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Dec. 4th, 2019 @ 05:56 pm
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Tomorrow is shaping up to be a clusterfuck beyond belief, some of that is preventable, but the people who could do something towards that prevention are refusing to listen. And the best part is, I am going to get to deal with it all by myself because certain people involved are being completely ridiculous in really offensive ways!
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Greyscale and bruise purple.
It just screams: "This flag is for the boring, vaguely repellent asexuals, who are clearly not interesting enough for anything approaching pretty colours."
Ugh.
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Nov. 26th, 2019 @ 09:49 am
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She died yesterday afternoon.
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Nov. 25th, 2019 @ 09:35 am
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The specialist has said that M. won't recover.
Going to the hospital to say goodbye today.
Not sure I'm going to be able to get all this out without crying too much.
I hope you know how much you meant to me. I wish I'd showed you more, told you more.
I missed you so much. It's been so long. I was so sick, for so long, and I couldn't dare to see you in case it was catching. I wanted to see you. I love you.
I was going to come see you next month. I had plans. I wanted you to meet my family. I wanted them to meet you.
You'll always be in my heart.
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South Africa won the World Cup.
Kiya Solisi became the first black captain to lift the Webb Ellis Cup.
No, seriously, this is actually a big deal.
South Africa is a rugby nation, but the composition of the Springboks, for a long time, very white. (Soccer was for black people, and yes, frankly, the fact that under Apartheid, black people got soccer and white people got rugby should be taken as an accurate summary of the relative merits of those two sports.)
Despite the ridiculousness of the notion that all the best players could be drawn from a minority of the population, the Bokke were still a good team.
This is their third World Cup win.
But it's the first - by any nation - in which the winning captain was a black man.
It's also the first time South Africa actually scored tries in the World Cup Final, and the man who scored was Makoze Mapimpi.
Sport *is* real life.
I cried this morning because South Africa has two new heroes who can and will be heroes to *all South Africans*.
There is hope yet for healing in the Rainbow Nation.
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Man, there've been a bunch of things I wanted to post about, and things keep getting in the way. I was sick. While I was sick I injured myself. Then after that I nearly broke my wrist and typing was problematic for a while.
And now, well...
SO ABOUT THIS WEEK
My father started chemotherapy this week.
And then my sister, who is in England, had emergency surgery. It turns out the NHS is a trash fire without compare, because despite the *critically necessary* nature of her procedure, they still couldn't even give her a bed to recover in - no, it was, "So who's going to look after you when we send you home immediately?"
The answer, in the short term, was a friend of hers who rearranged his life for a couple of days, and then in the medium term the answer is our mother, who flew out on a day's notice to go to England and take care of her daughter.
My mother is terrified of flying. Terrified. But my father, apart from anything else, started chemotherapy this week.
I feel like my family just caught fire kinda out of nowhere but we're managing and I'm totally not going to panic about any of it. It's all being handled. Just.Current Music: FFXIV OST - Shadowbringers Current Mood:  distressed
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first: the NHS is horrifying, fix it
second: for reasons relating to point the first my mother is in your country, if it is not nice to her I regret to inform you I shall be arranging an invasion
third: if I find out you are being mean to my mother so that I'll invade and take over on the very reasonable assumption that I cannot run your country worse than the idiots currently in charge then a) fair point but b) I assure you it will go very hard indeed for anyone who was responsible for being mean to my Mum so calculate your patriotism levels *really* accurately
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May. 18th, 2019 @ 08:31 pm
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Fuck Queensland.
Fuck all the selfish, weak-minded, racist dicks in this country.
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I'm sick so nothing serious is going to be appearing here right now.
However:
Today was the second-last day of the NBA regular season.
Currently:
- While the #1 and #5 seeds in the Western Conference are pretty much a lock... none of the others are. Depending on the outcome of tomorrow's games, 2-4 and 6-8 could end up in pretty much any order. (One of the games critical to this was won by a single point today.)
- Magic Johnson had an 'impromptu press conference' at which he announced, to the astonishment of everyone, that he's resigning as president of the Los Angeles Lakers.
- Dirk Nowitzki, franchise star of the Dallas Mavericks for the last twenty years, announced his retirement.
- He and Dwyane Wade both played their final home games for their respective teams and each scored 30.
