The state of my credit, the rest of the month, the still uncertain future

Table of contents:

• State of my Credit
• The rest of the month
• The still uncertain future

* * *

So, as I think I covered, I need like three thousand dollars.  "Like", there, is not used as a flavoring particle in spite of the vast majority of its possible usages being such.  ("Like" is to flavoring particles as "fuck" is to almost all other parts of speech.  Compare to "Lord" in certain Christian denominations.)  Instead it's being used in the dictionary-approved meaning of "similar to".

It could be replaced by "around-about" which is not to be confused with "roundabout" which refers to traffic patterns and rides at fairs, both in "Chiefly British" ways.

Technically I need [rather less] + [unknown quantity for washing machine repairs] + [oil when it runs out if I haven't built up savings by then], so more like $2,200 + ??? + ???.  I think.  I'd need to double check some things and I have some promotional no interest shit that expires at the end of the year giving me two months to pay it off.  So, yay on that.

I really need to get on the washing machine repairs thing but it's just so much easier to spiral into self doubt and hopelessness because the thing is, it won't take too many attempts at repairs before it turns out that I would have been better off to simply buy a new fucking washing machine.

So, what does this have to do with credit?  Well I was looking at my credit which, as you might imagine, is kind of shit.  Things that can't be deferred by leaning on leeway given by family members or accepting late fees because the fees add up to less than the interest on my other debt, end up being paid by credit.

My credit is somewhat ... complex.  Parts of it are stretched to the breaking point, but other parts are actually really good.  Trouble is, the good bits tend to be the smaller bits because the reason they got that way was allocating scarce resources to paying off what could be paid off because getting one less payment a month actually makes a huge difference in keeping afloat.  (I'm in a state where monthly payments matter more than interest rates because interest rates imply you have a middle to long term future.)

My credit score, however, is not complex.  It sucks.

In fact the free (as in actually free, not the front company for Equifax thing that says it's free because false advertising is ok if you add an asterisk) place I go to to check on my credit score has finally thrown up its hands and given up on me.

Normally it has recommendations for what you can do (consolidate your debt on this card for lower interest rate, get this card and make balance transfers to it, get this and you'll end up with rewards which will still leave you in a shitty state but it will be a shitty state with rewards) and as near as I can tell those recommendations are a big part of how it makes its money.

Sort of like how before Amazon.com dumped me I could make an affiliate link, and if you clicked the link and made a purchase I'd get a cut of the purchase price, I think that if you sign up for something from a link originating at their website they get a pay out for getting you to sign up.

So they want to recommend things to me.  Ideally they'd like to recommend things to me that involve me getting a new credit card because when they recommend, "Consolidate your debt under this thing you already have," that doesn't earn them shit.

But it's reached the point where things are such shit that they've given up.  Don't get me wrong, they're still trying to get money off me by showing offers that they don't actually recommend but would, presumably, make money off of if I took them, along with what they think are my odds of getting approved, but the general take away is that their response to, "How could I improve things?" is, "You're fucked."

So that's always fun.

They did, however, note that if I were to pay off $2,805 of my debt that would probably improve things.

If I had that much money, $2,200ish would go to debt that's not on my credit report.  My late tuition payment and what I owe on the house to the home owner who, being a relative, has yet to kick me out for being so far behind (but she is under increasing stress and it may well come to kicking me out, upside on that is that if she does kick me out I very much doubt she'd also hold the past due debt against me.)

Of the $605 that remained ... I actually had to stop, look things over, and reevaluate.

Here's the problem with washing machine repair.  For one thing I need it.  I need to be able to wash clothes.  How I've been getting by is not sustainable.  This most recent time I think it might have broken down and one thing might have developed mold.  Additional observation is needed to determine if that really happened.  Preferably undertaken at a distance in a place removed from the rest of my clothes, my house, and my life.

For the second thing, it has no clear end.

If I go maximum salvage minimum replacement. . . we'll I've already done that, it didn't work.  Next step up is something I haven't really considered before but while writing this post I decided to do a very extreme reworking of assumptions and try to figure out the minimum replacement that could conceivably make a difference and thus came to like 30 dollars, so I'm doing that today.

If that doesn't work then it's probably because I salvaged too much and replaced not enough.  Now I'm more like 300, if that doesn't work then it means I was focusing on the wrong area and the fix is actually pretty simple.  It just costs 450.

I could get a newer, better, working, warranty-having washing machine for that much ($780, recall.)  But by the time I knew that I'd already have spent $330 and wouldn't be able to magically get it back.  It's been very easy to go into doubt spirals over that especially because I've been treating $330 as the first step.

So, basically, I got a message regarding my credit score saying, "You're fucked to the point we can't even find something to recommend that might help you, but if you had nearly three thousand dollars to pay down debt..." and then responded with, "If I had three thousand dollars that money would already be spoken for."

That's the state of my credit.

* * *

November is National Novel Writing Month, which is called NaNoWriMo which is a name I can't take seriously.  Then again, I say "blog" now even though if one wants to knock two letters off of one of the ends of "weblog" in any decent world any non-assholic person would come up with "webl" (pronounced "weble") so maybe someday my standards will sink to the point that writing NaNoWriMo will not, in fact, make me feel like I'm contributing to the downfall of western civilization or, at least, won't make me care that I'm contributing to said downfall.

Will I be writing a novel this November?  Uh ... have you been reading hypothetical question maker in my head?

Of course I won't.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Also, November is already one third over.

But as I think about the possibility of imminent collapse of everything and the possibly of Stealing Commas dying, I don't want it to end with an extremely rushed incomplete fic written for a contest I was mostly without a computer for and sick for much of the rest.

November is a Friday the 13th month this year.

I'm thinking that maybe I will stick with Life After, for a bit.  I want to revise what there is without the rush and since it's a story with a beginning middle and end all planned out, and was indeed planned to be written in one month, maybe in this time of hopelessness it would be a good thing to work on and finish.

I can write it up to be what it was supposed to be.  Something without the rush, something with pseudo-witty back and forth, forces of death and decay but also rebirth and regrowth, mucking with timelines, and the drive toward hope while the world is ending.

