we got new desk chairs at work and they are COM. FY. my back feels so supported.
My heart of silk
is filled with lights,
with lost bells,
with lilies and bees.
I will go very far,
farther than those hills,
farther than the seas,
close to the stars
--Federico García Lorca, from "Ballad of the Small Plaza"
It turned out to be a very small event with only about 50 people. They had a sort of silly skit and some speakers about how private jets were killing the environment (they are), and then we had a little die-in, for only 5 minutes. The whole thing was over in about an hour, so I just took an earlier train home. There seemed to be more people taking videos and stuff than there were attendees. I guess they just didn't really advertise it very well.
I hadn't known whether it was going to be a real protest or not, so I brought a "Hands Off" sign that was relevant to the environment. When I got there, nobody else had signs, but I was randomly chatting with the other attendees and they encouraged me to get it out. A few more people with signs did show up later.
Their next thing is on Saturday, marching to the state house. Maybe there will be more people there.
https://xrboston.org/action/2025-earth-day/
Teen Titans Go! "Teen Titans And The Easter Factory" Review (Spoilers)
Apr. 22nd, 2025 11:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
matt_zimmersecond, pete hegseth was caught sharing classified military information in yet another signal chat, this time with his wife and his brother (among other people). because he is a dumbass who has no idea how to do his job. and! kristi noem, the head of homeland security, had her purse stolen at a restaurant - very secure there, ms noem - and said purse had inside it such things as her apartment keys (makes sense), her makeup bag (also makes sense), her passport (could conceivably make sense), and, er, $3000. in cash. which seems like the kind of money you carry around if you want to make a big purchase that you don't want anyone to be able to track. my question is: how did someone get close enough to her purse to steal it? she has secret service with her. we really are living in the stupidest timeline, seriously.
in happier news, i had today off on account of patriots day, which is marathon monday and also celebrates the battle of lexington which kicked off the revolutionary war. (reenactors gather on lexington green at ass o'clock in the morning to reenact the battle which i think is both really cool and kinda nuts.) the only states that celebrate are mass and maine. and it was mostly a nice day, even! i got a late start (partly because
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
tamalinn called me before i could bestir myself out of the house, and then i had to tell her about sinners and try to figure out what besides black panther michael b jordan was in that she might have seen) and went to the diesel and had breakfast for lunch and wrote a bunch, most of it for a random thing that i don't know what to do with. i had to exorcise a scene out of my head, i guess. but it was productive! which is always good.Yesterday it was still January and I drove home
and the roads were wet and the fields were wet
and a palette knife
had spread a slab of dark blue forestry across the hill.
A splashed white van appeared from a side road
then turned off and I drove on into the drab morning
which was mudded and plain and there was a kind of weary happiness
that nothing was trying to be anything much and nothing
was being suggested. I don’t know how else to explain
the calm of this grey wetness with hardly a glimmer of light or life,
only my car tyres swishing the lying water,
and the crows balanced and rocking on the windy lines.
--Kerry Hardie, "Acceptance"
But then I didn’t keep up with the Nyquil when I got home, and the “meh” feeling just kept dragging on endlessly. I think I finally kicked it this weekend. Or at least I finally got caught up enough on my sleep that I don’t feel like Dead Woman Walking anymore.
I had vaguely considered attending one of the No King protests on Saturday. But I hadn’t had time to track down any poster board or cardboard to make a sign. And hadn’t figured out where I wanted to go. Adding in the fact that it was the 250th anniversary of Lexington and Concord meant that traffic was going to be insane everywhere. As it turns out, I didn’t set the alarm and ended up sleeping almost until noon. Yeah, I needed that. The closest local protest was from 11:00 - 1:00, and I certainly wasn’t ready to bounce out of bed and hustle over there. I wanted a slow morning. So I was slothful and spent the day reading and just generally doing nothing all day.
It was just what I needed.
