Freakzilla.com Blog

C&C

Posted by sterlingphoenix at 22:53:38 on February 1st, 2012 | Category: Rambling | Tags: C&C, personal

A while ago Minnesota made it legal for people to get a Conceal & Carry gun license. I thought then (and still do) that this is kinda ridiculous. Supporters of this claims it helps reduce crime. Apparently people will be more afraid to commit crimes because other people could be packing heat. In my opinion it just makes it more likely that the criminals will want be armed, too, just in case.

Naturally I decided that I should get myself a conceal & carry license.

I don’t own a handgun. I don’t plan to ever own a handgun. Or any real gun (I’m OK with fake and/or toy guns). I just think that giving me one of those licenses is just further proof of how ridiculous that is. Also I want to see how easy it is to get one.

I have very, very little experience with guns outside of video games. I was required to shoot a rifle once time when I was 16, and I think the thing was older than I was and man did it hurt my shoulder. Also I didn’t hit a damn thing. I’d like to hope that, for a person like me, getting a license to walk around with a hidden pistol would be, at the very least, somewhat difficult.

I did some searching and found that a gun shop really close to my house offers the required training. Their website is not phenomenal though so I figured I’d just stop in and ask some questions.

I did not realise just how far out of my comfort zone I would be going.

I’ve driven by this place dozens (if not hundreds) of times. Their parking lot is not visible from the road, though.

The parking lot was packed. There were about 30-35 other cars there.

Mine was the only hybrid.

Mine was also the only Honda.

Actually, mine was the only “foreign” car.

Most the other cars had bumper stickers professing their love of shooting things and then eating them, and disparaging organisations that promote animal rights.

I went in anyway. I told myself that if anyone gave me any crap I could say I have a hunting dog in the car and run like hell.

I’ve been playing video games since the days where you were a red blob and you were fighting off the yellow blobs. I’ve shot many, many guns in video games. Nowadays they’re extremely realistic representations of real-world guns. You’d think I’d be desensitised to walking into a place with a few hundred guns in display cases.

I am not. It is extremely unnerving.

I walked up to the counter. Well, not all the way up. The girl working behind the counter was on the phone. I have to say, she was an extremely pretty girl, but I was just kinda terrified that she might shoot me. I know that’s not rational and, as I pointed out later, it’s still pretty illegal for them to just shoot me. It’s just… unnerving, is all I can really say.

Turns out that to get a conceal & carry license I need to take one course. I thought it’s a good idea if I take “Basic Handgun” class before I take a “I’m allowed to walk around with a hidden weapon” class, though. They will happily rent out weapons to use during the classes.

Total cost for this thing would be around $300. Keep in mind that most people applying for these licenses already have basic handgun knowledge and their own guns, so they’d be paying a lot less.

I can do this. These are not super-long classes and the place is a very short drive from my house.

Right now, though, the idea of actually using a gun, even in a classroom/training/shooting range kind of situation is seriously making me a bit queasy. I’m really not sure I want to do this anymore. It’s just so completely uncomfortable.

I’ll have to take some time and think about it. I know how to do it if I ever decide I want to. For now, I’m going to stick to video games.

Election Conspiracies

Posted by sterlingphoenix at 23:19:59 on January 31st, 2012 | Category: Rambling | Tags: conspiracy theory, nonsensical, politics, rant

It says something about Newt Gingrich that the very possibility of him actually running for president makes me actively root for Mitt Romney. Whom I would probably never vote for in the first place. But if there’s one thing science fiction has taught me it’s that we do not want a lizard in the white house.

I think I figured it out though.

Newt Gingrich wants to be the Republican nominee for president. This scares a lot of people. And somehow he’s managed to get a following and win one of the important primaries. This has a lot of people going “Good GOD, what if he WINS?”

I think they put Gingrich in there on purpose, and somehow made it so it looks like he has a chance. I mean really, he shouldn’t have a chance. He’s a nutcase. He was kicked out of power by the Republican party, and now they’re nominating him? I don’t think so.

Look at the outcome from all this. Many people currently have the mindset that Mitt Romney has to win, otherwise it’ll be a disaster.

People who would never vote for Mitt Romney are rooting for him. We find the concept of him losing to Newt Gingrich terrifying. We find the concept of Mitt Romney losing terrifying.

