Oh my god, posting June goals when I'm already 2/3rds through June is so dumb, so typical. Anyway, let's pretend summer just started. I'm gonna bring this up a lot but it's the bomb when a month starts on a Monday.
1. Artfight prep
2. Prep for Code de la route
3. Summer zine with Alice
4. Sketch for Tom's OCs
5. Pre-write Blaugust 1-10
6. Catch up on blog posts
Wow, this is coming so late. May was good but it was also hell. Between jobs, so it's really got my head in total confusion. I mean, money's coming but literally nothing else. No set time for work, no consistency. It's really fucking with my head. I used to think I was someone who thrived on my own schedule (why?? literally all evidence points to the opposite being true!) but I really need work to just be work. Clock in, clock out, forget about it. Anyway, this has seriously fucked my plans all month because I'm a borderline dysfunctional human being. Letting so many people in my life down too... not to mention all my art bullshit! Anyway, June has already eased the load a little but more on that in the actual blogs.
1. Draw 1 page (at least) of the Marmoris comic
Didn't do this.
2. Finish COTY Aug/Sep pages
Absolute art block most of the month. I'm dying.
3. Send CV around
Done and dusted. I mean, I'll have to keep sending 'em...
4. Sketch for Tom's OCs
Art block continues.
5. Blog layout for site
Couldn't come up with a final design.
6. Finish 1 movie review
First draft.
7. Mod the PS2
Done! Need to install a hard drive though because the USB method is kind of annoying.
8. Go to Witch Hat event
Due to time bullshit I didn't make it to the actual event but I did pick up my collector's edition and got the pen so I'll count it.
Started the month super strong with Sorry We Missed You, the whole situation was a little to close to home. Ken Loach is up there with Mike Leigh for me. Also enjoyed Carlito's Way. Slow movie month though.
My sister watched Stranger Things last year and she's really into it. We're rewatching it with my brother who hasn't seen it before. I think last time I saw season 1 was like a year after it was out, in 2017 or something. I'm keeping it to myself that I really, really don't like the show. It's just all tropes and nostalgia product placement. I do love Steve though.
Played quite a bit of NFS Most Wanted but more importantly me and Mo finished Halo: Reach. Very tragic Halo game, everybody dies. Except Jun. I kind of liked it's scope but wish we got more time with the characters, I really enjoy the other Spartans and Reach, the kind of societies that lived there and such.
Dude, I'm still reading a book that is essentially for kids... and I'm not done. I don't know what's wrong with that I've turned into such a non-reader in the span of like six months. Embarrassing.
Top album for this month is another Lo Pro one, this time The Beautiful Sounds of Revenge. It's very, very nu-metal space opera-like, wailing melodies. I love it so much. I think I like the grime of the self-titled a little more but there are some amazing stand-outs on this one too. If I had to pick a fave song of the album it would probably be Texas.
I don't read books or manga, I don't watch cartoons or anime. I don't know what happened to me but it's so wrong!
Full Log: May 2026
Even though I know it's all lies, time as we know it is fake. Lest you forget the 1/4 of a day that makes up the odd leap-year day every four years totally shifts the calendar out of wack! Most things aren't real anyway, so I'll let this slide.
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| Week 22. |
Monday was Pentecost. I don't celebrate anything religious so it's a holiday I'm not familiar with at all but when you look it up on Wikipedia, there's such a nice fresco of a dove that I was kind of curious. I'll have to ask Alice for the deets if I don't forget. Otherwise I was busy softmodding our oldest PSP, a 2000 in Piano Black we had for ages. It's all up to date now, with a new battery, a protective cover, and in my brother's hands. He's got a long wait time between getting to the town next door and the start of his class so a PSP is a way better choice than doomscrolling.
On Tuesday he went to his first official class and the PSP was working well so I'm happy with that. It's gotten hotter too, which is ass. I'm still in an art slump.
Wednesday we were making plans to slowly get everything down from the 3rd floor as there will be renovations in the coming weeks. We were promised a fully insulated roof this summer which would be so sweet.
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| Regal. |
On Thursday we went to Noel's and I was having a really tough time. I just didn't understand what he wanted me to do half the time and my whole body was running on nothing because of the heat. I'm gonna be real, I don't know shit about most outdoor tools. I also have no idea how pipes are set up and all so Noel has to teach us everything on the go, with varied results. On the way home we did drop by the recyclerie though and I found some great stuff. The news is these guys may be moving away soon so it's kind of our last chance to drop by and see what they're selling.
