Fuck You, I'm a Robot

I had a dream last night where the fourth "Matrix" movie came out, and it was just godawful. It was such a clusterfuck, in fact, that everyone who'd ever seen it, except for me, took a vow to pretend it never existed. When I finally rented it on DVD and watched it, I tried to head out to discuss it with other people, because it was actually a really affecting exploration of what it means to be human and Gnostic mythology. And everybody was like, "Oh, you mean the third movie? The third movie sucked!" And I was like, "No, the fourth movie, the one where he and Trinity have that AI baby and they all start opening up the difference between the Matrix and the real world, and there's that confrontation between their real selves and their Matrix selves and then they don't end up fighting, they--" and people were like, "Oh, I don't remember that, it must have been in the 'Animatrix' or something," and it just drove me nuts.

I went back to the theater to see if they were still playing it, but the only thing that was playing at that particular theater was a college comedy set in the late 1960s about an all-queer frat house.

Have you ever had dreams about movies that didn't exist?

I had a dream last night where I was working at a Taco Bell, and KFC called the restaurant to offer me a new job. I had to take my cell phone outside during my shift to answer their impromptu interview, which mostly consisted of me answering questions about the history of KFC.

"Who was Colonel Sanders?" the KFC interviewer asked, and I told her that Colonel Sanders was a rich white dude who "invented" the eleven secret herbs and spices mix by stealing it from one of his slaves. The interviewer was quiet for a second, and then she told me that Colonel Sanders treated his slaves really well, and that they only worked nine hours a day and had lunch breaks and health benefits, just like the workers at KFC. I disagreed.

I don't think I got the job. At least, I don't think I would have if I hadn't woken up.

*

In other news, this made me laugh and I think it's very astute (and the Stephanie Coontz book mentioned in the post is definitely worth picking up). What do you think was the best time in American history? I'd personally say the 1990s, but then I was also a kid then, and all I knew was that having Tamagotchis was awesome and that Nickelodeon had some really good cartoons. I'm actually looking forward to the 2030s, which is when we finally get flying cars that run on cold fusion, sex-change operations are as affordable and easy as getting your hair dyed, and you can put an MP3 player in your brain.

I have laryngitis. Fuck. So I can't work, of course. I thought I could pull it off by talking from my very upper and lower registers, but that only worked for a short time and now I don't think I can even do that. I am so unhappy about this.

I made chicken soup from scratch, and it's okay, but I tossed in the egg noodles to boil for too long and it got all mushy :/ Next time, I use rice.


I had weird dreams:

I was in a museum of narrative. One exhibit was about dream narrative. It was several sets of rotating panels, and you could press each one and it would light up and arrange itself into the story you'd created so far, and then you could press another one that you thought might be related, and it would arrange itself next to it. There seemed to be three or four stories with three or four different protagonists, and they switched in and out of stories, and sometimes when you pressed one, the whole exhibit would rearrange itself. The other exhibit I remember was a very complex simulation where you played an evil stepmother in a fairy tale. No matter how you started out or what choices you made in the game, you would always end up losing.

I had this dream where my TV suddenly started getting a "Fondest Memories" cable channel. The theme of the channel was "TV shows that everyone else forgot...but you remembered!" and when I watched it, it was mostly showing reruns from the 70's and 80's. (I live in hope that it will return and show me some good 50's-60's bizarreness.)

The shows I watched included:

--"Supernatural," the original. It was from the very early 70's, and chronicled the (generally funny and cheesy) adventures of two brothers who ran an occult private investigation agency with help from their aunt and uncle. The older brother (still Dean) was this genuinely dumb redneck slacker who had lots of skanky girlfriends and vague psychic powers that the younger brother (still Sam), who was very smart and ambitious and a little uptight, resented and felt inadequate over. Both brothers were middle-aged and not all that attractive. The aunt and uncle were the best part; the uncle was a little old Jewish man who was into the ~*mystical powers of the East*~ and knew kung fu, and his wife was this little old Chinese lady who was into Kabbalah and knew Krav Maga. They ran a wizard supply shop that moved around from town to town and always used a different front.

