Saturday: canceled LA Times subscription
Oct. 26th, 2024 11:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutYesterday’s excitement around the non-endorsements by LA Times and WaPo caused me to do a little research. Wikipedia today indicates that the owner of the LA Times sought a cabinet position in 2017. I decided that in combination with the owner being open about who caused the LA Times not to endorse, that was enough to cancel my subscription. I almost never read it anyway and they make it super easy to cancel / subscribe, so if I change my mind, it’s easy enough to sign back up.
Most of my friends canceling WaPo still read NYT and/or the Atlantic, which I gave up years ago, so I don’t feel particularly compelled to follow their lead.
I have very mixed feelings about Big Tent / Centrist politics. I’m sure the future will bring more dilemmas of this nature.
ETA:
I realized today I hadn’t blogged for a couple days, so as I was catching up on that, I got a phone call from BIL. This BIL is married to T, and things have been weird to say the least. It saved me calling him and inviting him to T-weekend here, no requirements to tell us ahead of time whether he / they are attending or whatever. He had apparently caught up on more of the Who Told Who What When and wanted to do a little (unnecessary) relationship repair (no relationship repair needed for the whole FIL estate nonsense, because that whole thing is on me. I had unrealistic, delusional expectations about their integrity and am now over it). Communication is helpful when there are people in a kinship network who are struggling with their connection to reality. I was happy to hear that there are professionals involved, and BIL is making good use of his, and his professional is willing to give reasonable advice and connect with other professionals as needed and so forth. I knew that both of R’s sisters had relationships that are well within the expected range for adult children of alcoholics, but it is always a little depressing to learn more details of how that plays out. I really don’t believe in relationships that prioritize the continuance of the relationship in a particular form over the needs of the participants and boy, that is a big factor here. All you can really do is listen, say reasonable things, and then not require people to actually make choices the way you want them to, because it is, in the end, their life and they are the one stuck in it.
Predictably, BIL found this conversation refreshing and says he’ll call more often, which is fine, and pretty typical for a lot of my light-touch relationships. Hopefully, he’ll absorb some of what I repeat to everyone about structure and boundaries and blah blah blah. Ideally, he’d take seriously the Brain Wave Radio theory and insist on physical separation of T. and Florida Man, but that’s never gonna happen.
COMPLETELY UNRELATED: I recently cleared out a bunch of books that were checked out via kindleunlimited, and then actually started reading books via kindleunlimited. Once I wrapped up The Delphic Dame series by Jenny Schwartz, I figured I’d try the Katee Roberts Kraken book. I’m still extremely uncertain whether I picked this out or my sister did (we share the account). There was a sample AND the book checked out via kindleunlimited. The book — not the first in a series — is completely unhinged. There is like a page of tropes / CW / etc. warnings and they should be read carefully. The series as a whole is well within the “sex with monsters” category, and the Kraken book is about what you would expect, if you were expecting non-rapey, consent and safety focused tentacle sex. It’s also NOT what you would expect, unless you were expecting a very compassionate and nuanced depiction of sexual chase dynamics and attachment disorders. But boy, read that list of tropes and content warnings carefully.
I wasn’t really able to get into Roberts Dark Olympians books (I tried!), but I got curious about the rest of this series, so I went back to the first, which has a bunch of recent escape from domestic abuse/early recovery from same stuff in it (also with complicated sexual chase dynamics). And I read another in the series, some D/S and even more sexual chase dynamics and a plot “surprise” that is signaled super clearly. One of the fun things about these books is Roberts takes tropes that a lot of us really dislike but which are gotta-stare-at-the-car-crash engaging in the old category romances. And then she works out the actual psychology underpinning it. It is just wild reading. But before you go, Must Read These Amazing Novels, these things are like half really detailed sex-with-monsters scenes, heavy on the bodily fluids, and containing all kinds of problems of their own (see tropes/CW etc. list, no, really go look at that list). If you don’t know what that might mean, don’t start here.
Most of my friends canceling WaPo still read NYT and/or the Atlantic, which I gave up years ago, so I don’t feel particularly compelled to follow their lead.
I have very mixed feelings about Big Tent / Centrist politics. I’m sure the future will bring more dilemmas of this nature.
ETA:
I realized today I hadn’t blogged for a couple days, so as I was catching up on that, I got a phone call from BIL. This BIL is married to T, and things have been weird to say the least. It saved me calling him and inviting him to T-weekend here, no requirements to tell us ahead of time whether he / they are attending or whatever. He had apparently caught up on more of the Who Told Who What When and wanted to do a little (unnecessary) relationship repair (no relationship repair needed for the whole FIL estate nonsense, because that whole thing is on me. I had unrealistic, delusional expectations about their integrity and am now over it). Communication is helpful when there are people in a kinship network who are struggling with their connection to reality. I was happy to hear that there are professionals involved, and BIL is making good use of his, and his professional is willing to give reasonable advice and connect with other professionals as needed and so forth. I knew that both of R’s sisters had relationships that are well within the expected range for adult children of alcoholics, but it is always a little depressing to learn more details of how that plays out. I really don’t believe in relationships that prioritize the continuance of the relationship in a particular form over the needs of the participants and boy, that is a big factor here. All you can really do is listen, say reasonable things, and then not require people to actually make choices the way you want them to, because it is, in the end, their life and they are the one stuck in it.
Predictably, BIL found this conversation refreshing and says he’ll call more often, which is fine, and pretty typical for a lot of my light-touch relationships. Hopefully, he’ll absorb some of what I repeat to everyone about structure and boundaries and blah blah blah. Ideally, he’d take seriously the Brain Wave Radio theory and insist on physical separation of T. and Florida Man, but that’s never gonna happen.
COMPLETELY UNRELATED: I recently cleared out a bunch of books that were checked out via kindleunlimited, and then actually started reading books via kindleunlimited. Once I wrapped up The Delphic Dame series by Jenny Schwartz, I figured I’d try the Katee Roberts Kraken book. I’m still extremely uncertain whether I picked this out or my sister did (we share the account). There was a sample AND the book checked out via kindleunlimited. The book — not the first in a series — is completely unhinged. There is like a page of tropes / CW / etc. warnings and they should be read carefully. The series as a whole is well within the “sex with monsters” category, and the Kraken book is about what you would expect, if you were expecting non-rapey, consent and safety focused tentacle sex. It’s also NOT what you would expect, unless you were expecting a very compassionate and nuanced depiction of sexual chase dynamics and attachment disorders. But boy, read that list of tropes and content warnings carefully.
I wasn’t really able to get into Roberts Dark Olympians books (I tried!), but I got curious about the rest of this series, so I went back to the first, which has a bunch of recent escape from domestic abuse/early recovery from same stuff in it (also with complicated sexual chase dynamics). And I read another in the series, some D/S and even more sexual chase dynamics and a plot “surprise” that is signaled super clearly. One of the fun things about these books is Roberts takes tropes that a lot of us really dislike but which are gotta-stare-at-the-car-crash engaging in the old category romances. And then she works out the actual psychology underpinning it. It is just wild reading. But before you go, Must Read These Amazing Novels, these things are like half really detailed sex-with-monsters scenes, heavy on the bodily fluids, and containing all kinds of problems of their own (see tropes/CW etc. list, no, really go look at that list). If you don’t know what that might mean, don’t start here.