Can’t Tell My Husband

One day I randomly discovered that watered down coke zero tastes just fine, when served partially frozen or with a lot of ice.  Further, I found that randomly admixing other beverages to it lends a certain interest to the concoction, creating a kinder, gentler chalice of iggy pop.

My husband’s peculiarities are such that he never finishes his seltzer completely.  Waste not want not, I have taken to using the dregs of his seltzers to flavor my watered down coke zero.  This is disgusting to him, but he allows it.  But my newest transgression might be so odious that it provokes murdilation with extreme prejudice, and therefore it must remain a dark secret between you and you and you and I.

There is also at least some risk of foodborne illness.  That said, I’ve seen a guy regularly eat bananas that have turned completely brown and mushy – like that was his preference – and he never died, so here I go…

Last week I sliced an apple and I did not eat the whole thing.  It remained in the crisper until this week.  It wasn’t completely rotten, but it was a little off.  Random areas had become lightly discolored, and more peculiar, the taste was altered by proximity to a big bag of fire roasted hatch chile peppers.  Both the apple and the peppers were sealed in ziploc bags, but those peppers were radioactive.  This experience is like eating a radish with light sweetness and a healthy dash of green pepper flavor.

Why am I strangely compelled to continue eating this corrupted apple?  By the time this post comes out of queue, I will either be dead from the consequences, or alive and fine, despite my poor judgment.  Stay tuned.

Hello from beyond the grave perhaps.  I hope you’re having a nice day.

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Brainjackin: Let’s Play

Didja know, there are yewchoob channels where all the person does is play video games?  Sometimes they do it straight, like, only the sights and sounds you would see if you were playing the game on your own, with their invisible hand on the controller.  Other times they do a voice over, with varying degrees of snark or foolery.  Other times, they have a face on the screen – either their actual mug, or a cartoon avatar of some kind.  Originally these were called “let’s play” videos.  I’m not hip to the current lingo.

I wouldn’t know about these if it wasn’t for my husband and his perpetual search for distractions.  He introduced me and I have enjoyed many hours of diversion as well.

Let’s play videos evolved into the more recent generation, which is people running live video streams on a place called twitch.  They play the game live while the chat runs on the screen yelling nazi memes and throwing fractional bitcoins at the players.  idk, never created an account over there.  But it’s all good.  Time marches on.  And there are still plenty of let’s play videos on yewchoob to choose from.  I favor John Wolfe.  Currently he does most of his gaming content on his second channel, which is something he had to create because yewchoob’s algorithms are crap for the liddle guy and even the middle guy, which is where he finds himself these days.

Before James? Stephanie Sterling came out, and before she?they? became too doomy and repetitive for me to watch (hence my lack of awareness of current pronouns), they occasionally did this kind of content for their own channel.  They were especially focused on playing the shittiest games polluting steam and itch.io.  A fan made collections of the best excerpts from those videos, and I include one below, for your delectation.  The Lenny Kravitz near the beginning is from Neil Cicieraga’s amusing remix.  Enjoy.

edit to add cw:  for the none people who still care, this does have a ton of ableist language.  technically some of these are horror games but the horror content has trouble breaking thru the wall of mangled medium.

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When it’s Over

I’ve been pretty blithe in my attempts to make people feel less doomy, and PZ did call me out on it, in a sense, during the August podcast.  The main thing I try to tell people is that for most of us life will go on – the terror fascism inspires may not play out as dramatically in most of our own lives as we are anticipating.  If you look at people from Ghana to Papua New Guinea, there are a lot of travails but people still live life, every day.  This perspective becomes especially important as shitler puts us in the fast lane to economic ruin.  We’ll suffer sometimes, but we will live our lives, at least as well as all the people who have been living under tyranny and economic depredation all around the world.  However, sometimes, for some of us, doom is gonna happen.  What then?