On Friday Noel wasn't feeling well so he went to the hospital and we did some work that we can do on our own and went back home. Sadly, a migraine started out of nowhere that it only got worse with time.
On Saturday Tom came over and helped us move a bunch of stuff down from the 3rd floor. After we relaxed and played some Battlefront and MW3 as usual. He picked out a movie, Gunpowder Milkshake, it was okay.
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| No idea what the context was... |
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| ... but it's giving this. |
On Sunday a brocante was in town but it was a little sparse. I saw a beautiful pack of tarot cards with fairies that I was seriously tempted by but I don't think I'll ever really be into tarot. Can one even read tarot if you don't believe in it? Or are is the aura just fucked then?
In the afternoon we drove to Monique's, we had to drop off a bunch of stuff for storage. My sister's been making my brother watch Stranger Things this past week and we just finished season one. I'm kind of a hater of the show but I'm not gonna rain on her parade about it.
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| The end! |
Well, summer's starting! And the end of the week has been cooler. Maybe it will be a normal summer for at least some time? Wouldn't that be great!
I don't know much about Julieta Venegas but I heard her song Lento in a mixtape and it's been on loop all week. It's just so nostalgic and airy. With an amazingly catchy chorus.
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| Week 21. |
Monday and Tuesday we went over to Noel's as usual and kept on working on the fence. I've recently been in a very weird art block. The new pen works great so I have all the tools I need right at my disposal but I barely sit down to draw and when I do I never finish anything. It's depressing and unlike me... art was something I could do for hours and hours.
It's making me anxious. I wanna keep working on my comic and visual novel. Plus I have to finish the Colour Of The Year calendar for 2026 and start the one for 2027 ahead of time! And I wanna take part in Artfight and I planned some drawings for Blaugust... that's a whole lotta drawing for a motherfucker who hasn't been drawing. Man, this may just be me digging myself into another hole.
All was the same on Wednesday and Thursday, been coming back really tired and the heat this week has been ruthless. Sweat rolling down my skin everywhere, it's gross! I get burned up no matter how much sunscreen I put on. And if I forget to wear my hat for even a minute, boom: migraine.
On Friday I got a rendez-vous at the dentist's finally and also dropped by the store. Forgot my hat and as predicted, I got a massive migraine. Alright, that one was kind of my own fault but still...
On Saturday we dealt with an issue that's been bugging everyone for a few weeks now. Basically, my mum's old laptop is now my sister's laptop and it's battery is inflated. I know this isn't a good thing but I didn't really think it was serious until my brother showed me a video of a lithium battery coming into contact with oxygen and burning sky-high. So, we set up a perimeter Men In Black-style or whatever and my brother took it out, hoping it wouldn't blow. Then we locked that shit up in a metal box to be disposed of safely later.
The week ended great as Monique invited us for dinner and the pool at her house. We don't have a garden or any outdoor space at our place but now I'm considering the logistics of setting up an inflatable pool on a roof. There's gotta be a way!
I'm gonna probably update the custom firmware on our OG childhood PSP next week so my brother can take it with him to play before class. I picked up a PSP 2000 in Mystic Silver sometime last year that came with some games that he tried to play meanwhile. Only issue was that for some reason, every single UMD, except Little Big Planet, was in Spanish. Meanwhile I played some more Style Savvy on my DS.
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| A good time. |
Over dinner we watched a little Roland Garros with Monique, but I don't really care about tennis lest it's in GTAV if I have to be honest. I don't really have much else to say about the week sadly, 90% of the time I was working or dying from the heat or a headache.
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| The end! |
There's gonna be another brocante/flea market next Sunday. I'm looking for my usual suspects: DVDs, CDs, some boxes. Not looking for clothes much as I feel like I have most of what I need now.
Another Lo-Pro song I'm afraid. This time from their second album, Beautiful Sounds of Revenge. I used to kind of not pay this song much attention but for some reason it really got me hooked on recent listens. A Life That's Just Begun has such an edgy but cathartic chorus. I just seriously love the vocals on this entire album and this song is one of the best samples of that.
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| Week 20. |
Monday was a work day but I was busy thinking about Tuesday and the Witch Hat event. My nerves were shaky: I was still worried that it would just be me and a bunch of pre-teens. It's why I originally wanted to bring my sister, as a kind of meat shield (and also because she loves skipping school). But alas, she had an exam and couldn't cut class to go to buy a manga with me. If you think it's pathetic for a 27 year old to live life like this you are correct. I don't have an argument at all.
