seiberwing

My grandmother (old, mobility/hearing issues, mild memory problems, and also an all around personality disordered hard to deal with jerkface) was in Fleischman's in the Catskills, where there was a lot of flooding. Her motel is "gone", as she put it (EDIT: no seriously this thing is floating down main street it is not even attached to the ground anymore), and she was evacuated to somewhere arts and cultural. As of my mom's last text "Gran evac'd to music conservatory nr ski resort so much higher ground. She is laying down talking to a friend, okay for now". However, the roads are flooded so we have no idea when or how she's going to get out.

My parents' current plan to throw my autistic brother in the trunkbackseat and drive up there (15 hours from Knoxville, TN) as soon as the roads are clear, since renting a car after flying into LaGuardia is going to be next to impossible. I'm on standby to catch a plane to LGA, if needed, and take care of my brother at her apartment while my parents take care of Grandma. We're not worried about her safety, more the mechanics of getting her back to her apartment in Queens. If she'd just stayed in the city this summer like we all told her to this would not have happened.

If anyone has any ideas, resources, cars, or psychic powers that might help us out, it would be deeply appreciated.

We have a heat wave moving in, constant storms (which blew all our stuff off the dock a day ago) haven't made a dent in the heat already present, and our A/C for the entire upstairs just broke. Going downstairs is like descending into a dark and cool cave in comparison to the humid hotbox is that is the living space of the house.

I think this is the first time I've felt mildly grateful for the deli cooler.

For those of you wishing to stay cool vicariously, I recommend the Cryostasis and Metro 2033 LPs by the ironically hapless and eternally comedic Helloween. The games themselves are very atmospheric but Helloween's vaguely British commentary just makes it cold gold.

Things that are awesome:

-lonescorpion, for obvious reasons and for giving me a reason to actually explore this strange town rather than just living in it.

-Zombieland. lonescorpion made a brief review of it here and I agree with his assessment of it. In full disclosure I am not an expert on zombie movies or survival horror in general, my limit on such things is Shaun of the Dead. However, I felt Zombieland took the isolation, fear, and despair one normally associates with the zombie scenario and flipped it around to make a zombie movie about togetherness and hope in the face of the end of the world as we know it. The comedy is great without having to resort to sex or toilet humor (well, mostly), the characters are likable, and the more melancholy aspects are touching rather than maudlin. It seems to be too late for one to catch it in theaters and I only barely saw it at the Dollar Movie, but I'd at least rent it on DVD if you can't bring yourself to buy it.

-Sherlock Holmes (2009). If you like action movies, particularly with a Victorian/mild steampunk aesthetic, go see this movie. If you like Sherlock Holmes, go see this movie. If you like buddy-cop dynamics with affection that teases the line between bromance and outright slash, go see this movie. If you don't like any of these things I'm not sure what you're doing on my flist, but go see this movie anyway. lonescorpion also reviewed it in depth, although warnings for a minor spoiler in the comments. I would say that the major plot is a little ridiculous and convoluted nearly to Dan Brown degrees at times, but it's not so bad that it ruined the movie and the mediocrity. The characters and character interactions make up for it fully. I've seen a lot of people saying this is one of the more faithful depictions of Sherlock Holmes and Watson that they've seen in a while and I certainly agree on the Watson aspect. He's more of a partner than a sidekick and it's a position he well deserves. Even the minor characters like Lestrade have their own charm and wit--in fact, the villain is really the only character who I didn't care for. He rates low on the Large Ham scale of awesome vs. annoying (also known as the Tim Curry scale), but he has the good decency to stay out of the way most of the time so we can focus on the actually interesting characters. It's fun, in a way that doesn't imply that it is so brainless that it can only be described as 'fun'.

