Category Archives: Text

by Wombatilim

The State of the Wombat

Kiwi in her typical resting spot while I work from home

Hello World.

I’ve been working from home since March, due to COVID-19. My work sent us home about a week before the 7-county Bay Area issued their stay-at-home orders, and even though restrictions have lifted for the most part, I continue to work from home for the foreseeable future. We’d been slowly converting a now-spare bedroom into a recording studio, and I’ve been using the room as an office as well. The cat likes to hang out with me in here while I work, usually sleeping in her box in the corner, sometimes demanding attention on my lap or with her toys.

(“Toys” is a loose term here; they have included actual cat toys but also things like an empty pill bottle or a twist-tie that we overlooked when throwing away the packaging from whatever bit of audio hardware we’d just installed. I do try to keep her from playing with the rug.)

I’ve left Facebook (and Instagram, since they are owned by Facebook) for reasons that are probably obvious to most people I know. And as LJ has been a ghost town for about a decade now (I deleted that too a few years ago once they announced their content was going to be covered under Russian jurisdiction), and Tumblr just isn’t the same since they banned porn, I don’t have much outlet for my long form ramblings lately. Except… I have a blog, don’t I? And it hasn’t been getting much use lately, has it?

So here I am. I can’t promise a regular post but when the mood strikes, I’m likely to come here. For short form, I’ll try to use Mastodon.

Of course the real question now is whether anyone will actually find this blog since I don’t have a Facebook account to crosspost it to, but I think I’ve decided I don’t really care whether anyone reads it or not. I’ve been blogging on the internet since 1997 through so many different platforms, and I see no reason to stop now.

I still miss the decade of LiveJournal, though.

by Wombatilim

Colors

The real reason I keep doing this blog is to challenge myself to represent whatever the hell I’m thinking about in some way or another. Today I actually failed miserably at the representation, but what matters here is that I went through the exercise.

The photography posts are almost cheating in this regard, really, but there are other things I am practicing with those.

colors

by Wombatilim

another sort of thread

The walls… nothing but walls.

I keep walking anyway. My only other option is to stay still, and only one of those options stands a chance of changing things.

Still… so many walls.

Have I been here before?

I can’t tell. It all looks the same.

How long have I been here?

What am I even looking for?

I need to sleep.

I dreamed of outside. It was pink.

Things are starting to feel different.

If I close my eyes…

I can hear subtle changes in the air.

I notice slight differences in touch from one wall to the next.

The smells change as I move.

The air is fresher over here.

The light is blinding. And it’s beautiful.

by Wombatilim

RIP Terry Pratchett

I can’t begin to describe the influence Terry Pratchett has had on my personality, largely because there is no way to describe such things.

I first encountered his name in an advert for Small Gods in Dragon magazine. He was billed as the fantasy version of Douglas Adams, which really doesn’t begin to do the man justice.

soul-musicThe first Discworld book I actually read was Soul Music. I don’t remember whether I was browsing a bookstore and it jumped out at me, or if someone gave it as a gift because obviously Sierra needs to read a book that has a female version of Death on the cover and has “Music” in the title. I was hooked.

I don’t remember what order I read them in, except that it was the “whatever the bookstore had available that I hadn’t read yet” order. This is not the approach I recommend in these days of eBooks and Amazon, but it’s what I could do at the time. Once I did discover Amazon, I began buying the new books in hardcover as they came out, and backfilling the older books that I’d missed, usually 3 at a time, in chronological order. When I ran out of back catalog, I had to wait for the next book like a hungry moose just like everyone else.

Yes, his books were funny, and set in a fascinating world. More than that, though, they were witty, and full of cutting social commentary. So many “I see what you did there” moments, and delightful puns1, and the sort of absurd footnote over-use that’s right up my alley. Characters that were flawed, believable, adaptable, and sympathetic. He put you in the shoes of the antagonist to see how things got that way, and highlighted that for most Bad Things That Happen, the true problem was human nature and the art of assumption and misunderstanding. The characters grew from book to book as the events and the world changed them.

When I first heard of Pratchett’s illness, I was shaken and disappointed. I knew one day he would be gone, long before the world was ready for him to be gone. I savored every book that came out afterward, even more than I had before. I could tell he still had a lot to say, only it was becoming harder for him to say it2. Reading the news of his death today was sad, but we all knew it had to come sooner or later.

Thank you, Sir Terry, for giving us a rich and beautiful world. Thank you for giving us characters so full of personality. Thank you for holding up the mirror to see our own world’s absurdity. Thank you for the turtle and the elephants. Thank you for your incredible insight. Thank you for your contribution in making me who I am.

Thank you for everything. You will be missed.

“…no-one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away… The span of someone’s life, they say, is only the core of their actual existence.”

― Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

1 And puns are so rarely delightful…
2 This doesn’t mean that the books were declining in quality; they most certainly were not. It was just more difficult for him to write them.