I was trying to figure out how to scrape data from YouTube for my dissertation & then I remembered I have MaxQDA which will do it for me & now I’m looking @ 410 comments for 1 video that were downloaded automatically in less than a minute & it’s so beautiful I might cry.

Want to read: The Summoner by Gail Z. Martin 📚

🔖 Read:

Want to read: The Once and Future Geek by Mari Mancusi 📚

Want to read: Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky by Kwame Mbalia 📚

Look, I’m never not going to have a crush on Wil Wheaton, okay? (This message brought to you by his GoodReads review of John Scalzi’s The Collapsing Empire.)

Want to read: The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi 📚

Want to read: Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty 📚

🎵 Listened to The Hazards of Love by The Decemberists.

I “picked this up,” to the extent that one can digitally do such a thing via a streaming service, because it is the source of the game Illimat. Illimat was conceived as a device for a photoshoot related to the album, and the Luminary cards - colorful, narrative-ish Tarot-sized cards - in the game are drawn from the story of the album. I read the summary on Wikipedia before listening, and flipped back and forth between tabs with my work in them and the lyrics at Genius to make sure I was following everything.

After reading the summary, I was like, yeah, this is my kind of narrative. Fairy story elements, creepy goth kinda stuff (The Rake is hella goth, y’all), sad love and such. As I was listening, the first thing that occurred to me was that this reminded me of Whisper House, the first thing Duncan Sheik released in the wake of Spring Awakening. It, too, is a creepy and old-fashioned feeling concept album that was eventually staged as a musical. It was released in January 2009, a couple of months before The Hazards of Love. And it has ghosts in it.

It’s weird listening to these things 11 years after their release, especially because I first listened to Whisper House as soon as it was released. I’m sure as I ruminate on them more, I’ll come up with some thoughts about the timing of their release and how it relates to my own life experience in early 2009, when I was about to leave teaching behind to go to library school, just after the inspiring inauguration day for President Obama, which happened on the day after we had a snowstorm here and the world felt quiet and peaceful and full of promise.

And here were these two albums, like a warning, almost.

the prettiest whistles won’t wrestle the thistles undone

from The Hazards of Love and

When everything is done
and everything is said
Life is naught but pain

from Whisper House.

Now that I’ve depressed you thoroughly, back to my thoughts about The Hazards of Love, which actually isn’t similar to Whisper House at all, I just have only very limited experience with concept albums and thus they all remind me of each other. (But I’m about to go listen to a bunch more because they really are very the kind of thing I like.)

Anyway. In summary, I liked it, but it’s not a thing I’m going to listen to over and over again (which I did, in 2009, with Whisper House). I don’t know from music if it’s not showtunes, so I can’t tell you about the sound, you know, or how it affected me. And I don’t care about the depth of the story, I care about the flavor, which is very much my speed.

So here’s what I can tell you, then:

  1. I loved Shara Nova as the Forest Queen, and will be checking out My Brightest Diamond.
  2. The fact that I’m a parent has changed my relationship somewhat from my previous loving creepy ghost children. Now I love creepy ghost children but they also make me deeply sad.
  3. And, following on that, I want every story of a pregnant person and their lover to end happily, with them all living in a beautiful home surrounded by family that loves and cherishes them, going on picnics and having family adventures and… I guess what we can all take away from this is…

Parenthood has ruined me for culture.

Happens to most parents, I think.

Anyway, I like The Hazards of Love, and I love Illimat.

Want to read: Pride and Prometheus by John Kessel 📚

🎲 Played Illimat yesterday. Gorgeous and fun. I want to play it all the time now. Also, it’s got me digging deeper into the Decemberists’ oeuvre.

Revelation that should have been obvious to me before now: all of life is laundry & dishes & housecleaning, doing the same stuff over and over, getting (you hope) incrementally better at it over time, getting overwhelmed and starting over, remembering what you’ve already learned.

