October 13, 2024 - bloghan 16
This week had me saying "what a week" on Tuesday, but by Friday I was wondering where the week had gone. The weekend was pretty exciting though. Well, mostly Saturday.
Tier list of the week
This week's tier list: lowercase letters of the English alphabet. I was thinking about this one for a while, then after I made it the first time, I realized that the letters of my rivals and enemies were not in low enough places. Here's the tier list:
Ordered tiers, but unordered within tiers. Well, in each tier, they are ordered alphabetically, at least.
Personal updates (achievements, reflections, and antics)
I walked into work on Monday and just starting working on stuff. At this point, I've put the director's task on indefinite hiatus, and the task from my work rival's manager was the top priority. I had one other task from the guy I used to have beef with, but that was also put on hold. As I'm doing work, my work rival asks me about a question he asked me last week, one that I didn't really think much of. The question was if you'd want an arts kid or a STEM kid on your trivia team, and I answered, "if it's general trivia, arts, but if it's trivia focused on one single topic, find the right STEM kid and you're set." On Monday, he clarified that the reason he asked me the week prior was because he was looking through some trivia questions, and was surprised at how many things he had never heard of, let alone knew the answers to. I was actually pretty surprised at some of the things he mentioned: I was completely wrong about how long the Pony Express lasted (I said 50 years, it was actually 1.5 years), but my work rival was shocked that I had even heard of it. He asked me a couple more, and while I didn't know some of them, he continued to get more and more shocked that I knew of the concepts. I will say though, I do really think that the forest in Robin Hood being named "Sherwood Forest" is common knowledge. I asked some other things back at him, like about Don Quixote and his whole beef with windmills, stuff like that. After, my work rival wanted to go head-to-head on Sonic trivia. I trounced him easily on that front, because I started with a question he knew for a fact, but he blanked on it completely. I let him have it though because I knew he knew, it's just that under pressure he forgot it. He asked me about basic things, like the final boss of some of the games, and which main line game was their most widely criticized ('06, easily), but he did get me on a release year (Adventure 2 was in 2001??? But that was when the towers fell...). Before that point though, I got him with naming characters in Heroes, even though I didn't even ask for names, just for a count of teams in that game. One point of trivia we touched upon was Rouge the Bat, and her line, "All the worlds gem's are mine to keep!" Now, "all the ___ are ___ to ___" said in a Rouge the Bat impression is a thing that the work rival and I say to each other a lot, filling in blanks with work related stuff. Afterwards, he then went against me in Pokémon, since he had played all the games up to the 3DS titles, and I had previously told him I have never played one. He was beating me quite significantly, since he was asking very game specific things like "what was on the champion's team," but I did call him out on Gyarados changing its type between games, because it never has (excepting Megas and Tera and all that). He got a little bored of asking me questions that I wouldn't be able to answer due to me not playing the games, so I suggested we do one of those quizzes where you list them out in a set amount of time. I gave him the website (pkmnquiz.com), and we agreed on a timer of 5 minutes. The goal was to name as many of the 1025 Pokémon as you could in 5 minutes. I was doing it on my phone, he did it on a laptop. After the 5 minutes had gone by, he had 36, and I had 103.
After lunch and some 'Exploding Kittens,' we went back upstairs. My work rival still had Pokémon on the mind, and he asked how I knew so many. I was a big fan of it as a kid, but the other big thing was that I semi-regularly keep up with the competitive meta. I then shared with him the battle simulator that almost every competitive player uses to playtest, and how most people do battles against each other in older formats, 'Pokémon Showdown.' My work rival was very enamored with it, and was really excited about Gen V random battles (or "rand bats"), since that was the meta where his favourite game in the series had its Pokémon added. He tried out rand bats in the more modern games, but didn't like how he had no idea what was going on half the time. After he did his first couple of matches, I told him the story of Lavos, a player who rage quit a tournament hosted on 'Showdown' because of the RNG in the base game, and now the phrase, "'Unfortunate' doesn't even begin to describe my ___," is something we say to each other about work a lot. We truly have applied brainrot to our company. Afterwards, we went to one of those warehouse stores with some other work friends. My work rival couldn't stop grabbing snacks and containers and stuff, while I just grabbed a bit less than a kilogram of roast beef for my sandwiches. I skipped out at the food court, but my work rival went to town on pizza and a hot dog.
