Day log: the ides of November.

Dinner today: spaghetti with mushrooms and tofu, green beans on the side; tiny slice of pumpkin pie for dessert.

Taking stock:

So here we are, halfway through the month, and this is shaping up to be a successful venture toward the conquest of THE IRON NODER CHALLENGE 3: THIS TIME IT'S MARTENSITIC.

Voting

I decided at the beginning of the month that I'd make sure to use up all 50 votes, plus my daily ching!, every day. This has been surprisingly easy, and I even found myself buying a few extra votes to catch new writeups. So I've put in maybe 780 votes, and I think only three were negative. Out of that scheme I opted to pick an E2'er with a manageable number of nodes and to read and vote on everything in their arsenal. I chose Morwen, and was pleased with everything I read from that noder, especially the theoretical claim of three-way sex with Winona Ryder and Famke Janssen in you have to be kidding.

Writing

As the month hits is midpoint, I have posted 28 write-ups, and this will be the 29th. I suppose I ought to admit, as well, that there are a half dozen more waiting in the wings which I've shepherded to various stages of completion. Some I have in mind to post on particular days, or in a particular order, and so they will not be coming until later in the month. I have, as well, some nascent ideas scribbled across my scratch pads which I may or may not develop, and which I'd quite possibly be pleased to pass on to a fellow noder looking for some seed of inspiration. And as for the posted nodes, they are:

1. Cephalophore

My double-header for Ten Years of Terror: The 2010 Halloween Horrorquest and Ironnoder. This one I've been planning for a while, as headless Catholics seemed to me to be an appropriately horrorific subject for a Halloween write-up.

2. A-Thorism

Just seen too many insistences to the effect that: a) premise: 'my religion is true'; and b) conclusion: 'therefore, my religion is true.' And, as well, that 'my religious text is so wonderful (or, in the example shanghaied here, so "decorous") that it couldn't have been written by humans.' Makes one wonder if these claimants have ever actually read any of the others.

3. An open letter to Dick Wolf, re: bringing back Bolander

No, this actually wasn't intended to be parodic. I'd really like to see it. I suppose it's silly in the sense that Dick Wolf isn't going to be trolling E2 for ideas -- but I emailed this one to NBC as well, so who knows.

4. o-string

For no particular reason I started searching Google to see where the longest "noooooooooooooooo...." could be found. Results here.

5. Battered Voter Syndrome

Politics in America is bullshit. Perhaps it has always been so, but in modernity it is no more than the slick scripted corporatised marketing of a two-headed beast with an unquenchable thirst for power. 'Nuff said.

6. Sailor Mercury

Awwww, come on, she's the cutest one. I happened to catch an episode of the live series, and found that water-based power to be quizzical.

7. The Failure of a Theistic Cohesion

Been working on these ideas from several angles for a while. An evangelical pushing this on me in a forum (as described) just pushed me over the edge to finishing and posting.

8. Eat at Khan's

When I saw this title in new writeups, I assumed that it would be about the Star Trek character. It wasn't. So I made it so. Heheh, little Jean-Luc Picard humour, there.

9. Aging across the Star Trek sequels

....and writing about a possible Khan in the alternate Trek timeline brought me to thinking about how the characters aged across the run of films portraying back-to-back events.

10. Is cancer man-made?

The mummies article was, actually, kind of a last straw for me on the proposition that we're causing ourselves to be exposed to a lot of things which it is unnatural for our bodies to deal with, and the biological response to strange chemicals may very well be disruption to orderly cell replication.

11. It is at that moment, I believe, that Sylvester finds his true voice

Another one where I saw the title in new writeups and was surprised that the content did not match what I imagined; and so I wrote what 'I tawt I'd tee' when I clicked over to it.

12. The Most Remote Town in the United States

Okay, this was simply me being a smartass with the bad pun. And, after the whole controversy over whether I was an alt of Glowing Fish (or vice versa) I always find it amusing to post in nodes GF has created. GF not long thereafter wrote Three United States Counties Not Connected to Land, and I struggled for a while for a story wherein three counties were going to land (in the verb sense), but finally gave up.

13. Questionable Content

Love that webcomic, and what was here was out of date.

14. The Art of Blowjob

I actually wasn't, particularly attempting to be provocative with this one. I simply agree with that website's premise that there's no reason why a blowjob can't be as much of a work of art as any other sort of performance.

15. reincarnation

This is an idea I've kicked around for a loooong time -- a decade or more -- and the excitement of ironnoder simply finally got me to put it down here.

16. The Muse's Triumph

This poem, for me, seems to capture a sense of what drives some to keep coming back here.

17. Why women have ridiculous amounts of shoes

This was a pure reaction post -- saw a theory put up, happened to have my own theory already knockin' around my noggin, thought to post it.

18. rocket surgery

I've heard folks proclaim this as a mangled punchline (intentionally or no) on more than one occasion.

19. brain transplant

Another thing I've though about for quite a long time. Obviously.

20. hot-boxing

Spur-of-the moment write-up on a topic that crossed my mind which I saw no coverage of.

21. How to spot bad internet porn stories

I don't remember how I got to looking at this node in the first place, but there were so many items of advice given that I just had to compile them as much as I could into a single story catching them all -- and throw on an unsexy twist ending to boot.

22. The Last Harry Potter Adventure

Got caught up in the Harry Potter fanfic storyline from the past few weeks of Questionable Content.

23. My First Porn

I was genuinely nervous about posting this. I haven't put much in the way of true erotica on the Internet, nor have I tended to write biographically.

24. alphabet trick

It.... came up.... while writing My First Porn -- I had just assumed it would be noded here; lacking that, I put it together.

25. Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap

The Custodian had this on a want list; well he had a lot of things on the list but this is the one that jumped out and grabbed me and cried out, write meeee!!

26. North American Man-Fetus Love Association

This has apparently caused some disconsternation as well. I was inspired to write this by the ridiculous self-justification arguments made by pedophiles, I had put together this joking piece a while ago on the equally absurd idea of fetophilia. I finally got prompted to posting when I read about the pedophilia how-to being pulled from Amazon.com.

27. The science fiction of shrinking

Another one I had bubbling around in my mind for a long, long time -- for as long as I've written about the possibility of time travel I've been keen to point out the implausibility of this sci-fi stepcousin to that concept.

28. Jesus was a Gay Black Hippie Jew

Well, here's the deal. Woodnot posted Jesus was a reactionary reformer, just like Martin Luther in later years, and this popped up as a related link, and following it led me to multiple arguments about the possible gayness, blackness, and hippieness of Jesus, but all of them relating to only one of the many possible definitions which could be applied to each of those words.

Success!!

All of my nodes to this point of the month are still alive. The most upvoted is My First Porn; highest overall score (and most C!'d) is Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap. Total upvotes 273. Most downvoted (and lowest overall score) is the admittedly bad-pun-driven The Most Remote Town in the United States, with 13 downvotes for a -5 overall. Total downvotes 93 (my six most downvoted writeups for the month count for more than half of all downvotes). Overall evaluation? Eh, not too bad.