greetings thatoddhaystack shareholders. this time around I am offering strawberries as complimentary snacks since the grocery store has had them on sale consistently for many weeks in a row. I also brought iced tea this time as the budget allowed for it.
ok silly preamble aside I greatly underestimated how busy I would be in march and april so like. I didnt write a post in feb and I thought that would be Fine except then the past two months have been a whirlwind. for both good and neutral reasons. (I also remembered I didn't write a post in feb because I was stressed about maybe?? not having a job by the end of the month??? which like. tbh as long as orange clown is in office I fear for my safety as a government worker but. What Can I Do. except keep applying to things outside of the government.)
february
I attended a barter fair held by a bartering group in February. it was. pretty okay. fairly small, and I had only managed to crotchet a couple of bookmarks to exchange with folks but if I remember correctly I did end up exchanging all of them for little trinkets. there were a couple of bigger ticket items (eg: clothing) I wish I could have looked at but I didn’t feel like what I had on hand was quote unquote enough to trade for. lessons to learn for the next barter fair I attend (which now that I think about it, there is another one coming up soon… I may skip it as I have not had a lot of time to prepare)
I did end up going to katsucon this year despite my goal of. not wanting to go to a con because of monetary reasons. spookala aside. but! I didn't buy a badge for katsu and thus didn't go into the dealers room or artists alley. I even packed my own lunch for the day I went (sunday) so the only cost was the parking for the con, which was still kinda stupid expensive, but much cheaper than buying a badge and spending god knows how much in the artists alley. I did finally get around to cleaning up my kagamine rin astray module cosplay I made last year, and I wanted to wear it out somewhere… it was actually a fairly comfortable cosplay to wear aside from the headband which I think slowly compressed me LMAO. anyways! I was able to watch an idol performance or two since that room wasnt locked behind needing a badge, and I caught a persona/atlus games cosplay shoot. mostly I just ended up walking around and people watching. I think I really needed the Nerd Culture Injection in order to be revitalized… I ended up trading trinkets/handing out trinkets to a bunch of cosplayers too… my sibling likes to fold paper stars and gave me a bag of them to take to the con to trade with people since they were too busy to go. overall I think even if I end up not purchasing a badge for katsucon next year I will probably end up lobbyconning it because it was pretty comfy cozy to just walk around in the public areas of the con and experience photoshoots and the idol performances.
in february I participated in the dark pot (yaminabe) ukagaka event! its a yearly event where participants are invited to submit files that contain dialogue/functions/(almost)whatever, and the end result is all the submitted files are combined together to create one chaotic ghost… the ghost for the event is written in satori, which was my first time working with that programming language. its a language more inclined towards dialogue than the more programming oriented YAYA, and it makes use of full width characters that are on japanese keyboards, but not standard to english ones. it was a bit tricky to figure out how to format my dialogue, but I did end up submitting a file with dialogue centered on sodas… keeping a theme to your writing makes it a lot easier to write dialogue imo. compared to just writing down things randomly. I have played with the ghost a little bit, and I have come across some english dialogue, but not mine yet. maybe next year I will be more ambitious and include more dialogue… or a bilingual ghost… I didn’t want to just swamp the ghost with english dialogue when it's primarily a japanese event.
also in february I started watching jojo’s bizarre adventure! I had in fact watched phantom blood last year in april, but somehow I hadnt gotten around to continue watching the series until now… I think the kicking off point was pressure from my friends (lol) and also me deciding I needed to cut back on my social media usage and replace it with something else… which ended up being watching A Lot More Anime but that’s nicer to my brain at least. I kept watching jojo's throughout march, and read steel ball run in one weekend pretty much LOL. currently working on jojolion although I’m trying to go slower since I know I’m reaching the end of the jojo’s content out there right now. probably going to consume thus says kishibe rohan after I catch up with the main series. my favorite character is DIO which I am embarrassed about to an extent because everyone around me clocked me going sicko mode for him like. up to a full year in advance… I am also a little silly crazy for diego brando which like .yeah. yeah I should have also expected that. my collection of blonde bastards continues to grow… my favorite arc so far has been golden wind because they crammed many Many vita tropes in there. found family. shitty brats. gay freaks. guy who died and continues to truck onwards. i shotgunned the last arc of pt5 in one day and had to keep taking breaks to wail in agony and pace around my house LMAO. it does feel kinda crazy at times to get into something thats been ongoing for decades because I have so much official and fan content to sustain me… so I'm not going to get bored for a while but also I’m holding off on getting seriously invested in another piece of media because I still want jojo’s to be front and center in my mind… especially with steel ball run anime now officially confirmed I want to keep rotating it in my mind until we get more details at least.
