zetasyanthis | Recent Entries

This is a poem I wrote a few weeks back, and hadn't yet posted. It's pretty sad, but true.

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Bleeding covers all the land.
Bleeding out their youth, you planned.
Bleeding them because of past.
Bleeding them to death at last.

Bleeding their child 'till they die.
Bleeding, hopeless, as they cry.
Bleeding until they are still.
Bleeding, dying, for your will.

Bleeding Gaza, and Rafah.
Bleeding because of their god.
Bleeding 'till they all are dead.
Bleeding for dreams in your head.

This is a list of random life tips.

1. Read. Keep your imagination in shape and keep learning new and beautiful things.
2. Listen to music. It's how we communicate when words fail. <3
3. Backup your important photos and documents.
a. Stick a hard drive in safety deposit box for off-site backup. Rotate this every quarter or however long you feel comfortable.
b. Stick a flash drive or SSD in you car glove-box for an off-site backup. Definitely encrypt this. Rotate this every week or two.

This is a list of mental health resources, listed by location. Please please please please use them if you are in need and they can help. This stuff builds up over time and getting help sooner can help prevent something becoming more acute.

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United States Resources

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Suicide Hotline (988, in the United States)

I have personally called the Suicide Hotline, and they helped stabilize me long enough to get me to further care. If you need someone to help you, they're the ones, though Trans Lifeline and Trevor Project below, may be able to offer better specialized assistance.

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Trans Lifeline (1-877-565-8860)

The trans lifeline can help you reach resources you need to get the care and support you need in a world that can be pretty dark. They can help very similarly to the Suicide Hotline if you need it, or help with less severe needs as required. That said, they're a much smaller organization, and might not always be available. Please call the Suicide Hotline if you need to and they aren't answering the phone!

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Trevor Project (Website: https://www.thetrevorproject.org/, Hotline: 1-866-488-7386)

These folks specialize in helping younger LGBT folks get the care and support they need, but they'll absolutely point you in the right direction regardless of age.

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Emergency Services (911, in the United States - last resort)

If you end up calling 911 for suicidal thoughts, request to go to the local crisis center rather than the ER, because you'll likely be stuck at the ER for quite a while before they can get you to a facility that can help you. Crisis center is a much better option if it's available, but /PLEASE/ do what you have to to be safe.

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Arizona-Specific Resources

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Arizona Warm Line (602-347-1100, https://crisis.solari-inc.org/get-help/warm-line/)

This is for sub-acute conversations, but still mental-health related and is usable in the state of Arizona. I haven't used this one myself, but my therapists have recommended it in the past.

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Sierra Tucson

This place is absolutely fantastic, and is more like a mental health resort than anything. It's quite expensive, but has a brilliant residential-level program that needs to be the standard for everyone one day. Their PHP/IOP aren't worth anything though. I'd swap to Palo Verde, farther down this list, for those.

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Sonora Behavioral Health Hospital

I've only had experience with Sonora's in-patient unit, specifically the Sabino unit. Their food is /terrible/, but it's otherwise a decent enough box to stabilize in. They don't really have much in the way of in-patient therapy (that's mostly focused on medication), but if I was in trouble again I would still consider it. (The food really is awful though.) I would recommend a bag with a non-hoodie sweatshirt with all strings removed as well as a few books, since reading cam sometimes calm the mind. Also bring a phone number list, as you won't have access to any devices. You'll be able to write with very tiny pencils and blank paper, and phone access is reasonable but limited to a common line that's shared between everyone in the unit.

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Palo Verde Behavioral Health

I haven't had an experience with the in-patient unit here, aside from the intake room, since when I went there were no beds and I was allowed (barely) to leave and return for IOP. I can say that their PHP and IOP programs are quite good, and as I'm writing this I just dropped from PHP to IOP.

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A tiny little bunny
who hopped into our lives
who opened up with science
the doubt inside our eyes.

That hopping little bunny
who was the friend of all
she hopped until she couldn't
and at the last did fall.

She left us teared and weeping
for her most sudden pass
and now we lay her shell to rest
in consecrated grass.

That hopping little bunny
that changed all of our lives
she made the world a better place
despite our crying eyes.

Failure, Abandonment, Vice and Blood
I cannot explain the should.
I cannot explain the pain of past.
I cannot see 'yond that last.

I cannot gather the threads of time.
I cannot savor the evening's chime.
I cannot see my mirth at home.
I cannot see the worth of tomes.

I cannot see 'yond darkness deep.
I cannot see beyond my sleep.
I cannot see past mist and sand.
I cannot find my hoped-for land.

I do not know what knots I'll find.
I do ont know 'neath fear and rhyme.
I do not know my blood's sweet birth,
the bloody rivers, the crimson earth.

Current Location: Palo Verde Behavioral Health

I honestly think that despair at the future has almost always been the case for many many people, though we have obviously had more positive and negative moments. Coming from a positive moment to a (in some ways) very negative one, as we currently are, makes things feel much worse.

Try to remember a couple of things:
1. We are doing wildly better for the vast majority of folks than even 100 years ago, let alone 2000 or before then. Societal progress generally moves forward, but takes time, as much as that is a reason to sob incoherently on a regular basis. >.<
2. Remember that the United States is not the world, and that other parts of the world (large parts of Europe) are way better and we're just lagging.
3. Remember that when we've gone through particularly bad times before (and now), people do stand up and put a stop to it eventually. (I hate to qualify with that word, but it's true.)

Per #3, I offer the following:
1. They Thought They Were Free by Milton Sanford Mayer (large swastika on the cover, be warned). "This is probably one of the most important books I've ever read as far as shaping my world view. It tells the story of a Jewish journalist who traveled to Germany after World War II to find out why what had happened had happened. My therapist actually picked up a copy of this one, and she liked it too. Hard read, but very topical, and I highly recommend it." This basically gave me hope for the future because if nothing else the folks trying to do it again are incompetent as fuck compared to the people who tried this last time.
2. Crime in the US is dropping. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/people-think-crime-rate-up-actually-down-rcna129585
3. Though it will not matter in the end, folks are standing up to the current ex-president, be they judges, lawyers, prosecutors, etc... People care.
4. Video from a few years ago that will make you cry. <3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUKC8saQPro

And yes, I realize there's a lot of terrible stuff happening too. I'm trans and fully aware of what states are doing to us and our kids right now, let alone the other political cruelty. It is 100% okay to cry and collapse for a while, but picking yourself back up is important, because if you get lost in that, though, you won't be able to help yourself or anyone else. <3

Stories to make you believe in the future again:

Here's a list of my personal stories, along with relevant tags:

My Friend Lon (silly antics, highly amusing)
The Wicked Grounds Name Story (heartfelt, gender)
My Greatest Travel Disaster Story (quite hilarious, yakkety saks should be playing as you read this)
Backups are Important! (title says it all for this one!)
How To Make SPI Cry (embedded hardware, microcontrollers)
Internship + Massive Flood (FPGAs, terrible software, epic flood)
Home SWAT Team (police, somewhat terrifying with an ambiguous ending)
Work SWAT Team (police, no one seriously hurt)
College (misc college stories, including an embedded internship)
High School (misc high school stories)

The first time I ever visited Wicked Grounds (a BDSM themed coffee shop in San Francisco), I was going to a small writers' meet with a friend of mine. He ended up being delayed by some personal stuff, so I ended up getting there a couple hours before he did. This was the first time I ever went as myself (female-presenting) to /anything/, and so I was a bit nervous. I hadn't changed my name yet, had just barely started therapy, and was very, very nervous.

Eventually, I went up to get a refill on my drank-far-too-quickly mocha, and the barista happened to ask me if I wanted to open a tab, since I looked like I'd be there a while. (I had my laptop, etc...) I said sure, and handed over my card, just as she was asking my name. Thinking she was doing a quick check on the card, I reacted instinctively with, "My name is <deadname>." She looked at me, sadness in her eyes, and said, "No hon. What's /your/ name?"

