Ray's Vacation Quest

UPDATE: It's over!

Well, the "reading 400 books" part. The "I need to get a job that actually pays a sustaining amount" part's still ongoing.

Hi! This isn't one of Mike's epic quests trying to review Nick and Disney Channel shows, good or bad...even though it's our explicit mission statement as stated in this very blog's title and URL but umm oh well...but rather to explain that I'm gonna be out on vacation (kinda sorta) for, ummm...potentially the rest of year meaning there's a moderate chance at least that this is going to be the last post of the year, in which case Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

What will I be doing on va-cay, you may ask? Well first of all I can almost promise you that's the last time I'll ever use "va-cay" so that's that, but also:

 - I really need to get a new job by basically a month from this posting. I've talked about it before in a lot of posts so I'd be surprised if you haven't grown tired of it, but the occupation I'm in now (even though it's still in the same industry as the job I want to transition to) isn't what I want and just simply doesn't pay enough. In fact it pretty much pays next to nothing, which is why the budget for this blog remains at absolute zero, which I hear is also the same temperature as Ajit Pai's absolutely Grinch-like heart despite what his stupid try-hard "I'm a YouTube celeb! Why doesn't anybody like me?!?!" videos might suggest.

 - Speaking of which I might spend "vacation" figuring out how to monetize this blog, something I've been trying to figure out for a while. I've been figuring out ways to make videos for my book review blog, and videos for this blog seems like a natural extension of that (shout out to Spongey).

 - But mostly I'll probably just be spending it reading books because I'm at 380 books read for the year, since January 1st 2017 and I'm hoping to get to 400 by Christmas, which as a handy reminder for those late shoppers reading this is just this Monday, four days away or so. According to some extremely quick math, that's a book read for every day of the year (for the entire calendar year, not just so far, although the distinction's rapidly disappearing) and then some. And no, it's not just a whole bunch of toddler picture books that I can knock out in like less than 5 minutes at a time although according to Goodreads my average book length is ~250 pages which is a bit shorter than usual for other years. But yes, I'm a speed reader, and it's a big reason why I do have the job I do have (and a big part of how I'm hoping to upgrade) and why I decided to launch a book blog (which, again, I "technically" launched a whole two years before even this one, way back in 2013, one day after Jessie's second season finale).

But I digress. Anyway, uhhh...yeah. See you next time which hopefully will still be some time this year.

Extra Thoughts 

 - yeah I'm just gonna abuse this feature again. Some of the things I plan to talk about in the upcoming days/the new year is to continue the #MeToo discussion (including sharing my most embarrassing and shameful High School story, where I tried to convince a girl I gave a ride to to repay me by showing her boobs - hey, I'll admit to being a pervert albeit one that's making real conscious effort to reform, which I consider the whole point of #MeToo from a male perspective and the whole point of even sharing these stories) and have what I'm hoping is a worthwhile discussion on censorship too (which seems particularly relevant now). On both this blog and my book blog I'll also be talking about some long overdue topics about some of the more common pitfalls of being a creative (yes using "creative" as a noun which has been a thing for a while now), especially some things that people really should know better about, particularly plagiarism and other forms of cheating/creative dishonesty. And on my book blog I'll be writing about the most memorable/biggest standout reads of the year (despite my obviously large reading resume, I don't actually read a lot of new books so you'll see a bunch of stuff published from years ago) as well as the ones that were most memorable...for all the wrong reasons, and the biggest blahs/mehs of the year. And of course, I'll be doing the same equivalent for this blog, which will be 2017's Nickelodeon and Disney Channel's Biggest Winners and Losers (which will continue last year's bigger inclusion of Disney XD and will now also include Nick Jr and Disney Jr).

UPDATE: I just also want to mention some other things I'd like to talk about in the upcoming, uhhh, timeframe indeterminate: the "practice novel problem," something I like to call "public domain creative nonfiction" (those two will mostly be on my book blog with at least some crossover to this one) and most relevant to this blog in particular - yes, I'll be publishing my Liv and Maddie fanfic on this blog!* (among other places)

So yeah. You'll get to look forward to that.

* and no, it's not that kind of fanfiction. Jessie Prescott or K.C. Cooper doesn't inexplicably drop in just to have an equally inexplicable lesbian love affair with Liv/Maddie. And no, Liv and Maddie don't decide to be twincestuous lesbians. It's basically a "novelization" of my fanscript that I describe in detail here, because at this point I might as well.

And I promise this will be the only time this blog uses the word twincestuous.