flamingstumpy | Network

Our little flock of poults with mom have continued to visit the past week or so.

I've spotted a molting Cardinal and Blue Jay this week too. It has also been another warm week here in Rhode Island.

Current Mood: hot

Some months ago now, spotted a baby bunny in a field. So cute!

( Read more... )

I accidentally left all of my requests blank so I'm putting a few things here.

( Likes and DNWs )

Today is mostly sunny, humid, and hot.

I fed the birds. I've seen a mixed flock of sparrows and house finches.

EDIT 8/12/25 -- I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 8/12/25 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.

EDIT 8/12/25 -- I did more work around the patio.

.

Current Mood: busy

On Mastodon they have various hashtags with various writing-related questions, and today, a question on one of the hashtags was "On a scale of from 1 to 10, how safe is your world?" (by which they meant the world of your writing project).

Several people pointed out that you can't really average out safety over a whole world, and still more people pointed out that safety is always going to be a matter of "for whom?" No matter what genre you're writing, if you have multiple characters, they can't all have the same level of safety. A bacterium is a different level of threat depending on the strength of your immune system; oppressive politics always have a favored exempted few, etc.

And I had to laugh at our current age's fascination with quantification. On a scale of 1 to 10, sure.

My tutee has a green card. This makes her situation a lot safer than that of the dozen new employees I was in the company of the other day who were from Haiti. They all have a card showing temporary protected status. ... We know how secure that status is ... But for the time being at least, it makes them safer than people with no legal status at all.

I love what people do with the power of imagination: we create all sorts of things; we can create elaborate shared worlds called things like "the economy" or "nation-states." We joint-roleplay these so intensely that it becomes our reality. It's like a picture book I remember from childhood called Conrad's Castle, where a boy throws a stone up in the air and it sticks there, and then another and another, and soon he builds a whole castle up there. It all falls down when a hater says "Hey, you can't do that!" ... But then he says "I can too," and rebuilds it.

The larger shared worlds we imagine, like the various nation-states or the rule of law, or principles of humanitarianism--they can fall down just like Conrad's castle, and suddenly your status changes. We know this. We're seeing it all the time. For the shared worlds we want to flourish, we have to keep saying "I can too." As for the ones we don't like so much, we can maybe take out the stones one by one to build something we prefer.

Current Music: Deus King: Why

Damn you climate change -_-

I'm going into work this afternoon, so I've spent this morning reorganizing my desk and doing some food prep for dinner tonight. By happenstance I got an e-mail reminding me Makiko Itoh's Real Japanese Cooking: Traditions, Tips, Techniques and Over 600 Authentic Recipes is out now. I've been a big fan of hers for awhile, I found her website years ago and promptly bought her Just Bento books when I started making bentos for my family. At that time I was working evening shifts at a different job and would often need to bring a full meal to eat on my break. The biggest thing it did for me was teach me a salad could literally just be cucumbers you seasoned a little bit - sides didn't have to be complicated. It made it so much easier to add veg to leftover dinners and throw things together in the morning when I wasn't feeling my best.

I'm still catching up on income I missed from being out for two months, so it'll be a bit before I buy her new book but I'm really excited for it *A*

Other things I'm looking forward to is Dragula should be returning this October, though I don't know if this will be for Season 7 or the teased Titans Season 2. I'll be interested either way, I'm waiting until September to re-subscribe to Shudder.

And this weekend I'll be phoning a friend to make plans to visit him next week <3_<3

If you have anything you're looking forward to, big or small, feel free to share!

This novel is structured as a woman's reminiscences of her life, beginning in the 1990s at an elite boarding school she attended in England. The students are told that they are special and important, and that it is an extreme privilege to attend this school, but they aren't given a clear understanding of why this is or what makes the school so different from others. Throughout the first few chapters, it becomes increasingly apparent that something strange and ominous is going on. The students have close friendships with each other, but nobody ever mentions family or going home for holidays. The teachers are cagey about the nature of the situation, and some seem distressed by it, as if their hands are tied.

