I Am Completely Serious

snarp @ 2018-12-06T12:10:00

2018-12-06T17:12:30Z

Suddenly a lot of "new follower" notifications here! I cannot imagine why

(BTW, if no one else does it I intend to make a Tumblr importer script once I'm done frantically scraping everything I can, but it would help to have some Ruby examples for DW's API.)

comments

If anyone was wondering what’s going on at LiveJournal since they moved their servers to Russia,

2017-04-05T21:56:40Z

(Crossposted from Tumblr, which is the only place I'm posting/reading recently, sorry.)

here's an article about the revised ToS they released yesterday (April 4, 2017). You can read the current ToS in full here, and the previous one here. Basically, LiveJournal no longer permits political fundraising, and it's probably related to other recent efforts to mess up Putin's enemies' fundraising efforts.

So, that happened! And something else also happened, which that article doesn't mention:

9.2.6. The user may not, without the Administration's special permit, use automatic scripts (bots, crawlers etc.) to collect information from the Service and/or to interact with the Service;

...if they're actually serious about this - which seems unlikely - then this new ToS is a suicide note, because:

* This policy would remove LiveJournal from Google and other search engines' results. And yeah, it's really easy for them to make that happen - they could just alter their robots.txt file to reflect this bizarre new policy, and Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc would immediately automatically remove all results on *.livejournal.com domains.

* This policy would ban all third-party clients, including those which use the official LiveJournal API. (Which, in its current form, they'd probably have to get rid of.)

* This policy would ban all backup clients. LiveJournal doesn't have an official one, they're all third-party.

* If they're serious about it, and they edit robots.txt to reflect it, this policy would make the Wayback Machine's LiveJournal archives inaccessible. The Wayback Machine automatically blanks out all earlier archived material when robots.txt tells them to get lost.

...now, LJ does not at this point appear to have updated robots.txt, and the API does still seem to be in operation, and literally fucking hiding from Google seems a little too dumb even for them? So, I'm going to assume for the moment that they're not serious.

Nonetheless, the fact that they even put this line in there is alarming, because it indicates they're dumber than we thought!

So, I'd personally be extremely grateful if some people with a few spare terabytes of space would get copies of the Wayback Machine's LJ archives before my fucking heart gives out? That's a LOT of fucking data that could be lost if they're dumb enough to enforce this.

...how long has their HTTPS been broken, christ.

comments

snarp @ 2016-05-13T20:19:00

2016-05-14T00:19:08Z

Steven Universe crew probably: so okay!!!! you may recall that a while back, steven accidentally created a species of intelligent watermelon people, and they walked off into the sea, and NOW we get to see what’s HAPPENED with them!! they’ve gone off to an island and have formed a peaceful genderless society where -

Cartoon Network probably: need bows on some of them

Steven Universe crew probably: - where we see them playing around, having fun, annnnnd.... reproducing by farming!!! which - as you can PROBABLY guess, haha! - is a little bit of foreshadowing about how ANOTHER genderless society we’ve met is going to have to learn a different way to sustain themselves that does not harm other lifeforms!!!

Cartoon Network probably: BOWS on GIRL watermelons

Steven Universe crew probably: what?!

Cartoon Network probably: yeah pink bows on

Cartoon Network probably: on one quarter of these watermelons

Cartoon Network probably: the girl ones

Steven Universe crew probably: seriously??? still??????

Cartoon Network probably: married watermelons

Cartoon Network probably: going to look gay

Steven Universe crew probably: omg why does this keep happening!!!

Steven Universe crew: *puts gendered clothes on the watermelons that are married and none of the others*

Steven Universe crew: *both the watermelons that are married are wearing clothes that Steven would wear but the “wife” one’s aesthetic is closer to his own*

Steven Universe crew: *the “wife” one is also the warrior one who goes enthusiastically off to war*

comments

snarp @ 2016-05-13T20:15:00

2016-05-14T00:15:29Z

Rambling and depressing personal post.

I think a lot about this article "Can You Call a 9-Year-Old a Psychopath?", because of this part about the kid's dad:

Growing up, he said, he had also been a difficult child — albeit not so problematic as Michael. "A lot of parents didn't want me around their kids, because they thought I was crazy," he said, closing his eyes at the memory. "I didn't listen to adults. I was always in trouble. My grades were horrible. I would be walking down the street and I would hear them say, in Spanish: 'Ay! Viene el loco!' — 'Here comes the crazy one.' "

According to Miguel, this antisocial behavior lasted until his late teens, at which point, he said, he "grew up." When I asked what caused the change, he looked uncertain. "You learn to pacify the rough waters," he said at last. "It just happens. You learn to control yourself from the outside in."

