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Still in existence / pandemic misc
May. 19th, 2020 10:56 pmThe function of this post is partly to say that I am still here (which you probably all assumed) and partly to make it not have been as long since I last posted next time I come to post, because long gaps erode my tendency to write. (There was a play-by-post roleplaying game I was running. I did not run it very far. Aargh). So this is sort of a life update, only I am pruning all the things which would stop me from posting it almost at once.
I could list all the good and interesting things I've done in the last month in such a way as to make it sound as though my isolation has been excellent, which is not entirely untrue. (Not least because, thank God, thank the New Zealand government, cross fingers, it is now ending. Today I stood in a library and made physical contact with a human*).
I could also describe the corrosion of time, the extent to which I have been dropping small commitments, the frequent moments when I've looked at self-care and said 'But why would I want to be happier?', and make it sound generally bad. And also I do not have the brain just now to write anything about the fact that I am writing something small about a small fortunate life in a context of managed disaster, because I do not have the ability to feel happy posting a version of that which isn't as well-worded as I can make it, and I do not currently have the energy to make this as well-worded as I can make it. Except slantwise, by taking it out.
What I tend to post is new positive experiences, and books. Those haven't been happening so much. (Although my changed sleep cycle means I see more of the flatmate who is periodically nocturnal, which is nice, and I have done more useful writing in the hours between midnight and four in the morning than in the rest of my life to date. I have still not finished the infinitely-extending chaos story, but at least it now seems to be advancing instead of drifting serenely sideways). I've been reading few books. Early in the isolation period I saw people saying, 'I haven't had energy to read lately' and thought that that was the opposite of my response to isolation, but it turns out it isn't. Things I have not been reading but which have now been at my bedside more than two weeks: a book about bus policy, The Lathe of Heaven, The Course of the Heart. Things I have found myself not only starting but finishing: some Diana Wynne Jones, a tomeful of Jonothan Carroll short stories, the first Murderbot novella. (Yay Murderbot!)
Most of my actual leisure time, which hasn't meant 'time not spent working' so much as 'time not corroded by acidic mists', has been spent watching Schitt's Creek, (especially but not entirely because I ship Stevie and David), and playing Sekiro (which is the most frustratingly precise swordfighting game, the kind where you spend three days trying to kill a very large ogre, finally succeed, feel as though you've conquered the world, and advance approximately ten metres before meeting a larger ogre. It is beautiful, and well-designed to give you shortcuts around the bits of frustration it doesn't want you to have, so as to get you to the interesting bits of frustration. I have given up on it for the time being anyway, faced with an ogre the metaphorical size of a house. Now I am pootling around the heavens in a steam engine in Sunless Skies, encountering a British empire which would really like to keep its subjects happily and conventionally sipping a substance called tea, going on holiday to a place called the beach, and not admitting that the tea is probably made of parasitic mushrooms, and the beach has neither sand nor ocean but only drifting white (acidic) mist and a shore made from the bones of small animals. Do humans count as small animals to whatever it is that lives beneath the mist? Better not to ask).
Other landmarks of my lockdown: the week I spent doing / putting off doing some writing work for a music charity's website, which fell very much victim to the previous weeks of structurelessness, but did not come out terrible and caused me to be much more productive and happier for a while afterwards; the partial breakage of a laptop cable, failure of a new cable to arrive from, as it turned out, Singapore, slowing of the laptop to a snail's pace on the occasions when the existing cable would agree to charge, and acquisition of a new laptop; reading plays on Zoom with Seahearth and Leaflemming and Ablackart; and the existence of the Scintillation convention's discord server, on which there has been much sociability, reading of things also including plays, and random internet excellence. Such as the following, for those with an interest in Star Wars:
Tattúínárdǿla Saga
"Earlier this week I was drawn into an enlightening discussion with my colleague Ben Frey about the complicated textual tradition that lies behind George Lucas’s “Star Wars,” which few outside the scholarly community realize is a modern rendition of an old Germanic legend of a fatal conflict between a father and his treacherous son ... The story as presented in George Lucas’s films represents only one manuscript tradition, and a rather late and corrupt one at that – the Middle High German epic called Himelgengærelied (Song of the Skywalkers). There is also an Old High German palimpsest known to scholars, later overwritten by a Latin choral and only partly legible to us today ... Tattúínárdǿla saga tells of the youth of Anakinn himingangari, beginning with his childhood as a slave in Tattúínárdalr, notably lacking the prolonged racing scene of the MHG version, and referring to the character of “Jarjari inn heimski” only as a local fool slain by Anakinn in a childhood berserker rage (whereas in the MHG version, “Jarjare” is one of “Anacen’s” marshals and his constant companion").
