silveradept | Entries tagged with december days: your requests

[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.]

I was thinking again, which is always dangerous, but I was perusing other people's December lists to see if there were any good questions that I could pluck for myself to fill space with and I saw someone asking about cooking and relating to cooking. For me, I tend to summarize my skills as "put a recipe in front of me and I can produce something that resembles what the recipe wants to produce" (even if I might have an anxiety about whether it's going to turn out well, especially if this is the first time I've gone through the recipe process). I'm not particularly skilled at kitchen improvisation, or that remarkable skill of being able to look at a basket of ingredients and say, "that looks like [protein] in the style of [cuisine], guest-starring [greens! vegetables! sauces!], and it'll take us about an hour to make completely." Maybe with more recipe experience, I'll be able to do that better, but for now, I don't know that I could do it into something that will be delicious.

There's a slightly bigger question hiding behind the one about cooking, for me, because of the way that I would phrase the answer to the question. I'd say "I can follow a recipe, but I'm not particularly good at cooking," because the act of improvisation and creation has become cooking, while following a recipe is not being creative, it's following directions. It's the equivalent of saying "Well, I can trace a drawing pretty well, but I'm not any good at art" or "I can create fanfic, but I'm not any good at writing." Because there's become an assumption, sometimes an insistence, that the ability to create ex nihilo, "totally original", is the thing that actually counts as a creative endeavor. So the question that I should probably be required to answer is:

What are you good at?

And I will probably say "not much, you?" because of the assumption that creating from whole cloth, without guide, without recipe, without tracing, (possibly without references, but really, that's stretching it a bit past too far) is the sign that someone is good at something, is truly creative, and that anything else is not as valid, because it's copying or derivative or imitation or just following directions.

( Okay, That's Going To Need An Explanation )

So, if there were something I was going to say that I am good at, the most honest answer I have is "I'm good at following directions." Which is also probably the most misleading answer that I can give to that question, too, because without the context above, that answer doesn't sound like it would amount to anything at all. Although I think it might make some of the scientists and engineers laugh, because they probably understand that in so many things in life, and especially in an information profession like mine, you charge someone one dollar for the chalk mark, and nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine dollars for knowing where to put it and how hard to hit the thing once you've drawn the mark.

Current Mood: happy
Current Music: Daft Punk - Instant Crush

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.

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: Pomme - Anxiété

[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.

Current Mood: busy
Current Music: Igor Stravinsky - The Firebird

What hobby of yours is your favorite?

I have often considered myself kind of boring and without hobbies, honestly. Which isn't true if you say "hobby" means "anything you don't make money from that you do." It just happens to be that a lot of the things I do as hobbies either aren't things that produce tangible things, like playing video games, or don't usually meet the unspoken definition of a hobby as the shirt of thing that you might want or need to collect specialized tools and materials for our spend money upon to improve it, like writing fic. I think there's also a second unspoken criterion for hobbies that they are or can be, to one degree or another, social activities, so if I took up trying to get really good at shooting pool or darts, those would be hobbies. I am an amateur or hobbyist musician, since I play an instrument for a community organization for no pay and just Suu that I keep in some sort of practice, which this pandemic has really put a crimp in that, even as I have been recording parts for that group. Which mostly reconfirms to me that I'm not going to be anything more than an amateur.

I suppose you could call it a hobby of mine to try and make old technology last as long as it can, often through the application of scripts and custom software installations and homebrew applications to those devices after they have fallen out of their manufacturer support periods. It doesn't feel like a hobby because I'm not writing the code that allows for these things to happen, just using my search skills to find what has already been done and following the directions from there (and then using some troubleshooting skills to occasionally try to find a way to fix things if they went wrong or there's a PEBKAC error thrown in the process). I would have said that building my own computers was my favorite hobby in years past, but I didn't build any of them myself, instead letting others do it or purchasing a box already assembled that otherwise just needed a hard drive dropped into it and everything going well from there. Or using single board computers with everything already integrated, so there's nothing to assemble but the case and the optional fan and / or heatsinks.

All the same, I have also done my best to keep those older pieces of technology living and working well past the point where they might have otherwise been put out to pasture or replaced with newer models . Such that, with a decent router, I can stream some amount of games over the local network to an original Raspberry Pi model B. Or stream media over the network, so long as the thing itself isn't trying to cram more bits than the Pi can handle. Or use an old Playstation 3 controller on that Pi to play Atari and Super Nintendo type games. It's not quite retro computing, in the sense of trying to get old systems rebuilt and booting again, on as original of hardware as possible, or the kind of restoration and archival work that places like the Living Computer Museum does, it's not quite being an inner cheapskate, but the idea that a technology should be useful from manufacture to the point where it will no longer physically start up. Planned obsolescence aggravates me greatly, and the way in which device manufacturers build products that will last longer than they plan on supporting them and warranting them, and assume that you'll want to swap your current one out for the next generation when your warranty period is up seems like the sort of thing guaranteed to generate a whole lot of electronics waste and toxic waste or other chemical exposures for the people who work to mine the metals used or to manufacture the finished product.

So, yeah, actually, I think my favorite hobby is trying to prolong the useful life of devices in one way or another. It's net some good results, like media playback on small packages, functional devices with more modern operating systems, and the ability to use multiple tools to multitask with, such that no one tool is trying ti take on too much burden by itself. Frankly, it's pretty cool, especially when it all works out and there's something new to use.

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: Nobuo Uematsu - Battle With The Four Friends

HTHRFLWRS offered some questions about gender for cis people to take a half hour and think about, because that means spending half an hour more than society thinks a person should take to look at their gender identity (especially if they're cis). Many of those questions are interesting for people who haven't questioned or thought about their identity at any point in their lives. I really think they would be good ones for cis men, because at least to some degree, because popular opinion has placed "happy blissful religious and submissive housewife and mother" and "career-focused, pants-wearing, no time for children or men feminist" on opposite ends of the gender presentation spectrum, women are often asked to think at least a little bit about their gender identity and presentation and how they want to navigate the world. And if masculinity was a lot less interested in retaining and reifying toxic behavior and made room for a bigger range of possible behaviors that would fall under the umbrella, rather than pushing nearly almost always to the fringe and policing each other's behaviors to stay on that fringe, I feel like a lot more men would be more comfortable in themselves and be less likely to engage in terrible behaviors.

