Month: August 2023

off to the showroom

Keith needs to buy some furniture to fit in his new room. We’ll go off to see that midmorning. He’s also setting up ‘the last family meal at the Manor’ for Sunday so I’m hoping Jeff will come.

Weather continues okay, pollen except mold is low.

Laundry done, now I need to put it away. har har

Ukraine has lost a lot of warriors in the offensive. Things are gonna snap.

Tanked all my Lumosity games this morning. I don’t mean to dip but using a trackpad instead of a mouse is kinda bogus and I should stop doing it.

Made more iced tea.

Had my leftover pad thai for breakfast. DAMN it was good. Jeff enjoyed his Mongolian stirfry so we’re putting that restaurant in the rotation. The soup (sort of like Tom Ka Kai but called Coconut soup) was so good I could feel my soul leave my body and then come whooshing back in with a big ass THANK YOU. I asked for Mild-Medium spicing and they NAILED IT so well.

Reviewing my to do list. Amazing how many items I’ve already crossed off.

360 words over today and yesterday.

Just found out that the only Guyanese person I follow on twitter… his dad was a chauffeur. And so is Blossom, so I’m thinking that is one strange echo.

ai yi

walked down to the weed store, lord but I’m in poor shape, even downhill was tough, and coming back uphill involved me planting my ass on every bit of furniture between here and there at least once.

Procured a poopsi at the donair place across the street from the weed store and after finishing it managed to make it home. I was dressed entirely in black so let’s just say the sun’s still doing their job.

ordered thai- nom

I am now in a parasocial relationship with an actor NOT IN HIS ROLE but in his role as HUCKSTER for the role. (David Tennant, as Crowley in Good Omens.) This is perilous layers of unproductive meta (I use it in the sense of people walking in and among and beside the artistic ideas which are being represented by an engrammatical ‘story’ as players, production staff, writers, relatives of the writers of the original text, media reporting on the fixed form of the engrammatical ‘story’, people creating paintings and gifsets and fan edits and AO3 stories and beadwork and t-shirts which reflect their emotions and experience, the feeling of reaching across and through an artwork and just holding hands with someone and crying, just crying, because you feel seen and loved, and then wearing them while they stream about the engrammatical ‘story’ because it’s something precious and fleeting and needs to be shared), as I will demonstrate,

as I’ve already BEEN through this with Misha Collins as Castiel, so I’m shoving the idea out of my mind like a warbler who’s twigged to the cuckoo’s egg. Not very successfully. These things happen.

Whether this newfound tendresse, or the caution it will hopefully engender as I heave it from my sensorium with many a psychic grunt and wail, will inform the longing I hope to continuously expose as a feature of Totally Boned (as you may not know, the longest of my current projects and the one which, despite itself, continues to show signs of actually being … worth charging money for.)

Anyway, the pattern-seeking in art across disciplines – the meta’s an outgrowth of this. I mean, as a cultural phenomenon it has all the appearance of some weird variant of an anxiety attack, or as more likely on second consideration, a cultural displacement behaviour for the ever trending anxiety that is our daily portion. Sad to say this is the shit my ADD brain was made for. I don’t worry about what I’ve got in my head, all I’m concerned for is that the useful items appear in the order in which they are needed, at least with respect to my creative life; I’ve never known to have truly seen whether I can do that in my personal life. It seems to me that there was a time, but I ain’t got the hormones to do that no more; ‘most everything has shrunk, my field of vision most of all. “The air gets thinner but the view gets better,” as Ingmar Bergman once remarked. In my case I’m looking through a smaller aperture. I can’t control my mood, or, necessarily, my energy level, so writing is hard some days and not others. Multi-thousand word days SOUND good, but I burn glucose and brain chemicals like a fucking thermal lance while I’m doing it and feel like hell for literally days afterwards so I now am writing to an upper limit of 750 words a day for my health. I know that sounds funny, regrettably I care not with great lots of uncaringness, parcelled out for your convenience. My hypocrisies and vices are what they are; we’re living on borrowed time, all of us, and the reason I’m angry I didn’t get a resolution in this Season 2 of Good Omens is that I think society is about to break in half and then get ground to powder

so I’ll never get one. Logistics of war, of plague, of planetary threats unknown.

