All posts by Mush

About Mush

I want to be a veterinarian because I love children.

Wow. Trump is president elect. Just… wow.

Introspection

In which I’m disappointed but not surprised, considering how many said they’d be voting their ‘consciences’ in this election.

I have several hundred Facebook friends; they are disproportionately musicians and cult members, and a lot of them announced they’d vote third party.

I really, really wish they hadn’t.

capture

So, to those of you who voted for anti-vaxx Jill Stein: congratulations! You voted for Trump! Ditto Johnson and all other third party voters.

Now, it’s quite normal for the country to vote republican after having had a democrat in office for two terms; it was very, very likely the republican candidate would win. Which is why it was particularly important we voted for Clinton this time, even though she wasn’t an ideal candidate.

Buuuuut we didn’t. So the republican candidate won.

Sadly for us, this time the republican candidate happened to be a spoilt little rich boy who does things like build hotels that fail, and host pro wrestling events and reality TV shows. And now this man will have his tiny little finger on the button.

RIP health care, gay marriage, help to refugees.

What’s wrong with ‘Westworld.’

Uncategorized

In which I keep lecturing people about what’s wrong with this show and they don’t want to hear it, so I’m going to blog it for my own amusement!

I’ve heard it’s possible that HBO will lock in as many as five seasons of ‘Westworld,’ an episodic TV reboot of the 1973 movie of the same name.

Five seasons of this? It’s well-acted and well shot, but it’s rife with fail. In the opening credits you see the creation of biologically printed robots; in the show itself you see technicians pulling rubbery skin onto metal skeletons. Which is it? Are they biological or mechanical, or both?

And how does keeping humanoid robots so life-like they look exactly like humans naked help to dehumanize them to the staff, rather than merely degrade them like prisoners or slaves?

The plot itself is interesting… if you like sappy, emotional Westerns with no science fiction whatsoever, and only a mere nod to game-playing in the “hidden level” sub-plot followed by Ed Harris’ Man In Black character.

All these robots can pass the Turing test, but they’re fodder for human guests to fuck and fight and maim and rape and kill. They bleed. They appear to understand freedom enough to want it. The whole show is gratuitous violence and weepy scenes of robot subjugation. It fails spectacularly to do what sci-fi does best, which is ask important questions:

If you can build robots so subtle they can pass as human, are they human?

What is consciousness?

Where’s the line between a very convincing machine and a self-aware AI? How do you design a test to find it?

Is it moral to build a device, giving it the capacity to feel and understand pain, just so you can hurt it?

Is what they feel actually pain, when they’re just robots? Can they feel, as we define feeling, or is it all programming designed to mimic feeling? How can anybody tell the difference?

You want to fix democracy? Then why didn’t you third-partiers do it last year?

Soapbox

In which there’s another rant about politics.

Absolutely do not vote third party. It is TOO LATE to vote your so-called consciences.

You want to fix democracy? Then why didn’t you third-partiers do it last year? The year before? The five years before that, or the decades before that?

I’ll tell you why: because you did not give a fuck about politics then. Not enough to participate. But now, suddenly, you’re all, “Oh, I have such strong FEELINGS about how corrupt this all is, and I absolutely must be true to myself and vote my CONSCIENCE!”

Because you’re privileged as fuck. Privileged enough to feel entitled to WASTE A VOTE. A vote — a right so important that human beings have DIED TO GET IT FOR YOU.

You will fuck this election up. You will put a shallow, incompetent man into the Oval office, and you will do it because you do not understand that your rights come with responsibilities. Responsibilities you have failed to carry out. You’ve stood with a bucket of water in your hands watching the building burn down and said, “Not my building, not my fire.” But now, suddenly, you care? You care so much that you just have to cast a meaningful vote that represents who you are?

You are being idealistic, ignorant children. You lost your right to vote your feels each of the billion times you did not participate in your own government in the past decade. You are dabblers. You are passers-by. Yes, you have a constitutional right to bitch and moan while doing nothing, but you also have a duty to use your vote wisely. Yes, there is corruption, but your vote is still a vote. And nobody cares about who you are or how you really feel; you’re an adult with a vote. Use it to keep your country somewhat intact. It’s your duty.

If the orange man of reality TV and pro-wrestling fame should, God forbid, win this fucked up disaster of a presidential election, I will blast every one of you “vote third party!” nerds with the most enormous goddamned THIS IS ALL YOUR NAIVE, RIDICULOUS, IDEALISTIC, DUMB ASSED FAULT rant you have ever seen. It will make those times your mom was so mad she nearly de-manifested seem like a pastel Easter basket on a gentle Spring morn. If you decide to use your enormous privilege to FUCK THIS UP, I will be incandescent with actual, genuine — not fake-internet — rage.

