drop ★ pop ★ candy

➤ All I ever post these days is pictures of stuff I've bought, but that's because I'm not doing anything exciting except buying things. The world's a hot mess and I'm stuck in treat yo self mode. Anyway look at my amazing new shirts.


(Click to enlarge) In my defense, two of these are for work lol.
Some people on social media had teased that Arcane shirt being in stores at Hot Topic but it WASN'T ON THE SITE so I basically just stalked their site until it was finally put up and then I bought one immediately. I swear they only printed like, 10 of these things because it's already out, I don't know why Riot is so deathly allergic to making Jayce merch. Or Viktor merch where he's not in his Herald form.

(Then again, the monkey's paw curled so hard on this one because there'd been leaks about a Pop Mart collab for Arcane blind boxes so I was excited to see what they'd have because they've done some cute League figures before. And they turned out HIDEOUS like holy shit. They want THIRTY ONE DOLLARS for a single blind box. Insane. They finally release Jayce and non-Herald Viktor merch and it's like a slap in the face. But you know what, good for me at least I don't have to spend money on it now!)

The DnD themed shirts are for summer reading this year! The art's by Carey Pietsch, who illustrates the Adventure Zone comics. :D The dragon one in the middle is long-sleeved, the DnD party on the right is short sleeved. They were both soooo cute I couldn't decide which one so I shelled out for both lmao. But hey, more clothes I can wear to work!

➤ I took these last two days off from work and I've been trying to use the extra time to poke away at my current fic that I should've finished weeks ago (it's for a monthly fic challenge, I'm still working on March's and haven't even started April's yet lol). It's much more "serious" than my usual fare which I think is what's been blocking me. Well that and the fact I've been very bad motivating myself to write lately. I'm going to TRY to finish it this weekend though...

➤ New game mode in Overwatch! Has anyone tried Stadium out yet? I played a few matches, it's been pretty fun so far but I'm still trying to memorize all the item perks and such because right now it's taking me forever just to go over everything between rounds haha. Also that magical girl skin line is SO cute wtf... I want Kiriko's skin so bad 😔

➤ Wrapping up this post and my coworker texts me that our nail polish order from Mooncat arrived lmao I got peer pressured into getting actual polish, originally I was just going to snag a bottle of their fast dry top coat off ysay's recommendation, but my Mooncat-collecting coworkers were like you should get some polish too...so I did. I am weak. Their colors are SO cool though? I ended up picking Antifragile and Strangeberry. Now I just need to actually stick to painting my nails more than once a year!

☆ Ahh where does the time go? I've been working on catching up with my reading page; I haven't been able to comment as much as I want, but I have been reading every post! I need to get into the habit of reading more frequently because I WANT to keep up to date but then I get lazy and don't do anything on DW for a week. Then I learn about all the fun stuff going on too late. :(

☆ The library was closed to the public on Friday so we could do our PC replacement, which we do every few years. Of course there was an issue with the server replacement in the morning which delayed things, and we ended up with a bunch of issues that we're still dealing with this week. Our poor IT guy... I don't know why they do this stuff on a Friday and then peace out for the weekend. I'm so glad I wasn't scheduled to work then lmao.

☆ I did hit up a Bath and Body Works soap sale though, they lured me in with their cheap soaps plus additional coupons. I'd been doing so good not buying stuff from them!! But I don't feel too bad because I actually use up the soaps unlike my piles of candles and creams and such. I ended up with 7 soaps and 1 hand cream for my mom that only cost a total of 17 bucks so now I'm all stocked up again. I do love the spring/summer scents, I got a lot of fruity and/or lemony ones this time around.

☆ The week between fic exchange submissions and the collection opening is so stressful I want to know if my recipient likes the fic!! I keep forgetting I'm actually getting something too sjdhfskhf so that's also exciting. I have a second exchange I signed up for so I need this one to be officially "done" so I can put all my focus into the new one lmao. It's nice to be writing again though! In addition to the exchange stuff I also wrote something short for PhoenixFlare Week. I wanted to do more days but I didn't have the time, alas. But at least I got one thing done which definitely counts as progress for me.

☆ Does anyone have any tips for de-cluttering? I reallyyy need to start a long-term project of just getting rid of ancient stuff I'm keeping for no reason, but starting is so daunting and when I actually do try to clean up, the nostalgia gets to me and I end up keeping old stuff I don't need. (Like last time I tried to make space on my bookshelf, got rid of a bunch of books, moved all my newer books into the empty space, and now it's completely full again dammit.) I know I should just start small, empty a single drawer or clean a single shelf, but I have no impetus to even take those small steps.

☆ Did about 1.5 hours of work today before we had to close for a plumbing issue lmao. I'm technically on call to go back in if they are able to re-open the building before this evening, but I feel like that's optimistic given that this has happened before and they definitely didn't fix it that quick. At least I hope things are fixed by the weekend because we have our biggest annual fundraiser party happening and I have no idea what they'll do if we don't have working restrooms by then.

☆ I took the extra time off to finally clean my bathroom and play some Honkai Star Rail. I haven't played for a while but my coworker got me hyped about Aventurine only for me to patch and boot up the game and then realize whatever's going on with him is locked behind a main story quest I haven't beaten yet jshdfskjfhs I'm still on the Xianzhou Luofu!! That's what I get for being lazy I guess. I'm probably not going to pull for him, I've had terrible luck with 5-stars in this game and I'm eyeballing Boothill even though I know nothing about him except that he's a cyborg cowboy and I already love him for that. Good luck to anyone who is pulling for Aventurine/Jingliu though!

