Author: Dana Seilhan

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A mental health note

In the interests of promoting harmony in future budding friendships and the like, I feel the need to spell this out.

If you are one of the reasons I have to spell this out, I don’t like your chances on fostering a friendship with me, or anything else with me for that matter. But I still feel the need to cover these bases.

I am pretty laid-back and flexible on making new friends and meeting new guys and what-have-you. My dance card is WAY empty. It’s cool. But I do have a few bright lines. This is important so, if you care, listen up.

Number one need: ***COMMUNICATION***

I need you to talk to me! I need you to tell me what’s going on when it affects me! If we need to “talk later,” I need you to tell me when that will happen, and then follow through, and if you can’t follow through then get a hold of me to reschedule and then follow through on that!

If I’m fucking up on something, tell me! Try being nice about it. If it’s all you, you can say so, but don’t say it’s all you when it’s me too. Nor blame me when it’s actually you. Sometimes it really is one or the other.

I cannot STAND being left in limbo. It is my BIGGEST PET PEEVE, and from men in particular. It’s not your fault. I was put through this by two different emotionally destructive former partners and it did a number on me and I NEVER WANT TO GO THROUGH THAT AGAIN. I will NUKE YOUR ASS FROM ORBIT JUST TO BE SURE. We will be DONE.

Related to this, your relationship status is not a state fucking secret. If you’re with someone, let me know. That helps me because falling for someone usually isn’t an instantaneous process and if I know there are boundaries, I know to steer clear of them. So if you have a platonic best female friend and you wonder why I’m distant, it’s because I caught your emotional vibe with her and misinterpreted it… and that’s your fault! Speak up. It is the considerate thing to do. And while you’re at it, better expect me to ask her for confirmation after you tell me, ’cause I fucking will. Better safe than sorry.

Number two need, and this is more for potential dates/partners/whatever. OPENNESS

I am not interested in truncated situations or closed doors. I want to be able to follow the trail wherever it leads. If something has the potential to happen, let it happen! If you have THAT MANY reservations about where things could go with me, we have no business doing anything. You are just wasting my time when I could be spending it with someone who IS interested. Don’t do that to me. That is shit behavior and no one deserves it. I’ve already wasted nearly half my life on someone who didn’t deserve my time. If I even think you are dicking me around, you’re getting nuked. I’m fucking done.

[[edit] I don’t mean polyamory. I mean openness for what’s possible between you and me. If you’re that fucking bored, there’s the door. I tried sharing, it doesn’t work for me, and so I do not share now. On the bright side, you won’t have to share either. Yay!]

Number three need: LOYALTY

I don’t mean never end our friendship or never break up with me. If you are unhappy or I’m mistreating you, by all means get out. Please. I’m not in this to ruin people’s lives. What I mean is:

friendship: If someone’s slagging me, speak up for me. Don’t just stand by letting them slag me.

relationship: If you’re in a relationship with me, you’re in it WITH ME. Your exes are exes. You’re done. If you have kids with one and you need to interact with her to deal with family stuff that is fine, but you need to think about what it looks like if you’re running off to meet her alone. If you don’t have kids with her at all, you’re done. Be done. You need to think about how you’d feel if the situation were reversed. Would you want me trotting off to have dinner with my ex-husband? Never gonna happen, but if it did. How would you feel? Or if it were my daughter’s father? No. Pick a fucking side.

—

I mean, if you can’t handle these three simple things, I don’t know what to tell you.

Similarly, don’t expect these three things from me when you won’t give them to me. I’m not your personal fucking doormat.

Good talk. Glad we could sort that out. Moving along now.

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Sandor on sale

Okay, not really on sale. I’ve reduced the price of my Sandor drawing here.

You can wait it out if you want but I’m probably not going to reduce it again. It doesn’t cost me much to keep it listed.

I get my brain sucked into stupid social media all day. I don’t exactly have wall-to-wall social hour around here; the two people I know to any degree here in town are both introverts and also running two organizations between them, plus one of them’s a published author who continues to write and is in the middle of a book project now, in fact. Plus each of them is owned by four dogs and one of them has additional animal responsibilities. They’re busy, okay? And I’m still new here. So I don’t have much going on, so I’ve been lonely and depressed (I am also an introvert, but I do like people, and I haven’t been getting enough peopling — in doses that I can cope with — over the past three-plus years). So, the self-medicating on a very bad “drug.”

