Freckles & Doubt

Fun features of Registration Hell Season: three different advisors using the wrong ID to assign student reg submissions to me on the database over a five-day period, so I didn't see them and found them only by accident, hitting me with a merry 30-strong pile to process when I thought I'd cleared my queue. Considering pinpoint retributive laser strikes from orbit.

Fun additions to Registration Hell Season: orientation. I have been working 10-12 hour days for several weeks and am very tired and scattered, so discovered only today that the orientation site, which I opened to students on Wednesday, had been released with the benefit of my extremely flawed and distracted fumbling of the degree groups. These were supposed to restrict students to seeing the curriculum material for their own programme only so they don't all sign up for the wrong degrees on the wrong forms, and I managed to screw it up so they don't see any curriculum info at all. Which, aargh. They really need that time to process it before they register. Sorted now, but aargh.

Fun additions to Registration/Orientation Hell Season: a mini exam committee in the middle of it, processing all the students who wrote deferred or summer term exams; small board schedule, only 100 or so, but I have to do it over this weekend. I am tired and scattered, see above, and checking them is like pulling teeth. I have sacrificed my last chocolate orange to the cause, and am permitting myself a segment if I check ten records.

(It's a slightly weird check, too, we assessed continuously rather than with exams last year, because remote, and it's inflated the marks so the distinctions and Dean's Merit List awards are off the charts. Remote learning and COVID have been very polarising, we have simultaneously the highest fail rate and highest distinction rate we have ever had, selecting, of course, against lower income students who don't have good work conditions or internet access. Yay transformation. And the Law faculty's merit-based access to the Law major has set its admission bar nearly 10% higher than usual because of the marks inflation, and unsuccessful students are exploding furiously all over my inbox. Sigh. It's usually fatal to cross a Law-inclined student, they all fancy themselves lawyers already, and present Arguments.)

Fun additions to Registration/Orientation/Exam Committee Hell Season: still no new glasses, and I can't bloody see with these ones, I have to slide them down to the end of my nose to read the tiny board schedule writing, and they keep falling off. Very distracting.

On the upside, the weather has remained below 30 so I don't have to make blood sacrifices to the rain gods, which is just as well, I'm too tired to leap naked around a pentagram. And my flame lily is green and leafy and flowering like a mad thing. It's not all bad.

Orientation/registration hellseason seems to have leaped out of the gate with considerable verve and velocity this year, I have been working 11-hour days since the start of last week. I am thus currently submerged in the usual sticky and insistent morass of remote registration admin, orientation site design, continuous student queries, advisor solecisms, tech support and fervent wishes for gin. A more than usually infuriating two-punch of student unpleasantnesses yesterday caused me to have to mute my computer, step away from the keyboard and go and play Stardew Valley for an hour to simmer down. (Spend three days patiently explaining the rule behind the "no" I have to give, to increasing petulance and anger, only to have the student go over my head and negate the umpteen emails and hours of typing when the higher-ups promptly fold and grant the concession in the way I've been specifically instructed isn't possible. Twice. Honestly.)

However, there are consolations! today has been materially improved by the following.
1. An advisor sending me an Instagram capture from one of the university's general student hangouts, which cheerfully states "The devil works overtime. Jessica (plus my surname initial) works harder." Which made me go awwwwwwww. Sometimes they do notice.
2. Getting today's Wordle in three goes, possibly as a result of undue fanfic exposure. (You do all know Wordle? Simple, brilliant, addictive. It starts my morning remarkably pleasantly on a daily basis for minimal time input.
3. Cooler weather for the last few days. Thank heavens. Although tomorrow also projected to be a stinker. I do not enjoy temperatures in excess of 30 degrees.
4. The discovery, in the course of digging through the cupboards for more sugar for my tea, of the stash of Terry's chocolate oranges I bought in the post-Christmas price drop zone, and promptly forgot about.
5. The further discovery, over the last week, that feeding her Animalax on a daily basis and catnip on a twice-weekly one reduces the level of continuous whinging from Pandora to something a lot more bearable. She seems to be missing Jyn. Or complaining about the heat. Or suffering existential angst. Or resenting the quality or the food service. Or her arthritis is flaring up again. Honestly, who knows, but the above seems to help.

