Sparkly told me what ey wants for holiday gifts. This raises some difficult questions:
(current candidates include: wool socks from Sock Dreams, kitchen gadgets (we need a whisk. and more spoons.), work clothes, a scarf, an amazon gift card for ebooks)
I thought I had turned off the “related posts” function, but… when I actually look at a post (what a novel idea, I know) it’s still there.
So this is still an accurate and relevant idea!
Sometimes I can tell from my activity notifications that people are clicking through to the “related posts”, not because the notifications specifically say that, but because I get several notifications in a row for posts that are maybe sort of vaguely related, but not actually tagged the same or chronologically near each other.
And usually then I think to myself, “Why does WordPress think that is related to this?” and feel all weird about it advertising my less-impressive posts like that.
I’m not going to get into this with this dude on Facebook but jeez.
“People said gross sexist things about Michelle Obama too” is not a justification for saying gross sexist things about Melania Trump.
You don’t have to care about Melania’s feelings. You don’t have to think she’s a good person, or consider what kind of treatment she “deserves” or what’s “fair”.
The issue is, when you judge one woman for having posed for nude photos, how does that judgment blow back against every other woman who has ever taken a sexy photo?
Do you want people to think that having taken nude photos is a shameful, gross, judge-able thing?
Do you want to implicitly support the sexism that says that women’s ~sexual purity~ is the most important thing about them, and that treats women doing anything sexual at all, and men being accused of sexual assault, as equally bad “sex scandals”?
Do you really want to do that, in the name of gross petty “but they started it!” revenge?
My opinion of the first one so far: not entirely my usual thing, but funny in a nice deadpan/sarcastic way, and funny enough to make up for the more negative/creepy aspects. I’m looking forward to reading the rest. Also it makes at least a token effort to show what the characters’ motivations are for doing unwise things. (Earlier I was reading something that did not do this, and it really bugged me.)
I gave em a recommendation in return, and I think ey’ll like it, but ??? who knows?
I always tell people that the area where I grew up wasn’t Really rural (and really, it wasn’t), but then I see things like what I saw earlier today, where people are like Did You Know? There are places in the United States that don’t have Critical Infrastructure like municipal water and sewer systems!
Yes, there are places like that in the United States, and I grew up in one of them, and it’s not a scary thing?
Because this is the United States, and “infrastructure” and “access to technology” encompass more than just stuff built by the government, people who live in places without municipal water systems have wells with electric pumps, and septic tanks, and companies with vacuum trucks that come empty the septic tanks, and companies that test their water for pollution, etc. etc. etc.
There are people in rural areas who can’t afford those things, but there are also people in urban areas who can’t afford to pay their water bills, or to pay a plumber when something goes wrong with their pipes, and to me that doesn’t seem so very different, but idk.
Most of the time, when I see people talking about executive function problems in the form of autopilot/habit fail, it’s things like “I put sugar on my toast and butter in my tea instead of the other way around,” or “I started putting my shoes on to go out the door but I hadn’t put my pants on yet,” things like that.
My most common and most annoying autopilot fail is clicking the wrong button on the computer. Examples:
The worst is when I do something wrong and then have to wait an interminably long time for the wrong thing to start up or load before I can get to what I actually wanted to do.
My throat hurts and I’m hoping it’s a heartburn thing because I just had a cold not that long ago and I’m really not looking forward to having another one.
Tumblr changed something and now the Tumblr mobile app is pretty significantly broken for me (I have an old-ish iPod Touch that can’t do iOS 7.) Trying to load the next page of the dashboard just reloads the page I’m on. Well, it’ll encourage me to get out of bed earlier in the morning instead of staying in “look at stuff on the iPod until my eyes will stay open” mode.
I’m re-reading A Wrinkle in Time and the rest of the “Time Quartet”, which I haven’t done since I was… young, I’m not sure, maybe 12 or 13? They’re simultaneously very familiar and weirdly different. Much more C. S. Lewis-y (by which I mean explicitly Christian instead of just vaguely religious/supernatural) than I remembered.
It’s possible for a book to be all High Fantasy-ish, Good vs Evil, without being so Christian, isn’t it? Or was I just oblivious when I was younger? Most/all of the fantasy I read nowadays is trying to subvert or avoid that idea, to the point that it no longer feels like a subversion, I’m just used to there not being straightforwardly separate Forces of Good/Evil.
I’m also working on a post about the ways in which Charles Wallace (one of the main characters) is arguably sort of “coded” as autistic? Like, he’s a Child Genius in a pretty trope-y way, but apart from things that fit into that, like having a high IQ and talking with adult vocabulary and grammar, he also canonically had a speech delay. He didn’t start talking until he was four years old. Anyway, it’s an interesting thing and I’m going to try to say something coherent about it.
Re-reading these books as an adult also raises the rather obvious point that… My mother said to me, when I was little, that she got me these books in particular because I have the same first name as the author. Realistically that should’ve been like #10 down the list of reasons, after about a dozen ways I am/was similar to the main character. I wonder how much of that she was thinking about.
It’s late and life stuff has happened so here’s a random idea that I vaguely intended to write about ages ago but didn’t. Can we all agree that there’s no such thing as an objective, comprehensive standard for ranking the quality of books? Like, there’s no such thing as an objectively good book.
There are a few things that are, arguably, universal standards, but what makes them universal is that they’re a really damn low bar. Like, consistent spelling and grammar. Beyond that, there’s a slightly larger group of things that most people would agree are probably important, but exactly how important any one of them is, is a matter of personal preference.
Like… I tend to enjoy characters with idiosyncratic ways of speaking. “Characters should have unique, memorable voices” is a good general principle, but the line between “unique and memorable” versus “weird and distracting” is entirely subjective. I know that lots of people think characters that I personally like are too distractingly weird, and I don’t think they’re incorrect on the one hand, or that my enjoyment of those characters is indulging a guilty pleasure with objectively bad writing, on the other hand. It’s just a different preference.
Some Open Space 