The Windy Hollow

[DawningWinds]

Hey, I guess this is me getting in on the "making blogs where people talk about whatever" train. Maybe I'll even remember to use this blog.
I might change the title if I come up with something better don't be too shocked if this occurs.

Uh, for those of you who don't know me, I'm DawningWinds. I like reading, performing in plays, listening to country music, the tv shows ATLA and The Owl House, and a few other things. I live in a small town in Minnesota. This is an abbreviated version I suppose, check my profile probably for more info.

If anyone feels like it y'all are free to use this place as a spot to ask me questions about whatever. Anything I've talked about in this or elsewhere on the forums is fair game to ask me about, or just anything about me you are curious about in general, though I reserve the right not to answer questions I consider too personal.

 

[DawningWinds]

A while ago, I don't remember exactly when when or in which thread, @takoyaki (not apologizing for this because you ping people in your blog all the time) suggested I check try checking out prog metal artists such as Plini, as such music forgoes the screamy tendencies of many metal artists in favor of pure instrumental music.

I've just finished listening to Plini's album Impulse Voices and I... am really surprised at how much I liked it. I did find myself absently wondering when someone is gonna start singing, as I often do when listening to instrumental stuff. But aside from that, it was pretty good. I'm not gonna site any specific songs because I accidentally had it on shuffle and thus don't know what order I listened to the songs in, but a lot of the melodies and stuff were pretty cool. And pretty impressive that this is all apparently done with just one guitar. I'll probably check out more of Plini's stuff at some point, and possibly some other prog metal stuff.

 

[lisianthus]

nice! super glad you liked it!!! for ones like plini, I'd reccomend maybe Sithu Aye and the instrumental albums of dance gavin dance. for a little more on the lighter side, piglet, dios trip, covet and jyocho are great picks imo.

 

[DawningWinds]

nice! super glad you liked it!!! for ones like plini, I'd reccomend maybe Sithu Aye and the instrumental albums of dance gavin dance. for a little more on the lighter side, piglet, dios trip, covet and jyocho are great picks imo.

Thanks! I'll see about checking some of those out sometime soon hopefully.

 

[DawningWinds]

Fell down the stairs and twisted my ankle last night. It might be sprained, I still can't put much weight on it today. I'm using crutches to get around right now since I happened to have them they're technically my older brother's but they live in my room as injured ankles are a regular-ish occurence for me but trying to put some weight on it.
I doubt its anything too bad and hopefully it'll be better soon.

Also last night my younger sister was using the couch as a jungle gym and rolled right over my foot, the one I possibly sprained. "Why's your foot there?" she complained. It was on the footstool. I was using the footstool for its intended purpose with an injured ankle and she acted like her using it to climb and roll around on had priority. Ugh.

 

[DawningWinds]

I have finally listened to The Marfa Tapes. This album came out last year, so I'm not sure how I managed to put it off so long considering one of if not my absolute favorite singer was among the three people who worked on it.

For those of you who might be unfamiliar, The Marfa Tapes is a collaborative album Miranda Lambert did with Jack Ingram and Joe Randall, recorded around a campfire with a pair of acoustic guitars.

It's really good. I'm really happy I finally stopped putting this off. You can hear the campfire through all the songs, and it creates a nice, cozy feel.

They slip up a few times throughout the albums; on "Tequila Does", Miranda Lambert draws one word out for several notes longer than its written for her to, and all three of them are laughing about this. She stutters on "Geraldene" on one of the choruses, and works it in to future choruses, which worked surprisingly well. (There are other instances of this, but those were the first ones that occurred to me.) They don't have these mistakes or the laughing these mistakes off edited out, and they also leave in a lot of the between song chatter. That creates a really lovely authentic quality to the album.

Lyrically the new songs were pretty good. There are some love songs, which is mostly standard for any country album. "Waxahachie" was probably my favorite Marfa-original on the lyrics front. It has a nice personification of the titular town in the chorus, and personification in songs is something I'm a major sucker for, and in this case the personification also happened to do an really good job working with the story told in the verses.

