(no subject)
Nov. 6th, 2020 07:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat1. Well, some good news on the COVID front - the red microcluster zone that I'd been in since pretty much October 1, has now migrated south of me to Midwood and Kings Highway (these are the idiots in Brooklyn who voted for DJT), while I'm firmly in the yellow zone along with the rest of Kesington, Borough Park, and Flatbush. To celebrate - all the restaurants had created little seating areas on the sidewalks and on the street wherever possible - for outdoor dining.
I took walk to get groceries after work. Left immediately after - to catch the last shreds of daylight. Got home towards dusk or right after dusk. It was a lovely night. Lots of outdoor diners. And some of the restaurants have gotten rather creative. They have individual stalls with walls. So you sort of have your own private booth. Others split it up with about two tables per enclosure. And a lot of outdoor wine bars - one that spread itself down the sidewalk past the dental office. It was odd to see seating for a tiny wine bar in front of a dental office - they specialize in natural/organic wines (aren't all wines natural and organic? Maybe not?). I picked up a card from them. I'm thinking of trying for deliveries.
They look kind of fun. But I've no interest in trying any of them. Because it doesn't feel safe. People are sitting outside at tables, without masks near other people. And people walking by.
I told mother over the phone about the obstacle course on the way to and from the grocery store. She begged me to stop - I was tiring her out.
2. This amused me. Although I didn't witness it myself - because I'm not really on Twitter or Tumblr for that matter, and my social media friends aren't into Supernatural that much at the moment, if at all. But I do remember the height of the fandom in 2012 - I watched Supernatural in 2012. I stopped in 2015 or thereabouts.
Supernatural Took Over the Internet Last Night.
Also this...
my sense of time has been so thoroughly broken that when i saw tweets about supernatural take over my timeline a real part of me was like “ah, now it’s 2012. so how a year works is you have january, february, 80 years of march, halloween, 800 years of election, and then 2012” - dylan morrison
3. Speaking of the never-ending election from hell...
A social media friend on FB compared watching American Politics to Test Cricket. While others, are saying okay Tuesday Part 3.
Meanwhile, somewhere in there, Russia felt ignored and decided to tease that Vladmir Putin was going to step-down (allegedly he has Parkinson's Disease), but the Kremlin immediately denied it. (That's 2020 for you - it tricks you into thinking you are getting the carrot or getting to kick the football, then yanks it out from under you at the last moment.) [I personally think someone hacked them - but it was bad timing and fell under the radar - due to the Supernatural fandom, the uptick in COVID cases in the US - I was wrong apparently, we had 120,000 new cases yesterday, and the election from hell (which won't end).
But...hope springs eternal.
I'm watching the NY Times Live Election Tracker to see what's going on.
Right now, we're all waiting on the final counts of Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina. According to the tracker these scenarios guarantee a win for Biden:
Pennsylvania
Nevada and Arizona
North Carolina, Nevada and Arizona
Georgia and Nevada
Georgia and Arizona
Georgia alone - they are tied.
So basically, if he gets Pennsylvania, and if he keeps Arizona and gets another state, he wins. Or if he gets Georgia and another State he wins.
Or if he gets Nevada and another state he wins. Or if he gets North Carolina and another state he wins.
Electoral College - such fun. Everyone wants to do away with it - and give the Midwest far less power than it currently has, not to mention all the rural areas in the US.
Mother thought there would be a winner by today. I don't. I know there are absentee mail-in ballots still hanging out there. And many won't come in until November 12.
We'll be lucky if we know the winner by next week.
I'm still optimistic. Or trying to be.
4. Our continuing, if somewhat sporadic coverage (because I get tired of it every once and a while) of New York vs. the Corona Virus
*. The positivity rate in the micro-cluster focus areas was 3.16 percent yesterday. The statewide positivity rate excluding these areas was 1.84 percent. Of the 160,705 tests reported yesterday, 3,209, or 1.99 percent, were positive. Total hospitalizations were at 1,321. Sadly we lost 18 New Yorkers to the virus.
[See #1 above about how the microclusters moved. We were joking about this in this week's Bible Study by Zoom meeting - about how the virus just moves from zone to zone.]
