I was at a party where I met Nicki Minaj’s evil twin brother Nicholas Minaj. He explained to me that he became evil because everyone liked his sister more than him, and that he knew his music career would never be as successful as Nicki’s but he was going to keep trying to surpass her anyway no matter how evil it made him.

Dolly Parton in Arlington, Texas during the Dallas Cowboys game on November 23rd, 2023.

Got it recorded that I would’ve originally taking photos, but nah! 🤷

(BTW, I’m “almost” as a “One Piece” fan myself after watching some episodes from online to Netflix’s library; especially with that live-action version that’s actually not half bad.)

Happy Birthday Fireman Sam

Thanksgiving.

A day where we are supposed to be thankful yet I seem to feel more taken advantage of than usual. All holidays seem like that the last few years.

My self esteem has gotten so low I considered not even posting anything because I genuinely feel like a bother anytime I talk or express feelings, why would it be different online?

Maybe one day I'll get fed up enough to do something about it.

Happy Thanksgiving ❤️

my name is sara. i miss my friends from the hospital, san and jaytee. san was a beautiful, big woman with dark skin and a shaved, bleach head. she was in her late 30s, and when we met for the first time she told me that we had met before. to jog my memory, she told me that the first thing she had ever said to me was that she loved me. i didn’t understand. i didn’t remember ever having met her before but i loved her too. she was close with jaytee. sweet, sensitive jaytee, a man in his early 30s with dark curly hair and olive skin. he cried often but never in front of me. he would always pretend he hadn’t been crying when i would come into the room because usually it would make me cry too and that made him feel a little nervous. i couldn’t help it. i just wanted to take his pain. the three of us would pretend, or maybe convince ourselves, that we had been a family in some other universe, in some other life, untouchable and pure. we called san “mom” and jaytee would pretend he was my older brother. she called us “sweetie”, “honey”, “baby”. jaytee taught me how to shoot hoops and during gym, he and i would dance forever in front of san, usually to smooth r&b that san requested. we promised we would find each other again someday, outside the walls of the hospital, where we could dance and talk and play make believe in the real world. but san’s landline was disconnected a few months ago. and jaytee’s number has gone to voicemail the four or five times that i’ve called since getting out. i wonder a lot if they remember me and my stories. i wonder if they secretly thought i was very sick. if they did, they hid it well. they were gentle to me. they would always ask for strawberry ice cream and extra soda and sometimes salt at every meal just to give it all to me. where are they now? do they think of me? i hope so. i hope i see them again, some day, maybe in some other life. untouchable and pure.

idk if there are any doctor who fans here but oh my good god the trailer for the 60th anniversary —

an excerpt

"Thanksgiving Theme" by the Vince Guaraldi Trio

Me and my family went to a cabin where after going through it was magic. There was no back end of it it just expanded into land which was the ghost realm for some reason where you could rent out an invisible tricycle and ride it around in the ghost realm just zooming.

Then my favorite characters showed up for two seconds to say “Yuri best girl” ( Doki Doki Literature Club!). 

The gift shop OF THE GHOST REALM sold DDLC bookmarks.

Sup, guys! Sorry again that I'm skipping another "On This Day" post share through secret blog again. I'm too busy working on my Thanksgiving artwork that's gonna be late for tomorrow or another.

At least got an alternative option for awhile; via recording video from watching Macy's Thanksgiving Parade. It was a good one to included the Monkey D. Luffy balloon float for the first time, but his straw hat gotten flattened somehow. Do hope he didn't gone mad for this. O_O;

Anyways, just dropping off from my Filipino pal's post from yesterday. Sorry if I'm missing out, but nice throwback by giving Jason a checkup with the Wattersons' kids. That's a nice thing than do crazy mischief stuff they do sometimes in their show for CN.

And that other note, it's good to hear my Filipino pal feeling alright. It's been a hard ride from toxicity/negativity thoughts we're been there; not just him or my other friends. Nevertheless, he shakes himself off and back on volunteering work once again. Also, he had enough funds so hopefully his custom PC desktop can be fix. Let's pray it will.

Happy Thanksgiving of 2023, you guys! 🦃

Holy fucking shit

Spain lied about not selling weapons to Israel.

Even after October 7th, Spain has sold more than 1 million € of weapons to Israel. Norway and Finland make it possible.

In January, Spain made headlines word-wide when the government's Minister of Exteriors, José Manuel Albares (PSOE), claimed in Congress and later again in a radio interview that Spain had stopped selling weapons to Israel ever since October 7th. Israel's intensification of violence in Gaza following October 7th meant that, on top of decades of apartheid and ethnic cleansing, between October 7th and January 23rd Israel had already killed 28,000 people and forced 2 million out of their home. In this context, many people were demanding their governments stop arming and funding the genocide of the Palestinian people, and here on Tumblr and other social media sites like Twitter I think we all saw the many posts praising the Spanish government for this.

