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.

YouTube Nonsense

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I was hoping I’d have something interesting to discuss in terms of what I watched this week, but things are very much the same as they were last week. We’ve made it through another season of Grey’s, and outside of that… Youtube has been in a bit of a summer doldrums period for me.

I also feel a little bit like I poisoned myself by getting caught up in watching a bunch of “drama” on Youtube back in May, and nothing has really been the same since. It’s wild to me that it’s been 3 months since all of that started. Where does the time go?

There’s a superstitious part of myself that is very hesitant to discuss any of it in definitive terms; I blame the Black Mirror episode “Hated in the Nation” for that. I’m certainly not tweeting “death to” anyone, but it seems like the nature of the internet sometimes is that you’re basically wishing that on someone if you’re part of the “Toxic Gossip Train” that’s tearing along focusing on all of the bad things about someone.

I do think it’s funny how I come across things sometimes though.

We’re big fans of YouTube essays in this household (I used to think it was weird to call them essays, since I wasn’t the one reading them, but, that’s pretty much what they are). We went to a whole panel about them when we were at CONvergence a month ago. There’s something rewarding about sitting down and engaging with that kind of information, whether it’s something philosophical, or something that’s maybe a little silly. We follow at least two lawyers, a couple of philosophers, film fanatics, and video game lovers, just to name a few.

The tangential cousin of YouTube essays are commentary channels. Those come in a host of different formats, some more reactionary, others pretty informational, possibly bleeding into the essay realm. But, commentary tends to have a more salacious edge to it. Commentary YouTube relies more on the algorithm, which relies on engagement, which relies on outrage; or at least it seems to a decent amount of the time.

We watch a mix of essays and commentary. Sometimes it sways more heavily in the philosophical side, and other times, we find a new channel and end up going down a rabbit hole of their catalog and watching commentary on all manner of things. It’s nice when you can find a middle ground between the two, especially with someone who has a pretty extensive back catalog, and that’s how we ended up spending a solid weekend early last year watching videos from iilluminaughtii. In terms of watching someone do takedowns on MLMs or showing off the seedy underbelly of corporations, it was very satisfying. Until it wasn’t. Eventually, we sort of gave up on watching after key words in her subjects would be mispronounced for the entirety of the videos, over entire series. Then in May, she called out another YouTuber we occasionally watch for plagiarizing her style, and I ended up going down a drama channel rabbit hole; I think I have yet to fully exit that particular warren of the internet.

I don’t know what it is about gossip that is so satisfying to my brain. What is it that makes something just a little bit nasty so appealing to discuss, or watch other discuss? Drama channels were like a junk food binge for my brain, and I could not get enough of them, to the point that I pretty much poisoned my own YouTube recommendation algorithm into thinking I wanted to know drama about everything on the internet, when really it was just this. Until it wasn’t.

I think just as the iilluminaughtii hype was starting to die down, allegations resurfaced about Colleen Ballinger, and then it started all over again. I watched full documentaries on the subject, hours long livestreams going through other people’s videos, and practically daily updates on the subject. For awhile, it felt like something new and terrible was coming out every 12 hours or so.

And then, the “hi” video was released, and my drama and commentary YouTube algorithms lost their collective minds.

For me personally, having watched multiple people calling out for comment or an apology, while others rehashed how everything had gotten to this point; that ukelele video was a weirdly cathartic experience. Was it the reaction anyone wanted? No. Did it generate a mountain of content for me to watch in the immediate aftermath? Absolutely!

The wake of that video has also been frustrating, because it sucked up all of the air for a little while, and every “sordid” or “disreputable” story afterward has felt pretty lame in comparison. Now, I scroll through my recommendations and unless it’s a name I know, I’m not that concerned with checking anything out on a subject I’m unfamiliar with.

I keep joking that I poisoned my brain with all of this, but it does feel a bit like I decided to go swimming in some toxic waste and I’m not feeling so great in the aftermath of that. I suppose this is the result of relishing in the “misfortune” of others. It’s just that schadenfreude can be so satisfying, especially when you see it happening to someone who very clearly harmed others; and when there are a lot of instances where that doesn’t happen.

