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. 💕

phyllosopapilla

That's "philosophy" in food speak.

Don't worry, not going there. I don't put that stuff into my mouth any more. I'm just stuck on a word smash week where words ping around in my head and won't leave me alone. Like sternocleidomastoid. Why in the world that word popped into my head is beyond me. Those muscles aren't bothering me at all lately, which is a nice change. I really was bouncing philosophical stuffs around for awhile yesterday, though. I think my stomach butted in because I was too busy to notice I missed lunch.

I've had a few very interesting private convos this month, each were completely different subjects with completely different people, but they all had a common theme- I clearly didn't know what love even was growing up. I didn't question it, didn't expect it, didn't care about other people bringing it up, didn't feel sad about not feeling it, and almost never applied it to myself or anything going on around me. I did know, though, that I didn't feel it, even though I could feel protective or enjoy hanging out with my sister.

After I had a child, I spent a few years filtering through all the social pressures and expectations that becoming a parent opened my eyes to. By the time she was five I was eyeball deep in a relationship that would strip every last shred of innocence that my first marriage had somehow left tatters of still clinging around like old wallpaper. By the time my little girl was seven, I knew exactly what love was NOT, and wrote out 3 pages of gripping philosophical sadness that concluded humans discarding each other like used dryer sheets could only be cured by at least one person rising above the expectations for love and hope to become love and hope. While we wait for love to rescue our pitiful lives, love can never really happen and no one has hope, because waiting around for love to 'happen' cancels out what we think is supposed to be coming from someone else. If we are expecting it like that, we can't be it ourselves for someone else. But when we rise up and love anyway, hope becomes real for someone else. The one who does the rising up must do it not only without hope, but against all hope. As long as people discard each other like used dryer sheets, 'love' spreads like a virus, and we teach all the bad habits to new loves, and they in turn teach it to new loves, because love is a throwaway item. The baggage we carry infects more and more people around us until we grow bitter and lonely in our old age. I found that unacceptable. The only way to stop it is to stop treating each other like dryer sheets, objects that are supposed to fluff up our emotional lives, hold down the static, and make everything smell fresh.

My second marriage is well into its 23rd year, and not because it's easy and we're romantics. I am one of the most fortunate people I know, meeting someone who thinks the same way (not in so many words, but more intuitively after a painful childhood himself), and what makes it work for us is we're so terribly stubborn and not easily swayed with every little breeze of emotion. Oh, there's been emotion, long years of gritting our teeth through mess after mess, challenges upon challenges, and it all boils down repeatedly to neither one of us would ever abandon the other even on our very worst days, weeks, months, and years. We've both been abandoned, neglected, ignored, used and abused, and we both know what love is NOT. We know that looking around for something we don't create ourselves is a ridiculous lie to tell ourselves. We. Are. Love. Why look around for it and hope to find it when the next person is doing that too, looking around and hoping. How can we be what the other person needs from that point of view?

I don't feel emotions right like other people do. I don't feel loving. I don't feel kind. Love and kindness are philosophies of emotional logic I developed to survive, because without them I am terribly alone and deeply sad. I don't think I am capable of being in love correctly, yet I'm in love all the time. The euphorias I've developed in later age (hormones out of the way?) can now easily be triggered, and they are the only thing that's ever connected me to feeling happy, especially the first time when my brain was so chemical soaked that I was high on chemically induced love and felt happy for the first time in my whole life. I enjoy people and things, I laugh quite a lot, I am pleased with this and that, but outside of euphoric episodes, I don't feel happy. And I don't even think about that, whether I 'feel happy'. This has been discussed at length with a psychologist over several years, looked at from several angles that include autism spectrum with complications like synesthesia and narcissism and possibly even dissociation, the way my parents raised me and my years of wrangling with a conflicting belief system, my best friend being maliciously murdered, injuries from a nasty accident, a first marriage to a pedophile, an affair that wound up in what boiled down to a 'forced' abortion (reverse rape, complete with restraints)...

Did I just keep switching it all off? How do I switch it back on? Did I survive because I couldn't turn it on in the first place? Yet I puzzled it all out into a philosophy of being that my psychologist thinks on par with extremely advanced awareness levels and thought processing skills for young child, preteen, adolescent, and young adult. I absorbed philosophies like people around me absorbed holiday candy and TV shows and the other lies of social structure, stuck on roller coasters of feeling happy and unhappy because that's what modern society insists that we constantly assess in ourselves. Are we happy? Personally, I think that feeling is so easily mimicked putting sugar in our mouths that we've become accustomed to habitual feeding frenzies and then agonizing over all the ways food makes us unacceptable. Food porn. There are stories throughout history of socialites alternately gorging and starving themselves, but what darker secrets lurked beneath?

The reason the questions are coming back up is because I noticed I didn't feel anything doing something that another person would likely have found exciting, possibly even exhilarating. Sometimes I do something that other people would feel prone to brag about or use as personal resume padding, and I feel nothing, even though I know now that I should. I'm aware nowadays that I'm numb most of the time. I used to harbor anger like Dr. Evil petting Mr. Bigglesworth, but I've mostly let go of that, so I'm on a sort of testing ground, poking myself here and there to see if I'm feeling anything.

click to read Ranking the Hottest Cat Movie Stars, From Keanu to The Hunger Games

Happiness is conditional on people and events and material things and feelings affecting me, and there is nothing in this world that makes me happy, although eating certain foods used to come close. Nothing *makes* me happy. I never understood what happiness was even supposed to be, like what does it mean when people say they don't feel happy. I grew up completely missing the ability to grasp that concept. I've tried to word out my thoughts on it through the years in some of my silly surveys at Surveypalooza, but after I went through the initial euphoria (almost completely stopped eating and sleeping for 12 days and was continuously gurgling in a love state, which alarmed my psychiatrist), anyway, after I *felt* that, I finally had some kind of context, because I was able to say "I feel so happy." I had never felt happy before. No meds or drugs or events or people in my life had ever induced any kind of happy feeling even remotely like that, but as soon as I was in it, I recognized it. And then when the euphoric episode crashed back down, the happiness was over and I haven't really felt that kind of happiness since, even though I go through euphoric episodes fairly regularly now. I felt happy for 12 days out of my entire life, and the whole thing was a brain chemical imbalance.