Probably the most of any other song on the album, "Tin Man" stood out to me. The original version of this song was always good but this version blew it out of the park. It dials up the emotions and one-on-one conversational quality that was already present in the original and it's just really excellent.

 

[DawningWinds]

Spotify has decided that the fact that pop fans have been listening to "We Don't Talk About Bruno" currently is relevant to me. This is not particularly the case, for a number of reasons, and I find it kinda odd that they only think I care what pop fans like when playing audio ads, not when I'm scrolling through my home page looking for something to listen to (not that I would prefer it if they also stuffed my home page with pop playlists and albums, this is most certainly not the case please do not do this, its just weird that like 90% of the playist ads I get are for pop music but none of what it suggests on my home page?). Regardless. I have no interest in listening to "We Don't Talk About Bruno" outside the context of watching Encanto.

Which I suppose begs the question of, why the fuck is Dawning bring this ad up? Just to complain?
Actually, no. For once, receiving an ad for a playlist I really do not want to listen to had an upside. I happen to have watched Encanto the other night (Thursday?), and had meant to post my thoughts on it here, but totally forgot. And this ad did me the favor of reminding me.

So then. After that overly long, ranty intro. Let's get into the actual meat of this.

I didn't vibe with much of the music; a lot of it kinda blended together with other songs in the movie; nothing really stood out from the rest of the songs in the movie. Aside from "We Don't Talk About Bruno", but that one solely for its memetic status that I've managed to not miss. And I had a hard time keeping up with the lyrics a lot. I got the general messages of the songs for, but a lot of the details, I don't think I caught. I feel the animations that went along with the songs did mostly make up for this; you could usually follow the character progression that went into the songs by catching just some of the words and watching the video.

The animation was fine. The characters moved, the art was visually appealing enough, and the characters didn't move in weird ways that rip you out of the story. It wasn't anything I'd call absolutely gorgeous on the front; the artstyle here isn't going to stand out from the bajillion other 3D animated things that have a similar artstyle, the animation doesn't have any stand out unique techniques that I saw. It does its job.

A lot of the characters don't have a ton to them; Isabella and Loisa kinda amounted "I have this trait that everyone admires but I don't like the way it makes my life", and some others get less. This is fine, they're not the main characters and its got a big cast and a limited timeframe. Mirabel, Abuela, and Bruno were all interesting enough. Mirabel's entire arc of wanting to do something in her family, and her progression to blaming Abuela for the destruction of Encanto all made sense to me; I was actually reaching the latter conclusion moments before her.
(My favorite character was the house though. It just had a really fun personality even without dialogue.)

Probably my biggest gripe with the plot its never really made clear why Mirabel never had a gift. Every other fantasical happening in the movie has something of an explanation within the themes of family. My mom suggested it was because Abuela was extra hard on Mirabel, but I don't feel like there was anything to suggested this was the case before Mirabel failed to get her gift? It just feels like a really weird thread to leave loose.
Aside from that, I liked the plot. It was a nice movie about family, and I could understand the reason for pretty much everything else.

Overall, it was a pretty good movie; not a favorite, I don't think, but I enjoyed it.

 

[DawningWinds]

Fell down the stairs and twisted my ankle last night. It might be sprained, I still can't put much weight on it today. I'm using crutches to get around right now since I happened to have them they're technically my older brother's but they live in my room as injured ankles are a regular-ish occurence for me but trying to put some weight on it.
I doubt its anything too bad and hopefully it'll be better soon.

So the ankle is not yet better; was hoping it'd be better enough to walk on without crutches by today but that is not the case (though this is also not surprising as I tend to heal ridiculously slow). Got an appointment scheduled for Wednesday at the local clinic, though I'm not expecting a whole ton out of it unless they decide I need to get an MRI on it.

 

[DawningWinds]

After several attempts at writing a post in this thread where I rarely got past five or six, I have completed my list. Subject to change if I come back later when more awake and realize I completely forgot someone super obvious.

1. Miranda Lambert

• Favorite Song: Bathroom Sink or Gunpowder & Lead
• Favorite Album: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

2. Eric Church

• Favorite Song: I'm gonna call it Springsteen even though its probably not for the sake of not spending forever debating this
• Favorite Album: Heart

3. Guy Clark

• Favorite Song: The Cape
• Favorite Album: Somedays The Song Writes You or Dublin Blues, can't decide.

