Last big day of a very long month, including appointments with psyche guy and a surgeon follow up after PT and checking on a tiny little guy in his own very giant surgery, and I wake up in the night with pink eye...
Thank goodness I know what to do. I am a paragon of sterile fields and not touching anything. This is where I wish I had a pretty handkerchief to hold, like ladies used to in the old days. People see me holding a kleenex will think there's a booger on it. Wish I'd been a paragon yesterday. It's super tree season, I'm sure I rubbed my eye at some point somewhere between the chewable benadryls and the chiropractor and bank and tax guy and Walmart.
Sorry, got lost in the weirdest cat memes ever. That's right, you didn't know I was actually gone. Anyway, I couldn't choose just one and probably went about 300 deep, so it's going to be one of those days. Like Pinky brain with pink eye. Anyway, I stopped at this one. I come from these people and I'm the one who's strange with brown hair and brown eyes. However, I still sunburn faster than anyone I know, and yes, I'm a magnet for pink eye. I grew up with Hereford cattle, they get pink eye really bad, too. Dad always thought white faced cattle have weaker eyes. No idea if there really is a connection, but he worked on a cattle ranch in Gunnison and knows a LOT about cattle. And he also never got pink eye while the rest of us went down in flames. He came from the blond hair blue eyed people, but his beard was red. But I severely digress. I need more coffee.
I spent a delightful hour in a huge crack in multiplayer a couple of days ago. I might turn it into a dwarf mine like in LOTR and the Hobbit movies. It's developing stair cases and little highways and I'm getting tons of gold and emeralds, even ran into a few little diamond veins. Redstone and coal all over the place. A werewolf I'd pushed over the edge before I went down finally got me at the bottom, but I respawned and /back so fast that I got ALL my stuff back, and then I found him later in human form and vented all my wrath. I love the way they wimp around yelling "Hey, you're hurting me!" before they die. I almost feel like I need a special chest to put all their little wooden tools in, like trophies. Yesterday I started tunneling under an ocean. I'm going to see how far I can go.
Noticed somebody left the door open at the store... Hope nobody wandered around long enough to find a way into our house and take anything. I'm a little OCD about doors. I've nearly been killed in the store AND in the house a few times by some really crazy looking mobs, bcuz MoCreatures.
I'm starting to suspect that Kai lives for the surprises, life always on the edge, a sort of carefree YOL9, as a cat meme would say. I see only one YOL12, but they used Ten for it. Eleven approves...
I don't know if Dwight has ever played minecraft, but some of you have designed skins for him. Go you guys. I'm continually cheered up by other people who obsessively obsess about obsessing more than I ever have.
Scott's already using his sleeves to turn doorknobs just to get out of here and go to work. I bet he didn't think about touching the coffee pot handle MWAHAHAHAHAHA. >=D I wonder if he would believe me tomorrow if I tell him the eye doctor says we'll have to amputate my eye bcuz bad stuff. You know, April Fool's Day. I bet I got this from that stupid werewolf. Those guys never wash their hands. And you never know, maybe I just got a little redstone dust in my eye.
Wow, I haven't had a free association day in a long time. I'm out of practice. I used to love those.
Ok, leaving the house in a little bit, need a jam to pull my brain together around this ooze.
I wasn't done with this yet, for the person who saw it accidentally publish while I was trying to publish a minecraft post. Sorry, lol.
#TrumpIn3Words He's no Reagan
I've been carrying a bugout bag everywhere I go for so long I can't remember not having one. I grew up under the supervision of a man born to world class survivalists. Not the 'cray' kind you hear about stockpiling, but the real kind who dodged wars and more wars over the Prussian borders being moved around, stuff like that. Way back kind of stuff.
Back in 2008, big pharma policies started changing, drug companies started getting 'audited' and frozen over 'grandfather' class drugs and a couple other meds, and I watched cries go up on the internet about doctors' hands being tied over head meds suddenly being unavailable. Patients across the nation were suddenly bumped off serious meds that you do NOT cold turkey off of. Being on the edge of insurance 'fraud' myself (seriously, a loophole my former rep didn't catch transitioning me toward disability nearly got me sued), I realized that I could easily find myself thrown out in the cold with serious withdrawal problems on top of severe pain from chronic illness problems taking me down. I thought it through and made a plan to become less dependent on big pharma and more independent through a revised healthier lifestyle. Much of this is documented on Bluejacky.
I called Ferguson about 15 years ago. I was in deep discussion with a naysayer at work in a breakroom when I said, "Just watch, it'll start in Missouri." We were discussing the necessary installment of military force on our own soil, how one could successfully establish martial law.
I'm neither for nor against this, and I'll tell you why.
There is no left or right. Everything is progressing exactly the way it's supposed to and has been for many years. We are watching a game being played out on a world chess board that's been going on for at least a thousand years and maybe much longer. It's not about liberalism and conservatism. It's not about human rights and the ecosystem. It's about winning the whole world.