What is really going on is stated outright a quarter of the way into the book. The rest of the book is spent exploring that premise and looking at how the characters are shaped by and respond to their circumstances. I don't know whether the author intended to present the premise as a secret or not, but the book has been marketed as though it's a secret, and whether it's a spoiler is subjective. (Thank you all for your input on the poll!)

The premise and my thoughts on treating it as a spoiler

The premise is that the students are clones who are being raised to serve as organ donors. They have limited rights compared to non-clones, and the expectation is that they will die from having their organs harvested sometime in young adulthood.

I knew the premise going in because I saw it discussed years ago, and I suspect it wouldn't be that hard to figure it out even before it's made explicit. But I'm sure it also depends on what your expectations are going into the book, if you're looking for a "twist" and how broad you think the scope of possible twists is. Personally, I think it does the book a disservice to coyly market it as literary fiction, if that's the reason the premise has been treated as a secret. For people who like both litfic and specfic equally maybe it's fine, but that's not everyone, so you're asking for people who only want litfic to be annoyed by the bait-and-switch, and for some proportion of people who would like the book to never pick it up because they think it's not for them (or to be aggravated by the implication that we're not calling it specfic because it's "serious literature" instead). I knew it was speculative fiction and I enjoyed it as speculative fiction, and I think dancing around the genre is unnecessary. So that's where I sit with it.

My thoughts which assume you know the premise but don't necessarily assume you've read the book

Anyway! I really liked the book! Based on the three Ishiguro books I have now read, (this, Klara and the Sun, and The Remains of the Day, I've come to appreciate his skill in writing characters who have a perspective on the world that could be considered "limited" in that the reader and the other characters understand things the POV characters don't, but it's very clear that their lived experience has validity and their inner emotional landscape is as rich as anyone's. No matter how small a person's world may look from the outside, to them it is everything.

Kathy and the other clones see things from a certain angle because of the way they've been raised and what they've been taught to believe. They don't automatically perceive the horror of their existence the way we do because they aren't us, they don't know what we know about how things ought to be. But within their own frame of reference, they live their lives and make choices according to their own understanding of who has authority and what the inevitable facts of life are. Their experiences, memories, feelings, insights, and relationships matter even if we can see how constrained they are by their circumstances. After all, we are also bounded by what we perceive as inevitable facts of life, and we also don't know whether we perceive that correctly.

I think the book reflects how we are socialized not to talk about (let alone question) uncomfortable societal truths. I was struck by Kathy's observation that as the students were growing up, the teachers drip-fed them bits of information that they were not quite old enough to understand. She realizes this may not even have been consciously planned, but it had the effect of making them feel they had "always known" what they were and the life that had been chosen for them, even though they had no specific memories of being told. I think this is a bullseye description of what it feels like to be socialized to accept injustice.

Children don't just learn from what is directly stated to them, they learn from what isn't said, from adults' discomfited grimaces, annoyed dismissals, vague contextless remarks, and awkward changes of subject. The school setting (which was a choice on the part of the characters, to structure the clones' residence as a school—it's not like these kids know what schools are really like in the outside world) to me drives this point home. The adults are trying to educate the students for reasons of their own that we learn later, but the primary lesson they're teaching isn't on the curriculum.

Some specific thoughts that reveal details from much later in the book

Once we got the full explanation of what the school really was, that they were trying to "prove" the clones had souls, I found it just as disturbing as the concept of organ donor clones in itself. Miss Emily's goal wasn't to prove the clones' humanity so they could be liberated and the hideous practice of organ harvest put to an end, it was to prove their humanity so they could be treated a little bit better before the slaughter.

The fact that she is able to tolerate this cognitive dissonance speaks volumes about what she has been indoctrinated to accept, and points to the modes of thought underpinning the broader dystopian world. This, for me, was the true horrifying reveal, and it's all the more horrifying because it is entirely mundane: The belief that a class of people is subhuman can withstand knowledge that disproves the belief, provided that abandoning the belief is inconvenient enough.

