diffrentcolours

1 what's your favourite kitchen appliance?
I never really thought about ranking them. The kettle is probably my favorite because it gets used the most.

2 do you have a collection of anything?
Random things related to Stitch (from Lilo & Stitch)

3 what's the best job you've ever had?
Probably the one I have now.

4 what's the worst job you've ever had?
Temping for minimum wage in a team that chased people up for overdue loans. I was new to the UK, so my partner and I were ineligible for all benefits, and I had a lot more in common with the people on the other side of these phone calls I could hear all day long as I was becoming The One Who Could Make the Printer Work and learning to like bananas because we had free fruit in the office and I needed the calories.

5 what's your favourite piece of furniture and where did you get it?
The green couch I bought the WonderHouse is pretty good. I can't remember where it came from; V sorted it out online of course.

6 what's your go-to recipe when you want to make something that requires minimal effort?
"Minimal effort" to me is taking something out of the freezer and putting it in the oven, which isn't a recipe. I guess in terms of things that I'd call a recipe that aren't difficult (and really pay off in how delicious it is, there's always the broccoli halloumi thing.

7 are you married or do you intend to get married?
I am not. I wouldn't say I intend to but I didn't intend to the other time either and it ended up being useful for geopolitical reasons so I wouldn't rule that out again in the future.

8 do you have kids? do you want them?
No and...I do not want to have them in terms of from my own body, and I'm fine that my life doesn't seem to have brought me any, but also if it had I think that would've been fine too.

9 are you on good terms with your parents?
...yes? This kinda came up at transgym yesterday: on the spectrum between good parents and shit parents mine are kinda...shit in practice but also... I talk to them every Sunday evening, which a lot of people would consider being pretty close and my parents consider less than the minimum to be happy.

10 do you have siblings? do you hang out with them?
ahahaha I have never found a good answer to this question. Do I have siblings in that I do and he turns up in anecdotes and suchlike? Or do I not in that if I say I do people ask stuff like "do you hang out with him?" and I can never hang out with him.

11 do you vote?
I vote in two countries! I just applied for a postal vote for the upcoming by election, because I can't remember if I'd done that since I got the notifications about it expiring.

12 what's the biggest purchase you've ever made?
Technically the mortgage on my old house but that didn't feel like a purchase. Next up is my Indefinite Leave to Remain which cost me I think I calculated about £7500 -- at the time. Using the Bank of England's inflation calculator, that'd be £12,828.24, and that's not counting that the Home Office has more-than-doubled the costs of those visas and applications since.

13 what are your hobbies?
Listening to podcasts, watching baseball.

14 what's a hobby you'd like to get into?
Hiking.

15 do you collect anything?
Aches, cynicism, grudges... wait, is this a question about knickknacks?

16 how long have you known your oldest friend?
I'm not really in very good touch with anyone I knew before I moved here, so probaby 18 or 19 years (despite being partners and good friends before that, neither D or I can remember what year we actually met but it was either 18 or 19 years ago).

17 are you a member of any clubs or associations?
local Queer Club. I have a gym membership lol. I don't think anything else?

18 have you ever changed fields in your career or education?
I'm a millennial, we don't get fields and careers. Not the disabled ones among us especially.

19 how many wisdom teeth do you have and have you had any removed?
I had them all taken out at 18, I didn't want to, my dentist said I had to, they'd be causing me loads of pain. They never did. I'm still convinced he did it to get money out of my parents.

20 what's your favourite beverage?
Coffee

21 do you have any living grandparents?
I did until a year ago.

22 do you have nieces/nephews/godchildren/other kids in your life that aren't yours?
D's niblings, his sister's two kids. They are great. They're also tweens/young teens now so increasingly absent/mysterious/incomprehensible, but still such good fun when we do get to hang out.

23 what's the coolest place you've visited?
There are so many, and it's hard to compare them. At the moment my first thought is the Atomium in Brussels.

24 what's your most recent degree and has it been useful to you?
BA (Hons) Linguistics. It has been very useful to me: not in an employment sense (beyond the fact that I think having a degree made it easier to get my job), but it has been so helpful to me to be able to approach my life and the world through this lens.

