initially I thought I got nothing done this year, and was disappointed about that but it turns out that we got a lot done, In 2024, I created this website, along with 5 others, with lots of content that I like
the year, overall, felt like when you're a small ant who kept getting squished by some amused entity, who would watch you get back up, and then squish you again so it resulted in a lot of creative drive crashing into a brick wall, which can kind of be seen from the project posts this year
but as usual all you can do is try your best
I think 2025 will be a nice year,
some things I would like to do:
make a bigger browser game like ratsnet/north of goodtown
try social media? could make videos for teppy's layouts, or put drawings on instagram?
lots of painting and digital drawing
get closer to finding a place that feels like home
˗ˏˋ ★ ˎˊ˗
thank you to:
pascal, for being a bright star in the sky pdog, for being an unchanging being in my life, though you've probably gone though a lot and changed a lot veli, for being that star that I can never quite find consistently but it's nice to know you're there somewhere my sea dota stack, taka, for allowing me to join you all, h, for being a good creative community leader, matcha, for continuing to include me in your life, monkey, monkey, my parents, for being warm to me my sister, for doing so well for herself, we are all proud of her and the many people who left nice messages on teppy's site, it's filled me with a lot of joy, and me for continuing to do such a good job looking after myself (,,−ω−,,)
2024
11 December, 2024
hello
It is the end of another year highlights as follows
To me this was a story about isolation and natural expectations imposed for those who [make the choice to] exist It was a comforting read and I recommend it
Don't know how to describe this one but it has a similar air to failed human. Also noted here because dazai makes a reference to this book and I thought that was cool
game
I don't like games I don't like playing no games
music
Top 5 tracks played this year according to spotify
While the storytelling was a bit squished to fit the 12-ep format, I loved the concept of innocence in a hopeless dystopia, and love the general shapes and colors of the world. The mechanics of this world were also creatively invented
And the opening theme is lovely
software
HeidiSQL The SSH tunnel feature has been very useful at work Because no one wants to view ascii tables on a terminal
Drawpile It is fun to drawpile with h and rab, and other strangers who wander in I appreciate them
Hope everyone had a nice year .
end of year
1 December, 2024
The new website blog about MapleStory has been finished, and looks like this:
I'm happy with it, though I realized a few posts in that the website is awfully hard to read, in classic oldweb fashion :D It feels like when you are given a guest bedroom, and the bed is surrounded by plushies. You must sleep with the plushies.
+ - + - + - + - + - +
A debudev page about north-of-goodtown was finally complete, in time for the next game jam GGJ 2025 will be 24 - 26 January I will be making another browser-pet-game-using-3-colors Because those are awesome
+ - + - + - + - + - +
TODO: 2024 summary post
game blogr
14 November, 2024
Hello
I've had some ideas in my head, tumbling around like this:
One of them was on how if I like MapleStory so much, I should marry it. But I can't marry it so I'm doing the next best thing, which is to make a website about it. Oh yes I will make a blog about MapleStory and it will be great.
I used to like MMO blogs by others, it reads almost like a travel diary into another world. Here are two examples of MMO blogs! -> TERA Blog, FF14 Blog It just feels so warm.
A layout is in the making:
I hope that, when others come across this blog layout, their response is "what on EARTH is going on??????"
The site will be used to post occasional game progress, about in-game events, and host some little graphics that I'll make about the game.
+ - + - + - + - +
Another idea I had was that I should try to stick to an art style next year, one for digital and one for physical medium. That's where my mind wandered off to "YEAH you shoudl totally make separate websites for those too" but no no no that's not the right thought process If I am able to commit to a style then I should just be able to drown EXILESOUGHTFINALE with the new styles
For digital, I want it to be more casual, simple, and comicbooky, like the MapleStory layout above. I often get stuck in infinite rendering refinement hell when I try to draw detailed things (refer to me spending hours on the insect wings in this image).
The physical style it will be pencil and watercolor. Like Yoshitaka Amano. And by "like" I mean I'll probably just rip him right off.
But there is one large obstacle in the way, something which must be overcome with great hardship, something I have been avoiding for decades and that is
drawing noses
savor the night
4 November, 2024
Hello
Happy November!
Inktober recently ended. This year I got to do 21 out of 31, with 2 more in watercolor on the way some time this week. Then that will conclude my Inktober for this year. Inktober is almost the only time I draw in physical mediums and I'm always impressed with myself for how quickly I get used to it :D It was a very mellow series, I liked it.
My friend Matcha turned one of them into a modified wallpaper for his monitor, which made me happy (I blurred stuff out):
+ - + - + - + - +
I've been pretty lost these recent months so I got back to MapleStory. Nothing warms the heart like feeling the familiar piercing claws of a predatory microtransactional video game gripping at your fond memories of childhood.
I had fun dressing them in Halloween costumes:
And I even made a drawing for them:
The above piece is titled "Misdirected single 31 year old woman draws her own video game characters as her sons, 2024"
+ - + - + - + - +
November tasks:
→ Fix sleep schedule → 2x watercolors → 21mil combat on my Bowmaster → debudev page for north-of-goodtown browser game I made a while ago
mastery
22 October, 2024
Hello
Finally finished the car course I bought 7 years ago - 122 episodes, 14 hours The instructor, Alex, was fun to learn from; the type of person who you'd want to listen about any topic Photo of some notes What stood out the most was his high level of mastery in his crafts I want to have that level of mastery over something Using this Dreyfus model chart, some things I could try to achieve mastery in:
CodeIgniter & jQuery (Current level: Proficient) Slowly grinding to Expert during use at work. Otherwise looking to use it to make a video game with
3D Modeling (Novice) Still find it painful to try but maybe I just have to keep smashing my head against the brick wall until I stop feeling
Making Whipped Cream Cakes (Competent) Can't do this one because it makes me fat
Alternative list:
MapleStory (Current level: Expert Beginner) It would make 14 year old me very happy but 40 year old me very unhappy
Collecting funny pictures from the internet What this isn't even a valid entry how can you be a master at this no you don't understand I love spending time on it I could spend months browsing trash piles of junk to dig out the nice things and categorizing each picture into organized entriesin my Obsidian vault
Getting approval and love from strangers on the internet (Novice) What I'm talking about is committing to a social media account which posts drawings Side-mastery would be "making drawings that please the general populace"
Another ideal mastery would be one over their own body, like yoga or bouldering or weight lifting But I think the closest I'm willing to go with that would be working with clay That's kind of physical right?
~ + ~ + ~ + ~
Speaking of mastery, one thing that's been keeping me away from Anything Productive At All was MapleStory, which was making me enjoy my day-to-day life too much. But I recently hit a milestone on two accounts so now I'm declaring myself mostly banned from the game
Cool edit of an inktober entry by a friend with their caption
"one single cell divided into two, now it has company"
pseudoskincare
8 October, 2024
hello
post about skin and hair care
topics which i know not much about
skin:
cica cleanser - i use this to wash face twice a day
cica toner - use after night wash
cica moisturizer - use at night sometimes
cica vitamin c - it's in a drip bottle which means i feel like a mad scientist witch and that is cool. use in morning after wash
cica retinol 0.1 - modern chemical thing. it's known to cause birth defects. why are we putting things that cause birth defects on our skin that's crazy. i use this a few times a week
hadalabo moisturizer - i never used to use this but I now do before guasha face massage
hadalabo toner - I don't use this anymore but I used this twice a day for probably 10 years or so. very nice
guasha metal massage thing - i kind of follow half of this youtube short tutorial, she makes the movements look really smooth but it actually feels like grinding a skateboard on a rough concrete edge. i actually like this massage though I do it at 3am when i'm half dead. at this point getting better sleep would be better for me than doing an alien face massage
i took in a lot of skincare data recently, the new things are adding vitamin c, retinol, and the alien massage. I had tried cica during a holiday and it seemed to work really well with my skin so i'm trying it again. but chances are my skin was just nicer because i was on a holiday and wasn't worried or sad about dying alone in a ditch. the skin is not nice right now because i spent two days crying, and with the liquids being more acidic than human skin, it's causing it to be really itchy i have red dotty areas around my eyes and mouth i look like an aids patient and feel like one too (laugh)
next up hair
morocco shampoo - expensive shampoo isn't supposed to go all bubbly. i miss the cheap bubbles...
morocco conditioner - this thing is thick
morocco leave-in conditioner - reluctant use but it's supposedly a necessity
olaplex 6 oil - this is incredibly fun and it smells really nice i will use this for the rest of my life just for fun
my friend vulka has been helping a lot with appearance stuff after finding out i look like a stray dog, so he started with referring me to the blowout professor who is this jacked man with no hair it's pretty funny but he's very gentle with making videos for women. his video on youtube
my hair has no problems with breakage but i do have problems with hair loss on months where i am very sad, i was still recovering from last year but the loss started again a few weeks ago so hopefully that stops soonish
i tried following some of the advice and it did yield results that I will probably never do again
photo of hair after hair mask + heat protectant + blowout hairdry - this is never happening again but it was interesting to see my hair take shape in this way for the first time
photo of hair after the above 4 stuff - this looks pretty nice without effort, but the problem is still that I don't know how to style hair around face
photo of hair a couple years ago - i miss having long hair. this probably looks terrible objectively because it seems dreadlocky but i really liked it. i miss my old hair before the hair loss T - T maybe some day i will experience this again
i think in the end hair and skin health is only to do with happiness and genetics/hormones
i would recommend the olaplex oil and face massage. also the cica cleaner/toner combo is very gentle and pleasant so i would recommend that too.