So, here's one of the questions from that list

How do I visualize gender? What does my gender, in specific, look like?

( In its most compact form, call it 1-0. )

There's a certain amount of irony in definiting yourself to be "not that," because the thing that I'm "not that"-ing defines itself on a shifting platform of "not that" itself, where their "not that" is something that's been decided to be a womanly thing. Which changes all the time and in differing circumstances. But it's the best that I've got for trying to nail down what I am because most of the discourse that exists in non-binary space (right from the name) is that being enby is that you're not at either of the endpoints described as "man" or "woman". There are some specifically defined identities and presentations, and some gradations that talk about presentation in regard to how close they are to "man," "woman," "absolutely," and "no thanks," but there's not really a robust discourse that I've seen where people start coining identities for themselves or discussing other axes to talk about identity and presentation about that aren't related to the binary. (On the obverse of that, of course, the ten thousand things can cause jam choice problems, and there's still the likelihood that even with ten thousand possibilities to choose from, none of them actually fit.) Maybe I'm not hanging out in the right spaces.

Current Mood: bouncy
Current Music: Nobuo Uematsu - As I Feel, You Feel

[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.]

Today's been a day of vacation and rest and reading through the Yuletide archive - I've made it somewhere into C so far, which is not terrible, although as with all Yuletides, I feel like I'm never goig to actually get through all of the ones that I want to read, because there's other things that I want to do with my time, like play games and read other things and do writing, like this. After this gets done, then I'm going to do the Snowflake Challenge in January, and by then, exchange season is up and running (not that it really stops, but a lot of exchanges try not to get across from Yuletide), and I might have another Fandom Trumps Hate bid to work on, and there's always the possibility that I might have an idea solely from my own head instead of writing to the prompt and specifications that I like doing for exchange fic. I try to keep myself busy with all sorts of things, even though that really only increases my pile of stuff that I want to do with the limited time that I have to do it with.

And, y'know, we're coming up on the end of this year, one that promises to be memorable and historic, and I'm sort of torn between the two ideas that suggested this year was the year that everyone was going to be able to get everything done, because we weren't going places and most of us, anyway, had Internet connections and an entire curriculum in Youtube or other tutorial videos so that we could finally start and complete that project that we'd been claiming we were going to get to once we had time, even if it was never going to be something that we did because there were lots of other things that were going to be prioritized over that new skill we kept thinking we were going to pick up, and the idea that says that the fact that you're alive is a miracle, and any further accomplisments that you made on top of surviving this year is gravy that you can be proud of as well.

Is this the year you did it all, or the year that you survived and are happy about that by itself?

( The answer is not either/or, of course )

So this was a year where, at least so far, we've survived it. And, on top of survival, which was pretty damn hard by itself, we kept to the schedule we've already established, and got all of our works in on time, including some new ones that got worked into the schedule. We got more confident about being able to do programming where we don't have all the answers, and more okay with the idea that "ish" is an okay result for things that can be ishy.

(Yes, I'm still worried that when I need to be able to take a criticism well and change, I'm going to end up making it about myself in unhelpful ways instead of being able to make the necessary changes and then go off and have whatever recriminations or feelings I need to have about it away from the people who will be affected by my having those feelings in public. But, y'know, practice the small things so that you can hopefull do it right when the big ones happen.)

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Music: Daft Punk - Tron: Legacy - C.L.U.

Where's Your Christmas Spirit?

To try and answer that question, I'm going to turn to other people's frameworks and writings to try and make sense of the question. In 02019,

siderea presented an idea that there are several different things that all claim the name of Christmas, but are significantly distinct from each other. The title of the post is "Why Christmas Hurts," and then goes forward to explain that these differing definitions of Christmas produce different expectations of what Christmas is, and if the Christmas that's happening around you or to you or that you are trying to make happen doesn't line up with those expectations, often through no fault of your own, then Christmas hurts, and you might wonder if there's something broken with you for not enjoying the holiday season like everyone else around you seems to be doing.

This is a duck problem, first and foremost. What you are seeing that looks like serene gliding on top of everything is the result of frantic paddling and churning underneath. The only difference is that you know how much you are paddling, but you can't see how much everyone else is, and so based on observations, it looks like the only person having a problem with all of this is you. Unfortunately, when we get to see portrayals of all of the work and stress that goes into making a Christmas, or any other gathering, it's either played for laughs (look at the person doing so much work for an audience that clearly isn't interested in it, watch the over-working person have things go wrong for them in comedic ways until they learn to let go enough to enjoy what's happening instead of trying to make it perfect) or for drama (the person who is trying to make this situation work is the only sane person in a room full of people who will snipe, attack, and otherwise try to make each other's existence miserable while they are together, until the only person trying to get everyone to get along explodes in a big ball of emotion, and because everybody feels bad at harshing the squee of the one person who enjoys this, they all make a bigger effort to get along and/or finally resolve the petty grudges (and the bigger ones) that have been holding them apart and making them miserable around each other), and rarely do we see situations where someone is putting in a lot of effort to do something that will go over well for an appreciative audience, even if they are clueless about just how much work goes into this, or an audience that knows how much work goes into it and tries to relieve some of that stress or otherwise be helpful so that the person who keeps taking on the responsibility doesn't burn themselves out. We don't have many healthy portrayals of family gatherings, where things go perfectly fine, but there doesn't have to be a spotless house and a pristine set of decorations and everything perfect and in its place. Or a gathering where a couple of people start getting on each other's nerves, but they figure out how to settle things or they make good decisions for themselves to try and stay away from each other as much as possible.

