#its just getting so annoying to me to read the same complaints over and over again

[stsgluver]

𝐒𝐍𝐀𝐏𝐒𝐇𝐎𝐓 𝐏𝐓.𝟐 — gojo satoru

synopsis. another installment of the first years going through old videos of their teacher and his friends

wc. 4.1k

tags. gojo x reader, reader in the same class as gojo, ft. nanami and haibara

an. do I have any idea where im taking this? no. still think its cute though (let’s hope the next part doesn’t take me another couple of months 🤭)

previous part / next part / series masterlist

“good evening boys,” nobara burst into megumi and yuuji’s room. the former who was shocked awake from his nap and the latter who had two big bags of popcorn in either arm. he’d been waiting for an hour for the orange-haired girl, a bright grin on his face.

“you can’t just come into our room,” megumi grumbled, pulling his pillow over his head and rolling over in his bed. nobara and yuuji ignored his complaint, dragging both chairs in their room in front of yuuji’s desk. nobara set up the laptop whilst yuuji ran to nobara’s room to grab a third chair. after five minutes of rustling, their movie night was read.

“come sit all, it’s movie time!” the orange-haired girl said excitedly, pulling megumi’s comforter off of him. he sported his usual frown but sleepily complied nonetheless, dragging the blanket around his body as he sat next to yuuji (who then forced the dark-haired teen to share some of the blanket with him). 

“we’re in detention.” the screen opened up with you – hair pulled back into a ponytail as you wore your usual uniform. the three students could recognise the wall behind you as one of their own classes. 

“not our fault,” shoko added, fixing gojo’s glasses on the top of her head. the two of you spoke in hushed whispers, glancing towards the door where, presumably, yaga was on the other side. you had shoved your desk closer to shoko’s so it was basically one big desk and the camera was balanced in the middle.

“never is,” you pinched the bridge of your nose, shooting the person next to you a glare. 

shoko lightly shifted the camera so that geto could come into frame. he raised his hands up in surrender, “it’s not mine either.”

“satoru is getting yelled at by sensei right now,” you whisper shouted, pointing towards the door. if yuuji turned the volume up any louder, they’d be able to hear yaga yet again scolding gojo for another mistake he’d made on a mission – an order he’d probably disobeyed the more confident he grew in his own ability.

shoko frowned, throwing her hands up in exasperation, “he literally knows it was that idiot. why are we being punished?”

“maybe yaga thinks if we get annoyed at satoru he’ll stop,” geto reasoned with a sigh, as if though he wasn’t gojo’s partner in crime and equally as complicit when he entertained his antics. 

“no he won’t. he thinks by punishing us, satoru will have some epiphany about his actions impacting other people. like he thinks far enough ahead to come to that realisation,” you dropped your head down onto your desk. geto laughed quietly, giving you a ‘comforting’ pat on your shoulder.

shoko leant close to the camera, a sharp pencil in hand that she lightly jutted forward, “count your days, gojo satoru.”

the classroom door slid open and the camera was abruptly dropped as yaga walked in, a head of white hair only seconds behind. “is that a came–?” his voice was muffled and cut off quickly as the clip ended.

“bagsy my turn,” yuuji practically jumped from his seat, almost spilling the popcorn everywhere as his half off the blanket dropped from his lap. 

megumi grumbled at him as he grabbed the blanket and bag of popcorn from his excitable classmate. “oh no i was in such a rush,” he sarcastically quipped and nobara lightly nudged his shoulder.

gojo behaved as a god now, untouchable to all as he alone was the strongest. even though their teacher had never been anything but overtly childish, his cursed energy wasn’t something that could be ignored. seventeen year old gojo was as human as they come, lovesick and reckless and happy. the balance of the world was yet to be forced upon him. 

yuuji grinned as he sat back properly, having only taken a fraction of the time to find a video he wanted in comparison to their previous snooping session. taking back his bag of popcorn, he settled himself back under the blanket. “want some?” he offered megumi, who shook his head in response. “your loss.”

as per usual, it was shoko’s face up close and personal with the camera as she adjusted the lens and made sure that it was on and focused. once she was satisfied, she spun the camera so that it was facing nanami – yuuji could hardly contain himself at seeing his beloved teacher look so… not muscular and scary. small giggles filling the dorm room.

the two were in one of the tokyo classrooms, and sat on desks on opposing sides of the room. nanami had his head deep in a book that would probably kill any of his classmates from sheer boredom alone.

“who do you think the first of us to die will be?” shoko asked indifferently as nanami’s eyebrows furrowed and he slowly looked to his left with an unimpressed expression. even as a sixteen year old, he was set in his rigid mannerisms and beliefs and often saw his four seniors as pains in the ass. whilst you and shoko were definitely ranked higher in his list of people he could tolerate than gojo and geto, questions like this made him contemplate his future in jujutsu sorcery if this was who he was going to be working alongside.

“why are you asking me that?”

“answer,” shoko demanded, zooming in the camera on nanami’s face. his blonde hair was held neatly in his side parting and he looked like anyone but the nanami the students were familiar with. 

it looked like he was contemplating telling shoko she was odd, or completely blanking her and opting to finish his book, but the thoughtful silence was interrupted by a sudden thud outside of the classroom. their heads darted up to look at the door and peer through the open doorway into the hallway only to hear gojo’s faint ‘i’m okay!’. 

nanami let out a drawn out sigh, shaking his head. “him.”

“none of us!” haibara’s voice called out as he peered out of the classroom’s cupboard that he’d been reorganising (it had been gojo and geto’s job but they’d left it worse than when they’d arrived and he really didn’t want to get told off again by yaga). 

shoko eyed the camera in disbelief, not even trying to entertain the young teen’s impossible ideology. “you know the mortality rate of a sorcerer right?” she called back to haibara who didn’t falter in his cheeriness as he affirmed his point.

“and? geto and gojo are almost special grades already! you’ve got to have some faith in us,” he grinned, slipping his jacket back on as he finished up his tidying. his footsteps held a skip that the older students had lost – an innocence that was rarely allowed to exist in the jujutsu world. 

yuuji had stopped giggling at the younger appearances of the sorcerers he now knew because he didn’t know him. it was a reminder to the three that no matter how positive they remained against the hardships that would come, it wouldn’t matter. it was kill or be killed and one tiny little mistake, one movement a fraction of a second too late, was the difference between getting paid and coming home in a body bag. 

“lame,” shoko rolled her eyes. she tapped her twin twice as she pondered her own question before pointing at the blond opposite her, “my guess is nanami.” despite his disinterest in the question itself, he shot a look of offence to shoko who raised her free hand in surrender. “imagine this: you’re put on a mission with gojo. you’d ask the curse to kill you.”

“i’m getting killed by a curse?” the special grade in question peered into the classroom, glasses pushed up onto his head and revealing his renowned dazzling blue eyes. there was a small scratch on his cheek – presumably from whatever he’d hit into a few minutes prior.

“no, nanami is to avoid you.”

gojo gasped, one hand on the door frame and the other over his heart as he cried out that ‘that couldn’t be true’ and nanami was his ‘bestest bestie for life’. he only halted his dramatics when you and geto forced him out of the doorway so you could join the rest of your classmates.

you sat in your usual seat next to shoko and geto sat on top of your desk. gojo, on the other hand, remained at the door, jaw practically on the floor as he aggressively pointed at the annoyed blond. “guys, nanami is going to die so he doesn’t have to be friends with me, defend me!”

“at least one of us is brave enough to end our suffering,” geto teased, pinching the bridge of his nose with a grin as you lightly hit his arm, scolding him for entertaining gojo’s behaviour.

instead of giving the white haired sorcerer’s antics any more attention, shoko turned the camera so that it was only a couple of inches from your face. “who do you think will die first?”

“satoru,” you said in unison with geto, eliciting another gasp as gojo dropped onto the floor, faking death. 

when he didn’t get the sympathetic reaction he wanted, he abruptly sat up, pointing a finger directly at you and geto, “did we all just forget five minutes ago when i kicked your asses in training?”

“i’m literally a grade two sorcerer, what sort of flex is that mr i’m-practically-special-grade-please-worship-the-ground-i-walk-on?” you scoffed. the video ended a few moments later, cutting off laughter and satoru bickering with you. 

there was a brief moment of silence – mixed feelings towards what the three had just witnessed. of course it was fun to watch their teacher and his friends but death was a sobering event.

“megumi?” nobara gestured for him to take his turn on choosing their next video but he shook his head, cradling what remained of the bag of popcorn (he’d stolen it back after yuuji nearly spilled once he saw nanami).

“no thanks, you can take my go,” he offered and nobara grinned, worries set aside as she leant forward to find the next video. it was like watching a tv show but it was real life and she knew the characters.

yuuji tried to argue it should be his go – megumi did steal his popcorn after all – but megumi didn’t care enough to aid his argument and there was no way yuuji could overpower the orange-haired sorcerer without his support. nobara was a force to be reckoned with and yuuji was scared to make her mad. 

“is that the teacher from kyoto?” nobara asked after several moments of silently scrolling.

yuuji leaned forward to look at the thumbnail of the video she held the cursor over and in between two tall cherry blossom trees was utahime iori. “it is!” he said excitedly; he’d never seen her without the scar before.

the video opened with utahime running towards the camera from the pink trees. they were fully bloomed and in the background there were tourists taking photos.

“did you get a good picture? does my hair look okay?” utahime asked whoever was behind the camera. the questions were so mundane – the questions of teenage girls worried more about their social media than if they’d survive their next mission.

“yeah don’t worry it always does,” shoko’s voice was heard speaking. her hand appeared in the frame a moment later as she handed utahime back her phone. “here’s your phone.”

“you never say that to me,” you grumbled.

“take the hint,” shoko threw a handful of cherry blossom leaves at you and there was the sound of rustling as you tried to shake what you could out of your hair. 

“shoko ieiri!” you whined, followed by some incoherent threat and a complaint that you’d just had your hair done after some curse had ruined it the other week.

utahime picked up the camera, lifting it high up to show off the trees and bustling streets of tourists and commuters. “i thought we specifically didn’t bring gojo and geto to avoid childless arguments.”

“yn’s fault,” shoko countered, jumping away into the frame of the camera as you tried to hit her arm. she giggled, half behind utahime, “do you at least have gojo’s card?”

“you mean this gorgeous thing?” you appeared on the other side of utahime, sleek black card between your fingertips that you showed to the camera. “today is on him ladies.”

“you truly are taking one for the team being with him, i retract all earlier insults.” shoko held her hand out for a truce, bowing her head as you took her hand.

“i appreciate it, it’s not an easy task,” you dramatically wiped a fake tear away from the corner of your eyes. gojo had given you the card before you’d embarked on your monthly trip to the city, telling you that as long as you brought back a bag of sweets and kikufuku from that one cafe, he didn’t care what you spent.

you froze a moment later, a look of deep thought crossing your features, “can you guys hear that?”

“no,” utahime frowned, a look of concern as she glanced around at the crowd. if your day was about to be ruined by a curse, or worse yet, curse users–

“sounds like the card is saying we need to buy overpriced starbucks.” the three of you broke out into grins at the potential that the black card had given you.

“oh my god, you’re so right and wait,” shoko grabbed your wrist and brought the card close to her ear, “it needs cigarettes to be bought too.”

“shoko! you said you were quitting,” utahime nudged her and shoko blew her an apologetic kiss. the nicotine patches she’d bought to try and quit were still sealed and in a draw she hadn’t opened since she put them in there several weeks ago. quitting was nothing more than a fantasy considered once every blue moon.

“she’s a liar–”

“–and proud,” shoko finished your sentence with a nonchalant shrug.

“i wish sensei would give me his card for a day,” nobara said wistfully as the video ended, twisting a strand of her orange hair around her finger as she mentally plotted the order in which she’d go to all of the shops in tokyo. all she’d need was a full day – 9 to 5 – and she’d never have to shop another day in her life. 

“you’d max it out within an hour,” yuuji scoffed, scooping a handful of the popcorn into his mouth. nobara scrunched her nose up at him as he messily chewed down.

“actually it’s a lot harder than it would seem,” megumi noted.

nobara raised a brow at him – megumi and shopping? “you’ve tried?”

“we tried multiple times,” megumi spoke without much of a second thought. his jaw clenched slightly as he realised his mistake and the consequential curious eyes . pointing to the dark screen, he lightly elbowed the boy next to him’s side, “yuuji take your go quick before i kick kugisaki out so i can sleep.”

“welcome to yn’s kitchen- don’t touch that,” you whacked geto’s hand with a wooden spoon, stopping him from dipping his finger into the bowl of chocolate icing. the dark haired sorcerer cradled his ‘injured’ hand though it was comical to believe you’d actually done any damage – he was at least an entire six inches taller than you.

“today we made a cake,” you held your arms out in a jazz hands manner to show something that… resembled a cake? if the students squinted maybe they’d agree.

“for satoru’s birthday,” geto added, pulling out the big ‘18’ candles that would eventually be used. 

it was pretty obvious that neither of you had any real baking experience, but the thought was definitely there. the shape somewhat was cylindrical, only a small clump had chosen to stay in the pan and had to be ‘surgically’ glued back to the rest of the shape with a large scoop of nutella. you were hoping that the icing would disguise the bitterness of the burnt edges.

“taste it,” you smiled at the camera, shifting the plate towards geto like you were on some cooking show and that pile of sponge was something to be proud of.

geto pushed the plate back without any hesitation, “i don’t want to.”

“do it.”

“you do it.”

your smile dropped and you flashed geto a glare before composing yourself by clearing your throat. taking a deep breath, you broke off a tiny piece of the top layer of the cake, “so i’m now going to trial this small bit for research purposes.”

you barely had chewed twice before your mouth was scrunching up in disgust and you were disappearing off camera to find a bin to spit it out into.

geto, unfazed and unsurprised by your joint failure, picked up the spatula and began dolloping it onto the top of the cake.

“that’s horrendous-” you came back in view with a glass of water in hand. “what are you doing?”

“hiding that with icing,” he stated obviously.

“we’re still giving that to him?”

geto grinned, directly at the camera as he hoped gojo would find this video after he too ate this. “obviously we’re still giving it to him.”

“it’s weird,” yuuji hummed once the video ended, “those two were sensei’s closest friends and yet he doesn’t speak about either.”

“can you blame him? have you ever spoken to maki about the attack geto led against the school last year?” nobara pointed out and yuuji’s eyes widened as he’d nodded. maki was a woman of few words but when it came to yuta? she’d spend all day ranting about how much she disliked geto and that he’d gotten what was coming to him.

“my turn,” megumi placed the now empty bag of popcorn onto the floor as he scrolled and clicked on the first video that he could find. you weren’t a conversation he was ready to have yet – he could bearly speak to gojo about it, let alone the two loudest mouths in the school.

the video opened to the loud sound of the subway. shoko and geto were sat on one side whilst you and gojo on the other – with you holding up the camera as your beloved boyfriend stood up in the middle of the subway carriage.

“fit check!” gojo did a little spin, showing off his basic hoodie and baggy jeans that he wore almost every time the four snuck out of the high school – or in fact, did anything together for that matter. for someone so rich he really did not use his wealth to its full capacity.

after his little twirl and bow, he dropped back down next to you, looking over the camera into your eyes as he seeked your validation. “i look hot right?”

“you always look hot,” you flipped the camera to face yourself as you not-so-subtly-whispered, “his mum paid me to say that.” the students knew their teacher well enough to know that the dramatic gasp they heard was almost definitely followed by an overexaggerated display of anguish. your giggles and geto’s laughter only confirmed the conclusion.

“i think i need a kiss to recover. or i’ll spend the rest of my days as a ghost, heart broken and never able to leave this subway as i haunt it and all the other coup–” the lens view was obstructed by their teacher’s hoodie as you gave into his demands, cutting off his pathetic rant. 

a loud groan was heard from shoko as she snatched back the camera and held it up to her unimpressed face and geto gagging. “i prefer it when they’re broken up,” she grumbled. 

before megumi could interject and tell nobara to get out now (he didn’t care if yuuji teased him for his ‘need for beauty sleep’), the video ended and automatically opened onto the next one. his words were caught in his throat at the oh-so-familiar apartment.

“get that out of my face.” you were older now, only be a few years but there was a scar on your neck that hadn’t been there in any of the other videos. gojo’s laugh could be heard as he ignored your request and instead held it up high enough to capture you both in the frame.

“you don’t remember this old thing?” he wrapped an arm around your shoulders and pressed a kiss to your forehead, securing you before you could duck away from him.

“we’re twenty one stop acting like we’re ancient,” you crossed your arms in front of yourself as you accepted that maybe just possibly you didn’t quite the match the strength of jujutsu’s strongest sorcerer.

“we may as well be. we’ve got two kids.”

your eyes widened and you shook your head, “we do not–”

“yn!” a small megumi appeared in the corner of the frame and you quickly shut up as gojo gave you an i-told-you-so look. “gojo said he’d help me with my maths homework. an hour ago.” 

the smugness almost instantly vanished from the sorcerers face as you glared at him for once again avoiding his responsibilities. because apparently there was more to looking after children than feeding them and taking them out for the day as a reward when they beat up bullies in school.

“i’m a busy man megumi, saving lives, helping–” gojo winced as you elbowed him in the side, allowing you to slip from his grasp.

“ignore him megs, let’s go into the living room,” you said, ushering the small boy out of the room. two years of this and you were surprised that megumi even still bothered to give gojo a chance to act his age.

“don’t take my sweets!” 

you halted megumi purposefully, “do you want gojo’s sweets?” the camera although kind of forgotten now, still had the young boy in view and picked up his smirk in full as he nodded.

“i’d love them.” gojo winced again, pretending like tears were about to start falling. as if though he couldn’t easily afford to replace anything they did eat by the thousands.

“perfect,” you exaggerated in a condescending tone. as the amazing parent that you were, you made sure not to forget about the other child that was staying with you. “tsu! do you want a treat?”

“yeah!”

“even better,” you clapped your hands together and gestured for megumi to continue on into the living room again. “have fun with your camera love. i’m very busy adulting here.”

“this isn’t over,” the white haired sorcerer shook his head, betrayal clear on his features.

you mouthed the words ‘i love you’, blowing him a little kiss as you disappeared around the corner. gojo gave you a fake grin, narrowing his eyes at the camera.

“jokes on them, i pay the bills. no more electricity for them.”

“you were so cute!” yuuji practically squealed as he and nobara jumped up 

“your hair was so spiky!” nobara reached out to poke at his less bold spikes that he sported nowadays. they had earnt him his nickname of ‘sea urchin’ but still couldn’t beat his younger hairdo.

