Promiseland

[Fetian]

Not even bad brain so much as mediocre brain but I'll be damned if I haven't lost a few days to it nonetheless

[Fetian]

Playing Supermarket Simulator, one of several wildly popular games based on recreating menial/manual labor, and thinking about how if people were given the option to not work, and weren't forced into demeaning jobs via threats of starvation and/or homelessness, that no one would do jobs like janitorial service, public transportation, retail, landscaping, or any other menial/manual labor based job. No one would ever do those jobs voluntarily, we have to keep an underclass of people who aren't given any other choice but to do those jobs for pay that forces them to stay in those jobs forever.

[Fetian]

Less sarcastically I am thinking about how when I was younger, my parents used to lament that no one knows how to make change anymore, and how I have in fact not come across a cashier who "properly" makes change in years. It is a truly obsolete skill with modern registers but was still neat to come across when it still happened occasionally, like running into someone who could hand-crank a car

[Fetian]

You also don't get customers giving extra coins to round up their total much anymore, but that probably has more to do with people handling less cash in general

[Fetian]

Last night ash and I finished our RE1 playthrough as Chris and then watched a speedrun of Jill's playthrough last night and this afternoon. The speedrun did not trigger the Jill Sandwich cutscene so I also looked that up to show him, and it also didn't include the opening, live-action cutscene so I also showed that to him separately. Next up we do RE2! That too is tank controls so will probably play the remake of it, as well, but I hear the remake has changed some plot beats for the worse so I'm not sure. And then I'll need to choose which character to play either way, will probably again do the thing of playing it and then watching the other character on youtube somehow.

Anyway, the game was fun. I know early REs are not particularly renowned for their plot, but there's also the issue of, it being such an influential game that a bunch of other games stole or parodied or were inspired by it, so it feels derivative now even though it's the thing that was being derived.

Interested to get to 2, because I actually remember that one from my childhood more than 1 (I'm not sure I or my cousins ever played 1? I thought for years that 2 was 1), though I don't remember it in any particular detail. I didn't have a playstation at home when it came out, so I just saw it when I went over to my cousin's house and so I wouldn't have seen it except for over a day or two.

Anyway, after we watched the speedrun we hung out for fifteenish minutes and then I went to go hang out with Dave and Erika -- Dave gave us a little tour of his apartment and Erika and I hung out while we waited for Dave to finish making his dinner, and then we played PlateUp for like four-five hours! It was very fun, we lost a couple times and then we had a very solid run where we made it to overtime three or four and then lost. Maybe we'll franchise it next time! I really rarely do franchises but it could be fun

We did take a ten minute ish break in the middle for Erika to walk her dog, so I got a chance to eat some dinner, but obviously not like a full meal's worth, so I'm going to eat some more in a bit here. ash also gave me his ... plumicots? Plum apricot hybrids? Because he didn't like them but I think they're alright, so I'll also eat some more of those

[Fetian]

Went to bed at about 2 last night (this morning) and then Cael kept waking me up repeatedly through the night. Understandable, since he isn't used to this schedule right now, but hopefully he adjusts soon if I keep at it myself

I watched Castle of Cagliostro last night as part of my watching every Miyazaki movie thing -- I was going to skip it since I've seen it before and didn't particularly like it, then, but I didn't like it as a Lupin III movie so I thought I might have a different opinion of it if I watched it as a Miyazaki movie, specifically, instead. I still didn't particularly like it. The beginning is very solid, but as the plot kicks off it just loses me. It's not particularly bad in any way, just, doesn't work for me. And as a Lupin movie it's still very weird -- very sweet, and Lupin is almost fatherly, which is just so very strange.

I think Nausicaa is next, and that one I haven't seen before

ash is laying down in the dark after his botox injections, so I'm hanging out in my room until either he gets back up or Dave is ready to play some Stardew

[Fetian]

So, the Neil Gaiman thing.

