Ah man, the days get away from me... I never like it when I look up and three or four days have passed. We've been in a time loop recently! A very nice one, granted, but with the family still in France (they're coming back tomorrow, all good), and us having to stick fairly close to the house for piggo breakfast and dinner and also because they get lonely, it's been hard to get out of the house and do stuff. We've been night owls, really! Been meaning to update the journal with stuff I've been drawing and also call my mom and all that, but I keep putting it off. Such is life with no schedule and no employment.

Thankfully, still got the better part of a month left on the trip, so nothing feels wasted, we have been very creative, and it's been nice doing more domesticore things with Caby, chores and chatting and going out for ice cream. We fixed the dryer the other day! Their dryer doesn't drain to the outside world like mine at home does, so we were experiencing weird pauses in the drying routine (and they normally air dry their clothes, so she wasn't sure what the issue was). Pulled up an owner's manual, found it was a full water tank, emptied it, and all was well. We're so smart and handy. (Then we burned some burger buns in the convection oven really badly, so. Well.)

We also baked! It's really funny. Caby sent me a compilation of Dylan Hollis historical baking shorts and prefaced it that she didn't expect me to watch the whole thing. I'm pretty sure I've seen more of them than she has now. This guy is great. He's the wittiest fruit in the bag, he makes weird and sometimes delicious-looking cakes and breads from the last century, and he's the only guy I've seen who can do an energetic, zingy personality in his shorts, and then pull off a calmer, more informative, but still highly entertaining personality in his longer videos.

I was looking through his shorts to find one Caby and I might wanna do, and the one for strawberry fluffies always intrigued me. It's an oddly really simple recipe. They're effectively cake cookies. Empty a box of strawberry cake mix and Cool Whip into a bowl, mix, form balls, roll in powdered sugar, bake. Little did I know that cake mix is as rare a beast as an unfinished bottle of rum in Trys' room in the UK, and Cool Whip doesn't exist here. Sainsbury's does sell the Betty Crocker stuff, thankfully, and we were able to thicken up some British cream as a substitute. (As for why I picked this instead of, like, a real cake or loaf, it was easy, and we've very rarely baked before. Start small.)

They were really good though! Like I said, they're effectively cake cookies, so you're getting the fluffiness of a cake from a pan or a loaf in cookie form. The color differences come from us experimenting with the baking time. The 13 minutes from the Dylan Hollis video gets you that ideal pinkness, but Caby thought they were still not done at first, so we did some for a few minutes longer and they got crunchier and slightly caramelized as a result. Still very good though. Highly worth the confusion I gave everyone in the group showing them the unbaked "batter" early on.

Since these went so well, Caby and I have been looking at other recipes we might be able to pull off from his repertoire. The peanut butter bread is apparently really good, and we both like peanut butter. Anything more in bread form is easier for us, since her family doesn't have a full-sized oven, only an air fryer and then a convection oven. (Both of these gave very similar results with the fluffies, so if you're wondering, yes, you can indeed air fry bake things. I'm sure I'm the last person on Earth to know though.) Also, her mom loved the idea of these, because the whole family likes simple and easy, and you get a lot of fluffies out of one box of cake mix. I wouldn't be surprised if there's more batches to be made.

Anywho, I will be posting more art on the journal, I promise. I also have an exciting announcement for a new place to see art from me soon, so stay tuned. Back to cleaning up the house before the folks get home!

Listen, when you visit a girl with a really nice screen tablet, you use that screen tablet. I have been stuck on art all month, but shortly after she went to bed one night (we're talking 5 in the morning), I doodled two Setters, and here they are finished!

I've been stuck exactly how I like to draw him—too big a snoot and hair more on the wavy side than the curly side, and he's basically just Cammy. I think they're pretty distinct now, still the same genre of guy, but again, distinct enough in flavor and design that I think both could be on Art Fight and no one would be confused.

Speaking of Art Fight! I do intend on participating next year, and I'd like to expand out my list of characters for that. Each ref I do very nicely pulls double duty: means I can get another toyhou.se bio up, and it means the character can go up on AF should I want that. Really, my true love for art hosting sites is still toyhou.se. It's not just a gallery, it's a big browseable directory of OCs that I can write bios for, and that means a lot more to me than just an art gallery.

Been also thinking of making an art Tumblr. Think folks there would appreciate Setter muchly, and maybe other things I draw...

Hello chat! I have arrived in the UK. Or, more accurately, I arrived a week ago and have been too busy doing that thing called "living life" and "having fun" to update the journal. I'm sure you'll forgive me. That said! With there being so much having happened since I last updated, there will be a couple posts on the journal, some trip-related, some not, for you to enjoy.

If you're wondering, it's been lovely so far. It's incredible going from all the awkwardness of a text chat to stepping out of arrivals in Heathrow and suddenly there being zero inhibitions from me or Caby. Seriously, living online sucks, but it's nice to get that reminder that it is entirely the medium that tends to put me at odds with people (maturing also helps). I think you'd all like me more if you found me playing Point Blank in an NQ64 in Soho. (That post is for the group blog though!)

