Today I decided to pump up the volume and make mistakes. 

I confirmed a theory, which is that my left pinky finger is rubbish. When I was ten, I accidentally cut part of my left pinky finger off in art class, with a giant, brand new pair of Fiskars scissors. It's never been the same. The tip, where the skin graft is, is extreeeeeeeeeeemely sensitive, so I've learned never to touch it. The problem is that my finger looks 100% normal, unless you look very closely. So I forget about it, and nobody notices, and then something stupid happens. 

It seems as though what has happened is that I've learned to compensate in such a way that I never use the tip of my pinky finger. I type pretty fast, but with only three fingers on each hand. I gave up learning to play ukulele, guitar and bass when my pinky said nope.

it doesn't hurt my pinky to play piano, but it's weak. Right now what I'm learning involves left hand chords with major thirds (?). So I have to retrain my left hand to use my thumb, middle finger and pinky, all at the same time. My brain and my muscles are NOT amused. It's the simplest thing in the world, just pressing down with those three fingers at once. And yet, it's as difficult as trying to write with that hand. I can feel it all the way up to my elbow. My muscles have no memories. 

Mayra (next door) was blasting her dumb music early in the afternoon, and the crazy lady across the street was blasting WOGL-FM (Worst of the 80s) later in the afternoon, so I cranked the keyboard volume up to 11 and played a left hand bass C scale for 30 minutes. 

Then I played Ode To Joy really badly. And loudly. When Tom Petty wrote, "The Waiting," he loved that intro riff, and he knew his neighbors could hear him practicing, so he played it incessantly, just to piss them off. 

I'd just like to give you an update on the pickles. Since we ran out of commercial pickles a couple weeks ago, I've been harvesting them out of our fermentation bins and putting them in the same jar, reusing the pickle juice that's in it. And, eventually, topping up the juice with our own.

The pickles are good. Not the best; I want a bit more garlic, a bit more dill, a bit more tang. And probably fewer additional spices. The flavour is complex, which is nice, but I think generally you want a pickle that's less of an orchestra hit (THWAMP) and more of a simpler but more harmonic electric guitar chord (BWARRRMM). So the pickle can join in with other flavours rather than just try to own the plate. 

Maybe there's a distinction to be made between solo pickles that you eat on their own, and harmonic pickles that you eat with other food. Am I over thinking this? No, these are pickles we're talking about. You can't overthink pickles. You can, however, overeat them. I assume. I won't test this hypothesis. Take it as read. 

Any way, the process seems solid. Next year, when number 2 cukes come around again, I'll try a difference recipe. I'll let you know if any of the bins fail; I'll be doing an edibility test on each new bin as we break into it just to be sure. 

I've been thinking that all I need for a laptop at work is 

1. terminal + ssh (including ssh agents, etc)

2. web browser

3. RDP client (for now)

I have been playing with a Chromebook for a while, and it looks like it will do pretty much all of this. My complaint is that I have to use some workarounds in order to get some things done, but then, I use some workarounds to get work done with my current MacBook Pro. Perhaps getting proxies to work properly would fix most of my complaints... and remove the need for RDP.

EXTERIOR-PARK BENCH-NIGHT

WILLIAM: I can’t deal with this shit anymore.

PHILIP: what is it now?

WILLIAM: The Americans have developed the most devastating biological weapon you can imagine. It’s terrifying. 

PHILIP: What could possibly be worse than liquefaction of your vital organs and extruding them through all of your orifices? 

WILLIAM: Okay, here’s the deal. You know when you get a case of pinkeye?

PHILIP: Yeah?

WILLIAM: Yeah.

PHILIP: ...And?

WILLIAM: But here’s the thing. It never goes away. 

PHILIP: ... 

WILLIAM: It seems to. Ten days, three different kinds of drops, eighty seven loads of laundry, bleaching all surfaces, and finally, the itching, burning, watering and cloudy vision starts to clear up. And just when you get a smidgen of hope and happiness, you try to go for a walk, maybe even smile in the fresh air again...

PHILIP: A smidgen?

WILLIAM: WHAM. Your own dopamine triggers a biochemical reaction and you’re back in Red Crudistan.

PHILIP: That’s... horrible. 

WILLIAM: Bet your ass. 

PHILIP: Is that why you’re so miserable all the time?

WILLIAM: Yeah, I can’t take the risk of thinking happy thoughts. 