Sunday I set the alarm for 8:00 and was up around 8:30, feeling decently rested. But not super motivated. I spent the day alternating reading and some slow housework. After I finished my book (I’m re-reading the Bruno Chief of Police series, turns out I was several books behind and I’m finally getting into the new ones I haven’t read yet) then I finished reading the new cookbook I bought. Facebook has been showing me various comedians on Reels, and I’ve clicked on Matteo Lane enough times to stumble across the fact that he’s written a cookbook, Your Pasta Sucks. He’s an Italian/Irish/Mexican comic, who, if you can’t tell by the cover, is also a gay man. He’s spent quite a bit of time in Italy, so I was curious about his take on Italian cooking. Plus, he’s sassy as hell. It was a fun read. I need to finish up some of my stock of pasta and sauce before I can try any of the recipes, but I’m looking forward to trying them. Once I finished reading that, I started trying to get caught up on Dreamwidth. I am So. Far. Behind. Like a month behind. But since my friends list is relatively small, I’m trying to make sure to go back and read everything I’ve missed.
In the afternoon a bunch of family traipsed into the condo to visit the next door neighbors. They’re the ones where the father is losing his hearing and uses his outdoor voice indoors. And apparently the grandchild that he likes to tease was visiting, there was lots of noise making from grandpa and that resulted in loud shrieking from said grandkinder. I really hate when I have to wear earplugs in my own home in order to enjoy a quiet holiday. GRRRRRR.
Someday I will own a house, with space between me and my neighbors. At least that’s the dream.
Amongst the excited buzz about the new Tomodachi Life game, there was something some folks in the main Discord server I hang out in said that caught my attention in particular — one of their hopes for the next game was a button during Mii creation that would opt them out of other Miis trying to date them, for the benefit of aromantic people who want to play the game. The “aro button”, they called it. It’s something that I couldn’t stop rolling around in my brain over the next week or so, especially as I finally put my modded 3DS to good use and started playing Tomodachi Life myself for the first time. Something didn’t quite sit right with me about it, and I couldn’t figure out what.
So after thinking about it for a while, my working reason for my hesitation is this: Tomodachi Life can’t be made aro-friendly just by putting a checkbox that says “opt out of romance” because the aro-hostility in that game comes from its core progression line of “friends → dating → marriage → kids” that the Miis have.
(Disclaimer: I don’t think that was the intention of the “aro button” comment; this was just something that surfaced in my brain while ruminating on it. Incredibly scattered thoughts inbound, haha.)
Two comparison points that come to mind are the Sims 4 and dating sims in general. On one hand, the Sims 4 is a large game with so many things for you/your sims to do that if you decide “this Sim won’t get married” or “this Sim won't date” then there’s still plenty of gameplay left to partake in. And I know that relatively recently the Sims 4 put their own toggle into their Create-a-Sim process where you can determine who your Sim is sexually/romantically attracted to, if anyone, for autonomous flirting reasons and the like. And by toggle, I mean like whole entire submenus. A befitting amount of detail, I suppose, for a game like The Sims.
On the other hand, you have dating sims, where in order to make them aro-friendly you’d have to do things like have romantic and platonic variants for all routes that don’t impact which ending you get besides the obvious (The Good People (Na Daoine Maithe)) or give the player the ability to chose what kind of relationship they get to have with the person whose route they’re on as part of the route itself (The Office Type) or you can do what I Just Want To Be Single is doing and just completely flip the concept on its side by having the goal be friendship while making romance the fail state that the tropes inherent to the dating sim genre are trying to push you towards. Either way, this is the sort of thing that clearly starts in the writing room.
But regarding the core progression of Tomodachi Life, if you just say, “I’m gonna opt out/opt certain Miis out of the romance”, then you’re losing out on at least the extra money and the extra boost to the Mii’s happiness level, which are the two main resources in the game, and then half the Mii’s progression is also nuked from orbit. Especially if you’re like, “I’m gonna do an all aro island!”;Then you’re not gonna get to play a solid chunk of the game because you’re gonna get up to the dating part and then...that would be it, yeah?It’s like that one Spongebob meme, with Squidward staring out the window while everyone else is running around having fun outside. Not quite the inclusion that you’d want it to be, that’s for sure.