I’m hopeful this will be my last foray into drama YouTube for a little while, because it’s not great to be perpetually caught up in what amounts to gossip a lot of the time.

Kochanski and Rudy

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Our resident felines are not really friends with each other. We call them each others siblings, even though they’re not from the same litter, they’re entirely different ages, and look nothing alike.

Keladry Princess Panda Kochanski (generally known as Kochanski, or more often Chanski) is an Oreo potato, who arrived as a birthday present to my wife, several years before we met. She loves to eat multigrain cheerios from your cereal bowl, be the littlest spoon in all cuddle puddles, and chatter at birds that show up on our balcony. Her version of playtime involves a lot of screaming, mostly because she gets overstimulated very easily.

Rudy Not a Communist Sonnek (aka Rudolphus, but usually just Rudy) is an orange croissant who showed up in our lives just over a year ago. He is a big fan of most treats (except the churus every other cat seems to love), engages in a lot of happy floor wiggles when he’s really feeling himself, and haunts our apartment like the ghost of a Victorian child with very sad little meows it’s sometimes impossible to hear. Rudy’s version of playtime involves dancing on various catnip-filled fruits and vegetables and then zooming out of the room like his tail is on fire.

For a long time, I thought they were never going to get along, since every play session involves Chanski screaming like Rudy is brutally murdering her and she’s utterly helpless to stop him. Except that in the last couple months, they’ve started behaving a little less like magnets that repel each other, and engaging with each other a little bit more (plus there’s that whole “easily overstimulated” thing where Chanski screams the second she’s excited or upset about something). We’re not to the point of happy grooming sessions, but I did come across them both sleeping comfortably on our bed a couple weeks ago, which I wouldn’t ever have imagined happening.

Lately, they’ve started taking up the same post Moxie used to hold when dinner time is imminent. Of course, they only do this when they’re waiting for their timed feeders to go off in the evenings, as though we’ve ever gone to bed without giving them food.

Rudy also used to seem very timid in Chanski’s presence, but he’s gotten a bit bolder about getting close to her, which could mean her screamy bluster is starting to lose its impact. Or, maybe he just likes her, and actually wants to be a bit closer to her.

I live in hope that they’ll work things out and actually become friends, since I have yet to live in a multi-cat household where the cats just get along. Every pair of cats in my past has just decided to come to a very volatile truce, with built-in allowances that if someone gets to close, they get screamed at and swatted without impunity.

I truly believe Rudy’s cautiously adoring fascination will overcome the fear in the end. He’s acting less and less like a little baby man, and more like an aloof feline, so it can only be a matter of time, right?

Fiber Friday, Blaugust edition

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Our county fair is happening this week, so of course my digital memory banks keep popping up with photos from the two times I was ambitious enough to put items in for judging.

Both shawls involved beading, which I still find totally fascinating as part of knitting a project. I remember when I first came across the pattern and the required bead count, I was a bit horrified because I was remembering my mom’s knitted bead projects and how she strung all of them onto the yarn before she even got started. With the fine weight I was planning to knit with, that seemed like a recipe for disaster. But, then I found out about adding them with very tiny crochet hooks was in love with the idea.

light blue lace shawl with white beading
A lace shawl I knit from a one-skein pattern book, the first time I ever knit with beads
the light blue shawl hangs on a black background with a blue fair ribbon pinned to it
I managed to get a blue ribbon

My next project involved a bit more digging around online. The thing I liked about my first project, was how the beads weren’t making a very obvious pattern, they were just sort of highlighting the lace pattern. I liked that they sort of became this little twinkling star at the center of each of the lace shapes, and I wanted more of that, but I had a lot of trouble finding anything similar. Then, a friend pointed out some of the projects people had shared on Ravelry, and how someone had added beads to Jared Flood’s Rock Island Shawl. As a long-time Brooklyn Tweed fan, this was the best of both worlds. I picked a yarn from my stash, found some beads at JoAnns, and had so much fun working on my next project.

a beaded shawl knit with variegated red yarn hangs on a stand with a grand champion ribbon pinned to it and a 2017 award for knitting excellence
I was pretty proud of that champion ribbon, especially since I had modified the pattern to add as many beads as I could manage.

