i come to you in this summer heat feeling like a little slug on a hotplate, my skirt gently sizzling, my pneumostrome clogged with olive oil, god watching over me, keen to saute me into a meal with eggs or something. the analogy is running out of steam. but generally, i struggle with heat like no one else. so, in my delirium, allow this little gastropod to recount how he’s been getting slimy with it.
the general new years romp
between the eldritch horror of working retail over this christmas period, i kept myself mercilessly busy with all the fun hallmarks of your 20s - friends, movies, substance abuse, paying off student debt. it’s a fun lifestyle for a time, but i’ve definitely felt a desire for things to regain a sense of stability, which i don’t believe i’m alone in - a lot of my friends are hitting the quarter life crisis stage it seems, and it has spared no one in its conquest of introspective thought and shifting priorities. it’d be nice to have a day where i’m not doing something or catching up with a person, perhaps even one in which i’m not stunlocked in bed in recovery. good golly, even the prospect of recounting all of my debauchery seems mentally exhausting, which is awfully convenient, as that leads me to my next point.
victory is at hand for this slimy lil fella (i’m finally getting my adhd medication soon).
i mentioned absolutely yonks ago that i got diagnosed with adhd, and that medication was within reach. turns out, no! the medical system is fucking awful!
exclamations aside, i’ve been locked deep in battle with my gp for over a year trying to understand the process, doing tests, filling out forms, eventually giving up trying to get access to medication due to my gp having zero understanding of how the system works, and generally not having the time / commitment to do so. at the start of the year i made it an absolute mission to get it sorted. i went into the office with no other ailments, and spent a frustrating amount of time bringing my gp back up to speed. after 20 minutes of trying to answer ‘what do you want me to do?’, i caught a glimpse of an email the specialist had sent him. it was an email dated APRIL OF 2025 saying they’d like to start me on medication, but needed his sign-off to initiate.
a long story short, i’m now dealing with the specialists directly, doing a lot of the coordination a gp should be able to do to keep this ball rolling. i’ve had hiccups. going through a private clinic isn’t cheap, i’ll need to see my regular gp to keep my prescription in check, my FUCKING MEDICAL RESULTS WEREN’T RECORDED OR SENT TO THE RIGHT PEOPLE, but i have the full backing of specialists whos entire occupation is wrangling together a pill bottle with my name on it. we’ll get there. i’m slithering to victory. i can taste the lukewarm water to wash the pills down.
*sigh*
the intense frustration i feel now is the lifesaving relief i shall feel later. that’s the deal.
i suppose my real frustration is that i’m having to actively chase up something that’s been honestly ruining my life recently. shit, even the specialist at the clinic was in disbelief that i’m only receiving care a year and 5 visits after my diagnosis.
this is the part where i talk about being neurodiv (again)
look, i get it, i’ll save you the crustiest specifics, but god damn. something that’s been observed about a diagnosis of adhd, asd, ocd ect (as in excetera), is that you typically see an immediate regression in ones ability to mask. i’ve gone through this with asd three separate times, but only now with adhd. i’ve been diagnosed for a year now, but only now that i’m seriously close to getting medicated am i noticing how much of my life this is raging throughout. i’ll save the self-pity, but basically for as long as i could remember i’ve had this intense hunger to be consistently productive - to create, optimise, move with intention, and an incredibly hard time in actioning any of that, and i honestly think it’s been my greatest downfall. and i’m truly at a point in my life where i’m prepared to use every tool and ounce of strength at my disposal to start living the life i (very potentially semi-delusionally) know i can make for myself.
dramatics and oversharing done. let's talk about something lighter.
loving to sing again.
i can’t remember if i’ve (and i kinda can’t be fucked to check if i have) mentioned i used to do jazz singing. more accurately, i’ve always been a passionate singer since i was little, and found jazz was the most suitable for my voice. stepping into production in my later teens however, i kinda moved away from it bit by bit. recently however, i’ve been frequenting a place that most of the queer/autistic/batshit insane people go to that hosts karaoke every wednesday. aside from keeping up appearances and descending into alcoholism, it’s reignited my passion in singing. i catch myself perfecting little melodic runs, running over lyrics, slowly learning how best to enunciate tightly-packed syllables. it’s helped i’ve earned a slight reputation. yes, i was the guy who did phill collins the other week. thank you for the complement. please, stroke my ego.
botempi
while a friend was clearing out their workshop, they offered to sell me a botempi b3 for 20 dollareedoos. for those not in the know, it’s an electro-acoustic wind organ from the 1970s, most practically used to teach children the basics of music. when i describe it as electro-acoustic, it means it has an electric fan that excites the acoustic mechanisms. it is indeed only passing air through tubes to create the sound of an organ, only using electricity to power the fan that creates the current. aside from being mercilessly cool, it means one can’t solder in a switched headphone jack, as there isn’t an electrical signal to convert back into acoustic sound pressure. no matter!! it’s rather adorable, creates the most authentic lo-fi organ/accordion sounds, and came with the original box in italian. very daniel johnson esque noises coming from da basement 2nite mamacita.
