don't know where, don't know when

Well, there's something wrong with the comments here ("no one, including me, can leave any"), and after fucking with it in every way I could think of for hours on multiple occasions, I just turned the fucking things off and disappeared the link. One day I'll come back & try again, but not today.

I was going to close this blog — posting has always been way less than I wanted — but then, eh. Seems dramatic. I'll post. Someday. Don't cry, she said, laughing carelessly, her ribboned hat blowing in the chilly breeze wafting off the... moors?

I've been Redditing, which: Yes. Everyone on Reddit is a fatphobe. Only 93% of them are transphobes. If I'm ever tempted to succumb to the comforting belief that men are 1.) significantly different from women, or 2.) prone, for some dark genetic reason, to bigotry and irrational aggression, I just hop over to r/gendercritical and read as much as I can before my face melts. Jesus Christ, those people. You could do a search & replace with "woman" and "gamer" in 88% of those posts and lose nothing (except lunch, and who needs lunch; you can always get another lunch).

Speaking of which: My least favorite part of Reddit bigotry is the relatively new, condescending Concern Troll tone adopted by so many assy posters. It definitely isn't that fat people (fat women, mostly) are failing to adhere to random pointless norms which Reddit has decided to personally police in unison, because the decay of standards when it comes to female attractiveness can lead to such horrors as... uh. It's that everyone is super-concerned with fat women, whose lives are irreparably harmed by depression and datelessness and an inability to ride unicycles (!!!), because Reddit loves too much, and too deeply. Why would you choose to be fat and depressed, when you could be wasting every micro-calorie attempting to conform to prevailing weird racist standards of commercial beauty? Eh, fat women? I once attempted to explain to a Reddit macule that the presence of "depression" in a likely post subject doesn't have meaning as a metric when it comes to who's allowed online; if we're depriving the depressed of representation for their own good, then there should be no more women online period (women are more prone to depression than men) (wives and mothers are even more prone to depression than regular women, I guess, so no mommy blogs either), no black or brown people (I love that in this study the scientists attempted to control for "unhealthy behaviors," which didn't seem to factor into any other depression studies), no gay people, no gamers (sedentary people are far more prone to depression than the anthropomorphized hamsters who voluntarily jog every day for no reason) (okay, you get one), no disabled people — in fact, the only non-depressed people fit to be depicted in pixels are straight cis white men who do [*WHATEVER THE CROSSFIT OF NOW IS*]. Best not interrogate that conclusion in any way; facts don't care about your feelings, sweaty.

I am obligated to maintain a particular level of fitness and "health" for medical reasons, and it tears my ass daily. I've been fat, on multiple occasions. I don't remember becoming public property on any of them. The obsession on the internet with women's bodies — with Other people's bodies in general — is medieval. Reddit is a cybernetic upgrade, though; I'm sure they'd burn us if they could.

But. In other, less agonizing news, I went back to Tumblring, if you too would like to Tumbl (there are fewer regular people post-Porn Purge, so it's slower but slightly more fun). I closed my old Twitter account, because I didn't actually have many followers/mutuals that I liked & all I was doing was getting into political arguments with total morons or getting hit on by weirdos. I have an alt, still. Don't know if I'm gonna use it.

We'll meet again, stranger. I'm sure of it.

even these apples look fake; but at least they've got stars on them

sláinte

Does this terrible old-man joke ever get less funny? (No.)
The quality of the Shamrock Shake has fallen off considerably, lo these many years.
My aunt passed away early this morning.
The cat is still fine.

Pictured article.
Tomorrow, more.

cats are nice

My cat is fine; she freaked the fuck out at the vet's office and had to be sedated, but her surgery went well and she got to come home later that afternoon (as promised). She lost 24 of her 30 teeth, and so far the only consequence is that her tongue sticks out when she's asleep. She still eats enough food for nine much larger cats, and bites me in the middle of the night with her three remaining canines so she can sleep in the mathematical center of my pillow. She only had the resorptive lesions, also. No sign of stomatitis, which sounds less scary but can potentially be a much bigger deal.

