There are so many songs that it could possibly be because Queen is just classic awesome. However, I think it boils down to one song, Princes of the Universe. Why Princes of the Universe? Because it's the opening song to Highlander, which I love. Just hearing the guitars makes me happy and I have to sing along. It may not be their most famous or beloved songs, but it is my favorite. I also love Who Wants To Live Forever, for similar reasons. It was in Highlander, but it's very poignant.

Oh man Chopped! I was afraid I'd have to make a post of frothy rage if that douchenozzle with the ponytail won tonight's episode. I'm so glad he got sent home! It was bad enough he won last night, I didn't want to see him in the Championship. He really was a raging prick. His trash talking in the last round was just plain nasty. When he made a dig at the other competitor's family cause he used his last win to bring them to Disney World, I really felt he was out of line. It was like Chopped Karma that he burnt his pie crusts. That's what you get!

Once again I wonder why it is that chefs are so damn egotistical. So what if you cook good food? I cook good food and I'm not a chef. Your good food didn't cure cancer. And if it's great food, amazing food, orgasm inducing food, it still didn't cure cancer, so get over yourself! I'm tired of all those egos and I'm just watching the show. It's condensed down into 45 minutes and it's too much. I can't imagine working with many of these people.

On the other hand, many competitors are there looking for validation. Most often validation that not going to culinary school didn't make them a lesser chef or switching occupations was the right decision. I'm sorry but, shut up and cook. Not to sound like a jerk but I don't think that cooking under pressure with ingredients you may or may not be familiar with is really the path to validation. I enjoy watching Chopped but it often feels like listening to a broken record.

That said, Easy Peasy, the first episode of season eight on Chopped, is hands down my favorite episode! All the chefs were so nice. None of that cocky egomania and cutthroat nastiness that you often see on the show. Just lovely personalities, great talent, and all delivered in their wonderful accents. I admit it, I’m a sucker for their accents. But all of them seemed so sweet, which made it hard to root for anyone. Often when the show starts I’ll pick a favorite right off from their little mini-bios. I couldn’t do that this time. Of course, I was rooting for Jun at the end, but I started out rooting for all of them.

The second episode, Ladies First, not so lovely. They had just one chick that was all ego and attitude that raised my hackles. Ew. I’m glad she didn’t win. You know, you can be confident in your abilities without being egotistical and smug about it.

Anyway, Yay! Douchebag didn't win this time, but booo for having to put up with those egos. How about we have another all British round, because they were lovely and delightful.

I think I'm going to close my Google Plus account. I am unhappy with them right now. Very very unhappy.

First of all, there's this opinion piece on CNN, Why Google+ will never back down on real names. What it basically boils down to is Google valuing us more for our information. We are not customers, because we are not paying. We are valuable sources of potential gold mines of information and thus income. Charming.

Secondly, there's this: Google axes Slide; takes many Facebook games down with it and Bloody Thursday: Google Deadpools All Slide Products Except One

For a while there, I would give just about any Facebook game a try, but I had a clear favorite and that was SPP Ranch with its ridiculously adorable animals and decorations. Its cuteness factor was its main attraction. It's like any other facebook game with timed "crops" only your crops are adorable animals that you have to feed and water and pick up poop. Even the poop is cute! It definitely has that "kawaii chibi" thing going on. Here is my ranch with a Japanese theme and some roaming sheep, turkeys and baby peacocks.



And there are more pictures here, not to mention that I have a folder dedicated to SPP Pet cuteness. Let us not doubt that it truly was my favorite facebook game. I might have been slightly obsessive, but in my defense I am weak against stupidly adorable things.

I'm sure the was making money. Super Poke Pets, one of the games that Slide came up with as a follow up to their Super Poke facebook app (which, coincidentally was one of my first facebook apps and gave me the ability to throw sheep) was rather scary in its ability to make money. I know for a fact that players were actually making money from playing the game and buying up gold items! I know people tried to do that with SPP Ranch as well, though I don't know if it was as successful a venture because it took a long time to put in a trade system. Either way, there was money there and the game is popular. I have 127 SPP Ranch Neighbors. Not all of them are active now, but that's quite a bit and a lot of them were dedicated players. The list of neighbors indicate those who spent real money on the game and I'd say about a tenth of them had invested. Microtransactions are scary in their power.

