Is It Perfume from a Dress That Makes Me So Digress?

 

I love gumbo but it feels like every time I eat it is when I get a cold. That's not how allergies work though? soI'm sure it must be a coincidence.

Recuperating. I slept a lot today. Though not quite enough...

(we'll see how I feel tomorrow)

As from a Dream, Some Music Playing...

 It's pretty dry room all the time, and every day for a couple of years now I guessI've woken up with a dry sort of throat and worried oh no, sore throat, could this be Covid? And every time the answer has been, lol no it's just too darn dry in your bedroom.

I got a humidifier for my birthday! but haven't had the time yet to set it up.

Anyway so I woke up this morning feeling cruddy in the throat and it's gotten worse, and I'm all phlegmy and mucusy- not the symptoms of Covid! but still not that fun. Working outside in the cold, not the best time for that. I don't know if my condition is stable or worsening or bettering, I don't know if I'll be able to work tomorrow or whatever. Mask has been helpful, especially in going into town today to drop my desktop computer off.

I'm not sure if I have anything more to say about that...

Anyway the guy who composed the music for Twin Peaks died. I fell in love with him watching The Straight Story and thinking, what a killer soundtrack, getting some twin peaks vibes from this, and lo! Angelo that is, Angelo Badalamenti, was the, he did both scores anyway, and some other stuff.

ummmm

So I spent the afternoon doing laundry and cleaning up and making Mac and Cheese and reading Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats and frequently reaching out to catch drops of watery stuff coming suddenly out of my nose, like Ethan Hunt reaching out and catching his sweat at the last second in Mission Impossible 1996. I would have gone straight to bed after my post-work shower had I had any clean pajamas, so it's good in a sense that I had to do laundry because dinner needed to be made and cleaning up needed to be done. I flit between projects in a way that feels productive but also delirious, fueled by lotion and hydrating fluids, and non-Cats settings of Old Possum verse I invent in a haze. And blowing my nose on whatever I can find, tissues and toilet paper and handkerchiefs I'm going to be washing anyway and napkins from pockets emptied out to launder. And washing my hands afterward, and moisturizing them again after that. (Just reusing the disposable gloves is working, but your hands get sweaty inside the gloves and wet means cold and so you have to dry your hands out, which dries your, hands, out. Naturally.)

Well I'd wanted to go to bed early and now look at it, about the time I usually go to bed anyway (though actually unusually late for a Tuesday.) Still need to do, well, a lot of laundry, but I think we should wrap up the loads for today...

And see how I'm feeling in the morning of course.

twlve twlve twent twent twooo

Well I haven't done Wordle or any of those things in over a week (but that has given me time to check out those mobile gaming apps like I said yesterday; I wonder if I'd have time to Marvel Snap on any given day where I do the wordle?) Planning on taking my computer in tomorrow during lunch; the local computer place/repair place is one of those locations that happen to be open only during my work hours and only on weekdays to boot. So.

Thought I'd have more stuff to say before I wrote this, but already wrote more than I'd thought I had to say as I wrote it.

Top Sci-Fi Economic Developments of 2022 (Seriously)

Alright, I remembered one of the things I was thinking about that made me want to maybe do more than just one post this month! So 2022 (and especially these last few months in it) has been kind of a wild year for weird future sci-fi economy stuff that like, I don't think any author would have been able to extrapolate and see any of these coming. Not that I'm an expert in authors who are really good at seeing economic movements coming or anything? Nor do I have any formal schooling in economics, so if I sound like an idiot who doesn't know what he's talking about, well... But I find these things fascinating! and I hope that comes across.

Starting the year with the mainstreamification of NFTs, of course (I think that was this year? They died pretty quick at least, thank goodness) (generally) ugly little hypothetically unique artwork you can buy a link to (which hypothetically then also gives you copyright of the artwork itself, but there were a lot of NFTs being "minted" without the permission of the copyright holder of the art being linked to, and links to like strange intangible concepts and stuff.) That is all based on cryptocurrency stuff of course, massive ponzi scheme stuff but there's nothing new about that. The way the "smart contracts" are utilized to refer to art ownership as a way to get people interested in buying in to the MLM, that part is a little newer.

Speaking of copyright of art, yeah this year also saw mainstreamification of AI-generated art whose neural networks learned from copyrighted art, able to replicate artists' styles and thus potentially leading to loss of revenue in a very tangible way. That is also a weird economic thing!