march
aka, the start of vita being busy 6/7 days a week. so, I took on a part time job in march/april, which was teaching highschool students game design. it was once a week on Saturdays for an almost 7 hr shift (counting commuting and lunch) so it pretty much ate up my Saturdays… I would also usually run errands after my shift because I knew if I went home in between my shift and errands I would not. want to leave the house again that day. so I was pretty exhausted by the end of the day… not to mention during the week I put time in to review the course curriculum for the next class. I was getting paid, not A Lot. but like enough for me to have extra spending money to not feel guilty about buying lots and lots of dio merchandise. which I kinda needed because I was (and maybe still am) using jojos as an emotional crutch because like. can't be sad about real life if I cram my head full of fictional characters!!
I did also want to take on the job because its at a place that I want to work at full time someday. so I think its important to keep that connection going, y'know.
two (or I guess three) small events happened in march. first was the release of orison!! sandalphon's second character single. I guess technically the release was at the end of feb but since I was purchasing a physical copy from japan it took until march for me to get it. when I got my copy I put the CD in my car and listened to it while I was driving around running errands. that first listen was really so powerful. like. not that the first character single was bad by any means (I would not have listened to it so so many times if that were the case) but you can really tell how much sandalphon has grown since then… my preorder bonus was a microfiber cloth with the album’s art printed on it. I currently have it hanging up next to my desk because I dont want to actually use it and get it dirty… it's so beautiful… i will keep loving sandalphon!!!
march also marked the two year anniversary of adopting our cats, tatum and dewey. two years ago my sibling and I walked into the local animal shelter and walked out with two little creatures… it is really beautiful to see how the both of them have come out of their shell as they have warmed up to us. it makes my heart full of love… so, we don’t know their actual ages but we estimated they are around ten years old… here's to many more years with the scrunklies.
lastly in march I carved out enough time to participate in etc jam 2025! I had higher ambitions to make a series of hydrate shells based off the cocktails from one of my favorite bars, katana kitten, but I overestimated how much time and energy I would have and ended up just making one shell for hydrate. in all honesty, I want to redraw the shell since I’m not 100% pleased with how it turned out, but for jam purposes it was Fine. even with a small contribution it was nice to be a part of a bigger thing.
april
wao! april! it is not quite the end of the month as I am writing this, but to be honest I don’t think I will do any more events other than my monthly horror book club meeting because. I am tired. I didn’t realize it but since the end of february I have had one (1) weekend that was all to myself and I didnt have work or plans that took the entire weekend. now like, I don’t regret the plans I made but also I got dangerously close to burning out again I think haha…. so this upcoming weekend I am purely going to try to engage with things that make me feel better and not try to put so many responsibilities on myself… we will see what happens tho…
so yes, I was still working my part time job in april but I got to skip out on it the first weekend of april because I went to orlando for the weekend to visit friends and also attend spookala, a tampa based horror convention. I flew down on friday and flew back on monday. the first day was pretty chill; we went to a local aquarium and got ramen and watched movies all day… it was nice. saturday was universal orlando studios, where we walked around and went on rides and watched one of the animal actors shows. I was gently bullied into buying this. stupid (affectionate) headband with a blue glitter dinosaur on it that everyone collectively agreed looked like diego’s scary monsters stand. we went to kbbq/hotpot afterwards where I ate sooooo much food.
sunday was spookala! my sibling had prepurchased an autograph ticket for tobin bell for me, and I brought my saw IV dvd because I thought it would be really funny for him to sign his own forehead… there was kind of a breakdown of organization that led to me waiting in line for. three hours without getting my autograph done so uhhh my friends walked through the con while I waited for tobin bell unsuccessfully </3. I got lunch, sat in on a panel by david dastmalchian that was actually really interesting… I knew about his acting work, but I was unfamilar that he has done a lot of comics work as well. also he very unsubtly made a dig at trump which the crowd went wild for LOL. I love hearing creatives talk about their work…. after that I went back in line for tobin and thankfully I was pushed to the front of the queue fairly quickly.