Let's start with something simple and timely. Caby and I went into Kellys yesterday! Kellys is a record store I have written about with adoration before, effectively blending the quality assurance and stock of a really good record store with the ragtag prices and organization of a flea market. Quite literally, it's one guy who owns the entire balcony in Cardiff Market and uses it for vintage records and clothing, and it is well worth the pilgrimage to grab some CDs and watch him just decide on a price on the spot.

The picture shows what Caby and I got in all. From top left:

• Warpaint's self-titled (which we were listening to earlier, absolutely gorgeous slow burner 2010s dream pop that gets better as the album goes on)
• Ben Folds Five's self-titled (which if I don't like, I can just pass onto dcb, though "Underground" is already a killer tune)
• Wilco's Being There (need to expand my Wilco knowledge—dcb, they also had Wilco (The Album) if you're curious)
• Counting Crows' Across a Wire (gotta dip back into my old-time love of the Crows, and this one came right after Recovering the Satellites came out)
• Cracker's Kerosene Hat (get off this! Get on with it!)
• My Vitriol's Finelines (which I picked up because I'm pretty sure it's the original UK mix of the album and not the US reissue mix with Between the Lines, though we don't have a working CD drive to check)
• Moby's 18 (or as Caby calls it, Happy Moby/Sad Moby)
• Feeder's The Singles (don't normally go for comps, but I love "High" and they didn't have any Feeder albums there and Feeder is Welsh and I always wanna pick up Welsh music while I'm here)

Caby also got a Specials best-of, because UK ska is very very different to American ska, an Elvis Costello best-of, which we were enjoying while I was writing this post, plus her own copy of OK Go's debut! It's so cool to see her expanding her music collection and getting braver about it. She has a really fun taste in music. What other girl will give you Flipnote music and Elton John's "I've Seen the Saucers" next to each other?

F's in chat for the eMachines Box's hard drive once again.

This was a sudden failure. The machine was really slow all of a sudden, which I thought might've been an errant background process, only for XP to tell me that the C: drive was not formatted! That's an error you don't want to see. I quickly booted into my Ubuntu (10.04 LTS, Lucid Lynx if you prefer :lince:) rescue drive and thankfully was able to copy off basically everything I wanted to that I hadn't had backed up, which included my Bryce projects, game screenshots and some saves, and some other scattered files here and there. When I checked the SMART status of the drive, I got what you see up there.

This is now the second hard drive in the eMachines Box that's gone bad. Thankfully, I'm a lot more prepared for it this time. What I plan to do when I get back from Wales is to get an IDE-to-SATA adapter in there and just use a modern SSD. I'm going through drives at a rate of one every two years, which isn't great, and IDE drives are only getting harder and harder to find. I don't need a ton of space, I just want something reliable, and hey, speed increases aren't bad either. (Fun fact, I have never owned a computer with an SSD in it. That's right, I am Stone Age in 2025, but to be honest, I've yet to really notice or care. I probably will when I upgrade though. Let me have my naivete until then.)

Time to obsessively back up all my shards and vaults in case my daily driver is getting ready to go as well. I love computers.

We're into the final two weeks before this year's trip to Wales! We've already bought most everything I'm bringing, including the vintage digicam for good measure. (I drunk bought another AOL PhotoCam a couple days ago for cheap, though fully working with pictures showing it powered on and in-box, so that'll be arriving tomorrow as well. What can I say? Fourth time's the charm.) Now all that's left to do is wait.

If you're not following the RSS feeds for my album reviews and game reviews, go do that! I implemented a really simple tweak in PHP that will let me schedule stuff to go up, and I'm being very smart lately and writing a ton to go live automatically each week while I'm abroad. I suspect I'll write some more stuff while I'm on coaches and things, so ideally, this will be the start to a backlog I can feed very healthily while I'm in the mood and then not worry about when I'm not feeling it as much. I'm also revising how I do the "catalog reviews", where I cover an entire bunch of albums from a single artist. Since I feel having a bunch go up at once makes it more likely that people miss stuff, I'll probably evenly spread them out throughout the month alongside the normal reviews, on the same day or maybe something twice a week.

As a final point of housekeeping, scores with game reviews are no longer displayed or even fetched from the database. I never found a way I like to score games, and I'd rather just talk about what I find interesting about them rather than try to rate it, easier as that is for folks to glance over (and I really don't yearn for glanceover traffic anyway). I've got summaries and some cutesy extra text instead, which I'm much happier with.

Anyway, back to score hunting on Rock Band I go! I've got 55/58 gold stars for the first game's setlist and 11/18 for the AC/DC Live Track Pack. I doubt I'll be able to full game gold star RB1 and I'm not even trying with the AC/DC pack, but the fact that I've gotten so close makes me damn proud.