Next - Archive - Icons - Previous 6/30/26 The halfway point of the year. 2026 sure has been...something. IDEK what. Started off pretty awful. How will it end? Who knows. Hopefully not worse. Whatever happens, I guess I'll be recording it here and in the Cousin lol. It's really hot and humid outside, has been all day. Been thundering for at least an hour now, but no rain yet. I wish it would storm big time. It's been too long since the last rain. (Probably hasn't even been a week.) I'm trying to decide if I should make an actual page about the LB experiment yet, or if I should keep going for a few more months to see how it goes. I should probably focus on that techo kaigi first at the very least. I'm not sure if I'll do a review of S1 of WHA. Probably not. I always end up reviewing random bullshit anyway. I think I'll keep my distance from the fandom. The Tumblr/Pinterest side is fine. But goddamn why is the Reddit so deeply, deeply homophobic? So weird for that many homophobic people to gravitate to a series like that. But then again, I feel like reactionary people love to intentionally go into spaces it makes no sense for them to be in just to shit up a place and pat themselves on the ass about shitting directly on the floor in front of people. I generally try to avoid fandom areas regardless, but I wanted to get a feel for what the vibe was like. Largely dumb, as fandoms are usually full of fandumb, but damn the Reddit side is so weird. I know Reddit's always been trash, but I feel like it gets more extreme ever year. You can kind of tell it comes in waves though. Midterms are this year, gotta start the political cycle early by being devisive and hateful in as many random places as possible. Anime spaces are always a hub for that. Things have been going alright with the Cousin switch so far. Already refilled one of my TWSBI Ecos because of all the writing. I got out the Emerald of Chivor ink. It's one of my favorites, but I haven't been using it as much lately. I'd been using Yama-budo to write with lately, which is another favorite. I have another ECO inked with Pelikan Topaz from a freebie sample I got from Goulet. I really like how bright it is. I think I might want to get a bottle at some point. I have so many inks I wish I owed LOL. But I keep ending up buying these green-blue with red inks all the time. I have a bunch of them. I need to stop. Did I really need Gravity Wave, Emerald of Chivor, and Walden? I have a cheap Chinese brand ink that's similar to those three as well. I have quite a few similar muddy red inks too. Like Red Beans and Rice and Lover's Red. I keep meaning to get more of a bloody looking red, but then I end up getting something else whenever I do buy a bottle of ink. I've been wanting a nice orange for a while too, but I keep forgetting. Oh well. 6/29/26 Wow, June kind of flew by. It didn't feel like it was going by fast at the time, but wow. Half the year is over. I didn't do anything for the solstice. Wanted to, but I am still sick and my ribs are still broken. Haven't gone back to Rhyme since my last update other than to try to delete my account, which it wouldn't let me do. The feature was still "under development". I'll try again ina month or so. Tried to keep looking around there, but goddamn is that place so negative. Like every Reddit offshoot. Like every Twitter alternative. I honestly think a lot of that is because people who come from those spaces are so used to engaging in highly toxic behavior that's been trained into them by the big social media platforms that when they go anywhere else or make anything else, no matter how much they may want to make a better space, they replicate the bad behaviors. Because they never honestly unlearned the behavior. They blame it on the space, and think leaving the space fixes everything. Very similar to ex-Christian atheists often seeking "science" (evo-psych horseshit, usually) reasons for Christian-influenced bigotry after they leave their churches, the Dawkins type and all that. I feel like a lot of people on the modern web are allergic to the idea they need to unlearn things they've picked up from places. It's all light and love, while ignoring the shadow behind them. Everyone wants to be "pure" so they don't have to apologize. Only bad people have bad behaviors, so it wasnt me, it was the BAD THING. Very unhealthy mindset there. On another note, I've crawled back to Itoi again. (AGAIN, REALLY?!) I'm going to need to do another techo kaigi soon. At least I didn't crawl back to the Weeks again. I'm back in a Cousin this time. Got out my old green Minä Perhonen A5 cover. I bought some blanks too. Sigh. Will I ever leave Itoi? I'm surprised how well the outside of the cover has held up. Hobonichi covers are god awful when it comes to staining and flaking and other issues. They look really pretty at the start, then before you're two months in, oh no. But the Mina one has a cotton cover. I suspect the leather covers probably also hold up pretty well too. I wish though that the Minä covers were usually paired with "vegan" leather (greenwashing plastic garbage). I wish they'd just to do full fabric. Hobonichi has done a few full cotton covers here and there, but it's rare and I've never liked any of the covers they did do that way. The inside is, as I expected, degrading much faster than the outside. There's some staining that I can't get out, and some chipping away. When it eventually is too bleh to keep using, if the outside is still okay, I'm just going to repurpose the Mina fabric for something else. I have the A6 version of this cover too, which is in a different color. That was looks much worse than the A5, because of the color. Darker was definitely a better choice. I wish the A6 had come in dark green instead of that yellow color, and I'm kinda sad the dark green design was a custom colorway for Hobonichi because it looks so much better than all the other version of this fabric. I'm still pretty salty about last year's messy launch and the bullshit with the Junjij Ito collection and me not being able to get the one cover I wanted while scalpers had no problem. But having seen that a lot of people have had that particular cover turn to shit pretty quickly and knowing the price it was at, it's fine. I wouldn't want to buy something that expensive and it just be so delicate I have to baby it the whole time or else the design will flake off and it'll probably stain regardless. Even with a COC, their plastic-y cover ones always stain. The COC just makes it stain along the edges specifically, is what I've found to happen. Also, why are these things so expensive but so delicate you're expected to buy a piece of plastic to cover the already plastic cover? It's all very ridiculous. I have one of the solid color ones in A6 still with a COC on it and I've barely ever used it and it is still stained somehow. And you can't really clean it well, because it's plastic. I've spot cleaned the outside of the Minä covers plenty of times and it's mostly fine. (The A5 moreso than the A6, again because of the color choice.) And the Weeks? I feel like none of them have ever absorbed stains for me, regardless of the type of Weeks. The covers for those just attracted dirt and grim into the cover. Without a cover? Just fine. So, it's not that I'm like extra gross or anything. Even without a cover on at all, I feel like the Hobonichis themselves don't have many staining issues or cover tearing. They're pretty durable and just fine without them. I suspect all the people who have super clean ones are mostly YT/Insta people who just washi away for photos/vids and don't really take their planners anywhere. I should really save some of this ranting for the new techo kaigi I need to do. A mid-year techo kaigi sounds about right. Other fun things: I finally managed to get the OST for The Craft on cassette. I've been trying to get it for a while, but it rarely pops up anywhere. The CD is pretty easy to come by, but the cassette isn't. Gave me as much trouble as tracking down Becoming X and the first two Pure Moods cassettes for reasonable prices. EDIT: Had to change the links for the Path cover to Jetpens ones because the way Hobonichi has the old archive versions of the site won't let you view things by direct link and blocks archiving. WHY. 6/15/26 Been keeping an eye on Rhyme, but I might ditch it. The vibe there is so weird around privacy issues. I swear anyone there who isn't enthusiastic about handing their IDs over to random companies and blanket government bans on "problem issues" is considered a disturbed alarmist. The site owner also wants to enable some kind of ID verification process too, one that's optional but I don't really see as adding any value. They've stayed dodgey about some of their funds as well, to a degree I am finding very odd for an up and coming place. I've been around enough beginnings of sites to know how they're behaving is very, very weird. The DFOS group has the same weird stench about them. I don't trust either of them at this point. So it goes. I swear almost no one who enters into that kind of space ever has good intentions. Still sick. How many months is that now? When will my lungs be normal again? Ugh. I think I'll try to get some writing down tonight. I've been mentally stuck with most of my stories. And of course I have some full novel length idea stuck in my head right now that I am probably not going to actually ever write out. Maybe I should just outline it so I can stop thinking about it. EDIT: Some more thoughts:Rhyme. I wanted to add after having used the site pretty much since open, the whole place has a really, really negative vibe to it and most of the comments tend to lean really negative. Which I thought was funny, considering the owner supposedly created it to avoid a lot of the toxic problems of Reddit. I was pretty thrown off by how borderline rude the owner tends to come off in comments. And the whole site just kind of feels like a really mean-spirited place the longer it goes on. I suppose that's to be expected when you replicate Reddit. Lemmy is the same way, just filled to the brim with toxicity. I think the fact that Rhyme also doesn't want communities to have their own mods, while I get wanting to avoid powertripping mods, it kind of just amplified the whole thing though, doesn't it? Instead of some powertripping mods here and there that the site owner could address, now it's the users of all communities are basically in the hands of what appears to just be an AI mod and whoever the site owner decided to look over things. Basically, all the power is just in the owner's hands. And it's his site, so that's ultimately always the case but IDK, when you have places that are hubs for communities you wouldn't typically expect it to be set up that way. The fact that they want to do ID verification at some point on top of that, IDK it feels weird. That paired with the refusal to be honest about funds or user stats is all just really not cool. Maybe Reddit's format just cannot not lead to trash, IDK. I would say a long time ago Reddit was a great place for discussions and some really good in depth stuff, but that was because they were pushing that off forums and other smaller communities that already did that while also having lots of snuff vidoes and CSAM on the site. Reddit was never really good, it just used to, in some pockets of it, have useful content. 6/14/26 It's been a while since my last update. My wife and I are still watching Mao. We're getting close to a chunk of the core cast finally being introduced. I forgot how long it takes to get certain characters into the story. We still have so many other important characters that haven't even been referenced yet. We've been watching Witch Hat Atelier as well. That was a hard one to start. Those first few episodes are so...ugh, anime kids being fake little anime kids. We had a conversation about why fake kids in shows are annoying when real little kids aren't really. The behaviors get played up too much. Kids are always too juvenile in a lot of things and when it's not even a real kid actor, but some adult voicing over a piece of animation, it takes that up to an even more obnoxious level because no element of it is a real little kid. I've read so much advice about not making kids too mature in writing to the point they're little adults, but let's be real. That almost never actually happens in media. The kids are usually the other way, far far too juvenile for their age. (An exception I can think of to this in anime is Gundam Wing, where it really is "these characters are far too mature for their stated ages", everyone in that show even some of the adults should be aged up at least 5 years. The plot would make more sense that way too, but off topic.) There's still some grating scenes here and there, but it's gotten better since that terrible first couple of episodes of twee sugar nonsense. I think some of the annoyance may also be a bit of uncanny valley at play. The kids are kinda doing kid stuff, but something's not quite right with it. I couldn't get a feel for the kids ages at first either, because the maturity level sometime dips down to these could be five year olds, but they're narratively clearly preteens. (Doesn't help that the girls get carried around a lot, but that's an anime problem in general, who really carries around a twelve year old?? In real life, some 12 year old girls are already their adult height!) I feel like the girls look younger than they are too, but that's another general anime problem. They look 7-8 to me, and the maturity range shifts from 12 to 5 and back up again. The adults and the setting is interesting though, and the girls are growing on me. The art in the manga is amazing though. The anime is such a downgrade, but that's to be expected for a TV series. I'll probably start reading it once the anime finishes. I got a pack of Moterm notebooks to try daily journalling in. They were free. I had some points built up so I just bought them with that. They didn't end up being all that great for fountain pens, but they're okay for gel. I'm still journalling in the Long Book, but it stays being more for abstract/brief thoughts and short notes/quotes. I intend that one to have more of an Urban Diary type of feel to it once it's done. These were intended for more long form, private stuff I wouldn't put on the Denji Log. I haven't been able to regularly finish physical journals since early 2018. I don't know if I'll have nay success with these of if I'll even finish the Long Book, but maybe. If I do finish the journals, I may take some pictures of them and post them here on the site at some point. I did decorate the covers. The Moterm covers are just plain light brown. I really like how the second one I did came out. It was a pain in the ass to do though. If I do post pictures, I won't be showing any of the entries of course, unless it was something really impersonal. It'd mostly just be the covers. Once I'm done with those, if I finish them, I'll get some proper FPF notebooks next time. 6/1/26 June begins. Haha, I have a little update about Rhyme, that Reddit alternative I mentioned last entry. So, they got banned from r/Redditalternatives because the mod is weird and wanky. You can see the post here. I thought it was funny that the site was made in part to try and avoid this exact same shit and themod of that sub that's supposed to be about finding alternatives to Reddit basically proved one of the site's points about why Reddit is so fucking awful. LMAO. I think people should read the Scenarios page honestly. It just perfectly sums up the bullshit of modern social media, but especially Reddit. Anyway, just thought I'd share that little update there. I'll probably update today's post again later. I mostly just wanted to get the archiving of last month out of the way and post that link. EDIT: Fun realization. If I don't put my medicine directly by my laptop, I'll end up forgetting to take it. I was like oh I'll make everything all organized and have all medical things in one place. That will make things so much easier. Nope. So, it goes back to my desk to clutter up things. But I didn't forget to take it this time. I'd been forgetting to either take it at all, or taking it way later than I would normally because of that. Maybe I need to get a pill container so I at least don't have a giant bottle of pills with pharmacy stuff taking up room on my desk. Next - Archive - Icons - Previous