In my industry, Late June- Early August is crunch time. For me, that's 4 nights of overtime per week, every week, plus monitoring things over the weekend to deal with emergencies. I make an extra 1.5 months of pay doing it, and it helps fund fun things for me, but man does it take the life out of me! Most days I was too drained to even speak or send a basic text message.

Well all that shit is DONE. I get the bonus pay in October and I'm gonna make sure to do something fun with it. And now that my schedule's back to normal, I can stop being such a complete hermit all the time and actually go do stuff. Seriously - I'm making it a goal for the second half of the year to get out a lot more.

Sooo, if anyone happens to be near Downtown LA in the near future, feel free to hit me up. I'm free most weekends, and there's a lot in LA I've never gotten the chance to do yet.

As of today, I'm officially at 300 followers! I've never gotten anywhere near this kind of attention before, so even though it doesn't seem like much, I'm really happy that so many of you are interested in me. I am considering doing a raffle of some sort to celebrate, so keep an eye out for that in the next few days/weeks.

An early Valentine's Day PSA by Sirâ Vecta

Greetings pathetic earthlings! Idiot Specter told me I need to get better at writing English so I “blend in”. Is my 5th language, give me break already 😠. But he gave me his blog to write on, and I have some things to say. Recently, more kespers are getting involved with humans. That’s not a good idea, but no one listens to me. Whatever. Problem is, we have to learn a lot about humans before we deploy to Earth, but you smelly mammals don’t know first thing about us! We think and feel differently.

I know there is a romance holiday happening on Earth. I don’t want my fellow agents to be disappointed, and I don’t want you humans to get hurt. So I made a guide on how to romance kespers. If you are dating one of us, these are things you should say/do to make him happy.

HOW DO I KNOW IF A KESPER LIKES ME?

Does he purr whenever you hold him? Does he lean his head against your shoulder or rub his face on yours whenever he’s next to you? Does air smell like lavender when you are around him? That’s how you know.

WORDS

In Kesper language, anything to do with love/sex will have letters M N and T, in that order. Verb for love is manat, and noun form is minta. If you want to say “I love you”, easiest way is manatev niråv. Don’t worry about saying it “too early” (stupid human hangups I swear 🙄), if you are already dating/fucking he will take it right way. Your manti is your mate, like Animal Planet kind. Manti vene̊c is term of endearment, your mate will feel really happy if you call him that. If you want something lighter, use nakí (sacred) or kamí (dear) instead. You can also just use 2nd person pronoun nir since is only used in standalone form for emphasis. Is like how あなた/anata can be used in Japanese.

PHYSICAL TOUCH

We like physical contact, and there are some spots that we like a lot. Tails and ears are good place to start, it feels nice when they are rubbed😇. BUT, if you really want to go further, massage his primary pheromone receptors. These are strips under skin that run along collarbone and up sides of neck. We bite area when things get more intense. When I say bite though, is gentle. Don’t do it like Hachi did to Aoi in Montone Blue. Actually, just use your lips instead, yours are more nimble than ours.

We also like to be cuddled a lot. We sleep in short bursts, is an evolution thing, but that isn’t a problem for you - your mate will appreciate warmth of being next to you for such a long time. We don’t kiss - doesn’t work with our mouth shape. We lick though, on cheek or around ears.

DATE IDEAS

We crave novelty, so any interesting experience can make a great date. If is during day, go Geocaching or something like that. If you’re getting food, make sure there’s no meat (doesn’t need to be fully plant-based - cheese is greatest thing your race has invented). Somewhere you can drink is also good. Most of us do basic training in Japan, so ramen spots or izakayas are great options. If you’re in LA, ask Specter, he knows all best places for this🤤. Be careful of anything with cinnamon or nutmeg in it though - we get what humans call “cracked out” from those. We all love earth music - so you should take him out to a concert if there’s someone you want to see. Genre/style doesn’t matter. Specter and I go to all sorts of different shows and there’s always other kespers there.

AFTER DARK

Mating with kespers is similar to mating with humans. But unlike you lesser, incomplete beings, we have all parts we need to mate in either direction. Yes, we have penile slits. No, you can’t put anything in there. Is too tight. Cloaca is under tail, use that. Don’t be weird. We like physical touch remember? Best positions are ones that let your mate wrap himself around you. Lotus, missionary, that kind of thing. Ekiben against wall if you are feeling bold.

