Chaos Attraction

Online Cons

2021-06-13, 10:34 p.m.

It's been three months since I last tried to talk to Scott. GOOD FOR ME. Maybe in another three months I'll stop caring or wanting to entirely. I've been thinking about it lately, but NOPE.

I stopped pounding antihistamines for 24 hours and the swelling is back in my foot again. For fuck's sake. Not like, hurting or anything, but enough for Loretta to comment on today, sigh.

I finished off the shawl (added the border) today, so good for me. I don't love it on me, but I guess it serves its purpose. I did wear it along with my steampunk hat during the afternoon. Then after that, I started a Tunisian crochet pattern and am now going, "Huh, why did I want to do this again? It's just weird."

This morning I spent watching more presentations from yarn stores at Stitches. The most useful one was on knitting with plant fibers, though I admit I don't think she converted me to wanting to knit with cotton and linen (especially the latter one, because "it sucks to knit with but it feels lovely when it's worn and beaten up" is not a selling point and I don't like linen IRL anyway) because they sound so finicky, fuck it.

Since this is now an "off week" for collage club, only Jade showed up and she was about done after 40 minutes. Which is fine today since I planned on spending the rest of the day at online cons!

Then I went back to Clockwork Alchemy.

I watched "Creating Western Steampunk," a conversation between two steampunk authors. "I had to learn to run a locomotive in order to write it," says one author. I enjoyed her talking about doing research for this in the 1990's "when those people were still alive." "There needs to be a reason WHY there is a steampowered ray gun," says another. "You can't just do steampunk as window dressing." On the Wild Wild West movie: "Jumping the shark might not have been the best idea." "Did I cringe through most of it? Yes." Then I got skeptical when one of them gave a rave review to Kenneth Branagh: "When he and Will Smith started doing the racial pounding on each other? Brilliant." The...what now? Not that I remember much about it. Then when she got to the tarantula...."That made me happy to see that." "I just laughed when I saw that tarantula." "It jumped the shark in a good way!" "Will Smith didn't just jump the shark, he pole vaulted it."

I watched a presentation on https://www.steampunk-explorer.com/, which looks AMAZING. It desperately makes me want to go to more events of oh, ANYTHING. He also has GREAT April Fool's steampunk magazine covers ("Queen Victoria's Fashion Meltdown," "Cthulhu's plastic surgery faisco," 13nhot new infernal devices, talk dirty in morse coe, 5 signs your guy might be a werewolf, keep the pounds off with these low fat kraken recipes, frank talk about cross-coupled oscillators At one point he was going on about trying to read people's book blurbs and translating them into well, anything comprehensible. He says they're so absorbed in their world that they assume everyone knows what you're talking about. Let me just say....NYMPH KRAKEN? ZOMBIE HEDGEHOGS?!?! "WTF is Nimbat Fire?"

Then I watched "The Delights of Shopping in Victorian and Edwardian London." After awhile I started also watching the Twitch stream of video of steampunky things at Maker Faire (from the previous show) too. Lecture on one Zoom, watching weird things on the other! Goes into fancy stores, arcades, which turned into malls, with restaurants...and then there's this line: "It could become an all-day adventure just by the addition of a bathroom." and "With tea, there are bathrooms." And "You have to pay a pound to use the restroom as a tourist at Harrods. If you take tea, you have access to the bathroom." And "once we had access to bathrooms and tea rooms, you couldn't stop us."

Then I watched "Basics in Ghost Hunting." This was a whoooooole lot of what equipment to buy (Amazon or https://www.ghoststop.com/ or https://www.digitaldowsing.com/.) Or "just start with your smart phone." Then it got into videos of weird noises and ah, orbs, whatever those are. Then they had a few investigators talking about what they find. Recommended locations: USS Hornet, Preston Castle, Meek Mansion, Oakland Aviation Museum, Mare Island, Benicia/Napa/Pleasanton Ghost Walks. But NOT Winchester Mystery House--no equipment allowed there!

Then I went to the last Stitches online hangout event: Beverly: "I did my best Robert DeNiro impression and said I don't need any stinkin' patterns!"

And after that, I went to card making class with Dawn and Loretta. I definitely made a few of them a little funky. It seemed like every time there was a green stamp, Loretta and I kept getting green all over ourselves and the paper, even before/after cleaning the stamps and ourselves. It felt jinxed. Finally, the last card--the "old goat" one--didn't involve green, and was also awesome.


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