multi-tools
i seriously have no idea how i fell down this rabbithole but (AS EVERY STRAIGHT MAN DOES) i got into multi-tools. i’ve had a leatherman wave+ for around 2 years now, purchased for work after the shitty kinchrome - which i settled for in spite of my contract specifically naming a leatherman - fell apart and shed all its individual tools like a very metallic snake (yay! another accurate and poetic metaphor from nick!!). i absolutely adore the wave+. feels good. actually competent tools. cunty pouch. but very unfortunately, the carry of a knife in australia is banned, meaning i can’t go around performatively signalling general handiness by having it on my belt. instead, i opted to get a gerber dime, which i can carry more discreetly in my wallet in-case of the odd package to open, wire to strip, or bit to fasten. a few observant readers might remember an older post that went into the contents of my everyday bag. as those forlorn writings imply, i’m intensely invested in the feeling of being prepared. i’ve debated taking down that post only because i find it preferable to constantly updating the ship of theseus. maybe someday. anyway, on top of that i impulse-bought a gerber shard dt (nothing more than a glorified keychain), a mullet, which i spent an embarrassing amount of time finding local stock of, and some phillipshead / flathead keys, all hanging from my bag as little trinkets. great fun. very cute indeed.
a love letter to the central markets
since i now both live and work in the cbd, i’m blessed with passing through one of my favourite places in the whole world on my way to work - chinatown and conjoining multicultural markets. deeply, deeply nostalgic for me. maybe it was coming here almost every weekend to the same noodle shop with my mum and twin. maybe it was the precursor to my weeaboo phase in highschool. maybe it was the neverending quiet nooks and crannies of asian convenience stores, the occasional empty lot, maybe it was the flurry of delightfully weird and wonderfully independent businesses housed within the markets themselves, i’m not quite sure, but i’ve held that singular block deeper and nearest to my heart than anywhere, almost anything i’ve experienced. i’m very fortunate to have my place of residence and place of employment on the opposing ends of such a deeply beautiful accident of urban planning, multicultural trade and core memories. words cannot describe my truly unparalleled love and affection for it, and how being able to walk through it nearly every day has kept me shockingly grounded in a period of my life with much change and many questions. fuck the redevelopment though. fuck it to death. it genuinely makes me deeply sad to see something with something i felt represented everything i love about my city being completely annihilated to house both an incredibly ugly mid 2010s gentrified hipster take on a market and a soulless hotel owned by a corporation. i don’t care how many plastic vines you drape, heritage bricks you lay or pipes you leave intentionally exposed; go fuck yourself you spiritually lost financiers cosplaying as stomp-clap enjoyers. god.
vulfpeck
i did acid recently and listened to big dipper for 6 hours straight and it was great and i’d like to thank oscar for being the vulf aficionado that he is and i also find it very funny that ‘big dipper 6 hour mode’ is now locked in our vocabulary and hanging out with oscar is genuinely great and recently we watched the nintendo direct for tomodachi life 2 and the homoerotic tension in the live chat was aspirational.
balatro
speaking of that friend, they were also (un)kind enough to show me balatro, a game i knew going in would be highly addictive tapping into my ‘number go up’ lizard brain. what i didn’t expect is how it would actually persist beyond the point that i usually get turned off by that kind of serotonin. as an example i got hooked to, but barely to the end of borderlands 1 and promptly never picked up borderlands 2 despite being hounded multiple times. once i saw exactly what the game was doing it instantly lost all appeal to me. i typically get most engaged with games that have more abstract draws like a good story, interesting mechanics or high skill-ceiling. it’s good then that balatro has all of those features (provided you’re willing to extrapolate deep themes of addiction and self-destruction as a plot). the more i’ve played it and showed others, the more i appreciate the game as a dance of high-skill and luck wrapped in self-aware comedy. anyone who’s played it or passingly familiar with the rules of the game need no regaling of the virtues of simulated gambling.
leon massey
i’ve been getting into leon massey after a short while of not consuming their content. i jumped onto this guy when he had around 500~ subscribers and made his first few video-essays on the fighting game scene, which were a breath of fresh air, coming from someone who was obviously very competent in a variety of fighting games, but more than anything was just an average enjoyer for the genre. he wasn’t a pro with hordes of disciples looking to him for validation, he isn’t a bonafide ‘content creator’ with seed funding and forced energy, nor takes himself too seriously, just a down-to-earth guy who likes what he talks about. analytical enough you can tell he’s above talking out his ass, but normal enough to not use words stolen from fellow crackers making essays on youtube. it also helps that he typically has a good understanding of the average player, meaning he can break down concepts into a form that actually resonates with a new player’s thought process. coincidentally though, leon has started to move away from fighting games in a similar way to myself, and has expanded out into other fields. recently, he’s made a video describing the burnout many players of competitive games (myself included) experience. i still watch his videos on tekken and third strike, they’re all bangers, but i feel like this is the first time i’ve seen a youtuber slowly pivot in real time with sacrificing anything that made their original success. it’s good to see.
swallowtail butterfly
i caught up with wok again and watched swallowtail butterfly by shunji iwaii, the same director as lily chou chou. compared to his other work, it’s a bit of an unpolished mess, which by no means makes it the lesser film, just not as concise and focussed as hana & alice for example. an eclectic mix of drama, crime, music, comedy and stilted english dialogue, you definitely get the sense that this movie was just something shinji ‘wanted’ to make without a care in the world of narrative cohesion or making things easy for the marketing team who had to strongarm such an oddball film into a blurb, trailer or 30 second pitch.
anyway. this slug has places to grime up, fungi to eat, soil to turn over. thus concludes my sludgy story. i hope in the next life i get reincarnated as like a gibbon or something, that’d be freaking awesomesauce!