Sometimes I think about that one tumblr post about The Vitamin, where one day your doctor discovers that you've been missing The Vitamin your whole life, and then you start taking The Vitamin and you are suddenly the smartest, strongest person ever because all this time it was your lack of Vitamin holding you back. And that really resonates with me.

But almost every time it shows up on my dash, it's accompanied by the followup reply about everyone you know going "Oh my god, you didn't have The Vitamin? You poor, brave soul!", and sometimes that quote about being found in a cave with a broken ankle and now you are the most beautiful pitiable admirable creature in the world because you were discovered in the cave with the broken ankle. To be clear, I'm not judging anyone who would like that, but thinking of it makes me feel like a little creature has coiled up and died in my chest.

What I want is to start taking The Vitamin and have everyone forget, as quickly as possible, that I was ever the sad pathetic lump I was before doctors figured out I was missing The Vitamin. I want to be so competent and smart and reliable and The Best At Doing Everything All The Time that my new existence blots out my past like the sun, just shining directly into peoples' heads and burning out all knowledge of me before The Vitamin. I want to move to a city where nobody knew me before The Vitamin and nobody will ever know that I was once Vitamin deficient. To them I will only be That Incredible Person Who Is So Helpful All The Time. No pity. Absolutely no "wow, you were so brave!" No acknowledgement at all, at any point, ever, of the Vitaminless Era, unless you are a very close friend and I trust you not to be weird about it, and even then only in private conversations away from all the new people who have no idea I need Vitamin supplements to function.

I'm working with two high school ESL students from Egypt right now, and their dad sits in on a lot of tutoring sessions. Lately we've been reading (an ELL adaptation of) Frankenstein. Apparently it's not a well known story in Egypt, and it's been really interesting reading Frankenstein with three people who are completely unfamiliar with both the book and the pop culture depictions of its characters. 

The kids picked the book out for themselves, and apparently based on the cover (which depicted a kind of store brand MGM Frankenstein's monster staring grimly at the viewer) they thought it was going to be an organized crime thriller. They reasonably assumed, given the beginning of the story was on a ship in the Arctic, that the rest of the story would somehow involve the ship and/or the Arctic. Early on the dad was saying that Victor seemed like a very promising, hardworking student who would make a good doctor, because preserving life is the best reason to study medicine. One of the high schoolers predicted Elizabeth was going to wind up a love interest on the first page she showed up and groaned when he was right. The other high schooler thought Victor was going to become a serial killer when he started stealing body parts, and the first one suggested that was just what happened when college students in England studied too hard. 

All three of them agreed that a lot of problems could have been avoided if Victor had just written back to his family and remembered to eat food.

Two of my private tutoring students are observing Ramadan and I felt slightly like a villain from one of those old fashioned kid's books about evil boarding schools, trying to get them to remember sentence structures or conjugations and asking them to speculate on what characters were thinking or would do next when I could practically hear the grinding unoiled gears in their brains
 Why? Because I had a fakeout ending and the real boss battle has multiple stages.

Poor garbage guitar's neck is a little bowed and when I tried to adjust the truss rod, it broke (or was already broken in a way I didn't notice before; not like I was playing around with the truss rod earlier aside from making sure it was there and I knew how to access it). Additionally, the neck has actually separated from the body enough to be able to wedge the corner of a credit card between them, which is uh. Bad! But wait, there's more! The scorched spot on the back that is my own fault because I didn't know how to use a heat gun is now a serious structural issue, and a brace attached there has come loose!

I took the Garbage Guitar to an actual luthier and was informed that it was not worth fixing. They wouldn't even give me an estimate. (I did get compliments on my paint job though.) But I wouldn't have started this project in the first place if I was being practical and realistic about the odds of success vs. the cost and effort, and if an actual professional says it's not worth fixing, I probably can't make it significantly worse. So now the plan is:
- remove and replace the back entirely
- remove the fret board and replace the truss rod
- reset the neck, possibly after sanding it flat

These are not things I am remotely qualified to do, and this will all probably end in tears, but I still want to try. If nothing else, I'll learn something.

Wish me luck.

