Sunday Sampler: Cleared Skies Edition

 Sunday Samplers are a “lightning round” of different subjects, none of which really warrant a full post, that have popped into my head over the course of the past week. They may or may not be regular weekly posts.

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So… apparently Hank Green tried to explain how knitting is only just now apparently relevant to STEM fields, and in true Green Brother fashion, he did it in the most condescending & casually insulting way possible. Deborah Knits has a good overview and actual scientist Kristine Vike has an even better takedown here.

Now, keep in mind, I am biased in a couple of ways. I am biased in that I am a femme-trending knitter & crocheter, and I am biased in that I think both Green Brothers are smug assholes unworthy of their public adoration. So Hank reducing a literally ancient art to “silly ladies using artsy trial & error that we can now apply REAL worth to as a scientific or mathematical exercise” isn’t surprising or upsetting to me at all. If he lived a hundred or so years ago, he’d be one of the dudes stealing credit for Mary Anning’s fossil findings and acting like he was doing the little lady a favor.

And the video gets into some of the things that made me love yarnwork. It’s a great way to keep myself focused when I’m doing things like meetings or trainings, since it gives me something to do with my hands and not to start nodding off from sheer boredom (it’s a major reason why I really don’t like doing in-person training anymore & prefer remote). And as much as I hate the whole “mindfulness” scene, there is a relaxing & meditative quality to both knitting & crochet that has been particularly helpful for me. That’s all on top of the fact that you’re making something practical or useful, too. There’s an interesting history of people using knitting as a way to send coded messages, since the two main stitches convert to Morse code dots & dashes quite easily, to say nothing of parallels to binary coding language. And if you’ve never experienced the… outcome of making a garment without swatching for gauge first, you’ll understand just how important math & measurement is to yarnwork.

However, I do personally find the whole “knitting is science and thus now Valid” thing rather… exhausting. Yes, there’s as much discipline & calculation to it as there is creativity, but removing the role of creativity from knitting feels like an insult to the artistry of so many designers. It feels part & parcel of the social tendency to downplay the “worthiness” of creative work, and if you wanna see where that leads, well, just look at the sheer volume of AI slop online. Also, this is only afforded to knitting out of all yarn crafts; crochet is still seen as “lesser” even though it’s just as complex & calculation-based as knitting. Never sure where that attitude came from, especially since it took me literally decades to finally “get” crochet compared to a couple years for knitting, and it’s always bothered me.

I know that I’m not in step with a lot of the knitting scene online - for starters, I like using colors when I make things, instead of the popular endless sea of beige. But I’m 100% on the same page with people who get annoyed at dudes like Hank Green who openly sneered at yarnwork and its rich history until he could find some way to apply it to HIS supposed field to give it “value”. Maybe he & his brother can do another “I’m totally not bothered people aren’t worshipping me, guys, don’t put it in the papers that I got mad” dance vid on TikTok. That or he’ll post a “correction” video that makes John’s idea of “ace rep” look considered & thorough.

(LATER-IN-THE-WEEK EDIT: Welp, the “response” came out, and it consisted of finding some random lady on his staff to try to explain it in the video description, failing to address the condescension & casual sexism that was at the heart of the complaints and paint the outrage over “we got the terms wrong”. At this point, the only people defending this are Green brother simps who would happily throw money at their scammy “faux-therapy tamagotchi” app, which I’ve discovered is another of Hank’s bullshit cash flows, and people who liked that he challenged RFKJ’s stupidity & ignore literally everything else. At the end of the day, this is on par with John’s “ace rep” footnote and exactly the kind of arrogance I’d expect from either of them, complete with idiotic fans who think Hank will pat their heads for defending him. So yeah… they can go fuck themselves and so can their fans.)

