- I don’t think I’m actually going to be using this, and not least of all because I almost never use Chrome or its extensions, but this is interesting: Jailbreak the Patriarchy, an extension that gender-swaps all the pronouns. [via]
- The YA Paranormal Drinking Game [via]
- “It has come to our attention that Ayn Rand was in fact a self-serving sociopath. We regret the error.” Copies of the Atlas Shrugged DVD pulled because they (very mistakenly) called it a “timeless novel of courage and self-sacrifice” [via]
- Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Fun Home will be a musical. That’s…interesting.
- And finally, these Paranormal United States [via]
movies
Bloody heck
I lead such an exciting life that I fell asleep yesterday evening before I could write anything about my day here. Which is maybe just as well, since nothing much happened yesterday. Looking back on it, I can’t think of a single thing that separated it from any of a dozen other days.
Today was a little different. First I mailed some packages that needed mailing at the post office, and then I drove to a local mall to donate blood. I’m a semi-regular donor, so I get e-mails about the blood drives in my area, and apparently there’s an increased need for A+ blood, which is what I happen to have. I’m always happy to help when I can, and when it’s relatively convenient, so I drove over as a walk-in.
They were still in the process of setting up, inside an abandoned nail salon on the mall’s first floor, but despite the line of people already there (around 11 o’clock) I wasn’t waiting too long. In retrospect, I probably should have used the time I was waiting to do something productive, like take in some more fluids.
I wasn’t at all dehydrated, and I’d had breakfast. Like I said, I’ve given blood before and I know the drill. But I could have used more fluids. Because, for one, my blood just wasn’t coming out. The nurse technician spent a lot of time adjusting my arm, asking me to make a fist, release, and re-adjusting the needle. Which, honestly, was not fun. I’m not especially squeamish, but anything that reminds me there’s a large needle sticking into my arm — like looking at the blood circling out or a woman pulling the needle out, pushing it back in — is going to get to me.
After a while, it started to hurt, but it was bearable, and we seemed to have hit upon an arm placement that worked for getting the blood out of it.
And then I got to feeling light-headed, and that was all she wrote.
A few minutes earlier, the woman behind me had passed out. I couldn’t see it happen, but I heard them reviving her and calling her name. She seemed fine after, and it’s apparently not at all an uncommon occurrence — I’ve seen it happen a few times myself, including the very first time I gave blood, back in high school — but everyone was on heightened alert. They immediately put my feet up and my head back, put ice behind my head, and had me relax my arm.
If you tell them at a blood drive that you feel light-headed, they take that very seriously. I remember once, in college, I said, after donating, that I maybe felt a little dizzy. Like, maybe just enough that I wanted someone to hold my arm as we walked over to the juice and cookies, rather than going it alone. I didn’t feel really woozy. I did today, so I’m glad I said something. I felt better laying back, and apparently that’s all my arm needed to start giving up the blood. The tech joked that I didn’t want to do any work except lying down with my feet up, but it did seem to work.
After, I had some of the juice and pretzels provided, and then a bottle of water from the vending machine on my way out of the mall. They tell you to drink plenty of fluids. I didn’t drink enough going in; I didn’t want to repeat that mistake going out.
Beyond that, the day has actually been surprisingly uneventful. I watched an okay (but not amazing) movie called Criminal, and I watched some episodes of Cheers and Community. Yep, real exciting.
“This is too much madness to fit into one text!”
Let’s see, what did I do today?
I got a haircut. My standard practice of just letting it grow until it gets annoying stands. I could be wrong — I wasn’t wearing my glasses and didn’t do a thorough inspection — but I may have spotted some small amount of gray in the clippings. Hairs of dubious shades show up in my beard all the time, but I can never quite tell if what I’m looking at is some weird anomaly or a precursor of aging to come. Going gray doesn’t bother me — not quite, but almost, the opposite. Going bald, on the other hand, which I think is probably also in the cards for me — if I take an honest look at both family history and my existing hairline — well, I have to admit, the little bit of vanity I have towards my hair gets a little twinge at the thought. But I’m not quite there yet, and the mop I do have was in need of a trim.
So I did that. And I mailed several dozen copies of Kaleidotrope to contributors and subscribers. You really don’t want to know how much that sort of thing costs. Mailing to Canada is relatively cheap; mailing to the UK is remarkably not so. If you’d like to support the zine, and you’d like a copy of the current issue, can I suggest the slightly cheaper (for all of us) e-book copy? It’s a no-frills PDF, but for $2.99 you get almost 100 pages of fantasy and science fiction stories and poems. You can check out the table of contents, along with the cover art and story samples, here. And all the money goes to keeping me from going bankrupt in 2012…when everything I save by not photocopying and not mailing may just get eaten back up by the one cent a word I’m paying contributors.
I also bought some pants. Sometimes, you need pants.
I went for a walk. I watched the latest episode of Fringe. And tonight I watched Attack the Block, a genuinely entertaining monsters-from-outer-space movie.
And that was Saturday, in a nutshell.
Wednesday various
- “When It’s Not Your Turnâ€: The Quintessentially Victorian Vision of Ogden’s “The Wire†[via]
- The Content Farm: “Informative articles about every topic, written by people with a passing knowledge.” [via]
- War Dog:
Dogs have been fighting alongside U.S. soldiers for more than 100 years, seeing combat in the Civil War and World War I. But their service was informal; only in 1942 were canines officially inducted into the U.S. Army. Today, they’re a central part of U.S. efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan — as of early 2010 the U.S. Army had 2,800 active-duty dogs deployed (the largest canine contingent in the world). And these numbers will continue to grow as these dogs become an ever-more-vital military asset. [via]
- If Housepets Were Libertarians
- And finally…
X-Men: First Class Title Sequence from Joe D! on Vimeo. [via
Tuesday various
- A is for Ackbar [via]
- You’ve almost certainly heard this, but it’s worth repeating again and again and again: Ayn Rand received Social Security and Medicare. [via]
- 8-Bit vs. Reality [via]
- Lost Boys is Michael. A strangely compelling cut of the movie. (See also: it’s shelley duvall! many, many times!)
- And finally, Cat Rambo shares with writers 5 Things To Do In Your First 3 Paragraphs