02:35 PM <Azz> https://www.monsterscooterparts.com/heart-shaped-scooter-tail-light.html "The inverted heart has come to symbolize strength & fortitude"
02:36 PM <Azz> It's truck nuts, for the power wheel chair
02:37 PM <PurpleK> rofl, totally
02:39 PM <PurpleK> "Our inverted heart scooter tail light is more than just a curiosity to symbolize strength and fortitude, it represents the sheer balls to drive a powered wheelchair on the road."
02:40 PM <Azz> And we have to drive on the road because the sidewalk is crap.
02:41 PM <PurpleK> totally
02:41 PM <PurpleK> just... still takes big balls and a tight sphincter.
02:41 PM <PurpleK> lol
02:42 PM <phone> mmmmmmmmmm, big balls and a tight sphincter.
02:42 PM <PurpleK> hahaha
02:42 PM <phone> now the phrase "load bearing balls" comes to mind.
02:42 PM <PurpleK> rofl
02:42 PM <Azz> lol

Earlier in the week, there was a small layoff. The unofficial communications networks at work have consequently been getting a lot of use as people attempt to figure out where the missing nodes are, beyond the obvious. There is a tradition of people sending a farewell email to their team and other close contacts. And then there are the people who use not!Facebook to do the same, and @-mention every group and individual who they can think of. Thus it was that I learned that Mr. Noise-to-Signal was laid off. Of my friends, the only person I know of who was laid off was R. There were no layoffs on my team.

R has been sent the information on where to find #adventuresofstnono. So have Mr. Zune and radius. (Yes, guys, I use an alias for this as well, and now you know where to find it. I started the practice of aliasing obscure/semi-private venues after the Incident where someone showed up uninvited in a different channel which I had mentioned, then never fit in well, angsted in-channel about not fitting in, and I eventually asked them to leave because I dreaded their presence and they were after all uninvited.)

Also leaving this week was one of the newer people on my team, whose wife got a dream job in another country, and (also as announced on not!Facebook) the second-in-command of the helldesk software. No word as to whether she was part of the layoff, or voluntarily heading for a lawn that hadn't been pissed on greener grass.

It being Friday and that point in the gas tank, I had to get gas before work, which resulted in a later arrival than would have otherwise been. Lunch was pleasant. It was the Rollercoaster Tycoon's last day (he's heading to a startup). I gave him my card.

A conference call with the vendor for the proposed new software followed. Researcher Haystack appears to have taken point on this one. His queries of the vendor's salesdudes are shaped slightly differently than mine. He's coming to it quite naturally from the perspective of the research utility of the thing; I'm coming at it from the shoving-all-the-things-in-it direction. Some of the things I had questions about had not occurred to him. He looks at the data structure of the Excel export of their template and goes "whaaaaaaaa---!!!" and I look at it and I go "wow, I would not have thought to do it like that, but I can do the thing", and most importantly the current thing we are using does not do the thing.

I still have many questions about their alleged choice of primary keys, but I think I can work with the thing.

Haystack likes Salesforce.

I made a list of my favorite software, starting from worst favorite and improving:

[that helldesk software]
[the procurement and expense software]
Salesforce
Outlook Web Access
Outlook
Kipper/Llama (fondness for the devs is coloring this)

Haystack was slightly surprised. I can't imagine why; it's not as if I haven't made my feelings fairly clear.

It was a beer bash day. I snagged a table. lb was not in, but Mr. Zune soon joined me, followed by Purple and large chunks of his team. radius also joined us. I waved hi to another friend, but the table was not quite large enough, so they sat elsewhere. Mr. Zune told college dorm tales. It turns out that when you freeze and then drop a pumpkin, shards get all over, and then they melt on your bike. This is not pleasant.

Joining #fishbrick is the fishdiscus, or fishbee -- first you #fishbrick the window, and then you throw the much more aerodynamic and prone to shattering fishdiscus through the hole. You can't really handle it barehanded, so you wear gloves. You keep the fishdiscus from sticking to the gloves with herring oil. In case they're gloves you might want to use again, you wear rubber gloves over them. A pair or two.

Shortly after Mr. Zune headed off, Lennon Glasses Guy wandered over.

radius regaled us with some of his OWA war stories. All he was trying to do was to move about 2,000 messages from one folder to another. Several months of swearing ensued. Presently, in the new folder, there are somewhere upwards of 40,000...

