There's nothing more authentically old internet to me than apologizing for not updating my blog for months. I always *meant* to, you have to understand, but things just keep happening and they don't stop happening and I don't even know where to begin with everything. Let's just do a bullet points recap of the last ... damn it was OCTOBER when I updated this? Christ.

• Somehow, inexplicably, I'm still waiting to find stuff out about my medical bills. It's been truly the world's slowest nightmare. Some stuff will hopefully get cleared up next week, with a few phone calls. Other stuff just sits, eternally pending. Insurance denials are truly hell I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy.
• I started HRT. I made the appointment like two weeks before the election and then spent a lot of the time after that feeling like fate conspired to punish me for deciding to finally go for it. It's been a little over three months now, which is nothing in the grand scheme of things, nothing to report other than hey if you want to cry WAY MORE in life, I highly recommend the potent three hit combo of nearly dying, working on a lot of your trauma in therapy, and starting estrogen. It's like at least once a day with the waterworks now. Supposedly it'll even out over time, just the most obvious and intense effect so far.
• I went to Chicago in January! Mostly to see my girlfriend, but I did visit other friends too. Relevant stuff has already been told as stories on the various podcasts, but it was great, even if it was a short trip. Hoping to go back in the fall after some surgeries I need this year. Traveling in my current physical state turned out to maybe unbalance me more than I was expecting, and between that and the illnesses going around I've spent the last six weeks veering between physical maladies. I don't recommend getting old and having your health decline like this, it sucks.
• I got my ears pierced. Part of the whole gender exploration thing. I meant to tell the story on a podcast but I was sick the week I would have told the story and never circled back around to it. I'm like three weeks into that, so when my lobes are healed up I think I'm going to go get another one, and I'm sure that will find its way into a show (ALF probably). It was so easy, truly painless, so I'm probably going to go get a helix piercing next time and step it up at least a little. My current day job is a bit regressive about piercings in general so I can't go too crazy but maybe someday, idk. 
• I got my legal name change. I would love to do like a gender marker change as part of that but I don't live in a place that supports anything other than binary so nothing really suits (also y'know... the current situation is a mess). It's been nice to slowly peel off the rind of my dead name in aspects of my life. The paperwork is really annoying SPECIFICALLY for credit cards, but honestly most everything else has been pretty painless so far. Nearly done getting all my accounts updated, it does take a while.

Anyway that's the big stuff. Most everything else shows up in my shows every week, because frankly I'm podcasting too much. The one two punch of starting Cosmo Champs and guesting on Ghost Divers really just maxed out my capacity for homework in this really alarming way all of the sudden. Didn't help that I've also been fighting being sick and everything else, and the dead of winter doldrums really bad. Hoping heat will fix me when the warmth finally returns to the world. It's trying its best. I just feel like I vaporized my free time all at once and while I'm having a great time, I'm feeling the strain of just not knowing how to fit it all in. If we could figure out how to make the days 28 hours long, or to give everyone a three day weekend, it would really save me right now. Just saying. Someone should make this real.

The thing that compelled me back to writing the blog tonight was actually podcast related. Anyone who listens to my work knows I love to talk shop more than nearly anything, there's something about thinking about the act of podcasting that just really gets me excited. Eleven years of this will do that to you, I guess. But I mostly wanted to talk about my feelings about the way my Podcasting Style, if you will grant such a thing, has shifted in the last year/year and a half, and really got supercharged in this new direction after the cancer mess in July of last year. 

I think the Abnormal Mapping house style has always strived for a sort of openness and curiosity about the works we cover, at our best I want to be open-hearted and take things in both their context but as valuable works even in their own right. I never subscribed much to 'good for the time' sort of thinking, I think understanding why things might be a certain way is valuable but I think good things are generally just good, and it's more about willingness to accept what they are and aren't without a lot of shoving things into boxes. On that front, I think this is what AM as a network has always excelled at. With games we tended to often be a little more formalist about things, talking about movement feel and level design and what the buttons do vs what you might want them to do, more than we were like narrative critics (though we've certainly done a lot of that). 

