Humming Rain

Succulent friends!

Hey everyone, it’s been a minute!

Life continues to proceed at a pace of about one second per second, with the usual margin of error accounting for the variability of reality. So, without any regard to order, life updates from the past few weeks:

• Received a bunch of wonderful succlent cuttings from my friend Erin C, that have now been potted and will hopefully take root!
• Finally decided on a new phone, a Nokia 6.1. It was a bit of a struggle to order everything I needed from Not Amazon, because the future sucks, but I got the phone from Newegg and the accessories (case, charging dock b/c docks are great) from eBay. It should all arrive in the next couple weeks. I’ll have a phone with a working onboard mic again! Oh, sweet luxury.
• I didn’t end up going with the little Unihertz Atom because I realized that at least right now I do a ton of texting, and I wasn’t sure how my already-inaccurate touch-screen typing was going to do on a wee little screen.
• Both Jerry and Jabberwocky have Done a Shed. Jabberwocky is still looking scruffy, but she’s gotten most of the big pieces off. Jerry had his day ruined by me getting stuck shed off his toes. Little drama bean.
• I’m working on a new short story, some sci-fi set in the Nautilus universe. I’m also realizing I have no idea how to write horror, so if anyone has recommendations for great horror short stories, I’m all ears and you should leave them in the comments.
• I finished Vampyr, the latest game I’ve been playing through. It was good, though I felt a little trapped at the end due to feeling a semi-compulsive need to play it and finish all the side quests and stuff. It’s a tricky game, in some good ways and some bad. I’m planning on writing a review of it soon to unpack my thoughts. A+ romance dialogue writing, though, which is really impressive. Though I shouldn’t have expected anything less from the Life is Strange writers.
• The next game up on my list is Papers, Please, because I want to feel sad, I guess?
• Been doing some work on learning Python. Whitespace-sensitive languages are so confusing, coming from Java.
• I’ve been having a huge urge to make a video game and have no idea how to channel it, so that’s fun.
• I am still trying to read The Republic, which is probably a mistake but I want to get through it! It’s just not quite fun enough that I’m like “oh boy let’s sit and read for an hour!” So I have to develop A Habit, it looks like. I’m also listening to an audiobook of The Conquest of Bread by Peter Kropotkin, which is simultaneously very good and somewhat depressing. (This book came out in 1892! We’ve had 120 years to get our anarcho-communist shit together and instead we live in a capitalist hellscape, boooooo.) I do really appreciate how much emphasis it puts on the logistics of revolution, though. “Remember to see to people’s basic needs” seems like it’d be an easy thing to remember in revolutions, but ((historically) apparently not!
• The job hunt continues. Currently wrestling if I’m at a place yet where I consider Amazon jobs a valid option.
• I’ve been rewatching Futurama, and overall it’s still amazing.

And that’s it for now, I think! What have you all been up to? If you leave a comment, I gain +10 life points, and if I get 100 of those I can get some awesome stickers.