Home Movies from the Cutting-Room Floor babbling within.


( Read more... )


In other news, one of my friends' teams at work is moving buildings. Today they had a small party in order to drink their way through some of the team-owned boozes so that they would not have to actually move them all. Having been invited, I went over there and partook of some hard, hard lemonade. Then I came back and did not stuff M&Ms up my nose.

I chatted with Purple. At one point I reached out a finger to poke him. He reached back. Then I was en garde and we fenced about his office, me standing and him in his office chair, rolling handily across the floor. He said something witty once he eventually did break through my guard. "Good fences make good neighbors," I said, and then we were giggling once more.

Last night's sleep was not exactly a farce, but it wasn't the feel-good blockbuster of the year either.

Work started out with a meeting, which is always my favorite. (It was a decent meeting, as meetings go, but I'm not particularly charmed with things that are tied that tightly to the clock. It's a personal viewpoint.)

Sometimes you reach into your pocket for the phone because you think of something, and you pull out a call from your braintwin. We are due a sit-down fairly shortly because stuff and also things.

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Picture a butch-er, more self aware Dean Pelton, running across the gymnasium bouncing and giggling like a school girl, wearing a Princess Leia wig on his bald head and a Princess Leia dress from A New Hope, clutching a blaster to his chest.

That just about sums up my day at work today.

~~~

Purple happily greeted "Miss Spider" when I became visible at the crowded lunch table. His colleagues were curious about who might have pranked his desk, but he knew immediately. Vacation was good for him. He looked much more relaxed.

( Miss Spider weaves a web )

Mr. Sub-tle the Events guy was MC for today's thing with the special guest. One of the other people who does events stuff and pours his whole heart and soul into it is the Turtle Guy. Much like the aforementioned Dean Pelton, the Turtle Guy is short, small, white, bald, boundlessly enthusiastic, and likes to dress up for special occasions.

So Mr. Sub-tle called the Turtle Guy up front to meet the guest, and a truly hilarious and touching scene involving a lot of glitter, a kiss on the mouth, a glomp, and some ballroom dancing ensued. I was happy to have witnessed that moment. The Turtle Guy left sparkling, and not just from the glitter.

Later, I got some time in with the guys, in the person of Purple and Mr. Zune. When they heard I was to be meeting a friend from out of town up in the city, their "have a good time" wishes gained lascivious eyebrows. I had to explain that it wasn't like that. Ah, dudefriends.

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A quiet Sunday.

Came home in a state of general delight and pleasure with the world, wrote up Saturday's happenings. Conked out in bed at something approaching a reasonable hour. Slept until early afternoon, as one does.

A further note: those thin black drink-straws really don't work well as chopsticks for ice cubes. I was SO CLOSE, though.

Embarked on various bits of reading, both off internet and on. Did some minor tidying and/or dishes.

Eventually I realized that it was getting on in hours and my fitbit was telling me I was behind on steps for the day. (I try to aim for at least the goal, but no higher than double.) So I moved myself with my chat with sithjawa on my phone to the bouncy-ball, and there spent a reasonably instructive hour allowing my abdominal muscles to stand in for legs.

zarhooie was having various Adventures of Road. Snow was not meant to travel in a sideways direction, no, not even in Minnesnowda.

I finished up reading Archer's Goon, which I found good.
( A spoiler. )
The tooth marks on my copy look like either a staple-remover or a cat.


A friend observed that Purple went from zero to Trusted very fast (for me)! This is true. ( Read more... )

The common factor in going quickly from zero to Trusted seems to involve getting a relatively low scoring of halt or caution flags, which could originate either internally or externally. A higher scoring hits the threshold where all the new stuff has to be carefully inspected lest it fuck stuff up, and that slows down the information transfer rate something serious. This results in a) more actual time elapsed per unit of information transferred, resulting in b) more actual time elapsed per trust benchmark. It also means c) there is a high halt/caution score, which goes right along with d) various forms of distrust or no-go piling up.

My trust is of course a multifactor thing, not a single axis. Imagine a very long page full of slider-bars. They're all set more or less in the neutral middle (with modifications for societal stuff: it's not like I'm expecting every dude I meet to react with an AK-47 to a gay-hug, but there's always the possibility that someone's a Sara*). There is a slider-bar for basically absolutely every interpersonal attribute you could imagine, from "I trust you to not kill me and dump my body in a ditch" to "given sufficient rehearsal time, we could sing a duet together and I'm pretty sure you wouldn't screw it up".

* Sorry, non-homophobic Saras (and people who love them).