PHILIP: Damn.

WILLIAM: I do like your new wig, though.

PHILIP: Thanks. I call it Slappy. 

It's 5:30am and I just woke up with a case of BRAIN BEES. (Thank you to Sean and Dawn for this term, though I'm sorry y'all had to coin it.)  In trying to get back to sleep and failing (it's now 6:53) I'm trying to think of more pleasant topics than my aging parents and Hurricane Michael and Kavanaugh and that article in the New Yorker whose last 3 paragraphs killed me and kids spraypainting swastikas on an historic Black schoolhouse and climate change report and Trump and Columbus Day and how I do not want to go to the dentist today for fear of what awfulness they will find and how much it will cost to fix. 

So let's think of something fun, shall we?

Many people have a playful, silly list of famous people with whom they would be allowed to [redacted for Adult Themes] without consequence to their current relationship. 

For example, I have negiotated a deal with my partners (past and present) which states that if I ever met either Jack Black, Nathan Fillion, or Questlove, and if they were interested in a one-night [redacted] with me, that I would be allowed to use my It's Not Cheating Pass and enjoy my one-time [redacted] guilt-free and consequence-free. 

I have now added Monica Lewinsky to my list. Lordy, I love her style. 

Who's on your list? 

For my second night of HARD WEEKEND PARTYING, for no particular reason on this here balmy Saturday night I decided to get my free annual credit report from the big three credit agencies.  WOOO!!!  Seriously though, it was painless and I highly recommend you do it if you haven't done it lately.  Doing this takes like 5 minutes, and while it doesn't give you your credit score, it does show you a list of your open and closed credit accounts according to the Big Three credit reporting agencies (TransUnion, Experian, and Equifax) so you can make sure there aren't any accounts opened in your name that you didn't authorize.  You can also see what companies have done a "soft credit check" on you so they can send you those annoying free "you've been pr-approved!" offers in the mail... these soft credit checks don't impact your credit score, but it's interesting to see who's been sniffing around.

So, to get your free annual credit reports from each of the big three go to AnnualCreditReport.com which sounds scammy, but it's the only site the government has approved).  It is totally free, painless, and a good idea.  (Some folks like to check all three agencies at once, once per year. Other folks like to pick one agency in January, another agency in May, and the final agency a few in Septemberish, just so you can keep a more constant eyeball throughout the year.  I'm not that vigilant, so doing all three at once was just ducky for me.)

Also: Fortune Magazine told me that as of September 21st, a new law went into effect that says that the big three credit reporting agencies must offer you the ability to freeze your credit for free.  Freezing your credit is a good idea, and it is painless.  A credit freeze simply means that nobody can apply for credit under your name while the freeze is in place... not even you.  So if/when you want to apply for a new credit card or get a loan or whatever, just jump back online and unfreeze your account, which takes two seconds.  So clicky on the Fortune Magazine linky at the top of this paragraph here, and it'll take you right to the Free Freeze pages for the Big Three.

Enjoy!

This is how I party on a Friday night!

.

.

PARTY!! YEAHHLH! WOOO!! FRIDAY NIGHT!! TETTS!!  OH MAH GAH!! 

 The math:

    Biore Pore Perfect Strips

+  B0rked Website Thing I Am Procrastinating About Fixing 

----------------------------

= Clean Pores.

Vince and I are celebrating the end of the week by watching a YouTube channel called My Virgin Kitchen. We're watching this adorable blonde haired blue eyed British family, testing various "kitchen hacks."

Honestly, I'm not in the mood for this right now. I want to test-drive a knitting stitch I found online, or finish knitting this purple hat for Trish, or drink screwdrivers while playing We Happy Few. But this family is so ridiculously cute and I'm so starved for People Being Nice To Each Other, and Vince wants to watch food videos and I happen to like being around him. 

Here's thing: Watch the kids. They are SAVVY. All Caps. They know how to look good on camera. I suspect this was filmed (a word that makes no sense, in the digital age, much like how a floppy disk as a symbol for "save" makes no sense) with something allowing the kids to see themselves on camera, like a phone camera in selfie mode or a laptop. The kids barely fidget, they're perfectly in frame, they follow instructions, only deviating when it's adorable to do so. The younger one, in particular, is working for Maximum Kid Cuteness. 

