i hear the voices when I'm dreaming

I keep not getting around to posting here. Not sure how much is "typing is hard" (this entry took an hour! On my tablet, which I can type on faster than on my computer!) and how much is just being out of the habit.

Ended up not doing turkey day at my dad's, mostly for mental health (I have Opinions about people who choose not to get vaccinated during a pandemic "because freedom", and I didn't want to spend the entire time watching what I said) but also because... I'd made a comment on twitter about wanting to do Hanukkah this year, so my dad offered to do latkes and candles last Sunday, aka the first night, and sent me home with the menorah and candles and some thanksgiving leftovers, which ended up being pretty close to perfect.

The candles, incidentally, claimed to be dripless. They... uh... well... weren't. I'll upload photos at some point.

I'm also sort of getting into Yiddish on duolingo, though I'm shaky on some of the alphabet (duo uses the Hebrew lettering for Yiddish, not the transliteration into Ronan lettering) ... I've got the consonants pretty well, but the vowels are killing me. And for the language itself, it's Germanic enough that I'm both doing okay and hella confused. There's a vowel shift going on, making words sound like other words.

From memory -- at least in the Hungarian Yiddish dialect duo is using, the word for "you" is /dee/ instead of German du. The word for here is either /du/ or /doh/, i forget which, instead of German da, and I keep wanting to translate doh as there (German dort). I also get into trouble with /vee/ and /voh/; in German the first (wie) is how and the second (wo) is who, but in Yiddish /vee/ is who. (Amusingly, how many -- in German wieviel -- sounds like wiffle, just with v instead of w.)

It's kind of like the German interference I had learning Russian. The word /ya/ is yes in German and I in Russian; /da/ is yes in Russian and here in German; all very frequently used words. So inevitably I'd use the wrong one ...

Sometimes it's not confusing between words, just hard to remember. I can after a second remember that /daan/ in Yiddish is your (in German it's dein, pronounced /dayn/ rhyming with wine) but trying to generate the Yiddish is harder, both because remembering THAT the vowel shifts isn't the same as remembering HOW, and because the vowel letters are hard for me to remember.

Anyway, at least duolingo has taught me how to say that things like "a zebra in a pyramid". So helpful?

(Ok to be fair they were teaching similar-to-English words for alphabet practice .. /a zehbra een a piramid/ or /a kehmul een London/ are easier to decipher than, uh, other things.)

+ + +

Totally unrelatedly, the Babylon 5 rewatch I'm doing with my mom -- so slowwww because I have limited mom stamina, especially when she Lingers so one episode takes 2-3 hrs of mom exposure, and she doesn't want to watch separately -- got to A Voice in the Wilderness, which is one of my favorites from S1. I'd forgotten that was the episode with the Ivanovo-is-God speech, lol. Also Londo's Hokey-Pokey rant.

Next up is Babylon Squared. Also among my favorites!

(Shadows and Portents is up there too, although in rewatch I got annoyed at the cc text -- when the Centauri dude is laughing about how his seer aunt predicted he'd be killed by shadows ha ha how silly, and he ends up being killed by a mysterious vessel later that episode, snd the point of him disbelieving the prophecy to begin with is that he thinks she means shadows, i.e. darkness on the wall, not knowing that the Shadows are an old race recently reawaken ... and the first time around that's what the viewer thinks too. Only, the closed captioning text capitalizes "Shadows" in that line...)

B5's special effects and title sequence both look 90s as hell.

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Speaking of my mom ... she wants to know what I want to do for Christmas. My gut reaction is "introvert party with me and the pets where I play animal crossing and watch die hard and nothing else" but I don't think she'd be happy with that, lol. I'm just ... idek. I'm cynical about how commercialized and ubiquitous Christmas is these days, carol singing makes me miss the harp I can't play any more, there's no magic any more, and I realized one of the things making me dissatisfied with Christianity is that if Jesus fixed things (and I know that's a big if but it's also central to Christianity) why are things so fucked up. And my increasing dissatisfaction with Christianity means that the "prepare for and celebrate the birth of the Baby Who Will Save The World" aspect of Christmas is less gripping, and the family aspect of Christmas is awkward when my mom is a lonely energy suck and my dad is married to someone who thinks I hate her and my sister has kids who are cute but exhausting, and I'm an introvert anyway, and I'm awkward about giving and receiving gifts. And there's also the "pagan holiday they got papered over with Christianity labels" factor, and my increasing awareness of Shitty White-People Behavior.

But I'll probably end up doing something with my mom anyway.

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For some reason I am remarkably chatty today. Talked my aides' ears off; even posting here is a reflection of that. No clue why but it's better than the sheer exhaustion I've mostly been feeling.

Yay I guess?

+ + +

Got Covid booster today. In home, which was nice and convenient. My initial vax was J&J so I asked for (and got) Pfizer.

Yay for another layer of Swiss cheese protection, boo for needing it.

Dear Ravelry,

( I thought we were friends. )

[Note: this was written before Jess's letter came out.]

There is a book I picked up probably when it was free on Amazon, that is so bad I am currently hate-reading it (but will probably stop because I have better things to do with my time).

I do not know if the mystery resolves in any satisfying way or if the characters ever stop being so cliche. But the writing is ... painful.

( Read more... )

...I can't decide whether to keep reading or move on to something actually worthwhile. Apparently my wtf face for a lot of use this afternoon...

excuse me while I capslock for a moment:

FUCK THE WORLD AND FUCK MY LIFE I AM SO FUCKING SICK OF HAVING TO FUCKING RELY ON FUCKING INCOMPETENT PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT ABLE TO MANAGE THEIR OWN FUCKING LIVES LET ALONE ANYTHING ELSE FUCK FUCK FUCK

::breathes::

I am *so goddamn fucking sick* of my aide M who seems to always be in personal crisis. I keep her employed because she's desperate enough and available/willing enough to fill cracks when no one else is, but a good 50% of the time I want to STAB HER IN THE FACE WITH A RUSTY SPORK

::breathes::

...okay so. M's phone is off right now, because nonpayment, which is quite a frequent occurrence, but I can communicate through her roommate's phone. So I ping to have her come over.

