Feeling Spoiled

My birthday and Christmas are kinda vaguely in-the-distance coming up, like two months from now is my birthday, and it's thus kinda vaguely time to start thinking about what I want. I love the two being so close together, meaning it's possible for the combining of gifts (I adore quality over quantity, as much as it may not seem it sometimes.) The camera a few years ago, that was the greatest, and I'm still getting much mileage out of that.

The real question is, since getting one huge gift over the two holidays would supplant any other huge gift (the camera was like the only thing I got Christmas of 2016,) what it is exactly that I want. My laptop 2.1 crashes at slight breezes, so Mom suggested a new one, but I've got my eye on a fisheye camera lens (this one) for my camera. (It's so beautiful I could cry.) 2.1 actually hasn't crashed in weeks, although the USB drives, indeed all input slots, remain finicky.

Guess it depends really on what sorts of laptops Mom has in mind; I'd meant to ask her about that. If there are any specific models for me to choose the lens over, because seriously I am gunning for that lens, then we would know exactly which laptops are worse than awesome lenses.

Anyone Remember This?

Anyone remember this?

https://dielikeadisneyvillain.blogspot.com/2017/09/anyone-remember-these.html

I'm adding one to the list; we've figured out a couple of them from that list already so good job there. #4 is Star Kid, which came out in 1997 and was released on video in 1998. And I discovered #5 today- it's You Wish, and it ran for one season back 1997-1998 on ABC's TGIF block. Knowing this, I'm guessing that the film I'm thinking of thus miiight be from 1997 or 1998, but of course there's no guarantee. 

I'm asking about it on the You Know That Show...? forums at TV Tropes as well, but I haven't gotten any nibbles yet. Maybe a family member would have more information.

Family film, live action. It’s about, or at least features, a girl, 12ish, whose father is a comic book artist. There’s a scene at a birthday(?) party, at a pool, and there’s a live 60s-esque band who’ve been hired to perform, singing lyrics along the following lines: “ooh, she’s daddy’s little girl” (trying to search these lyrics only turns up an unrelated song.) The other kids there are making fun of the girl because of something in the latest issue of her father’s comic book. It’s a vaguely TMNT-esque publication, with anthropomorphic animals as the characters, and the Master Splinter-type character has his adopted-daughter-type figure start wearing a training bra now that she’s growing up; all the girl’s friends recognize this as being a thinly veiled stand-in for the girl’s own blossoming into womanhood and tease her for this.

BICHOK

I would have gone to bed five hours ago already had I a post up; in many instances it's what keeps me awake. I bide my time hoping for an idea to come; sometimes it does but the cost is too great for the benefit. The benefit today of waiting till now is to realize, oh silly me, of course no ideas are going to start to flow with my hands off of the keyboard; it's only when I start writing generally in these circumstances that anything juicy occurs to me and I'm able to do a post.

NaNoWriMo in a couple of months like I said- if I'm doing Moone book 2, it's going to be discovery written rather than outlined, which has always kind of been the plan I guess. I do have a lot of ideas for it, but not really an idea of how they'll fit together. We'll see. There's going to be a lot of sex, like how gods reproduce is an important plot element and everything; I self-censored a lot of my more romantic elements out of the public draft of the first book, but if I do that here there simply won't be a book. So I don't know, it's pretty weird. That's the reason my POPULAR CULTURE machine of death Halloween story is posted as a page on the blog instead of in the body of a post, because of the saucier elements in that.

Musical Notation (Symbolic)

Heck, Inktober starts in two weeks, and NaNoWriMo after that. And my spooky short story the day before that of course. I'll think of something.

Today didn't really go as planned, but it was a good one nonetheless. A great one. I didn't think about killing myself today, and that like never happens (it's a disruptive thought pattern; I can't control it, but today was good enough that nothing was there to trigger it in the first place.) And I look and feel, really good right now.

