Pinky Stuff

[Pinky]

We seem to be getting through the initial shock ok. I think it's kinda like being too close to a blast point, you go temporarily deaf and don't hear anything else for a little while after that.

This is certainly more clearly defining some target dates for me, though.

I've got my biz accounts set up, made a couple of key connections, and surprisingly getting some 'silent' moral support via quiet follows. I'm terrified and ecstatic. I've got plenty of distraction to keep my attention focused, and Scott can figure out how to handle our boat tipping.

Now- can I *please* stop being hit with these super interruptions? This is ridiculous.

p.s. You really quiet people still hitting all my stuff- bless your hearts. Thank you. <3

[Pinky]

It's that time of year, everyone around me going antsy wanting to buy tomato plants. Between that and the question 'Where would you go during a zombie apocalyspe?' last night on Snarkalec Radio, I wound up mocking and arguing with a film director having conniptions about uncooperative tomato scenes in his attempt at apocalyptic filming in my dreams last night. Seriously guys, if you want ~messy~, go with organic ripened on the vine, they're redder all the way through and much softer and moister, and don't come crying to me how that's more expensive on a tight budget. Tomatoes grow like weeds, people can't get rid of the things and sit at little stands all day or sneak huge gift bags into churches because they can't bear to throw them away, there you go, cheap apocalypse filming. Now I'll have this song stuck in my head all day. My daughter liked for me to sing this with her when she was 5. It's way too early in the year for this...

[Pinky]

Burrito's mama is a professional sports and medicine massage therapist in a big health care system. She can't believe I'm continuing knee/leg ASTYM and strengthening on top of a full spinal whiplash on top of my fibro. I didn't mention this is also on top of other things in my life.

In the old days I used to have regular aspie meltdowns even on handfuls of meds because I wasn't aware that what was really happening was nervous system overload. Two key things to understand about aspies is 1- we can't shut that off, sensation overload is like an old fashioned microphone screaming through a set of speakers in a feedback loop and melts our brains, and 2- attempts to socially interact on any level beyond the basics during overload becomes catastrophic if the other person misreads tone, expression, bluntness, accidentally wrong words out of confusion, or attempts at redirection as emotions that must be taken personally. True, I am in 'KILL' mode when I'm in overload, but that doesn't automatically mean I hate people for no reason. I think I'm better at controlling meltdowns than some aspies because I was beaten through my childhood, but I don't think that's the proper way to handle a child in crisis, and only teaches violence as an answer to problems. Anyway, my point is that I have a lot of experience with friendships going wrong real fast, and I'm attempting to prevent that.

I normally break my public writing down into separate blogs for spoonie, aspie, Lexx, my daily planning, general writing projects, and occasional photoshopping. I also blurb stuff together here in this public forum. Today I'm blurbing. There is purpose behind this madness- no matter how long I stop interacting, people can still see that I'm doing ok if they want to check up on me.

I have to admit it was a little scary last night withdrawing from twitter for the second weekend in a row. Twitter has been a solid companion for the last 15 1/2 months when I first got my Droid and started joyously tweeting around the clock with my insomnia. That had such a positive impact on my depression that I threw myself even harder into twitter when my blogs went down for awhile last September. By this last winter my mention reach, according to Sumall, topped 1 million. That still cracks me up, the coolest most useless statistic in social media.

Several people on twitter have noticed that I seem to excel at keeping multiple convos in multiple and crisscrossing threads straight even over long periods of time. I am able to hop in and out of groups and lists like a hyper Energizer bunny. I don't always keep people straight, but I can sometimes remember things they tweeted in detail months later. I don't have a complete eidetic memory, but I once blindly went straight to a book on a library shelf I'd read excerpts from years before within a minute of walking in the door without remembering the title or author but only that one of the dogs was repeatedly drowned in lab experiments. Some people believe we are psychic and whatever, I just think that was already somewhere in my brain and I was able to bypass the stupidity of consciousness and access that info without my own conscious knowledge. A brain trauma therapist once asked me how I managed to hold jobs after she watched me introduce myself to the same person 3 times in 5 minutes at a charity function. I think it's pertinent to ask at this point how I manage to have friends at all being aspie with a glitchy brain, but I seem to have lots of friends.

