Category: the dipped in ink blog

I moved to Substack!

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hullo everybody! long time no see (my fault, but we ignore that)

today i come along to convey the good news (or not-so-good news depending on whether you actually enjoy the words i throw out into the internet-void or think them a godforsaken curse) that i’ve been writing again! albeit on a different platform: a book blog on substack! (currently named “if cats ruled the world” but i’m in the depths of seriously considering changing it to “the fantasy journals” to fit the theme better. we’ll see. you’re free to offer opinions and screamy thoughts)

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i am an olive and my life is perfect

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on the 2nd of january, i adopted a cat.

if you want the full story, then i guess it started with running away. back in the slightly summery depths of october.

but maybe we should start from the beginning. here’s the backstory: since the first of january of 2023 i’ve been best friends with every single cat-instead-of-human living within a 2 mile radius of my house (well except like two. because they’re both mean and spend 5 hrs every night screaming their throats hoarse. plus they fight with the smol cute cats that live on my front porch. it’s mean. the kittens get scared. which makes them hide underneath cars) (we’ve once chased each other, the bad grey cat and i, around a white car at 3 in the morning. i got scolded the next day and the bad cat still tortures the rest of his species. it was an epic fail and i’m officially giving up chasing) we know each other by name (or like, i do. i doubt they know my name or their own either) (although, if we’re basing this off the entire truth, i don’t think i’ve ever told them mine) and follow each other down compound lanes, in their case, or wave a slightly-ridiculous-sounding “how ARE you, jo?”, in mine, whenever we happen to be walking down the same road. i love them and by the way they all fight each other to be the one being petted at any given moment, i like to think that they like me too.

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the upside of falling by alex light (but falling doesn’t ACTUALLY have an upside. you scrape your knees and get sucked into a hole and sometimes get your heart broken. SO DON’T FALL)

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new years are so weird.

there’s all this anticipation and excitement and fireworks. and then it’s the first of january. and then it’s the seventh. and like, it’s just,, gone. no more firecrackers. no more remembering resolutions. no more freaking out (ok so maybe that last part’s a lie. we’re humans. freaking out is what keeps us breathing)

it’s creepy.

you get this one chance to do everything RIGHT this year and if you blow it, it’s going to STAY blown up for the next 365 days. AND THAT’S SO DUMB, DUDE. i only get this one chance to get every single square green on all my coding sites. i only get one chance to say i’ve read a thing once every 24 hours for a total of 365 consecutive days and won at life like that. i get just the one chance to reach my over-ambitious goodreads reading goal for the year. because if i start off behind in january, i’m going to go down burning underneath the weight of my own tears in december.

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everything i’ve been up to recently that hasn’t been nablowrimo (a half-finished painting of what my life looked like the last two weeks of november)

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if this was the 2nd of december, here’s an incomplete list of everything that happened in the last 3 hours of my life:

  • i accidentally killed a fly that has been trying to make a home in my hair for the better part of the last one hour.
  • i also came back from a two-week vacation and spent 36 hours alternating between watching tv on planes and dozing on airport chairs. (i realize that this isn’t something that has happened specifically in the last 180 minutes, but you need context)
  • my cats are overjoyed at having my undivided attention again (or like any attention because all they got for the last fourteen days was cat-snacks from the neighbours). i always assumed they were in this for the food but apparently they like me a little too. happiest day of my entire frickin life, thanks.
  • i also bathed and submitted to a coding challenge 24 minutes late because i couldn’t figure out how to edit things on my phone, and i drank tea and thought about caramel popcorn and affectionately scolded my cats for growing up while i wasn’t there to see.
  • it’s currently 4 am and i have become a night monster. although some people call it jet lag.
  • but monster’s cooler. so we go with that.
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the end of the year book tag (or the only thing anoushka ever does that’s on time) (SHUT UP my sense of time is perfect)

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(i do realize that the title might just be a smol massive lie because based on public consensus everyone will tell you that this tag is actually supposed to be a november occurrence BUT I WRITE MID-YEAR WRAP UPS IN SEPTEMBERS OKAY LET ME HAVE THIS)

it’s that time of the year again. when the world is teetering on yearly boundaries and our little blue planet in the hidden confines of the milky way is about to have it’s ridiculously huge-numbered birthday again (the earth is an old place)

for most people, that’s a scary time. BECAUSE OHMYGOSH TIME!!!! I’M RUNNING OUT!!!!! WHAT DO I DOOOOO (cue sob. and more sobs. and a rainstorm)

but if you’re a bookworm, it’s a scarier time. because you’re like the normal mortals too, in that the world comes one year closer to its demise and you do too, but also because your life is deadly in a way that the sane humans will never understand (they’re dumb okay).

