Black Dog Blog

Archive for the ‘praxia’ Category

Eyeballing angles game. Fun! I was expecting to be rubbish but got 3.89 (the lower the better). And I was hopeless at the triangles. I'm much worse in real life, though.

OMFD CLOUDED LEOPARD KITTENS

Anyone living in Kent, I hate you so much right now. ;)

This! This is either the weirdest and more expensive prank ever, or… or… something. Whatever it is, it's brilliant.

Meet the new Lara Croft. Why do you admire Lara? "She's confident, she's independent"…ly wealthy. Ahem. You've got to admire this girl's dedication, though, when you hear about all the research she's doing.

Ditto here, sort of… MEP helps to get 20 cows pregnant

I sort of wish I could do this. Not with farming, perhaps, because I have insurmountable issues with animals raised for food, but with a lot of industries. It'd be fun! I want to do work experience in a vet's surgery again. That was cool, because I'm fine with blood, but not so good at helping to move large anaesthatised dogs. I saw lots of spayings and one neutering. (Which took about 30 seconds, no lie; it was slice, whip-snip, whip-snip, stitch. So much easier than a spay. It could be that that's one of the reasons I'd probably have a male dog by choice. I'm not sure I'd like to send a young lady to have a stitch put through her cervix.)

Army horsie.

Happy (and very cute) birdie. Follow the related link if you like OWLS.

Man 'too slow' for new guide dog. Sounds unfair, yes, but remember that he has to be able to look after the dog.

Olympic pandas draw crowds. This is unfair. They've been flown in to be gawped at by a bunch of sports fans.

More postmen attacked by dogs. I… I'm torner than a postman's trouser leg on this issue. On the one hand, bad dogs shouldn't bite people. On the other hand, postmen are asking for it by coming onto people's turf and rattling their letterboxes, grrrr!

Just kidding, you realise. Posties are all right.

This, ugh. [Nazi warning] I can just about charitably think of it as a joke in bad taste, but…

Charlieboy sticks his oar in on GM again. He just doesn't understand why we all can't just dine on organic salmon.

Roman temple found under church

Meanwhile, new celebrity graffiti found on pub wall.

Asylum seekers on hunger strike. Who'd want to be locked up and sent back to Iraq?

[Cruelty to animals RAGE warning] Nasty fate befalls kidnapped rabbit

Grandmother warns off armed thief. If you're ever faced with an armed robber, don't attempt to emulate this, please.

Beach lifeguards help shark count

Freemasons charged with hogging too much power!

Clumsy and poorly co-ordinated children could be at higher risk of obesity in later life, a study says.

…screw you. But the link with sport is obvious and plausible. I loathed PE with a vengeance simply because it was so humiliating to be so bad at it.

Traditional UK names 'dying out'. I apologise to my proud country for not choosing Gertrude or Herbert or Norah or Walter. (I like the name Walter. I may name something Walter. And Irene, although I prefer the French pronunciation Irène. (ih-wrenn))

Jack and Thomas are still going strong, and although Olive is dying out, there are plenty of Olivias. Also a lot of Graces and Rubies. *facepaw* chavs…

Shops get fruit and veg sale help

If you got through all that, or skimmed it, here's a quiz about wacky inventions. Wonderful stuff.

[edit: This was written yesterday and I forgot to publish it. Whee!]

Rent-a-dog! Fantasy Fuff: about as close to a real relationship as hiring a prostitute, imho. Inclined to agree with the RSPCA person.

Cloned sniffer dogs are after your Mary-Jane!

Arrest warrant issued for Darth Vader

Birdie

I was reading this (short) experimental report on chimpanzee grooming. It's from 1958 and laughably patronising, not to mention a bit unimaginative. (Didn't E. ever think of grooming Malcolm in return?)

Also, these things. PRATCHETT things. (David Tennant is involved, for all those who inexplicably find him attractive.)

And finally, a sad tale. Because it's official: I can't hear that damn Metallica song without my fingers twitching. (I'm not a guitarist or guitar-gamer, I point out; I would probably hurt myself if I attempted this track on Easy.¹)

Slen has five-starred almost everything in GHII and III's career modes on Expert (with only that Slayer auditory fart and Misirlou left to go, I think—not counting DragonForce because that is solid damn.) All this has had the effect of making me vaguely itchy to play an actual instrument.

Also, we only have a righty bass guitar, but I'm strongly lefty by instinct. Boo. >:( (cf achirality, which I have in heaps, but I'd really really rather not pluck with the hand whose fingers seize up. Oh well, sucks to be driving this body, I guess.)

¹ Well, my claim to the realm of not suck can be that I got 70% into TTFAF on my first attempt at the game, on Easy obviously. I attribute that to beginner's awesomium coupled with knowing the real song very well. I also epically failed Slow Ride mere minutes beforehand.

[also, edit: must stop air guitaring to Cliffs of Dover in lift.]

No scan results yet, and it's two weeks ago today. Tried the GP twice today, both times no reply. I don't know if they will have had copies of the results anyway, since it was the neuro consultant what sent me for them.

Wording-dinf¹ difficulties, typing deteriorating, confusion, attention span nonexistent, balance nonexistent whenever my eyes are closed, the odd slightly dizzy spell… and then sometimes I'm fine. Tremor was really bad last week/early this week, has been much better the last few days, but it's temporarily improved before so I'm not surprised.

¹word-finding. Genuine typo left in for the enlightenment and lulz. 'Normally' with this condition (whatever this condition is) I only make similar mistakes verbally; recently it's spread to my typing.

I've got next week booked off work, and hope I can limp on until then. It was to be dentist time, but that's now happening in early December instead. I've wisely kept the time booked for general crashing instead of cancelling the leave.