I think they created this situation so that we all have this mindset, and hope it’ll carry over to the real election. It’s a mind-game, a very subtle subliminal message that they have planted in our heads and made us all think we came up with it on our own.

We’re all thinking “Oh god I don’t want to see Mitt Romney lose.”

In November, when it’s actually time to vote, we’ll still have that subliminal message poking around in our brains. Will we be able to ignore it and vote the way we really should? Time alone will tell.

Face This

Posted by sterlingphoenix at 01:13:52 on December 25th, 2011 | Category: Rambling | Tags: Facebook, privacy, rant

Last night I deleted my Facebook account.

As some of you know, I’m not the hugest fan of Facebook. But for a while I’ve had a Facebook account under an assumed name. This is because I believe Facebook to be a huge invasion of privacy. The only reason I signed on to the thing in the first place was because it was the only way I could keep track of our favourite vet who was in the process of setting up her own practice.

But I stayed on Facebook and I added a few people to my friends list, and then a few more, and then I started actually enjoying it a bit… but I always felt a bit creeped out.

Here’s the thing; I was using an assumed name. I have ad blockers installed on my browser(s). I did not give Facebook my cellphone number. I was using a unique email address for my Facebook account. I have script blockers, and I blocked Facebook from accessing my data from other sites. But I still felt tracked.

If you use Facebook, you know that it has a little “You Might Know These People” thing on the side. For a while all that showed me was friends-of-friends. But lately it started showing me people it shouldn’t know I know. Especially since they don’t know I’m on Facebook or use an assumed name.

People like an old friend who moved away years ago.

And people I kinda know from walking the dog.

And my brother.

I did figure out why Facebook was suggesting these people to me, though.

Another “service” Facebook offers is one where you give it your email address and the password to your email account, and it’ll go through your contacts and see if it can find anyone. And people are actually letting it do that. Look, letting Facebook invade your own pricavy, that’s one thing. But this… this is letting Facebook invade other peoples’ privacy. My privacy. My email address, and my name (however fully it was listed in peoples’ contacts) are now permanently in Facebook’s database.

Yes, I was using a unique email for Facebook, but clearly it was not unique enough. It was a @freakzilla.com address. Most people who have my email address have a different @freakzilla.com address. But apparently that was close enough for Facebook.

One of my big concerns here is this. I used Facebook in a very limited way. I had like 20 friends, maybe. So something like this popping up was very easy to notice. But I see people on there with HUNDREDS of friends, adding 5-10 people every few days. There is no way you’d notice anything like this if you do that. Just no way.

And the MAIN issue with this is, you, me and all our personal information have become a commodity. Facebook is making money off our private information. And it’s not even a secret! And we get what in return? What makes this worth the sacrifice? The ability to catch up with people we could catch up with anyway? The ability for people we dropped out of our lives for good reason to find us again? Farmville???

I just wish the whole damn thing would implode already.

Sidenote: I’m still on Google+. Under a different assumed name. But I don’t know if I’m keeping that, either. Not that it matters, nobody uses that thing anyway.

Sidenote 2: I’ve been asked to mention that people should stop mentioning other peoples’ underage children’s real names on Facebook, especially when they’ve been asked not to do so repeatedly.

Literature

Posted by sterlingphoenix at 20:04:34 on December 22nd, 2011 | Category: Rambling | Tags: book review

Have you ever read Moby-Dick? most people haven’t, though most people say they’d like to.

But it just looks so long and dammit, we all know it’s about some guy trying to catch a whale.

But I figured I’d try to read it anyway. It became obvious pretty fast that each chapter of this book could easily be summarised in a much much shorter format. Like, say, twitter.

So I started a twitter feed where I’ll be posting a tweet of each chapter after I read it. If anyone’s interested, you can follow @callmeishmael__.

(I’ve got four “chapters” so far).

Charity Begins at Home (and it NEVER ENDS)

Posted by sterlingphoenix at 17:35:41 on December 8th, 2011 | Category: Rambling | Tags: charity

Dear Heifer International^*,

Please stop inundating me with requests for donations. I am constantly receiving postcards, letters, magazines and catalogues from you.

Here’s the thing – I’ve already donated money to you guys. This is in fact when you started sending me all these requests for more money.

