Gamers have been weighing in on David Myers and Twixt, and damn, can they shred him a new one. Meanwhile, he continues to be incapable of basic debate:

My Favorite Twixt Insult

If Twixt's griefing were genuinely an experiment, Myers should be able to drop the Twixt persona and discuss the experiment objectively. But he's still in full-on defense mode--and has degenerated to taunting players when they step out of their player roles and debate with him as fellow scholars.

Amazing. Simply amazing.

It's becoming less and less surprising that no one can find credentials for this guy.


ETA: Someone finally did find credentials. He has a Ph.D... in communications, not any social science. It would be interesting to find out whether the man has any social-sciences training whatsoever.

This quote is interesting in light of the fact that Myers knew at the time of his study that Twixt was a griefer:


Note the date. Three years before he began griefing in City of Heroes, he already had a theory of griefing that involved forcing new rules on players, and that acknowledged both the other players' distress and the griefer's pleasure in their distress.

Once upon a time, there was a professor of media studies named David Myers. This professor of media studies played a MMORPG called City of Heroes, and he noticed something interesting: Although the game was supposed to be PVP heroes vs. villains, the players weren't just fighting one another. They were chatting across enemy lines, setting up demonstration bouts, and even teaming up across enemy lines to take on the NPCs. Most of them didn't care about the game's stated goal of conquering all six bases. In fact, they had set up informal rules of battle that forbade the use of several game-legal maneuvers.

"Huh!" said the professor. "This is fascinating! Why don't I do a study to find out why player society has developed cross-grained to the mechanical rules of the game world?" So he interviewed participants to find out why they did what they did, and observed the social world of the game closely, and studied other games where the player culture opposed the programmed rules, and examined the body of online documentation about how player communities react to deviants, and--

OH WAIT NO HE DIDN'T I'M ON CRACK. Sorry. What he actually did was turn his longstanding character into a griefer, and aggravated the server he was on so thoroughly that they ostracized him and tried to have him banned. Then he moved to two more servers and did the same thing. Then he wrote a report in which he was very, very surprised and deeply hurt that people didn't like him when he was just playing by the rules.


( More links, and a social science student's perspective on David Myers's study )

Cats now full of beans. As with small children, this is both a good and a bad thing. The mystery of the nocturnal pee-er remains unsolved. Feliway is on the way; will drug cats, encourage them in new, non-peeing directions.

Reminder to self: Do not serve cats beans again.

Personally, I find my journal's new "Photobucket bandwidth exceeded" background classy.

It is July. This is rather sudden. Just yesterday it was March.

Small, expensive, urinarily challenged cat is small, expensive, and urinarily challenged. Also perplexing. Tests reveal that he has none of the diseases that could give  cat these symptoms, yet have these symptoms he does. He did scarf down wet food once I brought it to his majesty instead of requiring him to stalk to the kitchen like the plebes. The vets get to see him again this evening, as they take a keen interest in the state of his bladder. Am rather hoping he will come out of this with his remaining privates intact.

Buffy's probably the culprit. He was dehydrated at the vet's office, and perked up a bit after getting subcutaneous fluids; but he doesn't seem any more eager to drink than he was, and his skin is starting to feel dehydrated again. Does anyone have tips on making a cat drink (or giving a cat water by mouth without a syringe), and when it's necessary to take the cat in for another round of subcutaneous fluids?

There's a fair bit else going on with Buffy, but for the moment, dehydration's what worries me most. The rest will resolve itself as long as I can keep him going long enough for the medications to work.

3 a.m.: Stay up late doing work. Make bed (jersey sheets, shrunk from enthusiastic washings; ancient white blanket with a new hole; purple bedspread, starting to fade from enthusiastic washings; stylish green shower curtain), set all alarms, finally get to sleep. Must be up at 7 for work.