But more recently! Marvel Snap, the line battle app whose gimmick is being able to up the ante at any point by doubling the points in play (the titular snap) is interesting from an economic standpoint, with the currency of the economy being points of course. Players play against each other but are also matched frequently against bots and that might be like, a guard against inflation or something? Like I said I don't know what economics is. Nor have I yet played Marvel Snap, though I am into mobile games from a ludological perspective so it's very on the table that I'm going to get into this for real in the quite near future.

Meanwhile on TikTok (and I've seen it extend a few tendrils onto YouTube as well) we have an entirely new economy start to form out of nothing! A fiat currency operating on the honor system, basically formalized Brownie Points, Dabloons are doubloons that you pretend to have, in your mind, and you can choose to buy imaginary things at pretend, like, video game potion shops sort of deal. And you do it for fun and not to not starve, because money can be fun! It used to be fun, remember when it was fun? And apparently theres big inflation going on or something, I don't know I'm not on TikTok, and the possibility of me getting onto TikTok is lower than... 

okay the ranking goes: probably going to start playing Marvel Snap, possibly going to use some kind of AI artbot, most likely not getting a TikTok, definitely never getting involved into crypto (unless "involved in" as a NoCoiner, somebody who is like a journalist on the scene and is an expert in it, so like technically involved, but sees crypto stuff as scammy or whatever; it's a dim possibility that I get into that kind of thing more formal-like.)

There we go! I just wrote a whole thing about stuff I don't know much about! This whole thing was a bad idea probably! Yeah I'm posting this anyway

Nativity Shows 2022

 Were the live nativity performances not so early on in the month I probably would not have agreed to be part of them again this year, but they were so I did. They've wiped me out each night we put them on, but now they're over for the season. It was a rainy miserable sort of evening, the wind dying down just in time for the weather to turn drizzly instead; the rain getting worse and worse throughout the night but never so bad we had to cancel a performance like I'd hoped. Probably wouldn't have agreed to be part of today's performances had I known we would actually go through with them, outside in this weather. Saturdays are the most popular for the performances, which help up even today. Audience members had umbrellas; we performers did not. Like I said I'm drained after these performances on a good day.

On a Besoin de(s?) Plus Gants Jetables (titling in French because I can't think of a better post name)

 Apparently the company that manufactured the disposable examination-style gloves that we use at work went under or something, and so they've stopped producing gloves even though the means of production still exist as far as I'm aware? Utterly fantastic. And I haven't been throwing away gloves after using them and washing them instead of throwing them away if they get dirty but they still get old and break, and even just avoiding that by limiting wear (by limiting wearing) the last pair I had, well they had holes already but one of them ripped all the way in two and everything. I've still got one (1) glove, while maintaining the fact that I've got twice that many hands.

All this is to say.

My hands are super dry again, having them be exposed to the elements like this. They'd been dry before, but then I got more judicious about wearing gloves which hasn't been as on the table for me lately. Bottom line: my hands' skin is chapping and cracking and it huuurts, and just regular lotion application won't cut it; we need gloves at work again, and ones from home designed for like gardening, they're useful in some of the instances in which I need gloves but not all.

Finished(ish_) the Lost Metal (Spoilers??)

See the title of this post. I finishedish The Lost Metal, Mistborn Era Two Book Four, yesterday. Listened to it on audiobook and I always start an audiobook over again a second time once I've listened to it once so as to, like, catch anything I may have spaced out about the first time, to make sure I really understand everything. I began it again this morning and am not finished with that yet, so I only say "finished-ish" instead of finished. So, like, I don't have real thoughts or anything yet.

But I did have one thought last night as I was drifting off to sleep. The book, the last of Mistborn Era 2, ends with several epilogues from the perspectives of different characters as they deal with the implications of the climax of the book, a lot of which are presumably going to lead us into the third era of Scadrial in the next Mistborn series. That's well and good. One thing that struck me though (and here's the only true spoiler of this post) there wasn't anything from the perspective of any of the people who'd been living underground, this City of Ember from City of Ember, Downunder from A Boy and His Dog, Vault from Fallout, situation that turned out to be a hoax? They learn the truth about their community, help with the thing at the place, and... and nothing, and we never hear from them again. Do they rejoin society or what, presumably, we don't know. Being in the head of one of them, especially in an epilogue weeks or months later (do they have months on Scadrial, being without a moon and all?) would really help at least get a sense of how they're coping with that; it doesn't even have to be a very long scene. Just some acknowledgement of the trauma these people went through would be nice.