So a few years ago I had a small NAS, serving as my main filesystem for all sorts of video and audio contents, packages, etc... It contained a lot of personal photos, etc, that I really would have hated to lose, and so I always kept a backup... of at least some of it. I couldn't quite afford a large enough backup unit at the time, so there were some things that only existed there.

One day, I came home from work and my NAS was off. "That's odd," I thought, since it ran 24/7, and I proceeded to try the power button. Absolutely nothing. Not an LED or anything else at all. Well, this NAS had a slightly odd internal power supply that ran off an external 19V brick, so I decided that I'd worry about the rest of the system later and just pop the drives out of the front and hook them up to my media center PC to try and check if my data was at least intact.

Montage ensues, pulling the media PC apart and placing the drives (still in their hot-swap trays) upside-down on top of the media PC. I hook everything up, plug the PC back in, and hit the power button. INSTANTLY, A THREE INCH FLAME shoots out of the top of one of the drive's controller boards where the hot-swap tray had shorted to the drive! Apparently, over time, the metal bottom of the tray had bent and made contact, and while the dinky little 120W NAS PSU tripped out and saved anything bad from happening, the old 750W PSU in the media PC was happy to just power the fuck through that short. Needless to say, that drive was toast, but my data survived to live another day thanks to RAID5, and now I keep backups all over the place.

Notes on easy off-site backups:
1. Encrypted flash or hard drive in your car's glove box.
2. Encrypted flash or hard drive in your bank safety deposit box. (Two or three 3.5" drives fit perfectly in a 3x5 box, which runs about $100/year most everywhere.)

Obviously, you'll have to rotate them periodically, but that's a good start at least!

Father Benedict

So when I was in high school, we had this awesome priest by the name of Father Benedict. He was a science teacher, and taught among other things biology (evolution, not that 6000 year old nonsense). He was an interesting fellow. Quick with a joke, kind, and unmistakable, because during class, his pet hedgehog would commonly end up sleeping in the hood of his habit! In addition to this, he wore paratrooper jump boots, which apparently have special sloped soles so that they don't catch on the airplane hatch and snap your neck when you're jumping out of the plane. I don't know what happened to him in the end, but he was quite a gamer and ended up the hub of the local file-sharing circle at the school. I should reach out and find out what happened to him some day.

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Mrs. Fletcher

Mrs. Fletcher was a grumpy old Nun who I had the misfortune of having as my teacher for Catholic Morality class. She basically turned it into "Why Abortion Is Bad 101", which had me wondering why on earth I should care since it wasn't my body in the first place. (I hadn't realized I was trans at the time, and even now I can't exactly bear a child.)

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Biology Teacher

I don't even remember her name, but she came in to teach a semester of sophomore biology after the normal teacher went on maternity leave. She came in with overheads... hand-written overheads that she proceeded to draw over to try and make more legible, which... did not work. Not my favorite teacher by a long shot, and given I all but passed out during a dissection, that was not my favorite class either. I cannot handle gooey sticky biology bits, and even the smell of formaldehyde makes me nauseous.

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Mr. T(aska)

Mr. T, as we called him, was a fantastic physics teacher and had all kinds of bling his loving students had given him over the years. He was very white, but went along with it, and was often quite funny. Among other things, I'll never forget his exhortation the first week of lab work, when he said something to the effect of "I know you are all very smart people, and they you can break anything you set your mind to. Please do not (intentionally) break anything in my lab!" :D

Mr. T also went on to push me to attend Fermi Lab's Saturday Morning Physics, which is a series of 9 three-hour Saturdays at Fermilab. You get two hours of lecture followed by a one hour tour of a different part of the facility. As a result, I've actually been /inside/ portions of that facility you can't even normally access, as the accelerator wasn't running while I was there.

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Dr. LeCompte

Oh boy, this guy. Nerd that I was, I was a member of Math Team, Science Olympiad, and Computer Club (and ended up running the latter two my senior year). Dr. LeCompte, though, was special. The guy didn't even work for the school. He just came in and taught probability and statistics for Math team when he wasn't flying over to Europe for what I later learned was involvement in CERN. He actually runs the bloody ATLAS detector over there, which I guess explains why his card counting problems were so fucking difficult! I learned probability from a /particle physicist!/

This is a collection of silly stories from my college days.

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Rose-Hulman Internship Stories (This was an 18-month period at a Rose-Hulman Ventures, a consulting internship shop - Worked there two summers and while I was in class, hence all the stories.)

1. The Honey Gun

One of the projects I worked on was a desktop reclamation system for a common chemical used in DNA analysis, acetonitrile (ACN), which is otherwise known as Methyl /Cyanide/. As the name suggest, this chemical is /quite / dangerous, as it basically breaks down into methanol and hydrogen cyanide in the body, and is used to /dissolve DNA/. It's flammable in addition to this, and attacks most common seal materials (316 stainless steel, neoprene, and Teflon are basically all you can safely use to contain it).

Where this chemical comes into my life is the acetonitrile shortage of 2008, and a company buying some internship time to work on designing a reclamation system to recover the chemical from DNA analysis waste streams. This is theoretically not that difficult, you just have to add some methanol, and boil out the ACN. The trick is that you have to pump this stuff around and seal everything so that none of this chemical escapes the process as a gas.

Had the chemists involved in the project known what they were doing, this would not be hard, but I (an electrical and computer engineering intern, remember) basically had to do all the research to figure out what would be safe to use. I didn't initially find neoprene (mostly because I didn't know what I was doing either), and pointed us in the direction of stainless steel and Teflon.

So, I found us some electronics, motors, stainless steel vessels, teflon-lined tubing, and peristaltic pumps to keep everything safe, and the project, while delayed, was on track. This is where the chemists came in. They came in one day on voice call, /VERY EXCITED/ that they had just found a pump that worked (this was actually the hardest bit). They proceeded to ship us this pump, which weighed 50 lbs (!?!), required a 50HP motor (!?!?!), and was rated for 1500psi (OMGWTFBBQ!?!).

We never ended up using it for anything, but my boss at the time remarked that we could have used it to shoot honey across a nearby lake... The project ended up being cancelled as it took /far/ too long for me to learn everything that these guys should already have known, and as far as I know it's sitting on the shelf behind his desk as a trophy... I really hope he built the honey gun, though!

2. The Rivet Via

On another project for that customer, I ended up having to re-design a peltier (PEC) control board because another intern kept messing it up. I ended up messing up my first revision too, for a really weird reason. I carefully laid out the board, and everything looked good, but when I tested the first one, the thermocouple readings went absolutely /nuts/ as soon as the power (~10 amps or so) was delivered to the PEC. I'd been pretty careful to try and isolate the sensitive measurement side from the power delivery, so I was quite confused. What I'd missed, however, was that in one spot, I ran the ground for the PEC /in-between/ the pads of an 0805 resistor. Cadence (the PCB design suite) didn't catch this, as it went "yeah, that net is connected, it's all good bro!", but holy smokes did it cause a ton of voltage bounce!

Long term fix was a board re-spin with a bunch of vias added to connect that part of the ground plane correctly, but the short term fix? I drilled a hole in the board, put in an aluminum pop-rivet, and soldered it to the ground plane on both sides! Problem FIXED! :D

3. The Partially Etched Board

On yet another project during that internship, I ended up getting a batch of boards back from the assembly house, and ran into a really weird problem. One of the boards had a power-to-ground short, and it wasn't immediately obvious why. It was a really solid short though, and we broke out the time-honored internship solution: an old linear power supply we called the Trace Breaker, and the thermal camera! Application of /30 amps/ only really heated up the entire board, and disappointingly, didn't actually blow anything up! Eventually, I had to know what the hell had happened, and it turns out that there was a massive connector on one side of the board, under which the PCB was completely un-etched! I guess they just didn't dip that side of the board in the etchant, and certainly didn't do electrical or visual checks prior to assembly like they were supposed to???