DO NOT VOTE THIRD PARTY IN THIS MOTHERFUCKING PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION. Jesus Christ, can’t you people tell how desperately important this is? If you really wanted a viable third-party system, YOU WOULD HAVE BUILT ONE LONG BEFORE THIS HAPPENED. But you didn’t. Your lack of participation, along with my own, is WHY WE’RE HERE NOW.

So STFU and vote for the bitch, and once the huckster’s been safely gotten rid of, YOU MAY MOTIVATE YOURSELVES TO FIX THE SYSTEM THEN, and with my blessings. THEN, you may participate your asses off. THEN, you may feel all the feelings and vote all the consciences you want. Then, you may go to local, county, state, and federal events, you may write letters, you may vote however you wish, and you may participate to your hearts’ content.

But if you do it in THIS presidential election, you’re a naive, selfish, childish, wasteful, and privileged idiot.

Handmade, custom, artisanal, quilted place mats

Family, Food, Holiday, Life

In which there are a variety of reversible, seasonally appropriate motherfucking handmade placemats!!!

When your mom is psychic:

IMG_20160923_161114

You buy a table and you think, damn, some placemats sure would be great.

AND THEN YOUR MOM SENDS YOU A BOX OF THEM RIGHT OUT OF THE BLUE, AND THERE’S, LIKE, DIFFERENT ONES FOR MAJOR HOLIDAYS AND SEASONS AND STUFF, AND SHE MADE THEM HERSELF, AND NOW YOU’RE LIKE FUCK SEPTEMBER, IT NEEDS TO BE OCTOBER ALREADY SO I CAN USE THE HALLOWEEN ONES!

Place mats

They’re like little blankets for your table, really.

On the table earlier this afternoon

Life

In which there’s a snapshot.

Wednesday afternoon

A cardamom mocha latte, served pretentiously in a Ball jar with a copper-riveted saddle leather cozy.

A box of chakra stones I received in the mail today. I’ve decided to take up the study of chakras because I’ve always thought they were ridiculous, a mental state that conflicts with my personal experiences with Mother over the years.

A copy of Herodotus’ The Histories, which I bought and started years ago and rediscovered on the shelf the other day and decided to start reading again. It was printed in 1960. It’s 56 years old, this paperback, and rather delicate.

A plastic spiral notebook I got as a prize when I worked at The Home Depot. It contains lists of extensions, department numbers, SKUs, and ex-coworker’s phone numbers, as well as more recent notes I’ve started in anticipation of the traveler’s journal knock-off I bought myself for my birthday. My handwriting is so rusty it’s nearly illegible.

And it’d be awkward if I revealed that I’m a so-called heathen.

Admissions, Love, Spiritual

In which I feel both uplifted and awkward.

Once in awhile, I fall accidentally into a religious conversation with a devout Christian about the experience of the practice of religion. And she says stuff, and I say stuff, and she’s pleased with my insight and depth of understanding, and we’re really grooving and having a meaningful chat about life and love and suffering and learning and keeping covenant and watching the mind and all that grooviness, and then suddenly I realize I’m fucking trapped.

Because by understanding her subtlest spiritual work, I’ve more or less “led” her to believe I’m also a Christian, which I’m really, really not, and it’d be awkward if I revealed that I’m a so-called heathen, and I end up feeling kinda bad about it, and then I start fearing I’ll be asked when I was saved or born again or baptized or whatever, because I won’t know what to say without ruining the fine fellow-feeling that I feel and know is well and truly earned.

I enjoy talking to devotees of any stripe, but Christians can get upset to learn that their little two-thousand year old, truncated, gutted religion’s precepts are not exactly philosophically hard to get one’s brain around, or that the work they’re doing — everything from forbearance to surrender to love in action to devotion to all the rest of it — is known to earnest followers of every religion ever, even the religions they hate or believe to be false, and that the only things unique to Christianity are irrelevant not only to all non-Christians but to the actual practices of religion itself (because most stuff unique to Christianity is actually politics, not spirituality, and everybody knows it. Same for the other Abrahamic branches, and a variety of other traditions, as well).