On the other hand, in a basement in Pasadena, a cabal of high school students, queer studies professors, elderly film directors, amateur set decorators and body double actors are depending on one young non-binary person to carry the weight of successfully using AI to create an entire film to ‘fix’ the notorious last season of a long running TV horror-comedy. Let those who ponder the meta, who enter the liminal space of the meta with the breath of a prayer, take warning, for that, my fellow lunatics, is a project with a much better chance of seeing daylight before the apocalypse really bites than S3 of Good Omens. We who have faith have faith for a reason. In other words, I’m making fun of it, but I have to; if I can’t mock what I believe in, I’m a victim, not a collaborator with an idea. And this whole Pasadena thing I made up on the spot, because it would be a great idea for a Destiel fanfic and I needed to make a note of it.

it ain’t the end of the world

It just reads like it on the page

 

from the NOAA site today

Valid 12Z Mon Aug 07 2023 – 12Z Wed Aug 09 2023 …Increased threat for severe thunderstorms and flash flooding today from the Tennessee and Upper Ohio River valleys into much of the eastern U.S… …Record heat expected from Texas, eastward along the Gulf Coast into Florida through Tuesday… …Elevated fire weather risks for central/western Texas and around the Four Corners region… …Heavy rain and localized flash flooding possible for the interior Pacific Northwest into the Northern Rockies today… A fairly strong storm system will track eastward from the lower Great Lakes and Midwest today, with an associated cold front reaching the Mid-Atlantic coast late Monday night/early Tuesday morning. Numerous thunderstorms are expected ahead of the cold front today, some of which are expected to be severe, containing the potential for tornadoes, damaging straight line winds, large hail and flash flooding. The greatest risk for all of these hazards will be across the northern Mid-Atlantic region but the severe storm and flash flood threats will extend across a broad region covering the Upper Ohio/Tennessee valleys into the Southeast, Mid-Atlantic and Northeast. Thunderstorms are expected to develop in the early afternoon and increase in coverage at they move to the lee of the Appalachians later this afternoon and evening. Daytime heating is also expected to develop the potential for severe thunderstorms and flash flooding across the central High Plains with wind and hail being the primary threats, maximizing during the afternoon and evening hours. Across the Pacific Northwest, an approaching upper level disturbance will track over Washington and Oregon into the northern Great Basin over the next 24 hours. This system will aid in the development of diurnally driven convection, posing an elevated risk for flash flooding from northeastern Washington into the Idaho Panhandle and far northeastern Oregon where Flood Watches are in effect through late this evening. Drier conditions are expected across the Northwest for Tuesday. While another upper level disturbance will approach for Tuesday night, flash flooding and/or severe storms are not expected at this time. Across the South, dangerously hot daytime temperatures will again set up from the Desert Southwest into Texas, extending eastward along the Gulf Coast into portions of the Southeast and Florida today and Tuesday. Record high temperatures are expected to occur again from western Texas, eastward to the eastern Gulf Coast region with temperatures reaching from the upper 90s to middle 100s. Heat index values of 105 to 115 will be possible both today and Tuesday for these same locations and Excessive Heat Warnings or Heat Advisories are in place from the Desert Southwest to the Southeast, roughly from I-20 southward (locations east of Midland, TX), or near I-10 for locations across the Desert Southwest. In addition to the hot temperatures across the southern tier of the nation, there will continue to be an elevated fire weather risk across portions of the Four Corners states into Texas. Dry ground conditions, low relative humidities and gusty winds will continue to support the fire weather threat across these areas.

phone calls etc

Long, heartcrunchin’ phone call with Tammy yesterday, so necessary and so fucking horrifying. Families can save or wreck us, that’s for sure. Candles up for her and her mother, and those poor great-niblings whose mother passed from the scourge of drug addiction.

Lovely convo with Dave. His apartment plumbing problems continue; I was about to write ‘his plumbing problems continue’ but virtually everyone who reads this blog would have misinterpreted that one so I had to fix it. Poor guy had to listen to me bloviate about TB, he would have been in his rights to quietly disconnect the call at that point. But I had THINGS TO SAY about writing a romance where there is utterly no sex at all and no prospect of any.

Jeff has returned. Buster ignored him for thirty whole seconds and then indicated that me he, and what a typo lol, might just be a lot happier now that he’s home.

Zibethicus the billionaire muskrat has announced that he may have to have surgery before his cage fight with Mark Zuckerberg, so he’s obviously whiffing already. What a fucking putz.

I am still not okay with the end of S2 Good Omens. I feel like someone has been cruel to me.

Still loving Twisted Metal though.

I’ve actually put some laundry away already. Now to finish in the kitchen and make myself some breakfast and try to pretend that I am a CONTENT CREATOR gordammit.

Useful site. well no not really but

 

 

 

a quote about religion

this gem comes from Blind Lemming Chiffon

A definition of religion that no one will like: a collection of preconceptions, often rooted in folklore, that some people use as brain-spackle to fill in gaps in their knowledge.

