I swear to God there isn’t a day of casually surfing Disney+ that doesn’t leave me absolutely floored by something.
It took about two minutes into the second episode of the fourth season of Kim Possible for me to be fully convinced that it was entirely about Laura Marano, since her symbolism was stuffed into every scene, both covertly and overly. It was just so blunt and obvious.
Shocking, and absolutely incredible. The first ep was about Kelli Berglund, and the second is about Laura Marano. It doesn’t take much to notice the pattern.
I wonder who the third episode will be about.
Where will Selena Gomez be? Olivia Holt? Sabrina Carpenter?
Stay tuned!
Speaking of Laura, I’m just… gobsmacked, I guess, about a lot of… things I’ve seen and realized about… all of this.
She’s not who she appears to be.
Well, I need to parse out at least some of this very confusing issue, so here goes.
Her public persona, which I do not buy for an iota of an instant, is that of a struggling, label-less independent artist. This… is not who she is. It’s an act. She’s I think an insider’s insider, and probably a Disney princess type of the old fashioned kind. IDK what she actually does during the day when she’s not out pretending to be down on her luck, but I would be curious to find out, that’s for sure.
She’s at minimum established Hollywood and established Disney, but she’s clearly much more than that. IDC what the viewcounts say on her youtube channel.
She was signed to Taylor Swift’s label at one point and had a monster hit with “Boombox”- and then the story goes that she was dropped soon after for some strange reason. I think the more realistic scenario is that she left voluntarily. Part of the act.
At one point I did a search on Tubi for “Vanessa Marano” and got something like ten movies, all featuring Laura’s sister in the starring role. Right… outsiders, both of them. LOL.
Well, this could go on for pages, so I’ll just stop here and mention her symbolism is all over the platform. I mean, not as much as mine is, but… it’s there, if you know where to look.
Personally I liken the Marano sisters to Lily Collins.
I still to this day believe that Lily is probably related to Joan and Jackie Collins and perhaps even May Collins, the silent film star that almost married Charlie Chaplin. I think the whole “daughter of Phil Collins” schtick of hers is a ruse to distract from her real legacy.
And, TBH, I don’t think it impossible that “Charlie Chaplin” might have been a Collins himself, although I won’t get into why I think that right now, lol. But suffice to say- I have my evidence.
I guess the points I’m making here are these: 1) These girls that I date are not who they appear to be, even to me; 2) These relationships are at least partially arranged relationships / marriages; and 3) I’m not 100% certain of who is doing the arranging, at least not yet.
Yeah, woah, heavy stuff here.
I’ll need to expound on all of this a lot more, I guess. Wow.
Verrrry close and… um, wow. Well I need to think a few moments b4 bed, so- here goes.
I just saw the last episode of season 3 of Kim Possible and, most interestingly, the first of season four, for the first time.
Ok, well, so… yeah. I got the Kelli Berglund stuff, you know? The foreshadowing. Well- this is something I’ve been meaning to talk about I guess for awhile now and I probably should, if just to parse through things for myself, but… yeah, wow. Immediate and kinda sudden. Wow.
There’s gonna be a real tonal shift between season three and four here. Maybe I shouldn’t watch these in the background while doing other stuff, lol.
Ok.
Perhaps I’ve been holding back too much lately. Perhaps it’s time to cut lose and just… write, and act, unrestrained.
Perhaps.
I’ve been holding myself back in some ways for sooooooo long now.
Hmmn.
They’re right, though. Ron Stoppable, journaling his notes in his mind in bed at 3:10 AM? I mean, they were an hour off, since it’s 2:10 in Orlando instead of 1:10 here in Illinois, but still… it’s impressive, regardless.
Yeah, I get it, tho. I’ll need to study this last season, probably with the sharpest of fine-toothed combs.
I need to know. I mean I just have to.
And I can, and I will.
It’s amazing, isn’t it? All the great secrets of the world seem to be laid bare here, on… Disney+, of all platforms, in all places.
Gawd I just need to know. Tell me tell me tell me!!!!
Oof.
Well- KP is an amazing, amazing series. Fun, funny, smart and, IDK, lovely, lol, it’s got it all, right? Surely one of the all time great cartoons. I’ve learned a lot by watching this show. A lot. Wayyyy more than I would have by watching almost anything else in the history of television.
That’s it, then. I’m determined, this time. This time, I will write, here. I’m a man on a mission. A mission to… somewhere, not sure where yet, but wherever it is that I’m going, I’m determined to get there in style.
Ergo- the blogging. The writing, the thinking. The mulling and figuring, and ultimately the creation of a full understanding of the world, and of my place in it.
I gotta know, damn it!
Well… that’s enough Kim Possible, for now.
Remind me to write about the sequel of Little Mermaid, and it’s mind-boggling truths. As far as I know, nobody has ever seriously looked at this movie, in a serious kind of way. Seriously!
And since I’m uniquely positioned to look at it’s fullness, I think I can bring a little more light into the world by talking about it.
Minnie’s Bow-Toons, too. Amazing, amazing stuff on Disney+ for those with eyes to see.
————————-
P.S. And I caught the Miraculous foreshadowing, too.
Uhm, wow, well, this’ll be a short one, but man, my uh, apparently continuing relationship with Mandy Moore sure has taken some… weird turns over the years.
Like- we went from that romantic relationship we had started back in my college years up to the Tangled stuff, and now I’m seeing her serenade me with her rendition of “Chugga-chugga, choo choo the Chugga-chugga choo choo train” on Sheriff Callie’s Wild West.
Wow.
Well, maybe some context would be useful here. Right now I’m sorting through some of the stuff in my drawers and I just needed something, you know, on the TV, so I picked Sheriff Callie’s Wild West, a Disney Jr. show about a precocious animated police cat who works as a sheriff in the wild west and what do you know- it stars Mandy Moore, of all people. So now I’m watching her dance around as a cat with a pink cowboy hat singing about “Choo-Choo trains” while I root through my old stuff.
Well… I mean, it’s not a bad show for the target demographic. I could see how kidlets might really like it. But the whole experience is kinda surreal.
I don’t think I’ll be going into the real origins of this character, at least for now, on account of me wanting to minimize the oddness of this. Besides, I have stuff to look through.
Well, I had a good Halloween this year, with a few caveats.
Felt I should blog about this since I just paid for another 3 years of hosting, lol.
Soooo, yeah, Halloween was fun / enlightening. I learned a lot, watched a ton of movies, and felt quite satisfied with the whole holiday.