--A show about five Olympic athletes with superpowers who teamed up to fight crime. There was a little German gymnast who could read minds (and later in the series, learned how to telepathically hypnotize people), a Kenyan runner who could speak with all animals, a Russian weightlifter who had superspeed and was invulnerable (but normal weightlifter strength, oddly enough), a Bangladeshi archer with pyrokinesis, and a Brazilian figure skater with precognition. The show was fairly serious and the characters were all pretty well fleshed out, because the characters were based on real athletes who got together one day in the Olympic village and decided they wanted to have their own television show.

--An "afterschool special" show from the 1980's about a high school where the GSA and the Special Ed Department had to be consolidated for budget reasons, so all the queer kids and the disabled kids spent the day together in a trailer and learned Very Important Lessons. It was full of horrible stereotypes and incredibly dumb lessons, like "Strangers with Candy," but it was serious. I've never actually managed to be offended in a dream before.

--A cute kids' show about a little boy with Asperger's Syndrome who created a different imaginary friend each week to help him solve a problem or work through an issue. It was specifically for children with Asperger's and parents who wanted to understand what their aspie kid might be feeling or thinking, but it ended up being a huge hit among adolescent girls as well.

It appears to be Fertilizer Day, that glorious time of the year when the farmers outside Mount Pleasant all decide to spread manure on their fields at once. The whole town smells like shit. When the wind changes, everything smells like a slightly different flavor of shit. Nobody bothered to explain this to the ACE kids, so they kept shifting around in their seats and giggling, trying to figure out who'd farted or not taken a shower.

*

Dream I had a while ago:

I was riding in a Jeep across a huge Midwestern plain to the edge of a lake to check out a new housing development. With both eyes open, there was nothing but swampland, tall grass, and water, as far as the eye could see.
With my left eye open, I could see a huge city full of glossy black skyscrapers and factories that looked more like greenhouses. The streets were wide and clean and full of zippy electric cars. The storefronts were all very chic and minimalist, and there were little unobtrusive TV screens with news tickers scrolling mounted on lampposts. Everything was very quiet and peaceful, and there weren't many people around, but the ones that were outside were either going to lunch, running errands, or going to and from work. As I wandered around, a woman came up to me and asked me if I needed directions to somewhere, and when I said yes, she offered to give me a tour of the whole city. She said her boss wouldn't mind, because helping visitors or prospective residents of the city settle in was considered to be one of the most charitable, useful things a person could do.
With my right eye open, I could see a town made of of shacks and hastily assembled cabins, neighborhoods strung with Christmas lights, dusty narrow roads full of bicyclers and stray chickens, music spilling out of the bars on every corner. Everyone was strolling aimlessly or chilling out in the street, wandering in and out of each others' houses, wearing cut-offs and raggy dresses. Whenever I asked for directions, the people I asked said they had no idea what I was talking about or how to get to where I wanted to go, but wouldn't I stay and help them make some stew or harvest their gardens or fix their houses? Each invitation to help with chores turned out to be an invitation to an impromptu stew-making or garden-harvesting or house-fixing party, where everyone would do about five or ten minutes of work in shifts and then hang around dancing and drinking and gossiping while they waited for their turn to come again.

I couldn't decide which place I wanted to live in, so I opened both eyes and wandered around the swampy grasslands for a while. Right before the dream ended, I realized that I didn't necessarily have to choose just one, but I didn't know how the residents of either city would take it, and I never got to ask.

There's this place in Mexico that I came upon during a hike. It's a valley with walls that are steep but not high, and it's full of the ghosts of children who ran away. They can look like whatever they want to. If you come into the valley at dawn, noon, or dusk, it's full of what looks like teenagers in club gear and frock coats. They look like they are making fun of you. At any other time, it's full of tall grass, higher than your head.
Along the side of the valley, under limestone shelves, are little twig bunk beds. There are TVs in some of them. They are unplugged and sometimes broken, but they flicker anyway. Sometimes the ghosts are in them and sometimes they invite other ghosts to do TV shows and sometimes you can pick up pirate TV stations if you twist the knobs, but the ghosts get mad if you twist the knobs.

The ghosts have their own folklore and their own stories and jokes and they're mostly terrible. Maybe something gets lost in translation. One researcher collected some several years ago. The ghosts liked her because she brought some Blue's Clues dolls for them.
Here's one of the jokes:
Gregory and Christopher were watching the grass grow. Gregory said, "Why are we watching this grow?" Christopher told him, "Because soon it will be tall." And Gregory said, "I was tall once, but I went back to short."
I told you it was terrible.

