Lookit this!
I got my machine back a couple of hours ago. They charged an eye-watering price for putting the drive in for me (never again – next time we bull through it ourselves).
But look at this! Is there anything more beautiful than a two terabyte SSD with one folder on it? I’m so looking forward to corralling my games in this one place. I shall bring them all to heel!
My house may be chaotic, but my hard drives – when I have the capacity – are neat as a pin.
May 14, 2024 — 7:31 pm
Comments: 3
I have no computer and I must post
My birfday present was a nice fast SSD to put games on and which we could install ourselves in a flash!
Yeah. No. Computer’s at the shop. Might get it back tomorrow. All my stuff is on it, including the old stuff I’ve been posting. So – hello!
I did play the cat game through during the break. It was beautiful and sweet. And weird. (Fair warning, it hurts the cat a couple of times in unavoidable cut scenes).
Also, I did something I’ve never, ever done. I take a tiny sliver of pride playing games through on normal difficulty, old lady though I be. Not resorting to easy or – god forbid! – story mode. What do I look like, a games journalist?
But I gave up and downloaded a cheat trainer for this. That’s what they call them now – cheat trainers. Kitty has to run through swarms of little parasitic creatures and I got sick of hearing him get jumped, scream and die.
Insult to injury, I watched other people play through on YouTube and they had no problem zig-zagging and avoiding trouble. I suck under pressure.
Now, to top it off, I miss the little cat and feel really sad about it. Stupid monkeybrain. Nothing for it but to play through again. When I get my computer back.
May 13, 2024 — 7:33 pm
Comments: 7
It was fine and hot
Another from the Litterbox.
Britain doesn’t have a lot of murder. Well, it didn’t. Cultural enrichment is putting an end to that. But back when all the murderers in England were Englishmen, it was a rare phenomenon.
Rare, but always weird. The Fanny Adams murder is one of the weirdest. The murderer was such an ordinary young man, the act was so awful and his demeanor afterward was so cool.
And then there was the dreadful temporal overlap of the potted mutton.
May 10, 2024 — 5:00 pm
Comments: 4
The failed diary
This was an experiment that didn’t work. It was a series of short memories – my memories, duh – that were linked together in three different ways: chonologically, as I posted them, chronologically, as they had happened in time, and topically. You could navigate the stories any way you liked.
Turns out, there was nothing particularly interesting in doing it that way (and keeping track was a nightmare).
Remember, this was early days and people were trying experimental comics that branched in different ways and ‘choose your own adventure’ and things like that. Turns out, there was nothing particularly interesting in those, either.
Because of the nature of it, I dropped a lot of personal (and likely traceable) information in this section. I later decided that was unwise – another reason I never tried to get the site back online.
The graphic was a take on an Altoids tin. Altoids were popular in my circle then, for some reason. I was particularly proud of the rusty tooth marks (see the color version). The pills are 1 milligram Xanax – a precious prescription I wrangled out of my doctor when I was a frequent flyer.
May 9, 2024 — 5:00 pm
Comments: 2
I apologize in advance
And now for something completely different. The Litterbox section was where I put the less savory bits of weaselbrain.
It started with a couple of True Crime stories. I had originally intended to do a whole True Crime site. Remember, this was early days and every idea hadn’t been done to death yet.
I never really gave up on the idea. When I moved, I brought my enormous TC library with me. Not only did I buy such books, but both my parents did and sent me their paperbacks when they were done. I managed to accrue a whole bunch
I’d honestly like to get rid of them now. I’ve forgotten most of the stories I wanted to tell. I’d like to find someone just starting a TC site or podcast and ship the lot to ’em. Any ideas how I could go about looking?
But this post isn’t about True Crime. Oh, no. This is an essay about human genitals.
May 8, 2024 — 5:00 pm
Comments: 3
Beelions and beelions
One more from the Laboratory, for now anyhow. This one is about visualizing our solar system.
I was a big fan of those this is what a million pennies look like in stacks of ten graphics. They were a staple of the early Web.
Come to think of it, I guess 2004 was the early web.
May 7, 2024 — 5:00 pm
Comments: 7
What do mice dream about?
When I lived in a sad, pokey apartment in Pawtucket, I kept pet mice. I soon came to appreciate what sweet, clean — and above all, individual — little creatures they are.