( A much longer explanation follows )

So, I suppose the answer to the question is that the Christmas Spirit is either looking for things that I'm choosing not to participate in or that it's asking too much of me of the things I do want to participate in. I had a perfectly good Midwinter already, and I've indulged in the parts of Christmas that I want to participate in, and if that doesn't meet someone's else's idea of what Christmas is and what I "should" be doing to celebrate it, well, tough shit.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go back to reading the Yuletide archive.

Current Mood: bitchy
Current Music: Dream Theater - About To Crash (Reprise)

If you could ask a wish-granter for a sequel to any piece of media, which one would you choose, and what should it look like? Or would you let yourself be surprised?

( Let's talk about why someone might want a sequel )

So, yes, it's mostly "works that could use a sequel are generally ones where the fandom (or me) feel like there's something amiss, or done wrong, or the person in charge turned out to be terrible," and very occasionally something where it would be fun to bring them forward and have them do the same sorts of things, but updated for the environment they are in. (Because, come on, if DuckTales did this well, surely they can bring back Darkwing Duck and update it for the current times.)

Current Mood: awake
Current Music: Gustav Host - The Plants - II: Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity

sonia linked to a list of all the available Crayola colors in 2017 along with a list of retired crayons and colors from Crayola and then asks a simple question

What's your favorite Crayola color?

I have to wonder what kind of work it must be to work in a place where you have to keep coming up with names for different shades of colors. Because it's not just the Crayola folks who have to come up with names. There's Pantone and other crayon manufacturers, and now I wonder whether certain crayon names are trademarked or otherwise unusable by other companies, except for specific colors that are too generic to be trademarked, and whether it's the formulation for the color that's the trademarked thing or the specific shade or whether none of those things can be protected at all and they're just relying on being good quality things with cute names to sell crayons, or if they feel there's something about the way their crayons are made, which might be superior colors to any others, or their formulation is the best for even-ness of color distribution. It's capitalism, we're used to people making big deals out of splitting tiny differences between things.

The crayon site also has an approximate hex code of the crayon, as well as both a big chart listing of everything that might show up in a really big box, as well as what the colors are in the various sized Crayola boxes, so that someone has an idea of how big a box they would have to buy to get the crayon that they want to have. (Assuming they don't decide to buy a box of crayons solely of the color or colors they want.) Of course, things on a screen and things that get printed have different colors, unless your monitor is really very specifically calibrated, so the color that looks good on the website might not look as good when applied by an actual crayon, and it's always possible that the crayon might be applied in such a way as to try and make the coloration lighter or darker with pressure and stroke.

But just by name, there are some good ones. "Macaroni and Cheese" and "Tumbleweed" start appearing in the 48 box, when some of the crayons stop being named with the color they're supposed to be somewhere close to and start being named for the moods or ideas they're trying to evoke. There's also the pretty pun "Mauvelous" in that box's new crayons. Then you get up to the 64 box and have to contend with "Tickle Me Pink" and "Bittersweet" and then there's the really fun ones in the 96 box, "Jazzberry Jam," "Razzmatazz," and "Inch Worm," before the 128 box gives us "Outer Space," "Fuzzy Wuzzy Brown," and "Shadow." Those are some very specific evocations there! I didn't think anyone would want to try and capture the ink of Outer Space or try to find the appropriate color that matches a shadow (or, possibly even, The Shadow, but only he knows that.)

I'm kind of surprised to see that while there's gold, silver, copper, and a brass, there's no bronze, Of course, I also think that metallic shades are really difficult to do in any sort of crayon, pencil, or marker, and especially trying to make a silver that isn't a misnamed grey. An actual silver in crayons is always going to be my favorite color, but there are so few times in my life where I've seen it that I feel like I need to have a backup color so that I have something that doesn't sound like I'm being some sort of snob about crayons. (Which, y'know, are generally a thing for children, and so aren't the sort of thing that anybody should be snobbish about. I'm sure, however, there are plenty of people who do fine art with crayons, who could very well be snobbish about it, all the same.) Usually, when I go back to a second choice, it's one of the blues, although really, what I want in a good color is a jewel tone, so my spectrum then shifts over to "carbuncle, ruby, amber, emerald, sapphire, amethyst" and so forth, so that's where I have to go looking for my favorite. But there aren't any of those names in the current crayon sets, either, and not all that many colors that fit that particular palette, either. This is suddenly a lot more difficult than it has any right to be.

Looking back through everything, though, at least on the screen, it looks like the color that I like the best is one of the deep purples that looks like it might be close to the jewel tones that I like, so I guess the answer to the question is that Plum's my favorite Crayola color, at least according to the hex codes on that site.

Current Mood: awake
Current Music: Daft Punk - Human After All

If you had to be an animal, what would you be?

( Either a cat or a dragon, I think. )

As with many things, the answer to this question is a bit of an "it depends," depending on how much latitude a person has when talking about "animal" and what's included. At least for now, though, with the current technology we have, I'm pretty okay with being a human, but I also know what my preferred options would be if I had to have my form changed, or if the ability to form change became easy and full of limitless possibility.

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: The Muppet Christmas Carol - Marley and Marley

[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.]

It's Solstice Day, at least observed, as the actual astronomical solstice wobbles back and forth between the 20th and 21st, but the upshot of this is that we can expect to have more light in the Northern Hemisphere until midsummer. (The downside is that it's the brightest day of the year in the Southern Hemisphere, so they can look forward to less light and heat until the other solstice.) The returning of the light is often accompanied by the idea of success at having made it to the darkest point of the year, of harvest having carried you this far and hopefully, it will carry you the rest of the way until it is time once again to plant and grow, and then reap.

