In July 2025, armed with only a Canon PowerShot A20 for photos, I piled into a plane going 600mph towards London. The goal, as always, was to visit my girlfriend Caby and her family, the latter of whom split off for a holiday in France for two weeks and invited me over to keep her company and help look after the guinea pigs. Naturally, I penciled in six instead.
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Here's the way it happened, and here are those photos.
Here at home
- Why I Always Miss Wales
- A requiem for the trip, and a little love letter to Wales and my Caby.
- The beasties known as guinea pigs
- Slightly less of a love letter (but honestly, I still love and miss 'em) to the world's most prolific bloaty cable nibblers, Caby's guinea pigs.
- What we watched on the trip
- You ever seen what the TV's like in a Travelodge? (I do talk about some slightly better shows, promise.)
- Oh, Listy: Way too much about Red Dwarf
- Probably the biggest thing I took back home with me is a fixation on the phenomenally funny sci-fi comedy series Red Dwarf. If you don't know what that is, you're probably American. If you do, you're a smeghead.
What we bought and went home with
- The hunt for a badger plushie
- You know what's better than one soft stripey lad? Four.
- Games, games, games...
- CEX always provides! Especially when you're not there, but your girlfriend is, and you can PayPal her money. (No worries, I'm well set for a long time.)
- Musical pickups
- I remember a book covering iTunes' shuffle mode saying something like "You never know when Eminem will follow The Wiggles". I do believe I have the Welsh equivalent of that.
- Books to read
- Wait, Cammy can read? Sometimes!
Galleries
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| Around London | London/Cardiff barcades | Around Cardiff | Cardiff Bay |
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| Margam Park | Caerphilly Castle | Kingston University's retrocomputing exhibit | Our trip art |
Blog posts
And in case you want a little more as it happened, here's what I wrote on Letters from Somnolescent and the journal while I was visiting:
| Title | Date Published | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Landing in London (and recent Kellys pickups!) | July 20, 2025 | Journal |
| Some early thoughts, and what we picked up for CDs literally the moment we got back to Cardiff. (Caby bought some really cool CDs too!) | ||
| New Setter ref! | July 21, 2025 | Journal |
| Caby's gigantic Huion tablet always inspires me to get to doodling, and since Setter is supposed to be my representation in Wyn's World (read: Wales), I wanted to give him a ref finally! Fruit. | ||
| London, Through the Eyes of the PowerShot A20 | July 24, 2025 | Letters |
| Lots of photos from our entrance into London, featuring the Underground, wandering around Elephant and Castle, and hitting up two barcades for some Point Blank and Guitar Hero Arcade action. Retro digicams! Pretty skylines! The lot. | ||
| Prince cookies | July 31, 2025 | Journal |
| Inspired by Dylan Hollis, Caby and I decided to bake a little bit, albeit without an oven. Imagine strawberry cake cookies fresh from the air fryer. Actually pretty good! (The name refers to my pink cat character, not the singer, to be clear. See below.) | ||
| Cammy returns to Tumblr | August 5, 2025 | Journal |
| A little announcement post about making an art Tumblr with Caby's encouragement, featuring a Cammy in a Bryce scene I did late at night at 5 in the morning. (Now back home, I am having the opposite issue of being awake too early. Such is life.) | ||
| Finished sample Superkitties! | August 6, 2025 | Journal |
| Just a couple of colorful cats. I actually brought all my files with me this time in case I wanted to finish anything up on Caby's big screen tablet, and it paid off a bit! | ||
| The Bad Guys 2 | August 11, 2025 | Journal |
| Caby and I had never seen a movie in a theater together before this! Actually, she hadn't been in a theater in like seven years before this either. Anyway, some praise for the most visually fun movie I've seen in a while now, and some thoughts on Pixar eating shit. | ||
| Catching 'Em All, and How to Do It | August 12, 2025 | Letters |
| This trip concludes a journey I set out on back during the first one, which was to complete the entire Pokémon Blue Pokédex on the 3DS Virtual Console. Here's a big post I wrote (again overnight, because her and I are very fun distractions to each other) on glitching your way to victory. | ||
| A little more time with you | August 17, 2025 | Journal |
| We were truly in the comfortable vibey part of the trip by this point—like a week before I was set to fly back, of course. Visiting the NQ64 in Cardiff, buying computer parts to fix the eMachines Box (I now write this from a fixed, much zippier eMachines Box :blobokhand:), Pokémon Puzzle Challenge, and surprisingly alright £5 limoncello from Aldi. Good times! | ||
| Gay space wizard | August 18, 2025 | Journal |
| Speaking of Prince... | ||
| For takeoff and landing | August 21, 2025 | Journal |
| And one final update before Caby and I got the coach into London. Just a nice lil sendoff, really. | ||
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Smoke me a kipper—I'll be back for breakfast.