Unsolicited Advice

For anyone who didn't catch it on other social media, I have finally moved out of the "temporary" apartment I was stuck in for 7 months, thanks to a lot of emotional and logistical support from friends, and a generous amount of financial support from the folks who gave to my GoFundMe. I am endlessly grateful to all of you, and if I weren't so goddamn tired right now I'd be more eloquent in saying so. I've spent the past few weeks of unpacking and working out the bus routes around my new place trying to figure out how to explain what was so terrible about the last one. Most attempts devolved into page upon page of rage, which is not really what I want to be doing here. On the other hand, I also don't want to downplay how bad it was.  Spoiler: The temp apartment was Very Very Bad. The tl;dr is that I was offered someone's spare room on the condition that I help out a little extra with household chores and caring for their rats, because the pet owning roo...

I woke up this morning trying desperately to remember what day of the week it was and whether there was anything special about it. As of this writing, it's Friday, and no.  It has become clear that I have moved into a situation of grinding poverty. I knew when I got here that nobody was going to have any money. Literally everybody involved in this venture is disabled in some way, which in modern America means you are left to starve by default. What I didn't realize until I got here is that the other two kids in this apartment grew up in this kind of deprivation, without any useful parental figures of any kind. When I arrived, there was no bath mat. I assumed this was because everyone was skint and had better things to do with $8 than buy one. I probably had better things to do with that money, but I was tired of slipping on wet tile, so I went and ordered one anyway. They said thank you. I also ordered a wire shelf for the freezer, because I was tired of vegan "patties...

Life continues. Kind of. I have a place to go as of this end of this month, although I still have no idea how the fuck to move my stuff during Plague Times. I don't own that much, but I also don't have a car. I am tempted to not bother moving the mattress, but I am very much afraid that if I don't I will literally never manage to own a comfortable bed ever again. Being someone who discombobulates joints on a regular basis, not being in extra pain every time I wake up is kind of important for my quality of life. I could eventually figure out how to replace the futon I use as a topper, but a futon alone is not enough padding -- I've learned the hard way that I can very much feel the hard floor or the hard pipes of a futon frame through one of those things, and it is Not Good for my sleep.  Massachusetts is, as of this writing, continuing with their re-opening plan. We've hit the phase where the dance studio has been cleared for operation, with appropriate procedures. ...

Hello, all. It has been a rough pandemic. As you may have figured, since I am in the performing arts, I have been completely out of work since this shitshow began. The earliest venues will open up here in MA is September, which is not helpful for me, because I need to be out of my current place by 8/31. No one will rent to me on my Patreon income, so I've been trying to figure out how to supplement that with other online work. My first thought, frankly, was camming. I'm attractive and I know that, and I don't care about being naked in "public". I have a lot of opinions on the legitimacy and legalization of sex work, but making a statement would be a convenient bonus; I'd be in it for the tips. As the appliance menagerie on the Flintstones used to say, "Eh. It's a living." The best camera I currently have is attached to the slightly-less ancient laptop. You know, the one with the broken hinge that won't hold the screen up on the right. Only th...

I'm still alive. Sort of. In the past few weeks, I've had a grand total of twenty-one hours where things felt like they were going reasonably all right. Twenty-one. I went back and checked timestamps and counted. I landed a short-term gig teaching dance for a bunch of kids. It wasn't absurdly lucrative, but if I could earn that much money every week I'd be fine long-term. I was on site for 6 hours a day M-Th and had a four hour evening on Friday. I wasn't even running around with the kids for all that much of it, I just had class periods separated by free time. It ruined me to the point where I was having trouble feeding myself and showering consistently. I would get out of there and try desperately to get something useful done and just stare at a wall, if I didn't lay down "just for a minute" and wake up hours later. I don't think it's necessarily the physical activity that's the problem. I can do four hours of hardcore dancing in...

