After 3 (maybe 4) years, I finally have a new journal/diary page! And this time, it's less clunky and roughly thrown together. I kept getting flashbanged by the old page, and I just wanted something that matches the whole site's theme better, so... here we are. The sidebar is still unfinished, so just ignore that and all the testing. I'll slowly import the rest of the old entries when I feel like it.

Anyways, my site turned 4 recently! And I also turned 22 yesterday! The highlight of the day was my Towa figure finally arriving.

Isn't he so beautiful????????? The assembly was a bit of a pain (one of my fake nails fell off lol) but it was so worth it. The paint job is really well done... he looks very pretty and perfect. I still regret not getting his Native scale (wasn't into SD at the time and I don't get figures from things I dk) but imo I think I like this one better... I have a bias towards medical stuff ^_^

My mom bought me a new laptop for my birthday! I was hoping it would come in time, but Fedex is dogshit so I honestly don't know how much longer I have to wait at this point. Dude, I'm gonna get to aurafarm so hard. I can go out and sit somewhere in public and use my laptop, which has Arch (btw), and then I'll pull out my iPod and listen to music with it. It will be so awesome.

On that note, I replaced the battery and hard drive in my iPod! I put in the iFlash solo with a 128gb SD card.

Really cool stuff.

Unfortunately, the front shell I ordered still isn't here yet, and the backplate doesn't fit, so I have to return that one... but it's fine. I like this look for now. The black is pretty. Besides, I really like working on it, more so than I anticipated, so I'm happy to open and close it a lot.

My music library at the moment is only 40gb, and I don't really anticipate it growing a huuuge amount anytime soon, so I'm pretty set. Honestly, it is really nice using an iPod for music. It's a nice little dedicated player just for my music, and I don't have any distractions. I think the only thing that would make it in perfect in my eyes is a nicer screen, but that isn't that huge of an issue. I guess I'm also a little bummed about losing all the weight from the hard drive. I liked the heaviness...

I'm pretty irritated with all the new tariff shit now. Supposedly, it'll be an $80 flat fee for packages that go through USPS coming from from Japan. I'm not trying to get put on any lists here, but my god, can somebody take one for the team already? Why are we still letting this braindead freak do this stupid shit?

Whatever. I try not to think about him too much. I have a few things waiting for me in Japan, and the last thing comes out tomorrow (today in Japan), so... I know it will take longer than a week to get here with all the new delays, but I just really hope it can arrive in America before the new policy goes into effect.

Ah... I dunno really what else to say. Right now, I'm just waiting for my laptop. Oh... wait. I do have something big to talk about. (my memory is failing...)

My mom and I went to an open house on Sunday. My god... it is so beautiful. I want to move there so badly. Let me tell you how good this house is.

Three rooms upstairs. Two full bathrooms upstairs. Big bedrooms. My own area.

I don't know if I have touched on why I am so miserable in my house as it is. I have two bedrooms, across from each other in this hallway, along with a bathroom in between them. All three of these rooms are extremely small, and are obviously meant for children. I am twenty-two years old. I have no privacy, one of my bedroom's walls is right against the living room, and they are rather thin, so I always feel too close. Plus... it's like, if I walk out of any of these rooms with the intention of just going into another, it's like my parents think it's suddenly an invitiate to talk to me. Please leave me alone. I am aware this hallway is completely open. Please just pretend you do not even see me.

So yeah, I just don't like this house. I'm constantly battling with my furniture to get a nice layout, but I have so little real estate in here, there just isn't much I can change. I can't rotate the bed, because then it sticks out too much and makes the room even harder to navigate, so I have to keep it up against the wall. Do you know how hard it is to be crippled and constantly have your comforter getting pulled all to your side so you have to keep fixing it and pushing it between the mattress and the wall and my god I am so out of breath and exhausted.

I just am unhappy with it all. I've bought some stuff, like the desk and the shelf that's holding my detolf, but my bedframe is a hand me down, and it's ugly to me, and doesn't fit my aesthetic. I have a dresser with a similar backstory that also does not fit my aesthetic. So my room is just very all over the place.

I'm complaining a lot, but I just needed to do it a bit. There's a lot of other issues with this house that just make me want to sell it and be done with it already. Sorry, I'm talking like I own it. I tend to do that... I took over dealing with the phone and internet service. I just can't stand the idea of these big things being in the hands of anyone else. I want to do it all...

Okay. That's all I have to say. I'll end it here now.

I did so much today... first, I cooked that really popular mac and cheese recipe from Tini! It was really good. While I was working on that, I also had some rice and cinnamon soaking in water for a few hours so I could make something else...

Strawberry horchata...

I found this recipe on Instagram reels a while back and I've been wanting to make it ever since. I am so glad I did... it is really fucking good. I will be making this again (and the mac and cheese, per my mom's request)

In other news, I won an auction for an iPod classic! At the very last second, too. I am so badass. I got a few of the parts, but I'm still debating on where to get the others. I even got a little silly and bought an iPod touch for 12 dollars! It's the 4th gen, which is the one I had as a kid. I just kinda wanted to relive my nostalgia a little... one day, I'll get an iPhone 5 for the same reason.

