#not much bandwidth for me for other things alas

[callioope]

i have once again been sucked into critical role by the gravitational pull of essek thelyss and am furiously attempting to catch up

[thebibliosphere]

Hi there, ive come from your post about ADHD and emotional disregulation, firstly thank you so much for putting it into words, its such a complicated part of how i deal with emotions and i havent ever been able to articulate how to why.

Secondly, in that post you mentioned how you've used stress as a motivator and how eventually your stress regualtion broke, i was wondering if you'd be willing to talk about that? (If not, its not a problem)

I feel like the same thing has happened to me but until i read your post i had no idea that something had... snapped? I suppose? I struggle with motivation all the time and in the past id have a week or a few days left and id be able to suddently push myself very hard to complete whatever it is before the deadline, just barely making it in most cases. However now it seems that i can't find that motivation anymore, deadlines come and pass and i can't being myself to work on anything, and i just end up spiralling into shame and guilt. That motivation was the only thing that I was able to rely on sometimes for things like uni, and i conviced myself that it was just me growing lazy or trying to get out of responsibility as to why the "last minute panic-mode" doesnt work anymore.

Again, if you don't wanna tackle this can of worms or if it's something youd rather not post online i totally get it, its no biggie! thanks so much for making the original post as well, it means a lot

Hello friend, thanks for the message. I'm sorry you're also dealing with this.

The good news here is that I've already talked about this using the rubber band analogy my therapist gave me. (Stress is like a Rubber Band)

If you don't have the mental bandwidth to read all of it now, the tl;dr is "stress is like a rubber band; it can stretch to hold numerous things in place when you need to, but if you do it too often or keep adding more and more strain under the band, the elastic eventually becomes brittle and snaps, taking your mental and sometimes physical health with it too."

I've been in intensive therapy for this for roughly three years now, and trying to piece my brain back together after my last bout of stress-induced productivity gave me a total mental breakdown.

It's... odd not being able to use stress and having to actively avoid it to avoid a relapse. But it is doable. Medication would help, but alas, I've got weird health issues and am unmedicated at the minute.

(And just in case that sparks anyone to go, "Oh, you do all this unmedicated! Wow, that's so inspiring!" as sometimes parents do to me on here as they then tell me they don't want to medicate their kids, I've unfortunately also written a post about what that kind of success looks like from an unmedicated perspective and the kind of suicidal ideation I deal with on the regular because I cannot take meds. It is not pleasant reading, but it is necessary for some folks, specifically anti-med, "if you just tried harder" people.)

A book you may find helpful is Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, by Emily and Amelia Nagoski. It was very validating for me to read about other people going through the same things, and made me feel less of a "this is a personal failing on my part" and more of a "Oh okay yeah, no stress literally breaks people."

It helped soothe some of my own internalized "I just need to try harder" and helped cement me on the path I was already going down with my ADHD therapist toward changing how I view myself and how I manage my ADHD.

I hope that helps! If you've got more specific questions or I didn't touch on something in my old post, I can try to answer them :)

[xtrablak674]

knitboy1

I will be the first to admit it takes less than a blow of the wind for me to get a crush on a man. I have had probably thousand of crushes, some for seconds others spanning years that never reached any kind of fruition. Frankly, I love a crush, its a parasocial relationship that is occurring in your head. #lol The hardest thing can be actually meeting that person if its a digital crush, or for IRL crushes the person calling you out over the crush, or in some instances ignoring it completely and doing things like lifting you up in a bear hug in the reception area of your job! #CJstopthat

John was one of many folks I followed and who followed me back on my old Flickr account (before SmugMug deleted it, with no cause or warning). I think the kids call it mutuals now, and there is an entire subculture about the relationships folks have with their mutuals. These were some of the things playing out with me and a lot of my Flickr mutuals. There was this British guy who was a bit more aggressive and verbal in his feelings, and I would be telling a whole-ass lie if I said I didn't encourage him.

But knitboy1 was a local Brooklyn artist and albeit I am not a fan of plugs, I not only loved his artistic vibe but I thought he was attractive. I could see myself dating him. He was giving you an anti-hipster early Williamsburg vibe, even though he lived in I think Bushwick, a neighborhood that boarded Willysburg. He didn't seem like someone who was outside of my reach, he was attractive but not at a level that I thought he would be slumming in being with me.

Sixteen years ago he actually came to visit me, it was a chaste visit. Both of us with our cameras his a Nikon, mines a Canon the duopoly of camera companies photographers usually falling on one side or another. I can't recall the specifics or the goal of our meeting, it was surely not a sexual rendezvous no matter how much I would have liked that, I think it was a more plutonic meeting of us just exploring what the other was about in person. And most importantly to see if there was any spark, well at least for me.

Alas there wasn't, even though he referred to me as 'handsome' in one of the two photos he posted of me in his streams tags. I wasn't sad as much as disappointed. Sometimes the fantasy in your head seems so real that you wish it would spill over into reality. But most times this is never the case.

Sitting in my window seat doing my morning reading, the last thing I thought of doing was writing a journal entry, but I had opened a new browser window and found this website of knitboy1 and took a look around and seeing on the contact page the reason I couldn't find him on the remaining Flickr account I have is because I forgot the 'one' on his screen-name, it wasn't just knitboy, it was knitboy1. #bingo

I took forty minutes to go through his stream fav'ing photos I had long ago liked, screenshotting a couple of models I still found hot, the bulk of them being his self-portraits. I clearly still find him attractive. It looks like 2017 was the last time he used his Flickr account like so many of us who felt so close during our time in the early and mid-aughts, the platform passing through so many hands since the originators, so many changes and upheavals, we had collectively moved on from this platform which at one time in my life took up so much of my bandwidth.

There were many friendships made during that time, folks that I actually met IRL. My time on the platform gave me the confidence to have a short-lived visual arts artistic career taking my work from a digital space to hang on the walls of brick and mortar galleries and museums all over the country and the world. I had fond memories of this photo-based social media network and not even the deletion of my account could dismiss these warm feelings.

Wanting to get back to reading and sucking up this vitamin D this morning, I decided to send knitboy1 one of the photos I took of him during our all to brief meeting. I had edited it recently for content for my DA account. He hasn't responded yet, and he may not, but you can never know if you don't try. #🤷🏿‍♂️

[Photo by Brown Estate, Bottom Photos by John Brinegar]

[yukipri]

Hey! I'm a patreon subscriber and just saw your merch post. Everything looks AMAZING. I was just wondering if you've ever considered selling any of your potential leftover merch online? Bc I am not in NY rn but I would *kill* for some of your stickers and a few tote bags lmao.

Sorry if you've answered this before! Either way, just wanted to say it all looks great and I hope you have a great time at the con!

Thanks so much for your support on Patreon, and for liking my Patreon sneak peeks at my Anime NYC merch!

As stated on the Patreon post, assuming the stickers turn out well, there's a good chance that they will be included in some future promotions (perhaps not the specific stickers made for the con, but some stickers). However, because production/shipping costs makes them significantly more expensive than my postcards, they will be on the appropriate Tiers to reflect that base cost.

Other merch that cannot be included in standard flat envelopes with stamps postage are a lot more complicated. I currently do not have the bandwidth to manage shipping things, especially not managing an online store and the vast number of tasks that entails. Even attempting to do so would mean I would need to halt all of my digital content so I have the time to handle that.

That would mean zero new art. Zero new fic chapters. Zero nothing.

I would maybe need to take one month, possibly two months off to figure out an online store. I tried once before, and it was incredibly stressful and I never got to opening, and that was before I had my current very demanding job. I would assume many of my patrons would drop during my time away due to lack of content, and in addition to a store costing money to run, and the amount of money i would need to invest in product packaging/label print/everything, it would put me in a bad place financially, physically, and mentally.

In addition to that, taking that much time away from my current projects runs the very real risk of me ditching them. Without an outlet for my stories, my enthusiasm for them will wither rapidly. So there's a decent chance that I will ditch most if not all of my current ongoing AUs. If the experience is miserable enough, I may just drop my current fandom entirely to get away from the association...

Plus like. Making art and fic is what I love. I hate business and figuring out new systems and handling money and shipping and going to the post office. i would be miserable ;_; Just thinking about it makes me want to cry.

All of this to say, again, while I wish I could take your money, snap my fingers, and get any merch I choose to make into your hands, it unfortunately is more complicated than that, and I currently just don't think I have the bandwidth to handle a store. If I could quit my day job, sure! Might be possible. But alas, while I am deeply appreciative for all the support on Patreon and it helps immensely, I do not make enough on it to live by it alone.

I understand that some artists manage to have an online store, and I feel immense respect for their abilities to manage it and gratitude for their effort, which I too have benefited from by being able to purchase from them. But in the end, not all artists are the same. Perhaps they don't produce as much regular digital content as me, or perhaps they don't have a day job, or perhaps they have people who can help them. Perhaps their circumstances are the same as mine or worse, and I just can't manage my time/am an slow creator. All I can say is I'm already working at the maximum capacity of what I personally can handle, and unfortunately there's no wiggle room for a project as vast as an online store.

(this is not me asking for advice on how to start a shop, or looking for people to reassure me it's easy. That's wonderful for you, but again I don't think I can manage it atm)

If it's just leftovers of merch from the con and they're in the single digits, I may be able to reach out to patrons on a case by case basis, and just send Paypal invoices rather than opening a store proper. But I also intentionally chose designs and fandoms that do not age out and merch that stores well, so it may be better for me to keep my extra stock for my next con. We'll see how it looks after I get the merch in hand, and the situation after the con!

I may also feel more optimistic at a later date, but right now I am extremely stressed, frazzled, and tired from combo of Clonetober + preparing for ANYC next month, so just the idea of a store is...Very Bad ^ ^;

I will try to update my inprint next month though, so that all of my prints available at ANYC will be there online too!

Apologies for the long response, but I hope this clarifies my current situation and the possibility of merch online. I really wish I could do more, but I am just a single creator, who is not at all well off, who is juggling a full time job + full time content creation, and whose mental/physical state is always one sneeze away from shattering. I wish my circumstances were good enough that I could accomplish more, but I'm also grateful for what I have now, and hope that what little I can offer is enough.

Thanks for understanding!

❀ ❀ Send YukiPri an Ask! ❀ ❀

[whiskeyjack]

top 10 fics?? are you kidding me??

Thank you @00gangfriend00 for probably one of the hardest lists I’ve ever had to make. I also haven’t gotten around to reading anywhere near enough of the fics I want to, my bookmark list is getting dangerously long. I have many favourites, so please note this list is off the top of my head and if you asked me in a month it would probably be different. This was not an easy list to make in the slightest, this fandom is absolutely brimming of incredibly talented authors. In making this list I’ve also realized the true extent of my negligence for not commenting on some of these fics (especially the early reads) - so I will be rereading some of these to drop you lovely authors my thoughts and appreciation 💖 In no particular order:

A Rational Choice by @fireinsideforfun (tumblr?)

i think this was one of the first fics I read in this fandom and my life has forever been changed because of this fic. i’m not sure if it’s still a WIP (boy I hope so) or if it’s been abandoned, but either way this fic is full of angst! tortured and vulnerable sexy times! plot! aka everything i look for in an indulging read.

Until Long After She Takes Her Final Breath by @watermelonriddles (@emilykolburn)

this was another early read of mine, and it was a fucking painful one. my heart physically hurt while reading this fic, and tbh i want to go back and reread it but i’m not sure i physically can. goes to show the amount of talent it took to write this one, and how emotionally provocative it is. this fic lives rent free in mind, and forever will.

Thirty Pieces of Silver by @riosnecktattoo (@riosnecktattoo)

alas, this fic will always be on my list because of where i was in my life when i read it. i think this is the first (completed) fic i read where i felt a full on wave of catharsis from the show so powerful that i just sort of… had to stop and stare around thinking about what i had just read. @riosnecktattoo i will never be able to thank you enough for the relief i had reading this fic. i’m also just always so blown away by the fact that this was your first fic… you are so gifted. i love love love the absent-minded scar touching, the 20 questions, the sheer vulnerability… everything about it. completely breathtaking.

a song inside the halls of the dark by @ms_scarlet (@mego42)

ok yeah so. this is a fic that’s very high up on my list, and will forever remain there. i could talk for years about how much i love the characterizations, the plot, character and relationship developments, the smut (the SMUT!!) , the vulnerability, and the angst in this fic. @mego42 you captured my attention right off the bat with this fic and i’ve always been so blown away by your ability to give me shivers with your comparisons to natural disasters and just perfectly concocted imagery. this fic also does contain my #1 brio smut, it’s just… so vulnerable, desperate, possessive and perfect. i’ve probably reread this half a dozen of times now, and i always need time to recover because of how fucking powerful this piece. also my heart literally breaks every time i get to the end. do I still reread? god, yes. thank you for writing this piece of art, truly it is magnificent.

i will collect and capture you by @foxmagpie (@foxmagpie)

i absolutely adore this fic, it has a very special place in my heart. it is complete with so much angst, on point characterizations, incredibly talented written humour gently weaved into moments (hospital bed//casket!!!), fucking phenomenal smut, and heartbreaking metaphors. it also has a precious lung! spleen! shoulder! moment that I won’t been forgetting for a very fucking long time. @foxmagpie thank you for writing this fic, it is so remarkable, and you are so talented i truly feel like we are living in Rio’s mind during this fic. word of warning if y’all haven’t read this one yet: be careful you will go on a fucking ride. i learned so much about my emotional bandwidth while reading this… and it hit my limits.

It Hurts When I See You Struggle by @BourbonOnTheRocks (@bourbon-ontherocks)

an amazing post 2.13/s3 fucking piece. this fic has it all: so! much! angst! shards of perfectly placed comic relief! vulnerability! rio chuckling! and amazing metaphors (tapestry!!)! i love how beth gets caught in her own bullet for rio, and @bourbon-ontherocks you write it in a way that’s just so utterly full circle, i let out a physical sigh of relief from the resolution these two go through. “I need you//I think I need you too” will be forever imprinted in my brain, it’s just incredibly flawless. your words always provoke such an emotional reaction while reading, i’m constantly just in awe that English isn’t even your first language. i have read this already a few times, and guarantee will be back for more.

Bringing Down the Neighborhood by @s_t_c_s (@sothischickshe)

certainly one of my favourite resolutions post 2.13. this fic is absolutely full of snark, idiots being idiots and VERY sexy times that are just so humorous, i couldn’t breathe from laughing quite a few times. the characterization is absolutely on point and accurate to the point that i could full out envision this fic taking place in canon (if it wasn’t so sexy). seriously @sothischickshe I just love how you used talking/kissing as important markers in their relationship in this fic, it felt just so true to canon, you nail them to a T. i’m also such a sucker for the idea that rio holds on to beth’s rejection of desk sex with him. yes. undeniable. fucking marvellous.

