March 2007
egg and feather courtesy of Jaizzy, collectible tray via my grandmother
Random photobucket pix for no reason.
Dec. 30, Saturday
Cut 7 inches off my hair. You can't even tell because it was so long. It's still past my shoulder blades. I talk about my hair more on my spaz blog. I mention it sometimes on this blog, too. If you're having hair issues, I seem to be solving mine naturally if you want to look through those link threads.
July 2007
snapping turtle in our yard, wouldn't let go of the flip flop
Went through my closet and all my drawers for charity donations and discovered that since the gallbladder removal, I'm a size smaller in shirt size now. Nice! (Didn't even lose weight for that, lol. Guess my poor tummy was puffy for a good reason.) I still like big and comfy, but I'm medium chested, so blouses have always fit funny. I might be able to get some sweet clearance blouses at Penney's if I can go down a size now.
Making chocolate pie for Papa because he's been exceptionally good this week being home with me and Bunny while she's off school. Pudding pies have less sugar than some pies (and way less starch than pastries and cookies!), and I bulk up the eggs from 3 to 5 or 6 (meringue with extra whites and still only a tiny bit of sugar is excellent), and with the milk that's pretty much a chocolate flavored protein pie. I don't do those very often any more, but that's going on today. I'm diabetic and am successfully controlling with diet, which I talk about in several places but lightly recapped into one handy post. I know it's hard, and I really hope I can help. Btw, don't be dumb and plow the pie down too fast. One piece, wait a couple hours before you dive in again. Be smart about controlling your glucose levels.
February 2007
proof that my husband was not the only person there with a camera taking pix of people they love standing in a line
why this was such a huge deal I'll never understand
Working on a new winter/spring syllabus to get me organizeder around here again. For awhile I was really good at daily/weekly/monthly lists and last couple years those have gotten more and more bombed with real life stuffs, so I need to find a more permanent way to keep my lists in front of my face. Bunny has a little chart... I might need to get me a chart going. She'll be jealous of my stickers. I may need to rethink her little chart because it uses magnets and those are kind of backfiring. She sneaks magnets on. Maybe stickers are the answer.
January 2007
I used to mock Scott's Minnesota teams
I know right, baseball Cubbies all month during the Superbowl wait
we're still married...
Dec. 31, Sunday
Watching the fireworks go off around the world on twitter. Wondering if I'll be able to stay up tonight like I hoped. Maybe I can get a nap.
March 2010
I have a long day ahead of me. A new year is nearly here. I can't see my future very well, but I do know that I'm ready to capsize all the boats now. A little toast to 2018, and hopes that I finally say it all. I'm ready to move on to the fun stuff.
Changing my wallpapers. That one above clicks out if you like it.
If anyone is really playing attention, vs just freaking out on twitter and facebook, it looks like martial law was finally put into writing just before Christmas, and there are all kinds of interpretations going on about what's going to happen next. Well, we are preparing to go to big war again (per people we know being called back into training), and I've been saying for years we'll eventually be living in a nationalized police state. Those of you who watch scifi have seen how this works in shows like Continuum, so it's not a new idea at all, and even part of our entertainment. I've been saying for years that TV prepares our minds for change by slipping in ideas over and over, and scifi is a major vehicle for that. Stuff doesn't happen overnight and most people's lives won't really change that much (just like all the other incremental changes we've gone through over the decades that we've already forgotten about), and life will go on. How we want to continue is up to us. I personally don't want to be a big drag, so I try to stay focused on my own microcosm, which includes my physical and mental health. How can I be good for people? That is a question I ask every day, and every day I find a way to be good for someone. I may not be able to control the big scary stuff, but I can certainly paint the smaller stuff around me any color I want.
There are no good guys up there in the scary stuff. The only 'sides' involve millennia-long bloodlines that control the world moneys and the people they front as governments. We are already living everyday lives underneath a broiling civil war above us, and you can guess at what's going on all you want but you'll never see the answers until you understand the biggest picture. Having answers won't change a single thing in your life. Obsessing and worrying and ranting will only bring people down all around you and make you more depressed. You are a 'prole', you always have been, and you always will be, even if you think you are white collar in an upper crust job. You will always be one of the cattle beneath the biggest picture. You mean nothing more than that, so you may as well calm down and create your own meaning.
I've gone through my own evolution over the years. I've come back from soul-draining illness, I've wrestled the blackest depressions and floated around in gurgly bubbly euphoria, I've been through brain crash and world crash and server crash and life crash and very real nasty car crash. I've lurked through the depths of despair on the webs, watching people like me finding ways to survive. And we all want more. Who am I ? What do I want? World of Spin
2016 was hard. I slipped backward into more depression and lost my focus and my discipline and 2017 started off with uber pain and I spent 6 months going through med fails, and finally wound up in an unrelated surgery last month. Through most of 2017, my life has been upside down helping other other people adjust to life crash/change, and there is nothing like everything in your world being fail and upside down to sift out what you really WANT when things start calming back down a little.
