Needles & Nilbogs

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, ...