(SATURDAY EDIT: Apparently this has spread to Facebook, Reddit, etc, and you can tell cuz the Sexism Defense Squad is out in their full glory. Apparently, there was no sexism in the video, and actually WE'RE the sexists cuz some men knit too, and it doesn't matter cuz physics is more important. Not pictured - too many emojis, AI-generated PFPs, and every other post they've made being in another language. The only social media place not talking about Hank's fuckup is Bluesky, cuz of course not; their "knitting" feeds are 90% Hey Arnold fanfic stuff for some unknown reason. These guys are equally as annoying as the fangirls, or the pick-mes like WOOLNEEDLESHANDS & her absolute refusal to even acknowledge the obvious sexism in play, and it’s just reminding me that absolutely nothing of value will ever be attached to the Green brothers or anyone who capes for them.)

Anyway, time to keep practicing until I can make my dream project, the below sweater but in the High Energy gear color scheme. I’m not a Zillennial or Zoomer, and I’m not on Insta, so I still like to make stuff involving this wild concept called “color”.

Look, you can even make Koko’s parrot! Just gotta figure out where to work in the checkerboard…

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Time to celebrate one of the rarest events in the world: me finishing a knitting or crochet project.

I decided to make a granny triangle tree skirt for my parents, and to my shock, unlike the bunting, I actually got it done well before the decorating season for which it was made. It needs some steam blocking but is otherwise finished.

A look at the folded skirt (Paintbox Chunky yarn)

Detail of the border (Yarn from Joanns, RIP)

The wooden buttons I used were ones my grandmother salvaged from 

one of my grandfather’s cardigans.

Now, back to working on my monthly subscription box project, which had been delayed for 4-5 months cuz the company’s site update managed to bork everything on their end.

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This week’s video recommendation might be hitting a few days after the event it’s referencing, but it’s the most appropriate that I can choose.

ABSTRACT is one of those channels that embodies “quality over quantity”. Every single one of her 10 videos is excellent, covering tragedies with careful research & genuine empathy. This is no different, reminding us that the handful of people who sacrificed themselves to save others were just… people. They weren’t trained for this; they just saw that if they didn’t do something, the end result would be much worse than just a crash, so they figured out a plan & did what they had to do. 

Other channels I’ve watched emphasize this human role and its toll; one that looks at the histories behind seemingly mundane photographs keeps reminding people that pretty much every example he’s found of someone who died that day was just an everyday person, who had done everyday things. They were just people working on a weekday in an office job. Even in the years after, the toll kept rising, thanks to first responders & nearby residents/workers being adversely affected by the miasma. I still think about the father of one old college friend, who worked for a telecom company & spent weeks at a time at their HQ near the site to get phone lines up again, and wonder if he’s still alive, since so many in similar situations aren’t. 

Maybe it’s because so much of my online circle has been infected by Twitch streamer brain worms in the past couple of years thanks to H*san & His Amazing(ly Awful) Friends, but sadly, this is the only place that I feel safe recommending anything to commemorate 9/11. They’ve decided that it’s a dark joke at best, a karmic hit that they want to see repeated at worst, and they’ll happily say as much or try to paint comments from their favorite streamer as somehow not being exactly what he said. They were already showing themselves to be prone to what’s been dubbed ZIP code based empathy, and I know that they’ll be loudly & proudly awful about today. For all that they talk about seeing others as people as being important, they tend to forget that when they’re prompted to do it by some talking head. It’s a smug casual cruelty that insists it’s not, and I don’t feel like dealing with it.

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Hopefully this week will be the last week that I complain about Bluesky, cuz I've decided that I'm done there. 

I get zero traffic from there, not even people sharing the links, and today's “let's champion the honor of an arrogant hack who said that the Holocaust wasn't as bad as Gaza now & views bi/pan/ace people as a threat to her queerness cuz DC decided to fire her & pull a book she never should have been given” wave has been the absolute worst. I knew Thursday was gonna be ugly there, but everyone worked together to reach a new low. I guess I'm just too neurotypical for that place (that or diagnosed by actual people & not Dr Buzzfeed). 