That's really familiar to me. Just, not on an outward-visibility level, because that wasn't the sort of behavior that achieved my personal goals. My grades were good because it wasn't hard for me to keep them up, and I knew that that was a good way to get people to leave me alone.

I didn't get in fights as much as a lot of the guys, but when I did, I was always the one to use violence first, and I never regretted it after - "they deserved it." I remember genuinely wanting to kill some of these kids.

(Like, sometimes the other person HAD done something shitty - I don't in retrospect think I was in the wrong for attacking the teacher who told me I was going to hell and hurt my arm, or the kid who'd been sexually harassing me, because the school was pretending it wasn't happening and my behavior was the only reason it got dealt with - but most of the others had done nothing to deserve this.

Hence my discomfort around people who are constantly in one or more arguments, and never apologize. I wasn't in the right even half of the time, but I thought I was never wrong.)

(I think I was worst during the times when I had my solipsistic delusion going on: "the world is fake, it's all just shaped by a hostile sentient energy field that's trying to somehow trick me and make me dissolve into it" + the sort of sensory hallucination that I could feel/hear the field.

But I remember wishing I could hurt someone at times when this wasn't going on, so. Not a good reason! It wasn't the energy field whose nose I wanted to break.)

This lasted up until I was maybe sixteen or seventeen. I'd been on mood stabilizers for about five years - as far as I could tell all they did was make me groggy, but I took them because otherwise Mom would throw a fit.

I remember a specific day sophomore or junior year that I was hiding in the bathroom during class, sulking after some kind of hissy fit (probably over a low grade I felt I didn't deserve). I was trying to figure out what sort of shitty theatrics might get me whatever it was I wanted, since the kind I'd just pulled hadn't worked for me.

Then I thought: "I've got to stop throwing tantrums like this. I've got to learn to work harder. I won't be able to do the stuff I want to if I keep this up."

Which, yeah, still the same selfish way to look at it! "Learn to control yourself from the outside in" = the outside wasn't giving me the responses I wanted, so I modified my behavior to try and look more like the person I thought I should be.

But it felt like the moment a cutscene ends in a game: like for a long time I'd just been watching myself, and now I knew control was possible.

Something clearly changed in me then - maybe I "grew up" in some cognitive/chemical sense, or maybe the Seroquel finally did what it was supposed to? Who knows. But after that, I knew that I could at least try to hang on to myself emotionally, which previously hadn't even seemed to be an option. Before, what I'd felt had been all that was real - therefore, I would act on what I felt.

Though I didn't think of it this way at the time, this fit really tidily with my solipsistic delusion. Do people end up with the delusions/hallucinations that fit their personal inclinations, or do our psychotic symptoms shape who we are? Shrug.

My metaphor for "fixing" myself was programming-based: I was "modeling" myself like a simulation person, building myself up out of code/polygons into something that acted/looked a little more human, and in the same way "modeling" the world like a simulation world, so that it would feel like a place I was properly a part of. With enough time, observation, testing, and tinkering, my self and my world would be indistinguishable from that which was external to me, and I and it would "become real."

Eventually, it worked for me!

But brain surgery and drugs also turned out to be necessary.

Neuro problems are really fucked up. I don't feel I really even became an adult, under my personal definition, until sometime in the last four years or so. I'm going to be 31 soon, and I'm still not, and probably never will be, the sort of person I'd like to be. So much fucking wasted time.

Intellectually, it took me a long time to stop believing in the solipsistic delusion. I didn't want to believe it, but it seemed so true and reasonable and inescapable. "Becoming real" meant "forgetting" that I was part of a fake world, and simply becoming part of it; losing my consciousness of its falseness, forgetting sound/feel of its "hum."

I don't believe it anymore, but I never forgot any of this. I used to be scared of becoming someone I wouldn't recognize; now I worry about becoming the person I was when I was fifteen again.

comments

snarp @ 2016-04-30T20:43:00

2016-05-01T00:43:50Z

Best-selling authors Laurell K. Hamilton and Larry Niven have teamed up to bring you the ultimate in boring xeno orgies with: Vampire Fuckmoon Planetworld.

comments

People to whom I said I'd send perfume or tea:

2016-04-01T20:47:02Z

I'm sorry, I haven't done that yet, I am catatonic + mildly phobic of the post office. Soon. I promise.

(This. Is not an April Fools thing. I'm sorry.)

comments

snarp @ 2016-03-21T15:25:00

2016-03-21T19:36:49Z

I just had a semi-planned minor surgery and am presently still stoned and sore, so I if you are expecting communications from me please expect delays.

