Fiction Vs. Reality: Part 2

Okay, maybe I lied about posting part 2 tomorrow.  I don't feel bad though - it's not like I'm spamming anyone with blog posts (I highly doubt most of these are being read anyway).  If you haven't done so already, read part 1 below first.

So back to it.  How my mind works.  As I last wrote, I labor under the delusion that my story has to start at some point.  Note that I am perfectly well aware that this is, in fact, a delusion.  Mostly.  The problem is that I grew up on books and television and movies where people's dreams came true because they were the ones in focus.  You knew that something amazing or terrible or heartwarming was going to happen to them simply because they were the main character.  This perception has leaked into my brain.  There is no way I can perceive myself as anything but the main character in my own head (well, on my bad days I think of myself as the comedy relief side kick, but then I don't know who the main character in the story is).  The only thing I haven't worked out yet is the genre I'm living in or about to enter.  Romantic comedy?  Hopefully.  Action-adventure?  Even better, so long as I don't get shot, stabbed, tortured, or killed.  Horror?  Hopefully not.  Reality show?  Please no.

(I think this genre-uncertainty issue is why I have more sympathy for stupid characters in movies than other people.  "Why are they going into the creepy old house?" my friends say.  "They don't know they're in a horror movie," I reply).

This world view of mine is part of why the YouTube idea gripped me so hard.  I really wanted to be a contributing, valued, and visible member of the online community.  My story sensibilities whispered to me, "Maybe this is it.  Maybe this is your story.  The girl who started an informative online show and gathered a community around her.  Maybe you'll even get to be on Channel Awesome, just like you've wanted for so long." I have also been living, or trying to live, by the motto, "You regret the things you didn't do more than the things you did."  Because of that, my YouTube project gripped me tight in its clutches and didn't let go.  Oddly, it served as a point to hold on to for keeping me sane.  I could placate my inner eight-year-old with a promise of things to come while telling my logical half that it would never really happen.

The YouTube thing has mostly lost its grip on me.  The more academic projects I complete, the less important it becomes.  It's not gone entirely gone, but it's mostly been worked out of my system.  I've almost gotten rid of the early-twenties-crisis part of my drive, the one that says I've accomplished nothing and will never be anyone and look at those ice dancing gold medalists and American Idol finalists who are my age or younger.  However, I still think this project could be a fun way to pass the summer if it works out that way.  There are few things I like better than teaching people things I know about media and pop culture, and if I make a video about it I'm proud of, then I'll post it.  It is a relief, though, to feel the urgency and turmoil receding (at least for now - hopefully forever).

If there's one thing you should take away from this whole post, it's the following: I want my story to start.  I don't know how; I don't know where.  I do know that it almost certainly won't come to me if I don't do something to get the ball rolling.  People make their own luck, at least partially.  So I'm going to start taking risks and going on adventures.  Small risks and small adventures, but they're going to happen.  It might be YouTube, it might be something else.  This blog is a risk.  I'm putting myself out on the internet, and even if I'm using a pseudonym, someone could track me down.  Someone could use what I'm saying here against me.  But I've seen these parts of the internet, and I actually trust them, believe it or not.  I've seen Allie Brosh and Charlie McDonnell have good experiences with their blogs/vlogs, and they're a million times more famous than I'll ever be.  I trust you, readers who are currently all friends of mine (I think).  The thing is, I'm tired of having to explain my facade to everyone.  I'm breaking it down right here.  It's the internet age of self-broadcasting, and I'm taking this step.  I don't know what's going to come next.

One last thing: thank you to my followers, who give me an admittedly small but countable number of concrete presences here.  I don't know if you guys are reading or not, but you give me a reason to write.  This is a very good experience for me.  I'm bad at keeping a journal because there's no motivation.  But I've made a promise to you to blog once a day, and so far I've kept it.  It gives me a way to feel like I'm contributing to the internet and still gives me a very slim hope of one day becoming an internet community builder like Allie Brosh.  Hopefully future entries will be more funny and less, as Callie would say, "Young Girl Talking About Herself."  Despite what I said earlier, this is not actually meant to be an online version of a journal, just a way to express myself.  As soon as I get the time, I'll pull out MS Paint (taking a page from Hyperbole and a Half) and give you an illustrated version of the time I learned the literal meaning of a common saying.  Also, the time when I thought my sheet of music was like a stick of TNT.

P.S.  Does anyone else think with this story-filter over their world?  I rather think/hope that I'm not the only one.

P.P.S.  I want to make clear that this was not supposed to be a way of guilting unofficial followers into becoming official ones.  Having any number out there is helpful - small or large.  It's having some kind of external motivation that counts.

Fiction Vs. Reality: Part 1

If you ever want to understand how my mind works, I can sum it up for you in once short sentence.

I am a logical scientist who believes she is in a story.

Or, more specifically, the prologue or very first chapters of a story. Now what I'm not saying is that I actually believe that someone is turning the pages of a book or the like - this is neither Fushigi Yuugi nor The Neverending Story.  What I'm saying is that deep in the most fundamental parts of my mind, my naive inner child is clinging to the knowledge that her story must start some day.

