Pinky Stuff

[Pinky]

First- THANK YOU for 18,000 views here.

Now- business.

If you wrote a million words, maybe even 2 million words over 8 years, and suddenly everything you ever wrote was about to go *poof*, would you panic? Whine? Bitterly complain? Go into depression and seclusion?

Facebook went down again yesterday. People ~FREAKED~.

I paid $450 to keep my million words from disappearing a year and 3 days ago. I was glad I had the chance to save it from *poof*. I've seen so many people feel shattered and destroyed when host sites suddenly went dead and they could no longer access their stuff, much less save it from disappearing because they hadn't backed up their artwork and manuscripts and stuff.

Well, it's happening again, only this time no one is saying anything constructive, and there might not be a rollover to keep taking fees this year. I'm screaming like a banshee moving stuff as fast as I can, bracing myself to lose a lot of it, and this is still on top of writing the book. Egads. Seriously?

I'm in way better shape than last year, or I'd be in a puddle on the floor, just letting people step in me. I'm actually trying to do this. I'm moving mountains and planning strategy and counting nickels and dimes, holding onto a dream.

I want mRpl to be a real book some day. That's just one of many really fun things I want to do. It's about to disappear. I nearly lost it once, I might be losing it again, but dang I'm scraping my blogs out as fast as I can. I will be forever grateful to Victor Navone for the inspiration I got from his work.

[Pinky]

Reeled out of bed around 5:15 a.m. after one of those dreams where you think you're waking up but you discover you're still dreaming and think you wake up again, went in circles about 5 times before I really woke up. I think I'm awake now... I've mentioned having dreams about future tech or accounts or websites I've created and forgotten about. Last night I cycled through OH YEAH howcouldIforgetsomethingsocool and trying to get back into stuff, and every time I 'woke up' it turned into something different. Now that I'm *really* awake and know nothing that cool exists yet, I'm thinking future tech dream again. That or alt selves have really cool stuff in alt 'verses. I'm not the only one thinking about future tech, apparently. Click this.



I wrote 17 pages of notes this week, several while I was driving, and that was just one spiral. Kinda chewing on stuff the last guy talked to me about breaking down my outline further, categories into subcategories. Another person mentioned that I'm basically writing a textbook. I need to just accept the fact that this one is gonna be thick and I'm not apologizing for that. Since I'm so good at summarizing thought now, I feel like I'm creating word art in 4D space, and the people who read it will become time travelers. If you love pinterest AND books, this clicks to a book lover's board.



The Geek Squad did giant dust bunny surgery on my laptop yesterday. As he tried to talk me into an overhaul, I felt my laptop quiver. It's alive! And aware! O_O

[Pinky]

So this happened. These were the retweet and fav numbers at 12:11 pm central today. Add those up and you get the notifications on my phone so far just from this one tweet. They're still coming in, you can click that screen grab and check the current numbers in real time. I would love to have counted all the other notifications I got during the Sharknado 2 live tweet but there's just no way I have the time or brain right now for that. All I can say is Thanks, Syfy, this was a truly fun tweet, and super thanks Anne Wheaton.



Don't know about you guys but back to school has got me all excited for autumn and Halloween. Only 5 months until New Year's Eve! We rock what I call the 'holiday slide' in my family, and thanx to burrito's birthday, it starts even earlier now. From here on out till New Year's, we have a birthday, anniversary, or major holiday every other week, plus FOOTBALL, so we are one big long party in my house. It's exhausting but loads of fun, and the only way I can stay in the game is to start loading the freezer NOW. I have this many eggs piled up from my 4 hens since we got back from Houston in May, before that I emptied the fridge.



The goal is to repurpose these eggs into holiday goodies and get them into the big freezer asap. Over the next couple of weeks I'll be making cookie doughs, cupcakes, a variety of pound and fruit cakes, rolls, and anything else I can think of that uses eggs. Most of my baking for the next 6-9 months will be DONE. I've discovered this works really well for us since I have a pattern of crashing every year right around Thanksgiving, and after that you're lucky if you get Christmas cards or a little cash from me. I don't do big Thanksgiving and Christmas any more because that's when people are passing flu and whatever else around, and that's when colder damper weather flares up the aches and pains, and that's when I hit my wall and start flirting with flare ups from overdoing. Since we get burrito regularly now, it's especially crucial that I get all over this plan before my brain falls out for the winter. I was such a mess last holiday season I could barely do pinterest, my holiday boards look pretty dismal over there. The Darth Vader pin is my favorite.



Tell me you guys know this is happening all over Vevo right now.

[Pinky]

In true aspie response to extra pressure and stress, I trifurcated into 3 different sets of research notes and threw my manuscript into a vortex to splat all over later.



Aspies look like this when they stress out.



I mean, what if spiders could time travel? YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST. By the way, don't do an engine search on 'spider time travel'. Just... don't.



One of my struggles lately has been softening up my content, trying to be 'nice'. I mean, I'm not going to get all languagy and stuff, but I can't be nice. I was remembering this morning back to being around my grandmother and one of her sisters, my great-aunt, always dressed to kill with their hair done and pearls on, never caught without their hosiery and gloves, the very picture of proper ladies. I remember realizing when I was about ten that you'd never suspect how sad or miserable they might be through the projection of looking perfect and fresh and ready, no matter what was going on. I remember realizing in my 30's that I can never be that kind of person because even on nice jobs and in nice places I can't help smudging my face and ripping my hose and looking disheveled- my priorities are so different. And that's what I'm struggling with in my writing. My priorities require that I dredge through the angst and sadness behind what is proper, while hanging onto all the things that got me in trouble for not being able to stifle my giggles.

I've been marathoning STNG off my DVR as it schedules through on BBCA, and one ep was about an alien drawing conclusions about whether everyone on the ship should live or die based on what it saw through a child's eyes. That means if I write the way I remember things only from my own perspective, the whole world will die and I really don't want that to happen. If I modulate several perspectives so that we can also look at stuff from the grown up perspective that Picard explained to the alien, then the world can go ahead and live. The problem I'm running into is that I truly do have a social deficit, plus I'm routing around two-way communication challenges that make it hard to convey what I want without catering or condescending to my readers, and I'm realizing that even though I've had years to think about things, verbalizing so much of it for the very first time is like trying to ice skate up the side of a cliff. It's like when you get bogged down on a quest so you go do something else for awhile and hope you pick up a jewel or level up your weapons for when you get back to it.

Basically, I popped out a couple thousand words yesterday and abruptly shut the laptop because even I wouldn't read that crap. But I would read about time traveling spiders.

There's a guy whose site I used to submit content for (the dotcom is still down until the Xanga migration is more complete, I suspect) who is meeting soon with local reps about autism planning. I'm not saying I'll be in any way instrumental, but people like me coming out on blogs and writing books over the last ten years has been a really big deal. Standing up against the genocide of a 'cure' has swept the world, brilliant minds headlocking with the financially savvy using the autism 'cause' as a big money pit, regardless of how badly it turns out for the 'victims' they claim to represent. I haven't been so shocked since I learned the truth behind Native American slavery and genocide. The answers shouldn't always be to 'fix the problem' without first finding out who stands to gain from there being a problem in the first place.

I have to write some mean things. I have to write sad things. I have to write things that most people would be afraid to write and have the world read, especially their families. It's important.

But I'd rather write about time traveling spiders. I'm making notes. After my hard work is done, I want so very badly to play.

[Pinky]

Whoever linked my dotcom on a Brazil site, ur awesome. Let's celebrate. Push play when you get there. That's an 80's song from a radio jockey during my Phoenix days.

Did a big ol' mostly private assessment of how I'm doing since the big comeback two years ago. Exactly 6 weeks from today is the one year anniversary of the Xanga migration to new servers. Also in the last couple of years I've been on two different cancer watches (one more might be popping up, kinda holding my breath), and both my daughters went through difficult pregnancies at the same time and popped burritos out only 2 months apart, and the second one came early nearly right on top of me having surgery last summer. Also during this last year my father-in-law missed dying in his driveway next door by about 5 minutes but didn't, thanx to one phone call and expertly practiced emergency response, and now my mother-in-law is recovering from an extremely invasive surgery. A whole lot more than that has happened and I'm utterly exhausted, but those are the basic highlights.

Why am I saying all this? Because I hope you guys who follow me are picking up how cool it is to journal, whether it's public or private, because you can see your own writing progress, no matter how slow and agonizing it seems to be, with the added benefit of going oh yeah, I remember that because we forget being in that day. I'm a natural yapper on a keyboard because I rarely speak to anyone out loud on the phone or anywhere else, and I use my screen as a playback for my glitchy brain- this is how I organize my mixed up thoughts. It doesn't matter what you write or what you think of what you wrote, just make a habit out of writing something down every day. I have a very old Harry Potter journal from 2003/2004 that I didn't write much in but I am so glad to have because 1- I can point back to 2003 on the trigeminal pain because I mentioned persistent continual earaches even before I had Bell's Palsy 8 months later, and 2- I wrote something brief in that journal on the day someone very precious died, and even though I never wrote more after that, I am so glad I have what I wrote that day.