4. how_many_digits()

Oh boy, this one. I don't have this source code, though I wish I'd gotten permission to save it somewhere, especially since it was thrown out by yours truly, but there was another project for a different customer that ended up running on an Atmel Atmega microcontroller. The device in question was an automated catheter inflation device (yeah, that sounds painful, doesn't, it?), which was intended to handle things without a doctor having to be there the entire time, saving the patient money (in theory anyways). (This was just a 'could we even do this?' prototype, so don't freak out too much!)

I had started at the internship just as this project was winding down, and about a month before the end of the school year. The previous intern was a Senior and had basically said things were ready to go, pending a little tweaking, and basically vanished on us with a severe case of senioritis.

It took one look at the codebase (I was a Junior, but not an idiot) and had to immediately go to my boss and tell him it would not ship for two to three /months/. The entire codebase was a horrible disaster, written in one giant main.c file that was approximately 3000 lines long. In addition to approximately /infinite/ bugs, some of which could have killed a patient (these catheters operated at approximately 30 bar (435 PSI), and are stress-tested to 40 bar (580 PSI)), it was a horrible mess and required a total rewrite before it could be delivered to the customer.

To his credit, my manager believed me, and as we went over the code (he was an engineer himself), gave me carte blanche to fix it as quickly as I could while maintaining some semblance of sanity.

I ended up ripping out all sorts of things, replacing his custom float printing library with sprintf(), like a sane person, and removing multiple places where he was doing /double-precision floating point division/ on the 8-bit CPU. This, by the way, takes over 40,000 CPU cycles to emulate in software (I forget the exact number), resulting in a /10 millisecond/ delay in anything else going on every time this occurred. This was the cause of many of the bugs, as the motor would happily keep running while the CPU was occupied doing ridiculous math computations.

The worst part of all of this, as I've already hinted at, was his float-printing library. There was a function in it (he at least used those, although not very often) called how_many_digits. how_many_digits' job was to calculate how many digits came before the decimal point when printing a floating point value. I'm not going to opine on whether or not you even need to do this in the first place, but what I am going to say is that there are a number of way you can do this, in /increasingly bad/ order. You can:

1. Divide the number by 10 until you reach zero, and use the number of iterations to figure this out.
2. Write an if and else if chain to divide by 10, 100, 1000... until you give up and just leave a huge bug in there since you're never going to write every condition for a 64 bit floating point number.
3. Write an if, if, if, if, if, if, if chain doing the same thing to force the CPU to calculate floating point division a dozen or more times every time you do this for no reason.
4. I'm sure there are worse ideas, but I can't think of one off the top of my head.

Care to guess what this guy did?

In the end, I fixed the hardware, fixed the software, and cut the cost of the unit by about 25% by simplifying basically everything and making it safer to boot. I call that a victory. :)

5. The Lab Tech

At the same internship most of these stories are from, I worked with a lab tech by the name of Jay. Jay was #goals, honestly, in that he told the worst dad jokes in the history of the world. His jokes were actually /so bad/ that his daughter came home from grade-school with a /letter from her teacher/ asking him to stop teaching her these jokes, as they were so bad they were causing disruption in class!

6. Flat Johnny

My boss, Jon, was a really fun and funny guy, but was /homicidally opposed/ to having his picture taken. I have no idea why, but he would literally /chase you down/, /rip the camera out of your hands/, and /delete the photo/ if you took one of him.

Naturally, this resulted in a slightly disgruntled employee taking advantage of this (not me, I promise - this was a friend of mine). My friend, we'll call him $mad_genius, found an old photo of Jon from a business function on the school's intranet. He proceeded to photoshop an arm holding a glass of wine and someone else's legs onto this photo, to the point where it looked hilariously legitimate, but still obviously fake. He then proceeded to have this printed /life-size on cardboard/ and had it /sitting at my boss's desk the next day at work when he came in. I heard the scream "WHAT THE FUCK?" from down the hall, and laughed my ass off when I saw what had happened, as I had had no involvement in this.

Jon immediately roughed it up a little bit and threw it (mostly intact!) into the dumpster outside, which happened to be empty. $mad_genius proceeded to rescue it, and then /take it around town/, posing for photos with all of Jon's friends, creating a fake Facebook profile with the name "Flat Johhny", eventually friend-requesting my boss, who flipped the fuck out when he saw it! He did end up conceding that it was hilarious and letting up on the photo thing a bit later, but yeah, that's the story of Flat Johhny.

Oh, and one more thing... he and his roommate (again, not me), ended up torturing each other with it... putting it in the shower so when they pulled back the curtain he was 'standing' right there, even suspending it above the other's bed while they were sleeping! I don't know how someone didn't end up murdered or dying from a heart attack, but it was /hilarious/ to watch from a distance!

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(Different) Internship Stories

https://zetasyanthis.dreamwidth.org/40609.html

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Misc College Stories

1. My Friend Lon

https://zetasyanthis.dreamwidth.org/40371.html

2. My Friend Mike

When I was in college, I had a friend of mine who was a TA in a computer science class. One day he had a student come to him, super upset, because he could get his program to work. My friend told him he could calm down that that he would help, and then asked what the problem was. The student opened up the source code and the problem was that he had used his girlfriends name, appended with a number, for every variable name... and lost track. My friend went WTF, laughed at him, and then told him he'd have to rewrite it. He also told him not to be a creepy asshole and sent him on his way. I'm not sure if he attempted to warn the girlfriend of this guy's stalker-ish tendencies, but I kind of hope he did. ^^;

3. Credit Hours

Rose-Hulman is... weird. They operate on the quarter system, but there's basically no way to count and end up with four quarters. The regular school year has three, an there's one main one in the summer no one really goes to, but if you count that, you kind of have to count fast track quarter and catapult quarter, which also happen during the summer.

Anyways, Rose is kind of crazy. They compress normal 15 week classes into 10 week quarters, so you end up with a lot of credit hours. I think I graduated undergrad with around 200 credit hours, which is kinda nuts. (Of this, 56 were humanities, so Rose did care about more than just math/science.)

4. Fast Track Calculus (CW: Anxiety)

So, about that Rose being crazy thing... Rose-Hulman has a course that I quite stupidly decided to take that starts six weeks before your freshman term, and ends one week before, meaning it's five weeks long. This course is Calculus 1, 2, and 3.

For those that don't know, this is a 45-hour equivalent course-load. This is, quite honestly /insane/. (Normal is 16!)

Okay, so clearly we need to modify things slightly to make this work and Rose /did/. They moved a lot of the actual calculation into Maple, a piece of mathematics software, which allowed them to accelerate the class quite a bit while retaining learning... to a point. They also made it extremely clear that we were expected to work together, and with 50 people in the class, that should be semi-possible right?

Well. They also restructured the class into a pass-fail format, but with a twist. Every day (except weekends), you'd have a 3 hour lecture, followed by a nightly (or weekend) homework assignment. To pass the class, you had to get an 80% or higher on all assignments (and the three tests through-out the class). If you failed to get an 80% on the first pass, you then had to complete the assignment or test 100% perfectly by the end of the class.

This is what we call a /death spiral/. I had the bad luck to get sick during week 3 of 5, and missed most of that week's assignments, and so ended up having to redo everything perfectly, /including/ many problems that even the smartest folks in the class (I wasn't even close to that!) had abandoned as ridiculously impossible!

