A Blogging Milestone

Guess what stinkers? I've already written more blog posts this year than I did in 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, or 2020, respectively. Interestingly, my last BIG blogging year was 2018. I blogged almost every day that year. I was diligent, and life felt big and endless in a way that is long gone for me now.

Me in Paris, June 2024.

I wrote 337 posts. It was my greatest passion. Then, in 2019, I dropped down to just 28 posts across the whole year. The great blog that had been my constant task, my own clutching child desperate for more delicious words and pictures, had reached the tender age of seven, and was relegated to somewhere further back in my mind. I still loved her, but I had my mind on other things.

Blossom, 8th April 2024.

I don't know, totally, what gave me the sudden urgent need to blog daily again this year. I know that seeing other people's growing nostalgia for even 2010s web stuff is a factor, but I also think that the transition into writing videos full-time over the past year and a half has been a huge catalyst. I discovered that I love writing long things, that I can often do it more-or-less in a stream of consciousness, and that I can put together a coherent script that is an hour long or more. That's a revelation.

I've also just become insatiable about it. I write the videos as much as I can, I write a diary entry every day, I've taken to writing reviews of most of the media I drink up (I have to blame Letterboxd for this - I can't leave a one line review there anymore), and after all of that, I still need to write gorgeous blog posts for my lovely blog.

At the Oi Ocha museum in Tokyo with Miili, 7th March 2025.

It's kind of an opportunity to decompress - sometimes, at least. This blog is more diaristic than many other avenues for writing, and it's also just, like, whatever. I don't have to think too hard about what I'm gonna say here, unless it's a more involved sort of post. There's an incredible freedom in the great big blank page.

I have to be honest though, I wish Blogger had a dark mode. My eyes literally hurt right now. I'm typing this at ten to midnight. I'm staring at a big white screen. It's not wise.

Anyway, the blog demands more posts. I will provide.

A good picture of me, 25th February 2024.

Sketches & Miscellany

Here are some miscellaneous paintings. I've been using this chunky brown paper scrapbook a lot recently, and I like the way white paint stands out on it. That said, the pages will stick together if I paint on them consecutively, so I have to be cautious there, but that's just standard notebook things. Two acrylic paintings can't kiss. They'll destroy each other.

Some creatures.

I tried to make the same painting twice, using this beautiful reference picture of my aunt's dog:

Neither one turned out quite how I wanted, but it's interesting to see a version on white vs a version on brown.

I didn't really define the shapes well enough in either, and the proportions are all weird, but there she is, emerging.

This one is a quick landscape sketch from a photo of a few trees I took at the beginning of January.

And finally, a comic, of sorts. 

:-)

Miffy & I

Let me introduce you to my dear friend, Miffy.

I've had her for seven years now. My beautiful creature. She came from the Rijksmuseum gift shop, and she wears a fetching gown made to look like Delftware. She's a cutie pie.

I've been thinking about taking her places. Fantasising about taking those pictures that some people dedicate whole Instagram accounts to: a plush character in different places, sitting on train seats, or in front of fresh cups of coffee.

There's an undeniable perfection to those sorts of pictures. A beautiful sunset, maybe, but Miffy's also there. The sunset is all the sweeter for her presence.

For now, though, she's just with me, on my scanner.

Love her. 

The Beautiful Chaos of Junk Journalling

For some reason, everywhere I look, I see junk journals. Waifish, skipping women with 1960s pigtails and thick, velvet alice bands are doing this chunky, eclectic sort of journalling in droves, or so Instagram informs me.

There is an endless stream of them, filled with stickers and torn paper and receipts for coffees. And glorious reams of washi tape, of course.

Many such cases.

And I have to admit, I love it. I've been, mostly, a person who uses a single medium at a time. One solitary pencil, for several pages. I'm a bit like an ascetic monk that way. They, too, fill their journals with pencil drawings only, no doubt. But mixed media is delicious, and I have made many a collage over the years.

