Onus

It's officially back to work time for me, and for what it's worth, I can honestly say I was able to make it through with a perfectly ordinary day. I keep telling my co-workers some version of how it's a "a top of the bell curve kind of day" when this happens, mostly in the hopes I'll find someone who catches the reference and thinks its funny. That's technically two separate goals, which is the excuse I give myself for still scoring zero out of zero for chuckles up to now. 

I got the new ribbons in for my typewriter today, and after having put them on, taken them off, flipped them around, put them back on again, and then watched a couple of youtube videos before trying to fiddle with my ribbon feed, I still seem to be making no headway in the "make my typewriter wheels spin my ribbon" department. There's still a couple of simple things I can try, and then I'm down to pulling  the ribbons back off, trying to look at my mechanisms again, and watching more youtube videos to puzzle out what's up with my device. 

The whole "almost working" thing it has going on is driving me up a wall. It's just this one thing, if I can just figure it out, I won't need to send it in. 

The estate sale lady I bought this from actually has a strict policy of never coercing anyone to buy anything, I 100% got excited here and failed to do my due diligence before purchasing the device, so this one's on me. 

Well, I may figure it out yet, and hey, plan B of send it in can still be a-go, even if it will almost certainly require some calling around and potentially even talking to people to figure out what my options really are. 

There's also plan C: acquire a screwdriver and go mad, but I just don't think I'm brave enough to do that, yet. 

I got a little bit of writing done today in my car, and have, really less than an hour before I go to bed (It's really hard for me not to try and stretch that if I'm not careful), and I need to decide what to do after I finish up this entry. I think I may have some time to work on my art? Or maybe just read. Both are nice ways to polish off the night. 

I spent most of yesterday putting together some website stuff, mostly finally putting up my outlines page in a new and improved format.

On the original version of my website, I had what was, honestly, a rather over complicated kind of setup involving both iframes and javascript that allowed me to grab two different webpages and load them into a single webpage, both of which used more javascript to select and isolate certain parts of the page for easy reading. 

It was cool, but it didn't actually help me read and sort through my own works the way I'd hoped it would, which was the whole point of the thing. so I simplified, and now it's just a bunch of outlines you can page through with some CSS tied to links at the bottom. 

Grabbing my original works and putting them back up for people to see is still on my agenda, but it's boring, so I'm still putting it off.

On my new (old) typewriter, I've spent the last couple of days absolutely kicking myself, because I, an idiot, accidentally put on the wrong ribbons, thinking they were the right ribbons, and am seriously worried I broke the damn thing trying to force the cover (which is probably the right cover) on. I couldn't get the ribbons to move to a fresh section when I typed, and I don't know if that's the machine itself or me fooling with incorrect ribbons that were incorrectly seated on the device. 

I also found more dirt and erasure bits underneath the carriage, which I plan to clean maybe today, if I'm feeling it. I have the proper ribbons in the mail, and if that fails, I'm going to shop around for a repair shop that allows for mail-ins, since there aren't any within driving distance for my area. 

Damn, I'm worried this one's on me. 

Book-wise, I've gotten started on Orion in the Dying Time, and so far it's pretty much the lightweight fantasy I was hoping it would be. The gist is that the protagonist and his super-sexy goddess wife have been sent to ancient times to stop an evil god and his dinosaur minions from enslaving humanity and probably also conquering the world. Decent action, heroic heroes, and evil bad guys abound. 

In terms of what else I want to do with my day,  I've still got a couple of sketches I'm working on, including that one with the bats I'm still in the process of getting traditionally inked, and a fanart piece I'm thinking about inking digitally over my pencil sketch. 

I don't know why, but the initial sketch phase feels so much harder when I'm working in digital, it seems to spur this sort of impatience in me that real graphite and paper just doesn't seem to. 

I also have some things I need to transfer into the writing "sketchbook" section of my website, for both fandom and my  original works. On top of that, I'm toying with the idea of writing something, either for an ongoing work or ginning up something new. 

Knowing myself, I'm probably going to get one, maybe two of these things done today, so it looks like I'll have to pick and choose.

Having several days off and gotten back the energy I normally put into work, I succeeded in toting a small nightstand up two flights of stairs, wiping down some desks, and re-arranging my room. I also finished the second draft of the second chapter for Insomnia, got started on the first few pages of Orion for my next read, and put together a fanpage section for Devil May Cry, Which I've enjoyed enough that I decided to properly dedicate some of my website to it. 