though they recently came out with something freaky, they call it a reedle shot
there's nano needles that's supposed to help your skin? what if you get that in your eyes? people do comment that it feels prickly (the product images don't show the needles, so the people buying it don't know what it looks like at that scale) skincare culture is actually wild
it is inktober soon will be using this prompt list this year i am completely out of practice when it comes to pen-and-paper this year so we will see how it goes hopefully will get to do it with h and rab if they ever coME BACK TO the intERNET!!! we recently started reading the book 'crying of lot 49' which is a paranoid fiction novel, i have finished it. it was confusing
a couple weeks ago it was geoguessr's world cup grand finals, and it was really fun to watch, and I recommend it! here is the timestamp for the final battle
I think it's such a cool form of esport, where it's based on memory recall, or trivia knowledge, or quirky meta knowledge (the copyright logo, the sky JPEG artifact patterns, the camera car model,), it is just so insanely unique and niche. I was trying to think of other possible forms, but couldn't really, maybe some comical ones about speed coding, or live photoshop/video editing battles, speed-stalking a target? :D that one could be unsettlingly cool with all the text dumps of data leaks and whatnot
friday13th
16 September, 2024
hello,
vaha surprised me with a cool gift on friday, which was a compilation of my drawings in a video with a cheerful song.
it still makes me smile a lot watching it, the sunny track going through the SEVERE mood swings of the drawings are really funny to me. it also feels wild having 14 years of stuff flowing in your brain in the span of 2 minutes. I mentally time warp to the instances - where I was, what I was feeling, thinking, at each drawing. it makes me feel a little embarassed actually. thank you vaha
+*~+*~+*~+*~+*~+*~+
I have been consuming a lot of information about people's communication/thought styles recently, and if you've seen that kind of thing, especially on youtube, you find that it's a lot of pointing out flaws in one's childhood; and I don't think these people mean to, but it puts a heavy focus on negative aspects of a person's childhood, of what it was lacking, what bad things happened, and why they are so broken today because of it. and sure, identifying causes can help a lot, but i feel like I've experienced a lot of people irl first-hand, even those in their 30s and 40s, hyperfocusing on their bad childhood and being permanently down from it. so i made a list of cool things from my own childhood after being a little affected by the waves of these downers da list some of the items in here I had nearly forgotten about, and I found myself giggling as I wrote them down. sure, in between these were bad events that have caused problems that I will likely never be rid of, but that's just how life is for everyone. probably. people are beautifully varied this way! :D the list was a fun exercise.
the list also got me thinking; "when did my childhood end, if there was an end?" and it's probably at 13, when I first got a job and also when a grandmother died as a 'first relative death'. which may be on the later side compared to others. I would ask the people around me but it probably sounds like a very depressing question for some so I shan't ask :DD
have nice day
do or die
28 August, 2024
i loom (literally)
5 August, 2024
hello
i tried some more embroidery -
since it's autumn I started with an autumn-themed one, except, it's not autumn, it's summer. I realized this after having completed the acorn
sunflower
i am pretty happy with the progress
if i was to describe embroidery, it would be that it's wobbly pixel art, with no zoom tool. you really have to look into which specific hole you're needling through and it hurts when you stab the needle down your finger where the base of your nail is
the biggest improvement between the two was the maintenance of the back of the pieces -
the autumn one got absolutely ridiculous because I only paid attention to the surface appearance, which left a lot of bad buildup that later resulted in more stabs, harder weaving, and undesirable threads coming through the surface.
there's a metaphor there somewhere.
with the addition of these two pieces, asdf atelier feels like it has enough content to put on the projects page.
·-·-·-·-·-·-·-·-·-·-·-·-·-·
while playing maplestory, I suddenly came to realize that the game has gotten pretty ridiculous
the game borders on irony it would be cool to see how an MMO player in 2008 would react to this i think it's so funny.
i loom
29 July, 2024
so no one told me that,
when I was making a room maker game,
that i would have to draw all the assets,
that's kind of
m e s s e d u p
there is still so much to do and so much time so much time
●・○・●・○・●・
4am singing stephaine poetri tunes to my phone STEREO LEFT: pc fan (a little far) STEREO RIGHT: me (too close)
as i was thinking of next steps for the game and as i am drowning in self-imposed MMORPG chores
i wanted there to be a point system where i could feel reward and progress for doing things
and i thought about how i miss the websites in ~2008 where you can freely drag-and-drop pixel furniture
so i combined both in this little demo game
(view video in new tab) (pls don't click full screen on the vivideo because the pixels will be stretched and blurry)
you can see me struggling with the concept of "vertical" and "horizontal" (i struggle with a lot of concepts, you see,) as well as with the numerous bugs already in the game
but it's nice
I think it's nice
july
1 July, 2024
heurrrghhiii
it is july, which means a new pagination page!
i have been feeling around at what making ratsgame would be like, here is a little demo:
the idea is this:
I have two grids at the moment, one that lays over the top of everything, which would be what you would interface with then the "stuff" (player, npcs, walls) is under that, and then the game board grid is under that.
at the moment I am thinking the board will be a 2D array, with an ID for each tile type. (there will be lots of tile IDs) and then the functions just look up the tile index to see what's possible with that board cell.
*+~*+~*+~*+~*+~*+~*+~*+
and for the visual concept (versoin 0.1) -
the experiment here was to try using a color palette with actual colors, instead of the monochromatic palette I usually go for
but the moment i started the coloring, everything went downhill in my brain
i do not wish to live in a world with colors which are not [blue variant]
i simply do not have the skill to use more than 1 hue
changes:
probably go back to one-hue palette
halve the size of everything
add the ring skills thing to the top of the screen
