Current Music: Deus King: Why

Entry tags:

Temporarily Protected and other statuses

On Mastodon they have various hashtags with various writing-related questions, and today, a question on one of the hashtags was "On a scale of from 1 to 10, how safe is your world?" (by which they meant the world of your writing project).

Several people pointed out that you can't really average out safety over a whole world, and still more people pointed out that safety is always going to be a matter of "for whom?" No matter what genre you're writing, if you have multiple characters, they can't all have the same level of safety. A bacterium is a different level of threat depending on the strength of your immune system; oppressive politics always have a favored exempted few, etc.

And I had to laugh at our current age's fascination with quantification. On a scale of 1 to 10, sure.

My tutee has a green card. This makes her situation a lot safer than that of the dozen new employees I was in the company of the other day who were from Haiti. They all have a card showing temporary protected status. ... We know how secure that status is ... But for the time being at least, it makes them safer than people with no legal status at all.

I love what people do with the power of imagination: we create all sorts of things; we can create elaborate shared worlds called things like "the economy" or "nation-states." We joint-roleplay these so intensely that it becomes our reality. It's like a picture book I remember from childhood called Conrad's Castle, where a boy throws a stone up in the air and it sticks there, and then another and another, and soon he builds a whole castle up there. It all falls down when a hater says "Hey, you can't do that!" ... But then he says "I can too," and rebuilds it.

The larger shared worlds we imagine, like the various nation-states or the rule of law, or principles of humanitarianism--they can fall down just like Conrad's castle, and suddenly your status changes. We know this. We're seeing it all the time. For the shared worlds we want to flourish, we have to keep saying "I can too." As for the ones we don't like so much, we can maybe take out the stones one by one to build something we prefer.

Entry tags:

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005)

This novel is structured as a woman's reminiscences of her life, beginning in the 1990s at an elite boarding school she attended in England. The students are told that they are special and important, and that it is an extreme privilege to attend this school, but they aren't given a clear understanding of why this is or what makes the school so different from others. Throughout the first few chapters, it becomes increasingly apparent that something strange and ominous is going on. The students have close friendships with each other, but nobody ever mentions family or going home for holidays. The teachers are cagey about the nature of the situation, and some seem distressed by it, as if their hands are tied.

What is really going on is stated outright a quarter of the way into the book. The rest of the book is spent exploring that premise and looking at how the characters are shaped by and respond to their circumstances. I don't know whether the author intended to present the premise as a secret or not, but the book has been marketed as though it's a secret, and whether it's a spoiler is subjective. (Thank you all for your input on the poll!)

The premise and my thoughts on treating it as a spoiler

The premise is that the students are clones who are being raised to serve as organ donors. They have limited rights compared to non-clones, and the expectation is that they will die from having their organs harvested sometime in young adulthood.

I knew the premise going in because I saw it discussed years ago, and I suspect it wouldn't be that hard to figure it out even before it's made explicit. But I'm sure it also depends on what your expectations are going into the book, if you're looking for a "twist" and how broad you think the scope of possible twists is. Personally, I think it does the book a disservice to coyly market it as literary fiction, if that's the reason the premise has been treated as a secret. For people who like both litfic and specfic equally maybe it's fine, but that's not everyone, so you're asking for people who only want litfic to be annoyed by the bait-and-switch, and for some proportion of people who would like the book to never pick it up because they think it's not for them (or to be aggravated by the implication that we're not calling it specfic because it's "serious literature" instead). I knew it was speculative fiction and I enjoyed it as speculative fiction, and I think dancing around the genre is unnecessary. So that's where I sit with it.

My thoughts which assume you know the premise but don't necessarily assume you've read the book

Anyway! I really liked the book! Based on the three Ishiguro books I have now read, (this, Klara and the Sun, and The Remains of the Day, I've come to appreciate his skill in writing characters who have a perspective on the world that could be considered "limited" in that the reader and the other characters understand things the POV characters don't, but it's very clear that their lived experience has validity and their inner emotional landscape is as rich as anyone's. No matter how small a person's world may look from the outside, to them it is everything.

Kathy and the other clones see things from a certain angle because of the way they've been raised and what they've been taught to believe. They don't automatically perceive the horror of their existence the way we do because they aren't us, they don't know what we know about how things ought to be. But within their own frame of reference, they live their lives and make choices according to their own understanding of who has authority and what the inevitable facts of life are. Their experiences, memories, feelings, insights, and relationships matter even if we can see how constrained they are by their circumstances. After all, we are also bounded by what we perceive as inevitable facts of life, and we also don't know whether we perceive that correctly.

I think the book reflects how we are socialized not to talk about (let alone question) uncomfortable societal truths. I was struck by Kathy's observation that as the students were growing up, the teachers drip-fed them bits of information that they were not quite old enough to understand. She realizes this may not even have been consciously planned, but it had the effect of making them feel they had "always known" what they were and the life that had been chosen for them, even though they had no specific memories of being told. I think this is a bullseye description of what it feels like to be socialized to accept injustice.

Children don't just learn from what is directly stated to them, they learn from what isn't said, from adults' discomfited grimaces, annoyed dismissals, vague contextless remarks, and awkward changes of subject. The school setting (which was a choice on the part of the characters, to structure the clones' residence as a school—it's not like these kids know what schools are really like in the outside world) to me drives this point home. The adults are trying to educate the students for reasons of their own that we learn later, but the primary lesson they're teaching isn't on the curriculum.

Some specific thoughts that reveal details from the end of the book

Once we got the full explanation of what the school really was, that they were trying to "prove" the clones had souls, I found it just as disturbing as the concept of organ donor clones in itself. Miss Emily's goal wasn't to prove the clones' humanity so they could be liberated and the hideous practice of organ harvest put to an end, it was to prove their humanity so they could be treated a little bit better before the slaughter.

The fact that she is able to tolerate this cognitive dissonance speaks volumes about what she has been indoctrinated to accept, and points to the modes of thought underpinning the broader dystopian world. This, for me, was the true horrifying reveal, and it's all the more horrifying because it is entirely mundane: The belief that a class of people is subhuman can withstand knowledge that disproves the belief, provided that abandoning the belief is inconvenient enough.

