wombat_socho

Weight went down, BG was normal, and BP improved a little bit. Sort of. 

So after a quick breakfast of flax muffin and coffee, I attacked the to-do list and got some of it done; found out the windshield is going to set me back $425, and fixing the A/C upwards of $400. That's just labor and shop supplies; I'll have to get the parts myself. So I guess I'll be staying home a lot this month and next month to save money for those things. 

I bagged up some garbage, ran the dishwasher (that wasn't on the list but it needed doing) and that was about as far as I got. I'll make the calls regarding a hotel for Son of Silvercon tomorrow, throw out some of these garbage bags, maybe pick up some fluids & flour and stuff. 

James Caan is dead; as I remarked to Martin, it's weird that I don't remember him from The Godfather (not even sure I saw it) but rather from Rollerball and Thief. 

I have a lot of friends who are unhappy, some who are being treated for depression, and it's made me think really hard about the difference between the two. I guess there's a technical difference: if you're unhappy to the point of wanting to kill yourself or for a really long period of time, and it makes life harder for you because of spoon shortages, a shrink will pronounce you as suffering from depression and hand you some pills. Sometimes the pills help. Sometimes they don't, and I've come to wonder if it's not just a matter of brain chemistry, it's a matter of trying to treat a normal human emotion like an illness.

I have some personal experience with this. Back when I was married and in the Army Reserve, I had a lot of stress in my life, to the point where one night after having a fight with the Mrs., I left my wallet and my pocket knife on the kitchen table and walked out into the night. I was thinking about killing myself, but eventually I concluded that suicide was a bad idea, quite aside from being Wrong with a capital W according to Catholic teaching, which I may be terrible at following in some respects, but I do believe it's Right. So after walking all over the west side of St. Paul and parts of Minneapolis, I came home and curled up in the back of the family K-car and went to sleep for about ten minutes before my wife, who was in a complete panic, came out, woke me up, and talked me into going down to the county hospital so they could shrink my head. The doc eventually prescribed desipramine, which turned me into a turnip for a few hours, and then changed that to nortryptiline. That didn't work either. I was still very unhappy, plus I developed a ravenous appetite that did my waistline no good, and was one of the things that got me invited to leave the active reserve. Eventually I quit taking it. The appetite went away, the unhappiness didn't.

Fast forward about ten years. The marriage had started to break down, and in the fall, about a month before I threw down the gauntlet to the soon-to-be-ex, I went to work at Wells Fargo and had to stop at the elevator because I couldn't breathe and my heart felt weird. Made it upstairs to work, but the problem continued, and eventually I wound up in St. John's hospital in St. Paul under observation for angina. My primary care doc came to see me and offered to put me on an antidepressant, and since my whole world was going up in flames, it seemed like a good idea so I could at least remain somewhat functional. It definitely made it easier to turn off the emotions and not care so much about the s2bx's fuckery. The problem was that it turned off *all* the emotions. I vividly remember standing there during my father's interment at the Family Plot and feeling nothing, nothing at all while my brother, my kids, and my nieces were crying their eyes out. That was when I knew I had to get off the drug, because it was killing my ability to feel normal and appropriate emotions along with the bad, negative ones. And over the next couple of years, with support from friends and my girlfriend at the time, I managed to wean myself off, and it would take being a lot worse off than I am now to convince me I need to try it again.

Of course, your mileage may vary. You may indeed have had a serious mental problem that drugs helped you solve. Or you may be going from shrink to shrink, pill to pill, wondering why you're still unhappy. Consider that contrary to society and its advertisements and its popiular preachers and its pundits: you have no right to be happy. You only have the right to pursue happiness. Good luck catching it, and enjoy it while it lasts.

This is being cross-posted to Facebook. Comment there, not here.

Something Cobb said in his Facebook Live thing this afternoon got me thinking about a subject I hadn't thought about for a long time, but which used to irritate the shit out of me when I was playing D&D and related fantasy RPGs. There was a definite aversion on the part of most DMs to having a monotheistic religion in charge despite the fact that historically, the Middle Ages on which most fantasy RPGs were based were extremely monotheistic, and failing to conform to whatever flavor of Christianity was in effect in your part of Europe (or Islam, for that matter) could drastically shorten your life expectancy at worst or make you a second-class citizen at best.

