I was plowing through another old stack of stuff, grinding away on the shredder and getting ready to move a little piece of furniture when I ran into some old measurements from 2012 after I lost that 50 pounds in 2011. I have since gained back 20 of those pounds, and this is the impact of 20 pounds.
Thigh- gained an inch around (ug)
arm- gained an inch around (ok, so I'm an inch bigger all over)
waist- gained 3 inches around (WHAT)
stomach- gained 4 inches around (no... this can't be right)
hips/butt- gained 4 1/2 inches around (facepalm)
That is 20 pounds of pure fight against sometimes twice yearly prednisone and this latest stupid gabapentin thing that screwed my diabetes to the moon and I'm still grappling that fasting glucose down to at least the high 90s 3 months later.
This has been my hardest year for diet and exercise since 2011, even though my blood work is super healthy, my diet is awesome, I'm finally sleeping the way doctors want me to, and I'm very controlled on nearly everything with as little medication as possible. Well, that's not entirely accurate. 2012 sucked quite a bit because I was still dragging to gym with so much challenge that I could barely handle nustep and basic lower core. But I was skinnier. Well, fat skinnier.
This is unacceptable.
April is always hard, so focus has to stay on controlling allergies. I've already cut out cheese, fish, and corn (I already ate very little corn anyway, because diabetic) because high histamine foods. I'm itching all over this morning for whatever unknown reason, and all I can do is keep taking antihistamines and avoid histamine triggers trying to stay off pred. Breathing is first priority, cardiac under stress is second, and everything I do is about avoiding developing congestive heart problems as I age through super spoonie challenges.
I've been around nursing homes and hospitals through other people's stuff enough to know that how much I weigh when I crash will be how difficult it is to care for me, help me move, keep my circulation healthy, avoid pneumonia complications, etc. I know I'm too young to even be thinking like this, but since I've already had my foot nearly in that door, I want to be more in control of how I finally do go in that door.
I lost the equivalent of a 50 pound bag of dog food, or 5 10-pound bowling balls. I've got 2 of those bowling balls back. I don't want them. Even if I'm in less pain and better health, this is still unacceptable. It's a quick slide back down a very slippery slope if I'm not careful.
As much as I loathe this part, I'm going to have to just start actual counting calories again. The first time around, it was simple. No special plans, no exercise, just stop eating after I hit 1500. That's all it took. 50 pounds melted off in 4 months with nothing more than that. I had incentive back then because my health was scary dismal and my food allergies became frightening, so now I'm looking for a new kind of incentive. I've got 3 other people in my house eating whatever they want, and one of them being 3 years old doesn't help. I'm not able to trick myself into believing I earn anything for achieving a goal like this (my biggest incentive has always been food, alas), and I don't have enough self awareness to really care what other people think of me in general, so it really is up to me to just own wanting this. So what do I cut out when I've already cut so much out that all I get for a treat is an ounce of chocolate chips...?
Looking at you, third cup of coffee with evap milk in you...
I'm feeling mean, so here's the most annoying Benny vid I've ever seen.
Remember when I moved 197 files to a stick, deleted them off my laptop, dumped the trash, and then immediately accidentally wiped the stick? And then as I went back and started redownloading and collecting the files, the one I wanted most had been removed and was irreplaceable? plowing face on the dance floor the Question >=l
Of course I just let it go and didn't allow myself to keep obsessing about it, so I failed to notice it being snuck back onto youtube 6 months later. I can't believe a year and a half has gone by since that happened. Anyway, I nabbed it again and I feel better now.
I talk about my stuff here on Pinky blog, but I don't name names and I don't get too gross with details. Actually, as much as I yap on, I imagine some of you are getting tired of my dodging around not sharing more, because I leave out quite a lot. Why that vid struck an important note with me has to do with how very emotionally shut down I was as a child. I would have been capable of being the child in that vid if I'd had a proper handler/trainer. I was so caught off guard at how that twisted into an entirely different story, and it gut punched me like nothing had in a very long time.
I know a few people like me. We grew up the same way, we all hit the same weird existential walls, and most of us figured out why it's important to choose positive emotional connections over remaining in a shut down state. Those of us who learned to choose and act on our own wills are virtual power players among the people around us, subtly changing histories all around us 'simply' by being kind and gentle. It does seem simple, but it's an everyday grueling sort of thing that goes against our natures, and sometimes puts us at odds with people we love. But we choose to open our eyes, take the extra step onto a precarious balance, and reach out to others like us, others who are waking up and changing the world in ways never before imagined in human history.
That sounds lofty. I say it that way because we are living in an age that has never before happened in human history. We can all see each other now, all over the world, any time day or night. We can all whisper our secrets now, share our sadness, and talk about our dreams in a way the world never could even a hundred years ago. But so many are still caught in sticky webs, trapped in lies, hostage in their own families, doing what they have to do to survive.
We live on a planet where wars are fought with children, where children are rented and sold as sex toys, where children are beaten from very young ages for the most minor infractions by dysfunctional adults who were broken as children themselves. What we see on the top- schools, malls, churches- is just a cover over what we don't see underneath. Right now there are children in cages in every country on this planet, and we talk about someone rescuing a kitten in traffic. Right now there are children acting more grown up than everyone reading this because they've learned they have to hold it all in to survive being a rape toy. Right now there are children in training to be super soldiers, and yes, we are seeing this more and more in TV shows, and my opinion is that the more we see stuff fictionalized, the more calloused we get to reality. We fuss over filming details. We follow actors around.
There are very important things going on all around you every day in real life that you don't see, because you've been trained to stay asleep, keep your eyes shut. Open your eyes. Notice the person who is different and apart. Smile at them when they glance up to let them know you really saw them standing there. You don't have to do anything else. Just let them know you saw them. Let your presence on this earth touch people who are closed off because they have secrets you know nothing about. It doesn't matter what those secrets are. What matters most is that they feel like someone saw them, because they are part of us, and not something to ignore and hope goes away and never touches your life. If you knew the half of what already touches your life you'd throw up.
You can't fix anyone, and you most likely can't save them, and if you try to reach out without knowing what you're doing you might wind up in all kinds of mess. But you can plant seeds. A genuine hello via eyes and smile is a very human thing to do for someone who is hiding that they are having a very bad day and possibly a life you wouldn't survive yourself. They don't have to smile back. They might even look at you funny, or get upset. Just look away again and mind your own business, it's ok. The important thing was that you made an invisible connection, a tiny change that down the road might make a difference. We don't see how that happens, so we aren't rewarded for doing that, are we? We just have to trust that it works.
It worked for me. I remember every person who made a genuine invisible connection with me when I was my most closed off. Those teeny tiny connections added up to a great big thought forming in my mind, and that thought started changing the way I see and live. Sometimes the most fleeting glimpses into a kind stranger's soul can make a lot of difference.
