so I intended to post something for august in general and also a weekly roundup in separate posts. but ended up mashing them into one because I didn’t finish my august post in time. with monthly posts, I’m taking after a concept I’ve seen from a couple vloggers where they post videos of whatever their favorite things (products, food, media, etc) were that month… I like that idea to reflect on things I liked that month so I’m stealing it www

my first august favorite is... good & gather brand cherry cola sparkling water. I've been trying to wean myself off soda for the past few weeks. in the past, I would buy mini soda cans with the intent of using them as mixers for drinks but then I would end up just having the soda alone. so I stopped buying soda for the time being.

I still crave like. soda flavors though. initially, I only knew about lacroix having a cola flavor, which I have gotten before and like, but I have to order it online because no brick and mortar stores carry it near me. I did some light googling for any other cola flavored sparkling waters and someone recommended target's brand of sparkling water for having a cherry cola flavor, so I got it.

it's not... exactly cherry cola flavored imo. it tastes like a cherry cola slurpee from 7-11. but I don't hate it, and it (mostly) scratches the itch for something cola flavored. it's fairly inexpensive too. lastly, it's caffeinated, so I get a little bit of energy from it. since buying the cherry cola sparkling water, I've learned about a brand called ugly that makes limited drops of sparkling water that are soda flavored. it's.... a bit pricey though, and it being limited edition kind of turns me away. maybe I'll buy one eventually though, just to compare.

another august favorite is another drink. because I've been cycling through sparkling water flavors in an attempt to find something that entices me like soda does. I've gotten the polar kids sparkling water for a while, but those are tiny cans (8 oz) and I wanted something a little larger. enter: lacroix hibiscus (or hi-biscus! as it is stylized)

I've had dried hibiscus flowers before, and I can't really say that the lacroix flavor tastes much like them. I don't mind it though. I think the flavor tastes like sweettarts! this is the third flavor of lacroix I've bought so far, and it's been the one my sister have gone through the fastest. it's non-caffeinated, so I drink this over the cherry cola sparkling water when it's late at night.

something that's not drink related that I liked this month is the newest milgram song. for those not familiar with milgram project, it's a song series by music producer DECO*27 centered around a group of people who have all committed the crime of murder. the prisoners try to appeal to the audience through songs extracted from the prisoners mind, and the audience gets to vote on if they forgive them or not. it's all a bit vague right now in terms of what kind of murder everyone committed, and I try not to get too deep into theorycrafting because I unfortunately either don't care about a particular prisoner or Care Too Much, and I don't want to chafe against other people's interpretations of the characters.

long preamble aside, the latest song release is "the purge march", a song centered around the prisoner amane. amane is a 12 year old girl who was heavily heavily implied to have grown up in a cult, with stark worldviews about promises and punishment. she was voted "don't forgive" in the first round of songs (we are on the second round now, so one round of voting has already passed), and the audience not forgiving her crime (which was murder!) seems to have made her dig her heels in further into her beliefs. trigger warning for heavily implied child abuse in her MV. 

for me, amane is probably the most tragic character in milgram, partially because of her young age and partially because she's very obviously indoctrinated into her cult's mindset. I believe in the voice drama for this round she claims to not have been brainwashed by the cult, but she is also. twelve years old. I seriously doubt she wasn't influenced by the cult or even her parents at all into gaining the kinds of views she has.

I'm torn myself on whether to vote to forgive her or not. it feels that if we were to vote to forgive her, that would enforce her beliefs, and if we were to not forgive her, that would make her dig in her heels even more (as we've seen from s1->s2). at the same time, I believe that the abuse she went through at the hands of the cult, while it doesn't entirely absolve her, was certainly a heavy hand guiding her actions.

there's a lot I want to say on amane... mainly about how I see shades of myself in her, being someone who grew up from a very young age in catholicism, and only disavowed it once I grew into my late teens. that's all a little bit heavy to talk about in just what is supposed to be a monthly roundup post though. another time perhaps!