I’m not gonna lie I was definitely a little bit starstruck. the tobin bell… mr. jigsaw himself…. I think I just said something like “you are a legend” and he was like “I try my best” LOL… afterwards I was able to swing by shawnee smith’s booth to get her autograph on the DVD as well and then I handled that dvd with the care of a newborn baby as I walked through the merchandise hall. I didn’t end up buying anything other than some stickers for my mom and a singular button for myself… I think I was a little subdued by dropping [redacted] on autographs so my spending urges were satiated. I cosplayed sabitsuki from the video game .flow for spookala, which in a way was a love letter to the vita of 10 years ago who was deeply invested in .flow… the cosplay was also pretty comfey too which was a major plus. my friends cosplayed the batter (off), anya (mouthwashing) and the janitor (willy’s wonderland) so it’s like we had a little eclectic indie horror group… very cute imo…
monday was a fairly chill day as well that was p much just packing up and then taking me to the airport. I went to the airport lounge as per usual and was able to indulge in the fantasy of being a rich person who travels often and spends time in airport lounges. the united lounge at orlando’s airport has a gelato machine in it and I am always extremely delighted by it.
the week after my orlando trip was jojoday! which wasn’t particularly notable for me Except For the fact that I had resigned myself to only catching like 15 min of the stream before I had to go to work, and then logging onto discord just in time for them to drop the steel ball run teaser. the VC text chat was CRAZYYYy and I’m so happy I got to siphon off that energy for my last shift of this semester… sorry to my coworkers that shift; I was utterly mentally checked out and just thinking about steel ball run LMAO.
easter weekend my mom visited from new york. we spent all of saturday roadtripping south where we visited a farmers market, a lavender farm, and a grilled cheese restaurant… we also got kpot again because my itch for hotpot had not been fully satisfied yet I guess LOL. sunday was groceries and also easter brunch!! and then I kind of passed out for the rest of the day because suddenly my lack of sleep caught up to me.
other small things… I went to a local karaoke place for the first time (as in, it was my first time at that particular karaoke place, not that it was my first time doing karaoke) and I had a lot of fun… of course I had to whip out all the vocaloid songs that I had been singing along to since I was like. 12. and also recent favorites like the jojo ops… I still need to practice bloody stream more tho.
I went to a genshin impact pop-up store held at a mall. I don’t even play genshin anymore but unfortunately I still care very very much about tartaglia… I was also on the hunt for merchandise for a friend! the store had a little bit of ZZZ and honkai impact merch as well which was surprising. no star rail stuff, which is disappointing because I do kinda still consider myself actively into that. maybe they are holding out for a bigger star rail pop up store. idk. the store had a pretty good selection of merch, although I regret buying a blind bag because it just had characters I didn’t care about… which yeah, duh, but at the time I was swept up in limited time impulse buying fever… it’s okay tho, part of the reason I worked a part time job over the past two months was to have a certain amount of spending money I could expend on quote unquote frivolous things… like tartaglia merchandise…
I participated in ghost masquerade 7, or at least, I have submitted my entry and am waiting for final confirmation that it has been accepted… ghost masquerade is an annual event where ukagaka developers submit new ghosts under a pseudonym, and then everyone gets a week or so to guess which developer made which ghost. I wanted to participate in masquerade last year, but I was too busy and didn’t finish my idea in time. this year, I wanted to submit the same idea again, but was once again too busy to work on it… I did have an idea for a very small project to submit though, since I would have felt bad being unable to submit two years in a row. I ended up building a ghost in about a week that I submitted. I can’t say much about it here of course, being that the authors of the ghosts are secret until revealed by the event lead, but I’ll probably write a small postmortem on my inspirations and thoughts while working on the ghost. please look forward to it!!!
I know last shareholder meeting I had a section where I talked about my 25 in 2025 goals and how I was progressing on them but… I’m going to skip that for now because truthfully I wasn’t paying attention to any of the things I was tracking on the sheet. probably in may I will reevaluate everything on there and update things to the best of my ability (read: my memory). I’m planning on just chilling out for the rest of april… still doing things but trying to take care of my health more.
I will leave you with yggdrasil radio, which has been my music of choice for the past couple of days. really enjoy that they have a lot of niche japanese music that I can’t find on spotify… and the fact that it’s a radio station not a playlist means I don’t have to stop whatever I’m doing and switch the playlist every few hours. very good for putting on and forgetting about it, which is what I’ve needed after doing some more focused sprints the last few days. see you in may! (hopefully. maybe. someday I dream of making blog posts on a monthly basis instead of only every few months)