Member Posts

Did the memory change, or did my taste?

Every now and then I get a craving like,

"I wish I could read [fandom] the way it was before [subsequent bad canon/creator behavior]."

The thing is, all the stuff I enjoyed the first time I read it is still there, but... it never feels the same. All that Avengers tower fic from 2012 and all that season 1 Teen Wolf fic, for example, actually don't taste the way I remember them tasting.

This is true of a number of foods that I liked as a kid, too. The smell of bacon or hamburger cooking are slightly nauseating to me now that I haven't eaten them in 20 years, but sometimes I still wake up from a dream wishing I could have the bacon cheeseburgers I ate at age 19 from the college dining hall once a week.

Entry tags:

health: allergies

There must have been a musk in that curl spray

Like oud or something. Not patchouli anyway. Because after shampooing it three times the night before last, I could still smell that on it yesterday every time it got in my face (the physically irritating part of the smell did wash out, but I personally dislike musks and think they're gross even when they don't make me sneeze). I can still smell it today too, but my hair is dry, and I don't want to shampoo it again yet.

So I guess this is no longer directly related to allergies, but I don't have a haircare tag or an "I fucking hate perfume flames on the side of my face" tag.

Entry tags:

film

(no subject)

Fantastic 4:First Steps

Jews do not dance in this movie. I have seen four Fantastic 4 movies and Ben Grimm does not dance in any of them.

Entry tags:

health: allergies

Not a satisfactory situation or explanation

Last night I was joylessly reading until way too late in bed, and then after I put my phone down, I suddenly started to notice my throat hurt a bit.

Now, I do have a perfume allergy that has caused my throat to swell mostly-closed in the past, but only about 5(?)x in the past 20 years, and only after a Lot (the perfume has to be concentrated close to my nose and mouth probably).

And yes, yesterday I had tried a new curl-reviving spray and I had been mildly annoyed by its perfume all day, but it hadn't irritated my nose right away the way dangerous perfumes (and also many others) do.

So when I started to worry that the product was causing an allergic reaction that might make my throat swell closed and kill me in my sleep, this was extremely unlikely for several reasons: the perfume had already proven itself not similar to ones that caused a reaction before, and also that's not really how anaphylaxis works, probably?

But my throat hurt and every perfume I could smell seemed to be aggravating it. So I decided that getting up at 3 am and showering all the perfumed products off would be a better use of my time than going downstairs to take antihistamines, painkillers, and a benzo. I shampooed my hair three times and combed conditioner through it in the shower, then put a folded towel on my pillow and slept on it after towel-drying, without applying my usual leave-in.

My throat feels a little better but still irritated today, and I took loratidine and paracetamol with breakfast. I wonder why my throat got irritated, though. I hope I'm not getting sick, but probably not; the last time I went to the store was Wednesday, so the incubation period for a respiratory infection wouldn't match up very well.

Entry tags:

plant and garden

Benjamin the benjamin ficus is living in the enclosed porch for the summer

Benjamin is one of several large and venerable potted plants inherited from Wax's granny, so he's probably older than I am; he has been in front of the east window in the kitchen since we moved here. However, he's had a hard time this spring after Sipuli peed in his pot several times to protest her litter box being smelly.

Once it got warm enough to not shock him in the process, Wax discarded all his old soil, shook and jiggled and rinsed his roots, and repotted him with new soil; and in apology for the trauma of that, she felt obliged to let him stay out for a while (but not fully outside, where the temperature fluctuations and wind and rain would be too much for him).

The thing is... Benjamin hasn't been pruned in a long time, and he's probably about six feet tall and four feet wide, now.

The porch isn't large.

As Wax put it when carrying out the recycling last week, it's not very convenient having your porch half full of tree.

She says she can't bring him inside, though, because he's enjoying himself so much (making lots of new leaves) that it would be mean.

Entry tags:

places: pargas

Shades of Local Color in the Villages of Ålön

We live in a tiny town with only one commercial street, but spread out with low population density. Our island of Ålön is about 77 square kilometers (about 44 square miles), and most of it is farms and forests.

My late MIL's summer cottage was fifteen minutes by car out towards one of the corners of the island, in the village of Levo, but what a world of difference! Behind its little orchard stretched fallow and planted fields; across the winding road lay a little forest, and on the other side of that the bay of Finland. (The neighbors gave permission to park extra cars in their field and to use their little scrap of sand and dock for swimming.) The music of the evening in Levo was birdsong and the rushing of the wind.

