Tag Archives: jeremy

bad weekend

I’ve had a bad weekend following a shaky week, and I pretty much fell off the internet in broad terms. I had to force myself to go shopping on Sunday, and I was shaking afterwards. There’s a few things going into this, and Jeremy still being missing is one of them. The depression spiral that leads into is a little terrifying and I actually don’t even want to voice the steps out loud out of some kind of prophetic superstition.

Today is better. I’ve cycled into work (and back home again) these last two days, and the physical activity helps, I think. Felt terrible yesterday (probably due to malnutrition over the weekend) but my energy levels are much better today.

Frustrations at non-functioning code are at a high point and that adds stress to near-breaking point. If it actually gets to the point where I know I’m going to yell at someone if they interrupt me again, that’s probably the point where I’ll need to walk out of the office. So far, so good on that point.

Bad times

I’m not having an easy time at the moment. I lack energy, I lack motivation. It’s harder to get going in the mornings, harder to get to doing things.

Everything builds up in a heavy spiral, spreading its weight across me. Little things get to me more, and I find it harder to relax.

Jeremy being missing really doesn’t help – it weighs more than everything else, and the lack of luck in finding him removes more of my motivation in general.

Between the building pressures and the business of the season, it’s tricky to keep my focus even on things I enjoy.

Tattoos and snakes

Tattoo is healing well. It’s faded, but the skin’s still healing, so it’s entirely understandable there. Really happy with it.

Jeremy still missing. Have acquired a USB inspection light[1] to have a look in some tight spaces for him in case he has got stuck behind the bookcase or something. Don’t really know where he’s gone – there are so many options, and he’s not left any trail or sign of his presence that I can see.

My worst fear is that he’s left the flat – squeezed out through the gap between the floor and the door, or found a hole somewhere that takes him out. If he’s not in the flat any more, I might never find him again. On the other hand, if he doesn’t come out in the next couple of weeks, he might starve. On the other other hand, this was something of the worst time for him to disappear as I have so many commitments stealing my time I can’t find the time for a concerted search of the entire flat even if the task wasn’t depressing in itself. I just don’t have the time I need to get things sorted.

Footnotes   [ + ]

1. bendy camera thing

function footnote_expand_reference_container() { jQuery(“#footnote_references_container”) most effective weight loss supplement.show(); jQuery(“#footnote_reference_container_collapse_button”).text(“-“); } function footnote_collapse_reference_container() { jQuery(“#footnote_references_container”).hide(); jQuery(“#footnote_reference_container_collapse_button”).text(“+”); } function footnote_expand_collapse_reference_container() { if (jQuery(“#footnote_references_container”).is(“:hidden”)) { footnote_expand_reference_container(); } else { footnote_collapse_reference_container(); } } function footnote_moveToAnchor(p_str_TargetID) { footnote_expand_reference_container(); var l_obj_Target = jQuery(“#” + p_str_TargetID); if(l_obj_Target.length) { jQuery(‘html, body’).animate({ scrollTop: l_obj_Target.offset().top – window.innerHeight/2 }, 1000); } }

Vegan Superpowers

Someone proposed using snake-skin in a LARP as a prop (by which I mean shed snake skin, not harvested skin) and some other people from “Team Vegan” piped up and said “not for us thanks” and went on to explain that they didn’t care how it came off of the snake, they want nothing to do with it.

I’m now wondering if they feel the same way about wool. Both snakes and sheep must shed their outer layers for their own comfort on a regular basis. Sheep can’t do it themselves (due to those traits being bred out of them) and need our help to do so. Not helping a sheep shed its wool in the summer is actually crueller than shearing it as it won’t be able to cope with summer heat with the thermal layers of wool. Snakes shed their skin as they grow, squeezing out of the tighter layer being shed to be more comfortable in the new larger scales beneath.

Jeremy is currently in blue at the moment (preparing to shed) which may be part of my reaction to this, but all I can think is that “Team Vegan” is so against any kind of animal product being used that they’re objecting even to the use of naturally discarded bits. I don’t get that. I can understand working against animal cruelty, and modifying your lifestyle to match, but not using natural discards seems overboard to me.

Antlers are discarded by deer every year, scales are shed by snakes regularly, sharks constantly replace their teeth. You can collect all of these things and more without ever harming or even capturing the animals in question – there’s no cruelty involved. It strikes me as being similar to objecting to cutting down forests and refusing to use fallen branches in a fire to keep you warm. It also strikes me that such extreme attitudes will lead to an increase in the use of synthetics, which will pollute the earth faster and cause more damage to animals in the long-term.

