the great amalgam
the fortnite to riotgrrl pipeline
I love Homestuck, Blow Me
Playing in the Crick
Minesweeper makes me normal
alex g is my hero
the ward peach trees

the great amalgam

the whole point

I am the great amalgamation of everyone I have ever known

If I've known you, you've been stolen from, not maliciously of course, actually with great love and respect. I steal your tone and style and taste, not as a sick twisted parody, but with great reverence. Even the idea of doing this has been stolen but not to try to make a perverse copy. Whenever I glue all the concepts and projects of my friends together with the few interests that are really mine, I hope I can make something original and real. Everything I like is everything I am, if I know you, I surely like you, so you without even knowing get to take part in the great amalgam.

I love Homestuck, Blow Me

cringe culture is dead (mostly)

ok so yeah cringe culture is dead but also this is still really embarrassing. like this is a thing i really like but i'm also really self-aware of the connotation of this media.

disclaimers aside, I love Homestuck, blow me. I am still realizing the extent to which that shit messed with my development. I started reading it in 8th grade cause this dude I had a crush on told me to (he's super weirdly conservative now, but yes he cosplayed Gamzee). This was my Hamilton, like my other freaky friends were having dan and phil 21 pilots esque eras but I was in the hard stuff. I fell ass first into the homestuck-->discord-->internet friends pipeline. I didn't read the whole thing until 9th grade but then it got me. I reread it almost immediately and got so invested i was literally reading it on my laptop at a waterpark.

but let's talk about the actual comic now. i wouldn't necesarilly recommend it cause it takes like a month minimum to go through the whole thing and the fandom for it is mostly dead. but it's this insane kindof coming of age comic/media of kids and aliens saving (making) their universe and it's really confusing and there's a lot of twists and turns and timelines and loops and time bullshit. but it's awesome i swear. it also has some of the funniest lines/media/interactions ever that have influenced me to this day. Any interaction between Dave, Terezi, and Jade (my favs) can be framed basically, here's some i've prepared for you, in frames.

terezi was my fav when i read it the first time and i do still stand by this as she is (imo) one of the less morally dubious characters (vriska apologists dni). she's also one of my kins but i mean it mostly ironically but also kinda not, whenever i get in a particular silly mood i find myself being giggly and neurotic and obsessed with justice as well. i just think she's really funny and her lore and theming is super cool (the dragons??? ((dragon deez nuts))) i love the arc of her doing her just1c3 thing and even though it was kind of a copout on Hussies end to clean up all the plot bullshit, i like how her mind abilities were used as a plot device. (I DO HATE HOW VRISKA WAS THE FOCAL CHARACTER FOR IT THOUGH) but that's a story for another day

if you for some reason read this and want to talk about homestuck ever i am so down SORRY THIS WAS SO EMBARRASSING SORRY IDGAF BYE

Minesweeper makes me normal

I'm always looking for patterns in everything all of the time I feel like a computer because of it. This is why I like minesweeper so much though cause that is the whole point. I'm like the apex predator of minesweeper cause i'm so honed in on pattern recognition. I play in my head when i'm bored i play in my dreams. every day i get closer to breaking world records (not like i give that much of a fuck but if i kept going i probably could do it accidentally).

i've weened off it a little but I was genuinely addicted to it after I figured out how the patterns worked. my college had yung gravy come perform but i didn't go cause i was too busy playing minesweeper for 8 hours. i had an average of 50 hours a week playing for like 2 months straight.

idc if you dc but here's some of my favorite patterns

    -i loooove the 2 and 1 combo it is so adorable how they go together. cause of the rules of the one of those 4 blocks in range the one by the 2 must have a bomb and the 1 cant. i think it's so adorable cause any number can do it if you can logically tell that its technically a 2 like if a three has one on another side. it's a super important strat for higher bomb play
    -the 5 on a corner is super cute too cause even though it's not really a pattern and more that is what it is, it's super helpful cause of how obvious it is
    -i also love when there's 2 ones together by the border cause you can go by the overlap

also complete sidenote but the speedrun meta for minesweeper is insane. like normally people don't even mark bombs cause it takes time to do so these people know the patterns so well they can just see it. i can kind of do it but it's hard to do fast. with more training ill get there though for sure. also people will cheat and hack their first tap to make it better so there has to be rules to use a standardized source. idk! i just think it's really cool that a game that's objectively really simple still has a meta.

