Hobbies and Other Things that Fill my Free Time

I left a few more small details and side-projects out of my most recent four-month update post, so I thought I'd give 'em a little attention right here.

Sims
No shit. I don't play as often as I used to, though. The last five fucking times I went into my game it fucking crashed and I lost so much fucking progress. It kept crashing in this one file, maybe because it's a seven-person household? I dunno. But I've got plans for that household, and every time I move forward with them, my game fucking crashes. I went in again a couple of days ago and made good progress in another file, so I was happy with that. My game is still doing that stupid thing where I need to change the file name every time it saves. If I just click "Save" instead of "Save As..." my game gets stuck on the part where it needs to delete the old file to create the new data under the same name. I need to change the number at the end of my save file name every time I save, and manually delete the old save from the main menu. Also, that texture glitch is back. I fuckin' give up. I'm not going to try and get into any more modelling comps any time soon, and it doesn't affect gameplay, so I'm just going to fucking leave it.

LittleBigPlanet
I have been playing a lot of LittleBigPlanet lately. I have officially aced every level in the first game, and collected every item! That is a seven year journey over and done with, holy shit. I'm getting there with the second game. I've aced almost every level. I only have like, three left I think? Maybe two? Anyway, whenever I get frustrated with trying to ace levels, I've been working on collecting all of the prize bubbles. Right now I've fully completed the second world, and only have some challenge level prize bubbles left in the first. I do own LittleBigPlanet 3, but I have vowed not to touch it until I've fully completed the first two. I may break that vow, though. I'm really excited to play it.

Lolita
Around the end of January, I got into lolita fashion. Here is a good explanation of what lolita is. I have been slowly but surely collecting outfit pieces over the course of the year, and I am almost done! I'm just missing a purse. Here is a photo of my outfit sans-accessories:

For accessories, I have two flower rings, one pink and one yellow, a pearl bracelet, and pearl earrings. I just need that goddamn purse, and I am not willing to pay an exorbitant amount of money for it. This puts me in a bit of a sticky situation, because the Canadian dollar is a giant turd right now and the exchange rate from CAD to USD and CAD to Euro is enough to make one cry.

MapleStory
Yes, I'm trash, I know, but I play MapleStory. I originally created my account in summer of 2009 (which would be the summer after my sixth grade year). I had a great time and made my first online friends through MapleStory. I even joined a guild and all that. My character's name is Belabelle and she's on the Windia server. I didn't go back to her, though. All the people I used to play with are long gone. I created a new character on the Dementhos server, named Genderfkt. They are a level 47 Wind Archer and I'm doing quite well with them! MapleStory is actually kind of a boring time-waster, but it's nice to chill with for a bit. Most of the quests are just "Kill x number of y enemy and get back to me" so it's a bit repetitive, but my character's class levels up a little faster than most, which unlocks dungeons faster, so that keeps things swimming along.

Bead Weaving
This is a more recent one. I got my bead loom back out for the first time in years just last week, and I'm really enjoying it.

Basically, I got this Klutz brand bead looming kit as a Christmas or birthday gift when I was like ten or something. It looks like this:

It looks like this set up:

And makes bracelets that look like this:

The handiwork is calming. I've made one bracelet so far and I've got a second one well on its way to being finished. I might post pictures of them some time, but they're gifts, so I just want to be sure the receiver of said gifts doesn't find them here.

Web Comics
I have been reading quite a few web comics! You already know about Homestuck. Homestuck is currently on Omegapause, which means there aren't going to be any updates for at least a year. When there are updates, they will be the very last updates of Homestuck, and they will finish off the seven-year journey. God damn.

Another web comic I've been following for a while is the now-finished Girls with Slingshots. Girls with Slingshots had its last update on March 12, 2015, and since then has been posting newly coloured versions of the old black-and-white strips. The earlier comics aren't as good and I kinda had to fight through them, but it's definitely worth it.