Lennon Glasses Guy observed that he's heard about an IRC channel driving some of this group's shenanigans from time to time, and he was curious about it. So he was issued a formal invitation to #cupcake. I think he will appreciate it, because he appreciates it when Purple and I bounce off each other at lunch, and has enjoyed the #cupcake table at beer bash.

The group split up. I went back to my desk and hammered on my inbox and the helldesk stuff a bit, although I was distracted by something terrible happening in Outlook when I tried to pick a conference room. It's always startling to watch the list of conference rooms populate and then vanish...

Presently, Purple pinged me. This time he had indeed parked in the same parking lot as I had, and we walked out. He had a banana and a tangerine; he held them both out and offered me some fruit. I picked the one that would not cause me woe. He suggested a frying pan and some rum. We chatted for a bit, and then he zipped off, as he had places to be. I chatted with Nora on the way home.

From Monday night, #adventuresofstnono working blue:

( NSFW, with even worse video link; mildly genital-essentialist )


So I woke up this morning with my early alarm and saw no good reason to go back to sleep. And I headed in to work. I started checking my email. I saw that the Conference Commandant had sent an invitation at about 7am. Which was for 11am. Which had been about five minutes ago. I reset my whiteboard for In Another Castle and skidded out the door for the shuttle up to the top of the hill, emailing as I went that I was on my way to the appointed building.

As I went across the second floor balcony, I saw the Events lady and the Commandant and Polka-Dot approaching. We waved. I went inside and down on the elevator, and we toured the conference rooms.

The committee chairs were charmed, and we put a hold on the rooms until we can get a confirmation of the actual dates (in January after people come back).

I'm going to have to, eventually, before it becomes more of an issue, have a brief chat with the Commandant about the hours in which she can expect me to be aware of my email. (Which is a conversation that I was having with Purple last night.) My expected sleep cycle swings between midnight to noon. I am currently hammering it back to 10:30am-ish via a very persistent set of alarms. I love my job. Nonetheless, I have three alarms. If it happens after midnight, don't expect me to see it until at least 10:30. When there's a known Thing which I need to be alert related to, I will actively monitor my email when I get up to pee in the night. When there isn't, I don't believe in actually being available 24x7, because I'm so very not getting paid like I should be.

There was another round of back-and-forth with the helpdesk. The tech of the moment declared that because our two test users who couldn't see the ticket via the link are mere R&D minions, everything was fine. I countered that there were use cases which made the inability to fucking link a fucking ticket a right bastard (without the swearing). I mentioned that this was a substantial regression and that it would be reported to the Torchbearer for triage. (I left unmentioned that the Torchbearer is now cc:ed on the ticket, and that I am one of the people giving substantial input on priority.)

Lunch happened. The group was chatting about how various places in the US had rather unexpected names. Purple joined us somewhat belatedly; I suspect he got swiped for conversation while in line. Eventually the topic turned to that of Fuck Off As A Service.

Table 1: engineers giggling over a Fuck Off as a Service API. Table 2: small children busily learning new words.

— Azure Luidaeg (@azurelunatic) December 23, 2014

The concept of Into the Woods on Boxing Day sounds moderately appealing to Purple, but he also has some friends who may need help moving at that point. We'll see. (Later, when I gave him the planned time and location, and said that this would diminish the chances that he could come, he queried. He'd been counting on me picking a place closer to myself in his initial assessment. I'd been willing to negotiate something closer to middle ground had he been guaranteed-free.) I would still of course be happy to see him, I said. He'd figured as much.

That turned into a discussion of the times and places where I would not be happy to see him. I eventually boiled down my general constraints:
* Clothed.
* Not awakening me from my sleep cycle.
* Not while I was in the middle of some bodily function or another for which I require privacy.
* Not while I was in the middle of something time-sensitive for which I require concentration.

So, him showing up on my doorstep and waking me up to see this dead skunk? Right out. Which is not his style.

Most of my day involved being face-first in the middle of explicitly writing out various of the assumptions embedded in the location meeting. I also did some of the aforementioned wrestling with helldesk, plus some bonus procurement wrangling.

Last night on not!Facebook, I tried to politely articulate some of my requirements for good documentation. ( Read more... )

Today's Procurement wrangling involved scanning some documents, then withdrawing the requisition, attaching them, and re-submitting it. Which, if the documentation had been available in non-video form, I might have got right on the first go.

To rest my brain, I did poke at a work-side Gallery of Hostile Signatures for local amusement.

