• wednesday 17th june 2026
• thursday 18th june 2026

wednesday 17th june 2026

i went down to sheffield hackspace’s craft night with my new housemate alfie and i decided that i wanted to create a chessboard out of wood.

i’ve only explored woodworking once before, when i made a dm’s screen for dnd out of an old door and some hinges, but creating a chessboard would require skills i do not have, and tools i wouldn’t have access to without hackspace’s lovely facilities.

i picked out this piece of scrap wood to start planning with and roughly marked it square, it had a small piece of wood on the back of it that i chiseled off by hand and then i got to writing a plan.

for those who (rightfully) cannot read my terrible handwriting, that reads

1. sand edges
2. plane
3. cut to size (either 272²mm or 275²mm)
4. cut into 64 pieces
5. stain half of them
6. reassemble

i relayed my plan to alfie who made some suggestions, mainly to create the 64 squares out of a piece of wood that wasn’t a square the size of my ideal chessboard, as when using the band saw, the width of the blade would discard small amounts of wood with every cut, eventually making my initial measuring obselete, he suggested a long, thin plank and helped me pick one out of hackspace’s supply (it cost me £4 to buy, which was an easy process), and finally he suggested that i create one square and make it as perfect as i possibly can, and then to use that square as a guide for the rest of them.

i roughly marked the plank of wood at 30²mm and used the band saw to cut it to size, i then measured each edge to make sure it was square, and found that the edges were: 31.83mm, 31.06mm, 31.82mm and 31.23mm. one edge was between 0.6 and 0.8mm longer than the other, i decided that my goal was to get the piece to within 0.2mm of being a perfect square, and took it to the belt sander to achieve that, which i did.

i then cut 3 other pieces to size so that i could work on them without using the band saw to get them the same size as my guide piece, at this time, it’d gone 9pm so i decided it was time to go home for the day and return the next day to continue.

thursday 18th june 2026

i arrived at hackspace and my first job was to use a circular saw to cut my plank of wood into 4 more manageable pieces, i asked ellie to teach me how to use it, and she helped me to safely use the saw. i then spoke to alan, who is a lot more experienced in woodworking than i am, we spoke about how i planned to make my chessboard, and he explained to me an easier way to do what i was trying to do, using a table saw and a crosscut sled (read the attached hyperlink for a slightly more detailed explanation of what that is and why it was useful).

i used some scrap pieces of wood to adjust the crosscut sled to the size i wanted, which was 32mm (leaving space for sanding) and then got to sawing. i started by sawing each piece vertically to 32mm, and then did the same horizontally, using the next piece to push the last cut through to avoid bringing my fingers too close to the saw, and after around 20 minute we had between us cut just over 64 identical squares that i could then sand down to size. at this point, alfie and chester had gone home for the day, so i followed shortly after, the next day i would be able to go to the hackspace would be monday 22nd june 2026.

anyone who’s been out with me can tell you how scared i am of the bathroom, i’m usually ushered in, held by the hand by one of my femme friends, while they reassure me that everything is okay and that no one is scared of me, but i see the looks on people’s faces, i see the split second microexpressions that tell me “you don’t belong here”, and who can blame them.

the media in 2026 is so dead set on portaying this image of a huge, muscular, bearded man in a dress, forcing his way into the women’s bathroom and assaulting the nearest person, the government of my country has made it illegal for women like me to use the women’s bathroom, i cannot blame people for a second for being scared when i enter the room.

but where should i pee?

countless times i’ve hidden in the stall in the men’s bathroom because i hear people outside who i know will cause trouble, or walked in and seen the way men lock eyes with me, like they’re entitled to me, it feels like the only time i’m allowed to pee in public is when a place is “kind” enough to have a gender neutral bathroom, and even then i feel like i’m in the wrong space. it’s been so drilled into me that i am not welcome to use the bathroom, that even inclusive spaces can feel wrong for me.

and i feel like i’m missing out on a part of womanhood for it, i feel like i can’t have bathroom talk with my friends, i can’t have messy selfies in the mirror, i can’t help my friends undo their 20 layers of tights, skirts and underwear and i can’t have my friends help me, it’s stupid i know but i’m tired of being a trans woman. why can’t i just be a woman?

and it’s only getting worse, i thought that as the years went on acceptance of trans people would continue to get better, but it feels like its just getting worse and worse, the world treats us like criminals, like perverts with a fetish for dressing up and imposing that on everyone around them, like predators skirting the system to prey on women. but i’m just a girl.

laura <3

As you can see I’m going a little bit dry.

Nearing 7x the droprate for an item is something I never thought would happen to me, and luckily it happened on something that was easy to grind, and something that didn’t have such a large droprate, but the idea of going 7x the droprate is frankly terrifying when I think about the longer grinds I have ahead. It is the same likelihood that I go 7x dry on a Twisted Bow as it is that I went dry here. This was a chill, afk, click a boss once a minute going dry. But holy shit going 7x dry for a tbow would probably kill me off.

A tbow, on rate, with my average points per hour is a 600 hour grind. Going 7x rate on that would turn it to a 4200 hour grind. I only have 6000 hours PLAYED, going that dry on that item would nearly double my playtime.