I am very tired and very stressed (in retrospect, working straight through the Christmas break to update the orientation site was predicably detrimental to my ability to handle all this), but life is not actually all bad.

I am, once again, a very tired thing in the limp chewed string category, it's been a long year, and one very full of emergencies and makeshifts and adaptations, all demanding unlikely quantities of my time and mental energy. It was exam committee season last week; over four days, including the weekend, I individually checked around 1500 student records. (With the added minor challenge that my wildly expensive brand spanky new bifocals weren't working, and wouldn't let me focus on close stuff, to the point where I had to revert to the old specs and send the new ones back for remaking, apparently without the prisms, which are giving me auras and headaches.) And the exclusion review committee meeting, in which we lovingly review every excluded student in the faculty and try to find ways to readmit them without the whole appeal thing, took out half the subsequent weekend, with 7 hours of depressingly disastrous records on Friday and 4 on Saturday morning, so I feel I am somewhat justified in being wiped.

I really wanted and needed to be on leave this week to recover, but can't, because results were released to students yesterday, and since 7.30am yesterday I have answered over a hundred desperate student emails panicking about exclusions and failures and insufficient accolades and what have you. About one in 20 of which are genuine errors, and the rest are causing me, in my slightly punch-drunk state, to type up replies which unequivocally deconstruct their attempts to graduate despite a pivotal failed course, while gently crooning to myself, to no fixed tune, "There are ruuuuuules, and they apply to yooooooooou".

This is a slightly unhappy, welcome-to-adulthood sucker-punch these poor kids are facing. Most of them wade right in with righteous indignation, insisting that there must be some way around it, it's only one course, can't they do it concurrently with postgrad, or get a rewrite, or a re-mark, or just count up their credits instead of their courses, because Plans next year, and Money, and Aargh. And the answer, unfortunately, is No, because there are Ruuuuuules, and they apply to Yooooooou. And I think the resulting outrage and sense of victimhood is because of two things: (a) their insufficiently developed organs of perspective, which as Just Post-Adolescents they are still develping, so that The End of Their World is still The End of THE World, and how can anyone not see the importance of accommodating them. Compounded by (b), late stage capitalism and consumerism, they are the Customer, there is always a way to accommodate them, they've paid for this, how dare!

Which, no. Welcome to the cold hard reality of adulthood, rules still apply. Like, (for everyone except actual billionaires, about whom the less said the better), gravity, and taxes, and speeding fines, and having to go to work in order to eat. And, in fact, having to meet the degree requirements in order to graduate. Adulthood is in many ways amazing, and I wouldn't go back to teenagerhood for anything except an absolute guarantee I could keep my memories and adult perspective and replay it properly like a botched video game run, but sometimes adulthood, in terms of consequences, simply sucks. I am sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings, but it does.

And it may be some small consolation that, if adulthood sometimes sucks, at least we are all in this together, no-one is immune. COVID doesn't help in the Adulthood Sucks stakes; my mum hasn't been able to visit for two years, my sister and niece are currently down with it (fortunately very mildly), so Christmas is cancelled. Which is not as dire as it sounds, my family's never been big on festive wossnames, I'm really not much bothered by that aspect. Which is just as well, I have to spend most of the break catching up the orientation prep I haven't had time for, in time for the new academic year and reg season to hit in January. I'll rest when it's all over. Sometime in March. Aargh.

oh gods we have a new COVID variant, and various apparently science-heavy sources, including this one seem to suggest that its jolly little spike proteins have mutated madly enough that current vaccines may not, in fact, slow it down any. Which is creating a horrible, leaden, despairing sense of déja vu: the advice quoted in that article is "go back to March 2020 precautions". I was enjoying the sense of comparative safety in being fully vaccinated: I had my hair cut, and had plans for importing a gardener and a plumber for necessary operations. This is horrible. And I am wincingly aware that it's putting SA in the news in an extremely negative sense.

I'm staggering around a little exhausted today because I was, weirdly enough, participating in a "women in fairy tales" panel as part of a UK-based online storytelling event until about 10.30 last night, which had me both stressed and buzzed enough that I didn't come down enough to actually sleep until nearly midnight. I have done absolutely no research or teaching for two years, since the exigencies of running faculty remote processes take up my time and energy to the exclusion of all else; it was lovely to dip my toe in the water again. The weird upsides of COVID and everything being online being what they are, the panel included speakers from the US and UK as well as me, and the audience was all over the world. Apparently the US was sunny, Cape Town has been unseasonably rainy for a few days, and the UK was locked in a snowstorm, so go global warming. But I found myself apologising, in the greenroom before we started, for SA's latest unhappy contribution to the current catastrophe. Could have done without that, really.

By way of rewarding self for the horrors of this year's remote reg and orientation experiences, I ordered myself Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and have been playing it in the evenings as far as possible given the various outcomes of the daily war between myself and Pandora for occupancy of my gaming chair. Apparently I can only occasionally seduce her away by deploying the heated blanket on the sofa. We have arrived at a semi-compromise, below:



I am enjoying ACNH, although not deliriously or obsessively, and have, shall we say, Notes.

Pottering happily about a landscape harvesting, planting, building or collecting things and meeting small, domestic goals is very much my jam when I'm tired and stressed, see obsessive re-play of Stardew Valley, incursions into things like Littlewood and My Time At Portia, and my fondness for the buildy bits of Skyrim, Fallout IV or Yonder. ACNH is more of same, although through the console lens rather than the PC, and is thus Different - less textured, less character-driven, and its cutesy aesthetic is occasionally grating. (Yonder and even Portia did it much better, IMNSHO, in the sense of being more Zelda-like, less childish).

I am enjoying, in a qualified sort of fashion, the pottering about, although its grindiness becomes repetitive a little too quickly. The writing, while in the facile sort of class appropriate to the genre, is occasionally amusing and wry. I do become a bit weirded out by the visuals, the fixed perspective is frequently frustrating and the horizon effects are frankly trippy, in the sense that ACNH denizens apparently live on a cylindrical world with a radius approximately the width of a football field. The way things move over the horizon is odd. But overall it's rather pretty and occasionally, when the art team have been let loose on a night sky or sunrise, beautiful. (Also: desperately enamoured of the museum.)

I also think I am losing potential texture and depth because I don't do co-operative play with Real People, that's not what I game for, so huge tracts of the game which are designed for island visits and social interaction with other players, are simply closed to me. (And the inbuilt assumptions around interaction infuse the gameplay rather unacceptably. Cannot, because of lack of above, complete fruit and flower collections! Maddened!) And the characterisation of the NPCs is superficial enough that it doesn't in any way substitute for the Real People interactions, and really makes me miss Stardew Valley.

Which all sounds unduly negative, but I have been playing several hours a day for the last couple of weeks, and am deriving quiet enjoyment from it, so there is clearly a lot here to enjoy despite the minor deficiencies. (I am also developing a marked habit of playing for an hour in bed in the mornings when I wake up, with tea and cats, because Switch, and it's definitely not a bad way to start the day).

What I am not enjoying at all, because I don't think they're satirising them strongly enough, is the unabashed capitalist underpinning of it all. I live in a late-capitalist hellscape, I do not need such to be faithfully and only semi-critically replicated in my gaming, thank you. ACNH is very much about Things, it's a densely populated landscape full of highly specific bits of furniture and clothing and decorations and appliances and useless modern tchotchkes, which you collect in large amounts. Even worse, its achievement and quest mechanisms are expressed in a miles/rewards/tokens system which forcibly reminds me of the one I rejected, with extreme prejudice, from my medical aid - little mini-quests all carefully calibrated to force you to grind, and sell, and buy, and grease the wheels of the whole system.