The next day was supposed to be a D&D day, but I texted my work rival at lunch (he hadn't shown up that day) and found out he got food poisoning and couldn't come in. So, D&D got cancelled. It's very interesting to me how nearly every single time I've had to cancel or move the workplace D&D session, it always seems to be because of my work rival. In any case, I headed home right after work and got to work. You see, between me and my closest duo of friends from high school, there's an image which we've propped as a sort of prophecy for us three. It discusses details extremely personal to us, so I won't share it here, but for the past couple years we've been interpreting it in the same way. Recently however, I realised something about the image that we all glossed over, which could have significant ramifications on the prophecy and its interpretation. Now, when I made this realisation, I could have just told them in plain text. However, I thought it would be much more comedic to instead give them a "conspiracy theorist"-style slideshow presentation on it instead, presenting my findings and making bold claims of how some higher entity is trying to hide the truth from us. My entire evening was composed of creating this slide show, manually writing in "Click to add text" on every empty text box to really set the mood. I also copied the title slide a bunch of times randomly throughout, as a way to reinforce my point multiple times, without actually providing all that much evidence, but only just enough evidence instead. Late at night, I was considering finishing it off with another 40 slides on the conclusion, but I realized that at this point I had 69 slides in total, so I might as well stop here. I scheduled the presentation for the next day.
My work rival was back on Wednesday, and was actually glad that I didn't bother to ask him if he was feeling better, because "I'm at work today, so of course I'm feeling better." If I'm being perfectly honest, I completely forgot that he had food poisioning the day before. This is a clever reference to the fact that I am a terrible person. At work, I was continuing on with my tasks, same as the days prior. Eventually, the thing I had expected the most from my work rival happened: he challenged me to a match in Gen V rand bats. I knew he would eventually do so, after I introduced 'Showdown' to him. I was hoping he would put in effort to make his own VGC13 or B2W2 OU team, because I think I could win 70% of the time with prepared teams, and maybe 5% of the time in rand bats. At the end of the day though, he's still my work rival, so he insisted on rand bats. He absolutely stomped me in the matches we played, because I am very easy to read in turn-based strategy games like this. I did win in the Little Cup match we played, but I think it was because it was a Gen IX format, and had mechanics and items he didn't know about. I was fine with losing, but it really stung when he said it was boring to go up against me because of how easy it was to predict my moves, and asked if anyone else wanted to play him instead. He ended up doing some battles on ladder, while I settled into doing work and crosswords. I ended up completing all the NYT puzzles really quickly that day, and was left unsatisfied. I thought of looking up a regular crossword, but those are often filled with pop culture stuff that I never understand, so they get old fast. Then, I remembered a type of crossword I hadn't touched in a while: cryptic crosswords. They're liek regular crosswords, but each clue has two parts: a straightforward part that is a synonym or basic description of the solution word, and a cryptic part which provides an alternative method of guessing the solution word. The cryptic clue hides this word through wordplay, wether it be through anagrams, playing with pronouciations, inserting letters into other words, or looking for words hidden in larger phrases. For example, "Performance in Ramadan celebration (5)" has the solution "DANCE." The straightforward part is "performance," which is what a dance is. The cryptic part is "in Ramadan celebration." The "in" is a hint that clues you in to look more carefully at the phrase "Ramadan celebration," and surely enough, if you ignore the space, you can see the word dance in the middle of (or "in") the phrase: "ramaDANCElebration." This is further confirmed by the "(5)," which is the length of the solution word. Another example is "Mad, mad smile leads to problems (8)," solved by "DILEMMAS." This one is not as easy as the last example, but much, much easier than other cryptic crossword clues. I won't solve it here, but my hint is that "problems" is the straightforward part, and "Mad" is the part which is suppose to clue you into what kind of wordplay you have to do. I liked them once, but they easily got me frsutrated when I was younger, so I stopped doing them. Now, as I have a bit more patience, and a lot more "I don't really care if I don't do this well, because at the end of the day who really cares" in me, I've begun to find them enjoyable again! My favourites are the ones from the New Yorker (not to be confused with the New York Times), but I'm dreading the say that I run out of cryptics in their archive, since they stopped publishing them when they saw that mini crosswords draw in more attention. Even still, I am pretty glad that I'm back into cryptic crosswords, because it really is so satisfying when you crack the wordplay and get the word, and everything neatly ties together.