I got a call about a job I applied for! It's pretty close, has good pay, benefits, and I like the sound of it. It's through an agency, so they just called to ask which shift I want and stuff, and then they send my info over to the company. I hope I get picked...

I was thinking about going back to college soon. Not this year, because I didn't apply for financial aid, but maybe next year. I want to do a minor with my major once I transfer to university.

My birthday is in 10 days. I don't really know what I'm gonna do......... 22 isn't a particularly fun number to me. I like 21 because it's like the 9+10 meme but like ... 22? And don't say Taylor Swift because I don't like her. I suppose I will spend it playing with my iPods and whatnot... so autism heaven.

I just really to comment on how good this horchata is man. I'm drinking it as I type and it's like omg with each sip I take Wow. Crack cocaine.

Oh, speaking of cocaine, I watched American Psycho last night. I liked it. When the intro was playing, and it was showing the cast, I groaned out loud when I saw Jared Leto's name. Can he quit being everywhere? I guess he looked at least somewhat okay looking at this time, but omg... I got irritated.

Okay, I have to end this here, sorry. I'm getting distracted. And my legs hurt so bad.

Happy August!

...I forgot to update in July. Sorry.

I was busy... I've unfortunately fallen down the Linux rabbithole. Arch specifically, maybe. I installed vanilla Arch on my laptop the other day because 1) I wanted to see the difference between it and EOS and 2) I wanted to actually be able to legally say "I use Arch, btw". I broke my EOS install and had to completely wipe it the first attempt, but I got it on the second try! It actually wasn't that hard, but I suppose that's mostly thanks to the fact that I have already technically been using Arch for a while now.

...on that thought, why exactly did I think going for an Arch-based distro when I hadn't even touched Linux in like, 6 years was a smart idea? (I know the answer to why I did it, but I'm not going to say it) I suppose my sheer willpower to want to make it work proved effective, and now I'm having fun.

I installed a new shell for my Hyprland recently. It looks so pretty... I've been forced to learn QML to edit the config files for it, but being able to customize it is really nice so I like it.

Cute, yes? ^_^

I went to HTML day yesterday! I was at the Austin event. I drove 2 hours for it... which, to be honest, I was very nervous about (chronic illness and what have you), but it ended up going really well! I had a lot of fun on the drive. Well, up until I got into Austin, that is. The traffic is so awful. And that is coming from someone who lives in Houston. So I don't really want to go back there any time soon.

Anyways, I made cool friends there! So that made the drive worth it. I coded a site about Janne Da Arc. And got told I was so cool for using Arch (btw).

You might be wondering, "Well Light, wasn't the My Chemical Romance Arlington date yesterday?" Yes, it was. And I did not go. A while back, I had listed my ticket for sale because I was on the fence about the drive and also because it was just an expensive ticket. But a few months ago, I cancelled that listing... OR SO I THOUGHT. Ticketmaster is dogshit, I've learned. Anyways, I'm just happy it sold when it did because I literally booked the hotel just a day before and only had hours to cancel it. I was sad, but it's a lot of money I need, and I got to go to HTML day, soo... it all worked out in the end?

Recently (for months), I've been telling myself I want to get a cane. Standing up is pretty difficult for me if I don't have anything to help support me, among other things, so I finally got around to measuring myself properly and bought one the other day...

I bought the cane with flames that House has.

Look. If I'm going to buy a cane, it's going to be 1) cool and 2) somehow related to something I'm in. And I really love it. It's probably one of the best purchases I've made in the past decade.

I love my laptop very much, but it shows its age... the processor is very slow. I can give it more RAM, but it's stuck at only DDR3, and neither that nor an SSD can do much to compensate for the CPU's limited power. I'm looking at that Framework laptop, but I have to get a job first... but I've already complained about that enough.

I paid for my Towa figure preorder just the other day tho! I am so excited. This is my first NSFW figure... it's really pretty.

Umm... I don't know what else to say here. Oh. I've been looking into getting an iPod lately. I mean, it's nice that I can put my music on my phone and stuff (more on that in a minute actually), but I miss the days of having dedicated media players. I never got one of the iPod classics growing up, so I've always longed for one. I'm looking at an auction for one on ebay right now, but it keeps going up... it's making me so mad...

But back to the music on phone thing. I actually put Ubuntu on my media server PC, just because this photo server worked best on Linux, and I just didn't really care for Windows anymore. So now I can stream all of my music and stuff from any device! To make it even better, I set up Tailscale so that I can access it from anywhere. The photo server is really cool, too. It's called Immich, and it looks just like Google Photos, but it's better. It's all self hosted... I love it.

Okay. That's all. I'm gonna start working on my site a bit here and there.