got_quiet

Something about the rich text editor is going wild right now. Including a user link to the Snowflake Challenge was causing some massive errors.

I decided to do something for Snowflake Challenge 2 after all. Instead of giving an origin narrative which I already sort of did, I figured I'd just throw in a few random memories of my earliest relationships with media. This is almost all stuff that happened before I hit high school, lots of it was before I turned ten.

Content warning for mentions of real-life sexual abuse (not mine) in a weird context.

I remember watching Rita Repulsa torturing a putty and thinking, wow, I want more of this, and then spent like a month daydreaming about putties getting tortured.
Likewise the only thing I remember about Ronan warriors is a scene where someone's getting tortured in a volcano or something and thinking, yes, more of this please.
Puck quickly became my favorite character in Gargoyles, mostly because in his introduction he's chained up.
Later on in life I realized I was a sadist lol. Who could have guessed. Note all of the above was well before I turned 10.
This one is fucked up but true. When I was a kid I found a little pamphlet that had been mailed to us soliciting money to support young girls who had been trafficked. It included a lot of first hand accounts. This became my illicit hide-under-the-bed reading for a while. Adult me is like, dude, that is not appropriate, but I was literally in elementary school and didn't really understand.
I was at the same age Harry was as the HP books were being released. I remember being in the car and expressing some frustration and not having gotten an owl. My mom was quiet for a moment, and then was like, "You know none of that is real, right?" Lol, I think I was kind of pissed at her at the time but I did need a little cold water splashed on my face there.
I ended up joining a Hogwarts MUD at some point later on, maybe 9th grade. I struggled to really make connections with people because I think there was actually a significant age gap. Everyone else I think was in college. Anyway the other players helped me with my algebra homework in the OOC channel, which is the only thing I really remember of my time in that MUD (fuck quadratic equations).
My first anime was Laputa and Totoro because my Dad brought them back as VHS tapes from the home country. Totoro was dubbed into Chinese as you do so my memories of it are of Satsuki shouting MEI MEIII!
The Mystery! PBS intro used to terrify me. I had to change the channel every time it was on. Likewise I used to love Ghost Writer but also could barely tolerate how scared I was of it.
One of the first video games I ever played was Orb Quest (http://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2020/03/game-362-orbquest-1981.html) on an IBM machine.
I've seen the Star Trek movie with the whale over 100 times I bet, because it was the only movie my grandparents seem to have on VHS and they babysat me when my mom was at work all the time. This was my only exposure to classic Trek.

Challenge 3

I'm sure I've changed my mind about lots of things but not much comes to mind. I've changed my mind about Blizzard as a company, but this has less to do with my re-evaluating the facts than the facts themselves changing or becoming public. I guess the biggest change in my opinions has been the merit of live action shows. When I was a kid I believed that they were inherently inferior to animated shows because the presence of an actor meant that the purity of the story was diluted by an extra layer of interpretation or something. I've matured up and now appreciate that actors are artists in their own right that can elevate a work but still generally prefer media that doesn't involve live acting.

Challenge 4
This is the New Year's Resolution Challenge.
I have no resolutions for this year. The ones I set I never meet so I'm just going to stop setting them. I am a little too trampled by 2024 to really be thinking about 2025 right now anyway. Maybe... cut down on internet fucking around still.

Since this is the resolutions post I'll also look back and see how my resolutions from last year did. Here are my resolutions from last year.

Here's how I did:

Minimize wasted web time - I had to calculate my total leisure hours to figure this out. 2024 I recorded 371 hours fucking around online. This year I recorded 366.5. So yay, a small improvement. However my gaming habits went from 513.75 to 542.4 hours. So it all comes out in the wash.

3 Days a week of no meat - I had to give up on this one relatively quickly. I was tracking the days I ate meatless up through mid September. I only hit three days 11 weeks out of 37. The problem is my main struggle with food is eating anything at all, so adding a restriction to that problem was resulting in negative health effects. So in the interest of putting my own oxygen mask on before helping others, I had to give up and just eat what I could. I did find a couple nice vegetarian recipes though.

Not buy any books - I failed at this utterly. I don't know how many books I did buy but it was greater than 0. My only saving grace is that the books I bought I bought in Japan which is sort of a FOMO problem. I did do pretty good at not buying books while at home, but even then I couldn't stop myself completely. At least I didn't come home with any bags of books from library sales this year..

I didn't get much reading done at all either. You'd think considering how many books I buy I'd also be reading a lot but no, that's not how this works. I think I only managed to read 8 books in 2024, which is a quarter of my books read in 2023. However if you consider the millions of words of Jayvik fic I have consumed over the past two months...

And I STILL haven't finished reviewing every VN in the BLM bundle, even though I've been on like the last game since 2023! AUGH.

So that's why my resolution this year is no resolutions. Fuck it, this is a cheat year.