numb3r_5ev3n

I saw Dungeons And Dragons Honor Among Thieves! It's really great and people should see it!

I got some free swag!
( exhibit A )

I'm going to do a follow-up post because for as long as I have been a tabletop RPG gamer (i.e. since 1991 or so) I have had sort of a love/hate relationship with some aspects of the Forgotten Realms, including the weird way it addresses (or doesn't address) some of its weird political themes. So, more to come on that. But the movie is great! I feel like I'm going to have to see it a dozen times just to catch all of the easter eggs. Gonna preorder the Blu Ray.

And, I got my first Microsoft Cloud Cert! (AZ-900)

( exhibit B )
(LOL, the testing site needs to clean their printer or check the cartridges.)

Why this cert, you ask, after all my recent bloviating about tech having gone down the wrong path over the past ten years or so in my opinion? Well, 1. It and any future cloud certs will potentially put me back in the running for a hosting job, 2. my personal precept of "learn as much as you can about stuff that scares you," and 3. my current job required it and paid for it.

In other not-so-great news, Booster Gold the sugar glider is dealing with some health issues due to the fact that he is now an Old Old Man. Chief among those is ankylosing spondylitis. He's on (a much, much lesser dose of) the same meds my Mom is currently taking for her arthritis, as well as some antibiotics. I know this is basically one of those long term maintenance care things and will be for the forseeable future, but thankfully he has a good vet and we're just taking things one day at a time.

Current Mood:

First off: RIP Nichelle Nichols.

Second:
So my Twitter addiction, which I have been very unsuccessfully trying to break over the past six months or so, is really a doomscrolling addiction.

I logged on today to see nasty infighting in the leftist/Trans folx sector (when there are Republicans and white supremacists standing RIGHT THERE to fight) and just logged back out, then created a Hannigram/HEU-only account and only followed the Fannibal Fam I was already following from my main account. Now when I refresh my Twitter feed, all I will see is Hannibal/HEU content, which is good for my mental health! (my new handle is @ ballerhyde)

1. Purity politics sucks, and it's the cancer that's eating The Left. We should be eating the rich and not ourselves/each other,

2. This is self-care, and it's what may break the bird app's hold on me after all this time.

3. I'm still doing a lot of crafts. A pics post is happening sometime this week.

Current Mood:

I stuck soles on the ghillies:



I used this stuff (aka the Forbidden Taffy)



They're holding up pretty well, and they're very comfortable! The rubber I used was the rubber used to make Birkenstock soles. So I guess I made ghilliestocks.

Current Mood:

:| The news out of Ukraine is horrible and we're long since past the point were Putin belonged *under* the Hague.

I feel dumb and escapist, but this is how I am handling the world being on fire right now.

( cut for ginormous images )

I really wish things were not so awful in the world. I wish we could do something more about it. I wish we weren't at the mercy of a narcissistic genocidal thug with nuclear weapons.

To quote President Joe Biden: "For G-d's sake, this man cannot remain in power."
Current Mood:

For work related reasons that I don't want to go into, I'm just absolutely fucking fried.

Other things that make me want to flip tables:

- The Usual Suspects have their drawers in a twist about Matrix: Resurrections and so much of it translates to transphobic dog whistling, mouth-breathing misogynistic bigoted little asswipes slobbering "GET WOKE GO BROKE" through their neckbeards. This is the world's smallest violin playing for all the chuds who are butthurt that their desired White Male Cishet Hot Topic Bro self insert power fantasy turned out to be a diverse queer trans intersectional narrative about the power of love overcoming everything else. If that doesn't float their boat, they can go wack off to the hundreds of other White Male Cishet Self-Insert power fantasies that already exist, and just let us have the Matrix, ok?

I guarandamntee you that if WB were to go ahead and make their own Matrix sequels with JJ Abrams or someone else, the same folks would be throwing their toys out of the pram over those too. I think it's the only way some so-called fans know how to engage anymore. See also: the Star Wars franchise.

- Lindsay Ellis is quitting YouTube because of Twitter trolls who took a massive oversimplification she made comparing Raya to Avatar: The Last Airbender and blew it all out of proportion. All of her stuff is insightful and entertaining, but some of it is downright invaluable. I must have recommended that video about the fascist aesthetic of the First Order from the Star Wars sequels to dozens of people, for example, due to her breakdown of Umberto Eco's Ur-Fascism essay. Oh well. You win, Twitter Trolls:



and this is why we can't have nice things.

- Fucking Omicron. For the second year in a row I am going to skip my local peer group's New Year's Eve John Wick binge watching party because of this stupid neverending pandemic.

I mean I can binge watch John Wick from here, and I have a new Matrice to rewatch over and over again to get screencaps of a ton of other things I could watch. But I miss being able to do so with my friends.

I think I'm going back into lockdown mode for a while.