I want to say I will do more artwork soon. My ideal self as I would like to be will get more artwork done soon. I make no promises. It’ll probably be tiny stuff at first, if it’s anything at all.

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Administrivia: 10 August 2024

Oops. I had left comments on. Got a spam comment, is the only way I caught it.

Sorted. Every post prior to this one will have a message on it after the main body of the post that says you have to be registered and logged in to comment, but you won’t be able to actually do that. From this post forward, I don’t think it’ll even have that message.

I used to love allowing comments and having people to talk to, and I would even hear from people I knew, but I was hypersensitive and trigger-happy and sooner or later someone would try to start an argument or a debate in my personal space and it would usually annoy me or piss me off. And then there was the occasional troll. So it’s just not something I want to deal with anymore.

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The Song of Ice and Fire

Hey, this realization hit me the other day and I wanted to put it somewhere in case I need to refer to it later.

People continually grouse about season 8 of Game of Thrones, really angry that GRRM made “Jon Snow” into the seventh Aegon Targaryen only for that revelation to go absolutely nowhere.

Well, let’s see, shall we.

“Born in the place of smoke and salt” = Aegon was born in Dorne. I don’t know if Dorne was ever labeled with that epithet, but it definitely fits the description.

“The song of ice and fire” = Aegon carries the bloodlines of both Stark, through his mother Lyanna, and Targaryen through his father Rhaegar. He was also instrumental in helping to end the threat of Ice posed by the Night King and definitively ended the threat of Fire posed by the Mad Queen Daenerys Targaryen.

“The prince who was promised” = Aegon was crowned king as “Jon Snow” by the North, but only because they thought he was an illegitimate Stark. (Ironic, innit, that the “rebellious” North accidentally crowned the true king?) As a Targaryen, he was never crowned. He was the crown prince and that was all. He also refused the Iron Throne, cementing his status as a prince and not a king.

I also think it’s neat the way House Targaryen started with an Aegon and ended with an Aegon.

It was the “prince who was promised” bit that finally caught me. It just landed on me one day like a ton of bricks. “OH OF COURSE.” The thing about prophecies is that we don’t pay attention to how they’re worded and assume that things are going to go a certain way. But sometimes you just have to take the words literally.

And if you think that’s fucked up, wait’ll I tell you about the Hound.

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Probable changes and random “big” thoughts

I can’t make any promises, only talk about what I’d like to do, but I’d like to get my brain together very soon and schedule work on each of the things I still want to do with my free time. Big man’s site is one of them. I need to get back to work on bringing all his pics and videos inline with what is now called the “blog.” I like the little headline I put with it, “Not from the desk of Rory McCann,” but I’ll have to think of something else to put there because I need to quit it with the unscripted updates. They will get in the way of HIS actual content and that’s not what I want to do anymore.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to use tags, but I might use tags here and then link to the Rory tag from the big-man site. If it seems self-serving to point people to my website, oh fucking well. When you are paying for my hosting service, you get a say. I will never charge anyone to look at Big Man Chronicles, not even with a Patreon account (there will, in fact, never be a Patreon account connected with it), so… good luck with that. My money my turf my rules my say. The end.

On a slight tangent, because this is still related to the Rory fandom, I accidentally found out (because I was not logged in) that Hound’s Lair was crying about Instagram changes last fall and talking about quitting. Considering I found her via Pinterest not ten minutes ago as I write this, that’s a bit stupid. There are always ways around limiting algorithms. Hell, people find my BMC site through Google searches because I tackle some things the Instagram fan accounts don’t really talk about. If you want it badly enough, you’ll get it; if you’re a quitter, go ‘head, I guess. I wouldn’t be this petty, but a lot of you who know me from BMC know that she and I locked horns five years ago. I was realizing, in fact, just a few minutes ago (as I write this), that she basically blocked me for locking horns with me on MY account. She wasn’t even using the Hound’s Lair account to argue with me, as I recall. So basically I was held to a behavioral standard for her IG when I wasn’t on her IG and didn’t know I was dealing with her. Trapped nice and neat. If you think that’s fair, go on, I guess. I can’t be fucked. So if she really does quit, I’ll be one shedding zero fucking tears about it. Wheaton’s Law applies here.

