#froze thoughts

[frozen-fountain]

Thank you @my-smial for tagging me!

Last song: I Will Find You by Whitechapel for real upbeat, happy go lucky, summer fun listening.

Last film: I rewatched The Death of Stalin last night because we kept quoting it on the way back from a family thing that wasn't as awful as I feared it could've been. Still one of my favourite comedies.

Last book: Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin. I came away being most impressed, as usual, by the depth and breadth Baldwin gives the inner lives of his characters and the very intimate way he portrays the effects of oppressive forces on their being (the concept of sin seems to seep into the very walls). It's been quite a year for ending up drawn to stories concerning faith, which wasn't a conscious choice at all or particularly reflective of anything going on with me. Next up is Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell. It's the last of hers I have to read aside from the new novel, but I tink she really excels in the short story format, so I'm looking forward to it.

Last TV show: I've been watching What We Do in the Shadows, which I never got around to while it was still airing. It's a great choice for something to put on before bed that isn't too demanding. The last show I finished was a rewatch of the original Madoka Magica series, which hits different but just as hard when you have the scope of what's going on.

Sweet/Savoury/Spicy: Most of what I make and enjoy eating involves balancing the three and throwing in some sourness too, and as prev said, it depends on the foodstuff as well. But I ate a lot of cake yesterday, so now I want savoury.

Last googleDuckDuckGo search: "university lecturer example interview", for an exercise I'm putting together for my no-longer-voluntary work.

Current obsession: I've spent so much of this year creating a little personal map of countries that boast at least one band fusing their folk music traditions with metal. The fictional thing I'm currently most excited to see updates on is The War of the Roses, which is my friend's ongoing Utena fic that I highly recommend (if you know canon and all the Akio-typical content warnings aren't too much for you). Also, fitness! I've never been much use at anything besides very long walks but for whatever reason this is the year I really wanted to see how far I can push myself physically just for the fun of it. I had a twinge in my knee last week that worried me, but after taking it easy for a couple of days I'm pretty relieved that I most likely just slept with it at an odd angle or something.

Looking forward to: A few things. There are various Pride-related events going on in my town this month that I want to show up for, the Miners' Gala isn't too long after that, and I'll have a bit more money coming in soon and can't wait for the day life overall gets slightly easier and freer. Other than that I'm also looking forward to all the little mundane ongoing joys, like time with my son and all the books I have to read and days wandering about in all the green.

I'm calling this one an open tag!

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Thank you for the tag, @laboradorescence!

Last song: Psyche by Otyken.

Last book: I'm reading Parable of the Sower currently, with Talents lined up to go immediately after. How has it taken me this long? Where was Lauren when I was a teenager and I needed her most?

Last movie: Pertaining to the next answer, Adolescence of Utena. My feelings about this film are as all over the place as its narrative and tone are, but on the whole I'm glad it exists as part of the canon and have a blast with it every time.

Last TV Show: The semi-annual Utena rewatch.

Favourite colour: Deep, vibrant reds and purples.

Spicy, sweet, or savoury: My favourite things to eat are all of these at once.

Current obsession: My nascent horror novel is dominating most of my waking thoughts right now, but I'm also back on my Utena bullshit (implying I'm ever truly off it) and still listening mainly to metal from unexpected places/hybridised with unexpected genres.

Last search: The address and postcode of the building my work is hosted in, in case i need to pass it on later.

Looking forward to: I'm going on a ~~business trip this afternoon (I'm spending maybe a couple of hours in the next town over talking to a potential book donor but I like calling it that anyway) and on Saturday we're doing a book sale! In light of a bigger than usual workload I am also greatly looking forward to Friday, which is the only one this week I'll have entirely to myself. Planning to make it a book and pastry after a long walk kind of day.

Tagging @kisaragiyukine, @hrh-spinach, @e-bea-trice, @picturaculminis, @danceswithdarkspawn, @runicmagitek, @artificial0wl, and anyone else who feels inclined.