After years of experience losing friends because of the second paragraph up there, I am trying something new. I have never done this before. I spent 7 years working very hard developing better social skills and it seems to be fantastically successful. However, I can still see me destroying these new relationships if I don't get them on the same page I'm on very quickly. I am in meltdown. I've been rocketing into overload for a couple of weeks and have been wracking my brain how to handle this. I do NOT want to lose friends over my different kind of brain function again. So here's how it works-

My live tweet and chat television/movie watches have been adding up to 10+ hours a week, and that doesn't include private interaction and tweet convos. I am also overloaded with increased pressures at home while I deal with burrito probs, job upheavals, cancer scare, and other family stuff I've never mentioned. I cannot play the social dance game in overload. I'm getting snappy over teeny things, and try as I might to hide it, I'm afraid I suck at pretending. I am NOT going to drag all this onto twitter or facebook, this is *exactly* what my blogs are for. I will link this on twitter. I will not explain any further there. This is it.

I see these things come through on facebook- who really reads my posts, leave a one word comment and repost, etc. I hate those. I feel like they are manufactured for lazy people to poke other lazy people with sticks for a response with the possible threat of unfriending from whomever doesn't respond. I will never unfriend people for not commenting or talking to me. I LOVE LURKERS. I've even had genuine stalkers, probably still do. I don't feed trolls and I don't bug people for attention. I would only ask that my friends not take it personally if I stop talking for awhile. That is the aspie answer to stress. I know I look really wordy right now and some people will actually feel offended that I could have put this energy into talking to them. But that's not how my brain works. I am the sort of person who is thrilled when my phone doesn't ring for 3 weeks, and no one emails me for a month, and it's not because I hate people. That I'm as public as I am is a true miracle, and I'm wanting very much to not rock boats this time every time people ask me individually on twitter and facebook what's up and expect me to type out the answer a hundred separate times. I snapped at someone I never dreamed I'd snap at yesterday, thank goodness it was private, but I feel really bad about it.

So I'm trying this new thing- I'm withdrawing from so much interaction BEFORE I start zapping people with lasers and side taking starts happening and mass confusion winds up in a 3 day brawl, because I seem to be very good at accidentally creating that kind of thing. I don't expect everyone to understand, much less actually read this, but at least it's here, and maybe in a couple of weeks or a month or two I can pick back up on live tweeting. I really really like the live tweeting and daily group convos, but I think that's what is draining this aspie, and I've gotta get my balance back. I will still be on twitter. I will still say hi. Ok, sometimes. But I may seriously fall way back down from that million mention reach, lol.

Remember- If I don't respond or talk to you it doesn't mean I don't like you. Thank you for your patience with me.

In the meantime, I'm WORKING.

[Pinky]

Have to admit I was a little disappointed that after all the big Irish talk, only one person got this.





I need to start pushing my #MerLexxian hashtag again. Merlin fans, more especially Colin Morgan fans are very aware of Irish in film and what has been overcome even recently to break into worldwide fandom.

Check out this lengthy IMDB list of Irish born actors. Do some of these names surprise you? Such a tiny country pumping out so many really good actors.

For my scifi friends, if you have never heard of this gem, please to check it out. It's the most beautifully heart wrenching movie I've ever seen, filmed in Ireland, directed and played by Irish. Click the pic to see more about Parked.

And if you want the ultimate fan-made spoiler, click here. It will ruin the rest of your day if you have experience and cry easily. I can't even imagine not knowing where my child was, no matter how they disappointed me.

Make this a good year to be Irish.

[Pinky]

Locked in a standoff with my left eye. When I try to work it shoots darts in my brain and oozes down my face. When I play it's FINE. >=l Well, at least there's that. It used to be so bad I couldn't even play. I think I mentioned somewhere I had to stop reading and watching TV for a couple of years during the worst of the nerve damage.

So, what is up with this???





>=l The twitworth site is down today, so I jumped over to twitvalue and LOST $2264.44?????

My twittascope is only making things a bigger mess. What does this mean???????