I'm slow to produce, so there's probably won't be much in the way of content on it for a while, but I'm hoping to add some stuff eventually. I've got one fan theory written out already, and hope to do a react/review type thing for the 2007 anime, which is much easier to access than the Danny Phantom series ATM (though I want to do the same with that show, too.)

Everything looks like ass on mobile, but it's awesome on a full-sized screen, I swear. 



I'm really pleased with all the diamonds. 

For what it's worth, here's the page for Danny Phantom, which as you can see, is much more complete!



As you can probably guess, I'm a big fan of box shadows and gradients.  Gotta love the glow.

Making these a CSS carousal rather than their own, separate pages is almost certainly dumb, but I like it that way, so I plan to keep it, at least for now. 

I need, or rather, want, to make a section just for outlines and story ideas, too, which shouldn't be hard, but has some how ended up being put off for no particular reason. 

I still need to re-upload all my original artwork, too.  

I had a nice Christmas today, just hanging out with my whole family and eating far more eggs benedict than was either wise or necessary. Present-wise I got a scarf which was so wonderfully soft I spent all day wearing it, and two sketchbooks, which I immediately inaugurated by putting some drawings in them. 



Please ignore both the sepia and the ominous shadow of my hand. 

This is another one I plan on finishing,( just like I still plan on finishing the evil caterpie I posted a while back, which is still being worked on, I swear), though considering this is being done in sumi-e ink, which is the most ungodly permanent thing known to mankind. I will either finish this, or destroy it, no take-backsies. 

Weirdly, this is more calming than stressful for me. When it comes to art, both written and visual, the thing that really kills me isn't the making, it's the tendency to get caught in an endless loop of revising and re-working until I get sick of looking at it and move on to something else. Turning the question into a binary - "Is this too broken to progress or is it not?" Prevents me from going completely nuts. 

The materials I use are also the reason my undersketches are so stupidly detailed. While there is no question in my mind not all artists need to do this, I really prefer knowing where I'm going before I start slinging my ultra-black ink all over my work. 

Thinking of sumi-e, I had genuinely not realized how thick that stuff was until I purchased fountain pen ink and started using it with my dip pens and brushes. What do you mean it just flows out? I thought turning your nibs upside down and watching your ink defy gravity was a totally normal user experience. I'm beginning to think not trying more than one thing before deciding the pine soot substance was the one true ink for me was not the best idea????

I can fix this tendency to thicken with my inkstone and a stick, as it gives me immense control over the water-to-ink ratio (the work above is being done with ground ink, in fact), but you're still dealing with something that's more of a paint than anything. It actually does have about the same consistency as watercolor when I have my ratios right. 

One of the many things I keep telling myself is I should really start using my brushes as brushes instead of the world's softest nib, but when I can get it to work without busting up my hand or accidentally blotting my paper, it looks so good. The sheer dynamism of line thickness is absolutely unmatched, and the pressure can change from hair-fine to thick with the tiniest twitch of the hand. 

Unfortunately, the pressure can change from hair fine to rail thick with the tiniest twitch of the hand. Believe it or not, all the ink on this bat took about an hour for me, mostly because I had to move very carefully to make sure I kept the lines looking dynamic instead of sloppy. 

For the background, I'm sort of wondering if I want it to be hard black too, or if I want to paint it in a grey tone so that my bats stand out without getting lost in the details of the background. 

I think I'll have to sleep on it before I decide. 

There was a party hosted by my work today. I'm not really a party person, but lately I've been trying to be, so I went. I try not to go into too much detail when it comes to my IRL life, but I can definitely say it was  something different for me. It's one thing to know you have over a thousand coworkers in concept, and quite another to actually see them milling around one room. 

It was a lot for me, but I made it, at least mostly. The "real work" that came after on the main site was pretty rough, though. Our whole schedule was shifted for the occasion, and between that and the unusual amounts of noise at people at the shindig, I was dog beat. I did get to talk to a real, 3D person about From Here to Eternity, which was pretty cool.

Thinking of From Here to Eternity, I've gotten to the bit where the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, and Prewitt is spiraling ever further down the hole of guilt and depression. He slept through the attack by accident, and can't re-join the army without going back into the penitentiary (and seems to still have some complex feelings about murdering Fatso Judson). His response has been to drink aggressively. 

I think I said this before, but the guy has no healthy coping mechanisms. None. He's a man desperate for purpose and meaning, but is also shockingly obstinate and often unyielding to the point where he would rather break than bend, hurting both himself and the people around him more often than not in his mulish refusal to compromise or accept what he believes to be an unfair deal. 

tragic flaws and evil ones aren't always the same thing, and Prews obstinance very much falls under this category. He is one of the very few characters in the entire book who will go out of his way to stop people from hurting those he considers vulnerable - small dogs and the "Slow" soldiers like Friday Clark, who are prone to getting picked on by virtue of being special needs. He's loyal to his friends and would rather walk up a mountain, twice, before bending the knee and apologizing when he knows he's not in the wrong. 

