January

January was really eventful!! This month was honestly defined by new things and new experiences (pretty fitting for the new year after all!).

• I got an opportunity to be a freelance researcher and script-writer for the Islamic history YouTube channel al Muqaddimah (the first script I wrote (which I didn't end up finishing until February) hasn't been made into a video yet but keep an eye out!)
• I started on a painting! This was my first time making a painting where I felt like I really "got it." Turns out doing basic shapes and letting the paint dry before putting more paint on is the recipe for success, at least for this style of painting!

progress on Mary Louise Williams, survived by her son Oscar
Jan. 5th	Jan. 6th	Feb. 1st

• On January 15th, a ceasefire was agreed to in Gaza, going into effect on January 19th! Writing now from March 5th, the ceasefire seems precarious, but my hope is always for the end of the genocide and for a free Palestine, from the river to the sea.
• On January 16th, David Lynch passed away. His films and visual art and his whole ethos are such a major influence on me, and on my feelings about art, so even though I obviously didn't know him personally, this really affected me. I've been meaning to make a Lynch/Twin Peaks shrine page for this site, I really need to get on that sooner rather than later. On the topic of Lynch, my roommate and I watched Eraserhead this month, and my girlfriend and I watched more Twin Peaks (we're working our way through the series!)
• A group of friends of mine started planning a collaborative art project themed around dreams and memories... keep an eye out, once it's ready I'll be linking it on the site.
• The other truly defining event for the month was attending the first in-person congress of the Marxist Unity Group (MUG), an orthodox marxist and democratic-republican (nothing to do with the two American parties) caucus in the Democratic Socialists of America! This was such a great, rewarding, politically energizing experience, and reinvigorated me to deepen my involvement in socialist organizing. TBH Lynch passing and MUGcon have been the two most defining events of the year for me, lots of reverberations out.

Click to visit MUG's site!

• And, finally, the washing machine in my apartment got fixed :p It was broken for like two whole months!!

lil lemon

February

February was mostly defined by me being horribly ill! I had the flu or a cold or something or other not once but twice in February (first during the weekend of Jan 31st-Feb 2nd, and then from Feb 15th-18th). Got to watch a lot of movies and got back to games I hadn't touched in a while, but it did mean I didn't really work on much this month (other than finishing the first script for al Muqaddimah). I thought a nice soothing moss background would counteract the sicky vibes.

It started last year, but I'm currently enrolled in an online library science program! One of my classes this semester is Awful, the structure is so confusing, everything is group work and in the groups we almost never know what the actual work is, it's a whole thing. A month and a half in, you'd think I'd have more of a hang on it, but I just don't! My other class is better tho, its about games and literacies so I get to talk about my first love, tabletop roleplaying games, a lot ehehe

In addition to the first-time watches over on the right, my roommate and I watched (re-watched for me) Blue Velvet, and I realized that might be my most-watched movie ever (at least, not counting ones that were repeat viewing as a child). Now it's dark...

I also got back to writing for my old school DnD blog, Save vs. Worm, this month! Part 16 of my long-running series reviewing monsters from the Fiend Folio (Tabaxi to Tween!) The False Prophet, a monster for my late antique Iran inspired setting King of Kings, based on a passage from the Talmud

March

March was, for the most part, not very eventful, no big events just lots of little things, which honestly may have contributed to why it's now taken me so long to getting around to writing about it (hello from July! Woops!). Just to keep it nice 'n simple, here's a bullet-point list:

• Started playing in my friend Nick LS Whelan's dungeon-crawling game using Errant! My character, Jessssica, is a former chimney sweep snake-woman magic-user.
• Also with my friend Nick, started up a weekly hangout where we watched the series Mussolini: Son of the Century one episode a week, on Mussolini Mondays. Eventually our friend Ava (creator of Errant!) joined in. Also, speaking of watching stuff, in March I also started watching The Venture Bros.! Both great shows, in very different ways.
• Made this year-in-review page!
• Made this fantasy map that I got just obsessed with for a few days there, came up with setting ideas for it but haven't touched it since. Maybe I'll go back to it at some point and make a page for it on the site!

figure: Three fantasy maps, one of a whole world and two of the geopolitical situations on two continents

• Went to the SICKEST drag show ever! I've not been to all that many in general, but this one had a bit of a horror-comedy vibe going on. Mad doctors, David Lynch references (one queen had a papier-mache Eraserhead baby that she incorporated into her performance), and one drag queen who at first appeared totally eyeless before taking off her dress to reveal eyes lining her limbs and body. Shoutout to the friends that last minute invited me to that, it was so cool.
• Which, speaking of friend stuff, later in the month I went to the theatre department capstone of a college friend of mine, who put on this very introspective, semi-autobiographical and history-spanning play (it had stuff set in Weimar-era Berlin and in Shakespearean London, pretty neat all around) about trans issues and transfem Experiences, it was a good time!
• And, back here at the Squirmzone, in March I wrote up a post over on my scraps midden all about a strange bird-related report from a British UFO zine!