Here one block behind city hall and the police station, in the village of Parsby, we sit in the midst of urban decay, as mentioned recently. Our little street contains three inhabited houses and two abandoned wrecks that the city owns and is allowing to fall into public health hazards, with asbestos everywhere, roofs caving in, broken windows, and fallen trees and power lines. The street leading down to the back of the police station contains two more inhabited houses and three more decaying wrecks, and the city tore all the pavement on it up last January to fix the pipes and hasn't paved it again yet. Across the other street (we live on the corner) is a big clot of densely-populated midcentury apartment buildings, whose retired inhabitants risk their lives on the above-mentioned poorly-maintained ripped-up road in winter (it's a steep hill).

Because our town is rural and the driving age for cars is 18 in Finland, the plague of Parsby (and small towns everywhere) is teenagers on mopeds. The music of the evening in Parsby starts with wood pigeons, thrushes, and the distant buzzing of cars on the highway, but is interrupted periodically by the deafening roar of mopeds speeding by under the window and teenagers practicing being cool and adult by shouting the equivalent of "FUCK" at each other. (I fantasize several times a week about an externally-mounted loudspeaker that would play a voice yelling "Shut up" towards the street.)

It would've been impossible to quickly walk to the store from Levo, though.

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: The Rookery
Current Music: Dvořák, Symphony No 9

Entry tags:

rpg,
social

Unfinished Tales

I find myself in the situation where I have a number of "almost finished" diverse projects nearing completion and several social activities worthy of mention, but without a common and unifying theme. The first involves an essay I'm composing out of pure love following several Shakespearean events which my mind raises the question: "Why Shakespeare?" After all, there were many excellent playwrights and other artists during the English Renaissance, but here we are still looking toward The Bard almost five hundred years later. It is an extraordinary achievement by any measure, and I have a few thoughts on the matter which I will circulate in the near future. Also in the "coming soon" category is a review of "Bleak Squad" at the Queenscliff Town Hall, a sort of 90s supergroup made up from members of Dirty Three, The Bad Seeds, Magic Dirt, and Art of Fighting, which I attended with Kate R., who rather delightfully took me out to see them and spend an evening at the 19th century Vue Grand Hotel (their website is so bad I won't link it). Band member Mick Harvey was also present at the lodgings, and I took the opportunity to mention how much I liked his work in "The Birthday Party". The overnight stay was also an opportunity to visit my old friend Lyle A., who now lives in the region, and also to see the famous "Black Lighthouse", apparently one of only four in the world to have such a hue.

On the RPG side of things, I notably joined Liz, Karl, Gavin, Phil, and Dan for an in-person session of "Dragonbane" on Sunday. This game is derived from the almost-mythic "Drakar och Demoner" Swedish RPG from the early 1980s, which itself was "very heavily" derived from Chaosium's Magic World booklet from Worlds of Wonder. The latest incarnation still shows these roots, albeit with some newer innovations, but still with a great deal of style and design elegance. The day previous, my dear friend from Ningxia, Dr Yanping, graced my home for lunch with Kate R., and Mel S., as well (why am I always surrounded by such fabulous women?), where I experimented with an Italian-Chinese fusion cuisine. Yanping has been away from Australia for over a year, so it was a real delight to see her again, and I'm very pleased that she'll be here for an extended period, having acquired some gainful employment at Monash University. Somehow I neglected to mention attendance at Brenda L's birthday gathering in recent entries where I played the role of waiter and provider of cocktails; especially excellent conversation with Brenda, Fiona C., Matthew C. and others. This all does sound like an extensive social life, and to be fair, that has taken a good portion of the past several days. Journaling does provide a gentle reminder that I do have other serious ("boring but important") work to catch up on; the batteries have been recharged.

(no subject)

Oh, I wanted to ask if anyone here will be at Worldcon? Let me know if you want to meet up!

Entry tags:

dad's injury

The Ambulance Merry-Go-Round

My dad (C5/6 quadriplegic wheelchair user) has been in and out of the hospital all spring and summer.

Initially, there was some kind of internal bleeding, I think, and he kept having very low blood pressure and cardiac events and then having to have his many medications adjusted. Then he had to have a colectomy, and then he got a persistently recurring UTI that is resistant to antibiotics. A lot of these times he's been carted off to the hospital it's been for low blood pressure or a slight fever, and it seems to my sister and me like they're just stabilizing him, tweaking his medication, and releasing him, sometimes the same day, only for him to be back in an ambulance in less than a week.

