anagram of brat

I had planned to take a break from beading after I got done with the Tetris Dance, but this past week it became apparent my brain has other ideas regarding break taking and also other projects. >_< I may have to get froggy with myself to ensure the needle does indeed get put down for a while, because yow, my wrists. (Really need to invest in some squeeze balls and braces at this rate, ugh. I will not be defeated by tendinitis.)

But yeah there are now a couple of projects on the docket for the future. One is a tube necklace/torq/wrap based on the Fourth Doctor's scarf, along with figuring out a pattern for making the TARDIS out of beads. The other is, well. Between calling up the Lost Projects of The Beforetimes and Kidzilla suddenly discovering Actual Honest-To-Goodness Pokemon, something like this was bound to happen at some point:



Sorry about the fuzz, I committed the web developer sin of displaying them at 3x their actual size. :P The patterns resolve to a square just about coaster-sized. I have a feeling these won't be the last I'll see of these particular patterns. If I do go ahead and do this I'm probably going to start with Snorlax - something about that particular pokemon never fails to make me smile. Maybe it's because he looks so fat and happy, like a slumbering Totoro or a Budai figure.

I'm thinking maybe during the proposed and HAPPENING (she sternly told herself) break I might hunt down one of the Pokemon Chromatics and actually give them a try - I keep saying that it's exactly the sort of game I would have been rabidly into had it been released a couple of years before it actually had been (I was already in college by that point), but due to prejudice and Previous Associations I never really let myself explore it. Also since the plan at this point is to get Kidzilla a (3?)DS and whatever edition is currently out for it for her birthday at the end of the summer, I feel like I need to catch up a bit (LRN UR HSTRY) before I start playing with her. Also I seem to remember my sister promising to send me G's old DS... hmm. I should get on her about that.

I also find it funny that I'm still firmly stuck about 5-20 years behind w/r/t gaming. I have about zero interest in the new generation consoles - hell, we only use our Wii for Netflix, which will probably stop once I figure out how/get enough scratch to hook up our blu-ray player to our wireless network. But yeah, everything I've been reading about the Xbox One has been NOPE NOPE NOPE DNW and I've been really Meh on the Wii U. I rather doubt my opinion'll be much different on the PS4, especially since I'm still not really interested in the PS3 even. Oh well.

Overall it's been a reasonably low key weekend - both kids were a little stir crazy yesterday what with the cold and the rain, so we spent part of the day at the Jones (deliver me from laissez-faire hippydippy parents not actually parenting their children - ugh), and then drove into Northampton so I could grab some thread and show off a little to the staff (the appropriate ooing and ahhing was had) and then had dinner at Sam's pizza, which both kids seemed to enjoy. After which we came home and watched "The Name of the Doctor" with Kidzilla, which, surprisingly, improved a bit upon the second watching, despite Moffat clearly Moffatting down the Moffat in a few places. I'll never forgive him for ruining River Song, man - I loved that character (and the actress!) when she was first introduced, but her plotline later... *smh* Alex Kingston deserved so much better. Well, in my ideal world, she and John Barrowman get that spin-off where they adventure around the 51st century together. I'd watch the hell out of that, I won't lie.

Vaguely toying with the idea of forming a Pioneer Valley GOC (geeks of color) discussion/meetup group. Between listening rabidly to TWiB and Nerdgasm Noire podcasts for the better part of the month, I'm discovering the lack of that going on in my life and that it's something I'd like to have happen, especially since I can count the area black gamers I know of on one hand and the ones of other non-white ethnicities on two, and that's ridiculous, there's gotta be more of us around here. I'm a little twitchy about it because I know it's something J would love to join if he heard about it, but if he also hears I'm part of it, well... That's on him, yes, I know, but I still feel bad. Meh. Still might be worth reaching out to George and Neal about it and gauging their interest level, seeing as both of them are way more connected than i am at this point. (and by connected, i've referred to both of then as the Kevin Bacons of the Valley at varying points.) The summer is for projects, right?

seems like the rain let up some today. maybe Frosty later? Maybe?

A little while back wrpigeek put a note up on Facebook saying he was selling his original Game Boy and a crapton of games, including a bunch that made me scream MY TWEENS THEY BURN WITH NOSTALGIA (*cough* both Castlevanias *cough*). Long story incredibly short, as he was swinging through the area a couple days later he brought the whole lot over. "Wedding present!"

