So you know those jokes that start with “sits bolt upright in bed, and declares—” type?

That literally happened to me at 4 am this morning, with the thought, “LET’S GIVE A SHOUT-OUT TO LEONARD NIMOY CONVINCINGLY LOOKING LIKE HE WAS GOOGLING THINGS FOR TWENTY YEARS WHEN REALLY HE WAS JUST TWEAKING COLORED GLASS BEADS!”

I then plopped back down and went back to sleep.

All other things being equal, my weight goes up.

I don’t eat more than most people; I don’t eat worse than most people. I certainly get more exercise than most people.

But for whatever reason, my body just wants to be heavier.

Every eighteen months or so, it starts getting dangerously close to 300 pounds and I can’t take it any more. I do intermittent fasting, cut out as much sugar and carbs as I can stand without having constant head/body aches, and pursue an aggressive exercise regimen.

The good news is, my body is very responsive to this. Typically, I lose 10-20 pounds within six months.

The bad news, I can’t sustain the effort. I’m not talking about “easy lifestyle changes” here, I’m talking about the focus of my life turns from Literally Anything Else to Lose Weight Again, Dammit. Sometime around the six to eight months mark, I am just too mentally and physically exhausted to keep going, and I start to coast.

And just as responsive as it is to aggressive weight loss efforts, it is to coasting. Maybe moreso.

It’s like my body is a ship with a leaky hull and being overweight is the ocean. As long as I furiously man the pumps I’m okay, but the second I stop, the ship starts sinking again.

I am fucking sick of it.

But it’s the hand I’ve been dealt. And the lockdown isn’t helping.

Ship’s flooded again. Back to the pumps.

Dammit. -.-

Yeah. So. Spoilers. The title warned you.

The show that asked, “What if Star Wars was incredibly gay?” and then answers, “IT WOULD BE AWESOME AS FUCK!”

There’s so much for me to say about She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, I don’t even know where to begin. I already knew, when I was defending Catra as A Cinnamon Roll Who Wants to Kill You that this was a show I was going to be very heavily invested in. Catra literally feels to me like Noelle Stevenson plucked her right out of my brain and put her on the screen—to the point that I wrote to Ms. Stevenson directly and leveraged all of my comics/animation contacts into trying to find a way to get onto the writing team… without success, alas.

Catra would look at Leona Lioness or Tanya Regellan and say “Oh, you too?” She is also directly the inspiration for Shade-Of-the-Candle, whose own transition from snarling murdercat to laughing bandit has parallels to the arc Catra actually follows. As Emmet Asher-Perrin so aptly put it, “Catra was an instant favorite on the show among its fans. But there was something about it that nagged at me, something more specifically related to her type, and what that type said about me, and what it meant that I kept returning to it.”

And I’m not gonna lie, I was scared for Catra. With every season ending with her in a worse place than the last one, and knowing in very personal detail exactly the self-destructive cycles she was going through, I was terrified she was going to go down with the ship. Redemptive Suicide is such a terrible trope, but such a common one in fantasy and SF, that I was at least 65% convinced that was going to be her fate.

(Mere words cannot express how happy I am to read that Shadow Weaver’s final fate was intentionally written as an “Up yours!” at that specific trope.)

I stopped watching the show halfway through season four, because Double Trouble pushed too many of my buttons—I didn’t have it in me to watch these characters I was so fond of just unravel and tear each other apart, and after the end of season three I couldn’t bring myself to watch Catra do any more horrible things without some kind of light at the end of the tunnel. So I suspended my Netflix account and waited. There was no way I wouldn’t watch season five when it came out—but I couldn’t finish until I could actually finish, if that makes any sense.

So… where do I stand, now that the show’s over? Like the title says, it gave me everything I wanted. Catra to have a true redemption. A true, explicit and undeniable romantic relationship between Catra and Adora. Adventure, excitement, and really wild things. Strong characters, deep and compelling villains, beautiful animation. The first ever canonically and unambiguously queer protagonist in mainstream western animation. On some level, I must face that I resent that I couldn’t be part of it. When I knew getting involved in the show wasn’t going to happen, I created The Reclamation Project to redirect that energy, so good has still came of it, but for me She-Ra will never not be “one that got away.” It’s a historic, once-in-a-lifetime event, a revolution that I was only able to watch and not participate in. And there’s nothing I can do about that except get over it.

On the other hand, the sheer joy that S5 has filled me with blots out those dark thoughts. Scorpia going from doormat to utter badass. Entrapta—who I’ve historically been very down on—not just coming to grips with the difference between “people” and “things,” but also giving Catra one of the most understatedly but purely kind moments in Problem Cat’s whole life.