25 would you rather own a dishwasher or a washing machine if you could only have one or the other?
Oh the times in my life when I haven't owned a (working) washing machine have been absolutely miserable. It's much easier to wash dishes by hand than to wash clothes by hand (or go to the laundromat even if there is one closer now than there used to be because it's where my barber was!).

26 do you make a list before going to the grocery store or just wing it?
We mostly shop online. D has a kind of master list that we just tick off what we need each week(ish) when we do the order.

27 what's your favourite household chore?
Mowing the lawn.

28 what chore do you hate the most?
Cleaning things I don't know how to clean/never feel like I get it clean.

29 do you have houseplants and how are you at keeping them alive?
We have so many, I'm so lucky. V looks after them; this is something else I would be shit at noticing in time. But I love living surrounded by them.

30 what's your living arrangement? (who do you live with, in what kind of building, do you own or rent or other?
I live with my boyfriend and his partner, in a suburban semi-detached house that I think was social housing? Sold in the 80s to a builder who...did things to it himself, many of which have consequences we're still living with. Technically the mortgage is D's and I'm a lodger but in practice all three of us contribute to the bills/food/household stuff.

hafnia

(If you want to ask me a question, there's a handful of spots left, and you can do so here!)

Talk about the art of running one-shot ttrpgs

A bit of context here before we leap in: if you're not familiar with tabletop, one-shot adventures are games that can be played in a single session (typically somewhere from 3-5 hours, depending on the table).

( There is certainly *something* to running them... )

azurelunatic

I got a steroid shot in my right knee on Wednesday, and miraculously I can almost walk again.

I'm still spending a lot of time in bed, but I don't have to strategize about bathroom trips. One cane is sufficient.

cosmolinguist

This afternoon, diffrentcolours and I were watching a documentary about chemistry with Jim Al-Khalili. (D has done sterling work getting the TV to be able to talk to his file server, so it's way easier to watch random things he has downloaded for us...like this BBC documentary about the history of chemistry.)

Suddenly, out of nowhere, D said of Dr. Al-Khalili, "He has a good scientist head."

"He really does!" I replied immediately.

Then I paused.

Then I said "Wait, I don't know what that means, and I don't know why I was so convinced of it."

Maybe it's the baldness?

Bald/shaved heads are so good. This came up at transgym this morning too: I was complaining about how much sweat my hair has absorbed because it's too long now --the last haircut I had was on my birthday! 3-4 weeks is plenty for my hair to need cutting again; the one problem with really short hair is it doesn't stay that way for long. And my barber has suddenly turned into a laundromat -- seriously, it only took a month for it to be open as a completely different kind of business! -- so I need to try a new one and I haven't had time and ugh...maybe tomorrow.

Anyway, as I was complaining, I was overhead by F, a guy with a shaved head, who said "enjoy it while it lasts!" Apparently he's still in his 20s, bless him. But it got me and our friend A talking about how much we like bald guys as an aesthetic, and then D told us about the subreddit for bald people, where guys share photos of them with thinning/receding hair, all sad about it, and then photos of them bald, happy, no longer giving a fuck. I think it's that "the way to win the game of conventional attractiveness is not to play" transformation that makes this seem sexy to me.

(Not that baldness can't be conventionally attractive, but a lot of balding guys seem to think that. Even if they're just having to get used to the change or confronting their mortality or whatever they do, I don't know. But it seems to do them some good to have to come to terms about it, if not embrace it.)

(Plus obviously bald heads are sexy because a nice close shave is fun to touch, and in the right circumstances I think the stubble can feel good too...)

hafnia

Full list of questions is, of course, here — there are still slots open if you have something you desperately want to know! :)

Day 6: What's it like being a GM/DM for ttrpg?

Okay, so.

Do you remember when you were a little kid, and you would play pretend? Maybe you were lucky enough to live in a neighborhood with a lot of kids, maybe you had a sibling, or maybe you were on your own. Whatever the case, you probably engaged in imaginative play, right? "Make-believe" or "pretend" or whatever you call it, maybe with props/costumes or maybe just with your imagination.

Right, so!