I don’t know – I just don’t get the extremism. Unless you really do get Vegan Superpowers from it.

The Winter Solstice

This weekend I’m off to Empire. First Empire event of 2015, first of the Winter events I’ll have been to. It’s also my first field LARP event as a player this year.

Currently I’m fretting a little over the things I don’t have. I can’t find my scaled brow prosthetic, so I might be reduced back to just make-up, which I’d really prefer not to do. I can’t find my rune bag – but that’s an accessory I can live without. I don’t have as much in the way of Demijohn liqueurs as I normally do as I’m a little skint right now. I also don’t have the final piece of my mage armour[1], so I’ll be throwing something together in a hurry – possibly just by wearing my big coat on the battlefield.

The idea of using some of Jeremy’s cast-off skin for my Naga scales has just occurred to me, but I think that might not work as well as the idea suggested. Might be worth an experiment though – I can see if it’ll take make-up to colour it. My worry is that it would tear easily, but Naga probably shed scales as well, so I can find an IC reason for it.

I’m not as revved up for the event as I’d like to be. My keen is low, and I’m not sure what I’ll be doing on the field as Sólsetur. I have a letter to deliver, some people to see, and some rituals to do, but I don’t really know what I’m doing as a whole. I may angle towards taking over as Thane for something to do besides sit around and occasionally do a ritual.

I don’t know. Playing events can be odd for me – I feel more comfortable in a ref/crew role in the main, and while I can write my own characters and play them, finding goals and things for them to do can be tricky for me. I don’t know why I find it easier to do that for an NPC I write than for my own characters, but I do.

Tonight we’re packing the car, and tomorrow morning we’re off to the new Empire site. Hopefully without getting mired in traffic. We’ll see.

Footnotes   [ + ]

1. I didn’t think I’d be coming to this event, so I didn’t commission it and by the time I knew I wasn’t coming, it was too late

Something magical

There’s something magical about watching a snake eat something several times larger than his own head. It seems to defy all logic, and while you’re watching there are several moments when you wonder if he’ll manage it, or if he’s going to have to give up. And then, slowly and magically, with no seeming transition, even more of the food has gotten in and you’re still not sure how that happened because you were watching the entire time. It’s hypnotic.

To explain, I gave Jeremy his first adult mouse yesterday. It is quite a bit larger than the rat pups he’s been on, and he gobbled those up no trouble at all, but they weren’t much bigger in diameter than he was. This mouse was a good third, maybe half again his base diameter and at least double the diameter of his head. I wasn’t sure he was going to be able to eat it. It took him several goes as well. He started chewing on the ear because he was trying to find the best place to start and hadn’t quite grasped where to go – especially given he couldn’t fit much in his mouth at once. He ended up unhinging his jaw and stretching to such an extent I was half-worried it was hurting him. I was completely unconvinced that he was going to get the mouse’s hips in – they just seemed so much wider than even him at his most stretched, but he managed to squeeze them back together and drag them in.

Absolutely fascinating to watch. And of course, upon posting the pictures to Google+, I’ve had two people go “can you not share that with me?” My answer is no. My answer will always be no. I do not make posts based on what my audience (such as it is) wants to see, I make them based on what I want to post. What that means is that the privacy level I use (be that circles on Google+, or friends groups on Facebook, or something else) is based on what I perceive the sensitivity of the post to be. If I don’t want to share something with everyone who might want to see it, I won’t. If I’m raising a potentially controversial issue, I’ll usually reduce the numbers. If I’m posting about my mental health, I’m usually quite careful about my audience. But that’s the thing, I choose my audience based on the limits I want to impose on the content, not what other people think those limits should be.

Many people I know create circles on Google+ purely to share content of a particular flavour. I can understand that viewpoint from one perspective, but I utterly don’t from another. Having a “roleplaying” circle that you make roleplaying posts to is great, as long as you know that everyone who might want to see them is on there. But what if you make a new friend who might want to see it but you haven’t asked yet? What if a friend of a friend might have a good point to make, but will never get to see it because they’re not in your group.

I use circles primarily to sort content into categories that make sense of how I know the person, and that I can use to break down who I want to read. My phone shows me the latests posts from my “Friends” circle on my homescreen rather than showing me all posts. This means that I don’t see the communities and the other people I’ve got circled – just the people who I want to read more often. The secondary use is to share sensitive content as I said above, and that’s a much rarer thing for me.

But then, I see things differently. I’m a glutton for information – I want to see it all, to have access to it all, and to freely be able to access it. I don’t like the closed off worlds that my friends create, even as I understand that they don’t share my views on the matter. C’est la vie.