Needles & Nilbogs

 Spoilers abound! Thoughts are unfiltered and spoilers everywhere.  I LOVED THIS ONE SINGLE-HANDEDLY GOT ME BACK INTO THE FANDOM BRAIN

 Okay but World Burn is one of my favorite songs right now for its musicality. Just. Key changes. Accents everywhere. The way the meter gets just so much more prominent when the kids are singing, like they're getting ready to Do Something. And, really, it's just. Incredible vibes and powerful stuff.  Also the meanest thing Regina could think to call herself was fugly cow and that's. Something. (It used to be a bunch of stuff about fugly slut and whatever and this has been very very toned down I think.) Also just the way it was filmed is perfect and the way it uses the movie medium in a way that a musical can’t but keeps the musical vibes  is just so very fetch (a very good word I’m starting to use unironically) and also the social media stuff which is a perfect example of the medium adding more information in new ways. In conclusion mean girls is being rotated in my brain like a kebab. No fanfic ideas but just going around and around. 

 A list: - *everything* is green here and there’s so much water and so many trees - everything is named after a person or a place in England. There’s no saints, no “beautiful views” or “snowy mountains,” no religious names at all. - turnpikes are a real thing and not just something that shows up in a history textbook  - ITS SUMMER WHY IS IT WET WHY IS IT RAINING I DONT LIKE IT - low flow toilets are less of a thing here because, according to my father, “water is basically free” - SERIOUSLY WHY SO GREEN WHY SO MUCH WATER - wet season is all year? All roofs are peaked? Everything’s so old????? What is UP with this place????!!! - no earthquakes what the HECK - why is there farmland right outside town??? - I apparently know nothing about water. This has been told to me multiple times. 

Aka, I’m desperate for more city spies fans. 1. Found family with problems who try to do better and fix those problems In the Murderbot Diaries, Dr. Mensah and the rest of PreservationAux are Murderbot's found family. They purchase it, but because they don't have the opportunity to talk things over, things go badly and it runs away. But by Exit Strategy, they're trying to treat it better --- Pin-Lee sneaks it stuff to help it run away, Mensah explicitly tells it she handled things very badly, all the humans make sure it has time now to make its own decisions.  In the same way, all of the City Spies screw up in their attempt to become a family. From the beginning, Mother handles Charlotte badly and doesn't tell the others. Then he and Brooklyn don't tell the others about a project, and Sydney gets jealous of Brooklyn, and they have to handle so much emotional drama beyond just the stuff with Mother's family. (By the way, it's really hard to provide spoiler fr...

 I made myself a new pair of fingerless gloves yesterday!  They are Very Green.  That’s all that’s the post. 

To: My Family From: Me Subject: The Dye Jar That Has Apparently Been Molding On The Windowsill For Some Time Dear Family, Dye jar molded. So sorry about the smell and the fact that I didn’t notice for a couple months. <3 *penitent emojis* Love, Me. 

 Warning, spoilers for City of the Dead ahead! I GOT THE BOOK AND I LOVE IT. So I wrote down all my reactions and now here they are, by page number so you can avoid spoilers. No explanations no nothing. Back blurb: I am DESPERATE to know what's going on here PLEASE Page 7: Hi Kat, I love you. Page 23: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA OMG I LOVE THEM P27: Garfield is giving me magpie vibes P33: oh, Rio. Oh, Rio.  P38: awww, Kat, stop pretending you don't have feelings. Also AAAAAAAAA SIBLING LOVE and aaa this is something mb would say P49: Brooklyn's birthday is November 20th dang it this has already ruined one fic P54: HEY WHERE ARE MONTY AND MOTHER (also AAAAAAA SIBLINGS) P58: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA P64: AUTISTIC KAT REAL P69: definitely undiagnosed autism there kat my girl P74: oh, Brooklyn. Oh, child.  P77: six years since team!  P79: oooooh P80: well, guess we know when the book is set lol (post... 2017 I think) P84: IF SHE ISNT TALKING ABOUT CLEMMIE ILL EAT MY COPY O...

