General announcement that I'll be live tweeting Sharknado 4: The 4th Awakens Sunday night on Syfy. If you are not yet on board with twitter, live tweeting, and/or Sharknado in any form, you live under a rock on a distant planet in a far away galaxy from another universe evolving through another dimension of alt space and time, and there's no help for you. We're getting buckled in around here. We'll be ready.
Incidentally, getting a swimsuit onto a squirmy 3 year old who'd rather be naked is the ultimate test of patience and skill, so by the time we got to this part, exhausted relief had me ready to stand there all day if I had to.
did it herself, yay!
Syfy on youtube uploaded this just yesterday, so get all over this party.
This guy came over yesterday and got busy trying to sweep my floors again. He's a natural born industrial cleaner kind of guy. He had 2 brooms, the swiffer, and my steam mop and was trying to use ALL of them at the same time. But he's cool, you know, eating markers and going all goth.
Something upset me yesterday way more than it ordinarily would have without my new meds messing with me (I'm having high blood pressure break outs now, very uncomfortable, a very typical response with me on ANY kind of pain control), and now this morning looks just stupid and hilarious, so I'm going to tell you the story.
I'm not a fake pet person. When I got on minecraft, I didn't go all mushy taming and naming and caring for critters, although I did a compliant practice the first week on mo creatures for the heck of it, named a rabbit after my very first rabbit that I had as a child, which is psychologically very foreshadowy if you knew the story about that rabbit and then followed me through time to the beginning of my evil lair. In the meantime, it was months before I attempted keeping my own farm in singleplayer (a disaster, which is funny because I grew up on a farm), and even longer before I finally let a friend get me onto a pegasus in mo creatures (which is brilliant, by the way, flying around is the bomb). Anyway, a couple of months ago while I was saving a village, I caught the ugliest wild horse I could find hanging around the area and named it after someone in real life, and then rode that bitch around the desert and villages in a mean I'm the boss kind of way. I didn't make a corral or anything, just let it roam free without protection, which meant a lion or bear could eat it, or a scorpion could kill it, or whatever. I didn't care. After I was done distracting myself with saving that village, I moved on and left the horse behind. Anyone could have taken it.
A couple of weeks ago I lost my amulet and nearly lost my pegasus, so I dug in and learned about pet IDs and teleporting and was surprised to find the rabbit, had forgotten all about it. I found out we can teleport our pets, so I tried it out, very cool, and since I needed a temporary place to keep my pegasus, I went ahead and tp'd my rabbit too. Our town has a nice fenced off pet area, so I put them in there, and then on second thought, tp'd the horse in just to see if that would work too, and it worked very well. Cool, had 3 pets in a safe location, moved on to other things.
Last week a couple of goats followed me in from a scout mission to the village I'm currently experimenting cool greenway and landscaping on, and since goats are annoying and eat everything, I corralled them, and doing that meant feeding them something so they'd follow me into the corral, and doing that tamed them, so I went ahead and just named them. Great, I have 2 pet goats... Some of you probably have no idea I milked goats by hand in real life for a few years, and that I especially love goats in real life, but I spare no love for them on mo creatures. However, one of them bears a name I was given in high school German class by one of the only two people in the entire school to ever treat me like a real friend (phone calls, visits at her house, actual talking and sitting by me in study hall kind of thing), and it's a joke name from a story about an idiot, so I guess I have a special goat now.
A horse followed the goats in, of course (here we go, I feel like a weird pied piper), so I tamed and saddled it, utterly failed to name it because I don't care. Within minutes someone was asking me if I wanted ostrich eggs, and dang it, I hatched 2 ostriches and named them Xev and Zev, and they were super cute as chicks running around the village.
Well, any kind of player activity attracts aggressive mobs, so next thing you know, I've got whole gangs of werewolves and silver skeletons hanging around, and the horse kept getting out and running off, which sucked because it was actually useful, so I caved and started thinking animal husbandry. Protection. If you've ever tried to get a passive mob into a corral, you know it can get pretty ridiculous, so after several attempts at building around the horse and trying to push and pull it in through gaping holes, I got the bright idea to look up its pet ID and just tp it into the corral. Worked like a charm. And then I tp'd Xev and Zev into the goat pen, and then tp'd the rabbit over to this village so I could watch it hop around, and then I thought, Hey, I have 2 horses now, I can tp the other one here, too.
Keep in mind I successfully did all these things without a hitch, and that tamed pets are coded not to despawn. So this other horse didn't show up and didn't show up and I finally got admin helping me, and after 15 minutes of following all the steps for this and that over and over, I was told that horse must be dead.
I went through many years of real life not reacting to real pet death before I finally broke apart over a chicken one year. I'm super aspie raised to shut down on triggers and never processed feels or cried, even when we ate my pets that I'd bottle fed from birth. And by eat, I mean exsanguinate, disembowel, and dismember with my own hands before they got cooked, so the floor dropping out beneath me and feeling devastated over losing an imaginary pet yesterday in a game really took me by surprise. I wasn't in the least attached to the pet itself, even loathed it in a messed up kind of way, but I'm Aspienado. A suspicious death of a pet I purposely named for someone in real life that was securely locked away in a protected place where nothing else was disturbed and only one other person knew about it (that I know of) isn't even the problem. I'm autism spectrum. Unsolved puzzles destroy me.
