(no subject)

[phosfate]

I saw a hawk last night and a fox this morning. The fox was really red, where they're usually kinda yellow. Do they change shades with the seasons?

Comments

[crantz]

They have natural variation.

I couldn't decide if 'it was a firefox!' was funny or not so I decided to just tell you the truth.

[phosfate]

I get that, I'm asking do they change seasonally or do they just come in different shades like dogs? I've mostly seen the yellow ones in winter, but that could also be chance and because I tend to be nearer the yellow fox that lives under the hospital in winter.

[crantz]

Different shades like a dog. That's what I meant by 'natural variation'.

[phosfate]

Thank you! I wasn't sure because 'natural' has multiple meanings. Like, arctic foxes are natural but they change color.

[crantz]

No no, I would have said 'seasonal variation' for something like arctic foxes.

[ashenmote]

I reckon you stumbled into a Ladyhawke remake and they picked a red fox because the male lead has red hair in this one.

[ashenmote]

It was me, Ann! I made the icons! I did it!

[ashenmote]

And in my mind the guys in the icons were reaction shots to an encounter with whatever the awe-inspiring fuck it is that a woman is. But I like your explanation better.

The woman rant wasn't Ginmar* or one of Ginmar's crowd per chance? OMG I just rediscovered my braincell that held the name Ginmar and hasn't interacted with any other braincell for so so so long. This feels so weird.

*That LJ military feminist that had a very fraught relationship with F_W, maybe not entirely unjustified because we brought the trolls to everyone's doorstep and hers especially I think?

[phosfate]

YOU ARE A GODDAMNED GENIUS!!! Thank you for telling me, I loved those. I wondered how you found the frames!

[ashenmote]

I think someone on LJ posted HUNDREDS of excellent quality stills from the lotr movies back then and I went through that looking for suitable facial expressions and then sorted them in three piles, the good, the bad and the weird ones.

Oh no here comes another hermit braincell of mine and tells me that was probably mollyringwraith. I don't trust it though. I don't know where it has been.

[phosfate]

It could easily have been. I'm sorry to say I was on a medication for a few months that really, really fucked up my memory, so I have to ask John about that stuff.

Google and Duckduckgo have nothing on the subject. This of course means nothing. I wish the wayback machine had a search function, but I'm afraid it would explode.

[phosfate]

Okay, prairie Ladyhawke is gonna have a fuckload more guns, pickup trucks, and camo than the original.

[phosfate]

The artist formally known as Gypsy did a lot of great screengrabs, too. She had a ton of Hot Fuzz stills that I made use of back in the day.

[ashenmote]

Yeah you really needed that after your loss back then, that's fine.

I got nothing from search either. I mean, I saw a lot of old Ginmar posts on DDG but none that I would care to look at more closely.

[phosfate]

Naw, this was the stuff he put me on after I was burgled in the teens and I had terrible PTSD. It was an off-label use for the meds (he couldn't prescribe them and I had to keep going over for endless sample packs), they made me barf almost everything I ate, and it still took weeks to convince his stupid ass that his pills were making me sick. That was also when my knee was fucked up (after six months of doctors it got better by itself). It was a weird time.

I only found an LJ Quotes post in which Ginmar said feminists were not allowed to like Hello Kitty, so fuck her.

[ashenmote]

Oh my. You mentioned your mom's loss on the Dean mansplaining post, so I figured it was about that. Sorry for jumping to conclusions.

Bad knee. Bad doctor. Bad burglar. Maybe a good burglar in a professional sense.


That one might have been on F_W. It sounds worthy.

[phosfate]

S'alright, it's been a weird 20 years.

He was a terrible burglar. He was like 16, they caught him in a day (he left prints all over the place and had a huge record), and the only things he stole were my Nintendo games (which was hella painful but were easily replaced) and a huge plastic pig full of quarters that was nearly full and must have weighed about 20 pounds. Everything was fenced by the time they caught him. He also dumped Mom's jewelry all over my bedroom, so I gave it to my sister for her daughters because it freaked me out to look at it. Also we had very different taste in jewelry (my newest necklace is a vintage NYC subway token strung on a ball chain) and the girls would actually wear it.

