📓 Edmund's Blog 📓

Happy Cinco de Mayo to those celebrating! Either way, stay safe on the roads out there!

Earlier last week I had implemented putting Steam net revenue of games where applicable, and while I still feel weird about it, seeing some games where it's obvious the only reason it's not making money is because of where they are and who they know? Like, Don't Open The Doors! is a terrific game but it was released in 2016 and it's only made $4k total? Compare that to something like Super Kiwi 64 which is also delightful but also had the option of using social media to their advantage to greater profits, or how Cuphead likely would have never had the meteoric success it's enjoyed without the benefaction of Microsoft? It really does feel like advertising is the name of the game sometimes, it's hard to stomach.

Speaking of the games section, I've been gradually making a map of the places that have a game recommended from where it was developed - so far, there's several from America, Canada, Russia, and Australia - there's also one from Brazil, and a vast majority of the games on there coming to us from around central Europe. I'm aiming to alter my current game 'diet' to get more games from South America, Africa, Asia, just try to hit as many countries on the map as possible, really get an international spread of what's going on in gaming outside of my periphery. I think it will be a worthwhile project when it's all said and done!

I tapered off of The Brothers Karamazov since I decided to get the book for myself instead of borrowing the e-book, so that way I can read it without feeling a lot of time pressure, and it just came in the mail so I'm looking forward to starting Book 3: The Sensualists in earnest!

Finally, FINALLY got some art done this week, and it's not too shabby, either! I gotta really think of some kind of project to work on to help conceptualize how to do more with the sort of painterly look I have going on at the moment.

That's all from me this week! Make sure you're getting enough water!

Hope everyone's looking forward to May!

One of the recent additions to the site is an approximation on some of the games I recommmend and just how much net revenue they made. I feel gross about it, but I feel like it's relevant information, especially for really small projects that don't have the advertising opportunities of other bigger operations. I'm also considering putting in details like original release dates and game engine used, but that's a while coming.

Speaking of games, I've been getting in on the game Felvidek and it's a real charmer! I'm enjoying my time with Pavol and Matej immensely, and I'm very excited to see how the story pans out. I've also been playing First Cut: Samurai Duel and that game's great. The things it does with its game mechanics are tremendous.

I'm still getting through The Brothers Karamazov little by little...I have to say, it's been a very long time since I had a book where every chapter left me more open-eyed than I was before...for one example, in the chapter 'Peasant Women Who Have Faith', there is an elder (more typically known as a staret) by the name of Zossima, and is speaking to a woman named Nastasya. Nastasya has lost her three-year-old son Alexey and come to the elder after vacating her husband Nikita out of sheer grief. When Zossima tells her to go back to Nikita for the sake of her dead son, I first assumed that it was mainly sexism that drove that suggestion. But then, he later speaks to an unnamed woman who confides in him that she murdered her husband for being abusive. He tells her to not fear but to have faith in God that He loves her, and to forgive her cruel husband in her heart. It occured to me that what I was reading was far deeper than simple platitudes, but that Zossima was having to answer these very pressing questions of faith in a way that made *sense* to those suffering. Nastasya was clearly grieving to the point of breaking, and in this situation, the only way that she would have any hope of recovery is if she went back to Nikita, but it had to be, for her, for the sake of her Alexey smiling down on her from heaven. No other edict would've made rational sense for her, even as a faithful person. It's the same for the unnamed woman, that she fears for her soul but had genuine reasons for her actions. Asking her to forgive her husband while faithful of God's love is the only way this woman would ever even consider her crimes and what she can do about them in a meaningful way. This particular chapter also gives a greater understanding of where the elders are coming from in the later chapter 'So Be It! So Be It!' where they consider Ivan Karamazov's essay about the seperation of church and state, and how the church has to overtake the state as opposed to becoming part of the state, or acquiring state powers. It's a frightening suggestion, but given Zossima had up to that point in the book been effectively doing mental health care that would benefit the state? It makes perfect sense why he would be in favor of it.

There is another example, and it actually sort of relates to my thoughts about being vainglorious last week. Chapters 6 and 7 left a foul taste in my mouth, because I felt very much my weakness of character in a lot of ways. The explosive argument Fyodor has with Dmitri reminds me of just how many grudges I hold in spite of myself, how much resentment and bitterness I cling onto like it was vital to me. The scene afterwards with Alyosha and Rakitin made me feel worse still, as Ratikin's dressing down of Alyosha felt like it's pinning me down with him:

"Do you know, I simply wonder at you, Alyosha, how you can have kept your purity. You're a Karamazov too, you know! In your family sensuality is carried to a disease. But now, these three sensualists are watching one another, with their knives in their belts. The three of them are knocking their heads together, and you may be the fourth."

I feel that way because I've been at least slightly disgusted with myself for a long time. The statements from Ratikin tear into me because for so long I've wanted to be something I'm not, and to somehow escape from it. It's the same way I want fame, it's not just the idea of people liking me, it's the desire for transcendence - to close my eyes and open them as a completely different thing. But, Zossima also says something to Fyodor in 'The Old Buffoon':

"Do not trouble. Make yourself quite at home. And, above all, do not be so ashamed of yourself, for that is at the root of it all."

This is important because it helped me contextualize something: this sort of work I'm doing has to be for its own sake, because this hunger for transcendence is nearly a form of self harm at this point, an act that gives no benefit and makes me feel substantially worse. This means that my work will need to come from a place of self care if it comes from anything at all. Now, how would I go about ensuring such a thing? Something for me to work on into next week, for sure.

Woof! This was a big blog post this week! See you all next time! <3

Hello, everybody, and how are you? Hope everyone had a good green day!

I'm going to get a little personal here, because...back in January, I was thinking about why I never did anything that I claimed was important to me. I never really thought about it after that, but a lot of the reason I focus so hard on being an artist or a game developer and whatnot is because I decided at one point that getting that fame was my purpose in life. I hate to even admit this much but time has taught me that I really was vainglorious after a sense; I wasn't pursuing making Newheimburg, or any other project because I fully believed in it, but because I felt like if I finished something big, something important, then I would finally have all the fame and prestige and maybe even the money I thought I deserved. And when that all fell through? When I finally realized I was never going to be some big shot artist or game developer or whatever? I couldn't bring myself to even look at a sketchbook after that. This is all to say that...i just really need to do some soul searching about all this before I start trying to get a project moving again, this is a pretty major problem.

I've started reading through The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (I'm on Book I: Chapter 5: Elders so far) and am having a fabulous time with it. I emotionally resonate with Alyosha as I'm pretty sure he's autistic, but I'm really more like the character of Mitya with his exaggerated idea of what he's owed. There's an early line from the book I like a lot:

"As a general rule, people, even the wicked, are much more naïve and simple-hearted than we suppose. And we ourselves are, too."

I also read through volume one of Local Man, which...gosh, I wish I liked that comic more than I did. The characters are excellent, the art is fantastic, the lore is interesting, but the overarching story itself is just not doing it for me at all. I might stick with it since its merits outweigh the demerits. Honestly I'm just glad to be reading again!

I suppose that's all I got! I'll see you all next week! <3

Well, it's Sunday! Hope you all had a good week! Mine was very brief and boring.

I've been spending a lot more time on the games section of the site than I really expected to, and I don't know how to feel about it. It's like, I know that these things come in waves, but it really feels like the games section is the only thing I'm invested in, like in general. It's a worrisome thing.

Got a new bed! It's comfy. Not much more to say on that.

That's all for this week! See you next time!

Hope everyone had a good April Fools Day! I'm currently on day six of a nine-day work week, so April Fools Day got extended for me this year. @~@

Aw gosh, I just remembered the solar eclipse is going to happen this Monday! Is everybody psyched for that? I know I am! I have a lot of emotions tied up with the 2019 eclipse, since that was the last major event I was around people without having to worry about wearing a mask. That time is behind me now, but I'm still really pumped to see the sky go dark!

So, okay, I know I've been fussing over the comic over the past couple of months weeks now, and I know you're probably sick of it because I sure am. Thankfully, I think I've come to a conclusion that it's simply going to need more time to simmer. For all the confidence I had that I was ready to take this on, I wasn't being realistic with myself about the sheer work load I'm up against. I wasn't just going to magically make a webcomic on a regular basis when I go whole months without drawing, that just wasn't going to happen. I also didn't consider just how much ground I was going to have to cover in terms of what I would need to draw to make this work, like settings and crowds and concept art - two character sheets and three props wasn't gonna cut it. So, I'm gonna try to spend the next few months learning and labbing to get something going. I might be able to make it into a whole new page on the website, that could be fun!

After last week, I've been sticking to my plan to get acquainted with more vegan foods. It's been cutting into my budgeting goals a bit, but I have to say, every time I make a vegan eating choice my body feels better somehow. I know it's most likely psychosomatic but I feel like the knowledge that comes with having a better way of doing things really puts a spring in my step! Anyway, some of my recent foods:

• Celsius Sparkling Fuji Apply Pear - it has a delightful apple taste that's sadly quickly soured by whatever they used to sweeten it.
• Morningstar Farms Chik'n Fingers - I didn't take to these, but the one time I made them they turned out a bit mushy for my taste. That has less to do with the chik'n and more to do with it being a frozen food that I cooked in the oven. I'm sure if I used an air fryer or just baked it for longer, it would have gotten that firmer outside I was looking for.
• Gimme Sea Salt Roasted Seaweed Snacks - really thin but has a nice salty fishy sort of taste, and a really good source of Vitamin B12 so it should really be a mainstay in my diet.
• Abbot's Ground 'Beef' - Getting some of this with some Badia taco seasoning and putting it in some Toufayan pita bread? Sssssscrumptious. The grounds get awfully dry when cooked according to the packaging but mixing it with a little Follow Your Heart Veganese helps boost it a lot. If I can get some proper vegetables to round it out I may have a winner here! Some lettuce and tomato for sure, but I'm wondering how well cucumber slices will compliment the thyme and mushroom notes.

One thing that this whole adventure is teaching me is just how much I missed cooking. I'd always wanted to approach cooking again but never made the time, but if I'm really going to go all in on this vegan food kick, I'm going to have to learn to make vegan food at home!

You know, considering I've been working such long stretches recently, I really ought to take some vacation time off soon. It's a pity I don't really manage my time very well when I'm not on the clock, but it is what it is. I've got two days off in a row soon, I should probably go out shopping and get some new shoes to replace my old ones, and really make a day of it.

That's all from me this week! Have fun during the eclipse! :>

Well, folks, it's Easter. I'm not feeling it, but my goodness, it's still Easter. Always a big fan of all the decor that comes out this time of year! Eventually when I have a place of my own I can get into decorating more intensely.

I met with my uncle for the first time in eight years this week! We last met at my youngest uncle's funeral in 2016, where the whole family had turned his house into a miniature Trump rally. Needless to say, I was fully expecting the meetup to be supremely difficult, but I was pleasantly surprised that Trump did not come up once. We mostly discussed our health and our families, our future plans, all that jazz. I hate to get all morose but I wonder how much better off I would have been socially if I wasn't so obsessed with being safe all the time. I don't understand why I waited eight years.

This work week was just...I completely forgot how tough Easter was on every department in the store. Christmas you at least see coming, Easter sneaks up on you with how much demand is there to supply. I mean, I'm not saying anything new here, obviously, but retail is hard!! I am SO looking forward to the next few months where we have a break from all the holidays for a while!

I finally got the sixth page of the comic done this week! It looks pretty good! That said, that single panel at the end took me two weeks of procrastination to resolve, because I'd managed to set myself up for failure. The first six pages were mainly of Avery and Hazard in Avery's car, so it was basic. To go from that to a crowd scene in a diner setting I had made no attempt to practice on? Absolute dingus behavior! I think the next week or so is going to have to be getting back in the grind of character design and background layout before I try to push out more pages. Gotta re-learn to apply myself!

