New Weird

[Regenbogen]

@Dina

My mom is fine, thanks. She has less pain in her hips now. Her leg is swollen, but all looks well for now. Today she was allowed to get up and walk with crutches.

And no, it's perfectly legal. The house does not forbid it, as long as no one exaggerates. I guess, it's in their own best interest that the employees care for their own health.

And another good news. The first rehab application was valid all along and she can go there immediately after the hospital. That's great.

[Dina]

Oh, excellent! I hope they take good care of her there. Some of those places are miraculous  (while others are hell itself, but I trust you know the place and have references).

Glad to hear you won't be in legal troubles anytime soon.

We finally watched Dune part 2. I have not read the books (even when I've been known the story since I was a teenager) and I liked it, even if I found it a little long. On the other hand, hubby, who did read the books, disliked it. He said they invented a bunch of things just because the USA public won't like what would be too similar to a muslim peopla and a Jihad. He may be right. But well, at least I liked it.

[Regenbogen]

We finally watched Dune part 2. I have not read the books (even when I've been known the story since I was a teenager) and I liked it, even if I found it a little long. On the other hand, hubby, who did read the books, disliked it. He said they invented a bunch of things just because the USA public won't like what would be too similar to a muslim peopla and a Jihad. He may be right. But well, at least I liked it.

I haven't watched it yet. Just the first one. But I have seen the other two adaptions. And I've read the books.
They were interesting but a little too political and focused on power and economy for my taste of fantasy/science fiction.
To be honest I only read them because of the cool cover art, lol. It was a big worm with his maw wide open towering over small humans. I just wanted to read about the giant worms and everything else was just filler.


My mother is in a good mood. We visited her yesterday. The clinic is located in the mountains which is always beautiful. She has an awesome view from her room. The food is fantastic. And it is only 1,5 hours from home. She has a lot of treatments during weekdays. She gets a plan for every day. She has almost no pain, but her leg is still terribly swollen. Though they say this is normal at this stage. And she has already met a nice woman she is hanging out with. By coincidence, the woman is her neighbour's aunt.


Cat Mona always shows her love through biting and scratching me. She doesn't do it to my husband, only to me and Mini. Micro gets scratched by all three cats, lol. Because she somehow pets them the wrong way, I guess. Mini says that she thinks Mona likes me best, because she always comes running when she hears me coming home. And she follows me everywhere when we are both in the house. 
Lisa always lies on my lap in the evenings, but she also lies on other laps, and Leonardo only cuddles with Mini.
I think Mona is a little crazy, but I love her.  🥰
***protects bleeding hand while hiding from cat***


The elections were ... no politics, let's just say, I expected something like that and we'll see how it turns out.


I have finished the no-romance book. It's a trilogy. The last one will be out in October. Yay.
The protagonist made a wish to an item which is fulfilling only one wish. She knew that and technically she would have had a lot of time to think about and plan for the exact wording of the wish in case she would ever have the chance to do it. Also she could have planned it together with her allies.
Then she made her wish and I almost facepalmed. And this was the end of the book.
She wished that "none of this would have happened" and that she wanted to be put back to "the beginning". And once I read that, my first thought was: damn, Harry would have phrased this better.

Does this happen to you, too? I mean reading a book and thinking of the Dresden Files. I immediately thought that she would not have made such a stupid wish that can be interpreted in so many ways, if she had had any experience with the Fae, lol .
I mean, come on: what beginning? The creation of the universe? None of this had ever happened? None of what. Stupid unspecific wish. But I guess I will see the fallout in the next book. Could be amusing in a sadistic kind of way.
I think I have told you already that the protagonist was acting stupid sometimes? This was one of those times apparently.
But still a good book. It was very exciting since the second half.

[Dina]

Hello there!
I am very glad your mom is doing well. If she is in no pain, I imagine she will feel more or less fine, even with the annoying swollen leg. And I laughed at the coincidence of her new friend being a relative of her neighbour. I wish both of them the best 
I it so good to know about your cats, I love their different personalities and human favourites.

Yes, no politics. Moving on...

I sometimes do that about Harry! Thinking what he would do in the situation. And for God's sake, everybody knows wishes are tricky. In every RPG session where a wish is involved I remember having to think a lot about that. And if she had time to think...oh well. Perhaps the author of the book is kind with the characters and things go well for her.

