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isunshoweri do kind of tire of having to go to DW every time i finish a new book, but also, i like having a record of all the books i've read over the course of the year, as it turns out.
i was in the middle of typing that last sentence and then got pulled away into work tasks for like an hour. maybe that's a sign. anyway,
hogfather: terry pratchett's death goes christmas! santa claus is murdered, by teeth hypnotism, and death takes over to make sure the sun will still rise in the morning. i raced through the back half of this one because it was due at the library and i couldn't renew it lol and was a good enough read to not make finishing it a daunting task. went pretty quickly. i like the "belief is a core part of humanity" and "what we believe does literally impact the workings of the universe" aspects. susan is a delightful character and suffers no fools and i love her. and teatime is for real kind of scary. so that's that on that.
okay time for me to talk about hockey since that takes up an absurd amount of real estate in my brain these days. the four of you on the internet who read these posts may or may not be aware that gavin mckenna, who's predicted to go first in the NHL draft later this year, got arrested this week for punching someone in the face so hard he gave them a concussion. i don't really know about this kid and i don't really care about the draft (or prospects at all) - i know two things. 1) hes eighteen. that's very young. and 2) i'm pretty sure hes Indigenous???? my first thought when i saw that news article was "are people going to be racist about this". (could i check wikipedia right now? yes. am i going to? no, four people read this blog and none of them care about hockey, fact checking is for people with reach.) so like, the discussion rn is very onesidedly, he should not have done that but he's probably going to go high in the draft anyway, because hockey enables violence and toxic masculinity, especially domestic violence. THIS IS TRUE. IM NOT ABOUT TO SAY THAT ANY OF THIS IS WRONG. EIGHTEEN YEAR OLDS SHOULD NOT BE GOING TO BARS, THEY SHOULD NOT BE PUNCHING PEOPLE, AND THEY CERTAINLY SHOULDNT BE PUNCHING PEOPLE THAT HARD.
that being said.
isn't it kind of fucked up how much fame we place on kids before they're even adults yet? hockey prospects are one example of this, but i'm also thinking of child reality/youtube personalities, kpop trainees, probably also other things that i know less about. it's cool that kids are exceptional, but then you throw them under the spotlight and surround them with adults who are ostensibly supposed to be looking out for them and then don't do that, instead only looking out for their own interests? isn't it fucked up how adults in their thirties and forties get furious at guys who can't even rent a car yet for not living up to already unreasonable expectations? (specifically thinking of the nolan patrick thing here and how the city of philadelphia absolutely contributed to making him a worse person because fans and media were so awful to him.) imagine growing up in that environment???? for years????? honestly once you think about that pressure cooker for longer than five minutes you start to wonder how most of them DO manage to keep their issues private.
also like i do believe that every human being is capable of change and becoming better (=/= healing all the harm that they caused this is a take that requires more nuance than i'm willing to put in a dw post). yes, even that person youre thinking of in your head. until we die we are all capable of learning and growing and changing. (note that often people don't actually DO this. that is a different thing.) and it kind of sucks that this story is probably going to follow him forever, high in the draft or not. eighteen year olds should be allowed to be idiots without it being immortalized on the internet.
this is much more a commentary on like, the right to privacy and internet moralizing and "fan spaces stop being weird about teenagers challenge" than it is about the many many structural institutional failings of the hockey industrial complex. that's another post and i'm not the right person to make it, i don't know nearly enough.
i was in the middle of typing that last sentence and then got pulled away into work tasks for like an hour. maybe that's a sign. anyway,
hogfather: terry pratchett's death goes christmas! santa claus is murdered, by teeth hypnotism, and death takes over to make sure the sun will still rise in the morning. i raced through the back half of this one because it was due at the library and i couldn't renew it lol and was a good enough read to not make finishing it a daunting task. went pretty quickly. i like the "belief is a core part of humanity" and "what we believe does literally impact the workings of the universe" aspects. susan is a delightful character and suffers no fools and i love her. and teatime is for real kind of scary. so that's that on that.
okay time for me to talk about hockey since that takes up an absurd amount of real estate in my brain these days. the four of you on the internet who read these posts may or may not be aware that gavin mckenna, who's predicted to go first in the NHL draft later this year, got arrested this week for punching someone in the face so hard he gave them a concussion. i don't really know about this kid and i don't really care about the draft (or prospects at all) - i know two things. 1) hes eighteen. that's very young. and 2) i'm pretty sure hes Indigenous???? my first thought when i saw that news article was "are people going to be racist about this". (could i check wikipedia right now? yes. am i going to? no, four people read this blog and none of them care about hockey, fact checking is for people with reach.) so like, the discussion rn is very onesidedly, he should not have done that but he's probably going to go high in the draft anyway, because hockey enables violence and toxic masculinity, especially domestic violence. THIS IS TRUE. IM NOT ABOUT TO SAY THAT ANY OF THIS IS WRONG. EIGHTEEN YEAR OLDS SHOULD NOT BE GOING TO BARS, THEY SHOULD NOT BE PUNCHING PEOPLE, AND THEY CERTAINLY SHOULDNT BE PUNCHING PEOPLE THAT HARD.
that being said.
isn't it kind of fucked up how much fame we place on kids before they're even adults yet? hockey prospects are one example of this, but i'm also thinking of child reality/youtube personalities, kpop trainees, probably also other things that i know less about. it's cool that kids are exceptional, but then you throw them under the spotlight and surround them with adults who are ostensibly supposed to be looking out for them and then don't do that, instead only looking out for their own interests? isn't it fucked up how adults in their thirties and forties get furious at guys who can't even rent a car yet for not living up to already unreasonable expectations? (specifically thinking of the nolan patrick thing here and how the city of philadelphia absolutely contributed to making him a worse person because fans and media were so awful to him.) imagine growing up in that environment???? for years????? honestly once you think about that pressure cooker for longer than five minutes you start to wonder how most of them DO manage to keep their issues private.
also like i do believe that every human being is capable of change and becoming better (=/= healing all the harm that they caused this is a take that requires more nuance than i'm willing to put in a dw post). yes, even that person youre thinking of in your head. until we die we are all capable of learning and growing and changing. (note that often people don't actually DO this. that is a different thing.) and it kind of sucks that this story is probably going to follow him forever, high in the draft or not. eighteen year olds should be allowed to be idiots without it being immortalized on the internet.
this is much more a commentary on like, the right to privacy and internet moralizing and "fan spaces stop being weird about teenagers challenge" than it is about the many many structural institutional failings of the hockey industrial complex. that's another post and i'm not the right person to make it, i don't know nearly enough.