When you are writing on your blogs, don't think about other people reading it. Think about how you feel about what you're writing. Think about what you'd like to read about it. Think about creating what YOU want to see written down. It doesn't have to be perfect. You know what phonetics are, right? I had a linguistics course in college. All language is ultimately defined phonetically by linguists. If you can convey the ideas in your head to another person by means of symbolism, you are communicating, whether or not the spelling and grammar and punctuation are correct. Don't worry about people nitpicking, that's their OCD problem. The most important thing we do as humans is share what is in our heads. This has been going on since way before the printed page, or even cave painting. Sharing our thoughts and ideas in story form is what being human is really all about. We come together as a group, we share what is in our heads. If we are not able to do that, we are not successful as humans. Even if all we can do is smile at someone and hold out a hand, that is symbology at its core. That we can draw lines depicting that, or create words conveying that, is priceless in a sentient race of beings.

Words are hard, reading is hard, and writing is hard. For everyone. A lot of people have dyslexia or vision challenges, most of us use spell check like maniacs, none of us is born naturally writing our thoughts down. Even the most gifted have to practice this. I had a tough time in my creative writing classes back in college. I've spent years practicing on blogs, most of them gone now or private. I've had days where I could barely make a sentence. But that doesn't mean I can't.

The hardest part is believing something we say is worth reading. It's scary. I'm about to tell you something really true. If you write something on a blog, and only one person sees it, and that one person dumps their bad day all over you letting you know how stupid you are because you can't spell or your idea is dumb or you're wrong because this or that, you got their attention. And that was your goal, wasn't it? You were successful. That one person was better than no one at all. That one person took the time to respond, and it's not your fault it happened to be someone who loves bashing pumpkins on people's houses.

I once commented on someone's blog post about how much I admired them for being honest about something scary, and right after me someone commented that we were both losers looking for attention. 1- this was before I ever shared who I really am or a picture of myself, and I was as nobody as someone gets, so seriously, looking for attention? 2- I checked that person's page out and everything on it was political bashing, not one thing was personal, just a continual regurgitation of the news but loaded down with lots of negative opinions. CHECK OUT WHO IS COMMENTING BADLY. Chances are they have their own little psychosis going. You have the power to delete ugly comments. I certainly don't respond to crap like that.

I wish I had known how to screen grab a few years ago, I had some haters melting my screen every time I turned around, following me in forums and blogs and trying to sabotage everything I did. It was very stressful at first. By the time it was over it was actually pretty hilarious. I had gotten so 'famous' that everyone rushed to see what I would do next that would set the diatribes off again. If I had known more back then, I might not have disappeared. I would have used the 'free press' and capitalized on the gains.

It's scary sharing stuff on blogs, whether it's personal or not. I still feel shaky after some of mine. When that happens, I turn my laptop off and walk away. I go do chores or even leave the house. When you publish something that makes you feel shaky and afraid, that's when you go out and get a milkshake or whatever it is you do that makes you feel special.

[Pinky]

I'm thinking about pulling everything out of my kitchen cabinets and super dusting the insides. I used to do stuff like that several times a year, and climb all over the counters reaching up to the soffits with the vacuum cleaner. Looks like one of the bean roosters fell over. I can move around a little better now, so who knows.



I have this mug thing, but a person can pile up only so many mugs before it's ridiculous, so when I did a double take yesterday over these I very nearly triumphed, but wound up caving and going back. I'm usually really strong willed with money, but whoever made these snookered me.



July is my Christmas. Lotta sales, and Penney's sent a book full of coupons for $10 off and 25% off and stuff like that, and being the penny pinching retail gamer that I am, I got a new crock pot, 2 Farberware skillets AND those mugs cheaper than I would have on Christmas sales, was like walking out with free merch just for showing up. Still, we all know mugs like that wind up in yard sales when old people croak off. Most of this stuff is exactly that. I've been told that snuff bowl was my great grandfather's and he really used it for something.



My whole house is a hodgepodge of other people's stuff. Most of those people are passed now. I'm the odd relative that likes little bits and pieces of people I knew as a child. Nothing in my house matches, there is no theme. When you walk through my house on a quiet day you can feel sleepy old days that came before from other places. The little forgotten corners from other houses are all in my house. It's not junky because I loathe decor clutter, but barely any of it is originally mine.

I think a lot about time. I skewed through a wild diversion this last week into thinking about another story I'm working on about time. It's hard staying focused on finishing just one project when I've spent so many years dabbling in a plethora of them for my own amusement. I keep telling myself I want the money (if it's worth anything), but since I'm such an immaterial person I hardly take that kind of motivation seriously.

I'm wandering around my house today doing a lot of quiet thinking while I catch up on chores. I love the theme music when they visit the ancient dead planet Brunnis in Lexx's Supernova, like an ancient music box in a dusty attic but awesome like ancient-galaxy-full-of-stars awesome.

[Pinky]

Insomnia provides awesome opportunities. I've spent many a long night stalking the dark streets in the swirling ether, and last night was a delightful gem of discovery. This first grab clicks to the convo thread on twitter.







The poor kittehs... This next grab clicks to the Wikipedia page.

Did you like that? Click this next grab for MOAR. Ur welcome.

[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.

[Pinky]

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

[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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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.