I found this really cute kitten meme today, and I like it so much. If I wasn’t already matching Discord icons with Jinx I would change it to this.
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Sugarlawn has been my recent game, and it’s sooo hard. My maximum score was $9,383. Very difficult but super fun. I aim to get on the leader board!
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We’re off to set up our booth for our big Xmas art fair. Such a relief to get this done. It’s a long, hard day of building a big structure in a huge space filled with other people building big structures, so everyone is trying and failing to keep the aisles clear and make sure neighbors have access to electric floor panels, and there will be newbies crying and cantankerous old jewelers sniping at each other. And after a 15 hour day of building, placing art, setting up lighting, doing safety checks and paperwork, and gabbing with all the friends we only see at this show, we’ll have a magical space surrounded by other magical spaces.
Wherever you live, there’s probably an art fair going on about now. If you’ve got some disposable income, please consider supporting a local artist at a fair. Buy a crazy painting for yourself. Or a print of the crazy painting. Or some gifts. If you like your local art scene, support it so it doesn’t die.
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Also picked up some end of term treats as a reward and grabbed some prismacolours (haven’t drawn with pencil crayon since I was in highschool, so definitely rusty, but this was just as lovely and smooth on the wrist as I remember) and scribbled my OOTD (outfit of the day.) And got an adorable Gothic My Melody and Kuromi lined diary (with tiny decorative jewel heart pictures on the pages, and dividers themed after them) because come on, it’s such a ME item.
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Wholesome vibes–I’m saving this to my computer.
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Yeah, you gotta play it a bunch of times to find all the secrets and extra score factors and figure out how to unlock all the paths before you can really get serious about score.
Edit: I went a little overboard and made this interactive graph of where the items go – it’s fun to look at but it wasn’t actually that much help…
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It’s fun to play with too! Like an interactive virtual sculpture 
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That’s the coolest gift ever! Really awesome your friends are supportive of your hobbies.
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I saw that Rovarsson had mentioned my game VESPERTINE under the category Best Writing in the XYZZY 2022 Nomination Discussion thread, which just about made my day.
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I do periodic backups of my Twine folder, largely because the number of projects grows exponentially and I often stash away snippets of code I re-use: either because I like the way a particularly styled element looks, or because it’s much faster to hit the ground running with my own pre-made templates and to futz around with colours if I’m not in the mood to play around too much with design- a pastel pink might have the slider pulled over towards blue: still pastel, but cohesive to a new colour scheme. (But usually things remain pink, because that was, and remains my major goal with attempting any new styling or authoring tool: how, and what can I make pink? I love the colour.)
I like to reread my own work. Most of it makes me cringe, which I think is just a fairly universal writerly experience. A great deal of them were rightfully set aside, because I don’t have a sense of the direction a piece should move into. (Usually, pieces like this are ground up as grist: some lines or images or ideas might be explored in another stab at the topic, but with major deviations. Sometimes they’re binned altogether, but I always hoard the writing: all writing is good practice, and I can often piecemeal arrange new works from the slashed up bits of old works.)
But sometimes I run across pieces that I really do like, and that make me pause to wonder why I stopped writing them. (Chronic pain, life responsibilities, wanting to spend time with shinier ideas, a social life, acute illness, plenty of reasons…) Other times the rationale is much more apparent- especially when I hew a little too close to my own experiences: trauma and body horror aren’t things I shy away from in writing, but they can be particularly confronting when the horror lingers in things that resonate a touch too true- (abusive relationships, transphobia, coercion, homophobia, stalking, a whole laundry list.) Tonight, I bumbled across one of those works: I’m really happy with the writing, knew a solid story direction to take it into: and just couldn’t bear the pain of actually writing it, because of what it was about.
This last while has been pretty rough. I’ve had some really haunting incidents. Maybe one day, I’ll be able to use it to write something that isn’t necessarily meant to be beautiful, (but if the prose made is beautiful, then I’m not angry about it, nor do I think it detracts from the emotional catharsis) but that primarily seeks to be cathartic, for me, and a cleansing sort of self-exorcism. A major motivation behind writing, for me, especially about the grotesque- is because I find it comforting. I don’t feel like that time, to turn my painful experiences into a particular creative work, is necessarily now, or any time soon. I gravitate primarily to Gothic Horror and Gothic Romance as my genres of interest, but I think a little levity might be due. (And what better time to indulge than the holidays?)
It’s sort of really refreshing to be able to meet myself where I am, and my emotional and psychological needs- rather than the really common self flagellating or falling into despair about not being able to ‘write what I feel like I should be writing.’ The words will always wait. I can always return to whatever topics or themes I’d like- and often return to old favourites over and over again, because I enjoy doing so, and each exploration is a fulfilling experience.
It’s just… sort of nice, to be able to recognize what I need in this moment, and give myself the grace to act upon it. To be able to prioritize my emotional health, even though I sometimes feel like I ought to write on particular experiences or explore particular topics because I rarely see them handled sensitively, or by those who have lived through them and made it out through the other side. Well, I’m allowed to write whatever I’d damn well please, and maybe right now that means silly little fluffy drabbles I don’t show anyone else but are really fun to write, and that’s fine.
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Also, I randomly stumbled across acalvaria while I was Wikipedia-surfing, and I love falling down medical rabbitholes like that. Having a blast reading through medical papers before bedtime. Yippee!
And I got my hands on a copy of Beloved. Maybe something to read on the car ride?
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A house meow sent me this today and said it was me, which I agree with, and frankly, find hilarious whenever people who don’t normally send meme images, let alone animal pictures, (the ever present confusion of Sophia, you didn’t get a pet kitten, did you?! persists) send me some, because I send them so many they just pick up the hang of it. Cute kitty… (I also have him in my like, 11gb hoard of cat pictures on my phone. But it was a nice surprise to run across him again.)
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Today is my birthday. 'Nuff said 
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
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Congrats for your birthday
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Happy Birthday!
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Happy birthday! 
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Having a small slice of bánh bông lan (super light and fluffy Vietnamese vanilla sponge cake, essentially) with black coffee this morning and the combination is surprisingly good. It’s like resetting the sweetness so every bite is the same pleasure as the first. Huh. I’m usually a fan of coffee-that-borders-on-dessert, but this is nice.
Most Asian desserts fall more on the “not too sweet” side of things anyways, (I actually really dislike the usual Asian fruit cakes, but I’m also just not a fan of fruit cake in general- I love cake, and I love fruit, but not together, thank you very much!) but this has a tiny thin layer of vanilla frosting between the two layers.
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