Maybe.

It's an aspiration at least.

So we'll see what happens in the remaining two thirds of November, but I might be sticking with Life After after all.  Not in the single-minded way I was when I was trying to get it done by the end of October, though.  Just more than I normally would focus on a single story.

For example, I was reminded recently of how I wanted to do a series of three posts on how I would do the original trilogy of Star Wars, but only ever did the post covering the first movie.

Part of that was that I think The Empire Strikes Back is the best of the movies so I'm not altogether eager to watch it with an eye towards, "This was fucked up and stilly/stupid, let's change it" part of that was that Star Wars* was a simple story simply told and Empire is a good deal more complex and thus needs even more in the way of consideration and changes.  Also, some of those changes I'm not even sure how best to do**.  And the biggest part of it is that I put it off for a while and then forgot about it.

So maybe I'll do the installments for Empire and Jedi in November.

Returning to decons when I don't know if the ... webl has a future is probably not the most sound idea, but it's not lost on me that I left off the Kim Possible one halfway through an episode, so I might as well get the second half of that episode done.  Also, restarting that, or either of the others, could be a way of embracing hope.  These are things that will take years, so working on them is a way of saying, somehow I'll make it through and there will be years more of Stealing Commas to come.

* * *

There's a fair amount of future of Stealing Commas discussion in the previous section because it's talking about the rest of the month which is, in fact, in the future.  But for a more general future thing, I present this section.

It's hard to explain the stress I'm under now.  When my boiler broke, which I've apparently finally gotten into the habit of calling a boiler instead of a furnace, I was despondent.  (Exhibit A, Exhibit B.  For reference, the end of that despondency.)  I am not despondent now.

It's instead a lower level constant stress.  So many times I've thought something catastrophic would end the blog.  [skip trip down memory lane] Then, suddenly, my miracles, you the readers, came through.  There's recently been the whole thing with my primary computer, you know how I got that?

The old old primary computer wasn't under any kind of warranty and was held together by work I did on it with a drill press, 4-40 machine screws, matching nuts, and a hacksaw.  (The screws are never just the right length, so you need to cut them off to limit, though never prevent for that is impossible, getting caught on shit.)

With no money for computer I was kind of doomed, then I got enough to not just buy a new computer but to buy the computer I wanted.  Old computer.  When that broke warranty got me new computer, when that broke warranty got me new new computer, when that didn't work as advertised I got new new new computer that I'm using right now.

So Stealing Commas was saved by a donation to get a new computer.  Then (or maybe before, me getting things in order isn't always the best) there was heating.  Thought it was all over.  Got money for oil.  Things like that happened.  When the boiler broke I was flat out convinced that there was no hope, $6,000 was so far beyond any of my problems previously and I needed it pretty much immediately because it was the dead of winter and without heat I'd have to abandon the house fast.  The very next day the problem was solved.  In fact, I had to turn down money because three people offered me the $6,000 dollars I needed.  Three.  Ok, one was more like five point something thousand dollars, but you get the idea.

All of those things were "Oh my fucking god, the sky is falling right fucking now," and that offers a level of stress I am not under at the moment.

This is different.

With the exception of less than two days between when asshole behind the desk at tech support said that my warranty wouldn't help and so I'd be without a primary computer for the foreseeable future and when non-asshole on the phone told the truth there's been no high stress "The world is collapsing around me," despondency or anything like that.

Instead, well ... On my birthday, August third, my back was fucked over and I had to spend a lot of time horizontal in the following month or so as a result.  By the time that was over I was behind on a quarterly payment on the house (they run about $650) a dentist bill (I'd have to look it up; I'm not going to) and tuition (about $1,080 when you account for the very important health fee.)

The dentist bill is the only one of those that I've paid in full.  Tuition hasn't been paid at all.  Next quarterly house payment is coming up sometime in the next two days (I'll need to check exact date.)

August, September, October, and now the first third of November have been spent with me stressed, and it might be worse than that.  I can't remember my mental state in July and I'm not going to try to look it up.

Which is to say, again, this is different.  Lower stress level, but long fucking term.  It's definitely taking a toll on my ability to write, but it's also really grinding down hope.  And that's why the future is still uncertain.

If I couldn't get together the money to pay off the house expense last quarter, and indeed still owe a fair bit of it, what the fuck is the chance I can do it this quarter?  Especially when I'm starting off by being behind.  What becomes of all this when I run out of oil?  (Good news is that the current furnace seems to be less oil gobbling than the old one, that or the gauge on the tank is broken.)

Of course part of this is of my own doing.  A big part of this.

A post in late July mentioned that a big part of the reason I was so low on both actual money and credit was that I'd bought shit in hopes of being able to sell shit and hadn't had a chance to do the selling.  Now here we are three and two thirds months later and I still haven't; not because of time but because first I was screwed over by back problems and since then I've been under stress which I don't operate well under.

I need to do stuff.  I need to create jigs (not dances; devices for holding something in place in the right way for tools to do their things in the correct way), I need to list things online (remember how fast The Princess Who Saved Herself almost-sold-out, that worked out nicely once I'd set up a listing), I generally need to do work.

All of which means that the things that will help me pay down my debt, get back my credit, and have some cash on hand will take some fucking time.  It's not an immediate solution to the problem of ~$2,200 for house and school.

And that hopelessness makes me think, if I couldn't raise the money to do the last shit (I got some, but simple math says $1,550 was not gotten) given the last three months to try to do it in, what are the odds I'll do that plus the $650 (hence $2,200) this go round?

Of course it's not quite that bad because some money that was raised ended up going to other things.  The tuition may leave me under constant stress, but it gets one late fee and doesn't accrue interest.  I could have paid off the full quarterly expense on the house last quarter and didn't because some of the credit card debt was more scary to me at the time (if I run out of credit then I'll be truly screwed, be I housed or homeless.)  But even though I know that, right or wrong, I did decide to allocate money to other things and so it's not like money towards paying off the house and paying for the dentist is everything, I still feel the stress.

And that's where things stand.

