Missing Letter Monday No “O”: Urgggh…

Nngh.

Why?  Why’d I start this thing?

This is…ugh.

These weeks are the w– er…hardest.  Yeah, that’s it.  Hardest.

Mnnnh.

Ugh.

Just…ugh.

Missing Letter Monday No “N”: (Untitled)

Why do I always press some key but the key I desire?

Over & over, I pressed “L” though it was supposed to be “:”

HOW?!

They’re — oh, wait, they’re right beside each other.  Well, that’s more…yeah, I guess that’s less odd.

It’d probably help if all my keys still had letters.

(Really, “C”, “V”, “A”, “S”, & “L” are all without letters.  “E”, “M” & this week’s letter are about half obliterated, too.)

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Meh.

Half-assed is half-assed.

(I was playing with my 3DS all day.  What else is there to say?)

Missing Letter Monday No “M”: The Return

“The Return”

I have returned!

I, the gru– er — the terrifying specter who forcibly denies the use of a letter — have returned!

You’re frightened now, right?

No?

Ah….would additional bold-face type help?

No?

Well, what about Italics?  This is scary, right?!

You’re still not afraid?  Really?

Then take this, oh unperterbable one!  Bold Italics!  This has to have you quivering in fear!

Yes, I know it’s not spelled that way.  But I can’t use that letter today…

Gaaaaaahhhhh!  Shake in terror at the sight of my UNDERLINED bold Italics!  Know ye the unutterable power I hold!!

…

Strikethrough?

…

You’re no fun.

None at all.

I’ll just go, if you’re going to be like that.

*sulk*

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*sigh*  I really wish I could draw.  I can just see this post as a cartoon strip.  The guy speaking would be all spiky shoulderpads and stuff, all the tough posturing in the world, and he’d deflate like a balloon as soon as he realized he wasn’t the least bit scary.

Missing Letter Monday No L; Movie Reaction: “A Wrinkle in Time”

Okay, so I saw a movie today.  Can’t write the name inside today’s post, but it’s right up there^.  (Or in my book report on the book, which I posted about a year ago.)

Man….

I wanted to be fond of the movie.  Very fond, even.   The effects work was great.  The acting was good (though the younger brother is…uh…not written in such a way as to showcase if the kid can act…).

But the script was…not great.  Very, very not great.

I knew going in, of course, that trying to make a movie of that book was pretty much not something that can be done.  (Awkward phrasing…stupid Monday posts…)  I knew that, and yet I kind of assumed that they had figured out the right way to do it.  Or a good way to do it, anyway.

It is a tragedy that the way they decided on was “omit most of it.”  (They even omitted the Murry twins Sandy and Dennys!  Movie Meg has one brother instead of three!)

Even more so, given the time they dedicated to the portion on Earth, and the many, many memory-scenes of Meg’s father before he disappeared.  Okay, yeah, so they wanted more time with Chris Pine to justify whatever overpriced pay he got.  (Not that he was bad, mind you.  Might have been the best performance I’ve seen from him.  Or the best right after Wonder Woman.)  And they may have thought that more time with him was what the audience wanted.  (Who knows, maybe that is what most of the audience wanted.)  But if they hadn’t wasted so much time on Earth, they’d have had the time they needed on Camazotz to do it right.  Or to do it better, anyway.  Much of what happened on the way to Camazotz was not suited to being adapted for the big screen, but the events on Camazotz were so suited.  And they got omitted in favor of stuff that wasn’t even in the book.

Trying to set the Earth stuff in a big city in the present day was one of the worst decisions.  In a tiny(ish) town in the 1960s, it was easy to see why Meg wasn’t in therapy over her father’s disappearance.  In 2018, with her behavior?  Of course she’d be in therapy.  It beggars the mind that she isn’t.  And her brother (who for some reason is now adopted) ought to have been written as a super high functioning autistic, as that’s rather how he reads.  (Or rather, that’s what I thought when I read the book.)  But no, he was just treated as a strange boy who can’t act ordinary except around his mom, sister, and three strange women from some mysterious dimension.  (If their origin point came up in the book, I’ve forgotten.  And the movie sure didn’t say.)  So much of the Earth stuff doesn’t make sense in the new time and the new setting.  And yet it got so much time devoted to it.

