just enjoy the game

you get far enough down 'thanksgiving walking dead meme' in google search, you forget why you were even there

I got lost in that search last night before I caved and went to bed. I think I'd go to sleep faster with a brain chip letting me mindlessly cruise nonsense.

So last week today I was 203 pounds and super calm before surgery. Within 24 hours I'd zoomed up to 215 on IV fluids and whatever my body started hoarding because it must've thought I'd been attacked by ice picks and had a piece of me stolen slick as slick. That was a little alarming so I looked it up, guess it's common to do that with surgeries, basically just take good care of yourself and let the fluids sort themselves back out. Today I am down to 206, which is fantastic compared to some people in the med forums, and apparently means my kidneys are in great shape chugging it out, yay! And that is why you wanna take care of your kidneys, people.

Another thing I learned, since I'm not a surgery queen and usually stick to the more mundane whiny chronic stuff, is that an ileum is about the last thing to come out of the whole knocked out stupor, and everything trying to leave ahead of it is like the worst traffic pileup you ever saw. I wasn't given after care instructions on anything diet or digestive except start slow and eat what I want. By day 4 I was becoming an expert on looking all the things up, and after all the stuff I've read from every point of view imaginable, it really doesn't matter a hill of beans what you eat and you should always have a bottle of milk of magnesia on hand anyway. Softeners and hydrating didn't work at all, moving around more while slacking off on pain meds backfired into every conceivable regret, all the correct food in the world can't make a difference if it's at the back of the line, and probably the only thing I'll do next time I have surgery is stick to clear fluids the last 12 hours or something. At any rate, we're all very happy now. If you've got a friend or family member going through surgery and don't know what to do for them, trust me, a bottle of milk of magnesia is pretty wonderful and will make you the hero.

And then of course, I just started typing in whatever question popped into my head into the search bar. How long do my incisions hurt after gallbladder surgery? Hundreds, maybe even thousands of people had asked the same thing. Some people hurt for weeks when they sneeze or move wrong or sit too long, so grain of salt, I'm keeping in mind that I got stabbed by ice picks and there are lots of little nerve endings in skin and the tissues underneath because being able to feel stabs kept our ancestors alive longer and they probably fought back, ducked and dodged, or ran for cover while I was knocked unconscious and purposely stabbed under some big lights. That stab memory will probably always be there locked in the tissues now, and it'll just become part of my overall nerve pain disorder if it becomes bothersome. Other people yapping about weeks later sneezing took a big load off my mind. It's easy to imagine the worst when someone else pokes a hole in you.

And I got to thinking, it's funny that people will let their gallbladders go defcon and become emergencies while they ignore them, but then fret over ever little sensation while they heal after surgery. Humans are weird.

Bottom line, if you're not taking good care of yourself before the surgeries start rolling in, don't expect to heal on demand kind of thing. And the opposite is true, too, ran into a lot of people getting back to their workouts too quickly and winding up back in surgeries to fix rips in what wasn't done healing yet. Y'all need to chill. Just because you think your body should such and such in your mind doesn't mean you're the boss of reality. Just because people are going back to work in 3 days or a week doesn't mean everything super healed super fast and you're a chump because you can't live up to a rumor standard. As far as I can tell, it all sucks, we all suffer, and it all takes time.

When I was in ER earlier this year, hanging out for a few hours in the waiting room, there was a guy dripping blood down his arm who had managed to elude everyone and went straight to the public coffee cart. I was mind numb with pain in a wheelchair after an ambulance ride, still waiting to get triaged, everyone around me pulling back from this guy and I'm parked right there. I just smiled and said You need to keep pressure on that. I mean, crazy or not, I'm probably crazier, so who cares. He got bashful trying to cover the blood dripping and getting coffee at the same time, evidently priorities are a problem in his brain, and he said he pulled his IV out. I laughed and said It's not like TV is it? I did that once, ripped it out in a bathroom, blood everywhere like the zombie apocalypse. And then everyone around us started relaxing and people finally found the guy and got him to the police desk to get his arm bandaged, and someone else cleaned up. I cleaned in hospital one year, I had no problem with that blood. I am OSHA trained and cleaned stat contagion many times all over the hospital. I was also the only one who talked to that man like a human being. The rest was just funny to me, but I thought that part was sad.

Around Thanksgiving, Americans make big deals about going to homeless shelters and feeding people. There were plenty of people in need around me in that hospital waiting room. One woman was clearly homeless but very organized. She had a travel case with wheels and a couple old pillows tucked into the pull out handle. Everything she needed was in that bag, including a book. I take a bug out bag with me nearly everywhere I go, too. I feel safer when I have all my little comforts with me if I wind up stuck some place waiting for something, like having my car worked on. When pre-triage came out to get her vitals, she clearly stated she was there because it hurt to pee, and apparently knew how to get help about it, was probably the best behaved person in the whole waiting room because she knew how to stay out of trouble. Conveniently, it was also better than being outside in the cold. I'm sure she knows every public area open through the night all over town. On my own really bad days when I can't stand being alone, I take my bug out bag and go hang out at the library or the hospital, some place big where I can move around a bit and still have facilities and people around me. I used to hang out at the airport when I was younger. I don't think I'm alone doing that. I think a lot of people hang out all over town like that. Some people go shopping and don't realize they're using the excuse to be doing something when they really just want to not be alone. When I retailed, there were customers who knew the store better than we did.

If you don't know what to do with yourself or your life and you want to be helpful, go hang out at a hospital on a holiday. Just move around from one waiting area to another, check out the coffee shops and gift shops, notice the families camping out around births and deaths and horrible accidents and cancers and stuff. And then go check out the opportunities board and ask about volunteer positions. Volunteers are awesome in big buildings. They train you to help move patients in wheelchairs after check in, or answer questions at a desk, or other stuff. A lot of places have volunteer programs. You don't have to just do it on holidays and twiddle your thumbs the rest of the year.

