leeshajoy | Recent Entries

So I finally got done watching a playthrough of Half-Life: Alyx. (Can't play it myself since I have neither the space nor the budget for a VR rig.)

I may have some more coherent thoughts about it later, but for now all I can say is "Valve, you FUCKERS."

Today's my birthday. I should be celebrating. Instead, I'm sitting inside, trying not to cry as I think about the state of the world right now.

My own situation isn't too bad. I'm working extremely reduced hours at the hotel because so few people are traveling, but I have enough savings to get by for a while. In fact, I'm seriously considering going on unpaid leave for the rest of the month so I don't have to fret over whether I'm working on a given day or not.

No, it's other people I'm worried about. How many people are going to get sick, or get other people sick, because they can't afford to stay at home? How many people are stuck in quarantine with their abusers? How many people are going to lose their livelihoods because of the economy tanking? How much are things going to change, forever, because of this pandemic?

This is going to sound hyperbolic, but I genuinely feel like I'm in mourning right now. The world that existed last week is gone, and there's nothing I can do.

Current Mood: sad

Does anyone else remember the Chokey from Roald Dahl's Matilda? It was described as a tall, narrow cupboard just big enough for a child to stand in, with broken glass lining the walls and rusty nails embedded in the door. Any student that Miss Trunchbull put inside would be forced to stand perfectly straight and still for hours on end to avoid being cut by the nails and glass.

The concept has been stuck in my head for a while now, but it was only last night that I was able to articulate why it resonated with me so much.

The Chokey is what cringe/callout/purity culture is like.

Everything you could potentially touch will harm you. You cannot lean in any direction, you cannot relax at any point, because you will suffer as a result. All you can do is stand still and occupy that single, narrow space that will not result in any further punishment than you've already been subjected to.

It's a shitty, miserable space to be in, and an even shittier and more miserable thing to impose on someone else. Fuck that.

Current Mood: angry

So I just saw The Lego Movie 2: the Second Part this afternoon. I re-watched the first movie just before, and it holds up beautifully; I had forgotten how much I enjoyed it. The sequel is a very different kind of movie, but just as much fun, and the two films slot together perfectly, as one would expect for a movie about construction toys.

( Mild spoilers below! Proceed at your own risk! )

questionoftheday asks: What is something everyone is "supposed" to love or enjoy, but you just don't? (question submitted by

author_by_night)

My answer: TVTropes.

I admit I haven't been to TVTropes proper in the better part of a decade, but when I did, I just... viscerally did not enjoy it, at all. It felt like all of my least favorite aspects of literature classes turned up to eleven. They say that analyzing art is like dissecting a frog, in that you can learn a lot but when you're done the frog is dead. Well, TVTropes is like taking the different frog organs and dropping them into individual bins with a bunch of other, vaguely similar organs from other dissected animals.

I know a lot of people consider TVTropes a valuable resource, or just entertaining, but for me it will forever be where storytelling goes to die.

I woke up this morning with a feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach.

This has been a fairly common thing lately; my anxiety and depression have been in high gear since early December, and I still haven't quite been able to nail down why. It's probably a combination of things: the changing of the seasons, a change in the formulation of my anxiety meds, various forms of horrible news happening in the outside world, et cetera. Whatever it was, for a significant chunk of December I was swinging between being so nervous I thought I would burst like a balloon and just wanting to crawl into a hole and die.

My mood improved considerably by the end of the month, but I'm still having "episodes" every now and then. Like today.

I managed to get through the work day despite having a crying breakdown in the middle of the morning. Now I'm here, typing this out, and I'm trying to think of what I can do to make things better, and what I even want out of life right now, and I don't know.

I want to live in a world where there's justice.
I want our leaders to have empathy for the people they lead.
I want our modes of communication and self-expression to not be dependent on making money for a third party.
I want to know that the friends I've made through those modes of communication still care about me, and would miss me if I was gone.

I want to stop feeling this way.

Current Mood: depressed

Today is, in the northern hemisphere, the shortest day of the year, followed by the longest night. Many different cultures have holidays revolving around this time of year, and they get more and more intense and culturally significant the further one gets from the equator. Over the course of the past two thousand years, Christianity assimilated a lot of those traditions into a day that they decided would represent the birth of the Messiah. So now, while many of those original holidays are still celebrated, a significant chunk of humanity considers this to be "Christmas time."

Personally, I had a pretty secular upbringing. I celebrate Christmas and Hanukkah, but more as family traditions than out of any kind of religious devotion. But ultimately, what are all these winter-solstice-adjacent holidays about? Hope. A reminder, at the darkest and coldest time of the year, that things are going to get warmer and lighter again. Whether you're bringing back the Sun God, or commemorating the birth of the Son of God, the underlying message is the same.

The light comes back, guys.

The light always comes back.

Happy Solstice, everyone.

Current Mood: optimistic

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

Current Mood: irritated

On the one hand, the current shitshow on Tumblr has reminded me of all the shitty aspects of that particular social media platform that made me hesitant to join it in the first place.

On the other hand, checking Tumblr has become such a compulsive habit for me that I've all but forgotten what I used to do with my time before I joined the damn thing.

Current Mood: anxious

Well, it looks like I might have to start posting here again, now that Tumblr has effectively given its two-week notice.

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Alycia

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in mourning for the world we used to have

[crossposted from Tumblr and Pillowfort]

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I can't deal with the world right now.

Some thoughts on the winter solstice

This is how it starts.

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March 2020

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