Asides

This is not about control…

"College Newspaper Editor Forced to Resign After Mask Op-Ed" via Inside Higher Ed

The editor, being a person existing in the world and, presumably, a student who has attended class in previous instances, understood that there are various restrictions on what they can and can’t do with their own body in a classroom. The assumption can be made that the student has previously been amenable to their previous controls (such as wearing clothes, not wearing headphones, wearing shoes, not wearing a beer-straw-hat) without incident.

This is about masks.

General nonsense #1

Who am I kidding? It’s certainly not the first.

In an effort to not take space in social media where so many people are sharing important information, I decided to put my weirdness here in a series of asides for now (probably forever). I don’t want to seem tone deaf in a sea of voices for change.

If you want to help bring about that change (and if you don’t feel free to fuck right off) here is a list of black-owned independent bookstores compiled over at Lit Hub (thanks to my great mentor, Sara, for the hat tip) and consider donating to one of the many Bail Funds in your area or the National Bail Fund network. Here is also a handy list of organizations that support black trans people (thanks Saher), please give if you can.

Amplify non-white, non-cis, non-het voices and educate yourself.

Now, on to the nonsense…

So I have this Solitaire program on my PC that I bought ages ago, years and years. It’s good for a quick game if I’m downloading a large file or listening to a podcast. The thing is that when you get to the end of a game you can’t win, the bottom bar will turn bright blue and read “You are stuck.” That’s fair, because I am stuck. The problem is that my lizard brain reads that as “You suck.” So, with each game of Forty Thieves that I lose, which is most, I get a, mistakenly, kick to the affirmation glands.

I fumbled around the options for this game, and it has a myriad of options and while I could not find a way to customize the “stuck” message, I did find a way to upload my own card back image:

I lost this game too, btw.

That should even things out…until I feel like the card is talking to me, which, in all honesty, I probably should every now and then anyway.

This is not the post I meant to post

Originally, since I have much other writing that needs my attention right now, I was going to post a short story that I’d written back in 2015 as part of a final project in a literature course. I’d found it today while searching my cloud storage for something else and thought it would be a good way for me to keep the consistency going without having to come up with another critical take on academia or a meme waterfall of the other academia, but then I re-read it.

And I kinda like it.

I think it may have some rough patches and it’s under 2000 words, but I was pretty proud of it and I may want to do something else with it. So, you don’t get to see it. Not yet anyway. Perhaps I’ll work on it and its companions (there are at least three other stories and pitches for more) over the summer. Maybe then I’ll start posting it here.

Until then, mine!