I liked this pattern so much, I ended up making two more versions of it as gifts

Look at how much bigger this one ended up being (there were 2 hanks of yarn involved)

I love how blocking lace adds a whole new dimension to a pattern. So often, my projects look very lovely when they’re on the needles, and a lot of that is down to picking pretty yarn. But, then they’re pinned out and the points are allowed to really shine and there’s nothing quite so satisfying as taking a completely finished project off from the blocking boards, trimming the ends I’ve woven in, and having a finished project.

Working from home for the last 3 years has unfortunately cut into the times I would wear these items, and in turn, I’ve been less enthused to knit scarves and shawls. They’re the sort of thing that I love to make, but they tend to pile up over time. So, I probably would have to start giving them away, because I know that selling them would be the least satisfying option. (Knitting lace like this takes SO MANY HOURS and while I’d like to think I don’t go crazy with expensive yarn, I do pick some pricier brands a lot of the time, so selling a shawl for what it’s “worth” would be next to impossible for me)

As the weather starts cooling down, I have a big project that’s been sitting in timeout because I have to take out and reknit an entire section of short rows that I did incorrectly, and I just couldn’t face it when I first realized the mistake. But… I think I’m almost to the point of wanting to take it out and finish it, because I am pretty close to that point. We’ll save photos of that for another time.

Blaugust!

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It’s been a week since I started my Blaugust journey. As with every event centered around a month of activity, at this point maintaining a consistent writing habit feels like a very doable thing. Being a NaNoWriMo veteran, there’s part of me that feels some similar feelings as I go through this practice of daily writing with the knowledge there are others on the internet participating in the same activity. It’s always the time after where things go off the rails.

My brain is still reveling in the novelty. Will this be as exciting and interesting to me in three weeks? I’d like to think so, if only because my brain will be happier with me for putting words down somewhere. But, the satisfaction isn’t always a guarantee.

I’m not sure why I decided to just dive headfirst into Blaugust upon discovering it existed, that’s not the type of thing I used to do. In fact, a few years ago I would probably have been a bit of a completionist about the whole thing and decided to mark it on my calendar for next year so I could prepare, and make sure I had something set up for every day of the month. Instead, I’m wondering if I will have enough motivation to do extra posts for a few days to make up for my late start and my missed day, but I’m not too concerned about getting 100% on the achievements board. Funny how priorities shift like that.

I’m glad I was curious enough to poke around Mastodon a week ago and realize this was a thing. I’m still trying to find my niche though, because it’s definitely not gaming, it’s barely knitting, it’s hardly reading… it’s mostly writing. It feels a bit self-aggrandizing to say this is a writing blog, when I don’t have a library of work to point people towards. Writing is always the thing I wish I took more time to do, which means Blaugust is a great excuse for me personally to just write.

I’m also slowly coming to the realization that, as with every hobby I undertake, this could just be something I do for my own enjoyment, and that’s the entirety of its purpose. I’ve encountered so many people who take up a craft for fun, and then they decide to turn it into a side hustle, I come from a family who does it as a very committed second job. But, every time I’ve tried to monetize a hobby, my desire to interact with that thing shrivels into nothing. It’s not like it’s unsatisfying to get money for doing something well, but the moment money interposes itself between me and a craft it’s like the dopamine gets cut off or something, and I just can’t engage with it anymore, and that’s definitely not what I want for this place.

I want to be able to talk with people online, especially because where I live, I feel like I’m missing out on some important conversations. I’m a bit wary of having those conversations in this space, but… its got to start some time.

The Bog of Eternal Productivity Management

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In the recesses of my mind, is a memory of receiving a “student planner” on my first day of seventh grade. They gave us these things and made it seem like they were going to be our literal keys to navigating the halls of the high school, and I remember using it with a limited amount of success. It was useful to have somewhere to write down deadlines for assignments, or have somewhere to look if I needed to know when our next break was coming up. It was useful enough, that I’m pretty sure I spent money on a college-branded planner every fall and used them with a limited amount of success.

