My heart’s not on fire, but there’s smoke in my eyes

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The past 24 hours should have been like that refreshing plunge into something cold after being in a hot tub or a sauna. Instead, every window is tightly closed because we’re still being blanketed with smoke and our air quality alert is probably going to be extended for another day. I’m hoping maybe it will clear up tomorrow, but this particular cloud ambled as slowly as possible across North Dakota before it showed up here, and I don’t have much hope that it won’t take its sweet time putting Minnesota in its rearview mirror.

Talking of other things that are being left behind, if anyone (I don’t know who is reading this blog besides my wife) would like to see what all the fuss is about when it comes to Bluesky I have another invite code burning a hole in my pocket. I think for the time being, Bluesky invites might be all that shows up on my Twitter feed, although, it feels like you have to talk about it in code or risk Twitter banishing your post to obscurity.

I’m not sure what we’re calling that place these days. I’ve seen it referenced as the following:

  • Birdsite (sometimes un-named birdsite?)
  • Hellsite
  • Xitter
  • Twixxer

Is anyone actually calling it X without mentally (or literally) rolling their eyes?

I did take off all of the blinders (read: Firefox extensions) I had employed to make the site bearable, which means now the stupid logo appears everywhere, and I am offered the useless For You page. I think this was sort of me putting some more nails in the coffin, because it’s time to stop closing the curtains to the ugly truth that’s been lurking outside for a while (I really need to stop mixing my metaphors…). Between the anti-trans and white supremacist rhetoric that’s run rampant there, Twitter is just one more place that’s not for me. Of course, there’s also a chance that maybe just the entire internet in general is not going to be for me if KOSA becomes an actual thing. It’s wild, the first place I actually started feeling comfortable enough to be myself and attempt to spread my wings could end up off limits, or at the very least severely restricted, and then what?

I suppose there’s still the option to just go outside and touch grass. Of course, the smoke needs to clear up before I feel comfortable doing that… and we’re right back where we started.

Past Times

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I’ve been settling in at Bluesky, as Twitter seems to be doing everything it can to embrace becoming a hate mob. I’m getting a little better about the reflexive actions I used to take. There’s this muscle memory when it comes to always opening a specific app, or the address I type in when I open a new tab in a web browser. I don’t know what I’m looking for when I go to Twitter these days… but after the last 24 hours, I’m pretty sure the main goal is trying to find the best angle to get a clear view of the car wreck, which really isn’t that productive.

With that in mind, someone I recently started following decided to engage in an ice breaker and asked “you are handed a banana. how do you respond?” One of the replies was “iii am aa banana” which was followed by “My spoon is too big” and I was somehow transported back to a college dorm room where someone was showing me Don Hertzfeldt’s short film Rejected for the first time.

I’m uncomfortable with the knowledge this is 23 years old.

I love the beginning of this film. It’s so delightfully odd and weirdly quotable in that way things used to be when I was a teenager. It’s the sort of thing you could just interject into conversation among a group of friends, and it’s like starting a game of pinball or something, where these non sequiturs sort of pile up as the ball zings around the table. I think something about it came up when we were at ConVergence this summer, and seeing it referenced again “so soon” after made me hungry to seek out the real thing and re-live it. And then I remembered how weirdly bloody it gets in the middle. This was the first time I’d actually sort of admired the visuals from that, where every stroke from a red marker was vivid on my flat screen TV, something I probably couldn’t appreciate before (also maybe because a little ball of fluff kept crying “my anus is bleeding!” while all their friends just keep saying “Yay!” over and over again). It gets strangely dark at the end, but it’s still fascinating.

Before the days of YouTube, an AVI file of the film existed on my perpetually-too-small computer hard drive, until it was burned to a CD (I didn’t have a DVD burner), and then I just sort of forgot that it existed; like every other thing I’ve put away for safe keeping. I have a lot of bits and bobs on CDs. I have no faith any of them are remotely readable, and even if they were, I’d probably be at a loss to explain why I felt I needed to keep them. The nice thing about digital hoarding these days is everything can just be plopped on an external hard drive and sit there comfortably, not taking up much space, just waiting for the day I decide to take a stroll down memory lane (assuming the hardware doesn’t fail).

As I was thinking about that film this morning, I found myself sort of transported to another time, where I’m sitting in my family’s den and my parents are discussing some (seemingly) obscure piece of media. My dad is trying to describe it and jog my mom’s memory enough that she can fill in the gaps. I was trying to imagine describing this thing to someone decades younger than me, who had never seen it before. It kind of defies explanation. I think I would always sort of stumble at showing it to anyone else. It starts off zany and devolves into something gruesome and I find it strange to insist someone “has to watch it!” when maybe they’ll just think it’s gross and that I’m weird for suggesting it.

I’m starting to wonder if instead of re-releasing old movies, my generation’s thing is going to be reliving compilations of early 2000s media, because we got to have some pretty good internet in its early days. I’ve been seeing a lot of it pop up lately, as others bemoan the very real fact that time has marched on. The Badger Song took Bluesky by storm over the weekend. I can only imagine what will show up next.

Variety is Spicy

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I’m pretty sure it would be impossible to be raised by my mother and not develop some sort of crafting hobby. I grew up wandering fabric stores and spending Saturday afternoons watching a bunch of people “birth” quilts they’d made in a day. At some point, I sewed and tied a small baby blanket for a friend’s new sibling, spent most summers learning some sort of new beading project, and was addicted to my Klutz friendship bracelet book. Somehow, I didn’t totally pick up crafting with yarn until I was 18.

There were a couple of aborted fiber craft attempts. My grandmother tried to get my sister and I to make some garter stitch dish cloths on some re-purposed double-pointed knitting needles. There was also a frustrating evening crowding around my mom on our loveseat trying to imitate her as she crocheted these delicate heart-shaped sachets. It took having just enough downtime during my first semester of college for me to decide to pick up knitting. I managed a scarf and then somehow decided a whole afghan with cables was the way to go.

Knitting was easy for me. There were certainly challenging patterns and difficult stitches, but I didn’t have a lot of the troublesome issues I see new knitters have: dropped stitches, extra stitches on the end, or not being able to tell where I was in a pattern. It was a great use of time, it was fun, and it got me hats, scarves, mittens… just warmth, which is something I’m very concerned with when it gets cold outside.

I think the one area where I did experience some challenges was tension. I knit a lot of patterns that didn’t require much in the way of gauge swatches or very specific size requirements. Unfortunately, I had very loose tension (I didn’t hold my yarn tightly at all when I wrapped my stitches), which I didn’t actually notice until a couple years in, when my sister and I decided to knit “spa sets” as Christmas presents and the bath mitt I had made was much bigger and floppier than hers. I knit pretty loose for probably the first 10 years of the hobby, and then I went down a rabbit hole where I got a bit obsessed with how Stephanie Pearl-McPhee tensions her yarn. It was like watching a magic trick, because somehow she wrapped stitches in her right hand, without having to let go of her needle. I knew about “picking” but this was almost like the “throwing” style I was used to, except you didn’t have to lose hold of the needle.

This new style of holding the yarn changed a lot about how my patterns turned out. I had wanted it to make me a faster knitter, but I think it probably ended up making my stitches a bit neater along the way.

Twenty years after learning to knit, I’ve started to pickup up crochet, a thing I’ve done very sporadically in my life. If there’s one thing I know about it, crochet is excellent when it comes to shaping things. With that in mind, I sat down to master the single crochet stitch and I made my wife’s birthday present. That was sort of the gateway.

I’ve been a bit wary of busting into my stash of variegated yarn to crochet. Part of it was just not having the various crochet wraps and stitches, but I’ve also been a bit picky about “pretty” patterns. I managed to make a small asymmetrical scarf and then decided something more even should be next on the list. After an evening of scrolling through Ravelry’s patterns, I came across the Mutabilis pattern.

A white and rainbow variegated crocheted project. The coloring starts out very evenly spread and then begins to pool in different ways.
Apparently this can be a cowl, a hat, a scarf, a headband… any number of things!

The section at the bottom of the photo is how this started, and you can very clearly see where I decided I wanted to hold the crochet hook differently. It completely changed the way the yarn pooled. And then, it changed again when I picked it up a couple of days later and things were more humid and sticky, so the yarn wasn’t moving through my fingers the same way. It’s wild to me, that deciding to angle my hook a different way, and some sweat can have this much of an impact. I still have a decent-sized ball of yarn, which I got from The Yarnery a year ago, as part of their One Yarn Collection.

