You know, I was all about to post some redonkulous “whee, my mother is a blowhard drama queen” rant and she’s all moping because I misplaced my toolkit and can’t transplant one of her precious machines but… I’m just sick of the whole matter already, and feeling like I can’t make one little error without risking a meltdown that may or may not trigger threats of divorce, among other things, so I’ll just do this instead:

T brendala, I may have left my toolkit at your house, and I am a moron for not having thought to look for it before today. So, um, if it is over there, I don’t suppose you could drop it off at my house tomorrow (at your convenience, of course), even if you have to stuff it in my mailbox? >_>; I have a replacement toolkit on order for future redundancy, but… yeah. Terribly sorry for my shenanigans. -_-;

The only things keeping today from completely going down the crapper? Chicken parmesan sammich with my pizza, and new Law and Order SVU episode… starting right now. :O

Domino’s Pizza. A name I’ve not heard in a long time.
I remember it was the de facto pizza store here for much of my childhood, since I don’t think Papa Johns had started building stores around here until about… 12 years ago? Anyway, it used to be that we’d get deep dish sausage+pepperoni on mondays, ’cause that’s when Father was off work.

After I moved in with mother in ’98, Domino’s kinda fell off the map. It was mostly Papa Johns and Pizza Hut. A couple years ago, Evil Stepfather used to buy up Domino’s when they did their 5-5-5 deal but that didn’t last long.

It’s not that I don’t like Domino’s– I’ve never gotten a bad pizza from them, I just found their sauce a bit much for my liking. Papa Johns got it juuuuust right in that department. SO! After quite a long hiatus, and having heard about their “overhaul,” I figured I’d give them a go, see what’s happened. Robert still stands by it, therefore…

Tonight’s experiment: X-large Brooklyn-style w/ Pepperoni, Chicken Parmesan sandwich and cheese bread.
Took a bit for the driver to get here, I’ll give him a pass since I don’t think they’ve delivered here before. :P Oddly enough, he didn’t come to the door with the goods in a sleeve… huh. Did the dood have one but took the stuff out while he was in the car? But everything was still reasonably warm, so I guess it’s okay.

Domino’s runs the Show Us Your Pizza campaign, and while it looks like they won’t show the disasters, they do… they just get posted on Facebook</a> instead. ;P They’re not currently accepting submissions but I snapped pictures all the same. (side note: oh god I can’t wait until I can get an iPhone, waaaay better picture quality than this thing)

I should have taken this out of the box. It looked a little odd. Thankfully, any fears were assuaged when I ate it. Protip: Don’t try to eat it like a sandwich, even if you cut it in half… the chicken pieces and cheese are so heavy that they fall out. XD Well, I suppose if you wrap it up in the paper it could work, but the bread is a little floppy. It is quite nomtasty, like eating a cheese+chicken pizza on french bread.

Cheese bread. Again, looks a little odd, and NOTHING like as advertised on the website (where they look like actual breadsticks) but not a dealbreaker. Taste-wise, it resembles the cheese bread that Pizza hut makes. It’s good, though I prefer the Papa Johns version.

…this is Brooklyn-style? Looks more like ordinary hand-tossed. Oh well, pizza is pizza. Omnomnom~
…
I like to think I remember what the original Domino’s pizzas tasted like. And… if they indeed changed the recipe, I can’t tell. They’re still as sauce-happy as ever, I see. Not bad, but not the “OMG WE CHANGED AND NOW WE’RE AWESOME” as their overhaul campaign is pushing.

Overall, I give these doods a B+, the + for the sandwich being very good despite being awkward to pick up and looking strange. I’ll be sticking to Papa Johns and Pizza Hut for the foreseeable future, barring sudden craving for chicken parmesan sandwiches.

—

I think, doods, I can finally answer the long-standing question as to which pizza store I prefer. While there are many local pizza providers… they don’t offer online ordering that I know of (deal-breaker, given my issues with using phones as actual phones) and often cost much more than the major chains.

