A Gentle Creaking

I've been enjoying Tumblr. No, really, I have. Who wouldn't? All those keen young minds and up-to-date whatever, I don't know, I mean John Green is on there, and Rainbow Rowell, probably.

But the thing is, I am old. Decades and decades and decades; centuries by now, even. OLD.

So occasionally, just every now and then, being on Tumblr makes me feel like an actual mouldering corpse. Like a mouldering corpse, in fact, who for some horrible reason has been unearthed and dragged to a school dance and forced to sit in one of those metal-legged plastic-backed chairs in the corner. All the young people are doing vibrant young people things, speaking entirely in memes and meta-jokes and listening to, I don't know, MUSIC, and I'm just sitting there quietly mouldering and thinking wistfully of how much more comfortably I could be mouldering at home.

Hello, LJ-style blogging platform. I've missed you.






...the hand which guided that pen is now mouldering in the grave...

Inspired by all the trans-ethnic demiromantic demisexual cat-otherkin on Tumblr, I have decided to attempt to define myself, for my own amusement and the possible benefit of friends and passing strangers.

1. I am Elderly.


2. I have been Mummified. This renders my life both very busy and, as far as non-Mummies are concerned, very boring. I apologize for this, but I like it this way.

As some of you know, I've been playing around with (uh...in the sense of attempting to write, not any sort of astral plane sexual sense) a new character. I can now see him! (Again: not in the crazy way.)

Thanfiction drew him for me, is what I'm trying to say (look: The Stranger, in Victorian military dress, sometime prior to getting involved with the Between the Wars "fandom").

And if any of you are looking for someone to draw you something, he* takes commissions, and works quickly, and is worth checking out. Plus I didnt get indoctrinated into a cult, so you know it's safe. Seriously, though: he draws stuff. Consider getting in touch with him if you need stuff drawn.



*"He" being Thanfiction. Not my fictional character. In case you were worried.

I have that exhausted-before-I-start feeling that I shouldn`t even bother posting this, but I`m going to anyway, because I`ve been commenting publicly (at Turimel`s and Abbey`s posts), and I just want to clarify what I`ve been thinking lately.

( I'll be merciful and stick this behind a cut under the assumption that most people, quite rightly, don't care what I think about this. )

But I'm a "reader" here, one so far distant from events that I know my reading is next to worthless. Still: it is real life. One of the most annoying things about real life, but also one of the loveliest, is that there aren't really heroes and villains at all. Just humans, flawed and variously fucked up, capable of enormous jackassery but also of compassion.

And mortal, so it would be nice if we could manage not to wish each other dead (in the face of anything short of manslaughter or murder, at least).

I'm screening comments. Unless you actually write UNSCREEN THIS in the subject line I'll probably leave everything screened.

You guys, I think this sentence should win some kind of an award. It perfectly captures the essence of an entire genre. I'm wiping away tears as I type this. Actual tears.

I'd been intending to share the joys of "Five Are Together Again" today, but PD, in what I can only assume is an effort to put me off men altogether and particularly off former public-school boys, has lent me David Blaize.

I don't know quite how to describe it. Best let it speak for itself, I think.
( David Blaize: quotations )
...yeahhhhhh. Quite.

Well, that does explain much about public-school inmates, such as why most women wouldn't touch one with a barge pole.

The whole thing has this sickly-sweet treacle-y feel to it, so that it manages to be both hilarious but also embarrassing to read, and it leaves me with a very slight urge to go beat up some nice boy in a uniform. Remind me never again to joke about the sillinesses to which girls are prone, or to listen in silence to anyone else joking about it. Because quite honestly, even at our very worst and silliest--which peaked, I think, at roughly nineteen for my immediate friends--we were never even a fraction as idiotic as this. No female I've ever met, even if caught at her worst and swooniest, ever approached it. Even a whole group of us nearly fainting away when our Favourite Undergraduate Professor said my name couldn't compare with that David-and-Jonathan line, ugh.

Also, there's something weirdly and killingly Freudian about the author's choice of words, so that fifteen-year-old David's discomfort "hugely increas[ing]" before he ran away "down the dark passage" had me in tears of LOL.