Part of me wants to find a similar yarn and then knit a project with a similar pattern, but then switch through my original throwing style, and picking, and the cottage-style knitting I do predominately and see just how differently the yarn will pool. Except that I’d really prefer consistency, which is probably why I’ve avoided doing much crochet with variegated yarns in the past, because I know I have a lot of work to do when it comes to the tension. Usually, this inconsistency would bother me, but I keep sort of picturing that first section as the brim or something, so I’m probably 95% okay with it (even though that’s really how I wanted it to pool the entire time). If I had started the pattern with a different hook, I probably wouldn’t have this drastic of a change, so even that can have an impact I guess.

This is always the hard part when it comes to learning a new skill, where I know what things are supposed to look like, but executing things to get the desired effect is still a bit of a challenge. I think I’ve learned enough to want to stick with it a bit longer, I guess we’ll see how consistent things are in the future.

Glad that’s Over!

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And Blaugust 2023 officially comes to a close. I’m relieved its over, especially since the slog of work this week has meant writing posts was akin to pulling teeth at times.

I’m hoping I’ll come up with something more interesting tomorrow, considering it will be the first day of September, and the start of a long weekend.

I’m going to do my best to keep posting here on a daily basis, whatever that means. Because, it’s easier to post here than it is to post anywhere else, if I’m being completely honest. The flux of social media at the moment leaves a lot to be desired in terms of where it makes sense to share anything.

I’m glad to have Bluesky as an option, especially since Twitter seems like it’s about two steps away from requiring some sort of blood sacrifice to keep using the service, while everything else is subsumed by the Zuck. WordPress certainly has its issues, but at least this website is mine? Right?

I’m definitely still trying to find my community when it comes to this whole blogging thing. I’m just not sure where it is yet, so I’m going to keep sending these little pings out into the universe of the internet until I see what comes back. (As long as its not spam, because I have no patience for any of that).

Yesterday?

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It’s kind of a shame that social media wasn’t a thing when I was a teenager, because I’m pretty sure I don’t have anything to look back on that would tell me when I got my drivers license. There might be a reference to passing my test in an old journal, but that seems unlikely. At best, maybe it would be in a chat log on an ancient computer I no longer have in my possession. As I’m thinking back on it, I know that I took the test in the summer, probably in 2001, maybe as late as 2002. I waited as long as I could manage to actually take my drivers test. I waited so long that I ended up having to get my learners permit re-issued because it expired.

I hated everything about learning how to drive. When I was 14, my dad drove us back to a secluded county road and had me get in the drivers seat to practice. In retrospect, I don’t know how I managed to move the vehicle an inch, let alone drive down the road. The worst part, was when we came to an intersection and he told me I needed to make a right turn. Except that the only things I’d driven previously had very tiny steering wheels, and apparently full-sized car steering wheels require a bit more rotation (and speed) in order to initiate a turn correctly. I think I maybe got us around that corner and then declared myself done, because there was no way I was going to drive on the paved highway that would take us home.

At 15, I took the written test as a sort of rite of passage with everyone else in my class who was eligible (because at that point, taking a drivers training course was a quarter-long class offered at my high school, and at the end of it, someone would come up and let us sit for the written exam). Somewhere, in that initial year of my learners permit, I took the required 10 hours of driving instruction with an official instructor, and then… I’m not really sure what happened.

It’s not like I didn’t practice driving, because that definitely was a thing that I did. Did I practice parallel parking or corner backing? Nope. Did I practice coming to a complete stop at a stop sign? Definitely not. Did I drive a vehicle without one of my parents in the passenger seat? Yes, on multiple occasions, all of them very much against my will, hating every second of it.

I’d say that actually taking my behind the wheel test is as close as I’ve come to being dragged into something kicking and screaming. It started off poorly, because my parents didn’t have a copy of our vehicle’s insurance in the car. We spent 20 minutes getting someone to fax a copy of it to the DMV, by which time I’d already had a meltdown about how I didn’t need “to learn how to do this, I’m going to move somewhere that has trains and I’ll take the bus.” So, all of that hung over me while I finally took the test and didn’t do a good job of visibly looking both ways at intersections, or coming to a complete stop, or managing to do anything that resembled a decent parallel parking or corner backing maneuver. And I failed.

I think my dad thought it was going to be a “get back on the horse” course of action, by running an errand after my failed test and leaving me in the car with the directive that I would be driving us home and he expected me to be in the drivers seat when he came back. I spent the eternity of that errand mentally wrestling with myself about what to do, because I failed by driving the way I watched him drive for my whole life, and now I was going to have to get behind the wheel and do more (to me, utterly pointless) driving? I’m not sure I’d completely committed to the idea of never driving again, but I certainly didn’t want to drive anymore that day.

I was wearing nice shoes, shoes that wouldn’t have been good for walking. So, I entertained the idea of going over to Target and spending whatever was left in my wallet on a pair of crappy canvas shoes and a bottle of water and then just walking home. Home was over 25 miles away. It was late afternoon, so I’m not sure how long it would have taken for me to arrive at my destination. I still think about that sometimes. What would have happened if I’d done that? What would my dad have thought, walking up to the car and finding it empty; me, nowhere in sight?

Instead, I was in the drivers seat, and I drove us home. I’m not sure how the steering wheel didn’t melt from the inferno of rage coursing through me. I can still feel it now. The impotence of it all, just boiling inside of me, with no way to release it.

There’s a nice ending to this story. I went back for another 2 hours with an actual instructor who got me through parallel parking and corner backing, and then I somehow aced my test with the same examiner as my previously failed one. He didn’t even dock me for points after I painstakingly waited for someone at a crosswalk who wasn’t going, and wasn’t going, and then totally started crossing the second I decided to take my turn at the intersection.

But, I’ve never really shed the big “what if?” of the hour after I failed. It’s such a weirdly immature regret to have, that I didn’t just throw a total tantrum and basically run away for a few hours. Part of me wishes I’d been that committed to just never learning how to drive. It would have been wildly inconvenient, especially living where I do now, where having a car is pretty much a necessity to live and work. At least maybe I would have gotten someone to say “you’ve made your point” and we could all have moved on from there.

As failures go, it was probably a good time to have started doing poorly at things, considering how often I coasted through things before then. A nice preparation for adulthood where suddenly actual planning and effort is required, and I couldn’t depend on either cramming the night before, or having a subject just be easy for me. In retrospect, that’s probably when a lot of things did start to get more difficult, so it was really good timing.

It’s weird what stays with you. Part of me wants this memory to be a triumph, because I did manage to do so well when I re-took the test. But if I had it to do over again… I’d rather not fail. I’d rather not have been crying and upset in the minutes before taking the test, and feeling so angry in the hours after. I’d rather have been more prepared. At least I can still learn lessons from my 16 or 17 year-old self.

And Then…

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I took a nap on my lunch break today. I’m not sure it really solved anything, but It’s made getting through this afternoon less of a trial compared to yesterday. So far, my prediction the week would drag by has been entirely accurate. I am still hopeful by the time Friday rolls around I’ll somehow be astonished it’s already here. But, I’m probably going to be more concerned about September starting.

I’m still grappling with some writer’s block, because exhaustion plus hormones is a powerful combination against anything resembling productivity.

A couple weeks ago (or maybe longer than that) I saw a TikTok from Elyse Myers about how someone asking “what’s your favorite song (or book or movie or whatever)” isn’t a quest for you to dive back through every catalogued memory you have and find the book/song/movie that’s your absolute favorite, and they’re going to know if you get it wrong; they just want to get to know you. This sort of thing often trips me up when it comes to answering writing prompts or responding coherently every time my wife and I have been drifting off to sleep and she’s asked me to tell her a story.

I used to think it was my mind going blank, but I’ve since reconsidered and it’s quite possible my brain is offering up every possible idea able to even passably fit under a prompt’s umbrella, and everything is so loud in my head, I’m not hearing anything.

I think the trouble I have with writer’s block is usually some part of me gets louder in those moments and rejects any ideas out of hand, even though there are probably some decent ones in the bunch. That loud part also seems to spend a lot of time focusing on how difficult (nay, impossible) it would be to write about something. Which, if you think about it, is a great way to just avoid doing any writing at all, because it’s so challenging and time consuming, and why would I want to spend my time writing something crappy when I want to be writing something brilliant and amazing?

The scary thing about doing Blaugust, and hitting publish on posts as a means to fill a quota, is I share things I otherwise wouldn’t. But, a lot of it, is content I don’t really find interesting or worthwhile. Lists of songs or TikTok creators aren’t the sorts of things I spend my time thinking about on a daily basis. Outside of meeting an arbitrary goal, will I continue to throw together words about these things? It seems unlikely.