Some people don't like this game and keep refusing to take sides. Can hardly blame Putin, he's actually been pretty bold standing up to all this. The Vatican is practically being held hostage and people don't even see it. Just another piece on the board, playing along.
The bombings tell the story. Some are planted fakes, some are real, most of them are just a distraction. It's all subtext. Pop music and bombings are like a sort of morse code going back and forth from the real players we never see. And you'll never see them. Not on the news, not anywhere.
The news is like that, too. How quickly we forget Orwell. Did you know C.S. Lewis actually spelled out how the news would be taken over way back in the 40s? That Hideous Strength It's part of the Space Trilogy.
I've been saying for a few years that entertainment heavily leaning toward mass extinction and hysteria feels like it's preparing us for occupation. We're so distracted with stuff we don't realize we're already slowly being occupied. Some people freak out about citizen control, but like I said, I think it's a necessary step in the growing pains toward the future. After all, I don't want to the wrong player to win the world game.
Over 2000 of us in Missouri voted for Huckabee in the presidential primaries. You don't see that because he wasn't running, but his name was on the 2016 ballot. Missouri primary election results I seriously don't believe my vote ever changes anything, because electoral colleges wiped out the idea that one person can make a difference, but I can still use the ballot to send a message. We know this is a game, and we know this is just a cover for the scripted news for 'seems legit' to the viewers.
I'm not worried. Orwell said the proles wouldn't be affected. Lay low and let it pass over. People bluffing that they'll move to another country if so and so is elected, don't be stupid. This is a world game, and all the places are already saturated with it.
It's good to be ready for stuff anyway, right? Hurricanes, wildfires, grids and satellites because dirty bombs or asteroids or whatevs.
Play smart. Even if nothing bad ever happens, at least you'll live a sensible life instead of whining about stuff. The politics on your TV might be more connected to the move into designer head meds than you can imagine. What do you think the long slow war over legalizing pot is all about?
Y'all know my hate relationship with ladybugs, right? I'll link a few quotes back. Keep in mind these are only partial grabs from sometimes extensive lengthy observations about ladybug behaviors that include pix and more linx.
Wo. Clearly this 'infestation' is a horrible way of life for me since it goes back many years, probably because I live on the edge of a state forest. Anyway, my point is that ladybugs are supposed to be cute and represent all that is good in the world, and they're even called love bugs.
Love bugs. Two incongruous words that really don't go together. Perhaps the love bug thing was borne of a long ago folk tale making up fun ways to get through another idiotic ladybug infestation.
K, just so's you know where I'm going with this.
I currently have 37 posts tagged 'twitter' on Pinky blog. Well, this one will make 38, so if you click that it will look like it goes back to this post, but all the rest drop into line right under it. I love twitter. I love the whole direct braining thing without all the messy in between stuff. I love seeing what's in other people's heads. I especially love the whole in the moment thing, and the way we can look back at single thoughts trapped in the amber of timestamping. My very favorite part is how awesomely witty people are on the fly in 140 characters or less, especially when they sync up during live tweeting TV shows and other events.
Twitter also has its drags. We live in a bifurcated twitter world- On the one hand, everyone wants to look cool with follower numbers because that denotes power and popularity, even though we all know half the accounts are dead or bots or spam. On the other hand, everyone wants the bugs to stop tagging and tagging and tagging and tagging and retweeting and tagging like omg do these people have no life... And then if you say anything they blow up and cry and sometimes they throw things or call you psycho, and then they tag you even harder and more and omg they really don't have a life...
Because that's what bugs do, isn't it? They bug you. And quite often they do it out of what they see as love. Love bugs.
That's not really a bad thing, is it? All that bug has to do is quip "I love you" in a tweet and that's supposed to cover it.
So here's the real stuff now, ONE example of the stuff I never said when it was actually happening.
One time someone buzzed my notifications apart with a retweeting blitz that lasted nearly ten minutes while I was waiting on a very important phone call back about something very distressing. It was all I could do to get a tweet out edgewise and say I needed it to stop because it was grinding that phone at the time to a very literal locked up standstill, and not only was I laughed back at on twitter, but it got worse before it finally stopped. I never shared publicly what the distress was. I'll share now that I was afraid and waiting to hear back whether someone was going to die because of stuff happening, and I was barely holding it together when the blitz happened. But all in good fun, right?
There have been other times my phone has been overloaded with twitter blitzes between my entire timeline being retweeted going back 3 days all at once or a slew of incoming private messages freaking out about something or someone, to the point where my own family couldn't get important texts through during critical situations. Again, older tech and not enough app control and I was dealing with phone freeze waiting to hear if my kid had been injured in a car accident because another person I barely knew in real life either thought it was funny to blitz me or thought I was the one to hang onto during a meltdown. Again, I never told anyone. I was cool about it and kept it private.
The point is that all it took was one person to do this. Now imagine more prominent people figuring out how to deal with this kind of stuff on a more massive scale.
I didn't realize Anne Wheaton had locked her twitter account. A Little Clarity It's ok, followers are still in there. Really cool to see her working directly with twitter on a few ideas. You guys saw my Pond of Death stuff before I pulled most of it back into draft land. I was thrilled to see that my own bugs aren't among her followers.
