The beatings of my heart

Wo, my whole brain lit up this morning while I was in reach of listing implements and able to get to Jawn to make notes. I hope this continues...

fandom refocus- drudgery of cleaning house vs elation of creativity

I've pared down my following number on twitter by a thousand now. This whole time I had only one tiny twinge of regret that lasted about 10 seconds. I feel like I'm doing twitter taxes or something when I think about it. My followers list never quite reached 3200 at its highest, so I'll just call my gross followers 3100. (That's not counting all the followers who dropped off over the last year when I didn't follow them back, or the spam/porn accounts that got deleted.) It's only down to 2875 right now, even though I've actually lost hundreds more in the last 2 weeks, because so many new ones keep following so fast, so I guess my net loss is only 425, even though I've unfollowed a thousand now.

. 

Btw, several people are going to cheer when they hear a certain person unfollowed me, and while I'd like to be sad about it, I've actually done my very real crying over months of emotional entanglement that goes back 3 years. My psychologist wasn't at all happy with that relationship eating away at me. I'm happy she's found a soulmate in a younger copy of herself, may they live in peace and love the rest of their lives. I kept saying I can't stay stuck in that rut, and I guess I've finally been let go. That's probably a very euphemistic way of saying it took forever to peel off and escape the continual emotional strain, and if worse comes to worst, it can always wind up in Pond of Death. I'd rather not take it to that extreme, but I imagine it would get a lot of traffic. I've been surprised how many people have tugged my sleeve over the last couple of years and asked what the hell I was doing playing that head game, because my stagnation over the distractions was very visible to people who know me better than that. You know what though? I didn't unfollow back. We really were friends, and I really do still love her very much. She knows that. I know she knows I know she knows that if she ever blocks me, it really is over. Unfollowing is ok. I'm going to take it to mean we're on a break for awhile. Sometimes Valentine's Day just turns out like that. But if I do get blocked after this, I'll never look back. I actually told her at the beginning- You're the last one. I'll never try to have another new friend again. She had every heads up about my history, all my honesty about who I am and where I'm wanting to go, and I had every assurance I had her full support going real places and doing real things. I don't think she realized she didn't want that kind of friend. You know, the kind who actually cares enough to come find why someone went dark over and over, and then takes it seriously when someone says they don't care if they die, and they're going to drink theirself to death. (I know that was awkward- Themself, themselves, theirself, or theirselves) If you don't want that kind of friend, don't make that kind of confession. Don't pull people into the dark expecting them to feel happy watching you throw everything away. Depression isn't a joke, and I don't appreciate being yanked around like that. Aspienado is a sucker and really fell for the shock effect. I suffered. Choosing to model a life of depression as an entertainment gimmick to the public just isn't cute, especially when I, the person who best friended you, am dealing with addictions and personal demons, and really especially when you flash a business card on twitter and the strange twistedness gets even darker. Srsly. Lotta potential traffic on this one. See, this is why I can't have friends. I get played in public, I play the recording back in public. A kind person pointed out to me this year, very gently, that maybe being a public person naturally precludes real friendships because the very nature of what I'm doing attracts trolls.

stuff, thangs, maybe deleted

On the bright side, @WalkingDead_AMC followed me last night, and they NEVER did that while I was actually doing the live tweet review. I'll take it.

Meanwhile, I started a seed world in single player called 'StarStruck' and have built my first house. It's already getting more elaborate, but I really enjoyed constructing this and it didn't take that long. Almost couldn't peel away for Walking Dead last night, so I think it's safe to say I'm a minecraft junkie now.



I originally accidentally started a super flat world and was doing pretty well with it, the potential for baddie attraction out on the wide open plains is very tempting for super combat skillz, but imagining a year of flatness dulled that excitement pretty quickly. As in immediately. So I deleted the whole thing, including the yellow brick road I was building toward the Emerald City I was going to make (building Labyrinth from the ground up would have been a great exercise, too, I may actually start a flat world over one day), and seeded another world. Now I live on a mountaintop and have plans for a futuristic city in a Taiga biome (I've also learned to write down coordinates and teleport, so it's getting hella fun) (you really need to do that because the minecraft world is too humongous to just 'explore'- The immense size of the minecraft world...).

