The followup to “Feeding the Machine” is being drafted, but largely thanks to the hayfever still kicking my ass it’s being a serious uphill slog to write. Whatever muse I have that normally tells me what best logical order to put things on is apparently on vacation. Rest assured I’m busy tinkering with the free ice cream machine.
Sorry for the lack of post; Stingray has been wrapped up in a hurricane of appointments and meetings, and I just Did Not Feel Well today.
Service of free ice cream will resume shortly.
The promised beast really IS a beast- maybe the longest thing I’ve written for here- and the first draft is sitting in my drafts folder waiting for input from my collaborator and for my brain to cool off.
No post for you today, I need beer and video games. Triple sized post soon. If it can’t go up tomorrow I’ll at least be in a better position to produce filler.
I would make a graph relating my time and energy levels as relating to my window of opportunity to write, with perhaps a second figure representing my priorities, but it would take too much time.
The groove I find my mind sinking into tonight has been created with the juxtaposition of this post by Ambulance Driver regarding his interaction with some sort of non-human taxa of English-speakers and the comments on this post about celebrity hatebag Mel Gibson’s latest caught-on-tape explosion at his ex-girlfriend should be enraging to me but instead are just filling me with dull depression. If you don’t wish to listen, and I sympathize with that desire because it’s nothing but ugly, the relevant portion of his series of remarks, aside from his earlier well-publicized proclamation that his girlfriend’s manner of dress would cause a pack of a very bad racial slurs to rape her, is the threat to take a bat to the side of her head and plant her in a rose garden.
What’s depressing about the comments is that a large number of them, perhaps even a majority, are about what a bitch slut skank gold-digging whore the girlfriend clearly is, and how she’s manipulated poor Mel into destroying himself by provoking him into the frothing rage caught on tape, and she doesn’t sound too upset, and who tapes a conversation anyway? They seem to be from, as you can imagine, men, who if pressed will admit that threatening to kill your girlfriend is inexcusable, but are extremely concerned to make sure everyone understands what a bitch this woman is and how she’s manipulating him into doing these inexcusable things in order to take his money and his child away.
I don’t know, maybe she is a gold-digger. Maybe she’s even a slut. Maybe she does plan to make sure he never sees his child again. Frankly after that performance, if it were my kid and I’d had the poor judgment to let Mel Gibson knock me up, I sure as hell would want to keep Mr. Bat-and-Garden you-deserve-rape away from a little girl. Maybe she did record that conversation in hopes of fucking him over forever.
How is that even at all relevant? If I record someone breaking into my house, do we have to hold an evaluation of my character and motivations before we can decide whether the breaker-and-enterer is just misunderstood?
Do these men regard frothing, out of control rage as an acceptable way to relate to someone if they feel betrayed by that person?
Do they think violent, over-the-top misogyny is a forgivable thing in a father of a daughter, who will herself someday grow up to be one of those bitches? Or just realistic?
Do they find threatening to maim and kill forgivable because they do it themselves when they are angry?
Do they think the bitch ever “earned” the beating, the rape- or the killing?
I am depressed because I suspect the answer, even if unarticulated, is yes. In which case my next question is why anyone thinks it surprising that people killed by their partners don’t flee or defend themselves until far too late- because apparently anything short of putting a bullet in him while he’s standing over you with an upraised axe, including withdrawing yourself and your children and withholding contact, is unjustifiable provocation.
Real Life rolled a natural twenty and I need to go do something mindless, with a drink. Material tomorrow.
Didn’t sleep well, or long. Whapping the bushes to see what flew out didn’t work.
No post for you! Not even a link!
So this afternoon I’m plugging along merrily doing computery things, I get up to get more iced tea, and as I return to my desk, I touch my mouse.
*KAZAP*
Static discharge. Not too uncommon, it’s very dry around here and between the dogs’ shaggy coats and my own long hair I do tend to collect static. This one was enough to make the computer beep in protest, which is also not too terribly uncommon.
What was less common was that the zap was, apparently, enough to kill my mouse dead. Disconnecting and reconnecting the USB connection didn’t revive it. Neither did rebooting. As it turns out, Stingray’s mouse (same model) works with my computer, and my mouse does not work connected to Stingray’s computer.
I killed the fucking thing with a touch.
I am not amused, given it’s my new Razer and for a frigging eighty dollar mouse it’s awfully goddamn fragile. It’s not as though mine is the only household in America with dry weather; computer mice have been around for just about long enough to be expected to stand up to this kind of thing.