The good parts, of which were many:
1) The movies. I watched a lot of them, mostly old-ish movies from the 80’s and 90’s, and in doing so I took many lengthy walks down memory lane. Some of them in fact I had missed the first time around so in those I learned new things about myself and my distant history, and, bizarrely, of my very recent history as well, which I guess shows how planned and organized this has all been, unbeknownst to me.
Example: In two of the movies I watched, I saw my recent (5 years or so) health problems referenced in regards to me, specifically. And these movies were 20 to 25 years old! I was… baffled. Confused. And disoriented.
I saw Urban Legend, a late 90’s slasher movie that used my freshman year in college as a reference point. Near the end, a pointed remark was made about injuries to my kidneys and my liver, both of which I was hospitalized for in recent years. Verrry specific, that one. Kind of… incredible, and frightening.
Reallllly creepy, which I guess goes along with the holiday, but still.
There was a lot of very personal stuff in the movies I saw. I Know What You Did Last Summer and it’s sequel were interesting explorations of my past relationship with Jen Hewitt. Wow, they were kinda mindblowing, lol.
Man, too much to talk about, there. But the movies themselves are critically underrated. Not by a lot, but they certainly were. The sequel was the better of the two. It was quite good, much better than I had been led to believe by the critics. I missed it the first time around because of the reviews. I wish I hadn’t.
Let’s see… I saw Aimee’s Beneath the Darkness, all 3 Urban Legend movies, Scream, The Craft, The Faculty, the two “Boogedy” movies on Disney+, the Disney vampire flick, Don’t Look Under the Bed, When a Stranger Calls, Piper Curda’s School Spirit, Casper, the 90’s The Adams Family, and some other flicks, which I’m kinda drawing a blank on now lol. And a bit earlier I saw Kelli Berglund’s Ghost in the Graveyard.
Oh yeah- and I also saw the third Crow movie- the one with Kirsten Dunst. I missed it the first time around, since it was a direct to DVD release. TBH I hadn’t even heard about it until a few years ago. It was good. The low budget didn’t give them much to work with but they did what they could with it. It was a fun watch.
Actually- now that I think about it, I think that the lower budgeted movies were the ones I liked the most out of the group. An interesting thought. Perhaps budgetary constraints forced creativity on the part of the filmmakers, or something. Or perhaps a smaller budget just means more creative control for the director, since the studio would likely be more concerned with higher profile projects. I don’t know. But it seemed to me that the direct to video or television releases that I saw were more personal and a bit more… impactful, I guess, then the glossier theatrical movies.
Oh, wait. I also saw the last two out of the four Halloweentown flicks. And Nightmare Before Christmas, again. And Frankenweenie the original.
I saw a lot of stuff, lol. Well, an in depth discussion of all this would take hours, so I think I’ll move on at this point.
2) Trick or Treating. This is always fun. I handled candy duties this year and it was interesting. I like to people watch in general I guess, but I did the usual analysis of things while doing so. My recent understandings of things made this kinda different. In particular it was odd seeing Trick or Treaters dressed up like Harry Potter. Imagine that- a kid dressed up like Harry Potter on Halloween, and the man who hands him candy is the actual Harry!
3) Music. As usual, I used Halloween as an excuse to goth out. I ran through a few playlists of goth this and that- some death rock, synthpop stuff, gothic rock, and darkwave. I even played some graver and gothabilly stuff. Gawd damn goff stuff can be just delicious. You can just kinda sink into it and get lost; it’s amazing.
I used to just adore this stuff before… ah… IDK, I guess before Selena Gomez and Co. expanded my palette. But it’s still there, always in the background.
Oh yeah, I saw that Olivia Holt and Kiki Shipka movie Totally Killer. So I guess this paragraph belongs up in section 1) somewhere, so please put it there, mentally.
Where was I? Oh yeah, ummmmm music.
Well, aside from the gawth stuff, this year I included in my rotation some more mainstream-ish songs, like some from the Rocky Horror soundtrack. And, believe it or not, even some from people like Elvira, whose music I was introduced to on the Sounds of the Seasons channel. Not really heard her stuff before but I was pleasantly surprised. I mean, it’s pop, but it’s listenable. Pretty good.
4) Life stuff. I like to use Halloween as a life barometer of sorts. So every year I take stock of how things are going, and I think they’re going pretty well in general this time ‘round.
I’d explain more but this post is getting a bit lengthy, and any further detail here would take things too far off-topic.
Now, on to the not so good if not downright bad stuff.
1) The candy. It… wasn’t good. I’m not sure how to account for this, but seriously. It sucked.
This year my dad went to Costco and purchased the same big bag of candy he always purchases, but this year, it was… different. The mixture in the bag, I mean. He was really disappointed. In the past, there’s been an even assortment of different kinds of candies, like M&M’s, Snickers bars, Twix bars, etc. in this bag. This year, there wasn’t. For some reason, three quarters of the bag was divided up between Yorks and Twixs, with the remaining 25% being a small mixture of everything else. There were two small bags of peanut M&M’s in the whole thing, and I think like 5-6 plain M&M’s, and like 5 Snickers bars. And aside them, a gigantic pile of Yorks. The weird inequality of the whole thing was glaring when it was all sorted out by product.
Not sure what was going on, but it looked like the manufacturer was stuffing the bags now with the least popular candies and not letting the consumer know of the change. Typical of a modern company.
The candy itself was… strange, too. My mom remarked that the candy bars seemed smaller than they used to be, like when I was a kid. IDK, but I don’t think it impossible. Some of the plain M&M’s bags were so empty I was shocked. One I opened myself had 5 M&M’s in it, total. Seriously- just 5. At first I thought maybe it was just a manufacturing one-off but there was another bag with only 6 in it. Wut? Even a 9 year old would feel ripped off by these things!
And the candy tasted… weird, too. IDK. After the holiday was over I ate some of the remaining candy myself and it didn’t taste right, like at all. It didn’t taste good. It was too artificial. And I know that I’m talking about Halloween candy here but still, this stuff tasted really artificial, and not in a good way. It didn’t taste how I remember it tasting back when I was a kid, that’s for sure. It wasn’t satisfying. It didn’t taste like a unique treat, it just kinda tasted odd.
Back in the 90’s candy tasted artificial too, but I remember it being… a measured kind of artificial. It tasted like something created to maximize enjoyment of taste. Like it was artificial, but it tasted good; on some level it was indeed satisfying. This stuff wasn’t. It tasted like candy-product. The M&M’s didn’t taste like M&M’s, they tasted like imitation Chinese knockoff M&M’s.
I though it might just be me but man, after eating the candy I got sick for a solid week! Hence the lateness of the post. That never happened back in the day.
