Art Exchange

(Original from wintersbucky; via feed-the-roses.)

We have been laughing all evening because my wonderful, sweet, lovable idiot cat fell asleep in the crook of my arm - despite his eyes being wide open!

Just imagine gentle snoring from this little guy as he disaffectedly stares a hole through time and space itself…

Bras are cool

I went pretty quickly from HRT kicking in, to getting kind of pokey in the chest region, to buying myself a couple of bras. Altogether, it was perhaps no more than eight to ten weeks from Point A to Point B.

And I was so glad that I did. There was something so satisfying about being able to see myself in the mirror, with matching upper and lower underwear. It was... completing.

It makes me wonder if perhaps there’s value in snagging a bra before it even becomes a necessity; just for the gender euphoria / psychological comfort it can provide!

Dose two: addendum

I feel like I might have spoken too soon on my COVID vaccine side effects dying down; I’m now four days post-hoc and it feels like I still have some issues (muscle aches and swollen glands on the injection side; feverishness if I overexert myself).

It’s physically irritating, mentally debilitating, and it only fuels my anger more towards the sum group of people inflamed this situation for their own selfish reasons.

(I will also add: a couple of years ago, the spouse and I caught a very strange, persistent cold virus; the lymph nodes in my upper torso and neck flared up like nobody’s business and remained that way for almost eight to ten weeks.

It scared the hell out of me, as that kind of persistent swelling is generally associated with far worse ailments; and I was still in my passive ideation phase at the time and was pretty convinced that This Was It. Thankfully it went away on its own; but in retrospect, I’m realizing that this episode might be another unprocessed issue I now have to unpack and deal with.)

Strange bug

I had a very strange bug today. We have a web application that makes extensive use jQuery and a third-party JavaScript library to serve up some tasty-looking data grids.

In the grids are some date columns, which are to be formatted "MM/dd/yyyy" (i.e. "02/24/2021").

Things looked great on my local machine. They also looked great in our development environment. When published to production however, these dates suddenly reverted to ISO 8061 format ("2021-02-24T00:00:00").

Standard practice is, of course, to try and determine what key differences exist between these three locales (even though ostensibly there shouldn't be any).

Well... The libraries are being served up externally, so it's not that. The grid configuration is the same; so rule that out. The data is identical.

The only difference is that the local and development versions are compiled for debug, and the production version is compiled for release.

And lo! What do you know - that was the critical difference.

It's worth stressing here though: that's crazy. It would be like a car refusing to start because you added a bumper sticker. At no point, logically, should the compilation mode affect what's going on with the front end.

And yet here we are...

Trayzn: "I am an expert, dear colleague, in the location and acquisition of antiquities. I have scoured this galaxy in search of artifacts both rare and priceless; and my service to the Infinite Empire is second to none in this respect.

And yet there is one thing, I must profess, that I have not be able to find: your story to be credible."

Orikan: "..."

Orikan: "BASTARD!"

"Stop laughing Trazyn, I have a Gf, she's just from another dynasty"

A newfound pain: addendum

Not that this is in any way, shape or form a surprise but... sheer tights are fragile. Like, super fragile. You so much as even look at them the wrong way and a run spontaneously appears!

This makes lace look positively durable in comparison...

Shuffle Meme - Part 3

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

...And finally, the part of the music library that has yet to be tidied up!

Everything Else

Clash Caravan Palace - Live At Le Trianon On my to-do list: catch a live performance from electroswing trailblazers Caravan Palace. (True story: the band was formed when three traditional instrumentalists / DJs were hired to produce the soundtrack to a black and white pornographic film. How French is that?)

Eustonia CoLD SToRAGE - Android Child Legendary for his Amiga and PlayStation soundtracks; Tim Wright also has an exceptional catalog of personal work (including an album that incorporated the moon - the moon! - as a production effect)!

BROKEN HEART 月野うさぎ Desired Desired is a pioneer of the anime-themed future funk scene, and a major tent-pole in the portfolio of Neon City Records. For a fuller sampling of his work, please enjoy this excellent mix by Real Love Music.

Ebough, Delicious DFast - Out Of The System DFast exists somewhere between funk and big beat; as is typified by this stellar contribution to HBC-00004: Field Trip by ½-bit Cheese.

As You Are Garfunkel And Oates - Music Songs Although better known for their hilarious output, the final song of their first album - dedicated to a mutual friend - is a message we all need to hear.

Eer Amak Et Amor've! Keith303 Arguably one of the greatest .mod music files ever made; through the magic of technological manipulation, Keith bends a sine wave into a more than passable imitation of an electric guitar.

Part One Mike Oldfield - Tubular Bells At 17, Oldfield composed the entirety of this album; at 19, recorded almost the entire thing single-handedly using analog technology utterly unsuited for the task. (As an illustration: a BBC performance demonstrates the number of musicians required to achieve this feat live.) From a technical standpoint, this album represents one of the greatest accomplishments in modern music history.