Bed to couch to couch to bed

is my daily routine

Bed to couch to couch to bed

is all I have to look forward to

Bed to couch to couch to bed

is probably the rest of my life

and it makes me

want to die, I think

 

I’m so, so tired

when I wake up and

I’m so, so tired

when I lie awake at night and

I’m so, so tired

for no reason

and too many reasons

and I have no idea what reason

 

When I have a little energy

I’ll clean something

When I have a little energy

I’ll think about taking a walk, but I won’t

When I have a little energy

I’ll play some online game

with a friend, if they’re around,

and they feel like it

 

I’ll check the news

and see who wants me dead this week

I’ll check the news

and see who wants all of us dead this week

I’ll check the news

and think I should be doing more

but I can’t do anything at all

even the things anyone can do

 

I’ll get a new job

I tell myself, lying

I’ll get a new job

at one of the three places in walking distance

I’ll get a new job

remote, safe, with no commute

and lose even that reason to leave

 

I’m so lucky

to not be where I was

I’m so lucky

to be safe and supported

I’m so lucky

and so selfish

and so outrageously stupid

 

My friends will say

if you need a ride somewhere just ask

My friends will say

on these days, at these times

My friends will say

if you tell me a week in advance

so it’s okay that you can’t drive,

and the bus doesn’t come here.

 

I’d dream of walking

in a random direction

I’d dream of walking

guiltless, fearless, free

I’d dream of walking

anywhere at all, forever

but I never sleep well

so I don’t dream much.

 

I'd like to follow more people on dreamwidth. I'm taking any suggestions for cool people, but I'd especially like the following:

- people who make things (artists, writers, craftspersons, etc.)

- people who repair/restore things

- people who like to talk about living things (gardening, biology, Cool Bugs, etc), especially marine and estuarine life/wetlands

- anyone who's really passionate about and constantly getting into the granular details of some relatively obscure subject

- queer/disabled/generally left radical "fuck all of this shit" type political commentary and analysis, especially but not exclusively US

- cool monsters

- fandoms: murderbot diaries, Ursula Vernon/Kingfisher short stories and novels, the Imperial Radch trilogy, Terry Pratchett/Discworld, Ursula K. LeGuin, Pokemon, Splatoon, The Liar Princess And The Blind Prince
 



It lives!

(Please excuse the tuning. Apparently brand new strings stretch a lot?)

These critters are on one of the cups of the headphones. Eventually both cups will be covered in them.

some kind of vegetable shrimp lizard with a collection of mismatched fins along its body, its segments blooming out of each other like a flower or an ear of corn, with its tongue sticking out.
a heraldic-looking turtle-shelled beast with a short proboscis, long scaled neck, vaguely equine scaled limbs ending in spurs and fins, and a long, flowing, curly tail. You can also see an abstract squid-like creaturehas a mammalian head reminiscent of a cat, guinea pig, or capybara, ringed around the neck with some kind of frill, plate, or gills. Its forelimbs are stumpy and hooved, and the rest of its compact, potato-like body is that of a fish with trailing tail fins. You can also see a bit of some furry or vine-covered little creature, sitting like a small cat or dog, with huge blank round eyes, and four horns, one of which has sprouted into an antler-like shape.

Despite the image descriptions referencing various plants and animals, all of these beasts are meant to be a bit abstract and difficult to read out as a specific creature or amalgam of creatures. They're just a pack of wierdoes!

While I wait just a bit longer to make absolutely certain the Danish Oil-Alkyd Oil Paint stain on Garbage Guitar is cured before I slap a coat of polyurethane on there, I turn to a different project: headphones.

I have a sensory processing disorder, and headphones that are at least noise isolating are a prerequisite for me existing in the world, but my current earmuff style pair is starting to fail in ways I can't fix without dropping more cash than the whole headset is worth on a new set of drivers. My Fancy Headphones, meanwhile, are neither sufficiently noise-blocking for out-of-the-house use, nor something I feel comfortable taking out of the house due to the fanciness. If those get lost or stolen I cannot afford to replace them.

So I'm taking a three dollar two-pack of earmuffs, the drivers + part of the hardware for an old pair of extremely broken headphones, and an audio cord that was still good except for the connectors, and making my own frankenphones. But because I'm me, I have dramatically overcomplicated things.

