130 hours into Yakuza 7, and I've just found out where you can buy trash. And a bunch of other things you need for a few fetch quests you get given right at the beginning of the game.

I can't tell if this is success or failure.

It's my birthday today. All things considered, it's been a pretty nice one. My sister unexpectedly remembered it was my birthday and bought me something, and when my mum when to see my ON this morning he gave her a birthday card for me with a ten pound note in it, which makes me feel about 10, but money's money. Then we all went to the park for a walk with the dog - saw the cherry blossom and the swans - and mum got me a cake, and we had takeaway for tea. And I got £100 (plus ten!) to spend, which is always a bonus. Given the massive social constraints we're living under at the moment, it was pretty nice.

I am playing Yakuza 7, I love Yakuza 7. I'm not really used to the storytelling of the Yakuza series, so I feel like I've been punched in the heart and my head is spinning, and the same is true for the main character. Also they do that slightly annoying thing in the game that they do in a lot of open-world games, where they make the main story really dynamic and urgent a lot of the time, but also put a lot of side activities in the open world. So it's exciting and makes the story compelling, and I have no complaints about the story, but can also be frustrating trying to find a believable time to mess about with less urgent things outside the main story. But I'm still very much enjoying it, story and side activities. I need trash, and I had trash and got rid of it, and now a request has come in asking me to deliver trash to someone, and despite painstakingly searching a lot of rubbish bins, I'm not finding very much trash.

My mum has struggled to see with one eye for the past few months - something to do with cataracts and previous laser eye surgery, I think? - but after getting vaccinated she finally went to the doctor's to have it looked at, and she had more laser surgery on Monday and now can see again. Which is nice.

Women's History Month got a little bit depressing in between reactions to the Meghan and Harry interview, some disturbing violence at some women's protests, and the Sarah Everard case. And now apparently the stories just keep on coming! Women's lives matter.

I'm playing Yakuza 7 most of the time, I barely exist on the internet until after midnight. Also I sort of applied for a job this week - my mum saw a Facebook post from a friend of hers about admin staff needed at a care home down the street from us. I registered an interest and the woman called me then sent me a job description at my request. But there weren't many details in the original post, and I guess I assumed maybe it would be casual because she was talking about it on Facebook - but she ended up describing it as a very 'full-on', full-time post where you basically do all the office work, to replace a woman who'd been there for years and was now retiring. So I thought maybe the job wasn't for me, and didn't end up applying. Still, it was interesting.

Supernatural Love - by Gjertrud Schnackenberg

My father at the dictionary-stand
Touches the page to fully understand
The lamplit answer, tilting in his hand

His slowly scanning magnifying lens,
A blurry, glistening circle he suspends
Above the word 'Carnation'. Then he bends

So near his eyes are magnified and blurred,
One finger on the miniature word,
As if he touched a single key and heard

A distant, plucked, infinitesimal string,
'The obligation due to every thing
That's smaller than the universe.' I bring

My sewing needle close enough that I
Can watch my father through the needle's eye,
As through a lens ground for a butterfly

Who peers down flower-hallways toward a room
Shadowed and fathomed as this study's gloom
Where, as a scholar bends above a tomb

To read what's buried there, he bends to pore
Over the Latin blossom. I am four,
I spill my pins and needles on the floor

Trying to stitch 'Beloved' X by X.
My dangerous, bright needle's point connects
Myself illiterate to this perfect text

I cannot read. My father puzzles why
It is my habit to identify
Carnations as 'Christ's flowers', knowing I

Can give no explanation but 'Because'.
Word-roots blossom in speechless messages
The way the thread behind my sampler does

Where following each X I awkward move
My needle through the word whose root is love.
He reads, 'A pink variety of Clove,

Carnatio, the Latin, meaning flesh.'
As if the bud's essential oils brush
Christ's fragrance through the room, the iron-fresh

Odor carnation's have floats up to me,
A drifted, secret, bitter ecstasy,
The stems squeak in my scissors, Child, it's me,

He turns the page to 'Clove' and reads aloud:
'The clove, a spice, dried from a flower-bud.'
Then twice, as if he hasn't understood,

He reads, 'From French, for clou, meaning a nail.'
He gazes, motionless. 'Meaning a nail.'
The incarnation blossoms, flesh and nail,

I twist my threads like stems into a knot
And smooth 'Beloved', but my needle caught
Within the threads, Thy blood so dearly bought,

The needle strikes my finger to the bone.
I lift my hand, it is myself I've sewn,
The flesh laid bare, the threads of blood my own,

I lift my hand in startled agony
And call upon his name, 'Daddy Daddy' -
My father's hand touches the injury

As lightly as he touched the page before,
Where incarnation bloomed from roots that bore
The flowers I called Christ's when I was four.



Given that I have a lot of interest in word origins, this is one of my favourite poems.

Marilyn Monroe



My life currently consists of playing through Yakuza 7: Like A Dragon and trying to catch a stringfish in Animal Crossing before March is out. I love Yakuza 7 though. But I suspected I would since I saw that trailer where the main character looks up into a sky filled with fireworks and says "Everything will work out. Just like in Dragon Quest", and I whispered to the screen "I will protect you".

Alanis Morissette
(tw: child abuse)

The other day I was reading a fic, and they quoted a line I recognised, and looking it up I realised it was from 'Hands Clean' by Alanis Morissette. It's a song I used to really like, assuming it was about a relationship Alanis had had with a younger man, and he sort of took advantage of her connections in the music industry and now doesn't talk to her. But reading the lyrics, I thought "hmm, that does sound like an abusive relationship though", so I looked them up again, and it turns out the song is actually, reportedly, about a relationship Alanis Morissette had with an older male music executive when she was 14 years old.


Years before Me Too, women were outright talking about being abused in entertainment industries, and we all just sort of bought it as a pop song.

Head Over Feet is the first song I ever heard and loved by Alanis Morissette - I heard it on the radio when I was a teenager, without knowing who sang it or what the song was, and ended up in an HMV trying to sing what I remembered of it to a shop assistant, in the hopes they could help me identify it. They couldn't, but luckily it was on the radio and around enough after that that I could eventually find it. The beginning could be argued as okaying sexual harassment ("I had no choice but to hear you/You stated your case time and again/I thought about it"), but I still think it's a really nice love song. And seen through the lens of Hands Clean and the experiences Alanis Morissette apparently had...I think it's even more touching.



Alanis Morissette is apparently still hanging out and creating music. She had a new album out just last year, and apparently played in London (presumably before the lockdown). I think I'm going to try to check out what she's doing now.

It's Women's History Month! Though no-one seems to be talking about it. Google hasn't mentioned, and Waterstones wants me to know about Mother's Day (UK) and World Book Day, but not Women's History Month. But it is regardless, so here:

My thoughts on The Great so far, up to episode 8:

( Spoilers )

The Met Office predicted a 60% chance of light snow right now, and lo, it is lightly snowing.

Mum usually goes to town on Tuesdays, but we'll see.

So, England's in the midst of a vicious wave of the pandemic, we have potential flooding, and Joe Biden is being inaugurated today. Should be a very interesting day in the news.

Also, less than a month after finally leaving the oversight of the EU, the government are 'looking at' the employment laws we followed as part of them, including the ones that protected workers' rights. A 'select group' of business leaders have been invited to the consultation. I wonder if they've also invited any minimum wage workers? Or say, working mothers? Probably not.

The first week of the year was interesting to say the least. Hopefully we're not starting as we mean to go on.

I don't know, I'm very blah and deflated at the moment. Everything is terrifying. I don't know what the rest of the year holds for me at all - I had a vague idea of looking for work in spring, when things will hopefully be better, but I feel like we're not through with the business bankruptcies yet, and if there's a chance I can hold out and get the vaccine, that would also be worth doing. I'm not particularly interested in getting long Covid, or long-term problems that show up a year or two or ten after being infected. But then there are stories of people who had the vaccine then getting the disease, and people are a little bit sketchy about the government messing with the vaccine schedule anyway. I don't know. January and February are always kind of crap, but now it seems to have extra greyness and uncertainty to it.

Mum was scared to go shopping today, for the first time since the whole thing started. I mean, I think she's been scared before, but yesterday she was actively looking for ways not to do it. She looked up online deliveries for Morrisons, and then debated just going to Marks and Spencers (rather than M&S then Morrisons) and trying to make do with the food in there, for a week. Marks and Spencers were apparently doing a little more in terms of precautions than Morrisons have been doing, only allowing a certain number of trolleys/people into the shop at one time. She cheered when the news about Morrisons enforcing mask wearing came out yesterday. She did go today, to both shops, and said it was noticeably quieter and emptier than it has been for a while. Maybe people are finally taking this seriously.

I have started playing Borderlands 2 again. It doesn't seem like a way to broaden my horizons, but it does seem like the game with the least darkness I can think of, and the most colours, which I think will suit my TV screen better. It is an amazing game, though. Maybe it's just nostalgia, but it just feels refreshing in a way so many games don't, like there's a real sense of space. And just a focus on one or two mechanics, done well, rather than a bunch of things all jumping for your attention at once, which feel super limited when you actually pay attention to them. Anyway. Also, I get to play Maya, after they did her dirty in Borderlands 3. Oh I love Maya. I have also been playing the Sims again, which I think is just because I crave the outside and more interactions with animals. My character adopted 2 stray dogs, and they made the most beautiful offspring in the world.

I have also been watching TV. The Great is on on Sunday nights - I intended to watch that last year, for Women's Month, and now it turns out you can't really get the whole thing anywhere in the UK legitimately, and the one 'unofficial' site I tried gave me a bad experience I just don't need at the moment. You can't even download the whole boxset on 4, it's just coming out one episode at a time, and that's it. I'm really enjoying it, as I assumed I would given the glowing reviews last year, and I will let you know my full thoughts on it in eight weeks' time. I've also been watching Traces on the BBC with mum and dad. The Guardian gave it a 2 out of 5 last week, but I'm really enjoying it. It stretches at reality a bit and has the same 'small world' syndrome a lot of modern crime stories have, but the acting's really nice and believable, and there are so many women. Talking to each other. The subject matter is a bit difficult, obviously, but I'd say it's still worth a watch if you don't mind murder mysteries.

It feels very strange not to be buying things. Usually that's how it goes, you have Christmas, and then after Christmas I go looking for all the stuff I suggested but didn't get, or that was too niche to suggest, and try to buy it in the January sales. But now I just don't want to spend money, with the future being so uncertain. I'm not exactly badly off, but I could be with a few expensive purchases. Money isn't going into my bank account anymore, and I have to remember that. So that's another thing I'd normally be doing at this time of year, and can't do. Also my mum's (second) Christmas present still hasn't arrived. The company have sent me about 3 emails revising the expected delivery date, so at this point I just don't expect it when they say anymore. Maybe it'll be here by June. In time for mum's birthday.