B roll: 2024 01
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For a while, after I deleted my Twitter account and before I started using my Bluesky account instead, I was keeping my bits and pieces on my Tumblr, which I also no longer use. These are those bits and pieces.
01 - This would normally be the sort of dumps I'd throw on Twitter, but I don't want to be all over the place with social media any more - so you guys get the joy of my daily spew. :)
01 - It's mighty weird when you can't read your own handwriting.
01 - I once listened to the fourth movement of Beethoven's 9th symphony 13 times in a row on a single day.
01 - "The wound is the place where the light gets in." Often attributed to Rumi, though there's much debate about that. Still an impacting thought, whoever said it.
01 - Hot art tip of the day: If you're colouring something and you're not sure what colour you want to make it, put a clear sticky note over it and colour that. If you don't like it, remove the sticky, put another im place, and try again until you find what you like.
01 - Maker idea of the day: You can make bookmarks/tabs for cheap by attaching ribbon to paper clips.
01 - Sometimes when I watch Veronica Mars and scenes when the Fitzpatrick family come on, I'm reminded of reading about the Black Donnellys in grade eight. I wish I could remember what book it was we had. I always thought that was a bit of an odd thing to give to kids that age to read - but The Stone Angel was an even weirder choice.
01 - I've just come up with a great name for a microblogging service that could be added into a larger service like Tumblr - B roll. For short things, like one would tweet were one not opposed to using Twitter to do such things.
01 - I wonder if the oddest conversation I've ever had with myself was when I wondered, briefly, whether the bladder was a bag or a sponge.
01 - I want a lava lamp.
01 - Watching Arabs do various version of dabke makes my knees hurt just looking at it. Ouchie.
01 - One of my uncles used to like the movie Montenegro, which they used to frequently show on late-night TV. For all the times I'd call him to tell him I'd seen it in the TV guide, I've never actually watched it.
01 - I wonder if anyone’s ever written any Veronica Mars fanfic involving Duncan's daughter coming back to town.
01 - Creativity’s a funny thing. The more you do it, the more you do.
01 - When confronted with an online troll, responding to them with surreal sentences translated into French is most enrichingly entertaining.
01 - What TikTok gave me in 2023 (and earlier):
- Saxsquatch
- Four guys in animal masks playing popular songs with boom whackers
- life moments acted out by crocheted frogs
- Mr. Bones, a tiny skeleton and his quilting adventures
- Dock Olympics
- Buckets the Drummer
- bapkat
02 - "You become what you give your attention to." - Stoic thought
02 - A short horror story: You are startled late one evening by a knock on your door - from inside the closet.
02 - Yesterday I thought about green. Today I'm thinking about ice cream bars.
02 - Mudlarking.
02 - I bit the end of a tine off a plastic fork. That's always a dilemma, wondering when you're going to find the bit you bit off, or wonder if you swallowed it.
02 - I still need to break in my hiking boots that I bought two years ago.
02 - "Catcher in the Rye rye, with a catcher in every bottle." - SCTV
05 - Sometimes I text things to myself so I won't forget them.
05 - I like the idea of bullet journalling, but so much of it seems like clutter to me. Like you’ll spend more time making a journal spread to track something than you actually spend doing the thing you're tracking. It's very Larry Wall.
05 - For every race of the F1 season, a friend of mine cooks a dinner from cuisine of the nation that week's race is in.
05 - I'm having an unholy craving for chocolate milk.
05 - Answering the eternal question: Can you eat Jello with a fork? The answer is, yes. Yes you can.
07 - It is not against the criminal code of Canada to open-carry a sword.
07 - I love those transparent sticky tabs made of PET, but there isn't a pen on earth that doesn't smudge on them. They say there is, but nothing I've tried holds up. What a bummer.
07 - It has only just this very day occurred to me to look up what the difference between scotch and whiskey is. Not that I’m going to drink either. They taste like drinking perfume.
07 - My teeth seem to get much plaquier much faster as I get older. Is it just me?
