Unsolicited Advice

Let leftover season begin! The critters have been enjoying such traditional rat holiday recipes as, "stuffing mix crumbs drizzled with last of eggnog," "wilted vegetable salad," "bowl of turkey parts (misc)," and the coveted dessert item, "food-paper from chocolate cupcake." They are filled with scavenger-ly joy. And sleep. Mainly sleep. They spend most of the day snoozing in an amorphous wad of rat fur, with the occasional tail poking out. But when they're awake, they're thrilled. I have been faring less well. I haven't posted much because I've spent the past couple of months cycling between being in a phlegmy coma and being in a state I can only describe as "annoyingly high". I caught some kind of respiratory something in early October, and every time I start to get over it, I catch another thing. Or relapse, I'm not sure. I keep wobbling between able to medicate myself back to stupid but otherwise normal, and ha...

Just so's y'all know how my night is going: I finally found someone who could repair my Wintel machine for a price within my budget ("Would you accept payment in baked goods?"), so Natasha is back in my custody, and charges once again. Since she's been gone, I've been working alternately on an Ubuntu 12 laptop (Maleficent, pictured at left) and a Macbook on loan from Circlet (Nekomata, pictured at right). Maleficent is fine for web browsing and she does technically run the software I use for work -- I switched entirely to using GIMP, Inkscape, Scribus, Neo/Open Office, and Chrome/Chromium specifically so that everything would work the same across all machines, in fact -- but she is elderly and slow, and does not like my graphics tablet. Nekomata works dandy but is a Mac, therefore not my favorite, and also not technically mine, so I daren't touch most of the stuff on the HDD. Now that I have Natasha back, I have the unenviable task of migrating all ...

I don't know if you've ever run into it, but there's a thing on YouTube called the "accent tag". It's a list of vocabulary words and questions that you're supposed to answer on camera in whatever your native accent is, basically to show people on other parts of the planet how you talk. Most of them are pretty ordinary, but occasionally you get a fantastic mashup. This young lady here popped up when I was searching for "transatlantic accent". She has not actually got one -- it's a specific regionless accent, popular among actors and some of the American upper classes prior to and during WWII -- but she dubbed hers this, as she picked it up accompanying her father on a lot of ocean crossings as a kid. The word list is really just a collection of shibboleths, and it's very heavily biased towards American regional accents. "Wash" turns into "warsh" in Missouri; "caramel", "New Orleans", "may...

Something which is often overlooked when studying media history is the history of individual pieces -- you can find a history of "silent film" or "Charlie Chaplin's silent films" or "Charlie Chaplin's last silent film", but rarely if ever do you find an investigation of one particular copy of that work. Most media historians I've met don't even know how to do this sort of archaeological excavation of a image. Some A/V engineers I've met have, but they don't; they're more concerned with observing the various tell-tale aberrations and eliminating them from the signal chain. The closest thing I know of would probably be a forensics position of some kind, dedicated to identifying sources and forgery. Watching the picture -- not the contents of the picture, necessarily, but the raw unprocessed image -- can tell you a lot. In 1914, a man named Winsor McCay made a short animated film called "Gertie the Dinosaur". It was u...

I spent six whole hours of my life in Lowell this past weekend. Unless you have some sort of fetish for former industrial mill towns, I don't recommend you ever do this. It's a collection of old, rusted-out hulks being slowly overtaken by a collection of slightly-less-old hulks that haven't quite completely rusted out yet, broken up by a brief section of town that is being restored by a bunch of hipsters to a condition where it appears to be in the process of rusting out, but isn't. I understand there are people who enjoy this, in the same strictly-intellectual way I understand that there are people who enjoy living in the Sonoran desert. I am very much a city mouse, so mainly what it looks like to me is civilization giving up in its senescence, settling into a grayed-out state of minimal survival while it waits to eventually die. The signs on the Commuter Rail fascinate me. They don't quite match the newer signs on the T. The typeface is subtly different than the...

Dear Facebook: I do not think you are good at this computering thing. I have a droidphone. Your app is on it. This is a native Android app whose purpose in life is to send and receive fairly small amounts of ASCII or Unicode text, plus sometimes some tiny-to-medium sized pictures. I also have an app called SCUMMVM. This is a homebrew project. It purpose in life is to run games. The way it does this is by pretending to be an x86 architecture CPU (it isn't; it's a Qualcomm chip) running MS-DOS (it doesn't; Android has its own operating system) taking input from a PS/2 keyboard (no external keyboard; you can bring up the on-screen buttons if you need them) and a serial mouse (no mouse; it captures motion from the touchscreen and maps it onto a phantom 'touchpad'), and sending output via a set of DOS IRQs (that don't exist) to a SoundBlaster-compatible MIDI instruments table and FM sound chip (which is translated in software and passed to the speaker) and a 64...