A fucking hour later, I send a followup text asking if she'd left yet. To which I get a text saying that K (other aide) will cover, but she needs 30 min.

Now, there was a previous incident where M said K would cover and it turned out K had no idea and so my roommate had to cover. Turned out that M had accidentally texted K's *husband* instead of K, and he thought she was asking about something else, so he said yes and then probably wondered why she never got back to him, and K didn't realize, and it was a whole big clusterfuck.

So I text K to see if she's aware of covering, so that if not I could just have my roommate cover and yell at M later. After which I find out two things.

One, that M was supposed to have let K know *this morning* if she needed her to cover, and that hadn't happened, so K had other commitments, though she could come in 45 minutes.

Two, that my roommate was dead-to-the-world asleep. Which is fair given that she worked for almost 12 hours today starting at 4am, but it means she can't cover.

If I don't wuss out of it (I am very confrontation-averse) I am going to give M a lecture sometime -- probably saturday, her next scheduled shift -- on how she needs to STOP HAVING FUCKING LAST-MINUTE CRISES FOR FUCK'S SAKE. I mean, I know the nature of last-minute crises is that they're last minute, but it's not fucking fair, either to me or to my other aides, for her to keep pulling "ack I am having Emergency I can't make it" at the literal last fucking second.

I am FURIOUS and I have no one (except myself) to take it out on (and I am impressed that it hasn't turned inward yet) because the aide that's coming is doing both me and M a favor and it's not K's fault I will have been waiting TWO FUCKING HOURS OR MORE TO PEE AND GO TO BED

::rage::

(actually I think I'm only able to maintain the rage because the alternative is sobbing despair)

So I have for a while had the vague, nonurgent desire to Get All The Mounts on my main character. (This was stymied slightly when I changed which character was my main... ah well.)

I have 70 mounts right now. This includes almost all of the purchasable mounts, flying and otherwise, and all available craftable (since I am for whatever reason a tailor, which gives me three mounts but makes no sense for a shaman, and a skinner, which gives me zero mounts). I also have rep mounts from netherwing, ancient egypt cat-centaur people, and kurenai.

The problem is, the remaining mounts fall into 5 categories: 1) unavailable, 2) based on achievements, 3) based on PvP or large group play, 4) based on having exalted reputation, or 5) hideously expensive. Some mounts fall into more than one of these.

( blather )

...yeah. I'm insane.

The whole keyboard/mouse issue (aka Two Things Cannot Occupy The Same Physical Space Even If It Would Be Useful) has gotten me looking more into non-mouse mouse control. Even if I find a mouse that works better, it's easier to just keep my hands on the keyboard.

I am discovering that a) browser navigation can be a pita without a mouse (especially on forms that don't have good tab ordering), and b) neither WoW nor GW can be played mouseless.

Both games have arrow key (and, at least by default, awsd) navigation. Both games have ways to invoke skills by number. There are also certain things (such as opening your inventory or displaying the character pane) that can be done by keypress.

I've been playing more GW than WoW the last couple of days, mainly because WoW has a bunch more shit that needs setting up. (I was able to copy over the addons I use, but some of the settings didn't stick, so I need to reconfigure where things are displayed.) And, well. You can define keystrokes for some actions -- like targeting nearest / next / previous foe, nearest / next / previous item (loot), etc -- but not for others -- in particular, there is no set for targeting nearest / next / previous NPC. There's a keystroke for interacting (attack if hostile, talk to if npc, pick up if item, buy/sell if merchant, etc.) but no way to do anything with said interaction (accepting quests or quest rewards must be done by mouse, buying and selling stuff must be done by mouse, identing and salvaging must be done by mouse, transferring stuff to and from storage, or other bags, must be done by mouse, etc.)

Also, it treats left control/alt as separate from right control/alt (and in fact doesn't let you assign right control/alt to anything as far as I can tell), and -- probably because [control] and [alt] are commands by themselves, it doesn't allow keystroke combinations [and on an unrelated subject, wtf, firefox: 'combination' is acceptable, but 'combinations' gets a red highlight? as does uncapitalized firefox? and, for that matter, uncapitalized?] so you can't set different actions for K and shift-K and ctrl-K and alt-K.

...you can in WoW. Which is very nice. But you can't use keystrokes to loot -- it has to be done by, guess what, mouse. I can't think at all right now, so I can't recall all of what you can and can't do -- I can't, f'rex, remember if there's a way to target nearest/next NPCs; I do remember there's (now) a way to interact with them, except that it has to be a different keystroke than "attack". Selling stuff and inventory management is, again, entirely mouse-based.

And I know that something as complex as those games, it would be hard to make /everything/ possible by keystroke. But then I think about something like Vagrant Story (which I classify in my head as the same sort of game, even though it is not multi-player or online or even a recently-made game), which has ... how many controls are there on a playstation? Ten buttons (X O triangle square, L1 L2 R1 R2, start, and whateverthehell the other one is) and two joysticky things that could be considered the equivalent of arrow keys. And it handles inventory management, transfer in and out of storage, looting stuff, fighting, etc, just with those things. Granted, sometimes it's really freaking tedious (especially juggling things in/out of storage in order to combine them), and it's really not time-sensitive (why sure, you can take five minutes in the middle of heated battle to change armor and weapons and stuff; your enemies won't mind [search for "fire elemental" for the specific riff]), but it's /possible/. So why isn't it possible with the other games?

Sigh.