Wrong Hordak. Just freakin’ Wrong Hordak. He’s another character who feels like he was ripped out of my brain.

Catra’s sheer desperation for Adora in the final two episodes—and that Catra’s (requited!) love for Adora literally saved the universe.

I could do this all day. I’ll stop. If you’ve seen the show you know all these things.

What does it mean to me? I don’t know. I know that Suburban Jungle has touched lives—but not on the scale or sheer power that this show has. Is there still something useful for me to do? If so, what? And how do I do it? What can I bring to the table in a world that already has this in it?

I’ll find something.

“The moving hand once having writ moves on. Nor all thy piety nor wit can lure it back to cancel half a line.”
―Omar Khayyám, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

Been chewing more on my same thoughts from last night re: blogging and social contact and such. The annoying truth of the matter is, frankly, that’s it’s not 2005 any more and it never will be again.

I’ve never wanted to be a “Thing were better in the good ole days!” sort of person, and it’s not in my nature to dislike new things on the grounds that they’re new. What is in my nature, is to hate losing things that I loved, whether it’s TV shows that have gone off the air and fallen out of the public consciousness, Long John Silvers restaurants, happy bubblegum pop music, or a thriving LiveJournal community.

I don’t know what, if anything, is “the current hotness.” Our culture has become so balkanized that very little seems to make a lasting impact, and it often feels like by the time something pops up on my radar it’s already waning. But it’s not like I changed how I approach or consume media and culture. It’s more like… stuff just stopped showing up.

I am aware of the accelerating nature of my perception of time. When you’re twenty, a year seems like a long time because it’s 5% of your whole life experience. When you’re fifty, a year goes by while you’re thinking up a blog post, and you’re like “WTF just happened?” But I’m also aware of a certain amount of jadedness that I think is an inevitable result of having been such a ravenous consumer of culture for so long. I’ve read so many books, watched so many TV shows, playing so many video games, that I could probably identify every entry on TVTropes.org and cite two or three examples. Things that seem exciting and fresh to people with more limited experience, I see as a retooling of a thing I saw back thirty years ago, and why get invested in the new one when the one from thirty years ago is still perfectly good?

The answer, of course, is connection. Fandom is a team sport, and if I want to be geeking out with friends about stuff, whatever that stuff is, I have to go where the people are! Unlike my mom, who was flabbergasted that none of my nieces had a clue who Gilbert & Sullivan were, I don’t want the things I love that used to be popular, to become a prison preventing me from being connected to what people are living in the moment right now.

-The Gneech

On a whim, I went to the Friends page of my old LiveJournal.

It had, literally, no entries.

I looked at the equivalent page on Dreamwidth: it had entries, all from one person.

I miss blogs, man.

Three Good Things for Today

1. Did some graphic design work for a friend.
2. Got my unemployment filing done for the week and deposited a royalty check.
3. Re-empowered my Bujo and my “Three Things” posts!

Three Goals for Tomorrow

1. Post some art to FA
2. Work on a new design project
3. Intro for this weekend’s D&D session

Gnite world, and have an awesome tomorrow. <3 -TG

I… might do art streaming again tomorrow.

It’s been so long since I did art streaming, for so many reasons.

It’s been so long since I did art, for so many reasons.

With “social distancing” and my jobs drying up, I need to do something, and I need contact with people. But mostly, I just need life to be good again. “Back to good” is a slogan coined by the D.C. metrorail system’s attempt to renovate their systems and rehabilitate their reputation with the public, and I gotta admire the ballsiness of just coming out and saying, “Yeah, we kinda suck right now, and we’ve gotta get back to good.”

That’s what I need to do, too. I’ve spent the past three years in an almost constant state of “tryhard,” watching my fortunes dwindle, my attempts to get anywhere be frustrated, and my mental health and creative drive evaporate. In late 2019 it just completely came crashing down around me, and in January and February I began the long climb back out of the wreckage… only to be greeted by the pandemic. Wow. XD

But to be completely honest, I feel strangely peaceful about it all. I’ve got a roof over my head and food to eat for the time being, and unemployment checks coming in at the very least while I continue my hunt for a day job. It’s not the “frugally comfortable” level I’m used to, but it could be a lot worse, and I can build on it. I can get back to good.

So what makes life good? Fun, friends, art and writing, creativity and gaming. I’ve got a big ol’ queue of art I’ve promised to folks, and with everyone doing Stay-At-Home Con, the best way to get some socializing in is while sitting there getting work done. :)

I hope if you’ve enjoyed my art streams in the past you’ll come back, and if you’re curious you’ll come around and give it a try!

-The Gneech