So referees would set up one or another of the traditional pantheons, or maybe make one of their own up, and inevitably the players would pick a god to worship, and the DM would say nothing. Now, I don't claim to be an expert in religions, not even my own, but one thing that I do know about the pagan religions was that's not how it worked. You might have a special devotion to Athena, but you sure as hell were going to make offerings to Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, and the other gods as well. It was a package deal, because ignoring the other gods was...unwise. I think it says depressing things about education in our country that more people didn't see that as a problem. Maybe now that there are several flavors of paganism loose in the land, this has changed, but the cynic in me rather doubts it.

It occurred to me this morning after finishing a rare Saturday morning In The Mailbox that I am probably missing out on a lot of webcomics and podcasts I might enjoy because I'm simply not aware of them.

On the other hand, I've stopped following a lot of the webcomics I used to follow religiously. Sinfest was balanced for a while between feminist BS and amusing story, but now it's tipped over into the feminist abyss. Screw it. Day by Day became less funny along with the politics it was satirizing. Penny Arcade...got tired of the crudity and the references to games I'd never heard of and knew nothing about, and the constantly aborted story plots got on my last nerve. There were tons of cool possibilities and they just threw them away, or couldn't figure out where the stories were going. or maybe the stories were just extended in-jokes that I never really understood. Skin Horse and Rip Haywire stopped being amusing for different reasons, while with xkcd, the snark outweighed the amusement more often than not.

I am still following Girl Genius, Schlock Mercenary, Freefall, The Specialists (on hiatus), Manly Guys Doing Manly Things, Erfworld, Terminal Lance, and Megatokyo. Exterminatus Now is done, unfortunately, and with the death of Larry Latham, so is Lovecraft Is Missing. I was hoping his widow could find someone to wrap it up, but I guess that's not going to happen. 319 Dark Street is done.

Podcasts...for some reason, I've never taken a shine to those. I was too young to really appreciate radio dramas, which were petering out when I was a kid, and despite the recommendations of friends and family, I just haven't gotten into Welcome To Night Vale or any of the other 'casts that might be relevant to my interests.

Given my druthers, i would rather read or play videogames than watch TV online or listen to podcasts, and movies these days just cost too damn much for me to just up and go to see if something's worth watching. I think I've been very, very lucky that the last few movies I've seen (The Martian, Mad Max: Fury Road, and Star Wars: The Force Awakens) have all been worth it.

haikujaguar has some news for you.

One of the commenters, uneko, makes a very good point:

"But the moment you say "furry"... people automatically assume that you BELIEVE you are 'a cat in a human's body', that you have a fursuit, that you become aroused by animals, and that you are basically some kind of weird manchild who's priorities are totally weird. ... yet most of the furries I've known are very moderate. No sexy art wallpapering their walls. No believes of being in the wrong body, no alternative sexual practices.

And yet: "furry" is a dirty dirty word that people shy away from. I have friends who enjoy anthropomorphic art, who have a anthropomorphic persona... yet will deny up and down being furry even while they post anthropomorphic pictures.

I hate it because all of us become painted as the worst of us. My little pony fans are just as bad.. if not worse. it's nearly impossible to express appreciation for the show without people assuming you have sexual involvement with it. The hell guys? You tell me you like Star Wars, I don't assume you're interested in boning Luke/Leia/Han/Chewie... I assume you're into space and jedi and cool stuff like that."

I'm old enough to remember when just being a science fiction fan or interested in comic books (past a certain age) was enough to get you ostracized from mainstream society. It wasn't that long ago. So it's more than a little distressing to find fans turning on people who (for all we know) actually have 90% of the same interests we do...but the main focus of their interests is on things like Watership Down and so forth.

N.B.: My nickname actually doesn't come from furry fandom; it's a play on words stemming from the job description of a badger at conventions, with a military honorific tacked on. If someone assumes it does, though, I'm not going to flip out and have a stroke about it. It's just not that big a deal.

