IRL – Page 6

24 Days of Quarantine Fun – Day 15: Arts and crafts

Living in a tiny condo with very limited storage space, I’ve had to scale back pretty significantly on how many holiday decorations I have. I’m down to one big plastic tub each for both Halloween and Xmas – a far cry from the much more plentiful decorations I had when I owned a house.

I don’t know how this really relates at all to my topic for today, but that’s the intro I wrote. It’s somewhat related, but not really enough to be an actually good introduction. I’ll keep it anyway because I’m a crap writer and I want to make sure that people know that.

Anyway! Today’s goal is to root around your living space, find some craftable materials, and make yourself a new holiday decoration. Me, I’ve got a big pile of cardboard, some coloured construction paper, a bag of cotton balls, and a sharpie. What could I possibly be playing at here? It doesn’t at all seem like I’ve pre-planned a very specific project for this blog entry. No, sir.

It’s Cardboard Santa! Golly gee! How incredible!

All goofing aside, I had a lot of fun with this. I haven’t done crafts since grade school, so it was something completely out of my wheelhouse, and it’s fun to do different things once in a while. As long as they don’t require very much in the way of time or financial commitment, of course.

24 Days of Quarantine Fun – Day 14: Go for a walk

I know what you’re thinking – I’m out of ideas and sick of writing these daily entries. You’re… not entirely wrong.

But this is a real thing that I’m advocating! It’s not just filler like Elf Bowling was! I think that taking a half hour out of your day to go for a winter walk is such a nice, relaxing activity. And you may very well need it after a stressful Monday at the office. I know I often do.

I find that the best times to go out are either early in the morning, or somewhere after dinnertime, when fewer people are out and about creating a ruckus. Natural calm and quiet tend to make for the best walks. The evening is especially nice for a winter walk, when the sun is down and there are lots of decorative lights to enjoy. Even just the regular streetlights and whatnot can lend a calming iridescence to the snow-covered landscapes.

This is all assuming that the weather is decent, of course. You go out on a windy day and you’re going to have a bad time. But if there’s no wind, you could feasibly go out when it’s like -15 and not be too uncomfortable. Bonus points if there’s a light snowfall in progress.

I, in fact, went out for a very pleasant stroll on Saturday, and it was the exact day that winter really started to show up. About -6 or so, with no wind and just the lightest of snowfalls. Basically, the perfect day for a walk. If only I had spent more time enjoying the snow-covered scenery, instead of being totally absorbed by Pokémon GO. But such is the burden we bear on Community Day!

24 Days of Quarantine Fun – Day 7: Make a Snowman

Okay, so, this one may or may not be viable depending on where you live or the current weather situation. For me, there’s barely been any snow, so a snowman isn’t really an option. Also I don’t have a yard or anything so I’d have to go out into a park or something to make a snowman. Which I maintain that I would do under the correct circumstances, but again – there hasn’t really been a good amount of snow yet.

My grand plan was to make a small snowman on my balcony, posed in a way where he’s leaned up against the window, trying to get inside. I don’t know that I’m a skilled enough snowman-crafter to have pulled it off, but the dream was nice. Maybe I’ll still try it once we finally get some snow.

I did make this little snowman out of marshmallows, though. That counts… right? Lookit his li’l chocolate chip eyes.! So cute! UwU

24 Days of Quarantine Fun – Day 4: Donate!

I don’t know how many times I’m going to reiterate this over the next few weeks, but the 2020 holiday season is totally different than usual. Stores are locked down or closed completely, people are losing jobs left and right, and we’re being encouraged not to get together to celebrate. It’s not terribly conducive to the whole gift-giving tradition.

So in a world where the economy is peering over the edge of a cliff, maybe there are better ways to go about spending way too much money? Well, there’s never a bad time to donate. People all over the world are always in need of help, and this time of year is certainly no exception. This can be the year where you throw some money at an organization that will help some less fortunate people have a better holiday season. It’s the most advertised time of year to be charitable, after all.

It doesn’t even need to be money. Find some things around the house that you don’t need and take them to a donation centre. There are always food collections going on that you can chuck a few boxes of cereal or cans of vegetables into. You could go donate blood, even. People always need blood. I don’t know how many volunteering opportunities are currently available given the state of the world, but you can use some of your quarantine time surplus to look into it. I’m not doing your research for you.

I don’t have a holiday donation plan yet, myself, but it’s been something I’ve been putting some thought into. I tend to make smaller donations to multiple organizations over the course of the year, so my charity budget is often emptied by the time December rolls around. I always make a contribution to the food collection at work, so that’s something. I really like knowing that what I’m giving is so directly helping a family that needs it.

