The word of the week is
dephlogisticate.
May 21 - Climate Crazies
Social media can cause brain
rot, did you know?
Let me rephrase that
slightly: social media allows people with brain rot to infect others, and I've
seen too many examples of it in the last few years myself.
I'm not talking about the
typically stupid comments, or the misspelled / poorly thought-out ones... or
even the too-easily-passed-on viral memes that generally get everything wrong
when it comes to facts and truth.
No, what I'm talking about
is this:
This was a response posted
to a friend's comment regarding climate change, a comment that included proven
scientific facts, links to said facts, and was made in a reasonable,
non-confrontational manner. My friend, like me, locks down his FBook account's
privacy for when we run into folks like Nicky...
As you can see, some people
don't like having their opinions questioned - why let facts get in the way of a smug sense of self-righteousness that dovetails nicely into your belief system?
Which really, is all it is:
opinions, mashed up with biases and in Nicky's instance, a bad case of My
Personal Experience Trumps Every Climate Expert's Evidence. Nicky states his
work at a telecom company for decades as well as a media company, plus some
'climate-related' college courses and as a researcher for 'over-educated Ph.D
'idiots' ( note he doesn't say in what field )somehow qualifies
him as a 'climate expert' - and things devolve from there.
What I find scary is how
Nicky then immediately proceeds to show his true colours as a rabid
Conservative anti-communist, right-wing monster who's comfortable threatening
total strangers over the internet:
These kinds of people are
resistant to facts, reason and decency... which they will immediately refute
and twist into a narrative that supports their biased worldview, looking for
support from other echo-chambers on the internet that have blossomed in the
last decade with the advent of easy-access sites like FBook.
They're loud, organized and
fearless of authority due to online anonymity, because their belief that
THEIR worldview is 'right' in the face of every measurable fact that people
point out... all because they're afraid. They're cowards, and it's telling that
Nicky's frustration with my friend's ability to mask his own identity
caused such a vehement response.
Yet the rest of us have to
stand up against such people, to let them know in no uncertain terms that their
twisted worldview, of 'alternative facts' and all the rest of the associated
fear-based garbage, isn't going to be the norm.
Because a world like that
isn't worth living in.
May 22 - Lost In Space
Tonight I finished watching
the new LiS Netflix series... meh.
No spoilers below, just my
opinion... and feel free to question it!
It just didn't grab me, and
for most of the episodes, I fast-forwarded through most of the character
interactions( much like I did with The Mist series a few years ago
)as I found them uninteresting and flat: same old contrived drama.
It also annoyed me that the
series 'beats' felt off: I kept catching myself saying "But why didn't
they just...?" and "Okay, that's enough time staring, the ship is
falling apart...!" and so forth. I'm no director, but things could have
been tighter, as well as better-written, especially if these are Earth's
"best and brightest" being sent out into the universe to colonize.
Even the main backstory was convoluted and somewhat confusing: rather than
coming as a revelation, it came as more of a "Oh, so that's what
happened... cool, I guess" which isn't impactful at all.
I did like some things in
the series though.
The special effects were
top-rate and relevant to driving the story, rather than the other way 'round.
The sets and physical props were incredible: full points for these for believability
and detail, especially the land vehicles( though what's with the doors? )and
the Robot suit:
Speaking of robots: the
relationship between Wil Robinson and the Robot was what made the show work.
They had a dynamic that was fun to watch, believable and emotional, which is
hard to do with a faceless creature with no voice.
That's about all I liked;
the hokey human drama I could take or leave, as it was just People Being People
In Space, which did nothing for the story but it wasn't nearly as unbearable as
it was in The Mist.
Overall, I'd watch it again
just for the visuals, maybe with a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 or 'Bad
Lip Reading' audio track instead, for added fun.
May 23 - Phoenix 2013
Five years ago, I left home
and came back a different person.
While my present
circumstances haven't changed all that much since, my self certainly has: I've
left burdens behind, got a job, and found love.
That's pretty good, in my
view of things.
In May of 2013, I'd been at
a new job for a few months after being unemployed for over a year, and I was
feeling upbeat: I'd just finished writing the second draft of my novel six months
prior, and was fleshing out the next two books quite nicely. My sister and I had
been in our current place a year, and while my finances weren't good, I wasn't
at the penny-pinching point yet, so... optimism still held.
Meaning I could scrape
together the funds to get myself to Phoenix AZ to make the 20th Anniversary
gathering for Babylon 5... and even though I had nothing but change to my name
when I made it back, with heatstroke, a few days later, it had still been worth
the trip!
