Er... Not to gainsay the thought you had regarding climate change, but the previous generations did have a little cold war and the threat of nuclear annihilation hanging over their heads. In retrospect, it's weird to think we probably had a few years of that ourselves we were just utterly oblivious to.

While power rangers is the particular avatar I chose to embody my melancholy, it's a larger issue than that. BUT, of we're talking power rangers, it is a genuinely fascinating case study in world building with absolutely no plan and working backwards from existing material that was never meant to go together. The comic books have done an amazing job over the past... Not sure how many years, but to this day I'm still really weirded out that they're so consistently good. It's bloody power rangers... It's a toy commercial, stop being actually competent!! (Never stop)

As for anime, I've heard of that title, but know nothing about it. For my money, there have been two series I was very excited for in the past couple of years. They've seemingly been fairly successful too, so I'm happy.

The big difference between the cold war and climate change is that with the cold war there was a clear external enemy you could focus your anxiety and hate at. With climate change, the villains are not so clear cut, which makes it a lot harder to deal with, psychologically.

Since this is getting heavy I'm going to spoiler it for consideration of those who might not want to be reminded of all the various stresses in our lives:



Elsewise, after much hemming and hawing on my part -- I am terrible at making appointments -- I have finally gotten my COVID booster shot.

Yeah, if you want to point to anything, Captain Planet or even the aforementioned power rangers would be more apt. However, I think, to a low grade, even though the thread of nuclear annihilation still existed, we were largely oblivious to it as children, unable to really contextualize any awareness of the situation, while children* of the 70's, shall we say had it drilled into them constantly. That's paired, albeit in different ways, with the threat of the draft and Vietnam.

Then, we had 9/11 and the terrorist state, and I've no clue what that did to kids, but most of us were already out of childhood by that point, I should think.

* Autocorrect seemingly wanted children to read as corn, which amused me more than is explicable.

So, what's good everyone?
How's everyone's week been going?

I've had low key stress over the fact that one of the employees seemingly thought I was harassing her because of something she said to me, but it wasn't anything unique to her, I've had to be more strict with everyone on the workforce lately because our boss's bosses have very little chill, and we need to get specific key numbers up. The staff, unfortunately, didn't take to the hints they needed to do better when I was nice about it, so I had to stop being nice.
Again, one of the girls felt singled out and regardless of it's something being done to the entire staff, human resources tend to look at certain things as being easier to just throw babies out with bath water than actually stand by any principles. They might as well call human resources "risk assessment management".

It's been a headache.

I'll accept any prayers anyone may have towards Avacyn, Serra, or hell even Yawgmoth for the safety of Texas right now.

I kind of kid but we've got another bad winter storm moving in right now and Texas hasn't really pulled its pants up from last year so things might get a bit hairy. I don't expect it to be as bad, since it's not getting as cold for as long, but even so my work is closed for tomorrow and probably will be for Friday.



I suppose it's also worth re-mentioning that I'm basically a generation removed from my mom, who was around 40 when she had me, and my father was another 20 years older than her. The friend of mine who sparked this conversation to begin with has a somewhat-similar situation where he lives with his grandparents because his parents are both Mennonite and crazy/abusive (like his grandparents pulled him out because of that), so we're both dealing with parental figures that are far further back (culturally) than what is typical.

So... I just spent almost 2 hours taking autism quizzes and feeling kind of called out by some of the questions. Like one was even just "do you have difficulty filling out forms" and I'm just like... YEAAAAAAAAH?!

I started with a short, simpler quiz that had a threshold (>80% of autistics scored above this number) of 32. I scored a 35.

So I went to a slightly longer, more involved test in which no neurotypical scored greater than 64 in the literature (the online test has people self-report, so the average "neurotypical" score is significantly higher). Neurodivergent males typically scored ~150 while neurodivergent females typically scored ~160 on this one. I scored 169. (inb4 "nice")

So I then went to an even longer and more nuanced test, which doesn't focus so much on a "threshold" so much as possible comorbidities by scoring several different areas as neurodivergent and neurotypical at the same time. So, for instance, a high neurodivergent talent score might be indicative of Asperger's or OCD, while a low neurotypical talent score might be indicative of dyslexia or ADHD. I'm still kind of sorting through my results on that.

And like, I'm not trying to necessarily say anything with this, but I feel compelled to tell people. Especially you all, since you're my friends.

Very interesting. I always recommend against any sort of self-diagnosis, as I figure people are inherently biased, one way or another, about their own health. But having never taken any of those tests you are talking about, I really don't have much to say about any of them. As always, however you're feeling about this, always feel free to PM me and rant for as long as you need to, buddy!

As someone who recently tried to get an official diagnosis regarding neorodivergence, I was basically told that, as an adult, unless my symptoms were very obvious or severely interfering with my daily life, I was unlikely to even get a full investigation. And that was in the Swedish healthcare system, which generally is better than the American when it comes to these things. So self-assessment is often the only way to begin understanding yourself and your issues. In fact, the one meeting with a psychologist I did get was basically just one of those exact self-assessment quizzes, except of course for the fact that she was the one interpreting the results.

That's fair. One of my aunts is a pretty severe hypochondriac, so I'm probably just wary of people's ability to accurately measure themselves.

Well, gods, I just had a depressing as hell dream that would make for a good story. Essentially what amounts to the reverse of the Ocarina of Time story about fairies.
You go on a quest to say goodbye and they change color when they're running out of time.

