gave in to temptation, signed up with playonline and watched every single piece of FFX video i could find. And then rewatched them all.

prrrrrrrrrrrr... *blissful shiny chibi eyes*

Mother of god, i am in *love* and i'm such a shitehawk gamer that i'll have to wait until Aphy's played it and then, um, watch the FMVs her nates have saved for her. Cuz i doubt i'll get very far...

But prrr, Shiva... *faints, luststruck* (I have a crush on a GF. these things happen.) ...altho' the main girl (Yuma, right? Anyone else think she's a cross between Rhinoa and Selphie?) gets her in the previews, which is kinda wrong because main girls tend to suck. And prrr, Lulu (ugh, what a foul name), who i woulda thought was meant to be evil, because she dresses like Edea and, hell, she has black hair and purple lipstick, but seems to be in battle scenes on Tiddles' side, so that don't make sense. And prrr, Seymour (cuz i have to go for guys at some point, dunni?), with those sticky-out straining veins at the base of his hairline and the glorious eyes that pierce and chill and the random upside-down antler piece of hair. And my spider-sense tells me that there'll be more than a few no,padawan! Auron/Tidus fics, because Auron *is* the older man. And for some reason i *like* the genki girl who's stolen Quisty's style. Rekki, is it? i blame her hairclips, and the fact that i'm still being unnecessarily happy. I'm just not up to my usual bastard-adolescent Squallisms, am i?

And man, the blitz ball football-underwater thing looks *cool*. Although it gave me Batman of the Future flashbacks. The animal guy, though, i couldn't really get into, because my mind has been attuned to fic and was therefore thinking "ewww! squick!". Also, there were animal people in FFIX, and i never really got that

But it looks *damn* cool... me want me want me want!

now!

[sentimental] i love you guys...

No, really, i fucken'love this fandom. Or at least the niche of it i've crept into. I'm sorry, i'm busy analysing my inexplicable happiness again, because it's NOT NORMAL and i'm not used to it and it tends to mean that everyone else is undergoing misery. I suck good karma, you see. Like a huge bloated leech of karmic ineffability. No da.

Anyway, people keep being nice to me, and that makes me happy, and then i'm nice to other people, and that makes them happy, and it's a vicious circle. Except, um, not very vicious. Rather cuddly, in fact.

Still, i want attention, for some reason. Gib' mir! And i *am* suffering from the random desire to quote Catullus again, which is never healthy. But I won't have to deal with the random bloke from the Russia trip who mailed me thinking i was someone else, since the girl he was trying to mail just send out a mail to us all. phew.

And i have yet *more* friends (gee, how many *can* a girl have?): wrenlet, who's a babe, and rrrosa whose boyband slash randomiser was the one i was plugging earlier. Oh, and last night i was thinking "hey, if *nsync play live, does this mean i have to go see them?" and then femgeek says they are coming to western europe and i'm confused. And hyped. And none of my mates would *ever* go with me and you know i'm too scared of teenyboppers to go alone. But she gets to join the select clique that is my mates for the scary serendipitousness. And for inadvertently reminding me of how much i like u2 (she's in rose's friends and kept mentioning them and i ended up buying their best of in leningrad and yes, i do blame her. because blame is good.). oh, and for writing btvs slash and rps. And ooh, her music taste too. And, hell, the fact that she lives in Antwerp is as good a reason as any. Nice place.

Now, let's spool off from this rant by matthew (*wavewave*, hi, you don't know me but...), mentioned by D. Sitting comfortably, y'all? I just want to refute any idea you might have that this, this culture of stupidity, is only an American thing. It *really* isn't.

There's this new thing they've got now in English schools, probably Welsh ones as well, maybe not Scots, no idea about the Northern Irish, called "Identification of Gifted and Talented Pupils". And when i say new, i mean 1999-new, only a few schools, i'm pretty sure the Barnet LEA subscribe to it, and that's just one london borough. I do secretarial work with all this, which is how i heard about it, but it gives teachers checklists on how to recognise the difference between kids who are "girted" and kids who are "hard workers". The idea is that you identify the gifted and help them to learn their own way, because gifted kids work best that way, like that thing about hackers being whatever% more efficient than normal workers if they get into the rhythm of a job. And I can't work out whether this is a good thing or not. Because, yeah, I believe in streaming, I believe that when really bright kids are stuck doing the same crap as everyone else, and quicker than everyone else, they get bored, and then they're more often bored than interested, and then they stop working. And i believe that putting the really bright kids together makes for healthy competition, in the sense that they don't feel the need to slow their own meteoric rise because x less-bright friend is lagging behind and they feel bad for being more clever and want to compensate by pretending to be thick. I know i spent most of year 9 latin reading ahead, because half the class were giving it up anyway and didn't give a shit, and then finally my teacher let me bring in a book of medieval latin poetry (...levis elementi/similis sum folio de quo ludunt venti) and i read that while everyone else followed Quintus thru roman britain or wherever he was. Hell, I know i'm still guilty about being taken out of 'normal' school and sent to a public (read: private) prep school because i couldn't hack the teaching style. Which is all wrong, because it isn't some kid's fault if their brain moves differently from everyone else's. If anyone ever asks me to do mental arithmetic the way they taught it there
class lines up in pairs, each pair in turn stands before teacher.
teacher: what's 7x4?
whoever works it out quickest wins. If you win, you are good at maths. If you are normally good at maths, finish every written test first and get the answers right, and yet cannot win this mental arithmetic 'game', you
a) think you're clever and thus better than everyone else; and
b) are obviously stupid as well as stuck-up.i will run at them with a katana. Or a frying pan. Whichever comes first to hand. Being clever is a fucking *curse* if you're not streamed.

