Listen to the Rain

I kind of exist adjacent to most fandom endeavors. Despite my long presence on Dreamwidth and Livejournal before it, I've never really participated in any fandom communities. I have a fanfiction.net account and have used it to read maybe half a dozen stories ever, and I have an AO3 account and have used it to post a single story and haven't read anything on that site at all. Of the stories I have read, some of them aren't on fanfiction.net--like the old classic Children of an Elder God that I read while it was updating at university. On fanfiction.net I read Aeon Natum Engel--you can see my interests here, in the intersection of cosmic horror and giant robots--and...I think that's all I can remember? I have a bunch of stories I turned into ebooks with the intention of reading them and then just never did. Part of it is that I'm not at all interested in romance in fanfiction. I found one Stargate/Cthulhu crossover fanfic, an area I had thought would be ripe with potential, and never ended up reading it because 1) it was abandoned 2) it was Stargate: Atlantis and 3) it was mostly slash. The only part I remember is that the nanoswarm cloud in the original Stargate: Atlantis was turned into a rogue shoggoth in the fic. I read a relatively short fic about what if Harry Potter were raised by the Culture (which I really appreciated because it did not assume that the Culture Minds automatically understood magic, they were baffled how an owl traveled thousand of light years from Earth to poof into a room on an Orbital) which ran about nine chapters before it petered out.

I have read a lot of Let's Plays, and some of them approach fanfiction by using video games to tell a story. I read the Final Fantasy VIII Altimate Rewrite, which was very good but also never finished. I read a long narrative let's play of Morrowind that was originally hosted at morningstarlady until it was purged and moved to Dreamwidth, which was then hosted at lady_morningstar until it was locked and limited to access only, and is now seemingly being remade (again!) using models from The Sims at aeronwen. I only got partway through the previous version (they were very long), but I think they never finished as well. You can probably see where the source of me being leery of reading fanfiction comes from, here.

I guess the most fanfiction I've ever read, now that I think about it, are the stories set in The Night Land. I read every single story on that site and keep thinking about buying the books, especially after the untimely death of its maintainer.

The reason I brought all this time is because last night I thought "I wonder if that old Sailor Moon website I found back in the day is still around..." and it turns out it wasn't, but it's still available on the Wayback Machine. Sailor Moon Expanded ran from the late 90s through the early 00s and...well, I have to admit that while there's a ton of fanfics I've never read any of them. At the time, 2010, I had never seen a single episode of Sailor Moon, and wouldn't watch any until Sailor Moon Crystal came out several years later. The part that drew me in was the meticulously-expanded bestiary, maps, and cultural information on the Dark Kingdom and the Silver Millennium, which was envisioned as a magic-based solar-system-wide confederacy that ended with the sealing of magic after Queen Beryl attacked the moon. Or, as I described it at the time, "The war between the Seelie and Unseelie Courts when the Unseelie Court wanted summon Cthulhu."

The other reason is A Dark, Distorted Mirror, a Babylon 5 AU fanfic that assumes that the inciting event of most of the plots in the early series--the Earth-Minbari War, a war where the vastly-technologically-superior Minbari curbstomped the humans for two years, only losing a single capital ship in all that time, until on the very moment of victory as they annihilated Earth's last defensive fleet before suddenly ceasing fire and surrendering--did not end with a treaty. As a result, Earth was glassed, most of humanity was killed, and the series is much less hopeful in tone. I did actually make it through the entire first book but tapped out when I had four more books of around 200K words each left, around the size of a doorstopper fantasy book. That one is still online and is finished, though, so maybe I should go back and read it.

I apply to fanfiction nowadays the same principle I apply to fantasy series--once the author finishes it, maybe I'll read it.

If anyone has any recommendations for finished, good Cthulhu crossover fic, I'm all ears. I had a lot of hope for Aeon Natum Engel until the author blew it up with a "rocks fall, everyone dies" sudden ending. They then declared they were going to re-write the entire thing better and higher quality, and I read the first chapter of Aeon Entelechy Evangelion and, when I saw how overwrite and baroque it was, I said to myself "This will never be finished" and stopped reading. And, well...it was never finished.

