tiny voices

i'm tired but i feel like rapid fire rambling about life in general.

still listening to a new (to me) album every week. this week's was Dear You by Jawbreaker. last week's, The Band Geek Mafia by Voodoo Glow Skulls. kinda dropped off watching WWE every week because the ending to the last PLE was in bad taste. instead been going through L.A. by Night which i'm just a few episodes short of finishing. in line with that, i was gifted Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines for my birthday. oh yeah btw i turned 30 a week ago. yikes/yay. the day itself kinda sucked honestly. but i also was gifted the Locked Tomb books, which was a nice surprise. i've been playing a lot of Rareware games while i listen to other things. been going back to work, which has been fine. my roommate's car is fucked again, possibly permanently. waiting for more info on the uh, financial fall out she'll be stuck with there. fuck cars.

gradually making progress on a short story (it may be on the longer side for a short story). gradually cooking a vampire (the masquerade..?) OC just for shits and giggles. unsure how to feel about the upcoming animated homestuck series(???) but excited for the animated mighty nein series. somewhat interested in critical role campaign 4; likely won't watch it live or keep up with that well because i just have other things i'm into all the time. sometimes struggling to stay positive/optimistic considering the things that keep happening in the World. slowly downloading my favorite BikdipOnABus videos in case i lose (reasonable) access to youtube, and because i kinda wanted to anyway. toying with the idea of putting one of the playthroughs onto a DVD. i've moved a bunch of stuff from google docs to ellipsus because you never know what might happen. we keep hoping our neighbor's confederate flag gets taken away by storm winds. i bought a ghost-shaped water bottle today.

hanging in there.

for years i've had this box of boxes with my old apple devices in it, most notably my first one, a blue ipod nano. after a quick jog over to apple's website i've determined it's a 5th generation nano. apparently these were the first ipods to have a camera and microphone; older ones could play videos, but not record them. i purchased my little blue rectangle with my own savings, and because i also kept the receipt, i know this purchase took place on august 18, 2010 at 7:25 PM (shortly after my 15th birthday). the price was $145, though i paid slightly less thanks to the target employee discount my dad had at the time. i'm getting a little wistful imagining paying relatively so little for an iphone nowadays.

anyway, back in 2012 and 2013 i dug out the nano to upload some videos sitting on it to youtube, only getting about a third of the way done before promptly dropping this project... until today. today wasn't significant, it's just when i finally got back around to it. i had been a little concerned the ipod wouldn't work anymore, having been unused for over a decade, but i plugged it in and it reacted immediately, turning on and charging like no time had passed at all. i let it charge while i did the dishes, then came back for further investigation.

i think it's a stylish little guy whose design holds up. the blue exterior looks nice especially with the sleek sheen on it (which was also new to the gen 5 nano). i dig the control scheme based around running your thumb along the circle of buttons to scroll and change the volume, though the buttons on mine seem a bit worn out and sometimes only work if i really press on them. the battery seemed worn out too, not holding charge for very long (i had to plug it in while browsing the music library and videos). the time and date were both incorrect, displaying that it was the morning of may 27, 2013... which is the same day i uploaded some of its videos to youtube. in all likelihood, that really was the last time i had touched this ipod. really made this feel like opening a time capsule i buried when i was 17 years old.

so, what's on this thing?

it's really just music and videos. to be precise: 439 songs, 30 videos... and 3 games, which i'm assuming are loaded on the nano by default. no pictures, no voice memos, no contacts.

the music is about what i expected. my music taste hasn't really changed since back then, or rather, it's expanded and developed, but i still like pretty much all the music i listened to as a teenager. there's multiple full albums from the beancore classics: green day, sum 41, blink 182, the blink-182 spin-offs, new found glory, mxpx. assorted albums and/or handfuls of tracks from the wonder years, linkin park, yellowcard, the story so far. nice batch of songs from the pillows (the FLCL soundtrack, basically). few bits and bobs, or in some cases a single bit or bob, from jimmy eat world, relient k, set your goals, all american rejects, emily's army, and the starting line. two songs i don't think i recognize now from rise against. to my surprise, no paramore at all. and even more surprising, homestuck-- two official tracks, and a handful of fansongs. i'm talking broadway karkat, fawn, and kylee henke. it's 2025 and i played 8lack Romance on my ipod nano. ridiculous. the original video of that song isn't even on youtube anymore, from what i can find.