This is having a weird effect where it's cumulatively and abstractly more scary every time he goes, while at the same time it is becoming so familiar that it's starting to feel routine. I know this is why people got convinced they were safe from COVID after a few months of wearing a mask and why people are frequently injured in the streets near their homes: the cognitive illusion that an action is proved safe if you've done it a bunch of times and nothing bad happened. Or in the case of these hospital visits, bad things happened, but he didn't get seriously (ICU) ill.

It's rough on my sister, who lives with her husband and my parents in the US, and I can't really support her long distance very effectively. And even if it were safe to travel there now, there's no way to know how long it would keep happening, so it still wouldn't probably be practical for me to go.

Entry tags:

culture consumed

Things

Books
Reading Danny Lavery's Something That May Shock And Discredit You. Unsure whether I have read it before or if it's just familiar because he published some of these essays online. Discovered that the pages from 84 to 101 of this (library) copy are missing. Not torn out, it's a misprint, they are replaced with earlier pages from the same book, printed blurry. Irritating. I suspect Unprecedented Times may be at fault: the publication date was 2020.

Comics
Dumbing of Age: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH. (I wrote that a few days ago.) Live Sarah Reaction. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH. (That one was today.)

Fandom
More betaing, and also I signed up for a fanfic bingo event that the Nine Worlds fandom server I'm on is doing.

Games
Played Toby's Nose, an interactive fiction game in which the player character is Sherlock Holmes' dog Toby. (A lot less unforgiving than the average IF game, but just as intricately detailed.)

Slay the Spire: still spending more time playing it than I should. Since last post I unlocked Ascension 6 for everyone, and Ascension 7 for Ironclad and the Silent and the Defect. It took me eleven tries to get the Silent through Ascension level 6. The eleventh time I had a shiv build with, among other things, Wrist Blade, Phantasmal Killer, two Accuracy+ and one Accuracy, Terror, Burst, Clockwork Souvenir, and a Flex potion. And, of course, Infinite Blades and Blade Dance+ and Blade Dance. So on my first turn I drank the Flex potion and let Clockwork Souvenir counteract the part where it wears off after one turn. Wrist Blade adds 4 damage to zero energy attacks, Accuracy+ adds 6 damage to shivs, Accuracy adds 4 damage to shivs, Terror gives the enemy vulnerability (attacks do 50% more damage) for 99 turns or until it cures the status effect, and Phantasmal Killer makes the next turn's attacks do double damage. That's a lot of setup, but you get shivs that a serious amount of damage. So of course my act 3 boss was Timmy. (The good news: he doesn't get stronger from power cards. The bad news: he gets stronger from you playing twelve cards period, and rudely interrupts you in the middle of your turn every twelve cards you play. And Burst's "play the next skill card twice" effect counts as playing the next card twice, not once.) I beat him in six turns. I had a Fairy in a Bottle potion, but I didn't need it. (I did use my Ghost Jar.) I also discovered a beautiful synergy between the Hovering Kite and Eviscerate, which didn't help me that much with Tim but was very helpful with hallway encounters. Eviscerate is 7x3 damage for 3 energy, one less energy for every card discarded this round. So even if you still only have three energy, if you block with Survivor and discard a card, that reduces Eviscerate to two energy and gives you one extra energy to play an Accuracy or whatever. The Defect, after that, just took two tries.

Crafts
I made another linoprint, my biggest and most complicated one to date (nearly A5, and not very complicated.) Yes, I'll post photos one of these days.

Also I dyed some flannel sheets and pillowcases a very dark bluish/purplish grey. It was my first attempt at overdyeing: dyeing fabric which already has a pattern printed on it. It was green and white gingham checks, and I hoped I'd get dark grey on darker grey checks. This indeed proved to be the case, although they mostly only show in direct sunlight. What I wanted most, though, was just warm winter sheets in a colour that went with my other sheets and blankets, without having to pay postage from another country, and, success!

Tech
Still configuring laptop a little bit at a time. Most recently, used Themix to install an unbelievably lurid desktop theme. I will get tired of it and need to change to something less garish within five hours of using my laptop again, probably definitely.

Links

It's that time of year again: Gender Census! (This year with a little disclaimer about AI. It said what I hoped it would say, and I'm relieved but sad it's necessary.)