Argh.  Just…argh.

As my brother (who hasn’t read the book) said, trying to interpret my reaction:  “I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed.”

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I won’t go into anything about the bizarre choice of the unfortunate, distant orb being named after a Mayan bat god, because that comes straight out of the book.  But it’s weird.  Very weird.

Missing Letter Monday No K; April A-to-Z 2018 Theme Reveal!

(Can I do this without one of the letters of the alphabet?  Well, I’m gonna try!)

So, after not participating last year due to having chosen a theme that required waaaaaay too much research, I’ve decided “to hell with it” and am doing April A-to-Z this year.  With (basically) the same topic I started researching for last year.  (Well, not exactly “researching,” really.  More just trying to decide what to use each letter for.)

In 2016, my theme was world mythology, with a preference for less commonly told myths, specifically those which hadn’t been used in video games, using the mythology-rich Shin Megami Tensei series as my guide to what had been used in a game, on the (probably erroneous) assumption that anything that had never been in a MegaTen game hadn’t made it into a game at all.

Obviously, that made things pretty complicated, especially since I had to use as many sources as possible (minimum two) to be sure my information was accurate.

So, long story short, I decided to do the reverse of that:  I’m going to feature a mythical figure who is in at least one MegaTen game, give the game’s text describing the figure (most games in the series, at least since the original PlayStation, have had a compendium that contains descriptions of the origin of each being in the compendium), and then what the actual mythic tradition has to say on the subject.

That was going to be my theme last year, only I had spent so long trying to put together a list of candidates for each letter that I ended up burning out before I even got started.  (Plus I had a lot of class reading, which wasn’t conducive to the prospect, either.)  This time, I’m not going to be as concerned as I originally planned regarding covering the whole world.  While MegaTen does include mythology from cultures all over the world, it does have a tendency to gravitate towards Asia and Europe.  Last year, I planned to focus on countering that gravitation, trying to spread the focus more evenly worldwide.  This year, I’m being more lazy, and just focusing on whatever happens to grab my fancy.  Though I’ll probably avoid most of the Hellenic stuff, since I’ve already got so much of it on my site.  And I can’t consider the whole MegaTen series, because I haven’t had access to a television for some time (for reasons) so I can only use the 3DS games (the two Devil Survivor remastered games, Shin Megami Tensei IV, and Shin Megami Tensei IV Apocalypse, and possibly Persona Q) that I have easy access to.  (Yeah, yeah, I’m pathetic….)

Oh, and (despite this post) Missing Letter Monday will be going on hiatus until April A-to-Z is over, as trying to combine the two either requires two posts every Monday or ends up with really lousy posts.  Not going there this time.

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Missing Letter Monday No “J” – Spam

Yay, I can finally post this!

Crazy spam message I found in my spam filter (yes, I actually read them before I delete them) at one point:

A lot of people ought to function and stand for extended hours at one time. If you should do this, then be sure you make an attempt to stand up tall and direct. Attempt to enable your thighs and legs to relax too every now and then if at all possible, probably on a feces or table if you are allowed to do that.

This one really made me laugh.

Having gone through a lot of these, I can explain what happened that made the spambot suggest people should lean/sit on excrement:

In what I have to assume was intended to make them seem more like people (even though they’re posting random snippets of “advice” on topics unrelated to the blog post accompanied by links to knock-off shoes or discount pharmaceuticals), some spambots are programmed to introduce “typos” or to vary the wording.  The typos are frequently ludicrous, as they generally are adding extras of the same letter (particularly vowels) or replacing a letter with one that looks a bit like it.  (These replacement letters are mathematical characters or something, things WordPress doesn’t even provide on its “insert character” interface.)  The variant wording is when it gets hilarious, though.

