This pain thing is a bit rubbish isn't it?

All the gloriously satisfying violence that Inglourious Basterds promised but didn't quite deliver on, has now been consumed and cheered for by me and Blue. Saw Boondock Saints II today with gonner221, and when I stood up the right side of my belly ached. I made it about eight steps before it felt like someone was kicking me in the nuts, and FYI: I don't have any nuts for the kicking. Seriously, body, what the fuck? And then he drove me home, because I am no fun when I am in pain. Either I can be distantly polite at you or I can pay attention but bite your head off at random. Sometime I would like for there to be a third option in there.

Anyway, tomorrow or the next day I get to see about doctor-type things, because this shit is just not on. Also, I realize that brit-slang is falling into my vocab, but it's not my fault. Blame elucreh and all her links to Merlin fanfiction. It's as deep and historically accurate as Xena, but with magical gay boys and a giant slash dragon. I'm not even kidding. So much crack; my brains are in terrible danger.

I can not sleep, and I'd like someone to blame for this. I'm blaming you, until you bring me candy. CANDY BITCHES BRING IT TO ME.

I am in another rough patch where my body has decided it hates me. Entire days of random cramps out of nowhere? Acne? Weird blood pressure swings? I have decided that estrogen is a minion of the devil, and would like to not have any more, KTHNXDIE.

In other news I should be getting my hair chopped off tomorrow. I'll post pics when I get them uploaded.

Disorder	Rating
Paranoid Personality Disorder:	Low
Schizoid Personality Disorder:	Moderate
Schizotypal Personality Disorder:	High
Antisocial Personality Disorder:	Low
Borderline Personality Disorder:	Low
Histrionic Personality Disorder:	Moderate
Narcissistic Personality Disorder:	High
Avoidant Personality Disorder:	Low
Dependent Personality Disorder:	Low
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder:	Low
-- Take the Personality Disorder Test -- -- Personality Disorder Info --

No surprises, eh?

News, Science, and Items of Interest:
Thinking negatively can boost memory, social judgment. Cynics would be thrilled, if they didn't know better.

GE scientists make RFID chip that detects airborne chemicals, take first step toward Star Trek Tricorders. Thanks, GE!

Our Scandolous Great Grandmothers: Feminism in Pre-Code Hollywood. So now I have more subversive movies to find and watch.

Of never feeling hot: the missing narrative of desire in the lives of straight men, or: YAY I'm not the only person who thinks it's fucked up to not tell men they make you horny!

And in that vein: The Pleasures Of Confusion a bit of prose/porn for my kinksters. NSFW.

Poetry, Music, and Art:
The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me - a poem to help us understand the teenage male.

A Silent World. Long exposure black and whites in ice fog conditions, haunting and ethereal.

Colorpulse - the guy who did A Glorious Dawn and We Are All Connected has a website where you can download his stuff for free, and a tipjar.

As I Walked Out One Evening by W. H. Auden - "You shall love your crooked neighbour with your crooked heart."

The Funny, The Sick, & The WTF
KnowYourMeme: lolziest channel on YouTube. I highly recommend "Weird Al Explains Auto Tune".

A poem for Roman Polanski, because he deserves it. Good luck in prison Mr. Polanski.

Louis C.K. has bad words that he loves and wants to share them with you. "Chewed Up" is rare comedic genius, and you should see it if you haven't yet. NSFW.

I have been hiding away, my lovelies. I am sorry to have deprived you of my presence, but I have not been good company of late.

Do anything to keep each other safe:
We'll sing better; we'll make sound hum like light.
And if you get lost in the lonely dark
Then I'll sing you a starry, starry night.

Happy Friday the 13th.

The Owl City show was fairly win. The venue's prices were ridiculous, and the openers are possibly unfamiliar with the term 'sound check' - I am sad for them. :( But all else was of the good!

In happier news Owl City's set was fantastic! Adam Young is Brendon Urie levels of adorkable and Jon Walker kinds of sweet. It was an all-ages show, and for 'Hello Seattle' and 'Fireflies' everyone was singing along, even the parents. Awesome. :)

Driving in the sun for 4 hours wasn't so good for my brain, so I'm sort of wiped and irritable, but I lived on headache meds this weekend and had 0 migraines. \o/

The basics

Don't listen.
Deny reason.
Misunderstand.
Push an agenda.
Take out of context.
Undermine authority.
Instill uncertainty.
Question motives.
Make incorrect assumptions.
Mock fallacies and flawed logic.
Refuse accountability.
Point out errors in judgment or other failures.
Criticize tone as well as content.
Doubt wisdom, sensibility, or intelligence of a position.