- Anthony Davis, who is still under contract to the New Orleans Pelicans for another year but has demanded a trade and spent the rest of the season, pretty much, thoroughly alienating home fans, wore a shirt to arrive for today's game that read, "That's All, Folks". Because he's good at PR.
That was today. There were probably things I missed including but I am sick.Current Music: Top Gear playing car rugby (I AM SICK) Current Mood:  sick Current Location: couch
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Short NBA Dramatic Storyline Update:
So a couple of seasons ago, the Los Angeles Lakers traded a former number two draft pick, D'Angelo Russell, to the Brooklyn Nets, a team that, at the time, was terrible and not expected to improve much in the immediate future. As the sweetener for a salary dump, which is pretty ignominious for a #2 draft pick in his second year.
D'Lo, as he is known, was only a couple of years into his career. There's been An Incident (when he put a video on the internet of his teammate Nick "Swaggy P" Young talking about how much he had cheated on his then significant other Iggy Azalea, causing Drama), but on-court he'd been... fine.
Their team's manager, Magic Johnson, made some extremely unflattering comments about D'Lo to the media, which is usually Not Done.
This season, the Nets have managed to build up quite well, D'Angelo Russell was an Eastern Conference All-Star, and the Nets are going to the playoffs. (In the east, which is easier.)
The Lakers, despite signing Best Player In The World (tm) LeBron James, are almost certainly not going to the playoffs.
That can, potentially, become an absolute mathematical certainty tonight.
If they lose to D'Angelo Russell and the Nets.
D'Angelo Russell, All-Star, can end the Lakers' season and make final what has in some ways been one of the most disappointing seasons for the Lakers in franchise history, just two years after they discarded him.
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Things that make me very uncomfortable:
When a person whose image/branding is partly based on their Being Very Smart (and whose image/branding matters somewhat, like, say, a reasonably high-profile author) posts something on Twitter that I reply to (I thought) quite innocuously and in a way that didn't need replying to, particularly...
... and they reply to correct me on my use of a term...
... and they are unquestionably, definitely wrong.
(I looked it up to check I wasn't somehow misremembering. I was not.)
And someone even retweets it, and... like, not only do I not like letting misinformation stand, but also, I'm kind of insulted by being condescendingly corrected?
But I don't actually want to make a high-profile black woman author look bad?
But seriously, you didn't have to be loudly wrong at me? You have a blue check and literally a thousand times as many followers as I do... maybe let it slide even if you think I am wrong? (I am not.)
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You know how I said I was going to talk about the NBA?
Well, this season there has been TOO MUCH DRAMA I am not even sure where to start. I'm waiting till I can marshal my thoughts a bit and put in some pictures.
Seriously. D R A M A
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So, in my last post I left out some more unpleasantness of the last couple of weeks.
I broke my tablet.
I'd put it where I usually put it but somehow this time I knocked it off, it landed, clearly, at the worst possible angle, and the screen was shattered.
It still works, kinda, but I've been avoiding using it in any way lest I do something that disrupts my ability to get all my data off, which I'm going to want to.
We took it to the repair guy for a quote, but Samsung parts are apparently now very expensive, and it would cost $300 just for the screen, which seems like too much for a tablet over five years old that's been starting to struggle.
I'd been thinking about replacing it for a while, but was holding off until something that actually seemed like an upgrade was available.
That time is still not yet.
Samsung tablets are now priced at "you might as well get a laptop" and don't include the functionality the one I bought in 2013 had. Hell no.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png) velithya spent most of a day researching (I was still sick and I think I was just too pathetic for her to ignore) and came up with the conclusion that an iPad 6+Apple Pencil was probably my best bet.
So I bought those.
And I hated them. I tried - I spent hours messing around with them - but the iPad's UI design is atrocious. Absolutely nothing is intuitive. "I want to close this program, so... I drag my finger slowly up one side of the screen?" Who the hell thought that made sense? "Oh, and I have to do it five or six times until I get the angle exactly right and do it slowly enough but not too slowly."
On my old tablet, that process involved: "Press home button. Touch applications icon."
No piece of electronics has ever inspired more thorough and profound hate in me in less time than the iPad 6.
Also, the Apple Pencil isn't very good, the tip design is absolutely rubbish. And the charging end and its accessories seem to be designed to get lost and require you to buy replacements and/or to break the charging port on your iPad.
So those were returned to the shop for a refund, because I'm not paying hundreds of dollars to be annoyed by the appalling design flaws of morally dubious electronics that I won't use if I can avoid it because I hate everything about the user experience.
