A series of unrelated images...

"Using the bones of my adversaries to build a ladder." - Hank Green

My contribution to the little Hank Green Out Of Context project over on tumblr.
Here's the recap post with all the entries.
Super cute!

Happened to see these two mourning doves gettin' it on in the backyard a few weeks ago. Ha! Get a room!

We're gearing up for a garden. Hadn't spent much time out with the birds through the wet winter. A few days ago I noticed one of the Scrub Jays has a bum wing.
Hanging awkwardly. And the poor thing isn't able to fly very well. It was extremely windy the last couple days and I didn't see him. Hopefully get out tomorrow to see if he's around/better.

D:

Took me forever to crack open the Nvidia Shield Tablet replacement after the recall. Just kept putting it off. Then I had all the Windows 10 troubles and didn't want to deal with it. I was planning on rooting it so I could format my SD as internal storage and do all that. It was daunting, so I procrastinated. 

But then there was a huge update around the new year, which integrated everything I would have wanted to do into the Nvidia... no need to root. So that spurred me to get the replacement going.

I've been using it since and it's perfect in every way for my needs. That update freed up an enormous amount of space and made the SD formatting super streamlined and easy. Woo!
I expected the old one to shut off much sooner than it did. It continued to work for like three months until it bricked itself. Thus ended the life of my first tablet. I gave it a ceremonial burial in the 'ship this tablet carefully so it doesn't blow up in transport'  box that Nvidia provided.
Bye, tablet! I barely knew ye!

ONE BERNIE, PLEASE!

The election was already ridiculous, but things have really escalated into madness over the last month. The DNC is totally effed. The fraud, the rigging, the voting problems... it's all gross.

I imagine it will only get worse closer to the convention. I'm appalled by how Clinton is representing herself through all this.

It's going to be Hillary vs. Trump and that's...

... ugh...

... uuuugggghhhhh...

We need election reform, news media reform, all the reform. Good god. It's bad.
I'd like to think Hillary can get a landslide over Trump.
I'm genuinely paranoid this could go very differently.

UUUUGGGGGHHHHHHHH.

In happier and vastly more entertaining news, the end of the Premier League season was an absolute delight.
Leicester won by 10 points. No one was touching them.
But the runner-up positions were still in tight contention up to the end. Tottenham, having their best season... ever, could have pulled off 2nd and finished above Arsenal for the first time in 20 years. The rivalry runs so deep that this had Arsenal fans shitting themselves. But then Tottenham choked in their last few games allowing us to gain on them.
It came down to the last game of the season.

Arsenal played Aston Villa (relegated)
Tottenham played Newcastle (relegated)

These games were played simultaneously. Tottenham only needed a draw to hold 2nd.
We had to win.

And beautiful beautiful Newcastle, playing purely for the yucks, absolutely destroyed Tottenham. They even went down to 10 men... and still destroyed Tottenham. 5 - 1.
Each time they scored, Arsenal fans went absolutely nuts, getting the results through social media.
And Arsenal won. 4 - 0.

Thereby, Arsenal popped above Tottenham into 2nd and the 21st St. Totteringham's Day in a row was celebrated like we'd won the damn league ourselves.



IT'S HAPPENED AGAIN! IT'S HAPPENED AGAAAAAIIIIINNNN!
TOTTENHAM HOTSPUR, IT'S HAPPENED AGGAAAAAAIIIIIIIINNNNNN!

Being an American who really doesn't care all that much about clubs and their local rivalries...
This was just far too comical to not enjoy in every way.

The narrative. THE NARRATIVE.

This season was so damn strange anyway. Very amusing.
It'll be interesting to see if it gets crazier next season, or if things get back to something more normal.
Euros over the summer though! That'll be fun.
I'm determined to stay relaxed and detached this time so I don't have a total anxiety meltdown like I had during Germany's run for the World Cup.

Gotta be chill.

Ding!

30.

Sweetly scented, highly poisonous...

A gift from my Aunt a long time ago. A Lily of the Valley teacup for May.

It's been a minute.

