Blog!

The foundational core of this site's fourth version is now live! Obviously the site isn't finished yet, but there's still a multitude of places to explore!

This has been my most ambitious and creative version thus far. Not to toot my own horn or anything, but I think this place has so much more personality than it had before!
It's taken me maybe a week(?) to get the index, home, about me, blog, and sitemap pages done but that time truly flew. The process was incredibly engaging and entertaining; it's a bit like making a collage!

I'm not sure when everything else will go live, but it'll hopefully be in the next week or two, so stay on the lookout.

So I had one of the worst nights of sleep ever, which was a particular bitch since I was hanging out with my mates today. I got maybe 3 or 4 cumulative hours of actual sleep and the rest of it was me spinning round and round; t'was a genuine horror.
I reckon the reason why I got such a shit amount of sleep is because I'm sick. For some reason, I can't sleep well when I'm ill, especially if it's a sore throat (my current plight). You might say 'Echo, just have a lemsip' to which I would tell you that I've been drinking at least one a day and it's been doing absolutely fuck all.

Despite that I had an absolute belter of a time hanging out with my friends! I hadn't seen one of them since September, which is a frankly ridiculous amound of time to wait.
We ordered lunch from Dominoes (pizza for my friends; chips and chicken strip things for me), and while we were eating had a very engaging and entertaining catch up. After an hour, we decided to make a cake; we settled on making a victoria sponge! I haven't baked in at least a year, so this was a wonderful change of pace.
When there's baking there's a mountain of washing up to do. Out of the three of us I'm apparently the only one who enjoys doing that sort of thing, so it was my solo job. I took it very seriously, like I was in the zone. It also allowed us more time to just chitter away about everything and nothing.
While the cakes was in the oven, we decided to play Scrabble. Despite doing fairly well in A-Level English I am so so bad at this game. Words? What are those? If you needed proof that I was in dire straits, one time I put down RAT of all things...
We also chose to make cakepops from the leftovers (when we took the cakes out the pans they sort of fell apart). We managed to burn the chocolate not once but twice(!), with the second batch being salvagable, although I couldn't tell you if that was due to the fact the chocolate was white rather than milk.
I had to go home before the cakepops were ready so I couldn't tell you how good they ended up being, but the actual cake turned out fucking fantastic! I took home two slices and absolutely scarfed them once I'd had my dinner.

Here's the cake by the way!

There was only one problem with the day, and that is I've lost my voice. Speaking in any capacity now hurts SO BAD, but I can't be mad since today was just that much fun!

I went out the other day for a very pleasant walk, and on the way back I decided to go buy some peach iced tea because that shit is awesome.
I ended up walking out the supermarket with a 1.25 litre bottle of peach iced tea, and another 1.25 litre bottle of lemon iced tea. I mostly did this because I wanted to simultaneously switch things up and keep things familiar (I only really drink peach iced tea); there was also raspberry iced tea but that genuinely sounds disgusting so I'm never goint to try it.

Lipton lemon iced tea is genuinely so disapointing.
It doesn't really have any flavour? Like, I took a swig of it once I got back, and it just sort of tasted like an ambiguous syrup that had been watered down so much that you got the barest hint of flavour, and that flavour (incidentally) tastes nothing like lemons.

I probably won't buy it again. Like, it's not bad, but peach iced tea is just on a different level comparatively. Maybe I should mix them together?
UPDATE: I mixed them together and the only thing you can taste is the peach iced tea; still not really worth it.

I use Firefox as my main browser on my laptop, and the other day I finally got around to installing uBlock Origin. The best part so far is that it's offered me an ad-free listening experience on Spotify.
I mostly use the browser-based version of Spotify when I'm on my laptop, so it means that web-based adblockers work a treat against the adverts! Hopefully I'll never have to deal with the (frankly) outrageous number of ads again.

Do I feel in any way bad about getting an experience that's akin to premium without having to pay for it? Absolutely not, and Spotify can suck my dick. They have some abysmal business practices, but I haven't found a single other alternative that I actually like.
I might have a look for something new, but for the time being I'm going to continue with this setup.