I watched "See how they run" this weekend. It is a movie (I have it in Disney+) with Saoirse Ronan about a crime commited in a play of "The Mousetrap" by Agatha Christie. It is fun and full of references to Agatha Christie and other whoddunits. I liked it.

[Dina]

How is everybody doing?

Weather has been fun. A week of about 37 C which felt like 44, and then mornings with 12 C. Many people got a cold, but it seems I was lucky this time.
Also, one of our cities suffered a terrible storm and was flooded. A few casualties and lots of troubles. We are making donations and taking relief measures.
In a lighter note, I watched the first 2 episodes of the new Daredevil. I am not too happy so far.

[Regenbogen]

Hi, so sorry. I forgot that I hadn't written a reply yet.

Spring is everywhere here. My mum is at home now and she is as well as she can be in those circumstances. Last week she somehow slipped and fell on her good side and hurt her ribs. I needed to convince her to let me drive her to the hospital. This could be dangerous, because she is taking anticoagulants and there could be bleeding inside or a broken rib constricting her lungs. This needed to be checked. Maybe there is a little break in one rib, but nothing serious. I am relieved. It hurts just as well. They gave her some happy pills and now she can sleep like a baby.

Tomorrow, I'm going to teach swimming to a grown-up woman from my village. She's afraid of the water, but we'll see how it goes. We plan to go somewhere where no one knows her. She asked if I knew a teacher for grown-ups, because usually they teach kids in groups. I knew of some, but they are all quite expensive, so I told her that I could try to teach her. And if that is not enough, she can still look for a real teacher. I managed to teach swimming to 3 kids and to one kid I taught a better style, lol. And I was one of the best swimmers in school. I hope, we will manage. For now I have scheduled 3 lessons. We'll see, if she needs more. And I am looking forward to the challenge.

Also, one of our cities suffered a terrible storm and was flooded. A few casualties and lots of troubles. We are making donations and taking relief measures.

Oh dear. What a tragedy. I hope the people are getting enough help. It is great that you are helping too.

[Dina]

Hi Regen! It is so good to have you back.
I am sorry to hear about your mom's fall but I am glad it is not so serious. I hope she gets better soon and well, at least she is sleeping well  .
I hope your first swimming lesson was good, let us know how it went, please. I am not a very good swimmer. I manage to move a little, I am not completely useless, but I am very slow and not very efficient, so I tire. But I am very good doing the plank (the thing were you just float facing the sky?)  It was a little frustrating for my dad, who was a very good swimmer and did water polo as a child/teenager but I never had the inclination of becoming a real swimmer. I just wanted to play and enjoy the water.

Thank you for your kind words about the city I told you about. Donations and help poured and i think they are quite better now but a lot of people lost pretty much everything and there is a lot of work to do. The scenes we saw on TV were directly post-apocalyptic, with some cars mounted above others and semaphores half submerged in water. It was terrible.

[Regenbogen]

Hi, weird.

They finally started building the house in our neighbour's garden. It's one of his daughters who will live there with her husband and child. For now they have only prepared the ground. Yesterday I watched them set up a small crane.

Update swimming: the first lesson went OK. She is already able to swim. Self taught, but she taught herself wrong. Now she needs to unlearn what she has done all the time. And this is very difficult. Most of the time, she swims under water and just comes up to inhale. That's bad and already caused her to almost drown, do she has panic whenever water touches her mouth and nose.
So she'll have to work on her fear and she is willing to do it. Meanwhile I try to improve her technique. I even gave her homework. We'll see today evening if there is improvement.

[Dina]

Hello!
It may be interesting to have new neighbours.
It seems that you are a really good and responsible teacher. I wish you good luck with that.

I had my first class of the year yesterday. It seems that the group of students is quite good with several ones who like to intervene, ask and answer questions. But today I am tired. The first classes always tire me because my body is not used to standing and talk so much.

12 months is now available for pre-order in Amazon and it says it will be released on January 2026, which is quite disappointing.

[Regenbogen]

@Dina.
I can imagine how exhausting teaching can be. When I have an intern or an apprentice with me at work, everything takes 3 times as long as it would alone and at the end of the day I have a headache because I talked so much and didn't have time to drink enough.

About 12Months: when he finished writing in February, I was very excited to have the book this year. It is only 10 months from now but it feels like eternity.