YESSSSSS.

So we've recently gotten around to putting batteries in the thing and firing it up. This morning on impulse I tossed it in my purse to play with on the bus to work.



I was expecting to just burn off the hour it takes me to get to work with some mindless fun, but it instead turned into the profound intersection of nostalgia and history and memory and I ended up with interesting collection of feels as I played, starting from plugging in my headphones and hitting the switch at the top. Watching the Nintendo logo descend from the top of the chartreuse and green screen, then the "boo-DWEEEEE!" startup noise. The small square wall of text that serve as credits to Tetris, listing the copyright date as 1989.

That's when I looked up. I was on the 31 to UMass at the time, and it then dawned on me that I was holding a game device that was older than 98% of the passengers on my bus + the driver. (UMass buses are driven by students.) Yikes.

The music started and the screen with the onion domes came up. I hit start, was aurally assaulted with the familiar 8-bit chirpiness of "Korobeiniki," and for the next 45 minutes I was 12 years old again, trying to meet the challenge of playing all six B games at Level 9 so I could see the little pixellated music dudes play Tchaikovsky's 'Trepak' before I got off the bus. It took more than one try, as it's been a pretty long while, but I did successfully work my way through and got all the musicians, the bonus dancers and the Space Shuttle takeoff at the end. (There might have been a "YES!" *fistpump* at the end there.)



Because that isn't the most random end screen to a game ever, and yet? Still awesome somehow.

Along the way old things buried in the synapses fired and were recognized. How one fuckup on level 9-5 tanked the entire game. How the blocks often didn't rotate quite fast enough and the resulting exasperation. The way the "bass" channel in the soundtrack briefly became louder than the rest of the music after the game was paused and unpaused. The weirdly shocking revelation that I was not playing with a device with a backlit screen so I often had to adjust either the contrast at the left side or my position in my seat so I could actually see the screen. The baleful red Hal-like glow of the battery indicator and the ghosts of panic attacks past as I struggled to finish a level/game before the light faded entirely. Remembering exactly why both my thumbs are crooked. (Controllers were anything but ergonomic back in the day.) Even the weight and heft of the machine was something - modern tech is so light and sleek and streamlined that something that is rather beefy in comparison while still being no heavier than a decent sized book felt... somehow more satisfying. A steak as opposed to a beautifully arranged salad, if you will. (Ron Swanson would approve.)

It also made me miss my mother something fierce.

Somewhere (and as god is my witness I will find it someday) in my boxes and albums and other forgotten storage of old pictures is one of Mom, lounging in a nightdress and caftan, playing Tetris on my game boy like her life depended on it. Tetris was her JAM. To the point where she she got much stricter about enforcing NO YOU DO HOMEWORK TIME NOW and YOU ARE GROUNDED FROM GAME BOY so she could have some play time, which I thought was a total douche move when I was a kid but as an adult that has two small children part time who abscond with All The Devices whenever they are here I TOTALLY GET IT NOW lol. I also remember having no one at school believe me when I told them my mother played Game Boy because these were the days when video games were something parents were more likely to believe were satanic or something so the idea of someone's mom playing one was beyond freaky. But yeah, Mom couldn't really fathom side scrollers or shooters or see what I saw in them, but puzzle games or Wheel of Fortune she was all over. It makes me kinda sad she missed things like Facebook and by extension things like Words with Friends and Bejeweled and yes, even Farmville. She would have massively enjoyed all of it.

Anyway. After experiencing the dopamine rush of clearing the last level and watching that space shuttle blast off (and level 9 height 5 remains a right bitch to this day), I had the following two thoughts: 1) I really really fucking miss gaming in general. Between the Return of the Warcrack and the brief forays back into Insert Mario Title Here my brain is all "Oh yeah! This stuff? Why'd you quit? It was good for you!" And it is - it's kinda interesting how my focus improves after sitting with some kind of game. I think its the positive feedback of achieving small goals: clearing levels, getting to the next checkpoint, getting achievements. COurse that's also where the addiction lies, because then you're all like "Just one more level/try/checkpoint/cut scene" and the next thing you know an entire evening's gone poof. But in small doses? It's a good thing for me. Games seem to provide that small degree of unbiased outside feedback I often require to continue something, and that effect often spills over into other endeavors.

