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user-inactivated  ·  539 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: October 5, 2022

For the record, not that anyone asked, but for the record, I think Godzilla vs Kong was by far, the WORSE Godzilla movie ever made. It was so poorly written, with so many terrible moments, I’m surprised I sat through the whole thing. The fact that it’s well scored by both reviewers and audiences makes me think that our standards as critical, conscientious consumers of media have dropped off a cliff.

Why do I mention this, you ask?

None of the teams I rooted for this year are in the playoffs, and the way The MKB does listen sing for broadcasting games, watching playoff games is a headache under the best of circumstances. So, until The World Series starts, I’m gonna binge watch Godzilla and Ninja Turtles instead, cause my ability and therefore chances of catching a live game, unless I go to a sports bar, are practically zero.

But, no. Seriously. Godzilla vs Kong was a kaiju sized turd.

user-inactivated  ·  1499 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: February 19, 2020

Someone looks a bit like a surly bird. I'm in a bit of a similar mood myself. I should probably limit my interactions to the more light hearted and positive today.

user-inactivated  ·  1505 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: February 12, 2020

Little Trees and Gardening and Bugs

I understand that the odds of individual seeds making it aren't the best. I also understand that all of my seeds are still over-wintering and I probably have a couple of months to go before I see any results. But I'm so bored of looking at bare pots. So . . . if these little guys could hurry up, just a little? That'd be greeeat.

I'm kind of looking forward to spring this year, besides the trees, cause I'm just ready to do some gardening again. Weeding is as much fun as it is a pain in the butt, but when I'm doing it with someone, like Dala in our garden or helping a friend out in their garden, the pain in the butt part just kind of disappears. I don't think I'll have my good camera with me when I'm out, for fear of getting it took dirty, but I might have my half-broken point and shoot camera with me. If I see any nifty bugs or whatever else, it'll be a convenient opportunity to get some shots to load onto iNaturalist. That said, getting insects identified is a little hit or miss, which is understandable. A lot of species look near identical to one another.

Video Games

Stardew Valley is addictive and fun, which, fun addictive is probably the best and worse kind of addictive there is. I'm enjoying the fishing. I'm enjoying the mining. Farming can just straight up go away because man, that's a literal chore. I think my favorite part of the game is giving people random gifts and seeing what they like and what they hate. Some people have odd tastes. You give them a dandelion, they're all like "Awesome! Thank you!" You give them a semi-precious mineral like topaz though, they're all like "Ew. Why would you give this." Don't even get me started on the lady who didn't like the cake I gave her. It's cake lady. Who doesn't like cake?

It's been a bit of a slow week for me so far, which is good. I've needed a bit of a break after the hecticness of the holidays. I hope you're all doing well and staying warm this winter, Hubski. That is unless, you live close to the equator or in the Southern Hemisphere. In that case, I hope you're enjoying the sun! Either way, here's to a pretty good week.

user-inactivated  ·  1519 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Hubski Craft Fair v2.0 - January 29, 2020

I don't have any pictures, because I wanna wow you all with my progress for next week. I've been devoting about a couple of hours a day towards the blanket though and I wanna make it pretty impressive for you all. It survived its first wash and I learned that the Pine and Cedar oil is a lot more potent than the Bergamot oil, so I need to use less of it. Otherwise it gets overwhelming. Talking with my mother and wife though, we're strategizing how to tackle some of the more difficult aspects of this. Suffice to say, I'm gonna need to buy a sewing frame or embroidery hoop, maybe use cotton string to reinforce some areas, and maybe resort to some quilting/binding techniques for repairs. I want to avoid the last part though, because I think it would go against the character of the blanket.

elizabeth, you still struggling with keeping your embroidery threads neat? I ask because, sometimes I watch videos on hand quilting and hand tailoring and I've learned a few thread management techniques from them. If you want, I could try to find a video or two that might be relevant for you.

user-inactivated  ·  1540 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Ukrainian airliner crashes near Tehran: Iranian media

Bro. I know exactly how you feel and I know exactly where you're coming from. Trust me. I really, really do. I'm begging you though, please, sincerely, mercifully realize that there's real human hearts on the other side of that screen. This is a really important conversation to have, but it's a conversation that can only take place with measured and reasoned words, not anger and vitriol. Otherwise, instead of building bridges of understanding, all we're gonna succeed in is building walls of animosity and resentment.

Please. I feel you. 100%. But trust me, this isn't the way to have this talk.

user-inactivated  ·  1546 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Hubski Craft Fair v1.0 - January 2, 2020 (FINISHED)

Here is my finished rabbit. I decided it would be better to take it apart, then embroider, then put it back together. In the process, I hit two small snags. First in taking it apart, I cut some non-binding thread that's kind of important for design, but thankfully Dala had some fabric glue to help me take care of that. Then in the process of putting it back together, I realized no matter how much I tried to avoid it, due to bulk, there was gonna be some blue border poking out in a few parts.

