Garthrey's Blog

midyear bonanza 2026

2026-07-20T00:00:00Z

20.7.26

i had told myself that i should let off the pressure of doing monthly posts, but almost comedically every time i had a topic i really wanted to write about, something happened that completely derailed that desire and put me back at square one. well, we got a few things to talk about! and fortunately it's a lot of things i've enjoyed this month, especially music and demarrying spotify! :)

for the love of god! i have not written these to have any flow, i've tried to lump similar elements but really just scroll through to the section that interests you and ignore the rest. remember, my blog my rules fuck you

killing spotify

if i'm being honest, my aversion to spotify didn't come from a place of "evil company bad" as much as the frankly horrendous user experience of using it and constant enshittification of the interface over a decade. i always wanted to go back to using foobar and alternatives, but with how little storage my phone has and how much music i listen to- there's not really a reality where i don't need to manage multiple devices and libraries as the alternative. my desire to move also came from a realisation of just how little intentional album listening i've been doing, and instead usually just a few standout tracks get added to a playlist or my liked songs and the rest get thrown to the sands of time, which is a shame because albums are such a fantastic experience and especially when presented as a cohesive unit rather than a collection of singles.

killing spotify with cds!

since picking up this shitty cd player that every school in my area had growing up, i've made it my mission to add picking up cheap cds to my opshopping rotation, and boy am i glad for it. having a seperate setup in the living space that i can just hit play on without touching my pc has been awesome, and it's a great conversation piece and piece of tactile tech that incidentally also forces me to find whacky and forgotten new music and listen to it very intentionally. just having a cd on while i cook makes me feel very warm and fuzzy, it's simple and nice.

killing spotify with the hiby r1!

finally bit the bullet and picked up the hiby r1 and zero-ones as my new everyday music carries! if not for soulseek and musicbee, honestly i'm not sure i would've ever fully committed this hard to transferring to a personal library over streaming, but thank fucking goddd for them because moving to a tertiary device for music has been so good. a lot of times when i was listening to music on my phone, considering i already had earphones in i could just swap to some short form content when i was bored- but since i use a pair of 3.5mm earphones on my hiby r1, and my phone doesn't have a 3.5mm jack- i end up never really doing that and instead just listening to music and being a bit more bored (/pos) and listening to MANY more albums than i usually ever do.

the zero-ones get a glowing endorsement too, i'm not much of an audiophile but these sound great, have a really clever earhook that make them stay in even on long bike rides, feel STURDY, and look pretty fantastic! also they are CHEAP for something of this quality.

so what music HAVE we found!

back by popular demand! the music rec/interesting things segment!

top 5 cds

in no particular order:

gatecrasher - discotech

i would be lying if i said that i didn't just get this cd at the bargain bin because it looked fucking sick and has an incredible design on the case/cds themselves. however, it is also a really solid techno/trancey cd that is pretty fucking long and so much so that i haven't been able to finish it, but everything i've heard has been solid and a good in for me to get more into oldschool techno since there are defs some elements i'd really love to see done a bit more in other music!

frou frou - details

if you don't know imogen heap/frou frou, i am really sorry for your loss. finding this cd for like $5 was such a pull and it's just such a phenomenal pop album that punches hard and has some really satisfying and fascinating harmonies without edging into niche or harder listening. easiest recommendation for anyone honestly!

james yorkston - year of the leopard

this was a complete random find in the $2 bargain bin and caught my attention from the gorgeous cover art as well as potentially being a folky album for me to put on while cooking. i was really worried this album was gonna be just a singer songwriter with a soft-spoken male voice and a guitar, but was so pleasantly surprised for the amount of depth on a lot of these tracks musically. i'm HORRIBLE at paying attention to lyrics, but it has this sense of melancholic wistfulness that catches me just sitting on my couch and staring out at the sunset. it never goes into anything far-fetched, but it definitely plays within the genre with interesting instrumentation and some gentle vocal melodies and a lovely sweet album i've been cuddling to a bit.

wheat - hope and adams

never heard of this artist or album either, but similar to year of the leopard it was picked up for looking like a nice easy indie album. another sleeper hit! a lot of these tracks wouldn't be amiss in a coming of age teen film (in a good way) like don't hold you but then we have some banjo-y country style instrumentation on body talk?? once again, nothing groundbreaking or experimental but just a great indie-sounding album akin to a weezer.

cocteau twins - heaven or las vegas

i never actually also never heard of the cocteau twins until last year when my ex introduced me to them through the playlist they made for me. i saw the cd (again, in the bargain bin) and felt a horrible pang in my chest when i listened to a track on youtube before picking the cd up and realised the track i opened was the opening track to that playlist. this story really doesn't have much to do with the album, the album is great and i have been putting it on whenever i have guests for a chill vibe and i'm sure nobody has anything new to add about their take on cocteau twins, but like another cursed object i don't listen to the album by myself unless i'm really trying to put myself into a pit. it's just fascinating how strong association can weigh on the most mundane things.

top 5 albums on my hiby r1

most of the stuff i've been listening to has been on bike rides, so they definitely have a certain vibe but still here are SCIENTIFICALLY the most played 5 albums on my mp3 player! note that i don't have any albums i own on cd on my digital library, there's no real rationale aside from i like being weird.

the softies - holiday in rhode island

your hand is mine so suddenly when did you find this good in me it's just the day that you don't want to end tomorrow you'll fall out of love again.

i don't actually remember where i found this album, but i'm glad i did. this year has been just very emotionally tumultuous and this album is full of so much gentle yearning that feels like it feels like a warm hug from someone you won't see for a long time. the vocals are so soft and gentle but have such a hold on me along some of the roughness of the album and the ethereal quality of how echoey and space-y it sounds, it just creates an album i constantly come back to to fill my chest with air.

mrvoletron - assorted wow remixes

yes. wow as in world of warcraft. hear me the FUCK out okay!! mrvoletron remixes have kinda been a staple of my wow friend group for over a decade, and now that i'm not bound to official streaming services, i downloaded these remixes in case they get taken down again and oh boy. i still like them.

you can totally write off a lot of these songs as gag songs, stuff like you face jaraxxus that got stupid popular even outside of wow circles but one of my favourites has always been algalon the observer which is just a nice lounge track with a groovy melody. however a new favourite is the onyxia wipe remix. just writing this is making me blush with embarassment, but there is something about the 'game fx and joke album' jesters we had in the 2010s that is so charming and brought me back to listening to some ocremix tracks as well as revisting stuff like yung scrolls's tes mixes. i hope mrvoletron is still making music, wherever he is.

similar kind - good grief!

okay back to serious albums, and this is cheating a bit since i have listened to this album a lot before getting my r1. i originally found the band from a hxh tiktok edit (lmao) but this album has comfortably landed as one of my favourites with a cool retro rock vibe with some party brass and a really interesting vocal synergy with the instrumental sound. it sounds between eras in a fun and interesting way, plus a lot of the songs have some CATCHYY tunes and lyrics even among the melancholic tracks. i've had a lot of compliments on putting this album on, and frankly i look forward to seeing what else they do!

kaleidoscopio - tem que valer

THIS ALBUM IS SO FUN!!! you will NOT have a bad day if you ride your bike to it at all, it feels like a latin mario kart soundtrack and will never leave my portable library EVER! the album is energetic, has an insane groove, and is SO bouncy without entering 'driving my car off a bridge' territory. you gotta listen to this on a sunny day and see what i mean.

