I did another silly lyrics thing.
This time I took on another hard to understand (but kickass) song, Thunderstruck by AC/DC
I didn’t do the whole song because after the point where I ended, the song gets pretty repetitive, and I made the decision that, while there ARE new lyrics in that part of the song, viewers would not enjoy the large amount of instrumentals and repetition it took to get there.
Plus, really, you get the idea.
Friday, October 4, 2013
(NOTE : This year’s convention theme was “pirates”.
2 PM : Jolly Joe DeVoy, Ruthless Julian Castle, and I depart from our home port of Seafair on the isle of Lulu for the nearby port of Sea Island, to partake of a three day grapple with fellow buccaneers. Our hold is laden with provisions for the trip, and we look forward to this break from the open seas, and chance to trade our doubloons for luxuries important from distant lands.
3 PM : The trip was short and uneventful. We arrived early but the harbormasters were kind enough to let us weigh anchor in slip 522 regardless. We stowed our gear, made ready for the grapple, and after a brief pause to catch the wind in our sails once more, proceeded to the main event.
(————Piratey talk ends HERE———————–)
(Felicity, feel free to format the above demarcation however you like when you put in in BCSFAzine. You get the basic idea. I leave the exact form it takes up to you. )
While waiting for our room, we had the pleasure of meeting Ryan Hawe, his lovely wife Jen, and their little bundle of sweetness and joy, baby Evelyn. Ryan and Jen are former roommates of ours and it was great to catch up with them and see little Evelyn.
Our room is pleasant in that detached way that the hotel industry has down to a science. I am disappointed at the lack of a microwave in the room. Seems I brought my Orville Redenbacher micro-pop for no reason.
4 PM : Having managed to locate Registration (and a lovely lady who knew where I got my nickname from), I am now a full fledged congoer, and after a brief search and some basic detective work, I manage to locate the panel about how to make your own eBook.
However, after settling down and chatting with some very nice people in the room, I discover that this is not, in fact, the room for the panel eBook making, but the one on the subject of that miracle ingredient of all those awful tasting energy drinks, taurine.
It is at this point that I get my first hint that the program book (ha!) is a pack of lies and only the pocket program guide is to be trusted.
However, by that point I am comfortable and enjoying the company, so I decide what the hell, I will do this panel about taurine instead.
And it was very fun! Turns out taurine is a basic amino acid, but not one of the ones used to code proteins. Instead, it seems to enable other processes to do their jobs. Fun fact : nobody is sure that putting taurine in an energy drink even does anything. It’s the caffeine and sugar that does the trick! All those people, drinking awful tasting overpriced drinks when they could go to Starbucks and get the same thing in a much tastier form, and for around the same price.
5 PM : The only programming on right now is the opening ceremonies, and I am really not a “ceremonies” kind of guy, so instead I ascend to the 8th floor and the Hospitality Suite. I enjoy an hour of hanging with my fellow nerds and grazing on the munchies. But only after dutifully dropping $3 in the alien’s head. Hospitality runs on donations, after all!
6 PM : Went to a panel about how to make your own audio kit on the cheap. Most of it was way over my head and hence not all that useful for a non-techie like me. I mean, they expected me to learn to solder! Not gonna happen. I would have been better off going to the panel after this one that tells you how to use the darn stuff. Still, I enjoy anything hosted by Dara Korra’ti.
7 PM : Up to our room to regroup with La Gange (Joe, Julian, Felicity, and I) and formulate a strategy for getting dinner done. Our usual urge to chat with one another gets in the way, but eventually we formulate a plan and get our rear ends moving.
7:45 PM : We investigate the hotel restaurant and discover that it is both extremely pretentious and extremely expensive. Why do those always coincide? Thank goodness they post a menu outside the restaurant so we didn’t have to find all this out after we were already seated. Time for Plan B!
8 PM : Plan B is the local Denny’s, a popular hangout with La Gange and pretty much the exact opposite of the hotel restaurant in all ways. It’s relaxed, unpretentious, reasonable priced, and the people there already know us and give us a warm welcome when we show up. It pays to be not just regulars, but NICE regulars.
Also, somewhere along the way, we pick up Chris, AKA RainRat, a local furry whom I had not seen in ages, and our friend Amos, freshly back from a long trip traveling across the USA to fly the BDSM flag everywhere he can.