I located a fireplace video and put it on the big medium screen. It was cute. People liked it.

Someone stopped by with cookies. It turned out to have been R.

I came up with a suggestion to maybe make the helldesk software a little better. When I mentioned it in #cupcake, I accidentally caught Mr. Zune on remote desktop working from two timezones away at 10pm.

All the running about with stairs did a bit of a number on me, and then the extended focus of writing up the meeting notes and braindumping gave me the headache.

Purple was also a bit braindrained from braindumping. He observed that my fireplace was buffering. He did a "Daddy, my fishtank is buffering!" conversation, involving "Did you reboot the router?" I giggled extensively.

My knees were not yelly today, but I was substantially off-balance, enough to accidentally punch the disco ball. I took my work cane out to the car. Purple was gentle hugging me goodnight, even though I was wobbly, not hurty. He joked about the level of kicks that should be dealt out; I demonstrated lightly kicking at the level of his laptop bag, and explained that in deference to my current status, I would only be kicking at that level and not any higher. Usually I go for the head or shoulder when being silly with kicking. (And the advantages of playing with people who are not Darkside is, they are less likely to attempt to knock me over. Heh.)

The thing which I was going to tell Purple about, but my train of thought got derailed, was the grapefruit video.

And I will see Purple tomorrow.

Pillow fort: didn't happen.
Abduction by #cupcake for the purposes of an ice-cream walk: happened.

( Azz vs. the IT Infrastructure )


Lunch with Purple. Despite the extra-full parking lot, very few of the usual suspects were around for lunch. Purple and I wound up having a nice quiet end of the table to ourselves.
Whatever they did to the pulled pork at the taco station was not good: it was somewhat sweet, which would have possibly been all right if it had had any amount of salt, which it did not. I asked Purple to pass the salt, by which he concluded that I did not have the chicken burrito, as he'd had an encounter with the same pulled pork earlier that week.
Purple's taking the entirety of Thanksgiving week off, and may not leave his condo during that time. He may therefore be absent from the Seanan party.
I observed my grandmanager showing up at an external cafeteria door, plate in one hand and cellphone held to the ear with the other. He stood there sort of uncertain what to do now until someone got up to let him in. Shortly thereafter, he was seen at the badged exit into the rest of the building, cellphone in one hand on one ear and other hand on other ear to block noise, spinning in circles until the other people near the door opened it and he was able to walk through with them.
Purple then defined the term "telepathetic". He removed the salt shaker from by my plate. "Hey!" "And instead of asking someone to pass the salt, you just stare at it looking pathetic until someone hands it to you." He moved it back. Then he took it away again, quickly returning it after I gave him The Look (not a pathetic one, an "I'm not wearing the loon beak RIGHT NOW, mister, but..." one).


Somewhere partway through the afternoon, a piece of network infrastructure went biting-pear-shaped and fucked the network but gloriously. That was a bit not good. Side effects included utter hosing of the thing which you need to authenticate through in order to get to the offsite SaaS helpdesk (sessions time out after 30 minutes).


In unqualifiedly excellent news: the Dean and I have an appointment for next Friday to print and laminate disambiguation signs for all external entrances (of at least my building, but I'm hoping to prepare the lot and just do it all in one go). My manager and Rocky were beside themselves with glee when I ran over to tell someone, and Rocky particularly hopes to sign all the new buildings.

phone: Wait, why would you need that?
ajl: "Hi, I'm here at Building D with your pizza."
ajl: "Great, what door are you at?"
ajl: "D."
phone: Oh. Yeah.

Then Purple and Radius discussed various amusing words which could be made with the letters A-D followed by low-ish Roman numerals. DIV, BI, AIX ... I shall perhaps spoil their fun a little through careful formatting.


Then Kat called. Upon learning that I was still at work and that Purple had just asked me when I was ready to leave, she demanded to talk to him. Hilarity ensued; he did show up and Kat somehow got from Segways (Purple and I need them to get around in the Very Large Office Park) through helpful ferrets in packing peanuts to whether or not Purple is a Centauri. (He helpfully held up his hair in a crest.) "YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO SEE HIM HE HAS A PREHENSILE PENIS!" Kat declared.

Purple held up a lemonhead. I had the phone in one hand and something (I think my headset) in the other, so I just opened my mouth. Purple tried throwing it in. It bounced off my lip and hit the asphalt. Woops.

I had to explain "drift-compatible" to Purple, as he hasn't seen Pacific Rim.