* SUNY colleges and universities will conduct exit testing for in-person students before sending them home for Thanksgiving. Students who go home for Thanksgiving will then be required to stay home and switch to remote learning for the rest of the semester (instead of returning to campus for the short period between Thanksgiving break and the winter holidays). We are asking private colleges to consider adopting similar plans.
[So basically, if you go home - you stay there, no returning. Which depending on your home/remote learning situation is either good news or bad news?]
* Buffalo Bills fans will have to wait to attend in-person games. Unfortunately, due to an uptick in COVID cases in Western New York, it would be dangerous to allow fans to attend games at Bills Stadium. [Uh, I didn't know that was even going to be possible. Hard to feel sorry for them - it's not like anyone can attend in-person games at the moment.]
* We are expanding testing in Port Chester in response to a recent uptick in cases. The Department of Health is coordinating with the Westchester County Department of Health and Open Door Family Medical Center to provide rapid testing at a new site. Rapid testing will be available at the Open Door medical clinic in Port Chester, NY on Saturday, November 7, from 9am - 2pm; Monday, November 9, from 10am - 6pm; and Tuesday, November 10, from 10am - 6pm. Residents must make an appointment—either online or by calling 914-995-7425. [NY has upped its testing initiative. I told you NY was test happy. It's out testing everyone else. Averaging between 100,000-190,000 tests a day. At some point I'm going to get tested, since if it were up to NY, everyone would be tested twice a week.]
5. Oooh...there's a cool interview with Grant Morrison (television scribe, comics writer, novelist, magician...)
What advice do you have for the magicians out there who have a story to tell and want to storm the reality studio?
GM: Tell a different story. Tell a fresh story that speaks to its times and the people around you. A story that offers possibilities, exit strategies, rather than apocalypse and ruin. I can’t see that there’s anything else…
In the Wonder Woman book I’m doing, for instance, I’ve actively avoided writing the boy hero story that’s so ubiquitous as to seem inescapable — the familiar story of the One, the champion, the Joseph Campbell monomyth thing that drives so many Hollywood movies and YA stories. We’ve seen it. The Lion King. The callow youth loses mom or dad, or his comfortable place in the tribe, and he has to fight his way back to save the kingdom from its corrupt old leader, before claiming the captive princess and becoming the new king and… ad infinitum. The Circle of Life if it only applied to boys. I thought, where is the mythic heroine’s story? In Ishtar Rising, Wilson talks about the myth of Inanna, and how she goes down into Hell and has to give up everything of herself to gain the wisdom and experience she can bring back to her tribe. Privileging the network rather than the sovereign individual.
And so, as I thought about the differences between the hero’s and the heroine’s journey, it gave me a bunch of different modes to work in. Finding ways to avoid telling the boy hero story again was quite liberating. It just gave me a bunch of new ideas, an interesting new way of telling stories that didn’t rely on the framework of the hero’s journey that Campbell talks about.
Playing the devil’s advocate here. Today there is a lot of fervor around identity, and there is one strong of thought that people can never truly understand what it is like walking in the shoes of others. Some may ask why a white man would seek to tell the story of a woman, from her perspective, instead of just sticking to what he knows, being a man.
How authentically real is that character or story, etc.?
GM: It’s important to air these feelings for debate. I must admit, with all respect, that I completely disagree with the idea that we cannot understand one another.
Firstly, there’s a major obvious problem about coming at things from this perspective — if fundamentally, we cannot truly know or have any meaningful opinion on what it feels like to be X, then we may as well stop listening to anything anyone else has to say about their personal experience, on the basis that it can only be irrelevant to our specific lives!
If I can never truly understand you without walking in your shoes and vice versa, what’s the point of listening or talking to anyone about our experience? What’s the point of writing stories, or protesting, or making art if experience cannot by its nature be communicated and understood by anyone who has not shared the experience of the artist, or the writer?
I think we all know it doesn’t really work that way in the real world. We don’t need to be a thing to have some understanding of how it operates. People can be great veterinarians without personally experiencing the day-to-day inner lives of dogs and cats. I can read Solzhenitsyn and shed empathic tears for the inmates of the Gulag without having to reprise their exact experience.