The major takeaway from my
AZ trip is noted here, in the blog entry for that week, and I mention a bit
more at the end of this week's blog too - see below.
Looking back, I wish I could
view things from a better place in terms of finances, writing career and
employment... but I'm still alive and still improving myself, so there's not
much more I can ask for that I don't have to work towards myself.
No such thing as a free
lunch in this world, but man, some coupons would be nice...
May 24 - Glurb...
Oof, where did that come from?
A little after lunch today,
my spirits took a nosedive out of nowhere.
Of a sudden, it hit me that
I was trapped, like Andy in his cell from The Shawshank Redemption. The
metaphor smacked me upside the face with its imagery: my dreams were the poster
on his cell wall, behind which I was scratching with my Persistent Hammer at
the hard Concrete Of Reality, chipping away a tunnel I could escape in, once I
reached...
The sewer?
The metaphor kinda failed at
that point, but the feeling stuck with me: I'm trapped in a place where no
matter what I do, there's no way out, and the universe keeps me there so it can
laugh at all my efforts to break out.
Or something.
Sure, it's only a
metaphor... but man, that feeling wouldn't let go of me. Good thing all I had
to do today was see to the mail and stuff envelopes...
Like every other day this
year.
By bedtime, the emotional jacuzzi
timer had run out, and I was feeling more balanced. A thought remained though,
as I drifted off to sleep:
How long will I keep using
the hammer, or should I find some dynamite?
May 25 - A long time ago...
I'm struggling this week,
but it's okay:
I've been here before.
The difference this time is
not only do I recognize how I'm feeling and why, but that I know it will
pass... because to dwell is to diminish, not grow.
Life is struggle: it's
messy, mind-breaking and monotonous sometimes... but you have to keep going,
never give up, because life doesn't care if you do.
Most people won't either;
they're too busy getting their own mess(es) in order.
I'm lucky to have the
friends and family I do: so many of them support me in my writing, are writers
themselves, or otherwise are people that I look up to and use the best parts of
as examples to better myself when I'm feeling... fractured.
Situationally, sure, things
could be better for me, but considering what's happened to me in the last five
years, they could have turned out far, far worse: I'm still relatively healthy,
I've found love, I'm in charge of my own life, and fairly well convinced that
I'm a writer whose skills can be honed to where I can make a living doing it.
All else is distraction.
I could toss in the towel
financially tomorrow, but I don't have to, not yet: I'm still holding on. I
could give up trying to get a better position in the government... but not yet:
I've only had a few dozen rejections in two years, and I'm going to intensify
my applications even further. Though I suspect that beyond that, I'll have to
consider mid-life retraining as a necessary step to a better position, either
that or leaving for the private sector with a flipped bird for the wasted time.
I'll leave mentioning my
stalled GlowForge business for another time, along with hopes of getting a home
of my own in this ever-more-pricey small-sized city.
Anyway, I'm done for now,
and I'll leave you with this reminder to keep one's chin up:
May 26 - We Might've Won...
Today started out messy!
My sister ended up needing
to get somewhere quickly, but as we no longer have use of a car( and can't
even budget a cab right now )this was a problem! Thankfully, my wonderful
girlfriend was able to drive her on short notice, after all sorts of convoluted
navigational updates by text from me at home to my sister, whose Google Maps
decided to take the day off - whew!
After that, my lady and I
headed over the new non-blue bridge to Esquimalt, where we put in our ballots
for prizes at a local car-lot event: it was worth entering, as the main prize
was a new car! I'd already entered online earlier in the week but not been
drawn for 1 of the 5 total 'maybe-it-starts' keys; the odds of that draw were a
low 1-in-100, and as only about 50 people showed up at the event for the last
key-draw, the odds were even better!
We went to lunch at
Spinnakers while we were waiting... and ended up having to walk back for the
draw at 1pm as our food was inexplicably delayed( we told them to hold our
table ). We made it back in time for the draw with two minutes to spare,
and we were both excited at the possibility of winning some of the decent
selection of prizes.
But, the draw was made...
and neither of us got a key. Or any of the other prizes.
So, we didn't win anything,
but it was a fun to try on a nice day, and the odds were certainly in our
favour!
Once we were back at
Spinnakers, we settled into our still-reserved table and ordered two beers...
and were told that it'd be a wait until our food was ready, as they were making
it again to ensure it was fresh - impressive! Our server was extremely
attentive too, even bringing out a sample of the daily soup for each of us when
we'd first say down: big points!
While we were waiting, and
with beers in hand, my lady and I fell into a discussion of what I've been
feeling this week, as I noted earlier above. I managed to express myself
clearly without too much wingeing, and we delved deep into the meaning of my
mental melancholy for a good hour... by the end of which I felt better, and she
felt that we'd had a deeper discussion than she'd expected: win-win!
Once I was back home, I read
for a bit, then had to spend the rest of the evening laying in bed with a cool
cloth on my head, as a migraine had jumped me out of nowhere - probably related
to eyestrain again, as it was on the right side of my head. Fortunately, by
spending hours just resting, it had mostly faded by bedtime.
Special Note:
Five years ago tonight, I
was sitting in a hotel lobby in Arizona, typing like mad on a tablet keyboard
with tears in my eyes.
I'd just come out of the Babylon
5 20th Anniversary Reunion, and I was a hot mess.
After finding a table to sit
at next to some gamers, I poured out my heart in what I later realized was my
first experience of creative, and cathartic, writing Flow in many years. I
blasted out the words nonstop, and thirty minutes later I had over 2200 of them
on the screen as I wiped my eyes and ignored the stares I was getting - people
probably thought I'd just broken up with someone, and I had:
My old self, the one
carrying so many burdens. I won't post that piece here, as it's pinned in my private FBook group, but I will show this snippet, which applies today as much as it did back when I wrote it:
It was love that brought me here, chose my path for me, bound me in my duty to my family and forged the links with the so many friends that I feel so fortunate to have in my life. Duty kept me on my path, stubbornness kept my mind focused instead of fractured, and fate - fickle as always - tossed me hints all along my journey of years that each setback was but a moment in the constant tick of time. Moments to learn from, to draw strength and courage from and to move on towards that then-unknowable grey future that contained humbling hints of light. Love was there too, waiting, never leaving.
That was life-changing for me, and the picture below shows it, as I look younger than I had for many years, with the pinched lines around my nose and eyes GONE in an instant:
It's still been a rough ride health-wise since then, but seeing what's possible when your life gets itself together makes riding those rough patches a little easier.
May 27 - It's a... market?
Today was block party day in
my area!
From 8am to 8pm, a
four-block section of Cook St was closed to traffic down in Cook Street Village
and lined with stalls for all sorts of vendors and exhibitors:
My lady and I headed down
for breakfast at Bubby's Kitchen around 9:30am, and our fave server there
slipped us two free cookies as we left, she was so glad to see us again after
our long absence!
We walked the length of the
block party, and were sadly underwhelmed: the live music was still getting set
up well after 10am, there were no performers in the crowd, and to all
appearances it was just a different form of Sunday market. We hope that next
year things will be better in their second iteration, as we didn't bother to
stay long despite the growing crowd, as there was little of interest to us.
Heading downtown, we settled
into Union Pacific Coffee on their back patio to play some boardgames in the
perfect temperatures( and cloudless blue skies! ). A few minutes after
we'd settled in, a table of young women sat down next to us... and had soon disabused
both my lady and I of the idea that one needs insight and intelligence
to get through life, through the conversations we overheard and soon tried
mightily to ignore...
It was nothing but inane
commentary: chewing over why they'd bothered to stay friends with certain
people, the complexities of paying mortgages and moving money around with only
their husband working, splitting the costs of weddings with their parents,
having too many bridesmaids and their unwelcome boyfriends attending... on and
on, and not a shred of substance. It was like listening to a third-rate soap
opera, with the accompanying bad dialogue( one girl used 'cray-cray' = crazy
repeatedly that grated on my ear ) and I honestly don't know how people can
live lives so mindlessly devoid of self-reflection or independent direction
from societal expectations: job, marriage, mortgage, social obligations, and
nothing else.
Honestly, while observation
and overheard conversations are usually the bread and butter of writers, I had
to wonder if in this case I'd stepped into a pocket universe where pedantic
laws had run wild... *sigh* No good material whatsoever.
My lady and I stayed for
over an hour, but headed out when it became obvious that the other table just
wasn't going anywhere( on many levels )to wander a bit in Chinatown's
shops, which refreshed both of us somewhat.
After that, we went our
separate ways, and I headed home to alternate my afternoon between blogging
bits and allowing my eyes some rest with some light reading of Consider Phlebas
by Ian M. Banks, the next novel in my ever-growing stack of Culture books.I ended up writing a longer than usual blog entry tonight at over 3000 words, which shows I've got a lot on my mind and it's got nowhere to go save out through my fingers on the keyboard...
Good thing I've got the skills to get them down the way they need to be, now.
Yes, it's been a struggle
this week to not feel sorry for myself: while I know I have to acknowledge
those emotions, I know it's a waste of time to STAY in that place, instead of
using them as motivation to improve my life.
