rynling | Entries tagged with my laifu

Tulip is taking a break from Lordran while I go to Toronto.

I was just saying to a friend on Twitter that Dark Souls has become the education about European art history that I always wanted. The architecture is so beautiful that I've been looking up the real-world references, and I've been learning a lot.

I have a fairly solid education in East Asian art history, and I love Japanese architecture so much it's unreal. What's cool about architecture in Japan is that, like... I'm not sure how to put this. So you know how, when you go to like a museum or a botanical garden, and they have a Japanese teahouse or something, they'll have cordons around it so that no one touches it? In Japan, it's the exact opposite. They'll be like, "This is the oldest and largest extant wooden building in the world, and it's built without a single metal nail, and it's still in active use, so come on and put your hands and feet all over it, also would you like to sit down on this thousand-year-old veranda and have some tea." The same thing goes for Japanese ceramics. You'll be casually having tea with someone, and they'll just randomly be like, "Oh yeah, that cup is four hundred years old." And the same goes for more recent architecture, where there will be a beautiful Victorian-style brick building from the Meiji period housing a café where you can get beer and pancakes.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that art history is more interesting if it's something you can touch for yourself. And for me, Dark Souls is exactly that sort of experience.

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And that’s how I learned that “Let’s Go Brandon” has become a rallying cry for QAnon rejects.

The planters my husband picked out are lovely, by the way. I’ll try to post a photo later.

The Uncanny, Fluorescent World of the Costco Influencer
https://jezebel.com/the-uncanny-fluorescent-world-of-the-costco-influencer-1846775539

They are unlike almost any genre of Instagram account in that browsing them feels more or less exactly like the experience they represent, a literal depiction of shopping at Costco’s warehouse store with its mountains of product and fluorescent lights. The conventions of the influencer universe, with its flattering camera angles and fuzzy promises, don’t exist in this world. The Costco lifestyle is simple. It’s about shopping at Costco, a practice best suited to Americans with basements and large garages in which to store their indiscriminating hauls. The influencers who post every week from the bulk discount store must have underground bunkers for all that they buy.

This is a long and fascinating essay, and the main take-away point is that it can be very difficult to distinguish between an Instagram normie whose account just happened to get big and a paid corporate puppet account. The last paragraph expresses this point in the most powerful and eloquent way possible.

True story: Now that we have a house, my husband's family has been bugging him on WhatsApp to get a Costco card. In their eyes, Costco is the epitome of The American Dream. My husband finally caved in, and we made our first visit to a Costco across the river in Cherry Hill, New Jersey.

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Now that I think about it, it was almost exactly twenty years ago that I got kicked out of school and kicked out of my family for being gay. After periods of living in shelters and living in my car, and after moving from apartment to apartment and city to city every few years, it’s nice to have a house. It’s also nice to get paid to translate and teach queer genre fiction at an Ivy League school.

It took a while, but damn. Fuck the haters and live your best life.

We’re in the new townhouse in South Philly! The place is beautiful, and the neighbors on our street are very kind. The neighborhood itself is exactly what most people probably think of when they think of Philadelphia. You could blindfold someone and put them in the back of a van for ten hours before dropping them off here; and, as soon as you uncovered their eyes, they’d be like, “Why did you take me to Philadelphia.” I’m still trying to figure out how to describe South Philly. It’s distinctive. I never imagined that I’d live in a place like this, but here we are.

The townhouse has two floors and an unironically nice basement, and it’s going to take time to unpack everything. I kept thinking that I would use the move as an opportunity to get rid of a lot of books, but it turns out that everything sparks joy. I guess I’ll just have to resign myself to having impeccable taste.

Rents Are Roaring Back in New York City
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/07/nyregion/nyc-rent-surge.html

Ms. Fried, 27, knew that a pandemic rebound was driving up housing costs and expected her rent would increase when her lease ended at the end of March. But when she learned what she would have to pay, she was floored.

“When I got home and opened that letter, saw an $800 increase, I had an absolute breakdown because I absolutely cannot afford that,” she said. She is moving out.

Philadelphia is nowhere near as expensive as New York (yet), but this is exactly what happened to me. I paid a reasonable amount of rent for the size, condition, and location of my apartment when I moved to Philadelphia at the beginning of the pandemic, and then the landlord raised the rent by almost $700 on the lease renewal agreement earlier this year.

I honestly never wanted to buy a house, but I can't afford to rent anymore. I understand that a house comes with its own set of expenses, but I don't know what else to do. And it's wild, because I don't have any furniture. I guess that's just more room for plants?

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Now that I’m a professor, I understand that grading is a shitty and thankless task, and that some students will walk all over you if you let them. Still, if you can make someone’s life easier by giving them a deadline extension, why not just do it? Especially if you’re not going to grade their work immediately (which I most definitely am not).

