On Saturday, it became apparent that one of my vanity e-mail addresses had stopped working. There may have been some quite important email that has vanished, but I will never really know the cost, and it is far too late to worry. What this prompted was a long, hard look at what happens to my email and what is merited as ‘important’. It transpires I have ten e-mail addresses, gathered across the years. At no point have I ever deleted a message on at least three of them.
The rest of the day was spent sorting out the chaos that lack of activity had produced.
In the end, 25,000 messages were trashed. This includes mails sent when my first ever Gmail account was created, back in 2005. The vast bulk of rubbish was acknowledgements from sites such as Twitter, or online forum which I belonged to, that simply never got dealt with at the time. It took a couple of hours, but the effort was more than worthwhile, and it allowed me to see exactly what account was getting what trash mail. The long-term benefit is that the actual volume of mail into my Mac (which collects from all the Gmail accounts and the vanity domain addresses) has been reduced by over 80%. Using the GDPR fiasco to unsubscribe from multiple newsletters and online gumph that’s no longer needed, it’s like the last thirteen years of bollocks into my Inbox never existed.
Needless to say, it’s a little embarrassing that it took my own stupidity to kick-start the action, but now that’s done, there is no going back. The sense of satisfaction and general organisation cannot be adequately overstated, either.
Like so many things, this should have been done years ago.
Yesterday, half a conversation arrived on my Timeline. It happens a lot less than was once the case, but with the overlap that (inevitably) occurs in a large group of like-minded individuals, there is an inevitability that eventually, someone who’s blocked me appears. I know the reason for most of them and continue to be impressed at the level of loyalty certain people create with their friends’ groups. I’m not sure I’d ever want anyone to close ranks like that for me if I’m honest. However, I think maybe I ought to start blocking back the people who’ve removed me from their lives.
TMW you decide that if someone's going to block you, it's probably not a bad idea to return the favour. After all, I'd not want to offend them with anything by accident ^^ pic.twitter.com/M0L2h00423
— 🌊 Sarah's Year of the Chat 🌊 (@AlternativeChat) January 29, 2018
Interestingly I discovered yesterday you can’t find who’s blocked you using the API. Twitter won’t allow that information to be discovered, despite what some online tools might suggest. Therefore it’s a process of waiting until someone pops up in my Timeline who has imported a particular person’s block list and then returning the favour. Yeah, it’s petty and largely depressing, but what can you do when people treat this medium not as a platform for change but the lunch room in High School.
It was also incidents like this that kept me from moving my life forward for a while, that obsession with feeling confident with myself that eventually had me annotating other people’s emails as if to justify actions were correct. I’ve not stopped making mistakes since that point, it isn’t as if I’m not able to improve on how my life works after criticism. The prioritisation has altered, and (as should be the case) my focus has shifted to things that can be fixed, and people who will listen. If it is obvious that’s not the case, there are better things to do with my time.
When I wrote down this topic yesterday I also added a line of secondary thought: if you write this, someone will assume you’re talking about them. This happened the last time I did a post like this, and it (for a while) dissuaded me from making such observations. The people who blocked me stopped caring about my words a long time ago, but I am still thinking about them. I remember the positive conversations we had, and then (undoubtedly) I said something which I can 100% guarantee wasn’t meant as an insult or abuse. It wasn’t posted in an attempt to offend them. However, that was what happened, and then it was Game Over.
I’m the one who needs to learn the lesson. Stop caring about people you’ve never met. Stop feeling you have an affinity with strangers because everybody on the Internet is evil and out to destroy your life. EXCEPT I DON’T WANT TO. I want to believe people can be decent and caring, and understand me. I want to experience the pain of loss and regret because that is how it feels to be alive. I absolutely do NOT want to spend my time with those who live in a sanitised, manufactured reality with no actual relevance to anywhere else. If that makes me unpopular and contentious, SO MUCH THE BETTER.
