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…
What’d I miss?
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Well, I’m excited about the Tubi thing. That’ll save me some money for sure…
Kinda know that few to no people will care, but I thought I’d drop in an update.
I won’t go into details about why I needed a big break, but I am now on the verge of changing jobs. There are a bunch of reasons, all of them not for public consumption, but the time has come for a much-overdue change. I’m looking forward to it, even if it means having to drive again in the city (the outskirts but still). But I’ll say this much, as convenient as remote work can be, it also leads you to feeling like you’re an afterthought, except when people need to yell at you for something. And it leads to you falling more easily into that particular kind of terminally online that doesn’t lead anywhere healthy, since you aren’t interacting with others offline regularly. Trust me, that really does make a difference for your mental health. (Also, as rough as the drive can get on certain routes, it’s still less depressing than the current state of 30th Street Station.)
Other fun stuff happened, ranging from bitterly cold weather resulting in me needing to de-flood my basement & get a new water heater to repeatedly hurting myself cleaning up the appalling amount of slow/ice/slush just to be able to function. Basically, life decided to kick my ass for a while. So when that happens, you have to figure out what you can change & how to best change it.
I’m not sure if weekly updates are gonna resume after this or if they’re gonna be more random. It’ll take a while to get into a regular schedule again, and I’ll probably be busy enough that I don’t get distracted by random nonsense. Maybe it’ll be more original writing or even fanworks. All I can say for sure is that we’ll see.
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One thing that I can say for sure is that this winter is the worst I’ve seen since 7th grade, and it is actively making me angry. It finally - FINALLY - all melted enough to let you function again, and here comes another nasty blizzard.
By the time the snow stopped, it was 17 inches before it started to melt enough to be horrendous to move.
I’m not someone who has experienced seasonal depression before, unless you count general grumpiness due to summer heat & humidity. But this snow brings out the absolute worst in me. It makes me feel smothered & trapped, with the snow reflecting & amplifying any sunlight to the point that it’s a daily headache. The plows in my area are basically nonexistent, so the roads are never clear enough for my ancient little car to navigate. And that’s to say nothing of peripheral events related to this garbage weather, y’know, fun stuff like burst pipes and flooded basements and such. Yes, those can happen in warm weather, but (a) it’s way less frequent & (b) cleanup is slightly less miserable due to the temperatures. Maybe it’s my tendency towards what I’ve nicknamed “angerpression”, but this winter has allowed me to experience what I can only describe as seasonal rage.
My biggest worry is for my garden. Last spring/summer, I got my yard gutted from the overgrowth of a couple years’ neglect (this is a surprisingly accurate approximation), and I planted some new perennials to replace the ones that were killed by the weeds. Even though I followed the instructions on how to wrap them in burlap, I’m still afraid that my new plantings will be dead by the time this season ends. Besides the obvious waste of money, it’s just dispiriting to have your spring garden dead before you could even enjoy it. It’d be the one thing that would already make this miserable winter somehow worse.
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Lightning-squared round! Cuz (horrible fax machine dialing noises here).
I wonder which spreads faster, kudzu in the South or scaffolding at 30th Street Station? It’s taken over the back half of the main station now. Hopefully it’ll spare the Pret a Manger.
“Now here’s the BIGGEST complaint that people are having with the finale!” The ADHD editing? The repetitive dialogue? The hokey effects? The “tell, don’t show” characterization? “The ships!” Ah, yes. Of course. I forgot, all of fiction - even BAD fiction - can & should only ever be boiled down to which toys you want to see mashed together to pretend they’re kissing.
It’s probably just from bots, but if not, “hallo und danke” to all of my German readers and “hei ja kiitos” to all of my Finnish readers. It’s much appreciated (provided you’re actual people).
Magia Exedra knew that I’ve been having a shitty couple of weeks and decided to grant me a small favor.
That it was in the same pull is what surprised me. Never had two five-stars, new or otherwise, in a ten-pull until now.
In further gacha hell updates, I FINALLY got El Condor Pasa’s Kukulkan Monk variant! The gacha gods saw my wretched state and blessed me with small favors.
Love how the same people who think a single year's age difference between adults is “basically a p*do” are now busting out age of consent laws to defend their favorite wrestler, the Tumblr Cowboy, being chummy with an actual admitted p*do.
I don’t really follow or know about Poppy Playtime other than its existence, but the fact that the newest villain they added is basically a warped doll version of that “Ms Rachel” character that’s beloved less by actual kids/parents & more by ultra-online childless Millennials is making me laugh.
Another interesting series from Thoughtnami, this time focused on Paramount & its TV/cable offerings. I’m not as familiar with what is under that umbrella beyond CBS, Nick, & Star Trek, so I learned quite a few things reading this.
I do wish that Tubi was rolling out its WB/H-B/CN offerings in less of a slow trickle and more of a… how to put this… more of a smorgasbord of everything that they said they’re getting. Go full Shady Maple with it. Especially since my "built on a cursed graveyard" theory is looking more accurate and the crappy new merger is likely to result in this deal being woefully short-lived.
One thing that irrationally bugs me in online cooking videos is when someone tries to put everything in the pan in little sections, only for the recipe to require the ingredients to be mixed first. So they wind up trying to stir everything in a shallow dish without making a mess, barely mixing it. Also, they’re narrating/captioning what the ingredients being used are, so the whole thing is just for A E S T H E T I C S or something. If professional cooking shows can just mix the stuff like you’re supposed to, y’all can do it too.
Enough time has passed that if the people behind the Max Headroom broadcast signal intrusion ever DID come forward, no one would actually believe it was them.
I respect it when any creator ends a successful series of any medium on their own terms, doubly so when it’s done in such a way that the money men who expected to keep milking them to dust didn’t see it coming. Triply so when the money men in this particular instance are terminally online dudebros who have built a weird cult around their “brand” & term search to fight even the faintest of criticisms as much as their cult-fans do. In fact, I'd bet money that these creators saw how the fans of other marquee shows on their block basically turned into cults (and in one case, at least, had its creators embrace that) and deliberately noped out before they could succumb to the same.
I thought that maybe enough time had safely passed to express my ace-related feelings about one of the character threads in Otona Precure, but I forgot that shippers are so monomaniacal that it’s NEVER gonna be safe to share any stripe of ace reading without incurring their wrath. Hence why I’m avoiding character names, but as always, IYKYK.
The Venn diagram of people mad about an AEW wrestler deactivating her Xwitter cuz of harassment and people who gleefully did the same kind of harassment to LuFisto to earn virtual love from their comfort brand is a big stupid hypocritical circle.
Remember when monopolies were discouraged? Especially in creative mediums?
Oh no, the shitty dentist is scared of returning to wrestling because the online fans might hurt her feelings and insult her? Like she encouraged them to do to random fans online if they didn’t praise her during her frequent vanity searches? Like she had them do to colleagues like LuFisto & Thunder Rosa until one quit the internet and the other was suicidal? I dunno, seems like more karma hitting her to me, and if you think otherwise, you’re telling me that you’ve been on the join-in end of a social media dogpiles & see nothing wrong with it.
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Well, I doubt that was worth the wait, but it’s done for now. As an apology, please accept this cat photo of my skinny boy shrimping on the heating pad that’s become the only thing able to make sitting at my home desk tolerable.
Sir, please. I need that to bend and stand. And it’s not even plugged in yet…
See you next time, whenever that may be.
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