4:30 a.m.: Awaken to discover that one of the cats has crept under the shower curtain, perched on hip, and peed. On me. Get up, launder bedding and PJs, shower, move litter box to the hallway, fill auxiliary litter box and put it in the living room, cover all soft surfaces with plastic or boxes. Get to sleep again at 5:30. Work is still at 7.

6 a.m.: Awaken in horror because--well, I don't remember. But it was horrible. Drift back to sleep after half an hour. Still must be up at 7 for work.

7:22 a.m.: Haul self out of bed for work.


At 3:20 tomorrow afternoon, both cats go to the vet. If things come in threes, this is another scare and nothing will be physically wrong with either of them. In which case, I will MAKE the vet do something. Put them on kitty opium. Make them wear diapers. Have their urinary tracts removed. You can do that, can't you? It's like spaying, only different, right?

One of the cats pissed the bed this morning while I was in it.

So. Not. Amused.

About to run out to track down laundry quarters and a shower curtain. The shower curtain is my new coverlet. Ask me how pleased I am about this exciting new design development! I'm also going to be cleaning the catbox more often on the chance that my formerly robust little cats have become delicate princesses who cannot piddle under these circumstances.

Sigh.

While I was in it, guys. You couldn't at least have tried to wake me up and get me out? Or peed on the other side of the bed, the one I wasn't on?

I just spent a few hours in the ER confirming that an unexplained calf pain was not going to kill me. There is ultrasound goo in places that ultrasound goo has no right to be. I don't think my calf is there, Madam Ultrasound Tech.

Two medical false alarms in two days. If things come in threes, let the third thing be a nice quiet backache.

This is a thumbnail sketch of feline heartworm. For more extensive information, go to the American Heartworm Society.

• Heartworm is passed by mosquitoes. It lives out part of its larval stage in a mosquito, then passes to a dog or cat via a bite. Once in the animal, it grows to its adult form in the animal's lungs or the right side of its heart, pumping out eggs or sperm to combine and form new larvae in the animal's blood. Then another mosquito comes along, sucks up those larvae, and starts the beautiful cycle of life over again. The larvae must pass through a mosquito; they can't come to maturity in the same animal.
• Cats are bad hosts. A large percentage of the time, their immune system fights off the heartworm. When they do become infested, they have fewer worms than dogs--usually 1 to 3--which rarely manage to create larvae that can be passed on to mosquitoes, and which live for a shorter time than in dogs.
• Heartworm infestations come in two kinds, chronic and acute. Chronic infestations show as coughing, wheezling, vomiting, lethargy, lack of interest in food, etc.--in short, they look a lot like dozens of other cat diseases. Acute infestations can show as collapse, convulsions, vomiting, diarrhea, blindness, tachycardia, etc. Or the cat can be lethargic for a couple of days, then die. Or the cat can die without warning.
• Heartworm tests are iffy. Some look for antibodies, some for antigens, some find mainly male infestations and others find mainly female infestations, and some rely on finding the (very small) worm itself via X-ray or ultrasound. False negatives aren't uncommon; false positives are less so, but blood tests may show that the cat has been exposed to heartworm in the last 6 months, without telling whether the infestation took hold. The standard of care (at least at my vet) is to do a blood test, and if that comes back positive, to do an X-ray, an ultrasound, or both. They look for signs of inflammation as well as for the worm itself. If there are no signs, they retest in a year.
• Heartworm treatments are iffy. Cats can't take drugs to kill the worms because when the worm dies suddenly, it tends to break apart into pieces that lodge in the lungs and kill the cat. Removing the worms surgically does work, but you have to be careful not to break the worm as you remove it, and it's a major surgery with all the complications that entails.
• The usual treatment is to treat the symptoms and keep the cat comfortable in the hopes that the cat will outlive the worms. (When the worms die naturally, they're far less likely to break into pieces.) Since Buffy's main symptom is coughing, he's getting steroids to reduce the inflammation in his lungs. There are also emergency treatments for cats who have acute heartworm or who go into acute respiratory or cardiac distress.
• Mortality figures are hard to come by because cats are so good at resisting infestation and masking symptoms. Vets have no clear idea how many cats get heartworms and outlive their worms. A large number of cats do survive, often without showing any symptoms. On the other hand, when a cat is infested, anything could change at any time; a piece of worm could break off, a worm could move into a new part of the body, the cat's heart could give out. The vet told me that if Buffy is actually infested, his chances are "pretty good," but he needed watching.
• Heartworm is preventable. Monthly treatments during the months that mosquitoes could conceivably be active in your area will prevent the larvae from developing into adults; and since the larvae are harmless, this amounts to no infestation. Keeping cats indoors won't prevent it unless you live in a magically mosquito-free bubble. (Buffy's an indoor cat. Like, really indoors. Like, hasn't been outdoors without a carrier since 2004.) Treatments come in chewables, pill form, and drops you put on the back of the cat's neck; they all cost the earth, and they all cost less than a single X-ray to see whether your cat has heartworm.
• If your vet hasn't mentioned heartworm treatments to you, kick him/her in the ass. My suck-ass vets at the Malden Animal Hospital said nothing, which is why Buffy and Murphy weren't on meds. If your cat isn't on meds, go to your vet and lean on them until they give you meds.

