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2/9/17 08:52 pm - new semester

Hi, I exist. It's a snow day, or half of one; Harvard admin/staff closed, but FAS did not, so I had to go in to lecture and teaching meeting. I then came home in something of a hurry before the snow got worse. I'm here to tell you the first ridiculous story of this semester, pasted from a group chat.




My Friday section contains two people with the same first and last name.

Correction: my section contains FOUR Williams. One goes by Will. But TWO of them have the same last name AND MIDDLE INITIAL.

(Note also that there is another section at this time, why are the two identically named young men not separated from each other.)

[friend 1]
it’s a test of ur will(s)

[friend 2]
Give them new better names

William the [adjective]

[friend 3]
"you will now be willhames welseton the third, and you will be wilma willson pennyworth".... oh. that makes a lot more sense.

[various other amusing ideas]

[friend 4]
or see if any of them would rather go by internet handles? xD


jinian [6:11 PM]
Okay, the story of the Wills gets better:

The two with the identical first MI and last know each other and grew up five miles apart. They know the third.

The fourth WAS NOT THE RIGHT WILLIAM.

The fourth william was an INTERLOPER, who furthermore left early for a track meet. I said "you need this PCR product for your later labs" and he said:

"I HAVE AN IDENTICAL TWIN"

[friend 2]
wait. does that mean there's a _fifth_ william who is actually on your class list

oh my god


jinian [6:13 PM]
YES

The correct fourth William was missing and this slacker William took his place!

His identical twin IS IN FACT in this class. So twin of fifth William did the PCR yesterday in his lab section and I guess they figure they can share?!

I sent all this information to the preceptor (along with an accusation that she was trolling me with these Williams) and her response was,

"!!!!!!! No! Will contact Will."


She wins.

This entry was originally posted at http://jinian.dreamwidth.org/676993.html. Respond wherever you like.
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10/20/16 08:36 am - a scientist is not always fine

I keep not posting, because I don't want to just say that I'm still not okay.

Stuff is hard. Someone on Twitter was asking people to say nice things that had happened to them this year, and, welp. I have accomplished some stuff that I worked hard on, but the good things that happen are along the lines of "this thing I worked hard on didn't unexpectedly fail anyway."

The cats are doing all right for being eighteen and a half. I'm enjoying teaching, though it's tiring. I've set up an online store for my pottery, and intend to add more items than one at some point. There's slightly more of a possibility of getting the permanent job I want, since it's on an org chart now. New roommate and I are pretty compatible. I should be able to start allergy shots next month, and the foot that failed catastrophically for no reason is seeming some better. I mostly don't feel scared when I go out. When my computer died I was able to afford a new one.

This is all not as bad as it could be. But I'm not actually okay. I'm not sure I'm going to be.

This entry was originally posted at http://jinian.dreamwidth.org/676613.html. Respond wherever you like.
 

7/1/16 12:14 am - update

I am nowhere near caught up on LJ/DW because of silly issues in transition between browsers and programs that I need to use for work (and quasi-work like making dragon game festivals happen). However, a lot is happening. The most important things are:

(1) Shiny new baby ball python.

just in case of phobiasCollapse )

(2) Shiny new trauma diagnosis.

(Secondhand. Usually happens to therapists, so writings thereupon are not terribly useful for my situation.)

Therapist: So I think this is what's going on.

Me: But lots of people have much worse bad things actually happen to them directly, I should be fine.

Therapist: Well, now you sound like a trauma survivor.

Me: >.>


Dragon game festival is going swimmingly, though people are a little less awestruck by our entire book than I was hoping. Managed to goad a friend into writing fanfic of it already, though. :D

This entry was originally posted at http://jinian.dreamwidth.org/676531.html. Respond wherever you like.

5/10/16 11:55 pm - state update

Feeling down and having trouble concentrating the last few days. Still being sick doesn't help, of course. Allergist visit May 20!

I had a good time Sunday going to Civil War and Martsa with Beth and Sandry, and I made things at pottery class on Saturday.

