Intermission

Have a project I need to work on, one that takes top priority, and then Jack is here for the weekend, so it’s likely to be a few days before I can post again.  Unless I do it late at night, because I need a break.

So it goes.

The Magic Pill (part 4)

[This is the fourth part of a series of posts telling a single story.  You can read the first part HERE.]

“You have a number of options,” the doctor said. “As far as your school system goes, they’re not going to do anything for you, at least in terms of putting him in an Individual Education Program or classifying him somehow, because he does not meet their definition of learning-disabled.” She weighed two sets of papers, one in either hand. ”The way it works is, they look at the intelligence test scoring and the academic test scoring. The intelligence test scoring shows them how smart he is, and as a derivation of those numbers, how well he should be performing academically. The academic test scoring shows how he is actually performing, in reality. If there’s too big a discrepancy between how he is performing and how he should be performing, that represents a learning disability. Which brings us back to the WISC-4.” She dropped the papers. “Unfortunately, because his new WISC-4 score is now lower than his original WISC-3 score, his academic performance lands squarely in the target range of where the WISC-4 predicts it should be. Indicating no necessity to take action. Even though he’s sliding, and you know he can do better, and his teacher knows he can do better, and I’m positive he can do better just from having spent this short time with him.” Read the rest of this entry »

The Magic Pill (part 3)

[This is the third part of a series of posts telling a single story.  You can read the first part HERE.]

Weaver was pretty sanguine about the whole idea, much more so than I expected. We had established well enough between the two of us that neither The Carrot nor The Stick ever made any demonstrable, long-term difference in Jack’s way of handling things, and as the person bearing the brunt of the majority of the struggles to get Jack to do his homework, get Jack out the door on time, get Jack to bring his grades up, get Jack to remember… anything… she was tired of it all, and willing to rationally discuss anything that might seem like it fit the available data. So she hooked us back up at the Developmental Pediatrics Center, where he had gotten all his early physical testing done. They started the ball rolling by plowing us with questionnaires, to get the back story. The questionnaires were comprehensive to the point of being exhaustive, and really horrible to read, as answering them forced me to imagine my safe, mostly happy child being tormented by a variety of awful problems, and to realize that somewhere, at some point, other parents of not-so-safe, not-so-happy children had had to check “yes” to every single one of them. I filled them out sitting on my living room couch, framed in a patch of bright sunlight, and then tossed them to one side when I was done, feeling for all the world like there was a grey cloud around me regardless. Read the rest of this entry »

Texture Algebra (Solving for EEEEEE)

Generally the way it throws down is this:  D is working on a build, and she says to me, “I need a [x] texture for [y].  You think you could knock that out for me?”  And I say, “Uhhhhh…  yeah.  Probably. Lemmee see what I can do.”  And then I go research [x] and [y] a bit, after which I crank up Photoshop and disappear for a while.

When I come back, I throw her a jpeg through Skype and say, “How’s that?”   Sometimes she goes, “Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!  That’s just what I wanted, thank you.”  Sometimes she goes, “Nnnnnh…  can you make it [j] and [k]?”  And maybe I can make it [j] and [k], and then I get the eeeeee,  or maybe it would take me a week and a half to do, in which case I scrap it and try a different approach.  Or maybe while I was working on it, she finds [m], something she already has in the can, or [n], that was on sale cheap and she likes better, and she uses one of those instead.  Or possibly she changes [a] [b] [c] [d] and [f], and decides [x] is no longer appropriate for [y],  probably because [y] no longer exists.  In which case I go back to playing Civilization 5.  (Damn you Gandhi!  We denounce you too!)

Every once in a while, though, the effort to provide [x] for [y] results in [Z], an end product that is an order of magnitude above what anyone was expecting, including myself.  Which is how we got the Tiphareth Designs Weathered Victorian Shingle textures:

16 color variations to date and counting, including (naturally) Dragonia’s Dark Plum. Shinglicious.

I’m thinking of moving the various TD entries to a store blog.  I should probably have one.  Like I need another web site, though!

That’s Life

Battled it out with my son in The Game of Life, and accrued over $350,000 before I even got married (which has to be some kind of house record–  the tornado sent me back to start and I discovered uranium twice, plus I got an inheritance)–  only to have him STEAL $200,000 of it away from me through a double act of Revenge.  I got even, though:  after he beat me to Millionare Acres, I won the game on that lame-ass Millionaire Tycoon rule, by betting everything I had on #4 and hitting it when I spun.

What?

The Magic Pill (part 2)

[This is the second part of a series of posts telling a single story.  You can read the first part HERE.]

His public school teacher made all sorts of wacky faces at the parent-teacher conference, trying to find a way to tactfully throw the possibility of ADHD out there, without knowing whether or not I was going to rip her head off for suggesting it. “This is his Math workbook,” she told me, placing it in front of me on the desk. It looked like a ticker-tape parade. “The green post-its are assignments he completed correctly, or assignments where he went over the things he got wrong and made the right corrections. The red post-its are assignments where he gave incorrect answers and still needs to make the corrections. The yellow post-its are assignments where he didn’t give an answer at all, or left something out.” She riffled through the pages one-handed, flashing a great deal of red and yellow, and not much green. “There are whole pages here he just skipped. Not even a first try. And they’re supposed to be done with this by now. Completely. The class as a whole has moved on to the next book.”

I sighed audibly, but didn’t say anything. The memory of the two of us sitting at my kitchen table with snacks and drinks, working through the problems together, going over multiplication and long division, talking about money, drifted into my head and away again. It suddenly seemed very long ago. “You know…” the teacher grimaced, looking rather fidgety herself. “Maybe… at this point… it’s possible…” Read the rest of this entry »

The Magic Pill (part 1)

My kid has ADHD.