I got home, and prepared to give my presentation. It would be online, and I was a bit nervous and pretty cold too. I made myself some tea, and turned on my space heater, and got started. I had one person manage the music, and called them the intern (he got demoted to unpaid intern by the end). I managed to pull off a classic schoolyard prank on one person, shock them with the possibilities presented by basic counting principles, and get them to burst out laughing at my conclusions. The whole time, I was talking like I was a conspiracy theorist (or perhaps an 'Ace Attorney' protagonist), to really drum up that aspect of it. When it came to my big points, I was using that theorist voice which is kinda low and gravely? Think Matpat whenever he says the word "lore" with that exaggerated "ooooooo." At the end, the other two seemed very entertained, and I was very happy that I put in all that effort. They also seemed pretty convinced of my theory regarding the prophecy, and they asked some very good questions that I was able to answer very satisfyingly. This little presentation thing was great fun, and I think I'd like to do a similar silly presentation like that in the future. Or better yet, one of the two in that call, in that prophecy, make their own presentation! Everyone should try giving a silly little presentation on a non-serious topic to their friends. I endorse this activity fully. Although, maybe hold back on the theorist voice: my throat hurt a lot for the next two days from my heavy usage of it.
Thursday at work was more tame. I had reached a point in the task from the manager of my work rival where I needed some more input; I was stuck, and I needed some further clarification from her. My work rival needed to set up a meeting with her, so we both decided to send our messages at the same time to see who would get a response first. Throughout the day, aside from work (I went ahead with the task given to me by the guy I once had beef with), I did more cryptic crosswords, and I got challenged to more Gen V rand bats by my work rival. I did way better this time, probably because I wasn't so afraid to switch. Something I noticed that was of particular interest to me is that whenever he won by one or two Pokémon, he said it was close, but whenever I won, it was always unfair because I had Guts Flareon with Toxic Orb and Facade, or Groudon with one Stone Edge flinch, and "all he had" was Gliscor with a full stall set and Life Orb Victini. This guy...
Thursday evening was for D&D, with the home group. And this session as surprisingly the most tame of all. Don't get me wrong, "Izuku" and "Harold" were as infuriating as always, but this week, it was toned back to a pretty good balance. We weren't getting as caught up as we were with communication difficulties associated with their character quirks, and we were able to get through things pretty well. They also had some really cool and creative ideas to get out of sticky situations, like using an oil can to make hinges be quieter (like in a cartoon!) or tossing the bakery's enchanted knives with Mage Hand (even if it didn't work...). It was rather unfortunate that during the combat with the three goblins (Cleveland, Joe, and Glenn were their names!), "Harold" could not seem to get a good roll, and whiffed every attack, while "Izuku" either rolled hits or natural 1s. The goblins rolled pretty well, and id some pretty consistent damage. I was told by the players to not make things easier, but I am a bit worried with what's coming up that they'll have a tough time surviving. "izuku" managed to take out all of the goblins, and while the player of "Harold" seemed a bit frustrated by that, it was clear that it was because of bad dice luck. Maybe next time, "Harold" will finally get a killing blow. Maybe.
