I never know whether to title these with the month I’m going over or the month I am writing in. anyways. greetings thatoddhaystack shareholders. I made matcha scones and iced genmaicha for this meeting’s snacks. i’ve been on a green tea kick lately, even more than usual.

may events

I expected things to chill out for me in may but uhhhh that didn’t quite happen. at the very begining of the month my car was totaled by a rogue tesla. rip touma-kun. I wrote an entirely separate post about that mainly because I didn’t want to bog down my monthly roundups with me spilling my emotional guts about my car. tldr; touma-kun meant a lot to me as baby’s first car and also the only place on earth that was “mine” for a few years; but I have a new car now and I am looking forward to making new memories with her!

so yeah. That happened. I spent most of the first week or so after the car accident dealing with paperwork/phone calls for the crash but I did manage to head out to a friend’s birthday party held in a park. it was nice to be outside and hang with people… being as I (mostly) work from home, I have to put effort into making it out to events and Interacting With People outside of a work capacity. sometimes it stresses me out (b/c of like… anticipation. anxiety. etc etc. but usually I come out of social gatherings feeling better than I did before… funny how that sort of thing works out. I also went to an in person book club for the first time, and the vibes were WAY different than my virtual book club in that ppl got way off topic and were generally more boisterous but I didn’t really mind it because at the time I was really craving something to keep me from feeling isolated. I also went and saw re-animator in theaters for it’s 40th anniversary screening and that was really cool!!

my mom visited from NYC to help me buy a new car. and by help me I mean haggle with the salesman because I feel like she gets a kick out of haggling with the salespeople and asserting dominance over a pushy salesperson. but we did it!! we got the new car… I kinda hoped by the time I got to writing this entry that I would be able to say I finished entirely with paperwork but uhhhh the DMV is moving very slowly so. I still have things I want to do. but I cannot do them yet. because I am waiting on the DMV. sasuga bureaucracy. that aside. I went to an italian restaurant for a family member’s birthday and had some really really good four cheese ravioli. and the free bread ouuuughhh. I took like a whole loaf home and used the remainder of the cream tomato sauce as a dipping sauce for the bread and I lived so deliciously.

speaking of living deliciously. I went to a local asian food festival with my brother’s girlfriend, because she’s filipino and was interested in some filipino food stalls that were there. I bought a couple of food things, but didn’t actually buy anything from the sort of “artist alley” they have as part of the festival. I think in my mind I felt like I had been spending entirely too much so I was disinterested from buying things…. the most unique thing I had to eat/drink was sugarcane juice, which I had been eyeing at different outdoor festivals for a while but I never actually went and bought some… until that day. it was really okay. not nearly as sweet as I expected, and had sort of a grassy taste on the backend? it wasn’t entirely unpleasant and I was really thirsty so it being a huge cold drink was a lot of the appeal LOL. I also had a banana milk cookie (absolutely delicious), curry puffs, and an unagi onigiri. not nearly as much as I expected to eat, but also lines for a lot of the food stalls were really long and I was impatient!!! I also took Very Unaesthetic Photos here so forgive me for that

memorial day weekend was more Vita Does Things in that I ran errands and cleaned parts of the house and also went to a korean spa for the first time. the set-up was that there were separately gendered locker rooms and bathhouse areas, and then a communal area that had a small restaurant and saunas. I went fairly early in the morning so that it wasn’t too crowded, and by the time I left around three hours later it was starting to get packed… I had gone to an onsen in japan wayyy back in 2017, but it has been A While since then so I thought I might feel shy or uncomfortable wrt the optional nudity policy in the bathhouse areas. but like, without my glasses on, everything further than 6 inches away from my face is just a Fuzzy Blob. so I didn’t really care. and really, no one else cared. at least on the women’s side (not that I’m a women but… you know how it is being a pre-everything transmasc person lmao). I heard that the men’s side gets a little freaky?? cruising in the [LOCATION REDACTED] korean bathhouse??? there’s gotta be better places to do that man. I enjoyed the bathhouse areas; I like to take hot showers and baths for muscle soreness and to quote unquote boil the sad out of me so I got plenty of that done. the saunas were less my speed, the bathhouse area had two that were really insanely hot (I was only able to stand in each for like 30 seconds before I called it quits) but I spent around five minutes in each of the different sauna rooms in the communual area. they also had an “ice room” that was around 50 degrees fahrenheit (10 degrees celsius for the metric folks) that was nice to go into after baking myself in a sauna room.

also during memorial day weekend I went to a local rec center to swim in their leisure pool because I had a free pass for it and… I ended up leaving after like half an hour because there were too many people and I was about to snap :pensive: I think even had people been like… well behaved and courteous that I would have been fine, there were just too many people clogging up the whirlpool area, and swimming backwards in the lazy river and things like that… maybe a little crotchety old man of me but I can’t stand people who don’t pay attention to others in public spaces!! augh. at least I got to see a corn snake and a turtle that the rec center had out for display. last but not least in my memorial day adventures was a family cookout I went to that wasn’t really notable except for the fact that I won two games of yahtzee in a row by getting a yahtzee both times. pro gamer moment.

the last thing I did this month was heading to a renaissance faire! I will be keeping the name of it secret to avoid doxxing myself more than I already have in these entries, but it was a faire I hadn’t been to in many years because the first time I went it was very mid. but it’s expanded a lot since then!! the food was stupid expensive and kind of really okay but that’s fine. I had two cups of mead (root beer flavor and lingonberry pomegranate flavor) that were the best things I had by far. I didn’t really buy much because there wasn’t anything I was looking for? i got a teeny tiny jar of fox bones for desk decor and a bracelet turned necklace for sandalnui because I felt like he needed something to dress up a little for the occasion, since I wasn’t in costume really but I did wear my witchy hat which counts for something. in my heart. I watched vixens en garde perform and my sister’s friend got roped into being the audience participant for the show but he was a good sport about it. if you haven’t heard of vixens before, they perform bits of shakespeare but have women play the male parts and then a dude from the audience performs the women’s part. great fun. usually there is some amount of yuri that happens :flushed: oh, there also was a rescue parrot exhibit that was cool! I saw some birds and tried to take pictures of sandalnui with them but I think the parrots thought he was a threat.

projects

so! at the end of april I was pretty close to burnout, and so I did my bestest to rest some… and I was able to get quite a lot done in may!

in the ukagaka world, I mentioned that I participated in ghost masquerade 7 in april, and now that the ghost authors have been revealed I can say that my entry was midnight sheep, a small ghost about an insomniac sheep. I wrote a more detailed post-mortem of the event here, but the tldr is that I greatly enjoyed participating in the event and reading people’s impressions on my little sheep and I hope to participate again next year with a bigger project. I also finished (and released a bugfix for) pomogaka! a purely utility based ghost that is an ukagaka implementation of the pomodoro method. there’s a lot of features in it and I am proud to have finally published it after starting it like, quite literally a year ago LOL. lastly, I’ve started working on the ukagaka wiki more to fill out pages. less interesting on a end users standpoint maybe, but I’ve wanted to contribute to the english ukagaka wiki for a while and only got the drive to work in it in may for whatever reason… wanna continue working on it in june!

I continued with posting weekly art in may, and even got around to doing some art outside of my weekly draws, that being some character references for some ocs. I slapped them up on my artfight account since that is just around the corner, but I plan to put them on toyhouse with more formatted profiles. eventually.

my annual group order of granblue fantasy valentine return gifts arrived and this time around before I repackaged them and mailed them off to participants I scanned each of the cards for archival purposes. you can view them (and the rest of my scanned GBF valentine return gifts) here. this is the first year I’m scanning the group order, and it was a little time consuming to scan and crop/otherwise clean up the scans, but I think it’s important to archive things like this that are usually just left to twitter posts that might be deleted in the future…. I know my order only represents a small amount of characters available but I think it’s better than nothing, haha… I scanned all of my currently owned valentine cards/polaroids/shikishis/etc so that’s what previous years are made of.

I’ve been reading a lot of books and watching a lot of movies… mostly in the horror genre but there is the monthly bookbug book that is Not Horror. I’ve been using this app called screenzen that is free (but I threw a few bucks at the developer because it’s been so useful to me) that essentially cut my mobile scrolling time to like, 30 minutes a day max. I think I’ve also just had very little interest in being on social media because nothing is like, actively helping my brain on there right now. I’ve been trying to spend my social media time doing things like chipping away at my media backlog or creating. mostly watching movies, honestly. but I’m getting through a lot of movies I’ve been meaning to watch for a while!! so that’s mildly more productive than doomscrolling on twitter for an hour and a half….

I’ve been working on otome jam! I can’t say much about the project, but I was recruited by a long time twitter friend into assisting on a jam idea. that has been exciting!! to work on game dev again for the first time in a while…

june plans

more of the same, really. gonna keep reading, gonna keep watching movies, gonna keep staying off of social media. I hesitate to say I almost have a normal sleep schedule again? I forgot where I initially talked about this, but a long time ago I set a goal for myself to fall asleep by 11pm (ish) 100 days (not necessarily consecutively) in order to “earn” this $100 Giant Fat Gengar Plushie. and as of writing this blog post I am less than two weeks away from reaching that goal… do I think it will take me two weeks? no, I think it will take me a little longer because I do slip up some days. but I have felt myself getting tired around 10pm instead of needing to Force Myself To Feel Sleepy so I think I am going to bed on time consistently enough that my body has settled into a rhythm. which is good because I do not remember the last time I had a consistent sleep schedule.

continuing to work on otome jam, of course. it ends at the end of this month so hopefully next month I can show off my team’s submission…!!

