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I have what I thought was a pleasantly mild-mannered cold, but it's clung on for something like ten days at this point. I wonder if you can get a watered down version of the flu if you were vaccinated against it?

Looks like the CDC thinks yes: "Flu vaccination has been shown in several studies to reduce severity of illness in people who get vaccinated but still get sick." That's cool to know! I'm definitely happier now than I remember being while sick with the full-strength version.

Anyway, have some belated Wednesday reading and watching.

READ

I finished Castle in the Sand DesdemonaKaylose and neveralarch, which was just as much of a dysfunctional delight as you'd expect from a story where Megatron and Rung get conjunxed while Starscream, the third in their triad, organizes the reception, and yes, that does include violence as foreplay. But in a kind of adorable way?

I also read the tiny and lovely My Hogwarts Will Be Intersectional Or It Will Be Bullshit by swingandswirl, written in direct response to JKR being unpleasantly transphobic on twitter this past week, and skimmed through Magical Metamorphosis by EontheDragonMage, which is a lovely Goblet of Fire rewrite in which Harry Potter realizes she's a girl, and a lot of other little injustices in the stories are worked out along the way as well. As of this writing, it's also a WIP, but it's just reached the end of the school year, so I didn't feel too unsettled when I got to the end of chapter 17.

( And then there's the very strange historical omegaverse hockey RPF... )

VIEWED

I don't usually think to include works of visual art in these posts, but Honk by vass, which comments very wryly on the ongoing drama regarding the AO3's Hugo award, merits an exception.

WATCHED

( Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. )

( The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel through episode 3x01, "Strike Up the Band" )

I'm still hard pressed to categorize this show, but it hasn't stopped me nominating it for Chocolate Box.

( Sym-Bionic Titan through episode 1x05, "Elephant Logic" )

For me. I don't feel any particular resentment towards the season; in fact, I spend a fair amount of it not feeling much of anything at all. Emotions require energy, is the thing, and I'm in very short supply of that. In a way it's freeing: at other times of year, when I think of something I might do, it exists as an actual possibility, with all the potential for anxiety and guilt that that entails, but now I just think, ahahahahaha -- no, and tell myself to hold that thought until I am no longer living in a light-starved hell.

Yesterday I ate a chocolate bar, which is notable because doing so required me to first open the wrapper, something which in the preceding days I had not found the wherewithal to do.

I promise you that this is very funny when you are the person living it.

I do actually have some energy. My shoulders ache from snow shoveling, which is good, because I got that ache being very careful about my technique so as to avoid wrenching my back. I spent a couple of hours rolling around in a wonderful horrible new plotbunny today -- I'm not going to write it, but it's good to know that at least my ideas haven't dried up. I even, unrelatedly, managed to make someone laugh.

I keep thinking of posts I might make -- about recent events on Person of Interest; about the fact that Almost Human is eating my brain; and then there's one I really do want to write someday, even if it's in a very disorganized fashion, about some of the zillion and one largely disparate factors that seem to contribute to whether a given story is judged "good" -- but I guess I'm making this one instead.

(Edited to capitalize the last word of Person of Interest. Oh touchscreen keyboard, don't you know it's unkind to kick a person when they're down?)