been friends with a pen

(I have recalled that one can title posts and that once upon a time I did that more frequently xD should get into the habit again, it's fun)

1.
The storm will be rolling in today (probably snowfall starting late morning/noontime), with projected snowfall of over a foot, heaviest in the late evening/early night.

It is unlikely that I will be working tomorrow, based on this. It was one of the big things folk were talking about on Friday! "Do you think you'll make it in on Monday?" on everyone's lips, and the answer was usually "idk, depends on the plows/roads" with a side of "it'd be cool if the work site shut down though, then we could just relax and not think about it". [ETA: Foreman sent out a text saying that we indeed are not working tomorrow "Stay safe, enjoy the weekend, GO PATRIOTS", because obvs everyone also needs to care about Patriots vs uh I think Broncos...? tbh I'd be cheering for the Broncos but really I simply do not care about football enough for that. xD]

New England is pretty good about dealing with snow, so I'm not particularly worried about the storm. Got grocery shopping done ahead of time, I live in an apartment that's fairly well insulated, etc. Shouldn't need to go anywhere until the snow has stopped and the streets are clear.

(A police car just drove slowly down the street, siren on, for the purpose of annoying the people who left their cars on the wrong side of the street into moving said cars to places that abide by the parking ban. I expect that in another hour I might see tow trucks if they haven't. This doesn't happen for normal snow bans—the plows just go around them and leave them a bit buried in snow—but, well, this storm is RATHER BIG and I see why the city would rather that not happen.)

2.
At work on Friday, end of the day, I was about to wrap up when the back door for one of the elevators opened (this is the one that we Do Not Use) and the woman who operates it stuck her head out and was like "I haven't seen you at all today! How're you doing?" at me.

I proceeded to have a Very Normal Conversation with her and then, after she left, my coworker/cohortmate was like "were you FLIRTING with her?" and I was like "No??? Just because you (probably) do doesn't mean I am?"

however upon further review I'm like "yeah no the way I interact with her absolutely could be read as flirting" and also a bit "huh she did not need to start that conversation at ALL", so, you know. (I am not opposed to flirting with her, she's cute, I'm just. too aro for this. xD in a "flirting is fun but it's not going to be serious" way.)

(also there's a bit of me going "god if I'm gonna have cute women flirt with me I want them to be queer, and I present as a dude at work in a way that means I do not expect people to realise I'm not cis/that a woman flirting with me should be a queer act" with this. like. I pass. I do not really care to and in some ways do not wish to, but it sure is useful/safe to know that to most people I'm just another dude working at a construction site.)

3.
At class on Wednesday night (I do not like evening classes! never have!) I was bored for like... all of class... because I already understood what we were going to be doing (I knew this from the week before). Which meant I was drawing, because Why Not. Pencil and paper, that day, because it was a practical class and having a sketchbook out was simpler than having a tablet out.

The teacher, when he came over to be like "so you're bored", was like "nice art", and then one of my classmates was like "wait, is this what you do during class all the time? I thought you were taking notes. you're good!" and another was like "dang, why didn't you go to art school?"

It's... odd. I do not think about my art as particularly good, due to having friends who do art at a (semi)pro level and following a lot of pro artists' work. But yes, objectively I am a Skilled Hobbyist? I can generally draw things that look like what I want to draw? If I focused on practice (especially doing life drawing studies) I'd get better faster but... I'm still pretty good at this, yeah.

Anyway during class yesterday I took the design I was working out on Wednesday ("that looks like Nami from League of Legends", one classmate said, which I do not think is true except for the "looks like a water-person" aspects, but that's sweet anyway.) and drew him out in color to see the design better.

At some point I will name him (his baby name is Sunshine, I think, but that's not his name) and he only exists as a baby/child during the timeline as currently established, though I drew him as an adult, and I still need to write the story about his parents (and when they accidentally conceive him) but hey, here's my pretty boy who's even quarters of dragon/orc/triton/elf. xD (mild nsfw? no clothes but also no detailed genitals and no intended sexiness.)

( two images under cut )

4.
My friend and I have started watching The Story of Yanxi Palace, one of tavina's recs, and we are delighted by it. Mostly we're pointing at Our Protagonist (Wei Yingluo) going "THE AUTISM OF IT ALL" (occasionally going "haha she and Maomao [The Apothecary Diaries] would be so fun to watch interact"). We're also going "look at this bitch! (positive)" about Noble Consort Gao, wanting good things for Empress Fuca, and contemplating how bored Emperor Qianlong seems while bemoaning Qing Dynasty Men's Hair. (He has a very nice smile! He looks good bald! Except then we see his hair and sigh loudly.)

We're only three episodes in and Yingluo has already caused so much chaos and trouble. It's great. This is such a wildly different vibe from the last show we watched (The Story of Minglan), but both shows are gorgeous and care so much about MATERIAL GOODS and this one in particular is set in a SPECIFIC TIME in such a way that one could in fact look up more about the styles of dress and meaning of earrings/hairstyles/etc.

5.
I thought I had another thing xD uhhhhh some rapid-fire stuff since apparently I don't want single-paragraph sections otherwise:

a.
Still slowly watching ST:DSC. xD s3e4 was a meditation on how Trill work now and how Adira is a very cute character but also very much A Teen and meant to be relatable to teens more than me, an adult. More interested by how Discovery has a personality and watching the bridge crew (plus Georgiou) have a dinner party that goes bad and then make up with each other. And Michael not following strict Starfleet protocol.

b.
Reminded myself, this week, of the difference between talking on the phone for "migraine means I can't look at screens but I am BORED and I wanna talk to you" reasons vs "I am awake and wanna hang out with you but there's stuff I gotta do that requires my body but hey I can talk on the phone while I do that" reasons. It's a lot nicer when one's a person and not a lump, oddly! One feels a lot more like they're participating equally in the conversation that way! Wow! Such surprise!

c.
The remix event (seasonalremix) that hafnia and I are running got SEVEN WHOLE SIGNUPS (including the two of us), which is tbh pretty good for the first time we're doing the event and how it's a rather atypical sign-up/event structure (and that we weren't promoing it particularly hard). It's a good number for hand-matching, too, since there's variety but not an overwhelming amount of data to sift through. Excited to see how it'll shake out!

d.
I wanna work more on writing Rhei and Ames' story (since, y'know, I now know what their son is gonna look like :P), and as part of that have started writing down my mental outline/figuring out a timeline. Might post excerpts here as I write, once I get to actually writing? It's fun sharing things as I go! And also with dw I do not need to worry about character limits the way I sharing bits with friends on discord. xD