I donated money to you because I like your message and methods. You don’t just help people, you help people help themselves. This is why I gave you guys money to send a bunch of bees to people. But you see the point, don’t you? You didn’t have to ask. When I wanted to donate money, I managed to find you guys without any help. Do you think that I now somehow lost the ability to do so, and need to be constantly reminded?

Here’s a suggestion. Rather than sending me all these things, why don’t you just keep that money? Consider that my additional contribution.

Sincerely yours,

-Me

^* Or just about any other charitable organisation. But these guys are the ones currently annoying the heck out of me.

Close call

Posted by sterlingphoenix at 20:27:12 on October 15th, 2011 | Category: Rambling | Tags: home improvement, mom

If I was making a top-ten list of things I don’t want to run into while digging bare-handed in my yard, I have to think this would be right up there.

Luckily I somehow uncovered it before actually crashing into it.

K’s mom saw it and was for some reason very enthusiastic about it, so I’m going to try and restore the thing.

Go Lynx!

Posted by sterlingphoenix at 13:24:10 on October 8th, 2011 | Category: Life, Rambling | Tags: cat, personal

Yesterday, the Minnesota Lynx (which is a local basketball team) won their first championship.

I don’t really care about sports at all, but it seemed like a good hook to do a little update on my cat Lynx (who I suppose is also a Minnesota Lynx).

I wrote a post back in May about how he has lymphoma and is going through chemotherapy, and that the most we can really hope for is to extend his life (his comfortable, happy life) by about 6 months. This whole thing stated in February, really, but he wasn’t diagnosed and treatment didn’t start till April.

For a while he’d been going in for treatment once a week. Three weeks of chemo, one week of just tests.

A couple of months ago he started acting really weird. As in, he was a lot more energetic, he was gaining weight, his red blood cell count was going up (oh, his cancer was giving him anaemia) and his fur was falling out.

There was no medical reason for the fur thing, but I asked them to do an ultrasound to see if the cancer was either bigger or smaller.

They couldn’t see it at all, and his blood tests showed his anaemia was very much improved. With that and the weight gain, we decided to stop the chemo, gradually stop the supplementary meds and check him again in a month.

A month later, with no treatment or meds, he was doing even better. He’d gained weight and his fur was growing back, and they still couldn’t see the cancer in the ultrasound. So we decided to have another checkup in 6 weeks.

Which was this past Wednesday.

They actually felt bad about shaving his tummy for the ultrasound, since his fur is finally all back. But that was the worst news of the day, which is just fine.

They use the ultrasound to look at his stomach lining. That’s where the tumour was, which is also what was causing the anaemia (blood was leaking out into his stomach and yes I know that’s gross). So they’d see the tumour by how think the stomach lining is. It is still completely normal, which is great.

His red blood cell count is absolutely back to normal, which is also great. Anaemia was the first symptom of this. Red blood cell count should be at 30 (I’m, uh, not sure 30 what) and Lynx’ was at like 10 way back when we started. Which they were actually shocked he survived in the first place.

His weight when he was healthy was about 10lbs (which is 4.5kg). When he was really sick he was down to under 5. Yeah, he’d lost more than half his weight. He’s now up to 3.5kg (which is about 8lbs) which is a VAST improvement. He’s eating like a maniac. Well, a very very very PICKY maniac, but hey.

Right now, he’s a happy, comfortable cat who’s feeling well enough that he’s occasionally really annoying – so perfectly normal cat-life.

They told us that the life expectancy would be about 6 months – and he’s beaten that. He’ll be going in for tests every 6 weeks or 2 months, but he’s officially in remission.

Now, cancer never really goes away. “Remission” doesn’t mean you’re back to where you were before you got cancer. The more time goes by, the more likely you are for it to come back. It’s very likely that that’s what Lynx will eventually die from, and he’s not super likely to be one of those cats who makes it to like 20+ years old. But every day past those 6 months is kind of a bonus. A happy comfortable annoying cat bonus.

I’ll close this with an xkcd strip that really illustrates the whole cancer/remission thing in a heartbreakingly simple and accurate way.

Tobit

Posted by sterlingphoenix at 16:21:13 on October 5th, 2011 | Category: Uncategorized | Tags: book review, nonsensical

This past weekend we got to go to a wedding. Now there’s a whooole long story about how this involved being without internet for a while weekend but THAT pain is still too fresh to talk about. Instead, I’ll talk about the churchy bit.