i'm not certain when i would've stopped using this ipod, though my best guess would be at some point in 2013, around when i got my ipod touch. i really figured this nano would've predated my obsessive entry into homestuck, but that was at the beginning of 2013, so i guess there was probably some overlap there. i don't know exactly when i got the ipod touch because it never made it to the old devices hoard due to the screen being cracked and possibly risky to touch. (one night i rather carelessly tossed it across my room, aiming for my bed but missing by a few inches and face-planting the poor thing directly onto the hardwood floor.)

getting back on track, what about the videos? in short, it's a bunch of random shit from 2010 through 2012. but, random shit i'm very glad to have found again.

conveniently, all of the time and date information for these videos is intact. the earliest recordings are a set of three "point the ipod at a computer screen" videos that i've since archived properly-- these were taken from an old blogspot site about a grandmother that plays video games. then there's the video from september 11, 2010, taken up at The Lake. i'm really happy about this one because i had almost entirely forgotten about it, and it's a lot of my parents and i laughing at some goofy tangent my mom went on. plus, due to the date, there's footage of obama giving a speech with my mom's commentary running in the background (she loves obama; she refers to former president george w. bush as "skippy"). next up chronologically was a few videos i took of my uncle's wedding in october, which amazingly includes the officiator declaring the marriage official by the power vested in him by god and the justice league of america.

there are a couple videos from 2011 that are mostly irrelevant-- one i took of school of rock on tv while... somewhere. i'm not sure where. i'm pretty sure my cousin's also there watching the movie with me, but i don't recognize the room. the other is the entirety of the adventure time episode "What Was Missing," recorded by pointing my ipod at the tv. you know, the bubbline episode? yeah.

on april 17, 2011 i sat down and took 17 videos of... 17 videos. you see, back in the day, before youtube was the only video site that mattered, there was google video. and i found this guy that uploaded a bunch of videos of him and his friends playing super smash bros. melee and acting like the knucklehead teenagers they were. being a knucklehead teenager myself, i thought these videos were hilarious, and i watched them all the time, and so years down the line i wanted to have them available elsewhere. but i lacked the means and know-how to download them. these videos were originally recorded by pointing a camera at a tv screen (which means they all have a black bar repetitively scrolling down the screen the whole time)... so then my recordings were made by pointing a camera at a screen showing a camera pointing at a screen. and 17 might sound like a lot of videos but there were a lot more that i didn't ever record, and are likely lost to time now. RIP google video. (this was the set of videos i had in mind when starting this little project... it took me 13 years to upload 17 videos to youtube. fuck with me. but picking up where i left off was incredibly easy because i had left a list of these videos, numbered based on the file names, in the box i was storing the ipod in. the ones i had done already were checked off. i had expected this process to take a long time today but it really was just plug in and go, done in like 20 minutes.)

the videos from 2012 were all taken during the summer. i have two videos of my high school's marching band performances at the state fair. the crowd is incredibly fucking loud in both of them. the last video, taken on my 17th birthday, is of my former best friend playing Slender on my computer while we say stupid shit to each other; this one i had posted to facebook long ago. but the big win of this set was from the last day of july where i do a sort of tour of my bedroom. with sum 41 blaring from my speakers i walk around and zoom in on the printer-paper posters on the walls, the disorganized contents of my bookshelf, and my bass guitar. there's a brief glimpse at 2012-era youtube and my internet explorer bookmark bar, which includes the neopets homepage and punk-o-matic 2. my very first cell phone, in all its red clam shell glory, makes an appearance. absolute time capsule of a video, god bless.

this little project has brought me more joy than i expected. i was really hyped that the ipod still works and that recovering some record of this era of my life was not only possible, but so easy. i love snapshots of times past and piecing together a little timeline from details like dates and times and my own recollections. i don't know why but i find it so fascinating to look at some event and think of what else was happening at that time, or just before or after it. i like to think of periods in my life based on what things i was really into at the time. plus it's nice to have an archive of otherwise unavailable videos; it's nice to have an external version of your memories, i guess.

maybe i'll do another room tour video. after all, in the future i'll probably end up looking back on now and think it's cool that i can see what things looked like back then.

okay so i haven't posted in forever but if i'm gonna post just once in this blue moon, it should be on 4/13, no?

i don't exactly recall why i stopped posting here, aside from the usual 'just didn't feel like it,' but i think it had something to do with my de-prioritizing my Sound System posts because i was more invested in my other avenues of writing, most of which were never destined to be shared here. i have still been listening to a new album every week though, and i started listing them all on a spreadsheet. here's all the new (to me) albums i have gone through since the year began that i haven't written up a review for:

