shonagonisms: facts about me

I have very small wrists and feet. Even when I gained 30 lbs after college, my wrist is only about 5.5 inches around, and at best I wear about a size five shoe. Two in Converse and three in Doc Martins.

I've only had short hair three times in my life, and one of them was before my hair grew in the first time.

My favorite parts of myself are my left eyebrow and my tattoos; my favorite parts of other people are usually little patches of the softest skin they have.

I think I could survive the collapse of society.

I think I would make a stellar Companion for the Doctor.

My favorite time of the day is that moment right after you realize you're awake, but you're still totally relaxed, and the sun is coming through the windows, and your bed is soft, and everything is still fresh and good.

I pretty much only know how to cook enough for five or more people; when I cook for myself, there's always leftovers for days.

I believe cats are agents of Chaos in a totally sweet and muzzy sort of way.

The best way to get me to read a book is to give it a nice cover, and there's a bonus if it contains things I like to read about.

At some point or another, I have a crush on every friend that becomes a close friend; it's part of the bonding process.

I've seen Rocky Horror live four times in four different places.

I have very specific tastes in boys, and never seem to date anyone who falls in that category.

I'm a romantic... but I tend to not like all the things we're told to do for valentines: I like my roses to be alive and in my garden, I like my chocolate to be in things other than heart-shaped boxes, I don't care much for diamonds and really don't like those things the jewelry stores push like the journey diamonds and that weird heart thing from Jane Seymour.

I tend to believe that people who like things that I like can't be all bad.

I try really hard not to be a screaming liberal, but I am pretty much there, most of the time. I just keep it to myself.

I'm convinced there are few things better than a really good book that changes your life.

I don't know how to take short showers.

You'll know when I've been cleaning because I'll be wearing all the random hair things and jewelry and accessories I found along the way.

I love fresh new office supplies to an unseemly degree.

Puns amuse me more than long jokes, especially if they have something to do with the subjects I love most: language, grammar, cats, pirates, tea, scifi, fantasy, books, cats, etc.

organizing

I've been slowly organizing my life since I got back from Res (which in my head sounds like The Res, as in Reservation, but whatever).

I've always been sort of a whim-based person. I grew up not liking schedules and hating to-so lists because they restrict the options: I can't do whatever I want because I have to be here at this one specific time* and I have to do this one specific thing, followed by all the other things that need to get done today. I blame it on being an air sign: you try to keep the wind from blowing where it will and see how angry it gets! I never did anything I didn't want to do until it became unavoidable. Even now, I tend to not plan things and to put off the things I don't like, like housework and homework and suchike.

But as I've gotten older, though, everything is becoming more unavoidable, and I've come to rely on lists to keep my brain from flying apart in a million different directions (the air-sign in me again: all the molecules want to be equally as far apart from all the others as they can!). I have official to-do lists for the week, and long lists that are part additional to-do, part things I want to know, things I need to follow up on or remember to check out, things I need to get or find, things I want out of life, ideas I need to remember... pretty much anything that needs to be recalled goes on the secondary lists throughout the week. And I love my schedule because somewhere along the line, I had a perceptual flip: they don't limit what I can do, they define what I have to do so I can actually physically see all the time I have to do what I want!

I cleaned out my Book (where all this junk is supposed to stay) yesterday, and realized I've been keeping the lists and collecting worksheets to track all my projects for almost two whole years now, and the folders for each month have gotten fatter, but my life has gotten freer and calmer and better: I hardly ever overdraw my bank account anymore, paperwork gets done on time, bills get paid when they're due. I found DIY Planner and The Organized Writer and they've done miracles in my dysfunctionally-right-brained world.

But it wasn't enough when I had to start being a full-time writer and a full-time student again, too. So I've rearranged. First thing in the morning, I write, and at least one day out of the week is devoted to reading, as well as a minimum of a chapter from something required before bed. And I've been physically cleaning up. J, a new friend from the Res, pointed me in the direction of FlyLady.com, and I'm not anywhere near the devotion I need for that, yet, but I've been doing little things she suggests along the way, and it's starting to work in just little ways that make me feel like I'm getting somewhere. I keep getting amazed at all the time I have between these two systems.

And it's getting better. I think I can do this. Eventually (and I think this will be a sooner sort of eventual, since I'll be all alone in the house for most of a year soon), I'll have everything in it's place, physically and mentally, and my life will make sense. Which is all for the best, since I'm finally devoted to getting it somewhere good and getting on with it.

link: Cisco helps build prototype for instant cities - San Jose Mercury News

Cisco helps build prototype for instant cities - San Jose Mercury News

link: Are we in the middle of a mass extinction?

Are we in the middle of a mass extinction?: "The definition [of mass extinction] I like is where you have numerous phylogenetically distant organisms involved in losses at the same time. For example, 65 million years ago there was a mass extinction. Dinosaurs were lost, but what made it a mass extinction was that all kinds of other species went down at the same time - all large marine reptiles and primitive types of birds, as well as many groups of plankton and other one-celled creatures. It was a large scale extinction that affected apparently all ecologies on the planet, from moderately deep marine to high altitude terrestrial ones. These were dramatic losses. By contrast, the End Pleistocene [about 12,000 years ago] doesn't stack up as a mass extinction. There were losses of large mammals [like woolly mammoths and mastodons], and some small. There were bird losses in the scavenger/raptor category. But then the loss picture drops off to nothing. There's no evidence for large extinctions among reptiles or fishes. Nor for plants."