It didn’t make me rethink what we do to mice in the name of science – I am firmly on Team Human – but it made me distinctly uncomfortable about it.
Also, when I wrote this, it had long since been proven true:
“Alone in clear acrylic boxes with a handful of cedar shavings in a brightly-lit laboratory eating pellets is about as antithetical to a mouse’s happy inclinations as you can get. If, indeed, emotional well-being turns out to play a significant role in health, all our medical studies using mice are gefukt.”
There was a famous addiction experiment where mice were kept in lab boxes and given a choice of plain water or cocaine water. They all chose cocaine water until they OD’ed and died.
Then in the Seventies came psychologist Dr Bruce Alexander, who wondered if mice drank the coke because their lives were so shit. He designed an experiment that has come to be called “Rat Park” – a fun, happy rodent environment with friends and toys and sex. These rats seldom chose the coke-water, seemed to use it recreationally when they did and never, ever OD’ed.
May 6, 2024 — 6:00 pm
Comments: 5
Let us begin
My original idea of printing out the pages of my old site to pdf’s didn’t work. The html didn’t translate very well. It wanted to break pages in bad places, for example. I had a workaround, but…look, it just didn’t work, okay?
I think the thing to do is dump the whole site into an area on this site. For now, I’ll link to individual articles. Later, I’ll fix the functionality the connects them.
Simply put, the “home” links don’t work yet. Let me know if anything else goes wrong.
Don’t worry. Just click.
I actually owned the lab coat in the graphic. You can’t tell, because weasels don’t have shoulders, but it was a proper mad scientist’s coat. Probably Fifties? It was a heavy, heavy cotton with little steel buttons that marched across the shoulder and down the side. And it fit! I loved that thing.
Our first experiment offers the cat raw meat and cooked meat to see which one she prefers. The answer surprised me.
Hell yes that’s clickbait. And do please click the graphic with the Zippo lighter. It’s a scrap of javascript and I was very proud of myself.
May 3, 2024 — 6:00 pm
Comments: 4
Science!
The first section of my old site was called Doktor Auntie Weasel’s Laboratory and it was essays on science. This was the header graphic (but in color. I think this one was animated.)
The machine is based on a snapshot of real object I owned. It was an early model Relax-A-Cizor, an item that was banned so hard in 1970, they were ordered to be collected and destroyed. You couldn’t even legally sell one used.
It’s a terrifying device – you attach probes to your body and it electrically stimulates your muscles for you. The electrodes were fabric pads that you wetted before use. Yes, I tried it. If they dried out or you placed them wrong, it hurt like a bastard.
If you placed them right, your muscles jerked like that decapitated frog from High School science class. Please tell me you had that class.
I paid $10 for it at a junk shop in Pawtucket and it was pristine. It had all its bits, including the instruction manual. I was awed by it and I’m not sure how I got rid of it in the end. It might be upstairs.
I’ll pick an item from this section for tomorrow.
May 2, 2024 — 6:00 pm
Comments: 6
Before I had a blog
Before I had a blog, I had a website. It was a series of medium-form essays on a bunch of different subjects arranged in topical…piles? I had a ball with the graphics and the coding. The writing was, as writing always is, a pain in the tail.
There were, like, twenty different front page graphics and you’d get a random one each time (two pictured above). When you moused over one thing, something on the other side of the page would light up. It was all stupid fun, but it pleased me. I crack me up.
It ran from 2003 to 2006, so the graphics were small and/or low resolution – we were all painfully conscious of download times in the Oughties (I still instinctively am). But, on the whole, it held up pretty well.
One day, somehow, domain scalpers stole the address. I’m still not sure how that happened. I must have missed a renewal notice or three.
And that was the end of that.
To be honest, I was relieved. It was ass-ache and I was then right at the beginning of my trans-Atlantic relocation. I was whelmed. I was too ignorant to be overwhelmed yet.
Zo! I thought it would be fun to reprint some the old stuff, probably as links to pdf files so the formatting holds. None of it has been archived anywhere, as far as I know. Long-time readers will recall that my birthday is in early May and I bug out for the first week or so of the month.
Have some vintage weasel and consider me bugged.
May 1, 2024 — 6:00 pm
Comments: 2