update 1/5/24
Two months since putting this up! I've added my social media links because I'm using this as a site to link to for some upcoming comic conventions I'm tabling at. It's more straightforward than my usual portfolio site and better than a linktree. Typing this out I just remembered the index is not mobile-responsive, but I already put this link down for some info. They might not end up putting it on anything so I might be fine, w/e. I should actually do that sometime soon, it shouldn't be that hard with the three-column layout. But by acknowledging it here I get at least one more update that I don't have to actually have it done for!
I've been working on a couple of projects lately, and keeping busy even with the winter break (my excuse for forgetting to update). I'm about ten-ish pages through a 18+ Fratt comic for Butchverse 2, and have about ten more left. I got way too ambitious for my first real comic but we're pulling through. I also just finished and submitted my essay for t-shirt's latest yaoi anthology (the theme this year being Yuri). It was kind of a doozy and was both one of my longer single essays but also needed to be done in a shorter timeline than I would normally give myself (mostly to safely procrastinate to let it simmer in my brain a bit). Ended up being around 3700 words and I'm very proud of it, it'll be in the upcoming anthology they put out (I think later this month!!! I will be posting an update) and I will also have it in Butchverse 2 (MUCH later. I do kinda want to have it out for Galaxycon and Awesomecon in March though).
I don't want to spoil the essay but it required me to read another book and consider my own methodology from Butchverse 1. It kinda ended up being about transmisogyny, as when I was skimming around for a book to serve as a reference I ended up on Andrea Chu's Females (that I'd been previously holding out on reading because I didn't respect how large the font size was). It was really good, she's an evocative writer. I also read her essay On Liking Women that definitely served as a touchpoint for the book, and realized that I had actually read her work before. Particularly, "I Worked With Avital Ronell. I Believe Her Accuser," which was about the female college professor that was abusing and sexually harassing her students.
Even that first essay I read from her was memorable. She has a very good voice for criticism, in that she is very insightful, sees both the bigger and smaller pictures, and she grounds things in the practical (the praxi-cal...) while still able to allow for theoretical frameworks. I also happened upon her review of Hanya Yanagihara's book To Paradise (she also ended up reviewing her other books and particularly her recent best-seller A Little Life in it). She's very good at putting Vibes About People's Patterns into concise and concrete verbiage. Inspo tbh. It is a big issue in a lot of academia (and especially queer academia) to get so caught up in the big exciting Ideas and Theories and Queering that concrete effects and the broader picture can get ignored.
Reading Females also made me realize that I had never actually read Whipping Girl by Julia Serano (though I do follow bloomfilters on twitter so I feel like I've seen the sparknotes) and I was sad I didn't have the time to read it before finishing my essay, but I was able to get a copy and added it to my book list. I also happened upon Michael Warner's Publics and Counterpublics and couldn't resist getting it either. The idea of "What is a public?" is soooo interesting to me, and I'd been thinking about it in terms of the internet for the past few years or so while I was ideating for Scrollform_01. Everyone talks about "virtual town square" but what would that actually entail in terms of the concept of a public space? What does it mean to attribute commons of physical, public spaces to virtual ones? Especially when you layer on top of it things like content moderation it gets tricky tricky trickyyyy. Definitely want to read it before Scrollform_02. Has also been added to the reading list.
Though as much as I've been productive I have also been aggressively UNproductive. I recently got into Vampire Survivors which is so good, the ultimate rogue-lite and super duper fun. It was on sale for like $9 to get the whole thing plus DLC but I think it's usually really cheap anyways. It's nice for 15-30 minutes rounds where you swear you were only playing for 10. Basically a built in pomodoro timer for breaks. As soon as I submitted it I got back into minecraft hardcore and it's been very eye-opening.
I usually lose focus in minecraft servers pretty quickly and then don't play as much, but this time I committed to not doing any creative mode or 'cheating' to build my house. So it's probably been like 30-40 hours and I'm still not technically done. This is because I am obsessed with having huge libraries on multiple floors. They look so good with the Mizuno skin pack. Also they're kind of prestige in how much labor goes into make a LOT of bookshelves. Each block of bookshelf requires three books (and six wood). Each book requires one leather and three paper. Each piece of paper requires three sugar cane. I have a farm with probably... 30ish? sugar cane plants that I can trim down from their maximum height to get two pieces of every 35 minutes, approximately.
But to get the leather, I have to keep a cow farm. I try to keep my numbers up, which means constantly breeding them, which means I also need to keep up with my wheat farm on top of the sugar cane (I also have a potato farm for actual food). They also can be bred every five minutes, but you also have to wait for the calves to grow up enough to be able to add to the breeding pool, which takes around 20 minutes. You usually get 0-2 leather for each cow killed, so it's not a guaranteed number each time, either. I'm at the point where I can probably get around 20 pieces of leather each time I do a cull, which means that assuming I have enough paper, I can get around six bookshelf blocks every 30 minutes or so.
