greetings person in my computer. welcome to what is possibly the first in a set of weekly blog posts where I go over anything interesting that’s happened to me that week. I don’t have a single original thought in my head (/s) so I stole this idea from another blogger. I did find out that I can type these out in notion and then export as HTML, which is nice! I wrote the very first zonelets entry typing in the HTML tags manually. not impossible but not ideal. [edit: the html that notion exports is.... very weird. I ended up rewriting it.]

a tangent prior to getting into the weekly stuff: a long time ago, I would do daily entries in a site called 750 words, a site that (as the name implies) would encourage you to write 750 words a day, in a private entry. I stuck with that habit for a while, but I fell off at some point. writing every single day was something that became increasingly untenable, but I still kept the thought in the back of my mind of “I would like to start journalling again!” as a contrast, I’ve been using twitter for nearly as long as I’ve had my 750 words account [just over a decade, as of this entry]. twitter is for microblogging, so in a way I did my journalling through there, because it was infinitely easier to tweet out a series of tweets totaling 750 words over the course of a day. however, I think twitter being made up of such small snippets of thoughts was one of the contributors to my slowly shrinking attention span. besides, if I had a longer, more fully formed thought, I would have to string together tweets in a thread, which could get awkward. I’m hoping this blog will help me to ease back into the idea of writing longer form posts (like 750 words) while keeping them relatively light on content (so not like 750 words in that I’m not writing anything deeply personal).

long preamble aside, what did I do this week?

FFXIV

I started playing on my alt again, first just to get the moonfire faire event done with, but then to continue trucking through ARR. my main is in a sort of stasis right now, where nothing particularly interests me, but there’s not new MSQ out right now, so I pretty much just log on to do my weekly tomes and that’s it. I want to get back to progging savage/doing p9s reclears but… that’s something that takes a lot of energy and my focus has simply been in other places. I’m mostly fine with that.

anyways. for those new to the Vita OC Universe (tm), my main alt on ffxiv is one of my main original characters, carrie greene, ported to ffxiv. I’m writing their xiv self like they were isekaied from their main canon, mostly because I had the idea of playing the isekai trope completely straight because I thought it would be funny, and then I ended up getting attached.

here are a handful of recent snaps of them. he is for sure my most heavily modded xiv character right now, but I really wanted to give him a flat chest and big floofy hair. unauthorized fucking thing!!!

I’m alternating between war/nin/brd on them right now, mainly because the MSQ throws so much EXP at you with the road to 80 bonus that if I didn’t spread them out across classes, I would be stupidly overleveled. as it is, I’m about 7-10 levels ahead of the msq on all my classes, but I don’t have it in me to pick a fourth class to level to distribute the EXP. I’m already struggling to remember how to play the three classes she has.

I know I could have purchased a story skip for carrie, but I really wanted to put them through MSQ organically, because I feel like with my main xiv character it was really beneficial to slowly develop their story over the course of the months I proceeded through the MSQ. chipping away at their personality through thinking about how they would react to various events in the story is something that I would miss if I just skipped past it entirely.

right now carrie is gearing up for the titan fight in ARR! I hope to keep chipping away at her progression through MSQ over the next few weeks, at least until patch 6.5 comes out and I’m momentarily consumed by new content.

halloween prep

I was simply going to title this “spirit halloween”, but I had a handful of Halloween Moments over the course of this week so I’ll toss them all in one section.

this past wednesday, I visited a different spirit halloween than the one closest to me. this one had a much larger selection of ghostface merch, which I was delighted by! I deliberated for a while, but I ended up picking up a bedazzled ghostface mask and knife. I’m thinking about throwing together a bishoujo ghostface cosplay for halloween this year, so maybe I’ll use these as part of it? really, I just loved the sparkles LOL.

I did a loop around the store, looking for the handmade by robots ghost face charm. I had spotted this particular item on the spirit website earlier in the month, when I was doing my regular sweep to see what new ghostface merch had dropped. I knew I had to have it!! he was so small and cute… unfortunately I didn’t find him during the two times I stopped by my local spirit, so part of the reason I stopped by a different spirit was to see if they had him. going to check-out, I hadn’t seen the charm in the store, and was resigned to another failed search attempt.

until I saw a handmade by robots display in the check-out line’s shelves. they had one (1) ghost face charm left. I was overjoyed.

I hung him from my car’s rearview mirror so that I can look at him when I am stuck in traffic. I love him so so much. something I didn’t entirely expect is that he’s soft? not like, stress ball squishy, but since he’s made from vinyl (and I’m fairly sure is hollow), he has a little bit of give if you press hard enough on his face. for now, this is the last spirit purchase I quote unquote need to make, since nothing else right now in the ghostface section of the spirit halloween site really calls to me. I’ll probably get another set of socks at some point, since I have two pairs of ghostface socks already. why not get some more!

another halloween related thing in my brain this week is halloween horror nights! specifically, the bracelet trade that folks are organizing. I don’t have the skills to make bracelets (nor are they… particularly something I want to make) but I had a moment where I thought about making stickers, and passing out goodie bags with a sticker, some paper stars, and maybe a piece of candy (tip from my sister is that dum dum lollipops are free from most allergens! so those are probably fine to hand out).

I scribbled a quick idea for a sticker while I was at work. I’m not married to this idea really, I just wanted to get something quick out while it was on my brain. I think I want to add more of the HHN icons, and make my sona a smaller part of the sticker (but still present! gotta get that branding in!). hoping that over the next week I can hash out a design I’m happy with.

last but not least, last night my completely unorganized youtube playlist spat out panic! at the disco’s 2008 song “it’s almost halloween.” which made me go into my annual fixation spiral on it. it’s almost halloween is fascinating to me because it exists in this sort of limbo between official release and unofficial release. it got a music video on the record label’s youtube channel, yet doesn’t exist on any other streaming services other than soundcloud. you can’t buy the song anywhere. it was performed live a sparse few times in october 2008 (and once in 2019 by former p!atd band member ryan ross). there exists a promo CD given out at the 10/31/08 live show that had that song, and only that song on it. that CD is my white whale. I don’t even particularly care about p!atd anymore (something I might write a blog post about sometime…) and yet this song is something I listen to yearly, and as such think about the weird circumstances of it yearly.

this time because it was late enough at night that my brain was off the rails, I did a frantic search for this song once again, because I desperately believe that somewhere out there exists a rip off the promo cd that is higher quality than the “official” releases. reddit came through in leading me to Panic! at the Disco Rarities, a barebones site cataloguing various live p!atd performances, demos, alternates, and remixes. naturally, this site had it’s almost halloween. unnaturally, the copy of the track they had was higher quality than either the youtube video or the soundcloud track. additionally, the track off their website has an album cover I’ve never seen before (that I saw when I downloaded the track). could this mysterious person have gotten their hands on a copy of the song from the promo CD…? I suspect so, whether they had a copy of the CD themselves was another matter entirely. I emailed the webmaster asking where they got the track, hopefully next week I can update with the mystery solved!

this entry has gotten fairly long I think… there’s a handful of other small updates I could put here (finished some oc refs that I’ve had sitting in my wip folder for entirely too long, been on a smoothie kick as of late) but that’s the main things that have been on my brain for now. if I keep making smoothies for breakfast maybe I’ll bring it up next entry? debated this morning making a page cataloguing the various fruit combinations i’ve tried, lol. webbrained or something.

bye for now! see you next week! (maybe. hopefully. I’m notoriously bad at sticking to habits).