Felt discouraged this morning and then pointed out to myself that my past few years have gone:

- Developed severe undiagnosed abdominal pain.
- Finished a Ph.D.
- Worked on a demoralizing project for a year.
- Moved across the country.
- Got dumped in a weird retconning way that gave me trust issues.
- Developed progressively worse abdominal pain.
- Had trouble doing the project I actually wanted to do because of illness.
- Finally got a diagnosis and had a difficult surgery.
- Lost my dad.
- Broke up with someone I liked because the relationship just didn't make sense any more.
- Lost my cat.
- Developed nonstop sinus problems.
- Got dumped in a particularly scalding way by the person I really wanted to be with.

(And, as usual for the litany of woe, I have probably forgotten some shit.)

It is a goddamn triumph that I get out of bed in the morning. So there.

This entry was originally posted at http://jinian.dreamwidth.org/676337.html. Respond wherever you like.
 

5/6/16 01:29 am - thrilling new information

Turns out when you have had sinus misery for about five months, and then you're crying really hard about your loneliness and how bad the world has turned out to be, you can give yourself a nosebleed.

Do not recommend.

This entry was originally posted at http://jinian.dreamwidth.org/675985.html. Respond wherever you like.
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4/25/16 09:49 pm - five things

1. My assistant, whom I have gotten hooked on Hidden Sweets in Harvard Square, went there last week and texted to inform me that the beloved grapefruit gummi candy of song and story has been discontinued, and that HS was already out. After partially recovering from my shock, I went to the internet and ordered a 3-lb bag of them, which has now arrived. Next step: confirm their correct identity by eating a precious single one. Then I can set up a safe-deposit box.

2. I felt really good today. I've been managing energetic or physical well-being or motivated lately, but today I felt like me, pretty much all day. It was wonderful. It's been way too long.

3. Now I just need something to do with this ridiculous upswing of libido. (Total Prince immersion maybe not helping here.)

4. Completed the writing style guide for the Brightshine Jubilee storybook finally! Now I have something to refer bitches to when they try to start with me about whether "archeologist" is misspelled. I'm really excited about this project, even though it's making me stressed about Flight Rising overall. C came up with it and plans to typeset the whole thing, and I wound up lead writer because I got stuck managing the "omg we can't possibly have a pirate theme pirates are evil" drama into "okay we're having seafaring adventures and here is how it ties to the site canon." And of course since I'm the only person involved with the project who can herd cats, that's where all my energy is going. Please can you do the thing you said would be done a week ago, M, thx. But! Style guide is done, all the pages have been claimed by artists and writers, all I should need to do now is a little light whip-cracking and then final edits.

5. Currently reading Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl by Carrie Brownstein from Sleater-Kinney. I had trouble getting into it at first because her style is a little overdone, but by chapter 2 I was on board. She swings from childhood attention-getting antics to reminiscences of queer-liberal-musician callout culture in 90s Olympia, says she can't call herself a musician and then comes out with deeply considered ideas about the nature of performance. I never lived in Olympia or Redmond, but I'm from nearby enough that I have my own ideas about them, so reading about them is a mix of familiarity and prejudice-confirmation (i'm sorry but evergreen college) that has me grinning over the book constantly.

This entry was originally posted at http://jinian.dreamwidth.org/675617.html. Respond wherever you like.
 

4/25/16 12:26 am - Purple Rain

[Those of you who follow me on Twitter have seen bits of this before. I had more to say, so decided to rework rather than tweetspam.]

I had never seen Purple Rain before, due to being seven years old at the time it came out. (Good choice, Mom!) AMC brought it out in theaters across the US this weekend in memory of Prince, and I badly wanted to go. Twitter has been mourning with me, but it hasn't felt like enough.

Well.

I loved Prince, but I never loved him as he deserved. That was wonderful and I want to see it on the big screen yearly.

We all clapped at the beginning "dearly beloved," at Purple Rain, and at the ending. Coincidentally also where I cried a little. I dressed lowkey, but the theater was sprinkled with beauty: purple fascinators, glitter shoes, lace.

