Another Spin 'Round The Sun

Happy birthday to me! I am 45 today, which... Well, I shall not dwell upon that too much, I guess, except to be glad to have made it this far.

Mostly, I am busy feeling excited about going to the Welcome to Night Vale live show tonight! Although it's also maybe a little bit awkward, because people -- mostly my relatives -- keep asking me what I'm doing for my birthday, and I keep saying, "Oh, I'm going to Albuquerque and seeing a show," and then they ask me what it is, and then I have to try and explain what Night Vale is, and... Yeah, good luck with that.

But! It is going to be very awesome, and I am super-psyched about it.

Now, if I can just finally get my driveway done, it will be a terrific week all the way around. (I was told it would be in the morning, one day this week. Given that the week is slowly running out of mornings, I am beginning to get nervous. But, eh. It'll happen! And that will be one less giant thing hanging around for me to worry about. Which will be an excellent present, so, yay!)

Space Stuff

Also an eensy bit belated, but hearty congratulations to the Juno team, who are all set now to do some really awesome science at Jupiter. Let us know if you find any monoliths, guys!

July Currentlies

Happy belated Independence Day to my fellow Americans! And congratulations to us, I guess, for managing that e pluribus unum thing more successfully than our parent country. Ahem.

Right. Time for the currentlies!

Current clothes: Blue shorts. A Doctor Who t-shirt with the 10th Doctor's (in)famous "big ball of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff" quote on it. White socks.

Current mood: Pretty good. Got lots of sleep today.

Current music: Nothing much.

Current annoyance: They told me "some time in early July," and it's early July now, but I'm still not sure exactly when the contractors are going to be here to do my driveway. Which is understandable, and probably not a big deal. My boss even very kindly re-arranged the schedule so I'm not on night shifts next week, so I'm not faced with the possibility of trying to sleep while people are using jackhammers outside my house. (Unless they end up doing it later in the month, I guess, on the Monday after my night-shift weekend, but that'd probably be more deal-withable, anyway.) But I get really, really antsy when I can't get things pinned down so I can make plans.

Current thing: So, I did finish playing Undertale again, and got my happy ending reward for not killing people. You can also get a very different kind of play-through if, instead, you kill everybody, but there was no way I was going to do that, partly because I didn't want to go through it again, but mostly because of the overwhelming guilt. So I found a YouTube video that'd show me what happens if you do that... and the game still managed to make me feel like a terrible person, just for watching it. Well played, game. Well, played. Anyway. That was definitely worth the ten bucks I paid for it on Steam, because even being done with it, thoughts and feelings about it seem to be lingering in my head and bouncing off each other in interesting ways. Arguably, when you play it as a pacifist, its response is a little too preachy and saccharine, but overall it's a well-aimed commentary on the largely unexamined way that games expect you to progress through violence. And when you put the various possible paths together, there's some fascinatingly meta stuff going on. Also, it has funny skeletons.

Current desktop picture: Still the same 12th Doctor wallpaper.

Current book: The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee. A good (if perhaps slightly over-hyped) book about a super-depressing subject.

Current song in head: Some of the stupidly catching music from Undertale.

Current refreshment: Nothing, but it's gonna have to be lunchtime soon.

Current DVD in player: I just finished disk 3 of season 2 of Community. Which is slightly weirder than season 1. I am not complaining about this. Truth is, despite the occasional musing about whether perhaps our popular culture is spending a little too much time gazing into its own navel, I actually do love the meta. (With or without funny skeletons.)

Current happy thing: I've been taking a little extra time to relax lately. It is good for the soul.

Current thought: Speaking of funny skeletons, I think I'm going back to the Discworld Death novels next. Hmm. Come to think of it, Discworld is also pretty meta. There seem to be some strange, strange patterns in my media consumption at the moment...

Some Reactions To Some Entertainments

In the interest of actually updating once in a while, here's some media stuff I'm currently/recently into, and the slightly odd thought's I've been having about them:

I've been playing Undertale, the adorable game designed to make you feel like human garbage. (Why is it so hard not to kill things? WHY??!) I actually finished it once, but have started over again trying to do things differently, which apparently is what the game expects you to do if you actually want to not feel like human garbage. I cannot remotely decide whether this is brilliant and thematically deep, or just emotionally sadistic. Probably both.