Sometimes the talking just needs to stop for awhile.

Iz trew. I ripped out about 8000 words over a 24 hour period and still got chores done and food cooked. The last couple of weeks have been extremely liberating.


I've noticed there's this meme dichotomy on twitter. One meme promotes unconditional love, flaws and all, the other promotes getting away and clearing out the toxic people who drag your life down. It's been interesting watching several accounts who promote the unconditional love thing block other accounts for very trivial interaction hisses. Blocking is for spam and abuse, guys. Y'all playing with your block buttons like they're toys and then pouting when other people don't put up with your own sass (I've been dealing with several of you), what a silly tangled little world your heads must be. Am I the only one I know on twitter actually seeing a real psychologist? Actually dealing head on with addictions and emotional puzzles? Actually angsting over the word "friend"? When someone brings a definite skill set to the table and yanks my chain making promises of loyalty and future coolness, it gets really weird realizing I'm tied up in a dark room watching someone drink themselves to death watching the same TV shows over and over, feeling like I'm being held hostage as a prize for the world to be jealous over or something. Yeah, I'm a webmaster in a world fandom. You know how many people noticed everything that happened? And asked me why?

_

Just saying. Naive aspie falling over myself because someone wants to be my friend. Yeah, this one hurt, quite badly. I'm still reeling away while I work on getting back to a more focused place in my head. I had completely stopped writing for my own fandom. That's how bad it got. Well, public friendships are over. No more new private friendships, that's not even a thing with me any more. I've got friends, yes, and the ones I already have have access, yes. But they know better than to drag me out in public to make me dance when they pull my strings. That's over.

more stuff, more thangs, maybe more deleted
Maybe I got thangs to do.

observations while I load family videos

I finally got my first spam comments here on Pinky blog. The only way the spam comments got through my border patrol was via spam G+ spam account, so I'm really glad I had the moderation set to pending, and they only hit 4 posts before they gave up. Not bad. I've had a lot of blogs, have seen all the spam, have been wondering if the tight controls on blogger were a dream come true or something. All the same, might oughta set my other blogs the same way, just in case.

Timehop says this was a thing last year. I forgot all about it. I ripped the code but I can't make it work here (mean ol' blogger!), so if you can see it there, click on the circle button to see the cool card.

This tweet got more actual engagements (counts more than RTs & favs) than anything else I've tweeted all month, including anything Lexx.

It's kind of weird being public, because my own silly self stuff gets more actual traffic than Lexx stuff, but the most interesting thing I'm discovering this year is that crossing these streams spikes that traffic in all directions. I'm not any kind of social media butterfly, but I do have fun experimenting with how to move traffic, and since that was my goal from the very beginning, I feel like I'm having a really good year. Spoonie #aspienado openly sharing my #Lexxperience multifandom style is working better than anything I've ever done to get more eyes on both me and Lexx. Interesting.

My crew is just about out the door and back on the road, so Christmas is pretty much over here, except for what's left between @bonenado and Pinky behind the tree. I'm wiped out, so I probably won't be popping out on the twitters much yet. Mostly family texting and stuff this week, has been forever since so much has happened on Christmas at OUR house. It's nearly time to GET TO WORK! >=l FOCUS!!!

Meanwhile, got a little weird here on Pinky blog. All that angsting for months, suddenly dropping hints...



I'm floating.

everything in the world is one big chaotic mess of algorithms

lol, this is a real thing, click!