So, one interesting change to my diet is I've started trying to integrate more vegan foods into what I eat daily! Believe it or not, this came about from playing 77p egg: Eggwife because it has a counter for Vegan Infractions? And over time playing that game, it started to occur to me that it might be worthwhile to consider working in more vegan foods into my diet because, quite frankly, my eating has been a mess overall lately. I'm getting better about it, I think! Some of what I've been trying out is Odyssey Mushroom Elixir, the Sparkling Blackberry Lemon Twist flavor, and it is phenomonal. I really am beside myself that I waited this long to try mushroom drinks because of my aversion to mushroom texture in general. I've also been trying Craize Coconut Toasted Snack Crackers, which are decent! I love coconut.

That's all from me this week! Let's all have a relaxing Easter!

Woo! It's the Sunday before Easter! Are you ready? I'm not!

I've been reading How To Be An Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi. It's been very informative, a lot of information to chew on. I mainly wasn't expecting it to be such a personal exploration into how Ibram got from racist to antiracist, and how that frames certain quotations about those two terms being like a 'peelable label' that depends on what the person is thinking or doing. I'm only on chapter 5 but I hope to finish the whole thing. There's one specific line that grabbed my attention: "We are what we see ourselves as, whether what we see exists or not. We are what people see us as, whether what they see exists or not. What people see in themselves and others has meaning and manifests itself in ideas and actions and policies, even if what they are seeing is an illusion." It really illustrates the civic duty of things like friendship, because it can be best described as seeing the mirror that a person sees themselves from, and working to fix any warping or skewed perspective through the work of being a friend.

One thing the book talks about, that isn't quite as related but I really gravitated towards, is the idea of looking at how a person has been shaped by policy, and i say 'unrelated' because I immediately considered it from my own character. For example, I think that my first real anti-patriotic stance came after the institution of the Patriot Act in 2002, which allowed the federal government to wiretap whoever they suspected was a terrorist. I was already an anxious kid but this sent me over the edge into paranoia and distrust that I don't think I ever recovered from. Do I think that the Patriot Act was avoidable? Earnestly, no, I don't think there was any timeline where the government wouldn't sing in extreme laws like this one in response to 9/11 and the anthrax attacks...Now, all this leads up to the question of how I make this knowledge into power.

...sigh...the comic. I honestly am just considering calling the thing off. The radical incrementalism idea was a decent one, but it requires me to develop a sense of self-motivation and for whatever reason I can't make it happen. It doesn't help that the fact of the matter is, the idea I have here would take decades to see through to completion! I don't want to be doing this for decades! It would be simpler if I could get a group together to help make it, but I have a real toxic individualism problem where I just assume that I'm the only one who can do something, and I'd need to learn networking skills...I need to learn networking skills, there's no other way. If I want any of my big ideas to get somewhere, I'll need to communicate that need somehow...

Okay, I think that's all I got this week. I'll see you all next time!

...folks, I'm not gonna lie, I'm going on day six of an eight-day work week, and I am OVER it. Positively exhausted, and I have little to report on other than I've been working all week, so this one's gonna be short.

One major thing I got done this week is go to the dermatologist and get a biopsy. I'll spare you the nature of what got removed but I'm very glad it's off of my person. Even better, the biopsy results came back as banal! This means that the back pain and pressure I've been feeling truly is, in fact, just me getting older. Hooray!

All right, as previously mentioned, I'm pooped and that's all I got. Y'all have a good one!

Itttt's Daylight Savings! Where DID the time go?

I have to admit, I've done little else but work this week, and the comic plan from last week isn't bearing a lot of fruit. There was no getting around the fact that working in small batches was going to be slow, but working incrementally turned into not working at all. Maybe it's possibly due to my work habits telling me that 'working for an hour max' meant 'working for an hour, period'? It makes more sense than saying I'm too lazy to do ten minutes a day, I don't want to believe that about myself. Either way, this system needs some tweaking.

As a followup to my promise to read more, I ended up checking out Leadership: Six Studies In World History by...Henry Kissinger. While I was initually flummoxed by a book this evil even existing, curiosity got the better of me and I just had to know what that man had to say. I'm not very far in and I doubt I'll finish, but he has at least one really salient point to make about leaders having a specific vision for the future that guides their entire focus on what they do with the resources they have, and owning up to things when they fall apart. It's really just good life advice! I'm also not finishing the book because one of the last chapters is in praise of Margaret Thatcher and, by God, I've gotta have some scruples.

Well, an update to the stray cat situation: I went out to the parking lot around 6 AM, determined to get them. I sat out with a cat carrier and a portion of Sheba for about ten minutes before I had to come to the conclusion that I simply did not have the resources necessary to do this. No stray is going to voluntarily go into an enclosed space next to a human without some work. It was a sobering thing to realize, because it made me confront the fact that what I was seeking here was control over the situation even though I knew that this was an avenue I had little control over...it's hard to reckon with your weaknesses, but I have to. At any rate, I'm considering throwing in the towel entirely, but I still have the option of investing in a live trap to see if that could work. Where I'm going to get a live trap is a whole other question.

The world has a kooky sense of humor - after I got done patting myself on the back last week for taking care of my teeth, one of my molars cracked literally two hours before writing this. I don't think it's at an emergency stage right now but it absolutely needs dealing with. But I gotta pay off some of the debt I've accrued from the last dental surgery. Oh well, what can you do?

That's all from me this week! See you next time!

Hello hello! Glad to see you all again! Happy Sunday!

Got a root canal and crown this week! It was highly unpleasant but gracious, do I feel better that all my tooth based issues are dealt with for now. I feel good! Well, not 'good' necessarily, my mouth is still a little sore, but it's such a relief to have taken action on a serious problem in my life and (gingivitis nonwithstanding) resolved it.

I've been on a excursion of sorts this week: last Sunday while getting a pizza, I saw a stray cat flop down really close to my car and look me dead in the eyes. I knew enough about cat body language that this baby trusted me immensely, and it made such an impression on me that I decided to use my time to try and get them to the local shelter. This, unfortunately, did not happen this week; much like how Four Thousand Weeks has been teaching me that I'll need to take the time that an action needs no matter what, the logistics of getting this cat to safety has proven to be an important lesson in humility. All I really managed to accomplish was making a Facebook post and buying a cat carrier. It's still more than I started the week with, but I feel sore at myself about it.

Speaking of the time management lessons, I'm choosing that instead of pushing myself to work really hard on the comic, I'm going to attempt to avoid burnout by doing something called 'radical incrementalism'? Basically the idea is I work on the comic, but I work at a minimum of 10 minutes and a maximum of one hour - and to cut myself off at one hour exactly even if I feel the rush at that point, because that feeling will lead to impatience and a rushed product. The book also suggests taking weekends off but I'm honestly not there yet.

I played through all three episodes of DUSK this weel - between that, CULTIC, and Cult of the Lamb, I've been playing a lot of cult-related games lately. Anyway, DUSK is an outright new favorite of mine, it does a lot of things that make me think of Quake and 5th generation console graphics in general, but it's the atmosphere that hits me the hardest - it feels like playing through a horror movie you'd rent at a video store, I love it so much...maybe someday I'll get through it without save-scumming. -.-

Well, that's all from me this week! Hope you have yourself a good one! Later!

Hope you all had a great week! I had a rough week and it'll likely be worse with the one coming up, but I'm keeping my chin up regardless!

I've gotta say, Four Thousand Weeks turned out to be well worth the money! There's a lot of stuff in there that could be construed as making new versions of old platitudes, but one that really stuck with me from that book is the idea that boredom is such a existentially painful exprience that we do literally anything to escape it - it seems absurd but it explains literally everything about my work process and regular failures to launch big projects...the use of things like games and internet to make my time feel like there's more of it, not even necessarily caring that it's being wasted, but when the alternative is to lock myself in and go 'this is it, this is what i'm doing'? I really need to make reading books (preferably physical books) a more common practice, because this is the most sober-minded I've felt all year.

As a part of that 'fighting against procrastination', I finally took the plunge and started the webcomic I've been talking about for literally months! In truth, I've had sketches ready to go since September but I just constantly hemmed and hawed about this and that regarding it. The truth is that, as much as I didn't want a repeat of Newheimburg, I also didn't want the comic to be the best possible version of itself...but it took understanding that the perfect version will only ever exist in my imagination and the frustration of bringing it into reality means it can never truly live up to that. Of course, this also means that I can look at it slightly more objectively now that it's in the world (I'm being generous with the term 'objectively', of course - my mind keeps going through the same three reactions: It's perfect! It's adequate! It sucks!)

Aside from that, the notion of 'locking myself in' has been extra useful to relieving myself of some major long-term anxieties, especially in regards to work, and it couldn't have come at a better time because work has been painful this week! But, you know, it was a lot easier to deal with when thinking about 'this totally sucks but I'm here and this is what it feels like' versus 'Tonight, I will be in my bed' because the latter is using a future event to make the present more tolerable? But in practice, it actually makes the surrounding problem of staying in the present worse because it glues you to that promise and has you aching for the clock to strike that beautiful moment when work is done, versus looking the present in the eye and agreeing to be a part of it.

I guess what I'm saying is, it's been a really decent week with a lot of learning for me! I'll see you all next time!

Another week come and gone! Very, very relieved to have the busiest part of February behind me!

I've been thinking about the notion of freedom while at work, and how technically I'm free to pursue whatever I want in my down-time? But I've been thinking lately like 'Dang, I'm really going to spend the rest of my life working retail for a 401k?' Which, y'know, is an awfully privlidged thing to have feelings about in the first place, and I know that...I have to wonder, though, if I'd still be having this train of thought if I was on a career path that wasn't so maligned. I'm getting to a point where I have no choice but to ask these questions because I'm simply not getting any younger. It doesn't help that I've never really crunched the numbers on what I could be making somewhere else, because I don't want to think about the inevitable doom spiral that would kick in if that plan fell through and I'd have to come crawling back with my tail between my legs and substancially less to show for it.

As you might have guessed, Valentines' Day and Super Bowl put a hurting on me work-wise, I feel a residual yuckiness but I'm no longer actively sick so that's a plus. I'm mostly just feeling a lot of ennui this week, to the point where I'm almost eager to be back at work just to have something to do. The only other thing I have going on is reading a book I bought called Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman about a more thoughtful form of time management? So I'm going to see about doing that. I might put together a personal reading list since I feel like I could be reading more.

That's all I got for this week! Stay loose!

Mercy, what a week! I did nothing but work from Monday to Saturday and it was a real warhellride. Saturday in particular was gnarly because I somehow managed to contract strep throat the night before, and I went in to work the day before the Super Bowl, AND our truck didn't get there until noon! Not a happy day in the slightest, but I survived it...or it let me live, I'm not picky either way. Anyway, happy Super Bowl Sunday!!

So, fun update on the movies from last Sunday: my mom took up to watch Poor Things because she was under the impression that it was a Frankenstein story where the monster "danced around and wore funny clothes" which, to be fair to my mother, is part of the movie. Needless to say, they were blindsided by the rest of the movie proper. Anyway, Poor Things kicked ass! Splendid movie, a bit like if Tim Burton directed a screenplay by John Waters. There was tons of sex but also really heartfelt. The comedy is very P.G. Wodehouse.

Spent Monday cutting an extreme amount of sugar out of my regular diet and gave myself what i assume is a 'sugar headache' on top of the toothache from the onlay earlier in January. They're annoying but they're both pains i need to experience if i want to get healthier...although it'd be easier to work around my sugar intake if i was just better at portion control - at present, it's one of the main things holding me back nutritionally speaking.

Checked out some stuff on Steam Next Fest this week! Star Trucker looks really promising, Yet Another Fantasy Title feels good to play, and #BLUD is looking like all of the cartoony fun I hoped it would be! That said, the demo that made the biggest impression on me was Mouthwashing, which by first sniff looks like a straightforward space madness story, but the way they get to said madness has been sticking to my ribs for a while since I played. Not to spoil anything, but the demo really got me thinking about a strain of nihilism in me that I never really confronted, or wanted to confront. It's really good, is what I'm getting at, really intense.