-Psychonauts, specifically for the PC. Yahtzee gives a more professional description, but I can fully argue that this is one of the best games I've had the pleasure to play. The story at its vaguest is your average 'child with special powers who is more powerful than the other children with special powers must save world from strange and dark evil', but the exact nature of the evil and what one most do to combat the evil is where the real fun parts come in (with a goodly measure of crack, I found myself saying things like "I need to climb on the meat in order to catch the imaginary chicken the next time it floats by" with a complete lack of irony). I'm not just saying this because I double majored in fictional psychology and videogames as a creative medium, there is something inherently awesome in a game where one can set things on fire with one's mind and bounce to abnormally high levels while navigating a twisted 1950s neighborhood infested with secret agents and girl scouts inside the mind of a schizophrenic security guard. It's not a really hard game bar the nightmarish final level, the real trouble comes in the form of pinpoint jumping puzzles and that goddamn camera that never seems to focus where I want to go unless I manually turn it around. Besides that it's a lot of fun to play, the plot is great, and I'd recommend it to anyone with an available console or a computer that can download it from GameStop.

-Coffee flavored mousse.

-Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. lonescorpion described it as a sort of miniature Las Vegas, with glittering lights and strange buildings and overpriced but still awesome entertainment--and here we'd only gone up there to make pilgrimage to the world's largest knife showplace and confirm that Dollywood actually existed.

-The Tennessee Aquarium, in scenic Chattanooga. Well, aquariums, they've built a saltwater one now in addition to the freshwater one and they're both awesome amounts of aquatic goodness. There are cuttlefish that stare at you and a sleepy giant octopus and a butterfly garden and you can pet stingrays and it's awesome.

-My parents. Just becanse.

A note here--no pictures were actually taken during the service. Due to Shabbat regulations I couldn't take them until after the sun went down and we did havdalah. Anything seen here is a recreation. I did also have some pictures of David doing the practice service but I can't find where I put them right now.

( After havdalah, of course, I couldn't keep my hands off the camera. )

I HAS A FERNY. FOR THREE BUCKS. Admittedly he's missing some of his ant legs and if he had a gun he certainly doesn't have one now, but it's still Inferno in his sexconfusing blenderbutted glory.

Me: So yeah, Transformers is basically car marketing waiting to happen.
Dad: So are there any hybrid Transformers?
Me: I...dunno? Maybe?
Dad: They'd have to see if they could mate a small car and a vacuum cleaner.
Me: ...I guess? Put on some soft music, lock them in a room, come back in a week and you have a hybrid.
Dad: You can use that in one of your stories, if you want.
Me: ...

Combine this with the fact that my mom thinks the US Air Force symbol looks like the Decepticon insignia and I think I've corrupted my whole family.

I've argued several times with my mother and somehow it's all my fault, my brother's had a meltdown over not being able to get a book at Mr. K's, my dad tried to talk me into going to see my gran when I'm not exactly in the best of conditions to do it, and I'm no longer at liberty to leave my gum wrappers all over the place. Why do I come home again?

Oh, yeah. Free food.



A master's student at Georgetown is working on fan fiction for her thesis. There's a survey and she needs as many people from as many fandoms as possible to complete it so that the diversity of fan culture is represented.

If you have a minute, please check it out and send the link to your friends. The survey can be found at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=1idSovixsYIF7EpKO2EGpQ_3d_3d .

I've agreed to help spread the word, but if you have any questions/concerns, you can email her at kem82 @ georgetown.edu.

He broke my door.

My brother broke my damn door down.

...perhaps I should back up a bit. I had a small argument with David this evening over how he needs to put his headphones in and stop singing when he's on the computer because it's bloody annoying. And he kinda...freaked.

So I rang up Mom. David took the phone away, talked to her for a bit, then hung up and refused to give me the phone back. Now me, I know this sort of thing when I see it, the threats of 'you'll be sorry' and the yelling are never good signs. So I snagged my cell phone and took off to go lock myself in the nearest room (his) as per procedure.

Didn't work, he knocked the door open and grabbed at my hands. So I made a few jokes and calming statements and managed to ease away. Went next door to my room next, properly locked the door--and he managed to break off that little bit of metal on the doorframe with one or two good slams. I had no idea he was that strong by now.

At this point I managed to distract him by talking about how strange it was that he'd actually managed to break the door down and how it was just like in cop shows where they bust into people's houses. The 'moment' seemed to have broken by then--David's outbursts of violence are usually fairly shortlived and wind up with him going self-pitying and begging that I not tell Mom, the problem is getting him up to that point without anything nasty happening--so I was fairly all right.

