#notes from the word page

[breakingthewordcages]

I am happy to say that most of the stores I usually frequent are Canadian owned! I may need to find a new place to buy yarn though.

[abstractfrog]

THE GLORIA SCOTT - part 2, and a follow up to my comic for the first half of this scene! thanks sm to @crashingmeteorz for allowing me to source validation for my whimsical cosmic approach to this moment <3

[breakingthewordcages]

It's such good enrichment!

He's gotten pretty good at pushing it around with his nose. His problem is mostly that he will push it into a corner and get it stuck; at which point, I pull it out and roll it to let some kibble out. I was surprised by how quickly he learned that sticking his tongue in the hole wasn't going to work. However, it does take quite a while to get two cups of food out of a little hole.

I got big dog one of those kong puzzle feeders that he has to roll around to get kibbles out and it was a lot of fun watching him figure it out. I only let him work at it for 20 minutes before I opened it and dumped his food in a dish, because I didn't want him to get frustrated, but that's still 10× his normal meal speed

yesssssss they are so good. puzzle feeders are really fun for both watching and intervening!

If you want him to get good at it, let him be a little frustrated as long as he's still engaged with the toy and willing to poke at it! sometimes they need a little bit of support to get the core basic concept (as with the Tug-A-Jugs I have for example) but once they have the idea it's pretty fun.

expect him to learn to yeet those kong wobblers into the wall though. that's the natural end stage for 'em in my experience... because if you fling 'em hard enough they scatter kibble everywhere.

[berryberrytaeberry]

Giving kudos to myself for making my depressing ass Lan Zhan spotify playlist entitled ✨️Thirteen Years✨️ because I have been doing The Not Good™️ because of work, and the playlist really do get me through the morning

[zirkkun]

hazuki is a wild character (at least to me) in the sense that he was in literally only 2 scenes, one of which very short, and he feels so insanely important to the plot in a way where i desperately want to write about him but we have so very little info that i feel as though i am scraping up bread crumbs that are crushed into the earth for a semblance of something to work with

[matteoberrettini]

oh btw i finally started translating a matteo interview i've been meaning to translate for like 2 months. it's gonna take me a long fucking time bc it's around 1h long and the hardest part is not even translating it it's making subtitles lol. and the reward will be maybe 5 notes on here but <3 spreading the matteo is a funny down to earth sweetheart who deserves the world agenda to even just one person will be worth it. also i always think that i want to get better at translating so it's good practice

[vivacia-18]

I'm about halfway to two thirds through You Feel It Just Below the Ribs, and asdjasdlkajsadjal

The reveals, the implications, I can't even - mentally I'm rolling on the floor frothing at the mouth. I want to go back and listen to season 3 and season 1 all over again, holy shiiiiit

[bigcats-birds-and-books]

Books of 2024: June Wrap-Up.

Okay, y'all have Convinced Me--I'm going to start doing little wrap up posts! Behold: a shelf of what I read in June (not pictured: the bookmark at page 466 of ORDINARY MONSTERS, because despite having read two (2) books worth of book so far, I'm still not quite done with that one).

June was kind of a slow reading month for me (I did a LOT of writing, looking back--nice). I wanted to take OTHER TERRORS and THE ELEMENTS OF ELOQUENCE a bite at a time so the horrors and figures of rhetoric (respectively) didn't all run together. Both of those, much like A SHINING, turned out to be pleasantly leisurely wanders, whereas MONSTERS is kind of a plod.

I already did bigger write-ups for TERRORS and SHINING, linked in the bullets below.

OTHER TERRORS - ★★★★ Great bite-sized horror anthology with a really inclusive mix, as promised! I enjoyed most of these (always nice in an anthology!)

A SHINING - ★★★★ Weird fucked up heavy little book in translation, lit-fic flavored, but very approachable, I thought. Tiny enough to swallow in a sitting, but also kind of exhausting to do it that way? I'll definitely reread this one in the future.

THE ELEMENTS OF ELOQUENCE - ★★★ Fun romp through rhetoric! The examples were fun, and I appreciated the humor, but I also find myself still uncertain what a bunch of the figures actually ARE, definitions-wise, despite having read a book full of so many of them (I did just buy his recommended A HANDLIST OF RHETORICAL TERMS to help with that, at least, which is. almost entirely. definitions by volume). Neat thing to have on my references shelf, but it wasn't as excellent as I was hoping it'd be.