I just finished watching The Wire, which does, indeed, live up to its reputation as a landmark piece of TV drama. And leaves one at the end with the impression that perhaps everyone is human garbage, made so by a crushing and inescapable human-garbage-producing system. (Well, all of us except maybe that one newspaper guy, anyway. And Bubbles, who is so darned likeable one can forgive him anything.) Honestly, I was eager to finally get through this show for sheer cultural literacy purposes, but now that I'm finished with it, I miss it already.

I've also been watching Community, which, mercifully, does not make me feel like human garbage, but which does make me wonder: How is it that tired, annoying sitcom plot points and cheesy, annoying sitcom morals-of-the-story suddenly become entertaining again if the show in question acknowledges, tacitly or explicitly, that that's what it's doing? I swear, part of me, watching this thing, is appreciating the show's ironic approach in a way that is itself ironic (because ironic meta is soooo last decade, amirite?), and it is at about this point that I start to wonder if our culture is about to disappear up its own navel, and whether that's a good thing or a bad thing or what. Eh, whatever. It make for an enjoyable half-hour of television, anyway.

New Mexico In June: It Makes You Not Want To Be In New Mexico In June

I still aten't dead. I've just 1) not had anything particularly interesting to say, and 2) not had lots of motivation or energy for blogging, or for much of anything else, for that matter. We've reached that inevitable stretch of triple-digit days here, the ones that leave you with the disturbing feeling that the sun is actively trying to kill you, and that rob you of your will to live, or at least of your will to do anything other than crank up the struggling A/C -- the swamp cooler can make it livable in my house, under conditions like these, but can't actually get it all the way to cool -- and lie on the sofa with a cold drink and a book. I have a to-do list as long as my arm, and I'm really hoping to get at least some of it done on my days off this week, but I don't think most of it is happening. The yard work, which would have to involve getting up very early to get it finished while the yard is still capable of sustaining human life, is almost certainly not going to get done. No matter how tall the weeds are getting.

Of course, summer is also fire season here. I've already had one person who saw a story about fires in the southwest on the national news ask me about it, so, for the record, no, I'm not on fire, or in any obvious immediate danger of catching on fire. The Dog Head fire, which is the big fire you may have heard about, is considerably north of me. We have had one only a few miles away, though, which I did find a little too close for comfort. The giant, dark plume of smoke visible from here the first day that one was burning was certainly unpleasant to look at, not least because it covered a surprising amount of the northern horizon. It did destroy a couple of houses and some other buildings, which is awful. But I don't think it was in any real danger of coming this way, so the most I personally suffered was some lung irritation from the smoke.

Honestly, fires are pretty much a fact of life in this part of the country at this time of the year. There's at least one right now that's being allowed to burn for the sake of the ecosystem, which evolved to expect a fire from time to time. It's when they encroach on human habitation that they make the news. And the Dog Head has done some terrible encroaching -- well, a couple dozen houses, but that's beyond terrible, if one of them happens to be yours. I think they have the worst of it under control now, though.

Anyway. That's the status of things at the moment: I myself am fine, albeit lethargic, but the state I live in basically feels like some cruel child-god is holding a giant magnifying between us and the sun. But monsoon season should be here in earnest any minute. Admittedly, probably just in time to prevent my driveway work from being done, if my luck holds true. But given the state of things, I'm not sure I could even bring myself to complain.

I Aten't Dead! Have Some June Currentlies.

Current clothes: A bathrobe. I just got out of the shower. Once I'm finished posting this, I'm going to go and put on... I dunno. Jeans and a t-shirt, like usual.

Current mood: Not bad. A little slow-moving, in that heavy, slept-too-much kind of way. Which I've been doing a lot, lately. Maybe it's the summer weather. Sometimes my body just seems to decide it wants to estivate. Not that I'm complaining (or at least not much). Too much sleep is better than too little, especially when I'm on night shifts.

Current music: Nothing, really.