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I've seen you posting about gaming a few times so my ask would be: what are your six top games to play ?

The fact I'm immersed in video game fandom right now is actually a bit misleading - I don't actually play that many (money and time being big factors) and when I do, it's more for story. However, I do recommend Final Fantasies VI and VII, Night in the Woods, and the first three Silent Hills (still need to finish the fourth some time). NITW especially might be a good one if you're new to the medium, as you can't really die in it and failure to complete a task mostly just results in different dialogue options (plus it's wittily written and atmospherically scored queer class conscious awesomeness).

Shoutout as well to the very first Tomb Raider game, which I actually finished this year! I hope Little Froze is proud of me for doing what she couldn't.

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The ever-delightful @mothboypoison tagged me to do this, so without further ado, here's five subjects I think I could talk about for an hour without preparing any material beforehand.

Post-punk music around the world from 1977-1984, its influence and influences, its ties to contemporaneous and prior artistic and musical movements, its politics, and what it means to me personally.

Recent history of England's north east, especially the inherited trauma caused by deindustrialisation during the Thatcher years and the ongoing psychological turmoil of this.

Relatedly, the way I see a society based around competition and dominance playing out in subconscious ways even in people who are wise to it, and ways I think can and could be helpful for moving as far past those impulses as we can.

Stuff I picked up between the lines of Final Fantasies VI and VII, some entries more half-baked than others.

My son! My boy! My special lad! My Georgie!

I no-pressure tag @ourspecial, @hrh-spinach, @visualheresy, @foxgloveinthesun, @garth-greensleeves, and anyone else who wants to give it a go.

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Nine people you'd like to get to know better

Thank you, @clevertitlegoeshere!

last song: Spark by Tori Amos.

favorite color: Dark red and vibrant purple.

currently watching: I've been saying "I'm going to start Dungeon Meshi" for the last little while and then not doing that.

sweet/savory/spicy: Yes.

relationship status: @kisaragiyukine has been bravely putting up with my terrible sense of humour and descents into the abyss for nigh on seven years.

current obsession: I recently bought a mouse for my laptop after the built-in trackpad, which was stupidly over-sensitive and wont to develop a mind of is own at the mere suggestion a speck of dust might fall upon it, finally gave up the ghost. And it's like getting my glasses. I don't know why I didn't do this ages ago. I can aim the cursor at things, click on things, scroll past things, and highlight things, all in minimal time and with minimal effort! It's intoxicating.

Besides that magic, I read the ending of The Solution by K.A. Applegate yesterday and I can't stop thinking about it and how abysmal it made me feel. Some of you may know that I've been working through the Animorphs series for the first time as a thirtysomething with my partner and another friend, and this one was something else. American Psycho has been solidly dethroned by a children's book for most upsetting literary rat scene.

last thing you googled: Krebsehalesalat (my Danish friend was telling me about a meal and didn't know the English word).

I nominate @foxgloveinthesun, @novelistparty, @monk-of-figaro, @mothboypoison, @sporebat, @moogleterra, @mothuary, @runicmagitek, and anyone else who feels like sharing.

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Since the feature is due to be discontinued along with much else of what made the site worth using, I got possibly my last ever Reddit award for this analysis of Reeve/Cait Sith I wrote a couple of months ago. I thought I'd commemorate it here, too. Here's why my view of the character is essentially the joke about Cait being a fursona but like, taken seriously:

"Cait Sith's a weird one. I'm not surprised the character is as unpopular as he is because the execution is pretty bizarre, the rest of the party's reaction to both his tagging along and his betrayal are underwritten which adds to the weirdness, and I'm not going to try to defend his gameplay mechanics here - but from a narrative standpoint, I think there's stuff worth digging into. Especially when you consider the man behind the controller.

Regarding the Temple of the Ancients - I think the melodrama of it is purposeful. To all intents and purposes it plays like the typical Hollywood noble sacrifice, a redemptive moment for this creature before the end... and then his replacement comes along, making a big joke out of the moment. The purpose, as I see it, is to contrast Aerith's death as well as many of the others we see on screen. They all meet their ends in ways that are sudden and brutal and don't leave time for last words or moments of closure. I think it's a brilliant addition to what the game is saying about the transience of life and unromanticised inevitability of death.