Witch - Witch (2006)
The Cure - Pornography (1982)
Jets to Brazil - Orange Rhyming Dictionary (1998)
Depeche Mode - Some Great Reward (1984)
Straight Line Stitch - To Be Godlike (2006)
Story of the Year - Page Avenue (2003)
The Clash - London Calling (1979)
AFI - Sing the Sorrow (2003)
Nirvana - Bleach (1989)
Origami Angel - Feeling Not Found (2024)

i've generally enjoyed these albums and have been able to capital-L Like at least one or two tracks from each. i haven't really branched out that much from what i already listen to a lot, which i would still like to do as the year goes on.

as for life in general, it's happening in a pretty typical fashion. going to work, playing a Lot of PokeRogue, contending with the constant droning hum of the state of the world in the background. my roommates and i have been doing this thing where we share our creative endeavors every sunday to sort of foster motivation/encouragement to make cool things. i was actually drawing in my sketchbook a lot more than usual for a couple weeks there (spring break). that's kind of slowed down but this week at least i did a little writing and some designing of fakemon (fake pokemon) just for shits and giggles. but that's a fun process, developing my idea in multiple drafts until i end up with the final design i like the most. this is probably very standard in character design, but it's a little novel to me. it's also a little novel to me to be learning how to be cool with imperfection in my art. gotta turn off that evil perfectionist creature in my brain, or at least lower its volume.

oh, and there was the bigass tornado-producing storm we in the midwest experienced last week. the tornadoes were not actually produced here where i live, but the storm did knock out power for large chunks of the city for a day or so and school was cancelled for two days. it was scary, having all the lights go out and then the rain (and hail, apparently?) and the wind making the house make noises, constant lightning making the sky look like a foggy rave, and huddling with my roommates in the master bedroom closet. but we were not hurt and our house wasn't damaged either. the morning after i walked around the neighborhood and saw several houses with tree limbs or whole trees fallen on them, wrecking overhangs and porches, lines down, all that. wild shit. it's the sort of thing that makes you wanna not live in the tornado-est area of the States, but it's tough just moving somewhere else. like even just financially.

anywayyyyyyyy... wrestlemania's next weekend! i've been watching wrestling for a whole year now. still really fun. never would've expected to get as much juice and pulp out of such a ridiculous theatrical concept, but there's nothing exactly like it. sip sip. (terrible. i don't even like pulp. whatever, the metaphor stands.) i also finished my second complete watch of Daria. still fantastic. and i've (tentatively) suckered another person into also watching it. all part of my evil plan. i started re-watching critical role's campaign 2 because the Mighty Nein is king, but i really fell off with that one after 20 or so episodes. great actual play stuff but it's just... a lot of video. hundreds of hours. maybe i'll get back to it, maybe not.

i got another tattoo. just a little guy on my right hand. sketchy heart-shaped skull, from the comic Serenity Rose which everyone should read. that's another part of my evil plan. go read it now! anyway now i kinda want another hand tattoo, one to match it on my opposite hand. it never ends, i tell ya

there's also another notable life update, but i choose to keep my explanation of that very short and very vague: onions are good.

so yeah i dunno, i'm alright. this is a post. there will be more in the future, maybe soon, maybe later. hang in there, kids.

If I'm gonna keep up with these weekly album listens, I'm gonna need to not do them at the last moment on Sundays. Not beating myself up about it, because it's a self-imposed thing and it doesn't matter (shout out to mental health), but I dunno, it's weird because Sunday is like... technically part of the next week, right? Calendar-wise, I mean. Even though that flat out contradicts with it being part of the weekend. Whatever. Maybe this week I'll find a time to sit through an album and generate more than a handful of words, which is all I managed with this one. This one being haha by The Garden.

Granted, the limited amount of time between when I started the album and when I would've responsibly gone to bed for work the next day was not the only reason I didn't crank out a bunch of Thoughts on these songs. The other reason is that I just don't have a lot to say about them. First of all, out of 17 tracks, only two of them are longer than three minutes (and even those are barely longer than that). Not unusual to me, short songs, but on top of the short length of the songs is the either strange, lacking context aspect of the lyrics, or the repetitive and not particularly deep depths of the lyrics. Also, much of the time, the instrumentals are sparing, limited usually to a simple beat, bass and/or guitar, and some keyboardy, techno-y decorations. These are not bad, but they're not broad landscapes, so to speak. That being said, the bass does stand out on the album and has a thrumming twangy tone to it that's nice to chomp on. Crunch crunch.

