pro tip: wash the car windows before going to a drive-thru safari
So.
I don’t know how to say it, so I’m just going to drop it here:
Guinness has been diagnosed with Degenerative Myelopathy.
When he was diagnosed with arthritis in his hips, it was expected. He’s a 12 year old, German Shepherd. Bad hips are a fact of life.
What was not expected was going to see a canine neurologist and having to listen to her tell me that we should really think about putting him to sleep.
The Zest Legacy, 2nd Generation: Bryce and Nathan Richardson
I don’t make it a secret amongst friends that I retreat into video games when the world becomes too much.
I’m probably a year into hardcore playing the Sims again. I cycle in and out of the Sims because the game gets boring, but this might be the longest I’ve been in deep.
All that to say, the new Sims expansion pack is really frosting my cookies.
Let’s start with the size and scope of the expansion pack: Growing Together is a complete overhaul of generational gameplay.
They’ve reorganised the social pie menus. Added a whole new life state (infants). Changed the way Sims interact with different personality markers. A memory system of sorts.
I’ve only been playing with it today because it took me most of yesterday to update my mods. (I have a metric fuck ton of custom content and mods. WAAAAAAAAY too many.)
The Sims team practically rewrote huge chunks of code to shoehorn infants into the base game and then added even more into gameplay by adding the new expansion pack.
Let’s also add the fact that the base game is now free so there are more players using mods.
There are several major mod tech support Discord servers and, from what I can gather, they are shutting down for a few days because of the amount of abuse the volunteers are getting.
A change this large has broken every single mod I have. I knew it would. I was expecting it to.
Mod developers have been SHOUTING to remove their mods and to make sure they were updated before you put them back into your game.
Yet, people don’t pay attention. It’s easier to let the game get completely destroyed and then bitch in the support servers.
I haven’t seen anything this ugly in a long time.
It’s a fucking video game. A buggy video game which (I think) is almost completely unplayable without mods now.
I love my mods, and yes, it is a major pain in the ass to manage them but I made the choice to play with them, and that’s something *I* need to deal with.
Screaming at the person who has spent hours making the things I can’t live without, KNOWING that they’re not getting anything from EA for fixing the game, doesn’t accomplish anything except making the modders quit…
But… dealing with the fallout from that isn’t bad enough.
Nope.
Apparently, if you live in Ukraine, your version of the Sims is geolocked. If you want the new expansion pack, you’re screwed.
They get language choices of Czech, Polish, or Russian. No English language version at all.
But, wait, there’s more!
If you live in Ukraine, you can only pay for your game using rubles.
RUBLES.
This is problematic for two reasons:
1) The hryvnia is the official currency of Ukraine.
2) Russian rubles are not allowed to be used in Ukraine thanks to the invasion.
Apparently, Ukrainian Simmers are reaching out to EA and complaining about those things.
And EA is constantly deleting the forum posts, shutting them down, and otherwise ignoring them.
This makes me so fucking cranky.
Grrrrrrrrrrrrr
But, aren’t my Sims up there adorable? They’re from my favourite legacy to date.
THAT I CANNOT PLAY WITH BECAUSE EA BROKE MY MODS.
I started a new save file because I don’t want to destroy my boys and their kids. Once everything is up to date, I’ll go back to them.
And while I’m impatient, I’m certainly not going to go to Discord and scream at people.
just like the real citgo sign, it only works about 85% of the time
Favorite American Artist: Matt Nathanson
Concert: 10 February 2023, Fort Lauderdale
Ticket Acquired: ✅
Favourite Ukrainian Band: Океан Ельзи
Concert: 27 April 2023, Miami
Ticket Acquired: ✅
Second Favourite Ukrainian Band: Антитіла
Concert: 18 October 2023, Miami
Ticket Acquired: ✅
Third Favourite Ukrainian Band: Бумбокс
Concert: 8 March 2023, Miami
Ticket Acquired: ✅
New Love: KALUSH
Concert: 10 March 2023, Orlando
Ticket Acquired: ✅
If you’ve been around me for any length of time, you know how much live music means to me. I mean, fuck, I used to drive to Upstate NY as much as I could to see Black Mountain Symphony. There were countless trips to Connecticut for Instrument and All Crazy shows. That doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of what I jokingly called “Scott-the-Roadie: Live at UConn” - all the BiG MiSTAKE, Frogboy, and Spring Heeled Jack shows I used to attend with him. Then, there were the nights at The Sting, and the nights at Toad’s Place. A random concert in Maryland. The day I went to a gathering at Bird’s that turned into an impromptu concert only to leave and catch BMS in Providence. (That, my friends, was probably one of my more ridiculous weekends: I drove through four New England states in less than 24 hours.)
Thinking about it, I’ve probably spent more of my life at live shows than I have engaging in any of my other hobbies in my life to date.
Of course, I don’t have the luxury of getting in the car and driving to NY anymore. It breaks my heart to think of the ridiculous logistics nightmare leaving Florida has become. There’s a plane ticket, and a hotel, and a rental car… I hate shit like that. I just want to get in the car and go. The drive itself is as therapeutic as the live show. All planes, hotels, and rental cars do is stress me the fuck out.
