galadhir

Ugh, having decided to come back to DW to do more long-form posting, I've ended up firing off my mouth on Tumblr. So I'm going to copy/paste my screeds over here before they become lost in the reblogs.

This one was written as a reply to someone whose mental health was suffering as a result of reading too much about climate change and global catastrophe, and who just didn't know what to do. I think it comes across as though I know what to do, but I don't. This is just my best guess:


I honestly think the human brain was not designed to handle the amount of bad news we throw at it day to day, and that when it becomes a mental health problem, we are beyond that point.

Making yourself ill will not help the world. The larger world won't notice, and your own world of people who actually know you will be hurt by it. So it would actually be a good and helpful thing to stop reading about climate change and concentrate on getting your mental health stabilized, in the short term.

In the long term - find out what YOU can do about climate change and do that thing.

For most people, there won't be an awful lot that you can do. But you can sign petitions. You can use green energy yourself and argue your friends/family into it. You can reduce your use of energy and plastic, and support food producers who are producing food in ways that improve the planet. You can spread awareness of the issues to the people you know. You can vote for politicians with good environmental credentials and support the work of larger organizations. You can start or join a community project to protect or improve a specific thing in your area...

If you're at the start of your life, you can can consider going into a field where you can help the environment. The world needs regenerative farmers and land managers and people working for Greenpeace and green politicians, and honest eco-friendly journalists and scientists researching renewable energy, and planners of green cities and builders of eco-friendly houses and designers and makers of regeneratively produced clothing, and inventors of plastic-substitutes, protectors of endangered lands and species, and makers of community gardens etc etc.

You can't do everything. Nobody can do everything. But you can probably do something.

So find your something you can do, and do that. And then try not to take responsibility for the things you don't have the power to change.

A friend on Tumblr just asked me what I thought of The Terror, and whether I'd recommend it. I wrote an enormous screed in return, and I'm going to repost it here so - if anyone here is wondering whether to watch The Terror, I won't have to type it all twice :)

I would definitely recommend it. The only thing against it is that it requires a fair tolerance toward gore, because there's quite a bit of people having their heads or other parts bitten off by a huge ice-bear-spirit. But this is not one of those programs where you feel have a kind of weird fetishistic enjoyment of the gore. People dying is always treated as a tragedy and with a kind of gentleness toward human fraility, that to my mind makes the gore tolerable

I didn't find it too scary - and I am someone who had to stop watching Supernatural because I found that too scary. I know I'm not invading someone else's land or (accidentally) shooting vengeful shamans, and therefore I can be fairly happy that a giant remorseless, unstoppable ice-bear-spirit is not coming for me.

I don't know if you watched Stargate Universe at all, but this has a similar vibe of an isolated crew of social misfits faced with an outside threat, and you gradually get to know people and love them as they gradually get to know and love each other.

It helps that the very first scene is of the search party learning from the local Inuit that everyone in the crew is dead. You don't get your hopes up wanting your fave to survive - the most you can hope for is that they get a good, or at least painlessly quick death. But tbh, death doesn't seem too bad by the time it comes for most of them.

So those are my caveats. Mostly though, it's cinematically beautiful to look at, and its study of human frailty and the kindness and love that are needed to deal with it are complex and worth thinking about. The Inuit are treated with respect and I think were involved in the production, so their viewpoint is a fascinating counterpoint to that of the doomed westerners

(All these guys staggering around and starving in the middle of the main female character's country, where she can just step off the boat and build herself a house and she's right at home.)
But the commentary on colonialism is also light handed and done with kindness

There are a lot of characters who it's difficult to keep track of, but I stan for Captain Crozier, everyone on earth loves Goodsir, and I loathe Hickey with all the force of loathing available to me, but nobody could claim he was not memorable :)
.... Already too late to cut a long story short, but I think it's brilliant and I would definitely recommend it

Oh, what is it about? It's about the Franklin expedition to try to find the North West passage through the Arctic. The two ships get frozen into the ice for three years and the crews eventually try to make it home by walking... That's all a true story, but in this telling there is also a giant polar-bear spirit which wants them gone from the lands that belong to the people it protects. The spirit is tied to a shaman who can control it, but the expedition accidentally shoots the shaman, and his daughter isn't ready to take up control of it because she's scared of it herself. She eventually has to face it and then decide what to do about all these white men going mad and feral all over the place

The female characters in the TV show are treated with respect throughout. (Unlike in the freaking book, whose author I would not like to meet.)

~

Incidentally, my DW's subtitle is a quote from a specially horrifying and yet moving scene in The Terror, and the deep abyss theme is because I was so impressed with a scene where one of the characters goes down into the ocean under the ice. Probably my favourite scene, because it's so beautiful, so eerie and so scary all at once.

I need an icon of that, don't I?

I don't think I'd make a good potion maker. I've only just realized that it makes a big difference which ingredient you add to which in what order.

To give context, I was making some kitchen-cleaning liquid. In the process of trying to use (and then throw away) less plastic, I stopped buying those neon-coloured spray bottles of kitchen cleaner and started making my own, which I put into a glass spray bottle which I then re-use continually.

This cleaning liquid is genuinely WAY better than the stuff I used to buy, and smells nicer. This is the recipe:

100mls castille liquid soap
2 tbsp bicarbonate of soda
400mls boiled water
Essential oils of choice (I use 3 drops each of lavender, tea-tree, citronella and peppermint, because they're supposed to have disinfectant qualities, and also they smell nice together.)

Previously I'd been adding the ingredients in the order given here, and I'd had a problem with undissolved bicarb clogging up the spray nozzle. This time I dissolved the bicarb in the hot water first, and only then added the soap and oils. Much better! It's amazing watching the misty clear of the dissolved bicarb water and the clear yellow of the soap turn solid white like milk when combined.

Anyway, I can't speak highly enough of this cleaning solution. It lifts dirt like the best 'activated oxygen' spray you can get from the supermarket, without smelling all throat-chokingly chemical. It does leave a white residue if you don't wipe it off thoroughly enough - but that helps you make sure you have wiped it off. And it means I don't buy plastic bottles any more.

(I did buy a 5L jug of liquid castille soap, but (a) it's lasted me a year and a half so far, and there's about 2L still to go, and (b) when it's finished it will be turned into a place to put a plant on my vertical wall in the garden.)

Woohoo! Guess who got their first appointment for their first covid vaccination! Thursday next week I get my first dose, and the second dose on June 3rd.

It won't change any of my behaviour, but it will make me feel a lot better. Fingers crossed I don't catch it in the mean time, considering I will need to buy groceries some time this week.