12/4/2025: Finished my first story project & stuff regarding music

Since late of June this year I've been working on a series of illustrations to tell a story featuring some of my original characters. I made a page dedicated to the entries that you can view here. I don't think making traditional comics are for me since I feel much more confident with showing rather than telling stuff. I'm proud of myself for being to commit to this despite it taking multiple months. I have other projects similar to this in mind but won't commit to them for a while. As of writing this, there is still a few more things I want to take care of before the year ends.
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Switching from streaming music to building my own library has been a great decision. Part due to no longer supporting Spotify but also it's been really fun finding so many fun pieces of physical media. Visits to record stores and thrift store have allowed me to find stuff that I can't even find online! The music itself isn't always great but I find it fascinating when looking through all the different artists and genres I would otherwise never pay any mind. There is something so interesting to me when finding a clearly homemade CD on sale for less than a dollar. Someone somewhere put time into burning several songs of their choosing onto somthing they can carry around. In this day and age, most people would just download the music onto a phone so someone taking time to use a CD instead is lovely. Saying this to say that it inspired me to make one myself!

I don't plan to give this to anyone. Maybe several years down the line I'll plop this into a player and it'll help me reminisce about this year. This one isn't comprised of my all time favorite songs, just the ones that were released this year that I've listened to and enjoyed. With how many blank CDs I have at the moment, maybe I should do one like once a year as a fun way to keep track of my favorite songs at the time as well as put these discs to use.
I also made a playlist on youtube that has most of the songs on it that you can play here. 'wireshark' by cat tizzle turbo and 'Let's Go! Neko-Chan' by WaxTerk are not on the playlist since I couldn't find them on Youtube but I know they are on bandcamp. Both of them are still very good pieces of music.
Speaking of music, the app I use for my phone tallies up what songs I listen to. It says 'most played of all time' but I only started using it near the end of 2024 so I'm counting it as just what I listened to the most this year.

All of these are beautiful songs. I think most of these I first heard of prior to this year but I'd like to highlight the ones that were new to me this year. 'Europa and the Pirate Twins' may be one of my favorite songs of all time now and I only heard it for the first time this year from picking up a compilation album on one of my first record store visits to build my collection. It has such a cool pace from start to finish that it makes me so happy each time it is played.
'Town of Bally Bay' seems to be a somewhat popular song as there are a lot of people doing covers of it. Maybe I am biased towards this rendition of it now since it's the first I've heard of it but The Diggers seemed to put a lot of heart into each line of the song. Maybe that was due to the songs on this album being performed live? Regardless, another great find for the year.
'Bravely' was not a song I found in a store but rather it was apparently another piece of lost media for a time. It was apparently identified in 2024 according to a quick search on Wiki but I had not heard of it until this year. I think I only stumbled across it after listening to the other songs by FEX and seeing lots of other music that has or still is lost media. Very glad I did though! Songs like this always help boost my moral. Something about it once being lost media as well as being a song about trying to stay positive despite hardships really gets to be. It is a very nice song.

If there is one thing I would like people who decided to read all of this for some reason to take away, its to try out thrift stores for music. You can find some interesting things if you dig enough. Where I am used CDs there tend to only go for $1-2 so its not much of a loss. Record stores may not have as niche of stuff but they can still sell whole used albums for pretty cheap. There might be more I'm trying to say but it is 1:22am in the morning as of typing this. I am pretty dang tired but I wanna blog NOW so I'd rather do it in a sleepy state than wait and never get to it again. Music is great, art is awesome, and I hope next year brings lots of spectacular pieces of media as well.

9/11/2025: Oh yeah I have a spot to blog about whatever

When first thinking about a structure for my website, I liked the idea of having a section just for me to let my thoughts out. In practice, I realize that I feel most comfortable keeping my thoughts to myself. Each time I see this button though I feel like I should add SOMETHING to it but am not sure what. I wanna make another entry to review myself on different things I did this year but also have been debating putting 'yearly self reveiews' into its own section, who knows! Not current me who is typing this, thats for sure!

Another fact I've accepted about myself is that I show my emotions better through drawings instead of text. I have been doing a lot more doodling lately, mostly because its one of the things I enjoy doing during downtime at work but also as a way to practice drawing different things &/or just letting my mind loose. There have been a few instances now where I'll sketch something and make it into a full rendered illustration later. My online activity doesn't get much interaction so I also don't feel compelled to share much more than the stuff I make, so that is also probably a factor in me not posting much here or anywhere else.

7/7/2025: Quarter-century old

I feel pretty lucky to be able to live for this long considering how much of the world is a mess, especially these days. I also feel mostly content with what I am doing with my art. As of writing this, these two drawings are the beginning to something I'm trying where I'll make one-off drawings as a way to tell a story I have in mind for these characters. Structuring sevral panels like a typical comic is not something I usually do and I want to stick to it this way to prevent myself from burning out on it. I'll also be keeping most of it dialogue free as another way to save time on it.

I also want to try keeping the main beats of the story to be traditional art. I've been looking at computer screens a lot lately, both from my job and also my main form of entertainment. Focusing on a piece of paper is one of the things I enjoy that keeps me away from a screen, even if only for a couple hours at a time.

6/15/2025: Current views about technology

I currently work as a technician to help people with getting set up on their new computers. 99% of them are on Windows 11 and it makes me a little crazy. It seems like the people I work for want to push so many new things to make stuff easier but in practice feels like its doing the opposite. If there is a common issue on the SETUP of a new computer that requires a workaround, I don't think this new OS should be getting pushed so heavily. A lot of the people I work with aren't great with computers so I don't understand how they expected this to go well.

I don't see all new tech as being bad, though. With things like linux, especially linux mint, it makes me happy knowing there are different user-friendly OSs if people don't want to use windows anymore, which is the point I'm getting to. I feel blessed to live in an age where I can have access to so much information and entertainment just through a computer. Its amazing that so much art and stuff in general can fit on a storage device thats physically takes up so little space. Whether through websites or physical discs, I recognize how privelaged I am to live in this time.

I do feel a bit like a brat that, despite all of these benefits, I still have things to complain about. It does feel a little justified since others, both in my workplace and on the interwebs, also have gripes with new tech. I mostly wrote this post to remind myself that, no matter how poor in quality new technology gets, there is years of old tech to appreciate and people to this day making alternatives to more popular products.

6/2/2025: First real blog post for real

Website is now in a state where I feel comfortable sharing it with others. The artwork posted right now is not everything I've made, its just what I want to upload right now.

While I do plan to tidy things up a bit and add a few more buttons, this is mostly what this website going to be: a simple collection of various art pieces I've created. I plan to use this blog space as the primary place to yap about subjects I want to talk about. I know I could do this on newgrounds and bluesky but a part of my gut just feels like I'll be more comfortable typing about such things here so I don't annoy followers with things mostly unrelated to my artwork (which I presume is what 90% of them follow my account for, though I don't know for certain).

5/17/2025: Test blog entry

This is a test on making a blog. Here is what the front page of my neocities website looks like at the time of typing this. Maybe I'll scroll down here and laugh at this later.
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