But like I said maybe that is in there; my reading comprehension isn't that great until the second listen-through is finished.

If I Had a Nickel for Every Late '90s Action Movie whose Title has Four Syllables and Starts with the Letter A in which Owen Wilson's Character is Killed Off Unceremoniously...

 ...I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot but it's weird that it happened twice, right?

Short e-mail Story (about e-mail)

I'd been idly wondering how long ago I'd gotten my computer, for, no reason really (alright that's a lie, for like, warrantee reason, but I think running computer hot render for days definitely falls outside of purview of manufacturer defect) and I get settled in here at this laptop, sign back into my email at the tab I'd had that opened up at- and the email it had left off at is the "your order has been shipped" message for the desktop computer! And it was at the beginning of August of last year anyway, wouldn't have been that hard to check anyway, that's just serendipitous. (And the reason I needed to log into my email in the first place was to check if any orders had been shipped yet, for this year's Christmas this time of course!)

Brick(s)

 heeeyyy uhhh remember yesterday I said something about not overtaxing my computer? Turns out that I failed to do that, maybe posting that blog post did push it over the edge, and I now have a very expensive brick! Well actually I managed to get my computer turned back on successfully this morning but then I tried to open After Effects back up and it kept on asking me to sign into my Adobe account over and over and over (because subscription-based services that gateway things you have access to is terrible, and you never own anything you only rent it) so I decided to reboot the computer and hopefully make that problem go away... and for sure Adobe haven't asked me to sign into anything since then, but that's because I haven't managed to get the desktop back up again since, and that was... this morning?? I'm writing this on my MacBook Air right now, which was manufactured in mid 2009 (and so would thus be incapable of upgrading to the latest Apple patch even if it had the storage space for it) and most importantly has zero battery life and so isn't really much more transportable than my desktop computer, and sure the heck boots a lot slower. It still works though. I did manage to, like, get Blogger open on this computer, whereas I can't get anything to do anything on the other one. It's just, not good for much outside of, logging into my blogger account and shooting off a post.

New item for Christmas wish list?

Computer repair services

Meanwhile today I'd been going to watch Brick on Amazon Prime as part of this Rian Johnson thing, because it had totally been there till now, I double checked and everything earlier this month, only, it's not there anymore, outside of renting or buying (which, at least there's that, maybe I'll do that! (or piracy (but really that's more an option I reserve for things that aren't worth paying money for (which like yeah sure leads to my continued dependence on Adobe systems)))) but anyway it had been there as part of the normal package, and it just left without warning, I don't know. Curse you, subscription-based services.

elephantine rumba

 I guess I'm posting every day this month after only doing one post a month all year? I don't know, it may have started out coincidentally but now I feel obligated to post today (but making it a short one because my computer's doing some heavy rendering work right now; we're at the end of day two and it's about halfway finished.) Anyway, my computer is doing some pretty heavy rendering work right now (we're at the end of day two and it's not even halfway finished) so I think I'll make this a short one so as to not overtax with nonrendering work. The process speeds up near the end so maybe I'll have full faculty this time tomorrow; we'll see. 

Yeahhh son (volume three thoughts, w/e feel free to ignore this one)

I posted yesterday about looking forward to some upcoming sequels but not partaking in any of their advertising because sometimes it's fun to go into things blind, especially when you know you'll enjoy them anyway. The Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3 trailer dropped today, right about the date I was expecting it to- May release date, Holiday Special lead-in on Disney+, yup yup yup, early December sneak peak season feels just about right. I have no similar peccadillos against spoiling myself on any of this, and it looks like it's going to be, just fine?

Guardians peaked at Volume 2 for me, afterward their being the weakest part of the weakest Avenger joint, Infinity War. (Not sure if that sentence works grammatically, feels like I'm missing a clause or something in there...?, but nonetheless.) Their bits in Love and Thunder were the strongest part of that though?, and Holiday Special was, yeah it was alright, Kevin Bacon should've stayed on as a permanent member of the roster maybe. It feels like the team dynamic has been missing something, which thing potentially be Bacon? 

Yeah I'd been going to say something about Mantis, maybe being mis- or under- utilized or, I don't know what, but now there is also Nebula and Kraglin too! and a lack of Gomora after, those, shenanigans! and the dynamic hasn't had a chance to reassert its equilibrium, it feels like, though there's been plenty of in-universe time throughout which we've only seen little glimpses. Whole things passed in between the Avengers movies and individual characters from those got their own little flicks, which made the flow of continuity feel real and expansive into the sequels- this feels a lot more flaky than that, like the li'l cameos going on peeking into the status quo only serve to emphasize the vast gaps there. Iron Man's world felt lived in and real. The Guardians' world, betwixt 2 and 3, felt like a lesser Laurel and Hardy routine.

