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.

with feeling

We begin again.

I was going to buy a nice theme for this blog, but I couldn't find any nicer than the one it already has. By which I mean that the ones I looked at were really ugly & dated, not that I particularly like this one. I'll try to there is no try there is only do come up with a nice header, one day soon.

I'm (sort of) in a better place than I was last time I posted. My internet connection was out for so long, and with so little activity on the part of my telecom provider (which is currently filing for bankruptcy, & I'm sure pensions and severance packages for their workers will be the first thing the court sorts out) that I ended up getting the Public Utilities Commission involved. Despite being only one family in a rural context (instead of a whole block or street in a more populous setting), we ended up with a bulldog of a representative who forced Windstream to install a magic "bandwidth magnifier." You think I'm kidding, but nobody had heard of the thing, including the tech people they sent repeatedly to my house, but my download speed went from 3 Mbps to 10 Mbps. Which probably seems pretty mediocre to people in actually developed countries like Latvia and Kenya, but I live in the dissipated banana republic known as Real America™️, so it's Christmas every day now. I was able to watch the last episode of Inside No. 9 Season 4 (I await Season 5 on tenterhooks)! And Vera! And the latest season of Stranger Things! I stopped watching all my formerly-favorite trashy British reality tv shows, though (my most favorite was Can't Pay We'll Take It Away, but I watched a lot of those terrible neighbor/bad landlord shows too), because it began slowly to occur to me that they were extremely racist & classist and that the British persons they depicted being evicted and shamed weren't actually fictional characters despite having charming accents. Well, you win some you lose some. Apologies to all nonfictional inhabitants of the British Isles. (Can someone tell me why dumb British people hate Polish people? I mean: They're white. Can you imagine how excited Donald Trump would be if a bunch of white Polish people wanted to immigrate to the US? I also saw a handsome-looking older male Brexit protestor holding a sign that said 'POLISH SCUM GO HOME' in a Guardian article photo. Are Polish persons not 'home' everywhere, in Europe? Much like British persons? I find this confusing.)

My internet connection is still kind of finicky, I should say; when it works, I get decently normal speeds. But the "working" part is still an issue — there are continuing weather-related issues, heavy rain kills it, the wiring still disconnects every time a drunk hillbilly pisses off his front porch into the wind, etc. But it could be, and has been, worse. I try to be grateful. Seriously!

Also, I paid off all my credit cards. All of the motherfuckers. All the way down to $0. At one point one of the creditholding banks sent me a (paper!) letter alerting me that a larger-than-usual balance payment had been made in my name, and was I aware of it, and was it me. Holy shit. It was at that specific moment that I developed an intense, unflagging, harder-than-average hateboner for the United States' consumer debt-based economic pyramid scheme, where my impulse purchases (and other, more empathy-deserving people's desperate-to-survive necessity purchases) are translated into the bingo chips international finance uses to gamble with. Not that I'm bitter. But. I'm bitter.

I got a part-time job at a local health-food store to pay off my debts, like a former child-genius character in a crappy Japanese slice-of-life comic (to be fair, Japanese characters usually get jobs in all-nite convenience stores & meet the quirky loves of their lives, but all my local convenience stores are fully-staffed and also I'm beginning to feel like the love of my life is my mattress) (not in a dirty way; in a sleepy way) (more on this later). I'd never worked retail before & was embarrassed to start, but lol a hoe gotta make sum $$$. It actually wasn't bad. I had a pretty nice time working four days a week in a mostly-undemanding context, & when I vacated the job so its former occupant could return from maternity leave I was sad to once again have to purchase facial unguents and glass bottles of magnesium taurate on my own initiative. I'm not sure where else I can get paid for doing basically nothing but putting stuff on a limited number of offbeat store shelves & helping old people and illiterate hipsters pick out supplement regimes that are unlikely to be effective, but I intend to look into it.

On the other hand, I recently had to have a (major chewing!) tooth extracted because of a failed, massively-abscessed root canal (still on antibiotics for it) (the tooth cost almost $3000 out-of-pocket to root canal 7 years ago) & I also recently discovered that my crippling, life-ruining, SSRI-resistant "clinical depression" was actually "severe iron deficiency anemia." My iron levels are less than half what they're supposed to be. Which is not to say that one can't be both depressed and iron deficient, or that one thing is a 'real' problem and the other isn't, but. When one's cells are literally suffocating, lying in bed all day sleeping looks less like an emotional pathology and more like a strategy for survival. I'm hoping the iron pills work well for me, and I don't have to have any infusions. I don't like infusions. Not even in my teacups.