My song-by-song Notepad file ended up pretty sparse, so I'll just summarize my thoughts broadly rather than going through each track individually. (click to read)

haha is kinda like the soundtrack to a gang of evil jesters born no earlier than 1998 doing crimes, or at the very least prowling and talking about doing crimes, and then celebrating. There are occasional shades of corporate, white fence, capitalist zombie-esque lyrics, and then there's the songs about clubbing. And I'm pretty sure they're referring to drugs, at least a few times for sure. Two tracks refer to something called "VV" and the latter track says "Vada Vada." Don't know what that is and I'm choosing to let it remain a mystery (after all, I am not an evil jester. I'm just evil). Sometimes the music reminds me of Crash Bash, a party game set in the Crash Bandicoot series, and sometimes the music reminds me of The Outsiders, specifically the movie version with the twangy guitar soundtrack. Strange things happening in this album. Like, if you were to imagine surf rock mixing with drums and bass mixing with post punk... you might imagine something like this album. Or maybe your brain wouldn't know what to even create with that set of components. It's not bad, and the songs are short so it's not a hard thing to sit and listen through, but yeah.

Highlights are "Crystal Clear," "Vexation," "haha," and "This Could Build Us a Home." "Red Green Yellow" is creative in that it's a song from the perspective of a traffic light. The two longest tracks, "Egg" and "Devour," feel the most conventional, and I thought "Everything Has a Face" is rather underwhelming. "We Be Grindin'" sounds like a meme, and I'm still trying to imagine the scene where it would be playing and getting the crowd pumped. I'd say it's satire of "up in the club" types of songs, but I would not put my money on it. Shoplift to "I'll Stop by Tomorrow Night." The title track is kinda like the evil version of the Wii Shop Channel music.

Lyrics I noted for being fun, catchy, or interesting in a way that had I been a dog I would have tilted my head curiously at:

"Take your sunglasses off and put them back on again / I've created a force field and I hope no one breaks it."

"Hip swing, hip swing, means nothing if you don't have thighs." [...] "Hiiiii!"

"You can't wish away what happened / you can't do so wrong / and live, care, live free."

"Lies are made by stories which we think of when we sleep."

"I wonder what's behind that cloak / whatever, oh well, whatever, oh well."

"I live by my knife, I'm so petty / like a ghost with flip flops, I'm not heavy."

"Don't dwell on it, fucker / don't dwell on it, fish."

Weird album. Fun and eerie, but I feel like I'm missing something.

IN OTHER NEWS -

I've officially survived the transition of going back to work after a vacation. Work opportunities were a bit dry this time last year so I'm glad to go back, despite the fact that it's, you know, work. My job is not bad, dare I say. I got color added to my tattoo last week. The tattoo artists were playing Lord of the Rings on their TV; my roommate (my ride) asked if "that guy from Critical Role" was playing Elrond. I thought she meant Matt Mercer, but she meant Liam O'Brien. Neither of these people played Elrond. I was a brave boy and cleared snow from our decks and driveway last week. Monday Night Raw debuted on Netflix and Rhea Ripley, god bless her, is champion again.

Perhaps most exciting: the first ever session of my game (eXtraOrdinary, XO for short) is scheduled for this coming Saturday! My plans are basically ready! Characters have been made and roleplayed! where doing it man. where MAKING THIS HAPEN

you may be wondering, what's bean been up to lately?

well, no, you're probably not wondering that. but i'm nice so i'll answer the hypothetical anyway. you're welcome.

my roommates and i have been watching the new season of Arcane, week by week(ly arc). i think there are valid criticisms to be made about the substance of the show, but man it's a treat to look at. the style is fucking there. the colors and artstyle and subtleties, chomp chomp chomp i'm eating it. also spiraling emo piece of shit Vi is the best Vi and catered just for me. thank you Fortiche. but also it's nice to sit down and watch stuff with my roommates regularly like that-- because i'm weird and have the finicky brain of a cat it's sometimes a struggle to simply sit and exist around them in a normal fashion, but we're making it work. congrats to me for being a person with other persons. i've also gotten them started on Buffy but Arcane has detracted from that, alas