It's nice that an expert in the field doesn't think we're about to suffer massive collapse, but I just keep thinking, 'what if it's as bad as they say?' and 'what if this is what it's like at the beginning?'. I mean, we have the tools now to notice the dying-off, but in the past, it would have just been, I don't know, that bird never came back one spring, and that kind of frog isn't here in the pond anymore, and our grandkids don't know what that particular tasty animal even looks like, and then one day, there's a creature walking around in a landscape devoid of anyone like him, with no ecology to speak of, and when he dies, 75% or 90% of the world has become fossils. Along the way, probably no one thought about it, or if they did, they didn't think everything would be gone. If there was even anyone to think about it.

We're just in this position where we have these big brains that make us speculate and allow us to speed up the process and notice when it happens... and deny that it might be. And do something about it.

Say this is the start of one of these massive events. Maybe everything will just collapse in the next decade and people alive now will notice that things have changed, but maybe it will take three thousand years, which is very VERY slow for people, but hardly anything for stones and the fossil record. Would we even understand in three thousand years that all the things that sound like really old myths were once real animals and that the ecosystems were once rich and diverse, or were so in very different ways than they are then? I mean, if this is the middle, and not the beginning, we only started to notice recently when big things like buffalo and dodos started going missing. How many more things died off that we didn't notice at all?

Maybe we should act like there's something we can do about it and try to avoid the big hit: maybe it's going to happen anyway, but maybe we can preserve genetic lines and captive-breed and genetically engineer, and build arc ships and colonize other worlds and spread out beyond the system of this one planet and maybe we can save it: expand the idea of a local population from a single woodland to a whole planet, and maybe things can keep living and diversifying elsewhere and survive.

Even then, though, things will change. Nothing stays the same. If we choose the strongest lines and preserve them, we've just sped up evolution in whatever direction we define as strongest, and maybe those wolves on other planets will be gigantic; or maybe they'll be small, domestic puppies that only look like wolves. Maybe the buffalo will be affected by new ecosystems and become something not at all like a buffalo. Maybe the panthers will go feral in the domes on the moon and get smaller, longer-legged, arboreal in the light Gs. Who knows? We would only have saved this moment in their evolution; in the future, we can't guarantee that anything we save will still be that thing, even if we only stay on this one planet.

Conservation seems to have this idea that we can stop time, and that's not the point. The point is to not kill everything so the ecosystem can stay solid; the individual animals are less important than the whole, because while wolves and buffalo and panthers are impressive, if they were all entirely gone, other things would step up to fill the roles of hunters and herbivores, and the ecosystem would eventually balance out again and be fine.

geeeks unite!: comic con, june 2010

I'm firmly behind the idea of ironic protest. Everything else has gone ironic, right? And protesting is such a hot-button topic all the damn time while simultaneously being mostly ignored, that I think this is exactly what the whole thing needs: people using the format to comment on other people using it unironically.

There are great pictures of the geekery here.

The mood of the states based on Twitter. Also, look how relatively happy Florida is... which leads directly to the question 'why is everyone so mean to me, then?'. Also, look how many twitterers are from California, and how no one's particularly cheerful in Maine.

link: Routines for Starting Your Day

Routines for Starting Your Day

Eat a healthy breakfast. (Don't forget to feed the kids too.)

Watch or listen to the news or read the newspaper (from your doorstep or online).

Get dressed and cleaned up.

Check your messages.

Get out your daily planner.

Do your morning chores.

link: The Laws of Saving Time

The Laws of Saving Time:

"Have a place for everything, and keep everything in it's place for quick retrieval.

Your New Motto: I don't have to do everything; I just have to do something.

Do as much as you can ahead of time.

Automate as much as possible.

Multitask whenever it is possible and safe.

Clean as you go.

Don't be afraid to say "no" when somebody asks you to do something you just don't have time for (or don't want to do).

Delegate tasks

If you get somewhere early or finish a project before expected, do productive things to fill your time.

Whenever you go on an errand, try to do other errands along the way.

Limit interruptions.

If you have kids, learn to break down projects into very small steps that only take 5 minutes or so."

letters to the aether

Dear Universe,
It would be nice if the drama would back off for more than just a few days. I have enough on my plate right now, and I don't need more of this crap. Also, it's alarming how many ambulances have been coming downtown this past week. If this is the beginning of the zombie apocalypse, I'm so not pleased.
Spikes,
Me

ps: it would be nice if I had a nice boy to hide away with while I waited for all this mess to blow over.

coming to computer screens near you: professional fangirl!

This is what I said on Facebook:

Also! Calling all Geeks! I've decided to start an incredibly low-budget online TV show called Professional Fangirl, and I need content! Anything geeky counts: reenact your favorite parts of shows and movies, have a puppet show, react to things of a geeky nature, make a fan vid of an episode you think is missing, interview people you know, film up to three minutes of discussions or board games or whatever!

Send me tips, topics, things you'd like to see, clips of people saying the word Geek, quick soundbites on why geeks are awesome, reaction vids on the geekiest things you've seen this week, how-tos of anything in teh realm of geekery, links to things I need to see, ANYTHING! The best and the brightest and the funniest will (eventually) become segments in a sort of skit show. In the meantime, I'm saving up for a flip video, and then anything is fair game. I'm aiming for distinct seasons, with an Alpha Season of uploaded clips and a Beta Season of little mini episodes, and then Season 1.0 with maybe ten or thirteen episodes of 15 minutes each. Let the info-gathering begin!

 So you've been warned. I have no idea how to edit video, I'm not a very good actress, I'm damn near broke, and I have very limited time, but I want to do this, so it'll eventually get done, a little at a time, and then I'll be a STAR, and I'll sell the show to Comedy Central or SciFi (sorry, SyFy) or something, and I'll be moderately famous in an incredibly self-referential and fan-referential way. It will be awesome. As soon as I figure out how to not look like an ugly monster on a low-budge video.

It'll all happen on my YouTube Channel.