This means that I exist in a state of near-constant mental turmoil, at least when it is allowed to rise to the surface. The logical scientist part of my mind knows that statistically, I am likely to live and die an average life just like the billions of people before me whose names have been lost to history.  On the other hand, my inner 8-year-old looks up to the moon every night and prays to a God she doesn't really believe in that the TARDIS will come and take her away, or maybe that one of these days when she pushes up with both feet and believes hard enough she won't be pulled back down by gravity, or that maybe this time she'll be able to disperse her atoms into the ground and flow along through the soil.  These are all thought processes I have regularly.  I live in a world that I know can't really contain magic, except that it has to.  I know that I'm just like everyone else, but I can't be.

Essentially, I feel like I'm trapped in the prologue to an awesome story that may never get told.  But that's enough for now; there will be more to come tomorrow.

THIS BLOG IS CALLED "METHYL ETHYL ALDEHYDE"

Why is that the title of the post, you ask?  You know very well what blog you're on, unless, as has been historically the case, you've been redirected here from an adult toy blog (that still amuses me to no end).  The reason is that I am very well aware that some layout changes have rendered my blog title nearly invisible and right now the site isn't letting me fix it.  It's like Blogger.com has a bias against brown title-text or something.  Maybe my blog is trying to segregate the title text from the post text and keep the colors from mixing.  Or maybe some code is just broken and I just like personifying web sites to make them seem evil.  All I know is that right now I can't fix it without jeopardizing my engineering presentation.

Me: 0
Internet: 1

Edit: I fixed it!  TAKE THAT, INTERNET!

Me: 1
Internet: 1

P.S.  No, Internet, I didn't mean it!  I still love you!  Don't leave me!

In which Trope Girl gets confused about Google Analytics and writes a lot about it

I have this blog being analyzed for traffic and hits by Google (I'M WATCHING YOU) and I've been surprised to find that among the expected referrals from the "Next Blog" button from blogger.com and the direct hits from my friends, I got a referral from an adult toys blog.  Um, what?  According to my research, this means that my blog was linked on that page and someone clicked on it.  Wait.  Actually, I can't tell if the referrals from blogger.com are from the next blog button or from the dashboard.  Relative percentages would seem to indicate the former because I can't...

[distracted pause as I check stats for the fifteenth or sixteenth time]

Well bugger all.  It looks like I just can't read Google Analytics very well.  I guess that many of you are just coming in from your dashboards and that the one hit I got from the adult toys blog was the "next blog" button in action.  I was getting all excited about the mystery of it too.  On the positive side, it looks like a couple unique visitors are still rolling through (most likely just those of you who didn't visit until the second day I had Google Analytics running).  I dream of the day when there will be so many visitors that Google Analytics will implode under the pressure of incoming data and I won't ever have to worry about reader numbers and referrals ever again.  AHAHAHAHA right.  But it's good to blog anyway.  This might not be the only post today - I feel that a disjointed ramble-session regarding statistics is probably not the best way to maintain interest in this blog.  

Of Zombies and Bike Rides

ZOMBIES!  Let's see if I can get this all typed and meet the midnight deadline.


(Read this as dramatically as possible for full effect.  Otherwise it just sounds kind of lame.  Okay, even with dramatic voice it sounds kind of lame.  Just...yeah.)


It was last Saturday.  I had been informed of the final Humans vs. Zombies mission and bought a Nerf-style gun specifically for that purpose.  This would be the first time I could really participate in the fight, and I was thrilled to get my chance to kick some zombie butt.  I had timed it perfectly so that I could get to the final showdown, finish it up, and then just barely make it to my concert call.  I borrowed a bike from my friend and prepared for the journey, putting on my black concert pants and a ratty t-shirt and storing the rest of my concert clothes in my backpack along with my Nerf gun.  I left my dorm about 15 minutes before the battle was supposed to begin a long way off.  I rode a bike for essentially the first time in the better part of a decade without a helmet for 15 minutes across campus trying to find a place I had never actually been to, dodging hordes of alumnae as I made my way to my destination.  I finally managed to find a bike rack and fumbled the lock into place, then ran over to the first group of humans I could find.  The battle was due to start in seconds.

"Excuse me, but where do I go?"  I had an atypical role to play and I needed to get it clarified.

"Sorry, the battle has been delayed.  The alumnae got drunk and didn't clear out when they promised they would.  We were assured multiple times that they would be gone by now, but they're not and we have to delay until 8:30."

And there it was.  The battle was now scheduled during my concert.  There was no way I could make it.  I took the bike back to my friend in defeat and prepared for my boring, zombie-free concert.  The gun did find a purpose in life, though, as the post from a few days ago should indicate.  Also, the battle got delayed another hour because the alumnae decided that staying drunk on our battleground instead of politely clearing out was a great plan.

THE END.

See how exciting that was?  Yeah.  Well, I don't run ads on this blog, so I guess you get what you pay for.



For Lizzle, who told me that if I wrote something, it would probably make sense: I sank a cheeseburger into a Hindenburg table while dancing to the pillow's topical tree.  Thank you and goodnight.

