thrillingdetectivetales | Weekly life update~ (Reply)

I am sometimes very bad about using my Dreamwidth as anything but a repository for fic, fic ideas, and icons, and I'm trying to get better about living and appreciating my life and one of the methods I've been advised to try to that end is journaling about things, so I figure I'll kill two birds with one stone and try to stick to weekly (at least) broad scope updates.

This one is in list format, because I find bulleted lists more pleasing than walls of text. Note: I discuss my general thoughts on both the second season of The Umbrella Academy and Space Force in the last two bullets of the list. I was careful not to share any overt spoilers and rather offered my opinion on the shows as a whole, but if you're not even looking to expose yourself to that, please be aware so you can avoid those two points in particular. Here we go:

The Coyotes made the Stanley Cup playoffs! I meant to post about it on Friday when it happened, but I was too busy shrieking in delight at the ceiling and scaring my neighbors and calling both sets of my parents to gloat while I hopped around my living room like some sort of excited prey animal. It's the first time in eight years that we've been contenders for the cup, and I'm incredibly curious to see how it goes. I think it's possible we have it in us to win—after all, Chayka's whole point prior to quitting in questionable faith just before the qualifiers started was to build a playoff-ready team, and regardless of the circumstances surrounding his termination he seems to have been very good at kitting the Coyotes out for depth. Anyway, time shall tell, as in all things. Apologies in the meantime for the no doubt more frequent hockey posts that are heading your way, friends.

I tried very hard to pull together a new Sunday Six(ish) but I haven't gotten very far in the Don/Joe fill I was going to try for looselipssinkships and while the one trope_bingo fic I started writing for Hannibal (secret twin/doppelgänger, whaddup) is progressing very nicely I think I'd rather just let it alone until it's ready to post in whole.

The Intro to Screenwriting class I signed up for got postponed, which is probably just as well considering I'm way behind on my Spiritual Nonfiction class with little to no intention of catching up. "Why is that?" my therapist asked, when I expressed this sentiment to her. "As with the previous personal essay class I tried to take, a lot of my most fruitful areas of exploration are issues I'm not ready to deal with," I explained, again. It's kind of disheartening to realize that but at least I know myself well enough to know when to push and write about my own experiences and when to simply dissociate by doing terrible things to Will Graham et. al. in fiction.

I have started my original fic for the His Magical Pet Anthology! I'm hoping to have the first draft finished by mid-September and will likely shop it around to anyone interested in giving it a read and offering feedback. If that sounds like something you'd be into, let me know. For context: it's a sweet romance story about a man who thinks a cat is actually a dragon in a shape-shifted form and falls in love with the cat's owner while he's out to prove his theory true.

I managed to do a guitar lesson last week for the first time in like a month, which was wonderful. I'm tremendously out of practice and have a long way to go but it was good to get my hands back on the strings again with purpose.

I continue to put in a bare minimum effort at my dayjob, which is still plenty but feels strange, considering I've been a self-inflicted workaholic for the majority of my adult life. The fact of the matter is that I'm tired of expending my limited pool of creative energy on projects that are sort of fun and pay the bills but don't fulfill me or better the skillsets I'm actively looking to improve in any way. Nobody has said anything yet, at least, which leads me to believe I'm still doing a fine job and my anxieties about it are probably in my head. It's a bit of a bummer to recognize that this also probably means that the aforementioned extra efforts weren't noticed or appreciated in the way that I expected them to be, but such is the nature of corporate life.

I binge-watched several TV shows over the last week and a half, the first of which being the second season of The Umbrella Academy. I'm conflicted about it. It was fun in parts but felt, to me, like a rehash of all the previous season's issues without any characters seeing really demonstrable character growth. I expect they're slow-burning that aspect of the show because they know they're locked in for at least one more season after this, but I have to say I'm not as eager to sit down for the coming season as I was heading into this one from the first. Number Five continues to be a delight and the acting, music, and aesthetic were, as always, stellar. There were some very fun story hooks, but all in all it felt a lot like the first Thor movie did, in my opinion: like a piece of full media that was created to function as a trailer for the iterations following it.

I also watched Space Force, a farcical exploration of what it could be like should this new branch of the U.S. military come to actual fruition. (As it seems to have, but has it, really? I don't know, I find it's unhealthy to keep up with all the terrible president's shenanigans and I've mostly tuned out of this one because it seems less harmful than literally many others I would rather spend my energy caring about.) I found the show delightful by several measures, not least of which being the chemistry between Steve Carrell and John Malkovich. They do reluctant besties so, so well. The cast a whole is just amazing from top to bottom. Lisa Kudrow is in it with them, alongside Ben Schwartz, who I've loved since his days as Jean-Ralphio on Parks & Rec, Jimmy O. Yang who was stellar in Silicon Valley, and Tawny Newsome, who I've seen in a variety of roles and was so delighted to have as a starring/recurring cast member here. If you're looking for a short watch that's very fun with a lot of parodic comedy in regards to the garbage fire that is the current American government, you may enjoy it. Arguably the most fun fact about it is that the show's use of the Space Force logo, which is an actual real logo pitched to encapsulate the Space Force, has put it into a copyright situation where the American government may not legally be able to use it, so that's an exciting twist.