If you can’t already guess what the method is from the quote above, let me give you a hint:  another spam message I got (which it sadly didn’t occur to me to copy-paste and save) talked about doing something “if it should swimsuit you to do so.”

Yeah, they simply plug in a thesaurus. 😛  Only they apparently didn’t realize there were such things as words with multiple, very different meanings.

As is often the case, I find myself wondering who in the world programs these spambots, and exactly who they expect to fall for them.

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Missing Letter Monday No “I” – Excuses

Er, yeah, should’ve posted hours ago.  Totally my own fault.

Played Stardew Valley all day.

*cough*

Not much to say other than that, really.

(Ugh, vowel weeks are the worst…)

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Missing Letter Monday No “H” – Random Nonsense

Yea, a difficult one today.  Not gonna try to make sense.

O, but on an unrelated(?) note, I broke down and ordered a new cell.  Didn’t want to, but sort of did?  I’ve been using a flip for ten years (actually, a couple years more’n ten) and I can’t even dial a so-called smart one.  I’ll figure it out, I’m sure.  Or I’ll send it back; I’ve got seven days.  (We’ll just wait and see.)

I’ve got a really funny piece of spam I want to post, but Mondays aren’t working for it so far.  Too many words in it, too many letters I can’t use.  (Maybe once “z” rolls around…)

Not really a post of any note…

…but I want to get back to a video game I just got addicted to, so…

Bye for now!

Missing Letter Monday No “G” – I Need 40 Hour Days!

I would really like to improve the quality of what I write on here.  Whenever I look back on what I wrote in the first year or so, I shudder to think how much worse what I produce currently is.  (Ack, that was a tortured sentence…)

I need to return to myths and ancient cultures, I think.  That was what produced most of my best work, and it’s a subject I can easily wax…well, not exactly “eloquent” or even “deep” but certainly one in which I can be quite verbose.

Which returns me to the title of this post.  My life would be so much better if there were 40 or so hours in every day.  Then I’d have time to work, spend time to meet the demands of others (esp. my family), have some time to waste on entertainment products, and still have time to actually accomplish personal tasks like this.  It could even be possible that I’d be able to have a proper amount of sleep!  (I usually don’t turn in until around 12:00, and then rise at about 7:00…which now that I say it out loud is totally plenty of sleep and I have zero excuse for always being tired.)

I mean, for example, this A.M., I was unable to write, because it took me so much time to fix the mis-named .mp3s to make up my playlist that I didn’t have any time left over to write before I had to leave for lunch.   Admittedly, my own fault in about five different ways, but the net result is still that I didn’t write even one word.

But if days were 40 hours, then I’d still have tons of time to write today.

On the other hand, if that was the case, it’d be even more time before my new phone could arrive here, and it’s actually rather unsafe to drive around without a cell phone, so…

Well, maybe we can coax them to switch over to 40 hour days after I replace my phone…

Missing Letter Monday No “F” – Worrying

You ever think “yeah, this is it; I’m going to be sacked any day now” or something like that?

That’s what’s been going through my mind lately.

I think I’m just being kept around until my exhibit opens, so that I can be the one to go down when the board hates it and/or it causes a publicity nightmare.  (It’s already two weeks late in opening.  Not really anything I could have done about it — display cases needed to be bought, and that’s not something I’m authorized to do — but I could and likely will still be assigned the blame.)

Were I being told the truth about that, it wouldn’t bother me so much.

Only I’m totally not.  Every time I bring the subject up to my co-workers, they assure me that I’m being paranoid and that’d never happen.

I don’t know why they think I’d believe that.  I’m totally untrained to hold this job, and I suck at it.

Why wouldn’t they send me packing?

I mean, I don’t even know why they didn’t do it ages ago.

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