At Least It's Not The Line About Expectorating

[bloodyrosemccoy]

 

Bubble Gum Day
Freedom Day
Hula in the Coola Day
National Wear Red Day
Robinson Crusoe Day (Amelia sez: This one’s for Lychee!)
Women's Heart Health Day

 

So I’m thinking about getting another tattoo.

 

I don’t want to get too many tattoos. I don’t want to wind up with a bunch of tacky spots.* But a few tattoos is okay.

 

Getting too many wouldn’t work very well, anyway, since it takes me years to think up one I’d like. But I think I’ve come up with something I will still want when I finally go to get one: I want a spine tattoo.**

 

It would be simple. I want it in my vertical conlang script (:rimulet), which is very cool looking. The really good news about that is that if I get a quote in my conlang, it doesn’t matter what it says, because people wouldn’t understand it! But of course, I still want it to make sense for me and have some meaning.

 

This means that the suggestions Josh and I came up with for what it says probably won’t fly. Although some of 'em were pretty good:

 

“This is not a zipper.”

“If you can read this, you’re doing it wrong.”

“This way up.”

“Lower.”

“As a specimen, yes, I’m inTIMidating.”

 

I don’t actually want to get rid of all funny ones. I’d actually like something funny, since I like funny. But there’s two other points: it has to be short (one line of :rimulet script), and it has to be something I honestly wouldn’t mind knowing was on my back forever.

 

Here are a few of my favorites so far:

 

• “The difference is that I really am right.” – This is my all-time favorite joke, although it gets complicated why I like it so much. At the end of the day, after we’ve all argued our opinions and carried on about how we all believe that we’re right and everything is subjective, it still boils down to you actually being right.  Even if you change your opinion, you are now right.
• “The ending has not yet been written.” – Yes, this is from Myst.  It’s still something I quite like. It states that the world is open to possibilities and anything can happen.  It also describes a helluva lot of my writing projects.
• “I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.” – Douglas Adams
• “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.” – Carl Sagan
• “It is the scientific use of the imagination.” – Sherlock Holmes.  Pretty much describes what it’s like to be a creative nerd.
• “Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.”
• “I can't tell one moon from the other.” – A phrase from the conlang; has to do with the excitement of inspiration and getting assaulted by ideas so fast it gets delirious.

Clearly, it will take me a longish time to figure out which I want to wear.  But I think it’ll be cool no matter what. And nobody can accuse me of a frivolous tattoo when I had to invent the language it’s written in, after all.

 

 

*If you have a large and cool tattoo that’s different, but using yourself as a doodleboard can make you look a little ridiculous.

 

**Let’s get it out of the way right now: “Gee whiz, Amelia! Isn’t that one of the most painful tattoos?!” So they tell me. Oh, well.

Comments

[michellerz.livejournal.com]

Not gonna lie, the one with the BatB reference made me LOL.

I kind of like the Sherlock Holmes quote. :)

[bluetara2020.livejournal.com]

See, I'd probably put something like "I am the universe"

Which would require explaining, possibly...

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Duuude. There's a universe in ALL of us.

[bluetara2020.livejournal.com]

Heh, sorry, I forgot who I was talking to.

You would get that...^_^

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Ah, here I was joking.

I actually could probably dig up a few Futurama lines I wouldn't mind having on my body for the rest of the life. ("No fair! You changed the outcome by measuring it!")

[bluetara2020.livejournal.com]

I'd probably go with "Just because I don't care doesn't mean I don't understand" It's from the Simpsons though...

I figure we are all multiple universes. Which makes looking at the world really interesting...

Also? Futurama is made of win.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Hey! *blink* I de-friended you. That wasn't supposed to happen! *re-adds you*

No wonder you suddenly stopped posting. :P

[bluetara2020.livejournal.com]

well, I'm glad I'm back in your good graces... ^_~

[gryfindormia.livejournal.com]

How about "Bring me blue pages"?

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Hey, hey, be nice to Achenar! He's all hairy and redeemed and dead now.

I could go with the third game and have a line from one of Brad Dourif's patented Hello I'm Crazy Orientation Videos. But that has ... slightly less meaning for me.

[gryfindormia.livejournal.com]

I've never played the third game. Was it good and/or worth it to go back and play?

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

I didn't so much like Riven, but Exile was pretty good. For one thing, it's got Brad Dourif in it, and he makes clothes out of curtains and sends you angry videos and if you do it wrong he kills you with a hammer. I very much like the settings--they feel more like the first game.

The fourth is more The Myst Family-oriented (Atrus seems to be remarkably vital for a 70-something-year-old)--you get to find out more about the fate of the boys. The settings aren't quite as good, although you do get to hang out with monkeys, and it gets a little overly mystical at times with its crazy shaman people in the dreamtime and whatnot.

I haven't yet played the last one. Someday ...

[gryfindormia.livejournal.com]

The one thing that pissed me off about Riven was how often I had to change disks when I went to different islands/world. The family computer was rather old and it took a while to coax the compy tower to spit open one disk to insert the other. Then I'd put it in and it'd be all like "Sigh. Now that I did that one little thing I have to go back to the other island." and spend another five to ten minutes getting the other CD in.

*looks about on Wikipedia* Hey! They got up to a fifth game!

*adds to my list of things to do after I graduate*

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the fifth is the final. It's the only one I haven't played.

I wasn't terribly impressed with the spinoff, Uru. It didn't have quite the right feeling for a Myst game.

[chairman-wow.livejournal.com]

I like "This is not a zipper", but all of the bullet-pointed ones are really cool also.

What's this script of yours look like? And how does it work? I am intersted.

I'm getting a tattoo this summer. I've been planing to for a few years, and my friend who I'm going to visit in the States knows a very good tatoo artist. Plus, with the value of the dollar as it is, it'll probably be cheaper! :P

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

The script is inspired mostly by Mongolian, although that's mostly just the look and feel of it--the letters themselves don't correspond at all. :rimulet writing has connected consonants and diacritical vowels.

I'll scan an image as soon as I can be assed to get my scanner set up. I am a lazy bum.

[ellixis.livejournal.com]

I like the Myst quote. It'd be cool to get that in D'ni. *thoughtful*

[placetohide.livejournal.com]

Ahaha, ode to Gaston.

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

I know a couple who have several tattoos, although most are not in places that are visible when fully clothed (no, not like that, it just means they have to roll up a sleeve or pull up a corner of a shirt to show them. The guy has a great one on his side: the line art from the side box art of the old arcade game Centipede. He was originally going to get it full color, but that would require several sessions to fill it in, and he'd rather spend those sessions getting new things.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

I have reservations about doing it RIGHT. I have seen some very cool weird tattoos (my cousin's sleeves are a study in non sequiturs, but they're all brilliantly put together), but I still have difficulty with people who wind up crammed with little spots.

I also don't want to get too crazy. While tattoos are cool, I want any I get to be memorable events.

[queenlyzard.livejournal.com]

ooohhh... niftycool.

I want to get a tattoo someday. But I'm afraid to start because I might get hooked on it and become a living doodleboard.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's my worry. Fortunately, I take forever to decide on one, so that slows me up a bit. ;)