This is cute:

a poster showing musical rhythms by the use of phrases whose rhythms correspond to the notes shown.

It was wonderful to have Alex. I am exhausted and we didn’t even really DO anything but I slept super crappy as he jumped around all night.

Now to launder and what not.

I’m finished Good Omens S2. I’ve seen cliffhangers before but this one is quite devastating and I’m going to be a while settling with it.

Wrote 635 words yesterday, again, mostly infill on part II – removing adjectives and adding/expanding description where it is helpful, correcting some timeline stuff, the usual.

alex is here

He’s asleep still. We went to bed late. We are having fun.

I wrote this in response to a tumblr post which I found evasive and self-serving, regarding climate change.

Gimuy Walubara Yidinji people have a dance. It’s at least 10000 years old. In the dance, the men are the water, coming up and coming up inexorably and washing over the shore. (The eastern shoreline of what is now called Australia was eroded by hundreds of metres every year for years as the water from the last glacial melt came up – they would have been losing territory and hunting and fishing lands and watching with horror). The ancestors of the dancers knew this was important cultural knowledge. I hope the light goes on with this; humans have always had ways of transmitting and absorbing info about climate change. Settlers as a rule don’t value it because it’s not a book, attested, or a podcast, or an internet post. It’s not peer reviewed science, as if keen observation were not the basis for all science ever.

Indigenous people should be better respected. They’re carrying culture for every human on earth, not just on the lands they defend.

gapped the demo

I must not have wanted to go all that much.

Still writing.

Have said farewell to Jeff, who has departed on his journey.

‘Regular’ fiction publishing continues to be a complete wasteland, wherein any profits to be recovered go to the richest people in the chain and the dregs go to the content creators. Better by far to maintain control of your creation and get nothing, in my view.

BEHOLD THE HORROR

Cover of a cookbook: The Microwave Fish Cookbook by Val Collins

Someone got this published, even though as far as workplaces and roommate situations go, its very existence is a violent crime.

My most popular bleat on Bluesky so far:

gentle reminder that every constraint applied to trans women is immediately and gleefully applied to cis women who don’t meet normative standards of appearance or dress. So all the hairy faced gals, all the bald gals, all the tall gals, all the gals with big hands or feet. Ain’t we all women

I’m about to write a really mushy affectionate scene for TB and it’s going to be amazing, I’ve been thinking about it for days.

*T&*^*( Buster just threw my laptop onto the floor.

He’s now wandering around the house and screaming for Jeff at the top of his lungs.

watching

Brief walk with Jeff yesterday morning, then a few limp attempts to write. Paul called and wanted to come and visit Buster “to beat him up”. The new medication is perking Paul up considerably and we had a simply lovely visit and I dealt with his toenails (poor man had a blood bruise on one toe and three others were recently smashed, so I guess him getting up to pee is actively hazardous) and washed his feet. We ate strawberry ice cream and drank iced tea and talked about Ruth and John’s upcoming visit and them borrowing the Echo.

When I came home I had 30$ of treats on me. LOL

Then I someone got a whole bunch of writing done and sent some to mOm.

And I talked to Mike on the phone. He’s maintaining – he was pulling his kayak out of Deer Lake to clean off the goo when I called him – but has zero interest in social gatherings. He mentioned that he has a spare camera if Keith wants to get into photography.

And I talked to mOm and pOp on the phone. The weather was fine and the pollen count low, which doesn’t mean much ’cause Jeff and I are sneezing like the dickens. Now to tornado the kitchen and get some cloathes in the wash.

There’s an ACORN demo tonight, I plan to go since it’s one bus ride away. Maybe I’ll coordinate with Keith if he’s going.

What we’re watching:

Twisted Metal: Answering the question, can you take a 20 year old legendary computer game and turn it into a TV show, with a resounding, unequivocal and extremely loud yes.

Rewatch of Justified, we’re early season II. Raylan you are a horndog. Winona you are a fucking idiot. And Dickie Bennett is the most cowardly stupid man who ever lived, until the next villain rolls up.

Coming up on the end of Medium. I cannot say enough good things about this show. It is so dazzlingly inventive with the tropes, formulae and story logic of modern television and so consistently well written (one bad show so far out of HOW MANY? IT RAN SEVEN SEASONS) that it is impossible to overstate how great it is. The child actors are so good they’re terrifying. They’re actors, not window dressing, professionals to the bone. Jake Weber as Joe is the superlative dad of all of modern TV in my view. There may be better ones, but I ain’t seen him yet. His representation of a world view of rationality (his job, most of daily life) and radical acceptance (all three of his daughters and his wife experience psychic phenomena) is a great accomplishment and he just surfs in the liminal waves of excellence for the entire show.

