• Diaries

    even my third eye is sleepy

    2024-02-15 /

    Although I’m not actively practicing yoga atm, I’ve been studying it (as I am wont to do with random subjects). I like to study stuff by getting into communities and absorbing discussions.

    I just saw someone talking about how he’s done yoga and meditation a long while, and after his third eye opened*, he just didn’t care about over-performing at his job anymore. He was in a really competitive field and started getting poor evaluations because he stopped striving to meet stressful goals.

    (*A lot of people don’t like talking third eye or other spiritual/metaphysical concepts, but I argue it is only terminology, and we can call it whatever we want. I am not a literalist. The general concept here is reaching a kind of personal understanding that you feel like…everything makes sense. Self and universe in unity.)

    I opened my third eye a while ago. Now I’ve been off weed for three weeks, it has not closed (yet?). I still have this deep, profound sense of peace gained from years of psychedelic meditation. I am just not interested in artifice, external goals, or performing.

    I spent my 20s chasing goals but didn’t get satisfaction when I achieved them. Literally I did not celebrate hitting the New York Times Bestseller list. Didn’t celebrate when I hit my first million sales. Nor when I got an agent. Or any of the other milestones that seemed to matter so much when I was younger. It was everything for so long, and I spent so much time working on it, and then I realized it didn’t make me happy. I was so accomplished and i was never happy. I was just more scared.

    I am happy now. And so I am satisfied with what I accomplished Back Then, more than I used to be, but…I did that, so why would I go back to chasing goals again? I know now that isn’t where happiness rests. Happiness is something I can only give myself. It’s a matter of surrender and presence in the moment. (Theoretically I could feel this while chasing goals but I haven’t figured it out yet.)

    When I think about what matters now, it’s basically my family, of the furry persuasion and otherwise. It’s both scary to know that I can’t keep them forever (as losing my darling Annie has reminded me, yet again) but it’s also so satisfying to know I am with my family now and we are together and this moment is really good, and it doesn’t feel like anything matters beyond distributing snuggles and emotional support to mi familia. I’m just gazing at my dogs while I type this lol.

    Obviously I’m still doing stuff. I am still writing a lot and have a couple trunked books. I’m gonna finish Fated for Firelizards because I think it’s important to complete some projects. I am drawing and crocheting constantly, too. But I’m not doing any of this because I wanna accomplish anything beyond the moment of engagement with it. I’m not sure how to tell people what they will get out of interacting with my art (my purses are chaotic, my game is weird, my reviews are silly) because I am just experiencing the creation of it.

    I don’t feel unsatisfied, or like anything is missing. Art is just something I do because I am here and that is one of my most fundamental methods of self-expression and it’s rather like breathing, dreaming, thinking, or anything else I can’t stop.

    The weirdest thing about this peaceful state is the fact that I seem to no longer have any relevance in the world, and the world has minimal relevance to me, and I’m not entirely sure what to make of that. Surely this is not sustainable, just existing peacefully.

    I think the most hilarious side-effect of my shifted attitudes is that I give the vast majority of movies 5* because I just think they’re nice. lol. Did the movie establish and meet its goals? Was I amused? Five stars for you! And you! Five stars everywhere!

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    movie reviews

    Movie Review: Chopping Mall (1986) *****

    2024-02-14 /

    In Chopping Mall, a 1980s shopping mall buys a three-robot police force to protect capital from ~thieves~. A lightning strike makes the robots go on an overnight killing spree. A bunch of horny young people who stayed in a furniture store for an orgy and excessive use of hairspray get targeted by the killbots, and only the least-horny ones survive.

    If that paragraph sounds good to you, then this is a five-star movie. If it doesn’t sound good, there is nothing in the movie you will enjoy. Nothing.

    Director Jim Wynorski has never met a boner that didn’t turn into a film pitch. This is the man behind 2016’s “Sharkansas Women’s Prison Massacre,” which is like a less-horny version of his pitch for unmade cinema classic “Prison Planet,” all about naked prisoner women fighting mutant alien naked women. He had the idea for Sharkansas in the shower. Yeah, he was definitely doing what we all think, and then he was like “I’m going to find a producer for this!” after hosing his Jimshot off the wall.

