37 tweets for 2010-11-6

In the last 24 hours, I posted the following to Twitter:

• Friday, 0107: @khasael Oh dear, I know which one you mean.
• Friday, 0114: Hey @NaNoWriMo, on my NaNo Stats page in 'Today's Stats', my Current Word Count & Word Goal is the before-midnight number, 1.25 hrs later.
• Friday, 0116: @NaNoWriMo Same thing for @khasael. After some vigorous refreshing. Top of page total word count & flash stats box is ok.
• Friday, 0116: @NaNoWriMo if it's a Known Thing or caches being slow to update it's cool, but if it's Something Wrong I figured y'all should know.
• Friday, 0122: The Neutral Denny's. Best place ever, or best place ever? :-P
( read the other 32 )

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Old stuff: October 8-14

6:09 AM 10/8/2010
So, yeah, movie fun.
I may have accidentally written a kids' story just for entertainment. I did that all the time when I was a kid with Mama! I should maybe go through, see what cleaning up it needs, and illustrate it or something. The inputs involved penguins, a truck, and a fire extinguisher, so I wrote a Baby Penguin Adventures story around The Flaming Manual incident.

(evening)
Went to Abney Park concert. As I was leaving, all spiffed up, I had a conversation with the two nurses who live next door now, in the apartment where the troll next door used to live. They were headed for the hot tub. The troll was one of the next-door neighbors who had a screaming fight with his girlfriend, and the one where we wound up calling the police. He earned "troll" as his distinguishing mark, because we had some long conversations about The Internets and Life when I was coming back at weird hours and he was out smoking, and he was an accountant or something as a day job, and didn't really use the internet much, but sometimes to unwind he would go on forums and post obnoxious things to start fights. Which really puts the 'ass' in 'classy'.


10/09/2010 (Saturday)
The tail end of the concert, and coming home therefrom. I then listened to the Abney Park part of the concert on the archive of the stream over again, so that I could write it up. Funtimes!

I got up after perhaps not quite enough sleep, so that I could do Dog Shenanigans with my aunt. Funtimes were had.


1:50 AM 10/10/2010
http://geekfeminism.org/?p=2476 ha-ha. Sucks to the traditional meritocracy!


8:39 AM 10/10/2010
I've been reading some of the No Makeup Week reaction stuff. As intended, it's made me re-examine my relationship with makeup. I have an awful lot of it for someone who doesn't wear very much of it at a time. I also am convinced that I'm from a culture that's alien to so many of the other people out there. The only times I feel obligated to wear makeup are to job interviews and formal events like other people's weddings. I resent wearing makeup to job interviews. I don't mind wearing makeup to weddings and such. And when I say "wearing makeup", I mean using coverup on any blemishes, and lipstick. Anything beyond that is strictly optional, even for formal events.

A lot of times I choose to wear lipstick, going out somewhere, running errands, or sometimes even around home, particularly when there's a tube of lipstick closer than a tube of lip balm. Sometimes I even choose to wear coverup and powder when I'm going somewhere random. Would I still feel confident about not wearing much makeup if I didn't have long dark eyelashes and expressive eyebrows as dark as my hair? The shape of my mouth is lovely. I know it is. When I was a little girl, I examined my face in the mirror very carefully, determined that an ever-so-slight pout was the prettiest, to make my lower lip larger, and carefully trained myself to hold my mouth that way. Holding my lips the way I held them when I was but a wee lass isn't natural anymore.


In honor of 10/10/10, Bejeweled 2 was a free download. As you might imagine, I was all over this. :D (However, it's not half as addictive as the Blitz version, for me.)


9:40 PM 10/10/2010
Spent an hour and a half chatting with best friend on phone. Then his battery died. Emailed back and forth. We have now commenced chatting on that most vile of modern privacysuck platforms. <3 <3 <3 <3 Apparently this is what it takes to get him to add me on the Facebooks. :-P


10/11/2010, Monday:
(US, celebrated worldwide) National Coming Out Day. Affirmed my out-ness as bisexual (sapiosexual), and my willingness to offer what support and shelter I could to anyone else coming out.