One of those things that's always interesting about the Julian (and Gregorian) calendar and the names of the months in English is that we have months that are presumably named for gods (Janus, Mars, Maia, Juno,) named for emperors (Julius, Augustus) who, if I remember correctly, would be part of the cultus as gods or to ascend to them after their death, a couple of months named for things that happen in them (Februa, Aperio) and then, there's the counting months (seven, eight, nine, ten), which were displaced from their rightful places by one of those emperors themselves when he moved the dead months to the beginning of the year, instead of leaving them at the end. I kind of wonder why there weren't more gods elevated to the calendar. It's not like the Romans didn't have plenty to choose from. (And, you know, the days of the week in English have astrologically and god-related names, too, but it shows the Germanic in English. (Sun, Moon, Tiw, Woden, Thor, Frigga, Saturn,) In other Romance languages, they stay a little closer to Roman gods and goddesses, but also make room for Judaism and Christianity (Lord's Day, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Sabbath). I mean, knowing that the pre-Julian calendar was only ten months and that past the ones that had major festivals or were dedicated to specific gods, they just counted, that makes a certain amount of sense why the other months never picked up certain godly associations, but it's still weird that none of the attempts to name any of the other counting months after something else stuck. Even after they were displaced by the two emperor's names.

Which, in a very roundabout way, brings us to this Solstice-themed question:

What do you believe?

...that's a pretty wide-ranging question, there, floating blockquote. I mean, I could say things like I believe there's space for Jews to acknowledge and make songs about how Black Lives Matter (which I am indebted to both

gingicat for explaining that there is a backlash against this idea and the Maccabeats, who performed the song, responding to the criticisms they've received after posting the song for helping me gain at least a surface-level understanding as to why two groups with a history of being persecuted by the same hegemon would be at odds with each other on such a matter as this). You want to give that some scoping?

Ugh, fine. What gods do you make sacrifices to?

That's better.

( And here we talk about belief and culture and seeking )

So, I suppose the answers, such that they are, are that I make my sacrifices both to the gods and archetypes that I wish to cultivate the benefits of association with and those gods and archetypes that are part of the public ritual, without whom I would be unable to participate in the society at large. I guess that would be a perfectly comprehensible answer to a Roman, based on what I've seen and read, so that, I guess, brings it all back full-circle.

Current Mood: intimidated
Current Music: Depeche Mode - Personal Jesus

cosmolinguist has an interesting post titled "Accentism and the Standardized Language Ideology" which examines the underpinnings of people thinking things that may seem common sense to one group but are nonsensical to another, like Accentism (discrimination based on regional or dialectical speech patterns) is real, but so deeply embedded into a society that it can't be undone. To which Cosmo points out the research backs up the assertion that speaking with a regional accent or dialect results in discrimination, but the second part doesn't follow - it's not a deeply embedded thing in the culture that can't be unseated. Because, as it turns out, there's nothing intrinsic about any accent or dialect at all, and so any connotations that we make about a person's class, wealth, politeness, or any other aspect about them that's not "they have learned how to speak with this particular regional dialect", based on their accent or dialect are learned, not innate.

This leads to Cosmo mentioning James Milroy's paper on "standard language ideology", the idea that nation-states built themselves an identity around standardizing how the language sounds and what words and grammars it uses, and in so doing, have taken away the language from the native speakers to the point where there is such a thing as "bad grammar" or "low-class" or "high-class" accents and pronunciations. Because otherwise, it's spoken language, and whomever is speaking it is the authority on its usage. (This is a really wide-application point to pull out if someone is getting shirty about language usage, neologism, memery, the kids these days, language drift, language shift, or is being excessively pedantic and/or prescriptive about the use of the language.) So much of what is associated with a particular regional accent, or a dialect, or any other variation in language is ideologically loaded, but since we're taught that ideology in grammar school under the auspices of books and teachers and the assumption that there is such a thing as the right way to speak a language, those prejudices get ingrained as relating to language when they are instead relating to everything but language.

The most easy and immediate examples of accentism and things that are supposedly "common sense" are the long-standing insistence that African-American Vernacular English isn't real or acceptable English and that a strong Appalachian or Southern US accent indicates a lack of education, an unshakeable belief in Republican TurboJesus evangelical Christianity, and low economic status. AAVE is a dialect, and a perfectly-comprehensible one to anyone who knows how to speak it. It, and basically every other immigrant dialect, has been the subject of a systemic campaign to erase them in favor of what we usually call "broadcast" English in the States, the specific pronunciation and regional accent of a national newscaster, which is, generally speaking, a lower Great Lakes regional accent.

And I would like to think that all the people who are plugged in to watching the state of Georgia's Senate races in the States and wondering whether it will elect two Democrats and the closeness of how things turned out in much of the South would put the lie to the idea that everyone with a southern accent is a TurboJesus hick, but the struggle is not only real, it's still going on, in memes that talk about the "United States of Canada" versus "Jesusland", which are memes that I has seen around in 2000 and 2004 as well, with the election and re-election of the last Republican administrator. And as much as people try to design infographics that show how deeply intertwined voting is and the purple-y ness of it all and how much structural issues like gerrymandered districts and voter suppression laws and tactics determine the outcomes of elections in places with racists determined to uphold white supremacy, the belief that the South can be talked about monolithically persists. Because it is cognitively easier to believe the red and blue maps and to assume that the elected representatives of any given area actually reflect the viewpoints of the people that elected them, rather than having to stop and think about how everything is way more complex than that.

So, I suppose, this leads to an interesting question to ask.

What other ideas in society have a "well-known solution" that is "neat, plausible, and wrong"? (H.L. Mencken, emphasis mine)

( I thought about the gender pay gap, how about you? )

There are so many other things like these examples out there in the world, things that are incredibly arbitrary, like what counts as masculinity, who's part of being white and who's not, Western music theory and judgement on what is good music is based almost solely on the compositions and styles of white German men as extrapolated by on-the-page racists with specific, articulated, loud, racist intent and actions, and whether or not stocks go up or down based on what happens outside of the bubble that is Wall Street. All of these "standardized ideologies" work best, as Cosmo noted, when they're seen as immutable and irrefutable, things that just are, rather than things that were constructed, are being maintained, and can be deconstructed or changed into something else. One of my favorite fannish podcasts, Starship Therapise, talks about the "Westworld Construct" when they talk about the social contract, and that a significant amount of what we think of as always true is consensus, rather than having any sort of cosmic reality that persists when you stop believing in it. (The ep on the Westworld Construct links to this specific book called The Social Construction of Reality, so if you're looking for some light reading, here you are.) This has definitely been a year where we've seen a lot of incidents that remind us of the consensus nature of reality, even if most of those incidents reminded us how many people are willing to accept a sub-par reality instead of striving for one that's better for everyone.