IDK. I don’t follow these things, but I suspect that the ingredients for these products have been futzed with a LOT in the last 30 years. Things swapped out with cheaper things that are only close-ish to the original product. And perhaps my crack about the Chinese knockoff type product wasn’t off the mark, either. Maybe these things are manufactured differently, now, in different places. Yuck.
At any rate, they taste bad. It kinda sucks.
Ohhhh that’s right. Speaking of candy, I saw Fun Size too. And also Idle Hands. So this paragraph belongs up there with the other 1). So please put it there mentally, thanks.
2) The costumes. Not a huge gripe, but still, are costumes these days kinda bland to anyone else? It’s just… where’s the gruesome? Where’s the disgusting?
Looking at the kids this year I was struck by how, IDK, samey they all were. There were a lot of Spider-Mans. A lot of Marvel, I guess purchased as whole units by parents who didn’t know what else to do, probably at those Halloween shops that pop up annually every October.
Back in the day there were a lot more DIY costumes. I know that this is kind of an old-man-yells-at-cloud complaint but seriously tho, lol. Back in the 80’s and 90’s a lot of kids and parents made their own costumes and they came up with some very cool stuff.
One year I went as a diseased hunchback and I got some weird reactions I remember to this day, lol. I had this swollen irregular hump on my back and huge, bloody, oozing pus filled welts all over my hands and face.
My mom and I took great pains to make the welts and sores as realistic looking as possible. At the time she worked in an emergency room so she knew what real blood and skin infection looked like. So we made it seem “real”.
The reactions I got made all the work totally worth it. More than once I caught moms doing double takes, lol. I swear that on at least one occasion there was actual concern. The other kids loved it. The dads were in awe. “God damn kid, who beat the shit out of you?!?” LOL. Good times.
One year I went as “Spider-Man”. No, not that Spider-Man. I had a different one in mind. I went as a normal kid being overrun and eaten alive by a horde of bloodthirsty man eating spiders. I painted some fake blood on, glued a few dozen spiders of different kinds to my clothes and covered myself in webs. It was a ton of fun.
The thing is is that unfortunately I don’t see any stuff like that anymore. Literally, it’s all just… franchises. Corporate stuff. If I’m being honest, boring stuff. No imagination. Honestly I can’t think of one costume that didn’t seem like it didn’t just come off the rack at the mall.
So many good memories there, of past Halloweens. It really can be a great holiday.
Well… I guess that’s it for this year’s Halloween installment. It was fun writing this; I hope you had fun reading it.
To prep for the release of Laura Marano’s debut album and as a follow up to the previous post on this blog, I decided to watch, on Tubi, the Maranos’ (sisters Laura and Vanessa, and mom Ellen) movie Saving Zoë.
Well…
*Ahem* Ok. Wow. Um… This… is going to take some unpacking. Wuh. Wow. Yeah. Multiple posts, this time, for sure. Uhm, yup. Multiple posts.
*Ahem*
Hugely, huuuuuuuuugely personal movie. This one goes way above and beyond the norm in that aspect for sure. Christ, I’m not even sure of what I just saw, honestly. In some instances the movie seems to verge on the autobiographical. Some of the things said and implied by, uh, Echo (Laura), and Zoë (Vanessa) were kind of seriously blunt and shockingly on the nose. One line said by Echo/Laura to her sister Zoë/Vanessa that directly revealed a lot of regret about the sacrifices made to become famous was kinda… interesting. Also interesting that the protagonist Echo/Laura Marano made a snide, direct reference to Laura Marano’s Boombox music video when she talked to her therapist in the movie, who is played by Ken Jeong, who also co-starred with Laura in her Boombox video.
Seriously. I was like… Wut? Did I just hear her say what I thought she said? I actually had to rewind the movie a bit and yeah, Holy Shit, lol. In this instance she didn’t so much break the fourth wall as she sledgehammered it into oblivion, lol.
Obviously there are shedloads of issues at play here concerning me. I take it it’s not a coincidence that the major antagonist is a creepy webmaster who runs an underground website who sexually lusts after both sisters and is named “Tom”. And there’s the whole subplot of narcotics addiction, and… other stuff…
Yeah, we are talking maaaaaajor psychological issues being worked out, here. And I mean… I get it, I do, it’s just… yo. Wow. Holeeee fuck.
Well, just glancing at the IMDB page for this flick, it seems as if this is yet another in a long long line of movies/shows that I’ve talked about here that is underrated. I’m not sure if people really “get” what this movie is saying, and why, and to whom. I’m not… going to bother looking up the RT reviews. Do I need to, really?
I’m still not sure 100% that I understand it, myself. This might in fact take multiple viewings, and that’s a good sign.
Honestly, I’m not sure of how to make this “not complicated”. I was going to start by describing the movie in general, but the closest flick I could think of to this one was… Zoey (!!!!!) Deutch’s Before I Fall. Yes, the same Zoey Deutch that famously guest-starred in an episode of Vanessa Marano’s Switched at Birth, and who was also a Disney regular like Laura. Not Zoë, Zoey. But, back to Zoë.
Actually, no- let’s stay on Zoey for a moment, since I swear I got déjà vu at least 5 times while watching Saving Zoë, and each time, it was in reference to a Zoey Deutch movie, like the aforementioned Before I Fall.
At one point I actually paused Saving Zoë in disbelief because a character recited a line of dialogue verbatim from Zoey’s movie! And in similar circumstances! I mean… were the camera filters the same, too? They kinda looked like it, and… yeah, yikes, lol.
At any rate, in Saving, uh, Zoë, there is a girl, Carly, who, uhm, reminded me a lot, both in looks and part, of Halston Sage’s character in Before I Fall, and… yeah, I don’t know, this only adds to the fuckery.
Ellen Marano (mom) lent her voice to a few episodes of the original Magnum P.I., (including an episode called “Laura”. Wut?!?) and uh… Halston Sage lent her talents to an episode of the remake. Her costar in that episode? Ken Jeong.
Looking up “Laura” in IMDB, we find that it is the second highest rated episode of the show on IMDB and it has a plot that reads like a weird alternate dimension script for Saving Zoë, with the primary change being that of the character of Thomas, who goes from being the good guy (Thomas Magnum) to the bad guy (Tom).
Wut?
I know that Saving Zoë is supposedly based on a book, but… yeah, well. IMDB tells me “The Maranos had the rights for the movie for 10 years. They bought them when they were still very young from Alyson Noel, the author of the novel.” Yeah, I’ll bet.
Oof. Wut?
All of this is seriously making my head spin.
Uhm, I’ll be listening to Laura’s album for sure… and uh, other stuff.
You know- at some point I’ll need to talk about some of the… other other stuff, you know? The really controversial stuff, the stuff I’ve not been talking about for fear of rocking the boat, so to speak. But… not now. IDK.