It’s taken about five years to get to that relatively simple statement, or ten, if you’re counting from when he was born instead of when he went into school. He was severely premature– “No Way He’s Gonna Make It Without Intervention” premature. It took drugs and surgery and a team of doctors and his Mom in the hospital for a month before they could even get him to the point where he’d have a chance, and then more surgery to get him born, and then more drugs and an incubator and a lot of tubes and another month or two in the Natal Intensive Care unit to get him home. And then a heart monitor and a steroid fogger once he was home, to make sure that he didn’t hold his breath while he was sleeping and kill himself, or that his lungs didn’t close up when he got a cold and make him pass out because he couldn’t breathe. So mostly we’ve just always been glad that he’s alive, and that he has all his fingers and toes, and that he isn’t brain-damaged or crippled. If he was a little off socially and perceptually, we figured, well… so are we. Read the rest of this entry »

Spring

The elderly lady who lives across the way just called me “young man”.

*giggle*

The Son King

Jack (assessing the diplomatic status of the city-state of Tyre):  It says they’re Hostile.

Ace: That doesn’t mean they’re hostile to you.  They’re hostile to everyone.

Jack: I am everyone.

Ace: Oh ho!  (laughs) L’état, c’est moi, huh?

Next!

Did I mention we moved the store?  We moved the store.  We teamed up with our friend Sarah from Uru and got a deal on New Kadath, a whole entire sim.  Much more space to build, and many more objects allowed.  So naturally we rebuilt everything:

As usual, it was a team effort, although the building was mostly D’s, and Luna Garden there was mostly mine.  And it was fairly exciting.  Only– [SL minutiae] nobody except me had full powers on the land, because I was listed as the sole owner.  Solving that required deeding the land to our Land Ownership group, and that process created an unintended side-effect.  I had parceled off the land into smaller sections for the store and the garden, so as to be able to create different landmarks for them, have different audio streams on them, and so forth.  When I did so, I never bothered to adjust the prim multiplier for each parcel.  As long as I was the owner of all the land, it didn’t matter;  an overflow of objects on one parcel was made up for by drawing resources from the other parcels.  But SL considers group-owned land as its own entity, with its own distinct ownership– even if the owner of a surrounding parcel is part of the group that controls the deeded land.  So when I deeded the largely unused portions of the sim to the group, the ones where all the free resources were, the parcels the store and the garden were on suddenly registered as massively over their prim count for their size, and SL automatically restored the balance by returning everyone else’s objects to inventory.  Like, um…  the store building.  Oops.

That’s not a total loss, of course, since being returned to inventory is not the same thing as being deleted.  You can just rezz it out again (in this case, all in one chunk, since it was linked.)  But it is a pain in the ass.  And in a related development, it turns out that D has been frustrated by her attempts to work on terraforming, because the in-world controls for doing so are fairly clunky.  So it looks like what’s going to happen now is, we’re going to purchase a RAW file–  a tweakable, pregenerated basic terrain sculpt made by someone else–  and apply that to the sim, then rework the location of the store and the other features to conform to the new terrain.  [end SL minutiae] So whatever the NEW new version winds up looking like in the end, it probably won’t look like that screen shot anymore.

I did manage to cobble together this picture out of 7 or 8 raw-stock shots I took in the garden:

Also, somewhere in that forest is an item I designed to Jack’s specifications and put there at his behest.  We think alike, him and me.  :)

MOULa: Phil’s Relto

Bork Bork Bork

I broke my spatula imitating The Swedish Chef.

Weather is Here, Wish You Were Beautiful

While I was away visiting Dragonia, I kept in touch with my son by writing and sending him postcards, mailing one out to him almost every day (except for Sunday, when there was no mail.)  I filled them with text, sometimes descriptive and sometimes humorous, and also did tiny pen and ink illustrations on them if a subject presented itself.  It took some effort to keep up with–   not only because it required me to find a time to do it each day, and remember to do it, but also because postcards are not terribly easy to come by these days.  The traditional kind with colored illustrations only seem to be available at tourist destinations, or in retail locations that have geography-themed sections.  (Living for so long in the shadow of the City of Mists, where a rack of them sprouts in front of every store like a sumac tree, I was perhaps unaware of this.)  And if you go to the US Post Office to purchase them, their selection is limited to one:  a thin, flimsy white rectangle with preprinted postage of a koi goldfish, that feels like it would wilt in your hand if it got damp.  But I found them.  I detoured Dragonia to any location I could think of that might have them, and I hunted them down, and I sent them out, fairly confident that it would be something Jack would enjoy.  I had done the same thing on other trips I had taken, up to festivals in Canada–   even going to so far as to buy all the postcards ahead of time, and draw a picture with one piece on each postcard, so that the complete picture would only be visible when he had all the cards.  He had been delighted.

Yesterday, however, during an otherwise pleasant conversation at a local bar, my ex-wife Weaver took the opportunity to slip in the aside that she had been prepared to “flame me” upon my return to Shadetree for having “gone off into my own little world” for two weeks, without ever calling Jack or her to see how he was doing.  (And also for responding “snidely” when she sent me a text message that pinged my phone at what, in the Golden Realm, worked out to 6 AM.)  I looked at her, justifiably I thought, like she had six heads, and cited the postcards.  She responded with a meandering soliloquy that worked out in aggregate to saying that the postcards were not an acceptable substitute for a phone call, and that Jack found them of dubious interest anyway.  She mentioned one postcard in particular that he had dropped into the recycling bin at the Post Office directly after reading it.

“It’s not 1910,” she quipped.