Cool things:

I've already seen Matrix: Resurrections four times and counting. And one of the reasons I love it so much is that it feels so much like the Matrix Agents RP that I was a part of back of Livejournal before the Matrix Cult infiltrated and imploded it. I don't want to drop any spoilers for anyone who still plans on watching it, but I found myself wishing I could discuss it with so many people whom I have long since fallen out of contact with, and it makes it kind of bittersweet.

Also: ( Cut for sorta being a spoiler )

I feel so blessed and fortunate that we got another Matrix movie at all, and for it to be what it is feels so much more awesome.

-My immediate family has escaped the rona thus far and are all triple vaxxed at this point.

-I got some cool loot for Christmas.

Happy New Year, everyone. Be safe out there. Get you some KN95s if you can.

CURRENT MOOD:

Thanks to the CDC and Greg Fucking Abbott, it's maskless, pre-covid levels of fuckery here in Texas. Once again I took some days off (stored up vacation time that was going to not roll over to the next quarter and be effectively lost if I didn't use it) aaaand now I'm having a bad mental health week again. My anxiety is through the roof.

I got some Delta 8 edibles, but they may be making my OCD rumination worse, not better.

I went to Northpark Mall for the first time in 15 months, and my first thought after walking around a bit was that I am maybe finally over the mall.

The mall used to be my place to go to be around people but by myself, if that makes sense. To see life. To walk around and take in the scenery. But now, even after being vaccinated, being around other people makes me nervous. And aside from the people, it was just the same old stores, same old concrete statuary and facades, same old decorative plant arrangements. I didn't stay long.

But anyway, one thing I realized that I really miss more than anything is the ability to just go somewhere spontaneously, just because I feel like going. Even vaccinated, going anywhere now takes a crapton of planning, consideration, and emotional energy to navigate it in my mind. Will it be outside? How many people will be there? Are they social distancing? Vaccinated? Are there decent bathroom facilities/the option of handwashing? In the case of the mall, it was like "is getting this coffee/these bath bombs worth it if I have to go into a smaller space with a crowd of people who aren't masking?" And so on.

ETA (cross posted from the comments) And I forgot (because of my ADHD and also because the news cycle moves that quickly) there was a shooting scare at that same mall a day later! https://www.dallasnews.com/news/2021/06/01/man-whose-actions-led-to-shooting-scare-at-northpark-center-doesnt-face-charges-dallas-police-say/

Apparently it was mentally disturbed person "finger shooting" people and hitting stuff with his skateboard, but it caused enough of a panic that one of my friends who was there got bruised in the push to evacuate. This wasn't a shooting - but it's not too farfetched to think that it could have been, or it might still happen, things being what they are these days.

In the Before Times, the mall was a place to do some walking (in the air conditioning - this part of Texas is unbearably hot a lot of the year) and then grab a coffee/pretzel and just see the sights. Now, I really don't feel ok hanging out where a lot of people are.

The few people I know who have gone back to see movies in the theater did not have a super great time, for similar reasons. I may go back for Dune. I *will* be going back for Matrix 4, but maybe not before that. We'll see.

I really hope there's not another spike/3rd or 4th wave or whatever. I'm hearing a lot of hopeful stuff about how at least the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines seem to be stopping this thing in its tracks. I guess we'll see.

Anyway, I found a new electronics store (Altex Electronics) here in Carrollton, and one thing led to another and I built another lightsaber (LOL, once again, ignore my unmade bed.)




Really, I'm nostalgic for the old days of Frys Electronics, where I could hang out all afternoon, pick up computer parts, really good coffee, DVDs, CDs, and books, while were people doing the Cha Cha Slide or DDR or playing whatever new Wii party game was on display.

So much of this was already on its way out because of Amazon. Covid 19 just drove the final nails into the coffin. But at least Altex is still around.

The Matrix Online Emulator (MxOEMU) is getting more ready for primetime. Enough of us apparently bugged Rajkosto about it enough that sitting works again!



This is actually a super big deal. The ability to do actually do combat again (outside of animation macros, which is how we had hacked being able to sit previously) may be next!

And that's not all! Some of the NPCs that used to have quest dialogue have that dialogue again (as opposed to error messages) and there are now a bunch of vendors that sell items congregated in Tabor Park. For twelve years since The Matrix Online was shut down, the MxO Emu project has been slowly working towards getting the emulator back to an operational, playable state, like one of the WoW private servers (before Blizzard cracked down on those.) Stuff is happening, and it's exciting!

Current Mood: This video, which is one of my favorite lightsaber tutorials, because other than his tools and the metal shop and the blade wrap/packaging plastic and the clear PVC he is using for the blade, just about everything he is using came from IKEA.

Wait, that's not quite right. I'm afraid I could never write in the first place.