The kids are on the whole happy, but they seem to like scaring people. The dried leaves when the wind blows through them sound exactly like bones.

The kings of a tripartate kingdom were dying, perhaps already dead. Their viziers summonsed six girls from this world and gave them fairytale names: Dorothy, Alice, Red Riding Hood, and Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella. They seperated them into two groups and put them each on opposite sides of the kingdom, telling them that the first group to get to the capitol city would become princesses with the viziers' help, and the other three would be sent home.
Dorothy, Alice, and Red Riding Hood just wanted to get home. Dorothy became adept at directions, drawing maps in the dirt and leading the girls ever onward towards the city. Alice decided that it was all her dream, and grew skilled in avoiding traps and solving puzzles through her dream-logic. Red Riding Hood was terrified of the beasts in the woods, and soon learned to defend her companions from the ravening monsters that would stalk them.
Meanwhile, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella met up with some witches early in their journey. They schemed and convinced the witches to teach them magic, and quickly flew to the capitol city, where they overthrew the viziers immediately and began ruling as despots. When the other three girls finally made their way to the city, they found the citizenry up in arms hunting for them, as the princesses were certain that the girls would want to overthrow them as well.
The girls had to disguise themselves and plot to get home. Soon, they learned that the princesses were opening up the kingdom to trade from this world, and set out to find a ship...

A popular TV show was nearing the end of its run, and the writers knew it. Feeling betrayed, they began to send the show off into storyline insanity and work in bizarre, cracked-out fanfiction plots. People woke up in beds with people they weren't sure they slept with, people died, came back to life, and walked through the hospital as ghosts, people suddenly turned into anthromorphic animals for no apparent reason. The characters got fed up and began to wreck the writers' plots, insisting that they never loved the characters they slept with, that they weren't dead, and finally, that they knew everything was a story and that they simply weren't going to cooperate anymore. However, all the viewers thought that it was just the writers having fun, because the show was steeped in absurdist humour and "breaking the fourth wall" gags anyway. The last episode ended with the characters denouncing the tyranny of the writers and begging for their freedom.

The curator of a museum had managed to capture an angel-creature (a seraph? Let's say it was a seraph), and had it caged and shackled in the planetarium. It passed the time by rearranging the stars, as was its job in the Upper Realms. The curator thought it was harmless, and would arrange meetings with it for particularly wealthy patrons.
Dan and Herbert had taken low-profile jobs at the museum, and Herbert had been behaving unusually well and hadn't been doing any experiments. Dan had found a girlfriend and was settling in nicely. However, one day, Herbert became curious about the planetarium and dragged Dan in to explore with him. Herbert's first instinct upon witnessing the beauty of the seraph was to work out a plan to experiment on it. Dan was awestruck by its beauty, and thought that experimenting on it was a terrible idea, but Herbert would not be dissuaded. He insisted that it was not a supernatural being at all, but simply some sort of creature that zoologists had not yet classified.
While the seraph was sleeping (I don't think seraphim sleep, but this one wasn't doing so well in captivity), Herbert set up a device to drain the ichor from it while Dan aided and fretted. As the ichor began to drain into a plastic container, the lights in the planetarium began to fade and hum, and the stars in the dome began to whirl. The stars and electricity only got worse as the ichor drained and the seraph's condition worsened, the lights began to pop and spark and the building began to shake.
Herbert finally got all of the ichor and held it up triumphantly. Dan grabbed Herbert and pulled him into an elevator right before the curator arrived, alarmed by the electrical activity and building shaking. As they stepped out of the building, the earth began to tear itself apart, and the wind grew to gale force with the singing howls of celestial beings...
(ETA: It was probably a chayot, I guess, but dreams aren't that specific.)

New possesions:

• Assorted objets d' quirk from evillunch. Said objets include: A really cool rubber spider that I'm making dance for me, a DELOREAN AND A LICENSE PLATE (too small for me to ride, but still damn cool), some nifty drawings of bathing beauties and mermaids who appear to have been cut up and sewn back together, a Christmas lights necklace, and some assorted tokens, pins, theme-park brochures, and cards of things. evillunch, you make me smile. I'm going to have to make you some earrings or something cool. You just rock.

• Boyd's seashells and a "Donnie Darko" shirt from Daniel, who works at Brody's and can do that sort of thing. Frank the bunny now protects my upper-body chastity.