(discussing the sexual assault allegations, thoughts thereon, thoughts on sexual assaults/rape in general, kind of wordvomitty)

I went looking around to see if there's been any updates of any kind, and I came across someone talking about the podcast that came out around the same time as the allegations -- they are kind of a garbage person (transphobia on profile in general, sort of casually victim-blamey in the threads in specific) so I'm not going to link it, but unless they have outright fabricated hundreds of tweets of direct quotes from the podcast (which is possible but I think fair to consider unlikely) I think I can trust the reporting as far as I can throw it, and if anyone's really curious about it I can give the link in a chat. But, so I read these threads and this is the nuts and bolts of what I get from it all

I'm not going to speculate on what's going on in the heads of the two original women who came forward. But in correspondence with Gaiman, for months after the alleged assaults, they reiterated to him that the relations were consensual. One of the women maintained contact with him, asking him for money to pay her rent, while filing the original police report against him.

I'm not going to say he's not a creep, there's a clear history here of pursuing very young (adult) women and using his fame to dazzle them into entering a sexual relationship with him, and it sounds like he does all of this while married to a woman who is not okay with him doing it. It lastly sounds like he's into some mild BDSM stuff that is confusing a fair bit of the reporting on this. And it's totally possible to put yourself into a position of having sex with someone you don't want to have sex with, and to later say things you don't mean that sound like you were okay with it, and to come to regret doing that. It's possible to have sex with someone because you want to and then later come to regret doing that, as well. It's of course also possible to have sex with someone and then lie about having consented to doing so. All of this is super shitty from a dozen different angles, but when you get right down to it, if he was told that the people he had sex with were doing so willingly, if they continued sending him flirty messages and stayed on good terms with him afterwards, how would he know to stop?

I can't speak on the other women who have come forward since the podcast came out, though the podcast apparently included the journalists attempting to contact everyone they could find who had ever been in a relationship with Gaiman and all but the two who came forward then had nothing but good things to say about their relationships with him -- I don't know anything about their claims except that they've claimed Gaiman has sexually assaulted them. I do hope that if Gaiman's reputation survives all of this that he does conduct himself differently in relationships going forward. And I can't speak on the law in any of the countries that he would be being prosecuted in, but if all of this is an accurate judgement of the events that happened, then I don't think anything he did should be illegal. But also, I'm not a judge nor a lawyer nor currently serving on a jury, so my opinion of his behaviour doesn't have to be based on law. I can think he's a creep and decide I don't want to support any of his work going forward.

I don't know if that's where I stand, yet. I'm still waiting for the fallout of all of this. I wonder if he's ever going to come back to social media or if he'll decide that's too risky.

My larger point, is that sex is complicated and relationships are complicated, and the line between 'consensual sex' and 'rape' is actually a lot blurrier than people would like it to be. It is very, very possible to have an extremely bad time, sexually, and for your partner to have no idea, especially when you start drifting into the BDSM side of things. It's possible to have a good time, sexually, and then years later for hindsight to turn the experience into something very different for you. These can happen despite the best possible precautions against it, and in terms of helping victims who are experiencing trauma I don't think it's useful or necessary to litigate whether or not it "counts" as "rape". But in terms of judging whether or not the other person did anything "wrong", it gets messy.

Anyway, all that is of course contingent on the thread having represented the podcast accurately, the podcast having represented the facts accurately, and my having interpreted those facts accurately. If things are actually that cut and dry, I'm sure it will bear out eventually. Still waiting for the fallout.

I should be in bed.

[Fetian]

I've also been up late reading about California's High Speed Rail, and more specifically reading the edit wars on its wikipedia page

[Fetian]

I did get to hang out with ash a little bit yesterday evening! We caught up on Helluva Boss, including watching the latest that I hadn't seen myself, yet. It's good fun, but now we'll need something else of medium length to watch before getting into meatier media. There's definitely stuff on our to-watch list, and there's also dropout and whatever else happens to be on youtube

And played Stardew with Dave -- we have discovered that Robin will upgrade his shack, so we're working on getting those upgrades, and I have a few kegs now so I've been making mead and wine and aging those in casks. I'm also trying to befriend the dwarf. We are very close to being done with the bundles, just need a couple of apples and the rabbit's foot, I think? We might be done with the apples.