Ain’t No Sunshine by @MissMaxime (@missmaxime)

another recent read of mine, and tbh? i’m v sad i didn’t read this fic before now. this fic righted my world in a way i didn’t know it needed to be and i truly am walking around believing that this full-out happened in canon. i absolutely love how beth’s ptsd (and turner’s!! thank you @missmaxime for pointing that out post-read) is explored in very unique (and HOT!!!) ways. very phenomenally done @missmaxime , this was such an amazing read. i will forever be thinking about beth looking for scars on turner’s chest that aren’t there.

It’s All About The Game (and how you play it) by @sdktrs12 (@sdktrs12)

another perfect fic that is incredibly indulgent on my part and an absolutely treat to read. the characterizations of not only beth & rio, but of mick, annie & ruby are just so accurate. @sdktrs12 i love how you play with beth & rio being thirsty idiots in front of the others, all while inserting perfectly placed and in-character comedy. i am super obsessed with the idea of the ot3 playing monopoly with rio & mick and you fucking nailed it. this fic made me feel lots of things, what a wonderful read that i will come back to often.

Dancing in the Dark by @gangfriend (@00gangfriend00)

um ok. this is a really indulgent fic that I have recently read and left me with a stupid big ass grin on my face, as well as a massive craving for chinese food. @00gangfriend00 you have such a gift with words, and yours painted such a realistic lovely picture in my head. your annie is on fucking point - napping/suiting up to impress gangbangers are gold!! I don’t usually read too much fluff but you really integrated the intensity of their relationship into such a soft and in character interaction. amazing.

Yes. So. Similar to what Kat said, so so so many lines from all of these fucking pieces (AND. SO. MANY. MORE.) live rent free in my head. Seriously, I’m so impressed by the sheer amount of giftedness and talent exist in this fandom, I can never thank anyone enough for how much reading their writing has gotten me through this pandemic and provided such a significant source of relief and escape in these uncertain and hard times 💗

@spiceesweetness @missmaxime @yellowhammerga @mamey2422

Tag, you’re it 🙈

[sagurus]

04. caged

Prompt was: Running out of time: caged.

Using @whumptober2020‘s prompt today.

The original idea behind this is credited to @magpythe; I don’t believe he’s posted any of his writing for this au himself yet, but it’s inspired entirely from a scenario that he started, and then we talked about collaboratively. For some context, this takes place in a world much like our own in terms of scientific rules, except there are magical/supernatural beings (vampires, werewolves, shinigami, kitsune, etc) living among us as well. This was a well-kept secret from the general populace bc those magical beings didn’t want to deal with the backlash, but alas this facade couldn’t last. Humans aren’t handling their new understanding of the world very well :’)

Anyway, onto the story.

----------

Eighteen hours, fifty-seven minutes, and counting.

The cell was minimalistic and austere. Plain walls behind and beside him. Metal bars before him, looking out at a vacant wall. The opposite side of the holding area. His cell was one of about five in the short hallway, all lined against one side of it, with a door on either end. Each cell was a little under two metres wide and three deep. Saguru’s own cell was the second from the right.

Insofar as he could tell, he was the only one in this particular holding area. In the nineteen hours he had spent here, the only sounds he heard beyond his own breathing were those of officers. It would seem that most non-human individuals who displayed the clinically-induced violent reaction were swiftly neutralized without extenuating circumstances to protect them. He was lucky, he thought bitterly, that nepotism could guarantee him the civility of a holding cell rather than more immediate measures. For other, less fortunate individuals, Saguru imagined that containing them was seen as risky. Or a waste of resources better dedicated to human criminals who had willingly broken the law, rather than innocent non-human civilians forced into a hopeless situation.

How long they intended to hold him here, though, he didn’t know. For all he knew, it could be indefinite. Or he could be released tomorrow. Or meet some more final fate. The seconds ticked by.

Nineteen hours, five minutes. By his calculation, it was almost noon, assuming his timekeeping wasn’t too faulty without the aid of his pocket watch.

The heavy, industrial door fell open and then closed again, sounding out a dulled thud. Footsteps clicked against linoleum tile. Saguru estimated at least three officers, until he belatedly managed to pick out a fourth, much lighter set of steps. Someone slight. A child? He dearly hoped it wasn’t a child’s footsteps he was hearing. There was something strange about them, too. Something about the way that these steps struck and slided across the tile, making them sound…sharp?

The cluster came near enough he could just make out the line of one of the officer’s uniforms. He stayed seated on his cot, listening. He couldn’t see the majority of the group from here, let alone make out whether the owner of the smaller footsteps had, indeed, been a child. There was a solemn air as the door to the cell neighboring his own. Small footsteps padded inside. The cell door shut. A woman’s voice, strained and tense (not with fear—guilt? Stress?) said, “Someone will bring your dinner around seven.”

A beat, something like hesitation hovering in the air, and then the officers’ steps (all three sets) retreating down the hall. Saguru held his breath, waiting for the officers to be out of the holding area entirely.

Once they were gone, he continued to wait, listening in for any activity from his new neighbor.

Saguru’s own arrival into this situation had been a rather unexpected one for all parties involved. The issue was this: the world was rapidly becoming aware of the existence of supernaturally-inclined beings existing among them in society—generally referred to as youkai in Japan. Sensationalized media ensured that this was not well-received, but at the very least most inhuman individuals still managed to keep the truth under wraps and continue to assimilate. Until scientific innovation introduced a drug which garnered no reaction from virtually all humans, but revealed any magically obscured, glamoured, or otherwise concealed features that these other beings possessed. It also bore a few potential unfortunate side effects for some youkai. The most common of these was an uncontrollable violence, pushing the recipient into a dangerous frenzy. In other, rarer cases, the drug had even killed some. The kicker here was that Hakuba labs was a major proponent for the creation of the drug and helped pioneer it. Once the drug left clinical trials, it was determined that it needed to be administered to as much of the populace of Japan as possible, in order to catalog human and youkai population.

Hakuba Takahiro and his ex-wife, Rosalin Caldwell, were both humans. As far as anyone had been aware, Hakuba Saguru was also human. Saguru himself had never doubted this.

That didn’t explain the flurry of flame, the way he had tried to surge out his seat, the loss of sense or understanding, vision gone red in outrage. They had barely managed to restrain him. His father had almost been struck with the explosive fire, before Saguru had somehow managed to extinguish it.

On principle, Saguru had been opposed to the usage of the drug; frankly, the ethical implications were horrifying even without the potential for dangerous side-effects geared specifically toward one party of people. Nevermind the fact there were not yet any laws to protect youkai, nor any clear delineation of a plan to accommodate for them a place in society. He had considered refusing to participate in receiving it and thus being complicit in the cause, but his father had left him little room for argument.

Needless to say, it had all gone very badly. So far, Saguru had not been informed at all about what was being discussed with regards to his fate.

Hell, he still didn’t even understand why it had happened.

In the cell beside Saguru’s, his new neighbor seemed to be getting acquainted with the room. Those strange, precise footsteps seemed to walk its inner perimeter. A few moments later, he heard the sound of the cot squeaking and settling.

Breathing, even and measured, but in a forced way. A restrained way. Holding something in.

Saguru couldn’t think of a single thing he could say to improve the situation. He decided he would wait until he heard some indication that the other would even want conversation.

Hours of mutual silence later, the heavy door opened and shut again. Heavy footfalls approaching from down the hallway. Saguru guessed that it was probably for dinner.

“Who would have thought Beika city’s murder magnet really was a shinigami after all?” the officer observed with an amusement that Saguru found chilling. It seemed to be directed at the neighboring cell, as the officer hadn’t reached Saguru yet.

Beika city’s murder magnet… Dawning horror. There was only one person Saguru could think of who matched that morbid description.

Meanwhile, the officer was met with tense silence. After apparently handing off the food, he moved onto Saguru. Saguru started at him icily. He was silent, privately daring the man to breathe a word in his direction. The officer, this time, was equally silent.

Once the officer was gone, Saguru set his food aside. He didn’t have any appetite to speak of, right now. Instead, he needed to know. “Edogawa-kun, is that you?”

The response was a startled, stammered, “Haku—Hakuba nii-san?” Alarm colored his voice. Clearly, he was just as distressed to find someone familiar here.

Saguru’s heart sank. “Yes, indeed, it’s me.”

“What are you doing here?” Edogawa demanded.

Saguru laid back on the cot, exhaled long and slow. “I suppose I’m not human,” he said simply. “Believe me, it was a surprise to me, too.��� He paused, and then ventured, “Are you unhurt?”

He tried to imagine what Edogawa must look like, now. The officer had called him a shinigami, but Saguru wasn’t entirely clear on what, visually, that entailed. Bat wings came to mind. He thought back to the strange sound of the boy’s footsteps. How much of his anatomy had been forced to change to its truer form because of the injection?

“More or less,” was Edogawa’s noncommittal response.

Saguru was still trying to get his head around the fact that the police had put a seven-year-old in a holding cell. Youkai or not, this was a child. What did they intend to do with him?

This had all been much easier when all Saguru had to worry about was his own fate.

Edogawa Conan, as it turned out, made a perfectly good neighbor, and even a pleasant conversation partner. The sheer amount of boredom that came with sitting in a cell with nothing to do for hours that stretched into days was almost enough to forget the horror of their situation. Either way, the only real escape—from the horror or the boredom—was to fill the space with conversation.

Fortunately, there was plenty to talk about. Old cases, literature, trading favorite Sherlock Holmes stories. The situation at hand. It was difficult not to discuss the problem they were in together, as they were both people who couldn’t help but try to study a problem from all angles in order to try to solve it. But inevitably the direction of those conversations turned dark too quickly for Saguru’s comfort. It wouldn’t do either of them any good to focus on the ways things could go wrong.

“Hey, Hakuba,” Edogawa said one day, apparently forgetting to use the honorific (or simply electing to drop it, there being very little bandwidth for Edogawa’s more childish act). “What are you, anyway?”

It was a blunt question, but over the past handful of days, they had mutually elected not to worry too much over politeness. Saguru faltered, before saying honestly, “I haven’t the slightest idea. I suspect one of my parents may not be biologically related to me, and whoever the other contributing party was, was some variety of youkai.” Yesterday, Saguru had been granted a visit by a scientist, who had studied him like a specimen and taken a variety of samples, all while Saguru remained restrained for the scientist’s safety. Never mind the fact that the more alarming skill he (apparently) possessed was manifesting fire without the use of any tools, so he wasn’t sure what good restraining him would do to anybody. Regardless, the examination had gone by without incident, and Saguru suspected that there had been some kind of DNA test conducted, although he had no confirmation as to the results.

Edogawa made a noise of consideration, lapsed into silence, then started again. “Did you change?” He asked, almost delicately.

“I don’t think I did,” Saguru told him. “As far as I can tell, visually everything is still the same as it had been. Admittedly, I haven’t seen my reflection since some time before the incident, so I can’t say with one hundred percent certainty.”

Quiet, again, and Saguru wondered if he should ask if Edogawa had changed, then decided against it. The other boy could tell him if he’d like, but otherwise Saguru didn’t want Edogawa to trouble him with it.

“So, they found out you were youkai because…”

“Because I had—an outburst, yes.” Understatement of the century.

Saguru could hear the grimace in Edogawa’s voice when he asked, “—Was everybody alright?”

“I—” Saguru recalled the violence of his reaction, the flames licking out and nearly making contact in a dangerous way with his father as well as one of the nurses. He recalled the feeling of a vicious snarl contorting his expression and the way he’d surged against the precautionary restraints.

He recalled going perfectly still as soon as he’d regained a handle on himself. The doctor approaching him with a new syringe, and the distant thought, Is he giving me a sedative or is he euthanising me? The foreign, turbulent rage churning inside of him until he’d gone under thanks to the shot (sedative, it turned out).

“Nobody got hurt,” Saguru assured him after a too-long silence. “It was—frightening. But nobody was hurt.”

“—I hurt a nurse,” Edogawa said, and his voice was the sort of stony that belied the great effort of holding in his emotions. “It could have been a lot worse, but I still hurt somebody. Really badly.”

“You can’t fault yourself for it,” Saguru said immediately, sternly. “It speaks volumes about your sense of accountability and responsibility, that you feel guilty for it, but it wasn’t your fault that it happened.”

“If you say so.”

It was their seventh day like this. Still, Saguru received no news any time he asked a passing officer for updates.

Earlier today, Hattori Heiji had visited, apparently to discreetly provide Edogawa some contraband (such as books). Edogawa had kindly requested that Hattori pass one of those books to Saguru. The other detective had been frankly shocked to realize he was here, and despite their usual animosity, the other boy had seemed mostly genuinely concerned for him. When Saguru asked if there was anything Hattori could tell him about the situation, it had been a definite negative. Apparently his situation was being kept well out of the hands of the media, at least for now. Saguru could only imagine his father must have told the school that he was on some sort of vacation, or had accepted a case which required him to head overseas again. Nobody would be worried about him, then.

Now, the visit was over and they had lapsed into silence while they, for the moment, privately entertained themselves. Rather than read, Saguru had tucked the book away for later, and was instead practicing what little exercise he could to keep his body active. Right now it was warm-up stretches. He desperately ached to go on a run.

At some point, Edogawa cut into the silence.

“What do you think is going to happen, Hakuba?” and then, hastily added, “—nii-san.” He sounded pensive, uncertain. He didn’t sound afraid, but Saguru thought that he might be anyway.

“I don’t know,” he murmured, opting for honesty rather than false hope. “It’s been a week and we’re still here. I don’t know what anyone’s plan for us is.”

“Yeah…” Edogawa trailed off, deep in thought. Saguru wondered if it would have been better to say that he was sure things would wind up working out. The problem was, he wasn’t sure. He had been under the impression that he would be placed under holding until they worked out the best circumstance to harness or otherwise stifle his apparent abilities, and then return him to something like normal life, but with a tight leash.

But now it had been seven days, with no developments, and Saguru was beginning to wonder if this was all much more dire than he had thought.

They both went quiet again, only for Edogawa to speak up just as abruptly as he had before. “—I need to tell you something.”

Puzzled, Saguru went still. “Proceed.”

“It’s pretty unbelievable, so I need you to bear with me. Okay?”

Edogawa seemed to do a lot of things that fell quite near the ‘unbelievable’ category, in Saguru’s experience. Much like Kuroba tended to, although they had different styles in the ways they defied reality. “I’ll do my best to keep an open mind,” he assured Edogawa.

“My name isn’t really Edogawa Conan,” he began.

And the sky was blue, and Kaitou KID was Kuroba Kaito. “Mm.”

“It’s actually Kudou Shin’ichi, and I’m really seventeen, not seven.”