Well, it turns out it was a lie.

According to Albares, "Since October 7th there are no more weapons exportations [from Spain] to Israel". But in November alone, Spain exported weapons to Israel for 987,000€, as was published on the Spanish Government's official website dedicated to exterior commerce (Comex). A researcher from Centre Delàs (an independent centre for peace studies) found it and published it, and it has also been verified by newspapers such as elDiario.es.

This 987,000€ worth of weapons in November was not the only ammunition that Spain has sent to Israel in 2023. In 2023, Spain exported a total of 1.48 million € in war material to Israel.

All of the weapons sent in November come from the factory of Nammo Palencia (Castilla y León), a corporation that is 50% property of the Government of Norway and 50% owned by a public Finnish business. However, even if the owners are foreigners, the ammunition was sent from Spain and thus it had to be authorized by the an organism of the Spanish Government named Junta Interministerial de Defensa y Doble Uso, whose deliberations on whether a weapons exportation is accepted or denied are kept secret. The only cases where they have denied exporting weapons to Israel have been when they thought that Israel would re-sell these weapons to the Philippines.

Spain has had a close relation with Israel for years. As published by the Spanish Government, Spain has sold 20 million € of weapons to Israel between 2012 and 2022. Spain also buys weapons and military software from Israel (for example, the Spanish Intelligence Service has been using the Israeli software Pegasus to illegally spy on Catalan activists, journalists, politicians and civil society members and their relatives to attack the Catalan independence movement), and Spain has continued buying from Israel and allocating defense contracts to Israel even after the October 7th attacks. It is very difficult to track the concessions of public contracts such as buying weapons, but some contracts have been known. For example, on November 24th 2023, Spain bought 287.5 million € of missiles from Israel. This is not unusual: between 2011 and 2021, it is publicly known that Spain bought war material from Israel for at least 268 million €, but experts say that the real number could be two or three times as much.

Spain has also continued allocating concessions to Israel. For example, on December 15th 2023 Spain allocated a contract worth over 576 million € to Israel for a rocket launcher programme. On November 22nd, Spain allocated another another Israeli company to provide missiles for 237 million € at the same time as the Spanish army bought Israeli inhibitors for 1.4 million €. The very next day, November 23rd, Spain signed another military allocation to Israel for 82,600€. The following week, Spain signed yet another allocation with a different Israeli military corporation for 3.7 million €.

Spain also allows Israeli weapon manufacturing companies to produce weapons through their branches located in Spain. This way, Israeli weapons make their way to markets with which Israel doesn't have diplomatic ties but Spain does, like Saudi Arabia. And since Spain is a member of NATO, Israeli weapons produced in Spain are approved according to NATO standards and access it easily. In the same way, these Israeli weapons manufacturers also access European Union defense funds through their branches in Spain. (source).

As I said, I saw a lot of positive posts around when Albares said Spain was going to embargo, but I haven't seen any post about how they didn't do it. I also (personally) haven't seen anything on international media, and barely anything on Spanish media, which is already busy with the PSOE covid material corruption scandal. So I share this in the hope of helping put pressure on Spain to cut all ties with Israel immediately.

SHAME ON EVERYONE WHO GIVES ISRAEL THE MATERIAL AND MONEY THAT WILL BE USED TO MASSACRE THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE. SHAME ON SPAIN, NORWAY, AND FINLAND.

Toya currently holds the record for the longest time between two unit events, with 549 days between the start of Walk on and on in September 2022 and the start of The first concerto yesterday (March 22nd 2024). However, he did have the Never Give Up Cooking! mixed event in February-March 2023, making the gap significantly shorter (only 389 days) if you include mixed events in the count.

The record for longest time between any two events is currently held by Ena, who has not received any events at all since Someday, This Wish Will Transcend the Morning Sky in November 2022. As of today (23rd March 2024), it has been 489 days since Ena had an event.

