Category: Personal

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Trust, but verify

Recently, one group of friends started talking about a YouTuber that another friend is a huge fan of, in very disparaging terms.

I asked about it, basically asking for receipts, and nobody provided them..

I’m not really a YouTube kind of person, but this contrast (between people whom I like and respect the opinions of) was too much for me to ignore, so I went and watched the YouTube video myself.

I should say that I really hate video as an information format. It’s long, you can’t really do much else while you’re absorbing it, you can’t easily skip around, you can’t copy paste quotes.

But I stuck it out, because I’m stubborn, and by this point I was INVESTED.

I should also say that normally, I am wary of the “both sides have valid points” rhetoric. It used to be true, or at least truer than today, but that was before people started telling us to inject bleach to cure diseases or what nonsense Tiktok trend is going on these days.

But I made an exception in this case, because both “sides” here are people I generally trust to be working in good faith. I don’t think any of them are acting disingenuously; I think all of them believe what they believe.

I watched the whole video over the course of a couple days.

It was this one: https://youtu.be/7gDKbT_l2us

The initial group of friends were saying that in it, Contrapoints was “defending” JK Rowling.

I watched the whole video, and I didn’t see any defense.

About a third of the way in, I messaged the group to say “hey, I didn’t see any of the stuff you guys are talking about so far in this video…am I watching the wrong video?”

Instead of sending me the Actual Bad Video, they doubled down. One person said “If your friends telling you this person is a Nazi and a transmedicalist isn’t enough for you to keep their voice out of your head, then I don’t know what to tell you.”

That comment made me see red. And after I calmed down a bit, I said, look. When two people I like and respect tell me opposite things, which one of them am I supposed to blindly trust?

And then I thought to myself: I *don’t* blindly trust. Or rather, I don’t do it as a matter of conscious policy. Sure, there are lots of things in life where I can’t be an expert, and I do have to trust other people. But “the contents of a goddamn YouTube video” is not one of them.

Yes, we trust. But we also verify. And it’s not anti-friendship, or anti-trust, to say “I’m going to watch this for myself.”

I’m a little worried that by phrasing things this way, I’ll give steam to some kind of “do your own research” alt-right pipeline. If my friends have actual concerns about this content creator, I expect they will continue to share them with me.

But so far I haven’t actually heard any real concerns; I’ve only heard single-word adjectives with no details and no receipts. 

So I am cautiously proceeding, and looking at the primary sources myself. Because that’s what I do. “Citation needed” is just a way of life, I guess.

I’m starting the second Contrapoints JK Rowling video tonight. We’ll see if this one has the defending in it, I guess?

Coda: The day after I write this, I see the following from a friend of mine:

https://blast-o-rama.com/2026/05/13/dear-internet-read-a-little-deeper-it-wont-hurt-you-i-promise/

This. All of this. PLEASE don’t stop digging deeper and fact checking, even on things your side writes.

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The Last Rose of the Season

I have some knockout rose plants by my house. They’re not fancy, just cheap hybrids, but every year they produce beautiful flowers for me.

This year, in November, when everything was going dormant. the one closest to my door suddenly decided to produce a flower. I made a big deal about it – roses in November, The Last Rose of the Season, etc. I picked it and put it in a vase, and when it began to wilt I hung it up on the wall to dry.

Then, the rosebush made ANOTHER flower in December. It’s wilting right now in the front bed, in the most perfect “seven for beauty that blossoms and dies” dramatic pose.

And what I am taking from this is: There is no guaranteed Last Rose of the Season. Even something that you might think is final, is the end of all things, might not turn out to be.

And yes, it’s important to cherish those Maybe Lasts. When my daughter was in preschool, I thought often about “is this the last time I’ll be able to pick her up?” Children grow. I’m not a power lifter. There was, indeed, a last time.

But we never know exactly which one will be the Last. So cherish those moments; but never give up hope just because you think it’s the end.

I know this is contradictory, but contradictions are just the nature of the world, like roses in December.

(I’ve written and deleted about five paragraphs’ worth of Discourse about whether “nature” includes manmade things, and then I decided: let’s not. This is “nature” in the sense of “reality,” not in the sense of “a human didn’t influence this.” Humans are part of nature.)

Anyway. My point in all this is: Keep hope alive. Don’t give in to the despair. Allow the world to surprise you, and to be wacky and obstinate and uncaring about social or horticultural norms.

There is no Last Rose. There is always another.

The dramatic November Rose

Bonus! Songs featuring roses!

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Hearing loss simulation

Today I learned about this Flintstones video, which simulates the effects of hearing loss, and its perfect.

This isn’t precisely the way mine sounds, but it’s close. I’ve described it as being muffled in the way snow can muffle sounds before.

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Stardew conversation

“I wish I could take my horse on the minecart.”

“What?”

“You know, the mine carts! I want the horse to get to take a break.”

“The horse wouldn’t fit on the mine cart.”

“I think it would!”

“I think you need your horse privileges revoked.”

Which of us is 12 and which is 42? 😂

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Grief

I am missing my friend who passed in 2023 today. She was a support to me during my divorce, and I guess it’s that season again.

To old friends, absent lovers, and the Season of Mists.

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Aging dummy thicc

I’ve been mulling over the word “thick” or “thicc” lately. Like a lot of slang, I’m pretty sure it originated in Black English, and is generally seen as a compliment. But when I think about who it’s applied to, I think it’s generally just specific body types that are thicc (fat in an acceptable way), in the most common usage of the word.

As I’ve been getting older, most of my weight gain has been centered on my belly. Sometimes folks still ask if I’m expecting. It’s stopped hurting, but it’s always jarring.

But I think about that, about the fact that I have a thick waist/belly and no noticeable hips or butt and minimal (though finally, beautifully, extant) boobs; and I think of the phrase “unfashionably thick.”

But then I think more about that phrase. It’s the sort of thing you might see in a fantasy novel that has a female protagonist: where “unfashionably thick” is just code for “she’s conventionally attractive in our world, but not in her own.” And I think the word for my middle aged wine mom lib body is “thick, in the unfashionable way.”

But it is still mine; and I am grateful to have it.

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Unexpected joys

You know, there’s a lot of discourse right now about Facebook and how ugly everything is and the Dead Internet and all of that.

And I definitely feel the pull to leave all the social media tools and stick to nothing but this geocities upgrade I find myself on right now. But I still stay on Facebook, because I genuinely *like* keeping in touch with people from high school.

And then today, one of them sends me this in the mail.

The most beautiful flame-colored scarf.

This is why I don’t leave. The people in my life make me who I am. And I’ll be sending them Christmas cards long after Facebook is consigned to the dust-heap of history; but I’m grateful to the thing Facebook briefly was, that let us get back in touch with each other.