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Ukraine || Наша Україна | Global Solidarity vs Ethnocentric Pain, a Breakdown

3/7/2022

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What's happening in Ukraine is an absolute travesty of the very worst and very best Humanity can offer. Ukraine is rising up and standing strong in the face of inconceivable terror. Russia's act of invasion is vile and horrible and nothing but pointless, arrogant, unbridled aggression perpetrated against a nation perceived to be weak. Make no mistake, however, is this Putin's war. And it has been his war for more than 2 decades.

This IS WW3. 

And it has been for a while, just playing out in slow motion. (More on that later.)
To start with, I want to address the most divisive issue

Why Ukraine?

Why has the world chosen to rally so dramatically around Ukraine? It cannot be ignored that blatant racism does indeed play a part in why Ukraine is striking such a chord in global media when there's such horror as exists in Yemen, in Syria, in Afghanistan, in South Sudan, among the Hmong in China, etc.
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According the the Global Peace Index (which I don't think has actually been fully updated for the whole actively on-going nuclear-adjacent war thing), there's a solid 20 countries in the world worse off than Ukraine for active State violence and humanitarian horror stories. But Western Media doesn't seem to care.

What's happening with Israel and Palestine is particularly grievous, in my opinion, because the State's violence is essentially just endorsed by the EU and NATO (and near-explicitly encouraged by the US). That Irish MP had it absolutely right when he ranted about how utterly hypocritical it is to feel such overwhelming empathy for Ukrainian refugees and victims of violence while just condoning the horrific cruelty of Israeli treatment of Palestinian civilians. Aljazeera has several great articles on how this conflict has exposed a startling degree of straight up vile ethnocentrism (like this one, or this one), but I don't think it's really so simple as the West is hella racist.

I think it's very hard to talk about without sounding racist because most people, even educated people and journalists, have never had to sit down that think about why Ukraine and why not Palestine. I want to make it VERY clear that racism is a BIG part of it, but I also want to ensure that my fellow Westerner don't just succumb to defeatist thoughts like 'realizing' that they themselves are more racist than they thought.
​
There IS a valid, non-racist reason that Ukraine matters to the world in a way Yemen doesn't.
Actually there's three.
Reason #1 : Shared Cultural Heritage.

This is the closest to just-plain-racist idea, but anthropologically, it bears out as legitimately non-racist and not simply ass-covering for a racist argument.
Western Media and Western nations have been invested in propagating the Western Canon of art, language, literature, music, architecture, etc for centuries. The West is the West because of an inflated and artificially reinforced self-assessment of being from a shared and glorious historio-cultural background. Beyond the fact that we do 'look like them', there's a shared religion that's either explicit the State religion or simply silently, but institutionally endorsed by the State (ie, all the US federal holidays being Christian). We value the art and buildings being destroyed in Ukraine because we've had 2 centuries of indoctrination that such buildings are Historical and Art and have Innate Cultural Value, in contrast to the Temples in Jordan and Turkey and Afghanistan (which we can logically conclude have value, but such hasn't been spoon-fed to us for generations).
We've been convincing ourselves that Europe is essentially composed of One People, a single large Family, with the US, Canada, and Australia as Europe's next door neighbors since about the 16th century. We've only been actively trying to start including the rest of the world in our estimate of that Family since like the late 1940's with the founding of the UN... And really, that wasn't an altruistic endeavor, it was a wow, WWII was bad and it was totally, obviously preventable, lets try to prevent the next one...

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We've only really been One World, One People since like... idk, the mid 2010's? I distinctly remember the 2008 Olympics in Bejing when commentators were discussing things like a new sort of cultural together-coming vs the old purely nationalistic pride thing and athlete performance then was still a direct reflection on national power rather than this newfangled 'it's the Sport that matters, not the Flag' strangeness from the last few (historically, the Olympics have been demonstrations just shy of active warfare, soooooo this whole 'for the Sport' thing is real new).

Anyway, back on point.
Why Ukraine and why not Yemen?

Because the West has over 4 centuries of institutionalized, pervasive, aggressively reinforced empathy with Ukraine and has maybe 20% of that time learning to empathize with Yemen--and that time has been spent under far less aggressive efforts, that do not include institutionalized doctrines of State-endorsed empathy. Acknowledging that is NOT racist, not inherently. In terms of neuropathy, watching a bomb hit Ukraine is like watching someone kick a dog--emotionally untenable. Whereas watch a bomb go off in Yemen is like watching someone kick a baby crocodile--Yes, we know, logically, that it's still animal abuse, and that technically crocodiles are more at risk for extinction than dogs, but that logical argument doesn't make and difference when the fact is that watching a dog be kicked just hurts more.

We ARE trying, as a human species to achieve universal empathy, but we aren't anywhere near actually accomplishing that yet, and that isn't a criminal offense. Hypocritcal? Yes. But worthy of such derision and venom as the Internet's dredged up? No.
  • (Though, I totally understand where the fury is coming from, particularly as those with ties to places like Yemen and Syria and Palestine watch the world unite behind a cause that is not them and when their suffering is just as grievous as Ukraine's.)

So, that explains a bit of why the common western citizen care so much about Ukraine.

But why does it seem like governments also care so much more about Ukraine than about Palestine?
The reason for that is two-fold, one is pragmatic to the point of cringe-y and the other is only slightly less so...
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Reason #2 : Resource Dependence.

