Thaddeusly

Songs I listened to More Than Once
"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

Books I've Been Reading
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. ( Spoilers )

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!

Crafting I've Worked On
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!

Things I've Worked On Learning
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.

Cooking
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.

Thoughts on The Last Two Weeks' LoTR Chapter
( The Palantir )

( The Taming of Smeagol )


Dresden Files

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.

Odds and Ends
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.

Songs I Listened To More Than Once This Week:

"Dead Hearts" by Stars
"C'Etait L'Hiver" by Francis Cabrel

Books I've Been Reading:

I've done a little reading in Python Programming for the Absolute Beginner, Second Edition by Michael Dawson (2006). I'm now at page 25. I like the tone of it so far and the way the font changes to indicate what's something that's been typed into a window and what's the text being used to explain/introduce things. I ordered this copy used through ThriftBooks and it's missing its disc, but as far as just wrapping my brain around how to think about concepts, I think it'll do me okay. It has enough pictures in these early parts that I'm tracking what's being explained without actually doing it, though I know that following the projects being described is going to be smarter for actually learning.

I took a bath the other night and got 50 or so more pages into The Ethical Slut, Third Edition by Janet W. Hardy and Dossie Easton (2017). I'm now at page 88. I can see why I was told that I probably knew a fair chunk of the information without reading it just by virtue of existing the way I do and being the type of person who tends to read a lot when I'm confronted with things that confuse me, but I'm glad to be finally reading it. It's one of those things that gets referenced, and I'd like to be able to what other people are actually saying when they talk about it. I like the tone of the text so far and how carefully inclusive it is. I think of myself as an aroace-spec nb dyke with a preference for non-monogamy, and so far it hasn't made me feel like there's anything abnormal about that existence.

I ordered Mooncakes and The Past Is Red this week through the local bookstore. The first will likely arrive sometime this week, but the latter isn't due to be published until this summer. Pre-ordering has been playing an interesting balance with my brain because it reminds me that there will be a future and I need to keep remembering to plan for it, but also feels weird because it reminds me that my lease is technically month-to-month now. I don't think I care for that much. I don't like the idea that as long as they tell me by the 11th, I could need to find a new place to live by the end of the month. I'll possibly aim to avoid this in the future.

Crafting I've Worked On:

( Crafting )

Things I've Worked on Learning:

I poked at a friend who understands computers better than I do about where to start if I was curious about learning more about computer programming. She recommended Python and told me that there's use for it in the biomedical field right now, which means it could be handy if I ever intended to do anything with my degree in microbiology.

I'm still in the binge-reading/researching stage of Stargate fics, though I've mostly shifted from Stargate Atlantis to Stargate SG-1. The overlapping authors and the crossover fics is most of what got me, I think. I'm enjoying it and it's definitely interesting for the way my brain keeps spinning on the themes of identity and belonging, but it's also very weird. It feels like so many of the fics I'm reading were written while I was in middle school, before I was reading fanfic (which someone else had to phrase as a 'decade and a half' ago for my brain to actually conceptualize as 15 years ago!), and that makes me feel late to the party? The fandom still exists and is still producing fic, would have plenty of fics even if they weren't, but it still feels like I'm trying to follow conversations through mediums that aren't used or available anymore. Not quite as bad as trying to wrap my brain about what LiveJournal was when I was first realizing Toy Soldiers had fanfic because more of it is on AO3 and I've had more experience with some of the website names that get used, but still odd. The part where I move back and forth between the fics and whatever personal websites an author might mention has become fascinating. Blogs that used to exist don't and names that showed up in a lot of conversations have inactive blogs. It's midway through active fandom and trying to follow the whisper of a ghost, and I can't decide if I like it.

Things I Want To Try To Cook This Week:

A pretty straight-forward recipe for scones that I think I tried mid-way through college, the last time I was trying to learn to cook (link).

A recipe for tuna noodle casserole (link).

I like food. Many, many chemistry labs have taught me that I am theoretically capable of focusing enough to do this. I'd like to actually get to a point where I don't think I'm cursing myself by trying to eat my own cooking.

Thoughts of This Week's LoTR Chapter:

This week's chapter was "Flotsam and Jetsam" from The Two Towers.

( Read more... )

Odds and Ends

My weekly phone call back east didn't happen. My youngest brother slept through it. Apparently he's been going to bed at 1600 a lot lately. It's weird to think about that fact that my mother's children are all mixed like that. He wants to go to bed at 1600 left to his own devices, I want to go to bed at 2000, and our other brother wants to go to bed at 0300. I think I might be closest to what's expected of us, and that's weird to consider given the recoil response people seem to have when they find out I'm happiest waking up at 0400. I miss my mornings. It doesn't sit right to be seeing the wrong side of them and trying to go to bed a few hours after my body thinks it should be waking up. It is what it is though.

I've been waffling about writing again. There's a part of me that thinks it'd be an interesting way to explore some of what I'm thinking about, but it's so messy. It's not just reading and knitting. It's actively creating something, and that means thinking about it directly. I think I've let myself get a little lazy, and I definitely haven't really tried to write anything since high school. The urge is there though, and not really having a social life right now means that the time could be, if I wanted. I read a post(link) this waking cycle that was really interesting for thinking about how writing actually works. Part of what made it sticky and strange before was the way I tended to just sort of write until whatever notion it was that had caught my fancy ran itself out, but it didn't feel like I was following a "why" very clearly. Synedochic's post there puts forward the theme as a major component, and then goes from there. That feels like a more focused, conscious way to write something. I think it'd be an exciting experiment to write something that was intended as an exploration, as opposed to just getting stuck on "here's something my brain says could happen." I really like the idea of trying to use this method to explore those dreams that people keep telling me I should try to write up. I get such vivid settings and characters and sometimes even get a plot of sorts, but just writing them as they are feels like something would be missing. Trying to use them to explore the bigger message might work better for me.

I think I liked trying to format this into sections because then it felt like I was doing small bits of journaling about things I commonly do, though it feels weird to be intentionally posting it. I think this is probably a carry-over from being a person who mostly reblogs/retweets rather than create content, though. If I accept that it bothers me that people I care about don't ask about what's going on in my life, I need to retrain myself into actually talking about what's going on with me. If I want them to know, I need to be willing to offer and to say, and this is as good a way as any to practice that. I don't really know when or why I stopped, but I'd like intimate dynamics in my future and that won't work if I hold myself apart from everything.