Woke up from dreams of earthquake-related terror.


10/12/2010 Tuesday:
Stupid sleep schedule. Tried to get caught up with stuff. Tried to get newest spam trainee trained, but someone not in channel got the spam very efficiently taken care of before the trainee came in. Alas.

No nightmares this time.

Discussed factors that would lead to a bulletproof OMG DO NOT WANT when looking at someone's profile on a site such as OK Cupid. Cisgendered male of A Certain Age, dominant, heterosexual, militant about a dietary practice that's optional (neither religiously required nor medically necessary) -- and someone who was not me phrased it better: "Male privilege as kink".

Big US politics news of the day: judge ordering that DADT should no longer be enforced. (And I'm as usual of two minds there: one, yay equality and yay for those of the community who want to serve; two, I was raised Quaker and am still pacifist enough to abhor the draft with DEEP AND PERSONAL LOATHING, even though as female-bodied I am not subject to it.)

Went to JD/Ryan's for Glee as per usual; also as per usual, Jed was there.
( Spoilerish Glee thoughts )

Discussed bees. Discussed Halloween-type plans.


1:42 AM 10/13/2010
If I am ever in a position where I have an employee I could not bear to part with, or an employee doing some pretty fucking mission-critical stuff, and that employee has a concussion, I intend that if at all possible I will make sure that the employee gets sufficient leave to recover, and by "recover" I mean "actually regain full function with a doctor's signoff". Recent experiences have demonstrated to me that while someone may be capable of doing the things that they are supposed to do on paper, it's the little things that they can't do that make things into a living hell for not only them since they're living with a layer of OW around their brain, but everyone who works with them or works under their oversight. I never want to have to do that again. I dearly love the person I'm referencing, and it hurt to see them doing so badly. The thing that I tried like hell to avoid thinking about -- the thought that maybe we weren't going to get them back, maybe this was their life now, for now and for ever -- that scared me, shook me. Terrified me even though I was trying not to think about it. Must have been worse for them. Must have been far worse for them.


5:20 AM 10/13/2010
THE relationship MEME !


2:59 AM 10/14/2010
Today: code tour! http://dw-dev.dreamwidth.org/74274.html

Went to farmers' market with aunt. Apparently I cannot resist a good straight line, as I hollered "Nice melons!" at her when she was carrying two, in the classic position.

Old stuff: shopping and steampunk (October 15 & 16)

Friday 10/15/2010
Shopping with Tif. She works in Oakland now, so we were going after dinner there. Her original idea for dinner involved more tricky hunting for parking places (and hiking from parking places) than I was comfortable with at that point in time (between sleep, blood sugar, and mobility). So we pulled over somewhere out of the main fray to Google about for other things. Fuddruckers it was! Somehow I had not heard the phrase "deer and beer" before. I found it hysterical.

After dinner, we headed down to Teacake, the little favorite cupcake shop thattaway. There were some pumpkin cupcakes. We gave each other the Look. seanan_mcguire had just that afternoon said on Twitter that she would be signing, and to not leave her there with a pile of books looking forlorn...

We calculated the distance. We decided it would work out, logistically. We got a pair of pumpkin cupcakes. We zoomed, dodgy directions that had us detouring and all.

We made it there before she left, and shared cupcakes and had a nice comfortable chat, with plenty of giggling.

