all made up with nowhere to go

Not to complain about the weather again, but the top temp we hit last week was 31°C in town. That was around a week ago, and was the peak of it, but ughhhhhhh. I think prolonged heat is worse than a few days of abnormal heat. It's cooler now, and it did actually rain overnight last night (after two days of being promised rain and it not happening), so everything feels 900% better now.

~

In other news:

# I wrote and posted the first art supply review for my ko-fi!

I'm planning on putting two of these up a month, since they're not very long*, and there's plenty of things (for now) that I can talk about.

I'm also going to put together some posts that anyone can access without having to pay for, because I thought the topic of at least one might be interesting, and also I know how irritating it is to click a link you want to read, only to discover it is paywalled.

And I did some more print tests yesterday, so a shop update will be coming soon! I am also going to update my redbubble store with some stuff as well, but I'll link to that when I've done it.

# I tried my Redbush tea and...I did not like it. It was certainly nicer than the Tetley one, but it tasted, looked, and smelt too much like black tea for my liking.

I also had some Blackcurrant and Blueberry tea, which was okay (miles better than the Redbush), but tasted too much of blackcurrant. Like, if I wanted hot blackcurrant, I'd drink Ribena. I am now onto Cherry and Cinnamon, which I've had before, and is lovely.

# Got a spoilery theory for Ni no Kuni, which I'm going to post now before it gets disproven!

( spoilers! )

Like I say, I don't know if any of this is right or not or if, as I often do, I am putting the clues together wrongly. Oh well, we'll see once I finish the game (if I do). Also if you have played it, or know the plot at all, DO NOT tell me if I'm right or not. I want to see this play out for myself, thank you very much.

~

*They were originally intended to be audio posts, but I kept putting it off because I feel self-conscious about recording myself. So now they're just short text posts.

Bullet points because I have not a lot of nothing to say:

# I finally ordered The Matrix: Resurrections, so I can get to watching that, and also picked up Bill & Ted Face The Music while I was at it.

Neither of these are sequels I wanted, but I will watch them all the same. I did laugh at the one B&T trailer I watched back when it came out, so that bodes well? And I think we all know how hype I was after seeing the Matrix trailers, so fingers crossed it turns out to be at least okay?

# The last six weeks or so have been this weird, horrible fug of me feeling really tired thanks to work (and some other stuff), and I thought I was feeling a bit better, but then I had a combo of a super horrible migraine and the clocks changing! So I'm still feeling gross, yay!

# In P5S, ~weird~ things are happening! (It's an SMT game, when are weird things NOT happening, let's be honest).

I'm around 30 hours in still (I haven't played a lot because of aforementioned migraine and clocks), and I'm still enjoying it. Fusion seems to be this weird mystery I can never get the hang of (I swear it changes from game to game what fusion produces which demon! Perhaps I should start writing it down in a notebook so I can compare next time).

# I'm finally nearly at the end of the offline diary I've been using for almost exactly a year. It has 200+ pages, and I didn't think it would take this long to fill it, but it has!

I know I said this a month ago, but this time I mean it! There's literally four pages left, all I have to do is write some nonsense on them! And then I will swap to the stripy notebook I bought in Tesco a while ago. I originally planned to put French revision in it, but never got around to it, so it can be a diary instead. Maybe I will use an exercise book for French revision (assuming I ever get to it, lol).

# Drive by tea review:

Tetley Lemon and Ginger: I'm not very keen on it. It doesn't taste of lemon AT ALL. It tastes of a fruit, but it isn't lemon. The ginger is apparent, and not unpleasant. Even leaving it to stew for ten minutes doesn't really improve it. Will not be buying this again! Also I should probably stop buying Tetley teas altogether, as I haven't had great experiences with most of the ones I've tried!

After having migraines/bad headaches all week, it occurred to me that I might have been sleeping funky, so I attempted to change that last night. So far, so good. Although I've had week long migraines before, so it could be they've just naturally passed. WHO KNOWS.

I will keep sleeping in the non-funky way, and see how things go.

So because I've had headaches all week, I haven't been doing very much, I say, having collated my mum's diaries, and rearranged mine so they can all go in the same box, among other things.

There is, in total, 116 of her diaries and commonplace books (mostly diaries, though). I do not know if this is all of them because she was a prolific diary writer, and she also wrote diary entries in notepads (presumably because that was what she had to hand at the time). I also don't know at what age she started keeping a diary - the earliest I've found so far is 1974, although I think there's earlier than that, because I'm p sure she wrote about the boyfriend she had before she met my dad.

I, compared, to my mother, am very much not prolific, unless you count this last year, in which I filled five diaries, and wrote almost every day. (I managed from February to August without a break, but then I was ill for a few days, which meant I didn't want to write. Since then, I've taken breaks and not chastised myself for it, as this is the most I've ever written in any diary format, ever).

I have also reclaimed some older notebooks that I haven't used in ages, like ones I was writing stories in that I haven't touched in over three years.

I think if I do start writing again, I'm going to go back to file paper. I only started using a notebook because published authors were like, "this is how I do it!" and I was all, "I have all these notebooks lying around that I'm not using!" and so...except it turned out more inconvenient than anything for me. This was partly down to having specific notebooks for specific stories except that, if my story went nowhere, then that was an entire notebook claimed. Whereas if I'm using file paper and it goes nowhere, no biggie. Not that I've been writing any fiction recently, but there we are.