Current annoyance: The company that's going to redo my driveway has been taking a while to figure out exactly when they're going to be able to schedule the work. They just got back to me with "sometime in early July, exact date TBA." I hope they don't end up wanting to do it the week I'm on nights. Or that they'll at least let me know soon enough that I can arrange for someone to cover for me. I really don't want to work all night and come home to the sound of jackhammers outside my window.

Current thing: I guess I have a couple of current things, other than sleep. I've started re-reading some of Pratchett's Discworld books, in between all the other books I have to read. Starting with the Death novels, because Death is awesome. The character, that is, of course, not the phenomenon. I'm also back on a little bit of a making-household-improvements kick. I've finally replaced a bunch of window screens that were shredded nearly to uselessness by time and cats, for example. Which is good, even if I am a bit annoyed with myself for accidentally ordering the wrong color frames.

Current desktop picture: It's still the same Doctor Who picture I've had for ages now. I should probably stop pretending to myself I have any desire to change it.

Current book: Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen by Lois McMaster Bujold. Which is pleasant enough, I guess, but kind of dull. Never thought I'd say that about this particular series.

Current song in head: Billy Joel's "For the Longest Time," ever since a few days ago, when I stumbled across this parody on the subject of entropy.

Current refreshment: Nothing. But I'm thirsty. And maybe a little hungry.

Current DVD in player: I just finished season 4 of The Wire. Which was amazing.

Current happy thing: Looking at my work schedule for tonight, it looks like, unless something goes horribly wrong (which is always possible), it should be a nice, quiet night. I am very much in favor of nice, quiet nights.

Current thought: Between the window screens and the driveway, my next household improvement project is going to have to be shopping for mattresses. Since it finally occurred to me that part of the reason why I wake up with an achy back far too often probably has to do with the fact that my mattress is 16 years old and saggy. This, I am not looking forward to.

This Is A Test. This Is Only A Test.

Nothing to see here, just me testing the Blogger app I installed on my phone, because trying to use the Blogger website on a phone is ridiculously awkward and difficult, and it finally occurred to me that, duh, of course there's an app that's actually designed to be used on a phone. (Not that I update from the phone often, anyway, but, hey, when you went to, you want to.)

Anyway, This seems way easier. Yay.

I May Have Some Currentlies

Current clothes: Olive green sweat pants. My Doctor Who wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey t-shirt. White socks. Black leather boots.

Current mood: Not bad. Today has been that combination of relaxing and productive I most like to achieve on the weekends, marred slightly by the fact that my days off just seem to slip by faster and faster, and today has not been an exception.

Current music: I was just listening to random-shuffle stuff on the iPod while doing some housecleaning. Last song was something by the Goo-Goo Dolls.

Current annoyance: That thing about my time to myself going by too fast. Slow down for a sec, time! I have things I want to do with you! (Stupid wibbly-wobbly stuff. Sigh.)

Current thing: Some of that time (OK, probably too much of that time) slipped past while I was playing Slither. That game is stupidly addictive, I think mostly because it's one of those games where every time you lose -- and you will always, always lose - it feels as if you almost didn't, and all you have to do next time is not make that one stupid mistake, or be just a little bit faster... It's so hard not to just click "play again" to attempt to prove it.

Current desktop picture: Still the same Doctor Who one I've had for ages. I really, really should change that. Will it happen before I do this again next month? Probably not.

Current book: Pretender by C. J. Cherryh, book 8 in her Foreigner series. Someday, in the distant future, I will actually make it through all of this series.

Current song in head: "Temporary One" by Fleetwood Mac, which came up on random shuffle yesterday, and has been playing in my head ever since.

Current refreshment: Diet cream soda.

Current DVD in player: Crimson Peak. Which, like all of Guillermo del Toro's movies, is extremely visually impressive (albeit a bit gory in places), but, like most of his movies, I'm not sure how impressive it is or isn't in other respects. It's got its good points, but... Well, if it's a bit slow, a bit stilted, and more than a bit ridiculous, is that a flaw, or is it just really, really good at capturing the sensibility of the Victorian Gothic stories it's paying homage to? I honestly can't tell.

Current happy thing: No work today! And later I will have pot roast. Mmm, pot roast.

Current thought: Happy Mother's Day to all you motherly types out there (at least in places where it's celebrated today). Me, I'm going to continue spending today reveling in the inestimable joy of not having kids.

