Hi, its been a gazillion years since I was last on this platform but I hope you’ve all been doing well.

This week I have been doing some self reflecting due to politics, and I am trying to figure out how to get involved in my local community. Currently starting off small by finishing my high school diploma after a decade, and seeing if I can help my fellow classmates out with the resources I know about. Since they’re also all in similar situations with educational and financial issues, I have been collecting resources on things like digital literacy, sexual health, financial planning sites, and local food banks.

I am also thinking of conquering my fear of meeting my ex in-laws and going to the local LGBTQ drop in, but that will have to wait a few weeks. Got too many appointments.

Other than that, I started talking to my friends again after dealing with social anxiety caused by being “chronically offline” for once. Since I am studying now, I need to work on my school-life balance too.

My mother got put back on her disability benefits and now I’m hunting down apartments for us to live in to get out of a bad housing situation that we were stuck in because it was cheap and we only had one income.

Got two viewings this week.

Wasn’t permanent but there was a brief few minutes where I didn’t have anything pop up in the subscribed communities, —refreshing it then gave me that “we’re working on the site” bug page. Back to normal now!

Doesn’t seem to be a major issue, but figured I’d mention it in case that pops up for anyone else.

Fata Morgana.

Listen, whether you like Visual Novels or not doesn’t matter. But Fata Morgana is just somehow…perfect. Everything is resolved and I don’t feel any need to complain about any aspect of it. It was an experience to play a game that left me with no questions afterwards. It was just a really good story.

Having just a teensy bit of a nervous breakdown reevaluating my life choices the night before a job interview.

Gonna try to get to sleep, though.

Using drawing as an example, because that’s what I’m used to:

The problem (or good thing) with art is that it’s definitely a matter of mindset that lets you improve. See, everyone is a beginner at art!

There’s no such thing as an artist that doesn’t need to practice. Every artist has to practice gestures, figure drawings, environmental drawings, all those fundamentals that pop up in beginner courses. Eventually, they start to learn shortcuts. They start to memorize specific ways of drawing the torso bent a certain way that pops up in their art a lot. These shortcuts speed up their art, makes it seem like they’re a master, but…

They’re still beginners. They’re skilled, but they’re still in the beginning of their journey, because art is a life-long journey. It’s something you constantly improve at, constantly decline, constantly go on a roller coaster of failures after failures and success after success.

A beginning itself isn’t a failure. Actually, the majority of failed art isn’t a failure, because hey—your observation skills are good enough that you know whats wrong in your mind, you just have to figure out the way to get there and improve.

Some people are good at the artist mindset, and some people aren’t. It’s not a matter of talent, beginners vs pros, so forth. It’s just a matter of how you think of self-improvement and how you cope with things.

Jam the Housnail.

I thought for the longest time it was a fever dream. That it didn’t exist. I could never find it anything related to the godforsaken thing on any Canadian channels list of cartoons they aired. My family thinks I am joking when I mention how horribly this show plagued my thoughts over this years, but I had been searching for a decade.

Anyway apparently it’s from Japan and I probably watched it on Veoh or something, because it’s on my anime list now and I finally found out what it was called last year.

https://myanimelist.net/anime/29367/Jam_the_Housnail

Thank you for this post! With the prices of meat skyrocketing we are considering more vegetarian meals but we’ve been struggling with carb-heaviness. Hopefully I can find something good in these cookbooks that can make up for it.

No bonus points - Air fryer potatoes with oil on it to make it nice and crispy

Yes bonus points - black bean burgers. It’s breadcrumbs, warmed black beans that got cooled down, and an egg to make it stick together. That’s healthy.

Oh dang thank you for letting me know! I definitely missed that.

Oh that’s good to hear! I was just worried the endgame goal was a little more serious than I tend to be.

Oh I meant I doubt there’s going to be something like an anime community or little sub communities for different things? Unless there might be. I just remember someone asking about that and getting a negative reply once…?

Unless y’all are cool with us discussing these things in the bigger communities, I’d be fine with staying in that case. Might be a little confused over here, it’s been a long day haha.

Reading through the docs rather slowly, but one important thing that I seem to be understanding is that you want to be something like…your own little community that takes a more mindful approach to curated content into consideration, eventually leading to potentially doing good in the world, so forth. Kinda activist-y?

I think that’s all perfectly valid. It’s not Reddit, and that’s okay. Sadly I do think I’ll have to go looking for some place else since I feel like this implies I won’t have a place to talk about silly little anime shenanigans anytime soon, but I want to say this: It’s super duper cool what you’re all doing. You’ve been stormed by Reddit and you’re sticking to your core beliefs, despite that.

I hope you all cultivate a good community for yourself!

Genshin Impact and Honkai Star Rails.

Genshin Impact successfully had my attention for over five hundred days. It’s a regularly updated game that can be played entirely F2P, and I love that concept. Anyone who claims that you have to whale to get good at the game is wrong. You just have to play the game and ignore that some Youtubers and Twitch Streamers seem to believe that fake big numbers are the only way to improve in that game. In reality, I’ve watched streamers ignore that, and instead opt to play with their favorite romantic pairing or favorite character because they just enjoy the game more that way.

Honkai Star Rails seems to be a similar concept, however it faces a dilemma where it is a turn-based game and as a result the battle mechanics, so far, have to be more carefully considered. For example, I run a defense-healer-single attack-AOE attack team. So far, I tend to die if I don’t do that. The gameplay is more simplistic than Genshin Impact, but the battles are stronger and tend to take longer. Bright side: because it was recently launched you get a bunch of free pulls! Yeah!

Not really.

I like witchy stuff but only if its considerable to placebos. A rose quartz bracelet, for example, might not be scientifically going to attract love and good fortune—but its cute and makes me happy, so who knows, THAT might help.

If I had to choose a religion though, I’d probably go with one of those polytheist religions because ever since I was a kid and first went to a church camp, I decided that a singular “God” scares the shit out of me. I basically considered “God” too overpowered and decided that wasn’t for me.

Not going well but I am not without hope either.

My mom didn’t get approved for social assistance so I’m crunching numbers on our budget for the next month or so.

Brought out the instant pot and made some nice black beans, which I turned into black bean burgers. 😋

Switched from Pop OS to Linux Mint, liking the experience so far. Not as cute as Pop OS was, but I like the interface and the battery alerts and sound effects. So it’s not bad.

Got bipolar disorder, so yes, I understand completely.

You’d THINK that being diagnosed with something that is prone to giving you depression would make you clue in quicker, but it doesn’t. “Nah, can’t be that.”

Thank you, I am super incredibly nervous but I hope it ends up going well. Kinda sucks trying to support another person when I myself am on poverty-level social assistance, but if both of us are on it, it will relieve a lot of stress.

I love visual novels but I’m so bad at playing them. I keep buying them because I love to support the industry, but they tend to be hours and hours long so I don’t finish them, aha.

The last one I played through a route on was “Life After Magic” which is a pretty relatable queer VN about a Sailor Moon expy who dropped out of high school and ended up in a dead-end job, having to reunite with her friends / potential love interests. I’d like to finish this one because I know you can date the villain in one route.

After roughly five hours of phone calls, on Friday I somehow managed to get a lead on getting my mother back on social assistance. We have an appointment tomorrow for her to apply. I’m hoping that the application actually goes through and we don’t once again get told to screw off.

I’m gonna be exhausted this week!! I have so many appointments.