Published on: Mon Apr 13
I have honestly had a hard time keeping up with weeknotes. The days fly by all the while I can’t take off. Initially I created this as a way to keep up with myself. There is something so beautiful to me about remembering the small moments as they happen, to keep track of them and to one day look back fondly to whatever it may be. But I had this sense of that I had to be writing for someone, whoever it is who bothers to read this. There is an inherent dishonesty to that, to imagine an audience and to believe that I must show off myself for that audience, rather than showcase how I think of my life. As a concept I think is fine, but to try to force memories of insignificant moments, to be vague about something to make my life seem better than it is, is a gross mischaracterization of myself. To have the capacity to be truly honest with myself has to have me look inward before anything else.
I finally started working on a costume for an anime convention in my city! I will be dressing up as Yusuke Urameshi from Yu Yu Hakusho, specifically his Dark Tournament outfit. Partially because I want to show off my new tattoo, but mainly because I love the show so damn much. It’s an excuse to get a Puu plushie to go with the fit… I have already gotten the shirt for it!! It was just a basic yellow shirt I found at a store, the fun part was cutting off the sleeves :0 First time I’ve ever done that, it made me feel so cool.
I ended up writing a pretty okay piece about childhood on here! Toll the Hounds keeps hitting emotional beats for me, to the point it inspires me to write. The notion of artists dying as they are forced into labour at a young age, as that childhood isn’t allowed to foster, as ideas are drowned in an adults wishes over a childs curiosity. Meant so so much to me. This series continues to inspire me in unexpected ways :).
Just to talk about Toll the Hounds some more. Again the Kruppe narration puts me in a chokehold. “Gather close, and let us speak of nasty little shits” he opens up a chapter with. Then proceeds to absoulutely tear my heart up on the notions of evil, and to hype me up on how fucking cool Murillio is. Also worth mentioning are Kallor’s sections of the book. Creating a character doomed to fail, but so motivated to keep trying. While Kallor is defintaly not a good person, it’s an interesting dynamic to explore and this book shows the kinder side of him. The Jaghuts war on death story broke him as hard as it did me ;-;
Ghost of Tsushima’s Iki Island DLC fixed all the problems I didn’t know I had with the main game. Kazumasa Sakai’s influence on his son is mildly explored within the scope of the original game, but the DLC really goes into that relationship. The isolation that Kazumasa put himself through, the distance he put between everyone, and how Jin took that lifestyle into a different lifestyle of ‘honour’. I’ve cried at a few scenes already, father son stuff always gets me.
“To live a hard life was to make solid and impregnable every way in, until no openings remained and the soul hid in darkness, and no one else could hear its screams, its railing at injustice, its long, agonizing stretches of sadness. Hardness without created hardness within.
Sadness was, she well knew, not something that could be cured. It was not, in fact, a failing, not a flaw, not an illness of spirit. Sadness was never without reason, and to assert that it marked some kind of dysfunction did little more than prove ignorance or, worse, cowardly evasiveness in the one making the assertion. As if happiness was the only legitimate way of being. As if those failing at it needed to be locked away, made soporific with medications; as if the causes of sadness were merely traps and pitfalls in the proper climb to blissful contentment, things to be edged round or bridged, or leapt across on wings of false elation.
Scillara knew better. She had faced her own sadness often enough. Even when she discovered her first means of escaping it, in durhang, she’d known that such an escape was simply a flight from feelings that existed legitimately. She’d just been unable to permit herself any sympathy for such feelings, because to do so was to surrender to their truth.
Sadness belonged. As rightful as joy, love, grief and fear. All conditions of being.
Too often people mistook the sadness in others for self-pity, and in so doing revealed their own hardness of spirit, and more than a little malice.”
- Steven Erikson, Toll the Hounds
I often catch myself thinking “Why am I sad? It’s not worth being sad about this.” and it is a mindset that I want to get away from. It’s so easy to equate sadness with a failing of character, that I am not build of a solid foundation, therefore the sadness is deserved. Quotes like this remind me that it is something I should embrace more, an avoidence of sadness will only put you down in other parts of life. To adress sadness as one would any other feeling is to live a fuller life.
🏶