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i want to do STUFF this november (welcome to nablowrimo and all the rest of my fake promises to the universe)

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i have this two-year streak of failing nanowrimo where i start the month convinced i’ll ace it this time but end it screaming. and i kind of want to keep it going.

it’s the thirty-first of october, my email is doomed with more ‘this is how you win nano’ messages than i can possibly read in a lifetime, and so am i because i don’t have an outline yet. or like. anything resembling, no matter how loosely, a coherent-looking story idea. i haven’t blogged about any of it either. AND WHERE’S THE FUN IN NANOWRIMO IF I CAN’T SCREAM ABOUT IT ON THE INTERNET AND EVERYWHERE I GO?

in 2022, i pulled an all-nighter and wrote up ten pages worth of notes, most of which were made up of all-caps screams. but i used gel pens and at least they looked pretty.

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i want to read BOOKS this halloween (because there’s obviously pumpkins and ghosts and candies and other such things that can also be read)

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welcome to 2023, the year when anoushka is finally in on the fun of halloween, and actively decides to read books related to something.

(see because i’m usually terrible at tbrs, themed or otherwise, and have been known to read christmas books in the middle of summer and summer-y contemporaries in december. she has no sense of time)

the internet is probably being a good influence on me though because i’ve never before kept track of october the 31st and all the days preceding the yearly ghost hauntings (shh i live in a country that doesn’t celebrate halloween and never makes a big deal out of it either. the first time i ever heard about the existence of such a holiday was through the diary of a wimpy kid books back in elementary school. which is to say DON’T YOU COME AFTER ME AND PUT THAT DAGGER BACK INSIDE YOUR SHOE, ALICE). but elli shared a spooky-book-ed tbr when october as still smol and new and exciting and shiny, and it looked like such FUN i decided i wanted to join in too.

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august inked on paper (no, i didn’t get the months wrong. i’m just. you know. late)

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august seems conveniently far away but also disturbingly just two months ago 01

a lot of things happened in august. the kittens who haunt my front door turned two. 02 i went on vacation and spent the days alternating between reading until my eyes fell off and worrying about the cats outside my house not eating enough. i tried befriending ducks and it was an epic failure™. (but i’m fabulous and consoled myself by the flawless logic of how ducks were supposed to be my enemies anyway. because my beloved cats eat them for dinner and if i ended up loving them both then my life would just be Tragic) i learned to stand in pool water that comes up to my chin and not suffocate under the constant nagging fear that i’m going to FALL DOWN AND DROWN UNDER IT.

so apart from the fact that i still very much cannot swim and i haven’t yet won over the ducks, maybe august was a borderline nice month. sometimes. (i mean,,, it TRIED. points for effort. i’m nice)

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i spent three days coding a dipped in ink replica and my computer didn’t burst into flames or give up its old life to join the ravkan volcra!!!!

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lately i’ve been doing wild things like learning how to code and make the computer bend to my will and do my bidding for me.

i’ve officially termed it my second step to conquering the world after creating a loyal cat army that follows me everywhere i go and raids libraries to bring me back all the stories.

but you already know all of this.

(from that time two posts ago when we spent a considerable word count talking about html and c++ and fun things and me wanting to give up sleep and food and everything that the mortals do in order to take up coding and physics-ing and blogging as a full-time life and do nothing else for the rest of my immortal existence)

recently i tried dragging myself through youtube’s html courses.

but i’m an opinionated olive who takes great joy in complaining about html being too looooooong and wordy and so commonplace when compared with the sheer magic of python or c++.

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why you might want to drop everything and read about the martian who got left on mars (cosmos is such a pretty word)

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i like to think that i’ve read a considerable amount of science fiction in my life.

two years ago, i spent an entire week of school evenings devouring the lunar chronicles and coming out the other end slightly angry because the hype lied and i could think up about 38163 better uses of my time. i’ve read three of the five books since and i’m wholly convinced it’s actually very lame (OK except maybe fairest. villain backstories are tragically irresistible even to fabulous beings (me) and i’m weak like that) (BUT SECRETS)

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