When I was younger, I was a big fan of Vampire: the Masquerade. I ran a game of it at Penn, for greyselke, jdcohen, spacialk, t3chnomag3, and a couple other people for a year, through the Week of Nightmares and the political chaos as the Ventrue Primogen attempted to overthrow the Prince of Philadelphia. I still have the huge list I made of all the vampires in Philadelphia and their relationships. I even went to a Vampire LARP at schoolpsychnerd's behest, though I never took to it.

I was young, and vampires were monsters. This was a horror game! You were transformed into a terrible creature of the night forced to stalk the living, to drink blood to survive, and ground down under the feet of the elders. What an amazing setting.

Well, that was twenty years ago. Now that I'm older, I can see that Vampire, and Werewolf, and Mage all have the appeal of the young. In Vampire, you play a fledgeling vampire, thrust into a society in which you are at the bottom and all the people older than you have already taken all the power and authority for themselves. You're going to have to fight them and take it yourself. In Werewolf, corporations are literally killing the planet because they're evil, like Captain Planet villains. And in Mage, if you can't accomplish something it's because you didn't believe hard enough. Anything is possible if you have the will and drive to accomplish it.

But no, the real horror game for me now is Changeling. Changeling, which I had no idea what to do with as a kid, which posited faeries hidden in human bodies, trying desperately to keep their dreams alive against the crushing mundanity of the world, knowing that they will inevitably fail and become Undone, the mortal body taking over as the faerie soul sleeps until its next incarnation.

I used to have multiple weekly or biweekly games I played in, even during COVID. Then they dwindled to no weekly games, then only one biweekly game, and now...nothing. No physical dice have been rolled in my house in years. I look at my bookshelves full of RPGs and see not promise and a surfeit of ideas but the falling grains of an hourglass as I'm forced to admit that many, perhaps most, of the games I've bought will never be played and some of them may never even be read. Some of them I've owned for close to a decade and haven't even opened. There is simply not enough time.

And that's the message of Changeling, and of life. There's not enough time to accomplish all that you want to do, or even a portion of what you want to do. I used to read 80 books a year and my to-read list still never got any shorter. There are more good video games coming out now than I would ever have time to play even if I were a shut-in NEET, much less as a family man. I lived in Japan for years and did not get to go to all the places I wanted to in the Chūgoku region, much less Japan, much less East Asia. I've been playing Hollow Knight for six months because I keep using the time I could be playing it to work on my Cataclysm mod. You have to pick and choose, and the doors you open mean that, by necessity, other doors close. Even by staying up to write this, I've closed the door on getting a full eight hours of sleep.

The horror of Changeling is not that you will die--though of course, you will--but that life will grind you down and narrow your vision and crush your dreams to the point that the you of twenty years ago would avert their eyes in disgust, or simply would not recognize you, if they had to see the you now.

Probably going to stay up a bit longer.

You might have heard of the collapse of FTX, a crypto trading firm that went from a $32 billion valuation to zero in under a week. This post is only about that tangentially, because I found an article linking to Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison's Tumblr, and reading through it I found this post about interacting with non-rationalists which links to this post by someone else about the differences between approaches to rationalism, those who think "I have discovered a new approach to human thinking, I shall revolutionize the world!! " and "I have discovered a new approach to human thinking, but maybe there's a reason there's no long historical record of people acting this way."

And that led me to thinking--what are the actual successes of rationalists? Their stated principles involve trying to use reason instead of appeals to tradition or emotion in order to guide human behavior, but what social ills have they alleviated? What government reforms have they proposed? What companies have they founded that effectively reduce suffering? Are there any billionaires who have pledged to give most of their wealth away (following the "earning to give" effective altruism proposal) that are actually less rich than when they made the pledge? I admit that I'm biased here, because from my point of view the primary output of rationalists is long blog posts, but one could make a reasonable argument here that the problem is crypto, not rationalism or effective altruism. There are plenty of other crypto exchanges or projects that have gone bankrupt or stolen their customers' funds with no tie to rationalism at all.