To think otherwise might be, I suspect, a symptom of narcissism painted into its inevitable corner, its private echo chamber – destructive, divided, atomized, individualistic to the point of self-abnegation – and indicative of late stage Osiris pathology.
And you know, we actually do understand one another in so many ways. We can imagine what it’s like to live someone else’s life –— or we can have our imaginations enflamed by well-told tales of other people’s lives and thrill to the ways they resonate exactly with our own lived experience. As a writer, I know this to be true.
We’ve been observing one another’s behavior and drawing conclusions since the dawn of humanity. People aren’t so complicated or new that the basic functions remain a mystery. All our plays, poems, songs and stories are a record of our attempts to understand ourselves and one another. The fact that Greek drama or Shakespeare still speaks to us is evidence that basic human nature has remained fairly consistent for thousands of years.
We figured one another out a long, long time ago.
And ultimately, I’ll say again, we are all the same organism. What we’re seeing is ring fingers fighting with thumbs, eyelashes screaming that eyebrows can never understand them! To point that out is probably an anathema in this current time of narcissistic inflation but it will be understood as a fact of nature in the end.
Maybe I’m wrong and we’re all fucked because humans are a kind of cancer-creature and our only purpose is to destroy each other and all other lifeforms on our planet… there’s still time for Agent Smith to be proved right!
I think everyone should have to imagine what it’s like to be someone else. We can all learn from one other but that means communicating; that means starting with the assumption we do have a common basis for genuine understanding even if our specific circumstances can never be repeated or totally understood by anyone other than ourselves. We all hurt, we all feel joy, we all get turned on, or scared. We all experience loss, and lack of self-worth and feel badly treated by the world at times.
And I understand why everyone should talk and tell stories from their own position you know but it’s also very useful – and a major human talent – to imagine how other people feel and consider how the world might look through their eyes.
And you do that by staying informed, listening to voices even when you disagree with them –—and by employing empathy and imagination to put yourself in their place as best as you’re able.
These are difficult times. I’m not a guru. I don’t know what to say to make it all better. There’s seven in a half billion people and it often seems they all fucking hate each other! Yet they all want everyone else to agree with their tiny, restricted, localized points of view. And they’ve all got a piece of ground to defend against perceived foes. I get it, but ultimately, we’re all one thing, one massive organism that’s going through difficult growing pains at the moment, so maybe we need to start thinking about what makes us alike, rather than different.
I hope so
GM: Well, this is part of the boiling process. Capitalist consumer culture has clearly reached its limits and we either advance to a more efficient, stable, less suicidal and aggressive engagement with other people and our environment or we go extinct as a species, taking all the whales and tigers and gorillas with us, before we even figured out how to talk to them and hear their stories! There are few options remaining.
The current questioning, the judgmental audit of where we are and how we got here, is a Horus thing. We can only hope we sublimate from here via Ma’at into something more nurturing and sustainable.
It is a hot moment. Temperatures are rising, Artic ice caps are melting at an alarming rate, and people may be unconsciously registering all that, and doing a horrible job at it. Instead of dealing with one’s own sense of panic, constriction, and fear it looks like many people are just running hot.
GM: I feel like every word we say is now a potential indictment, you know. The last malignant thrashing of the passing Aeon of Osiris. The echoes of the Inquisition, accusations of ‘wrongthink’, the return of Original Sin, the demonic glee taken in any stumble or falter from the approved path seems almost mediaeval. It’s terrifying. The potential for misunderstanding is almost infinite and its almost fated that we will struggle to abide by rules that grow ever more authoritarian and specific every day. Again, all that feels to me like the last ferocious attempts at asserting its fading power by the Osiris energy of the last 2000 years, now gone rotten and unsustainable but trying harder to keep everything and everybody under increasingly deranged levels of control in every area of our lives.
Writers and artists can find more reasons to stop their expression than ever before it seems. The voice of criticism and judgement is easier to find these days, just doom scroll through various social media sites and it’s all over the place.
GM: I regard it all as new input. As tough as it is, there’s an excitement. It’s making me think, it’s making me question myself and my assumptions, it’s making me write different things. I love ideas that challenge my thinking — even if I don’t agree with them in the end."