“can we meet her?” yuuji asked, the poor boy having been oblivious to any of the social cues that nobara already had. nobara coughed at his request, eyes flicking between the two boys.

megumi shook his head. “i think that’s enough for tonight. please, kugisaki,” he nodded his head towards the door. the girl gave him a quick salute, completing her secret handshake with yuuji before she grabbed the laptop and disappeared from their dorm back to her own.

the dark haired student ignored yuuji’s complaints as he dropped himself back onto his bunk bed, reaching for his phone. upon opening his messages, he scrolled to a contact and pressed on the chat. 

all of the messages displayed on the screen were sent from him to the unknown contact. there was never a response, or even a read message. just ‘delivered’. he knew that if he scrolled up it would be much the same. the last message he’d ever received was one on his 14th birthday; a simple ‘happy birthday. i love you. i’m sorry’.

hi. we miss you. i hope you’re doing okay.

taglist. @thefictionalcharacterssimp @hana-patata @mor-pheus @leathairs @sh0ek0 @maliakealoha @levisteeacup @g-kleran @stevenknightmarc @n1kimura @darliingyu @saturn-alone @splxtscreen @leah-rose03 @rinshoe @laurenzitaa @patricia142lilian @sabo-has-my-heart @wooasecret @dahliawarner @kysrion @dreamerdeity @mwah-chia @geromiegerald @arminsarlerts

[yuriartillery]

i'd say my main complaint with cca is the pacing. it doesn't have time to say everything it's trying to. jumping in en media res to after char has already begun his war on the earth sphere was the first red flag for me in that regard.

almost every character that isn't char or amuro feels like fodder. they're the barest smidge of characterization in a fruitless attempt to gain some sympathy when they inevitability and unceremoniously axed. if they're lucky they get used to develop char or amuro a bit. and maybe i could forgive this if this was actually the Char and Amuro show, but instead we spend a solid chunk of movie focusing on quess and hathaway.

the quess storyline in cca is a trite retreading of the dozen or so "newtype girl on the enemy side that has a connection with the main male child soldier and then dies tragically" plot lines we've seen way too many times except paced way too fast to actually have any emotional impact. like i was already rolling my eyes when ple2 died and that had so much more time to develop. but by cca this trope is so over done in the uc that it's actively annoying. its not that i dislike quess as a character! i know some people hate her character but i actually think id like her a lot in a different (or at least more fleshed out) story. she's the best new character in the movie and a hell of a lot more interesting than hathaway, who feels like the most nothingburger character in a movie full of nothingburger new characters. but again my main complaint with the subplot is that honestly by this point tomino did not need to rehash this again. he's already rehashed the lalah story so many times in so many ways and this one doesn't do enough different to be interesting on it's own or in relation to the char/amuro story it's latched onto. like we did not have enough time in this movie do this whole plot and the time spent on it makes the char/amuro rivalry feel undercooked, especially in the context of this being the conflict that ends their rivalry in mutual destruction.

i felt so disappointed by cca that i haven't touched anything uc set after it. anyway i embrace the incoming artillery strike.

"a crucial part of CCA is the crushing sense of bleakness the feeling that nothing is getting better that something has to change. but no single person can make that change happen! thats why we see another generation of newtypes make the exact same mistakes. the very same mistakes that char and amuro made in 79" thats four and kamille! you've just described the point of four's storyline in zeta! char and amuro practically turn to the camera and say as much! and it was great in zeta in no small part because they had multiple episodes to build this parallel and develop the characters involved! but then tomino did it AGAIN and AGAIN with other newtype girls later in zeta and in zz! by the time of cca it feels less like tomino is making a point about the cyclical nature of war and more like he can't think of anything else to say and is just falling back on an Ol' Reliable which is so worn out it isn't very reliable anymore. the repetition isn't reinforcing the point anymore, it's just undermining the impact. i'm just glad tomino got over his obsession with this point by the time of turn a. turn a is good.

So, this might come off as a little harsh, but this is an extremely surface level reading of Char's Counterattack. What follows is a little unfocused but I just have so much to say about this movie.

Char's Counterattack is a film that is almost entirely about Char. Everything that happens in it can be traced back to Char, each character reveals or reflects something about Char. We begin in media res because after the end of Zeta and ZZ we already know what Char has been through to lead him here.

Char Aznable has tried to cut out his heart for the sake of revenge in 79. He's watched not one but two movement for spacenoid liberation collapse after going rotten from with in. His protege, Kamille Bidan, the child he tasked with building a new future, was subjected to a fate worse than death to protect the future from Paptimus Scirocco. He has been a traitor, a soldier, and a demagoue for his own sake and the sake of the future. And now he is staring at the end of history, he can see everything laid out in front of him getting worse, forever. Nothing he or anyone else has done has mattered at all. So he has resolved to do something that will change something, make the current order impossible to maintain, skip to the end! We know that as soon as we hear that Amuro Ray and Londo Bell are too late to stop another one of Char's rocks from hitting the Earth.

Quess is Kamille Bidan after Kamille Bidan. She is impulsive, emotional, selfish, immature, and has a strong sense of justice. Her relationship with her parents is terrible and she's stifled by the Federation's vision of the future and herself. Char takes her under his wing in the same way he mentored Kamille, but through their relationship we see how much worse Char has gotten. He doesn't try to help her grow into a soldier or a more complete person. He doesn't have anything to give her except proximity to authority. All Char sees in her is a means to an end. He doesn't care about the future any more.

Hathaway is the Fa Yuiry to Quess's Kamille. He's sort of a newtype but all of his concerns are very ordinary. What he wants for Quess is contrasted against what Char wants, and while it is marked by an masculine chauvanism, the immature vulgarity of it heightens the contrast.

But what it really comes down to is his relationship to Amuro Ray. Char Aznable is a man of deception. He deceives is allies, his enemies, and himself. The only person he feels he can be honest with now is Amuro. Even though he has told himself that he feels nothing, that he is doing what must be done no matter what, he doesn't want to kill everyone, deep down. He doesn't want to kill himself either. At every opportunity he gives Amuro Ray the ability to stop him and to prove him wrong. He sees Amuro as his equal and he wants there to be another path!

But Amuro Ray had his life destroyed by Char Aznable. Amuro Ray has spent his life desperately reacting to whatever new bullshit Char has pulled! He has no reason to want to save Char or to give Char another chance or any of it! So Amuro ends up fighting for a status quo that is killing everyone a little slower then Char's ultimatum will. It's only a rivalry in the broadest of strokes.

I think the film is paced and constructed perfectly to communicate that. Each scene does a wonderful job of advancing this world according to Char Aznable, where everyone has petty feelings that are missing the bigger picture, where everything is meaningless, and everyone hurts each other. Where nobody even tries to understand each other any more. And at the end, during the Axis Shock, Amuro Ray finally understands why Char is the way he is! There's understanding! It averts the crisis! For a brief moment there's a way forward! It makes me cry and cry and cry!!!

[prettyboysdontlookatexplosions]

medialog january 2k25

books

ling ma, severance - first book of the year an unfortunate dud! the most notable thing about this book is that it’s a pandemic story published in 2018, but this is also true of carmen maria machado’s “inventory” which is a much better story at like 15% of the length. by chance literally the day after i started reading this brandon taylor sent out a newsletter talking about first person narration devoid of interiority, which allowed me to be like, yes, that! that’s what’s so fucking annoying about this! a first person narrative that feels like a list of stuff that happened, instead of a glimpse into someone else’s consciousness. and i knooooow people would say that’s the poiiiint because the book is reeeeally about late capitalist anomie or whatever, which would also be used to explain the fact that the narrator has no personality or emotional life, like she’s just so disaffected and detached and blah blah blah, but the theoretical justification for this mode doesn’t have any bearing on the visceral fact that i just at no point cared about anyone in this story, because it’s impossible to care about a narrator who doesn’t care about anything or act like a human being (a species that famously cares about things lol). might also be impossible to care about a narrator with a trust fund… open to having my mind changed on this one though. other complaints: prose clunky, nobody else in this book has a personality either, palpably convinced of its own interest and importance in a way that feels very Litfic Does Genre Trope Without Wondering If Any Genre Writers Have Thought About This At All Ever (zombies as capitalist metaphor is like... even i know that and i hate zombie shit!) the pandemic stuff closest to being interesting but the page count is unforgivably focused on 1 million backstory flashback chapters totally divorced from the present day because god forbid someone who wants to tell an immigrant narrative figure out a way to somehow integrate this into the actual plot of their book or otherwise develop a character through scene and action… truly this reads like someone was trying to write an autobiographical novel and realized they couldn’t make it interesting/saleable so they chucked a pandemic narrative at it to capitalize on the twenty-first century genre turn. i don’t know if that’s what happened… but that is how poorly the disparate threads are woven together.

miranda popkey, topics of conversation - really liked this! like it more the more i sit with it. i had it already and it happens to get mentioned in that taylor newsletter i mentioned as being a different kind of first-person narrator, so i read it figuring at least it wouldn’t annoy me in the same way as severance. i was a little skeptical at first for two reasons: (1) the book is told through a series of conversations across a long span of years, which i was worried was a cheat to avoid having a plot; (2) early on lots of women and sex and power stuff, which is dangerous territory re: potential to irritate me. but it won me over on the second point quickly by undercutting what it had seemed to be doing in a refreshing way near the end of the first chapter, and by the end i was ready to concede point (1) because it had done a very good job of telling a story beneath the story it was telling; more than once i was kind of rolling my eyes like, okay, but, really?, only to find a little while later the book addressing precisely what had been my concern, which made me feel like i had been pleasantly tricked. the prose is unshowy but very self-assured with a good ear, and a few lines/passages burrowed under my skin. the narrator is self-critical without being self-indulgent… idk, it threaded a number of needles very well. impressed and pleased.

myriam gurba, mean - another one i started out wobbly on and wound up liking a lot. in this case, the cover/what i’d heard led me to expect a different, darker, tone than i found, and i wasn’t sure i was on board; funnily enough, at one point i thought, disparagingly, “eh, kinda zine-y,” and then something clicked and i remembered wait, i like zine-y, and that let me recalibrate and get sucked in. mean is a memoir, more or less, opening with a description of a rape-murder in gurba’s hometown and then switching gears to become a coming-of-age story in vignettes, with the reason for the opening scene eventually coming clear in a way that made me really admire what the book was doing formally as a way to talk about sexual assault; i was also reminded of the absolutely true diary of a part-time indian, a book i loved, both for its form and for, to some extent, its tone, or its willingness to combine a light touch and a sense of humor with some dark-ass material (although mean is not YA and goes much darker in both content and expression) & often incisive racial commentary. gurba is a really playful, funny, curious writer, and while i think she could have killed a few darlings, by the end her voice had really won me over. she is not opposed to pushing hard on the bounds of good taste, and i would say that most of the time i was with her because she was either honestly capturing the sociopathic awfulness of teenagers, including her own teenage self (people who self-righteously respond “well i actually never laughed at XYZ in high school…” this book is not for you and also you are annoying, and i say this as someone known in high school as a bit of a PC scold myself!), or else, for example, making jokes about her own sexual assault or other issues, and then there were some times where, like… ok maybe an illustrative example is that i saw a goodreads review that was like “i was loving this book until she used touretted as a verb, my condition is not a cute joke,” and i was like, on the one hand, i get it, but on the other hand, the prison rape joke didn’t phase you? the holocaust joke? (holocaust joke distinct from the chapter about how reading the diary of anne frank made her horny btw.) so… on that score tolerance will reasonably vary lol. given that a fair amount of the back half of the book is in fact about the aftermath of sexual assault, i really admired how the book refused any kind of redemptive arc, landing on a brutal note, but also avoided feeling oppressively downbeat by virtue of the ferocity of its own telling, which stands as its own proof of survival.

elaine castillo, how to read now: essays - not for me. none of the ideas here felt new if you’ve ever spent more than five minutes considering the relationship between art, race, & politics, and i didn’t feel like they were ever explored at a depth beyond (or… even equal to?) that which i would find on a random tuesday scrolling my tumblr dash. elegance of expression can be its own justification but stylistically this book mostly just convinced me that books are not blogs and should not sound like the internet; the lack of discipline which can be a feature in internet writing (not always! but can be) is always a bug in print (or, at least, i haven’t encountered the book to convince me otherwise). i was excited that the title of the first essay was “reading teaches empathy and other fictions” but then instead of unpacking the cultural ideology that associates any kind of moral education with leisure pursuits at all it was mostly about how the white straight male story is granted universality but others are not, which… you perhaps see what i mean about how this will not be revelatory for those of us enrolled in the continuing ed program at supernatural dot edu slash tumblr dot html. there’s a weird essay about going to new zealand and being like “wow imagine if native relationships were this good in the US?” which i found weirdly uncomfortable to read from an american who by her own admission is not well-versed in that region’s history. she opens an essay by being like “i know it’s basically boring to talk about how you hate joan didion” and then spends 45 pages doing that (including what i think is a misread of at least the tone of didion’s comment that writing is the act of a bully - i’m not a didionhead and would never defend her famously terrible politics, but a) she is i think pretty clearly being both hyperbolic and self-deprecating b) castillo takes this as the chance to be like “well i write to be vulnerable and connect,” which… perhaps this is self-indulgent self-deprecation on my own part but i have an instinctive and strong aversion to writers hyping up their own reasons for writing, lol c) this is objectively not a stance exclusive to white ladies bc zadie smith once said essentially the same thing except i think she used the word sociopathic lol)... and then in the end notes of that chapter she drops a casual rec for the “excellent” show our flag means death which… girl, be serious… you’re gonna write 300 pages about the dangers of reading without context and then simp for the slaveholder RPF show with no commentary whatsoever? it’s fine to like that show btw i might watch it myself one of these days but it’s just deranged to drop this without qualifiers in a book allegedly against the act of eliding historical reality for the sake of aesthetic pleasure and comforting fantasy! she also does two things that are unfortunately guaranteed to make me, personally, insane (characterizing damon lindelof’s HBO watchmen as an important statement on race in america and being kinda wrong about the odyssey) which i will address below the cut at the bottom of this post because i understand that my own need to talk about them is the result of my bad personality and also this is long enough already.

movies

no - this is a 2012 movie about the plebiscite vote that ended the pinochet reign, starring gael garcia bernal as the young ad guy the leftists rope in to helping them make the best use of their allotted 15 minutes of TV time. i really loved this, for a few reasons. first, an interestingly and well-made movie; the director is the guy who did spencer, which i hated, and i don’t know if it’s a matter of directing in spanish or what but it felt like two totally different worlds. second, some extremely funny and perhaps broadly relevant commentary on the purity-strategy tension in leftist spaces; i particularly loved the scene where our protagonist unveils the logo and the leftists are like, “oh, and the different colors of the rainbow represent the factions of the leftist coalition coming together, right?” and he’s like “uh huh. yeah. totes.” third, there’s a matter-of-factness to the way the movie depicts living in a military dictatorship — depicts oppression, depicts military violence against civilians — that felt refreshing and, ummm…. very un-American. perhaps very latin american. but certainly very un-American. something really fucked up happens and it feels bad and then you go home and play trains with your kid and you maybe don’t expect that everyone is spending 8 hours a day wringing your hands about How Is Anyone To Live Now. fortuitous timing for me personally maybe to watch this on new year’s day 2025. also gael garcia bernal is always the only guy in the scene wearing jeans and rides his skateboard everywhere. strong rec.

the shop around the corner - the philadelphia story baby jimmy stewart pilled me so bad that when i learned this both starred baby jimmy stewart and was directed by ernst lubitsch i was like, wow i GOTTA see that. two coworkers hate each other while falling for the anonymous correspondents that are, of course, each other all along… this does a couple things that mitigate the screwball romcom gender politics problem, my favorite of which is introducing the female lead in a scene that highlights her smarts and competence, which is important in a love story about a meeting of the minds. has superb production design, lighting so good even i was like “wow the lighting,” a great ensemble cast given a good amount to do in a way that makes the whole movie feel really suffused with tenderness and care even amidst all the screwball prickliness, and most importantly some incredibly funny jokes.

one way or another (todo modo) - this is a really weird italian 70s thriller whose plot is largely incomprehensible if you are not conversant in italian party politics of the 70s, which i am not, but it was still worth watching for the unbelievable Catholicism Is So Fucked Up vibes… the whole movie takes place in a catholic spirituality retreat packed with power-players, largely underground in the spookiest ass rooms imaginable… there’s a ruthless priest and a million political freaks… and then people start dying… kinda conclave meets and then there were none meets glass onion? tbh sassier and bitchier and more honest about institutional catholicism than conclave!

a complete unknown - most of the non-singing parts of this movie are Fine, I Guess, If You Like Biopics; some are pretty bad (why does this movie hate alan lomax so much… to say nothing of the women, through no fault of the two actresses doing their damned best…). the cast is reliably good, i was worried at first timmy was going to be giving SNL sketch the whole time but something shifted and he won me over and i thought he was good and especially that he was very funny in the too-rare moments the movie found itself a sense of humor, mostly on the topic of bob dylan being a weird freak pathological liar with no social skills or interest in developing them (valid and should have taken up way more of the runtime than it did!!!). lots of people have complained about how much of this movie is just watching bob dylan write down lines while playing his guitar but i actually think this is even worse than people are saying because what it does is almost entirely obscure dylan’s voracious cultural appetite and eclectic influences, which is a huge part of what makes him the artist of he is, and which he himself is the first to own (chronicles volume 1 — of 1 lmao — is in my memory almost entirely dylan talking about what he was reading and listening to and watching as a young person). however the reality is that none of this really matters to the viewing experience of the movie because the movie smartly understands it’s not going to be better at making a movie than bob dylan is at making songs, so it just never makes you wait very long before the next time bob dylan is playing a bob dylan song, and if you are a certain kind of person for whom the music of bob dylan has a certain kind of effect — which i am — what happens is that the opening notes of one of the best songs in american music history starts up and all cares over “screenwriting” and “gender” and such things fall away and you just sit there in a haze so grateful to live in a world where bob dylan gave us “girl from north country.” also, credit where credit is due: the movie looks very good, in a very standard hollywood way but well that’s a dying art it seems. i liked all the lens flares in the night scenes! they were pretty and evocative without being distracting!

juror #2 - i love watching a movie about people talking about a process while i wash dishes. bonus points for this one because of my wrongful convictions thing — i found it genuinely a relief to watch a courtroom drama in which we know the whole time that the logic of the court seems persuasive to many people but is wholly wrong. nicholas hoult!

jay and silent bob reboot - this is an objectively pretty bad and at times genuinely offensive movie that made me laugh so, so much. im sorry

presence - i was absolutely never not going to love a soderbergh ghost story; i like that it’s less a horror movie and more a family drama from the perspective of the ghost, and i like that steven soderbergh, who i first started feeling interested in because of how unusually willing he is (among our A-tier dude directors) to view women as potential protagonists, made a movie largely about a sad lonely teenage girl. camera work on the ghost POV very cool and for me very effective. a tight 85 minutes! they shot it in 11 days! i love you steven!

nosferatu - already said this was a miss for me, and the more i think about it the more i feel reasonably sure that it would have been even if i were not so dracula-pilled… idk. i agree with my anon who called it cold. there’s a fundamental distance between the storyteller and the story that, again, was part of what i enjoyed about the lighthouse, but just doesn’t work for me with a more traditional, more visceral (in multiple senses) tale. similarly to the line about how there can’t be an anti war war movie, because you can’t portray combat without glorifying it, i sorta feel like maybe you can’t tell a story where you want credit for giving your abused and disbelieved female protagonist agency and also have multiple scenes that are like, “ok now do the crazy possessed horror chick thing” lol. i also thought it looked kinda bad in parts and really muddy in all the moonlight scenes but i did see one review on lbxd that was basically like “this movie only looks good in IMAX bc regular theaters can’t get the blacks deep enough” so… maybe that’s true. on the bright side: nicholas hoult!

music

kendrick lamar, gnx - this thing happens to me often with music where anything presented as A Big Deal i have a hard time listening to because i keep being like no it’s not the right time… this is why for example i have never listened to a mitski album and also why until now i had never heard kendrick outside of his features with taylor (bad, not his fault) and the lonely island (p. good) and, ofc, not like us. but “squabble up” came up at the singles jukebox and i got really into one of the slant-rhyme runs near the end and the general personality of his flow so i decided to check out the album and would you believe? kendrick lamar, good at rapping. i like how this album is like kind of about having a god complex and sort of knowing you’re being crazy but also what if actually you kind of mean it? (people get mad if you say this kind of thing so don’t tell anyone but it’s actually similar to the pose i enjoy taylor striking on some of the wilder moments on TTPD, lol.)

