Hello again! I've been learning how to draw, recently. I'm following along with a few books, namely You Can Draw in 30 Days, by Mark Kistler and Color, by Better Edwards. They're both great in different ways and, while armed with my drawing tablet, I can do almost anything! Allow me to show you my progress:

BEFORE I STARTED USING ART BOOKS (BAD):

( View some of my worst art thus far! )

WHAT I'VE LEARNED SO FAR:

( Take a gander at some of the cool new things I'm learning! )

I'm really pleased by all the things I've done thus far! Especially the many spheres pic and the boxes I did today! Not to mention the Color Wheel and Value Wheel I've been working it. It's extremely hard to follow along with the Color book because it expects me to be using IRL paints and not digital art. So idk how well that's going to go, but I really hope to learn more Color Theory. Today I made the two blue color wheels -- one based on blue and white, and the other black and blue. The black and blue value wheel didn't go well, but I think that's mainly because I was using black to get the values. I hadn't even considered other colors until I finished the wheels and finished the chapter. Hindsight is 40/40 and all of that!

I also wanted to take a moment to thank khaosinkinema for providing me with lots of info and places to look. I am, of course, still learning via videos and art tutorials as well, but I had already gotten the above books before I got the comment full of info. I'm going to respond to that next, fyi. : 3

Thanks so much to everybody that's taking the time to read this! I appreciate your watching my journey.

Hey! I'm back again, however briefly, to slap down some of my art. I've been working on creating again, and I've really got to work from the bare bones because I don't understand anatomy or even basic shapes. Below is some of the stuff I've created over the last few days, and they're of varying degrees of quality. I mostly know how to do a straight-on POV or a profile, but suck at three quarters. I'm working on it.

I also can't do line art to save my life and know nothing about line weight or how to digitally paint/render pieces. I want to learn, though, because it's a lot of fun. I'm just putting down all the stuff I've made lately because going forward, I'm going to focus on basic shapes and anatomy with only the occasional piece so I can draw directly from my mind instead of using references and frankenstein-ing things together.

Okay, okay, this will be my last post for the day! I just wanted to quickly talk about this new game that just came out yesterday in case I'm the only one that knows about it right now.

It's called Spirit City: Lofi Sessions, and it's a game about productivity. You get to create an avatar and dress them up. Similarly, you get to decorate the room your character resides in for the productivity sessions. There's a lot of choices for décor, including different colors. I made my room mostly pink because I eat that shit up. :3 You also get to find and vibe with cute, little spirits! Half the fun of the game/application is discovering the right combination to find them. It requires simple things like what activity your avatar is doing, where, the time of day in the room, and the sounds you're listening to (like a thunderstorm, the forest, a fireplace, etc).

This doesn't even touch on the journal that's a part of the program. It also utilizies pomodoro timer to help you be productive, while taking necessary breaks so you don't overwork yourself and burn out. You can set up little habits and a to-do list! There's also some smooth Lofi music playing, though you have the ability to pause or mute that should you want to.

It's been a lot of fun to play the game, and be productive at the same time. I just thought maybe other people would find it helpful like I did! It's about $10 right now (it's on sale), so it's not an absurdly expensive game or anything like that.

If you get it, I hope you enjoy it. If you don't, that's fine too! I just wanted to make people aware of it. :D

Following up on that old D&D post from like 6 or so months ago, our new homebrew Homestuck campaign has just started! 

We've only had a few sessions of it thus far, but it's been incredibly fun. I've developed Opal and Remi a lot since their initial conception, and it's really beginning to pay off. Opal is a bully character, but she's growing rapidly and developing into a better person based on the experiences happening to her. I think some part of her will always be kind of mean, tbh, but she won't be downright cruel for long. It's ironic that I like her so much and dislike Vriska so much, but I think you're always kind of biased when they're your specific characters.

My partner drew a short animatic based on the characters from the campaign for a Sleeping At Last song. It's gorgeous, and I love it. The video is the perfect introduction to these characters and I can't wait to see where everything develops. If you want to watch it, it's on youtube and available to be seen. You can find it right here, if you're curious. Opal is the long-haired red head (see my icon) near the end, and Remi the blonde girl from one of the last panels.

I generally struggle while playing D&D because of my ADHD and constant understimulation, but I've been doing a lot better recently. I've got a journal to write notes in when things get boring and, barring that, a coloring book to keep me busy while I listen to what's going on. It's an extremely effective way of keeping myself from letting my mind stray too far while I'm playing.

What about any of you that play D&D? Do you have this problem? What do you do to occupy your down time?

