oh huh the natural gas company we use just put out a bulletin that customers in our county and the..

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oh huh the natural gas company we use just put out a bulletin that customers in our county and the five counties surrounding us should turn our thermostats down until further notice because they’ve got a supply chain problem and might run out of gas.

doesn’t it totally rule that we live in an economy of monopolies? there’s no one else to buy gas from. everyone around here has gas furnaces.

It’s ten degrees Fahrenheit, and falling. 

… oh they just put out a new bulletin rescinding it, they say everything’s fine.

I still am going to pull out that space heater and be ready. *squints suspiciously*
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Pilling The Cat Chronicles, Part Umpty-ZillionSo, the vet told us to start giving Chita thyroid...

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Pilling The Cat Chronicles, Part Umpty-Zillion

So, the vet told us to start giving Chita thyroid medication when we got back, rather than trying to make the boarding place people do it.

My older sister, it turns out, has a cat with hyperthyroidism. Crawfish is twelve or thirteen, and has always been slender, but now is nearly skeletal. She started medicating him quite recently. 

He takes the pills from her hand, wrapped in deli meat or cheese. She’s developed a routine where she feeds him two or three little morsels, folded up, and slips the pill into one of them. He never checks, doesn’t care, and eats them all greedily, because he’s always hungry because his metabolism is so high.

So, tonight, while Chita was meowing around the kitchen– as she does anytime you go in there after dark, because it might be her dinnertime because she can’t tell time– I got a piece of sliced American cheese and tore it into a couple of small pieces, and fed it to her. She’s not used to taking food from my hands, I rarely give her treats because, well, she’s not used to them, because we’ve never bothered developing any kind of behavior around that. 

I hadn’t pre-made up the little folded bits, though, and as I was trying to make the cheese into small enough pieces for her quite small mouth, I couldn’t really get the pill to stay in the cheese.

She ate it anyway, because she was so excited that I was giving her cheese, which I’m not sure she’s ever had before. She was skeptical about the first piece but once she tasted it then she wanted all the cheese that I had.

I’ll have to go out and get some ham or something, and it would behoove me to get a small container of pre-cut smallish pieces because she honestly can’t eat a whole slice of that stuff, but. So far, a tentative success.
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a really funny thing is that when you have a post that gets popular for whatever reason, tumblr...

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a really funny thing is that when you have a post that gets popular for whatever reason, tumblr shows people your other posts, so other shit gets dug up. i think there’s also an uptick in people looking for Star Wars content, because a bunch of my stuff from just after TFA is getting recirculated again. Anyway, it’s a bit disorienting, but sort of nice. *waves hi* happy 2018, y’all.

I never think to do welcome posts but I do have like, four times as many followers as I did when I first started writing Star Wars stuff. Which is funny, because I think it’s a lower-traffic fandom than MCU was for me, but. Anyway, hi y’all. Sorry I’m not cooler. Gosh, I used to post a lot of fic, too. Fewer rants about chickens, though, so really, who’s winning here?
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Rogue One is actually about internet freedom

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Rogue One is actually about internet freedom:

kylostahp:

The fate of the whole galaxy depends on these Death Star plans making it back to the Rebel base, and for the entirety of A New Hope, our heroes are running around with the sole copy on one little disk.

No one thought to make backups, upload the files somewhere else, or even better: post them publicly somewhere. After all, only the Empire wants to keep the plans secret. It’s no skin off the Rebel Alliance’s nose if the entire galaxy can see the schematics of the Death Star. Why go cloak-and-lightsaber if you could just make an anonymous Tumblr?

So this whole article is tongue-in-cheek commentary but also actually a really good piece of meta re: mass media in Star Wars. 

It doesn’t address my personal interpretation, which is that the sci-fi side of Star Wars is perpetually stuck in the 1970s–a time when fitting a full set of technical plans and specifications for a major engineering project on a single disk was beyond the capabilities of modern computing. (Remember: 3.5″ floppies didn’t exist until right around when A New Hope came out. George would have been using 5.25- or even 8-inchers.) The use of long-distance high-speed communication in Star Wars is also clearly based on the early concept and use of the Internet–distinct from the World Wide Web, the public mass media tool we know and love, which didn’t exist until twenty years later–as a government-developed and sponsored communications network for high-level political, military, and research use.

Why has Star Wars canon stayed technologically stuck in the ‘70s? Harder to say. Part of it is tradition. But I think part of it is also scaling problems (which are endemic to the setting in other areas, as well). We don’t even have a single global news media network in real life–conceptualizing a galactic one, across thousands of planets with trillions of citizens speaking hundreds of languages, is a mind-boggling problem that the setting isn’t prepared to support. It also draws attention to questions like, “just how the fuck does galactic government work?” and “what services is the Republic even providing to its constituents?”… followed by “wait, what even are the galactic politics issues at hand when there isn’t a war on?” WE DON’T KNOW. Taxes, apparently. (But again, what services do those taxes even fund?)

