Unsolicited Advice

So, aside from the battery issue -- we achieved a 1% charge after sitting for about 48 hours untouched, hooray -- the MacBook Pro seems to be perfectly okay. I still feel like I'm smashing all the keys Shrek-style, and persistently reach for a delete-things-to-the-right button (and Home/End/PgUp/PgDn...) that isn't there, but that'll go away eventually. The touch bar is pretty neat, although wholly unnecessary, and my brain keeps telling me that virtual Esc key is a colossal single-point-failure waiting to take out the entire keyboard. How am I supposed to communicate my displeasure to the computer if I can't bang on Esc/Break/three-finger salute it when it hangs? Oh well. Step One when I get a new computer is always to factory reset the OS (or install another one, if it's completely hosed) and then wade through like twelve hours of updates and rebooting. Macs have a hardware (firmware?) restore mode, and will happily nuke the boot drive for you if you're sure y...

The apartment lost a roommate this month. Nice guy, but a bit of a hoarder. He left us seven laptops when he moved out. Seven . We had a stack of six up by the TV and we thought we'd found them all, but then he came back for another load of stuff and another MacBook Pro appeared on top of the pile. Yes, MacBook Pro. Yes, "another".  They were all Macs of various stripes; another roommate took the Pro that just worked right off the bat, but this one seemed slightly more recent and had nothing obvious the matter with it, other than it wouldn't turn on. I did some poking about and finally got it to boot by digging up a 100W power supply. I'm not sure it's supposed to need a brick that hefty. The model number says it's of early 2018 vintage, which in theory would have come with an 87W supply. That already blows my mind, as the chonkiest brick any of my Windows/Linux laptops needs is 19V at 2.5A. But 100W did get it to turn on and work flawlessly, except for a ...

'Tis the season for New Year's Resolutions. Roughly four thousand percent of them seem to involve food. The world is spamming my social media with ads telling me I could eat cheap, healthy, easy, tasty, organic, artisanal, yadda yadda yadda. Superfoods! Antioxidants! Environmentally and socially conscious! I'll look like a model and develop enough super powers to keep me alive for all eternity! I'll level with you all. I don't have much to say about the appearance-based propaganda. My entire opinion on the matter is that it is wrong to use anyone's physical appearance as an excuse to treat them as lesser humans, and if you do that you're being an asshole. It's just not something I wrestle with. I won't get into numbers or details, but I have looked more or less the same since I was fourteen, I am now forty, I am still paid money to show up to places and let various people stare at me. I'm not claiming to be perfect, just noting that the things I ...

One of the rare good memories I have of spending time with family over Christmas break when I was a kid was the video games. Starting at age five, the year my parents brought home a Nintendo and a gold Zelda cartridge, we always took the week between Christmas and New Year's Eve to sit in front of the TV and save the world. My father had the controller, my mother had the notes and the guidebook, and we kids sat on the floor and kibbitzed. ("Have you gone through that door, Dad? No, that door. No, that  door. No, Dad , that thing  is a door.") We kids had no school, Dad took the week off work, and we lived on cheese and crackers and sandwiches and takeout so that Mom could take a break from cooking. After Zelda, I remember playing the original Final Fantasy for NES, and later the first one for the SNES; Dragon Warrior (Dragon Quest, in Japan) I, II and IV; The Secret of Mana; The Illusion of Gaia; and ChronoTrigger. I think I'm forgetting a couple. I don't think we...

I've given up on the series of CPTSD book reports I planned. I spent too much time wanting to throw the books at the wall. Which is a problem, because most of them are e-books, and I'm pretty attached to my Kindle. Plus the noise would scare the rats. Almost all of the available books on the subject are formatted as self-help texts, and fall afoul of the same thing all self-help materials do. They're written for the lowest common denominator. They don't necessarily assume the audience is stupid, but they do assume the audience is starting from a place of complete ignorance. This is great if you are indeed starting from scratch, but irritating as fuck if you've already gotten past the 400-level research class and really just need to know how the last guy to run this lab kept the still from exploding all over the inside of the fume hood. The books also spend a lot of time holding your hand. They talk in circles and spew a lot of words reassuring the reader that they a...

So as soon as I set out to write a series of book reports -- a series of anything, really -- life slammed in on me. There's a bunch of stuff colliding messily in my head right now, which makes it difficult to get any of it out. I've been limping along, but I really need to get better at determining in advance what things I need to drop and when, rather than letting it get to the point where I just need to let the next thing fall, no matter what it is. In the meantime, I've given up, called out of the one thing I thought I was going to get accomplished today, and am holed up in my room to try and get some of this shit done. One of the things eating my attention is that a friend is going through a messy breakup. Or, rather, she should be going through a messy breakup, but she refuses to let go of her horrible abusive relationship. The details are unimportant, but, as Dr Nerdlove says, assholes gonna ass. Every time it happens -- which is often -- she runs to us, her friends, ...

When I was a kid, I had no friends. There were a couple of other kids whom I was told were my friends. In retrospect, none of them liked me or wanted me around, they were just forced to include me because my mother wanted to gossip with their mother without interruptions. The one whom I was told was my "best friend" didn't like me to the point where she ignored me at school, but she was the kind of kid whose mother picked out her clothes and hairstyle every morning, and she got clocked with a hairbrush if she protested, so clearly she couldn't do much to stop it. The message this sent was that friends were people who would tolerate you when you were there, then roll their eyes and start running you down to others whenever you weren't. So far as I can tell, this is how my mother actually believes friendship works. She consistently behaved this way with all of her friends, back when she had them, and sailed merrily onward with her siblings once my sister and I aged...