school food punishment - riff-rain

school food punishment is so incredibly nostalgic to me, and i would likely not be far off if i said i've listened to riff-rain and amp-reflection both approximately a hundred times over the course of middleschool. revisiting sfp again, riff-rain no matter how much dust is on it still sits comfortably in my top 5 albums whenever i make a list, and i'm sure a lot of is nostalgia but there is something in this album that i haven't found in any other. while prog-roid has a lot more 'bangers', riff-rain just grips me a lot deeper with tracks like egoist and the phenomenal opening track flow. the blending of youthful and melancholic j-rock melodies with the electronic risers, effects, and piano segments just makes me keep coming back to this band every time.

new bike

i got a new bike!

as some of you may know, my first (and at the time current) bike was a gift from an ex and was a single speed gravel bike of sorts. for a long while i was debating spending the time learning to and consequently installing a gear system into it considering the sentimental value, but also conversely getting a new bike would be easier, cheaper, and to be honest- probably better for me moving on.

this bike, which i snatched up from a bike mechanic for $250, from what i could research retails in the ballpark of $1200 brand new and is a very solid alloy frame road bike. the guy had it completely tuned up and minus some wear on the brake pads, this thing was functionally stock and rode beautifully. so much so that i had to ride it in the worst rainstorm of the year about 25km from his place to mine as he wasn't willing to hold onto it due to demand! but this thing rules, it goes so unfathomably fast compared to my single speed and is ABLE TO GO UP HILLS! i'm still honestly trying to find a name for it... let me know if anybody figures something out.

crown gambit/sovereign tower and silly voices

i finally finished crown gambit! (see previous post for slightly more thoughts on it) but it was great, once again it struggled to make me feel for the stakes of the kingdom as the only characters i really enjoyed were the main cast and a few antagonists solely because of their absurdity. the gameplay was great and still managed to challenge me even later in the game when i discovered some ungodly combos which is always a really hard thing to do in a game where you can build your own decks/builds.

i wrapped up the last bit of the game on a discord call where i streamed and voiced the game and had suchhh a blast that i went straight into the demo for sovereign tower, and once again voiced it as my friend's nightly entertainment. sovereign tower is a far different game despite having very similar art direction (just brighter) and is more of a visual novel with light management elements. there's an interesting mechanic where you're incentivised to time travel back at a cost, and unlocking new dialogue as a weird prophetic vision but aside from that, it's nothing phenomenal nor trying to be groundbreaking. it is really cute, suffers from a bit of cringe humour, but is charming and i'm really excited to play through and voice these silly larger than life characters!

actually, i had so much fun doing a voiced playthrough that if you're reading this please let me know if you're interested in playing through deltarune like that- i need some motivation to finally play it and this would absolutely do it.

bizlychannel

truth be told i saw this guy's stuff in my recommended and just assumed it was video essay slop with a bad youtuber accent and trying to capitalise off of the wave of 'manufactured storyline' stuff i've been seeing a lot of, especially coming from the minecraft side of things. i ended up watching his skyrim guard video and was REALLY impressed, like realistically he doesn't have any groundbreaking takes or thoughts but what really impressed me was his editing style where he actually dresses up and has these visual gags/storytelling scenes where his editors comp him in really well into a game scene and i feel like a baby watching cocomelon for the first time. they have SO much charm and are something i really haven't seen before and coupled with his storytelling-style of video, i've been really enjoying watching his backlog of videos when i need something on and it's been charming. highly recommend that guard video, or his oblivion video.

ping pong the animation

i'm sorry i slept on this for so long. i knew i'd really like it but i did not expect it to be one of the three anime i've given a 10/10. it's getting late as i'm writing this and i don't think i could do it justice without a full designated blog post, but i will just say that the character writing is outstanding and the anime has a really interesting way of presenting almost every character as their 'face' which often is unpleasant and damning to a fault. it takes these small personal scenes to really open these characters up. the egotistical international player who just wants to move back to china and has no interest in playing 'inferior japanese players', and there's a moment where we learn about his relationship with his mother in china, and she sends him a package of sweets that accidentally has one of her new grey hairs bundled up in it- and suddenly you realise that maybe there's more at stake than we want to believe. everyone has these moments and they're full of charm and so deeply entangled in mundane yet deeply important human experiences.

the soundtrack too is by kensuke ushio (of silent voice and devilman fame) and absolutely no notes on that front as always, the animation is absolutely gorgeous, and all just goes to accompany the very special story already on display. to me, the anime ultimately is about effort and what it means to truly give something your all and what makes it worth all the fuss.

microhabitat

i watched this film with a friend as a backup for the ping pong (2002) film not having any seeders, and i have thoughts. i actually wrote my first letterboxd review for it.

some extended thoughts: i wanted to cry at this film a lot. something about miso so earnestly seeing these people who were once her closest friends while they are changed, and honestly broken, and still seeing them as who they were deep down really hit a chord with me. i really liked the touch of her being a cleaner and the tragedy of her leaving every place spotless and without a trace, like she really feels like a phantom in their lives and never really wants to be anything grander- miso is presented like a total bum and i think is perhaps one of the kindest people i've seen in film who never tries to be nice.

i love films that make me walk away with a desire to change or live more in a certain way, and microhabitat came to me at a time where i am stressing so much about relationships, personal conflicts, housing, finances, my relationship with my friends and family, and my career. i should be a little more like miso, and maybe there is still time to enjoy cigarettes and whiskey, and to see the face of friends i haven't been able to meet in a while. i should try to make up with my old best friend i cut off years ago.

mandatory personal segment

this year has really fucking sucked to be completely honest with you.

i don't really want to just list out all the 'woe is me' things, but it really is laughable just how much it feels like i'm being beaten down and then all my main supports being kicked down whether by poor circumstance or a certain malicious actor. i'm so unfathomably stressed and have been making piss-poor decisions back to back for some form of fleeting comfort that i can hold onto long enough to get things stable and afloat again, and those decisions have just been eating my conscience away and making me unable to meet people in the eye anymore with any sincerity due to just how horrible i have been. i don't really know what the appropriate reaction is meant to be to having your ex and the person who singlehandedly spread something that made ~a dozen of your friends including best friend disappear from your life overnight hang out together and post like 5 stories back to back almost as if just to make me feel like shit. i think a big part of me has lost the ability to trust anybody's perception of me, and the issues i've had with identity have come crawling back now that it feels like an overwhelming guilt is constantly pointed at my throat and will draw blood if i exist in a space anymore.

unfortunately i think at this point i'm still self-sabotaging my relationships and trying to keep people at an arms length, it isn't effective for anything no, but it's kind of what i've always done and at this point it feels like tradition. i used to do this as a precursor for suicide when i was younger, and thoughts have definitely come back pretty aggressively recently with being at my wits end when it comes to a lot of things. if nothing else, maybe it'll be the final revenge plot to make this person finally get off my fucking back and stop trying to sabotage my social and personal life. i don't plan on killing myself over this, by the way, as funny as it would be. at times it does feel like the passive ideation is worse than the problems, or even suicide itself for sure, but it is something i have very unfortunately learned to manage and will have to continue to do so. it's taken up a lot less bandwith these days though, which is really nice and is usually something i can push through rather than needing to disappear for weeks on end and accidentally starve off half my bodyweight.