But there's been a real shift in my approach, and I mainly have two things to thank for this: doing a lot of work in therapy, and Around the Long Fire developing into a podcast that is only about 20% Sagas by volume. The therapy thing is hard to summarize, beyond the scope of this, but in short: i've been in therapy pretty intensely since 2019. How often I go drifts a lot based on need (usually every two weeks) but when I do go I am very diligent about making sure work gets done. And there's just been a lot of things to unpack: a mess of parental trauma, acknowledging and starting to actually process some grooming and abuse I underwent when I was a teen, figuring out I had an eating disorder and doing a bunch of work to try to learn healthy ways to cope with that, and lately a mess of like abandonment issues (more parental trauma stuff, ultimately) and BDD that has been ruining my life (the mixture of transness and ED? potent in an awful way. don't recommend. I'm sure many people reading this can relate). Anwyay, there's been a lot of work being done, and I'm very serious about making sure I spend that time effectively, so I'm constantly deliberately going through a trial by fire about myself and my emotions and my past and all the other things. This didn't slow down after my nearly dying thing, if anything I've gotten more serious about trying to tackle my problems with both hands, because I had to really sit with maybe not making it in July, having a nebulous and potentially still fatal road ahead of me with survivorship, and realizing I was deeply deeply unhappy with how I had spent my life up until the point I was waking up in the hospital with my guts in pieces. Many things to do, and I'm not getting any younger and while my odds are good, truly I don't know what the next few years are going to bring for me. So it's never been more carpe fuckin diem over here.

Add to that ALF, the strange little podcast that could, starting from a real niche just because I wanted to do something with Niamh and didn't have any better ideas and knew that fae wanted to do this sort of podcast specifically. So I agreed to a one season plan, we'd see where we're at, and then reassess if we wanted to keep going after that. I honestly didn't expect it to go as well as it did, both in terms of what the sagas brought us, but also during the end of season 1 when we were reading the awful Heimskringla we started filling the podcast with us talking about other stuff because otherwise the show would have been 30 minutes long and it was meant to be an excuse to hang out. So we started putting our lives into it, which meant I started talking about a lot of this stuff, and even before Last July that meant often I was working through a lot of my mental health stuff into a microphone on Around the Long Fire every week. It started serving as a sort of second therapy, and became a place where I could test being more honest and vulnerable because it was a relatively unpopular show.  But then, people started really responding to it? 

Not in droves, I still think ALF is a relatively obscure show, and people don't know what to make of our main coverage topic, but the people who do listen often message and tell me how much certain things I talk about mean to them, how they rarely hear people talk about these things in these ways, and how my problems remind them of their problems, and often that they draw strength from this. Its a really heartening thing to hear, frankly. I've always been very fearful of openness, in part because of all that parental trauma and abandonment fears, and to know not only do people not mind me talking about my private life but it might actually help others? Whew. That's potent. 

So I leaned into this. And Niamh has always been game, fae is a thoughtful and compassionate cohost, someone with a great reserve of strength and a contemplative empathy that is a nice antidote to my flailing emotionally heightened perceptions of things. I know we have the Serious Critic label applied to us sometimes, but I really tend to just go with my gut and operate from a place of emotion, and that's only gotten more dramatic as I've shifted this style.

There's a second project that deserves special mention here, which is Em and Dia's Let's Plays on Dia's youtube channel. I just blanket refer to those as Dia Time to my friends, and I will mostly do so here. We started with Dia just wanting to drag me through some dusty old games that I would never play, and I wanted an excuse to hang out with my friend especially after she had her own infamous brush with near-death a few years back. So I would have said yes to anything, but we were doing that. And then somewhere in Space Quest ... IV? We had this one episode where we were just exploring a future mall, and talking about our memories of malls and shopping as we looked at all the goods and stores, and I realized that we were doing something much greater than Criticism or Playing a Game, we were sharing ourselves with each other and to the audience, and it was intense and real even if it was also The Epitome of Hanging Out. 

