The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

I feel like I’m having problems finding things to write about lately! I’ve been consuming less content because I’ve been working so much, and my current game conquest I shouldn’t talk about, because the whole point of me playing it is to write an article about it! (Dun dun dunnnnn!) More and more, I find myself on days like this one where I just kind of want to go to bed, and don’t want to do this. Still, here I am, because this silly blog is such an element of pride for me. I’m proud that I write some sort of bullshit everyday. It means a lot. So here I am. Let’s ramble.

I still have no idea what the whole right thing to do is on FurAffinity. Every so often I write my stupid shit and post it there. I don’t edit it, and I don’t spend much time on it: I get feeling all guilty when I’m doing heavy editing and storytelling work on pornographies. Still, I put them up, and people who find them somehow often decide they like them, probably because they play into under-served fetishes I am also a part of. It’s when they favorite, or comment, that I don’t know what to do. People have sometimes sent me messages thanking me for watches on FA when I watch them. Should I be doing that? People leave feedback on a story and what they want to see. Should I address every person? I’ve mostly just stayed quiet out of being unable to know. I just don’t use FurAffinity that way. I know it’s some furs Facebook or whatever, but it’s not mine. It’s just an easy way to track artists who draw shit I like. I dunno.

The house-buying continues well. I guess I haven’t written about that much here, but I’m buying a house, and I’m excited. I’ve got all kinds of household goods I’ve been collecting, which is useful. Of course, I still haven’t gotten the most important parts, like a new router and cables to run all over the damn place for the serious internets. Of course, apparently my bank has decided to take my loan deposit out of my account twice, instead of just, you know, the one time, so I’m a big super-broke at the moment. I get to yell at them about that tomorrow. Yay! But yeah, that’s all going according to plan. I’m cooking and planning and scheming. Of course, I worry the house won’t really feel like my home until a certain wuff gets his butt down here to me, but that’ll happen in due time.

I also continue to unironically like ponies. I rather think the pony thing has gone too far as a fandom, though, and this sort of thing is proof, but that is part of the reason why I revel in it and enjoy it so much. For whatever reason, ponies are something that the internet has decided to just be okay with liking without caveats or haters. (Okay, there are surely those types out there, but for once, I just feel like they are getting drowned out by love, instead of the other way around.) People can show their love for this silly kids show, and it’s fantastic to watch people just go for it, and feel for once they won’t be judged for it. Maybe I’m misreading things, but that’s how I see it. I love it. The fact that it’s a genuinely good show that I am entertained by is fantastic too.
I do still think the term “Brony” is fucking terrible, though. Ugh. Certainly not going to call myself that.

Anyway, that’s a blog. Goodnight, everyone.

Usagi Drop is a lovely show.

For whatever reason I have been following a lot of anime lately. Usagi Drop is one of them.
It gets me every damn time.

I swear, an episode of this show does not end without me tearing up a bit. You can just feel the love radiating from these characters. It’s awesome. Daikichi is every bit as bumbling as you’d expect an older, career oriented dude to be who is suddenly a father. However, he has so much fucking heart. He dived into this thing head-first because he couldn’t stand to see this girl ostracized and hated, and fell in love with her immediately. It’s touching, and most of the big problems in the show are incredibly mundane. “Oh shit, I need to find a school? How do I even do that?” “Oh shit, I need to pick up Rin after school but my job requires me to stay and do overtime often.” “Oh shit, Rin is getting sick, how can I help her?” These issues are everyday, but they are harrowing. They’re tough, and the show shows exactly how they are tough. He makes difficult decisions, but the right ones. Things happen in a fantastic way. I love it. It makes me so jealous as someone who tries to write sometimes. I always feel like I completely fail at making those conflicts seem like conflicts. I feel like I can’t write a story based around that kind of action. It makes me jealous of shows like this.

Rin, too, seems to be really realistic to her character background. She was raised before having to do a lot alone. She was raised with her father, so she doesn’t think of Daikichi like that, although he clearly is. It just works. She’s adorable and also portrayed deeply. It’s nice.

Sure, there are some elements of the show that frustrate me. Daikichi not just getting up the nerve to ask the single mom he is clearly completely into on a date really bothers me, for instance. Maybe this is just a thing in general, where it’s easy to know what to do in a relationship outside it? I don’t know. Fucking ask her already! Gah.