I then went a solid decade without using much of a planner for anything. It wasn’t ideal, but, I spent most of my twenties and early thirties not really worrying too much about tracking tasks or making sure I noted when an appointment would be happening. I did pay attention to the various note keeping methods Lifehacker used to promote. There was the “hipster PDA,” literally a stack of index cards held together with a big binder clip. They touted the importance of to do apps like Remember the Milk, and their own text-based to-do app. And then… someone suggested Bullet Journaling, and it was all downhill from there.

The basic premise of a Bullet Journal is to maintain a list of items you’re working on, you migrate them to the next page if they’re not finished, you keep a running list so nothing really gets left behind, and its all there at your fingertips without the need of booting up another app on your phone, no need to pay for internet or data, just pen and paper, and you’re set. Except I do nothing by halves when it comes to hyperfixations, so it quickly became about getting the “right” Moleskine notebook, the right pen, and eventually the “perfect” layout.

If you were to Google “Bullet Journal” right now, I’m pretty sure you’d be hard pressed to find an image of the bland bulleted lists in the first few pages of results, because the internet took this concept and ran with it. People make these daily spreads that are gorgeous, themed, and maybe even helpful in getting things done.

The start of my 2021 June Weekly spreads

For me personally, I learned that I’m best off sticking to a hybrid model. I adapted to a pseudo weekly spread, where I could see what I had to do on any one day, but I also had a view of what laid ahead for me in the week. At one point, this was useful to me. I knew what I needed to get done on any given day, and in turn, I would know that I was still keeping a good pace for all of the work I needed to complete in a given week. Plus, with this set up, if something came up or I just utterly failed at task initiation it was set up for me to just drop a little “>” into the column as a visual cue that I’d moved it to the next day.

But, as with every task management system I’ve ever employed, it seems to have hit a critical failure point and no matter what I do, I can’t bring myself to focus on the damned thing. Part of it may just be because this year’s bullet journal notebook found its way into my purse and as with every other item I put away for the sake of organization, it then ceased to exist. Maybe, the act of complaining about my own inability to task manage, I will in turn be motivated to take it out and start using it again. Because for as frustrated as I am with myself and this presumably-failed task management system, I still kind of love it.

Bullet Journaling caters to my obsessive pen and notebook collecting needs. It let me hang onto the sensation of putting pen to paper, like I was still fifteen and obsessively pouring my thoughts onto the page. It got me into pointed and brush pen calligraphy, and even a bit of watercolor. I just wish it was half as satisfying to employ it as is was to design it. Because I obsessively designed my 2023 bullet journal. Every month got its own special cover page with a rainbow-themed geometric design. I was going to track my mood, my period, my outlook on the months, the quarters, the year… it was going to be a little glance into my brain I could look back on in the future, and instead, its sitting in a pocket in my purse, being utterly ineffective.

Part of my consternation comes down to the fact that back to school supplies are popping up everywhere right now, and there’s still some ingrained need within myself to start getting organized. September rolls around, and the first thing on my calendar is a reminder that I need to start planning any Christmas gifts I’m going to make. The unwritten reminder there has also become “you’d better start putting together your planner for the coming year.” With that reminder just around the corner, I’m not sure if I’m going to put in the effort this year or not.

So much of my frustration is also due to my habit of internally throwing up my hands the moment I get out of a routine, declaring it useless, when it is still working fine, and in fact, many things would be working quite well if it were still being put into practice. Just because several months in the middle are going to be entirely blank doesn’t mean it’s entirely useless. The reality is, I probably wouldn’t need to look back at it for anything, and if I use it more as a tool for now instead of a record for later, maybe it would be more useful.

Check back next week to see if I’ve even touched this relic of an item, and gotten my tasks more under control…

Chiroptera Terror

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I’m really, really trying to figure out ways to post here more regularly, especially since this blog is just… a blog. It’s not themed for a specific thing, other than my own personal life. With that in mind, one thing in my life is TikTok. When it really started becoming a household name in 2020, I held off (because no one can MAKE me try something) until it became very apparent that most of the content I saw in Instagram Reels originated elsewhere. So, I guess, when I’ve got nothing else Tuesday might be for TikTok.