☆ Lately my hands/wrists have been hurting even more than usual, and I know it's from too much computer use/gaming but it's basically impossible to not use a computer and stuff!! A friend recommended compression gloves so I bought a real cheap pair to try and see if it helps any. I have a feeling I'll ditch them after a couple days like I did with the wrist brace I tried BUT hopefully not. These last few days have been real bad though so I'm willing to try anything, I couldn't even work on the fic I've been writing because typing was too much of a pain. 😑

☆ While I shouldn't be spending more money so soon after my previous pin purchases (the FFXVI pins arrived a couple days ago and they're even more gorgeous in person), I'm sooo tempted by this Pokemon sweets enamel pin Kickstarter by leaphere. I've bought Pokemon merch from them before and everything is so cute, and they're a really nice/helpful seller! They've got a couple of my fave Pokemon in this Kickstarter set so I'm like oh no... I may end up pledging for a couple pins anyway lmao. I definitely recommend their stuff if you're a Pokemon fan!

☆ Good morning! Well, it's morning as I type this, who knows what time of day it'll be when I actually get to posting it. I ended up helping table at a nearby anime convention this past weekend for work, they were kind enough to let us have a table to promote the county libraries. People seemed excited to see us haha we had a bunch of other library employees stop by to say hi. I was subbing in for a coworker who had a family emergency come up so I was only there a few hours, but it was still a lot of fun. And it was interesting seeing what cosplays people are doing these days, obviously there were a lot of the big popular series, I saw plenty of Genshins and Demon Slayers and such, but there was surprisingly a decent amount of "old" classics like InuYasha and Ouran High School etc. (I was really surprised about Ouran?? I saw like 5 different Ouran cosplays, like damn still going strong in 2023 even without new content huh.)

I'm not much of a convention person, I haven't been to that con in over 10 years haha. I'd gone twice in high school and once freshman year of college so it's been a while but I'm glad it's still going strong. Hopefully they invite us back next year, I'd love to stay longer next time. (Probably best for my wallet that I didn't have a lot of time to go through artist alley, I got to do a quick run through but didn't buy anything, boo :c )

☆ The rest of my weekend was spent FINALLY finishing Persona 5 Royal holy moly. I thought the Royal endgame portion would be shorter than it actually was, and of course every JRPG has to have like a 5-part final boss fight where you think SURELY this is the end for the last 3 sections of it. But it's over, it's done, I did it! ( + )

☆ So The Dragon Prince season 5 dropped unexpectedly early? And the seasons are so short I watched the whole thing already lol. ( + )

☆ My big Star Trek quest is still in progress. I finished Picard season 3 and now I'm watching the newest season of Strange New Worlds as they come out while starting Voyager too. ( + )

☆ In conclusion...not only is it no longer morning it is no longer the day I started typing up this entry lol. But I got it done! Still haven't done a book update so note to self next post talk book stuff maybe since this post is already way too long.

☆ I am not very good at this once-a-week updating thing... I suppose not much has been going on worth making a whole post about. I did finish writing that Mal/Nikolai fic!! That only took like two months lmao. I still need to type it up and edit it and toss it onto AO3 to never look at it again, but at least it's done. I did make a new fanworks comm when I created this journal just in case, I doubt people are posting fic to DW much these days? But I might use it just because I miss having a cute little personal comm with all my stuff haha. I suppose I could use it for icons too. 

☆ The spring book sale at work was this weekend (I work in a public library) so Friday was pretty hectic. I love used book sales because you can so clearly see what was popular like 10 years ago and now people are cleaning house, I found multiple copies of The Da Vinci Code, Water for Elephants, etc. Didn't find much that exciting for me but I did snag a good condition paperback copy of The Goldfinch for a friend, then that friend convinced me (very easily) to get the nice paperback copy of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell I found. It's like 100000 pages longer than what I normally read but it always seems to come highly recommended so for a buck I figured why not.

☆ In terms of books, I should be reading King of Scars more diligently but instead I've mostly been reading manga this past week. I'm nearly done with Oresama Teacher, I've finished 25 out of 29 volumes. The story's been bouncing around a bit but with 29 volumes obviously things are going to go a little off track. Anyway it's still really fun, I can't wait to see how it wraps up so I'll save my final remarks for then.

☆ More importantly I sped through volumes 2-4 of Cherry Magic, the subtitle of which is "Thirty Years of Virginity Can Make You a Wizard?!" lmaooo yeah. I actually first discovered this on Crunchyroll as a live action drama and I watched about half of it, but I never finished it. I might go back and try to watch the rest though because the manga is super cute. The premise is that if you're a virgin when you hit thirty you gain the power to read minds via touch and the main character discovers that a guy at his office is in love with him. (Presumably the magic powers don't happen to everyone or else I feel like it would be a much more well-known phenomenon lol). Anyway it's a really fun rom-com, the MC is a socially awkward loner and the love interest is the hot popular guy at their work but he's really sweet. I'm definitely going to try and get my hands on more volumes because I must know what happens next with this.

☆ Still making my way through Star Trek DS9! I'm on season 5 now and it's actually had some very good episodes so far this season. ( + )