On the other hand, rationalism does seem to keep reinventing bog-standard bigotry from "first principles." I remember the SlateStarCodex reddit banning discussion of trans issues outside the designated Culture War threads, despite several trans people commenting that these were real issues that effected their lives, not just a political issue--and that tells me that in 1930s Germany they would have been having serious discussions on the Jewish Question, and in 1870s America about whether freed slaves should be full members of society. The linked Tumblr above repeats uncritical claims about how the entire gender pay gap is explained by work experience and job choice, and while you can explain that by noting Ellison is a self-described former aspiring Catholic tradwife who became an agnostic rationalist, how much Catholic tradwifery is still influencing her thoughts?

Plus there's the whole "AI will go rogue and kill us all! " obsession among rationalists despite there being no evidence that AGI will happen on any reasonable timeframe or is even possible. And I'm not even talking about soulless machines here--human cognition is inextricable from human biology and absent that biology, how would one emulate cognition? This is not an unsolvable problem but it is an extremely difficult one!

I am curious if there are any famous examples I'm missing.

Edit: This interview with Bankman-Fried about how most of his public statements were bullshit and done for PR reasons also seems relevant.

The title is a bit of a misnomer because I already get dental.

I've been worried about this year's work evaluation for a while, not because I had anything specific to worry about, but because I had nothing specific to focus on at all. I wrote about this earlier this year, but due to the switch to the new system, everything was thrown into flux. We were told that part of the impetus for the switch was that the new system would keep metrics itself, and then after its implementation it turned out that it didn't. By that point (much later in the year), I hadn't been keeping my own personal metrics at all, so I had no idea what to base my performance review on. I just put in what I had and hoped for the best and...it worked? On the one hand, I'm glad that my worries didn't come to pass, but on the other hand, this just reinforces my conviction that my performance reviews are mostly unrelated to my actual performance. I get about the same rating no matter what I do.

The real interesting thing is that my boss seems to be pushing me towards management. She randomly had me take a class about being an authentic manager earlier this year, even though I'm currently not in management (though it turned out that half the people in the class didn't have any reports even if they had management-level titles, so maybe it didn't matter) and she reiterated it during my evaluation. She pointed out that she didn't ever think of herself as being a manager until her manager came and asked her if she had considered it and yeah, I can see the parallel she's trying to draw here. I'm not sure--on the one hand, I've been doing my job for a while and a change and promotion would be nice, but on the other hand, with a child on the way am I going to want to be sitting in meetings and otherwise not as able to step away from the computer? But I don't want to turn down this opportunity because that's implicitly turning down every future opportunity that comes.

I'll have to give this a lot of thought.

With that title I really should have a Goblin Slayer icon to go with this post. Heavy metal intensifies.

I realized yesterday that, since I had pneumonia as a high school student that left me with damaged lungs to the point where for a decade-and-a-half, I'd get a horrible wracking cough every winter for five to seven weeks, I might be at higher risk from serious complications from coronavirus than I thought. I haven't gotten that cough for several years now, but I don't know what, if anything, that says about my lungs and how much I've actually healed. It's possible that I'd be one of the asymptomatic carriers since I'm otherwise in excellent health, and it's possible that I'd have to be put on a ventilator. I have no idea, so it's pretty good that I can work from home and only have to go out for food like some kind of burrowing animal. Yesterday I went to the grocery store and it was the first time I had left the house since Saturday.

Today we're switching over from the old new database to the new new database. I thought this would impact my work, but since we're working from the old database since the old new database is a trash fire, it doesn't. I just need to avoid the old new database so its info can be migrated to the new new database, and if this sounds ridiculous and stupid, let me tell you about how actually dealing with them is! The new new database has a terrible UX--in the old database I can work entirely with key commands, in the new new database I have to click through five pages to change one record--but the old new database wouldn't even start a search if you hit Enter, you had to manually click the Search button until I wrote a script to click the button when you pressed Enter.

So what I'm saying is that the bar for "better" is pretty low here.

I've gone to sleep early the past two nights and woken up early in the morning both of those days. I don't think this means anything other than this is an extremely stressful time. There was a tweet I saw that went:
...and that's really the heart of it, isn't it? Trying to pretend like this is a nice jaunt, or a chance to do that thing you've been putting off for a while, or learn a new skill, ignore the societal level of fear. We built our whole society around the idea that pandemics were a solved problem, and we were wrong.

