Never been one to let the carrier drop

So, you all may remember my experience with HVAC that resulted in me declaring I would be doing my own HVAC maintenance from now on – which reminds me I need to figure out if the blower motor or bearings need oiled, which sadly will require taking apart the air handler in my garage.. that’ll be on my todo list for this month.

Anyway, a new item has been added to the list of things I will not pay anyone to do again – or if I do, it’s going to be after *very* careful investigation of their bona fides: House painting.

I didn’t think this was something you could do *that* wrong at – but, a vendor quoted $9000 for painting the house. I expected a *really* nice job for $9000 – I was expecting a crew of two for a week, careful surface prep and sanding, careful cleaning, and then two coats neatly applied.

Then they wanted another $7000 to change some of the siding. Okay, I said.. after all, there was some of the paint that looked really scorched and I assumed that’s what they were addressing.

I’m not sure why they chose to change the siding on the *south* side of the house – but they started out getting on my shit list by not picking up dozens of nails in the driveway. Luckily I noticed a nail in a package and grabbed the magnet on a stick and walked the driveway several times, listening to the ‘clink-clink’ of nails being grabbed.

I wrote what would turn out to be the first of many emails to CribCare, LLC. At this point I was not yet annoyed, just figured they had overlooked this kind of important detail.

However, they chose not to apply primer to the new wood. As a result, the new siding looks *totally* different from the rest of the house, with all the wood grain showing through. This, sadly, was just the beginning of what I am going to refer to as the most amatuar paint job I have ever seen.

They started out by making their job considerably harder by using a power washer, applied way too close to the building. The paint job was completely intact when they started – you could see no wood color, just brown. They blew a bunch of paint off the house with the power washer, but unevenly, so paint applied to those shingles would be mottled. I actually offered to pay $1000 extra in order to get some of the very worst spots where this had been done replaced – and then, in one case, they cut out half a board – with the mottling – when the other half was split. I can’t even fathom what they were thinking. Increasingly, I started to suspect they weren’t – especially when they *painted over the house numbers*. Even worse, they painted over a nickel plated bus bar. And a service box for a microcontroller helium system. And *half* of the conduit and air conditioner wiring and pipes. But only half. Just to make sure it looked as amateur as possible.

They used a spray gun. Now, when I paint exterior, I use something called a power roller – it’s just a regular roller with a squeeze trigger that automatically reloads it from the paint can. You get really good results this way, fairly easily. Honestly, most of my house painting was done with a regular, rub it in the pan roller and a paintbrush. You also get good results this way. It’s a bit slower, especially on the higher parts of the house.

It is not easy to get good results with a spray gun, though. Overspray is inevitable. Another hint we were in trouble was when I saw that the trim had been oversprayed – after which of course it was painted the trim color. Also, the trim on the soffit had been painted the primary color.. and was obviously going to stay that way. There were of course places where the paint had run, and places where there were bugs in the paint. They had taped to the fresh paint and there are still places where it pulled off. Anywhere conduit or other similar things interrupted the spray, the result was glomming. Some of the shingles that should have been sanded prior to paint have a very.. let’s say, rough appearance. I haven’t even begun to catalog all the places where the paint is in the wrong place but I’m guessing it’s going to be long. I found *thumb tacks* they hadn’t bothered to remove.

I’m not even sure where to start with fixing it. Obviously I need to scrape and sand all the rough spots, repaint all the new wood with primer and then with paint. We’ll see if paint thinner will take off some of the paint from the AC lines and wiring. The bus bar will have to be replaced.. no way I’d ever trust it again.

I don’t normally name names.. but this was especially terrible. DO NOT LET CRIBCARE LLC DO ANY PAINTING. After we’ve done the final walkthrough I’ll add photos and also file one star reviews in all the usual places with those photos.

Now, to be fair, they do amazing concrete work, they are good at woodworking, they’re good at general handiman tasks. But they are TRULY not housepainters. I’m out $18,000 and I don’t know if this job is even going to last. Part of what’s sad is I’m guessing my one star review will be the end of our working relationship – but I feel like the world needs warned here, and also I want to make them *really* understand that they screwed up, in the hopes they will change their behavior.

