Cleolinda everywhere

Wow, y'all. I need an internet brain vacation. The problem is, I don't have time for one--I have GOT to finish these annotations; it's just not even funny anymore, how long it's taking me. (Also, my grandmother's icemaker broke, and when she opened the freezer door, water poured out and ruined her old kitchen floor and now the tiles are twisting and buckling and she's going to trip over them and fall down again so we have to get it replaced ASAP and seriously, is there anything else, anything else, that the universe can think of throwing at us? Don't answer that.)

That said, I do feel fairly accomplished--even a little energized, except for this headache--that I actually caught up with the show and turned out three recaps in three days, good God. I wasn't even actually sure I could do it, but I thought, well, won't know if I don't try. The problem is, I've been under a lot of stress lately, and I've found myself getting really tense and cranky over the last three or four days. I was even going downstairs and my mother just happened to be there at the foot unexpectedly and I jumped about three feet. And then Shelby let out one of her piercing sonic barks and I jumped again, and my mother was like, "Well, you're on edge today." But I need the internet to fact-check my footnotes, and even if I did try to cut back on intarwebs interaction, I hate that feeling of missing out on things and falling behind on the news. So... I don't know. I'm just saying, I'll try to hold it together if y'all will forgive me for any crankiness.

Well, here's something to make us all feel better: Upside Down Dogs. I so need to get Shelby on this, she is a champion upside-down sleeper.

OH AND ALSO Sister Girl came over and spent three hours showing me old boy band videos on YouTube (I spent my entire childhood and adolescence completely immune to the charms of boy bands, which made me the weirdest girl in fifth grade), and we decided that this is THE GREATEST BOY BAND VIDEO EVER (That Did Not Involve Monsters):




DISCUSS.

So the McJackass clan has passed two more checks--this time at Target and Home Depot--so they're up to something like $2400 now. But that's not $2400 coming from us--as raven_feathers succinctly pointed out, "It's not about your money in your bank. It's about the swag." They're actually stealing from the retailers, not us, since banks tend to back their customers up, it seems. Of course, if the McJackass clan starts applying for credit cards under our name, we're screwed, but there you are. And it's already hellaciously inconvenient to go around with certified bank letters explaining what happened to everyone my mother's written checks to in the last two weeks. Plus, any automatic payments made on that account will have to be updated to the new debit/credit card as well.

(Since people brought the issue up: my mother does drop checks off to be mailed at official USPS boxes, so they weren't poached from our mailbox.)

I'm starting to worry about my mother's health, actually--my grandmother's had shingles for nine weeks now, and while they're almost gone, this has necessitated my mother and my aunt taking turns to go by her house to fix each meal and help her with the ointments, and the strain of constant running-around is starting to get to both of them. So then we have the Great Check-Washing Scam of 2008 and all the crapfulness that's entailed, and today my mother had to stand in line on her lunch hour (after taking care of my grandmother) at the DMV to re-pay for the family car tags, since those checks had bounced. Since it's the first of the month (which was particularly galling, since she'd gone out of her way to pay for our tags early), there were about a hundred people in line. And then the presiding deputy told eight of the ten women working the counters to go on to lunch. All at once. 80% of them. With a hundred people in line. "You have another story to tell your people," she said grimly when she stopped by the house (she calls y'all "my people"). "I'm standing there with steam coming out of my ears afraid I'm going to sink down through the floor because it's melted underneath me." That's not really a story; it's more just "a thing that happened without any climax or comeuppance or dénouement," but I wasn't about to tell her that.

My point is, I'm really worried about her stress levels. I mean, she's always been a type A personality, but I think she's got an overload of fuckery on her plate at the moment. I'm really hoping that I can finish these annotations (which I originally thought, somewhat hilariously, would take me a weekend) a few days before Mother's Day, so that hopefully I can write her a check and wrap it up in a pretty box and give it to her as a surprise. Any little bit I can pull together would help at this point, I think.

Oh, and the police department here said they would need to go to Columbus, Georgia, to file a report. The bank's already dealing with it, obviously, but they'd suggested we go to the police as well. So my mother's going to talk to her people--the UAB police department, whose benefits she administers and firing squabbles she mediates, to get their advice. (See, she has people, too. Everyone should have people, I think.)

Another massive linkspam--sorry about my spam management, you guys. : ( I've got some reader links, but I'm saving them for tomorrow so they're not completely lost in the tidal wave of awesome. ( Read more... )

Annotated "Dracula" on Wednesday; wrote as much on "The Day After Tomorrow" and "Hidalgo" as I could without the internet (which turned out to be surprisingly little, compared to the other parodies--only 50 notes or so each). Ended up taking Friday and Saturday off, because my eyes had started burning and a bit of the vertigo came back (congestion related to allergies, I think). Probably best not to get burnt out this early in the process. And then someone actually sent me the Webkinz black cat I was going to get for myself, which was a really nice surprise (hee!). So... basically, I'm going to pick another one to look forward to while I slog through, because I'm just that lame. Heh.