At least the people learning a new skill aren't spending all their time online belittling and mocking people for daring to briefly step outside on a nice day, though.

A long while ago I wrote a blog post about the idea of fun boredom, about doing dull repetitive tasks deliberately because the monotony is part of the appeal. One obvious example would be people watching a TV series or movie they've already seen a dozen times and know every single line of, and another would be playing old JRPGs that require a lot of grinding, which is my own version of it. I recently went back to my iOS game of the original Final Fantasy that I've been playing on and off for years only to find that an update had erased my save and iCloud backup somehow hadn't worked. That let me implement something I was already considering for a while, but hadn't yet done because I was almost at the end of the iOS game--switching to the original NES version. And since I'm playing in Japanese, switching to the Famicom version.

There are a lot of differences between the modern iOS version and the Famicom version, but I can summarize them all as "Famicom requires way more grinding." So that's what I've been doing, just walking back and forth in a forest and killing goblins, then killing gigas worms (Eng: creeps), then killing ogres, and occasionally hitting the game milestones. It's soothing, to see the numbers go up on my little chibi characters, to watch the burst of pixels when the black mage casts a spell, to listen to the chiptune themes. While the graphics of the iOS version are great, much better than the mobile abominations of Final Fantasy V and Final Fantasy VI, the first version of the game I ever played was in my basement as a kid, in front of the TV on an NES, so the 8-bit version of Final Fantasy will always be my favorite. And in this time of uncertainty, with plague all around, playing a game where I know the plot, I know all the tricks, I know exactly what I need to do and I can turn off my brain and click through the fight command and buy up those potions to delve into the dungeons...that's comforting. It's a bit of normality that I can control, assuming your definition of normality involves goblins in the forest.

I have thought about resubscribing to WoW, or starting FFXIV, but I think the MMO part of my life is over. MMOs are about friends who also play them, and I can't rebuild the old Pig and Whistle community from nothing.

And now, back to work. Shabbat is tonight, which is the one part of the week that still feels different because I don't check social media then. It's actually still restful, and right now, I'll take all of that feeling I can get.

Something that didn't really fit into the previous post.

When we were out at the bar, britshlez asked me if I thought it was more important to have a partner with whom you agreed with on the major life decisions, like children or where you want to live or work ethic, or whether it's better to have a partner who really gets your hobbies and the references you can make based on your life (this is what I summarized in my meme comment). I didn't even have to think--I immediately said the former was better, because those are the things that will break a relationship over the long term, whereas it's important that a couple's interests be a Venn diagram. Each person needs hobbies that they can do by themselves, as a way of getting their own time.

Though, having said that, I did clarify that honestly it's not that important to me that someone immediately get all my references. I have to explain most of my Jewish jokes to my non-Jewish friends, and I have to explain almost all of my Japan references to everyone I know. britshlez asked me if there was anyone who ever just got my sense of humor immediately, and I honestly answered that yes, schoolpsychnerd had. But that's because we basically grew from callow youths to adults together, so we had the same life experience for a long time. Of course, I can't go into a new relationship and expect them to understand all the references and in-jokes and memes that schoolpsychnerd and I built up.

That led into a conversation where we were both complaining about how Western popular ideas of love are damaging, honestly--people are waiting for soulmates, and if they don't find someone who immediately fits their view of the perfect mate, well, there's thousands of people an internet away so they jump ship. But soulmates don't just exist out there, a soulmate is made. I told britshlez that I wasn't looking for someone to understand my obscure jokes immediately, but someone who would be open to learning what I find important, and sharing what they find important without mocking me for not knowing it. That's far more valuable than that they come into a relationship already knowing everything about tabletop RPGs and Japanese history and DOS games.

It would be nice to find someone who got my DOS game references, though.

(I appreciate the irony of the Listening song, but Linked is amazing. And the nightcore version is great too)

A few days ago, I was talking with thosesocks about what I described as "deliberate superstition"--i.e., things that are fun to believe even though you know they're not true. When I described what I meant, she thought of astrology and how she likes to consider how her behavior reflects her astrological sign, but would never make an important life decision about jobs or romance based on astrological compatibility. She immediately pointed out my red hair and my love of the dramatic when I said I was a Leo, and I was going to argue with the latter point, but I realized that if you think about how much I like the way Lovecraft or later Tolkien wrote their stories and how I like deliberately flowery or "overwrought" language, or even music like the one attached to this post, well, I see what she means.

