Unsolicited Advice

Cold Case makes me cry. Every goddamn time. In case it's not on TV where you are, YouTube has a bunch of episodes, which you can easily find by searching. You'll be able to actually buy it somewhere between next century and never. By the time this gets released on home video, not only will you be watching it on microchips plugged directly into your brain, but you'll be able to buy head-chips in shatter-proof plastic cases with Hello Kitty on the front. The main problem is the music rights. See, Cold Case , as the name suggests, is a cop series focused on a (fictional) division of the Philadelphia police department that specializes in solving murders, and occasionally other things, where the trail has long since faded. In the cases I've seen, the actual crime happened anywhere from a few years before the "present", all the way back to one set in the beginning of the Great Depression  The interviewees tell their stories to the investigators in flashback form...

Dear British writers: "To catch [someone] up" and "to catch up with [someone]" have distinctly different meanings in American English. If someone else has gone on ahead, and you are going to meet them sometime later, that's "I'll catch up with you." It indicates that you will be leaving later but traveling faster, in order to close the distance between you. It can also be used in a metaphorical sense between two people who intend to meet casually at some other point later, and in this case it means "when we see each other, I'll want you to tell me what's been going on in your life since we met last". If you have gone on ahead, and someone else is going to meet you sometime later, that's "I'll catch you up." In this case, the phrase has nothing to do with traveling per se,  but rather indicates that when the other party catches up with you , you will then catch them up  by quickly explaining what has happene...

This week is a series of posts about depression, anxiety, family issues, and other brainweasels, for the people who have come on over from CaptainAwkward.com's various open threads. Hello, welcome, and feel free to comment here. I do have other, unofficial drugs, besides the Xanax. Caffeine, for one. I started taking the stuff regularly when I was a teenager. My high school started classes at 7:20am, and my brain does not boot up until half past ten at the earliest; if I intended to show up, ever, I was going to need some chemical help. I still had a pretty appalling attendance record, to the point where I'm pretty sure they were supposed to flunk me for it, but someone evidently noticed that I turned in stellar performances when I did turn up and had the sense to lose the paperwork. I take in 100-200mg a day, most if not all in the morning. I quit once for a solid six months, on the suggestion of a doctor who thought it might help the anxiety disorder. Exactly the opposite...

This week is a series of posts about depression, anxiety, family issues, and other brainweasels, for the people who have come on over from CaptainAwkward.com's various open threads. Hello, welcome, and feel free to comment here. On the whole I consider myself fortunate that all of the very few drugs I've ever found that directly alleviate the depression, the anxiety, or both, are things I can only take episodically. They all knock me flat on my ass. If I take any of them, I have to block out 6-12 hours where I'm not required to do anything more complex than open water bottles and make myself peanut butter sandwiches. Leaving the house is definitely contraindicated. It's possible to go through life constantly, say, just a little bit drunk-ish -- but the problem with that is that you're always having to get a little bit more  drunkish than you were the day before in order to cope, and that can snowball in a big hurry. Alcohol never did anything much for me, opiates ...

This week is a series of posts about depression, anxiety, family issues, and other brainweasels, for the people who have come on over from CaptainAwkward.com's various open threads. Hello, welcome, and feel free to comment here. I am also prone to depressive fugues. I refuse all treatment for these. I drop into them after sustained periods of my stress levels being way too high, and every attempt I've ever made to "do something about the depression" -- as opposed to doing something about the thing that made my stress levels skyrocket in the first place -- has resulted in me just digging a deeper hole to hide in. Note that I don't refuse help for basic deficiencies that happen to be symptoms of the depression. I snork down NyQuil like it's going out of style when I have a horrible cold, and I have no qualms about treating the symptoms of misery either, even if it's similarly ineffective at getting rid of the root cause. If depression makes me stop sleep...

This week is a series of posts about depression, anxiety, family issues, and other brainweasels, for the people who have come on over from CaptainAwkward.com's various open threads. Hello, welcome, and feel free to comment here. I have an anxiety disorder. My medical records say "anxiety disorder, NOS". NOS is for Not Otherwise Specified, and translated from doctor-speak, that means, "You obviously have a thing, but you don't fit precisely into any of the insurance company's boxes, so we've pasted together parts of two or three different checklists and then also written some things in the margins." My anxiety disorder presents weirdly sometimes. If you've read more than two or three of these blog entries, you probably could have guessed that. The thinky parts of my brain work even when nothing else does; so I tend to go in and talk to people looking like a paranoid insomniac basket case, but sounding like I've just escaped my classes at...

This week is a series of posts about depression, anxiety, family issues, and other brainweasels, for the people who have come on over from CaptainAwkward.com's various open threads. Hello, welcome, and feel free to comment here. There is an  open thread for anxiety sufferers over at Captain Awkward's place right now. The Captain and her moderators are generally very cool kitties about this stuff; if you want to talk to someone about it, or just lurk and try to figure out how other people work, I recommend you click on over and have a look. Somewhere down in the 500-some odd commens, a few people start talking about CBT. In context, this is "cognitive behavioral therapy" -- I have been on the internets long enough to know that there are other things that acronym means, which are probably not used much by reputable therapists -- and it's one of the first-line treatments for anxiety disorders. Cognitive behavioral therapy, at its root, is really about detangling...

From time to time, I run into interesting people that I mostly fail to track down. Thus, I turn to you, the internet. There is an English character actor named David Collings who keeps turning up in things. He plays Silver in Sapphire & Steel, has had several supporting roles in Doctor Who  (Poul in Robots of Death  and Mawdryn in Mawdryn Undead , and one other I can't recall at the moment), and did the usual flurry of appearances on all those murder mysteries I watch, mostly in the '80s and '90s, that mean I've started to recognize his face. The most prominent thing he seems to have done on film was take the role of Bob Cratchit in the 1970 version of Scrooge. He's done a lot of Shakespeare on stage, including some that were filmed, but seems to do mostly radio these days. (He's done " The Dorabella Variation ". " A Question of Proof " and " Money With Menaces " for BBC Radio. I provide them here strictly because if there i...

