greetings, chat. it's been a minute. a little over two months, in fact. i've been meaning to write a blog post for a while but I kept getting started and then not finishing because I realized I had too many things to add/kept going in too much detail so. I'll try to keep this one on the shorter side. [author's note: that was a lie]

here is a (non exhaustive) (non chronological) list of things I have done in the past two months

I was a little bit busy. to say the least wwwww. I think unfortunately I have been teetering on the edge of burnout for a while now, as I've had something going on every weekend for two months now, and while some of it has been fun stuff, like travelling, it's also been draining energy wise. I finally don't have any immediate deadlines hanging over my head, so I've been taking this week to simply set no goals for myself (other than maintaining language studies and drawing my weekly doodle). hoping a week of normal sleep and not stressing about deadlines will help me recuperate.

language

spanish and toki pona are kind of in maintenance mode right now for me, since I was spending a lot of time trying to cram for the JLPT. I'm still working on flashcards (for toki pona) and duolingo (for spanish) but it's been sporadic. I want to work through a grammar guide for toki pona soon. haven't decided how I'm going to work on spanish (if at all) beyond duolingo. 

for japanese, I've been doing wanikani/kaniwani, my anki flashcards, and now bunpro semi-regularly. I started bunpro a little under a month ago, intending to use the free trial to work on grammar for the JLPT, and I am undecided if I want to keep up with it. I like the SRS, but I don't want my daily SRS workload between all my apps to get out of control. I might end up buying a monhtly/yearly subscription to see how I feel about it for a new more months now that I am not trying to cram as much as possible. 

for the immediate future, I want to start listening to nihongo con teppei for beginners again. I listened to his podcast for about half an hour last night and I'll say I felt like I understood about 95% of it this time. I could probably graduate to the podcast that is just a little more difficult, but I also feel like my brain right now is actively resistant against any japanese material that takes me extra effort to understand. as such, I'd rather start with very easy material to at least get in the habit of listening to/reading things and then once I am able to put more effort into comprehension I'll move to something a little more difficult. I also signed up to read a manga along with the absolute beginners book club on wanikani, so I'm hoping the group setting (and also the fact that I put down a small monetary committment in buying a digital copy of the manga) will help me to stick with it. I feel like right now, fresh off of taking the JLPT, I have a lot of motivation to study japanese so I'm trying to harness that energy to set up habits I will stick with in the long term.

projects

in terms of working on personal projects, I don't have a lot for updates. I worked briefly on a pets page for my website, but there's still a lot that needs to be added. for ffxiv modding, on a whim I started work on a nymph port for a vanilla mashup, but I still need to fix a lot of minor clipping before I feel comfortable posting it. 

ukagaka work has also mostly been at a standstill, but I've done some minor planning for an ukagaka I want to work on soon based on one of my ocs, maroth. I've been spending some time over the past two months catching up with what the ukagaka community has been making since the last time I took a deep dive into ghosts, and to some extent I feel like my goals for ghost development have shifted. it was really eye-opening to have it finally click for me that ukagaka don't necessarily have to treat the user's computer as a computer. it can be just a wide open vague space, which opens up possibilities for stories and scenarios that aren't just "character appeared on your computer randomly." not that that's a bad thing, I have two of those computer-themed ukagaka out already, but not every single one of my ukagaka ideas meshes neatly with the concept of "guy on your computer knows they are on your computer." it's a bit difficult to articulate what I mean exactly, but I recommend checking out I Often Dream of Marigolds and Xander's Refuge as examples of this sort of "ukagaka setting not on your computer" type of feeling.

I've kept up with tau tuesday over the past two months because sitting down and drawing for an hour or two on a tuesday is a well-engrained habit now and it's not something I intend on stopping. as it draws closer to the end of the year, I've been thinking about what I will do with tau tuesday in 2024. I don't want to stop the weekly doodles entirely for sure. I think keeping up a weekly drawing habit has been valuable for feeling like I'm staying creative, even if my other personal projects are stalled. I don't like framing it as a "I've been staying productive" thing because I don't think it's entirely healthy to view what I work on purely in terms of productive/not productive, but that is certainly a facet of this. I've been having the itch to draw other ocs for my weekly draw, so I am thinking I will expand it out a bit to "draw one of my characters each week" instead of "draw this specific character every week." I would like to induce some restrictions/challenge to it, perhaps on a monthly basis, because part of the reason I think I have been able to stick with tau tuesday for so long is because of the restriction of "draw this one character." I also want to get more weird and experimental with my weekly doodles, whether that be trying to include difficult poses or backgrounds, or something else entirely. I have yet to decide on a concrete plan for 2024 weekly draws, but I imagine whatever I decide on will end up changing through the year regardless.

social media

last topic I would like to touch on is social media or more specifically: twitter (refuse to call it x. elon musk can pry twitter from my cold dead hands). as part of my cram session for the JLPT, I deactivated my twitter for the week prior to the exam (it was more like five days, but same difference). I wanted to go completely cold turkey since I knew that simply blocking twitter hadn't worked in the past. it was difficult, at least for the first day, and I ended up procrastinating in other ways. playing neopets again. cleaning random parts of the house. scrolling tumblr or discord endlessly until I peeled myself off the couch. eventually I took the test and reactivated my twitter account, but I feel like I have been spending less time on it in general since I deactivated for a week. I don't have any concrete metrics, and I would like to experiment with simply recording my time on various websites without trying to limit myself to see if twitter is still my biggest time sucker, but I think this is at least marginally better. like many others, I feel like I have an unhealthy dependence on social media, and this mini experiment with deactivating my twitter account for a week has made me think more about my relationship with social media, and the internet in geneal. going into 2024 I would like to sit down and really rethink my relationship with the internet and how I can sort of nudge it back into a place where I feel like it's healthy for me. I don't have answers for my vague feelings right now, but it's something I will be thinking about for the next few weeks. 

that's about it for now, I look forward to sharing more things with you in the future! I'll make things again soon, I promise, I'm just taking a minute to chill out wwwwww.