Est. Read Time: 14min
Hello, and happy August, everyone! I know, it's not exactly MUCH earlier in the month than I have been publishing. HOWEVER! It is also NOT nearly midnight when I published. So... improvement! Yay!
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After three months in a row of using the Mali font (I did not intend to do that. I forgot to switch to this font last month), I'm back to trying out Kalam to see how I feel about it. After getting semi-used to the Mali font, how does everyone feel about this one? I kind of feel like I'm reading a comic strip, but I also don't necessarily hate that??? Does it miss the "look more mature and 'professional'" mark I've been trying to hit by switching off of the Coming Soon font??? I haven't had a comment on any of my blog posts since January, so I'm not sure how these fonts are hitting. I'd love the input.
Anyway, as for August thus far. Well....
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My one coworker is a biker, and hit up the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in Sturgis, South Dakota at the start of the month. She left on the 3rd and got back on the 13th. There's only three employees at the place where I work: me, the biker coworker, and our manager (there's more employees within the company, but they work at other locations). As I mentioned last month, due to the small staff, if one of us is on vacation the other two are working straight through it with no days off. It sucks, but we literally don't have the staff to handle vacations any other way without one of us working a multi-level store by ourselves for 8hrs. Plus, the company as a whole is small enough that normal labor laws - which requires at least one day off every Sunday thru Saturday work week - don't exactly apply. So, biker-coworker being gone for 11 days means Manager and I are working those days straight through. Plus, my manager had August 2nd off leading into Biker's vacation. Which means I had the joy of not only working twelve days straight - after working 8 days straight to cover Manager's vacation, and only getting 2 days of recovery before this next long stretch - but I also got to work with Biker on her last day before a long vacation. Clearly, despite promising the contrary, she was fully in Vacation ModeTM that last day: focused more on last minute prep work for her flight early the next morning.
Needless to say, by the time my next day off came around on the 14th I just needed to veg. I have been back to my normal work schedule since, which is nice. However, Manager's daughter is expecting her 2nd kid soon, and Manager wants to take at least 5 days off once she does. That way she (Manager) can go watch her toddler grandson for that first week and help around the house while Mom and Dad recover and bond with the new baby. Which means Biker and I will again have a semi-long work week to cover. Also, since it's contingent on the birth of Manager's 2nd grandchild, there isn't really MUCH forewarning as to WHEN this long stretch is going to happen. We just know it's going to be within the next 5 weeks.
Weeeeee.
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On top of all of that, I've also had ProjectsTM at work the past week or so.
Normally, one of the fringe benefits of my job - and one of the reasons having to work 12 days straight isn't TERRIBLE - is that there is a LOT of down time where I can more-or-less do whatever. I can sit and read. I can flip through my socials. My manager likes to play Candy Crush until her phone battery practically dies. Back when I wasn't bogged down with writer's block, I would use this downtime to write. Heck, I'm using some of it right now to work on this blog post!
While I was able to still use some of this downtime earlier this month to work on creative endeavors, which I'll touch upon later, this past week has not left me with much of any downtime at all. If I'm not helping with a customer I am working on spreadsheets or graphic design projects or double checking website accuracy or scanning and retagging the store products or.... herding a bat out of our store......
Yeah. That happened this past Saturday. Randomly, at about 11am, I saw this black blur dash past the office doors. I thought it was the shadow of a pigeon flying past the store's front door, so I didn't really think much of it until a customer alerted me of the rogue bat zipping around trying to find an exit. After the customers that I was ringing up left, I grabbed some Kevlar gardening gloves and a bucket with lid from the maintenance man (he was more inclined to try to kill it, so that's why I took over bat-escort duty). I then set to catch the bat and usher it outside. The thing was QUICK. Just zooming through the first floor at full speed as the poor panicked thing tried to find an escape. Our ceilings are pretty high up, and the bat stayed pretty close to them, so even at its lowest swoop it was still a good foot or two above me. There was just no way I was catching this thing unless it landed.
I tried calling animal control, but they aren't open on the weekends and the outgoing message didn't give a number to call for off-hours assistance. Hoping the bat had worn itself out - which it did - I looked for it again. It had found a dark room to hang from the ceiling within and catch its breath. Problem is, as soon as I noticed where the bat was - which was still WAY too high up for me to reach - I triggered the motion sensor, turning the light on in the room. This instantly startled the bat and it zipped around in a panic again. It shot right past my shoulder as it left the room to try to get away again, but it was too fast for me to even register that it was coming at me. There was no way I would have moved fast enough to have caught it with my bucket.
Thankfully, as it exited the formerly darkened room, it passed the front door. Playing doorman now, I held the door open and called out to it, hoping to catch its attention enough to direct it towards the exit. Kept a minute or two, and the bat near-missing the door about half-a-dozen times, but it finally figured it out and dashed out of the store without fuss. Well, aside from the pigeons that roost above our front door. All of them were like, "Who the heck is this jerk?" as the bat sped past all of their nests in an attempt to find a place to finally go back to sleep. But the bat was their problem now.