People around me in real life have noticed for years that I seem to be a cosmic target, like the universe makes it personal with me. I so rarely have a really good day that it can't help being obvious that I'll get 3 back to back phone calls out of the blue in a 5 minute time span by 3 different people in 3 different situations having drama crises when I'm actually happy and about to do something enjoyable, and then the rest of my day is completely shot. This has happened so many times that I expect it, I'm never surprised by it, heck, I even plan and pack for it. I'm always ready for my day to be ruined. This makes it easier to just roll with it and not be a whiner. My psychologist has called me a doom and gloomer for holding a view I call optimistic pessimism, which is basically assuming my day will suck in every way possible and then everything looks so much more fantastic when it doesn't that even the most mediocre day feels wonderful, right?
So losing the pet itself doesn't bother me. The idea of some kind of sabotage doesn't bother me. What bothers me deeply is that this is cosmically personal because it's just way too coincidental that none of my other pets have ever just disappeared like that, and I may never know why. Who cares if it might've been a code glitch, it was that particular pet. I would much rather find out a friend killed the horse out of jealousy (I can respect that, and it would make me feel loved) than be left dangling with no answer and always wondering why that pet. And it's actually pretty funny, because that is exactly the pet I would stand back and watch die if something attacked it.
In case you parents out there are wondering about your aspie-autie kids, THIS is how our minds work in relationships. The whole point to Aspienado is giving neurotypicals access to the inner workings of a neuroatypical mind. I am inconsolable without an answer to a problem bugging me, and it's very difficult to move on from that. This applies across the board to every synchronous (or coincidental, if you insist) relationship innuendo I've ever been through.
In the meantime, whatever awkwardness arises from this weird happenstance will probably be in the way in my head, and I'll have to valiantly keep stepping around it because I've been practicing not dumping and whining about my 'petty' obsessions that wind up exasperating people so much that they never talk to me, and I just remembered I forgot to buy bacon this week. *facepalm*
Real life tugs at me. Made a big bowl of salsssssa yesterday out of our first batch of tomatoes, maybe Bunny today (not sure yet), no idea what else. Mostly don't let these meds convince me I'm frustrated for any good reason, it's just my body feeling irritable and my poor brain is a rather innocent bystander. The idea has been forming over the last couple of days that I want back off the neurontin, though. I cannot take another year of trying to super control blood pressure spikes being caused by a med that isn't actually saving my life but just making me more comfortable. It's a curious interplay of sacrificing bits of this or that for fine tuning a definition of comfort in a body that can never truly be peacefully lived in. It's a matter of taste- which torment do I prefer? What degree of peace am I willing to kill bits of my existence experiences for? If I'm hanging onto the edge of a cliff, and something is stomping on my fingers, do I want to hang on feeling numb or feeling stomped? Because either way, what I'm doing right now isn't how I'm going to move away from this spot. I wasn't even hanging onto a cliff like this until after I changed up the meds. Ah, the philosophical conundrums that crowd into the moments between the stomping and slipping a little more.
No hard feelings. I close my eyes and remember that sweet first week on neurontin, and then turn to face a new dawn without a horse.
That would be a great ending, but now I'm going to bore you with the contour job I was working on, looks celebrity Ozarks, lol. No idea yet if I'll finish it up inside.
Ok, time to figure out what breakfast will be without bacon. Might do a southwestern omelet with sour cream and cheese because we've got all that salsssssa.
This song has been on my mind for days. The only good version is this cover. I'd have loved seeing a full song choreography in the vid beneath instead of just a teaser.
Why that horse is important is Easter egged into this post.
The water thing seems to be working. Stringently paying more attention to hydration, can see veins showing up, yay! Incidental minorish problems on the side may have been related to chronic dehydration, as well, like the sudden surge in stomach spasms, which was both annoying and unnerving. Hydration cures so much stuff.
Also, even though I think I feel stiff (probably from laying around all week), chiro has said twice now that he thinks I adjust more easily on neurontin. He saw me first and third weeks into it. He's known me since 2007, has seen how all the things affect me. Severe fibro does NOT make chiro adjustments easy for either of us, so him saying that is a big deal. Remember, this is the guy who spent 3 months helping me be able to walk again after a hellish summer of internal disc disruption and several years of very cautious neck work for severe headaches before ASTYM shred in physical therapy plowed out all that thick scar tissue. (Years of nasty headaches are gone now.)
I've always wanted to try building around natural flooring and elevation contours
It's more fun when you jack up the ore spawn settings
I love coffee. In the old days I drank it by the pot, usually nowadays it's 2-4 cups a day, and lately only 2. Like everything else I've ever been on, I am a true coffee addict and went through complete withdrawal twice in the last 20 years. If I want to retain my morning coffee, I need to be smart about it on a med that strongly affects the brain and nervous system, as does coffee.
