I used to… until I heard someone read it aloud one day.

I spent 20 years working as a sys admin, moving to new offices around the globe every few years. No matter which country I worked in, every single sys admin I’ve ever worked with always pronounced it “sequel.” I’ve never met anyone in real life who spelled out the letters when speaking it.

As a former sys admin, this clicked immediately for me.

You’re looking for Umamusume: Pretty Derby. It’s a Japanese video game franchise that has expanded into anime and manga as well.

The games are all gacha games (collect items through gameplay or in-game currency). In this case, you collect and train tons of horse girls to compete in races. The original game is a mobile game, but there’s a free version on Steam that lets you play on your PC.

All the anthropomorphic horse girls are based on real-life Japanese race horses (same name and hair coloring), and some of the game’s stories are based on real races too. It’s not an adult game series, if that’s what your curious about, but I’m sure there’s plenty of “fan art” in the darker corners of the Internet, if you know where to look.

I think that’s the one thing that truly drew my interest with Umamusume. Every “horse girl” is named and styled after a real-life Japanese racing horse.

If it was just an anime show/video game about anthropomorphic horse girls, I wouldn’t really care. But now I’m interested in comparing them to their real-life counterparts.

I retired about 4 years ago, but before I did, my office was using Teams, Slack, and Outlook to manage communications at work, and occasionally text messaging or social media (FB Messenger, WhatsApp, Signal, etc.) outside of work to get information outside of business hours.

To keep things organized, we always had a singular database where we tracked all tasks and projects, as well as who they were assigned to. We used to have this on SharePoint, but with Teams expanding their toolkit, we rebuilt our SharePoint sites there. No matter where the communication came from, it was everyone’s responsibility to update the master task list with new items, but core projects were always added and tracked by upper management.

It became habit to update the status of projects at least once daily. If a project went 2 or 3 days without a new status - even a simple note stating that no work had been done that day on this particular task - then upper management would come asking questions. Yes, there was a bit of micromanagement, but it kept us task-oriented and productive. We always reviewed everything on the master task list every morning and prioritized our day based on what could be accomplished. Nothing was missed.

I personally would also make bullet lists throughout my day with simple checklist-type objectives. Anytime someone asked me to do something, it’d go on the bullet list. Any new update I needed to add to the master task list, I’d make a quick bullet reminder. A new idea pops into my head… into the bullet list so I don’t forget about it later.

I have ADHD, so keeping focused on multiple things throughout my day was difficult and I’d always forget some important details. Keeping my own simple checklist on my person let me hyperfocus on one or two projects at a time without completely losing track of all the other things I needed to deal with that day.

I got real quick at jotting down notes as information came to me, so I could track dozens of projects a day and never lose details on any of them. At the end of my work day, I could settle down and take my time writing out detailed logs in the master task list so upper management would be satisfied with the effort put into my projects that day. The more detailed my logs, the less likely they’d come to ask me questions and interrupt my workflow during the day.

I was just about to point out that there’s a sequel series in production where Buffy is a mentor-type for a new young slayer, but apparently Hulu just cancelled that project yesterday.

We just can’t have nice things. If it’s not a reboot, Hollywood won’t invest in it.

An animated reboot?! Dammit, I was hoping the cast was actually coming back for a sequel series or something. I don’t want the show rehashed as an animated project!

I get that the cast has aged in the past 20 years and animation hides their lack of youthful vigor for a new series, but I’d rather see them return as they are now than be drawn to look young again. We could’ve had a “20 years later” plotline that had new ground to explore instead of redoing the original show.

Joss Whedon always said if the show ever came back, then the film Serenity wouldn’t be canon so we could have the whole cast return and continue the adventure. I’m sad this isn’t the case. Give us new stories, not a reboot!

I believe you’re correct.

I believe this is a meme concerning the film Inglorious Basterds. In it, Michael Fassbender’s character was an American lieutenant working undercover in Nazi Germany and used the wrong hand gesture to ask for another round of drinks. It got him and his team outed as American spies.