This is where the writer’s block makes me stumble. Because it’s so easy to be overly critical about the worth of so many subjects. I keep thinking about my posts on certain topics as definitive statements, but that’s foolhardy considering how things can change, and my opinions certainly aren’t static. However, I don’t have it in me to circle around the same three thoughts week in and week out, at least not publicly. That’s the sort of thing I save for my Morning Pages, where I noodle on something sporadically for weeks at a time until I can finally make sense of it.

I’d like to write something humorous at some point. Whether it’s re-telling some ridiculous story or just sharing something fun and silly, but every time I try there’s a hollowness to it, at least there is from my perspective anyway. I’m not sure I’ve really nailed down the “comedy = tragedy + time” formula I’ve seen touted everywhere on the internet. Or maybe I’ve internalized it so well that I just can’t even retrace the steps it took to get there.

So, that’s where things sit right now. I think I’ve referred to Blaugust as a roller coaster a couple of times, but as we get to the end of the month, it’s entirely possible it was just the long, slow, climb at the beginning of the ride. This is the part where its almost to the top, but I can’t see when we’re going to make that plunge down the first big hill. That’s always the scariest part of a roller coaster to me. After that, everything is happening too fast to really worry about it. I find the concept of that intriguing, but also terribly frightening. I’m not sure that makes it any different than most elements in my life.

Misc. Monday

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I knew there would come a point when even having suggested themes wouldn’t be enough of a boost to get me over, around, or through a bit of writers block. I’m going to engage in the exercise of writing and posting through it instead of succumbing to it today, but I’m pretty sure it will be a frustrating experience for everyone involved.

I might be a little bit ready for summer to be over. I’m not ready for winter to get here, but there’s a hint of fall in the air (and literal colors changing on some trees) and I’m looking forward to closing a window at night and not wondering when I’m going to wake up and feel like I’m being stifled with humidity. We’re also going to be under another Air Quality alert tomorrow morning, in the Orange zone. I thought 2021 was bad when it came to smoke, but it’s just been so persistent this year. It becomes a question everyday if we can leave the windows open or not, and our electric bill skyrockets because the only way to not feel like we’re just breathing our own breath all day is to run the air conditioner. At least if its freezing cold outside I won’t feel like I’m depriving myself of something by keeping the windows closed.

It’s been a while since I felt this way about a Monday. I’m sure a good chunk of that comes down to having a poor night of sleep and a smaller amount of caffeine this morning. It’s incredible how much of an impact a disruption to routine can have, because I’m dragging in a way that I haven’t at the end of the day for a while. It’s the sort of feeling that makes me look back through the day and wonder where I should have taken a nap. It’s not like I didn’t get things done, but all of my mental energy went to work today, and I’m left with very little to offer here. It’s not the first time this will happen, and it certainly won’t be the last. This is where the scheduling of posts and working ahead are going to save me, but I actually have to do that to save myself, which isn’t exactly fair in my opinion. But, it’s not like time travel exists , offering me the ability to go back and prepare something ahead of time.

I guess at least my Bullet Journal has been on track for the past couple weeks. After my last little rant about it, I spent a some time looking through my schedule, figuring out where some things were falling apart, and it’s ended up serving me pretty well for the past 3 weeks. It definitely helped me catch up with some things I’d fallen behind on, which is exactly the point of it. Part of it may also be down to getting a new desk and reorganizing my workspace, because for some reason that sort of activity always seems to give me a renewed sense of purpose. I’m not sure how long I can keep riding that wave, but it’s doing something for me at the moment, I guess.

I’m three-quarters of the way through Tress of the Emerald Sea. Maybe I’ll finish it tonight, I guess we’ll see just how awake I am for any reading as the evening progresses. So far, I’m loving the crazy magic system (even though it’s completely terrifying), and I adore the narrator. I can’t say this about everything Brandon Sanderson writes, but this book makes me stop and re-read things sometimes, just to savor them. It’s making me think about re-starting my commonplace book habits, because there are some things that I read and I just want to keep reading them over and over again, the way I will put a song on repeat. Sometimes its fascinating subject matter, but a lot of the time it’s stuff that I sort of feel like I could have written, but not in the “anyone could write that” kind of way. It just sort of feels like somehow it came from my own head, even though I know it didn’t. It’s just… truth, or something like it.

I’m trying to think of a “fifth thing” to write about here, since that seems like a nice, round number for some reason. But I’m coming up blank again. So, I guess that’s it for today. It’s also probably the bloggiest blog I’ve written in I can’t remember how long. I mean, a weblog is just a collection of thoughts, I suppose they don’t all have to have some detailed, over arching theme, right?

Lesson Time

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The final week of Blaugust starts today, and the theme of this is week is meant to be Lessons Learned.

Considering I only just learned about Blaugust, an event that’s been happening for 10 years or so, everything about this has been a bit of a learning experience for me. I’m finding out I still have a lot of things to learn about the fiddly bits of using WordPress. And that the landscape of the days of LiveJournal when I used to post more regularly as a blog are LONG GONE, and it’s just not the same.

I’ve also learned that this exercise is practically the same as all of the other writing exercises I’ve participated in over the years. So much of what it boils down to is just putting something together and hitting publish. I think the thing I’m less enthused about is how necessary photos feel to this exercise now. I try not to just string together walls of text, but I think so much of the nature of reading things online these days is that they’re broken up by contextual images just to give the brain a bit of a break, and as someone whose writing has encompassed novels and English Literature papers… very little of that involves finding and incorporating images.

I think the photo element of this feels like the biggest hurdle at the moment. I need to start navigating some fair use options when I don’t have something in my own photo library, and I really don’t know anything about that. Growing up in the age of internet piracy and just outright hotlinking things without a thought for where they originated is not a great foundation as a base of knowledge.

There are also a lot of things I haven’t done much of this month since I decided to put this much time into my blog. I find it amusing that the bulk of the individuals I’ve seen participating are very into video games, and the one thing I’ve barely touched this month is my Switch. Things kind of come and go that way. I’m at a pause in Breath of the Wild, because I’m pretty sure the next thing on my docket is Calamity Ganon, and I’m not ready to face him yet. So I’ve basically been wandering the world a bit aimlessly trying to figure out where I still need to locate some shrines and what I need to do to build up my health and stamina some more. I shudder to think of anyone who devotes time and actual effort towards this sort of thing, because I’ve engaged in some of the most haphazard nonsense when its come to that game, but it seems that sometimes that’s just how I go about things.

I was hoping for something a bit more profound today, but we went to bed pretty late last night, and then I was up unreasonably early this morning, so my brain is a bit loopy and it feels like things are firing a bit haphazardly. We didn’t end up going back for the marina concert last night, but Pride was fun nevertheless. We did decide next year we might try to bring our camp chairs or a blanket and just find a spot out of the way where we could sit and craft for a little while. Part of it is being there for the experience, and being the introverts that we are, sometimes its enough to just be on the periphery. We both sort of had a moment yesterday where we would like to have stayed, but we had sort of maxed ourselves out somehow. I think that’s the thing that I was talking about when I mentioned yesterday that I’d like it to be a bit more like ConVergence. There are just options there to check out for a few minutes and then re-engage. But for us, we were either there, or we weren’t there wasn’t really a good way to step aside or leave and then come back later without just totally leaving and then coming back later. We’ll see how we feel about it next year, if we’re able to have a more concrete plan of approaching the experience.

Tomorrow is Monday, the last week of our summer here, before everyone goes back to school and we all start acknowledging the changing color of the leaves. I’m not sure I’m prepared to embrace that, so it probably means this week is going to be something that simultaneously drags and flies by, as has most of August. But, we have some fun planned for the last weekend of the month, which I’m looking forward to, so if it does zip by, that might not exactly be terrible.

Happy Pride!

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It’s the end of Blaugust 2023’s Motivation week, and it’s Saturday, which means I’ve got no structure for anything in a post today.

It’s also Pride Weekend in Bemidji, so I’m a bit wrapped up in getting myself together to participate in our local festivities.

Aptly, Cat Valente just shared a post on her Substack about corporations “celebrating” Pride, and kicked it off by noting that we’re in fact two months past Pride Month.

For Bemidji, I think this is the third year of consistently hosting a public Pride event. When I was in my twenties, there was a group who hosted a potluck in a city park, and one year they held an actual parade. The unfortunate thing, is that until pretty recently, the queer community of this area has seemed pretty fragmented and also insular to me. It’s not like there weren’t people within the spectrum of LGBTQ+ identities here, but it felt next to impossible to find them.