Alive, Sane and Alone: Social Control and Responsibility in “What Happens Next” (Only recommended for people who've read Max Graves' webcomic What Happens Next, but it's interesting if you have. It's a (long) analysis of the comic through a biopolitics lens.)

Australia urged to move on from ‘moral panic’ over video games after Disco Elysium banned. This happened over four years ago, but I only heard about it recently. When it was banned, I hadn't played Disco Elysium yet, but had already bought it on Steam.

More recent context for the above: this bullshit. And no, it's not about "the sexualisation of women and girls", don't piss up my leg and tell me it's raining.

And see also face age and ID checks, in Australia and the UK. I'm finding it hard to talk about this stuff because it is so important to me and it upsets me so much and at the same time people around the world are facing so much worse things right now (even though the rights to privacy and anonymity are very much a part of those fights too.)

In memory of Tom Lehrer, this story about a paper he published while working for the NSA during the Korean War

Congratulations: it plays Doom. (Courtesy of the same search spiral: finally, a good use for an elliptical machine.)

Nature
Roo sighting! Not in my backyard this time. A much smaller one, maybe a jill or a joey (are they still joeys when they're too big for the pouch but not full-sized yet?) or maybe a wallaby not a roo after all.

It was crossing the road, presumably to get to the other side. It kindly gave me enough time to brake comfortably. For the next stretch of road (maybe ten metres?) it hopped along the side of the road, parallel with my car, until I got fast enough that it couldn't keep up.

Cats
They've been making their presence known when I'm at the computer, especially on video calls.

The perfect song for the times...

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Entry tags:

finland,
health

The ibuprofen barrier (also the paracetamol barrier)

Tragically, the supply of ibuprofen we bought the last time we went to the US - in 2017 - is running out now! Ibuprofen is more expensive in Finland and you can only buy 30 tablets of 400mg each at a time, and you can't mail it internationally, but you can bring it in your luggage, so in the past, I have just brought back a bunch of bottles each time I visited the US. (Technically, you can only bring your own medication for personal use, but we've never had a problem.)

The even more tragic part is that my sister was here just a year ago, but I forgot to ask her to bring it. Obviously it would be unwise to go there in the near future now, and I'm not sure if it would be fully safe even for my white middle-class family members to leave the country in case they had trouble going back (although they don't have any travel plans in the near future, because my dad, being quadriplegic, is immunocompromised and air travel is an elevated risk for him, and he's been in and out of the hospital lately).

When I was a teenager and young adult I used ibuprofen heavily for cramps, but in my 30s the severity lessened dramatically and I was often able to skip painkillers or get by with a small dose of paracetamol/acetaminophen, so the supply from our last visit has lasted longer than expected. (The last bottle has an expiration date in 2020, so possibly it is only working by the placebo effect at this point.) Concurrently with the perimenopausal symptoms I've started getting over the last few years, though, the cramps have started to worsen again and a couple of times in recent months I think they've been more painful than when I was a teenager! (But I also can't be sure because it's about 25 years ago.) A few years ago I was advised to try 1000mg paracetamol + 600mg ibuprofen together in case of emergency, and I now typically need to do this a few times per month. And also to buy paracetamol approximately every 1.5 months, because you can't buy more than 30 (500mg) tablets of paracetamol at a time either, and Wax and I both get migraines (not bad migraines by you Migraine Sufferer standards, but they are still headaches)! I've just never happened to bring paracetamol/acetaminophen back in my luggage because (a) I didn't know I could and should use it instead of ibuprofen until I was in my late 30s and (b) until recently there was always a larger bottle of it around leftover from various prescriptions.

Ugh, and I hate big Finnish 400mg ibuprofen tablets, too. They're not nearly as nice as the standard round coated ones you get in the US. And if you buy gel caps you can't break them! Come to think of it, I also don't like the big paracetamol tablets, but I don't have any clear memories of the size and shape of acetaminophen tablets to compare them to. But, honestly, they would have to be fairly awful tablets to be worse than the inconvenience and annoyance of buying them 30 at a time.

Entry tags:

cats

failure of classical conditioning

Sipuli is still unable to calm down enough to approach Tristana closely through the gate, in spite of ample opportunity; it seems like Tristana would like for her to.

