Bearing in mind the limitations of the four European seasons as applied to an Australian setting, it seems to be spring. Sort of. We had some warm days, then some cool days, and in a few weeks, warm will outnumber cool, and then we’ll be whinging about summer until March. (Steph would never whinge about summer.)
Spring is a wonderful time of year, but it also comes with some dangers in Australia. Here are things that make spring difficult for your average No Awarder:
So here’s how it works. No Award has mental health issues. We admit that. There have been doctors involved, medication, all sorts of stuff.
An older person in Steph’s life was recently told by their GP they should consider seeing a psychiatrist. They went so ashen, so still. “Will I still be able to work?” They asked. We had to have a whole conversation about how a) there’s nothing wrong with seeing a psychiatrist, and b) their work doesn’t have to know, also.
There’s still a stigma around having a mental illness. And there’s a real danger in assuming that someone who looks sad or who is quiet might be the one who needs to be asked how they’re doing. The insidious thing about depression and suicide is that often the people you don’t suspect are the ones suffering; because depression helps you get very good at putting up a front.
There’s a feeling you get in your gut when someone who doesn’t care about your mental health enough to ask any other day of the year asks, because a campaign told them to, RUOK?
Mate, if I wanted you to know, I wouldn’t want you to ask me today.
Steph is going to quote from an Anonymous Friend of No Award here:
A lot of the people who get behind the day are the exact kind of people who would have ignored me at my worst.
Steph continues, this day is perfect for people who want to ignore the sorts of attention, friendship and actions that would actually help a person who isn’t okay.
It totally supports the Western idea that if you do one good public thing as an individual you’ve discharged your duty.
The branding and corporatisation of diseases is complicated: it’s one thing for there to be Parkinson’s Australia and the Walk in the Park (GET IT); it’s another for Steph’s workplace to have had a casual dress and barbecue day for RUOK Day.
RUOK Day doesn’t promote long term support after today, it doesn’t address societal and cultural causes of depression, and it encourages people with no experience with depression to meddle with sufferers in a way that could actually worsen their lives in all kinds of ways.
This is not to say that no good can come out of it, but, judging by the results of Liz’s informal Twitter poll, positive outcomes from RUOK day come from engagement with wider issues, rather than reducing it to one single question on one single day of the year.
For example, Another Anonymous Friend of No Award said:
At my old work, we had a nice morning tea, and the boss talked generally about mental health issues and contacting Beyond Blue etc.
It was pretty chill, and as far as I can remember, no one actually asked anyone if they were OK.
Another Anonymous Friend talked about people making her aware for the first time that there is (limited) Medicare coverage for therapy, and that made her feel more supported.
What these experiences have in common is that (a) they involved people going to the trouble of finding better resources than a random acquaintance with a four-letter question, and (b) they didn’t put the onus on people with mental illness to answer a four-letter question.
Because that’s the part that sets Liz’s anxiety off, and judging by the Twitter results, a lot of people feel the same way: living with a mental illness — even a minor anxiety disorder — there is a lot of pressure to be normal. Whatever normal is, and it’s a concept that can change with the setting.
If I’m having an anxious day, I don’t want to dump all my feelings in a colleague’s lap — and it’s not fair to them to make them deal with that either. I don’t know what their other problems are! It’s none of my business!
But I also don’t want to feel the pressure to say, “Yes! I am okay! 100% okay! Please hold while I grin nervously and sidle away!”
I don’t want to dump an entire Hyperbole and a Half post in here, but Allie Brosh writes and draws about depression with extraordinary insight, and here she talks about the pressure she felt to comfort people after she had been honest with them about their feelings. RUOK Day has bunting and cookie cutters. It doesn’t have strategies for what to do when someone says, “Actually, no, I am not okay.”
It’s all very well meaning but No Award does not endorse this day.
We’re restricting this post to upcoming releases, because if we covered all the media we have in our wishlists, Netflix lists and so forth (people who bought all three German St Clare’s DVDs: me), we’d be here all day.
In chronological order with a caveat that release dates may change!
1 September
The Handbook: surviving and living with climate change
Steph is already breaking the rule but only because it just came out last week.
22 September
Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho
This is already out in other markets, and the buzz is strong!
The Muppets, (US)ABC, Channel 7 in Australia, no airdate here
23 September
Avatar: The Last Airbender – Smoke and Shadow (Part 1) by Gene Luen Yang
My OTP might look at each other! (They broke up, like, three books ago. Stop judging me.)
The Scorpion Rules by Erin Bow
I’m clearly going to get a lot of use out of my new Canadian Kindle account. Someone should give me a large sum of money so that I can open a bookstore and import Canadian YA to sell alongside Australian books.
