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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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So it's a known thing that depression is isolating.
Here's an under-observed (in my experience) part of why:
Many of the systems that, at present, exist for people to connect are, for the depressed, actively damaging and alienating.
Much of how people connect now is social media. Even a housebound shut-in can access that.
But social media is acutely toxic poison if you're coming at it from a certain place.
Which is to say:
Imagine (and I do hope this is something you have to imagine) that you have been depressed, and ill and/or injured. For a while. All you've done for quite some time is survive, and that's not nothing, but if you go to social media, you come across the following:
Everyone's life is better than yours.
Facebook is the worst for this, because everyone seems to post the best possible version of themselves on Facebook, and if the best possible version of you is still kind of a mess... what do you do? Facebook is a parade of people showing off how great they are and how great their lives are. You can't compare. You're pathetic. You have nothing to tell people that you're proud of.
You have nothing to say.
Everything you could say seems like you might come across as whining, or attention-seeking, and you have nothing interesting and novel to say about anything. You haven't done anything. You have no experiences to relate in any way.
Everyone is like a stranger now.
While you were sick, you didn't keep up. Even if you read what people were posting it, you don't remember it, because you were feverish or drugged and it's a blur at best. You've fallen behind. You don't know who the people they're casually mentioning are, you don't know what's going on, and you don't want to ask people, "Hey, catch me up on the last two years of your life?"
But the problem keeps getting worse because you can't make yourself keep reading, keep up, because it hurts even to try.
Everything about how people try to connect is alienating.
Friending memes feature people listing the things they're interested in and the things they do and the things they want to talk about, and you look at it and back away, wondering if you should just give up on everything, because you don't remember what you're interested in, all you do is try to make it through the week, or the day, or the hour, and you don't know what you want to talk about, you just want to talk to someone at all.
Popular culture is alienating too.
Everything is grimdark, everything you think you'll love goes full tilt to clear the nearest shark with room to spare, and you can't take it any more. You can't get emotionally invested in yet another TV series or book series that's all going to go to shit, so you take to avoiding them all until they're finished, until you can know whether it's worth it or whether it's going to betray you, and by then... no-one cares any more.
Crawl back into your box. This isn't for you any more.
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Dec. 6th, 2018 @ 02:39 pm
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So I just saw that apparently one of the drawbacks of DW is perceived to be "no reblogging" and I'm over here like...
"So you're saying that the problem with this car is that it doesn't explode?"
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Apparently people might be coming back to Dreamwidth. It's pleasing, but also a reminder that I've been absent here too.
I'm trying to be alive again.
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Aretha Franklin sings Rolling in the Deep.
There is so much to say about this.
I found the studio version too.
For one thing? This is not an Adele song. This is an Aretha Franklin song. There are two songs called Rolling in the Deep and they have a lot of lyrics in common but one is an Adele song and the other is an Aretha song.
Adele's version is deeply bitter. It's, "Fuck you, I hurt." Aretha's version is angry but not bitter. It's, "Fuck you, and you're gonna be sorry."
(The Aretha version shifts into Ain't No Mountain High Enough which, oddly, also transforms that song from joyful declaration of love to gleeful promise of destruction.)
Adele version, for comparison.
The video for Adele's version is also brilliant, but that's not all of why I personally respond a lot more strongly to Adele's.
(The video is so good, though.)
There's a sort of joke-not-a-joke about Adele being music to cry to. A couple of her songs, though, are very Killing Me Softly for me - there's almost an anger to it, like how dare she sing my pain like this, it's mine, who gave her the right to perform it in public like that?
Those songs, specifically, are Rolling in the Deep and Set Fire to the Rain.
So, yeah, I have many feelings.
But there's also the more... abstract part of this:
That the bones of this song were good enough to be an Adele song or an Aretha song.
That I really want to know what Aretha Franklin thought when she heard Adele's version, that she knew she could do this with it.
The album's called Aretha Franklin Sings The Great Diva Classics and I want it because this is fascinating.
I can't say I'm a huge Aretha Franklin fan - I have due respect (ha) and admiration for her skill and her accomplishments, but the influence of her work on my life is largely less direct - she was adored by and hugely influential upon the artists who followed her. (For example, Freddie Mercury thought she was amazing.)
I still want that album now.
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The University of Western Australia is going to be hosting an anti-trans advocate on behalf of the Australian Family Association. This Friday.
change.org petition
But alumni should possibly be calling or writing to register their disapproval.
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Pilot study of using Google Glass with an app that recognises facial expressions and provides autistic children with information on them.
Worth a read.