ETA: Bring unnecessary side issues into a discussion.
Ignore valuable input.
Exaggerate.
Disbelieve facts.

Y'all know that I sometimes venture out into the internet for the purpose of finding people whose heads are as yet un-messed-with and fixing that for them. And it occurs to me that while I am not even the best person that I know at starting shit and insulting people, manipulating the context of a conversation to trip up a participant, or turning someone's words against them, I may be the only person I know doing so on the internet in a non-/b/ forum. Or possibly the only one who admits to it. Which is sad.

Where is the love, you guys? Where is our pride in what we do, and our willingness to share what we do? I say it starts here.

Baiting people to step out from behind their disinterest is a good thing! Anger shows us what is important to us, so I'm trying to compose the how-to on trolling, insulting people, and the fundamentals of what bothers people and gets under their skins. Also because the better we know how to deliberately annoy people, the better we know how to avoid being annoying when we choose not to be.

Discuss!

I am sad. You should be sad, too. To this end, there is a list of the ten most depressing books so that even thinking about the existence of Lit classes where young minds are being forced to read them will drag you down to my level.

In other news, women like being treated like people. Film at 11.

So, yeah. I was sick my entire vacation. I got the swine flu, a secondary infection, and Friday I started my period. We got less done on the apartment than if this had been a regular work week, nothing done on decorating for the House-o-Ween Party this coming Saturday, and no project completions of any sort, and I'm pissed about every bit of that.

But I'm just gonna let it go. I acknowledge the feelings of betrayal and frustration and loss. And I realize that they are valid, and they are my feelings. And now I'm going to go take a hot bath and clip my nails off and get ready to take care of people tomorrow with a cheerful heart, because I DO love my job, and I like having joy to contagion onto people. Inner peace: this shit is still really new, yo.

In other news, season 2 of True Blood is hella awesome, and anyone who wants to get me the vampire Queen for Christmas is my favorite. :)

It came back. This time it meant business.

[Many of you are new enough to have missed this, and it's about time I reposted it. This may be one of the most important things that I have to share., Also, ALWAYS PUT EXTRA AWESOMESAUCE ON YOUR COPYPASTA.]

How To Depress Yourself And Get In Your Own Way, starting from the simple stuff and proceeding into the land of the padded walls:

Be Lazy

• Don't get to know yourself. Hinder yourself with ignorance.
  
• Invest no effort into complying with your principles. Self-respect will work out issues that you will need later on.
  
• Don't think about how you can improve your habits. Don't improve yourself. Don't take pride in your own growth.
  
• Make no contingency plans. If one thing goes wrong it was meant to, to screw up the rest of your day. Don't recover smoothly.
  
• Listen to your insecurities, instead of fighting them. Feel like a coward.
  
• Brood. Dwell on things and make them important instead of getting on with what you're doing.
  
• Don't pay attention.
  
• Don't learn from your mistakes, lest you better yourself from them.

Maintain Your Illusions

• Listen to gossip. Believe what you're told without checking facts at the source.
  
• Feel betrayed by the truth when your illusions break down and you are forced to deal with things as they are.
  
• Ignore the differences between things. Treat them the same so that you get different results each time and confuse yourself. It will make your bad mood easier to maintain to have something to complain about to your friends.
  
• Compare yourself to people you're not like. Comparing unlike things is guaranteed to separate you from what's real, and using an unrealistic standard to hold yourself to will keep you too busy to question the internal consistency of your context.
  
• Ignore your weaknesses so that you get unexpectedly beaten at things you thought you were good at. Then berate yourself for your failure.
  
• Don't listen to yourself to see if you're making sense. Find ways to justify your reasoning that don't apply to logic.
  
• Submarine your self-image by not trusting in your abilities. Get used to the paralysis of uncertainty instead of ability to reach for what you want.

Focus On The Negative

• Expect it to be about you whenever something goes wrong.
  
• Use high-contrast "weighted" adjectives when thinking about your life to increase drama.
  
• "Qualify" your joys. Don't take the good with the bad. Think that if something were really good, it wouldn't have a downside.
  