This is not new for me; I have a talent for destroying things in ways that simply should not be possible. I don’t fuck with things I don’t know how to use and I don’t do stupid “didn’t change the oil for three years” crap, things just break around me for no reason that can be determined.
Doesn’t mean I’m not still pretty damn ticked about it. As unique abilities go, it’s not exactly the most productive one out there.
In the meantime, I demand to be addressed as Thor, Wielder of Lightning.
You know you’re living in the post-DST doldrums when nearly everything new you discover in a day falls either under the category of “stupid crap” or “unbelievably stupid crap”.
I think the problem is me.
- You know you’ve got writer’s block when you find yourself trawling through the comments of blogs you don’t even read that often, looking for a bit of archetypical dumbassery to refute.
- Springtime in New Mexico: transferring roughly 40% of the state’s valuable topsoil from outdoors to indoors.
- Having a female dog in heat really drives home why we use the term “bitch” or “bitchy” the way we do. From mood swings to clinginess to irritability to exaggerated pathos to bloody-mindedness, it’s like living with a menopausal Barbara Streisand.
- Gandhi: not necessarily such an awesome dude. An oldie but a goodie.
- Want to know how you can make your online gaming experience even more like a job? Become an officer in a guild/alliance/whatever. Bonus points for doing so in a guild that raids or PvPs. I have new sympathy for anyone in management of any kind, as well as those in Human Resources.
- Our latest TV thing, thanks to the #gunblogger_conspiracy folks, is Spartacus: Blood And Sand. It’s very firmly in the “so bad it’s good” category. It’s a great big bowl of sex and violence smothered in cheese sauce. I don’t even like the protagonist. I don’t like anybody except maybe the gladiator instructor, whom we last saw being kicked down a well. The entire purpose of the show’s existence seems to be getting the Starz network to pay for softcore porn so long as they match the sex parts with equal amounts of violent parts. I can’t look away.
Sorry I don’t have much clever or interesting or just splenetic to say. Last week the dogs broke out of the fence, which they accomplished by reaching under the fence at a rabbit scrape and physically yanking the planks off. This was not the first time, but it will be the last, which means that until we fix the fence up right, they cannot be outside unless supervised. “Right” has yet to be defined, since we’re trying to figure out how to make this specific point of exit more difficult without a major construction project or constant maintenance problem.
This is a problem because the dogs love being outside. Kodos would be entirely happy LIVING outside if it weren’t that the best vantage points were here in the office and his occasional desire for affection. I do not love being outside when it’s winter and the yard is a mix of mud, slush, and solid sheets of ice, but they do. Today, it is snowing, and they both LOVE snow and thus want to be outside all day. There is a period of roughly twenty minutes to half an hour after a spell outside (with me sourly watching them eat snow and hump each other’s heads) in which they sleep, after which they revert to sighing heavily, desultorily orbiting from the office to the kitchen to the living room to the dining room and back through the office, and generally leaping up and reminding me how awesome it would be to be outside right now every time I move. Actually, strike that, it’s been ten minutes since their last trip outside, and Kodos took five minutes to meditate on his bed before returning to ownersynchronous orbit.
Hanging around with cold wet feet (my boots are disintegrating, and while proper new ones are on the way, no doubt they will not arrive until the final storm of the year has passed) while snow accumulates in my hair is not an inspiring experience for me. It might have been just toe-curlingly awesome for Robert Frost, but I have concluded I am a warm-weather and indoor sort of writer.
In conclusion that is why there is no meaningful content today.
The frame on my glasses snapped this afternoon. I can more or less see to more or less type, but I can’t really read what I’m typing unless I lean in like Mr. Magoo. Unfortunately, after years of nigh-invincible titanium frames, I forgot the “nigh” part and neglected to leave a back-up pair in any easily found location.
Jury-rigged repairs are in progress and hopefully I can get a new pair quickly. Until then if you’re hearing from either of us it probably won’t be me.
ETA: frames epoxied and glasses mostly functional. We’ll see if the smudge on the lens of the repaired side is a real problem or no. Unfortunately, if we could lay hands on tix, we would have gone that route- I’m sure there’s tons of it up here, just all ordered through the lab for such projects. I’ll get my eyes re-examined on Monday and see if I’m eligible for Lasik, and in the meantime use TD’s link to order some backups.