(Not planning on killing myself but it's alright if you're freaking out and want to talk with me about it or whatever- it's something we don't talk about enough as a society, something we naturally shy away from. I'm just bringing it up here, really casually. Because that's the way the thoughts are in my head, hey you know what's a good idea suicide! That devil, sure is a wacky one...)

As long as I'm thinking about the subject of my own mortality, if I do die randomly sometime soon, I don't really have regrets? I talk about it a lot, how there are all these art projects I want to get done but which I never work up the motivation to start; I've got plans for them written out at least, as much of them as I've got figured out so far, so I figure that somebody else can execute those concepts if I'm unable to complete them in my lifetime. My failure to (be able to) execute plans on my own, that's just some part of God's plan for me for some reason; I feel satisfied that, as far as it's formed so far, my music is outside of me.

Maybe I'm unmotivated to do the things I want to, because they already exist, at least in concept form? The mystery continues...

Executive Malfunction

It wasn't a book, it was actually a symposium- trying to track down more information about it I'm hitting a brick wall; I don't even know what this McDougall guy's first name is. All I've got is what Wikipedia tells me. Which information, seems legit, but there could be honking gaps I don't know about, all that. All that I have is a list of what the problems are, with no specific strategies to combat any given deficit. Bleeehhh.

There are other resources online, of course; and I've already looked into in-print resources, at the district library back in Rexburg. The problem with all of these is, these are all from an educator's perspective, telling teachers how to combat executive functioning problems in students. I already know how to learn, plus I'm already graduated, plus, well the most important plus so you may as well call it a multiply by instead, I'm not a teacher I'm myself, I started this journey specifically because of that. I don't need to know how to combat learning difficulties in students, I need to know how to combat basic life skill difficulties in myself.

Thinking about the problem academically, though, just right now hands-off ivory tower armchair, I can think of a few rudimentary tools. Writing down what needs to be done, breaking it into smaller chunks, organizing those chunks into categories based on difficulty level and degree of importance/urgency (that's the good old, Eisenhower Matrix,) sorting those tasks into an order based on those categories, scheduling out those sorted tasks, going through the schedule and leaving some room for flexibility in case unexpected difficulties arrive. It sounds so easy in theory. In practice, for whatever reason, there's still this vast disconnect.

I thought in the beginning that completing a blogpost a day would imbue in me some executive function skillset and the ability to operate within deadlines and frameworks, and... well, it's given me those things, but only specifically within the context of, being able to complete a blogpost a day. I'm not sure if it's improved my writing skills or journalism skills any. I seem to have been good at that from the beginning.

So it seems that I yet lack (and may always be in want for) self-motivation. 

But I know that getting forced to do something compels me to do it. 

It's back to the SMART goals then, which I never really excelled at but which had good some good ideas still. I've read that telling people your goals may in some cases make you less likely to complete a task, for some stupid reason, (I don't even care enough to look that up,) but which IIRC would have something to do with it taking away your intrinsic motivation. There's this whole fascinating intrinsic-vs-extrinsic motivation debate, where if you offer a reward to someone to complete a task they'll complete the task specifically for that reward and thus find no intrinsic motivators to do so (take away their reward before they're finished, they won't finish the task because why bother.) But I don't really have intrinsic motivation for, well tasks certainly. Even things I want to get done and want to do, I won't do, because it's all just by myself and is all thus arbitrary.

Which means that telling people my goals would maybe actually work or something.

Not sure yet how to use this information (maybe in conjunction with blogging, which I'm actually already good at?), nor am I sure how to end this post today, but...

TRIPOD TOO HECK

Executive Dysfunction

Somebody force me to do something. Please. I don't understand "self-motivated" people at all. Is self motivation an affect of executive function? 

I'm still capable of, y'know, doing stuff. Like just now I went and researched executive functioning skillsets. Didn't, plan on it beforehand or anything. It was spontaneous. Obviously.

