i hear the voices when I'm dreaming

I keep not getting around to posting here. Not sure how much is "typing is hard" (this entry took an hour! On my tablet, which I can type on faster than on my computer!) and how much is just being out of the habit.

Ended up not doing turkey day at my dad's, mostly for mental health (I have Opinions about people who choose not to get vaccinated during a pandemic "because freedom", and I didn't want to spend the entire time watching what I said) but also because... I'd made a comment on twitter about wanting to do Hanukkah this year, so my dad offered to do latkes and candles last Sunday, aka the first night, and sent me home with the menorah and candles and some thanksgiving leftovers, which ended up being pretty close to perfect.

The candles, incidentally, claimed to be dripless. They... uh... well... weren't. I'll upload photos at some point.

I'm also sort of getting into Yiddish on duolingo, though I'm shaky on some of the alphabet (duo uses the Hebrew lettering for Yiddish, not the transliteration into Ronan lettering) ... I've got the consonants pretty well, but the vowels are killing me. And for the language itself, it's Germanic enough that I'm both doing okay and hella confused. There's a vowel shift going on, making words sound like other words.

From memory -- at least in the Hungarian Yiddish dialect duo is using, the word for "you" is /dee/ instead of German du. The word for here is either /du/ or /doh/, i forget which, instead of German da, and I keep wanting to translate doh as there (German dort). I also get into trouble with /vee/ and /voh/; in German the first (wie) is how and the second (wo) is who, but in Yiddish /vee/ is who. (Amusingly, how many -- in German wieviel -- sounds like wiffle, just with v instead of w.)

It's kind of like the German interference I had learning Russian. The word /ya/ is yes in German and I in Russian; /da/ is yes in Russian and here in German; all very frequently used words. So inevitably I'd use the wrong one ...

Sometimes it's not confusing between words, just hard to remember. I can after a second remember that /daan/ in Yiddish is your (in German it's dein, pronounced /dayn/ rhyming with wine) but trying to generate the Yiddish is harder, both because remembering THAT the vowel shifts isn't the same as remembering HOW, and because the vowel letters are hard for me to remember.

Anyway, at least duolingo has taught me how to say that things like "a zebra in a pyramid". So helpful?

(Ok to be fair they were teaching similar-to-English words for alphabet practice .. /a zehbra een a piramid/ or /a kehmul een London/ are easier to decipher than, uh, other things.)

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Totally unrelatedly, the Babylon 5 rewatch I'm doing with my mom -- so slowwww because I have limited mom stamina, especially when she Lingers so one episode takes 2-3 hrs of mom exposure, and she doesn't want to watch separately -- got to A Voice in the Wilderness, which is one of my favorites from S1. I'd forgotten that was the episode with the Ivanovo-is-God speech, lol. Also Londo's Hokey-Pokey rant.

Next up is Babylon Squared. Also among my favorites!

(Shadows and Portents is up there too, although in rewatch I got annoyed at the cc text -- when the Centauri dude is laughing about how his seer aunt predicted he'd be killed by shadows ha ha how silly, and he ends up being killed by a mysterious vessel later that episode, snd the point of him disbelieving the prophecy to begin with is that he thinks she means shadows, i.e. darkness on the wall, not knowing that the Shadows are an old race recently reawaken ... and the first time around that's what the viewer thinks too. Only, the closed captioning text capitalizes "Shadows" in that line...)

B5's special effects and title sequence both look 90s as hell.

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Speaking of my mom ... she wants to know what I want to do for Christmas. My gut reaction is "introvert party with me and the pets where I play animal crossing and watch die hard and nothing else" but I don't think she'd be happy with that, lol. I'm just ... idek. I'm cynical about how commercialized and ubiquitous Christmas is these days, carol singing makes me miss the harp I can't play any more, there's no magic any more, and I realized one of the things making me dissatisfied with Christianity is that if Jesus fixed things (and I know that's a big if but it's also central to Christianity) why are things so fucked up. And my increasing dissatisfaction with Christianity means that the "prepare for and celebrate the birth of the Baby Who Will Save The World" aspect of Christmas is less gripping, and the family aspect of Christmas is awkward when my mom is a lonely energy suck and my dad is married to someone who thinks I hate her and my sister has kids who are cute but exhausting, and I'm an introvert anyway, and I'm awkward about giving and receiving gifts. And there's also the "pagan holiday they got papered over with Christianity labels" factor, and my increasing awareness of Shitty White-People Behavior.

But I'll probably end up doing something with my mom anyway.

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For some reason I am remarkably chatty today. Talked my aides' ears off; even posting here is a reflection of that. No clue why but it's better than the sheer exhaustion I've mostly been feeling.

Yay I guess?

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Got Covid booster today. In home, which was nice and convenient. My initial vax was J&J so I asked for (and got) Pfizer.

Yay for another layer of Swiss cheese protection, boo for needing it.

So the fucking disaster that is Ravelry's makeover

that is literally giving people migraines and seizures

and not usable by screen readers

has not been rolled back, or de-animated, or in any way made accessible

and there's been no explanation

the front page still has just a chirpy twee "explanation" of the redesign with stuff like "We tried a bunch of different approaches but ended up with a simple misshapen circle with the r in it. Like the primary logo, we kept the secondary mark simple so that it could be flexibly used. We affectionately call her "Lumpy" :)" and "We already had our cinnamon color for the logo, and now we needed some color friends." (the logo is coral not cinnamon) and "we didn't want the colors to follow current web trends in color schemes" (coral/teal is not unique) and "I can't stress enough how much hard work, thought, and love went into the new look."

there have been daily feedback threads that pay lip service to "We also will not permit accessibility issues to be dismissed." but also say "We understand that those of you giving feedback in this thread would like us to make the Classic Ravelry site the default site. We feel that keeping Ravelry’s New Look as our default, with an option to opt-in to the Classic Ravelry look as we improve the new site, is the best option." and there are no answers or explanations for anything, so it has the feeling of shouting into a void

this is not the first time rav has had accessibility issues, but holy fuck this is just a dumpster fire

I am so very out of cope

So ... Netflix has a new-ish show, Afflucted, that I've been waffling in whether or not to watch. It advertised as a documentary following people with chronic illnesses. I wasn't sure, in advance, whether it was going to be sympathetic or dramatastic.

It's the latter. In a "oh it's all in their head" way. And it deliberately twisted the stories of *everyone* involved, who were misled about the purpose of the show (documentary ga reality tv) and were basically abused by the production staff.

https://medium.com/@afflicted/the-truth-behind-netflixs-afflicted-92e92d32cd7c is worth reading. If links to essays written by the participants, detailing the experience and also the facts that got left out about things like, oh, say, actual diagnoses and actual medical info and actual *everything*.

I am Not Impressed.