Cross stitch done on 14 count Aida. The color is Tempest, described as light aqua-green with blue and yellow-green splashes. At the top in block capital letters: I AM JUST TRYING TO HAVE A NICE DAY DESPITE KNOWING FACTS AND INFORMATION. The letters are in black except for A NICE DAY which is in pink. Under that is a possum sitting at a desk top. You can see his upper half, his hands are gripping the desk and his tail is visible on the left. His mouth is open and he's looking slightly off to the right. There is a white coffee cup on the desk which has tipped over and spilled a dark brown liquid.

Me, too, possum, me too! I finished this little guy earlier this week. The pattern is from CrossStitchWow on Etsy. I love the Aida fabric - it's Tempest from Picture This Plus (acquired from 123Stitch.com). Last year I bought several pieces of Aida that caught my fancy but had no specific plans for them. This one went perfectly with this pattern!

Speaking of cross stitch, there's been a brou-ha-ha going on over on the stitching subreddit. I know - Reddit, what does one expect! But the cross stitching sub is usually pretty welcoming and warm. This past week 2 users completed the same pattern and showed it off to the group. It was a HUGE project - a very large and colorful Tree of Life pattern. And these stitchers spent an awful lot of time and effort on stitching and framing the pieces. So what's wrong? The pattern was very clearly AI generated.

A lot of stitchers (and I know this happens in the other fiber arts, too) get tricked, especially if they are new, and invest in patterns that are sometimes really awful in the ridiculous number of similar colors used and the amount of confetti stitches. But these stitchers bought the patterns in good faith and were so proud (justifiably so!) of their work. One even said they wanted to enter the finished piece in their state fair.

The feelings among that community regarding AI patterns is strong (rightly so) but it was very sad to see the number of people who couldn't separate the issue of AI patterns from stitchers who didn't know and put their heart and soul into a project and just totally crapped on them. What a way to turn off people from a community and possibly a craft. Don't fucking do that.

And, speaking of AI.... I finally made my site a 404 page. Yay! I really wanted a vaporwave 80's beach scene for what I had in mind and I thought it would be easy to find something on the web. HAH! I ran into so much AI-generated CRAP. Like, I know this is a problem but this is the first time I had to slog through it so it really came home. It was especially frustrating at how impossible it was to avoid even when trying.

I looked through Deviant Art, which I know has a reputation of being filled with AI slop. Previously I had been successful finding actual pixel art on the site so I didn't think I'd have a problem finding something like a vaporwave beach scene. So. Much. AI. DA even has an option in the settings to LIMIT the number of AI results in your searches. Note - limit. You can not exclude them entirely. Why, DA?

I've been using NoAIDuckDuckGo as my main search engine so I tried an image search. The search results were full of entire sites that are nothing but AI-generated images, even though I had the Hide AI Images option checked. So, what part of NoAIDuckDuckGo is NoAI? I did flag some of the sites but that was an endless task.

I never found what I was looking for - which, to be clear wasn't something concrete but just an idea I had in my mind that I was sure must have existed somewhere - and ended up using a different type of graphic. But damn - fuck the general state of things.

I feel like I'm seeing a lot of perfume related blog posts and pages lately which is awesome! I love the idea of perfume. But probably about 20 years ago or so wearing perfume became problematic. Not like I have a chemical sensitivity or anything like that but I would like the scent until I didn't and then the fact that it was still on me and I could still smell it really bothered me, to the point I would feel nauseous. It's like my brain and olfactory senses ganged up and said, "ENOUGH!"

I pretty much quit using perfume for quite a while. But seeing all these posts have got me feeling some FOMO so I'm back to some light perfume usage and enjoying it. This past week I wore Her Open Heart by Jane Seymour, Cardamom Rose Sugar by Solstice Scents and today I'm wearing Smokewood Apiary, also by Solstice Scents.

This week I have an appointment to see a specialst regarding HRT. I thought I made it through menopause without any issues but I've been dealing with a few things that could be related (hair loss, unexplained elevated cholesterol levels) and one that definitely is (hot flashes).

I'm particularly irked by the hot flashes. Y u betray me, body? We've gone 4 years without this nonsense and now, in the middle of a brutal summer, you decide to make me feel like I'm being dipped in lava several times a day? That is some kind of bullshit.

Listening

Some podcasts I've listened to this week:

Best Son came over and had some new music for me to listen to. I wasn't sure about this at first because I'm not into metal and this is kind of loud and screamy in parts but the chorus (I think? Not a musical person so not sure about the song part terminology) hooked me with its almost K-pop, bubblegum sound.

Reading

I finished We'll Prescribe You a Cat by Syou Ishida and just loved it although I don't totally understand some parts. This was translated from Japanese and there were several times where the author pointed out that a character was speaking in a specific type of Kyoto accent. I'm wondering if there was some sort of cultural reference to be inferred that I just didn't get. There is a follow up book, We'll Prescribe You Another Cat and I put that on hold at the library.

In the meantime I'm reading House of Frost and Feathers: A Folkloric Fantasy by Lauren Wiesebron. The main character has just gone to work for a sorceress who lives in a house on chicken legs. Love me some Baba Yaga flavored tales (although it's Baba Zima in this book).

Watching

I'm caught up with episodes of Harry Wild and now have to wait for them to come out weekly, like I'm living in the olden days. That's the only show I've been watching the past week. Other than that it's been a lot of YouTube watching.

I've fallen down the rabbit hole of videos about ATCs (artist trading cards) and thinking that's something I'd really like to do. I do this often, though - get entranced by something and want to dive into it until something else shiny catches my eye!

Link Lagniappe

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OK, that's about it for this week!

When I first started using Zonelets I had Disqus set up as a commenting system but it looked obnoxiously ugly and I ditched it. Some people are happy to not have blog interaction but I'd love to hear from you if you have any thoughts you want to share! You can respond through my guestbook or email. If you found this link on Discord or the 32-Bit Cafe Discourse, you can message me there or leave a message on my Neocities profile page.