Only other thing I've been doing this week is looking up this guy on Youtube talking about 'levels of consciousness'? And I'm a corny sorta enby who listens to Shpongle, so initially I'm all over it. About halfway through the video though, they say some really foul things about homeless people, and they also have what I can only describe as this AI generated test that's like a Quibblo quiz to measure your thetan levels? So it's a pass from me, but I must admit they did a lot of original research into the topic. The best way I've come to think about it is that the lower levels of consciousness like those that prioritize survival, connection and control are like 'applied' science, and all of the other higher levels of consciousness are 'theoretical' science - you need the input from the theoretical sciences to improve the applied sciences, but some theory simply doesn't carry over into applied science, which hampers its usefulness as we are only human and must reckon with that physical reality.

Alright, I think that's it! I really wanted to leave off on a less somber note than last week, and I think I accomplished that - I hate making people worry. At any rate, looking forward to next week because it means we'll be done with major holidays until St. Patrick's Day. See ya!

It's finally February! Black History Month, Super Bowl, Valentines Day, all the hits! Hope you're as excited as i am!

Went to the doctor this week! To my surprise, I somehow grew an inch (i'm assuming it's my shoe height but I'm still ??? about it) and gained six pounds since my last visit. The doctor basically told me that I'll need to lay off the sugar, natural and artifical, since I have prediabetes. We also talked about using the gym more often, and well...maybe it's legitimately just paranoia that I think I'll catch Covid at the gym? But all the data backs me up that it's a terrible idea. I dunno, I think I really ought to get back to working with a home gym setup, but there's no room at the house! What to do, what to do...

Going off to the movies today! It's been years since I went into a theatre in earnest, so I'm curious to see what's improved since 2020. When I was in college, my friends and I would go to the movies basically every week for a matinee. I miss that feeling a lot, but that's all in the past now...I would need to give my social life a real shot in the arm to ever have that again, and I don't know how to do that, or even if I really want to do that. Working in retail for so long has made me really apprehensive about being around people for an extended period, to say nothing of my autism affecting matters.

I feel like I didn't appreciate my rare three day weekend from work as much as I should've. I know the chances of getting that ever again are functionally non-existant, so I got it in my head that i had to make the most of it? But I kind of didn't, I just did the same things I normally do on my day off. I know this is the depression talking, but it really feels like there's no real escape from the hamster wheel I've made for myself, mostly because I had no strategy for dealing with it. I just try harder, which isn't a strategy.

I dunno, that's all I got this week. I'm gonna go for a walk.

Another week come and gone! I'm not gonna lie, I didn't do a whole lot this week to report, but I like to have something to contribute on a weekly basis, you know? Keeps me thinking.

I've been trying to get back into reading books recently, but there's no getting around the fact that I seem to really need to have an ulterior motive to read these says. This time last year, I was reading through the list in Dungeons and Dragons' Appendix N to try and write through a traditional RPG. I got through Sign of the Labrys, Three Hearts and Three Lions, and about fifty pages of A Princess of Mars. I then concluded that maybe Gary Gygax just had bad taste and read through A Wizard of Earthsea which was terrific. Fast forward to this week, where I was hoping to check out some of the books listed in the Sims 1 manual, but alas, my local library has nothing on that particular list. Perhaps when I move, I'll have greater access to material!

While watching Dawn of the Dead with some friends earlier this week, I had a stray thought: I always notice how people super obsessed with zombie apocalypse scenarios are generally people really into video games, which seems like they ought to be unrelated, but...I was also studying this one video by HealthyGamerGG about video game 'addiction' and how outward stimuli like that actually rewires your brain to seek out dopaminergic activity like gaming, and avoid serotonergic activities that actually improve contentment and self esteem. The point I'm getting at here is how, even with the joyful scenes in DotD, surviving zombies is an overall miserable experience, completely deviod of serotonergic value, and I wonder if maybe the reason people big into video games gravitate towards zombie media, because it portrays this sarcastic kind of activity that combines the serotonergic aversion with a sufficently nerdy fixation that increases dopamine. Of course, this also doesn't factor in things like the supernova success of things like The Walking Dead, but I don't think I'm entirely off the mark here.

That's it? That's it! I'll see y'all next week! <3

Another week down! Keeping busy!

The fillings went as well as I could ask! One of the cavities was a lot bigger than anticipated, so I'll have to get yet another root canal in a month or so, but still! Cavity and rupture free for the first time in a long time. Feels good! Well, feels painful on the freshly operated teeth (and having a rough time making sure to take the amoxicillin so the teeth don't get infected), but still! It was a long battery of work to undo a decade and some change of refusing to take care of myself, but I did it!

I keep thinking about the comic and the Godot stuff and wondering why I'm not working on it at all. I know it's something psychological. I know I'm able to self-motivate, but a lot of the times, the motivation I give myself is just bullying? Like, I only want to do any work when I literally don't have time, and when I DO have time, suddenly I have no time at all and I just sit there stewing in quiet self-pity. It's a bad way to live...I think that I never actually wanted to be an artist, but really just grasped onto something I had an above-level competency for when I was little. I can see looking back how much my personality wrapped around what I did, and how toxic it was for me that I had no other interests growing up. I really believed that if I just 'played the long game' I could become a successful artist, but all it got me was spending my college years clinically depressed and making really lousy art, with some brief decent works in between. The only reason I was able to produce Newheimburg to any capacity was because I was on a strict schedule and had absolutely nothing else going on in my life. I know I ought to recover from that, but how? How do you run back something that started back when you were still in the single digits?

...okay, happier news! I'm finally playing through Monster Prom 3: Monster Roadtrip. I knew the writing was good from the demo, but this is the hardest I've laughed at literally anything in a while. It's good! I may have to give it up and buy the whole series bundle, I'm having such a good time. I've also played Intravenous II: Mercenarism, which is a free prequel to the sequel to Intravenous coming out soon. It's great! A real return to form for Explosive Squat Games., and I can't wait to see how the events of Mercenarism play into II.

The exercise routine I haven't started yet is still on my mind. I really ought to just do the old fashioned 'push-ups and sit-ups' routine since that's the simplest and most direct means to getting in better shape. As much as I self-moderate with fantasies of having a more involved workout routine, I still have my Volition skill check going 'dude, just do some basic exercises, you're fat and in your thirties, you literally cannot afford not to do this.' Not the diamond push-ups or trying to do a PB for number of reps, either, I need a routine that's going to last me.

That's all I got for this week! Hope to see y'all again next time!

Welcome back, party people! Finally done with a six-day stretch at work, and not a moment too soon, because I am wiped.

I'm on the fence about a character in my comic where the premise is that they have superpowers, and because of this, their father estranges himself from them to keep them safe from people who would use them for gang affiliated work - the thing is, I'm gradually coming to realize that part of the way I write and consume work is to try to live vicariously through a youthful character and give them a happier life than mine. Not that I was abused or anything, but there's portions of my life growing up that I always wanted to set right, and it was never a realistic want for myself - but for a character? Absolutely doable. The thing is, while that's a compelling reason to make work in general, it's not a "throw away a winning idea simply because it's unpleasant" level reason. So I guess I'm in a state of dukkha about it at the moment, and will have to make a decision regarding the comic as a whole based on how I progress.

As a sort of extention of my study of Vampire Survivors earlier last week, I've finally started working in Godot again. I got nothing fancy just yet, and it may be a while before I do since Godot 4 recently came out, but I've got a box that moves around. If I can just keep my nose to the grindstone and focus on programming enemies, I should be able to make a base for a Vampire Survivors-like of my own! But that also leads to another point I've been thinking about, where one thing I'm noticing from a lot of devs in their early years is that they played a LOT of games, and just added what they were doing to their palate of understanding of the medium. I'm still very much a proponent of ludoancestry, and finding throughlines on material that means something to you, but it's obvious to me that if I want to be doing dev work, I'll need to be not only consuming games thoughtfully but consuming games more rapidly.

Got another dentist appointment for two fillings tomorrow! This should be the last battery of dental work I need done until something else comes up...I'm really proud of myself for making this a priority last year, you know? My mouth was honestly disgusting this time last year, and just knowing that I actually put in the effort to clean all that up is really helping my self esteem.

I think that's about all I have for this week! Ciao!

First week of the new year and I've gotta say, I'm feeling it! I'm ready!

Another massive Covid spike coming in...another period of time where I have to pretend everything is fine. It's like, I try to not get discouraged because that's a losing game on the nose of it, but when I think of how this country could have responded in a way that could have prevented most of these new cases back in 2020? When I lost my grandfather to Covid complications? It's hard to be anythin BUT discouraged. Please mask up if you don't already. Even if not for Covid, do it because it's flu season and the fewer people getting the flu, the fewer fatalities it can cause.

I think I've finally managed to cross the slump that was my process for the comic writing. On the nose of it, the process is simple - write out the storyline for each major character, graph out where they sit in relation to each other, construct how the storyline would look as consecutive issues including major story beats, and then...draw the rest of the comic. I know it's a gross oversimplification of the process, but I once again keep wanting to just put the pedal to the metal. I wanna DO it! But I don't want to reckon with the reality that making a comic is HARD, and I flat-out do not have a choice in the situation.

Speaking of Herculean tasks, I'm once again trying to figure out how/if I can make games! This time, I'm studying the process behind the devs of Vampire Survivors, and how Luca would use frameworks and placeholder assets to make that game - specifically the Phaser 3 framework that makes web-based games with HTML5 using Canvas and WebGL. Seems like it ought to be simple until I discover you need a proper web client and not just a web hosting service. This part's tripping me up because I don't believe I've ever made or used a web client before. I can theoretically make one with Python but the skill ceiling seems so high, and downloading a client comes with having to verify files and whatnot...and that's not even getting into how I never even finished the Twine game I was working on. Mercy, I'm sad that Unity went down the path that it did, it really was the choice among choices for game dev. Godot is first-rate, obviously, but I have a very small amount of time with that platform, same with Unreal.

In personal health news, that 'Run Fight Run' workout plan never happened, and probably won't until I have my own place with a work gym setup - I'm not going to a proper gym during a Covid spike if I don't have to, and seeing someone do a workout based off of self defense is just going to scare people for no compelling reason. That said, I am trying to get some better financial health by doing my best to wean myself off of the Starbucks cold coffee drinks. I shouldn't be giving Starbucks my money in the first place, I definitely shouldn't be giving them 4 bucks a day. Especially not that I find myself feeling more confident and self assured when I have a proper cold brew coffee with creamer out of a real mug. So, maybe I can convince myself to spend some of that money I'm saving on shoe inserts. I almost definitely have arthritis at this point in my life, my feet have NEVER hurt as much as they do now.

I think that's all I got for this week. See y'all next time! <3

Whoa, it's New Year's Eve! Hope everyone out there's having a great time!

The week came and went on my end, really. It's mainly just a time for reflection and a time for work. Lots and lots of work.

I got invited to a new Discord server over the holiday season, and it's been a real breath of fresh air! I don't talk about it a lot but I've had a really hard time being on truly friendly terms with people because of certain events over the past couple of years. I've become a lot more guarded and defensive than I would have liked to be at this stage of my life. Hopefully I can make some lasting friendships this new year.

On top of thinking about other things, I'm also thinking about my sense of fashion, or lack thereof. I've been inspired by Youtube channels like Frugal Aesthetic to try and think more about what I'm wearing and why. It also acts as a decent justification to do some clean-up of my wardrobe and think about what I want the new year to look like from the mirror's perspective. In my heart of hearts, I really wanna wear shock-white cowboy boots as part of my usual dress, but I've got these Demonia boots that I never wear and really ought to give those some love first.

That's, uh...I guess that's it? I truly did not do much to round out the year, just a totally baseline sort of week. I won't complain, though, I've seen what an interesting holiday season is like and they're brutal. Hope to see you all well and happy in the new year! Peace!