Be warned - we go through heat/rut cycles and it SUCKS. Feels so bad and frustrating 😡. If your mate’s scent changes from lavender to something deeper (Specter says it reminds him of Bath & Body Works fragrance In The Stars), skip all formalities and just get to it. Bad feelings fade quickly after mating, so he’ll appreciate it.

TAKING THE PLUNGE

Our kind doesn’t have marriage, and I still don’t understand point of it. If we’re together, we’re together, no reason to separate it into tiers. So don’t expect your mate to get it either. That said, you could get a kesper to live with you if your relationship is long & deep enough, and we’d be fine signing some papers under our human alias if that makes things easier for you. Just don’t expect any cultural baggage that comes with that, or any ceremonial stuff. When two kespers move in together, is customary to invite friends around and get blasted on tuber spirits. On Earth, we usually drink shochu for this. So make sure you stock up on that and be ready to drink it all by end of night.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
I hatched & grew up in Outer Asteroid Belt of Kesparel Core, near Orion Nebula. Wasn’t good for me there so I left. Earth can suck, but is nice to be on planet with weather. You have cool animals too, like opossums.

This was probably the most "out there" writing project I've done, and a great way for me to close out an otherwise difficult year. I wrote a more detailed journal entry about this project on Tumblr, and you can check out the final result here.

Here's to a hopefully more productive 2025!

I'm like a week and a half late for this, but whatever. I somehow made it to 28. I've kept quiet about my personal life, including to friends and family, but I legit doubted I was gonna make it at a few points. I work a shitty, soul-crushing public sector job, and the constant stress and degradation got to me. My physical health took a major dive and I fell into a bad depression. I've been working to claw my way out of it over the past few months, and I made a promise to myself to get out of this job and into a better place in my life before I turn 29. I can quit in May, and I'm making plans for the next stage in my life. I just need to make it till then, and keep my focus.

I recently won a bulk commission auction from . 15 pieces total -- 10 quick scenes and 5 more detailed pieces. I'm using this as an opportunity to get a bunch of concept art done for Wild Shape, including some stuff that I'm currently writing. I'll post the detailed pieces in my main gallery, and the quick scenes will go in scraps.

Speaking of, today I turned in my last major project for my professional license! So I'll finally have more time to get back to screenwriting. Hopefully sooner rather than later I can get Episode 2 done.

25 years old. Every year I look back and wonder how I made it this far. This year was no different. I'm as worn out as I've ever been in my life, and that's a step up from where I was in Spring. I'm a paradox like that - both highly fragile and resilient. So many things can easily get to me, both minor and major, but they only hurt for a day, or a few hours. Just 8 more weeks (hopefully) of putting up with my current position until I get my license to practice. Then who knows?

This is gonna be rather ranty.

Last night,  blake.zekky, the artist who drew this scene for me, died following a brief illness. I had gotten to know him just a bit while I was working with him and following his struggles on Twitter. He was practically a modern day Fantine from Les Misérables, constantly struggling just to survive and have even his basic needs met until his health to finally gave out. At the same time as this was happening, an old friend of mine was hospitalized after also struggling for their life in a different way. They survived this time, at least.

Though I never really got a chance to know him, Blake will always hold a special place in my heart because of what he did for me. He basically designed Rin from the ground up using just a series of text descriptions and some sample color palettes. This is a character who I first drafted in 2018, though the idea for him went all the way back to Spring 2017. Actually seeing him drawn means a lot to me, and it certainly will affect how I think about this character going forward now that he isn't so abstract. All four of the lead kobolds in Wild Shape have human aliases. The first names are all french due to some world-building details, but the last names come from multiple different languages. I'm thinking of having Rin's alias be named after him in some way, something like Clément Blake.

.................................................................................................................

Tonight has inflamed in me a sense of urgency that's been slowly growing for a few months. I've been closer to death this year then at any other point in my life. Back in March I had a major health scare, which was the end result of a sudden depressive spiral that had manifested as severe migraines, weakness, dizziness spells, deep confusion and catatonia. I've had things like that happen to me before, but this was the worst it had ever gotten, no contest. It was 100% the result of the bad environment I was in, an environment I never wish to return to.