i somehow got back into Risk of Rain 2 in the past week or so, gunning for some achievements/unlockables. after much effort and many failed runs, i FINALLY cleared Monsoon with my girl the Artificer last night and got her special chrome outfit. i'm a gaymer now. running the game a lot is also a good way to catch up on long videos (read: critical role). we also convinced my fave skeleton Malus to play the game with us huehue

i got my second tattoo a couple weeks ago. it's a dirk knife framed by peach flowers. beyond just looking cool and sorta representing the concept of rage and love, it's also a piece for my parents. this couples well with the "you can't take loved away" quote on my other arm. yes i am sometimes a sentimental bitch. but the tattoo is awesome and basically healed now. only thing is, the colored ink (green, there's a little emerald in the pommel of the knife) just... didn't take on my skin. it all came off in the scab process. luckily the tattoo artist already offered to add color to the flowers as a free touch-up, so hopefully in a while i can get the color for real this time. i've also got some ideas for tattoo #3. you know before i got my first one i was like "nah, i'm not gonna be someone that immediately wants more ink." haha wrong

last week my roommates and i went to an "artisans and authors" fair at the public library and purchased some locally-made crafts. it was fun. i got some christmas gifts squared away early and got myself a little resin ghost keychain. i've been wearing it on a pants-chains i already had (fuck with me). i checked out a sci-fi novel by Becky Chambers called The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. so far it slaps. very good vibes and charming characters. i'm a little less than halfway through, so maybe this will change, but it seems almost more... conceptual than narrative-focused? there is an on-going narrative, events are taking place and there's an ultimate Thing the characters are working toward, but mostly there's not been like, an on-going conflict or issue they're contending with. conflict doesn't seem to be the focus of the book, it overall seems more concerned with worldbuilding and musing on its own concepts and characters, almost in a slice-of-life manner. i don't say this as a bad thing. really it's very interesting. but i'm a writer and i'm pawing at the Craft of it all as well as simply enjoying the words on the paper. books good. stories good.

this month i've been aiming for an average of 400 words written each day, which i've managed for the most part. this may coincide with Nanowrimo but i'm not aiming to do a whole novel, nor have i ever done that. but the act of writing regularly is good for me to do at least occasionally. the running theme is simply things that would take place in my RPG setting-- flesh it out, experiment with my characters, ride vibes, etc. i think it's been a good experiment. maybe i'll keep up with it a little even after the month is over. or i won't, that's okay too. i'm gonna be nice to myself about it, dammit

we got actual snow yesterday, and it actually stuck for a whole day. the family next door had a snowball fight. thanksgiving is next week (i might end up going to two different gatherings). we're hangin' in there, folks

finding myself wandering back down the rabbit hole that is the 2000s emo scene developing and crashing as my fall break winds down. finding inspiration and entertainment in pete wentz's old livejournal entries from 2005-2006. i have more band OCs floating around in my head (i'm even managing to draw a few of them, when i can get my focus in check). i don't exclusively make OCs that are in bands but it's fun to make them because then you have a whole band to build around them. you can make a playlist of what the band would sound like, branch off into other bands that influence them, develop their group dynamic, think of what their fans would think of them, even draft lyrics for what their songs are like. bands are just cool. they exist in little eras-- during this time period they had this album out and their hair looked like this and they dressed like that, etc etc. and many of my favorite bands/albums are from (surprise surprise) the 90s/00s which has gone on to become especially interesting to me because i was alive back then, but i wasn't really around for the "culture" of it.

i mean, i'm all about it now, but it's not really nostalgia, exactly, because i was, for example, 9 years old in 2004. sure, american idiot came out that year, but i wasn't screaming about green day because i was in 3rd grade and all i cared about was pokemon, neopets, and teen titans. i wasn't old enough to be obsessed with daria and buffy, i wasn't really even old enough to understand them with any depth. i didn't get a gamecube until i was like 12 years old and i wasn't reading shit like electronic gaming monthly or nintendo power, keeping up with new releases or griping about new trends in gaming. it's like there's this whole world of shit that's so beancore, but that i didn't get to explore because i was busy learning long division and trying to beat the champion fight in leafgreen. i wasn't on the pulse point of the internet; i was playing sutek's tomb and watching stupidass flash animations. but now, i can explore it, with hindsight and a perspective that allows me to appreciate the culture of that era. and make fun of it too, of course. those were post-9/11 years, after all.

i got caught up on critical role (again) after losing touch with it while i was watching buffy. i don't know why i tend to second guess staying up to date with the show, or put off watching new episodes-- they're long, sure, but i always end up really enjoying it. i'd also planned on watching the new season of legend of vox machina, but it's coming out piecemeal and i think it might be better to watch it once it's fully released. and really i'm just biding my time until the mighty nein show comes out.... mighty nein my beloved

my hair is freshly bleached, though some touch-ups are planned for later today to make it all more or less even. shout out to my roommate for doing that for me and putting up with me complaining about my ears itching from the bleach. i did two pieces of digital art during this break(!) and scribbled up a "zero draft" of something that i'll maybe post...? i dunno. i have vague ambitions (i'm not good at those) of making some sort of collection of short stories set in my rpg setting. some day i gotta sit down and Plan that. maybe while i'm at work-- that sounds silly, but you'd be surprised how effective it is to be at work but do something else besides your job.

oh also: i got another tattoo scheduled. november 6th. that's gonna be fuuuunnn

tonight i intended to ride a caffeine high and get some work done on some art for my RPG. what i did instead was play splatoon 3 for like four hours. i even set a couple of timers to signal when i should stop playing and switch gears, but i was flowing so i ignored them. inkbrush good. you'd think with my self-set goal of having my game ready to be played by the end of the month (which is approaching quickly, not a big fan of that) i'd be more focused but... eh. i worked most of this week and i wanted to indulge in the feel-good of the splat

there was a fight at the high school on thursday; this was funny because i was on my lunch/prep period (prep meaning the time of the school day where a teacher doesn't have any kids, so they can get preparations for class done), sitting back eating chips and listening to music when suddenly there was a whole lot of yelling in the hall. i go out and look over the railing down to the first floor and see a pile of girls being pulled apart by school cops and admin (one girl was being held to the ground) right outside the deans' office. the poor ISS sign was knocked down. naturally kids were running over trying to get a good view of the fight, people were hollering, there was chaos in the air. apparently some girl tossed her crutches into the mix in an attempt to help out her sister, but this had the opposite effect. a boy in the class afterward showed me one angle of the fight on his phone. fun times.

(don't tell anyone, but i'm not a very professional substitute teacher.)

tomorrow supposedly me and the roommates are going to drive to the "weed store." i don't plan on making any purchases but will be joining just for the adventure of it. i considered not joining, because i hardly ever get the house to myself, but it's probably better for me to be around people (read: kept engaged/distracted) lately.

i had a nice moment recently when i shared a short bit of writing i wrote a few years ago on a discord server-- someone was very complimentary about it, said they were encouraged by the fact that it was short and good, that it was good because it was short. i knew i liked the piece (and i knew it was at least good enough to partly inspire someone else's DND character) but it's nice to hear that another person liked what you made. and getting to talk about what you made-- good shit, would recommend.

just for fun i made a short playlist to tack onto the end of this journal. call it an EP, maybe. there is a theme to it, but i'm not going to explain it. interpret it as you like and tell me about it. or don't. i'm not a cop.

eighteen - joyce manor
for always - mxpx
a praise chorus - jimmy eat world
gotta let it go - joyce manor
J.A.R. - green day

seeing all these posts about in-person meet ups to celebrate/mourn Cohost is a little weird. i can't even really imagine doing like a tumblr meet up, let alone a gathering for a teeny little site like Cohost. but i guess the whole thing is unrelatable to me because i've always lived in Irrelevant Town, USA. even when i lived in a "college town" i never felt like i was in a Cool City where Cool People live and Cool Things happen. it was better than my current city, in terms of having things to do and existing, but this whole state is basically a state you forget about in "locate all 50 states" quizzes. you drive through it to get to other states. like imagine living somewhere in the US that matters

i like to think here is more notable than Nebraska though. no shade to any Nebraska-dwellers, of course. i just never hear Anything from or about it.

all this being said, cool things do happen around here on occasion (my city's first Pride was this year! i got a cool dice bracelet there). it's just difficult to hear about events to begin with and then to actually go to them because i don't drive and i'm a humble breadmaker (read: got no money). also my roommates, like myself, don't leave the house unless they have to about 90% of the time. i only went to a bar for the first time at the beginning of this year. it was fun though, we played Uno

i had the idea earlier to maybe post journals in character, with each OC's own little icons and tags. seems fun and i'm kinda inspired by how old school dreamwidth is-- the characters i'd be writing for are in an early 2000s setting so there'd be like ~immersion~. this is largely unrelated to my previous topic but it's fine. i just made this page today, there are no standards to follow

-bean