December Days 2020 #29: The Best New Media In The World, Today.

[O hai. It's December Days time, and this year, I'm taking requests, since it's been a while and I have new people on the list and it's 2020, the year where everyone is both closer to and more distant from their friends and family. So if you have a thought you'd like me to talk about on one of these days, let me know and I'll work it into the schedule. That includes things like further asks about anything in a previous December Days tag, if you have any questions on that regard.]

We've almost made it to the end of this year, calendar-wise. There will be a lot of round-ups, and lists and all sorts of things where people summarize what they've watched, read, written, and the like. And I'll be indulging myself in the writing summary, once all of the anonymity periods have expired so I can claim them as my own. It'll just be what's on AO3, because that's the new stuff that people might be interested in. The Giving of Grief is basically another many tens of thousands of words toward the total count of what I've written this year, although I don't think of it as that, along with all of the roundup posts, and posting challenges like this one that I also don't figure into my wordcount for the year, because they're not fiction efforts, so, well, it's not that they don't count, strictly speaking, it's that a lot of them are things that either quote from the source material, or are commentary on links, or are things I've done for work, which, y'know, are still words, but they don't count because they're e-mails and documents and comments and all of that, too. I don't count my comments, certainly, as part of my words written for the year. So, I feel like there's a lot of words that I do write and don't count and that if I had someone who could count all of the words that I actually write in a year, across all the things that I do write, it would look really impressive, as a number. So, y'know, "what counts" is how we determine how many words happened this year. And I do a lot of "that doesn't count" on my words, because they're not for specific purposes that "count."

However, this question isn't about what I've done for writing, but instead what I've done for reading or viewing or otherwise experiencing.

What's your favorite media (of any sort) consumed this year?

And now I have to think about what I've actually consumed in this year, compared to any other year. This was the year the She-Ra and the Princesses of Power fandom were able to run up and down the corridors of the Internet declaring the absolute canonicity of Catradora (and how much the showrunner reveled in this) and that I was also able to enjoy a series where there wasn't fridging or Bury Your Gays after the declaration of explicit interests. I still have questions about Entrapta's treatment, which doesn't make it a favorite for me for this year, but it was on a good list for me.

I'm pretty sure I read through some graphic novels this year, because I had time to do so, so I went all the way through Making Friends. And I know I did the Midwinter Witch and a lot of Phoebe and her Unicorn, and a good amount of Iron Circus and Power and Magic Press materials, and quite a few of things that I ended up backing on Kickstarter, even though the pandemic completely messed with the ability of people to print books on the timeline that they were hoping for. The fact that they're not standing out doesn't mean they're not good, just that it was a pandemic year and I already have a loose association with when I watched and did things. I suspect it has some things to do with my neuroatypicality. And possibly also as a trauma defense mechanism, to let go of time stamps for things so that I didn't have to think about how long it has been or how long things were going on, or also that part where trauma makes it really hard to think about things in the long term or to have a time horizon past the immediate future.

In some very recent and seasonally appropriate media viewing, I have to say that I enjoyed quite thoroughly a three-episode program called "Rocket Around The Christmas Tree" which gave rocketry enthusiasts and professionals various challenges to perform, all of which had the same basic principle of strapping rockets to Christmas kitsch and trying to make them fly. Which, many of them did fly, even if not always according to plan. It was a delight to see some use gotten out of the various pieces of decoration that were tasked with being taken apart and modified into flight-capable objects. If you are someone who would enjoy seeing some revenge taken against Christmas-2b kinds of objects, and you have a subscription to Discovery Channel available to you, I would recommend watching it. Especially for some of the launches that go exactly according to plan.

I also did a little bit of game-playing in 2020, and finished some visual novels and played several rounds of Kind Words, and kept up my Pokemon Go habits, but I think I'm playing a lot more of older games than starting with new ones. A lot of my game-playing has either been on the Tabletop Simulator or using one of the various Jackbox Party Packs to play with friends and family, and those have been fun, mostly for the connecting and staying connected to other people aspects of the game. The "Blather Round" game in Party Pack 7 is good for people who like trying to construct useful clues from limited vocabulary available. And it's also hosted by Symphony Sanders, whose voice is nice to have in a thing that's different than the Night Vale network podcasts.