Purple is nicely tall, but not too tall. I like the way I can lean my head on his shoulder when hugging goodnight. His neck is warm. His hair likes to try to get inside my face.

adaptationdecay ran Bad Bang 2. I was just going to sit and giggle until norabombay found her poptarts on the pinch-hit list and grabbed me by the ear...

This is deliberate badfic. I do not expect any of you to read it. However, lb and StPatience (who are From The Internet and non-fannish) did in fact read it and then spend a chunk of time quoting their favorite bits back to me... and it is good that they enjoyed it, because they helped with the brainstorming process.

do they have within, The sons of the glorious gods?" - the fic (1693 words) by azurelunatic
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - All Media Types, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies), Breakfast Pastry (anthropomorphic)
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Thor/Breakfast Pastry, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles/Pizza, April O'Neil/Darcy Lewis
Characters: April O'Neil, Darcy Lewis, Thor (Marvel)
Additional Tags: no cylons, even though there are plenty of toasters, idk maybe one of the toasters is really a cylon, maybe one of the toaster pastries was a cylon, maybe you're a cylon, pop tarts, toaster pastries, I tried to get my friend to beta this, but all I got was a lecture about how I was using the wrong cooking product as lube, Not Beta Read, lube/not-lube, Not Lube, Recreational Drug Use, toasterfuck jizzworld
Summary:

In the first Bad Bang, we saw Thor fucking a Pop Tart, while getting reamed by a Ninja Turtle. It was the most erotic thing I ever saw.

But I wanted to give it a sequel. So here is a Pop-Tart, fucking Thor to find out what is with in.

Contains boy kissing, pastires. Don't like don't read.

---

Bonus chatlog of the creative process below.

( From #adventuresofstnono )

I really really needed a "white flowers and MURDER" perfume for work today. The J-Horror BPAL from synecdochic worked wonders today.

I woke up substantially before my alarm, and decided to say fuck it and get out of bed around 8:30 (only a half-hour early). Then I took a leisurely drive to work, chatting with Nora the whole way (well, post-coffee).

My Overlady popped over to see what was the matter, that I was in at the normal beginning of the engineering day. I explained. Her 12:00 was with someone I have dearly missed; I suggested some choice snippets to mention. Basically no sooner did she pop off to her own office than lb and the angry man with all the tattoos showed up. My cube was a distracting cave of wonders, but we went over the sortable chart of grouses (the wiki page with the timeline of the helldesk software, the sortable wikitable with requested improvements, the R&D end-user profile, and the picture of the ruffed grouse) and made a few edits and priority confirmations before marching off to the meeting itself. Beldorion was not in the office today, and Gramp had a conflicting meeting.

The meeting was on the ass-end of campus, in perhaps literally the furthest building from where lb sits: definitely the horizontally furthest, although there is a diagonal building which may have a little greater actual distance. Some people were at no pains to be friendly to engineering-land. We got there a minute after by my watch, while the people already in the room were giving it a few more minutes to see who else would be there and get the webex started.

I was correct in yesterday's assertion that today's meeting was unmissable. I believe I am recalling my manager verbatim when I relate that her instructions to me were: "Give 'em hell."

In the room: the aforementioned incomprehensible twerp, the highly placed dev running the demo, someone sitting quietly and shutting up, Too Much Eyeliner Lady (somewhere highly placed in local ownership of the helldesk software, but a consummate buck-passer), someone from IT, and then the engineering-land contingent. We were, in order: the Desert Islander, very chill; the Angry Tattooed Man, angry; lb, stern; Azz, by turns stern and earnestly, specifically, functionally constructive. Engineering-land contingent got printouts of the wiki page for reference. lb and I took notes (him every now and then on his phone, me with pen and paper).

The engineering contingent post-mortem lasted the twenty minutes back to engineering-land, with further follow-up to follow at some point I am sure.

Lunch was with Purple, and pleasant. He has an ambitious project to spearhead with the knowledge and blessing of his manager.

Wednesday is the day when the cafeteria does their hump day takeout program: place your order before early afternoon, and you too can take home a corporate cafeteria quality meal at takeout prices. It looked decent, so I ordered.

My Overlady came back from her 12:00 with many bits of information. She perched on my couch and shared the intelligence from this meeting. Oh, my.