Tying that into Introductory Week for Blaugust 2023, I figured I would mention a creator: Kc Davis/domesticblisters. As someone exploring the realm of neurodiversity and how to live more effectively when it comes to the issues that come along with it, I’ve found her content to be very useful. Aside from that though… she recently had a bat encounter. Her reaction in her initial video of the incident is one I’ve experienced personally, on multiple occasions.

My personal outlook on bats is that I love and adore them, OUTSIDE. It’s where they belong, I am happy for them to be there and nowhere else. I don’t know what it is about bats being inside that makes me completely lose my sanity, but literally all I’m able to do is scream in their presence. There’s no other response for me to have, it doesn’t matter the time or place I encounter them. If they are flying inside of a building, I am screaming.

We had one that made its way to the second floor of my work’s office building. I wasn’t the only person screaming in that scenario, because you could hear it was flying around the open plan of the building like you were in a sports stadium and “The Wave” was coming around.

My cat Moxie brought one into my childhood bedroom, just as I was going to bed for the night. I’m still not sure how we survived that encounter without the bat becoming airborne after she took it down.

I moved into a really shitty upstairs apartment in a house for a few years. It had a very poorly insulated closet with the ability to see daylight through the slats on the wall. On three separate occasions, bats woke me up in the middle of the night after getting trapped in my apartment. The last one was very outraged at its circumstances, and spent the entire time sounding the alarm until I was able to take it down and get it out of the apartment.

a brown bat hangs on a set of narrow white window blinds, partially obscured by the tilt wand.
The last living bat I’ve personally encountered, it also screamed

I was already making plans to vacate those premises, but consistently having late summer turn into Batwatch™ was such an unpleasant experience. The first time, it took me three days to get them all out of the apartment, and there was literally a point where I practically burst into tears when I was talking with someone about how much I missed sleep.

Currently, I just have these bats in my life:

a colony of toy bats, one bears the colors of the non-binary flag, one is just a cute stuffed bat, one is a black cat toy with dangly legs, and one is the beanie baby: Batty.
My little colony, no risk of rabies here

It’s a good thing I never had any close physical interactions with the living ones, because I am well aware of their ability to carry rabies. I never touched one with without using gloves or some sort of tool. I probably should have gotten a rabies series, just to be safe, but somehow I survived those encounters unscathed.

Oddly, my memories of bat encounters have been very present in my mind lately, and there’s been a lot of paranoia on my part when it comes to unidentified squeaking or something I can see flying just on the periphery. There’s something about returning to the time of year when I previously experienced something that brings it back to me, and bats are no exception. At least now I live somewhere they’re less likely to invade. And I can have a mental breakdown and make my wife deal with them.

Music Monday: Blaugust 2023 Edition

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Week two of Blaugust has begun, and it’s supposed to be an introduction to myself. I wrote this post a little over a month ago and that’s probably as much of a deep dive as I’m willing to get into for this month. Instead, I think I’m going to take this introductory week to share some things that had an influence on me, starting with music.

10 songs that encapsulate me

So Many Parentheticals…

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The least conducive activity to writing (for me anyway) is having our TV on. Regardless, it’s our most-used appliance, for everything from Netflix marathons to hopscotching through YouTube’s algorithm. In this age of smart TVs, practically every program or movie is at our fingertips. There’s dozens of new things friends and the majority of the internet keep recommending, and what are we watching right now? Grey’s Anatomy.

(Saying there will be spoilers for a show that’s been on for almost 2 decades seems superfluous, but, plot points from the first half of the show’s seasons will be referenced)

It’s probably been a couple of months since we started a pseudo-re-watch of Grey’s Anatomy (I describe it that way because my wife watched more of the show than I did, and we both stopped watching at various points so some episodes are old hat and others are practically brand new). I have a strangely high level of nostalgia about the first couple seasons of the show, mostly because of the soundtracks released with them. Much of that music accompanied me into my early adulthood, and as we navigated that first season at Seattle Grace, it felt like hearing a bunch of old songs on the radio. It’s sad to me that I have this random collection of soundtracks from my late teens, and then digital downloads and streaming gradually took over and now there are these random holes online where I know a soundtrack should be, but due to licensing it’s either incomplete or completely non-existent on the internet.

