Stumbling From One Disaster To Another

Stumbling From One Disaster To Another

Lia "Mwahaha" Brown

[	website	\|	The Rogues Kick Ass	]
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Fan Expo	[Aug. 27th, 2014\|07:44 pm] Lia "Mwahaha" Brown
I'll be heading there tomorrow -- come say hello if you see me! Tentative plans are to wear my Top costume again on Saturday, and when that happens my vision is incredibly bad and you'll have to get my attention. But at least I'm visible across the room :> This is all dependent on being able to fit into the costume, natch. I've dieted and stepped up the exercising since April/May and don't think I've lost a pound. Such is life at this age, I guess. Edit: Looks like the cosplay day may actually be Sunday this year because of other people's plans. Just FYI for anyone looking for me.
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Flash TV pilot

[Jun. 29th, 2014|03:26 am]

Lia "Mwahaha" Brown

[

Tags

nerdery

]

So the Flash TV pilot has leaked online. I was going to wait until October to watch it because I bet the show creators are pretty angry about the leak, but EVERYBODY was spoiling it and I feared having the whole thing ruined by October anyway (as it was, I heard some pretty major spoilers in advance. Kind of annoying).

Anyway, the episode is not without its flaws, but I really enjoyed it and am definitely hyped for the rest of the series.

Spoilers behind a cut.

Interestingly, the series doesn't really try to hide its Vancouver shooting locale, which is funny. I've been to some of the places that are visible :> Also, those mountains are not quite Kansas-Missouri -- although maybe Central City is located somewhere else in the series.

Anyway! The episode was very promising and I have great hopes for the rest of it.

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Why I believe the Top is on the autistic spectrum

[Dec. 20th, 2013|06:43 pm]

Lia "Mwahaha" Brown

[

Tags

nerdery

]

I wrote this piece during the early spring, before the release of the DSM-V. Since then there have been changes in the field of autism diagnoses: Asperger syndrome and autism have been folded into Autism Spectrum Disorder, and the criteria have been partially re-worded. However this change is somewhat controversial, and because the DSM-V is so new and expensive many non-professionals haven’t even seen the newest diagnostic criteria. Thus I’ve decided to stick with the information from the DSM-IV, which was officially in use until May 2013 (and is probably still being used by some).

This is long and probably not of interest to anyone else, but it’s something I’ve wanted to write for about five years now.

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Bits of things I forgot

[Oct. 31st, 2013|07:37 am]

Lia "Mwahaha" Brown

[

Tags

nerdery

]

newnumber6 reminded me I didn't link to my con sketches from Fan Expo, so here they are. Also, my write-up of the con is here at Speed Force.

(In case you don't bother reading it, the funniest thing that happened to me at Fan Expo was when I was walking on Dundas Street in my Top costume, and ran into Toronto mayor Rob Ford. Yes, the mayor who allegedly smokes crack. He gave me this weird look, then a thumbs up and said "Cool", and I laughed for like 10 minutes. I also ran into George Takei in the lobby of the Royal York hotel, which was neat.)

My computer was worrisomely close to giving up the ghost, so we got a used-but-new-to-me replacement. I now have Windows 7 instead of XP, and more RAM as well as a bigger harddrive (which is good because I was perpetually running out of space and having to dump files onto an external drive). I also changed my desktop wallpaper for the first time in about a decade -- not kidding about that, by the way. Getting a new OS is always stressful for me because suddenly things don't work or look the same as they used to, but I'm trying hard not to freak out about stuff and I think I'm doing pretty well.

Anyway. There's always angst to blather about, but I think I'll leave that for another post, if at all. Happy Halloween!

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Long overdue update	[Oct. 18th, 2013\|12:37 am] Lia "Mwahaha" Brown
Wow...I did not mean to go so long between updates (I haven't been on Facebook in three weeks either). Stuff happened and things got stressful, then I kind of forgot and ran into more stress. In brief, doubtlessly forgetting things: ( Cut for length Collapse ) Unfortunately I haven't been keeping up with stuff for a while now; what's new with everybody here?
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Fan Expo and stuff

[Aug. 22nd, 2013|12:34 am]

Lia "Mwahaha" Brown

[

Tags

nerdery

]

Fan Expo starts tomorrow, I am going! Fingers crossed that some weird calamity doesn't happen (I have bad luck with that con). I'll be wearing my Top costume again on Saturday, and I can just BARELY fit into it. The failure of my diet/exercise regimen is a huge disappointment to me -- I lost only one or two pounds, despite severely cutting back on food and doing a ton of walking. I guess I was eating the wrong kinds of foods? You'd think cutting out all sweets would have helped more :\

There was another bat in the house! He was crawling in the ducts and then somehow found an exit into the house, and flew around and pooped everywhere until I finally ushered him out an open door. The cats were going nuts trying to get him, and he was unfortunately flying around the basement with a low ceiling. They came really close to getting him until I locked them away.