    So when I tell you this man boner’d his way through 80s slasher horror, you can imagine how many shots of boobies the movie features. A *significant* portion of the movie is horny hooligans in a furniture store. If he can think of any excuse for the women (and the men too, to be fair) to be partially nude, entirely nude, showing boobies, or showing butt, then HE WILL DO IT.

    Everything about Chopping Mall is perfect.

    Here are some snippets of dialogue to prove my thesis:

    “I guess I’m just not used to being chased around a mall by killer robots in the middle of the night.”

    Guy: You smell like pepperoni.
    Girl: Well if THAT is how you feel–
    Guy, more sexily: I like pepperoni.
    Girl: In that case… (she gets her boobies out)

    “You know Brennan, you’re becoming a real candidate for prickhood.”

    Guy: Jesus! What’s that?
    Another guy: Robot blood.

    The character Allison Parks is literally named after a porn star. Whose name was Alison Parks.

    As horny as Wynorski was for Allison Parks (and her actress, explicitly cast because Wynorski wanted to bone her, according to IMDB trivia), Chopping Mall nonetheless follow horror movie rules. There is a final girl, and she’s the one who doesn’t whip out her titties. I think she’s supposed to be ugly, fat, and smart? I’m never sure when the 80s intend for me to regard a character as fat and ugly because I think everyone’s hot. But she’s got cheeks and keeps her shirt on, AND she’s forced to date the nerd guy, so I’m pretty sure she’s fat and ugly.

    The reason that Chopping Mall is ideal as a Valentine’s Day movie is because the final girl also gets her final boyfriend to survive at the very end. Isn’t that so cute and wholesome?

    My absolute favorite moment in the movie is when a girl falls down holding a gas can, and her friends watch with extremely mild concern as a robot laser-blasts the gas can. The girl immediately turns into a flaming stuntman (quite burly) wearing a blonde wig while her screams play over his thrashing. I’m convinced the only reason that this character ever put on clothes was for this moment. Wynorski didn’t want to see the stuntman naked. Gross!

    If reading this review didn’t convince you that Chopping Mall is great, then it won’t be. But I’m telling you this is CINEMA. REAL CINEMA.

    (image credit: Concorde Pictures)

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  • A fluffy black cat, leaning up against a brown-carpeted stair, illuminated by the sun.
    Rory Links

    Rory’s links #3: Sound it out

    2024-02-12 /

    Welcome back to links! Only took me three months to come back! Let’s start by collecting my initial year-end wrapup posts, if you haven’t seen them. (I spent my time and energy on these for a while instead of linkspams.)

    1. Movies pt. 1 (there will be a pt. 2 next month, along with Oscar posts)
    2. Music
    3. TV
    4. Books
    5. Video games

    I felt late posting these, but I did manage to squeeze them in right before Lunar New Year, so maybe I was right on time.

    A couple links on literacy: The Loss of Things I Took For Granted, a Slate column with a college professor that has watched literacy in their students drop over the last decade, and At a Loss for Words, about the flawed US teaching method of three cueing that has left kids and young adults struggling to read. The short version: sounding out words is a valuable skill.

    A random hobby wiki page: Did you know DND 5e allows characters to get married for an armor class boost? Why did no one get fake married in the DND movie or Baldur’s Gate 3? Wasted opportunities.

    Do you like space? Watch some documentaries and clips on NASA+. I think there’s Earth stuff on there, too.

    Totally respect if you don’t want to click Substack links, but here’s one person’s alternatives to Spotify. I’m not fully ready to ditch Apple Music in 2024, but I agree with the poor ethics of using these services and plan to prioritize buying music this year, especially for smaller artists.

    If you’re wondering why I’m bringing up Substack, the company has been really reticient about banning Nazis and white supremacists off the platform. (All the articles that came up when I searched were paywalled, like this Atlantic article, but they’re there.) Substack made a token reversal effort in January, but if we’re talking about digital ethics, moving off Substack is great to do in that regard. If you want alternatives: Egregious is WordPress + domain; Rory Learns is on Buttondown, Casey Johnson has talked on Bluesky about how She’s a Beast uses Ghost.

