Sun, 20 Apr 2025 04:54:20 UTC
i mean the statement in the title both literally and figuratively. all the required reading everyone had in school? didnt have it. i was homeschooled. the reading the curriculum called for was pretty weak and it was only cut further from there. probably the closest i ever got to doing typical required reading was reading the first few chatpters of the odyssey. i dont even know what books are on the typical "required reading" lists. theres also books a large portion of people have read that i havent. they were never true "required reading" but they feel required since everyone else has read them and theres a lot of "oh you *have* to read that" going on.
theres movies too. they feel like required reading because of the amount of people who are like "you havent seen that??". i usually respond along the lines of "at least ive heard of it" because half the time i havent. strangely when i call movies "required reading" people get really confused not because its not *required* but because its not reading? idk, i have to explain it a lot. people are constantly surprised i havent seen or heard of certain movies. prior to some three years ago i had only seen maybe half a dozen movies by my own choice.
to a lesser extent than movies, people are frequently surprised with which games i havent played. i hadnt played portal until last year and i still havent sat down and played portal 2's campaign. its a little strange that i havent since portal was great and ive played through the first half of portal 2's coop several times. highly recommend. never finished it because people really like abandoning our playthroughs for some reason. ive never played any elder scrolls game, any fallout game, or any half life game. the only halo campaign ive played is the first one and that only happened last year. i *have* played a couple pokemon games but the primary motivation for that was so i could carry a gameboy with me. i liked doing that, i should get into some more gameboy games.
lastly, music. oh void am i out of touch when it comes to music. i havent listened to any of what people consider to be required reading. people ask what music i listen to and i start my response with "its unlikely youve heard of most of it". until recently 100 gecs was probably one of the only things in my library most people would recognize. most of what i listen to is indie hyperpop, theres no chance anyone would recognize it unless they also listened to it.
im starting to try to get familiar with the required reading. theres so much that ill never catch up with it all but ive accepted that. anything worth doing is worth at least doing poorly. im starting to pick things up at thrift stores when i see something i actually recognize. i figure if i recognize a piece of media its likely because someones recommended it before. yesterday i was looking through movies and i picked up the second and third matrix movies, life of pi, and home alone. hopefully good picks? i did recognize a couple others but chose to pass on them because i seemed to remember people saying they were just okay. i think enders game was one of them? feel free to let me know if i was supposed to get that lol.