thedarlingone

I knew it was bad but I'd forgotten just how fucking bad The Broca Divide is, jesus christ. We've got rapist cavemen which I knew about, but also the first redshirt to turn caveman/animalistic is a black guy, Carter being the one to attack Jack which I had forgotten and is played even creepier -- oh I hate Janet's hair, wow, not that that's nearly as important -- we've got the stupid "men get violent women get sexy" split. Rick does have a *lot* of fun with the crazed screaming, he always gives fantastic whumpface.

The dialogue is actually really good! Everyone's on point when they're sane, Hammond gets to be a hardass about protecting the Earth from the disease, Janet is delightful, Daniel is hilarious, Jack's snark is fully established... it's just all the concepts are terrible and the execution is worse. It's jarring as fuck.

(Daniel and Teal'c being the only immune ones is also a fun concept, although I further object to the concept that even a brilliant space doctor like Janet could teach even a smart guy like Teal'c to do a blood draw in half an hour. The medical concepts are all so horrible though, and the caveman makeup looks idiotic.)

Chris Judge fucking carries the episode though. God, the main cast is stellar. (Including Teryl Rothery, she should count as main cast for how much she shapes the SGC even though Janet is only a recurring. And even though her dialogue in this one is 100% nonsense.)

God, what a shit episode.

oh my god i have just discovered that i can click through on player profiles on nhl.com under their listed games to see every play-by-play of their entire career. holy fucking shit. this is... given how damn hard it is to find footage of regular season games, let alone any games in watchable quality (i often bewail why can't you acquire dvd boxsets of hockey seasons), this is like discovering an entire library of novelizations for hockey canon. it's not the actual show, but it's approximately five thousand times more than i had. holy shit. i could fall down so many rabbit holes

I called the DME clinic again and they're going to order me a replacement belt and call me when it's ready for pickup -- if the timeframe is similar to last time it'll likely be a couple of weeks, and of course Labor Day is going to get in the way too, but it's still better than just not having a replacement.

I am strongly considering whether to void the warranty on the new one by modifying it to be less breakable, though. Or maybe do stuff to the busted one if they don't need it back, I should probably ask them that at some point, although it would be some definite engineering

and there's the stabbing hip pain, yup. goodbye walking. i never did get my callback either, so i guess i call them again tomorrow.

(and a friend's cat is dying, and leia just lost someone close to her very suddenly, and why can't anything good fucking happen occasionally)

i do want to keep using this exercise tracker -- it's called RunQuesting.com apparently created just this year, and i stumbled across it looking for the old and now defunct (thank god for the wayback machine) Walk to Rivendell low-tech tracker by karen wynn fonstad, author of the atlas of middle-earth, a book which i do not own because every time i get my hands on it i do nothing but make squeeing noises over the details and geological deductions.

ahem. anyway. point is. runquesting is a very basic virtual distance tracker: you choose from paths such as the great wall of china, the boston marathon, or of course the journey to rivendell, and you manually enter your distance, and it gives you a nice little simple visual readout with your percentage completed and your distance to the next checkpoint. it is ad-free and donation-supported through ko-fi.

it uses fonstad's distances for the journey from bag end to rivendell, rivendell to amon hen, and amon hen to mount doom, but being aimed at people more familiar with the movies, the checkpoints are... quite minimal. bucklebury ferry. bree. midgewater. weathertop. all very well and good -- for someone who is not me. i always fall off the fonstad tracker either somewhere before the first black rider or somewhere in the barrow-downs, so i knew i need the more granular checkpoints combined with the automatic calculations.

fortunately, runquesting also allows you to create your own custom quest path, of any length and with many many checkpoints. so i manually rebuilt the old walk to rivendell tracker in runquesting. i didn't enter every line item, just frequent enough ones that i can feel like i'm making progress: for instance, the first checkpoint rather than jumping the hedge at the bottom of The Hill is crossing The Water, three miles into the trek. i picked checkpoints i know immediately without having to flip open the book, so it's a very personalized path.

and then my fucking joint belt snapped in half and i immediately stopped being able to walk.

so i am trying to figure out how to convert other forms of exercise. the obvious one of course being, doing my PT exercises, which i have been not doing on walking days because i was busy trying to make sure i could position the belt optimally for best support before i tried to be acrobatic with it.

i estimated about 750 days to complete the 458 miles to rivendell, if i did about one kilometer per day to hatch a daily egg in pokemon go. obviously the simplest way to stay on track would be to count "do all PT exercises" as equivalent to walking one kilometer or 0.62 miles. i don't know if this is at all reasonable, because i've never tried to track anything but actual distance with this project before. i'm also really fucking annoyed that i can't just keep actually walking, which doesn't help with feeling like alternate exercise will be... satisfactory.