Also, I need to start drinking more often, because I had a glass of white merlot with dinner, and I'm a little woozy now. (Maybe I'm just not used to the feeling anymore, I don't know.) Maybe I will instate a quota of one (1) Woodchuck Amber per evening or something (I hate the taste of beer), because this is just sad. My favorite drink in college was Long Islands, y'all. And if nothing else, you'll have 100% more annotational entertainment as I attempt to work while toasted.

Oh, Jillian emailed me the other day--"The Extreme Makeover Home Edition show has announced email casting/nomination for Illinois and the more people to send in nominations for us the better." The entry with details at Christina's journal: "The TV show Extreme Makeover Home Edition is casting for the state of Illinois. We have sent in the application but I need the help of my friends and your friends if possible. I only have until May 7 to get as many letters to the producers to try to get our family chosen." She also describes what they need--why they'd like to get on the show.

Another entry from Erin (see previous entry), and it's not good this time. ETA: She's deleted and reposted something else.

More linkspam--I apologize for the sheer massiveness of it, but various crapnesses got in the way of posting. You may want to at least give the headlines a cursory skim, because there's some really good stuff in there. ( Read more... )

Argh. Determined to finish another annotation tonight, for a grand total of two done. I had no idea it was going to be this much work, y’all. I don’t know how many I can crank out by the end of the week (because you want a certain amount of quality control), but my poor mother is freaking out because the termite people have increased our rates, we've had to pay for new car tags, and our accountant decided to charge us $800 for doing our taxes this year, rather than $200-something, because previously he was the CPA where my stepfather worked (coworker discount, I guess?), and now he's not. I am seriously afraid one of us is going to fall and break a leg, or someone's going to have a fender bender, or maybe someone's teeth will explode--anything to cost us even more money. Because it's getting ridiculous, the way everything is costing more and everything is costing it now. And like I said yesterday, I can't work when I'm tense. Stress or panic makes me freeze up, but I can't even afford to indulge my nerves now. So every time my mother starts pacing and muttering, I let my inner seven-year-old start shouting, "WHEN I AM DONE I WILL BUY MYSELF A WEBKINZ BLACK CAT YAY! AND IT WILL BE FUN! AND I WILL PLAY ON THE COMPUTER ALL AFTERNOON! MONEY IS WHAT GROWNUPS BUY CANDY WITH! WHEEEEEE!" It's like, I have to pretend I don't have grownup worries in order to deal with the grownup worries. It's a childish zen thing, I guess.

Update on Creative Commons: Apparently CC has been dropped from the lawsuit, and not everything was as it seemed in the original article.

( MOAR LINKSPAM )

Re: The Orphan Works Act that a few people have commented or emailed me about: Actually, ursulav is saying that it's a dead issue: "Everything referenced is from the 2005-2006 legislative session. There is no current bill. Anything resembling such a bill died in committee years ago. This is not something you need to freak out about right now.... Relax. It's not happening. You can check the public record and find that there are no such bills currently before Congress." Apparently there was another hearing in March, but it's currently not in play. More here from kynn and here from maradydd. If and when it's written into a bill again, I will deal with it then. I'm too tired to deal with it now.

My goal is to get through POA and then GOF tonight, although I don't know if that's possible. I had briefly forgotten (!) that the Lexicon trial starts tomorrow, plus I've got regular linkspam to do, so I'm going to get kind of hammered, I think. The problem here is that my "deadlines" are all flexible and self-imposed, so rather than get crushed by work, the work just isn't going to get done in the window of time that I'd like. Sadface. But POA's coming along pretty well--about 85 out of 115 notes done so far, give or take. GOF will probably have fewer notes, if only because several general HP items will be taken care of in POA.

(In case you're wondering, the kind of notes I've got so far are: the origin of the phrases "no dice," "Let's blow this popsicle stand," and "woot"; actors who were considered for Dumbledore after Richard Harris's death; and the story behind "dead from [noun].")

The other problem is that both POA and "King Arthur" are striking me now as really, really repetitive--I think I had gotten into this idea that everything had to be dialogue format, whereas I moved more into paragraph territory while writing the book. So it's tempting to do quick hard revisions--not new jokes necessarily, but weed out some of the redundancy. Also, "Cloverfield" now strikes me as a few good jokes afloat in a sea of not-that-interesting, which is kind of depressing. But any revisions will be presented on the CD/download along with originals (the annotations will probably be on the originals).

