Invisible

Haunted Sleepover with #latenightmovie gang

From last night's #latenightmovie with Lisa Marie Bowman and the @LNMGang in the @syfydesigns souped up chat room (2018 version).

I never thought about this version of Sherlock Holmes being over 100 years old. I'd already seen it twice because @bonenado is a big #everythingSherlockHolmes fan, but generally ignored every version that ever came out until Moffat got hold of it. If you're into the quiet posh end of creature comforts, this movie was pretty sweet for studying lifestyles of the apparently upper crust and well known back in the day.

We missed Kurt. He'd have been terribly disappointed, though, no frilly dressing gowns.

Yes, in the future, AIs will debate hot topics over old movies. They won't even need us. Zoe and Caprica are our resident AI programs that we can yap with while we watch the movie. Myrna finally did get in, btw.

I personally think Watson is vastly underrated and under appreciated and used far too often as a somewhat comedic sidekick. Apparently I do have strong feelings about interpretation.

I can't even with a Sherlock theme song, lol. +_+

Back then things got super boring without television, so fun night romps through the meadows with your rowdy friends possibly getting shot was all the awesome.

I was making a Pottermore joke. I'm not crazy about the Pottermore extension.

Lisa for POTUS!!!!

You had to be there. You missed a rousing Santa Claus Conquers the Martians chorus and a stimulating discussion about sardines. I think somewhere in there I mentioned that Sherlock needed a moor of his own for Christmas, since it seemed to get him so excited.

Somewhere in here I decided that Dylan would be a good Sherlock Holmes, and got a bit of agreement.

I think several of us realized the biggest flaw in Sherlock's thinking is that he's never really blamed for the deaths of those he uses for bait. I mean, he knows they're going to die anyway, right?

The obvious suddenly coming to light was almost like *cough* a plot device filling a hole *coughcough*, but I'll be polite and not mention it. No wonder people thought Holmes set up the crimes to happen sometimes. He probably had tea with Jack the Ripper at some point discussing strategy.

You

Remember

Immortals

Run

like, pretend your villain isn't terribly empathic or something

This is a think piece, in case you miss that.

Sometimes I wanna sit and write out all the stuff I would've done in your place kind of thing. Like, lemme show you how to be a better sneak, a sharper thief, a wittier manipulator, a more cunning liar, a farther seeing revenger, a more thorough getting even thinker. The fail I see others stumbling through drives me crazy.

The key to all great successes is simply don't tell anyone. If you have to tell someone, anyone, then you aren't ready for the big leagues. If you can't stand holding it all in and need to spell it all out or you'll pop, you're not that terribly serious. You might still be dangerous and whatever, but you ultimately fail in evil villainry.

You can't have cult followings or pyramid schemes and be ultimately successful. You might be a terribly evil genius, yes, but you will still ultimately fail. Because someone knows.

You are the only one who can know. If anyone ever traces anything back to you for any reason whatsoever, that is fail. If you go blabbing, it's uber fail. If you actually organize, that's so facepalm fail that you wind up being the example of how to fail.

Needing to spill is the greatest weakness.

Conversely, using spill to bait, using truth and vulnerability to snap the trap, and please understand I don't mean being fake vulnerability or acting here, but literally allowing yourself to be stabbed in the back as part of the revenge, now that is heritage cognac level evil villainry.

And let's be honest. Half of you reading this just compared notes, and the other half thought of people you fear. We're not talking about Penguin level leverage and fail here, although I'd love to get hold of a few writers and shake them. We are talking every day people. Everyone holds a grudge, and half of you want to do something about it.

So the key to success is staying quiet. Winning is the actual success. Define what winning is. This is where I am so keenly disappointed in most people that I can barely take anyone seriously. Winning isn't about squashing someone like a bug. Winning is about quietly creating what you'd really like to see happen. People who succumb to thinking that bug squashing means happiness and freedom are pathetic losers and don't deserve to win anyway. Winning is about fixing the problem that creates the bugs in the first place. You don't want a bug? Turn that whole person or situation into a not-bug. Don't make it someone else's problem. Make it not a problem at all.

I know, some of you are actually thinking about killing, maiming, or at least making someone cry as a solution. NO. That's not the solution. The solution isn't about removing or screwing with anyone or anything. Winning isn't about making everything else around it worse. Your scope of vision is far too narrow if that's how you are problem solving.