My landlord is my mom.  She's retired and doesn't have enough money to keep on letting me be delinquent on the house's expenses and she does have a boyfriend who keeps on encouraging her to just sell the damn thing (right out from under me.)  As recently as yesterday I was making triage decisions on what to pay that today are making me worry about soon being kicked out of my house.

They made sense at the time and, if things were the same, I'd probably do them again.  Things aren't the same.  (As is obvious because I made those payments.)  House bills are up front now.  Any money goes toward making sure I still have a place to live.  My paltry income goes largely toward utilities and minimum payments on debts, so month to month expenses are not what bother me right now.  I need to make the quarterly payment (and the rest of last quarter's) and I don't think I can.

If I'm right about that then there's a good chance I do end up losing my house.  My mother knows that my sister and my father would both take me in, so she knows that if she finally declares that she can't afford to keep paying the expenses I'm supposed to be paying (I'm actually supposed to be giving her money in addition to expenses in a cost-plus kind of way; that's not happening) it won't be the same as ejecting me into the cold.

What she doesn't seem to know is how toxic living with either of those two would be for me.

And so that looms.  That's my future.  That's the future of Stealing Commas.

With all of this shit, my brain is not free.  If things go badly I'll be even worse off.  Do I think it will all come down in mid-November if I can't get up to date on the house expenses?  No.  But if I can't get this under control by the end of November, I think that means my future in my house may well be doomed in the longer term future.

That's what hangs over me.  Hardly the sword of Damocles, but enough to leave me in a constant state of, "This could all be coming to an end."

And that state makes it hard to write, makes it hard to think, makes it hard to accomplish.

Which is why the future is uncertain.

-

[added:] completely forgot, Stealing Commas theme song:

[/added]

-

* The name "A New Hope" was added for the VHS release.  Do I still sometimes use VHS?  Yup.  (I've got a reel-to-reel player downstairs; old stuff can be cool.) Do I revere VHS enough to consider the name edited into the VHS release more important than what appeared on fucking theater screens before I was even born and set off a cultural phenomenon that has yet to end?  No way.  First movie was called "Star Wars".  So it was, so it will ever be.  Han shot first, Amen.

** E.g. it needs to be established that Leia likes to flirt the way she and Han interact because without that being established almost every interaction between the two is creepy and wrong, but with it being established (and it's totally legitimate for people to like to flirt that way) most of their interactions can be kept entirely the same and have them be just fine.

The uncertain future of Stealing Commas

On Wednesdy afternoon I was counting days.  I realized next week was Friday the 13th and maybe I could try to finish, or at least reach some milestone in, Life After by then.  So somewhat positive hopeful thinking.

This morning I was willing to accept that everything was over, I'd shutter Stealing Commas, drop out of school, accept that I'm never going to get the money that I need to stay in my home, see whether I I was forced out by running out of heating oil, or finally being so delinquent on payments that my mom took off her mom-hat and putting on her unpaid-landlord-hat first, and hope that I could find some meaning and success the new life as a homeless person that has proven so elusive in my life as a poor blogger who is trying to hold on to the middle class life that she started out in.

(One can maintain a middle class life while poor, it's getting one in the first place that's generally impossible.)

Now I'm not feeling quite as down about everything, but I'm still pretty much fucked.

That doesn't make for productive writing.  And while some readers have kept on coming back (thank you so much, there are not words for how much it means to be), I can see the stats for the blog.  I've been losing readers.  I can also count the comments on posts, but that leaves out the lurkers which is suboptimal.

This post isn't going to change anything.  If people had money that they could donate they have done it the last twenty times I talked about how bad things are getting.  So I'm not asking for money.

Things fall apart, the miracle is that they've held together this long.

This is just a heads up.  This morning I was ready to close the blog and give up.  It could happen again.  It almost certainly will happen again.  What's less clear is if I'll be able to stop back from it next time, and the time after, and the time after that.

I don't know.

Hypothetical Star Trek, because Lonespark insists I have something less distressing as the latest post

On the up side it was about half an hour after that last post that I saw my therapist, on the downside while my mood might be more positive most everything said about non-mood related stuff is still true.

But to get that off your mind off you should give me a billion dollars  I'm going to fill in all the gaps in Edith and Ben right here right now  we're going to have more in depth discussion of Squirrel Simulator  I'm going to collect things I said in the comments of Fred Clark's post about what should be in the new Star Trek series.

* * *

Chris Pine as Captian Kirk was a horrible Kirk and a horrible Enterprise captain. Chris Pine as Jack Frost (Rise of the Guardians) would have been great. Whoever is directing needs to know the difference and be able to pick the right one. (If you can't sell "Second star to the right, and straight on till morning" do not apply.)

There needs to be gender representation, and I don't just mean male and female. Given the shit they can do with Star Trek medical technology we should have characters who, as a result of choice rather than their species' unique handwavium, can be male in the morning and female in the afternoon. There should be characters who are completely androgynous and that's never commented on because it's ok. And that's just the humans.

On the subject of medical technology, I don't remember whether Geordi being given sight (not ordinary human sight, but sight via the visor) was a choice that he made or one that was made for him at a young age. The thing is, even with the amazing med tech some people would decide to remain as they are. (For a diverse variety of reasons.)

I'm now imagining a character in a manually propelled wheelchair and this happening:

"Why don't you use a hoverchair?"

"Why don't you use one? You don't have to walk you know."

Aliens need to be more than just token characters.

Star Trek was built on the idea that we as a people could get to a better utopian place but that place would still be full of people. Problems weren't systemic but instead stemmed from individuals.  Individuals with enough power or at the precisely the wrong intersection of influence could cause horrible, horrible things, but together we could be better than any of us flawed human beings are individually and thus society could move passed the moral afflictions inherent in ourselves.

And such.  And stuff.  And warp drive and humanoid aliens and planets that have united into a single culture.

But back to the idea that even though people remain people it's possible for those people to live in a much better world with a much better society than we now have.

Section 31 was introduced basically to undermine that, say the system was rotten to the core, has been since the beginning, and argues that without that rot the apparent good on surface would be impossible, so, basically, "Torture the kid!  Have you seen how cool Omales is?"