Hubby had started up a rewatch of the 2004 cartoon The Batman last week, so I guess it is oddly fitting that this is when I'd have a bat encounter. Funny that it's the 2nd bat encounter - where I was the one who dealt with the bat - in just over a month, however.
Side note: Jason Marsden voices the villain Firefly in The Batman. I have always pictured Marsden using a Brooklyn accent as the voice of X-Future character Devon St. James. Marsden's energy coupled with the energy of The Scout from Team Fortress 2 just makes me think of Devon every time. The fact that Firefly and Devon are both fire users - Devon can manipulate it via his powers and Firefly uses flamethrowers as weapons - coupled with Marsden voicing this incarnation just makes me picture the character as Devon every time. It's been quite amusing. Anyway! Getting back to my main blog update.....
Outside of the excitement of chasing down a bat, work has been a drudge. My brain is fried. No thoughts. Total burnout. Every time I tried to work on something creative I just got radio static. I spent a lot of my downtime either aimlessly scrolling through my socials or doing mindless tasks I've been meaning to do for a while now. Mostly with regards to picture organizing.
Back when I started up Animal Crossing: New Horizons I realized that there would be parts of this game - by design - that I wouldn't be able to replay/relive. All other games that I had played (with the exception of The Sims), I could go back, replay the games, and re-experience scenes/dialogue/action sequences/etc. ACNH? Once I've experienced it I've experienced it and then it was gone. Just like in real life (to an extent). That's when I started taking screenshots and the 30sec screen recordings the Switch allows. I was starting to compile them into folders on my computer for me to go back and reflect on how my island used to be; used to look. I could also relive conversations I had with my villagers. Just record as much of my game-island life as I could to look back on later. Some of the villager conversations took longer than 30sec for me to go through, though, and it was clunky to watch half of the convo via one video and half via another. So I started taking screenshots of the recordings and splicing those together into a sort of conversation comic strip. It's also how I've showcased some of these conversations before in this blog.
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| Ooof. Terrible timing there, Maddie. XD |
Deciding to create these "comic strips" of various ACNH scenes that I encountered was truly when things got tedious. I still want to do it though. A lot of effort up front for a nice gift for my Future Self to enjoy later.
It did mean, though, that I couldn't just transfer the images and videos from my Switch to my computer and tuck them in their little folders. Done and done. No. I had turned this endeavor into ProjectsTM!
I did the same thing with the free self-care app I downloaded shy of 18months ago. I'm actually surprised it kept me this long to talk about it. It's called Finch: Self Care Pet.
The concept of the app is that you hatch a finch that you can name (and choose a pronoun for between he/she/they). Then you take care of your little "birb" (as the app calls them) by taking care of yourself. The more you use the app for your own self-care the more your birb grows and builds their own personality. As they age you can pick out feather colors to customize them. You can also buy dyes in the in-app shop (using in-app currency that you earn via logging in self-care). Once you have unlocked a color for your birb, you can easily switch between them via your finch's closet. No need to pay in-app currency each time you want to switch up your birb's look. You can also buy clothing and accessories for them to showcase their personalities even further. They also have their own little pet that can accompany them: your app's micro-pet. Your birb can earn a new micro-pet each month by logging in, as well as by completing certain goals you set for yourself. You can also switch through which micro-pet you want to accompany your birb.
I can't recall anymore if I came up with the name or if I went with the one randomly generated when I hatched her, but this is my birb Poki and her little cloud micro-pet Cotton:
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| If you're interested in joining the app,
you can use my Friend Code: XWMEYF4KXA |
Once your birb ages into adulthood (via you interacting with the app), they can start traveling to real-world destinations and learn about the culture there. Poki is currently traversing the Sonoran Desert (mostly within Arizona, USA). She's also travelled to Tokyo, Japan; Bali, Indonesia; Maui, Hawaii (USA); Paris, France; Taipei, Taiwan; and safaried through the Serengeti, Tanzania.
The key feature of the app is your birb going on daily adventures to explore the world and learn from it. It could be something as simple as the easiest way to warm up when it's cold outside, or trying out a new food, or discovering a new song or TV series. It could be something about the area they're exploring, such as how many people live in Tokyo, or what's up with the many faces carved into the Pont Neuf in Paris, or visiting the Tanah Lot Temple in Bali, etc. It could be a thought experiment, such as a preference to be able to rewind time and relive the past vs being able to see the future, or which super power would you like to have, or what element would you like to bend if you are from the world of Avatar: The Last Airbender.
You earn energy by checking in with the app and completing either exercises the app provides, or goals you have created for yourself, or just simply journaling. Once you've earned enough energy, you can send your birb out on their daily adventure. You can have them complete their adventure faster by generating more energy. You also earn Rainbow Stones (the in-app currency I mentioned earlier) alongside building up energy. After six hours (or shorter, if you've built up energy while your birb was adventuring), your finch will want to discuss their journey with you. There's two pre-scripted answers you can choose or you can opt to write up your own response. Based on what you picked, your birb will respond in kind. Obviously, it's a bit of a generic non-committal reply if you write up your own response. The app doesn't have writing generators to come up with a response based on what you wrote.