I was thinking about this because of an extremely old superstition among the Children of Israel called זוגות zugot, "pairs." The Talmud has a bunch of stuff about how dangerous pairs are, and how to avoid dangers resulting from them:

"The Gemara asks: How could the Sages establish a matter through which one will come to expose himself to danger? But wasn’t it taught in a baraita: A person should not eat pairs, i.e., an even number of food items; and he should not drink pairs of cups; and he should not wipe himself with pairs; and he should not attend to his sexual needs in pairs. The concern was that one who uses pairs exposes himself to sorcery or demons."
-Pesachim 109b

I mostly use this an excuse to say, "Oops, I'd better have another drink--I don't want to stick with a pair," not something where I'm actually worried about being bothered by the mazikin if I don't do it. And no modern Jew is worried about this either, because even by the time of the Shulchan Aruch, published 1565, this superstition had completely fallen out of fashion and no one thought it necessary to worry about pairs at all.

Belief in shedim lasted a lot longer, though: here's a story about a 17th century rabbi in Poland calling a rabbinic court to throw demons out of a house.

Which reminds me that another deliberate superstition is that I don't leave books lying open, because there's a sheyd that hovers over open books and causes troubles. I'm inconsistent about leaving my iPad out without a cover.

There's a list of more traditional Jewish superstitions in this book, some of which are familiar to pop culture (light candles on a child's birthday equal to how many years the child has lived), and some of which aren't (the reason we have a philtrum is that before a child is born, the angel Raphael teachs them all the secrets of creation, but right before birth, it puts its finger on the child;s lips and says "Shh!").

Do you have anything that falls into the "deliberate superstition" category?

I was surprised when Facebook told me yesterday that I divorced schoolpsychnerd a year ago. I had honestly completely forgotten that the anniversary was approaching.

...which says it all, doesn't it?

I described it a couple people as feeling like in the past, I had been stuffed in a box, and now I was taken out and I could take up space. Not even extra space, just space. schoolpsychnerd had a lot of trauma in her past, and she put in a lot of effort to overcome it, and I think she was mostly successful--more successful than a lot of people would have been. But our relationship, and my personality, still ended up bending around it due to its gravity.

I asked my therapist occasionally what had happened to the old me, pre-moving to Japan, who accepted jaiderai's invitation to travel two and a half hours to a college I'd never been to so I could meet a girl he knew and wanted to introduce me to, or who would hang out with friends after work all the time. And now I know the answer--he was there all the time, buried under everything piled on top of him. And over the last year I've pushed all that out of the way and stood on my feet. I've had a bunch of friends tell me how much I've changed, how I seem so much happier, how full my life seems now. All of that is correct.

And I can carry that hindsight forward. The reason I tagged this post 悟り is because I have a much better understanding of who I really am now, when I'm free to define it on my own terms. I remember my therapist being astonished at how much I changed over the course of the year-and-a-half we saw each other. At our last session, she told me:

"You seem really happy now. Some people never get there."

That post says I play plenty of video games, but I don't even do that lately! I've played five minutes of video games in the last month. I bought Link's Awakening the day it came out, played it the following weekend, and haven't touched it since. There's so much to do that I just don't have time.

Just look at my post for last weekend or the weekend before that for examples of what I mean. Last weekend, I very deliberately took the largest space of free time I had and filled it. I did the same thing tonight--I'm going to a lecture about architecture at a bar.

The previous chapter is definitely over. Now, it's time to live my life.