So, I’ve come to have a pretty good understanding of most of the process.

First of all, it seems like my subconcous plans for these even though my concisous mind doesn’t know about them. I am not sure why although one thing I would note is I come back each time with new abilities and they have also enabled me to fight a entity in my mind which isn’t me and which wanted me dead. (I have a feeling that I’ve largely won that war with this particular battle, although maybe this is just the optimism of coming back fresh from a slaughter)

Anyway, first, I get the urge to stay awake for long periods of time. Staying awake often feels very good for the first 48 hours or so, and then starts to feel, um, less good, but I get the urge to continue anyway. Somewhere around 96 hours, it becomes necessary for my brain to do the maintenance that normally is done during sleep. This is largely releasing neurotransmitters that have been uptoken – uptook? – during neural firing. There is a *reason* this is normally done during sleep. When I have it happen while I am conscious, I lose access to most of my memories for a while. In fact, I have to do a repair process to get anchored at all. I will normally check myself into a mental hospital or do something that cues society to do so, because I shouldn’t be working on anything computer related while I’m doing the restart procedure.

The restart and repair process takes a few days. The fastest way to cue it is to force sleep, for which normally 100mg of seroquel is adequate. Using larger doses of seroquel is not advised unless 100mg is not adequate, because Seroquel is actually antagonistic to restorative sleep, but of course, you have to get into the sleep process. There is also a self-test procedure that I will automatically run, mostly involving remembering song lyrics, parts of my past, skills, etc. Often there will be many neural chains that have to be relinked – this usually presents as me not being able to remember lyrics and reworking the same song over and over until I can.

Recently I said to my sister we have got to stop this ridiculous not talking to each other. One of the things my sister said was “You will not like court”, which implies she has some terrible list of things to say about me – maybe she was planning on getting $PERSON to tell the tale of how I’d repeatedly tried to get to her and therefore was stalking her..

Um.. wait a second. I *never*, after the first time, got to $PERSON’s house. I kind of assume this was by design. I certainly could have. I was often within a few blocks of it, but I knew she didn’t want to see me. I don’t know what I was doing, or looking for, exactly, my subconcious is full of interesting stuff, but I don’t think it’s really all that scary to come to within a mile of someone. Especially given that I’ve never owned any weapons, never been charged with sexual assault, and would rather die than hurt $PERSON or force her to do anything she didn’t want to do in real life.

Did I send her a bunch of very confused and probably scary emails including one that could easily be interpreted as very inappropriate? Yes. Wish I hadn’t done that either. It felt so good to be able to talk about what was wrong with my mind.. I tried to back off and range by asking her where her lines were since I’d obviously crossed one – and I was so used by this time to having friends I could say almost anything to – but. alas. It was a fuse, not a breaker, that I had opened.

I’ve offered my sister a apology for anything she wants. I think as far as changed behavior I already have. she has *NEVER* apologised for her psychological abuse, for her threats to kill my family, for her repeated physical abuse. I wonder what all she would trot out in a court case, and what she would say. At this point my theory is her goal is to get me disowned so she can get all of the inheritance.. or maybe she still, for reasons I can’t fathom, just takes joy from hurting me.

For most of my adult life, I’ve had two wishes.. $PERSON and music. I broke my friendship with $PERSON – and I’m not going to claim it was anyone’s fault but mine – a very long time ago when I acted very badly at a party she was throwing at her grandmother’s house, and then I was too ashamed to talk to her about it. But I’ve always missed her.. and it appears I always will. This is somewhat complicated though by the fact that I talk to someone who is very much like her – and claims to be what she will become at some point in the future – in my mind. My consolation prize I suppose, if you don’t get your first wish perhaps the universe – or your own mind – will give you the next best thing. The person I talk to in my mind can’t provide the one way I have of authenticating the real genuine $PERSON – the way they talk – the pacing and cadence of their voice.

Music, of course, became something I could – and am – giving myself. I’m my own genie there – after all, it’s not a experience you can buy – you kind of have to earn it one day at a time. And I am.