Also, my aunt that unexpectedly died of surprise cancer a few posts down? Her husband also died, about three months ago, of incurable surprise melanoma. Now I really have no white family to speak of. One good uncle ensconced in Texas, but we only manage to see him about once every three to five years. The rest of them are reliable racist Trump voters and good racist Christians, and if I saw the lot of them set ablaze I wouldn't waste the piss to put them out. That sounds (and is) harsh, but you don't know my family. Thank your stars.

Hmmm, I do have some book reviews! I think my next post (don't laugh) is gonna be about my computer, though, because I've also experienced an important life journey there, too.

I also also have some new Clarke-related podcasts to listen to, unexpectedly.
Good times online.

(Why does everything I type look chilly and sarcastic? Does that ↑ look chilly and sarcastic to you, or is it just my bodyful of slowly-dying cells making me think that?)

I DON'T HAVE AN INTERNET CONNECTION

I don't have an internet connection, & I don't have a landline. I haven't had either since July 18. There are cataclysmic problems with the telecom lines, and the only satellite provider that services our area throttles bandwidth for data overages like it's the goddamned 90s. I finally went to Wal-Mart & bought a $50 smartphone so I could pay my credit cards and check my bank account. The phone only has 500MB data rn, but I'll buy more next week so I can actually respond to comnents. ETA on the kind of intervention our connection needs is Oct 24. I am literally dying of boredom. Drums, drums in the deep... I can't get out... I cannot get out...

i can't think of a cute title

Oh, Reader. I've had a time (another one). My family is doing much better! My mother was given ten days' worth of some kind of intravenous super-antibiotic sent to an area hospital through a high-speed space tube from the future & got all the way better (much, much better than she's been in years), and then it turned out my dad had come down with a clutch of bad-but-not-as-bad-as-we-thought syndromes — hyperthyroidism, early-stage high blood pressure, and a cranial nerve palsy partially caused by a novel vein structure in his brain (?). Not completely sure about that last one, I was pretty tired when the doctor was trying to explain it to me. He has to take medicine every day and wear special nerd glasses, but otherwise there's no good reason he won't live to be 128. Thank you for your support.

The real obstacle to a state of current & continuing bliss on my part is that my phone and internet services keep going out. First, they both died very romantically together. For two weeks. Then the phone came back and the internet slowed to a mid-90s dialup crawl barely suitable for checking email. Now the DSL has come back at normal pissy strength, and the landlines are unusable. We've made multiple calls and had multiple friendly servicepersons come out and look at the lines, but nothing's helped. Our latest ticket has been guaranteed to be resolved by the phone company by August 10 (of 2023, one imagines). I cannot help but believe this is some kind of CONSPIRACY by "THE GOVERNMENT" to SILENCE ME for my criticisms of VARIOUS DEEP STATE ACTORS TO BE NAMED LATER and THE INTERNATIONAL LINUX CONSORTIUM. Oh, wait, I didn't PUBLISH the LINUX POST yet. THAT MEANS THEY CAN READ MY MIND!!!!!!

Another important consideration re: my posting habits is that I need a new hobby because I have to stay home in order to save money. Forever, probably. In the March/April fiscal frame, I (more or less) had to buy a new computer & pay for my cat to have her teeth pulled... but I also bought a new iPod, a USB SuperDrive, a new Wacom tablet, a massive area rug for my bedroom floor, a taller desk, a bunch of expensive makeup shit including a $70 blush brush, some whimsicle Etsy decor, and $150 dyejob that completely washed out in eleven days. I also ate at least one meal at a restaurant every single day in the months of May and June. I took money out of my savings account to buy stupid stuff. (I also got fatter.) I don't have any idea what I was thinking, except that I apparently believed I could hasten the advent of the Apocalypse if I spent enough money. If only, Reader.

So I will be amusing myself, in the house, alone, for the foreseeable future. That means either levels of masturbation consistent with a regular presence in /pol/, or keeping up the blog. I know I keep saying that I'm going to start posting more any time now, but stuff was/is always happening to me that's out of my control and has traditionally kept me away from my computer — and when I have had free time I wanted to exist in a pure state, totally vacant of all thought (on my part). That ends immediately, if I want to pay off my Sephora card (and my Lowe's card) (and put money in my savings account again). 😿

This is a list of all the posts I have in draft stage right now:

• I just read an enraging article about "cultural appropriation" in Tablet magazine that has left me yearning to create new adjectives to describe how stupid it is
• When white people write something critical of a "culture of victimization," they are about to show their asses to the entire solar system
• I also just read a sinister pro-Brexit (?) essay published by improbably-named British author Paul Kingsnorth in The Guardian in 2017. Seriously, this is one of the worst articles I've ever read in my life, mostly because it's proximate to many things I believe myself. I'm trying to triangulate a response that will help me clarify my own thoughts and find a nice tree to climb the man is insane
• Comically overpriced skincare
• Linux for the normie-adjacent + why I went back to Apple even though it's still annoying
• The Séance by John Harwood vs. Advent by James Treadwell
• A deconstruction(ish) of Robert Aickman's short story The Swords, plus bonus content
• I still have 18-month-old politics posts written that I've never published because I'm waiting on my own slow ass to pick through my millions of stateless links and find sourcing for my claims
• There are literally thousands of links
• Spread out over multiple services
• I'm not kidding

 We'll see which of them I get to first.