We've all noticed the inflation, and the rising gas prices around the world. The governments of the world care more about Ukraine than about Yemen because Ukraine has stuff we want and is being invaded by a country that also has stuff that we want. In terms of resources that Europe and the US want, Israel and Palestine and Yemen and even Afghanistan are so low-stakes it's embarrassing. As an economic consideration, the most significant thing about that whole miserable Israeli conflict is how many of a given congressional district's constituents have ties to Israel and how likely are they to donate to a campaign that condemns Israeli actions... Israeli-linked constituents are more likely to donate (to even be able to donate) than any Palestinian connected citizen.

While still truly abhorrent to reduce a humanitarian crisis to 'the numbers', it IS just math.

US economic concerns favor Israel. And that's only true when directly confronted on the issue or during an election cycle. If there's no election cycle in play, the US basically doesn't care at all, economically speaking.

But Russia and Ukraine? Between the raw metals, the natural gas and oil, and the heavy machinery manufactured in both Ukraine and Russia (not to mention the Vodka and such smaller scale imports), the US and Europe are in deep with Russia and have been for decades. The governments of the world care a lot more about this conflict because it's a helluva lot more genuinely impactful to them.
That's a tragic statement, but it's not racist to say that losing Russia's oil imports affects Germany FAR more than any nonsense in Yemen ever could. NORD Stream 1 and 2 were each multi-billion dollar, long term investments ($8.8 Billion and ($9.5 Billion, respectively). And Germany just wrote them off forever in the last few days. NORD Stream 2 wasn't even ever turned ON yet, it's an investment that was supposed to begin making up for the cost of itself this year, just gone out the window as a debt that will never manage to make up for the loss needed to build it. That's a whopping 20 BILLION dollars in taxpayer money just poofed out of play.
Yemen's direct economic impact on Germany? *shrugs* It's barely a footnote, with Germany dropping an obligatory 100-something million dollars (approximately half of 1 percent the cost of just the NORD Stream Projects), given as humanitarian relief, with zero other economic connection between the two countries at all.

So, seriously. Tragic as that distinction is, it's not 
racist, it's evil, psychopathic capitalist.
And the third, most objectively significant reason for Government attention:
World War Three.

If any of you reading this imagine for just one nanosecond that Putin's war is going to stop with conquering Ukraine, you might wanna sit down and grab a comfort blanket.

Putin has been trying to reestablish the old borders of the USSR (and the expand them) since before he officially came to power. Masha Gessen relates in clear, brutally straightforward terms how the Putin's 'Forever Wars' aren't going to stop and haven't been effectively thwarted by any Western power yet (appeasement is essentially permission, in his mind). From his early 2000's crackdown in Chechnya, and utter refusal to relinquish USSR control of the territory, to his 2014 illegal annexation of Crimea and his 2016 string of war crimes in Syria, right up to this current nonsense ploy of 'denazification' in Ukraine, Putin wants to destroy the rest of the world.
NATO is on alert because NATO is under threat. If you notice, the West is not actually helping Ukraine. Not really. It's sending some money and a couple of weapons. And it's putting a couple of scary sanctions into play... But NATO's got 8,000 troops just chillen out in Poland right now (the 5,000 usually there plus 3k more from the US alone) while just over 100 miles away, civilians prepare to face Russian soldiers as Lviv burns...

[Do you have any idea how effectively Putin's war here could be STOPPED if Zelenskyy had 8,000 more troops to work with?]
​If Putin eventually crushes Ukraine, he will move on to somewhere else. This is WW3 already in motion, just playing out more slowly than Hitler's version of the very same game. But Putin's not going to be distracted by ethno-cleansing. He's not going to devote resources to an organized removal of undesirables. He's just going to bomb all citizens unilaterally until he controls enough to the world to declare himself god.

Personally, I think NATO needs to intervene NOW.

Because we may as well help Ukraine instead of just watching it burn when it is inevitable that Putin will not stop there. Putin has already declared that the sanctions being levied on Russia count as declarations of War. HE already considers the West as active combat parties. Using NATO troops won't escalate it further than Putin already has.
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Yes. Nuclear war is a risk.
But Putin has captured and is bombing THREE NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS (and counting) in Ukraine already, so we've kinda already hit that depressing mile marker.
We NEED to do more to intervene.
​
THAT is what makes this different than Yemen, than Palestine, than South Sudan...
None of the aggression in those places can spillover into world wide nuclear war. They just can't. The aggressors simply don't have the resources to truly threaten the current world order in any realistic, significant way.
Putin's Russia, however? THAT is WW3 already in motion.

BONUS: Reason 3.5... Hearts & Minds in a Modern World...
There IS one more crucial thing, arguably the MOST crucial thing, that makes world solidarity with Ukraine more straightforward in terms of empathy-mining than any connection to Yemen or North Korea ever could be:
Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

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This is a war of hearts and minds, and Zelenskyy is the hero such a story needs to truly hit home within a fully modern, Western mindset. His consistent, eloquent, coordinated use of social media and his multi-platform English-language outreach all being threaded through a unified focal point... It's Heroics 101, catered directly to Westernized story-telling tropes, and executed with a degree of genuine sincerity and heartfelt earnestness that we haven't seen in a politician... Honestly? Since like our O.G. Washington.

His role in making Ukraine a focal point of world sympathy cannot be overstated.

Zelenskyy IS Ukraine, and the fact that he humbly thanks every single citizen who's helping the fight, and that he expresses clear and genuine gratitude for every tiny shred of aid the rest of the world gives him... It just makes it that much easier for public sentiment to coalesce around him, his people, and their plight.

There's no one leader in the Palestinian struggle that has this kind of reach or charisma or this clear understanding of how to effectively utilize social media as a tool of the State to impact the citizens of the entire world. There's no single general leading a unified people in South Sudan who can be looked to as an unadulterated hero at a glance by anyone around the world. There's no President of the Resistance in North Korea who can use their personal Twitter to touch the hearts of kids in Cali with rescued cat photos and then formally thank the King of Denmark in the same hour.