I am participating and helping to organize a fanart countdown for no sleep for kaname date, the newest game in the ai the somnium files series coming out at the end of july! as of writing this, we are 10 days into the countdown (60 days in total). this month I am focused on finishing my piece for the countdown (17 days to go, because 17 is my favorite number) and also working on a smaller piece for a big iris collab collage that will be posted on the release day. please look forward to it and also give some love to all the artists who contributed to this countdown…!!

ghost jam is also coming up soon on june 19th, running for a week. I intend on participating in it as usual, and will be spending my time up to the jam hashing out plans for it… going to continue to help flesh out the ukagaka wiki as well since I have an itch to at least take out all the redlinks we currently have.

I have some other events and trips planned, but I think I will save talking about those in any detail for next months shareholder meeting….

favorites

that’s right, we are bringing back the monthly favorites section because I missed it and I think it’s nice to reflect on good things that stuck out to me this month.

tea

I continue to search out ways to make myself drink more water. I had a sparkling water phase where I was drinking 2-3 cans a day, I went through a flavor droplet phase (like mios. flavors you squirt into your drink to make it taste yummy), and I am currently on a tea kick. I went through an entire box of this strawberry green tea so I guess if I had to pick a flavor of the month it would be that? I don’t think I will be immediately repurchasing it though as 1) I still have many, Many servings of green tea in the house to drink and 2) I bought it initially because it was on sale for 50% off, so I’m not sure if it would be as enticing at full price. I also have really enjoyed this ironmouse branded raspberry lemonade tea. it is a bit pricey, but I really like it… also something I might repurchase but will probably wait to repurchase since I have so much tea in the house currently, as you can see in the middle picture bellow of my tea shelf.

final destination bloodlines

when I walked out of the theater I wasn’t really thinking like. wow bloodlines was SOOO good that was my favorite movie ever. I enjoyed it sure but I didn’t think it was like, groundbreaking. and then I was still thinking about it a week later. I do think the ending like, 15 min of the movie kind of missed the mark. but I was never bored watching it. and the scene in the hospital was creative!! I enjoyed the opening disaster scene as well for having the Most Satisfying Piano Crash Ever.  bloodlines for the most part managed to walk the line between looney tunes cartoonishness and having genuine heart and poignant moments. the scene with tony todd was a beautiful sendoff to him, and his talk of death and living life to the fullest definitely felt like it came from the heart. excited to see dead meat cover it!!

my darling dreadful thing

this was one of my horror book clubs monthly book and I really loved it!!! I think to an extent marketing things via their tropes (enemies to lovers, strong female protagonist, etc etc) is silly but like. Wow. this was peak toxic yuri. it was grotesque and visceral at times, but I really enjoyed how the author said that this was a love story at it’s core. because that’s what I want to write!! I want to write beautiful foul terrifying obsessive love stories….. the setting was immaculate, the cover is lovely, and the depiction of the undead was interesting and provocative. I have devoured this author’s second book (blood on her tongue) and am eagerly awaiting whatever twisted horrors she writes about next.

ダイダイダイダイダイキライ (Big Big Big Big Big Hate)

so like, this song didn’t come out in may. nor did I discover it in may. but I did absolutely have it on loop during may ergo it goes in the may section. content warning in the pv for blood/violence and photosensitivity. also the eng subtitles on youtube Suck Ass so look at the vocaloid lyrics wiki instead

amala is a vocaloid producer that I had only listened to a little bit prior to this song, but I will absolutely be paying attention to them in the future…. big x5 hate is an earworm of a song. with a catchy chorus and a snappy style of tuning that makes me want to sing along to it… the pv also slaps, with just the right amount of flashy colors and lights to scratch my brain LOL. also the art style is really cute and I like the childhood friends to rivals story portrayed in the pv… there is also a remix of the song out which I didn’t like as much but maybe you will? anyways I think this song absolutely deserves the blowup it got (I’m not on tiktok anymore, but I did hear it as the backing track for some instagram reels when I used to fervently scroll through those so I imagine it had a little tiktok moment too)

in conclusion

will I ever write one of these posts that’s under 3k words. no. never. but I like reflecting on things I’ve done in the month because I had the memory of a peanut and if I never stop to reflect on fun things I will forget them… so I continue on. happy pride month btw!!! pride this year feels more important than ever… I will see you next month with a june wrap-up!!!