Not everyone who uses twitter apps on phones have got their tech set up for emergency preparedness, and my older phone especially didn't have that sort of capability, and then trying to get a tweet out edgewise to someone to stop blitzing my tech long enough to do something vital on it sometimes blew things up worse. All it took was one person having some snarky fun tagging and retweeting the hell out of my timeline to send me into overload during a very real crisis. I can't even imagine being a celebrity with hundreds of people doing that.
I was furious, and spent the next several days evaluating what that kind of friend really means when they say "I love you" after they acknowledge that they know they're torturing you with a "look at me" blitz, trying my best to figure out why their "I love you" tweet afterward didn't seem to equate to actually caring for real what was going on between us. And that was only one person. Add a few more in there, like the night 5 different people I barely know 'urgently' private messaged me for 2 hours about whatever was hanging up their evening while I was texting with an actual person I know and love in real life who was critically near a self harm or suicidal tipping point. Is it any wonder I started cutting people off? And then attempting to reason inspired "I love you" to turn into calling me a psycho real fast in one instance. Part of our twitter experience is how much we allow ourselves to be accessed by other people. Once I realized I was allowing people that much control over me, I had to learn how to disallow it and still keep the kind of control I wanted over my own twitter account. I've spent the better part of the last 3 months weeding out the crap in my twitter just so I can actually see what's going on there, and I was meticulously organized in the first place, and I'm a speed reader to boot.
If I put the kind of energy into tag tweeting that some people on twitter do, I'd own the world by now. I wouldn't stop at saying hi to every single friend for every single ocassion, like holidays and weekends and lunch time and whatevs (I love my gangs, don't stop saying hi to me), or stop at tweeting my fave celebs 20 or 30 times a day (a couple of you really need to cut that out, though), NO... I would experiment with cray stuffs like weird tag combos with random blurts for no reason (srsly not funny random #FF tagging me with Donald Trump, even if you're in love with him) (yes, that happened) (you guys wouldn't believe some of the group tags I wind up in), or a whole day of hundreds of Iloveanimalssavetheworld tweets with every trending hashtag, or -what. They're already doing that? Srsly? #facepalm
You know you've hit minor celebrity status when people tag you sometimes 50-100 times a day all day long for weeks/months/whatthehellYEARS and then feel destroyed or pissed when you try to get them to stop, or they create new accounts and pretend to be other people to keep following you. I've been doing this since 1994. LinkedIn is still trying to get me to connect with people I knew way back in the Xena days. I have been in and out of public fandom so many times for so long, and I still max out on tag tweeting from only a handful of people, so I totally get how someone way more prominent than me would max out, too.
I've tried everything. For awhile it was lists, which work really well until I realized I'd put hours of my life into something that's supposed to be making life easier. Then I tried muting, which only works on the main incoming feed because it ignores list feeds. I know from long experience that blocking generally only inspires more stalking, so I very rarely block any more. I learned how to turn general notifications off on my new phone, but keep mobile notifications on for certain people, and now I have a do not disturb option on my phone so I can turn those sounds off, too, like when I'm at an appointment but still need to keep my phone on for something important (bless you Samsung Galaxy 6). It's a wild balancing act, one that a lot of people wouldn't tolerate for very long, and wouldn't think is funny if it were turned back on them. But more than anything, it's about stressful loads of guilt for me for hurting other people's feelings because we just aren't made to be spread so thin. These click to good articles.
My general rule of thumb that I'm developing is that no one else dictates how I handle my social medias, especially twitter. Part of my recent transition away from twitter while still retaining an active account and not disappearing was about getting away from a few love bugs who've been dragging me around like a teddy bear through their feeds until my name has become so synonymous with theirs that it was actually hurting my reputation. I have a reputation. Several people who know me from earlier fandoms have been reminding me of this. There is waaaaayyyyy more to me than simply being a twitter presence. My end game is not twitter. Twitter is not the goal. Twitter is a useful vehicle for my overall goals, and a really nice side effect is enjoying some real people I've come to appreciate being part of my life. For some people, twitter is the ride they'll never get off, and I'm cool with that. I love twitter, it really is the awesomest thing since they invented ice cream. But sometimes it can be like ice cream full of ladybugs...
Final word- I am really glad Anne has the kind of klout that has the twitter police hustling to find a way to keep her on board. The world needs more people like Anne Wheaton.
Aaaaand statcounter went to sleep on Pinky blog on the 25th. That's actually pretty funny. You guys don't know why. Anyway, while I broke through 51,000 over Easter weekend, statcounter is swearing I've had zero visitors. I'm pretty sure it's related to a blogger update and I've got to go reinsert the code now. I'm still too lazy to go fix it. I'm such a tracker slacker nowadays.
Taking a puddlejumper out for a spin, like you do. You guys remember Stargate Atlantis? I feel like I'm mapping terrain on an alien planet, making notes of interest for later. And this planet really does have baddies, much like wraith. I'll have to be careful while I'm discovering an amazing civilization here. Kai says I can upload a singleplayer world to share when I get it the way I want. I might do that. May be awhile, though, still just getting through this last hectic week before I have room to breathe.