Thus, The Beafts:

mostly a long tapering lizard-like head, with a long mouth full of crabeater seal and shark teeth and a feathered crest, and a little curl at the back. It is sculpted onto the arm that connects the cups to the headband, and has a flanged nut and cross-head bolt for an eye.has a kind of squashed bun or river rock body shape, giant flat teeth, boarlike tusks, a crest that might be a mane or might be the dorsal fin of a fish, four little "legs" that might be fins, a curly tail, and a speckled pattern textured into its side.  It is sculpted onto the arm that connects the cups to the headband, and has a flanged nut and cross-head bolt for an eye.
has a beak and a vaguely birdlike head, but fleshy, with a blowhole, and a long knotted-up snake or eel body ending in a lobate fish tail. Same deal, flanged nut, etc.
There are more Beafts on one of the headphone cups (and you can see them on my pillowfort actually) but I need to get going for a bit so I'll put those in their own post later.

I just wrapped up the Fortress series by CJ Cherryh. I want to stress that I *enjoyed* all of it, but I think that's the first time I've ever seen a competently written, solid book series go downhill with every subsequent book. It started with solid characters and an interesting premise, and while it mostly kept those things, it gradually crept its way closer and closer to generic high fantasy.

Spoilers follow, nothing will make sense if you haven't read the books:

It also made a plot point of the main characters not getting to interact anymore, which added tension to the second book but I think sapped the strength of the others, especially as subsequently introduced characters were also isolated. If you're going to make "your relationships with others are your real strength, and isolation is the tool of your enemy no matter the justification" a core theme, you should at least have everyone together in your resolution, right?

Unsurprisingly, the two strongest characters in the series are the main characters, Tristen and Cefwyn, and the relationship between the two in spite of all the many forces trying to wedge them apart is the heart of the story from beginning to end. The people Tristen loves are his compass as he tries to navigate both being a magic-wrought weapon of uncertain purpose and a person with his own needs and fears, and while Uwen is arguably his most steadfast anchor to humanity, no one rivals Cefwyn for sheer affection and attachment. (We could talk about a homoromantic reading of this relationship, but that'd be a whole different essay.) In Fortress In The Eye Of Time, we actually see that relationship being built and explored; in later books, especially with their isolation from each other, we don't get to see that relationship build further, even as we're told repeatedly that it's still paramount. As Cefwyn and Tristen both come into their own, and Tristen especially changes dramatically, they also lose more and more avenues of contact, first to physical distance, then to both magical and mundane interference in the messages they send to each other. 

This also eats away at Tristen's interactions with Ninevrise, another important person in his brief existence. Emuin is physically near Tristen, but deliberately isolates himself from Tristen as Tristen comes into his own and Emuin fears influencing or accidentally being influenced by Tristen. This reasoning is better explained in Dragons, but that doesn't really make it feel less contrived. Uwen's time, meanwhile, is taken up more and more by management of the household. Crissand, a key ally and companion introduced in Fortress of Eagles, and the first friendly representative of the people of Amefel to join the main cast, exists in Owls and Dragons mostly to give Tristen someone to bounce strategy off of and remind the reader that a lot of people want Tristen to be High King whether Tristen wants that or not. Crissand is also pried away under frankly pretty weak pretenses for most of Fortress of Dragons, a turn just barely justified by the fact that the main antagonist is directly manipulating peoples' minds to get as much division and distance as possible between Tristen and his allies even as Crissand's own latent power directs him to important information. This is a real shame, as Crissand has his own interesting personal conflicts as the son of a would-be rebel leader, survivor of a massacre carried out by a Ylesuin authority, and ardent supporter of a hypothetical Sidhe high king against the Marhanen, who finds in Tristen both exactly the leader and loyal friend he's long dreamed of having and an implacable supporter of the current Marhanen king.

On Cefwyn and Ninevrise's end- because I cannot shake the impression that Ninevrise is supposed to be a main character on equal standing with Cefwyn and Tristen, whatever the actual result- they're separated from each other more and more by the separate spheres they occupy in the court. Emuin and Idrys, the remaining two people in Cefwyn's closest circle, are kept from him by physical distance and working very very hard to prevent an assassination/overthrow, respectively. Poor Ninevrise sees most of her core support die in the first book, and whoever is left is behind enemy lines until the climax: we, the reader, don't even get to meet the people she's been isolated from, nor does Ninevrise single out particular names very often even when discussing her distress at the separation. 

