Hi, How are you today? There's not enough of this in the world, and I'd like to change that. The Internet seems to be exactly the wrong place to talk about it, because it taps into a need for things to be black and white, and to battle things that are complicated in the simplest terms. But we have to use the tools we have, so please, be a little kinder today.
Posts
I don't really have anything to say at present, but also want to keep the blog active. As a result, I've decided to post some pictures of red pandas, because they're extremely cute. I mean, they're up there with cats for me on those terms.
Recently I wrote a post where I admitted that I'm questioning my gender identity, and in this post I thought I'd try to talk about that a little more. To begin with I don't think I was a very masculine child. I cried a lot, and was scared a lot, and was a very imaginative child often in the worst ways. I still swear I saw a woman fly past my window in a basket one night, and that on another a crone's voice came through the curtains. I wasn't sporty or tough, nor particularly academically gifted, outside of reading. In fact I got bullied a lot and hated sport from an early age because I was well aware of how weak I was. One of my memories of prep school is the games teacher pulling my head out of a rugby scrum by the hair and telling me to "get your head in properly, you girl". I had few friends, and the ones I made quickly seemed to default to picking on me, and calling me names. At the same time, my parents tried to "toughen me up", though I d...
The world feels as if it has shrunk since I was a child. I don't just mean that in the sense of growing up, nor in the sense of transport being faster and more ubiquitous. I think, in part its because of the Internet, which has meant so much in breaking up traditional communities and the adoption of broader, looser, and more transitional ones. In many ways that's been a boon, of course, it lets people talk to each other across the globe, and cuts down those feelings I recall from my childhood of being alone in a small town with no friends because I was a misfit. There's no doubt that for LBGTQQIAA people, women, and disabled people, the Internet is a lifeline allowing them to seek support and get a sense that their concerns and problems are shared and common. That's so important, provided what they find is support and not just an opportunity to sell them products or love bomb them into making foolish decisions (by which I mean that they may be preyed upon, not that thei...
Last year, I found a word for the way I feel about myself: agender. For years I'd struggled with the feeling that I didn't really fit among men and felt a goodly amount of time feeling repulsed by masculinity - all while feeling like there are some men who are very attractive and who, although I've identified as straight, I wouldn't really mind having a long kiss with. Folks like Aragorn from the Lord of the Rings films (and I'm afraid that it is Aragorn, Viggo Mortensen isn't at all attractive to me, but I do appear to have a thing for beards and long hair... on a guy that is!). I've never enjoyed the trappings of masculinity, and the social aspects of the male world - cars, drinking, football etc, leave me cold. I don't like saying this, but at times it feels like if men ceased to exist the world would only get better. There are times when it feels like all men do is damage things, and fuck up the lives of women and children. At the same time, I'v...
Hi, I thought I should do a post about Bournemouth and how I'm finding the town, now that I've been down here for a couple of weeks. I've done a fair amount of walking around the place, exploring it on foot and getting lost regularly, and there's a lot to love. The town's commitment to green issues is evident in the wild flower verges and wild, overgrown, graveyards, and that makes me happy. Admittedly there are a lot of cars on the road, and some of the drivers down here are complete bastards, and seem to hate pedestrians, but that's not a unique Bournemouth issue - you find those guys everywhere. It's fair to say that there are two Bournemouths, the tourist town and the other one. I'd say that the town centre and the front firmly belong in the former camp, while the rest of the town is terra incognita, a strange mixture of the two. With an economy that seems as reliant on barbers, tattooists, dog accessory shops, and little antique stores, as on the...
Morning, how are you? I wanted to check, because it feels like we rarely take the time to ask, and that's something I find sad. As a Brit, the default answer is usually "fine", noncommittal response that conveys nothing but a "I don't want to talk to you about it". It's a sort of conversational wheel, designed to move things on to work or whatever we deem to be more important. At times I think we only ask because its considered polite, and a genuine answer would be met with consternation. Certainly, I find that when I remember something someone's told me, they react with confusion simply because that wasn't expected. It's quite sad, that we are used to what might be described as benevolent indifference, and suggests to me that we're still trapped by our troop size no matter how times we claim to be as clever as fuck. More than that, I feel that we're told pretty consistently that we don't matter, and encouraged to live vicario...
So, last night I learned that the second Critical Role campaign has come to an end, which I found somewhat dismaying, because I'm still listening to the first campaign! At the time of writing Vox Machina are about to battle Umbrasyl the black dragon outside Westruun. A group of evil, and very old, dragons have basically screwed things up big time for the rest of Exandria (the fictional world), and the PCs have to find some magic doodads that can help them defeat the baddies... There, you're mostly caught up to where I'm at now. I'm very much playing catch up, and love listening to the podcast (I'm not in the right time zone to even think about watching live on Twitch and I prefer just having the audio - the only thing I really want to see is Matthew Mercer's amazing Dwarven Forge models, and... um, Matthew Mercer, as apparently I have a wee crush on him). I mean, yum... Yes that's one of things I have to ask myself about (as I mentioned in my last post)...
So, I have some changes coming up in the next few weeks. I'm relocating from the Midlands to the south coast of England - Bournemouth to be specific. (That's the English one, though I don't know if there are other Bournemouths, it seems a bit unlikely but who know? This is a strange planet we live on). This means I'll be starting a new job (and I want to assure you that my opinions are mine not theirs's), and finding a new place to live (which I'm currently searching for), as well as looking to make new friends and meet new people. I'll also be turning my focus on development and trying to work out certain things that I don't want to talk about yet, but which might have mean I undertake some profound changes. I'm hoping to keep this blogging stuff up, and make it part of my daily practice - though it might become more of a journal and less of me ranting at the world. That is mostly because I hope to start making steps to doing things about what enr...
One thing that seems very obvious to me is that humans are just apes with an inflated sense of worth. In part, that's because I currently live with a baby and am struggling to see how anyone could have doubted the monkey nature of the species. At around 17 months, the baby is pure monkey, right down to the noises she makes and how she tries to sit. That won't surprise any modern parents, but as a childless (by choice) person it came as quite a revelation to me. Beyond that - well, I find myself baffled by the refutation of Darwin's theories around evolution and can only assume that Christian doctrine was deeply ingrained and that the people who disputed it either didn't know very much about children, or very much about monkeys. Frankly, both those options seem quite likely. It made me think about human consciousness and the way our intelligence works, which seems to me to be intrinsically tied to our troupe nature and our dependence on being part of a group. Even toda...
I'm writing from an angry, tired, place at present. This world is too much and I'm sick of it. The problem is that "the world" is a nebulous thing for me - and it's certainly not the same as the planet. Likewise, "reality" seems to have very little to do with the science. If it did, there wouldn't be a tug of war between health (based in science, and vital for staying alive) and economics (a giant game of who's got the biggest financial dick to swing - that seems to only apply to nations). That so many countries have opted to prioritise the fiction of economics and productivity over the facts of the pandemic, and climate change, on so many occasions simply reveals us to be a narcissistic species; one that can't envisage a planet without us, even if that might be all for the better. All my life I've been told that "reality" is important, but it always seems to be based on a set of fictions that don't exactly scan with my ow...