thoughtvoid

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who do you think taught you to laugh and cry? ...what, do you think it's my fault you forgot how?

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distraction

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I wanted them to interact so bad

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congrats on the divorce

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Tenna has so many implications going on with him and I love how people are taking full advantage.

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I don't really watch Disney live action adaptations of their animated movies, regardless of whether they're good or not, because I see most of them as a waste. (Most older movies are/were were fairy tales, they've been adapted many ways already. That they're specifically adaptations of the animated versions is the only big question of whether it's necessary, among any other drama that goes into the productions. Lion King but with realistic looking cgi was the stupidest thing in terms of basic concept, and frankly shouldn't have been so popular to get a prequel.)

But. Lilo and Stitch was one of the movie series (and TV series) I adored. Oddly, if I were asked about faves, I doubt it'd have come to mind quickly (I always veer towards Treasure Planet), but it's the only ip from Disney that I bought any merch. I still have the shirt I got on my last trip to Disney World 20+ years ago when I was a kid - a white t shirt with Stitch on it. I bought an adult shirt to wear as an oversized sleep shirt, and now it's a slightly tight but still fits enough to not get thrown out. I had a Gameboy advance game. I had the little mini poster for the TV show as a 'have you seen this experiment' checklist. I have Stitch lounge pants that I bought 5 years ago because I was looking for something else and went 'omg, Stitch, long time no see'.

...So yeah, everything I hear about the live action is the first time I've ever been pissed off at things I've heard. People have always been annoyed at the constant barrage of live action adaptations (mood), didn't like casting, didn't like the style, or other factors that make up the movies... But to royally fuck up the very core of the story is a new one. Every change that was made, all the new elements that people bring up as the smallest of defenses for why the big 'wtf' moments aren't 'as bad' as they sound, come off as poor excuses rather than deliberate choices made to better the story. Other movies have added or changed scenes to suit the live action feel... but not usually at the expense of the entire narrative. Like, holy shit, how do you mess up a heartwarming found family through bonding and realizations about their life story so badly that you needed to create a grandma neighbor character to make the narrative changes feel 'not as bad as they sound'. How do you miss the whole dynamic of 'we only have each other left of our family, and even if things are difficult and tense, neither of us want to lose the other too'?

Anyway, here's a couple of pages from the "Learn How to Draw Lilo and Stitch" book that I found when rearranging my closet that I felt like adding to this.

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Okay, so. Partial unemployment.

My job is barely scheduling me more than an hour a week, and sometimes just goes with no hours, and has been doing so over a month. While I know I'm just part time, and not guaranteed good hours, it's still all kinds of BS. I have fully open availability, but corporate has cut hours down so much that even full timers aren't getting what are normally considered full time hours for the company (but are constantly reassured that they still get benefits). The normally 10+ positions the store normally had one or more employees per position has been cut down to. About 5 total. The most basic of basic umbrellas for all the various jobs are now the job positions, and they dumped any 'extra' jobs that no longer have dedicated positions onto the supes and mangers. So they went from leads in various departments and support for everyone else, to balancing the entire workload of every aspect of the store.

So corporate slashing hours so that leadership handles a massive workload and taking the employees who used to do that work and giving them no hours.

So I take my 'I've made less than 200 dollars in the past two months' and file unemployment for reduced hours. And get approved within the day. Great! Now if things continue like this, I get a little bit more money due to actually having a job that refuses to pay even what little it historically has. (I've never had less than 10 hours, even during slow periods. It's normally more like 15-24.)

But I don't understand why there's a requirement to look for other employment while employed in order to benefit from partial unemployment. I can understand that it's probably something like 'we (the goverment) don't want to pay you, so look for a job that will pay you more than where you are right now'... But when the problem is 'hey, this corporation used to pay me enough to at least save money and now they're shitting all over their employees and not even covering a third of a grocery trip, I need help' and the response is 'sure, I guess, we can spare an extra like, 50 bucks, but you need to join the job search website, make a new resume, and put in job search work, even though we know you're employed (and need you to keep us up to date on how little you're getting paid); you need to be trying to find something better, instead of your company having any real accountability so that they can continue screwing over anyone else who isn't going ahead and filing unemployment'.