ORDINARY MONSTERS - 466/658 pages read; will report back later (but it's not looking good, folks).

[wingsmould]

the book of bill is interesting because you cant take any of it at face value

[autistic-shaiapouf]

I think I need to actually break the oc fic apart into multiple google docs bc seeing the entire thing in one spot may or may not be intimidating me out of working on it

[breakingthewordcages]

Every therapist I've ever had: You need to be less hard on yourself! Learn to take pride in your accomplishments!

Me: What accomplishments?*

Them: Literally anything that was hard for you! Was it hard to get out of bed this morning? That's an accomplishment. Did you have a shower today? Did you brush your teeth before bed? Those are accomplishments!

Me: Sounds fake but okay.

[icewindandboringhorror]

just a few little bits from the past few days

[torithehoshi]

Oh look - it's him the Whole!

I think I prefer Whole as a concept more than a character, and I've certainly thought of that more. However, it doesn't mean I dislike the idea of Whole as a character. There's a lot of cool and interesting interpretations and as usual - people are really creative. Though I wasn't thinking too hard through my album listens about Whole as a character which is why it lingered with me but I didn't have too many of my own thoughts.

. And then I started listening to Pathological Facade by GHOST AND PALS again which led to something really clicking. So I've drawn Whole!! Tbf I actually have drawn him before in my sketchbook 'cause of another song I was listening to but the lyrics are me kiind of stretching it? I'll see what I do with it later - though I wanted to share these ones I did since like I said before - traditional drawing and digital feel different for me and it'd been a while. There aren't a lot but I like 'em!

[More ramblings under the cut 'cause this is getting long]

I just knew I wanted him to have a fusion (the word I intended to use but hadn't noticed until now???) of some elements in my HMS designs hair and face wise. And while I only have two frame redraws from the video (which are my favorite frames btw), it's something I've been thinking of a lot 'and... hope I can better articulate? . Although the lyrics really made me think of that 'cause I think about the lyrics of Pathological Facade a lot 'cause of its lyrics...

Although who knows - I want to finish the second drawing as something more fully-fledged but I have like... a few other WIPs and ideas I'd like done before the end of the year just personally before I start something new. I think this doodle looks really nice on its own though - I had fun drawing it. That song's really good.

[pynkhues]

Anon from earlier about Sam's family. Thanks for letting me know that tribe was an offensive term for the Aboriginal people. I'm not Australian and didn't know. I apologize. And yes, people were using that term on twitter when talking about it. It's all in very bad faith.

(x)

You're very welcome, anon, and I appreciate the acknowledgement. I figured it was probably the terminology being used, and you just didn't know, but it's really kind of you to own it, apologise and be open to learning.

I'm kind of a bit lucky in this sense, because I have a few Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander friends from across different Nations, and I work with a lot of First Nations people in different capacities (actors, writers and artists at the theatre company, of course, but one of my areas of specialisation as a freelance writer is in people-related safety, so I have a - - mm, I don't want to say expertise, because I think this is a space you're always learning in, but perhaps an area of qualification (?) in writing about child safety, gender-based safety in the workplace, and racial and cultural safety, particularly with First Nations people, in which I usually work with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to develop documents on what helps them to feel safe in different contexts. I've written these sorts of things for schools, health services and arts venues, so I have a lot of conversations with people in different capacities too. I'm also on the theatre I work at's Reconciliation Action Working Group, so yes! Having a lot of robust conversations every day, haha).

But yeah. It's quite telling to me that someone would stress a level of 'care' over what happened to those First Nations people while using a term that many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples would consider a slur. To do that level of research into a family Sam could possibly be related to, and then to weaponise a community while calling that community something they'd find derogatory just makes it beyond obvious what the intentions behind it are. It would take two minutes to look up any of the many, many guides that exist about this, but those communities aren't who they actually care about. They're just grist for the mill.

[carnage-cathedral]

I'm so glad Dean saved my extremely long and detailed vampire lore document because I would've been really upset if I lost that

[breakingthewordcages]

Me: surely it's not chronic fatigue if I can push through it given sufficient motivation

Me: *remembers this post from @/thebibliosphere*

Me: ...

Me: I really hope there's not a wall in my near future to crash into and burn up against