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I hate automated learning. I just spent 40 minutes on one of those "welcome to our company, let us put you through the spiel of 'don't be a dick when working for us' which you can quite ignore once you have enough whiteness, dickness, money, or power to do so, but you're just a peon and you could reflect badly on us, so sit down, shut up, and let us school you on the rules" training/learning things, and the damn system ATE MY RECORD THAT I'D DONE IT AND I NEED TO DO IT AGAIN.
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bb
After working the state election on Saturday, the conservatives got back into power. UGH. I don't like the conservative state leader, although I respect her acumen in keeping her head above water, but all her/her party's ideas are bad and purely capitalist/economically rationalist and they should be ashamed of them. Sure, they work for me, and I have enough money and agency that I can generally ignore the effects of them on me (or throw resources I have to deal with them), but they don't work for a SHITLOAD of other people.
( nitty gritty of the day )
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Hockey game yesterday - Hornsby v Hornsby, largely the core of Team 1 + core of Team 2 with Team 3 scattered all through both. I was put on the field with the Team 2 lot, although they're still making decisions.
However, I'm starting to think I'd be very frustrated in Team 3 this year - unless they end up putting me in a position out of my comfort zone, and even then I'd still be frustrated. I did get paired with a lot of Team 2 players (as my inners/wing) yesterday, so that's relatively promising...
Ah well. I guess we'll find out in a couple of weeks. Our first game is the 7th April...
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Mar. 24th, 2019 @ 08:55 pm
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So Becca, you may ask, is everything you've read recently gay?
To which I respond: no, not at all! The Door at the End of the World, an ARC of which was passed onto me due to its DWJ-reminiscent qualities as determined by respectable DWJ experts ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png) aamcnamara and bluestalking, is the kind of solidly charming middle-grade book that exists in a pleasant liminal space full of nifty magic and devoid of any sexuality whatsoever.
The plot: undistinguished adolescent Lucy Ebersley is a minor bureaucratic functionary working at one of the intersections between a collection of linked worlds, of which Earth is one (large and ignorant), Lucy's world is another (tiny, largely irrelevant), and six others fill various positions (has magic! has super technology! has a lot of beautiful scenery and is great for vacations!)
(In Lucy's world, adolescents have already gotten all their schooling, taken civil service exams, and are ready to serve as minor bureaucratic functionaries. We roll with it.)
Unfortunately, Lucy's boss has mysteriously disappeared, leaving Lucy alone to cope with a broken world-door, an amiable but hapless Earth teenager named Arthur who took a wrong turn and can't get home, and a collection of intelligent magical bees.
Like any good minor bureaucratic functionary, Lucy promptly attempts to escalate the problem to the proper officials! Alas, this is the kind of book where, it turns out, the proper officials cannot at all be trusted, leaving Lucy and her sidekick Arthur to solve the collapse of the multiverse with only the tools at hand: Lucy's organizational skills, Arthur's cheerful willingness to roll with anything, some chance-met connections in the inter-universe smuggling underground, and, of course, the bees. A solidly enjoyable middle-grade read; the bees are a delight and I support them in all their endeavors.
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Mar. 24th, 2019 @ 05:52 pm
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( wisdom tooth removal, no dentistry details )
So that's the state of the Sanguinity: newly free of wisdom teeth, and also a lot tired and a little grumpy and bored of reading fic.
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25.Adventure Time: Ice King by Emily Partridge, Pranas Naujokaitis & Natalie Andrewson - Ice King went from the silliest villain to the most tragic character in Adventure Time in a few seasons - or just with one episode where the writers reveal that he was once a normal human being who was driven into madness by the crown that gives him all the ice power and the immortality. The introduction of his wife changed that dynamic as well but by then the show had reached its apex and was trying to wrap up. This is one of those comics where Ice King is taught the importance of friendship when he ends up with a new crew who want to use him to attack a super powerful wizard who would prefer to be left alone. Gunther gets kidnapped. Ice King abandons the other crazy wizards for a time. He finds Gunther and everything is fine. Again, I suspect that half of these entries for the year will be about Adventure Time comics and I will find them mostly entertaining but not terribly enlightening.