 I haven’t decided if I’m ever going to actually post the city spies soulmate au that’s been rattling around in my brain since (*checks draft creation date*) February of last year (technically: 2/16/22, 9:19 AM, hah), but I want the book 1 outline out of my drafts before book 4 comes out (THREE DAYS AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA), so this is a proposed outline for a city spies fic that has about 1/2 of book 1 written, all of book 1 planned out, and a loose outline for books 2 and 3.  This was the original idea: It's the one where whatever you write on your body appears on theirs in the same spot, starting at age 10, and it's just the person who completes you whether it's romantic or platonic; also, fate guarantees that it's someone you will have contact with even if that comes from finding out you're soulmates, you're always going to meet in person at least a bit. Often have mannerisms in common. Rio and Brooklyn get closer platonically through their notes while fighting in...

 Like I said the other day , I want to talk about my writing more because there’s a lot that I want to say that I don’t want to put in authors notes (usually cause I think of stuff in the shower and then don’t remember to edit it in when I’m at my computer later), but there’s also no better place to put it. Also this is an official threat (not in a violent way) that if you ask me a question about something I wrote I will answer, and answer in depth.  So this is about my latest fic, once and for all , which is a city spies and murderbot crossover, and it’s basically an excuse to do a roleswap but across universes and also to drag in multiverse shenanigans in general (one of my favorite things). Go read it, right now it’s pretty short, and while this isn’t spoilery for the fic, it doesn’t really make sense without that context. And I had this idea in the shower last night and absolutely have to talk about it somewhere at some point   This… *drumroll*… is backstory.  ...

 If you’ve been paying any attention to me lately, you might have realized I got really into writing fanfic over the summer, and now I have an AO3 account under the name BWizard . It’s really fun and somewhat easy for me, and I’ve posted a lot, but I don’t think I’ve ever really talked about some of it in detail, and I’d like to.  I feel kind of nervous about that, honestly; I write a lot that’s intended for myself, and so while it’s fun and I’m happy with all of it (or at least everything that makes it to AO3), a lot of it has an intended audience of one person, me. (The murderbot stories about the mirror universe and high school au have an intended audience of maybe three people each, one of which is me. Just like this blog, with its four or five regular readers, including me, my dad, and a Russian spambot. [Hi spambot! Hope you enjoy leaving comments I delete instantly.]) So I do a lot of writing what I want to read and all, but that also means that I don’t get to talk abou...

Sorry it’s been a while, college apps and finals and whatever, blah blah blah, okay time to YELL EXCITEDLY ABOUT CITY SPIES AGAIN (spoilers ahead I’m not gonna mark anything except the big stuff). You can find my last round of yelling about book 4 here . Okay! So!! In the last few weeks we’ve gotten a lot of news about book 4, City of the Dead (CotD), and it’s all been absolutely fascinating. From Instagram, we have: slide 8 of this Instagram post   about Ponti’s year in review [slide 8 ID: a picture of Ponti’s computer screen with the prologue for book 4 partially visible and marked up], the book trailer  and the previous trailer  [video IDs: various pictures of Egypt intermixed with pictures of the city spies doing their thing], a p iece of trivia from November 4  [ID: a slide with a picture of an Egyptian boy and a pyramid, saying “100 years ago today, King Tut’s tomb was discovered by this 12-year old boy”], and the cover announcement which is what the fir...

 Tech week happened, sorry. Brief photodump today, but I’ll probably be better able to blog starting in January after all my college apps are in — I’m thinking about maybe dumping the “only posting on thursdays” thing at least until then and probably after too, cause that’s really feeling constricting. I wanted a schedule to force me to do stuff but now I’ve gotten really busy and I should probably at least reevaluate the schedule situation.  Anyways these are all my recent projects most of which speak for themselves.

Ironically for a blog that’s on my college applications, writing college applications has mostly kept me from blogging lately. Totally coincidentally, I only have a couple of photos but they’re of something really cool!  For Halloween, I wanted to make something I could use for cosplay, and I chose the PreservationAux survey group from the Murderbot Diaries books.  The jacket is a gray long-sleeved tshirt that I cut open and sewed a zipper into, then embroidered, and the rest of the outfit is just stuff I had, except for the “feed interface” which I bought at the local ren faire.  Me in the costume Progress shots Gratuitous project and pumpkin picture. You can probably guess which pumpkin I did, and it’s not the dog.  Mirror selfie of the jacket right after I finished it. 