Some bits of the movie are over the top, and being in the theater detracted from my experience once or twice. (Yes, I get that his father was literally a motherfucker, but you can stop giggling any time.) Some of it was really powerful, though. The part where he physically could not listen to his bandmates' music, a thing which he needed to do to get off the toxic course he was on, because his trauma was happening right there in the room with him: wow. I have my reasons to be interested in patterns of abuse these days, and this was helpful to my understanding without being too on the nose.

I'm bemused and annoyed by the way people seem to have taken the movie as a biography of Prince; I get that it's a little confusing, since his music is woven into it so strongly, but other people wrote that story, it is fiction. For instance, Prince was not biracial, a piece of misinformation that I've seen far too often recently.

Number of times I thought "my god he's beautiful": roughly 70??? I got a hot dog at the theater, but it was WHOLLY INADEQUATE as a sublimation target for the things I wanted to do to Prince in that movie. Damn. He even hit my "smartass/troll" button, though, much like Tony Stark, the character took it rather beyond what I'd put up with in real life.

I was thinking about "I'm not a woman/ I'm not a man/ I'm something that you'll never understand" on the way home, too, and the way our mourning for Prince and Bowie has been all about their gender transgressiveness and our nearly universal lust for them. It seems to me that, generally, women love men the best when they love femininity enough to adopt some of it for their own use. It's not just that they're not threatened by femininity, but that we feel more loved when men are willing to be like us in that way, when sometimes it's even more dangerous for them to be feminine than it is for us.

(Also, you gotta love that inevitable moment when the guy who winds up with the contested affections of a girl is called a faggot. That one got a good laugh from the audience tonight.)



Thus I have a new theory of gender-transgressive transformative works (perhaps overlapping in places with the "we slash because we want to read/write relationships which aren't societally unequal" theory): women and other feminine folks love these male characters so much that we want to share our femininity with them as a gift, and we want to believe that they would love us enough to happily embrace it, like Prince did.

This entry was originally posted at http://jinian.dreamwidth.org/675402.html. Respond wherever you like.

4/23/16 12:19 pm - The Rocky Horror Chiptune Show

I miss having pottery class, but it was nice to be able to accommodate my broken sleep last night by staying in bed rather longer than I'd have been able to if there were class today. (Cats have pointy toes, so I was awakened rudely about 4am.) My plan is to paint some of the bisqueware I brought home, and to make some new newsprint stencils for when I can work with my greenware again.

The broken sleep was not at all the fault of the Rocky Horror Chiptune Show, which was at 10pm rather than midnight and proved easy to bus to and from. It was also extremely strange. The regular movie of Rocky Horror had been edited to include chiptune versions of the songs, so more than half the callbacks didn't apply and I was too confused to dance to the Time Warp. (Also some lines are different here from when/where I've been to shows before, so I was trying to learn them from a ragged and incomplete version. Failed. And disapproved strongly of the Prince stuff some jerks tried to add in.) There was also an awkward framing story of dudebros playing a Rocky Horror video game, which I could have done without, and they leaned too heavily on Pokemon parodies when I would have liked to see more retro gaming variety.

The most amazing part, though, was that the cast was dressed as NES characters. Frank-N-Furter as Mega Man is kinda perfect to be honest, and the person playing him was great. Brad and Janet were Mario and Peach, and for some reason Riff Raff and Magenta had really good Link and Zelda costumes. The conceptual triumph, though, was Dr. Scott as Pong: LED paddles mounted on some kind of armature, as far as I could tell, and a glowing ball moved back and forth between them by the actor.

Some of the songs and animations were great adaptations, some seemed a bit half-assed, and some were merely confusing. There's a playlist of the whole thing on Youtube, actually, so you can see what I mean. All of them would have benefited from subtitles, since an audience populous and deeply steeped in Rocky enough to completely follow along is incredibly unlikely. I'm pretty familiar with the show, though I haven't gone regularly in years, and I was WTFing an awful lot. Better execution would have been great, though I get that it's hard in a multi-person project like this. (Looking forward to this problem for my latest dragon game cat-herding project now. Yay.) More accessibility, though, could be imposed on the thing afterward by adding in subtitles and balancing the soundtrack better so the parallels could be heard.

Parts I recommend checking out:


Really, all of the songs have one or two good points or are worth checking out to boggle at. :) So yes, I did have a good time, not least because I need more excuses to apply fun makeup!