Dia has always been much more casual about things than me, at least to my estimation. I tend to get worked up, and take everything very seriously, and attach a lot of meaning to stuff. Dia is more of a vibes based lady, at least in my experience. But we both realized we had something, and shifted the tone of our work together into different directions. We played Gabriel Knight 2, a very silly FMV game sequel to one of the best adventure games of all time, and it truly changed my life. Its like outside the scope of this blog, but GK2's camp queer story, and getting to just react to it and be led around by my coolest friend, did a lot to remove a lot of my hangups about doing Queer Reads in my work. Watching Gabe fumble the evil European eugenicist and being able to just laugh at it but be compelled by it showed me a way to authenticity and willingness to accept a thing for what it is and not what I expected or wanted that I just hadn't ever experienced so potently.

We continue to do these, and they aren't all Gabriel Knight 2s. Sometimes they're Gabriel Knight 3s. But nearly every week we are making memories together, and it's mostly just laughs and hanging out with my cool friend, but also sometimes we read the Lospass Guidebook for 90 minutes and I think it's some of the best work I've ever done. Sometimes we run around as Boku during one balmy summer in the 70s and wonder why he can't tell anyone he has the gold but also reflect on our own childhoods and ship the adults and have a great time being wistful. Dia Time is not criticism, but it is an aspect of this aspect of myself, something that is heart-first and earnest and trying to really create memories and meaning out of the stuff that surrounds our lives. It always means a lot to me, and our small but dedicated watching fanbase always delight me. I'm always happy when people tell me they're watching the LPs. They're a type of thing I never thought I could make, and certainly not like that.

And then, of course, July happened. And October happened. And November happened. And January happened. And things keep happening. And I find that this new style has started to become the main way I interface with a lot of my work now, as I really try to find the emotional core that draws me into things and engage with them with my whole heart and really wring truth and identification out of things. And that means putting a lot more of myself into how I respond to things, being really honest about what works and why, where I'm finding sympathy and empathy in a work, and what parts of me respond to that. I have offhandedly referred to this as a confessional style of podcasting to my friends, because it invariably requires putting a lot of my shit out there. I can't talk about Utena without talking about being groomed. I can't talk about 1000xRESIST without talking about my estrangement from my parents. I can't talk about The People's Joker without talking about my complicated feelings about my gender. They're high friction, both exhilarating and exhausting often at the same time, and I just put so much of my heart and energy into this work and I find it very rewarding, but it is strange that I have fallen into this new style as my main mode, and its begun to follow me into all the shows. How I feel about Eureka Seven in 2025 just couldn't have existed in 2023. I wasn't the person who could believe the things I believe, or process my feelings the way I process them now.

I say this as almost a full positive, I like this new me and I like the ways I am engaging with art, and I feel like I'm fighting every day to be caring and authentic and open to people and possibility. It's not always easy, and it doesn't always work, but given this multi vector crisis point and being offered motivation to re-invent myself, I've really tried to make the most of it. If anything, I regularly experience anguish because I can only go so fast in my reinvention. Change is slow, I have to wait for so many external factors, I ultimately have very little control over a lot of them and the world grows scarier every day. I am not a brave person in any way, and I've had to learn to emulate the bravery of those around me, and do things despite my constant and all-encompassing fear. I'm simply doing my best, worried in six months I'll be dying, and trying to make sure next time I'm in the hospital not sure what my future holds, I don't feel immense regret that I've wasted all my time, even if what I do week to week hasn't change all that much.

I still love art, and love talking about it, but the ways I find meaning in that process have changed a lot. I care much more about who I'm doing something with, and what we both bring and take from the exchange, the relationship of a podcast is so centrally important to me. When I was in the hospital, learning to eat solid food again and struggling to even get out of bed much less do laps, it was my closest friends who were all my podcast cohosts past and present who kept me sane. They were there in the morning for me, they would share their lives in my group chat and remind me there was normalcy outside of my hospital room, they were taking care of the shows while I was in the hospital and weeks away from being able to sit in front of a mic. It isn't enough to just have opinions about art, I need people in my life to share them with. I want a support system of people I love and that love to deepen *because* of the work we do. One begets the other, and reinforces it, and the cycle begins anew. 