Section 31 went against everything that made Star Trek Star Trek*, that shit needs to be taken down hard. I don't care if they have to introduce dimension hopping Julian Bashir to do it, it needs to be taken down. Actually, Alexander Siddig is awesome, so maybe they should introduce dimension hopping Julian Bashir.

When Data met Spock there was an interesting exchange.  Spock, trying to embrace pure logic even though his half human nature made it more difficult for him than most Vulcan, was trying to be what Data started out as while abandoning what Data strove for.  Data, naturally, was trying to abandon what Spock strove for, while striving to be what Spock abandoned.  Having completely different goals, views, and philosophies did not lead to judgement, condemnation, or animosity.  There needs to be more of that. "We completely disagree, that's nice, let's keep working together.

When they timetravel, which they will (they always do), there needs to be an understanding that the people in the new timeline have every bit as much of a right to exist as the people in the original timeline and thus "fixing the timeline" is only half of what they'd be doing with the other half being "in a way that doesn't erase the new timeline" and they'd have to face that every time.

Maybe sometimes it would be as simple as duplicating a planet, maybe sometimes it would mean creating an entirely new universe, but the one consistent thing about Star Trek time travel --seriously the only thing that's consistent across the various versions-- is that changing the past doesn't branch off a new timeline, it overwrites the existing one.

There was a good recognition of this, finally, in Stargate: Continuum when people in the new timeline looked on the characters from the original timeline with horror for even floating the idea of resetting things and thus destroying the entire world these people knew.  (The moral conundrum was solved when the entire planet was wiped out in the new timeline, though one imagines that people on other planets might have had objections to being erased when the timeline was reset.)

Given how much Star Trek dabbles in time travel it's well passed time that they start dealing with the fact that, "I want my world back," does not excuse "So I'm going to erase this entire world and all the people in it from existence."

Accountability and continuity.  When the captain does something that's morally reprehensible, the captain is demoted and, hopefully, thrown in the brig.  (So maybe don't have the captain be the one to do morally reprehensible things, just a thought)

Continuity in that the reset button isn't pushed every episode.

Because you know what would have been an awesome Star Trek show?  Voyager with no reset button (except for that one time when there was a time weapon that was a damned temporal reset button and the entire coalition against it made sure that they'd be able to be reset in hopes that maybe, just maybe, they'd create a better world through their sacrifice when they ... reset the reset button itself.)

Consider the episode "Deadlock". Spacial anomaly of the week creates two versions of Voyager and her crew but because antimatter is technobable each ship is operating at half power since they're drawing on the same, original, supply. Attempts are made to merge the ships, they fail. Eventually one ship blows up but not before sending the only two unique people (their copies died) to the other ship. Thus everything is exactly as it was.

Now imagine that they'd evacuated some or all of the blown up ship.

For simplicity say they saved everyone.  Only one adult doesn't have to deal with suddenly having someone who has an equal claim to their life, their friends, their memories, their identity, and their stuff.  The other unique was a new born baby, there are two people with claim to be her mother.

It should be simpler than Battlestar Galactica which had to fill up entire ships worth of people with just seven actors worth of characters, but it would still be a difficult, or at least annoying, thing, but think about what it means going forward.

Are unique people more important than ones with spares?  Voyager wasn't designed to hold a double crew.  At least the Maquis ship was relatively small.  The next several episodes would probably be about getting resources so that they don't all starve or something.

As time went on people would end up attending funerals for people who were, not long ago, the same person as they were (Voyager was never a safe place to live.)

That's just a single episode where there could have been continuity, the Voyager was in the special place of never being able to stop by a starbase to unload their accumulated weird.

A time traveler who's the computer's love interest and has been since version 2.3 of the AI came out centuries ago. ... um, maybe not. It's just a thought.

Bajoran religion got explored to a degree, but human religion not so much. Given that the Enterprise crew's actions led Apollo to commit suicide, I'd like to know how the Hellenists (human or otherwise) felt about that.

I'd like to see human religion grappling with people like Q. Loki is far less divinely overpowered, so in a universe with Q there should be no problem in believing in gods like Loki, but it's not like "If Q then Loki" is sound logic. So the question becomes, "Why do you believe in these particular gods (or that particular god) and why do you consider them (or it) to be gods (or a god)?

Loki was picked not-at-random.  Fred specifically said he wanted Loki.  (Fred also voted for Gina Torres for captain, which I can totally support.)

So, Loki talk:

Starfleet Captain has been assigned to the task of mediation to prevent Ragnarök .

Starfleet Captain knows a little about Norse Myth and initially assumes that Odin is obviously the good guy and then learns that of Loki's six divine children Odin uses one of them as his horse, cast another into the afterlife forever more (sounds a lot like murder), threw another one to earth where he was all alone and lives a life of solitude, raised another one and, in spite of him being perfectly obedient at every turn, betrayed him, tied him up, and left him there to starve (a nearby native took pity on him thus Fenris lives, but still tied up where Odin left him after all these centuries) and as for the last two... turned one into an animal and forced him to disembowel the other so that the entrails of the disemboweled one could be used bind Loki in a spot where he'd be tortured by venom till just before Ragnarök.

So Starfleet Captain now sides with Loki, except then he's reminded that in vengeance Loki killed one of Odin's kids, has committed casual murder, and finally sick of this shit and no longer willing to save the world, fully intends to get a djinn* army and destroy the world because him being sick of this shit means this shit has to go. No, the fact that a lot of people live in this shit will not stop him.

And then . . . what?

I suppose if it's a good ending Hel and Baldr get married and both are allowed to come and go from Helheim as they please, Fenris is freed and given top notch therapy and for the rest I have no idea. The whole situation is a mess.

* No one knows where the boat full of beings of fire came from, likely because the preservation status of Norse myth sucks. As such my going theory is that that Loki negotiated with God, who tends to prefer a monotheistic universe, and offered to take out a competing pantheon that's done morally reprehensible things. (That seems to describe most pantheons, including God's.)

That spurred some conversation, Betwixt-and-Between added this:

I would contribute to this kickstarter.