I want to make a D&D Character journal, but it's a lot of work! It seems like a lot of fun, though, so I'm really excited about the prospect of it.

I haven't posted in a long time. In like six months, which is like... woof! That's a long time to be absent. Yikes!

I don't even have a good excuse, if I'm being honest. I just didn't have the spoons/energy to catch up on DW, so I avoided the site until I finally did have them, which is now. I'm going to try and be more consistent about posting, if only because journaling is a healthy habit and a great way for me to look back on the years and remember what I was doing. I really need to do that!! 

SO, I'M BACK!! 

I'm afraid to check and see if all my old friends on here have unfriended me or not. I wouldn't blame them if they had. I was inactive for a very long time! I suppose, if they have, I can just try and make new friends. That would be good as well! 

As a head's up, there's probably going to be a small flurry of posts to update everyone about what's going on in my life right now. So keep an eye out for that, and if I do still have some friend's out there who are reading this, then... don't feel obligated to respond to every post I make! That's a good way to lose spoons, and put yourself in the doghouse.

Anyway, thanks for reading!

Yesterday, my partner and I went through a half the boxes piled up in the bedroom. For context, most of my belongings (and I don't have much) are in boxes in my bedroom. They're mainly books, DVDs, and games... but mostly books. I was planning to move a few years ago, but ended up moving my partner in instead in July 2021. We've been living in a super cramped apartment ever since. It's very small, only meant for one person, but we make it work. Soon, we'll begin saving up for a new apartment complex, and hopefully we'll move sometime next year.

Right! The boxes! They were piled nearly up to the ceiling in the bedroom. Originally, the heaviest things were at the bottom (and most of them still were because of the books + DVDs + games), but they've been shifted around as I've taken some things out of them. It was anxiety-inducing to see them on my partner's side of the room (the only place there was space!), and hanging out so precariously. So, yesterday, we went through them to see if everything in them was really necessary or not. It was mostly old clothing, stuff that didn't fit or was super threadbare.

Two days ago, my partner suggested that I get rid of the clothes I didn't use or weren't in good condition. I was reluctant, because I have so few viable clothing in general. As a bigger person, finding clothes that fits and is also affordable is pretty difficult. I cycle through the same handful of clothes and one bra regularly, mostly because it's all I can afford. Places like Torrid or Catherine's or Fashion Bug have clothes that fit my size, but they're all either extremely ugly, or heinously expensive and bad quality. But two days ago, I hit the jackpot at Walmart and bought about $200 in clothes (on my credit card) that actually fit me. Now, mind you, they weren't all pretty, but they were functional and there were a few pieces that I enjoyed and fit me well. So it's worth the purchase, even if it was expensive.

With the new clothes in mind, I decided that purging my threadbare and holey clothes was a good option. Especially the ones ripping at the seams with 10+ holes that I've kept for over a decade. -sheepish- So I got rid of a lot of them... and then we went through the boxes, and bagged clothes that were 1x or 2x or even 3x that didn't fit me anymore. I kept a few pieces in the hopes that I'll lose weight and fit them again, but for now, they're just taking up space that we really could use. There were also a lot of boxes that barely had anything in them and some that did, but were unnecessary because my partner had better quality versions of those items (like kitchen supplies or plastic plates).

In the end, we got rid of about half the boxes in the bedroom. It really opens the room up and makes it far more spacious. My partner has also helped me to better organize my wardrobe and taught me the best way to fold my clothes to maximize the drawer I use. I'm really pleased with our progress. Though, I realized today that there is one more heap of old clothing (sheets + ruined hoodies + jeans) that we didn't get to. So I plan to make work of that later today! It was crazy how much crap I had. I literally had an entire box packed to brimming of just old socks. I only use socks during the winter when I can no longer use my sandals. Truly batshit!

In other news, I've been awake since about 3am. My sleeping schedule is getting back on track, but it's still not there yet. I shouldn't have gone to bed so early yesterday, but alas... at least I had a good amount of time to myself to work on my coding. That's nice!

Through a friend on DW, mxcatmoon, I discovered another community on DW. It's called spook_me and it's a spoopy writing challenge! It focuses on monsters (you get to pick which one appeals to you the most), and they give image prompts for you to choose from.

I picked Tentacle Monster (prompt image), largely because I'm planning to write for Homestuck. There's a character named Rose Lalonde whose username is tentacleTherapist. More than that, she's associating with eldritch beings/horrorterrors, which is what I'm basically going to be writing about. I'm really excited to be given the chance to write it, but it's definitely going to end up sloppy because it'll be my first time writing horror when I rarely even read it. It's just not a topic I'm very invested in, unless it's like Cosmic Horror or Psychological Horror. Those are the only types of horror that you'll ever find me indulging in, something like The Magnus Archives or Doki Doki Literature Club, or even Hatoful Boyfriend.

