Another journal

I think one can do pinned here? Or "sticky"?? Anyway, I just went and cleaned up some weird code that the linkback from my WP plugin was doing and figured that I should note: more often than not, what you see here is just mirroring my blog-blog! But I do reply to comments here, obvi, the posts just *originate* mostly from another place.

In the spirit of putting some useful things right up top, here's a the intro from my Tumblr, where I am the most active:

---

I go by B most often and if you are wondering how to pronounce my handle/name, this post right here has visual and aural examples, thanks to a wonderful podficcer ask.

I’m all over the internet because I’ve been here a long time, see my Beacons for the regular places. Tarot card stickers can be found here!

I’m also on AO3 as bzedan as well because the fact that I’m very googlable has yet to be a problem with work.

Ah, the last update of the year! I suppose I could make an accounting of what I’ve done over the year. I keep track, because I’d forget and then think I did nothing at all but read possibly too many books. This is a common brain thing, I think, as I see others putting together their art versus artist, or otherwise also looking back over the past 12 months.

(I have a very legit excuse for not posting this yesterday, btw. My laptop decided it did NOT like being charged and just… ran out of juice after I’d typed up the above then gone to have dinner. I had to stay off it while it got back up to speed.)

Anyway, here’s the bodycount of Shit Did, links go all over, will note where. Now, most of this happened in the front half of the year and you might have already seen it in my mid-year roundup, but odds are you also didn’t so! Please have fun counting how many things are for my favourite franchise. A lot of this is documented in blogposts because I started blogging weekly about halfway through the year! (in fact, you are at this moment reading it on the blog, which I’ve crossposted this Patreon/Comradery update to).

The real bulk of it is zines and bookbinding:

– Book gifts I made my family for the holidays (blogpost).
– More book gifts, for the same reason (blogpost).
– A very dorky fanbind of a Locked Tomb short story, that keeps getting hits on tumblr, where the nerds are (blogpost).
– Flash Fiction February 2025 collection, my standard yearly collection of the best ten flash fics from the monthly challenge. (Itchio)
– I laid out my newsletter (which is coming up on its third year?!) as zines, which are available as physical prints or a collection of digital files, and it was really fun. (Bigcartel shop, Itchio)
– I did a paperback fanbinding of a favourite unfinished fic–yes, it is a Fallout: New Vegas fic–which turned out very cool and also gave me a reason to source some classic mass market paperback-style paper. (blogpost)
– A zine of the campfire recipes from Fallout: New Vegas, because I needed a reference sheet so why not. It’s free, also. (Itchio)

Illustrative stuff:

– The finished Labours of the Month calendar was dropped on Itch and I 100% then forgot about it and did not promote it monthly like I should have. That’s a years worth of illustration lol, such is life! (Itchio)
– I did hourly comic day, which is always a fun time. (Tumblr post roundup)
– Made the final card in my nostalgia 3 card draw, which is stickers and really was an indulgent fun thing for me to do. (Bigcartel shop)
– Neil banging out the tunes, which y’all fucking loved, wow. (Bluesky)

Writing stuff:

– When I finish a Flash Fiction February zine, I then also release a handful of my top faves from the previous year’s collection onto my blog with illustrations. (Blog archive)
– For my best friend’s birthday I wrote a fic using his OC ghoul from Fallout: Jammin’ With Junker Val -02.02.75, 16:23, (Archive of Our Own)
– The Fourth Step, a short story from last year’s Ominous October. (blogpost)
– Any Small Town, a short story from last year’s Ominous October. (blogpost)
– Café By-The-Sea, a scary short story that I shopped around to a couple markets then decided to just share on The Blog. (blogpost)
– Continued sending out a monthly newsletter over at Any Tree, Flowering.
– Also nearly forgot: I serialised that old book of mine, The Audacity Gambit, and included extra short stories from the world of it. (blog)

Other stuff:

– Papier-mâché dice tower video, part of the cleanup of old projects thing. (YouTube)
– Unearthed a 1998 video I made of Julius Caesar, because it’s stupid and silly and fun to see old work. (YouTube)
– Otter Pop*Stars Neocities page, which was partly a thing to remember “oh I like coding a little.” (webpage)
– I made a real-life model of a 3D asset from Fallout: New Vegas: A Sierra Madre Casino snow globe, which btw part of it broke inside so now I get to decide if I drain and fix it. (blogpost)
– A monster brainstorming worksheets game, which I made to help me generate some creatures for a project. (blogpost)
– I made a linktree-type page, because I realised that I own my own website and could just *do* that instead of using somebody else’s kit and url. (webpage)
– Dyed yarn for the first time, and did also finish crocheting a sweater, though it needs more work before it’s done-done. (blogpost)

Plus all the stuff that feels incidental, like helping out at an art fair, sewing a pair of shorts, finishing mending my coat, figuring out a cool map-making hack (play a game of Carcassone), made nine different cool prints as part of a challenge with Chase, and whatever other little fun things one does to fill the days. I think? A pretty fruitful year and full of Stuff Did.

Also I managed at least four posts a month here, swapping from private to public updates in early July. I just! Don’t care any more. I like sharing information. There will always be things that I gotta keep behind a paywall like if I start serialising something new and there are early updates, or if I make a short story collection and there’s a free download. But I got nothing going on behind the scenes that is worth paying a dollar for. I just like making things I dunno. My best friend sent me the script for Ricki Hirsch’s latest video (because she knows if I am given a video link I will just never watch it), and then I read the originating blogpost, which has this line at the end that I like a lot:

You can control how you and your work are received just as well as you can control lighting but you can always control whether you’re going to try.

Like, the script has the same line worked more cleanly but for some reason the way it resonated more with me in this form. Anyway, I will keep making things and thank you for looking at them with your eyeballs, whoever does. I have some cool things to show your eyeballs this upcoming year.

I have accidentally become someone who collects little novelty digital cameras. They’ve all been gifts so it wasn’t intentional, but I’m not complaining. A few years ago Chase got me a Canon PowerShot S200, which was what reminded me that I just like to take a snap. It immediately became my go-to for park trips, replacing my nicer DSLR. I mean, I’ve been shooting for nearly 30 years, I love messing with settings, but there is just something about a point-and-shoot.

Chase and I take pictures. It’s what we do. And I have a very distinct approach to things, I like shitty pixel quality, I like the flaws of a camera. So then they got me another. This one, the Camp Snap, is styled after a those disposable cameras. No screen, simple as can be, the colour profile of the images it takes is exactly the vibe. It’s my pocket camera often, because it doesn’t need the ageing batteries the PowerShot does.

It is easily overwhelmed by the sun, which is a funny thing to happen here. I love the yellow, watery way it handles light.

Then, a friend let me know about the Charmera, a cutie from Kodak that has a design inspired by the old 110s (a camera I ALWAYS wanted as a teen). It’s keychain sized and has goofy filters. It’s a hard one to get but Chase pre-ordered two (one for the person who told us about them) and when they arrived we’d forgotten that they existed, so it was extra delightful.

The photo corners are to hold “filters” (interesting pieces of plastic to shoot through. The designs are blind box and pretty cute. It also gets a little overwhelmed by unadulterated sunshine (which I think is just what this size and kind of inexpensive sensor does). The silly filters and size make it a delight.

Okay so, these were all gifts from one person (Chase, thank youuuu), but it’s not like I have picked up a gimmicky little camera myself yet or anything. Only, apparently this is now something I am known for and my amazing and wonderful manager got me this as a holiday present:

Yes! The screen is on top. YES you can crank the side to take video. There’s two filters: regular and black and white. It has two focus options and, like all little gimmick cameras, is overwhelmed by direct sunlight. The trigger button is where it is supposed to be, and the proportions hit that sweet spot of just small enough to squee over but not too small to easily handle.

The way you shoot with it should make it easy to hold a filter in front of the lens, so I’ll dig through my bins and find one of my heavier neutral filters and see if that helps it handle the sunshine. I do love that the silver of it absolutely reflects into the lens, causing some interesting artefacts.

Anyway, now I guess this is my Thing ™. Which I am delighted by. Taking pictures is fun and it is joyful to have fun things to do it with.

I super forgot to do a blog post this week, which is FINE because I do this for fun and I am the kind of person who schedules fun but also I do not strive for perfection.

Anyway, yes Fallout is back and they’re going to New Vegas and I do have feelings about it, but I’m personally going to be keeping an eye on the Mr. House tag on AO3, because he’s a fan fave of a lot of the lovely NV freaks I have encountered (second to Benny, lets be real) and he will be represented in the flesh on the TV. I don’t have any fannish feelings about him as a character but I love stats and there are already four new or newly updated fics about him since the latest ep.

Personally, curious to see what the Victor fandom does when they see their fave on screen in the flesh metal.

I’ve been really good on blogging every week, and often getting it in by Thursday (I feel like using the stay-up-later ability of Friday is kind of like cheating? like getting an assignment in at the last minute). This week, instead of thinking of a thing to blog about I have been using up all the brain meat on working on holiday presents. It’s a whole THING for us.

We used to make mix CDs with cool paper cases and give those to friends, there were some very cool themes. I don’t have them well-documented but here’s an old post about two of them! Then one year we made a soundtrack for a movie that never existed and sent them in DVD cases with a minicomic (which you can read here) and I made a fake google alerts printout about this imaginary movie and everything.

After this one, we reduced the number of folks who got gifts and also moved away from mix CDs as less people had ways to play CDs (wild times!). We moved to a cool card and then, for a handful of closer folks, a tuck-in of some kind. The cards have varied from normal folded cards that I got printed at a place, to smaller ones more like post cards that we print at home, to the year we did full on linocuts.

The tuck-ins have ranged from a mini colouring book to a phenakistoscope, which was a fun build. I try to not do something that has a HUGE time investment every year, but sometimes the assembly is so fun, even when its fussy. I blogged about the phenakistoscope here (and there’s a link to go make your own from there). Hate when I make something that is like: I can’t top this, sorry.

It’s like, we do about 50 cards, about 25 of those have a tuck-in, and then about 12 of those have a more personal gift (which ranges within themes across the whole group like its a kids birthday party–it’s been everything from nostalgic school supplies to a series of prints from an artist to pamphlet binds of short stories).

I am from the kind of family where there are so, so many cousins, so this sort of approach feels natural. Things get mailed out in January because that’s what aligns with the holiday I celebrate and also it’s so much nicer to not be part of the rush of mail mail mail, gift gift gift (my dentist and I have bonded over the pros of celebrating in January, an unexpected moment).

Anyway, this year will be fun? I hope! I have the card done, we have to go get more printer ink, also a specific paper for something. I have to finish 12 craft items, print the things, assemble, write notes (all of those 50 cards get something! I am not mailing you if I don’t love you, so I am writing something, even if my hand hates me for it). It’s a mad rush of joy that reminds me why the darkest of winter can be full of feast days–and I have so many wonderful people in so many places, I welcome the project of cards and gifts every year. The chance to send a little joy to my friends and family is a precious thing, especially as someone who can’t remember birthdays, even with reminders.

Maybe I can’t have everyone over to feed them, one of those all-day meals with people breaking up into groups around the house, moving and snacking and playing video games and petting the cat. But I can send you a card.

I have finished crocheting my first piece of clothing. That is wonderful, but what is less wonderful is that I’ve somehow forgotten I’m actually a small creature and my attempts to make this sweater a bit oversize have resulted in something that does not fit due to being too large.I think it may be salvageable, but I’m finding it difficult to drag myself back to the project after “finishing” it and finding it lacking.

Fabric never does me bad like this. Well, it does, but I’m used to how it misbehaves. Example: for some of this crochet project I planned to dye the yarn, so it wouldn’t just be plain white.

“I’ll get to it when I need it,” I thought. You see, with fabric the dyeing process can be a hassle (above a certain quantity of yardage, fabric is always a hassle), but it is straightforward. Yarn though? It’s not fabric.

With yarn, you have to turn it from a tidy skein into a hank (or several),which means unwinding an entire skein and spending quite a lot of the dyeing process trying not to tangle everything. Then, when you’re done, re-winding it.

I survived though. Here is some evidence. I have not colour corrected these for shit, which is fine because tbh the resulting colours are some of the literal worst to get accurate (I hate you, teal and peach).

What is hilarious is that, in the end, I almost perfectly matched a skein of store bought yarn. Not my intention! I doubt I could replicate!! Notes for myself I guess: this is SEI Tumble Die in maybe? Aqua?? (the colour is not labelled) and RIT Rose Pink in a misting bottle.

Anyway, fibre arts remain fun and frustrating in equal measures, which is why they have me by the throat. You can see the sweater when I’ve fixed it. This whole thing could have gone sideways and it DIDN’T, which means I’ve learned nothing and will probably approach yarn with the same “fuck it” energy next time I have to dye a batch.

This short story wasn’t to any markets’ taste, but I think it’s a meal you may enjoy.

You’ve probably found when looking into the gaping, dripping maw of an ancient beast of the sea that there’s a moment where your fear is so powerful you can feel your self split, groping along all possible paths in every alternate universe for one in which you are not here, in this moment. Don’t be tempted to let that experience define you, it’s what you do after, once you’ve realised you are well-stuck in this probability, that matters.

I’m not too proud to admit that the first few times I found myself having to make a choice on how to behave after coming face-to-nerve-twanging face with the horrors of the unknown I did what any small animal would do before a monster. I screamed, or my knees collapsed beneath me. I even ran, once, little good that does when the very world around you ripples in the wake of something that incomprehensible. Eventually though, the unknown becomes expected and, if you encounter it enough, familiar. A looming mass of flesh pushing from the sea can be a comfort, not a horror, if you see it often enough.

Living in L—— I did, we all did. If you want to be more than a tourist in a seaside town you have to just get used to some things. The smell of the day’s catch that city folk wrinkle their nose at when it drifts to their wrought iron patio tables at the tourist restaurants, the way a house ages before its time, salt-crusted shingles and sand-scarred plexi windbreaks, grocery stores filled with cans and dry goods, the only affordable fruit the small hardy things that don’t need to be trucked over the mountains. Your habits change, your recipes change, you learn not to look the beast in the eye when it decides to wild on the cliffs, the same way you do with the neighbour’s wretched little near-sighted dog who can’t recognise anybody until they’re close enough to smell.

And I wanted to be more than a tourist. I had as much right as anybody to settle there, since I’d grown up just on the other side of the range that kept L—— from getting any bigger than the mid-sized town it was. Small as it was, there were a half-dozen motels, a handful of bed and breakfasts, and even one actual hotel with a lobby and rooms linked by carpeted hallways instead of fenced bits of sidewalk. Even in the winter, there were a wealth of stores to support the tourist season. Milk might cost twice as much but I could walk a few blocks to buy it rather than drive twenty minutes or more. It was, for me, a city.

There was a nice café in walking distance as well. And I mean the kind of nice where, when summer is done you can find townies sitting comfortably, having morning coffee or a sandwich lunch, enjoying pastries and specials off-menu in the warm centre of the shop while the spill-over wing to the side waited the rainy season empty, chairs upended on four-tops.

Determined to become a known entity, my first winter there I visited the café three times a week, always on the same days and ordering the same handful of simple things. It pushed the limits of my wallet but the rainy Wednesday I walked in and saw my order already up I knew I’d become a regular and the expense felt worth it.

It was the next year, my face now familiar through the seasons as the person who owned the cottage with the green trim down past the sculpture park, that I was allowed to graduate from regular to townie. The girl behind the counter brought me my bowl of thick chowder with extra crackers—I like my soups to be practically solid—and gently set beside it a small plate with some sort of empanada steaming soft and lonely in the centre of the dish. I say empanada but that was just my first impression. It was as much a pasty or a karipap, a flaky and golden-brown circle of crust folded over and sealed prettily along the edge with a fork-pressed twist. I looked up at her while I crushed the crackers in their packets, curious.

She told me that it was on the house and she thought I might like to try something new, calling it a “seasonal special.” I let it cool to a safer temperature while making inroads on my chowder. The pastry was sealed perfectly, no leaking gravy giving me a clue as to the contents.

When it felt safe to pick up, I did, gingerly, my fingers sending a cascade of buttery flakes onto the plate. I love empanadas or, more truly, any culture’s hand pies. That all humans have, at some point, decided to wrap their favourite starches around fillings for crunchy treats on the go is something beautiful to me. Eagerly, but carefully, I took a bite and was rewarded for my earlier patience by a filling that was hot but no longer the searing temperature of savoury lava. With all hand pies it’s the second bite that really tells you what it’s all about. There was a rich oiliness of meat that surprised me, having become accustomed to the lighter textures of the type of fish found in local waters. It was paired with something dustily herbaceous, and I guessed it was a blend of the wild sage and mint that competed for what dirt they could wrest from the razor-sharp sea grass. But, other than that, this was very much a meat that relied on its own juices, salt, and time for flavour.

Looking into the empanada as I chewed, admiring the proportion of gravy to meat, I saw it was the kind of dark flesh that chars almost purple-black, bordering a rich red. Despite the clear presence of those richly-tinted myoglobin proteins there was undeniably the flavour of the sea to it. I liked it very much and spent the rest of my meal alternating between my chowder and the pastry, ending up full enough that I grabbed a coffee to keep me from a post-meal nap.

In my satiated bliss I forgot to ask the server what the meat was from. As I walked past the sculpture park to my cottage with the green trim I resolved to remember to inquire on my next visit—and to possibly see what other seasonal specials were now available to me.

The coffee, sugary as it was—made with the small café’s dedication to its syrup collection—was enough to keep me going not only past my body’s desire for a siesta but into the parts of the night that are rightly the next day. When I finally let myself lay down, I was certain I’d see the sun rise but almost immediately slipped into dreams. And with them, I saw the beast for the first time.

There are things I can’t tell you and things I won’t tell you, for my safety and for yours, respectively. I’d thought myself inured to the gut-dropping realisation of how small humans are against the deep and the things that dwell there. As I’ve said, this coast and its waters were as much home to me as if I’d been raised there. Normally, confronted with expanse beyond easy comprehension, at the most I feel a momentary doubling as if a quick measure were being taken, a comparison. And, on realising that I am but a mote in the eye of the sea I move on easily.

Thrown as I was into this apparent dream there was no subconscious preparation, and my reaction proved my confidence a liar. I’ve already described my initial and subsequent reactions to the beast and won’t bore you with them again, but I do want to impress that even semi-prepared with a life familiar to the unknowable I was humbled. I woke with my alarm at my usual time feeling hollowed out, my mind unable to piece together what I’d seen.

Even the most core-shaking dreams can only haunt you for so long and, despite a sharpness to the edges of the world that I could (and did) associate with too much coffee, my day passed easily. I did find myself staying up a bit later than I often preferred, not afraid to go to sleep but not eager to either. But, eventually, sleep I did and no dreams found me there.

The next day was another one for visiting the café, and this time my bowl of chowder was accompanied by g?i cu?n and a shallow dish of dipping sauce. Like all summer rolls the thin rice paper skin showed the contents as easily as that of a glass frog. I identified those familiar local vegetables that grew hardy in my kitchen garden, and thin strips of the same rich meat that had filled the empanada. Tasting the sauce with a fingertip I identified the familiar sweet-salt of hoisin, which seemed like the perfect accompaniment.

As before, I made inroads on my soup before delving into the local specialty. A mix of corn from cans and fish from the day’s catch, the café’s chowder is a reliable and filling dish with an almost indulgent creaminess that slides luxuriously around flaking meat and sweet bursts of corn. Thickened with crackers added at the table, it becomes the kind of meal on a spoon that can sustain a body until a late supper.

In contrast, the g?i cu?n was a light thing, refreshingly cold, the vegetables within crisp, the delicate skin of the roll barely containing the filling and giving way easily under teeth and tongue, the mingled meat and greens spilling across the tastebuds. That rich, dark red meat played well with winter vegetables, their marriage made all the better when dipped in hoisin. I asked for another when the server came by with my regular coffee to-go, and she demurred at first—like all the specials the summer rolls were made in limited quantities, just enough for the café’s regulars. I let her know I understood but after I’d stood to gather my things she came up with a small paper bag and held it out, smiling.

It turned out to contain two summer rolls and, as it was a Friday, I set them in my fridge to savour over the weekend.

The day wound on in a regular fashion. This time my to-go drink was a plain house coffee, poured from the same carafe that filled diner cups with the sweet-burnt perpetual stew of brew that is anathema to any coffee connoisseur but which I find comforting and nostalgic when lightened with one too many single-serve creamer containers. As my regular bedtime approached, I found myself eagerly anticipating my dreams, despite the initial horror that still wrapped down my spine and through my guts with the cold slap of kelp.

Despite the coursing spark of excitement running parallel to that cold chill, I fell asleep easily and found myself once more on the cliff, once more beholding the beast. Despite my best efforts, I did not comport myself with more acceptance or dignity than our first meeting. I woke to the soft brush of winter light painting empty colour across my room, feeling disappointed with myself. The malaise of failure hung over me through the morning, compounded by seeing the bag from the diner in my fridge while preparing breakfast.

I took myself and my recriminations to the beach, which was a pleasant stroll down the street and on through the bush. There were several better-built beach access points for tourists, but if it wasn’t raining there was little need for wooden steps to the sand when decades of feet had beaten an easy track along property lines and between the trees. It was a more pleasant way to encounter the ocean, watching more and more sand mounding up below shrub and tree, supplanting the rich earth that allowed some plants to grow surprisingly well even as the elements did their best to stunt them.

The sheer pleasure of the winter wind pushing your body along the beach, like a cold but firm hand, can focus your thoughts to little else than the experience of existing there beside the water. Sand and salt in your teeth, the weak tea of winter sun magnified against the water and pale sand so that you must squint or be blinded, you find your senses filled in a way that slows circuitous thought until it can be straightened and followed.

My own worries disappeared as they arrived, mirroring my footprints filling up with water and smoothing themselves out as I walked. Perhaps I was unworthy, to cower to cringe as I did. But worthiness can be earned, the same as I was able to prove myself a member of the community to the town itself. I did not arrive in town expecting to be heralded as a lost son come home. I had to earn the right to be given a nod hello, for advice to be given at the nursery, for directions to the hidden hiking path that afforded a breathtaking view and a source of sweet water trickling between rocks on its way to the ocean. And, of course, I had to earn the right for this newest blessing—to be given access to the truth of the town.

Proving myself worthy of this gift was another thing to be earned. As much work as you do in curbing pride, you will again and again have to pull up the invasive plant of ego that threatens the life of good sense as thoroughly as English ivy or Himalayan blackberry. And, like those plants, it can, in turns burn you as it is cut away or tempt you with transient sweetness as an exchange for being left alone.

Fortified with these thoughts, I returned home and made myself a dish to accompany one of my leftover g?i cu?n. While the rice cooker perfumed the kitchen with the florals of basmati, I put together a simple peanut sauce, pulsing the roasted legumes with sesame seeds to meal while the coconut milk and curry reduced over heat on the stove. Once everything was combined, with fish sauce, local honey, and my personal favourite spices, my mouth was watering in anticipation.

There is nothing so simultaneously simple and satisfying as a sauce over fluffy rice. The slippery, glutinous gravy of western-style chow yuk, toothy comfort foods like tuna rice, the full-mouth nostalgia of localised favourites like mole or gochujang, or even the bachelor tradition of a can of chili, rice is the perfect friend to any possible mix-in.

I was no stranger to the magazine-simple three-step peanut sauce that only asks for creamy peanut butter from a jar, but my cupboards and my desire supported a more classic preparation. And I felt that the summer roll, and the implications of it, deserved the care. Even sat overnight in the fridge, it was as good as fresh, if not slightly better thanks to a day’s worth of flavours melding within the softening skin of the rice paper wrap. It paired perfectly with bites of saucy rice, which I washed down with the cloudy cider a neighbour had sold me. Like many people in L——, the wooded streets were full of small business owners who supplemented the whim of seasonal income by turning their hand to tradecraft. That bottle of fresh-pressed cider was one of a case that had been part of a deal made with a farm on the other side of the mountain range. Barter can’t pay the electric bill, but it can soften a price in a way that pleases both sides.

Washing up after my meal, I let my mind run lazily over the ways I’d found myself folded into this economy of partial trade. I didn’t have much to offer myself, but there always needs to be someone ready to turn the extra goods into folding cash and my cupboards that winter were rich with the results. Flakes of sea salt that were too low grade for restaurants but the right quality to sell to a cousin who then made their own small profit. Myrtlewood utensils with flaws in the handles that only showed up on shelves in the off season, at a discount. Salsa blends that hadn’t been a hit during the last spring’s farmer’s markets.

I found comfort in thinking of how the threads between myself and the town wove more tightly as time ticked on and I could feel them tightening slowly and inexorably, their weight as much a comfort as the satiation of a warm lunch. I can confess that my mind was not fully occupied by my various Saturday activities, knowing as I did what the night would bring.

As I finally lay down to sleep, I prepared myself for disappointment. To assume one could know the unknowable was a level of pride I must disdain. Slipping into sleep, I felt that I had made a sort of peace with my upcoming inevitable failure. This, I found, was in itself a type of pride.

When you confront the shifting cat’s cradle of terrible possibility that halos an ancient beast of the sea, you may be reminded of Christ’s crown of thorns, the artful blood and symbol of pain seen every year in passion processions. You may be forgiven this embarrassing cultural mistranslation, though you’ll not find time to dwell on the gaffe as the fractal of it slices you cleanly into quivering pieces. You can be assured there is no pain and you find yourself somehow whole, but instead the aching memory of pain, of every kind of pain, echoes through your nerves with the pulse of hangover. Other things will happen as well, while also not happening, and the truth of both will slowly pull you to strings. The eternity of it, the echo of it, will fill your marrow when you wake.

I did not overcome my pride, nor my fear of failure that weekend. Nor for many weeks after. If you’ve ever had a particularly bad cold, the kind that changes how you breathe, you’re familiar with how your state of being becomes “somebody who is sick.” You can’t fully remember what it was like before you took ill, what it is like for your lungs to do their job quietly. You are only able to eat between gulps of air denied you by your nostrils. This becomes your identity so fully that you aren’t aware of the progress of healing that is happening silently within your body.

Then one day, you wake up and you are breathing easily. You may not be at 100%, but the cold has left you and it’s the body equivalent of tidying up after a particularly raucous party.

And so, for me, one day I found myself on that now familiar cliff—which was not a cliff—and I beheld the horror towering above me, spilling around me, filling my veins. And the beauty of it, which I realised had been tapping around the edges of my perception since well before my unworthy eyes had first fallen on the beast itself, it consumed me as fully as any of the terror had previously. I’m not ashamed to say I wept. Nor am I ashamed to admit I backslid, that it took many more meetings, alone and with others, to allow myself to accept its truth. But nothing worth the effort comes easily. A new recipe requires practise and patience and allowing for failure, but when you finally perfect the dish, you can taste the time put into learning it, allowing it to change you. And my soul, my self, was no different, when I joyfully stepped into the loving mouth of my creator.

It is wild that I shy away from saying things to friends like “I hope you’ve been doing well.” Something about it feels like a curse and also a faux pas–we all know none of us are well.

“How’s it going?” also feels like too heavy a lift to lob to a pal–doing bad probably, I know, me too!

It’s not as though the lot of us don’t talk about our feelings, or share emotional burdens, but when you’re just trying to check in beyond the lovely lazy river of texting memes you need a water cooler casualness that lets someone steer the tone of the conversation.

I know I don’t much want to answer a general inquiry to how the days have been, so I try not to give them to others. I care, honestly and fully, more about what small fun thing somebody has found. Like, I know I’m crossing streams with my newsletter here, but fuck me it really is just the small things that keep us going, isn’t it?

This is why weather talk is so vital. Yes, it is great with strangers because we can like, test the conversational waters, do casual vibe checks while discussing what the sun and the clouds are doing. But it’s also really nice with those you love and talk to all the time. You know i have friends who fucking LOVE getting rained on, bless them, the freaks. And since everybody is scattered all over it is wild to learn who is having a bit of heat, where it snowed, who has air so clear after a storm that they can count every radio tower on the mountain without squinting.

And then, you know, chatting about how wet it’s been can be a gauge to see: ah yeah let’s talk about The Horrors, or The Joys in detail, we’re both up for it.

But honestly and fully I just often want to know: How’s the weather been? (as we went to bed the other night there was like a solid 30 second roll of thunder it was amazing) Have you seen a good animal lately? (it’s been too cold for crickets but there is one in our wall who thinks its spring because of the warmth seeping through and it sings all night) Have you seen this video of the cows being grateful for dirt? (yeah, me too but I will always watch it again)

I’ve had on my to-do of blog posts to write “old embroidery” for a while. For many years, I had a commute that was a four hour round trip. On the way to work I tried very hard not to fall asleep, and keeping my hands busy with embroidery was a good way to do it (I also tore through so many books thanks to Project Gutenberg and a little Nokia mobile with wifi).

I had a little kit in a mint tin that held my needles and some of the thread or other things I needed. A dear friend made me a sort of soft folio container that I kept my projects and other hanks of thread in. The whole kit fit neatly into my backpack and off I went.

The earliest examples of what I embroidered on my Flickr seem to be a series I did illustrating different states, based on what I knew of them (which was not much). This was around 2008.

I started playing more with embroidery as sketching, “drawing” the other commuters I saw regularly on the train. I wasn’t much for cross-stitch, but I did have the aida fabric from various friend’s destashes and a life of scrounging craft materials and it was fun to approach the pixel-like limitations of the fabric outside of cross stitch.

Now, imagine if you will, an internet where a sassy man doing cross stitch could reach viral heights. Bacon and moustaches were the height of… something. Steampunk was doing things (and I was involved, writing about papier mâché, of course). I was in my twenties and found it all rather annoying. So I did a litle cross stitch series about it.

It was a fun, weird time for embroidery online, actually. A friend kept a blog where each post was embroidered and had a scroll-over effect, which I commented on in kind. Writing was sort of a focus for a bit, like this line from Fanny Hill, or this ranking of movie trilogies that I think got on some pages back in the day (the cleaner scan of it has 6k views, lol).

What my true love, with embroidery though, was sculpture. I loved stumpwork for being a great way to use up thread scraps as stuffing. There’s so much structure and thick texture possible.

In my years of commuting I amassed a nice amount of work. I didn’t just embroider on the train though, I liked taking it on trips, like this freeform cutwork practise I did when we drove to Wyoming. Please enjoy the same muslin ground used for this and the one above–I dyed a true fuckload of muslin for a backdrop in theatre than nobody wanted after the show was done so I’ve been carrying it around since and have almost used it all now, some 20 years later.

Eventually, I stumbled on Opusanglicanum, which introduced me to what has remained one of my favourite surface work approaches–laid and couch work. Its an approach I always enjoy, and it’s been around so long there’s something lovely about doing a stitch people have done for ages and ages.

Looking back it feels like it was a couple-year rush of embroidery but then the practise followed me along like a dog. The embroidery tag here on the blog has stuff as “recent” as 2015. I wonder if, from there I in general stopped blogging and also started focusing on other craft. My commute was mostly walking at that point, then a couple years later we moved states and everything changed.

I may not embroider as much as I used to, there’s just so much craft be doing. But the love and the skills are still there and I pulled them out to fix the worn out old cuffs and pockets on this coat I made nine years ago.

There’s a bag, in all my various craft storage, of what work I still have from this era of embroidery that I realise was close to 15 years ago. Maybe when I’m done with my current craft projects (which include crocheting my first sweater!), I’ll return to the stitching I miss.

There’s an episode I remember of something that can’t be Jim Henson’s The StoryTeller that’s a version of All-Fur mixed with True Bride, and mingled with some other things. The StoryTeller has an Allerleirauh episode called “Sapsorrow” that has a fabulous fur fit (and a deft rearrangement of reasons for Sapsorrow’s engagement to her father), but it’s missing a specific scene that has stuck in my memory for ages. The show also has its own separate True Bride episode, this one with a troll and a lion.

Here’s what I remember of the episode. Something something princess in a suit of furs, found in the forest by a prince out hunting. I think the prince is her lost love? She goes to work in the palace kitchens and there’s some like?? Giant keyboard with keys much like the Stargate chevrons that the princess uses to alter the soup she serves the prince with her ring in it to remind him of their love. That’s the thing I remember most, the viciously jubilant princess slamming her hands across the keys of the soup making thing as she defies the evil queen who has stolen her prince.

I have drawn the single scene I remember:

So, let us find this thing I remember, if we can.

I’ve tried looking for it before, but I had always assumed it was an episode of The Storyteller. Now though, I have the DVD set of the series and have watched it, plus it’s on Kanopy currently and has been playing in the background. The episode I’m remembering isn’t on it at all. I’d also thought it was a more true form of Allerleirauh (Aarne–Thompson type 510B, unnatural love), and not of True Bride (Aarne-Thompson types: 510, the persecuted heroine, and 884, the forsaken fiancée). First order of business then is figuring out which dang story it is the most based on.

I poked around variants of the AT types associated with True Bride and Katie Woodencloak/Kari Woodengown seems similar. Nicely, it’s related also to Allerleirauh. “Woodencloak” is a pretty solid little keyword so I tried:

-> TV adaptation katie woodencloak: no luck here, mostly just podcast episodes and TV Tropes.
-> TV episode woodencloak: going more specific, I know it was an episode of a larger show. Now here I encountered a show called “Jackanory” which sounded weirdly familiar. The problem is I’m a great reader of episode lists of random television series and went through a bit of reading descriptions of British children’s television series for a bit, so I was unsure why “Jackanory” was familiar.
-> Jackanory: lets see about the show, if that page looks familiar on Wikipedia? It doesn’t! And the show ran until 1996, so it’s very probable I caught some US-syndication of it or something. But looking at screencaps of clips from when the Woodencloak episode aired in 1969, the show was in black and white at the time, so that’s not the one, alas.

Sidetracked: Discovered epguides dot com a charmingly laid out and very intense database of episode lists for different shows. Here’s the page for Scavengers Reign, at this point in time this kind of page design is so refreshing, frankly.

Back to it. Results are getting scummy but let’s keep trying.

-> fairy tale soup woodencloak: this didn’t garner much but! Reminded me that what I watched could have been an adaptation of Donkeyskin (Aarne–Thompson type 510B, unnatural love). It wasn’t this 1970 French musical adaptation though
-> fairytale soup donkeyskin tv episode: not a lot out of this one, but oh wow, Archive.org has a bunch (all?) of Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre episodes.
-> donkeyskin tv episode live action: not a lot here, mostly that 1970s film, an entry on a lost episode creepypasta wiki (with Peter Potamus?!), but then found mention of a 1982 feature. That sadly was not it but it looks great tbh.

I was getting annoyed at how DuckDuckGo was failing at properly excluding terms (nothing truly accepts boolean search now), so I gave Marginalia a go.

Not necessarily the most productive search, as I’m starting to feel this episode remains only in my memory, but I did encounter Sur La Lune’s annotated page for Donkeyskin, which led me to Storybook International’s “Cap O’Rushes.” It, nor any of the other episodes, looked quite right so, alas!

At some point in all this I had encountered the BYU Fairy Tale TV database, because it looks like such a neat thing but the db itself seems like it isn’t working any more. So I sent an email to the project lead, because why not? Of course, so many of these types of projects disappear when the funding does so who knows if it is something that can be fixed–and if it is, if it will answer my question. [note, months later: I never heard back! alas.]

Something I hadn’t anticipated was how much the TV Show Once Upon A Time muddies the results. See also: the anime “Fairy Tail.”

Anyway, this has sat in my writing program forever. I really wanted an answer to finish it with but: I don’t think I’m ever finding this thing. I did, in my last desultory searching, learn another keyword: “thousandfurs,” which I learned thanks to a tumblr post with a Hunger Games AU concept. The keyword brought up nothing new in searches, booo.

One thing I did find during this searching is that there is a Reddit for finding things one can’t quite remember, so I made an account and put what I knew in an ask (and what I knew it wasn’t) up and maybe someday somebody will answer it, one can hope!

Anyway: THE END.

Also note: I didn’t list every search query variant I tried here, just the ones that brought up anything of note. Alas, alas, alas.

I used to do quite a lot of nail art. Like it was a whole THING for me. For various reasons I don’t keep long nails nor paint them any more, but because I did it for so long I’ve quite the library of fun shots or neat ideas for nail art. An app I use shows me photos I’d taken that day from years in the past and I have been seeing some Halloween nail art that were fun as hell, so I thought I’d share!

I’m just using Flickr embeds, but I’ll add a wee bit of commentary. We’re just flipping through an album together here.

First, some moody pentagrams, a fave tbh with the nail shape I did.

This was fun, doing movie poster inspired nails was a fave (see: Jaws).

This turned out pretty, and is a bit more “medical” than “spooky” but: skeletons. The plum base was what makes it work best I think.

This was a re-do because I tried to make it look like the ends of fingerbones but it didn’t read. Listen, cartoon bone is: SO much funnier.

This is more vibes-based but I think empty stage has some good classic theatre horror core to it. Evil circus, etc.

Okay, and you can close this tab now if you want because the next are a little gross. Zombie nails! We will work up from ick to nasty.

Just shittily remove your nail polish, it does make for a good “just clawed my way out” look.

You can also layer colours and partly remove, that makes for a “flesh falling off” chic. This is part of a flickr album with steps, if you are so interested.

Okay, the penultimate zombie nail: painted stitches. Looks actually pretty effective from a distance.

And now: the gnarly. I apparently made a latex appliance to look like a stitched-through nail one year. WTF, my mind. There’s an album if you want more.

That was fun! It is nice to remember all the stuff one has done, I guess that’s why we take pictures.