professional bad example

i think this is the best filter they offer. looks like a charcoal drawing to me, but i don't remember what they actually call it.

... man, i don't post many pictures of myself, do i. and it's not as if the cancer has made me look particularly awful. (or as if i wouldn't just touch them up a little if it had done do, i was retouching my photos before selfie filters were even a thing. gotta try out some of them to see what they can do actually, to be honest)

man, it's such a shame i can't figure out how to properly photograph glittery and shimmery nail polishes. born pretty store has such pretty polishes (and affordable too!), i'd love to be able to take my own pictures of my manicures. like say, i got a bottle of the rhine and a few others in that listing yesterday and put two layers of it on top of butter LONDON artful dodger. looks amazing, but on my photos it just becomes sort of... disappointing black and white speckles

(note: born pretty store also has their own site, definitely go look at that too, but some of their polishes aren't available there anymore, so you can only find them on ebay.)

today's alkemia perfume oil rediscovery and recommandation: hexennacht. why bother with actually burning incense (rhough i often do, if it's one of the more convenient forms like sticks or cones) when you can get all the resiny goodness you want in a simple little bottle, and you can wear it on your skin? though i would love to have a way to also use it as a room scent. maybe one of these perfume pendants that are actually meant to make it possible to wear perfume without putting it dirently on your skin, by spraying or dripping it on a piece of cotton wool inside the pendant...

(i also associate this and rites of spring with great customer service. see, when i got the order that contained these two, one of the two free samples you get with every order had leaked and caused the labels on the full sizes to smudge and peel off. i was still able to tell them apart just by smelling them, so i put on temporary labels made of masking take, and then my next order i asked whether they'd be so kind as to send me replacement labels along with that one. got them no problem, i was very happy. i wonder whether they would even just have sent me the labels on their own, as a letter, but i was placing frequent orders with them at the time anyway, so i never bothered to ask...)

new front for choli-slash-regency bodice draft. if it fits well, the next step will be one with my own armscye and sleeves and with a jewel neckline.

yeah, so according to traditional western patternmaking this would never make it to the mockup stage because the pattern would be deemed obviously wrong. good thing that at some point i said "hmm, indian patternmaking looks interesting", huh? or hell, even if you move a little less far away from western europe, places like poland and russia were doing interesting things that still involved way more rectangular cutting when in western europe that only really stuck around in chemises, and even then had largely disappeared by the 1850s. i guess fabrics became cheaper when power looms were developed because less human labour was required, so saving fabric by using the more efficient layouts of rectangular pattern layouts wasn't as important anymore...




shiny!

was inspired to draw this friendly little dragon thing by a map of baden-württemberg, of all things. at this point i don't really see the resemblance anymore, either.

it's still nice to have a laptop with a built-in wacom digitiser.

oh yeah, the foldable bed i ordered finally arrived today and just the fact that it's easier to get on than the loft bed and easier to get up from than the foldable mattress makes it so much better. getting up in the night to use the toilet was such a pain. and it probably won't be as hard on my back, either...

oh wait, that's absolutely perfect. my gender identity is "probably not". are you a man/a woman/other? "probably not". i love it, it makes me so happy

still don't feel strongly enough about the matter to ask for different pronouns though. feminine ones are fine, plus you know, i *am* female in the biological sense and i feel that's a good enough reason to go with grammatically feminine pronouns. though i do like the "ey" set and the way it sounds so natural because it patterns directly on the existing plural set. much easier for brains that are already used to pronouns that contain the syllables "ey", "eir" and "em" to accept that pronouns that consist entirely of said syllable could also be pronounces

(or hey, what if i said that my gender was "gramatically feminine", haha)

i'm trying CBD capsules for anxiety and for the soreness in my legs that doesn't seem to want to go away, now. wish me luck

(i mean, my oncologist would probably totally prescibe me medical marijuana if i said that i wanted to try it, but i just... don't want to. i have nothing against it, it just doesn't sound interesting. feels too much like i'd be asking for it for recreational purposes rather than medical ones. even though... i don't actually see anything wrong with using it for that reason...

no, dad, standing in my doorway and mutely staring at me in an attempt to figure out whether i need or want anything (stuff like a warm cherry pit pillow or something to eat or drink or just for him to turn the lights off - all stuff i could still do myself without much trouble, but it's admittedly convenient if someone else offers to do it for me sometimes) still doesn't work. and it especially doesn't work if i'm not even actually located in the spot you're staring at, but actually on the other side of the room and getting dressed. you've got to fucking talk to me! i promise that if i happen to actually still be asleep a single sentence won't wake me, and that even if it does, i'll be back to sleep soon! you tell me the precise same thing whenever i am concerned about waking you up because of relatively unimportant stuff!

and yet on the other hand, he has a weird talent for trying to talk to me at the precise times when i'm crocheting and trying to mentally count something out. made even more annoying by the fact he practically never says anything important or interesting.

also there's still the part where he pretty consistently shows up in the middle of the night (this is not the problematic part, i naturally have weird sleep patters) and asks whether i need anything, but when i actually wouldn't mind some help, he never does. is this some weird negative telepathic connection?

how is is that free material on the internet is often more useful than books you have to pay for? like, i'm playing around with lenormand cards (a form of cartomancy similar to tarot, except the deck has way fewer cards and its themes focus more on everyday events than on the abstract stuff tarot tends to go for and a total of two free web pages is proving more useful than any of the glimpses of various books that i've seen on google books. to the point where if some of this stuff was available in a nicely formatted book form, i would totally pay for it...

(the pages in question are melissa jozefina's free lenormand cheat sheet - the noun, verb and adjective keywords are pretty useful - and labyrinthos' card meanings and combinations list, with more general keywords and, well, exactly what it's called, slightly more elaborate definitions and ones for combinations of two cards each. i like them so much that i'm now combining them into a printable "book" myself. maybe if i look around a little more, i'll also find a page with similarly useful longer definitions for each card and add those as well...)

(i am this perfect combination of genuinely not believing in anything supernatural, yet just going ahead and using it anyway if it proves to have useful applications, and i love it. the world does't have to be all black and white. factual accuracy is more important than whether the idea of something makes you feel good, but sometimes, the question of whether something works is more important than what's true. it's pointless to question whether something is possible when it's very obviously doing something. rejecting the supernatural explanation doesn't have to mean assuming that there's no explanation at all.)