy about my writing and lack confidence in it.

Aw, c'mon. I bet you're better than me.

[Angel]

I've been completely re-writing my story about Boysenberry, so I'm kinda excited for that.

Ben has a good point about feeling more significant at night, to be honest. I sort of get what he's saying with that.

[RAMChYLD]

And, things go mad again.

Now I need to source an Asus V9999GT. Because NVidia has somehow decided that the GeForce4 series card is no longer worthy of support. For shame, NVidia! For shame!

[Stella Grapes]

Unfortunately, my laptop crashed during the final hour of Tuesday night on our time zone. James bought replacement batteries, and those did no good. We are still working on trying to fix the laptop, likely to no avail. (Yes, Bittersweet among other things were saved on a flash drive. Several other things are now lost if the computer is permanently gone, however, which it most likely is. That makes me very sad.)

I don't know how frequently I'll be able to access the Internet without my own computer, as well. Novie Nell, the teenager living with us a.k.a. Plum Puddin', will be gone to train as a junior camp counselor next week and she will be gone for about a month. She knows more about computers than the rest of us put together, and with her gone, fixing the laptop will be all the more close to impossible. James' knowledge about computers comes in second place in our household, though he can be ... very slow and tedious when it comes to fixing things. He is the type of person who wants to fix all problems himself.* When he doesn't manage to fix everything himself, because individuals are not invincible, he gets sad and thinks no one can fix the problem at hand. This is my computer, not his, and he will annoy me very much if he gets that way over my computer.

There were desktops in this house, one belonging to James and belonging to Ben (though used more by me). They died over the years since we moved in here, and no one minded because all of us have only been using laptops since. As I said, now I don't know how frequently I'll be able to access the Internet.

My laptop saw so many changes in my life in five years. It's been to several countries, it's been in a cold jailhouse, it's been on boats, it's been on planes, it's lived in a Honda, it's lived in motels, it's lived on the dirt, it's lived in an apartment, it's lived (its final years?) in a regular house, and that's just naming some of the things it's seen. It has been a very faithful and overused companion. The poor batteries exploded within themselves. When James took the batteries out at an Apple Computer store, the people at the store were shocked to see batteries that had obviously survived very strange and unusual circumstances. They were a very gooey explosive sight to see, and impossible to recycle. New batteries are not helping the poor computer, alas.

Affording a new laptop is going to be a challenge, and may take months. We are financially stretched, due to foolishness Angel and Sandy know about. I do not think the trip to Italy will be possible, what with court fines and needing a new computer to name only a few things.


* Yes, I have often felt like he views me as a project to "fix". I can't feel that way in full for many reasons, thank goodness. For examples, he fell in love with me as I am and he never went through a depressed period over me being "unfixable". That's me who gets depressed over that. Still, I can tell that does see me in part as some kind of project, not that this is a bad thing; I also see myself as a project.**

** We really lean on each other. We both have our personal struggles, and despite my rant earlier this week, I fully agree with James when he says that people who fight depression can be among the best friends in the world. There is something very mutual about us - besides that! - that goes beyond words, regardless of how opposite we appear. It is for our similarities and yin-yang ultimately rooted in similarities when similarities don't appear that I believe we are much more "equal" than our home's other couple. Not that the other couple lacks yin-yang. They certainly have that much. I don't know enough about the lady on a personal level to know if their yin-yang is rooted in similarities. I sincerely doubt it is, and they don't analyze that way whereas James and I do.

[cpd2009]

Unfortunately, my laptop crashed during the final hour of Tuesday night on our time zone. James bought replacement batteries, and those did no good. We are still working on trying to fix the laptop, likely to no avail. (Yes, Bittersweet among other things were saved on a flash drive. Several other things are now lost if the computer is permanently gone, however, which it most likely is. That makes me very sad.)

So your laptop's battery exploded? Wow. Odd though seeing how it just exploded out of the blue. Old Chrysanthemum's battery is as old as she is, and it only holds enough charge to last about 45 minutes to an hour. On top of that, she was having graphical glitches that were becoming annoying. Thus, I got Wendell.

What are some of the issues that are happening to the laptop since the battery explosion? Does the laptop turn on or boot to the desktop?

It may be possible to recover the data from the laptop's hard drive. You need to see if the Apple repair place can do data recovery. That way, even if the computer can't be fixed, you will still have all the data recovered to a CD or DVD-R disc.

Now, my latest addition to my Famiclone family....the RetroN 3!!


Retron3 Game System by cpd2005, on Flickr

Fully loaded by cpd2005, on Flickr

So far, so good, but the audio on the SNES portion is a bit....loud. Full analysis coming soon.

[RAMChYLD]

Several other things are now lost if the computer is permanently gone, however, which it most likely is. That makes me very sad.)

Never say die. Even if the MacBook is dead, the hard disk can be extracted from the MacBook, and with a little elbow grease, turned into a external hard drive with all your data intact. However, you must get another Mac to be able to retrieve any data at all (this is the one downside about using Macs- the data are stored on the hard disk in a format that a normal PC running Windows cannot read- at least, not without extreme hacking).

As for getting a computer, it needn't be that way. Just look for a zero interest installment financing scheme. At worst, just get some money out of the Employee Provident Fund.

Also:
Facepalm: OlderThanTheyThink: Elvis' "Love Me Tender" is an adaptation of the song "Aura Lea", written in 1861. Wow, I am seriously out of the loop!

And yes, I only got to it when BFTV's Videos page listed the song as "Aura Lee", which resulted in considerable headscratching and googling before the truth was uncovered.

[Stella Grapes]

Thanks, guys, though I know the Apple store will try to sale me a new Mac and we just cannot afford one right now.

Angel, I have a bone to pick with you. How am I ever supposed to talk to you when you sign on at four in the morning, and my time zone is three hours ahead of yours? The only reason I can be here right now is because schools closed for floods, and I wouldn't be able to stay here for long anyway. You're not even here. Baaaah.

My email is being weird. Why is the Autism Society addressing me as Selena, after over a year of getting my name right? Is this some kind of a glitch, with someone named Selena getting my mail? That's a pretty strange glitch, since the name means "moon" and I do have an affinity for the moon. Coincidence, sure, but a strange one.

Hm. Well, I do know that Apple computers grants free laptops to disabled people. They did it for Ben last year and his laptop is absolutely amazing, but I have a feeling they would say I don't qualify becaaaaause - I come across as too accomplished when my life is reduced to achievements on paper.

Hey, what was this you folks once told me about taking Ben's 2010 Mac's software (hardware? brain? heart? soul? some disc?) and sticking it into my older model? I heard from someone else that this would be impossible, for reasons I have forgotten. Something about that only working one time.