May 2022

5/26/2022

Yeesh. The end of May is already almost here. Some hours ago was the last time I'll leave my school and while I'm past the crying phase, I still can't quite get over it. The last class I left was my favorite out of all of them, and I think there will be an ever-growing hole in my heart where all of our silly moments once were.

I shouldn't let myself get too sad though, as I'll have my underclassmen to spy on the state of the class next year (hopefully).

My friend also mentioned returning the next year as a visitor/alumni. It sounds like a fun possibility, but I'm unsure of how it'd work out...

5/24/2022

[Chanting] I wanna get better at drawing mechanical forms, I wanna get better at drawing mechanical forms!!!

5/22/2022

Oh god. I know it's a regular occurence for my shrimp to get inside the tank filters, but not one of my plecos. How'd he even get in there???

I think shrimp are one of my new favorite creatures, and this totaaaaaally isn't because of a cute experience I had with my shrimp. I think on Friday my mom offered me some dying plant leaves from her tank since the shrimp might like to eat it, and as I was planting one of the larger leafs into the substrate of the tank, one of my shrimp swam onto my hand!!

Having a shrimp explore your hand is a lot like having a bug crawl around your hand, although you do have to control yourself since shrimp are quite fragile and can be skittish at the sign of danger. If the shrimp is looking to eat your hand, that contributes to a bit of the weirdness as well. Shrimp have tiny little tweezer hands called 'chela', and constantly being picked by them while they're on your hand is almost kinda ticklish.

I couldn't hold on to the little guy forever though, since I had some dead leaves to plant, but the little guy would not leave even if I gently tried to shake him off. This revealed another quality about shrimp I find rather cute. It's not a good idea to catch shrimp with a net, but if you're gentle enough you can coax shrimp anywhere. As the shrimp was exploring one of my fingers, resting the end of that finger on a nearby plant got 'im to crawl off of my hand.

5/20/2022

I just finished watching a film adaption of Murakami's piece 'Drive My Car', and one of the clever things I noticed about the movie was the inclusion of a mute character. There's some obvious points for representation, but there are also some things that this character's disability brings to the narritive. If you plan to watch the film adaptation of Drive My Car, maybe stop reading now.

Anyhoot, I think one of the main messages of the film is about love and communication. One of the troubles we're introduced to with Kafuku and his wife, who has been seeing several other men (although we only see her with just one other guy during the film). During the audition for Kafuku's play, we are introduced to a mute woman who is later revealed to be the wife of one of the directors. Throughout this film, there is an importance placed on actually reading or taking in the lines being said by these characters. Most of it is set in Japanese, but other languages like Mandarin, Korean, English, and Tagalog appear, unless you understand all of these languages, reading the captions is important to the understanding of the film. Because of this, I believe a lot of the important lines relate to or come from this mute woman.

Sign language is a language that has to be read or engaged one way or another, you can't quite 'overhear' sign language. Because the scenes where the mute woman is a main speaker are mostly in silence, that also makes her lines sink further inside the brain. That being said, I don't think the effect of this is clear — which is not a weakness on the part of the film. I can't quite remember since this film was watched over the course of a couple days, but I believe Kafuku, when trying to get his actors to read the script instead of act it, said that reading text draws out something within you, forming your own emotions about the text.

I mentioned before that the mute woman is one of the acting director's wife, which is a detail of note. In the film, Kafuku is invited to dinner by the director, which is where the wife reveal happens. Something special about the director is that he knows several languages, Korean, English, and Japanese, if I remember correctly. Sign language was learned when he met his wife. I believe there's something rooted in these details, as it pertains to the relationship between Kafuku and his (deceased) wife Oto. The acting director was willing to learn his wife's language, whereas Kafuku wasn't able to fully connect with Oto due to his own beliefs about love.

Whew! Busy week! Although I love to hear myself talk (or type), I don't wanna share everything that happened since it might be too revealling. Anyhow, as a compromise I've been thinking on writing another article. I've had a review of Flip Flappers in the works, but I don't wanna publish that until I rewatch the anime. It wouldn't be fair to review something based on my own memory of it because my memory is shit.

I've also been thinking on writing an article on why I've left most social medias, but I feel like that kind of writing mostly appeals to me, and wouldn't be of interest to other people. Besides, no one actually needs to know why I left. If someone is thinking about leaving, that's the first step, and then they make their own reasons from there.

5/16/2022

Oh my, I saw the funniest thing (to me) and I wish I was able to catch video of it. For context, my tank is mainly full of small bottom feeders, so I feed my fish crushed up algae disks. The shrimp in my tank like it too. Well, I dropped in two little algae bits and one of my crystal shrimp just grabbed a piece and swam away with it. Right now the lil guy is hanging upsidedown on the roots of a floating plant with his prize, little rascal.

5/15/2022

Hmm, okay. The Haribo Berries achieve the 'crunchy chewy' texture by how the candy is structured. The little orbs on the outside of the candy make the 'crunch' (and also make it look like a raspberry!), and those orbs surround the chewy inside. Unfortunately, the candy kinda fails to deliver on both aspects? There's a little crunch, and there's a little chew, not a lot of both.

Thankfully the candy doesn't taste offensive, so I can probably get through this bag with a little bit of time. Wouldn't buy it again though.

Gonna try me some of these lil' bitches on the right. I've been holding off on a pack I bought since I wanted to wait until I finished some other pack of gummies. The time is now, and I'm excited to see what 'crunchy and chewy' tastes like.

Some hours ago on the Flightrising community, I helped someone fine some old-web related stuff. In particular, it had to do with some old website layouts that used to be quite popular. Looking through one of the more promising layout offering sites, it's making me want to build some free layouts, too...