My wife was a really wonderful sounding board for the decorative embroidery thread part. Not only did she help me pick the shade of brown and green thread that worked best with it, she also patiently listened to my gripes a bit, as well as consulted with me on what was too much or too little.

In the end, I lightly only embroidered the grass by adding flowers, the trunk of the tree, and the canopy of the tree (as well as adding the features to the rabbit). I think this really worked for the piece in two ways. By only lightly embroidering it, I avoided it from getting too busy and thereby distracting the eye away from the rabbit, the central part. But also, the parts I embroidered make a bit of a C shape, focused on the left side of the piece, and so the non-embroidered part on the right kind of balances it all out. Can I type embroidered enough? I dunno.

I hope the recipient of this likes looking at it as much as I made it. Fingers crossed.

For my next piece, I texted a good friend of mine asking them what their favorite American Animal was. I was hoping they'd say "Bear." I was expecting them to say "Bear." They said either "A bald eagle, a mountain lion, or a combination of the two, the Patriotic Bald Gryphon." Sooo . . . I don't know what I'm gonna do. You guys ever look at eagles or giant cats? Those guys have hard to capture personalities and I'm not that good at any kind of art. They don't know they're getting anything yet, so it's gonna be a bit of a surprise, but I'm thinking of leaning towards a Bald Gryphon, just because if I'm gonna mess up, I'm gonna shoot for the moon.

user-inactivated  ·  1596 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: November 13, 2019

Charity

Team Trees is at 15 million. When the whole thing first started, for the first couple of days, they were getting about 2 million trees a day. It's slowed down to the point where now it takes a week to get that much. That honestly makes the whole launch that much more impressive to me, the burst of enthusiasm and support everyone showed. I think they'll still hit their goal of twenty million trees by 2020, but at this point, everything could stop today and I'd say they did a great job.

Houses as Playgrounds

I pass by sometimes a farm house that is currently undergoing repairs. It has a new roof and siding and it looks like the work has started going on inside. For a few reasons, I'm pretty certain it's not being fixed up for sale, and even if it was, I don't think Dala and I could afford it or find it practical. Being about 800 sq feet, the house itself is too small to be practical and being on farm with a barn and a field or two and all, there's also too much property to manage to be practical. But man, I was thinking if we were rich, that would be the perfect kind of getaway place. Imagine being able to stuff that house with bookbinding equipment, sewing equipment, etc. plus having a barn to do whatever with plus more acres of land than anyone really needs. I mean, the imagination runs wild with ideas after a while.

Sewing

Working hard on some projects. I'm probably looking at 100 plus hours on things when everything is said and done and one of my friends recently said "that sounds like too much time and work" to which I say it isn't. It's a hundred hours of meditation and mental stimulation, a hundred hours of learning and creativity and art appreciation, a hundred hours of couch time with the wife and dog, and a hundred hours of fruitful fun all at once. It's a really efficient use of time actually. That said, I recently looked at a corner of the living room and though "I bet if I got rid of a few things, I could fit a loom there." Unfortunately, that's pretty impractical. Unless I had a get away farm house with a loom inside . . .

user-inactivated  ·  1604 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: November 6, 2019

13 million.

Dogs

I kind of want to stay in bed all day and cuddle the dog, for no other reason than my dog is very, very cuddly.

Movies

Men in Black is on Netflix right now. Dala and I watched it the other day and it was the first time I've seen it in well over a decade. It holds up really well, it's such a well done film. Thinking about it a few days later, I'm pretty impressed by Tommy Lee Jones subtle, dry execution of humor. The dude did a great job.

Sewing

I'm doing two sewing projects this year for Christmas gifts and I've been watching a ton of sewing and quilting videos on YouTube while I've been working on them. I'm learning a lot of things I'll probably never use, but are still good to know. The main one being, how to hide threads. I don't know if that'll ever come in handy for me, because I really, really like the look of exposed threads, to the point where after these two projects are done I'm probably gonna go into experimental mode. I wanna try different stitches to see how they look, different thicknesses of thread, even putting two different but complimentary threads in the needle at the same time, just to see what happens. Also, as an aside, I'm finding myself paying as much if not more attention to the texture amd feel of a fabric than the color of it when ever I'm looking at stuff. Wonder if that's normal.

I dunno. Life's good. Hope you're all doing great this fall.

user-inactivated  ·  1646 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: September 25, 2019

I recently discovered that the Trilobite Beetle exist and I think they're pretty nifty. This one is a lady and from what I understand, even though it's technically mature, it's technically not because in this species, females never leave the larval stage. Nature's interesting like that sometimes.

user-inactivated  ·  1657 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What do you make?

I make books.

I make stuff dolls.

I make drawings.

I make Dala annoyed sometimes.

user-inactivated  ·  1681 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Five years after Gamergate: "I Wish I Could Tell You It’s Gotten Better. It Hasn’t."

I used to have two very good friends who I always looked forward to hanging out with (separately, they didn't know each other). We'd go out to movies together, dinner together, or just hang out in the backyard. In the past five years, both of them became pretty extreme. One of them became super hardcore right wing while the other became super hardcore left wing. It got to the point where I dreaded hanging out with either one of them, because they'd always find some way, sooner or later, to get to ranting and raving about "the way the world is." They genuinely scared me. They scared me for repeating talking points seemingly unthinkingly. They scared me for always wanting to be angry. They scared me because talking to them, it became obvious that they weren't trying to read the news to be informed about the world, but because they wanted to be indignant. Most of all, the scared me because I know sometimes I read the news because I want to feel indignant. I always did my best to try and be a level voice and they always did their best to drown me out. Towards the end, it became exhausting. I don't really talk to either anymore. One is too tied up with family to spend time with me, the other too tied up with work, and a big part of me is thankful about that. It saves me from having to actively try and avoid them.

So where am I getting at with this?

Well, I avoid a lot of things these days now and I see reflections of those two relationships in things I used to love. The main reason I gave up comics was because I wanted to spend my money and time on other things. Don't get me wrong, I love comics, but there are other things out there to enjoy and I want to experience them. But another part of the reason I gave up comics is because I grew tired of seeing some of the conversations around them. Somewhere, conversations around comics and critiquing them devolved from "I'm not a fan of this storyarch because I don't think it serves the characters well." or "Such a writer and such an artist did a great job on this collaboration they did. Their styles really compliment each other." It turned into "SJW!" "FEMINISTS!" "VIRTUE SIGNALING!" etc. etc. While not everything that's put out is gold, one of the reasons I really liked independent comics was because there were more voices from more walks of life. Stan Sakai is my all time favorite comic maker for example and Usagi Yojimbo will probably always be one of my favorite comics. When those minority voices started entering more and more into the mainstream, I thought it was a good thing. The backlash against those voices scared me though and I just couldn't handle it, so I stopped engaging in conversations about comics. The funny thing is though, if there's no one to talk to about comics, somehow, comics become less enjoyable.

Comics weren't the only thing I've seen this in though. Video games aren't my thing, so I can't speak to them directly. A good example of something similar though is, sometimes companies like Disney or Warner Brothers or whoever make some business mistakes. Maybe a movie bombs or this that or the other. If you look up Youtube videos though, none of which I'll share but they're scary easy to find and have scary high view counts, they say things like "SJWs and Feminists are ruining this company! They're ruining this IP! Everything is horrible because they want to be progressive and inclusive and we're suffering because of it." The amount of unreasonableness I see. The amount of anger in those voices. It scares me and pushes me away. I don't want to be around those conversations just like I don't want to be around my old friends.

One of the things with geek culture that I've always struggled to deal with is that a lot of people are socially awkward, and that's okay, we all are sometimes. Sometimes people say and do embarrassing things because they don't know they're embarrassing. I can live with that. Now though, it so many people seem angry. I can't tell if they're intentionally angry and realize it and they're okay with it, or if they're unintentionally angry, don't mean to be, don't see how hateful they're being, and don't know how to stop it. I don't know which is scarier.

I found out last night that Millcreek is releasing Steelbook Boxsets of both Ultra Q and the first Ultraman. I'm interested in getting them and checking them out. I want to talk to people about them before I do, talk to people about them as I'm working through them, and talk to people about them long after I've finished them. I can't though, because the places where I can have those kinds of conversations with people who enjoy them are no longer places where I want to participate in.

I'm just a faceless guy who likes art and storytelling and passively enjoys these things. If I'm affected in such a crumby way, I can't imagine what so many of these artists, writers, and journalists are going through. It's heartbreaking to think about.

user-inactivated  ·  1699 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Who Is Left on Hubski? (Part II)

Name

applewood

Location

Sitting on a dining room chair. Getting ready to head into the backyard to listen to the cicadas.

Current Preoccupation

Trying to learn Spanish. Looking for good stories to read, television to watch, anything that'll fill the hole that was created since I walked away from comics. Sewing. Bookbinding. Job hunting.

    What change would you like to see from the users of Hubski?

More casual conversation, because it's genuinely a good way to connect to people.

More OC and threads about what people are making.

Humility. Curiosity. Civility. Gratitude. There's absolutely no reason why conversations on here should feel like walking into a war zone, where you're afraid to share ideas for fear of being dismissed, mocked, or antagonized against just because someone disagrees with you and feels absolutely no compulsion to treat you respectfully because of it. When this goes beyond even remotely controversial topics and bleeds into conversations about cartoons, movies, books, food, etc., it's beyond tragic. Conversations are supposed to be about exploring ideas together, to build relationships and share in the joys that our experiences bring us. They're not supposed to be battlefields, where at the very best the only thing that's won or loss is the building up or tearing down of egos.

Four years ago casual threads would have comments numbering in the dozens. Now we're lucky to get that out of Pubski. We're not gonna be able to get back to where we used to be without a genuine and heartfelt shift in attitude.

user-inactivated  ·  1722 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: July 10, 2019

Mild Regrets

I've been trying to eat healthier lately, but I think we can all admit that healthy eating and easy and convenient eating are two different things. The other day though, I got a protein cookie from the gas station for my second breakfast. It wasn't delicious, a bit doughy and dry at the same time and not very sweet, but I still enjoyed it. My gut though seemed to enjoy it much, much more. I don't think I've ever been so flatulent in my entire life. We're talking full blown power rips every five minutes or so for basically the rest of the day. I feel so sorry for my coworkers. So, learn a lesson from me, Pubski, if you see a protein cookie and you're wondering whether or not to give it a shot, my answer would be "only if you wanna torture the people around you."

Sewing

I'm working on making another rat owl, third and last one, from another old shirt. I now know how button collections get started. At the rate I'm going, I'll never run out of buttons for the rest of my life. If I recycle more and more old clothes of mine and Dala's, the same will be true for fabric. I just gotta find a way to keep things organized.

Speaking of sewing, a few different community centers around here host sewing circles. Dala goes to one from time to time and I think when possible, I'll try and join her. I know I'll enjoy meeting new people and I bet I'll learn a thing or too as well.

Geocaching

I think soon, between the books I make, the pictures I draw, and the dolls I'm sewing, I'm running out of places to keep things (let alone any real reason to keep them). I still give away quite a lot as gifts, but I'm thinking it might be fun to take up Geocaching as a hobby and using it to leave things behind.

Spanish

It's not always easy, but the learning goes on. Besides learning basics like numbers, people, etc., I'm focusing on building vocabulary around animals, food, and adjectives at the moment, because I like talking about animals, everyone likes talking about food, and you can't paint a picture with words without using adjectives. I'm struggling a bit, with everything from grammer to understanding accents to different dialects using different words, but it turns out those are common issues for anyone starting out, so I'm not too discouraged.

johnnyFive has allowed me to pm him some practice paragraphs and the feedback I've gotten from him has been super helpful. He's corrected some of my grammer for me, taught me some new words, and has given me some insightful information too. It's been fun. fletcher, if you're still game too, I think I might be ready to try some light conversations. You'll have to forgive me in advance though if my sentences are super simplistic.

All loose thoughts today.

user-inactivated  ·  1743 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: June 19, 2019

While he might not be full grown yet, it's safe to say that the baby rabbit that lives in the parking lot at work is no longer a baby.

user-inactivated  ·  1750 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: June 12, 2019

Sewing

I got my second rabbit done. It's actually been done for a while now. Probably about two, maybe three weeks at this point. I keep meaning to share it, but I've just been so burned out and so busy with other things at the same time that just taking a few quick pictures and putting them on Imgur to share on here took more effort than I really wanted to put in.

To make the thing more sturdy, I did a blanket stitch around all of the seams. On the one hand, it worked really well, as it's sturdy as heck. The downside of it is though, is that all of the body parts are much flatter. I'm not a fan of the colors, and I'm not proud of the massive forehead it's sporting, and overall it's a bit too plain, but my second effort went smoother than the first, I learned some things, and I'm ready for a new project.

.

.

.

Can't think of much to say that's really worth saying today, Pubski. So I'll let things go for now. Hope you're all doing well.

user-inactivated  ·  1820 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: April 3, 2019

Thoughts: Remember last week I talked about how I kept on thinking about things that I want to share with Pubski, but when the day came around I've forgotten what they were? I realized its because the majority of things I thought were worth sharing were just negative rants and the reason I keep forgetting to share is because, honestly, I've gotten better at letting things go. Don't be confused. I'm not trying to humble brag here, this is legit bragging with pride and all. There is plenty in life that still frustrates me, but I'm so much better at managing to deal with those frustrations now. I've still got a long way to go in the world, but I'm really happy to know and see the distance I've been able to put between the me that is today and the hurt, frustrated, bitter me of yesterday.