They sent my aunt home to die. Her cancer is inoperable. The oncologists tried to perform a surgery that would've allowed them to start chemotherapy, but the surgery failed and there were complications. When she woke up after the second surgery attempt she formally refused further treatment, and is now at home with her husband and grandkids and various shifts of hospice nurses. My aunt herself was a nurse for nearly 40 years, and she knows what time it is. It's a dismal and heart-breaking situation comprehensively, but she's an 83-year-old woman and OG feminist who spent her life doing more or less whatever she wanted. There are worse things than dying at the end of a performance like that, I suppose. She doesn't really remember who I am anymore, and I suspect that talking on the phone with a random weeping woman distresses her (& she always believed that female hysteria in any form was letting down the side, anyway). I'm not going to tax her with my grief anymore. I just hope she'll be allowed to pass away in her sleep, like a good soldier or a bad cowboy.

There's nothing to be done about it one way or the other (except cry, of course).
Thank you in advance for the kind words I'm sure you'd say to me if I'd turned the comments on, but I'm still short a computer and wouldn't be able to respond to you until the weekend.

My aunt would wish me neither to be idle nor to despair in the moment or aftermath of her timely demise, so once I get my digital shit together I'll go back to complaining about books and you can go back to indulgently pretending you care.

Until then, then.

i thank whatever gods may be

So, as is typical —

• The prelude: On Wednesday afternoon, my iMac finally ran down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. I would say, It caught on fire!, but that would be melodramatic of me. What actually happened was that it got so hot that steam came out its vents, and it made sizzling noises and then wouldn't turn on anymore. I knew it was on its way out, so I did buy a new computer (this one + a surprisingly half-decent budget UHD monitor that I'll replace with something fancy at a later date, see below) — but it'll be a few days before it's technically usable for anything (I'm installing Linux, shifting files, etc). Right now I'm on my mom's newer iMac. Thanks, Mom.
• Act One: On Thursday I found out that my aunt, who is the last remaining member of my extended biological white family who isn't overtly villainous, is dying of pancreatic cancer. She will likely pass in the next few months. Reportedly, she finds this outcome preferable to dying slowly of Alzheimer's, which is what was happening before.
• Act Two: On Friday morning, I discovered that my cat has stomatitis and/or resorptive lesions in her teeth, and has likely been suffering discomfort/outright pain for months or years as a result. She will have to have some or all of her teeth pulled; she gets a full assessment, as well as the dental surgery, this Wednesday. They've told me I get to bring her home later the same day, and that feline dentistry has become a much-practiced art here in the year of our lord 2018.
• Epilogue: This doesn't really rank up there with the other stuff, but — my Netflix account got hacked by some enterprising Colombian people on Friday, too. In one actual 24-hour day, they'd upgraded my payment package and installed profiles for like nine people. Netflix helped me get the account back in just a couple of minutes, but shit. Did they think I wouldn't notice? I watch Netflix ten hours a day on the weekend. What a bunch of idiots.

Posting will be even lighter than usual, for the next couple of weeks. For reasons.

ETA: I got my new computer working! Using Windows 10. Which is horrible and pushy and ugly. It isn't as awful as I remember it being back in my office-lady days, though. Also I'm worried that my monitor is a little too nice, because everything is so fucking tiny & sharp. And hot.

i get along with starbucks lovers

What I eventually did was, I cleaned all the emotional/personal content out of both political posts and made them into one post. After I've published it, I thought I'd write all about my precious snowflake self, separately & unencumbered by any specific political association. Not that anyone cares, probably.
But I care!

I don't really care, actually, I don't know why I said that.

Now I just have to go back in and link up some sources, which is proving to be more annoying a chore than I'd imagined. My Pocket account is disorganized, and I had to buy the "Pro" level service to get in to search it properly. 🌋

I'm switching to Pinboard.