I spent several hours typing real words yesterday and now my hands ache again. That is work. Doing my Seradge exercises helps a LOT after all that ASTYM. Today was my last day of occupational therapy on arms and hands. I assessed out at about the same strength level, but my pain level has gone down dramatically. Thursday I follow up with the surgeon and see where I'm at. I'm hoping I go back into therapy for neck/shoulder/back/arm sometime later this spring, as per my neurologist. I saw someone go through shoulder replacement, I do NOT want to ever go there.
Here is the next morning for context on the very short bars because it looks like nothing else is happening.
And I finally figured out it was this.
Of course, that number is nearly 20,000 now, thanx to @kenjeong retweeting me. We've been watching Dr. Ken religiously.
This next is a random thought that popped into my head earlier this morning.
I think a lot of people have the idea that confidence is what inspires us to do something, and that having your confidence shattered makes it impossible to get it done. I've found the opposite to be true. I have no confidence at all and just do stuff anyway expecting it to go wrong or something because it seems like everything always does. I'm going to quote myself from confidence-
There is no such thing as confidence. I've never been confident. I'm not blogging because I feel confident. I hit that publish button and cringe every. single. time. I have learned that it doesn't kill me. Yeah, I still have a few panic attacks, once in awhile one will last a couple of hours and you don't see me being cartoony around my house, but I believe this is important. We are all important. I believe that feeling confident is a lack of feeling something else, just like my lack of stage fright due to an extreme lack of self awareness because I'm a little deeper on the Asperger's spectrum cannot be called confidence.
I think oversharing is a cool thing. It's about time we told each other what's really in our heads. If people want to read it, fine. If they don't, they can click to something else. It's your blog. Do what you want on your own blog within reasonable legal limits.
I have recently migrated into a 'safe spot' where I can have private support without it turning into a public debacle. I have relaxed so much. Relaxing isn't the same thing as gaining confidence, and it has nothing to do with getting confidence back. It doesn't take much to shatter confidence, even if you're at the top of your game, and it doesn't take much to find confidence, because it's easily manufactured in the form of chemicals going into our brains.
This part is different now. Pay attention.
I am confident in other people being more capable than they think they are, and being more in tune to what's going on around me than I am.
Pay attention again, here's where it gets good. Being confident in other people being capable and more in tune doesn't mean they really are.
And here's the clincher.
But as incapable and out of tune as I feel myself to be, look how far I've come.
I kind of failed theorems and proofs in high school and sucked at logic in college, but I'm pretty sure I just conquered it right there.
Modernized a cliff dwelling. I've walked around the Manitou cliff dwellings in real life, still use a locally hand woven wool blanket I bought in the museum gift shop. That was a very long time ago, though, before they had it all set up like this for tourists. I'm sure it's even cooler now. It didn't have sidewalks and railings like they show in the pictures now, we had to hike up to where they were.
I need to go do stuff. I want you guys to remember though, like she says, we were all born to be here. It's not about being brave first. It's about doing it anyway.
I've taken the it's not you it's me stance on Pinky blog for a very long time. I've tried to own #allthethings about who I am, how I came to be who I am, and how I handle my life now. That being said, once in awhile I've had to step up and face that ugly it's not me it's you problem and deal with a couple of bugs.
I've said in past posts that I'm a very poor judge of character because my Asperger's is so bad, and therefore sometimes wind up in some questionable situations with even more questionable people, or sometimes what seem like nice people but wearing layers of masks and me feeling lucky I have a friend because I have felt so bereft of people in my life. Even aspies need real relationships. Friends. But at what cost? It's one thing to still feel insecure and confused, unable or unwilling to trust people after going through a string of abusive or wildly unbalanced friendships, it's another to find out I have a backup army of friends who've been there all along but I'm so blind with social deficit that I remain unaware.
I'm in a really good place now. I have a coterie of friends coaching me, and I'm discovering that some of the things I have been through aren't unique to me at all. There are others also being hoodwinked and used like I was, not necessarily because we are so deficit and needy, but because there really are a few who are so domineering and buttinsky and destructive under a guise of love and caring.
I have shared a lot of credit throughout my writings, even when I didn't need to. I've made the executive decision to unlink and disavow a couple of those connections because they only lead others into stumbling through what I stumbled through. I will no longer support a particular international internet magazine and, very particularly, one of its contributors.
this is who I do support- my own stuff and my own fandom
This is not an easy task. I'm not doing it out of hate or vengeance. I'm doing it because it's the right thing to do in a world where some people walk on the backs of others and rip off their work. I'm doing it because I have other friends I may have inadvertently led into emotional messes because I mixed up trying to have a very public friendship with a person who plays dirty for 'professional' gain. Since many of my friends produce content, this is a problem. I deeply apologize for being a synergistic force for someone who takes emotional advantage of others for public gain.
