Category Archives: fangirling

fangirling, omg awesome, Uncategorized

My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is the Best Show on TV Right Now

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I’m not joking. I’m not exaggerating. The new My Little Pony show is simply sublime.

Let me explain.

Once upon a time, there was a girl named Lauren Faust. She grew up giving all of her My Little Pony and Strawberry Shortcake toys different personalities and making them go out and save the world in her imagination.

When she grew up, she started working on cartoons. You may have heard of some of these: Powerpuff Girls and Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends.

Now she has her own show. It’s called My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.

BEFORE WE CONTINUE ANY FURTHER, ALLOW ME TO POINT OUT THAT THIS IS THE SHOW IN A NUTSHELL:

Courtesy http://anowia.deviantart.com/

Okay, has that kept you here instead of scared you off? Good. Allow me to continue.

On its surface, I can see why the gentle reader might be somewhat skeptical. It’s called “My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.” Seriously. The ponies are all pink or purple and have names like “Twilight Sparkle” and they have discussions about pretty frilly dresses. Okay. Yes. I know.

BUT.

The aforementioned pony named Twilight Sparkle is a supernerd who puts reading and learning on a high pedestal and runs scientific experiments any time she comes across some sort of problem or unexplainable phenomenon.

The aforementioned pink pony, named Pinkie Pie, is utterly insane.

And the aforementioned pony who likes dresses, Rarity, is a haute boutique fashion designer who does things like lament about her career and slowly lose her mind when she attempts to balance the desires of her clients with her own artistic sensibilities. (And which of us, my fellow creative friends, has not been there?)

The characters are all female and cutesy and have big eyelashes. And have personalities. And have actual problems. And work those problems out. And grow.

And I can see a little bit of myself in each of the ponies. I’m a huge science nerd like Twilight Sparkle. But I’m also a giant ditzy derp like Pinkie Pie. And I’m also shy and quiet like Fluttershy. And I’m also a tomboy like Rainbow Dash. And I’m also an obsessive artist like Rarity. And I also don’t give a crap about my looks, like Applejack.

Now maybe it’s just me, but I have never seen a “little girls’ show” that was so very… human. Erm. Pony.

I’m writing this post because I want everyone to know about PONIES and how great it is. Have I finally snapped and lost my mind? Maybe. But it’s okay, because this morning when I was watching the show on YouTube I laughed so hard at one point that I had to pause for like five minutes before I could actually stop laughing and begin watching the show again.

And I don’t care WHAT the show is about, if it makes me do that, I’m a fan.

TL;DR: Ponies are awesome and everyone should watch them, regardless of age or gender. PROTIP: Watch at least three or four episodes before passing judgment.

fangirling, life of pike, video games

Video Games I’m Currently Playing

8 Comments

So I’ve had this blog for a year now. Awesome, huh? I’d like to thank anyone who reads or has otherwise stumbled upon my humble home on the interwebs.

Out of curiosity I went to look at my most used tags. Here are the top six:

  • Video Games: 43 Posts
  • Classic Video Game Monday: 41 posts
  • Life of Pike: 20
  • Writing: 14
  • Rambles: 14
  • Linux: 12

…I uh, sort of have a wee bit of a thing for video games, I guess.

Here’s what I’m currently playing:

Civilization IV

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney

…and Robot Unicorn Attack.

Because there can NEVER be enough HARMONY, HARMONY, OH LOVE~

I also, uh, resubbed to WoW specifically so I could derp around with a friend as a tauren paladin. I have no idea what I’m doing as a paladin. Button-mashing, I suppose! We’re leveling surprisingly fast, though; it’s going to be hilarious if I wind up with a level 85 paladin out of nowhere.

That Civ IV though, man, lemme tell ya. There is nothing funnier than researching satellites and the Apollo Program in the mid-1800s while building massive airship armadas and submarine fleets on the side and “collecting” various historical figures. It’s like I’m actually living out all my greatest fantasies!

fangirling, omg awesome

Crazy People Have The Best Ideas

7 Comments

Ever been gripped with an idea or thought that you sort of halfway think is nuts but it turns into a project that you work on anyway, because it’s all you think about?

For some years I have been afflicted with the belief that flight is possible to man. My disease has increased in severity and I feel that it will soon cost me an increased amount of money if not my life. I have been trying to arrange my affairs in such a way that I can devote my entire time for a few months to experiment in this field.

– Wilbur Wright, 1900

Fortunately, you’re in pretty good company.

(Yeah, short post is short, but the above letter excerpt tickled my fancy and I wanted to share it.)

fangirling, omg awesome, random, supergeekery

The Showdown to End All Showdowns.

12 Comments

So I was browsing this site of awesome fictional matchups and discovered something amazing.