I still haven't ordered the new coffee maker. I think I mentioned that somewhere. I'd like to get this one but holy cow, click the pic to see why I'm doing this. O_O



Yeah, the new trend is to ditch the reservoir and hook the water up directly. Really don't want to go to that kind of trubba. Now I'm running into a whole pinterest board devoted to under the counter coffee makers. Guess what, the reservoir merch links are broken. I may just have to cave to a counter top coffee maker for awhile. NOW the question is, do I get a fancy perk model (those used to smell so good when I was a kid) or just another drip? I'm not an espresso or cappuccino person. I'm more the mug collector type. I've had everything from Star Trek to Pirates of the Caribbean and a full range of holiday novelty mugs. My latest acquisition was Snarkalecs mugs (click the pic to get some)



and my next will be a Wireless mug from Andrew Lee Pott's Keychain Productions. Click the pic to see it/get it. I think all proceeds go to web series film production, or you can donate directly via link on the main site.



The way the filming is going, I think in the future fans will get tax breaks for investing in or donating to film projects as scheduling giants slowly cave to real time interactive media taking over the industry. In the meantime, people jumping on board NOW will be surfing the wave into the new entertainment mecca.

I really need to get back to work because my eye is clearly handling this now. If you still have another minute to kill on break, check out this cute fan-made Old Spice parody.

[Pinky]

Ladybugs.



NOT the cute innocent harbinger of spring many humans believe them to be.



Allow me to hint at what I put up with living so near a state forest. These pix click back to sources.





Imagine seeing stuff like that on your house. Imagine having to walk through or past something like that to get into your house. Imagine random idiots flying up your nostrils and clothing and into your eyes and ears while you're turning your key in the lock as quickly as possible, trying not to disturb them.

They don't bite or sting, but they are tenaciously clingy and about the stupidest bug on earth. They have absolutely no sense of self preservation and don't seem to have assessment skills, so they dive bomb straight into beverages and dishwater without hesitation. They get stuck in hair, cling to eyelids, march right into your armpits no matter how repellent you might think your deodorant is. They collect out of reach in light fixtures and ceiling corners and, until they simply dry up into piles of tiny carcasses, they randomly drop on you without warning.

Scott likes saving their tiny lives. He gently scoops one up and opens the door to toss it out and doesn't notice two more fly in over his head. Sucking them up in a vacuum grosses me out almost as much as spiders do.

Ladybugs show up in my survey blog every year, number 5 in this one, number 3 in this one. I get them coming and going, fall hibernation and spring resurgence.

The worst part is the little crunchy bits. They are so fragile they break into shards, and when they dry up you can't tell it was a bug. I keep all our food in sealed plastic bags and containers because of ladybugs. It's really gross wondering if you just ate ladybugs in your cereal.

Things to think about-
-I've never seen a chicken eat ladybugs.
-I've never seen a ladybug caught in a spiderweb.
-I've never seen ladybugs and ants cross paths.

I believe ladybugs are the zombies of the bug world. They are nearly indestructible unless they get smashed to bits, they don't seem to be capable of drowning, they fear nothing, they don't seem to be a food staple for anything else, and nothing you can do really stops them.

Ladybugs are evil. I bet you want one now. Click that to get one.



I'm apparently not the only person who thinks ladybugs are evil. Click this one to see more awesome evil ladybug pix.

[Pinky]

Now I know why people disappear for a month or 6 weeks just before they announce they've published, lol. I'm getting great stuff back from beta readers, and if I'm going to handle crunch time, I may hafta stop doing all other writing, because my excellent feedback support is right, I need to tighten up my last revision. Thank goodness Walking Dead is on break now, and I've already stopped doing my other live tweet TV watches. I may be taking breaks from live tweeting radio links the rest of this month, too.

Wanna say thanx to everyone who jumped on my Walking Dead reviews, 200+ hits just yesterday, and over 12,000 on my Pinky Stuff here since I started doing this. None of this was intended to draw that much attention, mostly just needed busy work, distraction, and focus material to help me navigate all the crazy interruptions that go on in real life.

I don't mean to be rude, have been turning down a few writing offers from other people and have stopped replying to direct and personal messaging, and lately have started ignoring being tagged on twitter. I hope you all understand I'm up to my eyeballs in rewrite and formatting before I turn all my stuff in. Twitter has been crucial in my personal development and is part of my story, so I'm not abandoning anyone, and I hope to be back in full swing in a few weeks. My goal (tentatively, lol) is to get my manuscript handed in by the end of April before we go on vacation. I really really really hope I can do this, sure going to try.

