I Feel Weird About Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

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It should go without saying, but: what follows will contain spoilers for the most recent Guardians of the Galaxy movie.

For starters, the movie is great. I enjoyed many parts of it. There’s a lot of fun to be had with these characters, and honestly, if I could include needle drops throughout all aspects of my life, I absolutely would. The diagetic aspect of music in all of these movies has been one of my favorite things, especially as someone who grew up with a fondness for movie soundtracks.

However.

Thoughts on animals and cruelty in film (SPOILERS!!!!!!!!!)

Where else?

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I’ve become a lonely nomad on the internet, and it’s an existence I loathe entirely.

It would be better if I just didn’t care about how I’m perceived, if I didn’t care about drawing someone’s ire, or saying something I then end up having to discuss with someone in-person.

Instead, I open up Twitter and start typing a tweet and then stall out because “is my tweet tacit approval of the perpetual bullshit happening on that hellsite at any given moment?” I look at Facebook, and then just get annoyed because most of the people I’m “friends” with in that place are so tuned out of anything I’d like to comment on, that it’s not even worth it. Mastodon is starting to sort of feel better, aside from the fact that I don’t follow enough people who engage with the site regularly for me to need to check it more than once a day. Plus, now a bunch of people I follow on Twitter are anxiously awaiting entry into Bluesky, which (I suppose once one has the ability to block bad actors) could be the Twitter killer so many are desperate for, so at some point I could add that app/site to the rotation of “places everyone I used to know might have gone.”

So, yeah, it would be better if I just didn’t care, except there are so many things to care about right now, it feels irresponsible to opt out of any of that stuff too.

And here I sit, occupying this middle ground of having so many thoughts about so many, sometimes terrible, sometimes boring, things, and there doesn’t seem to be anywhere for me to put them. But I have this blog, which is mine, and I think about that from time to time, and how I’m wasting money haphazardly updating it and then leaving it for months at a time. It’s a lot of pressure I keep putting on myself, when all I really want is somewhere to maybe complain about inane trivialities of life or my job and have someone say “yeah, I know what you mean, this one time…” and then somehow we have a conversation. Although, maybe I should be the one leaving the comments? Except that’s rarely something I have done willingly.

Of course, for all of those hum-drum everyday conversations, there’s also a ton of terrible shit going on, and it’s because of so much of that dark, terrible stuff, that I’m just as stymied when it comes to speaking my mind. I know just enough to be dangerous at this point, and it’s that level of knowledge that holds me back from even opening the door when it comes to talking about guns, trans rights, book banning, or abortion. Because heaven forbid I come across as uninformed or just so painfully naive!

I’d love to not care so much, to somehow make my peace with the ethical consumption I’m capable of managing, but I’m still wrestling with it. I spend a lot of time choosing my battles these days, and there are times when I get frustrated and annoyed because where I live, it’s easy to see how a dollar I spend locally might be used to hurt me or someone I love later. It feels like the social capital I used to spend (both on and offline) didn’t have as many obvious red flags, but these days… everything just feels dirty.

The Blur of January

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The end of January is staring me in the face, and I’ve got one blog post to show for the month, so this is my effort to disrupt that narrative

After several abbreviated trips around our apartment complex, we finally took our snowshoes out for a more extensive walk. Everyone who I’ve spoken with about snowshoeing has recommended Beltrami County’s Three Island Park, we’d never been there, so it was a pleasant discovery for the both of us. We had some surprisingly nice weekends in January, and it was a gorgeous day to walk beside a running river while there was still a bunch of snow on the ground. It also helped that we didn’t have to cut a trail, or worry about getting lost since we kept running into people no matter where we were.

The trail runs pretty much parallel to both sides of the river

Here’s where the month went?

Video Games, my History

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I had such grand intentions when I originally wrote this post… back in July of 2022. And then I got all paranoid and just didn’t come back to finish it. So, here’s this thing that I wrote, almost 6 months ago. And I’m hoping to make a more concerted effort to post here going forward, now that Twitter has lost so much of its appeal. I still don’t know what this place will be for me, but I know I do better when I’m writing, even if it’s a dead-end blog no one else will bother to interact with.

I finally finished Portal on July 16, 2022.

After looking back through my emails I found the receipt from the day I first ordered it on Steam: June 29, 2018.

To trace the origins of this purchase, I blame someone on Reddit, who suggested Portal as the best game a person could play to learn how to use a video game controller; specifically for those who had done a majority of keyboard gaming, and wanted to make the switch. Why did I think I needed to learn how to do this? Because, I happened to be watching someone play games on Twitch, and it looked like they were having fun. Why was I watching this random person on Twitch? Because at some point, I listened to their podcast, and started following them on Twitter, where they regularly posted about streaming, to the point I finally decided to check it out for myself. (I could continue further down the rabbit hole of how I wound up with this game, but it gets convoluted with references to True Crime and V.C. Andrews)

[In which I ramble about my video game learning curve]

Bird Watching

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When we moved upstairs and gained a balcony, I’m pretty sure Ivory’s first plan was to figure out how to turn it into a garden. My hope was to attract birds, at some point, because everyone (cats very much included) in our apartment would enjoy watching them.

Spring/summer of 2020, we went full-out container gardening, with limited success.

Squash, peppers, and onions, which turned into some blossoms, a few peppers, and very small onions which should probably have been planted deeper, or hilled at some point

Continue reading Bird Watching

Moxie

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03/03/2004 – 05/20/2022

I’ve had something of a tradition of writing to get through grief. It’s been a while since I last did it, literally 2006, so, 16 years I guess? The last time, it was in the midst of an ending and saying goodbye to someone. This time, it’s after the fact, and the grief feels partly raw and unmanageable, and somehow old and ingrained within me in a way I won’t ever shake.

Last pets with Moxie

Rest well, my beloved friend