One of my major challenges – what with wish 1 being what it is, and me missing $PERSON every day – is that when I go manic-crazy, I have no access to any of my memories. I have finally, and with $PERSON’s assistance in fact (thank you!) managed to store a authentic memory very close to my CE, where it won’t get lost even when I haven’t slept in 3 days, of her saying she doesn’t want me in my life and wishing me the best of luck. Of course, I wish she felt differently about the first half, but my god, I really can’t blame her. It astonishes me a lot of the time that I manage to succeed in the adult world as much as I do given the level of brokenness parts of my mind exhibit. I don’t know what happened to me, exactly, although I have some guesses.

One distinct possibility is that it has something to do with my sister. Now, my sister currently doesn’t want to see me, and I think her reasons mostly have to do with some pretty awful things that I did when I was 13-14. All of them I regret, all of them I think I have apologized for, and none of them I would ever do again, but I did break into her bedroom and watch her sleep, look at her naked in the shower, and then when I was 15, when she was pregnant and wouldn’t stop hitting me, in anger I said I would kick her in the stomach if she didn’t stop. Never would have actaully done it, and it kind of underlines how little she knows about me that she didn’t actually know that. But I was *so tired* of being her punching bag.

I would point out that the things I did to her that show a lack of respect for her bodily atomoy, *she earned* that lack of respect through repeated physical abuse of me. She can’t treat me as if *I* have no bodily atonomy and then expect me to respect hers – she broke me, and then was angry that I was broken. This shows a special kind of stupidity, a lack of respect for the laws of cause and effect.

Do I wish I’d done things differently? Of course I do. But I am beginning to really get annoyed at her weaponized victimhood of not wanting to see me and keeping me away from family events via that. The problem is I have no reaosn, to be honest, to think she isn’t just, well, basically evil. I’d like to have some reason to think otherwise, but we are talking about the person who repeatedly talked about, for example, killing my whole family in their sleep. This is NOT normal sibling rivalry stuff.

Anyway.. as I was saying. I don’t think $PERSON owes me anything, I’m grateful for the time and love she did give me, and I’m grateful for finally giving me a goodbye I can hold onto at the top of a manic peak so I don’t keep trying to get back to her. I also did eventually mostly solve what I was trying to reach her for, which is that my relationship with Kayti rather thoroughly broke me beyond the level of broken I already was. But maybe you have to really break before you can be fixed, like a bone being set.

That said, $PERSON, if you ever decide you do want me in your life, even as a call once a year for 15 minutes, I will be grateful for what you offer. I’m curious what you now thinks of you-then’s goal to be the CEO of Pepsi if nothing else. IF you change your mind, I am not difficult to find 😉

I do think I am going to make it to being a world class rock pianist, eventually. I wonder what my message for the world will be. I do wish Earth was a lot better – with better government, better resource allocation, more physical affection of all sorts, less people who think monogamy is the best answer, and more abilities to do what you want for a living instead of what will pay. I am curious when I will be able to make music pay.

So, I spend a lot of time, when I’m not ubergeeking out writing code or building stuff, missing people. Of all the people I’ve ever lived with, dated, or spent significant time with, I can only think of one that I don’t miss. (And pretty much everyone who knows me probably knows exactly who I’m talking about)

I wish people didn’t have to leave our lives, a lot. I do wonder how many of the people who have left my life have done it due to my bad choices – but I also wonder how much the problem is that I believe I can’t have what I want.

I again find myself at a crossroads. I don’t know what the streets are labelled, but I have the definite feeling that there are a series of decisions – and probably some pretty difficult moments and some significant sadness – ahead of me. I wonder what will happen next.

Well.. I did say I wanted a range of experiences and emotions…

So, here with a new set of thoughts. The first is wondering how often I subconciously plan my runups and occasional mnetal crashes. It would be nice to think that I don’t do so – I’m not cosnciously aware of any plan – but the timing gets increasingly suspicious each time. I seem to plan them for minimum damage to my life, if I do plan them. I am not aware of having any plan.