I will probably continue doing a daily touch base on my Pinky blog which does not support mobile viewing, alas, but I probably won't be posting links on twitter every time I post.

My Kaspersky blocked a trojan while I was getting this picture, so I won't link the source and save all your lives. This is me being dragged away from social media so I can finish my book.

[Pinky]

Today is a wash, so I'm catching up on a few Beyond the Wormhole eps while I do chores. Got a good lol with this one.

Was anyone else disturbed by the flagrant inertia containment when Kiera rode inside that time travel ball over to the other time stream? I was going Wow, they figured out how to create an axis for the cylinder coil theory



I think the Continuum writers are toying with us, smashing both the bifurcation and loop timeline theories together. I don't know if they're hoping viewers won't notice or if they're really going somewhere with this, mainly that Alec Sadler is screwing up way worse than anyone thinks, and I'm totally wondering now just how convoluted he is as an old man to actually use himself as a tool like that- surely he thought of the far-reaching consequences, he's a genius, right? Maybe the conflicting personal agendas clashing because he doesn't tell himself the whole truth is his undoing.



At any rate, it's ok now to go kill yourself and you'll still be fine as long as the *original* is still truckin, apparently. riiiiight....

Back to work.

[Pinky]

Posted 4-5-14 at janikabanks.com
One of the things on my materials list for submission is an author picture for the back cover. Scott doesnÔÇÖt like the one I chose, and IÔÇÖm not crazy about the two he chose. I could just about throw a dart at this point, and I thought Hey, why not let my friends choose for me? So I collected a few fun pictures and created a poll, and at the end of the month IÔÇÖll let you know which one wins.

edited & reposted 4-9-14
I'm developing bets with a few people which pic is actually going to wind up on the book cover. This poll is cookie controlled, but you can vote from all your different devices if you are hellbent on forcing my hand. Please click to get to the poll, listing your choice in comments doesn't count!

The poll closes at the end of April.

[Pinky]

It's almost that magical time of year when I was on vacation and met Dan Theologian in Dallas and then started hooking up with the Snarkalecs online while I was in Houston (proof 1, proof 2) where I saw Star Trek Into Darkness and wrote my STID movie review for syfydesigns, which has over 4200 views now. Those two weeks were the most pivotal I've ever felt in my life, and sometimes I think it feels like I've been floating ever since.

This year I will be meeting Holly and hopefully Mel, Lisa, Eric, and maybe a few other people in the Dallas-Houston area. Forgive me, but I've lost my little meetup list kinda sucking on that. #SnarkAcrossAmerica

In the meantime, it's crunch time and I'm in double countdown, so heads up, I will be turning off twitter notifications through this next work week starting on Monday and maybe even uninstall the app so I can avoid temptation. I don't think I've gone 24 hours without twitter since summer of 2012. I'll be back to live tweet Syfy movies with the Snarkalecs on the weekend, and I'll *try* to do #latenightmovie here in chat on Saturday, but no guarantees or promises to anything else. If I fail and start tweeting, I want you all to yell at me to GET TO WORK! >=l Practice that with me. GET TO WORK! >=l

[Pinky]

I know why time traveling into the past won't work. Forget about the energy requirements and grandfather conundrums, those are silly. Do you remember that quantum physics is all about not being able to pin down a particle to both time and place at once? The photon slit experiment shows you how messed up that can get, and that's just one particle. If you try to time travel back, you wind up trying to pin down a slippery elusive past of particles and waves that is so ginormous that our expanding universe looks more tame by comparison. Just because something is in the past doesn't mean it is locked down into a 'solid' immovable. The whole idea that we could join into a past time stream depends heavily on the mutability of probabilities in quantum physics. We could probably pop in and out of existences like particles pop in and out of the vacuum of space, no problemo, but finding a way to arrive at a point in time is like trying to pin down an electron's position at 3 a.m. on a Sunday in October. Until we figure out how to crunch this stuff in the new quantum computers being dreamed up, all the rocket science and wormhole dreams we've been having for the last hundred years just aren't going to work. Yeah, that's how old our scifi is, guys, the inventor of this kind of thinking was born nearly 140 years ago, and the new stuff is way over most of your puny little brains because you can't move on from relativity in your scifi to new and wondrous things spinning out of the new physicists unless it's in a Futurama cartoon.