But seriously, every moment filled with heart in this show makes me want to cry. I think that says something about my want to be a mother and have kids. Heh, maybe I’m not as good at hiding it and burying it as I thought. I’ve tried very hard to rid myself of that for a long time, since I can’t have kids outside of adoption and I hear that’s super hard to make happen for people like me. I certainly don’t think I want any children for awhile now anyway. Too much living my life as me I have to catch up on first. But I guess that’s still a want of mine. Somewhere, deep down. Heh, I bet when I become an aunt (which I am to believe is in my future some years from now) that sort of thing is going to come back in full force, and I am going to want a kid so badly! But for now, it gets to surface a little in teary smiles when I watch a silly show. I guess that’s alright.

Me hours ago when I wasn’t tired: Eh, I’ll write the blog later.
Me now: Well, I’m falling asleep at the keyboard, I guess I’ll go to be… oh wait, blog.
I’m a genius.

In any case, I wanted to talk about the customers at Kohl’s. I, of course, have to push the silly credit cards that we sell as someone on the register. It’s just a job, and it doesn’t bother me. (It does bother me a little that I’ve gotten caught up in the leaderboard bullshit because people keep telling me I’m good at doing it, but oh well.) I ask, and the moment they say no, I shut the fuck up. Other people go super-hard-sell on some customers, and that just seems crazy to me. That seems like bad customer service. I can’t blame people for not wanting a Kohl’s card. I most definitely have no plans to get one, and it would make getting my employee discount way easier for me. I can layer the Kohl’s Charge discounts on top of my employee discount, too. There are more benefits for me. But fuck if I want one. So I can’t blame people, but I ask because it’s my job.

In any case, when people say no, the one excuse I hear all the time is “my husband would kill me,” or some variant, such as “I would get in so much trouble with my husband.” At first, I thought nothing of this. But the more I’ve heard it, the more it started to bother me. It seems like such a stereotype kind of answer. “I am a woman and we are supposed to love shopping and not be good with money so if I had a card I would spend too much ha ha! Stereotypes!” I’m supposed to accept that because “Oh, of course stereotypes are real” or “I hear you I am the same way we are such women who shop too much ha ha!”
Of course, that might actually be some people’s situation. Their husband could be in charge of finances, and they could have bad impulse control when shopping. It’s possible. But I hear it way, way too much for it to be true for so many.

In any case, I was trying to figure out why one would lean on stereotypes like that. I suppose it just goes back to all those people who hard-sell these stupid cards. They feel like the only way to get people to shut up is to put the decision-making onto someone else. If that’s the case, I can’t follow up, right? I wouldn’t, but they’re making sure I couldn’t. If they actually make it clear they’re able to make decisions and think for themselves, then I suppose they assume I am going to hound them and generally make the interaction unpleasant. There is a co-worker I have who I will not name who will literally take the application, waves it in their face, and attempts to push a pen into their hand and get them going on things. It takes at least three no responses before this co-worker will check people out at the register, which is this co-worker’s actual job. This co-worker comes off as someone I don’t want to be around! This co-worker is making the shopping experience a bad one. I do not want to be anything like this co-worker. I understand wanting to dodge that kind of treatment.

But it’s really kind of sad. It’s weakening yourself, belittling yourself, and not for fun reasons. Sure, it’s just an interaction at a stupid retail store, but I know from experience that bowing down and using this kind of technique to dodge stuff again and again will eventually wear on you until it becomes more true than you’d want. People shouldn’t have that sort of erosion happen over a stupid credit card.

If you’re in my line, say no. I’ll shut up, having read the script I am required to read and thus done my job. If you’re in someone else’s line, say no. If you’re asked again, be annoyed as you have a right to be, and tell them that you “really need to get going.” This is not a lie, as I’m sure you need to not be in that situation and thus need to get going from it. Let that be the end of it. Alternatively, just ignore repeated questions after the first no. Pretend you heard nothing. I find that shuts things down pretty fast as well. But just, you know, trust in your own power to know whether or not you need another credit card. Because I’m sure you know that. I’m sure you can make decisions for yourself.

Happy Pony Day!
Let me talk about Penguins.

I’ve been watching Mawaru Penguindrum, as I said yesterday. But now I’m caught up. (Up through Episode 10. I think that’s caught up.)
I am loving this show.

If there’s one thing I really like about it, though, I suppose it’s how grounded it feels. The show can border on extremely silly, and there are many completely surreal and unrealistic elements to the show, like the silly transformation sequence I showed last time, and this lady who seems to be assassinating people’s memories with some sort of slingshot with a laser sight. But it never feels unreal. All the characters feel like actual people who could exist, reacting to things appropriately, even when they’re a little crazy. It feels stupid to me that I feel the need to point this out every time I notice it in an anime, but it’s honestly just rare. Anime tends to use so many stock characters and stereotypes. It’s so very nice when a show doesn’t. It shows that anime with good writing is just damn good television.