By the same token, Miss Emily's description of how public opinion turned against her ideas and led to the closure of Hailsham is so deeply unsettling because it is so familiar and plausible. A push for expanded rights for a marginalized group, even an incremental push, is a precarious thing that can be derailed by a poorly-timed scandal or a negative association, even if the connection is tenuous. As in our own world, many people's beliefs are not based on reason, on consistent principles, or even on a blunt assessment that saving some people justifies sacrificing others. They're based on how much of the truth you can convince yourself to dismiss. If you're looking for an excuse to discredit calls for justice, you'll always find one, and you'll find plenty of people happy to validate your conclusion.

Emily's story doesn't spell this out. As always, it's between the lines as she skips over assumed context that Kathy and Tommy don't share. And they're not even looking for justice, only a temporary reprieve from the fate they've already accepted. But they can't get that, not even when they ask nicely. (Does it ever work to ask nicely?)

My biggest takeaway from the book is how difficult it is to independently invent the idea of a just world when that concept has been denied to you. And how much harder when even the people who come the closest to being your allies don't actually want justice—they want injustice with the sharpest of its vulgar edges politely sanded off.

Current Mood: okay

Entry tags:

the sims #2: exiting the misery simulator

You ever have one of those days wherein you roll out of bed at three in the morning, bladder levels so in the red that you nearly piss yourself, so you stumble to the bathroom, nod off on the toilet, hygiene bar going down because you get some pee on your hands or whatever, then you compulsively wash your hands and brush your teeth as if some extradimensional being is just clicking away, commanding you to do things for some reason, then you realize your hunger bar is like non-existent, so you make yourself some breakfast in the kitchen, but for some reason the food has no taste at all, yet you force yourself to eat regardless, knowing that otherwise your hunger bar will just keep dropping, and of course you don’t want to starve on your first day at your new job as a Typesetter, which starts in ten minutes, so you speed-walk mindlessly to the bedroom to get dressed and that’s when you hear what sounds like someone just mercilessly holding down a car horn, so you look out the window and see Carpool John in his old busted-up 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air doing exactly that, mercilessly holding down the car horn, so you spin in place super fast like a tornado, which somehow sucks in all your work-appropriate clothes and magically applies them to your body, then you bolt out of the house, force the rusted Chevy door open, disappear into the passenger seat somehow, and say some dumb clichéd shit like, “another day, another dollar,” before holding on for dear life because Carpool John floors it, then the car vanishes down the road as if you just drove through some dark portal straight into Dante’s vision of Hell?

If any of this feels familiar, you might have more in common with a Sim from The Sims than you realize, because this is reality for little Forrest Unknown, or “FU” for short, who does this same routine on every day ending in the letter Y, which is each day of the week, or until I turn the game off.

I’m not sure what FU actually does at work, to be honest, because after the car disappears, time speeds up, hours pass, and suddenly he’s right back where he started, in front of his two-bedroom home, stepping out of that old busted-up 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air, extra $200 to his name, hunger bar totally drained, fun levels absolutely abysmal, so he goes inside, takes a piss, makes some lunch, plays video games on his PC for a few hours until his social bar is in the red, at which point he calls up Mortimer, whom he hates, invites him over, and Mortimer brings a friend, a little girl named Cassandra, and they overstay their welcome, sticking around all night, becoming so tired that they fall asleep in the living room, and Cassandra urinates all over the floor for some reason, so FU has to clean up the soppy piss puddle with a mop, which puts him in a bad mood and drains his energy bar, at which point he goes to bed, sleeps for like five hours before rolling out of bed at three in the morning, bladder levels so in the red that he makes a beeline to the bathroom where he nearly falls asleep on the toilet, thus getting pee on his hands, which makes his hygiene levels go down, so he washes his hands and brushes his teeth, at which point he realizes his hunger bar is like non-existent, so he makes himself some breakfast, scarfs it down even though it tastes like nothing, then he realizes he has to get to work in like ten minutes, so he speed-walks mindlessly to the bedroom, at which point he hears what sounds like someone just mercilessly holding down a car horn, so he looks outside and sees Carpool John in his old busted-up 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air doing exactly that, mercilessly holding down the car horn, so FU spins in place super fast like a tornado, which somehow sucks in all his work-appropriate clothes and magically applies them to his body, then he bolts out of the house, forces the rusted Chevy door open, disappears into the passenger seat somehow, and probably says some dumb clichéd shit like, “another day, another dollar,” before holding on for dear life because Carpool John floors it, vanishing down the road as if he just drove through some dark portal straight into Dante’s vision of Hell, and then time speeds up and FU is right back where he started, in front of his home, stepping out of that old busted-up 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air, extra $200 to his name, hunger bar totally drained, fun levels absolutely abysmal, so he goes inside, makes some lunch, plays some video games, and I think you get the point. It’s a never-ending struggle for little FU, like he’s stuck in some sort of heinous time loop, or a little something I like to call the fucking rat race that is modern first-world life.

It’s depressing, watching FU repeat his boring little mundane routine all in service to the almighty Simoleon dollar, just so he can keep himself alive and buy more electronics and stuff, which he then uses to distract himself from the existentially dreadful fact that, despite how much money he makes, he will always have to repeat boring little mundane routines in order to continue existing, as if the routines themselves only serve to facilitate distracting himself from those very same routines.

I will say, however, that little FU is moving up in the world. After just one week as a Typesetter, he got a promotion, he’s now a “Game Reviewer,” which the blue in-game text box describes as, quote, “the lowliest writing job you can get,” unquote, which I can’t help but agree with, having done the whole game reviewer thing myself for a time, the only job requirements being having passed third-grade English, and being of the smug belief that your subjective tastes are actually objective facts, and also being able to come up with some sort of cute point system wherein stars are replaced with, like, video game controllers or cans of Monster Energy Drink or sticks of extra-strength deodorant, all things hardcore gamers desperately need, which is to say that I hope little FU sees the error of his ways and grows out of this new job quickly, even though I do like to imagine that, on FU’s first day as a Game Reviewer, he maybe wrote a very meta review of the actual game that he himself exists in, which I like to imagine includes the following paragraph,

“Despite The Sims’ retro charm, zany humour, and addicting gameplay loops, there are no words to describe just how depressing it is to watch your little Sim guy repeat the same boring mundane everyday tasks that you yourself were doing right before you sat down at your PC to escape the very same boring mundane everyday tasks you were so desperate to avoid in the first place. Whether intentional on behalf of Maxis or not, The Sims remains one of the greatest Misery Simulators on the gaming market today. 10 out of 10 Lexapros.”