10 PM : Back to the hotel room to relax with La Gange, hang out, snack, and watch TV, which is more or less what we always do on Friday nights. There are room parties going on, but despite how I sometimes come across, I am an introvert, and my social batteries are totally dead. So we just hang out till we get sleepy and then drift off to bed. It’s sort of neat to watch television with friends in what is, for the weekend, your bedroom. I wouldn’t want to do it all the time, but it’s nice for a change to not even have to get up and go to the bedroom when the night’s festivities are over.
1:30 AM : Time to sleep! Thank goodness I brought my sleeping pills. Surely this time, unlike my VancouFur experience when I forget said pills, I will fall asleep easily and sleep soundly!
4 AM : Despite my sleeping pills, it takes this long for me to finally fall asleep. I guess the excitement of the day is still keeping my mind all wired up. Oh well, conventions aren’t for sleeping anyway!
Aaaand it’s another piece of music.
I am quite pleased with how that piece turned out. Best thing I’ve done since The Funky Duck.
I guess if I just keep making music, even if none of it is making me happy, eventually I will make good music that DOES make me happy.
Mentally I know that’s how it works, but I guess my heart needs some convincing.
Practice makes perfect, dammit!
Sorry for the expletive, but after taking a week off, I have a LOT of science stories to sift through this week. 22, as a matter of fact. So I hope you folks appreciate what I do for you when I make these silly science reports.
I feel like an employer with only eight job openings and almost three times that number of applicants. No matter what I do, a lot of them will go away disappointed.
But them’s the breaks in the rough and tumble world of science reporting. You’re either fascinating enough (and/or important enough) to make it in the big bad world of the FSW, or you’re yesterday’s lab reports.
Part I – General Science
We’ll warm up with a few miscellaneous science stories that I thought were cool.
The Gorgon Lake
This story is both tragic and incredibly beautiful in a very morbid way. There is a lake called Lake Natron in Northern Tanzania that both kills and petrifies any animal unlucky enough to enter its waters.
The lake takes its name from natron, a naturally occurring compound made mainly of sodium carbonate, with a bit of baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) thrown in.
Birds are attracted to (or possibly are confused by) the lake’s extremely reflective surface and crash into the lake, where the high temperatures (up to 60 degrees Celsius) and extremely high alkalinity (between pH 9 and pH 105… wow.) kill them. Then, over time, the natron calcifies the birds, turning them into statues.
This is, I admit, not a very important science story, hut its ethereal and deathly beauty meant I could not possible ignore it.
Hacking The Genetic Code
Brace yourself for some scientific vertigo : Engineers at University of Washington have written a programming language for designing your own custom DNA.
Feel that? That’s the feeling of the future opening up before you.
The language is crude as of yet, more like the machine code of DNA than C++, but it’s an amazing first step towards a world where anyone with a computer can design a genome, code for proteins, or just see what would happen if the DNA molecule was shaped like Angeline Jolie’s tits.
C’mon. You know some programming geek will try it!
More Water On Mars
It turns out there is not just SOME water on Mars.
It’s freaking EVERYWHERE on Mars!
Pick any spot on Mars. Dig up a spadeful of dirt. Heat it up a little. Boom, you got water. 2 percent by mass!
That is freaking awesome. Not only does it mean that we could land anywhere on Mars and find water to both drink (important) and electrolyze for oxygen (SUPER FREAKING IMPORTANT), but it really strengthens the argument that at one point, the surface of Mars was covered with water.
After all, how else would it end up so evenly distributed?
And if there was water on the surface of Mars, then that vastly increases the odds that it once had life, and draws even more attention to the vital question of “What went wrong”??
Part II : Energy
Baking with Carbon
A new kind of carbon capture plant deals with the stuff by turning into baking soda.
Yup, good old bicarbonate of soda, the same stuff your Mom used to make her biscuits fluffy. The technology is called Airmine, and it could very well be just the thing to capture the bad stuff coming out of a power plant or factory and turn it into useful stuff.
A Skymine plant is around the size of a semi, and, get this, is powered by the waste heat of the processes it is cleaning up. It would scrub out all the guck like sulfur and mercury out of the emissions (all of which have other industrial uses), then use a relatively simple chemical reaction to turn the carbon dioxide into bicarb, hydrogen gas, and chlorine gas.