Ace Attorney Investigations 2: Prosecutor's Path has eaten my brains. No, you didn't miss an English-language release of Gyakuten Kenji 2 -- Capcom inexplicably decided not to do one. A fantranslation group put out a patch in Xdelta and BEAT formats a few months ago, and I finally got around to trying it. I'm not giving you any of the files, on the grounds that if you can spell at least 50% of the relevant search terms correctly, it'll come up in about 20 milliseconds on Google. It works flawlessly on an early revision Japanese DS Lite with an R4 flashcard running Wood 1.27. (Not that I would know anything about any of these questionable third-party products, nosireebob. I don't have any family history of clever media conversion , and I certainly did not just convince someone to buy a DS emulator for her droidphone so she could play the original Ace Attorney games that Capcom inexplicably only released for iOS. And I would never dream of spending several of my ...

I really hate it when people tell me that 'mindfulness' is the cure for depression. I am mindful of the details of life all the goddamn time. If that worked, you'd think I would have noticed this by now. It can help with anxiety , yes. If you tend to wake up from nightmares about the Apocalypse like I do, it is much easier to convince yourself that it is rather unlikely that the world has ended and they forgot to CC: you on the memo when you realize that someone has, for reasons unclear, left a gargantuan piece of construction equipment idling loudly right outside your window. Somerville public works crews would definitely take the end of the world as a sign that they needed a smoke break, and turn that fucker off. No matter what state I'm in, life goes on. But seriously, 'mindfulness' does not make you feel better. It just shuffles the terrible feelings around. Or at least that's all it does for me. When I get upset, I go out and walk. I used to do Tuft...

Someone on the Straight Dope Message Boards started another one of those 'what will those whippersnappers be confused with next?' threads. There's a huge age range on that board; I think a couple of the regular posters are up in their 90s, and there are more than a few 13-14 year olds around. Every once in a while, the old-timers go round robin and trade tales of things that were obsolete before the new kids were even born. I recognize a lot of the stuff the oldsters are talking about. I was born in 1981, which is right on the cusp between Generation X and the Millennials, and I grew up in a very nerd household, so I had early experience with a lot of classic gizmos that other people might have missed. I typically geek about a generation older than I actually am -- occasionally amusing, like the time I answered someone's question about kinescopy on the abovementioned message board, and was promptly mistaken for a middle-aged Corporation STelE. I'm just old enoug...

When I run out of sensible things to amuse myself with on the internet, I read up on the most embarrassing moments of other people's lives. It would be convenient if the Wikimedia people just set up one of those list pages under the heading "Debacles", but they don't, so I have to go link hopping in order to find hilari-awful things. Like the story of the 2010 Commonwealth Games , wherein one of their crowning achievements in the area of Things No One Will Ever Live Down was when a ranking member of the organizing committee decided -- correctly -- that the least mortifying way to respond to a comment a South African swimmer made about the crowds in Delhi was to publicly admit that they were having a problem keeping feral monkeys out of the pool area. (The article mentions in passing that there are feral monkeys all over Delhi. No kidding. Apparently the local method of getting rid of a large number of small loud thieving monkeys is to procure a single much larger l...

Jazmin has recently experienced the HEALING POWER OF RAT. She came home after a particularly shitty couple of days, so I told her to sit the fuck down on the sofa, handed her two of the three rats, and pulled up the original Hitch Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy (1981) , because everything is on YouTube if you look long enough. The critters have grown up interesting. Binky is in fact still tilty. She can straighten her head -- she does it to eat -- but some combination of torticollis and maybe just that ear works better means that she usually cants to the left. This bothers her not at all. The spiral worsens as she stretches; if she's really keenly into smelling something, she'll cantilever herself out over the edge of the cage with a progressively greater and greater twist, until at her full extension, she's making frantic sniffing noises with her face nearly upside down. The bulk of the rat, of course, is right-side up and sat squarely on the roof of her house. Binky ...

Gymnastics is the summer equivalent to figure skating: very pretty, very difficult, very sexist, and full of eating disorders. If these are your main criteria for making something a sport, I have no idea why they don't run Olympic ballet, but nobody asked me, and I have a feeling that logic is not the strong suit of the IOC. It is, in fact, even more overtly sexist than figure skating in many respects, and that's something when your main competition is a sport that regulates the color of the shoes you're wearing under costume spats anyway. The men and ladies of figure skating at least run the same events (singles skates for each gender, pairs skates, ice dancing, and formerly the actual figures, the set of which was the same for both genders), albeit the requirements are somewhat different between the sexes, whereas in gymnastics the only events both genders have in common are floor exercise and vault. Men work on parallel bars, high bar, pommel horse, and rings; women wo...