Finally, I have relatively recently hopped on the Questionable Content train. Questionable Content is an excellent web comic that follows the life of Marten Reed and his circle of friends and family. As with Girls with Slingshots, the earlier days of Questionable Content were of questionable quality, but totally, totally worth it to fight through it. This comic has amazingly written representation of characters struggling with mental illness and addiction, as well as a canon transgender character and a canon bisexual character who has been shown in romantic relationships with both men and women with no nasty side comments. They also have a female character who at her introduction presented as more masculine and wore a binder regularly, and was not mocked for it. Later she stopped wearing the binder and, again, it wasn't made into a huge deal. Man, this web comic is so fucking great. The art style changes a LOT over time, it gets better and better, and all of the characters are so three-dimensional and complex, and it has fantastic representation and handles so many things so so well. This web comic makes me really happy and I highly recommend you read it (whoever you are, reading his post right now).

TV Shows
I have been doing a lot of TV watching! You all know about Steven Universe already, glorious gem that it is. I've also been watching the ever-popular Orange is the New Black, which I'm going to rewatch very soon because my dad set up Netflix yesterday! We recently upgraded our internet to unlimited so now I can do all of the streaming I want and not get in trouble for it (muahahahaha). Now that we have Netlix I'm also going to watch The 100 and sense8 because Rose loves those shows and has been wanting me to watch them for ages. I also want to watch Gravity Falls, which is unfortunately not on Netlix. Oh, and I own the first four seasons of Adventure Time and the first season of Teen Titans a.k.a. my childhood. I've got a lot of watching to do!

Social Media
This is the place where I plug all of my social media.

Personal Tumblr: Where I spend about half of my time on the internet.

Aesthetic Tumblr: For lack of a better term. Lots of pretty things and cute shit.

LiveJournal: I set this up so I could join a couple of lolita communities. I haven't posted in a bit but I'll do another post very soon.

Twitter: I never use this, but here it is.

Facebook: I am not giving you the link to my Facebook but ye, it's a thing that I have and spend time on.

That's it, pretty much! I have been spending most of my spare time doing any combination of these things over the summer. I'll do lil' hobby updates every once in a while for fun, I guess!

Forgotten Details

I forgot two important things from my last post!

1. I made my first machinima! One of the assignments for my film studies class was a two minute film, and I made mine in Sims. It's a music video for Green Day's See You Tonight.

2. I forgot a very important detail of Rainbow Week regarding the whiteboard and the terms workshop. Y'know how I mentioned that the board was left up for the rest of the week for anyone walking by to see? Little did we know, there was a meeting on Wednesday night in our cafeteria for residents of a nearby neighbourhood to discuss a new land development project planned in their area. This meant that those residents came in and saw our whiteboard. My art teacher said he walked by it on his way out of the school and there were a lot of confused 40-somethings squinting at the terminology.

One such parents who saw the whiteboard was so enraged by it that she wrote an angry letter to our town newspaper.

She fumed on about the gender identity side, claiming it was "scary that [she couldn't] just be a girl!" (News Flash: You can, and there is nothing wrong with that. We had listed some examples of non-binary genders across the bottom of the white board. It was a list of non-binary identities, which is why 'girl' wasn't on it.) She then made an astoundingly athletic logical leap to say that suddenly our whiteboard presentation (or "lies," as she called it) were going to be taught to eight-year-olds in elementary school.

She was even angrier about the sexual and romantic orientation board, where we briefly touched on the importance of consent in relationships. She proceeded to get angry that eight-year-olds were now going to learn about consent, because we put it on our high school white board. Yep. (Aside from that stupid leap, why the fuck shouldn't we teach consent to eight-year-olds? We should be teaching consent in kindergarten! It's not just a sexual thing. Wanna give someone a hug? Ask first. Consent. Bam.)

In the end, her letter came from misplaced anger at Ontario;s new sex education curriculum, which is most likely where the whole "eight-year-olds" logic leap came from (she probably has an eight-year-old child, that poor child). She whined about how the new curriculum 'devalues family' and how we need to "throw out this gender identity nonsense and teach our next generation about procreation, family of a mother and father, the value of children" (end quote, she literally didn't even put 'and' in there). She complained of the new curriculum's rule to use partner instead of mother and father and concluded her letter with a haughty, pretentious, "Get upset about this, everyone!"

This actually triggered a series of letters to the editor, most of which were in support of our school and what we were doing as a council. One such letter's headline was, "Make gender board even larger next year."