It's changed how I think about a lot of my life, even if the shows haven't ultimately changed much in formal structure. My critical lens, such as it is, has been fundamentally altered. The way I approach my job has shifted dramatically. And I wonder how far it'll go and how much tolerance for it the audience has, worried I will hit a wall someday where the interest just isn't there or I stop being relatable or I lose some aspect of my authenticity or whatever. Could be many things. I have a lot of fear. But I know that week to week, people still tell me the New Way has moved them, or inspired them, or just given them energy and feelings they didn't have before. And that feels really fucking good. I want to be strong for people, I want to share the breadth of my experience, and I want us all to be enriched for having gone on whatever journey we're on together. The audience is also experiencing a relationship, and it's more one-sided and there's a lot more distance, but I absolutely have my own relationships with the shows I love and the people who make them, even the ones who are not my friends. I think that's very human, and ultimately good for people most of the time. 

I don't have a big conclusion. Around the Long Fire low key changed my life, and it happened when the Kings harried and all we wanted to do was talk about anything else. Now? ALF is a sprawling weird mess of a show, regularly 2+ hours of manga and movies and games, explorations of personal politics about queerness, dusty roads of memory about our bad upbringings and how we're handling that as adults, and it makes me want to be better and bolder and bigger in every other aspect of my life. Not bad for a little book club about the classics. Me and Dia keep trucking along. We have a lot of weird games we want to play, and some normal ones too, and not every week is a huge winner but even the bad weeks have White Grace show up in leather pants inexplicably.

I think I'm doing some of my best work in my life right now. Hell, yesterday I recorded episode 3 of the Ghost Divers Chobits season, and that's not even my podcast, and I felt like I found a new gear I didn't know I had and we did some goddamn work both doing criticism and finding ways to do this Confessional Mode and talk about what art really means to me and what I respond to and how this speaks to the human condition. People gotta look forward to that one, it's something else.

And I really need to be doing my best work. In case I'm dying. In case the world is ending. In case I end up back in the hospital with worse news. In case a lot of things. I really want to be able to look back on this time and say I did my best and have no regrets, because that's all anyone can get in this rapidly shrinking time to be alive. It might not seem like it, I'm just a humble podcaster, but I'm fighting to my best every day. And I hope that some of that, somehow, can bring me closer to others and help them if they need it.

That's it. I won't promise regular updates, but I never forgot about this humble blog.

Apparently I was right that just solving the blog problem would get me back on track with the website, because I finally made some other progress since posting last night. I got the RSS set up, linked from the main website polarbearsummer.online for anyone who wants to follow that. I did a little bit of cleanup to the main landing page, added a few more links to the sidebar (especially since I'm primarily posting on bluesky instead of twitter right now), and felt pretty good about that.

Most importantly, I made a button! People have been sharing 88x31 pixel buttons linking to their site around on bluesky, and I figured I should join in. So last night I fired up aseprite for the first time, dug out my old wacom tablet (it was so dusty! I haven't used it since pre-covid), and got to work on a button! Thankfully, despite the small size, aseprite exports in social media friendly large sizes so I can post it without, say, twitter compression fucking it up.



I'm not really any more than an art dabbler, but I'm trying to embrace the handmade quality of doing all this stuff myself, so I don't mind that it looks a little crappy. My whole website looks a little crappy, I'm one person with two jobs and chronic health conditions doing this as my fourth hobby. We can extend ourselves a little grace on this Monday evening, I think.

This was inspired by Brianna Townsend's posts on bluesky about the buttons. The idea is that if you have a static website you can use the code next to the button on the main page to put my button somewhere on your site, where you'd collect buttons of all the websites you like, and I'm going to try to build up my own button gallery as I start following more sites. This is how the old internet used to work. A button is like a pinned RT, saying 'hey this person is neat.'

I'm really happy it's gotten me over the initial art block of doing something custom for the website. A new header for the main page is the biggest thing I need, but I'm pretty sure that's really beyond my ability and I'm still considering maybe commissioning someone for it in the future. Not right now, money's pretty tight these days, but until then I can do little odds and ends.

One of the ones I really want to do is make a custom set of polar bear mood icons for the mood section on the blog here. Dreamwidth has a few default options, but this rainbow kid is the only one that gets close to the classic Roshi's PaleFaces, the livejournal mood icons of my heart. If I had some small polar bear faces, though? I'd be happy with that. iykyk!!

