girderednerve

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can i just say how annoying it is to me personally that the burnout post has all those typos in it. you really can tell i touch-typed it while also having a work conversation #mytimetheft

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they wipe the summer reading app between summer readings so i am copy-pasting in all of my book reviews from this summer reading, in reverse order, for me to have. yay

A Court of Thorns and Roses, Sarah J. Maas (3/5): Pure comedy. How many times can our narrator observe that her "bowels turned watery" before we can agree that the romantic mood is broken? One brave author attempts to find out.

A Court of Mist and Fury, Sarah J. Maas (2/5): I suspect this book was written to sell destination AirBnbs, which would explain why it was written with the mesmerizing, frictionless predictability of advertising copy and the approximate eroticism and artistic accomplishment of the clearance rack at Victoria's Secret. It's an incredible move to premise the central pairing on the idea that choice and autonomy are necessary for a healthy relationship and then reveal that they were destined mates all along. Truly a book unwilling to commit to even the most slightly controversial of its ideas, and in that sense claustrophobically heterosexual.

Fourth Wing, Rebecca Yarros (1/5): This book is KDP swill. Its world is thin and poorly imagined; its military culture is nonsensical, which is not what I expected from a proud army wife; its disability politics are a 2016 Instagram post. Pointing all of that out feels mean, though, because the purpose of this book is to provide a vehicle for thinking about an anime man for people who don't watch anime, which it clearly accomplishes. The publishing industry is completely cooked.

Bride, Ali Hazelwood (4/5): This book somewhat misunderstands the point of vampires but I found it charming nevertheless. Trend of recent romances refusing to let us doubt for a moment that the romantic lead simps dangerously for our heroine continues, to my disappointment; literally this book becomes 20% better instanteously upon removal of the chapter epigraphs. I believe this counts as a "romp"

Compound Fracture, Andrew Joseph White (4/5): I never get all that annoyed at a book unless it's got potential so I guess this book has a lot of potential. This book would be substantially better if its author had gone to the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum in Matewan, WV instead of reading tweets

Strong Poison, Dorothy L. Sayers (5/5): Cannot express enough how irritating it is to find out that people who have been telling you that you would definitely like a book were completely correct. I hate detectives and the English peerage, and yet Peter Wimsey is both frustratingly charming and accompanied by a dazzling variety of women side characters who are Up To Things; the prose sparkles and there's even a joke about A Shropshire Lad. Literally who could resist!

Emily Wilde's Encyclopedia of Faeries, Heather Fawcett (5/5): Cute! Accomplishes exactly what it intends to do, which is be a frothier, fairytale Dorothy Sayers. I love it when the main character is Susan Calvin; in fact I think Susan Calvin should be the main character of every romance novel

okay i am not editing these but i am noting here that i want to edit the preceding review, because i wrote it before reading any sayers & while it might still scan (depends on one's understanding of sayers' reputation), it isn't accurate now that i have read some sayers. i wanted to express that it's clever & a little repressed, and the prose was surprisingly good. it is frothy though that part is true. i found the sequel functionally unreadable

Have His Carcase, Dorothy L. Sayers (4/5): Dorothy continues to astound and this book does contain stellar little moments (Wimsey being nibbled on by a horse; Harriet and Wimsey arguing unhappily), but it is unfortunately a murder mystery and convoluted logic puzzles about imaginary crimes are simply not for me. If only Dorothy had turned her incisive eye to the criminal justice system along with her sprightly dissection of misogyny :/

Gaudy Night, Dorothy L. Sayers (5/5): Placet.

Busman's Honeymoon, Dorothy L. Sayers (5/5): If you think about it, Busman's Honeymoon is really about why Batman isn't allowed to stay married in main continuity. Just one more way in which Ms. Sayers' work continues to resonate in our modern times [misrendered bat emoji]

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Auguste Rodin: Two Hands (1909)

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tomorrow is: bandcamp friday! what are we excited about?

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"It was no coincidence that one of the era's new pop psychology terms was 'burnout.' When New York psychologist Herbert Freudenberger went searching for an evocative metaphor for the syndrome he was beginning to diagnose, he found it in the fire-ravaged building. 'If you have ever seen a building that has been burned out,' he wrote at the start of his internationally bestselling 1980 book, Burn Out: How to Beat the High Cost of Success, 'you know it's a devastating sight.' He continued: 'As a practicing psychoanalyst, I have come to realize that people, as well as buildings, sometimes burn out.'

Freudenberger's epiphany came at the St. Mark's Free Clinic, where, in the early 1970s, he served as a volunteer counselor to the throngs of hippie youth who congregated in the East Village. He would arrive around six p.m., after putting in a full day at his private practice on Park Avenue. To get to St. Marks Place, he had to traverse an East Village pockmarked by burned-out buildings. Some areas, particularly blocks with a large number of Puerto Rican residents, lost more than half their housing during the decade. The peak hours for arson in these years fell just after midnight, right when Freudenberger tended to leave the clinic.