So Cobb wrote this response to a truly douchey Buzzfeed article (no, no link, fuck those people, seriously) which was full of metrosexual horseshit.
I don't agree with him 100%, obviously, because he and I come from different places and move in different circles - and, TBQH, the brothers have historically been more concerned with looks and style than us sloppy-ass functionalist Black Irish.
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So I'm going to spend the day in a mostly horizontal position helping my legs heal up and repairing the busted POS chair I got from Amazon.

Southwest did an extraordinary thing for me this past week, and I think part of what makes it extraordinary is that it seems to be Standard Operating Procedure for them.

As you all know, I flew SWA up to Minneapolis for Anime Detour this year, and had originally planned to fly back the following Tuesday until struck down by a bunch of marauding bacteria. I had to cancel the return flight, which meant I was out the ~$200 since it was a non-refundable fare, but at least the agent I talked to said they'd honor the fare for the return flight.

Now, I figured this meant I'd have to pay the el cheapo advance purchase fare instead of the Businessman's Special ZOMG I HAVE TO BE THERE RIGHT NOW fare, but I figured wrong. When I talked with the agent on Monday at Humphrey Terminal, she pulled up my file, saw the note from the previous agent, and used the unspent amount from the original return flight to pay for the new flight. That's right. I didn't have to pay one red cent for my flight home. As God is my witness, I would have fallen to my knees in the terminal if the pain wouldn't have killed me. Not only that, SWA arranged for me to have a wheelchair waiting for me all along the line from Minneapolis to Dulles so that I didn't have to walk more than a couple yards anywhere along the line. God bless them all.

Any other airline would have screwed me for hundreds, probably thousands of dollars.* No other airline would have looked after me all along the line with stewardesses, counter people, and crew making sure I was okay. So yeah. From now on, I fly SWA and nobody else. If they don't fly there, I ain't going unless I can drive. They have earned my loyalty in a coin that cannot be noted on ledgers or found in checkbooks, and I will repay them by being a feudally loyal customer.



*I well remember how Delta screwed me on the ticket home when my father was dying, the bastards. >:(

The problem of unsocialized assholes forcing their attentions (physically and otherwise) on cosplayers and costumers is not a new one, but for a social conservative like myself it's a pretty frustrating one. There are a lot of things interacting here, starting with the breakdown of traditional roles and behavior -whatever happened to the very basic instruction in politeness, "Keep your hands to yourself!"?- continuing with the increasing sexualization of the culture at large, adding an unhealthy helping of what Lea Hernandez memorably termed "the Manstream", as well as the influence of the Master Race and their not always safe for work portrayals of girls and women. Stir all this together and dump it into the overheated space created by a convention, which almost by definition is the American version of Carnival, and you get the problem we're dealing with today.

Whether people like it or not, clothes are a signaling device as much as they are protection from the elements and a place to put things. As an example, you'll be treated very differently if you show up for a job interview in jeans and a T-shirt as opposed to a suit, or at least a jacket and tie. Women in halter tops and hot pants will be treated differently than those wearing blouses, jackets and knee-length skirts. Sober colors like black and dark blue connote seriousness; pastels not so much and Day-Glo neon colors not at all. All this used to be common knowledge, and people used to learn how to dress for success as part of the process of growing up. Not any more. It's become so common to see things on Casual Friday that would have gotten you summarily canned fifty years ago that HR departments have resorted to creating new dress codes to make sure people don't come in to work looking like they just got in from an all-nighter at the local strip joint.

And so it is at conventions, where most people wear normal clothes but some people dress up in costumes or do cosplay.* Most people know enough not to run up and hug random strangers who are wearing T-shirts and jeans, but apparently for some people the sight of a fellow fan wearing their favorite character's costume completely destroys their common sense and gives them the notion that it's okay to tackle the unsuspecting cosplayer. This kind of stupidity needs to be corrected, not least because it falls under the wide heading of "things that are not okay outside the convention, or in it either." In fact, outside the convention, this sort of behavior is commonly referred to as assault, a misdemeanor in the criminal code,** and will get you a fine at the very least. Grabbing somebody of the opposite sex makes it even worse.