Like, as is, I'm perfectly happy with the way my site is right now, but I don't want my site building journey to be over just yet!! Obviously, the pages in my character directory are my biggest venture into alternative site designs, but that confines me to making layouts only for my characters.

I'll look further into how the whole thing works, but once I do figure it out, I think it could be great. There's just something really good about making something that not only looks great, but works great.

5/10/2022

I've had the 'huntlow' and 'huntceda' ship tags blocked on Tumblr for a while now, but I think I finally can put into words why I dislike both ships. Before I start this ramble, I will say the reasons I dislike these ships aren't objective reasons to stop the ship altogether, I just prefer if they don't pan out.

I am very biased against straight ships, for one, but the specific dynamics I can see being employed for 'huntceda' and 'huntlow' are akin to that of "the one who needs nurturing gets shipped with the nuturing character(s)", of which I dislike. Another personal thing is that I just think Hunter is aro/ace, just can't imagine him being with anybody or being romantically interested in anybody, for now, anyways.

Maybe I should make a seperate category for fandom live-posting. I can't really format my seperate thoughts well enough here.

(Watching Season 2, episode 18 of The Owl House) Damn, Hunter's a mess!

YEAH PRINCIPLE BUMP, GET THEIR ASS

This whole episode was carried by Hunter's missing front teeth (not like the whole episode was bad, I actually really liked it. That whistling moment really did get a chuckle out of me though)

(Watching Season 2, episode 17 of The Owl House) Aw man, I thought Tarok was cool :(

5/09/2022

At this point, I'm convinced that climbing into the filter is a shrimp rite-of-passage.

5/07/2022

What a win! You can now take your Roblox wife to Roblox court to dispute your Roblox divorce.

5/06/2022

I wanna update my 'Not found' page to be more aesthetically appealing, but I am so terribly sleepy right now.

5/05/2022

This site now has a hit counter, so I can see how frequently I'm acting like a Dingus

5/03/2022

I found it strange that a wave of abortion posts came onto my Tumblr dashboard until I learned that Roe v. Wade may be overturned today.

5/02/2022

Clenches fists... I wanna... Get better at drawing buildings... Or rather, I wanna get better at designing them. Anyone can draw some cubes and make it a house, but I want the ability to draw homes (as well as other kinds of buildings, to be honest).

Last night, I made the large (and impuslive) decision to leave the main CoS Discord server. It felt like I had a lot at stake for doing it, but really, there was nothing for me to lose. All I had was my Creature Creator role, which at this point is meaningless. Speaking of which, that was the reason why I left.

I didn't make many creatures as an OCC mainly since most of my eggs are with the wiki, but the actual OCC environment is a part of the situation, too. For context, the process in which creature concepts were made are messy. Until recently, the process of submitting a creature to the game was 1) Draw detailed, fullbody concept, 2) Send that shit into a submission channel and cross your fingers that it gets in. Basically, the whole system ran on unpaid work that didn't even have a guarantee to get in-game. This even isn't to mention the methods by which creators used to be paid.

In order to get paid for your work, you'd have to submit what official concepts (official meaning put into the game) you have and haven't been paid for, and that gets logged by CoS staff. The catch was that the payouts channel was hardly open, and when it was open for posting, it was only for a couple of days (even saying that might be generous, a voice in the back of my mind is saying that it was actually open for just one). If you did not log your concepts in this time, you didn't get paid. In my time of being an OCC on the server, I have never seen a reason as to why this was. I wanted to write that this system didn't effect me too badly since I only had one official concept and I still got paid, but that's setting the bar low. An artist shouldn't wait 1-2 months to get paid for their work, nor should it be their responsibility to remind staff that hey! I did this thing and it hasn't been paid for yet so don't forget to pay meeee!

I feel bad for the people who put more eggs into the OCC thing and had to endure this system while it still was. But 'was' implies that things are different now! Yes, they are different, and from what I've seen they're also better. The payouts channel is open forever, developers are more transparent as to what concepts will be getting into the game, and most importantly, they have scrapped the current system in favor of commissioning specific artists instead. This, especially the last bit, is how it should've been, but I still have my criticisms. The thing is, CoS has been relying on its volunteer-y system for 160 whole creature concepts, 150 if you wanna be generous. CoS has been relying on the shitty version of it's concept submission for too long, and it's the right thing to ditch it, but it's gone on for too long at this point. OCCs have been the lifeblood of CoS, so what will happen to them now?

At this point, it's both clear and unclear what will happen to OCCs (or what they're officially known as now: Recognized Creature Creators, something like this). The need for artists to toss their concepts into a pot and hope they make it out is gone, but it's unclear what the devs will do to thank the (basically volunteer) RCCs for how much they carried the game during this period. The last I saw was the possibility of a creature exclusive to RCCs, but honestly, I don't think that's what we need. It's definitely not something I want since I don't even play CoS that frequently, but I also just think an in-game reward is rather crummy for the work that RCCs have done up to this point. The concepts these artists have done will last outside of CoS, CoS itself does not have a guarantee to last.

... As for my standing within CoS as a whole, I'm not completely gone. I still have the wiki to take care of, but my business as an RCC is over. It is much more impactful for me to leave than it is for me to sit in the server with my dinky RCC rights or whatever, buuuut the Discord still has information I need to keep track of, such as the creature development videos and other updates to the game for the sake of the wiki. For that reason, I'll have an alt floating around, and maybe I'll even set up a notification channel in my own private server so I won't even need the alt (had to make a whole new e-mail for the damn thing...)

5/01/2022

New month, new demons! I should really get to work on that art page that's just been sitting in my menu bar, but the thing is, I have no idea what art I wanna share... augh.