Forrest Black’s LiveJournal friend GloomCookie has the best streaming cam on the web. It features 24/7 live streaming video of six Shiba Inu puppies. This is what the internet was invented for. At least, this is what the internet should have been invented for. Right now, while I’m watching, someone (presumably GloomCookie) is playing with the puppies and they are all trying to get into her lap at the same time. It’s pretty much the most pleasant and adorable thing I’ve come across all day. Not that I’ve had a total cakewalk of a day, but still. These cute little doggies even have adorable cute plush toys.

There are three female pups named Autumn, Ayumi, and Amaya. There are three boys named Aki, Akoni, and Ando. I don’t know if Ando is a common A alliterative name for Shiba Inu dogs or if GloomCookie is a big Heroes fan.

I got all my writing done for today and I got all the necessary photography formatted and posted to BlueBlood.com and wherever else it was due. Most importantly, I got to watch puppies! Now I feel refreshed and ready for a fabulous weekend night.

A long long time ago, in a land far far from here, I found myself in abrupt need of a place to live. After approximately five years in Connecticut, my parents convinced my lovelorn and underemployed self that I should come stay with them for a while in part of Northern Virginia which is really a suburb of Washington, DC. I think they maybe thought I would get into some kind of government work, which, in a way, I eventually did for a while. But one of the problems with being a prodigy is that you are never quite on the same playing field as everyone else. I graduated from college without being legal to drink in America. When I got to the DC area, I thought I might apply to work for the FBI. I liked the idea of a job which required intelligence and education, which also involved learning how to use all sorts of weaponry and getting paid to stay fit. Only I did not meet their minimum age requirement. I signed up to take the GMAT for entrance to business school, but my father was pissy that day and wouldn’t drive me. After getting into an accident years prior, I was not on their insurance, so I couldn’t drive myself. I often wonder how different my life would be now if I had just figured out how to put together the seventy bucks or whatever a cab would have been and taken the test. It hadn’t seemed like the sort of activity I could have asked a friend to help with in the early morning.

The sort of activity I could get a ride to was generally a science fiction convention or a punk show. There was a guy named Steve who I met at a con and got to know largely because he lived in the same area as my parents and was willing to drive me places like that. He and I always had a great time together out on the town and quickly became friends for real. So, when my parents abruptly suggested I move within the next day, he was who I called to help me. I was nursing a terrible cold with the hope of getting entirely well in time for a New Years con. My mom had received word that she would be stationed in Brazil and a snot-spewing daughter with an inappropriate wardrobe and funny-colored hair seemed like it might be nonideal adornment for selling their house. It probably didn’t help that, because they had taught me to be unashamed, I never thought to hide my inappropriate reading material kept in shelves in the garage. I think my dad had decided not to buy some house, partly because they’d had a kid around my age lying around in a way he found unappealing. To this day, although I am close with my parents, I do not know if they actually intended me to get out of their house in 24 hours or if they simply lacked the faith that I could meet a reasonable deadline. They certainly offered me extra time when Steve and I were clearly going to manage to get all my stuff into storage within the day. I was blowing my nose with one hand and packing boxes with the other, but we made it. Steve and I made it to the New Years festivities too.

So I went to sleep on the living room couch at Steve’s place and we set about looking for a great house to live in. It was surprisingly difficult to find a place which would rent anything decent to unrelated individuals. As time dragged on without us finding a place, my friend Johnny gave me a room he was sort of renting to stay in. I say sort of renting because he had agreed to live there but decided he wasn’t really nuts about who his housemates would be and the location was kind of far out from the city. So he had paid without moving in. My friend Julia from college was paying rent on a super-expensive place in Washington, DC proper and found herself suffering trying to afford it. Even though all four of us were gainfully employed, we found that most landlords in the area would not even show places to unrelated groups of people. It seemed to me that what was functionally a four income family ought to have been a better bet for landlords than a single income one with kids, but people who owned rental properties did not see it my way.

So, like the main characters in the BBC America show Spaced, the four of us eventually pretended that I was engaged to Steve and my cousin Julia was engaged to Johnny and we were serious couples. I don’t recall exactly how Julia and I were supposed to be related, but, after coming up with this egregious fiction, we quickly found a spacious and easily affordable townhouse. Best of all, the landlord was a futurist who, for sexually harassing the previous tenants, had been court-ordered not to visit his own properties.

