December Days 2023 #19: Things I No Longer Believe Fully: I'm Not Good At Managing Resources

[The December Days theme this year is "Things I Used To Fully Believe About Myself." Some of these things might be familiar, some of them might be things you still believe about yourself, and some of them may be painful and traumatic for you based on your own beliefs and memories. The nice thing about text is that you can step away from it at any point and I won't know.]

#19: "I'm Not Good At Managing Resources."

I mean, that's kind of true in a flippant way, in that I tend to be the person who hoards all of the rare items and bonuses in various games in case I need them in some other situation, even when the situation that I'm currently in is that I'm fighting the hidden superboss that's specifically there to be an extremely difficult fight that requires not just tactical knowledge, but that would be made much easier through the application of some of those rare items and bonuses. After all, the game designers put them there to be used, right? That's what they're supposed to be there for, and yet, here I am, going, "No, no, I can manage this without needing these things. I might need them in some other situation. Instead, I can use some of this thing that I have a full stack of and therefore don't need to worry about whether I can get more of them."

( What I actually mean by this means going back and talking yet again about my bad relationship )

Managing resources sometimes does trigger some of the issues where I start putting my own needs last or when I put off things that would be nice and that I would enjoy because I don't think there's as much resource available as there actually is. Or because I feel like I haven't earned any such luxury or enjoyment through superior moral virtue, Protestant Work Ethic, or any of the other things that are deployed as a way of enforcing denial or trying to make someone feel guilty about taking a small amount of enjoyment for themselves instead of always keeping their eyes heavenward, or focused on the grindstone, or similar things. It often takes someone else telling me to go get the thing and reminding me of all the research and thoughts that I've put into it, and that now is likely a great time for it, since it's on sale. It's easier to do this for others, because others' happiness is important to me, but I'm hoping that as I continue to feel like I have actual resources available to me that it will get easier to make some of those decisions about things for myself and for others without worrying that doing so is going to break the bank.

Late on the dump for this half-month - December 02023

A useful thing to start, a thing that may be familiar for us in all kinds of contexts, and a thing to be careful of in our communities: Contempt culture. If we buy our way into acceptance in a community with the currency of contempt, then we do a fair amount of excluding others from getting into the community because they don't want to use contempt as a currency, or because they're the targets of our contempt and they don't see us as safe.

As we are in the season of preparation for December festivals, a small point about how the advent calendar, which originated in religious tradition to get worshipers in the right frame of mind for the story of the miracle of Christ's birth has instead become a commercialized countdown calendar with small treats leading up to a big one on the 25th of December. Given how many people celebrate December 25th in this manner, though, it makes a perverse sort of sense.

Hard living and the complications of viral encephalitis caught up to Shane MacGowan, most famously of the Pogues, who merged much of the traditions of Irish music with as much punk as it would hold (which is a lot.)

The first woman appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States, Sandra Day O'Connor, died at 93 from complications of dementia. That we can still count how many women Justices there have been on one hand says a lot about progress and equality. We do have to say that she was appointed by Ronald Reagan as part of a campaign promise and that she was involved in the Bush v. Gore decision in 2000 (and all of the fallout and damage to the reputation of the Court as at least nominally nonpolitical).

Norman Lear, responsible for much of the ability of situation comedies to have biting commentary on current events, died at 101 years of age. You could likely say that we get Homer Simpson because we had Archie Bunker, and for that, we have to thank Norman Lear.

There is, in fact, a bridge too far even for some Republicans, as serial fabulist and campaign finance violator George Santos was expelled from the House of Representatives, following a damning report from the House Ethics committee detailing the many unethical actions Santos took while a Congresscritter as well as the ones he took leading up to his election as one. On top of the multiple federal indictments for wire fraud, money laundering, and other crimes. At which point we have to also point out that this was the third time that the House has tried to expel George Santos. And even with all of this material arrayed against him, 114 members of the House, including the entire Republican leadership, still voted to keep him in office and power.

( And from here, things get weirder )

Last for tonight, A complaint that CMSes and blog engines and the reverse chronological setup destroyed a significant part of the early, subject-organized World Wide Web. It elides some of the difficulties that are always involved in running your own site and updating your pages, it refuses to acknowledge that most people are not going to engage with the technical ept needed to do just that and will seek simpler solutions with sensible decisions made for them (thus, Geocities and LiveJournal and Movable Type and the like) because the thing they are interested in is not the technical aspects, but the social ones, and it believes that blogs simply killed off the collection of pages aspects of website, when reality suggests that blogs were added on to such things rather than replacing them wholesale. (At least until you get to Wordpress, which starts really integrating static pages and blogs in ways that don't always work. Websites of static pages can be made with Wordpress, and so can blogs, and there are very few places that I can think of that do both well with the platform.)

(Materials via adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)