IT’S NOVEMBER.

How the year is just flying by is one thing, but it’s time to review how I went in October with my creative goals and set-up some goals for November.

Review of October goals:

• Resin crafting - dice master logo/imagery designs. I got about 30% through this goal, and that work was almost exclusively during the first few weeks of the month.
• TTWFAGFCC - finish short story. I looked at this project once, then never again.
• Flight Rising - finish dragon bios. Finished this goal literally the first day of October. Really glad it’s done, but man, that early goal finish did not get momentum going for the rest of the month.

I know I’m still gonna be pretty distracted by Sonic x Shadow Generations in November, so not a lot of (new) goals. I’m carrying over the unfinished October goals, but sticking them at the bottom of the priority list. With the holidays fast approaching I’ve gotta prioritise art for that, and I’d like to do some non-logbook blog entries about the media I’m currently consuming too. So, all of the November goals, in order of priority:

• Holiday cards. While I won’t be able to showcase anything until after they’re given out, it would be nice to get these done earlier rather than later. I’d like to one day get art cards done for all my friends months in advance, but I’ve always lacked the planning for that. Maybe I’ll work on changing that.
• Non-logbook logbook entries. Something I struggle with is putting my thoughts into words. It’s something I want to improve. There’s a couple of franchise entries that have recently come out (Sonic x Shadow Generations) or are wrapping up (Godzilla: Skate or Die) in November. I’ve got thoughts about them that I’d like to put into words.
• Resin crafting - dice master logo/imagery designs.
• TTWFAGFCC - finish short story.

03/11/2024

Another week, another no-progress logbook entry. Got the 24h gastro on Monday and wow did that throw my whole week out. I dunno if I’m still tired from that or another busy weekend, likely both, but yeah, not a lot of creative stuff happened. And by ‘not a lot’ I mean none.

And now Sonic x Shadow Generations is out! I’ve started with Sonic and holy shit playing with a HD resolution and no framerate drops is wild. I’m having a blast. So I think that goes without saying but, dunno if next week will have a logbook entry with tangible creative work progress either.

October creative goals updates:

• Resin crafting - dice master logo/imagery designs. Oh no! No updates!
• TTWFAGFCC - finish short story. Oh no! No updates!

28/10/2024

Oh no it’s Sunday.

I dunno where the weekdays went. I know where the weekend went; cleaning! A productive time but not at all a productive creative time.

I mean, honestly, I do know where the weekdays went. My routines have definitely been thrown off by the warmer weather and daylight savings. All through winter I go for a run the moment I get home from work. It’s the only way to fit it in while it’s still light enough to see. Kinda important when I’m running in bushland haha But that’s no longer the way of it and my brain hasn’t clicked into ‘this time between getting home and running is now the spare time we were getting later’ mode yet. Sounds really dumb, but running is definitely my reset after a day of work and I’m not sure what that looks like now. You’d think year after year I’d learn how to make the transitions between AEST and AEDT better but not yet LMAO It’s definitely tanked my productivity besides getting the important life admin stuff done. Which, well, life admin stuff does take time and priority. Less than two weeks ago I finally got a surgery date I’d been waiting on for over a year, and I’ve been in a bit of a frenzy trying to sort out everything for that before it inevitably sneaks up on me way quicker than it has any right to.

So. Yeah. Productive in general but not creative productive. Hopefully this week is the week of some real creative progress!

October creative goals updates:

• Resin crafting - dice master logo/imagery designs. Oh no! No updates!
• TTWFAGFCC - finish short story. Oh no! No updates!

20/10/2024

It’s been a long week. Daylight savings destroyed me.

At the start of October I laid down my creative goals for the month, so let’s check out the updates on the ones still being worked on:

• Resin crafting - dice master logo/imagery designs. I'm dying. It has been incredibly difficult to find the time for this. It really has been five minutes here, five minutes there. Am I happy with the process? Absolutely not, I hate it here. The outcome without a doubt will be ‘it’s done and that’s good enough’. Hoping to have finished it by or over next weekend.
• TTWFAGFCC - finish short story. Haven’t touched this one. Gotta find the proper time to sit down and read it through to know what I’m doing with it.

13/10/2024

Goddamn it’s October already. Did you know there’s less than 90 days left in 2024? Ain’t that haunting.

Site changelog for 30/09-06/10/2024:

• R&D: added a ‘Trophy Case’ section for completed projects, will be interesting to see if anything else ever goes into that haha
• Extraterrestrials:
• Updated the ‘currently…’ box for October
• Got a site navigation section
• Site credits were moved to the site stylesheet page

Last week I laid down my October creative goals, so let’s see how I’m going with those:

• Resin crafting - dice master logo/imagery designs. After a little bit of struggling with brush settings in my old dodgy copy of photoshop I am now fighting my laptop’s lag and my horrendously wobbly hand to get these done. Trying to keep the mindset of any progress is progress but also hoping to have them finished by the next logbook entry.
• TTWFAGFCC - finish short story. I opened the document and got trapped editing the first page. Whoops. I need to just sit down and reread the whole thing and then get to work.
• Flight Rising - finish dragon bios. Finished on 01/10/2024. Incredible that, the lowest thing on the priority list getting finished first. I’m kinda shocked how quickly it happened. I really was just able to sit down and write dragon bios and search a database for items that reflected their characters to make their bios look prettier. I have no idea where I summoned that focus from. With how long it took me to get around to it, and how much it felt like it wasn’t really something I wanted to do but needed to finish just to have it finished, I genuinely thought it was going to be a massive struggle.

