The Male Hysteric

In a fit of astonishingly wasteful spending I'm getting a dedicated digital audio player. I am not sure if I'm going to end up using it... it will either be the best purchase I've made in a while or a terrible waste, but I'm getting one of the cheap ones so it's unlikely to be too terrible if I end up not using it much. Most of the reviews I see of people using them are audiophiles and I'm not sure I can actually discern anything that they're talking about when I'm listening, because I'm usually listening when I'm doing things. However that's kind of the problem, because most audio comes from my phone and the phone is the most distracting and anxiety-inducing thing in my general vicinity, being able to listen to music that's not attached to my phone should be... good? At least I hope. I think if things were going well in the world I would care a lot less about staying off my phone so much but these days you just scroll and something brand new and horrible hits you in the face every few hours. I need to be able to do my job, at least.

So I was reading an interesting discussion started by a user on BlueSky that begins:

Share a thought about writing some may find controversial?

Outliers aside, I think the quality of any text is roughly proportional to the amount of time its author is plugged online, especially in social media.

And goes on to explain some things that I've noticed as well about some recent books, though I'm not really sure I agree with the conclusion. I do think as a society we've been wrestling really hard with what is "real life" and whether or not the online can be considered "real life", and the denial that it is "real life" has actually been to our detriment in many ways when it comes to understanding how our society has gotten to the dark place where it is now.

I think maybe more of the problem than what this user is saying, rather than that these people lack experience outside of online forums -- maybe they do, or maybe they don't, I don't actually think that's the issue -- is that they are no longer keeping these behaviors siloed to online forums, which is a different matter. I think there is very much a faux pas of bringing the online into real life that is breaking down and some people are more comfortable with it and some people find it "cringe", to use an online word, while others who have never been very online have no idea what is going on because they have no idea the depths of depravity that the first two have experienced. I think in a lot of these cases these people are writing to a microculture, which would be fine, but maybe they don't understand how big or how small this microculture is because the internet has a way of obscuring numbers of these very basic things. The experience of not knowing how many people you are talking to would be rich to plunge the depths of, but it's kind of ignored... because we don't know, and there's a profit/political motive to keep us from knowing, in the form of bots.



But there's also the factor that due to the idea of these norms being siloed and their breakdown is that it kind of seems like maybe these writers do not know how to code-switch, or, possibly moreso, even think that code-switching is somehow immoral. If you read enough books and you read enough fanfiction, you begin to see that the way these two types of prose are written is slightly different, that they exist in different registers, and when you read an original novel that was previously fanfiction with the "fan" part scrubbed off, the register still remains and it's obvious to anyone familiar with it. Blogging is not the same type of writing as what you read in a novel, or what you read in a nonfiction book, either. Posting adeptly on a microblogging site is its own skill, and arguing online is yet another, though one of debatable value. And yet there are many writers who seem to be unable to switch between these forms of writing, and as this OP says, all their writing sounds like you're reading screeds from their blogs. Rather than respecting these different forms of writing as their own art forms, being able to change how you write from one form of media to another becomes dishonest.

And I think this might really be the crux of the matter. So much of this is about how annoyed even queer readers are that certain writers will transplant up-to-the-second overly-online queer microdiscourse into novels set three hundred years ago, or on another planet, or in an alternate universe inhabited strictly with fairies and unicorns. It doesn't make any sense, it destroys suspension of disbelief, and makes the story more difficult to read. However, the writer probably feels that to not include this would be dishonest, somehow, or otherwise morally bad. The piece is meant to be instructive, or an honest display of themselves and their writing identity, or something, meaning that the code-switch cannot happen. The friction between the two sets of norms cannot be smoothed out.

So I guess what I'm saying is that to navigate this skillfully in the way the OP thinks is better, one has to be, in online parlance, a norm-understander, at the very least, rather than it having to do specifically with how terminally online one is. I mean, I guess being terminally online does erode one's ability to understand outside norms, or people who are terminally online generally did not have a great understanding of outside norms to begin with, but I don't think it's quite as one-to-one as suggested.

I don't know, it's hard to formulate all of my thoughts on this. There's a lot. It's getting late.

I don't know if this is an insane thing to do but I updated a fanfic that I wrote two chapters of 3 years ago and then abandoned.

Saboteur, Chapter 3

It's a fic that takes place immediately after the events of S1 and is heavily focused on Viktor, Jayce, and Mel. The thing is that, well, the second season was kind of a clusterfuck of characterization (though it does definitely have its moments) so in a way this looks like a fix fic, except I didn't even know what was broken before I started. Either way, if you're interested, it does include Jayce/Viktor as a ship.

So, summary:

Sky's dead, Viktor's dying, and Jayce is out of commission. With Hextech possibly dead in the water and war on the horizon, perhaps it's time to take a look at who benefits.

Takes place just after events at the end of of S1.

First book of 2025 read! My challenge for this year is 12 novels in 2025, and I’m making progress on that, so at least one good thing happening. I started this book late last year as one of my writing buddies suggested it to me as a possible “comp” for a book I needed comparisons for and it really, I think, is a good comparison, in many ways, except I find Ishiguro to be pretty humorless in this book and my novel is… not like that. However, keeping this in mind, my reading of this book was probably poisoned in that I was looking at it for a certain purpose so that purpose was always in the back of my head and I may not have such a good idea of it on its own. It’s not a book that I would have picked up on its own.