I want my focus back. I've got my discipline, big time. I grew wealthy on a game server through constant internet glitch, and that was a focus distraction through depression from real life that I was accidentally thriving through just running to keep up with daily chore grind in all my pain, and I come to the close of the year with not just a will of steel, but a diamond tipped edge on discipline. I look around me and see a jumble of junk because that's what life is like with a 4 year old, but I look inside of me and see everything in order, all my junk sorted and organized and ready for action because I've been so focused on surviving real life daily/weekly crisis management through real life pain management, and I'm getting goooooood.
Now, to turn all that back around and apply it to my original focus out here. I am equipped like I never was before, bulked up in metaphorical armor and weaponized with god enchants like infinity power punch flame smite knockback looting efficiency fortune feather-falling depth-strider projectile-protection blast thorns. I'm so good in game that I'm like lemme finish chopping this tree first while mobs bite and sting me from all sides, then casually turn around and pop them all into little green dots that roll up into my experience and level me up some more.
If we could see that happening in real life, all the crap and junk would feel more fun, wouldn't it? We'd be able to see our advancements and achievements even if everything was feeling junked up and stupid. We'd be able to show other people our metaphorical coolness and say Hey, wanna band up and go conquer? I need a badass adventure for a cool power boost.
And that's what life is. On our dumbest days we can't see that we are having badass adventures. We are conquering the toughest demons and leveling up all kinds of little dots we can't see while we wade through stupidity and sad. We feel alone while other people all around us are doing the exact same thing.
We're not alone. And we are badass because we're still here.
2018, here I come. Throw snakes and spiders at me and I'll give a hearty laugh. Show me an impossible mountain and I'll say Hang on, lemme get my gear. Glitch my flying pet out of existence in mid air and I'll go find another one and level it up. You can't stop me.
All Jon had to do was 'like' that tweet and my impressions just kept churning up little by little over the day and night. People wanna see what Jon likes.
His timeline isn't for the faint-hearted. He mocks. Without constraint.
I'm not in any kind of brain shape to blog more yet. Well, I am, I could, but that would take more commitment than I want to handle right now. This is a big Bunny week while school is out, and we're rockin it. Already have the Christmas tree down and the huge dollhouse moved upstairs and getting all over the after-partay laundries and fridge dredging and kitchen reorganizing. I basically stomp Christmas back down to the depths it reared up from and get ready to hang on for that crazy new-year-taxes-and-everything-coming-due-ride in a couple of weeks. Stuff like car tags, insurance stuffs, new payments starting kind of thing.
The more I think about my resolutions for this next new year, the sillier they get, so you know what, I'm going with it.
Meme it up. Meandering miscreant mindfully making messes more meaningful. (btw, I didn't make any of the memes in this post, they all click to source.)
Step off the cliff. Minecraft filling in all the little holes needs to start joyfully filling in all the big holes, too. Creativity and expression are good for the soul.
Put my shoes on. Make up for this last year's routine exercise fail. At least put the shoes ON every morning, which will naturally make it more likely to follow up.
Own my own junk. I'm hauling out a metaphorical flamethrower and going to town on this decade of pile up in my room. I'm done with holding onto the past for reasons we can't even remember now.
Follow the carrot. Every month I am pulling a little money back for Christmas next year, organizing my snail mail hobby back into folders like the old days, and putting my Houston kiddos at the top of all the lists. What my heart most desires must be what leads me through this next year. I believe this will keep me more focused and in better spirits.
So. Another year of horrors, regrets, fears, rages... I can't help noticing that Pinky blog spotlights that rollercoaster we all go on even when I try to distract myself away from it, and if we're stuck on that ride, dang if I actually care any more that it's a thing. It's a thing. So are cookies, people. When life sucks so bad, it's time to make cookies and memes. You can do the healthy cookie thing, too, it's not a fail to do a cookie.
And, as always, what goes on Pinky blog, stays on Pinky blog. Here, have a weird video trail from the last few days. If you trigger easily bcuz you're a sleeper cell, maybe close this now so you don't go postal, ok? I know, not a cool joke, but you know I know you know I know that's real and how it all works.
We start off with a flashback to another similar incident a couple years ago and no one freaking out on the medias even remembered it.
Someone tried flirting with me on twitter, so naturally they got this and a shhhh, I don't DM.
Some of you saw this go onto facebook and twitter. Dangeresque is awesome, and now he's 3D!
