This is my first post after my vacation. I actually wrote it yesterday (which means that everything you’ve read up to this point was written, reviewed, and scheduled before the 22nd of December), because I was so exhausted that I actually got sick for a bit there. Not with a cold or Covid or anything. Just exhausted enough that I felt terrible in a lot of ways. So, instead of taking a long weekend and making up for my days off by spending a little extra time working in the days after my break, I decided to just not do anything and then, starting the first non-holiday of 2024, write two blog posts every day for a week. It will be pretty easy, considering how much time I’ve had for reading, watching shows, playing games, and spending time with people I care about. All of which wasn’t enough to actually make a dent in my backlog of stuff to read, play, and watch even if it did provide me with plenty of stuff to write about. I did make a pretty significant dent in my gaming backlog, though, so that’s nice. It got bigger though, not long after, since I got games as gifts this holiday season. I’ve got so much to do, still. Well, that I want to do. I don’t NEED to do most of it. I just want to do a lot of it.
Continue readingMedia
The Risky Nature of Digital Ownership
Last night, after I finished the book I was reading (Mélusine, by Katherina Addison, the first in a series I’ll be writing about once I’ve finished them all), I went to open the next one in my NOOK app on my tablet and discovered the entire thing was blank. It said there were a bunch of pages in the book, but no matter how many times I swiped forward, I could never make it to page 2 or get any kind of anything to appear on the page. It was frustrating since it wasn’t time to get ready for bed yet but it was too late to really start anything new. Plus, you know, I’d bought an ebook that had turned out to be entirely useless to me. Nothing I did could fix the file (or the file of the 4th book in the series, which was bugged in the same way), so I found the support line, spent forty slow minutes trying to troubleshoot the problem with someone on their online helpdesk (which, to give this person their due, was available at eleven at night, central time, and seemed to be fairly competent at their job) only to eventually be given a refund since nothing they did seemed to resolve the problem for me. It was annoying and, sure, I got my money back, but I didn’t want money. I wanted to read the book!
Continue readingI’ve Been Too Tired For Anything But Books
As I’ve slowly gotten parts of my new apartment in order and done what I can to create space for myself to relax, I’ve found myself turning back to books more and more. My video games and TV shows are fun, of course, but they have a layer of separation between myself and them. Video games require a certain degree of skill or mechanical separation. You must know how to play the game and think about how to play the game for everything but the most immersive experiences, and even those are frequently broken by reminders that there is a mechanical separation between you and your experience. TV shows and movies lack this interactive layer, but most modern movies require subtitles (at least for me, since I often can’t understand the actors over the sound effects) and there’s always this nagging thought in the back of my mind that this experience has a volume that could intrude on the lives of other. Mostly because of how often other people’s movie experiences have intruded on my life. There is nothing between me and a book.
Continue readingAdding Streaming To My Multi-Media Creative Life Goals
Since returning from my friend’s wedding, I’ve been streaming mostly Wildermyth (and a little bit of Valheim) when I’ve had the time to actually do a stream on my twitch account. It has been a lot of fun, even if I did spend most of my first two streams using OBS at a horrendous 360p, because I’ve been treating it like I’m reading a story to my audience rather than like I’m playing a game. Sure, there’s some combat stuff that occasionally interrupts the story I’m reading, but that’s usually over fairly quickly. The same is true of the overland movement and map unveiling portion of the game (even if I’ve coincidentally spent way more time managing things than I usually do on account of character hook quests pulling my characters to incredibly inconvenient locations). I spent probably forty-five minutes of every hour trying to keep the character’s voices consistent as I read through storytime and the other fifteen minutes managing mechanics. I’m really enjoying myself, even if it’s pretty difficult to manage audience comments and interactions at the same time.
Continue readingGetting Back Into New Stuff (Book Edition)
I meant to go from Podcasts into streaming stuff, but my trip and a late-night reading incident changed my plans. As I was preparing for my trip, I wound up buying a bunch of e-books. I’d wanted to bring some stuff to read, but I absolutely did not want to bring any physical books since my bags were already jam-packed with things I couldn’t do without. I also didn’t want to re-buy any books I already own (since, like podcasts, I’ve been collecting more and more of them without actually reading anything new). My initial plan was to pick up a bunch of comics that I could read on my phone in my downtime, since it’s fairly easy to zoom in on comics when I’m using my phone and I’m already used to reading them as I scroll around a page on my phone thanks to years of reading webcomics. As I was packing, though, I remembered I have a tablet that I bought years ago as a means of having D&D Beyond at my fingertips during Dungeons and Dragons sessions and that I was bringing that anyway, for a thing I’m doing with the group. So, instead of buying a bunch of comics, I queried around for some new books to buy, bought them, and set up my tablet with an e-book app. Thanks to that, I was able to read as much as I wanted during my vacation (which turned out to be not that much since I read all the comics during the flight out/recovery time and then only had a few more occasions where I wasn’t doing something more engaging than reading).
