HELLO! Happy Easter. It's a bit belated, but I'm still saying it in the spirit of the holiday. I hope you all got great eggs, or egg-equivalents.
This post could just be a list of my irritations lately. Number one on that list is the fact that my Hotmail account recently 'upgraded' me to Outlook, and a feature of my new inbox is apparently that it will only let me open emails
sometimes. Sometimes if I right-click on an email first, that helps. Sometimes going to the page to create a new email, and then back again helps. Sometimes it just lets me open my emails. Sometimes NOTHING helps. I have sent Microsoft a bit of 'feedback' about this feature. They assured me that they can't get back to every complaint and situation personally. So I am probably on my own with it. To be honest though, all they could probably do is send me an email, which I couldn't open. So the annoyance continues.
I'm going to try not to let this post become just a list of irritations though.
My birthday on Wednesday went pretty well, all things considered. Mum and I got to Leeds, we had a pretty nice day walking around, seeing all the shops I haven't seen in a few months at least. I put my name down for that jewellery making course again. We had a nice lunch and I bought myself some things. Then that evening we went out for a meal at a local restaurant we haven't been to for years, which has improved quite a lot since we last went. I had a Bolognese pizza, which I assumed would be a pizza with like mince and tomato topping. It turned out to be a pizza smothered in Bolognese sauce, to the point where you couldn't see the cheese anymore. It was delicious though. The only hiccup came when my sister called, needing mum to immediately give her some money for - reasons. Mum hadn't mentioned, as usual, that we were even going out for a meal, so she had to reveal that while having the argument, and setting a (pretty short) amount of time we needed to be back from the meal by. But mum's car had also ended up having some sort of wheel problem that caused it to start glowing red on the five minute drive from our house to the restaurant, so in the end we decided to leave the car where it was, tell my sister we'd transfer some money when we got home rather than going up to her house, and walk home in the light snow. It was quite pleasant and my sister didn't particularly blow up at not having been invited anywhere with us. She might be coming for Easter dinner tomorrow though, so we'll see if she says anything then.
And since then the weather seems to have not been as bad. I'm putting that down to the glory of my birthday. No-one can prove differently.
The Mass Effect fandom is still proving unsatisfying. That's an irritation. It's like every pairing I'm genuinely interested in has either no or little fic with male Shepard, but at least some or quite a lot of fic with female Shepard. IT'S LIKE THEY TOOK THE FIC I WANTED AND PUT IT BEHIND A GLASS WINDOW. But it's fine. In more my frustrated moments I think uncharitable things about the situation - but I know it's more likely that, like I said, the people who would normally write slash are writing fem!Shepard. Or maybe the voice acting of fem!Shepard is just a lot better and more suggestive or something than male Shepard. I would write mal!Shepard, but that make him sound evil. ManShep. I think that's the preferred fan name. Some people though, they write about their pairings and say their OTP is "femShepard/whoever". It's not even like it's "Shepard/whoever, but my Shepard is femShepard". IT'S LIKE THEY LITERALLY THINK A PAIRING IS MORE SHIPPY WHEN ONE OF THE PAIRING IS FEMALE RATHER THAN MALE. Even though the character is supposed to be essentially the same whether you play them male or female. Even though other characters treat you pretty much the same, as far as I know, whether you're male or female. Even though the game is set in a fictional future where gender is supposed to matter less. Or is vague enough that you can decide how much gender matters. It's fine though. It's fine.
Also, there are obviously quite a lot of men in the fandom, even on the kinkmeme. It's hard to tell when everyone's anonymous, and I really don't want to get into a mindset of "that's a male sort of prompt" or "no woman would want THAT". But there was a least one prompt where someone insisted that Shepard's love interest should be female no matter what, because reading about guys might be great for 'you ladies', but wasn't for them. Also there seems to be a lot of prompts about "[one of the villains] takes all of the female members of the crew hostage and uses mind control to turn them into willing sex slaves". In that way that doesn't sound like they're interested in said female crew members' perspectives on the events/ Also, any prompt for femslash that includes the phrase 'explore each other's bodies' I automatically assume is from a straight guy, and I also decide to never read it. And it's fine and all, and gender equality and safe open spaces on the internet. But. Blagh.
Also the other day I read an analysis of Labyrinth, probably one of my favourite films, that claimed it was obviously
a manual for creating a slave through mind control (Warning: that article has some probably EXTREMELY triggering material in it, also a bunch of moving gifs in the background that are probably an epilepsy risk). Which disturbed me quite a bit for a few days, partly because it's always weird when someone puts a much darker spin on a kid's films you like, and partly because mind-controlling someone through traumatising them is both horrific, and you know, a thing people actually pretty much do. But I went back to the person's Tumblr a few days later, actually to see if they were male or female since there was something off-putting about the tone of the article (they're female), and...it became clear exactly HOW MUCH they believed in the Illuminati, and 'a shadowy malevolent organisation controlling popular media'. So yeah. That kind of put it into perspective. Not that I
don't think there's a shadowy malevolent organisation controlling popular media. I just think they're called 'cunts'.
Also, today cakesy mentioned Love Shack by the B52s on Twitter, and it reminded me yet again of another Love Shack song that I've been trying to track down for years, but seems to be extremely elusive, even to Google. By sheer force of will and googling every lyric I could remember, I found
this page, which has the exact lyrics of the song I am thinking of. That is the song. But it claims it's by 'X', which may not be a real band, and if it is Youtube and Amazon haven't heard of it. All that comes up in the B52s. My long and possibly fruitless quest continues.
But on the other hand, I have jellybeans. Which always makes me happier. And I have an Easter egg. And some of the fic in the Mass Effect fandom is great. And a bunch of the old Nick Cave CDs I used to own or at least have access to and finally got around to buying this week have arrived so I HAVE THEM. And the sun was out for at least a couple of hours today. OH, and I was flipping through channels today and randomly found a new series of Moonshiners! I love Moonshiners. I don't know why, but it always seems to make me smile. Today I found out where the phrase 'bootlegging' comes from. I wish they would put it on primetime once a week, or bring it out on DVD so I could watch it at my leisure, instead of all in a clump on a documentary channel when I'm not really ready for it or I know my dad will want the TV after an hour or so. But still, Moonshiners! J'adore it. So it's not all been bad.
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