Here's hoping that sooner, rather than later, we can deconstruct the harmful ideologies and put, in their place, ideologies that help everyone.

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: Jo Blankenburg - Lords of Arkhmar

bladespark posted something of a fannish roundup or introduction set of things, although they're focused on output created and the processes thereof than more general fannishness, if that makes sense. Sort of the obverse of the coin that focuses on the things that one might request or says are the things they look for in content and fannish content. My brain is helpfully reminding me that there's a tiered hierarchy of sorts in fandoms, and depending on whether your focus in the fandom is primarily curative or creative, who occupies the levels of the hierarchy changes. At least in the transformative fandom and their audience, though, there does seem to be a fence between the people who primarily consume and the people who also create. I'd like to believe, especially in these halcyon days of the Archive of Our Own and all sorts of other sites where transformative fandom flourishes, that it's a very short fence, but it's still there, at least in the ways that these questionnaires seem to focus either on "what do you like to consume" or "what do you like to produce", as if there isn't a giant glob of people in transformative fandom that do both at the same time. Maybe it's easier to separate out the aspects for more practical reasons that I'm not seeing right now. Anyway, onward to the list.

( The List! )

And there we are! There will be a longer AO3 output post around the end of the month with commentary on works, but here's a little glimpse inside how the process works (or doesn't.)

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Yoko Shimomura - Dive Into The Heart - Third Revival

Why are people so concerned at people being "deserving"?

( Here's your context, in what is probably a giant subtweet (sub-blog?). )

To summarize all of the above into something more compressed, the question of "deserving" and "undeserving" is a speck-plank problem, and it always says a lot more about the person who is asking the question than about the person the question is directed at. So my recommendation is to avoid it and try to set up and support situations where there are no judgments about "deserving", only people getting the help they need from a pool of resources large enough to provide for everyone that asks (and a few more that might be asking for the first time).

Current Mood: annoyed
Current Music: Yoko Shimomura - Tension Rising

azurelunatic's prompts for this month:

Saturnalia!

The first thing that comes to mind when hearing about this particular midwinter festival is a webcomic that would be lost to the world, were it not for the Internet Archive, fittingly named Saturnalia, which is NSFW for nudity, cartoon sex, Jack Chick type fundamentalists (as this is a parody of a Chick Tract), 1995 attitudes regarding paganism (from non-pagans and pagans alike), and also contains menstruation and the involvement of children in adult ritual practices, which I suspect is, again, meant to be a parody of the nativity play and the attitude of the fundamentalist Christians to get more converts by appealing to "family values" and wanting the children to come to church for various things, like a nativity play.

( So why is this so important? )

So, in the spirit of Saturnalia, a non-exhaustive list of things that are true but can only apparently be said when the social order has been uprooted, upheaved, and the people who are slaves and the downtrodden are able to speak freely (even if they don't have and never really had the attendant freedom to make their vision of the world a reality, because Saturnalia never lasts long enough.):

Black Lives Matter.

Defund The Police.

Libraries Have Never Been Neutral.

WEAR. A. GODSDAMNED. MASK.

Eat The Rich. Barring that, Tax The Rich To Their Last Million (At Least).

Correct Pronoun Usage Is Not Optional.

Accessibility Benefits Those Who Need It And Those Who Find It Convenient.

Charity Is Not A Substitute For A Social Safety Net.

There are a lot more of those statements, of course, so many that even a supercomputer would have to take processing time to iterate over the array of them and display them for all to see and understand. And the biggest worry many of the people who are downtrodden and struggling in these times is that when this period of disruption ends, when the vaccines have gone through and the businesses have reopened and people are busily trying to re-create the life that happened before, that when this long Saturnalia ends, people will collectively pretend it didn't happen, that there isn't any reason to change or to take lessons learned from inside the disruption and continue to apply them when outside of the disruption. That, much like there is already pressure to forgive, forget, and put the murderous administration that will end on 21 January 2021 behind us as a fever dream of the last four years, that everything that's been done to make life work during the pandemic will disappear as "too expensive," "too difficult," or "no longer necessary," despite how effective it is and how many people who have otherwise been shut out were able to participate, sometimes for the first time in their lives.

So, perhaps, if there is one thing to take from this year, from the last several years, it's the rallying cry of the festival, "Io Saturnalia!", which can be both the invocation of a triumph and the punctuation of a joke. Choose wisely and well who to cheer…and who to mock, for there is and will be ample opportunity for both.

Current Mood: rejuvenated
Current Music: Gustav Holst - The Planets - V: Saturn, The Bringer Of Old Age

oursin.
( Chivalry, Enlightenment, Shakespeare )

I probably enjoyed Shakespeare a little more uncritically then, but as this entire sweep of three shows, many of the things that I used to seek when I was younger and put things into my profile are things that I have come to a more nuanced, and hopefully mature, understanding of. Or at least, I'd like to believe that's true.

Current Mood: busy
Current Music: Lady Gaga - Applause

azurelunatic, and is a fine example of how one word can spawn a thousand more.

Marginalia?

Doodling in the margins! One fo my favorite things to see done in materials that aren't part of the library's collection. Officially-sanctioned marginalia are often illumination, and frankly, if you're a monk in the scriptorium charged with copying books repeatedly, it's probably best to have an outlet for the creative urges that are going to eventually want to come out during all of that copying. (Of course, at that time, books are sacred and valuable objects that need to be chained to their shelves, so there's also a certain amount of making them beautiful and ornate so the value of both text and pictures is apparent to the reader.)

