ELSEWHERE

Yesterday I watched a video about the author of a cult-classic children's book (The Lonely Doll, Dare Wright) and that got me digging into some stuff from my childhood, including finding a couple of books that aren't, like, among the Standard Childhood Books and which I couldn't remember the titles of -- Barney Beagle, a book about a puppy in a pet store watching all the other dogs get adopted before him (related vocal tic: "Anyone can see THAT"), and Gordon of Sesame Street Storybook, a Sesame Street book that features zero muppets but does feature a child almost burning to death. That one terrified me as a child and I definitely remember the related splash page of a person standing at the top of some stairs that have been engulfed in a blazing inferno as being much more vivid than it turns out to have actually been. I actually would not be surprised if there as an original printing with different art that scared kids so they re-illustrated it for subsequent editions, every copy I can find online does seem to be from a second printing and there's very little information about it out there in general, but even if that's the case I'm sure my memory of it is embellished from reality. I also didn't remember the plot or the rest of the book particularly well, but I do remember not reading it very much, only being morbidly fascinated with this image that scared me. Like I remember the other stories but not as connected in any way with the fire story, nor with that part of the fire story being connected to the rest of the fire story, if that makes sense.

I also dug up The Secret Island of Dr. Quandry, a game I played on a teacher's computer during lunch in middle school, in which you as the player character are turned into a Kewpie doll and trapped on an island full of puzzles to solve. I never finished it because I never really had time for it, even when I dug it up again as an adult a couple times, but today I played it through and it's pretty alright. Pretty average fare for the time, I think, decent puzzles and terrible controls and corny writing.

Oh man I just went digging for another one I could never remember the title of -- it's about an ink monster that a kid ends up trapping in a bottle, which unfortunately mostly gets you Simon's Book and some other 'ink monster' related results, but not the correct ink monster -- but today I had some luck and have discovered it's The Yucky Monster by Arthur Roth and Tom O'Sullivan. Unfortunately it is not on the internet archive and I'm kind of tempted to grab it for cheap from somewhere. Then I could put it on the internet archive.

Okay I'm getting yelled at because I haven't pilled the cat like I said I was going to, so I'm going to go do that.

Man managed to sleep at about three buy then woke up an hour later and haven't been able to fall back asleep again

Oh yeah I forgot my insomnia always gets worse when I'm in language brain

Paid college fees. Should hopefully get a transit pass code tomorrow or so

Last time I was in this professor's class, she got the canvas up about a week and a half before class started, so if that's a pattern it'll be a couple weeks from now. I'd love to see a 'this is what I expect you to already have down before starting this class', but in the meantime I'll just keep at what I'm doing

 
Last time I was in that professor's class was when I had Oz on raw again. She was doing so well on it before it turned out the fridge was breaking and all the meat was going bad. I feel awful for putting her through that. I wish trying it again were an option.

Everyone in this room is a sleepy little guy

Transit pass got

House centipedes really are just fucking wild looking

As far as I'm concerned august and september are the same month

Today ash and I watched the Until Dawn movie -- it's bad! But kind of fun, but not fun enough to recommend it over how bad it is -- and then we watched a Taskmaster and a Nanalan and then I went back to my bedroom.

ash finally tested covid negative yesterday; I was cycling through four masks while we were isolating, so I'm going to run through each of them one more time and then I'll test myself for covid and then assuming I'm negative and neither ash nor Erik are getting symptoms I'll consider the house officially covid-free and stop taking in-home precautions. But for now I'm hanging out with ash and doing stuff out of my room, but still masking.

Super tired, not enough sleep. Have taken a few pretty down, do-nothing days so I hope tonight to go to sleep at a decent hour and have energy and awakeness to do stuff tomorrow, like resume Japanese study.

I started playing Abe's Oddysee again a couple nights ago -- the save system in that game is so frustrating that I honestly don't want to turn the game off and risk turning it on and having it load up a checkpoint half an hour away from where I actually saved it, so I just left the game running and put the steamdeck to sleep.

Supposed to hit triple-digits again next week, not looking forward to that. We've had a bizarrely mild summer so far, though, so we're due some hotter temperatures. Hopefully we don't end up with a heatwave, fingers crossed and touch wood

touch fucking wood for no more fucking covid.