Entries tagged with !rl

Current Mood: meh
Current Location: machinae supremacy
Current Music: Mechina - Spasms of Human Tragedy and Broken Matter Manipulation

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i saw a death cab sticker on a cadillac; a little voice inside my head said you can never look back

Boys of Summer was playing over the intercom at No Frills and it was just an oddly moving experience. I'd been thinking about what, exactly, that I learned in high school that was still immediately useful me this year. And it was mostly things from that hiking trip that I hated at the time but built a lot of character. Bring two litres of water per person on a day trip, how to poop in the woods, how to dress for the outdoors. All things that will come in handy in April.

Anyway, the great bathroom reno is nearly done, minus final cleanup and mirror installation. I might have Krogoth start a co-op game of Baldurs Gate 3 with me later, but I'm running out of excuses to avoid my WIP.

But the sooner I address my WIP, the sooner I can get to the Babylon noir detective fic in the same fandom that I've been thinking about...

Current Mood: joyful
Current Location: guelph
Current Music: sofia isella - us and pigs

Entry tags:

!rl,
movie

2024 Goals

They're real simple:
- wrap up my D&D 5e game (this has gotten very out of hand, if I can finish up around summer that'd be nice)
- Keep drawing with the inks I bought myself for Christmas
- recommence writing my WIP, which I stopped when I started playing Baldur's Gate 3, preferably before I:
- Successfully go on the road trip I've planned to fulfill a 20-year dream; I've bought a guide book and mapped out everything and all but the midjourney 40-minute flight is booked!! Unfortunately I borked the timing so I will miss the eclipse... but there's still Iceland in 2026 :)
- Successfully see Death Cab (already got the tickets and only overpaid a little bit!)

I finally got around to watching the director's cut of Kingdom of Heaven, i.e. Orlando Bloom being mildly cool but being effortlessly outshone by the rest of the cast. It's not his fault - how's a depressed blacksmith supposed to stand toe-to-toe with Saladin, Sibylla, Liam Neeson, and Baldwin the Leper King?

Current Location: guelf
Current Music: a rose for epona

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september WIP

- I walked home from my meatspace RPG group on Friday night, getting back after midnight. I get why some women don't like to do it, but I guess I've always had a high tolerance for potentially getting axe-murdered on a side street. There's an unlit shortcut that crosses the train tracks and goes up a big hill behind the plaza. Climbing it in the dead of night felt like a minor spiritual experience.
- I had McD's today. Condiments gotta be ordered separately and they don't have individual self-serve dispensers anymore. But as I was putting stale pepper on my ketchup - I realised, I didn't think of that combination myself. My parents didn't give it to me. Where did it come from?
- How do people grow up without keeping an eye on all the publicly available info on themselves?? But there I can't figure out how to delete my pinterest account because I haven't got a clue what the old password to my burner email was...
- I went to a concert last Saturday. It was fantastic, I will definitely keep an eye out for other acts coming to Toronto.

Current Mood: relieved
Current Location: guelph
Current Music: ad infinitum - marching on versailles

Entry tags:

!rl,
music

TIX

I have tickets - more accurately, one ticket - to see Delain and Visions of Atlantis. I debated getting one for Xandria/Battle Beast/Kamelot but that one is on a Tuesday. I know I'd enjoy it but .... it's on a Tuesday.

Also, all booked up to go to the east coast in October. Finally!

Current Mood: whiplashed
Current Location: guelph
Current Music: within temptation - hand of sorrow

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zero to sixty in three point five

We went from "window shopping is fun but we're not going to move," no mortgage approved, nothing, just having attended some open houses to look at neighbours' closets and stuff... to "holy shit" and accepted offer in 31 and a half hours. Why doesn't this train have brakes???

Utter insanity. We had the mortgage-paid-off celebration dinner only a few weeks ago and just installed a bunch of wall shelves...