All this only took minutes, might be what I work on today between chores
Kinda feeling like I'm snapping slowly back out of the super funk, better get on the laundry and dishes today. Did double cooking yesterday, so plenty of meatloaf and mash tatos, plus I'm doing a pot of little chickens today making stock. Need to get on my monthly money and calendar sync. After all that yap surge yesterday, I'm feeling quiet, so sari nari, bambino amigos. Here, have some agonizing subtext.
I joked a few months ago about betting @bonenado I could make it to 100,000 by this next Pinkyblogversary and then promptly slid out of the fast track. On purpose. But I'm still doing ok. Last year I was at 22,300 on my one year anniversary. As of writing this sentence I'm spot on 61,600 just under a month till my 2nd anniversary, so I've not only doubled, but nearly tripled. I'm sure I could have done better, but I'm not going to kick myself. I've watched a lot of people playing the blog game over the last ten years, and I'll stick by what I've always said- this dedicated blog property is officially declared bounce rate efficient by google analytics and heavily controlled for bots and spam. Numbers are just numbers until you lay the autopsy out on the table.
I tend to let thoughts percolate for months before I finally put a finger on whatever, and I've decided lately that the narcissism jabs I see in other places should be using a different term instead of lumping something they don't like about someone else into a disorder, because that really does undermine the actual disorder and people getting real help. How about we just call it like we see it, ok? I think "attention hog" would be a better term. And I think some of the people who point are just as deserving of that term as the people they very publicly pretend not to point to.
Attention hogs butt into convos, draw comments away from the originator, collect 'friends' like trading cards, turn awareness about #allthethings other people deal with into a competition over their own growing stash of compassion, and parasite off others in order to feed themselves. It's your basic bad manners thing.
This is probably the last time I'll bring that up. I'm so done with 'friends' whining about each other and the tiffs and tussles and hurt feelings. I'm not understanding why people who've known each other for several years online can't let go of each other if a whole year is slipping by and the same hurt feelings keep coming up over and over. In one case, I feel like I'm watching a married couple pouting, but they live on different continents, so it's just weird. I mean, even if I lurk only once a month, I see the same thing over and over. Do you guys not notice how redundant you are? *wow* I'd like to think we've evolved beyond monkeys flinging poop and acting surprised if someone flings back. Just because we do it digitally and virtually now doesn't mean we've risen above exactly that.
But maybe you're not supposed to notice. The whole point to social media is brain training the masses.
I don't care about either side of the argument in this vid, I could care less who is right or wrong, because I've been saying all this has been part of human history for so long anyway that it's already who we are. What this youtuber missed, though, is how smooth doublethink is. Every bit of this is about embracing 2 conflicting ideas at the same time. It's not about awareness and beliefs and truth, it's about being so slick that you don't realize you just agreed with something you disagree with, and now you'll go around reinforcing it because you don't realize there is a double meaning. I'm not talking about the Illuminati or the alchemy blurt or Stefani's confessions or hidden meanings, I'm talking about the researcher himself making it through this entire discussion without once realizing the doublethink was already planted. He thought he caught the alchemy, big deal neal. He didn't catch the concept that speaking to preformed society about freedom to choose is a controlled guide through a cattle chute. There is no freedom. If there were true freedom, we wouldn't even have the need to bring up freedom to choose being an option.
There is fear out there that Stefani will be murdered like other big stars for spilling the beans and rising up against the fame machine that made her. I see her still playing the game here. She didn't once cross the line. All good players know what lines not to step over. She is speaking to an audience who have been playing the game since birth. I mean, look at the college they're in. And I don't believe for one second that Mark Z. wasn't pressured on all sides and had the choice to say no.
All the moaning and fussing and flinging going on out there, all the emotions sparking- you guys are being brain trained to react certain ways on purpose. The more something or someone on social media (or talk radio, or whatever) affects you emotionally, the easier it is to create doublethink in your head. Pictures of animal abuse and political hate scroll by. "I hate people." A kitten or ducklings are saved on a highway. "Faith in humanity restored." Do you not see them doing this to you... Srsly, that is so ridiculous it's all I can do to stay on social media at all sometimes, but dang it, I'm on a mission.
As long as we snark out things like 'narcissist' when someone doesn't respond to us the way we want and then turn around and share loving all the beautiful things memes, we don't see that we are literally being split in half. We become part of the big machine, jerking each other around in rhythm, all because social media brain trains us to step up and play the game and shit on those who don't, even if they are polite about saying 'no', the way Lady Gaga was modeling for us.
She knew going into this that the industry training was a one-way ticket, and she still pays the price. There are so many people out there caught in the giant web of pretense and allegory, and now it's shedding down to us at the street level, and we're all caught between this pressure to perform and the belief that we are free to choose not to.