As for the betrayal (and not to mention the part where a four-year-old girl is taken hostage), yep, that was a lousy thing to do. So was Vincent being a contract killer, Cloud and Tifa and especially Barret disregarding collateral damage and innocent bodies during the reactor bombings, and Cid heaping years of verbal abuse onto a woman who feels codependently indebted to him. They're all broken people in impossible situations left with no recourse, and in the case of Cait and his handler, I think it's easy to imagine Reeve looking on what he's doing as helping to not make a bad situation worse. He can keep Marlene safe from potentially cruel treatment by his peers while maybe doing his part to bring a dangerous guerrilla group to heel. It's still wrong, and I don't agree his methods are either moral or effective - but he's the same as everyone else in the game and doing the best he can with the inadequate hand he has.

And in a story that examines the toll a brutally hierarchical society like the one Shinra imposes on the world takes on the people in it, and the difficulty in resisting it in meaningful ways that don't cause a heap of collateral damage, Reeve is there to represent the futility of trying to change such a system that's already so far gone from the inside. We see him bullied by his coworkers for being such a dreamy idealist as to suggest maybe not crushing thousands upon thousands of people to death to increase the chance of apprehending six, and he then has to watch as the city he worked so hard to improve is treated as a disposable thing to destroy at will. He's also only thirty-five years old, which is terribly young to be in as high a position as he is. So what can we infer about this little-seen character from the avatar that joins the party?

The boundary between headcanon and reading between the lines starts to blur here. But I think to be an engineer, or a scientist of any stripe, you've got to have a streak of imagination and whimsy about you. I've always imagined Reeve, college-aged at best, showing up for work in the resplendent Shinra Tower and immediately boxing away his youth to act professional. And over the years, one moral after another joins his childhood in being repressed and squashed down so he can do his job on the faint promise he can leverage his position to change things for the better. And I think we're meant to see Cait Sith as an alter-ego and manifestation of this - something childlike, which is what the world keeps telling Reeve his moral compass is. His time observing Avalanche makes him question this, and over time, he sees he has people in the party who might genuinely care for him in a way the Shinra higher-ups he's been surrounded by never will. If you take a moment in each scene to imagine what's going on in Reeve's head as he sits alone, weighing it all up, his robot becomes a fantastic addition to the story and a necessary layer to its political commentary.

I am admittedly also a cat lady, though, so perhaps there's some bias creeping in."

I imagine I meant to get into how I see the multiple Cait models as a reflection of Reeve's fear of being replaceable and disposable in the aftermath of the plate drop, and then an affirmation of the opposite ("There's only one me!") as he starts to reintegrate his whole self in the wake of changing allegiances, but apparently that fell by the wayside. My point is that I love the game for daring to make the emotions underpinning a major character's redemptive plotline exist almost entirely between the lines, though it's also hard not to want to see that journey play out. Hence writing fic about it, I suppose.

[frozen-fountain]

On that note, I wanted to say that if you've tagged me for memes and writing-related things lately that I didn't complete, it's not that I was annoyed by the tag or don't want to participate. Quite the opposite. I've not been feeling good about my work or in general lately and it makes me pretty reluctant to share anything, in addition to just forgetting a lot of the time - which is not a habit I want to get into. I'm going to try and work my way back over the rest of the week.

It's nothing serious, just a blip where gazing in awe at dust motes floating in sunbeams and shadows made by the wind in the leaves isn't cutting it. But I've been down this road enough times to know it won't last forever and to have a good idea of how to shake myself out of it eventually. I'm also taking a lot of satisfaction in the fact that a bad day now constitutes "I feel listless and demotivated" and not "I am an active danger to myself".

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I hope everyone had/is having a lovely day today, whether you celebrate culturally Christian consumerism or not!