so! been a while.... oops. what a year. anyways
fun things! new job! it's been nice. part of my inactivity has been from that, but also i've just been getting more and more offline in general. i've still been drawing, often before my shifts or during my breaks, and i have some favorites i'd like to share from the past few months. i think i've mentioned that i've been chipping away at making a website and unfortunately "chipping" is still the word, but i've at least gotten more into it again. progress! i'd like to redo my profile again but that's probably not gonna happen for a while
while i've been gone, i've also been kind of branching out. i watched dorohedoro, enjoyed it a lot, and i've been getting back into reading books with the wheel of time. i started the sixth book, lord of chaos, last week and i've gotten into a rhythm of reading during my commute (shoutout to trains) so i tend to move along at a pretty consistent pace. i also beat dmc3 and i'm now working my way through vergil mode (very fun but i miss having a double jump so so bad i never realized how much i used it until it was gone </3), which i guess is kind of branching back in, but i've also been trying to make more time for listening to music. i've had a bad habit of being like "i'm saving this for the perfect moment" and then just never actually playing anything ever, which i'm still trying to kick, but recently i've been listening to both versions of selected scenes from the end of the world by london after midnight. some of my favorites are inamourada and claire's horrors (i like both versions).
ohhhh my god and looking at the timing of my journals actually. bro. last october i got into granblue bc i saw vane in rising and i was like "you know what? i've seen granblue around and i've enjoyed seeing its art whenever i cross paths with it. let me look into it". bro. they get it. they Get It. they have me hook line and sinker. i don't spend money on gacha games just as a general rule and i only really roll when they do the free rolls events but i'm invested in some of my goobers. spoilers for what makes the sky blue: 000
the bit toward the end in the garden with sandalphon and lucifer still gets me when i think about it. cinema :')
i'm also so curious about nectar because i got his water alt (which seems to be after like. everything that had him in it so far) but i missed the story events he's involved in and the side stories that do have him assume you already know his deal. same thing with orologia, they seem really silly and i have them and i love them so much but they haven't rerun "...and you" while i've been playing so far. oh well c'est la vie i guess
in terms of things i'm looking forward to, off came out on steam yesterday and i'm excited to play it with a controller and see what's changed. i'm also playing fire emblem: the sacred stones and hopefully will finally beat it after having started it and then stopped and then picked it back up so many times due to getting swept up in other things. i also am hoping to finally really sit down and Draw draw because the stars have finally aligned to give me a livable temperature to work on my tablet without having a bunch of other things to take care of. so i guess that's it! hopefully i'll get a bit more consistent at posting because i really do like it here, i'm just really bad at keeping up with it
i feel a little bit awkward with how i've ended up posting journals more often than art lately, but i think it's helping me kind of chip away at that "new site" awkwardness i always run into (something i think is even stronger in my cohost which is like a year old now 😭). i've been drawing, but with the heat i haven't really been able to use my tablet, so it's been in my sketchbook. i've been having a lot of fun, and i've been gearing up to really put my colored pencils to work (finally! after having them for years!), but the thing about working in my sketchbook is it's hard to get pictures i'm really satisfied with, and despite the fact that it probably isn't that big of a deal, i'm apprehensive about the image quality, especially contrast, because my pencil lines and my phone's camera seem to be basically mortal enemies. some of the drawings are more personal and not necessarily easy to separate from the things i'm more willing to share, and others are development for things i want to work more on before i show anything about, so i'm also a bit on the fence about how to handle that. there's no rush or obligation to post, but i've been liking my development lately and i do want to share what i've been learning, but i want what i share to maybe have a bit more flair, but i've always kind of struggled with that... i don't know, i think i'm going in circles, let's talk about something else
i beat shadows of valentia this week! it's the first fire emblem i've beaten. i had a good time, but it's also nice to have reached an end point. there's still postgame, but i'm good to leave the game alone for a while on purpose, instead of just kind of incidentally putting the game down and then coming back to it months later like i did earlier on. it is an interesting game. i have some other games in the series i'm planning to get to, but there are other games in general that are more pertinent to me, mainly xenoblade chronicles and (with any luck) devil may cry 3. the amount of just unbridled joy i got from playing that game is unrivaled, but i had to take a break for the sake of my hands and i have missed her every day since </3. i've also been wanting to replay transistor for a while, as well as finally play bastion and pyre. there's also ultrakill, which i tried to play to see how i do on kbm (with my current setup, not very well), and i want to start over with controller to see if i'm able to play more steadily that way... the problem with good video games is there are many of them and i am but one gamer
oh also i've continued messing around with my profile. i recolored the image dustloop uses for anji's 2d to be in his ex k palette bc i love that move and i use that color and kind of themed it around that, but in the event i'm like "hm... you know what i want the azrael colors actually" i am not doing all that again. i'm lazy. ....unless?