I haven’t… talked about anything here in eons, lol. I figure I might stay with the running theme of TV stuff cause… why not, lol.
Honestly tho, it’s been so long I don’t remember much of what I used to put on here. I should probably change that.
But, anyhoo…
Tubi is awesome, seriously. They have a lot of good and interesting stuff and not a lot of ads, or at least, not a lot on the stuff I’ve been watching. It’s great.
I like the name, too. “Tubi”… I think it’s a Shakespeare reference. “Tubi, or not Tubi”. Kinda brilliant. Also doubles I think as a reference to those old style CRT televisions… and their gigantic, uhm, tubes. Yeah.
*Ahem*.
Well, yeah. Tubi is… good.
Wow, I can practically feel the gears grinding, here, lol. I really should blog more.
Well, I’ve been using Tubi to watch a lot of my girlfriends’ stuff, I guess to fill in the blanks on what they are doing, and, if I’m being honest, on what I’ve done myself, in my own life. I’ve lived quite a long time, and I guess that I’ve forgotten much in the past four decades.
Let’s start with last night. Last night, I saw Alice Upside Down, which is a kid’s movie starring a young Alyson Stoner. As with all of these types of movies, I liked it more than I think I was supposed to, lol. Yeah. And as is very usual with… all of this stuff, it’s all kinda… eerily… close to me and, uhm, yeah, IDK, hard to unpack. Well, ok, here goes.
I’ve always liked Alyson Stoner. I mean, I’m a fan, and I can say that unabashedly. I genuinely like her music, for example. I mean I actually have some mp3’s from her, I mean. And I knew who she was before the Super Bowl performance with Missy Elliot.
So, this was a treat, and of the kind that would have gone unnoticed by me in ages past, in the dark days before the era of streaming, so I decided to indulge. The movie itself was… good, objectively, for what it is; I mean, it’s a kid’s movie from 2007, so it’s very… “Hilary Duff- esque”, with a lot of Disney channel-ness and fantastical interludes. But it’s not entirely young- the aim here is of a year or two older than that of the average Disney channel obsessive, so the protagonist (the titular Alice, played by Alyson) dresses sometimes in a style that I might call “watered down Hot Topic”. 2007 to the core, then.
Alyson has a lot of charisma. She’s a very good actor, and had a lot of talent even at a young age, for sure. Her dad is played by Luke Perry, who also does well. (Requisite creepy aside, here – Alice’s dad is my age (!) give or take a year, and this is vaguely significant (!). This may not seem creepy now, but you wait, oh, you just just wait). Alyson’s rival is played by Bridgit Mendler, who acquits herself nicely in her bad girl role, interestingly. Her brother is played by Lucas Greebel who starred in the High School Musical movies and the Switched at Birth TV series with Vanessa Marano.
And… ahhhhh, yeah, ok, I juuuuust figured something out right now. Zoey Deutch, right? So THAT’S what she was doing… yup! Yup. I get it. Yup. Mmmmmn hmmmn. I mean, of course, I can’t believe I didn’t see it sooner! I just… wait. You know, never mind, that’s another essay, … or two. Yeah. Wow.
Umn, well, back to the review… uh, good movie-ish, thing… Oh fuck it, a formal review isn’t what we’re here for anyways, is it?
Ok, I need to organize my thoughts, such as they are, a bit.
The whole flick had a massively strong undercurrent of trying to advertise Bridgit Mendler as a girlfriend to yours truly, which… they didn’t need to do, lol, but I got a kick out of their over-the-top efforts, one amazingly funny (to me, nobody else) scene came when Alice tried to set up her my-age dad with her Bridgit Mendler lookalike teacher (remember- Bridgit is in school right now). Throughout the scene, an album from the band “Berlin” is placed within frame behind Alice. The name “Mendler” is of course German for “coat maker”, which, interestingly, ties in quite nicely with her single Hurricane.
Get it? Coat Maker- Hurricane? It’s a joke, kinda. But… yeah. The whole movie, and I mean, the whole fucking movie, was laced top to bottom with subtle asides that scream “HEY TOM, LOOK AT THIS CHICK! FUCK HER!”
Another obtuse scene had Bridgit’s character perform an audition for a school play replete with references to yours truly and- beside her, I kid you not- was a sign saying in bold letters “PRETTY LADY”, lol… and… other stuff, there’s too much to name, here. Too many things to list. The age thing here is also relevant- a line is said in the movie about Alice pushing pushing her dad to date Bridgit Mendler teacher stand-in, regardless of the 15 year age gap between the two of them. Mendler is of course about 15 years younger than I am.
Again, I had thought that I was the one who had pursued these girls. I suppose I was wrong.
Another very shocking (to me) scene came two thirds of the movie in when a Taylor Swift lookalike (!!!!!!!) entered the picture looking, sounding and acting like a carbon copy of teenage TayTay, and was introduced specifically as a potential/inevitable wife (!!!!!!!!!). I swear to fucking God I did a double take at that one.
This movie was released in 2007. That means it was in production during what… 2006? 2005? Taylor’s debut album came out in 2006! Christ! This scene is really obvious in it’s implications; there is no mistaking what it is saying. Again I’m just baffled; obviously I did not understand who it was that was initiating these relationships.
In the cases of both Taylor and Bridgit I thought I was being so devious and sneaky and… IDK, Machiavellian, by swooping in when they were so young and impressionable, from my perspective. But man… nope, lol. They both had me pegged and figured out lonnnnng before I had ever heard or laid eyes on either one of them. It’s kinda humbling, actually.
But, whatever. Regardless, the movie contains a ton of references to my own school career, including my time spent in high school working on the school creative magazine, Creations, which was no small part of my life, and a part I’ve not really discussed, here. Creations wasn’t just some random high school production- it was deemed more than once to be the best high school literary/creative magazine in the country, and it won a truckload of awards during my tenure with it. It’s pretty interesting stuff, actually. Maybe I’ll talk about it more, here, maybe not. But it was because of my time with Creations that I became such a stickler for, IDK, good creative writing.
Sometimes I do kinda wish that I could go back and talk with the teachers that created those masterpiece compendiums with us. I can’t, but… it would be nice. Hmmmn. Things to think about, I guess.
I still have the books. I’ll always keep them. Honestly, they’re really really good.
Wow, sooooo much to unpack, here. Jeebus.
IDK. I’ve been watching other movies, too.
I’ve seen a bunch of Kelli Berglund movies as well. She is also awesome, and they are also interesting, in a different way. She seems to have been heavily influenced by my past and present with Karate and TaeKwonDo, interestingly. I’m not entirely sure how this works, but… there it is.