If you have not seen the incredibly entertaining BBC comedy Spaced yet, I deeply suggest that you rectify the situation. Blue Blood readers are probably all familiar with actor/writer Simon Pegg from Shaun of the Dead. Simon Pegg and actor/writer Jessica Hynes together created Spaced. In fact, Simon Pegg got the idea for Shaun of the Dead while working on an episode of Spaced where his character plays a zombie-killing video game. Simon Pegg has described the Spaced show as “a cross between The Simpsons, The X-Files, and Northern Exposure.” Despite numerological references to the X-Files and a lot of pop culture references in general, the show most reminded me of a more realistic, modern version of The Young Ones.

The basic storyline revolves around comic book store assistant manager and aspiring artist Tim Bisley, played by Simon Pegg, and perennially fired employee and aspiring writer Daisy Steiner, played by Jessica Hynes. The two of them meet in a coffeehouse, read the housing listings together, and eventually pose as a professional couple in order to get approved for a lease on a comfy apartment at a great price. Their new place is ninety pounds a week. (In current dollar terms, I think the conversion rate would place this price at around $33,000 monthly, but the show first aired in 1999.) Their new home comes with the tortured artist Brian downstairs and the lonely boozy landlord Marsha upstairs. There are frequent appearances from Tim Bisley’s best friend Mike, a military fanboy and aspiring soldier, and Daisy’s best friend Twist, a dry cleaner clerk and aspiring fashion designer. Bike messenger and night club king Tyres bicycles through from time to time as well.

The show is laugh out loud funny, but it is also about a time in your life when you are in the process of becoming. Pretty much everybody, except for the divorced landlord with lost Olympic dreams and a daughter who hates her, is an aspiring something. And who gets their dreams and who settles and who enjoys their personal outcome is still all in the future. This series will speak, on many levels, to anyone who has ever done anything creative and lived in a group situation.

When my faux-fiancee Steve and my faux-cousin Julia and her faux-fiancee Johnny and I moved in together, we were all at that stage. I was a stagehand and aspiring writer. Johnny was a plumber and aspiring sex symbol. Julia was a production artist and aspiring graphic artist. Today, I am a writer, although I’ve certainly missed a lot of milestones I set for myself. Johnny was a sex symbol, at least in the DC punk and fandom scene of the time. If reality shows had existed at the time, he would have been global. I’m in touch with Johnny today via LiveJournal and, even though he was badly injured in an accident last year (he was hit by a cop), I’d still cast him now, if I were putting together a reality show. I’m in touch with Julia today via Facebook and she got additional degrees in architecture and works in a field which is one of the highest forms of graphic arts today. Oddly, although I would have described Steve as my closest friend in the group at the time, I don’t really know what he is doing now and I can’t think of what, if anything, he wanted to be when he grew up. From his well-decorated leather jacket to his obscure music collection, he seemed very cool and creative to me at the time. I remember thinking he should aspire to do stand-up comedy, but he never agreed on that point.

Some of the humor on the show Spaced comes from the fact that Tim Bisley and Daisy Steiner have told their landlord they are a long-time couple. But they are not. Only Daisy is more and more interested in having the story be true. For a long time, I thought that Steve eventually couldn’t be friends with me because he (and admittedly many of our friends) had thought he and I would eventually be engaged for real and not just to get a place to live. I did ask him once if he thought we should sleep together. His response was to drop acid and, while still tripping, tell me he was too worried about jeopardizing our friendship which was the most important thing to him. In retrospect, I realize that he was also really freaked out that I started Blue Blood magazine in print. He was one of the coolest guys I knew in DC, but all of a sudden I was meeting all of his heroes. I wanted his approval very much and had thought I was celebrating things he was interested in and would be excited about. Worse, I think he actually had some Puritanical objections to the erotic subject matter. He started freaking out about bizarre things like being afraid I would invite “clients” to house parties and expect him to be nice to them. We’d had a great run, but the party was going to have to move. Maybe I should have asked Steve to drive me to take that GMAT test after all, even if it was boring to him and early in the morning, and my whole life would be different.

I enjoy the show Spaced partly because it makes me remember some extremely fun times I had at a very carefree and adventurous point in my life. Spaced is one of the most real shows I have ever seen, in terms of my own personal life experience. It is very rare that I see characters on television or in movies who seem exactly like people I would actually know. Spaced is that rare exception. I highly recommend picking up the new Spaced DVD set or adding BBC America to your cable lineup.