After that, there was a Trader Joe's right in the same parking lot. Win! And it was open until 10pm! Double win! Tried to explain the story of "Conveniently located" to Tif. This one goes back to my freshman year of high school. There was this guy, let's call him Bugs Potter. He decided, on the first day of school, that setting up the two dorkiest dorks together would be the most hilarious funtimes activity ever. I was Dork Number One. (Happily for all concerned, I also saw the potential for hilarity in all this, and began taking notes; this would eventually develop into my forever-doomed-to-be-unpublished unfinished novel Much Ado About Star Trek Ectogenesis.) A dude, we shall call him Scott Brightside, was Dork Number Two. (Fun fact: Scott Brightside and my BFF Darkside share the same first name, and high school photos of Darkside show that he was a dead ringer for Scott in that era. I had to ask and double check when I saw that.) I fell for Scott hard. Scott, for his part, was not intrigued. You can imagine the sort of shenanigans that ensued. Bugs made every effort to have his shipping work out. When I was observed reading Star Wreck VI: Geek Space Nine, Bugs claimed that Scotty "[had] Star Wreck 1-6, conveniently located, right by his bed!" As that got a reaction out of me, he would embroider upon this theme, to my general horror.

I don't recall Tif's response to the description of the bullying from Bugs being particularly printable.

We proceeded to the next stop: Walmart, for lo, Mr. Kitty needs litter. My knee was really not happy with me, so I found a nice place to sit, and sat. This was also the night that the new Abney Park album, The End of Days, was released. There was a chat party to celebrate this, with hilarity and funtimes in the channel #TheEndofDays on esper.net. I experimented with my phone and found that it did too do Mibbit. I hung out in the chatroom on Mibbit (nursing my gimpy knee) as Tif shopped. Much hilarity was had.

(Eventually, the chat moved over to #steampunk, also on esper.net. Various people idle there, and sometimes there is also chatting.)

A week later, Jayekitty finally got it up:
http://twitter.com/#!/druidsfire/status/28371284298
Hey, @captianrobert, Abney Park IRC Transcript available at: http://www.spundreams.net/~phoenix/AbneyParkChatEdit.doc


6:25 PM 10/16/2010
Friday: shopping with Tif.
Saturday: dog shenanigans with aunt.
Thursday and Saturday's fruits and vegetables: http://fresh-haul.dreamwidth.org/2088.html (The squash is not a pumpkin, which is taken SERIOUSLY AS A VEGETABLE in Australia. In the US it's furniture. :-P )

When you've got, what, four labs (two yellow, two black) in one yard at the same time, you've got to expect that there will be Shenanigans. There was romping all over the yard. I believe Mr. Poodle also got involved.

Old stuff: relationships! Also dogsitting. (Oct 17-19)

8:09 AM 10/17/2010
( Chat log with the fish. Language. )

Azz: ... and if EV comes in and reads backscroll I'm in sooooo much trouble.
Azz: HISTORY ISN'T


At some point, spurred by the scariness the previous week due to the Abney Park concert, I actually got earplugs. I tried them out. They blocked out sound! It was glorious!


9:04 PM 10/17/2010
Woke up around 2am. Around 2pm, aunt pinged me to feed the dogs, as she was unexpectedly going to be out to dinner Rather Late with uncle. Fell over for a nap an hour and a half before that; had helpfully set alarm so this was not as bad as it could have been. Called best friend while I was waiting for doggy digestion, punned at each other.


7:18 AM 10/19/2010
Yesterday: tried to organize stuff. Heh.

(old stuff) LMB in Mountain View, October 19 (with bits through the 22nd)

On the 19th, LMB was speaking in Mountain View. I have now discovered OpenTable: it lets you make reservations online. I therefore made reservations for our planned restaurant, at an ungodly hour of the sort where I did not want to talk on the phone, no not at all.

I picked Tif up from work, then we braved traffic. We'd optimistically planned dinner for before the event, but were 15 minutes behind planned due to traffic. Alas. emceeaich and ekaterin were already there, and dinner (when it arrived) was very tasty. A fellow fan and DW user (whose name I can't remember very well despite hearing it twice) came over to greet us. We headed for the bookstore as soon as we were done. There was a crowd. ekaterin had wisely got her copy of Cryoburn ahead of time -- by the time we arrived, the store was entirely out.