I've always been jealous of people who can crank out decent fanworks within days or hours of new content, or the resurgence of a dormant fandom of any particular franchise. I have only ever done this once or twice, and both times it has arguably been my best work. In both cases, they practically wrote themselves.

All my best work is like this. All of my best work has consisted of one page character studies, or drabbles. Any multichapter fanwork I have ever attempted has petered out after chapter four or so. It's hard. Any kudos or good comments I get make me feel self conscious. I had one popular fic for like three minutes in 2009 in the Watchman fandom, and I had anxiety attacks over it. I kept getting "OMG PLZ CONTINUE" and I was like "I can't, the first chapter of this fic was a response to another fic, it wrote itself in one night, and all my attempts to build from it feel false and hollow, like I'm writing badfic of that first chapter."

I feel like I was never a writer in the first place. I have never been a writer. I have a ton of notebooks and an entire google drive full of notes but no finished stories from any of those notes. My last serious attempt at a fic was for Jupiter Ascending, and that was four whole years ago.

Just thinking about starting to write again fills me with anxiety. I can see full, whole, finished stories in my head, but am completely at a loss as to how that translates into a finished work.

I need to examine why, and it all comes back to this - I feel like maybe I have internalized a lot of the stuff I was told about fanworks when I was younger, by people I trusted - that it's literary masturbation. It's misappropriative. It's a waste of skills and time. It's shameful, and only flaky, sad little unfulfilled nerds writing self insertion stories do it.

People who have come up since the aughties may not be able to relate to what things were like before LOTR and Harry Potter caused the fanfiction phenomenon to be mainstreamed, much less what has happened since with the SuperWhoLock and MCU fandoms. Before that, fic writers were pigeonholed as pathetic late bloomers and horny spinsters and housewives cranking out Kirk/Spock smut, or Duncan MacLeod/Methos porn, or speculating on what a married Mulder and Scully or Benton Fraser and Ray K/Ray V would be like, etc.

What is the unofficial name for works like Twilight, and its even more maligned offspring, 50 Shades Of Grey, which began as a Twilight AU fic with the names searched and replaced? Housewife Porn.

There are fans who still remember what things were like before the internet, when fic only came in home-produced zines sold under the table at conventions. There are folks on Tumblr who have commiserated about these dark times, and who even talk about the aughties/1990s fanfic like it was a billion years ago, which feels crazy because I still remember it all like it was yesterday, and it makes me feel weird to be considered an Old Timer.

There are people who talk about My Immortal like it was whole decades ago, guys. That's weird. It just feels weird.

And because the Mary Sue phenomenon was so reviled, people went to extreme lengths to avoid writing Sues of their own, or to be accused of doing so. They lambasted the Sues among them. People were policed and harassed and ostracized because they broke a social convention in their fanfic - because everyone else was afraid it would reflect badly on us all, and bring our whole side down.

It wasn't until 2008 when controversial LJer Paperclipchains wrote an entry in the LJ comm fanficrants (which has been long since deleted) which, when summarized, boiled down to "I think writing Sues is maybe not a capital offense, but instead might be a phase people go through. Maybe people have to write a bunch of badfic before they get to the point where they are writing goodfic, and we shouldn't flame them for that. Maybe not all self inserts or OCs are necessarily Sues, and maybe we should all just chill out and rethink this whole thing. Maybe we should all take several seats and just let people create and have fun," that it really crystallized for me that perhaps here was something awfully toxic going on with how the fic writing community policed itself, and maybe that I had internalized it a lot. But I think it may be too late, that the damage is done.

How do I undo it? Every time I try to start a new fic, The Little Hater in my head says "Why can't you just *enjoy* consuming media? Why do you have to appropriate it? That's lame. You don't want to be lame, do you?" And I'm not even lying, my blood pressure shoots up a little, though maybe that's happening because I'm in my 40s now.

A new Matrix sequel was announced a week ago and I feel like I should already be cranking out reams of fic, but I can't. And I wasn't able to even back when the Matrix fandom was active - which is fifteen whole fucking years ago, what the fuck.

How do I work around this?

AMC Theaters will be running The Matrix again in several locations the last week of August. (Check your local listings - there may be a showing near you!)

I was ambivalent about the film trilogy for a while...I've tried to watch it several times in the past few years and haven't been able to make it through. I am hoping that going with my awesome support network of friends will suffice to exorcise the demons from my past that I still associate with it.

I was still iffy enough about it as recently as the move back in March to donate the coffee table concept art book for the original film to a used bookstore, and to almost throw out the software for the Matrix Online MMO I never got to play. Which I am actually still kind of salty about. There have been two fan-based attempts to resurrect it, both of which require the actual software to run. There are no quests or missions, they're basically just open servers for people to create characters and run around in. But the hardcore fans' attempts to keep it going long after the actual MMO was shut down is pretty amazing. There's actually a full writeup of all the game's plotlines and quests here: http://jao.voxtheory.net/2016/05/18/now-available-the-matrix-online-archives/

Work is work. Things continue to be pretty cool in the area where I was moved.