Brian Buccellato (one of the Flash co-writers) has made me mad again! Grumbling behind a cut to spare you...I just wanted to vent some steam, it's easily skipped.

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TFcon and stuff

[Aug. 3rd, 2013|01:25 am]

Lia "Mwahaha" Brown

[

Tags

nerdery, photos

]

I realized I forgot to post my photos from TFcon last weekend. It's Canada's version of BotCon, or rather BotCon's poor cousin, but happily for us it's held in the same city (Mississauga) every year, which is only an hour's drive away. I'm not super-huge into Transformers anymore, so I mostly went to keep Stan company, but I did get a few things here and there. My favourite purchase was a little Red Alert keychain doll that was home-made by a seller. We also met up with an old friend, who coincidentally we met on our first trip to BotCon (and I don't know if people know this, but Stan and I met on that first BotCon trip).

The pics can be found here at Imgur -- though I just learned that unpaid Imgur accounts only allow 225 images to be visible at any given time, which is annoying (I wish they'd made that clearer upfront). Once you pass 225 images, which I have, the older stuff is made invisible. Guess I have to find another image host.

There are also a few photos from last Sunday in Toronto. A few photos are of a Japanese cultural festival in Dundas Square, and a bit of the Eaton Centre. Also, we went to a vegan restaurant that is run by the most adorable cult ever. Their leader is a woman called The Supreme Master, and they mostly promote vegetarianism/veganism. They have their own TV channel called the Supreme Master Network and interviewed my mom for it a few years ago. Somehow Stan ended up on their mailing list a while back and he got all their emails, and they're adorably earnest. Anyway, we wanted to try one of their restaurants (Loving Hut) and it was pretty good.

On a completely unrelated note, the CBC [Canada's national broadcaster for you non-Canadians] website recently switched its style of comments section and it really sucks now. Comments now require a moderator's approval before appearing on the site, and somehow that made the system worse. The other day there was an article about the Ariel Castro case, with him whining that it was everybody's fault but his own, etc. This one dude in the comments started going on about how if Castro were a woman, everyone would feel sorry for her and let her off scott-free, and compared Castro to a mom in Winnipeg who recently killed her kids in the throes of post-partum depression and then killed herself. He then made further posts about how when women do bad things they never face consequences for their actions -- the usual bullshit. So I wrote a polite rebuttal explaining why the two cases are not comparable, and was never rude or inflammatory (I wanted to be, but was well aware the mods pre-approve everything). But the mod rejected and blocked my comment. I guess misogyny is totally okay, but a polite rebuttal is just unacceptable...? Personally I'm rather flabbergasted about it, because I honestly can't see how my comment was objectionable. Hopefully it was a site glitch or something.

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Damn you, Weather Wizard.	[Jul. 22nd, 2013\|05:39 am] Lia "Mwahaha" Brown
On late Friday afternoon we were hit with a hell of a storm -- I was sleeping, but awakened by howling winds and heavy rain pounding the roof. I looked out the balcony door and watched the trees getting whipped around and was sure they'd snap; in the end, none of ours did, but my next-door neighbour lost a significant chunk of her beautiful old tree and a tree across the street split in half. There were trees down all over my neighbourhood, so it isn't surprising that the whole area lost power. As soon as the storm was over (and it ended quite abruptly), most of the people in the neighbourhood came out to survey the damage and take photos. You can see a selection of my photos here, but this is just a fraction of the trees and wires that came down. The wire across the street stayed down for 48 hours, so I certainly hope it wasn't live. Here's a video I took during the storm. Apparently winds in Waterloo were measured at 119 km/h according to this article (some photos here too), and I can believe it. But we were only without power for 7 hours and I don't think anybody in town was hurt, so I feel lucky. Some people in town had no power for more than a day and somebody in Quebec was killed by the storm, so it could have been a lot worse. I'm not sure all my plants will survive though, as they were pretty battered (after the video was taken I ran onto the balcony to bring in a few, and got completely soaked in just those few seconds outside). Anyway, on Saturday I spent some hours helping the neighbours clear their downed trees. My next-door neighbour had a motley crew of assistants: some English fellows who live down the street, me, her nephew, and his in-laws visiting from Sweden. When we were done there, we went down the street and helped two other households. Fortunately last week's extreme heat and humidity were eased by the storm! Then some stupid stuff happened that I might talk about later, but bleh.
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Ithaca, NY

[Jun. 16th, 2013|05:18 am]

Lia "Mwahaha" Brown

[

Tags

health, photos

]

Last weekend we drove down to NY state to spend a couple of days with my parents and sister and her family. We hiked in a state park, saw a waterfall and a lot of neat rock formations, and a lot of wild animals!