Love and happiness are important, I know that. I know it's important that I help the people around me feel loved and happy, even if I can't or don't feel these things myself. I care deeply for the people around me, and I know I'm very lucky I actually have people in my life who love me back, even if I don't have any desire or need for them to go out of their way to do and say things to show me this. Well, poor @bonenado caught it a few times, but we're both hung up on our conundrums, and pretty much apparently nailed the love thing out of sheer stubborn devotion.

Not everyone is so lucky. Not everyone finds the glove that fits their weird hand. Not everyone feels understood and accepted, quirks and all. Not everyone feels comfortable just being themselves around people who are supposed to be the most important loves of their lives- parents, sibs, offspring. It's not something that came easily for me and Scott, and yet here we are, out of nothing more than sheer stubbornness and an unwillingness to drift alone again among the dryer sheets. Neither one of us can ever go back to that kind of thinking. We make the love we want and we live the love that we need. We've become for others what we desperately needed and didn't have for ourselves. It's been hard and it took time, but we are who we are and there was no other way to survive. We draw firm boundaries around misconceptions and dysfunctions, and we don't tolerate that crap in our own home. Our love depends on utter honesty, utter trust that the other won't leave over something stupid. My home is my sanctuary, and my people are exactly that- mine.

A great big part of this was letting go of and walking away from the kinds of things that perpetuate emotional codependency (dysfunctional relationships doomed to fail because they are not love even if they are disguised as love), chemical dependency (alcohol, drugs, meds), experience dependency (things inducing rushes of adrenaline and euphorias, shopping, thrill seeking, for some people gambling would go here), pretty much anything that masks pain, to put it very simply. To feel pain is one of the privileges of being on this earth (it seems designed especially for pain), and if souls and eternity exist in any form at all, then my being here is by choice because I wanted to learn something important. Blocking that process only slows down my spiritual progress and hurts other people. Even if I can't feel remorse or guilt, I know that is a bad thing and that I will be held responsible for being stupid. Years of deep reflection point no other direction than this- that we are here to learn to love through the toughest kinds of pain imaginable. It's ok to be weak and fall on our faces, but it's not ok to *not* learn from that, and once learned, it's definitely not ok to turn our backs on it and be selfish. I think this holds water in any religion or belief system you'd care to bring up.

My name is Broken Dragon, and that is my phyllosopapilla on life, the universe, and everything. I was 42 when I woke up. The next year I made a blog...

Day 23- last of 2016 30 day challenge

How often does Christmas Eve Eve fall on a Friday? I looked it up. The only other time in the last 10 years that December 23rd fell on a Friday was 2011, and has happened only 17 times since 1900.

1988 was probably one of those big mistakes. I'm still working on the scattered pieces of that blur... If it's the night I think it might have been, I was very lucky to get home in one piece that night. I was playing pool at a bar at least 60 miles from home, trying to sober up with coffee, not realizing one of my friends kept spiking it and I was getting more wasted. When the other friend started giggling, I figured it out, got upset and left, and yes, drove all the way home on snow and ice wasted out of my mind. About 15 miles from my house in the inky black oneish in the morning kind of solitude way out on the windiest road through hills and hollows you ever saw (that all my friends drove drunk I don't know how many times), I missed hitting a stray heifer standing just off the highway, surprised us both, and I remember thinking "I hope the guy back there (I could see other headlights) doesn't hit her." Made it home, crashed into bed, still pissed. Next day heard there was a guy driving home from work who hit a heifer full on in the middle of the night, totaled his pickup, broken collar bone, shattered arm, really messed up, and it wasn't because he'd been drinking. It was because my car spooked the heifer, and then she lunged into his pickup. That happened near a drop off that could've easily killed either one of us if we'd rolled our vehicles.

I've often wondered about the way events might've rolled out for him if I hadn't been through that stretch first, since my being there was on a drunken whim. Our drunk driving may not actually kill anyone, but we don't see the wave of consequences we stir up in the universe around us, do we? I definitely altered the course of that man's life and history just being a fluky blip on his experiential radar that night.

New Year's Eve Eve is also on a Friday this year. That's like having an extra Friday two weekends in a row. Please be careful and get home without breaking yourselves. I don't even know how I'm still here sometimes.

the celebrity death addiction thing

This is as far as we've gotten this weekend.

Despite sloughing off all those corporate and business accounts, my twitter analytics is insisting that my highest demographic is homeowners with good jobs (a third of you completed college) and a preference for premium brands, equally spread across political affiliations, and 18% of you purchased new cars in the last 6 months. Seriously, for real. It says that. Most of you prefer drama and comedy on TV, and sports is about equal with sci-fi for solid lifestyle interests. A little over 500 of you that I still follow are actual people and still currently active on social media.

In one year flat I reduced my twitter followers from nearly 3000 to just under 600 and didn't hurt my social media cred at all. My klout score has held rock steady in the 60s this entire time. 2016 is the year I proved that 'growth' does not equal WORTH. This is especially noticeable in my monthly impressions jumping another 100K the last couple of months, and if that doesn't mean anything (like I keep insisting), at least my daily/weekly/monthly engagements have held just as rock steady as my klout.

That's right, some of you just realized I'm doing the end of December stuff in November. This will probably be it for end of year assessment. Lotta people out there will be measuring 2016 in end of the year recaps by how many celebs died, by how crazy politics got, by how movies did at the box office, by Wall Street numbers, by trends in this and that games and software, by world catastrophic events, and that list just goes on.

I still have most of my friends. After 4 years. If you guys knew my personal history on the internet, that alone would sheath my house in gold.

@bonenado still has his job, despite the company he works for being on the market for nearly 3 years now.

I have gone nearly 3 years now without an autoimmune flare, and my health overall continues to be the best its been in my entire adult life since I changed everything in 2011.

