What made me unhappy today ?

[Louanne Learning]

Wild

This is an interesting word to me, ever since I read Women Who Run With The Wolves. I think our instinctual nature is a great source of wisdom.

 

[Madman Starryteller]

One wonders how one survived the Wild Child stage.

One does indeed.

Wild child stage you say? How about wild life stage?

I remember one time when I should have broken my leg (bicycled over a jump and hit hard into an edge. Did not have suspension on the bike...).
One time when I should have been mugged on a date (thought with something other than my head and fell for a fake profile who did not show).
Another time when I drunkenly tried to find my tent near a mountain in the middle of the night (this one wasn't that dangerous though, worst thing that could have happened is I would have been forced to sleep in my clothes outside in September and wait until morning.)

And various other stuuuupid stuff which I have miraculously forgotten right now.

 

[Set2Stun]

Is that what welfare is like in Ontario? Just curious.

It's not worth even considering for anyone who isn't already homeless, pretty much. And you need to be broke before you can receive any benefit payments. Disability wouldn't even cover a single person's rent.

 

[Rath Darkblade]

So, I had an adventure recently. The company I work for is big, with several departments, including one that provides written help for teachers and parents to communicate non-verbally with disabled people and disabled children. People can subscribe to software that does this, for a six-month, annual, or two-year fee. (The fees are fairly moderate - something like $50 for six months, or $90 for a year).

So, I had an upset person call us in the accounts division to complain that we had the nerve to charge his credit card. (We keep a simple Excel database of the EFTPOS payments we take, just for that kind of eventuality). I searched that Excel list, but couldn't find him. So he got mad. How dare I not know, and so on.

I was puzzled, because he was calling from Western Australia, and my department doesn't do business in that state. So I apologised for the inconvenience, took his name and number, promised to call him back, and went off to find out. (Of course, he got even madder at this, and swore at me, and made me promise to call him back within 15 minutes, otherwise he would call the newspapers and report us as cheats, etc. etc...)

Anyway, I finally figured out that he called our other department, and they charged him to renew his subscription. When I reminded him of this, he said, "Well ... you still should have known!" and slammed down the phone. *SLAM!*

How should I have known? By magic?

 

[Catrin Lewis]

I was 12 in 1980 when Lennon was killed, 3 months into secondary school. I, and others in the group, asked variations of "who's he now?" and "is that a footballer?" when Cully (who grew to detest the nickname) told us the news. It must be said, Lennon had quite the post-Beatles career in his own name, but still, at that age my music access was limited to what my older brothers and sisters had around and the Beatles didn't feature. The Best of the Beatles and The Best of Queen were my joint first record purchases with my own money a couple of years later.

I've never thought to uncover the names of band members, apart from the Doors where I recognised names I'd remember forever, Morriison, Manzarek, Densmore and whatisname on guitar.

Nothing makes me feel as old as the blank looks in response to my cultural references at work. It happens with alarming frequency.

We're not old, they're just ignorant. So there.

 

[Catrin Lewis]

Regarding the whole music discussion going on here, do any of you know who Jean-Philippe Rameau is? No? Bah... kids these days...

Yep. I do.

 

[Homer Potvin]

I spit out my coffee when I mention a "famous" jazz guitarist and somebody knows who they are. One of my bartenders, maybe 25, walked by with Django Rheinhardt playing on his phone. I was like, you listen to Django. And he was like, Django is the man!

 

[CatrionaGrace]

Spencer Bohren, a blues guy now no longer with us, named one of his sons Django.

 

[GrahamLewis]

I guess I'm pretty slow on the uptake, just now realizing the the blogs apparently missed the lifeboat when the old SS Writing Forum went down. I hadn't posted to mine in ages, thought I might do so today, and can't find it anywhere. Oh well, such is the ultimate ephemeral nature of all things. If my blog still existed I would post this there. I guess this is the closest place I can find. Though, as I realized by the end of my writing, I am not so much unhappy as resigned.

I recently recalled, unbidden so far as I know, an old phrase that my parents sometimes used with me, as a reminder of my youngest days. "From Kalamazoo to Timbuctoo, It's a long way down the track, And from Timbuctoo to Kalamazoo, It's just as far to go back." They said it was from a story they read to me almost incessantly long ago.

So I looked it up (it may be obvious to some people, but I had long ago lost sight of it). It's an old Golden Book boardbook, The Train to Timbuctoo, published in 1951, by famed child's book author Margaret Wise Brown. It would have come out during my earliest days, and dad was from a railroad family, so it all makes sense. I ordered the book from my library, picked it up today, and sat in a nearby coffee shop and read it, disregarding any curious glances from other customers. Didn't take long, of course.

The book ends with "And if you switch the names of the towns in the front of the book, you can get back to Kalamazoo."

I hoped that by reading the book at this end of my life I could maybe switch back the track of time, trigger some deepest memories, and return, however briefly, to those magical innocent days.

Not possible of course. It's a one-way journey. Railroad turntables no longer exist, and trains no longer turn around and go back.

Though I'm still waiting to see what pops up in my dreams.

I raised the vaguest awareness of my dad's voice reading it to me, and the Kalamazoo to Timbuctoo words are powerfully familiar. And I sense those days were there, and he was there, and I was there. And that's as far as I got.

One writer in the Buddhist tradition, Noelle Oxenhandler, has made this observation: "We're told that you can't change the past, but you can change how you frame it. And we're offered a range of different lenses . . . acceptance, forgiveness, gratitude."

Playing with those lenses, I find I'm grateful those days were there, I accept that their concrete existence is gone, and I forgive the universe its stubborn refusal to unbend.