I also rehoused duskglass.net!!! It should be up and running again in a couple of days, such as it is. I plan to work on it a lot in the next few months, but I'm having a hard time finding a good place to begin. And also I can't find any of my notes. Like, any of them. Zero notes. I'll probably have to start from scratch, which is actually a good idea, because the space between my original vision of the novel and my current vision of the novel can be measured in lightyears. Lots of lightyears. Five lightyears? 288 lightyears? How long is a lightyear, again? Probably at least a couple of miles, right? I could look it up, but what fun would that be.

If you find this phenomenon peculiar, by the way, you should know that I won't stop humping Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell because it proved to be the key that eventually unlocked the door to my psychological interior, a place I was seldom able to visit pre-Uskglass, and usually only ever at painful emotional cost. Now I can go there whenever I want! Mostly I am full of pieces of old novels, a common — and empty — desire for escape, and watery-eyed rage.

I was going to call the post about white men "i've got a dank space, baby," but of course I stopped myself at the last minute, because cringe-y out-of-date puns help no one. Also, Taylor Swift's cultural capital has diminished considerably in the last year or so, and all the songs on her new album are terrible. The first one had a funny video, but the others are a nightmare. Like, in a couple of them she raps. Unironically. About her boyfriend. And all of the non-rapping singles that have been released so far have been infected with a conceptualization of The Beat that is intended to suggest, but is not directly related to, the kind of music listened to by the young (often immigrant) people of color who are authoritatively dismantling the last remnants of Traditional Western Culture™. It's horrifying. Some white pop singers can handle stuff like that, but no, wait, no they can't. Like, that Ed Sheeran song that turned out to contain a shout-out to The Golden Corral? That song is awful. And I am the sort of undemanding consumer who typically enjoys Ed Sheeran songs, especially if they are about dragons.

Do you know what else is awful? The food at Starbucks. I had never eaten at Starbucks before — my contact with them was limited to chai lattes, which I love, and their proprietary fructose-based coffee milkshakes — but I was hungry and near a Starbucks on Sunday afternoon, so I went in. The food was really, really bad. I probably should've gotten a protein bomb, or whatever the fuck they are, but instead I got the Chicken & Double-Smoked Bacon sandwich. It didn't have any of whatever kind of sauce it was supposed to have on it, the esoteric-sounding Starbucks bread tasted like the outside of a Hot Pocket, and there was a single piece of anemic bacon pressed into the top slice of bun like Boo Radley hiding behind a bedroom door. Also they were out of whoopie pies! I got a brownie, and it tasted like multigrain crackers.

Don't eat at Starbucks.

I made a graphic for this page's background based on a default Blogger graphic, but now I'm thinking about changing the blog's title. Although I like "Sea Rabbits," it is non-descriptive and whimsical. What I should really call this blog, of course, is EMMA NEVER POSTS. Or, EMMA SPENDS ALL HER FREE TIME COMPLAINING ABOUT FANTASY NOVELS INSTEAD OF JUST READING SOME OTHER KIND OF BOOK.

Oh, I got a Kobo Aura One for Christmas! Although I am (what passes for) very excited about it, I haven't opened it yet. My computer is such a mess. My books are a mess. Imposing structure on that mess is intimidating. Although I'm often an obstreperous asshole online, I am sometimes intimidated by my own messes. (I'm actually thinking of just wiping the drive, lol.)

Well. How do you end a blog post? "Goodbye"? "My dwindling faith in the ability of humankind to survive self-created catastrophes has been seriously shaken by recent world events"? "I once ate a Starbucks sandwich on purpose, you probably shouldn't read anything I write"?