4. Jamey Johnson

• Favorite Song: That Lonesome Song
• Favorite Album: Should I answer this for the sake of pretending there are multiple answers to this question? ...That Lonesome Song

5. Hank Williams, Jr.

• Favorite Song: Probably A Country Boy Can Survive
• Favorite Album: The Pressure Is On

6. Kacey Musgraves she mostly gets to be on her due to that fact I've actively liked her stuff for longer than everyone here except Miranda Lambert, not necessarily due to being an actual current top artist Also I needed to fill space.

• Favorite Song: Merry Go Round or Rainbow
• Favorite Album: Same Trailer Different Park

7. Reba McEntire

• Favorite Song: Fancy, or maybe The Night The Lights Went Out In Georgia
• Favorite Album: Rumor Has It

8. Emmylou Harris

• Favorite Song: Bluebird Wine
• Favorite Album: Not sure at the moment. I might come back to this later.

9. Garth Brooks

• Favorite Song: Friends In Low Places
• Favorite Album: Fun by default as its the only case of me having actually listened to his songs in album order.

10. Carrie Underwood I don't really listen to her stuff anymore but I couldn't think of anyone else so this is who yall get

• Favorite Song: Blown Away
• Favorite Album: Haven't actually listened to any of her albums; I stopped really listening to her stuff before I started actually listening through albums so.

Crossposting this as I've talked about a bit of music here and for the sake of reminding myself that this blog exists so I hopefully I remember to continue posting shit here.

 

[DawningWinds]

This is a bit more rough at the moment than something I'd like to post in my art thread, but I'mma post it here so y'all can take a look at this messy work in progress of a comic page. I don't expect you to be able to read any of the words (props if you can though) since my handwriting is horrid, I'm planning to trace this digitally later and use the fancy "text" function to avoid unreadability.

Spoiler: The Comic Page

Also for those of you who follow my art thread, you may notice that I've got a working design for Crystal

girl with pigtails who has a hopefully gem-themed-looking design

that I used in this!

Also also if anyone has thoughts on what kinda colour scheme would be good for Naomi

there are two characters in the whole comic, she's the one who's not Crystal

's design that would be much appreciated. She's a new character so I don't have years of designs nudging me in a particular direction on how her colour scheme should look and I don't have a great feel as to what would look right for this design.

 

[DawningWinds]

Miranda Lambert released a new single about a week ago I think, titled "Strange".

I knew pretty much right off the bat I was loving this song; from the second line, "and the sun keeps shining in the middle of the night". It feels really freaking honest to the world the past couple years. Every damn thing about this song does, but the chorus and the few lines have a fun upbeat way of looking at it that makes it really feel like something the world needed to have. (I certainly think I need it.) The guitars do this twangy thing to punctuate some of the lines that sounds pretty cool, and right after the second chorus the instrumental bit was pretty nice as well.

In short its a really good song.

 

[DawningWinds]

I made pancakes. From scratch. And only irreparably ruined two of them (out of six attempted).
...It also turned out we had premade pancake batter powder mix so I'm not sure why I made the batter from scratch.

They turned out okay. Batter was a bit lumpier than it should've and they were very weird shaped, but aside from the occasional lump of baking powder they tasted mostly fine. I used a reciepe I found online and modified it by adding some cinnamon which I think turned out pretty good, I'll probably be adding cinnamon in future pancake making endeavors as well.

 

[lisianthus]

I made pancakes. From scratch. And only irreparably ruined two of them (out of six attempted).
...It also turned out we had premade pancake batter powder mix so I'm not sure why I made the batter from scratch.

They turned out okay. Batter was a bit lumpier than it should've and they were very weird shaped, but aside from the occasional lump of baking powder they tasted mostly fine. I used a reciepe I found online and modified it by adding some cinnamon which I think turned out pretty good, I'll probably be adding cinnamon in future pancake making endeavors as well.

