The People in the Computer Box

Oh, I totally forgot to mention in my last post--you remember a while ago when someone had asked me about translating my Groundhog Day/time loop fic I can't remember how this started (but I can tell you exactly how it ends) into Russian, only they had to remove the comment in order to get help translating it through some kind of fest? And I thought it was so strange but it turned out to be some kind of fandom battle where teams compete against each other, so everything had to be anonymous? Well, the translation was posted the other day (or at least, I think it's still the same person involved, though the poster had a different user name, but I can't imagine who else would have been interested in translating it), so if you were ever inclined to read that fic in Russian, you can now! Не могу вспомнить, как это началось (но расскажу, как закончится) is here on AO3.

I also forgot to mention some of the TV I've been watching during recovery. There were some shows everyone told me required absolute attention, which is not often how I watch TV these days, so I kept saving them for when I'd have time to really watch.

The Expanse was the first one, and I can see why people like it (I've only seen the first season since it's free streaming on Amazon; I'm not gonna pay 20 bucks for the second season, though), but it suffered from the same thing that pretty much all SF and fantasy suffers from that I really, really hate: it's still largely a show about men, with one or two roles for "strong" women, who are stuck representing all of our gender. One woman on a spaceship with all guys, one woman in politics surrounded by all guys…I'm just so fucking weary. And the small supporting female roles are all defined by their relationships to men--the police captain or whatever she was, the other woman, both defined by their relationships to creepy skeevy Thomas Jane, Juliette Mao by defying her father, by the men she's dealt with in the past. Maybe the second season is better, I have to hope so. I like the worldbuilding, but this hundreds of years in the future and women are still barely in the story; I have no more patience for stories where we're writing alternate worlds that suffer from the exact same myopic shit we have now.

belmanoir watched GLOW with me, I think we saw the first three, maybe four, episodes? I liked it, but I have to agree with a lot of what I saw in complaints about the show--Ruth is a terribly unlikeable person to hang your show on from the beginning. Not being likeable isn't inherently bad, there are great shows with horrible characters at the center, but she doesn't have a strong enough character to make you want to follow her on the path to redemption the way a lot of those stories do--when you have an unlikeable protagonist, you really have to beef up a lot of the other things to make them compelling. The other problem we both had was that they're spending way, way too much time on the men and not enough on the secondary female characters. Especially the wrestling dynasty girl, I want to see way, way more of her, and I don't give a fuck about the men. It's a huge mistake to spend so much time on the skeevy director guy or Piz the producer, especially in a story about these women. The '80s stuff is hilarious, though, and I love the soundtrack and I'm interested to watch more, I just hate knowing that they're going to keep spending so much time on the guys.

I've seen the first few episodes of Sens8, and I'm baffled by why people love this so passionately. But I'm hoping it gets better as it goes along; as it is right now, the only character I care about is the Mexican actor and his boyfriend, but that's not a lot of screen time. I mean I get that people like it because it's one of the few shows with main storylines of gay and lesbian and trans people, and I can definitely understand that, plus there's the international stories instead of it being yet another subset of white America, but…nothing's sparking with me so far and some of the stories are so over the top ridiculously unbelievable and stupid that I'm gnashing my teeth--but I'll stick it out at least through the first season to see if it gets better.

I watched all of the first season of Bojack Horseman and…wow, was that fucking depressing. It's billed as a comedy, of course, but I never laughed once, not even at all the fun it pokes at Hollywoodd or the guest voices or anything. It's just so goddamn bleak. It took me a while to get past the bizarro concept (the style of the world, with animals being partly humanistic and partly animalistic, and vice versa, is something that creeps me out beyond words), but I really wanted to embrace the show because I know a lot of people who love it so much, but I didn't expect it to make me wish I'd never woken up after surgery. I sometimes feel like that's all that's left of the future, this sort of miserable existence where you're just wasting time till you die, and the show made me feel that x1,000. So thanks, show, for making my already suicidal tendencies even more pronounced.