This meme cracks me up because I saw someone actually do this on a minecraft server, just purposely dump a lot of leveled up diamond armor and weapons into a deep ocean after a bad day. Sometimes you let go of the material stuff and just enjoy the game.

click for diamond memes

I've got Bunny tomorrow while her mama works, and Papa's work is having an employee cookout, so I think me and Bunny are going to try making shortbread cookies. I'm stuck with gluten free flour and no xantham gum, and it hit me that shortbread might be the ticket. There are no eggs or leavening, just 3 basic ingredients, and from there I can add gingerbread spices or melt chocolate chips into butter or whatever, and we can do cut outs and colored pinwheels, and I also found a shortbread spritz, so we can get the cookie press out, too. I haven't had a real cookie day from scratch in a long time, and I think tomorrow will be a really good day for that.

I've also been getting my own Turkey Day menu assembled, getting that cooked up today so I'll be out of the way tomorrow. I'm making cornish hens with homemade herbed biscuit and cornbread stuffing (yes, all gluten free, super allergic to wheat), a mashed tato and steamed broccoli. I'm going to record Macy's parade on Thursday in case Bunny misses the balloons, because she's high energy and will probably be too excited to be that patient. I stopped my pain pills so I could save one for tomorrow and one for Turkey Day, so today I'm having a little bit of a withdrawal headache, but I'll be ok. Me and opioids probably go back through several lifetimes, I'm pure addict on those, and have mentioned my love for vicoden in the past outweighing my love for anything and anybody else. If you know someone who has quit drinking or doing drugs/meds over the holidays, please be kind and gentle with them. They won't be feeling well because it's a real bitch dealing through that thick haze of suck, and it takes awhile to get through it. I still crave every single day and it's been at least 25 years since I quite drinking and smoking, plus here I am back on an opioid for surgery and doing low dose xanax this year staying mood stable (I check in regularly with both psychologist and psychiatrist). Holidays are very stressful. If you're stressed out, then you know the person in withdrawal is very stressed out, too. Not the best time to talk politics and religion. If you can't just enjoy your family over a nice meal, maybe make other plans that are healthier for your mental and emotional function.

Sorry so wordy, this might be my last chance to hang out on Pinky blog for awhile. Not sure how the rest of the week is going to go.

Love you guys. All my people. You know who you are. 💕

'Murican conspiracy turkeys

There's a room I keep in my head where it's always this. No matter what else is going on in real life, this is tucked away from the first time I heard it many years ago, and every time I play it back in my head I think about all the people I've met (both online and real life) and how glad I am I got to know them.


I'm the sort of person who took a very long time to figure out I actually had friends whether I realized it or not, and I usually didn't because I'm such an aspienado pinhead. I spent years autopsying every relationship I went through until I finally started noticing that I'm the dork who takes dolls apart and sets them on fire. If you translate this to people, I do it while they're still alive and trying to be friends with me. I'm sure it's been a little odd at times.


The comments on that vid are delightful, btw.

• I'm pretty sure this is how they greet you in Hell.
• This is the one song that will be burned into my mind until the day I die.
• I love this, subtly alluding to the children being lured to their planned deaths.
• I remember the first time I saw this movie I laughed like a madman at this part and my mom was so concerned
• 1:03 a reference to laughing in ''I am the walrus''
• Is it me or do the instrumentals for this song sound similar to the Silver Shamrock song from Halloween 3? They're by no means identical but for some reason that's where my mind went during this scene. -Me too.

Anyway, I'm coming off a week of coasting through brain fragments on happy pills, and I can't help noticing how much I deeply care about all my people lately. I struggled for years, some of you saw that happening on twitter and this blog, and it's like this year my junk finally settled into place and now I kinda get it all now. I get me. I get that I'm a roller coaster slinging around other people's heads and I'm the one who looks blurry, not you guys.

Context relies on experience over time. I have 5 years under my belt now, my glitchy head is getting more reliable, I'm remembering better who everyone is and where they're from and what their situations are, and most of all, I'm managing to organize this info into my memory closet in real time nowadays. I have these friends here, those friends there, we like to do this and that, and it makes a nice little spreadsheet of activities I can look forward to each week. So much of that was a mixed up blur for so long, even at the beginning of this very year I could still barely keep names and locations straight, much less other kinds of stuff that makes hanging out better. I remember when I thought Penny was another child, kind of a private joke going back a bit. But yeah, it's like years ago asking people in real life at work or down the street about something they said and they look at me weird because they didn't realize they left me dangling assuming I understood, when my brain was naturally concocting more interesting stories about their lives behind their backs just to fill in missing info. One person was shocked when I asked whether her daughter was her husband's daughter too, or someone else's. I get very hung up on pronouns and names not being used interchangeably to denote shared relationships because hey, autism, so little things kinda made me the weird friend people wound up tiptoeing away from eventually. I have no problem accepting that everyone's got some level of hash slinging slasher in their past, so it's up to you guys to make sure I'm not running off perpetuating myths of some kind.


Well, ok, except for Mike Bilinski. He might really be some kind of *cough* interesting *cough* or something, so always keep your spatula handy.


