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 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.

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.

a medicine for melancholy

 

The problem is: Paid-for Pocket looks exactly like free Pocket, and also it crashes at the same rate. Probably I should just bite the bullet and excavate the whole archive so I can get rid of the service, which is shoddy anyway (but convenient).

Also, stupid people keep moving my goalposts all over town. Like, did you read this awful thing that famously mendacious racist Andrew Sullivan wrote about getting an injection of testosterone? This man is too stupid to live. Here's a quote:

You need testosterone to turn a fetus with a Y chromosome into a real boy, to masculinize his brain and body. Men experience a flood of testosterone twice in their lives: in the womb about six weeks after conception and at puberty. The first fetal burst primes the brain and the body, endowing male fetuses with the instinctual knowledge of how to respond to later testosterone surges.

First-trimester fetuses have 'instinctual knowledge' of the world, despite not having brains. Excellent. The rest of the science is equally hilarious; Sullivan says, "[t]estosterone, oddly enough, is a chemical closely related to cholesterol," and doesn't bother to notice that all hormones are manufactured by the body from cholesterol. "Pregnant women who were injected with progesterone (chemically similar to testosterone)[...]," what. Progesterone isn't any more similar to testosterone than estrogen, which Sullivan actually goes to the trouble of explaining can be metabolized interchangeably from the same biological components (and then he forgets about it, I guess). Men and women manufacture equivalent quantities of progesterone under normal conditions, please shut up quickly. "The Big T correlates with energy, self-confidence, competitiveness, tenacity, strength and sexual drive," and here "correlates" is doing the work of ten men. "And most of the studies of the psychological effects of testosterone take place in culturally saturated environments, so that the difference between cause and effect is often extremely hard to disentangle," which invalidates his entire premise, but so what. Andrew Sullivan didn't get this far in life by letting a thing like the total negation of his hypothesis by all available evidence stand in his way!

None of this means, as the scientists always caution, that testosterone is directly linked to romantic failure or violence. No study has found a simple correlation, for example, between testosterone levels and crime. But there may be a complex correlation. 

No there isn't. If there were, this statement wouldn't have to be decorated with qualifications like the bumper-stickers on a 1978 Volvo.

It is also controversial yet undeniable that elevating testosterone levels can be extremely beneficial for physical and mental performance. It depends, of course, on what you're performing in. If your job is to whack home runs, capture criminals or play the market, then testosterone is a huge advantage. If you're a professional conciliator, office manager or teacher, it is probably a handicap.

Controversial, but undeniable. I am going to cry. Also:

Since most men have at least 10 times as much T as most women, it therefore makes sense not to have coed baseball leagues. Equally, it makes sense that women will be underrepresented in a high-testosterone environment like military combat or construction.

Sullivan then goes on to note a study undertaken by the well-respected, publicly-funded scientific research center Toys'R'Us.

The entire article displays a pathetic preoccupation with body hair, action verbs, and "assertiveness."

So, here we go:

1. The side-effects from testosterone injections administered to an ailing body do not, in fact, reflect the effects of global testosterone metabolism in a typical person.
2. Speaking of ailing bodies, I suffer from PCOS and, before I sought medical intervention, I used to (naturally!) produce massive quantities of testosterone all by myself; I grew a stiff and fetching beard, and curly arm hair, and I was almost totally bald on the top of my head. Also I weighed nearly 300 pounds, and had three periods a month. [ETA: And I had painful, disfiguring acne!] Despite the unfortunate consequences of my all-natural excess testosterone production, I managed not to rape or kill anyone to prove my fitness for mating.
3. Nor did I harass or attack anyone in a dog park, or mysteriously acquire the belief that I deserved to be stacked at the top of every imaginable human hierarchy and therefore get everything I ever wanted, whenever I wanted it.
4. Explain that, asshole. 
5. At the glorious pinnacle of my all-natural testosterone production, was I technically a butch lesbian, a man, or a kind of hyena? 
6. When I was an inch-long fetus, what did my disorder train me to understand about my future ability to manufacture sex hormones?
7. Can you explain why my possession of extremely huge quantities of all-natural personal testosterone failed to launch me directly into the Presidency, or any other lofty position? 
8. And why didn't I start yearning to become a construction worker, or Marine Todd?
9. I mean, mostly I just sat around having panic attacks and crying all day. And I couldn't sleep for shit! I was good for absolutely nothing. How did I manage to fail my beautiful testosterone so badly?