If you block me from here on in, I don’t want you reading my stuff either, in any form, so I’ll be happy to return the favour. The truth is, of course, that you don’t have me blocked on that other account and I could still read those Tweets regardless, but I get how stalking works and no, you’re safe. The only surefire way you stop people consuming content is to go private, but that inevitably destroys the social part of the media anyway. The lesson everybody has to take from this is that if you want to play with the big boys, everything’s a potential argument, and you just take your chances regardless.
The online relationships never end, even though you’d sometimes wish they would.
There was that moment, a few years ago, when I got into a fight with someone on my feed about the way I conduct my business. On reflection, I probably wrote about it at the time, and if you were that obsessive about it could go back and find details. That was the first time I heard myself referred to as passive aggressive. I’d say it’s a quite prominent character fault, which is normally kept under control. The Internet however has a way of making me want to be like this, because it is full of people who don’t think but assume that the World revolves around them, which most clearly doesn’t.
I'm having a bit of a passive/aggressive moment. I'll pass. I blame it on feisty legs and an uncooperative set of scales.
Mostly, it is the realisation that if you want stuff to change, *you have to make it happen yourself.*
— 🌊 Sarah's Year of the Chat 🌊 (@AlternativeChat) January 27, 2018
Today however it is the scales and my legs making me all ‘come at me, bro.’ I don’t have an issue with the weight situation, on reflection. I know how to make it all stop and go backwards, just have to find the self-control to make that happen. Similarly, my legs went to failure yesterday (again) and yet I get how much stronger the lower half of my body now is. All the various areas of balance that need to be first attained and then maintained can be frankly quite nauseating, especially if you end up having to do several of them at once. Social media becomes a hindrance, after a while, if you’re forced to deal with stupid without a filter.
Someone I greatly respect posted something yesterday that really was quite offensive, in a certain light. It was obviously a joke, which I get, but I did sit and do the WTF Face that now seems to accompany an awful lot of my online existence. It is the same face that stops whenever a guy gets upset at a woman reacting to something that has been normal behaviour for decades, but only now is becoming socially unacceptable. ‘But what about our feelings?’ they cry, not really grasping that by everybody suppressing the true realities of existence, the whole World ends up getting fucked over eventually.
This GIF of Judge Aquilina throwing away the letter Larry Nassar wrote the court about how hard it is for him to listen to victim testimonies PRETTY MUCH SAYS IT ALL. pic.twitter.com/5HB9WMaPqU
Then there’s the person on my Twitter feed that very rarely (if at all) converses with me who regards Social media as a diary: whenever something happens to destabilise their existence, they then use their feed in search of love and reassurance. I’d never really considered the safety blanket uses that Facebook and Twitter have, and will VERY RARELY do so myself. However, as that happened this week there’s reason to pause for thought and ask myself the question. If people really matter to you enough to complain about only when they don’t talk to you, who is really at fault? Who is hurting here, the person not getting the attention they crave, or the person who’s happy there’s no conversation at all?
If the answer to all of these issues is truly dialogue, then stating your intentions must start being the norm. So what if you think I’m being pushy and arrogant when I do that. If that’s the case, we’re not friends to begin with. Respect (surely) must dictate that to understand how someone else feels, you listen first. After that, if you don’t like what you heard there’s the choice to politely object or offer a counter argument, or simply fuck off. This is not rocket science, so why is it that I know I can’t unfollow certain people because of the emotional fallout that would result? Am I being too kind, or not hard enough…?
Passive aggressive behaviour is, let’s be honest, the least of my worries.
And now, there will be a small explanation of how the months up to BfA launching will be different from previous #Warcraft Expansions on this account. pic.twitter.com/Uak9CR9YpB
— 🌊 Sarah's Year of the Chat 🌊 (@AlternativeChat) January 27, 2018
I use my daily writing as means to sort all this shit out, but this never avoids the drama. Whatever happens, people will pick certain hills to die on and if that happens to be your desire to impose rules, you gotta take the flack when it hits. The trick, I think, is to make it all a learning experience, and grasp it is a fool who believes that their life when involved on the Internet will ever be drama free if they wish to live as they please.