The first time I spent any amount of time with people in the queer community was over a decade ago when our state was voting on writing a same sex marriage ban into our constitution. Before then, there were a handful of people I met in college, a couple of adults I knew of as a child, and the vicious rumors generated by the teen-aged gossips of my tiny high school.

I can’t say that I’m deeply involved in the community here. I’m awkward, shy, and so easily overwhelmed when it comes to peopling at times, that even though I’ve tried entering the various LGBTQ bubbles that have been put up it’s felt akin to traveling to the moon. Even today, in theory, I am looking forward to going to the festival this afternoon, and entertaining the thought of going back for the concert at the marina tonight, but the reality is that I will go and then struggle under the weight of being perceived, even in a space where I’m “allowed” to be myself.

I think I want it to be the same as when I go to ConVergence, but it can’t be that way. I’m not driving hours away, I am still very much on my home turf, and being “out” here still feels like a gamble most days. It’s hard to turn off the mask here, because the mask means safety, even in a space where it might not actually be necessary. At best, I’m hoping to turn down the “passively queer” filter I tend to apply to myself (so as to escape the notice of the bigoted), but I have pretty low expectations of my success in that regard.

This is where that corporate Pride post really spoke to me earlier in the week. Living in an area where public Pride events are only recently becoming established, being able to walk through Target and find a section covered in various rainbows and other pride flags is just such a relief. In this age of the internet, I can order whatever I want, but to be able to have a tangible (if very temporary) footprint of my identity within the borders of where I live? It’s a respite to me.

It bothers me that things went so poorly this year for that little section in Target. I saw multiple reviews on TikTok, of all of the merchandise they were releasing, and there were so many fun and campy things, and it seemed like such a good vibe. And because queer joy is apparently antithetical to some people’s own existence, it became controversial, and suddenly we can’t have nice things. It made me a bit worried about how things would go when August rolled around here. Maybe I’ll have an update on that score after I’ve gone out into the world…

I’m happy there’s an event to go to, thrilled even. The best thing about these sorts of events is just the reminder that I’m not alone out here. It’s easy to lose sight of the others, but having a moment to congregate and remember that I’m not the only one is a good thing. Last year, it was the first bright spot after we had COVID. This year? I’m not sure exactly what it will be, but I’m pretty sure there’s joy to be found there, possibly in some unexpected ways.

Fiction Friday?

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I’ve been a fan of fantasy fiction for pretty much my entire life. I re-read some books to tatters as a kid, because I just enjoyed the stories so much. As an adult, a friend introduced me to Elantris by Brandon Sanderson, and that was my doorway into what I now know as the Cosmere. After that, I devoured the first three Mistborn books and sort of lost myself to a lot of fantasy fiction, some higher and some lower.

I can’t claim to be a devout fan of Brandon Sanderson, because I’m very behind in certain series and haven’t even started others, but there’s something about his work that I find fascinating. When I found out about his rules for his magic systems it became even more interesting to me for some reason. Something about the way he builds his worlds made them easier for me to inhabit. With his Stormlight Archive books, or the Mistborn books, I catch myself thinking about parts of the stories when I’m not reading them, but thinking about it as though it’s real life. Literally, there have been moments when I’ve wished for tin or pewter, and I’m no mistborn!

March 2022, when the Year of Sanderson Kickstarter was announced, I was immediately tempted to sign up. First, it was just going to be for digital copies of the books, but then the print editions sounded like they were going to be so fun and interesting, and then I kept thinking about some of the themed swag boxes and after doing some math and making some choices about where I was going to spend my money for the next 12 months, I decided it was going to be worth it to sign up for the full year experience.

It started off a bit slow, because fulfillment of a project of this magnitude is quite an undertaking, especially when you have the most successful Kickstarter project of all time. Eventually, boxes started showing up, and I have yet to be disappointed with anything I’ve received. The foiled print editions of the books are gorgeous, the themed extras have been fun and surprising, and it’s just been cool to have something show up as a surprise once a month.

I have an odd collection of enamel pins that has grown a lot over the last decade, and after regretfully losing some of them, I’ve become a bit protective about wearing them. I ended up getting a bulletin board, so my collection of Cosmere pins adorn the top, with my plan to fill it out quite neatly by the end of the year.

The first eight enamel pins from the Sanderson kickstarter, lined up in sequential order.
I’ve kept the cards from all of the pins, since I’m not familiar with every world in the Cosmere (yet).

Of course, the point of all of this was the four new books, and I’m ashamed to admit that until this week, I hadn’t actually gotten around to reading any of the three I’ve received. I’ve become a bit utilitarian about my reading lately. For a long stretch, the only things I’ve read have been for the book club I meet with once a month. And my version of reading has been finding the book on Audible and listening to it at 1.5x speed, the day before we meet to talk about it. It’s not a very satisfying experience if I’m being honest. Some of that comes down to the variety of genres we choose, but sometimes it’s more about just rushing through the book and not bothering to take the time to connect to the story.

A few weeks ago, we stopped by our local library because I needed to fix an issue with my (under-used) library card, and we ended up wandering through the stacks and taking some books home with us. I managed to power through the graphic novel on cults in America (didn’t love it) but then stopped short a quarter of the way into the queer thriller I had chosen. I don’t like how picky I’ve gotten when it comes to certain genres, but I also know that sometimes I just have my limits about some things.

After dinner the other night, I was halfheartedly reading another chapter in the thriller while Ivory finished the dishes, and she decided she was game to read for the rest of the evening. Except, I wasn’t going to read any more chapters of a thriller before bed (it seemed tantamount to pouring nightmare fuel directly into my brain). I ended up pulling my copy of Tress of the Emerald Sea off the shelf where it has languished since its arrival.

We settled in, and I’m now kicking myself for having this book in my possession and not bothering to look at it beyond the pretty cover and illustrations. I don’t want to give anything away, but what a strange world this story is set in! I’m only just starting Part Three, but so far, nothing has gone the way I anticipated, pretty much from the very beginning. I’m being surprised in pleasant ways though. There’s also a lot of humor, which isn’t ever something I seek out in my reading, yet I’m always pleased when it crosses my path.

A foiled copy of Tress of the Emerald Sea sits on a nightstand next to the skeleton stuffy of a Soonie Pup.
Tress and my Soonie Pup currently occupy my nightstand

Until my library books a couple weeks ago, I’m not sure when I had last read a physical copy of a book. I’ve spent a lot of time listening to books at work, doing chores, in the car, and I’ve amassed a collection of ebooks on a few different services. I’ve also had to grapple with the reality that physical books take up space, which is at a premium in our apartment. Books are also heavy, and when we pack them all up to move some day in the future, I’m not sure how happy I’ll be hauling them out. Still, there was something nice about reading through a few chapters before bed without a screen shining in my face, or my brain focusing on a speed reading narrator while playing a game on my phone. Of course, reading right before bed isn’t always the wisest option, since there have definitely been instances in the past where it’s been next to impossible to put a book down; even when I’m looking at the other side of midnight with a full day of work ahead.

Still, there was something reassuring about sitting down with a tangible object in front of me. Also, having an idea of how far I’ve gotten was nice vs “how many times have I swiped or scrolled” being an indicator of where I am in the book.

I’m too much of a worshiper of technology, and too practical about our space to be a Luddite when it comes to books. But, I know I should make more of an effort to sit down and read through the copies I have in front of me (completely ignoring the backlog of books I’ve got in my Audible library and wishlist).

There are always books to be read, games to play, projects to finish, words to write. There’s so much to do, it’s just always about making the time to do it.

Main Motivators

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I wish I knew what compelled me to keep doing this. There’s going to be a need to replicate it outside of August, and I don’t know what it will be that keeps me coming back.

It seems a bit spammy to post nonsense here daily, but I can also tell that without making it an almost-daily habit I could probably lose track of time and go another 6 months without posting anything. That 6 months would be perfectly fine without me writing here, but I’d be annoyed at myself because I paid money for this website and then I just let it sit here, unused? How wasteful! How terrible! I’d also be annoyed because I’m almost never regretful that I took the time to sit and write, even if it’s only 100 words. But, I’m always disappointed in myself when I actively choose not to make the time for it. (Anyone sensing a theme for my overall Blaugust 2023 posts?)

