Unsolicited Advice

So, I have a Kindle. (I actually have several Kindles, but sidetracking myself on the second sentence would be a new record, so we're going to leave that for now.) I get a lot of ebooks from the public library, both because I got tired of hauling 20 lbs of dead tree back and forth and because sometimes I need to feed my brain something new at 3am when nothing's open. Amazon keeps a closer eye on me than the NSA and Santa Claus combined, so naturally whenever I open the Kindle Library, they do their best to sell me something I want. A few weeks ago, the New Releases lineup showed me a book called Red Side Story , by Jasper Fforde. Though Jasper Fforde is probably better known for the Thursday Next books, Red Side Story is the second book in his Chromatacia series, the first of which, Shades of Grey: The Road to High Saffron , I read and loved quite a long time ago. It's been fifteen years since that one came out, and I had frankly given up in despair. Red Side Story is als...

It has come to my attention that May is supposed to be Ehlers-Danlos Awareness Month. I've neglected to post anything, on account of I've been busy coping with the consequences of Ehlers-Danlos. May is a busy month for me. I perform, I do technical work for live theater, and I admin at a couple of places that deal with both of those things. This May, I ended up working for 21 consecutive days without a break. I didn't exactly mean to, but a combination of a coworker having to go out of town for a family emergency and several people who scheduled their spring recitals in September and then failed to do any planning until April slowly whittled away my days off until I had Things To Do every goddamn day for three solid weeks. Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome is officially a genetic disorder of collagen formation. The direct effect is that all of the connective tissue in my body is basically made of Silly Putty. Collagen keeps all of your various bones and muscles strung together, so it ...

Hello from the floor, where I once again find myself. Lying face-down on the floor as an adult is an experience. I can trace all of the steps I went through to get here, and all of them made perfect sense at the time. But then I end curled up like a pillbug on my bedroom carpet next to the rat cage, flat on my shins and the top of my head, and I have the nagging feeling I'm somehow doing something wrong. The rats are vaguely curious, but that's mostly because they're convinced I only get out of bed to feed and/or love them. They're not really wrong, but they don't understand the idea of an economy, and gloss over a lot of the intermediate steps. I assumed I was the only one who's been slowly melting into a puddle over the past month or so, but I know a few other people with the one-two Ehlers-Danlos/hay fever punch who have been similarly reduced to primordial sludge, so iunno. Objectively, my seasonal allergies are more annoying than disabling, but anything tha...

I recently cadged a Google Daydream VR rig off of someone on Freecycle. The Daydream is a mass-manufactured headset that Google produced for people who thought that building their own out of cardboard was too ratchet for words. It doesn't really fit me in the same way that swim goggles never really fit me, but I stuck some safety pins in the head strap and you're not meant to move around too much while using it anyway, so it more or less works. The Daydream can be best described as the world's okayest implementation of VR. It's main selling point is its rock-bottom cost, which was achieved by using your extant smartphone for both the display and the head tracking, the two most expensive modules in fancier rigs by Oculus or Vive. It's not a bad idea. We all carry around tiny high-resolution pocket supercomputers that can track our position well enough to catch imaginary Pokémon in the middle of a Wal-Mart parking lot, why not use it for this? The picture is not as po...

It is the weekend before Halloween, and a lot of people who don't normally wear makeup will be slathering on a lot of it. While I'm sure you've all put a lot of effort into planning how you get the stuff on, most of you have only a very vague idea how to get it off again. Let me help. In general, the easiest way to get makeup off is the same way you got it on. All makeup is, is pigment in a skin-safe solvent. If you know how you stuck the stuff onto your face, you know how to get it back off. Powders like loose pigment (Maybelline Color Tattoo pots, loose powder) or pressed cakes (most dry eyeshadows, compacts of setting powder/bronzer/highlighter) stick to your skin because of the natural lipids on the surface. You get them off the same way you get the natural oil off your face, ideally a gentle soap or face wash, and a lot of water. Thin liquids like liquid foundations are generally based on distilled water. If it smears a lot when you sweat, this is your culprit. Soap/...