I'll put up some book reviews, next time.

love in the time of the flu (or something)

Reader, I had the flu. Or something. I had it badly. I was sick for two+ weeks. Everyone I know also had the flu (or something) and was sick for two+ weeks. This particular flu (or something) had the following unique characteristics (in my case, at least):

• My temperature got so high I couldn't feel my hands or feet.
• Normally I never get a fever, ever.
• But this time my fever was 105ºF.
• I stopped taking my temperature when it was 105ºF.
• I had to control it with staggered doses of Tylenol and Advil in order to avoid having concerned family members call an ambulance for me.
• The skin on my lips and in my ears turned red and peeled off.
• The skin on the palms of my hands dried up and peeled off.
• And itched.
• Something happened to my hair
• It got horribly brittle and dry, no matter what kinds of (expensive!) keratin & jojoba oil & esters of goat milk & other shit I put on it.
• I cut it all off, Victorianly.
• It's not quite BBC Sherlock: The Early Years, but I can see that haircut from here.
• I took 2000mg of augmentin a day for ten days + cough syrup + chlorpheniramine maleate and I have just now started feeling like I am human again.
• All the housework was waiting for me :[

I am posting that goddamned Uprooted review right this minute, because I am starting to believe it's cursed.

ONE OF US IS CERTAINLY CURSED, READER.

(I hope it's the Uprooted review.)

My hair!

computers are like old testament gods; they suck

I have been having my what great-grandma Maudie would call "a time" with my computer. It turns out that those random, continual restarts it kept insisting on, for months, were its shy, understated, El Capitan way of performing a kernel panic. Like, it was constantly kernel panicking. Ten times a day, sometimes, and because I hadn't been reading the Apple Support site for fun since OS X became "macOS," I had no idea. By the time I figured it out, the System had become Corrupted. So I started backing things up, but during that process I discovered that my elderly FireWire drive was, in some subtle way, completely (as Great-grandma Maudie would say) borked, and had been quietly eating all the files I sent it. So, I had to go buy a new one (mine is silver). I slapped my entire user folder onto the new drive without enquiring further, and I made a bootable Sierra volume, thinking I would do a clean install and save myself a lot of grief trying to figure out what exactly had been fucking with my old system. That was when I started really having fun. First, I couldn't get the iMac's built-in HD to erase. Disk Utility said it was too full to work on (?), it wasn't a hard disk, it wasn't writable, whatever. I had to zero it out completely, twice, which took days. Then, there was something wrong with the copy of Sierra on the boot volume (still don't know what), and because my HD had been wiped I couldn't get in to download it again. I finally managed to borrow an old Macbook, redownload Sierra, and make a new boot volume (a week), but because the Macbook was so old it had limited available real-estate, so Sierra had just put the installer in the boot drive, to save space. So then I had to wait while the boot drive downloaded Sierra onto my computer (two days) before actually installing it. I ended up finally getting Sierra installed, and my electricity went out for three days. I was feeling really cheerful and relaxed at this point, as you might imagine, so when the time came to turn my iMac back on I was happy as a fucking clam to find myself continually rejecting the advances of Siri, a completely useless product feature Apple has decided to saddle their new desktopOS with for reasons that remain opaque to much of the marketplace. I would like to point out, here, that despite what you may have seen in various creatively-lit Apple commercials, Siri is completely useless for any purpose besides LARPing Star Trek: The Next Generation. Siri is also, even now, trying to turn herself on all the goddamn time, even though I keep telling her no. Siri is a PUA.