Which brings us around to the cute young ladies in the sexy costumes that often cover everything but conceal nothing. Under the Old (and presumably Bad) Rules, nice young ladies didn't wear clothes like that, but women of "easy virtue" often did. This has changed, and under the New (and presumably Good) Rules, women can wear any damn thing they want, and anyone daring to criticize clothing/costumes as excessively racy gets shouted down as a fun-hating repressive Puritan who's pissing in the ice cream. Now, I like young ladies showing off their sexiness as much as the next red-blooded American guy, but I would like to point out that since the Old Rules are no longer (officially) in effect, they've still had considerable impact on the culture at large. Which brings us back to the topic of signaling: what message is being sent by the cosplayers, and how is it being understood by the onlookers? I would like to further stipulate that figuring out what women want is hard enough when you're not drunk and/or sleep-deprived, and trying to do it when you *are* tired and drunk is cursed near impossible.

I'm also at a loss as to how convention staffs are supposed to deal with catcalls, wolf whistles and rude comments made to cosplayers. No, people shouldn't be mistaking a sexy costume as an invitation to bump uglies and talk smack - but trying to be the speech police is going to make the difficult job of Security damn near impossible.

The preceding should not be used to justify bad behavior, because that's not what I'm trying to do here. I'm trying to provide some context and make people think. I'm saying maybe things have gone a little far when cosplayers have to be told by staff that they're violating the local ordinances on how much sideboob is allowable. I'm saying maybe we shouldn't have teenage girls providing other congoers with easy beaver shots (Link NSFW).*** I'm saying it's going to be damn hard to change the mindset of thousands of people who have become used to thinking of a convention as a place and time where just about anything goes as long as nobody gets physically hurt, and we shouldn't let ourselves be fooled that a catchy slogan and cool art are going to do the job by themselves. This is going to involve changing a subculture that is no longer really separate from the mainstream (or, unfortunately, the Manstream) and that simply can't be done quickly unless you want to use force. Good luck with that.

*Costuming seems more common at SF/media conventions where most people aren't trying to act as the characters their costumes portray; cosplay, on the other hand, has people trying to stay in character.

**I Am Not A Lawyer, but a brief internet search of state criminal codes bears me out.

***Put on some damn underwear, FFS.

digex unintentionally ignited some bitchiness on Facebook by posting the pic from this article which compares the cost of buying dinner for two adults and two kids at McDonald's to buying raw materials at the grocery store and cooking dinner yourself. It's not really a straight-up comparison, obviously; the home-cooked meals are chicken/roast potatoes/salad and rice/beans, and just as obviously the value of time isn't taken into account. Anyway, some bunhead from Caltech hurfed a lot of blurf about how this just wasn't possible because poor people had to shop at 7-11 because they didn't have access to real supermarkets or some such, which I called bullshit on because I've been poor and been on food stamps. Maybe you have to ride the bus to the other end of town to do your grocery shopping, but you can get to a supermarket and buy the raw materials. Well, this guy got patronizing and said, well, that's a cute anecdote but what about single mom A living in the Gobi Desert Pasadena, and why are you such a hard-hearted hater of the poor? I replied,

I have been poor, and am poor, and your reluctance to accept that really pisses me off. I'm not saying it's easy, because it isn't, but calling me "clueless" for actually having lived in poverty and clawed my way out of it for a while is really insulting. So in conclusion, GFY.

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Apparently everyone is SHOCKED that the mild-mannered professor at Cal State Berdoo ran a biker gang and sold meth. Neighbors, co-workers, parents...nobody had a clue.

Think about it for a second. Think about the stereotype drug dealer - skeevy, probably a black or a Chicano or some kind of white trash, the kind of person that couldn't look or act bourgie if their life depended on it. If you were seriously considering getting into the recreational chemicals trade, wouldn't you want to get as far away from that image as possible? What better cover than to be a quiet, home-owning member of the middle class who always kept his grass mowed and his shrubberies trimmed? Who had occasional quiet parties that the cops never got called to? Even belonging to a motorcycle club (if it's the right kind of club) is a respectable thing these days, when lawyers and realtors and all kinds of rich folks ride Harleys.

This guy was just practicing good security - in a bad cause, I'll grant you, but he was doing just about everything he could to stay below the radar. Odds are he's already started a new career in a new town with a different name, and they won't find him for decades, if at all.

(Instapundit)