When I was a Wee Thing (back in the Mists of Time, aka the 1990s, this is fine), I was always the one that was going, "HEY! We're playing Pretend! Let's all get together, and..."

I would tell everyone the rules (usually just the premise/"don't be a jerk about this"), and then we'd just...play. Memorable games include:

-PIONEERS! (I had just read Little House in the Big Woods and, well, I was 6, what do you want)
-MURDER DETECTIVES (someone was murdering dolls in the dollhouse and we had to figure out who it was)
-Knights of the Round Table (I was Merlin; my friend's older brother, who was "too cool" for this kind of stuff but still painfully interested played King Arthur and told the littler kids what quests to go on)
-PRINCESS IN DISGUISE (my favorite, probably, where we were all royalty of some convoluted line or another who had to ??? to get our kingdom back — those question marks are because it usually varied a great deal)
-WITCHES (we made potions in the yard from various plants. I feel like most kids do this)

Right, um.

Running tabletop is a lot like playing those games again, but as an adult and with a better budget.

I feel like I could simply end it here, but no, really, ah — it's collaborative storytelling, where you are all agreeing to some conceits about the fiction (e.g. "this is high fantasy and takes place in this setting"), and then the dice and whatnot are for randomness. As the GM/DM, it's not really my job to "tell" the story so much as it is to gather all the disparate threads together and come out with a pleasing narrative.

It's literally what I used to do when I was playing Make Believe with my friends thirty-odd years ago, which makes sense given that ttrpg at its best is imaginative play for adults.

So. Yeah.

That's what it's like.

Good to know I haven't matured past the grand old age of eight, I guess? :P

cosmolinguist

Today's Teddywalk took us a slightly unusual way -- I let him choose, within reason. He didn't spend as long sniffing the grass triangle as before, and afterward when I wanted to drag him more directly back toward his house he scampered off the other way. This took us to a tree-lined residential street where he decided to poop next to one of the trees just as a man parked his land barge just behind us and the kids that got out of it were entertained by this free show.

This route also took us past a school where, even though it was nearing 5 o'clock, kids were going toward the school, with their grownups. They kinda looked like they were wearing pajamas? Some were in bathrobes or oodies. Some seemed to carry pillows or soft toys. One was almost hidden behind a Stitch that must have been fully half her size. It was adorable.

I had a pretty good day otherwise too.

Work was oddly satisfying.

A bunch of things happened to coincide today: I presented my new train report twice, first to a panel of subject-matter experts and accessibility advocates that I'm on, where people were very kind about it (especially as it was at the end of an hour and a half meeting that some people had to leave early and/or thought was only an hour long; one made sure to apologize for leaving halfway through but told me he'd read the report and it was good, which was very sweet).

Then in the afternoon I presented it to a group of lived-experience campaigners, a group I attended back when I was a volunteer who didn't have this job yet. They did their usual thing of wanting to vent their spleens on any tangentially-related topic, but I'm used to that and I kinda love it. Afterward, my colleague who runs these meetings messaged me to thank me and say she appreciates that I always handle the questions so well. I didn't think I'd done anything special! But despite that (or actually because of it!) this was really nice to hear.

And as well as feeling particularly competent with the different audiences my work is for, I also had a quick one-to-one(ish) with my manager which indirectly addressed the stuff I've been stressing about lately and where seemed much happier than I'm used to hearing with the work that I have done in the last year and the stuff that's coming up this year.

It's funny because the other day, on our way to the theater, D pointed out where transgym yoga had moved to: one of those "not actually far away but hard for me to find/get to on a bus" places. So I actually looked at yoga on the transgym website and not only was it on this Friday (it's every other week), but it was back at its old location! My hips are so much happier now, and it'll be good for my brain too.

And now, after a week that was really truly about a month long, it's the weekend! We have basically no plans, and the fascists aren't even yelling at the hotel this Sunday!

