Susan

• I got that smartwatch I was telling you about! Hilariously, I can't use the snoring detection feature, because it goes off sound activating the microphone and Lex snoring sounds like someone bringing down a rainforest. Jill does not get to do her "I told you so!" dance about sleep apnea on THIS day! So far it has twice decided that I've sat still too long and therefore am napping. No??? I'm playing Pokopia, what are you talking about???? Conversely, at the weekend it gives me such a good grade in sleep! A thing that is both normal to want and possible to achieve! I sleep for 10-12 hours, I'm great at sleep! And every workday it's like "... Girl are you okay?????"


• Relevant song.


• (I went for a sleep study at the start of summer, but I haven't heard anything back from it yet. I assume the answer is going to be "You're fine, stop taking medications with the drowsiness side effect," but we'll see!)


• My mental health has been on a FANTASTIC upswing now that I'm off work. Funny that. What a wild co-incidence. Like, it's still not perfect, but I am so much better than I was in April.


• Normal people: I want Nu:Carnival to animate the H-scenes.
  Me, a lunatic: I want Nu:Carnival to animate the fight scenes.
  
  I'm not even joking. Nu:Carnival did a series of chained ocean-themed events and I'm still not over the Cthulhu one. One of my favourite characters (the malicious fox spirit who keeps acting as strategically deployed karma) has phenomenal cosmic powers, and we might have found something that could step to him, and we had no resolution. Entirely in keeping with the cosmic horror vibes, but god I just want to see this man go all out. And then the most recent event had him throw down with the manic pixie killbot and I am losing my mind.


• Went to London with my baby sister Jill and one of her friends to see the Colours of Harmony concert, celebrating 40 years of Hitoshi Sakimoto's career, and god it was beautiful.
  
  • It was presented by the [Video Game] Is Funky guy, Alex Moukala, and at the start he said something like "You couldn't find this concert by accident. If you're here, it's because you wanted to be here, celebrating with us," and he's right! Plus, I appreciate so much that they didn't do what a lot of concerts do and interrupt the music with chat; they did the speeches, then the orchestra fuckin went. The flow was so good, it was so seamless, and I just! The music, the moments where you suddenly go "Oh, I remember this scene EXACTLY!" I have no idea whether the orchestra were used to getting people whooping them, but I hope they had fun. The conductor certainly looked like he did!
  
  
  • (Jill's friend: I'll drive us to London! We'll come pick you up!
    Me: My sister in Sappho you are in Wales and the North West, Are You Sure? I don't mind getting the train!
    Jill, the day before the event: So it turns out that it's Download this weekend and getting to you will be a nightmare.
    Me: ... I'm booking a train ticket.)
  
  
  • Jill and her friend got into London an hour after I did, so I was allowed to make my pilgrimage to Gay's The Word, one of the oldest queer bookshops in the UK. And when I say pilgrimage, I mean I got to the Russel Square tube stop, looked at the queue for the lift. Looked at the stairs. Looked at all of the signs saying "This spiral staircase is 175 steps, yes it IS that many and you WILL regret it." Went "Nah, it's not THAT many."
    
    It WAS that many and I DID regret it.
    
    BUT I now have a copy of New Lesbian Pulp and a Claire McNab book that I didn't own, so it's good!
    
    We also went for fluffy soufflé pancakes (amazing) and stopped by Gosh Comics, which is a magical place that I recommend if you're ever in Soho. I was less well-behaved there and bought a copy of Charity & Sylvia (because Tillie Walden, my beloved), and a couple of issues of an anthology comic called EX.Mag to try to soothe hole in my heart that Fresh Romance left behind. It was a good trip!


• As a result of this concert, I spent like a month playing Unicorn Overlord. I don't know what I was expecting, but the quick version is that it's kinda "What if Fire Emblem was an autobattler" and I'm not mad about it? I'm just confused. My friend Chris keeps arguing with me that it's not an autobattler, it's just the gambit system from FFXII, to which I say "FFXII did let me assume direct control if I had to, this is an autobattler." It's fun! The voice acting is good, and you can explore huge chunks of the world map before you have to do the plot, which I'm always in favour of. Unsurprisingly, Berengaria and Amalia (buff ladies who try to kill you; one has a fantastic voice and the other is canonically like seven feet tall) are my favourite characters. I don't know if I need to do a whole post on it considering how light on character stuff it felt? But we'll see.


• Two of my friends moved house, by which I mean they casually mentioned that they hadn't started packing yet one Saturday, and the van was coming next Thursday. I did in fact announce that I was going to FIX THEM and went round to help, so that's what I was doing for one week during a heatwave. (ʘ‿ʘ)


• Lex is okay, but his hatred for summer continues. He hates warm.


• A bunch of my baby coworkers are leaving due to work bullshit, and I'm going to miss theeeeeeeeeeem! But they also invited me to come to an outdoor aquapark with them, which: terrifying, thank you Aziz. I went though! I had a good time! I physically couldn't climb onto most of the inflatables, but I was having a whale of a time swimming around and cackling. One of them was like "... So you say you need to work on your arm strength?" and has invited me to go rock climbing. I appreciate her faith in me that I can do things, it's horribly misplaced, but let's try new things!


• Me: The druid in my family is known lore, right. This isn't like all of you forgetting I have two brothers.
  Offline Friend Jenni: Some people just send texts that say "How are you" you know.


• Have I done anything else lately? Uhhhhhhhhhh... Oh, D&D update! We fought the people trying to summon an eldritch tentacle god, I Banished the leader (exact words: "Get the fuck off my plane."), and then it turned out that he was an aberration and he couldn't come back. Whoops! Also I posted some of my silly doodles for this campaign, because apparently I'm Back On My Bullshit.


• I made a book nook! And one of my friends had the AUDACITY to ask me where I thought I was going to find space on my bookshelves for it!

• Tuesday: went to the doctor and maybe cried at him a bit because I am so tired. I'll go into the whole thing in another post because my note in the appointment request were verbatim "Med review and mental health getting worse, yay" and you can skip it. Short version: I'm doing all of the reasonable things I could be doing to not be crazy, and he's sending me for the MOT of blood tests to see if there's anything physically wrong.


• Wednesday: jesus christ.
  
  • Library that was closed due raw sewage shorting the system re-opens!
  
  

  • Coworker who's only worked in academic libraries: A customer thinks she saw someone with a knife upstairs!
    
    Me and the other public library survivor:
    
    [image or embed]

    — Susan (spindilly.bsky.social [BlueskySocial]) 29 April 2026 at 09:24

    
    Four security guards in full gear, two plain clothes security guards, café staff locking themselves in the staff-only area and contemplating hiding in the industrial fridge later: it was a comb.
    ( Read more... )
  
  
• Found the one (1) phlebotomist who has ever heard me say "Fair warning, the last guy needed a butterfly needle to get anything out of me" and not taken it as a challenge. Like, checked my arms, asked me to pick one, boom, needle in and vials full. First try, all of maybe thirty seconds. What a queen.


• I made the joke about it being an MOT of blood tests, and the phlebotomist joked back about if I was getting them every year, and uhhhhh yes I am actually! Pretty sure the doc sent me for a blood test this time last year as well!


• Realised that you can get watches that will monitor your sleep for you and went "... Fuck. Maybe I do have to do this." If only to rule out the issue being that I'm sleeping for twelve hours and only actually getting an hour of rest.

1. No full-time contracts, and a hard limit of 25 hours a week max. (Lunch breaks are inconvenient, and if we only work a five hour shift we don't get a break.) Also, no one will need to work extra hours because we'll be fully staffed – ignore every other time we've said that, this time we mean it!


2. No home libraries; everyone is part of a pool and assigned two or three libraries per week to work at.


3. No overlap between shifts, so no proper handover between shifts (because why would we need that?).


4. "We heard your complaints that there's no job mobility that isn't becoming a manager, so we created more manager positions! ♥"


5. Two fewer libraries in the network – one of them is closing entirely, and one is full of valuable and delicate material so we're going to leave it open and completely unstaffed.

• Got more hours at work! Work is being a low-key shitshow because they keep cutting staff, to the point where one of the libraries has three members of staff. In a library that is open 8:00-21:45. ("Oh but we're cutting down on extra shifts —" The fuck you are, sunshine.) On the plus side, I got an extra 8.5 hours added to my contract every week, so I'm getting an extra ~£450 a month on my paycheque?


• Had an absolute mad one in the January sales and bought a 3D printer.
  
  • It's a little one! A Bambu Lab A1 mini, and in the sale it was like £139? So a pretty good price, I think. The pro of this model is that it's basically plug and play, and as I wasn't sure if I was actually going to be capital-I Into 3d printing that was going to be my best shout. The downside is that it can only print tiny things, like 16x16x16cm. Small enough to be getting on with, just needs some fiddling.
  
  
  • I feel a bit weird showing off things that I've printed with it, because basically I had as much input in what comes out as I would with an actual printer. One day, I will probably get into the design stuff! For now, I'm poking Maker World and Thingiverse and trying out free stuff.
  
  
  • Me: I have printed so many boring useful things! D:
    Lex: Honey, you printed a torso with tentacles.
  
  
  • (My defence that it was for practical reasons – namely putting the Astarion BJD head I got on it so it's not sitting in a box – is apparently not good enough.)
  
  
  • Things I have printed off: tiny octopus friend, tools to make 3d printing easier, a little Solaire/Praise the sun guy as a combo xmas present/bribe for the IT Guy at work, stencils, two tiny jointed dragons that I need to reprint because the tails fell over both times, that torso with tentacles that turned out to be the same size as the head, so scratch that plan, a transparent computer mouse like the nineties never ended, and shelves.
  
  
  • Underrated feature of this thing: I can set it printing and then go do something else. I am multiplying the number of hobbies I can do at once!


• Discovered that Travelling Man import books published by Rosmei (a publishing house that specialises in translating queer Chinese fiction into English, but crucially only has publishing rights in Singapore) and have been emotionally devastated by both Priest and Mu Su Li.


• I HAVE A CRAFT ROOM NOW! We got our conservatory redone (... the most middle-class sentence I have ever written) and now it is my craft room! I have... Far too much stuff. I need to do a big purge and tidy, so that I can actually get at all of the craft stuff I have stashed away in there. But it's so nice! I have space for all of my desks, and room to move between them, and I have one of the HUGE cube bookcases in there to stuff things into. It's just currently wildly disorganised because of who I am as a person.


• Accidentally stopped talking to everyone I know? Which sounds really mean. I should uh. Fix that.


• Got new meds! It turns out that the ADHD medication I was on was aimed at Literal Actual Children so was the wrong strength, and the pharmacist who halved my med dosage last year was just a muppet who typed the wrong thing on my records. I managed to get that sorted out, so now I'm on Proper Grown-Up ADHD Meds and a higher dose. New meds are going... Fine? My insomnia is back and the negative self-talk is making a return, but apart from that it's good!


• Turned 36! I am officially A Fandom Old now and I'm so excited!

Alucard woke up as his door crashed open, sword flying out of its sheath before he fully opened his eyes. It arced across the room in a flash of silver, and Alucard managed to stay its motion just before it skewered Belmont in the doorway. Not that Belmont seemed to care at all; he batted the sword out of the way like he might have done a cobweb.