While I struggled to find a narrative format to talk about being a supportive husband a father in the three phases of pregnancy (prepartum, partum, and postpartum), I'm gonna go on a small rant about Kayla's "power pumping" show that I so graciously let her put on the TV while milk is sucked out of here boobs for an hour: Glee.

My first encounter with Glee was actually when the show got caught stealing Jonathan Coulton's version of Baby Got Back in an episode without attribution. All I really knew about the show itself was that it fit into the vein of High School Musical-like media happening at the time. Even now, it seems like a really strange and extremely niche genre of entertainment. Schools where you're in danger of getting caught up in a flash mob at any moment? Hard pass.

While this notion is not entirely off the mark, this show is full of so much more fuckery than I ever could've imagined. To set the scene before I add my commentary, the main plot is about a high school glee club trying to win nationals and avoid being dissolved by admin. Honestly, though, calling that the main plot is almost a stretch because there's so much other shit going on.

The Characters

Holy god, where to start. I think it's best to compare the characters in this show to something like Seinfeld or Always Sunny; shows whose core conceits revolve around a cast of characters that are iredeemably bad. But in the case of those shows, that's where the comedy comes from. The characters are comically awful and do comically awful things and are never painted as having the potential to improve. We're laughing at them, never with them.

In Glee, pretty much every character is self-centered and awful, but we're supposed to sympathize with the plights of these people. That's ignoring the fact that these people commit multiple felonies per episode. In the pilot, the teacher in charge of the fledgling glee club, the show's main character blackmails a student into joining his club by planting weed on said student. His wife pretends to be pregnant, going so far as blackmailing her OB/GYN into perpetuating this lie. The other main teacher - who is in a hell-bent war with glee club teacher - racks up a very long rap sheet that (partially) includes: physically assaulting students, tripping another teacher down a flight of stairs, being insanely bigoted right out in the open, and blackmailing the school's principal by roofie-ing him and either banging him or just staging photos of such an event. (THERE'S SO MUCH BLACKMAIL IN THIS SHOW!) But, we're shown she has a soft spot for people with downs syndrome because her sister has downs and she cares for her. Sorry, way too little, way too late.

Keep in mind that these are the ADULTS of the show. There's another dozen students that are also mains that I won't bother to cover. They're bad, but less so? I suppose that any of them are allowed to get away with their shit honestly probably falls back on the shoulders of the adults.

The Story / Music

You can't really separate these two items from each other: the music is really the tail wagging the story dog. Every bit of story is set up so that an episode can cram as many musical sequences in as possible, regardless of their merit to anything that's actually happening. I think what really bothers me the most, though, is how convoluted the story can get, while also being forgetful of its own rules. This is a show trying to operate like a long running serial, but have the amnesiac consequences of something episodic. Things that should have long lasting impact may never be completely resolved and quickly forgotten by the next episode, but there will be a confusing back and forth of the balance of power that persists for most of the show. Honestly, the storylines that revolve around the glee club are the biggest offenders of this. They can't keep their shit straight, they don't follow any kind of real world logic, and it's just a huge mess. The character driven storylines are an improvement, like Mr. Glee's wife and her fake pregnancy, or the teenage actual pregnancy of one of the students. These are fairly well presented, if not totally bonkers in some cases. To the point of pregnancy, I don't believe a single writer on this show has ever been an expectant parent. Having been in that world very right now, it hurt to watch "oh, I just found out I'm pregnant after having sex last week and IT'S A GIRL". No... I understand you're working on a compressed timeline within the confines of a show, but no. It doesn't work that way.

I think the broken logic is what really gets my goat. The glee club is in a constant battle for more funds, which supposedly they have paltry amounts of. AND YET they'll have five costume changes per episode for whatever random number they're throwing in on whatever locale. People seem to move about various locations (including into locations they shouldn't have regular access to, like other schools) with little regard for how that would work in a real-world timeline. It's like watching Star Trek '09 all over again; my brain gets hyper focused on the narrative contradictions and it just hurts after a while.

The Musical Numbers

They're a'ight. The band does a good job of mimicking the sound of the songs being covered, but the vocal performances are just too clean. They're good, just... vanilla and bland.

Conclusion

Do I hate this show? No. Do I enjoy it? Maybe? It's frustrating for all the reasons of logic and shitty character I've mentioned, but it's like watching a well produced draatic train wreck. (Seriously, the budget on this show had to be insane). It's enjoyable enough to watch with my wife as our child sustaining sustenance is sucked from her body. There are worse things I could watch, I guess.

