Merry Green Land

I’m mad but I keep forgetting why. Specifically I keep thinking I’m pissed off because I saw someone behave obnoxiously to someone else in a fandom context (ultimately not an issue that impacts me) but then I remember that I’m annoyed with my doctor for suggesting a medication that I’ve told her multiple times doesn’t work for me and has bad side effects (actually an issue but I anticipate that it won’t be that hard to deal with). And the lesson I have learned from this is that it’s good to have some minor sources of irritation that don’t ultimately matter, because it distracted me from getting too mad at the thing that did matter and now I have calmly arrived at a solution to that thing.

I used to get The Lion in Winter (Plantagenet drama), Becket (Plantagenet drama, Peter O’Toole also playing Henry II), A Man for All Seasons (more English historical drama from the 1960s, this time about Thomas More), The Thomas Crowne Affair (this is not a historical drama or English but it’s from the 1960s and there’s a guy named Thomas in the title so I thought that it was), and Larry Crowne (a 2011 movie where Tom Hanks plays a middle-aged man who goes to community college) so confused. Tom Jones (1963) would have been a problem, too, but I saw that way earlier than the others so I knew what it was about (sexual eighteenth-century dinners).

Is it just me, or do the actors in the live-action ATLA series pronounce “Ba Sing Se” more like “Boston Say”?

Audiobook discourse is fascinating but also deeply annoying because, when someone says “listening to audiobooks isn’t reading,” they could mean anything from “it’s literally a different act from reading words on a page” to “the narrator and their choices influence how you perceive the work so it’s a different experience from reading” to “I’m concerned that people will think audiobooks are an adequate substitute for books written in Braille or a similar system” to “I’m concerned that people will think audiobooks are an adequate substitute for helping children and adults who struggle with reading comprehension” to “I don’t like audiobooks because I assume they’re the province of the lazy” to “I just saw a BookTok influencer talk about how they Consume copious amounts of Dark Romance by listening to audiobooks at double speed and the audiobooks are always from Audible, never the library, and also they asked ChatGPT to give them a list of fast fashion items to buy with their gambling money instead of voting.” And if you argue with the last two groups of people that they’re engaging in baseless unexamined snobbery and/or overgeneralizing, people from the other groups simply will not consider that you’re not disagreeing with their interesting and valid but not, at this moment, terribly relevant points.

I’m reading a very pleasant low-stakes contemporary romance novel and the anxiety disorder of one of the heroes is stressing me the fuck out.

Whenever I’m in a fandom, I always end up thinking about Nick Hornby sheepishly admitting his love of Rod Stewart to a friend and the friend sarcastically replying something like “ah, that’s a man who never lets you down.”

Is Jennifer Garner’s character in The Five-Star Weekend constantly drunk and/or recovering from oral surgery?

Lady in the front office talking about how her older brother told her that she was adopted and her biological mother was Sarah Palin.