ANYWAYS the funny twitter post has relevance!! short story, but i was talking to/going on some dates with this girl and unfortunately had to cut it off since i felt like she was kind of idolising me to a very concerning degree and any attempt i made to learn about her just went back to me. it makes me just miss my ex and how they weren't really interested in the things i did moreso than who i was as a person, like they found the threads between the things i liked and that was what they were really drawn to. i miss those placid dates, and i miss just hanging out with a person i love rather than going on dates with the intention of seeing if a stranger and i love eachother. i'm not a nervous dater, but by god every date i go on just feels so bad in comparison and lacks the absurdity we had. i am just so over being single and having to go on forced ass dates because every time just makes me more upset over how well i had it, and that my benchmark is so seemingly unmeetable now despite being so reasonable. we wait, i suppose.

march/april megapost

2026-05-05T00:00:00Z

5.5.26

sooo the attentive among you may notice that yes, this post is indeed from the ~~fourth~~ fifth month. truth be told i shockingly didn't forget about the blog, but the more I wrote about april and especially march, the worse i felt and the less i wanted to really do it. i've decided to try dig up something low-commitment instead just so i can get back to guilt-free posts, but yeah. it's been one of the hardest times for me. also if you see any mentions to a bad month, just assume it means the past two months since i did already write a lot of the march update that i cbf updating

social media cleanse

a month so bad that i just felt so powerless and in an attempt to cull the depressed doomscrolling and over-reliance on stalking my friends as a way to feel like maybe everything isn't so bad by living vicariously through them, i decided to just, yk, quit cold turkey. now full transparency i did leave facebook installed on my phone solely as a test, because i know if i started to have a desire to scroll on facebook it was truly just over for me and i was, unc and chud as fuck.

honestly it started pretty well and i started to have a desire to do things that i've had debilitating guilt over not doing at home like: play through my absurd backlog of singleplayer games, work through my extensive reading list, or listen to some new music. and when i got bored of those? i just felt a way stronger urge to do some bullshit outside (though this grinded to a halt quickly because it still costs twenty dollars to go outside). all things considered the honeymoon period was pretty sweet and i felt a bit of an ego death, until i just realised how lonely it was and i was so disconnected from my friends and goings-ons anddd then i reached my month timeline and went back online.

i did a decent amount of things, but i have this awful thought process that i should've done everything in that measly month, but i'm still happy i did it if not just to identify what i'm actually reliant on/what i can depart with and not miss anything (tiktok and reels cough cough).

a very mythic bastionland(tm)

i had a brief little period where i was absolutely FROTHING at the mouth (and still am, a whole month later) to play a little ttrpg by chris mcdowall by the name of mythic bastionland. a few from my old dnd group have been absolutely going wild on a slew of new indie ttrpgs and this one came as a personal recommendation, and they hit the nail on the head. needless to say they simply opened a random page to one of the knights and myths, told me to read and look, and i was hooked.

thematically, bastionland is an OSR arthurian adventure where the players play heroic as one of 72 knights, knighted by one of 72 esoteric seers. the world is vague at best; myths blur the lines between reality and fantasy, and you are simply to seek them out with your fellow knights by guidance of your seers and service under the king. the myths, which act as 'quests' for the party exist on a hexcrawl in multitudes and are vague prophecies at best most of the time, which as a GM excites me with how simultaneously evocative and completely open they are for injecting into the mechanics of the crawl. if you're interested, the rules are legitimately like less than 10 pages, the 100+ page rulebook is actually a thinly veiled disguise for those 72 knights, myths, and roll-tables that follow the rules- even if you're not gonna play bastionland i'd suggest looking at some of the ideas because it's still a very compact and intriguing game (especially combat). also, most importantly, the art by alec sorensen is just absolutely fucking stunning and makes the book purchase alone worth it. seek the myths.

crown gambit

this has been sitting in my library for SO long and is a game i have literally spend hundreds of dollars backing (if not primarily for being led art-wise by perhaps one of my favourite artists of all time, gobert). i have really struggled to play singleplayer titles, but with my little cleanse i finally had a lot of time to kill outside of scrolling short-form content and really sunk my teeth into it. it's good! i think struggles from balancing four character narratives atop a grand political scheme, but it's still a fun visual novel with some really interesting ideas and combat mechanics. also, again, gorgeous art by gobert holy crap.

between two fires

a book i've been 'reading' for about a year now! a gothic horror medieval fantasy book on where we exist in the worst timeline where the christians were correct. i'm not too versed on my biblical history, but the book feels incredibly historical in a way that's very evocative nonetheless. i loved this book, the ending third or so did feel odd to say the least, but i felt inspired all throughout by the gorgeous prose by ol' chris and think it's captured a grungy, filthy plague-riddled europe with words alone incredibly well.

dude where's the copper

i have been playing sooo much vintage story recently, i've dabbled in it before but having a more committed group that simultaneously aren't neets so don't feel an overwhelming urge to look up every mechanic like a digital scholar has been so nice for feeling the progression of the game naturally. still the goat of survival games i fear.

everything everything

i finally got to see them live!! there is not much to say, there's a yt video of them at granada studios that kind of encapsulates how they sound live but this performance in my city was just awesome. i'm not a concert person but knowing the whole album back to front and sculling half a bottle of cherry liqeur definitely helped, and honestly i surprisingly had a blast screaming and jiving around. i also! bumped into an old close friend i cut off ages ago which was surprisingly sweet and we had a lovely chat there. awesome!

dating again...

nightmare. i feel i'm in a place where i've worked through the loss of my last relationship and have been microdosing hinge and meeting people to test the waters and see if i really am open to it again. unfortunately idk if my standards have risen to where they should be and that the dating pool in your mid 20s is a little horrific, or if my standards are now just unreasonably high. regardless it's been good to play it more slow because of it, and am finally excited by the prospect of meeting some cool people outside of the casual rebounds i had.

the allegations

this is more for irl people honestly, but i'm sure most of my friends know that i've been cancelled in some capacity seemingly? long story short, two of my closest friends have blocked me and a bunch of other mutual friends with the ""affected person"" have also followed suit/unfollowed me. the situation, i've been assured, is dumb.

losing close friends, more specifically probably my closest friend of ~7 years is rough for sure since it does feel like a reflection of your personhood, and as such i've kind of been in a state of paranoia and anxiety over the past few months about if i really did do something horrific that warrants this reaction, or even if this was the final straw in a series of reasons these people didn't want to interact with me anymore. it's a bad mental soup, but i've had a close friend really help me through it and share their similar experience which has truly been such a huge weight off my shoulders especially with how much i adore them and seeing how people can just be blatantly wrong about someone. it's getting better for sure, i just kind of want someone to respond and tell me what's being said about me lmao because now i'm just curious.

albums of the month(s)

anyways enough about me. i've finally done a few rym digs for albums i might like and have been listening to these a lot!

gwenifer raymond - last night i heard the dog star bark

a lovely guitar/banjo folky album that has a melancholic tone with some darker minor instrumentations and a heavy raw quality that makes me feel like a runaway vagabond wandering nomad steppe with nothing but my horse. it's a must-listen if you do like interesting folky projects.

souls of mischief - 93 'til infinity

bouncy, energetic, and goes hard as fuck,, i've fallen off the hip-hop wagon a little but this has been such a fun throwback to this bouncy style and playful flow that i've been listening to on repeat for short bike rides!

antropoceno - no ritmo da terra

i don't actually know how to explain this one, it feels very experimental and akin to an audio-version of sitting down with paints and just bleeding them on a canvas in a heightened emotional state. the noisy parts of this album i feel make you lose some of the really nice and interesting instrumentals found in like 'ayaba oxum' and the opening track, plus some of the tracks feel a little too repetitive for their own good. unlike anything i've heard, and still highlyyy suggest you listen to it atleast once because there are some absolutely incredible moments on this album.