So this is what Edogawa meant when he said it was unbelievable. He couldn’t help but wonder if Edogawa was engaging in a delusion to cope with the frankly traumatic situation they had found themselves in. “Is that so?” he inquired, honoring his promise to keep an open mind. Edogawa was right, though. This was difficult to believe.

Edogawa made an irritated sound, like he could tell Saguru didn’t believe him. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to us, and almost no one knows. I want you to know. I—a year and a half ago, I went with Ran to Tropical Land, and worked that case with the roller coaster beheading.”

Saguru recalled the news reports of that case all too well. Truly, it had been a particularly gruesome case, so he was eternally gratefully it hadn’t been him on the scene.

“There were these suspicious men there, and after I solved the case I left Ran so I could tail them and figure out what they were up to. But one of them surprised me from behind, knocked me out, and gave me this—drug,” allegedly-Kudou-Shin’ichi explained. “It was supposed to kill me via apoptosis, but instead it… de-aged me. ”

It was certainly a lot to process. It felt a little bit like the plot of a bad science fiction. But he spoke with urgency, and he was clearly being genuine. Although Saguru was still inclined to lean toward delusion, he decided to consider his way through the facts he had from his limited research into the whereabouts of Kudou Shin’ichi. It was true that the same day Kudou disappeared, Mouri Ran had wound up taking in Edogawa Conan. It would explain the strange amount of knowledge and understanding Edogawa possessed, especially in terms of investigating crime scenes and solving cases. It also clarified anachronistic errors—moments when Edogawa would say he’d seen something when it was first released, even though it should have come out well before his birth date.

After analyzing the facts, Saguru realized there was nothing (beyond his own understanding of scientific development) that disproved the claim. None of the facts he had specifically proved it either, though. He didn’t know the other detective well enough to quiz Edogawa in order to prove it for himself, either.

He thought back to their previous conversation. They didn’t know, really, what would become of them here. If they would make it out of here. Perhaps this was a delusion, but if so, Saguru didn’t think it would do any good to deny the other that. It certainly wouldn’t change anything for the better in the short term.

Saguru resolved that he would take the other boy at his word, and, should he have the means and opportunity if they got out of this, he’d pursue it more critically then.

“—I see,” he said, nodding slowly although Kudou couldn’t see him. “It is good to have gotten to know you, then, Kudou-kun. I’m sorry it wasn’t under better circumstances.”

When the other boy next spoke, it was obvious to Saguru that something coiled very tightly had unwound. The relief was nearly palpable. “It’s good to meet you too, Hakuba-kun. Here’s to hoping we make it out of this so that we can keep getting to know each other.”

They could only hope. “I’ll do my best to remain optimistic,” Saguru murmured in agreement.

[lindoig7]

Thursday-Saturday, 20-22 August

Thursday

It was a wild old night, with the wind rocking the caravan and rattling our awning all night.  It rained consistently almost all night and the rocking of the caravan and the pitter-pattering (and occasional hammering) on the roof made our warm comfy bed the very best and snuggliest place to be.  Even when the awning crashed and banged and woke us up, the rain soon invoked the Sandman and we went straight back to sleep again.

We were awake a little earlier than usual, but enjoyed a lazy half-hour or so snoozing before our cuppa and puzzles in bed.  Of course, by 7:30am, the Council workers were out in the rain, mowing the grass across the rampaging creek immediately behind the van.  The whole area is virtually under water so how they avoided getting bogged is a complete mystery to us.  The need to mow the area is just as mysterious because all they were doing was cutting the tops off the grass well away from the paths.  It wasn’t as if the grass was encroaching on the paths or hiding any varmints that might leap out to devour any of the early morning walkers.

We did some supermarket shopping after breakfast, mainly for a few extra things we need to make some tomato relish and peach chilli chutney.  We are getting low on our fancy home-made condiments so decided to make some more.  But as usual, walking past the fridges at Woolworths is a risk.  I spied a few likely-looking seafood bargains so now we need to find room for even more exotic delicacies!

We didn’t have much rain during the day, despite constant heavy black clouds but it was cold, bleak and windy all day and not at all nice outside.  As a consequence, we spent almost all day inside doing odd jobs, more cryptic crosswords, kenkens, sudokus and other pleasurable time-fillers before we fired up the stove and got back into cooking even more wonderful concoctions.

We made a wonderful pasta dish based on the vongoles and prawns we picked up as bargains in the morning – an elaboration on something we have done a couple of times before – vongoles, prawns, bacon, oil, garlic, parsley, smoked paprika, white wine, lemon, salt and pepper – man, what a feast and we never managed to eat it all so I suspect a seafood omelette is in the immediate offing. Even as bloated as we were, the potential for a meal from the leftovers left our mouths watering!

Friday

There was plenty more heavy rain overnight, and wild, wild winds, but we woke to a weak wintry sun and enjoyed a great hot breakfast.  (There seems to be a lot in my blog about food.  Maybe because we eat extraordinarily well and just want to keep experimenting.  We often (sometimes?) start with a recipe, but once the ‘start’ is dispensed with, the creative possibilities are endless and we try to make the most of any variations our imaginations evoke.)

We checked the weather over breakfast, expecting there to be rain everywhere as per the overnight forecast, but found that the Sale forecast looked surprisingly promising.  We had planned another day of cooking, but in light of the forecast, we abandoned (deferred) that and set sail for Sale.  Heather needed more yarn and some better scissors to we stopped at Spotlight on the way through Traralgon and stocked up there.

We wanted to explore the southern part of the Sale Common Wetland.  We had walked around the middle section a week or two ago, but wanted to explore other parts of this very large wetland.  Easier said than done!  We parked near the Swing Bridge (that isn’t like any swing bridge I have seen before – more like an opening or lift bridge) and set off on the soggiest of soggy tracks. We noted that cars – obviously high clearance 4WDs – had used the track, but had bottomed out and some had become bogged.  Multiple wheel-tracks ran in all directions in an attempt to avoid the worst of the deep ruts, but there is no way anything less than an amphibian would have gone through that day.  The track was even a challenge for walkers.  We had to pick our way through deep puddles and quagmires of mud, often abandoning the track for the waterlogged scrub to pass some of the worst sections.  We walked half a kilometre or so but it was becoming increasingly difficult so we returned to the car and set off for other access routes.  Sale was quite sunny, but still quite cool and very windy, but we returned to the walk we had done a week or two earlier and tried to get into the area from the north after our access from the south had been thwarted. We managed to get about 2.5 kilometres, partly along our previous route, before being confronted by water too deep to cross.  We had already traversed a few shallow puddles, but it was just not feasible to go any further without our water-wings!

My diabetes(???) had given me the shakes before we got back to the car so we ate our lunch there and recovered my sugar balance.  We still wanted to explore the northern area so went up to the much more populous and touristy lakes near the town. One of the lakes is Lake Guyatt and we had walked around that last time but the bigger Lake Guthridge was still to be conquered.  We needed to find a toilet and the signs said there was one 5 minutes away in the Botanic Gardens or 15 minutes away where we had just come from.  We opted for the Gardens – alas, NO TOILETS (of course!). Two kilometres later, we had almost circumnavigated the lake when we came upon the toilets advertised to be 15 minutes from our parking spot!  Have I ever mentioned the obvious attempts by all State and local authorities in Gippsland to confuse the public with fake signage?  I have got to the stage where I simply don’t believe any official signs anywhere in the area.

I had thought that it might be nice to circumnavigate the whole wetland area so we tried to do that, only to find that it was virtually impossible.  I reckon it would take a drive of about 250 Km to do it given that we would have had to drive all the way to the coast, then east to find another way north, then all the way back to Sale.  In our explorations, we found another huge contiguous part of the wetland on the other side of the road – presumably unprotected because it is not marked as such on the Council maps even though the main road is the only thing preventing the entire area being a single wetland.  There are at least 2 rivers and 3 bridges linking the water on both sides of the road so it is virtually impossible to separate the RAMSAR area from the apparently unprotected section.

We found an alternative route back to Rosedale, avoiding a trip back into Sale – and thence home in time for a shower before Happy Hour.  Topped up with fuel at Traralgon again on the way but we were still home again by about 5pm.

I had cooked a turmeric and fish meal on Tuesday/Wednesday – a little unusual given that the fish was marinated in the spices overnight, then only lightly cooked, but with additional veges and herbs added after the heat was removed just prior to serving.  Just add rice.  Very tasty and easy as anything to prepare.

Saturday

The Antarctic Blob is exerting its influence very strongly here today.  Lots of wind and rain overnight, some quite heavy, but consistent all night.  And today has been pretty wild too.  The rain had come and gone, but has been a deluge at times with heaps of hail – literally heaps, with it covering everything and piling up against anything blocking its passage.  It was banked up against the shrubbery outside the van for several hours before it finally melted – 6 degrees maximum here so it was very slow to melt.

It has felt really exciting at times in the van with so much wild weather outside and us safe and warm inside and enjoying the experience.  We cooked our tomato relish in the morning and our peach and chile chutney in the afternoon. We had to do a quick supermarket run to buy some extra spices early in the afternoon and I dropped Heather off and drove around the block a couple of times and picked her up at the door again. This was to avoid her getting too wet in the rain, but the hail absolutely pelted down while I was driving around the block – the racket inside the car was horrendous – exciting, but a little scary too.

We had a fairly unsatisfactory Zoom session in the afternoon – the bandwidth here is a real problem, but at least we spent half an hour or so in contact with some of the kids.

[macgyvermedical]

Thanks to the Grass Pea: A “Seeds + Permafrost + Feather” Review

Listen.

Listen.

That’s the sound of them messing with me.

Like, when season 4 comes out its going to be perfectly scientifically accurate and it’s going to come out that they’ve just been messing with me specifically this whole time. Just me. Just Ross. Just to get my reaction. They’re going to hire someone to knock on my door, slow clap for a few minutes, and leave.

It’s going to be really embarrassing.

Anyway.

Despite the lengths they go to not name the poison (literally they just call it “the poison” a lot), this was no ordinary handwavy science ep. Someone sunk time and energy into this. Not for the general public, oh no, but for people who wanted to dig in deep. People like me who were willing and really wanted to know what the hell was going on and what was at stake.

Watching this episode and digging into it on google afterwards was was like a little scavenger hunt for me. It was actually super fun ‘cause you know how much of a poison nerd I am, and I’m always up for a challenge when knowledge of a new poison is on the line!

The episode centers around the race to track down the seeds for a kind of pea plant, found otherwise only in North Korea, that supposedly contains a weaponizable chemical agent. There’s a lot of twists and turns and it turns out the seeds themselves mean nothing to the plot, but they’re still interesting and deserve some bandwidth.

I started with two clues:

Clue one was the name of the seeds:

Pisum amortium. Not to brag, but I google a lot of poisons and I was a little surprised I’d never heard of this plant. Honestly, being a legume I was kind of expecting it to be a cyanide. But cyanide is everywhere- why go to the trouble to steal these particular peas when cyanide is pretty cheap and abundant elswhere?

However, as you might imagine, it didn’t take me too very long to find out Pisum amortium wasn’t a real plant. The only things that came up in the google search were texts referring to the garden pea, Pisum sativum, in archeobotany and paleonutrition. Don’t ask me why other mentions of the garden pea didn’t come up, because none of the 10 or so articles have any mention of the word “amortium” in them at all (and literally it was just images of abstracts, no other search results). Which I found... odd.

But I put that aside. I had another clue to look into:

I kinda applaud the person who made this printout. There’s a lot to talk about in it. Let’s start at the bottom: the title in the bottom text box reads “6-Fluroro-L-Tryptophan -- L-BMAA”.  Now, accounting for what I can only assume are purposeful misspellings (though I got a few results that indicate it might be a correct spelling in Norwegian), “6-fluoro-L-tryptophan” and “L-BMAA” are real things. Different things, but real things.

Tryptophan is an essential amino acid, meaning we can’t make it ourselves and need to ingest it from food in order to survive. Our bodies use it to make the neurotransmitter/hormones serotonin and melatonin. It’s found in most animal-based food sources like meat, fish, and dairy, but is also present in brown rice and soybeans. 6-fluoro-L-tryptophan is a form of tryptophan that contains an atom of fluorine on one of its carbon rings (the “6″ and “L” just refer to the placement of various parts of this molecule). The fluorine on the molecule makes it so instead of helping create serotonin and melatonin, it inhibits their creation.

Now, that sounds bad, but as far as I can tell its effects have never been studied in humans. It is listed as an irritant and pretty standard PPE (N95 masks, gloves, etc...) is recommended to handle it. Even if humans *were* exposed to it in a meaningful way, it appears to have a relatively short half-life: when rats were injected with it, they had some disruptions in their sleep-wake cycle for about 3 hours, but that was pretty much it.

Like, yes, it’s a neurotoxin, but its *probably* not going to kill anyone. Going to the trouble of adequately distributing it is like a Doofinshmirtz-level evil scheme of “muahahaha I’m going to make everyone irritable and sleep-deprived for like 3 hours with my grump-n-ator and you can’t stop me Perry the Platypus!” <-- evil!scientific re-enactment.

The structure at the top of the page is indeed a form of fluorotryptophan, but with a hydrogen moved that makes it probably unstable? It’s been a while since I took organic chemistry, but I think this was probably just done for obscuring-the-science reasons.

But let’s put that aside for a moment too.

It’s hard to see in this screenshot, but the text in the lowest text box doesn’t talk about 6-fluoro-L-tryptophan at all, but it does talk about BMAA (the “L” usually isn’t used in the abbreviation). This is where it starts to get interesting. BMAA, or beta-Methylamino-L-alanine is in fact also an amino acid and neurotoxin, and what they’re probably talking the most about in this episode.

BMAA is produced by cyanobacteria, so plants and other things that naturally have cyanobacteria in them (cycads, certain ferns, and lichens) or animals that eat them or are routinely exposed to cyanobacteria (flying foxes, some sharks), can have toxic levels of BMAA in their flesh and can cause problems when eaten by humans. The presence of BMAA specifically causes protein misfolding in the brain, and leads to so-called “tangle diseases” (like, the proteins are all tangled) like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, ALS, PSP, and Lewy-body disease. There are certain regions in the world (most notably Guam) where the food supply has historically had a lot of BMAA naturally occurring in it, and therefore has also historically had a relatively high prevalence of tangle diseases.

Now, you might think you know where I’m going with this, but BMAA is not found in any kind of peas- not even super region-specific ones. Fortunately, wikipedia came in clutch for me by recommending I look into a similar neurotoxin called Oxalyldiaminopropionic acid or ODAP.

