Why didn't anybody tell me that She-Ra was going off Netflix in a month?
Jan. 29th, 2026 11:08 pmGuys, you need to tell me these things! Now where am I supposed to pirate this one from? (I mean, uh, legally obtain it - oh, fuck it.)
For reasons I am too tired to get in to, there ended up being no need or reason for me to be in London for work today. The thing I had been dreading didn't happen...not today anyway.
I sorta got my wish of not working much today. Viva la huelga. I got home in time to walk Teddy this afternoon, and both of the others could make it too. It was Vee's first time in a while and Teddy was beside himself to see us all.
I spent some time being annoyed by having bad to pointlessly stay away a second night. I could only conclude that the real reason I had to be here today is just so I could watch Heated Rivalry last night (it's on HBO in the U.S. so not easy to get here). And that cheered me up.
I finally got around to watching the gay hockey show.
Highlights from my social media thread:
First impression is how nice it is to hear some people who talk normal! Aww, some Canadian raising! When I write smut about gay linguists north of the 49th parallel, I'm gonna call it Canadian Raising.
Okay yes it's nice to see some butts and clavicles and forearms and all that, but also this is just making me miss my BlackBerry.
I watched this with a friend who'd been told that stuff doesn't start happening until episode 4. So by the end of episode 1 he was like "What the fuck happens in episode 4?! What is my friends threshold for stuff happening?! Because this is my threshold!" I replied: "This is more stuff than happened to me in like the first thirtysome years of my entire life."
omg why has being that awkward never gotten me that...result [I relate to Kip a worrying amount] Why isn't someone else the one saying "can I be too intense for a bit" to me for a change?
Yeah it's hard when you can't be out. You can't even like go fuckin... art shopping or whatever. It gets everywhere, after a while. This is what homophobes don't get: they think gayness can just be hidden like evangelical hypocrites hide it, just a behavior that stays dark and shameful. They don't know what it's like when someone makes you light up and you can't put a bushel basket over that.
Do they get a gay sports bar?? I want a gay sports bar!
I want a Canadian boyfriend with a cottage!
I miss loons.
We watched the whole thing and it's exhausting. So many big feelings!
Also I read a Margaret Killjoy thread that made me cry (content notes: ICE, Minneapolis). But also laugh. Especially this bit
Another person put it: "we're Minnesotans. We're excited to get out our real winter gear out of the box for the year."
Because I can absolutely hear this in my dad's voice.
I kinda wish I could have a day off for the strike tomorrow, but instead I'm gonna have a particularly stressful day at work! And then get a train back to Manchester! Bleh. I am donating money to various things -- here's another collection of links -- and I will be following on social media and trying to support my friends as much as I can from a distance. But I feel really weird being expected to have a normal day.
I did an interview that might become part of a radio piece on e-bikes as pavement obstacles for blind people today.
He'd done some reconnaissance before I showed up and had found the most e-bikes I have ever seen in one place, taking up most of a pedestrianized side road. We came around a corner to this nest of chaos and all I could think of was "If we were in a science fiction movie about aliens invading the Earth, and the aliens were Lime bikes, I feel like this would be their mothership."
He pointed his microphone at me and said "Say that again." Ha! I gotta watch my goofy metaphors better.
So if you ever hear someone on the radio say they found the giant egg all the Lime bikes hatched from...uh, that's me.
A Minnesotan friend read out to me a social media post that went something like "If you know any Minnesotans, you'll know that we take every opportunity to bring up Minnesota and Minnesotan things." The next sentence started something like, "If we manage to expel this ICE invasion..." but I don't remember properly because by the time I heard that much of this sentence I was already sitting up from where I'd been lounging on the couch, so when the sentence ended with "...you'll be hearing about it for the next twenty years."
"Twenty?!" I said. "We're still talking about the Halloween storm of 1991 and that's more than twenty years ago! I think people will be hearing about this for, more like two hundred years."
He scrolled down and chuckled, read out a comment that might not have been understandable because he was still laughing, but I knew what he was saying "This comment says, 'I remember the Halloween blizzard of 1991.' "
Speaking of October 1991, I was just thinking the other day we'll be hearing about the World Series of 1991, and 1987, at the very least every time it's another 5 or 10 years after those dates, for the very least as long as any of those players are still alive.
I said that I remembered hearing about, like, the 5-year-anniversary of that time there was a raccoon on the MPR building.
We are never gonna let you forget, you'll be hearing about this for ever. I guarantee it.
I can't wait (to be talking about this in the past tense).
Oh good: the problem with my Kobo not showing up in Calibre was as easy to fix as I hoped it would be: dodgy USB cable. Phew. (I still think of this kobo as new, but it is seven or eight years old now.)
So I have a lot of new-to-it books on there now, which is exciting. Good timing, since I'm off to London for three fucking days tomorrow.
And despite D's efforts at de-DRMing the ebook he got me for my birthday, the way for me to read it turns out to be to just log in as him on the Bookshop app. Stupid DRM! I've got a bunch of vouchers to spend on bookshop.org too, and it'll probably still be more worth my while to get ebooks than paper books, but it's not as sure a thing as the calculation would be otherwise.
Still, it's been nice to read the first 10% of my birthday present.
After the snow has fallen, sometimes it looks like more snow is falling when the wind blows it off of trees and roofs. Do you have a word or specific phrase for this?
Yes, and I'll tell you in the comments
7 (13.2%)
No, but I've heard some people use a term which I'll tell you in the comments
1 (1.9%)
No
40 (75.5%)
No - I don't live where it snows and am unfamiliar with this phenomenon
5 (9.4%)
Clicky?
At various points today while I was slaving away over a hot laptop, I heard various Bruce Springsteen songs floating down from upstairs.
He said on fedi: "I have often noted similarities between the musicians, but I desperately want to hear New Model Army covering Bruce Springsteen's 'Further On (Up the Road)'."
(It was when he first said that he wants them to cover "Badlands," and Springsteen to cover their song "Vagabonds," that I figured I'd probably made a proper fan of him, if he could see the overlap between Bruce and a band he likes as much as he does New Model Army.)
He also sent me a link to what Springsteen said after Renee Good was murdered and then a YouTube playlist centered around Springsteen being in the Kennedy Center Honors of 2009. Which I think must be where I heard those songs from.
My newest library book, has been acquired after I heard the author, Steven Hyden, speak briefly on a short podcast series about Springsteen that D found and recommended to me (and actually listened to, which is amazing because he normally can't/doesn't want to listen to podcasts!). I found his book, called There Was Nothing You Could Do: Bruce Springsteen’s “Born In The U.S.A” and the End of the Heartland, and honestly I can hardly imagine anything more Me.