Also it is my husband's birthday, which means, I can not start reading at once and have to wait until the guests are gone, lol. Could make me a shitty host perhaps.
But as it is a Tuesday, I am sure he will want to have the party on the weekend. Though there will still be at least my mother as a visitor.

Micro's birthday is on Tuesday and there are not many relatives there because of work.
And later that week I have to go to an indoor trampolin park with 11 kids. Yay 
I hope I won't have to jump myself. I am only 0.3 kg from maximum weight. Could be embarrassing.

Back to the book: maybe, the date is a new placeholder and we'll get an earlier release once editing is done.

[BugBear]

Hello Weird. Please disregard all of my previous advice on how to replicate that process.

Turns out there are a few ways to do this. That's the "get tossed into the deep end and swim your way out" version. The big problem with it is that if you don't swim your way out, you sink.

I swam. There are multiple reasons for this, bit it's not wise to try to force. Not everyone manages to pull themselves out.

I did.

I learned some stuff. I learned a lot of stuff, actually. I am currently making my way across the country doing a bootleg mashup of a 1 man Scooby-Doo act, with the tone of inspector-fukkin-Clouseau, and apparently, with the thematic structure of Journey to the West.

Which I have never read. I saw it out of the corner of my eye on an airplane once, as a movie.

I didn't actually watch that movie. It was in Chinese, and I don't speak Chinese. I had a Dresden Files book and some other fiction, at the time. I recognized the shape of the crown, though.

It's been pretty weird.

Highlights include:

Baiting a gang and some corrupt police into tailing me at the same time. I went a way that no one should really go normally, then pulled over, and watched as the fucking parade of vehicles followed me, decelerated as they finally noticed each other, and then all had to pass me without pulling over and getting into a tangle with much more bitter rivals than the mouthy... cold reader, let's say.

I was laughing my ass off. I made sure to be wearing my stupidest fucking driving glasses, so that's the image of the guy laughing at them they'll have to carry for the rest of their lives.

The gang stole my truck temporarily. The corrupt cops steal from the poor. They had it coming.

Also: An aggressive, unarmed dance off (okay, I had an aluminum telescopic cane) with a mountain lion. Say what you will, it worked and I'm alive.

Oh, and I was stranded in the middle of the Arizonan desert for days with no water source. I'm from the suburbs. Just had to follow the right stars.

Hijinks for practice aside, I'm developing an easier, safer, and more stable way to get where I've gotten. Something sustainable over a lifetime, not bursts of enlightenment that risk insanity every time.

Atm I can get people to enlightenment, but they'll stabilize too much. The outcome to that isn't unpleasant, but it's an evil fucking thing to do to a person imo. Still working on how to help others create a proper balance.

I'll keep you updated.

[Dina]

Ey Regen! I hope micro had a great birthday! And later, tell us about the trampolin park. They are quite popular here too and I think it looks like fun. I am far too fat to try them but I think I would have love them when I was a child.
I hope your mom is doing well and please keep us posted about the swimming classes.
Bug, you seriously confused me, but I hope you are safe. I will say I did not read Journey to the West either, but I watched some adaptations and I liked them, especially the one with Thomas Gibson and Bai ling one, who had a modern twist.
Well, now I have to go, sorry. But I had forgotten to answer for a while and decided a short answer is better than no answer. Take care of yourselves and don't forget to have fun!

[BugBear]

Thanks Dina. It's been a dense few weeks. I can never sell an autobiography. No one would believe it. It's too absurd.

To summarize:

Enlightenment is possible.
Enlightenment is *dangerous.*
Do it wrong one way, and you go crazy.
Do it wrong the other way, you become blissed out and compliant, like a zombie addicted to a cross between communal love and heroin.

The way I did it, and many artistic types do it, is the way that risks insanity. I didn't go insane, obviously. Now, Jim Butcher on the other hand...

(Kidding, kidding. He's overly stablized, if anything.)

I can help someone do it in the way that risks blissful, stable, choiceless happiness. I figured out how by paying attention to my own process, and using myself as my own test subject. Because, you know, I had to. Still have to, tbh, I'm not finished.

There *is* some utility there in doing it a little bit and stopping before it finishes, for treating anxiety. I'm running that experiment now with a volunteer now to collect data. No preliminary results yet. We had to reset from incorrect methodology, and are waiting on them now.

(It's low risk, informed, consensual human experimentation, and I'm not part of an institution with an (inaptly named) ethics board.)