I like your good ending, but it still seems weird to have a "good ending" for the coming of Ragnarok. I mean, I guess a more realistic (heh) ending would simply be to have Ragnarok delayed, yet again.

Ooohh...oohh! Or! Common enemy!

How about this: Just when things come to a head, and Loki's about to call up Naglfar (which is a SPACESHIP made of the nails of the dead, obviously), and Odin's about to launch Photonic Gungnir....THE BORG SHOW UP.

I don't know who or what the Borg have assimilated to make them an even match with the Norse gods, but the are, and now Starfleet Captain is stuck with THREE terrible sides to pick from. 

Star Trek has had various things with infiltrators, be they bodysnatchers or changelings or whatever.  I want to see some of them going native.

"No, I'm not going to help you overthrow the Romulan Empire.  I like the Romulan Empire.  Now if you'll excuse me I have to go [preform Romulan cultural ritual], don't contact me again."

There was probably other stuff too.

Oh, this is kind of important: Boobs.  There need to be more aliens where the females, if there are things analogous to male and female in that species, don't have them.  A lot more.  There can also be aliens where everyone has them so you're not turning away talented people on the grounds of, "No, sorry, you have boobs."

Star Trek is part of a long tradition where Female==Has boobs and that tradition needs to stop.  I'm not saying that they need to change any of the existing species, but the whole thing is "New life and new civilizations," so they'll be making new ones up.

Generally Star Trek is is based on a a Federation starship or base and I'd assume that would continue, but it's not the only avenue to explore.  Consider a merchant vessel, consider the fact that xenoarchaeology in Star Trek involves sometimes digging up civilizations on the level of the most ancient human stuff we find on earth, sometimes digging up civilizations on the level of the Iconians (technology so advanced it seemed like magic to people with Star Trek level advanced technology of their own) and lots of times investigating sites in between.  Following legitimate archeologists, looters, or both could be interesting.

There were some good episodes that came from Picard being an amateur archaeologist.  At least I think there were.  It's been a while.

I'm in a bad place, I have no dignity, and I need money

I never did the donation reminder for October, you may recall that I was without a primary computer for the majority of the month and sick in a way that made it difficult to think for the rest of it.

So let's talk about things now.

I stopped by Subway on the way here and realized that it was the first time I'd had a meal since last Tuesday.  A week and + some number of hours without a meal.  I had, basically, handfuls of peanuts during that time since they require basically no effort I've stayed well hydrated, though this morning i found myself on the precipice of a nervous breakdown when I shattered my favorite glass that, up till then, I hadn't broken yet, so it's been more of unintentional fast than unintentional starvation, but it's still not good.

My house house degrades around me, I can never find the energy to oppose entropy.  I often find myself hopeless, even the most basic things seem like tasks too large to handle.  That includes getting to bed on time.  Low on sleep and low on food I can become helpless in addition to hopeless.

Money still hangs over my head.  I got a letter from the university billing office, haven't opened it yet but it isn't hard to guess, I owe them $967 dollars, It was due at the beginning of September, a few days more than two months ago.  Also due to them is an $80 health fee.

I still haven't gotten around to order parts for the washing machine.  Part of it i hopelessness, if the fix doesn't work than the money is wasted, ad the parts aren't cheap, part of it is that I only seem to remember when I can't actually do it since I need the model number and only recently wrote the damn thing down, part of it is apathy.

A big part of the reason that I'm low on money is that I've invested quite a bit toward trying to earn the meager income that will be needed to give me independence but in this state I can't put that investment to use.

Assuming ... lost my train of thought.

I think I still owe $550 toward the house from before.  (Dentist is paid, yay, I accomplished the smallest of the things.)  That's been hanging over my head for a good long time.  Long enough that another $650 is due in mid November making the total add up to a nice neat $1200.  Well, not quite because those are rounded since it's easier to remember about X50 than remembering the ones digit and the pennies.

Add in tuition and health fee and we're at $2,247 except a lot of my money these days is taken up just paying down my debts.  Speaking of, the student loan people called me today (taking one credit is enough for heathcare, not enough o deffer student loans) and I have no idea why.  Haven't had time to call back.  It's confusing since I don't think I've missed a payment to them lately and I doubt they'd call just to say hello.

And this seems to be what I think about, when I'm able to think at all.

I never accomplish.  I thank you all for the advice on non-lethal mousetraps, but I'm not ordered any.  I could.  A lot of my bills can't be put on a credit card but shopping for mousetraps because there's this one loud annoying one that is severely damaging my calm is what credit cards were made for and my work to pay down my debt means that I do have credit with which to pay for such things, but apathy and tired and hopeless.

I've had broken glass on a floor I walk barefoot on since the end of August.  I just sort of kicked it to the side and ignored it.

I'm falling apart.

I don't like writing this woe is me shit, and I don't like asking money, but that's the only place where anyone else can help.

I need to clean up the broken glass, I need to deal with the upkeep in my house, I need to get rid of that damned mouse (all previous mice were mercifully quiet, why can't this one be?), I need to try to fix the washing machine.  I need to get to work on turning the sunk money into profit or, at the very least, break even, so that I can get rid of that particular portion of my debt.  I need to remember to eat (and not just remember but actually act on the idea,)

The only thing anyone else can do is offer well wishes, prayers if their the sort, and/or money.  And the money is what really, really has me constantly worried.  I'm getting screwed over by the regularly scheduled expenses, what the hell happens when I've burned through the heating oil?

So, since I've reached the point where I have no dignity, please (if you are able to do so without bringing hardship on yourself) give me money.

Life After - Index

Writing this index is proving difficult.  The genesis of this story is simple enough: there was an October contest and I decided to participate.  Unfortunately for most of October I didn't have a primary computer and for many of the portions that did, I was sick in a way that prevented thinking type things.

The story itself is harder to explain.

Short version: temporal meddling causes teleportation to go wrong which dumps Kim in the afterlife, lets the less savory portions of the afterlife escape to earth, and leaves the only people who know what went wrong (Kim's daughter, Shin, and Shin's nemesis Jacob) trapped in a world entirely unlike the one they know thanks to a quarter century of supernatural temporal divergence.