champion trees - i want to sound like a ghost

lovely emo, yes the singer sounds like every midwest emo singer so listen at ur own peril. i love a lot of moments on this album, especially the little peeks of brass, string, and woodwind in tracks like 'i wear a shirt that says australia' and some of the moments in something like 'higher taste'. it's very nice hearing something that isn't a guitar in the genre, and it's veryyy welcome and tastefully done here.

how to keep moving

lately i've been pretty inconsolable and just reverting to my teenage self in response to everything happening and my self esteem crumbling. i don't think i'm in a state to 'get a move on' with projects and such that i've been wanting to do but i can definitely start by stop being so comfortable with being inconsolable and sad, which i am striving to do now that i have Shit to Do and things to look forward to.

i have my third education placement coming up next week, as well as moving in with a dear friend right after that which i am unfathomably excited to escape my current living situation (a city apartment), and playing the rest of the season out with my team. on that though, it is truly absurd how much light they've brought into my life by how warm and loving they've been to me at the height of my weird dysphoria spats, i should definitely tell them but i fear i've been too sappy and sentimental already with them so i'll space that out :p

here's to moving on from the past, making art, new connections, and not developing scoliosis!

fe-bruh-uary update

2026-03-24T00:00:00Z

24.3.26

hell month

hello! late submission here mostly due to me waiting for my roll of film to be developed so i can use the images in this post- however also because i have had a rough little feb. to start, about mid-way i had my chronic condition flare up pretty badly due to some real life stress accentuated by just ambient moving stress. also! the week i got the photos, i got a cold so it's all kind of been a maelstrom knocking me down over and over again. so needless to say i've definitely been in a weird disassociative survival-mode of sorts that, to make matters worse, kind of got nailed in the head by finding out that a close and dear friend had blocked me and my alts on everything imaginable with no heads up. it has been a physically and emotionally tumultuous time for sure, but let's talk about the few things i managed to get done this month despite it all!

edit: so this was true about two weeks as of uploading this (24/3/26) but the further delay was caused by a really severe depressive episode (more in the upcoming march blog i'm sure!) regardless, read on my lovely reader.

it's lonely at the center of the world

a graphic novel about an artist struggling with it all. i do need to preface i've read very few graphic novels and my experience goes about as far as the scott pilgrim novels, but i have always preferred them to manga and comics because of how much more they generally play with the medium and have less a focus on the explicit plot (atleast the ones i've read). this novel was absolutely stunning, there are some jawdropping spreads that i think capture some extremely raw emotions (such as the spread of zoe being held above a couch with two wooden dolls cuddling) and depict the disconnect between one's 'selves' in a really novel and interesting way.

without the copy itself to refresh myself it's hard to give more specific praise but i do appreciate how little it shys away from suicide and darker topics and ultimately does make the moments hit harder that zoe can so casually talk about killing herself and then have an extremely gorgeous panel about the experience of disassociating in an intimate relationship or something which just places you in her mind a lot better. i really appreciate artists who can really just put out autobiographical pieces, even if like zoe, it is met with an internal feeling of 'this is nothing' i do find so much inspiration in the intimate looks into peoples lives like this. highly recommend picking it up if you do see it, it's an incredibly short read too, and might give comfort to you in a weird way.

the great chop

i cut my hair! for the longest time my hair has been one of the biggest sources of insecurity and euphoria simultaneously for me, but it was reaching a point where my style is kind of unsustainable for the active lifestyle i was beginning to reach into. i had always played with the idea of cutting it short, but a lot of people online HEAVILY advised against the concept of trans women with short hair, and i was truthfully very deterred by it for the longest time since there was a high chance with my dysmorphia i would just be seen as a Man again.

pleasantly surprised to find out that getting the pixie was absolutely the play, and ironically enough actually had the effect of making me look more feminine than i was expecting and just making me a spitting image of my mother in her 20s. i kind of got it to both just to have tried it once, but also to have a more even cut to grow into should i dislike it- atm i'm really liking it and would like to keep it maintained but i am fickle and cannot stick to things so we will see where this sentiment lands in a few months time.

losing friends

there's a slim but non-zero chance that the person/people i'm talking about read this (and if you are them, i hope you're doing well sincerely), but basically one day i was wondering why i hadn't seen anything from a close friend for a while and checked their socials in case things just had slipped through. i couldn't find their accounts, despite how many socials i checked (even spotify) and realised that they've gone scorched earth and blocked me on everything. i'm not getting into specifics, but we did talk about things and thought we reached an understanding which lasted for a little bit after the chat which is why this kind of felt like a curveball. a lot of our mutual friends that have been odd around me have too been avoiding me since this happened and frankly i do sincerely worry about their perception of the events and how that might've trickled to other people since in my mind it didn't warrant this response at all.

but in trying to come to terms with a lot of interpersonal turmoil i think i've worn myself a little too thin and currently am in the process of trying to let myself back into just existing without this eating paranoia that i am a horrible person. replaying interactions between all these people, and especially between someone who i still think of one of my closest friends who hasn't replied to my messages since mid december, and wondering what i did/didn't do. if you've noticed me being a little erratic in feb, it's probably because of this and just a sense of unworthiness to exist in the same places as people i put up on a pedestal much higher than where i felt at this point. i've kind of been keeping koe no katachi in my mind as a kind of sacred text for navigating this and if anything commending myself for avoiding any sense of drama centering around myself for a good decade, but it's a hard thing when i'm at a point where i do feel attached to the external perception of my character. this, like many things, is definitely a senseless ramble but i do hope these people are doing well is the bottom line, and if that means not associating with me perhaps staying out of it all is doing a favour.

volleyball

with preseason in full swing, i truly was terrified of my first season playing women's volleyball. i would spend thirty mins to an hour doing my hair to look as 'feminine' as possible in an effortless way, finding training clothes that don't accentuate my masculine features, etc. and my loud personality on court would be reduced to a passive whisper out of fear of my voice betraying everything i've worked for. i've been so blessed that a lot of my teammates actually have known me for years and my coach- who funnily enough i've trained with for many years- have been so supportive and most importantly, so non-chalant about it all. it's been an absolute blast, really excited to see how far we go and i cannot state enough how much these girls are one of the biggest pillars holding up my mental health at the moment.

january update

2026-02-12T00:00:00Z

12.2.26

hello everyone!! long time no see, i have actually been writing some drafts but nothing that really has any legs yet but here i am with a january update! i got given some sage advice that i shouldn't leave the update for the end of the month and instead do it incrementally throughout the month, and i am seeing why. but with no further delay, lots of fun things so let's jump into it :)

hrt & me

a little tmi but i feel like it's something i need to talk about because i feel a little insane about it. so i've been on HRT for a little over two years now, and until november-ish my dosage was done via gel which i believe was a little underdosed, having only recently swapped to injections. during my time on gel i noticed very little if i'm being honest, i hadn't noticed any of the mental changes and had only surface level physical changes.