And Animal Crossing works on a system which makes you borrow money to build things; hell, you arrive on your idyllic island and the managing company immediately turns around and stiffs you with a large bill you spend the first part of the game paying off. It turns out that owing money, which gives me hives in the real world, also gives me virtual hives in gaming. I hate owing money, and you can't do anything - build, move things around - without paying large sums for it. (I am simultaneously replaying Littlewood because ACNH has given me an overwhelming desire for a fully, freely landscapable map at whim, as often as I like, without penalty).

Although it's inevitable for the glossy large-scale popular product of a massive and powerful corporation whose design techniques are clearly aimed more at marketing than at narrative fulfilment, I really, really hate that this game quite unabashedly normalises capitalist assumptions and structures and, ultimately, entrapments. The cute island getaway setting is not an escape from capitalism, it's merely another set of images in which to replicate capitalist pressures and trappings, buy and sell and borrow and consume. (And don't get me started on turnips. I think the empty notional money manipulation of the real-world stock market is vicious and immoral and disgusting, and it's not suddenly cute and acceptable because your abstract coup markers are now knobbly vegetables).

Part of the whole setup is clearly semi-satirical, in that the company characters who run the islands are caricatures - raccoons with their little grasping hands, and Isabelle as a sort of overly and superficially smiley corporate doll. But it's a nod and wink sort of jokiness which renders these corporate figures both innocuous and intrinsic - that's just, the game says, how things are. They're a bit dodge, but you can't resist them or overturn them or choose not to interact with them. They underpin everything. Capitalism, the game says, is the only game in town. And it's cute! don't worry about it! just play it! we all do! it's all there is!

Animal Crossing: New Horizons is both training wheels and pabulum for the capitalist serf, and while it's a reasonably entertaining sort of gameplay amble, about the best thing I can say about it, re-reading the above, is that it's apparently energised me into rampantly politicised Marxism in two weeks, which is not bad going, given my levels of exhaustion and usual state of jaded political lassitude. Huh.

(My subject line is Preachers, "Motorcycle Emptiness", because apparently the only possible response to corporate capitalist cute is Welsh anti-capitalist semi-punk).

• The student in my inbox with the gmail account which calls itself THE INTELLECTUAL PLATFORM.
• The student the other day who thanked me, somewhere in the middle of a 20-email conversation, for my "relentless patience".
• The student who has just emailed me with an absolutely beautiful typo, addressing me as 'Dead Mam'. Why yes, dear student. Yes, I am in fact currently dead. How did you know?
• The fact that we are dealing with online registration processes which entail putting submissions into different stauses, like INCOMPLETE and REVIEWED and ASSIGNED, and I keep getting Laundry Files flashbacks to occult situational codewords. If I put a student into SCORPION STARE status after their fifth illegal duplicate submission, a basilisk ray will erupt from their screen and turn them to stone.
• The emotional kickback to the fact that I have relaxed all self-imposed tea-imbibing restrictions, and am damned well drinking tea, Earl Grey, hot, whenever I feel the need, which is frequently. I was drinking too much and had limited myself to four cups a day, and it's amazing how much the lifting of that feels self-indulgent, and naughty, and luxurious. I will re-restrict when I am no longer working fourteen-hour days.
• The colleague who accused me, in the advisor chat the other day, of being "bergamotted to the eyeballs". He knows me well. I am missing my giant campus meeting mug, which is that one Claire gave me a couple of years back, and which holds about double the usual mug capacity and is inscribed "Fifty shades of Earl Grey". It has become a faculty landmark which causes much amusement in meetings.
• The extent to which load shedding, which seems to be a seasonal thing, we always get it around now, maybe the electricity migrates elsewhere in autumn, has become a relief and a reprieve instead of its usual irritation. If I have no power, I can't work. It's currently the only break I'm getting.