This McDougall guy who wrote a book (and like a legit one too not like one of those people who write natural herbal remedy books or whatever) divides executive function into two broad domains (his book focuses on executive function in the classroom but that's only inappropriate in the context of the specific illustrations he gives to demonstrate his categories, and not in the constructs making up executive function itself, dawg): self-regulatory skills and goal-oriented skills. Each of those is broken down into sub-categories:

Self-Regulatory

• perception
• modulation
• sustained attention
• flexibility
• working memory
• response inhibition
• emotional regulation

Goal-Oriented

• planning
• organization
• time management
• self-monitoring

Wikipedia is telling me that individuals with autism "commonly show impairment in three main areas of executive functioning," and lists those as flexibility, planning, and, fluency which-isn't-one-McDougall-has-but-that's-fine-because-my-fluency-is-great,-thank-you-very-much. (Best fluency I know! Many doctors agree.) My flexibility is also, like, the bomb, but we hit a wall when we come to planning. And, yeah, the entirety of the goal-oriented skillset. 

It's not only the goal-oriented ones, but it is mostly those ones. Out of the self-regulatory Pokémon, the two I want catching are, 1) depending on the task, sustained attention (probably any flagging focus would be due to, goal oriented stuff, like shifting from one mini-task to another and being unsure of the demands and thus fatiguing,) and 2) modulation. GOOD GLORY do I lack modulation. That's the, awareness of effort required to complete a task. Guess it's just a perfectionist streak or, well I actually talked about this just a few cycles ago. Something about taking up as much time as possible, polishing and polishing until the very very end? Though most of that polishing, based on my record of class assignments' work schedules, actually being fundamental like construction and not spitshine at all.

Which would have to do with, time management and stuff, solidly a goal-oriented skill. Don't think I have poor judgement in effort required to complete a task, actually, so much as, the amount of time required to complete it. So, yeah, I guess 100% of my executive function problems do stem from, the goal-oriented skills side of it; nice to know.

It's weird thinking that there are people out there who can just... manage their time. Just like, as a skill they've got, whether it's one that comes naturally to them or not. People out there who can plan. Or organize. Or self-monitor (actually that one I don't have that much of a problem with.) Feels like a prison, without it.

But, you know. Spontaneity can be a lifeskill too. 

HECKING LAV MIC

Well There's Your Problem. Solution, Though, Search Me...

I've figured it out, why everything seems to go so slowly with me. If I work on any task for greater than, some arbitrarily short period, it fills me with enough anxiety that I need to take a break, generally by switching to another task. The amount of time it takes to get into the swing of the new task is overtaken by the amount of time I can successfully give unmonitored undivided attention to said new task, and I need to quit before I even really begin.

So that's no good eh.

(Things would be a whole lot easier if I didn't cringe just thinking about the word) Brandbuilding

Okay but really, fiction is so much easier, because if I get a good story idea or anything, I'd understand pretty easily which if any of my ongoing projects it would fit the best into, as a visual beat or character motivation or whatever- and if not, I can still write that sucker down and save it for later. Even easier. 

But social media, I don't know- is there anything intrinsic, like, alright this would be a Facebook announcement, this would be an Instagram post, etc.? Thinking about it it maps pretty cleanly, visual things would be posted onto IG, announcements etc would go onto FB, and audio-visual stuff going onto YouTube... but that's on paper; it doesn't map nearly so cleanly in my head. 

Thinking about studying the way other people do it; some of my favorite content creators are on more than one platform, which though not surprising is still baffling how they'd be able to do that. Maybe it's exactly the things I described with the way things map above? Maybe it's just a bunch of cross-platform pollination? Maybe it's this whole horizon that I can't imagine but would comprehend intrinsically if only I saw it in motion? 

I don't know. Which is obviously why I'm gumming about it here. Doing anything else beyond that- well, that sounds suspiciously like work to me. This really does have the potential to be so easy and natural. I've got the ideas in place. It's only the implementation of the framework, now...