I stopped playing the game for a time, because that stuff can get rather dry, but I've recently been poking at it again. I found that the game's development had been frozen and it was left as is for people to play. I worried. And then after googling (irony?), I found the fate of my beloved game. It's just gonna quietly die in a corner because Google is being retarded. I mean, they are clearly gung ho about Google Plus. They've started adding games to Google Plus. They own these Slide games that they know are fairly popular and make money and are they going to add them? NO! They're going to let them rot. How the hell does that make any sense? These games are all fully developed. Hire a few artists and animators to put out some items now and then and they can start making money again. But apparently they're feeling spiteful. I don't even know, all I can say is that I am disappointed in you Google. I am so damn disappointed. First you get all handsy and possessive over my real name and then you kill off the only silly social app game that I love. That whole do no evil thing? You fail. Killing off SPP Ranch is evil. How can you let the cuteness die?!

Appropriate SPP Ranch icon is appropriate. And now I'm going to go delete my google plus account. They're already tracking me a million other ways through my gmail and google habit, but I'm not sure I have the strength to leave my gmail behind. I guess we'll see.

OMG Livejournal! WTF! For the last few days, when I hit back to go back to my friend list, I get a freaking log in page. I'm already logged in! I use ljlogin and I'm pretty much always logged in and never log out. It's like Livejournal is ejecting my cookies or something. I shouldn't NEED to be logged in to view my f-list or half of the pages it insists I need to be logged in for. Fandom Secrets is an open community with no restrictions that is crawling with anons, but you want me to log in to view it? WTF is your problem? It's driving me nuts! And even once I refresh my log in, it won't let me go back beyond the point that the page appeared. The log in page will just keep popping up and it's driving me INSANE! RAR! Cut it out!

Oh Google! Why are you being so douchey? As far as you are concerned, my name is For-Chan Cookie. As far as 99.9% of the internet knows, my name is For-Chan Cookie! So why are you getting your panties in a twist if I don’t tell you that my real name is Joe Schmoe? You don’t need to know my real name to provide me with your lovely services. I’m not paying you, you’re not billing me, so really there’s no reason for that. But now you’ve put out Google+ and you’re all handsy for my real name. What does it matter? What will it change? Nothing! And here I was hoping that finally Google+ would be the place that I could consolidate my online lives. I want to be both For-Chan Cookie and Joe Schmoe on you, but instead you’re being a dick.

Now I have to make the decision to either stick it out and hope you don’t freeze me out of my entire online life, because for the most part it’s contained within your cloud, or shut down my Google+ account, if that’s even possible, until you get over this ridiculous bullshit. I’d really rather not lose my years of emails and documents. I can completely live without Google+. I don’t need Google+. But it does lead one to wonder, if they’re so hung up on real names, how long will it be before they come for my gmail account as well? I certainly don’t have my name down as Joe Schmoe. My name is For-Chan Cookie and I am very disappointed in you Google.

You can undisappoint me by implementing my ideal model for G+ as seen here. Until then, we’re not really on speaking terms. :P

Scary Links of Scaryness:

+ Google Plus Deleting Accounts En Masse: No Clear Answers
+ Google+ and the loss of online anonymity
+ What’s in a name? Google+ is working on that (Less Scary)

[Reposted from my Tumblr]

I saw X-Men: First Class at the beginning of June at the drive in with mom and my cousin. It somehow became my favorite movie of the summer. I don't know how that happened! I hadn't planned on seeing the movie because I HATED all of the other X-Men movie with the exception of Wolverine. I was mostly indifferent to that one. X-Men was part of a double feature with Pirates. I was really there for Pirates, but sadly, I really didn't like it at all. Maybe if I'd only seen the first one and that last one it would have been better. Maybe not. It was disappointing. Maybe that's what made X-Men better? But we saw X-Men first. There was just something about it. Charles and Erik's star crossed bromance was just...BEAUTIFUL!

The fandom has officially eaten my brain. Previously, I was all over the Tiger and Bunny kink meme and then bam, all desires to be there were erased. I'm now gleefully rolling around in two separate X-Men kink memes and it is lovely. There is so much fic. And not just from the kink meme, there's also the fic comm I joined and all sorts of fics popping up like weeds over on Ao3. It's glorious. I even wrote a bit. There's a million ideas swirling around in my head, but I have only managed to squeeze a few short bits out. Hopefully, I can sit down and finish more. There are just so many ideas.

This addiction is so bad that it's actually prevented me from watching a lot of the new animes of the season! Crazy. I'll get around to them. Maybe. We'll see. >_>

Lately, my tumblr has become my catch all for short fannish and dorky posts. I don't know why. It's not like I can't post them here, but it's hard to break the idea that livejournal is for long stuff and I shouldn't bother people with short posts. It's retarded, I used to make multiple shorter posts a day! This stupid notion makes it so that I hardly post at all these days! I guess the draw of tumblr is that there's a huge audience. On livejournal, you have your friend's list and sometimes the occasional transient. Sometimes they'll comment on your posts, but often they won't. This doesn't mean they're not reading, they just have nothing to say. On tumblr, anyone following one of the topic tags that you've used can potentially read, like or reblog your post. It just feels like people are listening or watching more than livejournal feels that way sometimes.