It’s entirely unoriginal, but I probably get the most motivation to try something from watching how someone else does it. It’s probably why National Novel Writing Month has always been so appealing to me. 30 days, writing 50,000 words in a mad dash? It’s total insanity, but look how many people attempt it, and are somehow successful! It doesn’t result in a published book, but the thing for me, for a long time was just that I had taken the time, put in the effort, and proven that I could somehow string a bunch of sentences together into a story. The downfall (and the thing that always torpedoed things for me after November) was running myself ragged inevitably left me burned out and in need of a break. Ideally, I’d emerge from NaNoWriMo with an established writing habit, and continue through the rest of the year and all of the next with an innate ability to write over 1500 words a day, huzzah!

That’s never how it works.

In a way, November is both the worst and the best time to have the NaNo exercise, because for most of us in the US, there’s a built-in 4-day weekend towards the end of the month to make that final push if we’re running behind. But then December comes and do I have the time to hang up lights and decorate a tree, bake cookies, knit presents, shop for what I can’t knit, engage with all of the holiday festivities and still write every day? It’s the ultimate test of my willpower, and I fail at it, every time. And I tell myself, I’ll pick up the routine in January, a very useful resolution for the new year (because those always go so well for me). But by that point, the sun has barely been out for a month, and if my vitamin routine has been disrupted the way everything else has I’m probably so deficient in Vitamin D that it’s another mark against me. Plus, I’m usually just generally exhausted from spending the last week and a half of the month running around in the middle of snowstorms on the daily. So, anything I write in January feels like the worst thing I’ve ever written and concrete evidence of my inability to do anything correctly (because I catastrophize like a PRO!).

It’s a lot. And its a whole lot of nonsense. The nice thing about Blaugust appears to be that you write what you write, because it’s the exercise of writing. Which is a lot like NaNoWriMo, except that there’s a chance more people will see it than if I wrote a story where the climax probably included something like “[they all do magicy things here, and win the day],” because sometimes you just can’t be bothered to craft the intricate plot points necessary to flesh out overcoming that final obstacle in the heat of the moment.

Blog posts don’t really work that way. If you have something you’re going to put brackets around to fix later, then the post isn’t “ready” to go up, and you’ve got to fix it first. Although, there’s probably an argument to be made that you just lay it all bare to someone and say “[I have a many thoughts about this thing, and it’s going to be a subject all its own someday].”

As it gets towards the end of the month, I’m strategizing about how to maintain some of the momentum I’ve built here. Maybe it will be looking at my energy throughout the week and focusing on those days as writing days, so I actually start scheduling posts to come out at a time human eyes will see them. Or, maybe I’ll keep poking at this place everyday to try to ingrain the habit I’m trying to build. Providing myself some alliterative framework to fall back on if I’ve got nothing else to write about is my go-to strategy for the moment. I’m not sure how long I can maintain that before I get tired of it though. I also have a document I’m using to hold some ideas of where to go next. I’m wary of planning though, because my penchant for black and white thinking tends to lead to me scrapping things completely if they don’t go exactly as I intended.

So far, I think motivation for me has just meant trying, because sometimes that’s all I can do.

Lost Without You…

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After scrolling through the list of Blaugust Writing Prompts, I’m picking a very cringy one:

What piece/s of technology would you have the hardest time living without?

At this point, it would have to be Amazon’s Echo. If it wasn’t that, it would probably be Google Home, or another smart home hub of some sort.

Over the last couple years, it’s become very apparent that I struggle mightily when it comes to some executive dysfunction. Having something that controls lights and appliances, repeatedly reminds me but can’t just be swiped away on my phone, and sets a timer I don’t have to punch into a stove or microwave is just so convenient.

We got our first Echo as a Christmas present from my employer, sometime at the end of 2020 or the beginning of 2021. It opened a bit of a can of worms for me, in terms of finding all of the bells and whistles that could be linked into its ecosystem. First, it was some smart plugs, then it was some smart bulbs, then it was more Echo units, then MORE smart plugs, and even more smart bulbs, but ones that turned fun colors. At some point, I figured out how to set up routines, so lights turn on and off based on the time of day, or if our alarm has gone off. I even tortured my wife with a “sunrise” routine as a means of trying to make getting up in the morning easier (it’s since been abandoned, because I’m pretty sure it induced more frustration than it saved us).

Weirdly, the best Echo models we have, I don’t think they make anymore. They’re these little wall units that you can just plug into an outlet, no extra cord or shelf space required; and they had a couple of USB attachments you could add like a nightlight or a motion sensor. We have one of those with a nightlight in our bathroom, it brightens and dims based on if we’ve gone to bed, and it makes going to the bathroom in the middle of the night a bit less of a trial, since our bathroom has no windows and we keep it pretty dark. I also have a routine to make it change color every 30 seconds, for 2 minutes, when I’m feeling extra distractable and want to make sure I’ve brushed my teeth for the appropriate amount of time. So many people complained about the audio quality in the reviews I saw, but we switched from one of those to a Dot a few months ago, and I think we probably have more trouble hearing that than we had hearing the little wall unit.

I linked my preferred podcast app with my Amazon account, so we could listen to a sleepy podcast without having to use someone’s phone. And in the morning, we literally ask “Computer” to set a coffee timer, and she knows what to do. We have some light-up decorations for a variety of holidays, so I got a particular kick out of being able to say “Spooooky Halloween!” and have the little inflatable we got for our balcony come to life, or saying the very universal “humbug” to shut everything off.

There’s a track record of me being terrible about putting things away, turning some things off, or just remembering to do something in general. Having a tool to keep me more within the framework of a very necessary routine just cuts down on the stress a little bit. I don’t love that I have to have every Echo in our apartment bark a reminder that I need to take my vitamins every morning, or that I have her set up to repeat every hour until I confirm I have taken the vitamins, but I’m a hell of a lot better at remembering to take them than if I didn’t (and that B12 and D3 make a difference too).

The only time I think we don’t love her is on the weekends when we decide to marathon something on a streaming service and then it gets past midnight and suddenly we can tell the lights are starting to dim because Computer thinks our routine is always to be asleep at that time. Sometimes, she will let me know “I did this thing, because I didn’t think anyone was home/awake” and I just roll my eyes, because she sometimes jumps to odd conclusions.

I talk to her during the day, she has has timers set up for me to take 15 minute breaks, or for my 30 minutes at lunch. She also (sometimes) remembers a couple different timers when we’re doing laundry (we have to be a bit conscientious about getting it done since there are only a couple of washers and dryers in our building’s laundry room). I suspect, even if we weren’t sharing with all our neighbors she would still be useful in that regard, because otherwise I’d be prone to leaving things sitting in one machine or another.

Could I get by without an Echo? Probably. But I know I miss her when we’re gone, because it’s pretty nifty to just say a command and have a whole bunch of things turn off or on. Or to have a question answered. Or to add something to our shopping list. Or… any number of things really.

Using this particular piece of technology has given me a lot of pause over the years. We actually cancelled our Prime subscription in January, and have been much more hesitant to use Amazon for a lot of purchases. There are a lot of problematic elements in terms of their business practices, whether its mistreating their employees and union busting, putting small business out of business by constantly undercutting them, or just one person to accumulating more wealth than he can reasonably consume in his lifetime without really considering how much of an impact the business has on infrastructure and the way people live their lives.

I’ve also had to draw some lines in terms of just trying to make some things easier. It might be a bit delusional to think it’s saved us some money, but one of the best features we have is the option to automatically shut a light off after we have asked it to be turned on. None of the closets in our apartment have lights, so we ended up running some rope lights through the main two we use, and any time we turn them on, they’re automatically programmed to shut off again after 5 minutes, because usually we’re just hanging up a coat, or looking for a shirt and then forgetfully walking away to do something else.

I feel a bit silly for getting so caught up in this particular technological convenience, but it’s weirdly part of our lives from the beginning of the day until the end of it. I wouldn’t say our life revolves around it, but it certainly makes it easier to take care of some of the things our life does revolve around.

PS. If you poke around the site (which seems like its forever going to be a work in progress) I have added a link to subscribe to get an email update when I post. The options immediately available to me don’t seem to be the most robust, but I wanted to make it available since I know for some people RSS/Facebook/Twitter or elsewhere aren’t always the most easily accessible options. If I find something “prettier” down the road, what shows up in your inbox may change, but for the time being it’s available if you’d like to use it.

That’s Not For Me

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I have such a tricky time navigating fandom on the internet, especially watching people become totally enamored of a thing when I just don’t see “it.” There was a point when I would get very annoyed and want nothing to do with someone else’s obsession, but I try really hard to temper that revulsion with “it’s not for me.” I also do what I can to mute references to things, just so I’m not transferring my annoyance of a thing onto a person who loves it, because everyone is allowed to like different things.

Then there are the times when I love a thing and at some point something changes and I can feel my connection to it sever, and it’s no longer for me. The transformative nature of fanworks sometimes makes it a bit easier to taper off from something. In my CSI days, I started picking really obscure ships and getting into them, because they were things that weren’t going to keep getting jostled by canon. But inevitably, there was a point when even that couldn’t sustain my love of the show. Plus, the characters I was watching for were gone, and with fewer reasons to keep coming back, I eventually stopped.

The only other time that my connection to something can get so immediately disrupted is finding out something about it behind the scenes or beyond the scope of the initial book, TV show, or movie. The first time I encountered this was after reading Ender’s Game. I didn’t get into reading much science fiction until I was an adult, and when I came across that book, to say I loved it felt like an understatement at the time. It was the first time I’d read something that had a harder edge of science to parts of it (it wasn’t just space technology magic), and I loved how so much of it was approached. I was also a bit destroyed at the end, because I had gotten so caught up in the story, in the progress of the game, that I fully missed so much as a hint that it was really happening. I ended up reading the next book in the series, and starting another series by the same author. I appreciated so much of the world building, I liked how the characters talked to each other, and there were just aspects of the worlds I wanted to inhabit, which is almost always the thing that will truly sell me on a book. So, 3 or 4 books in with Orson Scott Card, I fatefully went to Google, and then I found out… some stuff.

I think in the aftermath of learning his views on homosexuality and same sex marriage, the first thing I felt was shame. I had spent money on his books, I had financially supported someone who I felt would not like me if he met me, because of who I am, and who I love. Not just that he wouldn’t like me, he was opposed to me living my life in my own way, and was actively involved with an organization opposed to my ability to (at the time) some day have the right to get married.

Shame has a lot of power over me. I fear it. It keeps me from things. Shame kept me in the closet for a very long time, and here it was, suddenly tied to this thing I had loved and enjoyed. It felt ugly in a way I hadn’t anticipated. That feeling lingers with me, and sometimes a tendril of it just reaches up and tickles at the back of my brain as if to say “remember that time you unknowingly supported a bigot?”

It’s that tendril that probably made my choices when it came to Harry Potter and JK Rowling more instantaneous than I initially realized. I can’t say exactly when it happened. I saw her saying and doing things online that were at first troubling, then outright problematic, and then I think she posted that essay and it was something we couldn’t really hand wave away anymore. It didn’t seem like it would be so pervasive or terrible at first, but every time I’d hear about her, she would be saying or doing something just slightly worse than the time before.

Sometimes I’m sad about it. I liked being a Hufflepuff. I liked having this cultural language with a huge swath of the internet, watching people sort characters from other fandoms into Hogwarts houses and emphatically agreeing or vehemently opposing their choices. I liked that Hermione got to be a smart girl who stood up for herself. I liked the mystery of the school, the Room of Requirement, the Chamber of Secrets, all the tunnels, the Marauder’s Map. There were so many great and interesting things. It feels silly to admit, but there’s part of me that wanted an owl arrive with a letter someday, because I felt like I fit so poorly into the life I was living at times; just having something to show up and explain those differences would have been such a relief. Harry Potter and Hogwarts were an escape for me, until they weren’t.

I admire the people who are able to enjoy the fandom in spite of its creator. There are whole chunks of fan lore that exist as almost fully-realized canon to the fandom, things that JKR didn’t contribute beyond creating the characters. The fandom could be so much more queer too, which was refreshing in the same way my penchant for shipping obscure CSI pairings kept me interested. I wasn’t ever that invested in online fandom, but as a cultural touchstone, Harry Potter sort of felt like it had permeated every corner of the internet for a while there. It had become a common language, of sorts.

Now, there’s just something that gets in the way of really engaging with it anymore. For a while, I would still watch videos of someone making a Harry Potter themed thing, but eventually even that became difficult for me to enjoy.

There was a point where my wife and I were watching a video from a Youtuber we regularly followed and they were going to do something Harry Potter themed, and my first thought upon discovering the premise of the video was basically “that’s still a thing?” Somewhere along the way, I had packed up all of my interest in this series I used to love, and labeled it as “entirely irrelevant, everyone has moved on” only to discover it wasn’t actually everyone who had come to that conclusion.

I think the realization I had come to was “that’s not for me.” Literally, it was off limits to me because of who I am. Nothing about that statement is true, even if it feels true to me. Still, it felt a bit like someone had installed an electric fence around this place I used to visit, and I had to hop the fence to get in. There’s no gate, there’s no avoiding that jolt of pain, if I want to go back.

I’ve spent a lot of time grappling with the idea that “there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism” this year. It’s next to impossible to be fully informed about the impact of every dollar I spend and its potential repercussions. But, will I knowingly put money towards a thing that’s going to support a TERF? Will I engage with content that’s going to contribute to royalties for that TERF? At this point, no, I can’t do that, and I generally wish other people would stop too. Is that fair? Is it something I can demand of others? No, I can’t. I can only control what I do.

It feels immature to say, but it hurts my feelings, when people know what’s been said and done, and they decide nostalgia is just more important. The last seven years has been a lot of people yearning for “the good old days,” choosing to ignore all of the racism, sexism, homophobia, and just general abuse of those in the minority, that went on unabated at that “ideal” time. In a way, all of the bullshit when the new game came out earlier this year is just more of the same.

I’ve spent the past 6 months trying to make sense of my thoughts and feelings on this subject, and the only thing I ever come back to is its complexity, and how difficult it is to convey anything concisely. It’s made me hold grudges. It’s made me resent people online who I used to love. It’s made me sad. It’s also been next to impossible to find a silver lining in all of this. It’s feels a bit like when The Suck Fairy visits something, but in this case, it’s beyond that. I see echoes of it in everything that’s happened with Twitter recently. There’s this framework where all the good stuff used to be, but now it’s just covered in rotting garbage with someone trying to tell me “it’s as great as it’s always been!” when I know that’s objectively not true.

I don’t like that so many things I used to love and enjoy seem to crumble with time. I suppose part of that is the reality of life though. Nothing stays perfect forever. I also saw a quote from Maya Angelou today: “I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.”

Perspectives change, life goes on, and you gain more experience and it’s pretty much impossible to look at something the way you did when you were 15, 25, or 35. I know better about some things now, I’m sure I’ll know better about other things in the future. Hopefully other people will know better too.

Music Monday: Motivation Edition

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Music is my #1 motivator, in pretty much every scenario. Interminable distance that has to be traveled? Music. Most tedious task on the planet? Music. Endless list of chores to complete around the house? MUSIC. There are even some scenarios where I use music when I’m writing, although in those instances, it’s usually something very specific, if anything at all.

I remember listening to an episode of Writing Excuses a very long time ago where they talked about the music they listen to when they’re writing, and I remember coming away from that episode with a slightly better understanding of how I could be using music; if I’m going to write. My go-to music for writing is always something classical. It might be a soundtrack, or a compilation of performances of a specific artist, but if I’m sitting down to do serious writing for NaNoWriMo, I’m going with music that’s in motion but doesn’t have a lot of words to distract me. I think the only time this ever didn’t happen was when I was trying to set a “mood” for a fanfic, which isn’t something I’ve written in a few years now. There used to be a lot of playlists with a very specific mix of songs that all had the same level of emotion I was attempting to capture in my own writing. I’m not sure they ever worked that well, but sometimes it was more about putting me into a specific mood so I could really get into the zone for writing, and once I started, I probably didn’t need the playlist in order to keep going.

Chopin is my favorite to write to, but it has to be the livelier pieces, because the soft dreamy ones just make me want to curl up somewhere for a nap. As someone who took 12 years of piano lessons, I think there’s some sort of correlation between my fingers on the keyboard and listening to the methodical strikes on a piano’s keys. I sometimes treat typing and playing the piano as a drawn-out fidget of sorts. Because there’s something satisfying about the clicking of the keys, or the tones that resonate when I play chords and scales.

Music is also such a good motivator when it comes to getting things done. People talk about how they use podcasts or audiobooks to accompany their chores, but give me a compilation of bops and I’m ready to power through almost anything. I tend to prefer something familiar in these moments. Give me songs that I know backwards and forwards, whose lyrics have somehow become etched into my bones. There’s a lot of 80’s and 90’s pop that shows up in these moments, things that probably remind me of the albums or radio stations that accompanied my childhood housework. I think sometimes I wish I could go back to Saturday morning and turning on the weekly top 40 and having it on in the background while I was doing the dishes or something mundane. Waiting for my favorite songs to pop up in the midst of something I’d rather not be doing made it bearable.