So many good things.

wildeabandon

I got my exam results yesterday, and they were slightly disappointing, in the "virtually anyone would be fucking delighted, but they were all on the low end of what I was expecting" sense of the word disappointing. I got 15/20 in Catechetics, 16/20 in Anthropology, 17/20 in Psalms & Prophets, and 18/20 in Hebrew II and Ugaritic. The first two are entirely understandable - I wasn't particularly keen on either course, and whilst by no means neglecting them completely, I didn't put in a particularly high level of effort. I'm happy enough with the 18s. They were both challenging courses, and 18 is a bloody good mark.

The one that's bugging me is the Psalms though. I thought I understood the material well, and that I'd had some interesting and insightful things to say. I know that I got 18/20 in the paper that makes up half the mark, which means that I only got 15-16/20 in the exam. Hardly the end of the world, but it's the only one where I don't understand why I didn't do better. I've emailed the prof to ask for feedback, so with luck I'll get something useful. (ETA: Apparently marks get rounded down, not up - I got 8/10 and 9/10 in the two exam questions, and the 8 was because he had to prompt me a couple of times, and since at least one of those time he prompted me for the thing I was about to say anyway I am now feeling a lot less bothered by the overall mark.)

One result though which is positive in a sense is that my overall grade is now almost guaranteed. My average is currently 87%. The top grade boundary is an average of 90%, which had seemed in reach before these results, but would now require me to get 20/20 in all but one of my remaining courses (and 19/20 in that), which isn't really plausible. The grade boundary below is an average of 85%, and whilst the fact that there are just more numbers between 0 and 87 than between 87 and 100 means that there's more scope for my grade to be dragged down than up, I would have to do quite a bit worse than I have been for that to happen. Anyway, the sense that there's not a lot that I can do to change my overall grade means that I can concentrate more on learning for the sake of learning, which in the long term is almost certainly better than chasing grades.

hafnia

The master list of questions is here — the 16th, 22nd and 24th are all free, if you want to ask anything! :D

Talk about SPACE HEIST (how you came up with the idea, where you currently are in designing it, whatever else you wanna say...?)

Oh, glob, this is a deep pull. Ha. Okay.

For those that aren't in the know, Space Heist is a 2d6 ttrpg I designed and wrote myself. It takes place at a point where humanity has gone to the stars, interstellar travel is common, and people are scattered across the galaxy. Think space stations, alien planets, incredibly advanced tech...

Right, um, anyway. I started writing it about 5 years ago, in 2021. As far as "how did I come up with the idea", uh. People who have been around here a Long Time probably recall different short stories I wrote at various points in time about something I called the "Explorer Corps" — basically, a human-centered operation that was dedicated to "charting the uncharted" and hired the "best of the best" to do it. When I came up with it originally, it was very much, "I need something that works to put scientists into space but isn't NASA".

The very first long-form campaign I wrote/ran was wrapping up in 2021, and my players all wanted to play something science fiction. I'd thought about running TechNoir or Scum and Villainy, and neither one of them really appealed to me. So, instead of running something like Mothership or a Lasers and Feelings hack, I went, "I've been thinking about designing a game", and wrote Space Heist, using all that old Explorer Corps vibes/worldbuilding.

At this point, the player documents are a hot mess, but they're technically done. I have yet to start working on the GM documents beyond some basic notes on setting and how to run the game that are more philosophy than "here's how this works, mechanically". I have run it — I've run a couple of one-shots in it — and i'ts one of the things I get asked to run most frequently, because the people who like it, really like it.

The last couple of playtests, as well as getting more familiar with playing 2d6 systems like PbtA, means that I've got a bunch of thoughts about players and how skills etc work. I need to review and revise the documents, something I'm planning to do in the next month or so. After I revise the player documents (which will be pretty involved), I may run some further playtests (FUN) to see how stuff hangs together, if it does. I also need to actually write the GM guide for this — most of it is just "vibes", but there are some setting things and one-shot ideas that people who run it should be aware of.

It's my goal for this year to go ahead and get it up on itch.io, whether that's being like, "this is in alpha, please give me feedback, you can download it for free", or if I actually do get what I would call a 1.0 release ready and release it as a pay-as-you-want PDF. Right now I'm leaning toward the latter, just because I can't envision myself wanting to do a lot more iterations of it, and the only thing that's really stopping me is the knowledge I have zero artwork for it (but that I would want to either make or commission art — the former is intimidating, but the latter requires money I don't have to dedicate to a project like this right now).

So!

Kind of weird, but it came up in therapy the other day — my therapist asking, like, "so how are you doing at putting more of your stuff out there" (since it's something I have talked about with him pretty extensively — not monetizing projects, specifically, but putting stuff in a place where other people can see it and take joy in it). I said that I was planning to release Space Heist this year, and he was all for it. Guess I'll have at least one person holding me accountable? Heh.

cosmolinguist

On such a nothingburger of a day like this, where I feel like I don't have anything to talk about because it was really normal (awake, work, walk Teddy, make dinner, try to stay awake till bedtime), I am challenging myself to think of three good things.

Having taken off my clothes last night and added them to the unacceptably-large pile of liminal clothes I need to decide to wash or put away, I told myself I'd deal with it all this morning. And I did! With about five minutes before a meeting. Feels good; it was starting to weigh on my mental/emotional state having my room be untidy like this.
We saw neighbor G outside on our way to walk Teddy. We don't see as much of the neighbors now we're not standing in the driveway/on our end of the road with Gary any more; it's one of the things I miss. G is cool. He has started working at the bakery at rhe big Tesco! He said he likes it, though he also said it's very unsociable hours of course.
As I was starting to type this up, having gone to bed early for a Doof night because I feel kinda gross (I didn't get to sleep until well after 3am last night, and I think I was just sleep deprived after powering through work), D unexpectedly came upstairs to "make my back go click," as he says. It feels so much better when he's pressed some of the tension out of my muscles and spine, mmm. He's so nice.

diffrentcolours

(backstory: I asked the GP about an ADHD diagnosis in Spring 2023, got given some forms to fill in, sat on them for about a year, filled them in in March 2024, returned them in April, got rejected by the Adult ADHD service for not talking about my childhood symptoms enough; got given a different survey to fill out, returned that in April 2025, got accepted by the Adult ADHD service in September 2025 and put on a 7+ year waiting list)

Last October, cosmolinguist looked into getting a private ADHD diagnosis and compiled some notes for me. In January I managed to force myself to look through them and do some other research. I asked my GP to refer me to CareADHD for an assessment under NHS Right to Choose. The assessment will cost me about £400, which is a lot cheaper than some of the other providers. About a week ago I heard back from the GP saying that they'd done that. I haven't yet heard from CareADHD and obviously now it's not my turn to do something I'm really impatient about it! But I'll give it a little while longer before getting in touch to establish a timeline - it'll probably be another couple of months before I get the diagnosis appointment.

I'm having a lot of feelings about this. I know that getting ADHD meds has been a literal life saver for friends, and I'm hoping it'll help me with my current situation, where lack of concentration is making me suck at my day job and many other things in life. I'm hoping it'll help complement the therapy work I'm doing, where we've been talking about emotional dysregulation and my anhedonia - if I can't enjoy things, I'm significantly less motivated to do them and seek shiny dopamine diversions.

I'm trying not to get my hopes up too much. This won't be a magic bullet that'll solve everything overnight. It might not even help much at all, or it might be a painstaking process of adjusting medications and dosages (and dealing with ongoing meds shortages in the UK, particularly post-Brexit). In the short term it may even make things worse. But the possibility of breaking the decades-long cycle of overcommitment and burnout is so tantalising...

diffrentcolours

Last night, after a very pleasurable theatre trip with cosmolinguist, I ended up messing around a bit with the smart plugs I bought ages ago.

I have actually been using these plugs somewhat. They're on the house WiFi and that lets me remote-control them through a browser and set timers for them. They also have a mechanical button if you want to interact with them in a more traditional manner - that's basically a hard requirement for any home automation stuff I do, after the time I visited a friend and had to poop in the darkness because the bathroom lights couldn't be switched on until he reinstalled a Raspberry Pi.

But having resurrected Home Assistant on my fileserver I figured it was time to actually get these things talking to each other. I still find HA overly complicated, and I'm not quite sure what the difference is between an "app" and an "integration". I hit a few dead ends following this guide but eventually got to the point where I could use the Home Assistant web UI to control the plugs rather than the built-in web UI.