IT'S CHRISTMAS EVE, Y'ALL! You know what that means! It means the big man (and of course I mean Clarence Clemons...and the mighty power of his saxophone) comes to give everyone presents, and the traffic on the road goes back to a relatively sane level of congestion. I, for one, can't wait!

This is one of the main times of the year for reflection, and I have to say I made a lot more progress on a personal level than I really expected to! Sure, the comic thing didn't come out as fully formed as I was hoping in September - and that hope was pretty delusional of me in the first place, if we're being candid - but I've got a lot going for me, especially in terms of my dental health. Is my mouth healthy now? No way, not even close, but it really is night and day compared to where I was this time last year.

I feel like I push myself too hard in a lot of ways, but also I take it way too easy on myself in other places, you know? Like, I keep sweating myself over the comic thing because I've convinced myself that I need to be doing that, but then I have things like my budgeting and eating right that fall apart when exposed to above-average stress...like working retail at Christmas time. I feel like I can really be doing more in that regard, but I have no idea what that would entail.

Honestly? Not all that much going on with me this week beyond that. Work has all but swallowed up my free time and the rest of it has been spent on getting my achievement hunt on Vampire Survivors. I'm having a blast with that game! I looked into it and discovered one of the people working on the music for that game also worked on Jet Set Knights, which is a game I really ought to revisit since I didn't give it its due the first go-around.

Well, that's everything for this week! See you at New Years!!

Christmas Eve next Sunday! I'm not ready! Yow!

It's that time of the year where I'm having sincere trouble staying focused on, well, basically anything. I'm trying to not let it get to me, but easier said than done. I've got a very, very rough approximation of what's going to happen in the comic's story, but I've not put together anything along the lines of a storyboard to guide and inform the process. Come to think of it, I got a lot of index cards lying around, and I could probably use those to form a rough draft of what needs to happen across multiple issues to make the plot work. I guess I know what I'm doing this week!

A few days ago I got a massive hankering for some pinball, so I re-downloaded Zaccaria Pinball and am currently playing through that again...I feel like between that and the solitaire hyperfixation from a couple of months back, I'm gradually moving my interests into what I consider to be Dad Games, which is a weird thing to say considering I grew up playing my father's copies of Doom and Wolfenstein: Spear of Destiny.

While perusing Pinterest, I kept seeing clips from the book 100 Deadly Skills and getting caught in rapt attention. The boon it presents to writers is obvious enough, but what's really grabbing me is the concept it introduces called the 'Run Fight Run' workout. The idea is to get your adreneline to a rate of exertion that is realistic when in a fight. I don't make a point of getting into fights, but it reminds me of something I learned from Tools For Titans back in July. In it, Christopher Sommer talks about the important of switching out the concern about 'diet and exercise' with 'eat and train', because the latter has a specific target in mind that keeps you focused - "What am I eating and training for?" In the case of 'Run Fight Run', you're prepping the body to be able to work in an emergency fight or flight situation, which my anxious self finds really appealing to focus on. Now, the only real question is how exactly I train an intense regimin like that when the fastest I can run is 5 mph on a good day.

Well, that's all I got for this week! Hope the end of the year is a good one!

Hope everyone had a good week! I know I did! Lots of overcast skies this week but it is what it is. December is always weirdly warm in the South and doesn't get truly bitterly cold until February, but it still doesn't sit well with me how I can go out in open toed shoes this late in the year.

The major big news this week is I got an onlay on one of my lower left molars! I ended up paying quite a bit out of pocket since I'd used up a lot of my dental insurance on all the other procedures I've had done this year. The tooth still stings a bit and they accidentely scorched my tongue so that's healing too, but I'm glad that I'm still maintaining my dental health. That said, I've got more onlays to resolve in my mouth, but that's going to have to wait till next year. Next year...

The pressure is mounting in me about next year. I've got a lot on my plate! I'll be living in my own house in a whole other state by this time next year if all goes well. Thing is, I've never been a homeowner, and it feels obvious to me that with all the student loan debt and retail career that makes up my situation, my mom will most likely have to cosign for it, and I'm feeling very nervous about putting her in a bad situation as a result of that. She's worked so hard for me, and so few people have moms that will help them, I gotta work hard for her sake!

I finally caved and got a JSTOR account to try and get more research done on/for the comic. Specifically, I've got to nail down what the main character wants and why becoming a gang member will get him that. He wants respect, but most people do not respect gangs for obvious reasons, so what's his story? Based on writings by Stephen D. Hudson, there are four types of respect - evaluative, directive, institutional, and obstacle respect. To paraphrase, evaluative respect is the variable value we give to people, and directive respect is a boolean sort of respect you give to things like traffic laws and property rights, where you either respect them or you don't, with no inbetween. Now, because this is a Quest story, and because it creates more conflict for the main character, he has to be looking for evaluative respect in an environment where people are used to getting directive respect.

Aside from that, I also need to update and refine my Five Year Plan. I had a really decent year and got a lot done, but the plan was really makeshift in both form and function. So, I need to figure out how I'm going to write out the next couple of years in a way that makes a little more sense. But, I suppose that's why people suggest you do these things early, right? Plenty more time to refine them that way.

As far as games are concerned, I am having a BLAST with Born of Bread. It took me an hour to really get into it, but I am fully hooked. It's great! The connection to the Paper Mario games is clear and obvious, but it's truly doing its own thing and it's fantastic. The writing is there, the characters are delightful, the art style is terrific, the battle system and how it works in-story is really great - my only real gripe is how tough it is to navigate a level sometimes, but with a 2.5D game, it's to be expected. I'll try to do a proper write-up of it at some point.

Well, that's all I've got for this week! I'm looking forward to seeing you next time!

We're finally in the home stretch! My store is playing Christmas music again, but I have to give them credit for only playing a handful of songs shuffled into their regular rotation instead of having Christmas music nonstop like some stores/radio stations. I think I'm doing better from last week's entry, but I owe most of that to thinking back about my irritation and remembering that it's a symptom of depression. I don't get why I keep forgetting that!

After some research on 20 Master Plots, I've managed to come to the conclusion that the comic is going to be a Quest plot wherein the main character is seeking respect. I still have a lot of questions to answer concerning his decision making and why on Earth he'd think joining a gang would get him respect, but I'm getting to a point where I will be able to write a roadmap of what the whole comic's going to look like without too much trouble. Plus, with how many projects I write that never go anywhere, I might be able to use this tactic to make a little more happen in that regard! That's the goal, anyway.

Since last week, I've been trying to find ways to center myself so I'm a little less bananas throughout the week. One thing I'm doing is cutting the Starbucks Doubleshots out of my diet. I don't know if it's the guarana or the inositol or what, but it makes me so frentic and on edge compared to other coffee drinks now that I'm getting older. Another thing is that before work, I read a poem. I've got a book of the best of poetry from 2021 in my car that I read from, and I've found that thinking about a poem's meaning and emotional resonance helps keep me out of my own head in a way that I used to feel sketching before work. I should consider getting back on that anyway, but that's another topic. One core thing about reading more poetry is it lets me reconstruct my harsher feelings into poems, not things I'd post but things that help me think about my thoughts in a considerate way that journalling alone can't provide.

I'm pretty much back on my achievement hunting streak lately. I feel like one of the things that drives me in playing a game until I get all achievements is the same thing that helped me get through K-12 education - a teacher asks something of me and I can go right ahead and do it. Case in point: all it took for me to get serious about my brushing and flossing habits is to have a dental technician get on me for not taking care of myself when I went for a routine cleaning this week. It's not a great feeling to know that, but the thing is, if I'd factored that into my work over the years and had someone to be accountable to instead of trying to 'go it alone', I likely would have had more success. At any rate, I'm enjoying my achievement hunting and will have to consider what I can do about the latter situation sometime this month.

That's about all I got this week! Here's to a good one coming up! <3

Thanksgiving! Black Friday! What a week!

It's weird to say this, since I literally just had a vacation, but I feel really stressed out! I am not relaxed! I have SO many things I need to deal with and absolutely none of them are getting done, and it is making me nutty.

We drove over to visit my grandma and aunt in their new-ish home close to where I'll be moving. Not much to report other than they still watch a lot of TV (which they should probably get a mulligan on since the 97th Macy's Day Parade was on, I suppose) and while I'm online way to much to be giving them grief about it...it kind of makes me reflect on how much television was a means of staving off the effects of depression for myself when I was younger.

Thanks to a very dear friend of mine, I finally have 20 Master Plots and How to Build Them by Ronald B Tobias. I'll be honest and say I haven't gotten through enough of it to justify the amount of attention I'm not giving to my comic, or really any other projects at this time. It feels like I'm back in college, just begging myself to get past the next few paragraphs of a book and get on with it. It's not a good feeling.

Sheesh, listen to all of this. I'm embarassed in myself, honestly. I have to assume I'm feeling this bad because Christmas season is nearly upon us. Gosh, I'm just...I'm not in the mood for this right now. I gotta cut this blog post short, my vibes are way too off right now :(

My depression is still working hard on me, it looks like. I think a big reason it gets so bad around this time of year isn't just Seasonal Affective Disorder (although I have no doubt that's a part of it) but also the fact that the end of the year means there's fewer opportunites to keep on a schedule or stick to habits that could stave off the depressive atmosphere? I mean, out of all the personal improvements I attempted since June, the only one that stuck was the 'no soda' thing. Maybe I expect too much of myself, honestly, like...I don't know what I want from me here, I feel like my own worst boss. Maybe I should just chill out a bit.

Oh boy, grocery retail a week before Thanksgiving! What a ride. Nothing I didn't sign up for, of course, but sometimes I forget just how one minor thing like a pallet of food going into a cooler's extra space can snowball into multiple department's worth of preorders preventing me from running any backstock. And that's not even getting into what it's like on the sales floor - granted, I'm grateful to work in a place where Black Friday is a non-issue because those lazy Thanksgiving afternoons being cut short to swell the ranks of employees trying to keep Wal-Mart patrons orderly was not fun. Methinks I'll just count my blessings and move on.

Hope everyone has at least one thing they're looking forward to for the holiday! I'm headed off to visit my grandma, and also to scope out the place I'll likely be moving to...to be honest, I'm not sure how to feel because it's one thing to call the area 'redneck' because I've lived in redneck areas before, but it's quite another to go 'there are two army surplus stores and a gun store within spitting distance of each other'. That said, I'm not not looking forward to the move either because I kind of need a change in my life? And I want to be a homeowner. But then, there comes with it the questions of what I'm getting out of living in one state over another, because I don't necessarily have a preference? Or at least, I haven't done enough research to know to have a preference. I don't know. I had plenty of time to dwell on this and I still have an elementary grasp of what I'm getting myself into, so I'm a teensy bit frustrated with myself.

So, I was trying to get myself primed to learn more about plots so that I could be in a better position to write out more comics, you know? So I try to get an e-book of 20 Master Plots through my local library's Hoopla service, but all they offered is audiobook...I'm gonna be candid, I do not care for audiobooks. I simply do not see the appeal. I would probably like them a little more if I had ready access to headphones for my phone, but other than that? It's really just a matter of having the pages in front of you so you can read at your own pace - audiobooks offer a similar thing where you can speed up the narration, but I don't care much for that either! Point is, I might find myself trying to just buy the book for myself and study it that way, because the audiobook route is simply not working for me.

Trying to get some more work done on the site! I'm going to attempt to add a link in the Games section for Roope Tammanin's Lakeview Cabin series since that's a major hyperfixation of mine, it's been a struggle putting all my thoughts together there but a happy one. Maybe also add a series of links of note at some point soon? I feel like there are people I grew up watching their material that some have no idea about in the modern time.

Well, that was my week! I look forward to seeing y'all soon!

A big week for me this go-around! Woof!

Without getting into a lot of unpleasant details, I had to spend some time with a friend at the end of their rope last Sunday, and it's caused me to face up to some of the aspects of my own life that I've been taking for granted. Things like...how much pressure I put on myself to fix everything, to have some kind of sick savior complex in the name of not feeling weak and helpless. Needless to say, my mental health has taken a bit of a plunge this week, but I think I'm getting back to where I need to be.