I took vengeance on my paper.li yesterday after the latest edition came out and restructured the content gathering. I really do loathe the new algorithm. Even with stricter, tighter controls (which I pay for), I can't seem to stop one or two people from hogging the entire paper every little bit, based only on the very simple fact that their particular tweets or shared tweets get the majority of faves and RTs that day on twitter, and the algorithm notices and prioritizes by popularity, which means there is no truly random tweet sampling, it's all skewed to who is tweeting or retweeting the most popular tweets, which is NOT what I want because it knocks out nearly everyone else on the same or alternating list who have actual awesome content. I'm not thrilled about how the leading stories are picked up, either, might hafta dig a little deeper and see if I can cinch up how the story leads land in the upper section. Also toying with doing a guest list once a week just to splash a big load of different stuff in one day. The dangers of that are, say, getting a cool scientist on a rant day (srsly? plz to stop being uncooooooool), or getting a filmmaker on a drunk day (facepalms g.a.l.o.r.e.), you get the picture. Anyway, I've got so many lists, several of them are business-y, might be fun to see what happens. Or not. But perhaps I can theme within a theme if I can rig the controls.

As I was thinking all this (in the shower, like corporate execs do, naked), I also thought how easy it would be to start another paper.li (for free) purposely grabbing my fave celebs on twitter, just make it all about the twitter buzz from the cream that's already risen to the top. It wouldn't always look cool like this, of course, but it might be fun. This one clicks back to the smooshed together survey.

We all know Groovy Bruce has a Shat crush. He likes it sticky, apparently. Anyway, not sure how soon I'll get on that.

Halloween pulled some cosmic trickery on my family. Most people start their Halloweens later in the day or near sunset, well, ours started bright and early before the crack of dawn after Twink texted us a pic of her very swollen face and off we all went to the ER. Her lips were pretty spectacular, stuff you see in lip injections gone awry on places like Buzzfeed, and her whole body was doing this lumpy neon pink leprosy thing. Couldn't have picked a more perfect day for it, right? I mean, Halloween. While mama got shots and more shots, a very busy Bunny and I took up hallway monitor patrol and probably put a couple miles on our matching neon pink Nikes, and we were so awesome in our fall fashion long sleeve autumn tees that all the old people smiled real big at us. And it was a good thing Grampa was there, too, fixing the kid stuff.

After the scary part was over, we all went home and collapsed back into bed and woke up to Sploit sending flooding pix from Houston, people knee deep out in a residential street kind of stuff, and then on twitter I saw all kinds of tweets about Halloween plans going soggy over several areas for lots of people. So, Happy Halloween, right?

We had rain all day here, too, and not one single trick-or-treater for the first time EVER, but that didn't stop me from donning my costume. Big thank you to Walmart for making it so easy this year with their 'Awesome Gramma Costume' loungewear selection, lol. I don't do fleece very well, though, no way I could actually sleep in that outfit without having to turn on the AC in 40 degree weather, so I guess I won't be wearing Pinkyween all winter like I thought. It's still cute, though.

A couple of Bunny and Batman pix rolled in, they were really cute. The 'cranky ninja' pose cracks me up.

  

We've been having another spectacular ladybug year. I call this one "Bob on gray frosting." We won't talk about "Bob bits in hair" or "Bob drives a CRV" or "Bob caught in human nostril". Bob is a really busy guy in a multiplex of universal being, which means he's really good at quantum flux. If you ever think Bob was a goner, you thought wrong. He manifests in the millions, kind of like the Master in Master Race on Doctor Who.

November in my house is pretty much about recovering from one holiday while we wildly slide toward the next one, with all kinds of stuff happening in between. There are birthdays and another baby coming to one of the nieces, and this is also the month @bonenado and I visit the cemetery and remember our lost babies, not between us, but from before we became our own thing. And everything gets crunched under football and deer season, and by the time Thanksgiving gets here, we really are a big chaotic mess. I keep a firm grip on visualizing hot chocolate and Macy's parade and turkey in the oven smells until it actually gets here while my reality usually turns into bumbling around forgetting things and getting lost in stores. Things have been changing so much this year, I'm looking forward to the what ifs of November 2015 maybe being a nicer experience than usual. It's really nice having my brain mostly back.

This next pic is from Butterflies of Paradise by Diva Art, totally worth checking out, just really beautiful stuff.