All you can do is think, post, and hope you did a decent job.
Stuff has changed. You’ve not seen all of it yet, but trust me when I say to you that it has. The depth of that shift will slowly begin to show.
Let’s begin.
There’s been much excitement in this house over Christmas thanks to Netflix, and the Amazon Fire stick we’ve had for a year and hardly ever used. I have a fair amount of Netflix content I wanna work through (and I will) but for now, you need to have the Amazon service enabled to truly appreciate the horror I am about to share. Well, that’s not strictly fair, because… well, you’ll see.
Welcome, one and all, to Kitten TV.
If you are familiar with the movie Scrooged, you’ll know there’s a point where rodents appear in Bill Murray’s seasonal adaptation of Dickens’ TV adaptation in attempt to get dogs and cats to engage. Well, this series of six shows does the about face, using kittens as a means to hook a generation of people (presumably) addicted to cute kitten videos and GIFs via the Internets. The concept’s ridiculously simple: build a set with a perspex fourth wall, drop a load of kittens into it, comedy ensues. There’s a Minecraft set, and an entire episode dedicated to cats in hats. I kid you not.
Back in the 1990’s, in the early years of satellite TV in the UK, there was a TV channel up in the 300’s that showed nothing but a roaring fire overnight. There was another channel that just showed beaches and boardwalks. This is no different, in effect, to the years when TV didn’t happen 24/7 and there’d be Public Information films to fill the gaps. Back when BBC2 tested colour movies, I can remember watching slices of history that are now so jaded and bizarre they feel like a dream, or part of the past that simply never existed. Fortunately, the Internet’s beginning to fill in these gaps, and the movies of my past can still be a part of the present.
Having found a list of the BBC2 colour test movies, I’ll be spending the next month sharing with you guys (via the @internetofWords Twitter feed) the joy of a world I was shown on screen during my formative years. Like my 12 year old daughter will undoubtedly remember the happy evening she spent watching kittens get bored and roam Godzilla-like across cheap cardboard sets, these memories are an essential part of the process of learning and understanding. Yes, kittens are relevant.
TV does not just have to be about the depressing things in life.
Right then, Universe, you and I need to have a chat.
I entirely grasp that being a selfish, arrogant fucktrumpet is a bad thing. There is no issue understanding that you need to be accommodating and empathetic when engaging in Social media discourse. However, sometimes it needs to be stated, for the record, that you people don’t get the whole irony/sarcasm thing. It has happened a lot of late, and therefore probably requires a measure of explanation.
Reality aligning with expectation happens a lot more than was ever the case before the Orange Twat became President or my country decided to fuck itself over Europe… or in many people’s minds, far less than makes them either feel comfortable or safe. The whole irony/sarcasm threshold as humour ‘thing’ has become almost impossible to use safely of late because somebody is inevitably going to take offence. Let’s face facts, you don’t need an excuse to explode at someone else right now, and there are people out there actively looking for reasons to do just that.
In one part of my online existence, I’ve made the conscious decision to just take away the possibility of Drama to begin with, especially when it is becoming apparent that some people enjoy fucking with your brain for entertainment. Gaming is full of people whose sole task appears to be the organisation of their life in order to wind other people up in theirs. I suppose, on reflection, this is no different than pranking a work colleague and then laughing, before the reminder ‘well I found this funny, what’s your problem?’ The key advantage of doing this online is that you can laugh as much as you like afterwards, safe in the knowledge that no-one will notice.
Except, after a while, laughing just with yourself stops being enough, and you have to make a larger point, and lo the subtweet was born. This is not revolution, but a way for stupid people to make everybody else think you’re talking about them and instil a sense of guilt and shame to individual actions. These things float so close to the irony/sarcasm border as to be an instant provocation to a) anyone with even a scintilla of a guilty conscience and b) anybody who’s looking for a fight at that moment. However, you can tell more about a person by their subtweets than is ever possible (sometimes) from months of interaction. If you pay attention, it is amazing what gets revealed… and yes, I’d absolutely count myself in that number. That’s why subtweeting has become a thing of the past.