i had a lot of changes as-is that i struggled to manage around the same time as swapping to injections but now that i've had some time for the clarity of it all i can definitely notice what's been caused by what. it is also truly insane that i jokingly put 'have a cis straight guy have a crush on me' in my ny resolutions, and have somehow have had like four men independently try to hit on me?? i think it became less of a resolution and more of a monkey's paw if i'm being honest but anyways the connected thought is that my doctor was saying that her experience of people swapping to injections has always for some reason physically changed their faces? i'm a little too blind to my own features to notice but this would track, and it's all been a little odd now passing beyond my intended goal. i used to want to just fully 'be a woman' but i think i've settled into a non-binary identity where i do enjoy the androgny of it all, but now i've reached a point that i never really expected to reach? i know, first world problems, but it's kind of like being so focused on the climb that you forget your goal, and once you're there you just kinda realise you had nothing else after that. i guess voice training? get a dykier haircut? maybe i'm done now? who knows!

photography!

i've already touched on photography a bit in my blog, but i just wanted to add on that i feel i've actually been a lot better confidence-wise at actually photographing my friends and just being less ashamed in public to pull out the digicam. there's not much to say here, but i have been really enjoying it and as of today (12/2/26) i got a brand new film camera with a shitload of rolls coming in very soon, so hopefully i get up to some proper fun stuff! :)

volleyball

for about ~7 years now? i've played men's volleyball at a club level, most of which being with my current club. last season i kind of reached a weird point that i could finally articulate about how i get along with my team, but could never actually get close to any of them and always felt like an outsider. over the preseason break i was in two minds about finally biting the bullet and turning to women's volleyball instead, since i did have a fondness for men's volleyball and the culture/guys there- but having volleyball be such a big part of my life and feel so alien for my time there is just something i think that was weighing on me. i sent in my EoI for women's and got confirmation back even after disclosing that i was playing in men's and was on two years on hormones, etc. etc.

imagine my shock when one of my old libero's fucking messages me asking me to play up to a league i didn't actually apply for because he's coaching that one. i guess the anxiety was for nothing, but i've been training with them for a bit now and it is truly insane how much more comfortable i feel around them (sans the just general performance anxiety of now having to Be a Woman) and just how supportive and lovely everyone is, including teammates who knew me pre transition. it's going well, and i'm sincerely really excited to see how the season unfolds.

katanagatari

i've been reading nisiosin's (monogatari author) katanagatari during breaks at work and just an attempt to get off my phone more and read something fun that's also been helpful being scaffolded by vague memories of the anime adaptation i watched like 10 years ago. it's been good, and i've always been afraid of nisioisin's light novels solely because i know damn well how packed full of obscure japanese references and kanji puns they are, but this translation has been held in high regard and i totally see why. i still think having some weeb-level of familiarity with japanese helps a lot in understanding the translations but the footnotes are really helpful and honestly very educational at times. anyways, i've gotten through story 1 and 2 which i remember are still when it builds up but i've been enjoying it enough to keep me going through it because the author just has such an endearing charm in the writing style with the fourth wall breaks and quips/interactions between the characters and the narrative of it all. it does make me really want to rewatch the anime since i remember having so much fun with it, and it still sitting highly on my MAL.

mental update

man, i do remember in january i was actually having such a blast and felt really good but now writing this in early-mid feb, i have this cloud of awfulness over a lot of the things i'm trying to remember. i had an air of hope coming out of the rut that i still feel bad for my friends having to deal with during nov-dec, and i had this new clarity that everything was gonna be okay and that my chungus life is awesome. but there was a nagging feeling that something awful is coming with these good times. stay tuned for the feb update to see if that was right or not i guess.

i have kind of relapsed to some old doomscrolling habits near the end of the month, and have just fallen off the bandwagon with anything outside of hanging out and writing. this blasted drawing tablet has been staring at me, but especially now that i'm moving very soon it feels hard to root myself into something because of that nagging feeling of 'this is temporary' so i've been in a weird stasis i fear because of it.

i've managed to also read a little more too and been trying to find some spaces local to me that i can just sit down, have a coffee, and potentially get some reading/writing done with a good amount of background noise to keep me focused but not enough to distract me. i just stress too much and get too antsy! i would like to find some strategies and places i can readily access outside of a hug from a friend that can help me recenter and chill outtt

next steps

i do have a few drafts that might hold some water, speficially one about writing that i think when i have a clearer mental state would be fun to write about- and also a lot more poetry to chuck onto the blog, to the point where i might need a dedicated section for it oops. but going into februrary i think we're gonna need to buckle our shoes a bit and focus on survival, with all the changes and stressors coming out of the woodwork i already have fallen a bit off with updating here and feel like a broken record with my friends, so i want to focus on getting out of ruts reliably.

i have that work i submitted probably coming soon, and another two poem i submitted to a lesbian zine after being inspired by some zines a friend left with me in his move to another country which has opened up the possibility of just chucking some submissions in to smaller writing submissions. we'll see, in any case, and until then i hope everyone has a lovely february and all my partnered people have an adorable valentines day, and that all my single people survive it. sorry for the slightly depressed tone, that's what i get for writing the core of the update wayyy later that i should've oopsies! it'll be better next month and i'll make sure of it. dattebayo

film photography - a beginner's thoughts

2026-01-20T00:00:00Z

20.1.26

recently a lot of my friends have been taking film photos at events and such, and there seems to be a resurgence of 'inconvenience' as a social movement against the enshittification of technology and hobbies, as well as a return to older more traditional mediums like film to be more conscious of our consumption and creation.

my dad is a huge film photography enthusiast, and i was around it a lot in later adolescence and i think he really wanted to share it with me but i only ever had a passing interest at best. recently we've been connecting a bit more since he's moved interstate and now that we don't have to live with eachother, i think we appreciate one-another a lot more. so when someone arrived to a hangout with an unclaimed 'free' film camera they were giving away- i took it as a sign to get off my ass and get into something new and exciting, and had another friend teach me how to load, eject, and roll the film. then another friend of the show nudged me to getting a roll of film and go out to shoot some snaps together. most of these photos are from that day, and i just wanted to talk about technology, inconvenience, memories, and obviously photography.

also my friends will be replaced by pictures of cats for privacy reasons, i didnt realise they'd fit so well though lmao

killing the perfectionist

now full transparency, i've done photography before in school with a very passionate teacher and have a photographer dad, etc. etc. so i'm no stranger to the medium which i think really helped me get over this crippling fear i have of doing something new and embarassing myself over it.

in digital photography, i can always take like 30 snaps of the exact same thing with minor tweaks until i decide which one is the best and then tidy that one up further in post. in film? tough shit you don't even get to SEE the $2 photo you just took until a week later! this was actually really scary to me, especially attaching a monetary value to it because now my mistakes can't be covered up! kyaa! so scary! which is such a funny thing now writing back on it because the most touching pieces of art to me are ones that are almost 'accidentally art' where it just captures something very raw and unpolished in a way before it gets put through the post-processing that we put on the things we publish.

film kind of tricked me into creating art i like, being, the very transient moments of life that are punctuated with our personal eccentricities and flaws that make us whole. the roll i used (fuji 400) with this camera also had this really noisy dream-like quality which turned out gorgeous and accentuated this sentiment really beautifully that i think would've never come out the way it did if i had the opportunity to tweak and alter it like in digital.

exploring the familiar

all of these photos were from the same day, being where three of us went on a little stroll around our city with no clear destination and just followed what seemed immediately interesting. we followed construction zones, sourceless venue music, and whoever walked the fastest and so- ended up going into a lot of places that i don't think i would have ever gone myself outside of a similar scenario. it's kind of insane to think about how the city i've lived in/near all my life has so many places i've literally never seen before because i never took a certain side street, or went into that half-zoned off area.