Now that I've explained myself, I feel more comfortable asking these questions about some of my sketchier friends-

• Does Kurt keep *ahem* guests tied to, wait, I mean locked in, no wait, I mean on an extended visit plan, yeah that's it.
• Is Phil one of those retired dudes who runs a barside pool party? Because I wanna be where he is.
• I'm kinda getting the feeling Jinni knows where all the good dumpsters are for body emergencies, and always packing cute little cookies and a thermos in case the nights get long.
• I find it comforting that Lisa could be part of the mass brain training entertainment wave before aliens really do take over and recreate our society without a Vermont. Except I'll miss Cabot seriously sharp cheddar cheese. I wonder if she knows Benedict Cumberbatch. Pretty sure he's one of them.
• Are Chris and Tammy siblings? Cousins? Secret agents spying on us?
• Is Cindy in league with the Martians??? 😲

So in a few days it's a huge holiday in the U.S. and nearly everyone will be busy or comatose on the feasting, so before y'all hit the highways, I just wanna say be safe. This has been a challenging and sad year for a few of us already, so pleasepleaseplease stay safe. 💟💖💗 Especially you fun grillmeisters trying out turkey frying equipment for the first time. Show me some purty turkeys on facebook, not big lumpy bandages or something. Get those turkeys thawing! Do NOT toss a frozen bird into a deep fryer!!!! Yes, I feel like I have to say that. This year has been a little too ripe for facepalm. 🦃

turkey fam

Things going on this week.

On twitter-

My twitter family tree- Part 1 via Twitter Family game
Love my mama and papa! @DxDerailed @kurtzellner
Mama Deb is my go-to fandom nerd for #DirkGently and Dieter Laser
Papa Kurt gets after me all the time in #latenightmove @LNMgang movie chat at SyfyDesigns.com
You and me, babe @dawnsnarks 😆

My twitter family tree- Part 2 via Twitter Family game
So proud of my kids! @SesameSquirrel and @TScottBrave
My kid Seseme is my fave squirrel source linker and so much more
My kid Scott is my bug and spider expert and hopefully future reference checker on a side project

Also this thread about autism is awesome. Next snip clicks directly to that part of the convo.

On facebook-

In my G+ Lexx community hangout-

I prioritized my work schedule, AJ found out "May" is a college professor now, and Sanguinessa is starting on part 4 of a continuing Tales from a Parallel Universe fanfic series that I've promised to read and review.

I passed the 48 hour mark after surgery today with flying colors, incisions look great, no fever, was even able to skip the pain pill for 15 hours which was awesome because high dose opioids put your digestive system to sleep and I needed mine to wake up. 😋

click for article on wild turkeys

I have come up with a Thanksgiving plan. Our holiday is kinda blown apart with way too much happening around here, but I think this will work ok. I'm going to cook my personal Turkey food a day ahead and then have the kitchen cleaned up and I'm out of the way for Twink to help Granny get a bunch of cooking done with my stove. I'll get up early, as usual, and make hot chocolate on the stove like I do every year, and then I'm going to camp out on my bed with Jawn and hang out on Mo Creatures while I watch Macy's parade on the TV in my bedroom, and Bunny can hang out with me if mama needs her out of her hair. I'm sure I'll be popping on and off the internet randomly as the chaos rolls out, but I do want to hang out online through the day. Hopefully that will work out well.

yes, I'm still feeling festive (facebook joke)

Click for tweet source

Fiber installation has officially begun. Crews are all over my subdivision clearing brush and limbs.

Click to see Macy's lineup

Surgery scheduling seems to have stalled over something. Maybe they noticed I'm a complicated mess.

Click for easy to load and read info on route, street closures, lineup, balloons, floats

I have decided to commit to a literary challenge and review, starting this weekend. Yes, Lexx stuff. I waited 15 YEARS for this book.

Click for new balloons announcement

In the meantime, lurking the medias, playing on Mo Creatures (I put up a Festivus pole at my player shop yesterday), and slapping myself back from pressing that big red anxiety button.

scary thorough

I didn't make this, but I screened this pic.
Click the pic to go to server news update post with much better pix.

Clearing out my calendar this month as I get ready for the tuck and roll. Kinda feels unreal.

Aaaaaaaaaaand the Christmas decor is already up, lol.

I'm already making room for a couple of trees in my house. Papa's Vikings tree will be in the livingroom by the TV. Bunny's kid tree will be in the dining area bay window by the kitchen.

Speaking of football, total facepalm last night. Around 7:30 p.m. @bonenado goes "You didn't set your team, did you?", which screeched me to a frozen halt. I should have been on that, what *looks at invisible watch*, 3 days ago??? I mean, I'm on a fairly solid losing streak anyway, so maybe it wouldn't be too bad, right? So I asked how bad it was and he said I had 6 guys on byes. ##SUPERFACEPALM Ok, so maybe I just look negligent. I asked who I was playing this week, and he said Tony. I. about. died. My first thought was Oh no, it's going to look like Pinky Robot threw the game on purpose to the boss because #internetcrushhistory, and @bonenado said Yep, totally.

Facepalm.

So I have absolutely no dignity this morning. Just drinking my coffee sideways through facepalm.

*sigh*

Now puns are spinning through my head. I really dropped the ball on that one. Etc.

BUT I'm all caught up with Shannara Chronicles, The Flash, Gotham, Walking Dead, Dirk Gently, South Park, and I'm sorry, Tosh, I made an executive decision and decided that I just can't be the superfan any more. I have seen everything digital Tosh has done up to something like 16 shows ago, but something's gotta give, and my timer is loading up with PJ Masks kind of thing. It was a good run. We'll always have the show with all those people doing an exercise machine marathon, and the show where you dressed up like a Ken doll for the human Barbie. *weeping* I've gotta stop before I lose it and go get that timer back.



My only plans today are to keep the ringer on my phone on so I'll get scheduling calls, chip away at some more of the piles in my room while I do the daily dishes and laundry, menu plan some kind of supper, and rip another mesa down in Mo Creatures before resource gets reset. I expanded my player shop into colored and glazed terracottas this fall and I am slamming through clays like you wouldn't believe, on top of smelting chestloads of glass blocks and restocking ALL THE WOOD PRODUCTS. I'm a machine. I should take a little time and sell some more farm harvest, kinda blew about $300,000 this weekend on player shops and coal restock, and currently talking to someone about purchasing a flying bigcat, so I need to pump back up to my $2M before I blow it back down too far.