Social Media Means and Ends

Painted and posted a new Instagram post today; it's got one "like" which is quite nearly 100% of my followers, so I'd classify it as an unmitigated success. I've spent most of the evening braindumping all the ideas I've got for YouTube content out onto (virtual) paper; meanwhile I'm not sure how I feel about that as Lindsey Ellis's latest video is a deconstruction of YouTube as a, man I don't even know, but it was heady, and it had an interview with John Green in it. 

I don't think I want to be a "YouTuber" so much as I just see it as a means to an end, producing/ shooting/ editing content so that I'm comfortable with any given task associated therewith.

Same thing with Instagram, I suppose. An excuse to rip out the art ripened on my interior walls, instead of fretting over whether they could possibly be yet riper. As far as that goes, I should start thinking about launching that webcomic I've had brewing in me, though the problems with yet doing so are enough to base an entire post around them. I've got the worldbuilding in place, but not much story. For one. And for two, there are a heckuva lot of locations, within that worldbuilding, and cityscapes aren't my strongest subject artistically.

So anyway my Adobe payment went through yesterday, with my subscription back on track. It was... small. Very small. I'm just going to assume that it was intended to be that way, and not some sort of mixup.

Quem Canta Seus Males Espanta

Sing, the movie, its subtitle in Brazil is a Portuguese saying, Those Who Sing Scare Away Their Demons. Something like that. Which is just perfect, because the climax of the film is Meena abandoning her fears and opening herself up via her voice. Like Buster Moon says to her, "just sing."

Every day I wake up planning to have it be super productive or whatever, and every day I just sort of goof off all day, like, that's not productive. BUT SERIOUSLY THE NEW BUSAN MAP IN OVERWATCH I SWEAR I'VE SEEN IT BEFORE LIKE WAS IT IN THE BETA OR SOMETHING THIS IS DRIVING ME NUTS.

Maybe they just ripped off a map from BattleBorn; nobody would ever know. Though BattleBorn doesn't take place on Earth of course.

I hold back like, man that's gonna take forever, but if I give myself just the slightest push, whatever it is to do just takes, like, fifteen minutes. Or feels that short, getting all up In The Zone.

Blog/Ideas/Vids/Jot

At World's End, I've said before, is just a failed The Force Awakens. This could be a YouTube video essay or something. It should be a YouTube video essay or something. So never mind what I was about to say; I'mma talk about this instead.

So with the Adobe sub going forward (this could/should be a post on Pretzelize Me, Cap'n!, but whatever) though without any real excuse not to up till this time, I'mma gonna do it, I'mma gonna produce videos some more. Heck, I feel successful with only four subscribers. Heck.

I'm pretty good lately about jotting down ideas as they come to me, but that needs to improve when it comes to, video ideas coming to me. I'm not doing that as much as I should. They feel so fresh and obvious when they arrive, like a dream you just know you're going to remember so you never write it down and thus forget.

The Incredible Hulk feels like a failure as an MCU film because it's structured like a DCEU film. There's another one. I'm, writing these ideas down, at least.

Video essays (and, hey why am I writing this here, it deals with my Pretzel identity, it could go on Pretzelize Me, Cap'n!, but then again with all these ideas for videos I should do I'm writing down, I wrote down https://dielikeadisneyvillain.blogspot.com/2018/08/think-i-should-post-on-my-graphic.html and I still haven't done that;) what was I saying, something about video essays? It's a good fit for the platform, so those are popular, maybe too popular but whatever; that's like saying slide shows are too popular on that one platform dedicated to sharing slide shows.

Hats! Festival of hats! 

(That's not an idea for a video, that's me just writing something random so that this post doesn't get too boring, with me just talking about the same thing for paragraphs on end.)

A lot of the ideas for video essays are similar to themes in films I'm developing, though, and so there's this reluctance there because I don't want to be seen as a YouTuber who then started making movies. So???

Should I go through with that anyway? Leave your response in the comments; also be sure to like, subscribe, and share.

(nailed it)

What's the Deal with Dagon?