In the meantime, that vid (movie short) I'm talking about is 20 minutes of deeply haunting story with all kinds of dangling questions, and you can read more about it here.
I've been off and on this post for 3 days, so if you think you can handle all this, grab a sandwich and kick back.
When a 3 year old says it's time to clean the floors, it'stimetocleanthefloors. And no holding back, very disgusted *ew* kind of thing- Meemaw, you need to clean the floor! and then dancing off sprinkling more sticky around like sticky pixie dust.
So yeah, filled up the ol' steam mop Sunday while they were off visiting friends, dropped the reservoir on the floor hole side down, cleaned it up with a used towel, and @bonenado breezed through saying Good job, way to mop! 👍 #achievementunlocked I'm calling it a presoak. It werked.
Hello mildew, my old friend.
I've come to scrub you off again
Because the surfaces that you're darkling
I think it's time to make them resparkling
And it's gross how you're coating up the drain
You can't remain
Time to go down and perish.
I could make that 4 verses longer like the song, but I'm really not that into mildew hate. I mean, I don't tolerate it, yeah, and sometimes it sucks that I live in a state that strongly promotes its flourishing growth and it gags me to see it, so I'm usually all over it before it even shows up, but I could be doing something else like folding laundry.
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I love how kids are so innocent of seeing the bigger picture for awhile.
Poor mama can't see at all.
There we go, that works.
Boops are awesome. That is all.
Flying casual, like you do... Luke: Vader's on that ship. Han Solo: Now don't get jittery, Luke. There are a lot of command ships. Keep your distance, though, Chewie, but don't *look* like you're trying to keeping your distance.
[Chewie barks a question] Han Solo: *I* don't know. Fly casual.
--quote source--
I proudly admit that I gave birth to this person. I will always love this face, and this is my fave pic ever.
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The amazing leftover waste of oak tree sex. I'm so glad humans don't do this.
While so far I'm doing uber fantastic during peak tree pollen (compared to years past), it's not taking much to trigger histamine overloads. One day I saw my psychologist (how many people hang out on that beautiful fabric covered couch?) and ran through Walmart (I seriously actually get facial swelling in Walmart during high histamine seasons even without touching my face, and spring sunshine only exacerbates it because I get photophobic- polymorphic light eruption- when I'm in histamine overload) and spent the rest of the day tanked on enough benadryl to take a horse down, but I was just fine. One way I know I'm dealing with a reaction is when benadryl doesn't make me sleepy. My body gets so wired reacting that I can take benadryl all day long and never keel over into a nap. I have a great fight or flight response, good thing I'm not a meta (from comics for people who don't know what that is) or I'd probably be a ticking time bomb.
It's still beautiful.
So far this month I've had moderate reactions to salmon and corn on the cob on two different weeks, so naturally I'm all over looking up lists of high histamine foods to avoid, like All About Histamines. I spent so many years in my past with doctors saying IBS and anxiety- that has all melted away since I changed what I eat and started noticing that pollen seasons and hormones tend to kick up the systemic response to foods I normally eat just fine. I didn't start learning this until I went anaphylactic on several food groups over 3 years, notably nuts and peanuts (cashews was my first biggie), citrus (I lament the loss to this day), and wheat (the worst ever, 17 days on prednisone but boy did my life change after I purged it out of my house). I stopped eating fish and seafood until that all calmed down, about 3 years. I had to purge all my herbal teas (surprise! yes, you can have allergic reactions to chamomile) and stopped eating tomato salsas and sauces (I'm not even allergic to tomatoes, but they are a super trigger for kicking the rest up a notch), and the only chocolate I'll touch at all is Hershey's cocoa and Hershey's milk chocolate chips. I've been very fortunate that I can still tolerate dairy and eggs, but I'm learning not to overdo them during spiky histamine months.
Our first Japanese iris bloom.
The regular irises are about to pop, too.
In the interim, 'little' things I've lived with for a long time have been magically healing unawares. A CT of my abdomen for something else entirely (thankfully negative) remarked that a significant years-long spot on my liver could no longer be seen, so technically I probably can no longer say I have NASH. A treadmill stress test in the last 5 years placed me about 20 years younger than I really am, which is really significant with my kind of health history. On top of that, my lungs are scarred up from a soil based fungal infection and even though I lived on daily steroid inhaler for 9 months just to breathe one year when I was at my sickest point, a pulmonologist was unable to trigger an asthma attack during testing. I'm still at risk for COPD as I age (only smoked a year and a half, go figure), but aside from airway reactions during higher histamine seasons, I have beautifully clear lungs and easy breathing the last few years, and I think I use an inhaler maybe once a year now. I keep one on me anyway in my epipurse for emergencies, but I love not having to use it.
On the outer cusp of Mirkwood.
I changed my diet and morphed over the last 6 years into the healthiest I've been in my adult life, like aging backward. I still get tired easily, and I'm getting stiffer and have to keep after mobility and core strength to stay on top of normal wear and tear during aging, but at least I'm able to take care of myself around my own house. I've been through a couple of years of needing help putting on shoes and socks, not being able to drive, etc. I run into forum posts where patients say they'd rather die slow painful deaths than be compliant with whatever, and being someone coming back from the brink of slow, painful death, I just laugh and say Ok, be an idiot, but stop complaining about it. Years ago I asked a woman I know who was terribly ill all the time if she would give up her Pepsi if she knew it would add 10 years to her life, and she actually laughed and told me to my real face (not on internet or phone) that she would die before she gave up her Pepsi. Well... I'm still here. I gave up all soda pop and a whole lot more. I'm still here being good for people, not dragging their lives down.
And that's the thing, isn't it? The conundrum of becoming drags on our families, on society, on the economy, and the horrible depression of needing support networks and compassion. If we are sick and we know that we are doing it to ourselves, how much compassion can we expect? Let's do a thought experiment just for fun. Survivalists and conspiracy theorists contend that Mormonism is a branch of Illuminati or Trilateral control, basically one of the many parts of the New World Order mobilization and execution strategy. (I'm not saying that's what's going on, but if it is, then I personally think Glenn Beck is a strategically placed doublethink cover, like many others in religion, politics, and journalism.) Mormons are encouraged to follow health guidelines, as do some other religions. Entire religions recognize how foods and substances affect their populations, and those religions are part of world control, ergo perhaps that is how the new world order is 'weeding out' the sick from the healthy and rebuilding the future. And if that is the case and you are falling for the products that spin you into a pharmaceutical loop, joke's on you, isn't it? Because it's all out there, whether it's conspiracy or not, the FACT that these things make us sick and that big corp and big pharma are living large on you being stupid enough to say you'd rather die than give up what's killing you.
