Saturday morning random

* My home computer still seems unstable so I'm in here at the office.

* It's raining here. Lower 40s. It looks like "Mud Season" in New England. I'm glad the ice is gone but it's really messy out.

* And anyway, graduation is in about 2 hours, so I need to be up here at some point anyway.

* I didn't check my campus e-mail today even though I could have. I just don't really have the energy to graciously but firmly decline requests for after-the-fact extra credit from students.

* (Okay. I lied. I just checked them. Only one e-mail from a student, and it was someone being anxious whether their grade was their final grade. I told them it was. I don't think I will get back an extra credit request from a student and anyway they did okay.)

* I knit a bit more last night on the Big Purple Thing. As is fairly typical of projects, I think it's "nearly done" long before it actually is.

* I also gathered up some yarn and patterns for things to do over break....some socks, some mitts, maybe start the Mizzle shawl (non-Ravelry link to a picture; pattern is on Ravelry). I figured from the name I really wanted a "rainy day" colored yarn, so quite a while back I bought two skeins of Dream In Color in a colorway called Dusky Aurora - a greyish blue with hints of green to it. (As it turns out, the pattern really only requires one skein, but I'll take the second as insurance. It can always become socks if I don't need it).

I don't think I'll take the Little Purple Thing. I'm knitting it on casein needles and those needles are kind of brittle - I could see one snapping in my luggage and then I'd be really sad not just because I'd have to transfer it to another pair of needles, but because I'd have lost my nice casein needles.

* I also watched the mini-marathon of "Wander over Yonder" that one of the Disney networks was playing. This is the new McCracken/Faust cartoon (where she went, I guess, after she left MLP). I wasn't prepared to like it, I was kind of side-eyeing the premise when it first came out, but it's really grown on me. Wander is kind of the eternal optimist, the guy who thinks that deep down, everyone is good, and maybe you just have to coax that goodness out. Sylvia (who is my favorite of the two) is more of a realist - perhaps even bordering a bit on pessimism about human (creature?) nature. She's more cautious but sometimes that makes her slower to understand where Wander is going with a plan. (And ultimately, it seems to be Wander's way that usually results in success.....a subtle lesson there?)

My favorite episode so far, even though it has a bit of a beat-you-over-the-head moral, is called The Troll. I like it partly for the message ("Don't feed the troll" - literally. I could have used a cartoon like that when I was a kid.) but also partly because the creatures Wander and Sylvia help are angora goats. Angora goats that speak with a vaguely Norwegian accent. And their leader is named Prince Cashmere.

Anyway, they are having some kind of celebration, as they apparently have a magical food sack that keeps them all fed through the winter. Every year, the troll comes and tries to steal the food sack. The trick is, the troll insults the goats, and when they take umbrage, the troll grows. The more upset the goats get, the bigger and more important the troll gets. (I said it was kind of a hit-you-over-the-head moral). Wander's way in this episode: He lies there by the fire, and when the troll insults him, he doesn't say anything. Doesn't even change expression. And the troll starts to shrink. And eventually Sylvia twigs to the plan,  and informs the goats.

And then there's a great scene, of the troll unloading all kinds of (mild, this is a kid's show) verbal abuse on the goats (down to "Your mother wears combat boots!") and the goats stand there and cross their arms and look away and finally turn their backs on the troll, and he shrinks down to a tiny mite of a thing too small to do any damage.

As I said, I could have benefited from seeing a cartoon like that when I was a kid; one of the reasons I got teased and kind of bullied at school was that I *reacted*. (I still tend to react to teasing or adult-bullying, especially if I'm tired or otherwise overwhelmed or it catches me unawares). But not feeding the trolls is a good lesson.

(And I wonder: is not responding at all better than responding to say you don't care? At one point the troll said something like "Your capes are ugly!" and I would have been so tempted, were I one of the goats, to say "So? That's what you think." Because increasingly, that's what I feel when someone figuratively rolls their eyes over something I care about.)

Actually, in a larger sense, the episode brings up one of the uglier things about online life - the nuffers, the people who like to insult and run down things that make other people happy or that they enjoy. I try to do very little of that; for one thing I wouldn't like it done to me (though I know there are people out there who think knitting is stupid, or MLP fandom is stupid, or reading kind of obscure books is stupid, or that blogs are stupid). And for another, it's more fun and more bridge-building, I think, to say "Here's this thing I enjoy and here's why I enjoy it" and then you get other people chiming in about how and why they enjoy it too. (And sometimes, you even get someone who tries out that thing you like for the first time, and they realize they enjoy it and it adds a lot to their life. ) And that's a lot more fun, to figuratively open the doors and welcome in other people to share your enjoyment, than it is for everyone to sit Scroogelike in their corner and mutter over how everyone else is stupid.

Snark is cheap and while it can be very funny in small, small doses (and when it's well done), it gets kind of tiresome to me after a while. It's kind of like that teenaged stance where you are OVER everything and nothing can make you express a genuine emotion that is untinged by irony.

It's like all the stuff I post about Christmas (and there WILL be posts while I'm off on break; most of them are already written and "in the box"). I love Christmas, I love the music and the decorations and the idea that people are maybe a little better and nicer than they are the rest of the year and I love the ability to maybe go back and relive some of the good parts of childhood a little bit. And I get that some people aren't into that; some people don't celebrate or some people had bad experiences over Christmas or something. And while I don't buy into the idea that "I hate Christmas and your endless posting on it is HURTING me" (because people who are disinterested or disliking a topic can always click away). But I love it and it makes me happy so I'm going to do it.

But on the other hand, I think snarking on or making fun of someone for, for example, posting heavily about Christmas (on their blog they write for free, which they force no one to read) does seem kind of, well, shabby to me.

But whatever. Don't feed the trolls, even though it's Christmas! I guess.

At any rate: I like the new Faust/McCracken cartoon. (And I noticed Lauren Faust was one of the writers of the episode I described above.)