I told my staff yesterday that they could decorate their work stations for the holidays, on the proviso that they 1- do a 30 minute workout later (we are a health-conscious work force), and 2- actually do some real work. Yeah, right.
aspienado's work station
You know how that goes, office slump after a grueling Monday back after a big holiday weekend where people were moving furniture in the rain and whatevs. Hey, their lives are their problemos, but once in awhile ya gotta cut your people some slack, right? I think our slack turned into party and went outa control.
bluejacky just wants New Year's to get here
Anyway, they all wanna show off their screen savers, so bear with me while I update our website with our holiday cheer.
Janika is the drag in the office.
Don't tell her I said that.
I've been invited by a Russian Lexx fan to discuss one of my articles. In Russian. I'll hafta think about it. What's awesome is that my content is being heavily discussed (as I can see through google translate) as a legitimate look at how the film industry captures and uses political process along with personal agenda to involve the viewer, if I'm correctly summarizing some of the finer points.
aspienado butted back in. That says "Hasta la vista, meatbag!"
Imagine working with this person every day.
Yeah, not even a holiday theme.
I've mentioned my newer friends don't know who I am. I am translated and quoted all over the world. It actually is a really big deal that I'm finding a way to be an ASD person living out loud and managing to keep all my friends. People know me.
Yablo's work station. I caught Yablo passing around a bottle of real vanilla to spike the hot chocolate protein shakes with.
I know some of you still can't imagine it, but I am contacted on a fairly regular basis by people from all over the world, some of them very deep lurkers, some very famous, mostly fans from one fandom or another, so when I kind of lose it over a handful of people continually trying to private message me every little bit like we're buds and I've got time to drop everything and yap about your day one on one (Pond of Death stuff), it's because I truly am overwhelmed and need staff. I keep saying I need staff.
And y'all know this is Pinky's work station. Lotta pink splat there.
Through all this, I remain rogue, an independent review writer not umbrellaed under nor paid by a host network. All the writing I do online is for free. I even pay for some of my blogs out of pocket and never ask for donations or sell ad space. I don't monetize. Because of this, I don't show up on the radar as being a 'serious' blogger, although, aside from the continual churn of content curation, I am the most quoted and translated writer/reviewer I know.
The boss of me walking around with the coolest mug. Show off. I found this mug in my local HyVee floral but it was the only one and I can't find more online.
click for artist on facebook
click to buy similar mug by the same artist
click for her Etsy store
We've even got an office game going- guess how many candy canes are in the container. No, I have no clue. I just stuffed them in there. My staff will put their guesses into a bowl and we'll find out later who wins. They all wanna know what the prize is. Prize? What prize? Hmmm....
So. An invitation to jump into a serious discussion of my own work through translation software. Extremely flattering. A little daunting. Something I'd very much like to do, but do I have the time. I got up after 5 hours of sleep to finish a live tweet review that has already gotten just shy of 500 views in the 12 hours since I tweeted the link to the first panel, over 6200 views on that thread since the show started back up in October. In the meantime, Pinky Stuff still outranks The Walking Dead for total views on SyfyDesigns by 10,600 views, and my original zombies post there is over 12,500 now. I'm not even going to mention the Lexx views, I about fell outa my chair last night when I saw them. Is it ok if I keep staring in disbelief at this one? This is your brain on JJ Abrams (I did repent later.)
THIS is how you decorate a tree.
Imagine what I could do if I had more than imaginary staff.
Lotta magic going on out there.
I have a unique angle. As long as I stay fairly rogue, I don't get drowned out in other people's stuff. Because I don't get paid, I make my own motivation. Being driven with obsession is a guilty pleasure. I love what I'm doing even when no one sees it, as evidenced by years of private blogs.
I'm think I'm getting a new kid this year for Christmas.
Santa knew we needed another one. =)
Anyway, I've got to run into town again today.
Wearing your enemies. Pinky approves.
Always busy, well, except when we decorate the office, and then we work overtime. Yeah, they're all sorry now that they never came back after lunch. Gonna be a long day today.
So when I say a fandom jumps every time I whisper 'her', it's real.