 So I came home from retreat with strep throat. I’ve been sick all week and so today is just a photodump from retreat so have fun with that. Lots of redwoods! 

 If you see this on Thursday, it means scheduling posts works! (If you see this before Thursday it means I screwed up.) The reason I’m scheduling a post is because I’m gonna be completely offline Tuesday through Friday for senior retreat (both very excited and very worried, none of my friends are going on this one), and I don’t want to miss two weeks in a row.  I’ve been doing some embroidery lately, and I have lots of pictures! That’s what I’m going to show you today — all of these were done at school, usually on clothing I was wearing. I did these on the inside hems of my pants during a boring assembly Flowers from when I was bored at lunch  Emergency repair for my jeans when they developed a hole in the knees; it’s a woven patch, and I’m quite proud of it! (It’s fancy because, you guessed it, I was bored. I sense a theme here.) This is part of my Halloween/cosplay plan — it’s going to be the preservation logo that I put on the jacket I’m making! (It’s unfinished as of ...

 Happy Thursday! I swear I’m not dead, yet. Just busy. Anyways, it’s almost Homecoming (actually, today is day 4 of hoco spirit week) and I’d like to share a thing I wrote. It is a gaming thing. I have been alluding to it on and off since June.  It’s about homecoming. Specifically, it’s a game about having fun with your friends at homecoming and then realizing there’s an eldritch being at the dance as well. And then figuring out what to do about it. It’s not meant to be a scary game, it’s supposed to be pretty light and cozy.  Anyways, it’s called Rock This Dance and there’s a PDF that looks all pretty and a gdoc in case the pdf doesn’t work. Let me know what you think!  (Technically this was beta read. If you call throwing a pdf at a friend who then skims it beta read. Point is, comments very much welcome and encouraged.)

Ugh, club day. Too much being a smiley person for me, thanks. It was not helped by the fact that I was running on like no sleep. (I stayed up to make triboards for two clubs, which might have been a bit overly ambitious.) Anyways, that’s why I didn’t post yesterday. So tonight I used family movie night as an excuse to project all my complex emotions about club day onto some characters from a story I’m writing. I don’t know whether I’ve ever talked about this on the internet before, but I guess this snippet I’m really happy with is a good start.  The bare minimum context is that it’s about a bunch of high school theater kids, about half of whom are magical in some way; this includes the main character, eleventh grader and threadmage María Soledad “Solí” Armijo Riveras, and her banshee girlfriend Elia Graydaughter. Everyone involved is queer and magical and just trying to get through high school, and they have shenanigans and friendship and stuff.  (CW: mentions of transphobia, ...

 Sorry about last week. Blogging has kind of fallen by the wayside, in favor of school stuff. Happy senior year to me.  Anyways, on the bright side, now that I’m back in school, I’m back to cavandoli work, aka friendship bracelet making! For school, friendship bracelets are one of my favorite fidgets because I can stick them in a pocket and work on them any time I have a free second.  Pink and purple four strand braid, green and yellow and metallic blue stripes, green and blue braided, green and blue thin candy-stripes, rainbow candy stripes, pink and gold braid, gray and blue and red asymmetrical fun.  This is my current assortment, four of which are relatively new — one was a birthday present and the other three were things I did this week.  There are a few reasons I choose bracelet-making as my fidget craft during the school year, which I thought I might briefly mention. Obviously, it’s small, and easily put away, so it’s okay to have in class. It’s also a lo...

 Today was the second day of school and I have opinions but mostly trip photos. And some from senior sunrise this morning, and a super amazing thing one of my best friends sent me for my birthday.  (Blogger turns photos sideways for some reason but) The City Spies, as drawn and painted by one of my besties!!! Isn’t it gorgeous? It’s a scene from book 1, and if it wasn’t late I’d find the exact page reference, but it’s amazing and gorgeous.  Drone on a model coaster  Beach sunset, seen through trees CA museum!  Went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, saw lots of kelp Asilomar at high tide — just as cool as at low tide More Asilomar  Beach sunset again! Meet Lilac Lavender, the purple tardigrade plush I got from the aquarium  Steinbeck museum had to have Steinbeck somewhere… CA museum again, this time the quilt Senior sunrise, spindle sunrise… take your pick! Birthday cake! Lilac in a tree at the campground Coals at night  More senior sunrise, without th...