I've also decided to format my fic like an official pesterlog from Homestuck. Most of it won't truly matter because there will only be like 2 times in my short fic where the chatlogs are even available. It's mostly one-sided messages from Rose to Dave, and then Dave to Rose at the end. Still, it took me a good hour or two to figure out how to use and make the CSS for the A03 Work Skin to work the way I wanted it to. It's going to look great by the time it's done. I'm incredibly excited, even though I keep procrastinating the actual writing of the fic (I hope to finish it this weekend regardless). Even making this post is a form of procrastination. I think that's because it's a struggle to write a new character + a new genre at the same time. I'm afraid of failure, even though the only way to improve is to keep trying.

Does anyone have any advice on how to write horror, if you have any experience on it? I did some research on it, and learned a few things, but the best advice seems to be that if you're creeping yourself out, then it's a good bet that you're on the right track. I'm worried about that, honestly. I'm not afraid of Eldritch/Cosmic Horror, but some of the little hijinks that happen to Rose are things that would terrify me. (I'm of a mind that it'll start with terror and turn to horror as I write it, mixing subgenres). ♥

The best thing about the spook_me community is that they don't care what you include in your fic. Mine's going to have light Dersecest between Dave and Rose, nothing overly blatant or explicit, but it'll be there. I'm not sure how I'm going to include it yet, but I'm eager to see the dynamic develop between the two of them.

I've been awake since 2:30am due to a shitty nightmare I had. I can't remember it, and I'm grateful for that because they've been haunting me lately. It really sucks because I only got a few hours of sleep after falling asleep around 11pm. I'm really getting sick of the constant nightmares my psychiatric medicine withdrawal is causing me. Never in my life have I had so many of them clustered together throughout each night, every night. I dread having to go to sleep now, and my exhaustion from subsisting off a few hours of sleep when I'm used to hypersomnia is super sucky.

Homestuck:

On the plus side, I immediately took a shower after I woke up. I also wrote my rp response for the (Homestuck!) Dirk/Dovesprite roleplay my partner and I have going. It's an intriguing premise, basically taking place post-game. Everyone spawns back onto their planets, including the guardians, and luckily Dirk / Roxy do as well. Dirk, though, is entirely disconnected with his friends and family. He views his peers as looking down on him, and even infantilizing him, even though they're not. He's just struggling with going from extreme isolation for the majority of his life to having people around him all the time. Anyway! He uses his narrative destroying powers to rip open a portal back to the Medium and steps through it. The goal is not unlike Ultimate Dirk -- restarting the Sburb game.

Dirk was most at home during the game, despite all the strife, stress, and danger. He wants, more than anything, to feel needed again. He wants to be regarded as important, instead of feeling pushed to the side as all of his friends make lives for themselves post-game. To be frank, he needs therapy, lol. Not that he'd agree to that or even think kindly of therapists. What Dirk doesn't realize is that once the game has ended, it's literally not possible to restart it, no matter how much you alter the code. Not to mention, Dovesprite is there (as she slowly figures out her gender identity), having settled into becoming a kind of Denizen due to Dirk's presence there. She's the equivalent to anti-piracy software, always banishing Dirk back to his own reality after a sort of internal timer goes off.

In an effort to manipulate Dovesprite, Dirk makes an offer to use his heart powers to rip her soul from her sprite body and put her in a robot/android body instead so she can join everyone else in the new reality. He wants her out of the way, and this seems like the best way to go about it. What he doesn't realize is that once Dove is gone from the second prototyping, it'll just be Crowsprite. Crowspite is pure code, and finds Dirk much more quickly than Dove does. He has to pop up from the opposite side of the universe every time he shows up, just to get enough time to fuck around before he finds out. He'll keep at this for 10 years before he comes to the realization that it's literally impossible to do what he wants. That'll force him to come to terms with his life, and his new place in Dove's life (romantic, though she struggles with seeing Bro constantly in Dirk) as well as all the friends he's been ignoring.

So yeah, that's the premise of our roleplay. It's our second time making an attempt at it. The first one was decidedly more dramatic, and I was uncomfortable with my portrayal of Dirk. It's been a year since then and I feel like I have a stronger grasp of who he is. I'm also learning that in-character fictional conflict isn't a bad thing or something to be afraid of. All of this to say that my writing is progressing and getting better every day! I'm thrilled. Though I wish I had some friends on DW that liked Homestuck too. I've looked around, but it doesn't seem like the Homestucks have moved / transitioned here despite the inevitable collapse of Twitter (especially now that Musk is apparently going to charge everyone for using it.)