Regardless, I’m going to keep grinding for these storms, it really is a chill time and I’m thankful that if I was going to go this dry on an item, it happened here, but going dry is never fun. I’ve seen plenty of people in my clan finish all 5 of their bottled storms in less KC than I have, and I can feel myself starting to get bitter whenever I see a clanmate getting one.

Hopefully I’ll be done soon, but I probably wont

Laura <3

i would say that more than half of my hours played were spent afk, either skilling, or waiting for people to raid, or just sat with the game open while i work on other projects, it’s easy to look at a number like 6000 hours and think ‘oh my god, thats 250 days!!!’ but it absolutely hasnt been 250 days of solid playtime. i play osrs while im eating, while im watching youtube, while im working (on mobile), or even while i was working from home. i think of osrs as an investment, i have this account that i’m so proud of that i’ve genuinely worked really hard on that is a testement to the years ive spent playing, and yes, at times i felt like osrs was taking over my life, i honestly would say that it broke up my last relationship because i didn’t have the self control to recognise that i was spending too much time playing and not enough time being in a relationship, but even after that, i have zero regrets of my time playing this game, i genuinely believe it’s the greatest game ever made, and having this quantifiable number of ‘this is what my commitment to the grind gave me’ has been a very rewarding experience.

it’s just important to recognise when you get too locked in, it really is just a game, and it should be played in a way where yes, you put hours in, you lock in sometimes and you grind something out because you really want to do so, but also you find a really nice balance of ‘yeah the games open and im working on a goal, but i’m actually just sat with my partner right now and chatting, thats the important thing’.

laura <3

research

I’ve dabbled in web development before, as well as blogging, when I was younger I ran a terrible blog which I never archived that I mostly posted “Top 10” lists, terrible creepypastas that 12 year old me and my friend Joe wrote together, and other uninteresting things, I ran this original blog with WordPress and thus began my research there.

I found that WordPress was just not customisable enough for me, although my programming skills are lacking I don’t appreciate a service that attempts to sell CSS to me, and even though I will struggle to customize by myself, the lack of options to do so turned me off of WordPress. It was perfect for 12 year old me, but 25 year old me prefers the ability to do what I want with my website.

I then moved onto researching self hosted options, websites really are just html files when it comes down to it, but my disturbing lack of cyber security skills definitely turned me off of that. An example that comes to mind was during the active time of the Karlson Wiki, another project I ran, which I hosted myself. We had a user register to our site one time with my full legal name and address, that was a bit terrifying. Additionally with my skills in website development being not the best, I thought that maybe building a site from the ground up would be more effort than it was worth for a small personal blog.

And then I remembered hearing about Github Pages! From what I could remember, they were essentially just websites hosted on GitHub. Easy to setup, free to host, markdown is built in, customisable. It seemed perfect, so I searched on Startpage ‘blog on github’ and came across this post by Chad Baldwin.

creating the blog

The process was shockingly simple, I opened the blog template, named it 7lauraa.github.io, made sure it was set to public, and created the repository! Github does take a couple of minutes to update, so making the initial changes can be a bit of a slog, but it really was that easy.

I started by editing the _config.yml file. I changed the title to “laura’s blog”, the author name to “laura”, and the description to “i write things here” (surely i will come up with something better), and then added the social media pages I wanted to link, I added my email, my Github, my instagram, twitter, youtube (if you also follow this to create a blog with Github pages, note that your youtube username in the config file must include the @ for the link the work).

I attempted to channge how the site looked, before realising that I was out of my depth, so then I started work on this post that you’re reading right now! Mostly so I could get a grip on how to create blog posts, and keep up with my markdown skills which generally are okay, but there are things I needed to search up, specifically whether it was []() or ()[] for hyperlinks, and which number of #’s created which level of heading.

rework

I kinda didn’t love Chad’s blog template (no hate to him) so I moved to a different one that seemed a lot more customisable, called lightspeed, it was really simple to switch over, and using Github allowed me to download this blog post and upload it to the new layout easily!

Regardless, I enjoyed the creation of the blog, and hopefully I will continue to write about my personal projects on here!

Thanks for reading, Laura <3

Chester and I meeting definitely postponed things, but I have no regrets, I’m so excited to start our lives together properly, without having 16 birds, 2 dogs, 10 fish, 6 shrimp and 2 little snails to look after, without having my parents watchful eyes on us at all times, I really feel like our relationship can properly begin now.

We’re moving in with 3 amazing people, you should’ve seen how excited we were when we finally got chatting with Alfie, it was like we’d finally met someone who got us and we were genuinely excited to meet the others. We went to Sheffield and brought cookies with us (half for our potential housemates and half for my mum’s birthday) and went to go and see the house and meet our potential housemates.

It was honestly like we’d known them for months, Alfie is great, I think we’ll get along really well, we have a lot of shared interests, as well as interests I think the other would be interested in taking up. Sam was lovely, I felt bad that they were vegan and so couldn’t share our cookies with us but they seemed so fun, very adventurous, very interesting to spend time with. And Flo! They were quiet, but we spoke about their interest in art, they also seemed great but I would like to get to know them better.

I’m genuinely just so excited to get in there, I’ll be packing this week while Chester is at work, and deciding which of my things to leave behind, I imagine it’ll be most of it.

I’m tired, it’s 7:30am, I havent slept.

i probably should

laura <3