• Think of the good things that happen to you as deviations from the norm. Then take them off the bell curve of your expectations entirely. Skew your statistical universe.
  
• Focus on what's missing rather than on the things you have.
  
• Hold your friends to an unrealistic standard so that you can dwell on their shortcomings.
  
• Accept that any backsliding you do negates all efforts you put into crawling out of the depression you've now made.

Betray Yourself

• Teach yourself not to want things. Have no goals. Give up hope.
  
• Use your depression as an excuse to not help others. Convince yourself that you are not capable of doing good.
  
• Make time to do things that are bad for you physically, and can lead to health problems. Pain and illness will help your rough patch stand firm in the face of overwhelming joys.
  
• Use self-fulfilling negative prophecies to prove to yourself that your self-hatred is reasonable.
  
• Push away people who care about you.
  
• Ask people for good advice. Don't take the advice, then beat yourself up for not taking it.

Advanced Rectal Haberdashery

• Re-prioritize meeting the needs that you can get met now 'til after the needs that you can't get met until later.
  
• Invest effort and frustration into impossible schemes trying to make those needs get met now.
  
• Distract yourself from your need to fix your problems with drugs. Use people-related drama, religion, or illegal narcotics to keep your mind occupied and off-balance.
  
• Deny responsibility or ability to fix your problems. Cripple yourself with despair.
  
• Hurt other people so you can feel ashamed and horrible.
  
• Be angry with your friends for interfering in your unhappiness. They're on your side, but you're not on your side, and that means they're against you.

Some people have medical reasons for being depressed. I am SO aware of that, hello. Even so, I dare you to say you've never done any of this to yourself. Or comment me with ways I've missed, and we'll add them to the master list. Because this is just the ways that my friends, family and I have messed ourselves up, and I'm sure there are creative ways to self-destruct that we've missed.

When I was little, I had this intense hero-worship crush on Carl Sagan. I should probably be embarrassed by that, so once again I am glad I HAVE NO SHAME. But I had pretty much forgotten about that until this video showed up and hooked me back up with the lost dreams of my childhood. :)

I can't embed this one, so I have to link you to the glory that ultimatebryan found and pimped around. Ambient techno made from PBS shows about cosmology and neuroscience? Say yes. Carl Sagan - 'A Glorious Dawn' ft Stephen Hawking (Cosmos Remixed). If you click nothing else on this entry, this is the one you want.

Other cool embedded videos:




Extra link for my NerdFighters: A Short History of the PUPPY SIZED ELEPHANT because we fight World Suck with rainbows and tiny islands.

Music and vids:

Every Now is Everything by Rich Ferguson - video of unlimited wickedness.

They Might Be Giants - Why Does the Sun Really Shine? (The Sun is a Miasma of Incandescent Plasma)

Born In The Wrong Body by Danielle's Magic. Beautiful, wistful song of trangender identity. It has a geek goddess and her ukulele, how is that not awesome?

Funny/Wack:

Sometimes you just want to say "FUCK YOU, CAT!"

Picture is unrelated. And NSFW.

The Suck-Free Internet Manifesto, the Heirarchy of Digital Distractions, and the People Of Walmart all want to compete for your attention.

Dungeons & Dragons flavored soda by Jones Sodas, makers of much sweetness. Christmas isn't that far away, so if you have a geek in mind, best to order now. :)

Science and gadgets:

Magnetic nail polish makes star sapphire pattern on your nails. DO WANT!

Thinking literally: how we use metaphors to make sense to one another.

This article is the text that was up on The New York Times here, but Clue saved it so we could have some profound economic feminism. Tell her how she rocks, folks!

Plastic surgery cures migraines, insurance companies are sure to be thrilled.

Defunding ACORN illustrates the political Law of Unintended Consequences. Also a rant against corruption, wasteful spending, and Halliburton.

What a long and twisted tale: the history of spinning is 30,000 years long. As soon as we learned to talk, we sat out on the cave's patio and took up knitting one afternoon. Probably followed shortly by the invention of tea.

And an injectable gel that heals brain injuries has been formulated. I'm buying a pound of it for you lot as soon as it comes on the market. It's the least I can do after exposing you to brain-damagingly long-winded linkdumps.

While I have issues (and tend to talk about them, often at length), I know that you have issues, too. Just because I don't point them out and say, "ooh, where did you get that shiny warped perspective?! you are so beautifully broken!!" does not mean that I don't see you. I see you; I see us.

