Cerulean @Cerulean@dragon.style

Welcome. Primary mastodontal activity will now be here. Refer to @CeruleanK for toots prior to October 2018.

Unlike WA, NJ requires car inspections every 2 years, and puts a big sticker in the windshield to indicate when yours will expire. Today I finally went out and got a scraper tool just so that I wouldn't have to see "2020" there anymore.

Markets, you need at least one cashier. I beg you, treat your employees well enough to retain some. Because the self-check is not designed for a full cart. Piling all my shopping on the tiny scale to keep the weight _perfect_ from beginning to end is ridiculous.

The last time I went grocery shopping, I had to wait a long time for a manager to unlock the screen because I tried to rearrange something to fit better in my bags, and this half-second discrepancy was such a red flag that lower-ranking workers were not allowed to clear it. Once resolved, it was explained to me that bringing my own bags had changed the weight, and that I should place them on the scale before starting the transaction.

This time, I began by placing the bags on the scale, which locked up the self-check immediately. I waited long enough to reckon that help was not really "on the way", and I moved to another open self-check, where I piled up my items without bagging them, then bagged them in my cart after I was done paying. Fortunately this was a smaller run and it wasn't quite Tricky Towers.

Still, these bag charges are supposed to be encouraging conservation, and apparently it's too weird to think anyone would actually do it, such that the system could accommodate it; we're supposed to just accept it as another arbitrary expense instead.

Hain has plenty of practice at offering this exposition.
ceruleanstimuli.com/hain/index.html#new

This time, the update is what you'd call a page! At first I envisioned the flashbacks as narrow glimpses, but the layout blew up when I found I could only draw each one as a sprawling horizontal scene.

In August, my parents are coming here to bring me covid. That is unfortunately the only way the words form in my mind to describe the event, because they don't have a better reason. They just really want to travel because they like travel. They're going to drive across country, visit national parks, see what I've done with my place for a few minutes, and take me to an airb&b house they've reserved on the other side of the sound, where we will stay for a week.

They have common sense and they're going to be "careful" but there's a normativity to them; they embrace and praise the convenience of Amazon and Facebook much as a protagonist's mom in a dystopian fiction must always do for its main threat in the second act. They will not be any more concerned with a lasting crisis than the TV news is willing to be, which, no matter what happens to numbers in the next month, won't be much.

Nobody out there is taking it seriously anymore. I will keep wearing masks for as long as I'm allowed, in part because I can go out without taking dysphoric stock of how many hours it has been since I shaved my face, but mostly because something that gets worse every time you get it, even if you've taken measures to ensure it won't be bad the first time, is something I want to have zero times for as long as possible. And damn it, isolation is a thing I have gotten good at, and for once my nature makes me capable of doing the most responsible thing while the rest of you just can't function without being at cafés and conventions.

Anyway, my parents, as much as they believe in the virtue of work, are also why I can live without working all the time, which is why my capacity to say no to them has topped out at not joining Facebook. Our conversations are always friendly but our common interests are barely enough to fill a phone call with anything to say. We comment on food and the weather, and I try to sound like I'm accomplishing things. A fear of mine that always used to plague my regular dinner visits looms significantly larger for this weird little retreat, and that is that I may put myself on the spot by coming out to them just to fill the silence. Like I said, they're sensible, but you can't predict anyone's reaction, and as long as I don't really see any hope anymore of following through with real-world transition (please save your sunshine for someone who can use it), making everything more difficult would be reckless and pointless. Maybe not as reckless and pointless as drawing a line between the two highest-transmission areas in the country, but that topic is already passed over.

Basically, I was already resigned to nothing more happening in my life, but I could at least be comfortable, and now I feel like it's possible I may only have a month or two left to even be comfortable, for one reason or another, and I'm keyed up thinking about if I can get anything worthwhile done in that time. Send.

Tempted by persistent promotional emails from Overstock, which I used to go to as an alternative to Amazon but now seems to have been forced back down into its focus of home furnishings, I got these big cube things with the idea that if I turned my bed along the wall, they would form the back of a serviceable couch when needed. Purchasing them for the experiment won out over the part of me that said "when and why would you ever have guests here, fool."

