Tea Party at Hinamizawa

I've painted with acrylics before, and am familiar with liquitex and dahler-rawley student-grade paints.

But I knew that for this class I'd go through a lot of paint, so I bought a bunch of paint at walmart that i used alongside a tube of burnt umber from Michael's, a tube of cyan from a pop shop in texas, and like three partial tubes of titanium white liquitex from a local art store that closed about fifteen years ago and that I miss terribly.

This was a beginning painting class, and like a lot of beginner classes it had a bunch of basic exercises. One of the assignments was to translate an image to a grid and transfer it to a small canvas as a color study. Here's what I did:

It was a fun assignment and I liked how it looked so I pinned it to a cork board.

A couple months ago I glanced at it and noticed that maybe the cheap paints I'd gotten were somewhat less lightfast than I'd expected:

I put notes about the paints inside the canvas, only the cyan and burnt sienna (which were not the Walmart paints) had pigment, opacity, and lightfast info. Didn't bother testing the liquitex white because I know it's solid.

This means:

If you draw a hard line between "drug" and "medicine" based on current legality where you live (or any other criteria) you've gone wrong somewhere,

If you think legality and/or prescription status tells you all you need about a substance's capacity to do massive harm to someone's body, mind or well-being you've gone wrong somewhere,

If you think legality and/or prescription status tells you all you need about a substance's capacity to contribute meaningfully to someone's healing, function or happiness you've gone wrong somewhere,

anyways one of terminology we have coined to talk about music is "Knee Music" which is derived from the fact that album covers that show a person's knees tend to sound the same as each other. It's kind of a sleepy, grungy indie folk pop sound with youthful-sounding, vocals that affect a candid and vulnerable feeling.

or anyway we found multiple album covers with knees in quick succession, and they all sounded the same, hence "Knee Music"

For a while, his method was slightly different, instead choosing a random genre and listening to it until he found a song from that genre that he liked.

The challenge in this is that even if a song isn't particularly pleasant to listen to, novelty will increase the rating, because it's something interesting we haven't heard before. So, it's incredibly difficult for a song to get the lowest rating, because a song that is outstandingly bad has something different about it to make it bad, which paradoxically makes it good.

We had a very hard time rating this song, Burial Etiquette- Ivy Staircase in Ruin. We both disliked it, but we had never disliked a song in this way. The harsh vocals are so far to the background and relatively quiet that it's like, a kind of generic song but there's a guy screaming incoherently somewhere in the next room

The genre is Funk, so we looked into funk some more, but it turns out that funk is not very popular anymore and it was popular mostly in the 1970s.

Only one other random song we rated with a 7, which is Thrailkill- Cattywampus.

Benny Bleu- Five Miles from Town

I was taking care of the hardware store by myself, in between selling stuff to costumers in a humid cotton mask

I opened Word 2016 in the old checkout computer to write what was supposed to be the background info of my upcoming homebrewd DND character

But instead I ended up writing a 4 chapters long, nearly 10000 words crime novela, pack full with angst, obsession, drama and pain

Soooo much drama and pain

I imagined myself delivering the payoff to all of these set ups, 4, 5 sessions down the road

I could feel the character's pain

Best thing I ever wrote

it installs a user-login-time "startup" executable that ignores any windows directives to disable it on startup. doing so only removes the even-more-malicious taskbar-icon-creating advertisement-notification-creating process. no matter what you do, the sleeper "updater" process starts when you log in, and runs perpetually

it sends & receives encrypted network traffic both periodically and non-periodically. both are bad, both are suspicious, and a program doing both is more suspicious than the sum of their parts. and to boot: acrobat will polymorphically edit its code after such network activity

this isn't new: it has always done this. now, it does not even do the thing it is meant to: provide a way to interact with documents, which is amongst the very first features computers were built to provide. you can merely open PDFs and read some of their content in the narrow space between the requests for adobe to give them your money, and interface for features you cannot use (because you don't) or do not, have not, and will not ever need

adobe and microsoft would very much like the user's cultural norms around computers to allow for advertisement built into the local software and even operating system itself. the web being 100% advertisements was not enough! sure enough, acrobat will hijack the windows notifications system thing to give you the 2026 equivalent of pop-ups

i don't really know enough about windows software equivalents, so i'll paypal $20 to the first person that reblogs this with a list of 3-5 PDF reader/editor/etc acrobat equivalents that meet the following criteria:

open source, locally-built executables must match checksum of prebuilt distributed executable

no paid features/premium version/subscription/whatever

not a toy hobby project thing, must be windows-users-proof

KDE Okular: is a decent viewer and can also do basic annotations, and is so not-a-toy that you can even download it on the Windows app store.