I’m not trying to be funny here. Well, maybe I am, a little bit. But I’m mostly trying to be serious. Because as I played The Sims, watching little Forrest Unknown going about his daily tasks, which were eerily similar to my own, I was overcome by something I can only describe as the nihilistic heebie-jeebies. I was starting to see myself acutely within FU. I was starting to think that my life was not dissimilar to a video game in which some disembodied megalomaniac is just clicking around commanding me to do things. I was starting to question the whole meaning of existence and all that stuff. And before you know it, I was fucking miserable. And I figured, you know what, I bet little Forrest Unknown is miserable too.

So I decided to put him out of his misery. I decided to kill him. I decided this would be symbolic, somehow.

What I did was, I directed little FU to go into the kitchen, then I went into build mode and removed all the doors so he couldn’t escape, then I placed a bunch of toasters and microwaves and stuff in there, then I removed the smoke detector so the fire department wouldn’t catch wind of what I was doing, and the whole time I was doing this there was some upbeat pop music playing from the stereo in the living room, the singer was babbling incoherently in Simlish, and this felt dichotomously significant for some reason, then, knowing that FU was a terrible cook, I commanded him to make lunch, hoping he would accidentally start a fire, so he goes over to the stove and starts making lunch, which, to my surprise, he prepares successfully without managing to start a fire, so I command him to place the food on the floor and try again, so he starts making lunch again, but he prepares it successfully again, so I command him to place the food on the floor again and make lunch again, but he prepares it successfully a third time, so I have him do it like ten more times, each time successful, but now there are like flies and stuff all over the kitchen, and he starts babbling incoherently about the mess, but I just keep going, I keep commanding him to make lunch, which eventually turns into dinner, which eventually turns into breakfast, on account of all the time that has passed, at which point the whole kitchen is like a fly breeding ground, the buzz cacophonous, and FU’s energy bar has become so depleted that he passes out on the floor with his head in a plate of moldy fly-covered food, so I wait for him to wake up, at which point I command him to prepare food again, but he’s successful once more, so I start to suspect that, throughout this whole food-preparing fiasco, he has become so proficient at cooking that he cannot actually start a fire on accident anymore, then he pees himself, because he can’t reach a toilet, so now he’s standing on rotten food and piss, and at this point I’m starting to feel really bad for the guy, so I think to myself, there has to be a better way, so I pause the game and cycle through some of the entertainment items that can be purchased, and that’s when I find the fireworks set, which I quickly discover can be placed indoors, so I buy one of those and command FU to use it, at which point he walks up to it, fiddles with it, and it starts sparking like crazy, so he steps back, near the washing machine, and watches the firework set, which, after a few seconds, launches its first round of fireworks right into the kitchen ceiling, producing a beautiful flash of color, which of course catches the kitchen on fire, and the pop music has changed to some sort of sick metal riff at this point, all while FU is just standing there clapping his hands, which I suspect is part of the game’s code, to have Sims clap after firework launches, but it ends up feeling like FU is clapping for his own demise, which I find poetic in a way, but he doesn’t clap for very long because, upon noticing the fire and the fact that there are literally no doors to escape through, he starts flailing his arms like crazy and babbling incoherently, but he doesn’t move, he just stands there, even as the inferno creeps closer to him from tile to tile, he never moves, he just babbles and flails, even when the blaze catches up with him and he becomes totally engulfed, he’s still babbling and screaming, crazy rock music blaring from the living room stereo, only little FU’s head and arms visible as the fire consumes his entire blocky body, and he babbles and flails right up to the very end when he falls face first into the great blaze, at which point he babbles and flails no more, but the sick metal riff keeps going, as if part of some occult ritual intending to summon some sort of crazy demon, which actually works, because out of nowhere a skeleton wearing a dark gray robe appears, it’s the Grim Reaper, Death himself, and he starts lifting his skeletal arms up and down, up and down, as if performing some dark death ritual, and he does this until the whole kitchen is nothing more than a gray pile of ash, at which point a blue text box pops up and says,

“Deepest sympathy! Forrest has just died. Though the body is gone, the spirit will always remain.”

And I feel free at last, deciding never to play The Sims ever again.

But before I exit the game, I hear a familiar sound, it’s Carpool John, mercilessly holding down the car horn, beckoning me to return to the boring little mundane routines I so desperately seek to avoid.

dont know

Last post is the same. Paranoia has me in a choke-hold and I might not post as much here anymore. For now, at least. Hope to return eventually.. damn tired of feeling like everyone I have ever met wants to kill me with their bare hands

Entry tags:

tennis life lessons slow living mindfuln

Not Every Point is a Match Point

You can’t live your whole life like it’s a tiebreaker—sometimes you’ve got to let it play out.

Sometimes life feels like you’re stuck at 6–6 in the final set — all nerves, all urgency, no room to breathe. But not every moment needs to be a match point. Some of the best things happen when you let the rally go long and see where it takes you.

There’s a certain rush in a tiebreaker. Every point is urgent, every mistake magnified, every winner worth a fist pump. It’s addictive — that edge-of-your-seat feeling where you’re dialled in, hyper-focused, heart pounding. But you can’t live there forever.

In tennis, the beauty isn’t just in the high-pressure deciders. It’s in the slow burn of a set that twists and turns. The rallies that start with a tentative slice and end with an audacious drop shot. The points where nothing much seems to happen — until you realise you’ve been drawn into something quietly brilliant.

Life’s the same. You can’t be in crisis mode 24/7, even if you’ve convinced yourself you work best under pressure. Not everything needs an immediate winner. Some things — the important things — need time to breathe. A relationship. A career change. Figuring out who you are now versus who you were five years ago.

