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Once again, asuraid's gone and accidentally reminded me of something lol

Here are two sketches I made of my Warrior of Light that I made last October! Grrr she's so cuteeee

( Images under cut )

It's not particularly related, but this post by asuraid reminded me of something.

For the last... 3 years, maybe? I've been documenting my dreams. Unfortunately, almost all of them are exclusively on Discord (I really need to move them). That's not the point though. I can only remember one or a few real lucid dreams — all from long ago — but I think I've been getting closer to having more since I've started writing them down.

In these past couple of years, I've been having quite a lot of dreams where I either explicitly acknowledge a past dream (usually knowing it's a dream), or have a very strong déjà vu feeling about the location/events while I'm asleep. Funnily enough, sometimes those acknowledgements end up being of a dream I'm pretty sure never happened, like my brain is trying really hard to give me a cool experience but panicked and made shit up, or it very subconsciously held memories of a dream that I thought I'd forgotten.

This time it's a Mediterranean restaurant called Oasis Fresh, where I got a vegetarian platter. Basmati rice with dolmas on top, side salad, hummus, and pita. Simple and very good. The rice was much better than that place I got the boiled unflavored rice from (Assyrian...something) with no hummus. I added it to the "good" restaurant list and I'll remember it for the future, though I'm just bringing my lunch tomorrow.

Visited Laila in the hospital yesterday. sashagee told me before I got there that Laila was energetic and chatty earlier in the day, but by the time I got there she was listless and half-asleep. I waited around for an hour but she never got any more energy, but this morning right when I was finishing my breakfast, I got a FaceTime and Laila excitedly showed me Ariel and told me about the wires coming out of her head, so she had more energy at least earlier today. We'll see if she has more energy when I go see her after work today--I saw some pictures that Poppa and Nana took when they visited and she was more subdued then. We'll see.

I've been slowly reading a book that's much more interesting than my slow pace would indicate, called The Son and Heir. The book starts with the author finding an SS uniform hat in their attic and then expands to the story of his family--Dutch in Latvia and owners of a business empire, the clashes between his father and his grandfather over heritage (his grandfather was very proud of being Dutch and his father wanted nothing to do with the Netherlands), the way his father ran away to enlist in the German army to fight the Russians... I'm halfway through the book and the author is three years old, but his father has already divorced his mother, been put on trial for being an SS members and gotten off after only ten months in jail, avoided being sent to South America, and married another (already-married) woman. The book is only half-over. Now that the setup is all over I wonder when we're going to get the author's reaction to all of this?

Computer is still working. It's been over a month now without a single crash and the only thing I changed is plugging some things into the USB ports. Maybe it really was a faulty USB connector. Well, it saved me $2000, so I won't complain. Of course, now sashagee is asking for a gaming laptop so she can play Stardew Valley with mods, and Clair Obscur with the "disgustingly easy" parry mod. I've been looking around but I have no idea what a "mid-range" gaming laptop should look like so it's slow going. I'll gladly take any suggestions if anyone has any.

I uh. know that this might be a weird colour scheme (if you have it enabled), but it's actually a lot better for my eyes! Any tweaks will probably be minor/just switching things around, because it's designed after my Warrior of Light (specifically my icon of them in a lavender field, also purple's my fav colour anyway). The base style and theme are actually the same as before — the theme is has a couple of layout changes over the base that I wanted.

My (very very unfinished) Neocities is also based on her, but I was TOO insane with the saturation and stuff in my coding fever state, and the secondary colour palette (blue and yellow) is cute but does NOT match her colours. If it get around to it, the secondary palette will be changed to purple like my current journal colours, and I might make a pastel blue+yellow+pink alt CSS for certain pages or something. I was actually considering using a pink+yellow DW theme since I loved the Cookie Dough Color Palette from A Hat In Time.

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Help me pick my next* build! (*Well, I have the Destiny Astray to finish, whatever I'm making for 30ML Day, the other contest, and possibly some other small decompression builds. Which is fine, it means I can leave this poll open for a bit.)

These kits are all not Gundams, nor are they made by Bandai. There's a frustrating habit in the hobby, both by the folks who build the kits and the folks selling them, to lump all these kits under "Third Party", "Indie Plamo", or just "ChinaPla" even though not all of the makers are Chinese. I haven't decided on a preferred term, but I'm leaning towards just listing the maker or if I need to refer to a larger whole, "Other Kits" or "Non-Bandai".



( More info on each kit + links to listings/pictures )

Anyway, there's lots more conversation about non-Bandai and non-Gundam kits to be had, but here's a start. ^_^

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Sidestepping the whole debate about what to call it[1], we went to the Lunar New Year parade and celebration on Argyle Street yesterday:


We left later than I wanted to--we didn't get out of the house until 11:45 a.m. and didn't get down to Argyle until 12:15 p.m. We put in our name at Immm Rice, but when it was only twenty-five minutes or so to the parade we decided that even if we did get in we wouldn't be able to eat in time, so we tried stopping in at a bakery for some buns. The first one we went to had a cash-only sign that had been hidden by the long line, so we had to duck our and search the rest of the street. sashagee spotted one on the way back run by an old Vietnamese man and got a couple buns for Laila and herself, and they ate them while we settled onto the side of the street to wait.

I wasn't expecting too many people to show up since it was -5°C with a biting wind, but the streets were still lined when the parade stepped off at 1:05 p.m. Laila had been complaining and wanting to go home for quite a while, but once the parade started all that fell away. She watched the lion dancers and the dragon puppets, watched the floats going on, and was very excited when one of the parade-walkers gave her a lollipop! She didn't complain once as we stood out in the cold, but we left a couple floats early so we could get into a restaurant. And a good thing too--we walked in, were immediately seated, and within ten minutes or so there was a giant line waiting for a seat. We ate--with a brief detour while Laila and I walked around outside because she was getting rowdy--and by the time we were done basically all the festivities had ended, so we just went home.

Next weekend is the parade in Chinatown, but we won't be able to go.

[1]: A few years ago there was a push to call it Lunar New Year instead of Chinese New Year, since more cultures than just China celebrate it. Of course now the problem is that e.g. the Islamic and Jewish calendars also have lunar new years since both calendars begin months on the new moon, so "Lunar New Year" is ambiguous.

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