07 - "No one can implicate me in ugliness." - Marcus Aurelius. Other people being bad or ignorant doesn't absolve you from the obligation of trying to find a better way or trying to work with others to make one, to try and find the good in others.
07 - In marketing, social contagion is the idea that people will want something just because they see that others want it. I have to admit that I find it eye-rollingly noxious to watch people have a collective fit about a product, or watch one person after another fall under the sway of publicised products.
07 - To me, anyone who chooses to ignore the history behind an action is not looking to understand, but only to judge. Nothing happens in isolation.
07 - People saying "on accident" instead of "by accident" annoys the shit out of me.
07 - "Be your own self, fly your own flag, but just don't be rude, and care about others." - Pink
07 - People like to say "Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out," and I know why. Me? I prefer "Please allow the door to fully impact you on your way out."
07 - "The foolish and the dead alone fail to change their opinions." - Abraham Lincoln
07 - TikTok would be a great way to bring back NightWalk and NightRide.
08 - A malapropism of a metaphor is a malaphor.
08 - I love the idea of those mini printers, but the idea of spending three or four times as much for something that fits in the palm of my hand than it would cost for a full-size jobbie, is a bit not on.
08 - Are payphones still a thing?
08 - It's funny the things you think will be ubiquitous that end up not being so.
08 - There's a Holy Spirit Board on the market now, a ouija board to allow you to talk directly to Jesus. I say they market it as the Ouijesus board.
08 - Rita Moreno and Animal doing Fever is still one of the best moments to ever grace a TV screen.
08 - Al jumma is the Arabic for Friday. I made note of that one because I was born on a Friday.
09 - I don't have much sympathy, if any, for people who complain about protests inconveniencing their day. Protest should inconvenience you. It should be disruptive. And neither of those things is an advoacy for violence either. They aren't mutually inclusive.
09 - Are bush parties still a thing?
09 - "Knowlege listens quietly." - Unknown
09 - Someone should point out to Doug Ford that the LCBO doesn't have long lineups - but hospitals and food banks do.
09 - Sometimes I wonder how much money accidentally ends up in landfills.
09 - I saw a thing that said the title of the book you're currently reading is the new nickname for your hoochie - Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls. Oookey dokey then.
09 - "Things to say to men who are bothering you: You smell just like my therapist." - Unknown
11 - I saw a video the other day where some guy was equating the use of washcloths to something only poor or lower class people do. Is he serious? Do people really think that? Angels and ministers of grace defend us.
11 - "Joy is not in things; it is within you." - Unknown
11 - The evolution of the word aesthetic being used to mean attractive or pleasing annoys the shit out of me.
11 - Out of the several fast food places that serve chilli that I've tried, Wendy's is my favourite. Don't come for me.
11 - I wonder why we humans like scalding showers so much.
11 - I've started this thing where I try to listen to a new (to me) song every day.
11 - I should do a declutter one thing a day challenge.
11 - Sometimes I'm super bummed I can't have ruby grapefruit any more because of some of the medications I take. What a pisser.
11 - Today I finally looked up what family of fruits pineapples, bananas, and pomegranate fall into. I didn't look up kiwi, because kiwi is gross.
11 - I love reading books that make me laugh out loud when I read them in public.
11 - "Beware of the tiny gods frightened men create." - Hafiz
11 - It's easier to enjoy a cup of tea you keep reaching for more if you actually make the tea.
11 - "We're GenX. And yes, we do remember that one time." - Unknown
12 - I wonder which piece of cutlery is used most - fork, knife, or spoon.
12 - "The best way to spot an idiot: Look for the person who is cruel." - J. B. Pritzker
12 - Sometimes I just want to eat a whole cake.
13 - I’m watching the Babylon 5 season 1 episode Deathwalker. When Kosh says they'll meet at the "hour of scampering" I figure he's referring to what might pass for a rush hour. But I've never been able to figure out what the "hour of longing" might be.