I saved every letter from the newspaper. I'm tickled pink that our board generated this kind of conversation on a local forum.

April-May-June-July

Okay so this post becomes a more daunting task with each day that passes.

I am now on four months without a post. That is four months of life updates, and let me tell you, a lot of shit had gone down.

Update: I am alive.

Holy cow, I haven't posted here in a while. It's been too long.

I've been meaning to do an April-May-June post for a while now, but I haven't sat down to write it yet because oh my god, there is SO much to write about. That is three whole months jam packed with loads of life shit.

Since it's late and I have to get to sleep 'cause I have work tomorrow (gotta be in for 8:00 in the morning, doing summer camp at the same place I was teaching art classes), I will just tell you this: I am alive. I am some sort of healthy (I mean, how healthy can I ever really be with a chronic illness). I am happy. I am getting by pretty well. And I will give you a more in-depth update some time this week.

Another Simself a.k.a. A Well-Wasted Evening

I took an hour out of my evening to make this: my first ever young adult simself.

Every outfit except swimwear is loosely based off of my own clothes.

Everyday

Formal

Sleepwear

(the actual pajamas have penguins, not dogs, but it's fuckin' close enough)

Athletic

Swimwear

Outerwear

And yeah, that's about it! I figured it was about time for a new simself, and I don't quite fit the teen bracket any more? I'm too young for YA but too old for teen so I went with YA because that's when you can go to university in Sims and that's where I'm headed come September.

Fun Fact: I made this while listening to Froot.

18

Today I am officially a legal adult.

I had my family party on Saturday. It was really nice, although it was missing a few people, but that seems to be becoming the norm. My cousins and I played video games the whole time; Smash Bros WiiU and Mario Kart 8. The party itself was relatively uneventful, but it was nice to see so much family all together. There's been some shit going down recently that I shouldn't go into detail about, but it's been a little rough on my dad's side. It was swell to see people together and happy.

In terms of presents, I got money from most of my relatives, and a $20 Michael's gift card from one of my uncles. My brother got me five CDs: Black Veil Brides' first and latest (a.k.a. the two CDs by them I was missing) We Stitch These Wounds and their self-titled album, Marina and the Diamonds' Froot, Icon for Hire's self-titled, and Panic! At The Disco Live from Chicago CD and DVD. My parents took the cake on this one, though. For years, I've wanted an industrial piercing, and they're finally letting me get one. They're going to pay for the piercing, the starter barbell, and a gold barbell to use once I can switch it out, to keep it from getting infected.

For those who don't know, this is an industrial piercing. The jewellery used in it is called a barbell.

Today was my actual birthday. My first period English teacher got me a little card and a small bag of cookies, which I shared with my friends at lunch. During my spare, a friend of mine insisted on buying me food for my birthday, so we walked down the street and he bought me a whole medium gluten-free pizza from a local pizza place. We went back to the school and I ate three slices of my birthday pizza in the cafeteria while he had to go back to class because he skipped to buy me the pizza. I walked home from school with Rose and I've spent my evening watching some TV with my family and watching YouTube videos.

Well, I'm a legal adult now, though I don't feel like much of one. My birthday didn't even feel special, to be honest. With all the shit happening in my life, it kinda snuck up on me. The break up with Rose, school work, Rainbow Week planning, all the shit happening with my family... My birthday was the last thing on my mind. I don't feel any different. I still feel like a little kid and all that noise. Today felt like just another day. Maybe birthdays are finally losing their touch for me.

I might as well post this before the clock changes over. I really can't think of much else to say. I don't want to reflect on the past year or anything. Today I am 18 years old. I kinda felt like ass today, physically and emotionally speaking. I skipped breakfast to get to school on time so I missed my pills, and I'm so fucking drained from all the life shit.

Happy birthday to me.

~BookyGirl18~

Four Months, One Post

Hi there! Holy fuck it's been a while. We last left off on the twentieth of November. It is now the third of April. As you can imagine, a lot of shit's gone down since then. Let's go month-by-month.

December was a whirlwind of school projects, what with the end of the first semester quickly approaching. The biggest school project has to be the installation I did for my art class. My installation was a performance piece titled Split Self. Long story short, I taped myself to a wall in the name of non-binary awareness.