The whole reason this came up is because I keep running into successions of writing prompts, writing tips, writing memes, writing flaws, and so on ad nauseam. Everyone has the answer to how to make a better villain in a story. The problem with stories is that villains lose. Even if they are winning big for a very long time, they still lose.

The biggest writing fail of our times is making the villain lovable, giving the villain an out. Villains come to their senses, they are seduced by cuteness and some kind of love, they are just sad stories at the core like the rest of us. They are human. NO. A truly evil despicable villain is so unlovable, so broken, so ruined and cruel and obnoxiously loathsome that no one could ever really *care* about that person in their wildest dreams.

Case in point, Gollum. The very best you can do is barely take a little faint pity on the guy once being a simple soul. The rest is pure foul hatred that there is no coming back from. He would never dream of taking on an apprentice, like Palpatine does. The Emperor is a doddering grandfather compared to Gollum. Let's see Palpatine pull off the biggest power heist of the universe with no Senate support, and no Force. Nothing stopped Gollum, and dang if he didn't actually have the Ring back by the time it was over. The Ring itself couldn't stop him from utterly annihilating it with his twisted love.

It's cute to make villains adorable or fashionable or something fondishly cool to be a fan of, like Pixel. Why are we doing this to stories nowadays? Why are villains doing Disney showtunes? Why is Luna Girl the kind of brat we all dream of being deep down inside?

Writer gods forgive me for slamming tips back before I'm officially published, but if you can't Khan your villain into some level of unforgivable, I just can't myself. I can't read or watch stuff that has me feeling warm fuzzies for the super villain without the entire story caving in. If I'm hoping the villain wins, it's either because the story is some genre of mockery or the story is that bad.

Draw a hard line over which your morals don't step around your villains. Make your villains so hateable that no one ever forgets them. Drop the cute and hurt yourself writing what the hell happened. Some of us are out here depending on you to stop slathering evil with fun bathtub coloring soaps. And glitter. Stop that.

Evil needs to be evil. Because that is what evil is. Anything less is propaganda. Something to think about.

Love

Applause

Yablo

pinkyblue

I haven't been saying much this month because I'm working on other projects and paying attention to other things, like what friends are doing on their projects. I'm taking a little time to notice other people's stuff. Ok, yeah, and lurker games. I'm also going on more braincations without taking the medias with me.

Still here being Pinky, though.

click for deviantart source

Staying busy.

boom

One of those days where my brain is so flatlined that I'm cool deleting junk for 2 straight hours off my phone.

Have a lot I'm keeping though. I'm a packrat. The screenshots I hoard are very telling.

It was about this time 3 years ago that Pinky blog really started taking off. This month is the first time in 3 years I've let the views flatline, too. Also very telling.

FOCUS! GET TO WORK!

theme, focus, execution

The

Hot

I'm

White

Let

Dollhouse

That's what they get for using a landline

Last night @LNMGang tried out a new improved version of the SyfyDesigns chatroom watching Saturday the 14th. I'm not able to regulate the font size, and there are no click outs for these, so this is an experiment to see whether the new chat room works for screenshots. If I'll be able to see the chat yap on mobile, this will be a go.

Personally, this should have been a series. This is a veritable who's who, the dynamic was magic, the writers were actually both intelligent and funny, and we got nonstop nods to so many other movies and television shows from back then. Plus, the settings were delightfully cryptic. I mention later that I'd like to rewatch and freeze frame all the rooms in this house.

I really do think I've seen that door before.

Myke and Phil were talking cars, lol. 😂

Lisa was fashionably matchy.

Kurt's famous laptop got its own cameo in this movie. That's how old his laptop is!

I wouldn't mind a ghost doing the dishes. I'm not sure quite what was evil in this movie, but they sure talked about it a lot.

Eek, a new chat bot.

This is about the most obligatory bathtub scene ever, if you're into those.

Welp, can't say never police when you need them.

Lisa probably uses a time turner. 😁 Or she's an alien who can phase shift. Hard to tell.

I looked up Lisa's Twilight Zone reviews, and found out she was shadowbanned last year. I'm a Lisa fan, you can start with her gravatar to find all her blogs. If you're looking for a hobby and dig old movies, I just handed you a year's worth of fun reading.