Bluejacky is butting in saying we always thought humans were stupid anyway, but Pinky is reminding us that we like humans after all, and kind of feel sorry for them being so dumb. It's not always their own faults, and addictions and lifestyles really are super hard to change, as we know from personal experience. So who are we to judge? We are here to say there really is light on the other end of the long dark tunnel of suffering, there really is relief from depression and sadness, and it's worth all the work while you're feeling hopeless to finally arrive there and see it for real. I know many of us feel trapped in our bodies, in our jobs, in our lives, and on this planet, but we are more powerful than we can imagine, and every day the tiny changes we make add up to great big changes over time. You can do this.
~~~~~~~~~~~
I've never messed with site maps. Google has been trying to tell me for months that Pinky blog is too big to crawl now. I can see them still crawling my other blogs I that barely touch (pourquoi?), but not Pinky blog. Am I worried at all?
No, I'm not worried, and I'll tell you why. Webmii ranked me up from 4.4 to 5.6 just over the last 6-8 months I think, statcounter is telling me incoming from facebook far outstrips G+ and twitter referrals (and much of the FB traffic is from outside my network, I know where all my people are), and as rarely as I use wordpress, new material from both my own blogs and Autisable show up pretty immediately in my name search in a Google search bar, so I feel like site mapping Pinky blog wouldn't be terribly different from Mantrid collapsing a universe. It IS too big, and I don't want to pull a ton of crawlers in all of a sudden and upset whatever balance keeps the internet from spiraling into a black hole.
Speaking of Mantrid... Yes, epic fail getting that done. Again. Yes, my house flipped over like a pancake nearly right on top of me taking finishing that work seriously. Again. Which basically means that my method and plan wildly skewed into an alt world kind of daily rescheduling (since when has this ever not happened?), but I do have more written out, a few more screen shots, etc. And today, as I'm adapting to this new lifestyle and time zone (I've adapted my sleep schedule by several hours), my brain was so on heading out the door that all kinds of motivation and ideas were sorting themselves out as I drove around, but an hour later, even with extra antihistamines, that was just gone and a sinus pressure headache was in its place. Still, I'm thrilled that I'm over 2/3 through April and have yet to break out an inhaler, and how I'm this far in without prednisone is amazing. Last year I made it pretty much all the way through, but was extremely miserable and hiding in my house. This year I'm juggling my stuff and actually breathing easily, worst of it is my eyes, lotta ducking my head in stabby sunlight and morphing into lizard eyeballs kind of stuff, but that beats oozy eyes and ear infections. And anyway, me talking about real life stuff does this in search engines, so I really don't see the point of wasting a day or two on site mapping.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
So here I am, my first April since I pieced together all the things and crossed the threshold of that doorway I waited so long to walk through. April will always be my month of mourning. I'll always carry shattered moments frozen in time, and I'll always feel them pierce me like broken glass in every April to come. The only difference now is that I'm aware that I'm doing this, and that this is what affects everything else I do and say to people all around me, hiding that I'm bleeding internally while the shards shred my heart all over again. I really don't think I need to talk about it any more, at least not here.
But there is a reason I brought it up. #transparency I was talking to my psychologist about how a person like me and where I come from can reach a place where I'm defending my decision to publicly support a faux snuff film producer because I want the world to really see what some of us live through, live with. I want the world to see and feel what my best friend went through being stabbed to death multiple times during her brutal rape. I want people reeling away in shock from truth, from the horrors of real, and start looking more intently at each other, at the people all around us, to really see each other, noticing those of us who've touched the darkness, escaped it, slipped through it, been part of it. Those of us who talk in code keep low profiles, braced against the sadness of stepping up into public knowing we won't have the support of our families and many of our friends while we reach out to others trying to make it through the dark, others feeling alone and lost with no one to talk to or understand.
And then the weird cognitive leap from walking out of that appointment to driving over to a library to pick up some more books for a 3 year old, that strange step back out into the kind of bright daylight that hides the pain this planet is in.
Twitter can't fix this, although it's a good start. I know it looks like I left twitter. I still see you guys, and I'm still checking in. My rock is my twitter gang.
While I was driving around, another opening sentence for another story popped into my mind, titled 500M. "There was a time when there were over 6 billion of us..." The rumors about population planning and culling might be history some day. What would conspiracy theories turn into looking back? They would become legends, myths. Just stories. So many stories in my head. Will I ever get them written down and shared? They feel important. I love writing. What is stopping all this? Besides pain and pain and pain and pain, in my body, in my heart, in the people all around me, in the world.
Pinky blog is growing into something I never dreamed. I stepped back out so timidly, and over time have slowly removed layers and layers in public view until I'm no longer timid. I may not be a youtube vlogger or a contending reviewer or a special interests networker, but I'm the center of a universe with many things in it, and all these things are part of me, and all these things must come together soon and become a New Thing.
And I laugh- How in the world is that even possible if I can't even finish writing a TV series character review? And I laugh back- We never thought it would be possible to make it through April this well, either. Touché.
I was looking around in photobucket and discovered that I have to check a thingy now allowing them to link out from private albums so that what I link on blogs can still be public. I'm going to guess that this is one of those surging into international https compliance things I'm going to have to keep an eye on, one more little box to tic on a very long list of my own maintenance chores I seem to be letting slide a lot more these days. Anyway, if some of you are running into missing images, that's probably it, at least I hope so. If not, several thousand images going back to 2004 might be turning into little empty boxes for some other unfathomable reason, but the Lexx stuff seems to be intact, and I'm assuming that's because most of that stuff is housed in a public folder.
This last week was my first full week in 2017 without a major pain or med challenge and it was pretty wonderful (especially considering how well I'm doing on one of my worst allergy months). I did what most people do given a chance to actually enjoy time passing- chillaxed. It's not often I can just hang around doing nothing, so I relished it a bit. Well, actually, I got busy on a long neglected project I started 2 months ago in Mo Creatures, a very dangerous 3D sculpt that requires my full attention because it's so easy to fall and die and then have to run around looking for all my stuff while I fight critters below... Anyway, my sculpt seems to be attracting the pertinent critter to spontaneously spawn really high up, so now it's even more dangerous. Cool, huh? This will eventually become a giant spider web. I'm tickled that it might have real spiders on it. No idea if the sticky webs I placed encouraged this one to show up. I reap those with a shearing scissor from mineshafts deep underground because they're cool and fun to play with.
You noticed, right? A giant spider web where the brain would be behind the glasses... Because I'm on the webs, and other deep stuff. I have way too much fun being literal with my creative side, I think. Most people stop at words like 'bizarre' before they run along.
I also spent a little time doing more exploring. One of my fave things to do is just run and see. No map mods, no waypoints. Just run. Players on the server have no idea I'm probably the only person there who's taken a real cartography class and had to make a real map. I love maps. But real freedom is tossing the map and just running. Or swimming. Lotta swimming.