By the same token, Miss Emily's description of how public opinion turned against her ideas and led to the closure of Hailsham is so deeply unsettling because it is so familiar and plausible. A push for expanded rights for a marginalized group, even an incremental push, is a precarious thing that can be derailed by a poorly-timed scandal or a negative association, even if the connection is tenuous. As in our own world, clearly many people's beliefs are not based on reason, on consistent principles, or even on a blunt assessment that saving some people justifies sacrificing others. They're based on how much of the truth you can convince yourself to dismiss. If you're looking for a reason to discredit calls for justice, you'll always find one, and you'll find plenty of people happy to validate your conclusion.

Emily's story doesn't spell this out. As always, it's between the lines as she skips over assumed context that Kathy and Tommy don't share. And they're not even looking for justice, only a temporary reprieve from the fate they've already accepted. But they can't get that, not even when they ask nicely. (Does it ever work to ask nicely?)

My biggest takeaway from the book is how difficult it is to independently invent the idea of a just world when that concept has been denied to you, and when even the people who come the closest to being your allies don't actually want justice—they want injustice with the sharpest of its vulgar edges politely sanded off.

A short post this week, since I was very, very busy this weekend.

What I finished:

+ Behind Frenemy Lines by Zen Cho, which I enjoyed despite the awful name. Whoever is naming the books in this series is doing them a disservice! I really like the cover art though, so kudos to the artist.

The books in this series (two so far, the other being The Friend Zone Experience) are ostensibly romances, but that's not really why I read them. The romances move too fast for my ace ass, just like 90% of romances, but this is a Me Problem. If you don't have the "you barely know each other!" or the "I haven't spent enough time with you to be fully invested in this relationship!" kinds of problems that I have with almost all romances, then I do not think the romance will seem rushed. It's a nice dynamic between two immigrant London lawyers (one from Malaysia, one from Hong Kong) who have a series of unfortunate encounters before ending up working together.

I really like both of the characters, but as I said, I'm not so much here for the romance as I am for the other stuff. In both of these books, the real appeal are a) the family backdrops and b) the moral quandaries. Zen Cho is fantastic at writing complicated family dynamics that feel so very real--suffocating in some cases, loving but fraught in others. Family, no matter how loving, is never easy in her books--it involves responsibilities, expectations, negotiations but it's no less precious for all that. I deeply appreciate this aspect of her writing because it feels very real and immediate, especially in a world that (at times) can encourage us to just break things off with any relationship that involves conflict.

She's also really good at placing her characters in situations where they have to make difficult choices and are torn by dueling loyalties or moral commitments. The choices these characters make matter in a way that's rare in the kind of frothy fiction that these books get shelved alongside. Obviously, I dig anything that involves people making difficult moral choices, so I eat this up.

Honestly, my only real complaint about the book is that I wanted to spend more time with the characters and their problems. I wanted to dig deeper into their family stuff, have them struggle with the moral choices for longer, etc. I personally felt like this book could have used more room to breathe. But if this sounds appealing to you, I recommend it!

Oh, another thing I dig about Zen Cho's contemporary books-- they give me a glimpse of Malaysia, a really interesting multi-ethnic society I know very little about. And Cho doesn't over-explain things--she'll throw words in there that she doesn't take the time to define, so you either figure them out from context or look them up if you really want to know what they mean. I like this a lot! It feels like I'm being treated as an adult and also it feels like she's pushing back against the exoticizing that can happen in books published in Anglophone countries. For the characters, these aspects of their life are normal and not to be commented upon, and the specter of the white reader doesn't intrude through too much handholding by the text. It's great!

What I'm currently reading:

+ I'll be finishing up The Dawn of Everything for the last week of book club. As always, this book makes me want to write a dozen different anthropologically-focused fantasy novels a la Le Guin.

+ I read the lovely forward to Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine and I'm looking forward to reading the book. Shockingly, I've never read anything of his besides Fahrenheit 451.