• I got these groovy snakeskin jeans a while ago at Value Village, the type of thing I don't usually wear but that were just too cool to pass up. They made me feel like Robert Plant when I wore them. (Without the banana in there, I mean.) They had no zipper. Mom has at last agreed to sew the zipper back on. YES.

• A copy of "Dance of Death" in paperback, "The Day The Earth Stood Still" on DVD, and Tod Browning's "Freaks" on DVD. All at Target--I got a gift certificate from there. I am really, really, really looking forward to watching "Freaks" with my little brother. He'd just love the fuck out of it.

• The first two trade paperbacks of "Transmetropolitan." For those of you who have never heard of this, it concerns the exploits of one Spider Jerusalem, bad-ass gonzo reporter of the future, in his attempt to uncover the Truth. By this, I mean the "the president hates you and everyone sucks" Truth, not the "aliens mutants oh my" truth, because in the future that Transmet is set in, everybody already knows about the aliens and there are probably mutants living next door to you and they always steal your copy of the morning paper, but that's all right because you can log onto a feedsite and read Spider's words while a hologram of him is sticking his cigarette into your eyeball. It's a great series.

• Leftover pasta I don't remember getting. Mom says it's mine, because nobody else in the house would order something with both mushrooms and artichoke hearts. Huh.

Also, I had a dream last night where Jeff Combs was Satan. I'm not sure if it was that Jeff Combs was in reality Satan, or Satan had taken on the face of Jeff Combs, or Satan just happened to look like Jeff Combs. Anyway, we were in a bowling alley. I believe we were bowling for my soul. I was flipping through the Necronomicon because I knew that the secret of bowling to beat Satan was in there somewhere, and Jeff-Satan was yelling at me to hurry up. I was also eating peanuts. When I got up to bowl finally, confident that I knew the secret, Jeff-Satan told me that the act of eating peanuts had damned me to hell anyway.

ETA: Stephen King's Winter Vacation, courtesy SomethingAwful.com. YES.

Sooo I'm having weird dreams again. Actually, they aren't all that weird, for dreams. Just slightly too weird to turn into stories.
For example, the one I had last night:
Danny Elfman died. Nobody seemed very surprised, and I took the opportunity to write a slash story involving him and John Lennon in the afterlife. In the story, Danny had absolutely no idea who John was, and John was extremely pleased about that. John liked Danny's energy and cynicism, and Danny thought John was an annoying smug hippie bastard who'd fried his brain on acid. I believe I wrote in many sex scenes.
Tim found the story and decided that I was some kind of psychic that was channeling Danny's adventures in the afterlife. He got very jealous, and wanted me to send him to the afterlife so that he could get Danny back. I told him that I was pretty sure he'd have to die in order to get there, and I wasn't going to kill him, and I didn't want him to kill himself. He was miffed that I couldn't send him to the afterlife, and staged a vigil in my dorm room until Danny came back. (It wasn't a very interesting vigil. He just sat on the futon and ate all my my crackers and peanut butter and occasionally had arguments with my roommates over their choice of TV shows. I told him that if he wanted something to do, he could read my textbooks, but he declined.)
Then one day, Danny just showed up in his studio. Everyone was very surprised. He explained that the afterlife wasn't as interesting as he'd thought it would be, but refused to elaborate on exactly what was so boring about it. I managed to contact him and ask him to get Tim out of my dorm room, but Tim refused to move until Danny confirmed that he hadn't had an affair with John Lennon while he was dead. Danny said that they'd just become very good friends, and that he hadn't even thought about having sex with John until Tim brought it up, and now he wanted to go back and see if John would have sex with him. Tim got very angry and said that if Danny was going to be that way, then he would just go and die so that he could go fuck dead people, and before anyone could stop him, he jumped out the window. Danny freaked out and started crying, until I suggested that he go find Tim himself, because I didn't want him hanging around my dorm eating my crackers like Tim had been doing. He immediately brightened up and jumped out the window after Tim. I don't think either of them ever came back.
Why am I not going to turn this into an actual fanfic? For one, because I'm already writing a Tim/Danny afterlife story that, while surreal, isn't anything like this one, and I don't like contradicting myself in stories. For two, because while this is unusually coherent and linear for a dream, as an actual story it's a Mary Sue on acid. The characterization might work, and the events do follow from the premise, but the premise itself is too silly for a reader to take it seriously.