My computer's been in need of a reboot for a bit, so I was chipping away at getting the things done that I needed to get done before that point. Eventually it hit mid-evening. I pinged Purple and (after flailing at sithjawa a bit) mentioned the concept of dinner, and did he want any. Which he did. We opted for my cube this time. I have a guest couch! He said he'd be over in a bit, and to feel free to start without him (always a dangerous statement from an engineer). I was just separating the plates when he arrived. It's nice to have guests in my cube! I began to tell him some of the highlight from my Overlady's 12:00.

I heard Designer Sparkles coming out of an office. "There's nobody here at this hour!" she said. "No," my Overlady agreed, "except maybe Azure." Designer Sparkles wandered out of the office in search of places more like home. And as my Overlady came around the corner, there I was! With a Purple in my cube.

Then followed a delightful conversation wherein my Overlady shared intelligence from her 12:00 with Purple, we compared some experiences raising hell in school, and all in all a great time was had. My Overlady headed off in search of her own dinner, and we finished ours. Then Purple went back to his desk, and I had the joy of a very crashed computer in need of some Windows updates. My next task: install Notepad++, because I do much better about autosaving in that than in Windows Notepad. (Which I just typed as Nopetad.)

Parking lot conversation was largely fishbrick. Also puddinghandle, toiletjello, blenderpoop, shortsheet, notebolt, and other mostly theoretical forms of mayhem. To be clear: very few of these are actually good ideas to do! Puddinghandle: mix up some very, very chocolatey chocolate pudding. Put a roll of toilet paper on top of someone's car, to catch their attention. Spread the pudding under the door handle. Toiletjello: this is a Shawn stunt. Mix clear gelatin with the boiling water. Pour into the cold water of the toilet bowls at school. (This works best in a cold climate.) Allow enough time to set before the students come in. Shawn was disappointed in the janitors in that they did not think of the hot water (add more hot water, perhaps from the coffee pot, to dissolve the jello safely) and instead removed it by hand. (Purple: "That would be an unforgettable parfait.") Blenderpoop: targeting the Insufferable Smoothie person, either by actually doing it (ideally with multiple DNA sources) or just leaving a note with a crude depiction of a stick figure pooping in their blender. Shortsheet: this is the classic prank. Notebolt: leave a few spare bolts on somebody's desk with a note saying something like "I think you'll need these." The bolts are not actually from anything they own, but they spend some time looking fruitlessly. (Sort of like releasing the five pigs, numbered 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, into a sufficiently large building.)

Beardwatch 2014: still on.

At the end of the day, I still smell faintly of white flowers, although less like murder.

Today was a day!

( Contemptuous podcasts are not enjoyable. )

The Polka-Dot Researcher wandered by my cube and wanted to know if post-its and highlighters were a thing that I could help set her up with. She left my cube with some jellybeans, a rainbow stack of post-its, a package of rainbow bookmark flags, and a set of rainbow highlighters. After which I placed an order to replenish my stock of flags and highlighters. One of the sneaky benefits of this is that when I take the set of highlighters on my desk and present someone with instant gratification, the person gets highlighters instantly, the highlighters are nearly new, I'm likely to be able to do things that either don't involve highlighters or use some personal ones, and I get an entirely new pack of work highlighters slightly later.

The babyfish graduates high school in less than a week. I am immensely proud of her, for academic achievement under adverse circumstances, for staying alive, and for not stabbing her mother in the kidneys in the dead of night. All of these are worth celebrating.

My comfy chair is seductively cozy, and results in conferences and confidences. First my Overlady popped in, and we discussed all sorts of things. Later, R came by in the plotting of a DIY BYOB bash. I'd just got a call from Purple asking whether he could stow a box of stuff which he didn't care to have the movers tangle with in my cube, so we waited a while (he had been held up; we eventually waited outside). Of course, no sooner did we settle in outside than Purple showed up with the box. So I escorted him back to my cube, where I'd cleared a space specifically for the box. "You didn't have to come with me." "You didn't have to open the door. I have more hands than you." "Well, technically..." "Let me show you my third hand. And my third eye." "... ... ..." "And my third leg?" Wisely not responding to that statement, he parked his box and laptop bag in my cube, and we went back out to rejoin the fun.

There had been some earlier discussion about heading to check out a food truck thing, but there was no immediate decision made.

I got some jellybeans and the Who Would Win game. Purple prefers these to the Jelly Belly, which is nice as the CEO of this company, again, hasn't been caught saying terrible things about trans* kids. ( Who would win: Kirk or Vader? )

( Fun with dinner! )