Papa Johns would have to take the gold. I’ve never had a bad order from them, and their pizzas are just that solid– just the right amount of cheese and toppings, and they play well even if cold or reheated. They also get win points for bundling in the garlic cups, though I wish they’d let you choose to drop the pepperonicini (sp?) in favor of a second garlic cup. Also? Best cheese bread EVAR. Omnomnom~

Costco and Pizza Hut tie for silver, for different but equal reasons. Costco’s pizza is extreme awesomeness on par with Papa Johns, the catch being that you don’t get much selection as far as toppings goes (either cheese or pepperoni), and don’t expect to find sides there at all. Pizza Hut is awesome if you want novelty/experimental crust types (stuffed crust, cheesy bites, etc.) and they have an insane selection of side items. Also, OMG WINGS. Garlic Parmesan? Yes please!

Dominos takes the bronze. They occupied a significant portion of my youth. It’s not that it’s bad, it’s just… everyone else is better. If you like sauce, they certainly don’t disappoint! And their chicken parmesan sandwiches are quite nice. But otherwise, they’re just outmatched by the above three.

—

And now, I finally log into WoW. Holy crap I’m late. XD

Come reminisce with me, internets. In this post, we talk about the awkwardly-choreographed Christmas plays we were drafted into in elementary school.

I’ve mentioned several times before that mine (West Heritage) was a particularly weird place, and by golly the seasonal plays were nooooo exception. I only remember a couple of them in any real detail, but if you would indulge me a bit to speak on the WTF, the sometimes-awesome and how none of this would ever, EVER fly today.

2nd grade: If I recall correctly, the theme behind this one was “Christmas around the world.” Actually, I think that was the theme behind how my class approached the holidays as a whole, lots of emphasis on Christmas in non-American cultures. (Particularly, St. Lucy’s Day) But as for the play itself, I believe it was strictly a musical thing, with the kids rotated into parade decorated snowflakes highlighting the region. That year, my noobish tongue would master the pronunciation of Puerto Vallarta and Matzatlan, dammit, since that was the portion of the lyrics I was assigned.

Oh man, and there was actually making the snowflakes that we’d carry onstage. I’ll tell you, glue, glitter and I NEVER got along. I’d always get that stuff all over my hands. I remember my snowflake looked the worst, since the glue binding the silver glitter dribbled all over. Bah!

3rd grade: Oh man, if there was the year of the bizarre Christmas play, this was it. Jumping jeebus cripes, my teachers (main + student/apprentice, who would later join the school as a full-time teacher at 5th grade) wrote these over-the-top plays that almost involve themselves being kidnapped by “Bad Guys” and…. yeah, you could smell the ham from a mile off. This one actually had some sense of a story, with the scenes being partitioned off with musical transitions. And even those were all over the map– the tape with the musical accompaniement was a smattering of crappy MIDI keyboard, recordings of the school piano, and old-school “pop” holiday stuff (“Rockin’ around the Christmas Tree”).

This one was about “The Magic Word for Christmas.” Its titular song… I don’t know if it was an original composition or what. Holy crap it’s definitely something Flonne would sing, though. “The Magic Word for Christmas is L-O-V-E, love~” or something. XD

oh geeze, part of me now wants to do a Disgaea-themed recreation of this, with Prinnies as the chorus… I should put such a horrible thought out of my mind before it goes anywhere. >_>;

Because there was an actual story with characters and such, and because this was third grade, the teachers got to pick who got to play what. Oh boy… you can bet any notion of being unbiased went out the window, and quickly. The most popular (and not necessarily most well-behaved!) kids got top billing, and the ugly ducklings like me got shunted off into the chorus. Hurr durr, or something.

Ah, if only YouTube existed 20 years ago! While the majority of me cringes at the thought of listening to my awful singing voice played back at me (why yes, I sounded every bit as bland and boyish and uncute at 6 as I do at 26!), it would be one hell of a nostalgia trip. I want to say that there is indeed archival footage of little Yoshi in this nonsense, alas there is not– the closest I could find was kindergarten “graduation,” which for some reason involves singing about dinosaurs. o_O;

I don’t get it. As much as I hated my elementary school for all the crap I went through, part of me still wants to go back… to review all the shenanigans if only to WTF at it.