I didn't realize how extremely annoyed someone telling me they would do something, putting it off to a later date when I asked about it, and then completely blowing it off without any acknowledgement or apology would make me. I spent a bit of time today thinking that I was overreacting, and then I realized that no, I'm not. It's reasonable to be annoyed at someone for failing to follow through on their soft commitments and not even apologizing or offering a reason when I mentioned it today to try to reschedule. The reasonable conclusion is that they don't care

This is a bit of a flash point for me, because I spent thirteen years being unable to trust whether something I was told would get done would actually get done (it was about 80% chance it would happen). Sometimes I was told it would get done four or five times, and only when I got annoyed enough to do it myself would it actually get done. It was all of those comics about emotional labor except with the genders reversed, which means I have a pretty hard time relating to the people who post them sincerely as-is. I also spent thirteen years suppressing my annoyance about it, because schoolpsychnerd treated any time I was angry as me being angry at her as a person, rather than angry at her actions, and then it turned into a debate over her fundamental worth as a human being. So eventually I squashed down all my feelings to avoid having a discussion about chores or about something that bothered me get refocused onto her yet again.

I told my therapist that sometimes I had the urge to laugh during our arguments about how terrible she was and I felt really badly about it, because I certainly didn't think it was funny. Now I realize that I was trying so hard not to feel anything that my body didn't know what to do with its sensations and decided on laughter.

You know, I guess that's one facet of what they call "dissociating."

So now I'm annoyed, and that's healthy and reasonable. The part that's not healthy or reasonable, that I need to work on, is the urge to immediately cut them out of my life completely. This is not a particularly serious incident and that would be an overreaction. But I am allowed to be angry.

Edit: The main thrust of this post is still true, but now I feel a little sheepish because they contacted me after work and arranged to drop off the boxes, so now I can go back to packing without any problems.

I've been reading The Body Keeps the Score, about trauma and recovery from same. There's a lot in here that I wish I had known about earlier, though I don't know that it would have made a difference. I don't have the kind of deep-seated, serious trauma that this book is talking about. schoolpsychnerd does, but other people can't solve that for her. Still, it might have helped me understand better what she was going through.

This post isn't about that, though. One of the major points the books makes is that the ways traumatized people behave mark them as strange, cause them a lot of pain, and get them shunned or mocked by their peers, but those habits continue because they were protective against the source of their trauma. At one point, in a certain context, they were useful habits, even if in every other context they cause nothing but pain.

When I read that, I immediately thought of some of the habits I developed in my marriage to deal with schoolpsychnerd's behavior. I don't want to go into exhaustive detail (and it would be lashon hara anyway), but one simple example is how I'm often leery of offering a suggestion because there's a part of me that thinks it creates an obligation in the listener. schoolpsychnerd would often treat it that way, because she was a people-pleaser and always tried to accommodate herself to what other people wanted. I didn't want to run roughshod over her, so sometimes we'd end up in a stalemate where each of us tried to get the other to state their opinion first, me so I'd know that her opinion was purely her own and her so she could take my opinion into account when making a decision. That led to me being anxious about asking people to do things, including even inviting them to go out for pie or come to a party, because I've learned over years that merely suggesting something is often treated as a command. So in order to avoid applying undue pressure, I often avoided suggesting things. Most of what this did was isolate me from my friends, but maybe it made schoolpsychnerd feel better.

On Tuesday, though, I thought about hosting a party for Shavuot, since the "eating dairy foods" aspect of the holiday makes it easy to secularize for a gathering. And after about twenty minutes of thought, I made an event and invited sixty people. A Facebook event invite is not a binding contract. It's not pressure in any way. And hopefully people will come and eat delicious ice cream and cheese and have a lovely time.

And this is something I should be aware of in the future, and examine my own actions, and try to figure out what impulses I have that were once an adaptive response but no longer are.

It took me years to realize that part of The Hosting of the Sidhe was about a redhead and not someone whose hair was literally on fire, though I suppose you can never tell with the Fair Folk.

My iPad seems pretty decisively broken. It started acting like it had updated to iOS 12.2, but when I plugged into my computer iTunes started downloading the 12.2 update, and then said the iPad wasn't capable of syncin. When I put it in recovery mode it said the iPad could not be recovered and gave me an error 35, which indicates a hardware problem. It's not a problem with the computer or the cable because my phone connected and synced just fine. That leaves the iPad, so I'm taking it in to the Apple Store today. Hopefully they'll fix it, and if not, I guess I'll be getting a new iPad. At least I have the money.

I'm annoyed about it, but that's all. Something like that would have caused panic or a huge anxiety spike even a year ago, but now I'm just determined to fix it. That's progress.