No incredible bouts of self-discovery today, sorry. I did have my mind eased though; I'll put the whole quote up when I can be bothered to (it's 10:00 at night, and while that's not usually that late, it's very late for the sabbath.) 

Artistic creation is a mode of worship, but I'm always off somewhere misinterpreting the second commandment. I still feel like I may be too occupied with media (and whether other people may be even more occupied is no concern of mine; "you do you" is correct in that regard at least) but there's no intrinsic theologically problematic issue in being artistic. 

https://www.lds.org/new-era/1974/08/q-and-a-questions-and-answers/are-certain-forms-of-creative-art-discouraged-in-the-church?lang=eng#

Answer to a Different Question

My mom asked kind of out of nowhere today why I don't seem to read as much as I used to; I used to read all the time. Digesting this, I did not answer at that time; I read a lot still, but not really books, books haven't been my go-to source for entertainment / edification for years. Which is weird, because it's a preferred method of reading, for me; I've got multiple tabs of research opened up on my laptop, dauntingly, which text I would breeze through were it printed out in a physical medium.

(Speaking of reading things online, I posted up a new post today on Pretzelize Me, Cap'n!, which you can read if you waaant, totally optional but there for you.)

I guess the answer is that I'm, out of all the things I love pursuing, building up more of a visual vocabulary, because my verbal vocabulary (I guess you just call that a literal vocabulary) is, trying to think of a really fancy way of saying "sufficient" but sufficient itself is, sufficiently, sufficient.

Alright, so maybe it's not perfect or anything, maybe I write a bunch anyway. (It should me noted that the question was queried to me as I was writing something down.) That's an option open for me, and sure I've got some verbal prowess, but that's not the only arena I enjoy and am good at, and so I'm gearing toward more visual arts over literary ones (there's always a literary element to anything anyway.) Not only do I have words engraving themselves and bursting out of my skull, I've also got blocking and editing and camera movements doing so.

Funny. The more I research film making, the more I realize how collaborative a medium it is.* There's an upside and a downside to this; others can fill in my gaps (and there are plenty of gaps to any vision of mine), but it's arbitrary for me to be the leader when my knack for leadership is merely above-average rather than exceptional**. Writing, while authors do have a similar massive framework of editors and publishing teams and market researchers and all behind them, is still much more a solitary pursuit, and an entire vision can be carried out executed entirely by one person.

Which sounds fine and dandy by me, but still... Blocking. Editing. Camera movements. Bursting. Out of. My skull. The original conception of "genius" was the spirit of inspiration that visited a person, and not the person him/herself, and yep that sounds about right.

Q & no A

Great news! My mom transferred me $35, so now I'm broke! She wondered why I didn't just tell her about the issue, and yeah that's a question isn't it. 

questions aren't they
The situation resolved itself, so why worry in the first place, was maybe my reason? 

(Am I really so adverse to put in any effort? Do I take nothing seriously?) 

Am I afraid of my parents? Do I not trust their judgement? Or do I trust their judgement too much, knowing they'd be right and thus I'm afraid of that? 

Or is my blogging about things the way that I do deal with issues?

Unfinished Issues

Some kind of stream of self-realization!!?? better than no self-realization I suppose. I'm not comfortable (I'm sure there are people out there who are? but I'm not so I just have to find a workaround?) with showing any WIPs, any works in progress; that goes on to include a lot, and intrude its way into many aspects of my life. 

Including, not start any works, lest someone come across them unfinished. Even alone, where nobody would be around, it takes a while to build up the strength to overcome the inertia to build anything. It's like the indefinite waiting aspect- I'm fine if I know exactly how long I need to wait, if looking forward to something, but just giving me an indefinite "the future" is torture to me since I don't know how large an undertaking it'd be alright for me to attempt, undergo and finish before anybody sees. 

And even if I do "finish" something there's always room for improvement, so... Maybe this goes toward explaining my procrastination in school? I know that if I get started early it's going to take exactly as much time as it will until I'm finished, finished meaning deadline, so why waste all that effort? I'm not going to be satisfied anyway so why not force satisfaction?