Dude that's awesome!! I actually like making stuff from scratch because it feels like I do it all by myself lol. If you want you should post it in the cooking thread!!! I've done from-scratch pancakes like that before too~, and a few months ago I made butterscotch mini waffles which were great!!
I never eat breakfast but I love breakfast food lol

 

[DawningWinds]

Dude that's awesome!! I actually like making stuff from scratch because it feels like I do it all by myself lol. If you want you should post it in the cooking thread!!! I've done from-scratch pancakes like that before too~, and a few months ago I made butterscotch mini waffles which were great!!
I never eat breakfast but I love breakfast food lol

Yeah, the feeling of, "hey I did this" is pretty nice, and I don't think I woulda gotten that from using the premade pancake mix. But also I'm not used to actually doing stuff from scratch so seeing it on the counter immediately made me question "why did I do this"... I might start trying to make stuff from scratch more often...

Breakfast food is great. I don't consistently actually eat breakfast either but pancakes and waffles and breakfast burritos and a bunch of other breakfast food are all super good.

 

[DawningWinds]

Pretty unrelated to this morning's pancakes, but I made myself a pizza for supper.

Spoiler: And I took a picture so I could show off

It wasn't exactly round. But it was a lot less totally misshapen than the pancakes. And I'm really happy with how it tasted. Admittedly the only part of this I made from scratch was the dough, I topped it with some deli chicken (I know too much salt not having that is like the main benefit of cooking from scratch sue me I was short on options and the stores were closed) and some leftover pork from something my mom cooked the other day, and some cheese and pizza sauce we happened to have on hand (aside from the fact that we don't have tomatoes at the moment making pizza sauce from scratch sounds severely unfun).

The crust came out thicker than I'd intended, but it ended up tasting super good, like it was really kinda fluffy kinda? Not maybe something you associate with pizza but it was really good. And fresh out of the oven which is when all baked goods taste best.

Crossposting this cause

 

[DawningWinds]

Did some experimenting with Naomi's

the character without the pigtails or the magic stick from the comic page a few posts ago, fairly certain I specified this.

colour scheme. Not strictly sure I'm pleased with how any of these turned out, though I think if I had to choose on of these it'd probably be blue coat/pink ribbony thingies... But that's also the one the lineart turned out the best on I feel like so I kinda worry that's the main reason I'm more happy with how it looks than the other two...

Spoiler

Also got a couple more comic pages sketched up, which I'll post later probably.

 

[DawningWinds]

Chocolate chip muffins!

Spoiler

Really happy with these. I was kinda worried early on cause the batter was super thick and muffin batter is not supposed to be that thick so I didn't know what was gonna happen, but they taste really good. Only issue is they're a bit on the dry side. (Family also likes them, if my older brother trying to argue sarcastically, I think, but still seems like not somrthing he'd do if he didn't like them that we should each get half a tray for dessert today after having each had one earlier is any indication.)
I also managed to make a a lot more muffins than I meant to. I was aiming for 24 and by all accounts doubling a recipe that says it makes twelve should make 24 but I had a bunch of extra batter so I ended up finding a dozen muffin pan and filling it up for thirty six. Extra is probably a good thing though.

 

[DawningWinds]

For those of you wondering: yes, yes I do realize that DuckingWinds was right ducking there for me to rename myself to.

 

[lisianthus]

For those of you wondering: yes, yes I do realize that DuckingWinds was right ducking there for me to rename myself to.

Yours is good too!! but I didn't know who you were for a sec...

 

[DawningWinds]

Scrapped this thing together last night:

@DawningWinds • Pronouns.page

Hey there! Im Dawning. …

en.pronouns.page

Not precisely sure what doing this accomplished since mostly what fits and what does feels kinda obvious for me? And even though I marked a few words as "no" I won't care too much if you use them talking about anyway. But maybe having this sheet will be helpful to some people when talking about me...?
I'll stick that link in my profile when I'm feeling slightly less lazy/probably sometime tomorrow since I'm gonna be changing avatars and usertitles then anyway so I'll have to go to the editor of my account page anyway.
Oh, never mind, I do know what it accomplished: spoiling my next avatar.