I just wanted some help. I have a job, and when I'm allowed to do it, I enjoy it. I don't really want a new job, and frankly, the whole process of job searching is overwhelming and triggers my avoidance hard. I know being paid during complete unemployment has the requirement as a way of checking that you're trying to get employed and not just taking checks lying on the beach or something, idk. I'd hard prefer the idea of UBI, where the low hours would bother me a lot less because I'd still have some amount of decent income without having extra tasks to 'earn it'. But there should still be something different for people currently in employment, but are forced to barely work any hours, and need something to bolster their income. I've heard that the companies are forced to... idk, pay a fee or something when one of their employees files for unemployment while working, and are somewhat incentivized to just give a few more hours to get above whatever minimum pay would keep the government from supplementing money. But I'd like the filing to force some kinda audit of how many hours are divvied out over employees in the same position. Something that might keep companies from abusing their already abused and low pay storefronts.

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Had a dream where rp blogs would draw their muse receiving a hug or cuddle (or initiating if it was from behind, but they were consistently in the upper right side of the space for this meme and facing forward) and then tag someone (or multiple people) for them to draw their muse participating it it. Sometimes people would just draw both for the meme, but it was intended to be more collaborative. It also wasn't always sweet and friendly, sometimes a muse was annoyed (but leaning against the other character anyway) or, for muses that don't like each other, you could do other poses, like attempting to choke the other or generally make it clear the character didn't want to participate while the mun did.

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I like being on the internet because gender isn't really something that's big to know (mostly in fandom spaces), and it's a little fun seeing people use whatever pronouns they associate with my normal username. (Which slightly skews more masculine, but isn't hard-coded as such.) Some people do know my gender, and sometimes they correct people. But I'll never correct any pronouns, and probably am agender, so whatever people want to use is fine.

But the fun thing is, if I were the type to take pictures of myself, it'd throw even more confusion into the mix. Very prominent occasionally-shaven goatee and boobs would probably start some arguments. Meanwhile I'd basically be sitting back and eating popcorn, wondering who'd get to the intersex conclusion first.

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Oh right, and eyestrain. I've not had my eyes checked in years, and while my prescription never changed over four years (annual checkups), it may have changed a lot in six (uninsured).

It's not the main cause of my headaches (since I can tell when my eyes are struggling), but I'm sure it's not helping. Glasses on - something's off with the focus, because having it on in my day-today gets inevitable eye pain. Glasses off - Not perfect, but definitely feels better around the house at the cost of squinting at things from time to time. Glasses are usually okay while at work or out and about in general, it really feels like a 'my minimum distance focus changed somehow' kind of thing, and looking at things that are too close to me aren't okay with my glasses.

I'd say screentime could be an issue, but the problem with that is that it doesn't actually matter what I'm doing at home. Since I've been generally uncomfortable, I've gotten up and walked around, sometimes just stop and do the elliptical for a bit. Comfort goes up and down, but in general everything feels like walking a tightrope. Minor adjustments one way and then the other to try and maintain what should be no pain or discomfort normal.

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Been having head problems most of this year atm, and I don't even know why. It always happens midday, between lunch and dinner. So I've been going through a whole process to try and fix it.

1: Hydration - Most of the time when I've gotten a headache at work, it's because I need to drink something or get electrolytes or such. I drank water with an electrolyte drink enhancer, and it kinda worked? Some days were fine, and the headaches weren't as bad, so maybe I need more water in general, tbd.

2: Food - I don't have any major medical problems or anything diagnosed, but I do generally know that I get the shakes if I need to eat, so maybe that's shifted to uncomfortable back-of-head ache instead. So instead of eating my snacky food with my meal (a habit formed from school lunches when everything needs to be eaten all at once) and moved it back to about 2 hours after a meal. Which has gone better - when I can stop myself from auto-grabbing crackers immediately, everything's felt fine. With chips it's not as nice, maybe they're not substantial or too salty, or something, but similar to when I just have a drink, it's not fully helping.

3: The main reason I wanted to type up a post it that I remembered that when I had headaches in a general sense, I watched ASMR videos to kinda force myself to stop thinking about the state of the world things. And while currently feeling a bit bleh, pulled up something on YT and... I don't know if it's a great solution, depending on what causes my headaches, but it's definitely helping right now. Not sure how convenient it'd be to find a video to watch when I feel bad, but maybe I just need to relax in general anyway.