Anyway, one of the reasons I was thinking about all this so much was because it all reminds me of discussions surrounding Soulmate AUs, where someone makes their AU and then an aro person goes “hey, this is kinda aro hostile” and then the AU maker is like “no-no-no-no-no, I put – you can have no soulmates, sometimes! 😊” which is like. OK. By the way what’s it actually like, to navigate your world without a soulmate?
- Are you pitied for not having a soulmate? Are you derided, especially the longer you go on not having one?
- If the AU is of the soulmark variety: are the platonic soulmarks distributed among both romantic soulmark havers and non-havers? Are they given the same weight as romantic soulmarks by society? Are just the “aros” getting the platonic soulmarks, as a substitute for not having romantic ones?
- If someone decides they don’t want their soulmate because they’re repulsed or had a bad experience or whatever, and they leave, how is that treated?
- How is it treated when someone with a romantic soulmark and someone without a romantic soulmark couple up; is the “allo” person excessively wringing their hands and crises about how they’ll never know if the other person truly loves them because theirs no soulmark, blah, blah, blah…
There are a lot of questions to ask for true aro-inclusion, I find, and these questions make hearing “oh make it aro-friendly! Aro option!” not sit right. That’s why hearing “oh make it aro-friendly! Aro option!” doesn’t feel right, because it feels like that. It feels like a silly little bandaid on a stab wound where it's like no we have to go in there, and clean it out, and wrap it properly, and take care of it.
But at the same time, coming up with proper solutions that can be applied “in post”, so to speak, is rather difficult! Case in point, my first draft ideas are
- A toggle that swaps between “romance-focused” and “Career focused” options, paired with fleshing out a career track in game beyond the existing “part-time job”; and then promotions or being written up at work or what have you have the same happiness/money fluctuation as dating/marriage
- Putting a limit on how many people your Mii can befriend, and make it so that being in a romantic relationship takes up, say, 3 extra slots than otherwise, as a trade-off.
Which, like, both these ideas fall very much into the stereotypes of having a character who doesn’t experience romantic attraction “replace” it with a) a) being a career minded individual, or b) being a hyper-empathetic Best Friend To All. But that feels more like we’ve wrapped the wound in a thin layer of gauze, instead of just slapping on a band-aid and leaving, lmao. Or at least I think so.
What it comes down to, is, similar to the dating sims I mentioned earlier, good aro-inclusion’s gotta come from the ground up. So the devs would have to reshape the core progression of the game. And they’re probably not going to do that because that’s kind of ridiculous. Although there are rumors that they’ll let the Miis be gay. Perhaps that’s the opportunity to seize? My immediate first thought of how they’d do that is to “abolish gender” from the Miis entirely, which isn’t that great of a springboard for the aro thing, but we’ll see. And besides, would they make a change that impacts the game so little? What functional difference is there, between setting a toggle to “no romance” upon a Mii’s creation vs. simply dissuading every Mii that is developing feelings for or wants to confess to your aro Mii repeatedly? Miis don’t pair up like that without the player’s express permission, after all, so that default value isn’t getting much use on its own. But that’s me being super pessimistic, I know! XD
So all this rambling and all these tangents just to say: Tomodachi Life is a very aro-unfriendly game, beyond the fact that Miis can persistently ask to date characters you envision as aromantic in your personal island lore. As in, the game’s core structure is completely and stifilingly amatonormative. And unless you change that structure, you’re not gonna make an aro-friendly game. And that’s fine! It doesn’t have to be aro-friendly! But if they add that Aro Button, I don’t want people going, “Yay, hurray, we did it! Aro inclusion!”, wiping the activist dust off their hands, and fucking off into the sunset. And similarly, if you are actively nursing hopes that Tomodachi Life will be more aro-inclusive, well, we’re already in an imagination-speculation space, aren’t we? Think bigger. You can do it. I believe in you.
Anyway I wanted to list all the fics-per-month I've written, hehe. For months where I wrote more than one fic I'll just pick my favorite!
( Here are the fics! )
So that's 12 fics plus 10 extras! Looking forward to writing less next year, maybe. I have a bunch of other hobbies I'd like to catch up on, like my video game backlog or my Neocities site or even seeing if my melodica is still viable to play after sitting in its case unused for almost 5 years, haha (I should probably buy a new one)
In this YA novel published in 1990, six fourteen-year-olds face their inner dragons while they're in an accelerated academic program which includes a class on Beowulf.
