scrubjayspeaks

I'm finally doing it--I'm changing my usernames across, well, everything. Eventually. But DW is officially checked off the list! As is tumblr!

I will now be scrubjayspeaks wherever fine internet nonsense can be found.

The lake monster, having spent the afternoon basking in the sun and startling several unsuspecting hikers along the shore, made lazy spirals down into the deep waters to cool off again. Down in the depths where its eyes would mean nothing and only the microcurrents across its whiskers could show the way, it heard things breathing, dreaming dark fantasies painted in movement and temperature. It was reassuring to think that, just as it could offer mystery and surprise to the shore people, there would always be stranger things, deeper things, to do the same for it.

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LL#1263

For those who find themselves troubled by a lack of father, for whatever reason, as Father’s Day approaches, we offer some positive alternatives in which you may find comfort. Rocks, particularly when sun-warmed, offer a paternal sturdiness; antique tools carry that musty, grease-streaked smell of the more mechanically inclined fathers and would love to share a project with you; and neighborhood dogs are eager to offer their feedback on your running or biking form with that fatherly mix of encouragement and criticism. Of course, if you feel strongly about sharing a species with your parental figures, the old man you always see at the library might enjoy the company of another book lover as much as you would.

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LL#1262

[CW for frank discussions of body changes and sex. Discussions of surgical recovery. Discussions of sexism. I'll be putting these updates fully under cuts, as they are less general interest on the topic of gender/transness and more "what do I personally have going on with my bits these days." Niche interest and all that.]

Holy shit, how has it already been two years? I didn’t get to celebrate at all, but happy boy day to me.

( Read more... )

So I think the sound card on my computer died last night. Now I have to figure out how to get it to the shop I work with, which is back in my hometown. I really didn’t need the expense of computer repairs this year. I just can’t seem to catch a break lately. It’s not as bad as it could be, I guess--not compared to some of the computer deaths I’ve had in the past. Still...

This was the last “normal” week of the month for me. After this, it’s doctor’s appointments and trips out of town. ( ╯□╰ )

The weather chilled out, apart from a random cloud burst with thunder. It’s still not pleasant, it’s just not meteorological murder. While driving home from work, I spotted an oriole in a residential area.

Lewisia: 3 new pieces written

Day job: 43.5 hours, which was surprisingly chill for a week with overtime

Gardening: continuing to add data to the club’s inventory for sales

Reading: Strangers in Paradise #11 & 12 (normally, I would get frustrated by watching people ruin their own lives over misunderstandings, but I just find this so popcorn and candy munchable)

Watching: more Murderbot TV :3, finished season 4 of my slow Leverage rewatch

Listening: OUT THERE by Hiromi (I think this was another rec from John Darnielle, it’s got some more experimental, chaotic jazz, as well as more city pop type jazz, “Balloon Pop” is a very fine song indeed)

Aftermarket Parts: two years of T today! 💉🎉, attended a local trans pride event

Clock Mouse: 1341 words, and I’m actually having a very good time

Welcome to the June edition of Pandemic Garden Club! Growing good things in strange times!

Anyone is welcome to comment with what they're growing right now, things they would like to try, problems they're encountering, and questions they have. Share resources, answer questions, shout encouragement.

As for myself...

( Read more... )

The many mirrors of the Beacon House sometimes spent too long reflecting each other, an endless tunnel of silvered glass that slowly lost more and more light as it iterated. So in spring, when the sun was growing stronger, the keepers methodically rearranged them, rotating new ones out to the positions that caught more of the house’s white walls and broad lower windows, breaking up pairs that had gone too far down dark alleys. Up into the high reaches of the tower, new light bounced, refreshed, renewed, rekindled, to illuminate those in need.