5:00 a.m.: Settle into bed.

5:03 a.m.: Lack of a sense of smell means that one often misses subtle environmental cues, such as the detail that the cats have saturated the down comforter with piss and the blanket, both sheets, and now one's undercrackers and T-shirt are wet.

5:07 a.m.: Ponder the wonders of the universe, the splash patterns of the comforter, and the mystery of how so much urine can come from so small an animal.

5:12 a.m.: Emergency laundry run, followed by emergency throw-comforter-out run.

5:16 a.m.: Sweep bedroom free of litter. Change catbox. Note that the floor feels funny.

5:18 a.m.: Mop located, bucket improvised, no floor cleaner whatsoever discovered. Stand in awe of own ability to not wash floors for five years, floors' ability to stay shiny.

5:19 a.m.: Remember that despite minor variations in formulation, detergent is detergent. Reject laundry soap as likely to leave thick, slippery residue, much like the residue it leaves on my clothes. Use pink shampoo instead.

5:22 a.m.: Floors are becoming smooth, silky, with plenty of bounce.

5:23 a.m.: Realize that shampoo, despite being a detergent, does have one minor variation in formulation. It is designed to make suds.


...Bugger it all. Tonight This dawn, I sleep on the couch.

Washed most of the dishes, got a fair bit put away, unearthed most of the kitchen counters and floor, put away part of the shifting heap of clothes, dug out part of the foyer floor (then promptly covered it with bags of things to go elsewhere), handed some things off to rennie_frog, and made up for doing diddly with the washing by embrowning the sofa cover and washing the hell out of it. All in all, a productive day. I'm not quite satisfied with the sofa cover, but I'll live with it for a bit and decide whether hitting it with further embrowning agents is the answer.

Tomorrow is loads upon loads of writing work, which means I'll commit enough virtupitude to shine the sink, comb and curl the cats, and watch two more seasons of Stargate haul every available scrap of recycling out of the house. All while wearing one of my new brown shirts (formerly gray, now more thoroughly washed than it has ever been in its life) and brown undercrackers (the same, because women's garment manufacturers commit horrible sins in the name of femininity, and sometimes the only thing to do when faced with them is to dye them to match your sofa).

Tackling the jungle is also becoming a necessity. I like plants that explode into room-devouring vines, a trend I hadn't noticed until five plants simultaneously kudzued my front rooms. The golden and neon pothoses, well, one expects it of them. Cats claw furniture, dogs eat shoes, pothoses root in your carpet and send trailer vines up your walls. The Swedish ivy is impressive mainly because the whole thing is rooted in a wee tiny pot with no hope of being extracted for expansion. And the Lazarus ivy... has expanded to cover the entire bureau. It drapes over all three sides, curls fingers into the drawers, weaves through the jewelry rack. A few months ago I took down a necklace I hadn't worn in a while, and found that the tip of a vine had slipped through the seam of a filigree bead, wound neatly inside one half of the bead, then the other, then felt out a hole on the other side of the seam and popped the bead in two while escaping. I was almost late for work because I stood there gently disentangling the string and the broken bead from the vine-tip without breaking it. The beast needs to be pruned, or at least rearranged.

