Ever drifting away...

I get dragged back to livejournal after... apparently 3 months... because there were some spam comments posted to one of my messages. They've been deleted. I hope I don't have to restrict posting privileges or something.

I also haven't been involved with other blogs at all, either reading or posting to them, all this time. I've been doing other things. Okay, mostly I've been spending my very limited personal time watching Anime instead. Maybe I should return. Maybe not. We'll see.

This is the result I got from a somewhat demented personality-quiz-like thing.

There were a couple of online survey invitations recently with annoyingly vague titles - this isn't unusual, as it is probably done to keep certain kinds of people from self-selecting against even taking the survey in the first place, thus skewing the data. But if you're going to do that, you should at least provide an out for people whom it simply doesn't apply to. One of them turned out to be about watching basketball games, both at a stadium and on TV. Well, in the universe where this survey was created, apparently not watching basketball on TV isn't an option - or for that matter, not watching TV at all. And the question about team loyalty - I don't even know what basketball teams exist, let alone have a favorite one, so I can't answer anything involving loyalty to that team. One of the questions did have an out, but it was "I do not live in the United States", which isn't true for me either. Lots of random clickies on that survey. The other one was completely baffling. After the usual demographics question openers, it asked, "When was the last time you took a survey like this one?" (or something very similar to that)... without having ever indicated what kind of survey it was. After that, a few more general questions that were of no help to figuring it out, and then "Unfortunately, you did not qualify for this survey." I'm going to assume I was disqualified somewhere during the demographics step, which caused it to skip over a page which explained what the survey was about.

I also stumbled upon a vaguely horrifying website called "bidcactus". Basically, how it works is that you prepay bids in batches of 50, at $0.75 per bid ($37.50 total). So basically every time you bid, you lose $0.75 in credit, regardless of whether you win the auction or not. (The "bid credits" are not actually part of the bidding price, they're a payment for the privilege of even making the bid attempt.) And then if you do win the auction, you still have to pay the final bid price or forfeit both the bid credits and the item you won. And then the things being bid on are obviously not being put up for auction by other members like a standard auction site, and tend to be things of fixed value (like prepaid gift cards). So how is this horrifying? Because this sort of thing seems very much like it would often end up ripping off anyone who is bad with at least one of the following: bidding, gambling, math, or treating abstract money as if it were hard cash. And as far as I can tell, tricking fools into thinking they got bargains when they actually effectively overpaid is pretty much the only way that kind of setup could make a profit anyhow. Unless you like both bidding and gambling and consider the risk of a bad deal to be all part of the fun (or know what you're doing and are good enough to minimize the risk) I would advise people to stay away from that site and any similar ones which may exist.

In Soviet Russia, Chuck Norris's mom makes "you" jokes.

Out of context, here's part of something I wrote on another blog... which seems to have been lost because the interwebs ate my comment, and I didn't feel like retyping the whole thing. Just because I thought it was kind of amusing.

"The dinosaurs ruled for what, 150 million years or so, and they never even made it to the moon."

I bought a soft-core "artistic nudity" video several months ago from Amazon.com just for the curiosity value. As a result, Amazon has apparently very recently decided based on this that I am into books about garden photographs(?!) and will not stop flooding my email inbox with notifications about books of that type. (The title of the video was "May Flowers".)

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Some things I posted on other people's blogs recently. The first is on the prospect of SETI (Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence) picking up an alien trojan or virus:

I didn't really watch the video but it seems to me either the very idea of this is stupid or else SETI is stupid. What, are people taking SETI data recordings and trying to run them as software? And if they are, then how likely is it that the aliens are specifically sending us programs which run on Windows or Unix or Mac OS or whatever?

Even in the absolute worst-case scenario, that it's some sort of god file which can somehow exploit even the slightest security flaw to cause itself to be activated as a program even by software that isn't normally capable of doing such and then rewriting itself to function on any form of hardware imaginable without any advance idea of the system's operating codes, or even whether it uses binary or trinary or analog or whatever, then it can still easily be defeated by examining the data only on an isolated system: no connection to the internet or any other network whatsoever, and the isolated system is never used for anything except examining the SETI data.

Tricking us into building something may be a concern, but that's not a scanning issue.

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Also, in response to "dumb" questions from an issue of Cosmopolitan magazine (slightly edited). Note that while I have no idea what Cosmo Mag's actual responses to these questions are, it's very likely that they got some of them wrong. People who actually know a thing or two about sex and relationships generally consider this magazine to be a poor source of advice on those subjects.

Factual answers in case you have readers who don't know some of these:

Q: If you're pregnant, can the man's penis hit the baby during sex?

A: No.

Q: Do guy's balls really turn blue if they don't orgasm?

A: If a guy goes too long without ejaculating, then it may get a little painful down there (and supposedly slightly bluer, though I've never checked). But it has nothing directly to do with orgasms - it's possible for a man to orgasm without ejaculating and ejaculate without orgasming.

Q: Is it possible to have too much sperm in my vagina?