This song weirdly popped into my head out of the blue on Christmas Day. I first heard a friend play it years ago during a road trip to check out a college.
And then it went all cryptic. Make of it what you will.
After that it was like going down a triggered rabbit hole. Btw, this is why there will never be gun control in the U.S.
And I didn't want to keep going down that hole, so I veered sharply back out and into another one. I dunno, coulda been the same one. Hard to tell when everything goes Alice.
Merry Christmas.
This got shared around facebook. My comment on Jason Hawes' share was it sounded like a cow in birthing agony. Like, in case some of you were thinking I actually laid in my bed just hanging out in youtube the entire time, no, my life is rife with constant interruption.
But the second I got another brief respite, there I went again.
After that I diverted to my Space Cowboy list for a bit. Again, make if it what you will.
I grew up Germanesque. You know, that experimental breeding program no one still knows about. Lotta Mennonites breaking away from their parents into the world now, as I've demo'd in past blog posts. *cough*MattGroeningJohnDenver*cough* Robot Santa in Futurama, guys. Inspiration just exploding onto the world... They aren't the only ones, but I digress.
Sharp diversion into another playlist. My head was a mess Christmas Day. All kinds of stuff slamming into place now. Things I progressed through almost subconsciously over the last 5 years fitting together like tracks across the continent of my thoughts.
And then there I went, straight back to the old standby that crosses all genres, all countries. I felt like I just hanging on to the roller coaster, both in real life and in my head. (I seem to be fine today, thank goodness.)
So I slung myself back out again.
But not for long.
Seriously. And stay out of youtube, lol. I've mentioned the mass brain training a number of times across various medias for years. Y'all are sheep toast.
So I diverted again.
And the morning and the evening were Christmas, and the pagan overlords said, "It is good." Fourth quarter profits hopefully zoomed up to the stars.
That was mostly in between all kinds of chaos and determined efforts to get a lot of stuff done on a minecraft server. You wouldn't believe how much glass I've smelted this week. But Christmas itself was pretty good, and maybe I'll share a few pics another time.
I know what books I'll be looking into this next year, thanks to this video, Earliest Examples of the Mandela Effect. That chick's research goes back to 1999 and actually uses some well thought out science, which will be fun. I watched another vid, which lines up with conclusions I've come to myself over the years.
For instance, I discovered that the most interesting thought process follows the question "If I could go back and tell myself anything, what would it be?" I took that question very seriously for years and decided that everything I am doing NOW is the result of this question. Everything I ever wanted to understand about reality and why we are here is all coming to me. I concluded years ago that I am affecting my past, and that a lot of the weird stuff I seem to go through might actually be from me at a later date. I've had far too many coincidences, remote views, dreams that come true, and deja vus in my life to not be meaningful in some way, and I gravitated to synchronicity as I was looking for answers, which I've talked about many times. I've 'always known' who I need to be and what I need to be doing, I just didn't always know how and with what at the time. It's like I had to accumulate experience and knowledge, like you do in gaming, to be able to level up and do bigger things.
Here is one example of that process. For years I questioned faith if people assume praying changes nothing once a certain time has passed. How can an omnipotent god be constrained by something like time? (Especially now that we can visualize stepping outside of time ourselves.) I didn't realize I had the opportunity to test this until I found out later it worked. I was on my way to nursing clinicals at an insanely early hour, and about halfway there I had a sudden urge to pray for my kids to get to school safely. That was not a daily habit back then, and I was very distracted with pain issues, so it felt weird for that to come so strongly into my mind. I took it seriously and focused a few minutes on asking for my kids and I to all arrive home safely that day, and that the day be easy for all of us because it felt like things had been so hard lately. After we were all home hours later, I found out the school bus had just missed being broadsided on a major highway by a big transport truck. The kicker was that happened before I prayed, so where did that big urgent feeling come from? I immediately thought of quantum reality and figured time going forward or backward has no power over anyone I could possibly pray to about affecting reality, and that meant my prayer was still very meaningful and important after the event had passed, particularly because I didn't know about it. I think that the not knowing somehow gives us more power to affect change, and I don't mean that *I* changed anything, but that I inadvertently asked it to change and it did.
The key is the not knowing. The whole point is about going with your gut and focusing on what you want. What do you REALLY want? Give that all your focus for a quiet minute or two. This has become a daily habit for me. I use the form of prayer because I honestly can't not believe in someone being more powerful than me being able to see all this stuff from the outside. Given the new breakthroughs in cosmological thought about simulated universes, this isn't that big a stretch. I think our wording is very misleading, instantly lending to downplaying intent and purpose, but it makes total sense to me that we mimic our bigger universe by creating more digital universes ourselves.