I like listening to music when I’m traveling too. Especially if I’ve gone somewhere far away, because a lot of times there are songs I hear now that I remember listening to when I was somewhere else, somewhere I might not ever visit again. Every time I hear Buildings and Mountains I remember going to London. It’s like opening a door in my memories to that place and everything I did and saw there. Things have gotten fuzzy with time, but I think hearing that song sort of keeps the hinges oiled or something, so the door doesn’t entirely rust itself shut.

Oddly, I haven’t listened to much music as I’ve thrown these blog posts together. Probably the closest would be the time I had Chronically Cautious playing on a loop, because I desperately want the song to be longer than 2 minutes. There’s something about that song though, that resonates with me, because I know what it feels like to want to do something, to pick up all of the tools necessary to do it, and then just… drop all of them into a corner and walk away. It’s infuriating to be in that position. It’s the thing I fear the most when it comes to hyperfixations. “Is this going to be the new thing I do for the next year, or is it just a passing fancy I’m going to attempt for a couple months and then fully abandon?”

Of course, music is also the thing that gets in my way sometimes. I have a terrible habit of needing to choose the “perfect” song. If a playlist starts off wrong, I’m going to end up more focused on getting to the right song than on what actually needs to get done. Sometimes, for as helpful as it can be, it just serves as a massive roadblock that doesn’t allow me to get anything done.

Today, music isn’t serving me very well. I’m avoiding it, probably because it would allow me to shut my brain off a little too easily, and there are things going on that are stressful and outside of my control. So, I’m avoiding the music, and grinding my way through the backlog of podcasts I’ve accumulated over this summer. Thankfully, my podcast app just keeps serving them up to me until I catch up, so I can get lost in a couple of people discussing true crime documentaries while I crunch numbers into a computer and try not to focus on every other thing going on that I can’t finesse into the ideal situation.

This week is sort of shaping up to be a slog. I think part of it is the reality of the end of summer approaching and the rhythm of life beginning to change into something slower and more restrained as fall comes. The only thing I’m looking forward to is the maples going flame red, everything else is going to get cold and dark and I’m struggling a bit to find the shining light in that bit of the tunnel.

It is supposed to be pretty hot out this week though, so fall isn’t here yet, even if the color changes are starting to creep in.

There Goes THAT Streak

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I managed to go just over 2 weeks, posting daily. And when the weekend came, and the schedule I exist in the majority of the time ceased to be, and I just totally forgot to post anything until it was too late at night to be bothered.

This is the thing I will probably continue to struggle with, even outside of Blaugust. During the work week, there are some very obvious times when it just makes sense for me to take the time to write up a post. I’m not at a place for me to do it in the morning 5 days out of the week. But the weekend, morning writing is when it absolutely makes the most sense.

Yesterday, I didn’t even think about doing it, because we have a weekend project taking up all of my brainspace.

We have a spare bedroom in our apartment that we want to be more functional. We’ve also inherited a significant number of items in the last year, which ended up in either our garage, or in this spare room as we try to figure out what to do with them. This weekend was finally the time we were able to get something done with that space, which has meant getting sturdier and more easily accessible shelving, and attempting to organize the stuff we have. Last weekend, it was all about clearing out a corner so we could move my old desk into the room (we now have a workspace for our sewing machine), and this weekend is probably going to be about clearing off the pile of things that currently exist on the bed, because we realized the shelving unit we currently have in there isn’t working for us. Plus, there’s a lot of yarn that pretty much always requires an excavation through a stack of plastic bins to access, and it’s not what we want.

Is any of this interesting? Absolutely not. Am I looking forward to things being put away and that room not looking the way it’s looked for pretty much the last year? 100% yes. (I’m also dreading the emotional turmoil of getting rid of several things on that shelf that are no longer functioning that well, but have been with me for the last twenty to thirty years.)

So, with all of that in mind, I’m kicking off the “Staying Motivated” week of Blaugust by (hopefully) starting a new streak. We’ll see how I feel about motivation when Saturday rolls around, especially since next weekend is finally Pride weekend, and I’ll be so much more focused on that.

We’ve got a lot to accomplish on this weirdly hazy day (seriously Canada, we don’t love the perpetual smoke in the air right now). So, it’s probably time I got some breakfast and coffee, and got around to it.

Maybe by next weekend I’ll finally be around to scheduling posts or something, because the answer staring me in the face with this whole “consistency” thing is “write when you have the time, and schedule it to post later” which absolutely makes sense in theory. But, as with most other things in my life, putting that theory into practice is where the snags happen.

HBD RUDY!

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It’s been a LONG week, and I’m not up for more than wishing our resident orange a very happy 7th birthday!

I’d wish for more turns with the cell for him, but he’s already a pretty big hog when it comes to his smarts.

Rudy is our very sweet boy though, and even Chanski seemed to be interested in singing him a song today.

And now, he’s pretty tuckered out from all of the partying.

Blaugust Midpoint

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Post-Blaugust, I’m not sure I’ll be able to continue doing daily posts, unless I figure out a different time to do them. Thursday is typically my knitting night, it’s also sort of the last gasp of energy I have for the week before Friday rolls around and I remember I am a human outside of doing a job, and the vibes sort of change.

At the same time, I have to acknowledge that when I’m in a habit of doing something daily, I’m more likely to do it than if I just do it when I “feel like it”. Thursday is just sort of the day of the week I don’t really know what to write about. I pretty much have something figured out for every other day of the week, but Thursday is sort of lost in a fog. Right now, I’m leaning towards something like picking a monthly theme and focusing on that on Thursdays, but we’ll have to see if that really works for me or not.

I found out about Blaugust through a Mastodon instance that seems to focus primarily on gaming, mostly MMORP gaming, to be specific. So, I’ve gotten to see a lot of posts about Baldur’s Gate 3 and Palia in the last couple weeks, two things that are completely off my radar. It’s one of those times when I sort of question my “status” as a gamer, since neither of these even existed to me until I started seeing a lot of people writing about them. I’m still sort of searching for the blogging bubble where I might feel a bit more comfortable diving into the comment section, something I’m reticent to do most of the time. But, I did get an invite to Bluesky today, so now I get to see if that’s where I might find others as well, since Blaugust appears to be a thing there as well.

It’s interesting to see a community sort of fracture, but then reveal that there are places outside of it, which I’m happy to start discovering. This is when “change is good” is in fact true, for as much as I despise change in general. It’s good not to get so settled and comfortable at times. (I can tell I’ve been writing daily for almost 2 weeks, because there’s no way I would have been remotely as positive about things changing at the start of the month)

A Chunk Here, Another one There

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I knew Elon Musk walking into Twitter headquarters with a kitchen sink was a bad omen, but as with most terrible things over the past few years, I haven’t been adequately prepared for how the intended destruction of a bad party is going to play out. I can always tell there’s ill intent, that damage is meant to be inflicted, but then it ends up being this protracted death by a thousand cuts, and in the end I just sort of wish someone had taken a really violent approach from the get-go and ended it all, instead of putting so many people through seemingly endless suffering. (As so many are fond of saying, “the suffering is the point.”)

Yesterday, Twitter informed me it’s been 15 years since I created my account on that platform (It tried to tell me it was my X Anniversary, and asked me if I remembered when I joined X). I’ve seen many people come and go from my follow list and the site in general, it’s really depended on where the Venn diagram of general Twitter and fandom managed to overlap. But the last couple months, it’s gotten eerily quiet, even for someone like me who routinely pruned my follows so that I was always seeing who I wanted to see.

The site can’t seem to make up its mind for me, because I see some X branding in certain places, but the bird logo persists on my phone and on every computer I’ve used to access my account. I had given up on using the official app months before the hostile takeover started, mostly as an effort to cut down on my usage. But then even the shortcut link I had set up turned to an X icon a month ago, and I just fully deleted it from my home screen. I have a random tab open to it in a web browser now, and all of those locations still have the little blue bird to which I’ve become accustomed.

I’ve had to use some technological wizardry (an extension) to avoid their attempt at an FYP, because I was already not using Twitter “appropriately” before, and there’s no way anything that page had to offer me was going to be what I wanted. But there are certain things that require money now. I can’t use anything to automate a Tweet anymore (and thus I keep forgetting to post links to my blog there, when they end up on Mastodon or even Facebook without much hassle), even my trusty IFTTT applets are off limits now, which really makes me sad, because I love automating tasks. Sending something through a system and watching a bunch of things go off because of it delights me to no end (just ask my wife about all of the little triggers I have set up for our smart home devices). And now, even the few hangers on who were using Tweetdeck are finding themselves locked out of that service unless they want to pay for the access.