Turned out later that by some slipup he hadn't gotten his morning meds, which is probably why he went aggressive when he hasn't been like that in over a year and doesn't mean that I'm not still pissed off over the entire affair. Mom offered a chair and suggested I block up my room door since the lock slot didn't work exist and I blew her off. Seriously, I think I handled it fairly well and he didn't put a scratch on me, I don't need anything just in case he randomly wanders into my room in the middle of the night and decides to smother me with my stuffed whale puppet. I do still have teeth for to bite and knee for to make things uncomfortable.

Still. He took out my door. That's kinda freaky.

Since I decided to stay another night at home before driving back tomorrow morning, my parents and I spent a while watching some of the family tapes that Dad's been transferring to DVDs for posterity before the tapes disintegrate into melted plastic rubbish.

Around late August/early September of 1991, there's a scene of me and my little brother playing around with my old plastic dollhouse and riding about on a fire truck. My younger short-haired self rushes to the scene of the blaze and quickly evacuates the people and the "giant baby" doll while my brother gnaws on assorted bits of furniture. After the 'fire' is put out, I return the people to the house. This would be nothing special if it wasn't for the fact that we only have that tape because it was the one in the video camera when we went up to New York a month later for our annual Christmas trip to Granma's place--during which our house caught fire and burned down in our absence. It was a touch spooky to watch, and in a way morbidly amusing.

Of course, that bit of unintended foreshadowing's nothing compared to watching my little brother back before he was about a year and a half old. My mother kept sighing a bit every time my brother came crawling up to the camera, smiling and babbling incessantly in what my parents thought was crude speech and sounded to me like complete dribble (the quality of the tapes wasn't that great). Thing is, David's crawling and reacting to the world like a completely normal child and the rest of us, like your average group of college students in a slasher flick, had absolutely no idea what was going to happen.

Towards the end Dad kept fast-forward towards the interesting parts and the images were pausing and jerking the way they do when they go too fast to simply be moving very quickly. There was a half-second still as we went through a sequence of him in the bathtub of my brother's face, gap-toothed and staring out almost aimlessly into space. It chilled me down to the core because this was the point in the record where we could see the autism starting to creep in, the point where the actions of the world stopped affecting him and he abruptly stopped talking altogether. It felt as if we were watching a depressing movie for the second or third time since we all knew what was going to happen eventually--but instead of being it a movie, it was our life.

I turned around a few minutes later and saw Mom dabbing at her eyes. We decided right around then that we'd watched enough cutesy family videos for the day and went to have dinner before Hogfather started.

So an anchor from WATE came over to interview me and my mom this morning for a feature, and it was kinda cool. Mom answered a bunch of questions on what it was like having two kids with mental disorders (not that my brother and his issues aren't enough for three kids) and talked up the handbook she wrote for parents of children in the same situations. And damn if she doesn't deserve attention and praise for that, considering all the work she's done on it for the past two years and the grant managing and the staying up until four in the morning some nights trying to get it done in time.

Me, it was mostly "what was it like, when did you first know (Hint: When I scored high in a Reader's Digest quiz on depression), what's medication like, do you have any advice for other teens who have been newly diagnosed". Mom says I didn't do too bad.

It'll be airing on the first of next month, if anyone's curious. Not sure about the time yet.

So I'm back home for Sukkot, after getting slightly lost twice on the way down from UNCA.

My brother's gained a few inches and his face has broken out in proper teenager zits; it's a bit strange to look at. However, he still sings along when he watches cartoons and is quite happy with me adding yet another transforming furries adult site to the filter's Block List to remove him from temptation (apparently an interest in Transformers porn runs in the family, just...different sorts of transformers).

I'm pretty sure Sukkot's one of my favorite Jewish holidays, mostly because decorating the sukkah is fun and there's just something very primordially entertaining about a harvest festival, which is basically exactly what it is with some Jewish trimming.

Shaking a three bound treebits and a piece of fruit around in all directions has a strangely good feel to it, and even the prayers or deeper meaning (almost everything in Judaism has at least two explanations behind it as to why we do it, with the real answer being 'it's traditional') aren't really as important as the ritual itself. You make your own reasons for it, or you just do it.

I like that.