He also asks and expects more than he should of the people around him, especially his girlfriends, and seems to believe he can make the world confirm to his idea of right regardless of good sense, reason, or a need to compromise. He does not or will not understand that he lives in a world that will break you long before you break it, and still, damnably, loves the army, even though it's the institution that has inflicted most of his pain. 

I'm not quiet done yet, but I'm really close, so we'll see how this all turns out. I don't know if I'll finish it this week, but I may. Reading Prewitt's downfall after spending so long with the guy is uncomfortably hard, even with the long break to give myself some distance.

I am currently next to my space heater as I decide what to do with the last few hours of my night. 

I added a robots.txt page to my website today, which, in all honesty, is one of those really simple things I should've done a while ago. The sheer quantity of bot spam was getting obnoxious. 

I can't say much about plans for the future at the moment, since I'm mostly still trying to dig myself out of all the various projects I have stalled or still ongoing.

In terms of my lighter, less literary readings, Thrive: Unseen is pretty good. It was originally called Trash-tier OP??? Or something like that, but the author ended up changing it because it made the work sound like a goofy light novel type story when it's actually about a deeply troubled young man taking the thoughtful, scientific approach to a serious of tests designed to reward violence and the mad scramble for power above all else. He just lost one of his only friends to this thing, and had to watch the invading system keepers use his funeral for propaganda.

The new name is less catchy, but a much better reflection of what the story actually is. 

My family and I watched both the Ring (the American adaption ) and the Ring 0 (Japanese) last night. We meant to watch the original in Japanese, and then the American adaption, but we ended up throwing on the Japanese prequel by mistake, and just sort of decided to roll with it. They were both really good movies, although Ring 0 was more visually restrained in a way I think I preferred (and the male lead had superior hair.) I'm still interested in watching the original Ring, if only to see how it differs. 

I did something I had been planning for a long time - Namely, the beginning of the end of my tenure on Neocities. I've got the index page of my new host set up with a .org address, and will probably migrate all my files over the next couple of days. After that, all that should be left is pulling out of the webring I'm in, and walking away. 

As for why I would do this, the answer is a couple of things: I grew to dislike the community of Neocities, who seem to spend a lot of time on discord and seem to be weirdly focused on clout chasing, of all things. Why someone would ever think a personal website could win them any level of acclaim in 2025 is confusing, to say the least, and the expectation that I involve myself in modern social media...to escape modern social media is annoying. I really don't like discord.

After thinking further about it, I honestly decided I disliked all the social and sharing aspects of Neocities, too, from its like4like and follow2follow culture, its microblogging twitter-clone thingy (which was such a source of grief for the admin he had to hard limit the number of posts you could makes there per-day), and the latest updates page. My website is mostly for me, so having to worry about what my "followers" would think if I did something goofy with it - like push a partly written article or do a live tweak of something small, like a gradient color  was not helping me enjoy my site. 

It's also run by exactly one guy, and while Kyle Drake genuinely doesn't seem to be a bad dude, there is no guarantee, so far as I know as to what might happen if something goes wrong on his end - a financial crises, a personal issue, something, that might lead him to consider decommissioning the site. It just being him can also make moderation a tad capricious, though I confess that's something I've heard more through others than by personal experience.

The final reason is probably the simplest of all: I just kind of wanted something more. At first, I was planning to go full steam ahead into shoving my shitty website into a  no-kidding VPS, but after a long time of thinking about it, opted for regular, next-order webhosting instead. No weird subculture to navigate, better analytics, and more independence, if only by virtue of being a very small fish in a much larger pond. I may put in an RSS feed or something, but so far as increasing my sites "viability" or "popularity" or what have you, I have no interest at all. 

Neocites was good to me for a long time, and I'm not exactly moving with any grand hurry. If you ever want to see what its like to have your very own website, it's a great place to give it a shot, especially with its free hosting plan. 

A lot of people also recommend  Nekoweb, which I haven't tried but is supposed to be very similar. Teacake and leopard are supposed to be very beginner-friendly as well. 

Thinking of website stuff, I actually have a few more sketches, as well as some writing I need to upload when I get the chance. 

The first rain in a while started up sometime before I woke up. It's still light and somewhat sprinkly, but I'm hoping we'll get more before the day is through. It's been too dry. 