Doc Brown and Sherlock Holmes vs. Carmen Sandiego.

So as I was thinking about how fantastically epic this would be, @kordwar decided to one up it:

Doc Brown and Sherlock Holmes vs. Carmen Sandiego and Professor Moriarty.

Doc Brown and Sherlock Holmes vs. Carmen Sandiego and Professor Moriarty.

…guys. I can’t hear your comments over the sound of the EPIC.

fangirling, life of pike

Dude Watching With Pike

11 Comments

My interest in “cute guys” is usually piqued in one of the following ways:

Scenario 1:

*Sees Wikipedia article and black and white photo about some inventor/scientist from the 19th century. Said inventor/scientist is usually wearing a three piece suit and top hat.*

Pike: Guhhh *adds to “must date when my time machine is invented” list*

Scenario 2:

Any hot guy in a waistcoat.

Pike: @_@

Scenario 3:

At work.

Pike: “OMG, I’m so tired of people coming and asking me stupid questions about the crickets. NO IT’S NOT ICE, IT’S A GEL WATER. GET IT RIGHT.”

Random Cute Guy With Australian Accent: “Hi, I’m a random cute guy with an Australian accent. I’m going to ask stupid questions about the crickets now.”

Pike: “Okay ^___^”

Scenario 4:

Pike: “Hmm, that guy is okay I guess. I mean, he’s kinda… OMG IS HE WEARING AN OMEGA SEAMASTER? I’M PRETTY SURE HE’S WEARING AN OMEGA SEAMASTER. HOLYSHIZ. COME OVER HERE SO I CAN DROOL ON YOUR WRIST AND WE CAN DISCUSS HOROLOGY LONG INTO THE NIGHT. … … … I mean uh, cute butt.”

Scenario 5:

Gambit and/or Iron Man.

’nuff said.

…

Hey, at least it’s better than Dude Watching With the Brontes, right? …maybe?

fangirling, rambles, random, thoughts

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. And! Robot suits.

3 Comments

I don’t know if I have ever mentioned this anywhere but I have this massive infatuation with most types of modern transportation. And I’m not even sure why.

FLYING! I love flying. Airplanes are like the greatest thing. I’m that person who insists on the window seat, uses up every exposure on her camera within ten minutes of takeoff, and generally geeks out over the entire process. Last time I flew it was probably comical; twentysomething me bouncing around in the seat, in stark contrast to the six year old kid next to me who spent the entire flight quietly reading a novel. I dunno, maybe it’d be different if I had to fly everywhere as part of business trips all the time and I was jaded, but I don’t actually fly very often so I get to geek out over it, thank you very much.

CARS. I love cars. And not so much in the whole sup dawg, pimp-my-ride kind of way either. No, my love of cars is more abstract. I love cars because I love driving and I love driving because unless I win the lottery, it’s the closest I’ll ever get to flying my own plane.

AC on, music cranked to 11, cruisin’ down the freeway. One With My Machine. I don’t care, I’m still free, you can’t take my road from me. That’s what I’m talking about.

Now this little love affair of mine tends to put me at odds with the increasingly common zeitgeist that I should be carpooling or biking or something. Putting aside the fact that I hate bikes for various reasons (Hyperbole and a Half is pretty spot on here), or that carpooling is out because I get nervous when other people are in My Car (perhaps because then I can’t get away with squeakily belting out Poker Face)… I understand the sentiment behind said zeitgeist. But it’s hard for me to get into it when I am so very in love with my 2002 Toyota Corolla which allows me to be blissfully free for ten minutes a day.

See, I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I’m fine with tree-hugging, so long as I can do it in a specially constructed tree-hugging robot suit with all the extra bells and whistles and lasers and jetpacks.

Basically my idea of the future is nature and fuzzy animals living in harmony with robot suits and lots and lots of mechanical bunnies.

I like my idea of the future.

Also, lemme know if you find any tree-hugging robot suits laying around that are in need of a good home.

fangirling, life of pike, pictures

Fangirl Field Trip 2010 (Photo Spam)

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Since I have a lot of crap going on in my life right now, I decided it would be a good time to cheer myself up by visiting a place in my hometown called the “American Computer Museum”. Somehow I’d never actually gone there before, which is sort of shocking when you consider the types of things I saw there:

Old phones!

Old switchboard!

There is no way this thing isn’t a Tricorder.

Replica of the Antikythera mechanism; this looked so much cooler in real life than it does in the picture.

This is a calculator.

And so is this, and I want both of them so I can figure out how they work.

Arithmometer, aka mechanical calculator. Did I mention that I want this also?

Actual letter written by Ada Lovelace, I may have possibly fangirled over this for about ten minutes. (Directly underneath was a first edition copy of Charles Babbage’s autobiography, complete with technical drawings of the difference engine– cue similar fangirling.)