I’m put in mind of this by all the comments on a recent post.  A lot of people have family members near the end of the line, or have that in their own headlights.  I was reminded of my mortality a few years ago during my first nbd-styled cancer situation.  As a philosophical materialist, I know what comes after this: a big nothin’, which I want to put off as long as possible.  And my neurotypical sauce keeps me feeling like most likely, that will happen.  There’s a chance I’ll die randomly at any given moment of any given day, but it’s a small chance, and if it doesn’t happen, I’ll most likely be fine – even accomplish a few useful things before I go.  I just know, on a rational level, not even a minute of it is guaranteed, which is low-key depressing.

This is not to say I’m abandoning my anti-doomerism policy or even the earnest beliefs behind it, that for most of us life will remain tolerable for most of the path, that we gain nothing by living in terror and despair.  As I mention in the policy tho, I am occasionally going to point to dark truths, and this is one of them.  It’s something I need to address, because it points to what some might call a good reason to abandon the policy.

Sometimes you have to talk about your despair.  Arguably, sometimes you have to wallow in the ableism inspired by a world run by cruelty that defies all reason, by living among buffalo that are stampeding for the cliff.  First point true, second one maybe.  Neither of those are reasons for me to allow it here.  After all, Pharyngula is right next door and has no such limits.  If you need it, there it is.  And if you need to get away from it, here I am.

But what should I say to people for whom doom is extremely nigh?  I don’t know if I’m the guy to say anything to them.  My “dark realist” perspective makes me rather terrible at helping friends and loved ones through depression.  Sometimes at my job I have to talk to people who are dying, or have recently had loved ones die – sometimes their children.  I gotta keep it professional.  This isn’t a professional setting and I don’t have that excuse here.

Not everybody can be everything to everybody, and my pollyanna ways are a thin coat over a rather bleak point of view.  Best not to interrogate it.  Even so, I’m not lying when I say most of us are gonna be alright.  We’ll have pain and suffering, we’ll have ok moments, we’ll have life, the same as anyone has ever had.

There are many places in the world where that is less true.  Very sorry to those people, but we can’t all be thinking about that all the time, or life is over for us.  I expect that some people dying in pointless wars will die thinking, I’d love every last motherfucker living a life of ease to experience what I’m experiencing.  If I have to die, everyone should die.  I’ll forgive them for feeling that.  I’m a cranky bitch and I’d probably feel the same if I had to live through such times.

But I also expect there are people in Ukraine, Palestine, etc, who would not begrudge any of us trying to live life in peace and feel as ok as possible – as long as we do what we can to help steer our respective societies away from war and ruin.  Who are we beholden to, the angriest in suffering or the more kind?  What should we do?  Live in anguish and die in terrorist action against our tyrants and warmongers?  Or do what we can, within the limits that allow us to know the fleeting happiness we are allowed on this bitch of an earth?

When something scary or sad is going on, there are a million motherfuckers lining up to tell you that you are not scared or sad enough.  Let this blog be one place that calls bullshit on that.  Do what you can to make life better for others, as much as you can, but know your limits, and allow yourself to be as happy as is possible – in a world that is doing its best to make you miserable.

It’s Gloria Gaynor time.  I will survive.  You will too.  Until you can’t, and I’m sorry to hear if that’s happening for you.  I hope you can find solace and peace along your way out the door, as I hope I do when it’s time for me to go.  That’s all I can reasonably say or do for you.  Good luck to all, and a good life as well.

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Awkward Murder

This dream started with the usual kind of bullshit.  I was in the car, my husband behind the wheel bordering on a panic attack because he doesn’t know how to drive any better than I do, and we were trying to make decisions at highway speed.  I wanted to help him but I couldn’t make myself stop trying to explain the song “God Wrote Cum Junkie” to my homeboy Jeremy, who talks very little and was giving no feedback.

This transitioned into yet more of usual kind of bullshit, in bathrooms because IRL I had to go to the bathroom.  In this part I was a young doofus of the kind that must get his ass kicked and learn kung fu in certain movies.  Except in this dream, my destiny was to become a murder victim.  Martial arts gangster types (yakuza?) were going to murder me for an accidental transgression against Kung Fu Laws.