26. And I Don't Want to Live This Life by Deborah Spungen - Do we give Sid Vicious the benefit of the doubt? When I first heard about Sid Vicious as a man who murdered his girlfriend and then killed himself, I thought that he was the same kind of abusive partner that has made marriage and dating so damn lethal. Only in the intervening years, I heard almost every defense of Sid Vicious possible. Nancy was the aggressive one. Sid was a gentle soul. Sid & Nancy were the original Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, only they killed each other instead of Kurt shooting himself and Courtney going on to be not only difficult for her family but her daughter. Sid didn't actually do it. The drug dealer killed Nancy for the money they had. Or Sid did it but Nancy wanted him to do it. Sid was too confused from the heroin. Certainly Deborah Spungen gives Sid that out in stating that Nancy probably bullied her into stabbing her because she wanted to die.
Only there's something in Sid's letters to Deborah Spungen that sound manipulative. He's way too eager to reach out to the mother of the woman that he killed. He's way too self-pitying. He doesn't tell her that he's sorry for her loss. He tells her that he feels empty and hollow because the love of his life is dead. When Nancy was alive he was not above bullying Deborah into giving them money. The thing is that Sid was also violent. He hit Nancy. He got into fights. He was at a party CELEBRATING being released on bail when he overdosed. He had lived he might have gotten off but he would have probably killed the next woman or beat her. He would be like the Chris Brown of punk.
And it does seem easy to give Sid the benefit of the doubt given Nancy's problems. This book is about a girl who was difficult from birth. I was prepared to hate Deborah Spungen as a bad mother but she did the best she could with the mental health resources she had in the 50s and 60s. Nancy seems like Borderline Personality Disorder which wasn't even diagnosed until the 1990s. There were other diagnoses throughout like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, etc. But mostly Nancy was a difficult child who became a difficult teenager who turned to drugs pretty early on. But even if she never did heroin she was exhausting. The problem is that a mentally ill teenage girl was so exhausting that her murder becomes justified in popular imagination and even romanticized. She was a suicidal woman who fell in love with her murderer. And all her mother could do was watch and worry.
27.Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff - Speaking of assholes with mental problems, Michael Wolff depicts Trump in much the same way as Deborah Spungen depicts her daughter - as a fragile angry asshole who wants to be loved but won't stop pushing people away and destroying shit. Only where Nancy was a teenage girl with a drug problem, Trump is an old man in charge of the biggest nation in the world and completely out of his depth with a series of hangers-on trying to influence him. I'd almost feel sorry for the stupid motherfucker if he wasn't working so hard to fuck my country.
This book is mostly from Steve Bannon's perspective. Steve Bannon is trying to push his agenda over the Kushners with Reince Priebus as a guy who seems to be remarkably hard to push over when the time comes. Wolff gives us the Ivanka-Jered pairing as the liberals trying to keep Trump from going too deep into the racism but I'm not sure I can really believe that. Mostly, it's a portrait of Bannon who believes in Trumpism so much that he's willing to go against Trump to achieve it. By the time this book went to print, Bannon had yet to fail miserably with Roy Moore but the part where the creepy Mercers cut off Bannon came after the book. Everyone in this book is an asshole. Everyone is trying to get something. And for the most part these delusional assholes have made a huge mess and while Wolff is trying to give them a sympathetic portrayal, I find the whole thing rather sad.
Also besides the stuff that ended up in the newspapers (everyone crying when Trump won, etc.), most of this book is just the hits from the headlines, culminating in the bullshit Charlottesville speech with not much insight beyond the fact that everyone freaked out a little.
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Mar. 25th, 2019 @ 10:43 am
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7) That Ain't Witchcraft by Seanan McGuire
While in theory this is book eight of the Incryptid series, there are several short stories and a complete separate series (The Ghost Roads) that intermingle with the main thread about the adventures of the Price family siblings: Andrew, Verity, and Antimony. Ihis is the last of Antimony's turn as narrator, at least for awhile. Which is sad, as I really enjoy her style. I love pop culture references, and I love all the roller derby references. (I had a friend who was in Rat City Roller Girls for awhile so the jargon is familiar to me and made me happy to see.)
The story itself isn't the clearest along the main plot line. I do love the fast pace as so it onto the next thing before I have a chance to really think about what's happening; that pace, the dialogue, and the found family aspect of it are the top sells for me. I particularly like the scooby team in this one, as they are still in their learning about each other and learning relationships phase. it's not the strongest of the series, but I love that the main team it is composed primarily of non-human incryptids, rather than it being family based. It really helps bring home how much of an outsider Antimony feels like within her own family and humanity in general, while still wanting to bring in someone else who doesn't have the same sense of support from her family as she had from hers.