There’s lot of uses for bicarb, and both hydrogen gas and chlorine gas have industrial uses, or you could just recombine them into hydrochloric acid which has even more uses.
Oh, and the only thing the process needs besides carbonaceous air is water and salt.
Not for nothing, but this is exactly the sort of thing that gives me a huge efficiency boner.
But of course, if we could make energy a green way, we wouldn’t even need Skymine.
And we are surrounded by more energy than we could ever use. We just need to tap into it with devices like this new design for river water turbines.
It’s a simple idea. Put turbines in river. River flow spins turbines. Turbines generate electricity. No need to build a giant dam in order to tap in to energy of water based altitude differentials!
A simple idea, but tricky to implement. Luckily, the people at Verdant Power, the folks testing their gear on the East River in the story above, have the kind of funding that lets them just keep trying, and they now have a blade that survived 10 days of submersion perfectly intact.
In the future, energy will come from everywhere.
Part III : Brains
You knew it was coming! Time to talk brains.
The Most Extraordinary Brain Ever
The name of the article is Is This The More Extraordinary Brain Ever Seen?
And, well…. you tell me.
Above : an actual human brain that was actually inside someone’s skull doing all their brain things.
Looks like something an Alien from Alien leaves behind in the bathroom, doesn’t it? Or something that H. R. Giger left on the cutting room floor.
But no, that was actually the brain of some unknown person. All is known is that the person lived their whole life in a mental facility (quel surprise) and died in 1970. We don’t even know gender.
What we do know is that a smooth human brain with absolutely no crenelations is incredibly rare. Most people with this disorder don’t live to see their tenth birthday. There is a reason the brain is all wrinkly and crinkled, it’s because that vastly increases the surface area available for neuronal connections.
No wrinkles? No room for a human brain inside a human skull.
That person must have had very low function. Bravo to the hospital for keeping him or her alive!
The Eating Center
Scientists have refined our idea of what part of the brain controls appetite and eating.
We’ve known for decades that eating behaviours were somewhere in the lateral hypothalamus, mainly because when that is damaged, people don’t eat.
But scientists at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill have used the completely freaky new techniques of optogenetics (using light to activate and deactivate genes) to further refine the picture down to a particular set of neural pathways that when activated, make mice voraciously hungry, and when deactivated cause the mice to lose all interest in food.
Being neurologists, the authors of the study are confident that it will turn out that eating disorders, including obesity, are really just neurological disorders.
But knowing where the problem can be seen and knowing what causes the problem are two different things.
Stopping Brain Death
For the real jaw dropping bit of brain news this week, though, you have to go to the realm of Alzheimer’s research, and the King’s College of London, where they have discovered a chemical that stops brain tissue death in its tracks.
That is huge news. We are eons away from being able to actually fix dead brain tissue, so our only hope in fighting Alzheimer’s and many other degenerative brain disorders any time soon is to keep the brain tissue from dying in the first place.
After all, if the brain tissue dies, so does the information stored in it, and even if you could repair the cell, that information is lost forever.
And that information is you
So anything that can keep those nasty prions from accumulating in your brain tissue and causing your brain cells to shut down protein production for so long that they starve to death is a good thing.
Well, that’s all for this bonus-sized edition of the Friday Science Whatever for this week. Trimming a list of 22 awesome science stories to the 8 most awesome was a brutal, bloody process, but in the end, only the truly worthy stories survived to stand on the platform of victory, heads wreathed in laurels.
And you just read them all! Good for you.
Seeya next week, science fans!
There’s a word for women like this one.
And that word is “holy”.
That might sound like an odd word coming from an atheist like me. I don’t believe in God, or even gods, so how can I declare something to be holy?
But that would be missing the point. I am not a theist but I have a very strong spiritual belief in humanism and the humanist endeavor, and all that Jesus, as represented in the Bible, was actually talking about.
I just don’t need to believe someone was the Son of God to be onto something.
And so by my deeply spiritual humanism, Mama Hill is a holy woman. She doesn’t just give love, she lives love. Every day and in every way, she embodies my ideal of holiness by being someone who spends every waking moment filling the world with as much love as she possibly can, and has truly given herself over to the holiest of pleasures, the pleasure that comes from loving and helping others.
This is not just the most moral of pleasures, but the purest, strongest, and highest pleasure there is. I envy her and her spiritual strength and dedication. She is my spiritual ideal. If I had to describe my desired destination in my spiritual journey through life, I would just say “Mama Hill”.
