Friday Favorites: I Scare Because I Care

-Have you watched Light's Out yet?
I would like it to be known that I watched this by myself in the windowless conference room at work on my lunch break. It's really quiet in there, hence why I like it. The conference room also has energy-saver lights so that when no movement is sensed in the room for a certain amount of time, they auto shut-off. 
I shit you not, about 10 seconds after I finished this video the lights went out. 
I would be a liar if I said that absolutely zero pee left my body at that moment in time.

-Ok, if that video didn't scare you, this article should. 


-Way to go, Buncombe County. I'm glad my mom left you so I didn't have to grow up there. Thanks for blaming the victim and forcing gender norms on a child.

-Alright, enough scary stuff. This list is a year old and normally I think BuzzFeed tries too hard, but this is a good'un. The one with the guy in the BK shirt kills me. Also the last one brought me to tears from laughing so hard.

-Are you watching @Midnight hosted by our Lord & Savior, Chris Hardwick? It's the best. It almost makes me wish I still had cable. Almost.

And in other news, I started a new Tumblr. Yup, I totally Tumbl now, you guys, I'm hard core like that. I'm GurlNxtDoorTumblsStuff  because GurlNxtDoor was already taken (dammit.) My Tumblr is mostly going to be crazy stories from the entertainment industry so this blog can remain geeky/nerdy/gamer culture focused.
You're welcome.

Thus spoketh the Nerdist.

No Memory Lane Monday today because EARTHQUAKEOHMYGODIHATEEVERYTHING

So, I guess I'm officially a California resident now that I've experienced my first "light" earthquake. SCEC can call it light all they want, but that shit was scary. Technically, we only experienced light to moderate shaking according to the website, but if that was light-moderate, I don't want to know what anything bigger feels like. I'm just glad we live on the 2nd floor of our building and not in a high-rise type apartment complex, those people have to deal with all the swaying when the shaking stops. #ThingsThatMakeYouGoOMGHOLYSHITBALLZ

I do love, however that as soon as Boyfriend and I were certain the shaking stopped, and we knew nothing broke or fell down, and Leeloo was safe in our arms, we both took to Twitter. Like ya do. Apparently all of my favorite Angelinos did the same. Here is a collection of my favorites:

 

Thanks Twitter. Don't ever change.
For the record, I believe our collectables and their shelves all survived. In fact the earthquake may have done us a favor by shaking some of the dust off. 
We are filthy creatures.

Friday Favorites: Pi Day Edition

Happy Pi Day everyone! I'm celebrating by going over to Marie Callendar's tonight after work and picking me (and Boyfriend) up a pie!


-Pi Day is Half baked
Oooo, good one, LA Times. No one's done that pun before. But, otherwise an interesting and enlightening article. OMG everything I know about Pi is wrong! The Pi is a lie!!!

-Amazing looking Chocolate cream pie recipe
I'm licking my computer screen, but I still can't taste it!!!

-Peanut butter pie recipe (no baking required!)
No-bake pies are my favorite kind to not bake.

-Boyfriend made me this meme the other day because he loves me:

 

Also, I started playing a new game on my phone called QuizUp and ohmygodIcan'tstop! 

Trivia, plus competition, plus mobile gaming, plus never having to actually speak to another human being yet still sort of experiencing social interaction? This game was made for me.  
Come play with me!!! 
I hold the title of "The One with the Thumb" for reaching level 10 in Friends trivia. 
Go me.

Friday Favorites: Why Does Friday Take So Long to Get Here?!

This week dragged all kinds of ass, didn't it?

And on top of all that, Daylight Savings *spit* starts Sunday morning so I lose an hour of my weekend! Balls. 
Well, let's kick this weekend off right then with some fun shit I found on the interwebz this week:

-Disney-Themed Cocktails
It's 5 o'clock somewhere! Put these in my face hole!

-New Ben & Jerry's Flavors!!!
OMG I need the peanut butter cups in my face now.

-Mental Health in the Media Student Project on Indigogo:
I would love to see more positive/realistic images of mental illness portrayed in the media, wouldn't you?

-Ignoring Gender in Med Studies is Harming Women's Health
Can we not catch a break, ladies?

-The Entire Oscar's in GIF Form
It's way better this way, trust me.

-More Winter Awful on the East Coast
My FB feed is just a collection of this

-This video 
has gotten me through some seriously tough days. 

HAPPY FRIDAY!!!

Memory Lane Monday: My Nerd Shame

So, this is a shameful blog post for me. Not embarrassing. Shameful. I'm embarrassed fairly easily and/or regularly. It's a part of my life. I can live with it. Something however I find quite shameful and cannot believe I'm about to admit is a list of classic Sci-Fi / Fantasy / Nerd-ssential movies that I have never seen. According to Rotten Tomatoes,  io9, Time Out, and Popular Mechanics, I am seriously lacking in Geek cred by not having seen these movies. Also, for the sake of the title of "classic" Sci-Fi/Fantasy, I'm only listing movies made before 2000 that there's really no excuse for me not to have seen, especially since a lot of them are such pop culture icons.

source

Here we go, in no particular order, this is the shamefully long list of movies I should have seen by now but have not:

-Terminator 
(Oh god, the shame!!! I know!!!)   
-Terminator 2: Judgement Day 
(In my defense, between watching clips on TV, experiencing the T2 "ride" at Universal Studios, and pop culture in general, I've probably technically seen this movie. But, I have never sat down and watched it as a whole in a single sitting.)
-Metropolis 
-The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
-Forbidden Planet 
-Mad Max 
-RoboCop (1987)
(I know! I know please stop judging me!!!)
-Akira 
-Ghost in the Shell 
-The Abyss 
-Cocoon 
-Close Encounters of the Third Kind 
(I wish I could trade in the time I wasted watching The Fourth Kind and say I saw this one instead.)
-Sphere 
-Event Horizon 
-Howard the Duck 
-Invasion of the Body Snatchers 
-Total Recall 
-Cube 
-Repo Man 
(I've seen the musical)  
-12 Monkeys 
-Predator 
-Andromeda Strain (1971)
-The Time Machine (1960)
-Enemy Mine 
-The Man Who Fell to Earth 
-Star Trek: First Contact 
-Dark City 
-Gattaca
-The Dark Crystal
-The Iron Giant
-Brazil
-The Seventh Seal
-Princess Mononoke

Memory Lane Monday: So...About Last Month...

