Viridian5's House of "...What?"

Due to migraines and ridiculous allergies lately, I've been sleeping much more and haven't been online or writing as much. Pair that with how I wasn't going anywhere as much due to all the snow sticking around and making parking less reliable, I have less new stuff to talk about.

Even with higher temperatures and a lot of rain, we still have some mounds of the stuff, but parking is getting easier to find.

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It's Irish soda bread season in NY. The Stop & Shop version, heretically, didn't have caraway seeds, but Trader Joe's did, even if I cringe at them calling theirs the Blarney Scone.

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I had my annual eye exam last week, something especially important for someone with Chiari, which means they're very concerned with how my retinas are doing. For some reason, the pupil of my left eye stayed dilated hours longer than my right. They can't have put that much more dilating fluid in my left eye. My youngest niece saw it when I picked her up from college and was very concerned for me.

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I received a notice from Kia of a recall for my Forte. It said they first sent a notice for it to the original owner in 2021 but nothing was done. So, I got this voluntary emissions and transmission recall done as well as two anti-theft things for free. The Kia service people seemed decent and competent, unlike all of the Hyundai people I used to deal with.

Borrowing a disco CD from the library because it had some songs I liked on it revealed to me that there's a disco cover version of Simon & Garfunkel's "Bridge Over Troubled Water." I couldn't stop giggling through it. The female backup singers popping up with an occasional "You can be the bridge!" adds to it.

When I was describing it to my dad over lunch at a diner, I instinctively started doing the Hustle's rolling hand dance.

If you're curious, it's ten minutes long and melds another song into it around the five-minute mark.

Via the local Ridgewood Times:


Welcome to Queens. And I have so many unanswered questions.

(The GPOA are the Glendale Property Owners Association.)

On the eve of what the media is promising will be a snowpocalypse, I offer you a few St. John's Cemetery shots from about a week ago when we had recent but less snow. The sky in them was very pretty. You can see the eight photos at my Flickr.

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It’s impossible to find snow boots at a brick and mortar store nearby, and my feet don’t let me pick something willynilly online. I’m facing this storm with breaking 30-year-old boots I have to stick plastic bags in and sneakers.

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I am so bored with Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War. At this point, I feel like it's been going on forever without revealing much I actually want to know, like what Uryu's deal is (in the anime). It's been so long I barely care anymore. (The manga didn't take this long.) It looks pretty but that's not enough.

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I've been watching several videos from Captain Pikant, whom one commenter said was Bob Ross but with drum machines. I don't understand all the technical stuff involved but there's something so satisfying in how the different elements come together to gradually become the song you recognize. Also, it really makes you appreciate how much work goes into the music. The videos have a great aesthetic and moments of humor and are well edited, and the visualizer used gives the viewer an idea of the elements involved. Like, all the drum stuff in Michael Sembello's "Maniac" is, well, insane. At the end of each breakdown, they do an instrumental cover of the song.

So far, I've watched that, "Blue Monday," "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)" (it turns out the typewriter type thing in their music video I didn't understand was a drum machine), "You Spin Me Round," a drum machine analysis of three Nine Inch Nails songs, and a similar analysis of three Depeche Mode songs.

There was a lot more cowbell in the '80s than I realized.

I really want a Beatbunny T-shirt.

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"The Bad Touch" but it’s a Cyberpunk Club Anthem

It took me forever to get through it, though the back half is easier to get into a flow reading it than the front.

With this book I ordered from the library, I didn't know it had "a novel" on the cover until I received it. And it has the kind of bs I associate with books that have "a novel" on the cover. This is why I prefer genre fiction.

( spoilers )

Things are going from bad to worse with LiveJournal, so I'm worried about my LJ Scrapbook and three RP LJ accounts: Schuldig, Aya, and catalex maybe. (I didn't do a lot with the Harper or Omi accounts.) For the RP accounts, I don't even remember how to send stuff over to DreamWidth it's been so long, and DW is probably being slammed with stuff like this right now.

I definitely want them having their own accounts. I don't remember how to create a new DW account! It may just be that it's late and my brain is fried, so I don't have the brain bandwidth to do this tonight. (I'm in a lot of pain.) Hope I feel better in time to get this done before LJ makes its move.

I don't think there's anything I can do about LJ Scrapbook though.


If things get as bad as it looks like they might, we'll be losing some old, irreplaceable fic from LJ.


eta 5 a.m.: tastesofhoney is up, and none of my comments have imported so far. None of the userpics either. I wonder how long that will take.

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I'm not liking how music on iPhone 17 sounds with corded earpods. (I refuse the cost of airpods, their environmental impact, and how I'm sure they'd easily pop out of my ears.) The adaptor for the 17 with my iPhone 5S earpods sounded crap, but so did the belkin SoundForm USB-C wired earbuds I bought. (Not fond of how the belkin's soft pod material feels in my ears either.) Does anyone has a suggestion for iPhone 17 settings that might help?

I put up some photos from 2019 I rediscovered. They whole batch looks a bit like a fever dream.... Lighting in window displays isn't always consistent from night to night and sometimes result in a "softer focus" look. You can see them at my Flickr.

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More of the original lights that came attached to my Christmas tree just burned out. Barely any still work, and the tree's not that old! I keep buying lights to apply manually.

I went shopping online for replacements for my burnt-out vintage multicolor flower Christmas tree lights, and the prices I'm seeing are nuts. The low end is like $25 after shipping and handling costs. The high is $100-something???

(I don't like the "cold" tone of the colors of new multicolor LED Christmas lights.)

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Kind of a PSA resulted from my own experience....