( And off we go into the gutters )

Oh, and also, if you go looking at many examples of illumination and art in the books that these concepts are applied to, regarding the monks and the scriptoria and the eras when books are very valuable objects, you're going to see a lot of butts, breasts, and penises. because that's what was being drawn quite a bit of the time. There were a lot of people with knowledge of the time period making Python (Monty) Ltd. films, and that knowledge comes through in the film. A lot. Even if all the nudity in the film is limited to the animated segments. So expect a significant amount of nudity, violence, and sex in the artwork, the illumination, and the marginalia. In case that's a thing you need to be warned for.

Current Mood: aggravated
Current Music: Britney Spears - If You Seek Amy

What's the lie that capitalism has told you today?

Because his story, summarized, is "Sometimes I feel like a bad person because I go to work to support my ability to live and eat, rather than because I have any sort of passion for the work. I would love if they would take seriously the idea of 'I'd like to work less time, have fewer responsibilities, and make more money', but I'm supposed to want more work and responsibilities and not wanting them makes me feel bad and dull and lazy." And there are some good comments there that are reminders that there isn't such a thing as a company that deserves to have its interests put ahead of yours, and that not wanting more work and responsibilities only means that you're a bad worker in the eyes of capitalism, rather than being an intrinsically bad person. He also has some additional things that make him disposed to thinking of himself as un-valuable right from the get go. Others point out that there are a lot of other people who are doing their job because it puts food on the table and provides things that are necessary to survival, like health insurance. And some people who have fully embraced the concept of Slack, as posited by the Church of the Subgenius, doing the things they do to only the degree necessary and no more. (They may not be Subgenii, but the concept fits. I also feel like I might be daying myself slightly here, that I can reach for examples like the Discordians and the Church of the Subgenius.)

( Let me continue to natter on about this thing )

It's just hard to not catastrophize about how it's going to look to other people and how understanding they'll be about it. Logically, they'll be fine with it, illogically, they're all going to hate me about it, even though there's no evidence for that. Guess I believe at least some set of lies still, even if I know they're lies. Fucking brainweasels.

Current Mood: distressed
Current Music: Dream Theater - About To Crash

cosmolinguist:

Equity Over Equality

A concept that's been discussed a lot in the last couple years and brought into sharper focus this year, because of the Movement for Black Lives and other social justice causes and results being demanded to make the world better. Almost always related to a graphical series illustrating the concept of "equality" with showing the equal distribution of resources, which makes the least advantaged character still unable to surmount their challenge (most commonly being able to see over a fence to a baseball game) and the most advantaged person only more advantaged by the distribution of the resources in an equal manner. The comparative image, that of "equity," is where the least advantaged person has sufficient resources to surmount their obstacle, as does the moderately disadvantaged person, while the advantaged person that could already defeat the obstacle has no additional resources, because they don't actually need them to succeed. (So, there are more boxes underneath the person that needs them to see over the fence, some boxes underneath the other person that needs some boxes to see over the fences, and no boxes under the person who is already tall enough to see over the fence.) More recent versions of the image then add one more comparison, usually that of "liberation," where the obstacle itself has been removed (so there's no fence at all between the people and the baseball game). Most generally, the idea of "equity over equality" is that the best thing to do with resources that need distribution is to distribute the most to the places that need them the most so they can do the best work (which requires understanding your communities on more than a surface level or from a very high-level understanding) rather than distributing them evenly across the entire affected area. The problem is that the places with the most resources are also often the best at advocating for getting more resources, because they have the resources to spare to do advocacy work. When what we need is for them to provide the resources for others to use and to feel like it's a good thing for both sides. Preferably without the people with the resources getting paternalistic or taking the attitude that they're somehow "saving" the people who need the resources. Which would also require those people to take on the attitude that having the biggest bank account and being able to buy your way out of everything and avoid paying anything back to the community that supported and sustained you is the wrong idea when compared to being able to sustain and support everyone around you to a high standard of living and making sure everyone lives a happy and fulfilled life.

Equity over equality is also, hopefully, one of the guiding principles of my workplace, since the history of library services is one that prioritized equality and equal access and making sure that everyone could theoretically get all the resources that were available, even if in practice accessing library buildings and resources were only available to people of a certain level of privilege. (And still are, because there's a lot of resource concentration in the buildings, and in the pandemic, to access any library resources at all, you have to have a working Internet connection and a device that can connect to the same.) It's a slow process, which is maddening, because there's a lot of already done research about the ways that you can get organizations into better places, but also, it's slow because commitments like that need to be from the top to the bottom of the organization, and they need to be done well and correctly, neither of which is going to be served by undue haste. I'm trying to not be impatient, but there's still some low-hanging material, like permanent abolishment of fines, that could be done and that would have immediate beneficial effect, that's not happening. I suppose we'll know how committed everyone is to the practice as we go along.

Marching Bands

A staple of my required schooling and undergraduate university experience. Much less so now, because I am not participating in any such ensembles, but I certainly used them as an exercise program and as a way of making music in my life. The concept of the marching band goes back all the way to the fife and drum corps and other military bands and ensembles meant to help keep good time and order for the soldiers while they are on the move and while they are camped. Most militaries, of course, do not carry and entire band's worth of musicians along with them, given how fast they move these days, but there still may be buglers or others who help ensure schedules are kept and order maintained, and so the wind band and the marching wind band are now fairly exclusively the province of doing things for show, putting out formations and pictures on a field (usually a gridiron football field, but one of my friends from university mentioned that his marching band performed on an association football pitch as halftime entertainment) while playing music arranged for the composition of the band. There are varying levels of intensity and seriousness to the marching band experience, and most of the ones from my university were composed of non-music majors, because the possibility of damage to embrochure from the marching activities, especially the jarring lock-step, was nonzero and might otherwise cause a problem in a person who intended to make music for their livelihoods.