She made a couple of… unrelated movies in Australia about two different Americans who excelled in two different sports, and who were both missing a parent, and who both wound up teaching a bunch of down-on-their-luck Aussies how to work together and be a better team and beat some “evil” athletes, and… hmmn. Peyton Roi List also made one of these.
I was kinda… confused by that. And made curious. That seems like kind of a specific genre, doesn’t it? Like… ex-Disney stars IRL who play as American athletes missing a parent who have obstacles in the states who move to Aussieland and coach Australians who need a fresh outlook to beat some evil rival athletes… kinda weirdly specific, lol.
I think I found the answer in the last couple of frames of Swimming For Gold, Peyton List’s movie. These movies are being subsidized by the Aussie government. They’re probably then being made by the same people. In Kelli’s case I noticed that even though ostensibly her characters were “different”, they somehow shared specific details in their pasts and, amusingly, wardrobe pieces.
But ok, in Kelli’s movies she teaches gymnastics in one movie and cheerleading in the other, but really, she’s teaching a mix of both and also Karate and TKD in both movies. It’s kinda… cool, but I mean, she’s channeling me so hard in these flicks, lol.
So in watching Kelli’s movies, Raising the Bar and Going for Gold (note: not Swimming for Gold, that’s Peyton’s movie, we’re talking about Going for Gold, here) I can see what I used to do and teach with others in what she does and it’s pretty cool. It’s… kinda awesome. It brings back a lot of memories.
IDK, a lot to think about. These movies are actually packed with stuff, things mostly directed at a very specific athletic audience.
Yeah. One interesting theme I’ve noticed buried deep in these flicks in general is the whole idea that you can’t really “leave” athletics, not after spending your youth doing them. And that’s something I’m going through right now, as a middle aged man.
IDK, you just… can’t. You can’t leave, can you? This is a big essay, but… yeah it’s the truth. I’ve been watching a lot of these young gymnastics- cheerleader movies lately- not just the few I’ve listed above, and a bunch of them make a point to say that it’s really tough to check out of gymnastics or cheer or dance after a decade and a half of them. I get what they’re saying, there.
In my case it was the martial arts but the principal was the same. You spend so many years of your formative time doing something and it’s difficult if not impossible to leave, at least entirely.
Well, I’m not complaining, mind you. It’s not a bad thing to have gymnastics or Karate or Wrestling or whatever as a part of who you are. But it does become something to manage, then.
Well… this essay is becoming a few, all kinda mushed together haphazardly. I should probably stop here before it gets even more unwieldly.
Ok, I think I need to blog more, really. Like, seriously, lol.
Yeah, I know, but I hold out hope that maybe if I point this out enough that somehow, someway, some of this… stuff… might change, somehow, for the better, at least at little bit.
I mean, it never does, but… one can hope.
I’ve given up on watching T.V. I mean, I just can’t take it. Have I said this before? I’m getting the feeling now that I have. I might have; I’m not sure. But it’s true regardless. Nothing’s changed, then.
A question: Why does everything on television have to suck? Is there some kind of law or something? Something I’m not aware of? Something not public, perhaps? And I mean everything. All channels, every show, every single fucking commercial, etc.
I have Amazon Prime available to me, and I’ve been streaming some nature docs every now and then. They are nice, but there are distressingly few of those on offer. The rest of Prime is filled up with utter shit. If .1% of the media service of Prime is nature docs, this means that 99.9% of it is… other stuff. The garbage, I’m assuming. I’m not going to bother watching 10 hours of a show to find out if it’s “good enough” to watch the rest. That’s idiotic.
Well… there’s always Map of Tiny Perfect Things. But that’s only one movie.
Other stuff… Mom has a subscription to Discovery+. I decided to check it out. I was pleasantly surprised when I found some nice nature documentaries, but then, to my utter horror, my surprise turned to revulsion when I discovered that they had commercials. And not just any commercials- they had the ugly, stupid ones that accompany mainstream television. I was utterly aghast. There I was, watching Blue Planet, when some nasty ad for something like Tide or whatever popped up, randomly. Quickly, I scrambled for the remote, desperate to mute the TV. A Google search told me that Discovery+ had begun inserting ads into some of it’s plans, and I guess that my parents’ plan was amongst those.
Yuck.
The ads on the offer during the nature shows are particularly grating because, I think, the rest of Discovery+ is schlock TV. Logging into the service, I didn’t see nature stuff advertised. Instead, I saw a banner for My 600 Pound Life.
And that’s basically what Discovery channel is, these days. It’s one of cable TV’s fortresses of garbage. So that’s what the subscription service offers, then: a lot of trash, with a few token other offerings to give the appearance of variety.
So, with a service that’s 99.9% trash, and .1% not, you get commercials that reflect that ratio. You get the worst of the worst. Commercials with the ugly people, or, rather, with the ugliest people. I couldn’t bear to finish the first ep of Blue Planet, but with mainstream commercials being what they are most of the people I saw in the ads were black and I think all were fat, which is probably not coincidental considering the banner for My 600 Pound Life I had just seen minutes before.
Gods, what a disgusting shithole television is.
If anything, it’s getting worse the more I write these, if that can even be believed.
Everything on television is ugly, and stupid. Everything. It’s baffling. There is truly nothing I can find that isn’t.
Every month I try. I flip through the channels and try to find something to watch that seems pleasant that isn’t forty years old or older and I always come up dry. Everything new is stupid or ridiculous.
It’s kind of… pointless, really. So I feel like I should give up, and I likely will.
I still have that Netflix gift card but man, I am really struggling to actually put it to use.
Which… is kinda sad in comparison to the other news this week, which is that I took advantage of the Steam Summer Sale to buy a bunch of stuff for my new laptop. I purchased the complete Grim Dawn collection, for example, and also… well, a bunch of other stuff; a lot of other stuff. A lot of amazing games were on sale for… very cheap- I mean we’re talking anywhere from fifty cents to three dollars. And Steam is wonderful when it comes to offering bundles from different devs and publishers: buy a franchise, and you can get further discounts, etc. I spent a couple hundred dollars but walked away with a huge collection of games that I will play for years.
Money well spent, for sure.
When I was thumbing through Amazon Prime the other day I was… stunned, honestly, at how… expensive everything was. It was baffling. A movie rental for one movie cost like six dollars. 6 bucks, for a 2 day rental! Wut?
I bought the “Game of the Year” Edition for the first Borderlands on Steam for 8 dollars. I suspect it will give me weeks or possibly months of casual use.