girl pusher, gaslight gatekeep girlpusher - 20 minutes of very of-the-moment hardcore-adjacent punk, mostly too hardcore for me (literally, i don’t like music that’s all screamy) but the 3 songs that aren’t are real bangers.

ghoulies, shafted by the algorithm - 20 minutes of bright synthy punk where i have no idea what anyone is saying, kind of like matt and kim with less abrasive vocals? (remember matt & kim??? no? bc i’m old? well ok). not an album i’ll return you but i liked the vibe enough to chuck the whole thing onto my 2k25 rolling faves list and have been enjoying the occasional 2-minute infusions of pep!

underscores, wallsocket (director’s cut) - really impressed by this one, and also really enjoyed it. i keep seeing people call underscores hyperpop but either their earlier work (which i haven’t heard) is very different or i just don’t actually know what hyperpop is (very possible). to me it’s giving aughts indie, maybe a little emo but like the bright eyes kind, it’s giving saddle creek but made by a kesha fan. (does anyone else feel like we’re really in a post-kesha era in a way that is not being appreciated…) catchy, inventive, varied but cohesive, angry and funny, political & personal in the lyrics, sometimes at the same time. there’s a song called “johnny johnny johnny” which is an incredible banger about being groomed by an internet predator in middle school that really blew me away; would also rec “cops and robbers” just because it slaps. but even the quiet songs are good!

rosie gray, louder, please - flawless and sometimes even kind of interesting (although never that interesting) dance-infused pop (pop-infused dance? i think the first one but i’m no expert). pretty, fun, sometimes endearingly unsubtle — there’s a song literally called “party people” and another one where the refrain is “the best things in life are free,” also one called “switch” that rhymes “positions” with “submission.” dumb but thoughtfully and expensively so (or so it sounds, which is what counts). the way that people talk about feeling when they watch influencers swanning poolside in ibiza or whatever, that’s what listening to this album makes me feel like. vicarious luxury and all i need is a pair of headphones. another one where i don’t anticipate returning to the album as an album much but i rarely hit skip when a track shuffles my way.

zora, BELLAdonna - yoooooo this album FUCKS, like, SEVERELY!!!!!! saw someone rec this saying it was framed as a black trans revenge fantasy, which, i’ll be honest, turned out to have absolutely no bearing my listening experience whatsoever, but i am dutifully repeating because maybe you, too, will be intrigued enough to listen, and then discover that this album has BOPS. i am not really up to the task of describing this one — rap/hip-hop forward but with glimpses of both r&b and a pop (maybe even hyperpop?) sensibility, obviously broad in its influences (there are at least two likely refs to bodak yellow lol) while sounding like the clear work of a distinct voice, retro and futuristic by turns or sometimes at the same time. sounds really really cool and really really fun. sick flow, sick beats, a song called “sick sex”... strong strong overall rec here, this album rules.

single of the year so far is "IT girl" by jade (from little mix!!!) btw. if you care. really delivering on always low-key being the most interesting of the quartet in what she's put out so far, not all of it is my thing but she has a Vision and IT girl is a certified bop... really curious about where she goes next.

okay so petty grudge-holding below the cut:

first, the watchmen thing. to start with, she drops in the intro that she admires HBO watchmen, and like, did this alone make me read the entire book less generously than i otherwise might have? entirely possible. that is me owning my positionality as a reader. anyway. mostly here i just want to say that she specifically discusses the fucking 1922 movie about a black hero saving a grateful white crowd that made me the joker and drops that the name of the hero is “historically accurate” because he’s named for the first black marshal in oklahoma or whatever, which, ok. cute, i guess, if i didn’t hate this. what i hate, and what is not historically accurate, is: the existence of a film in 1922 (7 years after birth of a nation!!!!!) with a portrayal of american race relations that looks anything at all like the one in this movie. i mean it’s just crazy. and i find it first of all just inane because if you’re capable of writing this scene and thinking it feels plausible, you by definition do not have a good handle on the history of antiblack racism in america or how deeply it has resided at the core of american popular culture (among other things), and second of all genuinely kind of offensive because of the smash cut to Real Historical Atrocity that follows, underscoring the alleged “realism” of the scene. and it is insane to me to praise this scene for its “historically accurate” detail in a book, again, largely about the importance of bringing an understanding of historical context to your reading. it makes the author look a little bit like she only means that for stuff she already happens to know about or saw someone else talk about online. lol.

also the essay starts out being like “another day another jkr twitter meltdown” which does not help with the sense that these essays were blog posts that did not get sufficiently cleaned up for publication (is that true? idk. it’s how it reads though!). and it’s called “the limits of white fantasy” (but then is largely about how HBO watchmen is good lmao) and has a thing like “well rightwing types can appropriate symbols from harry potter and the hunger games and wherever else because those authors never cared about oppression they were just interested in its trappings.” first of all, leave my girl suzanne collins, cashing her checks blissfully offline, out of this. but second of all i actually think this is a substantively wrong diagnosis. jkr very, very, very obviously and sincerely cares about oppression. she is just catastrophically wrong about who is oppressing whom! but it’s extremely clear she thinks of herself as an actual victim of the actual injustice (in her head) of the woke trans mob or whatever. ditto antivaxxers using hunger games cues or whatever. they sincerely believe their rights are being infringed upon. sometimes people are actually wrong! sometimes people care a lot about morality and justice and are wrong about what those things are! i think this is in general harder for people to contend with than the idea that anyone engaging in such wack behavior just “doesn’t care”... but it is true. writing this out makes me think i undersold the insight potential value-add of naomi klein’s doppelganger, because she’s actually really good about recognizing that while these movements involve a lot of sociopath grifters at the top, the footsoldiers are people responding to ways they do in fact feel victimized (and sometimes actually are, e.g. i literally can’t remember if klein talks about this or not although i think probably yes but a lot of people in the alt-wellness/medicine space got there as a result of terrible experiences with healthcare that failed to address their physical and emotional needs).

ok also AND one last thing about this essay, she really gives the impression that she thinks damon lindelof is like the first person ever in history to politicize the figure of the vigilante/superhero… lmao? she praises the show for being about how actually community is necessary and justice can’t be done solo, which, first of all, just gonna throw this out there, there are ways to tell that story without being like truly the most police brutality apologia nonsense i have ever seen, and secondly, this is literally thematically expressed quite poignantly in alan moore & dave gibbons’ comic limited series watchmen in the scene where the guy acting as a lone vigilante who has taken the fate of humanity into his own hands nukes a bunch of new yorkers coming together to try to mediate some conflict. do i think that you need to have read watchmen to write an essay — not a BLOG POST on your DUMB BLOG, an ESSAY in a BOOK — about the politics HBO watchmen? i mean, maybe? is that so crazy? she says making hooded justice black is a radical reimagining of a comics character which is so funny because it makes hooded justice sound like he’s fucking superman or something and not a probable nazi who dressed up as a kinky klansman as part of watchmen’s commentary on the politics of superheroes lmao. like hooded justice is already a radical reimagining of the superhero mythos… because he sucks… and i guess in my heart no i don’t think i’m just being a weird watchmen stan (lmao) to say, “you actually can’t get a meaningful read on the politics of HBO watchmen without taking into account that the actual intervention being performed with this character is ‘what if this nazi was actually a sympathetic black man.’” do you see how that feels different? (also not for nothing but wrt the idea of HBO HJ being inspired by the movie about a black hero, again, in the comics HJ through his klan-ish costuming is already inspired by american iconography of heroism — arguably one he also saw in a silent movie that actually existed by the name of birth of a nation lmao!!!!! — which is part of the indictment of american hero iconography… i mean whatever. it’s so fucking stupid. btw her big takeaway from this character’s arc is that justice has to happen in community which is also funny because like you know who had a really strong sense of community? the klan.) do you see how it feels maybe extra different in a show whose ultimate thesis is something like “what if nuclear weapons were good if we gave them to a black lady cop who loves doing police brutality so so much”?

and… ok one LAST-last thing… in her informal endnotes, she cites “the watchmen universe” created by moore & gibbons, which… idk man. on the one hand i’m like, ok but it actually is mostly irrelevant to my textual beefs here that watchmen was in fact not intended to be a “universe” as we now use that term in the IP era and that the extent to which it has become one has been expressly at the disapproval of moore largely because of the fact that DC fucked him over so bad with this that it literally changed comics contracts going forward lmao. but on the other hand, if you like claim to care about the social context in which art was created, isn’t it not the best look to do not a single google and uncover the most famous example of the abominable labor practices of the comics industry? i acknowledge i could be indulging in pettiness at this point.

OKAY so that’s all on watchmen i think. the odyssey thing is smaller and less of a big deal, more just goofy. so she talks about the cyclops sequence and highlights how in recounting this story to the phaeacians odysseus is identifying certain arbitrary marks of “civilization” such as cultivating fields, and how he ignores the arguably very “civilized” acts we see polyphemus the cyclops commit, such as tending his sheep and making cheese. this is all fine and unobjectionable, even true, although i will say that, first, she presents this like these are insights she is bringing to her close reading of the text but i really struggle to imagine the person in the past several decades who would disagree with the fundamental thesis “the stories and myths and texts of ancient cultures served in part to delineate and reinforce their own social norms”; and second, she opens the essay with an epigraph from toni morrison talking about how she always admired how homer could make you feel sad for the man-eating cyclops, but then she doesn’t bring this quote up at all and talks about polyphemus’s sheep and cheese as though recognizing in them the marks of humanity is, again, a novel way to read the text? idk maybe i am just misreading her tone bc by this point i was very tired of how impressive she seemed to find herself but i found it odd because she’s like “see polyphemus is actually complicated but odysseus doesn’t see that” and i’m like well yeah that’s like what morrison was talking about… i have no idea how this would have scanned in ancient greece bc i’m not a classicist but neither are you so… anyway. i couldn't figure out her attitude on the odyssey (or this chunk of it) as a text, i guess.

so she takes us through the whole incident, including a cutesy reading of “nobody is blinding me” as like a metaphor for how power operates by making it impossible to name it, which, sure. have fun. and she closes on odysseus’s final boast along the lines of “if anyone asks tell them it was odysseus of ithaca son of laertes who blinded you.” and then she goes into this whole thing about how like… this is odysseus wielding his privilege basically, that he’s doing this because he’s so secure in his name and the power that grants him. she says, “It’s his confidence in his own context that is Odysseus’s greatest strength, his greatest privilege, and his greatest cruelty.” which… i guess kinda makes sense… if you ignore the part where namedropping himself is literally what GETS HIS ASS CURSED? he drops his name and instantly polyphemus is like “grandpa end that motherfucker” and boom, odysseus’s men are doomed to death and he is cursed to ten years at sea. like… it is literally not his greatest strength!!! it is the thing that gets his ass beat!!!! and notice that observing this, the BASIC LITERAL PLOT OF THE TEXT, does not require morally defending odysseus, or claiming homer was woke, or whatever. it is very obviously the case that the text does not think odysseus’s thing about his name is bad and he is being punished for it to learn lmao. i actually literally pulled my old fagles translation off the shelf to find what bernard knox had to say about this, if anything, in the intro, and he reads it as an expression (one of several) of the same heroic code you see achilles living by in the iliad, which includes the idea that you must take credit for your shit — even in this situation in which doing so puts yourself and your ship at great risk. this is not a particularly sympathetic reading to most modern readers! but it is one that takes into account the fact that this is the inciting incident for LITERALLY THE ENTIRE PLOT OF THE POEM!!! like it is crazy to quote that line and end the story there as if odysseus just walks away unbothered! the point of that interaction is not that he’s acting like a vanderbilt trying to get a table at a fancy restaurant, and it is not incidental what happens next because what happens next is THE ENTIRE STORY! and, like… it’s also not incidental because the fact of the matter is the world of homer is simply not a world where your name protects you, or achilles and agammemnon would not be hanging out in the fucking underworld. i’m thinking here about knox’s comment on the iliad that it was written in a century where athens spent more years at war than not, and how crucial understanding that is for understanding the world these stories were created in… i mean on the one hand whatever but on the other hand the essay collection is literally about the idea of reading things in context… so like… whatever. you could take the events in the text and then discuss their influence on 3000 years of western art and how that trickles down into values or whatever, i guess… but she didn’t do that so like :/

also then she says “he may be traveling, but he’s not a migrant,” which i just found goofy because i’m not really convinced the concept of A Migrant as she seems to want us to read it makes a ton of sense to superimpose onto the mediterranean 3000 years ago. (i feel like A Migrant requires the concept of… nations? borders? etc.?) happy to be corrected on this by any classicists who follow me.

also her didion essay is not as good a takedown as either didion's own takedown of woody allen or barbara harrison's takedown of didion. lol.

anyway. ok. that’s my grudges off my chest lmao.

[devilheartsblog]

I watch World of Winx,this is what I have to say about Season 1

Before anything I’m considering WoW it’s SEPERATE CANON. No Alfea, no Dragon Flame, no Black Circle, no Earth Fairies. But I will touch on the connections to the show in a later point.

Let’s start with the things I like. The concept is alright, I was doubtful but after watching the show it made more sense. Some new characters like the talents, Ace, the Queen and Shaman were fun and I like the variety for the talents. Roxy was quite enjoyable too (until she went on a mission with Bloom and it felt like she was her apprentice again despite them seeming to be the same age). The way the Winx use their powers outside of battle was refreshing and it’s nice to see how they can read different auras, and I love Aisha using water, I just like elemental magic a lot so yea. I also quite liked Bloom arguing with ace and the build up to her getting fired, but the toupee thing was stupid.

Now the things I don’t like which there is a LOT. So brace yourselves guys. There are a lot of plot holes such as Bloom not revealing her fairy form to Jim but Naoki (the talent geek) is okay because I guess he likes comics?? Also Detective Evans and Gomez aren’t a main focus despite being important, and it’d be more interesting if they were Anabelle’s friends as her flashback shows a blonde woman and brunette guy. Some other plot points are references to Winx Club such as Bloom coming up with the name, the girls only being on Earth for months, and Roxy and Bloom having relations outside the club. Which, guys girls and nbs, makes me wonder WHERE THE FUCK ARE THE WIZARDS? Ogron get yo ass over here and capture Roxy you stupid f- It seems like the show wants to be its own thing but has to be like “hey remember they’re the Winx Club” which makes even less sense. There’s also the travelling problem with how going from Paris ro Beijin is a van drive away and Beijing to London is a 2 minute walk. And going from California to Switzerland is just around the corner. Makes you wonder how Jim got to all those places so easily.

Other than that Crocodile man was annoying past the 3rd episode, like please someone turn him into a purse. And while the Winx use their powers in unique ways outside of battle, in battle they suck hard. Flora uses the same vine spell on Crocodile Man 4 TIMES, is she stupid? And honestly a lot of the plot feels dragged out because of the battles if you ask me, especially Crocodile getting away with the watch about 3 times.

I’m dedicating Dreamix to its own section because where do I start. First off, I don’t like the designs. The outfits are too glam for battle and the wings are so over-detailed it’s gross and would be better fit for a live action effect. The transformation sequences are also pretty bad. The girls just sit around as magic dust gives them accessories, which just makes me miss season 1-4’s transformations. And the way they earn them is so…like why bother showing them earn it? Dreamix just happens out of nowhere, they didn’t do shit why should they get Dreamix? At least Mythix and Butterflix are earnt.

I think I’ll stop here otherwise the post will be a bible’s testament worth of complaints. Show’s okay. First half of season 1 was good but then someone invited a season 4 writer and now everything’s about Bloom. So yeah, see you guys on the flipside!

[louscartridge]

valintines day

i do not give permission for my fics to be posted claiming to be yours, translated, or posted on another platform.

cw- none, other then its not really proof read lmao

requested by ❄ anon

summary- ray and y/n have hated every valentines day, except the past year, in result of being able to spend them together.

a/n: i like never write for ray romanticly, and i think this might be like the only time im going to lol soz.

valentines day. one of the cheesiest, most annoying holidays ever. it was just a stupid excuse for people to (usually) spend unnecessary money on someone their dating, just for them to break up 2 months later.

thats what you thought before you got with ray. the two of you got together on valentines day, making the day a little less pointless to you. ray thought the same thing. every valentines day he was throwing a little tantrum about how its pointless, and embarrassing. continuously going in circles to henry, charlotte, jasper, and somewhat shwoz. "even Laylani left me! without an explanation! stupid frickin hawai" they would all have to hear him repeat every year.

luckily, last year that finally stopped. there was no complaints from ray about valentines that year at all, and since ray and y/n were still together, everyone assumed it was gonna be the same this year.

you woke up before ray in the room that you guys shared in the man cave. after brushing your teeth and putting a pair of sweatpants on, you went downstairs. you put your hand over the screen of the autosnacker. "scrambled eggs". once you got your eggs, you turned around to put your plate on the table behind you, just to turn back around towards the autosnacker again. "water melon".

shortly after you ate, you started to get tired again. you layed you head ontop of your arms on the table. just as you were almost asleep, you feel a pair of hands hit down onto your shoulders.

he pushed himself up onto your shoulders, jumping like a kid. "y/n!" it was ray.

"woah youre awake" you say sarcastically.

"yeah here" ray says as he shoves a few roses onto the table infront of you in a glass vase.

you open your eyes slightly. "thank you" you say looking at the flowers just to be cut off by henry and jasper walking in from the elevator. "yeah!" they both start clapping. "we dont have to hear ray complain again this year uh uh" jasper starts dancing. "oh my god im going back to sleep" you say turning your head so your face down into your arms.

a couple hours later, you wake up to the sound of the emergency alarm going off. you lift your head up with a groan. "uhgg" "oh come on you need to wake up anyway" schwoz said while waving some sort of gun looking device around. "ok so im gonna take this before something else gets blown up" charlotte said taking the weapon away from schwoz. "time to blow a bubble" "and fight trouble" ray finished. "ok that was kinda lame" henry scoffed. ray ignored henrys remark for once, and walked over to you. "oh and before i forget, here" ray said before handing you a somewhat small square box. "love you" he said wrapping his arms around your head. "love you too" you said back, with your head on his chest. "ok lets go!" ray said rather fast before going up the tubes with henry.

'second valentines day is a win' you think to yourself.

[devine-fem]

lol might get hate for this but in my opinion in terms of the ranking the SuperBat pairings….

1.) Damijon/Jondami- Yes I’m completely bias but I never felt this strong for such a pairing (regardless either platonic/romantic! ) Such an iconic (chaotic) duo! I’m glad the dynamic of Damian and Jon worked out well and is well loved!

2.) Superbat-I mean they are the OGs and I can get why fans love their dynamic and pair them! I’m more bromance for them but I do look forward to their interactions whenever the two appear together!

3.) Timkon-I’m neutral for them. I like the fanarts if I see them but otherwise I think they seem more aesthetically good together than like actually together. Hey at least Tim has Bernard now and personally Kon deserves better.

Jon + Damian have squashed potential. Their friendship would have done both their characters so much good. Eventually, as they grew Jon would have felt like he’d have to chase after Damian and keep up and Damian would seek and find in Jon when it comes to anything he can’t obtain as a hero.

Out of all the popular ships, this one is particularly rare.