When consumed, ODAP causes paralysis of the lower body called “neurolathyrism.” The primary source of dietary ODAP comes from, wait for it... a plant called “Lathryus sativus” or grass pea (see above). The grass pea is an important plant in many parts of the world because it is seen as an insurance crop- it survives droughts and floods when other crops die off. It’s high protein content allows people to live off of it as a temporary staple food. There are other varieties of ODAP-containing Lathryus peas used in traditional Greek and Spanish cuisine, to the point where they have a Protected Designation of Origin.

But... poison? The picture below is a famous Goya print called “Thanks to the Grass Pea.” The title is a clever slant on both the fact that the depicted individuals were kept alive by the pea, only to slowly become paralyzed from it. 

The truth of the matter is, though, if you’re not relying on grass peas as a single food source for more than 3 months at a time, neolathyrism is pretty difficult to get. This doesn’t mean you couldn’t potentially extract enough ODAP to harm someone acutely or add it to the water supply in large enough amounts over a long enough time to cause neurolathyrism in a widespread way that would really confuse public health professionals, but its value as a chemical weapon is pretty low unless you’re really into delayed gratification.

But what if you mixed a fluorotryptophan and ODAP together?

Alas, this is, I’m sorry to say, kind of where the trail went cold for me on the poison front. They’re both mild neurotoxins but they work in really different ways and nothing I read talks about them having ever crossed paths in a research capacity.

Assuming the trail goes no further, I think it’s safe to say that the poison in the episode was based on ODAP. ODAP is *like* the episode’s poison BMAA, and comes from a plant that’s *like* the pea featured in the episode, which is related to a pea that also contains a lower level of ODAP that, while present in many parts of the world, is at least legally protected as an export from a very specific geographic region (that region is part of Spain, but still). Its a little less exciting than a dangerous chemical-weapon-making-pea from North Korea, but you gotta dial up the drama somehow.

Phew. Its almost like they really didn’t want someone to track all that down.

[Patreon] [Ko-Fi]

[fathersappointed]

Mad Hatter: Have I gone mad?

So you think you’re a Romeo. You’re playing a part in a picture show We take the long way home. Take the long way home ’cause you’re the joke of the neighborhood. Why should you care if you’re feeling good We take the long way home take the long way home.

Mad Hatter: Have I gone mad?

Alice: I’m afraid so. You’re entirely bonkers. But I’ll tell you a secret. All the best people are. Tried so hard to make you see But I couldn’t find the words Now the tears they fall like rain I’m Alone again Alone again Alone again…without you

Have I lost my mind and gone mad? Let me look there it is looking, sad on the ground let me pick it back up and put it in! Well, it seemed almost like pieces fell down from the ceiling so I bent down and picked up the pieces. With no concern really I put the pieces in the puzzle. I looked at the puzzle and a stunned petrifying feeling of horror-filled every part of my body and then my smile turned into a horrifying face. When my mind started reeling, I knew our situation was bad. I couldn’t even imagine what I saw I was stunned horrified. When I put the last piece into the puzzle, all the pieces fit, and the picture was mind-chilling horrifying. I’ve told you from the beginning you’re being deceived, People, and I knew the situation was bad. I wish you were up but I have no idea when you’ll be able to come to a true understanding of who you are and what’s going on in our existence on this isolated planet.

I have forgotten, the price of admission pop in a quarter I’ll tell you a story. This all happened when I was a young man, a teenager when you’re first learning to drive a car. You know how it is we were young and thought we were Rebels. And you know how teenagers will go they’ll have their drinking parties and flare-ups and they want to go for a drive.

I’ll never forget her demeanor, gentle a kind of gentle innocence of a smart little twelve-year-old that knew too much for her Age. She said please we have, a problem, you have a friend who was in terrible serious trouble, and he would die a horrible death. Not too much later, maybe a half-hour and the young girl appeared again and said, what have you done, you let him get away and she vanished. He killed my friend that night in a car accident and he killed another person. That was a sweet12-year-old little girl and he took the leg of another girl. After I realized what had happened and how I had failed to save my friend. I realized the little girl I had envisioned in my vision wanting me to stop my friend was the same little girl he killed that night in that car.

I’ll tell you why this story is this is not the only story he’s done this to me with other friends other families people I don’t know and only met He’s done this close to my whole life he knows who I am and he likes to remind me that I’m powerless to do anything to stop him. And as I’ve said before, you just can’t see it, but I will not accept this they’ll be a time it cannot be stopped. I don’t take any of this lightly, and my focus is on them

They Cometh Destruction, despair, then your God the Devil cometh. Christ with his Apostles, you will see bursting into the air a projection like a big screen without edges. Colorful intensity beyond compare. Christ with Anime eyes will hold you mesmerized. With soft kind words, your hands will be clasped, filled with joy. Your fate sealed.

The Devil once look at me through the eyes of another and said, I like to watch them quiver. When he said that I thought it meant kind of shaking!

It’s hate that attacks me but I don’t hold a candle to you the truth crushed. The Devil plays a tricky game with me and he wants me in the game. 

Well, this challenge is indeed challenging. This presents me with some confusion to work out. Breakdown the math together he can kill me, but he doesn’t? He can’t kill me, but he’d like to? He can kill me but he wants this and he knows I am the chosen player so he can’t kill me. I think the answer is I’m the only one that knows the answer I’m the only one who knows they’re here.

He needs me functional either that or he’s the Evilest Bloodthirsty Killer, in existence. That happens to be a bad Marksman who can’t hit his Target?

Unfortunately, you can’t Kung Fu do mathematics. I use high math you can’t you won’t be able to follow this in an absolute understanding because I use math the world can’t comprehend even the brightest scientists I know that sounds like I don’t know stupid egotistical crap, of a scientist but, we’re going to have to run with it. You’ll see it anyhow it just won’t compute. It’s kind of like looking at the brightest scientist math on a chalkboard board. You can see the numbers are clear as day, but they might as well be hieroglyphics If you can’t read that either.

What I use incorporates hieroglyphics hydrographic, scientific equations and when you see it it looks, like simple words of Ridiculousness like scribble math geniuses do on Chalkboards I know I can’t do either hieroglyphic or Brainiac math. I don’t get mad at The Brainiac in front of the chalkboard. I get mad at myself for not being able to understand anything not that it helps! You have no understanding of the monumental frustration See, the problem I have, and this is going to sound insulting, is I sound stupid to dumb people. Never confuse education with intelligence somebody should have told you it’s not the same thing.

Now understand this has nothing to do with you. I could be sitting in front of the stupidest person in the world and the smartest. And they’re going to walk out the door with the exact same thinking. Is a stupid guy as smart as a smart guy or is the smart guy as stupid as a stupid guy? It doesn’t matter this affects something that rides above the education field. Like I say you don’t understand the math.

Now I can be on both sides of the argument with this. Any answer would be the same God the Devil yes no it doesn’t matter. I’m sitting with a group of religious people and with a group of atheists. Together they going to walk out with the same mindset they have when they walk in regardless of their intelligence level It rides above the intelligence level. Or maybe it’s under it. What you can’t comprehend is the Scientific Technology they’re using! Understanding they modified it. 

If I can get you to understand my math, you would be able to see it. It’s not about if you’re stupid or smart. Before you can read me, you have to learn how to see me.

If you have the wisdom to see, what I offer you is the key!

I offered it to the world.

Take it, it’s yours, but alas, you throw your noses up and walk away.

You cannot see the math I, know the equation, this equation needs an x w. wisdom. 

Which, you refuse like bad little computers to accept it.

I see you down on your knees begging God for understanding, I can’t reach you yet, but I won’t give up trying. You don’t understand, he’s your killer he looks at you with a gleam.

I never speak about me you don’t even see my picture. One of the reasons you don’t see me on my site is it’s not about me. It’s about my message that’s what’s important.

There’s a whole planet of people on their knees, and there isn’t a single person in the entire world asking why? Not one single scientist is trying to find this group. Why?

I don’t know what else to say, I’ve given you the bandwidth. I’ve told you where they attack in the brain And I told you how they do it. They using technology to communicate they use technology to attack. And I can’t get the attention of one intelligent person in the entire f****** world there’s something seriously wrong about that. But I know that looks perfectly normal natural hunky-dory time to eat a banana monkey. I tell you something this group, modified your DNA. Billions of people around the world on their knees saying God, Allah, Christ, Devil, Extraterrestrials, Shiva are talking in their heads. And you’re upset because you don’t understand why they canceled your TV show. What do they do instead they put the guy on the money never, seen the inside of a hospital, yeah the entire country on their knees. I’ve had my stuff up for years in the most preponderance I can get is when I’m going to put PayPal on! I got news for you this notes this notes for you. You don’t know me and quite frankly Scarlett I don’t give a damn The only thing I care about is the absolutely impossible and that is to wake you up, wake you up to the fact that’s not your God or Allah, whoever you want to call it. It a cold-blooded entity of hate, and it’s standing right behind you breathing down your neck smiling, and you don’t have a clue I’m right, you’re wrong end of the story. Suck it up, and understand you’ve been played for a fool, and you’re being set up to die. I admit that I was a fool, actually, I was a fool twice. I was the fool the first time because I did what they wanted, and I read the book with curiosity I Was a Fool the second time when Christ appeared in front of me. But I was a smart man the third time (a Simplicity of encounters) I am Our Father’s Appointed and I stand alone. I Endeavor to wake up a sleeping world. I will say it again, people, this is not mystical mysticism, this is an absolute understanding of science! I believe therefore they can be detected we can find them we can rout them out! We have to start getting ready they are coming.

Ape-man your daddy God’s your daddy. Meanwhile, another guy pointing and laughing at you because he knows E.T.’S his daddy?

I say, Our Father is a highly intelligent being that came from a higher dimension to terraform, the solar system. And I tell you, that ship was taking in a cunning manipulated move. And the entity that had overpowered members of the crew this entity was using members of that crew to manipulate you into believing that your daddy was the ape-man God and ET so he can manipulate you in a position to kill you and I’m a raving lunatic?

I Stand Alone but I stand with knowledge.

I can find more people in this world that think that their minds king shit but I can’t find one f****** intelligent person in the entire Plane? And I’ve been looking for f****** years. I will speak to no egotistical idiot!

I’m not going to win this war the smartest person on the f****** planets an idiot.

He thinks he’s real smart though because he can count past 7.

The hardest thing in the world to do, is teaching a man who thinks he’s smart that he’s stupid?

I don’t have all the answers I know how to look for them but I’m not going to have the time.

I’ll tell you something you know nothing I’m done keep looking at your f email. You’ll find it’s like your mind nothing’s there? It’s a fine wine that went sour. I might be mistaken, it’s happened in the past and I must keep searching? Why are you are diligently working to kill everyone on the planet I must continue searching? You don’t like my words because they’re true it is the way. I am Our Father’s Appointed! And you are the one with the ego problem? I bring The Hidden Truth! And you have a problem with that. The situation is Extreme and it’s going to call for extreme measures to confront it. So, yes there is a chance and I am what I am for the moment because that’s what it’s going to take. We are under attack! The choice is not Ours? There is not an option to surrender? They are simply putting the pieces in place. They want to save the world because the world is our killer.

And I’m trying to wake up the World before they let the World know it?

And I need to find the smartest most honorable people in the world to do it. Because that’s when it’s going to take to faces this evil.

And the World’s ego and stupidity and a group of scum are in the freaking way! And you sit and wonder why I have an Attitude? And you call me stupid? I’ve walked the road! Like I said I may not like it, but I’ll wait because I have no other choices. 

I’m not psychic that ability doesn’t exist this is reality! I don’t know who reads my posts and when. Few like my words most discard me. I tell them the truth. Regardless of their religion or lack of it. The religious have been conditioned as well as the atheist. The Atheist sees me as an opportunist the religious see me as a liar or the Antichrist.

I’ll say it again to those of you in communication with what you believe is a higher entity. Are beings trying to deceive you and manipulate you! This is an extremely dangerous group, not benevolent at all.

My problems are bigger than I am and the solution is more than one man.

I am the Man of Sin.

I am Amor! Hahaha! I Am David.

I am every man’s worst nightmare.

And I don’t give a s*** what you think!

I am the toilet, bowl man, and I won’t be flushed!

Oh, by the way, your, money’s worth s***

The walls are thick.

No man’s, a fool, all have been deceived!

Doors to the left like I said we didn’t pick this fight!

I’m currently unavailable! The phone’s broken and, I’m done with phones leave a message if you want.

Sin stands for stopping imbecilic nonsense what they’re talking about I don’t know what to call that shit?

And in this, b******* I play King, but that’s not my name. And that’s not my game!

I am no little fluffy Puff that floats around! But I do have a busted bow somewhere? I don’t use it for love though. Love will kill you! You shoot her with an arrow!

I really can’t afford to wait, they are holding me back. So I got to wait but no God Stands with them. Damnation comes for them.

I am the holder of the winning ticket for a big f****** problem.

You ask when all this is supposed to happen? Hey, I’m the Mad Hatter how the hell would I know. I’ll tell you one thing I know we face a hora I’ve been confronting and trying to come to terms with my entire life. And when I tell you the choice is not ours that’s, unfortunately, the way it is.

They didn’t, come here, we did so as it, goes there already here. They’ve been at this for thousands of years. All I can say is we better be as ready as we can because they don’t care if we not. And I’ll tell you another thing you ain’t going to like they are getting ready to wipe out all the refineries! This is all going to happen when they stop running their tests. As I say what’s going to be coming is going to put, you unfortunate to the test.

[stepphase]

Looking for some cool noise canceling in small bluetooth headphones? Here's a small glimpse of original version

Anker Soundcore Liberty Air 2 Pro

The hero of the review is an example of how something very, very interesting can be hidden behind a rather cumbersome and unfamiliar name - Anker Soundcore Liberty Air 2 Pro

For example, inexpensive TWS headphones with active noise cancellation and the ability to analyze your hearing. And also add to this the wireless charging of the case and a bunch of nice tricks that make listening to music much easier.

Why Anker Soundcore Liberty Air 2 Pro?

Finding fancy yet completely wireless earbuds is tricky. In mid-priced models, they can easily save on case materials or noise cancellation. Models with a full "stuffing" of technologies will cost as a medium-sized smartphone.

Not the most pleasant situation, I agree. But there is a way out: for example, you should look for headphones not from smartphone manufacturers. After all, for this there are those companies that have specialized in sound for years. Anker is very well versed in sound quality. Although not promoted like many brands.

HOW MUCH IS IT COST AND WHERE TO BUY

Anker Soundcore Liberty Air 2 Pro Specifications

Type of emitters : dynamic, PureNote Resistance : 16 ohm Diaphragm of emitters : 11 mm frequency range : 20 Hz - 20,000 Hz Bluetooth version : 5.0, SBC, AAC Battery life : 7 hours on a single charge, 26 hours with a case Microphone : 6 pcs, active noise cancellation Price : Find Out Current Price And Discount

Appearance

The decision not to use gloss was good for the headphones. Nice matte plastic and a neat silver insert make the headphones stand out well from others. While others strive for minimalism where it is not always needed, Anker does it in its own way.