Quote of the Day:

[Church relates Tex's killing of his old squad via flashback]

Church: The whole thing was over before it even started. Poor Jimmy was the last one to go. Tex walked up to him, pulled Jimmy's skull right out of his head and beat him to death with it.

Tucker: Wait a second... how do you beat someone to death with their own skull? That doesn't seem physically possible.

Church: You know, that's exactly what Jimmy kept screaming.

[Flasback to Jimmy being beat to death with his own skull]

Jimmy:'This doesn't seem physically possible!

- Red vs. Blue

Since when does "be yourself" work? Apparently since YouTube.

You know, I think I'm figuring out the hardest thing about the internet, and it's exactly what you might (not) think.

As I posted about a few days ago, I've been working on a YouTube/TV Tropes project that could (on a very off chance) get me into the YouTube vlogger community.  Here's the thing: it could work.  I know it could work.  I know the odds would be against me, but I also feel like this project really has the potential to grow if people gave it a chance.  But the biggest problem is the following: no matter what vloggers talk about, half of what they're selling is themselves.  For example, it doesn't matter how well a television show is written, directed, or scored if the actors don't sell their roles.  If the characters aren't interesting, the show will almost certainly fail.  Do I have proof for this?  No.  Are there exceptions?  Oh yes.  *cough* Twilight *cough*  Actually, Twilight did at least have an engaging plot from what I remember of it, if in much the same way that soap opera plots are engaging.  The point is that for this to work, I have to sell myself.  And herein lies the problem of my future relationship with the internet.

Be yourself.  Yea verily, the advice they gave us when we were children seems to be true.  If you want to be popular on the internet, you must be yourself.  If that isn't what you want to do/isn't a good idea if you are not an interesting person, you must be a character that is very distinctly a character.  Here are my two examples to back this up.  Charlie McDonnell, a.k.a. the most subscribed person from Britain on YouTube, ranks in the top vloggers of all time.  He has stated several times that the "product" he has to market is himself.  People like him because he seems like a genuine, nice, and funny person, and none of what he does feels fake.  The Nostalgia Critic, on the other hand, is clearly a character made up by Doug Walker, but he is so clearly over-the-top that no one cares he is fake.  My hypothesis is that the problem is trying to hit somewhere in between.  Someone who is clearly not shy making a half-hearted attempt to seem shy on camera in order to seem more likeable will only be seen as fake and lose viewership.  A vlogger must decide where they stand and how to market it.

This is where my project has its greatest weakness.  I know that my friends find me funny sometimes.  Hilarious at other times.  Painfully annoying many times.  I would have to find the aspects of my personality that could appeal to an internet audience and put those on camera.  There are two problems with this.  One, my humor tends to be spontaneous and not amenable to being set down on paper as a script.  Two, the internet is an unpredictable place.  Hyperbole and a Half is my favorite blog, but what it boils down to is a woman in her twenties with unmedicated ADHD writing things that are often quite random and accompanied by somewhat low-quality drawings done on Paint.  And yet it is absolutely hilarious.  Everything works together: the random statements, the Paint art, and her personality.  Any one of those things could have gone poorly, but she makes it work.  No one can tell what about you the internet will like.  Therefore I would have to take risks.  Not too many at first, but more if/when viewership increased (unlikely).  I would have to make sure that my true personality came through, but not the parts that would drive people away.  I couldn't be fake, but I couldn't be annoying.  I would have to be funny, but not let the humor sound forced.  It would be hard.  I think I have an idea of how I could get started, though.

I'm expecting a lot of tl;dr for this post, but that's okay.  Zombie story will have to be deferred to tomorrow, if ever.  If you actually read this far, congratulations.  You win a word of this post to keep as your very own for all time.

P.S. I hope that some of that maintained its coherency.  I know what I mean in my head, but sometimes it comes out less eloquently on digital paper.

Chillin' with the Villain

My friends and I are inventing the sport of ceiling darts.  Get a Nerf-like berzerker gun with 20 darts, lie on the ground, shoot them at the ceiling one by one until one becomes un-stuck from the ceiling.  One point for each dart you get on the ceiling before they start falling, 10 points if a dart falls into the circle between the dart-launchers on the gun, 20 points if a dart falls back down such that the suction sticks to the suction cup of an unfired dart.  You should know that these bonus rules were both only instituted because they happened within the first half-hour of the game.  Caused by the same person.  The bonus rule was created on her first try.  She has skills.

Speaking of my friends, we were trying to give them fun blog names so that they can maintain their privacy.  Friend #1 (who won the game in terms of sheer rapid-fire) said the following about naming Friend #2: "I don't do villain names."  Freudian slip it may have been, but from now on Friend #2 (who created the bonus point opportunities as mentioned above) will be known as Chillin' McVillain.  Note: she is one of the nicest and least villain-ish people I know.  The name stays.  I have named Friend #1 Slim Foxy in honor of what she considers to be one of the greatest moments of television ever - the possessed Tenth Doctor's speech in the episode "New Earth" from Doctor Who.

Anyway, that's it for today.  Tomorrow I'll tell you the tale of the great zombie battle that took place tonight.  Stay tuned!

P.S.  Look!  I'm meeting my goal of one post per day.  Let's keep this up, yeah?