The other night, I was lying in bed looking over some photos of Jupiter
when I noticed a little animal icon at the top of my photo. I assumed it
was Apple's way of tagging a specific animal to make it easier to find
photos of it, so I tapped the button and glanced at the settings. I was
intrigued because it listed Jupiter as a Snowshoe cat. I chuckled to
myself, "Oh, Apple and your stupid image scanning... you're so stupid.
She's a Siamese mix or something, not a snowshoe... whatever that is."
Then I did a quick search and I realized Apple wasn't the idiot, I
was.
I'm not the most versed in cat breeds, but I feel like I can hold my own
in a conversation. With that being said, I'd never heard of a snowshoe
cat before, but it only took a couple of pictures to see the
resemblance.
Boring Standard Picture of a Snowshoe Cat
So, what is a snowshoe cat? Well, it's a rare Siamese mix formerly known
as a Silver Lace. Wikipedia states, "the Snowshoe is a short-haired
bicolor colourpoint breed" which is fancy talk for it has two colors
that transition from light to dark across the cat's body. It was given
the name snowshoe, because the cats have little white paws.
My little bugger licking the double sided tape, because yea she doesn't care
The breed is rare, because it’s difficult to get the right markings and
patterns (due to a reliance on recessive genes) to conform to the breed
standards. Even Jupiter, who would be considered a "pet snowshoe"
wouldn't meet the criteria, because she has too much white on her back
legs.
So, my little gutter kitty is a rare snowshoe cat, how
cool is that?
Well, after a depressing post yesterday, I'm back with something a bit
more positive today: this is my 100th post!
When I rebooted my blog (I like to think of it as a sequel, same
character and continuation of the same storyline) in September 2023, I
was hoping it'd be for the last time. I don't typically keep track of
the number of posts I make, but Scribbles makes it really easy to see
what post number you are on.
I'm not sure what my largest
blog has ever been, but if I was to guess I'd say 300-400 posts. After
this month, I should be up to 131 posts, which is pretty wild. In one
month, I'm going to write a third of what I've written over the past
eight or nine months.
Of course, if I'm completely honest,
there have been four or five "From the Vault" style posts which were
actually old blog posts from different blogs that I brought over. So, I
haven't written 100 new posts, but I've published 100 posts.
Still, there is something that feels so good about reaching the number
one hundred. It's like you've transcended a normal acceptable number of
blog posts and have moved onto something more. I appreciate everyone
that has been on this ride with me, and I look forward to reaching 200
very soon. And while I have your attention, yesterday Chris
suggested bloggers start an Interests page. I
liked that idea so I whipped one up. It still needs some work but I
think this is a great way to find other folks with similar interests.
This is not how I planned on starting out
WeblogMoPo2024 and I honestly wish I didn’t have to
write this, but here we go.
On December 5th, 2023 I wrote about my penpals. That post
began with:
Pikapal is my longest pen pal. She and I met on the Retro-Daze message board around ten years ago and have been in regular communication ever since. We bonded over our love of all things retro and since then we've kept each other abreast of our personal lives around once a month.
I last heard from Pikapal, aka Jennifer on November 22nd. It wasn't
unusual for us to write a little less over the holidays, as my birthday
fell between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and then her birthday was
shortly there after. I had expected her to comment on my Pen Pal post,
but she never did. However, the last I had heard she struggling with her
parents and trying to get a job, two common themes in our emails.
I sent her a birthday email in January, which also went
unanswered, and I'm sure everyone knows where this is going.
I noticed her blog has been on a sort of autopilot this year.
Partially written posts have published almost daily missing images, or
maybe they are just titles with little reminders to add text. She was a
meticulous blogger and spent most of her time reflecting on years gone
by. I kept telling myself, she was just busy, but tonight as I was
updating my links page I decided to give her name a search. I didn't
find much, but I did find an obituary. She passed away on December 23rd
a few weeks shy of her fortieth birthday.
