Hogg's Blogg

May 13, 2022

I miss going to shows so much. I recently moved at the beginning of the month and my new place is much closer to downtown, so I have more opportunities to do cool stuff now than when I was living in the suburbs. The band I saw this week was awesome, the first time I've gone out since.... no idea how long now. Celebrity Death Slot Machine, check it out:

The opening band wasn't that great but sometimes that's just how it is. There's another show I'm thinking of seeing on the weekend, with some harsh noise bands. I'm hoping there'll be a mosh pit. I miss mosh pits too. I have too much energy. Anyway the move is going well. It's my first time not living with my parents and I think I'm doing really well on my own. I've managed to get more thesis work done this week than I did in the whole month of April. And it really inspires confidence that I'm able to take care of myself, I even made shakshouka for myself for dinner tonight. But it's making me wish I could live with hoggsband even sooner, I told him to wait until I finished my degree and got a job so I could support both of us. That just means I should work extra hard to get my masters so we can shack up, right?

Apr 20, 2022

Happy 420! I was outside riding my bike to the library yesterday, when I rode over a screw somebody left in the road, check it out, it's huge:

huge metal screw some asshole left in the middle of the road

Anyway that punctured my tire. I've never changed a bike tire before, but I decided I'd give it a try to see if i could save some money. It ended up being really easy! All I had to do was replace the inflatable tube on the inside. i feel great now, i feel empowered like i could fix anything. i could probably build a house now if i wanted to

bicycle flipped upside down with it's rear wheel taken off

good as new! never pay money for what you can learn to do yourself.

Apr 18, 2022

I recently took this online quiz for fun. I got 105/1000, although I think probably only 80 of those should count. It's both less and more than i expected, less because i feel like i have read more than 75 books and most of those were pretty well known. More because i mostly read classics and not really even the most popular ones + i only started this little project of mine last year, and a lot of those are long books so i have more pages and fewer books logged overall. This however does lend credence to my theory about "people who make it a part of their personality that they read books", that:

they tend to read a lot of YA

and also this lets me add a new piece to that theory

they have a very loose definition of "reading" and "books"

by which i mean, they'll add books they read in school as a requirement (not necessarily bad, i do that too), but to pad out their numbers to make it seem like they do a lot more reading than they actually do, they'll include books from way way before the standard course of high school english class books. By which i mean, childrens books they were probably read aloud from in kindergarten that they probably don't actually remember, they just know the title from their childhood. Like 'a very hungry caterpillar' or 'if you give a mouse a cookie' types. you're telling me you read "everybody poops" at age 33? for fun? because you wanted to? And not to start a debate on which types of literature "counts" as reading, Hogg just has a higher standard for which books she considers herself as having "read", and which ones contribute to her overall goal to "complete the western canon". For hogg to include a book on her storygraph it has to;

usually have no pictures/mostly words
if it's a childrens book it has to have been read on her own in adulthood
if she read it in school she had to have read most of it by herself
if it was read a long time ago she has to be able to remember at least some parts of it from memory
and is not manga (this goes in a separate list on MAL)

If these types of people could include reading the cover of people magazine in line at the grocery store on their goodreads accounts to make the number go up they would. To tell you the truth i kind of have just a general distrust of people who say they "like books". I read a lot, especially now, I like reading - it's a little bit relaxing. But probably 99% of the books i've read seriously stunk. I feel confident in saying 99.99999% of all books just suck. Most books aren't that good. You have to develop some kind of personal taste or critical thinking skills to be able to distill out the 9 or 8 of them that were actually worth your time, just like TV, movies, video games, and everything else.