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Showing posts from August, 2017

Weekly Watch: Draw With Jazza

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A mildly-nuts Aussie (is there any other kind?) artist and animator. This playlist is full of "art challenges", like painting upside down, painting with makeup, and seeing what he can do with just one Copic marker or half a dozen of what are literally the cheapest colored pencils he can find. Particularly entertaining is the two part mini-LP of Passpartout. He also has tutorials with, like, actual art advice mixed into the wiseass commentary.

Weekly Album: Iggy Pop - Lust For Life

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Okay, like the fourth total stranger has now suggested that ye ballroom instructor has a crush on me. Y'all aren't crazy; this has also crossed my mind. He did kick this off with pretty classic crush behavior: A sudden barrage of attention out of nowhere, that he kept up for a solid two weeks or so, until he got clear acknowledgement that I'd noticed. My initial read of him was that he is exactly as gay as the stereotype of male dancers would suggest, but this all was actually ambiguous enough to make me reconsider that. The thing is, this is still ambiguous . The reason that kind of behavior comes about with crushes is that wanting to bone someone makes the idea of fucking up your first conversation with them carry a lot of emotional weight, so you get super nervous about it. The sudden burst of attention happens because it takes an extra push to get over the inhibitory effect of What if I screw it up?  and make yourself start. The internal wrestling and abrupt resolutio
Ye ballroom dance instructor has inadvertently made me re-think an awful lot of things. I suppose this is karma coming back to bite me. I have the occasional, baffling week where all the random shit that falls out of my mouth somehow results in me being the Epiphany Fairy for everyone I meet. I imagine my turn has been a long time coming. Believe it or not, this is the first time I've ever had to figure out what to do when someone I've resolved not to bother with my weird people-dowsing has turned around and decided  they  needed to be friends with  me . On top of that, while I correctly predicted that the inside of his head was an interesting place, I completely whiffed almost everything else I guessed. I am seldom that wrong about that many things, and usually discovering the truth is a much more disappointing process. Inasmuch as nobody I have decided to Not Bother has ever turned around and decided to try Bothering me back, I have no procedure for this. This near-total

Weekly Album: Janelle Monáe - The Electric Lady

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Weekly Watch: Michi Mavros

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Michi Mavros is a vlogger who posts a series of videos about what it's like to live with Borderline Personality Disorder. BPD is highly stigmatized even among people who generally get mental illness; because it's a personality disorder and therefore pervasive, and one of the symptoms is seeing the world in black and white terms, patients with BPD can take efforts to teach them how to change their behavior as the therapist telling them that they're a horrible unsalvageable person, and some will lash out accordingly. Ms. Mavros has an uncommon amount of insight into her own condition, and seems very motivated to better her own life. I'm sure the videos are made on her good days, but she explains the bad days succinctly and in a way that people who don't suffer from BPD can generally get.
Life continues. Apparently. Thank you all. I did go get myself some minimal amount of groceries, but most of what I remembered to buy yesterday was rat-oriented -- honey for compounding their amoxicillin, yogurt for tummy rumbles, and chocolate chips, because that's how you decongest critters too small for Sudafed. Flathead is more or less fine. He gets picked up twice a day for lap cuddles, so I can hand-feed him honey-flavored goo, Benadryl, fruity yogurt, and chocolate, in no particular order. If not for the WHRNK part, I think he'd be enjoying himself. He might be enjoying himself anyway. I am vaguely worried that he will develop Munchausen's. I have recently been alerted to the fact that people have been trying to ping me via Google Hangouts. I haven't seen any of it. Investigation reveals that Google forcibly switched everyone from Gchat to Hangouts a couple of months ago, and I haven't seen anything since. I hate the chat window loitering around my inbox,

Weekly Album: Janelle Monáe - The ArchAndroid

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Update

Rat antibiotics (ratty-biotics?) ordered. That's the thing that was worrying me most. Rats die of respiratory illness. I mean, they have limited lifespans to begin with, but with pets the aim is to keep them alive long enough for them to die of inoperable tumors and senility instead. You know, just like your human relatives. The people who sold me illegal Amoxi-Drops last time are gone, probably because they were selling illegal Amoxi-Drops, so this time they got a bottle of Fish Mox. No one in their right mind is going to bring a tank of fish into the vet's office to get them diagnosed with fin rot, so the vendors just sell you capsules of amoxicillin powder and conspicuously don't tell you it's the same stuff you use on your own kids. They kind of figure either you know what you're doing, or you know where to get replacement fish. I can work Google and do basic algebra, so I just compound it with honey or something and un-snot my rats without supervision. [The

State of the Blogger

I apologize for the lack of content here lately. Here's why. Flathead is making a WHRNK noise when he breathes. I've managed to figure out how to get rat antibiotics without the $100 vet visit, but they're still $25/bottle, which I do not have. I gave him Benadryl and a snootful of caffeine (gunpowder tea grains). His brain will be in an odd, fizzy state for the next 4-6 hours, but he's making less alarming sounds now. I am starving. Literally, albeit slowly. I can usually scramble enough peanut butter and cookies for the week, but sometimes I can't quite make it, and don't eat for a day or so. If you ever wondered how ascetics and anorexics keep running on less than 800 calories a day, it's sheer stupid stubbornness. You sleep a lot, and drink a lot of water. This week I get to do a lot of walking (5 miles or so to work/studio, because Dorchester), because it was food or T pass. The rats have oatmeal for a while yet, after which I guess I'll start

Weekly Album: Janelle Monáe - Metropolis Suite I: The Chase

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I am pretty good at figuring out where other people's pressable buttons are. It's a shitty, shitty superpower you win as a consolation prize when you grow up dependent on someone whose mood swings have no clear correlation with anything happening out here in the wider shared reality. Because their experience of the world is so different, there's no good way to predict what their reactions will be, so you just learn to throw logic out the window and watch for early warning signs that you should make yourself scarce. [My mother, for instance, used to get into these moods where everything made her angry, and she took it out on the rest of the household. In hindsight, she was probably suffering from terrible anxiety/overload, which I completely understand. I don't blame her for needing a quiet space in which to recover. I do  blame her for deciding this quiet space needed to be the kitchen . Where all the food and ice water was kept. In an open-plan house. They had a perf

Weekly Watch: Boundary Break

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Ever wonder what lurked just off-screen in your video games? Wonder no more! Boundary Break uses hacking and special software to take control of the camera and show you what lies beyond.