That doesn't sound like much of an improvement but it's actually quite exciting, because now anything I can do with Home Assistant, I can do with the plugs. I installed up simple speech-to-text and text-to-speech integrations in HA, and now I can talk to the HA app on my phone, tell it to turn the plugs on or off, and it does so! And tells me it's done it in a northern voice called Alan!

It's another small step on the HA journey and I'm still not thinking about temperature monitoring around the house, but it gave me a nice little dopamine hit.

(by this time it was 2am and E prodded me to come to bed, so I excitedly demonstrated this to him and then went to sleep)

hafnia

(You know the drill: if you want to submit a question, you can do so here ♥ )

Day 4: Give us all the cat updates!

This isn't really a question, but I'll let it slide :P

STATE OF THE CATS

The Little Cat:

She is officially, after Gid's growth spurt, back to being the littlest cat in the house (thank God), so it doesn't have to be an ironic nickname. Huzzah!

She has decided over the last couple of months that she wishes to remain an upstairs goblin. We respect this and keep her and Hilda apart. They're both incredibly territorial and attempts to reconcile them to each other have not gone well; the long and short of it is that in the interest of keeping both cats happy and healthy, one gets the upstairs and one gets the downstairs. Our house is 2700 sf, so this is not a bad proposition. Everyone has food/toys/litter pans on their floor, and they are very good about sticking to the upstairs/downstairs. Both cats are unstressed and happy, so. You know.

(Genuinely I think they each forget that the other exists when they can't directly SEE each other, but whatever — we keep one of the downstairs doors closed, the one that's closest to the stairs, and the peace is maintained.)

Hilda:

Still a horrible gremlin. She's on a perpetual diet because she is Too Chonk. We finally figured out what was going on re: that (she figured out how to open the container we kept dry food in...), and put a stop to it, so she is slowly losing weight again.

She's still very much Max's cat and not mine, as in, she will neglect me if he is home, because he is HER person and I'm just the sidepiece.

Gideon:

Oh, God, Gid.

He is almost fully grown now (he's gonna be 2 in a month!), he is long and lanky and there is still not a brain in that beautiful head. His tabby markings have come in way more strongly now that he's an adult, so he no longer looks like a mottled Siamese — you can clearly see that The Tabby Is Strong In This One.

Over the last few months, he's become almost ridiculously cuddly. It's kind of cute, actually — he has a bedtime routine and waits for both Max and I to go upstairs before he hops on the bed, headbutts both of us (rubs his face on our faces), then curls up between us and goes to sleep. When Max gets up in the mornings, Gid follows him downstairs to hang out, then comes back up to curl up at my feet once Max is at work. When I start the day in earnest is when he decides he can go do Cat Stuff and doesn't need to hang out with me.

Something we have realized is that he does not like to get petted unless he is basically at eye level with you, so sometimes he will climb onto the piano and howl mournfully until someone pays attention to him. It's weirdly endearing? Like, he is very careful about how he does it, he doesn't knock stuff over or touch anything he's not supposed to, he just hops up there and cries until someone pets him. Heh.

On the whole, cats are still 10/10, pretty glad to have 'em even when they do weird stuff.

For pictures, ofc, I post them regularly to my Mastodon account. :)

cosmolinguist

diffrentcolours has been on a mission to find more fun/novel things to do: it's kinda been the upshot of both our therapy lately that we should do this.

So tonight we went to see a Noel Coward play, Private Lives, at Hope Mill Theatre which was new to me. It was a great venue, though I'm glad I didn't have to try to find it on my own because that never would've worked.

And the play was great too: very cleverly staged, with occasional video projection and really good use of (mostly diagetic) music, well-acted, and the darkest the-straights-are-not-okay underbelly beneath that Noel Coward wit: it was sweet and even sexy but also made me think about what we do or don't learn from relationships that have ended. The seats weren't wide enough for our hench shoulders, but that just meant we had to snuggle up and that was such a nice way to watch it.