I deleted the app & locked responses, and unless it's a case like the autistic dude who sent me death threats over Lost (he tried to pick a fight when I said that the finale was “divisive”), I highly doubt I'll be seeing anyone from there. I know that the stats weren't the greatest, but even then, I knew y'all weren't visiting from there.

As I'm leaving, their way of breaking up the constant politically motivated shrieking is to post… nostalgic Tumblr posts. Most of which are just more political shrieking and/or “yeah, that totally happened” stories. I felt like posting the one that sums up Tumblr to me - TERFs straight up admitting that there’s an aphobe-to-TERF pipeline - but they'd probably agree with the aphobia. I matured past that point in life, so it's not for me. It’s for people who CAN'T do that or will refuse to if they absolutely had to, and I have truly run out of patience for 30somethings that still act like 10th graders.

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Lightning-squared round! Cuz the cats will only tolerate my ranting so much.

• RIP, Haru Urara. May your heavenly fields have the sweetest ryegrass.

• Oh shit, oh fuck, now I’m thinking of how to make a small-square crochet blanket in the checks & colors of the High Energy gear… actually have a pattern that would work too…

• Animation is sincerely one of my favorite mediums of art, but damn if the animation fandom (and a generation of creators that came up through it into the field) hasn’t soured me on engaging with it anymore. Especially the indie scene, cuz it seems like the stuff that I do like (Punch Punch Forever & Wastelandia) gets ignored or attacked, while the stuff that gets a following winds up getting a fanbase that defends the weird fetish bootleg accounts on YT stealing the characters from them. Can’t wait for that to happen with Dana’s edgy tantrum show…

• When you see someone sharing a post shocked about a tasteless 9/11 “tribute” cheerleading routine, but you know that they’ve become such a complete H*sanoid that they’re probably sharing cuz they have the same disrespect for that day’s dead as their favorite streamer & his orbit does… -___- 

• Reject emoji modernity, return to emoticon tradition.

• Why the hell is Bluesky’s crochet feed full of accounts making the same joke about the lady in Australia who poisoned her in-laws with killer mushrooms? That’s more baffling than the baseball posts, cuz at least those are about a guy named “Crochet”.

• Saw an ad for Taco Bell from the early 2000s, with tacos costing a mere 59¢ each. I now understand my grandparents’ sticker shock whenever they’d go shopping.

• There’s a lot that I hate about modern fandom, but their tendency to basically harass people into coming out will always be the worst. People have a right to privacy, even when they’re “famous” in some way, and not every person wants to be an activist for their identity like y’all seem to demand. Also, as we’ve seen with an entire subreddit, sometimes these fans get it extremely obviously WRONG.

• Man, I REALLY hope Punk didn't actually hurt his back on that misjudged rope flip… I can’t do this again, especially now that he & AJ are back in power couple form.

• Randomly thought back to one of the more disappointing things I ever backed on Kickstarter. It sold itself as “girl heroes that are magical-girl-adjacent fight an alien invasion”, but in execution, it felt more like the dismal paranoid sci-fi shows my mom loves (stuff like Falling Skies or the bad recent V remake) where very very occasionally a character would use her powers to do something mundane. Given that the 2nd volume barely made funding & the 3rd failed entirely, I don’t think I was the only person who was disappointed with the end product versus the pitch.

• Sucks that we just gotta accept that, at any moment, a YouTube channel you like will take a BetterHelp sponsorship despite the FTC report being the third search result, under the site itself and a SCATHING review of their services. The novelty land title thing got more pushback than this…

• Horse daughter game update: Quit picking on Special Week’s hearty appetite, game! The phrase “hungry as a horse” exists for a reason! 

• Time for the annual seemingly impossible “Comics sites talk about mental health portrayals in their medium without at least half of the piece being a transcription of the writer gargling Tom King’s war crimin’ balls” challenge. At least they stopped shilling for Maggs “Slide into a depressed fan’s DMs to promote your pretentious-ass Vertigo reject book” Visaggio.

• Huh. Caldor is back as a retro collector’s site. Cool, cool. Now, bring back Clover as something. Anything. Please, that’s MY local store nostalgia. I’ll even accept a Spring store selling logo stuff.