I mean honestly. Even if a student is balls-out lying about a death in the family so that they can take a break from school, what’s the harm in giving them a chance to rest before they start the assignment? If nothing else, it’s infinitely preferable that they take their time and turn in good work than me having to read an insane Adderall paper emailed along with an unintelligible cover letter at 3am. Not that I don’t appreciate those papers as the absurdist comedies they are, but they’re a bitch to grade.

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Anyway, this is the sort of feedback I want to be able to give my students. I want them to know they are beautiful and perfect, but I also want to give them concrete advice about how to take their work to the next level if that’s what they’re interested in.

To give a point of comparison, $1300 is the rent I paid on a shitty awful garbage slumlord apartment in West Philadelphia during my first year of grad school, and that apartment was a disaster zone.

During my last year in Atlanta, I was paying $760 a month for a beautiful new industrial-chic apartment in a renovated cotton mill next to a gorgeous old historic cemetery (it's actually the building that housed the team headquarters in the reboot of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy). That apartment was posh as fuck, so I thought a $1300 apartment in Philadelphia was going to be fancy. Like the Jeffersons, I was moving on up. I couldn't really afford the rent on my graduate student stipend, but I figured a nice apartment was worth cutting corners elsewhere.

Damn was I surprised when I moved in and saw the apartment in person for the first time. I still have nightmares about that place.

And don't ask me about my rent in DC. I lived in a subsidized, rent-controlled building, and you still don't want to know how much it was. Every day I took a long walk around my neighborhood and cried because it was so beautiful, and every night I checked my bank account and cried some more. There was a lot of crying. I couldn't afford living there, but there was literally nowhere else to live. I considered moving to Baltimore, but the commute would have killed me.

Part of me feels guilty about having nice things, especially since the only reason I can have nice things is because a global pandemic depressed the urban housing market, but fuck it. Bitches gotta live somewhere.

We bought a townhouse in South Philadelphia yesterday afternoon.

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Basically, if you can secure a reasonable down payment and take out a thirty-year mortgage, you can buy a brand-new, gorgeous townhouse kitted out with brand-new, gorgeous appliances for a price that amounts to about $1300 a month including property taxes. But only if – and this is the important part – you’re okay with living in a mixed-race neighborhood. LMFAO. That sort of prejudice is wild to me, but I guess it’s fitting that assholes have to pay a racism tax on home ownership.

There are a ton of houses like this in the area without much competition, so we looked at a dozen and just sort of picked the one we liked. If we don’t get this one, we’ll get another one. I have a feeling that South Philly is going to be like the mixed-race Adams Morgan neighborhood in DC, which used to be considered sketchy but is now where the Obamas live. I had a friend at GMU who bought a small townhouse in Adams Morgan and was able to retire early after selling it for almost $2 million, and it would be cool if we could do something similar. For the time being, I’m just looking forward to the prospect of getting out of our garbage apartment. And maybe growing some delicious fucking tomatoes in my new backyard to celebrate.

We looked at a few more places this afternoon.

The biggest surprise of the day was when we walked in on a nest of foxes.

We did not get that house. Sadly we were outbid.

This person gets it.

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I sort of hate myself for saying this, but I think it's time to leave West Philadelphia for the suburbs.

The problem with the suburbs is that the housing market is even crazier out there than it is in the city. Like, you'll look at the seller disclosure document for a small three-bedroom house, and you'll see that they bought the house for $90k in 2010. They're now asking for $350k, and if you don't bid at least 5% above the asking price within the first day of the house going on the market, it's gone.

It's insane, and I don't have the temperament (or the money) to deal with it. Even my husband, who is generally very chill, is affected. But the neighborhood we currently live in is gentrifying and rent is going way up, even if we negotiate the lease. I wish everything didn't cost so much, but what can you do.

This is yet another reason why I wish I hadn't stayed in academia. The way academia works is that maybe five to ten jobs you qualify for open every year, and you don't have a choice who hires you. The chances are that you won't get hired, actually, so you have to go from one-year position to one-year position until you are hired (or you give up). Because you'll generally be moving across one continent or another every nine months, you can't buy a house. And of course that's assuming you have money to buy a house in the first place, which you more than likely don't after living below the poverty line during seven years of grad school. If I had just gotten my PhD and quit academia to become a full-time professional translator back in 2013, then I could be selling a $90k house for $350k right now.

I mean, damn. I didn't even need to be a translator. I should have gone into real estate.

I try not to write about my personal life on this blog, mainly because most things have been garbage most of the time. One day I will be able to look back and laugh, but right now I just want to play video games.

Although maybe it's worth mentioning that I started looking at houses? There's no real reason, except that I'm getting tired of my landlord's bullshit and would like to have an outside garden maybe.