2) A year or so ago I made some plans to make my next big bead weaving projects based on classic Game boy screenshots. There are several reasons why this is a doable project, the main ones being a four-shades-of-chartreuse color palette and a 160x144 image can be easily replicated on a loom. Or if I didn't want to bother with delicas, I could theoretically do it with perlers, though an entire Gameboy screenshot may take up the entire oven. O_o. Anyway I went so far as to pattern out one of the end credit scenes from Castlevania II: Belmont's Revenge a while back; maybe post-wedding I'll see about doing that and a few screenies from other games as well. The Space shuttle and the full dance from the end of Tetris, not to mention the onion dome start screen would be good ones to start with. Goodness knows I'll need another creative project on the hook after this wedding is over and there will be this large void of craft projects needing to be filled.

Had a little online downtime this morning, so since I have a craft project percolating in my head I've been poking around on the net for things like, oh, personal hot wire cutters and scroll saws, and stumbled onto a workshop listing for a local school for architectural woodworking. Yeah IDK either. I occasionally get the "crafting with power tools" lusts, and know from personal experience that the best way of dealing with it is just riding it out until the shakes and the need to BUY ALL THE THINGS at Home Depot go away.

You'd be proud of me, btw. I had to go inside HD yesterday because we are out of picture hangers and I have two freshly framed things to hang (slowly gaining ground in my personal war against the whitespace in my house). I went in, went straight to aisle 16, checked straight out. No detours into paint, lumber, pvc pipe, rope, lights or any aisle prominently featuring words like DEWALT, DREMEL, or BLACK&DECKER.

...can I put power tools on my wedding registry?

Only vaguely related to all this is happening to glance out the bus window yesterday in time to note the presence of a library card catalog sitting in the window of an antique store we were passing. I have all sorts of FEELINGS about this. Mostly "LUST" and "COVET" and such. I have no earthly idea what I'd do with it, but I love tiny little drawers in things almost as much as I love blank notebooks, which is to say I have PROBLEMS. Seriously, if I had an entire wall of little tiny card catalog drawers, I'd be a very happy woman, but again, no earthly idea what I'd keep in said drawers.

Course I don't know why I'm even thinking about more craft projects; I've got creative stuff in the fire that I haven't touched that needs attending to. Beadwork. SQWRRL. My ongoing hair stuff. Writing. Not to mention I've been camping Donna Meijia's website like a Horde rogue over an Alliance corpse waiting for her to announce that she's teaching belly dance classes again. And then there's the stack of games I got last week for the SNES and the Wii that I need to find time to play, this damn wedding to plan, work, and a house to keep up with which is currently winning on the chaos front (2 kid weekends back to back probably isn't helping in that department). I need to give up either sleeping or The Internet to get everything I already have to do done. Probably both. Feh.

You are The Empress

Beauty, happiness, pleasure, success, luxury, dissipation.

The Empress is associated with Venus, the feminine planet, so it represents,
beauty, charm, pleasure, luxury, and delight. You may be good at home
decorating, art or anything to do with making things beautiful.

The Empress is a creator, be it creation of life, of romance, of art or business. While the Magician is the primal spark, the idea made real, and the High Priestess is the one who gives the idea a form, the Empress is the womb where it gestates and grows till it is ready to be born. This is why her symbol is Venus, goddess of beautiful things as well as love. Even so, the Empress is more Demeter, goddess of abundance, then sensual Venus. She is the giver of Earthly gifts, yet at the same time, she can, in anger withhold, as Demeter did when her daughter, Persephone, was kidnapped. In fury and grief, she kept the Earth barren till her child was returned to her.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.

a) no surprises here.
b) man, remember when every other entry in your friends page would be one of these? It's quaint seeing one now.

...when you realize how much of your fragile little psyche was shaped in childhood by commercials? Yep, had one of those this morning when I put The Preciousssss on random at work and Bobby Darin singing "Mack the Knife" came up near the top of the list.