It's only natural, surely, to stuff as many things in your journal as possible. So why have I never really done this? Well, I have - I made my own chunky book from printer paper during my university days and stuck all manner of torn scraps in there. And that was pretty great! I also distinctly remember a brown paper journal that I would stick loads of stuff into before I wrote a diary entry in there every day. So I guess I forgot about this frenetic way of doing things. But now I'm in the zone. I have a glue stick. I'm ready.

One Christmas ago, in 2024, before she died, my grandma gave me a stack of notebooks. I think it was four in total. One is specifically for keeping notes about books in, but the others are normal lined notebooks. The smallest one is a spiral-bound, roughly A6-sized notebook, and I have now dedicated it to the junk world. That thing is getting junked.

I started it this Christmas just gone, and I love the feeling of slapping down miscellaneous things. I kept the tag from my cousin's new shoes (not pictured), and if you look carefully, you might notice that there are two Christmas cracker hats slammed in there.

Did I receive a selection of washi tapes for Christmas? Which I picked out in The Works myself when I was supposed to be Christmas shopping for other people? Yes. Yes I did. And I shall be making excellent use of them. 

Playing Final Fantasy VIII (en français)

I will, perpetually, always need to replay Final Fantasy VIII. This is just a fact of life, an eternal truth. It's my favourite game, and I like to replay it fairly frequently. I know this thing inside out, so much so that I don't need the cues of a language I fully understand to play it - which is why I played it in German, back when I was vaguely studying that language.

You'll notice I'm playing the hideous and repulsive remaster this time around.

 

I've also briefly looked at it in Japanese (and I was surprised at how much I could understand, based predominantly on my kanji recognition, which at this point is... okay), but I didn't commit to that playthrough.

No, what it's time for, is to play Final Fantasy in French. Allons-y!

These experiments aren't really about understanding the text as much as enjoying the small linguistic differences and choices in translation. These little decisions are really fascinating to me - why is blizzara simply (glacier+) here?

I do get a little bit of a gauge on my ability to understand sentences, of course, but fundamentally I can't read French very well. I know enough vocabulary to get the gist of a lot of things, but the grammar really eludes me. That's because I like to pretend grammar isn't real and can't get me. But the unfortunate truth is that grammar gets me every day.

Nevertheless, it's a way of just sort of hanging out around a language. I don't really get what she's doing, but I'm watching her (the French language) do her thing.

The Frenchness comes out in interesting ways. The Trepies are now called Trèpistes. Balamb Garden is referred to as the B.G.U. (Balamb Garden Université). Characters keep saying "hum".

So true.

But my favourite thing about the French translation is its preference for literary allusion. Ifrit's attack is changed from Hellfire to Divine Comedie. Siren's attack is now named Andersen, for Hans Christian. Quezacotl is Golgotha, for some reason. Somehow, I feel as if these changes add a slightly more grounded feel to the game. It feels closer to the real world, but also a little bit darker and imbued with biblical horror. Diablos is Nosferatu. Wow.

A fun translation choice is that here, Rinoa's (or... Linoa's) dog-based limit break attacks are now all named after different dog breeds. Cute.

Beware: the dachshund attack.

And of course, we need to know what Seifer calls Zell on their way to Dollet. In English, it's chicken-wuss. In French, it's... blond hedgehog. Perfect.

I enjoy traversing this world in another language. It feels nice to wander Deling City in French. There's that big French archway, Nosferatu's in my brain, and I dreamed I was a clown.

This is how it should be. 

Please, touche pour descendre a l'arc de triomphe.

Toys (1992) is a Masterpiece

Toys is insane. In the best possible way, this freak's choice is a movie that requires the viewer's full attention. The dialogue is whip smart and searingly funny, but can be easily lost in the strange, foggy sort of atmosphere of the whole thing. Every scene feels massively unreal, as if the movie takes place inside a playset, which is of course, thematically on point, but can make it hard to follow.

The characters don't quite react as you'd expect normal people to, and the plot, while a fantastic exploration of the link between consumerism and militarism through the thoughtless representations of real-world violence and prejudice that can be common in play, is at times absurd to the point of nonsensical. This is what makes Toys great, but it's also what makes Toys a bit of a hard movie.