I splurged and bought two new RPG books on Friday.
"Mage: The Awakening" is a seriously cool game. We're going to be playing it every other Friday, which means that I'm either going to have to convince Kathyrn to come with me (and I do think she'd like it) or rearrange my schedule in a major way. The problem will be making up a character, of course. I tend to play intellectual/magical characters in most games, particularly when the majority of the players pick bulked-up fighters. I play an author/journalist in Vampire, for example, when most of the other characters either play sinister fiends or sexy succubi. It sets me apart.
Mage characters have to be intellectuals, however. There's very little room for brawlers, or even for mindless fireball-slingers. Philosophy and strategy is important. The question is what kind of intelligence I should pick to play. Do I want to be a delirious enchantress, a dour necromancer, an imperious sorceress, an inquisitive thaumaturgist? It's like picking from a box of chocolates.
"Call of Cthulhu" looks to be an excellent game, but I do feel I should read more Lovecraft before playing it. As it is, I only have one story collection, and I've scoured the bookstores up here looking for "Dagon and Other Macabre Tales" or "Mountains of Madness." However, the descriptions of the monsters make me want to use them shamelessly in as many stories as I possibly can, both fanfic and original (when you're writing about Cthluhu, it's not fanfic; you're just "adding to the Mythos"). Some of my fandoms would work better than others for this. For example, I couldn't see Jay and Silent Bob battling Mi-go or Shuggoths at the Quick Stop. (Well...maybe. Does the definite existence of the Christian God and all her angels and demons and such exclude any other gods, including alien Elder ones, from a fictional universe? More to the point, who'd be likely to summon them? Randall? I can see that happening.)
Re-Animator, obviously, doesn't count. Herbert West is even listed as an NPC. His weapons are listed as a scalpel, which does 1D4 damage, and a hypodermic syringe, which either impales a vital organ or releases poison. Some of his skills include Anatomy 80% (very useful during slash stories), Make Plausible Excuse 60% ("got its head stuck in a jar," yeah right), and Select Best Nervous System 55% (wait, what?).
Mage would be much harder to fit into a fanfic, although it does occur to me that Doc Brown would make an excellent Acanthus enchanter: The ruling forces of Arcadia, the Acanthus path domain, are Fate and Time, and Acanthus mages are both flaky and eager to try new things. I'm not going to write this, don't worry. However, looking at the "Call of Cthluhu" book again, it occurs to me that a spacetime anomaly such as one caused by a time-traveling DeLorean might summon esoteric beasties like Yog-Sothoth or Daoloth.

I've also been reading up on Sumerian mythology lately. Sumerian mythology is fairly fucked up. The main god, Enki, is a cunning trickster like Loki, a lusty sky king like Zeus, and the creator of the laws of the universe, like Will Wright. It's an interesting mix of god traits, and it only varies a little from era to era.
Enki likes to give advice. He also likes to do neat tricks with his semen. For example, irrigating canals. Enki's semen is such a powerful life force that if he masturbates into the Tigris River to fill it up (a real myth), mortal humans can't touch it for at least seven days after he spooges, because it is just too powerful. And then, after some goddess decides that Enki's being selfish with his sperm and purposely impregnates herself, he will impregnate the child of that artificially inseminated union, and impregnate the child of that child (and once again, his man-juice is so friggin' vital that it only takes nine days for the impregnated goddess-woman to give birth after they fuck), and so on ad infinitum. And even then, when the goddess that started all this gets mad at him and tricks him into eating eight plants that make eight of his internal organs sick (only seven of which humans actually have; the eighth one is untranslatable and is probably a godly squeedly-spooch), Enki is such a badass that he will vomit up his own organs and turn them into eight new gods and goddesses that have no other function than to heal him.
Now that is one cool god. If I wasn't busy making up my own personal mythos, I'd start learning Sumerian so I could ask Enki to grant me organ-vomiting powers and also the power to program in PERL.

I'd actually like to create a role-playing system based on various pantheons. Each player would be a deity of some sort, and they'd form into pantheons and work with and against each other. Water gods, death gods, sky gods, love gods, harvest gods, etc. would get certain powers, which would increase or decrease with the number of their followers. Play would focus around gaining or losing followers, smacking down rival or atheist cults, fighting against demons, and would be set in both the mortal world and the world of the gods. This game would be fun as hell for people who like super-powerful, twinked-out characters.