I don't think Jen
had any friends. I don't know if she was ever diagnosed formally with
anything, but she was not a functioning adult. Her parents struggled
financially and she had trouble finding a job and learning to drive, a
goal I don't think she ever accomplished.
She was fiercely
private and I only knew her real name from her Gmail account. I only saw
her once, when she shared a Facebook video of her meeting the local
weatherman at the mall when the news was recording for Facebook Live.
She loved clowning. It was a goal of hers to become a clown
and that was what most of our emails were discussing. She wrote fan
fiction and fake clown instruction booklets, and she'd join online clown
camps and newsletters. She'd keep me up-to-date on the latest thing that
triggered the clown community (The success of IT a few years back
was infuriated them) and she was always planning that one day,
she'd get a job, save some money, become a clown, and get away from her
parents.
Jen had this incredible talent of remembering the
most specific details of the most random things like sitcom plots or
rare television shows. I was always amazed at how she could pull out the
most random tidbit of trivia when discussing something from the past,
which is what she loved to do.
Most of her blogging (if it
wasn't about clowning) was about the past. She'd pour over old diaries,
notebooks, and blogs and retell the stories from ten or twenty years
ago. Yearly she also created weekly blogs that would chronicle TV shows,
movies, video games, music videos, and other random trivia from the
twenty years ago and thirty years ago. The only two posts she had
created for 2024 prior to her passing were Twenty
Music Videos from 1994 and Twenty
Music Videos from 2004. Those posts were always great for finding
forgotten songs from decades gone by.
Another favorite topic
of hers was Where
in the World is Carmen San Diego, the live action game show
from the 90's. She was a huge fan of it and spent time gushing over the
Rockapellas as well as the host Greg Lee. She wrote fan-fiction about
the show and watched old episodes on YouTube.
She was a huge
Gwen Stefani fan and I remember sharing with her that I had bought a No
Doubt VHS tape back in the day. She told she had the same tape and would
practice standing while watching the tape so she could build up stamina
to stand that long for a concert. It made me laugh.
Our
relationship was interesting. I wouldn't say we were close because I
don't think that is something she was able to be, but we shared our
mutual love for all things retro and she was passionate about sharing
her frustrations with the clowning community and her inability to find a
job. And that is what makes this so difficult to write, because I didn't
know Jen. I mean, I think I may have known her more than a lot of people
in a strange way, but I didn't really know her.
She didn't use social media much and outside of her blog and
some posts on Retro-Daze there
isn't much left of her online. It saddens me to think how much she
struggled her adult life, only to have it cut so short. I hope wherever
she is now, she has found peace.
I'll leave this blog with
the final words she ever wrote me and I'll dedicate my
WeblogMoPo2024 my friend Pikapal. She wrote daily, I
can manage to do it for thirty-one days.
Here are some more Thanksgiving themed retro tv shows: Supermarket Story; King of Queens, The One Where Underdog Gets Away; Friends, Caroline and the Balloon; Caroline in the City, and Thanks for Nothing; Martin.
WeblogPoMo2024
begins tomorrow. What is WeblogPoMo2024,
you ask? Well, it's a month-long event similar to NaNoWriMo (National
Novel Writing Month) created by Annie. The goal is to write
on a blog, once a day, for the entire month of May.
Back in
2020, I participated in Kev's 100 Days to Offload. I never
made it to the 100 days, but when I go back and read old posts of mine,
some of my favorites were written during this time. One of the benefits
of forcing yourself to write daily is you tend to take your foot off the
brakes. Those insecurities or questions about quality are removed when
you just need to create and publish. Sure, the quality may dip a bit in
exchange for quantity, but you never know what magic might occur when
you are just writing to write.
While WeblogPoMo2024 doesn't
have any specific rules or guidelines on what you are encouraged to
write about, I've established a short list of rules for myself.