I'm not done yet.


I've still got things to do.


There's always a reason to go on. I just noticed the time on this. Kinda like that other time. Seems to happen a lot around here.

dishing on my messy life

This is Thanksgiving Eve with a disability. It was originally the most beautiful swirled mocha cheesecake I'd ever made, a first time experiment with a gluten-free crust. I don't share that much, but this is the kind of nerve fail in my arms I'm fighting to hold at bay. I've been told that once I lose especially ulnar in my left arm, I won't be getting it back. I have destroyed my phone case dropping it so many times, despite taping it back together several times, but since my phone still brilliantly works, that is one helluva good phone case protecting my phone.

I remember sending you a story about a dream I had where I watched a life from beginning to end. Not knowing who it was, passing judgment on that life. Then finally being reconnected with my memories to find that I had judged myself. No matter how hard I tried to think up a reason of how this was unfair, I could not.

My cousin and I have very interesting convos, like no other person I've met. We've both had near death experiences, DTs from severe withdrawals, and close enough childhoods to be able to compare really deep personal meanings we've come away with.

This was the other half of that cheesecake. I've taken things out of the oven a million times, and I assumed this would go per usual, except this time my left hand couldn't make a grip at all in that position, and without warning (there was no pain), there she went, and my right hand was all that barely saved that 350 degree dish from burning me or careening across the kitchen.

I have always loved the debate over the existence of God, because it is unsolvable, even with logic. I was taught to debate from a very young age, and although it's taken me years to let go of using it as a cat and mouse toy on other people, I still love it inside my head. Sometimes I try every way I can to prove God cannot exist (for fun and games, I am not an atheist by birth, or even by nature, as I have found out), but physics keeps changing my footing. I used to be able to stop at If there is no life after death and this universe is all that there is and we are made of and from this universe and nothing else, then we should not be able to conceive or believe in anything or anyone else after life, yet so much of the world does.

I unfolded the saved bit and dug around taking a few bites, and it was pretty awesome cheesecake. I had marbled the lighter coffee swirls and darker chocolate swirls like art, and had used the only cream cheese I had to construct it. This was it. So yeah, I stood there at the stove and ate some after I walked off for 5 minutes on the pissy edge of tears. I'm not very good at self pity and why me, though, so it didn't take long to turn into a pig.

We are learning there is so much more to this universe that I have to keep tacking on provisional statements. For example, the Ancient Alien theories suggest that humans were part of a long galactic history of DNA experimentation, with growing evidence to support that. If aliens were posing as or mistaken as gods and could bring humans back to life via resuscitation, naturally this could be jumbled into a mistaken afterlife concoction. Like that. I allow for side jaunts into all kinds of logic that would still support my main supposition even though the side jaunts are questionably- questionable...

@bonenado was awesome and cleaned up the mess after it cooled. You can see I'm really hard on my oven, lots of broiling and spattering, but oh so yum. He got in there and spiffed it up while I stood off to the side sampling the other half of the mess. We were making crazy funny jokes and laughing our heads off. He always saves my days.

Anyway, over a long time I'm kinda sifting down to a couple of conclusions. There is no logic for the fail we feel over broken relationships at death after decades of not fixing them, and there is no logic for dreams like my cousin shared with me about the kind of life review judging we dread. Notice that both these things are very strictly subjective and usually unexpected. We question these things. We don't know why they happen, and we see nothing in this universe around us, even incorporating the latest physics, that allows or explains why we feel sad and guilty when everything else is stripped away and we are left standing alone before God, as it were. And it's not even that God is the vindictive one. We are the ones who recognize we f*d up. We are the ones who, at the very end of things when time has run out and despite all the other wishes and dreams and regrets we ever had, judge ourselves based on the deeds we did while we were here.

Nothing else.

This was Thanksgiving morning. Right hand this time, grip completely relaxed without warning after cracking the egg for scrambled eggs. I've worked very hard for years on learning to hold my hands differently, using both hands together, standing over areas so I'll stop dropping bottles full of tiny pills all over the floor, plus 4 years of physical therapy. This is life. I need assistance with so many things. When a handicap button to a heavy door doesn't work, I can't get into a building. It's that simple. I'm sharing this part of my life to help some of you understand the challenges holidays can be for people you know but don't really think about. Get up and help people do their dishes after they've cooked for you. If it's a drag for you to clean, imagine the drag it was for them creating the mess and then having to clean up after you. You know what love is, Charlie Brown?
14 Simple Ways Peanuts Taught Us What Love Is (click)

Here are the books.
Love is Walking Hand in Hand
   (1965 edition)
Happiness is a Warm Puppy
Peanuts Guide to Life

From The benevolent God of the funny papers

Throughout his life, Schulz constructed himself as the put-upon target of others' ridicule or indifference, from schoolyard bullying to the plaint, repeated well into old age, that no one loved him. Michaelis identifies the artist's "lifetime inclination to conceal hurt and the harsher emotions that follow on it, the better to brood upon them"; but as he also shows, that hurt was often illusory, the betrayal a figment: no one else recalls the bullying, and Schulz was indeed loved deeply and well by many. Yet, perhaps due to the premature loss of his mother, he nursed forever the symbolic wound of emotional and social rejection. "Arrested, bitter," Michaelis writes, "he spent a startling amount of time over nearly 60 years polishing a cameo of boyish helplessness and frustration." It's a puzzle worth puzzling over: the stunted boy's resentment of a cold, motherless world takes perfect creative form in the hopeful, searching Charlie Brown.

Getting ready for holidays in Mirkwood.

My biggest fail is an auto anger response that flares up over way too many triggers, clear back to childhood. The resulting fallout from that is sadness and depression. I'm trying very hard to change that response. Life is way too short and we have way too much to lose for me to hang onto being petty and hurt. Since so much of this response is both genetic and trained into me from birth (and I would argue might even be the survival tactic that helped me make it this far), it's hard retraining my brain to let go of it. Feeling sorry for myself or being angry about something I have no control over isn't useful. It's actually even wasteful of resources and drains me.

