The New Garage Chronicles

What I'm discovering in my forays into trying out various alcoholic drinks in the safety of my home

1) I am better off buying nonholic cider, it's actually better and tastier since regular cider already doesn't really go to my head 2) beer is still mostly awful 3) drink mixers are pretty good except if they use vodka as the base because I cannot untaste the vodka 3.1) except most of them are a little too sweet but that's why I have lemon and ginger juice on hand

Next up I'm gonna go to Alko and buy a couple of little bottles of fancy spirits to try mixers of my own, probably, but at least I have discovered a reliable Stonk Drink that I only need one of to get the Nice Kind Of Intoxication.

Caved into the deep !!!!! and messaged ~~three~~ some people that helped Rekudo take off when I first posted it. It feels strange that I felt so demotivated by finishing Assist Mode 1.0 and then did nothing with it instead of immediately shoving it out there like I did with Rekudo with plans to update it so it got better as it went.

I had like. two very bad arguments about it, and that somehow spoiled me on the whole thing and made me want to cross my arms and go "FINE I'm never doing ANYTHING NICE" for fandom again!!!" instead of just going "okay whatever 1% rule" and moving on. That's so strange. When do I care about people who disagree with me? Since when am I this sensitive?

Anyway. Fingers-crossed, I've noticed that Rekudo has rounding up about a 30% install rate -- which is fucking batshit insane to me, I feel like even if half of those people were using Assist Mode instead we would be seeing substantially more commenting just within the small circles of people who have seen it and know about it. Assist Mode for sure isn't perfect, the intro post isn't good, there are far too few prompts and their format is nowhere on the level of LLF's comment builder, but all of that can be improved on, and I'll have the motivation to do so if people, like... start using it, and seem satisfied with it. Because people do like Rekudo. I've gotten a lot of nice comments on it. I'm really happy about that!!!

Gotta say the "cringe positivity" movement isn't doing much for me as far as making me more shameless. All it is doing is reminding me that I am, on some ephemeral level, Doing A Bad, which leads to me having to jump through the extra mental hoop of either assigning the Bad as Good instead (which is not good for my mental health), or reminding myself that I am, indeed, Bad (which is even worse for my mental health).

Like people who wanna embrace cringe, more power to them. Sometimes you gotta let yourself be messy, other people have perfection neuroses that look different from mine and digging yourself into a nice comfortable trash can has helped me in the past, but at the moment the kind of positivity that would help me become more shameless is... IDK, value-neutrality? Like, positivity that aims to point to the feeling of cringe as something external to the creative process, something imposed from without or, in the worst case, from within. I wish for positivity that would help reinforce the feeling that when someone goes "you're bad and cringe!" at me, I can once again go "man, who cares? I'm not making you look at my stuff, your eyeballs are the ones doing that."

Anything else and I'm just constructing elaborate rituals around being sincere, which is exactly how I developed extremely debilitating OCD once upon a time.

I love it when fandom makes me ask deep, probing questions of myself

such as "am I going to fuck this animatronic bear"

Driving really makes no goddamn sense. On some days I spend my entire hour of commute like "I can't fucking believe people like this fucking-- bite bite kill kill kill maim murder anger hatred" and some days I get home, take off my gear, and go "wait who am I"

People really are just completely without sympathy towards people who can't or don't want to drive. Everyone thinks it's so funny to comment on me carpooling when the weather is bad instead of driving to work, and roll their eyes when I say that I would rather drive a motorcycle just so that if I get into an accident, I'm not liable to kill anyone but myself.

"not so convenient now when there's snow again" you do realise that the other option was never "get a car". That was never an option. If I didn't have the chance to carpool, my plan was always to take the bus and then cycle rest of the way.

"oh but you'd be so much less stressed if you had a more ~reliable~ vehicle" not if that vehicle was a car. I don't drive. I'VE TOLD YOU I DON'T DRIVE.

It's like people think I didn't think about the winter season when I got my bike, assumed I made no plans for when I wouldn't be able to drive. Like I fucking had that much money to spend on a whim.

(and even if I took the bus I would still probably break even for the year on transport costs so, no, it's literally not even cheaper)

I haven't really talked about what I've been Up To on here that much lately, huh.

So, I watched Higurashi Gou & Sotsu, spurred on by getting redthedragon into Higurashi with me (:) hiiii hellooo) and I really enjoyed them! I was wondering if post-Umineko Higurashi would reincorporate some of that worldbuilding back into Higu, and I ended up really enjoying the way they did it. Going back to my Umineko reread after watching Sotsu changes some stuff up significantly, it really plays into and with the tone of that series. The way the tail of the tale wraps around Rika, the way it builds on the anime, specifically, really works for me.

I'm currently playing through Horizon: Forbidden West. I only have the Hunting Grounds, the Enduring and Arena to go because uhhhh I am not going to be able to play through the Machine Strike questline, it simply requires the kind of brains that I do not possess. NGL I was pretty sure I wasn't gonna do the Enduring sidequest either, but then I did get reasonably good at the human-combat, so now it's a matter of grinding it out until I luck into a victory. I'm quite glad all the side activities aren't that hard, that it really is for when you want More Shit to do at the end of the game.