So the confusing unexpected birthday party went pretty okay. And by 'pretty okay' I mean the room as a whole achieved a level of drunkenness that inspired everyone to share reminiscences of previous instances of drunkenness. It turns out that several of the old guard went to college together, so I got to hear tales of shit-faced shenanigans that occurred while I was still learning to walk. One of them brought his sister, with whom I had a thoughtful discussion about how tequila is a series of terrible decisions in a bottle. Helpful hint: When someone starts out their story with a trick question like, "Okay, if you were completely hammered, would you rather crawl naked into bed with [dude who is standing RIGHT THERE, participating in the conversation], or crawl naked into bed with a total stranger?" the only reasonable response is to pause thoughtfully for half a second and say, "Well, what does this total stranger look like?" I didn't get to hear the res...

Still can't wrap my head around being invited to this birthday party. There isn't technically a C-suite, as we're a non-profit and everyone answers to the board, but there are executive operating officers, and the guest of honor at the party is top one. It is beyond me why anyone would think I'd be invited to this in the first place. I find it interesting that someone coming in from the outside looked at me in situ  and came to that conclusion. The rest of them are shocked when I demonstrate knowledge of something they had an entire meeting about, four feet from the reception desk where I was working, in a totally empty lobby. I literally have nothing better to do than knit and eavesdrop. Have none of them ever read a Miss Marple  book? On va voir  what will happen when I actually show up to the birthday party. Mr New York Producer-Person will probably be delighted; other people might be confused. The director will probably be mildly surprised. I seem to have inserted...

Jesus Christ, I feel like I've been drowning over here. Too many smaller things to deal with can be just as catastrophic as a couple of HUGE things hitting at the same time. Trying to cover a bunch of stuff I've missed over the past couple of weeks: Tabbiewolf was good enough to whip up a sketch -- and even color it! -- after I got curious enough to ask what kind of critter she thought I'd be. (Normally people go straight for 'fox', probably because of the red hair and va-va-voom.) Tabbiewolf is a freelance artist specializing in toonified critter avatars and the like, so if happen to be looking for one, head on over and ask about projects. She drew me as a bobcat, which is one I've never gotten before. Cute, non ? I sent her to my online portfolio for reference images, and I am amused to note that I apparently really am that busty. I don't tend to think of myself as top-heavy, especially since one of my best friends has knockers literally the size of he...

Hello, various other estadounidenses ! As many of you even outside the US may know, today is Thanksgiving, an American holiday where we, the descendants of European settlers, celebrate the fact that the natives were generally better human beings than we were back in the 17th century, and refused to let the colonists starve no matter how stupidly unprepared for winter they all were. I know there are still many political and cultural problems with the traditional iconography, but I would like to think that all of us, regardless of where we come from and what has happened in the past, can appreciate a day dedicated to making three times as much food as anyone could possibly eat, and then lying around digesting for the next forty-eight to seventy-two hours. I have yet to see a society in which feast days do not occur, so I feel safe in saying that pretty much everyone on the planet as at least this tiny bit of common ground. I do not attend family functions because of Reasons, and I have...

The articles about "Himmmm" have been put back up, in edited form. The reason for this is that one of the people fingered as the poster has supposedly gotten very angry and posted a cease and desist letter to one of the major sites dedicated to investigating the phenomenon. The articles I had written about it, strictly as a sociologist and an amateur forensic linguist, have driven a lot of traffic to my blog, and garnered quite a bit of commentary. I removed them for a while so that I could work out what to do about the C&D. I have not still not received any emails from anyone, particularly lawyers, on the subject. Personally I think that the C&D does not outline a valid case, and that the only reason it would ever get in front of a judge at all is if the judge had written up a really smashing diatribe against frivolous lawsuits and wanted to deliver it in person before throwing the whole thing out. Still, there is always the chance that the suspected person is tell...

Dear everyone who is here from GossipRocks: I tried to follow your trackback link and participate in your thread, but for some reason my account has been banned for "spamming advertisements". I have no idea why, because the only thing I've ever posted there was a hello-world message in the newbie forum, as directed. I would be more than happy to take requests for assessment of random YouTube interview clips or whatever, but since I apparently can't join in over there, y'all will have to come here. People go "Hey, what do you think of this person?" and "What do you know about this weird topic?" to me all the time both IRL and online, and I think it's fun to do the research. Questions, pointers, and non-public chat back to miss.arabella.flynn@gmail.com , please.