I'm self soothing by watching the first three series of The Great British Bake Off, which they won't show here for inexplicable reasons (on PBS and Netflix, season 1 is actually season 5, and season 2 is season 4, which just…why). It was interesting to see how the show evolved. I was kind of disturbed by one contestant because she was so clearly an abused woman, she showed every behavior I ever saw working at the shelter years ago--either abused by a husband or possibly a parent farther back, but since there was no husband in any of the home segments or the finale and her children said some really telling things, I'm betting it was an ex-husband. Good on her for participating, though, but it made me really uncomfortable many times because I kept wondering if the producers realized how it was coming across on screen. Still, it's fun to go back and see some of the things I've heard about in the show but never saw, and the show honestly, even when you're tense for the people you want to win, is so pleasant.

It's not like there are a lot of people waiting for updates, I realize, but I'm sorry it's been a while since I posted any news. I have bursts of energy and I still get drained really easily, or else I have weird pain that makes it hard to be in certain positions, or things like that. I've probably pushed a little too hard, too, on doing things just because I live alone and things must be done and there's just me to do them, but sometimes that leaves me completely sapped.

I've hit a depression valley, too. I don't know if it's similar to the post-surgery depression a lot of people get, and that I got after my gallbladder surgery, but that was also because I'd had a forced withdrawal from antidepressants at the time, I think I remember. This one feels a lot worse, and now the Republicans are trying to take health care away again, which is fueling my anxiety. I fucking told everyone they wouldn't let it lie, every time people were acting like it was a triumph last time I got really angry because I knew they wouldn't let go, and here we fucking are.

The other thing that's fueling it is that I'm having a hard time with this idea of being a cancer survivor--I mentioned to killabeez that I was watching something and a person described herself as being a two-time cancer survivor and it hit me that that was what I am now. My experience with cancer has largely been that no one survives, not for long anyway. I have a few friends who have, but by and large the people I know don't survive, and it's very strange to think of myself as someone who has had a cancer and now has to think ahead about staying a survivor. (And of course, this is the mother of all preexisting conditions now, so if that goes away, I'm basically fucked.) I find this trippy and depressing and frightening.

Most people I'd talked to (not the doctors, but most other people) made it sound like it was cut-and-done: you had the surgery and they took out the section with the tumor and that was it. But it's not that simple, as I found out in my two-week followup on Tuesday--I see her again in a month and then they'll want to do six-month tests for a while, as they want to make sure no tumor cells are floating around, waiting to attach to the colon again and grow. So there's the year follow-up colonoscopy, and the six-months blood work tests, and check-ups as well. I can get an oncologist, or I can follow up with the surgeon; I'm inclined to stay with her since I know her and I like her. the big problem will be insurance, as my insurance company is leaving the ACA exchange and the only other semi-decent one in the network wasn't working with my clinic last year, which is why I ended up with the insurance I had this year. They're all crooks, but I have to find the crook that will cover things with the clinic where my doctor and my surgeon practice, which seems impossible right now.

Otherwise I'm slowly recovering--today was rough, I'm having really sharp pains in my lower abdomen when I move a certain way, and I took off the steristrips on the smaller incisions which on one was a mistake, because now I have a huge gaping wound there that's way too big. The steristrip was really gross, though, because it was seeping, but I traded one problem for another.

I had a lot of trouble in the hospital with bleeding and stuff like that, I won't gross you out by telling you about some of the more alarming things, but one of the incisions bled a lot and kept staining my gowns, which I could not get them to acknowledge for a couple days. It left me with this incredible gross huge scab, but the surgeon just peeled the steristrip and the scab right off on Tuesday and wow let me tell you that hurt! So I thought, well, I can woman up and take the others off…ha ha ha. Bad move.

Anyhow, right now that's where I am--just trying to get better, trying not to let the post-apocalyptic atmosphere I came home to (with the city choking on smoke and the heat that's finally, finally broken today) depress me even more, and just trying to keep going in the face of everything.