What’s most interesting, really, is how a philosophy as broken as modern western Christianity still has such passionate, fervent followers with so much bhakti (loving devotion toward God) and intimacy with their guru, whom they call Lamb of God, without irony, realizing not at all that God takes birth repeatedly because He’s fucking INFINITE and unbounded and can do literally everything, and does. (That in and of itself essentially proves the fundamentals of Vedanta, really, but you can’t say that because it would be more unkind than useful.)

I mean, really. The very idea that God mandated only one opportunity is contrary to the concept of a loving God entirely. You can’t have it both ways: either your God is loving and absolute, or He’s a jerk who wants to damn entire swathes of His own creation.

I got into a big ol’ conversation with a customer at work tonight after I fixed her system and alleviated her worries about how it was functioning. I learned about some big parts of her life, of what she’s going through now, from marriage problems to serious health issues, and we had some really deep conversation about right action, ego, spiritual work, fear, and love. I felt really grateful for the connection with a total stranger, and she averred she did, too, but at the end of conversation I knew she was just this close to asking me when I found Jesus, which, in the sense she means, as far as I understand “finding Jesus,” I haven’t.

Well, actually, I have, but not in a way that I could articulate without using language not typical to Christianity. Have I had an experience of Christ? Sure, yes, but I consider Jesus to be but one flower on an entire tree of enlightened avatars of God, born of Self-effort to reach us all, where and when and as we are, for the purpose of revealing, through their lives’ example, our own indwelling nature as That. Persons who have never been exposed to knowledge of Christ — for instance, every human life that occurred before His own, and millions since — are not doomed to “hell,” a metaphorical, and not literal, place. To think they are is to limit the limitless, to project upon God the flaws of our own self-made minds, and to reduce the infinite into our finite.

I’ve spoken intimately with several Christian women over the years, and their astonishment at my grasp of subtle concepts is very near universal. It blows their minds that a religion with thousands of icons knows things they thought were Christian Mysterees, because their religion teaches them that all other religions are fundamentally wrong.

I’m pretty sure that any religion that calls itself the only path is deeply suspect, because it’s obviously ridiculous to posit an infinite, all-knowing God The Creator And Source Of All, and then say there’s only one way to get to Him because he wasn’t clever enough to allow for the foibles of all the souls in his His beloved creation.

Some day I need to figure out how to indicate, without sounding like a pompous jerk, that I’m not Christian but do know (though I’m not a proper scholar by any stretch), a bit about the fundamentals of religious philosophies. Hmm.

Domesticating and such

Admissions, Domestic Goddess, Holiday, Wishlists

In which I buy stuff I don’t really need like an asshole, but at least it’s all used so I can say I’m “upcycling”!

Bought a table today! A used table! A TABLE YOU CAN EAT AT!

It’s a brown pub-style table and chairs set, and it’s taller than strictly necessary but I think it’ll be comfortable for the man, who is tall. The chairs are not-awful considering how austere they look, and not so high I can’t easily reach a sewing machine pedal.

I’m already imagining our having our next bi-annual games night while sitting at it, and it’s still 3 blocks away! (We’re going to bring it home when the man gets home from work.) Trivial Pursuit! Yahtzee! Cards! Dice! At a pub table! Brilliant!

New pub table + 4 chairs

I have also, I might add, in the past two months, bought: dishes, water glasses, a gravy boat, and candlestick holders, mainly in anticipation of setting a semi-proper Thanksgiving table this year. It’ll only be the two of us again, of course, but I’m so tired of eating on the couch hunched over the coffee table on holidays. It’ll be so great to sit down to a proper meal together on occasion!

You don’t think of yourself as “a table person” until you go over two years without one. I haven’t owned one for a really long time, but I lived with one until moving here. You just don’t really notice the stuff a table’s good for until there’s no table. Games night. Sewing. Filling out Christmas cards. Dinner dates. Wrapping gifts. Opening boxes from Amazon. Putting down the groceries.

I was, briefly, considering buying TV trays, but then I was just, like, OMFG, NERD, GET RID OF THE RECLINER WE LITERALLY NEVER, EVER SIT ON, AND THEN THERE WILL BE ROOM FOR A SMALL TABLE! So I took pictures of it — the recliner, I mean — and put it on Craigslist and it was not only gone in a week, but we got $25 more than we asked for!

