We Can't Rewind, We've Gone Too Far

So for reasons that may be evident from my last post this summer was not a great time for reading or for anything else. Except crafts. Last week I did so much crochet I bruised my fingertip. (Tumblr quilt posts here and here)

Recent:
A Short History of the World According to Sheep by Sally Coulthard started good but got more irritating over time, and I ended up skimming the last few chapters.

Very much liked Patchwork: A World Tour; I still really want a general history (specifically one starting before 1700), but this was very diverse and very pretty.

I read the first of Jewelle Gomez's Gilda Stories, which was very well done, but the author's note was more evidence that debates over moral storytelling are not limited to modern tumblr.

In August I finished another Biggles book, and now the next time I feel like Boy's Own Adventures I can get on to the resolution of Von Stalhein's arc and widen my fanfiction options.

And then I deliberately picked up Circle of Magic: Sandry's Book for comfort reading, which it provided. Also more craft books and more RWRB fanfic.

Current:
Just finished Agatha Christie's The Moving Finger in audiobook for more comfort reading. I remember liking but also being annoyed by a paranormal romance about how great small towns are, and it probably says something very clear about me that Horrible Things Happening in Nice Small Towns are, conversely, very comfortable.

Terry Pratchett's Interesting Times, because I wanted to reread a Discworld book and I knew I'd only read this one once ... but unfortunately there was a reason for that. Which of course is going to be true of anyone who wrote that many books over that much time.

Sarah Caudwell's The Shortest Way to Hades, which is great. One of the nice things about this series is that I can think things like, "Ah, what an interesting choice to refer to Euripides' Helen in this particular narrative. What might that imply for the main mystery plot?" (I'm less than halfway in and don't know if I'm guessing right yet.)

My current purse book is The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax by Dorothy Gilman, which will probably go slowly but which I am enjoying very much when I remember it's there.

And a facsimile copy of William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience.

Future:
The library for some reason hasn't got any of K. J. Charles' recent releases.

I have another Christie audiobook lined up. In print the Caudwell will probably take me a while yet. But it's occurred to me that autumn is coming up, and this year I want to actually read The Haunting of Hill House.

So basically all of the dystopic takes on superheroes I've seen have the supers, or at least most of them, employed by either the government or a single shadowy organization and acting as law enforcement.

But why? Clearly their skills are more useful in the private sector.

Superhero teams are mercenaries organized by major corporations. Their celebrity status raises the companies' public image, they can attack other companies to distract them/discredit them/steal trade secrets, and of course then everyone needs their own team to fight off rivals.

This is all very inconvenient for the general public but of course the superheroes also do photo-ops cleaning up litter and volunteering at animal shelters. So that's fine.

Also there are reality TV shows, media interviews with the heroes, corporate award ceremonies, etc., etc.

And every so often a superhero team will deal with an actual threat to a nearby area, like cleaning up after a natural disaster, or stopping some terrorist whose exact plans and location the team just happened to find out about just in the nick of time. (The city is billed later.)

If a non-combatant sustains injuries during a superhero battle of course the company responsible will pay compensation! As long as you can prove that it was definitely one of their superheroes, that you could not possibly have known there would be a fight at that place and time, and that you were taking reasonable precautions to avoid it.

Each team's media releases claim that most/all of the other teams are full of supervillains. Alliances are constantly shifting.

It's reasonable; I was thinking last night, when I remembered that oh, yes, we know what's causing the recent physical issues, that I have a lot of very reasonable causes of stress, and then I remembered two more really obvious ones this morning, but I'm so tired. And there are neat things that I can do or have been doing, but also there are school things.

And school things were so much easier when I was just straightforwardly in a room where I had nothing to do except make circuits for two hours. I have ideas to rearrange things so I can do this more easily at home, but, yeah. Tired.

And one day off a week, unless someone in government realizes that possibly we should actually do something about skyrocketing case rates.

And when Canadian elections are coming up I have a habit of making nice informative posts full of links to Elections Canada/Elections Ontario, but it's so much harder to do that for American elections. Which of course is also why it's more necessary to do that for American elections *facepalm*. But this year I am not actually employed by any election organization, and maybe that will help me let myself off the hook. Here's 2018's, and apparently Stephen Colbert or someone is doing state-by-state videos?

I always feel that stress-caused symptoms are REALLY STUPID. Like, your body's reaction to be under stress is to give you more stress? This is the worst idea.

This post brought to you by yesterday's sudden hit of severe apparently causeless vertigo. Today I can walk and use a computer but I'm not better.

Have I mentioned I hate roller blinds? I hate them SO MUCH. I'm not a huge fan of any blinds, but off-white plastic roller blinds are one of the worst interior decorating ideas anyone has yet come up with. If you hate the view outside your windows so much that you want to replace it with an utterly featureless blank, move. The only reason to have roller blinds is if you need actual blackout conditions. Otherwise cover your windows with LITERALLY ANYTHING ELSE.