Sometimes, the most satisfying victories come when you stop pressing for the finish line and just play the point in front of you.

So yes — embrace the tiebreakers when they come. Rise to them. Feel the thrill. But remember to let the rest of the match unfold, point by point. You might just find the best parts happen between the big moments.

Current Mood: weird

Entry tags:

Book Review: But Seriously by John McEnroe

⭐️⭐️⭐️ – Candid, charismatic, but a touch repetitive

📖 Quick Take:
The follow-up to You Cannot Be Serious, this memoir sees McEnroe reflecting on life after his fiery days on the tennis court. It’s less about serve-and-volley brilliance and more about family, broadcasting, art, and the ongoing balancing act between private life and public persona.

✍️ My Thoughts:
McEnroe’s voice is as distinctive on the page as it is behind a microphone—dryly funny, self-aware, and never short of an opinion. But Seriously offers a peek into the mind of someone who has lived multiple lives: Grand Slam champion, commentator, art gallery owner, husband, father.

Where the first memoir thrived on the raw energy of his career highs and lows, this one feels calmer, more introspective. There’s a lot to enjoy in the anecdotes about fellow players, celebrity encounters, and the odd broadcasting drama, but some sections wander into familiar territory from his first book, which can make it feel a bit padded.

What surprised me most was the warmth—he’s still McEnroe (blunt, occasionally prickly), but there’s a reflective edge that comes with time and perspective.

💌 Vibe Check:
🎾 Life after the limelight
🎤 Behind-the-scenes sports media
🖼 Tennis meets the art world
💬 Still telling it like it is

💬 Favourite Line:
"You can’t live your whole life like it’s a tiebreaker—sometimes you’ve got to let it play out."

⭐️ Final Rating:
3 stars. Engaging and witty, but more of a gentle rally than a five-set thriller.

Mudlarking - 32

The tide was already coming in and I had decided I am going to try to collect less and not pick up all the pottery sherds.

People asked if there were steps further on and I told them there were but the tide was coming in so they might not be able to get to them.

I found another square black tile, like the ones I already have.

I found a pipe bowl with a maker’s initials on - AC, my father’s initials. One day I’ll find a pipe bowl with my initials!

My shoes got messy. I am not sure what I stood in but that and the rain and the incoming tide and my ankles hurting meant I didn't stay long on the foreshore that evening.

I did pick up a piece of rather damaged combware and a few other sherds though.

Entry tags:

montfort

I have an incredible story today...

So I was on wplace, looking at around my area, and I saw someone drew Chuck E Cheese and wrote an invite to a Discord server. So I joined it, right. And I just started talking about how I went to Chuck E Cheese in the late 90s as a kid and then later on in the early-mid 00s. I have a really bad memory issues, but one childhood memory I have is when I went to Chuck E Cheese on my birthday and the Chuck E animatronic was sitting behind something. I wanted to see if the animatronic had feet/legs, so I peered over it, and he said "do you mind?" That scared the shit out of me!! It's like he knew I wasn't supposed to be there!

And I find out from people who have encyclopedic knowledge of Chuck E Cheese that only one animatronic could say "do you mind?", and it was a location where I lived during the late 90s. And the chat fucking exploded because I might have seen an exclusive stage set and design of Chuck E that was around for a month. This was in the summer of 1997, since I had a Disney's Hercules themed party. I told my mom, she dug out the scrapbook, and I sent the server some photos with my face edited out.

Guess what. I was at "the" location, the abbreviation is AAM. The photo of me with the mascot Chuck E didn't have his face, but what was shown was an exclusive suit. And they could identify it was that stage by zooming in on a shelf in the background. The chair and tablecloth in other photos are identifiable too.

I was at Montfort and this means a big fucking deal to Chuck E Cheese nerds. I've been getting pinged about it in the last hour and I showed my mom the reactions to the photo I sent, I got 2 friend requests too lol. I think I'm going to have fun here

Entry tags:

Wheel of Fortune (1987)

I have a running list of games I remember from my childhood that I add to whenever I think of one. I always think there can't possibly be any more game memories to unearth, and I'm always wrong. For this one I blame/credit

zorealis, who brought it up during one of our regular nostalgia rambles.

Wheel of Fortune is a letter-guessing game based on the long-running US game show. It's like Hangman, or if the kids don't play Hangman anymore then it's like Wordle. The added strategy element is that before you guess a letter you have to spin the wheel to determine how many points your guess will be worth if it's right. The wheel also features bad outcomes like skipping your turn or losing all your points.

vanna white gestures to an unfinished puzzle TH_ P___T_D D_S_RT

vanna white gestures to an unfinished puzzle TH_ P___T_D D_S_RT

This DOS version of the game is very easy and probably aimed at children. You can play hotseat multiplayer, otherwise the game provides NPC opponents who don't exactly pass the Turing Test; I found it difficult to lose to them even when I tried. They'd cheerfully guess Q or Z for no reason, even while R and T were still sitting there like so many low-hanging consonant fruits. Poor pixel Vanna White always kept a professional smile on her face as she clapped encouragingly for each spin of the wheel, but I know she was secretly judging us, languishing in her pixel heels as she waited for someone to guess a right letter so she could awkwardly shuffle over there and turn it already, for God's sake.

The reason I was trying to let them win was that I was curious what would happen. When a human player wins, they get to do a solo bonus round. Would it make me sit through the computer doing it too?

( Let's find out )

I don't think I played this game very much as a kid. Even in 1987 there were more engaging options. But if you're like me and have been holding onto memories of it in some dusty disused corner of your hippocampus, you can play Wheel of Fortune in your browser.

Current Mood: thoughtful

Entry tags:

Iced Coffee, Hot Coffee, and the Magic of Bookstore Days

“Is there anything better than iced coffee and a bookstore on a sunny day? I mean, aside from hot coffee and a bookstore on a rainy day.”

Honestly, I can’t think of many things that beat either scenario. On a sunny day, it’s the kind of iced coffee that beads with condensation before you’ve even taken the first sip, paired with the satisfying creak of an old bookshop door. The sunlight filters through high windows, catching in the dust motes and making the spines on the shelves gleam like a rainbow of well-loved treasures. There’s a lightness to it—a sense of possibility—that maybe today you’ll discover that book, the one you didn’t even know you needed.