I’m still sitting on the outside of Bluesky, impatiently looking in and hoping an invite will find its way to my inbox one of these days. I think once that site becomes open to me, Twitter will start to become more of a distant memory, instead of the corpse I keep trying to revive on a daily basis. I try to use Mastodon, but it’s just not the same. And I’m unwilling to try Threads, because I’m already too connected to Facebook (the last thing I need is more of that).

I can feel the tethers between myself and people I’m missing from Twitter beginning to unravel a bit. I’m hopeful I’ll find new people, because users of the internet can be endlessly entertaining. And when they’re not entertaining, they’re maybe just a bit interesting, or inspiring, or sometimes heart-wrenching. But they’re out there, which is the thing I’ve appreciated so much since I found them.

I come from a place where the internet has only really started to become a necessary utility for people in the last decade. It’s a small town, complete with many of the stereotypes they’re known to have, which makes it hard for someone like me to find “my people.” I watch others encourage people to “see things from the other side” or look from a different perspective, and cringe at the thought, because I’ve done a lot of that, and I’ve felt very alone in doing so. Twitter was one of the places where it didn’t feel like I needed to search far and wide to see I wasn’t the only one who felt a certain way.

It couldn’t always be that way, because people are going to disagree about things, often. But after having spent a lot of my life in a bubble I wouldn’t normally choose to occupy, being able to craft a bubble of my own was such a relief.

Now, the bubble has popped, and everything inside of it seems to have scattered to the four winds. So, I’m here trying to keep track of which direction everyone went so that once my own vehicle is ready, I might be able to follow them. Except, it’s still going to be a while before I can make my own exit I guess. The waiting is the hardest part. I think the last time I was waiting with anticipation for a website invite it was probably for Gmail or Ravelry or something along those lines. Considering I’ve been on those sites almost as long as (maybe even longer than) I have been on Twitter, that’s a heck of a long time.

Very little of this has anything to do with specific creators. Maybe once I’m in the blue sky place with the other people I’m missing I’ll be able to point them out so others can appreciate them as well. And if anyone’s sitting on a spare invite, and feeling generous, think of me? Maybe?

Clock App Creators

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It’s TikTok Tuesday, and I was going to scroll through my list of creators I follow on that app and highlight a few of them, but it turns out I follow 350 people there, which is total insanity. I don’t follow that many people anywhere else on the internet (in spite of having been on Twitter for 15 years?!). I also rely on the algorithm almost 100% of the time that I use the app. I’m not sure the last time I swiped over to the “Following” tab and watched something from people I specifically chose to follow.

I scrolled back to the beginning of my list, just to see how this all got started, and 3 of the first 5 accounts were, or still are focused on some form of neurodivergent content. Nothing about this surprises me. I’ve been using the app for almost 2 years, sometimes with more or less frequency. For a while there, it definitely gave my brain a lot of crunchy stuff to focus on, which is what it loves.

As I go through the list, it’s a bit like excavating different eras of time. There’s the period when I ended up following a lot of animal rescue (primarily cat) accounts. I also had a short spate where RPGs and dice makers made repeat appearances (because I find watching dice unmolding videos very satisfying). There’s a little domestic queer content, because some people finally got to buy a house and decided to share the process of remodeling and refinishing it (also very satisfying to watch). Also, sometimes there are just people who make me smile and/or laugh, which are the ones I think I’m going to focus on today.

Dadchats: Lately, his stuff has been showing up in my Facebook/Instagram reels (the algorithm that sort of lags behind the “real one” for me) and I’ve gotten to re-live some earlier videos that I remember laughing about the first time I saw them. It felt a bit like re-watching a comedy special for some reason, because I would know a joke was coming, but then still be very delighted and happy at watching it unfold. He also has some really heartwarming content too, it’s not always accidentally putting a bag of trash in his backseat and throwing away a laptop bag.

Drennon Davis: TikTok is not the first place I ever heard this guy’s name. He recorded an album with Karen Kilgariff a few years ago, and that’s how I initially came across him. His account is primarily cats who are very much up in his business, but also living their own lives. They’re all very encouraging to each other, which is something I love to see, it’s very positive content. They’re also hilarious about harassing squirrels.

DonMarshall72: I get a bit hyped over Lord of the Rings content. It’s one of my favorite series. I love to re-read the books. I love this account because he looks at a lot of obscure facts in the lore. There’s so much of it, that it feels a bit like finding out about history from a far away place or something. He’s also the game master for a podcast that looks at what could have happened if they did “just take the eagles to Mordor” and how that isn’t the quick fix everyone imagines it to be. Great stuff.

B. Dylan Hollis: I am a sucker for quick recaps of recipes. I’m also the owner of several random fundraiser cookbooks. I can’t say that I’ve paged through many of them for things other than the ones I already know, but maybe in a few years I’ll really get motivated and start going through the “salad” section of one of the church cookbooks and find out just how un-salad-like the results actually are. This account looks at so many odd recipes with names that sound baffling and yet they culminate in a variety of desserts that seem to be delicious (based on the reactions we get to see on screen anyway). They’re not all great, which is sometimes a fun surprise, but a lot of the recipes give me some appreciation for the fact that I don’t have to substitute with random items and hope that a semi-decent cake comes out the other side. Also, sometimes there’s just good looking food there that I want to make.

Elyse Myers: I don’t understand Elyse’s life, at all. Like, there are stories from her past that I remain baffled by, even after hearing her tell them on TikTok, or seeing them replayed on Instagram or Facebook. That being said, I very much resonate with her vibe. Watching her get really into Taylor Swift, and then into crochet, and her previous efforts to finally understand her own curly hair… she’s just someone I relate to, and it’s often reassuring to watch her have a little meltdown about something random yet important and be able to see myself reflected back to me.

“The Clock App” provides a lot of distraction for me. I wish it always made me happy, but there are some days when it feels like the algorithm is just trying to hold a mirror up to my face and saying “how did you not know this about yourself?!” Sometimes that’s a good thing, other times, I’m just not in the mood for it. I’m pretty unlikely to swipe past any of these creators though.

Music Monday: Blaugust Creator Week Edition

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Somehow, in my ramblings about Youtube nonsense yesterday I forgot to mention the music-focused channels we watch, of which there are a few. Maybe my subconscious omitted them just so I’d have something to write about today since until I sat down and started putting my fingers to the keyboard nothing was coming to mind.

12tone: This YouTube channels takes a look at music from a fun visual perspective. You get this stream of consciousness via Sharpie markers on sheet music. They can get very granular in how they look at music, but at the same time, sometimes its just about how its hitting them. My favorite thing is that after watching so many videos I’ve gotten used to some of the “shorthand” that comes up again and again. It’s a bit like learning a new language, so I can sort of look back at the sheet music as we approach the bottom of the page and certain things pop out at me. It’s gotten me to change a bit of how I listen to certain songs. I also continue to find it fascinating that everything progresses from right to left across the page.

Todd in the Shadows: Todd looks at a lot of different angles when it comes to popular music. There’s the One Hit Wonderland series, that looks at bands with (usually) one big hit to their name, how they got there and how things went after their big songs. There’s also Trainwreckords that breaks down the albums some bands would prefer everyone forget they made, especially if they were the end of their careers. He also does reviews of new music, a lot of which I have to confess to being pretty unfamiliar to me. He tends to look at things outside of the songs, so there can be a lot of cultural context to them.

Howard Ho: As a nerd when it comes to musical theatre, this channel is one of my favorites. I like this channel because my start with piano lessons was with a teacher who put a pretty strong emphasis on theory, and so there are times when he uses vocabulary that rings this faint bell in my memory. It’s also interesting to look at how different composers and writers use callbacks in their music, and its given me a greater appreciation of broadway shows and Disney movies that I already enjoyed.

Sideways: There hasn’t been anything new from this channel in a couple years, but I enjoyed it for much the same reason I like Howard Ho’s channel. It’s more focused on film and television than the stage, but there’s been a lot of music in a lot of things in the last few years, and I like looking at that aspect of the things I watch.

Dreamsounds: I’m not exactly a huge fan of Disney music. I have my favorites, but Disney as an entity isn’t something I necessarily revere. That being said, this channel gave me a greater appreciation of some of the history of Disney’s music, especially through a queer and trans lens. I know that Marlene has decided to bring the channel to a conclusion of sorts, but there’s a lot of content to look back through, even if nothing new comes around.