A: No. Unless you're trying not to get pregnant and are not on birth control, in which case any at all is too much.

Q: My guy has low-hanging balls that get in the way during sex. What are the best positions for us?

A: The "best positions" vary considerably from couple to couple, even without little things like that complicating it. (Plus I'm not even sure how this is literally possible anyway, unless they're doing something very strange. Most likely either the asker is uncomfortable with them slapping against her skin, or else the magazine writers made this question up.)

Q: If a guy has a big penis, is he more likely to get you pregnant?

A: Very doubtful.

Q: I've heard it's unsafe to do it on a trampoline. Why?

A: If you mean while bouncing on a trampoline, it's because you might seriously injure yourself when you're distracted by/with something else (including sex). If you mean while lying down on a trampoline, it should be okay as long as you keep your head away from the metal parts around the edge.

Q: My guy has a third nipple. Is it as sensitive as the other two?

A: It depends on the person. You can't know unless you ask them.

...Was due to having to spend most of my spare time packing up, moving out, unpacking, taking care of stuff related to the move, etc. For me moving all the time (as in, every year or so) is normal. What's different is that I moved back to an old place. This was due to a temporary move-out so that the management could have my apartment rebuilt. Also, I had little advance warning that I was supposed to move back.

I vaguely recall that there were a number of subjects I felt like posting about recently, but I seem to be too tired to remember them.

Another quick commentary on surveys: Apparently due to the fact that I had experienced mild constipation much earlier this year (the first time in several years) I made it past the screening and into a world where not having chronic digestive problems is not an option. Plus I was required to evaluate a hypothetical product which I would probably never need (an anti-bloating drug, I've never experienced bloating) including how well it fits with a brand I've never heard of. This is what happens when I answer questions honestly - it usually gets followed by questions I can't answer honestly. At least not with any of the options given. Who writes these things, anyway?

Also in response to the search terms recently used on Google to find someone else's blog:

"Car-sized anime boobs"? Good thing they're not real breasts, because at that size they'd either turn into car-sized masses of rotting flesh due to lack of blood, or else the woman who had them would soon die of heart failure.

I used to do paid online surveys because I was desperate for every last dollar I could get ahold of. These days I still do them sometimes, even though the pay isn't really worth the time and effort that it takes to do them. This is in part because I get somewhat bored doing the same things all the time when it comes to making money (I'm self-employed) and part because I find it rather amusing how badly-designed many "professional" surveys are.

One which I did today was a grab-bag of seemingly random questions. I get those some times. One question was about US politics: "Many voters are having buyer's remorse about Barack Obama. If the election were held again today, who would you vote for?" The options, in order, were John McCain, Joe Biden, Mitt Romney, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton. First of all, it didn't give the option of "none of these / someone else" or something similar. I wouldn't, and didn't, vote for any of those clowns. There were a lot of other candidates available in that election. I always vote on the merits, not by who has the best chance of winning. (That means it's usually a third party candidate who gets my vote. For all the good that does.) Hell, even if I were restricted to Democrat or Republican only, I still wouldn't pick any of these. It's always the mediocre candidates which rise to the top, in my opinion.

And then... this survey question is completely lopsided. First, there are two Repubs and three Dems. Due to the way the country is in regards to voters (approximately 40% diehard Dem voters, 40% diehard Repub voters, and 20% independents) this 5-way split favors the Republican side. And then of the Repubs, Mitt Ronmey was never popular. Despite being overhyped by the media (which ignored some of the more popular candidates) he ranked as the #4 or #5 Republican for most of the race. He only rose to #2 near the end because everyone else dropped out once it was obvious John McCain was the top contender. And even then his popularity level was still really low. This means, by accident or design, the top "vote getter" will almost automatically be... John McCain. And then I have to wonder why this question was even asked in the first place...

Apparently the reason why almost nothing ever gets posted here is because I have very little spare time, which I use to read (and occasionally comment on) online news, post to other people's blogs, and work on another more specific-purpose blog (or at least try to, it's not going well) and so almost never have time left over for a personal blog. So... instead I'm mostly going to be re-posting some of the more interesting comments that I put elsewhere. With occasional short posts of original comments, mostly random observations. Partly as a personal record of things I've said before, and partly because in the unlikely chance anyone reads this page more than once, at least it's something.

So, random observation for today - ever notice that animals sometimes behave differently during a heat wave? Birds especially just sit there and stare nervously under the shade instead of flying off when you pass by or get close to them. Earlier today, there was this one really small bird (some type of brownish songbird, don't know the species) which, instead of staring nervously, did a quick jump-like flight to a spot around five feet away and started screaming at me. Well, as close as a bird can get to screaming. Never seen that before, not even from that type of bird. Weird. (Note: I am not deliberately disturbing the birds. It's pretty much impossible to get anywhere without going near them at some point.) Also, there have been a few times when a squirrel would walk right up to me, not paying any attention, and then bolt upon reaching less than a foot away even if I wasn't moving. This only happens during heat waves; normally they don't get anywhere near that close.