Just to recap- When I met this person, I had the bigger follower number. We talked privately about how to grow more followers on twitter with a couple of tag tweet games, and it wasn't long before this person outgrew me because I am really good at link sharing and driving traffic to other people. I have proof of that in stats, especially at SyfyDesigns. As time passed, it became obvious this person was growing numbers on other people's content using my social media gaming techniques until it turned into a power trip. It no longer mattered that the organically grown followers were spammers, porn, dead accounts, and hijacking other people's follower lists (all of which I personally steer clear of), all that mattered was the big number still growing. And once the power trip started, it was parleyed into block parties, spy rings, and group bombings, some of them not at all subtle. I was naive enough to keep falling for every bit of the depression gimmick played at me, and a big enough sucker to remain supportive even when I began to suspect and doubt and feel used and played.
And now I'm watching other people go through all the same steps I did with that relationship. Like I said, it's all very public. I wasn't lying when I said that was the most public friendship I've ever gone through, and I also wasn't lying when I said the world was watching. I lightly mentioned some time ago that an actual celebrity contacted me privately and got after me for neglecting a world fandom I represent and write for while my head was spinning through the emotional carnival that friendship dragged me through.
Guys, when a celebrity contacts you personally and asks why you're not doing your stuff, it's bad.
I've learned from past Lexxperience to keep the drama to a minimum in public, but I felt this public apology was necessary. I'm not sure this person understood just how 'famous' I am, but yeah. I got used. Oh, by the way, it wasn't a Lexx fan. Pretending to be a Lexx fan on the side in passing doesn't make a person a Lexx fan. And another by the way, this is actually affecting readers in other countries. This person I'm talking about is way more famous now in a very bad way than what they ever intended to be. That's what happens when you play head games with a major player in a world fandom. You're welcome.
Just leaving this here- a number of people have contacted me about this person, and are privately very happy that I've walked away.
Another Easter eve, and my house is quiet while the rowdy fun starts in other places. I'm a little relieved. Flipping through facebook, seeing a lot of Ishtar reminders going around. I think we know. But it's ok. We have #bencongruity saving us. Click for Cumberbunnies.
One more week that includes 5 appointments (one is Bunny's) and a big ol' surgery on a tiny little guy I haven't met yet but I've seen his picture a lot. (Not one of mine, but iz family stuff, so yeah.)
I generally don't allow the room to feel sorry for myself, but this week I've been missing pasta and tylenol. I've been eating extra chocolate chips to make up for it.
Khanbunny. Clicks to a whole feed of pix. Don't ask why, just do it.
I was actually searching "pink cumberbunny", and it's got some crazy nonrelated stuff popping up. I'm going to share. All these pix click to sources.
Crocheted food headwear. I really like the spaghetti and meatballs one.
THIS IS NOT A CUMBERBUNNY. But it's weird and it's Johnny. I'll take it. Oddly, it clicks to an article on Cumberbunnies, BUT on the side there was another feature article about Johnny Depp's head mold being used in The Walking Dead. You're welcome.
Srsly. In a 'pink cumberbunny' search, and even more strangely than the last link, this one goes to a blog review of the Hobbit trilogy. You guys think I'm obsessed with stuff, I'm nothing compared to some of the bloggers I run across.
Last one, I promise. And yes, the link is just as vague, but the overall experience there is you probably not coming back here. I mean, *I* nearly didn't, so I could hardly blame you.
These are the Easter eggs I want. Super spoiler warning if you haven't yet seen The Abominable Bride.
I'm not the first to coin that word because here it is on twitter. However, I never knew that and I just woke up from a dream with that word in it. The dream also had Van Halen, minecraft, and a crazy weird accident that ripped a guy's teeth out. I think the smash going on in my head was the joy of discovery (Magellan) and the chaos of destruction (Armageddon), set to song and in vivid color and as about as close as you can get to visual of a cross between Snow White's whistle while you build in the minecraft forest and a nasty accident with a bunch of quarry trucks maiming some of the workers. The song was called Armagellan. And of course the admins tried to ban Van Halen from minecraft, and lawyers were able to keep the boyz in minecraft with stipulations and exceptions, but it was all ok because I had ripped their coolest video before it got banned. And then I woke up with The Band Got Banned phrases in my head.
yes, srsly, click
Ah, the coffee is done. We are saved.
So I made the mistake of buying a chunk of aged sharp provolone from a local world import shop this last week. I love aged cheeses, but I've never been around aged provolone. It has a funky smell, like a cross between a teenager's old gym socks and the way puke smells when you've eaten spaghetti. Scott immediately spit it out when he tried it. I can't eat it straight, so I thought I'd try it on nachos. I got those cup shaped Tostitos, put a little chunk of mild Italian sausage in each one, grated a little of the aged provolone over it, and then sprinkled a dash of colby/jack over that just in case, nuked it for a few seconds, and it was palatable. Not exactly delightful, but went down ok. But ever since the quick nuke to melt the cheese, my entire house has smelled like that funky gym sox/puke combo, and it was definitely *delightful* waking up to that this morning. Hufda.