i was having a conversation the other day aswell and the phrase 'being a tourist in your own country' came up, and it kind of got this gear turning again about how much of my country i take for granted and kind of glaze over because it's just a place i'm familiar with. i think i want to, in this sense, use photography to explore the places and people i love and am familiar with- which in a non-wanky way basically means to me i want to capture the landscapes hidden in my plain sight, as well as capture the sides of people that show off how i see them in my mind. that's kind of been a throughline of my poetry and art in general, and i think that's in part due to how my memory works- or rather- doesn't... aaaand segue

how to remember

let me frame this section very quickly with some context:

i have aphantasia (meaning, i cannot readily visualise things in my mind- which yes- includes in memory recall)
i have poor spatial awareness and find it difficult to gain my bearings in new places
i have extremely mundane dreams that are often indistinguishible from real life and they get muddled with my actual memories

and so especially after graduating highschool and not having things practically remembered for me, i've always been grappling with my memory in a way that doesn't seem like many of my peers do. bits and pieces about my friends get jumbled, i can never recall people based off their physical descriptions, i can't remember what places look like, my sense of time in memories is warped because there is no visual reminder of age and so i get fragments of memories from years ago coming back as if they were a few months ago.

anyways, this is a roundabout way of saying that blogging and google photos/my calendar have been so incredibly useful for me in this sense! every time someone asks 'how has your week been' i get a little physical paralysis and need to check my 'memory bank' as i call it, where i look through my calendar and photos to jog my memory as to what's actually happened in the past week. however from an aesthetic standpoint, i kind of hate the look of photos on my phone and end up taking a lot of 'fluff' photos that clog up my internal storage too @.@ so i've been trying to take things on my digi/film camera instead to be both more intentional with the photos/memories i preserve (and ofc looking a lot nicer and more evocative!)

i'm still undecided if this is a good or bad thing, but one of my favourite pasttimes is just flinging through my phone's photo gallery and seeing where i land and looking through old memories. i think it's a big way of how i process and ground myself in change, in that i can look back on myself and reflect on how different/the same things are and the feelings surrounding that movement which can at times be pretty painful- but i think that too is helpful in identifying what does this memory dig up that i'm upset about. i never really gave this much thought until thinking about photos themselves, but i think it's a really helpful tool to check in on my life if i'm ever feeling shit and just see how i was doing a year ago and just realise "yeah, maybe i'm still moving forward despite it all".

memory is odd, and photos help me with it and is a fun medium to explore, basically.

updates (boring life stuff)

life has been going pretty well, i've mostly been spending time with new people and feeling a bit closer to people i might've fallen off with just due to time passing, and tiddling around with this blog in my off hours. i've started uni with this weird pre-honours intensive that i've already started not attending due to a bad tutor and a worse course that i've been butting heads with already whoops!!!

also i've just kind of been in a weird place mentally with my transition where i've come to terms with being a clocky little transgender and assuming my appearance is enough to tell the whole story, but it's actually almost got me in trouble recently where i've had a few people i think actually take me for a cis woman??? i'm not sure how i feel about that entirely, but equally i'm not sure gender will ever make sense in the context of a single idetntiy for me so i've not paid it much mind outside of now probably having to have to disclose to people that i am transgender but now from the other side of the fence which is a little funny atleast, albeit very annoying.

outside of uni and gender though!! i think i'm at the stage where i'm coming down from a very dramatic december and early january and just cruising along a bit which leaves me with some melancholic feelings i guess, but i think that's part of the natural course of "exciting and intense" so i'm not too bummed out about not having all these new experiences and adventures for a bit. makes the heart grow fonder after all!

blog updates

i don't have the time or mental capacity to tinker with programming at any level, but i would like to rejig the home page to have a 'most recent' feed, etc. as well as some better formatting for my writings, but it's just something in the back of my mind that i'll come back to once i have a little more time! as well as always being unhappy with the visual layout HAHA so i'm very sorry if you got attached to one style!! i hope i'll land on something that keeps me hooked for a while soon ;-;

also i just wanted to say i am very proud of the new blog title 'works on my machine' as 1. a funny thing i say all the time, 2. a reference to the literal writing works that were indeed, left on my machine and posted, and 3. a funny jab at my lack of programming expertise and constantly tweaking things that i break!! i just had to make sure the genius of it was not lost on my dear viewers and not mistaken for a mere funny title!!!

have a good end of january!

january is always a weird as fuck month where it feels like everything is pure chaos and mayhem as the new year shakes the box of life for a bit until everything settles into its right place. it's been a lot of reflection for me atleast, and i get that sentiment from a lot of friends and a lot of sweeping changes coming up for a lot of people so i just wanted to hope that your january closes out a bit neater, and a little less frantically with some newfound clarity. hopefully your enemies repent, and your friends tell you how much they love you.

i'll see y'all around for the next post, which might be about writing with my upcoming publication! we'll see though, i'm not too sure :)

growing into a child

2026-01-13T00:00:00Z

13.1.26

as i've touched on previously, even though a lot of my peers talk about how their transition is when they 'start living', i feel as if only very recently i've had that sentiment. it's been weird and hard to place, and perhaps even created more mental dissonance than i had before- like what has changed if anything, and what part of myself is the 'real one'. brace yourselves for a brief rant about social villianisation of children, parenting, and how i started to wear a propeller hat with a lollipop going lalalala!

inconvenient little ones

studying education, i've grown to really get a new insight on adolesence and 'growing up' as a whole, and kind of become a bit of an education radical. atleast in the sense that i believe that as society has gone further and further, children and adolescents are continually being forced out of their spaces and not afforded the power to defend them. young people inherently in my mind serve a kind of chaotic role in society in that young people are often the first to highlight issues in institutions and rigorously question the state of things if given the tools and power to do so, and like- when's the last time you saw a new kids arcade built? a new third space for kids after school? kids feel like they're being seen as inconveniences to larger society and that they are simply conduits for creating complicit adults. now, this is not the new thought that i was alluding to, but just background and something i've been pretty vocal to for friends who foolishly poke me about my thoughts on education and youth.

stupid parenting culture

directly off of that rant, i'm going into another and it's about parenting attitudes. brace yourself. working in retail, and training to be a teacher, i see so many parents with their kids and good lord at what point in society did we decide that yes- we should make a child the responsibility of ONE SINGULAR UNIT and we will applaud you for it!! like i feel genuinely insane at times for even suggesting that we should have social pressure for parents to have their children be exposed to different responsible adults in their life outside of themselves and teachers?? but sincerely time and time again it's always the kids that have uncles, aunts, and extended family that they can go to (not even just in times of crisis, but just as a change of scenery) and just learn about the world through new eyes to become their own person rather than a copy of their parents or a retaliation against them. kids are fucking awesome dude, in my opinion people are just traumatised from this parenting approach that just creates breeding grounds for bad parenting to go unchecked, and like not even at the fault of the parent, parenting is hard- and i think evolutionarily we were never meant to do it as an individual or pair.

growing up

img credit: @kibokey

i was in such a rush to grow up as a kid, and i think part of that was being a gender that i didn't realise i was not. i was online in spaces with primarily 20-30 year olds, i spent time with my older (by 5 years) brother's friends as my peers, and i just had a weird relationship with children's media as i got older. being 18-23 has kind of blurred over me, i've been trying to cosplay an adult without having any reason to or even interest in it, which to me meant saving up for a house and developing a professional career for the most part (among other less significant social changes). in meeting this new group of local queer people and getting close with them, i've felt this relief of seeing peers my age forego this collective concept of a socially-constructed adulthood in favour of a more personalised life teeming to the brim with their personal eccentricities and personal values. just being around them really made me wonder what have the past few years been for? and that thought alone really gave me pause to deconstruct and reconstruct the life i've been pawned off by Big Society (tm) alongside all of those expectations and dismissal of 'childish' things. 'what's wrong with being a kid?' is what i had to ask myself, and really it is so stupidly simple and something i never ended up asking myself. 'not a whole lot', is the answer (by the way).