I can’t point to what it is I enjoy about this show, especially because for a while it was the (self-described) nemesis of another show I watched. I got really into CSI my junior year of college. Like, embarrassingly into that show. There was fanfic, there were post-episode AIM live chats, incessant spoiler hunting, and a whole lot of cringe-inducing behavior I’d honestly prefer never to think about again. Grey’s and CSI ended up running in the same time slot on different networks, and a bunch of us CSI fans were horrified that something could take down “our” show (in terms of audience rankings), especially a medical melodrama with McDreamy and a bunch of girly nonsense (because “not like other girls” was definitely a running undercurrent in my area of fandom).

So, I got through maybe 2 seasons of Grey’s when they first aired, and then it was up against my main show and it was dead to me. That lasted until internet fandom started going nuts over Callie Torres and Erica Hahn, and then Arizona Robbins. I’m a sucker for a romance. I hate admitting that, because it’s mushy and feels silly, but watching a well-executed romance unfold on screen is like catnip to me.

As someone who was starting my own coming out journey, Callie’s experience was an odd blueprint I felt compelled to hold up to my own life. I probably take more advice from fictional characters than I ought to, but I watched her journey and locked away pieces of it in my mind and heart, because there wasn’t much in real life for me to go off from. People talk about how much we need queer stories, and as someone lost in the madness of my early twenties without much of a roadmap, hers was one I needed.

The difficult thing about television for me was sweeps season, and I can see its impact on network television in the late aughts and early 2010s. As a fandom-obsessed person, I feel like I became hyper-aware of sweeps episodes, which almost always involve high-drama plot lines meant to draw in as much viewership as possible, in order for the network to really justify advertising revenue. Those episodes where 5 people walk into a building and you wonder which one of them isn’t going to walk out of it? Sweeps. 3 weeks in a row of episodes ending on cliffhangers? Sweeps. Someone’s life hanging in the balance? Sweeps. November, February, and May episode airdates in a season were almost guaranteed sweeps episodes.

I always find the effect of sweeps episodes hard on the characters I love. Because writing things to draw in viewers doesn’t mean a bunch of stories where everyone skips around being happy, it’s almost always a threat of some kind, whether it’s to someone’s job, their relationship, or their life.

I remember at some point, when Callie and Arizona really started taking off there was a blurb in some media about the show and how their relationship wasn’t going to be as wishy-washy as the straight relationships on the show. I don’t know why any showrunner would make that comment about anything they’ve created without a concrete end date. Long-running serial melodramas can’t survive a character being happy and contented forever. It’s not compelling fiction, it’s not how you get viewers butts on the couch every week. Plus, you make two characters these ideals in work, love, and life and they somehow get boring compared to everyone else around them.

Inevitably, Callie and Arizona split up and got back together a few times. I will say, the show managed to thread a very fine needle when it came to giving Callie the baby she so desperately wanted. Also, they gave Sara Ramirez the opportunity to show of their Tony-Award-Winning vocal talents, with a musical episode, which I remember rolling my eyes at when I heard about it first airing, but it was awesome.

We’re in the very middle of the show in our re-watch right now, and I know more hardship is coming, which is the thing that could make me very reticent to coming back to it. Arizona has survived a plane crash only to lose her leg, and she’s going to be bitter and hateful for a while and watching through that is going to make this hard for me.

Fortunately (?) for Grey’s there are a host of other compelling characters to watch as well. We’re still at the beginning of Season 9. Cristina Yang is in Minnesota right now, I’m sure that will continue to go about as well as it has so far. The Mercy Westers who survived the mass shooting have somehow endeared themselves to me. And Miranda Bailey has become my favorite character, probably because of some aspirational desires to be half as good at thinking on my feet as she can be. So, even though the show broke my heart stringing Lexie Grey along for a whole freaking season, just to kill her after she confessed her feelings to Mark, well, I’ll keep watching.