(I was also amused with myself for playing Sailor Moon Drops all the way home on my phone. No cognitive dissonance here, why do you ask?)

This entry was originally posted at http://jinian.dreamwidth.org/675084.html. Respond wherever you like.

4/20/16 11:31 pm - status

I got shoes! Amazing shoes. They're not the "Elle Woods Astronaut shoes" (akycha got those) but they are sorcery. They also ate almost my entire state tax refund. Totally worth it. (Relatedly, I have a blister on my toe that might be infected. Ow.) It's vanishingly unlikely that I'll win Fluevogs for ten years, but what if I did. What if I did.

Squeak would like you all to know that she is a CAT who PURRS and she is RIGHT HERE.

Tomorrow is my pottery studio's show opening! I don't plan to buy anything, but I do want to go show my support. And Friday is chiptune Rocky Horror, about which I am still ridiculously excited.

Hilariously, I felt like I was about ready to stop seeing my therapist for the time being after our next appointment... until she emailed me a couple days ago saying she'd have to reschedule because her father had died. WELP. Maybe I am not feeling so hot after all. Still overall hopeful, productive, and enjoying the springtime, just a higher screaming-inside proportion than I really prefer.

In completely different news, I've been re-reading SailorPtah's lovely His Dark Materials/Welcome to Night Vale novels, and I spent some time thinking about Dust. There's a bit where Cecil is carving wooden replicas of people's daemons, and Carlos thinks, of course it makes Cecil happy to increase the number of Rusakov particles in the world. So I was contemplating intention and art. Dust accrues to artifacts, because consciousness went into making them as they are. But what I usually do with pottery is more of a dialogue or meditation with the material. My goal is usually not to have a piece of a particular size and shape, but rather developing my skill or moving in a direction and seeing what happens.

I undoubtedly come out with an artifact, but it's a different feeling. Then I wondered what Buddhist potters feel is the point of their craft. I feel like my experience is qualitatively different from making specific pottery to order, but maybe the idea of Dust is... less granular than that distinction. :D

This entry was originally posted at http://jinian.dreamwidth.org/674857.html. Respond wherever you like.

4/9/16 11:56 pm - weekend so far

Last night:

  • Tried and failed to nap, because I kept having interesting creative thoughts, first about work and then about ceramics. Dang it, brain. I eventually had to get up and write them down before I forgot them, so that was the end of that.

  • Met up with [personal profile] genarti and [personal profile] skygiants at a very noisy, very ironic tavern in Davis. Attempted to convey to Beth the full glory of the dragon-game drama currently transpiring. Had tasty potato tacos (but they could have cut the avocado up a lot smaller than that) and some glorified chicken strips with glorified ranch dressing, plus an Original Sin cider from NY that was dry and pretty tasty.

  • Went to Apple Cinema, pointed out the ice cream flavors, and saw a shadowcast Princess Bride production at midnight. The movie remains really fun to watch, especially in a theater full of people enjoying it, and the shadowcast had some good moments (though the movie was more compelling). Shrieking eel as pool noodle was especially amusing.

  • Found out the MOST AWESOME THING: in two weeks there will be a chiptune/retro-video-game-inspired Rocky Horror, with songs covered and animations made and OMFG. I am surprised I'm not standing in line for this already, I don't know how anything could possibly be more appealing to me.

Today:

  • Got up without enough sleep and went to pottery. Sat outside in the sun when I was too early, very nice day. Trimmed two big bowls successfully and went through the bottom of one so proceeded to convert it into an orchid pot with cutouts in the shape of the Light Flight emblem. Shut up. :)

  • Hung around after pottery for an extra half hour talking to my teacher about pottery ideas and employment and random stuff. I need to bring snacks if I'm going to hang around after class, I get too hungry!

  • Goofing off.

  • Successful napping.

  • Bubble bath. (Lush Ultraviolet. I'm excited about some of their Mother's Day releases coming up, but I should maybe use more of the Easter stuff first.)


Weekending successful so far!

This entry was originally posted at http://jinian.dreamwidth.org/674360.html. Respond wherever you like.
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