"Old Horses and Rough Riding"
23 Sep 2025Well, the water damage is still present, but it hasn't got any worse and it did stop dripping! There's some positive for ya.
Trouble is, now my car is acting up ;v; I gotta turn and hold the key for about three to five seconds to convince the old skrunkle queen to give living a chance. She drives okay, but obviously, I can only push my luck for so long. She's been put through hell since 2013, and only the past few years were on my watch, so who the hell knows what parts she had swapped out, replaced, damaged, etc. before I got her. She was a lemon too, bought as-is, so it's not like I was given any kind of history on her.
Gods, if there was ever any uncertainty my maleness wasn't carved into my bone marrow, that above paragraph alone should be all the evidence modern culture needs, lol. That car may look like a wreck, but I talk about her like she's an old gray horse I rescued from a pasture of similarly neglected animals, and that's precisely how I think about her most times too. What can I say? She's done nothing but her best for me since.
That being said, I've only got about 40USD to my name until Wednesday night, so there's no way I can even afford a diagnostic glance from a trusted mechanic, let alone the necessary parts and whatever the labor's worth. She's got a couple nails in her rear driver's-side tire as well, but thankfully, it's not losing air super-quickly and my father bought me a hand-held air compressor for Hannukah last year. It works great for what I'm pretty sure is a Temu product.
In other news, I've been working on some new art pieces, and I'll be getting my shop page set up here shortly. I just gotta figure out how I'm going to process transactions; I loath PayPal and don't have the money for something like Square, but CashApp only works in some regions and has a more personal vibe than most people are comfortable sharing with internet strangers. If you have any ideas or recommendations, dear visitor, HMU, I'm all ears.
"Shakespeare Clowns and Water Damage"
10 Sep 2025One of the things I typically do in my friendly Discord group chats is something we've referred to as "Lawrence Dream Journal Story Time", in which I start typing as soon as I wake up and tell everyone what I just dreamed. These dreams are usually either disturbing, hilarious, or just downright confusing. I prefer to keep the more distressing dreams to myself, so as to spare my friends from an unanticipated trauma dump, unless the PTSD is extra saucy and won't get off my back for anything. For the most part, my dreams are more of a chaotic stream of consciousness punctuated by some really interesting ideas and visuals, as well as some very incredibly dumb ones.
For instance: Sneaking a puppy into work, realising I can't keep him safely hidden from the managers, not wanting to get fired, swiping my badge to take the dog outside, realising my parents decided to drive off and leave me without transportation home, awkardly sitting on a bench in the dark parking lot, being approached by a very sweet and generous coworker who offers to buy me an Uber, only to tell me not only the driver's license plate, but that the driver that we'll know them when we see them because... shakespeare. clown. (?)
I'll spare you the details, as the whole story took multiple paragraphs to type out and multiple full-length character-limit messages to tell completely, but yeah. Also, the Genitorturers covering Cyndi Lauper for some reason.
I don't have a whole lot of time to explain all of it anyway, as my roommate and I have to bust ass and get our apartment spotless so we can report suspicious, dripping, gradually expanding water damage in the ceiling of my bedroom. I hope to the gods this doesn't turn into a massive issue where I can't sleep in my own bedroom until they cut into the building itself to fix the rusty old pipe that's sure to be at fault. We don't exactly have a lot of extra space in our apartment for day-sleeping, and I work exclusively nights, so...
Ah well. It is what it is. Habit finds a way!
"Heresy is For Days That End in Y"
7 Sep 2025It turns out that one of the dangers of editing HTML on your phone while stuck in a warehouse safety refresher course during night shift is that your fingers only need slip a tiny bit to delete some very important code you didn't intend to remove. And then you have to figure out a way to sort things out to "not super-broken looking" while still on your phone and just hope that it looks okay enough until you can find time to put things back the way they were.
Thank goodness it wasn't anything super crucial, just the blog index, without which this blog page looks mad funny, dude (trust me).
Now that that's fixed, I'm going to take a nap and figure out how to word that DM I plan to send to that festival owner. I feel like less might be more. Maybe something to the effect of, "Hey, I noticed that a couple of your new graphics on the social media account and official website are AI-generated. As someone who looks forward to this event every year and wants nothing but the best for it, I want to volunteer an alternative set of original hand-drawn graphics that still match the look you're going for. I already noted the dimensions of your current graphics and have the time and materials, and turn-around time could be one week or even less. Is this something you'd be willing to consider?"
Okay, that's not quite "less", but I think it covers all bases lol.
Fingers crossed...
In other news, I've been enjoying "Horus Rising" via audiobook at work, and I have two main takeaways.
First - Horus has no reason to be given such an insanely sexy voice by the narrator. This is a giant, genetically engineered, hypermasculine, bald and heavily-armored back-stabbing Judas of a supersoldier who has so far given zero indication that he has any interest in anything other than thinly-veiled fascism, brotherhood, and finding any scrap of evidence that his dad is actually proud of him. I should not want this abomination to hold me close and tell me nice things about myself until I drift off to sleep in his gigantic, freakishly muscular arms. And yet...
Second - After looking up the narrator's performance history, I cannot unimagine an alternate timeline in which the entire book is read in the voice of that dorky Neimoidian ambassador from the beginning of The Phantom Menace. We could have had it all, y'all.
Now that I've committed two heresies in a single blog post, I can thoroughly recommend that if you've ever been to a gaming store and wondered what was up with those funky little armor guys that cost an arm and a leg to purchase before they're even painted, you should check out the books. Horus Rising is a great entry into the Warhammer 40K universe, and even though I already know the cliffnotes of what happens in the story (the series is called The Horus Heresy ffs), there's no adequate substitute for the experience of actually immersing yourself into what I can only describe as what would happen if you explained the concept of bishounen to Willaim Shakespeare.
"Wrap It In Cheese I Guess"
4 Sep, 2025One of my favorite festivals, a small but longstanding steampunk event that has always struck the perfect balance of low-maintenance and excellence, has seriously let me down, as well as every hard-working artist who vends or attends year after year, and I feel very conflicted about it.
They used AI graphics on their website and promotive material.
I genuinely don't understand the logic behind it. As I mentioned before, this is a steampunk event. Steampunk as a fandom has always been a niche that celebrates human ingenuity and defiance of industry, with a spotlight kept on the beauty of an artist's labor. Using AI graphics is ick in general, but for an art-centric event like this one? Make it make sense...
That being said, I'm not going to mame and shame this festival, and im going to try to solve this problem in a constructive way. I don't want to give up on this festival, not just because it's sometimes the one thing that gets me through the year these days, but because I know enough about it to know that the people running it are not malicious or lazy. They've never operated the festival at a profit, striving to keep tickets as affordable as possible and even operating at a loss while raising money for local charities that often benefit the very people working and attending the festival.
The easiest solution that comes to mind is to contact the festival owner and offer to donate my time and skills to create an original graphics set to replace the AI-genersted ones. I've done it before on other sites, including this one, so doing it again, even for free, is a small price to pay for giving what i can to a festival that's meant so much to me for so long.
Now, being the blunt cunt that I typically am, the real challenge is going to be figuring out how to word that email without coming across as either judgemental, pandering, opportunistic, self-righteous, or unprofessional.
Wish me luck, I suppose.