I was talking with a friend the other day about how it feels when things are going good and you automatically think it means something bad is just around the corner.
[11/24/2016 4:10:38 PM] Pinky Robot: I'm a proactive doom & gloomer, too. I always ready for the other shoe to drop. But it's ok to enjoy the moment.
[11/24/2016 4:11:20 PM] Pinky Robot: And bad things sometimes happen because we're just being dumb and not paying attention.

And I was talking with @bonenado last night about how in shock everyone seems to be about celebrities dying all through 2016, and I was like- how was it any different from 2015, or 2014? Because those years sucked for celebrity deaths, too. And you know what? It's going to be like this from now on, because we grew up with these names and faces, we are ALL getting older, and now we're going to watch all of them steadily die off. This continual barrage of celebrity death shock is never going to end.

2017 is just around the corner. Celebrities we haven't lost yet who could go any time-

• Harrison Ford (yes, all my readers just seethed and hissed at my blasphemy)
• Morgan Freeman (omg, noooooooooo)
• Donald Sutherland (srsly iconic)
• William Shatner (I've already wept over the eulogy I wrote years ago, my most read piece EVER)
• Christopher Lloyd (not Doc Brown!!!!)
• Bill Murray (shtap already *weeping*)
• James Earl Jones... 

And apparently I'm not the only one looking up "oldest celebrities still alive", because Google search filled most of that in for me by the time I'd gotten to "oldest cele". There are a LOT of people we're going to be losing over the next ten years, and as we age with them, as social media keeps us informed up to the minute and second, O Best Beloved (Kipling), we are going to hurt every time we watch parts of our lives 'die' with them.

This is the cruelty of social media. Mass mourning is a thing now. Some of us are learning to disengage from mass mourning because it triggers too much stuff, and we wind up plowing face into that nasty depression wrecking on the highway of life thing, over and over and over.

My 2017 isn't going to be like that. I'm not going to let social media jerk me around and make me feel helpless and sad. I'm going to expect the world to keep turning and things to work out, like they usually do, and I'm going to continue focusing on my goals and why I'm here.

We have another long month to go before the end of 2016. Will social media crash your holidays? They're not going to crash mine. Not this year. I did that crash thingy last year, it sucked, and I can't go there again.

I'm an alcoholic with a history of child abuse and emotional neglect. I'm just now coming to grips with the stoicism that a- kept me alive and b- lost me all my friends over and over. I'm an aspienado that tears down belief systems and rips off masks. I'm a mess and a pissy dragon that eats people's heads. I can't be going down into a weepy bottle every time a celebrity dies, because above all these things, I am an alcoholic with a history of multiple medication addictions. Even if these addictions are considered 'mild' by some doctors, they lasted for several decades and withdrawals were wicked as hell.

So I won't be joining any of you in condolences and lamentations and remembrances every time a celebrity dies. I'm still not over losing loved ones, and I still emotionally crawl through nearly every day. Mass mourning and addiction- wow. That's a cycle that will never. end.

I ran into a couple of outstanding articles yesterday.

Are You Being Gaslighted In Your Relationship? Dysfunction as a way of life. I see this all around me in a variety of expressive ways.

The Opposite of Addiction is Connection Totally nailed it. I got so lucky meeting @bonenado.

Depression over holidays is a real thing. Depression moves a lot of money into hands selling drugs, meds, and alcohol. You probably already know you're going to be depressed around whatever winter holiday you celebrate, even if you are singing all over your house while you decorate. You think you can beat it this year. You think you can show depression who's boss. And then that sucker punch will come- social media will hammer home someone you loved all through your childhood dying right around the big holiday, and you will fall. apart. Because that's the mask stuff over the real stuff. And you will reach for the nearest bottle of something to deal with it.

You're not weak for trying, and you're not weak for succumbing. You are hurting, and you need hugs and help.

international suicide hotlines
national domestic violence hotline (U.S.)
veterans crisis hotline
24 hour crisis hotline (depression)

Why Pinky is on social media- depression, suicide, and Pinky's revenge

Aspienado dealing with juggling chainsaws and eggs in public while living with depression and chronic illness on autism spectrum- ~metaphorically~

Holidays are hard. Pinky is hacking through the emotion jungle and drawing a survival map. We can do this.

I reprised the broken cheesecake. This is coffee and chocolate marble in a rice crumb crust. It's my fave holiday dessert nowadays because I'm diabetic and allergic to lemon pie (*snif*) and it's the lowest carb dessert I can find to make without fake sugar in it.

recipe-
Crust- 1 1/4 graham cracker crumbs, 1/4 c sugar, 1/3 cup melted butter, stirred together and patted into pie plate. (I substitute 4C gluten free bread crumbs.)
Filling- Mix together 2 8-oz blocks of cream cheese, 1/2 c sugar and 1 tsp vanilla, then mix in two eggs.
For the mocha swirl, I pour half the batter into the crust and melt 1/4 c. chocolate chips on the side. Moisten 1 t. dried coffee in a drip of water, swirl into remaining batter, dollop half that onto the batter already in the crust. Swirl the melted chocolate into what's left of the batter, dollop the rest of that in between the coffee dollops. With a utensil, run lines through both ways and then on a slant both ways.
Bake at 350 for 35-40 minutes. Do NOT add a topping when it's done unless a label says it has no carbs because it's been replaced with artificial sweeteners. Fresh berries are ok if you don't add sugar to them, but please use your glucose meter to verify this and not my word.

This one's for Shatner still being with us and Nimoy for going on ahead and all of us left here in the wake. Bless the person who made it, and I don't know if it's the person who uploaded it, but that youtube account was created 5 years ago specifically to upload this vid. It's special, guys.

song of the broken dragon

click pic for bigger
click here for more fan quote posters

I still struggle with addictions.

I was born addicted from spending my fetal development with a mom on darvocet for arthritic pain (back then it was commonly prescribed during pregnancy) and spent years on and off a phenobarbital medication to help control severe digestive disorder arising from acute withdrawal when I was born. When the doctor stopped filling that script 8 years later, I went through some rough years until I discovered cough syrup with codeine in my preteens and developed a dependency.

