Em's Blog, Updated Sporadically

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.