[Note: This post has been edited from its original publication. See here for details.] Apparently someone -- implied to be [someone]? Maybe? the commenter doesn't say -- is sending out cease and desist letters to people who've commented on the "Himmmm" thing online. I have not gotten one, but I would like to make something abundantly clear: Nothing I have posted is anything other than an amateur attempt at forensic document analysis, and a little social psychology. I think the other blogs commenters have shown me are consistent with the writing style of "Himmmm", but as someone who respects the ethics of people who do  conduct professional forensic examinations of this stuff, I cannot say that it definitively is  the same person. Nor do I personally have any evidence that it belongs to the guy other people are pointing at, although I have dutifully reported that other people are saying it without weighing in one way or another. I am not personally interes...

Basically none! My official qualifications consist of a diploma proving I earned a Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Studies from Northern Arizona University. It was the closest I could get to earning a degree in Everything with a emphasis in Stuff. My focus was in sociology and communication theory, and I earned a minor in Japanese more or less by accident. If you were to examine my transcripts, you would find that I took what appears to be a load of almost completely random classes, and got grades ranging from A+++ to D. The reason for this is not apparent until you also get a load of my semester schedules as an undergraduate, and realize that I got all my best grades in classes that didn't give a lot of take-home work and met between 11 in the morning and 3 in the afternoon. I do quite brilliantly at school until I run into something that quite literally bores me stupid, and I'm not a functional human being before 10:30am at the earliest. I also have an aborted attempt at gett...

Not so's you'd really notice. I work as a tutor (paid and volunteer) and as a research consultant, mostly in IT. I also do freelance copywriting, technical writing, editing, and translation. I do take commissions for a variety of written work, and if you would like something written for you, please feel free to contact me at miss.arabella.flynn@gmail.com . Likewise modeling; I haven't really done any since I moved to Boston, but if anyone wants to hire me I'll still take bookings. I am also working, very slowly, on a book, which I eventually plan to e-publish to Kindle and Nook. Every so often, someone takes me to task for  not  giving them a way to send me money or random objects. This always weirds me out no end. I'm not used to anyone actually caring what I think to the point where they want to pay me to keep typing this stuff on a regular basis. I do run ads on the blog; I expect most of you don't know that, because most of the serious internet people ha...

Other than the celebrities, they're generally my friends and acquaintances. Pretty much everyone gets some kind of alias -- of their choosing, actually, if they're aware that I write this thing -- because if I'm  going to use a pen name, it would just be really silly not to let everyone else in my life do the same. You may notice I don't talk about my family too much. This is because I don't talk to  my family too much. I've never had much contact with my father's side of things and my mother's side is uniformly crazeballs, so I avoid them as much as possible. Last year I picked up and moved 2500 miles east without bothering to tell them, which I think gets the point across. They no longer have a mailing address or phone number for me, and since one of them sent me a lengthy nastygram a few months ago, I haven't checked the email address they have either. Suffice it to say that anyone who has ever tried to tell me that "blood is thicker than w...

So, who are you anyway? I am a bunch of words on the internet. Everything on here is my opinion, and if you don't like it you're welcome to not read it. If you do like it, please hang around -- I like having an audience. I mean what I say, but I'm really snarky and enjoy using sarcastic hyperbole to make my point. Figure my writing has 'for entertainment purposes only' stamped everywhere. That's nice, but what are you like in meatspace? I'm female, and as I write this, I'm 30. Nobody believes this. Occasionally someone will actually argue with me when I tell them, which always makes me check to make sure I haven't wandered into a Terry Gilliam movie by mistake. In person, people usually conclude I'm younger. My dress sense tends to skew young, mostly because I'm on the small side and clothes from the Juniors department usually fits better. I'm allergic to benzoyl peroxide, so for the past fifteen years my acne-control technique has ...