#ROW80 4TH QTR WEDNESDAY CHECK IN - NANO UPDATE & WHO'S SPYING ON WHO

First the good news; for #NaNoWriMo, I've managed to spit out 44,013 words into something that resembles a manuscript, but that I would more likely refer to as a "hot mess". If you don't believe me, here's visual proof:

I feel like I've been underground since November 1, 2013. This cannot be so, as I've typed eleventy-billion words it seems, AND I've actually played Wolf. This is going to be a mostly graphical update, because of. . . Runescape?

Wait! What? No, that's not what I meant to say at all! I wanted to tell you that all that yammering I did last summer about the NSA and FBI really, really paid off! If any of you read my ground-breaking post on how to fuc-I mean totally encrypt every day conversations on Facebook and Twitter and just waste everyone's time by running all of your stupid lolcats and chain letters that say "teh quick brown jackal jumped over the lazy capitalist" through Bing translators ten times with 10 different languages, you'd know that I am on the cutting edge of spy bullshit! Take a look at this! Apparently, I have the HOMELAND SECURITY FOLKS recruiting me for THIS: 

God knows what in the hell they want me to do, but it looks totally legit, right? I can't wait to start. I am so excited! This must have been in response to a couple of letters I sent to the FBI and the SEC when I got this:

So everyone now knows I'm on my toes and fighting for the little guy or some shit out here in cyberland. I just knew if I kept pestering these people they'd offer me a job when they saw what kind of cyber-sleuthing chops I have!

Of course, I'll have to work from home. That Imaginary Trotsky fellow-traveler probably isn't going to rate me much in the way of a very high security clearance. 

Anyway, 6,000 words from the finish line, at least for this draft of "Music of the Spheres". I like the title and I think it fitting for the subject. I sure couldn't have gotten here without my #ROW80 crew mates and everyone else in this new endeavor. What a great couple of years it's been. The Primodone is working wonders and I've put on over 40 pounds, since I first went into the homeless shelter. Who'd a thunk it? As my late Ma used to say. Thank you everyone! 

#ROW80 -- 4TH QUARTER 2013, WEDNESDAY CHECK IN

VIOLA, SHMIOLA  NANO, SHMANO

Really a quick update just to let everyone know that no, I have not been eaten by the trolls here on Nebraskascape, or Rune Avenue, 33602, 33605, or the blue dragons, nor have I fished myself into oblivion, *ahem* like some I could mention.

The Gold Barons of Runescape

Translation. My Glorious Waste of Time is still with me, that being Runescape, and da 'hood is still a-boppin' and a-beepin' and a-screechin' outside my window as I type. I've just added to the cacophony a bit. I've put in 32k+ words for NaNoWriMo. (Honestly, I've lost count; I just type and I'm reaching the cataclysmic meeting of two main characters, so it's safe to say *fingers crossed* November 30, will see 50k words.)

I can still play some mean air viola!

The viola is another revelation, some good, some not. But that was to be expected. Everything still seems to be intact; muscle memory and whatnot and I'm playing a LOT more than I thought I would. I forgot to mention that I had MOHs surgery on my left bicep over 10 years ago, and that booger STILL aches. Getting old is not for wussies! I'm not unhappy with my progress, and I need to have my stupid bow re-haired, and yes, real horse's hair. I don't have the time and I need to call my guy who knows a guy. It's like the Mafia putting out a hit. Later. But my passage work on the "G" string sounds. . . muddy. So, something to fix, if not for myself, for my muse, Beethoven. 

"V" for Victory, or dit-dit-dit-daa, used during WW II and, the 4 opening notes of Beethoven's 5th Symphony, a bit of trivia, for trivia buffs.

Anyway. The usual chaos medically, sort of. My red blood cell count will NOT come up, in spite of extra iron, B-12 injections, yada yada. I feel good and am up to 112 lbs. So, a lovely colonoscopy is scheduled. Can't wait to drink all of that lemon-flavored crap and poop it out. I know what they're going to find. Zero, zilch, nada, bupkis. But, better safe than sorry. My doc is primo and knows what's up. I have this thing called "malnutrition" from the lovely childhood thing "failure to thrive". Just so long as we do this AFTER NaNo and Thanksgiving. Giving thanks for just walkin' around. I missed the Pink pumpkins this year! Damn!

These were the Pink pumpkins. You can see how bad my tremors were last year this time, by the blurriness of the picture. LOTS to be grateful for!

Have a happy rest of the week #ROW80 Crew. See you on Sunday! 

#ROW 80 4TH QTR 2013, MID-WEEK CHECK IN - HOW'M I DOING?

I'm probably committing some kind of mortal sin by using a contraction in a title, but I'm feeling a bit reckless and devil-may-care these days. I just got ANOTHER call from the doctor's office. All of my studying for my latest round of blood work, got me an S-Minus (for Unsatisfactory, per Sundae Rye; a term I never knew existed, but I love it.) Anyway, my hemoglobin is a bit less than 10, which is after taking iron and B-12 shots and all the other hooey. Well, shit.

So, now, the dreaded colonoscopy. The test is fine; it's the drinking and "cleansing" I can do without, and I know what they're gonna find. Bupkus. So, enough of that. As to goals? I feel good, I know after a screaming run to the ER, that I'm NOT going blind; no glaucoma, no macular degeneration,  just the usual lack of depth perception and inability to make my eyes track. 

I tried explaining to the 3rd doctor, I saw on Saturday night, how my brain perceives images. I said, "does that make sense?" He said, "No." As long as I don't have glaucoma or macular degeneration, or diabetic neuropathy, I guess it's between me, my eyes and my brain. I still don't know what in hell's going on. 

