I’ve been on this nostalgia kick lately, playing Pokemon and working my way through the Animorphs series. You all remember those books, right? Five kids in generic small-city America stumble across an alien and are given the power to morph into any animal they touch to help them fight against alien slugs that creep into people’s brains and take over their bodies. I probably don’t know anyone who owned them all – like Goosebumps, the Babysitters Club and Sweet Valley High, they were one of those series of books where a new one would come out every month or two, you paid like $15 for them and then finished reading them in a couple of hours. I know BSC went over a hundred books, so Animorphs was a limited run in comparison – there are 54, plus four Megamorphs books and four others – The Andalite Chronicles, The Hork-Bajir Chronicles, Visser and The Ellimist Chronicles. So, yeah, even if they were $10 each that’s over $600 for the whole series, which is not the sort of money most parents are going to blow. I had to rely on friends and the school library, and only ever read a fraction of them. With the magic of the internet*, I can finally piece together the whole story!

And what a story.

Being set in the 90s, there are some pretty hilarious anachronisms. Rachel comments at one point that a cell phone and internet access is more allowance than she’ll ever see. When they use the internet in what I think is a public e-cafe in one book, they have to wait a while for the page to load – the single image starts out quite fuzzy before clearing up (remember those?) and the whole site is just that image and a text box form submission. In one of Ax’s books he describes the internet as a relic, and contrasts it with TV, which is pervasive and immediate and transmits sound and images and text – woohoo! More subtly, there’s a discussion in a later book about how Americans don’t believe war, particularly another World War, to be a real possibility.

But you know, it’s good escapism, because who wouldn’t want that power? Maybe not to turn into insects (though the fly morph does get portrayed as pretty fun) but morphing cats, horses, dolphins, kangaroos, or the sort of wild animals they keep at The Gardens? Hell yes!

I’ll tell you something else though. Some of what’s in these books is really not the sort of shit you’d find gracing the pages of the Babysitter’s Club. Aside from the rampant slaughter of Taxxons and Hork-Bajir there’s quite a lot of human death and injury – it’s sort of a pity I haven’t been counting how many times they blithely hit someone over the head hard enough to knock them out for an extended period of time. Traumatic brain injury, anyone? There’s a lot of gore in the fighting scenes too, not to mention the psychological horror. There’s a reason they all refuse to morph ant after the first time and the experience is vividly described. When David joins them, and then proves to be too dangerous to let him remain free, they carry out a plan to trap him in rat morph – forever. At least twice one of them has to face the same fate for themselves as part of a deal with the enemy, and Tobias himself does become a nothlit early on, though he regains his morphing ability shortly after and lives reasonably contentedly as a hawk. Moral debates come up often as they agonise over whether they’re doing the right thing, in general or in specific situations, and particularly over whether they should or could kill humans – innocent non-Controllers or innocent puppets of the Yeerks. Several times they have to choose whether to save loved ones – parents, siblings – when doing so could expose them, and Jake spends the entire series living in the same house as a fairly prominent Yeerk who’s controlling his brother’s body. Ax gradually comes to realise that the race he believes to be honorable and good are very frequently not, becoming quite disillusioned and starts struggling to understand where he fits in the world. And, of course, there’s the nature of the Yeerks themselves. There’s a reason body-snatchers are a frequent trope in horror fiction; the idea of some other being controlling your body, leaving you trapped and unable to do anything but watch is a pretty horrifying one. The Yeerks are also able to rifle through your memories (with you being fully aware of it), and a couple of times it comes up that for some of them it’s an entertainment a little like home movies.

The one thing you can say is that there’s no overt sexual assault, but once you start thinking about it, you realise that even that’s part of the fear of the Yeerks. Because when one half of a couple is infested, they have to play a part even to their husband or wife (naturally no one is gay in the books), meaning this alien with no compassion or sympathy for humans using its hosts body to make a twisted mockery of the intimacy they used to share, while the host watches. In fact in one of the unnumbered books, Visser, we learn that when Visser One first came to Earth it took a woman’s body and eventually married its fellow Yeerk’s host, conceived children and carried them to term. Later it’s forced out of the host body (taking another instead), leaving the woman to raise the twins she gave birth to while trapped in her own body.

