My spouse and I were talking about gender Sunday night when something in the conversation — I don’t know what — miraculously flipped my anxiety switch to the off position with an almost tangible click. I’m not going to overthink it, I’m just going to be glad!
I still entirely reject and deplore MAGA’s attacks on trans and nonbinary people as harmful, scientifically and morally bankrupt, fascistic, and beneficial to absolutely nobody. Likewise the anti-“DEI” garbage. And the anti-immigrant stuff, though to be fair, Obama and Biden were doing a lot of that too, just crowing about it a lot less. (And I am still deeply disappointed in the hapless, spineless complicity of the Democratic party as a whole.)
But I am serene. Neither panic nor rage disturb my personal joy now.
Tomorrow, Feb 5, is the 50501 protest against Project 2025. Unfortunately the web presence for this action is a mess. It’s “officially” being discussed on Reddit, which is a horrible platform for finding basic information quickly, and Bluesky. Some key things:
- the organizers are urging that this must be a 100% peaceful and nonviolent protest
- info for each state is here. Some of it is not great either (location but not time, QR codes that simply go to the general subreddit…
- this info (including “team 2” protesting at home and “team 3” wherever you have to be that day). I’ll be working from home, but I will do my best to otherwise stay off the internet (and my phone, unless I get calls/texts).
In GW2 I deleted the new warrior and started a necromancer… probably my fifth one at this point! Going for a high-sustain Condition Scourge build variant, using a pistol from weaponmaster training and a couple of disposable pets to tank a little. It plays a bit differently, so it feels relatively fresh. A real survivor; I did get downed once while soloing a Champion — but downed isn’t dead, and the fight was close enough that Life Leech won the fight for me, and I got back up.
While some areas in GW2 got a refresh over the years, almost all of the truly new content has been level 80 areas that combine a longish set of story quests and open world areas. As many times as I’ve been through the various leveling ares, I’d really appreciate some new ones for the variety. I have stopped the bandits from blowing up the water supply pipes for Divinity’s Reach, bowed to the Dignified Cow, and gathered the $#!@%#ing rabbit food so many times now. I’d really like some new things to do when leveling a character. But I also don’t want to just use the “skip to level 80” items that the game throws like Mardi Gras beads. There’s something satisfying about hitting 100% exploration in a zone.
A blogger that just started up recently wrote a post on Monday about 3D movies. Here’s my thought:
I have to wear glasses, and almost universally, 3D glasses work poorly with them. I have a vague memory of one 3D movie that worked well; I was thinking it was either Tron: Legacy or Coraline. But my spouse, who would have been there and also wears glasses, doesn’t remember any good experiences with 3D, so it’s possible I just saw Tron and thought “yes, this should work well in 3D.”
Avatar, for all that people hyped how great it looked, was the worst of these. I could not even see characters’ faces! I had to look them up online afterward to figure out who people looked like. But this was only my third-worst movie experience.
The second-worst was Cloverfield. I don’t like shaky-cam ever, and here we were near the front row. (We hadn’t even been planning to go, but happened to randomly bump into folks from work at a restaurant who invited us along.) I spent a lot of the movie looking at the floor and occasionally glancing up.
The absolute worst experience was Blair Witch Project: shaky-cam plus bad hot dogs. The friend I’d gone with threw up in a trash can halfway through the movie, and then was okay. I didn’t and was desperately ill for the next three days.
We saw 5 movies in theaters in 2023, but none at all in 2024. Not Furiosa, not Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, not even War of the Rohirrim, because the reviews of them were all pretty meh.
This year, I’ll probably want to see Thunderbolts mostly for Florence Pugh and David Harbour and their fun MCU characters. The Cap movies have generally been pretty entertaining but I could wait for reviews unless my spouse particularly wants to go, or we happen to be dining out and decide to go. I’m not nearly as familiar with Fantastic Four as X-Men or Avengers, so that could also be a “wait for reviews” thing. …wait, I just saw the teaser trailer and the retro style looks really fun, so I do kinda want to see it just for that. Yes I am easily amused, why do you ask?