It's not a criticism of those other movements. It's simply praise for the masterful demonstration of utilizing 
all possible resources Zelenskyy has available.

So, no. It's not just abjectly racist to empathize with Ukraine and not Palestine.


There are legitimate 
reasons why it just hurts more, why we can invest more in the observable heroics, and why governments are paying so much more attention (which, in turn, allows the average person to witness so much more empathy-inducing horror)...

Should we care about Palestine, and Yemen, and North Korea?

Yes. Absolutely.
It's an utter travesty that we haven't gotten invested in stopping the evils of what inhuman violence is occurring.

But that does not detract from the reasons why Ukraine just matters so much more to us all right now. And we shouldn't make ourselves feel bad about the fact that we do care more about Ukraine than North Korea.


The people who want us to feel bad will achieve nothing but to render us ineffectual if we let them make it so. Instead, embrace the empathy and DO something.


And then hold onto that feeling and when Ukraine's crisis has resolves, DO SOMETHING ELSE. Do work to help Palestine, or Afghanistan, or Illegal Immigrants in your own town.


Selective empathy might still be a problem, but isn't it better to be selectively empathetic in a way that motivates real change than to be entirely uninvested and defeatist?


Instead of saying to yourself ' 
I don't care about XYZ ' and beating yourself up because you think you should care, tell yourself ' t's okay that I can't currently care about XZY ' and remember that it's okay to focus on one cause at a time.

As long as you hold onto the virtuous triumph inherent in that little bit of 
save the world oomph, it's okay if the only person you successfully do anything to save is yourself. You just gotta keep on going with that save the world vibe inside you. Individuals CAN change the world.
We just have to believe it can be done for it to work.
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Shark Week 2021 !!

7/10/2021

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       As you may have noticed from last year (and wow, it's hard to believe that it's already been nearly a year)... I like Sharks. And Discovery Shark Week is one of my very favorite weeks out of the year. It's certainly the most important TV event of my year. Shark Week has officially been running for 34 years now, and I've been watching for at least 20 of them. Even with the Olympics gearing up (with I will address in another post shortly), Shark Week still takes the absolute cake for me.
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         Because the athletes of the Olympics are fine. People like them. They are obscenely well paid. And they get multiple chances to do their super elite sports-ing thing.
         Meanwhile, Sharks are pretty well universally feared and culled by their millions, murdered out of raw fear and cruelly butchered for psychotic levels of capitalist profit. (between the horrors of ineffectual 'protection' measures like drum lines and the vile brutality of shark fin soup, we kill WELL over 100 million sharks per year (Smithsonian).
         Conversely, you are actually NOT very likely to even encounter a shark within a 100 sqft area of ocean, let alone be injured by one.
SERIOUSLY. Sharks aren't honestly all that dangerous:
          For every single person in the world who gets bitten by a shark, 25 get bitten by New Yorkers. Yes. You read that correctly. You are 25 times more likely to be bitten by a New Yorker than by a shark. You're about 100 times more likely to go to the hospital due to something related to paint than because of a shark attack, and you're 1,000 times more likely to go because of an attempt to install a toilet-- and you're 10,000 times more likely to require emergency medical attention due to nails, bolts, and tacks (I wish I were kidding, but no, these are real stats taken from the Museum run by the University of Florida).
           500% more people DIED from bicycle accidents in Florida, alone, last year, than went to the hospital for shark encounters world wide between 1990 and 2009.

​
        More dramatically, the current sort of  'shark prevention' measures that most beaches use, like 'Drum Lines' kill everything that wanders into them including people. More people and 'nice' animals like whales, dolphins, and sea turtles were killed in Queensland, Australia, alone by drum lines last year than humans on the whole planet encountered a shark. Annually there are ~63 billion pounds of by-catch, much of it from passive 'shark prevention' measure (Oceana).
       Dying on a drum line is an awful death.
    Animals are stressed and struggling as they drown or starve over the course of several hours, sometimes even serval days to weeks. And if a diver finds a trapped animal, they cannot rescue them without potentially facing a fine upwards of $200k.
        Researchers documenting such atrocities may even be fined simply for publicizing the horrors, with film crews being placed under gag orders with $26k penalties.
​

       Also, this by-catch is basically a dinner bell for sharks. They're indications for an easy meal of newly-dead animal, drawing sharks closer to the beach than they would've come otherwise. Beaches with drum lines generally have MORE negative-outcome shark encounters than beaches without.

It's just all around awful.
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Baby Humpback Whale caught, inches from the surface, in a Queensland Aus. Drumline 2018.
    There ARE legitimate shark deterrent tools. Including ones that are safe and genuinely effective that are way less expensive (and astronomically less dangerous to humans and by-catch animal), but politicians will keep supporting shark culling plan because their constituents are misinformed and pre-emptive vengeance driven...
        Two of my very favorite scholars working to change that are Dr. Neil Hammerschlag, over at the University of Miami and Save Our Seas, and Dr. Craig O'Connell at the O'Seas Conservation Foundation in Montauk, NY.
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Shark Safe Barrier™ as deployed in 2019 La Réunion Island, designed largely by Dr. Craig O'Connell.
Those stats are remarkable largely because sharks kind of are hella dangerous:
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​         The average size of all sharks in the ocean is about 20 feet long. But that's including that massive Whale and Basking sharks measuring regularly at well over 40 & 30 ft, respectively (comparable to the average American school bus, which is about 35 ft long and 40k lbs), and little Lantern sharks coming in at just over 6 inches (about 2 HotWheels diecast models, set end to end).
          A better statistic is the size of mid-size, in-shore species. The ones that actually encounter humans with any sort of aggression or feeding-curiosity are typically Bulls, Tigers, Hammerheads, and Reef Sharks (Nurses, Lemons, and a few others DO encounter people, but humans don't notice 99% of those encounters and they almost never even result in so much as a sandpaper scrape
          The sharks that interact with humans average 
10~12 feet in length, & weigh around 1,000 pounds.  The average car is about 12ft, with cars weighing about 2,000 pounds. (Smithsonian Institute)

