Alright. Well. Guess it's time to go back to doing whatever I was doing before thanksgiving madness struck.

Oh yeah, I wanted to finish inktober and mount the drawings. I got some pretty washi tape to use for edges and borders and all I have to do is, you know, complete the missing drawings. Listen, it still counts if I finish it in 2021. I've made this rule up and it sounds good to me, so say we all. And then we never have to attempt inktober again.

I have to bottle the hard lemonade I started to hopefully be drinkable for christmas/new years. I was supposed to bottle it sunday but shit happened, here we are. If nothing else I will hopefully get tipsy on my own brew for the inevitable christmas disappointment the future has in store for me.

I still want to finish the velveteen quilt project. I did the exact same thing I always do with that project - get it out, spend a bunch of time counting squares and figuring out what I'm going to do, don't actually get to the part where I sew anything, shove it in a closet to get it out of the way, rinse and repeat. But I don't want to move a bunch of cut squares again. I have the clear table space now to set up the sewing machine and I got one of those half size tabletop ironing boards (I was using a jury rigged ironing setup with a towel and it is a marvelous way to ruin whatever surface is under the ironing space). I was kinda hoping to surprise spouse with the finished quilt-thing like ta-daaa, but whatever, I'm not going to bother trying to be sooper sekrit. I'm kinda over the whole "let's make a nice surprise for spouse" phase. Clearly he does not give a shit, so middle fingers to him.

Spouse doesn't know what he wants for christmas. I'm starting to think that jackass just enjoys being a wet blanket. But we are in a transitory phase and anything he needs he already has, and it's all his money anyway, so that definitely erases some of the magic. So I told him he's getting shitty arts 'n crafts projects. I have ideas. I was thinking about doing a little coaster painting of the kitties as loth cats. And maybe just finishing some of the other projects I have floating around. "Your christmas present is that I finished some projects." I mean, there are worse ideas.

(I already told spouse exactly what I wanted for christmas and he ordered it and the package is in the apartment. I wanted this LCD writing tablet thing by boogie board. Specifically I wanted the big fancy letter size one that has these templates you slide behind the writing area.

This thing.

Okay so it's this high tech version of a "magic slate" toy everyone had as a kid - the waxed cardboard with the flimsy plastic sheets that you wrote on with a plastic stylus, and then "erased" by pulling up the plastic? Yeah, that crappy thing that lasted 10 minutes before someone sat on it and crumpled the plastic beyond use. A boogie board is just a futuristic version of those. The only way to save what you write is to take a photo, so it's dumb "smart" tech or smart "dumb" tech. Why would anyone prefer this thing over a paper notebook or a tablet with a nice drawing program? Well, I figured the perfect use for it is script and lettering practice, where I want to grind in the muscle memory but I don't need to keep pages and pages of practice crap. Or it would be great for gesture drawings, thumbnails, warmups. Any dedicated artist is going to generate a huge volume of this necessary practice waste that goes straight in the trashcan. Not worth keeping, hate filling up the garbage with it. So I am pretty excited and it seemed like a perfect christmas thing.)

Speaking of coasters I have liberated about two dozen from home depot at this point. I guess it's time to think about christmas cards and christmas gifts again. We aren't going to do boxes and niece/nephew gifts like last year. We'll have to make it up to them next year. Maybe I will make some coaster sets for the adult in laws and call it good. Becca made this 2021 calendar featuring this running family joke and since it is almost used up I think I can take the printed pages and recycle them as family ornaments/coasters. It would be a nice way to preserve her work instead of tossing it in the trash, because it was very funny.

Oh I found this paranormal docuseries that is basically gold for someone wanting to run a spooky paranormal/Call of Cthulhu sort of RPG campaign. It's on prime and it's called Hellier. It's very well produced, the players are engaging and well spoken and the soundtrack is excellent. First season is average - there is an attempt to investigate some alien/cryptid mystery that starts fantastic but ends up being super unsatisfying. However, second season really starts going down the rabbit hole and it's great brain fodder for some sort of paranormal setting. Watch first season just to enjoy second season. Sets up some interesting concepts and there are enough loose threads and spooky happenings and weird coincidences to be genuinely interesting. Are they unravelling some enormous, disturbing mystery or just making total bullshit nonsense connections from nothing? Very rorsharch test. People with logical, practical, concrete ways of thinking will probably hate it because there's no payoff, just more strings to pull. It documents a strange sort of subtle madness that gets lost in most movie/series interpretations because it's not dramatic enough. I have enjoyed watching it, just for the interesting what ifs. And the soundtrack is good.