It's hard to think about a specific favorite when you've been trying to consume all the youtube videos and music and short film and creative output that keeps happening all across the year. There's been two clip shows of a comedy-variety show that's local to the Major Metroplitan Area one hop away from home, which have been great to watch and see, there's been watching David Tennant and Catherine Tate's Much Ado About Nothing, finally, and we got to see the isuas associated with Hamilton's soundtrack when it finally went up somewhere that it could be seen, rather than having to go see it live in a pandemic.

And, I don't know, maybe it's the recency bias working, or because the selections for music were really good ones for me, or maybe because it's just something that I really wanted and needed in this year, a year where there hasn't been live shows and movies being seen and making music in front of others in a live setting, but I got an absolute gem of a gift this year for the Disney Animated Movie exchange in pinch hit form, structured and narrated and put together like it was a third Fantasia movie, in such a way that I would love for fan-animators to put it together, but that would cost a lot of money and time to do for something that couldn't be sold under the Fantasia banner, because the House of Mouse is very jealous of their stuff and doesn't want to give anything up, ever, that they've claimed for themselves or bought for themselves. So it won't happen in any sort of fully-animated, voiced, and narrated form, but it was such a good gift that I wanted it to. So, the best thing that I've seen and listened to in media this year is Fantasia 2020, featuring selections from Holst, Rodrigo, Debussy, Stravinsky, Berlioz, Schubert, Satie, and Saint-Saëns. I hope that you get to enjoy it as much as I do.

December Days 2020 #30: Taking Comfort

[O hai. It's December Days time, and this year, I'm taking requests, since it's been a while and I have new people on the list and it's 2020, the year where everyone is both closer to and more distant from their friends and family. So if you have a thought you'd like me to talk about on one of these days, let me know and I'll work it into the schedule. That includes things like further asks about anything in a previous December Days tag, if you have any questions on that regard.]

Before I went on holiday, one of the last things I did for work was participate in a miniature convention themed around cozy things. Since this year has been absolutely full of upsetting and distressing things and necessary things that produced pushback and retaliation that was also upsetting and possibly infuriating, having time to do cozy things and to try and provide a space for teens to be able to set down the burdens of the world and engage in something that's not going to add to their stresses, and perhaps even to let them forget about the stresses of their lives for a little bit. I hope it did well enough that we'll be able to keep doing it on a regular basis, and possibly to expand it outward. (Then again, it always seems like as youth services folk, we're doing a lot of programming to try and get and keep people at the library and that the adult services folk are doing less. But that might be that I don't fully recognize everything that they're doing as the programming that it is. Or it might be that there's a tacit thought that programming for adults has to be a certain way, or for a certain audience, or that it all has to be outside material. I don't know, and it's getting away from the point.)

So, in this next-to-last day of 2020, it's probably worthwhile to indulge in a question that asks about what it is that we do that gets us through everything.

What comforts you? What do you do to de-stress?

I like both of these questions, because it allows for the room for someone to say "The understanding that there [is / isn't] anything beyond this incarnation is extremely comforting in these times." Which is not a thing that I would say, for either of those things, because I'm still in the phase of life where I'm stressing about everything and would feel like it was a travesty and that I had so much more to do if I ended up having a short life. And that I would be very unhappy about the mess I left behind for the other people in my house and life by dying. But I do like that someone could say that in these questions and still be within the brief.