I get these funny ideas and start snickering, and @bonenado hears me from the other room and has to come ask what's going on, which is interrupting his psyching up for his next fantasy football draft (only four teams this year, last year he had seven), and then I stumble all over myself trying to explain why a silly idea is so funny. Stuff like that can take up to 20 minutes and wind up in what feels like frustrating massive wastes of time to both of us, so I actually put my hand over my mouth and snicker as quietly as possible, because once I start laughing, I can't stop for beans.
I'm always popping on and off my blogs for something, sentence here, paragraph there, and as I cruised through again this morning I screeched to a stop and thought, "Not one person on this planet doesn't look awesome in a pair of sunglasses." I linked that back in case you're interested.
Anyway, every little bit I get funny thoughts twisting fandom stuff into real life, so this morning I was musing again on how easily fans automatically leap to assumptions that people working together on a job must have a real life relationship beyond work, no matter how platonic, they must still think about each other unceasingly because the fans do. And I see this all the time on twitter, Bradley can't show up without a virtual swarm of fans asking point blank about Colin, as if his life still revolves around a former coworker and he has the same warm fuzzies for him that that fans do. What really brought this idea home was an interviewer mentioning to Martin that he'd recently interviewed Ben, and Martin said "Who?" because they hadn't seen each other in months and there are plenty of Bens around, so why should he automatically assume which Ben, right? But once actors are coupled up in fandoms, it's basically married for life, whether they have a clue that's happening or not.
I've had a variety of jobs, everything in and out of food, hospital and hotel services, radio sales, worked up in retail. I've been offered hospital administration and teaching at one of the local colleges and told I really should finish my certification in professional counseling or nursing (or what the heck, my thesis in resource planning), but I have this habit of turning down salaried positions, God knows why (I do have reasons), so it's not hard for me to cross pollinate funny visuals of celebs working menial jobs.
So imagine those two up there working a department store. They have separate lives, they only know each other through work, they're not pals outside of work. They simply work in the same building, probably run into each other because the floor plan requires it or they wind up at register together or cover for each other on breaks.
Now imagine a few other coworkers in the store going home and shipping them into fanfics. Does anybody really do this in real life about their coworkers? I've not seen it, but surely they do. I was thinking how long something like this could go on without the two guys even being aware of it, until, say, a little gang of 5 other coworkers grouping up on break was giggling every time one of them went by, or asking one about the other on his day off, or bringing up weird convos about the two of them, and the guys going Huh?
At first I thought this seemed silly, but it's kind of occurring to me how stress relieving this could be, actually. Say you have a manager you hate, and a lead over you driving you crazy, you go home and ship the two of them into these wild dirty flings and laugh yourself silly because they reeeeeallllly don't go together in real life. And you could completely reorient them sexually and have them carrying on steamy affairs on the dock or something, and wind up pulling several other coworkers into your stories (both in the stories and in real life) and really have a ball with it.
STRESS RELIEF.
Except don't get caught. I have a suspicion if you hit too close to home with shipping people you could wind up in some kind of legal entanglement.
When I retailed, there was only one other person in the whole store out of 150 people who knew what Lexx was, and I was very careful not to tell him who I was on the webs. He'd have died. (That was before I ever put a real pic of myself up on my fansite.) But every little bit a group of us would get 8-8'd to bunch up and blitz a messy area together real fast, and it was fun driving other coworkers crazy shooting Lexx quotes back and forth. It wouldn't be long until the rest joined in shooting other scifi show quotes around, everyone anteing up, and I loved it. That was probably the closest I had to actually having friends in real life, except outside of work I never saw them, and they had no idea who I really was.
That was it. I really need to get back on my day. Hope you guys are having/have had a good weekend.
But that doesn't mean we can't put on our evil villain smiles. This one just cracks me up no matter how bad my mood is, I can't help laughing. The original is huge, I saved it as a wallpaper.
Own your Monday, guys.
And in case that doesn't work, click these for sarcasm memes.
And now for your irritating Monday morning music. If you must kill, kill joyfully. You're just lucky I didn't find this in a SpongeBob motif.