I was so mad about my belt breaking when I already had my shoes on that I went out last night and walked my kilometer anyway; it went much better than expected, I got home not stabby and only a little achy, but this morning my sacroiliac joints are definitely back to going cronch every time I sit up for some minutes, so that may not be repeatable.

I called the DME clinic as soon as they opened this morning, since I was awake anyway due to random smoke alarm at 6am (no fire, I think my housemates were smoking outside with the front door open again). They took my information, but want to show the orthoticist lady the picture of the broken belt before they schedule me to bring it in, so now I'm waiting for a callback on two hours ot sleep. It's been a couple hours; I don't think I'm getting back to bed this morning, so I have gotten out a soda to have some caffeine about it.

(I am trying to mostly avoid caffeine just in case it's doing anything untoward to my heart rate, but given that my heart rate goes to 130 bpm from just sitting up and was at 180 yesterday toward the end of my walk, while I hadn't had any caffeine in months, I don't think it's relevant.)

(It's not like caffeine *does* much for me anyway. I don't know if other people feel more of an actual energy boost or what; for me it just makes the difference between "my eyes are actively drifting shut" and "my cognition is still equally shot but I probably won't actually doze off".)

I cannot seem to knit and take many notes at the same time, and I'm going to need to knit to get through the first part of season one.

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I'm tired, and it's four in the morning, but I'm not sure if I stop before "The Broca Divide" whether I'll pick it back up. It does introduce Janet iirc, so there's that? We love Janet. Second best space doctor, right up there with Bones McCoy (who of course defined the role). Janet does on the medical side what Hammond does on the military side: she will make the right decision, she will do her damn job, and you defy her at your peril. She's also five foot four and extremely pretty.

(I know at least one person whose favored SG-1 ship is Sam/Janet, which is honestly more defensible to me from the character dynamics than a lot of them, although really with as much having to put each other in mortal danger as everyone on this base has to do in the course of an average episode, I've always been firmly on the side of the antifraternization regs myself.)

I've been putting off watching more Stargate, because SG-1 took a long time to find its feet -- my recommended optimal watch order for first-time viewing involves skipping four of the first eight episodes, for chrissakes. So if I want to actually watch *everything*, for note-taking purposes, I'm looking at a fucking uphill slog to get started.

So instead of actually watching the show, I thought I'd go through and write down what I remember about the episodes first. XD Starting with season one, obviously, but I might go until I get bored.

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Okay, glancing at the s2 episode list I don't recall every one, and I'm tired, so I think I'll call this for now. Maybe another time I'll actually get to slogging through some of these. S2 does at least have some bangers I know by name, like "Message in a Bottle" (RDA gives really, really good whumpface), "Holiday" (Mike Shanks and Chris Judge are both total fucking shapeshifters), and "1969" (introduces time travel as opposed to dimensional travel).

Also I tried Pikmin Bloom. It is unsatisfactory. Turns out the flower-planting-trail function, which was the draw for me when reading about it, is a mode you have to collect limited resources for and then activate, and optimally you only activate it while walking in a circle around a gym (they don't call them gyms but it's built on the PoGo base and they're functionally gyms), which completely defeats what I would want out of a walking app that supposedly leaves a trail of where you've been.

Also, since you don't catch pikmins like pokemons in the wild, it functions as "if you had to hatch every pokemon in PoGo before using it" and thus naturally pushes you to buy an obscene number of single-use incubators. No thank you.

i walked a mile and a half, which is more than i really should have but i wanted to try out a pokemon go "Route" near my house, and now i am going to have three large blisters tomorrow. *and* i was wearing my good hiking socks and laced my shoes properly. i just have no calluses left because i haven't been able to walk for so many years. ouch.

(i really shouldn't play pokemon go. it is all about getting you to overcommit. but it occupies pretty much the entire space of "game you can have running in the background while you meander around and then when you open it up there are rewards")

Memed from viridian5 – where I've been in the US. (Yellow is never visited. If I ever go to New England my percentage will jump sharply. Otherwise... well, "I have been a stone doomed to rolling," as Gandalf said.)