Most owners of forgotten personal blogs nowadays might say they just write in Facebook or Twitter instead, but that excuse does me no good. I never posted anything at all to Facebook, and while I did use Twitter a lot in the recent past, lately my profile rarely sees more than one post a day. What happened is I just lost the will to share personal thoughts. It seems I became as much of an introvert online as I am offline.
Anyway, this is what happened:
January 29th – “In any bureaucracy, paper work increases as you spend more and more time reporting on the less and less you are doing.”
The unknown author of this quote obviously meant it to be used in a much larger scale, but the idea of bureaucracy fitted nicely into what was happening to this site at the time. What little I did write was so padded with “I have been absent because” that actual content disappeared.
February 19th – “You expect me to account for opinions which you choose to call mine, but which I have never acknowledged.”
That is actually from Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice”, which I did not read, so I have no idea what it originally referred to. This post talks about how a friend once “classified” me because one afternoon, when doing some schoolwork at her house, she had a debilitating headache and I suggested she took some aspirin. “You allopaths take medicine for everything…”, she said, and proceeded to explain that she was an homeopath and refused to take medicines that were contrary to her belief. I had seen people judged based on color, gender, sexual orientation, income, nationality, team they support, neighborhood they live in – but being judged for taking aspirin was a first, and a shock. Her headache, paired with the very awkward situation that arose from this scene, prevented any work from being done that afternoon, and the friendship died down after that.
March 31st – “If it sounds unpleasant to you, put your mind at ease, insect. You will not survive to see my new world order.”
A line from System Shock 2’s SHODAN, the grandmother of GLaDOS and one of my favorite characters in any game I have ever played. This was just a personal post of no consequence, written to fulfill the monthly quota. A strange wave of fondness for scary games was happening around me, and people were jokingly mocking me for not playing this or that Silent Hill, Fatal Frame, Dead Space or whatever. So this was a hipsteresque post to say “n00bs, I was facing Cthulhu in games before you even knew who Bowser was”.
April 30th – “You know, I used to think it was benign neglect, but now I see that you are intentionally screwing me.”
A quote from what “Avatar” is most remembered for nowadays. In order: Ultima games, animated chatrooms like Worlds Away (predecessor to Second Life), Last Airbender, IM pictures, James Cameron movie. A house across the street was sold, people who bought it demolished it and built a couple of ridiculous tiny “things” in its place, which they hoped to sell for a fortune each. In the process, they had to cut down a big tree that had been in that sidewalk for decades (thus the quote from a movie that is essentially about cutting a tree, see?). The two “things” are still for sale, and I am sure the tree’s spirit will only be able to rest in peace once the damned things are tore down themselves.
And this is what happened in a parallel universe (not the one where everyone is evil, though):
May 27th – “Isn’t this beautiful, nestled all nice and cozy right up against the mountain?” “Yeah, just like Pompeii.”
“Dante’s Peak”, that movie people confuse with “Volcano” because they are pretty much the same and came out at the same time during a period where natural and unnatural disasters were the norm for Hollywood. Comments about this post were heated, but I stand by my opinion – “I have no other option” is an easy way out, an excuse to not try. But I said enough about the subject on two posts already; I will not do it again.
June 8th – “If at first you don’t succeed, skydiving isn’t for you.”
The quote is the original version of an old tagline from the Blue Wave days. This post is my second take on the subject that generated the heated debate in the post before. As I said, I will not touch it again.
June 30th – “If at first you don’t succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried.”
More of an inside joke than a post, which is why it features another old tagline. This is one of those multi-subject posts, featuring a quick overlook at the situation caused by the two previous posts (the situation, not the subject), from a more distant perspective; some comments on how the Soviets “erased” people from history; and, since it came from a Blue Wave tagline, some quick musings on how that BBS era is poorly documented (the Wikipedia page for “Blue Wave” still has no mention of “Cutting Edge Computing”).
July 29th – “Yeah, well, welcome to New York.” “Thank you.”
From “Enchanted” itself, I just wanted a cute quote from what I was writing about.
August 2nd – “Pikachu! Thundershock!”
Pokemon, obviously! For a post about translation and dubbing, and English pronunciation thrown in the mix, I had to have a very iconic line. My other choice was “chibiko, chibiko, chibiko, chibiko, chibiko, chibiko, chibiko…” from the video I linked to, but that would be cheating.
August 31st – “Your generosity is overwhelming. Really, we can’t accept anymore.”
In “Uncharted Waters: New Horizons”, this is what you hear if you try to invest more than 50,000 gold in a shipyard or marketplace in the same month. I figured I should use a quote from the game, and since I talk about how complete it is, that seemed more than fitting. This kind of post is very unpopular, though…
September 29th – “Be excellent to each other. And… PARTY ON, DUDES!”
From “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure”. It is news to no one that I rarely watch TV series. The (then) recent controversy around Charlie Sheen and “Two and a Half Man”, however, made me curious, so I picked up a few key episodes of select series in hope my opinion could be changed – after all, it is not easy or fun being the one going “Sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about, I don’t watch it” all the time. That was a waste of time, sadly, but since I was already watching old stuff anyway, I dove into old comedy movies. At the end, this post is what came out of it: watch what you like, enjoy it, I will watch (or read, or play) and enjoy what I like, and we all party on, just as Abraham Lincoln said.
October 24th – “Why look at the computer when you can look at the real thing?”
This is from “Dante’s Peak” again. When I was looking for the other one, I saw this and it just kept bouncing around in my head until I found a chance to use it. Pretty self-explanatory, no? Which is why the post has no photos – just go look at the real thing. (Also, I believe this is the second time I use the same source for two quotes in the same year. The first was probably Loom. And I doubt I even watched the whole movie.)
November 28th – “Jan! Ken! Pon!”
This requires no explanation, and the post itself already mentions the origin (“Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle”). It actually began as a “in the good old days” post, but in the middle of writing I figured both ages have good points (but the old one still wins).
December 7th – “Grass green, I hate that color.”
I had to have at least one quote from Loom this year, no? I rarely write about current news, but thought it would be better to summarize all I think, even if just to set in order my own thoughts about the whole forest and dam thing. The quote, obviously, had to have “green” in it.
Good luck in 2012!
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