(So no real change since I last wrote about this.) The problem is no longer that Tristana is afraid to come close to the gate; for the past 3? months it's instead been that Tristana will sit right there and if Sipuli just walked over and sat down they could sniff each other through it, but she wants to be friends too badly and she gets too excited and flings her entire body on the gate and tries to grab Tristana through it. And then Tristana backs off (without being too upset) because she doesn't want to be grabbed and she doesn't like sudden movements and loud noises.

After the thousands of times she got excited and pounced and Tristana left, Sipuli has learned that Something Bad is associated with her getting all excited... but she doesn't appear to know that it's the jumping/grabbing. Instead she sees Tristana and starts to get excited and then after about five seconds she gets embarrassed/anxious and retreats.

This happens even if she didn't make any sudden movements. She'll see Tristana sitting patiently on her side of the gate with her nose up against it looking curiously at her and she'll start towards her with fascinated ears, and then she'll pause about a foot away, turn around in a circle, pace a little bit, and then leave and go under a chair.

They HAVE touched noses through the gate a couple of times and Sipuli gets to take walks in the rest of the house on a leash now, but she has not managed to touch noses on these walks yet; she's still getting too excited and trying to lunge or jump towards Tristana and being prevented by the leash.

Current Mood: exhausted

Entry tags:

yak shaving

Under construction... mind the shaved yaks.

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Current Mood: busy
Current Location: The Rookery
Current Music: Talk Talk, Spirit of Eden

Entry tags:

Voyages to the Real, the Wondrous, and the Surreal

A couple of weeks ago, I made initial preparations for an upcoming trip to South America and Antarctica with my friendly neighbour Kate R., and last week, payments were made for said voyage. In addition to the tour's planned route to Lima, Cusco, Machu Picchu, Buenos Aires, Punta Arenas, Ushuaia, the Antarctic Peninsula, the Falkland Islands, Montevideo, and Buenos Aires (again), we've added a couple of nights in Santiago. To say the least, the trip isn't cheap by any stretch of the imagination, but there is a great deal of ruggedness involved on the itinerary, and volume makes a difference as well. There are many practical tasks to be undertaken between now and December, including improving my questionable competence in the Spanish language. I have smashed my way through the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile introductory course in Spanish over the past fortnight, at least in part helped by an existing "fairly good" B1 level on Duolingo.

Eschewing the numerous optional activities offered by the tour company that are not really to my taste, I am scanning attractions that suit my inclinations toward museums, art galleries, archaeology, natural beauty, and, in the South American style, anything relating to their surrealist and magical realist literary traditions. I already have firmly marked out "La Chascona", built by Pablo Neruda, who, apart from winning the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature for his surrealist love poems, was also a career diplomat and politician. Another site of this ilk to visit will be the "Centro Cultural Borges" in Buenos Aires, dedicated to the mythologist, writer, and poet Jorge Luis Borges. This said, the pair of them come with certain controversies, as if often the case, the art and the artist make a troublesome union.

It seems fitting that so much of the trip will be an exploration of wondrous landscapes in reality, history, archeology, and the literary tradition of surrealism and magical realism, and, I readily admit, I will be drawing a great deal of this travel experience in writing my "Call of Cthulhu" project "Fragments of Time, Slices of Mind". As that is being written, I have decided to run a short campaign using "ElfQuest", based on the comic series by Wendy and Richard Pini with their palaeolithic and telepathic characters. In the most recent months, I have been quite involved in a game run by Andrew D., "Night's Dark Agents", which is a story involving modern European special operations teams versus vampires. Finally, on this trajectory and of marginal interest to anyone not deeply into the lore, I have picked up (at an incredibly cheap price) an unpunched copy of Chaosium's "Dragon Pass", close to fifty years old and in "almost new" condition.

Current Mood: silly

Entry tags:

courses,
pokemon

catch them all

Just realized that Coursera has a lot in common with Pokemon Go. At least the way I play them ;)

- Gotta catch them all / gotta get all the certificates. Even though it's just a digital item, for fun and vanity, not useful IRL.
- There are so many cool courses / Pokemon you just *need* to get, and the new ones keep popping up.
- Sometimes (well, often ;) it feels like grinding...
- A 100% certificate = a 100% Pokemon.
- Specializations = special research. Both award a very powerful Pokemon (uh, certificate) in the end.
- Graded assignments = raids. They can be tough. If you fail, you can retry a couple of times, then wait until the cooldown resets.
- Peer grading = gym battles. (Thankfully, no PVP.)
- Coursera wants your real name, Pokemon Go wants your real location. Cheating on either can get you banned.
- Both are pay-to-win. You can play for free, but your experience will be very limited (especially in Coursera's case...)