Some sliders pull others. Some sliders are a compilation of others. Some have thresholds set by others. Some have no effect on others. Not trusting someone to not kill or otherwise hurt me has an amazing effect on my willingness to enter a large-scale project with, spend time in the company of, or leave my cat with, someone. However, unwillingness to lend someone my calculator because they may perhaps have a larger issue with carelessness with their friends' possessions doesn't necessarily have anything to do with their acting skill and their dramatic chemistry with me; I may be happy to play opposite them on any script perhaps even without examining it first. (Oh, Shawn.) Do I trust you to hold a tune without a bucket? No? No matter, I'm still willing to consider telling you my secrets, provided something else hasn't blocked that. (And maybe we could sing a duet just for fun, just us two, giving zero fucks about staying on-key.)

• A hilarious version of the pronoun conversation which took a detour through Second Life.


• Waking up at 6am with the thought "You know what? This is a great
  time for an oil change."


• Getting to work before all the parking disappears, even with the oil change.


• "I always thought you were a sick person, but now I know you definitely are!" -- Purple, upon hearing the 6am bit.


• The many ways in which the concept that the oil light is an emergency situation got reinforced to Figment at the start of that ill-fated date: my vehement lecture, the concurrent clunking noise from his engine, the subsequent hike and tow truck odyssey, and then the engine
  replacement.


• Categorizing typos, written and otherwise.


• Being exactly as helpful as a ferret in a bowl of packing peanuts.


• Accidentally magnetizing the whole silverware drawer.

( It gets worse before it gets better. )

And now, a gif of some ferrets bouncing around in a bowl of packing peanuts.

( Read more... )

So at some point in the earlier four of the last five years or so, I had the weirdest interaction with someone with whom I was at the time tenuously socially acquainted in person. It went weirdly and not well. It extended over what had to be at least a year, and culminated in use of the wrong name.

In getting to know Purple, we have both been sharing stuff from our various histories, and this was a thing that came up. A monoculture is rarely a good thing, and Purple brings more diversity to my group of friends; it's very interesting to see some of his reactions in contrast with some of my usual crowd.

( What happened at that time, and my subsequent discussion with Purple )

I predict a certain amount of ... processing? Post-processing? in my life, as random things re-surface in various discussion with Purple, especially things that I thought I was over, but the new perspective has caused me to re-visit. Since very few topics have been off-limits to date, it's not all going to be easy stuff. Gods only know what sorts of horrorterrors lurk in his past! (I suspect I've met a few of them, but those are his business if he wants to share, not mine.)

Did I mention the part the other night where I was fetching my potatoes from the kitchen, and I tripped over the rug and fell and while I saved the potatoes I also managed to land on my fist in the wastebasket, basically punching my garbage? Because that is a thing that happened. Nothing hurt except my dignity, my fist (slightly), and my garbage.

Today involved enough mailing that I was incoherent when one of the designers stopped by with a wiki question. It takes my brain some time to swap states, and that was seriously unswapped. I was vaguely professional at work! While I didn't mention doggy style nachos in front of Purple's QE friend, I did cuss about the outgoing system a good fair chunk. Fucking thing.

Purple and I both have highly associative brains. This makes us both tend to go off on tangents that get really weird, though we can usually follow each other for a few hops. Purple, lb, and I were hanging out at the lunar new year thing. We've established that Purple is one step lower and I'm one step further; turns out that lb is one step weirder. Hilarity, complete with "Centipedes?" references, ensued.

There are various sorts of funny. Tonight, I laughed, and I felt a particular sensation that most people with uterus as OEM equipment have come to know and perhaps fear. ( A bloody mess, is what. )

Purple was kind enough to run back upstairs to retrieve my headset when I left it on my desk. Yay headset! Yay Purple! BJ came up in the topic of the "Nice Guy", and it's educational to discuss the concept with someone who a) doesn't automatically know what's meant when I say it in that tone of voice, and b) who has substantial mutual trust-and-goodwill stock built up, such that one poorly-thought-out phrase on either end likely wouldn't result in epic meltdown of relations. One of the key bits in the description of the so-called "Nice Guy" was that when crossing the goddamn boundary lines, and being told about it, not only is there (itself worrying) defensiveness, there's also the fucking petulance. Which clicked with Purple. Heh. (His own approach seems to be back-off-and-make-an-effort-to-do-better, which is entirely fine by me.) I offered a glomp; it almost but not quite un-cricked his back. It was cool enough outside that hanging out chatting did get a little chilly. My toes were chilly, mostly; I warmed up well enough in the car on the way home, chatting with Nora and then Drewface.

The inside of my brain does a lot of its processing in audio. The presence of two people with the same given name and basically the same emotional intonation (despite different-shaped concept objects) has been causing problems in various processing. To illustrate, I named five people of the same given name out loud to Drew. He could hear the difference in the first three. The last two were difficult to tell apart. YOU AND ME BOTH, BRO.

