#Whee irresponsible money spending

[paradoxymora]

Thank you to @circular-time, @the-macra, @quipxotic, @therothwoman, @anotheruserwithnoname, and @elden-12 for the First Doctor audio recs.

I ended up getting Quinnis, The Rocket Men, Return of the Rocket Men, The Library of Alexandria (sorry, Hayley, I just HAVE to hear where memelord Susan came from), and the Sara Kingdom and Oliver Harper trilogies.

[girlfriendsofthegalaxy]

tuesday again 2/22/22

what a pleasing date! a twosday, even! one of my favorite coworkers is getting married today in a botanical garden and i send good wishes from afar!

also, lots of short things this week bc a bitch is having some Medication Side Effects i need to tough out a bit longer before this doc will be convinced they are adversely affecting my life

listening orville peck has a new EP out but none of the songs have really latched themselves onto the black matter of my brain yet. my sister sent me a tiktok that had me in hysterics and ended up having a full version, great beeps and bloops, we sing “pull up a stepladder and give me a peck” when her cats are yelling at her from the floor now

reading fallow week

watching the cuphead show. my boss and i keep very close tabs on video games media efforts, and i’m not like contractually obliged here on this blog or in my actual dayjob (thank god) to watch every piece of video games media, but boy do i love to give opinions on it.

my dad’s side of the family has very strong subspecialities and opinions about different areas of film history, bc they’re all engineers and designers and married other engineers and designers. my favorite uncle veered really hard into the history of animation, like The Thing To Do when you visited him was sit in the pool until you got unrecognizably pruny and then huddle under a blanket in the air conditioning watching looney tunes in chronological order. so i cracked this childrens show open like WHEE a fun tribute to early animation!

in general, i find the first episode of the cuphead show to have a really unnerving combination of some of the rubber-hose early-animation style with modern adult animated american television facial expressions and dialogue. it has shot sequences, shooting angles, and moving background elements that felt very modern and jarring to me. the opening titles are killer (probably bc they’re done by an entirely different team)! the watercolor backgrounds are lovely! the devil’s song and dance number was fun to watch! everything else i don’t really care for and so i will not be giving it the ol three-episode try. the second episode has a “whoops some irresponsible kids have to take care of a baby!” shit and i fucking hate that trope. if anyone’s watched it straight through, let me know if it’s worth gritting my teeth to see the cab-calloway-inspired character’s walk cycle or nah

reading interviews it sounds like it was underfunded, a lot of “well here’s where we had to lean on the magic of netflix technology to cut corners”, which is a real shame- it could have been a lovely throwback and tribute to early animation and a really interesting intro to new generations without insane uncles. IF they got the money to really lean into the 2D aspect of it, given that the game was so lovingly hand-animated and is still memorable years after release in a very crowded genre FOR that art style. shame this childrens show was not the thing i, a sophisticated adult, was looking for, glad studio mdhr got that fat fat netflix check even if i think it’s a poor likeness of uhhh Their Game. always fun to keep an eye on netflix’s newest video game transmedia efforts, even if it’s weird that both castlevania and arcane have been widely praised for their animation and this one simply doesn’t hold a fuckin candle imo. part of that is different teams, part of that is they’re less willing to spend money on their more explicitly kids stuff, wish it was different, what can ya do

playing junk shop telescope by cephalopodunk, a free short in-browser bitsy game tagged not-exactly-sure-how-a-telescope-works with exactly one mechanic, and it does glorious things with that one mechanic. it’s so clearly signposted, i never got lost or turned around or stuck, mwah. love space, love pixels, the ending screen actually made me gasp so i’ll forgive it for straying very close to a specific conspiracy theory i had to debunk constantly at the astronomy tour internship.

how did i find this: on the itch.io recs page of a different game maker i like, after i struck out sifting through the free + browser + recent + popular intersection of tags. do wish itch let you exclude tags. i will never want to play a horror game in my life. bio/shock was pushing it

making i’ve been thinking a lot lately about how difficult any given long-running podcast is to get into. there’s an expectation of prior knowledge about injokes and references by episode 100, i think, and it’s hard to know what a good entry point is.

so i’m going to explain what the fuck “the wives” and “the boys” and “cowboyblogging” is, since i spent a good portion of last year in no fit state to do much of anything and it’s been kind of iffy so far this year also but i’ve looped back all the way around to productive procrastination on hobbies instead of productive procrastination on life shit.

coming up on three years ago, i watched the entire dollars trilogy movies (for a fistful of dollars, for a few dollars more, the good the bad and the ugly) with an upsettingly high fever and wrote a fic where i put the horrible men (angel, blondie, and tuco) into the postapocalyptic roleplaying video game fallout: new vegas (where in my version, the best version, the player character “the courier” is married to a pair of butch mechanic assassins veronica and christine). i have almost no memory of writing that original first fic, but it did spawn a much much larger fic (”The” cowboyfic, if you will) unpacking what exactly happens post-game and what happens when you get everything you think you want and some stuff about the fall of empires and capitalism.

this fic assumes some degree of knowledge of at least one of these properties. there is a dramatic difference between my writing ability of three years ago, when the tuesdayposts weren’t even a thing yet, and my writing abilities now where i give opinions about data for a living. there are only like half a dozen people i shout to about this thing. this is purely to amuse myself. i encourage you, the reader, to block the “cowboyblogging” and “ain’t that a kick in the head” tags if you’ve been reading this like “okay now i know what she’s talking about and i’ve decided i do not wish to see this content, why have there been no textile crimes yet this year”. i’m dealing with clothes moths right now it gives me the serotonin to make the horrible men pine and the bisexual/lesbian trio be disgustingly happy.

if you’d like to dip in anyway, good news! i didn’t put out a new chapter but i did double the length of the previous chapter and am working on this whole fucking project in a much more serious and sustained way (i say, knocking on wood).