The ceremony part of the wedding took place in a catholic church. I’d never been in a serious catholic church before (not that I’ve been to many non-catholic ones). I’d been to one that seemed like a converted warehouse or something. This one had the insane amount of statues all over the place and stained glass and all that stuff. That stuff I’m fine with, gives me interesting things to look at.

And it’s not that I didn’t expect them to read verses from the bible. I was just a bit perplexed by the ones they chose.

What they read was a portion from the Book of Tobit, which is apparently a Catholic-Specific book. I think they read those verses because they mention a wedding, but the content was… questionable.

Disclaimer: I might have some of the names and exact relationships a bit off.

They tell you about this guy named Tobit who’s doing pretty well. His cousin and his entire family it seems come to visit and say “Hey Tobit, you’re doing pretty well, God has surely blessed you” and then the cousin notices that Tobit has gone blind. And he says “Oh no Tobit, you’re BLIND!!!”

Being smart, I go “Oh I see where THIS is going. Tobit is going to go “Yeah I’m blind but truly God has blessed me in other ways” and everyone will be happy”. But no. Cousin guy gets really upset about Tobit being blind and starts crying. Then his daughter starts crying, then his wife starts crying, pretty soon everyone’s crying. Poor Tobit.

Anyway, at some point here Tobit says he wants to marry his cousin’s daughter because that’s not gross or anything. Yes I know that kind of stuff was common in the year 721BC, but why would you read this at a wedding in 2011?

Cousin guy says “Yes, of course you can marry my daughter. In fact, there’s nobody who deserves to marry her more since you’re her closest relative and that’s the law.” Because THAT’S not creepy and gross. I mean if he’d at least have said “Yes, I know you will be a good husband to my daughter” or “Yes, she can take care of your blind ass”, still creepy but not AAAARGH creepy.

But wait, there’s more.

Cousin guy says “Oh yeah, I’ve already married her off to seven other guys but they all died while trying to sleep with her.”

Then they draw up the marriage contracts AND THAT’S WHERE THE READING ENDED.

And I’m sitting there going “Hello??? CLIFFHANGER????? What the hell happens next?????????? Does this guy survive or what? HELLO?????????”

So I looked it up when we got home (did I mention no internet for a whole weekend???) Turns out this demon named Asmodeus was eating all the other husbands, but apparently demons are terrified of the smell of burning fish guts so they just had to burn some before going to bed. PROBLEM SOLVED.

Oh here’s a nice trivia question for you. Guess how Tobit got blind. I’ll give you three hints. Hint one: it happened outdoors. Hint two: while he was asleep. Hint three: it makes no sense whatsoever.

Give up? He was sleeping outside and a bird crapped in his eyes.

But apparently fish guts are good for THAT, too, and they have some left from scaring Asmodeus away and use that to cure the blindness. THE END.

I’m not sure what the moral of the story is supposed to be, other than maybe “Keep burning fish handy to scare away sex-demons”.

Landscaping

Posted by sterlingphoenix at 13:27:04 on September 27th, 2011 | Category: Life, Rambling | Tags: home improvement

Over the past month or so we’ve been doing some home improvement/landscaping.

First, we replaced the side door and it’s companion screen door. The old door was (aside from being ugly as all hell) extremely inefficient and in fact had some cracks in it. So it REALLY didn’t insulate very well. The screen door was one of those ancient ones where the glass and screen parts don’t really work together very well. You had to remove the screen to get the glass to work, and you needed needle nose pliers to get the GLASS part out of the door. And to top it off, cats had no problem AT ALL getting it open, so even on nice days we couldn’t leave the main door open to get some nice weather inside. We had to have a friend come help us with the door since we’ve never done that before and it was… not going well (:

We started tipping out and redoing the side of the house gardeny area, and this weekend we finished that and extended the landing pad for K’s car. We also built a long-planned retaining wall. I did the math (yes I used a calculator) and between the two of us we moved over a (metric) ton of bricks.

And yes there are Before and After pictures.

Here’s before; the one cool thing we had going is that the bur cucumber plant was growing over the screen, which I liked. But since it’s a self-seeding annual it might figure that out again next year.

And here’s after. It’ll look much better once we get some plants in, but I didn’t want to wait till next year to take photos. Also some of the paving blocks are placeholders which is why they don’t match. But we both think the wall turned out real pretty.

C&C