Skip a bunch of stuff including alcohol poisoning, 3 packs of cigarettes a day, 2 pots of coffee a day, bags and bags of chocolate, and years upon years of legal medical intoxication via prescriptions, all warranted by insurance as 'necessary'.

By 2014 I was completely clean. Of everything. I had managed to stay clean off all of it, including tylenol, for two years by the time I was commanded in an ER last spring to get back on something for pain control.

Going clean doesn't mean I'm fine.

A couple of years ago I bought the most expensive bottle of brandy I could find, brought it home, took the tiniest sip, poured the rest down the drain, and spent the rest of the day on the couch.

I still miss vicodin. Nearly every day I still want codeine or a derivative thereof. It's been 2 1/2 years since my last one. I don't dare ask for a prescription cough syrup.

I was a medically created, approved, and supplied mild benzo addict for so many years that I developed a condition called protracted withdrawal and will probably be on a very low dose of it the rest of my life. I was approved to go back onto very low dose xanax this year. If I break loose and take more than I'm allowed, I will be put onto head meds and strictly monitored the rest of my life. Between my aspergers, euphoria, depression, and addiction history, I know that if anything ever happens to Scott, a legal guardian will be assigned to me.

My entire life has been about pain and addiction. Every single day of my life is a string of decisions I make to be ok with myself, find something to do, or at the very least just go back to bed. I've got a degree, I've successfully held jobs and raised kids, and I'm surviving chronic illness challenges that destroy people, but every. single. day., I decide to BE here, to BE someone for someone else, to BE glad that I'm still here no matter how sucky my day/week/month/year has been. My job on this earth is to BE a light in the dark, and my delight in this existence is to BE that translator who finds a way to speak for others who can't yet speak for themselves. (I'm using my #oneword2016 thing, lol.)

Several people have reviewed Heidegger's Being and Time. I can't remember now whether I swiped it or the friend who had it gave it to me (I swiped other books, don't know if he noticed), but I got brownie points in a philosophy class for saying I owned it. "Heidegger criticizes the view of the person that we have inherited from the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution--the view that people are isolated individuals, defined solely by the self-conscious possession of a rational mind--showing especially the crucial role that emotion, other people, and practical know-how play in human experience."

All the dark places I've been. All the reasons I hung on. All the people I love now.

Imagine a person like me going deep into Sherlock. "Alone is what I have, alone protects me." "No. Friends protect people." I'm still learning, and cruelly practicing on friends that I love. This is my public apology. I got bitey, but I'm not burning bridges.


:edit: 1-14-16 This is a good site- Understanding Addiction

the first executive bored meeting of the new year

We. are. exhausted.

I haven't slept this much in ages. I think I've gotten as much sleep in the last 7 days as I have in the last month.

We made it up through the end of season 2 in the Sherlock marathon and called it quits for now. Never yet caught up on Doctor Who. We decided we're getting so burned out on the slam of new TV shows piling up in the DVR that we went through the timer list and deleted 15 of them. We don't have netflix, hulu, or amazon prime, just Dish, and even then there's a whole slew of channels we just don't get, like HBO and Starz, and STILL we're burned out on new shows. Definitely not like the old days (ten years ago, haha) when we twiddled our thumbs watching reruns.

I've been doing my thinky planny stuff, though. There have been meetings and executive decisions and lots and lots of coffee.

One of the discussions brought up in conference is that I have been extremely overextending myself. I assessed my time management and decided there is no way I can continue the TWD live tweet review AND do the writing I really want to do for Lexxperience during the 20th anniversary (I've had 1400 hits in the last 4 days by people around the world who take my writing very seriously, I'd be ~stupid~ not to put more time into my own hobby after neglecting it so long) AND keep organizing and working on material I'd prefer getting published sooner rather than later. Plus there are other things I want to write that I'm much more excited about than The Walking Dead.

When I came up with my plan to 'game' social media 3 1/2 years ago, I had very specific goals and wrote out a mission statement. I've decided it's time I stop detracting and undermining my own efforts with jaunts into lesser projects that I wind up spending several days a week on. Also, I refuse to cut out family time to pursue my goals, so since I must make time cuts somewhere, it simply has to be the amount of time I spend checking on feeds and timelines.

New year, new ways of doing things. All PMs and DMs are now my discretion only. There is nothing personal behind me ignoring private contact. I make just about everything in my life public sooner or later, friends and family across the States and around the world can check any time and see what's going on in my life without me having to stop and answer questions.