I've turned this process into a shared journey.
clicks to source
And of course I played around. Since every time I do a search for ANYTHING and Benedict Cumberbatch usually pops up in there somewhere (hence #bengruity lol), I thought I'd do a deliberate search for "Benedict Cumberbatch Mandela Effect" to see if anything pops up, especially since he's got one of the largest fandoms in the world possibly mass mind quantum changing everything around us, right. Well, guess what. The only things I could find at all were one person swearing his name had really been Cumberpatch, one person certain he'd played Doctor Who at some point, and one person swearing they'd witnessed him dying in a car accident with a girlfriend that apparently doesn't exist now. You'd think there would be a lot more weirdness around as big a deal as him. Maybe the fandom has locked him into place. Benlocked.
I'm inserting random pix off my photobucket for no reason at all.
July 2007
Scott has no fear
So my internet is slower than a slug in an ice storm right now. I can't pull up a game server or youtube or facebook or anything on search, and not even blogger. So I'm on notepad. I wonder if I'll be able to paste it over later. I hope it keeps this font, I really like it.
April 2008
Steve the duck, turned out to be a girl
I'm in 'flat effect' lately, likely a survival mechanism for holidays, and my emotional interaction is at one bar out of five. It doesn't mean I don't care, it just means that if I start feeling the care stuff, I'll cry easily or get upset over stupid little stuff. It's easier to just not feel while it all passes over.
March 2009
vulture right by the house
I don't have big plans for Christmas. Scott will be on vacation from work in a couple of days and be hanging around through the new year. Bunny's school vaca will coincide nicely with his. Even though I'm recovering very well from surgery- wow there's no scroll with this... hang on.
June 2009
for real, in my henhouse, this snake was 6 feet long all stretched out
Dang it, I lost my font. }=l Lemme see if I can manually recode it here now. Oh, cool, I fixed it. Weird, now the wrap is off. Oh, ok, human error.
December 2012
feel lucky not to live inside a city
Ug, now it looks awful in blogger preview. It's daintier in the editor. Hang on again. Ok, at least breaking it up in colors helps.
November 2011
I found myself! Pinky Robot
My eyes have really changed this year. I'm having difficulty seeing colors on black. I used to have so much difficulty seeing black on white. Honestly, I can see colors on white the best. Wonder if I can change the background. Ew, total fail. I need the entire background blanked out. I'm too tired to dig around in the advanced editor. I'm going to re-black it out, apologies to those of you who get Pinky posts in emails. I don't know yet if this will turn out really hard to read like that.
November 2006
coming back from Dogwood Hill
And now the code is so mangled in my html (that's so laughable, I hafta use CSS for a lot of it nowadays) that I would be a fool to go back in there and try to fix anything. So, I'm going to stay out here in the 'compose' editor and hope I don't super screw anything up.
March 2008
we still have this truck
I really don't know why you're still here reading this, but in case you are, I'm about to get back to Christmas, lol. And I guess I'll just stick to this color now. Where was I? Oh, yeah.
October 2012
along my street
Even though I'm recovering very well from surgery, I'm not perky enough yet to jump into Christmas, and since I'm not that terribly helpful (except keeping the dishes and laundry done up kind of thing), I'm mostly stepping back out of the way and everyone can do their thing and not worry about me. I am pretty much doing my usual bowing politely out of plans and just humming along in the background helping some of the chaos run a little more smoothly, which I'm really good at most of the time anyway.
March 2008
from my back yard, high up on a flint ridge in the Ozarks
So on Christmas, I won't be cooking much, won't be going anywhere, and will likely be focused on the Mo Creatures server and the Doctor Who special. It's looking like we won't be getting fiber hooked up by Christmas like originally planned, the crews are going a little slower now after breaking water lines twice, and every home will get two visits between strategically mapping best hookup and then testing actual hookup once the lines are finally all in the ground. So between electrical brownouts and weather affecting my router, work crews blipping my existing wifi here and there (radio interruption is horrible around here, doesn't take much at all when your neighborhood is laid out along a flint ridge), and my usual chaotic real time interruptions because life and people and stuff, I'll likely be popping on and off, afk-ing, and intermittently checking my social medias on my phone all through Christmas Day.
March 2009
also from my backyard
Well, that's about it for now. Maybe I'll try to share more pix through 2018. Hope you guys are having fairly decent holiday seasons, and if it's stupid and hard, let's just keep ourselves distracted and busy and checking in, ok? I'm sticking around, and I'm already slamming 2018 up against the wall and telling it I'm the boss of me, not the whimsies and fates of a world around me freaking out over every little thing. 💗 lyrics
I started this hours ago and keep forgetting about it.