Imagine a world where Jon and Damian did engage in a romantic relationship in later years. I think it would be great queer rep to show two people who knew each other as friends - grappling with the same heroic pressures and coming to terms with the fact that they might not want to be just friends anymore (a common queer experience) I also think that in stories where they are do become Batman and Superman, it’d feel very refreshing to see DC have the courage to portray an iteration of their most popular characters like that.

These characters are both fairly new and not so much engraved into the audience. They both know each other and share chemistry so there wouldn’t be a lot of room for complaint.

Superbat is meh to me. Over the years, It has done a lot regarding DC fandom, it’s a ship that’s become iconic and is popular amongst passive fans which could become quite annoying.

Superbat is realistically, never going to happen. Respectfully, I doubt DC would do anything in all seriousness when it comes to anything romantic between these two.

Especially with the obvious things like how Batman is and how Clark has a wife and kids.

Although, no ship is shipped under the ideation of becoming canon so I give this pair its flowers because honestly, it could be nice in domestic situations or maybe a workplace relationship but I don’t see it being endgame or like anything happening at all in a likable way.

Timkon, I’m very, very bias about how much I dislike Timkon. Most Timkon shippers realistically do not read comics and I know this because I was one at first for a short amount of time and realized how deluded and far off from the truth Timkon actually is.

It’s crazy to me because fandom is so intense about this ship and all for it to be… alright?

A lot of Timkon stuff is boiled down to being one-sided on Tim’s part. It really irks me that Timkon's evidence is like Tim trying to clone Conner while knowing that he has a thing about not being cloned because he’s a clone himself which irks me.

Then him dating his ex-girlfriend is a HUGE red flag to me, especially when their relationship was semi-abusive and built on grief but good thing it didn’t last.

Also, Tim and Conner are NOT as close as people pretend they are. Conner doesn’t know much about Tim beyond him being Robin, they don’t hang out outside of being heroes.

In reality, Conner doesn’t know much about Tim at all and he’s much closer with his other teammates - literally any other YJ teammate other than Tim. Conner's established friendship with Tim caused a lot of really horrible character assassinations on Bart, Cassie, and Conner. It pushed all characters aside in an attempt to emphasize their relationship.

If they were to have a relationship then people acknowledge its toxicity - see toxicity doesn’t take away from shipability but frankly, I think both these characters deserve to be happy.

If they did date, I seriously give them half a year before they break up. I’m happy Tim is with Bernard because he seems much happier than he’s ever been. I’m sorry, reading those comics it felt like Tim was just grieving his friend after having lost a family member and he was spiraling and needing help, that’s not ‘cute’ to me.

Anyway, I notice Timkon shippers use Kon more as an accessory to Tim and melt his character down for that. If they read his comics then they’d know that he is canonically attracted to Bart anyway (I say canonically because of the on-the-nose insinuation which I take as gospel because it’s crazy for a writer to just outright mention Conner might be attracted to Bart.) Which Bart is most of the reason Conner is queer coded like he is now anyway.

Anyway, not saying all Timkon shippers are horrible but I don’t like the shippers or the ship. It’s substanceless for me. If you like it I’m very happy for you. I think all of these ships are iconic and adorable. This is just me being a person with an opinion.

Anyway, my thoughts.

[otakween]

Digital Monster: D-Project - Final Thoughts

Some quick stats:

This is my 13th Digimon game completed in less than 2 years, yay me!

This game took me 10 days to play. Love me a game that doesn't overstay its welcome.

This game was fantastic! It was probably most similar to the first Digimon World gameplay-wise, but waaay less convoluted and a lot cuter. Unlike in DW I had no problem getting the digivolutions I wanted and progressing through the game at a comfortable pace. There were a few "guide dang it!" moments here and there, but the game is mostly reasonable about hinting at what you're supposed to be doing. Full thoughts below.

Notes:

I loved the meta premise of this game. Basically when you boot it up, DemiDevimon comes along and "corrupts your game file." You then get sucked into the game world, "Swan World" (geddit, cuz Wonderswan?) The rest of the game is dedicated to restoring your corrupted surroundings and returning evil digimon to their nice forms. Very satisfying.

The v-pet aspect of the game was fun. The controls for calling/releasing your digimon were very intuitive. I liked how I could release them in various places like I was putting them out to pasture. The only really annoying thing was keeping the digimon fed because you had to input 4 digits to get one meat over and over and over again.

Of course I just used a guide to figure out the right codes, but the "enter a code and get a mystery digiegg" gimmick was cute. I really liked the animation of the egg slowly generating. It was a little weird because what digiegg you started with didn't matter much in the end, but oh well.

For some reason you have the ability to praise and scold your digimon? I understand praising because maybe it raises their happiness (I never actually checked), but there is no advantage to scolding in this game as far as I could tell.

Instead of the DW1 digivolution mechanic where you need a PHD in digivolving to get the right digimon, you just raise them in a certain environment to get the desired outcome. SO much easier. I liked that I could switch from line to line going from rookie to champion to make the game go quicker.

Except for the crazy last boss, it sort of felt like the difficulty level remained the same throughout the whole game. I brought a rookie into many battles, for example, and ended up being fine.

Omg the sprites in this game are so good!! Battling was so fun to watch (you can button mash to improve accuracy, but you don't really participate). Some kind soul uploaded all the sprites for download. I thought the Kyubimon victory animation was really funny:

Once I discovered jogress/DNA evolution I was like HELL YEAH 🔥🔥🔥 cuz the animation was so badass and took up like half the screen (wish I got more screenshots). There was also a really satisfying "BOOM!" sound effect during digivolution.

Lots of colorful, fun environments (especially compared to the last game which was blah). Another quality of life complaint is you have to go all the way to the start of the map every time you need food. There should have been more shortcuts to get from place to place.

I was actually kind of grateful that digimon die in this game. They have a pretty long lifespan, which is nice, but sometimes you need to clear up storage in your PC or you want the chance to raise a different type, so mons dying wasn't as soul crushing as in previous games.

If you can't read Japanese, I think I'd still recommend this game. The visuals and gameplay are enough to carry it and the controls/menus are pretty simple.

I give Digital Monster: D-Project an 8 out of 10

[zevilamotorcompany]

every time i consider posting any substantial warframe thoughts on here i remember how some people are treating/wildly misinterpreting characters from an expansion that hasn’t even released yet. let alone other characters we’ve had the time to consider for however long they’ve been active in the plot. like are we playing the same game. looking at the warframe tag has devolved into me gritting my teeth and going “they would not fucking say that” every 2 seconds because so many people on here cannot engage with the story or any of its characters unless they can jack off to their watered down and completely inaccurate caricatures of them. i realize the irony of me posting this from my sideblog that is 90% devoted to me going omg kyaa >_< over video game people but sometimes i have to get serious. this isn’t me saying we shouldn’t have headcanons or speculate on anything i think that’s the most fun you can have sometimes especially when we’re all waiting for 1999 and what’ll come after as well. i just cannot wrap my head around people who just… so clearly do not like or care about certain aspects of the plot/characters bc they’ll misinterpret stuff SO badly and so on purpose. like. it has to be on purpose right. nobody’s comprehension of this video game is that bad right guys. guys? haha

this is not directed at anyone or anyone specific btw everyone who i’ve chosen to interact with on here has been very kind and smart ^__^ this is more of just a general fandom-y complaint i’m having since with most things i like i do not engage with their fans/online spaces at all simply bc most of the time i can’t be bothered to/i know it’ll just kind of annoy me to do so. so i’m not used to what i’m sure everyone else is in regards to seeing really bad readings of stuff they like on the internet. i’m also not online much in general so joining tumblr and seeing everyone frolic about and be so active in fan spaces has been simultaneously super awesome and super overwhelming. warframe has been the exception bc in general i feel like we’re all pretty normal here. and also 99% of the stuff i look at is just pretty captura pics. like. i have the tag for fanfiction as a concept blocked i have a VERY curated experience and most of the time it is very chill and nice and beautiful. but sometimes stuff slips through the cracks and i pop a blood vessel. sorry for the essay this has just been broiling and marinating inside my skull for a few hours due to my notoriously sticky and horrid brain. and baby the crock pot timer just went off. post served. here it is. xoxo

[midwesterngothicmomus]

Hello!! So I am aware that this isn't for a LONG time, but I was rereading Queens responses to asks that have Piper, and I just realized that in this au Piper is so fucked😂😂

Either Percy puts her in her place, due to her lived experience in Valhalla, or Loki will and give her a previously undiscovered fear (in general, like there isn't a word for her fear) in the process😂😂

Either way, she is not gonna have a fun time in this au and I am honestly excited for it.

(If you can't tell, I despise Piper😅😅)

I wouldn't say I am the number one Piper hater but she always kinda bothered me. I actually only read the first two books of HoO fully. It came out in middle school when my interest in PJO was at its peak so I thought it would be a good story but actually, I didn't enjoy it that much. A lot of it just seemed like it was cheapening the victories and stuff the Greek heroes had fought for and the constant comparisons between the two were somewhat grating. A lot of stuff just felt really forced. I enjoyed the Kane Chronicles a lot more since it could stand on its own better.

Piper probably would have been one of my biggest complaints too. She is just so overpowered for where she should have been. I also didn't like how she constantly seemed to be looking down on the other aphrodite kids. Like they get mistreated and looked down on as just "pretty kids" all the time and yes I know it is YA literature but she was just doing the whole "I'm not like them" routine all the time even though she really kind of was (This is probably on RR for not writing her well). One of Drew's sins is using charmspeak to control her cabinmates (which was such a fucking cop-out that should not have worked) which is bad but Piper was also using charmspeak to commit grand theft and we are just supposed to forget about that (she probably got so many retail workers fired). Other people have posted longer and better explanations of their issues with her characterization and I tend to think the same way. She has potential as a character, with her deep personal insecurities and stuff but I ultimately felt a lot of it was unrealized. Yes she is a teen girl, and I understand her character means different things to different people, but I just don't like her.

Percy and Piper... well, it definitely wouldn't end well for Piper if they fought. Piper's charmspeak wouldn't work on Percy, but Percy, as a siren could completely control Piper. Physically, Piper doesn't stand a chance at all, she's a skinny teenage girl and Percy is a trained warrior. Piper's one saving grace is that Percy is ultimately an honorable fighter, she won't harm children or other non-combatants, which Piper could very easily be classed as. However, Percy still grew up with her main female influences being goddesses like Jord and Frigg who would not take another woman stepping on them lying down. So Piper would probably (since I haven't written anything yet) get huffy over Percy talking to Jason (ignore the older demigod's warning about not pissing off the actual goddess present) and try to distance them/pick a fight. Percy would either then ignore her or curse her depending on what Piper did and how annoyed Percy was at that given time. When Percy is in PJO universe she is very much a girl on a mission (complete dumb tasks and go home to my family) and would not appreciate some random chick getting in her way because of her boy issues.

There are characters in PJO that can give Percy a run for her money due to their unique skills, raw power, intelligence, etc, however, Piper is not one of them. I am probably going to make some major changes to what we see of the aphrodite cabin so Piper will not have as easy a time with her attitude and them also. They should be the social networking cabin, the spy and infiltrator cabin, not the "girly" cabin what the hell RR. The normal teen stereotypes only work if your teen's biggest issues are homework and sports, not being hunted for sport and vengeful gods. Yes, it will still be girly, but more in the in the "girls/gals/pals that murder their spouses together" way because it contains a bunch of extremely deadly warriors who also happen to be teens who love fashion week. Appearance/other's perception of you are assets and I feel like these campers would be the ones to leverage that best. So Piper's lesson probably won't even come from Percy but rather from some of her new half-siblings who don't really appreciate her attitude towards their hard work.

[nullen-void]

A Random Skeleton Rates the Paper Mario Games

Paper Mario: 7/10

Paper Mario is charming and cute, but decidely primitive and unrefined compared to its immediate successor. I find the controls to be finicky and unreliable, but I admit my experience is only with rereleases and emulators, so perhaps on the original N64 it worked better.

Story-wise, it's the standard Mario story where Bowser kidnaps Princess Peach. It's not special but this particular execution is bolstered by the world it's set in. All the characters we meet are entertaining, the places we go start out simple but steadily get more interesting as we go, and Princess Peach: Super Spy is a delight.

It's a good game, but it's held back by ancient graphics and, in my experience, strange controls. If and when we get a remake that upgrades it to the same level of quality as TTYD, it might move up to a great game.

Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door: 10/10

Yes yes, it's obvious and my bias is showing. I grew up with this one, it was a Christmas present, and it's nostalgic.

But in this case the popular opinion is just true. The game plays like a dream, the partners are amazing characters, and the story is a step or three above Mario's usual fare.

Admiral Bobbery's story is simple enough for a child to understand but sincere enough for even adults to tear up, and I wish Goombella was my best friend in real life. I use to name the Yoshi Kid Gonzap because I was also playing Pokémon Colisseum at the time and I thought it matched Mario's stage name of Gonzales.

Princess Peach: Super Spy makes a return and her story with a lonely supercomputer is fascinating, and all the more so for how little we see of it. My only complaint is it needed more Bowser.

TTYD is a truly great game, and the fact it's getting a remake makes me excited to play it all over again.

Super Paper Mario: 9/10

SPM is without a doubt the greatest story in the entire Mario franchise. The only thing holding it back is the complete and total alteration to gameplay. The only real thing relating it to the previous two games is the artstyle.

But man. It's just such a good story guys. Luigi gets brainwashed, an entire world gets turned into an empty white void, Mario suffocates in space, an incomprehensible Scotsman is best friends with a little girl who turns into a spider and a clown comes within a hair's breadth of destroying all of reality on a lark.

There are no partners, no badges, no real RPG elements left... it could have easily been the most polarizing game in the series, and for a time it was. But its failings are all made up for and then some by the greatest love story in Nintendo history.

Paper Mario Sticker Star: 5/10

Some of you will think I'm being too kind (he said, knowing less than ten people will ever read this). But Sticker Star is a perfectly fine game.

I was never bothered by the backtracking. I was annoyed by the battle system but never to the point of frustration. Some of the puzzles were obtuse but I freely admit that I'm not afraid of looking up a guide when I can't solve something myself. It's fine.

But it's only fine. It's not great, and I hesitate to call it good. It can drag on and on. But I had fun with it, after I got over the fact that it wasn't TTYD2.

Because that's the real problem here. In a vacuum, it's a perfectly fine game. But compared to the other games in the series, it's just... not Paper Mario. There's Mario, and he's made of paper, but there's more to it than that that the game doesn't seem to grasp. It's sad really.

It's fine. It's okay. But it'll never be more than that.

Paper Mario Color Splash: 6/10

It's pretty good. It has a lot of the same problems as Sticker Star, but... less so. Huey is more tolerable than Kersti, the paint mechanic is more interesting than just laying stickers everywhere, the levels are all more well-developed than any of the previous game's, and it's actually very funny.

It is once again Bowser kidnapping Peach, but at least this time it's because he was possessed by evil paint. Luigi saves the day in this game, so that earns it a whole extra point right there.

And the music is phenomenal. It always is, even Sticker Star has A+ music, but Color Splash is especially good. This game has good vibes.

In the end though, while I can call it good, it's still bogged down by the battle system and the lackluster story. The characters are okay, such as they are.

Paper Mario: The Origami King: 8/10

Yeah I put it higher than the first game, what of it?

Origami King gets it. It wants to be a good Paper Mario game so badly, and it very nearly accomplishes it. Olivia is a delight, Bobby is a startlingly effective character, and the villain isn't even Bowser.

It's back to being a connected world instead of being level-based. It has an extremely simplified badge system. The story, while not on the level of TTYD or SPM, is still fairly gripping (though it takes about two-thirds of the way through before you get the big twist of what Olly's deal is), and I would actually argue that Mario the character is more expressive here than the entire rest of the series. He emotes! He feels sad! He tries to stop his friend from committing suicide and FAILS! I swear to God that's a thing that actually happens in this game.

Origami King has issues. All of the bosses are oversized office equipment, and there's just no coming back from that, but even still, it's a fun ride.

This concludes this essay. I hope the five people who will ever read this enjoyed, and please feel free to give your own thoughts in the comments.

[azerothtravel]

Dragonflight Post-Mortem

As this expansion comes to a close, it's once again time to ramble about the experience. And lemme tell ya, your mileage may vary, but this was a top 3 expansion for me. They did everything right. No oppressive and unpleasant system, great zones, a solid story with a satisfying ending. Anything you want to do at endgame has rarely been better, from raiding to pvp to alts. More secrets to discover, more transmogs to collect, more random fun things to do than basically ever before.

I think this may be my most played expansion, actually. I've traditionally played Gormorash with an alt or 2 in rotation (Most often Tinzul, Tinovan or Fiazko), but spurred in part by the new crafting system, I was logging into 7 characters every week, and my usual altaholic tendencies made it more than that a lot of the time.

Dragonriding/Dynamic flight/Skyriding/whatever it's called is a welcome addition, and the customizable mounts are cool. I look forward to more of that.

DF was fun to play alts through. Shadowlands felt like an oppressive slog after awhile, but I never got tired of these zones. Great scenery, storylines and music kept it fun over and over.

I was surprised and impressed by this expac being full of stories about empathy and forgiveness and acceptance. There were a lot of genuinely touching moments in this. Who could have possibly imagined Kalecgos eating soup could be an emotional moment? The wrap for the night elf story begun way back in Legion was pretty cool. I liked Merithra stepping up in her Mom's place, and Ebonhorn becoming the Black Aspect. All the smaller stories, too, like Baine overcoming his prejudice against centaur, they just did some great stuff this time.

At the same time, this expac felt fun. The endless gloom of Legion, BfA and Shadowlands replaced with the sense of adventure that characterized vanilla and Mists. Some of the funniest material they've ever done (Azmurloth alone...). I enjoyed the tone.

The Incarnates were genuinely cool new villains, and (Especially if you read War of the Scaleborn) the storyline between Alexstrasza and Vyranoth was done really well. Blizzard has a very uneven history with retcons (Don't get me started on Legion), but these guys slotted into the history pretty easily, and drove some interesting story beats. I'm glad Iridikron escaped to keep being a problem in the next one, he's a good villain.

I felt like they got War Mode down to a science this time. World PvP has never been more fun (or more rewarding).

My biggest complaint about Dragonflight is the new crafting system. Obviously more interesting than the old one, it still had its problems. The endless frustration of "I want to make thing C. To make thing C, you first have to make thing B, and to make that, you have to make thing A, and guess what, that recipe comes from Draconic Message In A Bottle, so you'll never get it" was maddening. Every profession seeming to desperately need a single herb was really annoying. Alchemy has felt like an afterthought for several expansions, but never more than here. The only profession without work orders? Come on.

But there was just so much stuff, such a variety of stuff. The wide variety of public events. The Zsekara Vaults. Sniffseeking. Little Scales Daycare. Unlocking old Scholomance. The various dragon racing cups. The game has just never felt like there was more to do. It seems like War Within will only improve things, content wise. But beating the story stuff in DF will be a tall order. We'll see how it goes.