I'm currently listening to the Vienna Philharmonic while I wait for the Sherlock special. I used to listen to music like this all the time. It's wonderful just having it going in my background tonight. And it's about to start now, so brb....

~~~~~~~~~~~

And I never came back because I fell asleep again.

Scott's up, and we are listening to a DIY TV show with a table saw going at 4:20 a.m. +_+ This could be a long day.

The Sherlock special was beautifully layered last night. We paused a jillion times to excitedly compare notes. All these years with @bonenado, and we finally have a show we both equally tear into together, side by side like pro intellectual wrestlers. It really is a shame we don't do our own little podcast about it, because Scott's pretty awesome with canon details and comparing all the version character and story styles, and I'm pretty awesome at spotting every little bitty detail as we watch and remembering past episodes, plus I'm not just any Moffat fan, I'm a Moffat conquering the world fan, and what we saw last night topped every Sherlock ever written or made, or marketed. Moffat and Gatiss, in my opinion, are the most intellectually savvy writers on the planet. Anyone who can't see the whole picture of what they are doing are nothing more than brain level proletarians to me. I just insulted 99.99% of the world.

One of the list of blogs I read that I get email delivery on is Stone City Blogs. I highly recommend it for anyone who is bored, whiny, or otherwise frustrated over the little things this year. It's one of the first things I see every morning, and therefore usually my incentive boost for the day.

I've danced around the whole it's not you it's me thing for months, and then ok, it's you for a few more weeks, and then back to but I own that it's really me through the holidays, and now I just give up. What part of plz to stop poking the tiger in the cage can't be understood is beyond me, but if I don't rise above this NOW, I will forever be bogged in it. And I do admit I create the monsters around me because I am one of the most naive people on the planet. I've mentioned over and over that even my psychologist says I'm easily led and that I've gotten professional advice from a publicist to simply not respond, and what do I do? I respond. And then I get all pissed off because someone yanked my chain again. The whole crabapple thing was very real. If I'm triggering that easily, it's time to rethink how easily I fall for enabler relationships that wind up triggering my claws. Dealing with it delicately on a public blog is the only thing not making it worse so far. This is something I've been privately contacted about a number of times over several months by concerned readers who see everything that goes on in real time on social medias and understand the dynamics of what is happening, and while I appreciate some of the attempts to help me keep my balance, I fear that talking about this any more will only make it harder to sheath the claws, so going forward, I'll not mention this any more. This is it. I'm done with the poking mechanism and I'll simply no longer respond to it here, there, or anywhere.

I really love this song. People who don't get this visual, the character set up, the ship, and this song don't get me at all.

leveling up on suckage

my day in a nutshell

Actually caught myself thinking awhile ago how much I'd like some morphine today. Not the greatest sign from any angle, but seem to have cleared the ground up into hamburger on the rocks under a buffalo stampede part, so maybe an earlier impulse to throw all my tech off the deck and grow a beard and live on cicadas and wild honey was a bit hasty. Do you know how long it's been since I've actually longed for a morphine shot? I hate morphine. I know, I'm a weirdo. This is more my speed. Except I no can haz.

fondly cherishing memories of codeine love

Once I realized I was chem craving my way into a deeper pain hole, I switched to remembering my first tastes and smells of really expensive kona coffee and sipped it in my virtual reality palace, and whadayaknow, mind over matter. I actually started feeling better. The powers of the mind.... They say our brains are like pharmacies, manufacturing all the drugs we need. My brain manufactured kona coffee.

Super aspie went severely out of routine this week, leveled up the workouts, extra leaving the house in the highest ragweed pollen week of the whole month, injected MOAR ZYRTEC, and suddenly dried up into mummy mode. I think I dehydrated a little bit. Doesn't take much of that to get all the little cells cranky in there. Anyway, if you don't see me on the twitters or #latenightmovie tonight or this weekend, I'm in my head manufacturing the world's most expensive coffee.

titillated

Love/hate relationships are like an addiction that one cherishes quietly in the dark.


A person learns the true depths of their being in relationships like this. A really good love/hate relationship might come along once in a lifetime to one in ten thousand people.


I'm excited in a way I shouldn't be. I see an opportunity in future to rise above it all, sharply enhancing the tantalizing pull back into the dark. It will be everything I can do to stay focused on why I'm back.


"He gets off on it." Yeah, that... It's intoxicating.


If we can play the game right this time, it's going to be a really good year.


Feels like love.


But how would I know after the casualties I've left in my own wake.


It's all about the dance.

I'm excited. This clicks out to gigantic if you want a wallpaper, came from a cool review post.

Things to Do on Your Phone When You Can't Sleep

Last night was one of those long can't get comfortable and wake up every two minutes nights that finally got so bad I made myself sit up so I'd stop doing that. I'm an insomnia expert, have tried everything from pills to 'sleep hygiene' to writing to watching TV to cleaning my house at 2 a.m., but sometimes the easiest way through it is to just get lost on the internet. This is a sample of me handling severe insomnia last night.

Dug up celebrity hair shrines, devoted fans do the rest, easy 10-15 minute distractions. I've been doing this for years, amazing how many hair shrines there are out there.

Click to see way more awesome

Withdrawal Symptoms of Sex Addiction
Skidded right off my search on symptoms of a med taper into sexland. O_O *wo* Right off the bat I was falling off the couch over the user who named him/herself "Banjo". I mean, not to mock, I'm sure this is a very real problem for some people, but my curiosity is so piqued over whether some of that guilt has anything to do with kids, pets, bodies... 30 minutes flew right by before I remembered I had a weird headache and was worried I would die from prednisone withdrawal.

Sorry no clicky, comes from restricted site.

And then I remembered I'm getting obsessed all over again with Khan backstory and decided I was too flippant on my the wrath of the search for spirk post a couple of days ago just throwing a wikipedia link out there, so I apologize to everyone who seriously wants to know more and really don't have the kind of time on their hands to do deeper research like I do (evidently @bonenado missed a whole buncha stuff in the movie, too). Here's your link trail through all things Khan/alt Khan in the Memory Alpha and Star Trek Wiki.

Original Khan history dates back to the 1950s genetics experiments in the story line and back to 1967 in our Star Trek viewer history. Please note that in the original (prime) timeline, Kirk's crew are the ones to wake up Khan's entire crew.

The Eugenics Wars are a series of novels that fill in Khan's backstory before he met Kirk, much of which happens during the 1990s. There is also much more to read on the wiki about the Eugenics Wars so you can shortcut the novels. You also find out why and how Khan and his crew wound up in cryostasis.