Now that I have a table, I might buy fabric and make a runner, or placemats, or a tablecloth or something! Or, OMG, I could do seasonally appropriate centerpieces. It’s already September, I need a bowl and some pine cones and mini-pumpkins, stat! (While that is a joke, it’s also not. I’m totally gonna centerpiece it up for turkey day: I don’t even care that it’s common and privileged and totally something white bitches my age obsess over. Whoo! I even have a tray that’ll work for Xmas, maybe with candles and ornaments…)

Oh, who am I kidding. It’ll be covered in random shit within two weeks, and nobody’ll ever see any decorative centerpieces, and I’ll have to clean it off in order to eat at it, but at least I don’t have to eat on the couch anymore! Whoo! I’m gonna post the best Thanksgiving pictures this year!

Vintage Corning Ware pans are amazeballs and you should get some.

Domestic Goddess, Food

In which I wax enthusiastic about a very old product!

Even with shipping, I got a frying pan, a sauce pan, and two lids for $25. Which is a really decent price, considering you could easily pay almost that for a lidded 6″ non-stick that you’d have to throw out and replace in two years.

Well, I just bought these

Behold the P-81-B, which is the 1-pint covered sauce pan on the left, and the P-83-B, the 6-1/2 inch covered skillet you see on the right! The “P” series ran from 1958 to 1972, so these pans are 44 years old at the very youngest, and they could easily be older than I am by a decade.

These things are awesome! They heat up just as fast as cheap non-stick pans, and while they’re not non-stick per se, you can fry eggs and hamburgers in them with a little bit of butter and nothing sticks!

They’re also a pure and angelic white, so they look antiseptic as fuck. They scrub clean with remarkable ease.

Making dinner

They’re small and they have lids. I find that I’m cooking in them over much lower flame than I would with bigger pans, and of course lids keep the heat in too. Today I’ve fried a couple of eggs and a hamburger over very low flame in not much time at all. So they’re unexpectedly fuel-economical. Who knew!

And while you can’t buy either of these particular pieces new anymore, Corning Ware still offers some of the casseroles in this pattern. (I totally want them, and no doubt they’re worth every penny of the retail price, but if I do buy them I’ll probably buy them used because I’m cheap. You can almost see why so many companies went for planned obsolescence rather than quality when you contemplate that Corning Ware’s 50-year-old pieces are viably competing with their brand-new products.)

I love their sizes; great for cooking for one or two. (Not to mention great for not cooking far too much food every time you step up to the stove.) I’m not really sure why pan sizes have grown and grown when family sizes are smaller; I do know that when I was learning to cook I always made far too much food because the pots and pans were so big.

Knowing that the sauce pan holds exactly enough soup for two small bowlsful makes me happy.

I’m pretty sure there are a couple of these in my g’ma’s kitchen, but I didn’t cook with them much (beyond occasionally using one to put something in the toaster oven). I always used the small non-stick to fry or scramble eggs rather than the Corning Ware frying pan; habit, I suppose. Plus they look like they should stick, after years of using Teflon-coated pans, but they don’t.

I think between these and a decent cast iron pan or two, a person could easily give up cheap, disposable non-stick pans entirely! (I can’t speak for high-dollar non-stick cookware, because I’ve never had any.)

I love these pans!

Domestic Achievements

Domestic Goddess

In which I got a shit-ton of stuff done today.

Here’s the very exciting list:

tidied up generally
scrubbed the stove top
made awesome coffee in the Pyrex percolator
took pictures of the brown recliner
put all the throw rugs in the hall
swept the living room and bath
mopped the kitchen until the mop fell apart
put all the kitchen and bath linens into the wash
took all the rugs outside and shook the hell out of them
spot-scrubbed the living room and entryway floors with the mophead
listed the brown recliner on Craigslist
put the laundry in the dryer
made a pile of his stuff and asked him to deal with it
dusted and washed the coffee tables
washed the garbage pail lid
made the bed
put the rugs back down
folded the laundry and brought it back up
took pictures of the extra office chair to sell it
got permission to sell the PS3

Yay! Accomplishments!

Link roundup

Nerd, Soapbox, Social, Web

In which it’s so political out there that it’s just better if I bitch here, where nobody but, like, five people and a couple of bots will ever see it.

This article just showed up in my timeline. Being a woman, I clicked on it.

https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/the-reality-that-all-women-experience-that-men-dont-know-about-kelly-jrmk/

Oh. My. Fucking. GOD. Don’t click through. It’s awful. Let me summarize it for you:

“Men have libidos and they look at us, beginning as soon as we go through puberty. We’re totally TRAUMATIZED by this and expect to be protected from ever being looked at or desired, ever. Because we’re inherently weak victims by nature.”

