Helloooooooooo. This ended up being a pretty long one!
- This week my girlfriend made this blackened tofu for dinner several nights, paired with some basmati rice and a spicy pineapple salsa, and it was… soooo good. This also gave me the idea to make a page on here with recipes I like; we’re vegetarians and I always love exchanging vegetarian or vegan recipes!
- She also made these chocolate chip oatmeal cookies that I adore!! (And what did I cook or bake for my girlfriend this week? Um… [Slowly walks backwards and then sprints out of the room])
- I made some fun site updates, as described in my previous post! HOWEVER… I’m not going to let myself make any more changes to the site features this week because I need to finish writing some media logs and focus on some other stuff, including Art Fight (which has a time limit). Planning and building stuff for my website is super addicting.
- I’m on the east coast of the U.S. and we had smoke in the air on Friday and Saturday from a wildfire in Minnesota and Canada.
- Hung out with friends again this weekend. My girlfriend helped one of our friends with his worldbuilding stuff—she’s a linguistics nerd and a walking encyclopedia so this is like her favorite thing—and I watched our other friend play Desktop Explorer (which had some cheesy horror moments, but I liked the concept and the puzzles were fun).
- I watched the first three episodes of Chainsmoker Cat this weekend, and it was… it was a lot. I mean it’s… good, I think?? But they really don’t hold back on making the characters act absolutely disgusting. You’ve been warned.
- My girlfriend and I also watched the first three episodes of Jaadugar: A Witch in Mongolia. That I can say for certain was exceptional.
With life in general, I’m feeling kind of… blahhh. I don’t know. I’m feeling very scatterbrained. I think I need to work on building a routine again. I hate talking about routines because the hustle culture “optimize your time!!” mindset has ruined normal discussions about it—but the fact is that I’m probably some flavor of neurodivergent, and I think having a healthier routine would be really beneficial for me.
Music
I mentioned last week that I’ve stopped using Apple Music (my former preferred music streaming platform) so I’m trying to change up the way I listen to music—hopefully long-term, but who knows. I’m sort of just messing around right now.
- I listened to a local classical music radio station that I like but always forget about (I sadly can’t share it because it’s too much location info, I think)
- I listened to some NPR tiny desk concerts and this Shaboozey one was really fun!! I don’t listen to much country music so I liked trying something different.
- I remembered that I really like Masakatsu Takagi and need to buy more of his stuff. He’s made several soundtracks that I enjoy. He has a series called Marginalia (that he uploads to his Bandcamp) where he records his own piano compositions out in nature. They’re really relaxing to listen to, like this one and this one.
- I got a lot of music off of my CDs and onto my computer! Going to finish that process this week.
Links
- I found the magazine/website World of Interiors this week. It’s kinda bougie but I just love interior design stuff like this lol
- Also learned about Museum of Screens, which led me to a Manifesto Jam entry that I hadn’t read: sticky fingers (noise warning?). I want to steal.
- There were some articles going around about how young people can’t read—I read this one and this one if you’re interested. I normally think these kinds of fears are overblown, since everyone thinks this about younger generations, but I dunno, these seem pretty indicative of systemic problems in our education system.
- Trans Girl Baseball Makes Me A Better Woman. This one was really good.
“When I picked up a glove and ball alongside women I now call my friends, the kid I once was began to reconcile with the woman I wanted to be. I found that—even as I resented its form, even as I tormented myself with its slow changes—my body still knew what to do. I discovered that I was in the same body I always had been, and it did not hate me back.”
- I Am Not Sorry Lindsey Graham is Dead, an essay by Magdalene Visaggio about Christianity, transmisogyny, and hatred.
- Toxic Yuri VN Jam 2 ended a week ago. I think I’m going to go through these once I finish playing Ico.
- My girlfriend and I watched a bunch of KVN AUST’s 0-view YouTube video searches this week (he refers to it as browsing “YouTube’s Recycling Bin”) and I recommend them if you like finding odd stuff on the internet. He explains it at the beginning of each video, but he basically uses keywords or default file names in his search queries to uncover amateurish, unwatched videos that aren’t usually picked up by the YouTube algorithm. He censors anything he finds that isn’t appropriate for YouTube, but I’d still add a blanket content warning that the videos he finds can sometimes be unnerving or NSFW, and there aren’t any content warnings in the video descriptions—CW for animal surgery (???) in this one that I otherwise enjoyed, for example.