I was both moved and kind of "... huh." at the kid who told his mother he could read minds. Because, yeah, the ability to read facial expressions would seem like a superpower if you didn't have it.
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So... yeah, this needs a cut tag.
( In this: discussion of grief and loss with specific regard to mothers. Also, seriously, some detailed commentary about what it's like to watch your mother dying, and what happens after when it turns out she lives. )
But here's the thing:
Time still passes, and people are still people.
That was a sucky time in my life, and I am so, so grateful that I still have my mother. I still needed her, I really did. I am aware that I am blessed to still have her at 37.
But I also have a deep, deep dread, because I have watched my mother dying, but she did not die, so what I fear is the possibility that I'll have to do it again.
I don't think it's something that gets easier with practice.
I am protective of my mother. I worry about her and am concerned for her sometimes to an extent she finds slightly exasperating. I think the thing is that I love her, as any worthwhile child of a worthwhile mother does, but I am in the unusual position of still having her around while knowing how much it hurts to lose her.
She is, now, not allowed to die, because I say so.
But, mutual friends, if that should happen? Give some love to Vel and Chas, because they are going to be picking pieces of me off the floor.
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Gender is a big issue right now. That's fine. Good. I'm totally supportive of trans and non-binary people's rights to gender self-determination.
This isn't about them.
This is about the "gender variant" and "non-conforming" people and how much I kind of hate them.
Because, and there aren't a lot of areas in which I say this about gender, but that's not a thing and you are a terrible person for saying it is.
"Gender non-conforming"? Unless every single person I've seen talking about this is explaining it really badly, this is people who absolutely identify as "male" or "female" but want to make an issue of how special they are because they don't fit some arbitrary stereotype of it.
So... people who are The Problem, basically. People who think gender identity and performance should be policed, and if you don't fit into a very small box, that makes you some kind of genderqueer.
As a woman who was a tomboy and has long hair but doesn't own makeup or, currently, a skirt or a dress, who speaks her mind and can fix a computer or a range of basic mechanical problems, who fits no stereotype of womanhood in existence, but is nonetheless entirely cisgendered, I really need to tell you that no, and that literally none of the above means I get to absolve myself of association with cis privilege or that I get to be one of the cool genderqueer kids.
More importantly, though?
You. Are. The. Problem. YOU are a tool of the patriarchy.
Because what you're about is reinforcing bullshit gender roles for everyone but you.
Maybe think about what it says about YOU that you think gender has to conform to something specific. Maybe think about who benefits from people policing gender roles and identity like this.
I am a woman. I conform entirely to my gender identity, because "is a woman" is always true, and because I'm not trying to reinforce a social hierarchy that hurts everyone I give the slightest shit about, the only metric by which I rate womanhood is is this person a woman.
Gender presentation is not gender.
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Most of the last week went to Insomnia Jag and a replay of Final Fantasy XIII.
Insomnia jag: between Tuesdayish and Sunday night I got about sixteen hours of sleep, generally in blocks of 30 minutes or less, I think.
So that sucked.
While that was happening I wasn't really up for much that required substantial levels of brain, but I did play through FF13 again, because I had an outstanding, incomplete assignment from my old therapist:
To play FF13 again, and try to like Vanille.
Because - somewhat annoying voice aside - the thing that has been A Thing of discussion and all is that Vanille is very like me.
Vanille makes mistakes. She fakes every interaction. She hides things and she -
- is broken. She's traumatised and hurting and terrified. She's trying to fake normal, but she has no idea what normal even is.
But in the midst of all of that, she does try to help people, and comfort them, and be kind.
She's hurting and frightened and she doesn't want people to know that.
It's kind of a thing.
The other thing about FF13 is that it's a really good game with amazing characters and a good story that desperately needs fix-it fic, and inspired me to write fiction for the first time in a really long time. Several years, at least.
I'm starting small - editing and finishing a story I had mostly written but never quite finished something like five years ago - but it feels pretty good to write again, especially after the last several years of illness and injury.
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Apr. 27th, 2018 @ 03:06 pm
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There were things I was going to post about that are remaining mentally queued if I don't forget because I'm in an insomnia phase and have had about six hours of sleep since Wednesday SO THERE'S THAT.
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Apr. 20th, 2018 @ 07:14 am
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Yesterday I found out that the lump that shows up in my chest CT is not lung cancer
which is pretty damn good news since apparently lung cancer in a 37-year-old non-smoker is likely to be "very aggressive"
So there's that!
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![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png) myfyr came across a thing recently in which people were discussing the usages of "immigrant" and "expat".
