Updates

First of all... oh god it's been a fucking while huh. I didn't even migrate my interests page over to this new layout and at this point I kinda don't know when I will to be honest? Like I am still down with the idea of having a personal website but I haven't really been feeling like a real person for the last couple months so it's hard to really work on anything too personal, I guess. Just don't have much to say or opinions to have, kind of existing and letting things happen to me because it doesn't feel like anything I do really matters.

Anyways I figured like, this month or last month that the Prettier VSCode extension is actually supposed to do what it says it does and I just had to manually enable it for some reason. And oh god going through this site and just hitting save and seeing all the code instantly reorganize into something human readable feels so good. I'm not even having to break this paragraph manually, I'm just hitting save and everything is becoming beautiful on its own.

Wouldn't have that issue in the first place if I stuck with my Eleventy website but that wasn't really working for me, I like being able to have a million different layouts on my site. One of my partners has Eleventy set up to build only their blog and leave the rest of their website artisanal and that looks like a lot of effort but it's also what I'd do if I ever get energy and inspiration and a sense of identity out of nowhere one of these days.

I don't know where to put this but I should probably put it before the next section so I'll put it here: I've been watching show called 3% on Netflix and it's been fun so far, maybe I'll make a new blog post about it soon. That's kind of it.

Worldbuilding Project

Anyways what this blog post was originally about before I started saying all that was that I'm working on a website for it! This is where I'd put the logo if I had more than just placeholder images but I don't for reasons I'll elaborate further ahead probably, so here's an h3 with link and a pitch.

I've written more about it on the about page over there but it's gonna be mostly a writing project that'll eventually spawn some short stories and/or VNs in the future, hopefully. I made the actual Neocities account like yesterday so I'm still under the "2 updates 1 week" anti spam thing so I'll maybe post updates about it using this site. Speaking of did you know Neocities makes you do an HTML tutorial now? I think it's cute but I did wish I could skip it. Anyways.

I've been working at it for like a month maybe but I wasn't really sure when I had enough content to actually upload it out in the open. I still don't feel like I have enough content to upload it, I'm mostly doing this so I can share it with people easily instead of having to send over Google Docs or HTML files or god forbid fucking PDFs because apparently some phones don't let you open HTML files.

There's a lot of placeholders, I'm still not set on what tagging system I'm gonna use and there's at least two essential pages missing, but I do like where it's at right now! It feels like it's not a lot because there's technically not that many articles but when I scroll through them they do feel kind of meaty. And hey, none of this stuff is final, I'll be updating and touching pretty much everything for a long time.

It might get kind of annoying to read if you really like a specific part of the lore and it gets revamped, maybe? That's one of my fears publishing it this early on, I don't want people to become invested in something that might change entirely in the future. But I do think I've got a hang on the vibes by now. I've defined the core concepts and themes and all the changes I make are still going to follow those, so hopefully any changes I make will be changes people still enjoy.

Can you tell how hard I've been trying to avoid the word content? I hope that comes through because I refuse to call my stuff content.

Anyways here ends the cool part of the post, you can go click on the link up there and have fun and tell me what you think! If you want to! I have more to write but it's kind of a vent and might make me sound spiteful so if you feel like reading something like that might sour your perception of me or my project then you can close this tab and go back to enjoying your day. I hope it is a beautiful one. It's pretty cloudy here today, I thought it was gonna rain so I didn't go outside, but I hope you can. Going outside is good for you. Okay bye.

Vent? I guess?

It's never good to start with that attitude but I don't really know if it'll gain much traction or if I'll stay motivated for long enough to turn it into something cool. I think once I actually write stories instead of just worldbuilding it's all gonna click but for now it's still kind of abstract feeling.

It's always been hard to get original work out there but more so now that most people's views on what original work is worth checking out are "semi-professional-grade youtube animation" or "indie game but not like indie indie games I mean like stuff that looks like it should be worth more than twenty bucks" or "D&D webcomic".

Even then it's all visual media. It feels like writing is especially hard to get picked up. I do not know how to draw, don't have the money to comission people, feel like the scum of the earth when I ask people to make free art for me and I would rather die than use AI. There are some spaces where writing is like properly appreciated but those are like, fanfiction spaces which doesn't apply here. I think people do post original works on Ao3 actually? But I don't really wanna touch that site ever again so I'm still out of luck.

I've been trying WorldAnvil because they have like writing prompts to help you get the juices flowing and those are like decent if you have an empty head like me but oh my god WorldAnvil is such a shitass website. There's so many ads and most of them aren't even like, actual ads, they're ads for you to buy their subscriptions plans. It used to be just when I went idle but now that fucking 50% off summer sale whatever the fuck banner just blocks the whole screen while you're writing AND sometimes it's like timed so you can't skip right away. And when it is skippable the close button is so tiny and blends with most of the backgrounds on that fucking site oh my god I hate it so bad never ever trust any youtube sponsors jesus christ.

I didn't even know WorldAnvil had like a community/social media aspect to it until I made an account and I was excited for like a microsecond before I saw how it's set up. Basically you get an amount of Anvil Coins (oh my fucking god why are we living in this world) per day based on your subscription tier. You need 500 to make your posts actually show up on the global feed and if you have a free account you get one per day..

So yeah maybe in two years you will see Our Earthly Stars on the global feed if WorldAnvil doesn't crash and burn or gets cancelled for something like all youtube sponsors do. I'd joke about them leaking my worldbuilding to Facebook like the BetterHelp thing but the Facebook Container extension flagged their email field in the registration form so lol lmao.

Also it is pretty much D&D focused. Like they have these different presets that are like "ohhhh only one of these is for gamemasters and the rest is for authors and players and normal people too I guess" but you can still smell it. You can know. And I mean, from what I've been gathering as of late most worldbuilding is done either for D&D or for novels so it's not unwarranted I guess? But I personally think D&D is a blight upon the earth and I am not writing a novel so I'd rather have my own website with my own features instead.

I watched a video recently that talked about that, it was one of those "how to start worldbuilding" type videos that aren't worth much if you've already watching one of them because it's the same general advice everyone gives. But he said something to the effect of (heavily paraphrased and misremembered):

"I don't like the advice to avoid getting worldbuilder's disease (what people call when you keep worldbuilding instead of actually writing your novel) because it implies worldbuilding only has value if it is attached to a novel. Some people don't wanna write novels."

And that was pretty cool. The rest of the video wasn't all that notable but I like that this guy has original thoughts. Maybe I'll watch the rest of the playlist or something.

Okay that's it this section is already so fucking long and I have no more hate in my heart. It is time to become a beautiful lotus flower. And you can to, if you scroll up there to the worldbuilding section and click the link and enjoy my rabbits. And always salt your pasta while boiling.