I went on medical leave in April, and clawed my way out of that hole I was in by diving back into creative pursuits. I had so thoroughly lost who I was that I was desperate to get it back. This Wild Shape project, a revisit of an old sketch of a novel from undergrad, was my reminder. But as much as I am still being creative, and am now back on track with my degree, I still feel that pull towards the abyss, the old fears. These recent experiences have given me a sense of urgency that I've never really had before.

I need to finish what I'm working on and put it out, so that there is a record of who I am in my own voice. But more than that I need to get as far away from here as I can before it kills me. Away from my family of origin, and my backwards lifeless hometown, a little piece of desert suburban hell called Santa Clarita. I've been looking into opportunities abroad, and I intend to take the first one available to me the second I have my degree & professional license. For now, I just need to keep working. Keep pushing forward toward my goals. Life waits for none, and I can't wait for life.

So, remember awhile back how I showed off a writing system I created for a conlang I'm working on? Well, I made an interesting discovery recently. As it turns out, someone else had a very similar idea to mine... in 1867. Visible Speech was invented by Alexander Melville Bell (father of the telephone inventor Graham) as a tool for speech therapy. There are a number of striking similarities between the two.

Both of us chose to represent place of articulation as parabolas, and add extra markings to those parabolas to represent the type of sound being made. We both made the plain/default parabola be an unvoiced fricative, added a line in the center to indicate voicing, and added a ~ to represent nasals, though we put it in different places on the parabola. The directions of our parabolas also lined up, as they are a visual representation of the placement of the tongue and/or lips in the mouth at each place of articulation.

There are a few differences as well. Bell's system was designed for English as a direct replacement of the Latin alphabet, so it is a full left-to-right alphabet with a full complementary system for vowel sounds, whereas mine is a right-to-left abjad designed for a fictional language. Each of our systems also have consonant sounds which do not appear in each other's systems due to our language's differing phonologies. Bell's, for instance, has a distinction between "th" and "s" requiring an extra marking to distinguish them, and mine has velar fricatives which do not exist in English.

So it is not a perfect match, but it is very close. Despite our different purposes for creating these systems, our design goals were actually quite similar - we both wanted to create a system which visually represented each sound in our language in a simple, streamlined, and easy-to-learn manner.

... when you don't speak Spanish.

Yinller requested a Spanish version of Broken Wings since that's her native language. She told me to just run the screenplay through Google Translate, but I knew that wouldn't work. So I wound up taking matters into my own hands. Though I don't know Spanish, I do have upper elementary competencies in Italian and French, and I formally studied Latin in undergrad to an advanced level. So even though I don't "know" Spanish, I understand how it works and can intuit a lot of the vocabulary by comparison.

Here's a step-by-step guide for how I managed it:

Step 1: start with Google Translate. I mentioned this in another Twitter thread - the English-Spanish function is decent enough for the job. It will get you at least in the right ball park.

Step 2: manually read through the machine translation, word by word, and note anything that seems wrong. Most of the time, this meant strange word choices/phrasing and the occasional tense/gender mixup.

Step 3: check anything that you are unsure about (99% of the time, it was if English expressions/idioms translated to something with the same connotations) using ReversoContext. Also do this to phrases and clauses that seem suspect, or any odd word choices.

Step 4: If you wind up in a situation where the correct grammar is unclear, or there are multiple different ways to say something with unknown differences in connotation, research it using language learning forums on StackExchange and Quora.

Step 5: copy/paste the machine translation into Celtx , and make all your edits in the document itself. You can't do it in Google Translate, it's a headache. Also, delete the blank line Celtx always adds after anything is pasted into it.

Step 6: Figure out how to phrase camera movements. The original had a lot of panning/tracking shots. I rewrote all of them as 1st person plurals i.e. we move, we follow, we then see, etc. and translated those literally. MEMORY HIT became MEMORIA. Stuff like that. I also did this because Yinller isn't familiar with cinematography terms & screenplay jargon, and I didn't know where to even look for the Spanish-language equivalents to them. I browsed Roma's screenplay and that at least helped me with sluglines.

Step 7: sometimes, you just have to rewrite it. For instance, one scene had a few English double entendres which would not have worked. So I researched Spanish ones and found some ones that would fit the context, I think? Below is one example from the draft.

ENGLISH:
MAURICE (caressing Jack): So, what do you want to do tonight, hm? I have a few ideas.
JACK: I didn't call you here for that. Something's up.
MAURICE: Yeah, something's up alright.

SPANISH:
MAURICE: Entonces, ¿qué quieres hacer esta noche? Tengo algunas ideas.
JACK: No te llamé aquí para eso. Algo pasa. Tengo ganas de...
MAURICE (interrupting him): Sí, yo tambien tengo ganas, jeje.

Final step: assemble it all together and read it out loud as if doing a read through of the English screenplay, adjusting any lines that seem awkward. My pronunciation was a bit... Italian and I kept using the french ʁ for some reason, but I got the gist of how it should sound. IMO, some of the lines actually sound better in Spanish. Their rhythms seemed to better match the intensity in a way that's hard to do in English. The romance languages generally "flow better" to me due to their stress patterns.

The end result is a translation that is, I think, at least comprehensible. Whether it captures the original spirit... I think I got close. But I'll defer that judgement to Yinller. I don't know if it is worth posting publicly, perhaps if it goes over well with her.

I just got back from the El Capitan in Hollywood, which is the only theater on Earth right now that's playing it. I got what I personally think is the best seat in the house, a specific spot in the balcony. And I am so glad I did. This would not have been the same if I had seen it at home. The theater was maybe 1/5 full. It was a 10PM screening, so it was mostly adults and families with older kids. The experience was a bit different than how I remembered movie theaters being. There was a formal introduction by the theater manager, a full on overture sequence, and only 2 quick trailers before the movie started.

I went into what I thought of it in detail in this thread. The whole experience just made me happy to be alive, happy that I survived all the things I've been through recently. I got a taste of what life outside these four walls is like.

I can be found under the handle "spectrallik" for now unless I think of anything better. Someone took spectralk and spectral_k already, but that's fine. I kinda like how spectrallik sounds.

I got strong-armed into creating one as part of a class assignment. No clue where to even start with this -- I've made it a point up until now to be social-media free due to having bad experiences with all of it as a teenager. But now that I have to have one, I guess I might as well use it. My professor recommended TweetDeck to filter out all the bile on that site, but does anyone have any tips or advice to get the most out of this? Or just cool people to follow?

https://www.hindustantimes.com/citi.....206290937.html

My poor friend. Booked business class and everything, only to be treated like this.

So, I've been working on a conlang for a while now as a sidepiece/ world-building aid for a long-term project. It's a loosely Semitic thing (it has a similar tri-consonantal root system and the phonology is relatively similar to Modern Hebrew) with some personal touches thrown in - active/stative alignment, pragmatic word order (VSO default), and use of perfective/imperfective instead of tense, to name a few. (This isn't the "special writing project" I mentioned in the last journal, that's a shorter-term thing).

Right now the language has the working name of Koboldic, which is what the humans trying to decipher it in-universe call it. It's native speakers call it... well I haven't actually figured out much vocabulary yet, so I don't know what the exact words are. It will translate to something like "Interstellar Common."

A while back, I developed a really streamlined writing system for the language, and today I figured out how to make it type-able... sort of. The actual script is a right-to-left cursive featural abjad. The typed version is a more computer friendly thing that doesn't require messing about with Unicode. It's left-to-right (until I figure out how to change it) and uses optional Matres Lectionis. It also has a Kaktovik inspired numeral system, but in hexadecimal instead of vigesimal. It works on a US standard keyboard layout.

Anyway here is the link to the font: https://fontstruct.com/fontstructio.....46938/koboldic if you want to see how it looks. I have no artistic/drawing ability, so it is very geometric - a whole bunch of parabolas, diamonds, triangles, and circles.

UPDATE: I got it right to left! I mapped the letters onto the Hebrew keyboard. It works, though the numbers are still left to right. Close enough!

...wow. I don't know what to say, honestly. It doesn't seem like a lot, but I've never had anywhere near this many people take an interest in me before. This has brightened up what has been an awful week for me.

I feel like I should do something to mark the occasion, but I don't know what just yet. Any ideas?

So, in a few days my state and many others will be making the Covid vaccines available to all adults. Due to a surplus of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine at my local site, I was offered an early appointment. I think it would be useful to describe what it was like for anyone who has yet to get one, because I had a rather... interesting experience. This is an extremely long post, because I want it to be as thorough as possible.

Part 1: Getting the shot (the easy part)

My local site was Six Flags Magic Mountain, which had just re-opened last week. I was taken there and looked after by my grandmother, a retired nurse who has helped everyone in my family go through this process. At this point, most people who needed to get the vaccination for medical or employment reasons already had, so there was no line at all. However, my grandmother told me that when she took my great-grandmother a while back, the line extended far beyond the parking lot and into the intersection. So if you are going to get it when it first becomes available to you, be aware that the lines could be long during the first few days.

This was a drive in site, and I only had to open the car door once to give the nurse access to my arm. Even though the state gave me an early appointment, I guess for procedural reasons they still need a valid "reason" to give it to me early. However, this was just a formality. If you do get an early appointment and they ask you for a reason, well, let me put it this way. If you've ever gotten a medical marijuana card, whatever condition you used to get that prescription is also valid here. Any recurring or chronic conditions will do. In my case, it was Generalized Anxiety.

After a bit of paperwork, we pulled up to the station where the vaccines were administered. This part went pretty quickly. I got to choose which arm to use, which is good because when you get vaccines and the like frequently, you figure out that one is usually better than the other. It was over in an instant. It felt just like last year's flu shot, but with just a bit more sting. After that, we pulled into the waiting area. My grandmother told me that the injection was a bit higher on my arm than it probably should have been, which means it would be sore longer. I think that because they are doing so many vaccinations at a time every day, fatigue from the workers mean that they might be a bit less precise than usual.

We were in the waiting area for 15 minutes. There were nurses outside and they told us to flag them down if there were any immediate problems. They had a first aid tent set up, and there was also an ambulance if anyone needed transport to the nearby hospital. We passed the time watching all of the roller coasters go by. I really miss Magic Mountain. I practically grew up there. It was so close to my childhood house, and all of my friends and I had season passes. When all of this is over, I'm gonna go back. Anyway, there were no issues after 15 minutes, and after receiving my CDC vaccination card we were free to go.

Part 2: The side effects (what the phrase "flu-like symptoms" really means)

I got the shot at around noon. I felt fine, besides the sore arm, for quite a while. Though I noticed early on that I had suspiciously lost all of my appetite. For me, that's usually a bad sign. At 8PM, the "fun" began. At first, it was the side effects they warn you about: chills, muscle aches, tiredness, and a cough. Most people get these. I decided then that I would go to bed early, and maybe I could sleep off the worst symptoms. That went very badly for me. Because I got unlucky. I ended up being one of the 10% of J&J recipients who got a near worst-case-scenario.

First, the aches got worse, and they would continue to get worse the whole night. By around 10PM, I had developed a fever, which ramped up in intensity over the next six hours. At one point, my body felt so hot as to be painful to the touch. But whenever I tried to do anything to cool myself down, like take my top layer of covers off, I would instantly get these almost electric chills running through my whole body. I kept drinking water a little bit at a time as my grandmother told me to, but with each sip I could feel my stomach get more and more upset. It also became dangerous to move, as every movement made my stomach turn in a really bad way. And even though I was drinking water, it didn't make the fever any better. My mouth was constantly dry.

Note: if you get squicked out by vomiting, skip the next paragraph.

At just before 4AM, I ran out of water. I was then faced with two choices. I could let the fever dry me out completely, or I would need to refill the bottle, risking the nausea becoming unbearable. I decided then that I would try to do a little movement at a time, and see if I could get by that way. It worked, for a while, but when I finally lifted myself to a sitting position, I realized I had crossed a line. A few seconds later, I found myself violently retching into my trash can. Because I hadn't eaten anything in over 12 hours, it wasn't vomit the way you usually think of it. Around 50% of the time it was a dry heave, and the other 50% I threw up a mixture of water and mucus. This lasted for a few minutes. When it finally subsided for the last time, I was able to stand up straight, and I noticed that at some point during those minutes, my fever had broken.

