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Benjamin Zephaniah

Benjamin Zephaniah died today at the age of just 65 and it’s a real shame. I remember finding his books in the high school library as a teenager and just devouring them. His stark writing style just really stood out to me.

He also spoke at my university at least once and there’s photos out there of him with folks I know from there hanging out in Leicester, which is really nice to see.

My favourite of his books was Refugee Boy, about a really wonderful kid from Ethiopia who ends up a refugee in England and is taken in by a foster family. It’s a great novel and I should read it again.

Another withdrawal/relapse

I had (am having?) another mental health crisis and I know exactly why. I was on an antipsychotic drug, one I’m not sure I really needed, and I was casually told by the doctors that I could stop taking it soon as I ran out. So… oh my god, I went cold turkey on an antipsychotic and this could have been avoided so easily.

I’ve spent three days sobbing and I’m only just starting to come out of it, I think. I spent tonight watching Doctor Who and the Fallout trailer with Dave and I feel a bit better now. But the worst part has been all the hard and horrible thinking about what the future can possibly hold while I have this illness (not to mention all the other neuroatypicalities, which is a word I just invented, that I have.) I just feel a complete and utter mess right now. Who thinks it’s a good idea to tell a patient to stop taking an antipsychotic??

The Brianna Ghey trial

The trial of the teenagers accused of killing Brianna Ghey starts today and there are details all over Twitter. It’s horrific. I read some and I desperately wish I hadn’t. I want to know but I don’t want to know.

My only hope is that once the details do become publicly known, they will horrify enough people to actually spur them into action.

Hobbit Hole

The other day Blogspot sent me a message saying that I once had a blog with them, decades ago, and did I still want it. I looked and it was this:

The title “Hobbit Hole”, some nice shade of green, and some HTML. I wonder what I was planning to do with it.

An interesting use of language

This headline says that “dozens” of far-right “counter-protesters” were arrested at the London pro-Palestine march, but I feel like describing that number as “dozens” is really downplaying how bad the far-right violence was. This headline reads as though there was a small number of neo-nazis causing trouble in comparison to a large number of pro-Palestine marchers causing trouble, but according to The Standard, “Some 126 people were arrested throughout the day, with at least 92 of them being counter-protesters.” Think of “dozens of” and you think of 12 people, maybe a little more, but not 92. Of all the people arrested at the march, most of them were far-right agitators. (I know plenty of marchers were detained, but a detain is different to an arrest, so the point still stands I think.) If Sky News can put in the article that there were 82 arrests of the far-right at the time the post was published, why not put that in the actual headline?

“Show some respect”

Here’s the front page of The Sun today, covered in poppies. God, Britain really has ruined that beautiful flower.

“War heroes last night called for pro-Palestine marches on Remembrance weekend to be cancelled, demanding ‘show some respect.'” It’s wild. As if calling for a ceasefire of another war couldn’t be the highest possible respect you could show to people who lived through WW1.

(Also, all the actual heroes of that era, the ones the poppies are supposed to be in remembrance of, are dead. We don’t know what they would have thought, although I doubt it would be “continue to bomb innocent people.”)

Marvel’s Spider-Man 2

I’ve waited YEARS for this game! I played it all weekend, barely stopping to do much else if I’m honest. Didn’t get much sleep. Oops.

The game itself is rather glitchy unfortunately, I encountered a few rather frustrating problems. Including a graphical one where all the characters took on Mr Negative’s white glow, which was quite funny actually. And a few mission locations disappeared, and so on.

But none of that took away from the enjoyment of the story. I loved all these characters (except the ones I loved to hate.) But if you’ve read this blog enough you’ll know Harry was the main draw for me. I’ve written him so much that he half feels like my own character, you know? So here’s what I thought about his arc: