#hopefully i’ll see you at other CRAP events/around uni :-) :-) :-)

[andypartridges]

hey mia its ciara from CRAP society remeber we met like a month ago? every time they schedule a meeting i somehow have work which is why ive been absent oops ANYWAY youre the one who said i should wtch taskmaster well if inally got around to it and it just made me laugh so hard i threw up so my legal team will be contacting you shortly (all jokes aside thnaks for the great rec)

omg hiiiii !!!! taskmaster is one of the most shows of all time i’m so glad you enjoyed <3 my lawyers will be in touch with your people asap

i was wondering if we’d even run into each other at theatresports lmao but now i’m doing the CRAP revue so i probably won’t be doing thursday improv again until august bc rehearsals are exhausting 😔✊

[gingerbreadbooks2020]

Bookblr post #40: The End of 2020

It’s finally over. And what a year it has been. Although, given all the horrible crap that everyone’s been through, I think I’ll stick to talking about books for just a moment.

366 days ago, I set out to read 12 books. Probably a pretty average new year’s resolution, maybe I stick out a little given the stacks of unread books on my booksheld - or maybe I don’t. So, how did I do?

Well, long story short, I didn’t make it. I had the same resolution in 2019 as 2020, and neither year [if that’s an English phrase] did I make it. I’m still glad I made this blog though. It’s kept me accountable - for the most part - and being able to spend a bit of time digesting what I’ve read was quite nice too. And, along the way, we gained over 450 followers which I never expected in a million years, so thank you to everyone who followed me this year! 

I read 8 books this year. Given the fact that I didn’t even have to do my final college exams, personally it doesn’t feel too great. However, it was an improvement on the two years previous so it was worth something!

So, what did I read this year?

Well, I kick-started this blog reading The Reader by Bernhard Schlink, a reread of a book I was studying for my A-Level German course. I’ve said this before but I’ll say it again, I really enjoyed being able to read that book for my own enjoyment. If you’re into that area of history or just German history, I really recommend the read. Of course it’s not a work of non-fiction, but it’s one of those pieces which really helps you understand the feelings of the people at that time while also not betraying the interesting storyline.

My second book was The Shining by Stephen King. This was a continued read from the previous year. I’d never read a King novel before this, and horror has never been my favourite genre, be it book, film, or video game. However I really enjoyed The Shining and King’s narration and writing style. I don’t know if I;d recommend it for people like myself who’ve never read a King novel before as it is quite a long one, but it was a really good book. I found it took a little while to get into the action, so to speak, but once it did it was really worth it!

After that was a book I bought in 2020, called Faeries, Elves & Gnlins by Rosalind Kerven. This was a really fun book for me because it was just a bunch of short stories about, well, faeries, elves and goblins from Britain and the British Isles. I know many cultures have their own myths and legends, so it was nice to learn about such legends coming from tiny, unhead of towns and villages from the country I live in!

My fourth book this year was technically Macbeth... I did take a break and finish two other books in said break, but it’s next in line. I mostly wanted to read Macbeth simply because I had had to study it for my GCSE English class [which was around 3 or 4 years ago!] and simply never finished reading it. I don’t really know if I’m a Shakespeare person, maybe it’s just because it was a play which I’m not really a big fan of reading? Macbeth is a classic so I don’t think I can fault it. I guess English classes kind of ruined it for me so I can’t say it was a gripping read, but I’m not discouraging you from reading it. And honestly I’m rambling at this point so I’ll move on.

One of the books I read while on a break from Macbeth was Dad Bods by Robyn Sparkes, which is actually a story on Wattpad. I’ll be honest, I can’t really remember the whole story, although I know that I enjoyed reading it. If you’re looking for stories about a middle-aged man realising he’s gay, this is the story for you!

After that was Korean manhwa called Killing Stalking and... how do I describe Killing Stalking? I remember finding it several years ago - I was far too young to be reading it in reality - and the story wasn’t finished yet, so I just read what was there and left it, forgot it for years. Then, early summer this year, I started remembering it, went back and realised it was finished. The story is, put most simply, NSFW. Lots of warnings, I won’t lie. If you know what I mean when I say this, it basically ticks all of the AO3 archive warnings [apart from the underage one [I think!]] so obviously don’t read if those themes may upset you or disturb you. It’s definitely advertised as a psychological thriller by the creator, it’s not a romance novel or anything of the sort, please believe me when I say this. Do I still recommend it? I’m going to step back and let you assess it for yourself given everything I’ve just said.

Obviously after those two I went back and finished Macbeth, but then I think I took a break [unannounced, unplanned]. It was then that I read Volume 1 of the One Piece manga by Eiichiro Oda to get back into reading. It was fun, easy to dip in and out of, and a really simple read. Which is a good thing, I promise. Sometimes books can be big and confusing and they don’t need to be. Books don’t have to be groundbreaking in order to be good, they just need to be enjoyable. 

The eighth and final book that I read and finished in 2020 was To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee. I’d never read it before, never studied it for English class, and only had the briefest knowledge of what even happens in the story. All I have to say is, if you haven’t read it already, please do. You can read textbooks and understand events, but books offer a more personal insight into these things. Much alike with The Reader, you can just see things in a way you couldn’t with a textbook or history lesson. Perhaps it’s easier to empathise this way? Either way, please read it. 

I did start reading The Picture of Dorian Gray, unfortunately I didn’t finish it so I won’t really talk about it here, hopefully next year though?

All in all, I’ve enjoyed having this blog. I’ve enjoyed having somewhere to talk about the book I’m reading without my friend telling me to shut up. 

And, despite not reaching my goal this year, I’m optimistic for 2021. I want to keep going with this blog, hopefully I’ll reach my goal this year. Coming home for Christmas from Uni means that now, when I sit in bed, my bookshelf is opposite me and I can see all my unread books and I’m getting excited to read them. Luckily lockdown meant I haven’t been out buying more and more books recently. 

Thank you for following, for liking, for reblogging. Having this little blog has been pretty helpful in 2020. I hope we all have a successful 2021!

- Gingerbread ♤

[theemptymancometh]

Okay, this has been a week of self-discovery I guess and it won’t stop swirling about in my head so I’m just gonna wordvomit all over my blog about it and see if that takes some of the presence out of it.

I have aphantasia. I’ve always technically known that, I suppose, I just didn’t have terminology for it or a sense for whether it was a specifically me thing, an everyone thing, or something in-between.

Aphantasia (a term I appreciate having but that could stand to be a little less negative sounding) is the inability to produce mental visualisations. (mind blindness.) It seems like a sliding scale of ability; I’m at absolute zero. As far as I’m aware, I’ve never been capable of envisioning or imagining anything in that way. (therefore, congenital aphantasia.) This has just been my life since forever. I’ve always assumed that people talking about being able to see scenes from books in their mind were being hyperbolic - it just sounds like such bullshit, you know? It’s fun to read about, but not something I’d really given much weight to as an actual thing people were capable of.

People seen to be trying to make a lot of connections between aphantasia and other processing and memory things that I feel are a little unnecessary though. (I know this will vary on a person-to-person basis, just like the ‘level’ of mental imagery that people are capable of, but I still feel like they’re leaning a little too heavily on trying to make connections in a general sense.)

One thing I’ve seen mentioned quite a few times is this assumption that aphants prefer non-fiction books and struggle with fiction. I fucking love fiction and I hate non-fiction books. Sure, I struggle to get into High Fantasy novels because they tend to get really dense with their descriptions, but that doesn’t mean I don’t like fiction. It just means that if someone starts describing a character’s outfit or whatever that I tend to skip over it until they get back to plot, because those details are all meaningless to me. (I tend not to remember much more about characters in the physical sense than eye/hair colour and occasionally height in comparison to another major character, if specified.)

And face-blindness? I mean, I guess that depends on what your definition of that is, but not being able to visualise what someone looks like when they’re not around doesn’t automatically mean that you don’t know them when they’re there. I have a very good sense for knowing if I’ve seen someone around a bit, even if we’ve never interacted, but I do often struggle to remember where I know them from if I see them somewhere else. I also have a hard time putting names to faces, but I just have a bad memory for names in the first place, and I don’t take much care to try to remember names if they’re not someone I’m actually talking to. (This includes celebrities. I have a lot of ‘well I know the face but fuck if I know their name or what I last saw them in’ moments.)

As for memory issues, I’ll allow that some of that could probably be attributed to my aphantasia; I can’t bring forth images from my past, so remembering details and events is more difficult. But my long-term memory is also just pretty shitty in general when it comes to my personal life history. What I do remember is almost solely in a factual bulletpoint sort of way, like: I know that X thing happened in Y time period and contextually I guess I probably might’ve felt this way about it. I’ve always had a hard time placing events in a time sense - like whether it happened last year or five years ago, for instance. I can say stuff like ‘when I was at primary school’, but I usually can’t remember specific dates. It’s getting worse since I’m out of high school now because my uni life isn’t consistent enough to really use as a timeline, and even if it was I’ll probably have to use ‘while I was working at X’ as my next method of back-dating memories.

I remember lots of other useless crap though. Like random snippets of plotlines from shows I watched like a decade ago, or being able to identify what anime a character is from even if I can’t remember their name.

Okay, I think that’s all I wanted to ramble about. Hopefully my brain will stop whirring so obsessively over this whole thing soon and I can go back to my regular day-to-day life of not thinking about how other people imagine things.