greetings

happy halloween <3 i hope you’re all hanging in there. i’ve spent the better part of this month in bed. it’s pretty clear the break is taking me right now. i love spooky season, but the seasonal depression and the autumn slide have been conspiring to make it Very Difficult for me to enjoy. i’ve been leaning into being exhausted by doing the bare minimum of work and spending a lot of time in bed watching spooky movies.

in an effort to fill my time with things that are satisfying to me but are ostensibly Not Work, this month i have…

• cropped and hemmed my new favorite flannel (ty masks required mortuary clothing swap/stamp carving event).

• made a mixtape for the second time in my life and did it up real nice (designed packaging and made a booklet) for my sweetie’s bday.

• reorganized my entire digital music library (including mix cds from friends over the years).

• downloaded soulseek and have been filling out my music library- do you use this? what’s yr username?

• switched from itunes to musicbee on my laptop (highly recommend, user friendly and customizable, and has a built-in last.fm scrobbler. ty robin!).

• made a jellyfin account and self hosted a server so i can listen to the mp3s on my laptop from the finamp app on my phone (i wanna eventually set up a dedicated computer for this). jellyfin also has a last.fm plugin :)

• dreamed up and coded a new website, learned some fun new CSS stuff.

upcoming

nov 8th - i’m tabling portland zine symposium! 11-5, free to attend, mask up and come say hi! (and if yr tabling too, wanna sit together? i have a half table).
nov 22nd - covid safer fiber arts meetup at decay, 3-5, free.

i’ve decided i’m prolly not planning any events til the new year, but i’m hoping to organize a cassette tape swap, masks required karaoke, and another mask chain making meetup.

covid safer oly

elizabeth (who organizes the masked roller skate, among other things!) and i have been talking about making little business cards to hand out to folks we see masking that link to a hub for the covid safer community in olympia. i bought covidsaferoly.com for this purpose (site is live but not finished!). i would love feedback about what resources you’d like to see on there. i’m thinking where to get free masks/tests/air purifiers, various local group chats (fb, signal, discord), wastewater data, events calendar, list of covid aware businesses/services, artists/makers, other stuff???

some songs

remember the old days when you’d share mp3s with yr friends on a thumb drive or zip stuff to mega upload?? can we do that again?

i’ve been on a huge greg freeman kick this month, i dunno what to say about this song other than you should listen to it lol. those horns, that vocal delivery. fantastic album.

this one popped into my head randomly and i had to revisit this album. get disowned was in heavy rotation in the car on my cross country road trip to move here. danica and i passionately sang tibetan pops tars many times.

i couldn’t tell you why i like this one so much, it just hits me in a weird spot. i always have to listen to it on repeat. i feel weird for picking a swearin’ song where allison isn’t on vocals lol.

another kinda bummer song that just tickles my brain the right way. i recently gave know by heart a spin and decided to check out one of their other albums for once. glad i did.

last but not least, this week i’ve been listening to a lot of 3cm tour (a japanese screamo band my friend D introduced me to in the early 2010s). they’re at the top of my library, so when i was reorganizing, i was like “oh shit i forgot this band rips.”

some photos

tiny victories

• added a buncha metal to my face

  • i completed my second “i said NO” punchcard and my reward was getting my nose pierced - something i previously thought impossible until i discovered implant grade titanium jewelry! (i’m allergic to everything). i also got some lil silver hoops because i watched too many 90s movies with james duval in them recently.

• celebrated 12 years with kyle and we planted a tree together! something we meant to do for our 10 year anniversary lol (big thank you to sarah for the truck assist!)

• ate some king bolete mushrooms from our yard and planted garlic in the garden

• attended a masks required roller skate at skateland, which was especially cute thanks to halloween costumes

• got out of jury duty

• added some new covid safer touring/event hosting resources to dodiy.org

recommend me some more spooky movies?

til next time <3 take care of yrselves (& each other).