Betrayal +

◇ Skipped going to the garden today for the first time since June. I feel bad, but in my defense my right hand is still a bit injured and I don't want to open up any of my scabs digging in the dirt with a half-healed hand. I'll go next week, though.

◇ Read Erio and the Electric Doll, up to chapter 21, which is as much as is scanslated in English. There's more in French, though! Maybe I should try reading that for practice? Anyway, it's a GL manga, a post-apocalyptic steampunk story that has very nice art. I think the atmosphere is the most notable thing about it— the back-story and all that is pretty cliche robots rose up against the humans so to prevent the robots from doing that, humans stopped using electricity all together. The protagonist girls are an electric doll left over from the war and a girl whose body has been engineered to create electricity, as they travel through cities recovering from the war. I have a weakness for post-apocalyptic travel manga. There's honestly a fair few, and it's nice to see one that feels optimistic rather than pessimistic.

◇ I took down a few friend's addresses to send them post-cards! And I do have the post-cards! I just need to write them all, since I'd like to send them all out at once. Which... means I have some more to do. I've written some, just not all of them yet. It's maybe kind of a silly thing to do since we're all in contact online anyway, but I still want to.

◇ Diet time for real. It's just a few kilos but my dysphoria is acting up real bad, and I hate my clothes feeling tight.

◇ Dyed my hair! Or rather, a friend dyed it. I'm really happy with it. And since it's just the tips, if I get hired at a place that requires natural hair colour, it shouldn't be hard to cut. I'm hoping I won't need to, though.

So, my best friend is bad at audio media but we like reading scripts together— we've read a lot of enstars and mahoyaku aloud to each other, voice-acting out characters and playing the scenes. The Silt Verses sounded interesting to Kaz, but the medium was a huge stumbling block— but I remembered wait! There are transcripts!

So now, once a week, we read a chapter of the Silt Verses together.

This means I've been pretty quiet abt the Silt Verses on tumblr, lest Kaz stumble into some spoilers accidentally as we slowly read though. We just reached chapter 8. But as a side-effect of doing this really slow re-experience of canon, we end up having book-club type discussions at the end of every chapter and I try hard to not spoil anything which I am bad at but. I am trying.

Anyway, for this week, Kaz's roommate was around and there were enough Paige, Faulkner, and Carpenter scenes that we were like-- hey let's ask Moelle if they'd be up to voice a character for the three-person scenes. And realised almost immediately that it was a really funny episode to enter to immediately get the wrong impression of Faulkner. The in-universe first impression of Faulkner: what a nice boy with kind eyes experience is not usually what you think about him as a listener but in this case. That's how Moelle got to experience him, coming in totally blind.

A weird place to start.

also, a sketch page for brother faulkner:

◇ BED: FIXED.

To explain, I have a murphy bed in my flat right now to save space it folds away during the day. It has a little bar on the underside that prevents it from folding all the way down to the floor and thus hanging at a weird 45 degree angle bed triangle. Unfortunately, the bolt holding it in place popped off the other day while I was folding it down, and after 20 minutes panicking I balanced the bed precariously and investigated to find, oh, this would be an easy fix. I just needed to borrow a wrench! Thankfully, living in the Netherlands, many people have those because of how widespread bikes are. So I borrowed a set off a friend, biked an hour over to his place and grabbed them.

Then, for the actual fixing itself, the main issue became that I needed a spotter. Because if the bed fell on me whilst I was doing the repairs, that's game over. So I had to ask in the building group chat, hey can someone help me fix my bed? I have the tools and everything, I just need it held in place so it doesn't fall on me while I work.

For an hour, no takers. And then I got a private msg that was like, I'm sorry everyone ignored you in group chat. Do you still need help? I'll be home late tonight but we can do it tomorrow. And I let him know, yeah, that'd be really helpful!

So Geraldo came over the next day, held the bed in place, and we chatted while I got it done. We talked about where we were from and where we've lived before— California and Japan for me, and Curaçao and the Netherlands for him. I'd actually never heard of Curaçao before, but it's a tiny island nation in the Carribean— one that was declared independent in 2010, which is after I learned geography. So! I learned something new. But it was nice meeting him, and I let him know if he ever needs anything, to give me a shout and I'd be happy to help.

◇ Volunteered at the garden again, as I do pretty much all Sundays. The weather was very. sudden warmth and then sudden darkness and rain oh wait no it's warm again. So I stayed for less time than I usually do, but Martine is back from her camping visit in the south of France so it was nice to see her, and she told me how nice it was to come back to the garden in such good shape this year, and that last year when she came back everything was either withering or overgrown since it had been just Sandra taking care of the place. so! Validation!

I also did the usual grab as many herbs or tomatoes and whatnot as you like from the garden, so I've got veg for the week. And there were ripe golden raspberries so I had a few off the vine as I worked.

◇ Came back to Jake desperately messaging me that everyone else is out of town, can I cat sit? His and Issac's new cat is arriving today and he has work, he doesn't want it to be alone. Just make sure it doesn't fall down the stairs or anything. I'd just gotten home so I slung my bag back on and went to his place and arrived early enough I actually got to meet the cat— Tux— at the same time he did. Little black tuxedo cat with one white toe bean on each back paw, and that kitten was utterly fearless. Immediately started roaming around the room curiously.

There was also a bit of drama whilst Jake was gone when I used the restroom, exited, found the kitchen window blown open and could not find the cat. So, you know. I did the reasonable thing and climbed on the roof, just in case. The cat was thankfully not on the roof, but also didn't appear to be anywhere in the apartment, so I did a thorough check and then called Jake like hey I'd feel worse if this happened and I didn't say immediately but I cannot find Tux and the kitchen window was open. Jake was confident the cat couldn't get on the counter (which. incorrect, but fine in this case) and told me not to worry but to msg him when I found the cat.

And then, 20 minutes later, the door opened— Crystal, Issac's girlfriend, because Issac had been like oh shit no one will be there to watch the cat and independently asked Crystal to come over, unaware Jake had done the same thing. So we teamed up to find Tux— who had actually found an up-side-down black umbrella to hide in, in the entryway. The umbrella tipped over and out scrambled Tux up the stairs. So! drama over. And then Crystal discovered I hadn't seen K-Pop Demon Hunters and that was the rest of my evening.

◇ K-pop Demon Hunters: Pretty good! Fun watch. I don't have any real deep thoughts on it, though I have many shallow thoughts like: the blue tiger demon is great. The songs were very catchy. Not complexly plotted, but very tight without loose ends. I can see why it's popular.

◇ Also picked up an old horror shojo manga and read through all of it— Shi to Kanojo to Boku. Death, the Girl, and I, by Kawaguchi Madoka. It's about a young couple, both of whom can see/hear ghosts, the way this tormented them through growing up and how they found each other. The ghosts they can help and the ones they can't. Told out of chronological order, you might get a story with the couple in college or a story with one of them as children when they were still figuring out how to deal with what was happening to them. It was a long-runner so the art evolution from '88 and through into the 90s.

A lot of these kind of vignette horror series— like Nightmare Inspector, Hell Girl, or Petshop of Horrors— can tend towards moralistic in a way that's very serves you right or kind of shitty regressive misanthropic. But I think Shi to Kanojo to Boku feels very kind, particularly as it hits its stride, though it definitely sits right in that genre. Some vignette highlights: Julia's story, the unnamed ghost girl in chapter 30, and Prince Tulip.