All that said, I know people read my journal when I do post in it so I'll just cross post to try to get back in the swing of posting. And here comes the first post!

Oblivious Fangirl is Oblivious

I feel rather oblivious at the moment. I only just found out that Take That, including Robbie Williams, did the ending song for X-Men: First Class. I like Take That. I love Robbie Williams. And I’m obsessed with X-Men: First Class. With these three combined, you’d think I’d have noticed this sooner. But no. I think it’s because I don’t fangirl the same way other people fangirl (or boy). While I’ve been reading almost nothing but X-Men fics for a month straight and I did watch another James McAvoy movie, I haven’t really gone out of my way to absorb everything even tangentially related to the movie. So I haven’t hunted down the soundtrack or learned all the actors’ life histories, or gone on actor photo expeditions or begun to ship McFassy, or a dozen other things that many other fans are doing.

I just never totally absorb into things. It’s very rare that I look up actors and follow their previous films. The same goes for voice actors in anime. I can rarely tell if someone’s been in something else and don’t really care one way or another. If I like I band, I probably can’t tell you the name of anyone in it unless their name is in the title. And I never follow them closely enough to know when new albums drop or anything like that. It generally comes as a surprise, like “Oh, they put out a new album…last year.”

About the only exception is books. If I like an author’s work, I’ll seek out more. Same goes for manga. But since I’m in fandom, if I like a work, I often tend to turn to fanworks of the original thing I enjoyed. Sometimes I feel like a bad fan because I just don’t fan like other people. But oh well, this is how I do things and I’m not changing it now. I’m simply too damn lazy to get as absorbed in things. If other people want to do it and it makes them happy, they are welcome to do so.

Now I’m going to listen to Take That songs and ignore the fact that I hadn’t realized Robbie has finally hooked up with them again and I didn’t notice. XD In my defense, you don’t really hear much about the British pop scene over in the states. Even less so when you just don’t follow the music scene at all.

And I think I'll end this all with the video. :D

I have Google + now. Yay! I really like the whole circles concept, but there’s something that I really really really want them to do. I want to be able to control the name/information that each circle sees so that I can have one master Google + account instead of having multiples like I do with Facebook. I have one facebook account for real life family and friends and I have another one for fandom and facebook games. I hate that. I don’t really like facebook as it is, so to have to juggle multiple ones is annoying.

Ideally, I would like to have my family and friends see my real name and interests while fandom circles could see my fandom name. Because let’s face it, people are uncomfortable crossing fandom with real life, but the ability to consolidate like that would make life so much easier! The division of friends is already there! With just a few tweaks we can have best friends seeing that silly nickname they gave you while it never reaches your mom’s sensitive eyes. It just seems like Google+ was made to work this way so I’m surprised the feature doesn’t exist already! As soon as I figure out how to send in a suggestion, I will! Because I really really want this! Who’s with me?

[Reposted from my Tumblr]

To add to the ever expanding number of places I can be found, I'm on tumblr now. Well, I was on tumblr before, but that's a Minecraft specific tumblr. I made a general fannish tumblr now. It's currently (and terribly) titled Forchancookie's G(eek) Spot. I was out of good name ideas and had left it called something generic like My tumblr until I thought that one up XD

Anyway, I know that tumblr has taken some fandoms by storm and there's all sorts of picture posting from Pixiv and reblogging and junk like that. I don't really intend to do a lot of that. I think mostly I'll just post geeky links that I refrain from spamming my livejournal with and are too geeky for my facebook and I'll try to take ficlet requests through the ask feature or something. It's an idea that's still in that nebulous stage. I'll do other stuff too. I just posted a little mini-rant about the coveted 14-25 year old male demographic. So if you have a tumblr, you can watch me. I promise I won't post 900 pages of spam.

So of course I'm stalling!

The old dreaded birthday is coming up soon. I don't even want to say how old I'll be, but most of you know already. I mean, it is posted on my lj profile XD At any rate, financially, I am in dire straights. My birthday is when all my web hosting bills come up. It's usually my birthday present to myself, but this year I can't afford a gift for me. I probably should have done this weeks ago but I always get weird about asking for money on the internet, even if it's for a worthy cause like continuing my grand tradition of hosting weird fanfiction on the internet. I think, of all the years I've had my website, I only had up a donation button and received donations once. Well, no time like the present to try again. Forgive the tiny button, I'm too lazy to make a bigger one.

And now, I really should get back to packing and cleaning as we'll be leaving in a few hours.