​S
hark skin is used as sandpaper: 
​the dermal denticals (Latin, "skin teeth") are made of a durable and sharp material that can cut through stone (as seen in 
Egyptian records of obelisk refinement alongside sandstone) and has been used as industrial strength sandpaper in woodworking since the age of vikings and China's golden age of piracy. (Ocean Conservancy .Org)
Shark Teeth are scalpel-sharp: 
​       They were so effective as blades when embedded in weapons that ancient Hawaiians and Australian aboriginal peoples skipped straight over the developmental delays of the Bronze and Steel ages, resisting 18th & 19th Century imperialism partly because their stick weapons tipped with 
shark teeth could cut through most plate mail armor. They only lost out on dominating their homelands due to guns and disease. (Hawaii Alive .Org)
Sharks don't have feet.
​That might seem obvious, but it's significant because 
a Shark's primary sensory organ is their nose and mouth (you know the nose covered in industrial sandpaper and filled with teeth that pierce plate mail armor). If they see or smell something weird, they don't have a limb to poke it with. They have to bite it. (Smithsonian Institute).
Sharks don't have brakes.
​
Again, obvious, but also, think about it: this is a fish the size of a small car coming at you out of a vague curiosity at 10~20mph, with 
no brakes. So once it commits to investigating you at speed, it seriously commits and then can't stop if it realizes you're not what it was expecting. And if you move or thrash, you make the shark excited because suddenly the Weird Thing in the water might be alive, and then it assumes that if you're alive you might be yummy, and if you're yummy you'll run away, so it should grab you before you flee.
Summary:
         A small car, covered in industrial sandpaper, with pointy tippy bits that slice through steel, is coming at you at 10mph, with terrible eyesight, no brakes, and no pokey sensory appendages to nudge you with in any less-lethal way than a full on super-chomp. Human skin can be pierced with 3 pounds of blunt pressure. An infant human has the strength to kill a full grown man if the man offers no resistance.
       Honestly with how dangerous Sharks are just by existing, and how unbelievably fragile we pitiful humans are... Sharks are very clearly taking pains not to hurt us when they come up slow to investigate what the devil we even are.
Sharks truly do not deserve to be maligned in the way that they have been.
          And the victims of negative-outcome Shark encounters are their primary advocates. Most people who are bitten by a shark not only survive without blaming the shark for their injury, but they step up to actively protect sharks. An alarming number of people who should theoretically be the ones calling for shark culls have become shark ambassadors, researching them or aiding researchers. Hell, a sloid half of Discovery Shark Week's camera people are former 'shark attack victims' who want people to stop culling animals 'on their behalf'.

Sharks do NOT want to eat us.
        They just DON'T. As demonstrated by the wonderful (and mildly insane) Paul de Gelder in the Laws of Jaws from 2019. Sharks don't react to human blood as a predation trigger. They just don't. de Gelder cuts open a pint of human blood in a could around him while swimming with Reefies and Oceanics, and they don't even display a 'surprise' response. The blood may as well not be there... But a teaspoon of fish oil in the water? That draws in Oceanic White Tips from over a mile away within about 5 minutes.
         I just weep at how misunderstood Sharks are and Shark Week is one of the best ways in which the global culture is working to correct the mistakes of politicians and fear-mongers. And 2021 will be an EPIC year for it.
Robert Irwin (yep, son of my personal hero Steve Irwin) kicks with week off tonight at 8pm! And the rest of the week will continue to showcase the awesomeness of sharks!
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I've acquired Discovery+ for the express purpose of watching Shark Week. 
​     
I will be eating nothing but cereal and cheep frozen pizza this month to support that decision but I've got no problem with that. And I'll be maintaining that habit for as long as Discovery leaves the Shark Week content up, so that there's a direct link in the in/out flux of payment attached to the presence of Shark Week content.
      It's not much, but that IS still something extra I can do to signal shark-support to the might of Capitalism.
​          If you would like to contribute to Shark Preservation in a non-monetary way, check out this year's Top Priority endeavor: Shark ENVOY, dedicated to removing drum lines from Australian coasts (particularly in Queensland). There's a couple of petitions and email campaigns being run right now to help push the government into acknowledging that public opinion has shifted.
         I may write up a few more Shark-themed posts this week, but I will definitely be pushing myself to get more Fanfic chapters out to literally bribe what audience I have to address into thinking differently about sharks. I sincerely hope that all of you take these animals to be the beautiful, critical creatures that they truly are.
🌊🦈🌊🦈🌊🦈🌊
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A Court of Silver Flames - SJM | A Disgustingly Problematic display of Shameful Mental Health Handling...

6/23/2021

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I wanted to like it, I truly did, but there is simply nothing here worth pretending is acceptable...

              Well, I have to say unequivocally that the very best thing about this book (and maybe even about the series as a whole) is the Making of the super-sassy House of Wind. The way it happens, how it becomes a sentient BFF that reads romance novels and gossips with the girls and mimics up tiny pegasi for kicks and sleep-over whimsies... It's GREAT. Everything else about this book? Not so much..
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            There WILL be spoilers in this review, and crude language (not all of it me cursing at the thing, but some actual quotes & paraphrases that address SJM's tone)... But for now, let me say, this felt like a knock-off stage production housed in a low-rent theater, created by a psychotically invested artiste of a wanna-be director and acted in by 2 people who kind of care about the director and therefore managed to drag their half-resentful friends along to auditions...
          The prose is limp and lame, her dialogue tagging conventions are irksome, and the metaphors she uses are very galaxy-brain bits of nonsense that feel like symptoms a dangerous drug-high. Also. There's no plot. Like at all. (I'm all for character-driven stories, but seriously, for character-driven narratives to be at all effective, the characters have to be slightly more exciting than damp cardboard... Final non-spoilery points: there was too much sex that didn't do anything to contribute to the narrative, the mental health handling (read: dismissal) was pretty insulting, and it was way too frickin long a lead up for a predictable, boringly obvious ending that rendered all of the hyper-attentive foreshadowing utterly useless.
           Beyond all that, the new covers are hideous.
       I liked the House and the blossoming of female friendships. But that's about it...
            Strap in, folks, because this one's a ride. I nearly hurled a few times, definitely gagged.
          I wanted to like this one, I really did. It's just been a few years of SJM not writing up to her potential, but still showing that potential... I walked into this with low expectations, high hopes, and a careful detachment that would let me read this without my dislike of Nesta getting in the way of my enjoyment.
       Don't get me wrong, I don't hate Nesta. I've just always found her rather irksome; she was annoying but interesting enough that her purpose as a foil to her sisters worked rather well. She was never main character material because she was never meant to be. SJM actually did alright with fleshing her out enough to hold up a main character role, but Nesta just isn't a piece on the board. She's not significant enough to the world to NEED to be anything more, which means she's just there far too much of the time to be interesting as a central figure. 
           This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Any story needs its side characters. To promote a side character to MC status is difficult, but can be done, so long as you reframe the rest of the narrative along with them. SJM didn't.
Which means that all the elegant character building and world crafting she put into the first three (*cough* Frost and Starlight was a travesty that I will forever ignore *cough*) just evaporates. Because to make Nesta seem fleshed out and solid, the rest of the characters became pitifully flimsy cardboard cutouts of themselves.
         Like even Mor and Azriel were barely there and only the slightest bit participatory. It was tragic. Az had a few good quips, but it was an SNL skit of Clinton with Bengazi compared to the world-shaking political impact of the Shadowsinger's true glory.
           That was the main thing for me. This was a character-driven story without any truly great characters... And zero plot. 700-something pages of hints and preamble, but with zero follow through. 
​
Again, here there be spoilers. Very direct, spoilery spoilers:

Read More
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the Summer Country by Lauren Willig | Slavery is not Sith you're looking for...