[spextered]

you make such a valid point about how absolutely watered down remus' character is. if i could muster up some writing energy to finally write my introspective logan and remus series i Would, because i just need more people to be more exploratory with their remus characterizations

i admit we don't have a full grasp on his character yet since i think he plays a big role in the finale, but MAAAN people really be doing the Least with the way they portray him. another complaint i have w most fics is that if they make him sympathetic or comforting to another side, they basically strip his entire personality away just to make him palatable. it's very annoying!!!!

if you remembered where you read those remus essays i would def appreciate if u can send them to me!! need to intensify my remus brainrot rn

ps, I KNEW UR URL SOUNDED FAMILIAR!! of course u saw my dsmp and fundy essays from back in the day lmfao. those were the times - @intrulogical

for some reason i feel like tss fans are a little media illiterate when it comes to remus specifically

i just??? feel like they cant see past him being intrusive thoughts which, to be fair, is what he was introduced as and hasnt been really elaborated on but as much as remus presents through blunt honesty, hes also NINETY NINE PERCENT SUBTEXT

if u did write that fic i would LOVE to read it. im an intrological girlie at heart i just adore the way they mesh and im a sucker for introspective works especially. plus ur takes are always so good

AND YEAH!!! its so odd that hes so open and yet somehow we know so little about him. we know his name but .... but what? nothing. all the sides have emotional important moments through their name EXPECT for remus (and a bit logan technically considering he didnt reveal it but it did come after one of his videos). we have yet to get a peek into remus' noggin which is interesting considering how honest he is

but yes u have EXACTLY THE SAME OPINION AS MEEEEE i cant read a lot of remus centric/angst fics because its really just Not him. its like a blank cut out trope with his name and face plastered over but it aint him. and its always to make him more palatable, more normal because then its okay to sympathise with him. i get the feeling that a lot of authors feel weird making angst for a character who doesnt experience turmoil in the "desirable" way. like that they cant feel bad for someone who isnt a hundred percent morally good

maybe im reading too much into it but thats definitely the vibe im getting. either that or people just dont care enough to understand him past a trope gaaahh

(ps ps ur fundy essays were all i lived for u were one of like Two fundy people i followed.....love forever)

[thesearchforbluejello]

We've been seeing your reblogs of SNW on our feed, and we gotta ask... Thoughts and opinions? Is it good? Would you recommend watching it to a trekkie who hasn't watched any of the new trek properties since the first few episodes of Discovery?

Oh man oh man oh man. I have a lot to say. If you don't want to read all of it, there's a TLDR at the end.

✅ episodic format: It's SUPER different from Discovery, so if you prefer the older episodic shows over the newer serialized format, it'll definitely check that box.

❌ season arcs: even though the older episodic shows have two partners and/or small (or large) season arcs, SNW doesn't really... There's one that connects the end of s1 to the beginning of s2, and it's a big deal, but it's not drawn out. I'm not even married to season arcs, but I do think that if they're doing silly filler episodes, ten episodes is too short for a season and thirteen would have been better for them. I LOVE silly filler episodes, so let's get that straight, but they're better when it's not taking up literally a fifth of the season.

✅ space hijinks and the risks of exploration: It oscillates wildly between silly and dark, sometimes between episodes and sometimes within the same episodes, but I see that as one of its strengths. It gets really goofy in a fun way, but it's also bloodier than older Trek... mostly just because they actually show blood. The crew commits so many hijinks and they're all friends and fun to watch together.

❌ character development: the actors are really carrying the characters alone for this one. The characters are all lovable and for the most part the actors are doing a great job, but frankly this is my biggest complaint about the show. We get very, very little development for any of the characters even over the first and almost complete second season. They're just still not well established. The writers seem to think "trauma" is the same as characterization... which like obviously it's not, so. I get very irritated (which you've probably seen in my tags) about the fact that there's often "development" for the characters that builds on a foundation that's basically just toothpicks. It still takes them a step forward, but it's always a stumble imo. I know some folks who are casual watchers who don't mind this though (I'm just neurologically incapable of casual watching). This is also apparently an unpopular opinion, but (spoiler alert) I also think Kirk is in it too much. He'll have been in at least 4/10 of the season 2 episodes, but he's not even posted to the Enterprise. I LOVE Paul Wesley's Kirk like he's my favorite Kirk nobody @ me but the show is about the SNW crew, not Kirk. They're struggling to even develop the seven major SNW characters, so constantly throwing Kirk in constantly is kind of annoying me. They also don't do full ensemble episodes, so often some of the major characters will only show up for one or two scenes and someone else will be the focus. This isn't my preferred format, but I don't hate it-- that being said, some characters are being seriously neglected because of it, but I won't fully rant about that.

✅/❌ Discovery tie in: you don't need to have seen Discovery to watch it. I watched s1 without having watched Discovery. HOWEVER, it will spoil the ending of Discovery s2 in SNW 1x01, just be aware (as in it will totally obliterate one of the big reveals in Disco).

✅Anson Mount: I say this as someone who's literally never seen him in anything else, but he brought his A game every episode and he's the absolute MVP of the series. Really great performances and he makes Pike an incredibly lovable character but also a really great captain.

❌ Discussion of disability: I have a lot of thoughts regarding the treatment of disability as a horrifying thing and equating it with death. Like, fear of physical injury is a very human thing because it's literally a survival response that's wired into us, but there's both some sloppy writing that equates physical disability with death and just a failure to actually explore what a disabled future means for a person. It's kind of hard to explain what I mean without obliterating an entire episode of Discovery and the whole first season of SNW if anyone else reads this, so I won't go into it but I will say this-- I didn't find this weak point to be bad enough to stop watching, and it involves TOS canon that they can't escape, so they're not doing something that's deliberately offensive and disrespectful, but they're not doing it particularly respectfully either.

✅ special effects: there aren't as many REALLY alien characters as Discovery, so there has been less major prosthetic design on display, but what there has been has been good and the CGI is great.

✅ Old school nods: there's so much campy scifi in this show. They do the bridge impact lean and shake thing and they have cool props and the uniforms are a little silly but also so well designed. The ship design is really 2020s and not classic Trek but there are still elements of that design and it's still cool as hell. Also, like, it's the fucking Enterprise, so I'm going to be feral over it regardless.

❌ CO and XO: Listen, this is such a personal taste-based opinion BUT I'm mad about it so I'm going to COMPLAIIIIIIIIIN about it. One of my favorite things about any Trek is the CO/XO relationship, whether it's on a ship or a station or whatever. I just find that a really fascinating dynamic, and it's so different every time. This show has a FASCINATING CO/XO dynamic and the actors have really cool ideas... but developing this at all would require the XO to ACTUALLY BE IN THE FUCKING SHOW. She's in every episode but often not for long. I have some major opinions on this, in case that wasn't obvious. They've done 17 episodes and this relationship hasn't been developed very much. We've had some good scenes and a good plotline, but my complaint still stands for reasons I won't spoil unless requested.

❌ Strange New Worlds: there are barely any new worlds, nevermind strange new worlds. Half the time it's just Star Trek: Doing Stuff in Space and the other half it's Star Trek: Hey We Found Something Weird in Space and Are Investigating It. Not a big complaint, just... not quite what it says on the tin.

TL;DR I love SNW a LOT. It's fun and it's silly but it also confronts the big philosophical questions of existence and morality that are central to Trek. I do have a lot of complaints, but honestly one of the reasons I have so many complaints is because I love it so much.

It's definitely Trek in flavor and it doesn't demand high commitment to watch it. Someone will inevitably yell at me for this, but it actually reminds me most of Voyager-- it's silly and the relationships of the crew are prioritized, but they do some really messed up episodes along the way too. It's a very different vibe to Voyager though, to be clear.

If you decide to watch it, let me know! I'd love to hear what you think :)

[writer-notareader]

My Top 5 Video Game Bosses (July 2023)

(Riter no Reder Post)

Spoilers for Deltarune, Rhythm Doctor, Omori, Pokémon Legends: Arceus, and ULTRAKILL.

5. Spamton NEO

Deltarune character!? No way!

Basically Spamton NEO is one of the coolest secret bosses I know of that weren’t executed abhorrently. While you can completely miss Spamton’s secret boss, it isn’t that hard to get to either, so anyone who just beat the game blind will probably see it on the internet afterwards and be all “what” and go back to it, and it isn’t really difficult to encounter him- basically you just get the funny disc, have a conversation, then go through a weird secret dungeon at which point it becomes self-explanatory.

My first complaint is that a lot of the exposition for Spamton lore isn’t actually in the game, which irritates me and it feels like Toby or whoever was supposed to do it just forgot and decided to randomly upload it to the Deltarune website on a whim. Could be wrong obviously but that’s what it feels like.

Other complaint is that some of the attacks are extremely weird and ridiculous. For example, the one where Spamton’s hands are phones and he crawls towards you. What even is that? Why was that considered acceptable? Even if you figure out the no-hit method for it, it still feels weird, awkward, and kind of unfair.

Aside from that, the whole build-up was very good and mysterious and the fight itself was alright. The only reason Spamton didn’t make it higher on the list was because of the already mentioned complaints.

4. Super Battleworn Insomniac (Rhythm Doctor)

For context, Rhythm Doctor is a 1 key rhythm game where you keep patients’ hearts beating to the pace you set them at via the spacebar.

It has been a while, but I remember this boss vividly. It felt like it just came out of nowhere.

“AYE THE PATIENT’S HAXITUS IS ACTING UP AGAIN EXCEPT ITS ACTUALLY WORSE AND MORE ANNOYING.”

The original variant of this fight was a little tough for me, but not a massive strugglebus or anything. It wasn’t a big deal, and I thought it’d be the same deal again.

It was not. Not exactly, at least. The boss’s whole gimmick is basically to screw with your head and throw off your rhythm. It showed fake texts, fake buffered before the actual song even started, showed you these janky visuals that made the line hard to see… it felt absurd and unfair, almost half as much as FNF: Dave and Bambi mods.

I genuinely thought I might not beat it, but I was determined anyway. That’s when I realized, wait, hey, this isn’t just a timing game, it’s a rhythm game, and the visuals are what threw off my rhythm.

So I literally just closed my eyes. It took a few more tries, but I eventually beat it that way much easier than before. Honestly probably one of the best instances of an out-of-nowhere final boss I’ve seen in a video game.

3. Omori (I forgot what game)

Omori is a very story-based RPG whose main protagonist needs to touch grass. You basically play as a little man, 12 years old, named Sunny. He is a hikikomori, and spends a lot of his time just dreaming his life away.

If you haven’t played the game already, stop reading this post and go play Omori first. Seriously, massive spoilers ahead. I don’t care if you weren’t intending to play it, play it anyway (pretty please with a cherry on top). If you can’t or genuinely refuse to, I’m not really standing outside your window or anything, so go ahead and keep reading.

Over the course of the story, if you pick the route where you actually go outside and touch grass (thanks Kel), you get the route where you actually work through your problems. To put it bluntly, Sunny ends up in the hospital, and in his unconscious state, is forced into one last dream- after going through many of his memories, he must face his dreamself, Omori, in a dream.

This fight is a particularly important and climactic part of the story for many reasons. While the fight is ridiculously unfair and basically unwinnable, this actually only contributes to the resolution more.

After battling this part of himself for so long, Sunny solos Omori by hugging him. He accepts Omori and what Omori represents as a part of himself, and he is finally able to move on. I really like the way this played out, and I genuinely think that it it alone would be a selling point to Omori if it wasn’t a spoiler.

2. Volo (Pokémon Legends: Arceus)

Volo was one hell of a fight. I’m sure everyone knows at this point, but spoilers ahead for Pokémon Legends: Arceus.

As you might notice throughout the story, Volo generally shows himself to be quite friendly, as well as selling items to the player. He just seems like a merchant, and battles the player with a low-level Togepi a few times, maybe even just once.

As the story progresses near the end, Volo seems to have a weird interest in following the player around, especially once the Red Chain becomes relevant.

This merchant turns out to be a fanatic and a Pokémon Wielder rather than a normal merchant or trainer.

In fact, not only that, but when he battles you after using you to obtain the Plates, his team consists of six Pokémon. And they probably destroyed you.

I, personally, was determined to beat Volo without using legendaries or overleveling, although I did rebuild and retrain my team to fight him.

Then he had another Pokémon with two health bars and individual phases.

When I did defeat him, I couldn’t help but notice the text said something along the lines of “You finally defeated Volo” rather than just “You defeated Volo” after I did it and it was the greatest, most subtle, and most accurate insult I’ve ever felt considering it took me like two weeks to do.

I also like the way Volo was very slowly revealed and hinted at towards the end, yet the game purposefully tries to make Volo personable so that you don’t pick up on it until like five minutes before it’s too late.

I probably forgot to add something but basically Volo was a genuinely well set-up and thoroughly difficult fight that felt very good to battle and very good to beat- and don’t even get me started on Volo’s theme. Speaking of absurdly good boss themes,

1. Minos Prime (ULTRAKILL)

Minos Prime closely ties with Volo for my favorite boss in a video game.

By the way, if you haven’t played ULTRAKILL, go play it. Right now. Go play the game, you are legally required to. PLEASE.

Back to the topic at hand, everything surrounding this fight is ridiculously good and well put-together.

Imagine you’re ULTRAplaying ULTRAKILL blind. You see some random path leading to an alternative area to the left in the stairs room of 3-1. You go into it and you see that it has a bunch of little stone squares with the letter P on them.

Eventually, you replay some levels and get your first P-rank. OHHHHH. SO THAT’S WHAT THAT WAS FOR!? You go back to the P-door and see one of the squares are now glowing yellow, and come to the conclusion that this door may open if you get all the P-ranks in Act I.

So you do. After a lot of hard work and obliterating the same layouts repeatedly, you manage to get every single P-rank in Act I, you go back to that door, and sure enough, it opens this time, all those P-squares glowing brilliantly.

Then you go to some secret level: P-1 - Soul Survivor. You leave, grabbing a torch and seeing none other than an actual massive spine that you are expected to walk down as a relatively calming background music plays. As you descend, this music becomes more distorted, getting to a genuinely indiscernible point before you falling into a mouth door, place a torch to open a boss gate, and head onward.

Then that annoying excuse of a flesh sack appears and decides to ruin your day with its automatic nervous system that does its attacks for it (canon). After a few realizations about the Flesh Prison and a little while of hoping you don’t miss your shots, the funny blue ball appears.

That funny blue ball breaks open, revealing a blue guy with no face. He starts monologuing about killing Gabriel and you in such a ridiculously cool way that he is effectively impenetrable, then he sacrifices this impenetrability just to say “DIE” and actually kill you (cooler than 99.99% of antagonists ever and he’s literally lawful good).

Not only that, but the music somehow slaps harder than the yellow snake projectiles that shatter on contact. Don’t get me wrong, though: unlike some of the other top 5s, this boss is completely fair to you. Like, he literally telegraphs almost all of his attacks and STILL destroys you. Many of these can be parried and dodged without much effort, so this fight requires some stamina management, which makes parrying even more effective.

Heck, this fight actively encourages you to parry. The thing is, though, this actually refills some of Minos Prime’s stamina… except I’m still gonna do it anyway. Parrying Minos Prime feels so satisfying for some reason, and even if it makes his combo longer, I still love to actually react to his attacks, especially with such a big, open space.

That being said, those are my top five video games bosses. Have a good day, also God loves you.

[olderjodijournals]

Saturday, January 1, 2005

How glad I am to see the New Year has arrived! I’m amazed at just how relieved I am that it’s finally here. I don’t know if this year will cure our problems, but again, it can’t be as bad as last year was. Except for my birthday and the first time we did the Maricopa swap meet, I can’t think of one good day in 2004! At least Tom didn’t get laid off. Also, it would only cost a fortune to sign me on for insurance, not just him.

I took a shower a while ago and was surprised to find mom and daughter’s place pitch dark when I went to crack the window to let the steam out.

I slept well because I had both the fan and sound machine going. Shortly after I got up, though, I heard a few firecrackers.

If all goes well, we should have 120 days left here and 17 more Sundays for Bev to possibly go banging on.

Because I slept through the time when the annual “psychic window” is normally wide open, I didn’t get much. Just this:

1.              There could be something wrong with one of the back tires on the truck.

2.              We may climb out of debt sometime in March, though we’ll still be broke and probably will be 90% of the time throughout our lives.

3.              Miss Perfect may develop a mild case of cancer at the end of the year or early next year.

4.              Tom’s next job will be in a much bigger building and it may also be computer-related and pay $8.50 an hour.

5.              I may win a medal for Scuttle’s picture.

6.              In an unknown state, we’ll rent a small 2-bedroom house with small rooms and no evil 4s in its numbers. (hopefully in May!)

7.              The house was built in the 50s or 60s, probably late 50s and has white and red exterior colors.

8.              We’ll rent the house till the queen dies in early 2009, leaving us 20 grand to buy a 1600-square-foot manufactured house and Kaori.

The RealDoll people sent me a catalog which I got yesterday. I’ll send it to Paula so she can see what they’re like.

I was shocked to read that a new California law is going to give gay couples benefits and a lot of the same rights straight married couples have. I was shocked because so many people seem to hate gays.

With the Fred Meyer gift certificate, Tom got a new ink refill kit to give our printers at least black ink. That way I can print letters to Bob and Paula, and if he wants to print any résumés for any potential new jobs, he can.

He also got a new wire for my music computer to stop that one channel from going in and out like it started to back down in Arizona.

Later…

Tom just got up and informed me that Bev blasted her music for an hour last night. He said it was annoying enough to be heard in the living room, but that I probably wouldn’t have heard it in the bedroom.

Yeah, I’m not surprised. She’ll probably do it more and more often too, till I complain again. You gotta keep on people to keep them quiet, just like how we had to send periodic city letters to remind the freeloaders to shut up. Tom thinks she only did this because it was New Year’s Eve, but I know human nature when it comes to these kinds of things. You complain, they’re quiet for a while. Then they start acting up again after a while. You complain again, they’re quiet for a while again, and so on and so forth. I swear, though, if I hear any music coming from over there, I’m going to blast my own music for a good hour or two each day that I’m up while he’s at work. If she says anything to me, I’ll just tell her, well, you went back to blasting your own music, so I didn’t think it’d bother you. You want me to stop, YOU stop. However, I’m not going back to the old bullshit of submitting periodic complaints that don’t do me much good. In fact, I’ll be damned if I’ll play that game again.

Like with all the neighbors I’ve had over the past 12 years, I just wish she’d go somewhere for a change! She’s home more than I am. Same with on the other side.

Tom said there were lots of firecrackers going off at midnight. I’m surprised I slept through it all.

Still, I hate being sent back in time like this and having to deal with the neighbor stress all over again!!! I’m going to be so pissed if we can’t get out of here in May!

Later…

Tom and I just discussed a bright idea he came up with that’ll pretty much guarantee our May escape. It really takes a lot of stress off me, too! It doesn’t stop me from stressing over what people around here may do for the next 120 days, but at least I no longer have to worry and wonder if we’ll make it out of here or not.

Tom said I may be inconvenienced because I’ll have to go without Webshots and DVD rentals for a while, and I was like, that’s what you call an inconvenience? Spending 180 days in jail; that’s being inconvenienced. I can always get whatever pictures and DVDs I missed later on. The only thing is that we may have to send Bob a money order for the incense if he can’t get the money for it. I’m sure there will be some sort of problem and delay with it. You know I can’t ever just get something. They know me, though, so I’m sure we can get around whatever problems may arise.

The number one thing, as we both agree, is getting out of here and into a house we can comfortably live in for a few years. If it has to still be in Oregon, oh well. Eureka will wait for us. Whether it ends up being somewhere in Oregon or Redding, California, we’re all for staying in the colder climates till we go to a retirement community. Outdoors, the colder climates just aren’t as noisy as the warmer ones are. The climate doesn’t matter in a retirement community because there would never be any freeloading assholes there to destroy everyone’s peace.