Instead, we checked out a second-hand Surface Pro 3, and ended up deciding to buy it.
Now, I'll note that the hardware did and does seem completely fine, and the operating system was reset to factory settings, so none of this is on the previous owners.
The first morning I had it, I wanted to use it to watch basketball, because at this point my laptop was still in for service.
I wanted to be able to put it on the TV so I could use the Surface for other things.
So I installed Chrome, in order to use Chromecast.
Once I had the game playing on the TV, though, I had the issue that - even after I closed the Chrome window - the thing was running very, very slowly.
Fun fact: The Surface Pro 3 has 4GB of memory. Somehow, Windows 10 had this at less than one available.
I hate Windows 10, by the way, just not as much as I hate the iPad 6's OS. Windows 10 sucks but it actually lets me access the information that tells me why it sucks, it lets me adjust assorted settings where the iPad 6 just tells me not to worry my pretty little head about that, and it does things like "have actual buttons to do the basic system operations instead of wanting me to intuit arcane symbols to draw on the screen".
So I was wanting to try and poke at this issue, and rebooted the Surface.
It came back without audio or network capacity.
Diagnostics came up with nothing, and were like "try here to find more information on the internet" you little shit you're not recognising the network.
Oh well, say I. I haven't actually made significant changes to this thing yet. Reset to factory settings again!
... that throws an error.
... "Undoing changes," it says.
... except now it can't boot at all.
So, we had to download Windows 10 install media, and put those on a thumb drive, except that didn't work either, because it turns out the thumb drive was faulty.
IT WAS A DAY
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Mar. 4th, 2019 @ 09:02 pm
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I am terribly behind at reading again.
In my defense: it's been a stressful month and then a week or so ago I started coughing up blood and have been having to have scans and take antibiotics and grapple with the realisation that, oh, actually I was quite sick indeed.
It was weird, because I had almost no secondary symptoms - like, even the cough wasn't severe. So I could feel like I wasn't sick at all right up until the sheer effort factor of getting up to pee had me shaking by the time I got back to the couch.
And in the meantime, my computer had to spend almost a week back at the service centre, because when I put it in for repairs a couple of months ago, they addressed the issue with the power fluctuations by replacing the external power supply... which worked for a while, until the short in the port it plugs into fried the new one enough that that started malfunctioning too.
I suspect words might be exchanged at the service centre, because they had to spend most of a week working on it as a priority job, and then replace the power supply again, replace the motherboard (which the port connects to), and replace the port, with all the hours of disassembly, reassembly, and testing that involves, and all they charged me for was the motherboard itself. The cost of the power supply and labour was waived.
Without my asking, but come to that it would have been quite the argument if they'd tried to charge me for most of that. The new power supply wouldn't have been necessary if they fixed the issue I reported the first time properly, and the motherboard probably still would have needed replacing but that would have been a minimal task if they'd done it when they had the thing disassembled for the other stuff.
Who looks at a power supply with a plug that has visible scorch marks and is partially melted and thinks: "We'll just replace this, and everything will be fine!" without working out how that happened?
All of this, plus a bunch of (blood-)family stuff, has taken out the last few weeks for me. And also for the people I live with.
I'm trying to come to terms with it being okay that my problems are problems for my loved ones too. That's how family works. It's how it goes.Current Music: FFIX: Chocobo Lagoon Current Location: my couch
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So, I'm behind on reading again because... it's been a week, and also reading has been difficult due to issues with my glasses. BUT THIS IS HUGE
This thread on Twitter.
Her therapist told her to be nice to the negative voice in her head. Read the whole thing, but the conclusion is: that voice is trying to protect her. It's not helpful, it's not actually protecting her, but it's not malicious. She likens it to a child making a mess because it's trying to be helpful. You have to clean up the mess, but you also tell the child that hey, you appreciate they wanted to help, but they don't have to do all the things. It's okay.
That's... a thing. A thing that is huge.
The voice in my head that tells me that if I'm too confident, if I'm too sure, if I actually believe that people love me and I'm worth it, everyone will hate me and leave me and I'll be abandoned and alone...
It's trying to protect me. Because that always happened before. It's a voice of fear that's trying to keep me safe.
I don't need to deny it. I need to soothe it. I need to tell it that it's okay. Thanks for the warning. Good looking out, voice. But it's different now, and I've got it from here. We'll be okay, voice, I promise.
