The Male Hysteric

I'm realizing I'm actually very sad about Joann's going out of business. Yes I am very fortunate in that I am in an area with a few decent fabric stores -- but they're always out there and the small vintage stock and specialty quilt ones nearby might not have what you're looking for, and the big ones are a schlep. Ugh.

I started PT for my back yesterday and am starting to think that there should be an existential angst subscale for the pain scale they give you. Because just a number doesn't really cut it, maybe it's not bad but it makes you contemplate your existence too much is definitely an underconsidered problem, and feelings of impeding doom are considered medically significant so I think these are as well. (At least in my case this often means that it's nerve-related).

I think I'm getting sick of the internet, even though I'm still flipping through reddit etc. all the time. It's just not... that interesting? I wish it was interesting, I wish the good internet still existed, but I kind of doubt it ever really did. It feels a bit like a fever dream.

I finally deleted my old twitter account. I started it in October 2010 in anticipation of 2010's NaNoWriMo. Neither Twitter nor NaNoWriMo have turned out well fifteen years on, it seems like. Ugh.

Last Friday me and my partner ordered Chinese and I was exhausted and ordered chow mein and the thing that was delivered was... not chow mein. According to some messed up definitions of this city I live in it's apparently like chow mein, but the thing is that it was mostly soggy cabbage and onion with no noodles and they gave you a little packet of crunchy noodles and were like "here you go! it's chow mein!" I was so fucking angry I left it in the fridge and went to sleep like immediately.

Sunday rolls around, I really don't want to waste food. I prepare a packet of chapagetti noodles, add them to the frying pan along with the chow mein and some sesame oil and sprinkle some of the crunchy noodles on top. It was some of the best Chinese food I've had. And I was so fucking angry. Because the thing that was sent to me was like 80% of the way there to being a great meal and then it just didn't have the noodles. The noodles would have been so easy to add. But if I'm ordering Chinese food, I'm not going to be spending that much and then going to cook some more. So it's unlikely to be a dish I ever have again. I'm going to have to figure out how to make my own I guess.

In other news, on Saturday night, working on my neocities website, I was realizing that after a whole week of garbage, I was actually feeling somewhat calm for once. And I realized that the reason why was because... I do not access real social media on my laptop. I only access it on devices. So working on the neocities HTML meant that I was actually giving the thing I was learning my full attention and not thinking about the news at all. It was a very strange experience.

I don't know if I really think the future is on the small web, but in a way I want to believe. I joined smallweb to get into contact with other creators. There's also some burgeoning stuff going on on bluesky. People are getting into webrings and I was realizing I cannot add my blog to a webring because dreamwidth does not support javascript. Which is probably for the better, but disappointing nonetheless.

A someone who's always hated TikTok, I'm really upset they're banning it. It all seems incredibly ominous, really.

My partner helped me put together a small quilt sandwich today and it got me thinking.

For those who don't know, a quilt sandwich is the construction of the quilt before the actual quilting part. You have your quilt top (usually patchwork for most projects), the batting (fluffy stuff) and the quilt back (often a large, plain piece of fabric, but it could also be a patchwork if you want a double-sided one). So, it's fabric, fluffy stuff, and fabric, like a sandwich.

So, as far as we know, sandwiches have a definite invention in the Earl of Sandwich's household around 1762. However quilting is much older, and was widespread in Europe in the form of gambesons and otherwise much earlier.

So... what were quilt sandwiches called before there were sandwiches?

I was reading an article from 2022 Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media by Catherynne M. Valente and even if it's two years old at this point it still seems as relevant as ever. Bluesky is underway as the 'new' social media and it seems like some places on the fediverse are crashing.

The article talks a lot about LJ and the destruction of LJ that looms large in I'm sure a lot of DW users minds, considering that DW was born from LJ being gutted. It just makes me think, the thing about DreamWidth is that it's always felt a little like a bomb shelter, in that everyone wants it to be there but nobody wants to actually be here for long periods of time. For a long time, people threatened to move here whenever social media sites became unusable but very few people actually did, and when they did they tended not to stick around too much. Which is... sad? It seems like it could be a real thriving social media site like old LJ, but it just doesn't have the new-shiny that corporate can buy now to make it slick and immediately appealing.

This and other things have made me continue to think about my neocities website, but also aside from that I've been going even MORE low-tech and paying more attention to my commonplace book/zibaldone. I think once I've practiced enough I might do a write-up on these types of books on the neocities site along with some useful links because they are having a bit of a moment now, and maybe that moment should stay, because the internet is so friggin fickle.

So, because I’ve been putting off so much, and there are some thematic similarities between the two, these are going to go together. For both of them, the bulk of the novel is about women with significant mental/learning disabilities as unreliable narrators carving out their own way.

Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir of course is the 9th of the novels I read this year and is probably the easiest read of the series so far, though reading it and getting involved with the fandom on Reddit and all has made me realize that I really, really need to reread these books, that they are much denser than I originally thought. I do think that on my first reading/viewing I am mostly floating along based on vibes and then the next reading I start to get something out of it, and then probably on the third I really get it, which is a lot to ask for with such large books. I think I might start on the audio of these books, because I’ve heard the audio version is really good.

I also finally got around to reading the short stories at the end of all three and really liked them, and “The Uninvited Guest” at the end of Nona is really really good, though it doesn’t make sense until you’re nearly all the way through with Nona. It makes me want a stage play of Gideon the Ninth, it would probably make an incredible one.



Next, Poor Things by Alasdair Gray. I was kind of avoiding it because people were telling me “oh it’s like a feminist Frankenstein about women’s sexuality” as if that is not the most offputting description for me of any book ever. I went into it feeling like it was an obligation for me to read it but what nobody actually got around to telling me was that it’s actually funny. It’s a fun satire if you enjoy Victorian literature and has a lot of layers of unreliable narrators, so yes I’d recommend it. In fact the layered onion-like narrative is one of the most Frankenstein-like part of the book, which is interesting because this is the first part of the story that gets dropped in nearly every adaptation, so that was a pleasant surprise. It really is a totally different story, though. Don’t go into it expecting Frankenstein.



What’s next for me? Well, I’m still reading novels. In fact I put a whole bunch of novels on hold at the library, thinking that there would be several months of wait in between them like their estimation and most of them suddenly became due immediately, so I will have to work on that, I guess (I have no idea how Libby’s hold system works, it is very mysterious). With Arcane S2 out, there’s also probably going to be a bunch of interesting fanfiction that I’ll be diving into and may link my favorites. Who knows, I may write some of my own. I’ll probably post about the other books I’m reading, and I think next year I’ll bump up the number to 12.

So I am doing things little by little to stay sane. I've started I guess a zine library now by trying to keep all my zines in one place, a magazine holder on my bookshelf



The big copies are Better Homes And Dykes if you're interested, though I got these locally. I was intending to do this for a while and finally got my ass up to do it because I went to the library to get some seeds and they were giving out some free zines with the seeds and I picked up this one.



I honestly did not know that preserving tomato seeds was so involved.

Other than that -- I printed out more digital knitting patterns to add to the binder, and am actually backing up my computer after way too goddamn long without a backup. Take this as a sign to back up your fucking computer.

When I was little, I was obsessed with Sanrio. I mean I still love Sanrio but I used to, too. But much of the merchandise you find these days is pretty different than what you would find back in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Sanrio has two different product schemes, products they produce themselves versus selling the license to other retailers to produce goods with their characters. When I was a bit older I noticed they started selling Hello Kitty items at Target and Hot Topic and I thought they were fake, though really it's strange that I thought that way because it would be difficult for these large retailers to sell obvious bootlegs. However I was right that the quality of the merchandise is noticeably different, in that items that are licensed to Target, Hot Topic, and now Miniso, Joytop, Alibaba, etc seem to be lower quality than items produced directly from Sanrio... and also that at least where I am in the United States, items directly from Sanrio are somehow even more difficult to find than they were twenty years ago.

One of the trends of this licensing scheme has been to match up characters with specific colors in a way that the original merchandise did not and tends not to do. In this scheme, Hello Kitty is red/pink, My Melody is pink, Kuromi is purple, Cinnamoroll is blue, Pochacco is green, and Pompompurin is yellow. It used to be that it wasn't difficult to find, say, blue Hello Kitty merchandise, but finding a licensed blue Hello Kitty item is pretty much impossible and it's almost all licensed merchandise. Anyway, since 2015, Cinnamoroll has been in the top 3 of Sanrio's character rankings, and has won first 7 of those years, and it makes me wonder, is it because he's wildly popular and adorable, or... is it because everyone likes blue? He's cute, don't get me wrong, but also, he's not really playing fair if he's taken over the entire color blue, is he?

I dunno. I think my favorite is Chococat, probably because when I was like 8 years old and I first decided I was going to write a novel I started in a Chococat notebook. What's interesting about him though is that while he's consistently ranked highly in Western countries (#3 in the US!), he does poorly elsewhere, ranking 46 overall. I'm not really sure why that is? Possibly in the West a black cat character is seen as edgier and therefore more interesting, or maybe in Eastern countries they think he's just a Jiji knockoff.

For some reason I keep being recommended the digital minimalism sub on Reddit and a lot of it is people 10-15 years younger than me complaining that social media is ruining their life. And it kind of makes me think, because so much of the blame is on social media when it seems like a lot of their problem is that it is constantly accessible on a phone. And then I realize that these young people probably do not remember a time when social media existed, but you had to physically be at a computer to use it, and how different of an experience that was, or when social media was slow, and it was only really worth it to check updates once or twice a day, if that.

I dunno, I don't really have any deep thoughts here I guess.