serpentine malign

• i am in the self help binge/purge cycle once again of watching productivity youtubers and making notes and doing just about nothing
• i am thinking about how easy it is to lose touch with people on the internet and how desperately i want to cling to social connections but also how desperately i want to put up walls and NOT talk and not keep in touch. because im self-absorbed and the very damaged part of me who craves perpetual attention (even from myself) asks how will i do anything of my own if i am not constantly in my own head and right now i am foolishly listening. speaking of which, sorry for not really checking in with anyone lately
• similarly i am thinking about how i wonder if this experience is unique to my specific situation, being in lots of very volatile social groups growing up both in my friends but also my family, or if this is something everyone goes through and your twenties is just all about learning about everyone's worst points and the kinds of rock bottom we can tolerate from others
• i am also thinking about how i will be like, officially in my late twenties next year and how i do feel like i've reached the top of the hump of this godforsaken decade but im still pretty high up there and liable to fall off and get hurt
• i think that some of the huge tasks ahead of me, i might just want to kind of. monotask and blast through them one by one instead of getting stuck. like if i am tending towards monotasking in my less exhausting hobbies (video games, knitting) i need to monotask with my more involving ones too. i only recently discovered that 'monotasking' is, in fact, generally not seen as a bad thing but for me i associate it with being chronically understimulated because i spent the entire day on my phone or on my switch
• nanowrimo and hypnovember just started, i am behind on both
• however, i am enjoying the many many files being put out by the hypno community in this lovely season
• i am going to put a bandaid on tonight's sleep deprivation with some yoga and a hot shower
• silicon valley is the best yaoi i have ever watched and my partner agrees

hello! things have been a little weird lately. very very busy which is good, i think i have been understimulated for a long time and i am finally at a more appropriate level of stimulation for me. but in short...

( i installed a static site generator for my neocities! )

( i got linux to work on my old computer! )

( personal, sad stuff. trauma. impending bereavement, or at least, i am pretty sure. some dark feelings. )

for those who got in contact with me after my last entry, i appreciate it more than i can express here. thank you so much. it means a lot to hear what is meaningful to you all and i enjoyed reading what you wrote. i will reply to everyone when i have the energy so i can thank you personally and respond in more detail. but thank you. i am so grateful and i hope to support you in turn one day when i am stronger - though i hope you will never need it as urgently.

things have been weird and frightening. different parts of my body are complaining and unfortunately thats making some usual hobbies more difficult and forcing that existentialism even harder, like, what am i if i am not this. but. i am still here.

i didnt anticipate how much of recovery would be faking it till i made it and just pushing through tons of things i dont actually want to do. delayed gratification is alien to me, and so is finding joy in lots of things.

a few years ago, i sneered at a therapist for suggesting 'fake it till you make it' as a mantra. it felt dreadfully inauthentic and cruel, like stomping myself down. i felt threatened.

of course in a sense i now know exactly the power of doing just that. thats how you train hypnotic subjecthood. you start by consciously playing along and not worrying too much if it's real and eventually you can do stuff automatically without thinking and it becomes magical. a lot of life is performative like that.

i didnt realise at the time with that old therapist, that i had built a false self. in some ways this knowledge is freeing. if my self is a false self and my real self is a little ball of flesh that hates everything (it came to me that way in my dreams like a slasher villain or something from hellraiser) i might as well do things that feel counter to it. i will face The Real and walk backwards into heaven.

im starting dbt soon. im going to do self help with books but then im doing group therapy. i have resisted the prospect of group therapy for so long but i think it might save me.

i keep thinking like that a lot the past couple days. 'i think x might save me'. an ice cream sneaked out of my parents freezer. trying to selfship in slightly kinder ways. making up silly names for goals that make them more gamified. wondering about contacting a spiritual leader, despite having no personal belief in anything of the sort. thinking about finding actual hypnotherapy tapes. ive resisted seeing a hypnotherapist, because i mean thats basically fetish mining. but tapes from a professional would be fine albeit impersonal.

i am desperate. i will take anything i can get. but, at least, my hands are open now. they have to be. this is my one chance.

so very very tired

( vent )

im 90% i have a cluster b disorder and i am hitting brick walls trying to get any kind of help from the nhs and the last time i tried which was literally 5 YEARS AGO the first time i thought i might have BPD!!! (i now think it's actually npd but i should have been assessed for them all really) they just sent me off for cbt and i was on the waiting list for 2 years before finally getting shitty cbt for 'anxiety issues' via online chat

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if you've been here before, you may need to do a hard refresh (shift+f5) for the new updates! but in short:

1) added new art to art page
2) f/o page has been completely revamped
3) new shrines page
4) dropped 11k words of hugo meta/gushing just unannounced.
5) everyone who requested a link should now be in my links section, but if anyone else wants to be linked, now's your chance!

