greetings thatoddhaystack shareholders. it's been a minute since I worked on a blog post... as per usual, I've been up to a lot. and also not enough.

touching grass

my focus for the past month has been getting outside more. at the beginning of august, I took a brief trip to the outer banks. I was only able to stay for two days, but I made the most of it by spending most of my time on the beach or in the hot tub that the beach house had. I had intended to go running each morning I was there, but I was honestly so wiped that I slept in every morning.

I drove my brother back from the outer banks, and while I had intended to listen to my audio book the entire drive there and back, I ended up spending the drive back talking to my brother. he's a much less Online person than I am, and I mean that in the best way. I know I've been struggling with my addiction to social media for... probably as long as I've had my twitter account (which is to say, 11+ years), and it was refreshing to talk to someone grounded. I think something in that conversation sparked changes in me, and I haven't fully processed everything that's going on in my brain. and to some extent it's scary! I'm going through some drastic changes right now mentally but they still need some time to bake in the oven.

part of the way I've been coping with having eleven thousand thoughts in my head is by going outside a lot more. I used to take 20 min walks most days, I've upped that to 40-45 minutes on the weekdays, and an hour or two on the weekends. I don't go for a walk every single day, but I try not to go more than two days in a row without moving my body. I've also really been wanting to get into more wooded/nature trails, since previously my walks were just through the neighborhood. I live in a suburban area, but I have managed to find a segment of trail that passes through woods both close to my house and my office, so I can have some brief contact with nature. I haven't really been running lately, sticking to just getting some sort of physical activity in without worrying about the intensity. I also got interested in the iNaturalist app which has helped me get a lot more familiar with the plants and animals I pass by on my walks.

I've reserved my trips to parks (and thus my longer walks) for the weekend. I've explored two parks (state and national) near me and I hope to travel to more in the future... along with more of just getting out in general. I heard somewhere that you should plan weekend plans a week in advance, which I haven't been doing and is probably why a lot of my weekends I end up just laying in bed until the inevitable need to eat makes me move. I haven't gotten quite as good as timeblocking things, but I try to at least have a general idea of what I want to do on the weekend prior to friday night. of course, there are still weekends where I bedrot for 80% of it, but it's a work in progress. I feel like getting out to parks, even if it's only every other weekend, is still a win.

media

I haven't honestly been playing a lot of video games lately... I got back into goatlings, a fairly barebones petsite, because people have had Enough of the mismanagement of the site. and in some weird way I find comfort in commiserating with other users about the site. I unfortunately have been getting wildly stressed out about certain decisions on the site, so I think very soon I may pull the plug and log out until the storm passes over. I don't want to whinge too much about goatlings in this entry because I could go on for paragraphs but the key point is that I feel that I am not appreciated as a user of the site, and that my concerns are not listened to. which uh. sucks! I got mad enough that I picked up flight rising as a pet site that isn't going to make me crazy. I'm still playing neopets but seeing as I'm kind of uninterested in the plot going on right now, I haven't been playing as much as I have with goatlings.

pet sites aside, a lot of my time spent going through media has been prep for HHN! they revealed all the houses, and I've been slowly chipping my way through the movies for the IP houses and listening to the podcasts for the original houses. I enjoyed the ghostbusters movies! still need to watch a quiet place (all of them), and I watched the first insidious movie. I think my most hyped house this year is slaughter sinema 2 because it's themed after fake b-movies and I love, shlocky b-movies. also a quiet place, purely because HHN houses tend to be very Loud and a quiet place is uh. very not that. also I heard that they are incoporating ASL into the house which I think is neat!!

projects

bad news: have not made a lot of progress on things from last time. good news is that I have started several new projects! ok jokes aside, I did get accepted to my first ever zine! it's etches on the screen, a zine about the weird wide web. I can't say much about my part yet since I'm still in the early stages of sketching out my concept, but I'm excited to finally participate in a zine project!

I have participated/am participating in two ukagaka related projects this month. there was hydrate jam on the 20th of august, where I made a new shell, pumpkin punch, for hydrate in the span of a day. I'm hoping to update the shell in the future, so keep an eye out for that! there's also aughost, a server exclusive challenge where every day 3-4 prompts for ghost dialogue are posted, with the intent being that by the end of the month you have 100 new pieces of dialogue for your ghost. I have... not been keeping up with the prompts, but I've been finding it incredibly useful to draft dialogue for my three concurrent ghost projects. I intend to finish the prompts in september if I don't catch up before august finishes.

there was also trans representation game jam, where I took a role as an artist for seibetsu smoothie (flashing gif warning), drawing the title screen and some CGs. I'm not quite finished with the project, since the team was only able to get a demo out when there's a few chapters left of game that still need to be implemented, so keep an eye on it!

I did start picking at updating my mods in ffxiv for dawntrail. mostly just my personal ones, but I did redo tau's facial scars, and started reassembling carrie's 17 different mods into something more coherent. I swear, I joke about carrie being a modbeast but that's mainly because I have (or rather, had) several different mods for them that tweaked one specific thing about their appearance and now dawntrail is forcing me to consolidate the mods. it's not the worst thing, though. probably soon I will get around to going through my posted mods and updating them.

lastly, I did make a lot of progress on my website! the main thing I added is my horror hub, which I slapped together in the span of a few days because I read an 18+ horror bl visual novel and needed a place to dump my thoughts where they would be semi-quarantined from the rest of the site. in general, I intend for my site to be pg-13, but the horror hub is strictly 18+ so I can have the freedom to discuss gorey/otherwise more graphic content. thanks for your understanding! I also added a whole bunch of log pages for tracking different things I read/watch/play/whatever. I know that sites like letterboxd and storygraph exist but I wanted to have a centralized place to have all my logs listed in one place... I'm deciding what pages to work on next right now. probably my collections of physical and digital goodies.

I have to come clean that project fix my sleep schedule using fat gengar plush as motivation has not been doing as well this month as I had hoped. I've gotten really bad about taking my phone to bed/staying up scrolling on social media for no reason. I am hoping that I can get back on track soon though.