badger cannon

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I'm sick, waaaaaah

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I just did a draft recording of the Torchwood thing Kali and I wrote last night (when I do pod fic, I do a first recording to test different readings, my speed and to find problem words and phrases -- since seven years of speech therapy hasn't erased all my problems and my tendency to drawl is not always appropriate).

It's _really_ powerful aloud. It's also a much harder fic to read than I thought it would be, and it works better when I pitch my voice down (which I did instinctively for like a third of it, but I'm realizing need to do for all of it, clearly).

Hrrrr.

This is sorta gonna be a pain in the ass, but I also want to knock it out of the park.

But hey, off to the movies! More of this later, time for a different story for a few hours. (man, I've never so needed a bucket of popcorn in my life).

Yesterday I woke up to the radio saying "Paul McCartney's appearance in Halifax has caused quite a stir!" and imagined him spontaneously popping in to existence downtown, abusing his secret teleportation powers to get a haligonian donair, perhaps. (Ick, why, Paul McCartney, why?) But no, he just flew there in an airplane, on a pre-planned trip, to play a concert. I was quite charmed to see Halifax's mayor and the NS premier put on goofy wigs and pose for an Abbey Road shot to join all the fuss. Hee hee.

I just worked 3 10-hour shifts in a row for the first time in er, a while. Normally I do this every two weeks, but basically the whole first half of 2009 has been a confusing patchwork of vacation juggling in the pharmacy. (Mostly my fault of course! Although my opposite number did go on a three week cruise.) Ooh, ooh, I'm out of practice! I'm very sore just from the amount of standing this involves. I was going to say I feel like I ran a marathon, but I have run a half-marathon before and this is NOTHING like that, so I feel like I just.. uh.. ran a 5-k? And not too fast? This is getting less interesting by the word. Well anyway. I'm back to my normal work schedule until, hmm, labour day I'm taking one day off, and then nothing else until OVFF in October. And I'm realizing again that dude, my normal work schedule is really awesome. I work 7 days out of 14 and I get a 4-day weekend every second week. I'm such a slacker. But I'm a slacker who gets paid well enough to fly off to random locations on really quite a lot of those weekends. Hooray! Motivation to work full-time: lacking. Not that I could physically hack working full-time anyway, not in a profession where you stand all day.

I figured out this morning that I'm going to have flown enough this year to get MVP status with Alaska Air for next year. Besides the dubious benefit of getting to board early with the first class people (oh boy, an extra 15 minutes crammed in to an airline seat!) (Actually, at some airports, that really is better than waiting at the gate, not naming any names, LOGAN.) this means I get all kinds of extra bonus miles on flights next year, which means MORE CONS! I am so madly in love with their mileage plan. My credit card gets me miles with them, and we put all the big household expenses on it, with the result that I've gotten, hmm, 7 free flights in the last two years. I gave a bunch away because travelling is more fun with company, but like, my being at Duckon at all was totally "Brought to you by the Alaska Mileage Plan!"

I read Starship & Haiku, which I'd won in the Interfilk auction at Concertino, during my commute this week. It was nothing at all like what I expected based on hearing Kathy Mar's song of the same name. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was quite a grisly post-apocalyptic story, mixed with a grim little piece of hope. It's the same kind of mix you find in a lot of Octavia Butler's work. I was surprised to find such an excellent novel from an author I'd never heard of before - Somtow Sucharitkul - but google tells me most of his books were published as S.P. Somtow, which sounds more familiar. (He is the director of the Bangkok opera! He sounds like quite the character.) Time for a trip to Pulp Fiction to look for more! Because the 300 books in the to-read pile stacked precariously by my bedside aren't enough, obviously. The song somehow manages to be absolutely faithful to the book's spirit and still have the same message I originally got from it, despite the book being so vastly different from what I had in mind from the song.

Now I am working on book 5 of the Merchant Princes, Charles Stross' crazy economic-science-fantasy-soap-opera series, mixed with slowly creeping through Consciousness Explained, which seems to me to call for a few days of digesting assertions between chapters.