You know why so many people are critically anxious and depressed? Because from the very start, we've lived this dichotomy and don't know how to reconcile it. Fortunately, aspienado is like the Electric Monk and has no problem believing many mutually exclusive yet coexisting ideas without frying circuits. You know, like knowing when a meme is just a meme, not a trigger.
I really wish the youtuber doing the narrative about his research (and pushing his book sales, don't forget that) had done something with the 'digital matrix' phrase of the facebook part of the discussion. How long have I been saying one day we'll be using brain chips to tweak brain waves to control depression and anxiety?
Some of you are going oh thank god this wasn't minecraft, the rest of you are grumbling go back to minecraft. Or something.
I dug my bitch music out today for the road into town. Got more thinking done.
I know, I said I'm taking a few days off, so right now this is the real deal and I'm not going to post it yet. It needs to age a little.
Just after midnight last night there was a shooting at a school in a small town that I know well, or at least used to. I haven't been back there much since my mom died a few years ago. My whole family is down there (except my kiddo in Houston), and since I have history in that small town going into a book (not naming names), it doesn't matter that I didn't know the kids involved in the shooting. All it took was hearing it happened to set off an entire day of funk and memories.
Later in the day I was doing dishes and one of the sudden memories that triggered was Scott putting these almost ridiculously heavy giant boots on (think logger boots on steroids) to go with me to meet an ex family member because we didn't know if my ex would show up, and I was understandably very nervous (well, you'll understand if I ever get the book out). After the meet up was over and Scott was back home taking his boots off, I asked why in the world he wore them, and he said it was in case there was a fight. Apparently he's been scrappy enough to understand the importance of footwear in a nasty showdown, which it thankfully didn't come down to because my ex didn't show up with the other person, but when he said those words I thought, "This man will take care of me", and that was the moment that really sealed the deal on our lifelong friendship. I've always felt safe with him. Next week we'll be celebrating our 23rd wedding anniversary.
A few years after that happened, the memory about the boots triggered and I realized for the first time that my husband (we were married by then) was the only person who had really believed the stories I told about my ex without question, and that blew me away. I had been grappling with a small handful of people not believing me for years. My mom called me a liar to my face, and her friend, an elder's wife, said I watched too much TV and was trying to get attention (which still pisses me off to this day), so the memory of someone believing me enough to take "silly" precautions like putting on a giant pair of heavy boots nearly brought me to tears. And then a few years after that, he finally shared some pretty scary stories from his own childhood. Turns out he believed me because he'd personally seen abuse up close.
I've been talking about where I got the name Pinky and how Bluejacky spawned Aspienado, but I've never said where Janika actually comes from. I've mentioned that my little girl named me Janik when she was four, but now I'll say that was the town we lived in, where this shooting last night took place. Back then, Janik was an alcoholic that told her little girl to lie down in a ditch and hide if the police came. Janik survived the Phoenix underground because she survived a nearly off the grid family of in-laws and a crazy ex in the heart of Booger County, a place where people go to disappear from the law. Despite the peaceful overtones, that town is a boiling cauldron of teenage time bombs caught in the event horizon of a black hole of drugs and porn and violence lurking in shadows many fail to even see. I often feel like I escaped, as do others who move away, never to return. I met people that would quail your souls, people the world doesn't even know exist.
Janik was a survivor. Janik learned hard and fast sliding out of control during a slew of big mistakes slamming one right after another why we need to be kind and honest and take care of each other. Janik was a ringleader keeping a gang of underage kids out of trouble one year, maybe not in the right way, but none of mine got shot or shot anyone else. Three of us were shot at, but not shot. I won't bring up the people outside of Wendy and the Lost Boys that we knew who were raped and questionably murdered around that time and no one ever got caught. All I'll say is I kept my boys away from the bad stuff. Wish someone had been looking out for me when I needed it.
This came in the mail today. Over 300 hardback pages of high quality behind the scenes photos and stories about filming Sherlock. Clicks to amazon if you want a copy. Not being paid to share that.
Tuesday 7-26
I'm allowing myself an hour a day on singleplayer if I've been good all morning doing real stuff getting my life back around my house. This is from a mesa world where I've built the most hideously ugly house you ever saw over a gaping cavern and have been playing let's see what happens if with the natives. For instance, they don't all understand to come up the stairs into the house, and they hide underneath watching their family remain safe while they wind up plunging through the sticky webs trying to get away from zombies.
Meanwhile, upstairs we're having cake and watching scary movies and posing for pix, just a jolly good time.
Yes, very nice pose, got it, thanks. They love having their pictures taken. But yeah, seriously hideously ugly house.
With taste.
I may be a cruel dictator, but we still enjoy the finer things in life. Yes, that's a big screen TV on the left that we watch from the bed.
Holding a couple librarians hostage is the only way I convince the gang to come back into the house, but some of them are still stupid enough to run underneath and get zombied.
I want a real house like this over a gaping cavern.