I hope everyone is having a good day today! It's my birthday!

I don't have that much planned for today, mostly just to spend time with my partner and to eat cake at some point or another. Still, that'll be a far better birthday than most of mine have been in the past. So I'm excited to spend it with them and all of you!

I don't have a lot to say (I rarely do, haha. I'm not that good at the journaling thing. Not much happens to me that is exciting to write about.), but I'm happy to be here on DW with all of my new friends. I'm really enjoying getting to know all of you, and I think it's important to keep a written log of events going on in my life that I can look back on. I struggle with my memory a lot, so often times in years gone by, I have no idea what I've been doing, lol. I feel like this is a good way to keep up with myself.

I did get a few spoils for my birthday earlier in the month. You've seen some of them already -- the charms for my red Persona 5 ita bag. Other than that, I got a Deadpool titty mousepad, a coloring book (I don't know the series, but I like the art), a Meg from Hercules doll, and two dolls from Rainbow High. They're gorgeous, and a new thing for me. I've never collected dolls before, but they're girlfriends, and I love them. ♥ You can see the images below!


( Check out my birthday gifts! )

Here I am again, a few days later, after having read more fic. I'm in a bit of a small rut right now, struggling to read more even though I want to, but that's life. If I can't finish a fic in a day, I tend to lose interest in it the next day, though I've been forcing myself to keep reading regardless. I love fic, I love the catharsis of reading it, and I need some way of managing my Good Omens hyperfixation.

Getting a Wiggle On, by Kedreeva :: 7,200 words :: G
Crowley's prank to leave Aziraphale with fake eggs to babysit does not go remotely as planned.

Review: It's not often I indulge in crack-y fic, but I really couldn't resist when I read the premise of this fic. It's such a charming idea, and the fic itself doesn't disappoint. Neither does its sequel, which explores more of the 'Verse. It's so cute and heartwarming, a delight all the way through if you like crack treated seriously.

Tail as Old as Time, Swan Song as Old as Rhyme, by Kedreeva :: 41,000 words :: PG-13
Deep in the countryside, surrounded by a black-mirror lake, sits an abandoned manor, long since victim to some kind of magical catastrophe. Nothing lives there, nothing living will come within a mile of it, save for the one strange, graceful black swan that swims the moat, guarding the derelict home from anyone that would intrude.
And for almost a hundred years, none have dared until Aziraphale unwittingly stumbles in, on the run from his family.

Review: This fic is one that I enjoyed immensely, especially in the beginning. It's a "Beauty and the Beast" retelling. I was immediately sucked into it, and I loved the universe it weaved. I'm always so taken by interactions with monsters or animals or what have you. It's my favorite part of the fic, and it stayed with me after reading it. The ending has a unique twist that I kind of saw coming, but enjoyed all the same!
 
through the silent wood, by summerofspock :: 58,000 words :: NC-17
When Aziraphale Eastgate first moves to Tadfield, he struggles to understand the strange culture of the village. They're not friendly or kind or anything he expected from a village in the north. So when he rescues a snake from a snow storm, he's glad for a little company even if it comes in the form of an animal.
Unfortunately, in Tadfield, animals are often not what they seem.

Review: I feel I should warn in advance that this fic is darker than the previous. It heavily features depression and some suicidal ideation. With that said, the fic is absorbing, and immediately sucked me in. I loved the premise. I am always a sucker for prenatural creatures, including fae. Without spoiling anything, their romance is a bit of a slow burn, and that's what I love about it. It was so satisfying to watch them slowly open up to one another. The ending is a bit dark, but I enjoyed it all the same.

amaretto, by goosewriting :: 70,000 words :: NC-17
Aziraphale, a human, has grown used to being alone.
Everything changes for him when a unique occult relic falls into his hands and loops him into a contract with a mild-mannered (if a bit snarky) demon named Crowley.

Review: I absolutely adore the way Aziraphale is written in this fic. He's so perfectly him: sweet, but a bit of a bastard. Crowley is great too. They both are, but it's Aziraphale that shines in this fic. The plot is wonderful, as is their interactions. They fall hard and quickly for each other, but they don't get together until the end. My only issue with this fic was that the ending felt a little like it'd gone one for too long. I kept waiting for it to end, and it did, but it took awhile.

I don't know why I'm reading so many AU fic. I don't usually enjoy them, but I feel like I'm gorging myself on them right now. Feel free to ignore if they're not you're thing. I'll get back to the Usual soon enough!