Soundcore Liberty Air 2 Pro

From the front, it may seem that the headphones are angular and will not be very comfortable to sit in your ears. However, on the reverse side, a triumph of streamlined forms awaits you. Why is there such a difference between the front and back? It's simple. The front gray bar is the touchpad that you need to control playback and volume. It seems that a flat surface is much more convenient for all these sensory manipulations than a cylindrical one.

The anatomical shape of the body made it possible not to resort to the use of additional silicone tips for fixing the earphone inside the auricle. So in the Liberty Air 2 Pro you only have to deal with the ear pads. By the way, there are as many as nine pairs of them in the kit. So, there will be no problems with the selection of the optimal size. This is a plus.

The ear pads themselves are not firmly attached to the headphones, but rather tightly. Should not fly at a random moment. Reliability of fastening here is achieved by the fact that the ear pads consist of two parts. The first is made of soft silicone and it is she who will be in contact with the ear canal. The second part is more rigid, more difficult to stretch. And all this allows it to more confidently hold on to the plastic.

The indication has not been removed anywhere, it is in place. To understand that the headphones are turned on and ready to use, you can use a barely noticeable LED, which is mounted directly under one of the microphones in the upper part of the case. And, despite its size, it is quite bright - the LED is visible even in sunny weather.

Case

Not every headphone case deserves a separate paragraph. But in this case, you cannot do without it.

During all two weeks of testing, the materials used caused me a tactile delight. To the touch, the plastic on the outside is somewhat similar to a soft-touch, but the soft-touch itself is, nevertheless, a little more velvety.

Immediately the texture is smooth. Although if you look at the surface of the case, you can get cognitive dissonance. This is due to the visual texture, which looks like the texture of the stone, which is slightly different from what your fingers feel. And no, not only the visual texture here resembles a stone. The neutral gray color and the shape of the case help with this.

The opening of the lid here does not happen like everyone else, but with the help of a shift. Yes, yes, that very slider design, painfully familiar to all of us from old (and not so) phones. Its movement is pleasant, the lid does not dangle and there is a practical benefit from this form factor - if the case falls, the headphones will remain inside.

For the price at which these headphones are sold, one might not expect support for the Qi standard. However, Anker did not forget about wireless charging, and now the case can be charged not only through the Type-C port, but also directly from your smartphone, if it supports reverse charging, of course.

The convenience of use

In the first paragraph, I already wrote that the anatomical shape of the body is comfortable for the ears. However, the convenience of wireless headphones isn't just about the way they fit in your ears. How the headphones are connected to your equipment also plays a big role here.

Alas, not all of them can do it quickly and, most importantly, always. And with the Soundcore Liberty Air 2 Pro, everything is simple: take out the headphones and they are immediately picked up by the last used device. You don't have to press anything at all. Got it out and use it.

Soundcore App

The Soundcore application also helps in customizing the headphones. After installation, a full-fledged headphone control center, and not two buttons with an equalizer, as is the case with some famous competitors.

And if everything is clear with the setting of touch buttons, noise reduction modes and “skipping” of external sound (pressed and working), then you will have to spend a few minutes setting HearID. The fact is that in this mode the headphones will determine the sensitivity of your hearing in certain frequency ranges, after which they will create a preset with the most appropriate settings. You will be required to enter your age, and during testing, press the confirmation button when you start to hear a sound.

Noise suppression

In general, two microphones are enough for an active noise driver. But bigger is better, so Anker decided to use three microphones in one earphone at once, which gives more effective noise reduction in a variety of conditions.

The user can choose from three ready-made noise reduction modes:

Outdoors (reducing the sound level of the surrounding urban environment); Indoors (elimination of voices and midrange noise in rooms); Transport (low frequency noise reduction).

There is, of course, also a custom mode, but it is not easy to set up, so it is better to use something from the ready-made presets. The first two do their job well, but the most useful of them is the mode for use in transport.

The sounds of the Moscow subway are processed to a good level, leaving you with only a few high frequency sounds. If you go to school or work every morning by public transport, then these headphones should be your salvation from the rest of the world.

Two pairs

And as befits almost any TWS earbuds, the Soundcore Liberty Air 2 Pro can use their microphones for more than just noise cancellation and voice communications. All microphones in the same application can be switched to skip external sounds. A useful thing if you need to understand what is happening outside. After all, even passive noise isolation is at a good level here (provided that the ear cushions are correctly selected, of course).

Sound

The first thing that I involuntarily drew attention that- distinct bass and sub-bass sounds. Low frequencies do not turn into an incomprehensible mess and do not overlap the rest. The same goes for the rest of the frequencies. The sound is well detailed, even those musical parts that you simply will not hear in headphones of a class a little lower are clearly audible.

This is facilitated by not the simplest design of the headphones, although it would seem that they are ordinary TWS plugs. Above the drivers, there are as many as ten hardened nano-plates, which increase the frequency coverage and increase the clarity of the reproduced sounds.

Yes, someone would like to see support for LDAC and aptX codecs in these headphones, but for everyday use (videos on YouTube, music from streaming services), even the standard SBC codec will be enough. And do not forget that the headphones use Bluetooth 5.0 with not the smallest bandwidth.

Autonomy

From a single charge, the Soundcore Liberty Air 2 Pro can work for about seven to eight hours, despite the fact that all this time you will be using a rather energy-intensive noise reduction mode. This agrees with what the manufacturer promises, but in fact, you will rarely come across headphones discharged to zero, because they charge impressively quickly in the case.

Complete Wire

It was like this: The main thing is to charge the case on time. And it's good that you often don't have to do this. A fully charged case can provide a total runtime of 26 hours. Good result for compact TWS headphones.

Conclusion

Anker has managed to make some of the best TWS headphones in its price segment. Yes, and finding competitors is decisively difficult when headphones are cheaper than the con flagship class, but in fact offer a full set of all kinds of functions that you will not find in more expensive models during the day.

HOW MUCH IS IT COST AND WHERE TO BUY

The active noise cancellation is at a good level, the volume reserve is large, and even 7 hours without a case is an excellent result. What else do you need from fully wireless headphones?Also if you like this article or having any suggestions feel free to tell us.

#Stepphase #technologies #technology #tech #technews #techworld #techtrends #smartphone #apple #techupdates #futuretechnology #newtech #techgeek #technologynews #technologythesedays #smarttechnology #technologylover #technologytrends #technologyblog #gadgets #smartphone #gadget #marketing #digital #india #technologyisawesome #amazing #repost

[nicosroom]

New year, same pandemic

Hello, 2021! It’s been a while, Tumblr. 

Given 2020, it seems strange to set goals for the new year ahead. Yet, here we are...

This is a work in progress organized by categories for now; I’m not sure yet if I can muster a 21 for 2021 or a 52 list as I’ve done in years past.

Fitness:

Nine months of stay at home have forced us all to get creative, it seems. I started strong with this in March, when a friend invited a group to do Yoga with Adriene’s 30 Days of Yoga series, aptly called “Home” (having released it in January, I guess Adriene couldn’t have known). I was a bit nervous. The last time I’d done Adriene’s 30 Days of Yoga (January 2016), I injured my wrist and it took about 8 weeks to heal/recover; then, for me, about a year to get back on the yoga mat; and when I did, I would only go to professionally guided classes. So this March, I started slow with an every-other-day routine. l had some trouble forming a habit, though, especially on the weekends, so I shifted to a Monday through Friday commitment; this, I found much more compelling because soon enough, the yoga sessions marked the end of my (at home) workday and the start of my evening “me time.” This yoga habit is one of the better “silver linings” that I exit 2020 with.

Other fitness activities have been hit or miss all quarantine long. I’ve had a fairly strong habit of 20-30 minute daily walks and when I was still in Colorado, I tried to get on the hiking trails each week. Still, I had to lower my daily step goals from 10,000 of the past many years of using fitness trackers, to the far more realistic 5,000. With the gym closed, living in a studio apartment, walking was all I could really manage; and being the stress chef that I am, from March through June (like many), I saw the scale going up ever so slowly. When I got to Ohio, where I’ve tried teaching remotely while living with my parents, I had much more luck thanks to the wide open spaces of their farmland, an enthusiastic walking buddy in their 10-year-old Pomeranian, and both an elliptical (mom’s never realized New Year’s resolution in 2017) and a treadmill (perhaps from the early 1990s). Yet, living with my parents has seemed to wreck my diet, both because they’re such meat eaters, my stress eating (provoked by Zoom university and them), and all the fall/winter holiday foods I can’t resist). While I haven’t been gaining as I was earlier this year, my weight has hovered at 140, about 10 more than I want.

Now, I’m packing up once more and heading to a new state and my own apartment once again. I’m excited to take control of my own grocery shopping, food prep, and space again, but I’m nervous about saying goodbye to the cardio machines and the wide open spaces. It seems, just in time, a friend has introduced me to Cassey Ho’s Blogilates channel and monthly workout calendar, a trove of at home cardio and Pilates  videos that are apartment friendly and largely equipment-free. I started incorporating these into my routine in early December and enter the new year four weeks ahead of the curve on habit-formation. So, here are some fitness goals for 2021:

Daily, 10-min wake up & stretch video 

January 4-25, I’m tackling the Blogilates #21DayTone

After that, my workout routine will be: 

Monday thru Friday, Yoga with Adriene video

Monday thru Friday, Blogilates video(es)

By Dec. 25, 2021, I want to be able to do the splits

Buy a new yoga mat: I’ve had the same one since college (12+ years!), so it’s past due, and I feel really compelled by the product placement in Adriene and Cassey’s videos. And Target just started carrying Blogilates products. But, given how much I now am using my mat these days, it feels like an investment rather than a once-in-while accessory. And actually, I might buy two. Are there recommended folding mats for that are easy to pack when traveling? I’m traveling by car most often now, so it isn’t the worst to bring mine rolled, but when we can resume plane travel...

Work/Productivity:

My research has seriously suffered during the pandemic. There are a lot of explanations: grief and depression and a daily onslaught of bad news; my contingent status in the academy and the overall trash fire of the profession’s unpredictable financial future; and being completely unsettled in my home life while working from home. I’ll feel a lot better if I can produce some writing that I like, so after I get settled in the new place, I have some goals...

First, I’ve arranged to do a book review, which is due February 1, which I hope will be the gateway to feeling like I accomplished something.

Then, I’m aiming to draft this article I’ve been wallowing with for most of 2020. My “deadline” is June 30, which I hope is both generous and realistic, given that the new semester promises more of the same at global Zoom university.

To help me achieve these goals, I’m re-instating one of my dissertation writing techniques, which is a minimum of 40 minutes of timed writing per (non-teaching) day. Many days, those 40-minute writing intervals got repeated 4-5 times; but there are just some days where 40 minutes is all I have, whether its for scheduling reasons or for bandwidth or because it’s the weekend.

Sleeping & waking:

A constant, it seems, is to work on sleep and waking habits. Actually, my sleep habits have improved drastically over the past several years. During the pandemic, I’ve maybe even been sleeping more than ever. And as such, it’s my waking habits that have suffered, given the drastic disruption of routines and the total collapse of any separation between living space and workspace. I’m used to waking up about two hours before I need to be somewhere or do something; I take long showers and like to linger over breakfast. For months now, I find myself lingering in bed for 45 minutes to an hour after my initial alarms, not usually dozing off and repeatedly snoozing them even, but browsing social media (despite there being few updates since the previous night). Subsequently, I feel rushed as I shower, dress, and take in breakfast, hoping that I’ll hit my “home office” space by 9am.

In 2021, I’m striving to…

spend 20 minutes of non-screen activity immediately before bed, whether reading, drawing, coloring, etc.

live by a one snooze limit and get out of bed within 10 minutes of the alarm

also meaning, no social media browsing in bed in the mornings

(as noted above) start each day with a 10-minute stretch routine (even the weekends)

get back to hearty breakfasts… in my rush, I’m reaching for yogurts and various packaged breakfast biscuits or cereals. When I plan ahead and actually prep overnight oatmeal or organize some kind of breakfast bowls, where I only have to add an egg or an avocado in the mornings, I feel much better and my morning work flows more smoothly.

Spending:

Four months living with my parents rent free (down from nearly $1200 a month I was spending on rent), I expected to pad my savings accounts with quite a bit of money in the fall semester, even as I was on a part time salary. But alas, I seem to have not… Like a lot of people, retail therapy has been a favorite way to cope with the pandemic… candles, new boots, a two year supply of Korean facemasks, yet another set of Pyrex, books and more books. I purchased a few things I’ve been putting off for years, including a new laptop (mine was 10 years old) and a proper desk chair (which I’ve never had). In October, I was advised to get new tires before the winter set in ($494). And, my marketplace health insurance plan (including vision and dental), $244 per month… It added up fast.

In the new year, I’ll be on full time salary and have employer benefits, lowering my out of pocket costs on insurance. And although living on my own means my living expenses will surely rise (rent, utilities, grocery, and house supplies), I hope to calm down my discretionary spending once I get the new apartment set up––admittedly, there are some furniture purchases I want to make first (a real couch, a couple bookshelves, a baker’s rack for the kitchen).

Eating/ Recipes:

2020 was such a wreck for my eating habits, even before the pandemic as I navigated my interview schedule, travel, and stress during the tenure-track job market;  and the college’s block schedule (ironically, I was teaching food literature, yet I barely had time to cook or feed myself fresh foods). Then came the pandemic, where I had all the time to cook for myself… and cooking and eating seemed to be the only thing to do. So, I occupied myself planning complicated recipes, brainstorming how to use up any out-of-the-usual ingredients I would need for them. And I also noticed myself picking up new, not healthy habits, like buying non-dairy ice creams on my bi-weekly, masked up and high stress grocery forays. And on top of that, I felt compelled to support local businesses with huge takeout orders that might last me two or three days.

Spring faded into summer, summer into fall and I was settling in for the long haul at my parents’ house. They’re eating habits are generally pretty healthy (my mom has a degree in nutrition after all), but they are also truly midwestern “meal = meat” types. Probably as part of my grad school budgeting, I’ve long adapted to eating meat sparingly, preparing it at home just a few times a month or, more typically, getting it at restaurants while eating mainly vegetarian at home. I also found in my mom’s house that it is stocked with sweets and snacks like it never was when I was a kid––potato chips, cookies, chocolates, sugary drinks. Alone, I manage my inability to resist by simply not buying many of these things, but here they were all the time.

Moving into my apartment this January, it very much feels like I’m setting myself up for success in 2021, as I take control of my grocery trips once more, re-establish my meal prep habits, and dial down meat consumption/dial up veggies.

Here are some recipes I’m excited to try this year:

Oat and banana based breakfast muffins

Crock pot butter chicken

Various waffles (I got a mini waffle maker!), especially scallion waffles; leftover Thanksgiving stuffing waffles; hash brown waffles; and zucchini fritters (I tried to make these on the frying pan last year, but I think I’ll get a better crisp in the waffle maker)

Sweet potato biscuits (for a breakfast sandwich)

Various soups, including Chicken & Hominy Stew with Greens

Hasselback Potato with Cilantro-Peanut Dressing

Cookies: coffee (winter/Christmas), pumpkin (fall)

Read/Watch:

Finish The Bluest Eye (Morrison) - I’ve been stalled on p. 130 since July 2020. Help.

Laura Kang, Traffic in Asian Women

Charles Yu, Interior Chinatown

Tommy Orange, There There

The Lunchbox

History and Memory

Minari

Taxi Driver

90 Day Fiancée (for research)

[thegurlbehindthesmile]

Ticks

 Isnt it interesting the ticks you develop while trying to cope with anxiety- even being just uncomfortable-full of tension. 

(*Dressed in Black*-Sia)

When i’m overwhelmed with tension...anger, ill roll my neck over and over to try and crack is. rubbing it with my hands again and again. Instantly its a tension headache rushing blood to my head- a gold ball of a knot forming as whatever fuse i have ignites. 

If i’m uncomfortable ill sometimes get hives, on my chest, collar bone, arms. My ears will get itchy and red. my thighs will become uncontrollable itchy under my jeans, like an itch you just cant seem to make go away.

If i’m upset i tend to roll and rub my hands, ill rub my shoulder in a certain spot- my hair becomes uncomfortable, my clothes become uncomfortable- everything gets hot. 

When i was younger i don’t remember when it started...

i don’t remember where i learned it.

Now as an adult i can finally try and look back and do this replay- as i try and watch and figure it all out. 

*Chandelier (Piano Version)* -Sia

When you Google Self Harm a bunch of sites come up about differing from cutting to suicide. As you dip into all the words things like “learning to deal with deep distress and emotional pain” Apparently cutting has some chemical way of helping one cope with the feelings one can express?-feel?-understand?  totally get that- i mean now of course. At the time all you get is a bunch of people and doctors questionably starring and asking why would you want to kill yourself.

..”I’m not.”

BUT alas- i imagine unless you’ve been through it you don’t really understand it.  I guess i was going through some deep shit and had no understanding of how to actually process those feelings and harming myself was; a relief. SOmetimes it felt as if there was this scratch under my skin that i just couldnt itch. When the world flooded in and the noise got to much to bare; just a tiny scratch- and i was able to breathe- i was able to finally cry- i was able to feel. i always felt numb. (emotional bandwidth at maX capacity!) i could neither take in more feelings or even function through the ones i was having. I feel like i was a zombie. recklessly behaving in all sorts of ways- searching for ways to “feel” - not even fee better just- feel. 

i was young.. in love.. heart broken- hurt- happy. it was a wild ride. i would rather not walk down high school memory lane at this moment. lets just say i imagine i was like any other typical teenager, i just couldn't get a hold of my shit-at all. *shrug emoji*

At the time it feels like the world is melting and heavy, but after it feels like a blur- like a black out. All prior chemicals have now left like a flood out of the brain and your left questioning a moment- “did that just happen?” I swore sometimes i didnt even remember doing it- just remember see the small scratches with such curiosity. 

I dont remember stopping. I dont remember the problems going away or feelings disappearing. Just filed into the library of my mind to pick up again if id like to revisit hell. There was no ground breaking “end” ceremony where i pledged to never harm again.  

Time just seemed to go by. I was all a sudden- never really alone that much (as before i was) I soon began a relationship that started young and catapulted me into the marriage i’m in today. For most of the first 7 or so years we spent a large majority of our time together ( quite literally) we worked together, lived together, and spent all of our free time-together.  somewhere in that 7 years i became some else- none of that was on my mind at all.

*Breathe Me* - Sia

It’s very confusing (as a person) because i am generally SUPER optimistic. I literally cant seem to let many things get me down. In most reality scenarios i am the clear headed player who can come up with some happy arrangement and continue through the stress or dilemma with a huge smile. 

Today i continue to be this person but any quiet alone moments usually bring on some sort of tear fest. This flood of overwhelming feels as if i had been holding it all in from some cry before. Its gasping- and tears- and dry eyes and throat. Gut wrenching hurt crying. pure sadness. i can feel it- the sadness- it literally hurts. 

This was the moment i realized i was “one of those people” all a sudden i was my young self- the room got tight- the worlds noise got too loud and the darkness whispered its magic “relief”. deep breathes is an understand. counting. breathing...breathing...trying to breathe. loud music is an understatement. my headphones vibrating against my head to a melody that hopefully numbs out the whispers. and then it would stop. eventually enough music and the monster stops.

exhaustion- hunger - thirst.

if im lucky the word will let me sleep a little. my brain finally quiet.  no thoughts. just sleep.

[sciencespies]

Dog Ownership Associated With Longer Life, Here Are The Caveats

https://sciencespies.com/news/dog-ownership-associated-with-longer-life-here-are-the-caveats/

Dog Ownership Associated With Longer Life, Here Are The Caveats

Yes, I could make you feel better. Yes, I realize that I am quite cute. But before we establish a relationship, there are some things that you should know. (Photo by Owen Humphreys/PA Images via Getty Images)

PA Images via Getty Images

More

You dog! Two studies just published in the journal Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes came out quite positive “fur” dog owners. Both suggested that owning dogs is associated with a longer life. But before you go “bow wow wow yippie yo yippie yay” over these findings, make sure that you understand what they really mean.

One study was an analysis of data from the Swedish National Patient Register. The authors included Mwenya Mubanga, Liisa Byberg, Erik Ingelsson, and Tove Fall from Uppsala University, which is pronounced “Oops” (as in “Ooops, I did it again”) and “-ala.” Agneta Egenvall from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences was also an author. The Register had 154, 617 patients from 40 to 85 years old who had had heart attacks (i.e., acute myocardial infarction), 5.7% of whom had owned dogs, and 154,617 who had had an ischemic stroke, 4.8% of whom had owned dogs between January 1, 2001 and December 31, 2012.

The results were sweet for the Swede dog owners. After suffering the heart attack, those living alone were 33% less likely to have died during the follow-up period if they had a dog versus didn’t have a dog. Those who had a partner or child (it is not clear how often the partner acted like a child) the likelihood was 15% lower for dog owners. For those who had suffered a stroke, the numbers were 27% and 12%, respectively.

The second study was a systematic review conducted by three researchers from Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, Canada. A systematic review is when you search for all published studies that address a particular question of interest and meet some specified criteria and pool the results together. The research team found ten scientific studies published from 1950 to May 24, 2019 that compared survival between those who owned dogs and those who did not. Pooling these studies together revealed that dog owners had a 24% lower likelihood of dying from anything, 65% lower likelihood of dying after a heart attack, and 31% lower likelihood of dying from cardiovascular-related issues during the period of time that they were followed. Of course, eventually death like taxes (well, actually not like taxes) is unavoidable. Dogs may be the Shiz-Tzu, but they cannot prevent death forever. These findings simply showed dog ownership to be associated with more people living beyond particular follow-up periods.

To the best of my knowledge, dogs did not directly fund either study. I asked several dogs for comments on the study. One of them growled. Another looked at me like I was a hamburger. A third seemed distracted.

Before you say that this proves that dogs can help you live longer, let’s press the paws button. All these studies show are associations, not cause-and-effect. There are many things that can be associated with both dog ownership and living longer. For example, if you have a very stressful and time-restricted life, you may not have the energy and bandwidth to own a dog. After all, you can’t just leave the apartment and house each morning and tell your dog, “OK, the keys to the car are over there, feel free to make yourself breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and oh, don’t watch too much Game of Thrones.” Similarly, owning a dog is not free and requires resources. Therefore, dog ownership can be a proxy for what resources you may have. It may mean that you have large enough living quarters and can afford everything that you need to provide your dog such as food, veterinarian visits, and very small tuxedos. After all, household income alone can not tell what resources someone may have. As you know, people may inherit lots of things.

Nevertheless, as I have written previously for Forbes, there are reasons why dog ownership may bring potential health benefits. They can provide companionship when you feel alone. They can get you moving around because, at the very least, they need to be walked. You don’t want to find out what happens when you never walk your dog. They can also facilitate social connections with other humans. For example, one of my medical school classmates once bought a dog specifically to meet women. By the way, it worked.

Here is a Harvard University report on how dogs can help:

Be careful though. Dogs cannot and should not be a replacement for human contact. It may be tempting to have someone around who won’t actively disagree with you, or at least not voice it. At least, you don’t hear when your dog mutters, “my owner is a bleeping idiot.” However, dogs cannot provide everything that humans can. Owning a dog should not mean that you can neglect other humans or treat them like dog poop.

Additionally, everyone is different and has different life situations and needs. Dog ownership is not for everyone. Like any relationship, both sides have to be vested in the relationship and not have hidden agendas. You actually have to want to care for your dog, which can be quite ruff if you are not into it. Your dog also should like you, and frankly not all dogs will. If your dog hates your guts, that can create some Real Housewives-like situations.

In the end, don’t be dogmatic about what observational studies like these two may suggest. Dogs can be so fetch, but they are not necessarily for everyone. A dog-human relationship is a two-way street. The Shania Twain song “(If You’re Not In It For Love) I’m Outta Here” applies here as well. Don’t just get a dog simply because you think a dog will help you live longer. That would be like getting married for the same reason.

#News

[theliterateape]

The Primary Reason I Didn’t Vote in the Illinois Primary

By David Himmel

“The flag should never be displayed with the union down, except as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property.” —U.S Code 176

I didn’t see the usual “I VOTED” stickers from my darling and my annoying social media friends on Super Tuesday III—as MSNBC was calling it in further effort to make the news feel like a Rocky film. That is due in part because I didn’t spend much time on social media yesterday. I couldn’t afford that time. I was busy with other stuff. But it also could be because a lot of those social media friends didn’t vote, and if they did, things are so goddamn dour now that bragging about running an errand wasn’t worth the energy it takes to frame, filter, and post a pic proving your citizenship.

I also didn’t vote in the Illinois Primary on Super Tuesday III—again, MSNBC’s title for a voting day because MSNBC is run by dorks who get hard and wet over the most mundane but important aspects of American life.

Yep. I’m that guy. I’m that guy who didn’t vote in the most important primary of our lives. Right? That’s what this is, right? Eh. I’m also that guy who is married to a woman who didn’t vote in the Illinois Primary on Super Tuesday III. 

Allow me to digress… Okay, look, I realize that MSNBC didn’t create the Super Tuesday III moniker, but that was the channel my wife had on most of the day as we were holed up in our apartment trying to dodge COVID-19. And I dislike MSNBC almost as much as I dislike FOX News, so I’m easily coerced by my own ego—maybe my id, I don’t know—to take a barely clever shit on its dumb, smug face whenever I can.

Now, back to the important thoughts… I’m that guy who didn’t vote. And I’m that guy whose wife didn’t vote. And I fully expect friends of ours, friends like Rory Zacher to comment on this story or its Facebook post, or to text me and say something to the effect of: “I hope Trump comes into your home, grabs your two-year-old-son by the pussy and builds a wall around your toilet. That’s what you get for not voting.” And that’s fine. Because my son doesn’t have a pussy. Just ask him. He will proudly tell you he has a penis and that “Mommy penis… bye-bye.” And that reminds me… I need to teach my son that a penis is not something that all people have then goes “bye-bye.” That’s sexism. And it only applies, respectfully, to rich trannies.

I’m a politico. I even write and host podcasts for POLITICO. But I didn’t vote. Why? Well, duh…

The primary reason I didn’t vote in the Illinois Primary yesterday—Rachel Maddow’s third best orgasm of 2020—is simple: It wasn’t important.

My vote would not have mattered. Nope. I don’t want to hear it. It wouldn’t have mattered. I would have chosen a Democratic Ballot. Between the job, trying to keep Literate Ape functioning, missing Don Hall like the deserts miss the rain, being an engaged dad and attentive husband, and thinking through two film projects, one novel, and a book of poetry, I did not have the bandwidth to consider those down-ballot elections. I like to think of myself as non-partisan. I would easily vote republican if I thought a republican candidate could do the job right. But if I had voted today, I would have asked for a Democratic ballot, which means I would have ben voting for the best of the most useless so-called liberal. Maybe there were general contests to vote for, I don’t know. Because I mostly don’t care. And I’ll come back to that in a moment. As it relates to voting for the president, well… I’d prefer Bernie. But, if Old Joe Dementia gets the nomination, that’s fine. I know Bernie won’t get done all he wants to get done because he’ll never have the support of Congress required to do it. See, the thing that most people forget is that the president is designed to be the Face, not the Ruler. It’s Congress that makes the difference. And come the general election, I’ll likely vote Democrat all the way down. Except for judges. But that’s a complicated story for another time.

 The primary reason I didn’t vote in the Illinois Primary yesterday—Rachel Maddow’s third best orgasm of 2020—is simple: It wasn’t important.

So even I had voted, it wouldn’t have mattered. Some excited wank aligned with the Democratic Party would be elected over an equally excited wank aligned with the Democratic Party. And then it’ll be a fight to the finish against a republican cocknozzle who wants to be as (un)cool as Devin Nunes. And my vote for Bernie, and my wife’s vote for Bernie, would not have helped keeping him from getting trounced the same way the Houston Astros trounced the rules of baseball. Thing is, if I had voted, I’d feel far more disappointed than I am right now. And you should know, dear reader, that my secondary goal in life is to master disappointment. The first goal is to convince myself, my wife, and every girlfriend I’ve ever had that I was worth the lay.

Yeah, yeah, Zacher, I know, I could have early voted. And I thought about that. “Maybe we should do that,” I said to my wife, Katie. Or maybe she said it to me. But we didn’t. Why? I dunno. Because this primary didn’t matter much in our household, I suppose. And that’s selfish, I know. But we’re white and not broke, and we own a boat, and we have so many friends who can afford in vitro and all that shit—like multiple times, all of them—so what the fuck do you expect from us?

So, the primary reason I didn’t vote in the Illinois Primary is because it wasn’t important. And not just because I don’t care about the flawed system or the sub-basement candidates. But because when I considered the risk of casting a vote for one fuckhead over another at risk of contracting COVID-19, I chose to stay home and have Zoom meetings with co-workers.

