Daily Archives: November 26, 2018

Queued Down

Well this is weird.

See, one of the things that this blog has been doing now for over a year now in its Daily Blog Adventure, is pretty much posting constantly, thanks to coordination from a bullet journal system I’ve gotten very comfortable using. Story Pile posts are usually a month or two out in advance.

It may surprise you that these Story Pile posts are in some cases very thoroughly researched. I double check the things I want to talk about. Sometimes I cut them down, sometimes a whole point of an article is removed because I simply don’t want to be mean. I was pretty harsh, I feel, in my final assessment of The Punisher series, but that final assessment was mild compared to the positively blistering rage I had for the series. I was genuinely offended that The Punisher wanted to try and represent itself as a series that could have an opinion about the question of gun control. That had chunks of talk about American attitudes towards guns and about what it means when you esteem a symbol of violence more than the lives of children, and… I cut it. I cut all of it because it wasn’t really that important. I don’t think everyone who watched The Punisher is watching it to make something of it, I think most of them watched it because they liked the character in Daredevil or somewhere else and they were curious.

Earlier in the month, my queue ran out.

Not entirely. There were still a lot of queued posts. I just haven’t done much in October, in part because it was the final month of the semester, and its closing argument was marking every student’s work as quickly as possible. This is non ideal. It also means that over the course of four days, I have been reading roughly two books worth of text, then double checking that to existing media and texts I know, conferring with other tutors, then providing feedback in a way the student can grapple with.

Simply put, I’ve been pretty fried.

Then I look at the things I could Story Pile About. I was looking forward to the end of October and the Spooky Month because it meant I could Story Pile about anything again. I could write about whatever cool thing seized me. I had a list! I have a list! There’s Netflix shows and movies and albums and books and I have really, really enjoyed reconnecting with older stories as I share them with my nephews. But important to all this is that my Story Pile posts are actually pretty hard to just hammer out. Even when I’m talking about something I know well, I still need to spend time referencing it, still need to spend time checking it out.

That’s something I hope you appreciate. I don’t shoot from the hip with my Story Pile posts. They’re meant to be interesting and thoughtful. To some extent I want to be able to justify what I have to say about a piece of media even if I’m being a sassy jerk.

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