There was that time that EverythingHappenedAllAtOnce. And then I said things would go back to normal the next week. Well, as usual, they did no such thing. The Universe apparently no longer allows the word "normal" to enter my vocabulary without some form of punishment. The punishment usually entails everything blowing up at once.
And what do I mean by "everything all at once" anyway? Well, I'm so glad you asked that, me; I will tell you.

First, I'd been putting off going to the clinic to get a new prescription for my meds for a couple of weeks. Mostly because...well, I don't really know why. Fear mostly, I guess. My irrationally fearful brain made it very difficult to leave the house to go to a strange new place. But, as my med supply dwindled, I grew more and more agitated and fearful and panicked. Then, on top of all of that, Boyfriend had been complaining that his mouth hurt since Christmas, but we figured it was just dryness/canker sores, which we are both prone to. But, a couple of weeks ago, he looked in his mouth and it looked like a chunk of his jaw bone was sticking out of his gum under his molars. WTF?!?!?! I could tell he was panicking a little bit, but trying not to freak me out. I was exploding with my own panic already, then add my panic that Boyfriend's mouth was going to fall off into that mix and I really felt like I was just going to drop dead at any second from the shear overload of horrible feelings. But I, too, tried really hard to keep my shit together so as to not freak out Boyfriend even more. So, we went to the clinic.

Hint: no one ever looks this happy at the clinic.

The dentist at the clinic had no idea what Boyfriend's mouth was doing. She said she'd never seen anything like it before. Awesome. I had to do my usual I-have-no-health-insurance-please-give-me-my-drugs song-and-dance to another apathetic clinic doc which was successful but made me feel more ill at ease and self-conscious in addition to the already nagging fear that Boyfriend had mouth cancer. Boyfriend got a referral to an oral surgeon that was going to cost $75 but we needed to know what the hell was happening inside his mouth.

Also during this same week, I got some very exciting news that quickly manifested into more anxiety (surprise!) Remember when I freaked out about a certain casting notice? Well, miracle of miracles, they called me in to audition! It was such great news and I needed a "win" really bad, so of course the audition was the same week all this other health stuff was going down too. Because, why not, Universe? Why the fuck not?

On the same day Boyfriend was getting his mouth checked by the surgeon, I had a job interview (yay) for a semi-long-term temp job (yay?) that has really early-ass hours (boo) but I got the job (yay) but now I'm working full-time (yay) for kind of shitty pay (boo) so I'm tired all the time (boo) but that's really no excuse to not write anymore (boo).

Oh, and also, Boyfriend doesn't have mouth cancer, and his face isn't going to fall off. It turns out he had something that's apparently very normal that happens to some people called "bone sloughing." Mostly it occurs after surgery or some sort of tooth extraction. The jaw bone decides to shed some bone fragments and then they work their way out through the gums and it looks horrifying if you don't know what's happening. The surgeon took one look in Boyfriend's mouth told him what it was and used a tool to just pluck the fragment out. He said that if he had waited a couple more days it might have just worked it's way out on its own. Awesome. So Boyfriend shelled out over $100 in total to be told he would've been fine a matter of days. And people say our healthcare system isn't broken.

So, short-story-long, Boyfriend doesn't have cancer, and I still have anxiety.

I need to wear this every day.

So, shorty-story-even-longer, I was MIA on my blog for quite some time because I prepped the shit out of my audition for SourceFed and was seriously consumed by my own crazy brain for a while. I went through some serious self-doubt and had a really dark week, but I'm doing better now.
 I'm hesitant to really talk about the audition for fear of jinxing it or something, but I feel like enough time has passed that it's ok to mention it. 
I auditioned for SourceFed, you guys! That's not a thing I'd thought I would get to say 2 years ago. It was fun and scary and great to feel like I actually went on a real audition that meant something to me. For a whole week I felt like it wasn't a colossal mistake moving across the country. But, as with every audition (especially the important ones) comes the waiting game. It's hard when you want something really badly and you don't hear anything. Maybe by putting it in writing I am jinxing myself, but I don't care. I want to work at SourceFed, dammit! I like their style of humor, I like the stories they cover, I like the folks on the channel. I'm confident in my writing, research, and my hosting abilities. I'm confident I would get along with the rest of the team at DeFranco.
I don't have an ending to this story because I haven't actually heard back from them. At the audition they told me "you really know your shit" and I think they were impressed with what I had prepared, but beyond that, I don't know anything. There's no news of any major changes on the channel yet, and as of now I haven't seen any new faces, so no news is still good news, right? For now, I will say, yes.
If nothing else, I've had some time to think over the past few weeks about changes i may want to make to my blog or to my own YouTube Channel.

Seriously how awesome would this be?!?! (Answer: all the awesome.)

Carry on.

The Day We Fight Back

If this means nothing to you, go get educated.