What are you working on? Stuck on a plot point and want to talk it out? Have a canon question or looking for a resource? Anything and everything about your WIPs is welcome. Any kind of WIP counts, including fic, fanart, graphics, meta, icons, etc.

Optional questions are below. If there's something else you want to say about your WIP, please add it and we can update the meme.

You can contribute to the post until we put up the next WIP Wednesday! We are embracing the slower pace of Dreamwidth.

[ New Music Monday | Rec Something Wednesday | Monthly General Chat | Comment Fest ]

I've finally reached the point where I've posted more Bleach fic than I have Smallville fic, which feels right because I posted all that Smallville fic two plus decades ago. There should be a 'show only my top most written fandoms in the last five years' button 😂 I filtered by date updated for five year periods to see what fandoms I was most deranged about writing in in any given period, and first of all it's not even accurate because I have three fics tagged LOTR and it says I have only two. And secondly I think I've realised I'm just as unhinged in the 2021-2025 time period as I was 2001-05. I may have written 21 Buffy stories in the 01-05 period (well, I wrote more than that, but plenty of my early extra bad fic was not posted backdated to AO3, and in fact has been lost from the internet), but I also wrote ...uh... 23 Mysterious Lotus Casebook stories in a year and a half in the 2021-2025 period, so... there's that...

Whereas 06 to 10 and 11 to 15 is just [gandalf I have no memory of this place meme]. I wrote Merlin fic?? I wrote Teen Wolf fic?? I wrote Young Avengers fic?? I have absolutely no memory of ever writing getbackers fic, but I was obsessed with it, so at least that makes sense.

Creator:

andersenmom
Title: On Watch
Rating: T
Type: Fic
Size/length/word count etc.: 1109
Prompt: 006: Lust
Fandom/Ship: The Kingdom, Yang Dongsik | Louis, Shim Youngjoon | Hwon
Notes/Warnings: None
Summary When Dongsik wakes up, he reveals that his fall wasn't an accident.

Find the table with the list of fics here

Current Mood: exhausted
Current Music: Out the Door - Got7

( You're about to view content that a community administrator has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

I am spending a TON of time on this round of Cursed Witch editing at the moment, and loving it. It's still hard work, and it was hard work getting to the point when I could do this, but it's all coming together and feeding into each other and that's a great feeling. The worldbuilding is being refined even further, leading to new ideas that magically solve other problems I had on the backburner, so my brain was likely working on it the whole time even without my active input.

It's still all a bit strange. At first, going on yet another round of structural editing after so long felt like ghostwriting someone else's story. Then because the changes started getting smaller, and generating more ideas of their own, it felt like creating fic for it, haha. Now, I don't know, I work on it in the morning and at night and the story and world and characters are constantly living in my head, in a "love you guys" kinda way rather than the "OH MY GOD I AM SO SICK OF THIS STORY" way I had reached last year. I always had a vague idea for 2 potential sequels, a one-line summary ready for each which was interesting but apparently not enough to actually make me really plan to ever write them. Now I'm adding more details to that "Sequels ideas" file once or twice (or thrice!) a day, peppering little hints of foreshadowing, sometimes even bits that work in layers so that (I think) one can think are related to the current story, but should someone care enough to re-read later after knowing what happens in book 2 or 3, then some sentences take on a completely different meaning. And I'm thinking maybe I'd quite like to take a stab at book 2 once I've handled the Soul Thief structural edits? I also had a "fatal flaws" file about a couple of points I thought made the story broken at a fundamental level, but I believe I managed to smooth or fix that to an acceptable degree to me anyway :D

I am so excited. Obviously, working/editing at the current pace would not be sustainable, but I'm just making a big push while all that motivation and excitement are bursting at the seams. And I know this is all flowing relatively well thanks to all the thinking and prep work I did, even if it felt like it was taking forever. I had to summarise my summaries of beta-reader comments because it was still too long to easily reference XD But I think this kind of exercise is what's helping keeping as much as possible in my head.

