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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.

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Yes, Virginia, I’m still on Substack

Hard to believe, given my general pattern, but I seem to be doing pretty well with the three-posts-a-week format. I didn’t keep up with it as well when I was on the road two weeks ago, but the Substack app is for readers much more than writers and I just did not have it in me to write new posts on a phone browser. Half the time I was nodding off. The thing about bus travel is you seem to stop every two hours (and sometimes more often!) and about half that time they expect you to actually exit the bus even when you don’t need to. There is no way you’re going to get enough sleep like that.

If I had it to do over and had a few thousand more dollars I’d have broken the trip down into smaller chunks and then stayed at motels to take breaks at reasonable intervals. Road-warrioring in a car is bad enough but at least you have control of when you can sleep and you don’t have to worry about missing the car unless some asshole steals it.

But anyway, that environment wasn’t conducive to writing. So that was my big deviation from my usual pattern. I still need to write something for tomorrow but I’m lacking inspiration at the moment and may wind up just writing some fluff. I doubt anyone will mind. I don’t have that many followers anyway.

But here is my take on Pride that I posted yesterday.

I’m not against the idea of Pride per se. I get why it became a thing, but it has been turned into something darker and more ridiculous. People who would disagree with me or laugh that off tend to fall into two camps:

1. Those who only superficially participate in Pride for the attention and emotional validation, do not really pay attention to what’s going on, and feel they will be either inauthentic or a “bad ally” — depending on their sexual orientation — if they start to notice and question things;

and

2. Those who know exactly what I’m talking about and endorse it but don’t want a lynch mob coming after them. I wish I could promise that their mocking me or targeting me or whatever will 100% prevent said posse forming, but given how many parents are pissed off now, I wouldn’t take any bets. I only hope they go after the blue-haired straights who are actually hurting kids instead of the lesbian women and gay men who also don’t want those kids hurt but unfortunately are now force-teamed with ghouls, quacks, and perverts.

I don’t want to belabor the point here. Just go read the essay. There’s the link. I just posted it. Go.

—

Considering I haven’t even broken the 100-subscriber threshold yet, I have five paid subscribers. I suspect they have all seen me around Facebook — I know for a fact at least one of them is Facebook friends with me — and so it comes off a bit “Mom buying all my World’s Finest candy bars so I can win the boombox,” but it’s still nothing to sneeze at. One of the annual subscribers even saved me from losing my phone service earlier this year. (Thank you SO MUCH.)

I will say this: if any more people subscribe, the monthly sub does me a lot more good in the long run than the annual sub does. If I can get the monthly income up to about $200 to $300 a month, that’s me sorted on bills and baseline necessities. For the upper number, I would need 75 paying monthly subscribers because I see $4 and some change out of that $5 a month per subscriber. I can’t see that happening any time soon, but I wanted to math it up for you just so you can see for yourselves. The lower number is more doable, obviously: just fifty paying monthly subscribers. I think it’s doable, anyway, though it will take time.

So even if you can’t spare five bucks a month — and I won’t tell you what your own financial situation is — if you like what I write, sharing me around would help a lot. I get reposted inside the Substack platform, but that never goes very far.

You share the same ten memes every month. I’ve seen you. If you could stretch just that little bit farther, it’d be great, and it would cost you nothing but a few seconds’ time.

Hell, share it friends-only if you have to. I’ll understand.

Okay. I have to get back to figuring out what to post tomorrow. Toodle-oo.

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More updates to the big man’s site

Small stuff, but a blog post and an editing of the Photos page and a NEW PHOTO ADDED OMG.

You will just have to find it. It’s not actually NEW new. It’s just new to the site. There’s a shortcut to find it if you can figure that out.

I added a little bit of snark and I probably won’t keep it, but that’s just my mood right now. Can everyone please stop fucking watermarking celeb photos that you didn’t actually take? Please? I’m begging you? Especially when it’s clear you’re a SanSan fetishist. Cringe.

I’m changing my approach a little bit with this stuff though. I will still link to sources but I’m going to host as much as I feel I can get away with actually on the fan site instead of relying on embeds. I don’t entirely like it, but several years back I experienced my embeds disappearing because someone changed the back-end code and I don’t know if that’s happened again, but I want to guard against it. Now, I’m not going to swipe every photo of Rory I see, but I’m gonna grab the representative stuff. And if anyone wants to sue me for that, you better get your lawyers ready because you’re gonna have to sue all of Instagram and Pinterest too. And MY lawyer’s gonna see that you do. If I can retain one.

But most people are reasonable about fan sites. It’s not like the big man is CEO of Disney. I’ll still link to sources when I know them, too. Hopefully, that helps.

—

What the fuck is wrong with Pinterest? I was trying to find the old story about him rocketing his ass down a snowy mountain because he was cold and impatient, and I had to sell the book it was in when I was about to leave Ohio, and Pinterest was the only place I’d seen it. I don’t think I saved it off of there? But anyway, the site’s fucked. I can’t load it, and when I googled the situation, turns out the site was having weird errors for days or weeks before now. Rut-roh. I never used it worth a dern, but for some reason I’d hate to see it go.

Oh well. Onwards and whatever.

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Adventures in diabetes

So, after lots of years struggling with blood sugar issues, I finally got a type 2 diabetes diagnosis this past March.

Unfortunately, I was living with my father who believes all diet-related health ills come from eating large quantities of food and that what food you eat is irrelevant. So we basically had nothing around the house but meat, crap, and a few sorry little efforts at eating fruit and vegetables and usually those were canned. Fruit and vegetables don’t make people as healthy as we’ve all been told, but Dad buys into the idea, so his take on plant foods was a bit odd, considering.

I tried to cope with metformin but it really wasn’t doing anything. I wasn’t going to go on any of the shots. Turns out they slow down gut transit time and that’s going to cause a whole lot of other issues over time. I have diverticulosis anyway. Like, a ridiculous amount of it. Don’t wanna slow the food down.

I got my primary care clinic to prescribe me a meter and strips, and then I heard from the nearest hospital system about getting into a special diabetes program, so now I have two meters each with their own lancets and strips. The hospital’s meter talks to an app, which I find very helpful. I also learned I can get replacement strips off Amazon, which is also very helpful considering my current situation. Because I’m no longer in Louisiana, thus no longer on Louisiana Medicaid, thus I’m not in their program anymore. (They don’t know this yet. One more loose end I have to tie up.)

So, since I got to California, I have been transitioning over to a carnivore or mostly-carnivore diet. I leave it open to maybe eat nuts or maybe a little bit of fruit, and I count dairy as carnivore even if most of you don’t. But that’s where I am. And I’m annoyed. I tested for the first time in literal weeks and I’m in the 120s mg/dl. Long after breakfast. I haven’t been eating the nuts and fruit, either — I just mentioned that in passing. Hasn’t actually been in the diet.

I do drink coffee. I wonder if that has any effect.

I noticed back in Louisiana that if I’d gone out and had a really busy day delivering food, my sugar went lower. So maybe the answer is just to take a lot of walks. I am without a car now anyway, so I would have to walk anyway, but if it gets my sugar down, that’s a huge bonus.

I do need to start tracking my sugar again though. This is ridiculous. I at least need to see how my fasting sugar is doing. Sheesh.

If you are not diabetic yet and are still fucking around because “I’ll just go on meds if I go diabetic,” don’t do that. While you can still get to normal sugars, get your ass to normal sugars. And stay there. You’ll thank me later.