And kids were reading this! But you know what? Those kids were my age group. And while I won’t say we turned out fine, I don’t think it was the fucked up shit in YA fiction that screwed us up. I think if you made a list of things that screwed us up, dark themes in YA fiction would be a very, very long way down the list. Actually, I think that books like this were a pretty good way for us to explore some of the thorny questions in life, the difficult ethics and morals that turn out to be pretty common themes in books for teenagers. Now is the Hunger Games, before that was Harry Potter, before that was Animorphs, and before that were undoubtably countless others. And every time something new became big, there were probably adults looking at them and wondering why the hell kids were reading this appallingly gruesome stuff.

*A note on legalities here – I fully disclose that I got these as ebooks off the internet at no cost. This was actually a few years ago. The books were out of print, and there were no ebooks to buy, so if you wanted to read them you had to either buy the books secondhand or find a download of text conversions, often riddled with errors (the program that gets used a lot sometimes mistakes letters in the text). Either way, Scholastic wasn’t going to get any money. More recently it was announced that they may be bringing the books out as ebooks for sale, and the place I got them took the files down accordingly, as piracy is far less justifiable when you can legally get the material from the copyright holder.

So, my phone battery is not playing ball. It drains to nothing in less than a day. When I bought it it was already on the way out so the official sites (Samsung NZ etc) don’t seem to stock the battery for it, and while I can find other places to get them that say they’re compatible, I can only find 960 mAh while the original one is 1000 mAh. I tried one and while it knows there’s a battery there, it doesn’t seem to actually charge.

Considering you can get a smartphone for $180 these days, I’m considering just getting a new phone, and while I’m at it I might as well switch to 2degrees, which appears to be considerably cheaper than Telecom and will let me switch my old number over. (A non-negotiable – I love my number.) And earlier today, my oldest sister alerted me to the fact that 2degrees also has Te Reo phones. As in, not only can you send text messages in Te Reo without having to turn off predictive text because it doesn’t have a clue what you’re doing, but you can actually switch all the menus to display in Te Reo too! At the moment they only have the non-smartphone version, a Huawei G6600 for $99, but I asked them about the smartphone and was told that the Te Reo version of the Huawei IDEOS X3 Android smartphone will be the same price as the standard, $249, and should be available for sale in the next month or so.

The X3 is an Android 2.3 touch-bar phone, and the reviews are over-all positive though do point out some flaws – the touch screen is apparently a bit sticky and hard to see in direct sunlight and both the screen and keyboard are pretty small. It doesn’t support Flash and it doesn’t have the most powerful processor, so web browsing isn’t as good as it is on higher end phones, but considering the low price that’s somewhat expected, and it has quite a few of the same features as others – Bluetooth, WiFi, MicroUSB, a MicroSD slot for extra storage, GPS, 3.2 megapixel camera, video recording, etc. My actual needs are very limited with most things that phones do less days falling under “nice to have”s so to me it’s a good compromise – a cheap, functional smartphone that I can use in Te Reo.

Just because I feel it deserves to be kept on record. @BoganetteNZ posted today a link to an article about how rich kids do better at school. I replied “in other news, white people more likely to be Fortune 500 directors”, which, later tonight, she retweeted.

In a moment of surreality, I got the following response:

@CactusKate2: “@thelittlepakeha @BoganetteNZ and Asians…u know who’ve lived in poverty 4 yrs n don’t speak the English.”

After attempting to decipher what the hell that even means, I gave up and went with the far more pertinent “@CactusKate2 you’re a tool, go away” before following up with “and with that my day is complete.” (So if you were wondering the context of that, now you know.)

I really feel no need to elaborate on that. For a start, I’m about 103% sure she’s been told before exactly what makes her a tool, and more importantly, shit I don’t curr. Full of food, gonna go coma out.

Last night when I was trying to get to sleep I got hit with this sudden intense grief for my heart-bunny Holly. Jasper is darling but he isn’t a replacement – if I had the choice between then I would have Holly back in an instant. He was just such a good rabbit. He would always run over to me when I came out and if I put my head down low enough he would lean up and lick my nose. You could pick him up like he was a beanie baby and cuddle him, he was so chill, and when he was excited he’d run around in circles making the funniest noises.

Despite the fact that he barely seemed to notice earthquakes I firmly believe they were what killed him. His last few months were one sickness after another – abscess, respiratory infection, weepy eye, then finally the fly strike. It didn’t help that he liked to sit in the rain and he’d get messy and muddy, and he couldn’t clean himself very easily because of his head tilt.

I have other things I want to blog about, but I slept badly and have errands to run, so they’ll have to wait.

I have alluded in the past to a mysterious ex I once had when I was much younger. The attentive (and those who knew me at the time, largely family) might have also figured out that it coincided with the time I lived in Australia, and further that coming back to New Zealand was inextricably linked with leaving the relationship.

This morning, within a month of exactly eight years later, I was reading some replies left on a post I’d made and then clicked down to one that at first looked like spam, until I read it and realised who it was from. Though he didn’t actually identify himself, just assuming I’d pick it up from context, the references to two other people we both knew confirm that this is Allan Wayne Orr from Tamworth, New South Wales (though he may have moved since then). [Later I decided to double-check this. The IP address attached to the comment more or less confirms that he's somewhere in SE Australia - at least, he's going through Optus as an ISP, which is based in Victoria fairly close to the NSW border. So either I have a really malicious stalker who happens to use an Optus static IP to connect to the internet, or this adds further support to his identity. I tend to go with Occam's Razor.] After figuring this out, which took all of a few seconds, my brain clicked off. From there it was my body reacting – my whole chest seized up, I felt like even the air in the house was pressing in on me, I couldn’t breathe though I was gasping for breath, tears were pouring out my eyes. I sort of remember managing to type something into Twitter and then I ran outside to lie on the lawn where there was…. well, more air. But in the way I was thinking, it was un-claustrophic air. To give you an idea, I was panic attacking in a way I haven’t done through all the earthquakes – and I spent about a week after February completely in a fog. And this wasn’t even something that could physically hurt me. I’ve been terrified during earthquakes, for myself, for my rabbits, for my family (I incorrectly thought my younger brother was at Riccarton Mall on Dec 23, which was a big worry), because the earth was throwing itself around all over the place and anything could happen. Now, I have pretty damn good evidence that there’s a whole fucking ocean between me and this guy, and I highly doubt that he has any intention of coming after me, but in my mind it didn’t matter. All I was getting was fuck he’s found me and it didn’t matter how innocuous his message was because I wasn’t allowed outside by myself, let alone leaving the country and breaking contact for eight years.

So. Forward several hours, after cuddling with rabbits (literally! Nellie tried to hop out of her yard and I picked her up without thinking and she actually let me hold her for at least ten seconds before wriggling to get down!) and taking 2mg of lorazepam to help calm down a bit and obsessively playing many rounds of Solitaire because it’s pretty mindless, I had all these things swirling around in my head that I wanted to say to him.

Quite recently I read for the second time a piece by a woman who got a Facebook friend request from her rapist. She got in touch with him and asked him about what she remembered and it’s painful and powerful and devastating to read.

I’m not strong enough to talk to him on the phone like she did. I don’t think I’m strong enough to even have a proper conversation with him. But I needed to get the mess in my head out, so I opened a text file and got it all out, then tidied it up a bit and left it there while I played Solitaire some more.

When I was done, I still felt like I had to do it. So I clicked on the email in my inbox and scrolled to the “reply” link.

Here’s the conversation – after I posted, I made sure to freeze both his and my comments. If he wants to say anything else he can easily still reply to the post, but I very much hope he does not because even the best case scenario of a real apology I don’t know if I can deal with at all. Besides, I’d feel like he was just fishing for forgiveness, and that would be too bad, because I haven’t.

(For context about Ben, he was a mutual friend who arranged to stay with us for a week or so preceding another friend’s marriage. He’s one of those people who’s exactly the same offline as on and we got on pretty well. Also, the icon I used is from Dr Who – River Song draws it on the wall of her prison cell when she escapes, and it makes me happy.)

People who have blogs, or read blogs that don’t moderate out spam before it sees the light of day, might have caught on to a new technique spammers are using. Basically what they do is scan a post for a couple of keywords and use those to generate a comment that looks plausible in the hopes it will get through. How they do that, though, is by pilfering text from other blog comments. Normally this is just kind of amusing, except that I frequently blog about pretty sensitive subjects, so sometimes I skim through the spam and see things that… I’m really kind of uncomfortable seeing, knowing that someone out there wrote that for a particular conversation that I have no context for whatsoever and now it’s being spread all over the place by spambots. There’s never really any identifying information, since the web is so huge – though first names are fairly common, I’ve had spambots address me as all sorts of things – but I still don’t like it. It doesn’t feel right at all to be getting snippets about domestic abuse and rape victims and such delivered to my CMS backend. Unfortunately I doubt it’s a trend that’s going to stop any time soon, because I imagine it is something that would get past moderation at some places. If it works, they’re going to stick with it.

It seems that if you want to sign up for one of Google’s products – say, Google Docs – you’re now required to also get an email address and a G+ account. There’s a TechCrunch article on it here with the details, but it does leave out one thing that occurred to me immediately:

G+’s war on pseudonyms. If they decide you’re using a name which isn’t your “real” name (usually non-Western names, incidentally; I’ve come across cases of American Indians and people whose cultures only use single names, among other things), they can delete your account. They’ve also been known to ban your account – not just on G+, but on all Google services. Use a name they don’t think is real enough on G+? Yeah, you’ve just lost access to all your Docs files.

And now, you’re required to create a G+ account, creating a Catch 22 for people with unusual names or long-term pseudonyms. Effectively they’ve made “real names” a requirement for all services, even those for which the requirement is utterly baffling because there’s no interaction with other users – so why should it matter which name you use?

I need this computer for school, I cannot throw it out the window.
I need this computer for school, I cannot throw it out the window.
I need this computer for school, I cannot throw it out the window.
I need this computer for school, I cannot throw it out the window.
I need this computer for school, I cannot throw it out the window.
I need this computer for school, I cannot throw it out the window.
I need this computer for school, I cannot throw it out the window.
I need this computer for school, I cannot throw it out the window.
I need this computer for school, I cannot throw it out the window.
I need this computer for school, I cannot throw it out the window.
I need this computer for school, I cannot throw it out the window.
I need this computer for school, I cannot throw it out the window.
I need this computer for school, I cannot throw it out the window.
I need this computer for school, I cannot throw it out the window.
I need this computer for school, I cannot throw it out the window.

Remember about a month ago how I adopted a new rabbit? I’ve just uploaded ten pictures of Jasper enjoying life in his cage. He’s going to move outside when he’s bigger but for now he gets to hang out in my room being precious.

Here’s the link to the album (which also contains a couple of pictures of Holly being his ridiculous self about a month before he died).

Sometimes he’ll lean his front feet on my knee – I’m not sure if that’s where he stops because he doesn’t trust me enough yet to go further or if he’s just not yet big enough to jump up with any confidence. That wall of the cage is several inches high and even now he’s a pretty small bunny.

The other day I ran my prescription into the pharmacy and my mother was going to pick it up on her way home from dropping us at weaving. A while later I got a text telling me to call the pharmacy, so I did, and she checked with someone there and then said that everything was fine. Apparently everything was actually not fine, because the bag my mother picked up didn’t contain my venlafaxine, which is sort of the most important one (the quetiapine is pretty damn important because I literally can’t sleep without it, but I have plenty spare). Argh! I guess I’ll have to go in and try and explain and figure out what the deal is. Not what I wanted to be doing with my day.