6/19/2021

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Originally Published Sept 3rd, On Patreon.
          This was an excellent summer-story beach-read. I deeply enjoyed it. The pacing was not my favorite, but it was the expected vibe from a grown-up purportedly High Literary historical fiction novel.
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      In a few too many ways, it was your standard 'slavery is bad' story, and it took the grown-up route of utter ignorance in pushing that line further to say 'slavery is evil and it's inconceivable that anyone ever thought otherwise unless they too were evil humans' which is just plain modernist and pathetically essential-ist.
    Yes. Slavery (particularly in the New World) was atrocious. 
    And Yes. To say otherwise today makes a person pretty much straight up evil.
      But that is not a truism. It was not always the case that to believe in slavery as a sort of 'natural order' made you a morally bankrupt person.
​     That is putting a modern lens on things that modern people cannot fully comprehend. Just like a grown up does NOT genuinely remember what it was like to be 16 or to be 10, a 21st century person cannot even recognize that they are viewing history through a very rosy lens. The truth of the matter is that in 1812, slavery in some form or other had been a fact of how society functioned for over 6 thousand years and it was honestly weirder for someone to say, 'You know what? This is probably bad...' and a lot of that even had to come from how New World took the established order and heaped an unbelievable list of extra abuses onto it. 
          Slavery, in most nations, came to a natural end as the societal system it supported evolved. In the Americas, that societal system was artificially and intentionally maintained by a sort of aggressive racism unique to the West. In most slave-nations prior to the West's development, slaves were not racially inferior or species-separate or anything like that. People of all races owned people of all races. It was just a money thing.
          This is not to say racism, wasn't a Huge Thing (Imperialism is a very terrible thing itself, and the subjugation of others based on country of origin is a long-standing terror of our humanity), but that's a separate statement. Racism and Slavery were not intrinsically bound together outside of direct and immediate conquest. Once a new place was conquered by the Empire, the old lowest-people rose up in the ranks, and if you had enough money you could buy a slave of any race even ones theoretically high up the ladder than you.
         That does, admittedly, vastly over simplify things. But I'm not trying to make a nuanced argument (at least no more nuanced than to make it clear I find both racism and slavery abhorrent).
         What I'm saying here is that this story should have had a few characters, both black and white, who believed in the institutions they were raised within without that believe automatically forcing them into villain roles. Fear of change, belief in the status quo, confusion about why it mattered so much to some people... All of that should've been more prevalent in this novel.
         The fact that there wasn't a single character in 1812 Barbados that fully believed in the current Natural Order who was not ultimately painted as an utterly depraved and immoral individual was just plain creepy.
        The concept of slavery didn't survive for SIX THOUSAND YEARS because everyone always knew, deep down, that it was wrong. We aren't a species of creatures so heinous that we can look at something we know is wrong for SIX THOUSAND YEARS without doing anything about it.
      We didn't do anything because we didn't see it as wrong.
      Honestly, at the heart of it, we sorta still don't.
   The concept of free labor hasn't gone away. Unpaid Internships are the modern indentured servitude. The requirement of X years of experience to allow you access to a job force you need to be involved with in order to survive is heinous.
     Yes, Interns have things like rights and safety recourse guarantees and legal backstops, but they're pretty basic rights. Your employer isn't even required to feed you, they're just required to give you a bit of time not-working to feed yourself, buying food to do so with money you aren't allowed to make (only 10 minutes minimum if you're working less than 5 hours and none at all if you're working less than 4). 
      Slavery, through most of its history, included ASPCA levels of animal-abuse-type protections. Food, provided freely and regularly; body security and autonomy (ie, no direct injury or sexual abuses); recognition for good service and the ability to be a person with a name and a backstory and HEALTHCARE (instead of just an employee number with the last-line protection of company liability pay if you get grievously injured on the job you don't get paid for).
      Were there abuses? Yes.
      Was most of human history a string of abuse after abuse? No.
    People voluntarily sold themselves into slavery, or at the very least, term-indentured themselves, pretty dang regularly throughout history.
      Because sometimes, the promise of regular meals and decent healthcare was legitimately preferable to starving to death. Like right now.
     Not kidding. There are legitimately countless studies out there of how MODERN PRISON is a preferable state of being for human than getting shunted into an unpaid internship. (Some of them are even legitimately academic and peer reviewed, but those take longer to find for free-viewing than I want to spend right now, so: here, here, here, and here, will have to do, though most of these are just about the poor ethics of the Unpaid Internship concept).
      And yet, thousands of people in America alone don't see the problem with it.
     So, likewise, thousands of people in 1812 Barbados should've not been able to see the problem with it. And as a pretty well-researched author, Willig should have known that and accommodated for including it.
       It is NOT COMFORTABLE to be lead through a story where slavery is just okay, I wholly admit that (and am frankly, glad for it).
      But literature is not supposed to be comfortable.      It's supposed to make you FEEL what the author thinks you should be able to SEE, because its right in front of your face and wrong but not acknowledged.
      I am not saying, in any way, that a slave-believer should have been the hero. But someone should've been, at least sympathetic, to the Status Quo.
      Also, there was just such a fixation on the 'Slavery as an evil institution thing', that the little love stories didn't get much attention which made them feel cute but rather hollow. I loved the moments we got to see the two couples being cute, but they were so few and far between that I got lost.
       I LOVED the comments on being so unsure of your own feelings that you make the mistake of wanting your partner to be sure enough for the both of you, but that was the only message in the story besides 'slavery is bad'.
         It was good, and a great beach read. Really goo. I deeply enjoyed it. 
        To be perfectly frank, while reading, I couldn't put my finger on why I didn't love it. And I couldn't figure out why I didn't want to review it until I sat down and started reviewing it, (I actually read this over my little vacation in the second week in August, and put off reviewing it until a few days before you guys see this post).
       But it wasn't literature, and I'm pretty disappointed in the lack of legitimate social commentary.
​
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[Write Life] Struggles with Superpowers | the Ups & Downs of ADD

5/30/2021

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​Originally Published
on Patreon
Nov 28, 2020
         ​I have a pretty severe case of ADD, also known as Type 1 Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. And by 'pretty severe' I mean utterly savage to the point that the dose of medication I need to function like a moderately normal human being is substantial enough that we have to monitor my heart so it doesn't explode (not kidding, my average resting heart-rate is ~113 bpm; normal-person avg bpm is between ~66 and ~86).
         ​While ADD is dramatically different for everyone, there are some consistencies that are used as diagnosis tools. The obvious one is a lack of ability to pay attention, even when the desire to pay attention is present.
         ​The best way I can put it is that ADD is like the last 3 days of being out sick with a really bad cold. You're better enough to be pissed off at how exhausting it is to simply exist, and while your brain is functional enough to recognize that it's not stuck in the sick-fog sleepiness, you also have to spend five minutes staring at your TV remote to figure out what button turns the dang thing on. ADD is a wall of that feeling that doesn't ever really go away. With meds it gets better, like staring at a room through a window instead of through an opaque closed-door, but it never goes away.
         ​And yet, there is a converse to that: Hyperfixation. Not everyone with ADD has this, but a lot of Type 1's do, we hyper-fixate instead of exhibit hyper-activity.
         ​Let me tell you, it is a goddamn SUPER POWER. Sorta. A lot of people with ADD hate to have this piece valorized because it's actually far more dangerous to our direct health than any other aspect of our condition. That's a very fair assessment. I have hyper-fixated to the point of forgetting to eat for 48 hours. I have forgotten to drink water for almost 24 hours. I have forgotten to breathe for about 5 minutes and only managed to avoid passing out because I was already laying on the floor. I chew through my fingernails and rip out my hair and dig furrows into my skin that bleed for ten minutes before I notice them--because the motion is somehow helpful to my focus-clarity and my fixation means the part of my brain that feels pain is just turned off for the moment..
         ​Hyper-fixation is legitimately dangerous.
         ​But it's also really really cool.
         ​I have a partially eidetic memory, which means if I have heard a song I know it. If I've read a book, I remember almost all of it. If I have handled an object in my entire life and no one else has touched it since I last did, I can navigate to the geographic coordinates of it, blindfolded. I can research like BAMF, and I can instant-recall all of it on the spot and synthesize it into a legitimate argument at the drop of a hat. I can give college-level dissertation oral defenses on topics I've only skimmed the readings for, in after-hours presentations that I only remembered to attend because I left my water bottle behind after lecture... My brain is frickin' MAGIC.
         ​At least on good days.
         ​Honestly, on good days, the fact that this will probably kill me very young is a trade I could as entirely worth it. If this is my deal with a devil, man, I'm a-okay with the payoff.
         ​On bad days, it's extremely difficult to remember why walking backward in the rain across a 6 lane highway is a rather poor life decision... Seriously, most of what keeps me grounded on bad days is remember that I have written records showing that on good days I think it's totally worth the bad days.
         ​ADD, like everything else in the Universe, is cyclical. ADD is unique in that it has 3 separate layers of things operating on an influential cycle. There are some Psych Journal research articles on the topic, but I don't like how most of them describe the issue, so I'm gonna break it down for you myself:

- Engagement vs Disengagement
Am I able to legitimately engage with whatever I'm working on? Or am I looking at it through a plexiglass wall? This is the piece that is most easily influenced by medication. On bad days, the meds mean I'm still trying to play Operation while wearing wool mittens, but on good days, the meds let me manipulate my mental puzzle pieces on an atomic level to make them fit together perfectly. This is both the shortest cycle and the longest cycle. This because there's the daily circuit (pre-caffeine, pre-meds fog of nothing, then the productive bliss of extended release capsules, and then the nightly 'oooooh, yeah everything helpful has worn off') and a longer cycle where I'll just hit a mental block that keeps me from engaging with anything for a random month or two.

- Positive Feedback vs Negative Feedback
Is what I'm looking at interesting enough to make me ask another question, and is the answer to that question enough to spawn yet more? 'Positive' here doesn't necessarily mean 'good', it's used in the scientific way of 'increasing acceleration'. Anything that doesn't increase the interest / fixation level contributes to it slowing down. This cycle is the most obvious to me while I'm moving through these cycle-processes, and it's one I can effect. The moment I feel the acceleration of interest slowing down, I can stop, pull back, and take a break. Pushing against negative feedback does nothing but hasten burnout, which is AWFUL. Avoiding burnout is why I have queues set up and why working 8.5 hours in a boring office job would probably kill me.

- Present vs Dissociative vs Concurrent Mindset
A Present mindset has me fully aware of myself, my environment, and the intricacies of my current task. A Dissociative one has me exclusively aware of my current project and all it's permutating aspects, my body is not a real object and the outside world could burn for all I care. Both of those are productive, though only one is at all close to being 'healthy'. A Concurrent mindset has both awareness of what I should be doing (eating, homework, etc), and what I want to be doing (current project), occurring within my brain at the same time, without either of them really clicking into place properly. This is the mindset that has me staring at walls and into water bottle and just off into the middle distance. It's horrible because I can't focus on the thing I want to focus on, and I feel guilty for wanting to focus on a thing that is not the thing I should be focusing on, and we spiral into angst from there.

         ​And then all of that is further complicated by Focus Fatigue. Also known as Hyper-Exhaustion or Burnout, this state of being happens when all the lowest points of the other three cycles line up with each other. It comes at random, though I can usually feel it creeping in a few weeks before it really hits, and it stays for a random duration. The only effect I can have on it is to not prolong it by trying to just push through. Accepting that I'm in a down-beat and just riding it out without attempting to DO anything is usually the best bet I have to hasten the recovery process.
         ​This is what I've been dealing with from the end of October and all through November.
         ​I've just got nothin' left to call on. I've been playing lots of Solitaire and a hidden-object game called SeekersNotes. I've just been letting my queue run itself out while hoping that I get my mojo back before it hits the end of its schedule.
         ​It's possible that things will get back on track soon, but it's hard to tell. ​The best way I can characterize recovery is to compare it to alcohol consumption. When you're just sitting at the bar, you don't feel much different between your first shot and your fourth, a little buzz turns into to a little buzzier, but nothing major. But then you try to get up for some reason and you realize that the room is spinning and gravity is gone...
         ​By the time you realize your drunk, your very drunk.
         ​Likewise, by the time I realize I've got my focus back, I've been doing focus-related things for a while already and doing them successfully.
         ​I'm hopeful that this Burnout will be over soon (being able to succeed in writing this is a very good sign), but I can't guess how long it'll take me to go from tipsy with a drip of focus to full on smashed with Hyper-Focus... 
It could be a matter of days, or it could take a few more weeks. We'll just have to see.
         ​Wish me luck!


(Fortunately, while I'm waiting, I've got plenty of little objects left to find in Seekers).

​May 31, 2021 Edit:
Since this post was originally published, I HAVE since had several periods of high productivity, one of which is currently still on-going!
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The Last of Us: Part II - Triggering, Cyclical, and Just plain Pathetic...

5/23/2021

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I enjoyed the first one, wanted to like this follow up... but just could NOT.

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     My Associated Human and I have been playing through this together the last couple of week and it has over all been a deeply enjoyable experience, though 2 big sticking points kind of ruined it for me. This review will have specific spoilers, so short review here and then a detailed one below the 'read more' jump.
      Long story short, I DO NOT recommend this one. At least not buying it. Find a friend and borrow it, but do NOT give Naughty Dog more money for this vile piece of triggering shit. 
    It's a huge shame that I hate it like I do. The gameplay was fun, the graphics were astoundingly gorgeous, and most of the story was deeply enjoyable and extremely well-written... I fricken LOVED most of it. But I fucking HATED the ending. 
       Firstly, I just disliked it. Secondly, it was cheap-ass story telling.
       Thirdly, it was an example of a grown ass man foisting his own damn trauma onto a barely-hanging-on teenage girl (whom his dead brother loved like a daughter) and explicitly asking her to do something he knows will be traumatizing because he is too physically disabled to do it himself.
       And finally, that ending was a display of grossly misogynistic violence that the player is forced to carry out actively and personally, not watch as a cut scene.
      Which all combined to absolute, visceral hatred of the ending for me.