This is from earlier, did a float outside the window peeping Tom kind of thing. It all went to hell when one of the guys stupidly opened the door for a zombie crashing the party and I wound up nearly destroying the room over all of them fleeing upstairs and turning. Totes had to redecorate.
Side notes- Back on double zyrtec, thank you rain burst over Mirkwood. It'll be like this through September now. Also, this week is full blown aspienado. You guys have no idea the 'nothing' I feel like I'm hanging onto a sheer cliff face and the people I really need not being available, the panic attack I made it through in the shower, the self doubts eating me like piles of worms, the horrible realizations that I'll realize later were lies my head is telling me. Staring at this pic on Jawn's screen and telling myself I can do this...
Scott forgot his phone today, and I conveniently have a blood draw scheduled, so I'm going to get out of the house and take his phone up to him.
Thoughts.
My best months on twitter are all Lexx related, bar none. In the past I've gotten nearly 9000 profile visits a month, and top tweet stuff in twitter analytics is always Lexx. For some reason I seem to have developed a different awareness of my public self over the last year, like I have never before felt this kind of shyness. This is a brand new feeling for me, feeling shy after years of Lexxing to the entire world, having my stuff translated and copied and replicated all over the world, talking to people in entertainment like it's all cool and not a big deal, knowing from my stats that some fairly big players glance at my stuff sometimes. I did all that not caring who saw what, who said what, who hated or liked me, it was all the same to me. Suddenly- it's not all the same.
I didn't come back out for Lexx, and even though Pinky far outstrips anything Lexx for blog stats, Lexx has been and always will be part of who I am everywhere I go online. Why do I feel shy now? STA, as a niece used to say. Something to think about.
Bluejacky is at a standstill. I am the cat who walks by himself, and all things are alike to me. quote
Pinky says maybe not.
Aspienado is past the panic attack now and looking around for breakfast.
They had to use my hand for blood draw yesterday. This is getting ridiculous. They say drink water, well, I drank water. This guy told me it's more about the water I've had over the last couple of days, just drinking water right before going in doesn't do the trick. I'd like to blame my new med arrangement, but we were blowing veins out before we rearranged. I must be chronically dehydrated in spite of how I think I'm doing.
Never chug 3 bottles of water in a row. I used to do that. You get weird headaches doing that, and it's not good for you. I drink 1-2 bottles/glasses of water with every meal, plus a couple tall glasses in the mornings waking up and meds and stuff, plus the glass in between here and there through the day, plus 2-3 bottles of water in the car every time I go to town. Is that not enough? What changed? It used to be enough. I don't know what's going on in there. I wish I could get direct cell reports and do projection meetings with organ groups.
A little real world before I go all minecrafty again. I like looking up real estate from some of the places that check in on trackers. I don't mean specific incoming, I mean the general areas. This one is pretty sweet, asking price $817,000. Nice digs.
What's funny is I'm living in a house on acreage that easily be worth half a million on the east or west coast but assesses to only 126,000 here now (goes up and down with the market) because cost of living is so much lower. We're mortgaged out because real life stuff, pretty sure half the nation is living by the skin of their teeth right on the edge of possible job loss (company sell out in our case) after medically inspired bankruptcy. It's neat seeing other real estate from incoming tracker areas, kind of get a feel for some of you. Anyway, I seem to be getting to know the southern California area pretty good in particular. waving hi
You caught that hint, good. Yeah, little bit of stress going on, some of you probably remember me mentioning Scott's boss maybe selling out any time over the last couple of years, just got more hints it could be imminent (as soon as next month) or by the end of the year or something. We've been living on this edge for so long.
And since I bring up stress, I noticed last night that a few of my family are involved in fundraising for the medical expenses mounting up on the shooting victim I brought up a couple days ago. If there is a good part at all to a shooting on school property, it's that the main target survived being shot 3 times.
Despite my anxiety surge yesterday, I noticed I handled traffic just fine. *hugs neurontin*Thanx, buddy. I think I'm adapting, though. Starting to boing out of bed early again. *I* personally think that's a good thing, my health team might not.
Ok, first off, quick disclaimer- it's amazing how much a person can do with an hour of minecraft once you're used to playing it, so all the following is NOT me playing on minecraft all day. I spent my morning yesterday during my drive into town thinking about new strategy going forward on the webs, and I'm liking what I'm thinking, plus I made @bonenado an awesome supper of stuffed pork chop and seasoned roasted mixed veg (it really was a pretty dinner), so I allowed my hour of solace in minecraft for being a good girl. I'm a nice boss.
THIS is the hideously ugly house from the outside. I love it.
Got that last room done.
Me and the guys out for a night of ghost hunting. The excitement was palpable.
Aaaand it all went to hell. I just left the vid running like a web cam and walked around doing things in real life. You get to see villagers panic and bump each other off into the cavern like idiots, and the zombies getting in. I mean, if you're bored and really need something, here you go.