But there's a whole like 15 second straight chunk in the GotGv3 trailer that feels like the scene in Vol 2 where Peter is remembering the good times and building up his heart to make his arrow fly and there's a vast horizon as they're falling laughing through the sky and you understand more in those five seconds than you'd be able to from a film's worth of expository dialogue and if You Don't Love Me Now You Can Never Love Me Again And I Can STILLLLL HEAR YOU SAYYING YOU WOULD NEVERR BREAK THE CHAIN, and like I said there's more of that just casually in this trailer alone than the glimpse over the horizon that we caught in Vol 2, and it's just so insanely impressive to me. It feels like Volume 3 is going to be a strongman with chains around his biceps, and from those promising flexes found in this trailer he's bending the metal and will be fully able to, if he wants to, break the, um, chain oh okay so that's where the metaphor came from I actually thought I was being kind of clever there.

(On) Destined (Whale)-Dials

I happen to be in somewhat of a bind right now. I'm excited for, and yet avoiding as much detail as possible about, both Indiana Jones 5 and Knives Out 2. It's a painful contradiction. I told you back at the end of July, halfish a year ago I guess, how I'd even set one of my passwords as relating to Indiana Jones 5, which is definitely true though looking at that I can't for the life of me remember what account I could possibly be referring to with that. I know the new Knives Out is called Glass Onion, by which name I am absolutely delighted; I think I saw the Indiana Jones trailer today revealed as laying out the title thus: Indiana Jones and, something like, the Dial of Destiny. Whatever that could mean. I saw some half-idle speculation months ago that the plot would have something to do with time travel, so like, a sundial? Absolutely silly though (and I mean that with all love and charity in my heart), the way the filmmakers would just invent a new artifact like that when prior entrants in the franchise generally kept to like, real legends (though of course it could be referring to something real but outside of my knowledge; I am not professing to expertise on the subject.)

Dig, yo, who talks like that? Ishmael. Ishmael talks like that. Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, or, the Whale is wrecking my vocabulary patterns.

It is, in fact, his chapter on cetology that recalled to my mind the ostensible title of the forthcoming movie! 

When the sea is moderately calm, and slightly marked with spherical ripples, and this gnomon-like fin stands up and casts shadows upon the wrinkled surface, it may well be supposed that the watery circle surrounding it somewhat resembles a dial, with its style and wavy hour-lines graved on it.  On that Ahaz-dial the shadow often goes back.

 Whatever it is though, there are yet months to wait. Glass Onion is far nigh more present. Far nigh? Yeah that sounds like something a human would say.

Wishlist 2022

Paint the Roses

An Alice-in-Wonderland-themed cooperative puzzle game wherein players lay down topiary tiles and use colored communication cubes to puzzle out how to fulfill the whims of the Queen of Hearts and (hopefully) avoid decapitation. Probably spring for the Deluxe Edition which has the Escape the Castle expansion included? It also upgrades the components so it's not like it's saving money over just getting the base set and expansion together, but the point is, Escape the Castle adds replayability not really found in just the base game and you should never leave home without it. 

why did this turn into a mastercard thing all of a sudden

https://boardgamegeek.com/image/6375315/paint-roses

That Time You Killed Me

A two-player head-to-head that takes place over past, present, and future simultaneously; plant a seed in the past, have a bush in the present and a tree in the future. Try to use this mechanic to do fun murder and out-time-maneuver your opponent. This happens to be on sale at MiniatureMarket.com right now? I'm not sure if it's only for today or what. It's like part of a, this and every other PandaSaurus game that Miniature Market has in stock.

https://spacebiff.com/2022/03/30/that-time-you-killed-me/

The Essential Guide to Comic Book Lettering, by Nate Piekos

The guy what runs blambot.com finally compiles his decades of expertise into one volume, ranging from how to decide to do balloon placement to how to size lettering correctly to, how to do the big KASHOOOOOOM sound effects.

The Moons of Barsk

I snapped up the first book (Barsk: the Elephant's Graveyard) the moment it came out, in both hardcover and Kindle, and slurped that sucker up within a single day. And then, like, they came out with a sequel and I slept on it? I've got an audible account now...