The point is: find a cause that means something to you and make a donation. Don’t sweat the value, every bit of help is important. If you need some suggestions, I just happen to have some links right here!

Charity Intelligence Canada

United Way Canada

Canadian Foodgrains Bank

Centre for Addiction and Mental Health

Here’s Something New

I don’t think that, in the nearly 18 years that I’ve been operating a website, I’ve ever once written about clothing or fashion. At least not in any capacity that relates to me and my fashion sense (or lack thereof). So this is… this is different.

2020 has been a bit of a tire fire, but if there’s one positive thing that I get to take away this year, it’s that 2020 is the year that I discovered skinny jeans.

Rambling into the void

I set up a Twitch.tv account a few weeks ago. Finally. You would think that this is something I would have done ages ago, if only to follow streamers that I like to watch. But… I don’t actually watch any streamers. Not live, anyway. I can’t be bothered to follow other people’s schedules.

Anyway, it’s been one heck of a learning experience. The most important lesson being that I really need to make sure that my audio levels are set properly. I’ve done two streams now, and both times, getting the game and mic audio tracks to play nice has been a giant hurdle. So I’ve actually gone ahead and done a whole buttload of testing for this week’s stream.

Oh yes, did I not mention? My plan is to stream on Friday nights, and I have christened it the Friday Night Spooker Stream. Because… staying up too late playing spooky games is what I like to do on a Friday night anyhow. And this is also a great way to motivate me to continue working through my massive steam backlog.

Last weekend I played through Oxenfree, which is one of those rare games I bought purposely on Steam, and didn’t just get in a bundle. I’ve actually wanted to play Oxenfree since it was released, but just never made the time. When Friday came around and I was looking for a game to kick off the stream with, Oxenfree just happened to be installed, and I knew that it was a 4-5 hour playthrough. Perfect!

As I mentioned before though, the stream didn’t exactly work as planned. I spent the first couple minutes listening to the stream’s audio through my laptop, and it seemed fine, but three-ish hours in, I was informed that my mic audio was almost completely drowned out. Whoops! Worse yet, I didn’t even end up really solving the problem. The VOD version is up on my YouTube channel (embedded below), if you feel like checking out how bad it was. (At least you can still watch the playthrough of the game.)

Gotta Brush ’em All!

A couple months ago, The Pokémon Company released the weirdest little app called Pokémon Smile – a “game” that encourages children to brush their teeth by bringing Pokémon into the equation. Obviously I’ve been using it myself, despite not being a child (at least, physiologically).

Pokémon Smile is a strange thing – it watches you as you brush your teeth, and then rewards you based on how effectively it thinks you brushed. And I would like to put an emphasis on the “thinks” part, because it’s not great at determining how well you’re brushing your teeth. Quite often I’m brushing at full force, and it still relays the message “you’re doing good – but brush a bit faster!” It will also randomly lose sight of me, although my head and face have not moved from center-screen. I think it has problems understanding that one’s grip on their toothbrush will change depending on what area of the mouth they’re currently focusing on.

Director’s cuts

I had grand plans for the summer of 2020 – namely to record and upload a video to my YouTube channel at least once a week. I failed miserably on only the third week. I’d like to blame technology, but in the end it still really comes down to me.

To explain: The wrench in the works here is that sometimes when I record a video, the file ends up being upside-down once I’ve moved it to my PC. I have no idea why, but it really shouldn’t have been a problem. Shouldn’t. But Camtasia 6 is like the only video editing software in the world that can’t flip a video’s orientation, and that’s the software that I’ve been using forever. My bad for using a far-outdated program, I suppose.

Star Wars Binge Week 2020: The Empire Strikes Back

This morning I woke up with the expectation that today would be an incredible day. I watched the Pokémon Presents video that was posted and became unreasonably hyped about the announcement of New Pokémon Snap. Afterwards, I went out for a run around the block, and came back in for a short Ring Fit Adventure session. After showering off, I prepared breakfast and sat down with great excitement to watch The Empire Strikes Back, my favourite Star Wars movie.

Then I picked up my phone and everything went sideways.

(A word of warning, the rest of this post is not about Star Wars. Something much more important came up.)

Star Wars Binge Week 2020: A New Hope

I’ll be honest: I’m way too close to the original Star Wars trilogy of films to be able to properly examine them with a critical eye. I have a huge bias for them because these are three of my favourite movies of all time, and I’ve watched all three of them more times than I can count. Plus, I don’t think that my ” bulleted list of random musings” format really works as well with something I’m so familiar with. It’s really better suited to media that I’m either experiencing for the first time, or for the first time in about a decade (or more).

So rather than that, I’m going to… do something a little more personal.