Monday - 11:56 AM "Hey, look at this place, ha ha, isn't that literally the place that we thought would be funny to buy if its owner died or something..."
Rest of day: unable to nap on the bus due to thinking about it
Evening: call parents to ask for ticket off the crazy train, they don't give it to us. Call Justin's old real estate agent. Start moving moonies around.
Later at night: Can't sleep, reading Red Seas Under Red Skies until 3AM

Tuesday: 4PM - tour the other place,
5PM - make offer. Start signing forms. cancel d&d game due to stomachache
5:30PM - moonies finishes getting moved around
7:40PM - agent calls back, offer accepted

"You are beyond mad," said Locke after several moments of silent, furious thought. "Full-on barking madness is a state of rational bliss to which you may not aspire. Men living in gutters and drinking their own piss would shun your company. You are a prancing lunatic."

Current Mood: done for
Current Location: guelph
Current Music: carly rae jepsen - roses

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I was cleaning my desk today

I was cleaning my desk today, but yesterday I did a quick reading. It didn't make sense to me until I moved the junk box back to the bedroom and came back to see a bunch of discord messages, re: the DM having not enough time and needed to tie up loose plot ends asap. So looking at this with the benefit of retrospect:

Past: 2 of cups reversed

Present: 8 of coins - skill development, getting gud
Future: moon, reversed - fear of the unknown
Influences: 10 of coins - mastery, achievement, stability, certainty, having it all and knowing it too
Outcome: the tower, lol

I don't even want to do a full analysis, but I'll leave the following notes for my future self:
- It's interesting that the Present/Future card is 8P and the moon, while Influences/Outcome is what could be considered a clearer, amped-up version of the first pair. Where the first pair merely precipitated a falling house of cards, the second reflects a collapsing castle, as if just to underline the meaning of the first three cards drawn.
- It wasn't a complete surprise when I drew the tower, even though I wasn't sure what I was reading for. Again, that might be the first three cards. What can be devastating is less so when you already knew it was coming months in advance (the moon)

Current Mood: oh em gee
Current Location: guelf
Current Music: nothing

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fork

Forkin did a site visit on March Break, when tourism as at a low, when one of the station entrances is fully closed, when we're getting about half the ridership that the model says we should be getting, just absolutely FML

Past: eight of blades reversed. "I'm sad" // freedom
Present: three of blades reversed. one more time for the homes at the back: "I'M SAD" // rebirth
Future: star reversed. "I'm thinking about being sad some more"
Influences: eight of cups reversed. So this is one of the cards where I think the Divine Tarot does it better. I mostly read with the Darkness of Light tarot because I like the tactility of the art and the spooky atmosphere, but the Divine Tarot shows the eight of cups as Moses going off into the desert. Eight of cups reversed is Moses NOT going into the desert, being too afraid of the heat and lack of water and making excuses about his sheep.
Outcome: queen of coins. It's nice not to finish off the reading with a card of abject misery but I don't see what this is supposed to represent or how it's relevant, like, I'm going to be sad, but I'm going to make money off it?

Also I dreamed about a thing two people in my life have in common, except that it's WEIRD because one is DEAD and the other one is like, ???. I followed them through the transit system and lost them, like how Morgan loses track of Ree-ree's tribe in the chasm in Empire of Grass. Then I was unfortunately in university again and needed to take a course so I signed up for a mythology bird course.

Current Mood: good
Current Location: guelf
Current Music: seven spires - oceans of time

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thundersnow

I went for a walk last night around midnight, when it was snowing, because I was promised thundersnow.

It's an incredibly liberating feeling to wander around the neighbourhood at night, with no cars or people out, and just fall into snowbanks wherever I want to. To just lie back in a huge open field and stare at the snow coming down, and to scream into the sky and know that nobody heard you because of the wind. And also a very powerful feeling, to be armoured up in jackets and snowpants and boots, and just not feel the cold. I was out for about two hours, and only went back inside because the effects of my booster shot were beginning to catch up with me.

I didn't see any thundersnow, though.

Current Mood: meh
Current Location: guelf
Current Music: colder weather - zac brown band

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Bocconcini

Today I ate ten cocktail bocconcinis with salt, olive oil, and peach-infused white vinegar. They were delicious, and also 50% easier to snack on than, say, cheese ON the cracker. As opposed to just a piece of cheese, barely dressed, unabashedly pale in the night.

They are too easy to eat. I wish I'd never discovered the cocktail bocconcinis at the grocery store.