I've discovered some very interesting things about Indian tailoring. Why am I tinkering with Indian tailoring? Well, because I ordered a bunch of Indian kurtas, and they all needed to be let out at the bust.  Why did I order a bunch of Indian kurtas? Because that's what you wear when you take kathak, one of the seven(-ish) forms of classical Indian dance.  Why am I in a classical Indian dance class? Honestly, at this point, your guess is as good as mine. My old flamenco teacher is semi-retired and I don't see her too often anymore, but she held an open class at a little local dance festival a couple of months ago, so I dropped in to visit. The next class over was one of the Indian things with the ankle bells, which turned out to be kathak . You all know me and shiny, noisy objects, so I stayed for that. The teacher is apparently just getting settled in here in Boston, so I gave her a list of places I knew of that rented out studios and sent her a few links for local arts gr...

I have found out why the MSPCA was told these guys were bitey. It's mostly Yogi, and he's not biting. He's investigating . Rats use their mouths when they play, just like puppies. When they bite out of fear or anger, it's a very quick strike, very bloody, and you don't get your finger back in a hurry. When they bite during play, they don't chomp very hard -- just hard enough that the other rat feels it and knows he's gettin' got.  Yogi has been systematically testing my hand to see how hard he can toof me while he plays. I offer him my hand, he looks at me a second, then he slowly and deliberately puts his teeth on my knuckle and bites down a little bit. I go 'eep!' and jerk my hand away, then slowly give it back. And the next time he tries it, he's a little bit more gentle.  This is totally normal for a rat, but doesn't usually go over well with little kids. They feel teeth and think they've been bitten for real, then start shrieking...

Yogi, left, is a black self dumbo, and Koda, right, is a black Berkshire top-ear. They're about seven months old. These two came already named from the MSPCA. Usually rats in a group together get theme names, because humans like patterns; Google says these two are named after some beagles on Instagram . That's boring, so I combed through the WWWJDIC for some ateji/jinmeiyou kanji that I liked. I've decided the names are actually spelled 容疑 (yōgi, "looks suspicious") and 幸多 (kōda, "many blessings").  I have matched the correct name to the correct rat, trust me. Yogi is the fourth dumbo rat I've had who believes he is in charge of the entire universe. He is also the fourth dumbo rat I've had, period. I am starting to think it's genetic. Something about the shape of that flat little skull just doesn't leave any room for humility. The volunteer at Nevins said they were surrendered because they were "nippy", but further investigatio...

I've found a new podcast to binge. It's called "Computer Game Evolution", written, edited, produced and distributed as a one-man show by someone who's opted to go by "Tim". It's a very witty, very thorough exploration of how video games got to be what they are, starting in the pre-history of computers when all your tedious calculations were done by hand, and sometimes by post. His intro trailer mentions that he defended a doctoral thesis having something to do with video games, so my guess is that this is the director's cut audiobook of his dissertation, now with 400% of the snark his advisor made him edit out. Tim declines to say where he's from. His accent is distinctly East Slavic, although I admit I don't know enough about the languages in that family to distinguish between them from just their traces in his English. He also mentions that as much as he'd love to take donations for the podcast, he can't, as they don't work ...

I am saddened to report that Casper left us to rejoin his brother late on Wednesday night. It was very quick. One moment he was fine; the next, there was a sudden flurry of noise from his cage, as his legs failed him and he fell off a shelf. I sleep through normal rat sounds, but this was unusual. I bolted awake and went to see what was wrong. Cas was never a lap rat. I wasn't even allowed to pet him, when he first came home. Mickie wanted to live in the armpit of my shirt forever, but Casper permitted me only to politely boople his snoot through the cage bars. Actually picking him up was reserved only for dire emergencies, like the fire alarm. This was a touch awkward when it came to play time, since I needed a way to get them from the cage onto the bed where their rat-safe blanket and boxes were set out. But if he didn't want to be picked up, he didn't want to be picked up, and I wasn't going to argue with him too much. Instead I just offered them use of the box they ...

The last load of Amazon boxes contained a microphone. It is a Shure SM48 handheld vocal mic, with dynamic cardioid pickup. This is a piece of professional audio equipment. Not a pricey one -- they're about $40 -- but not the sort of thing you'd buy for fucking around with your friends on Discord. It hooks up with balanced stereo cables, and you have to run it through an amp to do anything with the signal, or an audio interface box if you want to get the sound into a computer. It is well-fortified and feels like it was carved out of a chunk of solid metal. It would probably survive being used to drive framing nails. Or being handed to your drummer. Same thing. It came with a stand adapter, a zippered case, and a warranty card. It did not come with any instructions. They figure if you've got one of these you probably already know how it works. It was on my Amazon list because these things are really good for general environmental sound. I've used them at work to mic every...

I've been wearing contact lenses a long time. I was first issued daily-wear disposables when I was fourteen. After being late to school every goddamn day for two weeks, my mother marched me back to the optometrist and got me extended-wear disposables -- the kind you could sleep in -- instead. A lot of people don't tolerate these well, but I do, and I've been wearing them ever since. Fitting these lenses is not the exact science they would like you to believe. Getting eyeglass prescriptions in general is not. They stick you in front of a rig with switchable lenses and ask you which one you like  better, ffs. You go to the eye doctor to make sure your eyeballs aren't going to fall out, not for custom tailored prosthetics. Neither glasses nor contacts are ever 100% custom-fitted to your needs, at least outside of very specific circumstances. Glasses are ground to "close enough" specs from the settings available on the machine, and lenses come in fixed size/power ...

  One tequila, two tequila.... Man, what a party. The Fate of a Squash, starring Cheddar.

Did you think I would let an eating holiday pass without decorating the cage? Hahahaha, no. Behold, the results of a trip to the Dollar Tree and way too much unmonitored daydreaming time at work. A pair of purple skeleton hand shot glasses (plastic!) full of hors d'oevres for Les Fromages. We've recently discovered Cheddar doesn't care too much about sweets, so I gave the candy corn a miss (also wouldn't have given them enough to fill the shot glass -- there are limits, much as they hate that thought), so instead they got banana chips and toasted pumpkin seeds. Where did I get teeny pumpkin seeds, you ask? Just wait. A view from the floor, showing a black photo box for nesting, a Halloween bowl of off-brand cereal for snacking, and a PIDER BASKIT for lurking! The plastic spider baskets are the perfect shape, basically the base of the perennial-favorite sputnik, but need to be covered with fabric so the rats don't get their wee toeses caught. Les Fromages' cage f...

For those who may have missed it over on Instagram, I took in two younger rattos in August. A nice young lady on one of my message boards had lost her housing and had to re-home her critters. Cheddar and Cheese came all the way up from New Jersey to meet me in Providence, and take an interminable train ride back up to Boston, where they were installed in the top floor of Schloß Ratter. Les Fromages seemed not terrible fussed by the move, and downright excited by all the rain that weekend, and mostly ignore Casper's attempts to annoy the neighbors from below. (Mickie does not care. Mickie cares about very little, other than hammocks, snacks, and getting proper scritches right behind the ears. Mickie is very happy with his life, and we would all do well to learn from this.) A few weeks ago, Les Fromages started making snoof  noises. This, like most other rat malfunctions, is pretty easy to diagnose. Itchy rat? Probably mites! Bathe rat, clean cage, apply kitten Revolution. Somebody g...

I recently had to explain to a couple of people that if I try to work more than about half time, I lose the ability to take care of myself. But what does that really look like? Well, for starters, my living area descends into unbridled chaos. I do most things from a nest of blankets on the bed. My room isn't big enough for a full ergonomic computer desk setup, and I wouldn't use it if I had one. Sitting in a chair like a grown up gets really painful. On the bed, I can stretch out or lay down or type all spidered up with my knees by my ears if I need to. I tend to force myself to work until I can't anymore, at which point everything I've been working on gets shoved onto the TV/rat desk or the nearby floor. Picking it up is not a high priority. Dirty clothes pile up on the floor. I don't put on real clothes unless I'm leaving the house, and I change right back into pajamas as soon as I get home. My day clothes stay where they fall. Again, picking them up is so far...