Ahem. Sorry, I've been living in my mother's house for a month now, this has been building up.

violsva: Okay, this fic summary mentions someone working in a coffee shop having a favourite "costumer", but it's also tagged steampunk so I can't tell if that's a typo or not
consultingpiskies: Bahahaha
consultingpiskies: Does anyone have a favorite costumer?
violsva: Actors, theatre critics, cosplay fans...
consultingpiskies: I would assume it's a spelling error until proven otherwise
consultingpiskies: Though maybe it's a fic trying to contain all the tropes
violsva: Renn faire people, film HR managers, fabric store employees...
violsva: I glanced at it and it also calls the coffee shop worker a barrister so I'm going with typo

Meanwhile, I knew job searching would destroy my writing ability for the duration, but ugh.

I keep feeling like I could be done this fic (which we will call fic A, because there is never just one WIP) by the end of the month if I just decided to work at it (and maybe set up a goal tracker), but Life is in the process of happening and it's going to keep happening, so I can't just decide to spend a month on that. And in the meantime (mostly to distract from the aforementioned Life) I have started half a dozen WIPs, some of which are also at the "one week of concentrated effort and they'll be done" stage, but it's always much more tempting to just start another damn WIP instead of finishing them. And concentration may be a slight problem, now that I think about it.

And there's at least three other WIPs from before fic A that I could also be focusing on.

And I still think they're mostly really good ideas! So it's not that I don't want to work on them. Except that I am in one of those states where I am convinced that my present writing is much worse than it used to be. Despite the suspicion that in a month or so I will think my writing now was so much better than that future writing will be.

There is also the problem that right now I feel like anything I post needs some kind of Reason To Exist. God knows what reason would actually count as sufficient for the brainweasels, though.

The really annoying thing is that if I posted chapter-by-chapter I have like three fics I could post the first chapter of (and on Fic A it's more like the first 3+ chapters) with minimal editing. Except that I do not write linearly and any of these first chapters could change at any moment. And anyway I do not want to do that without a schedule, and cannot keep to a schedule. And while fic A's structure is pretty clear by now I don't actually know how long the others are (or whether they even need chapters).

But that means I have thousands and thousands of words of unposted fic burning a hole in my metaphorical pocket. Of my brain. Whatever that means.

ETA: And I just sewed buttons on a knitting project instead of writing, so that tells you how much is coming out of the word mines today.

So yesterday morning I woke up at 5 with a vague headache, lay in bed a bit until it was clear it was getting worse, took two ibuprofen and sat up for a while with a wet cloth on my forehead feeling vaguely miserable and nauseous, and then went back to sleep and when I woke up again it was gone. This is about how I expect my migraines to work, although I haven't had many recently. (Yes, I'm very lucky.)

Then last night I couldn't sleep, so I went and sat up reading fic, and then developed a terrible migraine and spent the next three hours crying in pain and occasionally puking. Possibly if I'd taken meds sooner it wouldn't have been as bad, but man. And then consultingpiskies (very reasonably) insisted I sleep in so it is now 4:30 and I haven't done anything useful except feed the cat.

Title: Is Augmented Cognition the End of Original Thinking?
Rating: G
Universe: Original Work
Summary: Not a singularity.
Warnings/Enticements: Science Fiction, Social Media, Social Justice, Internet Arguments, People Being Fundamentally People
Word Count: 424

On AO3

Let's say that Group A eats kittens.

They're terrible people, right? But if I say to you, "Stay away from Grace, she's a kitten-eating monster," you're going to assume I'm joking. That's hyperbole. That's actually a terrible thing to say about someone.

So everyone in Group A doesn't have to worry about rumours that they eat kittens, because seriously? Who does that? You must be joking.

But if anyone does say, loudly, "Hey, these people seem to be eating kittens," they can say "Well, you eat BABIES!"

Because then people who don't know them are going to go, "Right, these people are throwing hugely exaggerated insults at each other, got it." Because these look like the same insult, if you don't know the history. And even if you try to show them the history, well, you must be blowing it out of proportion, right? No one eats kittens. Not in our society.

The fact that one of these insults is in fact true - people have actually been eating kittens - and one is false - no one has eaten a baby - may be ignored.

And the second person now has to fight against accusations of baby-eating - which they do care about, because they don't want to be seen as a horrible person. They don't eat babies, and they're probably really upset that someone said they did. And a few people are going to be saying "Well, they must have a reason for saying you eat babies, and you did start it by saying that they eat kittens..."

So no one wants to accuse actual kitten eaters of eating kittens, and if you do, the first thing that does is cast suspicion on the one doing the accusing.

Anyway, if you're wondering where this is all coming from, someone in the Sherlock fandom ate a kitten in public and then tried to distract everyone by going "THINK OF THE CHILDREN!" If you really want more information, it's here.