Thaddeusly (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thaddeusly) wrote2021-01-27 06:53 am
thaddeusly) wrote2021-01-27 06:53 am
27 January 2021
"Cough Syrup" - Young The Giant
"Something Just Like This" - covered by Madilyn Bailey
"Look After You" - The Fray
"Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk" - Rufus Wainwright
"The Ocean" - Dar Williams
I finished Mooncakes and lent it out to my friend! I've got to try to read something in the next month that's more lighthearted. I'm pretty comfortable reading books that go to dark places and stay there, but sometimes I'll talk about something that I really liked and my description actually talks other people out of it. So. Lighthearted! I really did enjoy Mooncakes though. It was cute.
I started and finished Across The Green Grass Fields and I enjoyed it. I felt like this one had an even higher build up to ending scene ratio than the Wayward Children series normally has, but I didn't mind. I actually enjoyed the villain and the situation turning out as it did, even though it horrified me some. I tend to really enjoy it when a human is a villain in a fantasy series, especially when it's one that's being somewhat portrayed as someone other people could relate to. How much could've been avoided if he really just thought of the other species as actual people? And the door! I would've cried! It seems like most of the series involves an element of being pressured through the door, but knowing you'll be going back to your starting world. This is the first time where I really thought of a door as a betrayal, and I'm not really sure where to go from there. She was home, and then she was cast out.
I've been chiseling away on The Ethical Slut! I'm now on page 144. I definitely like how it's handling jealousy better than I like how More Than Two handled it. I feel like this creates less of an idea that there's something wrong with you if you're experiencing jealousy and more that it's another feeling to sit with and sort through and poke at the roots of. Feelings happen and they're our responsibility to sort and handle the best we can, but trying to just say that they shouldn't happen isn't helpful. I really liked this book's discussion on considering what jealousy actually feels like for the reader as an individual, and then trying to figure out why that emotional combination might be happening. The bit on learning how to flirt was interesting to consider because I feel like I've mostly seen people act like that's just something people are supposed to know how to do, even though it's definitely a social skill. I hadn't really considered it as something that a person practices, but I've been rolling that around in my head and I definitely do play-flirt with close friends. I love how a good book can make me re-evaluate things and see them in a new light!
I finished knitting the cotton shawl for L, but I haven't woven in my ends or blocked it yet.
I blocked the Gramps cardigan, but it didn't dry quite right and smelled wrong, so I ended up deciding to send it through the washer and then hang it to dry. I realize that's not necessarily letting it be its best self, but it's also about the amount of energy I can put into it right now. The buttons sit a little differently, but not terribly. Realizing exactly how big it is on me makes me laugh. I knew there was a significant amount of ease in it, but I did try to make the one that I thought would best fit my hips. It hangs off me and sits a little low, but I think it'll be well enough for wearing around the apartment.
I ordered and got the cloth for making the linen apron I've been loosely planning on. I intend to prewash it tomorrow, and then I'm going to get to teach myself to iron! It'll be an adventure!
I got a little impulsive and decided that it'd be the niftiest thing to learn to do fan binding (link) so I can make books of the fanfics I've downloaded. The idea amuses and suits me, and it feels like a way of being able to love those fics differently. I've already got some of the skillset from doing mending back when I worked in a library, though I'll have to learn to actually make a textblock and cover the cardboard with cloth instead of just letting it be plain. I'm really excited about this. It feels like a way to combine skills I have, skills I want to learn, and something I love. The same skillset could be used to make my own notebooks as well, which is so exciting to consider!
I think I've decided I want to learn to engage with fandom in a more community-oriented way. So far I've really just done the feral fan thing and read a lot of fanfic after finding out about AO3 through Tumblr 8 years ago. It seems like that's a long time to be on the edges of a community without feeling like I'm actually doing something to help make it a community. For at least the next little stretch, I think that'll mean a lot of reading and observing and learning the social rules, which I probably really ought've done before now. I thought this post (link) was interesting for starting to understand that. I might try to find more posts like this, or try to find ones that are more obviously primers for beginners. It's a weird place to know terms and having observed communities in action, but not have really thought about my part in it. Essentially, I've been lurking.
In an exciting step towards that, I own my first fanzine now! My copy of Hands Clasped Tight (link) arrived last week! I haven't read it yet, but the art is so cute???? I think I'll end up want to read more of them and possibly even collect them because of the overlap of fannish and bookish, but this week I've actually mostly just been reading and thinking about what it means for so many fanzines to be out of print. I can understand why people argue for and against zine piracy/copying, and have started to form my tentative opinion about it.
L has said she'll help me learn coding, so I'm a little excited about that. I'm hoping to remember to try to do some maintenance on my desktop this week so I can try to play with the Python projects suggested in my book on there. L recommended I start with HTML just because it's easy and it'll teach me what my brain likes when it comes to coding. We were able to talk a little bit about how I've learned scraps of it for forums over the years and pet pages back on Neopets ages ago, so I know I like things laid out so that everything has its own space and proper nesting keeps my brain from breaking on things. She was working on a computer science degree before things got complicated where she was, so this is something she has more experience with than I do.
I'm pretty sure the only cooking I've done since my last update was the tuna noodle casserole. It came out basically the way I expected it to, which was a relief! When I was toasting the bread crumbs with the butter for the topping, it seemed like the amount of bread crumb was expanding? And I'm not sure if that's that they were absorbing the butter or if there was some kind of food alchemy involved.
I still would like to try to make a foccacia at some point, but I need to remember to find a plain recipe at some point.