She lives in a state of grace. I can only imagine what joy and serenity there must be in that. She has found the joy of abandoning self not out of self-denigration or self-denial, but simply because it was getting in the way of her true happiness.
And she is clearly someone who does not belief the corrosive and destructive lie that you can “spoil” a child by loving them too much. She does not believe in withholding love for any reason. It is never justified. Children must know that they will always be loved, no matter what, and without limit.
That does not mean letting kids do whatever the hell they want. Discipline is part of love, and if discipline is pursued with love, not anger, then it cannot go wrong.
Children might not enjoy the act of discipline. They will quite likely try to avoid the consequences of their actions. They might even curse your name and tell you that you are the worst parent in the world.
But they will be far, far happier in a world with limits, structure, and authority. They will feel secure and calm in a world where there is someone to watch over them and warn them away from harm. The world of a child is frightening and strange. They understand so little of the world they live in.
Thus, they are greatly comforted by the thought of not having to face the great unknown alone.
Her life is pretty much my ideal life, although I would be collecting and helping broken people, misfits and losers and marginalized minorities and such, rather than children of broken homes.
Other than that, though, that is how I would like to live my life. Provide a safe haven for those people who, for whatever reason and by whatever means, did not turn out right and hence are not healthy or whole enough to go out there and cope with the world like a normal person could.
I would be very fulfilled if I could provide those people a place where they can feel loved, valued, and accepted. No religion required, just a dedication to being there for people when and how they need you.
In a sense, it seems like religion is a long and complicated detour on the road to true humanism. Part of me wishes people would just skip the Jesus worship and concentrate on what He actually said, and spare themselves a lot of confusions and angst caused by getting it all tied up with superstition, priests, and the Old Testament.
But I suppose that people have to find their own path to spiritual enlightenment, and my path is not the only one by far. I recognize the symbol value of the idea of God. Apart from its value in keeping as adults also feeling like we are not alone and there is someone out there looking over them, God (or Jesus) represents the highest human ideals and gives people something to strive towards.
It just saddens me to see people who profess a love of Christ but endorse a worldview diametrically opposed to everything the Biblical Jesus taught.
I mean, what’s a messiah to do? How thorough and precise does a holy teacher have to be in order to make it crystal clear what you are talking about and what sorts of things will never, ever, ever be allowed.
Like I say in this comic strip I did ages ago…
It’s not what religion causes. It’s what it fails to stop.
… I would be one paranoid Messiah. Given how hard Jesus tried to get His message across, only to have it pretty much completely ignored, in part or in whole, by absolutely everybody who claims to believe in Him, I really do wonder how the hell you can successfully get the whole humanist ideal across to people.
It’s not complicated. Love one another. Be good to one another. Look out for one another. Pick each other up when you fall. Love your fellow humans precisely because of your shared humanity.
I keep picturing either this vast and incomprehensible legalistic document that covers every possible excuse someone might have for doing or being evil, or maybe some vast interactive flowchart type app that does more or less the same thing but in a more user-friendly mode.
But of course, that won’t work either, because no matter how thorough you are, the majority of people will find it to be too complicated and/or too much work to learn and use such a cumbersome belief system, and you might as well have just made a million Happy Face buttons instead.
Maybe Mama Hill knows.
See, I remember where I started!
Don’t read too much into the title, it’s randomly picked from the contents of my brain at this exact moment.
Hi there readers! Have I mentioned how much I love you all lately?
’cause I do!
Today has been… odd. I wasn’t aware of feeling depressed, and yet this afternoon, I had a hell of a time getting out of bed. I laid down after lunch (even though I was not tired… first sign of a problem) and drifted off for an hour or so… but when I woke up I just could not face getting up and going to the computer to do a video.
So I lolled about in bed until 5:30 PM or so. That is ninety minutes past when I usually start my video-making. It felt distinctly like I was hiding from something, and I am not sure what, except just…. life.
My life. My life that bores the hell out of me and makes me feel all trapped and lonely and crazy and confused. There is definitely something going on deep inside me, instigated by the lowering of my Paxil dose, that is going to take a while to resolve itself.
It is an elaborate re-balancing of forces and as such, it is a tricky and delicate operation that is largely going to happen without my conscious input, so I guess it’s kind of like waiting for a wound to heal.
