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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.

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.

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]

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

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.

My grandparents used to watch America's Test Kitchen a bunch when I lived with them and at some point I ended up signing up for their newsletter. I used to get at least one real recipe in the letter and a bunch of links to their site where they want you to sign up for a pricey membership. Since I was getting a recipe, I kept it, but lately you don't even get that. You get a link to a recipe or video that is available free for a short time and then they want you to pay again. I really should stop the emails but I've been lazy. Not to mention that of all the America's Test Kitchen recipes that I've tried, none of them have really delivered what they promised.

Regardless, I opened the most recent newsletter and it promised me the recipe for the Best Blueberry Muffins!

Blueberry muffins should be packed with blueberry flavor and boast a moist crumb. But too often the blueberry flavor is fleeting, thanks to the fact that the berries in the produce aisle have suffered from long-distance shipping. We wanted blueberry muffins that would taste great with blueberries of any origin, even the bland supermarket kind. Join Yvonne Ruperti as she shows Christopher Kimball how we found that overloading our muffins with berries wasn’t the answer—but concentrating the flavor of the blueberries was.

Well, I love blueberries, so I clicked and watched the video. And then I wanted muffins! Of course, clicking the recipe just brings up a blurry unreadable recipe graphic with a pop up over it saying you need to sign in. Poo. But I did a google search, because the thing about recipes is that you rarely keep them to yourself. And oh hey, what do you know, somebody blogged the recipe. Success! I just needed to get a bit of buttermilk and I was ready to go.

( Best Blueberry Muffins )

I watched episode 6 of Tiger and Bunny earlier and had this horrible terrible plot bunny that I'll mention later. I don't want to stop my progress on it by talking about it yet. Suffice it to say that this plot bunny send me to youtube watching clips of 80s cartoons on youtube. I ended up watching a bunch of Jem and the Hologram clips. Man, I loved the hell out of that show as a child. I should probably make some icons. I ended up watching interviews with Jem's speaking voice and Jem's singing voice. I didn't realize she had two voices, but then I've never really looked it up before.

Jem's speaking voice, Samantha Newark, actually is a singer, but she only did the speaking role. Britta Philips did the singing voice. But I started looking at Samantha Newark's stuff and she sang In Your Eyes, not the Peter Gabriel song, but a song from the Project A-Ko movie. Project A-ko was one of my first ever anime and my love for it eclipsed my love for Sailor Moon for a time. I recorded it off of SciFi channel's Saturday morning anime. I recorded a bunch of others but Project A-Ko was the one I was obsessed with. I'd pause scenes, tape tracing paper to the tv and then trace over A-Ko and C-Ko. As if that wasn't dorky enough, then I'd go outside and paint them onto the sidewalk with chalk paint!

I got some of the comic books and I was really disappointed. Not with the comic books, but because you needed to collect all of them to be able to mail in to buy the soundtrack or something like that. I really loved the song In Your Eyes! And now, learning that Jem's speaking voice sang the song, it makes me realize why I liked it. Despite the fact that a different woman sang Jem's songs, you can still clearly hear the Jem in this one.



Now I have the urge to drag out my Project A-Ko box set and watch it! But I won't. I'm going to finish the plot bunny and post it.

Also, I think I'll add icons to my to-do list. I need some old 80s icons like Jem and She-Ra. :D

ETA: The plot bunny has been completed! Of course it only spawned more plot bunnies, but it's done. You can see it over here.

I also made a Jem icon. :D

It’s that time of year again! New Anime for spring! Here’s what I’ve watched so far and what I thought. I’ve also tossed in what I’ve carried through the previous season and older stuff I’ve watched. Under this cut you'll find my thoughts on Tiger and Bunny, Hana-Saku Iroha, X-Men, Dog Days, Steins;Gate, Star Driver, Kimi Ni Todoke, the Ore No Imouto Ga Konna Ni Kawaii Wake Ga Nai OVA eps, Initial D, Nyan Koi, Tokyo Majin, Devil May Cry, Damekko Doubutsu, Prince of Tennis, Inazuma Eleven, and Summer Wars! Phew!