Friday was more relaxed. I continued to work on my tasks, did some laundry and hung it outside, and caught up with some younger friends back home about what was going on in their education and such. Saturday though, was a real exciting day. I had finally worked up the effort, time, and commitment to go to the aquarium. I have been planning htis for months. I started to get ready, eating my breakfast and doing all that morning prep. I open my door, and see a hornet just chilling on my bug screen. Wonderful. I closed the door, turned on the outsdoor light, finished off the rest of my morning routine, and checked again. This time, the hornet was gone, and I was free to go. I hopped on the bus, then on the subway, reading all the way, and eventually made it downtown. My first item of business was not going to the aquarium, but actually, finding nail clippers. I wandered around for a bit, looking for some store that might have them, when I remembered that I had data and Google Maps on my phone. I found a drugstore, and took the long way around to get there. This may be the "I have only been here for a couple months" effect, but downtown felt quite beautiful to me: the lakeshore and the greenery looked so nice under the fall sun, and even the skyscrapers didn't look as soulless as skyscrapers usually do. I got to walk on the sidewalk right next to that lakeshore, and I was just taking it all in, probably smiling in a way that made me look really strange. I found my way to the dtugstore, bought my nail clippers, took a picture of the nail clippers in front of the lake, then retraced my route back towards the aquarium. When I got back, I still didn't yet feel like going in, so I wandered around downtown a bit more in the vicinity of that aquarium. Once I had my fill, I went in.
I do feel like I went pretty fast through the aquarium, and I know I'll be back, so I won't give too much of a description here. It was a very soothing place to visit, and although the creatures there were mostly ones I already knew about, it was so cool that I was able to see them in person. Like yeah, I know about the archerfish, and the stingray, and the blue lobster from all those edits, but seeing them in person was amazing. I think I stared at this one stingray exhibit for 20 minutes, just enamored by them. It's clear to me that those fantasy writers were onto something when putting stingrays and whales in the sky, becuase they'd genuinely look like they belong there if it weren't for there actual existence in the oceans. Sea dragons were also a highlight for me, because even though they were relatively tiny, they still felt so magnificent to observe. Of course, I can't just talk about the creatures kept in the aquarium. It was a busy place, which checks out for a Saturday belonging to a long weekend, but I was really surprised by just how many couples there were downtown. Families in the aquarium, I get, but the amount of couples had me taken aback. I feel like that shouldn't have shocked me as much as it did, but maybe it has to do with the fact that I don't really go out as much? Sure, I'll go out on my own occasionally like I did here with the aquarium, and I'll go out if a group of friends invites me to, but I guess this whole realm of dating and relationships and all that is just so foreign to me. Outside, the couples seemed pretty "normal," for whatever normal is to those people. Sure, at some point I saw a guy carry his girlfriend princess-style outside, and I saw some couples doing that weird finger moevement stuff while holding hands, but that's stuff I've seen before wihtout much issue, and that's how it was outside the aquarium too. Inside, however, it was different. There were so many more couples around my age that were in there, and they were all significantly taller than me. The thing is, when you're at this aquarium, you tend to move on from exhibits at about the same pace as other people who enetered in around the same time as you, so you kinda see the same faces over and over again. I took many "breaks" during my visit to catch the next "cycle" (if you will) of guests, because at some point it gets obnoxious. I really don't know how much of this is jealousy, and how much is just plain sadness, and how much is more along the lines of "annoyance at the contrived even though this isn't fiction," but do you really have to grab hips and pull the other person in tight at every single tank you stop at? Every single one? You're only going to be standing there looking at the fish for less than 5 minutes. Surely, you can go that long without all that, right? I don't mind that it's all in public, I like to think I'm not a prude, but this is already a pathetic line of questioning to go down anyways. I'm sure they know more about each other's presence and how they want that to be seen by people, so between them it's fine. But I'll always be wondering, won't I?
