September 29, 2024 - bloghan 14
If I had a buck for every deer pun I made in this bloghan, I'd have two dollars. Which isn't a lot, but is it really that weird, given what happened this week? Let's get into bloghan 14.
Tier list of the week
This week's tier list: deer, specifically in the Cervidae family. I won't be delving into extinct species, and I also won't be going into subspecies. I have also excluded deer that have literally only been seen once (Pu Hoat muntjac), or have only been identified as a separate species by DNA analysis of corpses only (leaf muntjac). Here's the tier list:
Ordered tiers, but unordered within tiers. This tier list is based mostly on magnificence and a "cool factor" for each species: for example, the water deer has fangs, which is such a cool thing, which is why it's S-tier. The pudus are very tiny and relatively underwhelming, so D-tier. To me though, there's no such thing as an F-tier deer.
Personal updates (achievements, reflections, and antics)
I spent the very beginning of this week scrambling to get bloghan 13 out on time, so I was up in the wee hours listening to chill music with an old friend from high school in voice chat. We got into some pretty good discussion about 'Kirby' lore as well, and made some surface level notes on leitmotifs in music from that series. That was a very peacful night, I should do it again.
Monday came, and it was a pretty overcast day. It rained a bit as I got to work, but once I was inside, the rain stopped and the dark clouds remained. I worked on the task the director gave me, and looked at my work calendar, to see that there was a team lunch I signed up for that was today, and not the next day. I was sure it was a Tuesday thing, but maybe they changed it up on me? It was an Indian restaurant not very far from the workplace, so I headed out with some of my closer coworkers and my work rival 15 minutes before the lunch started. On the way, I stepped on a snail by accident, completely crushing it. I wasn't looking where I was going, and I felt pretty bad, but it was my frist time seeing a snail in the wild like that. My work rival was completely distraught. I recovered within a minute, he was thinking and talking about how horrible it was for five. We made it to the restaurant, which was in a small mall, and as we entered, I saw my work rival bend over near the entrance and touch something near the ground, but I didn't bother with thinking on it further. The restaurant was reserved just for my team, and we looked at the menu. It was very surprsingly limited for an Indian restaruant, but I guess they did that since a huge load of people would be coming in. I ordered the only spicy menu item, the chicken vindaloo, while basically everyone else went for butter chicken. While we waited, we discussed stuff about the tech stock market, about logistsics of booking an entire restaurant, about the kinds of sauces one eats with samosas, stuff like that. One person at my table showed me who 'the guy who was really mad at me for breaking stuff accidentally' was, and I was surprised. I did not expect him to look like that, but it justfied my beef with him even further (now that I had a corporeal person to beef with). We eventually got the food, and... yeah the vindaloo wasn't all that spicy. I could feel it, sure, and my nose felt it, but the sensation of spice wasn't all that... panicky? Some of my coworkers were sweating from the lamb kebab or the butter chicken though, but I guess that's just how it be sometimes.
It was a good lunch, with a very good portion size for it being paid on the director's company card, and we headed out 10 minutes after finishing (there was still work to do). On the way out, someone reminded my work rival of the entrance, and he bent over again, picking something up. I couldn't believe it. It was a snail. Not the same snail that I'd smashed, but one close by. He was cradling it in his hand, and he was fascinated. I was a bit concerned, since if you pick up a snail while it's suctioned, you coudl risk tearing its muscles from its shell and causing its organs to fall out, but he said he picked it up while not suctioned. Once we got back into the office, he straight up threw the snail on his desk, then realized that maybe he shouldn't do that. It was fully retracted in the shell, and I told him he should go wash his hands since snails tend to have a ton of parasites. It unnerved me that he just left it on his desk, since our desks are next to each other and they touch. Eventually, my work rival put the snail in a paper cup he once had tea in, and put a little bit of water in the cup too, since he read that snails like moist environments. Personally, I wouldn't want to be in a moist environment near my work rival, but I'm not a snail, so I guess that's a completely irrelevant opinion (but one that I needed to say, thank you for reading it). Eventually, I noticed that the snail was climbing out of the cup, and my work rival picked the cup up right away and just stared at the snail. It was fully out of its shell, exploring its surroundings with its eye stalk things. My work rival was completely entranced, and started lightly petting it (on the shell, not on the highly absorbent skin). It was one of his quietest moments, which I greatly enjoyed. Eventually, when he went home, he took it with him, and I immediately got some disinfectant wipes and wiped down both our desks.
The next day at work was pretty uneventful. There was to be no D&D, since we were delaying it to tomorrow to account for something my work rival had to do later this evening. So I went back to my place, and got bored pretty quick. While there was a lot for me to do, I didn't really feel like doing any of it. So, I hopped into an empty VC my friends could join and just listened to 'Shikairo Days' on loop, just to push my brainrot agenda and also because I had that opening in mind (I've found myself muttering/chanting the first four lines in my regular life a lot). I went ahead and did some cooking and cleaning, but after 3 hours of listening, one friend dropped in. She negotiated with me the following terms: I would clear the music queue, and in return we would watch the first three episodes of 'My Deer Friend Nokotan.' So I did, and we watched, and I had such a great time. I really love the show, since it matches that humour my friend and I have, what with the evolution of "brainrot" and "LOL so random" into longstanding bits with excellent payoff when pulled out at opportune moments after weeks of setup. I also just absolutely love the way it pokes at tropes in anime, such as the portrayals of the 'delinquent student' and 'ideal student,' the trope of the transfer student taking the empty seat conveniently next to the main character, and even more contentious tropes such as the prevalence of 'sister complexes.' Yes, it involves some of those more problematic tropes, but it does so not to pander. We laughed a ton during that watch session, and now I want to finish the series. Maybe later though.
Wednesday, I finally got a message back from the guy who was mad at me at work. He apologized for not responding to me, and then infodumped on the topic I had asked him something on, and I considered this as a clearing of our beef. This was good, but now I didn't have anyone to have beef with. One of the coworkers I'm closer with offered to have beef with me to make up that difference, and so I'll call her "beefing coworker" from now on. I continued to do my tasks, until it finally came to half an hour before D&D. I started to prepare some notes on the session I was about to run, and flesh out the map I had drawn on grid paper over the last couple days. Once the time had come to start, my work rival and my Japanese coworker told us they would catch up, they just needed a couple extra minutes, and myself and "Celeste" and "Rhythm" went to the unused conference room. We waited. And waited. Then I got a message from my work rival, saying he couldn't make it. Then, the Japanese coworker came into the room out of breath, saying he was ready to play. I asked the group if they wanted to play without my work rival, and that we would catch up with his character's antics later, but only my Japanese coworker, player of "Nikon," wanted to. So, we called it, and went home. I wasn't showing, but I was actually pretty mad at my work rival for this. We cancelled last week's session becuase he joined some soccer team the game before their second-last playoff game, which overlapped with D&D, and we delayed this week's session by one day to accommodate him as well, and then he cancels on us 20 minutes into the start time. I wanted this mini adventure to end before October, but it looks like we'll need Ocotober just to finish it. Tomorrow, I will be grilling everyone to ensure a Tuesday session happens. I went back, and hopped into the same voice chat as yesterday to loop listen to 'Shikairo Days,' trying to make myself feel better. 3 hours into that, I got an invitation by an old friend to join a different VC, and I talked there for a bit, with another mutual of ours. We mostly talked about media like 'Jujutsu Kaisen,' 'Dead by Daylight,' and other topics like grocery shopping and all that. It was nice, and it helped me feel better about D&D's cancellation.
On Thursday, I woke up to the first blue sky all week. It made me very cheery for the day, legitimately beaming while getting ready, heading to the bus, and even waiting for it too. I got a new task at work to repair a tool that everyone on my team uses. It wasn't fully broken, but one specific aspect of it is, and it's quite frustrating to my team for that one specific case. It was actually a pretty complicated flow to follow, a bit of a struggle to find some of the logs for this tool, but throughout the day, I eventually got there! I felt really good about this, even if most of my time was dedicated to just tracking stuff down, and not actually getting a chance to fix it. On this same day, one of the most senior leadership figures in this building/branch got a surprise party for their retirement. Almost every employee in the building gathered in the biggest conference room, and stayed silent, before the guy who was retiring was brought in, and we all gave applause. He said some words, a bunch of poeple called in and said some words, there were some pre-vetted questions about his life, and then, there was food. I got some veggies and fruit and some chicken wings, and topped it off with a slice of matcha cake. I don't know what I expected it to taste like, but I was not expecting... grass. The blue berry on the icing was quite nice though, so I didn't mind so much.
I was super excited on the way back from work though, for two reasons. One, I was grinning and walking briskly all the way because the perfect songs were queued up by my random shuffle during my trip home: 'GEMSTONE "DE-A-I",' 'Next SPARKLING!!,' 'Oh,Love&Peace!,' 'One More Sunshine Story,' all in a row. Each song came on at the perfect time during that return commute, made me think in my head "my life might be a musical." Second, there would be D&D online with friends from home, waiting for me once I got back to my place, and surely that would make up for the disappointment of yesterday's D&D cancellation! I got online, and went into VC early, and one person joined in early with me... and they were very very sick. Voice quite strained and all. I tried to order food before the session started (I missed the order deadline I think), and we watched that new official 'Shadow the Hedgehog' animation they put out earlier this week. The other player joined right on time and we set up text-to-speech so that the sick player could play, but she told us she'd rather play when she could actually talk, and so, it got cancelled, yet again 20 minutes after we were meant to start. This time, I wasn't mad, it was completely reasonable, but it still stung a lot. I stayed in that voice chat as "Izuku" streamed 'Splatoon 3' and "Harold" developed a way to speak without straining her throat (she succedeed), but I kinda just stayed quiet and listened. It was pretty selfish and awful of me, but I felt bad enough that I very nearly went to bed without eating anything, but I eventually just made a pork chop and vegetable sludge for dinner and then went to bed.
Friday was pretty standard for work: I got in touch with a different member of the team to get some more info on the process which I was investigating, and worked on the director's task while letting other things run in the background. Friday was quite packed with other news though. Two of my friends from my home city got offers for jobs: one of them had been looking for more than a year now, and couldn't accept the offer without major modifications to the role and some major changes to the path of his education. I was very happy for him, elated even, but also simultaneously worried that things might get screwed up by his university. The other friend got a short 4 month position quite near to my residence here, which I'm honestly not very excited about. One of the primary reasons I took this position was to get space from everyone I knew from there: not that I despised or was uncomfortable with everyone I knew there, but things in my life were progressing to a point where I felt like I desperately needed that space. So now with this guy coming here for four months, and him telling me he's going to come visit me on weekends... I don't know. I feel terrible for feeling this way, but it is how I feel. Maybe it will be good for me, like a little check in to see just how far I've progressed from the "me" he's used to seeing. We'll see.
The last big thing that happened on Friday was me reading the final chapter of 'Jujutsu Kaisen.' It's been pretty big to me since I started last September, since it was something that helped me bond more with the people I shared classes with back in school, drawing comparisons between the characters and our instructors, our lessons, the concepts we were learning. I quite enjoyed the series too, the action and the stakes and the power system too. And of course, the brainrot, the copypastas, all the references that I could twist to form my own jokes and longstanding bits. While the writing was actually pretty great (in my opinion) up to the Shibuya incident, and started to waver a little bit during that arc (but still held up), afterwards it trended downwards in quality. The fights were still great spectacles, the power system was (for the most part) kept interesting and fresh, but the way certain characters were introduced, split up, and removed fromteh story, and the way that things were revealed to readers, and how certain things were not revealed to readers, was not written very well. Also, there was not much in the way of character interaction, which I kinda missed. I think that the ending was fine: not great, not terrible, just fine. It was giving "this truly was our Jujutsu Kaisen" vibes. All in all, a great series, execution was a bit rough, and it almost missed sticking the landing. However, something in me needs to to do something about it. Maybe I can write them a more fulfilling ending...
The weekend was relaxed, just like the last one. Writing this bloghan and doing more maintenenace on this site, sweeping and vacuuming, having a call or two with some friends I hadn't talked to in a while, it was nice. The sun has been shining in through my windows, and I've been enjoying this little break. The day isn't done yet though: there's still more to write, more to cook, more to clean.
Future plans
I've been wondering recently why I've been less productive during this period with the things on my to do list. I'm working, yes, but I keep finding myself in situations where I'm just idling and not really getting things I need/want to do done. I think what I need is a more rigid schedule, that paces out things like books and games and such. The day I'm writing this, I'm working on the more specific schedule. Anyways, here's the list of things from last week:
- More D&D prep: Well, I guess it didn't matter at all.
- Grocery store: Gotta love pizza pops.
- Mushroom rosee pasta: At the time of writing, I haven't made it yet, but it will be tonight's dinner.
This week, I'm still setting up that more strict calendar, but I will be putting work into removing the door on the site, reading 'A Court of Thorns and Roses' and 'One Piece,' playing 'Thomas Was Alone,' and buying nail clippers.
Song of the week
'Shikairo Days' (https://youtu.be/fxPcJTU-A8U), from 'My Deer Friend Nokotan' is the song of the week. I think this week I've listened to it for about 8-10 hours? I might have a problem, but I really do think deer are neat, as well as me really liking 'Nokotan' as I mentioned above (match in humour, the way it mocks anime tropes). This song is also just so catchy, so I've probably added another hour or so of listening time form it being played by my internal radio. Maybe I don't have a problem, but instead, an obsession?
Until next time
Oh deer, that's all I've got for bloghan 14. I actually wrote half of this one on Saturday so that I could do more stuff on Sunday, and it seems to have turned out well, so I guess I'll keep doing that for the next little bit. See you then!
- bubbler