Hope everyone's September is going swell so far. I'm really keeping my head down and working a lot, and it's paying off. Customers dropping $2200 my store in one go tonight. My manager was impressed, and after I learned he's just hard to read and doesn't actually hate me, I've been a ton more comfortable in my job—and I mean, that's what you need in retail, to feel good and be able to chirp at customers. It helps that I'm a lot more excited about what I'm selling now than I was about beer—though I do miss beer. Haven't had a Yuengling in months now.

I've dragged myself back over to using MacOS! I'm not proud of it either. I've been wanting to toy with music again lately, since my last couple of music projects all ended in tragedy and I just plain want to put something better than my high school noise escapades out there. I had the most trouble getting my tablet to work; since it's so old, the drivers really aren't meant to work on Mojave, so I have no ExpressKeys! I've had to resort to remapping the shortcut keys in FireAlpaca to the numpad to get the buttons I rely on in a configuration sorta like what's already on the tablet. Guh. But the rest of the setup is comfy. I've been really in the mood to draw my girl lately, so have a guinea pig herder Caby and a Bunny looking all soft and sheepish.

And more typically from me, a Setter I'm gonna finish up for the photo gallery headers on this here site (so I can actually post some goddamn photos I've taken?):

Speaking of high school, tonight especially has been a Quake and Failure sorta night. I've been really into J.F. Gustafsson's custom levels—he's the guy who made the semi-official (and I guess official, as of KexQuake) Dimension of the Past 20th anniversary Quake episode, semi-official because he works for MachineGames, the company working on the new Wolfenstein games. Honestly, I'm a bit jealous. He's everything I really wanted to be in a mapper, perfectly replicating that imagination and magic that id had in their original levels, but just polishing the shit out of it. Revisiting my old levels for the rewritten postmortems on mari@macintosh.garden has been a humbling experience. Even in the 90s, when J.F. was still a hobbyist, they would've been a bit crap, or I guess nothing special most charitably. I'm taking it on the chin; they're old, everyone's long forgotten about them, and I know I've got a lot better in me. Eventually. When I get back to Quake. He's definitely gonna be a major inspiration, though, I love his work.

Guh, speaking of Failure, I meant to have a First Draft on Magnified on the blog last month, but I just never got around to finishing the mostly done draft I had for it. I can't post it this month, because the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot First Draft is supposed to come out on the 18th in celebration of the album's 22th anniversary, so the end of the Black Album First Draft makes no sense now. That's alright, it'll be for October. I've had a lot going on and I'm still only a month and change into this job, so I'm allowed to not be hyperfixated on website stuff for an indeterminate amount of readers. (Speaking of, I got a nice email from someone lurking the site network since 2020 asking to join! We don't really accept random people like that, but it is nice to hear from you if you're out there. You'll shoot us an email sometime, maybe?)