#plants #played

the gladiolus flowers in my garden have been blooming all month long. i don't usually like to cut flowers since they don't last as long and keeping them uncut forces me to actually go outside and enjoy them, but these lazy mf plants keep falling over and taking a nap on the ground -_- i took the worst offenders inside with me for my 27th birthday this past sunday, and made some baklava and butterfly pea flower syrup to use for drinks. i still get surprised sometimes making it how vegetal the dried flowers smell in the bag, like i keep expecting it to be like making rose or hibiscus tea… no lmao. i complained about it to my mom once and she was like "oh that flower? that stuff grows like a weed on the front of your grandma's house in thailand, we used to eat it like a vegetable in salads and stuff, you're not planning on just drinking it plain right?" luckily as a syrup it doesn't really taste like anything, and can be used to make pretty drinks. for my birthday i added some to a pina colada to make it lavender, but my favorite way to use it is to mix it with coconut rum in a glass, fill the glass with ice, then squeeze lime juice on the top and watch the blue turn into purple and then pink as the drink turns more acidic.

this month i've been getting really into oblivion again. idek why, when the remaster came out in april i was like y'all could not pay me to install a 150gb unreal engine 5 game on my poor laptop that has already played the og to death… but here i am four months later turning the 6gb og game into an 80gb one with mods 😭 when the remaster released i wasn't all that keen on revisting oblivion again but idk, maybe all the screenshots and gifs i keep seeing made me miss cyrodiil. even nearly 20 years later i still think it's just gorgeous.

or maybe it was virtuos/bethesda deciding to make emperor uriel hot af in the remaster for NO REASON and i needed to hear him rizz me up again just to feel something. in any case, i've never done a heavily modded playthrough before but this time i've completely maxed out the plugin limit. one particular set of mods i've been enjoying is the hesu mod collection, a series of mods published by japanese author hesu and translated by mhahn123 that alters the landscape and adds new locations to cyrodiil. one location, shipton, is added just south down the hill from kvatch, so after starting my usual new game ritual of picking martin up as soon as possible then fucking around for 100 hours before accidentally returning to weynon priory, i decided to stop by and visit one of the many new locations i added to cyrodiil. well, after getting attacked by man eating sheep, breaking into a seemingly abandoned house, and going down a trap door next to the dead body of the mage who seemed to have caused the whole mess, i appear to have accidentally dragged a freshly terrorized martin from the jaws of one plane of oblivion into another one… but other than the spider daedra it's lowkey kinda chill here, he doesn't even seem to mind it that much.

oh and the level 30 boss fight at the end when i was like. level 3. at least the architecture goes hard.

#plants #played #knitted #thrifted

it's the end of august which means my birthday was a couple of days ago 😇 my friends bought me this pinstripe calathea and a bunch of desserts from vegan east, plus i made pistachio + thai basil shortbread cookies so i think i have my sugar intake sorted for the next month or so ^^

i know i said in my last entry that i'd start raidou kuzunoha 2, but i ended up spending most of the month playing fields of mistria. it's only in early access but i've already played it for almost 50 hours, completing a whole year and finishing all the story + heart events released so far ^^; i love the vibe of the town and the sprite work is SO cute, i can't believe i have to wait a whole year to marry my girl reina 😩 i also hope the creators implement some sort of rival marriage or matchmaker system because i'm obsessed with whatever's going on between juniper and valen.

i also managed to finish piofiore 1926. (mild spoilers for fated memories + 1926 below) i think i liked this sequel a little more than the first game, if only for the alternative + henri route. i love when otome games that have a lot of death in them also have an "everyone lives" route afterwards, and with the alternative route in this game i liked seeing how the LIs interact with the MC when they spend a long period of time being her friend/acquaintance before trying to get with her. especially with dante and nicola, i ended up liking them way more on their alternative route vs. their original route in the first game. legit if dante ever gave lili shooting lessons in his OG route like he does in his alternative route he probably would've ended up being my fav 😪 also i loved seeing the LIs spend more time working together since it meant more time spent bullying yang instead of trying to kill him <3

this month i also worked a lot on my folklore cardigan. i started this in february and had it in storage for like… 5 months… but i finally decided to get it done and now i just have the back piece left. it's the first wearable i've ever knitted and i made a lot of modifications, so hopefully it comes together alright. the yarn is from a cardigan i bought at a thrift store and unraveled, and i was worried that i wouldn't have enough yarn but i think it'll be enough. i managed to thrift and unravel two more sweaters this summer, so i'm excited to get this done and start working on the projects i have in mind for them.

the mitsuba my friend gave me finally grew enough for me to try it! a couple weeks ago a rabbit ate most of the shoots (despite being in a 3ft tall planter -_-) so i was worried but it seemed to bounce back alright. it's more bitter than i expected, but it tastes pretty good in miso soup. apparently it gets more bitter when grown in full sun compared to part shade… probably should've checked that before putting it somewhere that gets like eight hours of direct sunlight ^^;

i also recently beat shin megami tensei: devil summoner raidou kuzunoha. i've read that a lot of people don't like this game (or at least the combat system) but i thought it was pretty fun. i loved that demons could be controlled directly and interact with npcs and the environment, it definitely gave the world some more charm and party formation some much needed depth. i emulated this game with this hd texture pack and it looks really nice. i haven't started the second game yet but i hope i have some time to this weekend. here are some of my favorite screenshots:

the mitsuba seeds my friend gave to me finally sprouted! some of my other #plants are doing well too.

my friends just got back from japan! this is what they brought back for me. now i've gotten my fair share of grow-in-a-cup sets that are always too small to germinate all the seeds they supply but this is by far the most egregious lmao. there's gotta be more than 20 seeds in this bag. did the manufacturer expect me to germinate each seed individually or something? the cup is cute and i've never eaten the plant, 三つ葉 or japanese wild parsley, before so i'm quite excited to try it out... but i'll definitely be sowing it in a real planter tomorrow. i was also quite surprised by how much of the packaging and instructions i could read. last week i got some japanese stationary (a pilot kakuno fountain pen and a kokuyo campus notebook and paper) whose instructions i could read a fair bit too. maybe i have actually learned something in the last eight months i've been studying japanese?!

this past thursday was the first day of the farmer's market that i usually go to. the first couple weeks it's usually just starter herbs and flowers, plus some hanging baskets of flowers. this year in addition to the usual basil, thyme, and other herbs i like to grow, i bought some snapdragons and violets to put in planters to spruce up my front door steps a bit. i really enjoy this part of spring, past the last chance of snow and freezing temps where i can finally get a bit of gardening done before the heat of summer comes, even though i have to suffer through my seasonal allergies.

i also cleaned up some files on my pc since my storage is running a bit low. here's some gaming screenshots that i particularly liked but never posted anywhere.