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| Week 30. |
Had one of the most shameful meetings on Monday. It was my last time seeing my social worker so we were wrapping up whatever problems I still had. Well, those we had the ability to wrap up anyway. I needed to log into some accounts on her PC for it but I forgot my planner at home so I spent like 20 minutes digging through my emails to find something. She was patient like a saint but I was keyed in enough to see that this was getting absurd on my end. So I'm starting to sweat in my own embarrassment and immature disorganization as her smile grows more and more pained, if it was there at all. She's not wrong but I can't help myself. I'm administratively challenged.
First fire on Tuesday. I get a text from my brother who's on the way to the train station that the town's abandoned factory is aflame and when I leave the house the plume is so tall it looks like it has no end and just keeps going on and on into the stratosphere. I've never seen that much of the town out at the same time but everyone's standing around, gaping at the burned out husk of a wooden tower still engulfed by flames. They had one firefighter on one of those cabin-ladder things with a hose. My brother said that he'd almost put the fire out earlier but then there was a big bang and the whole thing started again. It was put out later in the day but first it took a couple thousand meters squared of the factory.
I also went by the interim employment office and dropped off my missing documents, most importantly my totally blank criminal record. I've done no crimes! And if I have: no, I haven't!
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Kind of morbid with the cutesy lanterns... |
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| One the 'towers' of the factory. |
Despite the events of the day we were already scheduled to go another near by town for a kind of outdoor BBQ/dinner thing. We went with our family friends and their son, my childhood friend, Hisham. We're both rabid event-avoiders but there was no weaseling out of this one and anyway it wasn't half bad. It's a very cute town and there were lots of cats to pet. Plus we spent most of the time talking about immersive sims and shit like that while looking at a pretty amazing view.
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| Cat! |
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| Accidental matching fits. |
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| Cat 2! |
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| Monique enjoying herself. |
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| Dinner. |
Tom came over on Wednesday, I had such a bad migraine I could barely do anything while he sat next to me and applied for his internship. All my advice or input ranged between 'that's great', 'just be patient', and 'well, fuck them then!'. Once we left behind the need to be employed we moved onto the 2012 Need For Speed Most Wanted, though I didn't play because of the migraine. It was a lot of fun to see them struggle for gold in all the races, especially the police pursuits in a Ford Raptor. Piece of shit truck. I made semi-fancy beef sandwiches.
Thursday was a pretty great day for my comic because I finally finished up the sample page. It's not actually what I want the end result to look like, I really don't like how the top splash looks for example, but it's a good start.
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| Sample page. |
I put together a mini-process thing about how I'm gonna keep the work going. Quite happy with it so far, it fits my slow-ass pace. I really want to blog about my art and projects and shit on my site but I still haven't figured out how I'm gonna put a blog on my site with tags and shit so I'll make room for some of that here for now.
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| Comic pipeline. |
Otherwise, Monique stopped by earlier and told me about a massive fire that broke out near Biscarrosse. Something like 40,000 people were already evacuated. It's the end times, man.
Friday was the wildest day of them all. I started the day amazingly for myself by finally watching Blackberry and then we popped by the store for drinks. Film night was scheduled for around 7 and guests start appearing one by one in ten minute intervals. First comes Hisham, consistently punctual, and we chat some shit about games and movies. Then it's Tom, crop top paired with full-length jeans, nevermind that it's 35+ degrees. A bit later Abde arrived as well and the party was on. The first thing we had to do was actually pick a movie: I had three candidates ready. Nightcrawler (Abde's pick), Good Time (Hisham's pick), and Office Space (my pick). Tom gave me shit straight away because the movie I wanted wasn't made between the years 2010 and 2026. It was an arduous voting process after which we finally settled on Good Time. The movie was awesome, there were snacks a-plenty, I burnt the pre-cooked pizza twice. Nice.
Tom comes in, smelling like an ashtray after his smoke break and I tell him that. He's like, no, it's all the smoke outside! The what outside?! Well, outside was covered in a grey haze while the sky was turning an apocalyptic red. Turns out the fire Monique told me about has gone through 20,000 hectares and the sea wind brought the smoke inland as far as our town. If you stood at a specific angle you could get a strong whiff of it like someone's burning rubber right next to you.
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When you're in an RPG guild with no cohesive theme... |
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| Three counts of socks with crocs. Jail. |
After some hanging about we went back indoors, Hisham went home and Mo, Abde, and my sister sat down to play PUBG on their phones. My sister and her friend 2v2-ed Abde and Mo and these two grown ass men gloated over these teenage girls every time they won like it was the Olympics, celebratory cheering and whooping abundant. Let them never forget this. Me and Tom are old and play games the olden ways so we booted up some Halo and kept playing the campaign. On Heroic! When we walked Tom home the smoke was already gone but the moon was blood red.
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| Game time. |
On Saturday Tom was participating in a charity tournament in Dead By Daylight with a streamer he mods for so I tuned in to see how it went for them. They got bronze! I don't understand how DBD works, like, at all. I guess it's fun. Otherwise it was a pretty unproductive day besides the fact that Mo watched Office Space with me in the morning, he hadn't seen it before. I love that movie. Now that I've seen Blackberry, I wonder if all the parking lot scenes were even a little related to Office Space. You know, sports car versus Toyota Corolla. Maybe! Because when Glen Howerton was doing the whole shark-salesman thing on Jay Baruchel I was like, wow, this is just like Glengarry Glen Ross. And in the next scene Matt Johnson's like, Glengarry Glen Ross this guy! Hah!
Spent most of Saturday night freaking out about the fires that are now 30km from Bordeaux and places like Cestas are already getting evacuated. The smoke is unavoidable where we are, its putrid and with the doors closed its still all over my room. The more potent it gets the more I feel like a bunch of bare nerves or something. Paranoia is one hell of a drug.
We got rain in the early morning on Sunday. I spent a lot of time working on something that didn't end up how I wanted it to. Unfortunate. Re-watched Blackberry with my brother and my mum.
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| The end. |
Week from hell. Kind of. I had a lot of fun to be honest but all this fire shit is disturbing. Makes you really realize that when nature wants to wreck your shit there is nothing our scrawny asses as humans can really do. The few of us who are directly responsible in my eyes deserve it, but most of us don't.
This Week I'm Excited For...
Next week is my brother's birthday. I ordered a gift for him and it still hasn't come in the mail... getting nervous. I'd be real excited to see it next week!
Song Of The Week...
Really annoying thing happened where for some reason YouTube wouldn't let me keep adding songs to my playlist post-200 songs. So I've had to break up the 365 playlist into Side A and Side B. If you're checking it out in the playlists tab make sure to flip this fat ass cassette for the recent picks! Song of the week is more Weakerthans with one of my old favourites, Civil Twilight. Oh Ontario, Oh Jennifer Jason Leigh (just saw her in Good Time!).