Oh, I also tried out the sakura tube watercolours. They're thirty years old, so I'm surprised that they hadn't dried out, but I hear it's easy to revitalize them if they do. There wasn't any need this time, but I still can't read the instructions at the back because they're in Japanese.

Current Mood: meh
Current Location: guelf
Current Music: delta rae - i will never die

Entry tags:

!rl,
food

The $2.50/kg no name perogies, bacon and potato

First of all, the texture. When pan-fried from frozen according to the package instructions the perogy wrapper gets... puffy. Very sturdy. No give. Like deep fried bread, or tiny pizza pockets. I've had other pan-fried perogies, and dumplings, and none of the wrappers have ever ended up like that before.

Secondly, the filling. The flavour was nominally bacon and potato, but it had a hard time staying inside its fried dough pouches. Also I'm not convinced there was bacon in there. The filling tasted like they had once LOOKED at a closed bag of crumbled bacon bits, demurely, from the opposite side of the fridge, not making eye contact.

Current Mood: ambitious
Current Location: guelf
Current Music: machinae supremacy - overworld

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Long haul

1) I participated in Inktober. I half-assed it on some of the days (particularly when I was on vacation), but here are some from last month that I was proud of. Mostly portraits, because you can't hide bad proportions when doing a portrait.

( more pics under cut )
I'm still keeping to at least one drawing per day (even if it's a doodle) but now I'm also working on my Nanorimo project. It's a Good Omens fic where Upstairs wins (not currently pursuing either of the Tristan/Iseult crossover or Sixth Crusade ideas). I don't think it's worth 50k words, but I'll be happy to get 20k out of it. Currently, I'm about 9k words in and I have most of the plot ideas (finally) in place.

Other Books I've Read

The Fifth Season
The Obelisk Gate
The Stone Sky

The Fifth Season was brilliant. There's an event in the middle that happens where I think, damn, I should've seen that coming. Then something similar happens AGAIN and I'd never been so happy to be blindsided. The Obelisk Gate and The Stone Sky didn't have that WOMP factor, the same sense of newness and progression and volatility, to carve out a trilogy-shaped niche in my heart where this story could live rent-free. Don't get me wrong, I think the story is really well executed: there are characters that objectively should be loathed, but are written tenderly all the same. The world is full of bitterness and hate and vengefulness, but also incredible resilience and love. The trilogy as a whole is worth a read and easy to respect, but difficult to love unconditionally. 4/5

Ducks
I have friends that worked in Fort Mac, though I never did myself. This is a memoir of the author's time in Fort Mac between 2005 and 2008. She does a brilliant job showing the inhumanity born of isolation, the pervasive sexism, and the brutal casualness of violence and assault. I would consider this essential reading for anyone of any gender in a male-dominated industry. The only reason that this is not a 5/5 because it's so harrowing I do not want to read it again. 4/5

Current Mood: relieved
Current Location: guelf
Current Music: silversun pickups - the royal we

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2 dreams

I dreamed that I hooked up with an acquaintance and their spouse found out, so I had to pay them off. The furniture in their place was much nicer than the last time I'd see it - very dark and glossily-lacquered, with a touch of chinoiserie.

Then I dreamed that I was travelling through a post-apocalyptic world, and reached an underground stronghold populated by three factions. One was of women, one was of death-cultists with juggalo face paint, and I don't remember what the third one was. I tried to join the women's faction, saying I was up for any type of work but I had noodly arms, but both the death-cultists and the womens' faction wanted me. The death-cultists took me to a tunnel into a stadium on a recon mission to show me exactly they'd become death cultists. I saw bleached bone skeletons lying in the stands, but with their eyes intact and moving as enormous bugs roved over them.

--

The summer intern is gone at last. In his goodbye email, he said, "I'll probably be back part time towards the end of the September to help with XYZ." Like, one - nobody works in this field part time unless they're extremely well-established, old, or self-employed, especially not a dude about to start a master's degree, and two - my boss was just as surprised to read this as I was.

Also, he was not great, at one point I was trying to show him how to make the SIMPLEST of figures, he kept producing crap, I told him, this seems to be taking a while, why don't you work on something else while I finish this figure? And he said, no, I can do a better job of this than you can. So, I said, well, surely that's a joke, ha ha, good one. And he doubled down and said, no, I was being sincere.