The theater's independent, gets no external funding, so definitely worth supporting if you get the chance. I was glad to see it pretty busy on this random weekday evening.

mark posting in

dw_maintenance

Hi all!

I'm doing some minor operational work tonight. It should be transparent, but there's always a chance that something goes wrong. The main thing I'm touching is testing a replacement for Apache2 (our web server software) in one area of the site.

Thank you!

hafnia

(For all the questions, or to submit one of your own, the post is here ♥ )

Favorite song of the moment?

I do appreciate that it's "of the moment", ha. :D

There's a few — we'll go with different genres!

1). The weird: "Ants in My Room", Carter Vail.

You'll be fine, my baby
Oh, you've got to trust me
It'll all work out in the end, just maybe
You'll be fine, my baby
Oh, you've got to trust me
It'll all work out, 'cause
No onе's gonna love you like

It's weird, it's incredibly fucking catchy, it's great, I...don't know what else there is to say? Max made me listen to it on Friday and I love it.

2). What people probably expect from me: "Votive", the New Pornographers.

My hands are cupped around a match
I'm just trying to keep the lights on

That...feels familiar. To say the least.

3). Old but still good: Blood in My Mouth, Djrum

That cello opening is so good. The music layered over ambient noise — the result is this really weird, wistful soundscape. The fact that the only words we get are at the very end is also choice. I've had this album in particular on repeat a lot while writing lately. ♥

cosmolinguist

Counseling today was all about trying to make my body feel safer amidst all the mental/emotional stuff going on.

My counselor said some bodies need stillness some bodies need movement. I think mine is the latter.

She also suggested

getting people to spend time with me
gentle conversations about not-stressful things
familiar media
nice sensory stuff? (scents/textures)

Thinking about this tonight, she suggested I try to remember it all week.

hafnia

(For all the questions, or to submit one of your own, the post is here ♥ )

What's your favorite TTRPG setting, and why?

Ha. I love this mostly because I don't have one.

( details on what I mean beneath the jump. )

hafnia

AO3 added additional "No Fandom" tags!

To celebrate this (and because one of them in particular made me laugh and go, "of course that's a thing", I'm amusing myself by playing Tag Bingo, and if that sounds like fun to you, READ ON.

( beneath a jump to be considerate <3 )

cosmolinguist

Work team check-in this morning, I dreaded getting asked "How was your weekend, Erik?" My actual weekend: onboarding for new antifascist activities and returning to old ones, across two continents. My answer: "Oh you know, quiet."

I'm not doing anything scary or glamorous btw: mostly I'm in a bunch of Signal chats and standing around having cool conversations with strangers. There really is stuff for everyone to do.

(Including the people who are looking after people like me. I had a bad brain day yesterday and then listened to my parents for an hour and this time it was 100% [cw: MN, ICE, etc.] Details I'd managed to avoid myself, my mom just splurged all over me. My mom was late getting in touch with me because she'd been on the phone to her most annoying sister for the previous hour and, except for this bare fact, didn't even mention it. Normally I'd expect several solid minutes about how bad that was! So I went to bed feeling really down and the people and things that help lift me up are part of the fight too.)

hafnia

(For all the questions, or to submit one of your own, the post is here ♥ )

What are you most looking forward to this month?

Excellent question, ha.

I'll punt on this a little bit, because the actual answer (that I'm still recovering from last year) is not very interesting, and will say —

I'm trying to make a sourdough starter. "Trying" being the key word here. It's my hope that by the end of the month, I will have managed to successfully bake a loaf of sourdough bread. We'll see how it goes? I'm using the King Arthur sourdough guide, since most of their recipes work for me. I stopped by the co-op today to get whole-wheat flour from their bulk bins (local! it's hard red wheat grown in Oregon and they sell it for $0.99/lb, which is *wild* to me!), and this afternoon, I measured out flour and water and threw them in a sourdough-safe container in my kitchen, where they are now quietly sitting together in the oven, because it's the warmest place in the house. Ha.

Tomorrow will be the first discard, and you're supposed to see activity within 48 hours, so. Hopefully I will? And it'll go well? Shall see! ♥

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You Don't Live Like I Do

At the mercy of any sister with wrist scars and black eye goo

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