He's...Coffman's usually a good doctor, but he was a real dipshit for that period. He sent me to this batshit therapist (also part of the practic) and I knew, I KNEW I should have bailed as soon as I saw Jesus on her business card, but I really did need help. But instead of talking about how fucked I was from having my house broken into, she was obsessed with me taking public transport and "what we could do to help me with that." Unless she was prepared to buy me a new car (the old one was murdered), and pay to insure it, there was nothing to be done about it and I was and am perfectly fine with it. But she kept going on and on and on, and she also didn't know jack shit about how the bus worked and it was very annoying. After a few weeks, she let slip that she had also been burgled at her last apartment. So I asked her what she did to get over being afraid.

She said that she did not get over being afraid until she moved to a completely different place, and she had slept with her phone under her pillow set dialled to 9-1 so she would only have to dial 1 to get the cops.

I realized that our problem communicating had nothing at all to do with me and never went back, because her bullshit was costing me money. I convinced dipshit that his medication was making me sick and could he please give me something else. I had about six months where my anxiety was so bad that I was up at 5 am and spent much of my time in a fetal curl, listening to 1940s radio shows and unable to watch anything more violent than The IT Crowd and those CGI Tinkerbell movies. But it worked out. I learned quite a lot about the 40s, American war propaganda (Americans were no more willing to cut down on driving than they would later be willing to wear a fucking cotton mask), a bunch of music history, and I know what Benny Goodman's voice sounds like (not a bit like Jimmy Stewart).

The best thing about that period was that my co-worker Mary was kind enough to drive me to my knee appointments. Now, Mary had just had an operation for a brain tumor the size of a golf ball. Having it taken out was good for her brain, obvs., but absolutely terrible for her driving, so occasionally I'd have to tell her to move over to the right a little because she was stradding the line down the center of the street. But honestly I found this hilarious, and it was the middle of the day so traffic was light. I miss her.

[ashenmote]

Sad burglar is it then.

as soon as I saw Jesus on her business card
A miracle! \o/

So basically she tried to help you with her own issues instead of yours? That's sweet.
That pre-dial 9-1 trick is fine I guess if one is comfortable with snoring at the police a lot.

And I was really confused about her being obsessed with you taking public transport, because I rightfully expected from that that she saw it as her mission to help you be comfortable with it. Not that she was trying to stuff you back into cars.

Sadly I didn't kick out my own therapist when she told me she knew I wasn't Trans because she had worked with real Trans people. But I did drop her when she announced it was now urgent to start working on my Oedipus complex because we were running out of therapy time.
At the start she had assured me she was a modern Freudian psychologist so now I am a bit scared of some day meeting an old-fashioned one.

But she referred me to someone who first saved me by sending me into early retirement and then saved me again by finding a drug that actually helped me. Even better, he simply believed me when I told him I already knew one that would help me and prescribed that ^_^, which is quite a feat for a doctor. I hate to see him grow old very fast now.

Oh yes binging IT crowd is very therapeutic! I mean there are some really ugly bits that you have to carefully navigate around when you are already down but I have so much love for Moss that it hurts! I keep going back to the football game episode and the German cannibal episode when I feel miserable.

[phosfate]

Yeah, I imagined her face-dialing the cops a lot.

The weird thing is that I wasn't uncomfortable with public transit, I was very uncomfortable with their building and their bus stop because their AC was dead and it was 110F during the day. It was a transition to go from my poor little Chevy (which cost nothing to run except gas and minimal insurance) to the bus system, but it wasn't why I was there. As long as I had my ipod I was fine.

Congrats on being trans and your therapist sounds gatekeepy and unpleasant. "Nono, as long as I don't put my eyes out with my dead wife's jewelry I'm good."

Yeah, mine's getting old, too. Maybe I can talk him into leaving me his Prozac coffee mug. I have a search up on ebay but one never comes up. I may have to find a copy of the logo and go Redbubble. If there's not one there already. They have a new office now with working climate control, but it is a hilarious hour bus ride out into the country. Like, literally, if you were that far out of town when I was younger, you were going to Kansas, and you were going the wrong way.