13 - I was deep in the throes of my Bowie groove when Twitch hammered the stream I was watching. What? A bunch of tired GenX watching Bowie vids too much for you, Twitch?
13 - Service Ontario desks inside Staples? Because I want my government information at the mercy of another for-profit corporation? Fuck you, Doug Ford. Fuck you.
15 - One of the worst things about being human are intrusive thoughts.
15 - Sometimes I have a strong urge of hot chocolate, but not so much that I want to continue to spend money on the powdered stuff that doesn't satisfy. I haven't been able to find one that I like for years now. It never occurred to me until someone mentioned it yesterday, that I could simply heat up that chocolate milk in a carton. I did it just now. While it's not perfect, it certainly scratched an itch. I pronounce it acceptable!
15 - Crunchy peanut butter is better than smooth.
15 - "What do you call children born in a whorehouse? Brothel sprouts." - Unknown
16 - I misread "solidarity" as "squalidarity", and now I feel compelled to define that as an actual word. It's stellar.
16 - Somewhere in the world there's a waterway called Root Canal.
16 - We get so used to the names we're given at birth, that most of us never wonder about having another one. I have no idea what name I'd choose for myself if the inclination ever struck.
16 - "If you think you love freedom but you don't care if it applies to everyone, what you actually love is privilege." - Unknown
16 - "When you eat your Smarties do you eat the red ones last?" I do. I still damned do.
18 - I wonder whatever happened to The Look People.
18 - I never get sick of watching a cast do a version of All That Jazz, or Liza's Mein Herr from Cabaret. "I want you for my wife." "What would your wife want with me?"
18 - I hated Moulin Rouge so much I don’t think I even got through the whole thing.
18 - My favourite "dance" scene from a film is probably Gene Kelly’s wake up scene from An American in Paris, because he turned something so mundane into an effortless flow.
18 - Watching people run their hands over watercolour paper makes me insane.
18 - I told someone I was feeling relationship lonely. They told me how hard marriage is. I felt dismissed.
18 - I like the idea of thrifting, of upcycling, of the joy of finding one thing and turning it into another.
18 - I think I'm going to start indulging in non-medicinal lemsip type drinks. I want an alternative to tea and hot chocolate that I can sweeten to taste and doesn't involve alcohol. Sometimes you just want something that isn't so rich like hot chocolate is.
18 - They're doing some kind of repair work in another apartment. It's very thumpy.
19 - Next to all the art videos, my favourite thing on YouTube is The Tim Traveller. It is absolutely the most fun and wholesome thing on the entire site.
19 - Apparently today is World Quark Day. How does one celebrate such a thing?
19 - I have a mug that looks like a Stanley but isn't. I've had it for years. Now I'm embarrassed to take it out in public because I don't want people to think I'm insane - at least not for that.
19 - I really hate influencers. I know the trend is fading off, along with the cult of celebrity. They take all the fun out of things.
19 - When I heard the Doobie Brothers as a kid, I wonder what I thought doobie meant.
19 - Ableism is so ingrained in some aspects of Western culture that people think it's weird if you DON'T do it.
19 - Disability is not inferiority.
19 - One day perhaps I'll comprehend why people think Wuthering Heights is romantic. It isn't today, it wasn't yesterday, it sure as shit wasn't the time I read it. If that's your idea of romance, you need therapy.
19 - I never need to hear Taylor Swift ever again.
19 - I want to sit on a deck chair and drink a tea and have no one bother me unless I want to be bothered, while listening to a baseball game on a tinny AM radio, unless I want to listen to mid-'70s New York punk or late-'70s garage rock on FM radio, and order in food I don't have to cook, and not wear shoes, and maybe fall asleep there for an hour, and have fresh fruit showing up when I run out of the last batch, and enjoy the fresh breeze passing under the shade that makes sure I don't burn to a crisp.
21 - I love to watch the mad birds dance.
21 - I watch Escape to the Country as background noise quite frequently, so I get a lot of the same things over and over, ad nauseam. Do I ever need to hear the words "holiday let" ever again? I do not. The other thing is hot tubs. I fail to comprehend the fascination people have with hot tubs. Human soup. No thanks.