Game Of Spoilers: Or, I Would Rather Know Nothing About Jon Snow

I just finished watching season 5 of Game of Thrones on DVD. (And was surprised by how caught up in it I got, too. The last couple of episodes, there was a lot of very loud yelling at certain characters.)

Of course, being just about exactly a season behind, that means I got to the end of season 5 just in time to be hit by an avalanche of season 6 spoilers, everywhere I turn online. Honestly, what is it with this show? I thought Doctor Who spoilers could be tricky to avoid if you waited too long, but GoT fans and critics seem to go out of their way to make sure nobody can miss them. Years later, I'm still shaking my head in bemusement about the article I saw on the prevalence of GoT spoilers that had a spoiler in the title.

I'm seriously beginning to suspect that HBO is planting this stuff somehow, in an attempt to get people like me to subscribe.

Oh, Look, It's May!

And thus endeth the exercise known as Blogs-A-Lot April. I'm never entirely sure if said exercise feels like it has all that much of a point, but one thing I did notice, this time, is that it sort of forced me to pay attention to every day as it passed, which means that, unlike a lot of months lately, April did not pass by in a blur, but seemed to take its time and to go by in something that felt at least a little more like a steady, regular way. And, honestly, if I was going to pick any month to do that, April seems like a good choice. Despite a few oddly chilly days this year, it is, for the most part, a brief, beautiful respite between the major New Mexican seasons of Too Cold and Too Hot, and it's good to enjoy that while it lasts.

Anyway. It being May, you will probably hear much less from me now. You may breathe a sigh of relief if you wish.

I Guess It's Just Crappy Old Invisibility for Me

By the way, I forgot to mention it in the last post, but you know what's really annoying about having very poor visualization skills? My absolute number-one most desired superpower, with no question, is teleportation. I frequently long for the ability to just be places without having to deal with all the incredibly tedious, frequently expensive, and, in the case of cars, genuinely dangerous traveling in between.

And, of course, every time I've heard a description of how teleportation works in fiction, it inevitably starts out with, "OK, first you picture the place you want to go..." Sigh.

Maybe It's Because I Can't Put Glasses On My Mind's Eye

I recently stumbled across this article, "Aphantasia: How It Feels To Be Blind In Your Mind", and got kind of a kick out of it, partly because this guy's realization, astonishingly late in life, that other people's brains are doing a weird thing his doesn't is strangely hilarious, and partly because it's incredibly gratifying to be able to say, "Finally! Someone who's even worse at visualizing things than I am!"

Because I don't get pictures in my head, either. Or not much. When I try, I might get something really vague. Maybe something a bit like seeing a scene through thick, not-quite transparent glass, where you can get a sense of colors and where things are, but not actually see any details? Except even that seems like too visual a description. Once in a very, very, very great while, I might actually get something like a photograph flashing across my mind, but it's always gone in a split second before I can really look at it, and it always leaves me kind of weirded out. I can imagine colors well enough, though. It's not exactly like seeing them, but I can remember what they look like, if that makes any sense. And other senses are no problem. I can imagine smells and tastes and touches, not perfectly, but well enough. And my auditory imagination is great. I can recall or imagine voices in great detail and at will: pitch, pauses, and everything.

But visuals? I took the quiz linked to in the article, and found it immensely frustrating. OK, I might be able to come up with something vaguely resembling a mental image for some of what they're asking me for, individually -- the color and texture of storm clouds and flashes of lightning are surprisingly doable, by themselves, although the sunset they start out asking me to imagine is almost just an abstract idea of a circle on a flat horizon -- but to ask me to imagine a picture, see it in detail, focus on those details and then change them? Yeah, I'm kind of with this guy: How do the rest of you weirdos do that? (The quiz, by the way, told me I was part of only 5% of the population who sucked this bad at visualization tasks and asked me if I wanted to be part of a study when I was done. I'm not sure if I do or not.)

I do think this is at least part of why I'm not great at faces and why I'm really, really bad with directions and navigation: I don't have a good visual referent in my head to match a person or a street up with.