6 October
JUST GO THROUGH THE GHOST GATE ALREADY, BREQ!
18 October
Spear, Adelaide Film Festival, no general Aus release date
This has got to get a general release eventually, right? RIGHT?
21 October
Illuminae by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff
I die in this book. Also some other stuff happens, probably. I’ve seen an ARC, it’s pretty big.
26 October
Supergirl, CBS, no Australian network yet
The pilot was charming, and we are in favour of family-friendly entertainment about girls being superheroes. Also, No Award ships Kara/James Olsen.
27 October
Avatar: The Last Airbender – Legends
STOP LAUGHING AT ME.
A Thousand Nights by E. K. Johnston
The premise wouldn’t normally grab me, but I loved The Story of Owen and Prairie Fire enough that I’ll give anything Johnston writes a burl.
Sometime in November
If You Are the One / 非诚勿扰 Australian special
1 November
The Sea is Ours: Tales from Steampunk South-East Asia
19 November
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay (part 2)
(Steph will recuse herself here, she has Feelings about this franchise, both Casting Feelings and Archery Feelings.)
14 December
The Expanse, Syfy, doesn’t seem to have an Australian network yet
I quite liked the first book, and I’ve been meaning to read the next two. I’m mostly just happy to have some space ships on my screen.
17 December
Star Wars: The Force Awakens
I saw The Phantom Menace on opening day, and it marked the very first time she walked out of the cinema, went home and started writing about a movie being Problematic, although I didn’t know that word then, so I just said “majorly racist”.
AND YET.
2016
24 January
The X-Files, FOX, doesn’t seem to have an Australian network yet
I’m slogging through season 9. It’s a struggle, but I’m determined to finish the damn series. The reboot cannot possibly be as bad as this … can it?
5 April
The Nameless City by Faith Erin Hicks
What’s it about? I have no idea! But I love Hicks’s art, I’ve been seeing snippets on her Twitter for ages, and it’s blurbed by Bryan Konietzko. That’s enough to make me curious, despite the cynical marketing ploy of putting the Avatar: the Last Airbender font on the cover.
16 March
Exit, Pursued by a Bear by E. K. Johnston
July 2016
A good portion of the No Award staff writers are planning to see this one!
The Three-Body Problem
Did you think we wouldn’t be seeing this? The only thing holding us back will be the inevitable delay between the Chinese release in July, and whenever the Australian distributor deigns to bring it here.
(Stephanie, of course, is not limited by puny things like “needing subtitles”. Note to self: learn Mandarin asap.)
Some time in 2016
Cleverman, the ABC
Indigenous Australian dystopian SF on Our ABC. We have high hopes for this! (Of course, we also had high hopes for Serangoon Road, and look how that worked out.)
Icon by Genevieve Valentine
The sequel to Persona, YA about politics and beauty pageants and spies.
The Federal Election, all the networks
Election routine: vote, eat democracy sausage, watch results come in, drink.
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: The Green Legend
No one knows anything about this, but it has Michelle Yeoh in it, so we’ll be there with bells on.
Keen to nominate in 2016’s Hugo Awards when the time comes, but don’t know where to start? Renay is maintaining a GoogleDoc (with submission form) for eligible works.
If you’re in Australia, you should also keep an eye on the 2016 Ditmar eligibility list. The categories don’t entirely overlap with the Hugos, but it makes a handy source of reading suggestions.
Diversity Panels I’d Like To See – Want something a bit more substantial (and less well-trod) than “_____ in SF”? Check these out!
‘Is Critical Analysis Foreign to Chinese Students‘, an academic article, is basic but interesting.
This review of Round the Twist speaks to Steph’s very soul: Have You Ever Felt Like This: Going Round the Twist again
Watching Round the Twist is sprawling in a soggy chloriney cossie in front of the telly, fighting with my brother, eating spag bol, riding bikes, throwing a tantrum when Mum donated my pink Barbie convertible to kids in need. There’s no other show that takes me back to who I was as a kid and lets me identify the parts of me that have remained intact, and reliving it really has been the greatest thing that’s ever happened to me. Because it taught me that if ladies can be clowns and penises can be propellers and Daddos can be actors, I can really be anything I want to be, and that’s just as important for me to hear now as it was when I was six.
The evolution of female pen-names from Currer Bell to J.K. Rowling
In the lead up to Fringe, a Melbourne artist is putting up Unwelcome mats in front of government buildings.
There is an Indigenous Dance Movie!