I wish these could stay up all year.

I think the important thing is, now that I recognize I can attempt to control some of this emotional chaos within me, that I apply it before it's too late and I regret later that I didn't try. At the end I want to be able to say I'm glad I was here, I loved my people, and I think I did ok, even if it's illogical and there really is no God or life after death. That doesn't change that I want there to be, and that I want to go on learning and doing and being in a variety of new ways. I definitely don't want to spend my deathbed moments feeling sad or disappointed in myself because I dismissed the important stuff while I had the chance.

I can't go out on sappy. Here you go.

disturbances kaleidoscopic

💟🦃🍁🎈💃

That's as close to a Thanksgiving autumn parade theme as the new emojis will get. There's no pie emoji. I don't have pie on my phone, either. What's up with that?

Lotta pie tweets in the gang last night. No one I know is making any piecaken. I can't eat any of it any more anyway, but piecaken fascinates me. Here is a Thanksgiving piecaken. Click it for the recipe. I think in the old days, I'd have tried making one just to see if I could.

I don't think we're doing much here this year. All I was going to make was an actual turkey, but I have been talked into pie. I said ONE pie. So I picked up a can of pumpkin, a frozen pie crust, and a can of redi-whip yesterday.

I'm feeling particularly brainless this week, but still on track with chores, $$, and calendar. Funny, even tweeting and barely looking at the TV, I was able to remember a bunch of stuff going on in Dirk Gently earlier this week and @bonenado was kinda lost, reverse of our usual. My fave character, naturally, is Bartine Curlish, the crazy homocidal holistic assassin, played by Fiona Dourif (her dad is a huge fave of mine, played Wormtongue in LOTR and many other parts and shows). BBCA says "Bart is a terrifying, homicidal, deranged, fearless, and nearly invincible self-identified holistic assassin. Like Dirk, she is a causality psychic. Bart doesn’t determine who she kills or when and how she kills them. It’s all instinctual. Drawn towards people who kill or endanger others, she feels a second nature urge to eliminate them, which she can do with very little effort. She’s rough, rude, kind of gross and an upsetting person, but there’s a complex sweetness to her. Bart is comfortable with who she is and unlike Dirk, she’s found peace with her power." How could I NOT be drawn to this character?

She went from this

to this, and if you click this next one, you can follow her on twitter.

🦃🦃🦃🦃🦃🦃🦃🦃🦃🦃🦃🦃🦃🦃

Ok, switching gears. Let's talk Facebook and why I'm not on board. I kept getting notifications on my phone last night during The Flash about invitations to join messenger by a certain person, and since that person is who they are, I had my doubts. Facebook has done this to me before, throwing a name out here or there saying they're inviting me to join messenger. I finally got on my laptop last night and direct messaged and found out not only was this person NOT initiating contact, but was just arriving home from a funeral. So not cool, Facebook.

Facebook is one of the most intrusive social medias I've ever used. I've complained about it for years, to the point of deleting and not using it one year. I'm back on it as part of my social media hub and for Lexx stuff, but I am keenly aware that Facebook auto-shares my personal and private info behind my back in so many ways that I cannot find every single setting there is to turn that off. On top of that, Facebook looks into my phone AND my hard drive to continually suggest many things to me, from friends to shopping, and in some cases has made some very faux pas assumptions about mixing bad blood kind of history. And by bad blood, I mean possibly dangerous. If I'm getting these suggestions, then they probably are, too.

After last night's extremely awkward and poorly timed contact, I loathe Facebook more than ever. I think I may be tweaking a few more settings. Also, I will NEVER use a Facebook messenger app on my phone, so if any of you ever receive invitations from me, it's not me because I don't have the messenger app installed. I also have the chat feature turned OFF on my laptop. I've still been allowing nonfriends access to private contact since that is the only way some people can get hold of me, but it's so rare that anyone actually does that I ignore it for days, and have been known to miss seeing a message for 2 years.

Some of you may think I live in the stone age, but I still have quite a number of your personal contact details against my every wish because social medias and Android are so grab happy about info swapping and sharing. Trying to stay public every day against this kind of instrusiveness has been very facepalm for aspienado. I could go on into the ways I'm dealing with anxiety over this (my physical therapist was impressed yesterday how long I've stuck through psychological therapy), and I've actually got an eye twitching just writing this paragraph. Just started. Maybe I'd better switch gears again.

🦃🦃🦃🦃🦃🦃🦃🦃🦃🦃🦃🦃🦃🦃🦃🦃🦃

I think between Thanksgiving and Christmas I'm going to divert into a side project and see if I can stay on track getting through it before the holidays are over. I'll still be tweeting and movie gang and minecraft and stuff, but hopefully I can stay focused and get myself back onto the main track for 2017. I've dropped a lot of stuff juggling through this year and I need to get my focus back.

I'm also thinking about a new sox direction. O_O Yes, you heard me.

Happy Turkey Bird, fellow 'Muricans!

turkey bird week, GO!

I've decided this boinging awake in the 2 a.m.s now instead of the 3 a.m.s must be me flying through some kind of super euphoria and I can't feel it that much because of the gabapentin. I'm still eating, thank goodness. The first super euphoria I went through without any meds lasted 12 days and I practically stopped eating and sleeping the ~entire time~. It. was. awesome. but the crashing back down kinda sucked, and my psychiatrist seemed relieved this fall when I said I'm on gabapentin now.

Watch me wind up sleeping through Macy's parade...

Stuff from yesterday-

• Amy talked me into keeping Pinky Press Review, and that felt good
• Pat and Myke got the movie gang rocking again on SyfyDesigns and that felt good
• I polished off a big load of pan roasted parmed brussels sprouts with a splash of aged balsamic, and while that felt really good at first, later I  had a tummy ache, so maybe don't eat a quart of brussels sprouts in one go next time.