The other thing I really want to do is get started on the static MiSTer page of the website, which will mostly be about plugging various old controllers into modern hardware to play old games with. This is the angle of the old games hobby I'm most sicko about, and I think it would be fun to log all of my various controllers with photos and brief descriptions of the hardware. I know MiSTer life isn't for everyone, but I do think there is a certain sort of treat in using original controllers on games and as far as 'real hardware' goes its the most affordable facet of collecting with arguably the biggest gain in terms of verisimilitude.

I'll need to take a little more time for that one, take photos of all my controllers and probably build an honest to god table for the information because tables used to be the fanciest thing you could do with HTML and I really want to make a big fuck-off table. But it's the next big to do on the website beyond maybe working on icon art.

Anyway, that's it for now. I'm hoping the next blog post will be less update focused and more just talking about this and that, if I do three technical posts in a row then I'm just making a blog about making websites, and god knows I'm the last person equipped or qualified to be doing that. I hope everyone has a good week, welcome to October, the coolest month (because of Halloween, and because it's my birthday on the 27th, and because it's Scorpio season soon, and because Fall is coming, hopefully)!

It's been way too long since I've updated this, and I'm sorry about that. While life has mostly returned to normal, that normal is very busy, so I find myself mostly just doing my day job and podcast work and when I'm not doing those things feeling very tired and quiet and keeping to myself.

My health is okay, though I'm still in the final stretch of healing the large incision from my surgery, and between the open wound and the ostomy I've felt very weird about working out even though I'm technically cleared by my doctor and surgeon to do so. Which probably hasn't helped my energy level much, but it's hard to balance everything, y'know? Just getting enough sleep and water can be difficult enough, sometimes. But it means that my for fun projects like this blog get really back burnered while I focus on what's right ahead of me, and then I feel guilty, and stay away longer, y'know, the cycle of responsibility and failure.

Part of the reason I keep coming back to this is the whole social media untenability thing. Cohost is about a week from going into stasis, twitter sucks more than ever, and I'm posting on bluesky more but it's just not what things used to be. Maybe that's fine, it's very likely social media was a huge mistake we're all going to have to get over sooner or later. But I still want to put things out in the world and be acknowledged by others. So I'll keep blogging, even though I need an RSS and don't have any energy/time to figure out how to move this blog off of zonelets and into something that actually supports an RSS. Just not enough spoons for that sort of work with two jobs, and all. Sorry for everyone who wants to use a reader to keep up with blogs, I know it's annoying I just don't know how to fix it.

I want to have fun updates where I talk about what I've been doing, but like I said it's all work stuff and if it's not work stuff it's just gaming stuff that is technically work stuff that you can hear about on Abnormal Mapping in a little bit. I'm really happy with the gaming, been playing a lot of cool stuff, but I don't have another angle on it right now that isn't the one I'm saving for the podcast. So please again excuse me, and look forward to those podcasts. October's episode in particular is going to be a lot, I'm absolutely in love with the game we're playing for it!

I'm hoping the next two weeks will be a little more normal, I've been slowly having fewer and fewer doctors appointments, and we recently had a covid scare at home that really disrupted our living space but it's resolved now (I didn't get covid, thank god), so I could stand to have a little normalcy. I think I've earned it after the last two months. It's wild how little time it's been since everything got weird, considering on some level it feels like this has just been my life now Forever. I'm really tired of Recovery, I gotta tell you. I should go to bed, I shoulda gone to bed like an hour ago, and yet here I am writing this meaningless blog post where I mostly feel sorry for myself. Sorry again! Thanks for reading. I'll try to not just whine next time, I have so many Things To Talk About but by the time I get around to this I'm just so tired.

If you're on bluesky, say hello sometime! I feel like I never interact with anyone over there, I'm trying when there's something that catches my eye. You can do that on twitter too I guess, but y'know, maybe it's better if we don't.

Been putting off writing a new update until I had more to say, but since today was a day off and I did most of the things I wanted to do and am putting off a bunch of chores I should be doing instead, I figure I should do a small update.

Both the reading list and album review pages are up. I'll update them as I have something to update about them. The album review page is nearly perfect, just nailed that in one. I really like the aesthetics of the reading list but I'm not entirely sure how practical it'll be long term. If I go on a reading tear I feel like it'll become unusable right quick. Problems for another day.

