Vladimir sighting!

Hee! The Squishy is out of town at the moment with little-to-no internet available, and yet he manages to turn up anyway. wearejustducky pointed me in the direction of Neil Gaiman's latest journal entry:

Do they manage to translate the names of the Endless into other languages alliteratively? For French the obvious renderings are Destin, Mort, Rêve, Destruction, Désir, Désespoir, Délire, which is close but not quite there.

Sometimes yes, mostly no. Vladimir, my Croatian translator, was incredibly pleased that he'd succeeded in making them all start with "S", for example.

Hee! I remember him struggling with it, actually. He ended up translating "Destruction" as "Smak," which is incredibly fun to run around the house shouting in a Transformers voice: "DEEESTRUCTIOOOOOOOON! SMAK!"

(no subject)

Some very interesting personality-type tests--I got them off hawleygriffen's journal while I was desperately trying to catch up with my f-list. Basically, the premise is that women are wired to empathize and men to systematize. The weird thing is, I scored above average on the reading faces and empathy tests--and above the male average on the systematizing test. But then, I find sorting things--papers, computer files, pictures--to be very relaxing. It's probably more of an obsessive-compulsive thing than anything related to autism--and trust me, I usually get convinced that I have whatever the test is on. But autism and/or Aspberger's is one of the few things I can be dead sure I don't have--I was awkward as a child and a teenager, but I grew up to be way too much of the family diplomat for that, and once I got into college, I had this weird social blossoming. Like, I'm not all that great at parties, and I'm still a little awkward when I first meet you, but I basically forced myself to learn how to have a conversation with strangers. It's easy, actually: keep asking the other person about himself. (I find this works really well with guys. A little too well, if you inadvertently show too much interest, as I did one time at a niddle-school church social with this one guy and his fixation on model airplanes. Yikes.) If you're not familiar with what they're talking about, ask them. Seriously, I've talked to people I didn't even know that well for hours with this technique in mind. Anyway. If I could stop freezing up every time someone asked, "How are you?" ("I'm... uh... you know ... tired... busy... HOW ARE YOU??"), I could rule the world.

( Test links and my scores )

In other news--well, after that little tangent, it should not surprise you to find out that I have a Phear of Phones. In fact, the last time we discussed this, I discovered that tons of y'all have similar Phone Phreakouts. This weekend I ended up having to have extended conversations with my grandmother (which is fine; it's more of a struggle to keep talking) and my great-aunt, so that was sort of practice. (Great-aunt is Cindy the set decorator's mother, btw; Cindy is between jobs at the moment, having just finished that Bruce Willis movie--Hostage?--but her husband is apparently in Mexico working on The Mask of Zorro 2. I have an unholy affection for the first movie, so this is v. v. exciting.) Anyway. I am expecting at least one major business phone call this week, maybe two, and--PHEAR. PH34R!

You have to remember, prior to this, my idea of a "business phone call" was "Thank you for calling Movie Gallery, how may I help you?" And now I'm expecting a call from friggin' London. Hi, I'm a scared little white Southern girl, how can you help me?