Term starts tomorrow, we are doing change of curriculum for another week, with some late registration owing to complete funding meltdowns at the government level. We are about 300 students under usual capacity, which after a COVID year is causing the faculty to wince in financial dread, but they may yet all rush to register late. The wholesale horrors of reg have been energised by the ongoing threat of yet more student protests, which gave me a small but perfectly formed wiggins on Friday when they manifested, but so far have not been major in our neck of the woods. Mostly they're angry at the government, anyway. Which, same.

I am Dead Ma'am. I am quite unbelievably exhausted, but it's nearly over.

There is a student in my inbox with whom I have had an email exchange lasting (counts them...) NINE emails, during which I have tried patiently and unavailingly to get him to tell me a single, simple fact: what exact curriculum change is he trying to make? He has managed, over the repeated emails, to completely ignore this, sending me cheerful two-line answers in which he variously tells me all the inventively wrong things he has tried to do to make this mysterious thing happen and which haven't worked, and I cannot tell him what the right thing to do is because he WILL NOT TELL ME WHAT THE CHANGE IS! Given that I am sending increasingly annoyed emails with careful caps, underlining and bolds to try and make him focus on the question, I am being left floored and slightly breathless at the magnitude of the reading comprehension fail he is demonstrating. Honestly, he'll never survive a liberal arts degree if he can't read a simple question. And I'm very close to the point, given my current 12-hour days and 300-odd emails daily, of simply not answering any more. Because really.

Registration continues to melt down gently, we now have 70% of students having submitted, two days before the deadline, and have processed 65% of those. The proliferation of both reg submissions and queries to my inbox is being echoed, in more concrete terms, in my home environment, by various insectoid and other incursions, which likewise give the impression of scurrying masses imperfectly contained and erroneously misdirected. The cockroach outbreak has, merciful heavens be thanked, been more or less contained by the efforts of the landlord, who replaced the rotted sink backboard (thereby revealing millions of the little fuckers nesting madly in the rotting wood, as I had darkly suspected) and then made merry mayhem with cockroach insecticide all down the skirtings. I have a few desperate stragglers, but they are punch-drunk and staggering, and I dispatch them with extreme prejudice, and the kitchen no longer skitters when I switch on the light suddenly at 2am owing to sleepwalking, weird noises or the sudden need for the loo.

The more recent problem is the hitherto flourishing violet I had in a pot in the passage, which suddenly, a week ago, went all lacy-leaved on me instead of its previously happy and stalwart green, and I picked a couple of caterpillars off it, muttered strange gardening oaths, and though nothing more of it. Except the leaves continued to get lacier, and I rooted through them a bit to find more caterpillars, unearthed one or two, and eventually got the hell in and rustled the whole plant vigorously. Upon which there was a sort of squidgy, squirming shower, and about 20 browny-green caterpillars in assorted sizes, from mini to Economy, were left writhing disconsolately on the tiles. I have done that twice more on two subsequent days, to diminishing returns, and I think I may finally have eradicated them all, but really. Butterflies are pretty and all, but there are Limits.

Oh wait. 9-email student has just got back to me, via a futile and error-ridden detour through the Law faculty, with the final, grudging admission that he wants to move to Law, and a wild and exaggerately favourable reading of his eligibility for same in terms of school-leaving scores. I have disabused him of his various misconceptions, and am left reeling slightly at the though of the havoc his particular brand of wilful misreading could wreak on the innocent law profession. Lawks.

(My subject line is, of course, the Inchworm song, which I know through Danny Kaye on the Muppets, and re-watching the gentle sweetness of which has just soothed a lot of my irritation. On Youtube. My caterpillar infestation isn't nearly as cute.)