I am tired, everybody. Very tired. Being awake makes me tired. Being asleep makes me tired. Just tired. As I apparently do not have any appropriate topics of conversation right now, here is a photo of the underside of a rat who has decided to sleep on top of her cage today. I don't close their cage door anymore so they can do that, and feel all rebellious and clever without having to eat holes in anything I value. She is in need of a bath, but otherwise in good shape, that shape mostly being round and squashy:

When I was a kid, I used to think that sitting by the bedside of someone who was sick or suffering was something people only did in movies. Like in The Princess Bride , where the frame story is a grandfather reading an adventure novel to his grandson, who is home sick from school. Or maybe something that people used to do in Good Middle Class Homes, where Mother's "only" job was to keep the house and tend to the kids, but which had slowly died out under the pressures of modern life. Certainly, no one did it for me. I learned early on that it wasn't much good to ask my parents for comfort. I remember my mother running herself ragged when I had the chicken pox, but it stands out to me, because I can't remember her ever doing that before or since. The main result of pestering either parent for help was that they'd stand around being crabby, especially if I tried it in the middle of the night. When I was ten or so, I decided that I could just hold my own hair ba...

I see from Wikipedia that Malaysia Airlines 370 is still considered missing. I also see from Wikipedia that a thousand conspiracy theories have already sprung up to account for that. Apparently some people do not deal well with loose ends, or just aren't aware that there are quite a number of aircraft that have crashed and were never found. I realize that it is de regueur  to blame terrorists for everything up to and including the late night pizza joint getting your toppings wrong, but there are several previous losses that fit the same profile as MH370 -- that is, an aircraft that flies silently on in an unexpected direction long after all radio contact with the humans on board have been lost, and then stops pinging after a length of time consistent with running out of fuel and nosing into terrain. (Well, in this case, ocean.) All the ones I know of have been decompression incidents. If the cabin loses pressure in an explosive fashion, generally the oxygen masks drop down from t...

About 3pm. I am in a foul mood. I have been listening to music and entertaining myself by trying to put together some hooping choreography. Then all at once the bottom drops out, and it dawns on me that this is a pointless exercise, as nobody is ever going to see it. I fetch up in the kitchen with the computer, grousing at someone unfortunate enough to be on Facebook Messenger. I have no idea if the sudden plunge is a harbinger of migraine, a trigger for migraine, or merely co-morbid with the migraines. An acute case of emo is part of the prodrome of colds and various gastrointestinal misery for me, to the point where I can tell something is up before my nose even starts running. On the other hand, stress triggers depressive episodes, which in turn trigger headaches, which in turn put me under more stress, because I can't cope with anything when my head hurts. YMMV. It takes the person I am grousing at pointing out that mood changes are connected with his migraines for me to...

I am very good at getting into other people's heads. Not infallible, mind. But good enough to know that I should never try it on anyone I don't genuinely like and want to listen to, because if it works, I'm going to wind up hearing a lot whether I want to or not. It's a combination of intelligence, skill, constant practice, and hypervigilance. It's probably fairly obvious that I came by most of it from being surrounded by dysfunctional people: Two of the things I can spot most reliably are people who are lonely and depressed and trying not to let anyone else know that, and impending train wrecks that I want to stay far the fuck away from. If you live in a house of lunatics and can't get out, you learn this stuff as a matter of self-defense. I can usually work out if it's welcome or not. It throws some people off-balance; others just plain don't like it, or me, and are not interested in telling me a damn thing. I try to be hyper-alert for signs that som...

I am completely incapable of finding something interesting without also wanting to know exactly how it works. Not just physical objects like toys, or mechanical processes like figure skating and hooping, but also abstract things like linguistic structures and social scripts. I'm willing to do the kind of obsessive research you need to make this work, so the fact that this is weird normally doesn't bother me much. The most troublesome part is that I keep unintentionally convincing people that I'm the local expert in something I've only been cramming into my head for a few weeks, which can get awkward. At least by that point, I can direct them to other people who know a lot more than I do. I also do it in personal relationships, which has the unfortunate side effect of confusing and annoying other humans. I gather they feel that anyone who wants to scrutinize interaction in that much detail is determined to find fault with whatever's going on. I think it's just ...