Rainy-day bookshop visits are an entirely different kind of bliss. The air is rich with the scent of wet pavement and freshly brewed coffee, the rain pattering against the windows as you wrap your hands around a warm mug. The world outside might be grey and hurried, but inside, time slows. You linger over hardbacks you’ll never quite convince yourself to buy, stroke the covers of new releases, and tuck yourself into a corner chair to read the first few pages of something that just feels right.

I’ve always thought of bookshops as the perfect in-between place—somewhere between adventure and sanctuary. And whether the coffee is iced or hot, the magic is the same: you walk in carrying the day’s weather with you, and you leave with a little more than you came for. Usually in the form of a paper bag and a slightly lighter bank account.

So tell me—are you a sunshine-and-iced-coffee reader, or do you live for the rainy-day-hot-coffee kind of bookstore bliss?

Current Mood: amused

Entry tags:

Book Review: Book Lovers by

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ – Witty, warm, and wonderfully self-aware

📖 Quick Take:
Emily Henry flips the small-town romance trope on its head, giving us a story where the “cold big-city woman” gets to be the heroine — and the love interest is a grumpy editor, not a rugged local carpenter. Expect whip-smart banter, emotional depth, and a romance that feels earned.

✍️ My Thoughts:
Nora Stephens isn’t here to charm the locals, she’s here for her sister. But when a work trip takes her to a small North Carolina town, she keeps running into Charlie Lastra, a fellow New Yorker and fellow cynic. What follows is a delightful enemies-to-reluctant-allies-to-lovers arc that’s both funny and heartfelt.

Henry’s strength is in her characters — flawed, ambitious, and believably human. The sibling dynamic between Nora and Libby adds a rich emotional layer, exploring identity, sacrifice, and the stories we tell ourselves. And the romance? Crackling chemistry without losing sight of the personal growth that makes it meaningful.

Why not five stars? While I adored the writing, a few pacing dips and slightly overlong introspection pulled me out now and then. Still, it’s a standout in the romcom genre.

💌 Vibe Check:
💬 Enemies-to-lovers banter
🏙 Big-city hearts in a small-town setting
👯‍♀️ Sisterhood front and centre
📚 Publishing world backdrop

💬 Favourite Line:
“You don’t have to be anything more than what you are to be enough.”

⭐️ Final Rating:
4 stars. Smart, funny, and brimming with heart.

Entry tags:

AIcels stay losing

I swear to god anyone that sings the praises of ChatGPT being the future must be an easily impressed normie. I was lurking another site, and saw the idea of using AI to analyze your sketches to critique it comes up. I figured that would be a theoretical "good usage" for AI art alongside thumbnails or a reference tool, so I gave ChatGPT a sketch that looks off to examine.

It took over 10 back-and-forths for it to do just that. What a useless clanker, I could've spent that time looking up photos lol. That's what gets me when people talk about the time spent training or editing AIgen images counts as "work"... the time you spent could've been used to just write/draw yourself... lazy asses...

Current Mood: dark

Entry tags:

light from a dark star

It is dark and gloomy in here.

The light is on the lowest, most orange setting possible. There is a downpour going on. The rain sounds like rocks on the roof. Storm clouds have hovered over this town for weeks. I am absorbing the blue light of three computer monitors. The radio is on, some writer on NPR is talking about his friend’s children in such soft saccharine tones that it almost makes me sick. “My friends' babies look just like my friends, and that makes me love them all the more, like I’m always going to be there for these little babies, and they don’t even know it yet.” There is a small spider crawling up the wall. I allow him to live. “Yes, I am a writer, but I don’t want to be known for my books, I want to be known for the impact I make on those around me. I want to be a bridge to happiness for others.” The guy oozes fakeness. No one can be this nice, it’s just not possible. I don't like him. I start to wonder if selflessness is just selfishness in disguise, a way to alleviate some ever-present feeling of guilt, and then I start to wonder if motives even matter, or just results. I wonder if I just don't like the writer guy because I’m threatened by him, existentially, like he's better than me or something. The window unit hums loudly. I turn it off. I'm pretty sure I just don't like the guy because he comes off as insincere. There is a psychic malaise of listless negativity pouring out of all the holes in my head. I am full of sardony and saturninity. Earlier, I was looking up old high school girlfriends online. It made me sad. I wondered if they ever looked me up online, and then I wondered if we ever looked each other up online at the same time, like some sort of serendipitous stalking, and this also made me sad for some reason. Sometimes, when I'm alone, I behave as if they're watching me, through a crystal ball or something, so I pose in the mirror, walk with a strut in my step, and do this cool little twirly wrist thing when I close doors. I know it's stupid. The rain now sounds like bowling balls on the roof. I spent at least an hour compulsively clicking browser bookmarks, hoping each refresh revealed something new and exciting, but nothing new and exciting ever happened. The spider is on the ceiling now. I watch it intently. I envy its simple biological imperatives, its lack of angst. This is not boredom, it's more a sort of cosmic ennui emitted through the background radiation of a dark star. I have no desire to write, but I'm doing it anyway, as if on autopilot, like one of those bugs that just does things. Maybe I am no different from the spider. Maybe I am sphexish. I have smoked like five cigarettes within the past thirty minutes, even though, after the first one, they all start to taste like nothing and produce no discernible psychological effects. If I hold my hand out in front of me, it trembles ever so slightly. I cannot focus. There are things I want to do but cannot bring myself to do them. The woman on NPR is now imploring listeners to donate, she says it's more important than ever now that the Trump Administration has cut all their funding, and she's absolutely correct. I desire companionship but would probably reject it outright. I considered calling my friend but have nothing interesting to talk about. Music sounds bad. Nothing is enjoyable. I have a strong hunch that nothing matters. I hope to follow this stream of consciousness until the very end of it, which is hopefully soon. Sometimes I get like this, like I'm the dark star itself, taking on its heinous gravity, on the brink of collapsing in on myself. I wonder what happens when there are no stars left in the sky. I wonder where all the light goes. I wonder if time stops. I wonder if that would be such a bad thing. A mosquito lands on my computer screen, I thumb it to death and wipe the guts off with a napkin soaked in 91% isopropyl alcohol. I sometimes wonder if things really happened if no one remembers them happening, and now I wonder if the mosquito will come back to life if I forget about killing it. The rain has not stopped.