1. No ranting. I could easily spend thirty-one
days complaining, but I'm not doing that. I try to limit the negativity
and complaining on my blog as is, so I'm not going to give into the easy
way out for me.
2. No news/observations. This is another easy crutch for me, just pick a news topic and offer
my opinion.
3. No stress. This is
supposed to be fun, and the moment it stops, I stop. I don't tend to
write much on the weekends, so I may even take the weekends off. We will
just wait and see.
If you have a blog or have been interested
in blogging, I highly recommend you join in on the fun. Just look at
this all-star
list of bloggers who will be participating!
I've written thousands of words on video stores over the years. As one
of my favorite past-times and my first job, I love and miss the video
store. I have so many great memories of browsing the aisles and I dream
about it often. I like to joke that if there is a heaven, I know mine
will be inside of a video store.
When reflecting back on my
favorite movie moments, I've spent most of my time writing about theater
going experiences and visiting video stores, but I haven't spent much
time writing (or revisiting) the source where I saw the most movies in
the 90s: HBO, Starz, Encore, and Comedy Central.
My dad
loves movies and we always had at least one movie channel subscription
with our cable (usually HBO). The interesting thing about HBO when it
began as just one channel, it would repeat whatever movies it had
licensed. Then even as it expanded into multiple channels, those same
movies would repeat sometimes months or even years at time. This meant I
spent a lot of time rewatching the same movies repeatedly prior to
buying my first DVD player in 1999.
The movies that would
catch my attention usually weren't the finest film classics. They are
movies that often haven't even gotten a blu-ray release or are beloved
by the masses. Movies like Volcano, Daylight, Airheads, The Monster
Squad, Demolition Man, The Truth About Cats and Dogs, Mannequin, Trojan
War, Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion, and Speed.
These types of movies were easy to watch and they fun to rewatch. I've
lost count of how many times I've seen each of these movies (along with
a few dozen more) but the one thing that they all share in common is
when I've gone back to revisit them 20+ years later, I've had an
absolute blast watching them.
It started a couple of years ago when I decided to give Speed a
watch. I watched it so many times as a kid, I really had no interest in
revisiting it. But it was streaming, and I needed something to throw on
in the background. Two hours later I found myself on Amazon ordering the
4k disc. Wow... did it hold up well!
I took some time that summer to revisit some more movies from the 80's
and 90's that I used to watch often on cable and every time, I enjoyed
the heck out of it.
Over the past two years, I've spent a
lot of time trying to remember the films I watched so often in my youth,
and I've yet to revisit one and not enjoy it. In fact, I think one of
the reasons I've slowed down on watching newer releases lately is
because when I look back over the past couple of years of movie watching
and my favorite experiences have been in watching movies from the
80's-early 2000's. Maybe it's a bit of nostalgia or maybe it's just a
preference for the type of storytelling that was done at the time
(Seriously folks... can we stop with the 2.5 hour films already?!) but I
really enjoy watching these films that weren't always the biggest
releases but were enjoyable to watch.
A great example would
be from last year. My wife mentioned she loved Little Giants,
the 1994 kids’ film that was the football version of The Mighty
Ducks starring Rick Moranis and Ed O'Neill. I was eleven years old
when Little Giants was released and I'm pretty sure I haven't
seen it since 1994/1995. I wasn't all that interested in watching it to
be honest, but marriage is give and take, so I reluctantly sat down to
watch it with her.
It was my most enjoyable movie watching experience of the year, hands
down.
When I've written about movies in the past, I've had
some readers reach out and embarrassingly admit to watching a movie I
mentioned (it seems everyone loves those teen movies from the
90's/2000's, but no one wants to admit it) and I always try to reassure
them that sure, the movie may have been a little dumb, but there is no
reason to be ashamed of enjoying it. The internet has spread (and it's
worse since Letterboxd) a certain movie elitism that was much more
prevalent in the book communities years ago. Where some books are
considered great art, yet the next one is a "vacation read" which is
code for "trash." We call movies "popcorn movies" which is code for
"trash" as well. But you know what? It's all subjective. It's all a
matter of opinion and you can like whatever the hell you like and fuck
Rotten Tomatoes. Seriously, I'm forced to see those scores on Plex and
the number of movies I have that are under 10% and is mind-blowing.