The show has also just flat-out shocked me several times so far. Ringo’s character has just overwhelmed me with how far she is willing to go. To the point of me yelling “OH FUCK!” at the screen. I’m proud of the show for going there. I’m proud of the show for letting a character with some believable and understandable motivations also be so batshit insane and uncaring. I like her, despite of how horrible she is. I’m interesting what latest plot twist will mean to her character going forward.

One more thing I appreciate: the show seems to be leaving nothing on the table. When recent reveal about a background element of many episodes being important to Himari’s past came about, I was all like “Ooooh. Good job.” It really completely spun her character about: She can’t go ANYWHERE without being reminded of her life’s failures. All intense. Little elements or things that seem throwaway keep coming back in bigger and more important ways. It’s nice, because it makes the show feel very planned, which makes me confident that the narrative will continue and end as good as it’s going.

There is one thing I don’t like, though: the Penguins themselves. I just don’t find them working as comic relief, which the show seems to want to use them as, and they’re just kind of stupid. They don’t seem to be doing too much, plot-wise, now. Maybe that will change. Probably will. But for once, the random dose of cute doesn’t seem to be doing the show any favors at all. If I had to pick a weakness, that’s it.

Anyway, I am going to keep following this. Because it’s awesome. So I wrote some thoughts about it. The end.

River Song is a waste of a good idea.

I dunno, I just have to say this, because it frustrates me. So much of Dr. Who is so much better now that Russel T. Davies is gone, but at the same time, they’ve done so much shit. The show is so great, but they just tend to forget where the line is for creating entertaining cheesyness and real, terrible cheesyness. They do great work, and then cross the line and ruin the work they’ve done.

River Song is just such a great example of this. Current season spoilers coming, of course, so, you know, if you’re not caught up, don’t read.

When River first appeared, she was a great idea for a character. Being from the Doctor’s future, she was the first character who truly had something up on him, and could put the Doctor off=guard. You could see the Doctor react to that. It bothered the shit out of him, which was perfect. He was threatened in a whole different way. It was the sort of thing that you could get some character development out of the Doctor from, which is hard to do with a character like the Doctor. I was down.

Then she came back for another episode, which was fine. Sure! Why not? More Angels and shit. She’s still mysterious and a problem for the Doctor. I can dig it.
Then she came back again.
And again.

At this point, the mystery of her was wore out. She was just this person that the Doctor was supposed to be in love with. But there were no sparks between them. That was kind of a problem. Still, I was okay with it. Then there was this pirate episode that disgusted me so much I kind of gave up on the season.

Coming back, I got caught up with what had happened. And what had happened was bullshit. Apparently River Song is Rory and Amy’s daughter for no reason, and she’s also part Time Lord for no reason, and she’s also an assassin for no reason. I watched the episode “Let’s Kill Hitler” and I shook my head. They were flushing her character, and all the good she brought to the show, down the toilet for some really, really stupid plot twists out of nowhere.

I see it again and again from the show, and it frustrates me. It’s like they don’t know what they’re doing. I think the problem is a George Lucas kind of problem, where they worry that they need to make a show that kids will like, instead of just worrying about making something good that kids can watch. Whatever it is, I wish they’d stop it. They’re obviously capable of making some super-fun, super-interesting television. I wish they’d just do it.

There are times when I am like, “I am a pretty damn good conversationalist. I can get my ideas across, I can be witty and funny, I can listen and give good advice, and so on. I got what it takes to conversate.” I go out. I turn on charm. I may not be the best, but I can charm some people. I can orate. I can give orders to my crew. I can make assignments. I get stuff done. I do stuff.

Being semi-competent in conversation has just been doing great things for me recently. I feel like I’ve been getting really close to Cara and Aesa with all this talking we’ve been doing. Deep conversations. Good conversations. The kind of conversations where you leave knowing there’s a connection there, a strong one, that’s only going to get stronger.

Then there are conversations with my parents, where my wordskills completely fail me. When I can’t get across what I need to say because they won’t listen, no matter how I put it. Where every time I talk to them, it becomes more and more clear that wanting to be close to my parents is not a mutual feeling. I leave each encounter feeling the gap between us widen.

Words, like Space, have a terrible power. Good and evil, all in how you use it. All that shit. I spend hours at work thinking of petty and spiteful ways to use words to get revenge. I think of scenarios where I can annoy the shit out of those in my way, or make them feel how they make me feel. Or maybe I just roleplay, in my head, screaming at them, loudly and insistently, telling them off and telling them exactly what I wish I could without insulting them. Just yell “Fuck you, you selfish assholes!” Just scream until things somehow get better. Like screaming ever helped anything.

