February 2025: fox populi, foxes in space, and more
A collection of scattered adventures over the last month.
Saw a few sparklies from the Quadrantids meteor shower.
Got to see the International Space Station and Hubble Space Telescope fly over a few times. I also saw several bright space objects fly over. They weren't listed in my skygazing app, so they might just be random highly reflective debris.
Got back to my long-deferred goal to do more vocal stuff like audiobook narration, limited series podcasts, and music production video tutorials. The early results are currently patron-only while I practice with public domain short story collections prepared by Standard Ebooks. These will be part of an ad-supported podcast in the future, though the stories will always be available without ads to paid supporters.
The latest: a read of Charon by Lord Dunsay.
As I write this, my main practice is narrating one of the 34 chapters of Treasure Island each day. It's a fun, easy read and I expect I'll want to go back through it once I'm done and make it the first read for the podcast.
Thought Of Fox
English: where there's no connection between arrears, affronts, and asides.
Be The Bigger Dog
Yesterday: set upon by three barking dogs, ran them off by barking louder. Little barker took a minute to realize he'd been abandoned.
Today: two returned, the same tiny one barking just the same, but one was just precious. He came up wagging and being sweet.
Once he wandered off I told the little one, still barking: "Your only ally has abandoned you. You are beset by your enemies. Retreat is your only salvation."
Took him a minute.
Links
Wil
I, too, have struggled to read or focus on much and it all started around the same time. This article hits a lot of familiar points and has some good advice to try.
These are your self-preservation instincts trying to protect you from committing to someone who makes you unhappy, the same way they steered you out of your horrible childhood situation. Listen to them! If nothing else, can you imagine trying to plan an entire wedding with someone who can’t answer basic questions about what she wants honestly, thinks everything you do is wrong, and that everything that goes wrong is somehow your fault? NO!
This one is relatable. Learning to trust yourself after dealing with Some Stuff is hard. Deciding "yes, this is abuse" is hard. But "yes, this is toxic" is relatively easy. You know how it makes you feel even if you don't feel confident enough to bring a stronger label to the situation.
And here's the big thing: the way someone reacts to attempts to address the way they make you feel says everything.
JenniferP
“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
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