That make sense?

Somewhat longer version:

* * *

In 2029 Shin and Jacob declare a truce when Jacob realizes his interim boss is trying to change 2004 which would mean Jacob (and Shin) would never even be born.  They fail to stop the past from being meddled with, but do manage to avoid being erased by the changes.  Now they have to survive in a world dominated by decay and death, and, if they can do that, try to somehow set things right.

In 2004 while Ron Stoppable lays unconscious after a talent show bit gone wrong, Kim disappears from the face of the earth entirely, and a hole is punched through reality letting malevolent forces of the afterlife run rampant through the school.  With Team Possible sidelined others step up to try to defend those in the school and, hopefully eventually, the rest of the world.

Meanwhile Kim is unceremoniously dumped in the afterlife and left to avoid the unfriendly dead, try to find the friendly dead, and finally get back to earth.

* * *

With October over I've started to revise what was written in October, so far I have:

Chapter 1: Times Change Time Changes: The event that sets everything in motion occurs and everyone has to try to adapt.

Chapter 2: Dying Light: With a slightly firmer grasp on the situation, things now become about survival.

Scattered bits and pieces largely focusing on Mag, while she's unconscious, and her group - sort of an attempt to return to my roots by just writing the parts that resonate a the moment and skipping the stuff that doesn't.

The original versions of everything follow.

Chapter 1: Times Change Time Changes: The event that sets everything in motion occurs and everyone has to try to adapt.

Chapter 2: Dying Light: With a slightly firmer grasp on the situation, things now become about survival.

Chapter 3: If We Can Make It Through The Night: Even as great strides are made, staying alive becomes more difficult after darkness falls.

I cram three chapters worth of stuff into one installment - in a desperate attempt to get things done before the deadline.  It failed, as evidenced by the fact that it wasn't followed by another installment.

Metapost on the setting - I talk about decay, regrowth, cycles, and how that underlies the the metaphysics of the story.

Thing where I note that I didn't make the deadline - honestly it's probably for the best.  All of the installments were rushed, and the one that would have come next if I'd finished it in time was rushed, shortened, and butchered to a horrific degree.

Without worrying about the deadline anymore it will be a better story.  Whenever I get to it.  Chapters 1-3 need revision and expansion, the fourth installment needs salvage then do over.

Best guess is that it's going to look like this:

• Chapters 1-3: The first night, that being Halloween 2029 and probably sometime in September 2004 (need to work out what the exact date on that should be.)
• Chapters 4-6: The next two days.  The rest of Allhallowtide 2029, evacuation one day and a rescue mission the next 2004; Kim getting acclimated to her surroundings and finally finding help in the afterlife.
• Chapters 7-9: With the return of Kim we're down to two viewpoints; in 2004 they try to make a difference, in 2029 they try to make it to the past
• Chapters 10-12: All of the characters are together at this point trying to fix things as a single varied group
• Chapter 13: The resolution

I now propose the greatest game ever concieved: Squirrel Simulator

Honestly, I don't know if modern gaming hardware is up to the challenge, but you have to admit that it would be damned cool.

Historically water and foliage have been some of the hardest things to to simulate.  Well, not hard per se, more that they're extremely calculation intensive.

Consider that "Squirrel Simulator" popped into my head on the way to my pharmacy a while back when a squirrel leapt, as squirrels often do, from one branch onto another. These weren't the big sturdy branches, but rather the more numerous end branches that spread from the tree like pseudo fractals and cause the branches of one tree to become mixed with the branches of another without the two ever actually touching.

Naturally the branch that the squirrel leapt from reacted to the downward force exerted by the jump followed by the sudden absence of the squirrel's mass, but the more impressive thing was on the other end of the transit.  The squirrel caught it's intended branch and for a moment it and the branch dropped like a rock before a new equilibrium was reached and squirrel scampered off to preform its next feat of acrobatic daring that would make human athletes envious.

So we can imagine Squirrel Simulator where you run, jump, climb, and eventually unlock "Flying Squirrel Mode" (spoiler: they don't fly, they glide) through a world of branches and leaves and sprouts and the giant gap between the bottom branches and the ground and generally go around being awesome and having a good time.

But the amount of information would be massive, no two trees are the same, after all, and if you took shortcuts by making them that way it would show and the appeal would be lost, nor can you simply procedurally generate the trees using stochastic methods to keep them different and then discard them as soon as they're out out play.  Learning the best paths and experimenting and improving would obviously be an important part of the game.

But each leaf, each shoot, each branch, and ... well actually we can get away with pretending the trunks never move outside of windstorm levels because those things are massive fuckers that are hard to budge, but everything else needs to move in a realistic way in a system that's constantly having internal effects.  When one branch hits another that needs to cause a chain of reactions, the very air displacement as the squirrel launches itself through the empty space between one branch and the next is going to affect the leaves and thus the sprouts.

ANd the rendering, sweet fuck the rendering.  Maybe we can simplify the behind the curtain stuff representing branches as lines with a variable for thickness, though this is certainly not ideal, but to actually put the damned thing on screen and have it not look like shit?  Holy Mary mother of god and all her wacky nephews, think of the sheer polygon count.

So perhaps the world hasn't yet progressed to a point where it is ready for a game as great as Squirrel Simulator but I'm putting it out there now.  The idea is in the nonexistent aether now and you can't stop it.

Tragedies with happy endings, what people don't understand about Athenian "pessimism", and the importance of reversal

If you're the type to go to Facebook, you can find a nascent version of this there.

Nietzsche liked early and mid tragedy and Athenian pessimism.  He thought it was the highest art form because of it's blending of Dionysian and Apollonian.

Trained in classics and specializing in philology, he definitely came from a place of authority and he understood the words quite well.

He was also wrong.

One of the great examples of this is why he didn't like Euripides.  There are plenty of good reasons to not like Euripides.  I don't like Euripides.  But Nietzsche didn't like it because the joke flew over his head.  Characters that existed to be farcically wrong in their thinking and were put on stage to be ridiculed were ones that Nietzsche thought were acting as mouthpieces of the author.  So Nietzsche thought Euripides was supporting the very thing he was attacking, and things like that are why Nietzsche didn't like Euripides.