Animal sightings: ten live deer (and three dead ones), including a fawn. Four wild turkeys running in the road, and a turtle on the road that we had to swerve around. Stan knew I'd be upset if it was run over, so we turned around when possible (it was a narrow rural road) and went back to rescue it, but by the time we got back it had seemingly made it safely. Saw a hummingbird and a fox -- I've only seen a fox once or twice in my life.

The photos are here. They're mostly of Taughannock state park and/or my nephew Andy. Also I went to Tops supermarket and Waterloo, NY (because we live in Waterloo, Ontario).

Anyway, we're going to see Man of Steel on Sunday! Hope it's good :)

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Yay fanfic!

[Jun. 1st, 2013|04:45 am]

Lia "Mwahaha" Brown

[

mood

anxious

]

The reason I haven't been posting here much is to get my fic for the

roguesbang done. I finished the first draft early, procrastinated on the editing, and then had to work frantically to get it all done. In a perfect world there would have been a bit more time to polish it, but overall I'm fairly pleased with it.

There is also nice art to go along with it, capably drawn by

useless19.

You can find it here! On LJ it's been broken up into two parts because it was simply too long, or you can go to the Dreamwidth or AO3 version.

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Pics or it didn't happen

[Mar. 25th, 2013|03:33 am]

Lia "Mwahaha" Brown

[

Tags

cats, photos

]

I've started using Imgur to host my photos (and a few drawings) and am so far pleased with it. Now that I no longer have a paid account I can't upload many photos to LJ, and Photobucket shrinks stuff down which is kind of a pain in the butt. If Imgur shrinks pics it isn't particularly noticeable (although maybe that's because I don't upload anything huge), so I'm happy with it.

Anyway! Here are some pics from last Saturday! And here are some misc pics from the past week! The second gallery so far consists of one snow photo and some pics of the cute little dolly

runenklinge sent me :)

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Toy show

[Mar. 18th, 2013|03:41 am]

Lia "Mwahaha" Brown

[	Tags	\|	photos	]
[	mood	\|	tired	]

Had an unusually busy weekend! Later I'll talk about Saturday and maybe post pics if they are halfway interesting (I did take some nice videos). But on Sunday we went to a toy show in Burlington, and it was pretty good. I was actually afraid I wouldn't be able to see everything before closing.

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Whole lot of dads

[Mar. 9th, 2013|05:09 am]

Lia "Mwahaha" Brown

[	Tags	\|	cats, health	]
[	mood	\|	confused	]

I was petting my cat Abby a few hours ago when I noticed the backporch light had turned on, so I went to peek at who was out there....and saw Daddy Feral! (her father) There was no food in the dish, so he left, and as soon as he was gone I went out to refill it. He immediately came back to eat, and I got a bit of video of him :) (It's not very exciting) You may notice how much he looks like Abby -- they look very much alike, she's almost a clone of him.

I think I might have seen Daddy once last summer, but otherwise haven't seen him since last winter. Glad to know he's still alive -- I strongly suspect Mama Feral is not :(

My own dad had a CT scan yesterday to check how his brain is doing, and the news could be better: he's still having bleeding, but not enough for more surgery. Because it's not so great he'll have to have another scan in a month. Fingers crossed that the situation is better then.

I never did mention how Stan's appointment with the neurologist went, because it was the day after his dad died and things were in chaos here. All his tests came back normal. The neurologist's best guess as to what happened was that maybe he fainted or something. So that's good, at least.

And Stan made me realize last night that my unstable mood and general depression over the past few weeks is probably due to halving the dosage of one of my anti-depressants. A very obvious conclusion, but I didn't think of it for some reason (mostly because I'd kind of forgotten I'd done it). My psychiatrist had me reduce it because it made my appetite so out of control, but I'd rather eat too much than feel like killing myself all the time. I have now gone back to the old dosage and hopefully that helps.

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Arrr, I don't know what I'm doin'.

[Mar. 1st, 2013|06:28 am]

Lia "Mwahaha" Brown

[

Tags

nerdery, photos

]

So on Tuesday I'd felt depressed and opted not to go on Tumblr -- not particularly unusual. By Wednesday evening I felt a little better, though had been anxious all day. But that night I was struck by the worst anxiety about going onto the site for some unknown reason; not hyperventilating, but my heart was racing and I felt really scared and my bladder was being difficult :> It was very odd, worse than the usual periodic anxiety I get when I go on the site. Eventually I forced myself to go on at a relatively quiet hour, following the principle of getting back on the horse, and it was okay after I'd started reblogging a bit. But I don't know where that came from. Still a bit nervous now and when I went on Tumblr earlier this evening, but mostly better.

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Snow

[Feb. 27th, 2013|08:48 am]

Lia "Mwahaha" Brown

[

Tags

photos

]

Feeling down and making dolls. But have some snow photos from last night and this morning.