I got a microwave! This isn't quite cooking-cooking, but I'm not really sure I do enough nesting to need a heading for that yet. This is a little exciting for the purposes of being able to have warm leftovers on my days off without using the oven to heat them, but also because it means I'll be able to try different freezer foods. I probably should've gotten a bigger one because my full-sized plates don't fit into it, but I usually end up eating stuff out of bowls anyway. It'll do well enough.
Poor Pippin! This chapter seems so rough on him, and I've definitely spent time waffling on the idea of external pressures (even Gandalf felt the urge to peek, knowing better!) vs personal responsibility. I don't particularly care much for the way Gandalf handled the "you knew better" bit right after he talks about there having been elements of his thoughts that Pippin couldn't've known. It feels a little Bluebeard's Wife/Pandora's Box? He knew he ought not have, but he didn't have the context for why or what the consequences would be. My own curiosity is so strong that I have trouble resisting things if I don't understand the consequences. I can't weigh the "Don't" against the desire to know unless I can give the consequences appropriate weight. The downside to that is that I've definitely decided the consequences would be worth it for things that people didn't really want me to do that with.
I'm just saying, a potential darkfic lives in these last few chapters. Gandalf deciding he's going to act like Pippin's betrayed the Company in some way to pull everyone into line better, and sending him away somewhere he'd be "guarded." My bookclub partner would want it to be a situation where the party realizes that Gandalf is lying to them, in part because of the emotional reset he seems to be experiencing as he adjusts to being White instead of Grey, but also in part because he just genuinely thought Pippin would be able to bounce back from it because Hobbits are so sturdy. His little line about all Wizards should have a Hobbit or two to look after makes my brain think he'd keep Pippin somewhere, if he had a place of his own to keep him. There are ways my brain wants to take that that my bookclub partner would like me to Not. But it'd make a fascinating darkfic.
I cannot be the only person who read this chapter and then immediately considered whether or not there's fanfic of Sam playing the rigger for Frodo. He loves that rope and this chapter has a considerable amount of space put towards describing it and him threatening to bind Gollum (and Gollum's reaction!) and his pride in his knotwork. I'm just saying. It'd be a terrible shame if there wasn't fic.
This chapter also made me uncomfortable in some places. Gollum's referred to as "it" in several places, and Just No. Calling a person "it" makes me so uncomfortable. I know part of why Sam does it is his really serious xenophobia, and that honestly just makes it worse? Sam's my favorite and that doesn't mean he doesn't have problems, but it does mean that it upsets me more. Sometimes scenarios like this help me have a framework for how Enjolras could love France so much, but also want to change it into the best version of itself that it could be. I love Sam and want him to be better than he is now, and that's part of loving him for me. (Sidenote, I accidentally bumped into a mention of a fanfic called "The Making of Samwise" on Fanlore over the past week and was able to find it on the Wayback Machine! I haven't read it yet, but I'm plenty excited to dig into it!)
I can't help but wonder what Gollum's experience with the elves must've been like. He's angry about their eyes twice, and I know that might just be his thing about light, but... It doesn't sit right in my brain for that to be the full answer. Part of me wants to draw this out into some kind of elaborate idea for why he feels so strongly about them. This is probably why fanfic appeals to me so much.
L really likes the Dresden Files and really wants to be able to talk about them with me, so I've agreed to start reading them if she'll read along with me. We've decided to do two chapters a week, to be read by Friday so we can discuss them. She has Strong Feelings about the first three, so she's having me start on The Summer Knight. I'm a little excited to see where this goes, but also a little uncertain. I don't read a lot of fiction books written about men and by men. In the past I haven't enjoyed that terribly much. It'll be interesting to see how this book interacts with my experiences.
My friend K came to visit! We both wore masks as we hung out in my apartment and talked, except for when we sat in separate rooms where we could see each other to eat and drink. Our lives are aligned in similar ways right now, but that's kind of "Thanks, I hate it!" There's the pandemic and the uncertainty of what to do next. My relationship with Tree and Fae just ended for similar reasons that K's relationship with their boyfriend is difficult right now, though they're also wondering how much of it has to do with second puberty from transition. Being able to discuss our relationships fully has actually relaxed me a little about how frustrated I am about how everything happened. I think I'm reaching a place where I can sort of shrug and accept that I wasn't happy trying to limit myself and guess what they were thinking all the time. I'm so direct and so strongly "Ask Culture" that I didn't know how to interpret what they wanted from me a lot of the time because they weren't in a place to speak about it directly.
I'm trying to teach myself to actually reference who I've been reading things from. If they're important enough to discuss, then others might want to read it. On the other hand, I definitely stress myself out trying to decide how to best do that. I know I have a tendency to get obsessive and can latch onto going through one person's materials as broadly as possible as a way of trying to learn whatever I think is interesting/important, and I know that sometimes I end up in posts that are over a decade old for a single user. I don't want to make other people uncomfortable and mostly that has seemed to be best handled by just trying to avoid letting people know that I've bumped into a research spiral that involves them in some way. I know that might be worse for some folks, but I've also got a pretty strong memory of being embarrassed once when someone made a post about how weird it was after I liked a bunch of their art on dA and didn't comment. It can take me a long time to wrap my head around what it is that I find interesting or important. I'm not sure dragging a post from a decade ago into the light of anyone else's interest is the right choice, but it also feels like I'm not giving them credit if I don't. How can I actually share my thoughts on something without actually making sure other people can find it? How can I relax enough to let thoughts form if I'm worried I'm going to upset somebody by pointing out that somebody is sifting through their old materials? I need to think on this more.