valentines day & other february ramblings

17/02/2026

gintokism

a while ago, i wrote about getting a purse from dear my love that had a side for an ita display. at the time, i didn't really have a character i was interested in displaying full-time and had opted to just leave that side blank. but after getting into gintama, i knew what had to be done. and after taking some time to collect items i've finally put together my little gintoki ita display!!

i think it looks so cute and it makes me so happy whenever i look at it (´꒳`)♡ funnily enough, the day i finished it was actually the same day that the gintoki nui i ordered from amiami a while back finally arrived!!! you can see him in the next section. i don't know if the oshikatsu lifestyle will ever be fully for me, but i'm having a really fun time obsessiving over gin at the moment at the very least! if i had a bigger room i'd be setting up a little shrine area at home but i fear that is not in the cards (at least for now)

valentines day

for valentines day, me and my boyfriend went to the museum! i love the museum. half of my double major was in history and the ROM (royal ontario museum) has a wide collection of world and natural history artifacts that i can't get enough of no matter how many times i go. this time i was especially excited to check out the fossils because i've been watching a lot of extinctzoo. i really wanted to see some of the ancient animals i've been hearing so much about ^^ and it was really cool!!!!! i got to infodump on my bf on matters both world historical (which i studied in uni) and natural historical (that i stole from extinctzoo) so i had a really good time. we didn't stay as long as i would've liked because he got a bit overstimulated and doesn't have the same kind of zeal for the historical as i do but that's okay, there's always next time. it was also really busy being (1) a saturday, (2) valentines day, and (3) the weekend of the ontario holiday known as "family day" that gives everyone a random monday off, so i understand if he wasn't having a super good time.

i got an action shot of gintoki with a fossil

i made it a point to dress up extra lovely this year! i did this a few years back on a valentines day where i had class & saw the kaguya-sama movie with my friends after and had such a nice day all around, so i wanted to try and recapture that vibe. and i got a few compliments on my outfit so i'd say it was a success!! i actually saw a lot of people dressed up in valentines colours which i thought was so sweet.... a real spirit of whimsy around the city overall ♡ like every little girl i saw at the museum was in some kind of outfit full of reds and pinks and hearts. it was so cute!!

me and my actual date (sorry bf)

my boyfriend told me that before he got to the museum he had bought me flowers but that a security guard told him that flowers were absolutely banned from the museum. so he ended up asking a family that was leaving if they wanted them, and said he saw the dad give the flowers to his little daughter and that she was super happy. it's a shame he couldn't give his gift to me but honestly thinking about the little girl being surprised with pretty flowers from a stranger makes me so much happier than getting them myself would've!! i kept thinking about it all day and the following days after, i hope it became a beautiful memory for her ♡

we also got dinner after!

what i've been up to lately

i feel like i've had a really good balance of hobbies lately! usually i'm super tunnel visioned and just doing one thing at a time but i've been balancing reading, sewing, playing games, and watching shows really well... so my days have been frivolously busy and fun! it helps that i've been spending less time doomscrolling. i made it more difficult for myself to access twitter by completely blocking it on my computer and rerouting the app shortcut on my phone to pinterest (so even if i habitually open it, i just open pinterest instead). i can't delete it entirely because i have some friends on there that i only talk to through twitter dms, but now that it's more annoying to get to i don't find myself mindlessly scrolling at all. i might take a little peek if i'm opening the app to message a friend but even that hasn't lasted very long.

i'm kind of torn about all this though. i made the change because having so much exposure to recent news and world events has been weighing heavily on me and the more i saw the more i was struggling to keep it together in my daily life. i hate talking about things like this because i never want to seem like i'm making such matters about me or insinuate that my comfort is more important than being informed because it isn't and that's not how i feel at all, but i knew i couldn't really go on the way i was either. after discussing with a friend i felt like it would be better to throttle my access to that information in some capacity, at least for a while.

on the other hand, i haven't been seeing all the ragebait and bullshit fandom discourse either, and that has been great for my mental health. who would've thought it'd be so nice to not be angry all the time lmao??? i think overall i just wish twitter hadn't become such a dogshit platform because i do still like partaking in social media to a certain extent, but it might finally be time for me to let it go or start looking at alternatives... i've been toying with the idea of going back on tumblr but i'm not sure how to find blogs to follow like i used to, and that's kind of been a deterrent from jumping ship to other platforms too. like i've been curious about the fediverse for a while, but how do you even get started???? much to think about!!!

mini media log

to end off, i just want to say a couple of words on the books i read recently! the first was the count of monte cristo by alexandre dumas and, yeah. you hear someone say a 1500+ page novel is the best work ever written and you're like "how good can it even be" and then you read it and realize they undersold it. a joy to read from cover to cover, i was hooting and hollering the whole time.

i did have one problem with it though, and this is getting into spoiler territory so i'm going to cover it up for any future readers. as far as i have seen this is a pretty common gripe amongst people who have read it but i was pretty saddened by the way mercedes ended up. i wanted her and edmond to make it in the end, after everything they'd been through, and have found peoples reasonings about why they couldn't to be shortsighted and lackluster at best. and even if they couldn't, it's hard for me to accept an edmond that was so alright with leaving her completely miserable. he didn't even try to brighten her life after everything that had happened aside from a half-hearted "i'll give you anything you want" (as if she'd feel comfortable asking for it when she still feels guilty over your past????). it contributed to an ending that overall felt very rushed to me. like, we already know he doesn’t blame her anymore, so why the hell would he be ok with the woman he loved being miserable for years while he goes off to fuck his new hot teen gf. it doesn't make any sense at all to me!!

the next book i read was exquisite corpse by poppy z. brite, an 18+, delightfully gorey and disturbing romp revolving around two gay serial killers. i thoroughly enjoyed it despite there being some scenes that were very difficult for me to read. i did find it to be a bit disjointed and unpolished in parts, but i'm willing to forgive it this because it had a lot of the kind of insane perversion that i like.

and that's all i got for today! i've lost a little momentum on all the big things i was dreaming about last month, but not to the point of completely stopping. i actually think i'm in a much better place than i have been in recent years? so i'm still approaching each day happily and hopefully ( ˶ˆᗜˆ˵ ) i hope you're all doing well, too!

strangelove - depeche mode