https:\/\/www.kickstarter.com\/projects\/benyehuda\/again-at-a-crossroads<\/a><\/p>\nWhat else am I doing? Eating fruit and nuts, because it\u2019s Sukkot. Being worried a bit because ASIO tells us that Jews here are still under threat. Dealing with hate. Dealing with hate has been an everyday thing for 3 years now (the anniversary in the Jewish calendar of October 7 is at the end of Sukkot) and you\u2019ve heard enough about it, so I won\u2019t explore it here.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m revising my own thoughts about the world. I do this regularly. I\u2019m an ethnohistorian, I know that people change and culture changes and I need to know how I change. Every bit of my own bias I understand, I can factor into my other work. When I realised that being hated was a bad path to take for self-analysis, I decided to watch old TV to remind myself of where I have been and give myself context to explain how I deal with this interesting new world. I\u2019m watching two shows right now to give myself this context. One is Heroes, which was first shown in Australia after I\u2019d started looking into how we see heroes in story. I began on that trail 45 years ago, so it\u2019s a handy trail to look back from and check for change. When heroes was first release I was in the middle of formulating a tool, which I never took up academically but which is a lot of fun socially. If our TV was seen by aliens or our literature read by aliens, how would they see humans? I looked at gender, age, cultural background, religious background, amount of violence, amount and nature of sex-related stuff, material goods, use of tropes\u2026 No big project because no funding for it, alas. I still play with aspects of the idea, however.<\/p>\n
The other show is Doctor Who. I saw the original when I was very small, and it\u2019s been part of my viewing life. Every twenty years I watch as much as I can and it shows me how I have travelled to reach my current point. Last time I rewatched was the year before the new series, because our public broadcaster showed much of the surviving Who. Oddly, I could remember the bits that were not there. Later, as other bits became cartoonified and put to the original audio, I discovered a strange phenomenon: I could remember the original and, in one story in particular, it was as if the original walked alongside the new version and they argued with each other.<\/p>\n
Now I\u2019m in the 70s with Tom Baker. I was in high school when it was first shown, and it\u2019s a wonderful tool for bringing back lost memories. When I say \u201cTom Baker\u201d people instantly tell me about the scarf, but what I find is that Baker himself acts as himself and so the Doctor is real and so\u2026 it\u2019s closer to who I was as a teen and how I saw myself.<\/p>\n
My family never let me become properly Gothic and was not kind in the way they prevented it (which is another story), so some of the Baker episodes show me a path I wanted to travel but could not. I suspect this will appear in my fiction sooner rather than alter, because I have a character at hand who needs to discover something related.<\/p>\n
Everything returns to story in my life. Always. This is not a bad thing.<\/p>\n
Another thing that is not bad at all is that a friend gave me some of the spice mix used in Yemeni coffee. It fits with the way coffee was made in the region in the 15th<\/sup> century. When time permits, I\u2019ll see if I can find out the relationship between the current spice mix and the history of coffee. I need to get through the next few weeks first, however. I\u2019ve told you the tip of the iceberg, but I do not want the actual iceberg to turn my life into another Titanic accident. This takes careful navigation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This week\u2019s post is about my next few days. I\u2019ll skip most of the writing and editing and publishing side, because they\u2019re posts all of their own. One day, you will learn more. Keep reading, because eventually there is coffee. This weekend I\u2019ll be at Octocon. Online in Ireland. This is the Ireland we don\u2019t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[335,16,406,636,56,14,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4864","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-2","category-essays","category-food","category-life","category-life-experiences","category-nonfiction","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4864","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4864"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4864\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4866,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4864\/revisions\/4866"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}