Freakzilla.com Blog

10

sterlingphoenix — Fri, 11 May 2012 21:21:10 +0000

Happy 10th Birthday, Gigi.

It wasn’t easy getting that shot. It’s usually very easy to get her to look up a tree, but it usually involves me standing by the tree going “What’s up there Gigi???” and I tried to get this so I’m not in the shot.

Gigi was much more interested in playing football (that’s right I called it football).

Roll

sterlingphoenix — Tue, 01 May 2012 18:15:49 +0000

I always tell people that Gigi was raised by cats. But she was also raised by me.

A lot of times when she’s chasing her ball, she likes to roll on it. This makes her a bit of a dog-nerd.

It looks like a lot of fun though!

Running Tip

sterlingphoenix — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 21:13:09 +0000

If you go running outdoors at night, and you haven’t done that in a while because it was too cold, and you’re running a longer distance than you normally do, and suddenly everything in front of you seems to have developed a slight glow, almost like a shiny aura, it might be possible that you are experiencing that Runner’s High that people are always talking about.

But you might want to entertain the thought that perhaps there is a car coming up behind you.

Lynx

sterlingphoenix — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 08:08:49 +0000

Sadly, Lynx passed away on Tuesday.

He wasn’t feeling well a well or two beforehand, so we went back to the vat and yes, his cancer was back and one of his kidneys was being kinda weird. The cancer wasn’t out of control yet, so he got some non-aggressive chemo and a couple of treatments that’d hopefully help with the kidney.

But he continued to deteriorate (he wasn’t eating, and what he did wasn’t staying eaten), and Monday night he was just… well it wasn’t good. So I took him in on Tuesday.

The good news was that the cancer hadn’t progressed and his kidney was all better. But he was very dehydrated and his body temp was way too low – his stomach just wasn’t digesting anything, including water. Vet wasn’t sure why, but they were going to keep him overnight, give him some IV liquids and warm him up.

They called around 5:00pm to say he was responding well. His body temperature and blood pressure were almost back up to normal, and they got him slightly interested in food. Which was encouraging.

But they called back a bit later and said that, well, he just crashed, very suddenly. His vitals just rapidly dropped and he stopped breathing.

They did say they can try and CPR him, but there was only a very, very minor chance that would work, and even if it did there was only a very, very minor chance it’d work well enough for him to go home, and I didn’t want to put him through that.

We’re all very sad, but it’s important to remember that it was a year ago that Lynx has a 3-6 months prognosis. His oncologist and all the staff at the hospital were fantastic and gave us several more months of a happy, comfortable and obnoxious cat (cats consider “obnoxious” to be a compliment).

Lynx was a tough little thing. Cats are supposed to have 9 lives, and I think he went through about 15 in his first year. He was super-sick when we adopted him, but he got over that. He crawled into the building’s maintenance vents. He got locked in the fridge for four hours. One time I made grilled cheese and when I took it out of the oven he jumped on the trey. He used to jump on the window screen (on the 3rd floor) and one time the screen flew out, taking him with. We weren’t even home. I think he was more freaked out about the strangers taking him over to their place than the window thing.

Oh and that one time he drank paint.

But anyway.

He used to come when I called him and occasionally do tricks. You know, when he felt like it. He was an awesome cat.

This is the first picture I took of Lynx. I didn’t have a real camera so this was a crappy webcam, but hey.

C&C

sterlingphoenix — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 04:53:38 +0000

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

sterlingphoenix — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 05:19:59 +0000

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

sterlingphoenix — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 07:13:52 +0000

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

sterlingphoenix — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 02:04:34 +0000

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)

sterlingphoenix — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 23:35:41 +0000

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

sterlingphoenix — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 01:27:12 +0000

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.