Say you stumble in the middle of the night and fall into a well.
And whoooooshcrunch there you are broken at the bottom.
And you shred your hands in the effort to climb your way out.
And it takes a very long time.
It's not until you can look back into the well in full daylight that you realize just how deep it was.
You can't fathom how you were ever able to make it out.

I know I'll have setbacks. I recognize I'll stumble again. The truth is it doesn't always get better. Sometimes it gets vastly worse. All you can do is try to prepare yourself for when it gets bad so you can get better on the other side.

I've had this feeling before. Especially when I've recalled school, mostly 7th through 12th grade, I wonder how I did it. Getting very little sleep at night from anxiety. Early morning. Every day. Overwhelmed by too many people and too much noise and chronic stress and illness and no relief. Objectively, I know I got through it by being a suicidal zombie, which isn't any way to be. But I can look back and awe that I didn't blow my brains out every day. I got to the other side.

Here I am on the other side again.
For the last few months I have noticed, in small ways and big, that my sensory experience is vastly different than it was for roughly the last four years. My 'normal' during that time was to have a panic attack if I felt too cold or too hot or needed to burp or felt hungry or full or from watching a movie or for seemingly no reason at all.
My nervous system was on a hair-trigger for every tiny little bit of stimulation. And every response was a grenade going off in my ribcage, ripping my limbs from my body, sending me in a terrorized scramble to collect them... even though they were right there where they should be, attached to me just fine.
But surely they couldn't be when I felt like I'd been blown apart.

I know things about myself now. I know that when I'm totally fucked up and in a panicked state, but trying to hold it together, my right arm twitches involuntarily. My elbow swings away from my body, pulsing by my side. I know that the smaller anxious moments make me yawn compulsively and grip and massage my collarbones and neck without thinking about it.

I yawn a lot still.

But the grenades are gone.

So now I can eat full meals. And have seconds!
And I can watch an icky scene in Orphan Black and laugh through it.
I can go through the majority of my days feeling stable. The steadiness is so palpable. It's remarkable.
It's so distinct that I know even a year ago I was nowhere near this.

I turn 30 in a week and I'm a total failure by normal people standards.
But hey, for the first time in four years, I can eat seconds!
Win!

Got hired for a temporary little job creating questions for a trivia app... the Kpop section. It pays to be knowledgeable about an obscure niche of a niche bit of pop culture.

Got asked to contribute to a tumblr typography project for Hank Green Out of Context, which will probably be posted within the week. Mine will certainly be the least competent of the bunch, in the typographical sense. It's not something I've studied/practiced. But I did a playful Illuminated Manuscript dealio, which is kind of hilariously stupid.

JUNSU IS MAKING ONE MORE ALBUM BEFORE ENLISTMENT.

Bless goddess Hani for dating him so he would delay military to be with his lady-love for a little while longer. I mostly just want to marry her myself. I usually don't take much interest in female idols, but she's the anti-idol and I love her dearly.



EXID has a similar rapport to what DBSK had back in the day. Their company is less strict though. Would never have gotten a drunken, spastic, performance like this from an SM group.
Hani is fucking precious.
And Solji's voice is fierce af.

Arsenal's season utterly fell apart for the 2nd half of the season. Lol. And Leicester have had this fairytale, planets aligning, prophecy fulfillment of a prophecy that never was. And while most everyone hates little Leicester now, Arsenal fans are rooting for them to beat Tottenham... because Tottenham. If Chelsea beats them tomorrow, I believe it becomes impossible for them to beat Leicester for the league.

That'll be a fun game.

Back to work!

Too many things...

Football

Özil was on an insane roll during the first half of the season. Assist-machine is an understatement. Around the holidays I thought of doing this Norman Rockwell mash-up with the Gunners. His PR people started a little contest for memes/comics/sketches related to his assist record, so I figured I participate with the idea. Not concerned with the contest really, I just think it's cool of him/his people to do fun things like that.

Kicked it out rather rapidly to preserve my fingers, so it looks sloppy as all get-out to me. Lol.

Been a wild season. Leiscester is still top. Arsenal just beat them in a massive game over the weekend... with a goal assisted by Mesut to Welbeck in literally the last minute of the game.