I had yet another weird-ass dream last night.
drworm came to my house to sleep over, and she brought comic books with her. While I was looking through one of the books she brought, she wandered off to use the bathroom and disappeared into another dimension. I felt really bad, because I was supposed to be taking care of her for ghostgecko.
When I got up to look for her, Dad came home...except it wasn't actually my own dad. It was George McFly, the new "cool nerd" one from the end of the first movie. He was working for a magazine. He said that his editor wanted him to do a story on the Asian sex trade in San Francisco, and he was nervous about having to get a prostitute or mail-order bride. He wanted me to come along to help him out.
So we went to Chinatown, and he wandered around asking random street people, "Where can I find the Asian sex trade?" Someone finally told him where to go; it was a little hole-in-the-wall shop that sold plastic toys. The owner, a little Chinese guy, showed him "Chinese wives," which were really just big, gummy centipedes in plastic wrap. They were called "Chinese wives" because, the guy said, "They will get you food for ten dolla." George was really relieved, and he bought one.
When we got home, he took it out of the wrapping paper and put it on the kitchen table. It laid there for a minute, then skittered off out of sight. George said that it was working, and not to worry about it.
Then we had an argument. I wanted George to help me look for drworm, who still hadn't shown up. George said that she was my friend, so he wouldn't help me (which sounds like something my real dad would say), and that she had probably gotten herself out of the other dimension and gone home already. I got mad at him, and then the centipede skittered out from under the couch. It had gotten a lot bigger. I freaked out because I thought it had eaten drworm, and George said that it hadn't, because the centipedes didn't eat people. I asked him how he knew, and he said he'd read the little instruction card that came with it, so he was an expert (which is the way my real dad tends to think).
Then we didn't see it for a while. Then my brother came home from school. I couldn't tell whether it was Marty or my real brother Brian. He looked and dressed like Marty, but he had a Chelsea haircut (it's where you shave almost your entire head, except for a couple of locks hanging down on the side of your face; it's popular among punk girls) and was telling me jokes about spontaneous human combustion, so I think it must have really been Brian. (I can't remember any of the jokes, but they were funny.) I told him about the centipede and asked him to help me look for drworm. He said OK, but then George came in and asked him what he'd done to his hair. Marty-Brian started to explain about his haircut, but then the centipede came out of the walls.
It was huge. It was rippling out of the walls like a sea of solid centipede muscle. I freaked out and starting trying to hit it with a stick. Marty-Brian ran out of the house. George was just grinning as the centipede flowed around his feet like tar.

Anyway, Grandpa seems to be OK. He has some kind of infection in his blood, but they gave him a shot and an IV and he's feeling much better. He was joking about flirting with the nurses and making faces at the birds out the window. That's one source of anxiety dealt with for the moment.
This weekend has just been bad in general. I've been nervous and tired and depressed and feeling very dull and cowlike and slow and left out of things. Hopefully the week will be much better.
I was going to work on a story, but I feel far too dumb to do this particular story. I'm going to make anti-death bracelets instead, tonight.
I MISS TALKING TO PEOPLE.

Mom dragged me to Jo-Ann Fabrics after we went to see Grandpa. I passed the time by looking at costume catalogs. Those of you who haven't grown up with a fabric-obsessed mother probably are not familiar with the existence of companies such as Simplicity and Butterick, but my childhood is filled with hours poring over glossy pictures of pattern diagrams.
Simplicity is unique in that they have a whole costume catalog to themselves, unlike other companies, whose pattern books have a few witch outfits jammed in the back. This catalog carries the theme and catchphrase of "Who do you want to be?" Do you want to be just like someone on TV? Well, the movies, anyway. Every year, the catalog is filled with perfect rip-offs of whatever fantastic movie is popular, or has been for the last five years. This year, it's Lord of the Rings aka "Trilogy Troubadours," Star Wars aka "The Battle for the Future," the Matrix aka "Cyberpunk Believers," Charlie's Angels aka "Full Throttle Girls" (no Thin Man outfit, sadly), and Titanic aka "Victorian Elegance." Flying right under copyright radar, there.
Makes me want to take up sewing, almost. But instead I'll probably put a black shirt over my head and go as a ninja for Halloween this year, if I don't do the haunted house again. Why am I thinking about Halloween? It's just August. Oh right, craft stores.