journal, diary, blog, who cares

not very eventful but i redecorated my room! im still not finished BUT i decided to finally put the posters ive been saving since 2013 up!! i moved all the posters from my desk to my bed (which also needs more attention paid to it) here are some photos of my desk area and close ups of the posters around it!:

the super smash bros poster is one i got out of a magazine in 2013. the addams family from a issue of fangoria magazine and the DC comics and star trek ones are actually from old calenders! i loved the art and didnt want to throw it away when it could stay on my walls. I also have art a friend (niko! u can look at their art here!) gave me and some i paid for. the large one by the desk was given to me as a gift, but the 2 underneath the archer poster i paid for.

i went on a walk later that day and a large group of cows were gathered close to the pavement!!! they were all looking at me and some of the other cows further away were probbaly coming to see what all the commotion was. look at them!!!

the weather has been so nice this month so i have been going on loads of walks.

MAY 10TH

i went for a walk in the evening. here are some photos i took. the sun was setting and the sky was a gorgeous blue. i love walking along this bridge above the train tracks and watching the trains go by!!

saw some signs i thought looked interesting. i feel like i live in the land of oz sometimes. i say i live in london but im surrounded by so much farmland. central london is 20 minutes away from me on the train and yet.... i need to move closer to the city soon. but i will miss all this space to walk through

i liked the lighting caused by the lamposts by these steps. i had to capture it. im really proud of this photo

MAY 11TH

went on a walk during the day. here some clear photos of the bridge. it was honestly such a gorgeous day

went through a shortcut to get to the nature reserve i frequent alot. i felt like i was on endor (the ewok forest. silly star wars reference.)

there is a garage with a bunch of old/out of service buses. its like looking at the evolution of london buses. there is a bus from pretty much every decade since the 60s? there. here are some snaps i got!!

MAY 10TH

ok so, i have this gaming laptop, (PCSPECIALIST Ionico RX17 to be exact.) for the price it cost - it felt really fragile and cheap and was faulty after i week of using it. here is the laptop i am talking about:

these were taken when it would work fine!! but what would happen like once a week was, my laptop would overheat and the screen would just..... fuck up idk! this is what i mean!!

anyways i was still able to make do, but then autumn of 2024 i thought i would get my keyboard replaced. i found this guy who claimed if he couldnt do the job he wouldnt charge you (he still charged me btw). the keyboard is in awful condition and i had to use my desktop keyboard to use it properly.

the guy did not replace my keyboard as he couldnt get the parts needed, took £100 from me (as the "deposit") and gave my laptop back to me in a worse state than i gave to him. the night i received my laptop back my laptop couldnt boot up properly. constant blue screen of death.

i decided i might want to recycle this laptop as it was unuseable. so i started cleaning it and attempting to get anything i left on it off before doing so. and of course i was met with that dreaded blue screen

but after 7 attempts at restarting this laptop i finally got to my desktop. i uninstalled the browsers installed (that was all i had left on there) and tried removing my microsoft account. after i logged out the laptop was fine???? like i stopped getting the blue screen and it was working perfectly....

so i guess i have my £2k laptop back again? i still want to pull it apart and see whats going on inside. there might be a faulty part causing all the problems because ive done every thing you can do software wise to get this to work. if youre reading this and understand the hardship im dealing with please give me advice!!! im so tired of this laptop! its only lasted me 3 years!!

I was browsing eventbrite and came across an event called "Combatting Deepfake Abuse Impacting Black Women" and immedately got tickets. It was a lecture held at a university holding a "festival of AI" - 4 days of lectures surrounding around AI. As I was lining up to sign in, a older black woman stood next to me and asked if i was attending the festival. we hit if off right away and ended the day as friends. She also got me to attend other lectures as I had only booked tickets for one.

I also got to attend a lecture on mental health and AI, and how AI is impacting Literature. They were all really insightful but because they were lectures i have about 10 pages of notes from that day so i might have to make a seperate post about what i got from those sessions.

im just mentioning this because I just love that i am making connections with people who arent my age. People tend to act like young people have nothing in common with older people and we cant be friends but meeting this woman proved something else. Its so easy to make connections with people if you meet the right person, regardless of age.

I went to a placard/sign making session for the org DYKE MARCH. i have ,issed so many of the socials theyve put on i just had to go to this one.

they posted a photo of my (half finished) sign on their instagam story which i'll show you here:

i know i am trying to move away from social media, BUT people were messageing me on instagram and i went to check the messages, i then saw that the dyke march page had posted a story so i just checked it out and saw myself in the corner and my sign!!!

i had a really nice time there - i noticed people were sticking to talking to the people at their tables (which is fine!) but i wanted to get to know as many people as i could. i used the excuse of my paint needing to dry to talk to people. it also felt really great being in a place with so many lesbians. just talking about our expierences and especially with the current transphobic state the UK is in and the uprising of fascism, or moreso, the curtain being drawn back on it, as it never really left or went anywhere, we had rlly profound conversations about how we can come together and protect each other (dont worry, we still like made jokes and shit they werent all dower conversations)

i know i said i wasnt going to lament on the bigotry ive dealt with lately, mainly because i experience bigotry every single day - but, i have to downplay it and tell myself to let it go before i burst a blood vessel thinking about the bullshit. I have so many other things to worry about.

on my way home from this session i noticed something was off. i placed my sign in a bag but wasnt big enough, so you could make out what my sign said.

🡱 what the sign looked like in my bag

i noticed that men were suddenly folllwing me around, or werent keeping their distance (usually people keep their distance from others, thats why i thought it was strange). I remember this type of behaviour would occur when my ex and i would be out in public holding hands or arms linked and men would just follow us around and stare at us, and i cant tell if its homophobia + transphobia (it most likely is) or what but its def uncomforting.

You would think that seeing that i am a lesbian would make men want to leave me alone but it always seems to draw them closer to me - i dont know if they think they can turn me and thats why they start following me around? (perhaps it gives cishet men a sense of control fantasising about being able to be with a woman/person they cant have/has no interest in them.)

or if they want to prove something or just cant comprehend that i am a lesbian by trying to infiltrate my space knowing that as a lesbian i have no interest in dating men and they want to initimdate me.

it also reminds me of a few days ago when i saw a gay couple at the bus station and there were people who were clearly agitated that they were there. a man was just watching them as they walked away from the bus station. i think this is the type of homophobia that comes in the form of fetishistic or enraging intrigue. they cant believe theyre seeing a real gay couple in public so all they want to do is watch and keep their eyes on you, act as if they want to say something to you but wont, so they'll just keep watching you.

but back to my point - i got on the bus and forgot to turn my sign around when placing it next to me. a man comes on to the bus and the entire bus is empty yet he comes and sits in the seats in front of me. the reason why this began to annoy me was he would turn back and look me up and down every 5 minutes. I think he was looking at me and then at the sign. im thinking "what do you want??? why do you keep looking at me?". eventually i turned the volume up on my headphones which meant he could hear my music and he stopped turning around to look at me. but again, it was such a surreal expierence i cant tell if its homophobia or not. but when i do the maths it kind of makes sense that it very well could be.

but i will just move on. i kind of have to. i know that no matter what people are going to hate me for simply existing. im black, gay and present as feminine most of the time (people assume i am a woman). its exhausting living like this but i wouldnt want to be anybody else but myself. If i were to die and be reborn i would want to come back as a black lesbian!!!!!!!!
my priority is protecting myself and others who are marginalised in this world anyway.