This would be a great song to set to a minecraft fractals smash.
Journaling another POV is a whole other discipline. It's different from just writing another POV. Yeah, talking about Starrstrukk. There's a sad part coming.
Several recent things conspired neatly in my head and whadayaknow, suddenly it was clicking with something else I was thinking, and I couldn't sleep until nearly 2 a.m. last night because it was all so busy in there. It didn't even wait for me to start dreaming last night. It kinda started with rereading a friend's older post on dimensions (string theory stuff), then seeing Sean Carroll's tweet about his book, and the communication POV problem I'm wrestling with presenting in my book, then my head was all like You forgot the minecraft part, and *click*click*click* there it all went. In MY book I'll be taking Sean's stuff to the next level with using symbolism as a synesthete with an autism spectrum brain. Yes, I've also been wildly ducking off highways into parking lots to write notes on the car all week. Srsly gripped with this idea I'm word constructing.
click to check it out
Word rasslin'. The goal is to effectively communicate from my brain to yours what it's really like living in my brain in as elegantly few words as possible, you know, bcuz ur kidz haz autistik thots & u wonder wut's in their little noggins. And that suddenly reminds me I never got back to the correspondences. Sorry guys, got Bunny bombed and stuff. You're on the list.
It was really cute, after she got up from her nap, she was sitting on my lap munching while we watched the vids I got of her, and when we got to this one her eyes got big, and I said, "Boy, you sure got mad at Meemaw", and she said kinda quietly, "Yeah, I was real mad." It was so cute how surprised she was to see herself like that. And this is where it all begins for me, like I tell my psyche guy all the time- I had no alt-POV tools in my head for many years. I wasn't able to picture my own self and behavior, much less understand what others saw and thought, until well into grade school. #autismspectrum So Bunny- who's not autism spectrum, quite the opposite, very social and aware- is leading me through my childhood again, through the relationships I never developed. I didn't have relationships, just shared existences with other people, even my own mother. About the only person I felt an emotional connection to for many years was my first sister down. But here we go, that point of view thing. Imagine a 2 1/2 year old seeing herself like this and her brain tacking it into her growing social map. It was as magical for me as it was her.
I wrote a short observation called our selves in 2008 about how self awareness changes who we are and burdens us with the notion of self worth. I think society nowadays is so oppressive with self awareness overload that we'll be needing to evolve a new way of looking at it to survive the next growth step in our group psychological health. That is what I'm working on. And yes, minecraft and physics help.
This lends a whole new perspective to 'box canyon' and 'thinking outside of the box'.
I finally have a day off (won't have another one until April 1st, keeping my fingers crossed), and @bonenado has a septic guy coming out, so I can't shut everything off and go back to bed until he's come and gone. I got a couple hours sleep yesterday afternoon and about 3 hours last night, so that's how we roll today. Was planning on getting stuff uploaded through the night, but lightning kept me off the tech, so today already feels like catching up through sticky tar because my head is so full of stuff that needs doing. So I need a boost off here.
Big breakthrough on the arms and hands thing yesterday, yay! I was able to hold my phone watching TV last night, yay! I was texting and skyping and tweeting, yay!
pic clicks to an awesome article about sleuth tweeting under political duress
I was told I maxed out on the ASTYM, so we switched to a nerve gloss muscle stretch combo that worked so well that my pain level went down dramatically. I'm going to keep doing it through the week and see where I'm at Friday. I was unable to do those when we began. Because of the ASTYM, I'm able to go through all the steps now to keep relieving pressure on all the nerves.
my fave yoga cat ever
click it to go pin it
I still have a little bit of ache in my hands, but my left elbow isn't bugging me this morning. I have lived with that for so many years, I can't even tell ya. If that ache comes back, I've decided I'll go ahead and try a cortisone shot next and see if that helps.
While I keep waiting, may as well step off with an oldie but goodie. I'll keep this in my head at the dentist. It's just a cleaning, but I get anxiety because stupid reactions to so many things. So far the blue gloves and the mint cleaning stuff have never triggered me, but I go in doped up on zyrtec and benadryl anyway. I once left a cleaning with my throat puffing up, no telling what from, so you can imagine the utter anxiety I go through just over that. Our super tree season is starting early, anything could go wrong for the next 6 weeks. *keeping my mind on how glossy actors keep their teeth* (when I'm alone with my demons- pain spikes, PTSD, and anxiety attacks) (I just shrunk everything in my editor to minus a million microfont by accidentally holding control for something instead of shift. This is going to be a fun day.) (Way too many shortcuts built into this keyboard.)
experimenting with piles of leaves as a way to hide from mobs at night
My brain is really grabbing onto minecraft. It saturates my dreams now. I just woke up from one where I was standing in a mall. I had been watching a little girl try to push through the glass in a display window to get to something that she wanted on the other side. Of course the glass didn't budge and she was very frustrated. My first thought watching her was that we automatically think as children that we can move the blocks in our way, like minecraft. I got my phone out and started filming her, and I narrated these words.