For Nietzsche, tragedy was embodied in Aeschylus (the canonical early tragedian) and to a lesser extent Sophocles (the canonical middle tragedian) and utterly destroyed by Euripides (the canonical late tragedian.)

But Nietzsche likes them by way of taking part in a millennia long process of cherry picking.

Most tragedy doesn't survive.  If memory serves (I'm not going to look it up right now) Aeschylus is our best preserved author and we've got maybe ten percent of his work.  Tragedies came in threes.  Sometimes they were thematically linked, sometimes they were actually a trilogy narrative.  Every single tragedy was part of a set of three.  Only one of those sets survives.  Just one.

One result of this is that we've lost most of our happy ending tragedies and thus have a warped sense of the term.

Prometheus Bound survives, but it had two sequels in which Prometheus was first unbound and then he was reconciled with Zeus.  Prometheus got his happy ending, but we don't get to read it or preform it on stage because those happy ending tragedies weren't preserved.

But some happy endings do survive.  The famous king Oedipus finally, at the end of his life, is allowed to die in peace on his own terms having at last been forgiven for his unintentional crimes.

Nietzche's beloved Aeschylus produced the one surviving trilogy.  The last play, the Eumenides, has happy ending all around.  Everybody wins and nobody loses.

My favorite tragedy is the Philoctetes by Sophocles.  Happy ending there.  Euripides wrote one where Hercules goes down into the underworld and brings someone back to get a happy ending.

These things with happy endings are all tragedies.

Part of what makes them tragedies is that they hurt.  The endings are happy, but getting there is painful.  In the Philoctetes, for example, the character of Neoptolemus spends most of the play in an ethical dilemma that's tearing him apart.  Lying goes contrary to his very nature, but he's a soldier and his commander (Odysseus) has ordered him to take place in a morally repugnant deception.  It hurts to see the character go through that, and in the end you're relieved when he finally tells Odysseus to fuck off and isn't being torn inside anymore because it means the hurting will finally stop.

But a part that is perhaps more important is reversal.

Agamemnon starts his play returning triumphant from war.  Of course he gets his head chopped off.  Oedipus Rex has the title character start out as a beloved king, we all know what happened to him.  Antigone begins with the title character in a half-dead train-wreck family, but she's in a position of privilege and engaged to the prince so, while stuff around her is bad and she feels bad about it, she's sort of ok.  She ends up dying unnecessarily after being entombed alive.

Tragedy as we know it these days is all about that kind of reversal.  People rise, or (as in the Greek version) have already risen, and then they fall.

If someone starts in a shitty place, stays in a shitty place, and ends in a shitty place, that isn't tragedy.  That's abuse.

Tragedy with a bad ending requires people to have it good, even if it's only the half-good of Antigone's position in society while emotionally she's wrecked, and then have it all come crashing down.

The other sort of tragedy is the mirror image.  When Oedipus finally gets his happy ending he starts out already screwed over by fate: blind, outcast, with a dead mother/wife, and haunted by the knowledge of what he'd unintentionally done.  If that had ended on a downer there would be no reversal and without a reversal it's not a tragedy.

If we look at the happy endings that survived, and others that we know of, we see that where the more commonly preserved tragedies start with the character in a good place and end with them screwed over, the happy ending tragedies start with the character in a bad place and end with them in a good one.

In The Eumenides the human character starts off hounded and haunted by the furies, constantly on the run from them but unable to escape with his only respite being divine intervention.  Pretty bad place.  It ends with him free both of the furies and the curse that has for generations made his family a place of suffering, betrayal, revenge, murder, and so forth.

The title characters themselves start out as reviled old gods who are finding themselves without a place in the new order and are being robbed of their prize.  In the end they are loved, have a firm place in the new order, and have an even better prize than the one they were after.

Prometheus has to start out bound for Prometheus Unbound to be viable, he has to start out with Zeus really pissed off at him (which is never a good thing) for him to be able to reconcile.  That's how the two Prometheus sequels (which don't survive and so we know only the broad strokes of) are able to be tragedies with up endings.

Philoctetes starts off his play cursed, betrayed, abandoned, largely forgotten, and almost completely stripped of his humanity.  Also he's spent the last ten years in constant pain.  Most of the time it's almost unbearable pain, but that gets interrupted by periods of literally unbearable "drop to the ground screaming in agony because you're incapable of doing anything else" pain.

Plus the festering wound causing all this pain apparently smells really, really bad.

Philoctetes ends the play on his way to finally be healed and a prophecy-ensured glorious victory.

Neoptolemus starts out being coerced into doing things that go fundamentally against his morals and spends much of the play in anguish.  He leaves a hero.

Euripides Alcestis starts off with the title character dying.*  A lot of what happens in the play is her dying.  Which goes on, more or less, till she's dead.  Then there's a bit of mourning but even that doesn't go right, specifically it's cut short, and so those still alive feel even worse.  It ends with Hercules getting her away from Death and bringing the revived Alcestis back home.  Everyone gets to be happy again.

Tragedy isn't about good things going bad.  It's about things turning around.

I'd argue that there are three main points to tragedy:

• It's painful.  Whether the ending is happy or sad the journey will hurt
• It's about change.  Good crashes down to bad, bad is elevated to good.
• The problem is intractable.  It's the Kobayashi Maru test and the only Kirk option is divine intervention.  (Hercules was big into that even before he was elevated to full god, but other gods did stuff too.)

Tragedies are painful stories about no win situations, but sometimes you can actually win anyway.  It's just that you can't win through your own efforts.  Powers beyond those of mortals are at play and whether you crash and burn or rise above depends entirely on them and not on you.  All you can do is face the situation that you personally have no hope of solving.

They are also very much about reversals.  Which brings us to Athenian pessimism.

* * *

People hear things like, "Count no man happy until he's dead," or the story of Kleobis and Biton (their mother asked the gods to grant them what was best; they were struck dead on the spot) and they think the people who produced these things were pessimistic.  That's not quite it.