I'm still fiddling with a back end blog replacement for the current setup, but I'm constantly torn on what kind of compromises I want to make and this one does 90% of what I want (I'd kill for an RSS, is my one big complaint), so for now I'll probably keep using this as I try to figure out other options more slowly. I find I don't actually have much mental capacity for a ground up rethink of a process that works well enough. Truly I subscribe to the if it ain't broke don't fix it mentality. This is probably why I made a miserable fiction writer, I never wanted to revise anything. Once I got the idea out I was onto the next thing, I've never liked second passes.

I've been in something of a funk the last week or so, tired from too much work and with low morale due to health and mental affliction. Nothing especially out of the ordinary, but it has robbed me of a lot of my momentum from weeks prior. I was hoping the holiday today would rejuvenate me but I've mostly found myself agitated and aimless, not feeling up to tackling anything but more resentful than appreciative of all of the time to do nothing and feel, briefly, a little bit bored. Also I woke up at 6:15 in the morning despite not even setting an alarm because while I might be tired some aspect of my body seemed to want to tackle the day with the verve of a child on Saturday morning. It didn't really pan out that way, by noon I was flagging and never stopped.

I'm not a very good intention setter, but I would like to become better at this and hoping maybe writing stuff out on the blog would be a good way to help make ideas concrete. My main goal for July is to try to instill in myself a reading habit at home. I've made a lot of good strides in reading at work during my lunch breaks, getting treatment for ADHD helped settle me into the focus necessary for that, but I find that I'm antsy to read a little faster and 45 minutes (give or take) a day of reading just isn't satisfying me. So today I used a bit of that boredom to stop wallowing in self-pity this evening and read instead. It was easy today. It will be harder in future days when I have far less time. But if I can manage even a half hour three or four nights a week before bed it will be much preferable to my current wind-down habit of just compulsively refreshing my youtube suggestions until I get too sleepy to keep my eyes open before the screen.

A modest goal, but there's many things going on and I would like a win to make this new habit more likely to stick, so I'm going to start small this month and hope for the best. That's it for now, here's hoping that I burned off my Sunday blues early this week and the weekend isn't just a second, rougher wave of the same agitation. Sometimes it breaks that way. If it does, I'll just push on through, but I'd much rather just be happy.

So this is kind of a follow up to an episode of Around the Long Fire I did a few weeks ago where I talked about watching I Saw the TV Glow and how it made me re-assess my relationship to how I feel about being queer in the world. I highly encourage people to check that episode out, it meant a lot to me to do and I'm going to be picking up where that episode left off talking about this tonight.

Since then I've been continuing on with my life more or less as usual. Certainly feeling emotional catharsis is one of those things that can be difficult to hold onto long term, because no matter what might happen in my inner life on any given day, I still have to get up and go to work in the morning. I've still got laundry to do. This is the numbing inverse of 3 AM disease (when you are convinced at 3 AM that you have to blow up your life right now and you definitely have good ideas about how to accomplish that), where the highs are all sanded down and the resolutions stretched over boring Thursdays where your tummy hurts. It's hard to feel like you're changing and growing under such auspices, but important to remember that we are not actually narrative constructs, and people move glacially due to all the people things we can't just abandon.

My desire to embrace more queer media has run into a sort of gravity trap as I've just been pouring all my time into watching The L Word. It's exactly the sort of bad TV I love, earnest characters doing cartoonishly overwrought plots with often minimal actual stakes in favor of just the vibes of melodrama and comedy pushing things along. I'm midway into season 4, the gang recently formed a basketball team to show the young cool street lesbians they weren't bougie. It didn't work. Helena's accidentally fallen into a kakegurui gambling madness life debt thing. iykyk. Just a sense of where I'm at.

Going back and watching older shows is always a bit of a crapshoot, especially when they aren't for any sort of project. Nobody especially cares about The L Word in 2024. Most of my friends haven't seen it. The two that have, Dia and Destiny, both watched it back in the day as it aired and are eating up my reactions to it twenty years later where I just clutch my head and yell 'WHO WOULD EVER CONCEIVE OF JENNY IS A GOOD PROTAGONIST?' knowing the answer is of course Ilene Chaiken, who has to consinder Jenny an avatar of all the things she wished she could get away with at this point. Many of those things one should not desire to get away with. It's deranged.