( If you wonder why I consider you family when we have never met and have no visible thing in common, this is why. )

Thank you.

I'm still catching up on the backlog of entries from having been crazy ill and then having no internet access.

I'm going to try this crazy plan where I alternate weeks of consuming and producing across my internet access. I'll be keeping up with my flist here, but twits, faces, spaces, tumblrs, flickrs, cupids and sundry stupids will have to wait 'til after the 4th of October.

Saturday, October 24th we are having the housewarming. You are invited. If you are interested and I do not have your email addy, ping me at heidi dot hickman dot rmt at gmail.

If you are interested in seeing Owl City with me in Houston for Halloween, same deal.

If I owe you anything that I may have forgotten about, please remind me? I'm making new lists with checky-boxes. You know how I love lists. :)

Finally, I am interested in arranging a craft/supply swap meet in the Dallas area. If there is already one such that you know of and I don't, please point me thither. Thank you kindly.

Note to self: finish and post the PSA on socialism, dammit.

"Life in Lubbock, Texas, taught me two things: One is that God loves you and you're going to burn in hell. The other is that sex is the most awful, filthy thing on earth and you should save it for someone you love." - Butch Hancock

EFFORT AT SPEECH BETWEEN TWO PEOPLE by muriel rukeyser

Speak to me. Take my hand. What are you now?
I will tell you all. I will conceal nothing.
When I was three, a little child read a story about a rabbit who died in the story
and I crawled under a chair: a pink rabbit: it was my birthday, and a candle burnt
a sore spot on my finger, and I was told to be happy.

Oh, grow to know me. I am not happy. I wll be open :
Now I am thinking of white sails against a sky like music,
like glad horns blowing, and birds tilting, and an arm about me
There was one I loved, who wanted to live, sailing.

Speak to me. Take my hand. What are you now?
When I was nine, I was fruitily sentimental, fluid:
and my widowed aunt played Chopin,
and I bent my head on the painted woodwork, and wept.
I want now to be close to you. I would
link the minutes of my days close, somehow to your days.

I am not happy. I will be open.
I have liked lamps in evening corners, and quiet poems.
There has been fear in my life. Sometimes I speculate
On what a tragedy his life was, really.

Take my hand. Fist my mind in your hand. What are you now?
When I was fourteen, I had dreams of suicide,
and I stood at a steep window, at sunset, hoping toward death:
if the light had not melted clouds and plains to beauty,
if light had not transformed that day, I would have leapt,
I am unhappy. I am lonely. Speak to me.

I will be open. I think he never loved me:
he loved the bright beaches, the little lips of foam
that ride small waves, he loved the veer of gulls:
he said with a gay mouth: I love you. Grow to know me.

What are you now? If we could touch one another,
if these our separate entities could come to grips,
clenched like a Chinese puzzle...yesterday
I stook in a crowded street that was live with people,
and no one spoke a word, and the morning shone.
Everyone silent, moving ... Take my hand. Speak to me.

In happy news, my cousin's wedding was awesome! I heroically rescued someone from my crazy talkative aunt (who is also delusional, since she said it was going to be Catholic-style wedding). The service was conducted by a lovely older woman, the minister of a Unitarian church, who broke in the middle of her service so that the groom's dad could read an excerpt from Douglas Adams. LOVE!!! And I got to play with the toddler of this lovely set of lesbians next to the dance floor at the reception.

In other news I had to deal with sunlight, driving, poor sleep, and cigarette smoke which I have not gotten any less allergic to. I am frakking exhausted.

To bed!

Realize that when I say I love you, I am always speaking in the plural. I love all of the you's that you are and have been and will be. All rens_sanctuary's, allultimatebryan's, all elucreh's that say the wrong thing, or the right thing, or don't know where to start and say nothing are loved by me.


Edna St. Vincent Millay. 1892–
God's World

O WORLD, I cannot hold thee close enough!
Thy winds, thy wide grey skies!
Thy mists that roll and rise!
Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag
And all but cry with colour! That gaunt crag
To crush! To lift the lean of that black bluff!
World, World, I cannot get thee close enough!

Long have I known a glory in it all,
But never knew I this;
Here such a passion is
As stretcheth me apart. Lord, I do fear
Thou'st made the world too beautiful this year.
My soul is all but out of me,—let fall
No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.

http://www.bartleby.com/104/130.html