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Currently:
- my father is in hospital
- my mother is sick
- I am sick
- my sister is in Australia
All of these are bad things.
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I just got a Starlink: Battle for Atlas starter kit. IT HAS A SPACESHIP YOU MOUNT IT ON AS THE CONTROLLER IT IS SO COOL
I'm taking it with me when we head out for Christmas. There's one child I know of expected at Christmas this year, a little boy I pretty much only see at Christmas who's remarkably unspoilt by the standards of only grandchildren, but who is still accustomed to being the only child around a number of adults, at least some of whom will be doting on him.
BRING YOUR TRACTORS, KID. I HAVE A SPACESHIP.
Fortunately, Nintendo make their things quite sturdy, because, yes, obviously I will let him play with it, I'm not a monster.
My mother noted that I should rave about his tractors if he lets me play with them. As of last time I saw him, playing with him and his tractors actually results in being quizzed on my ability to identify assorted pieces of farm machinery. Incorrect answers win a gaze of disappointed pity.
And then we had a debate, because I was right, actually, but some things have more than one name.
He wasn't really on board with that idea. More pity.
My mother said intelligent children can be a challenge. I don't really find them so; I scale down my vocabulary and treat them like tiny versions of me, and it works just fine.
My mother had sharply limited experience with small children before she had her own. (She was a teacher, but she taught high school.) I suppose I was probably a bit of a shock.
My memory of what it was like to be a small child is of everything being written larger, in bold and underlined, but there never seemed to be a limit to what I could learn so long as people started from a point that wasn't new to me.
So dealing with children, to me, is: be gentle, because their emotional armour has not developed; don't tease, because they might not get the joke; answer their questions and explain anything they seem puzzled by. Assume they will be broadly ignorant, but never, ever confuse that with stupidity.
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Dec. 19th, 2018 @ 07:12 pm
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Is there a nice version of: "So, hey, I don't want to bring you down if you're happy about this [online platform/service/whatever], but you should probably know they have a racism problem and you might want to take that into account before you get emotionally invested in this thing."
(Context: Goodreads is racist.)
Because... happiness is good! Enjoying things is good! But it's probably less upsetting an experience to know something's problematic before it becomes a part of your life, than to either have to extract it from your life later, or feel guilty about it, or end up disappointing people when you explain your justification for supporting the racist platform.
Or, say, have established networks and relationships that depend on the racist platform that you really truly can't bring yourself to lose so you end up unable to tear yourself away from the racist platform.
(Looking at you, Twitter.)
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There is an NBA player whose nickname among fans is "Timelord".
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I'm thinking I might start posting recaps of This Week In The NBA. Because even people who don't actually like watching the sport should be able to follow along, the NBA is the best entertainment drama going.
Before I get into updates, though, there are so many existing storylines to bring people up to speed about.
So. I've picked my favourite team as the starting point, but some of this will only even make that much sense when I've done some more things on other teams and players, but bear with me!
Canon Background #1: The Golden State Warriors
Back when I was a kid, I went through a significant Basketball Phase. Mostly, this being the early 90s and US teams not being broadcast in Perth, I was into the Perth Wildcats, but we followed NBA teams, mostly through monthly magazines.
My team of choice was the Golden State Warriors, because they played in blue and gold (like the West Coast Eagles).
This decision was made just before the rise of the Michael Jordan Bulls, who would win six of the next eight championships (in two sets of three). You may in fact have heard of Michael Jordan even if you don't like sports.
The Warriors, meanwhile, would... well.
A site called Grantland ran a column called How To Annoy A Fan Base In 60 Easy Steps detailing the ways in which the Warriors would do basically everything wrong and get quite unlucky to sustain a historically long stretch of being really, really bad.
It was published in 2012. At that point, the Warriors had made the playoffs once in eighteen years. (The We Believe Warriors may get their own post at some point, it's a heartwarming feelgood storyline with some hilarious comedy denouements featuring the German villain who will go on to be redeemed into a beloved fan favourite Good Guy.)
So. Circa 2012, the Warriors were the long-standing comic relief character, the bumbling idiot who does everything wrong and gets really unlucky the few times he did something that wasn't actually stupid. In TVTropes terms, the Warriors were somewhere between The Chew Toy and Blessed With Suck. Nothing ever worked out right.
As of 2012, they were booing ownership on Chris Mullin Night, a night meant to celebrate one of the handful of heroes the Warriors had left.