I talk to people about things. I talk to them when I am tired, like now, and I tell them things that I wouldn’t say otherwise. I tell a certain someone about how I love them and wish I could move our relationship forward into something beyond online sexytimes. I tell friends how much they mean to me and everything I feel about them. I tell people about how I used to sing songs about how much I deserved to die and how I’d kill myself soon, surely. I sing those songs to myself. I argue with myself, then tell my puppy dog about it and cry. I make plans. I execute on plans. I laugh. I enjoy myself. I talk to people about things.

I’m talking to people about things.

Goodnight.

Gather round, get out your dream interpretation manuals, it’s time to talk about my dreams again. Oh joy! Here we go.

I dreamed I was at a family get-together of some sort. Mom, Dad, Grandma, Grandpa, and Jonathan were there, as well as all the dogs. I don’t know where Shauna was, but I don’t remember seeing her. I was trying to be sociable, until I met Jonathan.
“You’re supposed to be on your Honeymoon!” I said.
Jonathan shrugged. “I came back.”
“Why would you come back? You just got there!” I said. It was then I realized there was no way this could be real.

So I woke up. Only I was in a strange room. It wasn’t a bedroom I recognized from anywhere. It had stuff that very easily could have been mine, but I didn’t recognize any of it. I grabbed my glasses and got out of bed. It was morning. Mom was walking around. But again, it wasn’t my house. I didn’t recognize it at all. “This is all wrong,” I said to myself. “I must be dreaming.”

So I woke up. Only I was in the same room again. I picked up my glasses and it as basically the same as before. Strange house, nobody else thinks it’s weird. I remembered shit I’d read about Lucid Dreaming a long time ago, and figured that if I was going to be in a dream, I might as well have fun with it. I tried hovering, and flying around outside. It worked like a charm. I looked down at myself, and I was as I am now. (This is always a thing for me. Normally people are kind of just featureless entities in my dreams, and I don’t remember anything about how they or I look, but for some reason, I was just myself this time.) I’m like “Okay then, if this is my dream, I can be born female.” So I tried concentrating on it. I got the breasts down: they became real, but for whatever reason I couldn’t get the other bits working. This really frustrated me. I could fucking fly, so why wouldn’t my mind let me be myself for five fucking minutes? I tried and I tried to no avail. I was stomping around, angry. Dream Mom was concerned.

Then I woke up for real.

Your guess as to meaning is as good as mine, readers. And I dunno, if you want to see how often I dream, look back at when the last time I wrote about this stuff was. I haven’t had a dream since then. Heh.

I cooked tonight. To various levels of what one can call “cooking.”

Well okay, so. I was driving home from St. Louis. I knew I had the house to myself so I’m like all “fuuuuuuck what I am going to get for dinner on the way home?” I couldn’t come up with anything that sounded good to me.

It was then that I realized a flaw in my logic. “What am I going to get?” is the wrong question. I am the sort of person who will soon own a house and live in that house and needs to not be eating out constantly and be more wise with money. The question should be “What can I make when I get home?” I nodded with this sound realization and brainstormed what I could make. When I got home, I executed on the plan.

Basically, I had a few chicken sammich patties left over, but no bread. So I decided to make some Rice-a-roni type stuff and chop up this chicken and then use a fork and eat that. I was a bit worried, as the chicken was breaded and that seemed odd to go over that sort of thing, but I shouldn’t have been, as it was fucking delicious and filling, though the fact that I love some Rice that has been Ronied probably helped with that. It was an ugly dish, though, as most things I cook turn out to be. (They also tend to turn out at least mostly edible and tasty, so I guess I can’t complain.) I would not have scored many points for plating on Iron Chef.

After I enjoyed that, I had enough left for another plate, so I made that up and stored it for tomorrow, as I believe you are supposed to do. (We’ve never been a family that’s big on leftovers, and when we did have them, usually Mom would take care of the eating of them, not me.) I cleaned up the kitchen and went to work. Adventure over.

The one thing that occurred to me was that the whole process really didn’t take very long. One of the reasons I never did much cooking for myself is that I always felt like cooking took forever, but as I think about it now, it probably would have taken just as long (maybe a little bit shorter, but not a lot) to run out and get something from a drive-through. Granted, I’m not about to pretend what I cooked is anything even remotely complicated in the least. Real cooking probably does take longer. But just cooking for me, this was great. I did the kitchen stuff and caught up on podcasts and it was really no big deal. I feel like this bodes well for me surviving out on my own.

