[ 27.08.24 ] DOG PUB, ANIMATION, DUCKLING SEASON
this week has been soooo lovely, it's warm and beautiful outside but still crisp and cold in the mornings. perfect weather rn, and currently duckling season!! we've had a bunch of them brought into work for whatever reason; our native ducks here (wood ducks) tend to get themselves stuck in random places so people bring them in. we had the cutest little solo baby in a few days ago, who is thankfully now with a carer and doing well alongside the other orphaned ducklings. i've been seeing a litte family of them crossing the road all week too

i went for lunch with some friends (🌹, 🌸, & 🐦) on the weekend to this beautiful pub up a local mountain, where a bunch of st. bernards were roaming around. they were soooo so sweet and lovely, and the place itself was stunning. gorgeous mountain views over a valley, big ol dogs, really nice food. such a good spot. i will be out and about more now that the weather is warming up + drying out, i really want to get outside and do stuff this spring.

though until it's properly dry and i have some free time, i've been rewatching gravity falls with 🌙! she had introduced it to me a very long time ago but i never did rewatch it - given it's recent resurgance though, i've fallen back in the hole. i love it when my brain decides to latch onto a piece of media and it gives me inspiration to try big, ridiculous projects. i don't have much experience in the ways of animation, but i have drive and motivation and a very developed world full of characters that i really want to animate something for, so! big project in the works, we'll see if i can stick with it.

i think this will be my last post for the month unless something crazy happens in the next few days! i need to think of a better layout for the blog i think, i want to be able to integrate photos without having them on the side. hrmmmmmmmm we will see



[ 18.08.24 ] WARMING UP, GEOCACHING, PREPPING FOR SPRING!
just a little update to ramble because i've had a nice few days :) it is slowly beginning to warm up here, and the weather right now is perfect for geocaching, which i've been very into these last few days! i missed it a lot, i've been pretty busy with work through the week and have little time to get much geocaching done, but spending time out in this lovely warm but not too warm weather has been a delight. it has been difficult getting out and about in nature when i no longer have a dog as incentive and motivation, so this has been nice. something i've been doing on my days off is making a nice, proper breakfast and sitting outside to eat it without my phone - has definitely been a nice way to start the day! and, sometime next week, i plan on getting into my garden and prepping everything for the new season! got a lot of weeding and pruning to do, so

otherwise, i'm all caught up with most of the stuff i was doing last week. i finished what's currently available of ULTRAKILL, which i'll probably yap about on it's page later. loved it so much, cannot wait for the rest. my friends and i did indeed finish s4 of the umbrella academy and jesus fucking christ, i'm wondering if i can gaslight myself into pretending i never watched it. just, the whole season. terrible. awful. i have a few solo days at work next week so i might sort out their respective thoughts pages then

anyway! yea, nice few days, just wanted to put down some thoughts about them



[ 13.08.24 ] FLOOD WARNINGS, HOBBY WEEK, & TRAVEL PLANS!
it has been an astoundingly wet, miserable and rainy week this week - out of nowhere too, it's been pretty cold but now it's DAMP and cold and there are flood warnings in effect. with artfight finally over, this means: plenty of time for my other misc hobbies i've been half starting and then ignoring!!! i decided earlier in the week that i was going to pick up my kalimba again - an instrument i bought on a whim with very little prior musical instrument experience - and try to learn a new song. there is no peace like sitting on the porch in the rain and plucking away at a kalimba, let me tell you. i managed to learn like, halllfff of clair de lune so far, but the pacing needs a little work. no matter!! i will get there eventually. something else i've been working on this week has been this huge complex lighthouse cross-stitch piece that i've been picking away at for months now. i love settling in on rainy inside days and working on it while i watch something, so this has been ideal for me this week. the final(?) season of the umbrella academy released a few days ago, and my friends and i watched the other seasons together so we are currently making our way through it and wondering how catastrophically it's going to end. it's gonna be so bad, truly, i cannot wait. i also have recently gotten into sherlock & co! a podcast that surely cannot be worse than it's bbc show counterpart! its fun so far, but, yk, the bar is on the ground

other than that, this last week's big win was cementing in some travel plans with 🌙 & ⭐ - we're going to japan in a few months! i'm so excited, we have finally booked our flights and accomadation, and we have a rough plan for an itinerary set out. i think we are going to take it as it comes, but it feels nicer having a vague outline of stuff we want to do. it's gonna be so good!! next steps for me is going shopping for some weather appropriate clothes, as it's going to be a little cold and all i have is aussie summer clothes. i also need to figure out what to do about my film camera, i really want to take it but i'm weighing up the damage an airport x-ray might do to the film vs the cost of super expensive film over there. plus, getting it developed there or risk the x-ray on the way home and developing it myself. hard choices! but i suppose the joy of film photography is the unpredictable nature of it all anyway



[ 06.08.24 ] BLENDER HELL AGAIN, + WORST TUESDAY OF ALL TIME?, I DONT THINK I DID ANYTHING ACTUALLY COOL THIS WEEK
every 4mo my ego decides it can take another hit and i decide to hunker down and learn blender, but GUESS WHAT!! i did it this time, i have a whole model finished and coloured and shaded! kind of! i've been spending the last weekend trying to learn how to rig it and place bones, it's a goddamn nightmare. but its progress! and progress is good. i want to make a short little animation with my oc's so bad, i just need the time and patience to learn the technical blender stuff, which i really do not have! rigify is giving me so much trouble; it rigs well, and movement is great...when it works. parts of my model keep coming off and it's so annoying trying to get it all connected because god forbid you add a bone, the whole thing breaks

otherwise this week, work has been deranged. had the most ridiculous tuesday, back to back emergencies all morning and then it didn't settle down until way in the afternoon. i am pretty proud of myself for handling things well; everyone is a bit tense at the moment, and i am the only person who isn't! so things kind of get thrown my way when it all goes to shit, but, things went smoothly and nobody died, so. huge day though, i am so exhausted. i am also sleeping terribly rn as well like i have half a mind to just post this unfinished and go tf to sleep at 8pm. i did get a nice weekend break where my friends and i decided to binge all the x-men movies in chronological order (me being a huge prequel fan and them being fans of the original movies). was fun! been so long since i watched those early 2000s ones, i miss superhero movies from that era so, so bad. the shitty transitions, the montages...peak



[ 01.08.24 ] SITE SHENNANIGANS, KITTENS AT WORK!, ULTRAKILL HELL

it's so nice to have a fresh new site that just works nice and can't hurt me
my first site attempt relied a lot on iframes and art assets, which loaded soooo so slowly and aligning everything pixel perfect was so agonising - i have two monitors and one is slighly bigger than the other, and i kept forgetting which one i was trying to align it to. ohh my god, agony, never again. i am much happier with this one's layout honestly. it's not as gimmicky, but it's clean and simple and still pleasing to look at, so. i'll take it

other than tinkering with the site nonstop this week, i have been entirely consumed by ultrakill. it's terminal, i fear. i love this game. once i have my other media pages set up, i will go insane about it over there, because i haven't had so much fun on a game in a very long time. i'm trying to pace myself so i don't rip through the game before the final levels are out - it's currently early access, and not finished. thankfully though it is very replayable, and i can busy myself trying to P-rank everything lmao. i love that funky little mosquito robot so bad, i have to draw it at some point, IF i can get my art motivation back. it's been a bit slack these last few weeks, between work and other things taking my time.

though speaking of work - it's a quiet period at the clinic at the moment (which is fine by me!! i worked my ass off last 2mo) so i am able to spend a lot of quality cuddle time with my patients ((this is a vet clinic and the patients are animals)) and yesterday i got to spend the entire afternoon with two of the scraggliest, cutest little stray kittens i have ever met in my life. i am so, so deeply in love with them and if i had the resources right now, i would have adopted them in seconds. i have only ever had dogs all my life as my brother and i are both allergic to cats, but i fear that if i get a cat before i get another dog, i'm going to completely become a cat person. i love them so bad, i think i need a cat or i might die. OH AND, we had a lost eclectus parrot brought into the clinic as well! these guys are expensive little birds, and he was a bitey menace, but he talked! it was sooo cute, we had him in a temporary cage and he'd be saying things like "hello!" and "i love you!" and "hey babyyyyyyy"!! super cool, and we managed to reunite him with his owner too, which is always wonderful.

anyway. august already! it's so cold rn, it was 9*c the other morning - great news for me personally, not so much for my poor frog and plants. i actually just did a huge pruning and tidying session on my houseplants today, since they were looking a little worse for wear. hopefully by the time summer rolls around, they'll be back in full bloom again. they're a bit twiggy and sad at the moment. i really do want to get a start on my gardening blog, but everything looks so pathetic rn and i can't do anything but wait for them to recover :( it is filed away for a later problem, though. & i think thats it for the week!!