DeputyJournal(tm)

So it's been a while, hasn't it. I hope you're all well out there in internet-land, whoever might be reading this.

Life's been really good to me this year. Had a lot of good time with friends and family, work and health are both going well. My apartment continues to be wonderful. I got a new car, and it's working out quite well.

I've been on hormones for almost 4 months now. The changes are amazing. I've come out pretty much everywhere in my social life: I just haven't told my employer and coworkers yet, and I'm planning on not doing so until I'm... a bit more ready for that. I need to get more of a professional wardrobe. I don't have much in the way of the more feminine sorts of clothes yet. I bought a really cute dress last month, but haven't had really an opportunity to wear it out yet. Next month, my BFF and I are planning on going out for a nice dinner just the two of us, and I'll wear it then. We were going to go this month, but things got in the way.

I'm nervous, but I'm not really afraid anymore. Even my parents are on board, and I never expected that. They've still got a ways to go, they're still in the habit of referring to me as their son, but I'm giving them gentle nudges, and they're responding well to them.

I think I'm going to leave this one public. I'm not...afraid anymore. I feel happy.

I've been tumblring for about a year now. You can find my tumblr in my profile. I'm not terribly active, mostly the lurkish sort.

Well, that's enough for now, I suppose. I hope you all are well.

So, funny story about how I noticed that my tv has a very brief delay.

So I was playing some DDR, like you do -- and after I'd been playing a while, I noticed that I was stepping just before the arrows hit the template, instead of on the template, like you're supposed to. Like 5-8 pixels worth of space. But I was still scoring plenty of perfects. How is this? So, next song, before the arrows started, I tested, and yeah, the arrow blinking as I hit the button was just a little off.

You know you play too much DDR when you're just using the arrows as a guideline.

Sweet Eris, this homework is painful. "The mugs cost $4 and sell for $11. What is the mark-up?" Two chapters ago we were calculating standard deviation. And now this?!

These wild mood swings of late can end any time now. Preferably when I'm up at a really good mood and feeling generally positive about life in general, please.

Shaved off my moustache yesterday. I've had it near all of my adult life -- feels weird to see it gone, it's like my face is way different while still recognizable. Hopefully it doesn't freak out my two-year-old niece. It also feels weird. First thing I noticed was being able to feel it against my upper lip when I breath. Still feels weird. And all the other sensations of my upper lip not being bristly or covered in hair, but just plain flesh. It feels like it isn't really my own upper lip yet, you know what I mean? Feels a little disconnected yet. The flesh even feels textured different from what I'm used to with my skin. It's nothing close like body horror or dysphoria, just... different and weird. Well, I'm planning on trying it out for a month or so and see how I feel then, so if I still feel weird about it I'll just grow it back again.

Well, it's pushing me a little more androgynous, at least.

And apparently I'm posting to LJ again.

Current Music: Seanan McGuire - Cartography

Dear Comcast "Product Specialist",

Please don't call me 'buddy'.
Please don't call me 'buddy' when you're calling me, an hour and a half after the time you said you'd be by, letting me know you're not coming by because it's your daughter's 16th.
Please don't call me 'buddy' with that 'what stupid thing did you do' tone of voice when I let you know that I got myself a better deal than the one you offered me while you were going door to door.
Please don't assume that I didn't read the large-print 'Buyer's Right to Cancel' clause on the contract you handed me, and figure that once I signed up for the deal that you were pushing, that I wouldn't go seeing if there wasn't a better deal after all.
Please don't lie to me and tell me that my bill was about to go up over $60/mo, when customer care informs me that the normal price for my type of service is $39/mo.
Please don't act like you only care about making sure that my account isn't messed up, when every action you take just screams 'commission-hunting'.

Finally, you getting my personal information, and coming to my door to upsell me on your product and then later calling me? That's creepy, dude. That's you coming out and explicitly telling me that you have access to all of my personal information and are willing to abuse it for your own ends.