I just went back in right now to count and I currently have exactly 146 bookshelves. So I've spent about 30 hours just working on getting bookshelves. I enjoy minecraft the most when I have concrete goals that I can then show off to the rest of the server (also I really get into the minutia if trying to do cohesive interior design and feng shui with PIXELS). I've spent most of the time waiting running around looking for wild cows to hunt, so I also ended up finding a lot of really interesting caves, and I'm at about a solid 64 total diamonds mined. I have a very efficient system built out around the timing, thanks to the server having teleporting and waypoints enabled. Another motivation is I found a really great skin, as the Mizuno diamond armor is the most skimpy so you can actually see your skin. I was looking through general Daredevil skins and found a pretty good one WHERE HE'S WEARING FRANK'S SHIRT. Le reference to the latest run where he accidentally ends up wearing it (did not realize there was a skull on it) after busting out of Frank's hideout. They knew exactly what they were doing. Butchverse real?
In other local news: yesterday I was craving cake pops after I got some of the ones from Buc-ee's on the way back up from South Carolina and FUCK starbucks so I figured I had to nut up and make them myself. I liked this recipe it was very succinct and had good tips at the end. If you make them yourself it is very important you keep two factors in mind:
1) YOU ARE BASICALLY BAKING A WHOLE CAKE SPLIT INTO SMALL BALLS. THERE WILL BE SO MANY. I filled a gallon ziplock with them and it makes a satisfying THONK when I toss it into the fridge. I have been demanding everyone who enters the apartment to take some.
2) COMMIT TO YOUR FLAVORS. A recommendation (on another recipe) was to do devil's food cake mix but I was like hmmmmmm no that seems like too much chocolate. While still using chocolate candy coating and chocolate frosting anyway. I ended up using a yellow cake one and obviously it still tastes great but next time I am just gonna go with chocolate. Do you hear this I still have so many of them and I'm already talking about doing it again. This is how Big Baking gets you to start a small business. Also: I was looking at the frosting and got fudge icing instead of regular, because I'm apparently a lunatic. It made rolling the balls up and coating them SO much harder because the consistency was way more crumbly than it should have been. I still killed that shit though. BUT DO NOT DO WHAT I DID. I also put some sprinkles on but they're the small ball ones that I like but are scary as fuck to bite down on I think I'm about to crack my teeth every time. Next time.........
Also if you've gotten this far and thought to yourself man they are yammering on I'm going to be trying to use this to keep myself in practice for writing. I kept going on tangents and shit for the yuri essay so doing fun little easy blog posts might help in the long run. Or make me worse. So if you keep up you'll get a mix of website/project updates and whatever bullshit I did that week. Someone asked about an RSS feed for updates but after a quick search: that looks hard. I think following me on Neocities should let you know when it updates. I will also be posting when I update on Twitter. I really should figure out a comment section here on neocities (or just make a blog regular-style?), but you can also comment on my update post if you want.
update 11/29/23
I LIED a little bit. I wanted to actually get the internal pages done a bit more before throwing the whole thing up. I'm keeping the prev post but I also wanted to talk about the internals too. The about me is pretty much gonna have the same layout as the index for now, as I talk a bit about the projects I got going on in there. I don't have an exact plan for how I'd update information there other than just sneaking it, and maybe putting a more in depth update in this section? Maybe have a separate "blog" section there, idk. I might style it to be a little more funky later on. Site colophon, also not styled different for now. I'm hard-wired for efficiency so I like the idea of being able to visit most other pages from any page, though it's already gonna fall about with the reading list... Which speaking of, is a Notion page, and will thus technically be a separate site. But it links back to the homepage, and I was debating trying to embed the table into a page, but it would be more effort than it's worth, and it will still be the Notion style table formatting anyways. I'm keeping it a table for now so I'll actually update it over time and not get fed up with it.
I initially had a resources page mocked up, but mostly it would end up linking to OTHER people's resources pages. Which may or may not be helpful, but most of my coding strategy is having an idea in mind and then googling how to do pretty much every step along the way, or seeing someone else do something cool and then inspect-elementing to work it backwards. I might add one in later but its not a priority at this point. I've also linked some of my webpage projects and web versions of print publications because I still like them a bit, but I plan to remake some of them (most of them were made in 2019) I'm very torn on adding more animations and crazy stuff to the homepage, but I might save it for a later update when I have time for it.
update 11/24/23
ITS UP. KINDA. I've been messing around with the layout of this damn thing for so long #blessed I finally got it where I want it. Kinda. As much as I like web dev it's so overwhelming with how customized and elaborate and optimized you can get. Max showed me a Jekyll tutorial a while back and I was seriously considering learning it and then remaking my (professional GitHub Pages) website from the ground up (still gonna have to happen at some point that shit is NOT optimized. Especially the portfolio subpages. Every time I apply to something I'm so sick of touching the galleries I straight up just make a new page and put a different link LMAO. It's not even faster). And then I was looking at Maggie Appleton's website (I WANT TO BE HERRRRRR) and her about page and then I was considering biting the bullet and learning React (MY GOD) and then I was like MAN do I really want/need to learn this. I probably don't. It looks hard. I really wasn't interested in making anything more complex than she has on her site. Maybe a way to do tags on art so I don't have to have like five different illustration galleries depending on what I'm applying to. So of course I google "do I have to learn React reddit" and apparently there's an easier language called 11ty and then I asked my brother (actual programmer forreal) what he recommended for my use case and HE asked HIS guy and they were like yeah 11ty is fine. I looked more into it and it still looks kinda hard. So this site will be static coded by hand just like every other damn site I've made. This one should actually be fun though. I'm not making an illustration portfolio on this one I'm NOT I'm NOT go to my twitter to see more of my illustration. Or my instagram if you must.