I just want it on a tote bag…

• Remember the obsessive fan dude who won’t shut up about the power changes made from the comics to TV for Ms Marvel? Yep, he’s still going. At this point, I hope every comic and/or collector shop in his area has a warning poster not to let him in the store, cuz he’s really getting into “deface merchandise & pepper spray any employee who tries to stop you” territory. Not every mention of the TV show is your cue to complain again, dude.

• The official song of every cat when they get the zoomies is the Benny Hill theme. This is not up for debate.

• Another day, another “if this victim looked even a tiny bit like I do, no one would be losing their shit about this because it wouldn’t hit their racist & classist buttons the same way” example. Not elaborating, but if you’re smart, you can probably guess.

• To borrow a quote from a long-ago MiSTing of a very bad & very long fanfic, my apathy about superhero movies has become so palpable that I should adopt it as a pet. (Honk if you know the reference btw.)

• Oh no, the smug hack who said that the Holocaust “isn't as bad” as current events and mocked the very existence of bisexuals lost her Bluesky account AND her comic writing gig?! Gee, that's sure a shame, I'm sure it was the one singular post going around and not the well-documented history of her being a hateful shithead & hiding behind her transness when called on it. 

• Seriously, though, the outrage over Gretchen is a good example of why I'm getting sick of Bluesky. You can’t share her non-apology for saying Holocaust denialism rhetoric while getting pissed at JKR for hers. As much as they want to pretend that there isn't, there really is a culture of “it's okay when WE do it” deeply ingrained there.

• Finally decided to mute the absolute worst of the moots who’s gone down the H*san pipeline too far. Responding to people memorializing actual friends & family they lost on 9/11 by smugly replying “well I’LL never forget how it was used to demonize a whole religion” is beyond being too autistic to read the room (yes, it’s in his bio because of course it is) and just being a straight-up asshole. And given how he has absolutely zero problem demonizing every other Abrahamic religion, especially in the past couple of years, it’s especially rich. He’s pretty much become the embodiment of everything punchable about leftist circles, in particular on Bluesky, and humoring the occasional good comics tweet isn’t worth tolerating him anymore. And yes, he’s the same guy as the “obsessed with complaining about Ms Marvel” dude.

• This week feels like an exceptionally appropriate week for the discussion I saw about how the internet has basically killed the concept of “nuance” because the algorithm will only ever push extremes. Adding to that, it’s the people who insist that their extreme is the only correct one & that anyone still capable of seeing nuance is somehow evil that desperately need to have this drilled into their heads.

• Important zucchini update: babby is forming!

If it stays yellow, I'll be even more confused, cuz I had been growing the green kind.

• One more video recommendation. There have been a lot of videos lately calling out TikTok Zoomers for considering any attempt to learn something new or share a beloved hobby/interest “cringe”, many from their peers who have been victim to this treatment. This is a really good entry, sharing her own passions while eloquently addressing the topic.

• Comics Beat leaving Gretchen’s victim narrative unquestioned and closing comments so people can’t point out her history of venomous biphobia or link to her recent “the Holocaust wasn’t THAT bad” Bluesky comments is knocking my opinion of them back to the era when every hype article for an indie book they ran was based solely around how many DSM-V categories they could apply to the stories. Kinda pathetic, really. 

• Honestly, the sheer rush I’ve seen to rally around, champion, & protect a person who clearly hates them solely cuz of one demographic box she checks is truly garbage. It’s “rules for thee, not for we”, cuz if a cis person was in this situation complete with the same history of shitty attitudes as her, they wouldn’t be so fucking outraged, and they damn well know it. But as is the online leftist motto, especially at Bluesky & especially in nerd circles, “It’s okay when WE do it.” Much like with similar reactions to a late night show none of them have ever watched getting canned, it’s probably more about the sweet sweet outrage-gasm than anything else. Just another thing they have in common with their ideological opposites that they refuse to accept.