I JUST NOTICED BLOGGER HAS ADDED EMOJIS.

🌝😋⛄😍

HOW LONG HAS THAT BEEN THERE.
I can even search by drawing one to look for a match.

All righty, then, I am go for emojis. Wow. 🦃 Happy Turkey Bird!

Photobucket has not yet gotten back to me on not being able to upload anything for several days, but I'm too floaty to care right now. I've had a pro account forever, but they're ridiculously difficult to get hold of, so I dunno. If I had staff I'd just toss this problem at someone else, so I tossed it to Yablo, who was tunneling deep under an extreme biome yesterday and didn't care. I angled a beautiful 45 degree angle tunnel up through the highest point and emerged over a breathtaking view, which is pretty much Happy Land for me. I really dig dwarf mines on LOTR. Get it? Dig. Nvrmnd.

Random Batman pix. Someone has discovered the joys of button pushing, aka doorbell.

And popcorn!

And that Santa is an ok dude.

It's been a very long year, but also a very good year. Nonstop allergies, viruses, and the big dentist thing, but autie finally eating some finger foods, venturing into verbal, and even hamming for a camera is amazing. I am extremely proud of his mommy and daddy for being cool with making it ok to be himself, and thrilled that his doctor is into nutrition boosting early development. I didn't get any of that at his age (I was punished and fussed at a LOT on a daily basis for years), and I wasn't the greatest interactive mommy (although I did turn the corner on let's cut the crap with this punishment thing), but generational autism spectrum isn't the big bad doom and gloom it used to be, and I'm pretty sure Batman has got a lot of surprises for us in future.

My mother never knew I was one of the smartest people in my entire school. She didn't understand that stuff, and she couldn't get past me being a behavioral problem. She never knew her granddaughter was one of the kindest people I've ever met in my life because she was too busy trying to fix her with health food store stuff, like she tried to fix me. And my mother never lived long enough to see her great grandson, even though she could have if she had complied with doctors taking care of the diabetes ravaging her. I don't want to miss the opportunities to see how beautiful my children are.

My other kiddos were over yesterday, and I enjoyed them so much. Bunny and Spiderman are a blast together, and the hot chocolate after this was really fun. Bunny wound up with a tiny little Doctor Strange goatee around her mouth, should have gotten a picture.

seriousness srsly getting seriouser

After a string of 5-6 hour nights since the time change, got one of my rare 8 hour nights last night. Now I'm ready to work and fighting with photobucket over login, whee. I've been riding out upgrades and code tweaks since 2005 with no regrets, but once in awhile we do a sort of Indian wrestling contest before I get the thumbs up to enter. Ah, I can see my account now. No, I still get the boot on upload. Guess I'll go back later. Crossing my phalanges they're just working on coding again because of the BIG NEW SALES THEY KEEP HAMMERING MY EMAIL WITH. #facepalm In my long experience, 3-5 a.m. is maintenance hours, so I guess I'll just do that work later.

Bunny is learning our names. Sploit named me "Janik" when she was four, and it has always stuck. Bunny is three and I hear she just named Papa "Spock". All the Scotts out there- Scott is Earthspeak for "Spock". #thumbsup

Yesterday was the closest thing to an actual business meeting that I've had a very long time. Myke and I met in chat and eventually moved to private and talked about SyfyDesigns stuff. It's been an idea sort of on hold with mostly me playing in what I dub the empty hallways, but I think it's nearly ready to bloom into its originally intended galaxian hipster coffee shop / spaceship dive bar.

Our opinions about the medias-

• Facebook is trying too hard to 'do it all' and ultimately cosmically failing at providing a place designed for hang outs. The 'scifi' gangs and groups there don't work in a way where it's easy to see archives, or even last week's discussions if the group is busy enough.
• Twitter is great for live tweeting, in the moment gabbing, and archived convos, but so quickly gets jumbled that even the most ardent payer attentioner can sometimes lose track of hundreds of notifications, and the convo threads splitting don't always stay connected to original thread when one is backtracking.
• Reddit is simply just really hard to read and not at all useful for gang hanging outing.
• G+ is great for mass distribution but it doesn't draw crowds. At all.

In the old days, fandoms used forums and chatrooms. Believe it or not, those have been quietly evolving in the business world and have turned into sleek limo style high security hosts that can be adjusted down to micromanagement of individual IP masking for clients who'd like to remain anonymous. Usually that sort of thing is bulldozed by the host and people get lost in conglomerates pushing worldwide connecting upping and then fun things happening, like having to submit grievance forms regarding stalkers and ID ripoffs. Yours truly has actually had to report a false Pinky pretending to be me (Janika Banks) in another country because facebook is so connect happy that IDs can be ripped and copied.

SyfyDesigns is owned and operated by a person who has managed business level forums and long dreamed of one day hosting a fun scifi board for people to hang out. It's been a registered domain for some time now, requiring registration for forum interaction and blog posting so that spam could be controlled. Guys, I've watched spam hammering old forums from an admin POV, it super sucketh. For Myke to have gone all these extra steps and the extra mile keeping this forum secure and holding its place all this time with out of pocket expense shows me this is solid planning with clear goals toward the future. All the view counts you see are genuine people, and there are some impressive view counts there for such a slow forum.

We believe forums will be making a comeback as other social medias continue to outgrow themselves and start to decay. Forums allow international readership and interaction, which is awesome for fandoms. They are easy for finding topics and archives and following threads. They are very easy to join, and even better- Myke's SyfyDesigns forum has the most beautiful text editor of any forum I've seen. You no longer have to know or wrangle with BBC code (but you still can if you want to). We are talking WordPress level text editor.

