mamadeb

Total cost:

Application fee: 25€
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Theory test fee: 40€
Driving test fee (not booked yet): 99€

Total: 1191€

1. 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.



2. 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.



3. 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.

• This publication has alleged in the past that wearing tapered or straight-leg jeans is an embarrassingly Millennial trait (no mention given of older generations: possibly the youth in question have forgotten that there are plenty of members of Gen X just among their own generation's parents, and obviously nobody older than their own parents is relevant, lol).
  
  I went on an emotional journey of laughing, boggling, and remembering how in the mid-90s when the 70s-bellbottom revival was in full swing it became nearly IMPOSSIBLE to buy tapered jeans or even straight ones for a brief time, and how my friends and I used to refer to extant surviving tapered jeans as "boa-constrictor-ankled". Of course since everyone my age was growing extremely rapidly throughout the period from 1995-2001, it was impossible for any of us to own old pairs of jeans that still fitted that we loved; in high school, you're lucky if you fit jeans for more than a calendar year at a time. Everyone who had jeans that were ten years old or older was an adult, and their clothes were a minority of the clothes we saw closely enough to pay attention to, which made them stand out, I guess. I remember being actively amused by tapered jeans in the late 90s. And I clearly remember the few years before 2010, in my 20s, owning lots of pairs of bootcut jeans that were in some cases 10 years old and still fit me, and finding it necessary to get out the sewing machine to make several of them into skinny jeans (but the earliest ones, say, pre-2000, were unsalvageable then, because I couldn't consider wearing mid-high-waisted jeans ca. 2007, when waistbands were super-low). So the end of this emotional journey was laughing again.



• Another article in this publication alleged that the crying laughing emoji is also an embarrassing Millennial trait. Apparently nobody who isn't a Millennial would use this emoji. The article didn't contain a lot of detail - I would've loved statistics about emoji use frequency, or a detailed look back at the pre-emoji days of emoticons. I was a heavy user of "XD" before the crying laughing emoji, which is supposed to be a cartoon of it (although IMO XD does not imply tears on its own; that's what X.D is for). But anyway, I have been remembering this stupid article every time I used that emoji for weeks now.