Not my favourite moment in completely not my favourite time of year in a completely ungodly horrible year in anyone's terms anyway.

We are
(a) running remote registration too slowly, because students don't follow instructions, so we have processed a third of our returning student cohort in three weeks and have only a week left to process the other two-thirds, which explains everything you need to know about my 12-hour days, and
(b) last night, after two weeks of wrangling in which the Law faculty tried to make me do the data crunching and I, fortunately backed by the full and pleasingly territorial might of our faculty manager, refused, I could finally release the list of students accepted for the Law major, about which said students have been bugging me with increasing fervour for three weeks, only to find that
(c) when I woke up this morning, it was to an inbox full of indignant students not selected for Law despite clearly meeting requirements, because the Law faculty, in a probably unconscious display of the if-I-do-it-really-badly-they-won't-make-me-do-it-again trope so beloved by domestic spats the world over, had completely screwed up the data, at which
(d) my internet promptly went out, which after half an hour on the helpline and crawling under the desk to diagnose the fibre box, and establishing that Octotel was suffering from either "problems" or "scheduled maintenance", was accompanied by
(e) the water going off, because the landlord spent two days this week rendering my hideous workload even more hideous by banging, scraping and SOMEONE IN MY SPACE KILL IT WITH FIRE, in order to install a prepaid water meter, for which
(f) he gave me absolutely no documentation, which means I've spent odd moments in the frantic week trying to work out how to prepay on insufficient info based purely on the brand name of the water meter packaging he left in my recycling, and working through the tiny prepaid amount he actually preloaded into it, culminating in
(g) this morning: no water, no internet, so no way of getting water, and no way to access the steadily increasing public relations disaster in my inaccessible inbox in addition to the massive pile of work I have to do this weekend.

Fortunately the internet came on again at lunchtime, and unlogjammed the logjam, so I am watered, internetted and have with consumate skill and dexterity placated the students by blaming Law entirely and being very sympathetic. (They're nice kids. I posted the list the instant it was finalised, which was at about 9pm last night, and three separate students emailed me a heartfelt "thaaaaannnk yooouuuuu!" with varying vowel extravagances in both the thanks and my name, they have all been incredibly anxious about this, hence the late night announcement). And I have to say, typing up the above Itemised List of Inexorable Doom made me giggle hysterically, because good grief.

But I am a very, very tired thing. My Monty Python subject line serves to describe both my life in general, and my voice in particular, which is evincing that gravelly octave-drop so characteristic of exhaustion. Come, oh, the end of March, when this is all over, I am going to assume the horizonal position and not move for several years.

Apparently we are in another part of the pandemic where we are singing about the dark times, and I have learned a new random collection of words, which is "TikTok shanty fandom". It is curiously pleasing that the TikTok sea shanty fandom exists, and that it randomly builds multi-part shanty versions which disparately add a voice or instrument line in a fine spirit of emulation and community. The version below of the current viral sensation "Soon may the Wellerman come" loses me a bit when it adds the canned beat and starts remixing, but it's the best quality edit of the first part I can find. (Also, the first bass addition, the cheerful blonde dude in the cap who basically started all this, has a completely phenomenal bass voice).



This is a bloody catchy piece of music, and I love what the communal treatment has done to it, but it's also fascinating and faintly horrible that it's become a viral meme at this point in time. I mean, yes, it's catchy and we're all bored, and it's also communal and we are all relying on each other very heavily through the internet to beguile us through this crisis. It is curiously akin, in its creative/collaborative spirit, to making bread. But it's even more interesting in purely thematic terms.

This is a whaling song. It arises from the nineteenth century whaling industry in New Zealand, major participants in which were the British Weller brothers, who built and lost a small empire in Otago in the 1830s, both running and supplying whaling ships. The Wellerman, with his "sugar and tea and rum", is bringing supplies to the whalers while they pursue their whale, and while they look forward to the day when the whale is caught and "the tonguin' is done" (tearing the blubber off the dead whale in strips, eeuw).