The worst of it at this point was passed. I quickly started to feel better, but there was a problem. I had just lost up all of the water I had been drinking, and I was very dehydrated. My fluid balance was probably bad too. I needed to re-hydrate fast. I was able to walk to the kitchen and re-fill my bottle without any nausea. But the real test was if I could keep the water down. If I couldn't, then the only remaining option was hospitalization. Dehydration can turn deadly quick, especially out here in the L.A. desert. I took some careful sips of water, and I took a shower because I felt dirty. The water stayed down.

After taking a shower, the final two side effects took hold. Every muscle and joint in my body was aching bad, and I would start to have coughing fits. A single adult-strength Tylenol fixed the pain, though the coughing is still here. My grandmother visited our house like she does most days, and she helped me through the next steps. I had half a slice of toast in small bites (I realized as I was eating it that my stomach wasn't 100% ready yet, but I was able to hold it down). Later I had a banana to get some potassium, and had no problems. According to my FitBit, I finally passed out at 10:30AM, having been awake for exactly 24 hours and 14 hours after the symptoms began.

Part 3: Conclusions (and general musings about the pandemic)

So, what can we learn from this? On the bright side, I don't have to do this again. J&J is one and done. Upon some further research, it appears that young people like me are more susceptible to having bad side effects for some reason, but nothing that happened to me was unheard of. Again, 10% of people who got J&J have reported similar symptoms. If I had to guess why, I think it is because J&J uses the more old-school Adenovirus Vector method, instead of the fancy new mRNA method that the others do. My immune system discovered that there were unknown, fully formed viruses floating around of unknown origin, and went all hands on deck to destroy them. But for 90% of you, the side effects will be much easier, maybe a bit of a headache and chills for a day or two, but then you are fine. That is what happened to all of my friends, family, and coworkers who got the vaccine so far. I was just very unlucky. One other small downside to this is that J&J is less effective at prevention than the other variants, but from what I have read it is 100% effective in lessening the symptoms and preventing hospitalization in patients who do contract it later. So if (spirits forbid) I do get it, at worst I might just have to go through this bad night one more time.

Finally, this experience made me wonder about something. In February 2020, when Covid was rapidly spreading around Anaheim where I was living at the time (though we didn't know how bad it was yet), I had these exact same symptoms with varying intensity over a period of about a week, followed by a residual cough that lasted for a month. At the time, I thought it was just the flu. But looking back, I wonder if it was Covid. I've heard that for some people, it goes more to their gut than their lungs. A relative of mine had the exact same experience, as did a few others people they knew. When I did take a test, many months later, I had no antibodies. I've learned through all of this how my body can be both very fragile and very resilient at the same time. It's a paradox, but it's my reality.

Assuming I didn't massively botch my last finals, I now officially hold a B.A. and a B.F.A. It's been an absolutely psychotic five years, I've written more in the past few months than I think I have in a few years combined. I have a whole lot of conflicting emotions. Mostly I'm just exhausted. In a positive way, like a hard day's night. I now have a week to relax, then my first semester of grad school starts. Life stops for none.

The last thing I did in 2019 was take out the trash. It was about 10 minutes to midnight, and all of the cans in the house were as full as they could possibly be. I'd put off doing it for like a week -- I've been stuck in that late December crash that hits after the holidays, and even though the trash chute is right down the hallway, I just couldn't seem to find the energy. But right before midnight, something broke in me. I felt restless, suffocated in my little stale apartment. So I put on the warmest thing I could find, played some tunes that felt fitting in the moment, and set out.

It only took like 30 seconds, and it wasn't nearly as cold as I thought they would be. As a reward, I went to the roof of the building just in time to catch the fireworks. It was crazy. There were about 10 different shows going off at the same time. Disney had the best one, but that's a given. They do this every night. It was a mess of lights in all directions. Its probably the closest things have come to looking like this in real life. The past few months, I've been so paralyzed with fear and indecisiveness over the future, and where my life is going. I could write a Tolstoy-length book over everything that's been weighing me down. But for those 20-odd minutes, for the first time in as long as I can remember, I was fully present, able to enjoy the here and now, without needing to worry about what came next.