But here’s the other thing—that goddamn coronavirus. Yep. I’m not afraid, but I’m not an idiot. I’ve been a healthcare journalist to varying degrees for ten years. I was the editor in chief of Chicago Health magazine for six years. I’m a senior healthcare reporter for POLITICO. I’m not bragging (should I?), I’m just setting the stage to tell you that I’m not an everyday idiot. I’m a special kind of idiot! I recognize this shit is real. It was real the moment it left Wuhan. And really, it was real the moment it left the bat and made its way into the first human, or however the fuck this goddamn thing began.

Katie was sick on Sunday. A slight fever, which dropped quickly, was not the great concern. The great concern was her hydration because she was—how can I put this politely—shitting out of her mouth and pissing out of her ass for a good twenty-four hours. Three days later, she’s still struggling to find her normal. And now our boy has a fever. Tuesday afternoon, he broke through 100ºF with the gusto we all wanted Hillary to break through that glass ceiling. (Alas, another white male out did a woman. Yeah, I’m as perturbed by it as you are, brah/sista.)

Do they have COVID-19? Probably not. But were/are they ill? Yep. And in a time when we know less than almost fuck all about this pandemic, should someone exposed to their snot, breath, and farts venture out to a voting booth, take hold of a communal pen, and breathe on every available surface? Nah. Probably not.

As of this writing, I feel great. My bowel movements are as liquid as they usually are and my ability to breathe is as normal as it usually is, which is to say, I can smell all the farts in my house. The lingering ones… the ones living in the couch cushions, the ones that aren’t mine or Katie’s or Harry’s, but those of some of our dearest friends. You know who you are, couch farters.

My office shut down last week after the news that someone in one of the largest downtown Chicago office complexes was tested positive for COVID-19. The agency I work for has taken some drastic measures to ensure its survival as has almost every single organization in the United States with employees and clients to consider. This shit is ugly. And with each passing day, it look smore and more like a more devastating. I mean, they’ve stopped the money. No NBA. No NCAA. No goddam casinos! When America shuts down it’s money, you know shit is real. This is stranger and more dire and more uncertain than 9/11. And 9/11 was fucking  fucked up. You remember, right?

So I didn’t vote. I’m on a minor quarantine. Since I’m the only person in our household—other than the dog—without any flu-like or ass dynamite symptoms, I’m the one who makes the Walgreens runs and walks that mooch of a dog (whom I love). And as In pass other dog walkers, or the rare jogger or Walgreens runner, we take extra steps aside to avoid each other—three feet at least! And we give a knowing nod to say, “Don’t vote, dude. Those pens are not getting whipped down. I know they say they are, but come on. We all know that’s not true. The wipedowns are dependent on poorly paid democratic (lowercase D, morons, calm down) do-gooders who would rather be at home than have you breathing and coughing on them.”

The outcome of the 2020 election, presidential and every more important down-ballot ticket will not be determined by my staying at home. And if it does, it doesn’t matter. Because even if Old Joe Dementia gets the nomination, even if Trump is reelected, even if Kim Fox marries Jussie Smollet’s straight alter-ego, my vote yesterday—Super Tuesday III when Brian Williams and Rachel Maddow scissor to the tune of Europe’s “The Final Countdown” during Morning Joe, nothing is more important than the health of my family, myself, and my neighborhood. Especially when stacked against our decaying democracy, or whatever the fuck we call this shitshow now.

[certainheartrunaway]

A detailed comparison and review of the C.Crane CCRadio 2E

Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, 13dka, who shares the following guest post and review:

Do I really need this radio? A very belated review of the C.Crane CCRadio 2E

by 13dka

Ever since my relapse into radioholism a few years ago, I had a craving for a top-notch medium wave radio. This became even more of an urge when Germany abandoned the AM BC band just like many other European countries, leaving a band full of new opportunities but little left to receive during the day, at least with all the average portables I own. When checking the options, there’s no way around Jay Allen’s website if you want to know what’s best on MW, and I learned how little choices there are on the summit of the “5-star”-radios. Over the years I kept looking for an RF-2200/DR-22 et al but they are few and far between over here, and buying a dusty old radio with an unknown history, likely in need of repairs, restoration and alignment, for an insane premium price (up to 400€!) from a stranger was not exactly a pleasant prospect for me.

The CC Radio 2E and its predecessors, successors and siblings are the only radios in the topmost 5-star bunch that can be bought new and at a reasonable price. Sadly, the best product for the European market is only a 4 1/2 star radio and I realized that I have to buy a radio clearly made for the USA only, and accept the parts that don’t make any sense over here (120V, 10kHz AM spacing only, WX band). The problem: getting one shipped to Germany was rather complicated until Amazon.com made that much easier last year.

Performance comparisons

AM Broadcast Band

After 2 weeks of gleeful anticipation it finally arrived last month and I rushed to the mall to buy plenty of ‘D’-cells, then to the dike to answer my own, most pressing question: “how much better is a top tier Jay-Allen-5-star radio than my average 3-star radios anyway?”. I wasn’t sure what to expect from the 2E, partly because the videos I could find compared it with other good AM radios, or they didn’t compare it at all and sometimes the radio didn’t even get turned on. Nothing really related to the radios I have, after all they represent a whole bunch of popular radios people currently own with a similar (around average) AM performance, like the Tecsun PL-nnn, Eton Executive Satellit or Field, or ICF-7600, Zenith TO/R-7000 to name a few older types – and I was looking forward to fill that gap!

Sensitivity

Spoiler alert: the CCR2E’s sensitivity obviously bests all of my other portables. Duh! It should, because my example of the PL-660 isn’t good on AM at all, the XHDATA D-808 [read my full review here] is a 2-1/2 star radio and the Tecsun S-8800 [read my full review here] is a 3-star radio on the “Jay Allen rating scale”, even though I’d rate my examples of these radios the other way around – my D-808 has a tiny sensitivity edge over my S-8800.

So how much better is it? Here’s a cellphone video letting the radios speak for themselves, alas with plenty of wind noise (sorry, it’s usually windy here at the coast!). Make sure you watch it past the somewhat unspectacular first minute:

Click here to view on YouTube.

I hope you’ll agree that this is pretty impressive, and that’s the kind of results I was hoping for. There’s also a simple way of quantifying how much better it is in numbers: if I tune across the band in the afternoon and note all frequencies that clearly show signs of a station (not counting how well it comes in, just the pure existence of some signal that can be identified as “broadcast station”), the D-808 has 11 frequencies populated, the CCR2E has 25. That’s more than twice as much, the 2E has twice as many stars, sounds about right. Let’s also keep in mind that the XHDATA or the Tecsun represent “average”, “serviceable” or “decent” AM radios that are quite satisfactory for most people, and yet there is apparently a whole world between an average radio and the top of the heap. To be honest, I didn’t expect how dramatic the difference would turn out.

That made me curious how my battered old Grundig Satellit 400 would do, after all it was always a tad better than the other portables I have (Jay Allen might rate it 3-1/2 stars), and MW is the only thing in it that still really works. I decided to buy it the last bunch of batteries of its life and took it to the dike:

Click here to view on YouTube.

Evidently the Grundig is a bit more sensitive than my other average radios but without much benefit. Stations with some appreciable level turn out a bit better but it fails at the same stations as the other radios and the C.Crane unsurprisingly runs circles around the Grundig as well. The first and the last station recorded in this video demonstrate that nicely – my favorite low power benchmark station (1602 kHz) transmitting with 100W from a moored old pirate radio ship was just making it over the noise on the S-8800 in the previous video. The Satellit picks it up OK but with more noise. The last station is the BBC transmitter in Redmoss (Aberdeen, Scotland), which is pretty crystal clear on the CCR2E while the Satellit has only little remnants of modulation and the D-808 is at least on par with the Satellit there. That station pretty much didn’t exist on the S-8800 in the previous video either and I wish I’d know why this example turns out so extreme, why the 2E and that station like each other so much.

The closest stations in these videos are in The Netherlands, 150+ miles away and have only 100W, most of the UK stations are between 350 and 420 miles away (most of them not very powerful either), Scottish stations are around 500 miles from here and the Redmoss 2kW BBC transmitter on 1449 kHz with its beautiful signal is 490 miles. Given that this is daytime groundwave reception with no help from an external antenna, I consider this pretty darn impressive. But keep in mind that a part of the impressive results is due to the low noise location and the conductive North Sea water being only 50m from my position behind the dike, then stretching most, sometimes all of the distance between the radio and the transmitters, which definitely helps groundwave propagation a lot.

To put the benefit in some more practical metrics – my average radios pick up at most 3-4 stations in a halfway sufficient quality for continuous listening during the day, the 2E makes that at least 8-10 stations. While sensitivity is playing a somewhat lesser role at night, it’s pure fun to browse the band and discover stations that didn’t stick out of the noise enough in the past. It is undeniably an exceptionally sensitive and stunning AM receiver.

Selectivity, overloading resilience

The 2E has a wisely chosen single bandwidth more on the narrow side. Given the intended purpose of this radio, I think one can live very well with the “one size fits all” setting and the intelligibility remains excellent. At night when the band is getting crowded even over here, the 2E has absolutely no trouble separating the channels.

Other reviews mentioned that its dynamic range may not be sufficient to cope with local blowtorches and I’m sure that this is true. I don’t have local blowtorches, but I tried coupling wire fences between 200 and 1000m (600-3,000′) to the loopstick antenna, and it could cope with those arrangements better than the S-8800 and the D-808: at night, both of the latter present some roar between the stations on the lower end of the band (which is of course mostly intermodulation products). Both radios then need some looser coupling from the coupling coil, on the the S-8800 I can also lose the preamp stage (“local” switch) to mitigate this, the D-808 can’t do that and has the most problems with images, for example clearly discernible images from the top of the NDB band just 100 kHz lower in the same band.

The CCR2E stays pretty quiet on the few frequencies the fence antennas leave unpopulated. In other words, its frontend may not be as good as the one in some vintage receivers, but it still takes more of a beating than e.g. the Tecsun S-8800 with its improved (over the PL-880) frontend.

AGC

Lacking really strong signals, I can’t comment much on all of the AGC action but I too think it doesn’t pull up weak signals as much as other radios. That makes the 2E appear even less noisy between stations, but being desperate to catch some transatlantic DX before sunrise (yawn!) despite the season being over, I found myself a few times with the volume knob turned up all the way to the right stop on some quiet channels, while the band was filled elsewhere with considerable signals from that 3,000′ fence. The time constants are more on the slow-ish side, thunderstorm impulses make the signal dive away for half a second and it seems to struggle with weaker stations that come with a fast fading. SDRs with fully adjustable AGC characteristics sure have spoiled me.

FM Broadcast Band

Sensitivity

FM sensitivity is excellent in all of the portables I have (S-8800, D-808, PL-660) and the CCR2E can match their performance, there are generally only very little differences between all those. As mentioned in my S-8800 review, I found its sensitivity can’t fully match the PL-660 and the D-808, even though it employs the same DSP chip type as the D-808. I briefly compared the CCR2E with the S-8800 on FM (simply because both are big radios, and I guess I wanted the 2E to win this too).

Comparing portables on FM is a bit of hit and miss though – you need to find borderline weak stations to begin with, and then you have to make sure each radio’s whip antenna is adjusted for maximum signal, and you need to put one radio at a time on the table, because otherwise the whip antennas can interact with each other and make it hard to find the optimal antenna postion/tilt/rotation. When I tried the CCR2E at the dike, a complete lack of tropo conditions limited the number of test stations a lot, and the remaining stations were not really weak enough to find a clear winner among the two. Both radios were on par most times, sometimes it felt like once the 2E gets a bit of signal it will present it a tad less noisy than the S-8800.

But then a very borderline faint Dutch station on 88.1 MHz made it over the North Sea with much noise on the S-8800. No matter what I tried with the 2E (antenna gymnastics, raising, repositioning, lifting up and tilting the whole radio and swearing at it), it picked up nothing at all. That looked much like the 2E is actually less sensitive than I thought, but as it turned out later there is a much happier explanation for this:

Selectivity

Since the day I got it, I had the impression that the 2E has a narrower FM filter than my other radios. Tuning 50 kHz next to a weak station makes it almost disappear and 200 kHz off a local station gave me much hope for letting a weaker station pass unharmed. Now when I checked the station listings for my Dutch mystery station on 88.1 MHz it turned out to be very unlikely that I received the station listed there for 88.1 – “Radio 10” in Hilversum has only 3 kW and is a bit too far away, without any tropo help anyway. What’s way more likely is that I actually heard the much closer 60 kW “NPO 2” transmitter in Smilde on 88.0, that is, its upper sideband on 88.1. To understand this you need to know that Dutch (and AFAIK French) FM stations like to plow their channels with some rather hefty FM deviation unknown in Germany. The wider filter of the S-8800 picked up so much of that extra-wide deviation that I could identify the language. I could not hear the station on its actual frequency 88.0 MHz either, because a much stronger local station on 87.9 was whacking it.

The CCR2E just didn’t pick up any of the surplus deviation from 100 kHz lower, which is a quite striking evidence for a narrower filter (<200kHz), and this might also explain why it appears more sensitive when it picks up some weak station – a narrower filter means a better SNR on FM. I did not read Jay Allen’s “FM shootout” (where the 2E is the topmost radio as well) before tried the radio and I’m not sure yet if I’d put it above all other radios too. But it’s very safe to say that the 2E is likely about as sensitive as all of the contenders in the very crowded 5-star class in the “FM shootout” and its selectivity might be giving it an advantage over other radios. Too bad such a good performer on such a short antenna doesn’t have an external FM antenna input and RD(B)S.

2 Meter – VHF and Weather Band, SSI

Short story, there is no NOAA WX band in Europe, and my local 2m repeaters don’t even seem to transmit their ID every 10 minutes anymore like they were supposed to do in ye olde days, maybe they’re gone. Analog VHF ham radio has ceased to exist around here and if we’d have some catastrophic event, all a 2m receiver could do to help you is emitting some soothing white noise.

I will use this section to talk about the signal strength indicator on the CCR2E instead. With 12 discrete bars it has a better resolution than e.g. average portables, which often try to look like they had even more bars but actually have 5 sections of 4-bar groups, in other words they just have 5 real bars. The better resolution of the 2E is certainly helpful, for example when you pair it up with some kind of tuned external antenna – but it seems to indicate levels with some delayed response and that ruins it a bit.

Sound

The 2E has a quite satisfying bass and treble response for music listening on FM (if you turn up the controls). It has the biggest speaker of all of my portables and creates some audio that rather reminds me of a small home stereo than a portable radio. However it doesn’t have the power to really do “loud” and the bass may run out of breath and distort pretty soon on some music styles.

For a few days I couldn’t quite put my finger on why it didn’t put that much of a smile in my face like the S-8800 or my old Satellit 400 do, and I remembered the quite controversial ratings of the 2E’s sound I had read. I felt that it doesn’t have that special “big portable” in-your-face bass sound my other big radios have, a sound that was burned into my eardrums by all the big Grundigs and Nordmendes I had since when I was a teenager.

