Mangela Lansbury

I am super excited about developments at work for me and it's keeping me awake, so I will rant about work for a minute! Also the guy I've been seeing's parents finally left town this week. They've been in town and staying with him since the 4th, and our time together has been limited -- very understandable when your parents come across an ocean to visit you. So we're spending a lot of the weekend together! I am very excited about that too. This is a very good week for me. Maybe now I can get to sleep since I got all this out.

I don't actively delete my text messages, I just have my phone automatically delete all but the last 10 MMS and the last 100 SMS. I have a few conversations marked to save, but those are more just in case I need to prove something in court conversations than anything sentimental. I figure if I ever need a backup, I'll just FOIA the NSA.

I think the most generic word for that is xenomilia (very not sure), but I think that applies to long term sensations like that? It could be a starting place though. Maybe there was some super ordinary name for it too, like the opposite of phantom limb syndrome. This kind of thing is dangerous to look up too much, though! It can be like going to WebMD and finding out that you have a horrific intestinal disease that is going to kill you immediately, when in reality you just gotta poo.

I have never heard of this happening to any of my server friends, even when they work 30 hour weeks and bring home basically nothing. In theory, this is a thing. In practice...

Yeah, it's just the trivialization of the word. The same reason I don't like hearing people say they "ghetto rigged" this thing they have. One of those pet peeves that's hard to explain without sounding like a picky little snootlord, so I just don't like it. At least the runner himself, when the term was introduced, said "I don't even know why we use this term" in a way that sounded like he was saying "I don't like this/it is bad/I am uncomfortable with it" or something like that, but the guy with him who was explaining everything had no such qualms.

No problem! I always have some problem or another with Twitch streaming through my Chromecast, so it's good to know I can just turn on YouTube when I start watching next week! Thank you for checking!

This was all very cool. Plus, they kept the inside baseball to a minimum, talked to the developer about actual development issues (where the dev actually said something like, "I've been wanting to fix this highly technical bug, would that effect speedrunning or am I in the clear?"), and were generally just decent and entertaining people throughout! A+, would make myself exhausted today again. I watched some Metroid game for a while yesterday, but their constant use of the term "ghetto jump" made me uncomfortable so I went to do something else instead. I hate it when something I'm interested in uses such thoughtless language and makes me not want to like it anymore.

I was offered a full time, permanent position today. I've been working for 30 hours a week on a temporary basis for a while. I want expecting this offer for a few more weeks, so when I was asked, "Do you have an idea of what pay scale you have in mind?" I just had to answer, "I have no concept of what the answer to that should be." Here's hoping I don't get screwed over!

There's a local deli/restaurant here that has a weird structure. All the employees are paid a decent wage, but it varies per quarter because it's essentially profit sharing. The owners are well off, but they'll never be as rich as you'd expect someone who owns that caliber of establishment to be. The flip side of that is that all the employees are much better off than you'd expect them to be. The person behind the counter selling you cheese might make $20/hr, and the person walking you to your seat might make $13/hr. Service there is always phenomenal, too. I'd go more often if I could afford to, but it's an expensive place so I only manage to make it out there once every couple of months. I'm not clear on what their exact structure is, so I guess if you're interested you can look up Zingerman's in Ann Arbor.

Welcome from just a smidge outside Ohio!

Can you stream YouTube live streams through Chromecast? The YouTube stream was pretty high quality for me yesterday, but I've never tried streaming a live YouTube thing on chromecast.

Evangelion inhabits this weird space in my life. I was in a really bad place when I first watched it, but it was the thing I escaped into. I have basically an encyclopedic knowledge of it, so a lot of the series means things to me that it doesn't mean to other people. This has led to many weird conversations about the series. When I used to feel bummed (by used to, I mean still sometimes), I would listen to either the End of Eva soundtrack or the S6 soundtrack for the series. The music means a lot to me, and a song like that one brings a lot of weird emotions out in me.

I meant to respond to this earlier, but then I forgot and only just remembered. My disagreements with my mother are only polite at a distance. I only made my mom cry once while I was down there this time, and it wasn't in public. I'm counting that as a win. I'm unapologetically, uh... Radical queer left? I'm hard to pin down politically. My parents watch Fox news 24/7. Things are weird while I'm there.

Along similar terms to that, I went shoe shopping recently. It was a busy day, so everyone was really busy and I just asked whoever was available for help when I could. I ended up getting two pairs of shoes that two different people got me, and I knew they were both working on commission because, uh, I've worked at Macy's before. Who do you buy from in that situation? Both have quotas, and will get different rewards based on their performance. It was a really awkward decision to make. Bloomingdale's (same company as Macy's, but somehow higher discount there!) was a much better experience. I got a pair of shoes there too, but I bought them from the same guy I've bought shoes from at Bloomingdale's from for 16 years. Even though I hadn't even been in that store for 4 years, he remembered me and asked me about specifics in my life that we had talked about before and my general taste in footwear. He earned that commission. Basically, I flew home in a pair of shoes my mom thought were too shabby so she bought me a lot of shoes and things were weird all around. I usually tip 10% on takeout, which friends have told me is both very generous and very appreciated. I guess people don't usually tip on takeout, which I honestly never even thought of as an option.

This is a really powerful piece about the state of transgender issues today, and a woman named Alena who's being forced to live as Christopher. http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jul/24/alena-bradford-transgender-south-georgia

Is GamerGate trying to take credit for the Gawker relaunch yet?

I read a really good piece from the Washington Post about how race is not a Southern problem, which was nice since a lot of people frame it that way. http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/its-not-dixies-fault/2015/07/17/7bf77a2e-2bd6-11e5-bd33-395c05608059_story.html

What do you ship in your giraffe fics?

This is a huge problem in queer spaces throughout the West. LGBTQ+ spaces have turned more into G spaces, maybe with a little L, a bit of "I guess B is probably somewhere in this crowd, ugh" and that's it. And the spaces in general are geared toward the most commodified queer experience -- that of the drag loving, Cosmo drinking, Rihanna fan searching for their one and only,etc. The stereotypical gay with a six pack wearing a Speedo at the beach in Tel Aviv, and those who want to be them. That letter makes a lot of great and generalizable points, basically.

So Valve made a conscious decision to not allow the community to mark a game in a certain way because of abuse, so the workaround is to... abuse a different system...? Man, the minutiae of anything involving TB are just mindnumbingly dumb and dull and way overly complex.

Wait, why can't you tag something 30fps with Steam Tags?

He should have done this by not doing it. Don't shit on people over something arbitrary like being locked to 30fps. If you have to remark on it, play up games with framerates you like. You can't start a constructive conversation by saying, "This game is 30fps and my opinion is that 30fps is unsatisfactory," so don't say that.

Even better: They outed someone thanks to information from someone who basically said, "Yeah, I'm blackmailing this person, can you help me out?"

My mom has always had a troubled relationship with my sexuality. She's told me multiple times that she no longer wants anything to do with me -- the most recent being the day Obergefell was handed down. A regular piece of our conversational diet has been her asking me if I've found a nice girl yet, followed by me sighing deeply and sitting in silence until she asks another question or hangs up the phone. Basically, she's been very clear that she wants a son, she just doesn't want a gay son. But I'm home visiting family for my birthday (which I guess is today since it's after midnight, yay me) and, for the first time, she asked me if I had a boyfriend in a genuinely interested and supportive way. We talked about the guy I've been seeing and she gave me well considered advice about my unique situation. I have no idea how to react to this, but I like it!

Isn't the strongest Euro commitment to Syrian refugees made by Greece? Don't they host the most? I think maybe the European commitment could improve.