growing down

in the past year, i've spent a lot of time gravitating back towards some more stereotypically 'childish things'- i've been getting back into adolescent writing off the suggestion of one of my tutors, watching japanese adolescent superhero shows, and just letting myself enjoy stupid videogames again, and most importantly learning to ride a bike. this bike is so poetic to me you do not even begin to fathom dear reader, but anyways. it's not like i've just age regressed, there are definitely non-childish things that i still hold dear to me but it's more a conversation of why was i programmed to be so averse to these things and being perceived as anything but the paragon of cool, smoking a hundred cigarettes like that one uwoslab video. i did not need to write heartwrenching literary works to be a writer, i did not have to know what i was doing, to do something. i know damn well most people reading this are like 'well, duh.' but i think the intersectionality with other parts of my identity/upbringing (immigrating, and gender fuckery) have kind of taken the forefront of my thoughts and i let 20-odd years slip past me and now i get to deal with all of this baggage that caught up to me in my pursuit of injecting sesame oil in my stomach and chasing a humble bag.

i'm excited. unfortunately for me as a teacher, social media is in a fucked spot right now and the education system is crumbling at the foundations to really do a whole lot, but i think there's going to be some fun challenges along the way. i'm excited to potentially one day have my own kid(s) and raise someone kindly. and firstly, and most importantly, i'm excited to live out this new faux-childhood in a way that kid-me thought adulthood was going to be like but never was.

authors note

thanks for reading this nonsense, i didn't want to write an actual essay with any structure (laziness) so a lot of thoughts are half-baked and sort of just primers for myself to know where i'm at with certain things. if you're one of my irl friends and anything here sounds like something you'd love to chat about- in all honesty hit me up, i absolutely love talking about this stuff! i just bought a little memo pad as well so hopefully when riding around i can jot down some ideas to extrapolate into proper blog posts since i be forgettin'...

unfortunately uni sounds like it's going to be a rough slog with this 5-week intensive but i'll try stay on top of things to find time for fun things and atleast deliver a post a month :) have a lovely january everyone, and stay slutty for all my melting australian friends (with sunscreen on please)!

also i have been thinking about what my fursona would be... for so long i've thought fox but recently... maybe it's goat?? i feel like a goat would make sense... but i hate the idea of calling myself the goat... hm.. maybe it has a ring to it.......... yeah... the goat...

bring on 2026 - an introduction

2026-01-08T00:00:00Z

1.8.26

no guys seriously how do you write a blog HAHA

but while i figure that out, i guess this is a good opportunity to talk about setting up this blog!

why blog? why now white girl?

i think in my 20s, having finally transitioned my gender and shifted into social groups that i truly feel at home with, i have only just realised how much my life was built on coping mechanisms i developed to make things make sense and for the world to be a lot more bearable.

not that my childhood was explicitly traumatic or anything, i think i just always had an easy way out through things such as digital escapism and sunk a lot of my life into games, anime, and other entertainment with a sole purpose of 'passing time' until 'it got better'. now i'm 25 as of writing this, and in coming face to face with how much i rely on doomscrolling and ambient consumption to exist day-to-day i have made it my goal— nay mission! to defeat the evil of not touching grass... in layman's terms, my new years resolution (following from late 2025) is to just be a lot more intentional with the things i do and create. to me, i've identified it to mean seeking boredom without the crutch of the phone algorithms and making conscious efforts how to spend my time, albeit playing through a game on my ds, sketching, or writing. the blog gives me the opportunity to just write some bullshit, but also gives me the opportunity to reflect on my time spent and really identify if i want to do more, or less of something. simple, right?

the setup

i think i have some sort of IT-related trauma from my degree, it's complicated, but i'm so thankful to have an incredibly lovely friend who not only helped me set this blasted thing up for six hours, but also was one of the biggest encouragements in even entertaining the idea of a neocities blog in the first place.

we used the flamedfury guide for 11ty since one of my biggest pain points in the previous blogs (and a huge reason for their decay) was how much of a pain in the ass writing out blogposts in straight up html was, and i was told this is a more front-loaded solution that will make updates in the future painless! so far in writing this post, yeah, well... heh... let's justr say... it's pretty awesome... like being able to functionally just type in discord-syntax (which also uses markdown), being able to push changes instantly to a locally created copy, having github version control, plus 10x less annoying image linking than html all make me veryyy chuffed!

there's not a lot to be said about the technical nitty-gritty from a programming ape like myself, it was very nice to hear from my friend that the experience of running me through it all was pretty painless though! speaking of the experience, i kind of just wanna touch on how awesome it is to have friends with these sorts of skills and just spending the day in their element, learning from them and just spending quality time trying to figure out why one of the navs won't take any padding values for 30 minutes. jokes aside, i've always had this childhood dream that likely stemmed from my watching of seinfeld where i wished for an apartment where i could have friends over and we'd just shoot shit and work on things together for fun and learning new things. i fear this blog is just gonna devolve into jerking off my friends and saying how much i love them.

kamen rider ryuki

i kind of started getting really into kamen rider as a bit, but i fear that everyone in my life genuinely think i'm unhealthily obsessed now which is a little bit funny.

for context, i've seen a handful of heisei series (namely build, den-o, wizard and amazons) and having just finished up ryuki i think it sits neatly at the top of it all. the first episode alone is such a fantastic introduction to the early 2000s horror/drama tone and to shinji and akiyama as our beloved yaoi-riffic couple, and i highly recommend watching it to get a feel of the rest of the series. the sound-track is truly spectacular, having so many riders get thoroughly fleshed out alongside their motivations makes all the side plots feel a lot more weighty and neatly interconnected. there's not much more i can say without spoiling it, but i do absolutely adore shinji as the hopelessly optimistic main rider truly being checked at most turns of the story for his 'stoooppp fightingg!!!!' altruism against the very firm ambitions of the other riders.

it's always hard talking about tokusatsu in a way that's understandable to non-toku watchers, but i can highly recommend ryuki as an intro to the genre for anybody more interested in the dramatic and character-driven moments as opposed to the sheer shenanigans of shows like fourze and den-o. also zolda is so fucking cool, like it is hilarious how overpowered he is solely because he's the only rider who gets A Gun.

draw steel!

i am a big sucker for ttrpgs. you will learn this sooo quickly. but imagine my shock as the forever gm that i get invited to a pathfinder 2e game of season of ghosts one week, and then my old group's gm asking for an eoi to try out the new MCDM system draw steel. to say i was doing backflips would be an understatement.

draw steel is a self-described 'tactical heroic cinematic fantasy' game. basically what this boils down to is that it's a fantasy ttrpg that removes anything that does not support tactical, heroic, and/or cinematic gameplay. i was definitely intrigued in theory, but as with any concept it only goes as far as it's implemented— which thank god the designers have truly hit the nail on the head with it so far.