I decided that the time was right to present the most ridiculous picture of me ever taken. This, my friends, is the Pike-o-graph. Eh? Eh?

This watch went to the moon. I now find myself endlessly curious about the effects of low gravity on the movement. *mental note to look into this later*

This thing was full of blinking lights and made clickety-clackety noises if you got close to it. I have decided that I must have one. (You know, like I decided with basically everything else in this museum.)

A room full of computers, including at least a couple Commodore 64s. <3 The big red cabinet in the corner is Computer Space, the first commercially sold video game.

ENIAC…

UNIVAC…

8 megabytes of storage on this baby! Never mind the fact that it’s like twice as big as me. Seriously, you can see my reflection.

There was so much stuff here; it was fantastic. Also I bought a book called “The Victorian Internet”. With a title like that, you just can’t go wrong.

fangirling, pictures, supergeekery

Pike’s New Shiny

15 Comments

Ten days ago or so, the battery on my wristwatch died. Rather than buy a new one, I decided it was time to do something I’d wanted to do for a long time: namely, I decided it was time to graduate from a cheapy Wal-Mart watch to a nice real one.

For the uninitiated (aka sane people who aren’t watch geeks like me yet), most watches these days are battery-powered by way of electrical pulses sent through a quartz crystal. This makes for a watch that is very highly accurate, but the downside is that opening up the back to look inside is pretty disappointing because it is made of so few parts. Clearly this would not do for someone like me who is enamored with the beauty of real mechanical action. So it was that I went online, discovered a very nice watch for a very nice price, and ordered it.

And waited…

and waited…

and waited…

And finally the UPS Truck arrived today when I was in the middle of eating lunch. I had the biggest ever smile on my face when I was opening the box and was met with the most beautiful object I’ve ever laid eyes on:

This is a real mechanical watch– it was painstakingly made the same way they’ve made ’em for hundreds of years. It will never require batteries, and it winds itself via a rotor that spins when I move my arm. It is not quite as accurate as a modern quartz watch, and I’ll probably have to adjust the time when it ends up a few minutes slow each week, but to me that is a small price to pay for the Epic Factor.

And for being able to gaze lovingly at little tiny moving pieces anytime I check the time ^_^

It is also gigantic. Here it is compared to the Wal-Mart watch that served me well for the past few years:

Size matters.

It’s heavy and sits a bit awkwardly on my scrawny wrists (which are already small to begin with because I’m a girl) and it’s a good half an inch thick– at the least. But holy cogs, it’s beautiful. No matter how much respect I have for your utilitarian quartz watch for being accurate and being a pretty awesome technical achievement in its own right– you really can’t beat having the whirring heartbeat of a real mechanical wonder on your arm.

(And the back is see-through. How cool is that?)

animal geekery, fangirling, life of pike

And Down The Stretch They Come

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I was going to start out this post with something about how most girls go through the infamous “Horse Phase”, but then I realized that I’d just end up with dozens of “but I didn’t!” comments, so instead I’ll begin this post thus:

Yeah, I went through the Horse Phase. Mine was a little different from the other Horse-crazed girls I knew at school, though. While most of them dreamed of ribbons in the manes of Shetland ponies or wild mustangs or that sort of thing, I dreamed of

the thundering

hooves of

thoroughbred racehorses.

This obsession can be entirely blamed on this book, which my dad bought me for some unknown reason (since I had no real interest in horses at the time):

I read it when I was, oh, 12 or 13 years old, and was instantly intrigued by this world previously unknown to me: a world of racehorses– those brave, elegant, hotblooded creatures– and the people who loved them. I went on to read a bunch of the books in the series and then I started reading other books about racehorses and before long I was watching horse races on TV. I’ll never forget my first Kentucky Derby: an underdog horse named Grindstone who triumphed over a bunch of strong contenders. And that was it: I was hooked. I wrote a short story about that race for school, and from that point on I was a horse racing nut.

I drew thoroughbreds, I wrote about thoroughbreds, I read about thoroughbreds, I dreamed of owning a horse farm someday. Then I wanted to become a jockey, which I figured I could get away with because I’m short and scrawny, but reality eventually set in when I remembered that I have zero athletic ability and that I’m terrified of anything past cantering on an actual horse. Still, I wanted to get in on the action somehow, and I daydreamed up stories about my future horses and figured out what color silks my future horse farm would have (white bars on a teal body, and white sleeves).

My strongest desire was to see a horse win the Triple Crown: a perfect trifecta of the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness Stakes, and the Belmont Stakes, a feat which has only been accomplished eleven times in over a hundred years, and not since Affirmed in 1978.