Going 100% with it? Where it moves from turning their reactions down enough for them to get a handle on them, and turns into total non-reactiveness? It's the equivalent of them erasing themselves and their personality. Everything that wasn't okay with the way the world works gets "deleted" from their consciousness.

Which I think is bad, and an evil thing to do to someone.

The weird part that I *don't* understand is how I'm living out a story that I've never read. The Sun Wukong stuff. How is it that I came to follow a plot structure that I never learned?

Like, we all act out mini-pieces of the stories we read. Fiction and mythology is like voluntary human self-programming. We "see" other people do things, we see how, and we copy them if we want to do that thing.

We do it with real humans too. That's pretty much how modern education works, in an overly simplistic nutshell.

So living out a plot structure isn't weird. You guys probably live out at least a little bit of Dresden every day. Or, if you're wise, you live out Michael Carpenter.

Becoming aware of it is pretty weird. That sends people insane if they can't cope with "seeing their own code." It's one thing to say you know that psychological conditioning works on you, or that you have bias. It's another thing to see happen in real time, including the parts happening in your head.

I have no idea how you live out a plot you haven't read. That leaves the broad overlap of "magical seeming things that are perfectly explainable (and extremely cool)" that I can personally explain.

The Jungian collective unconcious is my current best bet for a cause. Maybe yes, maybe no, inconclusive data.

I hope that clears things up a little. It's been a weird couple of months. At least I'm in good company.

[Regenbogen]

@BugBear:
I admit, I was confused, too. I thought maybe you played some RPG and I just don't get it. And if not, you could be a secret agent, lol.
Also, I am not sure I understand what you mean by enlightenment. But this could be a language problem. For me it reads like some religious stuff.
If it works for you, go for it. And I think you are a good person for helping the volunteer.

And if I understood correctly, you are saying: however you live your life, whatever you do, is not your own idea, but you are basically going through the motions using the experience of others or fictional experiences as a guideline.

What I try to do with my life: I believe I am guided by social norms, social do's and don'ts, rules and laws and whatever I think is right. What I think is right might come from the rule: treat others as you want to be treated. But I admit, I don't always do that: for example, if I think the other is a mean asshole and treats others with disrespect, I can easily live with pissing that person off. If I see someone brown-nosing, I ask if they need some rug to wipe away the slime. They usually understand and some are embarrassed.
It the mean asshole is someone more powerful than me who can get me in real trouble, I try to be more subtle in saying my opinion. And sometimes I just withhold my opinion but make it clear to them that if I can't say anything positive about their actions I'd rather don't say anything at all. Sometimes a simple "ah" as answer is enough to convey: "I heard what you said. No further comment." I always hope that this makes them think it over again.


@Dina: the birthday went well, but the trampolin park will happen tomorrow. 11 kids. Great. As a kid I would have enjoyed that too. I had a very small trampolin of about 1mē size. No saltos possible without hurting oneself, lol.

My mother is well. She is glad that she no longer needs help with grocery shopping.

The swimming lessons also went well, though my pupil is a bit frustrated that she still can't keep herself above the water. This will take time. It is much harder to unlearn stuff than to learn completely new stuff. And she did swim better already. It takes time and training.

[Dina]

@Bugbear, it is a little clearer, thank you. It seems that you are working in yourself and others, and that is always good. I admire your awareness.
About what you say about living that plot (what I do not understand, as Journey to the West is a magical things, with gods and supernatural stuff) you did not read, I guess some things lead to convergence. Along the years, many people had similar experiences, because under similar circumstances people with similar characters (personalities) react in the same way. And their actions lead to a similar path.
@Regenbogen. I am glad to hear all that. I never had a trampolin and I only remember had played with them a couple of times, but I do remember jumping in the inflatable things (we call them moon walk) and I loved it.

Today is a not working day. It is not a holiday, because it is in memory of the Malvinas (Falklands) war and the boys who died there. It is the only thing I am going to say about that. But the good thing is that hubby and I can enjoy a cozy day...without annoying noises. That is because our neighbors below are doing a lot of modifications in their appartment and some days the noises are awful, really, really loud. Other days are just the sound of hammers and things like that. And some days there are barely any noise. It is all a lottery! But on not working days we all can rest    Regen, I hope your neighbors who are building things are far away, so their noised do not bother you too much.