No word yet on any appointment with the neurologist to whom I've been referred, but I am told that I've been marked 'soon' (less frightening for the patient than 'urgent', I assume) and so will bypass any waiting list.

The more I think about it, the more I realise I haven't been right for a long time; not only the last couple of months, which is how long I've been getting rapidly worse. The more I think about it, the more I remember this pansy-ass tremor emerging even while I was at uni, and realise just how long my brain has really been fogged. Thus, I don't think about it.

More kicking-the-air-and-missing last night (i.e. wushu), and superceded all my previous frustration at my uselessness. I, Mir. Textbook Dyspraxic 1982–present, tend to feel it is most unfair when movesets, activities or life require the controlled movement of two limbs at the same time, never mind their intersection at some point. Let me tell you, I'm lucky if I can slap my foot on the upswing one time in ten, and that's without worrying about keeping straight instead of flailing wildly or about recovering from said manoevre without falling on my arse.

If you've never remoted into someone with dyspraxia, and I don't blame you, just think about how coordinated is the average small child who's just learning to walk, and imagine all the 'cute' 'bumbling' persisting until the kid is 25. More specifically, you can learn to do the aforementioned manoevre and if you really thrash at it it will sink gradually into muscle memory, but first it will take you half an hour of solid, frustrating practice to connect once. (It also helps that as soon as I peripherally spot someone glancing my way, or anyone says "That's good, Herms!", I can be relied upon to fuck up royally. Like black-clad clockwork.)

Thus and thereby, it is with great pride that I conclude that I am the student with the most potential for improvement they've ever seen. This is a fairly safe bet. And I'm told fairly regularly that my kicks, balance and coords are improving fast. At the very most pessimistic, this means I'm not so much of a pest that they don't want my money.

Two wushu lessons down, my hip really doesn't like me. Nor does my tremor. Let's not even ask my sense of balance. My worst enemy, however, is as ever my charming self, who really seems to delight in messing up the crappy easy movement I'd been practising all week as soon as something unexpected and disastrous happens, like someone else being in the room. Epic fail.

On the upside, my weight is fluctuating downwards again. I'm not doing anything different, I don't think. Maybe this amount of variance is normal.

Finally got blood tests done on Tuesday morning and, with any luck, will soon be told that something not-too-serious, easily-fixable and not-imaginary is wrong with me. Somethings suggested so far (not by medical personnel) include B12 deficiency.

The range of diseases that can cause tremors, muscle weakness and confusion includes some real nasties. If it was a choice between pansy bloodlessness on the one hand and something horrible and demyelinating or metastatising on the other, I know what I'd be hoping for. However, let's not panic just yet. Maybe it's only, er, an inner ear infection combined with spontaneous subcutaneous ice formation? Or better yet, psychosomatic and curable by teaching myself to think about butterflies or PHP.

Drupal user group meeting tonight. I'm going to ask them if what I want to do can be done with it.

From what I understand of the documentation, the most difficult thing may be that I want users with switchable sub-users [edit: expanded in next entry]

Also some features associated with collaborative authorship (such as co-written sections – ideally with the option to attribute per paragraph) and lots of other things I haven't thought of yet.

Current music: Angra, Wishing Well, in head. It's all Ayreonnish.

Despite my bitching last night, incidentally, I'm not seriously injured. Some raw and complaining skin down my side, but that'd semi-recovered already by this morning, so apparently I am just a wimp.

Good to know, I guess.

One-handed typing's both harder and easier than it sounds.

I seriously need sleep, I think.

Also. I've been hoarding a long drawn-out easy coding/donkeywork task and was expecting to spend most of the afternoon on it, but I finished it before lunch. *emotes 0.o frantically, though one of hir eyes is usually wider than the other anyway, so the effect is lost*

What on earth am I gonna do for the rest of the day? I should've dawdled! Now I'll have to try to make our prayer calculator accept arbitrary latitude and longitude! (Most interesting thing on my to-do list at first glance, anyway… since it'll require me to pick through Perl, about which I know approx. three jots of nothing.)

Offwhite City's dialect decided it wanted consonant harmonies. It decided this last night when I really just wanted to go to bed, not grab my notebook. I double-despair.

Now off to blenderise some powder. The stiffness and clunking in my right thumb is already improving since I started using my left instead, so looks like I was correct in my suspicion that it was the violently humming little stick blender causing it.

(One of the things about having insufficiently diverged manual laterality, not to mention low dexterity, is that you can retrain yourself to brush teeth/spread marmelade/etc to the same standard with your other hand within days. Writing's harder, but I go through the odd whimsy for practising that with my left too. In the event I lost my right, I'd be back to my current cramped and painful scrawling technique within weeks. Note, not an invitation.)

A personal remark is a personal remark to me. And I find them intrusive and offensive.

Just in case you ever want to comment that my ass looks smaller or my skin looks clearer or anything, no, I won't thank you. I will be annoyed. Sometimes upset. At a compliment. Yes. My physical aspect and behaviour are off limits. (It comes from living so long in a body and reflexes that are utterly alien to you.) Thus, unless I'm being deliberately rude, I don't comment on other people's bodies or behaviour either.

I interpret such things as judging me. Even though I'm very much an Iorich, being 'judged' is something that angers me. So yeah, finding out that someone's been talking smack about me makes me want to kill things, even though it was my little bro saying I've been much 'nicer' on this starvation diet (it's called ketone euphoria, you imbeciles, nothing to do with your hippie wheat allergy theories – and, incidentally, typical that other people get the benefit of this 'euphoria' and I'm still miserable).

*sigh* *headdesk* Bad mood…