I did end up passing, with about 2 hours to go before the deadline, but basically killed myself in the process. The longest period I was awake during the class was 4.5 days, at which point I passed out still doing calculus (this may be related to why I got sick), and it was so intense that by week 3 people were starting to forget words in conversations as mathematics basically took over their brains entirely. It was stupid and I will never do anything like this ever again!

If you have to be proud of the fact that you had no attempted suicides during hte class, and that this was the first class in 20 years everyone passed, you are an /idiot/.

Oh, and lest you think I was even stupider for doing this, I'd taken Calculus BC in highschool right before this, so I knew Calculus 1 and 2 going in! I just wanted to make sure I was on solid ground moving forward, and boy was that a mistake! I ended up getting home and sleeping for 18 hours, eating dinner, and then sleeping for another 18 hours, which didn't even /begin/ to complete my recovery. As a result of this class I ended up consuming around 750mg of caffeine per day by the end of Freshman year (at which point I ramped down to avoid an actual heart attack). Yeah, this was /stupid/ /as/ fuck/.

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This is a random list of LGBT resources that can make you smile or be otherwise helpful! If you have more than I have listed, poke me and I will gladly add to the list!

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Mental Health

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Suicide Hotline (988, in the United States)

I have personally called the Suicide Hotline, and they helped stabilize me long enough to get me to further care. If you need someone to help you, they're the ones, though Trans Lifeline and Trevor Project below, may be able to offer better specialized assistance.

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Trans Lifeline (1-877-565-8860)

The trans lifeline can help you reach resources you need to get the care and support you need in a world that can be pretty dark. They can help very similarly to the Suicide Hotline if you need it, or help with less severe needs as required. That said, they're a much smaller organization, and might not always be available. Please call the Suicide Hotline if you need to and they aren't answering the phone!

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Trevor Project (Website: https://www.thetrevorproject.org/, Hotline: 1-866-488-7386)

These folks specialize in helping younger LGBT folks get the care and support they need, but they'll absolutely point you in the right direction regardless of age.

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Arizona Warm Line (602-347-1100, https://crisis.solari-inc.org/get-help/warm-line/)

This is for sub-acute conversations, but still mental-health related and is usable in the state of Arizona. I haven't used this one myself, but my therapists have recommended it in the past.

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Emergency Services (911, in the United States - last resort)

If you end up calling 911 for suicidal thoughts, request to go to the local crisis center rather than the ER, because you'll likely be stuck at the ER for quite a while before they can get you to a facility that can help you. Crisis center is a much better option if it's available, but /PLEASE/ do what you have to to be safe.

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LGBT Rights Organizations

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Human Rights Campaign (https://www.hrc.org/about)

HRC is an organization that fights for LGBT rights across the country.

They also sell various gear in support of the cause, though I've included them here as an organization primarily.

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Clothing and Gear

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Untag (originally Trans-Missie, https://untag.com/pages/our-story)

This site sells trans-friendly swimsuits (and other clothing) of Amsterdam, though ships to the US as well as many other countries. The can and will tailor your swimsuit for your body, which is very helpful when you're trans, as (at least I) don't always fit well into standard sizes. Little pricey, especially the tailored stuff, but fantastic!

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Degenderettes (https://degenderettes.com/order#baseball)

This "friendly international genderqueer agitprop club" sells LGBT-flag colored baseball bats, hatchets, throwing axes, etc... Their website is a little broken at hte moment, but I've got one of their bats in my car and I love it. <3

They also appear to do music, though I've not personally listened to it! https://archive.org/details/TheDegenerettes

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Pridemode (https://pridemode.com/pages/about-us)

These folks sell various LGBT flavored clothing, silicone bracelets, and jewelry. I've not bought any of the clothing (yet), but I have their trans flag, pride flag, and lesbian bracelets and I like them a fair bit. I will note that they're a little wider than I like (and also have small ridges in between the color bands), but that's just due to how they're made.

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This is the story of a bug that baffled a room full of engineers (some of whom weren't EEs, so it's more understandable) for more than a week.

The product in question is a very low-power device with a radio, a couple of sensors, nothing really special. It had an MSP430 running the whole show, and had to run off battery power for multiple years in a harsh environment. In the lab, with debug builds, everything worked great, but as soon as we dropped the production code onto the board, things would start jamming up and not operating properly. This was weird, because all of the various devices were on their own isolated power planes, with MOSFETs controlling the power to them to cut off even idle draw when not in use.

It took a while, but I eventually figured out the problem, and it was that we were being too clever for our own good. You see, in a SPI bus, you have four lines:

1. SCLK: Serial Clock (clock signal from main)
2. MOSI: Main Out Sub In (data output from main)
3. MISO: Main In Sub Out (data output from sub)
4. CS: Chip Select (used to select which chip on the shared bus you want to talk to)

Because some of the chips we were using didn't have safe tri-state outputs on MISO with the power cut, the engineer who designed the board had inserted a cheap directional buffer in-between the MSP430 and the various chips that were to have their power removed. The buffer, however, only covered the first /three/ lines. He didn't consider chip select a problem because it wouldn't affect any other chips, which turned out to be wrong!

What he forgot were the ESD diodes in the sensors/radios, which 'happily' (they weren't quite designed for this) passed power from the /active low/ chip select line up to the isolated power plane. They didn't pass /enough/ power to bring up the (3.3V) chips themselves, but that sneaky directional buffer was operational down to 1.2V and would happily, and /completely/, jam the MISO line for everything else on that bus.

Easy fix: Just software toggle the CS line to low after cutting power.

Referenced photo link: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1wGiUvFtASJFRSqnujrxaQm49MkCs7HTX?usp=drive_link

$city had a flood that broke the 1000 year flood line in $year while I was an intern at $company. It was pretty crazy. Couple of bullet points:

The flood ended up being really really bad, ending up at 37.5 feet above the normal banks of the river. This flooded... everything, for miles and miles down the Cedar river, especially $city itself, as it sits in the middle of multiple river bends.
We initially used a Dairy Queen as a water marker, but had to give up on that when it went completely underwater. We then switched to using the main transformers at the downtown substation as our water level markers. I could be wrong, but I don't think that's what those are meant for?
The five-in-one bridge over the river in downtown has a small dam, a utility corridor, A avenue deck, F avenue deck, and then I-380 on top. It ended up flooding up to a few feet below the top deck.
The bridge in #3 was the only one open for a very long ways up and down the river, and we almost ended up trapped on the wrong side (work was north of the river, apartment was south of the river) one day. The approach road we took to the one other bridge still (20ish miles out of the way) open literally had water just lapping across it as we made it to the bridge itself and closed minutes later as the water was rising.
The local railroad put trains on the bridges to weigh them down so the buoyant force of the water wouldn't lift them off their piers as the water flowed over them. However, they used an empty train on one bridge and lost both the train and the bridge???
All but one of the pumps for the city were flooded, and the last was only saved by a last minute heroic effort (this is the isolated round building surrounded by sandbags) in the photos). We ended up on 20% water for the city for a few weeks, and things were a bit stinky without the ability to bathe.
At the height of the floods, the square mile or so our apartment building was on was actually an island for a few hours, though we somehow didn't lose power or cell during that time. (We did lose cable/internet, though.) That was a bit freaky even though we were well above water level and in no danger at all.
The local-ish power utility had their main HQ in downtown, a smaller secondary call center in Ohio, and a third even smaller facility elsewhere (can't remember where). The basements and first two floors of the downtown HQ skyscraper flooded, and the Ohio facility was wiped off the map by a tornado two weeks before the flood peak, so they had a really bad time. They literally had generators on the roof and helicopters flying interns into the helipad to man critical calls and equipment. (I know this because some $company interns had shared housing with theirs.)
$company had to close their main plant elsewhere in the city when it lost power one day during the height of the floods. It got power back a few hours later, and as /people were losing their houses/, they attempted to force everyone to come back and complete their shifts. I did not come back after my internship despite a job offer because of this. :(
I got these photos from a co-worker who was a private pilot. ($company designs and builds a lot of avionics and actually pays for ground school for their engineers so they will have experience with what they're designing.) He went up with a CNN photographer and got a copy of the photos, which I got from him. These are the ones you are looking at. :)