I had this dream earlier, where I was at a festival in the countryside. After looking online for dream interpretations, it seems to me that setting is my subconscious telling me that what I want is to take it easy and enjoy life...as simple as that sounds, I feel like it's somewhat profound in my case. At some point when I was very young, I seemed to reach this conclusion that I was going to have to be 'an exceptional person', which I guess to my young mind meant someone who drew stuff and wrote books and made TV shows and games, and all this other stuff. I think I was under the impression that if I set myself up for those Olympian goals, that I would come out of it a better person, somehow? But all it seemed to really do was cause me undue grief. So, I guess now the question I'm asking myself is, what would have to change about that situation for me to follow my subconscious' advice and just take it easy? I don't have a ready answer and it bothers me.

The plan from last week about focusing on smaller works...I don't think I have it in me. I really seem to only perform at my best when I'm on a project that feels like taking on the world, it seems like the only time I feel motivated. But I'm going to take it easy. Before I worry about doing a bunch of roughs and inking and all of that, I need to get the scripts set up and all the characters and props on their marks. So, I suppose I'll be looking into ways to make that happen this coming week!

Finally got my Covid Spikevax booster on Wednesday! Kinda cutting it really close to the end of the year for my own liking, but I didn't want to get the shot while my immune system was still dealing with the wisdom teeth removal. Anyway, the first 48 hours of my body building antibodies was rocking my world, I should NOT have tried to work those days, I was moving around like I was half dead all day! Oh well, better to feel sick as opposed to actually being sick!

My budgeting has been going really well this past couple of weeks! Bought myself a bunch of games I've been wanting for a minute, and the one I'm getting the most out of is Boneraiser Minions. It's great! It's cute, it's fun, it's silly, and I honestly think I'm happy to have introduced myself to the Vampire Survivors style of game through this game first - one major thing I notice about it right away is how the art style instantly makes me connect the dots to how the gameplay loop of these games is very much like a strange passive version of Robotron 2084. Fascinating stuff!

All right! I think that's all I've got in the tank this week. Here's to a great next week, everybody! <3

Happy Daylight Savings Time, everybody! Hope your early birds are enjoying the sunshine! :>

Some of you who may read this blog regularly might remember back in June when I was lamenting my situation and feeling like I didn't want to get better. I'm unclear if this is due to the weather changing, but that feeling is back with a vengeance. I didn't get any webcomic work done this week, and I frankly am wondering if I'm even good enough to make a long form comic in the first place. And the thing is, I know factually that trying to make an issue a month of a comic after so long was not a realistic endeavor, but I can't seem to resist the allure of doing things the hard way, you know? I want to feel like a big deal! But so often, I make grandiose plans like this and then treat myself in a shabby manner for "quitting". It's a really ugly cycle, and part of the reason I dipped out of making comics for so long.

I think I just gotta focus on smaller works in general - works smaller in scope where I can experiment more with the work I'm making instead of trying to run a marathon without warming up. It'll take some doing to both get comfortable in that mode and also figure out how to do that sort of work consistantly enough that I see some benefits, but I'm sure I can make something happen there.

My mouth is...almost all healed up. Now it just feels like someone slapped me on the jaw instead of feeling like my molars are trying to pop loose. Still not pleasant, but whatever. I gotta trust the process!

That's, well, that's all I got this week, honestly - I'm bushed. I'm taking a nap. See you all next time!

Hello hello! Welcome to the final week of October! I'm going to be changing everything back to the default CSS after Halloween, as much as I get the impression this version of things might actually be easier to read.

I got my wisdom teeth removed on Wednesday! Very...well, mostly happy to have those things out. I'll be happier once I can eat food without feeling like I need an aspirin. I spent the first two days subsisting on rice pudding and cold coffee, and as much as I love both of those things, I really missed eating other things? I kind of just felt like Robocop eating the baby food, except that's probably more nutritionally sound than what I was doing.

So, it's been almost a month since I started work on the comic, and I gotta say, I'm not very happy with my progress. I got all the roughs for the first issue done, sure, but aside from two-and-a-half inked pages, that's all, and I expected more from myself. Sure, a typical comic takes about four people's worth of labor to make happen in a month, but when I see guys like Evan Dahm that work like there's no tomorrow basically from before I was even enrolled in college, it makes me seriously question what I think I'm playing at trying to do this. But, anyway! My next order of business to try and crank out more pages is to try and do the thumbnails for the next issue on 3 x 5 index cards, import those, and use them like a rough so as to get to the inking stage earlier.

Speaking of, for all the work I got done on getting things like props and personal style sketched out, I really didn't spend enough time on things like setting and color grading, so it's just like...I'm confronting the fact that I haven't been doing a comic since 2017, and that there's a LOT of work for me to do to get my drawing and notetaking where it needs to be. I mean, all this really means is that I won't be able to realistically get the first issue out with three issues worth of backlog out like I really wanted to.

Doing some very slight changes with the website in the coming days! Earlier last Sunday, I happened across this book, Fresh Styles for Web Designers: Eye Candy From the Underground by Curt Cloninger. In it, Curt talks about a lot of websites and burgeoning website styles, and one in particular that piqued my interest was Paper Bag Style, which is a style that was mainly seen in websites like funnygarbage.com and p2output.com. As much as these websites and book are working from outmoded versions of HTML compared to myself, I'm still toying with how to make my site look similar to/replicate Paper Bag Style. I managed to change the logo on the front page to look a tiny bit like the drawing-based logo on the Funny Garbage website, but I'm curious how I can push it further.

That's all I got for this week! Later!

Welcome back! Normally I lead off on a happy note, but this week I'd like to preface the blog post in rememberence of a six-year-old who was viciously murdered in his own home by a 71-year-old assailant last Sunday, survived by his mother Hanaan Shanin who is in the hospital and expected to live. Rest In Peace, Wadea Al-Fayoume.

The word of the week is PAIN. Starting on Tuesday, I had a serious problem with my wisdom teeth that's so far gotten worse by the day...lemme tell ya, it really makes you empathize with young children who scream and cry in public when you remember how bad it hurts having a toothache. I was dealing with the pain for two hours and I came out of it ready to fight somebody. The good news is that I have plenty of Tylenol to hold off the tidalwave of pain until Wednesday when I finally get these wisdom teeth removed. Granted, I'm kind of kicking myself for not taking care of this back when I was getting root canals back in June, but it's too late for regrets now!

I am very much not a fan of YouTube right now. I know it's a small thing to not be able to run an ad blocker on that site but the fact that I get treated like a thief for not wanting adware cluttering my laptop is really messing with me emotionally. It definitely does not do much to make me feel like a functioning adult, that's for sure.

My comics work continues apace, as I've gotten all the roughs for the first issue of the comic finished! The mood sort of sours, however, when I realize I have 9 days and some change to get the comic inked and colored and lettered, which is just plain not going to happen. It reveals to me that I'll need to figure out my workflow capacity, because while I do love having the problems of figuring out how to ink and color and write a page, I don't so much like the time constraint problems. I really seem to fall apart in the face of a deadline, and it's something I'm going to have to devote some time to resolving sooner rather than later.

Speaking of comics stuff, I decided to scope out Usagi Yojimbo since it's outside my periphery and I really ought to scope out how that comic works since my own current work is going to involve funny animal people killing each other. Aside from the tone being much more serious and the drawing style being much more similar to vintage furry artwork, there's a lot I can learn from the framing and pacing of the work, especially in terms of how one wields a katana. I'm also scoping out Madman since that's also been one I ought to familiarize myself with in general. I'm only one issue in but God, I love the meshing between the spectacular and the mundane this comic accomplishes. The main character tugs at my heartstrings pretty much immediately upon meeting him.

The news cycle is demoralizing as usual: the US House finally got its act together and awarded special powers to Speaker Pro Tempore Patrick McHenry, and it only took them slightly less than three weeks! Whether they can get their act together in time to have a spending bill in place before November is a whole other question. The al-Ahli hospital in Gaza was struck by an air strike, killing 500 people inside - and nobody's accepting responsibility for the war crime even though it's fairly obvious what must've happened. This also comes fresh off the heels of Israel promising to not inpede Egyptian humanitarian aid trucks moving into Gaza...all 20 of them. The US in typical fashion is a staunch supporter of Israel, even going so far as to veto a Brazil-drafted resolution from the UN Security Council that would have paused the fighting and condemned all civilian casualities.

Alright, I think that's it for this week. Happy trails, everybody!

Another week come and gone. Things are well with me, and I hope they are with you! <3

Comics work continues, now with 15 pages waiting for roughs/lineart/coloring. The goal is to make 24 pages per issue. I feel overwhelmed just thinking about it, honestly. I have that side of me that dead certain I don't have what it takes. With any luck, I'll have the remaining sketches/roughs done by next Sunday. If I can somehow get my output up to three pages of thumbnails a day, I'll be sittin' pretty. Fingers crossed!

I have managed to get my squats work down to two sets of twenty reps every two days. Even at this teensy amount of exercise, I'm seeing legitimate benefits both in my heart health and my mood stability. I hope to add more to this routine eventually but I'm not quite ready to add any more to my hampster wheel just yet.

The Israel-Gaza war continues this week, this time with Israel ordering 1.1 million people to relocate out of the north side of Gaza within 24 hours. Even a cursory glance at the situation from a layman's perspective like mine says this is impossible, but there are other strategists looking at the situation as a military strategy of clogging the roads in Gaza to the point that Hamas ground troops can't mobilize effectively.

Closing in on four months without soda! Mercy! I'm still absolutely astonished by how little I miss that stuff. It used to be I couldn't go one day without soda. I'm pretty thrilled about how much I achieved in that part of my life, if I'm being honest! I...well, now that I say that, I'm really interested in how I can do more and keep up the momentum from that. It might have to be a project for next year, though.

Well, yeah, I think that's it for me this week, not much to report this time. See you later!

Woof! This week had some twists and turns in it. But I'm alive and full of love!

I'm pleased to report that work continues apace on the comic, I've managed five sketches of how the comic will go so far, but I've still got a incredibly long way to go. In particular, I've got to figure out how I'm going to make a backlog of this stuff work since that's the part I struggled with the hardest during Newheimburg. One suggestion from Puddle that really resonated is how I ought to focus on doing the work, resting from that stretch of the journey, and then spend the necessary time advertising and pitching instead of trying to do both all at once.

I don't want to sound like I'm unhappy with the amount of work I've gotten done this week - five pages is more than zero - but I had so much going on this week that really hampered my ability to do much artistically - conflicted schedules, minor crisis management, driving my step-grandma to the doctor - but it makes it even more apparant how badly I need a backlog so as to prevent that from being a major conflict in getting the lead out.

Continuing to read more comics in general by finally getting around to Hip Hop Family Tree by Ed Piskor. So, SO happy I finally got around to this, I don't have any good reason why it took me so long to check this one out! I do have to admit the way the East Coast hip hop game completely altered the landscape when it came to gangs compared to the West Coast is something I never factored in to my studying, and I really ought to look into that. Comic research aside, this is vital American history being taught that I really ought to understand in the first place.

Trying to improve my budgeting by finally getting back to making lunch before work. My main lunch so far has been making a turkey sandwich with jalapenos. My logic is that I'm aiming to try and make something like an Americanized banh mi with jalapenos, carrots, and cucumber to add some extra nutrition so that I'm not just eating protein and starches.

The prolonged effort to stay on top of what's going on in the world continues from last week. A lot of really demoralizing news all around, with Pakistan ordering all undocumented immigrants out of the country by November 1st or face deportation in the wake of a suicide bombing that killed 52 people in a religious gathering on September 29th; the surprise attack by Hamas that no matter how justified still wound up with civilian casualities and the resulting aerial assaults by the IDF against the Gaza Strip just hours later; the way all of this is happening and the Republican House Speaker gets booted from his position for doing his job trying to buy more time to keep the government from shutting down and effectively causing chaos on purpose...jeez louise.

On happier news, I have been managing to do squats more often - not on a set schedule or anything, but often enough that I can tell I'm making progress. I'm considering the possiblity of getting back into tai chi chuan as an exercise possibility, but I'm unsure if that's going to work into my heart health goals as much as just old-fashioned calistenics. We'll see!

All right, that's all for this week! Catch ya on the flip-flop!

And so we finally make it to October! This was an awfully productive week for me, and I hope your week was good too!

You might have seen the Art Inspirations part of the site that's around now, and I must say I'm really happy with it! I still want to add things like commentary to the production but that might have to take a backseat to me figuring out just how much I can add to the page without needing some kind of navigation. Still, very good addition in my book!

I tried dosa for the first time this week! Specifically, I had masala dosa. I'll be very honest and say that the flavor of the fermented lentils used in the crepe threw me for a loop. I thought for sure that with the amount of bread I eat that this would be an instant hit with me, but what do you know? I guess I have to give some other dosa a shot because I can tell instantly that if I'd grown up with this stuff that I'd be all over it.

I got a lot of work done on my car! Well, okay, by 'a lot' I mean I replaced the car battery, performed an idle reset, and changed the cabin air filter. There's still a lot of work left to do on in before I can really say I did right by it, but...it's my grandma's old car, you know? It deserves more love.

Speaking of love, I'm gradually getting closer to having comic pages in the works! It's been a long time since I got busy on this sort of thing but I've gotten together a template for an average size American comic complete with markers for the bleed, the trim, and also ley lines for the center of the page and the focal points in the spirit of Frank Santoro. I'm feeling really good about this! I'm not quite back in the saddle but I've finally got one foot in the stirrup.

One interesting thing of note about getting ready to make comics again has been researching comics and realizing something important. So, I'd been studying Luke Cage comics since that's what I could get my hands on - Hero for Hire #7's story Jingle Bombs is about an unwell man stalking Luke Cage on Christmas Eve and dressing up in various disguises to 'judge his character' before he commits an act of domestic terrorism that causes World War III. One of these guises is as a homeless Vietnam veteran with PTSD who attacks Luke with a machine gun.

The reason I bring this up is that when this comic was released in March 1973 - I know, right? A Christmas comic in March? Maybe New York just had a big snowstorm that year - but when it released, the US government was still wrapping up getting American soldiers and POWs out of Vietnam - the last soldier wasn't officially back home until the 29th. So, while it's totally unlikely that this was the first ever depiction of the 'homeless Vietnam vet' stereotype, the timing is eerily prescient. It also signifies to me that these writers weren't just watching television and consuming media all the time, they were also paying attention to the news and the world around them. So, I've started trying to read more news articles and make notes on what I'm reading. It couldn't hurt, right?

Of course, it's not all good news - for all the good habits I've been able to keep this year, I've basically fallen completely off of exercising since my vacation. I can't say I'm very pleased with myself about that, but then, I kind of understood that it was going to be tough getting myself to do pushups regularly in the first place. But I can't just do nothing. Even a cursory glance at my figure and diet tells me that I need to get my body prepared for potential atherosclerosis and to prepare accordingly. That means exercise! This week, I'm gonna see if I can't use squats as a way to work up to push-ups, since I'm on my feet all the time at work anyway.

Alright, that's it for this week! I look forward to the next blog post! See you all next time!

I'm finally back home from my birthday weekend! Lots to report on, but needless to say I'm feeling very laid back at the moment. Granted, this peace will be shattered after about two days at work, but what can you do, right?

I've spent the last couple of days in some ritzy (read: over 100 bucks a night) hotels. and one recent thing that I've never seen before this trip is hotels suddenly having their own brands of body wash and shampoo in little squirt bottles in the bathrooms. When did that happen? I feel like that wasn't even a normal thing in 2021, but I have no way of gauging it. Just a strange thing to be so used to carrying my own toiletries along just for the hotel to be like "Yeah, we got the hookup already" after years of compilmentary soaps and travel size shampoo.

I'm most likely going to be updating the site with a new set of art pieces I like, since I've just gone to two art museums on my time off! Not quite the same as the clip file section, but I still want to keep tabs on what I'm finding myself inspired by, you know?

Of course, not everything could be sunshine and rainbows, because this Saturday was the start of FOOTBALL SEASON and the city with the art museum was packed to the gills with fans getting into town looking for parking. (Some of that parking went up to 60 dollars!!) Thank heaven for city planners getting most places like this into a grid shape so it was only somewhat painful to get through town.

Got myself a foot massage to round out the weekend! Never gotten a foot massage or even had an idea what reflexology was until I was already in the door. We got in really early, though, which really threw the nice ladies who worked with us for a loop. Either way, the results were very relaxing, and i guess I've got fewer toxins in my body now? But how would I know, anyway?

That all said, I'm glad to be back home, glad to get back to the quotidian humdrum while I figure out how the rest of my year is going to play out. Pleasure talking to all y'all as always! <3

We're getting closer to October! In all seriousness, I had plans for replacing the CSS for the month of October with a Halloween format, but I'm thinking it's going to be about a week in before I get the CSS to a point where it looks Halloween enough.

I guess, for starters, I want to pat myself on the back for somehow managing to go almost three months without soda! A whole quarter of a year! Sheesh, I didn't think I had it in me. There are certainly moments where I find myself craving a Cheerwine or something, but I've been able to hold back for so long that I'm earnestly curious just how long I can keep the streak going for.

My birthday is this week! I'll be 34 years old. Is that middle aged? It's definitely not young anymore. I'm definitely very blessed to have gotten this far, so I'll be keeping any existential worries in my back pocket for now.

I feel pretty good about the exercise I've been doing, both for the calliperization benefits and also because it seems to have brought my appetite back with a vengeance after a long period of depression for about a month. I'm eating good again! I know that doesn't sound much like a good thing, especially since I know I need to lose weight for my spinal health, but I really am at my happy weight as a fat person, you know? I like being fat! All that aside, the modified diamond push-ups are working like a charm. I really feel like my arms are bigger after only a week and some change, and I've managed about 60 modified pushups a day, but that being said, I might just switch to regular push-ups after this week as the diamond stance makes my upper back crack in a distressing way.

The preliminary writing on the comic continues. I know that good things take time, but my anxiety keeps insisting that the best time to actually write the thing is when I had the idea, and the second best time is right now. Still, I want to make sure this thing is the immensely enjoyable comic I know it can be. I have to remember to not get hasty and to avoid the deadline pitfalls that marred my previous work, but the creative writing work I've been doing is making some really interesting stuff happen. I'm excited about it!

I've been thinking about, and I'm wondering if I might have agoraphobia? But it's a strange situation because it's this paralyzing fear of being made to feel weak and helpless, but it happens almost exclusively in fiction. Like, I'll read or watch something that makes me feel that way and I'll want to avoid said fiction at all costs, even if there was a point being made with it....and yet, none of that translates to my dealing with humilating situations in real life. Wild, right? I've had this problem for well over a decade now and I still can't really make heads or tails of it.

I wrapped up Skulldigger and Skeleton Boy earlier last week, and I honestly couldn't vibe with it. It kind of seemed like the focal character of Skeleton Boy was just getting dragged around from story beat to story beat without having any real agency to deal with his trauma, which is true to life but it also makes the ending feel weaker as a result. At any rate, I've decided to read up on some Luke Cage comics since that's probably the first comic people think of when they think of street-level heroes (and also I didn't watch the TV show) but I'm absolutely enchanted by the storyline so far! I've got some weird vibes over Stark Industries involvement in the story but honestly, it's likely that part of the comics canon has been long retconned by now.

That's all I got for this week! Can't wait to talk to you all later after my birthday! Hugs and kisses!

This was a hectic week! Whew!

I guess the first thing I've been doing is I'm starting to try and draw more from life, to try and get a better sense of cartooning to get better at making comics. It's kind of working out! I'm definitely approaching things with a different viewpoint, maybe even improving my sense of humor about things in general. When I was younger and seeing some of the people coming out of the toxicity that Newgrounds used to represent, their drawing of people and the meanness in which they were rendered turned me off from the idea of caricature in general, but I think I'm smart enough to have a more wholesome way of going about it. I'm going to see about carrying a pocket notebook with me to see if I can't do this on the go.

Got some very nice new games off of Steam to spoil myself a lil bit. One of them is Clutter RefleXIVe: The Diceman Cometh and I'm really having a nice time with it! I've got a few others I'm playing as well, and I might just finally get some more game recommendations done before the end of next week!

I got my old car sold! After a lot of business with Facebook Marketplace, we finally managed to sell the car for 800 bucks. Not a whole lot of money but there was a lot wrong with that car. The shocks were so run out that the thing bounced like it was on a spring when the new owner pressed down on the trunk. I kind of feel like an ass for taking money for it at all, but it was a very nice couple that bought it, and I hope they enjoy it in good health.

I think I'm building closer to getting somewhere with the comic idea - I'm thinking of having it so the gang in the story gets formed on accident - like, an out-of-towner comes in and ends up forming a gang out of complete ignorance like a Mr. Bean situation, this would give a convieient way to explain why the gang isn't the same thing as others. I'm still working on it. I'm also trying to study more street-level comics to get a comprehensive view of the waters I'm wading in, and one of the first I'm studying is Skulldigger & Skeleton Boy since a picture of them on Pinterest caught my attention.

The Python studying is coming along, slowly...I'm using my time between studying how Python itself works, and how Ren'py works, since Ren'py is a program using a modified version of Python. I'm hoping to not have an experience like earlier this year where learning C++ for game dev made me run into the situation of needing to learn OpenGL and having a really frustrating time by the end of it. A very productive time, sure, but a rough one and I ended up falling off of learning that language fully. I hope I can learn from my mistakes here.

I'm exercising again! Well, 'exercise' is a generous term for doing all of 20 diamond push-ups every other day, but it counts! I want to say that the point is to just encourage calliparization in the heart so as to avoid a heart attack later down the road, and that is the core reason, but I would very much like to look a little nicer and more put-together than I do normally. I can at least sense I've got a muscle in these twig arms now. That said, my back is NOT happy with me when I do these, and I might have to resort to modified push-ups to see if that helps matters.

I think that's it for this week! See you all next time! <3

I got a new car! The trip to the DMV was a relatively pleasant one, got to do some people watching, like a very unfortunate woman trying to explain over a Russian-to-English translator app on her phone to an incresingly impatient DMV worker that she was from Kazikstan, or the poor fellow who held up a clerk by 10 minutes for something he didn't even need to be there for. There but for the grace of God go I, friend. Anyway, I got the title squared away, went home, transferred my license plate, and I now drive a Toyota Corolla. It's pretty cramped for my long dancer's legs (because I for some reason didn't think the car seat could go back further than half an inch) but it rules to drive a car where I don't have to crane my neck to see where traffic is coming from - having a radio with working bass is a huge plus, too. I've been driving to work and back, listening to Mr. Bungle's California album...having the uncomfortable realization that this album hits way different when you have some years behind you.

As part of trying to study for how this comic is going to work, I've been studying both the history of gangs and picking at the 'street-level' superheroes that Marvel in particular. A few things come to mind: 1. It didn't occur to me until actually researching gangs just how much the formation of gangs was made necessary by overwhelming racism, both overt and systemic, causing vulnurable communities to have to find ways to protect themselves, and 2. The Wikipedia page for the Night Thrasher makes him seem like a complete tool.

That all said, I am sincerely questioning the wisdom of the choice I'm making here - I know there are plenty of anthro animal animes that delve into organized crime like OddTaxi and Beastars, but writing something like this after seeing what some gangsters do is a completely different matter. You can't really pretend that there's no issue with it when you hear things like the horrifying murder of Tyshawn Lee, or stories about small children getting threatened at gunpoint for trying to do the right thing...it really makes me wonder what the hell I think I'm doing with this concept.