(Honestly, I remember getting offended because I posted a pic from the GOT premiere in NYC and she came along like “this is so-and-so’s picture”… in retrospect that wasn’t a bad thing to say, but it felt like she was accusing me of stealing it, which of course I was NOT passing it off as my own. Anyone who knows me knows I’ve never so much as set foot in NYC. I certainly in the post did not claim to have taken the photo. Since that argument, people have stolen my screenshots with alarming regularity and I would bet money I won’t have in a million years that she never had one single problem with that. Because she’s got flying monkeys who look in. I know how this shit works. So… just really stupid all around. It should have been a two-second fart and done and forgotten. Would have been, had I had any say in the outcome.)

Getting off the drama, this illustrates something else for me: if you want to be found, get the fuck off social media. Or, be on social media, but don’t let that be your one-trick pony. I see morons all the time claiming that websites and blogs are “obsolete.” Not if you want to keep an online presence, they’re fucking not. Did you notice Facebook and X have websites and that Instagram now allows you to upload photos from a desktop or laptop computer browser? Better wake up. These “services” are making dumber and dumber decisions all the time and I don’t give it another ten years and they’ll be going the way MySpace went: still in existence but no longer relevant. Where do you want to end up when that happens?

Yeah. Good talk. I’m gonna go watch paint dry or something. Got to be a better use of my time than this post was.

(I’m lying. I’ve got no wet paint in my vicinity. But I’ll find something to do.)

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Substack updates

Went in and changed the about page for the Substack. I know I feel a bit dissatisfied when I go to look at someone else’s Substack about page and they haven’t changed it from the default setting at all, so I wanted to make sure there was actual content in mine. Which there was, but I thought it needed a bit of fleshing out.

It looks like one of the paid subscribers bailed. Reason given: “Time.” I have no idea what that means, but I wish them the best. That said, they were a monthly subscriber, and those are the ones I really want to build up. The occasional annual subscription is a wonderful supplement to my miniscule income, but it’s the regulars who will put me on a more even path to stability in the long run. But this is not a thing I can make happen overnight. I will just have to be patient.

For the record, because some of you have told me I’m a good writer, it doesn’t matter. I always doubt myself. I think that’s probably actually really common amongst creatives — and I don’t even like calling myself that. I don’t get into this sort of thing to call myself a creative, I do this sort of thing because it feels like a thing I have to do.

I am trying to get better at it, though. Because that also feels necessary.

Okay. Fonts to sort through, shit to start. Whee. ‘Later.

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Administrivia: 20 July 2024

Update on the Facebook thing. It’s more like a 90/10 on interactions and maybe 80/20 on looking at it at all.

Predictably, the person who often chats with me on Messenger is still doing so and only one other person has reached out whatsoever. One.

We do understand that friendship is a basic human need, right? I’m not very clear on the thought process here. I just know what it looks like. I’m not a mind-reader, y’all.

Well, okay though. Survival is even more basic a need than friendship. (Though I could argue that friendship aids survival.) I suppose I had best get to work on that and maybe the rest of you will catch up and maybe you won’t.

I ought to quit Facebook for its “friend” designation alone. Intellectually we know it isn’t REALLY “adding a friend,” but that language still automatically triggers unconscious expectations and it can gum up the emotional works if you’re not careful. Or maybe that’s just me.

I was serious. If you want to keep me around then you want to start reaching out to me. I’m done with the passive consumerism masquerading as “social interaction.” It is nothing of the sort.

Though this isn’t just about Facebook. When you can interact with people in person and they still don’t give a shit about you, that’s pretty demoralizing after a while.

Okay. Enough drama on the “administrivia” category. Also, I tweaked a couple things here at the site. Nothing important or affecting functionality. The end.

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Administrivia: 19 July 2024

This is a sort of “administrivia” for both here and my social media.

I am on a sort of hiatus with Facebook. I would say it’s about a 95/5 split of staying off Facebook vs occasionally liking or commenting, respectively, and I’ve written no new posts since the one about my old house in Columbus.

If you go to my profile and notice you can see maybe two posts (not counting announcements that a profile or cover photo has been changed) but you can also see we’re still Facebook friends, you went on the Restricted list. If you don’t know what that is, google “Facebook friend restricted list.” We’re still Facebook friends because I still like you and want to keep you around. However, apparently neither of us is getting much out of the interaction and I am at a stage of debating next steps with myself. Likely I will leave the status quo in place for now; I may even add more people to Restricted status. It is not a compelling enough decision that I have to settle on it right now.

There is a difference between friends and friend lists. I need friends, not friend lists. One can have mutual benefit without having friendship. That is an incredibly lonely way to live. I don’t know what to do from here. I can’t even ask, because people can’t have these conversations without flying off the handle and assuming the worst.

So, one criterion I’ll likely refer to, if I even stay on Facebook (more on that in a minute), in order to decide who to keep around is who starts conversations with me. I now have Messenger installed on my laptop and running even when I don’t have Facebook up in my browser. I’ve had it on my phone for ages. If you actually want to talk to me and not just react to shit that you get notifications for like you are getting a hit of heroin, you know where I am.

Because you can say “well, we can’t really be friends if we don’t know one another that well yet” all you like, and I will still point out to you that there ain’t no fucking way we’re ever going to get to know one another if I only ever hear from you when you want that mutual benefit. I’m not a fucking appliance. Figure it out or fuck off.

If you feel I haven’t made enough of an effort in your direction, you certainly have the right to criticize me in the same vein. That’s fair. And at least then it would be a real interaction and not that stupid haha react I’d love to shove up Mark Zuckerberg’s left nostril sideways.

(Does a round shape have a “sideways”? Do I fucking care? Just wondering.)

Now. As to whether I stay on Facebook. I have no idea. I’ve toyed around with alternatives like getting back on MeWe, but no one would go with me. You’d rather complain about Facebook than leave Facebook. I’m on Spinster, but most of you wouldn’t go there. I’m on X, but I don’t use it much. (The current 0 tweets are because I deleted what little there was.) You know what? I’d rather just hang out with people. Can I hang out with people? Can I have a real life again finally? Please?

I won’t even get drunk and flash my tits. You should be glad. My biopsy scars do nothing for my personal aesthetics.

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Administrivia: 07 July 2024

Finally! I have everything back up except the few photos, and I’ll get those when I get ’em. I INTEND to get that done a lot more quickly, after posting this post, than I had been in getting the site back up in the first place.

Never fear. I had everything backed up, including my own little system for remembering where to stick the photos, before Old Host went down. This place was never in any danger unless my hard drive got wi-AVERT AVERT NEVER MIND but anyway, things looked optimistic and, turns out, deservedly so. Whew.

I really need to update the photo on the front page. My hair’s longer, for one thing. Will I? Who fucking knows.

Oh, um, shit. I didn’t put my bottom menu back yet. Let me go do that. Onward!

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Administrivia: 22 June 2024

Okay, everybody. We’re going to see some upset with some functionality for a bit. I am desperate to get my expenses down until I can get my income up, and probably even then because I have a LOT of economic recovery to be doing. So I am changing my website hosting service for the first time in five years.

I hate to leave Old Host because on the service side of things they’ve been good to me, but on the fiscal side of things they’ve been fucking awful. New Host is reputable (if I told you who they were and if you are at all familiar with hosting services, you’d probably recognize their name — they’ve been around for a good while) and currently holding a hosting sale where it’s around forty bucks for a year for me. Which is five dollars more than I was paying Old Host per month. Nope. I’m outta here.

So if for some bizarre reason you know my first name AT last name DOT net email address, that’s not going to work until at least the 27th. I have it all set up and I’ll know it’s working when Thunderbird stops whining at me about it.

This site may hiccup too because I’m not moving the domain name yet but will be migrating the site. I would just do it myself but I want to see if the official migration service with New Host will move the photos too. I’m currently testing this with another of my websites but I can’t remember if I have photos there or just links. We’ll see how that goes. Whee!

[edit] The site migration seems a mite complicated. Manual migration it is, then. Bleah.