All you can do is wait for your body to take care of things while you try to stay as healthy as you can in order to speed the process along.
I am definitely feeling like my current creative outlets are inadequate, which freaks me out a little because I am at a loss as to what the hell else I could be doing. What could be a greater expression of my enormous creative potential than 1000 words and a video per day?
One possible answer to that will be happening next month, because November is (Inter) National Novel Writing Month, known as NaNoWriMo back in the old neighborhood, and that means I will be hard at work writing my third novel. That should soak up all the creative potential I can throw at it, at least for a while.
This time, I will at least attempt to program some time for editing and proofreading into the process, so that at the end of the process I will at least have decently clean text. It might seem a little crazy to be adding editing to a process that already asks for 1667 words per day of fictional prose, but even though fiction takes a lot more out of me than my usual chatty blogging, I think I can handle it.
My only worry is the usual one, that if I try to look back on what I have written, my inherent emotional instability coupled with my fragile sense of self will cause me to lose all faith in what I am doing, which would be mighty inconvenient in the middle of writing a novel.
Also, not sure if I will be making videos during NaNoWriMo or not. I suppose I could get cute and make each day’s video consist solely of me reading out what I wrote that day. They say that reading your work aloud is a great way to make sure everything flows properly, so you know… two birds.
Speaking of which, check out this dude’s amazing discovery.
Un fucking believable! If I made a discovery like that I would be so stoked. I would go half-crazy with the excitement of discovering this whole secret apartment underneath my own and I would immediately have to explore it, poke around, and look for more secrets.
After all, there could be anything in there. Hidden treasure. Dead bodies. Dead bodies wearing hidden treasure. Dead bodies hidden IN hidden treasure.
The possibilities are endless!
Of course, they probably won’t find anything that interesting. But the mere possibility of it would have me pumped up for weeks.
And I would totally renovate all that space down there to be more livable. Some couches, some chairs, a lot of throw rugs, and of course LIGHTS, and that could be one cozy little dungeon.
Perfect for those BDSM get-togethers!
Another fun find : a website that asks you the question… IKEA or DEATH?
More specifically, it asks you to identify whether a word is the name of an IKEA product or the name of a death metal band. Cue Ed Wyatt!
Of course, it’s more or less random, or at least, the best you can hope for is an educated hunch.
Unless, of course, you have an encyclopedic knowledge of either death metal bands, IKEA products, or both. In which case…. this is the quiz you were BORN to win, big guy!
Oh, and finally, of course, the silly thing I did today.
Perhaps my creative outlets seems inadequate because, like I said before, I am in the midst of a painful artistic growth spurt where what I want my art to be is just out of my reach and I have to sort of grow in its direction, like a plant growing towards the light.
If so, the transition phase is a real bitch. But like Churchill brilliantly said, if you are going through Hell… keep going! Don’t stop because all you can see is Hell in front of you and behind.
Keep moving and you will find the way out eventually.
That requires faith, though, and depression makes any kind of faith difficult. Even perfectly logical, absolutely indisputable faith like “this can’t last forever” (what does?) or “my problems are not unique” (whose are?) can ge crushed under the boot of depression and its inability to believe in that which is not immediately evident.
And that’s what faith is, right? Belief in the unseen. In a sense, it takes faith to believe in Paris if you have never been there.
For all I know, Paris is a myth. Everyone is lying about it. There is no such place. It’s no more real than Wonderland, Narnia, and Shangri-La.
And yet I find it far easier to believe in Paris than myself.
The struggle continues.
Like golfing! Get it?
Got schiznit to share in the usual mode.
First, we have this amazingly cute fox pic.
I swear there’s a fox in there amongst all that fluff!
Awwwww! He looks so happy and so darn fluffy! It’s not exactly the most dignified pose, but it sure is adorable. All that fur makes me want to brush him and pet him and spoil him.
Or her. Can’t really tell from the pic.
Then there’s this lovely little bit of freeform fun from Cracked.com, which of course has a completely misleading name that presumably exists solely for Search Engine Optimization.
It has nothing to do with “if actress auditions were edited for honesty”. In fact, that is a terrible premise and I am not sure how you would even pull that off.
It would be more properly titled something like “The Many Faces Of…” and the faux-actress’ name. But I suppose that wouldn’t make people compulsively click on the link enough for Cracked.com’s advertisers, and compared to that, completely misleading people as to what they are about to watch pales in comparison.