We got a green rain that fucked up most of my trees, so I'm waiting for those to regrow, but that's going alright.

And after we stopped playing I just watched some youtube and nebula videos for a while before doing all of the above posts.

Alright. Now, actually, sleep.

[Fetian]

We were going to watch more Interview with a Vampire tonight but it got removed from Shudder apparently and I guess it's just on AMC+? Which we do not have and won't be getting so we're looking into, cough cough, other means of access for that. In the meantime we figured out roughly where we left on on Farscape and watched an episode of that -- it's been so long that Amazon doesn't remember where we left off, and we don't remember where we left off, and I've been putting off trying to figure that out so it's just been going on longer and getting harder to remember. But we jumped in, and it was a good episode and it was fun times.

Got advice from Erika on RE2 playthrough and we're gonna try playing Leon's route on the original. We will see if I am able to manage the tank controls! It was recommended to check out a speedrun (or commentaryless playthrough) for the other route but I may just go ahead and play it on the remake (after a break) if we think it'll be worth it.

A few days ago I broke the crank wand for my roll-up sun shade, which is super inconvenient, but the replacement arrived today. An issue is that the replacement is metal, where the original was plastic, and I want to try swapping the actual hooks so that the new one is still plastic. I don't want the loop the hook hooks to to break, and that is also plastic and would be impossible to replace if it broke (ash will probably remember what a nightmare getting that installed was -- it is not coming back off). Unfortunately that'll take some finangling -- the new one, the hook is just attached via a screw but the plastic one is I think glued on, so I'll need to figure out a way to remove it and then figure out a way to attach it to the pole. I wonder if just covering it in foam would soften it enough to not potentially damage the ring. I dunno, the physics of all this are a little beyond me, I just don't want the stress to end up snapping the ring in half.

Also arrived: ash got me the Steven Universe series soundtrack on vinyl! It's very nice, and I just listened through it and then listened to the movie soundtrack on youtube because it feels incomplete to not have both. They do make a vinyl of the movie's soundtrack, so when I have money I'll have to get that, too. Steven Universe has very good music, and actually a couple of years ago I was complaining about how hard it is to find playlists of Steven Universe songs that didn't include all the, like, incidental background music and was just the actual characters singing songs, the latter of which this soundtrack is, so that's nice. I also do think it is actually all of the music, which is also nice because LPs often have to pick and choose what goes on the album, because there's much less space to work with than on CDs (or digital albums, of course). I believe my Over the Garden Wall album is missing some, for example. Unfortunately another downside to vinyl is that you get, like, five songs on a side which means you're getting up every twenty minutes to flip or change out the disk, and that means it doesn't make super great zoning-out-to music, or writing/art/whatever music. Genuinely don't know how people used to get high and listen to these, except by having super fancy players that would handle switching things around for you.

I was up very late this morning and ended up with like six hours of sleep, or something, so tonight I will once again be trying to go to sleep at a reasonable hour. It's a good week for it, I think -- the weather isn't supposed to be too unbearable and maybe I can get some stuff done like grocery shopping and such. I did get my transit pass from the college, so I can travel around the city for free again. I also should get back on gardening regularly, and it'd be nice to use the pool.

Class starts in about twenty days! I'm nervous about it and what I'll be expected to already know but I'm sure it'll be fine. I don't think I mentioned but there was some talk about the summer semester in the group chat and at least one other student, the one other student who also regularly participated in the zoom meetings, is also scheduled to take the fall class that I'm taking! At once I'm like, ugh people who know me, but also that's at least one student who isn't going to be terrible! Like I've said I am optimistic that this class will have more people in it who actually want to be there, though, so hopefully it goes well. I am also nervous about my auditory processing being an issue, because I believe the teacher is going to have an accent, but hopefully it won't be too difficult for me to get used to it if so.

Alright, gonna eat some more dinner and watch some youtube, then I'll do my nightly textbook review (that has not actually been happening nightly, but I've been keeping on track with it anyway)