Anyway! After doing all the annoying set-up that any system would require, and requesting a PFA on Siri, Sierra asked me if I would like to host all my files and my desktop environment on iCloud (this would require me to pay money to Apple every month for the privilege), and I said HAHANO, but I allowed as how putting my iBooks library and my Notes and Mail and some other shit on there would be a good idea — and we are approaching Part Two of the narrative now, if you'd like to get up to refresh your beverage — and I sat still for hours playing mah-jongg while Sierra transferred files. Aaaaaaaaaand! And! Can you guess what happened next, Reader? iCloud destroyed my system. It fucked up every aspect of Safari, intermingled my bookmarks/Reading List with shit from my mom's c.2004 iTunes account (I don't even know how!), and destroyed by iBook library. And when I say "destroyed," I mean "first it refused to put the ebooks on my iPad, then it ate them and they disappeared, except for the ones I'd bought in the iBooks Store." We're talking about hundreds of books, here. We're talking about notes on hundreds of books. We're talking about my painfully close reading of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. I spent another entire week trying to fix iBooks (none of the Apple Support solutions worked), before finally giving up, getting my old iBooks library out of my backed-up user folder, and turning iCloud off forever. I also retired Safari rather than waste further hours of my dwindling lifespan trying to figure out what happened to it and how to stop it from continuing to happen/happening again. I'm now using Chrome (business) and Firefox (party), and I sync my iBooks manually, just like it says to do in the Bible. After I got through all that, though, I began to have lots of peculiar, random click problems that basically made my freshly-waxed computer unusable, but I eventually figured out that my legacy Wacom drivers (I used a Bamboo tablet as a mouse) were causing system-wide instability. So I uninstalled every part of the driver architecture, got out the Magic Mouse that shipped with my iMac, and discovered that... it no longer worked. Cleaned it out with a can of air and a microfiber cloth, changed the batteries: nothing. So I conscientiously, despairingly navigated to Apple's website using a pink Hello Kitty mouse borrowed from my niece, and discovered that everyone hates the new Apple Magic Mouse because it has sharp edges that you can cut yourself on and you have to flip it over to charge it. So I bought a "like new" used old one, and it works fine and arrived, indeed, in out-of-the-box condition. (One.)

heaven holds a place for those who pray

This time, I almost died.

Some other people did die, in fact; we lost my grandmother (when they called to tell us she passed, my mother sat on the sofa crying for a few minutes and then looked at me and said, "This is the first time in my life my mother hasn’t just been there. Now I’m going to have to call myself fat."), and the family cat (the elderly brindle gentleman looking into the mirror in those exceedingly sepia’d photos I posted a couple of years ago), both under extremely depressing dementia-related circumstances. My grandmother went from "crotchety old lady who had to be looked after occasionally but was basically fine" to "frail convalescent requiring constant care in a nursing home" in about six months and for no discernible reason, and then she stopped speaking or interacting with anyone, and then she died in her sleep a few days later — just about a month after her 83rd birthday. The cat got freakishly skinny and refused to eat, and then began to spend every waking moment pacing/peeing on the floor. When it was determined that he couldn’t be treated (he was 17) and appeared obviously to be suffering, we agreed to have him put down. The day he was taken away to be euthanized, I don’t think he even recognized me. It was, bewilderingly, almost worse than losing a person. He weighed almost nothing in my hands, and his vacant eyes reminded me of a toy’s. No fair, Death.

Afterwards, I got really sick. I developed pneumonia and a weird traveling infection that refused to stop inhabiting my respiratory tract; it was a very Victorian moment. But I got better! That’s what matters. I ate a lot of Twinkies instead of food (because pills), and I got better. After that, things were pretty okay for a while, and then just recently my mother almost died after a very routine medical test — she went into shock and had some sort of exciting cardiopulmonary event. She’s now doing incredibly well, given the circumstances, except for the fact that she contracted a staph infection because she had to be rushed to a substandard local hospital for emergency treatment.

Other than that, though, things have gone great.

Well, I mean. There was that fucking election! That was not great. That was pretty much an outré postmodern live-action dictionary pantomime of "not great," holy motherfucking shit. We might’ve finally managed to elect a president who will be removed from office by the Avengers in his first 100 days! What a world.