I'll be there, having fun. Anyone else planning to, who wants to meet up at some point? I'm not hotelling in the con hotel, because I didn't feel like spending more for hotel than for gaming...

FFS...

You know that your move is going poorly, when the easiest part of it is going to the DMV/SOS...

First I had to prove to Comcast that I wasn't the previous tenant, using post-dated mail (because when I called up the landlord to get the copy of my lease he said he'd get to me soon, 'going back to the office to copy it and then be right over' takes three hours...)

And then when I plug the ethernet cable from the router into the back of my desktop, it reboots and then tells me 'Ethernet controller drivers? Which drivers are those? Oh! Want me to search on the internet for them?'

According to the dictionary, the word 'insure' can also be used for the word 'ensure'. Seeing as how we have a perfectly good word 'ensure', and a perfectly different meaning with insure, it strikes me as backwards, confusing, and wrong for insure to be used as both. I will continue to see them as discrete words, whatever the dictionary says, and I will continue to get that ping of wrongness whenever I see someone use insure to mean ensure. Especially in professionally published works.

Consider yourselves duly noted.

Current Mood: pedantic

Because I'm clearly not working hard enough, I got a new job in my dreams. Working at a library, making sure that the new shipment of books (or latest returns from patrons, not sure which) got properly organized and then stocked on the shelves. There was some sort of a subplot going on, something else was happening behind the scenes that I was supposed to be in on, but it clearly wasn't nearly as important as getting those books sorted and up. I got up to the Gs before more books in the Bs appeared spontaneously, and I had to shift things to make more space. And then my alarm went off, letting me know it's time to wake up to start getting ready for my actual job. Yay.

Some of you know that I work at the Michigan Hall of Justice, home to the Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court. I work in the finance office, but I still get the daily court-related news feed, which often points me towards cases of interest. I followed a link to a few articles about one case that sounded interesting today, on a Fourth Amendment/Unlawful Search case that the Court of Appeals did an opinion on. It was interesting enough that I ended up following it up to the actual COA opinion, read it through, and then thought about my own opinion on the matter, and decided to write up my own two cents. If people are interested, I've written out the information behind the cut, and there's also a link to the opinion itself.

( Cut for the details and my own personal legal opinion, since it's fairly longCollapse )

I'm curious as to people's opinions as well. Would people be interested in seeing more stuff like this from me? Do people agree/disagree with me?

And as for the subject title, I was idly considering setting up an actual blog (of the terribly clever name "I Am Not A Lawyer, But-") depending on how I found writing this up to be, and how it was received.

Look, I understand, you're an established convention and you expect people to know what you're about...but would it hurt you to be a little less dense, and actually explain certain things on your website? Like..having something other than driving directions on your 'about' page? Or, when you list everything that comes on the 'day pass'... explaining the difference between a 'day pass' and a normal registration? Or listing on the 'registration' page how much a normal registration actually costs? And what the 'tickets' and so forth that you talk about on there mean?

In other words, would you mind having a website for your convention that has information on it that people who aren't regulars might want to know?

There are few things quite so creepy as dreams that very accurately describe reality, except for a few little details.

Like the one I just semi-woke up from. I was in my bedroom, which in almost all respects was identical to my bedroom as it really is. I go up to my bedroom window, and look out, and there it is. This...floating black mechanic orb, hovering around outside, exploring. Not exploring, almost -searching-. Or waiting. I saw it in great detail, and I can still remember the great detail in which it was visible in my dream's eye. Rather than wax on about it, I will post a link to a rather close approximation of what it looked like: http://images.wikia.com/starwars/images/2/23/IT-O_negtd.jpg

The dream, and that menacing-looking orb had the ring of familiarity about it, as though I'd seen it before -- or had dreams about it before, though as I'm awake it feels right on the cusp of remembering whether I had or not. It suddenly felt important that I take evidence that it was there, before it disappeared for the night -- because it would always float away just before the sky started to lighten, I remembered. So I grabbed my digital camera, fiddled with it for a moment to make sure that I knew how it worked properly, and that the flash was properly working, opened my window and pulled away the storm glass so that the flash wouldn't reflect, and started taking pictures, hitting the 'zoom' button to try to get a better view.