Maybe I don't hate graphic design; maybe I'm not even bad at it. I'm ashamed of 90% of my design work from school, possibly higher, but if I put in as many hours in as my teachers recommended... Man what the heck was I even doing, I didn't do anything in school. Even my anxiety attacks were lackluster.

And anyway, not starting on anything because I always lack the tools, so I always hold out on it. Tools meaning, tools, and/or skills as well. I could start on something at least.

Concomitance Trubbles

So in the continuing saga, checking how having negative money in the bank works, from the time I'm underwater I've got a 60-day grace period thing to add money, before I get in trouble! Yay! I probably won't make any money in that time period, but eh that gives me time.

So I guess every part of my worldview is concomitant with every other part of my world view? It makes it very cohesive, but on the downside I'm not very resilient at all because if any part of my experiences are challenged or invalidated, I have to rethink the. whole. thing. The whole thing. And part of my world view is always accepting the possibility that the other person may be right, so. yeah. So yeah.

SO YEAH!!!

Season 12 Discovery

I checked into my bank balance, and what's going on is actually quite simple- I simply have negative thirty dollars in my bank account. That makes sense.

In real news today, it doesn't feel like much happened because mostly I played video games and it's hard to feel productive doing that- but this was actually a moment of personal growth for me, or realizing something about myself, and so let me explain that.

There's a new season of competitive play upon us, Overwatch-wise, and while I never really go in for that I decided it wouldn't hurt, and started my first match on that. We were swept before our enemies; it was a rather easy victory for them.

Man, all I ever do is fail, but I'm not even good at that; you'd figure someone so used to failure would know how to handle it but no I do not.

Were the thoughts that went through my head. Before I realized, I'm not bad at failing; I do know how to handle it. It hits me bad and emotionally, but if it didn't do that then I wouldn't have much incentive to learn from my failures would I; I'm good at handling failures because they hit me so hard.

The important thing is going back in there! And so I did, and we won, and it was great, and my team has been losing pretty consistently since then; I've won but two games today, and am a total burden on my team. But I'm becoming less of such.

Little World & Big Stars

Looking out at the night sky because you have nothing better to do because you're locked out of the house and it's night and you're tired but have to stay awake to fight off any night mosquitoes which may come, gives you perspective. On how small the world is, and how small our dreams really are. But what else is there to follow, the world being so small, the way it is?

Grown-Up Business

So I don't really have any news today; the Patreon front seems interesting enough but I haven't looked into it at all to find out what the hex going on. I think my utter lack of concern is what led to the situation, but I'm utterly unconcerned by that as well.

As long as I'm on the subject though, somebody randomly flagged the Furry Experience patreon for, adult content, which is patently untrue?? So that's pretty weird there eh. It means that she's making her posts there public until the situation resolves, which means I can link you to the post where she talks about it so you can read more about it there if you want even if you're not a patron, but it also means that you have to certify that you're at least 18 if you do want to read the announcement. 

Jolly hilarious.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/adult-content-21167531?

Heh... heh heh...

😱 So, somehow that transaction went through... in its entirety... Just going to show that money works how I thought, even less than I thought. I think there's some kind of, buffer, especially with, automated payments? Like there's a, check one, and it goes through with a positive, and then a check two which would come back negative, and so then it would come in through someone else's overflow because the cash has got to come from somewhere and it certainly can't come from me...? Or maybe the next time I make money, if I'm ever actually making money ever again 'cause I don't know, it's been like a quarter of a year since I've been paid anything except lunch money, it's going to drain out of a hole in my bank account and go to the bank instead, for the money owed?? And hopefully that wouldn't pooch up my credit for the rest of my life and nvm of course it will?

I've got no idea the level of concerned I should be. There might technically be a breach in contract in there somewhere; that doesn't count as perjury, does it?

On the bright side, maybe now that I'm not suspending payment for two months in a row, I can skip payment to patreon for a pay period again.