Blogging is now my tool of revolution. If you can be bothered to read, all you need to know is here, sometimes wrapped up with the bare minimum of effort. There doesn’t need to be hand-wringing and wailing via Twitter: if I want to change the world, this is the best place to begin. If you refuse to provide the fuel for roasting and instead produce fireproof arguments, then everybody wins. I become a better writer plus the people who choose to follow me on Social media get 100% less Drama per day. In a world where there is quite enough of that, to begin with, I should definitely not be adding any more.
I don’t think I’ve ever been happier about being wrong in my life. Waking up this morning, to the first day when Jodie Whittaker is Doctor Who is… well, part of me still doesn’t believe it. My Twitter feed yesterday summed a lot of it up quite well, but if I’m honest this tweet is the real reason I’m celebrating:
I wish I could go back in time and tell my young nerd self that she's not going to have to pretend to be the boys forever. pic.twitter.com/YX8ti03jRe
That’s been me since I pretended to be James Bond, because all the women in his world were simply afterthoughts. Then I discovered Emma Peel, and I’ve sought out my own female heroes ever since… but I’d be lying if I didn’t say I still aspire to be the men. The ‘problem’ here is not the gender of the people involved. It really does not matter one iota whether these heroes are men or women. The bigger issue, by a long way, is their sexuality. That’s what detonated all those bombs yesterday, will cause wailing and trauma for months to come. As Doctor Who becomes a woman, NOBODY should lose their minds. The problem with the individually focused, me-cultured Social media climate we live in is that lots of people can’t separate gender from desire.
"Doctor Who is being run by PC lefties now"
In 1963, it had a woman producer and was directed by a gay Asian man. #doctor13#DoctorWho
I lost a fair number of followers yesterday on the back of my joyous ranting. I asked one of them why this appointment was so galling: she cited the trouble coping with the fact that the Doctor has a grand-daughter. How was it possible to reconcile this fact now the man is a woman? This is, of course, using established conventions that you need one of each sex to reproduce and create offspring. It is the same convention that will imprint on men that the Doctor was their hero… except now, she’s a heroine. The man they looked up to and aspired to become is now someone they could find sexually attractive. That is going to be difficult for many people to cope with.
There’s a flip side to this that’s made me especially angry, and it is watching certain women complain you can’t have a woman in the TARDIS. They enjoy the idea of a man being in control. Capaldi might not have been the most visually appealing of Doctors, but you could always go back to the days of Matt Smith and David Tennant and pretend you were one being rescued, or you were the favourite companion they’d turn to after a long day of saving the Universe. How can you write fanfic when the 13th Doctor’s forcing you to become a lesbian?
I took Daily Mail comments from people angry about a possible Female Dr Who and turned them into episode titles for the new series pic.twitter.com/k586EeVpld
All of these issues are underpinned by conventional notions of sexuality. Once one dismisses these, it does not matter one iota who plays what role. What then comes into play is whether your canon will support the change. When a female Thor was announced by Marvel, already established wisdom backed up the decision by stating that Thor’s hammer would only imprint on someone worthy of wielding it, and that choice was not gender specific. The path to gender fluidity in the Time Lords has been laid well in advance, placed into canon as far back as the transformation of Tennant to Smith.
‘The Doctors Wife’ establishes, IN CANON, the Corsair who (according to 11) ‘didn’t feel like himself unless he had (a) tattoo. Or herself, a couple of times. Oooh, she was a bad girl.’ It is another thing to thank Mr Moffat for, I suppose, apart from breaking the whole show apart and putting it back together in a modern, progressive fashion. You can choose to forget all this for the sake of non-canon sensibilities, of course, but anyone who offers shock and surprise that this could happen has really not been paying the right amount of attention.