Afterwards he tried to brush it off again and move past but seemed to not understand the lesson I was trying to impart, which was, although I wasn't mad, he needs to watch his mouth. But he said, can you just forgive me and we move on and at that point I really was lost for words.

Current Mood: ambitious
Current Location: guelf
Current Music: a rose for epona - eluveitie

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Ianthe was overfamiliar and frankly a pervert

A sequence of events that happened in the last two weeks:

Zyl posted character art with pastels. It was quite nice. I gave her inspiration for the next session.
I remembered the last time I used pastels (well). It was in seventh grade, and we were all doing Georgia O'Keefe homages. Somehow I picked one of her paintings that didn't look like genitals. Thinking backwards gave me a warm fuzzy feeling. I decided that I missed drawing. However, I didn't have any pastels. What I did have were a bunch of decent fountain pens.
Michiichan said she was doing one a drawing a day to improve. It seemed like a good idea, so I decided to do the same.
I broke the feed of my red Lamy Safari while trying to swap nibs for drawing, which ended up unnecessary anyways.
I ordered a strawberry red Lamy Safari to replace it. And also a 2B pencil for my underdrawings.
While looking at safaris, I wondered what was even the difference between a $40 pen and a $100 pen.
I started looking at $100 pens. I realize I wanted something with a hefty ink capacity, dumb ergonomic curves, and a slip lid rather than a threaded lid. Face it, I'd probably forget it was threaded and damage the pen trying to pull it off.
I fancied that maybe I wanted a cool nib on my pen too.
I absolutely lost my mind and ordered a Franklin-Christoph Model 20 with a custom fine cursive italic nib. It's a very nice pen. The fine cursive italic nib puts down some very crisp lines with an impressive amount of line variation, but without causing my writing to fatten up like with a 1.1mm stub.
Both new pens arrived. But now I had two ink colours (Diamine Teal and Diamine Sunset, that I'd owned for some time) and three pens. Obviously Diamine Teal, my primary journal ink, goes in the journalling pen - the Franklin-Christoph Model 20. And obviously the bright red ink, Diamine Sunset, goes in the red Lamy Safari. But now there was a charcoal Lamy Safari, which has served me faithfully since 2015, with no corresponding ink.
I went down the rabbit hole trying to find a nice ink that didn't clash overly with Teal or Sunset, but was a nice colour in its own right, that would be suitable for applying light shadows to drawings. I settled on Ferris Wheel Press Lady Rose. It's a desaturated pinkish-brown, neither cool nor warm, that reminds me of vagina. Maybe that's why I picked it.
To get free shipping I also ordered a bunch of cookbooks, and a white marker thing that can be used to make highlights (and fix mistakes).

Anyways, that has been an expensive few weeks. But I have been keeping up with doing one drawing per day, and they're turning out pretty nicely. Of course there are some duds, but I'm learning. Currently, I'm using Diamine Teal for the blacklines and hatching, and Lady Rose for extra shading (via washes) and texture. Mostly I'm drawing flowers because those have interesting shapes and shadows, generally clean lines, and it's easy to figure out what kind of hatching to use. And chess pieces, because those are symmetrical and good for practicing cross-hatching.

I think eventually I'll run out of flowers I know that names of. Then I can move on to the following things:

Hands
Stuff made out of glass
My cats
People, maybe

--

Top 5 ice cream flavours

5. Cookies & cream
4. Stracciatella
3. Love potion 31
2. Strawberry cheesecake
1. Orange creamsicle

Current Mood: happy
Current Location: guelf
Current Music: delain - april rain

Entry tags:

!rl,
aquarium

Fish tank upgrades

So, I was trying to replace the ceramic membrane of my external CO2 diffuser, twisted the stem wrong, and ruined the seal. Rather than futzing around with another external diffuser, I ordered an inline diffuser. Then I also had to upgrade the canister filter because the inline diffuser only fits on a 16/22mm hose (rather than 9/11mm one). The Eheim 2211 has a 16/22 hose on the intake but not on the outflow, but it's better to put the inline diffuser on the outflow rather than the intake because it'll put less stress on the impeller, and because this way the diffuser is only exposed to filtered water.

