elanya

I enjoyed this week's Leverage. ( spoilers )

I also watched the first two episodes of Murderbot. It was cute. I like Mensah a lot. I only read the first novella and thought it was fine but not at all memorable, so I have no real dog in this hunt. ( spoiler )

Ugh, I just found out the Mets are on ESPN next Sunday night too. ESPN is the worst broadcast.

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Title: A Plea for the Planet
Fandom: Original
Rating: G
Length: 209 words
Summary: A call not to ignore the waters of the planet

 Work has been kind of wild tonight. I'm working the AVSEC desk and I've had weird breaches and a case of arson and one airport employee meeting a Tindr date next to one of the departure gates. I'd blame the full moon, except that that was several days ago (and that was also a bit of a wild weekend!). I guess someone just spiked the water with something tonight.

I decided to take a relaxing break from watching Law & Order: SVU by watching The Purge movies. I am partway through the second one. I watched them once before, many years ago (the most recent one is from 2016), and I'd forgotten how much the premise makes so very little sense. I think it's because whoever conceptualized and wrote it didn't really think it all the way through. I have been trying to figure out how it could work, and honestly it just doesn't. The writer put a lot of emphasis on the fact that every crime is allowed during this 12-hour period, including murder, as if murder and violence is what most people aspire to. The Purge announcement over TV/radio/etc. also makes a big deal out of how murder is allowed, and therein lies the central weakness of the narrative.

The idea, of course, is that the poor and marginalized, the "undesirables" will either kill each other off, or be killed off by wealthier people with better access to weapons and hired mercenaries or whatever. And yeah, sure, there might be some of that in reality, but I don't think it holds true of most marginalized people. If anything, they are the ones most likely to engage in mutual aid and take part in a more unofficial economy. Also, while I'm sure there are wealthy people who'd take advantage of things, I rather think they'd be too concerned about preserving their property to really get into that much trouble themselves.

Also, straight-up murder is just so unimaginative, and humanity can get super creative with their crimes. Why go outside and run the risk of physical injury when you can hack into a bank, or government systems? You could transfer a bunch of money into your accounts, or cancel your student loans (or everyone's student loans!) Why wouldn't every organized crime group arrange to move vast amounts of drugs during that night with no repercussions?

What would stop the powerful people at the helm of institutions from committing collapse-inducing crimes? A bank CEO just cleaning out his entire bank, or a government official selling every single national security secret available to foreign powers. It's not treason during Purge Night! If even a few dozen people committed large-scale crimes, it could absolutely collapse the nation in short order. 

And then there's the issue of the emergency services. According to the premise, they are unavailable during the twelve hours of Purge Night, which makes a certain amount of sense: people would target any first responders getting in the way of their crimes. If you're murdering someone, you want them dead. That all holds up until you get to the fire department. The movies don't (to my knowledge, I could be misremembering) show any kind of arson, and you cannot convince me that there wouldn't be pyromaniacs and overexcited teenagers setting fire to shit all over the place. You know what fire does? It spreads. So why aren't entire neighbourhoods wiped out by fire on Purge Night, since there are no firefighters to keep the blazes under control?

Another thing that bugs me about the movies is that they focus exclusively on urban settings. It definitely works better for the plot, but a lot of the USA is either rural or at least from small towns. Does the Purge even happen there? Would people attack farms? You could set fire to all of the USA's food supply and, again, cause some pretty significant societal damage.

In short, the writer did not think this through, and just created a hyper-violent but ultimately unimaginative premise that doesn't really prompt the audience to think about the broader societal issues underpinning the story. It just boils down to "murder and violence bad," as if we didn't know that already.

Okay, thank you for bearing with my rambling thoughts about The Purge franchise. ;) Catch you on the flip side, friends!

Title: in another life
Fandom: The Double (cdrama)
Content notes: references to canon violence, gaslighting, nightmares
Length: 100 words

Summary: There are worse fates.


( Read more... )

3 degrees around here. The heater that I have is barely keeping the cold at bay. I think the space needs a few more curtains to cut down the area that needs warming...

Anyway, I'm just here for another night.

Good to catch up with my friend B, who used to be on LJ and has a DW account but probably hasn't used it in over a decade! I haven't seen her or her husband, C, since 2023 when her FIL died, and haven't seen her sons since...even longer. They were shorter than me when last I saw them, they have since shot up and tower over me at a 6-foot minimum. Haven't visited her family down here since before the pandemic, and she's had a lot going on in so many dimensions.

Got down here last night, ate pizza and had a long chat to catch up on all the things that don't get put on FB. Went for a walk today around town and did more talking about directions and futures and stuff, then back home for lunch, and out for dinner. Tomorrow is markets.

I gave her the rough (exceedingly rough) draft of my novel, and promptly found a bajillion spelling and name mistakes. I'm in the process of cleaning it up, but it's slow. Rewriting the next novel will be even slower, trying to fit everything in. There's a lot of stuff to get through!

For the cold tonight, I've piled a few extra things on the bed to help keep me warm - pillows, clothing, etc. It'll be fine, just a wee smidge colder than I'm used to (and I like things warm and toasty, but can't be helped). Like I said, it's only for one night.

Good to catch up with B though.

Title: Gone Fishing
Fandom: Torchwood
Author: badly_knitted
Characters: Ianto, Jack, Tosh, Gwen, Owen.
Rating: PG
Word Count: 1544
Summary: The Rift is up to its old tricks, this time dropping something at the bottom of a lake.
Spoilers: Nada.
Warnings: None needed.
Written For: Challenge 479: Underwater.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Torchwood or any of the characters.

I am very grumpy about having to get up early to go to the credit union to sign all my mortgage paperwork. The experience wasn't terrible, but it didn't have much going for it. First I got caught in long weekend rush hour traffic on my way there, and arrived exactly on the nose, only to get very turned around because not a single solitary door had a number or a label on it. It turned out the office wasn't even accessible from the main building lobby, it had a separate entrance at the back of the building. I had to call the representative for directions, and he came to get me.

The representative was very nice, but he had not anticipated having the kind of client who carefully reads all documentation before signing it, so it took a lot longer to get through the appointment than the time he'd budgeted. I regret nothing. ;) However, there was a glitch in the computer system when it came time to sign up for the insurance portion of the mortgage, and there was no way to fix it, since the automated system had gone into "weekend mode" (his term) and there was no one from IT available outside of office hours. So in order not to delay the payout of the mortgage I had to waive the insurance portion, which makes me very uncomfy, but the representative assured me that we can fix that next week.

All in all, I did not enjoy the process.

I've been mostly talking about my own problems here lately, but the world continues to be on fire. Carney, our new Prime Minister, went on an official visit to the White House last week, and to all appearances held his own with a fair bit of aplomb. There was an entertaining amount of Canadian passive-aggressiveness, some very amusing side-eyes at the camera, and lots of backhanded compliments that Trump took completely at face value. 

I still have a lot of doubts about Carney. His focus has been mostly on the economy and fixing the housing crisis, and he's pledged to massively increase defense spending and car manufacturing, and needless to say, I don't share those priorities, especially not car manufacturing. Given the current climate change crisis, we should be moving well away from cars and investing in robust public transit and 15-minute accessible cities. But noooo, cars uber alles, I guess. Ugh. He's also eliminated the cabinet positions devoted to people with disabilities and women and gender equality issues, which is a huge step back for the country, especially given the meagre progress we've made on that front to begin with. I am really unimpressed with that.

At least India and Pakistan appear to have backed off plunging the entire world into nuclear winter. The USA continues its horrendous slide into fascism, with the firing of the Librarian of Congress (the first black woman to ever occupy the post, appointed by Obama, back when the world still seemed sane), ICE grabbing people off the streets and leaving their minor children stranded there, and DOGE continuing to wreak havoc across all government departments.

Watching the USA go down like this feels a little like watching a friend who was always a little unstable succumb to a drug addiction. You always worried about them in the past, and now you're worried that not only are they going to self-destruct, they're going to take you down with them and burn your house down too for good measure.

*sigh*

I am really looking forward to my bed. I have about four and a half hours before my shift is over, and I do want to stop at the local U-Haul store (luckily a five-minute drive from my house) and pick up more boxes, because Monday is a statutory holiday and I won't be able to get them then. And then I plan to do all the sleeping.

I think that's it for now. Catch you on the flip side, friends!

I wrote this on tumblr nearly a year ago in reply to:

byjove:

countries will be like “nooooo our birth rate is falling exponentially and it’s effecting our economy” and immigrants will be like “hey can you let us in so we can boost your economy and fill your empty jobs and raise our children here” and inevitably the country is like “the only thing worse than a large scale collapse of our population is letting foreigners live here”


byjove:
America’s immigration policies are difficult enough but I read the immigration policies for some countries and it is batshit insane. they’re straight up like “we hate disabled people, we hate people who don’t speak our language, if you don’t have a $85k a year salary lined up for you, we don’t want you to move here. if by some miracle you jump through all the hoops and move here, it will take you 20 years to obtain citizenship and during that time we will not rent to you because you’re a foreigner.” damn bitch. fuck you.

lannamichaels:

I read foreign policy stuff and every few months, like clockwork, there’s an article about [insert country here] having demographic problems caused by not enough young people and What That Means.

And every single time, I have only two questions:

1. What is your immigration policy?
2. How much does it cost to have and raise a baby, both direct monetary and intangibles, such as does a woman destroy her entire professional career to do so?


Fixing both of those will fix every single falling population problem I have ever read about in those places. Because the answer is generally “both. both are bad.” And places where the second one is considered to be fine, the first one absolutely isn’t.

(I state these are the constant issues at play in foreign policy writings to contrast that with the stuff I’ve heard about from rural demographic problems where the issue is “we have young people, but they leave because there aren’t any jobs.” That is internal population shifting within a country and comes with other problems, ex: rent.)

I bring this up here now because I'm not going to keep adding on to someone else's post, especially this long after, but we have a new entry in the "every so often Foreign Policy likes to talk about birthrates" trend and it's...

It's an entire article about how Israel doesn't have this problem, because Jewish women tend to have lots of kids compared to the rest of the countries considered equivalent economically, and at NO POINT mentions the Holocaust.

How oh how do you have an article about how Jewish women have a culture where having a lot of kids is considered necessary and DO NOT MENTION THAT, I do not know. It probably gets included in, oh, it's a religious reason, but except not that much because it points out that secular Israelis also have more kids on average than the comparison population.

The author cannot be this clueless. Was it just that he felt it awkward to point out there is the actual need to repopulate????? Even I have heard from women dealing with infertility who feel like complete failures because they can't help poke Hitler in the eye.



As a complete aside, though, since I'm on this subject, many things piss me off in Harry Potter and Harry Potter fandom but among the worst is the Weasleys. Molly and Arthur Weasley are the only characters in that entire backstory who understood the assignment.

Congratulations, you have just managed to survive a genocide that wiped out an entire generation! What do you do?

Every other character: uh, have one or two kids?

Arthur and Molly Weasley: hold our birth control.

Yes, yes, I'm aware that in context, the Weasleys aka "poor and red haired with more children than they can afford" are anti-Irish bigotry. Also we don't know too much about random other characters and their families, true.

But seeing it repeated in fandom? Oh, that's a lot of people who don't know what it's like to be part of a people that survived a genocide five minutes ago.

The magical world is in a massive demographic problem* and the Weasleys are the only ones who are taking it seriously.




*all this random extra ridiculous pureblood stuff that isn't in the books that has become some kind of calcified fanon also makes no sense, and part of the reason it makes no sense is that your population size is too goddamn small. The magical world in Britain, if we take the numbers seriously, is actively in the process of dying out.

You know, if all that was required of me to be successful in life was making plans, I would be acing this whole "being a successful human" thing. I love making plans, the more detailed, the better. The problem, of course, is that to actually succeed at things, you have to enact said plans, and that is where everything kind of falls apart for me.

KK kind of falls into the same category as me, and we are pretty terrible about enabling each other at making plans and then following through on maybe 10% of them. To be fair, it's a lot of fun to make plans, and I don't mind too much if all the low-stakes, castles-in-Spain plans don't come to fruition. It's actually really fun to talk about these things and throw ideas back and forth and build it up in our imaginations. I don't know if she is quite as aware as I am that our reach might exceed our grasp in a lot of cases, but I suspect she is.

I am also well aware of my propensity to make grand plans to completely turn my life around while I'm working night shifts (I talked about in in a previous post a few weeks ago, during another round of night shifts), and I have just come to accept it as one of my brain's quirky little ways of generating dopamine, so I just let it happen now and try not to convince myself that this time will totally be different, no, really! As long as I can accept that this is just an exercise in making my brain go *brrrt*, and that I have no expectations of actually doing anything about it, then it's a harmless little pastime during slower night shifts.

Right now I am trying to make sensible plans for packing up the house next week. Working 12-hour shifts this weekend means I won't get anything done, and there is no sense in deluding myself into thinking that I will somehow manage to do anything other than sleep and go to work. My current ambitious plan is to try to get a lot of packing done on Monday, when normally I'd spend a chunk of the day sleeping after my night shift. Don't get me wrong, I will still sleep when I get home, but it will be more of a two-hour power nap and then I'll aim to go to bed very early as a way of shifting over my sleep schedule as quickly as possible.

Tuesday through Thursday I've hired the professional organizer I had hired back in... March? I think? *checks calendar* Nope, first week of April. ANYWAY. I have hired her to come for six hours a day to help me pack up the garage and, if there's enough time, the basement. I am reasonably confident that I can pack up the upstairs on my own (minus KK's room and bathroom), and if I have friends able and willing to help pack the kitchen and dining room, that will also be really helpful. I might be able to do it on my own, but only time will tell.

So far most of the coworkers I have asked for a shift switch have said no, which is sad but not unexpected. I have two coworkers left who might be able to help me out. One is coming in for a shift today, and the other won't be in until Monday, so if the first one says no I'll just have to log into my email account from home to see if the second is willing to take one for the team. He very well might, since I agreed to swap weekends with him back in November so he could take his wife to go see Taylor Swift in Toronto, but it will of course be dependent on whether he has other commitments lined up already. Getting the weekend off to pack would be ideal, but if I can't get it, I will cope.

I have set one boundary with regards to the packing with KK, and that's that I expect her to pack up her own shit. I am by far the more able-bodied of the two of us, so I don't mind that I'm probably going to end up packing up most of the house on my own. I need her to still be physically functional by the time moving day arrives, so I'm perfectly willing to take that on. What I am not willing to take on, however, is packing up her office or her bedroom or her bathroom. Those three rooms are all on her, and I told her that many weeks ago. Like me, she hasn't started packing yet, but I don't plan on bailing her out at the last minute. Whatever she hasn't packed is just going to get left behind, and she can figure out how to get it delivered to the house. The chances of her not being ready in time are not super high, but they're also not zero, either. But I can't be responsible for myself, the whole house, the pets, AND her stuff. So she gets to be responsible for that.

Somewhere in the next ten days I am going to lose at least half a day to attend the closing for the house. I haven't heard from the lawyer, come to think of it, so I'll shoot them an email to make sure everything is still good on that front, or if they need more information from me or something. Great. Another thing to be paranoid about. Well, at least it should be a relatively easy fix, and it's 10 days before my official closing date (and more than one business week), so hopefully there's nothing to worry about. Anyway, I assume the closing will be done at the lawyer's office in Cornwall, so I'll have to drive out there and back, and even if it takes an hour or less to sign all the paperwork, it means at least a three hour trip, possibly longer.

I think it's still doable, God help me. I may just be deluding myself, but I am an incurable optimist when it comes to these things. I guess we'll find out!

All right, time to close out this night shift. I have a little over two hours left before I can go home and get some sleep. Catch you on the flip side, friends!

( In which our motivations )
 

I realize I owe replies to comments and I will get to that. Work has just been eating my brain lately and not leaving much leftover.

In the meantime, I bring you two cool links:

- the Superman trailer which looks so good (I also ordered this adorable Superman dress for Baby Miss L); and

- this interview with John DeMarisco, who directs Mets games for SNY (and a cool behind the scenes video here).

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Title: Briar and Bramble Just Want to Play
Fandom: Ducktales
Rating: G
Length: 22 words
Summary: Murder ponies are totally sweet and are not trying to kill you.

( Read more... )

But not restfulness.

Off to catch up with a friend tomorrow and the weekend, back on Sunday to a hotel in the city.

Interestingly, I and one other guy are at the hotel where most of the others were last week...the others have been moved to a high-end hotel!

Anyway. I'm just glad to not be out here after tonight. Although how I'm going to manage to pack my bag again, I really don't know.

The panic hasn't set in yet. I'm moving in two weeks, have got absolutely nothing done, and am fighting against a rising tide of mystery tired. The panic is supposed to trigger adrenaline which in turn will lead to packing, but right now all I've managed to do is go to work, sleep, and put food in my body. I haven't even been eating particularly healthy lately, because I haven't had the wherewithal to cook. I'm not eating absolute junk, but there's been a lot of frozen meals and snack foods.

I don't know if the current amount of tired I'm feeling is the remnants of Covid, or the result of working a fuckton of shifts in a row including evenings, weekends, and now nights, or the result of being stressed and out of shape, or if I'm just one of the unlucky people who don't ever get to feel better when using a CPAP. Or an unholy combination of any or all of it.

*screams into the void*

Yes, I am being melodramatic. It will pass, I promise. ;) Right now, though, all of my feelings are "Woe, and darkness, and teh sad." I really, really wish that my brain's reaction to stress wasn't to go directly into overwhelm and shutdown. It would be so  nice if I had socially acceptable dysfunctional coping mechanisms, you know? I could be a compulsive cleaner, or a compulsive exerciser, but noooooo. I stress eat and procrastinate and doomscroll or play video games. The closest I've come to a "productive" coping mechanism is occasionally baking cookies or making soup.

*lies on the floor*

*screams into the void some more*

I had my meeting with the two M&C folks today, and they were so nice and so sweet to me, and even suggested that I have a "packing party" to get the house packed up. I will see how I get on with packing until the end of next week, and if I'm still in as much trouble as I think I'm in now, I will put up a plea for help on Facebook.

I think part of it is that I haven't had enough sleep this week. I got no sleep on Monday, then only six hours of sleep on Tuesday, and barely scraped together five non-consecutive hours yesterday (because of the aforementioned meeting). I am going to sleep as much as I can today because I have to get up early again tomorrow to go to the credit union. It has also been ungodly hot the past few days, thank you climate change. 

Title: Coming Up For Air
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Explicit Sex
Fandom: S.W.A.T.
Relationships: Donovan Rocker/Molly Hicks
Tags: Getting Together
Summary: There was something vastly different about this relationship and Molly wanted to keep it.
Word Count: 6,614

inexplicably tired. I even got 8 hours pretty solidly last night. (I think. I don't remember waking up anyway.)

Will try for more sleep. MOAR SLEEP.

Wish me luck.

Thanks for considering these assignments! Please reply (comments are screened) or email jukebox.mod@gmail.com in order to claim a pinch hit.

Due: 11:59pm EDT Sunday 29 June

Minimum requirements: A work about one requested song or music video (or crossovers if specifically encouraged by your recipient), complete and polished, no generation of content via "AI" assistive tools. 1,000+ words for fic; a complete piece for art; 1,000+ words of podfic of an existing fic OR 500+ words of podfic of a work both written and recorded for this exchange.

Song/video/lyrics links for all requested canons can be found here.

( CLAIMED - Pinch hit #1 - Lock-Keeper - Stan Rogers (Song), Glitter of Gold - Ted Wesley (Song), That Man - Caro Emerald (Song) - art, fic [varies] )

( Pinch hit #2 - The Questions Still Entertain Me - Hussalonia (Song), Passerby - Dave Smallen (Song), St. Elmo's Fire - Brian Eno (Song) - fic )

( Pinch hit #3 - Born Under Punches - Angélique Kidjo (Song), Vesoul - Jacques Brel (Song), Bigger Sky - The Altogether (Song), Lake of Silver Bells - Carbon Leaf (Song) - fic, podfic [varies] )

( Pinch hit #4 - Deutschland - Rammstein (Music Video), Le Jardin Des Larmes - ZAZ ft. Till Lindemann (Music Video), Blacksnake - Charming Disaster (Song) - art, fic )

( CLAIMED - Pinch hit #5 - After the Disco - Broken Bells (Album Short Film), Graduation - Benny Blanco & Juice WRLD (Music Video), Nothing to Find - The War on Drugs (Music Video) - art, fic [varies] )

( Pinch hit #6 - Let Him Roll - Guy Clark (Song), David Watts - The Jam (Song), America 2 - The Midnight (Song) - fic )

( Pinch hit #7 - My Therapy - Kamelot (Music Video), So Handsome Hello - Woodkid (Song), Until Eternity - Blackbriar (Music Video), Moonflower - Blackbriar (Music Video) - fic )

 I have spent all of this shift halfway convinced that it's my third night shift instead of my second. I think it's the fact that I've already been working for nine days straight that makes it feel like it's later in the week than it actually is. I still have five more nights to go, including the 12-hour weekend shifts. I am not really looking forward to any of it, but it is what it is.

I managed to get about six hours of sleep and probably would have slept longer had I not had to get up early for my therapy appointment. I have made the grievous error of agreeing to multiple meetings and appointments this week. I keep trying to not schedule stuff during my evening and night shifts, and I keep failing abysmally. It's just never a good idea, but sometimes there just isn't another choice. Alas.

So later today I have a meeting with tow members of Ministry & Counsel about a small worship group one of them wants to start centered around chronic illness, and on Friday I am going to my new credit union to sign my life away in order to qualify for a reduced interest rate on my new mortgage. Okay, I exaggerate slightly for effect, but essentially I have to switch over to a checking account with the credit union and have my pay direct deposited there in order to qualify.

I've sent out feelers to my coworkers to see if anyone will trade my weekend day shifts in 10 days with me. Getting the weekend off to be able to focus on packing would be a godsend, but I'm not going to hold my breath. People are pretty accommodating at my workplace, but we're getting into summer vacation time and people are a busier with kids and commitments and stuff. Fingers crossed, anyway.

Okay. Time to wrap this up. Catch you on the flip side, friends!

I now have an 8x8 case of tiny drawers. It arrived Monday. Some drawers are labeled, some are not. Labels include:


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The effort has taken most of my day, organized several drawers, and made my desk completely incoherent. Good times.