Astroturfing is the word of the week. My brother just told me that one of his model/starfucker friends just called him up to chortle over the word astroturfing. This tells me that it is officially part of the internet lexicon and everybody needs to know the expression.

The term is, like the term spam, derived from an actual product. AstroTurf is the leading brand of fake grass ground covering. Developed in 1964, AstroTurf has been a particular boon for major sports arenas in areas where real grass is not easily grown or cared for. AstroTurf takes their products very seriously and promises to provide whatever is needed for every possible sport:

” The broad range of AstroTurf products ensures that there will be a synthetic turf system engineered to meet the demands of your team’s sport. Whether it’s a field hockey team that prefers the hydrophilic properties of AstroTurf 12™, or a soccer team that prefers the high-density fiber of AstroTurf PureGrass®.

Whatever sport your team plays, there’s an AstroTurf product ready to take the field.”

Grass roots support used to be what you called it when a band or political candidate had a lot of people who believed in them, whether or not the record labels or political machine did. Astroturfing is the act of faking grass roots support.

For example, if you see a point being made over and over again on MySpace or LiveJournal or in forums, and the point is usually made by people who nobody knows in real life, who tell you nothing plausible about themselves, and who do not have known online nicks, then you are probably looking at astroturfing. This means that, when you see certain points made over and over again, by potential sock puppets presenting what they supposedly think in a bullet point sort of structured way, you are looking at astroturfing or fake grass roots support. It is my understanding that often dating sites and sites which sell music street team services to bands are the two types of organizations which most commonly set up fake profiles. Astroturfing is not the only function of a fake profile, but it is a favorite. A non-digital example of astroturfing would be when the news media found out that the enthusiastic fans waiting in line to buy various products when they first came on sale . . . were not really enthusiastic fans. Many bands, when either touring or showcasing, hire good-looking girls to come cheer in the front row, but traditionally one at least had to find real live good-looking girls to be willing to act like they supported the band. Now they can be wholly fictional.

Astroturfing has become popular for three primary reasons. Firstly, the current younger demographics have been bombarded with traditional advertisements for so many years that a certain immunity to them has resulted, forcing marketers to be creative. Secondly, because the internet was initially (ROFL) supposed to be a noncommercial environment, a lot of marketers came up with innovative (and icky) ways to circumvent people’s resistance to blatant and honest commercial presentation. Thirdly, artists and politicians who have actual grass roots support are very hard for the corporate world to entirely control, so corporations prefer popularizing something fake through astroturfing to having to deal with individuals who have personal power.

Now everyone go use the term astroturfing in a sentence this week.

I perused TuckerMax.com upon my return from Austin, to see if there was any vital news I should include in my article about Tucker Max and his writing and his SXSW panel. There was nothing which really jumped out as necessary for an introduction piece. But, what the heck, I’ll give you all the lowdown on what he has coming up.

He is currently working on a series for Comedy Central. He envisions the show as being a 100% scripted half hour comedy with no laugh track. Something like The Office or Entourage or Tucker suggests one “picture a Sex and the City for guys, done in the vein of my stories.” I’ve never seen Sex and the City, so this doesn’t evoke much for me, but maybe it will for other folks. At any rate, a fictional comedy half hour with the feel of a Tucker Max adventure sounds entertaining to me, so I’ll be putting the key phrase “Tucker Max” in my TiVo for whenever the heck the long-ass cycle of television production produces an actual show. I just used the word heck twice in the same article. Don’t get me wrong, I like the word heck, but I think this means I am jet-lagged.

A fun factoid is that apparently one of the producers of the upcoming Tucker Max show is former ABC president Jamie Tarses, the first female entertainment chief in the industry, who is reportedly the inspiration for the character of fictional sensitive-but-tough network president Jordan McDeere on the Aaron Sorkin-written, Thomas Schlamme-directed, star-studded, and shockingly disapppointing NBC show Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.

The Tucker blog announces his SXSW appearance and mentions that the show might be a bit pricey just to hear him speak, but caveats: “If you are a hot girl in or around Austin, well, you don’t need to pay to hear me speak. Just send me an email and we’ll get drinks. Or just we can just skip the pleasantries and you can come over to my hotel and fuck, whichever you prefer.”