*I* was bored by then, so I moved to another singleplayer world I'll likely keep. I world spawned practically in a village and there are 2 more within a hundred blocks of each other, a mesa only a thousand blocks away, and just really neat stuff. I looooove this acacia village. I'm not going to fence it, but I lit it up and fixed the doorways.
And after that I was flying around some more and this happened. Ran into a lone block hanging in the sky, was right in the middle of lighting it up for a marker when a cow spawned right on top of me. Next thing you know I'm in an episode of Can This Cow Be Saved? and throwing dirt blocks around for her to climb down on to the ground. If you don't play minecraft, you might not be aware that passive mobs walk right off cliffs and tree tops and fall to their deaths. I was in a silly mood and took her spawning right there as a Sign.
After I saved her, I knocked the extra dirt blocks back off and created a monument.
And then a trail of roses...
... to a Valley of the Roses where the treetops became natural rose-ringed temples. And the morning and the night were the first day, and the Pinky said, "All is good."
And then over the next hill there was the most nearly perfect desert temple I've ever found, so I'm calling the whole cow thing miraculous and leaving it at that.
And the morning and the night were the second day, and the Pinky said, "All is good."
This made me feel good last night. You understand what this means to a fansite owner of a show about a talking spaceship, right? It felt like a synchronicity hug from the cosmos. Tamsen McDonough voices Lucy, the spaceship on Killjoys. Well, the Lexx was voiced by Tom Gallant, and Ellen Dubin, who played Giggerota on Lexx, is also big voice actor in gaming (her IMDB list is impressive). I'm a big spaceship voice fan, all the Star Trek and Andromeda and other shows that used voice actors for ships, so this is a big deal to me, and I very much appreciate that click during this difficult week.
I'm not ready to push this one out yet. Still got some thinking to do.
This interview wins all the interviews.
~later~ Ok, it's been 3 weeks since med changes and I'm pretty sure a big part of this week's way heftier than usual funk is a result of that (years of blogging comes in so handy), so I went ahead and looked up side effects (I've learned to avoid doing that the first couple weeks so it's not psychosomatic, give the meds a chance to work) and wrote a note to my doctor. I think he's on vacation this week, but I'm on a 9-day countdown to follow up now, so it's up to him if he wants to change anything when he gets back before I see him again. I can handle a list of minor inconveniences with meds, and @bonenado is used to the mood swings, but plunging into actual exercise intolerance isn't acceptable. I've already been through that trade-off for pain management, it doesn't work. It only makes things worse in the long run to turn into a lethargic lump with puffy limbs. I suppose a phlebe remarking on my severe vasodilation during yesterday's blood draw is a red flag, as well, found that on the list for one of the meds. All together there were 14 different side effects piling up on me, many of them common, but a couple of them problematic.
It was nice while it lasted... We'll always have that first wonderful week on cartia and neurontin. I think I'm ok to make it to appointment date, which happens to be my wedding anniversary, lol. I usually wind up with psychologist appointments on that date, one year was neurologist, but almost without fail, every year I'm seeing someone besides my husband for a date on my wedding anniversary.
In the meantime, took a little ride down a lava fall. You don't die in creative mode, so it's fun messing around. Yes, totally swam back up, too. That little white square at the beginning is a block of wool. A sheep fell in and died there.
A note about withdrawing from public this week- People who watch me tend to worry, and then they start contacting when I'm my least capable of handling contact. I'm still popping up on facebook to check on family, still showing up on twitter every day, however briefly, so we know I'm ok, even though this is a very hard week. I'm not in the mood to spell out how hard. Go watch the lava fall video again. Maybe it's a form of subtext or communication from my brain about what's going on inside me. Maybe this entire post is a metaphor. I'm sure it would make a great psyche analysis, all things considered.
I will share one real thing. Weird pain running up one's chest and side of a neck for days on end while meds are excellently controlling nerve chatter and blood pressure and heart rate is still unnerving as hell, and it being muffled like this doesn't make it less scary. If it were in a different part of my body I'd wonder if I had appendicitis or a broken toe or a migraine being muffled by meds, but it's nerve centers that happen to be situated around my chest with my heart beating in the middle of it all, and I can totally understand why some people don't want to live like this. But I don't want you guys to worry so I'm not out there saying it. By the time you read this I'll be past it and busy doing something else, most likely in minecraft or watching TV with @bonenado after work, and we all know talking about it will only make it worse by drawing attention back to it, so don't comment. I have lived through 25 years of trigeminal neuralgia (deemed the suicide disease) and now this unremitting nerve pain through my chest is back full force. If you knew how many kinds of scans I've had and how many different heart monitors I've worn (and how often) ruling out heart problems, you wouldn't believe it, but it's standard protocol every single time I complain about this. Feeling like I'm being shocked and stabbed all day long in my ears and eyes and neck and chest and shoulder and back for 25 years has been very, very, very hard. But I'm still here. I feel like that is my defiant whisper back to the cosmos- I'm still here.