I've been procrastinating like a mad thing, so I've been playing with this . It's an online guitar tuner, sort of. You make a noise into the computer, and it attempts to tell you what pitch it is. I have a couple of friends who do this, mostly as a party trick, but both of them have had extensive training in both making music and thinking about it. I'm lousy at it. I tried to teach myself guitar once, and it was an unmitigated disaster in every respect -- I have weird synaesthesias, and one of them is that higher pitches should be closer to the top of my head, which is exactly backwards for guitars -- except for the tuning part. I cannot match waveforms that are unalike. That looks rather stupid now that I type it, but I don't know any better way to characterize it. I can tune guitars to other guitars or to violins and pianos, and hell probably to banjos or harps if I tried, because they're all vibrating strings. The sine waves given off by piezoelectric tun...

Sapphire & Steel is a very strange series. Mounted by ITV in 1979 as their attempt to compete with Doctor Who , it was theoretically a science-fiction adventure show. Really, it turned out more of a supernatural thriller. It was made on an even more desperately tiny budget than Doctor Who , which meant that very nearly the entire thing was studio-bound, lit for stage and shot on video, and littered with practical effects. The resulting claustrophobia works for it, rather than against it, and turns it into something quite different. You really have to see these things to believe them. Fortunately, someone else also thought of that, and has edited the serials together into omnibus editions, and whacked them up on YouTube. They have no formal titles, and hadn't even when they first aired; they've since been dubbed Assignment 1 through Assignment 6. Assignment 1 Assignment 2 Assignment 3 Assignment 4 Assignment 5 Assignment 6 You can begin at the beginning, as is tr...

I check the referral logs on this thing from time to time. I've apparently gotten some hits from  http://fuckyeahintellectualgiftedness.tumblr.com  -- although I don't know what entry they linked from, or what it was linked to, because sometimes the log is a frustrating jobsworth. In honor of this, and because Moggie's birthday is coming up, I went and dug up stuff on David McCallum, who is One Of Us if I ever spotted one. (I haven't gotten her to watch much if any NCIS , but Moggie has a cracking great crush on Illya Kuryakin. She named a laptop Illyana once, inspired by Illya's bit in the long version of the season one intro. For the younger crowd, no, I don't know why two L's in that. Because in the 1960s Russia might as well have been on a different planet. It's spelled "Илья" in Cyrillic. They got his patronym wrong, too.) McCallum does a great many of the amusingly strange things I spot in a lot of gifted-and-talented kids. I...

One of my sidekick's many amazing super powers is the ability to be ignorant of virtually every culturally-significant piece of media produced in the past hundred years. I have no idea how. They lived in England until she was two, then moved back to the US, and no, they aren't weirdly religious -- her father sailed a desk in the Navy for a quarter century and her mother used to ride herd on middle schoolers. She just somehow managed to grow up in a bubble with a television that would only tune in PBS. I, and occasionally other people, have made it our mission to show her all of these random things, from whence all the weird quotes and references come. Answer to obvious question: Moggie also has the magical ability to pay some fucking attention to the world around her. She figured out approximately what a flux capacitor was about a decade before we realized she had not actually seen Back To The Future, and told her to apply her butt to the couch and watch it or else . She made...

One of the kindly people who has donated to my Not Being Homeless Fund has requested more articles on reading body language. As Moggie is currently crushing hard on young Peter Davison, and he is an excellent example of one of the many things people tend to call "shyness", I thought I'd give it a go. (Moggie has a thing for intelligent blonds. You should have seen what happened when I showed her what Ducky used to do on TV . Another piece of pop culture that is rather dear to my heart.) Davison was pretty brutally shy on camera when he was young, especially when caught unawares. He was somewhat less so when he wasn't the only one being interviewed, as when he was booked with then-wife Sandra Dickinson , or with previous Doctors Job Pertwee and Patrick Troughton, both of whom were apparently quite gracious and friendly to their successors. He's still fairly quiet, but engaged and not trying to hide in his chair. Stick him in a seat  by himself , and give him t...

I am of course not going to tell you to try all the drugs and booze you can get your hands on in college. I am obliged by the tradition of covering my ass to mention that you can hurt yourself with them if you're not careful, that you can get into a great deal of legal trouble over them, and that at least in most parts of the US, having a drug charge on your record automatically renders you ineligible for some kinds of financial aid, and might get you kicked out of school. The above has never in the entire course of history actually prevented any sufficiently-determined human being from getting wasted. Running for a moment with the fiction that you are all squeaky clean little boys and girls who would never think of touching the locoweed or the demon rum, I am going to pretend that you have a "friend" who is thinking of getting into these sorts of things, and I am therefore going to give you some advice to pass on to them. First off: If you're going to do drugs, d...

Pot noodle has the nutritional value of cardboard, and the sodium content of those salt licks you used to give your gerbil. Man cannot live on coffee and Taco Bell alone. If you're going to go off to college on your own, you are going to have to devise some way of feeding yourself that doesn't result in a trip to the student health center for scurvy. There are a number of different ways you can handle this, but the one I recommend is learning to cook. You don't necessarily have to learn how to cook well , you just have to learn how to follow a recipe without courting disaster. Food is a kind of currency, in the dorms. If you're even a halfway-decent cook, people will spontaneously come up to you and offer to pay for all the ingredients if you just stand there and show them how to convert a miscellaneous pile of groceries into a meal. One can only eat so much microwave popcorn before one starts craving things like casseroles. And if that doesn't convince you, you...