so. it’s been a hot minute since I posted a weekly update. in my defense, the weekend of 9.16 my mom visited from out of state, so I spent most of my waking hours with her. this previous weekend, I was participating in etc jam hosted by the ukagaka dream team discord server, so I was spending all of my time chugging away at that. my entries are posted on my respective ukagaka release pages. I ended up restructuring my ukagaka section of my site entirely to break things off into separate pages, to allow for more growth as I release things.
updates from last week: was accepted to the wol webring and the rpgmaker webring! I also joined the vocaloid webring, and applied to the acing the internet webring. is there such a thing as too many webrings. sound off in the comments. (I say that tongue in cheek). I kind of would like to join a horror enthusiasts webring, but I haven’t seen one floating around yet… mayhaps I will end up making my own webring, someday. put it on the shelf with many of my other projects to be done LOL. I didn’t start work on my ghostface barrette for my bishoujo ghostface cosplay but… soon. I’m running out of time to keep pushing it off, so it’s really gotta be this week or else.
language update! I started interacting with native material for japanese again… by reading one NHK news easy article. it’s a start I guess? I would have felt really bad if I went another week just going “yeah I need to go do native reading again” and then not doing it so I mustered up the strength to do one (1) thing. I’ve been steadily working on wanikani in fits and starts; being busy over the past two weeks meant that i’ve let some reviews built up, which is… not ideal. I expect leveling up to 24 will be closer to two weeks than the average of 10 days I’ve achieved in the past. It’s fine, wanikani is a marathon not a sprint. I haven’t upped my jpn vocab deck limit yet, since my grammar deck is still staying at high reviews despite having no new cards… lot of turnover in recent things. I also ended up skipping a few days over the past two weeks purely because I was too busy, and was exhausted when I got home.
I did increase my toki pona deck briefly, but then it ended up providing me with too many new words daily, so I decreased it again. it’s not a very large deck, so I am fine with sticking to 10 new cards a day. most of those cards are repeats either for repetition or recall for vocab. I need to get back to watching the comprehensible input videos for toki pona; I got like five videos in and stopped, for whatever reason. I ended up starting the spanish course on duolingo again. my knowledge has deteriorated to the point that I couldn’t past the test to skip even one level… whoops. what happened to the ~7 years of spanish I learned as a child, man. it’s fine though, since it means the lessons right now are mostly just resurfacing things I forgot.
website updates… added more art to the art page. more buttons to my link page. more webrings, as I said earlier. updated my ukagaka section, also something I said earlier. wrangled a JS snippet from w3schools into something I could use for my xiv mods page. I’m pretty proud of how it turned out, and feel better now that it’s not just a straight mirror of my ko-fi page as I originally conceptualized. by that I mean, I added the ability to filter by multiple tags, when ko-fi just lets you filter by one. also, I added clickable tags to each mod so you can filter things that way. I plan on reusing the filtering code for my oc pages, but to tell you the truth, I’m kind of burned out on looking at JS right now, so I think website updates for the near future will be some fairly simple pages. I started drafting a page about my pets, for example.
weekend excursion
I mentioned that the weekend before last my mom visited. we went to a local farm that has a fall festival, washington DC, and a renaissance faire!
the farm is a place I’ve been visiting regularly for years and years now. they’ve got a hayride, corn maze, and goats to feed and pet, among other things. it’s just a really cozy place to visit since I remember being there as a little kid, and how every year I would take great care in picking out the small pumpkin you get with admission. I ended up eating an apple cider donut and kettle corn, and took home some apple cider. all of my pictures from this are of my sandalphon omanjuu I took with me LOL…
for DC, the prime reason we went was to check out the exorcist stairs. I haven’t actually watched the old exorcist movie yet, but it’s on my mind since the new one is coming out, and there’s a halloween horror nights house this year about the new movie. while we were there, a dude exercising sprinted up the steps. I thought that was very powerful. we also got cupcakes from georgetown cupcakes while we were there. I think their red velvet cupcakes are some of the best I have ever had, if a bit small. I am opinionated about red velvet flavored things!! i am frequently disappointed by things labeled red velvet where the cake flavored part doesn’t have that tang that red velvet does. or, even worse, they eschew the cream cheese frosting entirely and just use a vanilla buttercream flavor. that’s not red velvet!! that’s just a chocolate cake!! all is this to say when I compliment georgetown cupcake’s red velvet cakes, it comes from someone with strong feelings about red velvet.
