Two Years Of Blogging {Week 31}

Happy b-day to the blog! Yeah, finnyfoto is now 2 years old! Woo! Pop the children's berry-flavoured champagne, woo! Like with my site (which turned 5 this year), I think this blog is something I'd be doing regardless but it's so lovely that I have occasional readers. In fact I even have 2 regulars (thank you, Alice and Ari!), which is honestly way more that I imagined because this blog is totally incoherent. 

Anyway, it's a whole two week of birthdays actually, because the week also ended with my brother's b-day and Tom's b-day is next week. Lots planned, lots to do!

Week 31.

Had my last meeting with my France Travail counselor on Monday. We reviewed all the job trainings, workshops, and interviews I went to and concluded that things are on track. Despite this fact I am still unemployed. And very sad. She's sent my CV out to a bunch of spots locally but I haven't heard back from a single one. Guys, I really don't wanna go to Bordeaux every day... I realized this after realizing that just getting to the station is one hour (like, duh) but I would probably have to travel another 30-40 minutes in the city. Nooooo! Since there was nothing else to do she kind of just sent me off with a wish for good luck, 'whatever. go my scarab'-style.

More importantly it was this blog's 2nd b-day. That's right 2 years of weekly blogs, literally never on time but also never incomplete. I was tempted to buy a small cake but I am so broke after I bought my brother's gift and we still haven't been paid for the kiwi job so I'll leave that for next year. Here's some cats:

So rat like...

Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday were quite normal, except for the heat wave, and I spent a lot of the time doing the thumbnails for the comic. I've got 15 scenes total, all varied in length but with an approximate count of 10ish pages per scene. Some much shorter. I'll post a few more previews on the blog but as I get more into the meat of it I'll keep the actual comic for when the first chapter is done in it's entirety.

I don't usually post memes or anything like that here but these have been cracking me up a lot recently. Plus more Yoshi:

So true, twinkhole-destroyer.

I feel like this a lot.

Dusty as hell!!

On Friday, Mo's gift luckily arrived at just the last second. We did a bunch of pre-birthday stuff like decorations and the cake. It was also the last day of Artfight, though I stopped a few days before that. Got really tired this time around.

Saturday was Mo's b-day, the big 24! He got up so ridiculously late, like at 11 or 12. First thing was of course the presents. 

Da birthday boy!

B-day!

Followed by breakfast and after a small break (we're not animals!) we had the cake and spent time dicking around (mostly doing some Magnum PI cosplay with the shirt). We also caught up with the most recent episode of Silo.

Tactically ascertained the cake.

Everybody turning 10 every year (we re-use the same candles).

So I got him the Art of Dishonored 2 which was a bit of a mess because the bookstore in Agen listed it as available but turns out they didn't have it. They had to order it in, assuring me in messages the whole time that it would arrive safely and securely. It sure did! My sister gave him an abundance of treats and snacks and his very own Hawaiian shirt. I know white nationalists in the US are trying to co-opt them now or something but they can seriously suck my dick about that. That is meant for the general public and very badly disguised "covert" CIA operatives. Er, I guess the CIA and white nationalists are kind of synonyms...shit...

When you got pool party at 5 but destabilizing foreign governments at 7.

Tom arrived with Monique shortly after that. She drove all of us to her house and we went straight for the pool. The whole b-day arrangement was kind of ridiculous because Mo asked us to have a very small party, better if it wasn't a party at all, since the start of the summer, no big extravaganza and not a lot of guests. But then Monique invited us to hers, but that's fine because she's basically family. But then we were like, we should probably invite Tom too! Oh, but if we invite Tom it will be weird not to invite Naomi (who will bring her mum and brother, surely), she invited Mo to her birthday, so... And we should probably invite Hisham too and his parents will come as well. And then Mo was also like, I wanna invite Noel as well (who's his boss technically, which is hilarious on it's own) and his wife too. So long to the small event thing then! But it was more fun with everyone over anyway. 

Dinner was delicious, BBQ chicken and vegetables. Tom forced me to download this astrology app he's into to see our compatibility. Considering he's gay and I'm gay I could probably figure that one out myself but alas.  

Deep discussions.

L to R: Tom, me, Marta, Mo, Artur, Naomi, Hisham.

My star-crossed dipshit.

They are discussing Naruto, by the way.

All the 'kids' went into the garden and we had a good time shooting the shit. It got funky and strange when Hisham claimed that he thinks we live in a simulation, but not in the cringe manosphere way but in the 'advanced alien species create billions of pocket universes and observes them' way. A little cosmic horror, why not. Everyone had an opinion, acting like it's a NASA conference and every on of us motherfuckers here has credentials (including me). Once it got dark, the party died down and everyone went home. Naomi drove us in the dustiest, most vintage Toyota Yaris known to man. 

She drives.

Artur losing it.

We played some Blur and Halo 3 before everyone got too sleepy at around 1AM. I know, we're real party animals... Mo was happy, even though he usually doesn't love all the fuss and activity but I think it was a good time overall. 

Boring Sunday, everyone's in recovery. Sleep schedules totally destroyed.

End.

And that was the week. And the month! July is over.

This Week I'm Excited For...

Probably to hang out with Tom on his birthday, though I haven't gotten him anything good since I'm broke as hell right now.

Song Of The Week... 

Since we played the 2012 (a.k.a. the inferior) Most Wanted I've been listening to the playlist for the game. Not as good as 2005 but still very good, especially when it comes to the real unknowns such as The Chase by CD (or C&D).

Armageddon, I Guess {Week 30}

Hey. Weird week. Had a lot of fun, going out and hanging with friends. Watching movies. Did some art too! But all of it's undercut by local events: the fires. Two big ones, one from the bay or Arcachon and another from Biscarrosee, which is probably my favourite beach spot in all of France. Was hoping to go there this summer but it's all on fire now, that's the least of anyone's concern let's be real. Lots of people are gonna lose their homes once the blaze has passed through. Scary stuff, I don't have anything smart to say. We got smoke here but no fire, as of Sunday. I'm just fine. Only nervous.

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! 

Kind of morbid with the cutesy lanterns...

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.

Cat!

Accidental matching fits.

Cat 2!

Monique enjoying herself.

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. 

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. 

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.

When you're in an RPG guild with no cohesive theme...

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.

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.

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!).