21 - The simplest answer to most problems facing the world today is that people are cunts.
21 - I like to be occupied, but I am not the type of person who likes being busy. It's okay to have nothing to do, and to enjoy doing nothing.
21 - If I recall correctly, I got measles from someone at my Brownie troop.
21 - I am quickly growing to despise the term "shadow work" when it relates to dealing with one's psyche or emotional state. It makes the entire process sound like new age bullshit.
21 - Just for giggles I looked at the sites for the temp/staffing agencies I used to look at most frequently. Between three major agencies there were five jobs, two of which were industrial and not office-based. Nothing's changed. The job market is still a nightmare.
21 - Sharing something publicly is not consent for abuse or bullying. It has "what was she wearing" vibes.
21 - Not all outings with friends need to be events. Sometimes a trip to the grocery store is enough. Everyday things.
21 - I miss taking walks at night, especially on snowy evenings.
21 - Who stages a house by putting a bowl of oranges in the living room?
21 - Suddenly I have a craving for fried baloney.
21 - Some of my favourite people are teenagers who get vaccinated behind their insane parents' backs. And the Yemeni.
21 - Somehow, the fact that snails have teeth is a bit stomach-churning.
21 - You shouldn't feel temporary in your home. Worry about resale value when you're actually selling it.
21 - If someone tells you they're lonely, your response should not be to tell them how problematic it is to be in a relationship.
21 - Dear anyone younger than GenX: Punctuation in texts from us is not passive aggressive. Periods are so you can tell where one sentence ends and another begins. Punctuation tells you the difference between "Let's eat, Grandma!" and "lets eat grandma". Poor Grandma. Trying to decode paragraphs with no punctuation or capitalisation gives me a frigging migraine.
21 - There are some things I'm glad I'll never have to do again. There are some people I'm glad I'll never have to see again.
21 - It is not against the criminal code of Canada for me to open carry my sword. That said, were I to actually do so, it wouldn't stop any member of the police force from asking me why I'm doing it.
21 - Kumquat sounds like it should be a euphemism for something but we know it isn't.
21 - Never tell a disabled person how to refer to themselves. I prefer identity-first language. Others prefer person-first language. I like identity-first because person-first makes me feel like folks think I can take my disability off as if it's an attachment.
21 - Why do we call that pain in our sides a "stitch"?
25 - "No one is fit to rule who is not first master of themselves." - Seneca
25 - There's someone who lives down the hall from me who's a heavy breather. It's weird when I can hear them coming up and down the hall to their apartment.
25 - I deeply hate the song Tiny Dancer. My favourite Elton John song is Honky Cat.
25 - Disability does not care about age, gender, economic status, religion, cultural background, education, nor anything else. If it wants you, it'll come for you.
25 - Purlicue.
25 - TikTok needs to add a mute function to comments so you never have to be notified about anything but comments to them.
25 - I asked an LLM to give me a list of out-of-the-box hobbies I could try. It suggested extreme ironing. I don't even like normal ironing.
25 - The thing I find most odd about Engelbert Humperdinck is that that was his stage name. He chose that. On purpose.
25 - I used to wear my high school ring on the middle finger of my left hand. I don't remember why.
25 - My favourite misappropriation of a quotation is what I say when I'm textually rolling my eyes at someone in that "Oh dear god" sort of way. "Angels and ministers of grace defend us." - Hamlet
25 - I had a realisation one day many years ago, when someone knocked on my door and I didn't answer it. You don't have to answer your door. Ever. It was an immensely liberating feeling.
26 - I could never date a man with a soul patch.
26 - Sometimes I like to put TV shows on when I go to sleep so there's some noise in the background. I've gone through multiple rotations of Alien Nation, the first four seasons of Babylon 5, Madam Secretary, the 1980 BBC production of Jane Eyre, the 1995 version of Pride & Prejudice, Veronica Mars, M*A*S*H (though not for years), and Cadfael.