The dream switched perspectives to have me in the role of one of those gangsters.  The plot was supposed to be that I feel sympathy for the bozo who is about to get offed by my homies, and turn on them to save his life.  But I couldn’t get over my sense of honor to betray them, until it was too late.  On seeing previous me’s brutal death (lightly strangled and sawed open from stomach to sternum), I snapped and attacked my homies to avenge him.

Still in a filthy restroom, I quickly killed the guy who did the deed, leaving just the lady among my criminal colleagues.  I offered to just drown her as a mercy – less painful than what I did to the first guy.  She agreed and I started trying to drown her in the sink.

People kept coming in to use the bathroom, including a mom and her children.  It was taking forever to drown my homegirl, and the mom explained to the kids that there was nothing they could do – it would be like trying to save a baby bird that fell out of a nest.  Yakuza ladies getting waterboarded to death = the circle of life.

This felt grody but I also felt committed to the path, that I couldn’t make myself stop trying to kill her.

Anyway, this is the second time within a short while that I’ve had a dream shift to a different perspective, and from that perspective, watched my previous self get murdered by criminals.  That’s a heckuva recurring theme.

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No Thoughts, Head Empty

there’s this trend among youths on social media to speak in memes that self-deprecate the intelligence.  “no thoughts, head empty”  “two brain cells to rub together”  “smooth brain”  etc.  i dun’t cotton to it, son.  save it for your sons of superwholock discord.

but i genuinely am running out of shit to post – an experience kin to running out of thoughts.  the obvious solution would be to react to news, but fuck that noise.

probably within a week you’ll see my tap out post, then I’ll be back to my old ways – still more productive than 90% of the sidebar here, heh.

let’s see how much longer this baloney rolls…

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Murdercat Management

I had a dream that was some kind of medieval fantasy scenario where two opposing sides of a battle had to alter the battlefield to make sure they did not get killed by roaming leopards, and to arrange it so that the other guys were.  Not sure if I was a character or an omniscient watcher, but as I reflect, it was definitely a video game or board game situation.

In fact, if you abstract the idea far enough, there are certainly video games that operate on the same principle.  There is a damaging / dangerous / deleterious presence on the playing field, and the opposing sides can, within constraints, change the barriers and openings on the field to protect themselves or harm their opponent.  I’m not an encyclopedia of gaming history, but let me know if you can think of one like this, in the comments.

And if you can’t think of any, and are fairly certain this is a new cool amazing idea that will get you a bank full of money, have at it.  I don’t care.  Throw me a farthing from the back of your lambo, or don’t.  Hell, I’ll let you have the name, tho it’s not very snappy.  At least it’s alliterative.

Murdercat Management, coming soon to an arcade near you.

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Wassup

I have nothing queued for today.  Pretty close to the end of my sauce for daily posting.  I will just mention some random biz that is on my mind or that I have going on.  Feel free to do the same in comments.

I’ve gone up a mountain for the second time in as many years, after a long-ass streak of doing no such thing.  Mount Rainier.  Pretty cool but I’m finna learn mad science so I can genetically engineer voracious diurnal high altitude bats, before I do that again.  Death to mosquitoes.

Have you seen that tiny bed they have at ikea?  About cat-sized, but shaped like human bed?  We got one.  Our cat initially said no, but finally got up on it for a nap a few hours ago.  Purchase justified.

Not getting enough sleep.  Got enough last night then immediately set to ruining that good work by staying up past one AM to write this and do a few chores.  Ugh.

Walked around the peat bog park in Federal Way yesterday.  Not nearly as many mosquitoes.  Barely saw any birds, but the birdy app caught a moderate assortment of characters.  Nothing out of the norm.  Also notable what it missed.  And where were the douglas squirrels?  I saw a few on one trip years ago and never since.  Kinda creepy.

Had a shitty phone conversation recently with a racist 80 year old named Virgil.  Are there any decent virgils out there anymore?

I think I’m gonna go back to Hurricane Ridge in a few months here, have a cold weather picnic with chipmunks and canada jays and doctor seuss trees.  Hope I can.

Anyway, how’s your dog?  How about them Bulls?  Was yer band inspired by The Velvet Underground?  Say hi to your mother for me.

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Jenny McCarthy sang Trans Rights?