• Resumed painting my nails again after having stopped around the time work switched to mostly remote during COVID, and it’s really fun to do again. So far it’s mostly Sally Hansen Miracle Gel (cuz I’m not made of money), and I’m enjoying seeing how using the different top coats changes the look of the same base color. Unfortunately, I still can’t do the initial application without getting polish on my skin, especially my right hand, so I’ll never be photographing the results.

• I know Mom is still pissed at them, but I really wanna buy another Annie's kit. The Moroccan kit in Midnight Mosaic, to be precise...

• Please pardon any wonky formatting. Blogger decided to be a little shit about copying my images from my Goggle Doc working drafft this week.

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This week’s cat picture is all about inspecting the new Halloween decorations.

“... Mom…?”

See you next time! Unless you’re here to defend the honor of either Green brother or of Bluesky, in which case don’t come back and instead go outside.

Sunday Sampler: Creative Delusions Edition

Sunday Samplers are a “lightning round” of different subjects, none of which really warrant a full post, that have popped into my head over the course of the past week. They may or may not be regular weekly posts.

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There’s been a lot of stuff that’s resulted in me becoming increasingly more jaded & disappointed in life, but one of the biggest has to be the way AI has taken over everything online.

You can’t avoid it. Even if you try to remove it from online search results, it finds its way in somehow. It’s clogging YouTube and other video sites up like rancid grease in a pipe. At work, my coworkers & I all hate how much the programs we have to use keep pestering us with popups to use their AI services, that can’t be toggled off to just let you do your work. Even memes have been ruined by bad “cartoon” art (usually with either the waxy textures or the bizarre orangey tint that no human being would ever use). It’s kudzu, right down to sucking the nutrients away from actual original work.

But MAN, does it piss me off to see people using it in any kind of creative field. This past week, we saw one of the Marvel Comics editors that I consider a good example of a Comics Dude decide to not only make a bad blog logo with AI but also defend it as an inevitability. AI is already built on blissfully stealing art, writings, anything without attribution (let alone payment), and it’s already being used to replace human creators so the bosses don’t have to part with any money. At least until they need someone to fix the many many MANY mistakes AI made, that is. 

And look, I’m not gonna lie, I tried using AI when it was new. Until I learned that it couldn’t exist without plagiarism, I thought it was a novelty. I tried to do a non-pixel-art rendition of my unread fiction’s title character, and the results were… garbage. Notably, it didn’t get the following references: specific flowers, the concepts of “gray eyes” or “green hair”, color blocking on clothes, pigtails, hair length, and desired human expression. Each one came out as a moe blob, and as a character, Val is too ornery & too fond of using body horror as a fight tactic to ever qualify as such. One came out making her look like a blonde coquette with a ginormous gold cross where her floral brooch should be. OOF.

For reference, here’s my pixel art of Val that’s the best I can do (and that’s using a base body from a long-gone website). AI could not do better than THIS:

Not pictured: her cat or her weaponry, cuz I’m just that bad at art.

So yeah, it’s known that AI only produces trash. Yet, because it’s free/cheap trash, people keep opting to use it; it’ll never need time off for family or healthy insurance or a dependable cash flow to pay its mortgage, so the bosses will prefer it to a pesky human being. Like, right now, a long-awaited sequel to an anime I like has just been announced for the winter, its trailer is coming in October, and I am actually afraid that Crunchyroll will pick it up cuz of their continued use of absolutely horrid AI subtitles. Same for Walpurgisnacht Rising - is THAT gonna have mistranslations full of tone prompts?

We already live in an age where nothing creative feels valued, even when there’s evidence that the audience still wants new & interesting things (for a good example, look at the responses to K-Pop Demon Hunters or the rise of indie animation, even if the most popular stuff is Not For Me). AI just makes it worse, because you never know when it’ll appear out of nowhere to ruin everything. And it’s putting talented people out of work when the only real alternative is gig work delivery jobs for pretty much everyone. It’s the only thing that makes me want to quote the “hate” rant from Ellison and actually do it without mocking him.