In other news, I changed my journal theme again....the last one was A E S T H E T I C, but didn't work too well on my phone.

Current mood:

So, IKEA was something I was not aware of as a place I could actually go to until around 2007-2008. When I first saw Fight Club in late 2001, I assumed Jack/Tyler had ordered all that Swedish furniture directly from Sweden.

I didn’t know yet that IKEA existed as a brick-and-mortar store in the US – or that IKEA products were stigmatized as stuff bought on the cheap to quickly furnish dorm apartments and the homes of bachelors (like Jack/Tyler in the movie,) and not “good furniture,” especially at the prosperous tail-end of the 1990s and early 2000s.

To me, the idea of Jack/Tyler ordering a Yin/Yang coffee table directly from Sweden seemed like yet another symptom of his isolated, materialistic life.

In 2005-2006, IKEA was a four-letter word that Draven/Fake Internet Neo used to vilify anyone who didn’t acknowledge him as a messiah – which he had in fact appropriated from Fight Club. So when I learned, post Matrix-cult, in 2007 that IKEA did in fact have brick-and-mortar stores in the USA, and that they had just built one in the nearby town of Frisco, I just had to go check it out.

I wasn’t a real adult in 2007. (I don’t think I actually began to qualify as one until three years later.) I’d never bought my own furniture before that – everything had come down to me from my grandparents, recovered from storage when I moved out.

I’d never even bought my own sheets before that. I got all my Grandfather’s linens after he died. It wasn’t until I was trying to put the twin extra long sheets from his old bed on the standard twin bed that I ended up with the next time I moved that I realized there were even different sizes of twin mattresses that required differently-sized sheets. I was nearly 31 when this happened.

I didn’t have an aesthetic then, or an idea of one. I didn’t know Boho from Industrial from Mid-Century Modern. My first apartments in the late 90s and early 2000s were combinations of my grandparent’s hand-me-down chintz and gingham sensibilities with my fandom memorabilia, and cheap plastic garage shelves to hold all my books.

I was also forming a philosophy about art, and it’s this; art in a capitalistic culture may be subservient to profit and capital – but that doesn’t make it not art, if that makes sense. People who design furniture do so for it to serve a purpose, but also as a form of expression, and for the people who buy it to serve as a form of expression, even if that expression is, “I am living from paycheck to paycheck, but I still want furniture that looks nice.”

My first IKEA purchases near the end of 2007 were actually cookware and bath towels, then eventually curtains and curtain hardware. By 2010-2011, I was aware that my aesthetic skews somewhere between Boho and Mid-century Modern, particularly that stuff from the 70s that looks like it should belong to outer-space pimps, or on the the set of a Panos Cosmatos film, or in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

(My apartment bedroom circa 2011)

In 2013, I built a queen-sized bedframe out of lumber from plans on the internet. Then I gave that one away and built another one. Woodworking was a skill I really wanted to hone. That bedframe warped to shit because I didn’t finish the wood quickly enough, and Texas in the summer is hot and humid.

After three moves, I was never able to get it back together again correctly, and I didn’t have the space or the tools or the time or the money to make replacement pieces (I still have the pieces that didn’t warp, and I might do that someday.)

I’m currently using a perfectly serviceable metal bed base I bought off of Amazon right now. But sometimes, as I walk through the IKEA showroom, I’m tempted.

One thing that bothers me about the 2018-2019 line is that there is suddenly a focus on soft, cute pastels (which pretty much flies in the face of everything I believe in) as well as the chintzes and ginghams that my grandparents favored. One look through the current online catalog bears this out.

A friend pointed out that pastels tend to be popular during tense, dark times. Pastels were all the rage during the Reagan administration, after all. I miss some of their more daring, bold designs from around 2010-2012. I pieced together two twin duvet covers into a queen duvet cover in 2013, because they didn’t sell that design in a queen bed size, and I wanted one. Here it is.

Anyway, Draven’s scoffing at IKEA was, ironically, hilariously elitist as fuck; he was mocking something that was not a marker of wealth and status as he also erroneously perceived it at the time, but something seen as readily affordable and accessible to the hoi polloi. And it was stupid, because IKEA is fucking awesome. And I wouldn’t know this if I hadn’t gone out of a sense of rebellion after his trifling ass skipped town and was out of my life for good. So, thanks asshole!

Mirrored from Cyber Alfheim.

Thanks to everyone who commented. Things got really rough for a while. I'm dealing.

I'm baking a pumpkin pie right now, because that is a perfectly normal thing to be doing in the summer in Texas, and heating up the house when it's over 90 degrees.

On that note, I've sort of branched out into the Outrun genre of Vaporwave. I know:



My favorite YouTube playlist so far: