---
title: "2023-05-10"
date: 2023-05-10
---

### more stuff that i've been thinking about

#### series of photos of oil rigs
[link](https://twitter.com/FedeItaliano76/status/1650871570137600000)  
![](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FulCfAMXsAEEn2P?format=png&name=900x900)  
if you dont think about the environmental impact these are so fucking cool. oil rigs have this particular hyper industrial look to them that you dont get in many other places and would make for an excellent inspiration for other industrial drawings. it's like hyperconcentrated cyberpunk vibes.  

#### organisation postmortem
i mentioned my bullet journalling technique in my post [on organisation](/blog/on_organisation) and how i sort of skip the larger scale life planning, instead keeping them in google calendar and records of past events in my journal. i do wonder if i should try bullet journalling properly because A. it would allow me to keep more of my thoughts in one place where i can bounce them off each other and B. it would force me to keep my bullet journal at hand more often instead of leaving it in the other room accidentally. dropping google calendar does have the downsides of taking info off the cloud (chance of data loss if i misplace the book) and a lack of noisy notifications to tell me when an event is happening.

a friend of mine also started using evernote and likes it a lot, which makes me wonder if i should get in on it as well. i do know that i dont like taking short term notes on a phone because theres more fuss involved than just scribbling something down, but there might be some benefits i havent experienced before

i also stumbled onto the concept of a commonplace book which seems interesting, but the concept seems a little hard to nail down. i think it might actually just be "a book you put your thoughts and notes in" which i actually already have via my second field notes: this one contains my journals in the back, but also movie notes, shopping lists, recipes, napkin maths etc.  
![](/_assets/img/blog/commonplace_book.webp)  
<sup>these are my notes from my recent playthrough of fez, where i foolishly tried to translate the in game language before the part where the game just tells you. i cherish how it looks like absolute crazy person scrawlings</sup>

finally, i did a bunch of reading and testing to find a game tracking system that i really gelled with. i tried grouvee, rawg, gg and [infinite backlog](https://infinitebacklog.nl/), and eventually settled on last one. the kicker was the too much / not enough information ratio that infinite backlog seem to nail, as well as having a "now playing" list on the home profile page, a-la anilist. i like to have easy access to the games that i'm currently working towards, and that didnt appear to be a thing for most of the other options. a close runner up was [gg](https://ggapp.io), which is made by a single passionate dude, and has a nice visual design with quite a lot of creature comforts. my obsidian needs a downsize in general, so hopefully moving the game tracking elsewhere will help in keeping it exclusively to the things that benefit the most from being saved on a simple markdown editor. the two other big ones are music ranking and my rolodex; the former could maybe be done by creating the worlds most simple rym account, and the latter by migrating all of my personal notes to google contacts or some other service? maybe?

#### camping
i went camping a couple weeks ago for the first time in forever and it has cemented my feeling of "i don't really get camping unless you are specifically going out to do something (like climbing, fishing, bird watching etc). camping is fun for a day, especially as a way to reset yourself with nature and chat with your pals for a bit, but i feel like i dont have enough interesting things to talk about for more than a day at most.

#### feeling this
[a little bit of art motivation for ya](https://www.tumblr.com/marciaillust/715501347033792512)

#### stickers
i recently got an excellent deal on a super cool sticker from [sealdeer](https://ko-fi.com/sealdeer/shop) (their tumblr is [here](https://sealdeer.tumblr.com/)). im a huge fan and stuck it straight on my new sketch book, as well as some spares i had kicking around in my stationary box  
<img src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/8bf7fb1cbbdeebbcc7d11fe91b50050a/ad1bc4ef7d14ef49-f1/s1280x1920/fc90acad0e03bbef776621cc7ce920c0f78e41d7.jpg" style="width:320px"/>  
this got me really psyched on the idea of becoming one of those sticker people that i hear so much about, but i very quickly ran into the dilemma of sticker purchasing: i'm not super aware of any local events that really do them besides horribly overpriced conventions, and your two online options for buying stickers is redbubble and etsy. etsy's real issue is that you have to get each sticker shipped individually, and because a lot of people dont seem to configure their shipping settings that means a single sticker can cost like five bucks to ship domestically. redbubble lets you do bulk orders which brings shipping down to being a non-issue, but the quality is not as nice and there are other fun ethical issues with buying from them. 

#### look back
i really enjoyed reading both chainsaw man and fire punch last year (two serials by tatsuki fujimoto). theyre these crazy raw experiences that separate themselves from the tropes of manga in a way i hadn't really seen before. the content is of course kinda grim and regularly unsavoury, but i like to think that it scratches some of the same itches as zombie media: what are the effects of human beings being put in intense and awful conditions and being forced to fight for their lives without the modern expectations of polite society. the result is a resounding "it's not that good for most people involved" but it also has some moments of pure wonder and positivity as characters manage to make a happy life despite their circumstances

some time this month i was pointed to another of fujimoto's works, a one-shot called look back. it tells a really interesting story of a pair of young artists writing their first manga together, and touches on the feeling of looking back at the past and wondering what could have been. i don't want to spoil anything, but it's a five or ten minute read, and as always it is incredibly well illustrated

#### journal.html
i added a couple of new static pages to the blog in the last month: [journal.html](/journal_html/) and the [infinite nightmare list of artists / pieces / references / things i want to draw](/infinite_nightmare/). journal.html's main use is just to give me a super simple place to record updates to the site and really minor stuff that i'm doing that shouldnt require a full blogpost. the infinite nightmare is sort of a catch-all for art things that i want to return to because i think that they could be useful. for individual posts i will try to keep that to my pinterest (which is currently going through a reorganisation) but this page gives me flexibility to add things that can't be put on pinterest (whole artist pages, nsfw / nude models, wear.net for some reason). it also gives me everything chronologically, meaning that i can see what's been on my mind in the past