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Comments
I guess the classic body style is an iconic stylization by this point, though it's still amusing to see the clearly gap-filling design of that figure.
But I find the newer style rather refreshing.
Regardless, there's no possible universe where that gap-filling Jasmine is a good idea.
Also, the other day (like several months ago) I saw The LEGO Movie and I liked it way more than I thought I would.
On unrelated things, sometimes I get the impression that I teach myself ostensibly useful skills as a form of escapism, that I'm deceiving myself into thinking that'll help me make my problems go away.
I mean there are long term plans and such that I should be doing things about, but then there's also school that I need to focus on and I do focus on that, but maybe that's just an excuse?
There are times I think I'll just stop doing things the way I'm currently doing them and pay attention to real life, but then I... forget <_<.
IRL there's like, a lot about things that I would personally not like to get into tiffs over or certain things associated with my age group I really really don't want to associate with, and I feel like this constitutes about 70% of most people's real life experience so...
Basically I'm taking a "I'll stay in my line and everybody else stays in their's" approach. Maybe that's my escapism?
Anyways, learning new things is always great and a thing more people should be engaged in so hat's off to you either way.
I guess the reason they were able to create the minidoll is because LEGO Friends essentially constitutes it's own separate world from most LEGO things.
Instead of accepting this, most adult fans kind of treat it like it's treading on space it doesn't belong in (even though it's never resulted in decreases to the production levels of other lines), with an uncomfortable amount of them engaging in lowkey misogyny over it.
Anyhows, I've kept learning programming but I'm still worried that it'll end up the same way 3DCG and other stuff did, where I try to monetize it and end up nowhere.
Speaking of programming...
That was frustrating. I managed to build the program again, not without a lot of hassle too. It's often tempting to blame poor instructions, but this time the notes I left for myself didn't help either. It doesn't help that this thing actually does end up with errors at random. Now, I can reliably build this version of this project in this folder, but I'm unable to do the same with the newest version and as usual I can't figure out why. Though I guess the earlier version is good enough for the time being.
Also the encoding wasn't wrong at all, but for some reason Forge hangs when I save some files in Notepad/Wordpad in anything but ANSI.
Also I'm only getting like 3-5 hours of internet service each day.
School is a good thing to focus on, tho
(See here if you're curious.)
I think for the longest time I've defined myself by what nerdy things I pledge allegiance to, but I've only come to realize this because I was able to voice it in a new form (LEGO Friends). It turns out I've adapted this all-in or nothing take to... well, everything.
I could either change that or decide whether or not LEGO Friends is worth it ie not fix it at all. The former sounds really, really hard.
Hang in there!
I've decided to not bother with that anymore.
Mostly since I've come to realize there's no guarantee that I'd care about something a few years later.
^^^ I clicked the first link and got hopeful that I seemed to have a decent shot at it, then I read the part that says they're in order of career-depth and saw that the latter sections are at "I can't understand the question" level.
Though I think I can do the one about gas mixtures if I'm given thermodynamic tables or are allowed to treat it as an ideal gas.
Anyhows, I managed to fix a leak in a hydropneumatic tank, at least temporarily.
I managed to figure out what was wrong with building Forge, I just had to select an option ("windows-linux" in "profile") so that the compiler assistant actually does something useful.
Also I got new glasses.
Well, I have this grand dream of having the perfect collection of... something. Like one day when I'm old, I want to be able to look back on it and be all I totally surely achieved collecting this thing.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of things in the world and paying attention to one means ignoring everything else.
To compound this, as a child I read the first Confessions of a Shopaholic book and I really identified with the protagonist (probably not a good thing) when she says "I'll buy this Vuitton bag, but then I have to get the matching Miu Miu boots and the Botega Vennetta halter minidress. With these three pieces, I'll be unstoppable. I'll be the gaudy girl shopping her way through Paris in no time."
I mean, what I'm describing is a less extreme version of this, but basically I sort of want to be that obsessive guy who they feature at the end of news broadcasts when they have nothing better to show. I mean obviously this is nowhere near a full-time goal, I'm articulating what is basically a fantasy, but that's the thinking behind all this.
I'm thinking it might be time for a change. A real, scary, real life one.
*My fashion knowledge is super rusty but I tried to present a scenario where an entry level luxury brand led to like, the extremes.
EDIT: As an actual update; right now I'm in that weird place where I'm ramping up the time I spend studying every day. I wake up every day feeling like it's a normal day, but then I have to remind myself that I'll be spending X amount of time dealing with books all day.
It's kind of odd.
http://www.tampabay.com/florida/2019/05/09/think-lovebugs-are-bad-now-they-once-caused-a-public-safety-crisis-in-florida/
Actually it's been vaguely terrible ever since the weather started getting warmer here. The other day I was driving to my grandmothers and I must have gotten at least 30 bugs on my windshield.
Anyways, I was wondering if I'd been coming off as rambly in this thread for a while. Maybe a bit too tl;dr. I mean, even if it's not bothering you guys I'm starting to get self conscious about it, so... uh... yeah.
I think I could use being more like that, it'd probably make me more organized and appreciative of the stuff I have.
On what may or may not be related, I think I'm becoming a hoarder, I often get carried away thinking about how to reuse junk and am reluctant to throw it away.