Misc additional stories:

The internship had a rough start, as $company brought on many more interns than their IT department was prepared for to the point where they were pulling random computers out of conference rooms (including mine) to cover the gaps. Mine ended up giving endless trouble, was super under-powered for FPGA compilation, and had a monitor with a burnt out green electron gun or phosphor. I discovered this last one when trying to view a Powerpoint template on my screen, which showed as black, but was bright green on my teammates' monitors. My computer was also totally non-functional for two weeks after the internship began, which made it hard to do work. The network was also so overloaded it was common for the VOIP phones to be down so you couldn't even call for help. :(
The entire internship project itself was a disaster, though in a positive way for the company. $company had started a number of projects over the last few years with the Analog Devices Blackfin DSP processor, a dual core DSP. This chip had all kinds of bugs and /absolutely horrible/ cache coherency issues at the time (hopefully fixed now) to the point where $company had created a common wiki internally for folks to report issues and workarounds between the /seven/ major projects using it. One of the projects just gave up and re-spun their PCBs, putting two chips on the board and disabling one core on each, which says a hell of a lot about how bad that must've been to deal with. My project (team of three of us) was to test out a new technology by Altera at the time, the C to H (hardware) compiler, /before/ it was potentially adopted by a larger project (shocking idea, I know). The idea was that you could drop a NIOS II soft-core processor on an FPGA and the compiler would be able to generate a co-processor for complex math functions (FFT in this case) and automatically hook it into the processor and call it when the code was due to be executed. The goal was to have normal software engineers be able to write FPGA code, saving the money on specialized FPGA engineers. Not only did compilation take as much as /40 hours/ on our underpowered machines, but you basically had to write your C knowing what hardware it would likely create, meaning you were just taking an FPGA engineer and having them write less efficiently (C vs Verilog or VHDL) with less predictable results. The compilation chain was built for Linux (okay), and ran Java and Perl (for a compiler???) on top of Cygwin, further slowing everything. Needless to say, this technology was not adopted for wider use at the time.
One of my team members refused to indent his C code for whatever reason. I still don't know why. I ended up scripting a linter that would run before code commit on my system (and the third team member also copied this) to clean everything up. Later on in the project I got to chose a scripting language. I chose Python. ;) I still smile a little bit every time I indent a line of code because of this. :)
There was a night where /every/ car (approximately 50) in the apartment parking lot (interns were in shared housing) was broken into with the exception of mine, because I left no visible electronics or anything else worth stealing in the car. I was quite unpopular for a couple weeks even though I had nothing to do with it, and ended up with at least on dent on my car likely due to that.
I don't remember what all of their password policies were at the time, but I do remember two things about them:
1. The password policies were so constraining, including restrictions on length, to the point that the default password they gave you was basically the most secure password you could actually use.
2. They had the most ridiculous password restriction I've ever seen: Your password could not be a palindrome. What the fuck hashing algorithm were they using and what was so horribly wrong with it???

So I have a friend, who I love more than life itself. (I in fact have many friends like this, probably including you!) His name is Lon.

Lon is /special/. He is hysterical, and smart, and funny, and more than a little cute, but that last bit is outside of the range of our story! What is relevant is that he's absolutely, hysterically, and totally, insane!

You see, I met Lon when he was a live-in dorm tutor at my college, two years ahead of me. He helped folks out most nights (maybe every night), and could be commonly found in a large room in the basement with many many whiteboards, built specifically for this purpose.

Now, whiteboards have a common problem, and I'm sure you've all experienced this before. It goes like this:

1. Walk up to whiteboard.
2. There's no marker!
3. Oh there's one!
4. Oh no, that's dead too. Damn!

Lon, obviously sick of this like the rest of us, hits upon a solution only Lon could think of. He proceeds to buy a huge marker set in all the colors of the rainbow, and then goes to Walmart, one of the only real stores in downstate Indiana, and buys a shotgun shell bandolier! He proceeds to insert said markers into said bandolier and proceeds to wear it, using markers at will and making life much easier! (This is honestly genius???)

However, this is not the /end/ of the story! Later that year Lon was interviewing at $defense_contractor (a place I would later work, and which features in several of my other stories)... $defense_contractor is a somewhat small business (~100 employees at the time) and the CEO personally interviews every potential hire, diagramming for them the company structure and who they'd be reporting to. (Can you see where this is going? I can!) CEO proceeds to walk up to the whiteboard, and, shockingly, there's no marker! Lon opens his suit jacket, with a huge dumb smile on his face, and goes "What color would you like?"

I... I have tears of laughter crying out right now, even after telling this story 1000 times by now!

And /even better/, Lon told me this story at work, in front of another co-worker. Said co-worker had been working at $defense_contractor at the time of this now infamous event and immediately blurted out, "Wait, we /hired/ you!?!?!?!" XD

God, I love this man! XD

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Addendum: Lon is also awesome in general and would regularly do things like bring italian ice to the office, have an entire floor-standing popcorn machine inside his office, etc... I don't know what to do with this man, but I love him dearly. XD

Content warning: Police interaction, concerns about bodily harm, mention of firearms. Fairly anxiety-inducing.

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So this story took place a few years ago in Tucson, when I was heading home from work. I had nearly gotten home when I turned onto the small side road that led to the house, at which point I was suddenly pinned into the center of the lane by police cars on both sides, stretching down an entire block (approximately 1 mile). Police quickly came up to my window and escorted me to my house, telling me to go inside and lock the doors and not answer for anyone who wasn't a uniformed police officer. They didn't tell me what was going on, and I'm pretty sure I forgot to even ask, but I obviously did this and hid inside, wondering if I would be less likely to be hit by stray bullets on the first or second floor, a though I'm quite sure has never crossed my mind before or since! Such was the density of the police that they ended up with an officer in my backyard, one in each side yard, and one in my front yard. There were helicopters and SWAT teams, and everything else under the sun. I have no idea what happened, but someone must've done something very very bad.

Weirdly, everything eventually quieted down and the officers just... left. The helicopters moved off to another area, probably still looking for whoever it was, and I had zero success trying to find out what had happened in the news the next day. It was super weird and unsettling. I no longer live in that house/neighborhood, but Tucson is pretty mixed as far as good and bad areas (probably a good thing since it forces us to deal with problems rather than ignoring them)... Either way... ;_;

Content Warning: Police response, unintentional self-swatting. (No serious injuries or deaths, just a /hysterical/ amount of poor decisions and a few traumatized kids that legitimately could, and probably /should/, have died.)

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Personal disclaimer: This story appears to involve sensitive information, but actually does not, as you can find everything but the story itself on the company's website.

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So this story comes to me from a co-worker a number of years ago, and took place a year before I started at this job.

At the time, my coworker was (and later I would be) working at $defense_contractor, a defense contractor in the city of Tucson. Said contractor handles a lot of intelligence work, which is extremely highly classified! Now, if you've ever watched a movie involving a contractor out in the desert (Terminator, other random sci-fi or action movies), you've probably noticed that these places all usually have /significant/ private security contingents. There is a reason why, and that reason is that if you have a security incident at your facility, you (legally and obviously practically) need to have a serious response very very quickly, scaling with the type of incident and type of information you have at the facility. Keep in mind that intelligence information is basically protected by the highest classification that US government has, again for obvious reasons (losing a war, troops and sources being killed etc).

So, with that background, our story begins.