Oh! Also, I changed my layout. I found some instructions about how to unfold excerpted posts (although it doesn't cover other template formats, so I'm stuck with this sort of basic one for now), and I copied & pasted it, and now Sea Rabbits exists in like mid-2015 instead of LiveJournal purgatory. Also I changed my Blogger profile a little. I'll find or buy a new header soon. With a rabbit on it. I like rabbits.

ETA: Fixed a link & went back to my old userphoto because Blogger does something terrible to userphotos and that's the only one that still looks okay post-terribleness.

begin again

My mama is in the hospital battling MRSA-complicated pneumonia for the third time in six months; my dad was recently diagnosed with ocular sarcoidosis (probably, we don't know for sure) (other, much worse things were excluded, so it's either ocular sarcoidosis or "a weird, scary, specific thing your body does that doctors can't explain"). Your continued patience is appreciated.

I'm sad I blogged about Jordan Peterson. I would delete the post, if I deleted posts. Peterson's "ideas" and sniveling sympathy for wounded entitlement are so unoriginal as to border upon the cliché; even his name sounds like it came out of an airport paperback. I don't want to get that on me. Watching ostensibly sane adults line up four abreast to excuse the malignancy of this prick, who's kept up nights by visions of feminists & transpeople stealing the magic beans of self-actualization from innocent, kingly North American bigots — just in case it turns out he goes Mainstream — is nearly as excruciating as looking at Cletus Safari photojournamalisms of rusted-out, abandoned steelworks whose blank-eyed degenerate gaze is meant to indict anyone who enjoys flavored coffee. & as though finding yourself at a cultural or economic disadvantage is a quality reason invest in a worldview informed by irrational prejudice, right? This is of course why we all excuse the anti-American animus that exists in Middle Eastern & South American countries that have been excoriated by acts of enlightened Western humanitarian warfare haha just kidding. Also, I initially thought Peterson was LARPing Joseph Campbell for an audience too vapid to read even works of popular academic criticism, but it turns out Joseph Campbell was also an evil racist anti-Semitic prick whose own patriarchate sympathies were only tempered by his belief in the Sacred Feminine. Fuck him too.

It isn't fair for Jordan Peterson to think he has the right to write the story of my (or anyone's) life based on notes he took while observing reading someone's observations of lobsters, or creating psychomaps of fairytales (which are themselves a fallen form of art, irreparably tampered with by paternalistic capitalists who altered their form and function). The fact that some people think he might have a point goes farther than any amount of evo-psych ouija-board "science" to suggest that the Enlightenment's primary achievement was aiding monkeys to understand how important it is to comb their hair. (Or hide it under a powdered wig.)

Tomorrow night I'll be back with a post that has nothing whatever to do with goddamned Jordan Peterson.

of things unknown (but longed for still)

EDIT: Fixed a duplicated link & added a new Jordan Peterson fandom article. Because who doesn't want to read more things about Jordan Peterson's Svengaliesqe hold on White North America's precious reserve of pathetic male morons?

I made a new layout! Sort of! I bought a background at CreativeMarket & stuck a rabbit on it in PS — but Blogger destroyed its children's-book majesty by reducing its resolution, and now it looks like a bunch of wavy blobs on a fuzzy dark blue background. Obviously Blogger is trying to make me give up my love affair with the elderly LJ-style old-timey c. 2008 layouts and choose one of the new ones. YOU'RE GOING TO HAVE TO TRY HARDER THAN THAT, BLOGGER.

Actually, no it isn't. I'll pick one of the new ones later. I tried them a few months ago & thought they were fine, but also felt they encouraged a surfeit of image posts. Maybe I can make something work for my hectic "once every eighteen months" posting schedule.

I was going to write about Jordan Peterson, last night. Does anybody need me to write about Jordan Peterson? Everybody's writing about Jordan Peterson. He's a brainless prick who makes millions of dollars every year off other, even more brainless pricks. Peterson hates transpeople. He seems suspiciously jealous of housewives. His primary contributions to the Principles of Western Thought are: 1.) women are best served by being receptacles for men's penises and feelings, and 2.) (white) men built the world and deserve to be the exclusive beneficiaries of its wealth & wonders. I think those are very odd concepts to carry into the marketplace: "Hey, gals, queers, and brown people, why not participate in your own oppression? Things would go so much more smoothly that way! Everyone would be so much happier! Especially straight white men, who of course are the only group that in congregation amount to "everybody.'" Then again, I don't make $100K a month in donations from butthurt social media trolls who yearn for the state of holy matrimony so they can have someone to officially oppress, so maybe no one should listen to me.