He also mentions people asking him about whether he's a good speller, which seemed like a weird, out-of-left-field question to me a first, but apparently, when a lot of people are trying to remember how to spell a word, they see the letters in their mind? When I need to think how to spell a word, I imagine myself either typing it or writing it, often with my fingers twitching slightly. So, like the guy says, it's muscle memory.

And now, suddenly, all I can think of is how I read that book called What We See When We Read a little while back and spent the entire time indignantly going, "Whoa there, buddy, what do you mean we?!" Speak for yourselves, you mind-picture-makers, you!

Real Life Is Annoying. I'd Rather Just Sequester Myself Somewhere And Read.

I seem to have reached one of those not-infrequent points in my life when I've got a bunch of things that need to be done all at once, all of which have to be scheduled around each other and my weird work hours. I'm working on getting the ball rolling on my driveway replacement, and I need to get my swamp cooler up and running, and I have to make a dentist's appointment (because I still have a filling that needs to be replaced, and although I really wanted to just blow that off for a while after the root canal, the dentist is bugging me about it), and I have to go in for my semi-annual blood test before I run out of my thyroid medicine, and I've got the exterminator coming soon (because it's spring and attempted roach incursions have begun).

I'm trying to let my attitude be, "Yay, look how much I am getting done!", rather than "Aargh, too many things! Too much stress! Want to hide from the world!" I'd say I'm having maybe a 65% success rate.

Windows And Driveways

Oh, right, I forgot that thing Windows 10 did the last time it upgraded, where it kept constantly telling me I had to re-enter my "most recent credential" for my Microsoft account. I'm trying to remember how I dealt with that last time. I think, after trying everything the internet told me to try, I just finally told Windows to ignore the message. Oh, Windows.

In other news, I now have an estimate for my concrete work, and I'm possibly more surprised than I should be by just how close it is to my own rough guesstimate for how much this was gonna cost me.

WTF, Computer?

After all the wailing and gnashing of teeth that Windows 10 caused me last time, until I finally gave up and went back to 8.1, my PC has suddenly decided, with no permission and no warning, to "upgrade" itself again. What the hell, Microsoft. What. The. Hell.

Sigh. Dare I hope it'll behave itself better this time? Dare I?

Sunday Is TV Night

I've been watching the Walking Dead spinoff, and it's... Well, it's not awful, but, I have to say, some part of my brain is tempted to just skip it and watch the aftershow, because the episode they're talking about always sounds slightly better than the one I just watched.

Also, they keep showing ads for Preacher, which intrigues and bemuses me, because I'm pretty sure one of my main thoughts after reading the comics was that, of everything I have read in my life, that was the least likely to ever be filmed.

Maybe I Need A Beryllium Atomic Clock.

Speaking of Doctor Who... It was just brought to my attention that next month marks the 20th anniversary of the Paul McGann TV movie. Which I am having no small amount of trouble wrapping my head around. How is it that I am so constantly blindsided by the steady, predictable passage of time?

Welcome Aboard The TARDIS!

Although there's not going to be any new Doctor Who until Christmas -- *sniffle* -- the BBC has just announced that they've cast the new companion. (Apparently they made a big announcement during halftime at a soccer match, which seems a little odd, but, I guess, very, very British.)

They've also provided a little snippet of video for us, in which we don't learn a whole lot about the character, but do at least get to see that she is amusingly irreverent towards the Daleks:



I'll be looking forward to getting to meet her for real! Even if it won't remotely be soon enough.

RIP, Grunk. Or Not.

My half-orc barbarian only lasted a few weeks, after all. She went down last night, fighting an annoyingly well-armed vampire. And then, just to add oddly hilarious insult to injury, the creepy sorcerer in the party re-animated her as a zombie, so her corpse is still following us around.

I really need to finally bother learning how the magic system works in this game, so I can be the one standing in the back throwing fireballs.

I Ant That Impressed

Yesterday's viewing: Ant-Man. I have to say, I didn't find this nearly as engaging as most of the other Marvel movies. A lot of the humor felt like it was trying too hard, and the "dramatic" dialog was terrible. Plus, the whole concept is so silly that even acknowledging up­front how silly it was didn't make it feel less silly. Well, at least it did have one or two fun little action-y moments. Unfortunately, though, mostly it just made me think about how much I hate ants.

I really, really hate ants.