Hypervigilant Haberdashery
I left hypervigilant off of yesterday’s list because it’s a whole separate category. It’s why I have 40 man days of emergency supplies and why I’m measuring Rev’s water consumption so I can have 40 man + 20 dog days of emergency supplies. It’s why I wear clothes as armor and carry a knife and am ready to flee the country same-day without returning home to pack. It’s why I owned a minivan, and why I am always prepared to use 10 distinct forms of locally accessible transportation. It’s why I maintain a foreign mailing address and bank account and why I am so compelled to obtain additional citizenship. It’s why I have studied secrets so careful and understood their relationship to security — that secrets are literally the cognitive creation of a deficiency in secrecy that has ever-increasing social and economic costs.
But it’s also how I can sometimes stare past your sunglasses directly at an important bit that you didn’t know you were sharing, or carry on a conversation where only one of us talks. It’s why I can react productively in a wide variety of circumstances and can deflect abuse and panic and fear to get things done. It’s why I can organize people to help each other with things they don’t even know to worry about. It’s why I have organized non-profit non-data-mined versions of communications and information services. It’s why I am able to supply equipment and consumables and communications for my usual household for 2 weeks of in-place endurance and a self-supported rescue, or a full household for 10 days, or my household and neighbors for a couple of days. And it’s why I always have a knife when you need one**.
And it’s why I need to protect myself from all of the poorly regulated emotions that other people are leaking at me 24/7*. Fun fact – Most of you are on this list because you, for a variety of reasons, don’t leak emotions in the way that triggers my fear. Many of you have excellent control of your eyebrows†, which is very comforting to me. The space between what I can see people are feeling and what they are actually telling me is really hard for me to deal with, and often poorly received if I allow it to influence my interactions.
I’m finally watching Better Off Saul (AMC). That show is so pretty sometimes that I get distracted from the story and have to re-watch a scene. And sometimes it happens more than once, where I still don’t catch the dialog on the second pass. It hurts so good because it tells us the story of a man who can hardly keep himself alive but trying to not be a terrible person, and mostly getting shit on for it. A man who sees how power works and can exercise it, but who would really love to never be required to do so. A man with sometimes terrible motivations who sometimes does terrible things, but who does think about how other people will be affected and does often try to actually help them instead of merely cooperating with them.
Worked on M’s project a bit and I think I have a workflow outlined. Refining now to technical specs so I can PoC the process before specing an interface. I also had a great idea about my shared state distributed pub-sub system that will give me all the parts I want in the rebuild but can be wedged into the current framework to support legacy clients, and that will reduce the amount of software I have to write. Which is motivating me to actually undertake the project again, and if it works will clear a prerequisite for several other home automation improvements. Yay for non-economic productivity. I want to say “boo for extrinsic motivation”, but I wouldn’t say that about anyone else in this situation, so I shouldn’t say it about me.
Got some Rimworld today, but again just a small chunk. I’m still feeling out the system after becoming quite rusty; I don’t feel incapable like I did in the first session, but I am not yet remembering 100% of the things you need to be prepared for — the point of the game is that you sort of can’t. Rimworld exercises the same bits I use for hypervigilance about survival and management of other people’s mood, but in the context of fun times and celebration of incremental improvements instead of actual survival (or traumatic memory of survival) and punishment for exerting control.
My new colored pencils are so much better than the cheap ones. You can actually fill saturated color [fig 1,2]. They’re so nice and greasy going down, and the differences between the English and French color names are sometimes hilarious. Would recommend.
ZiB
*This is the reason Ben lives alone in the rainforest outside of consumer comms service. So he can turn off that fucking leak when he needs to not be in charge of other people’s mood regulation. I moved to the city so I could grin fuck the shit sandwich that is the public, and maybe become desensitized to it, because I know that independence is dying alone in the forrest and the only thing that can save me is other people. I’m not sure either plan quite works.
**I also always have sparks and water and food and fuel and first aid and electricity and communications, but only at base camp unless I expect to need them specifically.
†Eyebrows are without a doubt the best part of Dog. He’s got giant white eyebrow whiskers that make him look like a crustacean and that greatly emphasize changes in his eyebrow poses. Shanda likes his analog-positioned ears but she doesn’t understand how much more information you can get from the eyebrows. And it helps me with my hypervigilance about reacting to other people’s emotions, because Dog only has about 4 emotional states and he never wants them to be secret — he wants my participation above almost all else.
