I posted a diorama I made for Caoimhe³ yesterday. I like to make little things for partners sometimes.

My other partner has a strong fondness for the pokémon goomy and I have learnt that your partner identifying with an extremely marketable pokémon makes putting together silly little gifts pretty easy. A couple of years ago I got a little 3D-printed goomy figurine from an Etsy shop (that doesn’t seem to sell it any more), painted it myself and and paired it with a love ball from a more official toy as a gift for her.

She has also been, more recently, getting back into Magic: The Gathering and had put together a ooze deck which she used my printer to make proxies for. While I was doing that for her I threw in some little custom cards for the deck.

For the Slurrk card I used Poké Card Generator to fill in the basic rules then made more modifications in GIMP. For the token card I used Card Conjurer and put a photo of the goomy figurine over a swamp background made by Aveontrainer.

Caoimhe³ has a Toyota GT86 named Takumi that she is taking out for a track day tomorrow. I gave her a little something today to commemorate it.

I got a 1:36 scale model car online and originally simply intended to give that to her as a gift, but the idea of making a small diorama for it struck me and I threw this together yesterday in a fit of anxious hyperfocus. The construction was a mess and I was surprised with how well it turned out in the end.

Pretty much everything that you can see other than the car and the foam it’s mounted in came from a local model shop.

The cobblestones were originally a uniform grey but I painted them with some watered down black paint to sink into the crevices and then heavily drybrushed grey over them to give a little bit of depth. The footpath could have perhaps done with similar treatment but I didn’t think any of the paints I currently had were very suited.

The streetlamps, perhaps a bit out of scale with the car as well as not being mounted particularly straight, are powered by 3V from two AA batteries, which are mounted in a battery holder with a power switch that I cut from a length of fairy lights and sloppily soldered to the lamposts. It’s rough and I think the connections are liable to break if it needs to be taken out for a battery change, but it works and the switch to turn the lights on and off is accessible through a discreet hole cut in the side of the foam.

The foam itself is just something I found thrown with some other miscellaneous rubbish in the press under the stairs while looking for something to mount this on and ended up being almost perfectly shaped to hold the segment of road as well as having depth enough to hide the battery pack. I didn’t even have to cut it other than the hole for the lightswitch.

Picmix is a website for making GIF collages. If you’ve seen square GIFs of anime characters drowning in glitter and surrounded by rapidly animating icons and text it was probably made with Picmix. The typical aesthetic leans extremely girly and overloaded; the digital equivalent of a scrapbook page covered in magazine cutouts, glitter and stickers. It is very charming (though sadly the current front page of the site seems to be flooded with AI art).

Last year on Cohost (R.I.P.) Freja asked me what my favourite planet was and my reply was “♃”. This is mostly just vibes and associations with fictional characters that I have great fondness for: Lita Kino from Sailor Moon¹, Jupiter from We Know the Devil, and it would be nice to round this out with a third example but actually it’s only those two². But also the planet is cool and I like the astrological symbol.

But thinking on those vibes, that loose collection of associations that still resulted in an immediately clear preference it made me want to make something to tie together these Jupiters: The planet, the Sailor and the Devil-knower. And even though I had never actually used Picmix before that type of silly, sparkly, collage seemed like just the thing.

The Sailor Jupiter, rotating planet and glow around the edges were pulled from Picmix but I actually put it together using Aseprite. This is an artisanal GIF collage. The central Jupiter picture (that I also use as an avatar now) was made by putting the cover art for We Know the Devil through Luna Pic’s glitteriser. The little tin sample cube is because tin is the planetary metal associated with Jupiter in alchemy. I actually have a similar cube of copper in my house next to a replica Ea-nāṣir complaint tablet that I have on my wall. Perhaps I should get a tin one as well.

A little while later I decided to make a similar collage for Blaze the Cat, my favourite Sonic the Hedgehog character.

This one pulls from Picmix, The Spriters’ Resource and a GIF of Blaze running that I do not know the original source of that I cut the background out of frame-by-frame.

I never returned to making these but it was a lot of fun and perhaps the urge will strike me again at some point.

And let me know if there’s any other Jovian women that I should check out.

some things I made

I don’t wear jewellery much but I still have an occasional hobby of making my own earrings and I just enjoy a good kitschy earring in general.

Here’s some things I have stuck a fishhook in:

Some other earrings that I didn’t make but felt like showing off.