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real life

A 3905-post collection

Tropes That Annoy Me: Hypergendered Fat

Think about all the overweight people represented in our media. Now think about all the overweight main characters. What do they have in common?

Well, if they're not Jack Black, who can actually get away with the Overweight Antihero, then they are excruciatingly well-dressed. Neat as the proverbial pin.

The ladies (far rarer than the men) are aggressively cute. The stand-out example is Penelope Garcia from Criminal Minds. She is the girliest of girly girls, despite being in a STEM discipline. Every episode, if she's not wearing something fluffy, she's wearing something either covered in sequins, or something baby-girl pink. Her outfits are always bright in colour and form-fitting in nature. She always wears inconveniently high high heels.

As for the men? Suits. Ties. Vests. They're always impeccably groomed. Their shoes are shiny Oxfords if you see them at all. They always have a beard and that beard is always neat and well-kept. They're rarely allowed to have any other hairstyle than the short back and sides.

Neither of these types are allowed to have any kind of relationship that lasts the entire series/movie. Garcia gets to playfully flirt with another teammate, but he's offscreen married and the relationship is nowhere near serious.

Even Jane/Deb in Drop Dead Diva only gets to have her girlfriend from a previous life. I haven't watched the show past the first season. Things might have changed. But I doubt it.

In our media, today, fat people are not allowed to just be themselves. They are not allowed to have relationships. Not permanent, loving ones. They are not allowed to exist, unless it's under a specific set of rules. Lady fats have to be HYPER FEMININE (with all the bumps in the "right places"). Male fats have to be HYPER MASCULINE. And if they're not, then they're the gross slob that only exists for comedy value.

Unless, as I mentioned, the actor in question is Jack Black. He gets away with it because famous. There is no other reason.

Writers - break this mould into a million pieces. Please. There's thousands of ways you could represent fat people, but you choose two.

In other news, the place I tried to order the A Monster in Paris soundtrack from has called to say the manufacturer has quit making it. Gnash. Anyone who knows anywhere I can get this from legally, please help. Stop bootlegging at the cause.

Smol Dramas

Once again, I have to rant about a few things because life is hellishly inconvenient and everything costs too much and I slightly want to scream.

First up - ISBNs.

So I was thinking that once you got an ISBN for one book, you could use the same ISBN for the SAME CONTENT. I couldn't find anything about this on Lulu, but Smashwords insisted on one, so I thought I'd better check with Lulu just to be sure.

And dummins me went

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Tropes That Annoy Me: I Have Brothers

It's usually a feature of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, but sometimes your Action Gal explains her usually manly feats with "I have brothers". The brothers are almost always older, and numerous, and our female lead has learned to hold her own against them as some form of survival skill.

Sometimes, there are no brothers, the mother is usually out of the picture1, and the father "didn't know how to raise a girl" so did all the boy stuff with her.

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Tropes That Annoy Me: The Fighting Fucktoy

If you want to know all about the Fighting Fuctoy, you won't find much about it on tvtropes.org at all. Nope. For that, you have to go to sites written by, and run by exclusively female authors.

Or you could absorb this picture:

[Artistry care of Kate Beaton of Hark, A Vagrant! fame. Link leads to her Strong Female Characters series collation]

Any attempt to put this sort of thing up on tvtropes results in, I presume, a phenomenally unbelievable amount

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GDI

I was really hoping for the crises to be done with by today. I wanted to talk about the Fighting Fucktoy trope with y'all.

But no. Life has intervened and I need to bitch about stuff for a bit.

Before you fret, Chaos is fine. Her tooth is still nice and shiny and she's eating okay. Today's threat to the return of normalcy is... Mayhem.

Yes, folks. Disasters come once per little darling in this house, and it's Mayhem's turn to fuck

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Signs of a rotten week

The fear/exhaustion feeling is not going away. It's starting to suck major league balls.

I will do just about anything to make it go away. Except break Keto. That crap is not going to happen.

Fortunately, I have a fuckoff-huge coffee hoard and little tricks like sugarless mints to help maintain awareness.

The worst part is trying to go to sleep at night. I can succumb to the exhaustion, but the fear manages to keep me awake for way longer than

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Blurghledy

Something is in the air. Something got to me in the dead of the night and reminded me that asthma is a son of a bitch.

Sneezin' and Wheezin' Season got me, last night, and I woke to the all-too-familiar sensation of not having enough air. So I've used Max for maybe the third time since I started on Keto.

I'm okay. I found my Seratide and dosed myself up on that and some nebuliser Atrovent. I can breathe again.

What I

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Off I go again

This time, it's a much shorter trip to MeMum's to sort out whatever has fluffed up with her tech this time. I suspect she's forced a quit during an update and now everything's gone do-lally. Either that or a virus has managed to get past her antiviral thing and now she needs a purge.

I really hope it's the update thing. That's way easier to fix than the virus.

Either way, I am sorting out a lot of crap, today. Which means

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...sigh...

Home again, home again, and boy, are we grateful. It takes a time to get away from it all to appreciate what you have.

But of course, it wouldn't be a family holiday without a family disaster. Chaos got the run-abouts while waiting in the Adelaide airport, tripped over Mayhem, and bumped a front tooth. Grandma insists that Chaos has broken her tooth and it's going to end in disaster. And won't shut up about the dental disaster that she calls key

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Off we pop

Headed back home to sunny Queensland, today. We've given ourselves until midday to shift on out of the place we're renting, and planned a leisurely toddle towards the Adelaide airport for the hurry-up-and-wait.

I am definitely making certain I have access to my headphones so I can listen to some good tunes1 all the way home.

And I will be extremely glad of my nice comfy home that doesn't creak ominously when you head off to one of the loos.

And

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Last full day in Morgan

There's nothing planned for today, but I would like to pop over to the museum, later on. I, for one, will be very glad to get back home to a bed that's actually comfortable to sleep in. Beloved will also be glad of that respite, I am sure.

Tomorrow, we pack everything up and get ready to exit Morgan, head to Adelaide airport, and do the whole hurry-up-and-wait noise all over again. All so we can return to our home so late

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Well...

We did go on a riverboat tour. For some reason, I was convinced that it would also be a paddle-steamer. No such luck. There were a few paddlewheel boats on the river, but they weren't operational.

Miss Chaos had a beautiful birthday cake made for her by the tour people, and she's been allowed to have all the chocolate-coated strawberries that were on the top and what looks suspiciously like a Ferrero-Rocher praline ball. All of which will be gone, I suspect,

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Hello from Morgan!

And for everyone wondering where the heck that is, I can safely say that it is on the Murray River, and somewhere in South Australia. I think we drove for three hours to get out here, but I can't be certain because I fell asleep for patches of it.

There's a lot of one-street towns in Australia where the Town Hall is right next to the Pub, which is right next to the only shop for forty miles or so, and the

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Rushed!

What I was not told until late last night, is that we're taking off for South Australia at four in the morning, tomorrow. So we can be at the airport in time to hurry up and wait.

Today will all be packing, when we're not celebrating Mother's Day in a very rushed way.

So far, the Primary Parental of the house has not been woken up by younglings. And one of said younglings apparently spent all night gaming instead of coming up

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No Tropes Today

We're due to get our flu jabs, this morning. As such, I don't really have the time for an in-depth rant about things that Hollywood does to tick me off.

That will probably happen more often next week.

It all depends on what else I find to write about, really.

But for now, I have a one and a half hour time window to hammer out a story for you, because post-jabs, I'm planning on heading down to MeMum's for a Stuff

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