my personal feelings on amane aside, I think the animation for the MVs continues to improve. amane’s hands twirling the baton at the end are particularly impressive. the contrast between the bright inner world that amane has compared to her dark and dull real world, along with the lyrics being dark in tone compared to her bright voice is an impressive feeling… I am interested in seeing how her voting ends up!

that pretty much wraps up my favorite things of august so… what did I do this week...? I made cookies! I started learning toki pona! I went to a creative club meetup!

cookies!

there was a recipe floating around on tumblr dot com claiming to be "norwegian christmas butter squares", although the poster doubts the norwegian origin of these cookies. regardless, it's a pretty simple recipe. very hard to mess up.and since I had been wanting to bake something for a while i saved the recipe and decided hmmm I will try to make this sometime. 

and I did this week! I didn't have a properly sized pan for these so I kind of just slapped it onto a baking sheet and pressed the dough down until it was vaguely the shape of a rectangle. I also didn't chill the sheet because it didn’t fit in the freezer.

that aside, they still turned out fine!! I might roll them into little balls and make more traditional cookie shapes next time instead of the big cookie that I cut into pieces. they aren't as cloyingly sweet as some cookies I have had. sugar cookie adjacent. I like them. my sister and I ate them all.

toki pona

toki pona is a conlang (constructed language) that I saw a handful of neocities folks talking about. I looked more into it, and ended up really liking the concept of a small selection of words that try to encompass basic concepts across cultures. it's also appealing for having a small amount of words (looking at the other language I'm working on, japanese, with its hundreds and hundreds of kanji)

I picked up an anki deck for the words, which actually ended up being a lot more than the 120 words that toki pona has (I think it's 137 with the handful of community approved words that have been added on). as I discovered, there's recognition and recall cards, along with sitelen pona glyphs, which is the written, non romanized form of toki pona. I appreciate the amount of repetition in the cards, honestly. it kind of makes me want to turn my core6k word deck for jpn into a recall deck as well as a recognition deck. I would, maybe, if it wasn't already 6k recognition cards.

I've also been watching o pilin e toki pona videos, which are a series of stories told in toki pona with accompanying visuals. there's some type of theory behind it, but the gist is that even though I don't know toki pona, through watching a video that has drawings/facial expressions/actions/etc along with an audio story, I can still get the main ideas of the story and maybe pick up some words along the way. way back when I was a kid, I was in spanish immersion classes in elementary school. I never really had like, typical grammar/vocab lessons in spanish, but my math and science subjects were taught in spanish, so I ended up absorbing the language through that. even today, having barely studied spanish for years (a couple of failed attempts to continue the duolingo course here and there), I can still read spanish text and get the main gist of it. or overhear a conversation in spanish and follow along.

so, I think at least starting out, this level of "listen to a story in the language with visuals" is working to keep me interested in learning toki pona. I probably will at some point go into more traditional grammar study, I just know that my brain balks at the concept of sitting down and doing grammar drills and whatnot. SRS flashcards are fine tho.

creative club

I'm part of a discord server that's made up of creatives local to my area. I've been in the server for a little bit, but haven't gone to a lot of events purely because I am a little bit out of the way compared to the main hub where most activities take place. they have meetings every thursday though, and this past thursday I went to it.

I ended up only being there for the last hour of the three hour art jam session, but it was still nice. I am wildly socially awkward so I really just walked into the garden they were hosting the meeting at, saw everyone sitting down in groups already, and panicked a little. I ended up just sitting awkwardly next to a group until I was absorbed into it. I did end up talking to some folks though!! which was nice. the travel time was a bit long for me to consider going out to Every thursday meeting but I would like to try to make it out to at least one event weekly. since I really enjoy having a group of other creative people to vibe with in person. (i love my online friends. unfortunately I don't have unlimited time off from work and unlimited plane tickets to visit them all the time)

to close this out, one update from the last weekly entry is that I have no update on it's almost halloween, the panic! at the disco song where the physical CD is practically lost media. the website owner I emailed last week never responded, which I kind of expected after a few days of silence, but its still disappointing. at least I have a higher quality version of the song than then youtube version, though!