And then something magical happened.
Steph Curry, who'd missed most of a season for surgery and rehabilitation on his ankles, because he was a talented young player balanced on ankles made of spun sugar, reworked his movement and biomechanics and muscle development and learned to stay healthy for most of the season.
He and Klay Thompson got to play together more. They're both amazing shooters who became known as the Splash Brothers.
After another player was injured, second-round draft pick Draymond Green blossomed into a defensive powerhouse.
The Warriors started to click.
In 2013, they made the playoffs and got to the second round.
In 2014, they made the playoffs, and were heartbroken to lose in the first.
They fired their coach, Mark Jackson, and hired a first-time head coach in Steve Kerr.
In 2015?
They won a championship. And Steph Curry won the league's Most Valuable Player award.
Some of their opponents through the playoffs and Finals had injury problems, so that summer, people were downplaying their achievement. People were calling another player, James Harden, the "real" MVP. (Harden won the Players' Association MVP award that year.)
The Warriors were not impressed. Their centre, Andrew Bogut, got his championship ring sized for his middle finger. (Yes. Really. He's Australian.) And unlike most defending champions, the Warriors came out for the next season...
Hungry.
They won their first 24 games in a row. Which was a record.
This season opening is a montage of spectacular success... amid some worrying scenes of their coach Steve Kerr having spinal surgery, and complications, and having to miss their games in agony.
Kerr eventually returned to coaching, but looked decades older than he had, haggard, and still visibly plagued with migraines all season.
The rest of the season is intense. Every team is coming out to beat the Warriors like doing so is as good as a championship. Almost none of them succeed. At no point do the Warriors lose twice in a row. If I remember right, they don't lose a single game at home, either. (If they did, they lost no more than one.)
The Warriors win 73 games, and lose 9, breaking the Jordan Bulls' record of going 72-10.
Along the way, Steph Curry blows the whole league out of the water with the most spectacular individual offensive season the League has ever seen. At some point I'll probably do a whole post on Steph Curry, but suffice to say: no-one was saying anyone else was the MVP that year.
Steph Curry wins the first unanimous MVP in the history of the NBA.
And then in the playoffs?
Steph gets hurt.
The Warriors make it through the first round. Steph comes back in the second. They go down 3-1 in the Western Conference Finals and come back to win (it's best-of-seven). They go up 3-1 in the Finals... and then they lose. (These series could sustain their own posts but this is already long.)
After the greatest regular season in history.
Yeah... people said things.
Meanwhile, that offseason, Kevin Durant, generally agreed to be the second-best player in the NBA and an all-time great, is entering unrestricted free agency, and he doesn't seem entirely happy with his team, the OKC Thunder.
Kevin Durant also deserves his own post.
He signs with the Warriors.
His first season with the Warriors has a clear period of adjustment, but come the playoffs, the Warriors are unstoppable. They go 16-1, losing only one game, total, which they lost to the Cleveland Cavaliers in the Finals. (The Cavaliers were only marginally worse on playoffs record; they lost one game in the Eastern Conference Finals, to the Boston Celtics, that was it.) Kevin Durant wins Finals MVP.
His second season with the Warriors (we're now at the 2017-18 season), the Warriors have a rough ride. Injuries keep hitting the team - at one point the entire starting lineup is all out at once - and the Houston Rockets are on a tear. The Rockets end up with the best record and the first seed.
The Cleveland Cavaliers have lost Kyrie Irving, one of their stars, and somewhat struggled all season. They're not looking good.
People are talking about the Western Conference Finals as the "real Finals", and they're not wrong.
The Houston Rockets take the Golden State Warriors (feat. Kevin Durant) to seven games.
And are leading in the seventh game going into the third quarter.
Houston proceed to miss 27 three-point shots in a row, which is unheard of.
The Warriors win.
They proceed to sweep the Cavaliers (winning four games without losing one). Kevin Durant wins FMVP again.
The Warriors have now won three of the last four championships. (The fourth, if you ask Warriors fans, is mildly controversial, at that, but the AU in which Kelly Olynyk didn't break Kevin Love, the Cavaliers win in 2015, the Warriors win in 2016, and Kevin Durant doesn't join the Warriors at all is a whole other thing.)
The bumbling, failtastic Warriors are now an all-time champion team, because after all of that failure, all of that frustration... they're heroes now.
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