Wow!! It's been a long time since I've written here! I've been wanting to very badly, and had been planning to update this site with more features all the way back in December, but about a million things happened and life became very hectic for a while.

Even now I'm not fully recovered from everything that happened. I haven't even been coloring my digital art, just making doodles. But the lack of art I've done has made me feel dreadful, and it was about time for me to start working on something bigger, so I finally worked up the energy to start working on this site again!

Things look mostly the same, I haven't been doing much coding since it is one of the skills that takes the most energy for me to get done. Because of this my skills haven't improved drastically while I've been gone, so unfortunately I can't come back with a drastic shift in style :(

But now I have better plans for what I want to do! One, I want to try making a schedule for updating this journal, since before I stayed off it since I didn't want to do it too much or too little. Also, I made the entries scrollable so I don't feel self concious about writing so much. I also added a new tab for my story, Flow of the Cosmos! I've been working on it for a few years now, without writing literally any of it down. I think trying to do it here will make it much more creatively fulfilling, as well as allow me to share it easily with others! :D

For the Characters tab, I was originally planning on linking it to my toyhou.se, which I'd made because i wanted to customize it the same way I do here. I ended up not using it much.. at least for now. I just have too many characters, some which barely have art drawn for them, so I felt a little bad searching for art to upload of them and not finding anything finished. Also, trying to make layouts and working with Tailwind is just not something I know yet, which kept me from experimenting with it too much. I think I might make small character tabs for this site, but I wanted to make the page searchable so you can filter through all my characters, but from what I understand that's a lot more difficult (and would require SQL I think? I barely know anything about it).

For the Flow of the Cosmos tab, I was thinking of formatting it like a tribute page with an index that lets you jump to a specific portion, just so I can get over how big of a task it would be and be able to put it out into the world without half a year in delay. I might make it all separate pages? But I am trying my best not to get too carried away with ideas so I don't intimidate myself out of working on this site. Before it can be really good, it has to be a little shitty.

Also, I've almost fully cut off social media from my life! I put a website blocker to get rid of both Twitter and Tumblr, and now when I return to those sites it doesn't seem that pleasurable to browse them. The only reason I want to stay on them is to see my friends and their art, but since I don't see it often nowadays I mostly stay off the sites. Now I still haven't caught the hang of browsing neocities, I was never one to surf the web in my youth, but maybe now that I'm getting less used to social media's instant gratification feed I can find the cool stuff here too! Because from the few sites I've seen, I know there's some incredible stuff!

Well, I think that's it for now. If you're reading this, I've pushed the site layout update without finishing really new pages, but I hope the new layout and backgrounds are interesting. There will be more visuals coming soon too! Thanks for reading :)

I've been planning to write this journal entry about 3 days ago, but unfortunately my schedule filled up way more than I expected, and it will remain that way for at least 2 months. I'm somehow going to have to cram all of my creative to-do list and site updates into Friday and the weekend, but that's already what most creatives do!

I wanted to talk a little about just what is crammed in that creative to-do list. I've listed all of the skills I practice in the current interests, but the issue is I'm trying to do all of these skills at once. I've been told this is a bad idea by basically everyone that I've talked to about my pursuits, and I'm aware it's not the most effecive way to learn pretty much anything. Half the time I don't even get anything done! I'll often just sit around thinking about how I want to draw, or paint, or sculpt, or start making a game... the list goes on. I end up just giving myself decision paralysis half the time!

I've been told the way to fix it is to limit the skills I work on to just one at a time, for a specific period of time. That process is what allowed me to learn 3D modelling over a month! Unforunately, I haven't been able to capture that flow again. I think it would help to have a project where I can use multiple of my skills to work at the same goal, which is why I wanted to start a game project so badly. I think if I can focus all my efforts on one project. That way, I'll still be able to feel productive and learn a lot at the same time! Honestly, I don't even think I need to make a game to get started on these skills. I have this site right here! I want to draw more assets for it and get into the flow of chipping away at something, so I'll eventually be able to get more ambitious with my execution.

The most difficult part of trying to juggle all these skills is that I never make any significant progress in any of them. I've been chipping away at some of these for close to a year now, and I'm still stuck making beginner projects because I never dedicate serious time to any of these. The only skill I've made serious improvement in was art, because I started doing consistent life studies and worked with other mediums like acrylic and color pencils. I wish I could do this with all the other skills, but when you get into the tougher ones like 3D modelling and code, they take so much more energy out of me than drawing that I end up not doing them. Because I do them so little, I get discouraged when I do try because I'm still stuck with the very basics despite how much time has passed.

I think this year I'll have to make an effort to slow down and really do my hardest to focus on one skill at a time, even if it's a difficult one, because the more I do it the (hopefully) easier it will get.

My first project I wanna attempt this with is this site specifically! I'm already in the designing stage for how I want the Flow of the Cosmos info page to look. I'll have to draw a lot of assets for it, which makes me a little intimidated but I'll do my best to get it all done. I also wanted to add more simple interactive items, like images of characters you can hover over and click for little changes, because I think that'd be cute. Hopefully by the end of a month or two I'll have something cool to show for it!

For the time being, you can at least look forward to more journal entries.

Oh man it has been WAY longer since I wrote here than i intended. I have been working on the site! It's just I've put off writing a journal entry for a bit, though to be told there hasn't been that much to write about outside of random thoughts I can't really expand on.

Regardless, I wanted to talk a bit more about what I've actually been doing that you haven't seen.

The first thing, I got a course and started learning Javascript! The one course I did before was not very good, and I'm very excited to get a more proper and practical understanding of it. Before I got it I actually managed to learn to make basic interactivity, which I'm very excited to implement in the character's page. I have a lot of ideas for that one :)

And on the topic of new pages of the site... that is the main reason I'm writing this entry. I've been chipping away at the worldbuilding page and struggling with it very much. I realized shortly into starting it that my setting just isn't very well developed outside of the characters that inhabit it. I can very easily make a surrounding city for my OCs to play around in, but now that I'm writing a broader, general "Geography" section, it's getting a lot more difficult to figure out.

I've always been more focused on the smaller stories that just deal with people and there everyday conflicts, even if those conflicts are elevated more due to the fantasy setting, it still remains very people-focused. So, for those stories I always built the world just enough to tell the story, so when it comes to writing something for the entire world is a little difficult. Especially because most of the world outside those small stories just isn't really there!

Now I want to develop the world more, and I will! But that might mean ages before the site gets something big for an update and I really don't want to do that. My plan so far is: just write the general things down, publish them as an intro to the setting, and add more as the world continues to be developed. I'm a little nervous about doing something like that, but it might be even longer if I work on the Characters page, since that would be starting a new page from scratch and learning a ton more skills before I can actually make it how I want it to be.

Another thing is that it's very difficult for me to do explanatory writing when I'm just used to writing character stories! I'm trying to keep things engaging, while also avoiding making things too overly poetic when the writing needs a bit of a clinical approach. I don't want to be too clinical though, in case that makes things come out cold. I'll probably get the hang of it as I write more for the later parts of the page.

That's how my progress is going so far. You can look forward to some more basic information about the setting, and maybe a little more on individual characters if I start working on that page, but it might be a little while longer before you see anything major as I still don't have a lot of free time to work on these things. I also wanna develop the world just a touch more before I get to writing a final draft on its information, so the worldbuilding page will remain a work in progress for much longer.