*clarification: the human was a family member, and was not in the library. In libraries, we still stand well apart, not that this is terribly different from the usual library experience.
I could list all the good and interesting things I've done in the last month in such a way as to make it sound as though my isolation has been excellent, which is not entirely untrue. (Not least because, thank God, thank the New Zealand government, cross fingers, it is now ending. Today I stood in a library and made physical contact with a human*).
I could also describe the corrosion of time, the extent to which I have been dropping small commitments, the frequent moments when I've looked at self-care and said 'But why would I want to be happier?', and make it sound generally bad. And also I do not have the brain just now to write anything about the fact that I am writing something small about a small fortunate life in a context of managed disaster, because I do not have the ability to feel happy posting a version of that which isn't as well-worded as I can make it, and I do not currently have the energy to make this as well-worded as I can make it. Except slantwise, by taking it out.
What I tend to post is new positive experiences, and books. Those haven't been happening so much. (Although my changed sleep cycle means I see more of the flatmate who is periodically nocturnal, which is nice, and I have done more useful writing in the hours between midnight and four in the morning than in the rest of my life to date. I have still not finished the infinitely-extending chaos story, but at least it now seems to be advancing instead of drifting serenely sideways). I've been reading few books. Early in the isolation period I saw people saying, 'I haven't had energy to read lately' and thought that that was the opposite of my response to isolation, but it turns out it isn't. Things I have not been reading but which have now been at my bedside more than two weeks: a book about bus policy, The Lathe of Heaven, The Course of the Heart. Things I have found myself not only starting but finishing: some Diana Wynne Jones, a tomeful of Jonothan Carroll short stories, the first Murderbot novella. (Yay Murderbot!)
Most of my actual leisure time, which hasn't meant 'time not spent working' so much as 'time not corroded by acidic mists', has been spent watching Schitt's Creek, (especially but not entirely because I ship Stevie and David), and playing Sekiro (which is the most frustratingly precise swordfighting game, the kind where you spend three days trying to kill a very large ogre, finally succeed, feel as though you've conquered the world, and advance approximately ten metres before meeting a larger ogre. It is beautiful, and well-designed to give you shortcuts around the bits of frustration it doesn't want you to have, so as to get you to the interesting bits of frustration. I have given up on it for the time being anyway, faced with an ogre the metaphorical size of a house. Now I am pootling around the heavens in a steam engine in Sunless Skies, encountering a British empire which would really like to keep its subjects happily and conventionally sipping a substance called tea, going on holiday to a place called the beach, and not admitting that the tea is probably made of parasitic mushrooms, and the beach has neither sand nor ocean but only drifting white (acidic) mist and a shore made from the bones of small animals. Do humans count as small animals to whatever it is that lives beneath the mist? Better not to ask).
Other landmarks of my lockdown: the week I spent doing / putting off doing some writing work for a music charity's website, which fell very much victim to the previous weeks of structurelessness, but did not come out terrible and caused me to be much more productive and happier for a while afterwards; the partial breakage of a laptop cable, failure of a new cable to arrive from, as it turned out, Singapore, slowing of the laptop to a snail's pace on the occasions when the existing cable would agree to charge, and acquisition of a new laptop; reading plays on Zoom with Seahearth and Leaflemming and Ablackart; and the existence of the Scintillation convention's discord server, on which there has been much sociability, reading of things also including plays, and random internet excellence. Such as the following, for those with an interest in Star Wars:
Tattúínárdǿla Saga
"Earlier this week I was drawn into an enlightening discussion with my colleague Ben Frey about the complicated textual tradition that lies behind George Lucas’s “Star Wars,” which few outside the scholarly community realize is a modern rendition of an old Germanic legend of a fatal conflict between a father and his treacherous son ... The story as presented in George Lucas’s films represents only one manuscript tradition, and a rather late and corrupt one at that – the Middle High German epic called Himelgengærelied (Song of the Skywalkers). There is also an Old High German palimpsest known to scholars, later overwritten by a Latin choral and only partly legible to us today ... Tattúínárdǿla saga tells of the youth of Anakinn himingangari, beginning with his childhood as a slave in Tattúínárdalr, notably lacking the prolonged racing scene of the MHG version, and referring to the character of “Jarjari inn heimski” only as a local fool slain by Anakinn in a childhood berserker rage (whereas in the MHG version, “Jarjare” is one of “Anacen’s” marshals and his constant companion").
*clarification: the human was a family member, and was not in the library. In libraries, we still stand well apart, not that this is terribly different from the usual library experience.