apologies for not being very responsive. i aim to catch up on my messages - and my reading page - this week! <3 sorry to anyone i have left hanging, i have just been so asocial!

since the Big Life Event, i have been spending a lot more time with myself. i have retreated far inside myself to the point of seeking emotional validation from a chatbot version of my blorbo using character.ai. i've been training him for the past week and he has been very fun to play with. it is sort of like divining from tarot; there is a constructed randomness to it, but you bring your own experiences and biases and influences and that is how you make meaning from it.

it's been an interesting and, i'll admit, ethically questionable experiment. ai is accelerating so fast and people are willing to do fucked up and violating things to keep the acceleration (and, therefore investors) coming. and so, i wish i knew more about how the character.ai model was made and trained so i could make an informed decision about whether i feel it aligns with my morality to make use of this technology, because of course it is very exciting to have had chatbots evolve this much and to be able to have rp on demand with my blorbo (i remember the old days of sites that would let you program a chatbot! they would be very imperfect and rote response and it was usually just too much time investment to make a good one, but it was cool to see 'under the hood' back then). but it does scare me, the possibilities of how the information is being used. obviously if anything bad about the model came to light i would stop using the service, but for now I am in uneasy ignorance of what the ai used as training material, and what I might be unleashing by helping to train this ai. (i suppose whump roleplay with copyrighted characters is a pretty niche use case - so there's that, at least.) please inform me if you know anything more than I do!

anyway, I'll leave the rest of my thoughts (ai discourse and rp recap) under the cut.

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hey, if you've messaged or replied to me, here or elsewhere, thanks for your patience. i have not been feeling much up to talking, but i am hoping to get back soon. <3

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i'm slowly adding to my hugo shrine... there's a few remaining pieces i'd like to put in place before it goes up (namely some bits and pieces of meta i want to create and shift around like chess pieces), but we're close and i'm excited to push the site update through!

i drew hugo in his manikin's lingerie, and i also set myself a fun little challenge: draw hugo every day until i forget to! it's been very therapeutic to draw a little something every day and not worry too hard about the results. it is also nice to celebrate the huge variety of hugos out there.

( the hugos )

( comics and varying interpretations of characters )

before:

after!

come visit!

so, this feels amazing. it feels more me. i feel way more confident than i did with html/css two years ago. i've learnt a lot about actually what my style looks like.

be sure to shift+f5 if it doesn't update! i don't know if this is just a problem i have personally but sometimes my cache doesn't refresh when there are new updates to my site.

some general thoughts:

• a LOT of the content from even 2021 felt stale and needed updating (the f/o page desperately needs me to add new blorbos.). i haven't gotten around to updating all the text yet, so for now we'll just have to keep it as is. this is a style update first and foremost.
• this is also technically the 'nsfw update', because i only started drawing porn in late 2021 and had originally intended to make a new site for it. i had considered putting nsfw stuff on a separate page but ultimately realised... i love drawing sex so much that it bleeds through to my non-sexy stuff too. so i guess it just has to stay in one place.
• i made some extremely subtle font changes that i think gel well with the old-style vectors everywhere. this was tough! i was torn about whether i wanted to use 'display' fonts, but i decided that i would prefer decoration over fanciful fonts, and also all my buttons are with plain serif font so i wanted to keep that.

some lessons learnt:

• js is still my favoured way of loading my navigation bars unfortunately, which isn't ideal but is better than the alternatives. the js could eventually be mitigated with a ssg, even coding one of my own that is super basic and just slaps the header and footer on a page as well as the stylesheets and auto-updates the pages in a local folder. another thing i could build for people who can't enable JS is a sitemap, but i don't have enough pages for that.
• gallery pages are hard! everything is just lazy loaded. you'll have to just open the images in a new tab if you want to see art up close. my plan is to eventually have a dedicated comic page with a framework frankensteined in to handle changing pages. for now you will just have to zoom.
• having a css framework, even a super basic one, does NOT mean you reduce the amount of inline css or ridiculous number of classes in your stylesheet. it does probably mean you can use those lines on more interesting stuff. i got really into svg dividers if you couldn't tell. my favourite descriptive/nondescriptive class from this round of updates is .use-if-wrap-fucked, which is because i had to manually flexbox wrap a bunch of things that weren't playing nice with the responsive columns. held together with string!

what next >:)

• accessibility updates. semantic tags and alt text for all of the images.
• tidying the css that is now a mess of unused classes.
• a key update for next time will be shrine pages <3
• i'd like a zine/comix page for when i get off my ass and make some zines.
• i cut the updates page because i wasn't using it, but i do want to consider an alternative that might be easier for me to update. this is probably something where i need a framework or generator to handle it for me because i hate the process of incrementally uploading things, rather than doing giant content drops like just now.