I figured out something that’s vaugely terrifying.. in the same vein as my theories about Milgram – if we accept the idea of the human mind as a loose confederation of subnets rather than one cohesive whole – which certainly fits the data – then we have to consider that any lie created within the system is inherently dangerous to the system as a whole. For several reasons

1) A ‘lie state’ network has to be created to remember which subset of individuals have heard this lie, unless it’s consistantly told to everyone
2) Routing of some firings occur through fairly complex means and the pointer to the data will end up being inaccurate because it’s not the truth

The biggest problem will come if the user of the mind thinks they can lie to themselves. This is NOT going to end well – among other things, #1 becomes reentrant (ponder whether that’s the right word.. recursive might be better)

Once I realized that lying is both using capacity better used for other things and is literally causing brain damage in that it’s leading to incorrect routings and signalling inside the mind, I resolved to confess all my lies, no matter how difficult, and to never do it again.

Another thing to contemplate – if you are lying, you are on the side of noise rather than on the side of signal. I know which side I want to be on in that particular battle.

Yet again I seem to have overestimated my ability for being alive and landed somewhere where the doors won’t open. Probably not for that long – I’d certify myself sane now, really. One advantage, painful though it be, I have a immutable memory of a rejection from $_PERSON which hopefully means that loop can bloody well die now and I can mourn what could have been without thinking there’s any path back. And still try to learn balance and health from what I knew to be true about them. $_PERSON, should you happen to read this, you have my sincere thanks for your kind and well worded rejection while I could actually write it to memory. I know none of this is your fault and you didn’t deserve any of the flack and annoyance factor that came from my mental issues.

In upcoming sheer’s mental guesses about neural architecture, look for a post about why creatures of our type should never lie.

You’re being blinded by the news, by the mesage you’re being sold. In fact you are richer than a midevil king. You have access to *insane* amounts of resources. For a pittance a month you can have access to most of the music catalog of humanity. For *free*, you can check out more fiction and nonfiction from the library than *existed* in 1800. The Wikipedia and other similar resources offer almost unlimited access to collective knowledge. Youtube offers more video that you can imagine, and the ability to broadcast yourself. You can send a packet to anywhere on earth, almost, in a few milliseconds. You have access to a huge variety of food, both prepared and raw ingredients and even seeds.

Are you as rich as you could be if we had a perfectly designed resource allcoation system? No. But NONE of the politicans are talking about redesigning our resource allocation system. They talk about the three major families of systems that exist as if those are all there is, and they talk about capitalism as if it is the best by far and to be adhered to religiously. But we have not even begun to grok what a truly advanced resource allocation system might look like. Money is *pathetically* bad.. it repeatedly encourages us to destroy real value to make paper dollars – it throws away enormous amounts of metadata with every transaction. We can do so much better if we try.

Also, you are alive in one of the most exciting times to be alive in. We might for the first time see something smarter than a human on earth. We might also see fusion tapped for energy – and once you have energy aplenty, it’s a very low bar to talk about feeding and housing everyone. There is the real possibility of a much better world.. or a much worse one. The people selling you hate, the people encouraging you to feed the wrong wolf, the people selling the idea that being empathic is “the woke mind virus” and needs destroyed.. the people who are upset by transgenedered people have not even begun to use their imaginations. It’s likely that in the near future, if we can develop neurological software or man-computer interfaces, we can not only change your experiential gender at will, we can let you wear the body of a cat, dog, or dolphin in terms of your conscious experience.

So don’t let our leaders sell you the idea that you are downtrodden. Are there problems? You bet there are, but Donald Trump isn’t even talking about them because he has no idea how to solve the real problems in front of us. What he’s done is make up a bunch of problems, and also encourage a bunch of destructive behaviors that will make us all far less wealthy.

According to https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/06/kevin-hassett-stock-market-crash-not-part-of-trumps-strategy.html, Trump claims he is *not* trying to destroy the stock market. Now the one thing we know about trump is he *always lies*. So apparently.. he is.

I was present at the 50501 protests in Seattle. No one paid me to be there. I doubt if, aside from the musicians, there was *anyone* being paid to be there. I think it shows just how deeply addicted to Ketamine and out of touch with reality Elon is that he thinks there are paid protesters. No, Elon, the only people being paid are the people you pay to vote – in any sane world, what *you* are doing would be far more illegal than paying people to protest.