Yeah, it’s been an ongoing saga. I’ve tried going to the teachers, but their hands are tied because of his neurodiversity - this is where the “be kind to him” instruction came from last week. And it’s like, I did that for months and all I have to show for it is exhaustion, anxiety, and depression. So, nope. Not doing that. He can just stay away from me.
A very wise person once said “the only way to win is to deny the battle”. This advice is working well for me this week. The guy at university that I have developed a strong aversion to keeps trying to talk to me, and I have been ignoring him. If you’re reading this and feeling inclined to call this mean, this situation has arisen because he repeatedly refused to respect my boundaries (and I genuinely cannot express them more explicitly than the literal words “do not touch my laptop”), repeatedly started arguments because he can’t accept his opinions are not facts, and repeatedly obstructed our group project to the point that I ended up doing every single task that was assigned to him, because he either didn’t do it, only did half of it, or did it so badly that it was unusable by the rest of the team. He is quite capable of talking non-stop for 8 hours without even pausing for breath, including talking through lectures, talking over other people, and talking while others are trying to concentrate on their work. He does not think the word “no” should ever apply to him. He has broken my belongings, lied about it, and when confronted about it, neither apologised nor offered to pay for them.
I’ve been getting some pushback on my decision to start pretending he does not exist, because he’s neurodiverse (autism+ADHD+oppositional defiance disorder) and we have to “be kind to him”. I’ve really struggled with this, because I normally have no difficulty getting on with neurodiverse people and I have genuinely tried my best to be understanding with this guy. My default approach to interactions with anyone is to be(e) nice. But that has to be a two-way street. Having had my very reasonable boundaries trampled over multiple times, with all the evidence being that he misses the unspoken social cues, isn’t listening when asked politely, and argues about why “no” should mean “yes” when asked grumpily, my conclusion is that my own self-preservation has to take priority now.
By refusing to engage with him, he has no opportunities to ignore my boundaries (except for his continued attempts to keep talking to me) and he has no opportunities to start arguments. He can’t do any of his usual shit if I completely blank him when he speaks. This is the most control I’ve had over my interactions with him in four months, and it’s the least stressed and suicidal I’ve felt in two months. I would also, perhaps, argue that this is the best way I can “be kind to him”, because the one thing that will consistently make me lose my temper is when someone keeps pushing me even after I’ve told them “no”. Refusing to give him the opportunity to keep pushing me is a kindness to both of us.
And a new team project begins. Team leaders from the last term’s projects were exempt from being in charge again this time, which was something of a relief for a couple of hours. The new team leader is a lovely guy, but very shy and socially awkward, and so far his success rate for deciding what to do and delegating it to someone is… uh… one time. A couple more times if you include me making a suggestion and him going “yeah, what Frog said.” I have to give the dude credit for volunteering for team leader - given his personality, it was a seriously brave thing to do and I genuinely admire that. But I understand there are some bets amongst the class for £5-£10 over how many weeks it will be before I’m in charge. And I’m just like… nope, I am not taking over. I’m just not doing it.
University spring term started again this week, and after being loaded down with three more assignments (including another group project), we also got the grades for one of last term’s assignments. I am very, very pleased with mine - 81%, which probably only really means something to those familiar with UK degree-level grading, but I’m really proud of it (while simultaneously being mildly annoyed I couldn’t do better). Last term’s group project grades will be given next week (though we do know that everyone passed, which is 40% or higher), and I’m expecting that one to be quite a bit lower. I’d like something above 70%, but that feels a bit optimistic given what a disaster the project was.
I’ve mentioned on a number of occasions the guy who was on my team project whose combination of arrogance and laziness made him more of a hindrance than a help throughout the entire project. I had a bit of a blow up at him just before Christmas, the culmination of his obstructiveness, his chronic (but not terminal) verbal diarrhoea, and utter lack of ability to accept that no means no. (“Do not touch my laptop” is pretty explicit, and should not prompt an argument about how it’s fine because he knows how to handle laptops.) Anyway, the outcome of this is that he’s spent the whole week sulking in the corner of the room, not talking to anyone. He also ragequit the class Discord server over Christmas, and nobody even noticed he was gone until today when we were getting set up for the new group project. That’s how much everybody likes him. I feel a little bad because I don’t like it when someone feels like they’re not welcome… even when they’re genuinely not welcome because they’re a dick.
Yeah, it’s not flawless, but it’s straightforward to use, which really is the thing you need for this kind of service, since it’s intended to be used by normal people rather than experts. The one and only thing that our glorious Conservative overlords have done well in the last 13 years is modernising a lot of official administrative processes like this so they can be done digitally and without a load of needless complexity.