Once there was a zombie couch.

Except that it wasn't really a zombie couch, it was a sage-green couch, or rather, a cream couch with a floral pattern and charming exposed-stuffing accents, artfully disguised in a sage-green cover. Sage green is a lovely warm color, unless it's beside spring green; and then it looks like dusty unwashed death warmed over badly after sitting in the crisper too long.

Zombie couch.

One day, the zombie couch found itself rudely denuded and left to sit (with the shades open). Its stripped-off skin was taken far away and washed

once in boiling-hot water to clean it
and once in boiling-hot water to turn it brown
and once in warm water with soap to rinse it
and once in boiling-hot water with special weavers' chemicals to do the rinsing right

and then it was baked in the hottest hot dryer in the town

and then it was dragged upstairs, where its tormentor danced about with it and squealed "It's brown!" while people killed each other with hammers for each others' amusement (for in this strange and cruel land, the people watched all crime TV, all the time)

and then it was brought home
and restretched over the naked and shivering couch
where it was discovered that washing a cotton sofa cover in boiling-hot water three times (and warm water once) and then baking it in a spinning oven will tend to slightly debiggen it.

But now it was no longer a zombie couch. Now it was a hot-cocoa-with-cinnamon couch.

And all was well.


Except with the cats, who were Used To a zombie couch, and now had to adapt to the fact that the couch was hot-cocoa-with-cinnamon couch, which is, as you know, a Very Big change that is known to turn 3% of all zombie couches into cat-eating couches. But the cats will eventually come around. Or be eaten. One of the two.

GRAAAH, I CANNOT TAKE THIS PLACE ANY LONGER.

( Grand plan for de-GRAAAHing it )

What I need is somewhere to put everything I don't want. That would half-clear the house on its own.

Didn't I do this last year? How in hell did the house get into this state again? Admittedly, it's better than last year--far better--but wasn't the house's metabolism supposed to be straightened out by now? "In" is still easy and "out" is still a problem.

On the up side, the cats are doing their best to make everything match by covering it all with a layer of hair. Good job.

Once more I'm cleaning out my house. Want any of this stuff?

Two large plastic pitchers
A pink mug and saucer
Cords for hanging lamps - some for regular bulbs, some for chandelier bulbs
Small computer speakers
A flash drive from circa 1998
Anime videotapes - Slayers, Kodomo no Omocha, Gundam Wing, more
Painting supplies - cut-in cup, a couple of paint-pourers
Microwave - broken, but the fix is probably easy
Extra bathroom shelf for Ikea bathroom sets
Old laptop and printer - OOOOOOLD laptop and printer, circa 1997


I'm also selling some stuff:

Scanner, about 10 years old, worked well last time I used it - $20
Rice cooker - works great, but I have a smaller one now - $25 $15
Full sheets - white, the Target brand with the sateen stripes, just fine but I got sheets I like better - $10


If you want any of it, you'll need to arrange to pick it up yourself (or see me sometime in the foreseeable future).

Overdosing on SaucyDwellings, desperately in need of a renovation project. Am broke like augh. Should perhaps clean and declutter house before I redesign it, but DO NOT BRING COMMON SENSE INTO THE SITUATION, IT BINDS AND RESTRICTS.

Also: this room. Who lives somewhere that fabulous? WHO?

Demand Studios is paying $15 per article for simple 400- to 500-word articles. They have tens of thousands of articles available (and let you suggest your own article topics). I worked for an earlier incarnation of the company and had a good time--they basically let you mint money, one article at a time. And yes, Demand Studios is legit. They've been around a while and have a good reputation.