I just hope this is the year we can finally stop starting over! I’m sooo sick of building up just to be torn down and set back, having to give up this, give up that. We didn’t come here for this shit!

I told Tom that while I don’t vibe any upcoming problems with Bev that are any more serious than the annoyances we’ve already had on account of her, we both know it’s better to be safe than sorry, so I think that the next time he sees Pam that he should mention that she’s been noisy. I think he should do it in a casual way and not a complaining way, and make a point of stressing that it hasn’t been that often (unless things change between now and then) and that she’s a nice lady. This way, if there is any trouble ahead that I’m not seeing, they’ll already know she’s been noisy in the past. It just may help us in the end cuz you never do know. They say it’s best to have things documented or at least mentioned and remember, I picked up a noise curse in ’92 and we’re not dealing with a full deck of cards here. She’s not on permanent disability for being fat and ugly. I understand that music and banging go hand in hand with being attached to someone else, but if it does escalate, Pam won’t be so surprised to hear about it if she already knows she gets noisy. What I’m not going to do, however, is go back to the periodic complaints to the source’s face that don’t do me much good, but maybe give me only temporary peace. Instead, if it does escalate I just won’t worry about my own music and noise for the next 119 days. Still, no matter what she has in store for us, I think it’s best to get it mentioned, though I don’t know if he’ll want to. He may be afraid to do so for whatever paranoid reason he may have, and again, he’s always been hesitant to speak out against a neighbor. He’s an Arizonan, and as I learned the hard way, you don’t do that. But this is Oregon, so I hope he will bring it up.

I realized that her working a regular job may not keep her from any future banging sprees or concerts. This is because she only does this in the evenings or on weekends. Working second shift would eliminate evening concerts unless she decided to bump those up to earlier hours, though we’d still have the weekends and those periodic Sunday banging sprees to have to listen to.

I already decided to make our final days here less than pleasant for her. I’m going to stick to my promise of giving what I get, and therefore, once we’ve given our notice and are safe from anything happening to us, she’ll have a few annoyances of her own to have to deal with.

Tuesday, January 4, 2005

Tom was up to $35 on the game site but had a losing streak last night that threw him down to $19. At least he’s still got some money left to try to build back up with.

Anyway, yesterday was a very hungry day for us both, though we achieved our 24-hour fasting goal. At the end of my day, I had a can of ravioli. I was so hungry that I didn’t think it’d make a difference, but it did. I felt quite a bit better, actually, so I decided to do this at least till Saturday when we plan to go out for blizzards at DQ and to Jan’s for a couple of bucks of incense since it could still be a while before I get my order. There’s going to be a 2-day delay as it is since I’m going to have to send them a money order unless they know and trust me enough to ship it first. I sent an email yesterday asking if they had any idea when my order would be shipped, but haven’t gotten a response yet. This isn’t like them, so I hope it’s only because they were overwhelmed with more mail to respond to after the holiday.

Yesterday I ended up having about 700 calories between the ravioli and coffee, and knocking a pound off of me. I usually fluctuate between 127-130 and am currently 128. If I could just get my weight down, then I could move on to the next problem; how to keep it down. Well, I’m going to at least try to hold out again today till the late afternoon. Then I’ll stuff myself with a few baked potatoes, so at least I have that to look forward to. The 3 small meals and 3 small snacks did nothing to fill me up, leaving me always hungry. I did 3 half-hour workouts, but that was too hard on my knees so I think I’ll do just 1-2 today and try to keep busy with my writing, singing and reading, then hopefully we’ll get some DVDs today. Two were due yesterday and one’s due today. This next month will be our last month of DVDs and Webshots. Anything to keep my mind off my growling, protesting stomach!

Posted by Jodi at 9:05 PM No comments:   

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Monday, January 3, 2005

Well, we got through a peaceful weekend without any shit from Bev or anyone else. All we hear during the daytime is a bunch of birds in back eating seeds from old rotten apples that have fallen off the trees.

We were talking about how fasting for one day every now and then is actually a healthy thing because it gives your digestive tract a break. So we decided to both give it a try today to save money. For someone who’s always hungry, I’m doing okay, but I’m only 6 hours into my day. The closer I get to the end of my day, the harder it gets.

Tom sent a letter to Miss Perfect letting her know we’re broke and won’t be able to write for a while, and I was like, why would you waste a 37¢ stamp on the bitch? She and the queen couldn’t care less. He said he thought I wanted them to feel guilty. First of all, they don’t. Secondly, I’d rather them send us a grand than feel anything, but since that’s not going to happen, I see no point in even communicating or acknowledging these selfish assholes. However, I didn’t think they’d send extra money for Christmas, even if it was a piddly amount, and it’s his family, so if he wants to keep things going with them, he’s entitled to do so. He said he played up our situation big time, not that it isn’t bad enough. I mean, hey, we are about a grand in debt, after all. I know beyond a doubt now that we’re not ever meant to have money, but the question is, are we destined to just not have much extra money? Or to struggle like this throughout the remainder of our lives? He thinks they’ll send us something, though I doubt it, even though I didn’t expect more than the usual for Christmas cash-wise. It’s not their problem so why should they care?

Wednesday, January 5, 2005

Here’s a quick update and then I’m going to take the day off to watch the 3 movies we got yesterday. Every writer needs a break, even me. I might not even work out today.

I was laughing at Tom because he’s still the same 216 pounds he was to begin with while I’m down to 127. Here’s where I doubt I’ll lose much more, though.

Yesterday was easier than the first day, and except for Saturday when we go out for treats, I plan to do this as often as I can where I go about 24 hours without eating, then I have a filling meal. It’s easier than having 6 small things to eat throughout the day because then I never get full. At least this way I have some satisfaction to look forward to at the end of my day.

I did some rearranging yesterday for a few reasons. For one, I didn’t want it to look too homey so I packed some more things. I want it to look like we’re moving on soon enough. I also made it so that Blondie can come in here, though I still have to supervise him because of all the wires. Lastly, it was something to do to take my mind off of food.

At around 3:00 yesterday, Beverly started in with the music, and I said to myself, no way. I don’t care how much time we’ve got left here. I’m not listening to her thumping bass anymore! So I went over there for what I promised myself would be one last time. I say one last time because if this doesn’t curb her bass, nothing will, and if it doesn’t, she’ll be hearing from MY bass. Then she’ll see that yes, it can be heard easily, and she should know this. After all, the hypocrite complained about the people who were here before us doing the exact same thing she is.

So anyway, I knocked on her back door and she seemed surprised to know I could hear her bass, though she said she’d turn it down and she did. I took this as an opportunity to ask what the banging was all about a few Sundays ago and she said it was her grandkids.

Damn, everything’s come back to haunt us! Everything but dogs so far. Everything we tried to run from is back – noisy kids, music, banging, people, bills, etc. There’s just no escaping them!

Anyway, she explained to me that she had her grandkids over to watch a DVD and you know how little kids can be, etc. Yes, I do know. That’s why I decided I was glad not to be able to have any.

In the end, I don’t think she’ll be any quieter (though she’s still just about the quietest neighbor I’ve ever had) and I can’t stop her from having her grandkids visit, so I’ll just have to live with whatever she gives me over the next 116 days, then she’ll be just a memory. I can see where blasting music in here and little kids running around would have driven her crazy and this is why I think she should know better. She’s just one of those who care only when she’s bothered and not when she’s doing the bothering, but we’ll see how things go. If she does act up, I’ll just give her a taste of her own medicine like I said before which is what she’s likely to get when we move. Most people do like to crank up their stereos, and most people, like the people who were here before us, don’t give a shit who they’re bothering. So if she’s here in May, she’ll more than likely be sorry we left.

I now strongly vibe that we won’t be going to the coast of Oregon. Also, last night I could swear I dreamt of Redding! Is this a sign? Tom says it’ll all depend on the job situation. If he can get a good-paying and secure job here, we’re not going to throw away a golden opportunity and throw away good money that we so desperately need. If he can’t get anything more than other minimum-wage jobs, then we’ll probably leave the area. My logic says we will leave the area too, because you usually have to slowly work your way up in a job and climb the ladder to the bigger pay. Most people don’t get good money to start off with.

Thursday, January 6, 2005

I decided to go 24 hours without eating two days in a row, then eat normally. So twice a week I’ll eat normally. I ate normally yesterday which bumped me back up a pound to 128. It’s just that to do it day after day is too hard.

I discovered another incense site that looks promising. Maybe even more promising than IG. There’s no minimum and shipping is free on orders over $100. They have over 1000 scents! Also, I have the option of getting just an ounce of oil for around 2-3 bucks if I want to try a particular scent. They have bags, though they don’t have rings. They also don’t have about 20 of my favorites, but that’s ok. They may be worth it with scents like Caramel Pecan, Candy Corn, Chocolate Chip, Cookies & Cream, Cookie Dough, Mochaccino, Pink Lace, etc. IG doesn’t have these scents. Speaking of them, I still haven’t heard from them which makes me think they’re blowing me off for some reason if something hasn’t come up to prevent them from getting my email.

Friday, January 7, 2005

We got a few inches of snow out there. The old man in the house across the street is now riding his little snowplow, plowing not only his driveway but the nearby sidewalks as well.

I’m still doing the diet where I don’t eat till the end of my day. I’m back to 127 pounds. That’s about as low as I usually go. If anything, this diet will save money and keep me from going over 130 pounds.

Next month I’m going to try a few of that new site’s 100-packs, but only a few. This is because if their incense sticks are bad, their oil is bad. If the oils are good, however, I’ll probably buy them by the pound rather than the ounce because then I’ll get more for my money.

Saturday, January 8, 2005

And now I’m 126 pounds. Yes, I just may’ve concocted a damn good diet here. The question is, if I did, how much do I want to lose right now? We don’t exactly have the money for me to get new clothes should I start falling out of the ones I’ve got. I should set a limit of 115-120. Then again, I still have my doubts about any diet causing me significant weight loss at my age and with my slow metabolism, so we’ll just have to wait and see.

Not eating makes you cold, so by the time I get to where I’m a few hours away from my one big meal, I’m freezing!

The roads are snowy and icy, so we’re not going out today. Instead, Tom got us treats yesterday when he did the grocery shopping, including incense, figuring that this is how it’d be today. That’s the one thing I hate about snowy climates; unlike in Arizona, the weather can prevent you from going out. As much as I hate this shit, it just may keep the little animals from coming to stomp around next door this Sunday. Next Sunday, however, they probably will be there.

Tom got us our first snow shovel yesterday. I had swatted out a path with the broom before he got in, but additional snowfall filled it back in.

China is one stupid country. They have a one-child-only policy due to their huge population. Recently they made it illegal to have sex-selective abortions because the gender ratio was getting thrown off (the sexists over there prefer boys), but it’s like – duh! If they let them keep aborting girls and throwing the ratio off even more, then that’d help curb their overpopulation problem! They say boys are so popular because they’re seen as able to keep the family line going, and I’m like – hello! You need a woman to do that, too. A man can’t carry children all by himself. That’s just 95% of the population for you, though - plain old stupid.

Sunday, January 9, 2005

Romeo’s next door now shoveling Bev’s driveway, but his truck isn’t present. He was over for a few minutes yesterday. I hope my complaints about the music won’t spark them into other annoyances, like slamming doors, for instance. I’ve heard that front door more often, though it’s so far from where I sleep, it’d never wake me up. It just seems to be human nature, though, for people to act up in other ways when they’ve been complained about. That’s what the freeloaders did, always making a point to slam their car doors as loud as they could.

At least today ought to be animal-free, so we’ve got 15 more Sundays to hope we can dodge the animals, though I know they’ll be here a few times before we leave. There are 3 Sundays left in the month as it is, so one of those ought to include them.

The old man across the street came knocking yesterday. We figured he wanted to plow our driveway for a small fee, but we just ignored him.

If I don’t hear from Bob or Jeff come Monday, I’m going to tell them to forget my order. I’m also not going to play any more mail games with anyone else, so I’ll probably forget about trying incense from that other place and just get us a small microwave and me a new pillow. Mine’s just about mashed flat. I think I’ve had it since back east if I didn’t get it when I first moved to Arizona.

Later…

It looks like I’ve bottomed out at 126 pounds, though I’ll continue to do this diet for two days at a time with a day off in between to save money.

Last night I slept pretty shittily. That’s because I had to sleep on pieces of foam because this bed leaked just like the last one did! It fucking figures, though I’m surprised it took so long. Why is it always our stuff that breaks? Meanwhile, none of the stuff in here that we don’t own has broken in any way. At least I caught this leak while I was awake, rather than awakened to find I’d sunk like I did in the RV. I was lying in it reading when I realized it was getting softer awfully fast. By placing it in the tub, Tom was able to locate the leak by pushing on it. The leak would then cause the water to bubble. The odd thing about it is that the leak is in the area where my pillow is and once we examined it, it was clearly a puncture made by a sharp object and not wear and tear of the bed itself. But I don’t have anything that could do that. I don’t lie on the bed with things in my pockets, nor do I have sharp objects on me. The sharpest thing we could come up with was the metal clasp around my elastic hair tie, but even that seemed too small and just not sharp enough to go through a sheet and a wool blanket folded in half.

We tried to patch it with a piece of semi-rubbery backing from a mouse pad and some rubber cement, but that wouldn’t seal it enough. We had Tom sleep on it because I figured I’d always be waking up, paranoid about sinking. I was shocked to find it stayed up all night, though it did lose a lot of air. I was like, I nearly broke my back while this thing stayed up! Despite sleeping on 4 pieces of foam, I was still quite uncomfortable. I guess it’s because I’m a little heavy. Maybe I wouldn’t have been so uncomfortable if I were the 100 pounds I used to be, but since that’s not going to happen, we got a new bed today. Fortunately, it came with a repair kit because we forgot to get one and these cheap pieces of shit are obviously always going to spring leaks.

Next week we’re going to get a microwave and me a new head pillow as well as a new body pillow.

It wasn’t overly cold out there, but it was all slushy with patches of water and ice and just totally yucky. Dreary looking, too. Tom’s still finding this fun, though, and even enjoyed shoveling the driveway. He’s insane, I told him.

Again someone knocked on the door. Some woman with a little kid that was probably looking for hand-outs. They just don’t leave you alone in the city!

I wonder if I’ll hear from the publisher this coming week. The 6 weeks are almost up. I’d rather them tell me they’re rejecting my manuscript than just blow me off without a word, but a lot of people do that.

Tuesday, January 11, 2005

Just 110 more days to go here. If Romeo’s now living with Bev, hopefully he won’t dig the idea of a bunch of little kids visiting, but I’m sure they’ll visit again soon enough. Better yet, I wish she’d start hanging out at his place more and more, though I don’t want her to move before we do because we may get something worse over there if she did.

I wasn’t kidding, though, when I said no more complaints against the bass if she were to start up again. I’ve got an advantage here that I didn’t have with the sickos that I’m going to take advantage of and that’s that I can give back what I get. Not being attached to the sickos, it wasn’t easy to “pay back the noise.” Also, they were so damn noisy that my noise wouldn’t have mattered. Here, though, the only thing I couldn’t do is wake her up if she woke me up because I’d have to wake Tom up in order to do that. Meanwhile, I’ll just give back any bass she gives me, though all’s been quiet since complaint number two.

I was shocked to awake at 125 pounds. That’s a 4-pound drop in 8 days!

We got a little more snow, but haven’t gotten over half a foot yet. According to these online charts, the first week of January was as cold as it gets here, though it’s still going to be a few months before it warms up. I just hope it isn’t too nice to invite all kinds of chaos outside these bedroom windows before we leave!

Got a nice view out the kitchen window yesterday when a couple of deer decided to come digging through the snow for some apples. I even managed to get some decent pictures. I was amazed at how easily and gracefully they hopped over the fence. It was almost as if they floated over it and they were nearly soundless when they touched ground. They’re pretty brave too, because I went out back and watched them for a few minutes and they didn’t mind.

When Tom got in from work, he told me there were 3 of them watching him leave for work that morning. They were between our driveway and the side of the neighboring duplex.

I spoke with Bob yesterday who said things were in shambles when he returned from a vacation in Mexico. He said Jeff’s a good guy, but he’s lousy with management. He also says he’ll have my order shipped today or tomorrow, though he doesn’t know if the two body oils I want are in stock. Either way, we sent off the payment today, so maybe they’ll cross paths. If all goes well, I can mail Paula’s incense and CDs out on Monday.

Wednesday, January 12, 2005

We decided to get a microwave this weekend and put my new pillows on hold till next weekend in light of the $150 electric bill we just got. That’s nothing compared to the Arizona bills, but still a hell of a lot for us, considering what he makes here.

We did more research on Redding and were surprised to see how much warmer it is there than here. It’s barely two hours away yet its temperatures are more comparable to Arizona than here! It rains more there, though it rains more everywhere than in Arizona. Well, I’m pretty sick of the cold and snow already. My only concern would be that it may be too noisy being a warmer climate, but we’ll see. We still don’t even know that we’re going to make it down there this year. It’ll all depend on what he finds for jobs.

Tom got an idea for a book he wants us both to write together about a PI who looks for a missing person with computers being involved. It’s sort of sci-fi. I told him I didn’t know if I could do that because I’m not a sci-fi writer. I’ll give it a try, though it seems like it’d be like me trying to sing opera. I’ve still got so many book ideas of my own, and who knows when No Escape will be done?

It’s been exactly 6 weeks since I submitted my manuscript to PDP, so I hope to hear from them soon. If February rolls around with still no word from them, I’ll email them.

Of course I haven’t heard a damn thing from Bob saying that my package has been shipped. Why oh why do I always have to fight to get things??? Why can’t I just order something and get it???

The sleep curse was on again this morning. A single loud bang woke me up that seemed too loud to be any of the neighbors, so I’m thinking it may’ve come from the street. I heard another single loud bang about 10 minutes later. Since I doubt it was any of the neighbors, unless Bev hurled a chair at the dividing wall or they slammed doors with all their strength on the other side, no midnight snowballs will be hurled at their bedroom windows, though I think mom and daughter are wide awake at that hour.

Thursday, January 13, 2005

I thought it was time to do something I’ve been thinking of doing ever since I got off probation and that’s to email the Arizona Republic with the truth about what happened with the sickos we used to live with. I’m not going to tell Tom just yet because I know that’d make him extremely paranoid. Even I was a little nervous at first, knowing they could alter my email, etc., but then I remembered my vow to not let this incident keep me from speaking my mind. I did it because I felt I finally had to “fight back” even if it’s in a pathetic sort of way. It isn’t to make anyone believe me or side with me or to gain anything. I can’t kill them, I can’t sue them, but I could finally speak out without being attacked or used as people’s source of entertainment, and so I did. I will place a copy of the email at the end of this entry.

I called Bob again and he says that by next week they should be all caught up, he got my money order today, and will email me to let me know the current status of my order. Meanwhile, I’m sure it hasn’t been shipped yet.

I also called Paula and told her to start looking for her package after the 24th. She’s been kind enough not to call me so she doesn’t take up my minutes, and I assured her I’d make it a point to call her once a month. The gay guy got a 1-year restraining order on her, she’s still in touch with psycho Miguel, and her married black pig still comes around every now and then.

Last night was utterly freezing here at -7º! Bev hasn’t hung clothes out back for a while now.

I was so sick of being so cold in my sleep that I cut my comforter in half, making the part I’d cover myself with a little wider, and put the other part under my sheet to act as a padded mattress pad. I had two hours of sewing to do, but it was worth it.