Yeah, Graham Linehan's transformation into an insane gender goblin obsessed with everyone's genitals makes it hard to watch anything he's done. Though Count Arthur Strong was hard to watch because it was a great cast in a terrible, terrible show. Also Arthur looks like the Child Catcher. The weird thing is that I thought the takeaway from the ITC episode with April was that Douglas was a fucking idiot whose transphobia made him completely miserable, but apparently I am wrong. Because in real life, Glinner is a fucking idiot whose transphobia makes him...waaaaiiiit a second. Anyway, I have Moss on one side of my work coffee flask and Sailor Moon on the other. They finally installed the kitchinettes they promised us ten years ago so we can make coffee and microwave and have a huge fridge. Rachael gave me an excellent re-usable keurig pod that saves the earth and makes nice coffee.

[ashenmote]

Oh we're increasingly getting busses with good AC now here and I have a flat rate ticket and can just go sit in one on a hot day. And I alway have 3 MP3players with me in case two run out of power.

Thank you!!! I was perfectly content being all ambiguous about it for most of my life, but I feel like I'm done with that dance now. I don't think it's going to be a stunning surprise to anyone. :D

Yeah the modern Freudian was the shit. It was still good to have someone to talk at, it helped getting my thoughts in order no matter what.


I am fortunate in that I had to go to Wikipedia to figure out who Lineham/Glinner is. I know Big Train and bits of Garth Marengi, but otherwise I'm not familiar with him or his stuff. Not even with Father Ted. Though I listened to a BBC thing celebrating it once.

The April/Douglas stuff I can deal with? I mean, yeah, the punchline that Douglas just misheard her and turns out transphobic after all was cruel. But before that is a long stretch where the both of them are charming together and April was lovely and kind of real. She felt not at all like a Trans butt of joke character in a TV series to me. I can keep all that and dismiss the turnabout.

I mean without that sort of compartmentalization how could I have enjoyed something like The Breakfast Club?

For me it's the IT Crowd episodes that have long stretches of vile stuff woven into it that I want to avoid. Like the one about the calendar shoot (that felt almost like a Big Bang Theory episode?) or the one where Roy keeps hiding from his cave woman coworker.

[ashenmote]

You have pictures of your sailor moss flask by chance? I assume that's not a standard issue that you can buy of the shelf.

[phosfate]

Just took pics. It will take a bit to figure out how to get them from my phone to here. Oh hang on I'll do the water bottle too. They're both from Target's bargain bin. The coffee thing had some horrible motto on it that needed covering. The stickers are all vinyl from Redbubble, except for Sailor Moon which was a rare nice find at Hot Topic when I was mall walking. (That was also my first visit to the mall when Covid was starting to shrink, and I learned that I have lost my ability to cope with the mall. I used to have a really nice mostly-indoors route from 66th Street through the mall to the bus stop, but they've closed a bunch of the mall down so I can only do it when weather and brain permit.)

[phosfate]

I should get a backup mp3 player at some point. If I'm out all day my phone juice can get dangerously low, and I don't want to get caught away from home with no access to a cab if my leg gives out. I should also ride some of the routes I don't normally take so I know where they go, especially the north side of town.

The sad thing is that Father Ted was/is really good, a genuine classic. And Black Books of course. And I rather like Hippies. But I often wondered why he'd work with a co-writer and then never work with them again (while claiming on podcasts that he wanted to do a project with them again and it would happen one day). I imagine we've got the answer there. He's only in about five seconds of Garth Marenghi, which is otherwise the greatest comedy of its era.

GOD you're right, the calender episode would totally be a BBT episode. (I hate that show so, so much. For many, many reasons, not least because every time someone here finds out I am a nerd, they ask if I go to SDCC. Nobody in this building makes enough money to go to SDCC, it's more expensive than Disney World, but it's the only con they've ever heard of.) The cavewoman episode is just gross, a completely unnecessary subplot. Roy is a bad weekend away from joining an incel group.

[phosfate]

Okay, I think I got it. Click to embiggen:

[ashenmote]

Having your life support systems and entertainment suite tap into the same fuel source is just bad practice. I'm sure it killed a starfleet ship or two.