We’re into S4 of Law and Order. Christ, that’s a dark show. But I LOVE LENNY.

And life proceeds. I get Alex this weekend for a night. Happy sigh.

I got a new credit card (replacing old one) and it actually WORKS. I am so happy.

I need to check that I’m going to get my pension money starting in November but I’ve already done enough paperwork for today so this is a tomorrow problem. And of course I can at that point give M&P their ‘glad newis’ that they can reduce their stipend to me and start applying it to the kids instead!

My blood pressure and Paul’s blood pressure were PERFECT and within one point of each other yesterday. That was hilarious since it never happens, but it def. sounds like Paul’s finally got his BP under control.

Me reacting to twitter imploding

more server notes

Previously, we announced that on Wednesday, August 2nd, our server admins would begin restarting some VPS servers as part of a maintenance to improve stability of your VPS service. This is still the case, however due to an additional issue that requires the host machine’s BIOS to be upgraded as well, our original service disruption estimate has been increased. We now expect the disruption to your service to last for about 45-60 minutes on average.

The full maintenance process is scheduled to begin at 7:30AM PST and is expected to last for approximately 8 hours.

listography

First, some housekeeping for the site:

On Wednesday, August 2nd, our server admins will begin restarting some VPS servers as part of a maintenance to improve stability of your VPS service. This will cause minor disruptions to your site, which is expected to last for about 10-15 minutes on average.

The maintenance process is scheduled to begin at 7:30AM PST and is expected to last for approximately 8 hours.

Weather continues fine and not too hot. Osoyoos is under less pressure.

Feasted brO with chicken and ribs from Earls, got him croissants from Cobs, and encouraged Suzanne to bring him an Aero bar (she brought him a pack, reserving one for herself!) and then Suzanne came over to collect a garment and a ring she’d forgotten, and we had iced tea on the deck and a good old chinwag for her to decompress after caring for Ryker all day (he was an ambulatory demon who fights diaper changes with all of his considerable strength.)

Spare a thought for baby Ryker who has: lost a two day a week caregiver, has to move to four new locations because his dad’s moved out from his caregiver – his mom, with whom he is now apparently at daggers drawn. Suzanne will still be looking after him but she’s got scant days to get her apartment fit for a toddler and he’ll be moving into a one bedroom apartment after having a four bedroom to literally run around in.

Walked with Paul in Foreshore Park. His Parkinson’s symptoms are bad; one of the possible triggers is TCE (trichloroethylene) and of course over the course of his career fixing things he’s been exposed to enough of that stuff to hurt him especially as TCE is often stabilized with MEK, methyl ethyl ketone, both together being used as degreasers and both being godawful toxic substances.

He’s started the Aricept, and good God, is my heart torn. He’s not feeling a diminution of his dementia symptoms, but he is feeling insight, for the first time in months, into his disease, and it was all I could to stay present with him, and not feed my grief into the conversation, because he’s got enough of his own. I loved him so much – no one can ever know how I felt about him, especially after the kids arrived – and now I have to choke it down to be his friend. He is feeling disoriented and (after I gave him plenty of silence to compose his thoughts) he said he’s finding it harder and harder to follow conversations. His ready smile is gone. He’s still got a sense of humour and deploys it, 95% of the time with kind accuracy, but you really have to listen because his voice is starting to whisper and the Parkinsons makes his face a mask.

He walks around the seniors residence twice a day. He wishes he had a microwave so he could make himself breakfast, oatmeal is what he wants, but he faithfully turns up for their excellent meals. We’ll try to deal with it this week.

He ran a couple of errands by himself yesterday – I could have gone with him but I stayed in the car or ran other errands – successfully, and walked as much he could in the park. I was having a hard time because I can’t dawdle, I have to walk with purpose or everything hurts. And he’s slower than he’s ever been so I am less inclined to walk with him because I’m practically keeling over if I have to move that slow.

We saw a yard long valley garter snake, just shed its skin from the incredible glossy scales, sunning next to the bridge, paces from where I saw the vole. I also got to watch a heron scratching itself on the neck for TWENTY SECONDS. Much relaxation and feather shuffling afterwards  – that was viewed from the observation deck on the river. Paul got to see it too.

And he got lost and turned around on the way back. And he didn’t recognize me until I got within about five metres. It’s not a cruel disease process because diseases just are, in our DNA or in our response to our environment, but it impacts like torture for the sufferers. Fifteen minutes later he managed a bathroom visit and two errands by himself. I want him to be as independent as possible but Christ I worry.

This is a hundred million yo crab in amber.

100 million year old crab in amber, four different views