Other Stuff

But really expensive so probably I can get it myself, but like. The Mission: Impossible boxed set. There's this board game coming out called Stationfall which is supposed to be great. A Switch OLED. I don't know what happened to my PS4 it just like disappeared one day.

November Update

I haven't posted in a bit, just shooting off a quick update to let you know how I've been and what I'm up to.

I've been busy! Big project! Maybe I'll have it completed by the deadline I'd set for myself! I do have my Halloween short story for this year maybe 3/4ths written; I haven't been able to work on it since, two Saturdays ago really; there was an internet outage during Halloween itself and then November hit and it's like, heck wrapping up this project, that's my NaNoWriMo this year.

I did manage to take time out of my day today to watch all of Zootopia+ though of course. 

Fun with Topology, Down in the Mystic Forest

("moon's haunted" voice):  rectangles arranged in brick pattern topologically isomorphic to hex grid.

what?

*screenshotting somerset art assets and getting onto photoshop to hack together a rough .png file* rectangles arranged in brick pattern topologically isomorphic to hex grid.

So I guess it never stopped bothering me that the roads/bridges mechanic in Somerset was a little too complicated and graphically confusing- in the playtesting group I was in in college we were always forgetting that there were certain ways that movement was limited. I always thought, maybe this would be better with squares instead of hexes? but then it wasn't complex enough, and there was too much blocked off to boot, with 1/4 of the edges untraversable bridgeless rather than 1/6.

Discovering that squares/rectangles tiled in an offset grid is topologically identical to tiled hexagons reminded me of this conundrum, and got me thinking again. If the squares were arranged in bricks, with one corner each cordoned off instead of one edge? Maybe not topologically indistinguishable from prior prototypes' regular hexagons with one side inaccessible (it's possible to have as much as 5/6 of the edgeage blocked off under this model, [edit: come to think of it it's possible to have 6/6 blocked off under the hexes]) but imho that makes it functionally better, providing hopefully the perfect balance of navigational affordances and meaningful need to circumnavigate/ bridgebuild. Maybe there's a way to do functionally the same thing with hexes, I don't know [edit: 1 full hex side, plus 1/2 a side? but that still allows 100% of a tile to be blocked off mathematically, as established in the earlier edit, whereas that's literally impossible with the square thing, so.] Certainly a lot easier to read the board this way with squares.

Also: triangles arranged in a similar offset grid, topologically identical to square regular tiling. Also topologically identical to hexagonal tiling, alongside the offset square thing discussed above? Well, a lot of things, as seen in the last link, but particular to speaking of non-edge-to-edge Euclidean tilings: hexagonal tiling is isomorphic to hexagonal-but-with-triangles-surrounding-them-this-time tiling. Wild.

Homestuck Made This World

It was Spring of 2009 (I was at the tail end of my Junior year in High School) and I read a lot of webcomics. I'm not altogether positive how I heard about it, but there was this webcomic Problem Sleuth that I learned about (probably through Ryan North's blog on qwantz.com) and binged. In it kingdoms are united and divided, the Black Tower is fought to the top of floor by floor, reality turns out to be an illusion. They truly were, MS Paint Adventures. (Only not actually done in MS Paint. But truly adventures.) It was the most epic undertaking, reading-wise, that I'd undertaken in my entire life till that point. Almost 50,000 words over 1,673 pages; I just did the math and that's, 10.75% of Rhythm of War? Which as a single volume is like 90, 95% the length of the entirety of The Lord of the Rings, including appendices. But Lord of the Rings isn't heavily illustrated, and Stormlight Archive is only illustrated a couple times every hundred pages; Problem Sleuth has at least one illustrated panel every page, many of them animated, which invites a slower pace as you reflect and, like, fondly regard creation.

So yeah like I said it was till that point the longest single work I had ever consumed in a jot- (looking up Harry Potter wordcounts, stayed up all night reading those on their releases, days at a time- 250k+ words, that's... more than 50k for sure) but like I said, only illustrated once a chapter, and in Harry Potter they don't have to stretch a power cable from one end of the universe to the other, growing and shrinking it in a complex sequence of maneuvers so that it can be the right size to plug the AC in, so there.

Anyway.