Off-hand I can't think of any, but I'm sure there's something.

That headline is misleading. You thought I was talking about my wee baby boy, not what I'm actually gonna talk about.

Frequent readers of this blog (heh) will know that, for the last several years, I've run a couple of fairly successful reddit-adjacent websites: one RedditBooru and AnimeBracket. But, very soon, that chapter will finally be closed.

RedditBooru I shut down last year due to rising costs in storage. Turns out my $200+/mo Amazon bill was not transfer, but the price of storing oodles of terabytes of anime related images of varying levels of couth. I hadn't been active in the community for quite a while, so the plan to drop it was really just finishing something I'd already started. I wouldn't say it was easy, after all, that consumed quite a lot of time and was something I was proud of. But, the rising costs and trying to stay ahead of an aging tech stack that really needed to be rewritten was too much. A phase out plan went into place, the main site was shuttered, and I moved a bunch of data around so images could continue to be served much much cheaper. That's where it stands today. Technically, I had a sunset date for the image serving too, but forgot about it and just kind of let it go. I'll turn that faucet off some day... In retrospect, I was way ahead of the curve in shutting that down, because the recent reddit API changes would've forced me to do it anyways. At least I could've blamed u/spez for that one...

That leads to baby #2: AnimeBracket. Of these two sites, this one was the most technically sound. There are bugs that need to be addressed, but it largely hums along by itself with little intervention. The folks over at r/anime have been using it with large audiences for years with only occasional investigation on my part (timely investigations, but occasional). The biggest issue is the UI and admin tools: they're not user friendly, so I've spent a bunch of time correcting data for folks' brackets, which is all manual database queries. Not fun. The issues/suggestions list just keeps growing, and I can't find the time or energy to actually delve into it. And now with a wee baby, there's less of both and... honestly, I'm kind of ready to just be done with it. So, hopefully, I'll wind up handing it off to somebody in the r/anime community so they can keep having their brackets without any time on my part. Also, that's a bunch more money per month in server costs that would just disappear.

Hard to believe that it's been over ten years with these two things, but it's been a good run. There's a lot to be proud of for sure, and part of me misses their peak when I loved working on them and working with the community. But, that time is gone and it's time to move onto new things.

Like an actual baby.

And maybe an electronics YouTube channel?

Occasionally, mia madre and myself enter into a pact wherein we try to churn out one blog post a day for a month. This is one of those months, as it turns out. Given recent developments in my life, I have lots of thoughts to get out. But, as a warm-up exercise, I'll start with what I generally blog these days: publish and comment on a letter I wrote to myself in the past. A bit over a year ago, I decided that in addition to the end-of-year letter to myself, I'd do a birthday one as well. So, here's that:

FutureMe's persistent push for engagement has worked this time. Writing a letter to yourself twice a year roughly six months apart is an intriguing notion. You do always boast about how you get presents twice a year, why not a present from yourself?

You've been married half a year now, that's exciting. Baby plans have been put (temporarily) on hold for various reasons, which does open up the possibility of squeezing in some additional world galivanting (as "the COVID" allows to permit). Disney this weekend, Bend the next, Maggie visits after that, a cruise in August. Hoping for some Japan action, but we shall see.

You'll probably remember this, but playing pretend boss is no fun. Management track has never had appeal, but you have to try everything once, I suppose. Glad to be doing it on a trial basis, because I would not want to be doing it full time. No thanks, gimme code. (The ultimate irony will be 37-year-old me is a Sr Eng Mgr...)

Hope you open a dope ass Etsy shop with the laser (once that office room gets cleaned up). Thanks and Happy Birthday!

Going off of paragraph one, the middle of the year letter was hardly my actual idea and FutureMe suddenly being very annoying about sending emails. I've since unsubscribed...

It's interesting to read paragraph two, because it all seems so far in the past. The all consuming situation of getting ready for and then having a baby has been... all consuming, and it seems like that's been the mindset for a very long time.

From what I remember, last summer kind of sucked and was the beginning of me starting another wave of burnout, work being the biggest pain. Not only was I playing pretend manager for my boss who was on paternity leave, but I was also filling in as tech lead for another manager who'd bopped to a different team, and also acting as the point of contact in the stead of my director while he was out on sabbatical. On top of that, I was mentoring an intern. That's a lot just on the surface, but it's doing a lot of things that are very firmly outside my zone of comfort. The managerial things eventually bled away, but the tech lead role stuck firmly. A new team was grafted on to ours, doing work that I had a lot of intimiate knowledge of. Unfortunately, due to various departures, I was really the only one who had that level of experience, so was the person everybody continually leaned on... pretty much up until the point I left for paternity leave myself. To be fair, I was also heading up a big project, so was expected to be making some of those calls, but it just felt like continually thinking for myself and my own work, but also others all at once. That's quite a lot...