Anyways. Installing the Eheim 2213 was a breeze because I got to keep the existing intake hardware (the 2213 uses 16/22 hosing on both the intake and outflow). However, having the double taps and the inline diffuser as close to the canister outflow as possible made it a bit of a tight squeeze in the cabinet.

The end results, on the other hand, have been amazing. One less piece of equipment in the fish tank, a far more even distribution of CO2, and likely better CO2 diffusion (though I can't confirm this visually, because I can't trust my drop checker to stay suctioned to the inside wall of the tank. But yeah. Amazing. I should've saved the money, trusted the process, and used an inline diffuser right off the bat.

Current Mood: thinking
Current Location: guelf
Current Music: my ex's best friend

Entry tags:

!rl,
work

Just some career thoughts

I'm somehow at the point where I'm one of the most senior people in my team (alright, not actually usually a great sign, but it's always been very small) and pretty much unsackable. I like all my immediate coworkers. My last raise put me near the upper limit of the pay range in my location and position. My boss is a very reasonable person and one of the most effective people-handlers I've ever met. Generally, my position is low-stress, I've nearly no greys, and I can count on one hand the weekends I've worked in the last two years.

Then I look at where my peers from both my university and high school graduating classes, and see how many times they've job-hopped, and I wonder what I'm missing out on. Moving companies - scratch that, moving FIELDS - is how you get really exciting, prestigious roles. And fat stacks, for when momma's gotta buy a new yacht.

I'm happy where I am, and not looking to move around, but sad that I'm definitely not living up to my full (career) potential. I wonder what I could've been if I actually pushed myself rather than having coasted since I got into grad school.

Also, I've been thinking about doing a post comparing where my elementary school and high school peers are now. I know that both groups are equally smart, but also that my high school peers self-selected to go through the discomfort of switching schools, and I wonder if that was indicative of any elevated level of risk-tasking or ambition that was only magnified over the years. I'm not sure either how I'd set up the job classification buckets to include enough diversity at a glance, but without being overclassified (overfitted?). Luckily I'm only gonna have a hundred data points from both groups combined, so it won't be too lengthy of an exercise.

Entry tags:

!rl,
grief

(no subject)

( trigger warning: suicide )

Current Mood: hopeful
Current Location: guelf
Current Music: xandria - where the heart is home

Entry tags:

!rl,
aquarium

Turkey baster

I started using the turkey baster to clean the aquarium and it is a game changer.

- I can use it to clean debris out of tight spaces without using the gravel vac
- Adjustable pressure levels: can be little gentle poofs or I can blow mulm all over the place depending on hard I squeeze the bulb
- No more woopsie-doodles with the 5mL parameter testing vials!

Still flirting with the idea of stepping up to using pressurized CO2. It's a nontrivial investment (plus, do I just wedge the 5lb tank behind the TV speakers?) but I'd finally be able to grow AR mini and an entire carpet of marsilea crenata!

Current Mood: grump
Current Location: guelf
Current Music: halestorm - heart of novocaine

Entry tags:

!rl,
food

Sides

One of these days, I'll order the fries instead of the salad when I get a burger at the local dive. Like, the burger comes with an enormous pickle spear... that ought to count as enough vegetable matter for the day, right?

Current Mood: curious
Current Location: guelf
Current Music: i lie here buried with my rings and my dresses

Entry tags:

!rl,
aquarium

Red tiger lotus

I'm not sure if my aquarium can handle a plant like that, but I can stunt its growth by potting it and then aggressively pruning... right? It'll take the place of my ozelot sword, which has been melting since the day I got it.

Current Mood: kind of depressed
Current Location: guelf
Current Music: grimes - realiti

Entry tags:

!rl,
tarot

three o swords

So my mum had a heart attack so I've elected to ignore my feelings; however, I have deigned to do a tarot reading for the situation.

Past - nine of cups (reversed)
Present - page of coins
Future - page of swords (reversed)
Hidden influences - three of swords
Outcome - temperance

I MEAN THAT TRACKS