They require decent writing skills, but not Shakespeare--if you can write a coherent blog entry, you can write for them. They have a set of formats that they want articles written in, so read eHow.com, one of their sites, to see what they're looking for. Their formats sound hard until you realize they're all broken up into steps or subheadings, so you're not expected to sustain a thought for long. The topics are highly specific, so the research you need to do for them is limited. Basically, it's spootwork. Pick a topic, do the research, spoot the article out, move on to the next one. The skill level does have to be higher than the average spootwork piece, but the pay is also higher... and "higher than the average spootwork piece" quality is what any one of us uses to write an LJ post. At midnight. Drunk.

How to tell If an Egg Is Hard-Boiled

How to Treat Foot Pain in Children

How to Start an Online Magazine

It's a good way to make a little money in your spare time without complications or commitments.

ETA: Jobs offered at Demand Studios

Writer: $5 to $20 per article, with revenue-sharing options. Requires a writing sample.

Title Proofer: Proofread automatically generated article titles and add metadata (like keyword tags). $1.60 for a page of 20 titles, or 8 cents a title. Requires a test.

Copy Editor: Edit articles written by Demand Studios writers. Pays $2.50 per article. I could swear that the terms just changed in the last couple of days--a few days ago, the site said each article paid $3.50, and copy editors often made $20 or $21 an hour. Anyway, assume you can do about six articles an hour, for an average pay rate of $15. This is crappy for copyediting, but hey, the work's always available. You need to have worked as a copy editor for five years to qualify.

Expert: Appear in videos shot by Demand Studios.

Transcriptionist: Not hiring at this time.


ETA 2: It takes a few days for an article to be approved--about one day per thousand jobs in the copy editors' queue, say some of the writers. Wait times used to be shorter, but recently DS changed their policy so you aren't limited to having ten articles in the queue at a time, and the result is a bottleneck in the copy editors' queue.* They pay on Friday for whatever you have in your published queue by a certain hour on Wednesday. (This results in jitters in the writing forum as Wednesday approaches.)

So far I've had two articles accepted--both topics I suggested, which means they pay only $5 apiece instead of $15. Bleh. I tossed out two of the articles I suggested to them because the article would have been more than $5 of effort to write, and I could find easier-to-write articles for $15. On the up side, they just got a flood of articles about food and cooking--sweet! Food articles are so easy to write.


* I'm still limited. Why? Probably because I'm a new writer, and they need to see a certain amount of my work before they change the settings on my account. That's typical of how DS does business. You're rated on quantity and quality, and when you hit certain ratings, you get more or fewer privileges. For example, good writers get to reserve more assignments at a time, and bad writers get fewer. Right now the ratings system is a black box, but they're making it transparent shortly.

The kitchen linoleum was underbeautiful to begin with, and has gone five years now without a mopping. Fortunately it was brown to begin with, so all one can say for it now is that it's browner... but scrubbing up five years of neglect doesn't appeal to me. I'm considering ripping it up and baring the hardwood floor underneath.

...Then maybe hitting it with deck paint. Or refinishing it? I DO NOT KNOW, IT IS A GLORIOUS MYSTERY.

Update: The floor under a peeled-back section is wood, but it doesn't look like floorboards. Possibly a foundation for the linoleum? I may do better to scrub the hell out of the linoleum, sand it rough, and hit it with deck paint instead.

Should possibly not read SaucyDwellings while procrastinating.

This is the first Star Trek movie to be genuinely good. Not good for Star Trek--good, period. Freaking AMAZING. And yeah, you need to have watched classic Trek to know what's going on, but who hasn't?

I watched it with browngirl, an experience I recommend to anyone. She squeaked, she squealed, she chairdanced, she bounced in her seat and got a good eight to ten inches of clearance. It was impossible to not be enthusiastic with that sort of example. if you plan to see the movie again (and you should), see if you can borrow Browngirl for the evening.

( Hey! Spoilers! )