Arik Soong is a geneticist in the Enterprise series who comes after the Eugenics Wars but before the waking of Khan. We learn more about Augments (genetically enhanced humans) and what happened to the embryos after the wars.

Alt Khan was awakened earlier than prime Khan by Admiral Marcus due to changes in the timeline precipitated by Nero blowing up Vulcan. Marcus knew exactly who Khan was and had him surgically altered to be unrecognizable, had some of his memories wiped, and put him to work as John Harrison. When 'John' regained some of his memories, Marcus forced him to continue working in exchange for the lives of his Augment crew, who were all still frozen. Before the film came out, all of this was explained in comic books.

And NOW we are ready for Star Trek Into Darkness. And you can always go back to the wrath of the search for Spirk for continued distraction into fanvid land.

If you are really super hardcore into the alt ST verse, you can also pick up on the Kronos moon Praxis history being changed, since you see a glimpse of it in STID.

Here you go, Benedict having his hair washed, in case you actually do have a celebrity hair fetish.


I also looked up Terminator Salvation because for some reason @bonenado doesn't remember seeing it, and even though we saw it during one of my super sickie years, I do remember it because I was so ticked off about Christian Bale being John Connor. Now, you've gotta understand, I adore Christian Bale. But not as John Connor. Plus the continuity was so screwed that I was lividly frothing my way through it on a med cocktail that brings out my darker side, so maybe Scott just blocked it all out out of sheer survival, who knows. It's safe to say I'm possibly an even bigger Terminator fan than I am a Star Trek fan, plus I super dig explosion movies and will sometimes frame by frame them just to see all the effects (who of us has NOT yet ever slow advanced Darth Vadar throwing the Emperor over the railing and seeing his skull, raise your hands) (do this for all Darth scenes in all Star Wars movies where special effects are going on). That being said, I desperately need to see Terminator Salvation again to psyche up for Terminator Genisys (click that to see awesome trailer O.M.G.), which starts showing on July 1st, and guess what, Salvation is showing on Wednesday June 17 at 7 p.m. central on AMC. You're welcome.


And you guys thought all I did was blog and babysit and whine about my book not being done yet.

Side note- it's always comforting to find lengthy med forums filled with fear-crazed people going through more suffering that you are, and it turns out I'm not actually dying, but at least I know what to watch for now. The internet is awesome in its shared wisdom.

I'm actually bouncing around my house again, even though the pred is over now. Hoping I get a nap later today, because this is unreal, although I have to admit I'm loving it. Maybe a little too much. Crossing my fingers I'm not jaunting into a euphoria. Dang it.

So yeah, my head is all over the place today. In the middle of watching STID for the 4th time this week, catching all the background stuff. I need to find something silly so I can wrap this up and get off here. I love fans.

brain drain

Yesterday sucked. Nothing terrible, no injured (or dead) neighbors (that was a joke, corpse was discovered in a house up the road couple weeks ago), or emotional calls or texts about job loss or flooding (always on the verge of catastrophe somewhere), not even a bird hitting a window (we are the house of death). Made a beautiful roast in the crock pot, chewy oatmeal cookies for Scott to take to work this week. All the rest was me sitting on my hands and falling into the abyss where the old stabby furniture lurks in the corners waiting for me to stumble.


I expected it. The pressure dropping on the first day after a week of high energy performance/alert levels is always a head grinder for me. I'm not on head meds, so the shifting brain chemicals dripping acid through the ol' coils is familiar. Still, the snap back into place got pretty rough.


Those of you living with OCD and severe depression can imagine the plunge. It starts out with the typical background chatter that makes no sense- I'm ugly, my hair is stupid, I'm never going to get this effin book finished and without warning crashes a person into I may as well be dead because I'm a waste of space and then the panic attack starts because the OCD/bipolar combo (especially if one has ever had previous dissociations during medical or med crises, both of which I'm familiar with) becomes so overwhelming that you fear for your own safety. My coping strategy yesterday was stop trying to do anything (and feeling like I was failing), ENJOY going back to bed, ENJOY finding silly stuff on youtube, ENJOY some good food. I could feel when the chemical crisis started ebbing away and I was able to start functioning again, took about six hours. But it was definitely a crisis. I'm really good at managing depression, but when I'm in the dark and bump into the furniture that starts mocking my existence, I take it seriously just in case a euphoric compulsion popping through my head becomes a live action scene that I stand back and witness like a doll.


One year I kept the patio door locked for a week while Scott was away so I wouldn't go outside in case I flipped off the upper deck onto the jagged river rocks below (I have no desire to die or feel pain, but that doesn't mean those things couldn't happen), and kept the shade drawn so I wouldn't look outside. That year 3 doctors and a psychologist supervised me through a double hormone crash that took a couple of months before my body reset to a new default, and I split apart into several bubble worlds for about a week where I talked to someone that wasn't there, and couldn't tell which bubble was the 'real' one. I got through it without head meds, but only under the strictest supervision. That was the most intense episode I've experienced.


My brain chemical problems are very genetic. I won't go into details, but some of the things my people have dealt with, besides general chronic depression, include OCD, severe post partum, manic/bipolar, personality disorder, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer's. And I make no secret of my Asperger's now, which isn't a mental illness, but you can imagine stirring that pot with brain chemical imbalances. So far my daily stuff is mostly just medically-related depression with some mild PTSD (anxiety is noted in big letters throughout my medical history) and for the most part I'm able to live pretty normally without head meds, but I do have to be vigilant. My psychologist thinks I'm mentally and emotionally pretty healthy and has 'turned me loose', since I've learned how to self monitor and make and follow self care plans.

I got this from the bravest person I ever met.

Part of mental health is being honest. It's very hard to touch base with others for help when we might need it the most. For me, simply telling Scott I'm having one of my bad days is enough, he knows what those are and switches gears with me. When he walked in the door after work last night he asked how my day was, since I'd very much been looking forward to a quiet day after a week of ruckus, and was surprised when I said terrible because readjusting crashed me into the depression real hard, but then I laughed and said "You were stuck at work jealous of me having a day to myself, and it was awful, so thank goodness you were at work." I always feel better when Scott comes home. He's not a mean person, plus I had awesome food waiting for him (a very good priority to keep in mind is rewarding one's personal caretaker), and the crisis was abating by then, so I didn't have to say much.