I’ll keep watching because sometimes those sweeps storylines are too compelling to resist. And there are new faces I might grow to love just as much as the familiar ones. Plus, we have to at least watch until Derek dies, because I know that’s going to happen at some point too.

Whomp whomp!

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A year ago, our household tested positive for COVID for the first time. We’d spent so much time and effort avoiding it, and then it showed up and was entirely unpleasant. As the anniversary of our infection approached, my wife’s job saw an outbreak beginning to bloom, and I started seeing more references to people online also running into it.

We’ve also been dealing with a recurring heat wave and smoke combination this summer. My instinct to watch the thermometer and throw open every screened door and window the second the temperature becomes bearable is doing battle with the fact that I look outside and see hazy sunshine for days on end; or the air starts coming in smelling vaguely singed. Thursday night, I was desperate not to be running the air conditioner, and against my better judgement, I opened everything up, and we went to bed letting the nice cool air into our apartment. Then, I woke up with a nauseating headache that was next to impossible to deal with for all of my Friday.

I tried laying down, my 2 hour nap definitely helped, but sitting up again and trying to focus on work for the rest of the day was a herculean struggle than left me nauseated and miserable by the time I clocked out for the day.

It felt a little inauspicious for my second day participating in Blaugust, that I was pretty much immediately incapacitated.

If there’s one thing that I’ve learned as I succumb to adulthood, it’s that I’m apparently more sensitive to things than I used to be. The air is crappy? My sinuses decide I am going to be down for the count. I forget to hydrate over the course of the day? I end up spending the next day feeling poorly because everything is just out of whack. My life is the very epitome of the meme about water being the “adult beverage.”

Of course, all of this on top of another potential COVID infection meant I spent most of the day paranoid I was going to be back at the brink of brain fog and a persistent cough. But, it turns out I was at the mercy of Canadian wildfires and poor air quality. For the moment, we’re testing negative in this household, and hopefully it will stay that way. Now, if the air quality could improve and being outside didn’t make us both nauseated I’d really be relieved.

It’s a pretty humdrum way to start off this first week of Blaugust, but for now, it’s words on a “page” and I’m just going to count that as a win.

Blaugust?

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Yesterday, I threw together my writing prompt based post, went through the ritual I’ve seen others use to share their post on any algorithm based social media site, and then immediately complained about it to my best internet friend. I’m sure there’s some definitive information somewhere on the internet, about what you should and shouldn’t include in a blog post, and what should or shouldn’t be used when you decide to “advertise “it somewhere else online. My biggest takeaways have been that everywhere sort of penalizes you for linking to a place outside of their walls, but you might be able to avoid the penalty by including a photo, bonus if you decide to link to the thing in your comments, rather than directly in the post. Is that the most helpful thing for someone who follows you on Facebook or Twitter? No, of course not. Is it annoying as all hell to go through those steps every time? 100% yes. Especially when I don’t have much of a following to begin with, and the only engagement I end up seeing is from comments on Facebook.

After airing my grievances and chatting with my friend for a little bit, I decided to poke around on Mastodon and see if there’s any sort of blogging community in existence on that platform, since Twitter is proving to be completely useless these days.

Somehow, I managed a very timely stumble across a post about Blaugust.

I’m not sure I can adequately describe just how happy I was to find something like that. I think mentally, I may have been transported back to 2010, when I worshiped Google Reader, because RSS feeds made it possible for me not to have to remember to visit a myriad of sites around the internet on a daily basis. Many of the sites were cat foster blogs, but there were also so writers, and Lifehacker, and it was my happy little oasis where I could follow up on so much at my leisure.

Twitter and Instagram managed to subsume a lot of that domain in the last 10 years, especially in Google Reader’s absence. I enjoy being a reader on the internet. Give me an engaging blog post or an article, make me scroll for a little while; to get lost in some words. Except that I’m all out of shape for that kind of reading now. All of my content consumption happens in drips and drabs. Carefully meted out Twitter threads, or TikTok (sometimes chopped up into 5 part reels on Instagram) seem to be the only way I engage with content these days, and getting used to that kind of format makes sitting down to read something meatier more difficult than I would like it to be. It also makes it really hard to attempt constructing something longer for myself, because while I might benefit from whatever I’ve posted on the proverbial page, it’s hard not to think “Who else is going to care about whatever it is I have to say? Is there any point?”

Somewhere along the way, I lost my connection to any sort of niche community on the internet. It’s frustrating, to have come into adulthood online, and then watch every place I congregated eventually crumble whether its due to mismanagement or just the passage of time and the whims of internet fandom changing. I have a very knee-jerk reaction when someone brings a new (usually unrelated) fandom into what I perceive as an existing fandom space; it’s almost always “no, thank you.” It feels foolish and petty whenever it happens, but it’s next to impossible for me to fight that instinct within myself. It pretty much means whenever someone decides they’re going to spend more time talking about the new thing, I end up getting annoyed with the subject altogether. I’m sure it’s kept me from experiencing incredible movies and shows, but I’m not sure the effort to overcome that level of annoyance has ever proven to be worth it. Usually, I have to wait myself out, because the thought of sitting down to watch something I’m not interested in but have seen someone rave about daily online for weeks makes me want to tear my own skin off.

I like the idea of Blaugust. If nothing else, I’m hoping it will give me a bit more motivation to post through the rest of this month. And, maybe if it motivates me, and it motivates others, I might find something interesting in another corner of the internet.

I miss talking with people online, whether its about our shared love of a show or activity, or just the mundanities of life. Somehow, I lost sight of that connection and it’s been more about sidestepping debates or entirely avoiding the comment section, except that as an introvert, if I want conversation with anyone, that’s probably where I will end up finding it. So, this is my attempt to head in that direction, with the hope that eventually I’ll be less of an internet hermit.

Asking Through Observation

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Daily writing prompt
What are you curious about?
View all responses

I don’t think of myself as a curious person. If I’m being honest, I feel more nosy than anything else.

I associate curiosity with the word “why,” a word I don’t feel like I use all that often, at least not when it comes to my personal life. I use it a lot in my day job. But it’s less out of a sense of interest and expanding my knowledge, and more me looking for an explanation for the course of action we’re taking, or possibly looking for a reason I can’t justify speaking in passive aggressive sentences for the rest of the day.

For all that I don’t prefer the company of many people, they’re probably the thing I’m most curious about on a day-to-day basis. It seems trite to say it, but sometimes what makes someone tick is a complete mystery to me, and I don’t really feel comfortable asking someone why they are the way they are. It’s a pretty personal question, if you really think about it. A lot goes into someone’s personality, both internally and externally, and while I can’t put a finger on exactly why, it feels like it might be rude to just outright ask someone “why are you like this?” It could be meant very innocently, but there’s something a little accusatory at the heart of that question, if someone isn’t expecting it, or maybe it’s just in how you ask the question.

So, instead of outright asking, I make a lot of assumptions. I’d like to think they’re informed assumptions. I hear someone tell a story about their childhood, or talk about something they do often, and it starts to paint a picture. It’s a pretty blurry picture, but considering it feels like I spend a lot of my life squinting to make out the details of people and their lives, it doesn’t feel like it’s that much of a stretch in the end.

It’s also possible that I very much internalized how “curiosity killed the cat.” Apparently “satisfaction brought it back,” but that particular part of the proverb didn’t really feature whenever I heard it referenced when I was a kid.

There is something to be said for the bit of satisfaction I feel when it turns out the puzzle I started piecing together about someone comes together and it turns out I was on the right track. Sometimes, it feels a bit like looking at one of those magic eye pictures, or at least, I think it does? (I’ve never been able to get those to resolve into the pictures I saw in the back of the books.) People can present a lot of intriguing and entrancing images, and then you sort of step back and see all of them together and you just know who they are. I wish it could always be a satisfying experience, unfortunately, sometimes it’s also disappointing.

Kochanski, a black and white tuxedo cat lays on her back showing off her very fuzzy belly with its signature void spot. She looks very playful. There is also a toy fish on the floor beside her.
The only other thing I’m ever curious about is what this cat is thinking