Cut for what the surgery was (and I am posting this here and not Tumblr because it's gross and Tumblr doesn't respect cuts).

I was having vagina pain and couldn't get a pelvic exam while conscious because it hurt too much, so they anesthetized me for it; my hymen turned out to be imperforate + unusually thick/tough so gynecologist clipped it off.

This was the srmi-expected part, she'd told me it was a possibility that that was the problem and I said "okay if it is just get rid of the thing I attach no spiritual significance to it" but I thought it was more likely just vaginismus, since it seemed like my previous gynecologists would've told me. Presently pretty pissed off at my previous gynecologists right now.

Edit: conversation just now.

Me: No! I'm not getting in that filthy jacuzzi, it's disgusting!

Dad: It's fine! I just cleaned it!

Mom: You know she's got some stitches up in there, right, dear?

Dad: EEEEEEEurgh no oh my god don't talk to me stop -

Me: I've got stitches in my vagina?

Dad: *is screaming*

Mom: Yes.

comments

I'm posting a lot more often on Tumblr than here lately

2016-01-31T00:57:27Z

because I'm tired, and thus most of my internet communications have been via the tablet while lying in bed. Sorry. My crossposter obviously still isn't done, and the IFTTT Dreamwidth-to-Tumblr one I was using before is too glitchy and hands-on for my current sluggish state. I may try a Tumblr-to-Dreamwidth one instead.

My main Tumblr is just snarp as usual, and my reblogging-stuff-only one is prospitianEscapee.

comments

My father is very good at denial.

2016-01-31T00:49:31Z

Here is a story about his abilities that I think is pretty interesting! And also depressing. Also that.

One evening in 2010 or 2011, we had a client meeting in a case in which the plaintiffs were basically a whole small town. We were about to start, and I was handing out some paperwork to everyone.

Me: Okay, I think I've given everybody their stuff except [name]. Is he here somewhere, or is there a family member who can deliver this to him? (Looking at Client 1, who's at the front of the room and has the same last name.)

Client 1: Oh, no, he - sorry, he passed away. Sorry...

Me: Oh, no! I'm sorry. Are you -

Client 2, sitting next to her: His funeral was [date], right? Very sad. Wish I could have made it...

Client 1: [Something about the funeral.]

Dad, who'd been standing right behind me talking to someone else, at this point turned around and started the meeting. He should have been able to hear this conversation, and didn't ask anyone else about this person during the meeting, so I assumed that he had.

So at home, a few days later, I was surprised when he complained that [name] hadn't yet turned in some piece of paperwork. I reminded him that he'd passed away.

Dad seemed shocked and upset: "No! Not [name]! He's a friend of mine, I've known him for years! He's not dead!"

I hadn't realized that Dad had known the guy, and thought maybe he'd actually been too engrossed in something else to hear the conversation at all, so I said something like, "well, I'm sorry, but, uh, I think she was a member of his family? ...One of the clients definitely said he'd passed away."

"No! You must have misunderstood! He's just sick, they were saying he was sick. I heard someone saying that at the meeting."

"This was at the meeting a couple days ago, though. At that one -"

"Yeah! A couple days ago [Client 1] and [Client 2] told you he was sick, I heard them. Don't scare me like that, honey!"

With an air of impatient finality, he went back to something he was working on on his computer. He could have used to it to check the local news for an obituary - and ordinarily, when told that someone he knew may have died, he would have done that, in an effort to prove it might not be true.

This time, he just didn't check. On some level, he must have known what he was going to find.

Since he'd chosen not to accept this information as canon, I didn't make any further efforts to break the news. He apparently finally accepted it a week or two later, shortly before he needed to meet with the guy's wife and kids to deal with estate-related stuff. Notably, though I'd been scheduling all of the one-on-one client meetings for this case myself, I didn't know this one was taking place until the family showed up in the office and he let me know to prepare some paperwork for them.

He does this sort of thing frequently, in all sorts of situations, but this is an interesting example because it's often hard to tell whether he's editing a memory, willfully forgetting it, or if he genuinely missed something at the time. In this case, however, I'd forgotten the names of the people I'd been talking to, but he remembered them. So, it was very clear that he'd overheard the conversation. And if he'd overheard any of it at all, he had to know that his friend was dead, because it had been so short and to the point. Nothing about disease or what he'd died of, just that he'd died and that there had been a funeral.

But Dad wasn't ready to deal with this, so in his head, he'd re-written the discussion.

Yet he was still horrified when I told him, as if it was totally new information. I wonder how long he would have kept this up if he hadn't been representing the guy?

comments

Anyone have any opinions on warm coats/jackets that can be smushed down very small?