You can’t complain now, because that’s your fandom, and you should know better.
the next James Bond should be transgender FTM, a Saudi expat, & a UK naturalized citizen. let's make all the bigoted heads explode at once.
I want to quickly mention 007 here. This is a Universe that, as it stands, won’t support anything other than a white, hetrosexual Bond, if you look at canon for guidance. Sure, the franchise has tried to reinvent itself (see my mate Roger’s excellent dissection on License to Kill and how changing this male lead’s not as simple as writing in some historical precedent) but even now with Mr D. Craig, Esq in the lead roll, that reinvention has only gone so far. Unless something radical changes in terms of how the lead man is portrayed, it is unlikely we will ever see change on the scale that now exists in the TARDIS. Personally I’d want to pair him up with an equal female agent as we did in Tomorrow Never Dies, but I’m not sure even that is possible at this stage. Some ideas, like it or not, just have to be left to die.
There has also been, quite understandably, some comments on how the kerfuffle in the TARDIS could have been avoided if an actor of colour or from a non-white background had been cast. That is another large can of worms: it might help the Bond franchise reboot, on reflection, but I suspect would have caused similar levels of outrage in the TARDIS, which is ridiculous. This is 2017 and honestly, anyone getting upset at a TV show employing anyone in a lead role who isn’t white and male is on a hiding to nothing.
There are more important things to get upset about, and really this is not one of them.
My weight’s been doing odd things over the last few weeks: it is obvious my body’s adjusting to life without a gallbladder a lot better than could have been the case, however. I’ve gone from not keeping anything inside me for very long to my body returning to some semblance of what was normal before the operation. However, on what I thought was a pretty decent low fat and sugar diet before surgery there’s been a slow but noticeable creep up of weight. It isn’t muscle mass either, my lovely set of biometric scales at the Gym indicates this. So yesterday, on PT’s advice, I started scanning and recording what I’m eating using My Fitness Pal and realised exactly where my problem lies.
Breakfast is already putting me on the back foot. Sure, that might be sub 300 calories, but when my sugar intake is marked at 45g maximum in a day? There I am, having thrown nearly half of it away in one hit. That’s fine however, because breakfast is awesome right now and is probably my favourite meal of the day because of the pomegranate. The problem then comes with what I shove in the rest of the day. What was my favourite protein bar up until I read the labels yesterday delivers more sugar than my 33g chocolate bar snack of choice. It really doesn’t matter how much healthy shit you chuck at me, if I’m getting more sugar as well, there’s something wrong somewhere.
This has meant a reconsideration of what counts for ‘snacks’ in the household.
These two are good staples in my cupboard and I won’t end up out of sugars by lunchtime. I’ll go investigate other brands too, but for now the lovely American protein bars aren’t being restocked. When I closed my food log last night, I found myself thinking that if writing life can be managed more effectively, why can’t the same be true for my eating habits?
How hard would it be to make yesterday happen another 34 times, exactly? I’ve logged onto My Fitness Pal for 435 fucking days and I’m still struggling with weight, mostly because I won’t log consistently, instead cheating quietly and forgetting the transgressions overnight. No, the biggest problem I have with weight loss is myself. Because I’m exercising there’s this misguided belief that it’s okay, because not being sedentary matters more. Except, in the end, it doesn’t. Making changes requires just that, CHANGE. Stop pretending you’re somehow virtuous because of all the miles, and make the real evolution your body believes it can’t cope with but needs to overcome. Provide reliable energy, long term, and keep your body in a fit state to last the next fifty years.
Forming habits works for me. It is a solid means of moving forward. The same thing, day after day, and I finally remember that this is part of a larger plan. Now I’ve got large parts of my life sorted using this mantra, let us see if it cannot be applied to the business of sensible eating. 34 days from now is, quite usefully, August 1st. This seems like a nice date to aim for, as it is smack bang in the middle of the Summer Holidays for kids and then gives the rest of that month to consolidate and regroup. So, that’s the plan. My target weight was 11 stone 3 pounds at the start of the year. Let’s aim there, and make it happen.