I had a dream a young lady in a black wig came into my place of work.  This was Jenny McCarthy, younger than she would be in real life, fallen on hard times that she will never experience in real life.  She was reporting income from a singing gig at a strip club, because she was receiving a need-based social benefit with eligibility tightly linked to those numbers.

As I was trying to get access to her benefit record for the purpose of placing this work report, her social security number was showing on two lines, where one had to zigzag between them to get the sequence, and each zero was replaced with an ascii character of a double zero.  Do those even exist?  She was sitting right next to me and I had to dissuade her from looking at the screen while I sorted this out.  I told her that normally she’d be on the other side of the counter, please don’t read this stuff.

Somehow that changed in the course of the conversation to where I was willing to let her sign into gmail on my computer, to download her pay stub.  It was a pdf full of hyperlinked images, looking like a porn site.  I was trying to understand which number represented her gross income and accidentally touched one of those links, forcing me to close my browser immediately before the malware could load.  Then I had to get back in and start over from scratch.

In waking life, I’m under pressure at work to not use the hold button.  I just try to do my inputs quietly while people yak at me.  She said she wanted to regale me with an original song about trans rights, and launched into it.  I had to ask her to be quiet twice, while nearby coworkers were on phone calls.

She started playing with one of those coworker’s hair, like a stripper might do to somebody during a lap dance.  Then Patrick Stewart came, in character as her strip club manager, in a black toupee of his own, tousling her wig hair.  I got that he was playing a character even tho I didn’t feel the same about her, and wondered why he was still doing shitty parts when he could have retired long ago.

I finished my work, she was gone, and I wanted to tell a coworker about it, enough that I violated a privacy policy to do so.  Then I noticed Jim Carrey sitting on floor, leaning against a pillar, and thought, shit, ex-boyfriends are a category of people we particularly do not want to disclose information to.  I hoped he hadn’t heard me.  Ho-hum, I woke up.

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Be Still and Know

I was in the parking lot of home despot, when I saw this sign at a distance.  Initially I thought it said, “I AM GOD.”  Strange place for fundie horseshit, I mused, until the actual product was revealed: “FARM FRESH SOD,” where the words farm and fresh were de-emphasized.

I had been primed to see these words by this ornament dangling from the rearview mirror of my ride’s coach:

Sit still and know that if you misbehave, jesus will fuck you up.  Bes’ believe.

I like to mix the ideas.  KNOW THAT I AM SOD, THE FARM FRESH GOD, like a parody of this jam:

If you haven’t thought of that song since your homeboy in college DL’d a midi of it in 1989, you’re welcome.

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Life List: Sooty Grouse

I’m in love with some chickens.  Sooty grouse are a pretty generic pheasanty-type bird.  I think a pheasant is a grouse if it spends most of its time being brown, but I could be wrong.  Chickeny overall look but with cryptic brown coloration (males get fancy in mating season) and no wacky head ornaments.  I believe chickens cluck to let each other know where they are in the underbrush; these guys made a soft woob woob noise instead.

The thing is, despite being game birds, these ones had no fear of people.  They weren’t as obviously hoping for treats as the canada jays, but might have been fed by some scofflaw in the past.  They walked in and out of plain sight, right next to the path – in snatching distance.  Their calls were sweet and their eyes big and cute.  It was a very nice encounter.

This was on a recent trip to Mt. Rainier, where we fucked up pretty badly at estimating our abilities, got wreck’d.  I kept saying “when you need it to have ended an hour ago but it’s still going.”  In the last couple miles we were basically being chased over the rough-hewn terrain by multiple species of mosquito.  They got our asses.  It was not worth it.

But it was almost worth it.  In addition to the sooty grouse family, we saw canada jays and two types of chipmunk, all close enough to get a pretty good look, and a lot of wildflowers and natural majesty – like looking at Rainier’s peak from the lower slopes.  The animals were close enough it was like being in a zoo without bars.  Oh, and we had to stop the car for an elk, which was a lot more impressive in size than the usual white-tailed deer.  But still…

I ain’t doing that again anytime soon.

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