I know, I'm still using super default. I'm mod-free except for the server load. If you guys could see what I see in my head both on and off the server, you'd never look at mod packs the same way again. If the question ever comes up what alien or synthetic life form I find myself most attracted to and feel akin to, it's always been V'Ger, kinda lost inside and needing to find a way to reach out and communicate. I'm simple on the outside. Inside are wonders only I ever get to see. I can definitively say we are not our brains. It's like we're seatbelted into automated super computers and don't have a clue. I've actually been able to watch mine work, and I'm pretty sure some kind of self awareness goes down to the cellular level, but very unlike our kind of self awareness. Being human, a conscious entity governing a whole self-correcting universe of cohesive units acting in tandem for our every whim in order for us to emotionally and spiritually learn things without having to be too distracted by overlording the physical, is something my actual brain can't even conceive, yet makes possible for me to think about. If we could turn ourselves inside out and really see who we are, we are like V'Ger, clouds of being around tiny organisms that we feel trapped in sometimes. And we use layers upon layers of thoughts and simulations and presentations and art and stories to fathom what being is. The bonds we form in life are so different from chemical bonds in our bodies, and feel so much more important.
And it's funny how we need to invent things like V'Ger and minecraft to keep perpetuating the depth of simulations running in our minds, and nearly every bit of it is how it relates to our own being. Once in awhile I step out past that part (did it way more as a kid), really let go of the human connection and let the simulations about how everything works just run on and on, watch the mysteries unfold, go so deep I forget I'm even human in a body on a world and eventually come back very surprised, going oh yeah. As far as I can tell, the only way I can know for sure this particular experience world is 'real' is because pain is nearly the only thing that keeps pulling me back to it before it pushes me back out again, and I always come back to this body, this life, no matter how many thousands of other places and life simulations I get lost in. This one is important. This is the one where the people I love can actually love me back. I'm not making it up in my head.
#transparency I've really lived like this my whole life. I've briefly touched this level in The Unstuck Pinky.
First of all, the in-blog Rick Lagina searches across several states from that last post was like watching lurkers come out of the woodwork. Some of you were already IN Pinky blog and just came alive like I announced I'd hidden Easter eggs. I was honestly not even expecting that. I cannot say clearly enough- "Rick, GET A BLOG. And I'm not your secretary."
Well, @bonenado is, too, so there you go, really cool busy guys are off doing cool things being busy.
Second of all, you hafta admit he's hawter than Benedict Cumberbatch playing Doctor Strange, and I'm the only person in internet history that has combined these two gentleman into one search history, so no wonder y'all hang around here waiting for moar. If I were more considerate I'd do this more often, but I'd rather be playing on Mo Creatures, so... Sorrynotsorry.
See, I totes get that this is important. I know you guys all over the world are suffering and working really hard to find any new info you can about this awesome guy doing really cool stuff that no one's ever done before in our entire world history, right? But you know what? I actually have a friend in Michigan and other friends around Nova Scotia who've never even brought the guy up, so it's not like I have a standby fan crew ready to go out on fact finding missions like the Cumber Collective has. I'm afraid this is the closest you're going to get to seeing Rick Lagina naked.
I've made the horrible confession before that I'm behind in the series. Bad fan! BAD!! If you are behind like me, you can catch up by clicking on this next pic. You can see way more Rick Lagina there than you can here.
And of course, you can go to History's official youtube channel and watch it there, too. 😊You're welcome. (In case this playlist doesn't show up 3rd party on your device, you can see it here.)
Disclaimer- I'm not connected in any way to the History Channel or the Lagina brothers. I'm not paid to link anything and I don't speak for anyone. I'm just a fan being silly, and I really do love the show. I have every single one saved on my DVR. Also, I think it's hilarious how hard Pinky blog gets hit by other fans every time I even whisper "Rick Lagina". I really don't know what else to do for you guys, but I do feel your pain. 💗
Dear person using a page opener coming straight to Pinky blog-
I appreciate that you like what you've found. 💗 It's actually quite flattering that my posts are not only bookmarked with direct links, but that you like to open them back up to read, watch the vids, share, or whatever. Page openers, however, open all the links at the same time, which inflates the actual page views one person is making. Sometimes, when page openers are clicked on a lot, they look like spam bots and it's hard to tell if you're a real person, so sometimes being a visitor can make you invisible and overlooked even if you're right up front being my best visitor.
One of the problems with page openers pulling open all the direct links is that I can't gauge how well I'm doing with my reader base. Some of my posts have become super inflated to all time top posts and it's all from one person. We're reaching a point where my monthly stats won't mean anything any more if a third of my daily hits are coming from one person. I won't be able to objectively compare this month to April of last year or eight months ago or whatever because those months weren't inflated the same way by just one person.
I've noticed the bookmarks have changed a little over time (mostly after I brought it up first, which surprised me because it means you're a real person), and that lately there are sometimes fewer simultaneous multiple visits (like 4 instead of 6), which means this isn't necessarily a machine grinding away at my security or that you're simply not as compulsive as you were first coming across, but all the same, you're hogging my data log now, which I pay for, and I'm this close to not caring any more if I ever see stats again, which means I'll not only not notice you any more, but I won't bother noticing anyone else, either. I display public hit counts as a courtesy, but if that number is being overcome by one person regularly clicking a page opener, I may as well just take that off.
I would like to think you're a nice person who is finding something you really like on Pinky blog. This has happened with other blogs in the past, and before the world became a savvier lurker place, I was able to document for several months the daily whereabouts of one person in particular who traveled the world lecturing since his service host wasn't proxied and campuses don't hide their IP IDs. There have been a few other people who've checked on me daily that weren't family, and I even accidentally had a real life person I used to live by cease and desisted because it got really creepy. Since then I've become used to lurkers and don't mind being checked on, in fact, that's why I'm so public now, so that people can make sure I'm ok. I'm just saying, since you live in a different country than I do that isn't typical for app spamming (although you could be here in the U.S. routing dark web style to look out of country), that you are singlehandedly exaggerating my numbers so badly now that I can't help but wonder what in the world is going on with you and I want to ask- Are you ok? And if you're a coat-tailer, like I've been extricating from on social medias, you really need to stop and go get a sandwich or something. I've made all my jokes about people running into Pinky blog instead of porn and winding up staying for the brain candy, and now I'm thinking 6+ months of it is a bit excessive.
In the end, though, I'm concluding that I took the bait and you're actually enjoying the sparse attention and inviting me to try to dig you up, since I've talked about stats so much on Pinky blog. I'm not biting. Sorry about that. I could care less. You could be Johnny Depp and I wouldn't care. I know who reads Pinky blog, and all I will say is you're not alone, and I've had super lurkers for a decade now who are so deep that they really do know #allthethings. But chances are you're not Johnny, and you're not really here for #bencongruity and very clearly not here for Rick Lagina, so you must be here for *me*. Whatever niche Pinky blog is filling for you, awesome.