 

[ps102]

just now realizing the the blogs

I really miss the blogs. This new forum is better in every way except this one.

 

[big soft moose]

we decided early we weren't doing blogs again, 5 reasons

1) if it is writing focused high quality content why not put it in a thread? blogs tend to canibalise content away from the boards which are the main focus of the site

2) if its not writing focused why do we want to use our bandwith and storage to give it a home? - that stuff can go to facebook, or blogger or whatever.

3)some people tend to use blogs to evade the no debate/ no unacceptable content rule, not to mention carrying on arguments already shut down on the board... like foxy loxy and his treatise on why women are the root of all evil, not to mention all the orange man bad/orange man son of god stuff

4) blogs attract spammers like mounds of shit attract flies...towards the end on the OG a good third of the blog content was buy moah viagra, and mail order brides and other such.

5) the blog function isn't native in XF its a plug in and a lot of them conflict really badly with other more useful plug ins

 

[Set2Stun]

Progress journals can serve this purpose for the most part. My entries are typically writing-focused, but I will also mix in some stuff about what's going on in my life, or some random thoughts. For less writing-specific content there, I'll just throw up a link to my website's journal in case anyone's interested.

 

[CatrionaGrace]

This news from a writers group friend made me very unhappy, but not the least bit surprised. Thieves and looters are everywhere.

If you or anyone on your publishing team uses Gmail, you need to hear this.

Yesterday, Google quietly flipped the switch on Gmail's "smart features"—automatically opting millions of users into allowing their private emails and attachments (including Word docs) to feed Gemini AI training models.

Yes, even unpublished manuscripts.

Even drafts you never sent.

This could affect you even if you don't personally use Gmail. If your agent, editor, beta readers, or anyone else on your team uses Gmail, Gemini has likely ingested your work.


I checked all nine of my gmail accounts and smart features theftware was switched on in all but one account, which I'll check again tomorrow. I turned them all off and will check the status regularly. I'll also mention this to others with whom I correspond regularly.

To get rid of it (at least for today)

Go to Settings in Gmail.

Click "see all settings."

Go to Google Workspace smart features.

Uncheck box to turn off smart features.

 

[Set2Stun]

Thanks homie. "Smart features" can get fucked.

 

[ps102]

This news from a writers group friend made me very unhappy, but not the least bit surprised. Thieves and looters are everywhere.

Thanks for letting us know! I had no idea.

I'm sick of these tech giants doing whatever they want (legal or illegal) and getting away with it.

 

[Madman Starryteller]

And I just uploaded all my commissioned art to Google drive... damn timing.

 

[Dante Dases]

Thanks for letting us know! I had no idea.

I'm sick of these tech giants doing whatever they want (legal or illegal) and getting away with it.

Ditto. Much as I sing the praises of AI as a labour-saving tool when used judiciously, what it then takes away to train itself is concerning. Add to that, everything now is cloud-based so I actually own nothing. The solution, of using USB sticks and external hard-drives, is increasingly hard to implement as a) hardware is increasingly moving away from hard, present storage and b) increasing levels of encryption are incompatible with home devices. The end result is that almost everything ends up in a cloud somewhere, unless it's handwritten.

Proper legislation could put a stop to it, but it would have to involve international agreement and, right now, it is unrealistic that governments can get heads together and reach an ethical global solution.

 

[Amontillado]

Here's something that made me unhappy last night. Just as I was finishing a blog post about a writing workflow, my office lit up with an intense reddish-orange flash. With the flash, an immense detonation launched me from my office chair in the general direction of the ceiling fan. Something significant happened at very close range.

Side note about Oncor, a Texas electric generation company. If you call, you get a voice menu with no escape to a human. You have the option of reporting an outage, a life threatening situation, or a couple of other things. None of those options are any use if you don't have an account number handy. When I finally got through to a human by way of transfer from a billing company's customer service, she logged my report as a "pop."

Yes! You've got it, I said. It was a pop, if a pop is what you hear when a prankster drops a stick of dynamite in your phone booth, or like the pop you heard from battleship Arizona's 16 inch guns, presuming your ear trumpet was close enough to the muzzle. It was a pop you could see, thanks to sonic compression of your occipital lobe. On a zero to ten volume scale, it was a pop Spinal Tap would have respectfully called it a 12.

Anyway, when The Event erupted I dashed out to investigate along with most of my neighbors.

There was nothing. No debris from fireworks, just a heavy cloud of smoke in the intersection, gray, acrid, and metallic, and not like conventional black powder fireworks.

My guess, one of the aliens on 3I/ATLAS flicked a cigarette butt at 200,000 km/h and it made quite a thump when it hit.

There were no power outages. I don't think that much noise could leak out of a transformer and not disrupt electric delivery.

Oncor said they will call back within two business days. My next guess, I'll never hear from them. That's probably OK. I don't think our big bang was from power systems.

 

[big soft moose]

space x had a rocket blow up at Brownsville texas yesterday... if you're near there it could have been debris, alternately there has been a fair bit of meteor activity over the american south lately

 

[Amontillado]

space x had a rocket blow up at Brownsville texas yesterday... if you're near there it could have been debris, alternately there has been a fair bit of meteor activity over the american south lately

We're in Central Texas not too far from Waco. Hope there were no injuries in Brownsville.

SpaceX bought the Beale Aerospace facilities on an old WW2 bomb factory in McGregor, which is about 60 miles away.

One night they did a test firing of a Falcon 9 engine. I can't imagine what that was like in McGregor. It was about 11 at night and very quiet here. I heard the test. Probably an advantageous thermal layer channeled the sound.