Tuesday morning my brother went to another meeting with Aicha to get a spot in her class. We took the same train and I arrived pretty early before the bookstores were even open. About a half-hour after they finally opened (I didn't want to bother the employees as soon as they stepped into the store) I decided to drop in and see what was happening. It was only me, so already I began to suspect that something was amiss. I talked to the cashier and she told me that the new volume wouldn't be in until after lunch and my train was at lunch, so I was a bit screwed. Luckily, she told me that there was another store that also had the event and the volume.
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| I've arrived! |
It's a very cute bookshop, if you're ever in Agen I recommend you visit it. It's called Dans ma Libraire and it's got a wide range of stuff but sadly has a very shit website. When I got there I asked when the event would be and apparently it was at almost closing time later in the day. This obviously wasn't on any of the adverts... anyway, I got what I came for which was the collector's edition of volume 15 which for some reason did not want to get scanned. Still, it was mine in the end and I got one of the event's items (the one I really wanted), the dip pen!
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| It's beautiful... |
I met Mo on the train. Grabbed him by the shoulder and he jumped like 5 meters. Apparently when he got to the town where the classes will be there was a bunch of cops outside the station. He got stopped and ID'ed. I asked if anyone else got stopped and he said yeah, some other white guy. There's some criminal running about that's in my brother's demographic. Then again, I assume like 80% crimes are probably committed by some white dude aged 20-30.
My period started on Wednesday so I skipped work and also didn't burn myself with the hot water bottle this time. Was very unproductive, did make my summer bucket list though and I'm pretty happy with it but who knows how it will actually go. I tried not to make any huge plans this time to avoid last year's problem.
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| Summer 2026, baby! |
Thursday was much of the same but by Friday I was well enough to go work. The usual was happening: we were making more metal cage-fences filled with rocks. It was pretty good. We also had plans to hang out with Tom right after work but for some reason my cramps suddenly came back. I marinated at home a little and we made it to his house an hour late. He hooked up his PS3 to the big screen and we fucked around in Black Ops and Advanced Warfare.
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| Now that's advanced warfare... |
Uneventful weekend. The cats have been getting lazier which is a very bad sign: it likely means the heat is coming on. I don't want it to... I hate the heat, man. Like, if you think I already don't have any brain function (you'd be right) I have negative brain function in the heat. It's actually horrible...
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| Pretty clouds. |
Soon I'll run out of flashback trips to include here in the blog, because I managed to misplace a bunch of photos somehow from my time traveling during uni. We'll see if I can dig anything else up...
Flashback Trip #3: 2019 La Rochelle (+Charente-Maritime) with Mum and Mum's friend
Sometime in the late winter (or early spring?) of 2019 my mum and her friend were visiting France all the way from China as this friend was looking to buy a house in France and my mum tagged a long as a kind of consultant or something. This was years before we ever even considered living in France (and in fact, this friend was a major reason as to why we could even come to France in 2022). I was studying in Finland at the time and had a week off so I decided to travel to France via some incredibly uncomfortable and cheap flights and spend some time with my mum and see the south of France.
I was on a very serious budget so I took the cheapest flight out of Tampere that stopped in Stockholm, I had a short layover after which I flew to Paris. From there, I took a Flixbus from hell. A 12+ hours bus ride from Paris to La Rochelle that was luckily going through the night, though I barely slept with an incredibly pushy neighbour beside me the entire time. I got there in the very early morning.
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| Duck. |
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| Tower!! |
I met my mum and her friend in La Rochelle, which is a very cool seaside town and where Cousteau's research vessel, the Calypso, was held in the late 90s.
I don't remember much about all the little towns and villages we stopped in later as we'd traveled a lot by car. I often dozed off or listened to music and didn't even notice where the road took me.
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| Me with my mum's friend. |
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| Near a camping area. |
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| At some random gas stop. |
The entire trip was about 4 days after which I took the flight back, it stopped in Oslo and then I was back in Tampere. Most of the trip consisted of going house-hunting, eating at some local small restaurants, and going on walks all over totally new towns. It was a weird trip because I rarely ever travel by car but since our friend was driving it was lucky that I got to just sit back.
And that's all for this week and this very, very late entry. Another good time to repeat my favourite mantra: better late then never, always, always.
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| The end. |
Not much, maybe to have some time off to get my life in order. I have a lot of stuff to get done and a lot of things to finish up for other people. I'm really letting some people down right now with my tortoise speed so hopefully all that...
Again, I don't know if I had a distinctive song of the week but a lot of Midnight Club LA has been on my mind lately so I'd have to say that Dundy Lion by Markus Kienzl is my current choice. It's very moody and has that little motif that's so, so good it will totally become an earworm.