That was the biggest stressor of last summer, for sure, but even the fun things had their own amount of baggage... which is probably a shitty thing to complain about. Oh, woe is me. We're going to Disneyland. And then we're going on a road trip to Bend to see Weird Al in concert and drink beer. Then my sister is going to visit for a week where we bop around and have fun. Then we're going on a cruise, boo hoo. (A cruise I wound up getting COVID from, mind you.) But, when one's brain is already over-taxed, the lack of down time and constantly having places to be and things to do is just more taxing. Mind you, I enjoyed all those things we did in retrospect, but I recall being very drained at the time. Also, that was when we were ramping up the baby making plans, so that was it's own layer of stress on top of everything else.

Of course, doing all that stuff and being mentally drained didn't leave much in the tank for doing things with my new laser at the time, but I've since made pretty good use of it. It's one of my favorite toys and I'd like to make even more use of it... for, like, a YouTube show about how I make things or something...

Circling back to the emailing myself mid-cycle idea, I didn't this year. Mostly because of exhaustion and prepping for baby. I think I'll just leave that to December me. I've already got enough words I have to type in my future...

One down, thirty to go...

Occasionally, I get bored and/or anxious and, instead of doing something productive, I will turn to reading the deeper regions of this very blog. On one such occasion earlier this evening, I ran accross this little gem. For those who don't follow the link, it's a post in which I posit that, every two years, my life checks off some societal major milestone. While an argument could be made that the provided evidence is heavily cherry-picked to support the argument, some compelling points are made. Starting college, beginning my career, and moving out are all big life events. That these all happened at a cadence of once every couple of years is interesting.

What's more interesting was the end of that post, where I attempted to predict the next several cycles of earth shattering life events. To be fair, the ideas put forth aren't very novel and aren't necessarily wrong... except the timing. And that brings us to the conceit of this article: let's catch things up and see how that theory held up.

Catching Up

2015

In the original post, I suggested that 2015 would be the year I started going steady with a "nice girl". This was probably more projecting of my desires at the time than anything based in evidence, and I most certainly did not have any long term romantic situations in 2015. I was correct in that I was still at LinkedIn, but the biggest thing I think happened that year was probably moving to San Mateo. Not a huge shift, really. I suppose it was also the year where I started my spiral into depression?

2017

Well, I certainly wasn't married to the "nice girl" that I supposedly was dating in the previous milestone year. In fact, the biggest thing I think happened in 2017 was moving to a different apartment in San Mateo. And got more depressed?

2019

Here's where my original ideas start catching up to reality, if not in timing, at least in sequence. Found that "nice girl" in Kayla and we moved into a house together. Sweet, we're back on track.

2021

Got married in 2021 to the same person I was seeing in 2019, restoring credibility to the prescience of my 2013 self.

2023

And, rounding it out, 2023 will see the birth of our first kid. Also, I've now been living in California for ten years? What the fuck?

Okay, we're caught up and kinda-sorta vidicated the predictions of my past self. Let's do this extrapolation exercise again, looking forward to the next three cycles.

The Future

2025

Given the plan as it exists now, somewhere 2025 we'll be expecting child number two. Does that count as a big life event after becoming a father once? Probably. (If you're reading this in the future, child number two, I love you :D)

2027

Y'know... at this point, we're kind of running out of giant life events. What's left? Sending a kid off to college? Starting a mid-life crisis? By this time, I'll be over forty, but crossing that line will have happened the year before, breaking the proposed two year cycle. It'd be nice to have a house attached to the ground, but that's not a huge life event and really falls into the vein of years 2015/2017...

2029

I got nothing. Maybe at this point, huge life events are just staying alive...

I started out writing this as an interesting though exercise, much like I'm sure the first one was. Despite the radical difference that my day-to-day life will take in the next few years, life really is kind of hitting cruising altitude. There's nothing wrong with that, it's just how things go.

Maybe I'll wait another eighteen years before I revisit this idea.

If there were a way for a casual viewer to passively keep tabs on updates to this blog, they might think that the lack of an appearance of the one thing that has remained consistent would be harbigner of said blog's final demise. But, while late, here we are. Being in the middle of travel pushed out the publication of my annual reflection, but it is here.