For more go HERE.
I kind of needed to read some of that - it inspires me to go back to my writing and weaving of different worlds.
I took walk to get groceries after work. Left immediately after - to catch the last shreds of daylight. Got home towards dusk or right after dusk. It was a lovely night. Lots of outdoor diners. And some of the restaurants have gotten rather creative. They have individual stalls with walls. So you sort of have your own private booth. Others split it up with about two tables per enclosure. And a lot of outdoor wine bars - one that spread itself down the sidewalk past the dental office. It was odd to see seating for a tiny wine bar in front of a dental office - they specialize in natural/organic wines (aren't all wines natural and organic? Maybe not?). I picked up a card from them. I'm thinking of trying for deliveries.
They look kind of fun. But I've no interest in trying any of them. Because it doesn't feel safe. People are sitting outside at tables, without masks near other people. And people walking by.
I told mother over the phone about the obstacle course on the way to and from the grocery store. She begged me to stop - I was tiring her out.
2. This amused me. Although I didn't witness it myself - because I'm not really on Twitter or Tumblr for that matter, and my social media friends aren't into Supernatural that much at the moment, if at all. But I do remember the height of the fandom in 2012 - I watched Supernatural in 2012. I stopped in 2015 or thereabouts.
Supernatural Took Over the Internet Last Night.
Also this...
my sense of time has been so thoroughly broken that when i saw tweets about supernatural take over my timeline a real part of me was like “ah, now it’s 2012. so how a year works is you have january, february, 80 years of march, halloween, 800 years of election, and then 2012” - dylan morrison
3. Speaking of the never-ending election from hell...
A social media friend on FB compared watching American Politics to Test Cricket. While others, are saying okay Tuesday Part 3.
Meanwhile, somewhere in there, Russia felt ignored and decided to tease that Vladmir Putin was going to step-down (allegedly he has Parkinson's Disease), but the Kremlin immediately denied it. (That's 2020 for you - it tricks you into thinking you are getting the carrot or getting to kick the football, then yanks it out from under you at the last moment.) [I personally think someone hacked them - but it was bad timing and fell under the radar - due to the Supernatural fandom, the uptick in COVID cases in the US - I was wrong apparently, we had 120,000 new cases yesterday, and the election from hell (which won't end).
But...hope springs eternal.
I'm watching the NY Times Live Election Tracker to see what's going on.
Right now, we're all waiting on the final counts of Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina. According to the tracker these scenarios guarantee a win for Biden:
Pennsylvania
Nevada and Arizona
North Carolina, Nevada and Arizona
Georgia and Nevada
Georgia and Arizona
Georgia alone - they are tied.
So basically, if he gets Pennsylvania, and if he keeps Arizona and gets another state, he wins. Or if he gets Georgia and another State he wins.
Or if he gets Nevada and another state he wins. Or if he gets North Carolina and another state he wins.
Electoral College - such fun. Everyone wants to do away with it - and give the Midwest far less power than it currently has, not to mention all the rural areas in the US.
Mother thought there would be a winner by today. I don't. I know there are absentee mail-in ballots still hanging out there. And many won't come in until November 12.
We'll be lucky if we know the winner by next week.
I'm still optimistic. Or trying to be.
4. Our continuing, if somewhat sporadic coverage (because I get tired of it every once and a while) of New York vs. the Corona Virus
*. The positivity rate in the micro-cluster focus areas was 3.16 percent yesterday. The statewide positivity rate excluding these areas was 1.84 percent. Of the 160,705 tests reported yesterday, 3,209, or 1.99 percent, were positive. Total hospitalizations were at 1,321. Sadly we lost 18 New Yorkers to the virus.
[See #1 above about how the microclusters moved. We were joking about this in this week's Bible Study by Zoom meeting - about how the virus just moves from zone to zone.]
* SUNY colleges and universities will conduct exit testing for in-person students before sending them home for Thanksgiving. Students who go home for Thanksgiving will then be required to stay home and switch to remote learning for the rest of the semester (instead of returning to campus for the short period between Thanksgiving break and the winter holidays). We are asking private colleges to consider adopting similar plans.