Things you expect to be easily searchable information and yet turn out to be impossible to access via search engine: roadrunner body language. We have a friendly neighborhood roadrunner that turns up in our front yard from time to time. Like most predatory birds he’s insouciantly confident, and he likes to come right up to the glass to have a good look in at us before he goes on his way. This time Kodos was hanging out watching the world go by on the other side of it, and the bird gave him a crest-ruffle and a big, exaggerated tail dip. I’m betting it’s an avian middle finger roughly equivalent to the mockingbird tail-waggle, but I don’t actually know for sure.
Because fucking everybody has named their company after roadrunners. Search for “roadrunner (adjective) display” and you get endless pages of results for things that have absolutely nothing to do with roadrunners. Same with just about any variant.
Off to find the birder websites and search through there…
Accomplished this weekend:
IPA: transferred to secondary fermenter and dry-hopped.
Lawn: de-fenced* and mowed.
Cottonwood: some of it chainsawed into more manageable chunks.
Dog: bathed and brushed.
Raspberries: surrounded by recycled fence.
Garden: slightly reconstructed for better watering efficiency.
Blog: Knew we forgot something.
*The lawn was surrounded by rabbit fencing to keep the dogs from tearing it up until Kang proved that she can easily clear it from a standing start if she feels like it. We’ll see if it survives the both of them.
So, this afternoon, feeling peckish, I also apparently felt ambitious. Knowing that there was a leftover chicken breast and also some leftover mushrooms, I thought to myself that I’m A Big Girl Now and I’d make myself a fast stir-fry for lunch.
I did not intend to turn this into a CN post, because I thought that this would be an extremely simple, straightforward, and therefore boring endeavor. Yeah. I think this constituted a taunting of the kitchen gods. So since I wasn’t taking the mental notes I do when I intend to blog something and it wouldn’t be that interesting anyway in painstaking detail, here’s a set of Lessons We Learned Today.
1. Stir-fry recipes that tell you to add garlic before you add meat are full of lies.
2. If the recipe wants you to let the pan get as hot as it’s going to before cooking, it will tell you this. IMMEDIATELY start adding stuff after you flick the burner. Don’t take this opportunity to wander around debating seasonings.
3. If you burn garlic, it really doesn’t matter what else you added to the pan. Carbonized garlic is the flavor of the day. It is neither appealing nor healthful.
Also, I burned my hand on the pan and damn near broke my butt slipping on a puddle of water next to the doggie dish. Awesome.
First I was betrayed by a major organ that jumped out of the bushes and beat me into uselessness, then there was a surprise swarm of breeding ants in the office, and then there was a raid.
Yeah. I actually have something to say for once, it’s just that now I don’t have *time*. Hopefully tomorrow I will, providing all my bits obey.
I had hoped to leave y’all with at least one more semi-meaty chunk before I lit out of town again, but I ran up against a combination of an unexpectedly difficult research phase and a strong antibiotic making it tough for me to focus, so it’s only about a third done. Hopefully I should have it finished tomorrow before I leave.
In the meantime, check out the latest webcomic to entertain me: SPQR Blues. It’s a historical comic featuring Romans, Titus’s “interactions” with Judea, and Chekhov’s Volcano. It’s done by someone obviously very big on the classics and features historically appropriate humor and a surprisingly complex storyline. Hit “first” and do what I’ve been doing since I got back- archive bingeing.
I’m back. Technically. I missed a ton of sleep while gone- word to the wise, antihistamines and science fiction short story collections don’t mix- and generally spent the entire time either stressing or running from one place to another, so even though I got a solid nine hours last night, I still feel ready for a nap. Downtime is most definitely required.
IF there is no breach of mediation agreement, the Legal Hell may finally be over. We ate it on a pretty large scale, but the alternative was essentially to give most of the estate to various lawyers for only a chance at minor further gain for us. Opponent’s victory was not total.
This made me laugh today: World Leaders’ Facebook Group
I don’t know whether my problem is whatever’s puking pollen right now, or a mild cold- I’m betting on the latter- but it’s got me hacking my lungs up and feeling well enough not to have an excuse to stay in bed for a day or two, but crummy enough that at the moment I haven’t got a scrap of creativity or initiative available.
Hopefully I’ll get over it quickly.
From SmartDogs:
I posted somewhere else that I propose February be named “my muse is a lazy, ignorant whore” month.
And I feel like mine is boffing everyone except me…
Amen, sister.