I've been getting a lot of 'animated series' intros in my Youtube recommended of what are clearly very young people doing the sort of work that I was quite frankly hoping to do out of college, and a very bitter wave of nostalgia hits me. I think about how much work I put into a series that never got off the ground, that I went to a lot of trouble to get voice acting for just to realize I couldn't animate very well, and gave up...Why did I give up? I ask myself that question all the time. I've given up on so many things, and I don't understand how I could turn this weakness into a strength, how do I cultivate a negative side of myself so that I'm not constantly getting in my own way?

I'm going to see about making a more concerted effort to learn to code more stuff, since the effort to learn Javascript is kinda not going anywhere. There's nothing I wanna do with Javascript, y'know? There's no intrinsic motivation like there was with HTML/CSS. I think since I want to see about doing more work with Ren'py if I can learn Python and apply some of that knowledge base to that format. I have to imagine the program uses its own fork of Python but I'm going to try, regardless. Maybe it'll work out! Even if it doesn't, it beats wallowing in self pity like I've been doing.

A tiny bit less exciting week for me this go-around! The depression has not really gone away as much as shifted to a lower gear. Read on if you want to see what I mean...

I'm probably going to be paying money on my student loans again, finally. I'm scared. I don't want to go bankrupt. I don't want to owe this money. I wanted so badly to stick my head in the sand and pretend none of this was real, but it is real and there's nothing I can do except deal with it. So, I guess I gotta stop whining like a jerk and deal with it! Sigh...

My mom found a car, and she's talking about me selling my car and taking her old one once she gets it. I'm trying to be polite about it but I really don't want to part with my car. It's running rough and has plenty wrong with it, but it's seen me through some tough battles. I feel like I'm sticking an old friend in the back. I don't know. I can't help but feel like I'm just not in control of my own life, you know? It's not even that I think that car will last me forever, it's that I really just suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and any time I do make an executive decision, it's the wrong one! It's...tiring.

I've been looking back through my old notes from college and seeing if what I went through back then has some semblance of the sort of weirdness I'm dealing with now, and while it's been quietly depressing at seeing how strangely hopeless I felt even at that young age, I am gleaning some insight into what's making me tick. For example, I'm coming to terms with the fact that I seem to be fixated on the idea of having a job and a career, that having the 'right' job would have fixed me somehow, or justified my existance. It's messed up. I've also noticed how part of the reason my creative plans never seem to come to fruition is because I never actually plan around what would be a fun story, I just use the characters and setpieces as imaginary scenarios to talk around issues I can't, or won't deal with. It's messed up!

I'd love to say next week will be better but...God, I'm a downer this week.

So, I got hacked! That's right, despite being absolutely old enough to know better, I ended up getting my Discord account abducted for several hours after falling for one of those 'help test my friend's game!' scams that...wasn't even aimed at me? It was aimed at another close friend of mine, and I tried to pitch in to help, and lo and behold, the hacker spent the next several hours messing with my friends in DMs trying to get them to fall for it, too. I'm ashamed of myself! I used to think that people becoming less technologically literate over time was just ageism, but like, teenage Edmund would not have made that mistake, you know? I'm pretty sure I'm in the clear now, getting Spybot and Malwarebytes for my laptop, but I feel like the final girl at the end of a slasher where I'm not fully convinced it's over, because it's never over. I might try to get into more infosec communities since I clearly could use a hand in that regard...I say, as I type out my weekly blog going over my week :P

On to better news, I got a new phone! Google Pixel 7 Pro, very nice, has a lopsided sort of camera sticking out so I can't rest it on its back like I could the Note 8, and I can only count my blessings that the thing hasn't shattered on me with how many times it's fallen off of the table since I got it. Sigh...you'd think I'd be less morose for someone who just bought themselves something really nice, but with how much of my job basically requires me to have a smartphone to look up prices on the fly, it's almost a business expense. Almost.

To my surprise, it's genuinely looking like I might actually start a webcomic for real this time! I still have a LOT of stuff to figure out how I'm drawing it and why, but it feels amazing to have a character who's been an OC for years, and finally have them look like an actual character! It feels great, I really missed this process.

Speaking of the webcomic, I'm thrilled to report that I'm getting a fair amount of creative writing done! Nothing major, nothing I'm ready to put my name on, but doing at least one scenario a day is helping a lot with solidifying both my style of writing and trying to tame my odd verbosity with the necessary ingredients for a story. I think I'm really going to be able to make something special here if I just keep my nose to the grindstone.

The only other thing that's been eating at me is what I'm going to do about some of the website that's really...needs some overhauling. The games section was a fun idea and the webcomics idea could work? But right now, it's mostly just eating up resources when I could honestly just condense the whole thing into a Links page, since realistically speaking, it's mainly me sharing a bunch of links I like. I'd love for it to be more - but in it's present form, it's just not working out!

That's all for this week! I'm exhausted! Here's hoping that next week is a tiny bit less exciting.

Ugh. Bad week. BAD week. Lemme tell ya, I thought I'd had some bad weeks this year, but this one came out swinging.

For starters...I don't really follow astrology the way I used to but if there was any day where I felt the cosmos insisting that everything break on me, it was last Thursday. A bunch of stuff broke on me at work - including my phone. It's a Galaxy Note 8, and I've had it since 2017, my long suffering companion laid low by a single moment of clumsiness and a swift drop onto bathroom tiling. Out of both bullheaded-ness and the bleak truth offered by that one Pictures for Sad Children comic, I promised myself that I'd ride that thing 'till the wheels popped off. I guess that time is now. That all said, it was relatively easy to get a new phone ordered even though it'll take 'till at least Monday to get ahold of it, but it's a real kick in the pants. That phone's seen me through some troubled waters. I feel like I should give it a military burial or whichever one has the guy with the bagpipes playing Amazing Grace.

But the hits didn't stop there! The day after, I had a chiropractic meeting to see about a movement assessment screening, but I didn't get up in time for it, AND i couldn't re-schedule because my phone wasn't working. Later that day, I had contact from a person who was hosting a Meetup event to learn how to cook schwarma, which I was really curious about. They say they need cash up front for groceries, I say no problem! So I go to the place where it says the meetup is happening on Sunday...not only was the person not actually there, and not only was the cash apparently a mistake because he thought I was attending a different event altogether, but the venue we're meeting up at is a ramshackle event space on the west side of town that I have NO familiarity with. I went in expecting to walk into a kitchen, pay up a 20, and come back on Sunday - instead I'm sitting in a neighborhood I know nothing about with a non-functioning phone and no clue how or why I spent one of my only days off driving into town through 5 o'clock traffic. Needless to say, I cancelled my RSVP not long after, but not before having my mind flooded with noradrenaline and making my mom very worried for my safety. I'm sorry, mom. :(

Oh, and I threw up later that night while trying to get to sleep because I've been stress eating too much lately. But honestly, that was no one's fault but my own.

To put all this another way, I've hit a real depressive slump. I can tell distinctly when I'm in this mode of thinking because I'll get impulses like "Hey, you should stop drawing and studying code and, hell, why not stop flossing every day for that matter since it hurts so much? After all, nothing you do is ever going to be good enough." and my rational mind is all "You know, you're obviously full of it, but right now you're making a lot of sense." After all, if anything I did was good enough, I wouldn't be sitting in a retail job ten years after college with a BFA collecting dust and a mountain of debt I will never have any hope of paying off, now would I? I would have finished Newheimburg and made some actual money off of it, now wouldn't I?? It has to be my fault, because nobody ruined my life for me, right?...I don't want to be saying all this quitter stuff about myself - I definitely don't want to be endorsing it, either - but sheeeeeesh, if it doesn't constantly feel like the reason I can't accomplish my dreams is because I'm the one having them.

But, speaking personally, I hate cliffhangers. And I definitely hate cliffhangers of this sort where there are people worried about me. So if you're asking "What are you going to do, Edmund?" I'll tell you exactly what I'm going to do: I'm using this slump to re-assess what I'm doing with myself and use this plateau as a jumping off point to come back from it stronger than before.

Joe de Sena once spoke about thinking of reaching one's breaking point as a privledge that few get to reach. While I'm not surprised that a guy who invented a brand of self help called 'Spartan' thinks modern life is too soft, it still makes substancially more sense than letting these setbacks walk all over me just because I've gotten good at that over the years. So, my plan going forward is to try and continue the improvements I've already made by making improvements that work in tandem with them. Specifically, I'm going to get more into creative writing over the next few weeks, in the hopes of both getting more comfortable with writing in general and potentially using my code learning to make some games in Twine and Ren'py. We'll have to see! I'm also going to try to exercise five times a week, but we'll see how this goes. Either way, this is one step closer to making this disasterous week a net positive! I'm going to arise from the ashes like a big, dorky phoenix! Look out!

Well, here we are again on a Sunday! I, uh, feel like dirt emotionally but otherwise everything's going great! Not really any special reason for me to feel like a worm, just got some feelings this week.

This week saw the addition of my artwork page on the website! I have to say, I was getting really tired of having my art just sitting on my hard drive, and not really feeling in a sporting mood to find yet another art hosting site for material that's barely taking up space as it is. I like this setup because it's actively encouraging me to draw almost every day so I have more material to add to the site. And honestly, it's just less hassle! I don't like the sensation of knowing that my artwork has to be on a Deviantart competetor to try and get views, I can't play that game any more.

Speaking of games and site changes, after some rumination on the idea and (frankly) floundering with learning Javascript, I am gradually getting around to trying to put a Klondike simulator on the site at some point - I seem to think that it's very important to my game dev aspirations to learn how to code things in Javascript since they can run in browser and work in a way that doesn't require extra setup or being lassoed to a program's limitations or an operating system. That's right! This bird's gonna be free as a bird :›

Some of you may remember some blog posts ago that I was flirting with the idea of getting back into webcomics again, and I'm thrilled to report that...well, that I'm still working on it. As I mentioned before, there's a lot of goof-ups and bad habits from my time on Newheimburg that I'd like to leave in the past, and one of those things is actually committing to using Obsidian to take notes on some of my art books that have been gathering dust - one of whom is one of my earliest inspirations for getting into comics, The Total Cartoonist by Ken Muse. I have to admit, there are parts of my design work that are quite simply too touch and go - I'm not sitting with the designs for long enough to make the characters I'm drawing interesting or fun to draw. I gotta work on that!

Doctor's visit was this week, and surprise! I'm still fat. But I have managed to drop 11 pounds since our last meeting, putting me at about 234 lbs. I'm also happy to report that a bump on my ear that I'd been worried was, in fact, just normal cartilage growth. Slightly less happy to report that the stuff I learned about in Tools of Titans earlier last month was not only not beneficial but was also not relevent to me - I asked about an 'oral glucose tolerance test' and my doctor immediately went 'that's for pregnant women', so that's me looking like a big ol plate of foolish goulash :P

I'm feeling overwhelmed lately by the amount of stuff I could be doing to make more money - I know I have what it takes to make at least a modest cash flow on Sketchfab or possibly taking commissions, but my goodness, the fear gets me so bad just ruminating about it. Like, my life is going to be changing relatively soon, and I'm not ready, and I don't know what on earth I could possibly do to be ready. Money isn't enough to deal with these problems I'm having, and while 'I am the solution', I'm also not sure how I'm the solution.

Woof! Big post this week. Have a good rest of your weekend, everybody!

Another week come and gone! I've been hangin' tough for the past couple of days, doing quite a bit better than I was last week, and I've been trying to make a lot of changes in my life!

One of the changes I've been making recently is coming up with a mantra to get me through tough times. Chris Sacca has spoken about how he used the mantra 'Tonight, I will be in my bed' to get through a marathon he was running. As I've been using that mantra on my work days when things get rough, I've come up with a mantra of my own - 'I am the solution.' It sounds self-aggrandizing, but here's my logic: I've spent a lot of my life feeling like I'm not in control of it at all, feeling like all of my problems are something I have to be rescued or protected from...but as I've come to learn from taking better care of myself, one mantra sticks in my mind above others, because no matter what my situation is or what problems I'm facing, I am the solution to those problems.