There is one unexpected perk of being exiled to Florida - the massive Ukrainian community in Miami.
I haven’t been kidding when I’ve babbled on about how thrilled I am about the opportunity to see ALL of my favourite Ukrainian bands.
Granted, I hate the reason why they’re all on tour, but… at the same time…
I GET TO SEE ALL FOUR OF MY FAVOURITE UKRAINIAN BANDS THIS YEAR!!!!
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I went on a deep dive in YouTubeLand to find live video of KALUSH and… expectations matched reality.
Seriously.
This video confirmed that I’ve been to too many shows.
When you can perfectly imagine a show just by listening to the recorded versions of songs, you know that shit needs to be a resume-level skill.
I’m always that person who takes charge of a group project when people are slacking… this time, I bulldozed a Captain.
In my defence, not a single person on the team was offering anything up, and I have charities that mean a shit-ton to me.
FRC is attempting a new format for racery - teams of five people randomly chosen, a fundraising component, and all the shenanigans we’ve grown to love.
I’m really looking forward to this one. The last few just haven’t been fun because people talk offline and make teams full of super cappers. They take off and are impossible to catch… but, with random people creating teams? We might actually have a chance to have fun this go ‘round.
So any way - I wanted to choose Cobblestone for our charity, but that didn’t work out. (Cobblestone hooked us up with with our trip to Lviv, sent us the most amazing tour guide ever, and now are helping support his family through donations. I donate as much as I can, when I can.) Unfortunately, Cobblestone isn’t a registered charity in Canada yet.
I asked if we could fundraise for Razom for Ukraine. This is a better known charity and absolutely massive. I’d rather donate to them, if I can’t directly donate to Ukrainians hurt by the lack of tourism.
Razom is the transliterated version of разом - the Ukrainian word for together. (It’s pronounced “rah-zom”)
The team ran with the word, brainstormed different ways to use razom in the team name, and we settled on razoomies, because, well, we’ll zoom.
Razombies was also thrown out there. I loved that one, too.
Our team colours were also chosen for us. The Ukrainian flag serving as inspiration.
I know it’s trendy right now to care about Ukraine, but - of course - this means so much to me, personally.
I’ve been crying on and off, I’ve been so touched by the interest.
I have bunch of hashtags chosen for the race itself and I’m so excited to use them.
If we’re friends on Facebook, you’re about to get sick of the relentless posts sending you to the racery fundraising link. And I’d apologise, but sorry, not sorry.
And I devoured that fucker in between bouts of swearing at iTunes / Apple Music / whatever the fuck Apple is calling it now. DEVOURED.
YES. IT IS SO GOOD IT DESERVES SOME SERIOUS ALL CAPS LOVING. AND THE REALLY GOOD LUBE.
There is something amazing about her writing, and whether it’s Steter / Stetopher / original characters, she always delivers. I think the majority of my AO3 Teen Wolf bookmarks are her stories.
I don’t remember how I found out about it, but now I see that she’s co-written an entire series of LGBTQIA+ stories with Discontented Winter. (And - rabbit hole alert! - this just made my entire fucking, um, 15 minutes.)
I’m going to need to get a tumblr account again just to follow those two.
Just like I had to get a new twitter account for the balloon ladies tracker.
Every time I think it’s OK to get rid of an orphaned account, AS SOON AS I HIT “DELETE MY ACCOUNT”, shit happens.
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An entire lifetime ago, when I bought the new MBP, I decided to shelve the old iMac. I didn’t need two computers on my desk; not when one of them basically served as a jukebox.
I took my little LaCie drive that had my iTunes library on it, (bought a FUCKING ADAPTER. For fuck’s sake, Apple. STOP IT.), and fired up the Music app.
Holy Jesus motherfucking crispy Christ on a fucking bike.
I had multiple versions of songs. And I don’t mean twelve different versions of R.E.M.‘s “It’s the End of the World…” - I have twelve of those because it’s on Best Ofs, bootlegs, and studio albums.
I mean I have six different “Spin, Spin, Sugar” files in my hard drive, each one sitting happily as a line in the iTunes song listing.
Apparently, the app made a habit of creating a music folder when 1) it downloaded a song and 2) every time it decided / forced me to “organize” my library.
So, I had music folders in music folders in music folders in music folders in.. you get the gist, yes?
And every single one of those folders held MY ENTIRE MUSIC LIBRARY.
I filled up a massive external hard drive with music because Apple decided to duplicate my music folder every fucking time it felt like it.
I’ve been cleaning it up in bits and pieces because when you have a dozen files named “01_Intro” you have to be VERY FUCKING CAREFUL. (Why do bootleggers all name their files like this?!?! I mean, I love the consistency, but I can’t tell if that intro is from Boston ‘95 or Boston ‘03. Just sayin’...)