"I believe our souls come from a place where manipulating space and time and matter was very different. When we come here, we learn to slow down and have patience so we can see each other."
And then I woke up and came screaming out of bed to write that down before it got lost.
I am very tired. I have three more days of occupational therapy on my arms and hands before I see the surgeon again at the end of the month. The pain has been bad enough to keep me feeling a little nauseated nearly this whole month, and it has become abundantly clear that I'm going to eventually lose all the function in my arms like my mom did. She was 69 when she passed. I watched her lose all that function over about ten years, and by the end her hands had locked into immovable fists. I know by my 40th birthday she was right side deficit from a stroke, which was 8 years before she passed. I've been told my entire adult life I'm too young for all the pain and problems I've had to overcome (since my 20's), and I can tell some of where I'm heading might be at a faster pace than my mom went. We thought all her deficit and loss was from strokes, but I've got plenty of indication I won't need to have a single stroke to wind up in the kind of muscle freeze she did.
That little girl was me. My entire life has been about learning patience, and seeing past the frustration to the souls beyond the communication walls. Our emotions get in the way far too much. Emotions are good for letting us know a problem needs solving, but first we have to learn to sort our emotions out so that we can go on to solve the problems. The biggest thing I've learned as aspie married to ADHD and raising someone else's child with a very different brain style than mine is that there is nothing on this earth except myself preventing me from becoming a kind person. The whole thing, the whole point of being here, is about learning how to slow down and be kind. It's very hard to be kind when frustration keeps rearing its ugly head. I see it all around me on the medias and when I get around other people. Everyone is frustrated. We all think we have to be some place and do something and forget that doesn't supersede learning how to be good people. We're mean to each other, some even to their own families and kids. Some are so off track that they use other people without love at all, and human trafficking is deeply entrenched in the world around us until its invisible and acceptable and part of everything we do without even realizing it.
We come here to learn something. We leave here with nothing but what we've learned. During our occupation here we move a whole lot of little blocks around- blocks of time, blocks of money, blocks of housing and food and entertainment, and even literal blocks of earth and mountains and water and manufacturing and built up wealth, just like in minecraft.
And lest anyone mock minecraft, 30 years ago it was pixelated ping pong on a very simple screen, and I remember people being pretty glued to it.
On a side note, I also think a lot about the physics of the minecraft world. I know it's just coding built into 'blocks' and everything in the minecraft world is about codes interacting (wow, kinda looking at the real world in a new way, everything is just codes interacting...), but there is a different sort of physics there. Physics are just sets of rules. Water in minecraft is counterintuitive to water here, so filling up a pool was interesting. We can't just anchor water to a block in real life, and it smooths itself out here. In minecraft you can have blocks of water flowing in all directions for no reason (that you know of), and it actually kills fish. I killed a few fish before I figured out how to turn off the flow in all the blocks.
I think staggering around as I'm getting hit by arrows is about as realistic as it gets. I have to organize my thoughts into action under duress, just like real life, running, ducking behind trees and blocks, aiming my own bow, charging with my sword against more incoming arrows. My favorite is when a whole group comes after me and they all wind up dead because they accidentally kill each other in process, all I have to do is charge in and start flailing my sword, and next thing you know, there's zombie flesh and skeleton bones and creeper flint just laying around. It's way better than watching TV. I've been fantastically burned out on TV this last year.
Ok, focus. Plan. This week is 2 physical therapies, a chiropractor, and a teeth cleaning. Next week is a physical therapy, a chiropractor, a Bunny day, and the very last big day of March is psyche guy and the surgeon follow up and a really big surgery on a baby in the family, so that's a full day in town and lots of seeing people. I'm hoping to at least go hug the mama.
April will hopefully be a month off. March has been so busy and overwhelming that I'm barely able to think. I think this is the longest twitter break I've ever taken, barely even touching base there. Behind the scenes I've actually got several things going. I need to respond to a couple of correspondences about a couple of projects, and maybe start a follow up correspondence about a suggested project, and I got permission for something on another project. And it's time to get my money organized again because it won't be long until other projects need paying for.
OH, ha, forgot all about this. I got into my google web tools page for a few minutes yesterday, because I hadn't in so long until recently, thought I'd take a good look around to make sure everything was ok, right? This is the list of search bar phrases that has popped Pinky blog up over the last 7 days. I'm loving the 'shark attack' and 'practice my stabbing' and 'magic jurassic blitz', but I think my top fave is 'puzzles and dragons and egg farming'.
No security issues with Pinky blog, yay.
My crawl rate is optimal and I currently have no crawl errors, yay.
Passed the robot test, yay.
They want me to improve my search presence. Can you imagine if I did? I'm too lazy.
This really isn't that impressive, although these are external links, not internal. You guys know I link like a crazy maniac. However, third one down, I have NOT linked that post outside of Pinky blog that many times. I imagine that was a good twitter share day among fellow aspies and auties or something.