To purchase a movie on Prime it’s like 15 dollars at least. Wut? I checked and the new Little Mermaid thing from Disney is selling for 20. WUT?
Insane. Utterly insane. I also bought “The Handsome Edition” of Borderlands 2, the one with all 52 pieces of DLC, for like 12 bucks the other day. It will likely provide months of on again, off again fun.
For like 20 dollars here and there, I bought bundles from and drained all the inventory from multiple publishers and developers. I walked away from the sale with hundreds of quality games. I mean, some of these were good to great games from independent publishers that were discounted to twenty cents, thirty cents each.
Movies today are… really expensive, in comparison to what you get. Any place you look, in any format, anywhere. Rentals, purchasing, streaming, anything. They are expensive in money, time, or attention, or… anything. This is why I stick to kid’s movies, mostly, when I watch them, or my girlfriends’ movies.
Because then, there might be something personal, and that’s worth it.
But the rest of it?
Well… no.
The old media is really stuck, isn’t it?
Movies suck, they are always too big, too long to watch, too expensive to make and watch and stream, too… weird and complicated to understand, etc., and TV is just… a godforsaken shithole, lmao. There is literally nothing good about television as a medium, at all, anymore. Everything about it is terrible, lol.
It’s dying, too. You ask kids what they watch now, and they tell you Youtube, or twitch. They don’t tell you anything on TV. It’s not even streaming services. It’s twitch they watch. They sit and chill and watch an ordinary guy play Minecraft for 4 hours. And why wouldn’t they? I would rather watch that myself than anything on the cesspool that is TV, lol.
TV is just… Gods, it’s just so vile, isn’t it? I mean, it’s uncanny how every single thing on it is ugly. It’s like a reverse Midas touch, or something, where instead of it’s touch turning something to gold, it just turns it to shit.
lel.
Seriously, tho.
Another question, here. Why does every TV commercial that features a relationship show an interracial one? Seriously, I ask. It’s bizarre. Like… seriously. It’s confusing. I don’t get it, at all.
I think that the real problem that TV has, and broadly speaking movies have this problem as well, is that TV has an overwhelming lack of “normal people”, which explains the rise of youtube and twitch, naturally.
Everyone on TV is weird, somehow. Nobody is just… a normal person.
Scrolling through the TV channels what you see is a gallery of freaks, oddballs, and assorted “others”. And I know that this sounds cruel, but that is basically what you get. And watching movies, this is also the problem.
Nobody is “normal”.
It’s the usual problems. I mean, I can list them, we all know them, but here we go: too many tattoos, too much interracial stuff, too much weird and probably fake facial hair, too much bizarre… ways of talking, weirdo politics, weirdo sports shit (yes, this is a problem), muscles that are too big and cartoony looking, dumb drama and ridiculous theatrics, and… I don’t know, everything is awful, lol.
In my down time I’ve been curiously investigating some of the media related things I’ve talked about before on this blog that have irked me, like the ridiculous facial hair that we see on so many of those professional douchebags these days. I’ve realized that those beards are fake: they’re glued on. I mean in some cases you can actually see it. Like, there will be a huge bushy irritating big fake mustache on some guy, but if you look closely, you can see underneath it a small reedy looking thin stubble of a different color that is “growing” in a different direction.
And in many cases with these big meathead muscle guys, so too are the muscles fake: those are not actually muscles, those are implants. Well, that, or synthol or other injections. But I think most of the fake muscles are in fact implants.
And I think the abs come from liposuction, not exercise. And the ab muscles themselves there might be silicone, not real tissue.
I mean, this is a separate essay, but God almighty, the fakery involved in looking “hot” is unreal. It’s all so fake. For years, decades, I wanted to look “hot”, and that was part of the reason why I started exercising so much.
But gods, it’s allllllllll fake. It’s all just plastic surgery. There’s no “diet and exercise” there with these people (celebs). It’s lipo, implants, body contouring, hormone injections, steroids, silicone, and cgi (which is used more often than people think, I think).
Uhm, well, separate essay.
Other stuff…
Disney sucks, something like the last 9 of their movies bombed at the box office, and their new haunted mansion movie is going to bomb, too.
Christ, what on Earth are they doing?
I already dissected the disaster that is Lucasfilm on here, so I won’t do that again, but that race swapped abomination that they call The Little Mermaid really needs to be picked apart, here.
First, let’s get the obvious out of the way. Why did that movie bomb so hard? They miscast the lead, of course. Why oh why, in all of fuck, did they race swap the lead of The Little Mermaid? Oof.
Yeah. That… was a bad idea. A terrible, terrible idea.
I don’t… get these people. Seriously. What were they thinking?
Mermaid bombed horribly overseas, basically because of the casting.
Hollywood has a problem. It wants the Asian market more than anything, but as I’ve explained before on this blog, the Asian market is the market most resistant to race swapping. They are the people who like it the least, and are thus not going to take to the stuff being peddled by the studios.
This is… a stupid, stupid problem, made by the studios themselves, since they have some kind of hard on for race swapping red heads with blacks.
The thing is, the people who make this shit seem to have some unnatural and a-historical hatred for whites that other people do not share and do not want.
The diversity crowd does not seem to understand that white people are not bad; that they are good people fundamentally, that their history is a good, just and positive one, that they have brought good things to many people and that they made the world a far far better place with their presence and actions. Replacing them on film like this is ugly, stupid, and just… monstrous. It shows an absolutely tremendous arrogance and a fundamental lack of understanding of history.
Minorities in the US are arrogant, small minded and stupid regarding racial matters. They think only domestically. They do not see the “big picture”, and thus do not understand the tremendous good that whites, and especially white men, have brought to the people of the world.
Other countries do not have a chip on their shoulder regarding whites that minorities in the US seem to have. Universally, whites are regarded as having a history and culture worth valuing and honoring… except by the shitheads and cretins running the show in the West.
The morons that run Disney do not seem to understand that the Chinese do not give two fucks about any black domestic racial struggle yadda yadda about whatever blah blah. For the record, I blogged about this back in 2016, lol.
I don’t remember the context of this post, but I thought it amusing. IDK what this is even about anymore, lol, something with Will Smith, IDK, I guess, lol, but I think I made some interesting points:
This tide must be arrested if Hollywood is to survive over the long term. Jettison the Smiths. Just get rid of them, and make an effort, a real effort, to make inroads into the culture of the young WCWMs. It needs to happen!
Or not, and Hollywood can just sink into further irrelevancy with the most important demo in America. It’s up to them.
Secondly- Asians, in Asia. Black actors in general will never find appeal with them, and “black experience” movies do not appeal to them for obvious reasons. Why should rice farmers in Indonesia care about the “plight” of black slaves in 1800’s America? They shouldn’t, and they don’t, and they never will. Hollywood needs to stop with this B.S. if it wants to succeed in the global film marketplace.