I can only assume that a lot of people out there have absolutely no memory and so they don’t even remember the title by the time the video actually plays like, three seconds later.
But anyhow, I thought it was a great piece. They obviously worked really hard with the costumes and makeup to make some of the most hilariously terrible characters I have ever seen.
Ironically, it really does function as a legit character reel for the actual actress playing the fake actress, because she is clearly quite talented and can do comedy in a lot of different modes, including complex takes which start in “character” and end in the “actress” breaking down or breaking character.
I look forward to seeing more of her, as long as she keeps that baby costume locked up forever.
Then there’s this lovely little analogy laid down by that groovy funkster Bill Maher.
I would add that by sharing the money equally, the NFL is not “picking winners and losers”, as the right wing likes to say about the social safety net. It’s just making sure everyone has the same chance at winning.
And what could be more free-market than that? They are acting to maximize competition and thus create the best conditions for both the teams and the fans. That’s exactly how consumer capitalism is supposed to work.
If you are a Tea Party fanatic, presumably you think the game shouldn’t even have a referee. I mean, what does a referee do but pick winners and losers, and penalize the most aggressive and innovative teams?
But about Bill Maher. I was, way back in the 90’s, somewhat of a fan of his, or at least, of his kickass discussion show Politically Incorrect.
It was a great show because it consistently delivered the funniest, most interesting, most dynamic political discussions I have ever seen. And back then, Bill acted mostly as the moderator and/or instigator.
But then that show got canceled out from under him because he dared to suggest that the USA might have brought 9/11 down on themselves (which they totally did), and while he has had a series of similar shows after that, they all seem to focus on him far too much.
And that wouldn’t be so bad but every time I see him, he’s even more smug and petulant and acting like a bad little boy who expects a pat on the head, and it’s depressing. Even when he is delivering killer material like in the video above, he irritates me so much that it’s hard to endure him for very long.
Especially when we have John Stewart being affable and self-effacing out there.
I mean hey, I am glad he is still out there fighting the good fight. I don’t mean to insult the guy.
I will leave that up to the professionals.
It’s not by the same folks who did that other famous insult compilation (no idea who they were now), but there is still a lot of good stuff in there.
Anyone know what movie it is that has Gene Wilder deliver that “dumb bastard” speech? Because I am really curious about it. Seems quite out of character compared to his usual wacky and imperturbable persona.
Oh, and if, like me, you have wondered what exactly “four-flushing” means, I learned from that page of 20’s slang I linked to a while back that it means someone who borrows money from everyone in order to pretend to be rich.
Seems like a highly specific thing to have a whole slang term for, it must have been quite the problem back in the era of the straw boated hat and the ukulele.
Also, I have no idea what the number four and the concept of flushing having to do with living beyond your means, but I sure hope it’s something to do with card games.
The alternatives are unthinkable.
But if you want to see someone REALLY get angry, watch this!
That’s my vid for the day. See how the content for today’s blog gets angrier as we go?
That’s just the kind of everyday quality you can expect from an old-fashioned, hand-carved, hickory-smoked, unvarnished but honest, down home cooking blog like this one.
Damn. Now I am hungry.
Anyhow, collected enough rant seeds to do another triple shout out and get some things off my chest. I realize they are not exactly Earth-shatteringly important issues but those I treat more seriously than just ranting about them in an offhand way.
Plus, I am sort of scared that if I get rolling on politics or whatnot, I will start frothing at the moutgh and end up coming across less as a “sage and perceptive commentator” and more as a “frightening and deranged lunatic”. It can happen. I’m a big scary guy when I get real angry.
So I stick with the little stuff.
See you all tomorrow!
Well, here I am, back home after a weekend at Vcon.
Feels odd to be back. There is always some post-convention sadness. I liken it to the day after Christmas. Christmas is great, but afterwards you are always a little sad that now it’s all over again for another year.
I feel the same about conventions. I would never in a million decades say that it was not worth it. I had a lot of fun over the weekend, despite my mood occasionally not cooperating.
But there is always that sad little transition period when you realize you have to go back to normal life after spending three precious days in a world full of fellow nerds.
Luckily, I am enough of a routine-liking person that there is also the compensation of going back to a life where things are predictable and knowable rather than improvising every day.
I don’t have Aspergers, and there are definitely limits to how monotonous things can get before I become bored. But I do take a lot of comfort from a certain level of predictability so I can get emotionally prepared for whatever comes nest and do not have to deal with sudden change.
I don’t handle “sudden” and “surprise” very well. I will tell you the story about the brand new bicycle that I got for my birthday some time.
Of course, this being the day after the convention, I spent most of the day asleep. Conventions always wipe me out, and I am not alone in this. And this time, it was not for lack of sleep. I slept fine both nights in the hotel room, although one night it took a long time to nod off. But I got the right quantity of sleep.
Nevertheless, I have been just plain drained for all of today. Except for meals, I slept the whole day and did not really catch up with sleep enough to actually be functional until around 7:30 PM.
Then I got up and went next door to do some shopping and pick up prescriptions. Yay me! I didn’t feel like doing it but it needed doing and I wanted to prove to myself that I am perfectly capable of choosing to go out in the world by myself and get things done without any of La Gange along to help, even with drives.
And it went fine. In my addlepated state, I had some time figuring out what I wanted to buy during the shopping portion of the mission, but otherwise all went smoothly.
I even found my Optimum card, which had gone missing. Previously, I searched my wallet over and over for the damn thing. But this time, abracadabra, there it was. Isn’t that always the way?
And of course, my body complained under the strain of actually freaking doing things. My lifestyle has been so sedentary that even just going next door to shop is like a sudden arctic marathon to it.
And that has gotten SO FUCKING OLD to me now.
So when I can, while I can, I will resist it. In fact, resistance is going to be my middle name for now. I will take all the rage I have deep down and focus it into the iron will needed to smash all my barriers and finally give myself room to grow as a person.
What else. Oh, Amos feels ill after coming back from Vcon and that has me feeling paranoid about Con Crud.
If you are not familiar with the term, Con Crud is the generic name for the kinds of illnesses that arise from the very nature of a convention, namely that it brings people from all over the world together to exchange views, perspectives, and disease vectors. Bacterial strains that otherwise never would have found a nice tight concentration of people without antibodies for them can now proliferate and frolic at will.
I am sure that immunologists are taught to look for conferences, conventions, and other coordinated confluences on their first day of germ hunter school.
I wonder what THEIR conferences are like? Probably bathed in Purel.
Anyhow, it is prudent to be extra vigilant after such an event. Currently, I have a mildly scratchy throat, a headache, and a general “icky” feeling, but those could all be from sleeping all day.
Plus, I am really freaking hungry today. I have been pretty hungry lately period. I don’t know why. It could be a blood sugar thing, it could be that my metabolism is speeding up, I don’t know.
Or it could be that my success in developing my will and desire and confidence has simply led my body to be more confident that if it tells me it is hungry, I will go do something about it, instead of just stonily ignoring it until the next Proper Meal Time comes along.
One thing I can clearly see myself spending some of my future increased income on is snax. Just little things I can eat between meals in order to stifle the cravings and keep my blood sugar in the “happy” zone.
Oh, before I forget, I did do a video today. Technically.
That is probably the most minimal video I have ever done, but even that felt like it took a downright Herculean effort in a day like this. Just two minutes of me talking without even a video to capture the eye.
Oh well, I am just glad I got SOMETHING out there. Considering the amount I slept today, I was not even sure I would get to do a blog entry. I might have slept the whole damned day.
It should be noted, however, that when I am done here, I am going right back to sleep.
I swear, I will catch up on sleep soon and then I will be able to go back to being merely indolent, self-indulgent, and addicted to napping.
So you know… same old same old. Back to the old incredibly gentle grind.
Seeya tomorrow folks!
Well, okay. Not so much a pond as a bridge.
A very short bridge, but still a bridge, so I did technically cross water to get here. Here I am, at Vcon, on the very creatively named Sea Island (from the minds who brought you Asphalt Highway and Sick People’s Hospital), at the Delta Something Or Other Hotel, with time to spare and the kind use of Joe’s laptop upon which to give you nice people a blog entry for today.
So I might not be able to do a video today (unless this thing has a hidden webcam…. hmmm… ) but I can at least shoot you nice people your 1000 words for today.
Con’s been fun so far. Went to a couple of panels, hung out in Horse Brutality, said hi to some people I know, went to dinner with La Gange plus Amos and Rainrsat, and in general did my con thang.