I would like to mention, before moving on, that Sullivan also thought #GamerGate was a reasonable reaction to women provocatively requesting to be treated as human beings rather than objects. Perhaps you think I'm kidding. "The argument seems to be that some feminists are attempting to police or control a hyper-male culture of violence, speed, competition and boobage. And in so far as that might be the case, my sympathies do indeed lie with the gamers." In the same essay, he blames libtards for the entire problem, because in high school the libtards were too socially-adequate to be bullied, and therefore don't understand how childhood bullying leads naturally to doxing, harassment, and proud misogyny in defense of innocent digital waifus. (Perhaps I should start calling him "the famously mendacious sexist Andrew Sullivan.")

The love on the left for this cretin is inexplicable. I think they just like calling him "Sully."

Sadly enough, I found that wretched article because I read this article, which also led me to read this inexplicable Twitter thread in which a bunch of tragic morons who don't understand what evolution is attempt to defend unequivocal gender segregation by suggesting that human behavior is informed by the culture of chimpanzees. I wonder how far down the road to Chimpanzeetown these fools would like to travel? Cannibalism? Gang rape? Infanticide? Circus tricks? Zoos? This is getting embarrassing. I will say that I'm willing to accept guidance on social engineering from any chimpanzee capable of getting a scientifically-illiterate, disingenuous article about testosterone published in The New York Times.

Your move, Bubbles.

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.

it felt good to be out of the rain

Well, I think we can all agree that if there's one thing I'm good at, it's not posting on this blog. My last six months have been filled with the typical medieval bestiary of Debbie Downer life events — many of which have been related to severe health crises, for both myself and others — that I always feel slightly guilty writing about online, as if I'm attempting to elicit the sympathy of strangers to collect donations for a shady religious charity. There is definitely something coercive about saying, I or someone I love almost died! to people who don't know you in person. I don't know why! But it always makes me feel uncomfortable when I read other people's explanations of dodged fatality. I empathize with people who have gone through awful things, obviously, but I suppose I have somehow acquired a puritanical dedication to suffering in silence myself. Maybe it's all those English fantasy novels. Still: I got better! My mother got better! My father got better! Then my mother got better again! We're all better. (Mostly.) (92%) We are as well as modern medicine can make a person, which is good enough to write blog posts with.

I've already written a post about "politics," but it turned out to be so full of poison and despair that I'm never going to let anyone see it. I'm currently taking it apart into two posts; one is about the failures of American cultural liberalism, and the other about well-off essay-writing white people who would like to reclassify poor white men as a minority group (when white people call for an 'end to identity politics' and they aren't being 100% disingenuous, this is what they're talking about). Writing about both of these things makes me angry, of course, but the "white people suddenly trying to invade the spaces to which minorities historically retreated for self-protection, because those minorities managed to make their own exclusion look like a fun party" part passeth all understanding. White people, what are you doing to us? What are you doing to yourselves?

Anyway. Since I've spent the last five-odd months sitting in hospitals and doctors' offices reading, with an increasing degree of incredulity, the articles in mildly-outdated American "news," "science," and "women's" magazines, I have prepared for you an overview of the intellectual landscape of the dying world of paper publishing. It's like the maps Tolkien put at the beginning of all of his Middle-earth novels, only pointless. This is a brief enumeration of some of my favorite topics, all of which were, are, and will be written about in the the most opaque, inhumane, and unimaginative ways possible:

• My Wife's Decent Salary Made My Penis Redundant
• Will You Get A Load Of All Of These Millennials Over Here
• Do You Remember That Time In The Recent Or Distant Past When Things Were Wonderful/Explicable
• Is The Entire Universe Going To Explode Next Year
• Impressionable Suburban Jamokes Are Frightened Of Various Mostly-Imaginary Threats, Here's Why You Should Worry Too
• Everything You Eat And Touch Is A Cancer IOU
• Will You Get A Load Of All Of These [Post-Millennial Generation Name] Over Here
• Have You Noticed That Some Emotionally-Crippled White Folks Act Like Assholes Online
• Look At Some Floodlit Photos Of Obnoxious Underweight Rich Famous People Who Are Promoting A Depressing Commercial Entertainment Product, They Are Such Adorable Nerds (Follow Them On Social)
• How To Dumb Down Your Feminism So It Doesn't Threaten Your Guy (He's An Hysterical Useless Baby That You Won't Ever Dump) (Not That We're Suggesting You Should Lol!!!)
• This Giant Faceless Tax-Evading Corporation Is Spearheading Symbolic Logo-Ridden Efforts To Combat Some Of The Starvation And Misery It Created (Here's How You Can Help) (Buy Stuff)
• Is It Okay If Fat People Exist
• This Repellant Irrational White Supremacist Fulfills Many Brainless People's Expectations About Conventional Physical Attractiveness: Does That Make Him/Her More Or Less Scary
• Could You Be Putting Even More Effort Into Your Pointless Job
• 10 Tips For Helping Women Shoulder Extra Cultural Burdens
• Cook All Your Own Food Which You Grew Yourself (In A Quirky Repurposed Pinterest Bucket)
• Let's Go Back To Training Men To Perform Outdated And Harmful Gender-Stereotyped Behaviors So Dumb Women Will Want To Fuck Them More
• Be Sure Your House Is Decorated Exactly Like All The Other Houses
• New Study Says Thumb Dexterity Is Down 12% Among Kindergarteners (Scientists Blame Recently-Discovered Undetectable Toxins) (The Word "Down" Is Defined Creatively)
• Pretending That Making Your Own Shampoo, Toothpaste, And Cosmetic Products Is A Fun And Necessary Activity
• Here Is A Fawning Interview With A Man Who Portrays That Character In A Popular Movie Or Television Show That Everyone Wants To Fuck
• Read An Over-Simplified Account Of The Isolation Of A Minor Neurotransmitter That Looks As If It Might Have Something To Do With Appetite Control (Will The Scientists Finally Give Us A Magic Diet Pill?) (No)
• Do These Difficult And Faddish Calisthenic Exercises So You Can Look Like A Photoshopped Celebrity In Your Swimsuit And Attract The Sexualized Beach Gaze Of Random Men
• How To Make Your Own Substandard Naked Feet Look Like An Extruded Plastic Nordstrom Mannequin's Pedal Appendages
• This Boring Well-Off White Couple's Desperate Expensive Quest To Breed Biological Children Will Make You Wonder How People This Stupid Were Able To Acquire That Much Disposable Income
• Acting Like The $350 Purse Is A Major Bargain Compared To The $7,438 Purse Which It Resembles (They Are Both Ugly)
• A Misinterpretation Of Poorly-Understood And Incomplete Scientific Data Suggests That Women Are Biologically Required To Pursue Cuddles, Babies, And Ice Cube-Sized Engagement Rings At The Expense Of Rational Thought
• This Plant-Related Superfood Has Been "Linked" To A "Reduction" In "Cancer Risk": 9 Unpalatable Smoothie Recipes Whose Greenness Conveys Awareness Of Global Injustice (Get A Transparent Travel Cup)
• We Rated 34 Brands Of Transparent Travel Cup And Will Coincidentally Recommend The One Sold By Our Biggest Ad Sponsor
• Profiling The Deeply Deranged Megalomaniacs Of Silicon Valley Who Are Titling At The Windmill Of Human Mortality (Like Alchemists, Only Dumber And Wearing Khakis)
• 10 Minutes Of Mindfulness A Week Will Literally Stop You From Ever Dying
• How To Tastefully Wear Your #NastyWoman T-shirt To Your Aggressively Soulless Corporate Workplace Without Annoying Any Important Men (Accessorize)
• Donald Trump: Is He Orange Satan, Or An Old Toddler? We Ask Poets, Chemical Engineers, And Your Mom

I left out all the articles I saw about Muslims, because I knew better than to read them.

I don't actually have the time to reply to comments at the moment, assuming there might be any, but I (probably) will soon. Also I have lots of things to do online before I can get back to writing mean words about fantasy novels. Speaking of which! I am currently working on the review of a couple of feminist fantasy novels written by men, as well as finishing Carolyne Larrington's King Arthur's Enchantresses. After that, it's Simon Schama & Mark Fisher. After that, who knows? 

Thank you for your continuing forbearance, Five People Who Sometimes Read My Blogger Blog!

ETA: I JUST DISCOVERED THAT I HAVEN'T GOT A FEMINISM TAG WTF FIXED

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.

the shades of night were falling fast

Aha! I bet you thought I died! No, I didn't die. I had a long internet hiatus because my brother shot himself (he's okay now) and then my mother got ill, and I was Otherwise Occupied (you can see more of this intense soap-opera action in my #me Tumblr tag archive, if you're so inclined). Now I am living in the Era of Unreliable Internet Connections Under the Best Circumstances, and the Farmer's Almanac has predicted a bad winter for the Ohio Valley. I'm going to try to post more regularly again -- in fact, I have two actual, formal posts lined up, one about Tolkien and one about... something else... and I intend to make a capsule book review post tomorrow or the next day -- but my better nature may be thwarted by technical difficulties. Still I shall persevere! Excelsior, I say! Excelsior!

Anyway. I've just fixed up the layout a little (new header!), as well as changing my profile photo and et cetera.
I guess I get combative when I'm bored, Jesus :[

To tide you over (in anticipation of what?), I went out and took photos of the icky-fruited something-tree in my front yard, before the weather took all the leaves. No filters, because that didn't work so well last time. Also I would like to apologize for the shot of my unpainted fingernails; I really drop the ladyball when it comes to manicures. They're very uncomfortable and expensive, I don't care. (Content includes a bonus fishpond photo.)

Until next time, all you lovely people who continue to visit my blog even though it is very boring!