06/10/2024

Another week, another logbook entry. Cause I wanna try to keep myself accountable with these. I think writing about what I’ve been up to in the last week is entirely doable. But I’ll guess we’ll see how that goes, consistency is not something I’m good at.

Site changelog for 22-29/09/2024:

• Responsiveness issues fixes - when I launched the overhaul, there were responsiveness issues I hadn't checked for that popped up. Namely I only really checked horizontal responsiveness using a 27” monitor. Turns out, unsurprisingly, that vertical responsiveness is a thing too. Now only the logbook should be not optimal, but at least still functional and not janky, on mobile. Everything else should be responsive and serviceable to all screen sizes.
• Museum overhaul - the code for image thumbnails/modal was originally an edit of Skelizard’s old gallery code, now it’s Lokesh Dhakar’s lightbox. I liked and could’ve continued working with the old one, but Dhakar’s lightbox had inherent responsiveness while what I was using did not. I’m at a point where as much as I enjoy fiddling with code until I get something that works, I’d rather just have the core site code done and working so I can move onto working on other things.
• Museum additions - added rest of art and writing backlog. I decided to only include work from 2024 onwards with art summaries of a few previous years. There’s more that I’ve created, but a lot of my art is rough sketches that I don’t feel are necessary to share and a lot of my writing is character exploration stuff that doesn’t feel like it has a place when the characterisations are outdated or I don’t think the concept of the piece is salvageable so isn’t worth editing. Resin gets the exception cause I've only been doing that since 2022.
• Site stylesheet page - created a page dedicated to the site’s stylesheet. I find it really useful to have this info as a readily available reference, and if it’s on the actual site it’s portable and visual.
• Extraterrestrial page now has a site credits section. I’m considering putting the site credits on the site stylesheet page too and linking to it from somewhere.
• Other minor tweaks to text written on various pages. Typo fixes type stuff.

With the site overhaul completed (that's wild, it's been something going on for two years even if that definitely wasn't solid work), time to move onto other projects, with a deadline of October 25th.

October 25th is awfully specific, what's happening October 25th? Sonic x Shadow Generations releases. I might brainvomit that brainrot another time.

So, the creative goals for October, in order of priority:

• Resin crafting - dice master logo/imagery designs. This is something I've been meaning to do and have had rough sketches for for over a year now. I just need to finalise them digitally. I hate working digitally and have been putting it off, but it's gotta get done.
• TTWFAGFCC - finish short story. There's a link that leads no where on CC’s page for a short story. It's a link that leads no where cause when I wrote that page I figured I'd have that short story completed by the time I finally finished the site’s overhaul. Uh, yeah, that didn't happen. I've still got a lot of redrafting and editing on it to do. I want to finish it so I can move on.
• Flight Rising - finish dragon bios. FR has a big culture for lore for your dragon clan, and I've had scrappy unfinished lore and dragon bios since I started playing it. It looks messy and annoys me and I just want to finish them LOL I'm not active on the site anymore, and when I step away again I'd like it to be a “finished project”. Each bio is really only 100-300 words to give overviews of each dragon's character, so it really shouldn't take too long and will hopefully be a nice way to break up the work being done on other projects. There are 16 in total to do.

It doesn't look like a lot but considering so much of this site's overhaul was done five minutes here, five minutes there when I had a spare five minutes this will likely keep me plenty busy for the month.

29/09/2024

Apparently I started working on this overhaul in 2022. Wow. The reason that I remember wanting to overhaul the site was that it was very, very unresponsive to different screen sizes, clunky and generally not my vibe. I’m no good at layouts and colour schemes, so even getting to the stage it was at was a challenge without taking into account that I’d never used HTML/CSS/Javascript as an adult haha I’m hoping this version of the site is more functional, even though it definitely has massive limitations. I also prefer the colours!

Gotta admit, I didn’t actually go away and learn HTML/CSS/Javascript. I’m still slapping into google what I want to do and copy-pasting then absolutely butchering whatever tutorial or example code comes up. I’m at a point where I don’t think I can do much more unless I actually learn those languages. I’d like to! I’m just not sure if I’m willing to dedicate the time to it. There’s elements of the original version of the site I miss but lack the knowledge to make a more responsive version of. It'd be cool to be able to revisit them once I’ve levelled up one day.

For now, here’s the new site! I’m planning to actually use it this time aha (...as long as I actually start creating more to showcase here, haven’t been doing a lot of that) (I should probably put more art/writing up too aha)

Here's some comparison screenshots of the current (left) and original (right) site:

22/09/2024