Trying something experimental today, I have a number of random stories on my mind and I'm just going to tell them all.
Cherries
I read a story online once about some young guys who worked at a restaurant, and some older guy comes in and says he wants a sundae, "86 cherries". None of the workers happened to know that "86" is an old-timey phrase for throwing something out, still in common usage in restaurants, and so counted out eighty-six actual cherries to put in the old man's sundae.
Now, I told you that story to tell you this one: I tried to tell that story at work, some restaurant humor for the kitchen, and it didn't get a laugh, and at first I couldn't figure out why. In the awkward silence that followed, I put it together in my head: I had completely flubbed the story... by saying 69 instead of 86. Oh no! I quickly cleared up what I had meant to say, but yeah, I ruined my telling of the story.
That's okay! Just means I now have a story to tell that's twice as long.
Voice Acting and Shujinkou
Shujinkou was one of the best-reviewed games of 2025, and also one of the lowest-selling. It's good, but it's very esoteric: an old-school dungeon-crawling JRPG that's also educational, teaching you the Japanese language while you fight monsters.
For myself, I couldn't figure out the eccentric combat rules or dungeon navigation, and I simply can't connect to such a dense game that has absolutely no voice acting in it, so I abandoned my playthrough very early on. I want to commit to continuing to support Shujinkou, though, as I've worked with the composers and it's just a cool title I want to get more eyes on. I'll make a full let's-play one day.
I'm also still in the game's Discord server, and one day I was talking about how I found it odd that a lot of super-indie video games have no voice acting, a stage that seems to be so much less time-consuming than every other part of game development, especially since most such games also have a fully-realized original musical score, which in my experience is so much friggin' harder to obtain.
The game's creator, Julian, saw my comments and talked a bit about why that's the case for Shujinkou in particular: it's based on older JRPGs which never had voice acting, it may not be time-consuming but it can be expensive for such a big game, and if not done exactly right it can seriously diminish a player's enjoyment, so it just wasn't something that he ever seriously considered prioritizing. It all made sense to me, and he also mentioned he did hope to give his characters voice actors at some future date.
I asked if he had any particular voice actors in mind, and he immediately cited Matthew Mercer and Laura Bailey. And I was like... huh. Is it hipsterish of me to be disappointed? When asked what video game voice actors you'd include in your extremely personal indie project, you immediately name easily the two most famous people in that field? He laughed at that, admitting that he didn't really see Mercer and Bailey that way, as he'd been following their careers since they began.
And I made it clear I wasn't really razzing him; voice actors do not get big and famous in the same way mainstream actors do. The only actual person who ever got A-list celebrity status from voice acting was Mel Blanc -- he's the only voice actor the average audience member has actually heard of and he died almost 40 years ago, and I'd argue the only other person who ever had their career trajectory altered, even slightly, by landing a voice acting role was Ellen DeGeneres.
The big voices in the industry like Mercer and Bailey get paid the same as those who are just starting out. The famous ones are the ones who get lots of jobs in lots of titles, and there's no internal politics, they get lots of jobs because they're very good at voice acting and, if they're known in the industry for anything whatsoever, it's for not being jerks in the booth. So, yeah, might as well go with those two. Heck, I'd hire them too, if I thought I had roles that suited them. Which I occasionally do think.
Sweden
I played Shujinkou with the Japanese-learning part turned off, as I've been needing to prime my brain to learn Swedish, I'll be immigrating to Sweden sometime soon to be with my wife, we've been married almost a year. I can't seem to get anything to stick in my head through independent study, so I'll just be waiting for the mandatory Swedish as a second language classes I'll be taking when I get there. We've been together almost twelve years and I don't know a dang thing; I know ja and nej and jag älskar dig and that's pretty much it. My in-laws think it's cute, but it's not very useful. I can't even read the place names on the signs, because I have no idea what sounds the extra vowels make. I'll probably have to start with that.
I just haven't hugely prioritized it before because, well, everyone in Sweden seems to speak English. When Naty and I are walking around town together and talking, and she needs to talk to someone, she generally doesn't bother to switch her brain to Swedish mode, she just sticks to English and the other person responds in kind.