The answer might be quite simple though: the 2E has a much wider frequency response than those radios, it actually reaches down lower and the treble range is also extended. What we (OK, at least I) perceive as that “warm” and “big” sound in those old portables is actually “pseudo-bass”. Pseudo-bass is a psychoacoustic effect that tricks our brain to perceive louder and fuller bass when actually only the first harmonics (typically one octave higher) of bass instruments are heard, for example because the speaker is too small to actually render the fundamentals, with the “bass” tone control boosting the harmonics instead. The 2E sounds more like a small 2-way hi-fi speaker and tries to do “real bass” rather than pseudo-bass, which is much more demanding in many ways. Pseudo-bass is also much less depending on automatic loudness correction at low volumes, so the 2E seems to lack bass at “bedroom” volumes sometimes, compared to the Tecsun or the Grundig. Though once a station plays the right music and the 2E is turned up a bit, it’s getting quite obvious that it can sound even bigger than those other radios.

On AM the CCR2E can even produce too much bass that needs to be dialed back: like talk radio dominates the US AM band, its EU pendant is still reigned by pop/rock stations (usually employing lots of signal processing for extra-fat sound). On those stations, the CCR2E can be bassy to a degree where the bass is almost sounding detached from the rest of the signal, as if it’s coming from a different, stronger station. It’s a more boomy, “wet” or maybe a hint less “musical” bass sound, this is rather a wordy description of impressions and not a complaint though. It just doesn’t massage my auditory cortex the same way the other radios do, which is of course a matter of taste and “getting used to it”.

The tone controls are modern and efficient like the ones you find on the S-8800 – compared to my old Satellit, they have a steeper roll-off at well-chosen cutoff frequencies so you can eliminate just the hissy top end in the treble range or remove all that rumble below 200Hz, leaving the midrange in between untouched. On the positive end of the knob range, they just add deep bass and a nice clarity on the top, as if the 2E had a tweeter.

So it does sound great and I can see now why the successor radio, the C.Crane Radio 3 got upgraded with Bluetooth. But the 2E is a great powered speaker as well, it has an AUX input radio nuts can use to boost the audio of an SDR connected to a laptop or a small SW portable to the same level of fidelity. The manual claims that the 2E has a battery endurance of 250 hours, which would mean it should serve all day for at least a whole week as an awesome powered speaker for your other radios out in the woods, and it even might become the best speaker (with very useful tone controls!) in your home shack. This works so well that I deem this a serious (and perhaps often unconsidered) asset.

Quirks

One thing I don’t like a bit is a strange scratchy narrowband distortion that seems to come up within a certain level range. It’s independent from the station, the frequency or the noise on it (and not to be confused with multipath distortion), it’s showing up across the band and is solely depending on the input signal as it seems. It doesn’t affect stronger signals (so there shouldn’t be anything overloading) but if a station hits a certain low signal level it’s quite permanent and also quite disturbing, if there’s fading the noise will come and go when it passes through that level range. The only way to mitigate that prickly “frying pan” sound is turning the treble knob all the way down. I don’t know if that’s a bad case of demodulator distortion or some AGC related malfunction and for some reason beyond my understanding (strong out-of-band signals playing a role maybe?) this does not always happen. Still a bit of a fly in the ointment.

A rather harmless little quirk I (among others) found is happening when I recall preset stations on AM: under unknown circumstances the 2E will not tune the antenna properly so I need to change the frequency and tune back to get full signal. I assume that the coil tuner setting is saved with the preset, and when the environment of the loopstick changes (like when you saved the preset at a different place), the saved tuner setting does not fit anymore. Retuning, then saving the preset again should fix that.

Rather fast fading can have a similar effect on the tuning process, if I tune and retune to such a station, I may end up with different signal meter readings and volume every time – it seems that the integration time window used to automatically tune to peak signal can be too short in relation to the fading speed and that may lead to a less than optimal match of the coil. Admittedly, tuning to peak signal on fickle stations like that is just as hard for a human being. Since the tuner seems to rely much on locking onto a carrier, offset tuning (e.g. like DXers often do to optimize reception of a station with a strong channel neighbor) may not work as well as with regular receivers, signal and volume can drop quite dramatically when tuning 1 kHz to the side, and it sounds like this is bad for the SNR too.

Here’s a video demonstrating these issues:

Click here to view on YouTube.

My example of the 2E has a “birdie” between 99.7 and 100.0 MHz, which luckily doesn’t make any noise on FM. It doesn’t seem to harm reception much (if at all), I can still get a rather weak Danish station on 99.9 MHz but I can’t tell what effect it has on stations on the other affected frequencies.

External AM antennas

This is not a quirk, it’s rather a design decision I deem not working anymore in many (if not most) of today’s homes, or simply an oversight: the CCR2E is yet another radio that has screw terminals for an external AM antenna but no means to take the internal loopstick out of the circuit. This is not a problem as long you are using radio and antenna in an electrically quiet and interference-free environment, in which you may not even need an external antenna because the CCR2E is such a good performer. If you want to use one anyway, the 2E will benefit only from antennas with considerable gain, very lossy designs that trade gain for low noise and high SNR (like BOG, LOG, EWE…) may not even leave a clue of their existence on the 2E.

If you live in the city, in an apartment building, a crowded neighborhood or just a modern home and want to let your family use computers, appliances, switching-type wall warts and so on while you listen to distant stations, an external antenna may be the only way to enjoy the radio’s performance but even an antenna with lots of gain will not help getting rid of the hash and noise of the digital world. It may increase the signal a bit to improve the SNR, but the noise level will stay the same because it’s being picked up and added back by the internal loopstick. I think that any ambitious modern receiver should take the ever-worsening noise situation into consideration. Paradoxically, back in the 50s and 60s local noise was much less of an issue but a lot of radios had switchable loopsticks. They were all tabletops though and to be fair, I know only one portable radio with that feature (and that’s a scanner which sucks on AM).

The hardware

First off, using this radio is generally very straightforward. The only thing I needed to learn from the manual was how to keep the frequency on display, which is only possible with newer versions of the firmware. My radio was manufactured in January 2018 and it has this option, plus an updated version of the printed manual, now describing that (and the antenna calibration) procedure. (Just hold the “Clock” button, then immediately hit the ‘1’ memory button on top. The radio should emit a beep and from then on the display will show the frequency.)

You may want to think twice about buying the “Titanium” version of the radio. The product photos on Amazon were showing the radio with somewhat different and darker hues between grey and champaign, so I spontaneously decided to not buy yet another black radio. What I pulled out of the box was blindingly silvery and yelling “plastic” though, so don’t let any pics fool you – “Titanium” is just a fancy name for the same old standard “light grey-ish/silvery plastic” seen on a billion products from the Far East in the past 50 years. A matter of taste of course.

If it wasn’t obvious to everyone already – this bulky radio is more like a “portable tabletop”, it’s only little more “portable” than a big old Transoceanic or Grundig Satellit with a broken handle. New radios get lighter and lighter even when they get big (like the S-8800), the CCR2E brings gravity back into the game, so on the plus side it will stay put on the table when you push a button, or when there’s an earthquake.

While it does radiate some quality feel (nothing is loose, wobbly or rattling), the tuning knob is the exception: it has a tiny bit of play and it feels and sounds like it had a former life as a hairspray can cap. The stepping/rasterization of the encoder resonates in that cap and if you want to tune to a distant frequency on the dial you just need to say “rien ne vas plus” before you turn the knob to create a great acoustic impression of a roulette table. On the other hand, the solid steps of the encoder causing that sound are very precise and the sound helps me counting the 9 steps I need for hitting the next channel in the European AM BC band. Some reviews also complained about the flimsy FM whip and I used to think the D-808’s whip is flimsy, but this one has a top segment with a diameter of one millimeter, the antenna is the shortest of all my radios and looks exactly like the whips I’ve seen on most of the cheapest (<$20) radios I came across. But that doesn’t affect its function of course – that is, while it lasts.

Now that’s even more a matter of taste, but I just can’t leave the design uncommented. I’m still undecided whether it looks more like a hi-tech humidifier than a radio or not, luckily it says “Radio” in red letters on the speaker grille but still… I don’t know if it’s the complete lack of “retro style” and its sober, “senior-friendly” approach or just the color – whichever way I look at it, it ain’t the most handsome radio of the pack. I think I can get over it, provided I never watch any of Thomas’ videos featuring his gorgeous RF-2200s again. So all it can do to win my heart is working well, that is, very, very well. Let’s see if it succeeded:

Summary/Verdict

The C.Crane CC Radio 2E is an extraordinarily sensitive radio on AM and certainly among the best on FM. It puts some effort in picking up AM stations that most other portables won’t and that’s what it really does as advertised. Like any other radio (so that’s not Bob Crane’s fault like some disappointed Amazon reviews allude), it will not be able to do that in noisy, interference-infested environments and not even an external antenna might help much with that, because the internal loopstick stays on. In an electrically quiet environment though, it’s nothing short of marvelous.

It has a great sound and to my own surprise, I found its qualities as a powered (also long-lasting battery-powered) speaker for other radios a serious asset. It’s simple and easy to use but that also means it lacks all advanced features that would help in difficult, “hardcore DX” reception cases. With its bulky form factor, the built-in power supply, the 4 D-cells, the weight that all brings and the lack of a proper handle, it might not fit into everyone’s understanding of “portable” and its specs are rather meant to cater the needs of American homes. However, importing it to Europe can make sense even with the extra taxes and shipping (which means a 40% markup in Germany), at least for AM radio lovers who want top performance and avoid the problems vintage portables can bring. It’s at any rate a sensible choice if your favorite station is somewhat beyond the range of average radios, if you just want more stations to choose from, or if you enjoy general daytime groundwave DX, all without making an external antenna a necessity.

Of course the CCR2E is not the mythical “perfect radio” either. The muting and automatic loop-tuning when browsing the band isn’t great, it has a few quirks, a flimsy whip antenna and a tuning knob with a cheap feel to it but then again, it’s not an overly expensive radio either and its price/performance ratio is certainly appropriate and attractive. It may not be much to look at but I like it anyway because – among all the all-rounder radios I have – it’s the specialist doing that one thing really well: making AM radio feel like it used to be.

So do I really need this radio? Maybe I don’t, but now that I’ve learned how excellent it really is, I know that I really, really wanted it!

Wow!  What a brilliant review! I absolutely love the details you fit into your evaluation and your wit, too (especially that bit about the tuning knob possibly having “a former life as a hairspray can cap”–!). Ha ha!

No doubt the CCRadio 2E is a solid performer and among the best AM portables currently available. While the CCRadio 2E has been replaced by the CCRadio 3, many 2E models can still be found on Amazon (note this is an affiliate link), and eBay (partner link).

The CCRadio 2E is still available new on C. Crane’s website, but you should also check out C. Crane’s Orphan page for the occasional discounted unit. 

Thanks again for a thoroughly enjoyable and informative radio review! I, for one, can’t wait to read your next review! 

Click here to read 13dka’s previous posts and reviews.

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[advotproject]

Help

My Mother was a social worker. She had a soft heart and the deepest brown eyes that helped countless people with her sweet compassionate gaze. She was a really good listener and had a way to make the complicated things seem easy. My mother taught me that we should help others when they are down. She showed me that you give a hand to those in need; you pull them up when they fall.

When I had my children I had to learn to let them fall.
I believed in teaching them to rely on themselves and pull themselves up so they would learn how to get along and have tools to deal and be able to take their own steps. OH MY GOD do those three girls of mine take their own steps.

Being a helper can be tricky, sometimes you help a friend through the long process. Getting a new job, navigating a marriage, or moving away, only to feel alone and maybe a little sad when they move forward and don’t need your hand anymore.

I struggle in my programs to know when to stop helping. When can I not help
anymore? When can I simply not help enough? These are big questions I need to deal with
It isn’t only about my hand or me personally helping. It is also about the bandwidth of my organization. Do I take the limited funds and resources I have and spend them on one kid, or the other? How do I prioritize? Who needs more help? Is it the one who is in solitude?

The one on the outs with the drunken Mom? Is it the one who needs to hold my hand when her tattoos are removed? Or the one who has been incarcerated again? Who do I reach out for help? Can I dare admit that I too need help?

I decide examine my help giving, I make some rules 
I think, OK, I will focus on the girls in the program that are in Jail now and I will help the girls who come to my program on the outs. I will draw the line when they go back in to jail. As I drew that line, I knew it would be erased like writing in the sand when the tide comes in. How can I possibly not help someone who has gone through my program and then continued with us on the outs?

And indeed that tide came in and all my lines were erased.

Last year I met a girl who was incarcerated. She must have done something bad because she was in for a long time. She did my program in the spring and was still there when I came back in the fall, so she did the program again. She got released the day before the second presentation after being incarcerated close to 18 months. She was 16 when I met her. She got out of jail and came to my program. I cried when I saw her. I hugged and held her like she was mine.

This one caught my heart, a smart tall beautiful young woman she could easily be my
child. She is determined, has a social conscious she wants to give back. She is stubborn as hell, but my god she was and is so incredibly broken angry and lost.

I watched her fight so hard to blend back in. How in the hell could she do that after being away for so long? 18 months in teenage years is a life time and more. She has dreams this girl of mine She has so much to be, have and do.

I held her hand. I talked to her. I tried to help as hard as I could –but I saw her falling, and as tight as I held her hand, I couldn’t pull her out. And then I was told she is locked up again.
I lost a little piece of my heart when I found out. I cannot get involved when they go back to jail. I had decided. Advot cannot be involved We can’t do anything about this; this is not in our mission statement. We use theatre for transformation. That is what we do.

The water came rushing in, my lines in the sand were erased without a trace
I sent an email. I made a phone call. I found out where she was. I found my girl.
I drove downtown planning to see her but alas I am not allowed in, there is paperwork to be done. She was told I will be coming she is happy. I am happy to help – can’t wait to see her.

It is 9pm on the weekend, I walk out of the movie theatre with my kids. There is a text on my phone – I have made rules about that too – Someone needs my help she is here, needs to get to there. She has no one to call, no one to pick her up, she is sorry to bother me I text back, I send an uber to get her and take her – The uber is SUPER expensive –of course it is, who the hell wants to go to those neighborhoods?

Was this right, was it ok?|

I talk to the girl, I told her that I am happy she called but I will not be able to do that again –I know in my heart I did the right thing – I left her with some ideas and options of how what to do if when this happens again.

I think of a post a friend recently put on Facebook:
Always leave people better than you found them.
Hug the hurt, kiss the broken, befriend the lost, love the lonely.
I would add, help, help as often and as much as you possibly can.
Have lines in the sand, because they are important, but do not be afraid to let the water wash them away.