But there's a lot more going on here. The accounts I've been able to find are either "yay NZ industry" or "boo dead whales", and comparatively few mention the fact that the whalers were not salaried, they were paid in supplies, in fact, in the "sugar and tea and rum" carried by the Wellerman. Who was thus both boss and supplier, in a little closed and incestuous loop which gave all the power to the Wellers, who did indeed grow rather rich on whaling and supplying whaling ships, at least before the whale-oil bubble collapsed. The song is about entrapment, the ship hooking and endlessly being dragged by the whale, the whalers endlessly bound into the work/eat cycle of their moneyless employment, which ensured they couldn't actually easily leave it, because they could build up no savings on which to do so. "The Wellerman" is the whaling version of the coal-miner's "Sixteen Tons" - another day older and deeper in debt, I owe my soul to the company store. It speaks, under its jaunty tune, to pandemic and lockdown because of that claustrophobic sense that you can't get out.

It also implicitly speaks to our current late-stage capitalism, and its absolute disregard for the wellbeing and prosperity of the workers it exploits. The whalers under the sway of the Wellerman are desperately akin to the Amazon wage-slaves who are slipping into poverty while Jeff Bezos accumulates billions. While I love the song and its communal expression, it has also made me incredibly depressed, because it suggests that there is something fundamentally broken and intrinsically unlearning about humanity: nearly two hundred years ago we were not only slaughtering whales, we were exploiting the workers so a tiny elite could make money, and we're still doing it. Slavery, and indentured service, and exploitative and inhumane companies who care about money and don't care about people and deliberately locked them into service so they couldn't escape, are baked into our cultural DNA. I hate that. I hate that America is still fighting to implement a minimum wage which has been fought over for so long that it's no longer a liveable amount. I hate that the "New South Africa" notwithstanding, there are people digging in our bins every time we put them out, and the divisions between our poverty-ridden rural or township citizens and the wealthy commercial or political classes are huge and growing huger. We've always done this, how can we stop doing it?

It's giving me a micro-version of the grief and despair I felt when America elected Trump: that there is a segment of humanity - capitalists or Trump supporters - whose thought processes are so alienatingly inhumane to me that I can't feel any sense of connection to or kinship with them. And their inhumanity is dominating the directions our culture takes, precisely because it is exploitative and uncaring, and tramples the people who feel otherwise. And it's a lot of work for a sea shanty to be doing, but we're all trapped in this, working endlessly at awful, destructive jobs for which we are paid insultingly and from which we cannot escape, because the system has put us there and keeps us there deliberately. All we can do, apparently, is sing about it.

Aargh. And I'm tired and in the middle of exam committees and virtual registration, and losses and dissolutions are characterising my social circle, and I have a sinus headache, and it's hot, so probably I'm more pessimistic than I should be. But aargh.

In an unprecedented move blindsiding everyone except anyone with a brain who's been watching Trump in the last four years, MAGA goons today attempted to occupy the Capitol, in order to disrupt Senate ratification of the election results in favour of Biden. Two things about this.

One: cruising through my various social media feeds today, I am struck afresh by how much we seem to be living in a clichéd and not very well written science fiction dystopia.

Two: the attempt to disrupt congress and force an electoral decision in Trump's favour appears to have been half-baked at best, conceptualised by idiots as an idiot gesture, and fizzled without achieving anything except unnecessary death and destruction, and to unnecessarily underline the extreme and terrifying fragility of American democracy as a system, and the depth and ferocity of the country's social divides. Which, frankly, could happen to anyone, nationally, and has been exemplified all over the globe in the last hundred years or so, see badly written sf dystopia, above.

But the pointless gun-toting posturing of the invaders is in the event an irresistible parallel to the delightful video I actually wanted to post today, whose wantonly inept robots exemplify all of the above flailing futility with considerably more innocence and charm.