My letter to the Arizona Republic:

My name is Jodi S and while I doubt this letter will be read since it’s not exactly going to say what the media would like to hear, I’ll give it a try anyway. I had turned down an interview with you folks in March of ’01 from Estrella jail because I didn’t want to be your source of entertainment, after being terribly slandered by a couple of news people who insisted they were to remain neutral and weren’t out to attack me, though you went and bashed me anyway, even though I never did read the article.

So why am I writing this? Oh, I guess it’s just because I have to get the truth out, even if no one ever cares enough to read this, much less investigate my claims.

I’m the one who was convicted of stalking Joely N on 10/30/00. The reason I’ve chosen to wait so long to write this is so that no one thinks I wrote it simply to try to get a break on my sentence since my sentence has been done and over with since 4/30/03. I don’t even reside in Arizona anymore. My husband and I were forced to run after the countless threats we received from both Miss N and the arresting officer involved, Jerry O, her personal friend. I guess the reason for the threats was that they were angry that my probation got cut 6 months early, aside from the fact that these are seriously disturbed individuals. Because of this, I am not going to disclose my location.

Let me cut to the chase and then I’ll expand on what I have to say. They said I was convicted of writing and sending N a threatening letter, but in reality, I was convicted because I am Jewish (something N has personally told me she despises) and because I launched a city complaint against her when she was on section 8 and living next to us in Phoenix for constant noise and trashing our yard. I did not know this right away, but she and Jerry O have been long-time buddies.

We moved to Maricopa because we were tired of being continually harassed and badgered by these people for no reason whatsoever. Loud stereos would come and go at all hours of the day and night, screaming and yelling were a constant occurrence, trash would be tossed over into our yard, and so on and so forth. Every time we’d call the police, they’d tell us they couldn’t be there 24/7 to monitor the situation and that they’d probably start up as soon as they left, and they did. The police also told me to keep a log of their activities. I did this in my journal. This is what the state called “stalking.” Well, let me assure you, we couldn’t have helped but know their every move if we tried because N, her boyfriend Michael, her friends and family, went out of their way to make sure we knew of their every move and this was just a few feet from our place. Their driveway ran alongside one wall of our house and we’d hear them out there slamming car doors as loud as they could, laughing about it, calling out, taunting us. I was becoming quite frightened of them. After all, there were just 2 of us and lots of them. I even heard N once yell out, “Call the police again and I’ll personally skin your white Jewish ass!” This was along with prank phone calls and notes slipped in our mailbox slot that I am so, so sorry I never saved. I thought I was being the so-called bigger person by ignoring these things and so I threw them away.

When repeated complaints to quiet down directly to them failed to work, we wrote a letter to the city. This was never about their color. This was about them being loud, rude and obnoxious. They themselves turned it into a racial issue, and never once did I make any threats to them in my journals. The closest thing I may’ve said to a threat was, “I wish they’d drop dead over there,” or “I sometimes want to go over and strangle them for all the noise,” but I never once wrote any direct threats to them or their kids.

She said in court that she had to move twice because of me yet I never knew where she moved to. That’s why I sent the journals to the old address; so they could be forwarded. (I’m sure O coaxed her into saying this) Then they said I picked on the next family which was Hispanic, but they weren’t Hispanic. They were as white as I am. When I called N and asked if she’d gotten the letter, “the letter” meant the manila envelope I’d sent her containing the journals.

That’s where Det. O comes in. We had just moved into our Maricopa home when he so rudely stormed into my house, scaring the living daylights out of me, with a ton of other cops. It was like a swat team! I was like, all this for a 105-pound, 5’ person? Then I was dragged into Phoenix to be asked questions that I could’ve been asked right there in my home. This was when I was framed, though I didn’t realize it at the time. O thrust a threatening letter into my hand that I had never seen before. It was very threatening and filled with racial slurs. I told him I knew nothing of the letter, though I did send some journal excerpts as a way of “speaking my mind” in a non-violent way that was exercising my right to freedom of speech. What I didn’t know then is that O typed the letter up himself, then thrust it into my hands to get my fingerprints on it. I also have every reason to believe he altered many of the journals as well.

Words cannot describe the sheer frustration of being set up by your own perpetrators while the media has done nothing but glorify these people. Words also couldn’t describe the frustration of knowing I can never prove the letter was a frame. I have been humiliated beyond belief. The police have ignored the threats made against us. They just didn’t want to hear it or believe it. It always makes the news when non-whites are discriminated against, but when a white person is discriminated against, you never hear about it.

The corruption doesn’t end here, I’m afraid, so please bear with me a little longer if by some chance you are still reading this.

Paul K was my public defender. I thought I just may have someone on my side at last, someone I could trust, but boy was I wrong! He withheld valuable information from me that could’ve prevented me from receiving the ludicrous sentence I received, and didn’t show me additional “evidence” till minutes before sentencing. I don’t even remember what this was because he flashed it really quickly and then shoved it away in a file folder. When I asked to see it clearly, he refused. My husband and I tried to take action against him, but the Bar Association refused to even listen to us. Meanwhile, I was led to believe I was being charged with the journals, not the letter. I was also assured – no promised – that if I pled guilty, I would receive no more than a year’s probation. I still didn’t think I deserved that much for sending what was a handful of pages of journal excerpts, but I truly believed at the time that I had no way out. K was great at manipulating people who didn’t know a thing about the law and the system. And why should I have known anything? After all, the worst I’d ever done back in my native state of Massachusetts was make prank phone calls that I got a slap on the wrist for. However, I would come to learn an awful lot too late right around this time, along with the fact that N and O were friends and maybe even more than friends by the way they carried on out in the hallway before we could enter the courtroom. Oh, it was quite a show, I assure you!

And then there was the DA and Judge. When Paul told me the DA was seeking a 6-month sentence, I was stunned. I couldn’t believe it! Who in their right mind would seek that kind of a sentence for something that was written on paper? After all, I never harmed these people, never forced them to read the journals. They could’ve simply trashed them and moved on, but not these vengeful, vindictive people. This was when I started to realize much to my horror that I may never be allowed to move on and get these people out of my life forever. And what kind of judge could hand down such an insane sentence? Even if it was the so-called “law,” well, what if the law came down and said you had to throw your children off a bridge? Would you do it? I should hope not! I should hope at that point you’d do the right thing which the judge failed to do that day. Even if I’d been 100% guilty as charged, no one – no one – should do 6 months in jail, plus 2 years of probation that would amount to thousands of dollars, for a letter!

I thoroughly regret pleading guilty and that I cannot prove the guilt of those involved, protect others from becoming potential victims of these hateful people, and sue them silly. So my next hope is that N and O, who are obviously obsessed with me, never find me. There’s no saying what they would do if they did and let me set the record straight – the only “victims” in this case were me and my husband! Another thing that’s truly frustrating is knowing that no one’s ever questioned them. Never once has these people’s credibility been questioned. I mean, certainly I can’t be the only one they’ve picked on. I’m sure that if one probed deep enough, they’d find others they’ve victimized that they believed crossed them and that O used his authority against. This man is nothing but a very angry person hiding behind a badge that he uses as a weapon against those he dislikes or that his friend/lover N has a personal vendetta against. I don’t know if they’re all white like me, but I’m sure you’d find a common denominator if you looked hard enough – Joely N and Jerry O.

I do not wish to be contacted regarding this letter. Sadly, I know these people will never be questioned, or investigated, and that justice will never be done in this case. I just wanted to correct the tall tales they’ve spun along with the media and God knows who else, and speak the truth without being attacked for once, or assumed to be out for personal gain.

Later…

Got a Bob letter today. His lungs are so bad that he says he may not make it out of there. I never thought he would, truthfully. I always figured he’d either kill himself or get shanked by some sicko.

The Bob in Idaho is still stringing me along. He emailed saying, “We never received the order so we couldn’t find it,” yet he just named off a few things on my order list the other day that he said he’d check on to see if they were in stock. Now I have no clue whatsoever when my order will be shipped, but I do know that I’m done with them for good. I’d really like to find a place I can buy my supplies from in person!

Sunday, January 16, 2005

Although I don’t expect them to get it till Monday, I went ahead and sent the publishers a message regarding any decisions made about my manuscript. Whether or not I hear from them will depend on just how professional they are. If they blow me off, then they were never all that professional to begin with.

If Bob blows me off and I don’t get the incense by Friday, I’ll just go ahead and send Paula what I’ve got, along with her CDs. Then I’ll have to fight to get the money back, and never, never, get anything through the mail again.

Meanwhile, I was able to go online and order free mailing boxes from the PO. They say they’ll be here in 10-14 days. It’d be nice if they kept their word because that way he wouldn’t have to stand in line at the local PO.

If I do get my incense, then I’ll stick to my plan of trying that other incense place next month. I’m sure they’ll start off reliable, then slowly slack off like Bob and Jeff did. Things always seem like they’re going to work out at first, but then they slide downhill. Neighbors start off quiet, then they get noisy. Diets start off effective, then they stop working. Melatonin starts off keeping me on a schedule, then it’s worthless. People’s service starts off okay, then it gets horrible.

No animals next door today, but the damn things will probably be there next Sunday.

My weight is at 126 pounds. I don’t know if I’ll get lower than 125-126. My guess is no, I won’t.

The temperature’s climbing back up which makes it much more comfortable at night. It’d cost us a fortune to heat it so that we’d be comfortable in here when it’s around 0º. It’s going to be in the upper 50s in about a week.

The Arizona Republic has so far honored my request not to be contacted regarding my email, though I’m not terribly surprised about that one. They probably never even read it, having long since decided that I was the perpetrator in this case, and if they did it would have only been to see if I threatened the sickos so they could try to hunt me down and come after me.

Tom sprayed mildew killer to try to kill all the damn mildew that’s around the windows, and although that was hours ago, I can still smell the shit. It reminds me of Monkey-Faced Maria in jail who was so obsessed with bleaching everything she could!

Monday, January 17, 2005

I got a response back from PDP. I hope she’ll find my current story more “fleshed out and expanded on” as she put it. I think it’s much better than the one she read, but we’ll see. I don’t know if I’ll rework the one I submitted only because it’s easier to start from scratch than to rework a manuscript, but we’ll see. It’s definitely longer. Still, I appreciate the feedback, even if she made a typo at the end of her review. We were kind of expecting a form letter or to be completely blown off.

Tuesday, January 18, 2005

If I could’ve read future excerpts back before the mid-90s, this one would’ve had me laughing: A cold tried to set in the night before last. It took me a while to fight it, but between my spells, incense burning, and chicken pot pie, it never got worse than a scratchy throat. I don’t know how I do what I do. I just concentrate really hard on what I want (or don’t want), though sometimes it takes a few tries.

Here’s another classic example of how not having my own kids hasn’t necessarily spared me from having to deal with other people’s kids getting in the way of my life, plans and peace. On Sunday, Bob told me he worked on my order a little, then he got pulled away by his daughter who was celebrating her 10th birthday. Supposedly, it’s to be shipped out tomorrow, but I’ll believe it when I see it.

I took my first duplex nap and slept for a few hours this evening. Perhaps that’s because cramps woke me up after not much more than 4 hours of sleep this morning. Again I don’t know what it is with the 4th hour of my sleep being so vulnerable. Did I smother someone in their sleep in a previous life after they’d been asleep for 4 hours, or what? I may be asleep when he gets in from work if I can’t get to sleep till late in the morning, but I’ll wake up to a nice surprise in the freezer if I do – a mud pie blizzard from DQ! Yes, it’s my day off tomorrow, and I’m also virtually certain that my weight won’t drop below 125 pounds. Oh well. For years I couldn’t get under 127 so maybe someday I’ll get under 125, but probably not anytime too soon. I still intend to keep up the diet, though, cuz it does a good job of saving money.

I do not look forward to this Sunday, knowing it could very well be a circus next door. The question is, will I be awake before the earthquakes begin, or will the animals wake me up? I did not come here just to be woken up by other people’s kids or grandkids!!!

Wednesday, January 19, 2005

Romeo’s visiting now. I still don’t think he’s living there, though, because the truck is hardly ever there. Why would you move in with someone and leave your vehicle elsewhere most of the time? How would he get to work, assuming he does work? He may very well be on disability himself, though I’ve never seen his truck here during regular business hours. It’s just that I remember all too well how hard it is for those on Disability to attract those with jobs. However, a guy probably wouldn’t mind a woman on Disability as much as another woman would.

The guy across the street yelled for Tom to come help him lift an air compressor out of his trunk the other day, but they didn’t chat or anything.

Thursday, January 20, 2005

Amazingly, Bev’s been gone since Tom got in from work, which was right around when I got up and still is. I’ve never known her to be out after dark. My guess is that she’s at her kid’s house. I hope that’s where she is because it’s about time she went to them rather than them going to her, cuz when they do, we’re the ones that have to deal with it, though I’m sure they’ll still visit occasionally. Most people aren’t going to forbid their grandkids from visiting just because they bother the neighbors.

I just realized another not-so-good possibility. Her daughter-in-law could be having the baby tonight, in which case she and her son may want to pawn the other kids off on her because they’ll have their hands full enough with a newborn. Why do other people’s kids always have to butt into my life? With my shit luck, her daughter-in-law has no mother for them to go to, so with just one granny to sic them on, we’re the ones that’ll have to put up with their shit.

It’s getting more and more obvious, at least to me, that Bob’s just stringing me along with no plans to ship my order. I don’t think he ever processed it. I don’t know if he’s just so overwhelmed that he’s deliberately losing customers while he’s too greedy to hire help, or what, but here’s my plan. If I still haven’t heard from him by Monday, I’ll email him informing him that he has one week to either send me my order or give me my money back. If in a week he hasn’t delivered either, I’ll trash and bash him in his testimonials every day. Hopefully, he’ll get so sick of that that he’ll finally cave in and send something. There’s no way I can trust this other incense place. I’m just too cursed with mail orders, and the more it’s something I like/want, the more I have to fight for it. It’s just too damn hard to get shit through the mail, so I give up.

I hit 124 pounds today. If things continue as they have been, I just may keep losing after all. I may be 115 when we move, from what I calculated.

Friday, January 21, 2005

It’s currently 21º here, 3º in Springfield, and 69º in Maricopa. It’s going to be 81º in Maricopa come Sunday. God, I miss that! I mean, I don’t miss the huge electric bills, struggling to regulate the AC, sweating my ass off even when I’m sitting still, but I’m sick of being cold! I’m so glad we’ll be moving when the weather warms up, cuz as much as I miss summer, I’d hate to have it warm up here. Never know what trouble it may bring outdoors if it did.

Bev was out for at least 3 hours that we know of. I’d say that kid was born. She’s never been out that long and after dark, so I’m getting rather nervous about the upcoming weekend. Damn! I did not come here to be stressing out all over again about what neighbors may do! Oh well, whatever she does, it can’t be for more than 100 days now, then all I have to do is hope we can get a house that doesn’t include the neighbors’ barking dogs or a car stereo. If they did have a stereo, though, I’d like to think they couldn’t pull right up alongside our house with it, or sit with it blasting while they tossed hoops. I just know that someone in the household will be home all the time, they’ll probably have little kids who are outside a lot, so I’m hoping we’ll have more privacy than we did in Maricopa since we couldn’t possibly have that much distance.

I had to laugh to myself when I thought of how we came here to build a home on the mountain. Instead, we may very well move to California and I may publish a book this year (I have vibes that my second submission will make it). Now that’s pretty far out.

I also laughed when I thought of how Mary had contacted me to help her get her book published, yet all I could do for her was type up what she wrote. Instead, it just may be the other way around, since she’s the one who really inspired me to improve my writing and to write more elaborate stories.

Tom was right when he pointed out how we seem to fail when we set out to do something with some grand goal in mind. Getting my stories published was the last thing on my mind when I started them. I still can’t say for sure that I ever will get any published, but I think I stand a pretty good chance. The vibes I got from Barb weren’t just that she hoped I’d submit something publishable, but more like she expected me to.

Saturday, January 22, 2005

I was laughing when I read that Massachusetts is 30 degrees colder than we are right now, and expecting a monster snowstorm. Yup, winters here are mild compared to even the easiest winters there.

Bev was out again till dusk. I know she’s not visiting Romeo who’s laid up with a broken leg somewhere because he came by last night. I just hope this place isn’t hit with 7 hours of sonic boom-type vibrations tomorrow!

I awoke at 126. That’s a 2-pound setback, so I have to really watch it for the next couple of days. My goal is to hit 123 by the end of the month.

The good news is that my incense was finally shipped out on Friday. Now all I have to do is hope they sent everything I ordered. If whatever extra thing he threw in isn’t good, I’ll just send it to Paula. I just hope I don’t have to be available to sign for it because I should be asleep when it comes on Monday or Tuesday.

Tom’s written a program to aid him with the online games. We’re hoping this will earn us an additional few hundred a month, but we’re afraid to get our hopes up. It’s just that we’ve struggled so much of our lives that I can’t see why we’d suddenly stop. The hard part is that he’s got to come up with a program that’s not too obvious and that they can block with their own software they may have set up to detect aids.

As for me, I thought that once we had a PO Box somewhere again, I’d post a notice on the bulletin board for people to send me $5 per question, and as a psychic, I’d send them their answers via postal mail or email. This way, if some trigger-happy psycho doesn’t like any answers I may give, they won’t know where to find me. I hope I can do something because my books can’t make us shit. Even if I got 5 books published right now, you’re talking just a few bucks a year in sales because not many people buy these kinds of books, and I’m not a big-name author.

He found a dollar bill in the driveway the other day. At least the occasional trash that blows in here is worth something unlike the millions of pieces of trash we’d get in Maricopa!

He said he felt a slight cold starting, so I did a spell on him. I hope it works!

Why couldn’t they come up with these flavored cigarettes before I quit smoking? They’ve got all kinds of them coming out now, and of course you also got all kinds of people protesting them. I can’t imagine how you could “flavorize” smoke, but then again, you can add fragrance to it so why not taste?

Sunday, January 23, 2005

No animals today, so that’s good. Maybe God’s just waiting to send them over on a day when he knows I’ll be up to having to figure out where we’re going to go for 7 hours while they bounce off the walls, floor and ceiling. There’s no way I can see her having them over and ordering them to sit still. You can’t tell little kids to sit still any more than you can tell a rattlesnake to rid itself of its venom. Not without traumatizing them into a catatonic state with threats of death for running rather than walking.

It seems the worst of winter may be over, judging by the variety of birds there suddenly is. So unlike Massachusetts, though I’m sure it won’t feel very summery for a while yet. Good, we still have 98 days to go here.

I have this cavity that acts up every now and then, but then I do my spells and it’s okay for a while. Although Tom’s a bit more sure he can win us a couple of hundred extra bucks a month, I want to put off filling it till after we get moved so it doesn’t jeopardize the move.

It also appears that my spell stopped his cold from setting in, too. A cold made another play for me in my sleep, but again I fought it off. Let’s put it this way – we’d both be feeling pretty lousy right now if I didn’t have the powers I have!

I hope we can find an old dumpy house no one wants to rent that’s cheaper than this. If it’ll only be for a few years, I won’t care if it’s small, old and rundown. I guess it’ll depend on how much land is around it. Just as long as there are some space and some trees for privacy. I also hope it’s where we stay till we buy a house. I may be anxious to get the hell out of here, but I’m still sick of all the damn moving we do, too!

Monday, January 24, 2005

Tom’s trying for today’s $10 on the game site. That’s what we’d like to start with; $10 a day. Without this cheater thing he wrote, there’d be no way. If this works out, though, then that’ll be his additional part-time job.