Tomorrow I'm meeting my aunt for dinner. I'll need to do laundry.

The flappy plane is beeping at the fluffy nutchewer, and I am braining about hard squares of tasty submarines.

That is to say, the fishbrick concept keeps getting built upon.

( Fishbrick. )

There was pizza. More pizza would have been better; keeping co-workers who were not attending the event from sniping would have also been better. (I think moving up the delivery time would have helped also, to decrease the window at the risk of possibly late pizza.)

We doubled up on nametags: we had ours that we did, and also the dude who does the meetup had some specific ones. (Ours were pretty awesome, and they worked for the people who just sorta showed up.)

There were a bunch of people who used to work with us showed up: I got to meet the guy who had the cabinets before me. I feel honored.

The libations were no problem as per usual.

My Overlady got where she was going safely (it turns out that a great but one of those things you could never see coming way to stress me out is to have me dealing with a time-sensitive remote travel-related thing in an unfamiliar email system) and stuff. But fortunately it was something where I could just call instead of bashing my head on the email search (I am going to have to read their manual) for the email address that one of the A-Team left us.

I have WORDS for helldesk regarding fucking tags and the fucking trip back from Kipper/Llama. Fuck.

( More things. )

Today I drove. The parking situation was sort of dire at the hour I got there; I parked in the far garage and thought I could walk between the car and my building without a cane. Which was not the smartest decision I ever made, but not the dumbest either.

I had emailed Researcher The Stig regarding planning for his upcoming thing; part of that had included "hella pizza". He emailed back saying that he had been waiting for someone to use "hella" in work email since he arrived here, and I had just made his day. (Heh.)

This resulted in a lunch table discussion of how "hella" could be usefully added to services that have moods as part of their updates. I proposed that it be added to the list. The Renaissance Man counter-proposed that it be a tickybox to apply to the mood: are you tired, or hella tired? And then, if your entry was hella, was there anything that could be done to the styling? The Renaissance Man suggested that positive emotions could be intensified in some way, and negative emotions could be maybe faded.

Now it turns out that he had hit on one of my modest design-and-emotion related hot buttons unawares, and I hastened to enlighten him. He and I were both on the same general page as far as "positive" emotions, but just because more amped up works for "happy" and more diminished works for "sad", from the directions we were looking at it, doesn't mean that works for everything. "Angry" is also an energetic emotion, so "hella angry" would be adding intensity; "calm" is a quiet emotion, and "hella calm" would be a good thing, if perhaps excessively quiet.

Lunch was short, as I had a meeting to get to. I raced to the room I thought it was, consulted my phone, and raced to the room it actually was.

The meeting was about the upcoming internal thing, in the summer. In with the rest of the other stuff, Shibe Designer was on the topic of swag. I sort of think of him as kind of a wacky guy who is possibly likely to explode stifled creativity in an unexpected and possibly destructive direction, but he surprised me by stating a rule for swag up front: "Nothing that can be caught on fire."

There are a lot of things that can be caught on fire, y0.

This means that the candle wrapped in condoms which you can use as a slingshot or a whistle is right out.

Yesterday I bestowed some more chocolate covered espresso beans, and also some non-caffeinated pomegranate chocolate things upon the Renaissance Man. ("If it's not caffeinated, what's the damn point?") Today included the strict instructions to not stick them up his nose. Also a prohibition against snorting caffeine powder mixed with pixy stix. I shortly thereafter provided him with two pixy stix: "One for each side." Despite his previous firm declaration that he did not put citric acid up his nose. (Installing Citrix in your sinus data center: probably also a poor choice.) I finally remembered that I'd brought FEED with me, and dropped that off, for his copious spare time. (Basically it sucks to be the one person who does a thing who is also not on vacation when something urgent happens with the thing; he's My People now, and $FAMILY takes care of Their People.)

I bumped in to his officemate in the break room, and we introduced ourselves. I am still not used to being relatively tall, even though statistically speaking I know I am.

I headed out at a reasonably sensible hour to do hella pizza research. (Amusement: someone else's concept of "a lot of pizza" was "what, like 10 boxes?" Actually, math says 33.) My poor Researcher The Stig is getting stage fright: not the literal fear of being himself up in front of people, but fear that it'll be a complete shitshow of an event with all the ad-hockery and stuff hanging out of the fronts of our pants. I gave him the duck lecture. Even with many of the things that could go wrong, we already have the advantage of having had some of them go wrong before, and things still went well.