^ If it helps, I can ramble more as well. More fuel for the thread, at any rate.
Also, I'm watching over some relatives' home again. I must say it's comfier than the previous times I've done so.
I have this tendency to, in a slightly heartless way, get rid of things once I decide they're no longer necessary. There are times when I'll be sentimental, almost always related to clothing, but eventually I'll look at it and judge that it's getting a bit much, then purge.
When everybody was inflicted with Kondo-itis earlier this year I found it a bit odd. The processes she teaches really weird me out, because I'd rather set up my own criteria for getting rid of things, since then you can change it on the fly. The problem with deciding things based on one criteria is you fly off the handle one way or the other (everything makes you happy right now, so keep it vs nothing makes you exactly the optimum level of happy, of destroy it all and start over.
I do find that whilst I do miss certain things, I can't honestly say that I'm heartbroken over losing a doll or a specific CD or video game.
For example:
I mean, if I stopped collecting LEGO Friends right this second, I don't think I'd be too worried. There are a lot of things I find have gone wrong with the brand, some of which I've articulated here.
However, Aikatsu Friends! had the most terrible episode of Aikatsu! this week since about 4-5 years ago, but I will not quit. I've wavered with the franchise before, but I still soldiered on, because it has a lot of value to me. So that's the sort of logic I'd use, I guess, to decide on things.
That's always good. I have this weird feeling that I'm not sure is substantiated, of people drifting away (not here specifically, but in other places). I'm not severely worried, anyways. I also don't want to be that guy who is accosting people all the time to come back and hang out though. I always try to post as much as possible here, at least.
Oh, well, this wasn't a short reply at all.
I wonder if life is trying to tell me something.
*shudders*
After I signed up to a new... newsletter, I find myself having to read twice as many emails as normal. I wonder if this'll end up adding up time-wise or if it's worth it.
Mattel has revealed a new doll line called Wild Hearts Crew. Honestly, I don't love them? They kind of remind me of the Bratzillaz except they aren't meant to be magical, just instagram levels of edgy. I do think I could see myself getting at least three of them, but we'll see how it goes once when they actually come out.
I'm also not a fan of the name, three words in that context is too long. A Barbie doll is one thing, a Bratz doll is another, an Ever After High doll is pushing it but Ever-After is basically one concept but Wild Hearts Crew is a lot to pack in before "doll".
Also from the Mattel instagram, Barbie hangs out with BTS, which is so weird but it also shows off how expressive some of the BTS dolls are.
Since I'm talking about dolls, I wanted to just mention something I noticed earlier this month. The new Aladdin movie is possibly the first time ever that a major non-spinoff doll line* was released where a company was willing to do a line made up entirely of Arabic characters (and Will Smith, I guess).
In saying this, I want to make sure that this doesn't come off as me looking down on any other lines or that this makes the line inherently better than other lines in any way, but this used to be a world in which MGA Entertainment regularly carted Sasha off to her own case assortment or only made her available to retailers if they previously requested a case including her*, making sure most children or collectors never even saw her. Similarly, the only black character in Ever After High until the final year was a wooden dummy.
Basically, it's nice to see that people believe in these sorts of things now.
*To be fair, Yasmin, based on MGA's Israeli CEO's daughter (but at times portrayed as Latin American, so sort of a double whammy?) was such a popular Bratz character that she and Cloe continued to populate line after line, carting everybody else to the side.
*There was indeed a Barbie line a while ago called So In Style that was basically as premium as Barbie got at the time that featured an entirely African American cast.
Also, I'm told the original story had Aladdin live in China. It was probably a stand-in for "far, far away", but still.
I don't quite grasp the context, but the way it sounds makes the show seem to reach the levels of oblivious racism that would be very hard to beat.
I mean it was lowkey as possible but it wasn't something you could overlook.
To be fair, I complain like this but I loved Cedar's style (I did not love her wood skin).
Eventually we got Justine Dancer, daughter of one of the Twelve Dancing Princesses, just before the line died.
Okay, sorry, but just leaving this here out of context feels racist in itself (or at the very least, incendiary). Ever After High was great, and it did have decent representation in other areas. Briar and Rosabella Beauty were both Latin American, and Ginger Breadhouse and Melody Piper were possibly mixed race (Ginger more likely than Melody).
The mere fact that it tried to have it's cake and eat it too by playing with the rules around Pinocchio and then just went all out changing with the Twelve Dancing Princesses is a testament to the creativity of the team behind the franchise, coupled with the fact that this was before Mattel was all that cool with making dolls in every ethnicity. It was, sadly, mostly a business decision from the corporate side, because there have been a lot of designs for diverse characters throughout the series.
In this context, I'm glad for the progress that we've seen in the doll industry which is why I mentioned the Aladdin thing to start with.
Yeah, I think it had something to do with the original translator inserting it into the original 1,001 Nights for some unknown, probably terrible, reason.
(Edit: ironically, the word "corrected" was written incorrectly.)
Anyhows, I had been having worse luck with my internet connection recently, but it's been working fine for several hours now and I made use of the opportunity to download as much as possible and stayed up all night over it.
If I recall correctly 1001 Nights research in general is a bit complicated by how the Arab manuscripts that surfaced over the years were directly based on the French, making it tricky to find out about earlier tradition.
I know you've had a hard year, but I hope today's a good one for you.