At the required schooling level, for my school, the marching band had a single show, music and movements, that we performed each week for the gridiron football crowd, with improvements and practice done in the intervening class time so as to make the show better each time it was performed. At or around the end of the gridiron football season, we would travel to one space along with many other bands, and perform the most polished version of the show for adjudication and rating at the festival. There were some good years where the rating was high, and there were less good years, including the one where I was drum major for the ensemble, which I was profoundly disappointed in and felt like was a personal failure. It probably wasn't a personal failure, as no one person can will an ensemble into being better than they are, so that was probably just a year where we didn't have the best musicians and marchers available to us. But it did make me disappointed in my leadership skills. (And also taught me some valuable lessons about where the actual ability to make decisions was in the ensemble, so that I can look back on this and recognize that I was trying to take seriously a role where I was more of a figurehead. Learning that lesson has also helped me recognize when actual power is being delegated and people are being seriously asked to do something and when someone's being asked to be a figurehead and to do something for the optics, rather than because an organization has any interest at all in implementing suggestions or sharing power.) There was also usually one show done in the gymnasium for all of the parents and boosters who were too busy working concessions to be able to see it on the field. Since we couldn't move in the gymnasium, some of the show had to be modified, but at least it was an indoors concert, so the warmth available from that was very much appreciated. And then, it would be done, and we would be on to concert band season.

At the university level, the marching band experience was essentially learning an entirely new marching show with formations and music in five days and performing it on the sixth day for the crowd at the gridiron football stadium. The show for before the game remained unchanged, but the halftime show would be different from week to week, and any extra time to learn a show was only because the game was away from the home stadium and the band was not traveling to the away space. I never could get the hang of memorizing the show fast enough to avoid having to compete for a spot in the ensemble at the end of the Friday rehearsal, where the challenged and the reserves would fight for the open spots in the block. This experience as well taught me about the potential for politics in decision-making, rather than those based on merit, as the system for scoring the challenges was never anything more than opaque, and requests for clarification from the people who had those scores were often incredibly unhelpful in making suggestions on where to improve. And that I spent a few weeks in the reserve as a fourth-year member, unable to figure out what I was doing wrong, until I finally asked to spend some time after and see what's happened. The person who stayed after made one comment about something that wasn't completely to specification, and from that point forward, I was able to get back into the marching group and stay there. Which, well, I suppose that was supposed to make me think that the competition was simply that intense that small things like that were the difference between people getting in and people staying out, and that I would have to practice yet harder at the task of perfecting things, but I was also a fourth-year person, and therefore it seemed less likely that the problem was something that had to do with my technique as it had to so with something else. But because there wasn't such a thing as getting a useful answer out of the people who were responsible for scoring, it's an equally plausible theory that what they wanted was for me to go consulting and asking for help about something as it was that there was something wrong with my technique. So I learned there, as well, both about music and musicality, about how to put a show together on one week, about traveling and performing and being able to say that I've been conducted by John Williams, yes that John Williams, playing a piece he arranged, but I also learned about how much I desire transparency in processes that could have problems or that might negatively affect me, a thing that I still desire from my organization, not that they have done a whole lot of anything toward the goal of greater transparency in decision-making at the administrative levels. (At least I have a competent manager at this point who believes that performance reviews should not have surprises in them.)

Marching band has been, on the whole, a good experience for me in my life, and in finding things out about myself that will serve me well later in life.

Sonic Screwdrivers

The tool of choice for The Doctor of Doctor Who, the sonic screwdriver is basically a device that allows the Doctor (or any other Time Lord, I suppose) to do whatever needs doing to keep the plot moving, rather than to have to find an appropriate tool to do such things has unlock doors, reprogram computers, perform diagnostics, or any other such things where the Doctor needs to do a simple action or gather some sort of information that would otherwise either take time or specialized equipment. It runs on Plot, mostly, although there are apparently some limitations to it, like it doesn't work at all on something that's completely made of wood. It seems to have been a thing in the 2005 series, starting with the Ninth Doctor, that when a Doctor regenerated into a new form, the sonic screwdriver took on a new form, although that didn't happen between Nine and Ten, possibly because the budget for the new series might not have been up to a new prop at the time. Christopher Eccleston only stayed on for one series, after all. So the blue-light sonic on Nine and Ten gave way to the green four-pronged sonic of Eleven, which changed to a more TARDIS-like one at Twelve, and then Thirteen reforged one out of Earth materials and a crystal not of Earth, and hat one looks much like the spoons that provided the steel for the casing. And, I suspect, much like the technologies that were considered simply standard for science fiction shows like Star Trek, there are people hard at work, who may have even produced prototypes, of objects that have the same form factor and maybe one of the many functions of the sonic. After all, we make technologies, and then we do our best to make them smaller until they're too small, at which point we aim for a good size and then start trying to stuff it full of features and other such things so that it becomes a true multi-tool in a compact form.

So those are the things that were on the interest list for this particular day. I'm still taking requests for questions on topics throughout the month, if there's something that interests you.

Current Mood: bouncy
Current Music: Nu Deco Ensemble - Fuse

What's in a name?

Because names are important. The concept of the True Name, and the associated power that it has, is an important concept in a lot of fantasy genre literature. Speak something's True Name, or something in the language of the true speech, and you have power over that thing, whether to command or control it or to reshape its very nature into something else. In setting with True Names, there's almost always a use name or a given name or some other name that's not the name that holds power. Earthsea, among other works, made good use of the fact that Ged had a true name and that it was important for him not to let too many people know about it.

In several of the Abrahamic traditions, the Name of the Being Represented By The Tetragrammaton is extremely powerful and not to be used lightly, carelessly, or at all. Euphemisms are substituted so that the person reading aloud does not speak the Name itself. (One of those euphemisms, is, in fact, The Name.) xkcd is very fond of the use of True Names causing things (admittedly, usually disasters) to happen, such as Gretchen McCulloch summoning a bear by speculating about what its True Name might be, Cueball summoning the actual sheeple that have been slumbering for ten thousand years, and an experiment involving two mirrors placed directly opposite each other and summoning Bloody Mary. With what might be the predictable results, were it known that this was the kind of world where this was not only possible, but replicable.

