ENTRY 08: 12/14/2023 - Year's End Approacheth

Really gotta get out of the habit of these hiatuses. Hello once again, dearest reader! It is I, your favorite decrepit dweller of the information superhighway, back again to update you on various inane goings-on while burning my current reserve of good vibes like the coal in a steam locomotive to do so. Let’s hop straight into things, it’s been a hot-ass minute and I’m sure I’ve already forgotten some things. If I remember anything else after finishing this entry, expect subsequent posts or future edits to this one!

So, let’s work our way backwards, shall we? Ye olde Christmas season is upon us once more. I’ve considered updating the site with some festive decorations, but there’s really nothing more festive than glowing green slime, in my opinion, and also I’m feeling like a lazy bitch at current. Maybe I’ll throw some fairy lights up, we’ll see.

More to the point, holiday festivities are proceeding much more smoothly than they did in the spooky season. This is our first season where the majority of our gifts have been ordered online, and I’m happy to report we’ve received the majority of them already, with only a few still being in transit. The tree is up and decorated with the same decorations we’ve kept since I was born, and the holiday tunes are on rotation. Managed to dig up a Bing Crosby christmas record from a dusty box, I’m personally looking forward to playing it, but my mom sure isn’t, heh heh! I can’t blame her, there’s absolutely a justifiable argument for why that music is lame as hell. However, as a counterpoint, I must raise my experience playing Fallout, which has a few Bing tunes near and dear to my heart. I’m sure he was a bastard in his prime like the rest of those crooners, but by golly he sure can sing the oldies.

But I digress. More interesting is the project I’ve got in the works for this christmas. This year, I was blessed with the timely arrival of a frivolous desire for something! Utilizing that energy, I’ve secured a bunch of raw fabric, which I’m using to craft two cloaks! I’ve never built a garment of any kind before, but my respect for cloaks as a fashion item cannot be understated, and I’ve always wanted one of my own. Powered by that, and the fact that cloaks are just about as simple as you can get when it comes to clothing fabrication, I put in the research work and settled on making a ruana style cloak out of woolen fabric.

I picked the ruana cloak design because it was the simplest I could find while maximizing the versatility of the garment. The basic process is getting a rectangular sheet of fabric, folding it in half, and cutting a slit up the front side. This allows you to drape it over your neck like a poncho, with the uncut rear side acting like a cape, and the remainder draping over your arms like two banners. Said banners behave like sleeves, but the dangly bits can be thrown over the shoulders to fasten the cloak in place while a) looking fab and b) adding more layers between you and the wind. The only downside to this design is that it lacks a hood, but it’s easily modifiable, so one could easily sew some buttons around the head to attach one, or simply wear something underneath that has a hood.

I’ve finished constructing the first of two as of a few hours before writing this post, which I’m eager to wear after christmas. The second is a gift for a family member, and I plan to work on that tomorrow. I’m a little disappointed with the fabric I was able to obtain, in many respects it’s great, easily the best choice out of the selection I had access to, but my research suggested I should seek as close to 100% wool as possible, and I could only find wool blends, primarily with polyester. Additionally, the fabric is a solid black, which isn’t the worst color, certainly, but I had envisioned something in either a dark blue or some kind of earth tone. I initially thought the thickness was a little low, but after messing with the rather hefty fabric I think it’ll suffice.

Definitely one of the more interesting and rewarding experimental forays into art forms I’ve no experience with. Would recommend.

Working our way further back, I’m happy to report I finally got around to modding the Nintendo Wii I’ve got kicking around from my childhood. It’s much easier to do than you think, I’ve gone and linked a guide on the site if you’re interested. It’s easily doubled the lifespan of my Wii already, and I’ve been having a whale of a time. Most recently, I 100% completed the normal mode of Pikmin for the first time, fantastic game, that. Got started on Pikmin 2 shortly after, but I’m also chewing on a few other games, notably No More Heroes, Killer7 (by the by, both NMH and Killer7 are some of the most unique and fun games I’ve played ever??), WarioWare, Rhythm Heaven, and more. I’ve got plans to check out even more games, like the original Luigi’s Mansion, Xenoblade Chronicles (finally, I’ve been meaning to play that game for practically a decade now), Wario World, Skies of Arcadia… the list goes on.