This is the part that I was referencing in conjunction to my ACNH project. The app doesn't save your birb's past adventures to relive outside of noting whether they like or dislike a particular discovery: food, desserts (not sure why it's a separate category), drinks, books, TV shows, movies, songs, games, or activities (such as bathing in an onsen or moon watching).
I find the adventure itself, what Poki has to say about it, my different response options, and her reply back to me all adorable. All things I wish to revisit. Much like ACNH, I realized that I would have to record them myself to do so. This results in me taking HUNDREDS of screenshots and then splicing them together so I can later quickly flip through and relive Poki's journeys.
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| Sorry for the blurry image.
It's not this bad on my computer. Not sure what's up with that. 😅 |
Soooooo, yeah. As I mentioned, my brain has been fried, and so I've been using the need for mindless tasks as an excuse to finally get back to my massive backlog of ACNH and Finch images that I've wanted to splice together via GIMP. I'm still probably over a thousand images deep for both projects when it comes to backlog. But I did make some progress. So... yay.
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Back to that one creative endeavor I did manage this month, though. Yup. Finally circling back around to that. For whatever reason, when I woke up on Saturday, August 19th, I was fixated on my one character Artie. In the past - mostly 2016 - when I talked about Artie, I said that they were still cisfem, but disguised themselves as male for various reasons. They would even purposefully present as female if they felt it would be beneficial to the situation.
Since then, I've felt like Artie was actually the first queer character that I created. I feel like they would definitely use they/them pronouns. I still don't know enough about non-cisgender identities to truly know how Artie would define themselves, so I don't want to canonically say. In one incarnation, Artie still thought of herself as cisfem and did indeed disguise herself as male to better survive in a patriarchal society. In other incarnations? Artie is probably closer to gender neutral? Maybe gender fluid? They don't care if people think of them as male or female. They see the social benefits of both options, and mostly present as one gender or another for those benefits: males aren't questioned on their strength or intelligence, females are allowed to cry or enjoy "cute" things, males are allowed to be a little reckless and exploratory, females tend to have tighter communities to interact with, etc.
The more I thought of Artie while I got ready for work, the more I wanted to introduce them to the world. Back in 2019, I had abandoned this project before finishing my introduction of Lia, but the way Artie was poking at me, I knew I needed to revive my "Meet My OCs" series on Tumblr. During the aforementioned work downtime on the 19th, I started up the first half of my introduction to Artie. You may notice, if you go through the few blog posts here where I talked about Artie before, that I got some of the details of Artie's early versions wrong in that Tumblr post. Funny how your memory can morph facts. Whoops. I have to say, though, I think what I "remembered" for that Tumblr post feels truer-to-form for how I picture Artie now anyway. Maybe it was always what the character wanted, but I just wasn't ready to have a non-cisgender character yet, so I manipulated the facts for my own benefit.
It kept me another two days, but I did manage to get Part 2 of my Meet Artie series published before the close of the weekend. It was fun trying to recreate them on Hero Forge and Picrew.
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| Generated in Hero Forge |
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| Generated using this maker |
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| Generated using Maker 773 |
My main problem with Artie is that I have a character that feels interesting to me, but I have no plot for them. As mentioned in those Tumblr posts, Artie was created for a play-by-post roleplay game that fell through. Then I revived them for a one-shot horror-survival game, but we never got past character creation. An older post from this blog notes that I tried reviving Artie a third time to write a YA dystopia short story for Ronoxym's 30th. The world build alone ended up being five pages long, so I knew that wasn't going to really work out for what I wanted to do, and shelved Artie one more time... in favor of creating Colton and Zetelica instead.
I just don't have a specific setting or plot sorted out for Artie. They don't have a "world" like my X-Future/Glitches pseudo-cyberpunk characters do, or my Gyateara fantasy characters. Even Colton and Zetelica have a world: the one I built for Rono's story. Artie? Artie just kind of floats around in my head, popping up now and again to make sure I don't forget they're there. I hope to find a home for them someday. Maybe they'll join Colton and Zetelica in rounding up the spirits of the dead. Maybe I'll import them into Glitches (although, I'm not sure what their powers would be....). Maybe I can find a way of reworking the speculative fiction that originally birthed Artie into fantasy, and they can find a home on Gyateara. Maybe I'll think of a story all for them.
Who knows? It was nice getting them out into the sunlight, though. Maybe it will help me keep them a little closer to the forefront of my mind, and I'll be more inclined to figure out where to put them.
Do any of you have "story-orphaned" characters like Artie? What do you do with them? Were you able to "rehome" them eventually?
While my mind still ponders what to do with Artie, I hope that September brings a bit more mental recouping so I can get back into actual story writing. It's been a while, and clearly I missed my initial goal to have at least one chapter of Seduce With Caution published by August 2023. Bully me, peeps! Keep me on track! Have me hunker down and FOCUS on this story. I have so many WIPs piled up. It would be nice to finally take one off the pile, you know?
Anyway, until next time!
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