Therefore, I promise you shall always get AI-free work from me. My stories no one reads? Genuinely awful but made by a human being. My horrible art, including the column logo that somehow took 2+ hours to look like THAT? It’s hand-crafted artisanal crap, and I’m proud of it, even if it looks nothing like the cross-stitch sampler I pictured. It’s not much, but by avoiding it & mocking it, I’m doing my part to make this bubble burst a little bit faster.

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Apparently there is a named hex code for "phantom violet". Not gonna lie, I’m kinda disappointed in how… gray the color is.

This is actually one of the more colorful examples.

Maybe it could be a reference for her eye color…?

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I initially posted this as a lightning-squared entry, but then I learned something that made me want to scream:

In the extremely slim off-chance any of my work ever got popular enough for someone to make a TV Tropes page, I would die of shame if I limited 90% of the world-building, character development, etc to Q&As on Discord, as opposed to in the work itself, to the point where my one-person work would need its own separate “Word of God” page to account for that laziness.

That’s bad, right? You can’t parse out a way to make key details about the world or characters fit organically into your work, so you just reveal it when asked on a closed-gate social media site. It speaks of a lack of planning, skewed priorities for what does or doesn’t reach the finished work, and suggests being more concerned with “connecting with fans” (who you can then coincidentally weaponize against anything that isn’t praise) than with honing your craft & telling a story. And given that this is one of those instances where I suspect either the creator or a close friend of theirs is the one doing all the TV Tropes updates regarding the work, thus making every entry feel like an attempted advertisement, it makes sense that they’d think “I saved 90% of the actual work for my Discord to make my fans feel extra special while keeping the work itself feeling hollow & half-formed” is a good thing.

Welp. This morning I learned of something worse & more embarrassing than this.

Y’see, the Discord thing is for a web series that’s free to anyone. The actual Discord itself is invite-only via Patreon donations, but the work itself is readily available to find. It’s not… say… a published novel that squanders its interesting premise in an effort to direct people to a Reddit built around a knockoff SCP Foundation project. Yes, this is real. No, I’m not naming the book, since it’s less a novel in its own merits and more a promotion for a FUCKING SUBREDDIT.

I said before that I find the trend of selling your work with AO3/TV Tropes tag bullet points instead of actual plots to be brain-searingly awful. It speaks of both authors & desired audiences being so incapable of logging off that they cannot assess something in any other way. So having a book that basically goes “if you want the full story, put this down and go read this subReddit instead” feels like the unfortunate next step in this odious trend.

At least Trevor Roberts is working to make his Mystery Flesh Pit book a standalone, even if it’s taking longer than planned (being the at-home parent to infants does that). It’s not like he’s telling one short story and just expecting you to find the site & read that instead.

I’m anything but a book snob - my main leisure reading anymore is usually part of some light novel series, since those are relaxing reading. You lose all claim to being literati if you’ve read more than 2 volumes of Bofuri. But those don’t basically go “check out my social media if you want the REAL stories/developments” like these instances. If a work cannot stand on its own without needing its creators to channel pre-obsessive-transphobia JKR & post their own “wizard poop” variations, it’s not ready for public consumption.

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My town is holding a suicide prevention & memorial walk for the second time this weekend, and I have… complicated feelings about it. On one hand, I’m glad that it was successful enough to warrant doing another year. On the other hand, I find that these events usually aren’t for people who’ve lived with suicidal ideation like I have.

This is not to dismiss their value. For people who’ve lost loved ones or nearly lost them, they provide a good avenue to connect to others or memorialize someone. And maybe it’ll reach someone who is having some self-destructive thoughts. So I won’t dismiss them entirely.