i just love playing this game cause i'm good at it and i want people to know im good at things ( even if theyre dumb )

how fortnite got me into riot grrrl

+intro to riot grrrl guide

my brother wanted me to play fortnite with him so as the best older sister ever i got epicgames so i could play with him. there were free games and i played gone home with the slowest framerate ever on a pc i got from my neighbor. the game was kinda scary but it was just about a girl coming home and finding her sister gone and trying to figure out where she went. i kinda forget the morale of the story but when she was digging in her sisters room there's a tape player that when you interacted with it the cover of cherry bomb by bratmobile played. the song was simultaneously on my discover weekly so i took it as a sign from god to listen to this band. i soon fell down the natural big 90's pipeling of bratmobile-->bikini kill-->L7-->7 year bitch-->sleater kinney-->le tigre-->babes in toyland-->etc there's so many fucking riot grrl bands and inspired bands. it was the perfect time to find it too cause it was the Winter I Turned Evil so i had a soundtrack to accompany my transformation. riot grrl is also a good gateway to harder music for someone who listened to primarily emo/indie/surf rock like i probably would not have been as receptive to screamo if i didn't have my riot grrrl era.

    for anyone curious here's a beginners guide to riot grrl
    the ogs:
    -Cool Schmool - Bratmobile
    -Carnival - Bikini Kill
    -He's My Thing - Babes in Toyland
    -The Scratch - 7 Year Bitch
    -Shitlist - L7
    deep cuts:
    -What Kind of Monster Are You? - Slant 6
    -Little Bunny Foo Foo - The Moldy Peaches
    -The Drop Dead Look - Excuse 17
    -Safari - The Breeders
    new gen (not technically riot grrrl but adjacent)
    -Your Mom - THICK
    -Kill All Men- Basketball Divorce Court
    -Cut Me Off - VIAL
    -Some Mutts-Amyl and The Sniffers
    -Sorority Girls - Mommy Long Legs

Playing in the Crick

If there's a small cold stream I'm gonna lose my mind. I'm gonna wade I'm gonna throw my shoes off and look at stuff. I'm gonna look at some freaking bugs I'm gonna flip some rocks (with respect). I love looking for macroinvertibrates and if there's people with me I love to show people them. Next time you're at a body of water look for these guys:

if you find a net and some jars


this is the casemaker caddisfly (this one has the rock getup) they have cement spit and build a shell around their body of small pieces of rock or wood. you can find them in medium quality water, like i've found them in the stream to the panther hollow lake.

this is a dragonfly nymph! these guys are kind of rare like they're normally in pretty high quality water BUt they are easy to see, they are fairly large.

these are my favorites!!! (the mayfly nymph >:D) they have 3 tails and cool eyes and cool gills. You can find them most places, but they only get really big in high quality water.

these guys are stonefly nymphs they are super cool too, easily mistaken with the mayfly, but they have 2 tails instead and a distinct pattern. They also need good water quality

alex g is my hero

alex g is a hero to everyone who has ever been young. ok that's probably the overstatement of the century cause he is also just a guy but what he's made has a community around it for a reason.

i'm not an alexgeologist by any means, there is so much to know about the guy and his unreleased discography is extensive. Everything he makes is soaked in nostalgia and everything is beautiful (even the songs that are not the best ever).

i'm grateful to him though cause I think I am who I am now because of his work. Like freshman year my friend whom I just met asked if our friends whom we just met wanted to go to the Alex G concert. Going to that somehow made me care about everything more. Alex G makes music that makes people care. So much of his work evokes experiences or memories that so many people share and it reminds me that the human experience is universal and that you're never the only person to experience something. I am constantly grateful to be alive and that I have the blessing to be a witness to the world. Alex G's music to me sounds like how grateful I am to my friends and the planet.

here are my favorite alex g songs: Whale, Salt, Brite Boy, 16 Mirrors, Southern Sky, Soaker, Forever

the peach tree on ward

i went to see some of my best friends in the world to eat pie and icecream and gossip and i was going to park illegally on ward street like i do when i saw peaches rolling down the street. i parked and went to see what happened and i realized this tree i'd been walking by for 3 months with its diamond leaves had been a peach tree the whole time. the fruit was everywhere by the chain link fence and overflowing onto the road cause the heavy rain knocked it down. some of it was rotting already but i picked up a couple and stared through the sun to look for ripe ones i could grab. i jumped to grab one and was grinning about how now we will have peaches pie and icecream.

i'm bad at poetry or saying anything artful so i wish i could say something beautiful about how peach trees give and give or whatever but i was just so happy i saw it and so grateful i could pick a peach.