Writing? Meh. A little here, and a little there. Trying to get my stuff together and gather resources for NaNoWriMo, which is coming up, and trying to hang with Alex J. Cavanaugh's IWSG group, since I got a huge case of stage fright when I got just a RETURN email from the Florida Writer's Association and told them basically, "Oh. Hell. No." This from someone who can make a total ham of herself on a stage either talking, or playing the viola. WTF?

So, in keeping with that, I thought you'd enjoy what passes for random or what used to be called whimsy, which this is actually neither of those two, because I worked hard on this; I really did. I wrote it a while back and it's the closest thing I have in my writer's "repertoire," that comes to spooky, although, I think the operative word here is "spook" as you'll see in the post. So much for goals. One thing, though. I typed this in a record 10 minutes. Last year, this would have taken an hour! Let's hear it for better living through chemistry? Now I'm off to noodle around on Wolf; that's a definite reward!

PUTTING THE "SPOOK" BACK IN SPOOKTACULAR? OR, E. T. PHONE HOME

#ROW80 4TH QTR - WEDNESDAY CHECK IN – SPAM COMMENTS FROM HOMELESS CHRONICLES “READERS?”

Who knew I had so many readers or followers? I certainly didn't until today, when I happened across my SPAM comments folder or doohickey or whatever it's called out there in cyberland, where all of these fabulous bits and bytes occupy space, if not time. It's up to me to occupy time and try and persevere over it, but we'll get to that in a moment.


Needless to say, I was just gosh-a-mighty pleased to find that so many swell folks had bothered to comment on my blog, until I started to notice a few things. One of them is this, all of the comments are coming from “Anonymous” and I'm pretty sure it's not this guy:

Anonymous' corporate logo of choice. As a protest group, or a focal point for protest, their Mission Statement may seem apt for our times, but there is always the possibility of becoming vigilantes merely to make a point, rather than justice.

Number two; depending on the subject, the spam is sorta related to whatever topic I was blogging about that day. I am hoping and praying that this has more to do with the search-and-spam algorithms, or else we are up to our eyeballs in a universe of deranged madness. The It's not just the pornoQueen sites, it's the sort of puckish, yet demented cross of one of those translator robots and AutoText Correct.

Of course, once I started really trying to decipher it, it just became hilarious; well, to me, at least, because, it's confuse-a-what at it's finest. And in a weird, sort of Boolean, true-or-false, computer way, it makes sense.

 

Why yes, Anon, I do happen to know of plugins to protect against hackers. It's pictures of warts in ASCII code. 1001 0001 1111 0010 etc... or you can write it in Python, I understand... 

StopIteration... Wait! What?

To be sure, the comments were rich and varied but none so filled with irony and self-fulfilling prophecy or fate, or something high-flown sounding as this:

For you non-programmers in the reading audience, site () = null in JAVAscript, which is about as nihilistic as it gets. Of course, my upside-down sense of humor finds this hysterical, to the point of almost-apoplexy. There are times, when even the heaviest of psychotic medications are penetrated by the unreality of this world.

Meanwhile, over in Russia, happy is sad; sad is happy. Too much is truth, pravda and vremya and once again, тротскы, виолафурыжс феллош травелер ис чоме. It's pretty bad, when your alter ego has an alter ego, but Имагинары Тротскы and ViolaFury have traveled along for many years. So, I guess it was natural for this to show up:

My Russian being slightly less horrible than my Spanish which is awful-to-mediocre on any given day, this loosely translates as "Samsung Corgis and Vodka Being Please No Stop." Or, it's just a bunch of garble kicked off by the 2013 Bloggers' "A to Z Challenge Letter, Z for Zither."

One night I was working on a post and I got one of those annoying "Restart" messages for some doohickey or another. I try to jump on those and kill them as quickly as possible, but I wasn't quick enough this night, so of course, I received the legendary "Windows Update..." message, for what seemed like 6 years. 

Since I write most of this dreck in my head, I had plenty of time to wait, while Microsoft rooted around on my hard drive and snooped and pried and did absolutely nothing except slow things down and cause me to uninstall most of whatever it had installed in the first place. 

Of course, some search-and-spam algorithm responded with this:

Yeah, I do need some quality meds, and Vodka, if you expect me to work with your stupid operating system, thank you very much! Bring me some blinis, black bread and sour cream too, you stupid apparatchik! Balalaikas, too!

WE'RE STILL WAITING! OH, THE HUMANITY, THE HUMANITY!

Still another response to the "Windows Updating. . ." post. Apparently, I had much to rant about, being as how it's Microsoft and it sucks and all and IBM has a much superior product in it's operating platform for PCs, called OS/2 or Merlin. IBM just didn't know how to market it, so the majority standard is Windows with Java and it ALL sucks!

I'll leave you with this; I had to look at this for the longest time to understand what was so familiar about this type of spam. Well, when I puzzled it out and. . . Shit. I was being really good about the cuss words and then. . .

This is actually kind of creepy; this particular (data-mining) response is to my post "TECHNO-STUPIDITIES," but the algorithm is from this post. So, all that Eye-in-the-Sky paranoia, is maybe not so paranoid after all. 

Which kind of leads me back to Anonymous, our "V" guy. The whole personal freedom thing here in the U. S. of A. Now, that as of today, we have once again, veered our lemming hordes away from the fiscal cliff, I guess we can breathe a sigh of relief.

This week, really did nothing towards attaining any of my Deliberate Goals, but I did get some of my blood work back and it looks okay. Next up, Eyes (in the sky?) and Bone Density scan. Enough folderol. JC has been sick and is recovering from cancer surgery, as well. But, he is a trooper and all in all is feeling pretty good. On my "Deliberate Goals" blog, I am going to re-post 2 posts I wrote about a very wonderful pet we had when I was a kid. They will be part of my life's story, should I ever publish.