There's a cafe in the middle of the aquarium, and I saw a guy sitting at a table alone, with 16 chicken wings and a full pizza. I thought he was going to eat it all on his own, and I felt a little better about myself. Ever since I walked in and saw the amount of families and couples here, I felt pretty strange just walking around alone at the aquarium. But it seems like this guy is like me! Just alone at the aquarium, enjoying his afternoon in this more relzed environment. As I'm thinking this, three kids, their mother, and their grandmother, pull up to that table and begin to eat. I then proceed to feel way worse about this. I quickly wrapped up the visit by visiting more stingrays, and checking out the jellyfish exhibit, before looking at the small crowd full of - you guessed it - more families and couples standing on the edge of the stingray touch zone. One of the keepers was doing the feding today, and he was explaining what goes into that feed supply: it was a bunch of krill, and also some vitamin B12. I started to wonder if I was getting enough of that vitamin as I left the aquarium. I skipped out on the cafe in that aquarium, and decided to find a Vietnamese sub place, since I hadn't had one (or, one I considered a real Vietnamese sub) in quite a while. After about 1.4 kilometers of walking, I found a place that I enjoyed a lot. I was at first disappointed with size, but it had a lot more filling than I was expecting, so it was alright in the end. I retraced those 1.4 kilos almost exactly, caught the next train home, then the next bus home, and got back just before sunset. I torn open my new nail clippers, because they were actually starting to bother my toes, given all the descending starircases I walked on in downtown. After clipping all 9 toesnails that needed to be clipped, I began to waste away in front of my computer, my thoughts filled with just how undesirable I must have appeared in that moment: slightly stubbly face, completely empty refrigerator (dinner that night was two slices of bread, each with a very thick helping of peanut butter), and a ton of other things too. Is it even my place to feel sad about that kind of stuff, about couples and all that, if this is the life I'm living? With the way I look, and the things I like, and just who I am overall, how could I dare ask for such a thing? I don't know if I'll be back downtown anytime soon. I will go to the aquarium a couple more times, just to make sure my annual pass becomes worth it, so I will still have to go downtown for that. I just don't know what to do about the pathetic feelings above except for what I've always done - ignore it and move on. It's not all that important. I'm me, and that's all there is to it.
Edit: October 14, 2024. I wrote the above 2 paragaphs way after I normally go to sleep and I was feeling tired and crabby while writing. I don't really feel like doing a full rewriteat this moment, but I think some of those feelings and frustrations up there are a bit exaggerated. Don't pay any mind to it, I know for the people who regularly talk to me, its a pretty tiring sentiment to hear from me.
Finally, Sunday. Not much happened on Sunday. Mostly writing this bloghan, but I did get some laundry in, as well as grocery shopping, and a return to alfredo pasta dishes. I'm 99% sure that I get tomorrow off from work, so I think I'll just repeat this day on Monday. With less bloghan writing though.
Future plans
I probably shoud have considered that suddenly deciding to go to the aquarium would mess with my plans on the day that I go, leading to some things being left behind. The aquarium was great, so it's not all so bad.
- LaTeX USB: Didn't get to this
- Door: didn't work on further removal
- Reading: re-read 'One Piece' up to and finishing the Drum Island arc, and read no further chapters in 'A Court of Thorns and Roses'
- 'Bocchi the Rock!': I have now watched up to episode 7
- Nail clippers: finally bought them! It's been months but after clipping, it feels so much better
This week calls for more reading and watching of what I have been, as well as probably some more 'Thomas Was Alone' (I think I can 100% it by the end of November). Regarding those vestiges of the door, I'll maybe get to removing those this week, in addition to working on my portable LaTeX USB this week as well. I might make another Gen V OU team, just in case my work rival challenges me to that.
Song of the week
'Koi ni Naritai AQUARIUM' (https://youtu.be/3j9YFNx12I0), by Aqours is the song of the week. This song is at the top of my aquarium playlist, and is probably where my recent fixation on aquariums has been, as well as my association between the same and romance and all that. The song is from the perspective of someone who's gone out with someone they're interested in to the aquarium, and how they really want to tell them how strong there feelings are for them, and how the atmosphere the aquarium provides is giving them the courage to up and say it... almost. If things were like the way they are written in songs, I'm sure the world would probably be abit too "exaggerated," but I guess that's why things like these are only relegated to my daydreams anyways. So many "if onlys." Outside of all that sentimentality, I have been quite enjoying this song, since my favourite member of Aqours is the center for it, and because of the story of the MV. One day, I'd like to visit the aquarium around Numazu that inspired the visuals in that MV.
Until next time
Truthfully, this bloghan didn't come out on time. I didn't write any of it on Saturday, and I was feeling very unmotivated to write it on Sunday, but I just stuck with it anyways. Hopefully, bloghan 17 will be more prepared.
- bubbler