And now I'm reminded of that last paragraph of Moby Dick, the one right before the Epilogue, the one that goes something like this,

“Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf, a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides, then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.”

And that reminds me of Leena’s speech at the beginning of Chrono Cross, when she's standing on the shore of Opassa Beach, talking to Serge about the sea, the one that goes something like this,

“It's been rolling in and out like this since long before we were born. It'll probably keep rolling in and out, in and out, long after our lifetime, without a single change.”

And now I can't decide if this makes our transient lives entirely pointless or if it just makes them all the more beautiful. I don’t know. Maybe these things are not mutually exclusive.

I wish I hadn't killed that mosquito.

Current Mood: proud

Entry tags:

the sims #1: $30,000 & a bad attitude

The other day, I got the urge to play The Sims, not The Sims 4 or 3 or even 2, but the original Sims, released back on February 4, 2000. So I booted up my desktop computer, which runs Ubuntu, and went through the whole tedious trying-to-install-an-ancient-game-on-Linux process, which involves several hours of looking for a cracked, zipped copy of the original game files on sketchy pirating sites, running those files through some supposedly user-friendly program called Lutris, and then failing miserably multiple times in a row until I just gave up, at which point I purchased the new Legacy Collection rerelease on Steam for like $15, which, to my surprise, runs perfectly on Linux. And thus far, after a few hours of play under my belt, I still don't know what the point of this game actually is, but for some reason, I'm enjoying it.

But seriously, what's the point? Is it to build the most lavish home you can possibly dream up? Is it to live vicariously through some digital representation of yourself? Is it some sort of therapy for clinical control freaks? Or is it a dark wish-fulfillment simulator that allows you to create virtual voodoo dolls of all your most hated enemies so that you can systematically ruin their lives and/or just outright kill them by deleting the doors in the kitchen and putting a bunch of microwaves and toasters and stuff in there, thus triggering an inescapable electrical fire? Or maybe it’s some sort of weird digital voyeurism, like I’m supposed to be getting off to these 2D-sprite people, who are serious levels of uncanny valley, while they go to the bathroom and make “woo hoo,” which is what they call “fucking” in their native language, which is called Simlish? Or maybe it’s all of the above? Maybe The Sims is whatever you want it to be, maybe that’s the beauty of The Sims, I don’t know.

Regardless of all that, there’s something about The Sims’ janky isometric blockiness and nightmarish character models that evokes a sort of compulsive yearning for the very early 2000s, back when I was like 10 and living in an apartment complex every other month with my mom and stepdad, and there was this one kid who lived nearby named Chris, who was blonde and kind of chubby and had a lot of freckles and also had a Dell something-or-other in his living room, right by the entrance of the cramped rectangular kitchen, which was the same kitchen in my apartment, because every apartment had the same floor plan. He, Chris, would sit there and play The Sims for hours, even when I came over, and I would pull up an uncomfortable wooden chair behind him and crane my neck to watch him play, but only for a few minutes at a time, because The Sims is very much not a multiplayer game, meaning it is quite boring to watch someone else play, because it’s pretty much just watching someone watch someone else go about their very boring and mundane lives, virtually. So, of course, I would lose interest pretty fast and get the hell out of there, primarily because of Chris’ refusal to let me play, because he was actually a pretty unpleasant kid, for a variety of reasons that I won't get into here, but one of those reasons was because he didn't bathe, and another was the fact that he would often just throw shit at you, and one time he went to my birthday party at the local game store and hogged all the games I wanted to play, which, considering it was my birthday party, seemed pretty assholish, even for a ten-year-old kid. So, yeah, that was the extent of my experience with The Sims back then, even though I did have SimCity and SimPark and SimAnt and a bunch of other Sims games loaded up on my Mac at home, which was one of those translucent blue ones that everyone pines over these days, I just didn’t have The Sims on it, because, to be honest, back then I didn’t really understand the point of The Sims, and obviously I still don’t understand the point even now, yet here I am, twenty-five years later, playing The Sims.

And considering a Sim is like a little story, almost like a little diary of code in a way, I figured I would write about the little Sim guy I created, which I very creatively modeled after myself and named Forrest Unknown, or FU for short. And I tried my best to make him look like me, but the Sim-face selection, while being quite vast, is actually incredibly goofy and limiting, so I picked the dark-haired male with the mullet and the bags under his eyes, because I’m sure that I looked like that at one point in my life, especially when I was drinking and smoking all the time, and I made him wear a baggy dark sweater and cargo pants, because that’s kind of my thing, especially in the colder months. Then I created FU’s personality, which is through a point-based selection system wherein you get a limited number of points to assign to five different core personality traits. Neat, outgoing, active, playful, and nice. So of course I maxed out “neat,” because I’m actually a very neat person, in fact I think the only thing ever to give me a panic attack in life was this one time when I was rooming with some friends and one of their dogs tore through the trash and got soggy wrappers, half-eaten food, and garbage juice all over the apartment. I also maxed out “active,” because I work out like five times a day, not because of health or anything like that but because my diet sucks and I want to be thin and attractive despite that. And I also put a few points into “playful” because, when I'm in the right mood, I really know how to have a good time. I really do. And probably needless to say, but I left “nice” and “outgoing” totally devoid of points because, well, I’m not very nice most of the time, especially in my thoughts, which is just a constant stream of name-calling, judgement, and faux superiority, and I’m not very outgoing either, seeing as I have like a total of two actual friends, both of whom I’ve known since childhood, both of whom also think I’m not very nice or outgoing. And, tangentially related, I just can’t seem to make new friends, no matter how hard I try, and believe me, I’ve tried. There was this one guy at the playground I tried to make friends with one time, we talked about writing and our kids and I even gave him my phone number, but afterwards he totally ghosted me, because I think his wife, who was also there at the playground, got a weird vibe off me or something and decided I was bad news, like maybe she thought I was a low-key psychopath or whatever, which is the only thing I can think of that makes any sense, because the guy and I actually got along quite well, and we were actually in the same line of work, too, so we had a decent amount of stuff in common, although he was quite outgoing, whereas I’m quite reserved and full of glares and scowls, so I probably come off as somewhat mysterious because of that, which, when you’re in your thirties, more so comes off as just plain creepy, especially to those of the opposite sex, which is something FU and I need to work on, I guess.