[So basically, if you go home - you stay there, no returning. Which depending on your home/remote learning situation is either good news or bad news?]
* Buffalo Bills fans will have to wait to attend in-person games. Unfortunately, due to an uptick in COVID cases in Western New York, it would be dangerous to allow fans to attend games at Bills Stadium. [Uh, I didn't know that was even going to be possible. Hard to feel sorry for them - it's not like anyone can attend in-person games at the moment.]
* We are expanding testing in Port Chester in response to a recent uptick in cases. The Department of Health is coordinating with the Westchester County Department of Health and Open Door Family Medical Center to provide rapid testing at a new site. Rapid testing will be available at the Open Door medical clinic in Port Chester, NY on Saturday, November 7, from 9am - 2pm; Monday, November 9, from 10am - 6pm; and Tuesday, November 10, from 10am - 6pm. Residents must make an appointment—either online or by calling 914-995-7425. [NY has upped its testing initiative. I told you NY was test happy. It's out testing everyone else. Averaging between 100,000-190,000 tests a day. At some point I'm going to get tested, since if it were up to NY, everyone would be tested twice a week.]
5. Oooh...there's a cool interview with Grant Morrison (television scribe, comics writer, novelist, magician...)
What advice do you have for the magicians out there who have a story to tell and want to storm the reality studio?
GM: Tell a different story. Tell a fresh story that speaks to its times and the people around you. A story that offers possibilities, exit strategies, rather than apocalypse and ruin. I can’t see that there’s anything else…
In the Wonder Woman book I’m doing, for instance, I’ve actively avoided writing the boy hero story that’s so ubiquitous as to seem inescapable — the familiar story of the One, the champion, the Joseph Campbell monomyth thing that drives so many Hollywood movies and YA stories. We’ve seen it. The Lion King. The callow youth loses mom or dad, or his comfortable place in the tribe, and he has to fight his way back to save the kingdom from its corrupt old leader, before claiming the captive princess and becoming the new king and… ad infinitum. The Circle of Life if it only applied to boys. I thought, where is the mythic heroine’s story? In Ishtar Rising, Wilson talks about the myth of Inanna, and how she goes down into Hell and has to give up everything of herself to gain the wisdom and experience she can bring back to her tribe. Privileging the network rather than the sovereign individual.
And so, as I thought about the differences between the hero’s and the heroine’s journey, it gave me a bunch of different modes to work in. Finding ways to avoid telling the boy hero story again was quite liberating. It just gave me a bunch of new ideas, an interesting new way of telling stories that didn’t rely on the framework of the hero’s journey that Campbell talks about.
Playing the devil’s advocate here. Today there is a lot of fervor around identity, and there is one strong of thought that people can never truly understand what it is like walking in the shoes of others. Some may ask why a white man would seek to tell the story of a woman, from her perspective, instead of just sticking to what he knows, being a man.
How authentically real is that character or story, etc.?
GM: It’s important to air these feelings for debate. I must admit, with all respect, that I completely disagree with the idea that we cannot understand one another.
Firstly, there’s a major obvious problem about coming at things from this perspective — if fundamentally, we cannot truly know or have any meaningful opinion on what it feels like to be X, then we may as well stop listening to anything anyone else has to say about their personal experience, on the basis that it can only be irrelevant to our specific lives!
If I can never truly understand you without walking in your shoes and vice versa, what’s the point of listening or talking to anyone about our experience? What’s the point of writing stories, or protesting, or making art if experience cannot by its nature be communicated and understood by anyone who has not shared the experience of the artist, or the writer?
I think we all know it doesn’t really work that way in the real world. We don’t need to be a thing to have some understanding of how it operates. People can be great veterinarians without personally experiencing the day-to-day inner lives of dogs and cats. I can read Solzhenitsyn and shed empathic tears for the inmates of the Gulag without having to reprise their exact experience.
To think otherwise might be, I suspect, a symptom of narcissism painted into its inevitable corner, its private echo chamber – destructive, divided, atomized, individualistic to the point of self-abnegation – and indicative of late stage Osiris pathology.