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Now that my work schedule is drying up faster than a puddle in a desert, I have to say. Holiday retail is getting really weird now.

It might just be for the store I work for, because management is making some really weird decisions, but some part of it feels like the shoppers are just. Not doing things at the right time, too.

Like. My work has slashed hours to nothing, to the point that I wouldn't even say we have a skeleton crew 90% of the time. Unless we're a skeleton with a couple of missing limbs. But during holiday, we of course have seasonal workers. Possibly not as many as usual, but also enough to make things noticeably better for the months leading into the Big Sale time. And for the Big Sale time, we had all hands on deck on Friday and Sunday/Monday.

But, while we did have a lot of orders to deal with, the amount of people we had scheduled to work them were actually struggling to have a good consistent workload. There weren't enough orders to keep us all busy, and most of our work was from taking care of the orders made during the holiday when we were closed. But as far as dealing with what came in all day, it was just us juggling with taking whatever had come in during the past ten minutes. Orders started to build up a bit over the weekend, but nothing like what I've experienced in the past and came to expect. The 'peak' days were fine and manageable.

...The days after the Big Sale days were hell, though. Employees to process things slashed immediately back to one person per shift a day, two shifts total. The company advertised a pretty good coupon the day after the biggest online sale day of the year. One day use, so anyone interested would have to order that day. I wasn't originally scheduled for orders, we had freight coming in that I was scheduled to help with instead, but I wasn't at all surprised to get pulled off that to chip away at orders instead. We didn't get the numbers under control for a couple of weeks.

I blame most of the insane workload on our company. Us backroom people weren't given a single break, not one single day without a sale to let us catch up with the orders that the Sales left behind. And our hours for backroom were divvied out to other areas of the store. (Which, granted, the floor upkeep people are basically treated as so low of priority that most of the year we might have one person scheduled to keep up with the entire store. And during the holiday time, they might have been given a couple of extra people who were more expected to back up registers.)

However. The customers were also just making the most inane choices. There were so, so many orders coming in like crazy after the Big Sale days, up until a week before Christmas.

I get that the "Big Sales" are overhyped at this point and not always the real lowest price they ever get to. But I've been at this store long enough that the price they get to is pretty much the lowest things will be through the rest of the year. The sales can be lower, or the coupons higher, but they usually aren't as good or are only just as good as the Big Sale day price. During the year, the sales and coupons might match up to more savings, but during holiday season? Everything's getting roughly the same deals throughout the last month and a half. There's no real need to hold off during the days when stores are prepared for high workload. With all the cost cutting, the store only bolsters its workforce for those specific days. And immediately afterward, they leave all the workers to deal with the floods that came afterward, be it with pushing people to work harder, asking them to stay more hours, pulling people from other shifts, or ultimately calling in people who managed to get a day off.

When it's a one day 40% off one purchase, I get it. That's a company screwing us over problem, and they don't even tell us at the store level when they give those limited time deals. That's something we would prepare for, if the company gave a damn about us being prepared for it. But the one week 25% during subpar sales? I'm sorry, I will be calling everyone who ordered during that kind of sale stupid. There was no need to wait compared to the better sales and coupons earlier. There was no need to have the two people scheduled per day struggling to keep the order numbers under control. And the people ordering the week before Christmas to have things shipped to them? 1) I hope they weren't seriously ordering for Christmas, and were just ordering something for themselves because 2) I hope none of those packages got there in time. In previous years, the website used to have a countdown for when something ordered online would be guaranteed to arrive. They stopped doing that at some point, but the deadline used to be 14 or so days before Christmas. (And they may have stopped giving that countdown because they wanted people who don't plan things well to place more orders even if it might not arrive in time.) My patience is thin during holiday season, and I have no good vibes to send to people who didn't jump on the sales they should have and wait until functionally the last possible moment.

TLDR: Retail holiday season has gotten weird because the Sale days aren't a problem, but for various reasons, the time between those days up until Christmas were horrid.