I didn't read it, but the bit he read out to me featured the people involved concluding that expat meant immigrant but white and being angry about that.
Which struck us both as odd because neither of us agree with that.
We spent some time discussing what the nuances are in that, and came up with:
Expats are, in our dialect:
- people from a Commonwealth country in another Commonwealth country (phrases like "American expat" don't work)
- not necessarily permanently relocating, generally not citizens of the country in which they live
- unless they're English, because English people don't necessarily become one of us
It came up again today, because we were watching the celebration in-stadium from when Malawi beat New Zealand at the netball in the Commonwealth Games, and observing that it looked like most of the crowd were rooting for Malawi.
Australians love an underdog, which Malawi unquestionably were; Australia and New Zealand are netball powerhouses. Half the crowd would have cheered for Malawi if they were playing against Australia, let alone New Zealand, our trans-Tasman cousins/friends/mortal enemies.
And, of course, there'll probably be some supporters who came from Malawi, "... and basically every African expat," he said, without thinking about it.
So that.
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Recently I've been reading a booklet on US Foreign Policies through history - one that was written in 1943, revised in 1945.
It's interesting.
At some point I'm going to do a detailed writeup of... a bunch of things, really, but a highlight to note about this booklet:
1) The author throws some truly amazing shade. It's all about foreign policy, so it largely skims domestic issues, and yet... there is shade in the most arch and neutral way. It's beautiful.
2) More importantly/notably: in the recitation of events, he blandly recounts a number of events in the manner of one reminding the reader of things that are well-known to be true but a non-historian might have forgotten.
The curious thing is that some of them are events that I recall, in my lifetime, people getting very excited about, "So we thought this wasn't true, but it turns out that it is!"
For example, I have clear recollection of a discussion of divers discovering that the wreck of the Lusitania turned out to hold ammunition, and this being a surprise because it was believed that it did not.
And yet, in this booklet written in the 40s, the author casually notes that the Lusitania was carrying munitions, and discusses the issue of the sinking of the Lusitania in that context.
It also brought home to me in ways I had never consciously considered that, as a matter of policy and practice, the US was militarily weak throughout its history until the Second World War.
I should be clear that it was written by an American when I get to this part.
He reviews how the US's survival from the Revolutionary War onward was dependent on others; on the aid of France in the Revolutionary War itself, and onwards. How the Monroe Doctrine, at the outset, was sustained because the US was sheltered behind the "stout wooden walls" of the British fleet.
He notes that the US's entry into the World Wars was delayed, in part, by the great appeal of profiting by selling to both sides, and reviews in detail how badly the US mishandled various things in the period between the wars.
Without quite using the word, that I recall, he acknowledges that the US was profoundly hypocritical in its approach to some matters dealing with the European Powers.
It's strange, because a measured critique of American policy, by an American, that acknowledges that the US's behaviour has been flawed, and that dispassionately identifies the ways in which assorted events were driven by national self-interest rather than some kind of noble purpose is kind of novel.
Apparently it used to be allowed.
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I should probably mention why I've been basically gone for the last several years.
Basically I've been sick.
Summary:
Several years ago there was a nasty flu strain going around, and I caught it, and I was really really sick.
And then the flu sort of got better, but I still had a really nasty vicious cough that was bronchitis for a few months.
And then I still had a bit of a cough but the really nasty part was that I had a bad fever for about a year.
And I spent so much time sick and immobile, it seems, that I developed diabetes.
And then I was really sick for a while because it turns out if you have too much diabetes medication, that can also make you very very sick, and I started out on a dosage that was supposed to be we'll see how your blood sugar goes on this dosage and get an idea of how much to increase it from there which turned out to be okay so we'll cut that dosage in half.
Craziest thing about diabetes: I kind of have to eat more than I did before, but I am eating better because the government paid for me to see a dietitian. However, if I skip meals, eat late, or forget to eat, I am now very very sorry I did that.
This combined very badly with getting gastro last year. It was pretty bad. After I passed out and possibly had a momentary seizure, we went to the hospital, where I had to stay overnight to be reviewed by a cardiologist, because both the ECG and blood tests were showing I'd maybe had a heart attack.
I hadn't, but it turns out of you're sufficiently dehydrated that your blood is basically sludge (the doctor needed real effort to draw blood for the test) your heart panics a bit and sends out the same distress markers it does for a serious heart attack.
They gave me like four litres of IV fluids and I still didn't even need to pee.
And I still have a cough. Which has been getting worse. I'm on a hefty rotation of asthma puffers at the moment, but I still have to sleep propped somewhat upright or I can't breathe, and if it doesn't improve dramatically in the next week the next step will be to see a respiratory specialist.