Today was the good kind of brain melt. I've been in partial shut down all day, which is kinda like my brain being a roomba, kinda just bumping around, actually getting things done but very randomly and not always coherently. Since I'm kind of cleaning off part of my hard drive, here, have some random screenshots. I'll start with last night's #latenightmovie.
I don't know why I'm such a packrat. I'm like a compulsive digital hoarder. I steel my will every once in awhile and dump a lot of stuff.
I still blame Mrs. M.
Whoever wrote that script is guilty of something in real life, I just know it.
Creating worlds is like an addiction. Seeding new single player world names and resetting the defaults makes me feel like a minecraft junkie. One of these days I'm going to wind up custom building something so ridiculous that I'll disappear and you guys will never see me again.
Yes, Gary Graham actually looked at a post in my Lexxperience group. This was awhile back. I don't know if anyone else really noticed, no one said anything. I think most people are pretty oblivious.
Oh, nothing *coughcough*. Just something off a stat tracker. Move along.
I feel so cool when I see this.
Seriously, cracks me up. What are the odds that this part of that post out of hundreds would wind up next to that stat number?
I keep saying I can see back yards. Satellite view and then google street view is pretty sweet. Please figure out how to use your proxies. Or not. I really don't care. I'm just a freakazoid who loves maps. Be aware, though, that it's pretty rare to get a real street address like this, and that once I do, I can look up the floor plans and value of your home, among other things. I mention once in awhile being able to 'see' people sitting in parking lots reading through post after post on one of my blogs. If I, a NON monetized blogger can see stuff like that just running a tracker, and timestamp your day out and even know where you work or go to school, which is really super rare nowadays, then YOU need to join the rest of us here in the future and realize how unprotected your tech and personal information are from fraud and possibly actual theft.
I think the biggest surprise I ran into this week was someone not knowing North Korea buzzed Japan again this month. That's a really good article, by the way. I think that timeline of developing nuclear potential is pretty spooky.
Wild gear change, if you aren't hip yet to the mandela effect, here's a quickie.
The only problem I have with this phenomenon is that they're blaming CERN. I've been bringing stuff like this up for YEARS.
Example- I had a fit one year about what I thought was a bible quote. Linus quoted a bible verse to Charlie Brown, and it's not even real. I could have sworn that was really there. This is from one of my Surveypalooza posts. "I don’t know why I think I remember a bible verse about a prophet telling an evil king to go back to bed for another hour so his people can get some relief, but whatever it was impressed me when I was younger. I haven’t been able to find it, and when stuff like this happens it feels all Matrix-y, like something changed, and maybe I really do remember something because my brain didn’t completely readjust. Or like maybe time travel is real and people really do go back and change little things in history. I remember when I was a preteen crawling through the hay gathering eggs, was suddenly gripped with the weird thought that when I come back out, everything was changed, and I didn’t know who the president was. That was back in the 70′s, I had never seen any scifi like that, had never seen a Twilight Zone, etc. I have a cousin who experiences stuff like that, too, said one day in grade school he was terrified because the teacher handed him back a paper with a good grade on it, and he *knew* he didn’t do that work, and walking home after school through a vacant lot he freaked out about a tree being gone, and his sister said there was never a tree there. Either he and I drift through parallel lives, or things really do change, or we’re crazy, and my psychologist has assured me I’m not crazy. Anyway, it really bothers me that I can’t ever find that bible verse. If anyone else knows what I’m talking about, ~please~ put it in my comments. Otherwise I can only assume I’m on my way to early Alzheimer’s or something. :edit: 6-3-14 Someone reminded me that was Linus ‘quoting’ to Charlie Brown."
Ok, go try finding that quote now in any context. I can't even find Linus saying it. Good luck.
My personal point of view on experience distortion (I just coined that, don't know if it's a real thing, not seeing it used much) is that so many of us have actually been through it in some form without realizing it that a good half of our entertainment industry is actually (and quite comfortably) based on it. We so readily except the weird in our fiction that we expect it. If we lived in a universe where the weird couldn't ever happen at all, we wouldn't be able to conceive it in the first place to wonder about it. Our universe is wonderfully weird, and I love it.
One could argue it's our brains that are weird (and even faulty), and plenty of observation and research has gone into reality and perception and how our brains miss quite a lot going on around us (we aren't adapted to see infrared or hear higher and lower sounds than we do, for example), and time distortion is a real thing based on drug and med reactions and brain injuries, and of course there are memory jags and all kinds of stuff. I often feel like my brain runs too many diagnostics, because I get a bit of deja vu like it's on microsecond feedback loop, or like I even just felt a time break or jump or alteration, and I know from living in a brain like this that I can't count on my perceptions to be correct about reality around me. I have also seen false memories happen in other people during or after traumatic events, and it's really quite spooky to talk to them like that because they are otherwise perfectly sane and normal and you could never convince them something didn't happen that way when you actually have 2 other witnesses kind of thing. So I pretty much take everything with a few grains of salt, as it were. What gets really spooky is when a person has two memories of one event and can't tell which one is correct. I have a memory like that from my childhood.