In no way, with the world as it is now, should Hollywood be indulging in liberal schmaltz, not with the reality that competition is coming soon from China and other places. China is big enough that it can make it’s own film franchises to rival Hollywood’s- and they’re not going to cast black actors. And you know what? That’s what the global audience really wants. The danger here is real.
I think that if Hollywood gives in to the Smiths and the others, they’re going to lose ground and it’s going to be much faster than even their most pessimistic predictions will be.
The fact that Hollywood refuses to face up to reality is what is going to destroy it in the long run. The 90’s are gone. The liberal project has failed. It’s time to move on.
Interesting post. Perhaps people should have listened to me more back then.
And so Disney sinks into the mire, along with the rest of them.
I saw some on set pictures of the new Snow White movie, and… gods, what an ugly, ugly… ugh, yeah.
It looked bad.
As in like cheap, bad. It’s baffling.
We are told these movies cost like 300 million dollars, or something, and… I mean… how? Where does the money actually go, then?
Google “Snow White Set Pictures”. I’ll paste one of them below.
Does this look like a 250 million dollar production to you?
I mean, what the fuck am I seeing here?
My Junior High School drama teacher, Mr. Brian, would have been livid with anger if his students were to show up to a performance of Snow White looking like this. I mean, this looks cheap. Like CW cheap, and their stuff looks almost like bad cosplay at times.
This is not exaggeration. Google “Snow White Cosplay”. You will see better looking costumes than this Disney shit.
Seriously. 250 million dollars, for this? WHAT?!?!
Uncle Walt was adamant during his lifetime that nobody touch Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. No remakes, no sequels, no continuations, no novels, comic books, nothing, nada. He understood that Snow White was Disney’s foundation, and that to touch it was to risk everything, image-wise.
Snow White was sacred; it was the first ever full length animated film, and thus one of the most important and influential movies ever. Possibly the most important movie ever released. Maybe even the best. It’s a human cultural milestone, similar to the Mona Lisa, the David, the Taj Mahal, or the Sistine Chapel. I mean… you don’t touch those things. You just don’t.
I mean- imagine the world today if Snow White had never been made. No Disney. Maybe no full length animated movies… literally, like, at all. I mean… no Pixar, no Dreamworks, no Ufotable, no Madhouse. I mean, none of it.
And… yeah. Just… look at that picture, up there! What the fuck IS that?!?!
I do not think Walt would have been happy!
Well… I know. But I take this personally because I know that Ariel was me, originally. She was based on me, and my formerly bright red hair… the blazing hair I had in childhood. So it means something to me.
Back to the new Snow White… they’re no longer Dwarfs, even. Wut? I know this rant is getting long, but apparently Peter Dinklage said something jaw-droppingly dumb about “Dwarf” being offensive and Disney changed it to “magical creatures” or somesuch nonsense and that’s just… idiotic beyond belief.
“Dwarf” is not an offensive term. Literally nobody thinks this! Dinklage is an idiot.
Three quarters of the role playing games released in the last fifty years feature “dwarves” in some capacity, and usually in a major one.
Arguably the most popular video gaming franchise in the world, Warcraft, uses dwarves as their mascot!
Here’s the World of Warcraft entry on “Dwarves”. Note the sheer, overwhelming size of it:
For me it would take days to parse through and understand all of this!
Dinklage is a dumbass, and Disney here is in real danger of looking like a laughingstock. They’ve gone wayyyyy too far overboard with the “woke” shit, and in the worst possible ways.
And seriously, what is even the problem? Dwarves are awesome, right? Whenever I play a D&D based game I choose a Dwarf fighter, because those rule. I mean, Dwarves are cool, right? There’s a reason why they’re in so many fantasy games. So why is he complaining so fucking much?
Well, I’m kinda tired and blogged out, but there you go.
I think that the major takeaway from this post should probably be the racial stuff, at least in regards to the international market.
When it comes to the international market, I suspect the key to unlocking their wallets is whiteness, and lots of it. Redheads, blondes, European fantasy. There is a reason Barbie broke records and Little Mermaid bombed, and the racial angle is it. The international market loves loves loves them some white people.
Little Mermaid could have been the movie breaking those records. It could have wiped the floor with Endgame, but nah, gotta have the right politics, right?
Movies are primarily escapism, and to the masses of the world, there is no better escapism than beautiful European fantasy. There is a reason why Warcraft has been so popular worldwide for so many many years. Ditto for DOTA, and for LOL. And, hell, for Minecraft, and a bunch of other stuff. It’s all different kinds of European fantasy.
This “woke” stuff is purely American. It may do well here but I suspect it will continue to struggle if not fail completely overseas, likely forever.
Seriously, though. 9 bombs in a row. Then 10, with Snow White. The stock continues to dive. At what point are the share holders going to get angry? If they had just stuck to their traditional European centric formula, Disney would be swimming in god knows how many billions right now. One of media’s greatest missed opportunities.
I guess that the takeaway here is that I’m done searching, both for things in others and myself. I don’t need to experiment anymore, with anyone or anything. In regards to sexuality or even relationships in general I can just zero-in now on those very specific things and particular types of people that are most fulfilling for myself and safely ignore 99.99% of everything else.
And with that being the reality, nothing impresses me anymore, and TBH everything outside the very specific zone that works best for me no longer seems to even register. At best that stuff is casually ignored; at worst, it’s repulsive.
It’s kind of amazing, actually.
Life is so much simpler this way, and so much more fulfilling. It’s quite nice.
Random relationship stuff tonight… IDK, I need something new to talk about lol.
Well, I think I’ve reached peak internet. Porn just grosses me out completely these days.
I’m… really, really tired of porn, or frankly anything sexually explicit, at all. Even nudity, save for very rare exceptions, seems boring at best. I just… don’t like it. It looks horrible, or maybe sad. I don’t like it.
It’s finally happened, lol. After twenty five years of living my life online, I am truly sick of pornography, lol.
Is this a function of just getting older, or something else? Maybe I’ve just seen so much of it that I’m just… desensitized, or… I don’t know. But I’ve gotten to the point where I’m actively repulsed by it now.
Porn, I mean, or anything else. Sex scenes in movies, grossly sexual music, or like, any of that.
By accident I saw part of one of Lily-Rose Depp’s sex scenes in The Idol and I actually threw up in my mouth a bit. And no, I’m unfortunately not exaggerating. I actually tasted it. It had a chicken-y flavor, since I had chicken for dinner that night. It was horrible; truly nasty.