(Shoutout to that person on the notebook subreddit years ago who said you should cut pages out of used notebooks rather than tearing them so it doesn't destroy the binding).

~

In other news, a small handful of small tea reviews!

Lidl Sleepwell: this is nice, but it makes me feel extremely groggy the next day after drinking it in the evening. I think it's the chamomile. Also it has lavender in it, which is a bit of an acquired taste (and I know some people don't like it - a friend of my mum's used to say she thought it smelt medicinal and thus was put off).

Lidl Mixed Berry: this is also nice, but it has chicory root in it, which I don't like (one of the reasons I can't drink coffee substitutes). I also think it may have contributed to some headaches, so am avoiding it for the time being.

Lidl Deluxe Superfruits: this is a mixed berry which doesn't have chicory in! And while it's more expensive (15 bags per box versus 40), I think it's nicer? It tastes really fruity when it brews for a long time (5 min+) and I really like it.

I also got some more of the green Rooibos and peach, which I haven't seen for ages for some reason*. The last box I had didn't seem as nice as the first box, so I'm going to see how I feel about it again. I also have a box of just Rooibos on its own, but I'm scared to open it in case I don't like it (which is daft, because I know I will?? I can't imagine green Rooibos tastes that different from normal Rooibos, right?)

~

*I mean, the current circumstances means not going out much, and working in an entirely different town that doesn't have a Lidl in the centre of town is probably the reason.

Stream:

Luke plays AC:NH - Nature day updates - again, I didn't see the first hour of this, because I was watching a Dicebreaker stream, but the rest of it was chill as usual. (And he read one of my comments from the chat stream!!! *spins happily*)

~

So thanks to my friend Jean on twitter, I have ended up listening to the FFVII Remake soundtrack. Turns out I have Opinions, who knew! (He also has Opinions, which is what started this off in the first place).

I'm not going to say anything about it right now, because I'm halfway through a hecking playlist on youtube, and I'm making notes as I go. I've got like, ten sides of notes on A4 paper already. (I'm going to condense it, though, because a lot of it is essentially different ways of saying the same thing). I was originally going to make a HUEG twitter thread, but I think it might work better as a post on here.

Oh yeah, and on a related note: I watched Advent Children for the first time in years. It's okay, I guess? I suppose if I were still into FFVII as much as I was when it was first released, I'd enjoy it more. I didn't dislike it, but I dunno. It just wasn't doing it for me this time. I cried every time Aeris' theme played, though, because apparently I am an emotional wreck at the moment!

(I feel I should say here that, while VII isn't my favourite Final Fantasy any more (though it was for a good long time though), it's special to me as a) it's the first one I ever played, and b) it got me through a horrible depressive phase when I was 23, and I'll always be grateful for that. And the soundtrack is one of my comfort blankets. So I still feel extremely strongly about it, even if I'm not all !!! about it all the time).

~

Tea reviews, I has them behind this cut!

( Read more... )

So one thing I have been doing for the past week and a half is writing an offline diary. I'm just putting what happened in my day in it, and how I feel, and leaving it at that. I actually like writing a diary (which is why I liked LJ and like DW), but I've fallen off the wagon, so to speak, with regard to writing an offline one. I used to only write in them when I was angry or upset or crushing on someone or likewise, so it's kind of refreshing to be like, "well, nowt major happened, but that's okay!"

I'm actually surprised with myself that I've managed to keep it going, but I have! I've almost used up the notebook I was using (A5, 100 sheets), and most of that's just been from recent use.

This is part of the reason I have so many notebooks. Because I've written diaries since I was...approximately 11? and I assumed I would be prolific at it my entire life (because my mum was - I have Quite The Stack of her past diaries) Except that when I was younger, I didn't expect crippling depression or the internet to take these things away from me.

But if I keep writing at this pace, maybe I'll use up some of those older notebooks and so on (of which there is also Quite The Stack, especially if you include the ones that were mum's that are still unused). My next one at the moment is similar size to the one I'm using, so I don't overwhelm myself. (I rarely use A4 size books, and the one thick book I used lasted me five years and I was sick of it by the time I got to nearly the end).

I am actually kind of excited about this, as weird as that sounds.

~

I looked up herbal teas online, and now I have fallen down a rabbit hole, and am considering buying a tea strainer for if I ever get any loose leaf tea. I do drink them occasionally, but want a different variety than what the local supermarkets can provide for me (which, if you're mostly shopping in Lidl, as I am, isn't a whole lot).

I also learnt Rooibos isn't a type of tea like black or green tea, which is good news, as I wanted to try it. (My sister in law occasionally drinks it, and she likes black tea, so I assumed it was similar). I don't like black tea in the slightest, and wasn't taken with green tea when I tried it, and I have no idea how I feel about Rooibos, but it's worth a try!

Maybe I should do what my friend Liam does, and make a tea review when I try a new one? He has an entire twitter (and it's only for black tea), but I'd probably put them here because I know what I'm like. And I don't need another twitter account.