The Q&A session was fun; it was nice to see a little more about her writing process. Hers appears to be rather less structured than mine (and mine is not particularly less structured), as I will have some more solid events that I know are going to happen, and her characters wander through the world, discovering it as they go.

She does not plan to go into the adventures of Vorkosigan: The Next Generation. For one thing, Miles would be very very angry with her if she tried to mess with his children. (Miles is very aware of her presence, and aware that she jerks him around a lot by doing terrible things to him. I like a character who talks back.)

She read a chapter of an untitled, uncontracted, unfinished book. It involved Ivan on Komarr! (It is prior to Cryoburn, a side-story.) It involved Ivan and Byerly snarking at each other! Elf and I made giddy fangirl-flailings at each other.

There were more questions after; someone asked if the woman in the Ivan-snippet were to be Ivan's OTP. LMB said something about how she always gets questions about pairing off Ivan; couldn't people happy if he were left a happy bachelor?

Other reports: http://willowgreen.livejournal.com/174974.html
http://elf.dreamwidth.org/361038.html
http://ase.dreamwidth.org/542186.html
http://mmegaera.livejournal.com/281316.html

Tif and I suddenly had a thought: we could go to another store to get a book (with CD), and return to get it signed! So we located a store and headed out; she picked up the books; and then we zoomed back. Sadly, there was a train. This contributed to us not getting there in time -- Lois had left. We stopped for coffee on the way back, because it was just that kind of night.

Aside from the running out of books and lack of signing, the dinner and the talk were great fun.

20th: I don't remember much about the 20th except perhaps sleep.
21st: I went to the farmers' market with my aunt.
22nd: Dogsat and read Cryoburn and cried.

(old stuff) Spirit day, winter, random, and David Bowie dogs: Oct 20-23

10/20/2010 Wednesday
Spirit day! I changed my Twitter avatar to the purple version, and made a purple version of my Facebook face too. I changed my LJ and DW defaults to my "Queer as a $3 Bill" icon, which is an old favorite of mine. I got the concept, and then I had to track down an appropriate $3 bill image. The one I found that was workable was very nice on the bill art -- but it had a Michael Jackson picture. *sigh* So I cropped it so the face wasn't part of it, and gave it a nice pink-through-purple rainbow effect in the GIMP.

I changed my icons up because I did not actually wind up venturing forth that day into places where I could be seen by other people, but my icons are all over the internet.


8:22 AM 10/23/2010
It's cool enough this morning that I slept almost 10 hours, and I turned the fireplace on, upon getting up. And since Google appears to not have the version we sang in the Shapenote group in Fairbanks:

Winter

His hoary frost, his fleecy snow,
Descend and clothe the ground;
The liquid streams forbear to flow,
In icy fetters bound.

(It amused some of us young punks to sing "sweaters" instead of "fetters.)

Spring

He sends his word and melts the snow,
The fields no longer mourn;
He calls the warmer gales to blow,
And bids the spring return.

Now, the other verses were either absent, or deemed not appropriate for Alaska, so our group wrote some new ones. These were written in the mid-90s, the collective effort of the Fairbanks Hidden Hill Shapenote singers.

The mud descends and covers all,
The ice drips from the eave,
The rivers thaw and flow once more,
And daylight we receive.

The sun doth shine both night and day,
Earth's green mantle springs forth,
But God decrees that night must come,
And cold creeps from the North.

And from there we proceed into the first verse again.

http://www.cyberhymnal.org/htm/w/i/withsong.htm
http://stoddardfamily.home.comcast.net/~stoddardfamily/L/181.html


In which elf goes line by line through Elizabeth Moon's screed, pointing out the problems as she goes: http://elf.dreamwidth.org/362415.html (There are some sections which are snipped, "someone with more formal scholarship can explain where she scrambled those parts".)


11:07 PM 10/23/2010
Today: dogsitting. This included my aunt locating raranax's David Bowie wig, and us taking photos of it on both dogs.