Training to become a Certificate Master. Only 7000+ to go :)

Current Mood: creative

Entry tags:

Warm up exercise.

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Driving lessons update

Last time I updated about my learning to drive stick/standard shift I posted this, you may remember:

Total cost:

Application fee: 25€
Driving lessons: 875€
ADHD tax: 152€

Incorrect. That was my total cost thus far, but I forgot the fees for the theory test and the driving test! I have now reserved a time for the theory test on August 14.

Theory test fee: 40€
Driving test fee (not booked yet): 99€

Total: 1191€

I'll have to take the bus to Turku to take it at the nearest Ajovarma office. ( Read more... ) I have been studying the badly-translated textbook that came with my driving class (and also the good Swedish translation and occasionally the Finnish original, for clarity) and going through the test practice questions. I passed the first full practice test I took yesterday, but at about 70%, so I'm trying to make it so I know the answers to all the questions.

Friday I had a second lesson with the driving simulator, and it was much better than the first one. It was fun actually! But I completely failed to manage to start the car on a hill again (I failed to do this in my first simulator lesson like 8 times in a row and the teacher, after coaching me through the steps and explaining it, just gave up and reset the lesson lol) and had to reset it. Now I've read in the textbook I realize it's because the hill in the simulator was too steep for the instructions he gave me the first time (on a gentle slope you only need the brake, but on a steep hill you need the parking brake as well - terrifying).

BONUS OFF-TOPIC FUN FACTS: READING AND BANNING

After we watched the season finale of the Murderbot show, and I discussed it extensively with both my sister (who is extremely ALL CHANGE IS BAD CHANGE) and waxjism (who is not, but was annoyed because the show felt too YA for her, although she didn't HATE it), I reread the books. I had reread All Systems Red before the show; last week I reread it again, then all the others, and then I read the newest short story, Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy (about ART and its crew). And after that for days I just wanted MORE and didn't want to read anything else, but the next novel isn't out yet; I reread Artificial Condition again and started Network Effect again, and skimmed through the tags on AO3 and Tumblr to see what people are saying... but it wasn't really satisfying. When I'm interested in a ship that is non-sexual in nature, I rarely find what I want from fandom, and that's what happened again (though there is some gen friendship fic and some queerplatonic fic on AO3). I can't begrudge people their desire to sexualize nonsexual relationships, because I've definitely thought that was fun before. I wrote Finding Nemo slash (and I stand by that). But when you don't want to read that, and I don't, your odds are simply worse, because there's less of it.

Unlike my sister, I didn't hate the show, but I was even more annoyed by what Wax called "YA" writing choices than she was. I'm not sure if she can stand to watch it with me when the next season comes out, because I find it very hard to shut up when I'm annoyed at tv. I am happy with the casting and have no problem with the acting - all the things that I disliked are what I consider objectively bad adaptation and writing choices. But it was still fun and watchable when considered as its own work in isolation from the books! Just weirdly and unnecessarily YA in tone.

For fans of banning/blocking, the action, you'll be pleased that I banned someone from my design blog designobjectory last week! I like all ages and periods of decorative arts, but my blog contains a lot of my special interests - midcentury modern, Bauhaus, Art Deco and Art Nouveau, and Swedish and Finnish design (mostly 20th c). Somebody reblogged one of my MANY posts of Finnish midcentury light fixtures by Finnish lighting titan Lisa Johansson Pape (one of the many times I've posted a variant of her 44 cm. diameter metal pendant lamp shade, which is still in production by Innolux)... anyway, somebody reblogged it with a comment sort of like "This is the ONE Scandinavian modern thing I like lol. I hate light birch furniture!" My blog is extremely heavy on light wood because of my strong interest in Swedish and Finnish 20th century design! So I blocked them. First I asked Wax if that was too unreasonable and she laughed a lot and said that it's never unreasonable to block people on your own blog. Maybe a little weird though. I mean, probably. But it's so thrilling and satisfying to block someone.

Ever since DW made it so you can type @ + username to create the little username embed (waxjism), I have completely switched to it and whenever I want to use the version that links to another site I forget what the code is and end up having to google it. I mean, to search the DW faqs. This is the third time it's happened. That's because it's user name, with a space between. I always forget that.