I wanted something to compare that to, so I looked at the GWT on Lexxperience (which passed security and crawl and robot with flying colors, as well), and this is more impressive to me. My stuff at Lexxperience really does get linked around the world, and I'm going to say right now that it's actually really impressive that my Stanley character post has been outside linked more than any other character post. The 3 domain thing only means it was shared on the same medium, like VK (which is like facebook outside the U.S.), twitter, etc. I'm really liking the 24 domains linking the main blog page. Ten of those source domains are probably mine, because of course I've linked my own Lexx blog in other places (twitter bio, facebook page and group, tumblr, linkedin, aboutme, gravatar, paperli, the other Lexx blog, syfydesigns), but I seriously doubt I've linked my main page outside of it more than a couple hundred times, unlike Pinky blog, which is linked on just about everything I own because it's a central redirection hub. So basically, thanx to fans linking and link sharing back to my Lexxperience page.
Last couple of days I've been on UK time or something, this waking up at 1 and 2 a.m. stuff is going to get old. I think my body will be pretty relieved to get back to regular workouts in April.
Yeah, I know, I said this wouldn't turn into a minecraft blog. Some of these are older, so I'm just saving them here. Easy to load to youtube while I'm cleaning house and cooking. I love this shot, lurking in the blue. Pretty sure I'll wind up with a breathing enchantment and going down into the ocean one of these days. By the way, we're wiped out, gonna miss the TWD live tweet again tonight. It's not even 3pm and we're counting down to bedtime. x_x
These are the pool pets we got after the sand was all cleared out from the sand manufacturing facility. Sometimes I catch myself holding my breath when I go under the water.
These cows are mooshrooms. You can get either milk or mushroom stew out of them, but if you shear them to harvest the mushroom on their heads, they turn back into regular cows. The way they sniff and the noise they make is exactly like real cows.
This is always my favorite part, following Kai around. That is the cutest little avatar I've ever seen.
We swam to the tundra one day.
Slight lag issues. This is the plundered village we're salvaging with the 'Dyson sphere' of dirt and a roof of leaves. This involved reconnaissance, planning and strategy, and execution of a number of projects. As usual, Kai was the genius and ringleader, and it was awesome.
This is in the singleplayer mesa world, a sweet change from regular minecraft. I'm thinking about building an adobe house out of crafted sandstone and spawning a herd of mustangs. Maybe I'll put a Mexican cantina somewhere, and a saloon somewhere else. I'm sure I'll be popping on and off the mesa all year.
Wherever I am in minecraft, I pause and watch sunrises and sunsets if I'm where I can see them. I get the same feeling seeing them on minecraft that I do irl.
Hanging out with the locals, yapping about the weather, ordering hamburgers. Cool, huh?
Or NOT.
If you've never been on minecraft, villagers have a unique language no one else can understand that sounds like "huh, huh", and they get really excited when humans come around, and especially if they hear doors and especially if they can open and close their own doors. They love doors. Holding these guys right next to my bedroom gets a little weird, it's like listening to an orgy, and they don't. shtap. Giving them a blocked door to play with was probably a little cruel, but it sounded like they really got off on it.
This is my pad on the other side of that wall. (That's a Sherlock poster.) The innocence is gone.
But it's cool, because Kai has even bigger plans. We are reviving a pillaged village and saving the villager race. They finally got relocated this weekend. No, this isn't the village, just one of our houses.
Minecraft is like Magrathea (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) (edit: sorry, misspelled the title up there), with endless world possibilities. I grew up in the desert southwest and get a kick out of the deserts on minecraft, so Kai let me know there really is a mesa world out there.
Cool, huh? So I tucked that into my singleplayer and go visit once in awhile. I hop liberally in and out of creative mode like I'm a rich sob on vaca, and I grabbed pale blue diamond armor so I'd look like a turquoise kachina.
In spite of that and the minecraft, many things still got done yesterday. The spring cleaning bug has been biting me pretty hard (and Easter coming this next weekend), and you know what that means, right? Deep cleaned bathrooms, all the rugs are washed, laundry is already caught up, and today the beds get stripped and curtains come down, along with (hopefully, while I have @bonenado here with me today) all the floors getting done. I'm not sure if I can handle the steam mop, but I'm going to try. Might hafta wear the wrist splints doing it. Scott does the vacuuming, though.
Oh, yeah, this happened. That's right, Lexx is being re-released, yay! Funny fan comments about the artwork here. It's all wrong, but since when HAS Lexx been properly merched? I'm laughing. It's a precious part of it's wacky history. Clicking on the poster goes to more info for official announcement and purchasing.
These vids are for whoever keeps coming in on "drugs and porn and whores" search and staying, which I can see because GWT (this blog is a verified site, guys) and stats. You're awesome, and I know you need deeper things in your life to fill that void in your soul. You're welcome.
Aaaaand statcounter went to sleep on Pinky blog on the 25th. That's actually pretty funny. You guys don't know why. Anyway, while I broke through 51,000 over Easter weekend, statcounter is swearing I've had zero visitors. I'm pretty sure it's related to a blogger update and I've got to go reinsert the code now. I'm still too lazy to go fix it. I'm such a tracker slacker nowadays.