( Click me! )

I've been a bit busy lately. Not that busy means much in my life, but busy enough. There's been social obligations like going to my sister-in-law's sister's bridal shower. I tried to skip out on it. It was the same weekend that Paco arrange a giant charity event on Qubetubers but some last minute drama locked me in. Kristin's mother fell while getting dressed and ripped the pad of her finger off, exposing the bone and she had to be rushed to the hospital. A plastic surgeon was not on hand as it was a Sunday so she was sent home to attend the party on pain killers. I had to put up with a bunch of stuffy old ladies, some stuffy younger ones and Kristin's sister-in-law's crazy mother. To top it off, I hadn't slept much because of the charity event so it was pretty horrible.

Now on to that charity event. We basically played Minecraft, had some guests and all proceeds went towards the Child's Play Charity. Our original goal was a mere $2,500. Our first guest from our affiliate the Minecraft Workbench got us up to that goal only a few hours in. I raised the goal to $3,000 and shortly went to bed. Then Paco called me a bunch and I dragged my carcass out of bed after, maybe, six hours of sleep. Our website was getting hammered with traffic. I got online just in time to listen to Paco accidentally close our Chip In event. x_x Cue me deciding that I could never sleep again. But some time while I slept, our goal was increased to $10,000 and she'd been trying to raise that goal again since we'd collected over $11,000!

Then I got dragged off to that shower and when I came back our goal was raised again. We had thousands of viewers and it was some insanity! Our goal was adjusted to be higher, then lower, but I can tell you that as of my typing this we've raised $34,603.81!!!! The chip in event will run for five more days. I guess I should stream a bit and try to push us to $35k but I haven't been as enthusiastic for the last few days. A stream with an unenthusiastic audience kind of dampened my enthusiasm.

Also, I was gifted with Portal 2 a month or so ago. That was released and I played it for two days, despite my computer supposedly not having enough graphics card juice to handle it. Well, on the third day, my luck seemed to have run out and the game would freeze leading to blue screens and emergency memory dumps and restarting. I was so upset! Ugh! I thought I'd need a new graphics card to finish the game, but it played so well for the first two days! However, on the Steam forums it seems that this is a major issue for a lot of people. It worked fine for a day or two and then refused to work any more. There's a thread with over 50 pages of posts! So hopefully this is a software issue that Valve can fix on their end and not a hardware issue that I can't afford to address at the moment.

It was Brian's birthday last weekend and we had a lot of food. I made more quinoa and black beans and man, that stuff is freaking great on a tortilla. It makes an amazing burrito! Everyone was really surprised at how much they enjoyed it. Yay!

This weekend was Easter and we had more food. Mom picked a ton of blackberries and made a fresh blackberry pie. That pie is addictive. It just draws you in and makes you eat it! Evil pie! Evil!

It's my baby cousin's birthday tomorrow. She's going to be 21?!! When did that happen? OMG! Well...it's my birthday in two months and that's gonna be a whopper >_> Those numbers keep crawling up but as I've been defiantly telling people for years, I am not growing up. I am stubbornly, willfully, self-destructively staying how I am. Hmm, doesn't sound so great when I put it that way. Well, changes much come, so be on the look out for them. I hope to report back with positive results. I keep joking that I'm going to get our website to buy me a new car. That'd be nice, but I'm not counting on it XD

And before I forget, Kristin's mother is apparently doing fine, but they had to ( Cut for grossness )

So, LJ just introduced Interest pages and I clicked on Television and was greeted with this.....

( Not Safe for Children, Puppies or Co-Workers with a fragile sense of Masculinity )

I figured that Television would give me a lot of fandomy stuff but dayum, wasn't expecting that.