This snow was a bitch to shovel because it's so wet and heavy, and not 30 seconds after finishing the driveway the motherloving plow came by and dumped a small mountain of wet snow into it.

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Stuffs

[Feb. 12th, 2013|02:52 am]

Lia "Mwahaha" Brown

[

Tags

health

]

Haven't heard how my aunt's been doing for a few days, but last I heard she was progressing well. My dad is doing well.

This past weekend was Chinese New Year, and we were going to leave a day early to visit my dad, but then I got sick and my parents were understandably reluctant to have a sick person around when my dad's still recovering. Stan's family was told I was sick and didn't mind, although I get the feeling they didn't know how sick I was -- and I was actually doing pretty well on Saturday. But on Sunday my week-long cold suddenly took a turn for the worse, and I felt HORRIBLE. This was a really nasty cold all week (the one I had in November wasn't nearly this bad), but on Sunday and Monday I felt worse than ever. Off to the doctor!

I think we all know how miserable it is to wait outside for a bus when you're sick in winter. This stupid bus was late, there's no shelter, and wet snow was blowing in my face. I was already regretting my decision to take the bus when some jerk in an SUV zoomed past me and soaked me from head to toe with slush. Perhaps if I hadn't been so sick and miserable I would have noticed the giant puddle right next to the bus stop. And while waiting for the bus on the trip home the wind almost blew me off my feet; the weather was nuts.

Anyway. The doctor says I have bronchitis and a sinus infection, so I have antibiotics and an asthma puffer (I have mild asthma but haven't used a puffer in years). Frankly I can't wait to be well again and put these shitty stressful few weeks behind me. I actually really want to get on the treadmill again and resume my normal routine, so hopefully this goes away soon. I did shovel snow during the big blizzard last week, but right now my lungs feel too fragile to shovel the snow that's fallen tonight, and the doctor did tell me to take it easy. Poor Stan is stuck.

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Sheesh	[Feb. 4th, 2013\|10:07 pm] Lia "Mwahaha" Brown
Dad's still the same, but apparently my aunt had a heart attack today. I'm so done with this month.
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Moar updates	[Feb. 4th, 2013\|02:49 am] Lia "Mwahaha" Brown
My dad's home from the hospital now (still has the shunt and drain in his head), and was impatient with me when I inadvertently called during the Superbowl halftime show. So he seems to be getting back to normal :> He'd asked my mother to take a photo of his head while he was in hospital and she told me she hoped it wouldn't go up on Facebook, so of course he promptly posted it on FB :> That's my dad... He says the doctors give a 20% chance that the problem will re-occur, so I guess we'll have to be vigilant and prepared for it to happen again. And hope for the best.
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Another update	[Feb. 2nd, 2013\|02:09 am] Lia "Mwahaha" Brown
So the news is good (fingers still crossed) -- my dad had the less-invasive surgery today and it seems to have gone well. He did need to have two holes drilled in his head, though. I haven't talked to him, but my mother seems optimistic. I guess I'm enough of a pessimist to figure things aren't over just yet, especially because we still don't know what caused it, but I'm really relieved it all seems to be going well so far. And so glad it was handled quickly and efficiently. In other news, at the rock and mineral club meeting tonight I got to hold a real Neanderthal tool which is kind of a huge thrill, and also won a pretty amethyst crystal in the raffle. I enter the raffle every month and rarely win anything (there are multiple winners each time). And Neanderthal tool OMG. After a really shitty week, this has been a very good day :) But I'm utterly wiped, and will be going to bed early.
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Update on my dad

[Feb. 1st, 2013|12:05 am]

Lia "Mwahaha" Brown

[

mood

worried

]

So my mother talked to his GP this morning, and told her about his cognitive symptoms -- apparently he was either downplaying them or simply forgot to mention them. She agreed that it sounded very alarming, so he was immediately sent off for an MRI and CAT scan. The tests revealed he has bleeding on the brain, so he's having surgery tomorrow to relieve it. It could be as simple as drilling a hole in the skull and suctioning out all the excess blood, or it might require removing a section of skull (a lot more serious, obviously). I don't know how likely the latter option is -- obviously we're hoping it doesn't come to that. I don't think the doctors expect it at this point, but that might change during surgery.

It's at least good to know what the problem is, though I'm not sure anyone knows what caused the bleeding (he hasn't had a head injury or accident), so that's a bit worrying. I'm trying to keep my mind off things right now, as there's nothing I can do about it. I offered to go down and help out, but my mother said she didn't think it was necessary at this point...I don't want to be in her hair and causing more stress for her unless she needs me. Guess we'll see what his recovery will be like, because we don't know how long he'll be in the hospital or how long it will take to recover after surgery. He's in the hospital now, so I'm glad someone's officially monitoring him.

Anyway, fingers crossed, and please keep my dad in your thoughts.

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