May this energy last until I finish this round of editing, too...!! Haha. One can hope. Back to it, now.

To-day is the day oh my pumpkin! comes out! We have two more members of the senbatsu to talk about before the month ends, and I sadly know nothing of their groups at all yet having only been in BNK48 sister group CGM48 since passing auditions in 2022, Pimlapas Suwannoi, nicknamed Lookked, is already standing shoulder to shoulder with members of AKB's Kami 7! If that's not a success story, friends, then I really don't know what is!

Lookked!

Lookked and fellow member Arunya Kaewmalai, also of Team C, hold the record as being the two fastest promoted members across both Thai groups. With CGM's debut announcement in 2019, they weathered the storm brought on by the sudden pandemic whilst other contemporary groups such as the Indian DEL48 and Vietnamese SGO48 collapsed and went on to announce their second generation in 2022, of which Lookked was a member. You could argue that the prior existence of BNK helped shore the group up during the plague years, making investors perhaps a little less nervous given the older group's track-record and the transfer of former AKB member, Izuta Rina, now a force to reckon with in her own right, but however it happened, CGM, with only single under their belt at the time, Chiang Mai 106, an adaptation of NGT's Max Toki 315-gou—guess my two favourite members in that video, folks!—CGM endured.

Less than nine months after the announcement of the second generation and Lookked was in Team C, appearing in the senbatsu for fifth single, 2565 just several months later. By this time, Izurina was being created as co-producer alongside Akimoto Yasushi for CGM's releases. I don't know if she will have any say over the matter of the senbatsu, I wouldn't have imagined so, but it's nice to think that Izurina would have been especially looking out for future members who might make an impact. Whatever the case, Lookked definitely made an impression as she has remained in the senbatsu with her latest appearance being in Totsuzen Do love me!, a HKT cover, in which she acts as the song's centre. Along with the release of the AKB48 original in which Lookked appears, to-day also marks the release date of the international versions of oh my pumpkin! including a CGM only version with Lookked as centre!

Already one of the most prominent members of her group, I hope that oh my pumpkin! helps draw Lookked even more attention amidst both the Japanese and overseas audiences! As a former member of Thai pop group, ASTER, and with a sister also having been a member of another group, DAISY DAISY, it feels as if Lookked has both the experience and talent to really make an impact—and CGM now have announced its fourth generation as of March this year, so I feel the same can also be said for the group as a whole!

I'm holding off on listening to the new song until I have the CDs in my hand, but I really can't wait to hear how all these different members of different groups will come together for this anniversary!

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: somewhere
Current Music: Cataplexy - Lifelessdawn

Limbo (1014 words) by thawrecka
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Bleach (Anime & Manga)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Kira Izuru & Matsumoto Rangiku, Kurosaki Ichigo & Kurosaki Isshin
Characters: Kira Izuru, Matsumoto Rangiku, Kurosaki Ichigo, Kurosaki Isshin, Tia Harribel
Additional Tags: Bittersweet, Grief/Mourning, Post-Winter War (Bleach), Awkward Conversations, Angst
Summary:

Three different shared griefs, in three different places.

So the only thing on deck today other than driving home was going to Hershey World. A) yes it's a giant tourist trap b) yes it's mostly for kids c) yes it's kinda hokey.

BUT I have wanted to do the 'factory' tour since I was a kid and never got to. I took myself. I got there early-ish lucky me (because there was no line and they have the queue line all dolled up with history to read while you sit around waiting. (I also was now on the clock. It was free to park for 3 hours, after that you were getting hit with a 35-60$ bill)

There is plenty of things to do at Hershey World as you can see. Most of it of course is geared to kids. I wasn't interested in that. One thing I thought SHOULD be on that web page is their no stroller policy. You can park them in the food court but with this level of people streaming in you couldn't just park it and level. I get why this is a rule. I saw the size of those strollers. You wouldn't be able to move inside but you should give people warning. Maybe I'm NOT taking my 1 and 3 year old if I have to carry them thru the whole thing and come back in a couple years...