I threw on Avatar last night as my writing music, Feathers and Flesh is probably one of my top ten albums, particularly in regards to the heavier stuff, which I love, but can be picky about. It was what I ended up finally hammering out another page of Where You Belong to, which felt pretty good. I may be being to optimistic here, but I'm hoping I can get back on the wagon when it comes to writing that one out. 

Now I need to decide what I want to throw on for the next page. I'm stuck between going for nostalgia, with Korns See you on the Other Side, (Twisted Transistor is a childhood favorite, in particular), or throwing on Battle Beast, who I listened to for the first time yesterday and decided I liked enough to maybe listen to again.

Sitting here writing this, I'm thinking of maybe going for Korn.   

I want to catch up with Shinedown, too, so if I manage to keep up with this particular writing jag, they might be next. I've had a vague desire to write a fic centered around The Dead Don't Die, purely because its so painfully matchy with Danny Phantom, you almost don't even have to try. 

I found a copy of the Mothman:prophecies on youtube, and was reminded of just how good a movie it was. You would think something with the premise of "the mothman is real" in any capacity would be some kind of schlock horror, but no, it's not. It's actually a pretty restrained movie about loss, omens, and trying to grapple with something fundamentally beyond your ability to even conceive. It's also a movie that expects you to pay attention the entire time, which is something I hadn't realized I missed from a lot of modern cinema until this one reminded me of it. The number of superhero movies or Netflix specials you can just tune out for half an hour or so without loosing in anything is, now that I think of it, slightly appalling. 

I had heard stories for years that this was deliberate, a consequence of companies trying to appeal to the kind of people who put on movies as background music or as filler on a second screen, as well as attempting to cater to younger generations with weak attention spans, but damn. Maybe I'm not watching the right kind of modern movies, but it does seem that things have changed. 

On the subject of modern movies, I've heard that Tron:Ares wasn't very good, which sucks. I enjoyed the original Tron, honestly liked Tron:legacy, and was one of those people who was really hoping Ares would be a true sequel to it, following along with the same characters as before. I don't have a lot of free time, but I'm enough of a fan I might be willing to sit down and see the movie for myself, just to judge it first hand.  

Somehow, I spent more or less all day drawing, which is a rare mood for me these days, but not an unhappy one by any means. I'm mostly just glad my hand is up to the task again. 



My sister once accused me of a propensity for drawing "evil pokemon". A strange accusation with no basis in reality at all. I've asked edgelord caterpie about the matter, and am pleased to inform you that she agrees completely. No evil pokemon here.

Obviously, it's still a WIP, one I'm still actively working on, so it has yet to be put up on my sketchbook proper. It's also a good example of messing with my own workflow once again. I'm drawing all of this on only one layer - a rarity for me, while making heavy use of a water color brush set paired with a charcoal blender to ease up the edges of the lines. 

I'm also adding the linework after I've blocked out most of the color, using my rough sketch as a basis for where it should go, another change from how I normally do it. I think I'm still not very settled or experienced when it comes to the best way to do digital art. 

for those wondering, those arrows are there to help me remember where the light is supposed to be shining. When I formally decide I'm bored of drawing something, the first thing I usually do is erase those guys from the screen.

I also found the button that will cause Procreate brushes to make effects such as multiply/lighten/overlay ect. without having to change the layer itself. They're down in the settings menu you get when you click on a brush. I'm wondering if I want to try out one of my paper texture brushes on this guy, or maybe save it for something else. 

I messed around a bit with procreate last night, just to get myself back into the drawing mood. I discovered how to make custom color pallets for the first time, which is embarrassing because I've had that program for years, but cool because it is now much, much easier to plan out a theoretical pallet. Colors have never been my strong suit, which is one of the reasons I've been trying to use them - it's one of those things I've always wanted to be better at then I currently am. 

Weather wise, it has finally started to cool down, enough that I can pull my favorite heavy jackets out of the closet and start wearing them around. The grass remains summer-green, but I'm expecting that to change once we hit first frost. 

I'm still putting off most of my big projects, or maybe just put to the side? I'm over a third on a longer short story featuring Sam and Vlad, and have another started centering on Danny, Poindexter, and how Casper High was probably the scene of at least one student death. I also have an original work going that's even more self-indulgent than fanfiction, featuring demon-priests and oceans of blood. 

I haven't mentioned it, but in addition to reading "real" books, I also read a lot of serialized fiction down on Royal Road. Super Supportive (superhero slice of life, with heavy emphasis on the SOL), and Paladin of the Forsaken Lands (Monster nerd gets monster crafting powers, immediately begins using them to create horrors for fun), are two of my current favorites.