(i am seriously late in posting about this due to The Problems BUT whatever! its here now!!)

somewhere around late november 2022, i asked my dad "hey are there any out of print technical books you'd like a reprint of for christmas?"

he linked me to a dubious black-and-white pdf of Foundations of Mechanical Accuracy. now, i wound up checking out a copy through link+, and the original edition is a really nicely put together book! the chapters are themed around various types of measurements (length, angle, etc), and they all have these cute little diagrams which the endpapers reuse in a lil repeating pattern... the image captions are done in this really lovely dark red that did not scan for SHIT... tons and tons of diagrams and illustrations and images (both color and b&w)... just, all around, a fucking nice book!! (see also @morrak's post about it here.)

and that made me feel kind of bad about the crappiness of the pdf, which is where the Problems began. i used my phone to take pictures of all the photos and color diagrams in the original and went about replacing them in the pdf, using what turned out to be the world's worst pdf editing software (i also got through replacing all the image captions in chapter 1 of 5 before my dad convinced me to give up). i did NOT finish the pdf editing before christmas 2022 (i was going somewhat off the deep end, because both my housemates were away visiting family and i had zero external structure in my life so it was just me and my cat and this stupid FUCKING pdf wrecking my sleep schedule together); i poked away at it for most of the rest of my time off and then got so goddamn sick of it i put the project away for months. "it'll be a birthday gift instead", i said optimistically (my dad's birthday is in april! it should have been enough time!)

gentle readers, i did not finish the pdf editing by april. mostly because it was such a miserable slog that i put it off until the last possible moment and then tried to make up for it with another death march.

hating both myself and the project again, i decided i was Not going to let myself typeset Anything Else before it was done, and then took a break to bind my immortal (using the renegade publishing typeset! i didn't do any typesetting!!). SURELY, i said, i can finish this in time for christmas 2023.

i'm sure you know where this is going.

in my defense i DID finish the pdf editing by christmas, despite first doing every other possible procrastination project (including a second edition of the little second century warlord book), because by this point my dad had managed to convince me to lower my standards. on the evening of the 22nd i kicked off the print job and said to myself "this will finish printing overnight and then tomorrow i can work on sewing the textblock!"

late on the 23rd, after lots of babysitting and using at least one cartridge of every color ink in my printer, the print job was finally done. (my sweet and lovely cat wants SO BADLY to hunt and stalk the printer while it is printing -- more specifically, the printed pages, i think because they tend to make noise and move and then STOP moving. for this reason, the printer is kept in the craft room, because the cat can be shut out of the craft room and thus prevented from chewing on the pages when i have an all-day book printing job going. unfortunately the craft room was also being pressed into service as a guest room at the time so 80% of the floor space was consumed by an air mattress which i had to repeatedly trip over in order to reach the printer and replace the ink cartridges.)

then i went to my parents' house on the 24th and 25th and apologized to my dad (again) for not having the book finished. but this worked out well because we finished putting together my awesome new book clamp:

(the feet still aren't done being painted so they're just dry-fit on for now but you can still clamp books in it and that's what matters!!)

i came home, sewed the textblock (french link stitch over four linen tapes, with sewn endbands made of variegated embroidery floss over linen cord, and kozo paper glued over the spine)

... and promptly realized i SHOULD HAVE PUT IN MORE OF A GUTTER because some of the text was getting reeeeeeal close to the spine. "it's fine!" i said. "i just have to make sure it lays flat!! what better time than to try out K118 binding, a technique i have literally never done before and which people on the bookbinding discord notoriously have a hard time pulling off first try! i even have tyvek tape for it!"

so it turns out that tyvek tape isn't actually tyvek with glue on it, it's tape FOR attaching pieces of tyvek TO EACH OTHER, which maybe i could have guessed if i'd done even the slightest amount of research or planning. at this point i think it was the 27th and i was still angling to get this thing done by new year's, so no time to order Actual Tyvek.

fortunately, i had ALSO received An Package in the mail with yarn for a totally unrelated knitting project... shipped in a tyvek envelope.

i peeled all the shipping labels and stickers off my tyvek envelope, cut that shit up, and glued it on there.

and THEN it was time for gluing on covers, which i thought was going to be easy because i had actually thought ahead and ordered materials (specifically acid-free museum board), except when i cracked open the box of museum board i decided i Didn't Like It because the surface was too soft and easily dented, so i glued onto it the too-thin board material i'd previously been using (so that the cardboard goes on the outside of the book). this worked super well (the cardboard stuff has a tendency to curl up from the glue moisture, but the museum board doesn't!) and i'll probably use it on other stuff in the future.

i thought the blue bookcloth i used was kind of boring but i showed my dad the available cloth options and he really liked it, so... what do you know? i cut the piece i used on the back cover very slightly too short but it wound up being covered by the leather, so you can barely tell.

and the leather... a scrap just baaaaarely big enough from my bag of leather scraps from discount fabrics... and this the first time i'd ever attempted to put leather on a book... AND YET the only complaint i have is that i didn't manage to put an even amount on the front and back. it's reasonably square and straight!! amazing!!

i am super super happy with how this project came out (especially given the number of problems i encountered) and oh my god check out how much the spine bends

AND, AS A NEW YEAR'S PRESENT, I FINALLY MANAGED TO GIVE IT TO MY DAD