26 - I deeply crave a Little Oly's chocolate malt.
26 - My cousins and I snuck into the local church one time and went into the rooms behind the altar. What rebels we were.
26 - If someone tries to tell you that they never had privilege, that their life was hard, bear in mind they probably don't know the difference between privilege and privileged.
26 - I did not care for the Win11 start menu nor forced bottom of the screen placement at first, but I’m liking the simplicity now. I never had a need for the old-style tiles anyhow.
28 - My favourite most recently learned vulgarity is "halve poes". It's Afrikaans, and used when you want to tell someone they're useless. It translates to "half a pussy" or "half a cunt" which are useless, because you can do something with a whole one.
28 - I keep thinking today is Sunday. It's nice to realise I still have a whole weekend.
28 - I haven't listened to the Broadway cast of Hair album in years. I'm listening to it now. Apparently I still remember all the words.
28 - What do these Canadian political parties have in common? NDP, Green, Liberal, Bloc, Communist, Rhino, and even the PPC? Every one of them has some kind of platform, values statement, or constitution easily accessible on their websites. Notice the conspicuous, but unsurprising, missing party - a party whose supporters see it as some kind of flex that there is no mandate of any kind on the party's site. I'd ask someone to make it make sense, but I know there's no way to do that.
28 - It's really disappointing when you order in from a new place and the first bite is great, but you suddenly realise that all subsequent mouthfuls are just going to be you tolerating it till it's over.
28 - I've got the same mountainous stack of reusable grocery bags everyone does. Today I went through the jammed stash and folded them more tidily. I gave up counting them. There are at least 130 or so. I'm going to donate some to the food bank and maybe some to the community fridge if I can get near one.
28 - Despite living on this planet for many decades, counting years as they go, I was today years old when it finally hit me, while watching an astronomy video about Milky Way planetary rotations around the sun, that 2024 is actually the number of rotations we've had around the sun since 1 AD. I knew that. I know I knew that. But it just never occurred to me. You know?
28 - Too many reusable bags? Same.
29 - I've got a strong stomach and all, but some aspects of graphic medical drama are just too much sometimes even for me.
29 - Has the Greek system weaselled its way into Canadian universities? I hope not. It sometimes gets mentioned in Canadian TV series/films like it's happening here when it doesn't. Gag me.
29 - I love the way saying the word "notes" rolls off the tongue. It's got good mouthfeel.
29 - The job market's great, huh? Then why do the biggest temp/staffing agencies in my area have nothing?
29 - "What do you mean atheists don't have morals? My morals are what's stopping me from becoming a pastor and exploiting your gullibility for profit." - Unknown
29 - It makes me laugh when I heard collections agencies offering the only good repayment options to people with money. Buds, if they had money they wouldn't be in the pickle. Maybe offer the good repayment options to the people who need it most.
29 - One of my friends said we should do a spa visit, and I'm like, "What the fuck would I do in there?"
31 - The medical miracle we all need is a way to do a blood pressure check that doesn't involve the cuff.
31 - Please don't use the term special needs. They're just needs.
31 - "If you wonder what you would have done in Nazi Germany, you are doing it today." - Unknown
31 - I don't look at my clock all that much, but the frequency with which I do look at it and it's 12:34 o'clock has become obscene.
31 - I don't like Star Wars. It's like a live action cartoon.
31 - I feel bad for people who have to take the oath of citizenship, and am relieved I'll never have to, because they're stuck having to swear allegiance to the monarchy.
31 - I just saw a video of a girl talking about how she bought one of those wedding cake sample boxes from a bakery for no reason, and ate the whole thing by herself on a Friday night. I'm ashamed I didn't think of this myself.
31 - I don't often talk about this, but ... I'm naked under my clothes.
31 - Dole orange juice is terrible. How can you take something as delicious as an orange and turn it into that.
31 - I found a new place to buy art supplies from. They also had things that were not art supplies, so I bought some of them too.
