Okay, I haven't managed to re-establish the reading-DW habit yet. Or... do it at all, really. But! Reconnecting with the interface, etc! So I shall now tell you about the Most Pathetic Injuries Ever, both of which I have suffered in the last week.

First, my grievous stabbing. By which I meaen a splinter that was just so annoying in its tininess.

See, I'd noticed, suddenly, that when my left ring finger brushed against my middle finger, it sort of hurt. It was super-annoying, so I looked at my finger, and saw... nothing. But there was still pain!

Upon closer examination, I noticed a little dark spot. No, smaller than you're thinking. Like, look at a hair, end-on, right? About, oh, a quarter that size.

Looking at it side-on, I confirmed it was definitely a splinter of some kind, as it stuck out of the skin maaaybe 0.1mm.

I had to borrow velithya's tweezers to get it out, as they are newer and better than mine, because my tweezers don't apparently meet perfectly at the very very tip so it didn't stick out far enough for my tweezers to grip.

Epic poetry will be written about my suffering. Or would've been, except velithya out-suffered me by burning her fingers slightly the next day in a sleep-deprived moment of oops, so I had to out-stupid her injury, apparently, and I managed that HANDILY.

In that two days ago, while eating noodles for lunch, and reading, and also talking to Chas about something, I was a little distracted is the issue here is what I'm saying, I managed to sort of miss my mouth and stabbed myself in the lip with my fork. I didn't think much of it until after lunch when I felt like I had something on my lip and went to wipe it off and found dried blood crumbling away.

I currently look permanently like I have a little bit of chocolate ice cream or something on my chin/lower lip, but it's actually a little scab from where I stabbed myself with a fork, because I missed my mouth, and seriously, there's a reason the toddlers I know eat with plastic cutlery but I am thirty freaking four years old.

So that's my week in Pathetically Trivial Wounds That I Feel More Inclined To Complain About Than I Did About A Broken Leg.

Drawing humans, especially human faces, is hard. Crazy hard. It's all too easy to lurk in the uncanny valley, where it's close enough that you can see what it's supposed to be, and far enough away that it's still wrong.

I've recently had a sharp upsurge in the quality of my drawings. Here's how:

A serious problem with teaching yourself to draw is that you can look at something you've drawn, know it's wrong, and yet struggle to work out where it's wrong. In the absence of an expert teacher, I've found a home solution.

Tracing paper - not for tracing the whole drawing, but just for being able to correct your lines.

Draw from a reference photo, for practice this way. Print the photo - a crappy black-and-white printout using my very cheap, not-meant-for-images-at-all laser printer has been more than adequate for my needs - and use tracing paper (or baking paper, or something like that, if you don't have any and don't want to get any) to go over it, marking all the lines and shapes out on that.

Then draw. When you've done some of your drawing, and you're at the frustrating point of "it looks wrong... somehow" you can lay the tracing paper over the drawing, and compare your lines to where they ought to be. Then edit, and correct, and learn, with something to tell you where your errors are.

So, the gig stand I got yesterday came with a warning that, if used for ongoing holding of an electric guitar, risks burning the polyurethane [edit:] nitro-cellulose lacquer [/edit] finish by reaction between the rubber and the finish.

So, I wrapped the rubber on the gig stand with paper tape I had in the house.

However, today I found that the paper had let glue through, which was marring my guitar.

CAN NOT BE BORNE.

So, I congratulated myself on my decision not to throw away some soft flannel pyjama pants that tore a few weeks ago, in case I needed rags. The guys at the guitar shop use pieces of cloth to protect the guitars. I cut pieces off one leg, and wrapped them around the supports. The tape is indeed tacky, and is holding it in place within reason, and I've got some safety pins (carefully placed to avoid touching the guitar ever) to hold them there as well, just so I don't have to worry about them falling off when I'm trying to put the guitar away.

A different piece of the soft cloth was also useful for polishing off the glue that was already on it.

Sorted!