Joe is off playing paintball this morning. I somewhat guiltily hope that he's not very good at it, because then his outfit will be way more fun to photograph when he gets home. Or do they just issue you a burlap sack or something? Oh well, I already have enough incriminating photos for this week: yesterday was Blackmore Memorial Mustache Day at his office. Theobald Blackmore was some character in one of the WWII games his company makes, who, I hope I'm not spoiling anything for you here, dies in the game. He had a goofy mustache. Now once a year everyone in the office grows a scraggly beard and then shaves it off, leaving only a mustache, for BMMD. (And then shaves that off too, because the dress code doesn't actually call for 1970s Pornstaches on everyone.) Or the girls (not that there are a lot in the office - welcome to the games industry!) glue on fake moustaches. Oh hah, the company already posted their pictures! Seph is the one crouching down who looks like the Dread Pirate Roberts. Swoon! That's my handsome, handsome man. Ooh, I totally have an appropriate icon for this.

An awful lot of people are making the point of telling me to write what I want to write. Thank you ;-) And really, that's what's going to happen one way or another. The poll isn't going to produce decisions, just more data, as I think about how I want to use my journal here (or on Dreamwidth, or whatever). I'm finding myself less interested in writing about my life generally, and yet I miss the interactions with people. (Though I've been in a pretty hermitish space.)

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So my beloved tablet is in rather ill health. (And yeah, the timing sucks. On the up side, I started this month with one computer, and it's looking more and more like I'm going to end it with three. On the down side... Ow! My wallet! Gods I hate spending money... The pleasant side effect of this general attitude is that I have the money. And even temporary and partial lack of access to my computer stuff is really annoying. Yes, all my data was backed up. It's still annoying.)

I replaced the blown fuse on the mainboard. (And yeeps! The darn thing was less than a mm on a side. Fine soldering tip and dissecting scope FTW - and Chris, my mentor, also wins - and I think I'm going to get myself a Weller workstation once I get over the stickershock from this month. Which might, admittedly, take a while.) The screen backlight briefly lit, and then failed again. This time the fuse did not blow. I replaced the hinge cable assembly, put everything back together, and before I started it up again there were sparks near where the cable assembly connects to the mainboard. Briefly. And again, the computer boots up just fine, but no backlight.

I suppose it could be the inverter card. I will check that before I make the next steps. But really, I'm thinking mainboard.

Which, BTW, will cost around $500 to replace. (Well, a bit less off of ebay. Still.) (And why are they routing the backlight power through the mainboard? Does this strike anyone else as kind of a bad idea? Or maybe I'm misunderstanding part of this, since after all this isn't open hardware so I don't have real schematics, though the maintenance manuals are better than with pretty much anyone else.)

Of course, there's no reason I can't use the video out to hook it up to a monitor and have a fairly energy efficient little machine - at least none I can see, so I'm trying that this afternoon. (And perhaps I'll be more aggressive about server maintenance if I own the server in question. After the harddrive died on the house server a while ago, I haven't been moved to finish setting it up properly - works as a box, but DNS doesn't point there, and I never reinstalled unison...) And while I'm at that, I'm finally getting around to grabbing some shelves so that both our printers have real homes, and the server can be reached comfortably.

As it happens, I can pick up another tablet for around $650. It won't have as nice a screen as my current one, though. OTOH, the screen on my current one is fine, excepting that the backlight isn't getting any power.

So. Here's the question:

Is there any reason I can't just swap my old screen into the new box? I can't see any (and I've posted on the lenovo forums - but it's been 18 hours! and no one's answered!) but then this is the first time I've done this level of mucking around in laptop hardware.

This is also a fine time for someone to tell me about $SomeOtherTablet that I should really get instead. Keep in mind, though, that the resolution on my current tablet is a lot of what my it My Precious, and I'm not seeing any other tablets with that kind of screen quality. (And why is it that most consumers don't care about resolution on laptops, even though apparently they do on their television - think about how much closer you generally sit to your laptops. No, really. It matter that much. The technology has been there for years, and yet apparently the demand is not there...)

I've got one dreamwidth invite code. First request gets it.

http://www.helenkellersimulator.com/

time to go.
(scared)
(as winnie the pooh would say: bizy backson)

Unlike after Day 4, things do look better in the morning after Day 5, but possibly only because there's no new info to absorb, I can finally just sit with this.

Coming at you, hopefully tonight: an audio version of the story Kali and I posted last night amd a post Golden Age fic from me.

If you have reaction stuff re: Torchwood you particularly want me to see, you need to point me to it, as I'm feeling overwhelmed by everyone's emotions and no longer feel like I can click on every link, at least not for a few days.

Yes, I'll be at the DWNY thing on Sunday. I want to see other people react in real time. I want to put myself through at least some parts of it again and lord, I want to do it with a proper drink in my hand.