I’m over it. Long gone is any desire whatsoever to dredge up anything in my old “porn” folder. If I ever find it again I’ll probably delete it, or at least all of the big stuff in it, whatever that might be.
I’m officially “porned out”. I would die a happy man if I were to never again see two gross people bumping uglies. Honestly, even the thought of it is rather nauseating.
I saw, much to my unfortunate dismay, a “leaked” sex tape of TikTok personality Olivia Dunne. Ugh, gross. At one point I had considered a relationship with her but no thanks, not if that is what she’s going to be famous for. If you want to be a gross slut fine, but I will be looking elsewhere for love, thanks.
Instead of Dunne, I think I will be hanging out with the amazing Lily Brooks O’ Briant instead. She’s prettier and younger than Dunne and more talented as well. Her music is amazing, especially for her age. Or at least it’s music I can identify with. And she seems… IDK, my type. She seems like someone I could get along with over the long term. Or I guess, that’s how it seems now. We’ll have to see.
But Dunne… ick, no. She comes across like a dollar store Paris Hilton. Not really my type these days.
For what it’s worth, a fully clothed picture of Kathryn Newton or Kaitlyn Dever is more of a turn-on for me than… pretty much anything else I can think of, lol. IDK, perhaps that’s what love is. And maybe that is why porn is such a gross thing, to me. I have something better. Why would I settle for a sloppy, smelly substitute for love when I can have the real thing?
Love is physical yes, but also spiritual, and emotional. Porn is… watching someone else do a base physical act. It’s love, minus everything that makes love transcendent. If love is a famous diamond, porn is the gravel in your driveway.
Kind of an awkward analogy but I think it fits. Porn is common; it’s everywhere online and everywhere else today; everyone has seen it, and so it has no value. It’s worthless. Love… is rare. Most people, I think, do not ever get to really feel it, or even see it in others. Of the two, love is vastly, almost infinitely superior.
That having been said, someone famous for being in porn is beneath me. I choose not to hang out with those that have no value, or who seek to not cultivate value in others. If you want to roll in the mud with the swine, good for you.
But I have finer tastes.
I also saw a few random pictures that purport to be intimate shots of Ashley Benson and Cara Delevigne together, back when they were an item. Yuck, as well. Not interested. IDK what the deal is with this stuff or where it’s coming from, but it doesn’t seem… pleasant. Not my thing, whatever this is.
I suppose that there are others interested in these things. Maybe younger people, IDK. But I’m not, and I think it probable that I never will be, again.
IDK.
Other stuff…
Well… I have other things to write about here, concerning other relationship topics. I might talk about that stuff later on in the weekend.
But for what it’s worth, I can understand much better now about the old conservative position against pornography. It’s like… I could understand it before, but now I get it.
I will probably always be a libertarian type at heart, but yeah, I can see it, now.
Well, I’ve been playing more games, lately. It’s pretty fun, and useful.
Random stuff… I’ve been going through my Steam catalog and just… trying stuff, games I bought years ago but never got around to playing. For example- I’m trying the Anomaly series of tower defense games. Those are fun, I like tower defense. I’ve also been playing Warcraft III again, and… well, that’s a story in and of itself.
I think I know where Warcraft III came from, now. I’ve been tracing its roots back to me, and the stuff I’ve done and thought. I’m like 99% sure at this point that I inspired the character of Arthas, for example. I mean, just look at me, lol. Big guy, nordic, strong, and… good, and evil, etc. I channel both the powers of the light and dark, of life and death, in equal measure.
I think I might be Kerrigan, too. At least partially. I can see it. It’s a feeling. The hive mind, and all that. At any rate I think I pieced it all together. But… I won’t bore with the details.
And I need to keep some things personal. I mean, as much as someone like me can, lol.
But suffice it to say I understand the underlying bits and pieces of where this stuff came from, now. At least I think, lol.
Other stuff… I’ve been playing Heroes of Might and Magic III again. Man, that is a great game. I really appreciate its understated aesthetic. Warcraft tends to be very cartoony and “over the top”, and that isn’t bad- it fits the franchise well, but it’s overwhelming success as a franchise means that fantasy games have tried too much to copy its style, I think. Regardless HoMM3 is amazing.
I ran through the campaigns in college, and TBH I think on some level it did me good. Helped me to learn how to strategize, or something, IDK. Or maybe it was just a way to blow off steam, lol.
I think I have some saved games somewhere. I mean, from college, seriously. Twenty five years ago.
It’s not impossible for me to dig them out. I also installed the GOG version of Diablo/Hellfire, dug out my old saves, and installed them. One of them, a wizard character decked out in the game’s best stuff, was last used on this very day (July 18) twenty three years ago. So July 18, 2000. That’s when the save file was last modified. Amazing!
I remember playing Diablo I at nights, after my shifts at Office Depot. lol. What a world. It was a good way to wind down after a hard day at work. Wow. Twenty three years ago. Man, that’s a long time.
Looking back- would the person I was then be proud of the man I am now? Yeah, I think so.
For sure.
I guess that’s the test, really.
Other things- somehow, a game called Fight ‘N Rage ended up in my Steam library. No idea how this happened, lol. Tried it; it was fun, a stylish amalgamation of Final Fight, Streets of Rage, Denjin Makai II,64th Street: A Detective Story, and I think D.D. Crew. And probably some other stuff. But regardless of it’s origin, I played it once and got to the fifth level boss, whoever that is, and quit the game because I was tired of playing. IDK, I’ll try it again, someday.
I’ve also been playing iOS games. Most of that store is… bad, most games are deliberately broken or otherwise extremely sketchy. I’ve gone over this before, but I’ve downloaded and played simple puzzle games that drained my battery and caused my device to overheat. I think a lot of games and apps in that store secretly use peoples’ devices to mine… stuff, crypto, data, or other things. The iOS store is really toxic and dangerous.
There are a few games, though, that are not horrible or alarming. I play them while using my exercise bike. I crank the resistance up to max and just bike away, for hours at a time.
I have some old clothes that I need to lose a handful of pounds to fit into. It isn’t much, it can be done pretty easy. The bike + pilates + dumbbells can accomplish that, no problem. But still, I need to work at it. Once done, I’ll rethink the rest of my life, I think.
Other thoughts- the typical midwestern diet just… isn’t working for me. It’s too much food, just… too much food. It’s not bad food, but the sheer quantity of it can sometimes be a real problem. IDK, that’s kind of another post.
But… yeah. It’s too much, really. Sometimes I find myself taking the food I’m given and secretly disposing of it, somehow. I feel guilty but… it’s just too much, but I don’t want to refuse it, because that would be rude, so…