In between all that, I’ve also been catching up on some films I’ve been meaning to watch, namely Predator, Total Recall, The Gate, and Hellraiser. This is part of a recent practice my family and I have been able to start up where we try and gather on Fridays to watch a movie together after dinner, and on Saturdays to play retro video games. Lately we’ve been falling behind a tad on the movies thing, my little brother’s got ADHD and he’s got a thing against sitting still for so long, and this aversion to watching movies with the fam has combined with recent hangouts he’s been having with my mom, who’s introducing him to Game of Thrones, and has resulted in more movie nights between just me and my dad, while my bro and my mom watch Game of Thrones in the other room. Nonetheless, I hope we can keep this practice up, I’ve got a lot of films to catch up on and playing videogames together with the family has been really rewarding.

Sounds pretty busy, huh? Well, that’s partly because it is, but it comes with a caveat: I’ve been going through another of my reclusive periods recently. That’s part of why site updates have been so infrequent, though the primary culprit for that remains my shifting focus and laziness. I’ve noticed this happens from time to time, I’ll go through periods of a few weeks at a time where I interact minimally online for one reason or another. Sometimes it’s easy to trace the reason to a specific incident, but most of the time it’s the result of some kind of unnameable malaise and fatigue that makes the idea of hopping into a voice call seem like a recipe for burnout rather than its antidote. Likely irrational, I’ve never ever joined a VC with my pals and felt worse for it, it’s always been refreshing, energizing, and affirming, but nonetheless, by mind stands as my enemy and convinces me I should isolate myself one way or another.

I want to say that at least part of this feeling, at least in the case of the last few weeks, is a certain anxiety that’s crept in since the last few scares re: bad things happening to people in my friend group. We’ve all got struggles, and some are pretty dire. I worry for a lot of my friends, given that some are in pretty dangerous situations on a regular basis due to their home environment, and the fear that they might suddenly go offline for the last time hangs over me, even if I try to ignore it so I can do better at being there for them and supporting them. Having done some work on researching actual suicide support strategies and knowledge on the subject, I feel a little more secure in the idea that, at least with regards to my actions, I’m doing right by them, but it doesn’t diminish the fearful energy I get when things get dire, and it’s still a great effort to push past how that anxiousness stops me in my tracks in order to actually help.

That’s enough heavy stuff for now. Let’s see, what else is going on… I’ve partly fallen off my admittedly infrequent piano practice, though I did learn a new song (yes, it’s Chopsticks, point and laugh at this beginner n00b). I’ve taken up the practice of regularly stretching out my spine to counteract my shite posture and lower back pain, I think it’s helping a bit. I started playing a bunch of Half-Life and Minecraft recently, that’s been nice. I played through Half-Life 1 ages ago, but never got the chance to check out the expansions until the Steam sale recently (big shoutouts to Mischief for footing the bill on that, you’re an MVP), nor have I had the privilege of owning Half-Life 2 on PC. Now I do, and it’s great. Re: Minecraft, I’ve been playing that more infrequently recently, sort of falling off of it again after getting a little fatigued with Thaumcraft’s slow progression and my own rock-brained attempts to make use of the magical technology at my disposal within it.

I think we’re coming up on the end of this post. I can’t remember anything more at the moment, due to the fact I’m composing this past midnight and my sleepy brain isn’t on that remembrance shit right now. I’ll have to consult my real-life journal later and see what important stuff I missed that I could include in this update.

Moving on to the future, now. Plans for the site are still in the works, I’ve still got a lot of links and portals to make before I’m satisfied, and I’ve gotta get plans made for the eventual addition of shrines. I also wanna get an idea of what sort of space I could make for some of my other writings, among other things that need doing. I’m probably gonna put that all off for even longer, though, the holiday season and all the aforementioned gaming is currently taking up a lot of my focus at the moment. That, and the almighty backlog of stuff to read, watch, listen to, and play. Ideally I’d like to have a little get-together with the pals online before year’s end, I think it’d be great if we could chill in a VC for a night or two. Ooh, there’s a thought, Based Ones movie night! Maybe we could watch a Christmas film or two, like the stop-motion Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer movie or something. Memo to self, pester Mischief about the prospect of that soon.

With that, I bid you a hearty “until next time” and “happy holidays”! See you in the next blog post, whenever that is. Probably in the new year!