2015, An Annotated Year in Scott: January

Last month, I found myself staring at my computer, boredom welling up in my soul.  The collected media output of all human history, centrally accessible through my magic future machine, was insufficient to quell the raging tedium that had laid me low.  In desperation, I turned to my Facebook friends, that last bastion of wit and jollity, but even after scanning through their feeds, nothing caught my eye or my fancy.  Perhaps they'd all taken the day off from entertaining me.  As a last resort, I turned to someone whose Facebook posts never fail to disappoint -- myself.  I loaded up my Facebook feed from earlier in the year, and rapidly felt my mirth return after reminding myself of the solid distraction gold I so generously post from time to time.

In this modern, low-attention-span era, it's a foregone conclusion that people won't generally react to things that can't be easily consumed in a few seconds.  Many of my postings fit the bill, but many do not, and it would be a crying shame if those were to get left behind in the shuffle.  So, my good readers, I have done you the service of going back through the year and annotating the best of Scott's best, that you may be fully, and finally, entertained.  Not all of it will be funny, but it will at least be interesting, and it will be mine.



The New Yorker Caption Contest is a tricky beast.  Before embarking on this resolution, I read through every guide for how to win that thing.  I carefully crafted the best entries I could, and I kept it up for a solid two months, but I began to realize that my main enemy was not myself, but the ridiculous, terrible cartoons they so often put forward.  There are some that just aren't fertile ground for any sort of humor, no matter how ambitious the captioneer.  We'll come back to this.



With this new winter of rainy discontent upon us, we sure could use a Winter Storm Jotun or Yggdrasil to bring on the feeling of the season.



I was tired of hearing people use age as part of their reasoning.  Too young, too old, I utterly reject the notion.  I see it as a state of mind (barring certain reasonable standards for development in the very young, but not many) and little more.  It's an unpopular attitude, and maybe that's why I like it.

(you can click on things that are links)

Ah, music.  I periodically find myself moved to share whatever I'm listening on Facebook.  I never hear back, but I keep at it.  And don't worry, love is no more a construct than anything else.



My New Year's blog post took a far more hopeful stance than most of the last year's, and I find it interesting that the subject of freedom remains at the forefront of my mind, even after all this time. What can we possibly hope to accomplish by becoming free?  But you gotta keep hold of that tiger's tail.



This seemed a lot more interesting to me when I posted it.  The more I thought about it, I realized that I'm not at all a typical American, so I shouldn't expect my personal attitudes to carry over into stereotypes.  Seek solace in the universality of kindness.



The Hunchback of Notre Dame is an outlier among Disney movies for a lot of reasons, not least of which is its protagonist failing in his romantic aspirations.  But the movie wants you to be cool with that, and you should be!  Unless you are a terrible or extremely unlucky person, you too will fail in most of your romantic aspirations, because the majority of them will be fleeting distractions from existing strong and stable relationships that you would be stupid to pursue.  Or would it even be correct to describe that as a failure?  Well, that's my point exactly.



Here I am at the end of the year, and I've only finished three of these things.  Granted, Fantasia was a mammoth undertaking for me, and took two months all on its own, but I've still been rather lax in this project (which, I assure you, remains ongoing).  Dumbo's next, and I just need to watch it without my wife, because she's far too obsessed with Twin Peaks to give me any time for anything else.  Not that I blame her.



This was the best of my caption entries this year, and it was my second.  I did about twenty before I lost the will to keep going.  I was lucky that this caption came to me rather quickly -- the frustrating parts are the ones that I can stare at, and think about, for hours upon hours and come up with nothing truly funny.  On top of that, the winners are very rarely funny themselves.  Study of the finalists reveals that the judges have a sense of humor that focuses on the non-joke and workaday cliché.  The actual contest is an online vote, of course, but the choice is between three finalists chosen by New Yorker staff.  I do not like them.  They are my enemy.



It's a good review, in that it conveys the excitement I felt while watching the film.  Afterwards, somebody (who hadn't read my review) told me they thought the movie was sexist, which was one of the more ignorant things I heard this year.



Some of the people I work with say dumb things and some say smart things, but some say very weird things.  I really appreciate it.



Despite a strong start, it was a pretty bad year in teeth for me.  One of my old fillings broke, and it had to be replaced multiple times (it kept breaking!)  I love my dentist and my dental hygienist, but some of the other dental auxiliaries could use some work.



Here's a tip: you can replace the word 'friend' in this quote with anything, and it still holds true.  You should still worry some, but less than you already are.  You're awesome.



I had actually never seen the movie when I came to this epiphany, but I knew its premise.  After seeing the movie later in the year, I can tell you that the answer is both yes and no.



Nobody had a mystery for me to solve!  What is that about!



When I told people I liked the sound of this, they seemed to think it was creepy.  When I explained that I wanted to BE an Invisible Boyfriend, rather than to pay for one, they started to come around...but only slightly.  Some even suggested that it would be akin to cheating on my wife, which was pretty silly to me, with her being invisible and all.



'Avuncular' means 'like an uncle'.  Around this time, I was just starting to enjoy ballroom dancing. The rest of the year will tell the story, I'm sure.



My love of Babymetal is well-documented.  They are truly committed to their core concept, which is that cuteness and infernal death-worship are hardly mutually exclusive.  It really resonates with me, which is to say, it makes me seem even weirder when I tell people about it.



These things are hilarious.  Why didn't everyone I know immediately make dozens of these to share back with me?  I thought I'd be kicking off a trend.



But it was a short-lived trend, and, like so many, it started and ended with me.



This guy was ridiculous enough that I actually responded to him on Amazon, so props to him.  I just want to point out that this is a precursor to the whole 5/7 thing, if you're privy to that -- I'm always ahead of the game.



After I started liking David Foster Wallace, I discovered that there is an entire segment of the population that negatively judges people for liking David Foster Wallace.  I don't care.



My mind works in mysterious, murderous ways.