I did not get through the gift shop unscathed (I'm talking POUNDAGE of chocolate here). This is where all the exclusive flavors were. I got me so many (good choice there, diabetic, good choice) cafe espresso and caramel macchiato and pumpkin spice latte nuggets, brownie and hazelnut kisses, a crystal kiss dish for mom for the holidays, peppermint patty chips for cookie making, whacky exclusive bars (some of which will be going into deep freeze for later gift giving), some expensive exclusive caramel chocolate and receese's cups with chocolate lava centers because peanut butter cups are MY favorite. I also found ancient ones I haven't seen if years like zagnuts.

I learned that krackle (another one I liked) dates to the 20s. Cool (so working on that Spider family as kids story. It's gonna happen) Another woman with a cane saw my purple sparkly one (I needed it at this point) and wanted to know where I got it as she has a boring black one (Amazon). Me and that cane nearly died getting onto the chocolate lab ride because it's a rotating floor and holy hell that's difficult to navigate when you can't feel your feet.

Yes I over spent. I did get out while parking was free. I tried that damn chocolate avenue grill again because it was 11:30 and it only opened at 11. Nope, full up. Went to Houlihan's a PA chain I haven't seen in years, had the best buffalo chicken sandwich I've had in a LONG time (the sauce had a bit of salt. I liked that also ranch dressing with blue cheese crumbles which I laughed because last night I had Beat Bobby Flay on as background noise and the judges reamed Bobby for mixing the two. Shows what they know)

Drove home. Too many 18 wheelers. SO many 18 wheelers but I'm home. My knee is done. It looks like a pumpkin.

Can't believe I'll be going back to work within two weeks.

I SHOULD get caught up on comments tomorrow. Thanks for coming along on vacation with me. I probably won't have the pictures up for a day or two because I have to get my syllabi done AND my loan repayment paperwork which the government just made infinitely harder to do (basically returned it to what it was 20 years ago)

Current Mood: exhausted
Current Music: Murder She Wrote

a lulzy sign i did *way* too much mercenary research back for iron crown/~~walon vau rping~~:

is when my brain still autocorrects "executive order" (the government act) to "executive outcomes" (that semi infamous sketchy af paramilittary organization/PMO/mercenary company in south africa in the early 1990's).

anyway if you have a trivia night about mercenaries and their fucked shit take me along i'll make bank for ya :D

Boys, Beasts & Men by Sam J. Miller is a 2022 speculative fiction short story collection themed around male coming-of-age and queer male sexuality*.

* Okay, can I still use an asterisk if I'm just going to immediately elaborate on that?

The thing is, I went through this book twice under two different apprehensions. When I read it the first time, I assumed this was written as a collection. It has a framing device that does a lot of heavy lifting to create thematic meaning and an overt narrative through line. So, while my initial disappointment was that all these stories with different protagonists from different time periods and walks of life felt so similar, I thought: "All right, that's deliberate. It's not really working for me, but I can appreciate the idea of all of these stories belonging metaphorically to one person who's been boy, beast, and man. The 'man' part is a bit of a letdown, since that's almost entirely external straight counterpoints to a queerness that is perpetually young and modern for its day. But 'YA with a higher rating' aside, I can dig what it's trying to do."

Then I realized all the stories were written separately for different publications, and I went back through with that in mind. The knowledge made me a little less forgiving of the samey-ness (and the awkwardness of the few times we did get other voices), but it also made me much more forgiving of the fact that the stories don't actually come together into something coherent beyond their basic shared worldview.

This was a "less than the sum of its parts" collection for me, where the individual entries didn't rise to the framing device, and even the framing device felt more...sanitized and self-conscious than I was expecting. It's the type of dark queer speculative fic that feels like it kept walking me up to the edge of an interesting premise and then carefully staying behind a guardrail that showed me the sights but didn't let me take the plunge. To the point that in aggregate some of those steps back and framing of mundane horror added up to something more conservative than I think was intended, and wasn't what I was hoping for from a collection with this title and a framing device about an anonymous hookup.