I am so sick of this idiot “narrative” that can’t tell the goddamned difference between evil (murderers) and horniness (young males), between actual danger (ISIL) and vague interest (a guy who looks at you), and which remains so completely convinced of its intrinsic worth and right to a voice that its adherents complaint-blog about men everywhere, constantly, all the time.

Sometimes it’s not even about “sexual harassment” (aka being human in public); they’ll blog about males simply being nice to them, because their victim-as-identity mentality is so deeply embedded in their psyches that they can’t tell the difference between a male with bad manners and a male that is trying to be helpful. Literally.

Any time a male interacts with them and doesn’t cower and grovel and spew “feminist” platitudes, it’s “harassment.” And if a man tries to help them, they’re instantly pissed off and insulted because they don’t need help from men and are perfectly capable, and being offered assistance is an insult!

Ladies: you’re not “feminists.” Feminism died before most of you were born. Actual feminists fought for equality and had legitimate academic clout. “Feminism” has degraded into a male-hating pogrom and it’s ugly, unbalanced, ignorant, privileged, immature, selfish, sexist, and wrong.

I loathe this article. It’s simple, petulant, and privileged, and sounds like it was written by an indoctrinated twelve-year-old still struggling with puberty and the measurable, demonstrable fact that boys and girls are different.

If I were more attached to my sex than my humanity, I’d be embarrassed by it, and go on apologetically about how most women aren’t nearly half as stupid, self-obsessed, and immature as the author appears to be, and I’d say that most of us are quite capable of rational thought and can tell the difference between being looked at and the legal definition of harassment.

Except judging by the massive volume of complaint-blogs about males and re-posts by women, apparently it’s not true.

This kind of thing isn’t groundbreaking, it isn’t useful, and it isn’t feminism. It’s privileged whining as a wrapper around full-on hatred of the masculine. It’s sexism.

I can’t believe how many otherwise intelligent women are applauding this article. Wives of husbands, mothers of sons! And if they’re instilling this kind loathing into their boys, well, it’s no wonder they’re all transgender. (Three of the women who reposted the link are mothers of boys who want to be girls.)

+~+~+~
This was posted, in earnest I believe, on Facebook yesterday:

http://mysteriousearth.net/2016/07/17/smithsonian-admits-to-destruction-of-thousands-of-giant-human-skeletons-in-early-1900%E2%80%B2s/

Really? Are you not even gonna use any part of that university education you paid tens of thousands of dollars for? I won’t even bother to say that both Nat Geo and Snopes say “hoax,” because it’s obvious.

Filed under chemtrails. Ye gods, people.

+~+~+~
http://www.salon.com/2016/03/03/my_gen_x_hillary_problem_i_know_why_we_dont_like_clinton/

A more mature rant, but still about the same shit: ZOMG SEXISM IS EVERYWHERE, ENTRENCHED AND RAMPANT!

Please. You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. Women abandoned tech because they didn’t want to be there. I personally spent my career — what there was of it — in tech. Women don’t like tech for two reasons: they don’t like being on call all night because they have families to deal with, and nerds expect them to be competent. The ones who aren’t competent find that using feminine wiles on (most) nerds is an epic fail, because (most) nerds either don’t notice or don’t care but they definitely know you have no idea how to configure a border router or do subnetting in your head.

Being annoyed once in awhile by an idiot who happens to be male and says dumb shit does not equal rampant, entrenched sexism. The rest of your male employees and clients were capable of behaving normally, but the occasional reject proves “sexism” to you? Really?

Sexism is “prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination on the basis of sex.” It’s when someone says, “I do not believe you are capable of doing this because of your chromosomes.” Not getting a job in the engineering department because you don’t know how to subnet is not sexism.

40

‘And then I turned 40 in the office,’ and confused sexism with ageism. Any idea how many males get let go because they’re “old”? Our culture is obsessed with youth.

And let us not forget that our culture undervalues motherhood as a whole and half of “our culture” is voting women who haven’t bothered to do shit about it. If you chose housewifery over a job that undervalued home and family and valued only itself, that was capitalism, not sexism.

It’s not men who say that making money at work is so important that it must take precedence over caregiving, it’s all of us. If women wanted it fixed, they’d get it fixed. Our society in general feels, if pay rates are anything to go by, that being the CEO of a successful corporation is valuable, being a doctor is less valuable, being a teacher is even less valuable, and being a mother is worth nothing at all.

Don’t like it? FIX IT, LADIES. YOU HAVE THE VOTE.