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LL#1261

When you say, “They are all out to get me,” or, “The world wants me dead,” you are mistaken. Take this small dog, for instance, which is experiencing the new thrill of receiving head pats from you for the first time, or this bee which has been enticed over by that new perfume you treated yourself to, or this flower which dusted your nose with pollen when you smelled it and gladly made you an accomplice to its reproductive cycle. The world is vast and full of things, and a small and shameful percentage of your own species cannot outweigh the hundreds of thousands of beetle species who think you are entirely acceptable, just for a start.

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LL#1260

A new water polo team has been formed and will be hosting tryouts this weekend for those with the skills, confidence, and possibly foolishness to compete. The kelpies seem extremely, perhaps even disturbingly excited for their part on the teams, and we noticed a suspicious lack of polo mallets or balls at the hastily constructed lakeside clubhouse. We recommend anyone trying out also be scuba certified and bring an alternative source of oxygen, just in case the kelpies are excited about something else entirely.

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LL#1259

Another absolutely brutal heat wave. The air quality has been terrible as well, such that I’ve been having asthma-like symptoms off and on all week. It’s supposed to cool off sharply this week, so I’m holding out hope that things will be a bit less taxing.

I got bloodwork done for my upcoming rheumatologist appointment (which has already been rescheduled by them once, because they’re always like this). Thus begins what will be a full month of endless doctor appointments, which I am broadly dreading.

I saw a flock of rental goats out cleaning a hillside on my way into town. While I don’t particularly want to have more animals to look after, the prospect of a few goats does sound fun. Maybe someday.

Lewisia: 3 new pieces written, June posts queued up

Day job: 33.25 hours with the short holiday week and coming in late one day

Gardening: against my will but at mum’s request, I mowed in the wildflower field, pruned the big operculicarya into a more respectable shape and moved it to a spot outside of the cold frame

Reading: Strangers in Paradise #8, 9, & 10 (oh, I love my little soap opera, I’ve hit the section where it is overtly playing with the idea of alternate timelines)

Watching: more Murderbot TV :3, finally watched Jurassic World 3 (hm, it’s not good, even if it’s nice seeing the old team back together)

Listening: Imaginal Disk by Magdalena Bay (saw the video below of them performing Bowie’s “Ashes to Ashes” and liked their sound enough to pick up an album)

Watch on YouTube

Clock Mouse: 1630 words, a third named character, and picking up some kind of momentum

The little tugboat that patrolled the waters off Rocky Head Beach was captained by an equally little person who appeared to be somewhere between forty and seventy-five, depending on how historically severe one imagined the weather conditions to have been. They would, with no prompting at all, inform visitors to the boat that she had hauled warships and schooners and weekend warriors in kayaks as a free public service. Such a conversation usually took place in the middle of haggling over the price of some piece of the waterlogged treasures of dubious origin heaped on the stern, the bill-paying side hustle to their charity.

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LL#1258

The dark entity had prided itself on choosing so pliant a tool: naive, kind-hearted, eager to please someone who showed her the merest shreds of affection and attention. When it offered her the ring of power, it expected her to succumb to the temptation, but it did not expect enthusiasm and tears of joy. It soon discovered that plans to plunge the world into darkness are remarkably easy to derail when pitted against the single-minded determination of a bride-to-be with a wedding to organize.

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LL#1257

Have you grown frustrated by all the tracking and data mining, impossible to opt out of, being done by your digital devices and accounts, but you’re not ready to take the leap of becoming a wood hermit to escape it? Consider the advantages of letting one of the many types of modern fae, who have embraced rare earth minerals as they once shunned cold iron, have unfiltered access to your data as well. Within a week, their mischief will have turned your algorithms into a mess of butter-churning videos, pranks to play on your cattle, avant-garde fashion, and increasingly obscure true crime accounts, rendering you useless--or at least unsettling--to all those advertisers monitoring you.

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LL#1256

I probably shouldn't get in the habit of letting Kickstarter suggest other projects I might like--that way lies madness and empty wallets--but damn:

Dark Fairies - a queer art book
“Dark Fairies” is a 200+ page fully coloured artbook and anthology of comics, short stories and illustrations about dark fairies and queer desire. From cannibal fae to sneaky shadow pixies, this book is a must have for any fan of fairies.