The thing that really bothers me about Jordan Peterson — aside from the fact that he lives at the top of the slipperiest slope in the Whole Universe, at the bottom of which lies Death — is that he doesn't seem to have any command of the material he's claimed authority over, and nobody cares. He's like the Dan Brown of mythography. He's much, much worse than Dan Brown, actually, who embodied the sacred blood of the Living Lord in the person of a female cryptographer. That's not nothing. That's letting your little light shine, is what that is. I apologize to Dan Brown (although the attempt to use the female body as the unsullied seat of holiness is neither a feminist nor a novel practice; but I really do appreciate the effort). Peterson despises "postmodernism," and blames it for unlawfully shaking the monkeytree of white male privilege — but postmodernist deconstruction is the only lens through which his viciously absurd characterizations of world myth could actually work. "Superordinate" mythological artifacts, bro? Where the fuck did they come from?

Peterson thinks "chaos" is female, and that order & hierarchy are male. What the fuck does that even mean? When he refers to some property or group of properties as "chaos," does it mean "that abundance of formless biological constituents from which life emerges, in the womb and in the wild"? Or does he mean "feminists holding signs and shouting at me"? I think that distinction could be important. I also have a problem understanding how men can qualify as agents of order when Peterson also believes they have to be coaxed out of committing violence by having continual legal access to women's slimy untrustworthy vaginas at all times. Despite their innate competence and command of order, apparently, men are not fully in control of their thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. They are, you might say, not as fully human as women, whose natural impulse is to tame our innate chaos and become silent supportive infant-fondling agreeable housewives. Now, I’m no professor, but even in its deformed native context that shit looks like it’s exactly ass-backwards.

It’s magical thinking of the most objectionably fanfictional order to suggest that any group of people embody chaos as a function of biology, of course, but if we’ve absolutely got to do it, the only choice for the job is men. Women’s bodies operate like clockwork. We are attuned to the moon and the tides. When we’re healthy, we work as well as a calendar — a decaying and artificial construct men devised to count the days we mark naturally with our bodies. Our wombs are advanced ecosystems that are so stable they can (and do) grow people. Men, on the other hand, are an ad hoc arrangement of hormones and impulses; there's no male birth control available because male bodies don't operate in regular, predictable cycles. Men are agents of violence and destruction. Men are incapable of avoiding physical harm even when they want to; their protuberant genitalia damage vaginas even during consensual sex. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Jordan Peterson.

I'm in my feelings, a little. I don't actually think men are innately chaotic, of course. I don't think women are sacred microcosms of the planet. I don't think men and women are even fundamentally (or practically) different, to be honest. I do think that if enough men insist on making women their enemies, we will have no choice but to destroy them. 😘

Here are some other people who have written about Jordan Peterson, professionally and/or humorously:

• The Intellectual We Deserve @ Current Affairs, Nathan J. Robinson
• Current Affairs’ Comparative Mythology Exam @ Current Affairs, Lyta Gold (fave)
• Is Jordan Peterson The Stupid Man’s Smart Person? @ Maclean's, Tabatha Southey
• Jordan Peterson, the obscure Canadian psychologist turned right-wing celebrity, explained @ Vox, Zack Beauchamp
• Jordan Peterson, Custodian of the Patriarchy @ The NYT, Nellie Bowles
• Wonksplainer: Who Is Jordan Peterson And Why Is He The Worst? @ Wonkette, Robyn Pennacchia (h/t BBB)
• Jordan Peterson Somehow Worse Today Than Yesterday @ Wonkette, Robyn Pennacchia (h/t BBB)
• Jordan Peterson & Fascist Mysticism @ NYR Daily, Pankaj Mishra
• Reconsider the Lobster @ The Times Literary Supplement, Kate Manne
• The religious hunger that drives Jordan Peterson’s fandom @ Vox, Tara Isabella Burton (ETA)
• Two Ways Of Responding To Conservatives @ Current Affairs, Nathan J. Robinson (ETA)
• Jordan Peterson’s Flimsy Philosophy of Life @ Psychology Today, Paul Thagard (ETA)

& here are a couple of Crooked Timber posts (one of which links to Beauchamp's Vox article, and maybe also to Bowles's piece in the NYT, I can't remember). Crooked Timber is great, actually. Lots of straight white men there. Probably hardly any of them are even rapists.

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.