But maybe I’m just making a bunch of stuff out of nothing because I am tired and I needed something to write about and that felt like the one thing of note I did today. You decide! Just remember I have a delicious lunch waiting for me in the fridge that I am totally going to eat tomorrow.

Saturday, I worked late on Ad Set. Sunday, I got up super early to be at work at 6 AM, worked a shift, then came back and worked another shift at 5 PM. Today, I will be driving to St. Louis, driving back, then working another shift.

I’ve been working a lot.

I’m not complaining, perse? I’m glad I’m finding some sort of hours, and while Kohl’s has it’s problems as an employer, I really don’t mind working there. (I wouldn’t be working there 6 or so years later if I had problems.) I like most of the people there, everyone knows and trusts me, and everyone has been fantastic with all the changes going on in my life to boot. The experience of working is not a bad one. I don’t really mind it. At least I’m being useful, you know?

It’s really the lack of a schedule that bothers me. When I work is all over the place. It was before, when I was just doing ad set, but I still had structure in my life because my classes were structured and regimented at normal times throughout the day. Now, I don’t have that. I teach those two days a week at a set time, but otherwise I have no idea when I’m going to be working, or when I will be able to pick up a shift.

I’ve always been the kind of person who likes normalcy, and dislikes change, but it didn’t occur to me until I started picking up all these extra shifts and doing all this extra work how much not having a set weekly schedule bothered me. I feel lost, like I don’t know when it is. It’s harder to put things into a time perspective, something I am already terrible at, without being able to point at cycles in my life to determine how long it’s been. (Sort of a “Well, I’ve done that twice since we talked last, so two weeks ago?”) In a post-school world, I never figured that filling that time with work however I could would bring me down, but here we are.

Basically, I hope I can find a full time position for the scheduling benefits. I mean, other benefits, like not completely ass health insurance, will really help me too, don’t get me wrong. As well as, you know, money. But I’d like to get into a routine again. A routine would be nice. A routine would be relaxing.

I’m still playing Tiny Tower. Like, every single day.

Why?

1. I’m still seeing new things.
Tiny Tower has nice pixel-style visuals. I like it. It looks cool. They put a lot of time and effort into making all those floors look really neat. Plus, there are a TON of them. At the time of this writing, my tower is currently 76 stories tall. There has, of course, been no repeats in the types of floors. Even stuff like the various apartment floors, which could easily have been repeats, are all distinct and different looking. And I know, from looking at the list of desired jobs and at friends’ towers, that I have not seen a whole lot of stuff yet.

2. Progress is really well thought out.
I really like that, even though my tower is huge now, and I’m bringing in a ton of money, my progress is thought out enough that I can still proceed. In most free to play games, you eventually hit a point where proceeding without paying is a tedious mess. The game is basically screaming at you to give them money, and lots of it. Tiny Tower doesn’t do this. Progress is still about the same: I can make enough to build about one floor a day. I could certainly build a lot faster if I didn’t, but I don’t have to. Since the game is so casual, a floor or so a day feels like perfect progress to me. I like it.

3. Availability of “For Pay” Content.
Tiny Tower loves to give you Tower Bux, the thing you can pay money for. It gives them to you quite often. It’s extremely nice. As long as you keep your spending of them to a minimum, you don’t have to be shut out of key features just because you didn’t pay, like upgrading your shops. Personally, I use my Tower Bux to move tenants into apartments (because that takes FOREVER without it) and upgrade shops that require a lot of constant attention: I only really check the game twice to three times a day, and shops that require me to constantly be fiddling with them are less desirable. Thankfully, they put in that feature so I could upgrade them and have to worry about them less! And because they’re so nice about giving me Bux, I can use that feature sparingly to increase my enjoyment of the game.

4. Inability to Lose Progress/Low Time Commitment
If I forget to check Tiny Tower in a day, I don’t lose progress. Everything I’ve done is still effective. My tower doesn’t rot, my wares don’t spoil. I can not touch the game for days, and it won’t punish me for it. Sure, I’ll be making less money and progressing slower, but I won’t be kept back. I won’t have to climb back up to where I was.
Because of that, and my upgrading strategy, I can play the game when I wake up and when I go to bed, as I have been, and not feel like I’m fucking it up. I can play this game on my terms. Many of these games try to set the terms for you. Tiny Tower makes suggestions of terms, but doesn’t stop you from making them yourself. I appreciate that.

Tiny Tower really is great. Some people hate this kind of game on principal, and that’s cool. Don’t play it. But I easily would have dropped a few bucks on this game. It’s just fantastic, and even better that it’s free. If they offered something to buy that wasn’t just the ability to do what I am doing but more, such as, I don’t know, a pack of new shops or something, I would probably buy it to support them.