One of the things that is eventually comforting, or perhaps a useful reality check, is that it's less likely I'm going to end up as the person who is The Asshole on Am I The Asshole. And that there are a lot of decisions that get made on a regular basis that are ones that I can see the bad potential consequences of. For as much as the Internet tends to like showcasing the worst of human behavior, interspersed with a few of the best of human behavior, it does make me go "Unless things have gone particularly, spectacularly wrong in my life, I am probably not going to do or say that." It helps the anxiety a little bit to be able to establish that there is a floor that people are managing to slide under, dig under, or stay so subterranean that they never know there's a floor they're tunneling under. (It doesn't help with the "you are doing terrible tings that you are unaware that you are doing, and nobody is telling you that you are doing those things" anxiety, but it does help me say "those are some choices that are being made.") And sometimes it's kind of nice that I'm not famous enough that everyone is hanging on my every word as a way of living their lives, or trying to find some imperfection, or needing to have a perfect public persona. If the worst I get for harassment is people telling me that I should abandon the very thing that makes sure I have job security, well-negotiated wages, and a disciplinary process that doesn't rely entirely on the caprice of a boss so that I can get a one-time bonus of one third of one paycheck, then I've done well for myself, even if I want those anti-union folks to get looooost. (But they won't, because my data is publicly published, with my salary, because being a public library employee makes you subject to public disclosure laws, apparently. And I have yet to figure out some way of being able to send them a letter that says "stop sending me your bullshit that I did not sign up for, or you will hear from my solicitor and I will make sure they punish you until you have no more money to continue your harassment with.")

Anyway, what do I actually do to de-stress myself? A lot of the time, I end up having to talk it out with people, whether it's in person or over the Internet, so thank you for being around when I need to talk about something. Or, rather, for reading and sometimes commenting when things spill over to the point where I have to talk semi-publicly about it. It can be entirely de-stressing to write up the incident report for a lot of things that happen in my life, because once it's down on paper and e-mailed away, that means that it's finished and has been documented and its done, and I can let go of it. Writing things up means not having to carry them around for any longer, in memory or otherwise, and it means passing things along to people who, even if you know they're not going to do anything more about it, you've at least let them know that this is a thing that needs closer attention.

Sometimes I de-stress by firing up a game where I don't have to worry about the possibility of things going against me and use that opportunity to crush pixels until I feel better. Sometimes I decide to go be by myself and watch programs until I've calmed down or de-stressed or otherwise been able to forget what's been going on enough to be able to come back to being a regular human being. It can be a little tricky, though, because I tend to want to vent my stresses and then I feel better, but it's not a good or healthy idea to vent myself around other people because I can end up causing issues for them by being who I am. Which is itself a difficult thing, because one of the things that the Unnamed Ex did was insist that I wasn't allowed to be upset. Never explicitly, of course, but she liked to escalate and she didn't think I was good at communication or at telling her what was going on in my life. And so I've developed a perception of myself that I get angry easily and that I don't have healthy ways of expressing those kinds of emotions, because the ways I usually do it are not good for others. At least the rest of my household is good at communicating that "this sort of thing treads perilously close to standing on my toes, please be aware" so that I can try to find some other way of de-stressing. And sometimes the best way of doing it is removing myself from the situation and doing something else until I calm down. (And there are some people who have told me that when they saw or heard me get upset about something, they knew it was a serious thing, because I'm apparently some sort of unflappable librarian. Which suggests mostly to me that they're not reading me correctly, and that might be my own fault, because I try not to react too much because I'm afraid of over-reacting or of saying something that gets me into trouble or that goes back through a gossip network. Because that's a thing that still happens, and I've already had enough terror about my career for a lifetime, thank you.

I could probably benefit from mindfulness exercises and actually devoting time and space to a regular mindfulness practice, at least as a way of being able to appropriately understand what level of reaction something should receive, but it doesn't currently rank high enough on my priorities list to get that time. Maybe if it came in concert with some other things to help me work with my brain chemistry, it would stick better as part of a package deal.

Sometimes the thing I need to do is have a cat perch on me and demand pets while I'm reading or watching and to remind me that, despite whatever I might think about myself as a human, she thinks I'm important enough in her life to yell at me when it's time to feed her and to sleep on me and to appear near me and ask for pets when I'm in a situation where I can use having a cat around to help de-stress. I know that people talk about the loyalty of a dog and how that can help them feel better about themselves. In my case, it's the cat that reminds me that I can succeed at being a human by making sure that there's food and water in the bowls and having a place for the cat in everything that I end up doing. Especially if I have a blanket on, because then she's got a place to curl up and nest, and that, apart from food, is apparently the best thing that I can do for her. And that, at least, is a little comforting, in that I can provide for a cat and, as best I can tell, I'm not messing it up so badly that she doesn't want to be with me.

There's only one more day left in 2020 after this one. Congratulations to all of us that make it over the finish line for this year.