"Mack the Knife" is a pretty awesome song. It's kind of a gateway drug into the messed up little world of Bertolt Brecht, if you're inclined towards interesting pockets of music geekery and not so much into pop/jazz standards of the early sixties. The problem is that if your brain was at a certain stage of malleability/development around 1989 (which mine was) and you watched probably too much TV than the experts deemed healthy at the time, this is probably the first thing you think of when you hear it:



A big scary moon face wearing sunglasses that's only slightly less creepy than the Burger King. Who can't lip synch to save his life. (RuPaul would be telling him to sashay away after three bars.)

I have similar problems with Beethoven's "Für Elise" because of yet another steller ad from Mickey D's.



I still know every single one of these words. There's a fleeting wish for a little brother included with that so I could spitefully deny him french fries. Hands off, they're mine, all mine ALL MINE!!!!!

Well, I suppose I have cell23 now, but he buys his own goddamn fries.

You know what else I still know all the words to after all these damn years?



Man, the McDLT, talk about taking a person back. :P I remember having the little plastic record of this back in the day and thinking it was just CRAZINESS that they could etch things on a skinny strip of vinyl and your record player would totally PLAY THEM. CDs were still expensive space tech at the time.

I suppose a greater comment about the impact of advertising on children can be made here considering how far up into the delicate nooks and crannies of my brain the ads from one company in particular (and one pushing fast food at that) have lodged themselves and remain long after I've grown up, but I'm not making it right now. Instead I just amusedly shake my head (and my fist) at how McDonalds has warped my fragile little mind and to some extent my music taste.

I will note, however, that I now have a POWERFUL craving for McNuggets.

Well since my twitter feed seems to be posting in Russian lately, my "happy birthday to me" post might as well follow suit. :)

Thirty-three. Huh. I sure as hell don't feel that old and feel infinitely older all at once.

• I'm getting better. The whole forcing myself to eat until my body stops treating food with suspicion seems to be working. Balancing it with lots of fluids, which seems to help. Small snacks instead of actual meals also seems to be the right way to go, especially since my stomach still likes to be all like NO after ten bites of anything. Not exactly 3 meals a day friendly right there.
  
  Surprisingly so far what has been pretty well accepted right now is cheese. I would think it would be something that would make me feel horrible but apparently this is not my week to be dairy-sensitive. So the last few days one of my primary nibbles is chunks of hard sharp yummy. grinninfoole treated me to a small brick of Gruyere on Thursday and today at the farmers' market the lady at the Chase Hill Dairy Farm stand gave me the remainder sample chunk of her sold out Queso Veijo, so for right now at least it's an easily indulged craving.
  
  
• Speaking of which, I did indeed go out to lunch with grinninfoole on Thursday, though considering my digestive issues I opted to have chicken noodle soup instead of Bueno y Sano. I do enjoy our lunch dates, it seems to be a nice check-in/how are we doing for both of us and have some frank discussion about depression, recovery, efforts at being more social/adult/goal oriented and how all that's going for us. Other than my health issues, we both seem to be on an upswing at the same time, which is excellent.
  
  
• D&D went decently on Thursday night; after a group consensus that combat and general gameplay needed to be tightened, I think overall we all did better. Apparently putting a chart down on my combat cheat sheet listing all my dice roll values helped me a lot - a fair amount of what slows me down during game, believe it or not, is trying to figure out what 17+26-4 is. We seem to be approaching the end of our campaign, and while I like playing Mare and enjoy the band of characters we've got going, I think I'm in agreement with avalon616 here - epic tier is kinda rough and aspects of it are starting to poke me in the "this is why you never liked endgame raiding in WoW either" place. Starting to. They haven't quite gotten there yet. We'll see how we progress.
  
  
• Work is actually pretty good now that back to school rush is over and the work study minions are starting to know what they're doing. The bad part is that my layout's been accepted so now I'm on the profoundly unfun bit of website design where I have to translate pretty shit in photoshop into CSS. Eugh. And I still have Other job stuff to do so if I can find a bit of time to work on that this weekend, next week should be nice, money wise.
  
  Oh and yesterday (well actually today, but never mind) was my boss's birthday. Apparently most of a slice of red velvet cake doesn't disagree with me either, go figure. ITS does not scrimp on the baked goods, seeing as besides the red velvet there was this cake called "to die for" that looked too much like diabetes on a plate to even want to get near, but damn. Also ITS has a fair amount of Polish folks. There was a rousing chorus of "Sto Lat" as the cakes were getting cut.
  