Chatrooms are their own animals. I've used a number of chatrooms through the years, and while I think they're great for real time grouping up like we do with movie gang, they can be a little costly. Myke has graciously paid for chat capability for some time, and this winter we'll be test driving and comparing chatrooms. The latest comparisons are being made between Rumbletalk and Mibbit's  IRC style. It's kind of boiling down to ease of use vs micromanaging security.

Still can't upload. I could blame our President-Elect, whatever good that would do (you guys realize he doesn't actually have any POWER yet, right? And when he does he won't be a dictator... get a grip) (I didn't vote for either one of the top 2 candidates, y'all could've totes turned that mess into an entirely different thing noticing other names on the ballot, you know that), anyhoo, guess I'll keep finding other things to do.

TODAY. Money $$$. I have a big spit test payment to make, get those rolling into auto-pay. Still worth knowing I'm not a genetically inclined carrier for key cancers, so that's my Christmas present to my kiddo and the rest will be a little tight till that's paid off. I'm thinking about letting favstar go this year. I've had my fun with it, but I'd rather spend that on Minecraft. Also thinking about letting statcounter expire. I'll still have a free account for immediate tracking, but all the archives will go away. It was fun, too, but honestly, with all the masking people do nowadays, it's just not that useful for actual data, especially when half my readers are coming in through Google translate or referring from facebook. Those are both excellent data masks.

7 days till Thanksgiving! My fave thing about this time of year is all the produce suddenly spiffs up into best of the best, so we're diving back into salads. I cooked a little peppered bacon ahead and chunked some up into my big ol' chef's salad last night, super yum.

By the way-
The Muppets Will Brave Manhattan’s Crushing Holiday Crowds to Lead the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade
Also- Who Will Participate In The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade
Just thought you might wanna know. Was hoping we'd see some Doctor Strange, but oh well.

HOW TO BE DOCTOR STRANGE IN MINECRAFT
Watch this vid, it's amazing.



Using Minecraft to become part of the Doctor Strange world? Yes, please!



Ug, still waiting on photobucket. May as well get all over folding some laundry and a couple other things before offices open up and I can start making phone calls. Last time photobucket had a code fix it took a few hours. I can get to all my other stuff, just can't upload anything new yet.

Work music! Pick your poison. Some material might be NSFW.

turkey day countdown

click to see where this happened

This post is brought to you by the letters I-M and the other letters T-I-R-E-D. I haven't sanded pallets or power washed a house, like some of my friends, but I kinda feel like I was with them in spirit.

So, this getting up in the 3s every morning aching all over and staring at the stupid 2 pounds I put back on that aren't coming back off and even taunting me with nearly another pound- I blame time change, govt change, weather change, and especially multiplayer server change (yes, that is the most important thing in my life). I made an early New Year's resolution yesterday and I'm going to stick to it the rest of the year- DON'T BUY MYSELF ANY MORE ICE CREAM. I've been exceedingly slack in my disapproval of carb binging over the last week, and it's taking a real toll on me, so I've made the executive decision to embrace taking responsibility for this and not blame our new President. I'm still obsessively checking Mo Creatures for player service, though.

click for cool article on rare colors in wild turkeys

Let's see, where are we on countdown to Turkey Day? 11 more days. I'll probably have @bonenado haul our giant turkey up from the downstairs freezer next weekend. Tuesday is my big day in town this week, hopefully the rest of the week will stay freed up. I'd like to get my floors done.

yum! click to find out how to easy these are to make

Oopsie, ventured into candyland, time to back it up and get off here. Nope, no deer yet. By this time yesterday @bonenado was already up pacing the floor tweaking all his plans, today he's still zonked in there. I'd better get breakfast going just in case.

I cannot believe someone actually did this. I have never in my life run into a pharmacy cocktail that could produce this level of happiness about Turkey Day.



All righty, anyone need a brain cleanser? This is way more my level of cool and exciting.

Pavlov, Schrodinger, Machiavelli, and Freud walk into a bar

And Plato is a bartender... Hang on a sec, we need a piano man. Or something.


I had a eureka moment this morning after that last post. I've been struggling for at least two months with how to handle letting someone with severe depression know I'd like to stop being tagged in certain convos without triggering problems and without encouraging private messaging to do it. I really need to be done with private messaging. It all suddenly came to me in one sentence- "I'm not on twitter to promote religion." Once that gets said, I may ask to be untagged from those convos. I believe in tolerance, but I'm to the point of extreme impatience after several polite hints and finally just flat saying in private that I'm not going to retweet certain things and then being very publicly poked with tags afterward, as if there were a leveling up kind of game.

I have a big variety of followers, many different religious and political beliefs, many different agendas, all ages and sexual orientations. I believe in people first, ideas second. I learned growing up watching other people that it's kinda stupid to condemn other people for not agreeing with one's own point of view, especially when that point of view is first and foremost based on the concept of forgiveness. Several religions promote forgiveness and tolerance, and this can be practiced by anyone, even without religion. All the same, one person's obsession with what I can only think must be an attempt at something humorous can get a little tiresome, and I can tell a few friends have been keeping an eye on my tag feed and are probably wondering how much longer I'm going to put up with this. Some people enjoy poking other people to respond, and I tend to let it go on way longer than I should because I can't tell if it's deliberate obnoxiousness or sarcasm or friendly and possibly even innocent annoyance by someone who genuinely likes me as a person and doesn't know how else to interact. I compare it to feeling like a tiger in a cage being poked by a little kid, which I've actually seen happen, and the parent didn't stop it, and none of the onlookers said anything, while the tiger on display actually took it really well until it abruptly turned and sprayed pee all over the kid. I'd rather not sink to that level, but basically that's what I do, isn't it, in the form of nice words molded around me grappling with a problem. Imagine if the tiger could tweet how it was feeling to the world or blog about its life.