I've fantasized about how good it would feel to kill someone who was trying to kill me. I know that sounds horrible, but visualizing success and positive imaging are good for emotional and physical health, and I often run through scenarios where I rip someone apart with my bare hands just for trying to hurt me. I think my will to live far outweighs my need to escape this suffering, and I know it's solid because I really do enjoy those scenarios. I think the Spock/Khan fight is my fave.
You didn't see me cry a couple of paragraphs back. Pretty sure it's the meds. They're destroying my kill mode vibe. I need my evil villain-ness back.
This is my house in the winter. In the summer it's way too jungley to see the ground.
It has also occurred to me that whatever meds I start or stop, all must be compatible with the extra zyrtec I'm on now. Zyrtec shouldn't really be a potentiator, but there's a bit of debate both ways with hardcore users. This is one of the milder debates. Back in the day I was really good at timing out and pushing my cocktails, and my doctors kept me well stocked for years until I got this new guy. Well, that's not the goal now. When I'm way closer to end game, yeah, I'll just stay stoned outa my mind, on brandy if I can't take anything else (especially now that opioids are out, and still not allergic to grapes yet), but right now the goal is to be able to stay healthy enough to push end game off further, right?
~~~~~~~~~~more thoughts~~~~~~~~~~~
I have been kicking around several ideas about migrating my Xanga Lexx stuff to wordpress, an arduous job, or custom redesigning blogger, and I keep thinking but I've already done so much of this work... I've tossed around better hubbing and I can't help thinking but I already hub better than nearly everyone else I know, and the ones who are better have staff. Then I think how much time I've wasted and I can't help thinking but my launch platform survived all the stuff and is actually stronger than first projected. What it all finally really boils down to is whether I'm going to publish sooner or later, and none of the rest will matter that much once I do, so the real REAL stuff bantering around my head is whether to just lay it all out on private blogs anyway, because other people do that all the time. I'm not keen on previewing, but I'm very seriously cross with MS Word because I'm so used to a blogging format- omg, after all the work I've been through, would it really be any harder to just blog the frickin books out and manually paste the content over? I can't even tell you the kind of headache I get having to think this stuff through. But everybody does that, don't they?
I've got the titles, one is already a domain, all I have to do is put my content on the web anyway. That's it. It's where I'm comfortable, where I'm most at home. This folders and files stuff and book style format makes my eyes crazy. If you guys have never had optic nerve headaches, you cannot truly appreciate being able to use your eyes without thinking.
Whiny, crabby, bitchy me. Thursday
I think I need to release this into the wild today before it turns into its own book or something. This has been just about the worst head week I've had since I came back out 4 years ago. Pretty sure the beginning of slinging into this unreal number dimension started with that morphine shot reaction, and then the rest is just a domino effect from there.
And now Jawn is disk checking and bossing me around and stuff. I'm this close to just pouring coffee on the keyboard.
Anyways, I'm doing ok, already demanding Sharknado 4 live tweet time in the family schedule because Bunny bomb on Saturday. I normally don't dwell, so the med thing has settled into I can do this because it's working for what it's supposed to be doing, and it'll be the doctor's call if I continue and tweak. I'm not sure at this point how, but I've got to get my workout routine back. This feeling knocked flat thing might be temporary because the utter relief after living so long through such hard pain yadayada. Maybe I really did just need a week OFF that bad. I spent hours laying around looking at the walls, not even moving. I wasn't too worried until I noticed 4 hours had passed, and then another time 3 hours had passed, but when I'm on my feet I feel every minute and time takes forever to go by and I can't think what to do. Actually got my shoes on a couple of times, but what triggered shooting that note to the doctor was not being able to get past 2 whole minutes of mild exercise. THAT really is the deciding factor on what happens next.
Beating Pinky blog to a ragged pulp, I really need to let this one go. Here, look at my cool ocean stuff going on with Planet Yablo. I found 3 ocean monuments in the same ocean, so I'm linking them up and I'm going to build an underwater city. Yes, I'm sure it'll take a very long time, but something to go back to when I'm bored with regular stuff. This one actually belongs on the StarrStrukk blog, so anything else there has to wait for later.
I guess that's as good a song as any to go out on. Mood I'm in, anything could happen today.
I think it's time to admit I've been stalled in a deep funk about my writing for the last 9 months. It's still creeping along, just not going public. I noticed I went through a series of phases about it, like denial and displacement and all that, but I'm sort of coming to embrace that this Year of Suck (which is a double whammy because I was looking forward to it for so long) is a thing I don't need to pretend isn't happening or apologize for or fret about messing up plans or whatever. It's very simply just what it is, a year of suck. I can only apologize to people who've asked me to write for them, and people who wait for more installments in other places.
I'm so very tired. My pain has been increasing for months (that's a good thing, means nervous system is healing), I'm worn out from handling years of so much stuff for other people, I'm finally starting to SLEEP regularly (I hadn't done that in 20 years), and I think my body has taken the bit and said NO MAS to the ol' brain. No more wild exuberance at 4 a.m., no more juggling 5 projects and an ADHD child, no more super me being there for everyone while I'm micro scheduling nutrition and rest and I'm the spooniest one handling all this stuff. No. More. Till. I've. Had. Some. Real. Rest.