But it does mean I'm mostly pouring my enthusiasm for this old thing into the ether, which is fine but I'm used to getting more instant feedback and positive reinforcement on projects I do. I don't think that's inherently better, and in fact am trying to work through feeling discouraged at all because I think the opposite, but lacking that it does end up feeling a little lonely being into a thing by myself during this moment.

It's made a little more complicated by the reality that a show like The L Word used to be very important, and is no longer especially important, and in fact in the intervening two decades has somewhat faded into obscurity in a media culture where (on its best days) things being about gay characters simply isn't enough to drive an object anymore. I think The L Word has more to recommend it than that, but on the face of it it's the groundbreaking but now creaky lesbian ensemble comedy. It's got a lot of really bad things in it, it's got a lot of dated things in it, it's full of middle aged actresses that were marginally relevant in the 00s and are even more marginal now. I get why the kids aren't watching The L Word these days.

But I also think there's value in the messy things that were there at the time as objects. Even and especially because of their eventual irrelevance in the present. I think it's important to remember that culture is both constantly moving around us, and that many of the arguments we find ourselves surrounded by and embroiled in in the world are not new but instead cycle through the world over and over. And I'm not just talking about the goldfish memory of twitter, but the reality of spaces pre-social media, where these things were happening just at potentially slower speeds. It's both refreshing and depressing to see how many things haven't changed fundamentally, but also how less normalized the really outlandish stuff in this show has become since. But not everything, some things honestly just got repainted and are still loitering around being the same problems. And that's also worth recognizing, when we exchange one problematic facet of culture for the same one under a different name.

Which isn't to say that I'm watching The L Word entirely in a curiosity-driven historian sort of way. That would be dis-ingenous (though certainly someone could do that). It's a show that used to mean a lot to people in my life who are important to me, and also it's very easy to sit down and watch four episodes a night of, because it's funny and most of the cast is extremely likeable. That's really the secret of good TV, they're people you can hang out with at length without actually expending the effort of socializing. Perfect, imo.

But it does mean I feel a little like I've been negligent and unserious about my desire to explore more things. I finished reading Stone Butch Blues and then went right back to reading my normal book diet (reading Solaris right now). It's not a problem, and in reality it's only been like three weeks and I should get over myself, but I do feel a little unfocused. But at the same time, I shouldn't turn every aspect of my life into some sort of project, and if I want to spend my nights just settling in with a cozy TV show there's nothing wrong with that. And I do believe that, but I also feel a little frivolous and indulgent about it.

This is a me problem, I recognize that. I can explore more serious works any time I want, and it's not like unserious work isn't without merit. But I just find myself feeling a little guilty about how I spend my time, is all. And I shouldn't. I truly should not. I work, both a full time job and a second job doing all my podcast work, and I've been going through a period of bad health where my energy overall is pretty low. So I have every reason in the world to not beat myself up over this expectation nobody but me is placing on myself (and that I couldn't clearly define if I wanted to).

I don't have a greater point or conclusion. I just wanted to get my thoughts out for my sake. I hope when I finish Solaris, and then finish the Eragon book I have to read for podcast deadline, I find a nice queer book of significance if I want to and enjoy it greatly. I hope I can go back to watching Important, Relevant Films about these subjects when I want to. But also if I don't it's fine. I can continue to poopsock The L Word until I'm out of show and then maybe watching the modern comeback Generation Q and just overeat all the Halloween candy until I feel sick of it. Nobody is holding me to account for any of this, other than myself. And even I know it's stupid.

Unfortunately, intellectually knowing a thing does not make it emotionally true, and I still feel guilty for just happily enjoying a culturally insignificant, oft-derided thing with the scant free time I have when I could be living up to all my big talk. This is fake! Nobody cares! I don't even actually care! But sometimes you just can't let go of your own projected misery. I simply have to be hard on myself for ???? reasons.

It's stupid. Maybe I'll change my habits in the last two weeks of June. Maybe I won't. It doesn't matter because I will have the weeks beyond it, and all the other years of my life, and also there's no deadline and none of this matters. I just am working out the other side of suddenly caring about a thing I haven't cared about before, where you start to attach expectations and desires onto it. Caring too much about doing anything 'the right way' has never brought happiness to anyone.