As for the plot of HFB... I'm not hating it? I feel pretty neutral on it, it suffers from the lack of the driving mystery HZD had. It's kinda just average, buoyed up by the character work being really good and the elements it does introduce being really thoroughly chewed. The art and animation budget for the game must have been huge, the script must be massive, there are so many incidental non-subtitled NPC conversations I've just gotten stuck listening to because they're so fun. I think something about the way they make these games had them neglect that part until the Frozen Wilds, and then they had so much fun making Frozen Wilds so cinematic and character-driven that they realised they possibly couldn't go back.

I'm also really happy with the new mechanics! The complicated resource trees, which were left out of the first game, still feel a bit... overly elaborate... but the way they're integrated into the fighting-of-the-machines validates their existence on a design level, and I think all of the new machine fights are really well designed and really interesting to engage with. Hitting weak points is a lot less ambiguous, and the weapon damage scales up much faster, so you're not stuck fighting irritating HP mountains for that long. The incentive to use elemental damage is also much stronger, the weaknesses have been shuffled around to make more sense. The one thing I still don't like is how the enemy attack damage scales, I don't enjoy playing games where I'm constantly two hits away from death, but eh. I've learned to live with it. Figuring out when to chug a potion is much more of a tactical concern now.

I also got a Switch over the winter, and I absolutely blazed my way through DRv3 and the Ori games. I really wanna replay Ori 1, it genuinely became one of my favourite video games as soon as I got started with it, although I wouldn't know how to explain why and how.

Oh, and this is not fandom related, but Essie is finally fixed and I am just slobbering for the driving season to start properly. I miss the nyoom more than I expected Q_Q)

In 2015 I bought this big tub of tom kha paste on a whim, because I wanted to try new stuff and get more used to eating stuff with coconut milk in it for diet reasons. It's honestly the least hasslefree food I can make, even beyond just basic beef soup, and I recently learned that tom kha can be made as... basically a sauce? Served with rice? And I love serving things with rice.

It is just the best kind of Right Kind Of Spicy. Galagal and coriander and lemongrass is just a really good combination. Any food that doesn't make me want to add ginger has already succeeded in winning over my heart.

I got a really fancy journal from my sister as a christmas present (it has green leather covers!! The papers are all in a ring binder and can be replaced! There's enough space on the inside to hold a fountain pen securely) and I've been using it to teach myself toki pona on the way home from work since, y'know. That's a half an hour each day I am doing absolutely nothing with since my scoot is still broken.

But hey, at least scoot is now at a shop that has the correct tester, even if I ended up paying for it. I had to go through the Italian customer service to get them to fork it over but at least I'm now in a situation where I can pay myself into having Essie available again. Honestly, going through this, I still don't want a car, and in fact every time I've been like "is this costing too much? Should I cut my losses and sell the bike?" every time I've come back with "remember how we were like 14 when we first discovered three-wheeled motorcycles and have been like 'YES' ever since?". So, no, I just want my scoot back, I want to go vroom vroom, I miss being able to drive my own arse to work.

mi ken toki e toki pona lili. mi ken ala toki e ijo mute. mi ken toki e pali mi e musi mi. lon tenpo la mi ken sitelen e sitelen pona mute. toki pona li pona :)

Worldbuilding Exchange ends after this year and it's making me too ike to work on my stuff :((

At least I have tomorrow off b/c my coworker I commute with who I share a shift with is sick and I took the opportunity to be like "fuck this actually". I need to renegotiate and start working shorter weeks, for sure.

My new ink cartridges for the fountain pen arrived, and I struggled through swapping from the converter to the cartridge for the first time. Even after multiple washes, the first stroke is still a little bit muddy (I went from my blue calligraphy ink to Lamy's own red ink) but at least I got it working after drawing a bunch with it to get all of the water(?) out of the feed and got a nice steady... slightly purplish red coming out of it.

The only part I completely failed to safely disassemble was the cap, so I cleaned the inside with a Q-tip as well as I could. I'm also still so scared I'll accidentally ruin the nib on this so out of my next paycheck I'll buy a spare just in case.

cimorene sent me a fountain pen! I made a huge mess filling the converter with ink, but once I got it working, I immediately remembered why I tried so hard to learn how to use a dip pen even if I ultimately never really got a hang of it. My hands are extremely confused about not needing to use hardly any pressure at all, but the quality of the line is super nice and I don't feel like I'm putting any effort into it.

I've filled three sketch book pages with doodles and loopdeloops already XD I can hardly believe drawing and writing can feel this good.

Went to get tested for carpal tunnel since my hands have been going numb in the mornings. The test itself didn't hurt, but afterwards both of my hands felt tingly and by the time I got home my right hand (the worse hand) had crapped out.

I hate this. How did I survive three years of art school and years of mouse before any of these symptoms set in? At this point I figured I'd mastered using my hands in ergonomic ways to minimise strain since they're already pretty bad.