I said to Vince, "Imagine the amount of work that the Food Network goes through to capture Friday afternoon attention spans, how much money is spent, how much studio space, how many lighting assistants, whatever. These folks circumvented all of that and made something that's basically just as good, if not better." 

Admittedly, I like the videos better when it's just the guy in his kitchen making grilled cheese sandwiches and failing. But anyway.

So, I'm watching this video and over-analyzing it, wondering how this guy gets compensated for this work. Is this his thing he does for fun, while the girls are at soccer or his wife is working? Is this their family activity, like board game night? He does have a cookbook, but I can't imagine that's hugely lucrative. 

Then I notice,  the older of the two girls is soaking up all this information like a sponge. This little girl is going to grow up to find a way to make YouTube able to use data from fitness trackers so that every time a video makes a viewer happy, the video creator gets paid. 

Yes, that's incredibly invasive and requires tremendous pressure to get users to opt in, along with working in the background to pressure the general populace to use fitness trackers. It requires a vision as detailed as it is vast. But, look at that face.

This little girl is working on a master plan. 

So, in researching this current art project, I came across an interesting thing: we all scale our perceptions to our own experience. We joke about first world problems, but that’s the thing; for the person who is screaming about how he didn’t get his appetizer as fast as he wanted, or, gee, I dunno, who whined about liking beer in front of Congress, or who maybe killed people because they had nicer business cards than him, those things ARE the worst things ever to happen, because they’re the worst things to happen TO THEM. They’d rate that ten out of ten on their scale, because that’s how they tare their scale.

The depth of feeling is the same as it would be for, say, Katrina survivors - the worst thing is the worst thing. The problem is how many people lack the basic capability to go “oh, not getting a 7 pm table at Prego’s is not the same as having cancer.” Or “Being told you can’t graze your herd on public land for free for years is not the same as systematic racial discrimination over three hundred years.” It doesn’t work any more than that thing we heard way back when about how we should clean our plates because there are starving children in Africa worked. 

The problem is that empathy, or even the ability to recognize that your scale of suffering might not line up with someone else’s, can’t be legislated, it can’t be forced on people. It’s actually somewhere in the physical brain. We evolved to have empathy, and it’s clear that not everybody got it in the kit.  Hell, maybe human society needs the occasional bastard to function, I dunno.  

But the key thing here is that appealing to a lot of people in power’s empathy is not going to work. They will think that because the worst thing ever was the time their frat bros have them a wedgie and they got through that all right, then everybody else’s worst problem can be gotten through just as easily. 

Facts don’t matter because their scale has been tared to a region of human experience where person-to-person interactions are all that matter.  If you’ve never had an experience where the world disagreed with you and you couldn’t tell it “No, there ISN’T a fire burning my house down”, then you have no way to deal with someone ELSE telling you that if you have a gasoline-and-sparklers party in your living room, bad things might happen. 

This is why I think a fair number of anti discrimination activists are attacking the problem where it can’t be hurt. Reason doesn’t work on the people whose scales are set to a region where feelings got hurt. Fairness doesn’t apply to people who haven’t ever experienced unfairness. 

What would work? I dunno. But if somebody thinks that being late for a dinner party is the same as having your children taken away and lost in the system forever, and can’t imagine there’s a difference between them, then you gotta try another way to solve the problem. 

So, the new heat pump went in yesterday. I've been living without a heat pump for 2 years, after the unreliable old one went belly up on the first cooling day of the year. Winters, I limped by on the emergency heat circuit, an electric blanket and two dog power. Summers were handled by a sophisticated array of window air conditioners and portable units providing enough cooling to be comfortable/tolerable.

But of course there are no windows in the bathrooms of my house.

Consequently I spent as little time in the necessary rooms as possible during the summer. They were always warm-ish. Post shower it was advisable to skip shaving as often as I could get away with it. Shower, brush my teeth and dash.

But now the new heat pump is in! Huzzah!

I noticed it immediately as the temperature and humidity both made a precipitous decline. Because the odd thing about portables is that you're either freezing your 'nads off if you're in the direct airflow, or you're a bit warm if you're anywhere else in the room.

But central air. Glorious central air, all hail Willis Carrier!

First impression: this thing is quiet. When the condensor fan kicks on I can't hear it. Which is probably the way it should be, I have just gotten used to listening to the industrial grade impeller grinding to life on the old one. It's a nice life upgrade.

For those keeping track at home, this is renovation project number three. Next up, windows. (No, not the OS from Hell. The other type.)