At first it seemed to disappear for a moment. I saw, down near the base of one of the trees in the front yard a pair of oversized children's toys, a stuffed bear, and oddly what appeared to be a stuffed green army man -- I could see the stitching on it. For some reason I took photos of that as well.

But then the floating orb reappeared. Looking back at me. I closed up the blinds and hid for a moment, then peeked out....taking more photos as it was obscured by a tree, and saw it extrude what looked like mechanical arms, coming back and forth. And I suddenly wondered: Was it a good idea to so openly take pictures of this, expose myself to it. What would it do now? I had the thought of quickly uploading the pictures before anything happened -- but the idea of escape, of getting to safety won instead. So I woke up.

And I immediately started cataloguing the differences between that dream and reality; there were few enough, but obvious enough. And no, no menacing orb outside. It was far too dark to see it so easily if it were there, besides, and the wrong time of night.

But still, creepy as hell. And somehow I know I've had a dream like that before.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/elfsternberg/5720633873

The caption: "Today I pretended to be Gordon Freeman."

Kinda late notice, but for folks in the Lansing area, the local gaming store is hosting a 24-hour gaming party at Great Lakes Christian College, fundraising for the American Cancer Society, and I'm planning on going. Happening on this Friday, the 6th at 1pm...they're planning on having it be a whole 24 hour deal, but I'm not sure how long I'm going to be there for.

That's board/card/D&D gaming, not video gaming, btw. There's going to be Flux, Battlestar Galactica, and probably quite a few other things there, I know I'm going to be bringing my big bag o' games with my varieties of Munchkin.

So despite people's best advice, I decided to head out on the internet and see that video 'Friday' by Rebecca Black. Well, first off, it took awhile to find it, as apparently the parodies are more relevant to the search terms than the actual video is...

So I find the video, and watch it and listen to it and... okay... so the big deal is what, exactly? Yeah, it's an insipid pop song, and her voice is oversynthed. And? No worse than Kei$ha or whatever her stage name is (assuming that she's the presently hyped-up synthvoice star that I'm hearing all over lately).

In short, internet, take a chill pill and relax.

What do you call it when something that used to mean everything to you, was one of the most important things in your life -- when you look at it now, and you feel nothing at all for it?

Eris help me, but the only thing I can think is 'growing up'.

Dear Conference-goers:

You are going to a work-related Continuing Education conference. You are aware that you are, and you probably signed up about a month in advance. You know that there is important information there, and that you'll probably want to take notes, right? Right. Because there will be speakers speaking on subject matter that pertains to your job, and there'll be information you'll want to remember and refer back to, and things you'll want to share with your co-workers, or anyone else.

So why are you whinging about the conference staff not providing you with note paper? Seriously, you know you're going to want to take notes, so why are you leaving responsibility for providing you with the ability to do so in the hands of other people?

In short: You're going to a work-related conference. Act like the professionals you're supposed to be and be prepared, already. Buy your own notepads, you can get them for a buck at the dollar store.

And yes, it's cold in the conference rooms. Newsflash: It's -always- cold in conference rooms. You live in Michigan. Learn to layer.

Oscar, a can with experimental prosthetic feet.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vcy78rnDKiQ

I have just finished reading one of the most difficult books I have ever read -- Catherynne Valente's "Palimpsest". Oozing with imagery, dreamy and almost reading like a hallucinagenic drug-trip would read (or so I would imagine, never having had any such thing personally), and with the true goals only arising slowly, as though Luke Skywalker were forced to take on Prometheus's role in old Greek mythology, except with his X-wing from the mire rather than a boulder up a hill.

And I didn't read the same book that most everyone else did. Oh, it's all the same words, all the same font and punctuation and typesetting -- but I very clearly read a different book.

Palimpsest is the most subtle horror story I've ever read.