Another big change I've been making is using ice cold water at the end of a shower to improve my mood and activate brown adipose tissue to see if I can't lower my cholesterol in that manner. The feeling of ice water is really tough to work through at first, especially after a nice hot shower, but I've taken some tips from Hybrid Calisthenics to focus on getting the feet exposed to the cold before the rest of the body, and stay focused on your breathing because the shock makes the body want to hyperventilate and you want to avoid that. I know this is a pretty hard sell, but I really feel amazing for hours after this treatment - things that would typically bowl me over in a typical day don't even faze me! It's a solid routine.

I'm having to amend a lot of taxes lately, because I messed up on a specific thing I haven't been paying attention to for years. Oops! At least I'm taking care of it now, but good gravy, is it tough to make amended taxes when you can't just do them through a tax program! I've got a lot of stuff to print off and mail, which wouldn't be such a big deal if I had my own printer, but I don't. Oh well, gotta be an upright citizen and make this happen!

One of the last things I did was have a banh mi for the first time! I got a 'dac biet' version that had a lot of meats I wasn't at all familiar with, so maybe not the best way to introduce myself to that food but it's a really nutritionally sound sandwich compared to what you usually get in the US, so I've very interested to see what the other versions of it are like - I'm thinking of going for a 'thit nuong' next time!

That's a wrap for the blog post this week! I hope to have a thrilling adventure to share with everyone soon, possibly involving an alligator. See you next time!

Hoo mama, this was a long week for me! Started integrating a TON of new routines into my daily life from that Tools of Titans book from last week. I'm doing so many, in fact, that I'm wondering if it would make sense to put a list of tips and tricks from some of these methods on the site based on how I used/modified them. I'll do that at some point this week if I do it at all, but I also acknowledge I am not a qualified person to be giving out health tips.

I hate to say it, but in spite of all the effort I've been putting into giving up soda, eating better, and all that jazz, I still find myself feeling like I don't know what I'm doing with my life. Even given the amount that this stuff will help me in the long run, I don't have an adequate explanation of what I'm getting in the long run for in the first place. I'd love to say that all this work will amount to something, but the grim truth is you can't rationalize the irrational, and life itself is as irrational as it gets.

I guess, with all this existential dread homing in on me, I'll try to make some kind of five-year plan over the coming weeks. I can't say I'm getting my hopes up that anything will come of it, but if I don't put in the effort I get no results. 'Those who work get the bread', and all that. I can't be letting depression get the better of me when it's not even autumn yet.

Kind of a morose way to sign off on a blog post, but it's been one of those weeks - maybe I've just been pushing myself too hard and that's the problem? At any rate, I'll see y'all next week! Take care!

Hello and welcome to all my new friends on furryring! I'm very excited to be a part of a webring, and a very special thanks to Lenny for setting the whole thing up in the first place! The website work is coming along slow but steady - now that I have the core basics of CSS down, I'm going to see if I can't get my feet wet on .sass CSS preprocessing, to potentially speed up the whole process of changing how things work in browser. That said, Sass has the added hinge of actually requiring a compiler to output CSS code which is a strong step away from the sort of 'plug n' play' nature of HTML and CSS that I've gotten used to. Maybe I'll hold off and just learn Javascript first, maybe! Who knows? Who knows.

Within a couple of days, I will have officially been off of soda for a whole month. Strangely, it's not nearly as big a deal as I thought it would be. I'm sure my teeth are marginally healthier and I'm fairly certain I've lost weight but it's really just the tip of the iceberg, I think. It's not so much that I want to be on a diet as much as I just want to be actively thinking about the nutrients I'm putting in my body.

My researching bug has jumped from philosophy to personal improvement - I started flipping through Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss and making some notes about what I can be doing differently in general. Taking notes on what people suggest in Obsidian is, I think, going to help a lot in actually applying a lot of these changes to my life. I've got another dentist appointment on Friday to assess where we are now that the crowns are in, but I'm going to see if I can't schedule a functional movement screen sometime this coming week, since I get the feeling a decade working on my feet has introduced some challenges to my chiropractic health that need to be accounted for. Not sure where I'm going with all this, honestly - I feel like I have what it takes to exercise regularly, but I'm very much not there yet mentally.

Not going to make promises, but I am at least going to try and write a preliminary concept for a possible webcomic (or possibly just a short run series of print comics, I'm not really sure yet). I'll keep you posted! Hugs and kisses!

Finally got my second crown put in and it feels absolutely dazzling to have a full row of teeth again! I don't like to talk about it but I went a basically unthinkable amount of time just with a broken molar like it was no big deal. Disgusting, I know. But that's all over now! The CEREC crowns feel amazing, I feel amazing, life is good!

This website...I dunno, I'm not feeling it where it is right now. I think my major issue with the site as it stands right now is it's just not indulgent enough for a personal site on Neocities. There's a lot of room for different experimentation I haven't tried yet, and honestly the content on here is basically just showing off what I've consumed recently, which isn't a whole lot of fun to write about. The most glaring problem is how the music recommendations are not what they could be - there are SO many interesting music videos floating around that I want to share!

I kind of want to get back into making webcomics again. I miss Newheimburg. I miss it, but I got in my own way too often on that project, same as with all my other projects. I can safely say that while that comic wouldn't exist without my hard deadline of releasing a new strip every Monday, it basically meant the comic was never anywhere close to finished half the time, making this thing I was getting out of bed to do some days look like a hack-job. I feel pretty bad about that, but more than that, I worry that I learned nothing from the experience. Of course, there's only one way to find out if that's the case or not.

My research adventure continues, this time finding out about Carlo Cipolla and The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity and his graph for four types of people. While I originally balked at the idea of categorizing people according to something I would expect as a template for a Saturday morning cartoon, there is merit in thinking of actions in terms of "if this action does not benefit either you or other people, maybe don't do it" because I can say with certainty that the majority of things I've done in my life that I regret would fall under Cipolla's definition of 'stupid'. I'm still not any closer with my hypothesis of 'radical freedom as social currency' but frankly, the amount of stuff I have no idea about is a more worrisome situation I'd like to resolve. In particular, Kierkegaard's theological conversations made me realize that part of why I don't understand existentialism is because I don't understand the religion that informed it.

I have officially been off soda for two weeks now, and you know? The stuff they say about not missing soda is actually true! I kind of always assumed that was mainly something said by people who weren't fond of soda in the first place, but I'm really doing just fine without it. I'm sure my doctor will be happy, since I'm fairly certain the decision has helped me drop at least a few pounds at this point.

I officially got my second-ever root canal done on Friday! I had taken Prilosec for a few days before going and I was told it was like 'day and night' compared to how difficult my acid reflux made the first procedure. The dentist mentioned taking clove oil daily for acid reflux so that might be something I look into.

It's strange...for as much as I know I needed to resolve all this self-improvement, I can't help but shake the feeling that everything I'm doing is naught but an expression of toxic productivity, something I've always had a problem with. All of my instincts tell me that my own motivations shouldn't feel so nebulous at this stage of my life.

Speaking of nebulous, my philosophy studying has shifted gears in an interesting way: since downloading a highly useful note-taking app called Obsidian, my thinking has gone from simply analyzing the existentialist movement to trying to work up a theory of the concept of 'radical freedom' as defined by Jean-Paul Sartre being a form of commerce in how people assign themselves to the social contract. So far, even I think it's a crackpot concept, but there's something here, I can feel it. There has to be some way of resolving the concepts of people being 'condemned to be free' in any and all matters with the reality that people feel so trapped in what they're doing. Projecting aside, even if this research goes nowhere, it's also helped me become more cognizant of rebuttals to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, like Self-Deterimination Theory. I look forward to jumping further down this rabbit hole!

This was a good week! As of around 8 PM yesterday, I've offficially been off of soda for the past week! I've still been drinking coffee, so it's not a total victory for my teeth, but with the exception of a Yoohoo earlier I've mainly been drinking water, tea, and juices. (And honestly, I think I should get a mulligan on that Yoohoo because how was I supposed to know a chocolate milk drink was going to have HFCS in it? That just seems redundant.)

Summer is here proper, and the mosquitos are out in full force. I can't say I'm very happy about finding fresh bug bites on me every day, but maybe I should think about sucking it up and getting some kind or repellant on me regularly - it would dovetail pretty well with getting a skin care routine restarted again. Granted, that routine would basically amount to a cleanser and eye cream, but it's better than the nothing I'm currently doing.

My next root canal is this Friday, and I can safely say the high of self improvment (and Novocaine) has fully worn off. There's a part of me that really doesn't believe that I'm going to stick to this 'no soda' plan or that even if I do, the damage is so extensive that it won't really matter. They say there are people in this world that don't want you to succeed or get better, and it's really hard when that person lives in you.

While it's more like reading the Wikipedia pages surrounding it, my adventure with studying Fear and Trembling continues. Currentely, I'm mulling over the concept of the 'knight of faith' that Kiekregaard argues is exemplified in Abraham. He is a man who acts with unwavering faith even in what is called 'eternal resignation' at the reality of having to sacrifice Issac, but still acts in faith that he will still get to have Issac in this world. While I admit this is a fairly elementary understanding of the material, it makes sense that this text in particular would serve as one of the lynchpins in the Existentialist movement - the concept of Abraham being an example of a man who, by having 'faith in the absurd', makes the decision that cannot be rationalized by any known code of ethics and makes what Sartre refers to as the Great Choice. There's also some signifigant similarities with Nietzsche's Übermensch, but with the specific caveat that the Übermensch is a person of 'this-worldliness', totally unconcerned with any 'other-worldliness' that might be suggested by the necessary step into 'faith in the absurd' required to quantify a knight of faith. But that, of course, will require some time with Thus Spake Zarathura before I make a total buffoon of myself.

This has been a pretty eventful month! I finally opened this site to the public on the 17th after a few weeks of learning HTML and plugging away at this site in Notepad. I probably could've also made it in Visual Studio but there's something about making it in the Notepad program that I feel connects me to the traditions of what Geocities and other sites used to be about. As much as my mind says I'm 'diving face-forward into an antiquated past', there's something enticing about having a site that lives or dies with you and you alone.

On a related note, I have to offer a HUGE shout-out to W3 Schools, without whose valuable and committed coding tutorials, the site you're currently reading would not have happened. Thanks, W3 Schools!

Aside from this website, I've also been committing a lot more to my dental health this month, having gotten a root canal and crown on one of my molars that was on the verge of breaking. It's not a fun thing to see age take its toll on you, and I'm maybe a little too excited to be having this many medical visits so close to each other, but after a frankly outrageous amount of time pretending my mouth was just a lost cause altogether? It's a relief to be taking charge of my life in a meaningful way. One good thing about all of this is that, much like Disco Elysium, I've managed to unlock a thought that's my inner voice going "You spent how much money on your teeth and you're drinking soda??" This should, at least if I'm steadfast about it, mean that I'll be drinking way more water that will hopefully get my weight under control.

Speaking of, I've also started a food diary this month! Not much to report on that front other than acknowledging how much of my eating decisions are based on emotional connections in the past - if I didn't grow up on Fudge Rounds, for example, would I even be eating Little Debbie products today? Would I still be drinking Starbucks Doubleshot drinks if I didn't associate them with a moment's comfort from back when I worked at Wal Mart? The mind boggles.

Earlier this month, I decided to try and learn more about Søren Kirkegaard since I've finished watching Atlanta recently, and Donald Glover discusses being very influenced by Kirkegaard's writings, so I picked up an e-book of Fear and Trembling. I must confess, I did not get far enough into it to understand his more salient points about Abraham but I hope to eventually finish the book and take Zettelkasten notes to better comprehend the material, but so far I've gathered that part of the goal of talking about the story of Abraham is because it's easily one of the most divisive Bible stories especially from the perspective of a Christian thinker like Kirkegaard, and it begs the question at the beginning of the book - who can understand Abraham?