On the plane of humans, there are more than a few traditions where one takes on a name or uses a different name in the space that is supposed to be set apart from such mundanities. The rite of Confirmation in Roman Catholicism involves the candidates taking on a name, after research of associated saints, to invoke their aid as intercessors before The Being Represented By The Tetragrammaton and to hopefully also remember and take on the qualities that made their chosen saint beatified and canonized. The Bishop of Rome in that same tradition, upon ascension to the office, chooses a name for himself on much the same principles, possibly also as a sign to his flock as to what type of pontiff he intends to be. Several cultures of the world have a child with a child's name, one given to them, which they then discard upon reaching a certain age and assume to themselves their own name. (I forget where, but at least one thing I've read about such things suggests that the child's name is given to them through the time when they were most likely to perish, and a belief or tradition arose with it of giving the child a name so as to confuse or otherwise mislead or keep away the entities responsible for children dying until they were old enough to survive.)

Not all traditions of taking on a new name are necessarily ones with a religious aspect to them. Secret societies or other places that wish to hide or anonymize their conspirators might have them all take on different names so as not to give away the game if one of them is captured. Members of kink communities might take on different names or identities if it would be dangerous for them to be known as kinky in the communities where they are under the names that they present to that outside world.

And, as has been mentioned here and there, on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog. Or, for that matter, whether your fursona is a dog. Zuckerberg's Folly and other such places that insist on a "real name" policy aside, the Internet is built upon pseduonymity, such that a person gets known by their handle where they go, for better or for worse. And, as we have found out, if it ends up being worse, it's still quite possible to jettison the old handle, find some new places to hang out in, and try again with a different presentation to the world. (Even if it's much harder now, because of places that want to track you all over everywhere and the ease in which data can be crunched to make it harder for someone to be able to fully disappear from a place and then return to it later. Because, smartly, a lot of places have said that changing names to get around being banned is a bannable offense and more stringent measures will be put in place to stop it from happening again.)

But, eventually, we come back to the core of the question, and those moments in time where someone says "this name that I have used, I renounce it, and in its stead, I choose this name." Most commonly, people think of that with regard to marriage and divorce, and there are still some very gendered expectations around who will be changing their name in the partnership, even if we've managed to progress to the point where people will at least ask first as to whether someone is changing their name or not when they get married. And there's an acceptance of hyphenation of name, at least, so that any children raised in the partnership will bear the name of both partners. I don't want to say "more recently, we have seen the changing of name occur with people who aren't engaging in sealing or breaking the marriage contract," because that suggests a certain primacy of marriage that I want to avoid, and it also erases the reality that there are plenty of people who have been petitioning to change their names or who have engaged in either work or recreation under a different name than the one they were given at birth. The acting profession, for example, and the likelihood that a person doing acting has at least one other name that they work under, either for union work or for non-union work, so that they can continue to receive and consider work without having to violate any rules. Writers have noms de plume, sometimes to obscure what gender they should be perceived as, sometimes to make sure that all the urban fantasy stays under one name and the science thrillers stay under another. There are lots of reasons that people add a name to themselves, and we generally accept this as normal and valid, often because we don't necessarily know them by any other name than the one they've presented to us.

So that's not quite renouncing the name that came before, but having a proper alias or an also-known-as or other parts that can eventually be knit together into a whole of "all these names are the same bodily entity." And those things sort of rely on the idea that all the names are wanted ones. But there are a lot of situations where the names are not wanted, no longer wanted, and to keep using them is causing injury and pain. Our world is set up on the idea that a person does not get to choose their name, but has to fight for it, instead. Some places make the fight much easier, by accepting the names that people use for themselves, by learning how to say and use the name and its associated pronouns, by providing clear and easy pathways for them to change their name on documents, and by affirming their choices that move in the direction of a person being able to express their full, complete, and authentic selves. Others insist that children cannot possibly know anything as important to themselves as who they are, insist upon mountains of paperwork and fees to change documents, claim that changing the names on the published work would be a corruption of the integrity of their processes, and otherwise try to put as many roadblocks in the way and loudly proclaim that a person who would make such a transition is confused, deluded, or otherwise wrong and will come to accept what everyone else is telling them is true, rather than what they know is the truth with the conviction of their own heart. Deadnames are used as violence, to reject the reality in front of someone and insist that their way of seeing the world is truer, that others should bend their own identities to fit that perception, rather than assert their own truth and reality. What an act of arrogance, of profound rudeness, to insist that you know better than someone else does about who they are.

What goes into a name? An entire being, their experiences, their triumphs and sorrows, the pain they've received and the thought they've given. Because a chosen name is almost always done with thought and wanting to take on the aspects or the meanings of the name chosen. Someone's name, especially their chosen name, is telling you the kind of person they want to be. That's got to be important.

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Entries tagged with december days: your requests

December Days 2020 #31: Ending Where We Began

December Days 2020 #30: Taking Comfort

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

December Days 2020 #28: Wholesome Hobbies That Are Encouraged

December Days 2020 #27: A One Letter Off Error From A Male Goose

December Days 2020 #26: Achievement Hunter

December Days 2020 #25: Getting Into The Spirit Of Things

December Days 2020 #24: The Entry II: Selectric Bugaboo

December Days 2020 #23: One Wax Stick In A Box

December Days 2020 #22: And Now, For Something Fluffier

December Days 2020 #21: Practice For The Big Ones

December Days 2020 #20: Not Everything You See Or Hear Is Real

December Days 2020 #19: A Creative Process

December Days 2020 #18: TISHLILS(HIBPA): How To Subtweet In Blog Form

December Days 2020 #17: j0, 54turn41!4!

December Days 2020 #16: Revenge of the Rhubarb Game

December Days 2020 #15: Read Between The Lines

December Days 2020 #14: Self-Care Is Hard

December Days 2020 #13: The Return Of The Rhubarb Interests

December Days 2020 #12: To Be The Person You Always Are