It is approximately 10:30PM on a Saturday night, and my coworker is coming down the stairs of $defense_contractor's office building, about to head home after some significant overtime. He pops his head out into the lobby, and sees a bunch of people running around with assault rifles with ski masks on! Freaking out completely, he slams the door, runs upstairs, and puts the entire facility into lock-down, calling 911 and everyone under the sun to come help with whatever is about to happen!

Cue one third of the police force of Tucson showing up outside the building within 15 minutes!

What my co-worker does not know at this point is that those rifles aren't actually real, nor is anyone trying to kill anyone or break in, despite the cameras showing them trying to tamper with locks. What's actually happening is that $defense_contractor only rents 4 of the 6 floors in the office building (having built out their areas to the appropriate specifications - SCIF), and there are multiple other businesses in the building, including an insurance company. Said company has a guy working for it who has a kid in highschool, and he and his friends are trying to make an action movie for class, including some filming in a commercial space. Dad has the stupidest idea in the history of stupid ideas, and tells his kids that they can absolutely do it in the lobby late on Saturday night when no one is around, which brings us back to current events.

Eventually, the SWAT team throws flash-bangs in, storms the lobby, and tackles everyone to the ground, scaring the everliving shit out of all of these people. Lasting trauma ensues for absolutely no good reason, especially since these fine individuals had both /removed the orange tips from their airsoft rifles/ and /were actively hunched over a lock looking like they were trying to break in for the purposes of the movie/. In what is frankly a miracle, no one was shot or otherwise injured in a serious way, though I'm sure quite a few people learned what tile floors tasted like without meaning to.

Everything immediately de-escalates, but everyone is /absolutely/ going to jail, as taking the orange tips off your fake rifles is a crime in most states, including Arizona. (Can't imagine why that would be important. Perhaps it would help prevent a situation like this?) Unfortunately, though, the incident lasts basically the entire day, since they have to clear the building room by room and everyone has to be debriefed and sign NDAs for any classified material they may have been exposed to. Utter, fucking, disaster.

Shockingly, no one was killed, but even if this guy contacted building management, and they had contacted $defense_contractor, and $defense_contractor had sent an email out, and even /if/ they had had orange tips on their rifles, this was a /shockingly bad idea/. The sheer amount of stupidity that somehow resulted in no one dying actually makes me quite unreasonably angry, as I have no idea how one makes decisions this stupid. Even if it had been a normal commercial space, this would have been a /terrible/ idea, but with $defense_contractor there, this was just horrific beyond description.

Fuck, even telling that story gets my heart rate up. XD

This page serves to document some special links and stories that have made me cry, or otherwise helped me love myself / look with hope upon the world. Heavy subjects ensue, and appropriate content warnings are provided.

I love all of these, but as far as absolute /must/ reads/watches:

1. M.C.A. Hogarth's books (/ESPECIALLY/ Prince's Game, but there are MANY caveats below - please read them before complaining to me!)
2. Cinema Therapy

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Webcomics:

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Jocelyn Samara's (https://retro.pizza/@LynnSenpai) Rain and My Impossible Soulmate (https://rain.thecomicseries.com/comics/first/#content-start, https://mis.thecomicseries.com/comics/first/#content-start, https://www.deviantart.com/jocelynsamara/gallery/all)

Rain hit me like a ton of bricks.. From a transgender protagonist who is absolutely adorable, to an aunt and friends I'd probably fight to the death to protect, this story will warm your heart. You'll cry too, but never for very long, and you'll be happy to trade those tears for the joy this will bring you. Bisexual, transgender, genderqueer, gay... whatever your stripe of rainbow, and even if you're straight, this comic has a way of making you smile. I think it's the artist's love shining through. <3

My Impossible Soulmate is newer, and has very similar themes, though it's and isekai instead of taking place in a more traditional setting! Absolutely loving it so far! (I just devoured the 3+ chapters that currently exist in like 2 hours!)

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Jakkal's Black Tapestries (http://blacktapestries.keenspace.com/d/20020711.html, https://www.deviantart.com/jakkalwolf/gallery/51412331/black-tapestries-comics)

This is by far the most heart-wrenching comic I have ever read. It is also probably the hardest read on this entire list. It takes place in a world where Kaetif (anthropomorphic animals) are looked down upon as vermin by most humans, and follows the story of a drifter, a mercenary for hire, as she attempts to assassinate, and then later, to find out how to reverse, what appears to be a curse. I cannot even tell you how much this comic means to me, especially since I found it so many years ago, but it is a brutal one at times too. You are hereby warned that there is an /on-camera skinning/ as well as a rape that take place as part of the plot. I do not recommend it lightly, but it should say a lot that I recommend it despite that at all.

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Thomas Fischbach's TwoKinds (https://twokinds.keenspot.com/comic/1/)

This is superficially similar to Black Tapestries, though it does not veer anywhere near as dark (at least not directly). This is a lot more lighthearted, but the Kiedran (similar to the Kaetif from BT above) are essentially separate from human society most of the time. They aren't always looked down upon, but they are considered potentially dangerous, and are even enslaved in some cases. There is so much love and loss in this one I find it hard to adequately describe. Suffice to say that I've purchased copies of all the published volumes to support the artist.

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Jeph Jacques' (https://mastodon.social/@Jephjacques) Questionable Content

This is a story about a group of friends in the northeast US who move into an out of relationships with each other. All of the characters are 'real' in the sense that they all have issues, some of them very serious. Running the gamut from anxiety to control and OCD, to outright grief, this strip will make you laugh and cry in equal measure. And all the time you'll be learning, about both yourself and others. UPDATE: There's a transgender character, now, too! And she's awesome! ^^

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Erin Lindsey's Venus Envy (http://venusenvycomic.com/index.php?id=2)

I wish I had found this one ages ago. Both the artist Erin and the main character Zoe are transgender, and though Zoe's struggles take place way back in high school (well before I managed to break out of *any* of my shell), they still mean a lot. If you've ever wanted to understand a transgender person's desire to just fit in, be normal, and be accepted, you'll want to read this. Beware though, it's not an easy read. Lots of tears ahead.

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David Willis' Dumbing of Age (https://www.dumbingofage.com/2010/comic/book-1/01-move-in-day/home/)

Man, this is one that absolutely leveled me, multiple times. It's a slice-of-life comic about a group of friends going through college together, and living in the same dorm. It's beautiful, and heartbreaking, in ways that will make you wish you could hug the characters right through the page. You'll fall in love with them, hurt with them, and laugh and love with them too. More, you cannot ask. [And since I don't quite know how to segue from that, several of the characters are LGBT, or have PTSD/anxiety/depression/etc... If you struggle with any of those things, this may help you. This comic is also similar in feel to Questionable Content, which is just a little farther down this list.]

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Semi-Traditional Comics

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Stjepan Šejić (Seriously, just go look up the quality of this guy's art, I'll wait a minute. Absolutely mind-blown.)

Sunstone is an utterly amazing, lesbian BDSM romance. I've actually never considered myself to be interested in BDSM-related material, but this comic caught me a bit by surprise. The way it portrays an alternate lifestyle in such a positive and loving way, with no fear or judgment, is absolutely huge. Learning new ways love can be seen and experienced is never a bad thing, and as much as it surprised me, I think it might surprise you.

Blood Vigil is another fantastic comic by him. I don't even know how to describe this one, but it's fucking awesome. Quoting from an Amazon review: "Funny, dark, violent, quirky characters, elder gods, feathered dinosaurs, necromancers, and death herself. What is there not to love about this comic?"

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Books/Stories

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M.C.A. Hogarth

Caution: Hogarth is pretty conservative and not trans-supportive, unfortunately. That said, her books are possibly the best I've ever read for dealing with life-long trauma and love, as well as gender and sexuality. (I hope that she eventually comes around, as she definitely has the right foundation.)