The most recent entry in Tucker Max’s blog announces that he is going to be co-writing a book with Paul Wall. I told Forrest Black this and his first response was to ask if it was going to be called Stuff in Your Mouth. He then immediately posted this thought to his Twitter account. Twitter, although you can use it in your browser or instant messenger client, is essentially like short attention span LiveJournal for your Blackberry or Treo, and it was this year’s hot site to, err, twitter about at the 2007 SXSW Interactive conference. If you are feeling digitally trendy, you can find my Twitter account at http://twitter.com/AmeliaG and the still kinda undeveloped Blue Blood Twitter account at http://twitter.com/BlueBlood. Ya know, I just popped over to Twitter, preparatory to making this post and the two most recent posts were Forrest saying “Coffee is a good thing” and Halcyon saying, “trying to find a balance between SXSW inspiration and despair.” There may be a certain sort of odd haiku quality to Twitter.

So I’m recuperating from the corisone shot I mentioned last week. I asked my BlueBlood.net friends, my 60,000+ Blue Blood MySpace friends, and my LiveJournal friends. Apparently I have a lot of different site-specific friends. I was surprised to only get five responses on BlueBlood.net. In my personal journal, I received eleven responses, ten of which were from people I have interacted with extensively, ranging from interfaced with digitally a whole lot to stayed up late with at science fiction conventions to lived with, and nine of which were from people I know in real life in different cities. It is nice that the journaling service helps me keep in touch with people from different places and times in my life, although sometimes the chasms between the different folks on there seem odd, given that they all intersect with me.

I would have expected my personal journal to have had the most responses, given that it seems most likely that the folks on there would be the most interested in what is going on with me personally. Not how it went. More than 250 people on MySpace responded, including people I have known for many years, people I have just met, people I have made art with, people I have worked with, people I have partied with, people I’ve met once, people I hope to meet someday, and people who seemed interesting but I’ve never chatted with before. More than 250 MySpace friends were generous enough to share their experiences to make mine a more informed one. I was both stunned and touched. MySpace sure has gotten to be about 680 million times cooler since FOX bought it. At any rate, it seems that my friends who have received cortisone injections are most likely to be women who have worn extremely high heels and/or performed very vigorously onstage and men who have participated in some form of UFC-type fighting and/or performed very vigorously onstage. Your more traditional sports such as baseball, football, and gymnastics came in second place for both genders. I’m not sure what that says about the demographics of who I like. The general consensus of the general demographic seemed to be that cortisone shots are unmitigated hell to get but work magic for healing.

At any rate, when I went for the shot, I was scared and I brought the Mummy given to me by the wonderful artist Kristin Tercek of Cuddly Rigor Mortis. My doctor was entertained by the name of her company, but he told me I really didn’t need to worry and that he had a reputation for being good with a needle. I laughed nervously and he explained that there are three things which make it so a cortisone shot is not that awful. If I recall correctly, the three things were (1) spray the skin with topical anaesthetic but not an injected one, (2) use a very thin needle, and (3) don’t muck about. I asked him what he meant by don’t muck about. He explained that many doctors inject lidocaine or something similar to numb the area before they inject the cortisone, but he couldn’t see how two shots would hurt a lot less than one, and he suspected that many doctors did it that way because they lacked the experience and confidence to get in there quickly in the right spot and get out fast. A numb patient won’t notice the doctor feeling his way and a numb patient is likely to go overexert their injured area immediately afterwards.

I seriously get sick after getting blood drawn, so I was very nervous about the shot. It was totally nothing. The doctor was super fast and precise. It didn’t hurt at all. There was a peculiar burning sensation in my ankle for a while afterwards, but it was not painful, just odd. Afterwards the doctor said something about hoping he didn’t come across as arrogant. I told him that I’m just fine with my doctor being arrogant, especially when he is right.

Then me and Mummy went home to play with the awesome new Royal Gimp Kristin made for Blue Blood in Blue Blood purple.

So, in conclusion, I sure do like Kristin Tercek. I sure do like my doctor. I sure do like people who are accurately arrogant. My ankle hurts way more now than before the shot and I’m a little grumpy, but that is all apparently a normal precursor to feeling miraculously better. I just want to be able to go to the gym and drive like normal. And, fuck me, but I think I just may like MySpace.