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-after eating through my YT content faster than usual due to doing nothing while sick, checks on older channels that I only look at a few times a year- -clicks to Markiplier- ...Wait a second. -checks GT Live-

...I think FNAF somehow got me sick, because it's a super weird coincidence that I suddenly got sick right when it had an anniversary. I'd actually checked GT Live around the beginning of the month, but I guess I just missed when they started playing the initiative fangames to lead up to the new game. But literally, I got taken out health-wise when into the pit came out, and it took a couple of days before I even watched YT again (over sleeping). Which solves my 'I'm running out of my usual content I like to watch' problem, I'm just mildly offended. I might not be the biggest FNAF fan, but I like to keep up with stuff happening. And I like the fangames, so seeing that all of them came out without me noticing and that I got sick for the new game coming out when I could have been watching LPs... Sus timing. Feels like the universe didn't want me to see any of them.

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So. Tis covid, according to the at home test. Which outside of the 102 F fever making my brain boil, actually hasn't been horrible. Like, yeah, I'm definitely sick when I'm not used to being sick, but the balancing of clear vs congested sinuses is a non-issue in comparison to the controllable fever. (Though i did wake up with completely bone dry mouth/nose/throat, which was not a great feeling. Had to sip a lot of water at 6 am to get that feeling normal again.)

The actual problem with being sick at the moment is that I apparently had a mouth ulcer that grew and is just tormenting me right now. Actually, not even mouth, a tongue ulcer. With the unstable mouth environment I have going on right now trying to balance symptoms to get me comfortable with existing, it's not healing in the slightest. Which means what I can eat is pretty limited if I want to avoid making it worse. My mom (who had covid last month and gave it to my dad) keeps asking me what I feel up to eating and I keep having to tell her it's not really an appetite problem for me. I don't feel nauseous or have malaise or even that much fatigue atm. The only thing keeping me from my normal meals is this stupid open sore on my tongue that rules out hard foods and spicy foods (just anything aggravating). I went ahead and got a mouth guard because I know it just keeps rubbing on my teeth when I flip flop which direction my head is facing on the pillow at night.

So the actual sickness? 3/10, mildly annoying, but tolerable as long as I keep the temp from going too high. It it's too high, then 6/10 because I don't handle outside heat too well, much less internal heat.

This ulcer? 8/10, its location is making it very difficult to deal with. Licking ice helped slightly with the pain, but that's not a good long term solution to make it go away.

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Got some kind of sickness that came with mild throat congestion and escalated overnight to a 102 F fever. Maybe Covid, maybe not, I certainly don't know, but man. I'm the kind who only gets sick once every other year, and it's usually a mild cold with stuffy nose, so a high fever and being tired because the fever made it hard to sleep sucks.

Worse is that I've been slowly gaining more hours at work, and I do need the money. I went in with my fever (and a mask) for a quick, single hour shift to get one thing done, because I knew it wouldn't be that bad, but it was still. Not great. My shift tomorrow is supposed to be five hours and involve a lot of walking, so that's the one I might have to cancel.

It's difficult to just. Not work, though. Not due to being a workaholic, but because I've never had a reason to not come in before. I haven't been sick on days I'm supposed to work before this. The only time I've had to cancel any shift was three days in advance because of unexpected and sudden death in the family. And most people can get sick pretty regularly? -shakes head- Wild, I couldn't endure this too often than once every other year.

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I used to hate shopping as a kid. I'm sure there were a lot of reasons, most of them autistic reasons, but part of me wonders how big a part of it was just. Growing bigger in general.

Did I like my clothes and not like the idea that I couldn't wear them anymore and had to buy new ones? How often did we end up shopping and doing the whole ordeal of 'look around here, see if it's the right size, do you like it, try it on, we'll need to try about ten things and maybe buy three or four'. No toys, no snacks, so bored and only asked to focus on something I wasn't really interested in doing because we'd just have to do it all again at a random point in the future.