So the whole mandela effect thing isn't CERN, and it's not new. This kind of stuff has been going on time out of mind, and thousands of years of humanity is so full of weird and creepy stories that it seems awfully lame to blame CERN.
What I HAVE noticed is that social media makes the whole reaction cascade go rabid very quickly. Before twitter and facebook, it just went in slower motion in email group shares and forums. Now that we can chatter real time with so many, it's like ignorance just explodes left and right, and logic gets drowned out very quickly in the madness and mayhem. How many times has some jerk posted that some celebrity died and they're not dead. But so many people share it so quickly that no one believes that person is actually still alive. We've become so death-obsessed that we can't seem to share quickly enough, to mourn hard enough, like it's all some big ocean current we get pulled into. Whether a person really died or not, that current pulls so many people under, and now I'm literally hearing from all sides that 2017 has been the worst year EVER. Even mental health professionals are saying this.
NOPE. I am several decades old, and we've definitely had worse years. We're all aging, we're all heading for death's door, and the rest of our lives will be spent watching out for who dies next. Really??? Guys, I was in high school when Elvis died. There are so many stories about how he's not dead, etc. And John Denver? Conspiracy theories galore, but the truth actually really was pilot error. So many brains get so swept up in the fervor of emotional tide that we collectively develop false memories. That's a real thing. WE ARE OUR OWN MANDELA EFFECT. Besides, Berenstain/Berenstein- I see so many typos everywhere I go, like on billboards, in newspapers, and it's common to see copyright ripoffs with slightly changed logos or names. That notwithstanding, I love that video up there and I'm going to check it out some more. I wish I lived in a place like that, where reality changes from room to room.
It's all fluid. All of our realities are always in motion. There is no 'truth' that we can prove beyond the shadow of a doubt, and there never has been. I hate to agree with Jim Carrey, but we really do make up what we think is truth in a universe we can barely even see. Aside from Plato's Allegory of the Cave (that just threaded every post I ever made here with the word Plato in it), I'm not sure we're smart enough to be discussing how smart we are.
I've otherwise been in a really quiet mood lately.
"Although toads, shrews, and mice may feed on JB adults or larvae, they have not been noted as an important factor in beetle control. Invertebrate Predators. Spiders, praying mantids, robber flies and soldier bugs have little effect on adult JB populations." From Japanese Beetle: The Continuing Struggle to Achieve Successful Biological Control
Guess what question popped into my head first thing waking up... +_=
Aside from this being the Asian Beetle Christmas of 2017, this month is flying by me so fast I'm barely cognizant of time passing at all. True to the blur flying around me, some of these might be a bit blurry.
Flat refusal to see Santa for the, what, third time? But very thrilled to pose with this coyote. PINKY APPROVES. Mama might make her go back, lol...
The last game of the season was my first to see, and I laughed so hard the entire game. I have got to make it to the next set of games in 2018. Watching tiny people mimic playing sports is the coolest thing since the puppy superbowl.
And of course this big grin is worth all the gold.
I haven't been keeping up very well with my Batman. I can't even begin to describe how hard this year has been on me watching them going through everything from Harvey to other really big stuff and feeling very helpless to be useful at all from this distance. Someone likes getting to sit in the front seat with Mom while they wait for school to open.
It's kind of the thing to medicate high energy kids into more submissive behavior. We don't medicate for neurodiversity in this house. It's draining, but there is no way we're squelching this amount of happy joy. One of the secrets of happy is simply being able to constantly move, at least for this one. Her mama was the same way. Some people naturally sit quietly (I'm one of those), some people naturally burst forth and conquer. This one is a direct descendent from Daniel Boone's brother. Imagine if the Boone clan had been the type to sit quietly. Half of the U.S. would never have been settled, lol.
I think we're all going down, might be having a sickie Christmas. Got the achy all over chest stuff coming on. Bunny sounds awful. Crossing my toes I don't get this.
Here are the holidays, yay! I'm on that holiday slide, keeping my arms and legs tucked in at all times while the blur goes by me in loops and gut wrenching drops, and somehow I'm still coherently available when needed. I'm otherwise wondering how nearly 2 weeks just went by me when September took a-EV-er, as Bunny says.
One of the things that saves holidays for many of us is all the new coming out. New toys, new gadgets, new movies. Lotta new. We need all this new before the Big Sad comes after the holidays, and suddenly it's taxes and payments and failing resolutions and a whole other year to watch deflate.