Though, it should be noted that the non-mystery religions of ancient Greece had a very negative view of the afterlife so being mortal was generally assumed to suck by the time you got to the end and one god claimed that the best thing that could happen to a mortal was for them not to be born at all.

It's all about an idea that's deeply ingrained in the Athenian mindset and has everything to do with change.  It's best summed up by a phrase that probably originated a bit later and definitely came from east of Greece: "This, too, shall pass."

You can't say someone is lucky before they're dead because, since they're still alive, you don't know what's going to happen to them next.  They might still fall.  What was best for Kleobis and Biton was to die at their peak in a way that gained them eternal fame (we know their names and have their statues) rather than to live on and possibly come crashing down.

It is extremely pessimistic, if you're doing well.

But people forget that Athens was a very old city.  It's so old that the margin of error on the earliest settlement date is around 2,000 years (9000 BC give or take 2,000 years).  It's definitely been inhabited non-stop for at least seven thousand years.

In 1200 civilization collapsed.  No one knows why (it was mermaids) but every civilization that had managed to be created was brought down.  Egypt and Assyria were basically the only ones to limp through the catastrophe but they were both quite diminished, all of the other civilizations were gone and people were forced to rebuild from scratch.

The empire that Athens was a part of was gone.  Literacy was gone.  Building techniques were gone.  At that point the idea of things turning around probably seemed pretty damned optimistic.

But they did rebuild, and they did regain literacy, and they did improve, and then came Persia.

Athens was, at the time, a nothing town surrounded by other nothing towns.  It made a play for power by supporting a rebellious Greek-speaking city in Persia and it backfired.  Persia was a giant nation.

Cue the battle of Marathon.  Athens took on Persia and won because landing is the most vulnerable time for an army invading by sea.  (Sparta was taking the day off for religious reasons.)

Persia, which was definitely the biggest thing around and possibly the biggest empire in the world at the time, didn't take the defeat lightly.

Having learned the vulnerability of landings the army was set to walk the distance.  This meant building a bridge from Asia to Europe.  They also dug canals so pesky peninsulas would get in the way of their ships.

Nature thus subjugated to their will, and with the largest army the world had ever known beside the largest navy the world had ever known, they sent emissaries to Greece.  Each city state was asked to give water and earth.  It seriously was just water and dirt.  It was, however, symbolic of becoming subservient to the Persians.

All but two Greek cities said, "Sure, have some dirt and water."

Athens figured they were screwed no matter what, so they threw the emissary to them in a well.  They were probably right.  While Sparta couldn't make it to the battle of Marathon, another city did send aid.  The Persians wiped them out entirely.

Sparta was just Sparta.  They also threw the emissary in a well.  They did it with a sarcastic remark that it was a good place to go looking for water and earth.

So Persia came.  After the Spartan defeat at Thermopylae (which was a useful-to-the-Greeks defeat because it gave the rest of the army time to fall back and regroup) the Persians had full run of the upper part of the Greek peninsula.

Which is about when Athens kicked their asses at Salamis.  There is no way that should have happened.  Athens was a city.  Persia was a nation.  This was their second seemingly impossible victory they'd achieved and they felt they were on a role.  So they said to the rest of the Greeks, "Let's keep beating these guys," and went on offence.

Sparta didn't opt in and instead went for navel gazing and enforcing one of the most brutal forms of slavery known to history.

Athens kicked the Persians out of the Aegean and the Golden Age of Greece began.  Why the Golden Age of Greece when it was Athens doing the prospering?  They owned a lot of Greek world by this point.

They were doing ridiculously well after defeating an enemy they should have had no hope of defeating three times, with one of those times involving beating the biggest army the world had ever known along with the biggest navy the world have ever known.  The alliance they'd led against the Persians became their de facto empire (which eventually just became their empire) and all of the places they'd liberated from the Persians they'd turned around and immediately subjugated to themselves (though it didn't look like that at first glance, it took a while before you realized you'd been conquered rather than freed.)

The wealth flowed, things were great, their civilization was at its peak.

Suddenly all of that stuff about reversal takes on a more negative tone.  Herodotus wrote the first history, the one that gives us the word "History", and he started out by pointing out that great things become small, small things become great, good things decline, bad things improve.

Given how great things were going for Athens, viewing the world as a series of reversals tended to imply that they were heading for a massive crash (they were, though it was in the form of a twenty year war, so not as fast as a crash.)

So, sure, you could say that there was an Athenian pessimism.  But that was when things were good.  If things were bad it became an Athenian optimism.

It was the idea that this will not last.  If "this" is bad then that's positive.  If "this" is good then that's negative.  But, regardless of how the idea applied to a given situation, it was always part of a larger framework of viewing the world that was value neutral.

Things are gonna turn around.  This, too, shall pass.

-

* It wasn't a normal death though.  Wacky hijinks in the past that ended with Apollo getting the Fates drunk earned King Admetus a get out of death free card (not immortality, just living longer than he was supposed to), but death couldn't be denied completely so when it was his time to die came someone would have to go in his place.

He had years to try to find someone to take his place, no one would.  When the hour finally came round his wife Alcestis (title character) volunteered.

She had reasons beyond just loving him.  In the world they lived in their children would be better off if their surviving parent was the father, for example.  She has Admetus vow to always remember her, and never remarry (she doesn't want a possibly resentful step-mother in charge of her kids.)  He also vows to quit the merriment that his household was known for and live a life of solemnity in her honor when she is gone.

So she finally dies.

This leaves everything in a bad place.  She's dead, Admentus is really sad because he loved her and feeling really guilty for taking the deal, and so forth.  Everyone's kind of despondent.

Then it gets worse.  Hercules shows up and Admentus doesn't want to turn away a guest, so he brings Hercules in and tries not to burden Hercules with the knowledge of what happens.  This means no one can even mourn properly.

Finally someone gets pissed off enough about cheerful merry Hercules and tells Hercules exactly what happened and why what he's doing is pissing everyone off.

Hercules feels like an ass, apologizes, and leaves.  He comes back with Alcestis.

So she's returned to life, no one is sad anymore and everyone gets to be happy.  Yay.