Interesting.

Amy Paxson, some other blogger who's at university 'west of the Mississippi', has reviewed my blog as part of one of her classes. Dunno how she found me - randomly, I assume, although the fire background apparently had something to do with why she decided to review it.

Hope she doesn't mind if I reproduce her entry about me under here (or me linking to her):

"For my tenth and final blog review for portfolio three of a certain class at a certain university in a certain part of the U.S. (West of the Mississippi), I am taking a shot—I mean look—at “Archangel Online.” This blog belongs to Richard who, like Biz Stone but with evident self-deprecation, claims that his blog contains: “The occasional random musings of Richard Cowen, bestselling writer, acclaimed genius, renowned love god, deluded fantasist.”

I first chose this site because of the background he chose. I don’t care for fire in real life, but the look is pretty cool. Richard writes in tiny little bits of entries and, like Michael, Catherine, and Erin, he too takes those on-line quizzes. The one he took on 7 May told him that he was a candidate for Mahayana Buddhism. I took the quiz and found that they give you a list of pre-selected religions (including Mormonism and Scientology—which I wouldn’t ever join) and ranks them with percentages of something (maybe how close your answers matched the tenants of those religions?). I also found that you can “click to learn more” then copy the code on that page and where ever you place that code, it will say that the religion that you just clicked on is your number one match. So, if I clicked on Mormonism to learn more, grabbed the code to put my results and a link to the test on my blog, the table that would pop up on my site would say: “According to the SelectSmart.com Belief System Selector, my #1 belief match is Mormonism.”


So, you won’t see my match on my blog because neither of us could say if it was verifiably true or not, and I don’t necessarily believe that Richard could be a Buddhist either. He drinks and his friends drink, he hates being single, and he says things like “Fuck fuck fuckity fuck.” Who knows what religion he actually practices but even he says that he doesn’t have the discipline to meditate. That is another reason why I don’t think that I can be a Buddhist, but actually, I don’t think it is about discipline as much as selfishness. You need to be selfish and set aside time to be still and quiet. The discipline part is trying not to think or snore while you are meditating.


Okay what else. Richard has links to some weird and “mature” sites including a big brother cam and a role-playing magazine (digital fiction?). The best, by far is the link that says “Lego Caricatures,” which is a link to reasonablyclever.com. I made a Lego me and I don’t look very happy as a Lego girl, either! I’m far too busy. I have no idea if Richard posted his Leggo image but based on posts in the archives, I’d say that he might choose the Darth Vader head!


His site is a lot of fun and because he’s been working on a dissertation (in the UK is that for a PhD or is it like a research paper?). I can empathize with his stress and I only wish I were drinking as much as he seems to be able to—but alas, my stomach and my bank account forbid it. Richard’s site is cool and I hope he passes or gets a good grade on it or whatever, and I hope he falls in love so he stops pouting! One tiny annoying thing: his site is set too big for my monitor’s screen so I have to scroll horizontally to read everything. Other than that—groovalicious!"

On the off-chance that she comes back, I'll address a few of the points she made:

- The reason I went for the fire background's a bit tenuous. I nearly went for the one that George uses on her site (with all the stone heads), but realised that quite a few other people were using it, so went for this instead. I rationalised it as flaming swords, vaguely archangelic, I suppose.

- Self-deprecation. Well, yes, a lot of people say that. I have low self-confidence and a lot of the time, I'm not actually that special.

- She raised some good points there about my Buddhism, or lack of it. No, maybe I couldn't be a Buddhist. (I'm actually a non-proselytising atheist.)

- Mature sites? Makes me sound like it's linking to porn or something. :-) There's some with a fair bit of good old swearing, but that's about it. Students Unzipped is only really up there because it's local and Mish is one of the residents. I normally wouldn't be bothered with a site like that.

- The dissertation's a module for my BA (straightforward, normal degree).

- My drinking. I really don't drink that much, or often. It tends to be the Friday night Pulsar bar crawls (or the Fringe Society bar crawls, as Mish tries to bring along more Writers Guilders, and seeing as how most of LURPS and LUBBS turns up as well). I'm a binge drinker, come Friday night. Fortunately, I'm almost immune to hangovers. [EDIT: And Americans drink less than Britons, or at least it's less socially desirable, which could have something to do with it.]

- I pout about being single? Well, I suppose I do. It's just... I love the feeling of being with someone, even in a casual relationship. Although, recently, I've been making the most of singleness. The thing is, I'm a romantic at heart.

- Too wide? That seems to have resolved itself, actually. Occasionally, when I import bits of code from quizzes that include graphics, it automatically throws itself beyond the usual 800x600 ideal resolution, so that even on my 1024x780 monitor I'm having to scroll sideways, and can only just fit it on if I leave off the left hand bar. It's an annoying problem, and one that I haven't worked out how to kill yet.

I would have posted all this in her guestbook, but she hasn't got one.


Christ, I've been very negative in my posts over the past few days, haven't I? Constant "Oh for fuck's sake"s and so on.