Some of us don't get into all that. I keep my inner world pretty flat. I watch people all around me go through bipolar swings that make my actual real diagnosed derp look like fluffball pancakes. I could have said rainbows and kittens, but I'm hungry, so you get pancakes. Anyway, holidays kinda do that, mass seasonal mood swings and most of us are in some kind of tandem.
Name it. Sports has Superbowl coming, and then March Madness. Entertainment has a slew of awards shows lining up after all the new movies come out for holidays. Mass inebriation, mass misdirection, mass brainlock, anything to keep us going. Some of us tune out (or never tune in), but many of us are locked into step on the medias, talking about the same things, kinda doing the same things, going through the ups and downs together.
Some of us in the background see all the things. We already know how to hang on. We sleuth through the days, lurk through the nights. We find all the things we ever wanted to know about players, celebrities, people we talk to on the medias. We're really good at digging up every stray word, picture, thought about whatever our obsession is.
My obsession is NOT Benedict. He's just a diversion. For me or for you, some of you wonder. lol
Superfans make a lot of what we find on the webs possible. They rabidly collect and sometimes channel for other fans. They tend to share what they love with the whole world. They are there with content in the long dark nights when no one else is up and you can't sleep. They give google and flipboard stuff to hand to you in search bars. They light up the night with stuff.
I am one of the superfans. True, I don't stir up content like I should on a more often basis, but I stick out the most in my fandom. Other superfans in other fandoms and I keep little eyes on each other. We watch each other's obsessions, we admire from afar, we notice details. Sometimes we lurk each other, possibly even casually bump into one another briefly somewhere. We're careful not to overstate our presence to one another, but we know each other knows we know they know we know, you know?
If you are having a hard time through holidays and very much need something new, possibly a very distracting distraction, I hang out on the Mo Creatures minecraft multiplayer server. I am Yablo there, and I like to build stuff and collect a few cool pets. It keeps me sane, it keeps my mind moving, and it keeps me interacting. You can be anonymous there and go kill crazy badass mobs, or peacefully fly around on a manticore enjoying your mod pack. You can say Hi, Yablo, and I'll say hello =).
Holidays are hard. Zone time is hard to find sometimes. Minecraft saves me from the pit of despair, the swamp of sadness, and the bog of eternal stench. If you are stuck in brainlock and need an escape, come find me. Let's play.
click pic to get rickrolled, #bencongruity style if you get lost, just come back to Pinky blog
play time
I pasted the code over from the last time I did this. I'm being lazy.
I think I'm bouncing back, just in time for the rest of the holidays, yay!
I'm taking it slow and still watching what I eat, but I'm already getting more done now than I was pre-surg.
I have been very surprised this last month, too, remembering past eps of certain shows that @bonenado has forgotten. It's usually the other way around. Some of the glitchy bumps are smoothing out.
Pinky blog got super spammed yesterday by auto-bots pinging off a travel blog in the U.S. and passing it off as Russia. Noob slammed me 94 times from one source like a piece of code was corrupted or something. Dork.
Of course, that's like issuing a challenge, sometimes I get spammed harder just for bringing it up. Whatevs. I could go into my analytics and block the address, but like I said, I'm lazy.
You know I'm really building a gingerbread house that all the crumbs are leading to, right.
Fake hits don't phase me any more. I'm cured.
Hang on a sec, I need to annoy a few people. I know right, like the last one wasn't annoying enough.
Ok, where was I. Oh, yeah, being lazy. I've run out of code paste without having to go get more or manually extend this, so see ya.
So I'm looking at this movie reviewer's all-time stats since 2014 after reviewing 1,078 films (no one any of you guys know, but I found his Lexx review), and the only stats he has is about actual content, like 35 countries the movies he's seen were made in. As far as I can tell, the goal is to tic off as many movies as he can from several different lists, like IMDb top 250 and Oscar Best Picture Winners kind of thing, and in 3 years he has spent 1,847 hours watching these films so he can write little paragraphs and tic lists. That's his stats.
I, on the other hand, have no idea how many movies I've seen, how many directors I've gotten to know through their work, how many hours I've spent watching any particular thing or even all the things, but I can see that the thread with yesterday's review commentary that I put on SyfyDesigns.com has over 4300 views on it, that my Walking Dead think piece has over 13K now, and that my James T. Kirk homage now has over 17K. I can't really see where they're coming from, like I sometimes can on a couple of my own blogs. Today I got a street view of someone's house from stats on one of my other blogs, but that's really rare, and don't worry, I still don't have a clue who it really is.
We all do what we love, play the games that keep us going on this little blue planet. Whatever keeps turning this earth for us, right?
Every year I assess where I'm at, check it against how far I've come, and make a plan about how to continue. "The way forward is sometimes the way back."
I dreamed the other night that someone gently kissed me and told me to keep going. I won't say who, but it was extremely significant because it's not someone I'd ever have thought of on purpose, but definitely someone significant. I think I was being told to turn back to my original direction, the one direction that has always held true for me.
I have wanted to quit so. many. times.
I'm still not going to say who it was, but I will say that direction did hold true when all else was failing me this year. It's been a very hard year to stay focused and keep any kind of direction. Despite my facepalm super fail feels most of the year, reader spikes doubled and I pretty much just fell to my knees and onto my face wondering how stuff like that even happens.
I didn't know what to do with it, so I came this close to abandoning Pinky blog till the numbers dropped back to some semblance of normal, which took about 4 months. I thought about going after bigger tracking systems and roundly vetoed that with a few metaphorical slaps to my own face, and jumped clear into a tuck and roll while the stats thundered by, then peeked out of the bushes a bit after it kinda died back down. It's bad enough that I obsess over maps, and worse (or a blessing???) that my life has been upside down for the last 8 months. Time to walk away and not look at the numbers.
Best move I ever made. Got my breath, felt my brain start to purr again, tossed a little catnip out for it, and watched it start pouncing again. That felt really good.
So here we are, a 4 year old zooming around me
several blurs later, I finally got her to be still...
and @bonenado's show on the TV and the phone ringing and mama coming home any minute now and the next 2 hours of wonderful chaos reigning with a Christmas tree in the background behind my messy floors and dishes piling up on the counter.
I consider myself very lucky. I also think about my mom a lot. I wasn't shiftless or anything, because I worked hard, but I was selfish and spent many a night running with a rough crowd while she put my kiddo to bed after my own divorce, and I truly appreciate Bunny's mama not falling into that crazy life crash trap. I'm happy being part of this chaos because I see us being a team getting through a challenge together. I didn't know how to do that when I was younger.
I take full blame otherwise for my entire year diverting onto the slow track. I started off not feeling well and ignoring the real problem, thankfully that is solved now. I slugged my way against my own current and then lost myself in white waters, but along the way I found my joy, and that was exactly what I needed, so I don't count this year a waste at all. With that in mind, now I can properly assess.
Pinky blog clearly outstrips my spoonie blog, my fansite blog, my aspienado blog, my minecraft blog, I could go on, but it has never pulled in the specific high traffic like I get at SyfyDesigns. I should be over there more, and I do have good intentions. Currently in my background is a very noisy kid game going on, some kind of wack a mole music thing, and there is no place to hide in this house, which I call my spaceship. This is where I could argue with filmmakers showing personnel walking endless hallways in spaceships while they talk- my house doesn't have a single hallway in 3 floors of it, not even a very short one. It's the most efficient house you've ever seen. There is no escape. I can close a door, but anyone with a 4 year old in the house knows that's an invitation to be swooped on and winds up with all kinds of bouncing on beds and bringing #allthetoys and stuff like that. So when I think about needing to do stuff over at SyfyDesigns, I almost immediately collapse into exhaustion mode and crawl back to real life. But it's definitely priority. I've already lost a couple of lists about directions and goals over there, and I want to jump back over in 2018 with a vengeance. We'll come back this time next year and see if I laugh sarcastically or triumphantly.
I've never compared all my blogs in one place before, mostly because I barely work on most of them, but I'm curious what the all-time top post is on each one.
That wasn't an exhaustive blog list because some of them have no tracking whatsoever any more (Xanga), a few more remain private, and one is unlisted and I'm not going to link it.
The point to assessing is to gather info and learn. On the blogs with very few posts, I was surprised at the incoming to the home pages (like people checking on the dotcoms themselves) were in the hundreds every year since I made them, especially on my two 'official' placeholders. One of those has been checked nearly every single day for 3 solid years. Had to put my eyeballs back in after they fell out. On the blogs with more goal-oriented directions, it was very surprising to find posts I didn't expect hitting the top all-time.
And then out of 1,111 published posts here on Pinky blog (this post is 1,112), my all-time top post now is summer syllabus. Most of my posts here average between 50-100, some hit around 300 once in awhile, but this was one of two that went over 2000. I'm sure it got caught up in the weird surgey spike last summer, whatever that was, but even then it was nearly double the other stuff also caught up in the surgey spike.
I'm not blogging to win points or make money. I blab away whether anyone reads this or not, because I do it for me. I am learning, though. I'm going deeper into me dredging out my closets, I'm getting a feel for what readers prefer in content, I'm finding out this whole #transparency thing isn't the big, bad monster it used to feel like not so long ago.
2017 was my sabbatical year, perhaps. I'm getting anxious to FOCUS! GET BACK TO WORK!
