ELSEWHERE

Thinking once again about the time Swing got Concerned at me because I was drinking about a shot of whiskey a day

Gonna try a different pillow tonight and see if that does my neck any better

Not really working out, but is that because of the pillow, the pain, or the cold, who can say

Pulled out some extra blankets, maybe that'll help my agonies

Also checked the choir's meetup page and it's just gone. And still no emails from anyone about it, so it really seems like it's dead. I think if Rich actually intended for it to keep going he would have (should have) said something about it, instead of just quietly killing it. Tempted to shoot off an email asking what's going on, but I won't.

I need to call in Oz's prescription, set myself up with monthly covid tests, call the debt collector people, and fill out the social security form. To my credit, I've been trying to do that last on the website but it predictably hasn't been working

I also didn't manage to do any laundry this week, which is annoying. I'm going to need to steal the washer some night to do it before wednesday

This week got away from me. Season change, among other things. May next week be better.

If you point me at your laundry I can throw that in Sunday. I need to finish ours anyway because I got behind.

Sims mod that requires electronics be placed near an outlet to function; outlets are placed randomly throughout the house on game start and cannot be moved. Extension cords are available for sale but they lower room quality and are a fire hazard

Went hunting down Cats Don't Dance to show Lee later, and it's bizarrely difficult to find? It's available for rent, of course, so it's not completely wiped from the internet, but it's not streaming anywhere and there's no results for it on torrent sites -- not 'there are dead torrents', there are no torrents. I did find a couple dead ones through DHT crawlers, and one (1) torrent that's actually working. And then when I went to get subs for it there weren't any results on the usual sub sites, either

Extremely weird. I'd thought it was pretty popular but I guess maybe its cult following is smaller than I thought?

 
Back/shoulder/neck/whatever is still ow. Gonna lay down for a while until dinner's got

And in that moment I swear we were all Johann

In terms of "problematic media", I don't think there's enough focus on how heartbreaking it is for something to help raise you, or shape you, or your worldview, or how you think, and then to grow up and discover that the creator of that thing would want you dead

Like yeah, people who grew up reading Harry Potter, for whom something in Harry Potter is a part of them, and then they turn out to be trans and JKR turns out to be a TERF. People who grew up reading Ender's Game, approach problems the way they do because of it, and turn out to be gay and Orson Scott Card turns out to be a homophobe. People who grew up reading Charlie & The Chocolate Factory, are jewish, and learn that Roald Dahl was an antisemite.

I don't know what could be done about it. I don't think there's a way to outright avoid it, even if that were a correct thing to try to do. But I think it should get talked about more, maybe -- create support groups (or whatever) in which it's okay to talk about, yes I got value out of this and yes it is a part of me now, I wouldn't be the person I am without having read that or watched that or listened to that. And that's okay, even though the person who made it is awful and I want to divorce myself from them and want both to never support them monetarily and to somehow retroactively take back the support I already gave them.

I don't know! I just have thoughts. Ender's Game was hugely influential and I don't know what to do with that. I can't remove it from myself and I don't really want to, but I don't want either to appear to support Card or his views, nor for people to recognise that those parts of me came in some way from him. There's a kind of shame to it, where I might have pride or something like it when people recognise the parts of me that came from a different author.

Certainly none of these good, influential things are unique to any of these authors. I could have picked up whatever I got from Ender's Game from something else, probably. But I didn't, and there's no way for me to have predicted, as a 14-year-old checking a book out of the library, that that book would have the effect it had, that I would feel the way I do about it now as a 35-year-old. There's no way for me to send the message back to teenage-me to read this other book instead, that will somehow have the same effect without being from a problematic voice.

Death of the Author and all, but it's a different kind of feeling when we're not just talking about disagreeing with the author's intent, but knowing that the author in some way despises you and who you are.

Obviously part of the solution is to be real loud about the shitty opinions famous people have, so that gay kids just don't pick up Ender's Game without already knowing how the author feels; so trans kids don't just pick up Harry Potter; so jewish kids don't just pick up Roald Dahl. Etc etc.

Content warnings. The book may or may not be good but the author's a shit and you should know that going in.