I read this when it first came out, so when I saw a copy at a library book sale, I grabbed it to re-read. It largely holds up, though I'd completely forgotten the main plot and only recalled the theme and the subplot.
My recollection of the book was that the six teenagers are inspired by class discussions on Beowulf to face their personal fears. This is correct. I also recalled that one of the girls was a gymnast with an eating disorder and one of the boys was an athlete partially paralyzed in an accident, and those two bonded over their love of sports and current conflicted/damaging relationship to sports and their bodies, and ended up dating. This is also correct.
What I'd completely forgotten was the main plot, which was about the narrator, Eric, who idolized his best friend, Paul, and had an idealized crush on one of the girls in the class, who he was correctly convinced had a crush on Paul, and incorrectly convinced Paul was mutually attracted to. Paul, who is charming and outgoing, convinces Eric, who is shy, to do a speech class with him, where Eric surprisingly excels. The main plot is about the Eric/Paul relationship, how Eric's jealousy nearly wrecks it, and how the boys both end up facing their dragons and fixing their friendship.
Paul's dragon is that he's secretly gay. The speech teacher takes a dislike to him, promotes Eric to the debate team when Paul deserves it more (and tells Eric this in private), and finally tries to destroy Paul in front of the whole class by accusing him of being gay! Eric defends Paul, Paul confesses his secret to him, and the boys repair their friendship.
While a bit dated/historical, especially in terms of both boys knowing literally nothing about what being gay actually means in terms of living your life, it's a very nicely done novel with lots of good character sketches. The teachers are all real characters, as are the six kids - all of whom have their own journeys. The crush object, for instance, is a pretty rich girl who's been crammed into a narrow box of traditional femininity, and her journey is to destroy the idealized image that Eric is in love with and her parents have imposed on her - and part of Eric's journey is to accept the role of being her supportive friend who helps her do it.
I was surprised and pleased to discover that this and other Sweeney books are currently available as ebooks. I will check some out.
Something about our pond/wetlands area causes the north side of our house to get very green.
And they got the spot that the last people missed.
( before and after )
1.
Here's one that is quite worth your time. Historian Heather Cox Richardson gave a talk on the 18th of April in the Old North Church – the very building where the two lanterns of legend were hung. It's an absolutely fantastic account of the events leading up to April 19, 1775 – a marvel of concision, coherence, and clarity – that I think helps really see them anew.
You can read it at her blog if you prefer, but I strongly recommend listening to her tell you this story in her voice, standing on the site.
2025 April 18: Heather Cox Richardson [YT]: Heather Cox Richardson Speech - 250 Year Lantern Anniversary - Old North Church (28 minutes):
( More within )
and then i came home and read some more and made dinner (as passover is now over i can eat bread but instead i had, uh, matzo brei which is basically scrambed eggs with farfel) (ok and also a red bean bread i got at h-mart) (i was going to go out for dinner with my sister but did i mention it's easter? and almost everything is closed) and watched an episode of andor s1 with the confab discord in preparation for s2 which starts on TUESDAY. we haven't caught up yet. if you haven't seen andor i highly recommend it. it's kind of harsh but really well done and diego luna is exceptionally cute. also it has stellan skarsgard and he's always worth watching.
On the edge of another blue world
the lake looms like salvation. Over
coffee, my mom and tía speak excitedly
about the vibrant villages along the shore,
how you can only get there by boat
across the lake’s beautiful depths, how
the volcanos stand piously over the water,
how each village is named for one of the twelve
apostles. I ask, with complete sincerity,
if that means one is named for Judas.
The waitress brings our food. My mom
and tía eat slowly with side-eyes and silence.
--Ariel Francisco, "On the Shore of Lake Atitlán, Apparently I Ruined Breakfast"
This entry is not counting children's books, since I talked about those separately.