I went to therapy yesterday after dinner at Furious Spoon with lisekatevans to celebrate National Ramen Day, and we talked a bit about my hair, I think because I mentioned it being tangled. My therapist asked if I grew my hair out as a way of deliberately blurring gender lines, and I said no. My conception of gender is fluid, but not in that specific way. As I phrased it to her:

I am a man. Everything I do is masculine.

...but I did mention that literally as long as I could remember, ever since I was a young boy, I've always wanted long hair. I felt best right before my parents took me into the barber to get a haircut, and I always hated going to the barber. It's what led to kind of unhealthy hair--for a long time I'd only get a haircut once a year, and it's only recently that I've started going in for maintenance cuts every 3-4 months.

The conversation continued to how I hate interrupting people in conversations, and how I tend to have a hard time talking to people unprompted, and tend to allow other people to strike up a connection with me, and she suggested maybe my appearance leads to that. I have a lot of experiences that are alien to most men, like people telling me I'm pretty, or touching my hair, or catcalling me, or plopping down next to me and giving me their numbers, and having such an idiosyncratic (as I phrased it) appearance leads to that. Most men aren't over six feet tall, very thin, with waist-length wavy red hair, and dressed all in form-fitting black clothes, but that tends to be what I wear when I go out. And it has worked for me so far. I made all my friends at university because gurami abruptly sat across from me at lunch and introduced himself, saying that he was in three of my classes, and through him I met everyone else.

I remember one time at Dracula's Ball, there was a man with a stuffed animal plush on his shoulder. t3chnomag3 and greyselke went up to talk to him and it turned out he wore it because he was very shy and it got people to come up and talk to him, so it definitely worked out for him.

But as my therapist pointed out, this leaves me at the mercy of other people. And it's worked out for me so far, and may work out in the future, but there's no guarantee of that. It would be better to have the tools to make connections myself so that I can use them if I want rather than hoping for fate to work out. That's easier said than done, obviously, but one thing my therapist keeps bringing up and which I agree with her wholeheartedly is that flexibility is just better overall. It's better to be able to adapt to a wide variety of situations, to not require rigid routines or very specific forms of interaction, so that I'm not lost or out of place outside of those circumstances.

She also brought up that my complete hatred of interrupting people makes it harder for me to make an impression in group settings, because I usually sit in silence unless there's an obvious pause where I can speak, and that lack of impression means it's harder to carry on an interaction into a one-on-one conversation. She's right about that, too, but I'm less sure how to feel comfortable with inserting myself into an existing conversation. I hate being interrupted and I'm very conscious of how much other people hate being talked over too. Can I find a balance? Maybe? I can try.

Summary: I have a very different personal experience than average, and it's meant I haven't had to develop the social skills that some people do. And those skills would be useful for me to have, so I should think about working on them.

The whole office got sent home early on Friday because of the Laquan McDonald shooting trial verdict. We got an email about it stating that people who were worried about their safety could go home, and I was going to stay because I live on the far north side and don't have anything to worry about. Then the section chief went around to talk to people while I was in the stairs, and then my boss came to me and very nicely told me to get out, so I went home at 10:45.

I mean, the whole "We need to protect ourselves! You know how those people are!" aspect of the warnings are pretty racist, but also I'm not going to argue against going home early on a Friday. And then when I came in today, there was an email that building management closed the whole building anyway. I ended up going to the art museum with lisekatevans instead with my afternoon, and then later out to Izakaya Mita for Japanese food and shōchū. Delicious.

On Saturday I woke up early (after going to bed at 3:30 a.m.), took a shower, and then took the train out to the suburbs to visit my parents. This weekend was the Scarecrow Festival, probably my favorite cute suburban festival I've been to, and so I went out into the rain to look at the scarecrows with my parents. They weren't as impressive as previous years, and I think that a lot of people didn't even show up. The mechanical section was almost completely empty, for example, but there was this one in a tent:


The scarecrow itself shot out steam and there was a zeppelin circling in the background. Sadly, this was really the most interesting scarecrow there was. There were a couple others I liked, one designed like a butterfly and one with a scarecrow monster emerging from the corn, and one straw statue of a large wolf that wasn't a scarecrow at all but was still really neat. Not as many as previous years, though, and even the lack of crowds due to the weather wasn't enough to make up for it. I look back on the festival two years ago more fondly, but maybe that's because all of the pokemon scarecrows. Geek scarecrows will always be a draw for me.