I tried it out and it worked. It opened up space in the middle of the room and looked nice. I kept the bed in that position and slept that way for a few days, and it was basically fine but for some reason I really didn't like it. Something to do with where I was facing, or being against a wall, or the fact that I hadn't quite worked out a good place for my bedside stuff. Or maybe just that I had made a change for the comfort of nobody except my parents who are coming to see me for no reason in August (sidebar topic here). So, since I can't in optimism nor in good conscience imagine having friends around, and the only remaining point of it was to look nice, I took a picture, and then I put everything back the way it was.

And have a look at this lovely gift art by @moult

As usual, the next section of Hain and the Half Coin is taking some time, but here's a peek.

I am about at the end of my fuse with Monotype and the way they're running MyFonts dot com. To better inform my next actions, I ask any of you who bought the whole Anachrony family when I released it on Fontspring (who made it available overnight without complaint): Have you encountered any trouble at all with the name field of Anachrony Royale impacting how it appears in your system or application menus?

I am wondering how many different "engaging" info tile boards the Windows 10 system taskbar needs at the same time. There's the oldest one by the Start menu, which is still showing the weather for where I used to live and trying to sell Candy Crush. The handy thing that showed up this year that displays the weather in my present location contains another one full of news articles. Now this week they've added a colorful illustration inside the search field that opens into yet a third one with quotes and words of the day. The illustration changes so that we will look to find out what it means.

Got into the Baba editor again; couldn't resist building a better knight. So I give you "Processed Chess Food": VNTY-CKR9

Albatross! MIAOU gang for life

Moey spots the premise. https://ceruleanstimuli.com/hain/index.html#new

I had that dream where I'm dressed up femme and brushing my hair at a mirror, and have somehow fixed it up so it looks like it's all still there and I have half a chance of getting away with it.
This was probably brought on because I'm scheduled for my second booster this morning, and I know I'm going to have to show up with no hat because it messed up the fever detector last time.

Apparently I'm supposed to be checking the number plate outside my apartment every day just in case they've tucked a two-day notice of a mandatory inspection there. They can send an email to everyone in the building every time there's an office holiday or a car parked wrong, but not when they're going to pound on my door and then barge into my apartment faster than I can pull pants and a mask on.

Woman Who Had A Rough Coming Out But Now Is World Famous For Doing What She Loves, Has Everything She Ever Wanted, And Looks Like An 18-Year-Old Girl At 40 But Doesn't Have To Go Back To School, Wants Leftist Youths To Stop Complaining Because Everything Is Better Now, In California Anyway

A hair away from unfollowing three mutuals on birdsite because they won't stop their round robin of crude strawman mockery of the latest vulnerable young person they caught wishing elected Democrats would do more than shrug and demand our votes again while Republicans do whatever they want.

Daily Dordle #0067 6&5/7
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zaratustra.itch.io/dordle

Was briefly visible today while getting a package from the lobby. Didn't know that's how it worked but I've fulfilled my responsibility.

I watched documentary "The Fandom" and it was alright, I even learned some things, but of course I was thinking "am I going to show up in any of this old footage" and sure enough, when I do, it's sitting at that Philcon panel watching Eric Blumrich grandstand like Khrushchev. This was "Introduction to Anthropomorphics", literally a first impression for the greater SF/F audience, and he was up there screaming about deviants and the mass graves they belonged in.

That, I have to admit, exemplifies my east coast furry experience. It was trash. Just a bunch of artists desperately vying for popularity and hoping to strike gold, while the most popular ones groused about there being so many weirdos tainting the reputation of their respectable busty horse business. All of us sprawling around one gun nut's hotel bed like supplicants of a king. Showing up to any redneck's furmeet and trying to convince ourselves we were all friends despite having nothing in common. There must have been good things too, but I find it hard to remember them. All the positive feelings were misplaced hope and ambition. Everything worthwhile has always been in our heads and on the internet, and maybe, having got to this point, we should be staying there.

I know I don't have a large audience and probably not a wealthy one, but to soften the blow of scoring 92 points against her with "zillionth" in WwF, I really ought to plug my mom's jewelry. Every piece is unique, bold and elegant, and there are dragons. https://suzanne-pease.square.site/jewelry