And you know, we actually do understand one another in so many ways. We can imagine what it’s like to live someone else’s life –— or we can have our imaginations enflamed by well-told tales of other people’s lives and thrill to the ways they resonate exactly with our own lived experience. As a writer, I know this to be true.
We’ve been observing one another’s behavior and drawing conclusions since the dawn of humanity. People aren’t so complicated or new that the basic functions remain a mystery. All our plays, poems, songs and stories are a record of our attempts to understand ourselves and one another. The fact that Greek drama or Shakespeare still speaks to us is evidence that basic human nature has remained fairly consistent for thousands of years.
We figured one another out a long, long time ago.
And ultimately, I’ll say again, we are all the same organism. What we’re seeing is ring fingers fighting with thumbs, eyelashes screaming that eyebrows can never understand them! To point that out is probably an anathema in this current time of narcissistic inflation but it will be understood as a fact of nature in the end.
Maybe I’m wrong and we’re all fucked because humans are a kind of cancer-creature and our only purpose is to destroy each other and all other lifeforms on our planet… there’s still time for Agent Smith to be proved right!
I think everyone should have to imagine what it’s like to be someone else. We can all learn from one other but that means communicating; that means starting with the assumption we do have a common basis for genuine understanding even if our specific circumstances can never be repeated or totally understood by anyone other than ourselves. We all hurt, we all feel joy, we all get turned on, or scared. We all experience loss, and lack of self-worth and feel badly treated by the world at times.
And I understand why everyone should talk and tell stories from their own position you know but it’s also very useful – and a major human talent – to imagine how other people feel and consider how the world might look through their eyes.
And you do that by staying informed, listening to voices even when you disagree with them –—and by employing empathy and imagination to put yourself in their place as best as you’re able.
These are difficult times. I’m not a guru. I don’t know what to say to make it all better. There’s seven in a half billion people and it often seems they all fucking hate each other! Yet they all want everyone else to agree with their tiny, restricted, localized points of view. And they’ve all got a piece of ground to defend against perceived foes. I get it, but ultimately, we’re all one thing, one massive organism that’s going through difficult growing pains at the moment, so maybe we need to start thinking about what makes us alike, rather than different.
I hope so
GM: Well, this is part of the boiling process. Capitalist consumer culture has clearly reached its limits and we either advance to a more efficient, stable, less suicidal and aggressive engagement with other people and our environment or we go extinct as a species, taking all the whales and tigers and gorillas with us, before we even figured out how to talk to them and hear their stories! There are few options remaining.
The current questioning, the judgmental audit of where we are and how we got here, is a Horus thing. We can only hope we sublimate from here via Ma’at into something more nurturing and sustainable.
It is a hot moment. Temperatures are rising, Artic ice caps are melting at an alarming rate, and people may be unconsciously registering all that, and doing a horrible job at it. Instead of dealing with one’s own sense of panic, constriction, and fear it looks like many people are just running hot.
GM: I feel like every word we say is now a potential indictment, you know. The last malignant thrashing of the passing Aeon of Osiris. The echoes of the Inquisition, accusations of ‘wrongthink’, the return of Original Sin, the demonic glee taken in any stumble or falter from the approved path seems almost mediaeval. It’s terrifying. The potential for misunderstanding is almost infinite and its almost fated that we will struggle to abide by rules that grow ever more authoritarian and specific every day. Again, all that feels to me like the last ferocious attempts at asserting its fading power by the Osiris energy of the last 2000 years, now gone rotten and unsustainable but trying harder to keep everything and everybody under increasingly deranged levels of control in every area of our lives.
Writers and artists can find more reasons to stop their expression than ever before it seems. The voice of criticism and judgement is easier to find these days, just doom scroll through various social media sites and it’s all over the place.
GM: I regard it all as new input. As tough as it is, there’s an excitement. It’s making me think, it’s making me question myself and my assumptions, it’s making me write different things. I love ideas that challenge my thinking — even if I don’t agree with them in the end."
For more go HERE.
I kind of needed to read some of that - it inspires me to go back to my writing and weaving of different worlds.
no subject
Date: 2020-11-08 01:40 am (UTC)