8.23.26 visiting my in-laws always makes me happy. they've got so much homegrown produce to share, my MIL shows off the new creative things she's been making, AND i get to spend time in the middle of nowhere. we play games and lay around and rest. it's probably the closest thing i'll have to a cabin to visit in my adult life. i did a lot of updates on my art site! i found a way to be comfortable adding a picture of myself, a digital collage around a masked selfie. https://o17.xyz/about while dinner is being prepared, i'm starting to put together "forgotten islands", my 2026 napowrimo zine. i'll be using patterns i photographed on a tour of a historical mansion as the backgrounds, i think it'll look quite nice :) 8.15.26 my birdwatching has led me to falling in love with green herons. they're so small compared to the ones i'm used to, and i love the way their neck shoots out when they're catching fish. i also learned they use tools, which has only been observed in 33 out of 249 families of birds! they use bait to fish, leaving a scrap of bread to attract their prey. such fascinating little guys. i wrote two new pages of a zine last weekend, but i've still been struggling to connect with making things. there are plenty of ideas and things i'd like to work on, but time/energy/enthusiasm are often lacking. for now, i'll continue taking photos while i walk, journaling, reading books, writing down my dreams. last night, i had one about an alligator who was making it big trading magic the gathering cards for fish, which somehow turned into a crypto scam. he needed more staff to manage the process, so he decided to use his mother's sort of brain zombie for help? as in, her body was suspended in some tank, and in order to preserve her mind, all of the rest of her energy was put into making a digital copy of it. also, she was a human, so. not sure about how that motherhood worked. ⋆˚꩜｡ּ⋆˚꩜｡ּ "yet where did the idea of an infinitely divisible whole come from in the first place if not the human brain, its infinite folds, its infinite pathways, tracks and trails, surging rivers, tree-crowned hills and dark-green valleys, its grazing cows, rabid dogs, hay bales, iridescent fish leaping on sun-pricked hooks, waterfalls, all its glittering synaptic leaps..." -from "hell" by kathryn davis 8.3.2026 trip a couple weeks back was amazing: collected so many gorgeous rocks from the lake, bought books at a cool leftie bookstore, played lots of games and read books and hiked to a natural oddity, where a small waterfall disappears into a hole and scientists still aren't 100% sure where it comes out got a lot done this weekend so the apartment feels more put together, though it doesn't take long for me to feel behind again. want to install more hanging shelves ASAP for displaying all our treasures. sometimes it feels too cluttered, but any time someone comes over, they always say they love all our stuff. surpassed 350k words in my dream journal as of today, just moved it over to ellipsis because it feels less likely to get AI scraped from there than discord. got some simple binoculars + a goofy little zoom lens that clips onto my phone, hoping they'll up the quality of my bird watching at least a little. 17.17.1717 send me a letter - oneironaut17@gmail.com