I have to say, putting together the Minerals setis a perfectly pleasant way to spend a Saturday evening at the midpoint of a five-day break. I don’t want to be too much of a Lego wanker (who am I kidding) but this set, especially for something that only has 880 pieces and has to build three frames, has a ton of cool techniques that I’ve never used before. I’m going to have to find somewhere bright to display this so that all the translucent pieces look properly amazing.
Brace yourself; it’s possible I’m going to watch a movie later.
I dunno what the headline means either, but a new Atmosphere album just came out and I’m listening to it and that lyric from “Neptune” stood out for some reason(*). I have been playing Silksong for several hours, hating most of it, and I still stand by my thorough review from the other day. The game’s fucking masochistic; it’s not fun-hard, it’s bang your head against the wall until the pain stops hard, and I can’t explain why I’m still playing the fucking thing. I’m not relaxed when I’m playing, I’m stressed out and angry, and that’s … not only kind of shockingly immature for a motherfucker who is going to be fifty in less than a year, it’s also not really a good use for leisure time? Like, there are other things I could be doing. There are even any number of other unpleasant things I could be doing that would at least result in, say, the house being cleaner or some sort of shit like that.
It is possible that I spend too much of my leisure time doing things that actively make me unhappy. I should find a therapist and have a conversation about that.
(*) Also don’t know why the album is called “Jestures,” but I’m on my first listen so it might become apparent eventually. There’s no title track.
The Treehouse set, which has since been retired, has been sitting in my office waiting patiently for me to get to it since my 48th birthday. I finally started putting it together a week or so ago, doing a couple of bags at a time because the instruction manual was terrible and I was going blind every time I looked at it. One way or another today I finally tackled all those leaves and finished it off. There were also green leaves in the box, but I like the autumn look a lot more.
Also, my fingers are not quite bleeding, but damn, putting all those vertical pieces into the leaves hurt.
The leafy portions can be lifted directly off, and all of the roofs come off of the three “house” portions of the set, so you can explore inside if you want to. Everything is detailed and furnished according to Lego’s traditional “details where no one will see them” system (and there’s a yellow gemstone hidden underneath the grass for some reason, too) and it all looks really nice.
In its final resting place, giving the A-Frame cabin some extra shade:
I may end up putting it on a little riser to make it more visible. That picture’s not from eye level in my desk chair but it’s still a little more covered up than I’d like.
I really ought to re-embrace the notion that I don’t have to post every single day, but I’m absurdly close to a year straight without missing a day and only, what, 2/3 of those have been bullshit? That’s a pretty good record, right? January and February have been exceptionally heinous, I know, but between being constantly sick and actually (don’t tell anyone) having a pretty damn good year at work, I’m both lower on good material than I normally am and less inclined to talk about it than I might be otherwise. The main things going on in my life right now are shit I actively don’t want to talk about here, which leaves book reviews and the occasional picture of a pile of fountain pens.
(The purple one on the right and the coffee-colored one in the middle are my current favorites. I am trying my best to not buy any more, because if I do, I’m going to start edging into more expensive ones. The most expensive pen there was $52. I caught myself eyeing one for five hundred dollars the other day and am uncomfortably close to pulling the trigger one that runs $150. I can’t do this.)
Anyway, speaking of video games (just pretend), I’ve been trying to put 9 Sols to bed but I’m completely stuck– I actually turned the difficulty down on a boss that I’m certain I could have beaten but I didn’t want to take the time, and now I can’t figure out where to go next. If I can’t figure it out tonight I’m gonna hit up a walkthrough. The game’s a lot of fun but I feel like it should have been a 25-hour game and right now I’m pushing 30 and I don’t know how much game there is left– at least two more bosses and who knows how much exploration. I have like four games on my PS5 I want to get to and another on the Xbox, believe it or not, and I can’t play any of them until I beat this one.
Got a new book from Amazon today, and the damned thing was mis-bound, with the cover a good quarter inch or more off from where it was supposed to be. Ultimately it’s no big deal, because I can just exchange it, but I’ve never seen this in a new book before. (Entirely possible that this is because Amazon specifically has never sent me one; no brick and mortar bookstore would even let these make it out to the floor; they’d have been damaged out immediately once they came out of the box.)
I survived my first day back, although I do mean “survived” in the most specific meaning of the term, certainly not one that implies any teaching took place. I foolishly neglected to take any drugs before leaving the house other than my antibiotics, which meant that the first thing I did when I left work was go to a drugstore and buy the methy kind of Sudafed, the one you have to ask for and have your ID scanned. I do actually have an ear infection, according to my school nurse, but she says the antibiotics I’m already on will take care of it. We’ll see!
