selja@hepta

hey

been having thoughts of writing here for a bit now and i'm sure i had ideas too. but they went somewhere. 's fine.

backpack

remember when in march i said i wanted a mid-size backpack? well, i did get the one i mentioned with an internal frame. and i got the aluminium frame for it. and it's pretty good! the intent i got it with was that i could use it if i go to a camping event again, but for reasons i did not end up getting tickets for Electromagnetic Field, the next such event i woulda liked to gone to (the reasons are mostly "they ran out and by the time refunded tickets became available for purchase i had decided not to"). so i won't be doing that for another year at least - they have another dutch camp in 2025 and we'll have to see about that

i've tried the backpack out though, and the frame definitely helps in moving load off my shoulders when there's any considerable weight inside. so that's good - that's why i got one with a frame. neat!

moving

i'm gonna end up moving some time next year. honestly ive been expecting that i'd have to move any time now for like... idk, three years? so it's good that afaict i'll only have to be doing it next year. and instead of it being an "i'm getting kicked out" situation like i feared, it's the case that i've got a place lined up. it just won't be available until some time next year

now, this'll uhhh be some trouble since i've lived where i live now for a good long while. like, most of a decade. and i've never actually moved much Stuff before. but even more importantly, the place i live now is, like, unimaginably cheap. the next place i'm moving to is affordable, sure, but a napkin estimate is that moving there will straight up double my living expenses. these expenses currently take up a manageable third or so of my income, and i don't exactly look forward to that getting doubled! but it's possible that i'll be able to just Work More and significantly increase my income as well. we'll see, i suppose.

other than the trouble though the new place's pretty nice. it's a little bigger, maybe i can actually fit my stuff in there and still have space to, like, do a thing. i'd say "have people over" but i'm not much for that and also none of my friends are local. long as the moving goes well - probably early next year, so it's gonna be winter and that could go any which way - and i get the income sorted, this should all be fine.

hobbies and projects and stuff

still on my photography stuff but i've pretty much fallen off everything else.

i'd still like to make stickers! if you have any ideas for, or (gasp) would like to collaborate on making stickers of crows or something, do contact me! see the meta section for how! (this is spoilers for the meta section!)

software projects are on pause - though as usual i've started a new one as well. it's an idea that's been rotating in my head for a while now, namely, some kind of solution to cataloguing the stuff i have around. partially it's for the move and partially it's just because sometimes i genuinely run into a thing and go "huh i didn't remember i had this" or i wonder where i keep a specific thing. some kind of repository of information about Stuff I Have would just be convenient. a spreadsheet could work, but a spreadsheet would get unwieldy with how many different kinds of things i want to track for various features. like, as an example, if i add a focal length field for camera lenses, i probably don't want that for every other object, too! i might post more about the scheme when i've got it figured out in more detail.

i guess i've been catching up on my magazine pile, but i'm like two years behind and it's not very fast. also, like, what can i say - i also just don't have the same kind of enthusiasm for a very tech-optimistic computer hobbyist magazine as i did in 2014. i'm bitter and old about computers, now. i really should catch up faster on the poetry one, though!

the next section, though, details stuff i have been up to date on... because it's stuff i've read and listened to and whatnot. i'm just not counting it under hobbies.

stuff i like recently

music

going back to my post from march again, i'm still listening to the beths a lot! though instead of having Expert in a Dying Field, or Knees Deep, or Future Me Hates Me stuck in my head it's usually I Told You That I Was Afraid, or maybe Out of Sight. the beths are genuinely my most listened to artist this year i think, which isn't like unusual for a band to be but it's fun to think about.

other than that i guess i've listened to like... left at london, and a couple songs by she/her/hers. you may already know about left at london - i kinda expect you to, if you've found your way here - and She/Her/Hers is an album by the band of the same name and it's got some real catchy songs on it, such as the opening track.

and then just random stuff. like, literally i will queue all tracks from my music library, weed out a couple ones that i don't want to listen to right now, dequeue rest after a certain point and then listen to the 20-80 track playlist i've just created. is this a good or reasonable way to listen to music? who knows, but i do do it.

reading stuff online

also, i have been reading stuff online. one of the things i've been reading is this scifi story called Time To Orbit: Unknown. it's been running since mid-2022, updates twice a week, and i guess actually i've been reading it for at least half a year, now? but i still keep up with it regularly and i think it's worth mentioning. note that that link is a link to the first chapter of the story - if you go on the front page it shows you the latest chapter by default, and there's a lot of things that you'll get spoiled on if you read the latest chapter. i'd advise starting from the beginning!

i also keep up with a bunch of webcomics to this day, of which i will higlight one in its own entire subsection. i won't mention the other ones in particular, because i dunno if i can in good faith recommend them to people who haven't already been reading them for years!

webcomic: nothing doing

the one thing that i specifically wanted to highlight in this blog post: i've been reading this webcomic called Nothing Doing. as the site says, it's a "comic -- about hating your job and loving your friends". it's been running for a bit over a year, and updates irregularly. and i'm thinking about it a lot!! sometimes i will just remember the king of sales (he is the king of sales. he is autumn's enemy. he might also be my enemy?).

i think a lot of my enjoyment of this webcomic comes down to going "yeah me too buddy" at the characters a lot. like, it's not that i do logo design for 20 weed paraphernalia shops per month, or write search engine optimised marketing blog posts for a small software company, but the general vibes of the comic just align with how i feel. it's nice. it may sound like an extremely mundane thing but i dunno if i've really seen anything i feel this way about for a while

i think i'll be keeping up with this one. as for how long i've been reading it... i dunno, probably like a month on purpose? but i happened to run into pages of this comic at several points, including some of the early ones, so i guess in some sense i've been irregularly reading it since the beginning.

there's 32 updates so far, so i guess on average that's two or three updates a month? there's an rss feed (it's really RSS too rather than atom, which shouldn't matter to most clients but might be worth nothing) and it's also being crosspost to multiple social media, some of which you may be on (you can find the links on the website).

rating: yeah out of yeah. not a long read and, yknow, the worst case situation is that you'll bounce off a funny little webcomic. i think you should at least take a look!

funny pony addendum subsection to stuff i like recently

i've just accidentally ended up following a lot of people who post about my little pony friendship is magic, a show i never got into despite being in circles where people got into it. i was already listening to pony music too since i got recommended it recently so, sure, why the hell not. entering my pony era in 2024?

meta etc

still no comment system. i'm genuinely gonna make try to make that bad idea smtpd thing at some point.

however for now i've rolled a fresh new free email account at protonmail specifically for blog comments, and it's heptagram-agency+blog@protonmail.com. that email is not currently being used for anything else so i feel comfortable putting it here - a spambot finds it, yknow, whatever.

this may change in the future - for instance i might make it so you need to put a post-specific identifier somewhere in there to reduce general spam - but for now that's what it is. it's not automatically baked into blog posts but i'll put it on the about page while i publish this post. i'll also update the about page while i'm at it - it's kinda empty.

so send your comments in via email if you'd like! i'll try to remember to read them and put them in the next post in some kinda mailbag section if i feel like it. either in the next post, or edited into the current post. remember to mention how you'd like to be named, if at all, etc. etc.

also, i've gone back and added some new tags to some older posts. i might do this from time to time if i feel like it's useful. when i make changes, even if they're just tag changes, i do update the "edited" date, so if you see an older post that has an update date from today... that's probably why.

kisses

mwah