Again, I fully understand that this is the point. Isolation is the primary tactic of their enemy, but more importantly, it's the real conflict of the series. But isolation only works in contrast to unity and togetherness. Fortress in the Eye of Time, by itself, did a great job with this, with characters at their most distressed and vulnerable when separated or doubting each others' intentions, and at their strongest and most sure when reaffirming their bonds with each other. Fortress of Eagles upped the stakes on the same core conflict, in a different, more political context. But every subsequent book seemed to pay lip service to it, while focusing more and more on the typical high fantasy issues of military movement and action, courtly intrigue and maneuvering, and of course powerful forces of dark magic Doing Things and threatening to escape confinement. The end tries to bring all the disparate parts together, but it's rushed and awkward, without the emotional force it needs to stick the landing.

On a different tangent entirely, while I'm not going into a traditionally published high fantasy series from the 90s, by an author from the 70s-80s (even if she was a lesbian), with high hopes for gender or sexual diversity, another thing that suffered as the books went on was the depiction of female characters. Ninevrise gets less and less to do as the series goes on; she's a far stronger presence in the first book, where she's only introduced more than halfway through, than in, say, the third or fourth, where she's present the whole time and gets a lot more page space. She's at her best in later books when interacting with Cefwyn, and here I will give credit where it's due and say their miniature war councils do a good job of both establishing Ninevrise as Cefwyn's strategic equal and making me believe a heterosexual romance is actually built on mutual affection and respect, a tragic rarity in my personal experience as a reader. But we hardly see her outside these conferences, where she serves primarily as another of Cefwyn's allies as he tries to rein in the court, and in Dragons all the focus is on her pregnancy, her feelings about Tarien's pregnancy, and her ability to carry messages from Tristen. The other women of the northern court are mostly pawns to push around or foils and minor antagonists for Ninevrise. Orien starts as a formiddable (though stereotypically sexual/seductive) antagonist in her own right, with motives that are compelling if not complex. She is a pawn of a greater power, she doesn't understand what she's getting into, but she's interesting in that love-to-hate way good antagonists are. She disappears for two books, then comes back just to lurk menacingly in the background until she can try to steal her sister's baby. One could argue that this is a part of her character arc, that the gradual hollowing out of what was once a whole if horrible person reflects the similar hollowing out of Hasufin, who is no longer a person in any meaningful sense at all, but if that was the point it would have worked better if we'd been given the chance to watch it happen. Tarien, meanwhile, seems to exist for the sole purpose of being pregnant and jealous. For good or ill, it would have been nice to see her interact with Ninevrise more I think? And Auld Syes is more or less a recurring plot device.

Both these issues are just... kinda weird given these are Cherryh books. Usually my problem with Cherryh books is the high frequency of sexual predators (and no, she does not get points for making those sexual predators women instead of men), but it's a testament to the strength of her writing that I keep trying to read her stuff anyway. The places where this series failed are not places I would expect from her. It makes me wonder if there was some interference from an editor or publisher, or if she just couldn't conceive of a high fantasy setting with the same flexibility and potential as her science fiction settings. Really, most of my complaints here could be solved with few or no changes to the plot if we just spent more time on characterization, including that of secondary/minor characters, with an emphasis on the bonds they value or discard. (Then again, I'm a LeGuin fan, and I understand my idea of an appropriate amount of time spent on people existing and relating to each other without directly driving the plot is what many other people consider a book-killing slow pace.)

So that was a lot of poorly structured rambling, but the TL:DR is this: while I swear in spite of all my complaining that these books are worth reading, it wouldn't be the worst idea to read Fortress in the Eye of Time as a standalone and treat the rest of the series as optional supplementary worldbuilding.

Yes, I'm still working on the Garbage Guitar! I hit two roadblocks a while back. One, I wanted to add some marquetry (of a flying squid) to the head of the guitar, but I'd never done marquetry before, and after some practice I've determined... that I need a lot more practice. Also maybe better craft knives. Two, the plastic binding was in godawful shape and I wasn't sure what to do about that.

For the latter, I finally decided done was better than perfect, and also better than compromising the structural integrity of the instrument. I sanded it down, filled in some pits with epoxy putty, and colored it over with a silver paint marker. The paint marker needs to cure for a month just in case, because I'm putting poly on this thing when I'm done with it, but it should be fine and it certainly looks better. As for the marquetry, the smart thing would be to give up on it, but my local library is supposedly adding a wood-safe laser cutter to its computer/crafting area, so I'm waiting to see if that actually happens. I have my design, the scrap veneer, and the wood glue ready to go. There may be a little bit of a sunk cost fallacy going on here, but dangit I want my squid guitar.

All the really hard parts are over. I've taken off the old paint, from the geological layers of latex and acrylic down to the original, scuffed up, Girl Assigned Pink finish that required a heat gun to soften up before I could scrape it the rest of the way off. I got the geological layers of acrylic and latex off the hardware as well, without destroying them or losing the very tiny screws, which was harder than it sounds. I sanded down to the wood, repainted with Danish oil tinted with oil paint because that is what I had available, and didn't end up with a sticky disaster or a broken guitar. I made my own replacement nut, and my own replacement bridge, and successfully attached both. I filled in the tearout under the bridge and re-reamed the holes without ruining the instrument. I've sanded, cleaned, and (where relevant) oiled every centimeter of this thing.

Now this extremely long project is nearing its end and I'm excited about it. Is it going to sound amazing? No, it was a cheap kid's guitar I literally found in my neighbor's garbage and I'm a complete amateur in every crafting skill relevant to its restoration. Is it going to look professional? No, see above. But it's my garbage guitar. I've poured a lot of time and effort into it, and I think I'm going to be happy with the end result.
Who would like a haunted computer story this fine Halloween the 3rd
I got the minecraft server up and running. Logged in fine, but noticed waystones, a fast-travel option added with a mod, are broken now. I asked any available players to help me test. A player logs on and reports that yes, waystones appear to be broken. I go to shut the server down and see if I can fix it.

I am greeted by a wall of errors in the terminal, culminating in "Server failed to start" and a kick back to the folder containing the server.

Scrolled up, could not find original confirmation that the server had booted up.

Went back to my laptop. Successfully pinged and logged into the server.

For those completely unfamiliar with Computer Type Stuff, that means both I and another player logged into a server that, according to the terminal, exited with a fatal error and never started running.
I can still log in. Right now. I cannot stress enough that according to the terminal, the server is not running.
I don't see my own pings or login.
what the actual fuck

Due to the fact that I casually haunt the local craigslist listings sometimes, I was able to get a pair of Extremely Fancy Headphones for less than a fourth of their retail price, ie Normal Human Amounts Of Money. And the difference is wild. 
If I'm playing music on my cell phone, I can't really tell the difference between the new headphones and my other Good Headphones aside from slightly better noise isolation, and with my laptop they actually sound worse (probably because of the higher-than-standard impedance). If I plug them into my mp3 player though, I can hear all these little details! And tell what direction all the different sounds are coming from (moreso than "ah, this is in my left ear, my right ear, or both ears"). 

It's kinda like when you get glasses for the first time and spend the whole trip home staring at trees because holy frig hey did you know trees have leaves?????

But now I'm a little worried that this is how audiophiles happen and I cannot afford to become an audiophile.

You know what's kinda funny? Sometimes I can tell I'm more likely to enjoy something based on negative reviews. (And I don't just mean "does it send bigots into a frothing rage", though I do also mean that.)

I like stories that meander a bit and give people space to be people at each other, so when I see someone complaining about "glacial pace", "unfocused plot" or "too much dialogue" that tells me I might actually like that thing more. This is especially true of books and video games; a movie or TV show is more likely to be using its limited time unwisely or be just plain nonsensical when described that way, but books and longer types of narrative games tend to actually have the space and time for it (and both video game and spec-fic book critiques are full of people who are looking for one or two specific experiences from all media they interact with and consider it a failure of the writing/game design when they don't get those exact things).
Unicorns are very clearly herd-animal-type ungulates, but usually depicted as solitary. They are also famously elusive and easy to lose track of despite being stark white. I propose that unicorns are herd animals, and the majority are not pure white; rather, albinism and leucicism occur in unicorns as in everything else, and only these unicorns ever get spotted because a properly camouflaged unicorn is even more impossible to spot and track.