we're currently playing through the delian tomb starter adventure (very cutely designed after designer matt colville's youtube series on de-mystifying running ttrpgs: 'running the game') and so far the combat feels very reminiscent of LANCER in the best way possible, while the 'narrative play' of the game has employed the sacred art of 'it doesn't fucking matter bro'. what does this look like? well, if you go back to 'heroic, cinematic fantasy' you can kind of figure it out. tracking gold? is it heroic or cinematic to mark down 2sp to buy a drink at the tavern? not really, so draw steel instead denotes your general wealth with a single value (e.g. 1 is enough to afford necessities, 2 is lavish living, 3 is enough to own a nice house, etc. etc. you get it.). this trickles down to things like reputation as well, and a completely forgone equipment tracking system in lieu of 'kits' which represent your equipment but also alter your gameplay via changing your character's speed, actions, etc. it really wears the mantra on its sleeve and forgoes a lot of ttrpg traditions in favour of selling this very punchy and snappy experience of just being badass heroes kicking doors in.

at level 1, my troubador pregen walked into a room of a dozen goblins, power-slid into the room, played a power chord and slammed an entire squad of ~5 into a burning brazier and killed them instantly via environmental damage. and this was not even using my main action. this game is truly such a blast and classes all interlock with eachother to create awesome tactical scenarios, once again, in the tagline. having forced movement be so integral to class kits, and having rules for forced collision makes it such a fun bit of tactical gameplay where you're playing goblin bowling and tossing them around the battlefield and trying to mold the battlefield into an advantageous shape for your party's strengths. i haven't had much opportunity to delve into the proper rulebook outside of the trickling of mechanics in the delian tomb, but i've been told about some of the kiss-curse character creation mechanics and exciting things to look forward to and i'm definitely not saying no to another adventure or campaign run in this system as a nice break from the granularity of pf2e to say the least.

i can't wait for the next session, not only for my gm's awesome presence at the table and monster noises, but just to find out more about the system and this interesting take on stripping and rebuilding the unquestioned foundations of all these dnd-shackled fantasy ttrpgs.

how are you doing?

the 'real' part of these blogs is always so odd to do for me. i have nothing against talking about myself but afterwards i always worry that i've 'misrepresented' myself or others for some reason. but this is an important part of the process too, i suPPOSE.

december was truly insane. without too many details i had a breakup that weighed so heavy on me that it kinda poisoned december and served as one of the most violent wakeup calls to date, which in hindsight perhaps was equally helpful as it was painful. it helped me identify a lot of the things i'll talk about in the next section but i think off the back of switching to estradiol injections changing my brain chemistry and an extremely stressful month of uni assignment crunch it dealt a death-blow to myself as a functioning person for november/december. even for me, the ruminator, i ruminated so much more than i think most people should in their entire lives and realised i need to make some long-awaited changes to my life.

publication??

yeah so this is a little crazy still, basically early in the semester i read out a writing excercise we did in class for about 5-10 minutes and a few weeks later my lecturer talked with me about getting that piece published because she enjoyed it so much (for context, i consider myself an above average writer, i think i lack the structural knowledge of a writer since i mostly do it to get thoughts and feelings out into a page, without much consideration of proper form and technique) so hearing this was definitely a shock from a lecturer who i respect an insane amount as a very knowledgeable and skilled writer. anyways, we talked about the timelines etc. and as much as i was terrified, i did want to start saying yes to more opportunities (especially ones as exciting as this) and so we shelved it until december when she'd open applications.

cut to a month ago now, after the semester has wrapped, and me checking my student email to follow up some enrolment issues and lo and behold a two-week old email from my lecturer following up on publishing that piece. with a deadline in a week. whoops. thankfully it's a short 500~ word piece, but writing it was very cathartic in that most of my writing being glorified vent-pieces have a very melancholic/gutwrenching tone and i have used it as a very potent crunch in most of my writing, and this piece was a firm attempt into writing something more meditative and hopeful. and so well, i ran it by a few friends and my lecturer and have gotten some shockingly good reception! the piece in summary is just a meditation on my experience as an immigrant walking through an asian grocer and how the space serves as a 'cultural bunker' from rampant globalisation and the assimilation a lot of these communities are forced to due to fewer cultural spaces for them to exist in. i had a lot of fun writing it, and from the sounds of it, it's probably being published early next year? not for a major thing, of course, but still as my first publication i've had to seriously consider if i want to pivot into a writing pathway especially with all these actual writers in my life, including my roommate, and forego teaching. i am on the fence about it, leaning to no. i think writing has always been a medium that has never felt intimate to me, but more like the most familiar pen in the drawer that i always reach for.

BIKE!

hoooly shit guys. as my city's number one public transport warrior, getting a bike has been life-changing.

i live in the city and usually have to bus around or take 40-min walks to get places, but having a bike i can reach anywhere in the city in sub-15, and can even ride out 20km pretty comfortably on this thing. it's served as both a way to rehab my busted knee for volleyball preseason but also it's just been wonderful to go fast down a hill, feel the wind on my face, and just forget about the world for a little bit. since late november, i have ridden my bike every day without fail and not even as a challenge or anything, i just have because it's so much fun and so convenient, some days i ride for hours in total.

the community aspect too, of having a lot of friends who ride bikes and even inspiring some of them to get back into it/get into it in the first place, has been so exciting and i've been in the talks of doing a big group 'bike dyke' ride with them and potentially making it a regular thing. at this point, i've just been mostly riding with the friend who helped set up this blog and it's been extremely lovely to strap a speaker to the back and just go. bikes are so efficient it actually is insane, and i absolutely get it now and am unironically thinking about getting a fuck-off bike tattoo now.

boombox

i got an mp3 player earlier in 2025 as a half-assed attempt to decentralise a lot of shit off of my phone and inconvenience myself a bit more so i'm more intentional with my consumption. unfortunately she hasn't been used a single time lol. but one of my friends held a big music trade and i ended up getting recommended some cds which took my ass into gear to getting an actual cd-player and thinking about starting a physical music archive of sorts.

now, with a boombox poetically gotten on nyd, it's been so nice to just chuck an album on in the kitchen and do something whether it be cooking or cleaning without the hassle of a bluetooth speaker or needing to touch my phone. that's about all for this thought, it's just a nice separation, kinda like having a designated office to work in vs a home office and has encouraged me to listen to a lot more music properly. it's good!

next steps

well, now that i have a working skeleton of the blog. all that's left blog-wise is to freshen up the css, get it looking like not a temu version of my friend's blog, and get to writing!

outside of the blog, i half-jokingly made a 'ins' vs 'outs' ny resolution list which honestly in doing so on the back of life events has actually proven very useful:

ins:

showing my friends the love and physical affection i want to give
writing with purpose and intent
new art mediums
being bored without my phone
bike with friends

outs:

being afraid of embarassment
computer
vitamin deficencies
bad furniture
bad injury management

mostly there's just a theme of not holding myself back, i think because i grew up around the 'nerdy kids' and on the internet, i typecasted myself into that stereotype and even when i fell in love with sports in highschool i just assumed that was a weird glitch more than anything. only in finding this new group of friends and continuing my volleyball pathway have i actually realised that i actually unfortunately do need to touch grass and i feel infinitely better cresting that initial embarassment of failure and the unfamiliar... how damning... but i have a feeling 2026 is going to be a year of a lot of movement, new experiences (but actually, not like in a trashy way), getting dripped the fuck out, and wrestling my friends.

it is 2:44am as of finishing this non-stop stream of consciousness, i did suddenly have the thought of having a new blog-section for poems i write in a cute layout— but i fear that may step on the toes of the 'vitamin deficency' and 'bad injury management' parts of my resolution, so i will concede to bed and push up this post. good night.