I think I'm going to spend my week with the laptop unplugged and see what happens. This means no facebook messaging (don't get that on my phone, guys), no blog updating, no minecraft, no research and studying, no checking on things...
I've processed a lot of stuff this year. Just loads. Getting an adjustment disorder with anxious mood diagnosis last fall after finally processing stuff from years before probably means I'm still processing. I was so super trained through childhood and an abusive first marriage to simply shut down that it's taking years to get it all opened back up and dealt with. I've been through days that have felt so excruciating that I'm not sure how I even keep breathing.
I think what I'm realizing is, I can't just keep pushing through it. I'm stuck in it, I need to let it keep processing. I've been going through mini-shutdowns over and over, thinking in black and white terms, but the middle ground might be just walking away from public for a few days and hopefully not panic about missing all the neat stuff going on out there. Distraction, while very helpful during intense days, is a shutdown vehicle, and something is trying really hard to coming through my heart and soul right now. Now that I know I'm handling the neurontin ok and have private touchbase in place, I think I need to step back and let it on through.
To people with big money, the real world is like minecraft.
this click is not an endorsement for a candidate
There are tons of different kinds of minecraft servers with different ways of playing multiplayer. The multiplayer I joined has a towny plugin.
"Towny is a versatile, player-controlled land management plugin for use with Bukkit/Tekkit/Spigot/Libigot. Towny offers solutions for pvp, griefing, chat, inflated economies and monsters to minecraft server admins. Towny allows players to work together and against each other as they see fit. Find here the best Minecraft Towny servers."
A word about real life politics- If you guys think it's too much work to learn minecraft township code, then you really need to calm down a bit about political leaders. They have a LOT of stuff going on, and all the public hype is just that, hype to keep people wound up, because if they didn't, we'd all be passive mobs like the cows in minecraft, following players around for hay and then walking off when there isn't any. (I just made a sideways statement about the un-hyped proles being smart AIs.)
Staying sane through the weekend involved more tweaking on a village I had lit up and then lost track of about 6 weeks ago and then accidentally found again during a flyover. It had already been ransacked, and the nearly buried desert temple a ways off had already been pillaged, but this location is fantastic and everything still nearly all intact, so of course I went about replanting the gardens and fencing out the mobs. I had previously agonized over saving a desert village in singleplayer survival (details at StarrStrukk) and later in multiplayer (villagers still around, too, huzzah!), so I used this opportunity to play with more greenway landscaping and town beautification. Of all the things I do on minecraft, aside from tunneling, I seem really drawn to fixing villages.
This was early on. This is in multiplayer, so I mark wherever I've been in case of griefing since I don't pay for the land ownership protection in some areas. I can't really stop anyone, but it's there for other players to enjoy if they want to.
Several weeks ago (couple of months?) an admin tossed 42 blocks of turfed dirt blocks at me for some unknown reason and I just tucked them away in a chest with no idea what to do with them. Well, this weekend I remembered them and had a ball. Turfed dirt blocks (can be harvested only with silk touch pick axe) will help spread grass to other dirt blocks around them, which is very convenient. If I wanted to, I could replace all the sand in the town with dirt and eventually have grass all over, but for now, I like this 'greenway' effect.
That light in the distance is the buried desert temple. I'm thinking about fencing around it and plowing all the sand out, make it look a bit more metro.
I always light my rooftops everywhere I go. I've had aggressive mobs drop on me out of the blue off rooftops so many times, so lighting up the place keeps them from spawning inside the village. Also, it looks really cool during flyovers.
See that well down there? That's about the only way you can keep anything that moves from drowning in the well. Knock a wall out and put a dirt block up for leverage. I drowned in that well yesterday trying to get a cow out. It was very deep. When I respawned and went back I had to sink to the bottom to recover all my stuff before I swam back up and got out.
I love birch trees being so easy. I couldn't believe this worked out so well.
I'm also getting the hang of melons and pumpkins. I've mostly been ignoring them, but they're neat to have around.
This vid got a little long, but I was waiting for dawn to watch the werewolf turn back into a guy. You can see how nice using glass blocks is as a mob protection, most of them can't get over and you can still see what's going on out there. I also love taunting aggressive mobs.
You guys know I'm all over the Benny C at SDCC vids. I'll leave a couple here for you.
Oh, and before I go. Yes, this happened. Most of you have no idea I really do hope to be book signing at SDCC sometime in my life (yes, hopefully because of Lexx and other stuff). (Several other Lexx fans have published already, very cool.) It's a bucket list item that I've never said anywhere before, so there you go. It's really hard maintaining positivity (take the test) in the face of challenges like mine, but it's a thing I do hold onto as something to hopefully keep me moving forward. Clicks out to original convo. I've been very thrilled and fortunate watching Ellen thrive, and I'm so happy for her, and especially that someone LEXX is really making it out there.
