branchandroot | Entries tagged with argh

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So far, this academic year is _ridiculous_.

( OMG )

So yeah, this academic year is extremely fired. Preferably into the sun. If week five tries to go one better, I'm gonna have to kill someone.

Die in a FIRE, Stablehost, die! Oh my god, that's two months of journal and fic comments I DIDN'T GET and the fucking spam filter won't give them back! Aaaaaaaaa!

...erm, for anyone I didn't reply to, I'm so sorry, it's the spam filter, not you.

*goes to try to find fic comments*

So, the axe finally dropped, today, in that Pres Mark sent out an email to the whole university saying that we're looking at a pretty dire deficit this year (largely but not solely because the University Hospital is part of the University financial structure as a whole), pay increases are frozen, hiring is frozen, furloughs are voluntary now but may not be at some point in the future.

Now, this is not actually a problem for my team, by and large. We are (once more with feeling) the only instructional design unit for about seventy percent of the university. They're already talking about doing Fall fully online. They can't actually furlough any of us without massive disruption of critical service.

But you betcha I spent an hour or so intermittently shrieking CRITICAL SERVICE, YOU ASSHOLE, I'M TRYING TO REPLACE STAFF WHO ARE LEAVING, I'M ALREADY SHORTHANDED, GIVE ME BACK MY JOB SEARCH YOU LITTLE WORM. It's not unlikely I'll /get/ my job search back, really, because again, critical staff. But this has not been a warm and fuzzy day.

So I went out on the porch, and ordered some comfort food by delivery, and now I'm going to make good use of my newly arrived rum and have a nice mojito.

So, just when I was thinking it might be safe to, like, breathe, one of my team announces that she will be retiring, not at the end of August, but at the BEGINNING OF JUNE.

Have I mentioned that Umich decided to hold all spring and summer courses online? Because they did. And who is the only online teaching support unit in all of LSA? That would be mine, yes.

And now I have exactly two months to force a new position posting through the current hiring freeze (because vital) at senior rank (because independent responsibility a must) do interviews (wholly online) and onboard the new ~~sucker~~ team member, possibly also online depending on when the lockdown lifts.

Two months.

While also running full speed with all the spring/summer faculty on our shoulders.

*bright, crazed smile*

I'm fine. This is fine. We're all fine, here.

Though the next person to ask me whether there's a timed option in Canvas Quizzes, when it says so right there in the settings, may not be.

You know, I can kind of understand the sudden flood of invitations to virtual events from retail outlets. It's a little slimy, because impulse buying is probably at an all-time and alarming high right now, but it's also true that retail is losing /normal/ sales and traffic right now. And they don't know that I'm hella busy. I mean, a lot of people aren't! So I don't mind them as much.

But the ed-tech companies who are circling in like vultures who see a tasty corpse, filling my inbox with breathless "opportunities"... them I'm keeping a shit list of. Those are the companies that I will cold-shoulder so very hard, when we're done with this, because I DO NOT HAVE TIME FOR THIS SHIT RIGHT NOW, FUCK OFF, I'M TRYING TO EXPLAIN TO 4000 INSTRUCTORS THAT CANVAS WILL GRADE QUIZ QUESTIONS AUTOMATICALLY, DIE IN A FIRE MEDIASITE. They know exactly how busy instructional design and ed-tech support is right now. They are on the Fiber 500 Platinum shit list.

HA! YES! SUCK IT, APPLE, I'M GOING TO CHANGE MY SYSTEM FOLDER ICONS WHETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT!

*breathing hard*

For those who have updated to El Capitan and lost their custom icons:

-Shut computer down.
-Hold down Command + R and restart (release buttons once the gray apple icon appears on the screen)
-Wait for the dialogue box on a dark gray screen; bypass the dialogue and go up to the menu bar and select Utilities > Terminal.
-Type in: csrutil disable
-Hit return. Close Terminal and select Restart from the apple icon on the menu bar.

-Fire up LiteIcon or whatever icon swapper you use and swap out icons.
-To do it by hand navigate to System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle; right click and select "Show Contents" for CoreTypes; navigate to Contents/Resources; replace the system icons by hand.

-Now do that reboot, Cmnd+R, Terminal song and dance again.
-This time, type: csrutil enable
-Close out and restart, and lo you will have both your custom icons and your system integrity protection.

This process complicated, in my case, by the fact that none of my computer's boot screens will accept a tap on my trackpad as select/enter, and I had to go fish out my spare mighty-mouse from way back when to actually CLICK on anything.

*gives Apple two middle fingers, quite vigorously*

Normally, you know, I scoff at the people who respond to any variation of "you depicted people who are like me as $DISGUSTINGLY_BIGOTED_STEREOTYPE in your fic, could you not do that?" with cries of "What do you mean I can't write about this?!". Because, of course, that isn't what any sane person involved actually said, and pretending they did is a transparent buck-passing attempt for which I have only scoffing.

I do also realize that there are people who really do try to tell people they can't write about X topic or group, but, honestly, I can't consider those people with anything but scoffing either.

However.

I hereby declare that no Western steampunk fan is ever, ever again allowed to use the word "geisha" without first undergoing, and prominently displaying proof of, at least one full term of Japanese women's studies or the equivalent.

This post brought to you by a serious case of "omg, how are you related to me, can I disown you right now please" (national and fandom varieties).

Okay, seriously, what the fuck?

My rant on women in KHR was far from the first thing I've written castigating some anime/manga or other for presenting women as useless frills or objectified sex shows or whatever other negative stereotype was in question. I'm fairly sure it wasn't the first time such an entry has been linked on a meta comm.

So why is this particular entry drawing so much fire? I just ran across yet another (annoyingly clueless) screed against it while googling for a KHR timeline for pity's sake!

Is there really such a concentration of anti-feminist women (I shudder that such a phrase can still be written) in KHR, or did this particular entry just happen to fall into the orbit of a small knot of them and I have the bad luck to keep stumbling over their excrescence?

That is to say, I'm seeing a lot of similarity in how Lau Wu Fei, of Shin Petshop of Horrors, is treated by D/Leon fans and the way just about any canon girlfriend is treated by fans who wish to pair the hero with someone else. He's dismissed, reviled, and generally stomped on for reasons that do not actually have to do with his character.

I would very much like the particular brand of D/Leon fan who does this to knock it the fuck off.

Totally aside from the fact that I happen to like Lau, there is absolutely nothing stopping them from reveling in the first ten volumes and writing D/Leon fic and manifestos to their hearts' content.

In addition to that, I happen to like Lau. And, because of the degree of "omg, he's not Leon, HE IS EVIL" running around, I'm about ready to wash my hands of the damn fandom.

So, my dear flist, what do you think? Should I mention (more diplomatically than this, probably) that those D/Leon fans need to stop harshing other people's squee? Or is that just asking for a flamewar on the comm?

WAROGAGOT is a handy acronym which stands for Wailing And Rending Of Garments And Gnashing Of Teeth. I use it sometimes as a tag.

It is also nicely onomatopoetic, being similar to the sound one makes when, for example, one has just spent five hours working on a website, trying to fix a problem, and then trying to fix the problems of the fix, only to find out that it doesn't work anyway and one has to reload the flawed copy of the database from backup and just live with it. And with five wasted hours of computer anguish.

The sound one makes an hour later, when one loads the one line of code that it took three minutes to type which fixes the initial problem is a little different.