Nowadays, I work retail in a clothes store, so I get to see everything that comes in, and started making somewhat impulsive purchases (I'd wait for sales or good incentives, but with many specific things I'd been keeping an eye on) about three years in. I've worked out what styles I like, what sizes typically work (but also know my measurements if it's an iffy online purchase), and expanded my wardrobe to. About three times what it used to be. And got rid of older clothes that really wouldn't fit anymore and that I'd had sitting in the closet for five plus years! I started wearing jewelry when I realized we had a brand with clip on earrings! (Prior to that, I wore cheap necklaces and a couple of bracelets and exactly two souvenir rings. And had my great grandmother's old genuinely vintage costume jewelry, which I never really thought fit with my graphic t-shirt wardrobe. Which included beaded clip on earrings, but the brand in store was the first I'd seen in person with modern looking clip ons. I've expanded on all my jewerly options now, but being able to wear earrings without needing holes is what prompted all of it.)

And even outside the store I work at, I've learned what I'd like to go with my outfits that I can look for online. I have a nicer, slightly more expensive dress that would really look fancy if paired with a chiffon cape - okay, good to go for if I need something fancy. I have a small pouch that really just holds cards, but I'd like it if I could put it on a strap instead of in my pocket or with a purse - oh look, I can find some straps in a variety of colors and have the option of a chain. Oh holy shit, there's clip ons relevant to my fandom that aren't absurdly pricy, I definitely want those. I have graphic tees that are relevant to my fandoms, specifically, as opposed to the past where my tees were just 'whatever was in the store in my size that I preferred over the other designs whenever it was time for clothes shopping'.

I have skirts! Dresses! Blouses! Sleeveless! Both pretty and activewear tanks! Still mostly wear black pants casually, but I have jeans that hold up better at work in four completely different colors! Alongside the tees that I'm a lot more attached to because I actually wanted them. I bought most of my stuff now, so I got to pick things I like on my own, when I wanted to buy them!

My mom says that I went a little crazy with buying stuff. Not that I couldn't afford it, but that it seemed odd because I was never interested before. Getting me to go shopping was like pulling teeth, and I was just wanting to get it over with and leave as soon as possible. She doesn't have a quarter the amount of jewelry I have now, so if she ever needs to dress up, she'll check in with me for accessorizing.

But I remember playing dress up. I remember wearing my grandmother's squaredance skirts. I remember putting on a really old fashioned, scratchy, fancy-ish purple hat that was probably my great grandmother's. (Looking at hats through various decades on search bars makes me 70% sure it was a pillbox hat. I think it did have a small bit of white veil. Maybe.) I remember putting on beaded necklaces and feeling fancy. It was fun and temporary, but my smile at the time was so genuine, my grandmother used the picture taken while I was playing dress up to paint as a portrait.

I also remember hating dresses because I was forced to wear them to church every Sunday. And after ten years, eventually I could just wear skirts, which was marginally better but still not something I liked doing to go somewhere I was forced to go. Church wasn't even a bad experience necessarily, I just hated waking up and dressing in clothes I didn't want to wear at the time to attend 'Sunday school' when the weekends were supposed to be for fun. I remember wearing hose, and while I haven't actually worn any of that again, I'm not opposed to the idea of it. Because if I do, it'd be because I want to. Not to fit some very conservative dress code for a religious organization. (I went to church long after I had the ability to choose, because for a while I went along with it just because I didn't want to make my family sad. But I did stop, even if the current state of church is far less strict and more just 'dress a little nicer, people might judge if you come in with a tshirt for a metal band, but we really don't care as long as you're attending to hear the message'.)

I like my clothes now. I like dresses, they're very cool to wear when it gets hot. My only problem at this point is my body size being on the upper limits (and sometimes just beyond) the average size ranges for in-store normal size range. Used to teeter the line of XL and XXL, now I'm solidly XXL and it depends on the brand if I can wear that size. But I'm pretty happy with my closet.

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I know shadow Pokemon were added to Go a while back, but I only just now had a longing for a Let's Go Orre game. Not that I think the styles would mesh well (the 'catch everything as much as you can't game' vs the 'there haven't been wild Pokemon in this region for a long time' game), but purely because Go and Orre are the only games with shadow Pokemon.

And since the Orre region was gradually having wild Pokemon return, it'd be nice if it could just. Have the wild Pokemon. Maybe only a part of the game is catching shadows from whatever evil org, and another could be research or conservation catching. Since the region is based on Arizona, it can be kinda connected to Unova. Desert regional variants.

...I just miss Orre.