But one of the things that I’ve found over the years is that no one really wants to hear from the person who struggled (or still struggles) with the urge to end it. I want people to understand that it’s not just one thing that will tip you into those depths, no matter how much garbage YA media insists that it is. I want them to understand that “masking” isn’t just a buzzword online but something that a lot of us do to just get through the day. I want them to understand that a superficially “good” life doesn’t magically negate this urge. I want them to understand that going “but what about meeeee” as a way to make a suicidal person feel “needed” can be indistinguishable from being guilt-tripped into living & seen as on par with an appliance instead of as a person (it certainly is for me). I want them to understand that parroting slogans like “it’s okay to not be okay” or insisting it’ll be fine if you get some exercise/drink more water/eat more veggies is not helpful and usually just insulting.

But for them to understand, they have to be willing to listen in the first place, and that ship has not just sailed. It sailed, hit a reef, sank, and became a nice artificial reef. The number of total strangers I’ve had try to “UM ACKSHULLY” my own lived experiences because they cared more about the fictions built into their heads has illustrated that vividly. And don’t get me started on specific examples, especially the IWC/Wrestlesky people who genuinely seem to think that the best way to honor Hana Kimura is to put a flower in their usernames and then act exactly like the guys who attacked her. As Rod Stewart said, “There ain’t no point in talking when there’s nobody listening.” And absolutely no one wants to hear from anyone living with ideation like I’ve been.

So yeah, I hope the people going to the event have a good time or find whatever healing that they need or both. I just know from past history that it’s not an environment intended for people like me.

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Okay, enough heaviness. Instead of a video recommendation, I have a website & ARG recommendation instead:

Pendog Creative Library!

This alternate history story is based around the art site run by one Penny M, focusing on her favorite pop culture characters. She’s a fan of animation & puppetry in particular, so most of the characters featured will originate from there, as well as some included for some more personal reasons. Along the way, as we learn about these characters, we learn about the differences in this world’s timeline, the path of Penny’s life, and the existence of at least one cognitohazard.

I STRONGLY recommend anyone curious make a point to find the credits link on the About Us page before diving in too deep, because besides giving credit to everyone behind the site it also includes some very necessary content warnings. This work gets HEAVY and gets there pretty quickly. But it does so in an adept & effective way, with nothing feeling like it was included just to be “edgy” or “serious”.

So many themes & plot threads are resonant in different ways. How do you handle connections with friends who… aren’t so great? What do you do when they abruptly leave your life? How can the potential parent-child relationship between a creator & their creation go sour? What happens when your life’s work, or merely a work that you treasure, winds up in the legal hands of the worst people possible? Is “true crime” media inherently amoral? And most of all… Why is this one particular song objectively awful yet so very catchy? Some of the hidden works have brought me to tears with their relatability.

The art is period accurate - no “black & white rubber hose cartoons still popular in the 80s cuz we have a skewed concept of ‘retro’ art” here. We even have a character going through a brief UPA-inspired era. And it’s an ARG that actually puts some emphasys on the “G” part, with puzzles that have confounded me more than I’d like to admit but always reward you by adding to the bigger picture of Penny’s world.

If you’re a fan of art & narrative ARGs like Welcome Home, PLEASE check out Pendog Creative Library. It’s a beautiful piece and deserves more love.

—

Lightning-squared round! Because if you write down the intrusive thoughts, they go away. We all learned that from social media.

• Today in “Bluesky is full of idiotic hypocrites”, we have the same people rightfully angry that a Marvel higher-up is cool with AI taking artists’ jobs turning around & sharing an ugly obviously-AI-generated fake Peanuts meme.

• Sorry, can’t be excited about the new big indie animation trailer. The creator still needs to learn how to act like an adult & not a perpetual Tumblr child before I can respect anything she makes, and “omg she’s totally sticking it to her old corpo bosses” is telling me that her well is just as shallow as the “Tumblr child” description implies.

• I do like being able to sub-post here, cuz I know that the main subjects of my frustrations on social media can never be arsed to read beyond a sub-headline at most.