Near pissed myself.

Politics

I've always participated in terms of researching and voting, but also felt it's all pretty bullshit-y and helpless. For the first time in my life I get to vote for someone I sincerely want to be the president. Not a lesser of evils or whatever. My ideals have alignment with an actual candidate... remarkable!

Bernie, of course.

Bernie Bernie Bernie.

There was a time when I 'supported' Hillary, because it seemed likely she would run in the future and she would have aligned a lot closer than anyone else I had seen. And even now, if it got to be her as the nominee, I would feel relatively comfortable in voting for her.

Then she started campaigning in earnest. And against Bernie. And it all turned to shit.

At this point it feels like a betrayal. With the absolute clusterfuck happening on the Republican side there was this extraordinary golden opportunity for the Democrats to show a positive, intelligent, and united front. They started out that way... a bit. But then instead of steadily and logically expressing the differences between the Dems and their reasons for their platforms, Hillary made an about-face. She started eating her own. Attacked the other guys by straw-manning and misrepresenting their positions on the major issues and disparaging them.

Especially now that it's just her and Bernie, she does this constantly, which is especially ridiculous because Bernie's record is rock solid. And when Bernie accurately refers to her inconsistent record she gets hyper-defensive, calling it an attack, sexism, harassment, and "artful smear".

WTF.

And the polls show I'm not the only one WTF-ing. It's clear that the group of people voting for her are people unfamiliar with her record, leaning on name recognition and assuming everything she says is true.

She's overwhelmingly distrusted by young people. I'm convinced it's because young people are using the internet, researching her record, seeing videos like this one where we hear her own words out of her own mouth... and her claims of consistency become instantly hollow and dishonest.

And a longer one.

I agree with Bernie here. It's not exactly a problem that she has changed her mind on things, but it's the way she now claims consistency during debates. She knows her constituency won't check what she says. So she just states that she has always had the position she currently has even though that's bullshit.

I'm so angry about this I don't want to vote for her at all. Even if she's the nominee over Bernie.

I'd rather vote for Jill Stein or write in Bernie. It's just so fucking aggravating that she had the opportunity to be honest, forthright, and strong... she would have been an easy shoo-in. But she or her people thought it would make her look stronger to bullshit and attack the other Democrats.

Utter fuck-up as I see it.

At any rate, BERNIE SANDERS FOR PRESIDENT.

Scalia died over the weekend. Holy shit. The Republicans are crapping their pants and warning Obama against replacing him during an election year. That he shouldn't even bother and let the 'American people' choose based on who becomes the President. Lunatics. We voted for Obama twice. He's got a year left. That's his responsibility and we gave it to him.

I sincerely think the Republicans have lost their damn minds. I've watched every debate on both sides. It's a fucking circus over there. I'd be horrified if I was a Republican to see that total shit-show. It's a farce.

Also been watching the Flint crisis, which is heinous beyond words.

Thinking often of MLK's Three Evils of Society. Greed. Racism. War.

Thinking often of Chaplin's Great Dictator.

I was raised on Star Trek. Measure of a Man. The Drumhead. Who Watches the Watchers.

I can't help but crave utopian ideals. How can there ever be change if we are constantly leaning backwards into stagnation and the status quo?

JYJ

The variety show hilarity they recorded right before Jaejoong enlisted will be coming out soon. Really takes me back to the old days seeing the clips/highlights. Laughter and tears all the way through.

Yoochun released a mini-album out of frickin' nowhere. We kinda knew he had recorded something before enlistment, but nothing had been said about it. Then BAM... mini.

Jaejoong released his full album just a few days ago, which we were expecting. Another lovely rock album, more diverse than WWW, but less heavy.



My favorite track is Run Away, largely because it's just so different for him. Really ethereal. And so much English! Unusual.

Junsu Dracula'd the hell out of Dracula for the 2nd run. Ripping his throat apart in the process, like ya do.



He'll have a small Japanese tour in the Spring. I'm guessing he'll enlist sometime in the Summer.

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I'm hungry.
Peace.