Spontaneous ∂erivation

Neutral dreams I can’t quite remember, but they involved something like a high school and were not traumatic. Although after I woke up I still cuddled Overcow for a little while because, you know, high school, while not being blown-out horrors like home life, wasn’t all that great for me.

I’ve been thinking about and browsing over the TVTropes entry for Toy Story, and it occurs to me that, while I very much enjoyed the first two movies and really want to see the third (and suspect I will quite like it), I never really understood the movies. My toys as a child tended to be deprived of meaning due to either being associated with trauma or were enormous bribes to not blame my parents for abuse (Paradise Estate¹ was “earned” by being strangled by my father that one time), or just taken away from me (like all my stuffed animals, I think when my father found out that the reason I circled them around my bed was as a primitive, 8-year old logic attempt at trying to ward him off²).

The Overherd is, on the other hand, quite different, and now I think I understand the Toy Story series better. What a weird thing.

On second thought, I definitely understand more. I wrote a little adoring page about the Overherd and even worked out the PHP code needed to automatically display a quick listing of links to each OVERHERD post. Er. It might need to be paginated one day.

1. A My Little Pony thing. *shudder* [↩]
2. ETA: Actually, come to think of it, he might not have had such an issue were I not also using this method to ward off “evil spirits.” [↩]

In celebration of what Agony Booth would call The Worst of Trek.

Of course, YMMV. Some people love Enterprise, lots don’t. Lots of people love the Star Trek reboot, some people don’t. Although everybody seems to hate Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, so that’s a sort of uniting issue.

All I know is, here are links.

Agony Booth Hilarious Recap

Trekking with Tim at Rotten Tomatoes

Roger Ebert’s Take

DVD Journal reviews the DVD

Star Trek V Rifftrax

Enter Stage Right defends Star Trek V

TV Tropes Star Trek V page (Warning: time sink)

I love Neil Gaiman’s work. His writing in combination with Terry Pratchett’s in Good Omens got me interested in two variants of non-stereotypical fantasy (and actually the first types of fantasy I became interested in) and provided a lot of relief from a bad parental situation.

Last night, I reread Endless Nights, seven short comic book stories about the Endless from Sandman, a series which I love.

It was Delirium’s story that made me go “argh, Neil Gaiman, why did you do this?!”

One of the crazy people is a raped girl who’s gone catatonic. Now. I didn’t mind that bit, because mental illness is mental illness whether someone is inserting Unfortunate Implications or not, and I think Gaiman was mostly not, for this part of the story.

No, it was the ending, where she wakes up and says, “I spent enough time there already, I’m done now.”

That was fine. I have felt this very way for years.

And then she says, “I’ll let it go.”

Four words that ruin the story.

It’s okay in one sense, in that even with chronic PTSD, there are things you can choose to do to heal over a long, looong period of time.

But it’s not okay in a lot of other senses. To name just two major ones: (a) that traumatic reactions are just a choice and not, you know, the result of hormones, body chemicals, or the long-term results of evolution/nurture; (b) that the traumatized are, basically, just victimizing themselves when they can just simply choose to let it go.

Dude, man. You for sure know it’s not that simple, right? You know that’s one of the worst examples of Armchair Psychology, almost verging on Family Unfriendly Aesop? Right? Right??

But, I quite liked the rest of the collection. He’s still a good storyteller, and we all make really, really, really stupid mistakes sometimes. There’s no help for it, except to listen when people tell you “I have a problem with this,” and also for people to say so in the first place. Fallibility is what it means to be human.

For any Neil Gaiman apologists, yes, I forgive him. No, I’m not rewriting this.

I’m going back to bed.

I had kind of a silly nightmare, compared to the ones I usually dread. It was more of a realization, kind of like the Obama dream.

This is going to ramble on a bit.

In my dream, I’d driven my car to where Home Depot used to be. Except there was a Toys ‘R Us instead! Bizarre, but I spent some time walking around.

Click here to read more →