2016-01-13T14:31:21Z

Mom got me a nice winter coat from LL Bean, which doesn’t fit, so I am returning it for a different one. Any reason I shouldn’t have them refund the money to her card and buy a coat off eBay? (I told her I was probably going to do this.) Is Primaloft actually significantly better than Thinsulate, etc? Is it possible to pirate Aerogel yet

comments

Someone who knows what they're talking about correct me if I'm missing something here:

2016-01-05T04:40:57Z

Bugs don't actually ever "develop a resistance" to pesticides, right? The fleas aren't actually "getting immune" to the old pet flea meds? These things aren't antibiotics, they're poisons that eat through the little things' chitin and eggshells and stuff. How exactly are you going to overcome that?

Bacteria are able to develop immunities to antibiotics that because their life-cycles are really, really short - they evolve really fast. Also, because huge populations of them are constantly being bomboarded with huge quantities of antibiotics due to Industrial Shit I Do Not Actually Understand, so there's plenty of opportunity for one bacteria to come up with a helpful mutation to resist a specific antibiotic and reproduce a lot.

Bugs don't live long, but they live at least a few days, which means population-wide genetic changes are going to take orders of magnitude longer than they do for bacteria. And they've got other places to live than on crops and domestic animals, and we're not spraying pesticides in the forest or giving flea pills to deer.

So I feel like if bugs are "learning" anything on a genetic level, the majority of survival-conducive mutations that actually get passed on are going to be the ones that tell them to stay away from humans and our stuff, rather than tiny changes that make their exoskeletons a little tougher in the face of something corrosive.

Evolution likes path-of-least-resistance shit like that, right? Even if a flea all of a suddem mutates up a total resistance to pesticide X, and that mutation doesn't impact them negatively otherwise, and that flea survives contact with said pesticide and breeds, it's not going to do as well reproductively as another flea on a deer in the forest that's got another mutation that tells fleas to slightly prefer deer/raccoons/bears/etc over dogs/cats/horses/etc. The forest flea has plenty of potential mates because no one's given its deer any Frontline-or-generic-equivalent-thereof; the house flea, in a house where most of the other fleas just got massacred, obviously has fewer opportunities.

(I feel bad for the mutant flea now...)

The only way I can see the "fleas get used to pesticides" narrative making sense is if some of the pesticides actually are antibiotics, and they function by messing up a symbiotic bacteria that lives on/in fleas, and that bacteria is actually the thing that mutates...?

But even then, it would have to be slower, because so few fleas ever come in contact with flea killer in the first place.

Anyway, I refuse to buy still-under-patent flea killer anymore because the generic stuff is fine.

comments

snarp @ 2016-01-04T16:33:00

2016-01-04T21:33:26Z

Also I just slept >14 hours and it doesn't feel like enough.

comments

Personal philosophy calibration.

2016-01-04T21:33:00Z

I am naturally inclined to be a mean, judgmental jerk who writes people off entirely, which I do not like. I believe in the concept of a Bad Person fervently on an emotional level after about 11:00 PM, but not really in any other set of circumstances. So for the past few years, I've been trying to do like this:

If I find I'm thinking of someone as Bad, I try to nail down exactly what thing(s) they did that made me form that opinion.

And if they're justified, I go like, "okay, but what specific area of Badness is this?" And I try to recategorize the person, in my brain-spreadsheet, as "Cannot Presently Be Trusted To Make Decisions In This Area": and then there's a sub-table containing the list of things they are Bad at. If I have the mental energy for it, this table includes the dates of last observed failure of judgment, because maybe [name] has learned a valuable life lesson about [not hurting [category of person]] in between [date of last observed failure/defense of earlier failure matching category and] and [today's date].

(Spreadsheets obviously aren't the right format for this, maybe it'll get easier once I'm better at SQL.)

comments

snarp @ 2016-01-01T18:13:00

2016-01-01T23:13:26Z

I keep thinking about getting my real-life atsumeta neko a kitten. Unlike in the game, he has no other cats to sit with in his box and on his little tower! And lately he's been bringing his little soft toys up onto my bed and grooming them. Not the big soft toys - he doesn't groom the ferret or the goose, just the bouncy-ball-sized tribbles and the felt knot. He is parenting.

comments

Belated realization

2015-12-22T03:16:27Z

The Hamilton fandom is basically the American version of the Shinsengumi fandom.

comments

Is he just being passive-aggressive at this point

2015-12-14T19:21:36Z

I spent the week house- and pet-sitting for my parents, and except for pet-wrangling and some IT stuff, I spent every motile moment cleaning.

