Seven Things

01 - Motivation is nowhere — I'm very unmotivated these days. I don't know why but I can't focus on anything. I can't blame it on work even if it's crazy-busy this month but I kind of do. When your energy is spent, it's hard to want to do things even if you love those things.

02 - Not much reading — I'm not doing much reading although I did finish one book this month so far. Every book I started reading is kind of boring. But I did try re-reading my favorites because that's how I usually beat the reading blues. But maybe I don't need to do anything. Maybe I just need to find the right books to read or simply not read for a while.

03 - Watching a lot of old tv shows — I've been watching a lot of old tv crime shows. (Old means ten or more years before this year.) What I find strange is whenever there are female leads, there is always romance or that she gets a boyfriend eventually while if there is a male lead, there is less chance of a romance or even if there is a romance, it doesn't work out. Why are females always coupled up while the male remained single? This can be said as sexist but it's more like we all still think females are meant to be mothers and wives while males keep his freedom. Of course if the female lead is older than forty or fifty, she reminds single. I suppose it's hard to change since it's been that way for hundreds of years but I honestly thought modern television should be more progressive. But then again, this may just be nonsense since I didn't watch every crime show there is but certainly, it's true for the shows I've seen.

04 - Summer is coming very, very near — I'm not ready for summer. It's not just the waking up with a stuffy nose or itchy/watery eyes, I just can't get use to the change in temperature/season no matter how many times I have experienced it. Why do some of us take habitual changes badly? It's not like there is really any difference from the year before. I don't know, I find seasonal changes never easy.

05 - Google is replacing Universal Analytics with Analytics 4 which means absolutely nothing to me — Not that they explain it well but you can read about it here. Of course, it says nothing about Blogger users or really, any type of users. Either you know what the heck they are talking about or you don't. If they want to, they can just do the switch for us and announced it afterward but I guess they want users to figure it out themselves or give up in frustration. I don't know what the hell this Analytics do aside from something to do with statistics. I don't care about stats so I'm not going to bother with this. I only know about this because I got an email about it.

06 - Bye, Bye Book Depository — It's old news but Book Depository has closed and if you go to their website, it will show the announcement. It's not unexpected. Whenever a big company (in this case amazon) buys out a smaller company, either they merge the smaller company into their bigger one or they just close it up.
    I didn't use Book Depository much aside from when I'm giving away books for international readers but I don't do giveaways anymore and I also don't buy as much paper books as I used to. People outside the U.S. will probably be affected more because it's harder for them to get books. But I'm always sad when a bookstore, whether online or in stores, closes up because it means some people somewhere are not getting books.

07 - Slow blogging — I only took a week off blogging but somehow, it feels longer. I'm not going to say I'll post more or post less. I've gotten into the habit of blogging whenever I feel like and I think that's fine. If I get a post up once a week, it's fine, and if not, that's that. I don't want to fret about blogging anymore. Seventeen years of trying to post regularly is enough and it's time to have a more relax schedule or none-schedule although I've been doing this none-schedule thing for a few years now so...
    
Any thoughts to share today? Feel free to leave a comment.

April 2023 Books, Music & Movies

The A-Z challenge took up most of April so I didn't do much else unless you counted work. I finished the challenge right on time (Links to all the posts over here) so I made a winner's badge which I have never done before which is odd considering I've done the challenge 8 or 9 times. So it was a busy month. Here are the medias I consumed in April.

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Books I read

01 - The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien > link
I really enjoyed the beginning but I was disappointed by the ending. [Spoilers ahead > You have a group of people - Bilbo and the 13 dwarves - and we spent all this time with them but who slays Smaug (the dragon)? Some other person who we maybe get to know for a few minutes. What's the point of having these main characters if they are not the one to do the important task? They kept mentioning Smaug and how they will have to face him but all they got was a glance of him and then they never saw the dragon alive again. < End Spoiler]
        It was a somehow happy ending but it seemed we went on a long journey and ended up seeing nothing much, just some interesting characters, a battle that is sort of interesting and a dragon half interesting and characters who are mostly interchangeable aside from the hobbit and that's only because they keep referring to him as the hobbit about about every other page. This was a bit of a slow read but I sort of enjoyed it.

Reflections: Notes on the 2023 A-Z Challenge

Here are my thoughts on the A-Z Challenge this year.

01 - An unofficial participant — This year, I didn't bother signing on the Reveal list or the Master list which makes me an unofficial participant. I think they (the a-z people who hosted the challenge) is collecting a bit too much data from participants especially on the master list. It is mostly social media links and physical locations and yes/no questions but still, it's a bit much but I guess excessive info is necessary for reasons I'll never understand. Just a name, a blog link and whether you are posting adult content - that's enough information for me which is how it was in the beginning.