Why you should read despite that: Hogarth helped me realize my wings were clipped and how to heal them with time and love. That helped me become more whole and help others (like you reading this) more effectively. She can do the same for you.

All of these stories include a mix of species, including furry characters, dragons, humans, eldrich, etc...

The Dreamhealers (Mindtouch, etc...) - https://www.goodreads.com/series/125031-the-dreamhealers

An asexual sci-fi romance between two espers who help terminally ill kids by going into their dreams and helping them. (Things get a little less dark depending on the book, but are still deep as hell.)

Full review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/735601194

Her Instruments (Earthrise, etc...) - https://www.goodreads.com/series/125031-the-dreamhealers

An adventure involving a spaceship, family of origin rejection, finding a new family, war, pirates, and love. Can't say enough good things.

Prince's Game (Even the Wingless, etc...) - https://www.goodreads.com/series/158921-princes-game

/Major/ content warning: This series includes abuse, mutilation, rape, and death, /but/ all of which /is/ deeply integral to the story and non-gratuitous. This involves:
1. A society that is seriously traumatized and is passing that on to each ongoing generation (and a threat to their neighbors as a result).
2. Discovery of yourself as an actual person, and the ramifications of that, both good and bad. (This is both in the context of a sociopath /and/ one of his victims, though obviously they have very different arcs.)
3. Interstellar war, causing large amounts of death, anxiety, and complex and non-complex PTSD.
4. Feelings of inadequacy in the face of despair.
5. Eventual victory and hope, though those who fought are forever scarred.

MY ENDORSEMENT: This is BY FAR my favorite book series of all time, without any kind of question. When I went to the psych hospitals a few years ago, I took these books to help me cry out the pain. I love them more than words can even say.

Thief of Songs (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24777202-thief-of-songs)

A polyamorous romance between two composers (and other partners), one of whom is bi-gender (referred to as a hermaphrodite in the story).

Flight of the Godkind Griffin (https://www.goodreads.com/series/145102-the-godkindred-saga)

A griffin, gods, magic, transformation, rebellion, love, and healing. Need I say more?

Also, /everything else she's ever written/.

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Of the Wilds' Dragon In the Dungeon (https://www.sofurry.com/view/368475/)

This is a quite NSFW story involving a dragon imprisoned years before for <spoiler I'm not going to say>. He gets a new warden who shows him compassion (and sexual interest, as it happens) for the first time in many years and slowly tells his story while you, he, and everyone involved, sobs your eyes out. The series is not yet complete, but is absolutely devastating.

Note that he has written many other stories on the same themes that are amazing as well, and I recommend them all.

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The Death of Duty by elynne (https://weirder.earth/@troodon)

Story Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/46443229/chapters/116935159
Author Link: https://weirder.earth/@troodon

This story is fan-fic of Final Fantasy, which I haven't actually played. It involves death, suicide, learning how to live with yourself, and more.

Two quotes:

“In death, all duties are discharged.”

"Set aside the question of righteousness for a moment. If your debts have been paid, what remains to define you?”

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Patrick Rothfuss

The Name of the Wind, The Slow Regard of Silent Things (do NOT miss this one), The Wise Man's Fear

This series by Patrick Rothfuss absolutely blew me away. It's fantasy, and beautifully written, but what really makes it are the characters, torn and broken as they are. If anything, I read these too quickly, and should have given myself more time to cry while reading them. I do not even have the words to explain my heartbreak here. TSROST is about a particularly broken character who knows she's broken, but still does her best to love as best she can. It's heartbreaking, but love incarnate.

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Luna by Julie Anne Peters

This covers a transgender girl who goes through a fair bit of abuse, just like I did. It broke my heart in myriad ways, and I really needed to cry those tears. In many ways I'm both Regan *and* Luna, and I don't think I've ever cried so hard before.

Full review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1905417734

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Girl Mans Up by M-E Girard

Respect... Holy moly, is that a loaded word with me. I too grew up in a household that preached respect while really meaning obedience, and /blind/ obedience at that. Can't say I was as brave as Pen in this book, but I wish I'd been. >.<

Full review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1857904813

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They Thought They Were Free by Milton Sanford Mayer

Different tack on this one... This is non-fiction, and probably one of the most important books I've ever read as far as giving me hope for the future. It tells the story of a Jewish journalist who traveled to Germany after World War II to find out why what had happened had happened. My therapist actually picked up a copy of this one, and she liked it too. Hard read, but very topical, and I highly recommend it. Do note that the cover is bright red with a large swastika on it, so keep in mind you may get some /looks/ if you read it in public with the cover visible.

Full Review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/569285989

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Karl Schroeder

Permanence

This is one of the most hopeful sci-fi books I've ever read. It's an action adventure with spaceships and bad guys and beauty and love beyond compare.

Full review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1343915335

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Youtube

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Cinema Therapy

This is a duo (licensed therapist and movie directory) going over movies with a focus on the character trauma and ways to work through stuff. All of their stuff is amazing, but these few hit me particularly hard.

SERENITY and Coping with Trauma - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1R6wrZVR39k (Complex PTSD - River Tam)
Therapist Reacts to TERMINATOR 2 and Difficult Parents - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsdPZAol5yg (Mom who always corrects and never says she loves you.)
Radical Acceptance & Dealing with Hardship in THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2qqfafRdEQ)
Psychology of a Hero: FRODO BAGGINS (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5VgahGh2I0)
ARAGORN vs. Toxic Masculinity (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pv_KAnY5XNQ)

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Shane Koyczan

Remember How We Forgot - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBVJuA0jr6Y
How to Be a Person - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PI5uYOSEhs
To This Day - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltun92DfnPY
More Often Than Sometimes - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vX4s04wlxQA

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Shane Koyczan

Coming Out of Your Closet - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSR4xuU07sc
Linkin Park's Hands Held High - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PibXTko6VC4

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Content warning: Though funny, this story can cause extreme travel anxiety in someone predisposed towards that. I think in the end the laughter wins over the anxiety, as you can always go "Wow, at least I've never had it /that/ bad!" in the end, but you be the judge. On to the story! :)

Oh, and a disclaimer: I'm extremely chill while traveling or interacting with customer service in any way. My dad is one of those "I demand to see the manager!" type of assholes and I have absolutely no time or patience for those folks. If you do that in front of me I may well punch you in the face. Just... don't be a dick.

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This story begins in Tucson, a few days before memorial day in 2011. The plan is to fly to Harrisburg, PA, for my nephew's graduation, especially since as the computer girl of the family, I've gotten him a nice laptop to take to off to college with him and want to see the big dumb grin on his face when he opens it. (Note: Luckily I had this laptop shipped directly to their house, as as we'll see, if I had attempted to bring it with me, goodness knows where it would have ended up.)

My original itinerary is Tucson to Chicago to Harrisburg, PA on American Airlines. I get to the airport early, as I always do, since as you'll see, I have /wonderful/ luck with air travel. When I arrive, I notice there's a lot of people in line, and kind of wonder to myself, "Is this an entire plane's worth of people? It sure looks like it! I wonder if this is /my/ plane's entire worth of people?" Turns out, it was!

I stand in line, waiting with my checked bag, and the line ends up moving super slowly, quite a bit more slowly than you would expect. Eventually, the folks in front of me give up and drive up to Phoenix (approximately 90 minutes away) to catch their international connection, and then even more eventually, a little lady comes running down the line, handing out little slips of paper with a phone number on them. She apologizes and says our flight has been cancelled, and to call the redress number to be re-booked as soon as possible.

Okay... I do this. I call the phone number, answering a million questions along the way, including the following:
* "What is your name?"
* "What is your birthdate?"
* "What is your social security number?"
* "What is the last digit of Pi?"
* "What is the solution to the Riemann hypothesis?"