In 1971, after a year of sixteen-hour days, the psychologist found himself unable to get out of bed, having succumbed to what he would soon term 'staff burn-out'—a condition that he associated with over-dedicated and overachieving professionals, especially care workers like himself. Years later, when Freudenberger related the experience for a broad audience, he reasoned from the ruins surrounding the clinic: 'What had once been a throbbing, vital structure is now deserted.' Not reducible to stress, depression, or exhaustion, Freudenberger's burnout was a symptom of high expectations that went unfulfilled. 'The American dream is no longer a reality,' he told the Los Angeles Times in 1982, 'but many of us are still operating as if it were.' If Freudenberger was looking for a symbol that could evoke those dashed dreams, he couldn't do much better than the burned-out building. Though he failed to acknowledge it in his own exploration of the term, those torched buildings had generated value by being destroyed. Freudenberger's burnout unwittingly suggested how depletion, even to the point of destruction, could be profitable.

Despite its poignance, burnout had obscured the conditions that gave it meaning. Gone were the landlords and underwriters, the agents of government austerity, the torches, and the constellation of other forces that obliterated the built environment. Freudenberger even evicted from his analogy the tenants who had in actual fact been burned out. He described his prototypical patient in this way: 'I came from a pretty good home, I went to school, settled into a career, married someone I loved, had children. We're a pretty successful family. Money, home, cars—but something is missing.' In this early formulations Burn Out was thus reserved for the well-to-do suburbanite: the byproduct of accumulation, rather than dispossession. An indifferent worker putting in twelve-hour days on the assembly line was definitionally unfit for the diagnosis. 'It would be virtually impossible for the underachiever to get into that state,' Freudenberger wrote. That the tenants who had literally been burned out were deemed ineligible for the diagnosis was typical of an arson discourse rife with elisions, smokescreens, and amnesia."

—Bench Ansfield, Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City (2025), Ch. 4, "'We Went to Bed With Our Shoes On'"

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Felix Vallotton, Evening on the Loire, 1923

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PSA

the internet archive is getting sued for a bajillion dollars. you can voice your support for the archive and its services on change.org here or below.

the actual internet archive staff are pushing for signatures, so i figured i would support. + definitely reblog if you feel so inclined.

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Butterflies, William Baxter Closson ca. 1885

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i am not vegan, will not become vegan, and own many beloved items produced using animal-derived materials, but the popular genre of tumblr post inveighing against vegans who selfishly insist on wearing only the most microplastics-shedding fabrics are really irritating. no, wool is not completely cruelty-free, because the scale of agriculture required to produce cheap wool for this clothing trend involves a great deal of cruelty, to sheep, to the animals whose habitats are destroyed for pastureland, and to agricultural and textile workers. no, leather is not the chemical-free alternative; tanning has been a nuisance industry and source of pollution for its entire lengthy existence. there are various ways to mitigate these harms to some degree, but not to prevent them entirely; diminishing them by gesturing at plastics does not make them disappear.

those posts all read, in summary, "i am defensive about the choices i make about what i purchase, and instead of thinking that through i am going to yell about a small group of people, whose arguments i do not understand or attempt to engage, because it reassures me that i am leading an ethical life." which is legal i just think it's tacky

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me whenm i am. Prougraming on my Computer

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girlfriend showed me the sequoia trail bricklink lego set and i said "straight up gooning." and we're still dating. love is real

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buffy the vampire slayer ⇾ 1.10

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i have wandered into a social conundrum, please advise

i have a coworker (technically she is my direct report. we are all nice & stuff but i do sign her timecards) who i like a great deal & who invited me/my partner to go play magic the gathering at her house last-minute on friday (guy who was supposed to round out an even number for friday night magic canceled last minute & she sent me a text like 'hey bossman i mean this respectfully but you seem like you might know how to play magic,' thereby wrecking me 4ever) has sent me an invite to her husband's discord server. (i did not actually play magic at her house because i don't know how, but i did helpfully sit behind my partner & contribute valuable insight such as "that guy have big arm," "elf lady! awooga?" and "bug! you need a bug.") i do not want to reject overtures of friendship. however, the only discord handle i have is the same handle i have here, my idiot tumblr blog for complaining about my life & mentioning the fisting tag on ao3. i do not want her to read this. the only people i have met irl who are allowed to see my tumblr blog were required to meet me in high school or earlier. what do

note i know that server nicknames exist but i don't want my current username to be even temporarily visible. for my mental health or whatever #mymentalhealth

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Sculptural fashion: In 1962, french sculptor Etienne Martin built his amazing wearable sculpture Le Manteau. Here Etienne himself is seen modelling in Le Manteau in his studio. 

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we are so fucking back, figured out how to type emoji in linux without having to memorize a bunch of unicode tags 😈

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Windows 11's latest update is resulting in SSD failures if it reaches 60% capacity. The update wipes the drive and unmounts it.

If you are on Windows 11, please don't update. If you have already updated, please look up how to roll back your update

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Tired about (1895-1900) oil on canvas by Ramón Casas