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.

Seeing how much time has passed between just three entires is honestly a little heartbreaking. It's my fault it's like that, but still, I'd spent so long just going "Yeah I'll update the site soon! That seeing how long it's REALLY been is a little shocking.

I feel like I should've called it "quits" a lot sooner than I'm doing now. I'm still gonna keep this page up, but I think the expectations I placed on myself of how much I was gonna work on it and just the grand things I'd do kind of ruined this whole ordeal for me.

The biggest problem I had was when trying to make a page to explain my setting. I still have the skeleton of that page ready, but the biggest delay was having to physically write down everything I was working on without record for ~2 years. I'm still not done with it. I've intimidated myself out of it just like I did with this project. The character page has seen a little more progress though. If I can get myself to work on it I'd be able to show you 10 OCs with bios and everything! But especially now, I can't make any promises.

This idea that I was going to regularly tend to this place probably did me more harm than good. I've never been able to consistently work on a project. The only thing I'd return to every day was drawing, but that was always just different doodle pages and never one continuous piece I would chip away at. I think I need to get better at consistency, but expecting it to be like a weekly update kind of thing was too much. What would happen is I would just say: "I should work on my site!" over and over again until I didn't even want to think about it anymore.

But even when I wasn't working on here, I think I kept improving somehow. I did a lot of little web projects that never saw the light of day, and a whole personal page for another artist! I gained a lot of experience from these things, saw how people made their sites different, took inspiration, and then my site just looked like complete garbage in comparison. That's probably the thing that killed this site the most: comparison. I did it with myself, as making newer projects that were neater and had better organization made me feel like I had to remake this entire page from scratch, which was way too overwhelming. And I did it with other people too. I looked at the complex layouts and everything and how different and 'better' it was that I got completely demotivated to work on my own. I wish I could get rid of that process in my head completely. There's so many wonderful pages and art pieces and [insert literally anything else] that I haven't allowed myself to enjoy because I felt too bad about not being as good as them. Even when my own friends starting making their sites (which I really wanted them to do so we could have fun together!) I was more upset about not having as much stuff on mine or not being as put together.

I lost sight of what this was supposed to be for: self-expression. Now I need to just try and get it back. But that's the story of any artist, right? We're always comparing ourselves and not doing what we want. Maybe someday we'll be able to move past it.

It's gonna be even harder to find time for working on this now, as in a few days I'm going to officially be a college student. But maybe it's something to keep on the back burner. (It was always on the backburner really, I'm just not lying to myself about it anymore.)

I'm not even sure why I'm writing this at this point, I feel like I'm just kind of moping all over the place. But this is my page, I should be allowed to, right? I wanna use it for self-expression, and if this rambling is self-expression then I'll commit and put it up here. But anyway, I opened the folder in VS Code, did some poking around and thought, why not? Why not write something here again. I think I really just need to lower the stakes for myself and what I'm gonna do. It doesn't have to be the most complex, technologically impressive, aesthetically immaculate thing to be online. It can just be something I like that I feel represents my style. Typing this out makes it sound like such a simple concept I'm surprised at how easy it is to lose.

To try and wrap this up... I think going forward I'll try and lower the stakes. Not everything has to be some big update, sometimes I can just write a little entry when I feel like it and keep chipping away at my worldbuilding. Everything builds bit by bit and I shouldn't expect more from myself than that. Oh, and definitely making this over half-a-year long hiatus official. (Is it even a hiatus if nothing is changing?)

If there's someone here reading this, whoever you may be, thank you for giving me the time of day.

Oh yeah, I also made a game in July with my friend. Check it out HERE if you want something to play with.

Recently, my friend Pinky started hosting an Aternos minecraft server so me and a few other friends could play together. We like to do little character roleplaying things so we use potion effects to give our characters differentiating boons. Typically, Pinky just applied these with the /effect command every time one of us died, but you can imagine after a while this starts to get cumbersome. The next logical step was then to try and use command blocks so the command wouldn't have to be typed out manually every single time. A clunky way we went about this was placing a pressure plate in front of our beds so every time we respawned the potion effect would be immediately applied. However, for this run we went several sessions without sleeping once, which meant Pinky had already gone for a very long while just reapplying effects manually, and each time a different friend logged on that wasn't op'ed they just had to play without effects.

Clearly it was time for a more elegant solution, which is where I come in!

My friend Pinky starting looking for guides to learn how to apply an effect each time the player respawns. I started looking into this too, mainly because I had a bit more coding experience than them and wanted to try putting it to use again after not touching it for so long (I kinda had to push to be able to help them, and I'm really glad they let me do it in the end!).

The first and quickest thing we learned was that there was no simple "has player respawned" check that we could work with. Also that the in-game coding language was very clunky, at least to me. It took me a good bit to wrap my head around the targeting system with @s and @a and how that affected execution, but after I picked up on a bit of the syntax from reading the wiki it got a lot easier to understand. Basically, the guide just created a variable using the scoreboard feature to track the time since the players had died, and then checked if the death time was equal to 1 before applying the effect. I tried a lot of different things, mainly messing with the target selectors and telling Pinky to go die to then see if the effect had applied.

I was frustrated because there was no "output to console" command I could run to see what was going on with the time variable... but there absolutely was! It was a part of the scoreboard, which meant I could display it on my screen! It all clicked from there, as I could see the time-since-death was always ticking up because it was tracking the time since death of all the players collectively. This meant that if one player died, the variable never got reset to zero, which meant the timer never hit 1! And since the command was only checking for time == 1, it never triggered at all!!

To make the whole thing work, all it took was adding two dots. (Writing matches 1 means time == 1 and matches 1.. means time >= 1. It felt ridiculously simple.)

Now we had effects that were permanently applied, and it all works great! But why am I telling you all of this? (Thank you for reading my story btw!)

Basically, this whole experience made me remember that I do like coding! And I do like messing around and figuring these things out! And I kept wondering, "If I liked all of this so much, why did I stop working on my site? Why did I stop trying to make games?" Well, I finally figured it out. It turns out...

I do like coding, I just don't like making assets.

Seriously! I think that's it!! I LOVED wrting the CSS and HTML and doing light scripting for my character page, but you know where I got stumped? Drawing all the assets for the characters!!! My art changes too much! And when I perceive a change, I get freaked out about consistency, so I feel like I need to redraw the ENTIRE thing again, which makes me overwhelmed, and I keep putting it off until there's another change! AUGHH!! This explains everything! That need for constant change as I improve just makes me want to never work on something long-term and to completion. Like, I already want to re-structure this page because I can see how cumbersone it would get if I ever wanted to link this specific entry elsewhere. I think I will link it! And then I'll complain about it! But whatever, I have to move forward and complete the other parts of the site or I'll never work on it again.

Rambling a bit after this, let me rephrase my initial conclusion: I do like coding, I just can't handle working on long-term projects.

But I do want to work on long-term projects! They're too good once they're done! So how am I gonna get over this hurdle? Good question. I'm probably gonna have to accept that it's not all going to be perfect, and that perfect is the enemy of done. And right now I need a whole lot more done than I need perfect.