It was inspired by the visual art in a vid I shared last week, which reminds me of a sophisticated math render used with a several different techniques, and of course I love the pinks and blues and the way the visuals flow. I've been a Vanessa fan for years, regularly make it back around to her stuff on youtube. I don't think most Americans are very aware of her unless they are hardcore Johnny Depp fans, and even then, everyone's cool if you take Vanessa's side and still love Johnny.

what's a love song doing on Pinkyween Eve?

There are some youtube vids I generally avoid. The weird ships are ok, they mostly make for great protagonist forays with good action music since action/violent scenes lend such a good visual companion to sexual subtext, but the parent/child AU smashes are completely opposite and rather devastating. There are a lot of those. It's rather stunning to realize how well each actually understands the other when it comes to vid story construction, but still can't break out of whatever vicious loop they might have going in real life. Or maybe it's just that I so rarely stop and think about these things.

Yes, up at 1:30 a.m. again. I go in for 6-month psych follow-up (the one who prescribes and can't get me to commit to meds) and I'll have to come clean and say no, I'm not sleeping that great. Totally split shifting again for several weeks now. At least the total is still coming up to 6-8 hours in every 24. I'd so much rather just get up and move around and then go back to bed than zombie out solid and not be able to move in the morning.

So this was my first October in over ten years where I managed to keep some kind of real time cognitive involvement going pretty much daily without bombing into complete distraction to survive. No teeter-tottering through emotional shutdowns, no significant time disorientation bubble breaks, no angsting over a daily plan...

Taming the brain That's a pretty good site.

The daily plan thing is a toss-up. I feel like I'm bombing because the angst of stuff piling up is visible on my kitchen table, but even the least amount of reflection recognizes I'm easily keeping up with daily living nowadays as meals and chores and writing automatically happens without much conscious thought, much less having to create daily planning around them. Same with simple grocery shopping. I spent several years making elaborate lists of places to go, errands to run, things to pick up, and would still come home with it mangled up. It's nice being able to remember a few things now without having to write every little bitty thing down. Still, the daily planning was a very good habit, the root command under all the crawling back up the mountain stuff, but I think my conscious discipline is becoming an unconscious automatic routine.

Enough quickie psyche assessing. I'm stalled on the Mantrid post for good reasons. I've already spent every day in town this week, and not all of it over my own stuff. Bunny has something going on that we're watching, other people close to me have stuff, plus holidays and family birthdays and their baby stuffs have started popping in and out of scheduling, so I'm generally just not even on the computer much lately. I see several people are still wondering why I'm not personally responsive online, well, I'm actually functioning better in real life, so yeah, juggling 100 people means prioritizing and it's taking some of you a really long time to accept that. If I were a good cartoonist I'd create a panel visualizing calamities galore dive bombing all around and me holding a hand up and saying "Wait a sec, someone I've never met needs me online" while I'm bent over a failing phone or glitchy laptop. Social media is fantastic, I'll never say different, but the hilarious idea of aspienado being on-demand for people who've never met me in real life hasn't quite sunk into a few heads yet. My empathy is sketchy, and my time is extremely restricted. I apologize.

But you're blogging. You have time for blogging. But I'm not sleeping. I should be sleeping. If I'm up working on my own head/life stuff while I get through a pain problem that won't allow me to sleep, I don't owe anyone a pleasant conversation. I've spent incredibly long sleepless hours in the past online with people who were actually in hospitals or getting through other people being in hospitals, many hours logged keeping people company online sometimes right up to their last hours, and to grind my head back down to people demanding interaction of me simply because they are ~*~bored~*~ or restless (not being more forthcoming) kind of twists my head up. I'm saying this as kindly as possible to several people. The reason I'm public is so people can talk to me publicly. And having said that, if you do tag me, I can miss it because I'm tagged a lot, and if I still don't 'like' every single thing I'm tagged in, it doesn't mean I'm not paying attention or hate anyone. It just means I'm not going to slow down and hit the 'like' button a hundred times. In case anyone still feels left out or put off because I haven't personally acknowledged your presence lately, just wanna say you don't see anyone in my family complaining about me paying more attention to people I don't know than I do them.

Actually, kinda rambling while I listen to the latest SNews. Just put coffee on. It's about 3:15 a.m. now.