April

April was defined, personally, by another DSA-related event and one major family trip. The former was my DSA chapter's chapter convention, where I put forward a resolution to establish a committee to write a chapter-level political program; the process of writing the program has defined the rest of the year for me! The latter was a trip with my Mom and Grandpa to Washington, DC, complete with many museum visits.

We visited the National Museum of Natural History, the Museum of the American Indian, the National Museum of African American History and Culture (where the in-museum Emmett Till memorial elicited tears on my part), the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Silver Springs, MD, historic Christ Church in Alexandria, VA, and the National Portrait Gallery/National American Art Museum (which share a building). This last pair of museums was where I came face to face with (alongside aforementioned memorial to Till) the things which most impacted me in DC:

THE THRONE OF THE THIRD HEAVEN
OF THE NATIONS' MILLENNIUM GENERAL ASSEMBLY

figure: My perhaps not very good photos of details on the Throne

The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations' Millennium General Assembly is a piece of "outsider art" or "visionary art" made by the Black custodian St. James Hampton, who lived in Washington DC, out of cardboard, aluminum foil, gold foil, and found objects over the course of 14 years following a series of religious visions. It was one of the things I was most anticipating for the visit to DC, and seeing it in person was practically a religious experience, I couldn't take my eyes off of it. If you want a video about him and his art, this video is pretty good! My pictures just don't do it justice. What almost does do it justice, however, are these very blurry photos that evoke a certain feeling in me when I look back at them:

The other item in the museum which had a similar effect on me (a mix of excitement and awe) was stumbling upon, without even knowing it was in there, the portrait of the great abolitionist and revolutionary fighter John Brown!

Seeing his face on that wall without expecting it made me so happy... There were other cool artifacts and exhibits in the museums we visited, but everything existed in the shadow of James Hampton and John Brown, at least for me. In other news, in April I also wrote a post for the scraps midden on the rabbit hole I went down in search of the right honorable Jacob G. Post and his battle with a gargantuan mosquito in the very early 20th century!

May

June

JUNE was both Pride month and the start of the summer semester of online library school, which sucked so so so bad, even worse somehow than the spring semester that was already pretty onerous. Really felt like I was wasting my time with the classes I was taking. BUT, other than that June was a great time.

• Over on my DnD blog, I wrote two new blog posts: Wasserdämonen des Landes der Dunkelheit (Three Monsters (and Two Lairs) for King of Kings) (which, tbh, kind of underperformed views-wise compared to how excited I was about it but that's okay) and Mnemovore Worms and Phantasmal Plants, both posts also featuring some of my art!
• Went to a Magic: the Gathering tournament with my girlfriend which was a lovely time :)
• Went to the pride festival in my city and I decided I HAD to get gayer... also, I somehow left the pride festival having bought two books on UFOs and cryptids and nothing really queer-related, sooooo...
• On June 24th, Zohran Mamdani, the DSA candidate for Mayor of New York City won in the Democratic party primary, which honestly redefined the whole political conversation (I was and still am against the idea of getting socialists in power of the executive at any level before we have a real majority for socialism rather than trying for some kind of top-down municipal socialism, BUT I remain cautiously optimistic and glad that DSA has taken a chance on this!)

And, at the very tail-end of June, I had yet another honestly life-changing event (this year seems to have been full of these... perhaps life-changing isn't the right word so much as path-setting, reinvigorating, or personally redefining), in the form of a big meetup with a gaggle of a bunch of my online trans girl friends over in California! I was only there for a long weekend, and felt so so so nervous at the start, but by the end I had realized just how much my friends meant to me and had something like a new lease on life, which I wasn't totally able to keep up for longer than a few weeks after getting home but it did provide a new baseline to go back to, y'know? Watched movies, went to bookstores and museums (namely the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum in San Jose, which was... interesting (and pretty cool)), went on a night-time hike up what to me was a mountain but to the California girls was just a hill, went to a second pride festival, and more than anything just chatted and had good conversations and emotional conversations and jokes with each other... I kinda keep referring to this trip in my day-to-day life as like a turning point and to be completely honest, that's because it was!

If I can figure out how to put a spoiler on an image with CSS I'll put the crazy photo of a half-eaten deer carcass we found on the night hike here. I was kinda genuinely worried about mountain lions up there not gonna lie.