Ah, yes, the ol' act straight maneuver. If you've never told anyone to act straight so you don't get caught, you never had any fun.

Cats. Btw, there's a tiny white kitten cameo near the end, not sure anyone else caught it.

That exterminator (Van Helsing) was played by Severn Darden. His bio and filmography on IMDb is worth checking out.

That Pink Panther memory is actually this cartoon (the Inspector was part of the series), and here is the Bugs Bunny version of bat changing if you prefer that.

Ok, crossover time. Mega Maid comes from Spaceballs (1987) and was first spoken by George Wyner playing Colonel Sandurz (click that one for movie quotes). He looks a bit like Jeffrey Tambor, so there was probably some memory trigger going on, but perfect for this movie. I should have given Phil points for that one.

These people definitely took the blue pill.

Here is the Pete Burns interview, in case you're a Dead or Alive music fan.

I can't tell you guys how many versions of Van Helsing I've actually seen because @bonenado is such a huge fan of that character. Lexx fans who follow me are excitedly jumping up and down yelling for me to mention Walpurgis Night, in which Peter Guinness played Joseph Van Helsing.

Billy had to learn to dumb down a bit so he could save the movie.

You know everything is ok when the dog comes back.

speed fail

Another hour till  movie gang time and I know I'm super fail blogging lately, so quickie power point.

• I love burnt raisins. Overcooked the last batch of oatmeal cookies and am now delightfully hooked on that bittersweet of the tortured grape.
• My cynicism is kicking into high gear as I become more seasoned moderating on a game server. Srsly gonna start supplementing my twitter with the warn, mute, ban thing. Apparently foot fetish is ok to slide into DMs and I instantly hated, you know? Like *ew* thanx for spoiling a long twitter friendship.
• K, Holly's calling so the hour is slipping by, lol.

Here, have a video.

Satellite

Accidentally

Sex

Take

my point of view, such as it is

CAUTION- Graphic content.
Strong warning on triggers for rape and violence.

I know y'all know I strongly discourage comments because I'm weird and you're all cool to never comment even though that's an option, but this post has comments turned off. This is the first time I've ever put all this together in one place with real names and searchable linked content. I'm still not capable of getting through convo about this event, but at least we'll all know now where my head is sometimes.

Three years ago on pinky blog I started blogging through a daily depression trail that starts every April first through my entire adult life. I started questioning why, and you guys watched me uncover and start dealing with a repressed memory. Today is the first day I put together the bits and pieces and deal 'out loud' with what happened.

This is Julie Ann Jackson. She lived on 816 N. Watson Ave. when I knew her in school. She was my best friend from the fifth grade. Her hair was naturally golden, and she was slightly chubby in a very pretty way. I considered her my only real friend (because that's what aspienado does, one real friend at a time) even though she was very popular and had lots of friends.

Aside from biting my hand when we were ten because I was being so bossy that she had to find a way to make me shut up, she was always kind to me, and every time I showed up near her, all her other friends moved over. I never thought about why, but I knew that was my place. I know now that she knew I was different (I'm autism spectrum), and she elevated me to an intellectual status dismissed by everyone else, including my family. I was the only one in school that could keep up with her on all kinds of testing and reading material, although I never bested her at anything. She was one of those true MENSA types with a very easy personality, and she spent time not only including me, but teaching me how to draw horses and taking turns writing stories that we passed back and forth in classes. We attended all the sports events together, and the only times we were apart was for being in different classes or activities. Because of her, I actually had other friends in my life that I probably wouldn't have had without her.

My family moved to another state right in the middle of the ninth grade. I've written about how hard that was, the day I left I didn't even get to say goodbye. Thankfully, Julie loved snail mail, and we sent off letters to each other 3 times a week like clockwork for at least four years. I did get to go back the summer after graduation and visit, and she gave me the royal treatment. I was family to her. She escorted me around showing me off, took me to her house, drove me around talking about college and friends she had and her boyfriend. I was as out of the water as a Vulcan fish with my Asperger's, for those of you who know Spock history, but that didn't phase her in the least, and I let her do all the talking and leading me around while I just soaked her in. She had grown up while I was gone, and she was beautiful and charming and didn't miss a beat. After I went back home we continued writing to each other as she started college and my family moved again. I had a big box full of all her letters the night I got the phone call.

I've written in several places what that night was like, but I'll keep it simple here. Emotionally I almost instantly went into hard shutdown. For those of you who've never experienced that or know anyone who has, I very literally chopped off my emotions right then and there. I didn't cry. I didn't feel. I didn't talk about it. I hung up the phone, ignored everyone, and went back to bed. The next day I took the box full of letters outside and burned the entire thing without a second thought. I didn't feel anything doing it. I didn't reflect. I didn't have a reason.

Nearly everything that happened over the next several years was the result of that hard shutdown. I went through a bad marriage and became an alcoholic. I wound up in a big city underground of drug dealers. I met people completely off the grid doing despicable things, and I talked to people who witnessed or lived through atrocities that would make most people very sick. I didn't blink an eye.

After I stopped drinking I started turning my life around, went to college, remarried, raised kids, had jobs, met people on the internet and finally started having 'friends', although much of it went badly very quickly. I never questioned that until one particular friend stopped talking to me, and without warning I spiraled into an abyss of despair that lasted for months. I felt so desperate to understand why this was happening and why I couldn't keep friends that I started seeing a psychologist, and have spent years learning how to see myself objectively, how to assess and make goals and plans to reach my goals, and how to deal with feelings. I'm not just autism spectrum. I have a complicated diagnosis that includes delayed response, which means I just don't deal with my emotions.

So by 2015 I'd been working on all that with my psychologist for eight years. I still didn't know what the real reason was for that particular depression in April, and I didn't yet realize I had displaced it onto the friend I lost that woke me up out of that hard emotional shutdown. Somewhere in 2015, one of my sisters delicately brought up my friend's murder, saying they'd been afraid to tell me it was showing up on the internet, and she was right, I was absolutely terrified to click around and find that pain. I started going through a series of little shutdowns over and over between 'waking up' to more and more ability to feel in real time, and I guess all the stuff I should have processed through years ago started processing, and believe me, putting off dealing until later doesn't make it any easier. When I finally started remembering and as I was slowly able to start reading about this very famous case, all the feelings and emotions swept over me as fresh as they should have from the very start. I was making up for 30 years of lost time processing through all those emotions.

In case you'd like to know more you can -click this- and read an article of interviews with the medical staff who saved Colleen, the person who survived. Here is a good quote from one of the nurses.
One of the nurses in that operating room called me to say Guzman's crime was as vivid to her today as it was 30 years ago. "I remember every detail, because it was so horrific," she said. Doctors and nurses spent nearly 12 hours trying to save Bush's life, and that nurse said the experience taught her about strength and fight and survival. "It changed my life," she told me. "I made a decision that night that if anything like that ever happens to me, I'll fight to the end."

The official true crime book Escaping the Arroyo (which I have not yet had the muster to read), has a Facebook Page, and you can find author info on Amazon and her dotcom.

This crime story was also featured on Investigation Discovery. I still can't bring myself to watch that.

Here comes the graphic part. This is the part I live with in my head now that I've put nearly all of my pieces together.

This last week was Julie Jackson's death anniversary. On April 5th I kept triggering into a memory of my dad and a sheep. You see, I've seen a living body stabbed. I'm about to tell you a story about saving a sheep's life, and after that I'm going to get really rough. I'm making sure you really want to be here reading this... It's ok to stop if you want.

When I was around ten or twelve I think, making my next sister down about 8-10 and my brother 5-7, Dad found a sheep loose in the alfalfa field. Sheep will gorge to death sometimes, but my dad was able to force her out of the field and up a little hill before she flopped over gasping for breath. He ran to the house, called us kids to follow him right now, and as we arrived was already commanding us where to sit on different parts of that sheep, to hold her down at all cost, don't let her move at all, and we obeyed immediately because we had been taught like that. As soon as we got square on pinning that sheep down (who, incidentally, wasn't moving much at all because she couldn't), Dad whipped out his big knife and plunged it into her belly, then dropped the knife and pulled the wool apart on both sides of that big hole and barely got his eyes shut before he was sprayed all over with the vilest smelling stomach spew you ever saw. He never once let go of keeping that wound open while us kids were instantly working very hard to keep that sheep down in one spot, because naturally every instinct in her body would be to fight whatever punctured her.