It took me longer than expected to read Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett, but that happens sometimes, and it spanned the Brain Be Weird part of the month where I was badly crashed out. I quite liked it, obviously. Here's what I wrote on Weds when I finished it:
Okay yeah, Feet of Clay was *really* good. I like the gender part --"we've got extra pronouns here", _be still my heart_ and I really fucking like the golems. And I lovehate Vetrinari so very much, he is such a beautifully sympathetic antagonist. If Vimes ever figures out how much he's been played...actually, I think Vimes would sulk for a bit and then be okay with it.
And then there's Dorfl, and Oh Man. The part of mybrainheart that loves community and solidarity and the inherent worth of all and trying to make things better for everyone is Very Aware Of How Good This Feels.
I'm obviously going to keep reading, but one of the unexpected things I really like is that I've read three watch books now and each of them is a fully complete story. No cliffhangers! Like, there's obviously more things that _could_ happen, but they feel like opportunities, not like frustrations. It's an astonishing feature of writing, and something I hadn't realized I'd been missing by some of the other fantasy I've read. I love Seanan, for instance, but you read enough Toby books and you know there's unfinished story that hasn't been resolved and it'll nag at you. Which is fine! The story she is telling is a longer one that takes a lot of books to get through! But it's still refreshing to know that I could never read another Discworld book and still feel like I've reached a satisfying end.
After, I dove into Richard Osman's We Solve Murders on a day in which I was going on slow meandery errands that involved lots of hanging out outside in the _almost_ bearable weather. Read from start to finish in about three and a half hours, nearly continuous, and you know? It was real nice to have a book that was both fluffy enough and captivating enough to do so. Osman writes incredibly human characters, with fairly clear good-vs-evil descriptors, and it's pretty fun to find out what they're up to.
On Thursday I read a couple of short works, the first of which was an 1884 Evangelical screed entitled There is no harm in dancing (a title, I want to be clear, that should be read extremely sarcastically). It's about thirty pages explaining how dancing is The Worst Sin That Ever Was and especially being simultaneously victim-blaming and slut-shaming about All Those Horrible Women That Do It And Corrupt Men, and then we get to the crown-jewel part, which says something like "most if not all of these sins can be found at every dance" and precedes to list about thirty sins, a great many of which I have never once seen because I am clearly not going to exciting enough dances. For instance, not once have I been on a dance floor that features "assassination", or "infanticide" although I have to admit, of late "sedition" has been appearing in most of my social experiences. Anyways, it turns out that if you're gonna hate-read something, choose something that's like a century and a half old, it's *way* funnier. And I wish I knew how to cross-stitch so I could make a proper art piece out of that last bit.
I followed it up with the Simple Sabotage Manual, which is neat because a lot of the specifics they offer are out of date, but the concepts feel real clear and lovely. I shouldn't say more about this one.
Thursday afternoon I stumbled into a copy of Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine, which I haven't read in ages, so I grabbed it. It's still a pretty fun book! It is more of a love story than I remember, I think I think of it as "Ella becoming a whole adult" but it really is "falling in love with Char" as the central premise. It's sweet though, it's a damn good romance, and I like all the worldbuilding quite a bit.
Currently Reading:
I have cracked spine on Wyrd Sisters (metaphorically, all my Pratchett is in e-form) but literally only read about three pages. So I'll get to that all in a rush soon.
I don't know if I have properly mentioned, in part because I really don't know how to mark it on my spreadsheet: I have gotten pretty entangled in The SCP Foundation of late, which is several million words of collaborative semi-horror. It just _keeps going_ is what I am finding. It's serving as a nice thing to read when I don't feel like playing video games.
Reading Next
SamSam has never heard of Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, and I'm visiting them soon, so that's going to get read aloud I suspect, at least a few chapters worth.
I have the next Vorkosigan book, so I really ought to do that. Also I downloaded like...fifty? eighty! Eighty things from Project Gutenburg. This is how I got the short stuff I mentioned above, but there's Oz and the coloured faerie books, and the complete Poe, and Man of La Mancha, and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and all sorts of stuff.
And Dracula Daily starts in two weeks. Every year I've managed to get a little farther, but this'll be my third year trying it out. Let's see if I can finish the novel this time around!
~Sor
MOOP!