    JP Brammer of ¡Hola Papi! fame has an interesting column about Latino identity in the LA Times. So many good lines in this one, such as “…language, nations and identity are all ghosts with teeth, phantoms that aren’t real until they bite you and draw blood.”

    Black Twitter Remains Unbothered in Elon Musk’s X. I’ve limited my Twitter usage for a variety of reasons, both ethical and functional. In the past, I’ve also witnessed and been a part of online communities standing firm against profit machines that don’t care about people. No judgment from me (except for soulless billionaires).

    This might be paywalled if you’ve looked at New York Magazine much lately: Apple Vision Pro Owners Are Struggling to Figure Out What They Just Bought. Sounds like Apple is selling expensive VR headsets to people too cool (or work-focused) to buy already-existing VR headsets. I think there’s space for work apps on VR; I think most people buying the Vision Pro don’t have the skill to use them. Still, if Apple wants people to promo the Vision Pro, they should give one to Sara, who has VR experience and wants work apps. Just saying.

    Interesting YouTube videos recently (expanding the info box will allow you to click to a transcript, if you prefer to read):

    FD Signifier’s short take on cultural appropriation pointed out that Travis Kelce started sporting a fade because it was a way to signal that he was dating Black women. (That was pre-Swift, of course, but he hasn’t changed his hair since that started.)

    Slowly going through Variety’s latest Actors on Actors series, and I think Andrew Scott & Greta Lee’s is going to be tough to beat. Past Lives is my favorite Best Picture nominee so far (it’s on Prime Video right now), and I can’t wait to see All of Us Strangers, which I can pretty safely say got snubbed without even seeing it (but it’ll be on Hulu as of February 22nd, so I’ll speak more authoritatively about it then).

    An essay about east Asia and buying luxury. I got into cdramas a few years ago and was surprised to see how many Chinese actors/idols had deals with luxury brands. It was helpful to get perspective on how economic/social trends coalesce within collectivist cultures in this way.

    It’s hard to be remotely a US film nerd and not have heard about how Sofia Coppola ruined the Godfather Part III, but this essay put into perspective how much Francis Ford Coppola failed his daughter. It’s fascinating because only a nepo baby could have the career Sofia Coppola has after decades of (undeserved) attacks, but also, she never would have been made the face of the movie’s failure if she hadn’t been a nepo baby in the first place.

    Creative ownership and copyright have been hot topics the last few months, between tech bros stealing from artists for their fancy autocorrect, Steamboat Willie entering public domain, and hbomberguy’s big plagiarism essay, to name three prominent examples. A different essay talks about some creative copyright infringement from the past and asks where we go from here. You should mostly watch it to see Turkish Star Trek and Filipino musical Batman, if you haven’t.

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  • facebook,  writing

    Character blocking – less can be more

    2024-02-12 /

    I’m enjoying the work of reading the first Malazan book, but the prose itself, I do not like. The amount of character blocking bothers me. I get why the author does it (you can find his analyses of a scene or two online) but…it doesn’t read well for me.

    Character blocking is something most writers I know do. Including myself!

    I say “blocking” in the manner of a stage play. It is describing many small gestures of a character that doesn’t meaningfully add to a scene, or just doing it to excess. Character blocking is a broader way of describing something that is *usually* Eye Choreography.

    X looked at Y. He looked away.
    Y’s gaze cut to the ground.
    X looked at the thing, and then he looked at his sword.
    He walked to the bar with his gaze averted.

    There are two issues here.

    1) A book is less like a stage play and more like an impressionist painting you create in a reader’s mind. Broadly describing behavior will allow readers to fill in gestures themselves.

    2) Gestures don’t mean the same things to everyone. It’s unclear. I just touched a hand to my chin. What am I doing?
    Is this a thoughtful hand?
    Surprised?
    Am I messing with a blemish?
    Am I hiding the cleft in my chin?
    Maybe I’m about to say something.

    Looking at things or moving your hands or whatever can definitely be relevant, necessary scene information…sometimes. *Writing* it can also be totally necessary for *you*, the author, to work out where things are in the scene and what is happening. YOU know why the character is Looking.

    A character’s mood and physicality can be conveyed throughout the scene in MANY ways. It should form a greater picture for readers. Save specific gestures for when you wanna “zoom in.”

    In editing, I get rid of all blocking except the stuff that makes a scene *less* confusing.
    If he absolutely needs to look at the window or nobody is going to realize he’s talking about someone outside instead of inside the room, then yes! Block that. It zooms us in on that “look.”

    But remember: Gestures mean different things to different people. A lot of people can’t read body language at all, even on the page. You are adding gestures that “zoom focus” without adding more information or experience for the reader. I am exhausted constantly zooming focus on characters’ faces when their whole bodies exist and inhabit a setting.

    There are alternative beats you can use, if you want to confer a pause in dialogue (though I think you can let readers infer a lot about dialogue cadence too). I will favor beats that embody characters in their setting in meaningful ways.

    I really like beats that add *new* description to a character or setting. That breaks up big blocks of description and adds color and vivacity.

    I also like character-specific beats. One character might mess with his ear a lot. Another has antsy feet. One can’t stay sitting.

    Using character-specific beats consistently across scenes, chapters, and books helps fix a character in the reader’s mind. And the reader will bring biases about the character to fill in smaller gestures (X looking at Y, then away) as appropriate to their personality.

    In Malazan, Character Blocking is frequent. I know from reading the author’s analyses of his scenes that he does intend these lines to confer information. “By looking at the sword, Tattersail is thinking xyz.” He doesn’t actually intend for anyone to know what that means though. The author generally doesn’t care if anyone knows what he’s talking about. While I respect the attitude, I find that his reliance on blocking to express information he doesn’t care about conveying isn’t NEARLY as well-thought-out as his worldbuilding details.

    I dislike the insulting connotations of “lazy” when I mean “convenient at the expense of quality,” but lazy is the word I think reading a lot of this dialogue. Perhaps less lazy, more cursory? Like “FINE I guess people have to inhabit this world I’m writing, and they talk.”

    Likewise, I can’t say the prose on Malazan is bad when what it actually is, is that the writer and I have way different priorities. That’s all.

    I see my prose on this level as the Welcoming Center of my book. It needs to get out of the reader’s way so that my story and world can thrive. I want my language efficient and my meaning clear. I am not deliberately puzzling anyone, unless the specific intent of a scene is to puzzle, and even then, I will communicate it wholly differently.
    Efficiency of language can be so beautiful.

    Malazan is legendary for its complexity, opacity, and demands upon the reader’s patience. The world and experience of conquering the books makes this worthwhile. For my writer friends, I suggest editing out Character Blocking in draft 2 because you aren’t writing Malazan, probably. Don’t worry about the rough draft. Write whatever you have to write in the rough draft. But consider taking a scalpel into your scenes to excise all but essential blocking.

    ~

    Blocking (and especially Eye Choreography lol) is super common in some areas of fiction. It’s an instinctive thing. We’re trying to think our way through a scene and conversation and we put in unnecessary information while we work it out, which is better removed later, imo.

    A story written so minimalistically need not be dry – action and dialogue alone can still be compelling if your story is compelling. I do like to add some physicality of gesture, commentary, inner thought, etc on those things, and that’s nice too.

    A novel writing class is probably bringing some of these thoughts out because I’ve had to read Hemingway. Hemingway does not do this in his dialogue at all, and his dialogue is still effective (imo).

    Example:

    “Santiago,” the boy said to him as they climbed the bank from where the skiff was hauled up. “I could go with you again. We’ve made some money.”
    The old man had taught the boy to fish and the boy loved him.
    “No,” the old man said. “You’re with a lucky boat. Stay with them.”
    “But remember how you went eighty-seven days without fish and then we caught big ones every day for three weeks.”
    “I remember,” the old man said. “I know you did not leave me because you doubted.”
    “It was papa made me leave. I am a boy and I must obey him.”
    “I know,” the old man said. “It is quite normal.”

    Then we can look over at Gardens of the Moon by Stephen Erikson for the other end of things.

    “Are you the last left in the cadre?” he asked.
    She looked away, feeling brittle. “The last left standing. It wasn’t skill, either. Just lucky.” […] She heard Hairlock laugh, the sound of a soft jolt that made her wince. “The tall one,” she said. “He’s a mage, isn’t he?”
    Whiskeyjack grunted, then said, “His name’s Quick Ben.”
    “Not the one he was born with.”
    “No.”
    She rolled her shoulders against the weight of her cloak, momentarily easing the dull pain in her lower back. “I should know him, Sergeant. That kind of power gets noticed. He’s no novice.”
    “No,” Whiskeyjack replied. “He isn’t.”
    She felt herself getting angry. “I want an explanation. What’s happening here?”
    Whiskeyjack grimaced. “Not much, by the looks of it.” He raised his voice. “Quick Ben!”
    The mage looked over. “Some last-minute negotiations, Sergeant,” he said, flashing a white grin.
    “Hood’s Breath.” Tattersail sighed, turning away.

    That is some dialogue from the beginning of Malazan, which I personally feel is too much blocking. The information conveyed is not important and it breaks up the conversation too much, distracting from the way the conversation is meant to propel the scene.

    But again, as I said above — This is an issue of different authorial priorities. The author here think it’s important we should know that the cloak this mage is wearing is heavy in the middle of an explanation about the situation and people in the situation, and I think it’s too much.

    (I originally posted this on Facebook on 2/12/23.)

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  • Diaries

    the scientist withdraws

    2024-02-11 /

    What kind of oddball drug tests herself periodically through withdrawal to see when the THC has cleared from her system? This oddball, right here. I got a pack of THC drug tests when I quit weed.

    These tests work the opposite from pregnancy/COVID tests: when you are negative for THC, you get two lines. So far I have only had the control line.

    15 days after quitting, I got the faintest line – meaning it detected very very little THC. This was using my most dilute sample (end of day, very well-hydrated) so I suspect I’d have zero line testing again tomorrow morning, but! I am getting there.

    Technically *any* line is a negative because these tests are qualitative (yes/no) not quantitative. Community apocrypha says you pee clean after a month, but I might get there sooner – pretty wild considering I was such a heavy user for almost a decade. But it also makes sense considering that I was cutting back the last couple months and mostly inhaling (versus edibles), which clears faster.

    I’m still expecting to have weed-related cognitive issues for months, even when it’s out of my system. I am told I could remain intermittently foggy for almost a year. Also, THC binds to fat, and I’ve stored a bunch in my adipose tissue. It can release if I lose weight or exercise hard.

    The process isn’t linear, is what I’m saying, but this is cool progress to experience.

    I told my spouse that I was drug testing myself and I was like “I know it’s really weird, but–” and he was like “No this is just you having a scientific mind, like always, and it’s why I love you.” I love him. It’s true though — any excuse I have to run tests on myself, I will do it.

    I haven’t been posting Sara Reads the Feed posts (or much else) mostly because this quitting process has totally thrown me off my groove. I’ve made mood-management, self-care, and adjusting to sobriety kinda my full-time job during this period, which is also how I got off nicotine and alcohol. It’s telling myself “this is the most important thing right now” and giving myself lots of space to Feel Stuff.

    Of everything I have quit, weed is by far the easiest on me. Alcohol was emotionally easy because FUCK THAT STUFF, it is POISON. Nicotine was the worst. The most brutal withdrawal, the most intense cravings. But I did that! I am free. It’s awesome.

    Still, here I am, babysitting myself again. Hopefully this will be the last substance abuse self-babysitting for the rest of my life. It’s funny how I feel Very Done With This but I am neither embarrassed nor regretful about what all I’ve done. That was just like…the road. You know? That is the road I was on. No hard feelings, cannabis, but we’re done now. Thank you for what we had together. Bye. Can’t wait to see two bold lines on the drug test.

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  • bluesky,  facebook,  tsfka twitter

    Punxsutawny Says Spring

    2024-02-11 /

    Posted on 2/2/24. Facebook.

    I am so obsessed with 9yo Sunshine’s energy and confidence. I found a school paper that he graded for himself. He only spelled 2 out of 8 words correctly. He graded himself with an “F+” and then wrote “bad but still good” next to it. He can’t even fail himself without getting cheerful about it. He invented F-plus! lmao

    He’s got a little speech about how nobody is perfect, which means he cannot be perfect, but to him that seems to mean that being 70% awesome is actually 100% awesome and the other 30% is just inevitable humanity.

    I had really really awful self-esteem for most of my life. I felt absolutely radioactive until I met my spouse, and even then it took over a decade to genuinely internalize my self-worth. I don’t think Sunshine’s ever going to deal with that. It’s a massive relief, and also extremely charming.

    (I spelled perfectly at his age, fyi, and got 100% regularly, and I was an absolute wreck disaster human. I prefer bad grades from a happy kid than good grades from a miserable kid.)

    Posted on 2/3/24. Facebook.

    You know what’s funny? My older sibling tells me that I was the first in the family to “come out,” but I have zero recollection of it. Apparently I formally told my mom that I liked girls before my siblings did. (I’m the youngest.) I declared myself bisexual.

    I don’t even know that I’m bisexual now, lmao. My younger, forgotten self was so confident. I got crushes on girls and boys and That Was That.

    It was probably so unremarkable because I wasn’t afraid of my mom’s reaction. I DO remember her telling me that she would always love me, no matter who I loved. I was very young in this memory. I think we were playing with Barbies. I was probably doing something weird and gross and unselfaware, like making my mom watch two Barbies scissor. Parents know! Kids can’t hide for crap.

    This is odd to me, I guess, because my sibling is transgender and I’ve always just thought of them as The Queer One, placing them up on a rainbow pedestal in my heart. They are the one who asked for different pronouns; they are the one who made it clear their bio-sex was not just wrong, but an uncomfortable fit; they crashed against homophobia all the time just for existing. I advocate for them at the doctor’s office and step in to enforce proper pronoun usage with other people and do whatever I can to protect my sibling’s right to be themself.

    I take my own queerness for granted because I camouflage. I’ve dated women, but I’m married to someone AMAB with a beard; I married him wearing white and we made babies together. Neither of us tell anyone IRL that neither of us consider our genders to align with our sexes. Not that we’re hiding. It just seems irrelevant, and anyway, nobody seems to understand if we try to explain it. I think you can only start to grasp exactly what a gay relationship we have after spending a while with the two of us. Sometimes we are like a sapphic relationship, both of us women. Sometimes we are gay as fuck, like two dudes. We virtually never fall into m/f style roles, except by accident. Our fluid gender identities are part of our couple identity, too.

    My beloved sibling calls me Woman+ in terms of gender. I like being a woman. I am not only a woman. If gender identities could be written down like states on the map of America, my location would not be a dot like a state capital, but a blob of weather that encompasses the entire west coast with fingers across the northeastern seaboard. I am a woman in the most basic of ways, and then something happens and you’re suddenly hanging out with a Reddit neckbeard who talks like gay Dane Cook.

    I am most often a man in romantic situations with women; I’m a gay man with men; I am jarred and confused when I meet men and they treat me like a ~woman instead of a masculine peer. But in social situations with women, I’m a woman. I also definitely do not want to look androgynous. I want to look feminine, but get received as a man. I feel silly trying to explain the amorphous boundaries of my gender. Like, nobody’s even gonna take me seriously. Why bother? People don’t think my climate is even real. “All women feel like that,” say people who have no idea what I’m talking about.

    So I just don’t bother, really. I’m just Queer and that’s that. But somehow, when I was young, at a time I don’t even remember, I knew that I was bisexual enough to announce it and then forget about it, and I think that is SO INTERESTING. Some critical piece of personal history I’ve got no memory for.

    Posted on 2/5/24. Facebook.

    I’m on day 10(?) without weed. I’ve been having emotions all day and haven’t wanted to relapse. I started *really* over-using when my first cat died, so it’s a testament to the coping skills I’ve been working on.

    I’m still not very thinky. A lot of the fog from weed has passed, but my emotions are very surface and it’s taking a lot of effort to write anything that makes sense. (Which you might not be able to tell by the amount of posts I make…lol)

    The main thing I’m doing to pass the time is hanging out on sobriety support forums to talk with people. I always find congregate therapy settings valuable. I’m not doing stuff IRL right now, but online is basically as good.
    Mostly people in group therapy need validation, and peer validation is really effective. There’s really nothing so loving as a recovery group. And I’ve made it so that if I feel a craving, I just…go online and talk to people about how to manage cravings.

    I am extremely sad and crying a lot because of my cat, and all the associated feelings, but I also feel really healthy about it so that’s good I guess.

    Thank you to everyone who has been sharing love and support. It means a lot to me.

    ~

    King Charles has been diagnosed with cancer after his prostate surgery. They haven’t released details on his prognosis, but it is serious enough that his estranged son is flying out to visit.

    I think it’s interesting that this does somehow align with Nostradamus’s predictions, if you squint. Here’s the relevant quatrain, which some have read to mean King Charles:

    Because they disapproved of his divorce
    A man who later they considered unworthy
    The People will force out the King of the islands
    A Man will replace who never expected to be king

    So…if you squint.

    I don’t hold any opinion on Nostradamus because I am currently in flux (kind of in the “I have no idea what I believe about anything” place) but this has often been read to mean that Charles would be unpopular, abdicate, and someone not-William would inherit.

    Interestingly, Prince William has been saying things that indicate he *isn’t* interested in the traditional monarchy, including being head of the Church of England. But he has also shown signs he would like to take over for his father on his own terms.

    I don’t think Prince William’s personality would permit him to willingly step aside, though. There were whispered rumors of William & Kate divorcing – which would be unpopular after her hospitalization – so Nostradamus’s quatrain could also potentially apply to Wills.

    Or it could all be UTTER NONSENSE and it’s just interesting to watch history happening in real time and we could probably bend/stretch/squeeze this prophecy to fit *literally anyone*. I mean, if the new King of Denmark divorced his wife (who would probably be happy to escape the dude), this could also apply to them. yk? and the monarchy in Denmark has been “slimmed down” so I could imagine odd succession happening there.

    I truly cannot imagine a likely scenario that would lead to King Harry and Queen Meghan, but you’re going to see people talking about this a lot in the weeks to come anyway, and this quatrain is a significant reason why.

    Posted on 2/6/24. Bluesky.

    freestyling about how much i love my nebulizer while assembling a new mouthpiece

    i love my nebulizer
    love a bronchiodilator
    iprutropium bromide for
    making me breathe more
    yeah
    take my albuterol now
    like i’m a boss who breathes now
    yeah

    …sorry i’ll stop

    Posted on 2/8/24. TSFKA Twitter.

    i wasn’t going to see dune 2 in the theater because i’m a fussy bitch about splitting movies into episodes released years apart (how dare). but. the dune 2 popcorn bucket is gonna make me do it. and i’m mad that i’m this cheap. stupid dune 2 popcorn bucket.

    Posted on 2/9/24. Bluesky.

    New cat owners are so funny. I keep coming across posts where people are like “what’s wrong with my cat? It will push everything off my lap and climb on my face and never stops rubbing on me and meows at me every time I move.”

    It’s love. Your cat loves you. Lmao

    The more annoying a cat is, the more they love you. Rub them and talk to them in a baby voice. Accept your servitude. Your lap is theirs. This is why you got a cat.

    “Why does this cat purr the instant he sees me even if I’m not doing anything?”

    YOUR CAT LOVES YOU, this is supposed to happen! I think new cat owners expect their cats to be aloof, sort of decorative, and just aren’t ready for the fact cats are clingy little weirdos (which is why I love em)

    Posted on 2/11/24. Facebook.

    Two weeks sober now. Woo woo! Mostly unremarkable. However, I spent the last few years only having one kind of dream (travel dreams), and now I’m having all sorts of bizarre dreams.

    Like I dreamed about having four boyfriends last night. Four BOYfriends. Wtf is my brain even thinking?
    ~

    (I am definitely also attracted to men; I just have way more exacting standards and don’t trust dudes easily, so the idea of finding four men I’d bang at once is ridiculous to me! OTOH if four women were like “join us Sara” I wouldn’t have enough a brain to even ask questions.)

    ~

    I was finally honest with myself and bought MARRY ME with Jennifer Lopez and Owen Wilson. I didn’t think it was a very good movie the first time I watched it. It’s all I want to watch right now, and frankly Jennifer Lopez romcoms are all I want to watch about 60% of my waking hours.

    When I say “Jennifer Lopez romcoms” I do in fact mostly mean THE CELL (2000). It’s a romcom between JLo and ME.

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    movie reviews

    Movie Review: Marry Me (2022) ****

    2024-02-10 /

    In Marry Me, a pair of characters best compared to IRL Jennifer Lopez and Bad Bunny agree to get married on stage during a concert, but the dude popstar turns out to be a cheater, so Character JLo marries an audience member on a whim because he’s holding a “Marry Me” sign. Much to her benefit, this audience member turns out to be Owen Wilson, who is very good at “I’m in love with this woman”-face.

    As it turns out, Owen Wilson is a humble single dad math teacher. He respects the hell out of JLo’s character. He’s one of the nicest romcom heroes, and I just always love nice dad heroes. The match-up between a fabulous globe-trotting pop star and the Extremely Common Dude creates plenty of insecurity between them. Of course it all works out nicely.

    That said, I was not terribly impressed the first time I watched Marry Me. I’d have probably given it a knee-jerk two stars of “what is this crap?” This was my first rewatch since release two years ago, and I loved it a lot more.

    In the intervening years, I’ve watched a ton of romcoms, high and low budget. I also watched a movie with a similar hero/heroine duo, but at Christmastime, and with Freddie Prinze Junior: Christmas With You. I gave that one five stars because I was in *such* a Christmas romcom mood and it made me so happy. Marry Me isn’t quite as much of a happy-glow vibe for me, but it’s also way better than two stars now that I can compare it to many more flicks in the genre.

    Where Marry Me works, it works very well. I like JLo romcoms because she puts her whole doe-eyed heart into them. She has outstanding chemistry with Owen Wilson (kachow!). I believe that both of them have reasonable motivations to make a sincere effort to have a successful marriage with a stranger from disparate life circumstances.

    This movie also features young Chloe Coleman as Lou, the daughter. You might recognize her from Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves as Chris Pine’s adorable daughter. This lass has enormous talent, and she’s been exercising it since she started in 2013, locking in thirty roles on IMDB. Can you imagine a career starting on Glee and crossing through “daughter of Captain Kirk and Lightning McQueen” before you’re an adult? Although I *always* worry about kids working so much, I’m also impressed when kid actors are good enough to meet (possibly exceed) the abilities of the adults surrounding them.

    The casting in general is notable for a romcom that feels a bit Hallmarky. Sarah Silverman gets to be the chaotic lesbian best friend, Samwell from Westeros is the manager guy for JLo, Maluma played Bad Bunny* (*not really), and Jameela Jamil even shows up for a minute with hardly a single pomp OR a circumstance. I was just looking at the casting for JLo’s upcoming music video movie, and it’s got an even more stacked cast list, so I’m thinking JLo has a lot of famous friends?

    On a less glowing note, the setup stretched credulity a *little* too far. The whole wedding flipperoo early on still just feels extremely contrived to put these people together. I wouldn’t mind if the movie’s energy went a little harder in general–more stylized, more silly, more *something*. Matching the extreme sincerity of JLo’s interest in the “I still have hope for love” narrative (which is charming) with this concert wedding that suddenly involves a total stranger just doesn’t quite work for me personally. But I bet that’s the element that makes this a perfect fantasy for someone.

    The soundtrack is solid if you like pop music, the chemistry and performances are worth the price of admission, and I genuinely enjoy every single look JLo’s character wears in Marry Me. I’m glad I spent eight bucks to buy this one because I know I’m going to keep rewatching it when my brain doesn’t want to brain and I just want to say “Wowwwww, kachow!” every time Owen Wilson is on screen.

    Okay, but now let’s imagine that the “Hansel” theme played when Owen Wilson went on stage to marry JLo. That would have made this a six star movie, bare minimum.

    (image credit: Universal Pictures)

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