After that was over, which didn't take long, we were almost too cramped to stand up because we'd locked her down so hard, and Dad was just nasty. The sheep got up, shook off like a dog, and trotted off, feeling much better. We had to hose Dad off, and we didn't get an explanation until that stuff was off his face so he could talk.

It's not very often you see someone stab something out of the blue, and it's probably even more rare to see children help hold a living being down to be stabbed. We didn't whine or cry or question. Our dad could do anything in our eyes back then, and even if we didn't like doing what we were told, we did trust him to know exactly what he was doing.

And that is leading to this. (I know, you're thinking that wasn't graphic, but if you get queasy or cry easily, you do need to leave now.)

I grew up helping butcher sheep. I know how to hold a very heavy body down, how to drain its blood with a little nick, and how to keep it from automatically thrashing while the blood drains out. This is very important if you don't want the meat bruised up and you want all the blood out. Blood will spoil much faster than the carcass and must be gotten out so that the meat doesn't spoil if it has to sit.

Since I sat on sheep and helped skin them from childhood, I know what blood smells and feels like, I know how heavy dead body parts feel (especially the head), I intimately know how bodies feel while they are dying with all the tiny little muscles twitching for awhile, all the jerks and gasps and groans. All these things are automatic reflexes a dying body does, desperate for oxygen, working hard trying to increase blood flow. When the brain is still alive and the body is dying, the nervous system comes on full blast trying to stay alive.

Imagine what it must feel like to be raping someone while you feel all that happening in the other body against you. Imagine being able to smell the blood gushing out all over you while you keep stabbing. And it's not just blood. What we see on TV shows and in movies is so clean compared to real crime. Being stabbed in different places pops open different kinds of fluids along with the blood. Imagine smelling bilious stomach contents while raping someone. Imagine smelling intestinal content, being slimed with it and blood while you're raping someone. Imagine the jerks and gasps and groans going on all over the body while the eyes roll grotesquely around, all the smells and sounds and all that slime...

Imagine being all done and staggering back to the open the trunk of the car to start over on the next person. Imagine finally being satiated and driving off, thinking no one would ever find your mess out in the desert like that. Imagine someone actually living through being stabbed 30 times and crawling up the side of an arroyo to a highway. I grew up in the desert southwest. I can imagine a bloody slimy body being caked with dirt and grime and full of weeds and ants by the time it got to a highway, and I can imagine how terrifying that would look to someone stopping at the sight. And that was before cell phones. All that time that passed. All the grit and work and waiting it took to LIVE. And hours and hours of repair with a medical team. All that recovery. And then living with the memories the rest of your life.

I emotionally shut down when I got a phone call in the middle of the night. I never thought about any of that because I just couldn't go there. I had already grown up with so much experience with death, with seeing and smelling and hearing and feeling death.

So all week long in my head, I have been there with my best friend. I have been feeling her body being violently punctured, I have been smelling her life fall apart into slime all over a nasty person's raging body, I have been hearing the squashed grunts and gasps and wheezes, and feeling every muscle strand in her body straining for oxygen as her blood drained out, the muffled frenzied thrashing being held down for the rape as her consciousness slipped away.

I cannot stop crying.

Friends, when I give you a heads up that it's a bad week and beg you not to take me personally if I fail, please understand hell is filling up my head, and I can barely hear or see you over the pain I am in.

Here are all my posts with the tag #sadness.

I have to run out the door. If there are typos I'll fix them later.

live blogging back to lurkers

Ah, yes, thank you person who is checking on the posts that got wrecked by my recent wallpaper update. Apparently a Shezzaday post is wildly screwed now and impossible to read. Just run your mouse over it to highlight. I'm not going back to reset the tables and stuff. #sorrynotsorry

Million

veering wildly around the mental cliffs

Test, test. Is this thing on?

I've had a few complaints concerning difficulty reading pinky blog for awhile (years), but I didn't care. I was actually changing the background today and apparently overwrote more than just the wallpaper with one click. My bad. I used to highlight links in my posts in different colors, those are all gone now. Sorry. I can colorize them going forward, not sure if I can fix the past, and I'm not going to worry about it. Anyway, for those of you whining for monochromatic white on black, here you go.