On the other hand, identifying the gifted and talented means they're gonna be made to stand out. And small children are naturally conformist. There's some punk woman got a kid at my friend's sister's school, and she dresses him up in girls' clothes and dyes his hair because free expression is *right*, and he shouldn't have to conform just cuz the world's telling him to. And the child's fucking miserable, he's bullied and made fun of and -whatever-, because primary school children don't have the time for self-expression, they're naturally tribal and form a homogenous mass because it's a hell of a lot safer to exclude the freaks. Exclusion cements the clique, it keeps the group away from the dangers of originality. It's only as kids get older that they start to accept and maybe even turn towards *difference*. That's just the way it is. So that means if the G+Ts are identified early on, sure they'll maybe learn quicker, learn more, learn learn learn fucking learn. But they won't learn social skills. Those who are effectively cushioned by the G+T system will be complete academics, people who are book-clever but not world-clever, people it's easy to fuck over and despise. Those who aren't cushioned by the system will have to stand there in the playground and explain why it is that they go off with the teaching assistant to the other school in x lesson. And they will have to put up with ridicule from the others, the kind of silent resentment that the *special* get
You're *special*... as in "special school"... ha ha fucking ha.
because they're not like us, they're other. And these ones, who have to survive in the real world, will become steadily more embarrased by their intelligence. They'll become fucking doormats in an attempt to prove that no, they don't think they're different, they don't consider themselves above the rest, it's just the teachers have the wrong idea. They'll blame themselves for this thing that's been loaded on them, that they never asked for, and that is perfectly calmly ruining their seven-year-old life. It'll be like a birthmark they keep trying to get rid of, by playing up and truanting and stealing and talking back and trying trying trying to fit in because all they ever wanted to do was fit in they never wanted to be different it just happened and it's not their fault.

An odd thing, right? The people that i know in the rock fraternity, maybe even in the slash fraternity, they're not 'normal', they're outsiders, and a lot of them are intelligent. Hyper-intelligent, even. But they're only the strong ones, the ones who right now are reclaiming the words "geek" and "freak" as positive terms, like the reclamation of "queer". There are a lot of intelligent kids who fell by the wayside, tumbled into mediocrity because it was safer and because they couldn't hack being shat on from a great height by life because they were too fuucking clever for their own good. The ones i know now are those who decided to accept the fact that they stood out, to even capitalise on it: to put their hair into dreads, to loudly discuss their girlfriends in front of the becks (female, wealthy, conformist, less than painfully intelligent... like jocks, no?), to refuse to help the "popular" people with their homework, to populate the computer room every lunch and talk 80's music, to go to anti-capitalist demos. And when we get stupid "freaks", real dumbass i-don't-read-anything-but-kerrang *idiots*, me and my rock mates are just confused: what went wrong? We're meant to be the clever ones, not the slamdance-happy i-fight-and-it's~like~fun bakayarou, who could be *anyone*, who could be rudeboys with a different accent and a change of clothes. Which is probably why bad slash upsets me so much, because i'm convinced that slash and yaoi are about openmindedness and that openmindedness is the preserve of intelligent people. And it's depressing to think that neither of these have to be true. Well, depressing to think that the first might not be true, at least. The other's quite possibly a good thing.

And i know it's *wrong* that i see these things as the preserve of the intelligent, but i do.

To get back to the *point* of all this: the problem is the institutionalised fear of intelligent kids. I mean, if i was a teacher and i met a child who was cleverer than me, i'd hate it. With a passion. And i might well make its life a misery - not intentionally, but because them fuckers are hard to teach. And making one child special just means it will be resented and excluded by other children, even though it can't help it. So there has to be some way to integrate clever kids into the precarious and brutal society of small children, because otherwise they'll grow up fucked up, and i think it should be by encouraging intelligence *somehow*, but not by just identifying and separating. "Gifted and talented" in LEA-speak translates to "a threat" in the natural argot of the tribal seven-year old. In my twisted experience.

And Ignatius Loyola said "Give me a child for the first seven years, and he is mine for life", and he was wrong: but still, the way you're treated when you're little seriously effects the way you act when you grow up. There will never be a revolution in the streets until there is a revolution in the schools. "We won't use guns, we won't use bombs, we'll use the one thing we've got more of - that's our minds".

Issues, moi?

This rant has been brought to you by the new knowledge that a friend of mine has just dropped out of school. She's going back, mind you. I hope. It was also written while getting distracted by wererabbit.comwhich is pretty pretty but saps my ranting energy.

Oh yeah, and what *is* pocky? i have never come across it in my short and unthrilling life, and its constant mention is starting to bug me.

...in fact, i'll just put this link in to round the rant off. It really, um, says everything i was trying to say but *slightly* more succinctly. That post really was kinda long, weren't it? Just think, if my muses were functional/existent i could be devoting all that verbiage to fic...