51 Wears

I've been using an app that lets you catalogue your clothes and record outfits and see stats about the composition of your wardrobe, etc, for a while. 

It's called Whering, one of those perfectly confused business names that is just slightly off a relevant normal English word. Tumbler, Flicker, Wearing. Twitter was, in relation to these names, pretty clever. An actual word, a good and whimsical synonym for talking, and really gorgeous when combined with calling posts "tweets". Nothing will ever be quite the same. The linguistic design is insane. It's too good.

Whering has this conspicious feel of plucky startup about it. They seem heavily invested in testing features. One of those features is the brand new UNWRAPPED. That is, a Spotify Wrapped, the ornately animated slideshow that shows you end-of-year stats about who and what you listened to on Spotify, but for the wardrobe organisation app Whering. Although in this case, it's a quarterly review, which seems both appropriate and fashion-y, and deeply insane.

Let's investigate my personal statistics, shall we?

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The first shocking and tantalising statistic is that I have, apparently, worn 35 items of clothing between January and March. Cool.

Next, we can see my TOP 3 HIGHEST WEARS. At number one are my boots, which I've been wearing the whole time. At number two is a long cardigan, very nice, very comfortable and I wear it a lot in the house. And at number three is my jacket. That's because it's cold sometimes. Very good.

Next, bizarrely, it shows me my TOP 3 LOWEST WEARS, which is really begging for a tie, and yes, we have three perfectly tied items. That's not very satisfying.

My MOST WORN OUTFIT is this combo of grey jogging bottoms, a red t-shirt, and a navy jumper, which is very real. I guess I wore that one a lot. And it was comfy as hell. Outfit construction, though, is a bit on the clunky side, so every time you record an outfit in Whering you have to essentially add a new outfit to your library of outfits, and it's then its own particular outfit that you have to go back to and select on any other day that you wear the same outfit. Except you won't do that, you'll make a new outfit instead, because it's way too much hassle.

This is my most worn outfit only because I went back and added it to later days instead of what I almost always do instead, make a new outfit that's definitely the same as a previous one. It's a structural issue.

These stats and their presentation are a bit awkward, but nevertheless, I do enjoy looking at the info, figuring out how many times I wore my jacket. Don't worry, I say to myself.

It was 41.

Donkey Kong's Frightening Bananza

I've been playing a lot of Donkey Kong Bananza lately. The great feeling of unstoppable power the game gives you by allowing you to transform into a bigger monkey and smash almost everything in sight feels engineered to make a toddler throw up. It's so frenetic that the game's camera can't keep up, desperately trying to follow Kong as he tunnels madly into another mountain, ending up squashed pathetically against the rock face. And the player doesn't care, drunk on rock-pummelling, enjoying it maybe even more because the rock is up against your face and you can't see a thing.

It's a weird game in many respects. The other animals dear Donkey Kong can become are deeply ugly and mostly not that helpful, not as much as Big Monkey who can Smash. The 'Bananza State' is presented as a special form that helps Donkey Kong in times of need, when he needs to access a unique ability, but in reality, you're never really leaving Bananza mode. Why would I be a small monkey when I could be a big monkey with a huge, juicy ass?

Last night as I write this, I obtained Donkey Kong's elephant form, which can suck up vast amounts of rocks, and even dangerous and frightening lava. Elephants can do that sort of thing. There's an exhilaration to be had here, sucking up the walls around you, eating that lava, formerly dangerous, now yummy. The elephant's domain is a rainy one, beset by storms, and the elephants you speak to wear raincoats. They're probably the most appealing NPC animals in the game - and the raincoats are a big part of that. I love the way they speak, in gibberish, but with theatrically lilting voices. They feel very much like talking to the most dramatic freaks of Breath of the Wild.

And there is, overall, an interesting Breath-of-the-Wild quality to this game. Not just in the explicit references, like when Donkey Kong falls into very familiar Tears of the Kingdom style terrain, but in the way the game unfolds. We visit layers that have some kind of disgusting problem going on, they're filled with poison juice or weird mud, and you have to have to solve the area nastiness - just like in Tears. The smashing itself evokes those mounds of explodable or smashable rock Link occasionally has to deal with. I'm feeling like, hmm... what if I opened up Punished Hyrule again? But then again, Link can't smash everything. More's the pity.

In any case, I like being Donkey Kong, fists out and ready to destroy the whole world. There seems to be almost no use for his zebra form, but I don't mind. That thing is hideous.

 

I am Finally Listening

It feels embarrassing to note the gulf between every individual aspect of a language you have to learn. To have to study listening and reading and speaking seperately, as if none of them touch at all. But it feels that way, often. Being able to read just doesn't mean I can hear. It seems like a joke, knowing hundreds of words and missing even the simplest ones when you listen, but this incongruous sense of... the senses is constant in language-learning. It's frightening.

Quistis greets Squall. What is she saying?

So I've decided to finally force myself to do something I've been saying I should do for a really long time: do some dedicated listening in my target language, so that I might maybe understand it on some level. Okay cool, great idea. This is easy enough for French - there are French YouTube channels making hour long videos about the ins and outs of Nintendo history, and stuff like that. Done. Japanese however, has been more challenging for me.

Exactly the kind of video I need.

You'd think maybe I could just watch tons of anime and become a big anime freak, but it's weirdly hard to find Japanese subtitles. A lot of recommended Japanese learner-appropriate podcasts are either pretty boring to me, or have no transcript to follow along with. I realised that I really wanted a visual component. Rather than relying purely on text, seeing images just provides so much context alongside subtitles. But where French YouTube is pretty similar to its anglophone counterpart in terms of general available content style, Japanese YouTube seems very different.

There are plenty of vlogs, people taking trips and showing their day to an audience, but a lot of those are very quiet videos that use subtitles instead of talking. Where, I'm asking, are the quirky videos detailing all the glitches in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater in this language? 

I don't know the answer, nor how to locate Japan's prickliest video essayist, but I think I've found what I need: A lengthy let's play series for Final Fantasy VIII. This is an 81-video series made by someone called "GAME COMMENTARY SISS", which will keep me occupied for at least a month. And then I'll just watch that sort of thing until I accumulate a thousand hours or something. And in theory, I'll start to understand better. We'll see. I'm not sure learning a language is a real thing that actually happens to people. I think it's made up.

Night Creatures

Here are some more recent journal spreads. I've started to go towards darker scenes with thicker, more dense areas of dark pencil. They create such a nice mood. I love to go for a sort of serene night time scene, glistening with stars. The perfect mysterious time.

Pages with a lot of empty white space don't really excite me in this journal, especially with the transparency. As soon as I add those dark zones, the transparent layering starts to look much cooler and have much more depth.

I still keep feeling like I should use both sides of each page, really commit to playing with the transparency more, but it's always weird when you must effectively destroy the previous image to do that. Although, my frog-stamping moment really felt right, felt like it added the perfect texture to the other side - so maybe I should try more stamping.

I have completely used up one mechanical pencil lead while working in this journal. I discovered that a mechanical pencil feels amazing in here, super smooth and sharp. But tragically, I don't currently have any refills, so I've had to return to the traditional pencil. It's amazing how fast a pencil dulls when you're filling in large spaces.

The variation in lines works perfectly well for those big segments of pencil, where all merge together, but it's just so satisfying to use the sharp, perfect, never-dull lead of a mechanical pencil.

Nevermind, I'm here to wear out as many pencils as possible. I cackle and the pencils quiver. 

Mysterious Frog

I made a little frog character - a mysterious gentleman - and stamped him upon a journal page. Is he not distinguished? Is he not gorgeous?

I made him with the PRIXEL stamp kit, which was very kindly sent to me by the PRIXEL man maybe around a year ago. I feel now that I have this kit in my life, I should probably make use of it. I haven't stamped much up until this point, but now that we have this little fella in our midst, I'm very happy. It's a joyful world in which this frog man resides.

He's made of many colourful little parts, when it comes to the stamp, which is really a beautiful object, a temporary creature of its own. It's pretty fun to assemble your own shape with all these little rubber pieces, and now I'm thinking about how he must be disassembled, how he's only with us for a short time. How he must be washed.

There's a nice slow routine to making a stamp, diligently stamping it on some paper, then cleaning it off and letting it dry before, finally, returning its components to their box. A time-consuming, pleasant thing to do. 

Now the frog will be reconstituted - into who knows what. As it should be. 

Fluffoids

I think I'm going to set myself a strict daily goal of completing ONE journal page a day for a while, because I keep neglecting my onion skin journal for other things, and I now simply passionately wish to fill it up and finish it. Here are some recent spreads.

Sometimes I get a little crazy and wacky and turn this thing sideways to draw something in landscape. I don't know what it is about a horizontal canvas, but it just feels good and right. We're abandoning vertical. We despise and shun vertical.

Well, not really, not truthfully. I think a lot of it is just the endless allure of something different. I'll do one sort of thing for a while and then think... wait a minute. What if I did the opposite of this? Wow. Sounds amazing. The simple pleasure of novelty and change is eternally welcome.

I have been, as you can see, incorporating some collage elements in here once again, but in really lazy, small ways. I pasted in a handful of wrappers from individually-wrapped teabags. I tore an envelope into pieces and stuck those down. I love rubbish.

I have also been trying to be loose with it, just really drawing whatever, but I keep finding wobbly drawings that take up the whole space and use a lot of vast dark pencil the most appealing. I like the high-contrast and the intriguing, soft shapes of various fluffy animal bodies (fluffoids, if you will). More of the same, I tell myself.

As always, more dogs emerge, and they must sniff the flowers and plunge themselves into serene night skies. 

Blossom

It's been a string of beautiful spring days. White blossoms are everywhere, stark and perfect against an untouched blue sky. I took these pictures of blossoms on my 3DS while I was taking a walk outside the other day, and I don't know, it's perfect. Somehow the black and white setting really does let the camera get past its limitations. I thought because the blossoms were pretty high above me that the depth of the 3D effect wouldn't look very good, but these are some of my favourite photos I've taken on the 3DS.

It really can't be overstated how good it feels to walk outside in the sun and see clumps of perfect little flowers everywhere. I think this joyful effect is also massively enhanced by mild weather. I'm not sweating and squinting, just feeling comfortable and normal - hooray!

Spring really does feel like a pleasantly magical time.