Today is much better. I don't feel so scattered, I'm not being hammered with inner negative chaos, the quiet feels wonderful now, and I slept good. Doesn't mean it couldn't blow apart again, but it's a good start.


This is my first ever full on admission of all the stuff I'm dealing with in my head on a daily basis. I've been mocked in the past, plus I know real people who trigger easily, so I tend not to bring this stuff up very much. I really don't care what other people think of me (thank you, Asperger's), but sometimes it's important to share. I have a tiny little flashlight in a big, dark world, and I'm moving forward every chance I get. I refuse to stay stuck in a rut. Yesterday's post was me dealing with my head. When I posted and walked away, I had every intention of never coming back to this blog. Yeah, right, it's called "blog addiction". It's the healthiest addiction I've ever had (I've been through numerous very real addictions), and the important thing is I'm still here.

The Dark Side of a really bad egg

Bunny day was a blast yesterday.


The Dark Side of the Egg, perhaps.

We're still running into 'Bunny was here' evidence.

 

I don't even wanna know how a creepy swimming pool got involved. Easter Bunny hot tub party, maybe. Might hafta set some traps. #lifeinthewoods

You look fabulous, dahlink.

She felt big like mommy, had to go to 'work' when she walked in after church today.

I've been living a double life this week. True to my April nature, I went through a series of very sudden blood pressure 'break outs' and had to touch base a couple times to make sure that's all it was, given my ridiculously complex history. I'm one of those people who can smell CT scans to the point of nausea, and this last time I caught a flash like a ghost light, which was cool. Hypersensitive is a word nurses and techs have used around me for years. Once a doctor called me a canary in a coalmine, noticing chemical or other change in my environment long before other people do. It no longer surprises me that spring storm season really screws with me. I can't even imagine adapting to changing water pressure in a wet suit. Anyway, it's been a week where I've been able to luxuriate in long swaths of deep thinking in between intense writing surges. Yeah, I know, what's up with these shoes?

Despite the the truth of my sadness finally Lexxploding through my aspie head all week, millions of dots are suddenly connecting and flooding my brain with the most fabulous light show ever. I cannot stop writing. I can't help wondering if the weird BP break outs on top of a lingering manic euphoria episode are having anything to do with this. In the end, the only logical conclusion the last doctor could reach was perhaps this boils down to a pain management problem, and I've been commanded to treat for pain every single day whether I feel good or not. Since a euphoric episode slops the kind of brain chemicals around that tend to camouflage pain, I had stopped taking my pain med at all even though I was obviously dealing with a headache going defcon from a severe fibro flare up my neck and left shoulder (all that writing, I'm sure). I have a long history of low dose med addictions (which I was called out on by the very same friend I've been angsting over all week), pill phobias from crazy med reactions, and noncompliance, so this command wasn't made lightly. Imagine my amusement finding this gem. One of the reasons I stopped smoking years ago was because I was hardcore doing 3 packs a day, and it took a year and a desperate deal with God to quit. During that episode I went tone deaf in one ear, which I still find devastating after years of vocal training and never going off key. And that is all I'll say here about my string of serious addictions.


You have to watch this show to get the joke.

Extremely strong caution on this next vid, the very end is either a fan expressing anger or a joke (or an angry joke) after the season cliffhanger, and in case you have never seen it, ~huge~ ~spoilers~, it was a blank. He was showing Sherlock how easy and fun it is to fake one's death. Since I myself found it extremely disturbing the first time I watched it (and I hadn't seen the show), please don't watch this video if you have severe depression or self harm triggers. Some of my newer friends are still probably not aware I did this in a virtual way myself three years ago, suddenly ripping my web presence out from the fabric of ethereal spacetime and disappearing, deleting huge chunks of Lexx internet history as I went. I'm sure a few fans still hate me for being that despicable and then having the audacity to show back up. I find this video amusing in so many ways because of my internet history with fandoms. My new friends who know the real me now would probably be surprised by how quickly I pull the dark side out into the open everywhere I go. Or perhaps not. I need to give you guys more credit. It's taken me a long time to realize I glow like neon when I think I'm being cleverly covert.


Am I done dredging now? Getting close, at least on this part, which has been a wildly exhilarating release after 8 years. 
:edit: 8-13-15

I cannot believe no one has ever called me out on lying to you guys. Every once in awhile I'll write something completely erroneous or false and easily fact checked, and I kept waiting for someone to pop up and say Wait... If you haven't seen Sherlock yet, fine, I'll just leave that like it is. 'easy and fun'... In case you think I'm an idiot, no, I'm layering the same way they did on the roof. What is reality? What really happened? You've no idea the amount of time I've spent digging around the webs over it. Unless you guys thought I had the inside goods on Moriarty or something, I mean, this post was in the top five for months. Watch how words are constructed. The first time I watched it I hadn't seen the show and I found it disturbing. Then I compared it to me destroying myself. I don't want anyone to think I tried to commit suicide. Kinda wondering if that's what readers thought because I worded this so poorly. I'm also wondering if that's why this post held such a top spot for so long. I apologize if anyone misconstrued my meaning from my obnoxiously bad taste.

world class webmasters- a Jurassic expedition

The glory days of fan sites and forums is slowly ebbing into an unnoticeable extinction as all new tech and software interfacing change the way fans find info now. IMDB and Wikipedia, bless them, grew into the bibles of info gathering, making it easier over time for deeper wikis and advanced searches to channel hunters and gatherers into camps, and before long, TV show creators learned the ways of the web force and started constructing their own wikis, blogs, and forums, which have become a staple of fandom, sending onelist and bulletin board forums the way of the dodo. The latest trash-glam fan support, thanks to Nerdist creating an all new band of marauders, is all about the competition of recapping- who can get theirs out the fastest, who can get noticed, who can outshine? Nerdist has become the Graham Norton/Oprah/Rachael Ray of fandom. Now it's all about syncing devices and live twitter interaction.

In the meantime, I'm still working on an old dinosaur fansite.

Well, the truly old dinosaurs have vanished. Remember geocities? "In 2009, Yahoo! succeeded in destroying the most amount of history in the shortest amount of time, certainly on purpose, in known memory. Millions of files, user accounts, all gone." Yeah, talk about an asteroid wiping out all life as we know it. But thanks to retro becoming uber fashionable with the nerd geekery upper crust, it's actually back. A lot of Lexx fans had stuff in the old geocities archives. I have no idea if salvage will be the next cool internet thing (y'all know I paid big bucks to help keep Xanga alive, right?), but CHECK THIS OUT.