Yuki Satellites Mosaik Mosaik's work features a kind of quiet, contemplative beauty; and this - the theme to the demo Channel 5 Sequence, by Haujobb - is no exception.

Activate One Now Subi The mad maestro of 4-channel .mod music. (I was astonished to learn later in life that we grew up just a mile and a half apart!)

Holly Republica - Republica One of the first albums I ever bought. I strongly suspect that if I had been bestowed the luxury of transitioning in my teens, a great deal of my personal style may have ended up modeled on that of Republica frontwoman Saffron.

Using downtime to write makes sense to me!

(Every laptop I’ve ever owned has had a small form factor; in large part because I wanted to make sure I could easily crack it open, irrespective of current locale.)

Kudos to you for using your phone in this way, however! (Also, it makes me wonder: due to the differences in writing implement - do you think the phone guides your creativity differently from, say, pen and paper, or a keyboard?)

I’m also all for the in-depth research! I know that there is a danger at times of spending too much time educating oneself, rather than writing; but honestly, if there’s a landmine guaranteed to take a reader out of a story, it’s an incongruent (and easily avoided) factual error.

(It’s also come to my attention via some of my own projects that you simply cannot avoid having to know things in order to accomplish an otherwise simple goal.

Case in point: I have to replace a zipper. I didn’t expect to have to learn about the different materials, sizes, styles, pullers - let alone, the art of trimming a zipper to desired length! And yet: this knowledge is critical to completing the task.)

Likewise: you have to take the time to define your characters, their world, and the events that unfold from both - or, as you note, you may end up with some significant plot SNAFUs. 🙂

Regarding the fanfic asks: 📈, 🛠️, and 🤗!

📈 How many fics do you have?

Uh. UH. I... they're kind of spread over a few different areas, and are we counting only active fics?

Upwards of ten active WIPs. I don't want to chase down every WIP I have somewhere, or even the completed little one shots.

🛠What tools/programs/apps do you use to write?

I do ninety percent of my writing in gdocs. It's quick, easy, and I can do it on my phone because I'm a madlad.

In terms of 'tools', just stuff for names. I've been using a lot of wiktionary to research the meaning behind various kanji to help create names for Naruto/Bleach, and occasionally even get to use it for some wordplay. Otherwise, random name generators, behindthename, top 100 baby names - that kind of stuff.

🤗 What advice would you give to new fanfic writers that are just getting started?

This kind of goes for any writer or creative but: create for yourself first. Pleasing your audience is great! It feels great! But don't chase them.

Make something for yourself first, be happy with it, satisfied, and let that be enough. And then, if people like it, that's great! If they don't, well, who cares? You didn't make it for them.

Okay, but I have to give some context to my spouse’s tags here:

As a teenage, I played the beloved Nintendo 64 classic GoldenEye 007 with my two brothers; and we were speculating as to what the upper limit was for number of enemies slain in any given mission.

To test this, we used various cheats to render the player character invincible, arm him with two rapid-firing machine guns, disable reloads, and provide an infinite supply of ammunition.

We then proceeded to the latter part of the Facility mission; where - during the climax - a never-ending supply of Russian soldiers spawn, and enter the room via the same narrow doorway.

By the simple expedient of placing the player character on the other side of the door, these hapless troops had no option but to run directly into his cross-hairs. We then used a rubber band to hold the fire button on the controller down, and went to dinner.

Returning an hour later, we discovered that our hero James Bond had single-handedly killed no less than 3,000 men; at a rate of a little less than one per second.

Fast forward: I’m in college, and my (soon-to-be) spouse is living with me in my dorm. Fortuitously we had the same Nintendo 64 to entertain us; and a copy of GoldenEye 007′s spiritual successor: Perfect Dark.

My spouse greatly delighted in playing the mission Mr. Blonde’s Revenge; in which the titular protagonist golden-haired behemoth fights his way to the top of a skyscraper with the intent of kidnapping the CEO stationed at the top.

For whatever reason (class, I assume), I had to leave; and when I came back, my spouse was still playing. On completing the mission, we discovered that they had also managed to end the lives of some 3,000 unlucky guards.

Here’s the important difference: during the experiment my brothers and I conducted, we reached this goal by taking advantage of a quirk of level design to automate, at speed and scale, the dispatch of enemy NPCs.

My spouse, on the other hand, had committed their incredible murder spree by hand; endlessly stalking the lower floor of the skyscraper and by various turns firing upon, blowing up, and bludgeoning each new security officer that had the misfortune of ending up in their cross-hairs.

(And filling them with crossbow bolts. So many, many crossbow bolts.)

Hence the epithet: “Captain Overkill”.