I didn't find my way to it soon enough to snag the bundle that would get me a print copy of their previous anthology, Fey: A Guide to Butch of The Fae Variety, as well, so I opted to just get the digital bundle of the two of them. Admirable restraint on my part, considering how very much this is my jam. The art all looks fantastic.

Well, I got to spend a lot of time writing up my notes from the robotics training, which helped keep the week chill. The self-defeating stupidity levels at work are rising again, though, so my temper is taking a beating.

After getting hot, hot, hot, it cooled off sharply. That won’t last, so I have to enjoy it while I can.

I am collaborating with another person in my succulent club on the technical changes needed to switch the club’s yearly sale to a barcode system. Recreational data entry! Woo!

Lewisia: 6 new pieces written

Day job: 34 hours, after my boss encouraged me to take Friday for an actual day off, unlike all last week’s hubbub

Cooking: made the Color Vision Cake from Baking Yesteryear (uses cherry jello mix for flavor, I also used a sour cherry concentrate to amp it up more, only made a half batch because of what I had on hand, definitely better the second day when the flavor has a chance to mellow a bit)

Cleaning: fixed a garden hose, fixed an unrelated hose splitter that was leaking, still need to get supplies to replumb the riser that is in bad shape

Gardening: sunchokes arrived and are planted

Reading: my copy (signed! which I wasn’t expecting) of Baking Across America by B. Dylan Hollis arrived so I started thumbing through that

Watching: more Murderbot TV :3

Listening: You & i are Earth by Anna B Savage (the vocals and general style remind me of Anjimile, a chill break from the string of more rock sounds I’ve been listening to lately)

Clock Mouse: 1392 words, and now I have two whole named characters (what am I doing...)

While used bookstores and libraries dreaded the endless copies of popular books that flooded them in waves, he was only too happy to take duplicates off their hands for cheap. He was a scientist, after all, and he needed plenty of identical subjects on which to perform his experimental book rebindings. So far, romance novels had shown willing and able to graft onto nearly all other genres, their stitched-together pages gradually melding plots and transplanted characters as the stories attempted to achieve coherence.

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LL#1255

As not every community hosted a church, so too were they not all protected by a church grim. Increasingly, households had to be communities of their own, and so their first dead had to take on the role of guardian. That often ended up being an ill-fated houseplant, leaving homes protected against danger and sorrow by fierce countertop basils or aggressive window violets.

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LL#1254

After many years of hiatus, the Infrequent Buyers Club has been restarted, thanks to sponsorship by Quartz Family Hardware. This repair and repurposing society provides community-owned tools, like sewing machines and welders, to wring every bit of use out of anything a person owns, with monthly prizes at meetings for the oldest functional piece of equipment brought in for demonstration. And for those who truly can’t let go of a belonging, members are experimenting with animate object necromancy, using the club’s old beverage fridge as a case study.

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LL#1253

1. You're holding a dinner party and can invite three famous people from the past or present; who would they be?
Anna May Wong, of whom I have a signed photo from my great-grandfather's days working in Hollywood. John Darnielle, of The Mountain Goats, would be lovely, if probably so far over my head. As would Terry Pratchett, but hopefully kind enough to ignore my starry-eyed stupefaction.

And because I originally thought it said five people and I have a taste for chaos today: if I can be allowed to have a babelfish or similar and thus guarantee we can understand each other (linguistically if not culturally), I'd like to have one of the famous mummies/skeletons, like Ötzi or Lucy.

2. You have the opportunity to question someone about something you've always wanted to know and receive a truthful answer; what would your question be?
Jesus, that could go some dark places for me. How about this: I would like to be able to ask our most deranged horse what it is that goes through his head when he freaks out and what he needs to not feel that way.

3. If you could change one thing in your life, what would it be?
If we're talking full-on wave-a-magic-wand-type stuff, I wish I could rewrite everyone's memories of me so they only ever knew me as a man. I would settle for just being able to do this to my coworkers, if we're negotiating.

4. If you could save other people's lives by completing an act that would lead to your own death, would you do it?
Possibly. Depends on the people I would be saving, and possibly depends on the method of death. There are people I wouldn't piss on to put out the flames if they were on fire, you know? And there are people I would let carve out my kidneys with a spoon if they needed a spare.

5. Would you commit murder if you knew that you could get away with it?
I might have said yes, enthusiastically, at various points in the past. These days, most of the people I would wish to see dead, I would be equally satisfied to simply have them banished from all polite society. Powerless and ignored would accomplish my ends, with fewer moral quandaries.

Hi, hello, yes, I am absolutely done with travel for at least five years. I just spent the week in a hotel in order to attend a robotics training seminar for work. The training was super interesting, and I fully intend to carve out time for me to do interesting thing with the robots at work now.

However! I am reminded again that I hate traveling, I hate staying in hotels with no ability to cook my own food, and I hate being away from home for more than an afternoon. Constantly having to eat restaurant food does hideous things to my body. Even if taking it back to my room at least avoids the anxiety of eating alone in a room full of strangers, that means all my food becomes a lukewarm mediocrity. The pillows are weird! The soft water lacks the proper mineral content to give me the showering-with-sandpaper experience I am accustomed to! None of my animals are with me, and I can’t do anything if something goes wrong with my mother!

*roaring and gnashing of teeth* *old man yells at cloud*

I’m such a homebody, it’s a wonder I haven’t put taproots down from my ass by now.

Also, the power once again went out, this time probably due to the wind downing something. Even though the last time was caused by human error, so this hardly constitutes a pattern, it’s hard not to think this bodes ill for what the summer heat waves will bring.

There was a sporting field of some sort visible from my hotel window, in which there were a dozen Canada geese hanging out. I got to hear them, and a single duck overhead, honking a few times on the way to my car.

Lewisia: no new pieces written, time to play catch-up

Day job: I don’t know how to calculate this (＠_＠;) nine-hour lecture sessions + two days of six-hour drives + being semi on-call the rest of the time since these were work days and not PTO = ???

Cleaning: replaced one of the wiring disconnects to install a new battery for the electric fence

Gardening: succulent club meeting, garden club post, phone consultation with another club member to coordinate our tech upgrades, moved a big planter into place to receive incoming sunchokes

Reading: System Collapse by Martha Wells (my entertainment for the long drive, finally caught up on Murderbot audiobooks, still need to read the little side stories)

Watching: MURDERBOT~~~! I am so goddamn excited to have this as a show as well.

Listening: Even In Arcadia by Sleep Token (wasn’t aware of this band until Anthony Vincent/Ten Second Songs did a cover of Bastille’s “Pompeii” in the style of Sleep Token and found myself smitten, it reminds me of early Dir En Grey with the mix of pop/rock and metal elements), This Wasn’t Meant For You Anyway by Lola Young (one of those rare times when I listened to the radio, heard something new I liked, and managed to track it down afterward, “Messy” roped me in and the rest of the album is pleasingly in that spirit)

Clock Mouse: 1167 words, and the protagonist has officially acquired a name 🎉

Traveling by flying cauldron was intended to be a one-person affair, and carrying passengers had traditionally meant keelhauling them through the treetops below on a rope, but she liked to think of herself as a more modern sort of witch, even at her advanced age. Part of that modernity included knowing her way around both a welder’s bench and the local scrapyard. The cauldron gradually acquired sidecars of frying pans and rice cookers and waffle irons, and it was quite popular as a commuter bus in the rural areas around her chicken hut.

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LL#1252

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28
29	30

On A Trail of Breadcrumbs

Sticky: Name Change!

Lake Lewisia #1263

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On Two Years

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Pandemic Garden Club

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The Friday Five

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Lake Lewisia #1252

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