small things

18 Nov, 2025

to make this post, i traded titles with another blogger, mason. if you want to read what he made based on my title then go here.
coincidentally, i already had a few small things that i wanted to write about, but none of them were important enough on their own to warrant a whole post. this will be a compilation of some little reports about passing interests of mine from the past several weeks. ¹

weaving sticks

i have a lot of coffee stir sticks² and i've been experimenting with weaving these sticks together into boards. each stick needs a minimum of three points of contact in order to friction fit into a board, which allows you to weave them together into a 2 by 2 square hole grid using an 'over under over, under over under, over under over' pattern. this grid can then be expanded to a 4 by 4 hole³ grid (or other sizes if you want to).
one flaw with these boards is that they can only be as large as a single stick is long; to solve this, you can wedge other protruding sticks into the board and weave those to extend the board entirely. in this way, all manner of things can be made! actually it's just thin boards with holes in a grid pattern, but those boards can have unique proportions.

magic glyphs

there's this show called the owl house that i saw a few years ago and have re-watched⁴ a couple times since.
anyways, the show has (among other things) a really cool magic system where essentially there's this potent energy all around that can be manipulated by using glyphs that come in four types: light, ice, plant and fire.
these glyphs can also be combined in complex patterns to evoke new magical effects. i've always had a fascination with magic systems, but now i can draw one and it's been insanely fun to toy around with. my one problem with this magic system is that (because it is not the main focus of the show) we don't get to see very many complex glyph combos, which means that i'm sort of stumbling in the dark when i invent new 'spells'.

pest infestations

bugs are pretty cool, i like them. bugs have skeletons on their outsides, bugs can walk on walls (sometimes), bugs live all over and can make some awesome things⁵ despite their itty-bitty-ness. but when they start trespassing in our human spaces that we human have made specifically not for bugs, then there's a problem.
i've always hated the idea of bugs inside of a human house, but recently i've been thinking about specific reasons why i don't like that, rather than simply accepting that bugs should go back to where they came from.
i'm not afraid of bugs,⁶ but i would be afraid of all of my food being plundered and my living space being made moderately less sanitary by vast armies of almost imperceptible beasts. another reason i believe in the separation of bugs from human society is that i didn't invite them! it's not your house, mister fly, please leave.

the smiths

this is probably the smallest thing in this small list of small interests.
a week or two ago, during a singing rehearsal for the musical, somebody told me that i sound like 'the smiths' and was appalled that i didn't know who these metal workers⁷ are. she played a song about a double decker bus and i heard a little resemblance, but not much.
anyways i started listening to music by 'the smiths' and i can say, they're pretty good. it's not a genre of music that i normally listen to, but i like it.

that's (sm)all for now.
goodbye from sam. ⁸

footnotes

(this isn't one of the small things, it's just a footnotes section)