• Today in “Bluesky Is Somehow Worse than Xwitter Sometimes”, the exact thing that I wrote about last week - people defending & championing eugenics movements fueled by visceral loathing of the overweight existing in public based solely on which political alignment is doing it - is happening without pushback. It was so, SO much worse than just “healthy lunches & exercise”, and if you STILL think that’s the case, it’s cuz you weren’t a fat person during that whole era & probably participated in the condescending concern trolling.

• Given how much of Arc 1 of Magia Record that Magia Exedra cut out, I’m fully expecting them to trim down Arc 2 as much. Trying to figure out if there’s a faction that they’ll just drop entirely… I do feel bad for anyone who didn’t play MR, cuz Exedra is leaving so much of that story & its characters on the table that it’s low-key depressing.

• Watching people go from “let’s avoid being antisemitic” to “actually, the Holocaust didn’t go far enough, cuz if it did we wouldn’t have Israel now” thanks to one champagne socialist streamer & his gaggle of hangers-on has done more to turn me away from the online left than anything else. And the worst part is that they’ll refuse to see that this shift has happened or they’ll try & justify it as somehow being acceptable.

• Man, who knew that getting all of those project kits pre-tariffs was actually a smart idea and not just me giving myself shopping-related dopamine hits!

• Outside of Crunchyroll’s current AI bandwagoning, I am looking forward to MGRP Restart finally being adapted. It’s tied for my favorite arc in the series (alongside Jokers) and was responsible for making me a fan of the books.

• Ever have that one celebrity/movie that you alone seem to hate, yet they keep giving you justifiable reasons for it, like shilling for AI as somehow being ultra-feminist? “OMG Elle Woods would hate this!” No, this is the exact kind of “girlboss” BS that you've been cheering all along, in fiction AND reality. Grow up and admit it already.

• Horse-girl game update: I don’t really care for the whole thing with Mayano & her constantly flirting with her trainer, but at least, if you’re playing the trainer as female like I am, she comes off as an over-excited lesbian disaster instead of a weeb fantasy. Bit of respect to them for not changing it.

• Somehow, the zucchini plant that I deliberately planted in my back garden is already dead & never bore fruit, but one that managed to plant itself in the front garden walk of my house is thriving nicely & has multiple flowers.

Why are you there?! Your home is in the back, not next to the azaleas!

• We're still gonna cheer for every ace character that turns up in media, even when it's clear that the creator made them ace to underline their creepiness and/or villainy, huh? This is why I gave up on y'all, just absolutely no standards.

• I swear, if the thing that makes me finally get into Homestuck is learning that apparently one of the characters makes herself a mighty battle gown out of her many unfinished knitting WIPs… actually, no, that’d probably make perfect sense for me.

• Ex-colleague, I appreciate the friendly check-ins when you want something, but I’m not about to forget how you basically left me flailing for a year with your short-notice departure & now I’m sure half the company thinks I’m a dolt cuz of it.

• I am extra avoiding your knitting event if the poster is (a) very obviously made with AI art and (b) has it spelled “KINIT” by the plagiarism bot.

• Building off one of the pieces above, I just thought back to one of the worst Very Special Episode issues of a comic that was supposed to be about bipolar disorder & mental health where one character talks another down from being suicidal by talking about her brother’s death. To be precise, she talks about how upset SHE was by his death & how much it hurt HER, with no real attempt to discuss him except as a source for HER pain. The fact that Darci & I were the only people who found this to be insulting & gross instead of “omg so powerful & important” will always stick with me. That shit was written with a supposed therapist’s input. A therapist okayed that fucking shit as an effective way to make a suicidal person feel valued & worthwhile. Maybe if you’re eternally 13 years old it is, but the internet has actively discouraged maturing, so here we are.

• Low-key disappointed that the new Street Fighter movie wasn’t cast entirely with wrestlers.

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And that’s it for another week. Here’s your traditional closing cat picture, since I WILL make anyone reading this far appreciate my cats. Appreciate them, dammit! APPRECIATE THEM!

People think he’s mean just cuz he hates being photographed, but I swear he’s a big cuddlebug.

See you all next time and thank you for making it this far!