I remember watching it as a child and being completely unable to understand what was going on. Watching again now, I'm not surprised. Watching this movie is a bit like viewing a snowy landscape through greasepaper. The obscurity of everything has to be embraced. You don't watch Toys as much as you let Toys wash over you.

And that works well with the sheer spectacle of the visual design, and the creepy, clanky, synth glitter goodness of the soundtrack, which really reminds you that, oh my God, it's 1992. In one scene, we see an assembly line of joyful workers assembling various toys, and Tori Amos sings moodily, "I love my job". It's amazing.

Robin Williams is here, and he's great, but my personal favourite performance is from the inimitable Joan Cusack. She's like a fairy floating through it all. She sleeps in a duck-shaped bed. She wears a big, plastic, pink wig. And she is filled with such wonder and love and passion for the toys and machines in her father's crazy factory. You can't help but love her, and smile when she smiles. But, y'know, that's me with Joan Cusack in general. She's the best.

If you weren't already lost in the great sauce of this movie by the half way point, the ending brings a great battle to fruition, in which essentially: a lot of toys are destroyed. Because they are "fighting". It's a moment of complete anarchy and chaos that strains against the edges of a movie already struggling to contain its own madness.

There's this sense of confinement to Toys. Almost every scene is in a claustrophobic, brightly coloured, meticulously decorated set. And then, in a dark room, all the toys die in a blaze of glory. Robin Williams is shouting and screaming. Explosions are going off. The sheer power of play and imagination beats opportunistic militarism. And it's so, so funny.

Four toy penguins out of five.

★★★★☆ 

Returning to Animal Crossing

The little animals in my Nintendo Switch have missed me dearly, or so they say. It has been quite some time since I've deigned to speak to them, but now, in January 2026, we have been given the gift of an enticing new update. So I must return to my island and see what's new.

Fine.

I stopped playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons some years ago because I'd essentially done it all. Every inch of my island was terraformed and bedazzled to perfection. Pink flowers and gnomes surrounded my little house, and I'd collected enough Nook Miles to last a lifetime. Back to the real world.

But what's this update all about? Did they add fights? Can you now physically brawl with your pig friends in this game? Of course not. They added a hotel.

There are some quality of life changes like improved crafting (you can make one thousand things at once now, you little manufacturer), but the main thing is: you get a hotel to decorate. This is situated at the end of that previously mysterious empty pier that sat lonely on the island, and that I plonked a harvest spread down onto, imagining it as a scenic, secluded picnic spot.

Here, the game gets into Happy Home Designer mode. This was a spin-off game on the 3DS that followed New Leaf, which had you decorating rooms to different animals' specifications. I didn't play it that much, but I liked the more task-focused gameplay. Here, that's tacked onto New Horizons, and here I am, decorating a new, child-themed room.

Lovely.

I'm only a few days into this (new rooms are allocated for you to decorate each day), but I already feel like I've exhausted the new stuff. Sure, it's fun to decorate a few rooms, but I've done it. And sure, it's nice to see hotel guests wandering the island, but they have little to say. All I get for my trouble is a new type of currency which I can redeem for stuff I don't care about. There is a hollowness to the experience. All these rooms, and nothing much to do with them.

I do like to see Resetti again, though. Maybe I'll employ his new services and wipe it all. Probably not though, because I'm attached to my gnome placement.

Don't touch my gnomes.

Duck World

Here are some more old photos from some beautiful Christmas in Scotland or other. I'm in the process of scanning a lot of the family photo collection at the moment, so I'll probably give you quite a few instalments of these.

Let's start it off real nice with this picture of me jumping all over my grandfather:

I must have entered terror mode. He was powerless to stop me. I regret nothing.

When I wasn't jumping on him, of course, he was sitting peacefully on that couch. With his daughter and her dog, Poppy.

Here's my grandma, at the other end of the room. Who knows what she's chuckling at.

Now for a detour. We must visit the ducks.

This was a park we used to visit all the time. Here I am, very much enjoying that duck attention, with my cousin in the background.

True bliss was attained in that duck park.

And then, eventually, we had to leave. Goodbye ducks. Farewell duck world.