So basically, the sci-fi end of Star Wars–such as it is–can’t be updated without exposing the crumbling foundations of the entire setting. Whoops.
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Back at work. Some dimwit left the heat turned up to 82,

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Back at work. Some dimwit left the heat turned up to 82, which literally didn’t matter, it was 66 in here anyway. I turned it down to 70, not that that matters. I came bundled up because duh, this building has no insulation and the climate control doesn’t work in *any* weather, and it’s 11 degrees outside. 

I scraped the ice off my car after I got to work because I’d tried before I left and it was immovable. I mean, I got most of it off, but. My windshield wipers wouldn’t actually touch my windshield, which was great. So I got in, clocked in, then went back outside and pried all the bits of ice off with a scraper and my literal fingernails. Ugh.

I had a weird dream and I actually remember it so I’m writing it down. I’ve mostly forgotten it but a few scraps are left. Sort of dumb dreams, and I guess I can kind of see where it all came from. (Some, clearly, from the gas company’s announcement that we’re all doomed. They did rescind it but it got me to close off the guest room and put up the insulated drapes in the kitchen, so. I guess it wasn’t all bad.)

#1 the furnace didn’t work in this… big… house… we were in… I don’t know who “we” were, I never dream as myself. I mean, I was a me, it was first-person, but I don’t know who I was. There were a lot of people, and I don’t remember who any of them were; not real-life people, surely, but I felt like they were at the time. Anyway, the furnace wasn’t working, so we were using a kerosene heater, or a series of them, and I was worried about soot staining the nail heads in the drywall, because I know that happens sometimes. 

#2 We had to get out of the house. I don’t mean like, we had to flee, but we were told we had to remove ourselves from the house and it was going to be demolished. So we all grabbed our suitcases and such and worked to get ourselves out, but then I was like, “but all the stuff in the house is going to be lost when they tear it down and that’s stupid, it’s good stuff, why?” so I was going through with big garbage cans trying to salvage the stuff that was clearly unused and valuable, just pitching it into boxes and cans and dragging it out to the lawn. We didn’t have a moving truck or anything, and everyone else was just sort of standing around, but I was like, “We’re going to have to re-buy all this shit, so I’m going to try and salvage what I can, because it’s stupid to throw things away and re-buy them.”

Only as I was starting to wake up did I start to get upset about, you know, the expected trauma of being uprooted from all one’s possessions like that, and like, trying to strategize the most expensive things– in the dream-world, I’d been prioritizing unopened containers of things because it was stupidest to re-purchase such things, but as I was starting to wake up I was like duh jewelry electronics and furniture. 
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This is some shit, y'all. Getting our money’s

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This is some shit, y'all. Getting our money’s worth out of winter. (at Buffalo, New York)
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saader: In a fairer world, he would be the one lying in filth...

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saader:

In a fairer world, he would be the one lying in filth with a burning hole instead of a heart.
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my dude, cooking: a vignetteWe are having pasta for

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my dude, cooking: a vignette

We are having pasta for dinner. Just– spaghetti with jarred sauce and frozen sausages cooked in the toaster oven. (The Found Cat special. With box wine. <3 Hey they said to write what you know.)

#1 I did not know this before today, but. So. We have a big saucepan we use for pasta and such. It’s big, it’s got two small handles, it’s RevereWare, it was my grandma’s. It’s like, 4 quart capacity, at least. 

My dude measures cups of water into it to boil pasta. Me, I just stick it under the tap and turn it on and come back after a while and swear and turn it off and dump a little out so there’s headroom for the pasta to expand. But no. Dude actually uses a Pyrex two-cup measure to fill it, turning the tap off between cup fulls to dump it carefully. Fills it to the two-cup fill line. 

#2 I had seen this before but hadn’t really… remarked it… Dude takes a candy thermometer and hooks it on the edge of the pot as he boils it. “Water boils at 212,” I said. “And like, you know it’s boiling because. You know. It boils.” “I know,” he said. “… Why do you need a thermometer?” I asked, slowly. “I like to know how hot the water is so I know how soon it’ll be done!” he said, defensive. I looked at the thermometer. “See,” he said, “it’s at like, 190, which is pretty hot, but the water looks the same as if it was at 140, which isn’t hot at all.” “Okay,” I said. “So, how many minutes does it typically take for the pot to go from 190 to 212? How long do you have now?” 

He looked flummoxed. “I don’t know,” he said. “Longer than you’d think.”

So… what good does it do to know whether the water’s 140 or 190? It can’t possibly really help much with the timing. 

“It’s like a progress meter!” he said, gesticulating at it. “Look, it’s even got a dial!”

I could understand measuring the water exactly and using a thermometer if he was doing science to it, like writing it down or something, but he’s not, he’s just… making it more difficult than it has to be.

I left and went into the living room, because he was sulking that I was “judging” him. [n.b. he’s not really sulking, he’s pretending because it’s funny.]

I would absolutely steal that for a story but I cannot imagine what character would possibly measure the water and use a thermometer without also writing it down and timing it, or something. And if a character did, someone would surely shake their head and say ‘that’s a pointless bit of characterization, who would even do that’

Real life is so much weirder than fiction because real people are so fucking weird.
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