random stuff

Ten words that rhyme with June

It’s the end of June, I’ve lost weight, it’s been sunny, and I got sick.

So, a mixed bag.

And now ten words that rhyme with June:

  1. Spoon
  2. Moon
  3. Prune
  4. Loon
  5. Tune
  6. Rune
  7. Boon
  8. Croon
  9. Zune1According to Microsoft, this is totally a real word
  10. Dune

Now, take these ten words and use them in a story! Surprise writing prompt!

I sat by the window, listening to a tune on the radio, staring out and up at the fat moon. I used a spoon to shovel up ice cream from a bowl, directing it to my mouth. The night was silent, save for the plaintive cry of a loon. I did not want to listen to it croon its sorrowful song, so shut the window.

I picked up my Zune, which still worked all these years later, quite the boon. I played a song at random and did not like it. Why had I bought it? I would need to prune my playlist. I laid back on the bed and closed my eyes, seeing before me in the dark an image of endless sand, one giant rolling dune after another. Had I been here before, or only in a dream? I opened my eyes and reached over to the nightstand, picking up a small wooden talisman I had been given by a stranger, a burnished, dark rune, whose etchings defied explanation. I held it up before my face and turned it over.

"Soon," I whispered. "Soon."2Bonus rhyming word for extra credit

These are a few of my favourite things

In no particular order:

  • Pizza
  • The number 9 (but not the song)
  • Dark pink
  • Gum Gum People
  • New running shoes
  • Showering then going to bed with clean sheets
  • Hot chocolate on a cold winter day
  • Drinking briskly cool water from a fountain after a run in summer
  • The scent of freshly cut wood
  • Songs I never get tired of, no matter how many billions of times I listen to them
  • Re-reading something I wrote years later and coming away impressed
  • Fixing up a bad drawing
  • Improvising a zinger that is way funnier than it has any right to be (this is not a common occurence)
  • Getting lost in a great novel
  • Watching a movie where characters are smart, believable and competent
  • Happy endings
  • Dioramas. They’re just cool and spiffy.

I’ll do a sequel post on this later this year. This was all off the top of my head, so there’s going to be things I missed.

I have purchased sunscreen in April, let summer begin!

With the forecast calling for sun tomorrow (weird, I know) and expecting to spend some hours in said sun, I have purchased sunscreen because as I’ve learned, if you spend any time in the sun, it will burn you. This year, I’m ready! As long as I remember to put it on. Which I will. For sure.

Also, speaking of summer, they have already filled the swimming pool at Hume Park, even though the pool normally doesn’t open until late June. It’s not actually open now, but it looks like it could be. Maybe it’s a test run. Or maybe a family of adorable otters will live there until late June.

I’m not sure what the tent is for, but it looks somewhat festive.

A random list of things I like, April 2023 edition

Here it is, in no particular order.

  • Mechanical keyboards
  • World peace
  • Taking photos
  • Drawing
  • Writing
  • Reading (fiction or non-fiction)
  • Video games
  • Music (listening, possibly creating some day1Not quite a bucket list item, but close)
  • Singing, specifically, like Bob Dylan. I do a decent Bob Dylan.
  • Chocolate chip cookies
  • Pizza
  • Making things
  • Getting sprayed with cool water on a very hot summer day
  • Being alone with my thoughts on a run
  • Quiet places
  • Bouncy things, like trampolines
  • Battlebots2What can I say? It’s fun watching 250 pound robots tear each other apart.
  • Roller coasters
  • Bright colours
  • Baseball caps
  • The accents of YouTubers Tom Scott and Mark Brown (both British)
  • Cats3The furry creatures, not the musical
  • Other things that may come to me later

Flickr: Now with more sh*t

I got an email from Flickr inviting me to use their print services to print out and cherish/send my photos to others.

This is how they are attempting to persuade people to do this:

Did I have a “How do you do, my fellow kids?” moment and miss how “sh*t” is now the cool, hip way to say “shot”? But also it looks like “shit” so it’s…funny? Edgy? Dumb?

Dumb.

UPDATE: I have taken the newsletter to its logical (rear) end. Behold:

The newsletter/subscription purge continues (I swear)

Today I cancelled a Substack newsletter and a streaming service:

  • Sweary History (after not quite a year)
  • Netflix (after being subbed for many years)

The reasons were a bit different for each, but both are part of my ongoing digital decluttering process.

For Sweary History, I actually quite like James Fell’s foul-mouthed writing style, and his personal posts (which require a paid sub) were especially enjoyable and informative. But as someone who chronicles human history, and given how dark and awful so much of human history is, Fell often wrote about unpleasant people doing unpleasant things. And in the same way that actively seeking out current news was making me generally unhappy, I found getting a dose of daily “look how terrible people have been throughout history” started having the same effect. This morning I started to read the latest newsletter and just stopped partway through, like a little switch in my brain flipped. I unsubscribed.

Netflix was different. I found that I just wasn’t compelled to watch any of the current stuff on it (Archer has grown stale, Stranger Things is something I want to catch up on, but it seems the season four episodes are long, and it’s more of a commitment than I’m willing to make right now), plus Netflix seems to think they can keep raising their prices and make up declining subs by squeezing their most loyal subscribers that much harder.

Didn’t work for me! I checked “too expensive” as my main reason for dropping the sub, and it’s true. If Netflix was cheaper, I’d probably just keep it, but it’s $18.47/month after taxes and that is too much for the very minimal use it gets.

For streaming, I still have Prime Video (as part of Prime), Disney+ and Apple TV+ (as part of Apple One), so depending on how things go, I could potentially get down to just a single service. And more time to draw.

Another newsletter bites the dust (Pocket)

These companies are making it easy for me to slim down my reading list.

In the case of Pocket, it’s ironic, because they’re all about providing reading lists.

A while ago, Pocket switched from a weekly newsletter to a daily one, with an option to change the frequency, so you could go back to a weekly newsletter if daily was too much.

I stuck with daily for some time, but eventually did decide it was too much. I switched to weekly, which seemed more manageable. It was fine at first. But then I got my weekly newsletter, and it was “sponsored” by The Wall Street Journal. This means every article was from…The Wall Street Journal. I subscribe to the Pocket newsletter to get stories from a number of sources, not just one. I don’t know if their answer is to go back to daily (which I won’t do) or pay for the premium version, which will somehow spare me the sponsored newsletters.

This morning, my weekly Pocket newsletter was again sponsored, this time by MarketWatch. I don’t even care about MarketWatch! Or its stories.

So I unsubscribed.

I’ll still use Pocket to occasionally capture interesting stories I want to read later. It works well enough for that, though it would not surprise me if the free version eventually gets crippled in some way to make it too annoying to use. Which may make you ask, why not pay for the premium version? And the answer is I don’t use it often enough to feel it’s worth the money (it’s $4.99 US per month or $44.99 annually). If they did make it horrible to use the free version, I’d probably just create a temporary bookmark folder as a “read later” dumping ground. Not ideal, but it would be functional.

So thanks, Pocket, for helping me in my ongoing quest to digitally declutter!

FAKE EDIT: I also emptied the Pocket folder in Outlook, deleted its category, then deleted the Pocket folder itself. Doing these things was strangely satisfying.