  
• Kiddos are here, and for the most part, behaving themselves. Kidzilla's missing front tooth is ridiculously cute when she giggles:
  
  
  
  See? Oh here, since Lil'Beast decided to butt into the picture taking have a bonus.
  
  
  
  We had a nice visit this morning from their grandparents (chirping_monkey's side) who dropped off a kitchen playset for them. Lil'Beast kept coming down the stairs and serving us invisible cakes. These are the moments that keep me from eating him, I swear.
  
  Every so often I have an "AAAAH TOO FAST STOP GROWING" with them. Between Kidzilla's facial window, having to raise her bike seat this afternoon, and the fact that Lil'beast is now too big for his PJs, tricycle and almost his sandals... yeah. They've both changed so much in the two years I've been regularly part of their weekends on this end of MA. And yeah, I realize it's what kids do, lol, come on, I'm still having issues with my nephew being legal to drink and getting tattoos and macking on women cause he tall and cute. Somewhere in the back of my brain he stopped growing around 12 and his siblings and Alejandra all stopped accordingly as well, no matter what their facebook statuses say. One of those things, I guess.
  
  
• We also managed to make it out to the farmers market, as I mentioned earlier. Came home with ingredients for some ghost pepper chili (which I will not be eating, thank you) and I've been bugging cell23 for two weeks to make potato leek soup, so he got stuff for that too. Noms are afoot. And the kids got maple candy and cheese and cookies so they as usual made out like bandits. I didn't personally get too much this time around, but I'm thinking next week I'll stop by the astarte farms tent, buy up a whole big bag of their end of season tomatoes as well as any I get off Icky and Sticky in the next week or so, plus a few other bits and pieces and try my hand at making an army sized batch of tomato sauce in the crock pot.
  
  
• New eggs in the cave today! I know I know "you still play that game? lolwut?" yeah yeah shut up.
  
  
  

Yeah, that's kinda life as I know it right now. In a few hours it'll be time for me and some of the crew to head down to Northampton for burlesque, and then tomorrow I think there's apple picking happening since we didn't get to go for Kidzilla's birthday. Definitely creeping on up to Fall... cannot wait...

On the one hand, it's lunchtime and this is the first time I've gotten to sit down since getting off the bus. My feet are already screaming. On the other hand, if the traffic remains steady through the day rather than dead dead dead dead HOLY CRAP 15 PEOPLE RIGHT AT CLOSING TIME maybe I'll get out of here on time today. So it's not entirely a bad thing. Plus busy days go faster.

In completely else news, this morning was much more together than yesterday in terms of getting out of bed on time and getting morning stuff done so that's a win, even though I woke up from a strange but interesting dream wherein I was having a heart to heart conversation with someone I no longer speak to (no, not either of Them). It was weird because the conversation happened while we were trapped in a large rambling antique mansion trying to solve a murder mystery so we were wandering through all sorts of rooms and staircases that folded in on each other in Escher-esque ways (oh, dream logic) and having this intense conversation at the same time. It ended well, which was nice. Normally when real people i have beef with show up in my dreams it always devolves into screaming and waking up angsty.

Also? My brain suddenly developed an infestation of plotbunnies. We'll see whether they get exterminated by Life per usual or if the ideas actually go somewhere. If they stick around long enough, maybe I'll make another laughable crack at NaNoWriMo this year. Or as it usually works out in my case, NaNoWri48h.

I think tonight cell23 and I are going birthday shopping for Kidzilla, since D&D is canceled. I have some plans for what I want to get her, and something I wanted to make but I got sidetracked, so it's gonna wait until Christmas. (Considering it was going to be a calendar/journal like object, it makes sense to give it to her at the turn of the new year anyway.) I'm kinda psyched about it, honestly. I remember seven being a pretty awesome year. At the same time whaaaaaaaaaaat? She's seven already? Man, the old. I has it.

Ugh, I really don't want to put my shoes back on and head back up into the computer trenches. :P No rest for the wicked, and since wicked is tattooed on my shoulder, that includes me.