I can relate to how he said he wanted to brag to everyone and anyone about how he came up with this brilliant program, yet the only one he could tell was me. He was adamant about me writing about it at first, but then he said it’d be okay since it’s not illegal. The worst that could happen to him if he were caught would be that he’d get kicked off the site and not paid any of the money he won.

Where I can relate is that if I ever did get a book published, I’d want to rub a copy in both our family’s faces, and maybe even send a copy to Andy and Miss Priss, yet I know we wouldn’t tell anyone other than Bob and Paula. Impressing the others and showing off to them isn’t worth the cost of the postage it’d take to send the copies anyway.

Later…

I’m both excited and delighted to say that after waiting exactly one month, the incense is here! Not without a catch, though, as usual. One of the two body oils is out of stock and so is the incense oil I ordered. Also, they left out my bags. This is no biggie, though, compared to if I find that any of these dipped sticks aren’t what they’re supposed to be, but so far so good.

Bob said he’d send the stuff to me next week. I guess my box was packed, then repacked, and they forgot to stick the bags back in.

What’s funny is that he can’t find my money order which he acknowledged both on the phone and in the e-mail had arrived. He said his daughter cleans up after him and she may’ve put it someplace. Serves him right for making me wait this long! Anyway, Tom will give him its ID number if he has to. These people are so damn disorganized! What kind of fool leaves payments lying around to get misplaced? Don’t they have some sort of box for these things?

I’m impressed with how well the oil burns in the light bulb rings. Just half an eyedropper of oil, and the place smelled heavily of chocolate for about as long as in incense stick burns, maybe longer. It only smoked a teeny tiny bit, too. The only drawback to the oil rings is that I can’t use them when I don’t want lights on.

He gave me two extra 20-packs. One was an extra pack of Cotton Candy which is good. It actually sort of reminds me of butter rum, believe it or not. And also a pack of the famous Frankincense. I don’t really care for that one, so I sent it to Paula. Both she and Tina will be in for a pleasant surprise. Especially Tina, since she’s not expecting it.

The flat-rate mailing boxes I requested arrived, too. The mailman left them by the door, knocked, then took off. I’m going to miss getting packages this easily, though I’m not going to be getting many for a long, long time to come. Not just to save money, but because I’m sick of having to work so hard to get them! It sort of takes the fun out of shopping when you have to fight for your purchases, though I still may give that other place a try and get just $20 worth of sticks.

Tuesday, January 25, 2005

I was surprised to wake at 123 pounds! I did not expect that. Every time I think I’m not going to lose anymore, I do, so now I’m back to not being sure how low I’ll go.

Tom’s got a new game plan in mind. Instead of playing for set dollar amounts each day, he’s going to play for 2 hours on weekdays and 5 hours on weekends. That’ll be 20 hours a week, the part-time job we need to supplement us. He still thinks he can win around $10 a day.

I called Paula to let her know her incense and CDs would be mailed out tomorrow or the next day. I also enclosed some designer envelopes for her as well as a couple of dull colognes and a bottle of nail polish. Plus, I’m sending her a light bulb ring and a bit of watermelon oil so she can see if she too, wants to switch from sticks to avoid the residue buildup. I let her know I’d send a fragrance list from the New York site for her to choose from and to send me money for whatever she wants and I’ll get it for her when I go to do a trial order for myself in 2-3 months.

Not surprisingly, I found more botches on the incense I just got. My Butter Rum is Butter Rum and so is my Cranberry, and I’m almost sure the Cotton Candy is, too. Also, the Jasmine smelled a bit off, yet when I sniffed the bag, it clearly smelled of Jasmine. The Fruit was way off, and when I sniffed the bag, it smelled Lemony. They obviously can’t handle big incense orders, so even though he says he got a new kid helping him, I should buy more oils from them and fewer sticks. I want to convert over to oil anyway. They don’t manufacture their oil, so maybe they won’t fuck up as much as opposed to when they have to dip/package sticks.

Thursday, January 27, 2005

I spoke to Paula last night and let her know her package is on its way. While we’ve had no snow and have been in the 40s and 50s, she’s got 15” of snow and single-digit temps! Some parts of Massachusetts have 3’ of snow.

Not surprisingly, his cheater program doesn’t look like it’s going to help him win $10 a day at the game site. As I reminded him, we wouldn’t be cursed financially if we were meant to be able to do things like win money that often. The point of this is to keep us down in life and make sure we always struggle. I don’t know what’s doing this to us or why. Everyone else in our families was meant to have money, so why are we the black sheep in that department? Because we are in so many other departments as well? Well, I don’t know why we’re destined to scrape pennies, but there’s no point in getting upset over it. It’s always been this way and it always will be.

I’m also sure my publishing vibe is bullshit, too. I mean, it has to be, doesn’t it? Why would God let me do something as extraordinary as publishing a book, even if it means we still stay broke? I guess the answer is simple. I may not want to be a writer like I once wanted to be other things, but I like to write, so why would He let me do something I like and want to do other than for fun? I just don’t see Him letting me publish a book, although He did let me get pictures published, and well, I don’t know, but maybe getting something published isn’t that extraordinary. I don’t know the odds. I guess it’d be somewhat special, though certainly not as special as winning a Grammy or an Oscar. I just don’t see how one could make money with gay characters with all the bigots in this world, so maybe He would allow it after all. I think that’s why He allowed me to get my pictures published; because He knew I wouldn’t profit from it. So, if I have nothing to gain, I just may succeed.

I learned yet another fucked up religious belief from Tom when I commented on how those that hate gays tie them into religion, unlike blacks. He told me that they too, were entwined in twisted beliefs. Back when they were slaves, certain religious people said it was okay to enslave them because they weren’t really human but were in fact monkeys. As much as I hate the damn things, even I have to admit that one’s pretty fucked up, yet it’s funny, too. A lot of them do have monkey-like facial features.

I went to the Arizona Republic’s site to see if anything was printed pertaining to my e-mail. Not surprisingly there wasn’t. I wouldn’t have cared if there was, I was just curious. All I found connected to my name was one small paragraph from when I was in custody, and sure enough, and not at all surprisingly, that one little paragraph was riddled with lies. The sick bitch said I hung a teddy bear by a noose from her clothesline, that she spent as much time as possible away from the house, and that she was pregnant when we had to live with her and her sick associates. Again, I had the great misfortune of seeing her often enough to know she was never pregnant while living there. I got a kick out of the ax bullshit she threw in, though, saying she slept with an ax by her bed. What? Her big man couldn’t protect her from someone smaller than she was? Then again, I was only shorter, but not lighter. The bitch was druggie-thin, so I was no doubt the heavier one. Still… an ax? My, my, Joely, aren’t we a little drama queen? I know it was all for show, though. She was never afraid of me. The only thing she was right on about in court was when she said she was lucky to be alive. She got that one right! I still don’t know why I didn’t stick it to her when I had her on our property. I still would’ve gone to jail, but it would’ve been for a worthy cause in that case.

Anyway, I did toss an old teddy bear over the wall I no longer wanted, but I’d never have had the guts to go into the yard for fear of being shot to death. Then again, the Mexicans would’ve shot us faster than the blacks because that’s just the kind of people they were. I wasn’t kidding or exaggerating when I said they’d literally die for me. They’d die for anyone or anything, for that matter, if that’s what it took to get their way. They don’t come much more defiant than those little shits. Anyway, the noose-hanging was just the black bum’s own throw-in for dramatics, as the roof-hopping was my own add-in in the journals I sent.

As for her spending as much time as possible away from the house – I suppose that’s why I’d always bitch about her being there 24/7, because she was out as much as possible, right? Well, the truth is that it was only in the last few months that she was gone during the day, but that was only because she finally started working.

I would also bet everything I have that she didn’t lose the house. Her time was no doubt up because they were beginning to set time limits at that time. Since the 90s, you haven’t been able to stay on welfare for decades like you used to be able to. Some people would have one child after another just to stay on it, but now they’ll only pay for so many for so long, then “you’re the parents, so you foot the bill,” is their attitude, which I thoroughly agree with. I thought it was about time they cracked down on the lazy mother-fuckers. Either way, there’s no way even the nicest, most peaceful person would have gone out that quietly the day she moved, had we been the ones to cause her to be evicted. The Mexicans may’ve ended up evicted, but she did not.

Later…

I’m back to thinking I’m not going to lose any more weight. I’ve been 125 pounds for the last two days, and when I first hit 125, it was 16 days ago. Oh well. Going hungry still saves money.

I split my 24 bags of incense in half. I plan to rotate every other day between my sweets, spices and musks, and my fruits, flowers and perfumes.

Friday, January 28, 2005

Another weekend in the city has just about arrived, and so has the stress that goes with it. One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned since leaving Phoenix is to never think you’ve escaped something for good! The stress may be nothing compared to other places, but still, it’s there, nonetheless. I almost wish those animals had come last Sunday so that I could know I probably wouldn’t have to worry about them for a while, but now I’m left to anticipate what shit this Sunday may bring. Oh well, I’ll just keep reminding myself that there are only 13 more Sundays left here.

She left just before Tom left for work this morning. I wonder where she could’ve gone so early.

We’re done with Netflix and Webshots. I’m hoping Tom will be able to hack the 2 out of 4 daily premium pictures from Webshots, though I doubt it. I’d think they’d be pretty hacker-safe about that, but we’ll see. I doubt I’ll return to these things if we ever have more money because you know how I hate to have to keep starting over. I hate the part-time, sometimes-I-can, sometimes-I-can’t routine I’ve been on for so many years now. I want to either just do something regularly or not do it at all.

Tom heard at work that Walmart, which is expanding into a supercenter, is about to hire 300 people, so he’s thinking of applying there. If he could get hired there, we’d get a 10% discount on groceries and other merchandise, and he could transfer to another Walmart Supercenter in another state/town if they had an opening, because they’re everywhere. The pay’s shitty, but they do get raises and it should be more than what he’s making now (he’ll never get a raise where he is now). A coworker’s wife said she’s only been there two months and they’ve already raised her to $8.40 an hour.

Despite the not-so-good pay, I don’t know if God would allow Tom to work there what with how convenient it would be. We’d both almost certainly have insurance too, including dental.

I’m 125, which I first hit almost 3 weeks ago, so now I’m virtually certain that I won’t lose any more weight. I could if I starved myself even more, but I don’t want to. At least this diet saves money and keeps me from gaining.

Saturday, January 29, 2005

If I were doing this diet to lose weight, yesterday’s setback would’ve had me pissed enough to up my determination, and today’s setback would have me totally discouraged. I’m back to 126. Typical diet, after all. It works at first, then stops.

I slept with just the sound machine and an earplug because I was sick of having the draft on me from the fan. I’ll have to have it on tomorrow, though, in case the animals come. I should be going to sleep around the same time they’d come, if they come, although it’s easier to fall asleep to noise than to fall asleep first and then have it get noisy. It’s not that it’d be “noisy.” Just bangy and vibrant like sonic booms.

I sleep shitty half the time when I’m on nights because the city stress wakes me up constantly. When I sleep at night, though, I sleep better. It’s still a million times quieter here than anyplace I lived in as an adult in Phoenix or back East.

I just hope to hell we can find a place in a neutral zone. One that isn’t so far out and that won’t have the sounds of hunters and sonic booms, but that doesn’t have neighboring houses so damn close. I also hope there are more trees to block sounds and give us added privacy, and that if we do go to a warmer climate, dogs aren’t left outside to bark 24/7 like in Phoenix. I don’t know if they do that everywhere it’s warmer, or if it’s just a Western custom.

Monday, January 31, 2005

Tomorrow should be a good day for Paula, despite the shitty weather they’ve been having there. She should get her package.

I wonder if I’ll hear from Tina. It would be kind of rude and ungrateful to not at least get a ‘thank you’ note, but if I don’t, I don’t.

Later…

I check every now and then to satisfy my curiosity as to what’s going on with Mary’s case, but there are never any new updates that I can find. I know our justice system is fucked up and that things tend to move awfully slow when it comes to the courts, but I can’t believe she’s still sitting in jail with apparently nothing going on! I couldn’t even find any upcoming court dates mentioned. Maybe the vibe I had of her getting out in the fall of this year was way off. Maybe she’ll sit in jail waiting forever for this case to close!

It seems we’ve traded places, Bev and I. Now she’s the one out more. I just haven’t had any place to go, or better yet, any money. So broke. Always, always broke! Where will we be in a year from now?

Poor.

In 2 years from now?

Poor.

In 5 years?

Poor.

In 20?

Poor. Always poor.

It’s funny how much I’ve gained in the time I’ve been out of jail, despite how much I’ve lost as well, and what with how broke we always are. I sure got a lot of MP3s, dolls and other things since then, even if I ended up not liking some of the dolls. And look how much my writing has improved since then.

We managed to get through all of January without the animals next door, but I’m sure they’ll be back sometime during our remaining 89 days here.

I’ll miss some things about the duplex itself. The bedroom’s so much better for daytime sleeping than the Maricopa one was. On sunny days it’s darker than the Maricopa one was on its gloomiest days.

Tom sent for a brochure on Redding, yet it didn’t tell us much about living there. It was basically a tourist brochure for the rich. We certainly could never afford to rent a houseboat on a lake at a resort.

Since I’m 100% sure I’m not going to lose any more weight, unless I miraculously get the willpower to deal with the never-ending hunger, I’m not going to chart my weight on a daily basis, just weekly. And it’ll be to maintain my weight only since I can’t lose. I just try to look at the bright side of keeping the weight. Sure I’d look better if I lost it and rocking would be easier and my clothes would fit better, but with the extra weight, it may make handling the doll easier, even if she’s still years away. It should also help when the next Tami of Valleyhead or Bonny of Woodside Terrace or Barbara of Norwich or Nancy of jail goes to threaten me. I’m not holding back no matter how much of a hold they may have on me, let alone weight, height, strength and experience. Even if I was sure to be beaten to a bloody pulp, the point will be that I stood up for myself and up to them as well.

I realized something that made me wish my hair was completely gray, as funny as that may sound. If it were gray, I’d have a wider variety of color selections to dye it with. Right now I’d have to bleach and strip it to get it blond or even a light golden brown, though I doubt I’d want to have my hair those colors. I could redden it easier and even do some far-out colors like pink, purple and blue if it were lighter to begin with.

As much as I thoroughly believe Michael Jackson is as guilty of child molestation as charged, I don’t see why they even bother to drag the little pedophile into court. The rich, black male is sure to get off, not just because he is a rich, male and black, but because of the riot, they’d certainly have on their hands if he didn’t. Blacks are such sore losers, though they shouldn’t give in to their immature tantrums just because they can’t handle it when a famous black person is made to pay for their crime. We’ve got to take a stand against them and show them they can’t always get their way. Nobody always gets their way, and why they ever thought they should be any different, beats me.

To keep my fragrances special and so as not to get too used to any of them, I’ve paired them up. I’ll rotate between two scents each day, and right now I have 24. Today’s Patchouli and Sugar Plum day. Tomorrow will be Hazelnut and Gingerbread.

People sure do jump the gun on the holidays here. Valentine’s Day is two weeks away yet they already have these Valentine’s theme music stations on Yahoo.

Later…

I did hear back from Tina, after all, though all I got was a 5-dollar bill. No note or anything else. That’s cool, though, as money is more needed than notes. I didn’t specifically ask for money, but I mentioned that the incense normally sells for $1 and the burner for $4. I’d have added a ‘thank you’ note and been generous enough to send $10 for postage and just for remembering and taking the time to send it, but any bit we can get helps.

Tom says there may not have been a note because she may’ve not wanted the incense and therefore, she grudgingly paid for it. No, she wanted it. If there’s anything personal that prevented her from enclosing a note, it’s that she didn’t make $650 off of us.

I decided to end my pairs game because I get sick of having the same two scents going all day and I get to missing the other scents. I’d rather just burn what I’m in the mood to burn until that scent runs out.

Bob said the Bump & Grind oil came in today, but his supplier missed the White Shoulders. Figures, huh? If I’d ordered any other scent; that’s the one they’d have missed. Due to an awesome thing I learned about SOS, I asked Bob if the White Shoulders was made from the exact same oil as the incense oil, which I thought was way off. If it is, I asked that he substitute it for Hugo Boss or Patchouli, which costs the same. Whatever body oil he sends, I told him he could hold it till he has everything in stock.

What I learned from SOS is that there are two different grades of oil yet they cost the same - manufacturers and cosmetics. With the cosmetic, it’s not only good for burners but as body oil, too! I’m definitely determined to switch from sticks to oils due to the residue the sticks leave. My monitor looks like it did when I smoked.

I’ve been doing regular checks on Redding’s temperatures. It seems like it may be warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer which makes me fear it may be noisy. If we can get some space and some trees between the neighbors, a little noise may be worth it because I’m already sick to death of winter. Winters here may not be like back east, but they’re bad enough. So as long as every yard doesn’t have a dog left outside to bark 24/7, and the driveway closest to ours doesn’t have a basketball hoop, it may be an ideal place to go. There’d be more job opportunities for Tom, too.

[extasiswings]

I continued this audiobook despite my complaints about early plot holes and now that I’m finished am back to complain again that if you are marketing your series as a romance, yet at the end of 2 books with a collective 850+ pages, the two main characters who are supposed to be the romantic focal point are a) still doing the will-they-won’t-they/denial/“oh no I can’t do this” thing and b) have had exactly one makeout session and otherwise maybe 3 short kisses in a variety of circumstances, then you should stop marketing your series as a romance. Especially if you’re sidelining the romance at every turn even if I ignore the lack of physical development (like…these characters are stuck in a cycle of one step forward, twelve steps back where as soon as anything happens someone gets cold feet and I’m sorry but you can only repeat that cycle so many times with the same pairing before your audience starts being Over It). [Sidenote, but there was a reveal at the end of this second book that was heavily implying a whole True Love’s Kiss magic thing had happened earlier when at the time in question he…kissed her hand. Please be SO SERIOUS RN (see below for more on I would be fine with this if they were supposed to be close and platonic, I’m totally down for a family or friends TLK situation, but again this is theoretically supposed to be a romance)]

I do think it comes back to genre confusion though (which was one of my original complaints). It’s not claiming to be YA but has moments where it drops into feeling more like YA (compared to, say, India Holton’s Wisteria Society books which are very fun and whimsical but I never question that I’m reading a book written for adults), it claims to be “fantasy romance” but there’s very little actual romance happening (whether between the mains or the side pairings the author has thrown in for idk what reason other than to balloon the page count because they don’t add anything to the plot). Honestly, the series feels a lot like it wants to be Discworld (but isn’t clever enough) and the author isn’t confident enough in the fantasy world/plot itself to let it stand on its own as fantasy so instead there’s mediocre romance thrown in to prop it up (because frankly, I think there’s very little that would change for the underlying fantasy plot if the mains who are supposed to be so in love had a strong/close platonic relationship instead, and in fact I think the series could maybe benefit from that because then by the end of over 850 pages we wouldn’t be stuck on the nth repetition of “I love you but oh no I couldn’t possibly admit that and certainly couldn’t be with you” while I bang my head against the wall).

Anyway, tldr, Romance(TM) is a whole genre with its own conventions etc. It’s not easy to write and it’s not for every author. So if you’re not interested in (or perhaps capable of) writing a Romance Novel, then be honest about what you are writing, because if you’re marketing to a romance reader like me and I’m expecting to read a romance and your book/series is Not That, well then I’m just going to be annoyed.