So after I read Problem Sleuth (I binged it just after it had wrapped up I think, if not a little before) a few months later it turned out that its author, Andrew Hussey, was starting up a new webcomic in a similar vein, Homestuck. I... it's, the spellcheck isn't recognizing Homestuck as a word, it corrected me on how to spell Hussey's name but it's redlining this one, strange. It's HOMESTUCK why wouldn't it recognize- oh okay it has to be allcaps I see. Nope, not doing that. See, I made it one or two days into it (HS) and lost interest. Stopped reading, as I liked to say, when John Egbert was still stuck at home.

Flash forward half a decade, and Homestuck had become huge while I wasn't looking I guess, and even people who weren't wired into that '00s webcomic circuit were reading it, and it was A Thing, maybe even A Thing And A Half, and I'd checked back in MSPA on occasion I guess and read the sidecomic Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff, but didn't know it existed in\ relation to Homestuck like it does, so I was very surprised to find that out when I did get around to reading Homestuck.

How I got around to reading that was this. It was Spring of 2016 (I was at the tail end of my Junior year in college) and, Zootopia fever was in the air and Pokémon GO fever was a few months away and stuff was happening politically that had the opportunity to go very very differently but didn't, and, the webcomic Homestuck was ongoing and HOMESTUCK was NOW, but not now for long-- for for exactly 7 years after Homestuck launched (4/13/09 - 4/13/16), it was coming to an end. Yes buddy, an end, and it was A Thing, maybe even A Thing and Three Quarters. The adventure had been on Act 6 of 7 for half of its run, and Act 7 would take place in the form of a gargantuan like 25 minute flash animation, and maybe there would be one or two epilogue pages but that would be it, forever. I read that friends on Tumblr were rereading it to get ready, and I read that friends on Facebook were hyped about it, and heck and gosh and gee, why do I have so many GNC friends what does that say about me, and I just looked back through my posts at the time and there were totally a few Homestuck cosplayers in the background of the reportage I did of Fandomonium! I, and it was In The Water. I do hate when a secret is kept from me, and this seemed like a terrible secret.

And so I began the undertaking...

It's the present day. I'm flipping through my At-A-Glance for 2016 right now, its pages rich with pressed movie tickets from my multiple viewings of Zootopia and Hail Caesar and 10 Cloverfield Lane, and there's only one official reference to reading MSPA in the section I daily keep of the things I watch and make and read and play. April 13th, fittingly; a day upon which I also apparently played Tzolk'in and Halo Reach and explored the last-updated-in-July-of-1999-and-kept-in-pristine-condition-since-then babyname website alfabette zoope. That's the only official reference, but you can catch glimpses of references here and there elsewhere if you keep your eyes peeled and know what you're looking for. A Morse code decryptor written down the margins of April 1. April 16, a couple references to a "JADE FLUTE." Nothing that would mean much at all if you weren't in the know, but telling enough in context.

There's a reference just under the sole instance of the words "MSPA" to "North of Reality," a microfiction blog that was one of the things advertised in the MSPA adbar at the time. It was the first Patreon I ever signed up for, on my tight college budget. A new exclusive print-only limited run short fiction sent in the mail every month. I do hate when a secret is kept from me.

Flashback to a few months ago. Not even a flashback, let me just, tell you about it. Dropped my phone, shattered its screen, got a new one but finally with an old one I could take to work with me and use as an MP3 player, I could do that and listen to audiobooks and podcasts and maybe a little music, like I'd always figured would be a good idea but never had the wherewithal for, though I'd tried it before with an even older phone. Thursday June 2nd 2022, the daily in/out/cycle section reads like this: 

a bunch of WRITING EXCUSES; TRENCH; THE BAD GUYS; I inadvisably start (so, 1st 45 min of) THE DARK KNIGHT because it's a good movie, even though I should really just go to bed

I'm soon listening to one or two other podcasts and make my way through an entire audiobook I'd downloaded to my drive back in 2018, and exhausting listening options rapidly which is great, but I learn about a podcast GAMES STUDIES STUDY BUDDIES which I'd somehow overlooked in my search for games studies podcasts till now (because my focus primarily lies in analysis of analogue games?) and make my way through that. Halo Reach is namedropped as "solving the Hamlet issue." It's great.

I make my way through the back catalogue of that with the alacrity of, like, I'm picturing the opening logos of BONANZA and the way the fire burns through that map, but fortunately for me GSSB isn't the only podcast on the Ranged Touch network. Michael and Cameron also host a podcast where they do serious literary analysis of Steven King novels (they're currently on Misery) and another podcast where they do the same thing to, Homestuck... It's called Homestuck Made This World, but that's not why I'm titling this post that.