      Reminder, from here on out, there will be explicit spoilers.


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Baby Boy - the Cuter than Cute Philosophy of a KMV Explained.

6/5/2015

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'Aggressive' and 'Adorable' are NOT Mutually EXCLUSIVE: 

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           High4 is not a band I've been terribly enamored with I loved their debut, but most of what they've done since just hasn't struck my fancy. This one is extremely different; I like it so much that it's even jumped the queue of MVs I should be reviewing! 
           From the moment I first saw it, my only reaction has been "Yep. That's it. We're done here. The most adorable song humanly possible has been produced. We can all go home, now". And that feeling hasn't dissipated at all in the two days I've been watching it while pretending to care about other things. And now I just HAVE to explain the full extent of its intricate weave of imagery, because there's much more than meets the eye to this release and it would be a shame for anyone to miss even the tiniest detail. What seems at first like a mess of contradictions is actually an array of perfectly inter-locking pieces that create a dynamic and accurate depiction of an enchanting reality.
           Kpop has done things were 'cute' and 'gangsta' overlap, there's been other examples of aegyo mixing with straight-up awesome, but nothing else I've ever seen does it quite like this; nor nearly this well. Most other versions of an attitude that resemble this one use aegyo to straightforwardly mix in a dose of adorable, but this release takes that a leap forward by avoiding straight-aegyo, for the most part, and using a more sophisticated weave of more traditional imagery to convey the idea that the object of the narrator's affection is a singular point of exception in his world. Every single detail in the visuals plays off the notions in the lyrics, leading to an achingly cute final product that takes its message more seriously than I would have ever guessed just by glancing at the colorful screencaps.
           It also has something very important in common with Beyonce (but we'll get to that later).

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Just Tell Me - THE (SURPRISINGLY) Sweet PHILOSOPHY OF A KMV EXPLAINED.

5/14/2015

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True Love Is Hard to Define, But It's Pretty Easy to See...

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        With their lovely So Too Very Much release in February, and their March activities in Japan, I wasn't expecting anything new from these guys for a while yet. I've been pleasantly surprised by their Korean return and the release in question is itself absolutely fantastic. And when I say fantastic, I mean FANTASTIC. This is easily going to stand up as one of the very best releases of the entire year, it's going into my history books as one of the most fabulous releases EVER.
          From the set aesthetics and the basic styling, it looks like Just Tell Me can't possibly be anything to terribly spectacular. MYNAME isn't really a band with a track record of deeply meaningful or profoundly impacting releases, so when combined with a concept that looks to be more of the same old, hiphop-grunge-but-still-clubbing-chic that's been flooding the market lately there was really no reason to suspect that this release would be incredible. Honestly, there were a dozen pressing reasons to think this release would be anything but awesome, including the fact that MYNAME has already had a comeback this year, and they've had activities in Japan, so theoretically they haven't had much time to spend on this; not to mention the fact that the concept seems blandly unoriginal and the the Choreo from the teasers has some moves that stand out as painfully frequent instances of recycling moves.
          HOWEVER, to anyone who believed the teasers or who concluded on a cursory examination that it really is just another sex-focused grungy hiphop club thing: YOU GOT PLAYED. The whole thing is one big joke on us and the best part of it is that our expectations were used against us by preparing us for something mediocre, but what they gave us was something FABULOUS. Unfortunately, there are still a ton of people who are taking the release at face-value and as it's easily the best thing MYNAME has ever released, I will not suffer it to be maligned by people who won't give it more than a cursory look to allow the true elegance, sweetness, and complexity to unfold.

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Xiah Junsu's "Flower" ... Crazy Mess or Cultural Critique?

3/6/2015

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THE PRODUCTION COST OF "FLOWER" IS THROUGH THE ROOF, BUT DID JUNSU GET ENOUGH BANG FOR HIS BUCK? THE MESSAGE IN IT IS A HAZY, SILENT SCREAM TO THE VOID, MADE WITH FLASHY SYMBOLS AND GLITZY VISUALS BUT WHAT IS IT REALLY SAYING?
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          There is a HELL of a lot going on in this MV and some of it is really not all that slick. There's a ton of good stuff going on, but there's a lot that I'm disappointed in as well. I keep waffling back and forth. Junsu's voice is unquestionably one of the best in Kpop, but it's usage here doesn't make it obvious... And while there's a lot of gorgeous symbolism in the visuals, the way they're strung together without exposition leaves me less than impressed... Arguably, it's a flashy, but poignant critique of the whole nature beneath Idol culture, one I personally find unduly antagonistic. 

           But in order to critique it fairly, I think I should start by explaining what on earth is happening in it:

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The Awesomeness of Amber & What "Shake that Brass" Might Mean for Kpop

2/12/2015

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Amber has always been a brightly unique individual, in all the most wonderful ways.

This is particularly true when she is viewed as a successful superstar within the confines of the Kpop world. At this point however, the confines of that world might be changing to suit her, rather than the other way around. Shake That Brass is a great release on it's own, showing off Amber's special flair with a brush of comic hilarity. Humor of this scale is the sort that has the potential to easily normalize even the craziest of concepts and I believe that it can push this release to the next level. Kpop is evolving and becoming a world-wide phenomenon in a way that can't be ignored and Amber's unique depiction of what it can look like (and sound like) to be a successful woman in Kpop might help the rest of the world embrace the musical revolution with open arms. 

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