Hi, you. Welcome back.

I'm in an interesting position this year, I feel. Even different from past years, where I felt I was in some sort of limbo waiting for things to happen. Indeed, there's a certain amount of "limbo" now that you're a married man and the search for love is over, but it's basically a limbo at a known cruising altitude. Okay, whatever.

What's in store for 2022? Assuming your little swimmers are as good as that app says that they are, you're either Daddy Matt or soon-to-be Daddy Matt. How that timing plays out is anybody's guess, but I'm putting my money on the "soon-to-be" version of history.

As for the things that pad your life around the expectancy of spawn... well, that's the unknown. Disney trips, sure. There's the talk of going to New York City. Dennis' 50th birthday bash is... coming up very soon, actually. Lots and lots of house projects on the brain: exercise room, changing office rooms, doing up a nursery, building more furniture. And, of course, there's that burning desire to Hakk's Lab it up: SNES boombox, house sign, anything utilizing the fun of the maker's space, possibly those house projects?

I dunno. Whatever you've done this year, I hope you take care of yourself and your wife and just enjoy things.

Before I go into it, a muse. The format of this series of letters at some point devolved into predictions of the future and perhaps a short list of things I wanted to achieve at the time of writing. What that leaves me with at the end of the year is a "hey, I called it!" and "didn't achieve that... again" post. I suppose the whole point is to capture my thoughts at a moment in time, and later reflect on it with the benefit of hindsight. Is that useful? Is it a notch in the ruler of my life that I can use to measure whether I've improved over the previous year (whatever that measurement looks like)? I dunno...

The "limbo" thing is an interesting note to open this letter on. At various points in my life, it's felt like I was waiting for something. Be it college, career, relationship, or some other fourth thing, I've often had a background feeling that I'm just waiting for the next thing in life. I'm sure the feeling has been touched upon somewhere in the depths of this blog's archives. Per my message to myself, I'm in a perpetual "limbo" now, but it feels less like it. Probably because my future is progressing with more knowns than unknowns these days; variables like career and relationship are much closer to constants. Still, with fewer and fewer seeming big milestones left ahead of me, I find myself in the beginning stages of dreading the end of the ride. That's fun.

To the point of things planned, Daddy-to-be Hakk was a spot on bet as Kayla and I are expecting the birth of the Wee Baby Evan this coming June. There was a small hiccup in the process of child creation, but all things considered, wound up pretty much exactly what we hoped for in an optimal scenario. Kayla is going into week sixteen of pregnancy and, thus far, no puking has happened. I don't think she's appreciated my open readiness for barf bowl fetching (as I was conditioned to during my mom's pregnancies). We haven't done much prep at this point, mostly getting over the "bad statistical chances of miscarraige" hump plus all the holiday stuff we've been doing, but now that all that's past, I anticipate the "get ready for baby" machine will be starting up very soon.

The remaining things I mush together in that one paragraph were fairly spot on, with 2022 acting as a little bit of a catch up after our plans to do just about anything in 2020/2021 were foiled by the pandemic. A week was spent shredding gnar up in Heavenly with the LinkedIn gang, centered around Dennis turning 50. Kayla and I did a lot of various travelling, including but not limited to many Disneyland trips. We visited New York, hit up Las Vegas during a rare work conference for me, and went on a small road trip up to Bend to see Weird Al in concert. Making up for her absence in 2021, Maggie even paid a visit in July and we showed her all the fun things life can offer outside the confines of boring-ass Oklahoma.

Of the various projects mentioned in that paragraph, a lot of that was a hit as well. We repainted/refloored the room off our bedroom into a pretty kick ass exercise area. While I never actually made another visit to Maker Nexus after the writing of that letter, I did obsess over and eventually purchase a CO2 laser that I haven't quite taken advantage of as much as I could have yet. The house sign did get cut, though remains mostly unassembled. But 60+ keychains were made for our Disney cruise that I'm quite pleased with.

Hakk's Lab, as it often has been, was a no show. I have no good excuse for why this is outside of good old fashioned procrastination and debilitating perfectionism. I should just be filming things, perfectly tuned narrative be damned. The arrival of the Wee Baby Evan is going to make this much of anything towards [video] making more difficult. Though, I do have illusions of editing while front packing a sleeping babby...

There's my thoughts on my thoughts on 2022. This next year is going to be interesting, for sure, and I'd like to do a better job of documenting it on this website that I pay money for every month. Will I in actuality? Who knows...

Only I control that fate.