greetings thatoddhaystack shareholders. Boy it has been a year already. but we press on. oh yeah I brought string cheese for the snack this meeting. haven’t been able to get out to the stores to buy something more substantial on account of everything outside being encased in four inches of ice.
january projects
uhhhhh january was not very productive on the projects part. whoops! mentally ill webmaster forgets that they are mentally ill, as per usual. while I did write a list of goals for the month I mostly did things that were outside of the list. I did finally buy the parts I need to build a PC, since it’s been something I’ve been talking about doing for Literal Years at this point. and seeing the bullshit that windows 11 is pulling made me mad enough to decide alright. i’m not upgrading my current laptop but my next machine Will be primarily linux and then a small amount of programs that need windows to run (looking at you, fortnite). hearing that ram is only going to get more expensive is also what finally pushed me to Buy My Parts Now. I still have a lot of research to do before putting them together but at least the major financial part of this process is over.
I also finished my first draft for my visual novel script. it clocks in at just over 12k words, which is the longest piece of continuous fiction I’ve ever written. now I just have to face the saw trap of editing my own writing… I feel like that in itself will take another month on its own. although, the amare games festival started at the beginning of february and I was tossing around using that as fuel for working on my game, so maybe I’ll make more progress in the month through that.
I started picking at new pages for my website because I needed something to calm me down and for whatever reason my brain decided in that moment what I needed to do was Webdev. so I did. I’m at the part of the dev process where I have the basic framework for the pages done, but I now need to make the Content. so maybe I’ll finish them in feb maybe not.
I made watercolor binder and thrifted items to mull watercolor as part of my project to turn expired eyeshadow into watercolors, and while I haven’t actually tried the binder yet, I am excited!
my irl and I completed library quest, and got the last library cards we needed. I now have a total of twelve cards from the surrounding area and I feel delirious with power. while I was aimlessly looking up if there were any more free library cards I could get I found out that there are two counties in my state several hours away that offer cards for the rest of the state. I do think I will be traveling by these counties either for work or for vacation this year so I’m marking them off as library quest dlc when the time comes.
january happenings
the biggest event I had in January was going to NYC for a weekend to visit my mom! we walked a total of 36.75 miles over four days and visited too many places to cover in this entry. some highlights were picking up charcuterie boxes and watching fallout prime together; getting to see death becomes her on broadway, and taking my mom to hotpot and having her be utterly in awe at all the accommodations the hot pot place had (aprons, mouthwash in the bathroom, the sauce bar, etc etc). it was cold and snowing some of the time we were up there but that did not stop me!!!
I went out for pancakes with my irl after we finished our last leg of library quest. sometimes you just need a stack of carbs to comfort you. tangentially related is at the very end of the month I had An Incident happen in my personal life (because it seems it’s just normal for me to have one Personal Upset per month now) and I went out to eat because I had no spoons for cooking; and I am pretty sure that the waiter gave me extra dessert perhaps because he sensed the misery coming off me. anyways it almost made me cry after an especially stressful few days and it is a reminder that the kindness of humanity is still there, despite it all.
also in january we had a massive winter storm. school was closed for an entire week pretty much everywhere. I think we got about eight inches of snow in total; the problem was that we also got sleet on top of the snow that quickly froze into an impenetrable sheet of ice on top of everything. it’s been below freezing also pretty much every day so I feel like we are going to have piles of snow on the corner of every street until march at least. it’s gotten to the point where my FL friends send me picture of outside and I am momentarily thrown off by the fact that there is Not a solid sheet of snow on the ground. which I mean duh yeah. but still wild to me in the moment. here is an image of sewer cat after the storm when my neighbor excavated his sewer drain
january favorites
iron lung (2026)
I saw iron lung in theaters with my irl at the tail end of january and walked out of it thinking yeah that was a solid 7/10 movie. and then 12 hours passed and I had been frantically scrolling the tumblr tag and consuming bits of theories and lore and. something happened to me. I still have my critiques of the movie of course I just think that my joy of having a Weird Indie Horror Movie brush against mainstream entertainment is overtaking any critiques I would make. we need more passion projects from sickos (affectionate)
you weren’t meant to be human
book that was recommended to me by two separate people. I picked up a copy because I saw it offered at a horror bookstore in nyc. I read about 1/3 of it at the beginning of a day and then forced myself to put it down so I could do other things. and then that night I intended to only read a little bit more and instead shotgunned the whole thing in a feverish few hours. as a tokophobic trans masc thing I did see a lot of myself in this book. gruesome, visceral, but somehow cathartic in a sense. not something I would recommend to everyone but something that will be sitting in my brain for a while.
pallas’s cats
by Sander van der Wel - originally posted to Flickr as Manul, CC BY-SA 2.0, Link
I’ve always liked pallas’s cats but in january I started actively seeking out instagram accounts posting about them because I needed a respite from The Horrors. my instagram story for a few days was [atrocities being committed in the US] [video of a pallas’s cat] [more atrocities] [pallas’s cat] etc etc. there was a zoo in nyc that was supposed to have pallas’s cats, but when we went it was so cold and snowy outside that the cats were Not coming out into their enclosure. which is fine, wild animals will do what wild animals will do. I just need to plan a trek then to my local zoo that has pallas’s cats when it’s not below freezing outside.
february plans
the good news about not having done most of the things on my january list is that I can push most of them to february unchanged. a lot of the usual of wanting to finish a book, finish an oc profile, keep applying for jobs, keep reviewing japanese. I still want to do my one off projects of moving my shareX guide to the ukagaka wiki, moving my goatlings archive to neocities, and moving my FFXIV mods to heliosphere. my primary goal for this month though will be working on my visual novel; since the amare games festival is ongoing until the middle of march. I have tossed around the idea of recruiting people to have bespoke music or backgrounds for the game since I consider those my weak points. I am also still trying to figure out what I want to do in 2026 in specifics… I have the broad strokes plotted out at least.