So of course the Racing Gods thought it would be most amusing to toy with my heart, and over the course of my next several years of keen race-watching I got to watch heart-wrenching near-misses by Silver Charm in 1997, Real Quiet in 1998, Charismatic in 1999, War Emblem in 2002, Funny Cide in 2003, and the most soul-crushing upset of all: Smarty Jones in 2004. I’d been a fan of Smarty since watching him just romp the field in the Arkansas Derby. “That horse,” I said, “Is going to win the Kentucky Derby.” He did. Then he won the Preakness. And then… then he lost the Belmont to a horse named Birdstone, son of Grindstone, who I’d fallen in love with years before. Oh irony.

After that my interest started to wane a bit. It was a combination of usually being scheduled to work on Saturdays (when most “big” races are run) and simply sort of moving on from the obsession. But while I may not be quite as obsessed as I used to be, I still love the Sport of Kings. I can’t think of anything quite as thrilling as the two minutes that are the Kentucky Derby (this weekend, by the way!) and I can’t think of anything quite as nail-biting as the post parade for the Belmont when a Triple Crown contender is running. I love the spirit of thoroughbreds, I love the stories behind them and their people (insert obligatory “I liked ‘Seabiscuit’, bite me” comment here), and who knows, maybe one of these days I’ll actually get to see a Triple Crown Winner.*

Until then, I present the greatest race of all time (which I can’t watch without tearing up, by the way. I blame the Rudy music):

—

* In actuality the fact that horses these days are bred for speed more than distance has me questioning the idea of preserving the lengths of the original Triple Crown races, even for nostalgia’s sake. I envision a “modern day” Triple Crown as having a 1 1/8 mile Kentucky Derby, a 1 1/16 mile Preakness, and a 1 1/4 mile Belmont. But on the other hand, who am I to mess with the Derby? <3

fangirling, super heroes

A Girl And Her Super Heroes

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I never actually read super hero comics when I was a young kid– I was too busy reading stuff like Scrooge McDuck comics, or Calvin & Hobbes compilation books. I did watch the early Superman and Batman movies quite a bit, though, and I enjoyed them as most kids probably did, buuuut my first real comic-characters-fangirling can be attributed to my friends in, oh, 8th/9th grade or so, who introduced me to X-Men.

The movie was coming out right about this time and there was a Saturday morning X-Men cartoon that I started watching and all in all it was a great time to get into it. Beast was my favorite. I mean, seriously, a big blue fuzzy guy quoting Shakespeare. You can’t NOT love him. Then I got into Wolvie and Nightcrawler and finally, the ever-so-drool-worthy Gambit.

(As an aside, I just found “Steampunk Gambit” on Google Images, and the Fangirl Senses are off the chart. Anyways, moving on:)

There was one thing that was possibly cuter than Gambit, and that was Gambit/Rogue…

…because I’m a hopeless romantic and I was a 15 year old girl who liked to daydream about guys in trenchcoats. (Hmm, some things never change, do they… *cough*)

Gambit/Rogue is still one of my OTPs by the way, up there with Locke/Celes, Cloud/Aeris, House/Cameron (shut up), and ahhh, err… uh… Khadgar/Medivh. >_> Aaaaaanyways…

Then I got to about the end of high school and suddenly I fell in love with Spider-Man.

Spidey was appealing on a multitude of levels. First of all, he was a giant geek. Like me. Secondly, he was socially awkward. Like me. Lastly, the movie reboot made him exactly my age. In the movie, he was graduating high school the same year I was. I know it’s just a silly little detail, but it really sort of helped me to identify with him.

This picture says it all, really. Courtesy Kizer180 @ DeviantArt.

The Spider-Man myth was plausible to me in a way that other super heroes thus far hadn’t been (well, if you can get past the whole radioactive spider thing.) Peter Parker was just a normal kid with normal kid problems, who happened to become a web-slinging manifestation of awesome. I ate it up. He was my fave super hero for a while.

Then…

…

…then came the “cool exec with a heart of steel”:

IRON MAN.

So, let’s talk about Tony Stark for a minute. Let’s see here:

  • Brilliant
  • Handsome
  • Rich
  • Builds robots and robot suits in his basement

Yeah, um, what’s not to love?

The “brilliant” bit is the most important part, though. In a modern world where science and technology are built on the backs of huge teams of people, Tony Stark built something awesome “IN A CAVE! WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS!!” and that’s just hot. He, with his suit, represents the lone inventor changing the world– the one person making a difference– the individual guy inside the technology. I could probably write an essay on it, really, and get all philosophical, but ultimately it just comes down to Sheer Awesomeness.

Also, last night I had a dream that I went to Stark Industries and Tony Stark was showing me around and WHO ME, FANGIRL?

…man. I just wanna shake Stan Lee’s hand. Don’t you?