The only place that doesn't work, interestingly, is when we go out for Japanese food. Every time we've done so, the Japanese waitresses know, at most, enough English to say they don't speak English, then require us to order in Swedish. That makes sense to me. If you're a young Japanese person waiting tables in southern Sweden, I can see why you wouldn't prioritize learning English, that would feel kinda random.
Pet Stroller
My mom got me a pet stroller when Sebastian was getting too old for walkies, enabling us to still go out and get some fresh air. After he died, the cats liked to use it as a perch sometimes, but mostly it took up space. And I do say take up space, because... I never figured out how to fold it back up after I assembled it.
A few weeks ago an old friend, Ashley, was asking on Facebook for a pet stroller she could borrow for a weekend, and I told her I could do her one better and give her mine outright. She came by for it, bought me a beverage in return, and later sent me a video of her on a walk with her elderly little dog. It was bittersweet giving away an item that was associated with Sebastian, but I was very glad to give it to someone who needed it instead of just tossing it aside.
It appears that Ashley's dog passed only a week later, which explains why she was looking to only borrow a stroller for the weekend. Oof, that's sad...
Sleeves
I saw a viral Tumblr post where someone had an idea for a guy: a guy who wears a shirt with some anti-sleeves slogan such as "sleeves are bullshit" or "sleeves are for wimps", but on a long-sleeved shirt. Part of the humor was that the poster was coming up with numerous variants on this single idea to try to find one that sticks.
After seeing that post on my feed a few times, it gave me an idea for some sort of friend or colleague of this sleeves guy: a woman who promotes bralessness with her shirt slogan, something like "no bra club" or "burn your bra", but is very obviously wearing a bra underneath it. Is that anything?
Evil General
Here's a situation you may have seen: someone suffering with depression forgets to eat the bananas they bought, and the bananas get mushy. They inititally feel like a loser for wasting bananas, but decide to reframe it as an opportunity to learn how to make banana bread.
I saw a post online that was a great parody of that concept: a warlord forgets to feed his army and they die en masse, but rather than feeling like a bad general, he sees it as an opportunity to learn necromancy and raise his army up as an army of evil skeletons! Even better!
My mom is always talking about cognitive reframing, so I thought she would appreciate that joke, and I sent it to her. She did not. She lectured me about how the general is a horrible person for letting his soldiers die and their families suffer, and delusional too since learning necromancy isn't actually a thing people can do. Jeez. No wonder she thinks my very typical fantasy stories would be inaccessible to audiences.
Now, to be absolutely fair, which I try to be in all things, I have a long history of being very hostile toward the concept of cognitive reframing, so she didn't grasp the point I was actually making by sharing it, thinking it to be a critique of the concept.
I have indeed critiqued it in the past. Cognitive reframing is basically saying "what you're going through isn't as bad as you think", but sometimes what you're going through is exactly as bad as you think and it's condescending, to a deeply jerkish degree, for someone to suggest otherwise. To tell me that there could be a positive side to some of my life experiences, well, that's just trying to be deceptive, and I don't like deception. So, yeah, I've been extremely hostile to the concept of cognitive reframing, so my attempt to convey that I'd come to understand it since we last discussed it, that fell flat like the cherries story.
Eowyn by Frazetta
This is an illustration by Frank Frazetta, supposedly depicting the scene from The Lord of the Rings in which Eowyn confronts the Witchking. Now, keep in mind that for most of this battle, Eowyn is disguised as a man. Is that the men's Rohirrim uniform she's wearing?
Of course, for most artists, the answer would be no and that would be very hypocritical, but this is Frank Frazetta we're talking about. The men in Frazetta's world go around in thongs too, and often midriff-baring shirts if any shirts at all, but I think even Frazetta wouldn't go so far as to have the men wear boob-shaped armor, so, yeah, he screwed up this scene in a very uncharacteristic way, just as much as any other artist who'd put Eowyn in sexy "women's armor".
Not-so-secretly, I like the "women's armor" trope, with the showing off of the shape and the skin. What do you want from me? I'm a guy. What I'm not is a hypocrite; I like the way Frazetta does it. If the women don't wear armor that actually works, neither should the men. Good armor is no fun. Makes every character look the same. Which is why my characters usually aren't wearing any armor at all, just fabric, so nobody can claim my characters are wearing sexualized, skin-revealing "armor".
