Scribbles and Bits

Rogan: another aphantasia post! Realized it’d be easier to convey the sensory experience through text!

I wake up in the morning. The “real” sun is beaming through the “real” window, and I am snug and warm under the blankets. In our headspace, I am also in bed, also snug and warm, but there is no sun, and I couldn’t perceive it if there were. Instead, there is Mac, a warm drowsing weight over my chest and side. He is still asleep.

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Rogan: I‘m going to do it! I’m gonna start running a mile every day!

Mac (who has the energy of a Jack Russell terrier): YESSSS AT LAST! WORKOUT BOYFRIENDS!

( It gets better after the first week! )

Quick notes on life happenings:

• what started as a weekend getaway turned into “oops, home’s bathroom is unusable, can’t really go home.” We really need shit to stop blowing up. (At least, after three cancellations of increasingly humble anniversary plans, Rogan and Mac finally got a weekend to relax in between disasters? But seriously, I want to go home to my workstation, Madgic won’t finish itself.)
• At least most of our big gay packages have come in. We needed that win.
• We finally got to find out who translated our plural history essays into Chinese! It was Simplex Systems! Thanks, guys!
• we found out the above because Nobody (a median) reached out to us about translating other posts we had made into Chinese! It’s crazy to think our stupid little posts about Anglophone plural slapfights would be of interest to Chinese plurals across the sea, but we could use the win!

Rogan: this month has been a 28 episode month so far. I have now had more episodes in the past 3 months than I did in all of 2023. 109 was my record for most episodes in a year (in 2020), and I have already blown past that in a year that’s not even half over.

That I have managed to not just avoid hospitalization, but not flub any of my biggest business responsibilities is, I’m telling myself, an accomplishment to be proud of, even if I feel like microwaved dogshit and haven’t been growing my business how I would like.

I just keep reminding myself, through gritted teeth as necessary, that this cannot last forever. One way or another, I’ll get where I need to be. But anyway, that’s why I’ve been quiet.

We had fun making a little headmate relationship map. :B Originally intended for our therapist, since our brain is throwing a lot of old names into the mix that she has no reason to have heard of.
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Mori: we have many text files on our hard drive titled "How To (insert thing here)", which contain all the annoying things we need to remember, but not so often that they're easy to recall. (You know, how to reinstall custom dictionaries in LibreOffice, how to fix when our tablet's pressure sensitivity fails, how to turn whites transparent in GIMP...) Somewhere along the way, we developed the habit of ending these helpful tips with something along the lines of, "you're welcome, future self."

It works. Every time I don't have to Google how to convert straight quotes to curly, I feel gratitude to my helpful, thoughtful past self looking out for me. What a great guy! And whenever I make a new document explaining how to fix that stupid thing (like when I had to do a step-by-step How To Do All Your Taxes.txt) I'm able to weather the frustration by knowing how much trouble it will spare my future self.

Thank you, past self! You're welcome, future self.

Three ordinary plebian objects that I will never choose to live without again:

1. Left-handed scissors
2. Long-arm stapler
3. A bone folder

Why did I live so long without these objects? Being able to easily fold and staple zines out of any damn thing I desire (thanks to roomie's printer) has spared my shoulder so much pain.

Insightful decade-old blog posts from someone who's since disappeared off the Internet? Print, staple, fold. Academic articles on fiction-based religion that are murder to read in fifteen-minute increments on my desktop? Print, staple, fold. Some short comic that went out of print fifteen years ago, cannot be bought anymore, but got reposted online in a horribly inaccessible (yet high-res) way? Print, staple, fold! Need to go over my own work and edit multiple times? PRINT, STAPLE, FOLD! PRINT, STAPLE, FOLD!

My life is forever changed and improved. I live a life of riches and abundance, all thanks to maybe $30 and ransacking the closed-down Theology School for office supplies.

...oh shit I just realized I could print out a bunch of the old SBing experience database from twenty years ago and read and annotate at leisure! I could just print and bind all my stupid plural sources, organize them properly, and NEVER LOSE THEM AGAIN. I AM DRUNK WITH POWER.

Biff is sick of us complaining about having to do workarounds for anything longer than fifty pages, so he's considering learning how to stitch together book covers using scrap cardboard, rubber cement, and/or needle and thread. If he does indeed end up doing this, move over Elon Musk, because we are now the richest.

Sneak: I added length and genre tags to pluralstories , so now people can filter by those criteria. (The short/medium/long tags by necessity have to be somewhat arbitrary, so I defined them in a metadata post here.) Three folks have submitted stories already, which is very exciting to me! :D And a couple people have corrected me on tags and content warnings, which I appreciate very much. Thanks, guys!

( Tag planning and a fancy new possession. )

In the course of his Marie Kondo-ing his way through everything we own, Biff tackled our clothes. And he discovered something: we were wearing the equivalent of cheese pizza and vanilla ice cream.

Biff: "Okay, guys, what if we made it so everybody gets at least one fucking outfit they like. Not don't-hate, but like. And we got rid of all this shit nobody likes."

Us: "?!"

Biff: *holds up shirt* "Do ANY of you actually like this fucking thing?"

Us: "..."

Biff: *shoves into donate sack*

Us: "!!!!!!!! WHAT WILL WE WEAR"

Biff: "SHIT WE FUCKING LIKE THAT'S WHAT"

( Our magical clothes shopping adventure where nobody gets murdered in a fit of wardrobe wrath. )