Here, have a pic a friend shared earlier. It's a Ben sammy. 😂 Oh, I kill me. To me it looks like Tom and Ben had a son, but turns out it's two Toms with a Ben in the middle. Whatever. Maybe it'll help us feel better about me torching the fun out of pinky blog.

I had a flirt with ID theft this morning on top of being stalked, if you don't follow me on twitter, too bad, you missed the whole thing, lol. I had one of those stupid weather headaches all weekend and I'm still a little woozy brained, so nothing surprises me today. I can't seem to touch anything without a chain reaction of things going out of control, so I'm kind of not touching anything any more today. I'm also realizing that a double bag of instant coffee in one cup wasn't my brightest idea and I'd better quit only a third of the way down if I want to sleep at all tonight.

I'm currently listening to this guy. I love him. I hinted last month that maybe (woot! I think I fixed the link colors), anyway, there might be some synchronicity to Dave, right. Well, David here, which I did not know when I wrote that silly post last month, actually has a book out on synchronicity. So there you go. This video isn't about that, this goes further back, I think. Anyway, in case you wonder how it's going, I've got David's voice bouncing around my head while I do chores.

Poison

Natural

Why

bits of good and bad advice

I am absolutely killing Pinky blog. 😆 It's been hilarious watching all that drop off. Au revoir.

I started a different kind of project, which will be explained later. In the meantime, I'm fine. 😊 Super busy, as always. Maybe I'll bullet point before I go.

• Approved for physical therapy on left shoulder for impingement, which, if I'd known was taken so seriously, I'd have gotten on top of years ago. I've lived with crazy amounts of pain, this is hopefully the last big hurdle.
• The difference between parm cheese and candy is mega amounts of salt. Don't parm yourself like it's candy. Heart got a little thumpy this week.
• I can't believe how much TV we've managed to get caught up on again this last week, even came in late to a live tweet. Felt so goooood.
• The back to back euphorias finally wore off and I'm sleeping through the nights again, yay! That was pretty wild.
• Plan this month is stay on top of tree allergies. This is historically one of my really bad months, so I'm mostly hiding in my house. Might be pouring liquid zyrtec in my eyes. (Don't really do that, ok?)
• I'm also craving spring veggies, so I'm all over salads this week. Can't seem to get enough radishes. Check it, they're full of vitamin C and other good stuffs. Radishes 
• And now I'm going to bed. Sweet dreams.

Spin

Shattered

Little Apple

Click on CC and settings for English

Dark

I'll

Everyone in Poe stories is crazy

I was so confused in this movie, but it all worked out fine. I think. Maybe. Anyway, another #latenightmovie with @LNMGang in the SyfyDesigns.com chatroom.

I couldn't believe how quickly this movie just went there.

If you don't get the broad hints in this movie, nothing at all makes sense until the end. Apparently none of us got the broad hints. You're actually seeing it right now.

The artwork in the credits didn't match anything, either.

We cannot definitively say that no foxes, horses, or dogs were harmed or suffered injuries or abuse in this movie. Humans were probably mishandled, as well.

I skipped a bunch, but if this chick did her own stunts and riding, she had amazing lower spine and pelvic constitution. That side saddle looked brutal.

And I loved her hat.

She was also really good with pain.

No one got my Rocky Horror reference. Oh, well.

Pretty sure everyone making this movie was on the snuff.

Little did we know...

Ah-ha! MysticLisa caught that, too.

You missed the bit where I was talking about Poe showing up for the goth kids on South Park, super fave.

So many bell quips missed being quipped. I supposed the bell scene had actual meaning in there somewhere, but it very much detracted and look, I don't even show the bell.

Kurt, lol. He'll overlook anything if you're hot. Not sure what his definition of hot is at this point.

Vincent was no Benedict Cumberbatch. Just saying.

I think Tammy longs for days of yore.

Caprica is getting a little spooky, like those weird Alexa youtubes people make.

I'm wildly curious now what the blue and purple candles might have meant.

Phil. 😁

Lotta *snap* going on here.

I consciously held down the ol' trigger finger this weekend, lol. No spoilers! 😋