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So, I did, in fact, end up just going on to season 2 of The Orville. I had to keep myself awake last night to keep my sleep schedule adjusted for another week of night shifts, and some light sci-fi binge-watching was just the thing. I've now seen up through episode 6 of season 2 ("A Happy Refrain," and more about that one under the spoiler cut), and since I've got to do pretty much the same thing tonight, I'm thinking I'll likely keep going with it and maybe catch up to current with it by tomorrow.
In very broad terms, I guess my thoughts about the show are still much the same as they were about season one. It's an odd hybrid of things, it really is. Goofy, even juvenile humor. Absolutely traditional-feeling Star Trek storylines, complete with attempts at social commentary. And also a strong focus on character relationships (very much including their love lives) in a way that itself straddles the line between serious and comedic. It's a combination that, even after the point last season where the show started to click for me, still doesn't always gel terribly well. There's a lot of episodes that are quite watchable -- a pleasant enough way to keep yourself awake, even, if you're me -- but that just don't feel like they entirely know what it is they want to be, and don't end up being all that much of anything.
But. But. There are episodes -- including some towards the end of season one -- where, surprisingly, it all does work together, some crazy chemistry happens, and the show lets us see just what it can be. And when that happens it's great. Great enough to maybe make the whole thing feel better than it actually is, and certainly enough to make it feel well worthwhile. (Even if it also kind of makes me want to look at the lesser episodes, shake my head a little, and mutter, "Don't be an underachiever; you can do better!") Occasionally, an episode leaves me with a giant grin on my face and the feeling that I've just watched something utterly delightful.
( Cutting the rest for spoilers, and also for my embarrassing shipping proclivities )
Anyway. More thoughts after I'm caught up, maybe. Hopefully less embarrassing ones, but I make no promises.Current Mood:  happy
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I’ve tried to follow the Archive of Our Own's instructions to modify the ones on offer and achieved zilch.
What I want when I view the archive:
- Display the work text in the same font as my browser default
- If I have already given kudos on the work, use a pink background.
I believe that if this is implemented through a site skin, I will have the same experience on laptop as on tablet.
Can you do this? Happy to discuss payment.
If you can't do this, feel free to point me to a better place to ask.
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Mar. 24th, 2019 @ 05:50 pm
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I have not had a productive weekend.
So that, uh, that Noah Reid fellow. Good face, eh?
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Here is the sign-up form. Welcome to this year's challenge! Sign-ups will close at 11:59PM EDT 4 April (see what time that is for you).
This year's rules are the same as last year's. You can request 3-10 canons, and offer 3-10 canons. If a canon doesn't appear in the drop-down menu when you go to enter it, you can copy and paste it from the tag set and press enter.
Each of your requests and offers must be tagged with 1-3 of the labels "Fanfic", "Podfic", and "Fanart".
If you are offering podfic, you are pledging to create both text and recording (500-5000 words). You are welcome to team up with a friend to create a work, whether you're the recording artist or the writer, but if that's what you intend, please contact me at jukebox.mod@gmail.com to let me know of the arrangement and to provide a contact email for your friend.
Your requests have a space for optional details. Go ahead and use them to talk about how you understand the song and what kind of art/fic/podfic you might like. However, your gift creator doesn't have to follow your prompts. They do have to respect clear and specific Do-Not-Wants listed in the sign-up (like "no pregnancy" "no scat" "no rainbows").
Your requests have a space for a letter link, if you want to provide one. This link must be included before sign-ups are closed. If you are writing a letter, please have it complete and unlocked by the end of 7 April.
Notes to Mod in Offers
Last year, I added an Optional Notes box in the Offers part of the sign-up, so that people could tell me if they wanted to match on one request more than the others, or wanted a particular style of prompts, etc. I thought it worked well, so I'm using it again. You do not need to use this feature.
Corrections are still welcome to the tables of sources for all canons (by title, by artist).
You can comment here or contact me at jukebox.mod@gmail.com if you have any questions about signing up.
Letters posts will go up shortly.
This post on LJ
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I'm not entirely sure if I'm actually intending to follow my self-created reading challenge or not, but I did update that list with the things I've happened to have read so far.