So like, all this time I just assumed that everyone else, like me, got done reading Homestuck in April of 2016, and nobody ever thought of it again, but that's not true? There's still an active fanbase, not just of the weird and multitudinous ongoing spinoffs but of the original comic. It never even occurred to me that that might be the case.

So Homestuck Made This World. I rapidly made my way through the backlog of that. Michael was keeping up with the entire thing as it was coming out, Cameron is reading it for the first time for the podcast and getting a fresh take on it, and I...

I'm actually halfway between the two hosts. I told you half the story, but that was only half the story. I said I began the undertaking, up above, but if you assumed I finished it I... what's that thing Doc Scratch says, well anyway. I made it to the end of Act 5, halfway through the whole thing, and a little bit into Act 6 but not very far at all-- the same instinct reared up that I'd had when I first stopped reading, when it was coming out for the very first time; Act 6 just seemed like a remake of Act 1 which just seemed like a remake of Problem Sleuth. May have been the reason, or at least part of it? Because, like, if Homestuck were half shorter, I would probably have been able to get all the way through it by the drop of Act 7, but it wasn't, it was twice longer. I told you that in High School Problem Sleuth was the biggest thing I'd ever read? Acts 1-4 of Homestuck, put together, were already hundreds of pages longer than Problem Sleuth (a webcomic in which, I must remind you, the entirety of the universe is traversed several times over) and with a word count that is literally hundreds of thousands of words greater. Act 5 was longer still than those four acts put together. And...

Alright so at the time, it seemed to me (apparently misreading the events of the 13-minute long flash animation climax of Act 5) that the entire universe had been destroyed and all our beloved characters dead, the events of Act 6 taking place in a new universe with an entirely new cast that nobody ever talks about so must not care about very much. I don't know where I got that apprehension of things, but that was indeed my apprehension of things, yet scores of pages into Act 6, that it took place in a new reality created by the kids' Sburb session the same way that our universe was created by Sgrub of the Trolls'. 

And anyway, by the time I'd got to it, it was too late. Act 7 had already dropped. I'd failed in my quest.

I don't regret giving up there when I did. If I do have a regret about it, it's that I didn't get to Act 6 by the time Viz media bought the website making it corporate, and the URL changed breaking many links and obliterating the forums entirely, and Flash was discontinued so a lot of the interactive elements in the comic had to be dropped or altered in form. The experience reading Homestuck now is entirely different from reading it in 2016. As was always going to be the case.

So anyway, I'm caught up to the events of Homestuck that they discuss in Episode 7 part 1 of the podcast, and suppose I'm going to keep going. I mentioned North of Reality being my first Patreon, in my way old baby days of being a patron, and well now Ranged Touch is my latest. Mmhmm.

There's something about Homestuck that invites this kind of reflection on it, the circumstances under which you read it for the first or the whateverth time. Sorry if I rambled, forgive me for writing ALMOST TEN PERCENT OF THE SINGLE WORDIEST PAGE OF HOMESTUCK here. Act 6 intermission 3, 2 intermissions past where I'm at so far. There was a break of 32 days in between the panel that preceded it and that one, and I cracked this thing out in like, .2 percent of that time, so like, if this were 10 times longer it would only have taken me a day to write. Sick.

Alright well I've got work in the morning, so, y'know. Goodnight. 

Film Tier List: My Favorite Movies by my Favorite Directors

So today we're making tier lists of our favorite films, but I love films too much and needed to limit my tier list some, so decided to make my list of favorite directors instead, choose my favorite films of each of those, and ranked those in a tier list. So there are a lot of great flicks that aren't on this list because their directors are already represented elsewhere on this list (I really vacillated on my favorite Tarkovsky let-me-tell-you)! And there are a lot of great flicks that aren't on this list because like I either haven't seen enough of their directors' movies to really consider them favorite directors of mine though maybe I would if I've seen more of their stuff (Carl Th Dreyer, Martin Scorsese,) or they're great movies by directors whose outputs I generally consider overrated (apologies to Edgar Wright et al.) And it's tough. Like, some of my all time love-with-all-my-heart faves couldn't make it but whatchugonnado. 

In real life all of these movies would be S or A tier (perhaps breaking down along S-A being S's and B-C being A's) but this is like the, GOATs butting heads the way goats do. Rather not get this granular about rankings at all but hey it's fun and, at least in this instance, harmless.