I’m also overwriting the metadata on the music files - I HATE transliterated Ukrainian, so I’m putting everything into Cyrillic. Now, everything shows up in iTunes the way God intended it to. (But seriously, fuck record labels who use transliterated Ukrainian on albums.)
I’ve been buying new music on the phone and then downloading it to the computer. THEN, I have to go into the new, clean, pretty, hard drive, REMOVE THE MUSIC FOLDER, and put the songs where they actually fucking belong.
It doesn’t seem to like the fact that my music folder is “LaCie/iTunes/Music” - I’m pretty sure that’s what’s confusing things… but when I have the location as “LaCie/iTunes” Apple rejects the location and claims it can’t find my iTunes library.
I have some random files still to find and I am missing entire R.E.M. bootlegs, so that’s going to be a search. I also need to pull the playlists off the iMac at some point.
But, I’m considering the task done.
I can listen to music when I’m sitting at the computer again.
I’ll take that as a win.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
In other news, I only finished the 5K and the 10K this year. Dopey attempt #2 shat the bed.
(The husband was there to watch the epic fail, but that’s a story for another time… it only took a $50 gift card to Pure Hockey (which I bought before he became an unsupportive ass thankyouverymuch) for him to understand what it means to support someone. grrrrrrrrrrrrr)
I know there’s a lot of factors at play and the asthma seems to be the biggest issue. I was struggling to breathe after pushing myself for 9 miles and a medic practically forced me off the course.
I hated the pulmonologist I saw, so I have to find another one.
I’m also trying to figure out what I do about running… I had a goal to move every day, even if it’s just a mile on the treadmill in my jammies.
And I promptly threw that plan out the window and have been sat here, licking my wounds, and refusing to even think about the treadmill.
2023 and I are not getting off to the best start.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Oh wait.
I lied.
I’m a lying liar who lies because…
I HAVE HIT A MUSICAL TRIFECTA.
I’m seeing Matt Nathanson (Mike Nickerson? Matt Petty? Whatever the fuck his name is.) in February. Dropped a shit ton on the pre-show hang, too. Love those extra moments with him. Even if I can’t remember his name.
I’m seeing БУМБОКС(!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) in March. They’re finally coming overseas. I mean, I forgive them for cancelling on last March’s show, and I hate that this a fundraising / awareness raising tour, but they’re FINALLY coming.
And and and and and and and and and and and and…
MOTHERFUCKING ОКЕАН ЕЛЬЗИ IS COMING TO MIAMI IN APRIL.
Bonus: Антитіла is coming overseas in the fall. No idea where or when, but I’m there. Even if I have to get on a plane.
Still pissed I missed KALUSH because of Wine and Dine, but…
Бумбокс, Океан Ельзи, and Антитіла are the Ukrainian OG Three and I get to see ALL THREE OF THEM THIS YEAR.
I don’t think I’ve ever been more satisfied, music wise.
(Also, I think it’s time to be frightened by the amount of time I spend on the internet. I wanted to find out what “a trifecta but four” was and, wow, that was the first autofill suggestion google came up with. I don’t know if I should hang my head in shame over that or laugh hysterically.)
(Spoiler: I laughed hysterically. And fell off the damn chair.)
To be honest, I had forgotten about it and scheduled a dog grooming appointment in that time slot instead.
For what it’s worth, I was completely overwhelmed at the amount of information there was. It just seemed like too much work for a one-off. Yeah. Despite having a bunch of pocket friends who play, I’m just not interested.
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I thought I’d end this with my most favourite songs from the four bands I’m seeing this year, but some of them have already been posted. And besides, how do I pick my favourite????
I’m just going randomize that shit and give you whatever the magic wheel spits out. (Just like a Mike Nickerson show!)
We’ll start with The Infamous Wheel just so you get the joke. (Bonus! We were at this show.)
When the sun is getting lower // and your wildest days are done // and they ask you ‘bout a photograph // from back when you were young // well, baby, you don’t have to tell ‘em // what we did when we were us // but when I think about it // I hope you blush, just a little bit…
Скажi менi, чому не можу // Забути те, чого нема.
Tell me why I cannot // forget what I do not have.
Хворі ми хворобою однією // На щастя ще не вигадали від неї панацею // На голову мов злива впала ця вразлива манія // Діагноз – меломанія, в нас з вами – меломанія
We are sick with the same disease. // Fortunately no panacea for it hasn’t been discovered yet. // This vulnerable mania has fallen on my head like a rainfall. // The diagnosis is melomania. We all have melomania.
[Melomania: A singular passion for music, that is beyond all reason. An abnormal love of music. A hobby or even an excessive fanaticism for music.]
Люби вільно, цілуй поволі. // Прощай швидко, або ніколи. // Часу мало, маєш дійти. // Хочеш правди? Мусиш знайти. // Люди далi прокидаються. // Люди далi не ховаються. // Нова глибина напроти нас. // Отакий цiкавий час.
Love freely but kiss slowly. // Forgive faster or never know it. // There’s a few time for you to come // You need the truth so find it now. // People keeping waking up. // People no more hiding now. // There’s new deepness here ahead. // Interesting the time we have…