Also to see if there were certain problems I had a chest CT and there's a lump in my lungs that I have to get checked again in a few months in case it's cancer or something.
And for the past several weeks I have had shingles.
Having shingles is incredibly annoying, and I would probably have lost it in some fashion by now except velithya found a capsaicin-based cream that induces a very mild burning sensation, which counters the neuralgia symptoms, which is great.
Although I also discovered just last night that if you used the cream and then washed your hands thoroughly like you're supposed to but then apparently touched your skin again without realising it, and then you rub your eye, then your eye will have extremely strong opinions about just how "mild" that burning sensation is. (Fortunately, after flushing my eye out with copious amounts of water, it turned out that while my eyelid was very, very upset with me, the stuff didn't seem to have got on my actual eye at all.)
So that's what's been up with me. I've just been sick.
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Apr. 11th, 2018 @ 09:04 am
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Trying to uncurl from my box again.
Big problem, looking at my reading page: the guilt and shame of having completely lost track of everyone's lives. It feels inappropriate to ask of someone who's clearly huge in their life now: "So, like... who is that?"
That sort of thing.
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Final Fantasy XIV features:
- a misogynistic jerk with a very high opinion of himself who is going down in flames every time he tries to interact with a woman, because none of them are having any of his shit
- another guy quite a few female characters seem genuinely to be hot for, but sadly for them while he's super-nice and all he doesn't appear to notice their interest (but he did find some scantily-clad male warriors very distracting)
- a tribal group with unusual views on death and reincarnation that result in an interesting perspective on gender e.g. "She happens to be a woman at the moment, but she was a great man like three times already, so she's still the man in charge" and "yes, I do have a woman's name, I was born into a male body but I am in fact a heroic woman so what's your problem exactly?"
As far as I can tell they either determine "real" gender by what someone usually is or first was, or else by kind of a personal preference thing bordering on not actually caring that much, beyond encouraging people to take lovers who are reproductively compatible because they're kinda super-fighty and have a mild population crisis going. Like, they seem to use pronouns aligned to people's potential reproductive status because they need more babies and beyond that point they could not be persuaded to care less.
(Their take on life is this: that when one of their people dies, it's not a big deal, because that person will be reborn in a forthcoming baby, and identified by what familiar spirit they recognise behind the baby's eyes. Whereupon that baby will be given the person's name, and taught about their previous lives, and raised as that person. They are, therefore, undying warriors, whose souls burn brightest in battle.)
- Another group features all-male warriors who cannot stand interacting with women pretty much at all; a friend was surprised at herself for how belatedly she realised that they are also, of course, extremely gay.
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NPC just made a comment that amounts, more-or-less, to a snarky comment about how everyone in Kugane is short and has black hair.
1) Bro, I am a Lalafell, don't step to me with short jokes
2) I didn't even know how many Japanese stereotypes I was vaguely aware existed until Stormblood started hitting every single one of them oh my God I'm starting to feel racist just for noticing. If I thought Japanese people cared more about what other people thought of them, I'd start to wonder if Yoshi-P was going to be in trouble when he went home to Hokkaido.
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Final Fantasy XIV: Stormblood features new areas which, so far, are heavily fantasy-mediaeval-Japan in theme.
The aesthetic is super Japanese, the names are Japanese, and also, I have to say, there are here and there some stereotypes and portrayals that would, to me, seem really kind of offensive and racist if it weren't for the part where Final Fantasy XIV is made by a Japanese company under the direction of Naoki Yoshida.
I feel like I can't really object to portrayals of Japanese culture as authorised by Square Enix and Yoshi-P.
So I shall just have fun tooling around Kugane and make plans to buy a house in Shirogane and go NOPE MUST BE FINE NOT EVEN GONNA THINK ABOUT IT, because, really, a Japanese company making a game in Japan can do whatever the hell they want with Japanese cultural and historical everything.
It's just kind of weird to keep tripping over things I'd find kind of skeevy if it was made by non-Japanese people.
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Huh
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Jun. 5th, 2017 @ 09:00 am
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I just made a memory connection that maybe explains some things:
When I was a kid, until puberty really hit, strangers assumed I was a boy. Consistently. I at least once got sideways looks for wearing a dress consistently.
Maybe this is why despite my actual cisgenderness I am so angrily definite about accepting people's gender identity as they claim it.
I know how it feels when people wrongly assume your gender (and sometimes don't believe you when you correct them) and it's annoying, varying levels of insulting, and just really really tiresome to keep correcting them even when your family, friends, and birth certificate all back you up.
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