Tried not to go down too deep a rabbit hole with animation directors! But there are like a lot of anime directors that I'm sweating bullets now realizing I forgot. Why'd I include Satoshi Kon, of whose movies I've only seen a couple, but not Masaaki Yuasa or Mamoru Hosoda, when I've seen just as much Yuasa as Kon and almost every Hosoda to boot? It's weird and arbitrary and also has to do a lot with what didn't make this list, like, have you seen the Magnetic Rose segment of Memories? All these directors are incredible but you'll go mad double-guessing your own tastes.

Pirate Game Reasons to be Excited for August

 Leder Games, the makers of Root and Oath, are coming out with a new game whose preorder opens on August 1st. It's called Ahoy and it looks great, and hopefully cheaper than either Root or Oath? But with all the fun artwork and spirited design and asymmetrical gameplay that Leder are known for. I've read the design diaries on their website and it's clear that they put their usual care and craft into every stage of the process, and like, that's swell. Still you'd better be cheap than Root or Oath, I friggin mean it.

AEG, the makers of Mystic Vale, came out with a pirate game last year called Dead Reckoning (nothing to do with the Mission Impossible movie coming out next year, it's a nautical term for a method of determining your position based on direction and speed.*) I saw it on Kickstarter but ultimately decided not to back it, hoping to instead pick it up in stores or something when it came out. Only it never came out in stores, and might've been a Kickstarter exclusive thing or something?, but it's coming back onto Kickstarter again on the 9th. This one's also got a lot of neat ideas in it, plus a solid-looking integration of AEG's same patented Card Crafting system that we saw in Mystic Vale.

Also like, I never got around to buying Stonemaier's revamp of Libertalia when it came out earlier this year? I thought I was tighter on money than I really was, and, oh well. I actually saw a copy of the original 2012 edition of the game in a Local Game Shop in Montana when we went there a few months back, and would totally have bought that in a heartbeat had I not known that Stonemaier was coming out with their own revisit. Now of course I'm thinking I wouldn't mind having both..., but oh well. If I'm looking into both others next month, I may as well make August the time to (swash)buckle down and get myself a copy of Libertalia: The Winds of Galecrest. Yo ho.

A couple of days (may 6th) after my last post (may 4th) a few things happened but I didn't post about them because I wanted my mom to see it (last post) and maybe know what the heck I'm talking about, like oh yeah I remember that movie it starred Bob Odenkirk or whatever. But when she saw me after reading the post she just brought up tips for not having stressful dreams?? So like hey anything you can remember at all would be appreciated. 

And the things that happened, anyway, were followups to previous things that happened. Really, the only reason they bear repeating is because of that. My hand cramped, and a bird flew somewhat close to my head?? That stuff is nothing, right. Outside of context.

But there are two posts, both coincidentally from Decembers past (one 2020 one 2019) that provide context.

my hand cramping- I made this post when my hand had cramped and it was in such a specific way that it felt like, oh, that must be electricity, I must be generating electricity with my hand.

https://dielikeadisneyvillain.blogspot.com/2019/12/shocky-powers-pt-i.html

I promised I'd have more, and that was, a quarter of a decade ago, two and a half years. Because it wasn't the last time my hand had cramped like that, even at time of writing that post. I promised I'd get to a part two. 

Eh, maybe later.

A bird flew by my head! Actually, this post, not context, though frequently I think, it should have had.

https://dielikeadisneyvillain.blogspot.com/2020/12/readshorts-blogpost-with-three-prologues.html

You see, this post with three prologues, the first prologue was the dream I had that morning, which actually doesn't have to do with anything, and even the day of posting it, I realized- no, that's not what the first prologue should have been. The other two provide context, and tie into something that happened. Dream, introduces you to Oscar I guess? Dunno.

Alright, prologue for real though. In elementary school, E.C. Best which would have been sixth grade then I think, at recess I'd ducked under a thing at the playground, and the moment I emerged happened to be the same moment a flock of birds had decided to swoop down close to the ground, and there's this rush of birds whooshing past me and cawing around me. Other times, as well, were birds flying in flocks near enough to me to reach out and touch. And so there's a sort of personal symbolism which has build up around such moments in my head, it's like those are checkpoints, in a video game or however you'd like to think of it, where progress has been saved and there's no going back. There was a flock of birds that flew around me as I went home for the day, Christmas Eve of 2020. Like being caught up in a narrative.

And yeah so a single bird flew kinda nearish to me, friday the first week of last month, two months ago now (this being the end of june.) Felt worth mentioning, in context of the other stuff.