Continue readingGetting Back Into New Stuff (Podcast Edition)
I’ve been listening to mostly the same podcasts for the past two years. To be entirely fair, there’s been a lot for me to catch up on, since I got into podcasts late in general and very late in regards to some of these longer-running podcasts, specifically. That said, I hit a point last summer where I was entirely caught up and had listened to or watched all of the Patreon bonus content I cared for, but I wound up starting a string of full-series re-listens that I’m still working through now instead of trying something new. I needed something familiar and comfortable, so I just listened to stuff all over again. Some of it was nice, since I missed things here or there the first time and a second listen-through cemented the stories and characters I loved so much more firmly in my mind. Most of it, though, was just something I enjoyed to fill the silence of my evenings, combat the tinnitus I’m developing, and drown out the constant thumping, bumping, and creaking of my upstairs neighbors. Over the past few weeks, as I’ve pushed myself to start trying new things again, I’ve finally started making progress on my “to-listen” pile.
Continue readingGetting Back Into New Stuff (Anime Edition)
After years of living alone and even more years of borrowing someone else’s Crunchyroll account, I’ve finally started watching new stuff again. Mostly anime right now, since I don’t feel like wading into the intermittent cesspool that is Netflix, Hulu, HBO Max, or whatever else I’ve got out there. So much TV and streaming-centric movie stuff has happened in the last decade and so much of it ran for so long that even thinking about trying to catch up on what I’ve missed or saved for later has me feeling fatigued. In the anime sphere, it’s a bit easier. Most shows feel like they take longer to come out, the overall runtimes/episode counts are shorter, and it’s also a bit easier to get recommendations from my friends since I’ve watched so much less anime than any other type of TV show. I can usually just ask for the top five shows from a few people and watch what comes out of that without needing to worry too much about whether or not my taste aligns with my friends’.
Continue readingAn Angry Rant About Algorithmically Generated Images and Media
Every time I see someone posting photos of themselves that they’re run through the latest in algorithmic art theft and image editing, I find myself screaming in my head “did these people learn NOTHING from the stupid facebook quizzes of the 2010s???” History is cyclical and it is frustrating to watch so many people I know repeatedly make the same mistakes about their digital footprints. It is difficult to fault them, at times, since the entire internet aparatus these days is set up to scrape as much of your personal information as it can, but given that all they have to do is read a EULA or keep up with all the art theft, copyright infringement, and actual damage to the artistic professions that these media-generating algorithms are doing these days, I find myself losing respect rather than feeling a desire to educate.
Continue readingSpending My Time And Attention
As you might have guessed from the subject matter of my blog posts of late, I’ve been thinking a lot about social media and the role it plays in my life. Which is actually just a piece of what I’ve actually been thinking about recently. And by “recently” I mean “for most of my adult life but in a new sort of context.” I’ve been thinking a lot about my time, my attention, my effort, and how I spend all three of those things. The recent focus of this mental exercise was inspired by a thread I saw on Twitter a couple weeks ago (that I unfortunately can’t find again) that made some bold claims about the amount of money and energy spent on advertising to people against their consent. I mean, all you need to do is look at how many ad-blocker programs exist for web browsers and phones to see how much people want to avoid it, and so much money gets spent on not only bypassing those things, but filling as much of the world with advertisements as possible.
Continue readingYou Don’t Need To Hit The Ground To Know What Will Happen When You Fall
Last night, I engaged in a choatic bacchanal during what some alleged might be the final hours of Twitter’s life. Of course, the site is still up this morning and I don’t think most people truly believed the website was going to abruptly vanish at some point. It was (and still is) pretty clear that Twitter is going to diminish and fade into obscurity or diminish and transform into something else, just like every other social media site that has fallen by the wayside over the years. After all, it’s not like MySpace is entirely unavailable, it’s just irrelevant. Things on the internet tend to not vanish completely so much as fade from public reckoning or change so completely that they’re actively abandoned. Thus far, neither has entirely happened yet, but last night marked the end of an era as, if the reports prove true in coming days, most of Twitter’s employees have left the company.
Continue reading