Okay, I might be creatively mis-remembering those last few, but you get the point. :P

Eventually, it gets you to the point where it's going to put you on hold to talk to a person, and promptly gives me a busy signal, hanging up on me! There are so many people on hold that the system can't even put anyone else on hold anymore! Welp, guess I'll stand in line then.

I try this a few more times, and after about two hours, end up at the counter. The lady trying to help is more than a bit frazzled and just trying to do her best, but re-booking multiple aircrafts worth of people is clearly taking a tole. As usual, I'm kind and understanding, and wait patiently as she looks up my records and tries to figure out what she can do for me.

It takes a few minutes (the system is badly overloaded), but she eventually pulls up my records and informs me that:
1. My flight has been cancelled as an emergency measure. There have been significant hailstorms in both Chicago and Dallas, and American Airlines has 150+ planes down for safety inspections before they can fly again. Absolutely all non-essential routes have been cancelled and Tucson is sadly one of them.
2. She can't do anything to help me on American, but she can help me if I'm willing to take US Air and am willing to accept a /slight change in itinerary/.

I kind of side-eye her when she says this last bit, as the way she says it has me going, "Okay... hit me."

She then goes, "Okay, I can still get you (mostly) there /today/, but you'll have to take US Air and the following itinerary. Your new itinerary will be Tucson to Phoenix, Phoenix to Los Angeles, Los Angeles to Las Vegas, and finally Las Vegas to Philadelphia, to drive two hours to Harrisburg." (US Air doesn't fly into Harrisburg, so it's the best she can do.)

I somewhat reluctantly accept this, with half an hour connections all over the place, and race over to check my bag with US Air. I make it /all the way to Las Vegas/ and am /sitting on the plane that is going to take me to Philadelphia/, when, during final boarding, a passenger steps out of the way of an airline stewardess and trips, slamming into an emergency slide arming handle and snapping it off at the door. (These are the little grey plastic levels you'll see sticking out from the door when the plane is at the gate. The sticking-out position disarms the slide so the door can be opened without triggering them.)

Now, this is an emergency safety feature, the plane can't take off without it. The part is in Phoenix, and I could have brought it with me had I known, and I now have my second cancelled flight (probably third, as I imagine the Chicago to Harrisburg flight was also cancelled) in less than eight hours.

The crew apologized profusely and proceeds to de-board us, promising us overnight hotel coverage, as it's 5:30 PM in Las Vegas, and there are no further flights heading to the east coast tonight with seats available. They further say they're going to pull our bags off so we at least have our luggage tonight. (Cue drum roll?)

It is at this point, having just gotten off the plane, that I pull out my luggage tag so I can go get my bag, and read it for the first time. My name is /apparently/ Raul Castro, and I am traveling from Tucson to Kansas City to Cincinnati New York City, where we'll be in a minute???

With all the chaos, I skip the redress number and go straight to the counter for help, waiting in line for a while again because obviously there are a lot of people who need help. The nice lady who helps me pulls up my reservation, and as I see the screen flash up the record (reflected in her eyes), she chokes. It's a half laugh / half 'oh my god this person is going to kill me', and I quickly laugh and tell her it's okay, she can laugh at me, as I certainly am at this point. She is /so/ relieved, and winces as she tells me she can't get me there for another six days, as they have taken on so many people from American that they are completely booked for almost a week. She /can/, however, transfer me to yet another airline, and United (and United's small regional carrier) can get me there tomorrow by 10PM if I'm willing to travel from Las Vegas to Washington, DC to Philadelphia. (I should, at this point, point out that United flies directly into Harrisburg, but US Airways now has a contract from American Airlines to get me to Philadelphia now and can't change my final destination even though it would save me hours of car travel. ;_;)

I consider just getting a one-way rental car back to Tucson and abandoning this whole mess, as I'm actually further west than I started after more than 10 hours of travel, but I end up taking it. I overnight outside Las Vegas (not sleeping a wink because I'm so wired from the anxiety) and through a series of nasty flight delays, end up at Philadelphia at /3 o'clock in the morning/. I'm wiped, but my parents come out (they drove from Chicago to Harrisburg a few days prior) and pick me up, and we end up back at my sister's place in Hershey (near Harrisburg) around 5 AM. I immediately crash out and fall asleep, only to be woken up two hours later, because we are headed to New York City to go see Wicked and celebrate! I am so excited! (I think you might be able to actually /taste/ that sarcasm?)

I do my best to sleep in the van, and as we are about two miles from the exit, receive a call from LaGuardia that they have my luggage and we swing in. I walk in and walk out with my luggage five minutes later. Mission accomplished, right? I can sleep, right?

LOL, what kind of story did you think you were reading?

That night, the hotel room is much smaller than it's supposed to be (they screwed up the reservation) and I end up on an air mattress on the floor, which promptly goes flat on me and leaves me sleeping on the barely carpeted concrete floor. I sleep anyways (more or less), because I'm so fucking tired it doesn't matter anymore, and eventually (mostly) recover over the next couple of days.

Okay, so, we're almost done, right? Not quite. My dad, as previously mentioned, is a raging asshole, and drove out with my mom to PA, but then flew back immediately after the graduation, because he wanted nothing to do with the rest of the family and couldn't be arsed to drive back with her. (She had/has poor eyesight and can't drive herself safely.) I had agreed previously to do this, and so I ended up driving all the way back to Chicago with her. I then flew home from there and had no further issues. End of main story (though there's an appendix you should also read).

Ridiculously insane summary:

1. Not counting my return flight from Chicago to Tucson, I was scheduled on eight flights, sat down on six, took off on five, and my luggage took a separate three.
2. My final itinerary was Tucson to Phoenix, Phoenix to Los Angeles, Los Angeles to Las Vegas, overnight in Las Vegas, Las Vegas to Dulles (Washington, DC), Dulles to Philadelphia, to drive two hours to Harrisburg, to drive to New York City, to drive back to Chicago, to fly back to Tucson.
3. I circled over the Pacific while landing in LA and ended up standing on the deck of an aircraft carrier (museum) in New York on the Atlantic less than 48 hours later.
4. I was in /21/ states in /six days/, and was in or flew over /29/ of them.
5. I did all of this on frequent flier miles.
6. RE: 5, holy shit did I get my money's worth out of those things!

Final note:

As I'm writing this, I'm on yet another of my /many/ #AirTravelAdventures, this time with Southwest, and am currently at my /second/ unexpected city for the day. The lesson here is that you shouldn't travel on the same plane as me, or the same airport, or even from the same city if you have a choice. /Absolutely/ drive 100+ miles away and fly out of /there/ so you're not affected by my absolutely insane travel chaos aura. D:

Appendix:

At the time this happened, I happened to work for a defense contractor and carry a security clearance. One of the requirements with those is that you must report all contact with the media and foreign nationals, whether unintentional or not. I ended up, in order:
1. Talking to the head of AP News's technology division on on of the earlier flights. (I had to apologize and stop talking to him immediately when I found this out.)
2. Talking to a Russian national (who had no accent actually) in Dulles. (I obviously apologized and stopped talking to him when I discovered this.)
3. Stuck directly in front of the Chinese consulate in Manhattan for over and hour due to a car crash (not involving us).

When I reported this, my security rep looked at me like I was insane, and his eyes looked like they were going to pop out of his head by the time I was done telling this entire story. XD

Also, I am much happier out of defense for a variety of reasons, among those being able to talk to whoever the hell I want without worrying about how it will be seen. <3

EDIT: Fixed a few typos, as well as the year this happened. (Went back and checked my email archive and it was 2011 rather than 2013.)

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Ramblings of a Transgirl

I'm complicated. So are you, if you take a minute to think about it...

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