I like my doctor. He’s probably the nicest I’ve had of all the doctors I’ve gone through since my ass got booted from Kaiser. Bonus: liberal, geek doctor! Yay!

But… but… his front desk/receptionist staff SUCKS! I can’t say that they hate cash patients since this happens when I so much as call for an appointment and thus would not know who I am, but they either don’t pick up, or they do and INSTANTLY put me on hold… and then never answer again. I’ve tried calling in five times– including today, as of a half-hour ago– this week to get an appointment, and every time I’ve been put into a black hole. When I was last at the clinic, I saw how they work– they put the dood on hold, then either chatter in the back, or BS doing something else… it’s really not that hard to multi-task, is it? Seriously, this passes for customer service? WTF. I already hate using the phone for stuff like this, but to get jerked around by the laziest front desk EVER…no, do not want, GTFO >_<

I don’t really need this nonsense right now. Mother keeps coming back to be a drama monster about my meds– dude, stop it, yelling at me doesn’t make the receptionist stop being a lazy dumbass who puts me into a black hole. I don’t know why they pull this nonsense… do they not want people to make appointments or something? If that’s the case, no wonder they’ve been dragging their feet on putting some sort of online appointment booking system in place.

So the only thing I can think of doing now is… well, go to the freaking clinic on Monday and make the appointment in person (may as well try to do it same-day since I’m physically going up there). I need to make it really worth dragging Robert out for awhile >_>; I’ll bug him about it when I log into WoW in a bit.

I’ve been on these interwebs a long time, so you’d think I’d be used to nonsense like trolling and dumbassery by now, and lower my expectations of humanity accordingly. But late at night I also tend to overthink things… thus, this post.

Please indulge me, internet and gaming culture, as I have some questions. I’m not trolling, I really do want to know the appeal behind these things.

1. Why do you veer in favor of sexual/bodily function humor? See: games in which you get to name your character, and have public channels, and then OMFG OUTRAGE because there are measures in place to stop you from naming your character “Dong.” I hate censorship as much as the next guy, but… really? Are we all perpetually 12 years old? We are better than that. At least, I want to think we are. It’s not even that funny.

2. Why do you hate women? I was almost going to rephrase “women who do not fit conventional standards of attractiveness,” but it seems this part of the world just has this overwhelming hatred of women as a whole. And it doesn’t stop there… I thankfully don’t see it much if at all in City of Heroes, but in WoW it’s hip to claim that we don’t exist, and if we do we’re all fat and ugly and deserve to be harassed and violated and all sorts of other things OH BUT WE STILL LOVE YOUR BOOBIES. I almost feel sorry for these trolls, clearly the people in their lives never taught them to respect their female peers.

3. Why do you hate homosexuals, then co-opt homosexuality for trolling? This is especially common in WoW. I see all this hate speech about them flying, and then there are some who commandeer gay stereotypes to troll and be generally obnoxious and hateful, and that’s even worse. It’s as if these people don’t even want to put forth the effort to be civil.

4. Seriously, did you sleep through civics/history class… or school as a whole? (Particularly pertinent to Americans.) Ignoring specific political opinions, I’m disturbed at how many people do not really have any understanding of the technical details of how our government works. More than that, I’m just… sad at how much blatant, willful ignorance is thrown about, and that we think being stupid is actually something to be celebrated! If you can be bothered to look up PVP builds or boss strategies, what is stopping you from truly educating yourself about the world?

There are others but now that I think about it, they’re more or less variations of the above four.

I know, I know, “Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory” right? Knowing that doesn’t make it any less discouraging. As much as we fling around the non-solution “just ignore them,” you really can’t. It’s everywhere. You’re drenched in it all the time. You grit your teeth and try to endure, but you can only take so much before it starts to wear on you… and there’s really no escape.

Rarely, there are reminders that there are still good people out there. Their rarity makes it all the sweeter, but still depressing that people behaving civilly towards each other is not the norm.

…Sleep now.