Nerd Girl Thoughts

Blaugust Promptapalooza 2020 is this crazy year’s crazy twist on the August blogging challenge cooked up by Belghast over on Tales of the Aggronaut. Instead of writing every day, a whole bunch of us have committed to being “prompt-bearers”. I’m a little bit late on this one, but the prompt I’m writing about today comes from Heather over at Just Geeking By:

What are the things that get you excited in life?

Promptapalooza (August 13, 2020)

I don’t think of myself as a particularly excitable person – after all, if I get too excited too often, where will I get the energy to be an anxious mess about everything? But there are a few things that I know make my whole face light up and bring me a special kind of joy, and if that’s not excitement of a fashion, I don’t really know what is.

Dogs

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Most specifically my dogs (that’s Dakota on the left, and Charley just chillin’ there on the right), but really, it’s just dogs in general. Despite realizing that yes, I am a dog person, a little bit later in life, I’ve rarely met a dog I didn’t immediately fall madly in love with and want to spoil rotten. I follow my groomers on Facebook because they do daily photos of all the dogs that were in that day. I follow WeRateDogs on Twitter. I stan Coconut Rice Bear in all her floof-y glory, and I can lose hours to watching pretty much any kind of dog video.

Sure, dogs can be kind of high maintenance as far as pets go, but god, they do bring multitudes of joy to my days.

Over-analysis of pop culture

More specifically, applying critical thinking to the kind of popcorn entertainment that people tend not to think too much about. There’s a certain subset of horror movies that fascinate me to no end, and I was downright giddy when I discovered there’s a text book out there with scholarly papers about exactly that type of thing.

I’m most particularly interested in the paper by Ian Conrich on the elaborate murders from both the Saw & Final Destination franchises, which I have analyzed endlessly in my head. I am both shocked and delighted by the fact that someone else has actually thought about them even more than I have.

I feel like there’s not enough deep analysis of the fluffier parts of pop culture, outside of a few really intricate fandoms, and I’d love to find more of it.

Well-Constructed Mysteries

Regardless of the medium, nothing gets me jazzed like a plot that comes together perfectly in the end but that I also didn’t manage to figure out before the denouement. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy that feeling of when the pieces all fit and I have figured everything out myself, but it’s a million times better to be surprised, and then to realize that yes, I did have all the information and the answer is completely logical but I didn’t see it coming.

Unfortunately, as someone who’s loved mystery stories for many years, it’s a rare thing for a story to get one over on me in such a way, but when it does? I will not rest until I get someone to read, watch or play that story because it’s a damned high bar, and I appreciate creators that can fly right over it.

Giving a Perfect Gift

As much as I go into full-on Grinch mode during December, I actually like spending time trying to figure out just the right thing to gift to someone I care about. I find most actual holiday gatherings, whether family, friend groups, or workplace-related, put far too many restrictions on gifting which makes the whole thing a chore rather than a fun experience.

This is also why I play Steam Sale Santa twice a year – sometimes, I do just pluck things from wish lists, but there is no better feeling than giving someone their newest favorite game that they didn’t even know existed.