Ok, where was I? AU parent/child youtube ship smashes.

I grew up fantasizing having different parents. I imagined so many different scenarios and how many ways my childhood could have turned out. I've imagined having other kids, which I've discovered in 2012 is actually common for parents who've either lost or never managed to have babies or children.

Fantasizing relationships is a form of problem solving. It can get weird, yes. People can seem like creepers when they share what's going on in their heads. Exploring situations and conversations that never happened irl (in real life) is no different from imagining doing other things we either enjoy or don't normally do, like riding a horse or skiing or decorating a cake. Brains are pretty awesome for projecting scenarios.

But it's possible to get stuck in scenarios without resolving why one is there in the first place. Getting stuck in fanfictions, either in our heads or in actual print, without moving on to new or different material seems like a red flag. I've read some really excellent fanfiction, and I've tried writing some, but in the long run, I don't find it satisfying. I do find it helpful, but youtubes go way faster getting ideas across. I like the kind of anguish I can zip through, like ripping bandaids off with lawnmowers or something. I feel like I don't have time to slow down and lolligag around feels.

It hit me yesterday while I was driving around again (driving way too much lately) that part of my problem processing emotions in real time might be that it takes too long, so half the time I just shut it off. Emotions are really different from absorbing myself in technoweenie garble, a completely different kind of jigsaw puzzle. It's probably an apple and orange thing, like soduku and crossword puzzles. I'm not crazy about either one, but I'll take the crossword puzzle over the soduku if I'm desperate and there is no other distraction available. I think AU shipping vs real life is like that. Whether it's coworkers or significant other or family structure probs, it's just easier to turn to the distraction of puzzle solving scenarios than actual puzzle solving.

There are games that are never over. Chess and checkers definitely have an endpoint. Monopoly gets a little fuzzy, especially with rule-bending that allows credit. I'm a repeater, I like gaming for the fun of gaming, playing for the fun of playing, thinking for the fun of thinking. I think that's what the vids are, emotional game playing that never really has to end. Like soduku. It doesn't matter if you've solved a block, you just keep moving on for the sake of doing soduku.

I'm not good at feels, so I shut mine off and watch other people grind through theirs. I learn all kinds of stuff way faster than I ever did in real life. That SNews show I linked up there is the same thing, going over and over a scenario and outcomes, taking sides and leveling up in the debate arena with facts over something that is fiction. It's good practice, and provides interaction opportunities, just like shipping vids and twitter do.

Sooner or later, I can tell, I'll need to tackle the parent/child stuff. Since I've reached the point where I'm starting to deal with glitchy/missing memory stuff, this kind of struck me. There is more about the story setup in the youtube description, if you need it.


I have absolutely no interest in this pairing, nor the reason for it (back to regular shipping), but it's just a really well done vid story. A show we were watching on TV last night quite bored me for a long five minutes and prompted me to blurt that I never went through that poor me love stuff in high school (asexual aspienado's so facepalmingly aspie), and it hit me I'm sitting next to a guy who's managed to stay married to me for more than 20 years despite me so epic failing in the whole relationship department. This kind of video actually helps me 'get' stuff about other people that I otherwise don't normally even notice or go through myself.


For someone who doesn't get romance and can't flirt to save my life, much less even look like a girl half the time, I've been amazingly lucky. What really struck me about that last vid was the idea that part of the relationship revolved around a traumatic incident. Most of my life is one long traumatic mess of incident after incident, but I know that's not uncommon. What is uncommon is winding up in a successful relationship in spite of that. What's even more uncommon is having no idea how and having to look back to figure it all out.

I'm the sort of aggressive person who triggers into extremely destructive violent thoughts if I go into the angsty places too long (don't worry, just my style of fanfic shipping, if I had one), so it's time to spring back into the mockery I make of normalcy and get all over my day. I told someone earlier this week (or last, maybe) that I credit being pissy with getting me through the hard stuff, and since this week has gone a little further off the rails getting hard again than I projected, I wound up making another playlist to deal with it.


And if that doesn't do it for you, I like the softer stuff, too.