Oliver Moss

Patrick Stewart has passed

Fuck, couldn't we have had a few more decades with him?

I want to make more buttons, but am not sure what. I've done a lot to organize my Procreate and even have some lettering templates set up. Procreate doesn't have a built in way to to do curved or rounded lettering buttons so I just have to do it letter by letter, like this in this:


Which is a Hello Kitty version of the Kraken's mascot, a sea troll named Buoy.

I watched some procreate lettering tutorials on youtube and they were all like 'import your procreate project into photoshop'. I love procreate, but it's a nightmare for anything text/lettering. For doing buttons, circular text can be key. In Procreate, it's always going to be very kludge.

I may or may not making that Buoy a button. I have had some people offer me money to send them the buttons I make. I'm just sending them out.

I did used to have an esty shop where I sold buttons. I have... a LOT of supplies. It would be cool to have some button designs to at least think about having in some stores that stock local artists, but I've got no clue what.

I dunno, I have a lot of assets and templates and stuff set up. I still need to merge my brush libraries. Would be nice to do something with all this... outside of the few hundred individually watercolor painted pride pins I've donated to things.

The Black Tapes is becoming a TV show... with John Rogers writing.

The Back Tapes and how it treated it's fanbase, it's crowdfunding shenanigans, it a chunk of why the scene is as dead as it is. I personally hate Paul Bae and Terry Miles, because they took fan money meant for TBT and used it to find other projects, including funding the Bae project that got him into prominence. I used to support Minnow Beats Whale productions, via KS and then Patreon. I am one of the fans who was lied to. I've been mostly ignoring Bae's career trajectory, and for now will try to keep doing so.

Seriously, bro is lucky no one archived some of the shit he said to the fans via Patreon. For years after it ended, all people talked about in regards to TBT was how thoroughly he'd pissed everyone off.

Some of the TBT dramas are best left in the past. He thought fanart was a 'gift' for him to use as he wanted, and put it in promo materials without credit, altering some of it even. Seems insane from a fannish POV, but he's not the only creator to make mistakes like that.

Well, it's early days. Sometimes these projects never leave development hell. I am going to hope that happens here, and if not... well, I'll be sad to miss out on Roger's writing in a genre I really like.

Too many of my posts are about hockey, but I am sparing you talk of re-organizing my bags so I use my nice Chrome one less so it stays nice. Also, as much as I love that bag, other bags are just easier to manage dropped on coffee shop floors and the like. I could really use a new bag, but I have lot of nice bags and need to figure out best uses for the ones I got.

Also, the writer's group I was in has mostly fallen apart due to it being too casual of a group to kick out or manage problem personalities. That's part of why I was thinking of making a group, one that can have boundaries. No one wants to be the one who push back against her, so attendance had dropped dramatically. My dumb ass always stays too long, but I noped out of the last meeting halfway through.

I never did post about leaving the D&D thing I was in. Honestly, so many things starting going sideways there at once I am still not sure what to make of it. Also, losing my main social outlet sucks but I don't want to dwell on it.

After being so involved for so long, after abruptly leaving mid-chapter the only person who reached out... was someone after an item I have.

I really should make myself go on some Mondays when they have live music in the bar and be in a space were like I am not a complete stranger.

I know I am not the only one who left around the same time. There was a difficulty spike, a fundamental change in game design, and also leveling was reworked in such a way that even people whose main focus in life is D&D were complaining about how much prep work is needed for every single session when you are so high level.

I though the silver lining to dumping that D&D campaign would be more time for photography and writing, between all the work of being in it and how far the commute is especially since the #15 bus was sometimes not there and I had to walk the 5 miles back... but that hasn't been happening because the one regular social thing being gone has been a problem.

but on top of everything else my GM suddenly couldn't gender me correctly in front of new players, like he was embarrassed to. I am bad at staying in certain social situations way too long, but even I have limits.

Last night was a nationally broadcast game, which mean I couldn't see it because I don't give ESPN hundreds of dollars to watch 3 additional games. Some other local Kraken fans and I attempted to go to a Buffalo Wild Wings since their whole thing is showing all the games. They could not show the Kraken game, though, because they didn't have all the ESPN channels.

