don't know where, don't know when

Well, there's something wrong with the comments here ("no one, including me, can leave any"), and after fucking with it in every way I could think of for hours on multiple occasions, I just turned the fucking things off and disappeared the link. One day I'll come back & try again, but not today.

I was going to close this blog — posting has always been way less than I wanted — but then, eh. Seems dramatic. I'll post. Someday. Don't cry, she said, laughing carelessly, her ribboned hat blowing in the chilly breeze wafting off the... moors?

I've been Redditing, which: Yes. Everyone on Reddit is a fatphobe. Only 93% of them are transphobes. If I'm ever tempted to succumb to the comforting belief that men are 1.) significantly different from women, or 2.) prone, for some dark genetic reason, to bigotry and irrational aggression, I just hop over to r/gendercritical and read as much as I can before my face melts. Jesus Christ, those people. You could do a search & replace with "woman" and "gamer" in 88% of those posts and lose nothing (except lunch, and who needs lunch; you can always get another lunch).

Speaking of which: My least favorite part of Reddit bigotry is the relatively new, condescending Concern Troll tone adopted by so many assy posters. It definitely isn't that fat people (fat women, mostly) are failing to adhere to random pointless norms which Reddit has decided to personally police in unison, because the decay of standards when it comes to female attractiveness can lead to such horrors as... uh. It's that everyone is super-concerned with fat women, whose lives are irreparably harmed by depression and datelessness and an inability to ride unicycles (!!!), because Reddit loves too much, and too deeply. Why would you choose to be fat and depressed, when you could be wasting every micro-calorie attempting to conform to prevailing weird racist standards of commercial beauty? Eh, fat women? I once attempted to explain to a Reddit macule that the presence of "depression" in a likely post subject doesn't have meaning as a metric when it comes to who's allowed online; if we're depriving the depressed of representation for their own good, then there should be no more women online period (women are more prone to depression than men) (wives and mothers are even more prone to depression than regular women, I guess, so no mommy blogs either), no black or brown people (I love that in this study the scientists attempted to control for "unhealthy behaviors," which didn't seem to factor into any other depression studies), no gay people, no gamers (sedentary people are far more prone to depression than the anthropomorphized hamsters who voluntarily jog every day for no reason) (okay, you get one), no disabled people — in fact, the only non-depressed people fit to be depicted in pixels are straight cis white men who do [*WHATEVER THE CROSSFIT OF NOW IS*]. Best not interrogate that conclusion in any way; facts don't care about your feelings, sweaty.

I am obligated to maintain a particular level of fitness and "health" for medical reasons, and it tears my ass daily. I've been fat, on multiple occasions. I don't remember becoming public property on any of them. The obsession on the internet with women's bodies — with Other people's bodies in general — is medieval. Reddit is a cybernetic upgrade, though; I'm sure they'd burn us if they could.

But. In other, less agonizing news, I went back to Tumblring, if you too would like to Tumbl (there are fewer regular people post-Porn Purge, so it's slower but slightly more fun). I closed my old Twitter account, because I didn't actually have many followers/mutuals that I liked & all I was doing was getting into political arguments with total morons or getting hit on by weirdos. I have an alt, still. Don't know if I'm gonna use it.

We'll meet again, stranger. I'm sure of it.

begin again

My mama is in the hospital battling MRSA-complicated pneumonia for the third time in six months; my dad was recently diagnosed with ocular sarcoidosis (probably, we don't know for sure) (other, much worse things were excluded, so it's either ocular sarcoidosis or "a weird, scary, specific thing your body does that doctors can't explain"). Your continued patience is appreciated.

I'm sad I blogged about Jordan Peterson. I would delete the post, if I deleted posts. Peterson's "ideas" and sniveling sympathy for wounded entitlement are so unoriginal as to border upon the cliché; even his name sounds like it came out of an airport paperback. I don't want to get that on me. Watching ostensibly sane adults line up four abreast to excuse the malignancy of this prick, who's kept up nights by visions of feminists & transpeople stealing the magic beans of self-actualization from innocent, kingly North American bigots — just in case it turns out he goes Mainstream — is nearly as excruciating as looking at Cletus Safari photojournamalisms of rusted-out, abandoned steelworks whose blank-eyed degenerate gaze is meant to indict anyone who enjoys flavored coffee. & as though finding yourself at a cultural or economic disadvantage is a quality reason invest in a worldview informed by irrational prejudice, right? This is of course why we all excuse the anti-American animus that exists in Middle Eastern & South American countries that have been excoriated by acts of enlightened Western humanitarian warfare haha just kidding. Also, I initially thought Peterson was LARPing Joseph Campbell for an audience too vapid to read even works of popular academic criticism, but it turns out Joseph Campbell was also an evil racist anti-Semitic prick whose own patriarchate sympathies were only tempered by his belief in the Sacred Feminine. Fuck him too.

It isn't fair for Jordan Peterson to think he has the right to write the story of my (or anyone's) life based on notes he took while observing reading someone's observations of lobsters, or creating psychomaps of fairytales (which are themselves a fallen form of art, irreparably tampered with by paternalistic capitalists who altered their form and function). The fact that some people think he might have a point goes farther than any amount of evo-psych ouija-board "science" to suggest that the Enlightenment's primary achievement was aiding monkeys to understand how important it is to comb their hair. (Or hide it under a powdered wig.)

Tomorrow night I'll be back with a post that has nothing whatever to do with goddamned Jordan Peterson.

call when you want, but there's no one home (moron redux)

Aaaaand... did you see this incredibly dumb thing Dave Chappelle said a couple of days ago?

Jesus Christ, what a dumbass. How, exactly, does Dave Chappelle know the precise length of time Abby Schachner stayed on the phone with the large orange pervert? Was it a conference call? Is he judging her by the length of time he stays on the phone with unprosecuted masturbating sex-offenders? Perhaps, during the incident, Schachner thought the big orange comedian — with whom she believed she might be working, like, professionally — had just gotten into the house after a nice long normal relaxing workout, and hung up as soon as she discerned the tell-tale fapping noise of fingers on foreskin amidst all the gasping and wheezing? And how, in any case, is this a question of personal responsibility on the part of the victim? Who the fuck is this idiot, Paul Ryan? How does Dave Chappelle manage, with such resolution, to avoid drawing a line between "a woman, as an eternally-potential victim of sexual assault, has a responsibility to mitigate her exposure to predators" and "a black American, as an historically-persecuted minority, has a responsibility to mitigate their resemblance to the sort of person a police officer might feel compelled to murder"? I feel as though it might be just a simple failure of empathy: "racist law enforcement officials" is an oppressive group to which Dave Chappelle decisively does not belong, but "diseased male assholes who regard women as fuckholes with whom they are perpetually at war" is a label that might fit a little more comfortably.

Women are criticized for believing that all men are potential rapists, and then also criticized for not accepting the hard, obvious fact that all men are potential rapists. We're evil, hysterical basilisks until the exact moment we are required to become innately defenseless weaklings so their alibis will stand up in court. Get fucked, Dave Chappelle.

P.S. — I wonder if Chappelle has ever met Andrew Sullivan? Sully has some very interesting made-up ideas about hormones that he might find very compelling.

P.P.S — I don't expect comedians to be inoffensive, of course. Nor to I expect comedians, or indeed humans of any variety, to agree with all my political positions. I do expect adults of all professions to be able to prosecute a complete thought, though. I also generally prefer that a professional comedian at least make visible efforts in the direction of regurgitating actual jokes when on stage. If I wanted to be pointlessly offended, I would patronize an "offendian."

a medicine for melancholy

 

The problem is: Paid-for Pocket looks exactly like free Pocket, and also it crashes at the same rate. Probably I should just bite the bullet and excavate the whole archive so I can get rid of the service, which is shoddy anyway (but convenient).

Also, stupid people keep moving my goalposts all over town. Like, did you read this awful thing that famously mendacious racist Andrew Sullivan wrote about getting an injection of testosterone? This man is too stupid to live. Here's a quote:

You need testosterone to turn a fetus with a Y chromosome into a real boy, to masculinize his brain and body. Men experience a flood of testosterone twice in their lives: in the womb about six weeks after conception and at puberty. The first fetal burst primes the brain and the body, endowing male fetuses with the instinctual knowledge of how to respond to later testosterone surges.

First-trimester fetuses have 'instinctual knowledge' of the world, despite not having brains. Excellent. The rest of the science is equally hilarious; Sullivan says, "[t]estosterone, oddly enough, is a chemical closely related to cholesterol," and doesn't bother to notice that all hormones are manufactured by the body from cholesterol. "Pregnant women who were injected with progesterone (chemically similar to testosterone)[...]," what. Progesterone isn't any more similar to testosterone than estrogen, which Sullivan actually goes to the trouble of explaining can be metabolized interchangeably from the same biological components (and then he forgets about it, I guess). Men and women manufacture equivalent quantities of progesterone under normal conditions, please shut up quickly. "The Big T correlates with energy, self-confidence, competitiveness, tenacity, strength and sexual drive," and here "correlates" is doing the work of ten men. "And most of the studies of the psychological effects of testosterone take place in culturally saturated environments, so that the difference between cause and effect is often extremely hard to disentangle," which invalidates his entire premise, but so what. Andrew Sullivan didn't get this far in life by letting a thing like the total negation of his hypothesis by all available evidence stand in his way!

None of this means, as the scientists always caution, that testosterone is directly linked to romantic failure or violence. No study has found a simple correlation, for example, between testosterone levels and crime. But there may be a complex correlation. 

No there isn't. If there were, this statement wouldn't have to be decorated with qualifications like the bumper-stickers on a 1978 Volvo.

It is also controversial yet undeniable that elevating testosterone levels can be extremely beneficial for physical and mental performance. It depends, of course, on what you're performing in. If your job is to whack home runs, capture criminals or play the market, then testosterone is a huge advantage. If you're a professional conciliator, office manager or teacher, it is probably a handicap.

Controversial, but undeniable. I am going to cry. Also:

Since most men have at least 10 times as much T as most women, it therefore makes sense not to have coed baseball leagues. Equally, it makes sense that women will be underrepresented in a high-testosterone environment like military combat or construction.

Sullivan then goes on to note a study undertaken by the well-respected, publicly-funded scientific research center Toys'R'Us.

The entire article displays a pathetic preoccupation with body hair, action verbs, and "assertiveness."

So, here we go:

1. The side-effects from testosterone injections administered to an ailing body do not, in fact, reflect the effects of global testosterone metabolism in a typical person.
2. Speaking of ailing bodies, I suffer from PCOS and, before I sought medical intervention, I used to (naturally!) produce massive quantities of testosterone all by myself; I grew a stiff and fetching beard, and curly arm hair, and I was almost totally bald on the top of my head. Also I weighed nearly 300 pounds, and had three periods a month. [ETA: And I had painful, disfiguring acne!] Despite the unfortunate consequences of my all-natural excess testosterone production, I managed not to rape or kill anyone to prove my fitness for mating.
3. Nor did I harass or attack anyone in a dog park, or mysteriously acquire the belief that I deserved to be stacked at the top of every imaginable human hierarchy and therefore get everything I ever wanted, whenever I wanted it.
4. Explain that, asshole. 
5. At the glorious pinnacle of my all-natural testosterone production, was I technically a butch lesbian, a man, or a kind of hyena? 
6. When I was an inch-long fetus, what did my disorder train me to understand about my future ability to manufacture sex hormones?
7. Can you explain why my possession of extremely huge quantities of all-natural personal testosterone failed to launch me directly into the Presidency, or any other lofty position? 
8. And why didn't I start yearning to become a construction worker, or Marine Todd?
9. I mean, mostly I just sat around having panic attacks and crying all day. And I couldn't sleep for shit! I was good for absolutely nothing. How did I manage to fail my beautiful testosterone so badly?

I would like to mention, before moving on, that Sullivan also thought #GamerGate was a reasonable reaction to women provocatively requesting to be treated as human beings rather than objects. Perhaps you think I'm kidding. "The argument seems to be that some feminists are attempting to police or control a hyper-male culture of violence, speed, competition and boobage. And in so far as that might be the case, my sympathies do indeed lie with the gamers." In the same essay, he blames libtards for the entire problem, because in high school the libtards were too socially-adequate to be bullied, and therefore don't understand how childhood bullying leads naturally to doxing, harassment, and proud misogyny in defense of innocent digital waifus. (Perhaps I should start calling him "the famously mendacious sexist Andrew Sullivan.")

The love on the left for this cretin is inexplicable. I think they just like calling him "Sully."

Sadly enough, I found that wretched article because I read this article, which also led me to read this inexplicable Twitter thread in which a bunch of tragic morons who don't understand what evolution is attempt to defend unequivocal gender segregation by suggesting that human behavior is informed by the culture of chimpanzees. I wonder how far down the road to Chimpanzeetown these fools would like to travel? Cannibalism? Gang rape? Infanticide? Circus tricks? Zoos? This is getting embarrassing. I will say that I'm willing to accept guidance on social engineering from any chimpanzee capable of getting a scientifically-illiterate, disingenuous article about testosterone published in The New York Times.

Your move, Bubbles.

it felt good to be out of the rain

Well, I think we can all agree that if there's one thing I'm good at, it's not posting on this blog. My last six months have been filled with the typical medieval bestiary of Debbie Downer life events — many of which have been related to severe health crises, for both myself and others — that I always feel slightly guilty writing about online, as if I'm attempting to elicit the sympathy of strangers to collect donations for a shady religious charity. There is definitely something coercive about saying, I or someone I love almost died! to people who don't know you in person. I don't know why! But it always makes me feel uncomfortable when I read other people's explanations of dodged fatality. I empathize with people who have gone through awful things, obviously, but I suppose I have somehow acquired a puritanical dedication to suffering in silence myself. Maybe it's all those English fantasy novels. Still: I got better! My mother got better! My father got better! Then my mother got better again! We're all better. (Mostly.) (92%) We are as well as modern medicine can make a person, which is good enough to write blog posts with.

I've already written a post about "politics," but it turned out to be so full of poison and despair that I'm never going to let anyone see it. I'm currently taking it apart into two posts; one is about the failures of American cultural liberalism, and the other about well-off essay-writing white people who would like to reclassify poor white men as a minority group (when white people call for an 'end to identity politics' and they aren't being 100% disingenuous, this is what they're talking about). Writing about both of these things makes me angry, of course, but the "white people suddenly trying to invade the spaces to which minorities historically retreated for self-protection, because those minorities managed to make their own exclusion look like a fun party" part passeth all understanding. White people, what are you doing to us? What are you doing to yourselves?

Anyway. Since I've spent the last five-odd months sitting in hospitals and doctors' offices reading, with an increasing degree of incredulity, the articles in mildly-outdated American "news," "science," and "women's" magazines, I have prepared for you an overview of the intellectual landscape of the dying world of paper publishing. It's like the maps Tolkien put at the beginning of all of his Middle-earth novels, only pointless. This is a brief enumeration of some of my favorite topics, all of which were, are, and will be written about in the the most opaque, inhumane, and unimaginative ways possible:

• My Wife's Decent Salary Made My Penis Redundant
• Will You Get A Load Of All Of These Millennials Over Here
• Do You Remember That Time In The Recent Or Distant Past When Things Were Wonderful/Explicable
• Is The Entire Universe Going To Explode Next Year
• Impressionable Suburban Jamokes Are Frightened Of Various Mostly-Imaginary Threats, Here's Why You Should Worry Too
• Everything You Eat And Touch Is A Cancer IOU
• Will You Get A Load Of All Of These [Post-Millennial Generation Name] Over Here
• Have You Noticed That Some Emotionally-Crippled White Folks Act Like Assholes Online
• Look At Some Floodlit Photos Of Obnoxious Underweight Rich Famous People Who Are Promoting A Depressing Commercial Entertainment Product, They Are Such Adorable Nerds (Follow Them On Social)
• How To Dumb Down Your Feminism So It Doesn't Threaten Your Guy (He's An Hysterical Useless Baby That You Won't Ever Dump) (Not That We're Suggesting You Should Lol!!!)
• This Giant Faceless Tax-Evading Corporation Is Spearheading Symbolic Logo-Ridden Efforts To Combat Some Of The Starvation And Misery It Created (Here's How You Can Help) (Buy Stuff)
• Is It Okay If Fat People Exist
• This Repellant Irrational White Supremacist Fulfills Many Brainless People's Expectations About Conventional Physical Attractiveness: Does That Make Him/Her More Or Less Scary
• Could You Be Putting Even More Effort Into Your Pointless Job
• 10 Tips For Helping Women Shoulder Extra Cultural Burdens
• Cook All Your Own Food Which You Grew Yourself (In A Quirky Repurposed Pinterest Bucket)
• Let's Go Back To Training Men To Perform Outdated And Harmful Gender-Stereotyped Behaviors So Dumb Women Will Want To Fuck Them More
• Be Sure Your House Is Decorated Exactly Like All The Other Houses
• New Study Says Thumb Dexterity Is Down 12% Among Kindergarteners (Scientists Blame Recently-Discovered Undetectable Toxins) (The Word "Down" Is Defined Creatively)
• Pretending That Making Your Own Shampoo, Toothpaste, And Cosmetic Products Is A Fun And Necessary Activity
• Here Is A Fawning Interview With A Man Who Portrays That Character In A Popular Movie Or Television Show That Everyone Wants To Fuck
• Read An Over-Simplified Account Of The Isolation Of A Minor Neurotransmitter That Looks As If It Might Have Something To Do With Appetite Control (Will The Scientists Finally Give Us A Magic Diet Pill?) (No)
• Do These Difficult And Faddish Calisthenic Exercises So You Can Look Like A Photoshopped Celebrity In Your Swimsuit And Attract The Sexualized Beach Gaze Of Random Men
• How To Make Your Own Substandard Naked Feet Look Like An Extruded Plastic Nordstrom Mannequin's Pedal Appendages
• This Boring Well-Off White Couple's Desperate Expensive Quest To Breed Biological Children Will Make You Wonder How People This Stupid Were Able To Acquire That Much Disposable Income
• Acting Like The $350 Purse Is A Major Bargain Compared To The $7,438 Purse Which It Resembles (They Are Both Ugly)
• A Misinterpretation Of Poorly-Understood And Incomplete Scientific Data Suggests That Women Are Biologically Required To Pursue Cuddles, Babies, And Ice Cube-Sized Engagement Rings At The Expense Of Rational Thought
• This Plant-Related Superfood Has Been "Linked" To A "Reduction" In "Cancer Risk": 9 Unpalatable Smoothie Recipes Whose Greenness Conveys Awareness Of Global Injustice (Get A Transparent Travel Cup)
• We Rated 34 Brands Of Transparent Travel Cup And Will Coincidentally Recommend The One Sold By Our Biggest Ad Sponsor
• Profiling The Deeply Deranged Megalomaniacs Of Silicon Valley Who Are Titling At The Windmill Of Human Mortality (Like Alchemists, Only Dumber And Wearing Khakis)
• 10 Minutes Of Mindfulness A Week Will Literally Stop You From Ever Dying
• How To Tastefully Wear Your #NastyWoman T-shirt To Your Aggressively Soulless Corporate Workplace Without Annoying Any Important Men (Accessorize)
• Donald Trump: Is He Orange Satan, Or An Old Toddler? We Ask Poets, Chemical Engineers, And Your Mom

I left out all the articles I saw about Muslims, because I knew better than to read them.

I don't actually have the time to reply to comments at the moment, assuming there might be any, but I (probably) will soon. Also I have lots of things to do online before I can get back to writing mean words about fantasy novels. Speaking of which! I am currently working on the review of a couple of feminist fantasy novels written by men, as well as finishing Carolyne Larrington's King Arthur's Enchantresses. After that, it's Simon Schama & Mark Fisher. After that, who knows? 

Thank you for your continuing forbearance, Five People Who Sometimes Read My Blogger Blog!

ETA: I JUST DISCOVERED THAT I HAVEN'T GOT A FEMINISM TAG WTF FIXED

heaven holds a place for those who pray

This time, I almost died.

Some other people did die, in fact; we lost my grandmother (when they called to tell us she passed, my mother sat on the sofa crying for a few minutes and then looked at me and said, "This is the first time in my life my mother hasn’t just been there. Now I’m going to have to call myself fat."), and the family cat (the elderly brindle gentleman looking into the mirror in those exceedingly sepia’d photos I posted a couple of years ago), both under extremely depressing dementia-related circumstances. My grandmother went from "crotchety old lady who had to be looked after occasionally but was basically fine" to "frail convalescent requiring constant care in a nursing home" in about six months and for no discernible reason, and then she stopped speaking or interacting with anyone, and then she died in her sleep a few days later — just about a month after her 83rd birthday. The cat got freakishly skinny and refused to eat, and then began to spend every waking moment pacing/peeing on the floor. When it was determined that he couldn’t be treated (he was 17) and appeared obviously to be suffering, we agreed to have him put down. The day he was taken away to be euthanized, I don’t think he even recognized me. It was, bewilderingly, almost worse than losing a person. He weighed almost nothing in my hands, and his vacant eyes reminded me of a toy’s. No fair, Death.

Afterwards, I got really sick. I developed pneumonia and a weird traveling infection that refused to stop inhabiting my respiratory tract; it was a very Victorian moment. But I got better! That’s what matters. I ate a lot of Twinkies instead of food (because pills), and I got better. After that, things were pretty okay for a while, and then just recently my mother almost died after a very routine medical test — she went into shock and had some sort of exciting cardiopulmonary event. She’s now doing incredibly well, given the circumstances, except for the fact that she contracted a staph infection because she had to be rushed to a substandard local hospital for emergency treatment.

Other than that, though, things have gone great.

Well, I mean. There was that fucking election! That was not great. That was pretty much an outré postmodern live-action dictionary pantomime of "not great," holy motherfucking shit. We might’ve finally managed to elect a president who will be removed from office by the Avengers in his first 100 days! What a world.

For what it’s worth (nothing), I cosign Jamelle Bouie’s framing of the quantum intersection between racism and the modal straight white American voter — probably most of these poor silly bastards would vote for a chicken running on the Party Of Free Pancakes From Hitler With Love platform if it promised to punish Wall Street for committing fraud and create some decent jobs that didn’t require a college diploma.¹ That doesn’t make any sense to me either, but I’m not the modal straight white American voter.

Also, I just now found this essay, which ends thusly:

But the truth is, we don’t know. If all the predictions were so far off, why should we think the post-election analysis, with all its instant pseudo-certainty, is any smarter or more accurate? What do we know now that we didn’t know before, except that the story wasn’t what we thought it was and that it didn’t go where we thought it was going to go? I am not sure of anything right now, except that on the morning after the election there was a big piece of shit in a doorway and I didn’t know what it meant or how it got there, and that someone was going to have a wretched, smelly time trying to clean it up.

That’s no, "He would be there all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning." I suppose it will have to do.

I’ve also been finding it useful to remember that Trumpists make up about 48% of the the 58%-ish of Americans who voted in the election. Haha! Hahahaha. Ha. 👀

Another important lesson from the election that we can all take home and eat is an empirical refutation of the hypothesis that (biological, cis-) women can be counted upon to behave like feminists just because they’re women — especially if they’re also straight and/or white. If you have three straight white American women in a room and you play them that Trump pussy-grabbing tape, one of them will think he’s a monster and empathize with his hypothetical victims, one will think, "Oh God, I wish a powerful and important man like Donald Trump would grab me by the pussy!", and one will think, "Well, if she wasn’t standing there dressed like a slut he wouldn’t be able to grab her, would he? Stay at home with your legs closed, whore!" In public, Women #2 and #3 are a lot quieter than Woman #1, but they still vote. Irony!

Also, who would've predicted that we’d be finding evil Russians under the bed again in 2016, but that in this sequel they’d be best friends with the quasi-fascist right-wing imbeciles who used to witch-hunt them all night long?

Anyway.

While I was convalescing and grieving and contemplating the murder of my television on November 9th, I was also reading books and writing book reviews, because I am a gigantic nerd. I have 70+ single-novel short-stack reviews ready to go, as well as story-by-story reviews of around 12 collections, and a few normal-length book reviews too. I’m going to start posting them here twice a week (or more often if I get very bored), starting on Wednesday.

Don’t laugh, I’m really doing it this time.
One day, I may even review The Quincunx.
(I’m also remaking my other website, because why quit now.)

See you Wednesday!!!

---

1. Why the hell anyone would run on a "college for everybody forever" platform in order to appeal to people who could barely make it through high school — and who watched their own grand/children barely make it through high school — eludes me. That was not a good policy, Democratic Party. Let’s replace that policy with something less awful soon.