They are really bad about cleaning, okay! They have one of those huge wheeled garbage bins, and I filled it all the way up.

I did about ten loads of laundry, mostly bedding, because Dad leaves blankets lying around everywhere in the winter and the dogs lie on them. They came back late last night. I hadn't yet gotten the last load out of the dryer and into the closet before I went to bed - this load contained a blanket Mom likes and their good flannel bedsheets.

Obviously, when I got up this morning he'd 1) put a pair of his muddy shoes on the table and 2) put the contents of the dryer on top of the shoes.

comments

Fuck this

2015-12-12T23:59:27Z

Anyone have suggestions on getting (fairly deeply-inset) stripped screws out of the back of my laptop that don’t involve a soldering iron?

There is no way i can safely use a soldering iron in the vicinity of my laptop. My ordinary levels of hand-shakiness quadruple just thinking about it.

comments

You can stage Hamlet however you want

2015-12-12T23:48:05Z

but if you present Ophelia's madness as any less of an act than Hamlet's is, you're doing it wrong.

comments

Buying generic Lufenuron from eBay people who use Comic Sans and are probably not veterinarians

2015-12-12T01:38:48Z

is not something I can do. I'm demonstrably okay with buying my own medications that way - though most kratom vendors prefer Papyrus or Lucida Handwriting - but I cannot do the same to the animals.

comments

Selected Fantasy Works Which Equal or Surpass the Levels of Unrelenting Emotional Realism in ASoIaF

2015-12-08T15:41:21Z

* My Neighbor Totoro

* Moominpappa at Sea

* Please Save My Earth!

* Steven Universe

* Avril Lavigne's Make 5 Wishes Graphic Novels

* this dream I had back in August

* Cold Comfort Farm

comments

I worry that this says something about my body's ability to heal itself.

2015-12-08T04:21:34Z

Cut for gross:

I've gotten little cysts in my earlobes pretty often since I was a kid. This evening, the left lobe started hurting and feeling hot, so as per my usual practice when the things start hurting, I popped the cyst, squeezed out the goop, and swabbed the lobe down with rubbing alcohol.

(This may be counterproductive, I just. Feel the need to do it. A purity-fetishistic little personal ritual, I guess?)

I then also cleaned my right earlobe, because symmetry, and was surprised when that also stung. It's been at least two years since I even put earrings in, and I stopped wearing them regularly in college, so I'd assumed the holes had grown in. So I found a pair of my old earrings and cleaned them.

They both slid in easily. It wasn't even as hard as I remember it being in high school when I went a few months without wearing them. Why.

comments

snarp @ 2015-12-07T19:58:00

2015-12-08T01:02:13Z

At least, when the vessel of boiling water shattered in my hand and splashed me, the burns were not two inches lower; I would be at the World’s Worst ER right now. As it is, I cannot post pictures without landing this blog with an NSFW tag.

This is a wildly inappropriate way for karma to repay me for spending the afternoon doing volunteer nerd stuff and cleaning my parents’ kitchen.

comments

The highest level of mental functioning to which I personally can aspire

2015-12-04T07:20:05Z

is putting rice in the rice cooker for in the morning, even though I'm not hungry right now.

comments

Humanity doesn't deserve the technology we have. Our priorities are wrong.

2015-12-04T06:48:12Z

This evening's anxiety-fueled research project was pet tracking technology. Because what if Bu gets lost, like Polly did. One of these Bluetooth trackers looks like the most reliable option at the moment, and they don't seem to actually be all that reliable.

comments

My cat thinks that he is a therapy cat.

2015-12-04T01:04:19Z

He comes running whenever he thinks I'm stressed out. He's not really competent for the job, though. For example, he thinks that running water is a sign of emotional stress! It's clearly self-destructive behavior - he would never turn on a faucet or take a shower, he knows better.

He feels similarly about coding or writing fanfic, but he's probably mostly right about that.

He also thinks that sinking his claws into a human is how you calm them down. I know he's just trying to knead, but I'm neither wearing a thick coat of fur nor producing milk, and he's an unusually pointy cat - seriously, razor-sharp. I suspect I'm going to end up with at least one scar on my stomach as a result of his efforts to heal my wounded soul on Saturday. Cut for slightly gross:

I was already half-asleep for the evening when he applied this treatment, and I didn't get it disinfected and bandaged properly. So the cut got infected, and the edges of the big band-aid dug into my skin in the night and left a blister (due to the band-aid being old? due to contact with the electric blanket?). The blister then also got infected. The cut's only now closing up, five days later, and the blister's still in the process of scabbing over.

comments