noted hermit

a 6” by 3” tapestry woven in yellow, with a blue stripe with black and red. a small white rectangle at the end of the stripe.

a 6” x 3” tapestry with a dark blue and back background. The center consists of three rectangles of white, in three sizes smallest on the left, middle twice as wide as the left most, rightmost twice as wide as the middle. In the center of the white rectangles is a shape resembling a slightly abstracted stick or tree in winter depending on its orientation, woven in brown.

january and february successfully woven on the tapestry diary before the end of each month, moving through mud but we get things done, some things

“When filled, check if the jam skunks.”

what a sentence, very very good stuff

I somehow did not realize that jam, like preserved fruit, is a core system in Midnight Muscadines. What a delight ttrpgs are.

my promise to myself is, if i keep up with my tapestry diary for six months i can use the money Im setting aside each month to order the yarn i need to make this idea into a roughly 8” by 11” tapestry. so sampling and iterating till summer is the plan.

the basic idea is a page from a notebook like the field notes notebook that lives in my bag, but all the text is smudged blurry blocks of indecipherable nothing. sometimes you try to make sense of things but its all just a mess of blurry thoughts.

a small wooden tapestry peg loom with white gray and black yarn. various papers both printer paper and tracing paper with sketched design ideas for a tapestry.

tracing paper and a grid notebook open on a wooden desktop with a pencil and a circular sewing tape measure on the notebook. the papers all have various sketches for tapestry designs.

spent a lot of today trying to make sense of a tapestry I’ve been thinking about for many months. not sure I fully figured it out, but progress I think.

a sepia toned photo that resembles an old disposable camera image of trees missing their leaves in winter

An image of the game Soviet Dawn and a hand reaching on top of the board placing a deck of cards. All with a sepia toned filter.

friday

yeah I was really excited when I opened it, it was the one I wanted most! I truly had been thinking a lot about toy cameras the last month but wasn't sure I could justify film, any excuse to try and get out and walk in this weird place where there's no place to walk. thank you for posting!!

A small digital camera a Kodak Charmera, in the palm of a white persons hand.

A digital photo from a small digital toy camera showing two windows, an unmade bed, two plants, a lamp on some books and the edge of a large desk.

already loooooove this little thing

these posts brought to you by a visit to my storage unit which made me very sad and prompted me to finally set up plex again so i can access the 70% or so of my physical music collection i digitized. nice to have the scrapes and hums available again.

time is very weird, life? also very weird.

open, by Matt Davis/Phil Durrant/Mark Wastell 2 track album

spending my evening remembering what feels like a different life lived by a different human, getting very stoned, listening to stuff like this, then making my own versions with a tiny tape player, autoharp, motors from cellphones and stuff i made from sculpy erstwhilerecords.bandcamp.com/album/open

White Collar and Bones were favorites in part because they focus on the grit that makes the gears of “justice” show their own inadequacy. but tbh they are still just copaganda. We all have our weakness.

I have both enjoyed but also wondered why procedural copaganda have been some of my comfort shows when my baseline politics is acab and kill the cop in your mind, but these dumb shows do repetition and predictability with clever variation so well. Its soothing even if I also sort of hate it.

I have been really missing my old toy film cameras!!! I had some amazon return money and got the little blind box buddy, gonna take some walks and pics. Love the photos you posted from these.

In other bw mental health news I have started a rewatch of White Collar which is a great sign that Im just desperate for anything familiar and comforting. Nothing like some guilty pleasure copaganda about a con man and art forger.

A white person’s hand holding a notebook with grid lines on the page. The notebook is sideways and on the fully visible page is a drawing in pencil of a simple tree or branch like form divided into three sections.

By the end of the year should have a roughly 36” by 6” tapestry. 12 small 3” wide by 6” tall pieces side by side. January’s new design is here ready to be traced onto tracing paper after i warp the loom again. This time with my trusty cotton seine twine. Which is basically indestructible.

I was then feeling worse.

But I managed to not spiral or melt down. Which I’ll take as a win.

I haven’t rewarped yet, but will tomorrow. And have redesigned both the entire project and the January little tapestry. Will be weaving everything sideways.

Also turns out the risk of linen warp being rigid which can lead to snapping if its under tension for too long is very real. I warped this in August.

I sort of just sat and stared. About five minutes before it snapped I had the thought, I am not feeling better, but I’m not feeling worse.

A white persons hand holding a broken warp string made of linen. It is still attached to a small tapestry that was in progress on a small tabletop tapestry loom.

A small tapestry that was in progress with dark blue, light gray, white and various brown wool tapestry yarn depicting stick like shapes on a white and gray background with dark blue borders. The tapestry is on a tabletop tapestry loom made by Mirrix.

through the January piece. Not super happy with it, but the diary is about doing the work, getting my hands back in wool, and in the case of this warp, linen.

Then today I ran into a small issue, and by small I mean I am restarting from scratch. Hard to weave with a broken warp it turns out.

In an effort to fix my my very bad brain being permanently stuck in misery/anger mode after the holidays, I made a plan to start a tapestry diary. An exercise to mostly provide some structure and timelines to designing and weaving 12 small pieces this year, all on one warp.
I was maybe halfway

Celebrated new years eve by finishing my Bluets re-read and then falling asleep completely sober at like 8:45.

2026 seems like it will be a rough year in many ways, lets take care of each other.

The Quiet Apartment: play The Quiet Year but the map is the layout of your apartment. The Frost Shepherds are your landlord.

I took pottery classes with anna/mochimociland and she was so sweeeeeet. these little guys are so good!!!!!

related, I realized today I haven’t read bluets yet in 2025 😱 so now I have new year’s eve plans.

gonna weave more and read more in my next year I hope

a still image from the film Sans Soleil by Chris Marker depicting blurry hands on a railing.

a still image from the film Sans Soleil by Chris Marker depicting a group of Japanese women in white and pink dancing in front of a crowd on a street

a still image from the film Sans Soleil by Chris Marker depicting a blurry computer modified image of a street battle between protestors and police that is pixelated and blue and green and barely discernible tbh.

today I turned 44, drank some jester king beer, got a nice shirt and a board game about time travel, played a game about being nice to dragons, and am watching sans soleil.

life is still very weird and exhausting but it was a nice day and I made it through another year successfully

Sometimes all you’ve needed for weeks is to talk to your best friend for nearly five hours while sitting in your car in a Target parking lot to feel okay.

family can be about this day and the expectations. But we made it through. Birthday in five days and then new years and then my oldest nephews birthday and then back to whatever I call normal schedules again which will be welcome.

Thanks for reading my livejournal, merry merry.

Voidfall upgrades I wanted that will make one of my favorite games easier to set up. A couple expansions (Obsession, Viticulture) and Dune Imperium Uprising. My sister got like 15 games which is crazy but I’ll get to play some of them. I miss my solo holidays quite a lot, and don’t love how intense