Except, it wasn't about faeries, it was about the remnants of a person bound in a tube of fluid that went on a gun. Orange was normal, but she'd turned green, meaning there wasn't a lot of time left, and this was the pairs' second shot at finishing the quest.

It was sadder than it was weird. Y'know, dream logic and all.

Yeah, dreams are weird.

I don't really have much else to add, but dreams are certainly weird.

According to his profile page, Ruwin hasn't been around here for over two years, so the likelihood that he'll ever see this is small, but for what it's worth, happy birthday, buddy, and welcome to your thirties, apparently!

Well, I hope wherever he is, he had a good day.

I did not have a good day. I ran over debris that jacked up my car, so gonna have to take that in.

Other than that, I suppose I should apologize to saying degree that I've not had the spoons lately to really offer much in the way of interaction, but I hope everyone else has been in a less frazzled state

To quote the Tick, "SPOOOOOON!!!!"

Ah, The Tick.
I think there's few pieces of 90's media that so interestingly captures the concept of Gen X so well. The only other thing that I can conceive of is maybe Clerks, but that's a can of worms.

I could go in at length about the Tick, but I'm going to pivot slightly to a video I watched the other day about A Goofy Movie and how it was such a beacon to the millennial experience... Though the video in question was actually about how it is supposedly an extremely black culture kind of movie, which I won't argue, but I'll admit frustration that it seems the essayist in question wanted to claim it rather than let it be universal as something to share that can unite people instead of specifically seemingly excluding anyone outside the band of experience that makes it 'black'.
... But I digress in this digression. For the most part, generations have difficulty bridging the media, as when a generation moves into a position to tell stories, they tend to tell stories they themselves wish they had growing up instead of creating stories for the generation in question, leading to a case of "hello fellow teens", but man the Gen X media was better than the majority of garbage millennials are intent to create. And unfortunately, it seems like an effect of millennials moving into that space had been to corrupt gen x rather than get that hard disconnect like X had with the boomers.

But gen x media had this really good edge to it that managed to never get too cynical, which sadly, millennial works are cynical even when they are sanded down to have no edge or pointy bits at all. I could whine more about millennial media all day too.

But the Tick though!
Also Freakazoid.

The whole concept of corporate Human Resources is kinda screwy. They're essentially the worker's advocate against the company, but they work for the company. It seems like a system set up to not accomplish a whole lot.


Is this a free online thing? Cause I have this friend, who has this fiend, who is me.


:nods sagely:

@Stuff about older parents: I think I'm in that boat too. It became very noticeable when we moved to a new town and my dad didn't know anybody else with kids my age. He had a hard time believing that all the other kids in high school had self phones. He implied that 20 was getting a little old to play videogames. He kept trying to get me to wear polo shirts to school. It's also possible that my dad was just never at any point "with it".

Launching into responding to everything interesting that's been said while I've been away will probably make me sound more grounded than I am -- I have been an absolute mess this week and still am because I may have made things worse and I am expecting to get a talk from my brother whenever he remembers to call back, and I can already barely talk to him because of everything that's changed over the last two years and change. I don't really want to get into all of it right now but I am just... not in a good place right now, mentally.


Oh, I have a number of dreams that I've written down specifically because they will make good stories. One in particular seemingly came with a name, as if I was dreaming I was watching a movie, that I always remember off the top of my head: After Narawa. I may have even posted about it here before.


I see him online every so often on Steam, if I happen to be playing something on Steam (even out of my PC games, only a small portion of them I own on Steam) so I know he's still alive at least. I get way too anxious to reach out to him, though.


Yeah you can go to embrace-autism.com -- it's made/compiled by some autistic doctors of some kind (I think they're psychologists) using tests and papers written by other people who researched this stuff. A lot of the tests they host on their own site and some of them have links to other languages (though some have become made less available outside of English for some reason [not related to said website]). My therapist recommended it to me after another of her patients told her about it.


Maybe he used to be with it, ever think of that. They just changed what "it" was, now what he's "with" isn't "it" and what "it" is is new and scary.

On that note, the Transformers fan wiki is an absolute trip to browse through. They meticulously detail every bit of Transformers lore but also don't take themselves too seriously, so wiki pages for characters with a notable quirk (such as Wheelie speaking in rhymes) are written with that quirk, and most every image caption is some joke or another. Like, all of Kupp's image captions are Abe Simpson quotes because he's the "back in my day" Transformer in canon. Another fun thing is that they refuse to acknowledge anything outside of Transformers-specific canon so you have claims that Darth Vader "is PRESUMABLY related to similarly-named Luke Skywalker" because that's never been explicitly said inside of Transformers canon despite Darth Vader appearing in some cross-overs.

I can’t put up with toxic people solely because they are family. Some people take it too far as an excuse to take you for granted.

So, things at work aren't bad, but there's a weird tension between me and some others and it's irritating me. Like, either we good or not, but letting things be weird is just making sure they stay weird.

Beyond that, and totally unrelated, man I wish MGM hadn't left such a big mark on the Oz franchise. Judy Garland and the like basically permanently warped the property and it's so disappointing, not because the movie was bad, but because Oz had every chance to be as important as Lord of the Rings in terms of cultural solidarity. Oz is a uniquely American mythos and the potential there is so disheartening to see unrealized.