That's right, Cloaked's original links to the Lexx game, comic, legos... Some actual content is still jaggedly missing, but the original pages are being revived, much like Prince bringing Xev out of stasis. (Does this mean I'll eventually be able to reaccess old youtube videos I deleted? There used to be a way to get those back, but then youtube changed a root command because too many users were resurrecting other people's embarrassing flashes of exhibitionism. But I'm going off track.)

I go off into these jaunts on days where I get lost in working on minor code fix-its, transfers, general maintenance, stuff most bloggers nowadays don't even know is a thing. Myspace was the ultimate code playground (like the evil side of facebook) until 'Tom' stomped it so flat smashing bugs that he had to rebuild it into the $6mil facsimile from Alpha Centauri. I was a huge fan of Lycos gears until they shut down, and as the years go by, internet life seems to be about trudging from one blog host to the next looking for an ecosystem that isn't already doomed. I facepalm every time I see posts on buzzfeed, omg, if that isn't the rock bottom of 'journalistic' digging and sharing, what is?

So, lately I'm learning how to figure out the percentage of proxy visits coming through translators. I don't think this is being done on purpose, like Codingfreak goes on about, and I know from my own laptop that my exact locations vary from browser to browser. One of my own proxies puts me in Florida, another in Monett, still another in New Jersey, depending on what device I'm using and even the blog I'm working on. Throw in the service my device is using, the browser using this or that service, the building I'm in, on and on. Some days I'm out in the wheat fields of Kansas when I accidentally ping one of my stat trackers. But back to the point, the Mountain View percentage thing kind of matching the outside the U.S. percentage thing makes sense now.

The weather app on my phone places me in four different geolocations just moving from room to room in my house because I'm in an oddball school-voting-city line-county line-whatever piles of districts. My IP might never change, but facebook has logged me in from several states. I've actually watched this happen live on my facebook login activity with SMS backup codes going between my laptop and phone, shut the log history, start over, it's incredible. Try it, you can watch yourself pop in and out of existence.

I know that the cities, states/regions, and countries I see in my stats aren't necessarily spot on. The info I get is generalized. Yes, I can use particular IP geolocators and actually see the real areas where most of my visitors originate, and I've even used maps to pinpoint a few neighborhoods, but odds are that actual locations are much more solid coming from campuses, hospitals, and military bases. I say that because one of my browsers insists I am sitting in the middle of a street about ten miles from my house, between a clinic and a restaurant. I know many of you probably never do all your logging in from open fields and industrial warehouses, but that's where the maps say some of you are. Once in awhile I get an actual house if someone is paying for all their bundled services locally and the host proxy service is turned off.

Stat counters are not an exact science. Well, at least not for those of us on the outside of those cool super computer nerd scenes in TV shows where all it takes is 3 seconds to find someone somewhere on the earth. I have found my blogs and youtubes linked to some really oddball sites in other countries, but usually the only way I find them is because of pingbacks, which are actually very annoying, so I turn them off. I've seen the difference between having bot filters and spam filters. If you want to run numbers up really fast, just turn your spam filter off, but then it won't be long until your site picks up a pile of trojans, worms, and all those little bugs that make up internet VD. I think I mentioned somewhere a few years ago that I once crashed my hard drive hacking a song off a super cool abandoned scifi site that was infested with code germs. Wound up paying $300 for a rescue that could have been avoided with a 99cent purchase from a legitimate sharing site. @bonenado will never let me live that down.

Why in heaven's name is all this even coming up? Because it felt so good this week to gab a little bit of code fix stuff with another genuine webmaster. Site building is a brain sport, a sort of joie de vivre that sometimes out rivals coffee and bacon in the mornings, and I'm seriously not kidding.

Becoming a webmaster for one's own enjoyment is a hobby. I use webmaster loosely, I'm obviously not building my fansites from absolutely scratch with a webkit, although that actually is how I got started years ago. I tend to be lazy (don't laugh) and choose to use the inbuilt preset parameters of blogs, which are making archiving and filing easier all the time, although I sometimes turn even that into a mountainous chore because simplicity needs a touch more elegance. (I'm sorry, creating a WordPress 'menu' is laborious and artistically dull, par exemple, not to mention stymied in its usage parameters.)

I'm a triceratops in a world of dying brontos, stegs, raptors, and T-rexes. Metaphorically. Top 10 Biggest Errors in Jurassic Park Current fandom is all about trending on twitter. Lexx will never trend. The actors from Lexx will never trend. But I intend to leave solid evidence that Lexx was once here. Resurrecting sites is great, but broken links and missing images makes piecing fossils together ridiculously difficult for fans picking through the last vestiges of an ancient era that ended yesterday. The idea that the internet will contain all human knowledge is a joke. The idea that the internet is used to spy on people is hilarious. The idea that TV show recaps and trending is the bulk of what we have to show now for fandom loyalty burns my hide.

Fandoms have become a fleeting thing. Riding the live interaction wave of hardcore investment rivalries is exhilarating, yes, but it's not a real commitment. I call the continual reconditioning of audience jerking experience addiction. The same emotional and relationship stories are told over and over in different characters, settings, art forms. The same feelings are being evoked over and over in the audiences, no matter what is being watched.

As long as this formula holds and money keeps rolling around, the stories and characters that fall by the wayside will continue to be perishable. So many series have gone out of print, and I manage to get a few because someone in another country illegally recorded them and found out they could sell them to a warehouse to be remarketed (hopefully not illegally), and even though the condition is much poorer than originally created, it's better than never seeing it again at all. Fans screaming over cancellations is easily satiated with a continual barrage of new shows that themselves will fall by the wayside in the near future. Entertainment has become a bonanza on building roller coaster experiences, and it must be extremely profitable. Evidently, the more the fans are jerked around, the more merchandise they'll buy as quickly as possible before it disappears.

Lexx fans are more hard core than that. I honestly couldn't tell you whether or not this is fan-made or an actual original trailer. I caught Lexx from the very beginning on Showtime, including the featurettes before the first airing. When Lexx disappeared it really was ~gone~ until fans started their own salvage. It's available for purchase again, but it's been edited and some original content is gone now, from what I understand. The acquisitions page probably indicates why Lexx is so difficult to expand on, while other franchises right and left go through reboots galore. Because of this, Lexx remains unique and untainted, a true original.