fell down the stairs but it's ok I got better.
lastly in the weekend’s excursions, the renaissance faire. this is another event i’ve been visiting since I was a little kid, and another nostalgic place. last year, I ended up buying several more pairs of earrings, but I was a lot more reserved this time and only bought one. I bought some more crystals because they had a “mine your own” booth and I really like that kind of random grab bag when it comes to pretty rocks. I also got a dragon wing keychain and a cat toy from a vendor that I’ve visited yearly at the faire. I got some honey candy from a honey store, and as we were leaving I stumbled across a shop that sold perfume oils. I have a lot of perfumes at home, but they were fairly inexpensive so I picked up two rollerballs, one that is one of their special blends, and one that is dragon’s blood with a hint of their earth scent. truthfully, I kind of wish I had gotten a rollerball of their earth scent alone. it’s fairly strongly Dirt and Leaf scented but that’s what I want. I want to smell like a bog witch!! I also ate… so much food at the renn faire. they don’t have period accurate food there which is something i prefer since it means I can eat normal carnival food. their deep fried mac and cheese continues to be a banger.
etc jam
so! I mentioned I participated in etc jam this past weekend. what that meant is that the goal of the jam was to make anything but an ukagaka. things like balloons, free shells, guides on making ukagaka, and calendar skins fell under that umbrella. there were a few extra challenges that were listed if people wanted to challenge themselves beyond just “release one thing by the end of the weekend” and I really latched onto them. one of them was releasing something in the first 24 hours, and the other was releasing two or more things. I knew going into the jam that I wanted to make both a calendar and a balloon skin, and have them be matching. I toyed with the idea of making a menu theme, which is usually part of a ghost’s shell, to release with the calendar and balloon, but was told that wouldn’t count as an entry, so I shelved it as “stretch goal if I get everything else done”.
I decided on a theme day-of, funny enough because I was looking at my neocities site and I realized I could make the theming based on old computer terminals. there’s something cozy to me about bright green on a black background. I ended up completing the calendar skin the first day of the jam, clearing the first challenge. I also, as a tangent, got the updated covid booster shot the evening of the first day of the jam. in the past, I have had a mix between major and mild symptoms following a dose of the covid vaccine, so I was praying that I wasn’t knocked out the whole rest of the weekend.
saturday came, and I wasn’t feeling too bad physically. I did end up napping for two hours, whether that was from vaccine side effects or just general lack of sleep I’m not sure. still, I ended up finishing a balloon late at night for day two of jam. while I was working on the balloon, I tossed around the idea of making a very simple shell that I could attach the menu theming to. I remembered I had a “computer bug” pin, and dug it out of storage. I thought it was super cute and feasible to draw in a short time frame, especially if I was limiting myself to just the one day left of jam.
sunday! last day! I ended up downloading a new mobile game which zapped a lot of time… and I had to run errands as well that I had been putting off. I did finish the computer bug shell in time, and gave it a few dressups for some flavor. I also managed to squeak in updating the ukagaka section of my website, since I wanted to restructure it prior to putting out public download links for my etc jam projects.
honestly, while I’m glad I did etc jam, I worry I may have burned myself out a little, as monday I pretty much felt like I didn’t even want to look at a clip studio paint file or a notepad/brackets file for days… I got over it tho, and started sketching my tau tuesday draw (which uh. I need to finish today)
I think at the very least, I need to take it easy this upcoming weekend, as having two weekends that were back to back busy has tired me out… the weekend after this upcoming one is my orlando trip, and after that start two months of a parttime saturday job. so, while I’d like to keep writing on my blog, I might have to suspend it as things get busy over the next two months.
if you made it to the end of this entry, thanks! I didn’t mean for it to be super long, but also I missed out on a week of updates so it was kind of inevitable, haha. see you hopefully in a week with another roundup (or at the very least, I do want to post a september favorites post)