As a former Blockbuster clerk, I can assure you folks rented
Mallrats way more than Casablanca, and when I say way
more, I bet the rental ration was easily 400 to 1. Scarface was
something else we could never keep in stock, but I can guarantee you
The English Patient was collecting dust next to Citizen
Kane and Gone with the Wind and most of your other classic
Academy Award Winners.
Anyway, I got a bit off topic, but I
just wanted to say, there are a lot of great movies out there that are
fun to watch. I recommend digging a little and stepping outside the
algorithm or even thinking back to your teen years and youth to see what
movies might be worth revisiting. I have a feeling you might enjoy what
you find if you allow yourself to.
I have this idea, this notion, of what my blog's narrative is and I'm trying to continue that narrative in a consistent way. But yesterday I realized that maybe I no longer want to continue that narrative!
Meadow
touches on something I've struggled with for years. I don't want to use
the word branding, but the niche or as Meadow says the narrative of my
blog seems to be always shifting. What got me through the day today
isn't the same as a year ago, and that can create mixed emotions when
you look over a blog.
I had to manually paste all of my old
posts when I moved from BearBlog to Scribbles, which means I came
face-to-face with the past eight- or nine-months’ worth of posts. In the
past, I would have deleted these without a second thought, but over the
past year a few things changed how I viewed old posts.
The
first was a response to a post of mine called What
to Do With These Blog Posts. I was referring to the past couple of
years of personal blogging that I still had backed up and I wasn't sure
if I wanted to add them to my blog or just let them go forever. Out of
the blue, I got a few emails encouraging me not to scrap the old posts,
including one from my good buddy Matt who told me about a post I had
written a couple years prior that really helped him out. To me, that
post was a throwaway, just a quick reflection on something I thought
that day, but for him it was a bit more. That's when I realized that
maybe it isn't all about me sometimes when it comes to writing. Sure, I
got to make myself happy, but you never know what post might resonate
with someone or help them through a tough time. I know I've had these
sort of "A ha!" moments reading certain blogs and I was equally
disappointed to see them disappear. So much so, now if I run across a
great blog post, I actually copy it and save it in Notes.
The
second thing that changed my view on old posts was a poll I ran on
Mastodon. It got a much larger response than I ever imagined it would. I
asked, "If you discover a new blog, do you go back and read the old
posts?" The overwhelming response was "yes."
Now, I believe
in keeping your old posts, but what does that say about your drafts that
never got published? I'm notoriously bad for this, I mean, the amount of
content that I write that never sees the light of day would probably
astonish you. In the past, I'd let them sit in my drafts folder and
whenever I deleted a blog or started1fresh, they just died. Now, if they
sit for more than three months, I post them into my Diarium before
deleting them, but I do my best to publish whatever I write, even if
it's not perfect. I stopped worrying about spacing out my posts and
triple proofreading and all that.
The problem is exactly
what Meadow talks about, the emotions and interests I had when writing
that blog three months ago or even a year ago, aren’t the same as today.
I'm not the same person. In the past, it would really frustrate me
because I looked at my blog as a book. It was supposed to be one noted,
follow a predictable pattern, retain the same quality throughout, and
tell a connected story. In a way, it's exactly how I looked at my own
life.
Then I ran across this quote and my thoughts shifted
dramatically.
Life is not one perfectly manicured story. It's not neat, nor does it
have a complete beginning, middle, and end. It's okay to kick around
different ideas and explore new thoughts. And I loved the quote Meadow
shared from Eve:
Sometimes I have to sit down and remind myself that there are no rules for what I post & I can change the game at anytime!