So, we wound up at a Red Robin watching on our phone. The Red Robin couldn't feed me, but it was a more chill place to watch a game looking at one of our phones. It was fun and hopefully we'll do it again. One of them is going to the same Kraken game in Feb that I'm going to.

This morning I see that the national broadcasters were just as expected. Berkly Catton is the highest skill player we've drafted, the future 1C we are building around. They kept calling him Cate or Cate-ton. They praised our Russian goaltender, we don't have a Russian goaltender. The occasionally mispronounced Eberle. If your job is hockey, that should be a name you know.

However, the nationalcast is only for TV. We have a radio team, and Kraken fans like to mute the TV and sync the radio calls. This morning I am seeing people editing the highlights to replace the ESPN idiots with our own Fitzhugh's calling. I love this energy. Instead of arguing online or complaining, we'll just make our own highlights. I love this flavor of salt. Go ahead and ignore our guys, we'll just have our own fun.

Our TV broadcast team is amazing, but also I am so glad we just extended the contracts of the radio team.

Oh and also Kraken won! We beat Utah! And we looked solid doing it, even though the game got tight at times.

I've long since given on up DW comms, either running them* or trying to help keep them limping along. I did look a while back to see if there is an hockey comm, and there is something hilarious to me about the most recent post being an announcement that the lockout is over.

I'm glad that Tumblr is a surprisingly good place to chat hockey and liveblog games.

My HR-adjacent spaces have been muted for a while so I don't start to hate the Sharks. I've curated my hockey spaces a bit to hear about them as little as possible.

The combination of how overhyped the Sharks are and how aggressively the Kraken get ignored is an annoying combo platter. The NHL wont even post our new player's NHL first goals, even when it's a defenseman landing this shot a few games in. I just want to be only intellectually aware of that, keep it abstract, not engaging with it.

(* I've never talked about The Incident that lead me to quit modding permanently. I have though about posting what happened a few times because it was really bad. I'd like to talk about it and what other outlet would I have? But, at the time trying to a keep a lid on what happened was the best thing to do for the people affected. All the usernames but one are abandoned/deleted. Talking about it now is probably fine, but I can't be sure so... I can't. Modding / leading events without a separate support system is a bad idea.

My dumb ass has spent the last day pondering trying to start a writers group out of the local discord that hosts multiple book clubs. We asked for a writing event and got something pretty opposite to what was asked for. I could offer to start up the sort of thing people *were* asking for. I have so much experience running stuff online and offline. I've written policies for so many groups outside my own because of my experience... but I'd be better off just punching myself in the face. I always wind up taking shit in the teeth one way or other.)

The visual theme / stadium design for the Winter Classic is... cottage. JFC, NHL be more cringe. Link

Winter Classics are outdoor games that are often heavily themed. They are silly. Since it's outdoor in an arena meant for a sport like football, with a much larger field of play, the extra area is filled in with 'theming'. Certain types of cringe are fine. Some people had a problem with Miami's walk in last year being too gaudy, but it's Miami, what did people even expect?

This year the venue design is...


And in case there is any doubt in your mind that this is meant to be them awkwardly winking at The Cottage from HR, one of the pictures on the 'fireplace' is a fucking loon.

* CJ Jackson of the Torrent is co-writing a Spiderman story with Marvel writer Stephanie Phillips. Looks like it's a short stand-alone in one of those seasonal specials they do.

Well, that sure was a movie.

I am, for once, glad I saw it in theaters. The audience reactions were interesting. Most showings were sold out so I went to a chain theater and I will never disclose how much I paid for a ticket and a soda. Also, I had to go to the last showing.

( Spoilers )

If you have any interest in this film, seeing it unspoiled and with a full theater will add to the experience.

LibraryThing has just had a big code update. The site is a lot faster for me. Also lots of ways to customize your libraries. Some of the sorting is a little wonky for me because the data on the indie books I read could use some work, but at least the books are there. So, if you want a very mid-10s style book tracking website with a lot of customization, no fucking AI summaries and no Amazon ownership, LT just got a lot more viable.

The slowness was the biggest problem for me. I used it anyway because other sites just did not what I consider very basic features. Now it loads fine for me. Nice.