Rebel Sport Seeks Asylum From Claims It Ripped Off Refugee Video To Flog Stuff On Father’s Day
Taylor Swift made a colonialist music video, right before joining Nicki Minaj on an actually-African-inspired-with-actually-black-people performance at the VMAs. Awks.
Tony Abbott had an interview with Alan Jones and this is just the machine transcript but
the Nazis did terrible evil but they had the sufficient sense of shame to try to hide it
?? !! ? (also abortions are like Nazis)
On turning slacktivists into activists.
Yesterday was Indigenous Literacy Day, but Indigenous literacy is important all year. No Award highly recommends supporting the Indigenous Literacy Foundation all the days of the year.
No Award says no to yarn bombing. It’s a waste of yarn, potentially damaging to trees (we keep hearing different things on this, so it may depend on the tree), interferes with things that live in trees, renders mobility and accessibility aids useless or difficult to use, and if it’s not hideously ugly to start with, it will be by the time the yarn goes mouldy.
Literally the only yarnbomb I’ve ever seen that I didn’t detest was small and subtle — tiny red crocheted flowers loosely tied around the branches of a naked tree in winter.
“But it’s so clever and subversive!”
No, it’s just a mould that accompanies gentrification. It’s about as subversive as Banksy or Julian Assange. Yarnbombing is to underground art as manic pixie dream girls are to well-written female characters.
Luckily, the argument that yarnbombing is in any way underground, clever or subversive has just gone out the window.
Is that a guy in a hi-vis vest applying machine-made crochet* to a tram stop?
I was going to put on my Intrepid Journalist hat and investigate the tram stops in person on my lunch break, before conducting an in-depth interview with a sweet potato with cheese bacon and onion for Liz’s Lunch Magazine. But I had a lot of errands to run, so I just stayed at my desk and used Twitter.
Corporate fake yarnbombing. Stop the bus tram, everyone go home, it’s over. We’re done.
* We assume it’s machine-crochet. Though Official Potato Moya notes, “the idea of Yarra Trams having, like, a back room full of bearded hipsters knitting quietly away at their yarnbombing, being paid in lattes, that’s kind of delightful”.
In conclusion, use your knitting powers for good instead of gross wet wool evil and find out which charities accept donations of blankets.
When Sergeant Hayes is called to Yoorana cemetery in the middle of the night, he makes a discovery that turns his world upside down – six people with no memory of their identities. Who are they and what has happened to them?
It took me a while to get around to watching Glitch, because I’m neck-deep in The X-Files right now, and frankly, season 7 is so dire that I’m slightly afraid that if I stop now, I’ll never start again. But then came “Hollywood AD”, and I was like, “Right, we need a break. It’s not me, The X-Files, it’s you.”
Previously, Gwendoline took Extreme Actions against Mary-Lou by destroying her beloved fountain pen. NOT OKAY, GWEN. NOT OKAY.
Only two chapters left!
Continue reading “First Term at Malory Towers – Chapters 21 and 22”
Previously: While recovering from her appendectomy, Sally has deduced that Gwen is the person destroying Mary-Lou’s property, even as she blames Darrell and Alicia. Darrell and Sally agree that Mary-Lou needs more self-confidence, and that the best way to make this happen is to manipulate her.
Well.
Continue reading “First Term at Malory Towers – Chapters 19 and 20”
“Australians may or may not be making booze out of Vegemite” is hilarious right up until you realise that the rumour is about Indigenous Australians, and ties into a long history of government interference in Indigenous communities.
Important fatberg update: Fighting the fatbergs: how cities are waging war on clogged sewers.
From that link: Arne Hendriks is building his own fatberg. I legit hope this comes to MONA. I’ll go back for that. I’ll even take the boat.
The cats of the State Library of Victoria tumblr.
When changing names means changing identities. Steph has so many feels about this.
That awkward moment when Our ABC briefly employed a Nazi spy.
A group of students have figured out a way to disrupt the period industry in low-income countries. Amazing brown girl innovation.
Remember that time Mark Latham almost became prime minister? These days, he’s probably* a misogynistic and transphobic troll on Twitter, and causing some grief for the Australian Financial Review, which publishes his rants.
* “Probably” = the twitter account in question claims it’s run by an old school friend of Latham’s, which doesn’t explain how its tweets end up word for word in AFR columns, but obviously Latham can’t blame his nanny.
ETA: It’s most definitely Latham, so there goes that slender shred of doubt!
Koala on a quadbike. Probably a dropbear.
Steph has a new housemate, proving that sometimes it pays to enter twitter competitions. (Stay safe around trains, quokkas!)
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