For what it’s worth (nothing), I cosign Jamelle Bouie’s framing of the quantum intersection between racism and the modal straight white American voter — probably most of these poor silly bastards would vote for a chicken running on the Party Of Free Pancakes From Hitler With Love platform if it promised to punish Wall Street for committing fraud and create some decent jobs that didn’t require a college diploma.¹ That doesn’t make any sense to me either, but I’m not the modal straight white American voter.

Also, I just now found this essay, which ends thusly:

But the truth is, we don’t know. If all the predictions were so far off, why should we think the post-election analysis, with all its instant pseudo-certainty, is any smarter or more accurate? What do we know now that we didn’t know before, except that the story wasn’t what we thought it was and that it didn’t go where we thought it was going to go? I am not sure of anything right now, except that on the morning after the election there was a big piece of shit in a doorway and I didn’t know what it meant or how it got there, and that someone was going to have a wretched, smelly time trying to clean it up.

That’s no, "He would be there all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning." I suppose it will have to do.

I’ve also been finding it useful to remember that Trumpists make up about 48% of the the 58%-ish of Americans who voted in the election. Haha! Hahahaha. Ha. 👀

Another important lesson from the election that we can all take home and eat is an empirical refutation of the hypothesis that (biological, cis-) women can be counted upon to behave like feminists just because they’re women — especially if they’re also straight and/or white. If you have three straight white American women in a room and you play them that Trump pussy-grabbing tape, one of them will think he’s a monster and empathize with his hypothetical victims, one will think, "Oh God, I wish a powerful and important man like Donald Trump would grab me by the pussy!", and one will think, "Well, if she wasn’t standing there dressed like a slut he wouldn’t be able to grab her, would he? Stay at home with your legs closed, whore!" In public, Women #2 and #3 are a lot quieter than Woman #1, but they still vote. Irony!

Also, who would've predicted that we’d be finding evil Russians under the bed again in 2016, but that in this sequel they’d be best friends with the quasi-fascist right-wing imbeciles who used to witch-hunt them all night long?

Anyway.

While I was convalescing and grieving and contemplating the murder of my television on November 9th, I was also reading books and writing book reviews, because I am a gigantic nerd. I have 70+ single-novel short-stack reviews ready to go, as well as story-by-story reviews of around 12 collections, and a few normal-length book reviews too. I’m going to start posting them here twice a week (or more often if I get very bored), starting on Wednesday.

Don’t laugh, I’m really doing it this time.
One day, I may even review The Quincunx.
(I’m also remaking my other website, because why quit now.)

See you Wednesday!!!

---

1. Why the hell anyone would run on a "college for everybody forever" platform in order to appeal to people who could barely make it through high school — and who watched their own grand/children barely make it through high school — eludes me. That was not a good policy, Democratic Party. Let’s replace that policy with something less awful soon.

i am not dead; i did not die

I did, however, discover that the Blogger interface has no clearly visible Find & Replace function. Almost as bad?

I also had to fistfight Blogger’s comments service so it would let me reply to the nice comments people had left under my last post. That mofo didn’t go down easy, believe me, but I hit like a girl.

Also I had to switch out of Chrome, because it just randomly stopped working a couple of hours ago — and every time it quit on me, my menubar went from black to white. Weirdness.

Anyway! I’m reading four books, fixing up a new Links page for my website (because the hot popup I copypasta’d and spent an hour editing doesn’t work in mobile browsers, sadness, sorrow, regret), and working through the worst flare of PCOS symptoms I’ve had in two years. And assiduously avoiding Tumblr!

Tomorrow evening I will post the book survey I was working on. Until then you can content your bad  bibliophilic self with this repost of old content, which took me ages to arrange because all the electronic devices in my household are working against me tonight. I’m going to the doctor tomorrow afternoon, and after that I’ll probably visit my horrible granny for awhile (so she can tell me I’m fat and remind me repeatedly that I’m the only non-married adult member of the family now) (THAT’S A FEATURE NOT A BUG GRANDMA) — but after that, it’ll just be us and the books.

Sounds like a party to me!