Needless to say, FU started his life with $30,000 and a bad attitude, which is only a small leg-up from how I started my life, I guess, although I did have loving parents, and FU, as far as I can tell, has none. Zero parents. He just sort of popped into existence somehow. He also doesn’t have a wife, kids, or any pets, because I figured I’d just start with FU and go from there, let him live his life, give him a few happy bachelor years, allow him to build up some nostalgic alone time wherein he can actually focus on the stuff he enjoys, which I think, based on the few things he’s shown interest in thus far, are watching television for hours and playing computer games and subsisting entirely on bags of chips that he keeps in the refrigerator for some reason. Maybe down the road he’ll come across someone who loves him for who he truly is, despite all his flaws, of which he has many, as I’ve made sure of that just by basing him on myself, which, in hindsight, was probably a poor decision, because I’m realizing now that I’ve probably doomed poor Forrest Unknown to a miserable, loveless life, one in which he will likely end up in a shotgun-esque relationship devoid of any emotion besides boredom, frustration, and sexual angst, and he’ll probably work a soulless nine-to-five until he’s seventy, at which point he’ll retire with barely anything to show for it except a high-interest mortgage, some serious wrinkles, and broken dreams by the truckloads, and perhaps he’ll be divorced, too, with like two kids, and those kids might just be the only reason he doesn’t delete all the doors in his kitchen and place a bunch of microwaves and toasters and stuff in there to “accidentally” trigger an inescapable electrical fire which conforms to all the cause-of-death clauses outlined in his last will and testament which legally affords his entire estate to his beloved children in very plainly written no-nonsense English.

And before we go any further, I realize that the lines between myself and FU are starting to blur here, but, unless otherwise stated, I am specifically talking about FU here, not myself, unless stated otherwise. That is the god’s honest truth. I am fine, really, don’t worry about me, worry about FU, and maybe send him your thoughts and prayers or whatever, too, because he needs them, he really does.

Anyway, Forrest Unknown, at the immaculate conception of his birth, immediately put a down payment of $15,000 on a small, two-bedroom house, then proceeded to spend most of the remainder of his cash on the important stuff, like a nice Y2K-era boob-tube television set, a big wooden desk, and a personal computer to place upon that desk, all of which he set up in his living room, partitioned off by an oriental screen and a blue two-seater couch, then, after purchasing those vital necessities, he bought himself a king-size bed for his bedroom, some posters and paintings for decoration, a bookshelf, and a few toasters and microwaves for the kitchen. Then some pencil-mustached guy in a suit named Mortimer showed up at the door, so FU went out to meet him, which resulted in the two men hurling insults at each other in what sounded like salvia-divinorum-induced babbling or those religious nuts you see on late night television. Then a black cat named Callie showed up and somehow pushed open the front door and now just stays in the house like she owns the place. Then FU spent a good two hours vegged out on the couch watching television, then he spent another two hours playing computer games, at which point he was very hungry, so he went into the kitchen and pulled out a bag of chips from the refrigerator, which cost him $5 for some reason, because I guess refrigerators in The Sims also double as check-out kiosks or something. Then he went outside to grab the newspaper, which had been thrown in the street for some reason, then, while standing in the middle of the road, he checked the classifieds and, by doing that, somehow immediately got hired as a journalist at the local paper, and now a car will be picking him up at 3 AM tomorrow morning to take him to his first day of work, so I guess FU was eager to get into the job market as soon as possible, which, to be frank, isn’t like me at all, but at least he decided to become a writer instead of some hypocritical self-hating salesman, so in a way I’m actually kind of proud of him.

Perhaps there’s a bright future ahead for little FU after all?

I guess only time will tell.

Entry tags:

The Permanent Stain

I really hate to link to something by Andrew Sullivan. I'm aware of his issues ('94...), he's the type of commentator I just read privately for the sake of not having an echo chamber and to roll my eyes or nod at 40% of the time. He's been annoying me half of the time. But today's post hit me hard.

The Permanent Stain

It’s been over a decade now since Grendel emerged from the forest and the metaphors are understandably tired. But a sentence in a recent Mark Helprin piece jogged my amygdala nonetheless. He described the president as someone who “behaves like a wild boar crashing through a field of well-tended crops. (Look carefully at the eyes, and you see it.)”

Yes, you do. Helprin is as far from being a leftist as one might imagine — which, of course, is precisely why he sees the feral glint in Trump’s eyes the way he does. Conservatism is prudent, diligent care for the inheritance of the past, and the shepherding of constitutional democratic governance away from the shoals of dysfunction and ideology. In that sense, Trump is conservatism’s actual nemesis: a wild boar — psychologically incapable of understanding anything but dominance and revenge, with no knowledge of history, crashing obliviously and malevolently through the ruined landscape of our constitutional democracy.

This very Greek tragedy — conservatives killing the Constitution they love because they hate the left more — is made more poignant by Trump’s utter cluelessness: he doesn’t even intend to end the American experiment in self-government and individual freedom. He isn’t that sophisticated. He is ending it simply because he knows no other way of being a human being. He cannot tolerate any system where he does not have total control. Character counts, as conservatives once insisted, and a man with Trump’s psyche, when combined with his demagogic genius, is quite simply incompatible with liberal democratic society. Unfit.

[... blah blah, a lot of recap on the last 8 months and Sullivan's hateboner for Biden, more notable snippets under the cut]

( Read more... )

When a disaffected conservative who loves Reagan and Thatcher is in the right (no pun intended), that's really when you need to reconsider who the fuck we elected. (I disagree with the successor part, but whatever. Trump is in awful shape, I don't think MAGA will live after he dies.)