Anyway, I started looking at houses, and I have seen some shit. I thought apartment hunting in Philadelphia was bad, but I didn't know what "bad" was. I can't believe people live like this. Goddamn.

So you know all those movies where a couple moves into what is obviously a haunted house? And then all sorts of creepy shit starts happening, but they're like, We're just going to deal with this? And then maybe a kid or a pet dies but they still don't leave?

I get it now. I totally get it. If you can find a decent house at a reasonable price, I think you just sort of have to make your peace with the fact that it's probably filled with murder ghosts.

A new set of Pokémon games is being released today, which means that my corner of the internet is filled with people talking about how bad the games are, and how bad Nintendo is, and how it’s always morally correct to pirate Nintendo games.

And they’re right. Nintendo is a horrible corporation. It’s true and people should say it. I personally hate Nintendo and have made my share of memes about pirating their games.

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I’m aware that university libraries are not without problems, but I think giant institutions with incredible amounts of funding should bear a portion of the burden of creating and maintaining digital archives. This is something I advocated for at my former university, but I made no progress for complicated reasons I don’t want to get into here. I can’t do anything at my current university because the library system is still mostly shut down due to the pandemic, but I absolutely intend to start advocating for the creation of a digital game archive here once it’s possible to do so.

In the meantime, I am just going to ignore the internet and play my stupid Pokémon game in peace.

The other day I got very depressed for reasons I don’t care to talk about, and I tried to cheer myself up by going to the aquarium in Camden to see the axolotls.

If you’re not familiar with axololts, they’re neotenic salamanders with tiny eyes and big smiles.

If you’re not familiar with Camden, it’s the city across the Delaware River from Philadelphia that is not Cherry Hill. While Cherry Hill is known for its giant mall, its gourmet diners, and its cheap ~~weed~~ gas stations on the way to the Jersey Turnpike, Camden is famous for having the second-highest murder rate in the United States. In 2008, the city was given almost a hundred million dollars in revitalization money by the state of New Jersey, and they used about half of this to build an aquarium, which I understand has not improved the situation.

The axolotls on display in the Camden aquarium were clearly the new subspecies that’s been crossbred with tiger salamanders, but they were still very very very cute. The staff of the Camden aquarium were clearly a bunch of baby gays from Philadelphia, and they were very cute as well.

Driving through Camden to get to the aquarium was not great and did not improve my mood. The aquarium itself seems to be going for a “family friendly” theme park vibe but comes off as trashy, and it felt a little cringe to be there. I’m not sure what I expected from New Jersey. The friend I went with made the observation that “New Jersey is the Florida of states,” but that feels unfair to Florida.

Anyway, here is a picture of some axolotls:

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I was chatting with a friend on Instagram the other day, and I was saying that I was surprised that there was a referendum to legalize marijuana in Pennsylvania on this year's ballot.

What this means is that legislators from Philadelphia are trying to demonstrate popular support to the state legislature. Possession of small amounts of marijuana has been decriminalized in certain parts of Pennsylvania, but it's not legal for distribution or recreational use.

I was surprised because New Jersey just started issuing business licenses to sell marijuana in September, and New York is at the point where they have stores in Times Square. You can smell weed almost everywhere you go in Philadelphia, so I thought it was already legal here. That's why I was surprised that we were being asked to vote on a referendum.

Anyway, my friend was basically like, "I don't think the tax money they'll get from legalizing narcotics is worth the trouble." I liked her message and put down the phone, because that's not a conversation to have over Instagram. My friend is a defense attorney, and her perspective is probably informed by knowledge and experiences I can't even begin to imagine.

Still, though. While I can't deny that any given lawyer sees some truly horrendous shit on any given day, it feels like a stretch to put weed in the same category as, say, oxycodone. I get that there was a campaign to make marijuana seem dangerous and edgy during the 1990s, but the vast majority of the weed you can get in America doesn't do more than alleviate joint pain and relieve tension headaches. Like, if you want to get high off pot, you really have to work for it.

Meanwhile, it's totally legal to grow magic mushrooms in the United States, and there's no law regulating the distribution of spore cultures. I don't know if they're actually easy to grow, but you can get starter kits on Amazon. If your goal is to get fucked up, there are better and easier ways to do it, I'm just saying. Personally I run cheap vodka through a Brita filter and mix it with cranberry juice, and that does me just fine.

ETA: I was doing some research, and I found that you can also buy datura seeds on Amazon. Amazing. It's probably easier to grow mushrooms, though.

I don't always do this, because I'm usually running late and don't have the time, but occasionally I'll check the Etsy profile of someone who ordered one of my zines if they have an interesting username and avatar. The way I see it, they probably have good taste if they ordered my zine, and maybe they make zines too. If so, I can take the money they just gave me and give it right back by ordering something from them. I've discovered a lot of interesting work and even made a few friends this way. (I also try to do this with AO3 comments when I can.)