Let’s see, what else? Spent the evening fighting off the urge to buy another fountain pen or two. My rapid cycling through obsessions and hobbies is fucking breathtaking, y’all. I need to become obsessed with saving money for a while. The world economy is about to tank (mental note: save $1,000 as quickly as possible, withdraw it in cash, and keep it in the house) and even if that wasn’t the case (or if I wasn’t already first against the wall as an atheist, outspokenly liberal teacher running the gay kids’ club in a rural area of a red state) my kid is gonna be driving in a couple of years. You’d think I’d at least be able to sock money away for a car.
Alternatively, we’ll be scrounging the wastelands for food in a couple of years, so why not buy fountain pens now while they’re still being manufactured?
We’re going to present these in reverse order, because one of them is a better picture than the other:
I finished the Lego Himeji Castle set this evening, which turned out to be a really fun build even if it continues the fine Lego tradition of putting a bunch of cool details in that are immediately completely covered up by other bricks, never to be seen again. I suppose I would rather have the cool details than not have them, but I wanna see them, dammit.
Also, I need a bigger house, because I have four unbuilt Lego sets sitting in boxes a few feet away from me right now and I have no idea where the hell I’m going to put any of them once they’re done. Anyone want to give me their house?
My wife got me (well, both of us, but I was the one who wanted them) registered for three pottery classes at a local makerspace for Christmas, and we had our second class today, charmingly titled “Build a Mug.” The first class was kintsugi pottery and I did not post my product from that one because, frankly, I screwed up on the very first step and didn’t notice it until it was much too late, and since the modern version of kintsugi involves repairing broken pottery with epoxy, the initial mistake meant that every subsequent piece I tried to put back together only ended up slightly more askew, and the final product just looks crap.
This mug? It’s not glazed yet, but I think I might actually use this mug once I have it finished in a couple of weeks. It needs to dry for about ten days and then we can go in and glaze it for final firing, so it’ll be a bit before I can post a picture of the final product, but my understanding is that glazing will smooth over a lot of the little imperfections. This obviously won’t look professional but I don’t think it looks completely crap, and the class was a lot of fun.
We’re actually doing a throwing class on Valentine’s Day, and I am fully ready to make pottery my entire Goddamned personality for a while if that’s as much fun as I think it might be.
I need a new obsession to keep me busy between now and the election. The way this weekend is going I’m going to have to do a full news/internet blackout in the next couple of weeks if I want to keep my sanity. Anyone want to buy me a lathe or a pottery wheel or, like, an easel and a bunch of those … things … you paint on, that I’ve forgotten the name of for some reason?
Holy shit, I really can’t remember.
Canvases! Anyone want to buy me an easel and some canvases? And I guess some paint?
Got thirty more cards done today. I think that’s my limit before my handwriting falls apart and I start misspelling things at random, as evidenced by the fact that I typed “limmit” just now and it was 100% deliberate and not a slip of the fingers. Either way, that’s a fourth of them done. Not bad.
Maybe I’ll make my son a couple more notebooks. He seemed to enjoy the first one well enough. I’ve got all this bookmaking crap lying around, I may as well use it.
I haven’t ordered the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC yet.
I … what?
I put something like 130 hours into Elden Ring. My Let’s Play series is a hundred and ten episodes long. I completed every mission I could find, got the Platinum trophy, all of the endings, everything. Played the absolute ever-loving shit out of that game and enjoyed Goddamn near every second of it.
And they’re releasing a lengthy DLC on the 21st, which by all indications is amazing. And I haven’t bought it, I don’t think I’m going to buy it, and I’m not excited about it. Right now I should be planning on staying up late on Thursday night so that I can get started immediately, just like I did with the actual game. I stayed up late to record the demo, for God’s sake.
What the hell is wrong with me?
There’s been a consistent theme in my life over the last several years of this creeping anhedonia, where I just … stop doing things I used to really love doing, or stop enjoying things I used to enjoy. I effectively don’twatch anything any longer. No movies, no TV, nothing streaming. There’s a new season of The Boys, which I’ve enjoyed. Not gonna watch it. The Acolyte? Not gonna watch it. I’m done with Star Wars. I’m done with Marvel. I’m only still buying comic books because my weekly trip to the comic shop is my only reliable in-person interaction with human beings I’m not related to or work with; I can’t stop shopping there unless I move or die. I could literally just come home and put them in a box and never read them and I wouldn’t miss a thing.
You’re never going to catch me complaining about reading, but it’s literally the only thing I do for fun. That’s weird, right? I read books and I write here. Dassit. Those are my hobbies. The honest truth is I think I could sell my PS5 and my Xbox and I wouldn’t miss them. And I’ve been a gamer my entire life.
I don’t fucking get it, and I don’t like it.
(And, to forestall this: Yes, I recognize that I’m basically describing a textbook case of clinical depression here. And while I’m on Effexor, that’s an anti-anxiety med, not an antidepressant, and I don’t think the two overlap much. But I have no other symptoms of depression, including the not exactly minor detail that I’m rarely actually feeling depressed. This is a mental health issue, don’t misunderstand me, but I feel like the most obvious answer is not the right one.)
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