Movies: Skinamarink
My final three stories are about movies I've seen recently that I thought were worth talking about. The 2022 horror movie Skinamarink is set in 1995 and is filmed in 1995 quality.
It stars two kids who wake up one morning to find that their parents have disappeared, as have all windows and exits in the house. Being about five years old, they're not as freaked out by this as they ought to be, and simply camp out in front of the TV watching cartoons, having completely lost their perception of the passage of time.
I wouldn't have known that just from watching the film, I only know that's what the film is about because of descriptions of it I read ahead of time. There's very little dialogue, and you practically never see the children, because the film is basically shot from their perspective and they're very uncurious about what's happening around them.
The children's song "Skinamarink" makes no appearance in the film, so I'm not sure why it's called that. It's a very surreal, dull film... I appreciate most works of art that I see, but this one was a dud, I did not enjoy it.
Movies: Smallfoot
Smallfoot is a 2018 animated feature I've been aware of since it came out but never actually decided to watch until recently. I was pretty much aware of the premise. There is a hidden village of yetis in the Himalayas. The yetis have a strict religion, one of the tenets of which is that humans, which they call "smallfoot", do not exist and not to go looking for them. But of course, one young yeti named Migo, played by Channing Tatum, is out exploring the mountain one day when he finds a human, who is himself trying to find evidence of yetis. Also, it's a musical! That's about when people figure this is the kind of movie people made on drugs, but, you know, I never vibe with that idea. Making an animated film takes about three years minimum, I don't think it's possible to stay high that long and competently finish your project while in that state.
I was also aware before going in of the third-act plot twist: the chief elder of the yetis eventually takes Migo aside and reveals to him that the yeti elders have always known humans exist, but kept it a secret from the general population because they feel that if curious yetis seek out humans, the violent history between the two species will reignite. I knew this ahead of time because the soundtrack had come highly recomended, and in the song "Let It Lie", the elder, voiced by Common, explains all this history to Migo via straight-up gangsta rap. Okay, referring to "Let It Lie" as "straight-up gangsta rap" is probably the whitest thing that was said on the Internet today, but still, it's a pretty good song and Common performs it and the surrounding dialogue with awesome intensity.
So, after having that song on my playlist for years, I finally saw the movie. It was... aggressively mid, which I might have guessed from the fact that none of the other songs on the soundtrack were worth listening to, but it might have, I don't know, deprogrammed some children from some strict religions, heck if I know. Like I said, I enjoy most art and I'm glad I finally saw it after all this time, I might watch it again sometime should the opportunity arise.
Movies: Fall
Our final story today, I saw the movie Fall, a 2022 survival thriller, which was recommended to me by a coworker. In this film, two daredevil climbers, Becky and Hunter, climb up to the top of an abandoned signal tower in the middle of a desert. Some pieces fall off the rusty tower when they reach the tippy-top, leaving the two women stranded together on a small platform 2,000 feet above the desert sands.
As I learned when I watched it, this all happens after the opening scene, in which Becky's boyfriend falls to his death while rock-climbing, and some months later Hunter is wanting to get out and climb something again so they can move past it. After the events of the film, I think it's safe to say that Becky will never be climbing anything ever again no matter what. And I think that point is proven by the fact that the recently announced sequel will be featuring completely different characters, because... yeah.
One thing that really caught my eye was, when I rented the film, the streaming service classified it as both a "suspenseful" film, which was to be expected, and also an "erotic" one. I figured that was probably not true, but held onto some hope that, hey, maybe so. Not so much; Hunter wears a very cleavagey outfit for the climb, and Becky's outfit... isn't cleavagey at first but becomes so later, I'm not sure how that works, but by the midpoint of the film they're horribly dehydrated and "erotic" is definitely not the right word, very intense stuff.
This one also has a pretty epic plot twist, but I won't discuss it like I did the previous one, because, well, I'd encourage people to watch this movie. Unless you're reeeeeally not into heights, in which case... you don't want any part of it. But if you like a good thriller with a minimalist cast, definitely go for it.
~
So that was my random collection of stories for today. There probably won't be a comparable blog entry anytime soon, but, you never know, I collect a lot of thoughts, perhaps enough will be worth distilling again later.