Current Mood: Cracticus
Current Music: Fuzzy - Lemon Rind

turning the world upright again

Megan has tattoos of a serpent and a teapot filling a teacup, of a watering can filled with flowers and a flock of butterflies and I drew that arm behind her although it was only there for a brief moment.

Jack is a shih tzu mix with a cleft palate. He’s 9 months old.

Gerald Finzi - Intimations of Immortality
The cool weather, and I mean, it’s usually July that’s acts like that, and the thick smoke haze from California fit the elegiac quality of Finzi’s music. It’s a rarely-performed work, which is a shame.
It’s a poem about how everything was simple in childhood and accepting that this is so, sort of like Fern Hill, but it kind of goes on to be about how growing up may suck for some people but it doesn’t have to, that adventure is still out there if you know where to look.
Or at least, that’s Channing Yu’s interpretation anyway.
The guy nearest me had a tattoo of Evil Homer and Yoda and SpongeBob’s neighborhood with the pineapple and the rock and the moai head. Nearby, people were waving Colombian flags because the tenor is Colombian and his credits mention several Mozart operas and I’ve seen him in those.

Ottorino Respighi - Pines of Rome
I first heard this live in the summer between freshman and sophomore years of high school and I think Respighi has grown on me since.

And that was it. Short concert, even if you inlude the brief talks and the intermission.

Katie is a cellist who had her hair in a braid slung over her shoulder. She got on the train at JFK so I think she was at the concert. There was a guy with powder blue hair and a guy with half normal black and half ember red and all curly hair.

Big Balls was beaten up probably because he chose the wrong person to harass and the far right is trying to conjure up heroics, as if Big Balls would be the kind of person who rushes in to aid someone in distress. Call me if you’ve heard that one before.

I also learned that Nashville is building its own version of the Vegas Loop which I guess makes sense because the bachelorette party demographic overlaps with the can’t-have-the-undesirables-getting-into-our-suburbs and I dunno putting-pickle-and-french-fries-on-our-hotdogs demographic.

burning question: Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

Entry tags:

books

poll: Never Let Me Go

This poll brought to you by some questions relevant to my next book post, and a discussion with

phantomtomato.

Poll #33473

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 50

View Respondents

Is it a spoiler to state the PREMISE of Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, which is revealed 80 pages in but is treated as a secret by the jacket copy?

View Answers

Yes.
4 (8.0%)

No.
3 (6.0%)

Technically yes, but the book is 20 years old and it's common knowledge now.
27 (54.0%)

I'm not familiar with the book.
16 (32.0%)

Is it a spoiler to state the GENRE of Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, which is discernible neither from the jacket copy nor from where it was shelved in my library?

View Answers

Yes.
1 (2.0%)

No.
19 (38.0%)

Technically yes, but it's in the first sentence of the book's Wikipedia article so you're probably good.
17 (34.0%)

I have not become familiar with the book between the previous question and this one.
13 (26.0%)

For what it's worth, I was spoiled(?) years ago for the reveal, and I don't think it hindered my enjoyment of the book at all.

(Comments may contain spoilers? I guess?)

Entry tags:

updates

upd8

From the Neocities feed:

I took the review I did for Game Change (HBO drama based on the 2008 election) offline for a few days because I finished the book last week and thought deleting it would motivate me to update with how I felt about that. It didn't, I have such little interest in upkeeping this site. Not a loss because I really want to forget about this political climate.

I'm really not feeling the love creativity-wise anymore, and the past 15 months on top of how much of a pain it is to upload/update my art, I'm really tired. This is why I've been slow to respond to emails, I'm really frustrated and tired of this sphere lately.

If I wasn't such a workaholic I'd take this as a cue to look into Github push updates, but I don't even care at this point. I'll upload art drawn for me last month some other time.

I don't even think the page was all that controversial and neither was the update with info from the book I was chipping at, but every day I wish the joy and investment I had in "smallweb" or whatever in 2022-2023 would come back. If I'm not reminded that my ex was my main inspiration and motivator, I just don't see a point in "making" anything because the same Twitter doomscrollers are there. This can be chalked up to just "depression" or whatever, but I really hate this. I feel like I can't express anything without "callout" types on my ass, social media is boring, my usual Discord company I'm also uncomfortable with. I'm tired and I don't know when things will get better.

Here's a tutorial on deploying to Neocities I found that's pretty good, by the way.

Entry tags:

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013)

subtitle that didn't fit in the subject line: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a botanist and an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. The "braid" of the the title refers to the interweaving of Western science with Indigenous knowledge to create a way of looking at the world that is stronger than either one alone. In a series of wide-ranging essays she elaborates on this idea from many angles, exploring the economic and cultural factors that lead us to feel cut off from the land that sustains us, and the consequences for our environment, our society, and our mental health.

I found the book effective at developing an intuitive sense of what she means and what it looks like to hold complementary truths and change our relationship with the planet. She argues that the problem isn't just seeing the environment as a possession to exploit, but also the common perception of "nature" as something separate from ourselves that we mustn't touch, like a fragile exhibit in a museum that we can only admire with our hands clasped behind our backs. Indigenous relationships with the land are mutual interactions, and active land management in the Americas long predates colonization. She points out that while those of us who aren't Indigenous can't appropriate those cultures, we can still cultivate a relationship of intimate reciprocity with the land we live on in our own way. I was struck by her comment that many North American settlers seem to have one foot on the land and one still on the boat, as if we're not really sure if we're staying. It's been a long time; maybe, for all our sakes, we need to start treating this like home.

The book is beautifully written, and struck me as deeply evocative of the Obama era in its themes of reaching across gulfs of misunderstanding and its appeals to hope. Kimmerer cautions that despair robs us of our agency, which was perhaps easier to say in 2013, but I believe the message is more relevant now than ever.

I have to admit that at close to 400 pages I think the book might be too long, and some of the later essays began to feel like they were reiterating earlier points rather than expanding upon them. It might read better if you interspersed the essays with reading other things rather than plowing straight through, but I have a hard time doing that so maybe it's on me. The book does offer a lot to think about and isn't the kind of material that can be digested quickly, and I expect I'll be thinking about it for a long time.

Entry tags:

mudlarking

Thames Invader

Mosaic made from pottery sherds found on the Thames foreshore. (With a permit.)