( More scarecrow pictures )

I was staying at my parents' house, and while I was there they told me they're planning to make me a successor trustee to their trust, in a conversation that just makes me think "there comes a time in every middle-class white person's life where..."

Well, and also:

We are Sex Bob-Omb and we're here to make you think about death and get sad and stuff!

Better now than later, of course.

The UN just released a report about climate change and the capsule summary is "we're fucked." Sure, it says that decisive action can still avert catastrophe, but proto- or actual fascists are being elected all over the world and they're much more likely to go to war over resources rather than work together to fix the problem. We're not going to do anything to fix it, industrial civilization will get increasingly strained, the refuge issues now are going to seem like nothing compared to what will happen in twenty years, and while humanity probably won't go extinct, who knows what will happen to global civilization.

We are doomed and no one will save us.

That's basically been my thought process for years and really, every report about global warming just confirms that I'm right. I don't end up despairing over it, fortunately, but I can't say it doesn't affect my life. Part of the reason I was on the fence about having children for so long is because of climate change, because I wasn't sure I wanted to bring a child into a world where they'd grow into adulthood in a time of civilizational collapse. Previous generations didn't have the choice not to do that, but we do, and I think it's a pretty rational choice.

I don't know why climate change doesn't fill me with despair when so many other things do. Maybe it's because it's such a large problem that there's literally nothing I can do. No action I take will affect climate change in any measurable amount. I mean, one hundred companies are responsible for 71% of emissions. Me personally not buying them won't affect those emissions any more than me not going to see movies for years after MPAA support of SOPA kept the FCC from dismantling net neutrality, and I missed out on all the Marvel movies. Maybe it's that there's no point I can latch onto as a shortcoming in my myself, and so I am more detached from it? Or maybe it's just that the enormity of the problem is overwhelming--I can understand people being cruel to me but not the end of the world.

Happy Monday.

I've been going back and reading through some of my older blog posts lately. One of the major benefits of my having been posting on LJ and then DW for so long is that I basically have a record of my entire adulthood here. If I have doubts about my behavior or thoughts, I can go back and see what I wrote about at the time.

I've learned, for example, that some things about me don't change. I'll probably always be inordinately nervous about meeting new people, and I might always feel a little lonely. I'll probably always get very depressed in the face of failure. Those things have been with me for over a decade and I'd have to be a completely different person in order to change them. But, I can change how I deal with them. A decade ago, I was much more social even despite these worries, often with something to do every weekend. I didn't seem to feel that kind of urge to hermit and do nothing on weekends that I've felt in the last couple of years. I played video games a lot, but I made more time for other things too. I told my therapist that this was actually really hopeful for me, because it means that I don't have to completely change my entire being in order to be the kind of person I'd like to be. I just have to remember who I was, once, and work to be more like that person again. It's something I've already proved that I can do.

I'm working on that. Going to a Starlight Radio Dreams show tonight. And going to movies. I used to do that all the time but really fell out of the habit, originally due to moving to Japan and later due to SOPA. Of course, it turns out that just not purchasing something and otherwise not saying anything about it is a completely ineffective means of protest because the corporation has no idea if you're a lost sale or just disinterested, and also, films like Black Panther making billions is itself a powerful message. I missed out on a lot by not going to movies, including some things I probably would have really enjoyed.

Speaking more of old posts, I found a very old post that chronicles my first forays into the World of Warcraft, the game that I've played the most and which was the overwhelming majority of my gaming time between 2006 and 2011. Little did I know when I started it that I'd rack up something like 500 days playtime. If only I had devoted even 10% of that to Japanese, I'd probably be fluent by now...

I also found this post from back when I worked at a newspaper. I'll put the relevant quote here:

"Sir, our inability to cover a story on a certain day is not a violation of your First Amendment rights."
-one of the reporters

I've slept badly every night this week, and I can only blame one of them on the child downstairs crying. Hopefully this weekend I can make some of it up!