There are plenty of good ideas, executed very competently (albeit with a share of clumsiness around handling the diversity it's aiming for). Stories include a boy reckoning with his mother's fallibility through an encounter with a dinosaur on exhibition, a teenager developing mind control powers that he turns against his bullies, a father failing to meet his son in the time and place the son inhabits, and an oral history of events around the Stonewall riots. But none of them really grabbed me, or at least none of them kept their teeth sunk in. I think I felt primed for something a little more visceral, messy, and transgressive in a way I definitely wouldn't have been if I'd just encountered these stories separately in different magazines.

That said, there is a specificity to the viewpoints and language, so I think this is a situation where if you like Miller's use of language, his message, and his ways of conveying that message, you'll probably get a lot of enjoyment out of the collection. I'm aware that this is one of those situations where I'm much harder on a book that starts running in the direction I want but is ultimately heading somewhere else than I am on something that starts and stays miles off. I feel like the book overall expresses what the author is looking to express with a high level of technical ability on most fronts, but it just wasn't for me.

In lieu of an excerpt, here's the entirety of one of the stories up on Lightspeed Magazine's website: "We Are the Cloud" by Sam J. Miller

...I feel like there's no point to me writing on my blog, or anywhere else, because I don't respect or trust my own thoughts and feelings. I don't feel like i have anything meaningful to say. Anything I ever could say has probably been said by someone smarter, more experienced, more disciplined, with firmer morals or better poltiics, more articulate and well-read. I don't feel like I have any unique experiences that would confer novel enough insights to compensate for my deficiencies as a person.

Someone can say that they like something I wrote, but that's never enough to make me feel like it had value on its own. General positive regard is a nothingburger; people can feel it about something that has nothing new or interesting to say, soley because it's by a person they like, or about a topic they like, or it's written in a style that garners Big Emotion and hits certain simplistic buttons in their brain (nostalgia, coziness, righteous anger, lust, etc) that override deeper critical thinking. it says nothing about quality of content. it says nothing about if i've actually raised good points or opened a discussion worth having. it doesn't say if anything i've said has value - intellectual or ideological or artistic or else-wise.

i don't understand how general positive regard can be "enough" for anyone. it's so detatched from anything specific about what makes you or the things you make worth their time. people feel it all the time about "essays" that are just fluff with no coherent argument, about fiction that's trite and banal because it happens to contain some tropes they enjoy, about kinkade paintings and funko pops of a guy they remember from a movie.

I don't want to be liked without a coherent reason. I don't want to have anything I say be liked without a coherent reason of having provoked something meaningful. I want to provide value, usefulness, something, and even when people seem to enjoy my company, I don't feel like I'm anything more than another mediocre soulless pseudo-intellectual who only mimics real thinking and creativity through imitation of their betters.

Today is partly sunny and sweltering.

I fed the birds. I've seen a flock of sparrows and house finches.

EDIT 8/12/25 -- I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 8/12/25 -- I potted up 12 sweet cherry seeds.

EDIT 8/12/25 -- I did some work around the patio.

EDIT 8/12/25 -- I did more work around the patio.

EDIT 8/12/25 -- I watered some plants on the old and new picnic tables that were wilting, then did the telephone pole garden and a few of the savanna seedlings. I'm annoyed that some plants are wilting so soon after copious watering, because I can't haul that hose around every day, or even every few days. >_<

I've seen a skunk on the patio.

I am done for the night.

Current Mood: busy

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Another hot wednesday...

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005)

what i'm reading wednesday 13/8/2025

WIP Wednesday

(no subject)

006: Lust; Kingdom; On Watch (Yang Dongsik | Louis, Shim Youngjoon | Hwon)

Wednesday, August 13th - Oaths

Diving into edits, prep work paying off

AKC Courtneyyyyyy Culture Festival #190: Pimlapas Suwannoi

Bleach fic

Now that's what I'm talking about