Thea Larson's Blog

I had so many feelings about the Loki season finale that I’m bringing this blog back, baby. It’s been three and a half years since my last update here? I remember last working on a post about the Evil Within 2 and all the ways I didn’t think it measured up to the original. Ah well.

This many years later, and yet I’m still the same person. A better version of myself, perhaps, since I was without mental health meds for far too long. Now I’m back on my antidepressants and my ADHD meds… yet I’m using this to procrastinate from my much-needed house cleaning. For everything that changes, everything stays the same, right?

Since the last time I posted here, so much in my life has changed. I’ll probably do the Loki thoughts in a second post because, as inconsequential as everything seems to me, it has shaped me into who I currently am.

First, I’ve been single since 2018? I got into a car wreck where my car was totaled right around my birthday. My now-ex couldn’t be bothered to come back from vacation to make sure I was okay, and things snowballed from there. Now I’m living alone with my three cats and my mom just up the street.

I’m no longer employed at a newspaper. Instead, I spent a year and a half as a QA tester on Apex Legends! It was a delightful job. Now, I’m doing the gig thing until I feel able to actually handle a job. The pandemic reinforced my hikkikomori tendencies, unfortunately, so actually interacting with people outside of the internet is daunting as heck.

Speaking of Apex Legends, I had the extremely great fortune to become a twitch moderator for two of the Apex Legends voice actors! Chris Edgerly (Pathfinder) no longer streams, but I’ll be ready for him to make his comeback so I currently only moderate for Johnny Young (Crypto). I’m also a twitch and youtube moderator for RagTagg, and that’s an adventure for sure.

I haven’t been writing stories much, if at all. I’m sure you can tell by my writing style. I want to get back to it, though, and that’s partly why I wanted to get back on the ADHD meds. I feel like, maybe, I can get back to it!

I guess that’s enough of an update Maybe I won’t let this languish for another three years. Catch y’all later!

It seems like the more time I know I have, the less time I find.

Does that even make sense? I mean, with me only working for the newspaper now, there are four days a week, sometimes, where I don’t have anything to go out and do. I can sit around my house and do what I like, when I like. At least, that’s the theory.

Now that I have more time, I’m spending it doing things that I may not be interested in doing. Granted, I enjoy going to Baton Rouge to play Yu-Gi-Oh, but doing so every week gets draining. Then there’s the time I spend sharing the television, which has become less of an issue now that I’ve found the PSVita charger and can use Remote Play for Final Fantasy XIV.

I just feel like my life is too full. I want a day where I can sit on the couch, build a nest, and lose myself in a fantasy world without the outside world intruding. I need time to myself to just exist, you know? Time is slipping away where even weeks are passing by in a flash now.

I hate it.

I saw something recently that annoyed me. It was an excerpt from a history book that described the European occupation of North America and its bloody history in bland terms. To whit, it stated that Europeans asked the native peoples of the continent to move. The levels of wrong this statement perpetuates cannot be counted by me, a bisexual white woman, but I’ll try to quantify it.

First, there was no “asking” involved. Any native that tried to fight back against their European conquerors was slaughtered. They were driven out of their lands with blood and guns until, eventually, they were “gifted” a portion of their ancestral lands by the United States government. As if the lands their ancestors lived and died on didn’t belong to them by default.

This new narrative erases the bloody history of Europeans thundering across a land that belonged to others first. Men, women, and children were slaughtered. When Natives stood up, they were cut down. As far as I’m aware, the Wounded Knee massacre is the deadliest in United States history. Assigning that dubious title to other mass shootings erases the trauma faced by our Native precursors.

We, white people, marched Natives across the land. The Trail of Tears didn’t get that name because the Natives quietly agreed to go. They were forced at gunpoint, often with only what they could carry, to march to new lands across the country from where their fathers and mothers lived and died. Many natives died on that journey. It was a harrowing time for them.

We cannot erase our history with bland words and blanket statements. We must fight to keep the worst of the worst in our history books. It may be shameful, it may make us uncomfortable, but it deserves to be known. We shouldn’t celebrate it in any way by glorifying it, no, but we shouldn’t cast that past aside.

Happy belated Indigenous Peoples Day, everyone. Remember the native lives that were taken to give us the country we now reside in.

It’s been weeks already since I posted an update? Time certainly flies! A lot has been going on in the area, so I’ve been writing a lot more articles than normal. I’ve also been playing a lot of Final Fantasy XIV – I’ve gotten my first gatherer class to 70, so now it’s time for endgame fishing to see what exactly that is. Since they reworked Scholar, my main class, when Stormblood was released, I’ve been less interested in playing that class. Leveling another class to 70 is taking a while, so I’ve been queuing as Red Mage and fishing while I wait.

I’ve got one thing to say about fishing: RNG rules your life. Also, I’m freaking tired of my specialty lures being lost! The vast distance between Kugane and Ala Mhigo means I’m wasting thousands of gil on teleportation fees whenever I need to go buy another lure. I’m supposed to be trying to MAKE money with this class!

And thus goes more days in my life. Ah well, at least I enjoy it. Now could someone please tell my plot bunnies that no, Danny Fenton is NOT the son of Bucky Barnes so I can go about my day?

Like the title says, I can’t figure out what to do with boredom. Sometimes I can feel bored despite doing something – writing an article for the paper, reading facebook, playing games. Boredom isn’t the feeling of having nothing to do, I guess. It’s the feeling of being tired of what you’re doing. Like, even writing this now, I feel kind of bored.

Weekly posts are great and I like doing them. But feeling like it’s an elephant in the room – the thing I need to do in order to make my week complete – gets kind of onerous. I don’t know what to write half the time! I’m also writing 1,000-3,000 word articles for the paper some weeks, and sometimes I do two or three of those. It’s no wonder I don’t get much written on Claudia Syndrome! With all of my writing energy going to the articles on the paper, it gets difficult to get the energy to write these things.

But, that’s another topic of conversation. This week, it’s about being bored with what I’m doing. I gotta tell you, it feels like I’m defeating myself when I get too bored to do what I need to do. Maybe part of it is that apathy I wrote about a few weeks back. I don’t know. I’m tired of being bored. I WANT to do things I want to do! I know that doesn’t make sense, but I want to get back to writing fanfics. I have several ideas in my head, but I don’t have anyone to bounce them off of. I hate it.

Sigh. I guess I’ll get back to being bored, then.

There’s nothing like writing a scene that takes place in a restaurant while watching the Food Network.

Now that I’m determined to actually finish writing this book, I’m finding that writing isn’t as daunting as I feared. It helps when my thinking distraction helps to set the mood of the scene!

However, it’s difficult to write a character with a skillset I don’t have. To that end, in order to make Corinne convincing as a programmer, I hope to learn C++ on at least a basic level.

It’s going to be busy, but I look forward to it!

I’m not normally the type of person to hate Mondays. For much of my working life so far, my work week has been variable and so Monday meant as little to me as Wednesday. However, now that I have a job with a weekend and a Monday start, I can kind of understand that sentiment. Even so, it was a day, and I can do what I need to.

Unless, of course, I catch a sinus cold over the weekend. Now the article I have to write is fighting me tooth and nail while the rain pounds outside. I write a sentence, maybe two, before having to take a break and do something else until I can wrangle the words into order again.

Ironically, this little piece is taking me much less effort to write.

Why, brain? Why do you hate me so?

Why must it be Monday?

This week has been fruitful for the plot bunnies. A plot came to me in a dream, as cliche as it sounds. While I doubt the story will start with opening a door in the sky in Minecraft, as the dream did, it will feature the main idea from the dream.

Imagine that you wake up in a house, a mansion, with no memory of arriving there. As you walk the halls, you notice that the walls are all brick. You see one with the name Victor, but that means nothing to you, so you move on.

In the dining room, which has a lavish breakfast full of all of your favorites, you find a note next to the only plate. “Within these walls lies a brick with your name. Find it and gain an inexhaustible fortune. If you fail, you will die here.”

As the days pass, you find yourself wanting for nothing. Entertainment is provided in the manner of your choosing – television, books, magazines, even single-player video games. Even socialization is possible, though limited to letters sent to an anonymous individual who responds.

Theoretically, you could live here, but you want your freedom. How long does it take for the madness to creep in? Will you ever find your name, or will you be consumed by the thought?

Okay, so after taking a while to think on what’s happening in the United States, I’ve come to a conclusion:

Both the left and the right are correct in their interpretations of the First Amendment.

For the left: The first amendment doesn’t allow speech that could cause harm. Marching down the street with torches calling for violence? Yeah, that causes harm. Don’t do that.

For the right: The government cannot interfere with your right to say what you want. So yeah, say blacks are inferior or gays can’t marry or whatever. I may not like it, but I’ll defend your right to say it.

I’ve heard some say that if we censor this speech, we’re paving the way to the elimination of the First Amendment entirely. I’m calling BS on that. For one, we’re not calling for all speech to be punished. We’re only calling for the speech that incites riots and violence against marginalized groups to be censored.

Secondly, we have more than two hundred years of judicial precedence to show that the first amendment is alive and kicking. Sure, we may not agree with some interpretations of it, but it’s in no danger. Not even a executive order can eliminate that right, as Trump found when his executive orders were challenged in court.

By all means, stand up to racism. The first amendment only says that the GOVERNMENT can’t censor speech. We the people, as a civic body, bloody well CAN censor speech we deem inappropriate. The government can’t throw you in jail for calling blacks inferior, but we WILL call you out and shame you for it.

I have a short, poetic thought that occurred to me as Facebook notified me about my birthday tomorrow.

Today is the last day of my 20s. Tomorrow is the first day of my 30s.

Now excuse me while I have an existential crisis.