You get your bullets early this week.

[rax]

• So excited about catgirl goth rave. There are logistical issues; I will conquer them. Conversation included "Well, there's nothing you can do about weather." "Want to bet?" MUAHAHAHAHAHA. I am so psyched for this party. I seriously brought 45 pairs of cat ears with me in a suitcase. (This fact caused the people at the warehouse the party is at to be like "We like you already." :)
• The non-academic (though still intelligent, incisive, &c.) test reader for my transsomatechnics paper has said that "THIS PAPER MAKES D&G SEEM LIKE THEY MAKE SENSE." I'm still nervous that it's terrible but I think it is probably OK to hand in if I poke at the ending a bit more. I am certainly not going to fail. Someone else who started reading it for me but didn't finish said it had them laughing uproariously which I think is good? I dunno. I just futzed with the introduction some and am still not happy with the conclusion but I don't know if I'm going to get happy with the conclusion by tomorrow and maybe I should just let it go for now. We'll see.
• This week I did a good thing: I convinced my company to add sexual orientation to their harassment policy and gender identity and expression to bot the harassment policy and the equal employment statement. I mean, it wasn't hard, but it wasn't in there, and I asked, and I backed it up, and found wording that they like. Hooray for using the things I am learning in school to make a difference, even if it's a really small one, in the world. (And thanks to the friend who took me aside and was just like "Rachel, you need to ask for this.") So that's awesome and makes me feel good about my continued employment with them.
• I spent much of yesterday in transit --- it takes like three hours to get from my house to the airport if I'm not driving, and then I had two longish flights, and then I had to take a train from the San Francisco airport to SoMa. Most of that time, when I wasn't dozing off, I was playing Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky. (This is your faults, yonho and bossgoji!) It is ADORABLE. Playing as a pokemon rather than as a trainer, and talking to the pokemon, and oh god. I am playing it for the plot more than for the mechanics; it's clearly a love letter to roguelikes but the actual gameplay is kinda angbandy, which is not super my thing. Although it's actually somewhat hard, which I appreciate; recently I got to level 15 of a dungeon and there was this crazy boss Venomoth who accelerated to quadruple speed and destroyed me. I have the option to ask for a rescue but I think I am just gonna try again, because I don't have easy access to DS-usable networking and don't know how to do the rescue mechanic anyway. I will figure it out when I get home. In the meantime, I am going to keep playing this, because oh my god it is so adorable. I am a mudkip and my best friend is a Vulpix. We sleep on bales of hay in a room together. Why is this not actually my liiiiiiiiiiiife
• It looks like I'm going to read a bunch of the books for next semester in advance? I got an email with a list of them and at first I misread it and thought I had to read them all by the first day of class and I was like "Five books? Over Christmas break? I am filled with rage!!!!" and planned out how I would get them all done and get notes taken on them during that time. It turns out those are the five major books for the class instead, and she was just offering us the chance to get a head start, and here I am having already started two of them. I... guess I might as well just continue? Maybe the other classes will also send out their reading lists and then I can get sufficiently ahead that my crazy travel plans will not hose my schoolwork as much as I worry they might. Or maybe I will get distracted and not get that much done. But if I only do half of the reading for the class before it even starts, I will probably be OK.
• I complain, because working this hard does wear me down, but I really do love what I do. Otherwise I would not be able to do this much of it. And my transsomatechnics paper, while it was a grind that took me almost fifty hours to draft 27 pages, is only 27 pages because it has to be 25-30; my initial outline has two entire sections I cut out of it, and I also trimmed out an entire five-page digression from the conclusion. I love reading and talking and thinking and writing about this stuff, and I hope it is someday useful to someone else. If I can find people to let me do a dissertation on this, I think I can do one and make it good.
• My brain is convinced I am on vacation. Weirdly, I have no problem doing work for my job while on vacation, which I have been doing all morning, and no problem doing work for school on vacation. But when I'm on vacation and people try to pin me down to a schedule, I bristle, and it's a little unreasonable of me. How else am I going to actually see people? I'm hoping this calms down after a few days. I guess I am still stressed about Catgirl Goth Rave and jetlagged and wasn't able to eat normally yesterday and and and and.
• The phone charging cable I brought with me... just doesn't work. I will definitely fix this by tomorrow. It could cause me some issues tonight. My current anti-planning attitude is "good I should just let the battery die and people who wish to contact me should have to find me in person" but that's uh not at all reasonable Rachel and you need to get over that. And find a micro USB cable. Preferably not for stupid expensive.
• The Brainwash, my favorite pinball laundromat, has Attack from Mars!!! It has been years and years but I used to be Good at that table --- in ten games, I was able to score two replays, and you can get on the high score list right now with only like seven billion. I think I can hit seven billion with some practice; I was on the scoreboard the last time the Brainwash had Attack from Mars. I have a win condition for my trip now. I CAN DO THIS. I need to read up on strategies though, and accept that I'm going to burn like $40 re-learning all of the shots. Also my ball control has gone to shit. I'm not reliably able to stop on the flipper right now, which ugh. Ugh ugh ugh. Practice is good. Good lord my non-social time this trip is going to include a lot of games. Also my social time! I brought Race for the Galaxy.
• I'm a smidge overbouncy. I think this iced tea is caffeinated... did I mention here that I more or less gave up caffeine in August when I gave up alcohol? I drink tea occasionally. That's about it.

Comments

[greyooze.livejournal.com]

I have got cat-badge building instructions and a puzzlepoem-stuffthing in PDF form in my pocket as we speak; I can't send them from my work computer but I will email you as soon as I get out (about 8–9 hours from now). Hopefully this will be sufficient time, but if not they will keep until next year, so no stress.

Materials for making each cat badge: one square of paper (side length about twice that of the desired badge size), one safety pin, and a little sticky tape to hold the latter on. Or you could pierce the pin through the back layer of the paper I guess, for a tapeless version. Oh, and pens for people to draw cutesy little cat faces on the front of course! Highlighter pens react pleasingly with ultraviolet, if you have black lights up.

The puzzle/poem is just printed on a single sheet of paper which is cut out and stuck in a manner which is hopefully obvious by looking at it. The puzzle is to work out what order the lines should be read in (hint: each face borders its successor), and also to decipher all the references within the text (hint II: they all relate to the poem's subject matter, which is also its physical shape)! If you are feeling bold you could pierce a hole in one corner and suspend it from the ceiling via some string?

Sorry this is all coming in at the last minute, I have taken on too many projects at once again. If you want to leave these things out in favour of more important tasks then feel free.

[greyooze.livejournal.com]

Done, stuff is sent. Sorry for delay, I had email problems as well. It's like there's a conspiracy going on!