THIS is how I blow through a minor writer's block. I have an idea for a science fiction book down the line. I hope I don't scare anyone away with the first book because I really really want to get to this after it's done.

BACK TO WORK. I'm glad I can count on at least one of you to hammer me over the head with that. Where's my work music...

[Pinky]

Back from vacation, and the most alarming thing I have to share is that I ran smack dab into a weeping angel in the kids' new backyard. O_O ermagherd, now I fear for their LIVES ~help meeee~



The most shocking reveal I've ever made on twitter was during vacation. The 3rd tweet grab links back to the photo on twitter and the thread to the convo, if you're a diehard Snarkalec Radio enthusiast, or want to be. #joinus & #FF@TonySolo while you're at it. (What is a Snarkalec?)











My 70,000th tweet happened while I was on vacation, so now you need to #FF@shinybabyb Bronwyn from the Bring Out Your Geek podcasts. She's the savviest Doctor Who fan on the North American continent, as evidenced in @holidill's Dylan Doesn't Know Doctor Who episode. It's ok if you go watch that and come back.

This was the coolest thing I saw on vacation, hands down, retired now and living at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.



Apparently I'm pretty hawt in grown up clothes. I wonder if anyone else ever snapped a selfie in the NASA bathroom. Wish they'd had cool rocket and robot graphix all over the walls and doors.



And what better way to top off a day at NASA than with @rebekahkennedy giving Tony the big L on the show that night?



This vacation post is skidding out of control in all directions. Hang on while I start another panel.

[Pinky]

No vacation would be complete without a dorky family photo. Yeah, lol at Scott, BWAHAHAHAHA xD heehee.



I'm pretty sure I'll wind up in Houston if anything bad ever happens to Scott. But until then, I get this once a year.



First haircut!



First birthday!



First cake! They kept it cautious...



First cake was actually cupcakes. Very dangerous cupcakes. Gotta watch poking an eye out on a lightsaber.



There was even pin the lightsaber on the ewok. Sploit drew this herself, was about 3 feet high.



I like perspective shots, they amuse me for some reason.



While we were gone, burrito's mama had a bat under the stairs leading up to her apartment.



And we missed a whole bunch of burrito stuff. I've got some catching up to do.



Hold on, one more panel.

[Pinky]

:edit: Some of this content has been removed due to conflict of interests. 3-27-16

[Pinky]

Last night Scott confessed he killed one of those giant creepy black-as-sin super fast flat field spiders in the tub. That makes 3 different species that are not only grown but wickedly thriving to overgrown and probably laying eggs inside our walls or something just in the last month. And I've been killing at least one baby spider a day. It's like Aragog and Shelob found each other and claimed our house for their offspring. And even though the poisonous one of the big three was the smallest, it was pretty big for the kind of spider it was. You can see two of them in @bonenado's photo tweets, easy to find since he very rarely tweets.

When a person feels really gross and fatigued during illness and can't move quickly and trying to move too quickly could result in serious injury, this kind of stressor is all it takes to bring them to tears, especially if they have arachnophobia. If this were snakes we were finding in the house, Scott would be tipping furniture over with a gun in one hand, even if they weren't poisonous, because he has ophidiophobia. I have breathing restriction reactions around bug repellants and insecticides, so we've never bombed the house. Every year we kill the occasional crickets and spiders and a beetle here or there, sometimes wasps, but that's expected when you live on the edge of the big woods. Killing the granpappy of a different species of spider every single week in your bathtub is NOT. Something is going on, and last night I felt so desperate I actually said maybe we should bug bomb the house...

As you can imagine, I had weird scary dreams all night, thank goodness not of spiders, but in one dream burrito fell out of a shopping cart onto her head and I was so upset I woke right up. And, as you can imagine, I'm not in the best of moods this morning because I'm having a hard time getting spiders and bad dreams out of my head. I decided best way to deal is head on- *write it*. One of my projects for after this first one gets done is a kid-teen level scifi story filled with spiders, an idea I've had for ages but never took seriously until I met @TScottBrave on twitter, and now I can't wait to do it.

I can't believe I'm saying this, but there are some really cute spider pix out there. I'm not going to put them here because I don't want to see them every time I load this page to add more stuff, I'm sure you understand. I wish the spiders in my house looked that cute, instead of like the spiders from nightmare hell.

My favorite spider scene ever.