The Buried Giant is a book about an elderly couple traveling in post-Arthurian England to meet their son, who lives in another village, while the country is shrouded with a mysterious mist that causes people to forget things. It might be a small thing and more indicative of what I read but I appreciated the main characters being elderly. This may be less true of literary fiction but… there aren’t terribly many elderly protagonists out there, at least in comparison to more youthful ones. I think in general most writers tend to write ages they’ve already experienced. The friend who recommended it to me also talked about how they hated the way Ishiguro writes dialogue and honestly I did not notice it. Or, well, it’s less that I did not notice it, but noticed that it did not seem bad read out loud by the narrator, in the same way Shakespeare is better read out loud by someone who actually knows what they’re doing rather than awkwardly stumbled over by a first-time reader. Not that I think Ishiguro is that brilliant, but there’s something to his dialogue that probably would not come through in the strictly written text, or the reader David Horovitch is very talented. But considering The Buried Giant is a novel, this would probably be considered a flaw.

Hello everybody. If you're an American, you should know that it is a great day to yell at your representatives about the illegal grant disbursement hold going on right now. As of this post the soonest they are going to meet on this thing they admit is an emergency is tomorrow. I know my emergencies can't wait that long! Anyway, calling your reps only takes a few minutes and overloading them with calls can be quite effective!

If you need help finding numbers to call, look here. Make sure to call ONLY your senators and representative.

Don't know what to say? Celeste Pewter has written a nice script here on Bluesky. Just say something! It really only takes a few minutes from your day!

Also, anything else the government is doing getting you down? Call your reps early and often. At the very least yelling at them is cathartic. Let them know they're doing a shit job. That's your job.

So I was trying to quickly download a whole bunch of fics for archiving purposes and about four in I get the message that I'm making too many requests too quickly and that I need to make fewer requests or wait! Don't they understand that I am also an archivist doing my own archiving? Ugh.

Anyway, if you're in the position to, it's a real good day to yell at your senators and representative. I've already done so and written down their phone numbers in my planner for quick access. They work for you. Time to be a mean boss.

I was bored today when I discovered the gemini protocol, a parallel/stripped down internet protocol (alternative to HTTP) that's meant to be lightweight, easy to use, text-focused...! so I downloaded a client to try to browse and the client itself is janky (search doesn't work) and the alternatives to the client on my phone are abandonware, and a disturbing amount of the capsules (equivalent to websites) were dated early in the pandemic. I had hopes and my dreams seemed to be crushed in a couple hours. I mean I'm sure there's still stuff, I would just have to access it differently. But it's such a big idea, no?

I've been slowly updating my Neocities website and at this point the web resources page has a decent amount of links. I feel like I should probably write an essay or so on blogging, and why it's important, even though, hypocritically, I do not keep up well with this blog. I don't know. I've added analytics to the website just to see what happens. I am very tempted to add a guestbook and such. I looked back and saw that I had commented out a chatbox that I had attempted to add, and looking at the site I'm thinking, wow, a chatbox goes totally against the vibe, doesn't it? But I think it could do with a guestbook. It could probably do with a lot of things that I don't know if I'm going to get to. One thought I had was to add my fanfic onto the site. It's mine, so why not?

I am still working on the same novel, but I guess since the election and the direction the country is going, I am wondering what or how this work will be distributed, if I have the chance to distribute at all. I still have dreams of trad pub but a lot of that is because, well, I would like a professional clean-up to work with me, of course, and also the covers and whatever are so much nicer than POD and whatever. But, you know. I don't know. It's hard to say anymore.

I was reading a book that was apparently published in 2023 and it makes me think about how basic the understanding of most non-cis people are in fiction even though like, the portrayal was not offensive or clearly wrong. And how you get things like in Arcane the implications of say Viktor being transcoded in various ways but had the narrative made him explicitly trans, the narrative would have inevitably diminished him, and it's not just because the show has worldwide release. It's just... frustrating. I don't know.

I should write harder, I should post about the last two books I read, etc. I think it is easy to get lost in crafting because it's so much easier than the other things I do on my brain. But the other stuff is worth doing BECAUSE it's hard, etc.

I am not making this up.

Summary for people who aren't from the US or have been living here under a rock:

1. A gunman shot up Sandy Hook elementary school in 2012
   
2. Alex Jones, creator of conspiracy "news" company InfoWars, continuously pushed the conspiracy that the dead children in the shooting were actually "crisis actors" and the whole thing was staged as an excuse to take guns away from US citizens
   
3. (Please note that absolutely nothing has happened to US gun rights since Sandy Hook)
   
4. Families of those murdered in the shooting sue InfoWars into bankruptcy
   
5. The Onion, a satirical newspaper, along with the families of those murdered, purchase InfoWars along with its assets like mailing lists and social media accounts, with the intent of turning it into a satirical website lampooning the original owner
   

I guess we'll see how this one plays out, but maybe there's some glimmer of justice still in the world.

Apparently the owners of GouletPens are core founding members of an Evangelical church offshoot along with all that entails. This along with the recent Lamy/Harry Potter collaboration makes it not feel great to be a trans person into fountain pens right now.

Though, to be honest, the Lamy is more disappointing, because Gouletpens doesn't really offer much besides social media content that I don't pay attention to with purchases, and in the United States that fountain pens bring out all sorts of political weirdos is unsurprising, especially if you've ever been to pen conventions, though in my experience they tend to be more hard libertarian types than Evangelicals.

The thing is that there are definitely a few Lamys that I like, and because Barnes and Noble and Dick Blick sell Lamys around here their cartridges are probably the easiest to find locally. Even though I don't want to give the TERF lady from TERF island money, I'm not sure how much Lamy actually knows or cares about her. Lamy doesn't seem to know or understand too much about their foreign/angosphere market, as demonstrated by the Lamy Dark Lilac ink kerfuffle a little while back. I wonder if it's a little like how Hobonichi had a Michael Jackson collaboration a few years back and they didn't anticipate the backlash against it in the international market. However, I really doubt that the Harry Potter pens will be withdrawn. Ugh.