The Male Hysteric

I've been busy this week trying to get ready to move and I was going through a pile of notebooks in the back of my closet. A lot of them were bullet journals and sketchbooks so I'm posting 3 pictures I found while packing

This was some figure drawing I did during a Shakespeare play. I don't remember the play. I think it might have been The Winter's Tale?




I think this was from when I was at a convention and there was a figure drawing event. So, I don't know what he's supposed to be but he's probably wearing a costume.



I don't think this one was "for" anything in particular but it was unique because a lot of my sketches were more figure-drawing or fan art and this one wasn't either.

Last year I decided to replace my plastic shower puff with cotton washcloths, in an effort to reduce plastic waste* and because they're supposed to be cleaner**. I spent a lot of effort knitting and crocheting each one to be unique but it turns out my favorite is one that's knit in a slightly loose garter stitch with a stockinette stitch stripe. It holds the right amount of lather, has the right scrubby texture, and has just enough aesthetic detail to not look like a messy rag. I butchered this pattern if anyone is interested in making their own.

*Bath puffs should be disposed of every 3-4 weeks for sanitary reasons. They can apparently be recycled, but recycling in western countries is a bit of a cluserfuck right now. I also don't know the exact metric of producing cotton yarn and washing it vs production of this plastic so I guess this is debatable.

**If you have enough washcloths you can just pull out a new one every time you bathe and they're refreshed every time you do laundry. Bath puffs need to be thoroughly rinsed and dried and need to be thrown out after a period of time that let's face it not everyone is good at sticking to. Let's be real, it's probably just best to use your hands.

I found a box of nail polish in my room that I was planning on giving away. On a whim I opened it up and found colors that I really used to like -- like black, dark gray, and dark blue. Figuring what the hell, they're still mine, I put on some of the black. Recently I'd only been using colors that matched my skin tone, more or less, and couldn't for the life of me remember why I had given up black.

Within two hours I'd wrecked the manicure.

When you do this with almost-invisible nail polish, you can hardly tell when you fuck it up.

I'm an idiot.

Under extremely short notice, apparently 8tracks is shutting down. I have probably a lot of feelings and opinions on this as someone who used the service a lot in the first half of the decade, but those would probably be elucidated on better in another post. Meanwhile there are instructions on attempting to preserve your playlists here. Better hurry though because it shuts down on December 31st.

My chronic compartment syndrome was to the point where I got surgery. Well, I got the first one today. They have to do it one leg at a time, about a month apart.

I was confused because I thought they were going to do typical pressure testing but apparently with my description and MRI results my doc thought that it was an obvious/severe enough case to just get right to cutting. Lucky me!



Lucky me in that I don’t have to mess with the dressing until I actually go back to see him, too. It’s kind of huge because there are three different incisions. But it’s been 9-10 hours since and it doesn’t really hurt, I have more of a headache from anesthesia. I got percocet for the pain but may not end up using any. I’m not sure if the numbing stuff from surgery just hasn’t worn off yet (they said it would in 5 hours) or I just have a really skewed perception of leg pain from this. I’ll probably be in agony tomorrow. We will see.

I just finished the book Same Same by Peter Mendelsund and I am not sure if I enjoyed it. I bought it because the cover caught my eye and the blurb sounded intriguing:

So from the blurb it sounds like a magical realism novel about the insufferable world of the people who do TED talks, cool. It’s a thick tome, 483 pages long, and I picked it up because it looked like one of those literary-like books where there would be a lot of words but not much action and because I had been going through a lot of shit in my life (and let’s be real, when am I never going through a lot of shit in my life), I thought it would be a bit of a breather. I guess it delivered, because that’s mostly what it was, but I really wish it was, well, better? Maybe more character focused, having a bit more candy flavor than pure textual flourish to keep me interested because I don’t think I was that invested until I got to maybe the final quarter of the book.

However I find that this book has a major problem. This problem is not anywhere within the covers of the book itself; rather the problem is that this book was shelved in science fiction and fantasy in every bookstore I’ve seen it, and it’s not a science fiction or fantasy book.

( Spoilers Below )

A significant portion of modern life nowadays seems to be just making sure that all one's devices are adequately charged.

My new phone has no headphone jack, so I have some bluetooth earbuds to go alone with them so I don't need to use the headphone adapter that goes into the charging port. However, using bluetooth wears down the battery very quickly and makes the phone extremely slow to charge while using the earbuds. What was the point of this, again?

Anyway, I resubmitted a piece after it was rejected. Slowly getting back onto this horse.

It’s that time of year again, and by that time of year, I mean it’s Hobonichi preview month. This is a very exciting time of year for people with a very particular interest and I am going to lead you down another Japanese stationery rabbit hole that you probably don’t know about and won’t understand.

Hobonichis are a type of planner by the company Hobo Nikkan Itoi Shinbun which was first released in Japan in 2002 and in English (and therefore overseas) in 2013. Planners in general have their own kind of hobby base that exists at this weird nexus of actually using a planner for its intended purpose, journaling, and scrapbooking, and attracts everyone from busy students to moms recording “baby’s first” everything to Every Day Carry guys. The big name planner stateside is probably the Erin Condren system, though other popular systems are Midori Traveler’s planners and the Bullet Journal, which can use any kind of notebook, along with many others. There are a few things that make Hobonichi planners stand out, and that’s the paper, the organization, and the yearly release. The paper is somewhat unique because instead of no-name paper of variable quality, Hobonichis are printed with paper that can withstand all sorts of media, up to and including watercolor. The main setups for Hobonichi planners are one page every day rather than month or weekly spreads, gearing it towards scrapbookers or very determined journalers or otherwise people who are very busy and need all the space. And, of course, every year they put out entirely new covers and designs, making each year’s edition collectible, and everyone loves collectibles. This has led to an extremely aesthetic following on sites like Instagram and Pinterest.

They are bizarrely expensive for what they are and for the year of 2019, I have two:

And yes, I do use these, though the one on the left much more than the one on the right. The one on the right is mostly for drawings, and I haven’t kept up with that much.



The one on the left is an actual planner, a book I use to keep track of things like doctors appointments, workout reps, and how much I hate myself on a given day.




Does this actually keep me on task and prepared more than actually putting alerts in my phone like a normal person? Probably not. But hey, everyone needs a hobby.

This is not a paid endorsement. I have not received any compensation for this post.

It's been a while, and I am definitely still working on this. It's very hard, but I see a light at the end of the tunnel in terms of all the other stuff in my life... though that may just be an oncoming train.

This time, I bought the February release of The Dark, and also read another one of the stories from Jagannath.

As usual, the literary magazine was hit and miss, though the best out of it was "The Little Beast". If you're interested, you can actually read this one without purchasing the whole magazine. However, as always, supporting literary magazines financially supports writers. Your choice.

I'm not a religious listener of long-running podcasts but one of my favorites is Reply All, which is "about the internet" and touches on a lot of security topics. I just got finished listening to the most recent one and it's a bit of a doozy if you've ever owned a cell phone. I bet you have a cell phone. You may even be reading this on a cell phone, right now!

(A link to the episode, because the embedded media player is not working right now. Hopefully it will be soon.)


There's a lot to unpack about what is being done with your data without your permission and what is still being done. Much of this is still very "wild west" and seems like forward-thinking regulation has not caught up, but some of it isn't, and previous protections are actually being chipped away. If you don't have time to listen to the whole thing (and you really should), I'm going to go ahead and post possibly the most damning part of the transcript here:



Why was the FCC suddenly unfriendly to consumers in 2018?

Elections have consequences.