Had a lot of trouble getting to sleep, despite having remembered my sleeping pills this time. Quel surprise. I usually have some trouble adjusting to a new sleeping arrangement, even if it’s a very nice and comfy hotel bed. So much of sleep is based around habit. We come to associate our usual sleeping arrangement with sleep, and over time that grows so powerful that it becomes hard to sleep anywhere else. All the sensory cues are wrong. This not The Sleeping Place!
Plus, I have been having a hard time getting to sleep lately anyhow. I honestly think I might be in a hypo-manic phase right now. I have lots of energy, my mind is fairly clear and zipping along, and for the most part I feel great.
But when I try to sleep, I just can’t seem to turn that overstimulated mind of mine off. It just keeps racing and racing, generating idea after idea after idea, and I get the feeling of trying to close a suitcase which has far too much packed into it, or trying to close a book whose pages keep multiplying.
Of course, now that it would be inadvisable for me to go to sleep, I feel quite sleepy. Well fuck you, evil circadian devil that makes me need an afternoon nap no matter what. I have a panel I want to go to at 3 PM, and then the almighty Elrons at 4 PM, and I am sure as hell not going to miss THOSE.
So I will endeavour not to nap, tho I know that will be tricky with nothing in particular to do. This blogging is helping with that. I figure habits are something you keep up whenever possible, and with a computer I can use right here in the hotel room and a couple hours to spare, I might as well keep up the blogging part of my daily creative output routine.
Oh right! Fabulous and amazing news! I got a letter yesterday. (That’s not the amazing part. )
It was from the Ministry. I have been approved for full disability! I am moving from PPMB (persons with persistent multiple barriers) to PWD (persons with disabilities) status as of November 1.
That means roughly another $2oo per month in income for yours truly, and seeing as I am getting by fine now (just barely, most of the time), that extra money is pretty much all gravy. It can all go to making various life-improving purchases, like for instance upgrading my computer chair, not to mention my computer itself, and finally getting a green screen that works, AKA one that comes with its own stand and therefore does not have to be stuck to my wall.
If I wasn’t renting, I might consider just getting Chromakey Green paint and painting the wall. I don’t know much about painting, but I have done a little bit of it in my past, so I would be willing to at least give it a shot. The trick would be getting it to go on perfectly smoothly and evenly.
But the walls I live in are not my own, so a standalone green screen will have to do. A green screen, a nice bright even light source, whatever I need to get my camera hooked up to the computer again, and I could make some far more slick and groovy videos with real production values.
Or who knows, maybe I will just spend it on little luxuries like sugar-free sweets or baked good. Either way, this new money will make life so much nicer.
Plus, I will be able to get a bus pass for just $45 a year, and that is all zones, so I will be able to go to anywhere the transit systems goes. That does not guarantee that I will go out into the world more often, any more than leaving the cage door open guarantees the animal will get out.
But it sure as hell opens the door, anyhow.
So I am pretty stoked about that. The only flaw is that because it does not kick in until November 1, it will not bump up my next cheque on the 23rd of October. Dammit.
So I will have to wait six weeks or so for the extra dough. Oh well. It will sure as well make the Xmas season a heck of a lot nicer!
There is a buch of other stuff that comes with being PWD, I think, but I have not checked that out yet. I am really hoping it gives me access to both education and some kind of therapy for my poor sore back, which is bugging me as I type these very words.
Meh. I think the Nap Monster is going to get me no matter what. I only hope that I wake up in time for Elrons and whatnot. No alarm clock, so I can only have faith in my inability to stay asleep for more than a few hours unless I take a sleeping pill.
Glad I got to talk at you all today. Seeya tomorrow, I hope!
As you all know by now, I am heading off to Vcon today. That means there will be no video for today and as for the blog entry for today, you are looking at it.
So no FSW this week, although my science story folder is very full so I might do it Monday instead.
And as I will be away, there will be neither blog entry nor video Saturday or Sunday either. There’s a small chance of a blog entry or two if the hotel has free computers to use, but as for videos… nada.
After all, I make them with a webcam and my computer, and neither of those are coming with me!
I will miss you folks, but I will be off having fun, and hopefully when I get back. I will have lots of notes from which to write a nice fat con report for you all.
Until then, seeya Monday, folks!