The Male Hysteric

My dumb thought for the past couple days: what if I started working on my Neocities webpage again?

On one hand I think this is a sign that I need to get back on my medication, that I am in some way mentally unwell*… on the other hand, like what if I did it!

*I am sure there are normal** people who make Neocities websites but I think I have learned that this is also a “what if I ran off and abandoned my life to live off-grid in a cabin with a dog and two goats”-type fantasy but more accessible

**Not really “normal” per se, maybe no one on neocities is truly “normal” but their work on a personal site is perhaps not indicative of some sort of breakdown

So, I finally got around to reading These Violent Delights by Micah Neverember. I remember following him on Twitter back when it was still Twitter and I actually used the site and had put this on my to-read list for a while. Then I saw this book at the local Barnes & Noble and made an impulse purchase and it sat on my desk for a while longer before I finally got to it.

What to say about this book... I suppose this is what the kids call "Dark Academia" these days, right? About a third of the way through I realized that, as an old person, I am not easily invested in the emotional lives of seventeen-year-olds. I'm sorry but that's just the way it is, there needs to be something exceptional about them for me to get into it. There was definitely a turn around halfway through, that made them exceptional, at which point it was interesting and I started reading it at a more normal pace, but by God, it took me a while to get there, and I don't think it should have taken that long to get there given the book. Like maybe I am missing something but unlike, say, Gideon the Ninth which has a slow first half and then knocks down all the setup like dominoes if you can manage to get to that reward, I do not think there were enough dominoes to justify the bulk the first half. Though then again, I think I would have enjoyed it more if I were more easily invested in the romantic lives of 17 year olds, and for me, at least, them being gay in the 1970s did not make up for this.

I feel like I am maybe being harsh in this review. It is less that the book is bad but more that I feel like I did not get out of it what I wanted to. I guess it's more that it's not the book for me, which is a shame, because I really want to love dark, queer books by trans authors. I don't know.

I received my postcards to send to Dem voters in swing states a few days ago. I have been sick so I only got to starting them today, and managed to get 25 written. So, that's 1/8th of the way done for me!

If you're in the US and interested in sending postcards to voters to keep Trump out of office here's a link to the site Postcards to Swing States. If I recall correctly the minimum postcards to order is 200 and you have to pay for the postcard stamps but it's probably one of the easier things to do to help the election.

My birthday is coming up and I am thinking of getting a gift (either for myself or having someone else pitch in) of a new e-reader. I found my old kindle but the screen is scratched up and the file system is… very annoying, and I would need to take time to sort it out on a busted screen. I do have an iPad mini which should theoretically be a perfectly good e-reader, but. Like. I’m gonna be straight here. I love devices.

I am contemplating getting the Boox Palma, which is an Android-based ereader styled like a phone, but with e-ink. You would have access to Android apps so kindle AND Libby and whatever else would be easily accessible, along with music apps (which has long been a complaint of mine with my past e-readers, for some reason I feel like they should be able to play music) and podcasts and the like. It has a huge amount of battery life, too.

I guess the questions are… is it going to be competing with my phone to the point that my phone will “win” and I don’t use it, or will it being Android and nearly all my other devices being Apple mean that it feels locked out and inconvenient? I’m not sure. But I dunno. My birthday is real close…

TW: sex, sexual assault, sort of

So often discussion of erotic fiction and such online these days has such a puritanical bent. There is so much interrogation and assertion of ravishment fantasies (sometimes 'rape fantasies', but I prefer the other term) and their moral purity or use as a 'coping mechanism' for specific instances sexual assault to the point that it ends up with harassing specific authors to either talk about their sexual assaults or face ostracism for writing something 'immoral.'

The conventional wisdom is that ravishment fantasies are the product of a puritanical society that disallows sex for pleasure and therefore it must be 'taken' by force, which as a naive explanation makes sense until you realize on surveys and such that people who are more open about and in-touch with their sexuality are more likely to have ravishment fantasies. This might be reporting bias (someone more open about it is more likely to report it on a survey, though various techniques try for accuracy), but there's another explanation, in that ravishment fantasies are more about desires that would conventionally be considered 'pre-sexual' are being expressed through sexual ones... which makes more sense with the finding that people who had to go through serious medical procedures as children are more likely to be into masochism because of an early connection between care and pain.

This starts to make even more sense with common kinks of transgender people that tend to mix gendered desires with degradation, in force-feminization for transfemmes and omegaverse for transmascs, as these two things also become connected at a very young age for trans people. Everything is about sex except sex is about power, etc. I remember trying to describe ASMR to a friend who didn't get it, and after a while she admitted "it still sounds like a sex thing." But it was less that ASMR was a sex thing and that sex was an ASMR thing.

Taken this way ravishment as a fantasy becomes very difficult to pin down to something specific by the time one is interviewing about them -- things like receiving force + care are extremely early experiences and while one could possibly look at attachment styles and ravishment fantasies, even those could be modified significantly between birth and taking a survey as an undergrad, as how this data is usually collected.

I don't know, I'm not a psychologist.

Apparently there is another fanfic purge of unseemly naughty-type fics going on on Wattpad. However, this one is made worse because apparently what's happening this time is an AI tool is flagging and shadowbanning anything that could be potentially naughty until it is reviewed by a human, at which point it will either be allowed back up or purged. So it's like last time, only even MORE automated.

Anyway, back up your work if it's on Wattpad, I guess. From the AO3 reddit, AO3 users are concerned about an influx from Wattpad going against etiquette and flooding the place with placeholder fics, harassment over 'immoral' stories, etc., so if you're on AO3, be prepared for that, too.

Against my better judgement I went ahead and purchased one of the supernova rainbow titanium nitride bullet fisher space pens. I also got a purple ink cartridge for it -- so I will have a fully automated luxury gay space communism pen when it arrives, I think.



I have also put in a hold for a digital copy of at my library for The Future Is Analog by David Sax, so he might come and strangle me in my sleep for that, I suppose.

I feel like an insane person. I have like 70,000 words and I want to rewrite the entire book. Maybe with an outline this time.

I know I need to type everything up so I can use it later but still ahghghghghghg this is so painful.

I am not entirely up to date on all the details about what is going on with the NaNoWriMo organization implosion but I feel like it's part of a larger discussion on how much of how the internet "was" and a lot of programs that we would like to have are impossible because moderation is too difficult and the cost of moderation failure is far too high. 'Kid's spaces' on the internet don't really exist anymore because they attract bad actors by virtue of existing, and then venues that were originally for adults get flooded with children who are thrown to the wolves because the liability is limited there because it's for adults. I'm going to be honest it doesn't help that there's no margin for error because it gives incentive for places like NaNoWriMo to ignore problems or try to cover them up because if they were happening, that would make them bad people, etc.

People will talk a lot about "old internet" and forums and such with a rosy tint but the fact is that there was also a lot of bad things going on there, and we know now how difficult moderation is and the liability of recreating them would be damn high. So, I don't know. Kinda sucks, idk.

Novel #2 I finished like a week ago, and it was another novel I had started last year and not finished, The Golem of Brooklyn by Adam Mansbach.

It’s a book that I don’t think people would get unless they’re very tuned into Jewish culture, especially American Jewish culture, especially New York American Jewish culture. I was pretty lukewarm on the book, but I’m not sure if that’s really why —- I think it’s more that it’s a book that was extremely “of-the-moment” and it’s very clear that the moment has passed, so it’s a bit surreal looking at that moment frozen in amber. It might be less weird further in the future, or perhaps it will become even more strange. The past is a foreign country, after all.