This is the last time I'm going to acknowledge that this is happening, and only because it's making me feel disappointed. I know, I should be feeling a lot happier about my numbers popping back up, but it's just depressing like this, and I can't pretend this is getting me anywhere special. If you're a real person, I really do appreciate you, but if you really really are a real person, please go talk to someone, because I'm getting a little worried about you. 💟 And if you're the Illuminati, I got the message. j/k
I guess we're supposed to get some pollen relief today when rain sweeps through. I'm still doing really well so far, almost unbelievably too well for this time of year. Oh, what the heck, I'll take it! Others, though, are dropping like flies around me, so I can't gloat in case it smacks me when I least expect it.
With a Bunny in the house, sooner or later a cookie must appear. I'm afraid I fell off the cookie wagon. Not in a really bad way, but 3 chewy oatmeal cookies wound up in the wrong tummy over a course of several hours. Also...
I want to immediately say it wasn't me, I'm a fastidious person who doesn't like getting things sticky. I'm so fastidious that I changed my sox twice before bedtime so I wouldn't stick to anything in my sleep. @bonenado is reaching a place where voluntary floor service will soon be an option, so all I have to do is wait this out, then sit back and chillax while a self-correcting system automatically clicks on. I should buy watermelon more often.
Don't worry, not going there. I don't put that stuff into my mouth any more. I'm just stuck on a word smash week where words ping around in my head and won't leave me alone. Like sternocleidomastoid. Why in the world that word popped into my head is beyond me. Those muscles aren't bothering me at all lately, which is a nice change. I really was bouncing philosophical stuffs around for awhile yesterday, though. I think my stomach butted in because I was too busy to notice I missed lunch.
I've had a few very interesting private convos this month, each were completely different subjects with completely different people, but they all had a common theme- I clearly didn't know what love even was growing up. I didn't question it, didn't expect it, didn't care about other people bringing it up, didn't feel sad about not feeling it, and almost never applied it to myself or anything going on around me. I did know, though, that I didn't feel it, even though I could feel protective or enjoy hanging out with my sister.
After I had a child, I spent a few years filtering through all the social pressures and expectations that becoming a parent opened my eyes to. By the time she was five I was eyeball deep in a relationship that would strip every last shred of innocence that my first marriage had somehow left tatters of still clinging around like old wallpaper. By the time my little girl was seven, I knew exactly what love was NOT, and wrote out 3 pages of gripping philosophical sadness that concluded humans discarding each other like used dryer sheets could only be cured by at least one person rising above the expectations for love and hope to become love and hope. While we wait for love to rescue our pitiful lives, love can never really happen and no one has hope, because waiting around for love to 'happen' cancels out what we think is supposed to be coming from someone else. If we are expecting it like that, we can't be it ourselves for someone else. But when we rise up and love anyway, hope becomes real for someone else. The one who does the rising up must do it not only without hope, but against all hope. As long as people discard each other like used dryer sheets, 'love' spreads like a virus, and we teach all the bad habits to new loves, and they in turn teach it to new loves, because love is a throwaway item. The baggage we carry infects more and more people around us until we grow bitter and lonely in our old age. I found that unacceptable. The only way to stop it is to stop treating each other like dryer sheets, objects that are supposed to fluff up our emotional lives, hold down the static, and make everything smell fresh.
My second marriage is well into its 23rd year, and not because it's easy and we're romantics. I am one of the most fortunate people I know, meeting someone who thinks the same way (not in so many words, but more intuitively after a painful childhood himself), and what makes it work for us is we're so terribly stubborn and not easily swayed with every little breeze of emotion. Oh, there's been emotion, long years of gritting our teeth through mess after mess, challenges upon challenges, and it all boils down repeatedly to neither one of us would ever abandon the other even on our very worst days, weeks, months, and years. We've both been abandoned, neglected, ignored, used and abused, and we both know what love is NOT. We know that looking around for something we don't create ourselves is a ridiculous lie to tell ourselves. We. Are. Love. Why look around for it and hope to find it when the next person is doing that too, looking around and hoping. How can we be what the other person needs from that point of view?
I don't feel emotions right like other people do. I don't feel loving. I don't feel kind. Love and kindness are philosophies of emotional logic I developed to survive, because without them I am terribly alone and deeply sad. I don't think I am capable of being in love correctly, yet I'm in love all the time. The euphorias I've developed in later age (hormones out of the way?) can now easily be triggered, and they are the only thing that's ever connected me to feeling happy, especially the first time when my brain was so chemical soaked that I was high on chemically induced love and felt happy for the first time in my whole life. I enjoy people and things, I laugh quite a lot, I am pleased with this and that, but outside of euphoric episodes, I don't feel happy. And I don't even think about that, whether I 'feel happy'. This has been discussed at length with a psychologist over several years, looked at from several angles that include autism spectrum with complications like synesthesia and narcissism and possibly even dissociation, the way my parents raised me and my years of wrangling with a conflicting belief system, my best friend being maliciously murdered, injuries from a nasty accident, a first marriage to a pedophile, an affair that wound up in what boiled down to a 'forced' abortion (reverse rape, complete with restraints)...
Did I just keep switching it all off? How do I switch it back on? Did I survive because I couldn't turn it on in the first place? Yet I puzzled it all out into a philosophy of being that my psychologist thinks on par with extremely advanced awareness levels and thought processing skills for young child, preteen, adolescent, and young adult. I absorbed philosophies like people around me absorbed holiday candy and TV shows and the other lies of social structure, stuck on roller coasters of feeling happy and unhappy because that's what modern society insists that we constantly assess in ourselves. Are we happy? Personally, I think that feeling is so easily mimicked putting sugar in our mouths that we've become accustomed to habitual feeding frenzies and then agonizing over all the ways food makes us unacceptable. Food porn. There are stories throughout history of socialites alternately gorging and starving themselves, but what darker secrets lurked beneath?
The reason the questions are coming back up is because I noticed I didn't feel anything doing something that another person would likely have found exciting, possibly even exhilarating. Sometimes I do something that other people would feel prone to brag about or use as personal resume padding, and I feel nothing, even though I know now that I should. I'm aware nowadays that I'm numb most of the time. I used to harbor anger like Dr. Evil petting Mr. Bigglesworth, but I've mostly let go of that, so I'm on a sort of testing ground, poking myself here and there to see if I'm feeling anything.
Happiness is conditional on people and events and material things and feelings affecting me, and there is nothing in this world that makes me happy, although eating certain foods used to come close. Nothing *makes* me happy. I never understood what happiness was even supposed to be, like what does it mean when people say they don't feel happy. I grew up completely missing the ability to grasp that concept. I've tried to word out my thoughts on it through the years in some of my silly surveys at Surveypalooza, but after I went through the initial euphoria (almost completely stopped eating and sleeping for 12 days and was continuously gurgling in a love state, which alarmed my psychiatrist), anyway, after I *felt* that, I finally had some kind of context, because I was able to say "I feel so happy." I had never felt happy before. No meds or drugs or events or people in my life had ever induced any kind of happy feeling even remotely like that, but as soon as I was in it, I recognized it. And then when the euphoric episode crashed back down, the happiness was over and I haven't really felt that kind of happiness since, even though I go through euphoric episodes fairly regularly now. I felt happy for 12 days out of my entire life, and the whole thing was a brain chemical imbalance.
Love and happiness are important, I know that. I know it's important that I help the people around me feel loved and happy, even if I can't or don't feel these things myself. I care deeply for the people around me, and I know I'm very lucky I actually have people in my life who love me back, even if I don't have any desire or need for them to go out of their way to do and say things to show me this. Well, poor @bonenado caught it a few times, but we're both hung up on our conundrums, and pretty much apparently nailed the love thing out of sheer stubborn devotion.
Not everyone is so lucky. Not everyone finds the glove that fits their weird hand. Not everyone feels understood and accepted, quirks and all. Not everyone feels comfortable just being themselves around people who are supposed to be the most important loves of their lives- parents, sibs, offspring. It's not something that came easily for me and Scott, and yet here we are, out of nothing more than sheer stubbornness and an unwillingness to drift alone again among the dryer sheets. Neither one of us can ever go back to that kind of thinking. We make the love we want and we live the love that we need. We've become for others what we desperately needed and didn't have for ourselves. It's been hard and it took time, but we are who we are and there was no other way to survive. We draw firm boundaries around misconceptions and dysfunctions, and we don't tolerate that crap in our own home. Our love depends on utter honesty, utter trust that the other won't leave over something stupid. My home is my sanctuary, and my people are exactly that- mine.
A great big part of this was letting go of and walking away from the kinds of things that perpetuate emotional codependency (dysfunctional relationships doomed to fail because they are not love even if they are disguised as love), chemical dependency (alcohol, drugs, meds), experience dependency (things inducing rushes of adrenaline and euphorias, shopping, thrill seeking, for some people gambling would go here), pretty much anything that masks pain, to put it very simply. To feel pain is one of the privileges of being on this earth (it seems designed especially for pain), and if souls and eternity exist in any form at all, then my being here is by choice because I wanted to learn something important. Blocking that process only slows down my spiritual progress and hurts other people. Even if I can't feel remorse or guilt, I know that is a bad thing and that I will be held responsible for being stupid. Years of deep reflection point no other direction than this- that we are here to learn to love through the toughest kinds of pain imaginable. It's ok to be weak and fall on our faces, but it's not ok to *not* learn from that, and once learned, it's definitely not ok to turn our backs on it and be selfish. I think this holds water in any religion or belief system you'd care to bring up.
My name is Broken Dragon, and that is my phyllosopapilla on life, the universe, and everything. I was 42 when I woke up. The next year I made a blog...
Ode to @bonenado making it through Easter surrounded by women on all sides, including mom, sister, daughter, granddaughter, wife...
I mostly stayed in Mo Creatures. Bunny helped me name a raccoon and hunt for chicken eggs and then we had a discussion about why a rabbit didn't have her name, so another player helped me make a baby bunny and we named it after her. Outside of minecraft, blurs of activity happened in spurts with quiet times in between while the blurs ran around seeing other blurs, lol. Between being autism spectrum and aging through fibro, even though I'm having a fantastic year so far, inside my mind I feel like I'm on a constant lag. My psychiatrist says what I'm feeling doesn't match what others observe, but I think it's because I'm just really good at faking y'all out, lolz.
Halfway through April and so far so good on allergies. This was always my big airway rescue month for years, keeping my fingers crossed this'll make my 2nd year in a row not winding up in ER or clinic for pred rescue. I've hit 100 3 times now I think on my CPAP score, meaning I'm making it 6+ hours with good mask seal and low apnea counts. I can tell, though, that central apneas are going to continue to be a huge deal if I take meds any time after 4 p.m., so I'm still excruciatingly med sensitive, and no wonder I spent 20 years being a super insomniac. I used to think I made it through being ejected from that wreck without a head injury, but it's coming up with my sleep doctor now that possible brain stem area concussion might be the culprit behind me not breathing in my sleep. All this neck, jaw, and lower skull work in physical therapy can't solve that problem, so as I age, I'll probably be higher risk for something as simple as not breathing in my sleep because my brain can't tell me to wake up and breathe, and CPAP doesn't fix that kind of apnea. It can, however, make sure other apneas are solved and bring my OSAT up, and more oxygen to my brain means more overall continued healing and health, and more healing means a better chance of my brain being able to make me breathe when I stop.
I have always felt I'm here on borrowed time, and like I'm racing time to get done what I'm here for. I've said several times during crisis "I'm not done yet." I've never said "I'm afraid of dying." I'm very much afraid of having to leave the game board before I'm done here. Life sometimes feels like a Monopoly board and sometimes feels like a Parcheesi board. My life feels like both, all mixed in with chess. (Imagine Parcheesi chess Monopoly...) I've thought this way since I was a kid. The reason I write so much on the internet is because I don't know when I'll have to stop, and I can't count on there being a 'later' to do things. Between autoimmune reaction disorder (anaphylactic reactions) and central sleep apnea, even really good days for me could be over very quickly. I have lived like this every day for many years, always knowing today could be my last day. I'm working very hard on increasing percentages, ratios, and chances, but sometimes it feels really important that I tell people I love them just in case.
By the way, I'm NOT writing this because anything feels urgent or imminent, lol. I used to go through horrendous anxiety attacks that were way worse for feeling like I'd die any second than this feels. I actually feel really well the last few months compared to the last ten years, but those who know me know I'm always ready for that other shoe to drop, because it's just a habit. I'm writing it because I'm thinking it. Being on CPAP has brought this to a much more #inmyface attention.
What a morbid Monday, sorry about that. I'd better go do some chores.
I am hopefully assessing out of physical therapy today for either the rest of the year or at least a much longer stretch than I've gone in years. I'm on new ground now. I never EVER envisioned getting this far, although I have pushed hard to get here anyway.
And, like a dork, I let my zyrtec run out. I also completely missed an appointment yesterday. Crashed a little harder than I thought I would coming off the euphoria but it's all good, kept laundry caught up, meals got made, I even worked.
@bonenado sounds terrible, and I'm guessing head cold going into bronchitis. Doesn't seem to be the typical allergy stuff, all the sicky symptoms dragging around. Beautiful spring popping out, @bonenado going all zombie on us. Poor guy.
This is pretty much my head right now. Everything is all stirred up in there bcuz Bunny and PT and pulling all my focus into navigating euphoric ep and allergy boom. Been making my coffee a little stronger this month. I know I'm out of touch out there but srsly thx to my friends for shares around the medias and hopefully I get a lot more work done this year. I feel solid through my hurricanes with my gangs under me.
Caught it. Finally caught it. The hardest part about catching who exactly is doing what is when they know how to be invisible to trackers but still show up on blogger stats. Blogger stats are the vaguest stats I've ever seen in my life, but dang they actually see the incoming, so I can't fault them at all. I went through the Brazil and Ukraine things and laughed, this one has been a great big pill and I've finally got it nailed down now. I've been able to confirm that it began immediately after embedding a javascripted paper.li widget into Pinky blog, which meant their sharing code was vulnerable. This isn't the first big media site I've linked to and been cyber spammed out my eyeballs behind the scenes. If you guys think spam emails are bad, you've never seen bot swarms pinging back from legit companies who don't have a clue how to secure their sites and get hacked like crazy without even knowing it, and their clients get swarmed just for linking them. Yes, I was a paying client, was being the operative word.
This hacker who's been pinging me over the last year is definitely based in France, confirmed taking over my stats for months, and since the beginning of this year I've been watching 6 posts in particular pull in 50 hits a week each, over and over, like on a regular schedule. I never could nail the referrals until today because they were always mixed in with regular incoming. This morning in the wee hours I caught a loner, and all the rest was already in place.
This is about hash merge redirects. I don't think it affects you guys at all, but it seriously skews my statistics. Basically, hackers will use fairly innocent app sites like streamsend to set up redirects to a cover site that looks like porn but is REALLY a scalp site that hijacks personal info off your device. I've been able to compile a list of apps being used to hash redirects and they all go back to the same site, which no one would ever find on a search engine (big red flag that it's not really porn).
So why in the world would hackers like this be working so hard to get into Pinky blog? Well, my email address is like my phone number or social security number, a unique identifier that opens a great big door all over my medias. My blog fleet is only as secure as the host I choose, and that's pretty much why I've been sticking with blogger. They do most of the dirty work keeping the sewage cleaned out behind the scenes (they trash the spam for me, I normally don't see most of it), and these hackers are looking for ways around a really tough security system.
Why is this a big deal? Because my stats boomed. I want to know if those are real readers, right? Well, about a third of my readers at ~very particular times~ are fake. The rest of you are still real. I really did experience a reader boom, but it's been a little bit inflated lately for some reason. I couldn't help noticing they took the bait I put out awhile back and immediately fixed their bot to crawl instead of remaining static, so someone actually is paying attention. Hello, Someone. You Suck.
It's all good. We're both laughing.
All pix in this post were previously used and linked on Pinky blog, so I'm not linking them today.
Totes rockin a bad hair day like Leo, knowing I'm a super cool badass under it all. I have looked like this ever since physical therapy this morning. That one really white straight hair in his beard is making me crazy.
Bunny is just like her mama, super hyper insomniac. My edge in my older age is I don't have enough energy to care and even think it's kinda funny. The 'wait till you have a kid' curse is spot on. Getting to see it live cracks me up.
Against all conscious bracing against caving to this level of shallow thinking, I'm mentally developing lists of awesome and stupid kids' shows, complete with their own pros and cons. PJ Masks is pure brainwash. One show and you're actually repeating lines around the house and thinking about cool new pajamas, and basically it's just a really simple psychology establishing bad guys (other kids) and all the ways we have to fix the problems those kids create. I give it 2 thumbs down, an obvious first step into linear thinking that progresses throughout life into party affiliations and blame games. The problem solving isn't much different from black and white thinking camouflaged into colorful adrenaline filled action scenes. Contrast that to Little Einsteins, the absolutely most annoying cartoon on the planet, and it's actually growing on me. Bunny is only 3 and already hums and sings along to classical snippets, totally gets the music instructions, and easily follows a real story. The bad guy is usually a jet instead of another human, and while I don't really understand why, it's a relief to get away from the whole bad guy motif because some human is being a monster that we must fix. The creepiest show is The Hive (uber 'normal' twisted into adorable bugs is creepy, guys), and I love it, to my surprise. I'm not a bug fan, every character in that show is some kind of bug. My fave is the wasp kid. Charlie Brown needed a wasp kid in his life. The Hive is like a British sounding Peanuts kind of soap style series (but also with adult bugs) on the opposite of steroids. That is the calmest children's show I've ever seen, and my brain thanks all the creators and voice actors and Netflix and everyone else involved in that show.
I know, right, I'm missing all the CW shows. I've been digging up rants and raves on youtube and web reviews, and pretty much Felicity floating to the top is irking me like crazy. Of course I've missed the entire last couple of weeks of #allthethings, although I'm somewhat staying caught up with The Flash. Barry can screw the timeline all he wants (you gotta admit Iris did a really nice future death scene and that it really coming to pass would crank the live tweet ranting up into outer space), but I can't wrap my head around Felicity masked and then killed off so fast. I'm just
click for more gifs
Also, something is going on with our electric, several times this week we've abruptly lost power, couple nights ago was 3 times in a row after we went to bed, which rather sucked for getting a child to sleep (you know how those backup batteries have to announce in really loud voices that the power is out and you're now on backup supply? yeah, that, and it does NOT help that suddenly there is a strange voice in the inky darkness), and today, especially all afternoon and evening long, the brownouts have been so bad every other minute or so that I can barely use internet at all because the router keeps getting interrupted, even if the other appliances are able to continue. Big storms the other night musta done something, and I finally just abandoned myself on a sheer mountainside on a multiplayer server, and I'll just hafta hope I don't get killed immediately tomorrow and lose all my cool gear that I worked so hard to get leveled up with enchantments when I finally log back on.
First world problems, huh?
I can't decide what vid to go out on. Hang on, we'll change it up tonight. Readers who don't follow on twitter really don't have a clue about a my girl crushes, and Felicity is right at the top.
That snip is from Google browser.
The month of April is brought to us by the word "disingenuous" and the number 3.
@bonenado and I have had ample opportunity to compare notes and revisit our own old memories while we watch the world fall down. We remember our own struggles with trying to understand how we fit with others who turned out to have used us as covers, as refuge, as shields, as defense mechanisms, as displacing bins, as emotional slaves.
Emotional vampires abound. They are selfish and treat others according to whim of the hour and whatever trubbas they've gotten themselves into, don't know how to extricate from, and won't be honest about dragging other people into. Once dragged in, the innocents become unwitting dysfunctional feedback loops in a neverending drama that either must eventually explode or turn them into zombies who keep secrets and even help defend gunk they're all trapped in.
There is no defending someone using another person to step on, especially under a guise of sympathy and helpfulness. When it all flips over into creating 3rd class citizens expected to take whatever crap and still keep acting normal, someone needs to figure out their shit and get out of my family's way.
Scott and I are extremely patient people. We allow our kids to make all the mistakes and figure things out themselves. We do this in an edge of the precipice horror kind of stance, of course, trying not to pull all our hair out. Pretty sure most of my mom's aging was my fault. But I just wanna say watching a guy almost as old as my youngest sibling pull this crap on our daughter for years, getting her so wrapped around him that she left all her friends and life behind, and the way he left her homeless through her pregnancy, used her place as a hideout after she had a kid, let her believe the whole family thing when an ex finally moved out, and then started the name calling and accusing and blaming and... It was all I could do not to go ask him How old are you? Because he sure wasn't acting like a 40 year old with a brain. Lotta psychological damage from our point of view, and I won't hesitate to splash more out if this gets outa hand again. Really tired of people f*ing each other up.
I'm just putting this out there, not going to link it or anything. Well, it'll go to G+ because it's automatic.
3-day cervicogenic headache aside (mimics migraine), I thought our first weekend with Bunny moved in went really well. I have 2 days left in physical therapy this week (doing my usual fibro-flare kickback against all the local stimulation and then sleeping better with my neck in a weird position, plus dental chair for teeth cleaning, yowza to the neck #uffda), my blood pressure seems to be settling around 116/78 kind of stuff (huzzah! CPAP, guys), I finally broke through on that stupid fluid retention from the big med change in January (still can't believe how much that bossed my whole body around), and yay we're finally back to Monday routine.
Allergies- don't wanna jinx myself, but CPAP is super duper for helping control so far. April is my bad month every spring. The air I breathe through the night now is double filtered. So far I'm using only half the antihistamines I was using last year and breathing comfortably, but oak pollen is just now really ramping up (birch is already high), so we'll see where I am a week from now. People around me, meanwhile, are struggling. I've talked before about how quickly pollen saturates a house in a variety of ways with tips on how to manage that. the definitive last word on living through a ragweed tsunami
Still euphoric, but it seems to be pretty controlled. This is the 12th day, which is usually about where it starts tapering off for me. Feeling pretty confident that I won't go through a crash and burn once it does. I think this is the best controlled big euphoria I've had, and despite all the extra stress around me, I still managed to float through quite a bit of it even though I was controlling the float level.
I'm not letting myself look at work I feel isn't getting done. I'm hugging myself for getting through all this huge stuff intact and not worse off. I think my family is a good team because we know each other so well and we're all into problem-solving, and somehow we all seemed to click into about the smoothest problem fix transition we've ever gone through together.
Number one lesson learned- no matter how smart a 3 year old seems, the probability of treasure winding up in one's tummy is 100%, pretty much just a matter of time. Bunny's amazed disbelief at how in the world it had to and actually did make its magical reappearance still cracks me up. Watching this learning process has been delightful and opened up all kinds of new thoughts about thought processes in my own mind. The conclusion, as always, is that humans in general don't 'know' anything without conscious investigation and observation, and all our knowledge as a species is cumulative. Left to our own devices, we'll always just keep swallowing metaphorical rocks and not know what to believe.
Quick summary- I'm tired, and we've still got a long way to go. I can do this.
This was my lullaby in my headphones last night after everyone else settled in. One of my last thoughts before I finally drifted off was how I never seem to talk about how much the Joker has filled background gaps in my head since I was a kid. I saw all the old Batmans in the 60s, the cartoons, all the movies. I love Jack Nicholson, but I think Heath really nailed it.
There's a thing that happens on the Mo Creatures server making me think a bit about time order. The dimension we live in heavily depends on it, but we seem to be able to think in ways contrary to that, which I don't think should even be possible to cross our minds unless it really is possible for time order and spacetime to work differently. Of course our brains have specific wiring for us to be able to experience time order, and certain kinds of brain damage can make time feel jumpier than the smooth moment to moment that we normally experience. At worst, time can become so disconnected that a person can become very confused and disoriented, but it's always within their own cognitive experience. When a group of people share the same time jumpy memories, as in UFO abduction stories, we start to dig deeper into what is really happening, but we still have no conclusive evidence or proof that a time disorder really happened independently of local cognitive processes.
Once in awhile, due to whatever issue, the server goes through a lag and then a sudden jump or series of jumps. Sometimes it simply jumps forward catching up all the commands I've executed to real time. Sometimes it's a little more complex and knocks me back a few blocks and then replays the series of commands I've executed, making it seem like deja vu. And sometimes it suddenly lag-jumps in a way that makes things 'disappear' or 'lost' or at the very least seem a bit nonsensical. Yesterday the jump and replay was so convoluted that I watched all my commands re-happen out of order, but the consequences changed. It involved a re-teleport and items placed not just replayed or backward, but shuffled up completely out of sequence, and all of a sudden I was missing one particular block I had made the special teleport trip to get, but everything I did just before placing it apparently reappeared intact, even though I got 'bumped' over a block. When a moderator got involved, I think they could see I was still holding that block, but there was no way I could see it or interact with it until they handed me more of the same item to my inventory, and once I handed their amount back, I could see my own block just fine and finally placed it where I wanted it. (:edit: I worded that wrong. I was told to keep that extra inventory, but once I opened my inventory and closed it again, I was able to see and use my own block.)
That seems an awful lot like spooky magic. In reality, it's a series of executable commands in lines of code, and they actually have nothing at all to do with each other except they're supposed to retain a sort of time sequence integrity. If we step into the sort of dimension where we see the world as code, we can see what actually happens, but if we step into my laptop dimension java talking to incoming information that has to be processed from a server and then processed and consciously interpreted through a completely different server such as my brain (experiencing my experience, as it were), we see a mangle of what my real life brain interprets as spooky magic. It was only my processor talking to their server in a weird sort of un-time because electrons and radio waves actually are kinda spooky on a quantum level, but my own experience interpreted a code entanglement as time suddenly getting all jumbled up and something disappearing.
This post is me practicing how to do words around that kind of stuff because I'm working on a real story (have been for years) that I'm wondering if I should share straight to a blog because my life keeps getting so interrupted that it seems like I'll never get that story actually published.
This is how a red glass aquarium rock (bead, pellet, whatever it's called) looks from another dimension of light travel.
A sequence of events (executable commands) led to the placement of that rock, and I think 'time travel' is greatly misnomered and could be a very useful tool in lieu of surgery, should it come to that. I think it should be possible to be able to step out and revisit the code lines of executable commands and then take a command line out without messing up the overall sequence of events that led to this 'fix' having to take place. And that alone springs all kinds of philosophical debates to life. Don't worry, I won't list them (but I really could) because I'm still on my first cup of coffee and I really want to get over to Mo Creatures and keep working on my bone block ceiling in the uber cool big spooky dark library I am fixing up to spawn surprise creatures of the night on unsuspecting guests. Too bad I can't code time glitches into their experiences and really freak them out, right?
If you like thinking about code in real life, I've also got a post called wassappening that you might like.