So recently I did this, and the person's profile prominently featured a collection of nipple clamps, all from the same store. I have to admit that I'm not really into that sort of thing, but friends, the variety of nipple clamps on display was kind of astounding. So I went to the store's page, and it seems like the small business of someone who invested in a 3D printer for the purpose of making sex toys. Which is all well and good, except they apparently specialize in fancy rubber band guns for ball flicking. Is that a thing? I guess that's a thing. How about that.

I almost want to start adding niche sex toys to a list on Etsy to see what the site uses that data to recommend to me. I feel the same sort of anthropological curiosity about kink that I do regarding furries, like, they've created a vibrant subculture with intricate codes of behavior that flies completely under the radar of mainstream society. I have nothing but admiration for them, but still. That's fascinating.

I should say that I respect people's privacy, by the way. I have no interest in investigating people online. There are only so many hours in the day, and also I don't care. That being said. If I get an Etsy order from the UK that has an address like "Bumbleton Proudfoot, The Cottage at the End of the Lane, Misty Hollow, Hobbitshire LA22 0LF," you can bet I'm doing an image search, and I am never disappointed. Apparently England is a real thing that really exists - just like ball flicking guns!

In October I maintained a strict posting schedule on all social media platforms, taking care to post original content at evenly spaced intervals. I tried new things and also created everything well in advance of posting so that I’d have time for editing and proofreading. Along the way, I did my best to be active on social media, liking and commenting and messaging and uploading “Stories” and so on.

Not only did I not gain any followers, I lost followers across all platforms. My posts and tweets performed more poorly than they have at any other point during the past year.

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I’m not doing so well, and I really would sell my soul for a little talent, or at least the ability to create work that people actually care about. In any case, I just put together a social media posting schedule for November, so we’ll see how that goes. Also maybe I’ll just have to bite the bullet and post more memes.

Anyway, I know I've said this before, but I hope people realize how powerful even the smallest acts of kindness on social media can be. I get the feeling that a lot of creative people are going through the same struggle, and leaving a like on someone's art post on Twitter or kudos on their story on AO3 can genuinely make a world of difference.

Being both a literature professor and someone who has trouble reading from a screen, I actually have a lot of books myself. Getting unsolicited review copies doesn't help, and people insist on giving me books as presents. I do my best to donate and give away (and sometimes just throw away) books on a weekly basis, but still. There are a lot of books I want to keep, and they add up.

On my creative bio, I say that I live "at the center of a maze of bookshelves," and this is very literal. I don't consider myself to be a hoarder, I just live in a small apartment and therefore need to organize the space creatively by using bookshelves to form interior walls. Aside from the bookshelf maze in the living room, my apartment is very clean and minimalist.

Still, if I drop dead one day, I hope my books creep out whoever comes after me.

The winners of Jezebel's Scary Story Contest have been posted. There's nothing particularly interesting or spooky this year. There's also no "my landlord was living in my crawlspace" real-life trauma, which is a shame.

I love horror, but nothing spooky has ever happened to me or anyone I know. This is probably the closest I can get to a Jezebel-style scary story...

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The house hadn't been cleaned out before it was sold. Mostly I left everything as I found it instead of poking around into closets and so on, but one night I got bored and tried to move a stack of cardboard boxes from one room to another. None of the boxes were taped shut, so I couldn't help but see what was inside them:

Hundreds of paperback copies of the smutty cavepeople romance novel The Clan of the Cave Bear, all very clearly read from cover to cover. Which raises questions I don't want to ask and don't want answered.

Anyway, my dad eventually moved into the house after he married and divorced his girlfriend. He now lives there with his most recent wife, who is a hoarder. Not only does her stuff fill all of the rooms of the house (and the porch!) from floor to ceiling, but I doubt anyone ever got rid of the stuff that was in the house to begin with. So magic has not faded entirely from Middle Earth - all the boxes of The Clan of the Cave Bear are still out there being weird and mysterious.

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Rynling R&D

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Rynling R&D

Entries tagged with my laifu

The Adventures of Tulip, Interlude

Let's Go Brandon

Costco Influencers

Re: Always Sunny

Always Sunny

The Rent Is Too Damn High

Statement of Teaching Philosophy, Part 2

Statement of Teaching Philosophy

Haunted House Hunting, Part Five

Haunted House Hunting, Part Four

Haunted House Hunting, Part Three

Haunted House Hunting, Part Two

Haunted House Hunting

Pokémon Release Day

Axolotls

While I'm on the topic of substance abuse

You Learn Something New Every Day

October Social Media Report

Re: Scary Story

Scary Story