All my MP3players are approaching the age where they become characters. One of them was the one that came with the neat Greek music on it. It blacked out on half of it's screen now, but it soldiers on.

I found a few new parts of town this year that they secretly built since I scouted the place on bicycle. One had good food!

I can't find the Father Ted show I listened to on the radio. I think it was mostly some of the actors talking about how it was, making it. I came away with the impression that I would probably like it, yes.

And Black Books of course. And I rather like Hippies.
Is Hippies a show too? Or is Black Books a show and it has Hippies that you rather like? Garth Marengi is hard to find outside the Youtube clips. But that is really on my to-do list.

Yeah that was gross & baffling. Roy alone can be adorable as the incel waiting to happen character! And funny! But when it's both Roy and the show itself being like that, nope thanks.

And the bad thing is the calendar episode would be among the extra annoying BBT episodes if it was one.

Oh but I loved the whole long 'Smoking on the Job' sketch they did when they changed the Reynholms in season 2, just to end this on a positive note.

SDCC must be the con thing that they go to then. I kind of thought they made a fake one for their show.

[phosfate]

We have whole new parts of town that, when I was younger, were literal farms and if you were there it meant you were fucking lost. Now there are houses and megachurches and weird strip malls.

Oh. Oh. You need to see Black Books. Bernard Black (Dylan Moran) is a grumpy, alcoholic bookseller who doesn't understand why people keep bothering him wanting to buy books. Manny Bianco (Bill Bailey) saves his life and his shop in the first episode after accidentally swallowing a copy of The Little Book of Calm. Fran Katsenjamer (Tamsyn Greig) is his longtime bestie who owns the gift shop next door. It's on youtube if it's not blocked in the EU. There is also a truly strange DVD extra called Black Dolls, in which the characters are played by ragdolls and Bernard puts Manny into a time machine that is actually a microwave oven. This may be posted separately.

Hippies is not quite classic, but has Simon Pegg, Julian Rhynd-Tutt, Sally Phillips, and Darren Boyd as mid to late 60s hippies trying to put out an underground newspaper. It blows hot and cold, but you get stuff like the gang putting on a Hair-like musical that includes the characters of Jesus Christ and Hippie Horse. "And why does Jesus always stick close to hippie horse? Because Hippie Horse is EVERYTHING Jesus wants to be!" Also on youtube unless etc.

It also looks like Darkplace is up again. Plus Matthew Holness has written an actual Garth Marenghi horror novel called Garth Marenghi's Terrortome.

I don't know if they go to actual SDCC or not -- I've never seen the show with the sound on, but my McDonalds had it on their TVs with subtitles for like two years, when I'd get dinner before grocery shopping and cabbing home, until they thankfully got rid of the TVs. I only just realized that the televisions have been gone for at least a year, because my hatred made them invisible.

Okay, I looked it up and there's at least one where they go to SDCC, but they live in Pasadena (location of Disneyland, northish bit of Los Angeles) so it's not a huge trip for them if they get a satellite hotel. Apparently Sheldon also tries to run his own con, but I don't know how that turns out because I got bored and closed the tab.

[ashenmote]

All four sides look lovely, but Moss!hellokitty in particular is a delight.

[ashenmote]

For Black Books at least I can confirm it is not blocked for me. Neat!

[phosfate]

Oh they're two different flasks. Black one is coffee and purple one is water, so it had to have all vinyl stickers. I rescued the Lost sticker off my last water bottle, which developed a terrible and annoying suck-hole, but that's my own fault for buying an obviously shit water bottle. So I upgraded to a slightly crap water bottle with more sticker room.

[ashenmote]

Oh it's show that is familiar from 'gifs I couldn't connect to any particular show'. I had that same effect with Miranda, makes you feel right at home.

[ashenmote]

I watched Black Books season 1 and 2 now. That was time well spent. I hoped for Jehova's Witnesses to return after episode 2 but alas they did not.

And like, does he dedicate one episode of everything he makes to his 'small people vs people who do not filter their speech' thing?