I have an agenda, which I don't bring up very often. My challenge is sales without alienation. If what I intend to sell heavily depends on my personal honesty, and my targets are emotional crises subjects with interpersonal relationship challenges (or the families of such) (delicate wording is like a game to me, I can't help but love this sort of mental wrestling), how do I be myself without harming my own agenda? Because I'm really super good at rocking boats until they flip everyone right into the water. (And don't protest just because you've never seen me do it.)

Everything I'm practicing now with Pinky is about not rocking boats. I'm practicing and getting good at handling not only staying public, but balancing interacting with a variety of personality types on social media. I know crossing the streams can be bad and that one set of friends might not mix well with another set, and I do everything in my power to keep it fairly cool and non confrontational.

One of my biggest problems both online and in real life is being a sucker. According to my psychologist, I am easily led. My aspergers diagnosis has legal connotations, and a panel of judges appointed a payee to oversee my finances. If I hadn't been married, a legal guardian might have been appointed over me. "People with an ASD respond and perform neurologically inconsistently depending on emotional state, familiarity with the people and situation and various sensory experiences. For example, they may be very talkative in one setting at a particular time and later be UNABLE to speak well in the same setting."

That document should probably be required reading for anyone who wants to remain public with me. If I really do wind up 'out there' in interviews or whatever (notice I'm not rushing this, egads), I may actually lose a few friends if they are that clueless how I might be in real life, even after knowing me so long on the internet. It's not that I'm a regular jerk about stuff (anymore), but if I'm going down a rabbit hole right in front of you and you do all the wrong things trying to pull me out, you will find out exactly how much chaff is being burned down to the gold in your heart in the ugly fire I set on you. I've been told I'm scary by people in my own family, and it's because I'm unpredictable when I hit meltdown. I'm so afraid of meltdown myself that I have contingency plans in place for any given moment and every conceivable scenario. I can look intensely hateful and draw blood with little flicks of words without even trying, and you will think the rest of your life that I must really have hated you all along underneath everything. Very few people survive being friends with me if I'm caught not able to hole up in a corner for a quick braincation. The only way I survived as a child was my mom beating me until I learned to turn into a rock. If I turn into a rock, you best be scattering. If I turn to stone and stop responding, that's your signal to step back. Fortunately, I'm usually over it pretty quickly, and I can be bribed with food. Well, unless you haven't been paying attention and stick something in my face that I'm allergic to, then whatever god you believe in have mercy on your soul (and I'm pretty sure Baphomet won't.)

That's a significant paragraph up there because I keep trying to positive image myself getting through a book signing. I will be pretty incoherent in a matter of minutes (an hour, tops), might be able to fake my way through another hour, but after that I'll need complete guidance to keep me focused and moving. By the end of whatever public session I'm dealing with, I'll need trusted people to lead me away. Yes, my aspergers is that bad. I become nonfunctional. Whatever brilliance I might occasionally display in print will be lost in the idiocy I descend into as I fall into shutdown. Staying on social alert is very different from spazzing out through college classes or automatically cycling through another day on a redundant job.

If I want to succeed, it's important that I communicate well to people on social media. My friends generously allow me to practice on them in public. New people that come along don't realize that my social media intentions are exactly that- practice with my social deficiencies. They bumble right into me and usually never have a clue how I feel about it. I can't even imagine what it's like for some of my better friends to watch it happening again. It's either hilarious or scary, but either way, there are a handful of you that I notice showing up, and I thank you guys immensely for your instincts and watching out for me. Just me noticing you noticing I'm walking into another awkward pickle is usually enough to help me focus nowadays on self monitoring and backing off again before I go into a crouch and launch.

Life experience helps, getting a sociology degree has helped, and a past rife with fandom squabbles has helped. My psychologist has helped immensely, and what really turned it around for me personally was Chris Hardwick's The Nerdist Way. I'm becoming very experienced at monitoring and managing myself nowadays. That doesn't mean I've overcome the autism spectrum. That just means people more and more rarely see me reacting like the very real aspienado I am in my own home, where I cycle through mini-shutdowns repeatedly, and often disappear into another room on weekends for a few minutes of alone time. If I'm sitting in a room alone with you and not saying a word and not looking at you, you might have no idea I'm still picking up on your every breath and eye roll, even if I don't understand a single nuance hinting at how awkward it might be for you if I'm not holding up my end of the convo, or worse, taking over completely in a nonstop gush of exuberance. I really don't know how @bonenado has lasted this long with me.

Ok, focus. I've been up and down doing breakfast and getting my day going and keep coming back and piddling here. I'm needing to start concentrating on actual work again, and maybe that will be a good way to ignore social media a little more again. October hit with all that finally dealing with the emotionally repressed stuff and I've been way off track ever since, BUT I have to admit this has been my best autumn in many years for dealing with stress and depression and staying pretty oriented and focused. Maybe going off track for a little while was a good thing. I seem to be in a good place in my head.

So I haven't disappeared, but I'm going to try to get back into a work schedule and stay off the twitters and FB a bit more this next month. Not ignoring anyone if you don't see me around faving or liking, just not there, letting it all slide by me while I'm busy like a little elf. I still feel driven, just in a new way I've not felt before, and I need to explore it. It's like a new point of view from a new angle, no longer feeling lost in it.


~later~ I let this sit all day because my head was such a scattered mess after Turkey Day, and I couldn't properly read back through this well enough to see if it made sense. I really don't have a clue how I'm able to write sometimes.

Again, thank you to my very tolerant friends on the webs. I have felt most extremely grateful for you guys, and aside from the usual Thanksgiving list of being thankful for health and family and a nice new roof over our heads, I really am sincerely grateful for #Snarkalecs, SyfyDesigns, #latenightmovie chat gang, my pals from Merlin and other fandoms, and the friends I still have in the Lexx fandom. I really do love you guys.