Dogs and dolls and Doomsday, oh my

The hand is bad. Just red inflammation, but it's spreading, and I have an awful feeling that it's cellulitis. I'm going in to a clinic in the morning. More than anything, I'm pissed off that I said on Monday night, "Hey, I think I need to see a doctor about this," but because this has been the week from hell for everyone else (overtime at my mother's work, new classes for my sister, her brakes are out, Sam the pom is having messy stomach problems, my mother's having surgery on her own hand tomorrow...), they've spent the week trying to convince me that it'll go away on its own, even as I have 200 people in the previous two entries going "DOCTOR NOW." We actually had something approaching a fight over it this afternoon--my mother was like, "Are you sure it's not just people on the internet scaring you to death?," to which I ended up shouting, "NO, I'm SCARED TO DEATH because IT'S GETTING WORSE and IT HURTS." So I'm getting a clinic visit squeezed in before her surgery tomorrow morning. What kills me is that everyone's all sorry I got bitten in the first place, and they seem sympathetic to the general problem, to the point where they'll get me all the Advil or Neosporin I want, but it's like they have some mental block as far as the idea that it could actually be dangerous goes. I just can't understand why they won't believe that it's serious, because they can see my hand, and almost the entire back of it is red now. I'm sorry it's inconvenient, but your convenience doesn't really have any bearing on whether my hand falls off or not. TAKE ME TO A CLINIC.

( Linkspam )

telepresent got in touch with me today about a project he's doing--about "digitalism" (nice way of putting it) instead of postmodernism in theater--for his master's. "I'm signing up to several of these sites (all as Telepresent - Myspace, YouTube, Facebook and LiveJournal) basically as part of my research and search for stimuli. I want to see how people respond to the idea of this project, how they'll interact with me. I want to see how and why people spend their time on these sites. I'm going to be keeping blogs and vlogs on the progress of our piece, so please feel free to talk to me (or yell at me or flame me or outright ignore me), it'll all help me out, and might well end up being used in the performance." Personally, I feel like this ties into the Blood and Chocolate link from the other day--I think there are two separate components to the way people use journal and social sites. There's the mass communication element, in which interesting and particularized social mores develop (friending etiquette, the social consequences of plagiarism, the way people who've never met in real life bond over fandom), but then there's also individual innovation, the creative ways people find to use these sites: viral marketing, role-playing games, online novels, unfiction, the Dracula-reposted-in-real-time community, and so on.

Speaking of Dracula, something bizarrely awesome I found while Wiki-hopping today: You remember Mary Badham, the Alabama native who played Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird? I was looking her up because an episode of The Twilight Zone that she was in, "The Bewitchin' Pool," ran during the New Year's marathon on Sci-Fi, and it became increasingly obvious that her voice was badly dubbed over for some reason for about half the episode. Not only did she sound like Rocky the squirrel in all the outdoors scenes, it turns out that June Foray actually did the dubbing. So, you know: interesting. Then I found out that she has a brother: John Badham, who was born in the UK before the family moved to Alabama. Now, how you're sitting there in the UK and you suddenly go, "You know what? ALABAMA," I can't begin to imagine, but there you go. And it turns out that John Badham is actually a director I knew of in his own right--he did Saturday Night Fever, WarGames, Short Circuit, Stakeout, Nick of Time, and... the 1979 Dracula. Duuude.


ETA: POTC3 concept art from AICN, mostly awesome, but including the most ridiculous cleavage ever. "They painted it on" can't touch this. Caution: mild spoilers.