Assorted thoughts update (test)

I always have a difficult time posting things, not through lack of anything to say, but because I feel like I have to polish my thoughts to an irreproachable degree before they're allowed to leave my head. Unfortunately, I am also a perfectionist, and subject to frequent fits of anxiety, so you can imagine how much of an impossible standard that is to set for myself.

So I'm going to try something new? Just laying down in bulletpoints whatever I've been thinking about during the day, the week, or the month, and then maybe coming back to them later if it happens to be something I want to develop further.

Here they are:

• Recently, I've had to DNF The go-between by L.P. Hartley. I'm not sure if this is through genuine lack of interest, because technically, I'm not uninterested in it; I found the first chapters and their approach to the inconsistency of memory, the certainty of feeling without the objective recollection to back them up, to be pretty fascinating. Maybe it's because I've been tired recently, due to packing and going on vacation to my home country, but reading it eventually became incredibly soporific, and I couldn't find the energy to wait until it engaged me again. It's something I've been worried about, because it's been for a while that I've been slow at reading, and I keep getting scared that I've simply lost the ability to read anything more challenging forever, but I've since started reading the first book in the Gormenghast Trilogy by Mervyn Peake and it's definitely keeping my attention much better. Maybe that first book was just too boring.
• I've picked up replaying The Great Ace Attorney: Chronicles again, now that I've freed up some time for it, and it's been a fun, if frustrating experience so far. I'm on the second game now, having just finished the second episode, and it's brought back all my annoyances with the story's political narrative. Ace Attorney has never been profound commentary on law, but I've always felt that TGAA's decision to include more mature topics -- classism, racism, nationalism and political treaties -- ends up revealing all the more clearly where the mainline series' politics fail. The narrative has always been unequivocally pro-carceral justice, and while I could perhaps look away from it in the mainline, when you choose to include plotlines that deal with the specific vulnerability to law enforcement many people experience due to their positionalities (class position, racialization, nationality, etc), then not straying from a moral storytelling structure that always endorses police power and the power of the Law (even if you can acknowledge that mistakes are made) kind of lessens your ability to make poignant commentary. 
• I've been wondering if I happen to be too anti-social and pessimistic about fan engagement. I always make it a rule for myself to keep an open mind to different interpretations, but sometimes it feels like to join in certain circles without sounding too much like a pedantic crank, I'd have to compromise a lot of my own honest, thought-out feelings about my own readings. I've always felt that fandoms aren't particularly receptive to critical engagement, or at least that the sites on which fandom is mostly done doesn't offer space for discussion that doesn't read as inherently antagonistic. Maybe I should simply loosen up, and try to form links with people in my interest centres regardless of how they choose to engage with the canon, and I'd certainly like to, but I would always feel something lacking in how I myself would like to enjoy a fan space. I suppose there isn't any way out of it than to create that favourable environment on my own? I'll have to look into how I could manage that.

(no subject)

And of course, here comes that annoying feeling where once I've posted one thing, there's so much more I'd like to add, but I've tired myself out mentally too much to be able to follow it all up with something coherent.

You know, I do happen to sleep very poorly, often, for reasons I should probably see a doctor about... maybe that might help with a lot of things in my life that I feel I can't do to their full extent because I end up way too tired.