Pretty much the same in the UK. Most people don’t have to file their tax at all (it’s automatically deducted from wages for most people), but for those that do, you can do it for free on the government’s website, which is largely a matter of saying how much you earned, and any relevant deductions. The government then calculates what tax you have to pay. If your tax affairs are more complicated than that, you’re earning enough that you’re in the “having an accountant is mandatory” territory anyway.
Yeah, it’s one of those things where I understand intellectually that the odds of an incident are incredibly low. I’m sure I read somewhere that air travel is statistically the safest form of travel. But anxiety is definitely not logical!
(Those two bears would have to be very determined to attack me - neither are native here!)
I know, logically speaking, that air travel is statistically very safe. But it’s news like this that makes me anxious about flying later in the year (for the first time in 15 years!), especially as the last leg of my outward journey is on a 737 Max.
I’m fed up already. Neighbours felt the need to party, with music and screaming, until about 4am. 2024 looks to be significantly more financially challenging than 2023 as my primary source of income has had the final nail in its coffin. I’m not looking forward to going back to university next week - I like the course as a whole, I just despise one of my fellow students and the thought of having to endure his obnoxiousness for another two and a half years is just…
I’m starting this year from a place of having almost completely given up, and it’s all downhill from here.
how many woman would put up with a stay at home guy. Maybe some but not likely.
I would guess that would be primarily because even when the woman is working full time and the guy is at home all the time, the stats show the woman still does most of the housework and child-rearing. Plenty of women do “put up with” a stay-at-home guy when he’s doing all the unpaid work that traditionally falls on the woman in the relationship.
The sad thing is that torture didn’t used to be a staple of kids films. I watched a lot of animated films in the last few months (research component of an animation module at university), and the torture scenes only really start appearing in the last 30 years or so - and seems to be more of a thing in the 3D animated films than in the traditionally animated ones during the brief time period where the two mediums overlapped.
There’s violence in pretty much all of the older ones, for sure, but that feels different to torturing someone for information, I think, because there tends to be two contexts for the violence: a hero is using it as a last resort to deal with an enemy (eg Jungle Book, where Mowgli initially goes “well I’ll just talk to Shere Khan so he understands I’m not a threat”, and only engages in violence against the tiger when Shere Khan is literally trying to murder everybody) or it’s used to demonstrate how cruel and petty a villain is (eg Lion King, where the hyenas shove Zazu into a geyser - they’re not torturing him for information, they’re doing it because they find it funny). In both cases, there’s no ambiguity about whether the violence is justified or not - it is justified when the hero is doing it in self-defence or defence of others, and it’s not when the villains are doing it for the giggles.
Even in, say, Pinocchio, where Stromboli uses the threat of violence against Pinocchio, it’s in a situation where it’s undeniably evil. He had been using cooperation and persuasion up until that point, very successfully, but when Pinocchio basically goes “okay, I’ve had a nice day, but I’m going home to my father now, I’ll be back tomorrow”, Stromboli cannot find anything that would persuade Pinocchio not to go home. So violence and the threat of violence are the only options remaining, but there’s no question that using threats to prevent a child from going home to their family is in any way justified. And a key part of this is that when Stromboli does this, Pinocchio has absolutely no interest in helping him anymore.
I think the most troubling element of torture in animation films of the last 30 years is how often it’s used by the heroes. There is, perhaps, some leeway when the villains do it, because if a villain does an evil thing, then it creates no grey area about whether torture is acceptable. (And it’s probably an easier way of having a good character reveal information that they shouldn’t, than have them do it voluntarily, which would have audiences going “WTF Mike Wazowski just betrayed his best friend! What a shit guy!”) But torture does seem to be increasingly used by the protagonists, when what they should be doing is trying cooperative methods - why does Dory opt for threatening the crabs after taking “there’s nothing you can do to make me give you the information” at face value, instead of at least trying cooperation first?
You know, now you mention it, torture scenes of some kind do seem to be very common in kids films, and not just the Disney Pixar ones. The non-Pixar Disney ones often do as well, as do the Dreamworks ones. Not always, but a lot of the time.
One big question comes to mind: are there any kids animated films that were written by women, and do they feature torture scenes?
(I’d be willing to bet a lot of the Hallmark films are written by men, too.)
My impression is it wasn’t so much about thinking they had a unique idea that the others were “stealing”, as fearing the other books with similar themes releasing at a similar time would pull attention away from their book. Which is actually a bit silly, because generally the first thing someone does after loving a book with a particular genre/theme combo is go and look for more of the same. Cooperating with those other authors, so they all plug each others books (“Hey, if you loved my book, go check out X, Y, and Z too!”), would have been so much more productive.