Cloudy, 28 Degrees12/17/2024, 2:02am Cloudy, 28 Degrees
impressive - i've managed to go over a full year without updating my blog.
time to work on something like a website doesn't come easily when you're a full-time college student, and to be perfectly honest, i got knocked off my rhythm of maintaining the entire site after a pretty rough patch in my real life. i'm happy to say that things have been better, and i'm sad to say they've also been worse - these are both reasons why i've thrown myself into it lately. i'm not going to give you an entire year in review, because that's unneccessary, and also i don't want to. past three months or so i can do, though.
keen-eyed viewers, regular-eyed viewers, and anyone who is an occasional noticer of events is aware that i've completely overhauled pretty much everything about this website, including its name and URL. "webheaven" has become "webforest(s)," the clunky geocities-inspired rainbow sparkly space theme has been replaced with green. the newly-made FAQ page went into this, but if you haven't seen that and you're wondering about the huge renovation - it mostly just comes down to my personal tastes, getting older, and wanting to be more true to myself. rainbow sparkly pokemon stuff is great, (really!) but i didn't feel like webheaven reflected who i am as a person now, which made me uninspired and unmotivated to work on it. to be honest, i don't think it fully reflected who i was then, either. i was leaning harder into nostalgia than into things that really deeply appealed to me. nothing wrong with nostalgia, but a personal site ought to appeal to your own tastes first and foremost, right? that's what i think, anyways.
i feel like it's not just my site that's changed, though. neocities and the general personal-site circle of the internet feels like it's changed a lot since i was last here. people are spreading out to different hosts like nekoweb and leprd, which i think is great. i'm glad this hobby has gotten big enough that there's multiple places for multiple kinds of people. the sites i see on the front page are totally different fron the sites i'd see pop up even just a few months ago. i've had a lot of fun exploring people's sites again. everyone is so interesting and brings their own unique vision to the table - it's a breath of fresh air and i missed being a part of it.
in addition to just generally being busy with school, i've been dealing with a slew of real life issues. i couldn't find employment, i found employment, and then promptly lost that employment. i need to start looking for more serious and long-term employment now that i'm graduating next year. there's nothing to do but do it, but i'm stressing about how much work i can really find with a comics degree. i'm getting older, bitterer, and generally not fond of or optimistic about mankind - which is to say i'm becoming my father. i've griped about that to his face, and he finds my misery amusing. i have little desire to do art, to engage in my hobbies, to be with my friends, or to take care of my basic needs. most days, i feel tired and mopey at best, and miserable and paranoid at worst. i regularly enter sob-inducing spirals about the end of the world and the bleakness of existence. "that sounds like-" yeah yeah, winner winner chicken dinner, those are textbook symptoms of depression. it's why i'm in therapy. therapy isn't a magic pill, i know it's something you have to stick with and work hard at, and i haven't been actively treated for very long - but i'm tired. a lot of the time, i feel unfixable.
at the end of the day, though, what can i do but keep going? it's not acceptable to just lay down and refuse to try. it's not fair to the people around me - or to myself - if i throw in the towel and deem myself too broken to change. i've known people who have done this and i've seen them wield it as an excuse to be cruel and uncaring to the world around them. i've been through worse, and will probably be through worse again. i know i have to believe that there is a light at the end of the tunnel, even when it sometimes it feels unfeasible.
despite all the hardships, my life is not devoid of joy. in october, my partner and i had our two year anniversary. we are the mushiest, most oopy-goopy, disgustingly sweet couple i know of. i love them very dearly and they've remained a pillar of support throughout my life. here's to many more years. i've gotten into flight rising again - i played it a lot as a child and had a lot of fun with it. i don't remember my username or password, so i guess rest in peace all those extremely expensive almost 10-year old dragons. i think it's more fun to start anew. everyone's obsessed with first-generation dragons now, and i think it's so odd. i finished one of the hardest semesters of my life and got straight As. i'll be sure to wipe my tears with the dean's list letter. christmas is coming up, and i'm excited for that, despite my perpetual wintertime misery. i've been weaning myself off of social media because it's definitely not helping my mental state - this will probably pay off, eventually.
my dear friend robin upgraded to a new computer, and let me have the old one. when she gave it away, i was under the impression that what i would be getting was an old broken-down laptop i could harvest for parts. i'm not sure where this assumption stemmed from - maybe the fact that my computer of choice is an old broken-down laptop. (it's better than anything else on the market, i swear, i swear!) anyways it wasn't it was actually a perfectly functional gaming PC that she gave to me for free. when the truth came to light, i felt terrible, and wanted to do something in return. she requested a large box of cheez-its. so i got a gaming PC for a box of cheez-its. the only thing that it was missing was a computer monitor - which i already had. i also got that for free by making a pngtuber for my friend's boyfriend. sometimes the sidequests pay off. it's been great to play games on a functional computer instead of tormenting my poor school-issued laptop. it was very very kind of her to let me have that.
i've gone and written this whole big blog post, but it's not actually going to be readable until i open up the website again. i didn't want to break the whole website while it was still public, so as of writing this, it's still got a "come back later" graphic on the index and little else. i'm not sure when it'll get opened up again - i want to revamp just a few more important pages and draw a nice graphic for the index itself, but hopefully sometime before the year ends? that would be nice.
that's all i've got to say. if you've made it to the end, then thank you for being curious enough to check in. i never know who reads these blogs - and that's kind of the fun of it, right? whether it's twenty of you or none of you, thanks for checking things out.