No conclusion. Change is slow, revelation rarely happens, and I've still gotta go to work tomorrow.

The first real blog post! I've been meaning to write this for a week, but that's how it goes on this bitch of an earth. One of the concerns with starting a website is that ultimately I don't have that much time to dedicate to something like writing a blog and setting up a website.

I've really shied away from writing for the last few years, I've continuously claimed I'm the one person in my peer group who hates writing, and that isn't necessarily untrue despite how much I flirted with being A Writer in the past. I'm trying not to be too precious about it this time, and mostly focus on just blogging stream of consciousness about the things I'm thinking about as they come to me. This isn't going to be an anti-professional web haven if I'm too focused on producing Refined Work. I'm trying to carve out a new/old way of living here.

Writing the blogs in HTML is also a thing I've found kind of intimidating. I've finally settled on writing it in Visual Studio Code, where I can save a blog post template and just copy it into new blog posts, and save the backups to my dropbox automatically as I write. The plus of having a mostly HTML site is that damn everything's really small when you aren't super devoted to multimedia presentation. At some point I'd like to produce some actual art and maybe a small animation or two, but for now it's just some text pages that amount to nothing. It's nice to be reminded coming from the world of 100 GB video games and blu-ray rips of movies that most information is just astonishingly small. We don't have to live in the bloat of storage.

I also just feel kind of bad about how rough everything looks. I know that's the point, but I have to go through the deprogramming myself as part of this. With this blog I'll be posting about the website on main, probably, as I write new blog posts, and it's a little anxiety inducing for me. I'm hoping to carve out a space here that's deliberately different to my podcast persona, I'm not exactly looking to do written criticism in my free time when I do a bunch of spoken criticism for my job. But also there's things like book thoughts or album reviews that I want to get out somewhere. These days I post them to my locked twitter, but that's ephemeral in the extreme and frankly I think it's smart to begin pulling away from using social media to hold long term information I care about anyway. So maybe there'll be some very uneducated music reactions on one of these pages at some point.

The actual thing I keep thinking about is how much I miss livejournal. I spent a good chunk of the late 90s and early 00s pouring out all my teen angst on LJ, like a lot of online people my age, and I would give a lot to be able to read all those posts and cringe down to my toes about how earnest and weird and going through it I was when I was 15. But also it means when I was setting up the CSS for this blog, I was like 'how close can we make this to an old LJ skin?' and I got as far as seeing if I could find a pack of the Roshi PaleFaces gifs for the moodlets when I went 'knock it off you're delaying writing to just pretend this is important' so here we are doing this instead. But no really, if you know where to find the Roshi PaleFaces moodlets in bulk, let me know. I know where to see them all on a website, but I don't want to have to download them one by one because I'm lazy. Too much work for an indulgence like that.

The main thing the blog needs is some sort of bio, but I don't even have any idea how to sum up myself for that. I've been lucky enough to coast on the notoriety of my podcast work for a long time, so I don't really ever have to introduce myself online, I can just point to that and be like 'you can figure out what I'm about' but like ... I don't know. In some perfect world there will be people who eventually find this site who have no idea about the podcasts, don't give a shit about Gundam (and wonder who that lady is saying Welcome to Blogging on the blog page) or anything else. I don't know. Maybe this is the human contact version of the desire for infinite growth. I always want to be meeting and affecting new people. Number goes up. Maybe it's okay to peak as a personality, and do stuff for nobody but myself.

Anyway I guess that's enough for the first one of these. This weekend is a three pod weekend but I don't have to watch Gundam and I don't have ALF reading for next week, so maybe I'll find some time to update the website a little more. I don't know how to add an RSS to the blog, so please check back on your own accord when you think about it, or maybe follow me on twitter at em_being. I don't tweet very much anymore, honestly, so you'll see the latest blog post mentioned sooner or later if you scroll down.

You know, assuming I keep this up. It'll be very embarrassing if it turns out this was just like a six week dalliance and nothing ever gets updated again. Not the end of the world, but I'd feel bad about it.