growing up, my brother played fighting games sometimes, and i liked to watch because i couldn't really wrap my head around actually playing them myself. outside of smash bros, i also never personally owned any for a very long time. but i always loved the art and the music of pretty much any of them i'd find, the former of which i mainly saw through fighters generation articles on characters i was interested in. for years i'd watch things like compilations of the animation in them or tourney matches, but save for chipping away at some skullgirls tutorials years ago and then falling off, and much later dipping my toes into capcom fighting collection (which i really had bought at launch more in hopes that if it sold well enough, capcom would be like "oh shit people want darkstalkers? alright bet" than out of certainty i'd actually play it earlier this year), i kept just not really playing, only watching and reading....
UNTIL NOW
i have now officially graduated from passive guilty gear observer to active guilty gear participator 🎉 i started playing +r recently and i've been having a lot of fun just kind of messing around and half-winging it, half-consulting dustloop for explanations on details. even though it's older than strive (hell, xx in general is older than me lol), it's new and exciting to me bc i don't know nearly as much about how it works (which isn't the Highest bar to clear since i mostly watch it casually, but still i have way less exposure to +r than it). i'm especially fond of the sound design! like the first time i did ground viper i popped off bc the sound effects for it were so cool. i have a lot of learning to do and sometimes i see a set of inputs and i'm like "maybe i should have started with strive after all" but strive does not go on sale for three dollars on the regular (in fact, +r is actually on sale right now!). it's also very nice to have a game that my computer basically stays cool running
a summary of my +r journey so far (which consists of about two days)
- get excited to finally see the opening that goes with a song i have had on my phone since last year
- bind my controls
- find out my controller, steam, and the game itself apparently disagree on what my buttons actually are?
- basically frolick in the training mode as sol, trying out different colors (previewing them on dustloop first) as i familiarize myself with his inputs and what buttons do what in general
- try arcade
- get the fear of god put into me by potemkin
- remember that ky is a shoto
- find out that ky has way more colors that i enjoy (i've been using reload h mostly for now)
- continue learning
- almost get to the end of arcade mode!
- decide to take a break for my hands
finally got some more decoration going, changed up the like landing page of my profile, and made a specific icon to go with it instead of that dante from early on. it's me! roughly, at least. i still have some things i want to add so i didnt post about it right away, but since it's been a month since my last journal and i just posted art, i figured i'd say a bit about it. speaking of, with the background behind it, it looked really cool as a draft and i think i might try incorporating something like that into my work sometime!
on the backgrounds themselves, i found them on texturetown. i've been wanting to make my own website for a bit and i started chipping away at that by slowly working on learning html and css, guided mainly by the "intro to the web revival" section here so far. that's how i found texturetown, actually. i thought the patterns would look nice here, but i'm not sure if they're maybe a bit much to look at when scrolling or anything. chat, what do we think?
ive been wanting to properly set up my page with a more thought-out palette and some decoration but i prefer doing it on my laptop because i have finer control over things but my current setup is "put my laptop somewhere and probably have to contort uncomfortably to actually use it as a laptop and not either the video game machine or the tablet machine". if not for that i.... well im not gonna say i would have done it bc i know i probably would not right away but i would definitely be closer to it. i have to clear my desk.... but i don't want to