This goes slightly against the "unicorns are a type of monster and should be treated as such, dammit" reasoning I usually prefer, since it assumes unicorns are prey animals that make biological sense, but I like the idea that for every unicorn you actually see there are two to eight nearby that you miss entirely.
The new T. Kingfisher novel, Nettle and Bone, came in the mail today. I read the whole thing in one sitting.

It's good.

More romance and less horror than I was expecting outside the Official Romance Novels, and like those romance novels, it did leave me with a vaguely nagging feeling that this Was Not Written For Me. Still very much a Kingfisher, with all that entails, and well worth reading/having a copy of. The old ladies are definitely lesbians and I will brook no argument on this subject. Bonedog is Best Boy.

The book itself, physically, is pretty, with a gold foil silhouette of Bonedog on the outside and an illustration by the author on the inside.(Kingfisher/Ursula Vernon is also an incredible and accomplished visual artist whose work can be viewed here.)

Will try to collect my thoughts and say something more cogent about Themes And Narratives later.


PSA: If you plan to get your name legally changed (say, for gender reasons) and you reside in the US, Do Not change your name during tax season. To be on the safe side, give yourself a couple months to be sure all your documents are updated and the updates are all processed, because the various agencies in charge of those updates all want the same original copies of other identifying documents so you will have to wait for each one to be finished before starting the next.

Signed, someone who got most of their tax stuff sorted out a week before the deadline but still has to make a phone call tomorrow to try to convince the local tax office that they exist.

two bridge blanks, about half an inch thick uncarved rectangles of padauk wood

A finished guitar blank!

I made this guitar bridge! Me! With mostly hand tools! Cut, filed, drilled, routed with a chisel and sanded! This is the most accomplished I've felt in years.
 




I'm autistic, and this means a lot of tasks are harder for me or require more help, especially with regards to my sensory issues. Not being able to handle things that are a non-issue for most people is incredibly frustrating, and makes me feel pathetic. Sometimes I try to do things the "normal" way because I technically can and thus feel like I should.

But today I had my earmuffs on when I was doing laundry (because my housemate was making noises and laundry needed doing) and I remembered that, oh right, laundry is much easier and less stressful when I wear earmuffs, because of the godawful noises the washer and dryer make.

I stopped wearing earmuffs to do laundry because technically I can do laundry without earmuffs. I didn't "need" them, and it felt silly. But not only did this unnecessarily stress me out, it was making it harder for me to get anything else done on laundry day. Normally, despite the physical steps of loading and unloading the washer and dryer being easy and non-taxing, I don't have the energy afterwards to put the clothes away even if I did nothing else that day. Today, through the magic of earmuffs, I don't have that problem! And nobody cares if I wear earmuffs while doing laundry! it's allowed! The push-past-your-disability police have no jurisdiction here!
Alas! I fucked up the guitar bridge I was making when I had to remake the saddle slot, and broke a tiny chisel in the process. I don't own a router, which has made the saddle slot an Issue. The good news is, I'm fairly sure I know what I'm doing now. The bad news is, I think this bridge is unsalvageable, and unless I can turn the blade of the tiny chisel into a tiny routing plane I need to either buy another tiny chisel or see what I can do with aggressive sanding to even out the bottom of a slot made by carefully drilling in a line of holes.

I have three guitar bridge blanks left. One is padauk, the reddish wood I was making the now-ruined guitar bridge out of. Two are ovangkol, which is a brown wood with dramatic dark lines. Both types are registering in my brain as Too Fancy Woods despite being the cheapest options I could find that were tonewoods already in guitar bridge blank size, which is making it hard to pick one and try again after messing up the first one.

I think I'm gonna go for the second padauk blank. The ovangkol matches the fretboard better, but the padauk is a really striking color without having such a nice figure that I might literally cry if I ruin it.

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