🔖 Read:

🔖 Read:

M just now: Here you go, Daddy, I have some secret battle plans for you from Princess Leia.
Me: ⚰️💀🥀

The scene of tonight’s New Moon tarot reading, my first with the Wayhome Tarot. I love all of my decks, but this is the most intuitive by far. This spread is spot on with the energy I’ve been feeling the past few days. Also, yeah, I kind of summoned the Empress with pink roses and rose quartz, what of it?

Co-Star pulls no punches.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is (90s gothic) noblebright while Angel is (pretty widely accepted as) hopepunk. Discuss?

📽️ Watched Star Wars: The Clone Wars.

The criticisms of this are really interesting. I definitely would have been unimpressed with it as a theatrical release, but I think it works fine as a small screen, feature-length pilot for a TV show. One thing I’ll say for all the prequels and related media, I do like seeing Yoda get more screen time.

Anakin is almost likable here; Ahsoka is my kind of precocious and Ventress is a fun, if confusing, villain. It’s definitely heavy on combat and a bit dark for what seems to be its target audience, but that’s true of Attack of the Clones & Revenge of the Sith, too.

W: Do you dare to eat a peach?
Me: I would sit on its throne.

A green smoothie in a narrow-mouthed 32 oz Mason jar with a large pink straw

One of my plans for 2020 is that if something is easy & helpful (as opposed to harmful), I do it. To wit, today is the 1st day of smoothies for lunch.

This is a peanut butter and jelly smoothie from PCOS Diva’s Winter Meal Plan. I buy her smoothie bundle (she also has a vegan version) and add power reds. (No affiliate links, just products I love.) This is basically the only way I’ll consume vegetables, so I thought, why not do it for breakfast AND lunch?

Next step: reusable milkshake straws.

I’ve re-started The Starless Sea once, decided to re-start again but didn’t, once, and am now in the process of deciding whether to actually re-start it again or not. 📚

It’s not that I don’t like it. I love it.

The problem is a problem I’ve had since my son’s birth: I live life in little fragments. So I tried reading a chapter/section before going to bed each night. But The Starless Sea alternates between a main narrative and vignettes/stories that are sort of a story-within-a-story situation. And when I read one a night, I’m getting either a main story chapter, or a vignette. And then when I pick up the next night I’m getting the other one. And when I get to a new main story chapter, I can’t really remember where I am in the story.

This isn’t Erin Morgenstern’s fault. Erin Morgenstern doesn’t write books that are meant to be consumed in tiny bites over the course of days and days. Nor does she write books that are to be binged, wolfed down. Her books are the sort of thing that you need a long stretch of time to get into, but you also need to savor. Her books are like a many course meal. You don’t want to move through it quickly, but you don’t want to spread it out over days. You want to enjoy each piece of it and how the whole thing works together. You don’t want to get to the third course and be unable to remember what the first course was.

I’m experimenting with extended metaphor here. I’m not 100% satisfied with how it’s turning out.

Her books are kind of like a really excellent narrative video game. You wouldn’t want to play it 5 minutes at a time, day after day. You wouldn’t want to play a little and then wait a month to play more (this is how I play video games lately, btw, and it is very unsatisfying). You wouldn’t want to play it and rush through so fast you have no idea what’s going on. You would want to spend 40 - 100 hours on it over the course of a few weeks, in long stretches of 4 - 8 hours (with bathroom and eating breaks, because you’re not about denying your bodily needs, even for video games).

Anyway. The first re-read, I stayed up really late and got through maybe the first 50 pages or so. Lately, I’ve been too sleepy to do that. But I think I’m going to go back to the beginning and start again. And then if I get annoyed because the first 100 pages are too familiar or whatever, I’ll find either where I left off, or where things started to get confusing, and pick up there.

🔖 Read If Your Wellness Isn’t Intersectional Then You’re Not “Well.” You’re Racist. by Michelle Pellizon

First, hard agree. Second, I really appreciate that Michelle Pellizon has included resources to explore and organizations/businesses to support here.

💻 Completed MDN’s What’s in the head? Metadata in HTML, HTML text fundamentals, and Test your skills: HTML text basics.

💻 Completed Mozilla Developer Network’s Getting started with HTML