It's interesting how unusual it feels to me to have 'so many' 20thC titles on my "read" list. By that I mean, I've been putting through PG Wodehouse and Dorothy Sayers, which is really not a wide range of 20thC literature. Though it is fascinating, looking at their publication dates, to see that they're within just a few years of each other, and the Jeeves stories are closer to WWI chronologically. It hadn't occurred to me until just this moment to see them as sharing a core structure of "wealthy, dandyish gentleman and his butler live a life of unattached adventure", probably because they do extremely different things with that core structure.
Does this mean that there are more "dandy and his butler" stories from the 1920s? Was this a subgenre?? If so I would LOVE to read the ones that didn't famous!
whisperspace: Wednesday is my Very Long Work Day this term so Reading Wednesday will have to be a Wednesday-independent phenomenon for me, for a while.
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Walking with armpit crutches is exhausting. Though on the plus side, my worry that my overall level of fitness would go to hell due to lack of exercises was hilariously wrongheaded - if anything, I am liable to get much stronger by the time this is done (and/or some added overuse injuries.
I went to see Captain Marvel yesterday with hederahelix at Mann's Chinese, which involved plowing through a gigantic crowd of oblivious tourists, people attending a street fair I hadn't known was happening, hucksters in costumes or with an albino boa, and aggressive Jesus freaks holding HELL IS HOT and YOU WILL BURN signs and carrying crosses (easily carried ones, not actually crucifixion size or weight - missing the point, Jesus freaks!). I kept having to stop and rest, and by the time I got to tickets I was literally dripping with sweat.
That was when I discovered that Captain Marvel was no longer in the IMAX theatre I'd gone all the way to Hollywood and braved the skeevy madness of the Walk of Fame for, but was in 3D. I can't visually process 3D and it makes all scenes using it visually incomprehensible to me. So I had to go all the way back, through the oblivious tourists and the hucksters and the super lightweight cross-bearers, and then to another theatre. On the way a huckster dressed as Pennywise startled a group of tourists, one of whom collided with me and nearly knocked me down.
This was all additionally complicated by the fact that hederahelix was driving us in her car (in retrospect she should have just driven mine as I realized this exact second, oh well) which had two broken door locks so both driver and passenger doors cannot be opened from the inside.
(The movie was no Black Panther, but it was very fun. Loved the Carol & Fury & Goose show.)
Then I got home and found that my homemade bread had gone moldy. I consoled myself by getting the cats high and getting hederahelix to photograph my foot so I could cadge some sympathy.
This morning I went to the farmers market, but was so exhausted by the time I got there (and also concerned about shoulder/wrist overuse injuries) that I bought some berries, carrots, and oranges and called it a day. Then I realized that I had to walk all the way back, but now with a weight. I was debating asking some random shopper for a ride to my car when a helpful homeless guy who I'd earlier given some money spotted me and carried my backpack to my car for me.
I got there and back by taking off my boot, driving with my left foot, then putting the boot back on. Unfortunately, when I tried to get over a curb, I tripped, went sprawling, and landed directly on my broken foot. So I may have some additional degrees of dislocation now. ARRRRGH!
Also some of the berries got squashed. I decided I had better eat those immediately, before they went bad, and polish off most of the raspberries as well in case they had hidden crush injuries. However, I bought three boxes, so I have plenty left.
Cats are very put out that I am no longer walking around the house cradling them in my arms like a baby (Erin) or letting them leap on to my shoulders from a standing position (Alex). They are consoling themselves by taking up permanent residence in my lap.
But here's the most interesting thing I've learned. Having a very visible and presumed-temporary disability, at least for me and so far, makes people be extra-nice. Strangers are helpful or offer stories about their own broken bones. If I decline help with thanks, they don't have a problem with that. Not a single one of the MANY people to whom I have now told the story of how I broke my foot has blamed me, even though insofar as there is any blame to be placed, this was 100% my fault.
Having an invisible disability, again at least for me, mostly made people be absolute assholes, openly disbelieve me, and tell me to my face that it's all my fault. If I declined help with thanks, they often got angry with me and then blamed me some more.
Having a visible disability of the sort I currently have is no picnic (fucking curbs, I hate them), and I'm sure the fact that mine signals "temporary" makes a big difference. All the same, all else being equal, if I had to pick a permanent one, I'd take visible over invisible every time.
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accomplished
annoyed