I've not gotten dressed yet, because I'm afraid I'm going to go into my closet, with all my dress shirts lined up in a neat little row and my coat and my suit all wedged in there (it's NYC, we have no closet space and everything gets wedged together) and burst into tears.

ALso people, wow, I've never seen anything like this whole crazy experience. Anyone know what the overnight numbers were for days 4 and 5?

Meanwhile, today I have things like work, and the farmer's market and tending to plants and going to see Public Enemies with Patty.

I decided to Google for I feel weird tonight and was quite charmed to see that the first result was some long thread of people discussing anxiety who had obviously found the page through such a query, all expressing their shock at discovering that other people felt this way they thought was so weird or impossible to quantify, and that others are talking about it like they talk about it, and that others feel the same strange existential anxiety, depersonalization and derealization that they do.

I think a lot about things, especially anxiety, where it seems like people don't really talk about it, but when they do they find immense common ground or a whole new world to explore or perhaps some peace previously unknown. I want to be somebody who talks about it. For the longest time, this meant I thought it would be wonderful to start a project to catalog the human subjective experience as a sort of manual so that people could look up the most obtuse of feelings and see that, yep, they're normal. I used the people around me in that way growing up, but of course the set of questions I had wasn't a perfect match for the set of questions they all could answer.

It's the sort of thing that really resonates with my long-standing desire to be a priest and my on-again-off-again desire to be a shrink (which has been mostly off for a very long time.) I really, really want to be the sort of person who talks about these things. To read the books of case studies of anxiety that I have, or Rollo May's excellent The Meaning of Anxiety often inspires me in a way that few other things do. There's something glorious and real about the idea that other people have these thoughts that so many of us are afraid to express, if we can even figure out how to express them in the first place. Insidious feelings like derealization and depersonalization can be so hard to make sense of, especially when they're long-standing or early-onset. The constant worries of madness or imminent death are nothing to laugh at, but a great many of those who can talk about them at all do so through very heavy humor (i.e. Achewood.)

There's more to say, but then again there always will be. I'm just particularly happy right now with: I want to be somebody who talks about these things. It's important, it's a calling. It's sometimes spiritual, philosophical, self-analytical (indeed, sometimes my desire to talk about these things is motivated by a desire to make it external and true that they are normal; expressing my experience as just part of life's rich pageant is comforting for me, even if it is me who is providing the comfort by doing so) and so much more. It's a core part of human experience for a great many humans, and it's something to be celebrated, as it is a common experience that is defined in many ways by rising above reality and existence, and I think interacting on that plane makes us all so much more real to each other and perhaps even more so to our selves.

We need a replacement for ephermata, who leaves by September first for his swanky new MSR job. It's a lovely room and quite a bargain. If you want a cheap awesome place in Oakland in the near future, drop me a line! And pass this freely to any friend who might be looking. (If it's a friend, have them write to Oakland.House@gmail.com but also drop me a line through some channel.)

All good people. We are 1/3 lesbians, 1/3 Jews, 1/6 Sarah Silverman's ex-boyfriend, and maybe 1/6 you. Or alternately, 1/3 budding filmmakers, 1/6 KPFA producer, 1/6 retired electrician who can fix anything, 1/6 dude who paces around and mumbles things like "tashreef laaiye" and "punctured holomorphic curve" and often returns from trips with Manhattan bagels or Santa Ana kumquats to share.

( $458 One person to share house with 5 other adults available September 1st )

Today I got a great haircut in Palo Alto (I now have about a third as much hair as I've got in that icon photo!), I got a tasty dinner and saw a Bollywood movie in Fremont with jholomorphic, and my grandmother died in Phoenix sometime around the intermission of the movie. That is all.

"The weight of the world is love"

One city in Brazil shows the way.

hey! my name is Kayla, a recent birls recruit... this group seems pretty sweet :)
i suppose i should do one of those introductory things...

kayla, 17, massachusetts, floating around in that undefinable area that isn't really butch but certainly isn't femme either.

anyways im posting this mostly because ty (queerly_fucked, i believe) said i should come to the boston meetup, and i think im going to, and i dont want to be TOTALLY random. :)

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From a a recent 9th circuit decision (specifically, the dissent):

"(I must, however, acknowledge that the majority is quite correct in intuiting that, unsurprisingly, there is no Klingon word for "deference." See generally Marc Okrand, THE KLINGON DICTIONARY (Star Trek 1992))."