I've upgraded from the iPhone SE to 17, and it's reacting weirdly to me syncing it into iTunes: it won't show recently played songs in iTunes since I started using the 17 and it randomly mixed up all the cover images of the songs on the phone. The images are properly attached in iTunes but not on my phone anymore! Part of me keeps trying to find a pattern in the image switches but so far keeps running into a wall. Is there a way to fix this? I've synced it many times, and these things remain. (iTunes has all its recent updates.) My music is important to me!

An example of some of the hunh:

"Want" through "Bare" is all the same Cure album, Wild Mood Swings, but with four different incorrect cover arts. "Open," "High," and "Apart" are from the Wish remaster.

My chats with Apple Care--Regarding the issue with my iPhone 17 not syncing up properly with iTunes--didn't go great. I spoke to two people via Chat who couldn't help me, the last one asking me to attempt two solutions that might make other things worse. One thing I definitely will not be doing is paying for a monthly Apple Music subscription just to properly access music I already own. So I scheduled a phone call from a Senior Team member for the evening, hoping that person can create a solution we can all get behind.

Apple called me 12 hours earlier than scheduled and using the wrong phone number, even though I gave them the correct number and time during the chats twice, then sent me an e-mail about how they couldn't contact me. Shocker. I replied to both e-mails with the correct stuff. Then they still didn't call at the correct time, so I instigated and Karen-ed myself into getting a call from Apple senior support immediately.

It was illuminating in some bad ways.

There's a known issue with this in the current iOS: 26.2. (That showed up in my 17 but not the SE, which was also running 26.2 when I traded it in, so I'm thinking there may be some setting or programming stuff also involved we can't figure out? More people have 17s and such than SEs, so a lot of people have to be having this issue.) But since it's "just" about music, it's not something Apple will immediately resolve.

My other problem is that I have a lot of music I burned myself from CDs, so Apple Music might get rid of those if I'm not careful. Because it's third party! Legal issues! (I didn't realize until this phone call that apparently lots of record companies and music business people are suing everybody over rights.) Who knows if I should really have this stuff!

So the senior service guy said he would not suggest I delete the library and create a new one in case stuff I own but Apple doesn't approve of goes missing.

He's a DJ, and he says he pirates stuff himself. He was like, "Yeah, we're all turning into pirates. And I work for Apple." Because people will ask for a song while he's working but it might not be in his internet, legally feasible library. Brave new bullshit, enshittified world stuff.

The senior support guy says he has a ton of songs on hard drives that aren't connected to the internet to keep them safe from getting taken away or changed.

It's funny having an Apple employee saying he prefers flip phones.

Since I prefer to listen to the music I already own, even if the images are wrong, over potentially losing swaths of my songs, I'm sitting put.

I have music burned off CDs from local NYC '90s bands that never got a real record deal, stuff from singles CDs in the '90s, rare bands, rare music, and Apple wouldn't provide me with that kind of stuff even if I were willing to pay to get them over again. I still rip music off CDs into Tunes. I did it one night recently to test the sync problem, and saw that even sending over a single new music file screws up the cover album art image on the 17. (I have a disc drive as part of this laptop, not an external drive.) I have thousands of songs, and some of those CDs I don't have any more.

He commends me on avoiding subscribing to Apple Music, given the conditions I mentioned. With what this guy told me about Apple policing music, I'm not sure I trust them. I'd say 98% of my music is "third party," which means Apple distrusts them and doesn't guarantee they won't be borked and doesn't care if they are. Sorry, Apple, I'm not going to buy all my music from you just so you approve of what's on my phone.

So I'd have to be careful in my choices of what I do.

~snerf~ Here I am, listening to a Cure song on my phone with a Poe album cover on it, angry at everything.

So. Wish we all had a better solution available now. I have a brand new iPhone 17, as part of my family's plan, so switching away from Apple is unfortunately not an option. I had no idea things were reaching this point until this problem led me to contact Apple Care.

I hope you guys have an idea that could help me. I've upgraded from the iPhone SE to 17--my SE was four years old, its battery was starting to suffer, and the screen had some cracks and dings that sometimes hurt my fingers--and the 17 is reacting weirdly to me syncing it into iTunes (on my PC laptop): it won't show recently played songs in iTunes since I started using the 17 and it randomly mixed up all the cover images of the songs on the phone. Is there a way to fix this? I've synced it four times tonight, and these things remain. (iTunes has all its recent updates.) My music is important to me!

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I'm testing out its camera. Yesterday was so dark and rainy that I could barely make out the details of this angel in person but the iPhone 17 rendered this.

I've shot this statue many times over many years in differing conditions and seasons and with different cameras, but I've never noticed the wing edges looking this sharp before. I also usually shoot this angel when it's completely or mostly dry, thus the color difference; the whiter the whole thing is, the drier it is. This angel has a fairly unusual look and design, which is why I keep going back to it.

My winter cemetery shots are most often about shapes and structure, since everything has been stripped bare, and that's certainly true here.

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I only sent out a few Christmas cards this year, mailing them the morning of the 24th. I think part of the delay came from me not getting any cards from anyone aside from dine, so I didn't have many reminders. Nobody in my family sent me a card.

I ran out of tape completely halfway through wrapping the last present tonight! What are the odds?

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For seasons readings, I have a list of my Christmas-based fics here.

Happy holidays, folks!

I finally found a warm-ish night when I was available to go, so I traveled into Manhattan on a window display spree.

I've posted Ralph Lauren, Bloomingdale's, Bergdorf Goodman, and Kleinfeld Bridal Christmas/holiday window display photos to my Flickr.

I'll be going through, processing, and posting Saks Fifth Avenue's haul in the near future. They made things so hard on me...

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I'm still adjusting the arrangement of ornaments on my tree to my taste and wondering if the (non-thieving) roommate ever notices.