(Did I mention that I was thinking of offering the CD on Cafe Press, as previously mentioned, for people who do want to buy it as a gift, but offering a direct download for people who'd rather have it now [and not have to pay shipping, either]? It would still be $15 either way, because that's the fairest price I can think of--$15 for 15 annotated pieces--but with a direct download, I'd get all of it. Again: thoughts?)

Hmm. I think I'm slipping into my old coping tactic, which is, essentially, avoidance, couple with epic napping. Basically, once my annual winter depression started up senior year, I crawled into bed and started failing classes. This was probably the low point of my entire life--not so much in what happened but because I caused most of it by refusing to deal with what started it. So, you know, here I am all over again, and it's clearer than ever that my default reaction to adversity is to hide and hibernate (hidernate?). And it doesn't have to be. A habit is a learned thing, after all--growing accustomed to a repeated action. So I'm just going to have to "cowboy up," as my aunt puts it, and put in some quality work on these annotations as quickly as I can. I have had so many chances in my life to really step forward and choose the better, stronger, happier path (and if you want to know the truth, the weaker path is a cul-de-sac, metaphorically speaking), and I almost never do. I can do this, and I can do it now.

( Linkspam )

Okay. It's four in the morning, and I have had something of a brainstorm. I had some complaints about the handwritten annotation idea, because having only one copy means that no one but the buyer gets to see the notes. What if I use the footnote function on Word to annotate the online parodies? (Why the online? Because I haven't sold the rights to those to anyone else, unlike the the book parodies. And yes, they would be .rtf files so different operating systems could read them.) And rather than offer hard copies--which would kill the handy-dandy links in the parodies--what if I put them on a CD so that you could print them out if you wanted, but you could also click the links on the original files? And Cafe Press offers CDs as a merchandise option, so it's not something I'd have to deal with producing 100 copies of myself.

I don't know what to charge just yet--it'll depend on how much work ends up going into the thing, but I don't know that $15 for--hey, exactly 15 parodies. Huh--is a bad idea. The base cost at Cafe Press is $4.99, so I'd basically be making a $10 profit, which is pretty good. Again: thoughts?

(This doesn't preclude doing anything else. I'm just saying, it seems like a fairly good compromise on this particular idea.)

Okay, so. We're going to be able to beg, borrow and steal the money we need by April 15--more like "borrow, charge and scrape together"--but then of course we'll have to pay it back and/or off. But we're not immediately screwed. Also, I went and found my cache of hardback 15M books, and there's only six--even fewer than I thought. Woe.

I need to put them on eBay--let the market decide the price, basically--but I'm kind of terrified of eBay. I'm scared of Doing It Wrong somehow. I've bought things there before, but never sold anything. I keep trying to remind myself than I can just pull the auction (can't I?) if I screw something up. This is, in fact, why I've had a handful of things for about five years now that I've never sold--I'm too chickenshit, basically. I'm also trying to remind myself that complete morons manage to sell things on eBay everyday, so surely I can't get myself into too much trouble. (Can I?)

Anyway. ( Linkspam )

Oh my God. I just found out that we're going to have to pay $6200 in taxes--in part because we didn't realize they weren't withholding them already from my stepfather's military pension or whatever it is. We're going to get about half of that $6200 back, but that's the problem: we have to pay it all first in order to get any back. And this is on top of the $5000 air conditioner which I still believe was a gigantic ripoff, although it is very nice. I have no idea in the world where we are going to get all this money from, and neither does my mother. Well, she has ideas, but they involve loans and eBay. So... uh. I will be putting some things up for sale shortly. Mostly collectibles I'd been holding on to in hopes they'd appreciate a bit. But I also have a few M15M hardbacks (< 10), and a number of paperbacks (~20, maybe). They're not doing me any good, and since a lot of people can order from the UK but have told me they don't want to, well... this would be your chance.


ETA: I think there's some kind of payment plan involved--a good bit of it upfront, and then six months (?) to pay the rest of it. But then we also have six months to pay off the new air conditioner, and last year the oven died, and I think we have until November to pay that off. It's probably something like $12,000 over the course of the next six months, all told. Yeah, we're horrified. Oh, and we don't qualify for the economic incentive--we make just enough to get ourselves into trouble, basically.

Also, I have some BPAL from 2004 - 2005 I'd meant to sell, I think. Maybe it'll be worth more now that it's aged a bit--pity none of it's Snake Oil, because I hear that's fantastic after a couple of years.

As for the books, I have more than I need for myself, but not enough to go around, really. I'll probably throw the hardbacks onto eBay and see what happens (if you want 'em signed, obviously I can do it, since they're coming from me, but I'll wait until the buyer tells me what they want it to say). I don't know whether I'll set a price (via the Buy It Now option) for the paperbacks or just see what happens.

And of course, if I put anything else on eBay--I have an extra copy of the loaded Snow White DVD Disney put out a while back, for example. You know, random things like that, and a couple of LOTR collectibles--I'll link it here.