Onus

My family and I watched both the Ring (the American adaption ) and the Ring 0 (Japanese) last night. We meant to watch the original in Japanese, and then the American adaption, but we ended up throwing on the Japanese prequel by mistake, and just sort of decided to roll with it. They were both really good movies, although Ring 0 was more visually restrained in a way I think I preferred (and the male lead had superior hair.) I'm still interested in watching the original Ring, if only to see how it differs. 

I did something I had been planning for a long time - Namely, the beginning of the end of my tenure on Neocities. I've got the index page of my new host set up with a .org address, and will probably migrate all my files over the next couple of days. After that, all that should be left is pulling out of the webring I'm in, and walking away. 

As for why I would do this, the answer is a couple of things: I grew to dislike the community of Neocities, who seem to spend a lot of time on discord and seem to be weirdly focused on clout chasing, of all things. Why someone would ever think a personal website could win them any level of acclaim in 2025 is confusing, to say the least, and the expectation that I involve myself in modern social media...to escape modern social media is annoying. I really don't like discord.

After thinking further about it, I honestly decided I disliked all the social and sharing aspects of Neocities, too, from its like4like and follow2follow culture, its microblogging twitter-clone thingy (which was such a source of grief for the admin he had to hard limit the number of posts you could makes there per-day), and the latest updates page. My website is mostly for me, so having to worry about what my "followers" would think if I did something goofy with it - like push a partly written article or do a live tweak of something small, like a gradient color  was not helping me enjoy my site. 

It's also run by exactly one guy, and while Kyle Drake genuinely doesn't seem to be a bad dude, there is no guarantee, so far as I know as to what might happen if something goes wrong on his end - a financial crises, a personal issue, something, that might lead him to consider decommissioning the site. It just being him can also make moderation a tad capricious, though I confess that's something I've heard more through others than by personal experience.

The final reason is probably the simplest of all: I just kind of wanted something more. At first, I was planning to go full steam ahead into shoving my shitty website into a  no-kidding VPS, but after a long time of thinking about it, opted for regular, next-order webhosting instead. No weird subculture to navigate, better analytics, and more independence, if only by virtue of being a very small fish in a much larger pond. I may put in an RSS feed or something, but so far as increasing my sites "viability" or "popularity" or what have you, I have no interest at all. 

Neocites was good to me for a long time, and I'm not exactly moving with any grand hurry. If you ever want to see what its like to have your very own website, it's a great place to give it a shot, especially with its free hosting plan. 

A lot of people also recommend  Nekoweb, which I haven't tried but is supposed to be very similar. Teacake and leopard are supposed to be very beginner-friendly as well. 

Thinking of website stuff, I actually have a few more sketches, as well as some writing I need to upload when I get the chance. 

I put up the tweaked version of my fandom homepage, today, as well as a new version of the page I keep my main fanfic, Where You Belong on. I'd copy the format and make that my new short-stories page, too, but I want a couple of days to think about whether I should mess with the colors to make it more distinct, or just leave it as-is. 

Thinking of Where you Belong, I more or less put it to the side for the last week or so, in favor of drafting out a couple of short stories,( which is why a new short stories page for my website was on my mind in the first place). I'm in that spot where I know what I want to do with the chapter, but can't quite work up the gumption to sit down and do it for any length of time. 

Rather than torture myself for not being fast enough, I've decided putting it to the side for at least a little while is not the worst. 

Overall, I'm happier with the new versions of my web pages - They both look a lot more cohesive with how I've designed the rest of my Danny Phantom themed stuff, though they probably could still use some tweaking. Purple and green together are natural eye-burners, but the bright yellow-lime I have on my Danny Phantom homepage in particular could probably stand to be slightly less noxious than it currently is.

I want to make sure my font is readily visible against whatever background I'm using, but dimming that color down is going on my list of planned alterations once I get in the mood to play with gradients and sliders once again. 

I'm probably going to finish up that second short story tonight, and then after that, I don't know. I'm sort of caught between reading, drawing, and just fooling around with one of my browser games with what free time I have left. 

It's tentative, but I'm thinking about devoting my time between work and sleep next week to finally finishing that one Jack and Vlad essay I've been bellyaching about. The darn thing has given me a bit of a case of creative constipation, and if I finally get that done, perhaps it will be a little easier to pursued myself to move on to something else. 

I had one of those powerfully surreal dreams that involved a burning house at the edge of a long road running across a landscape that was both incredibly flat, yet massive in scale. I wanted to use the road to get somewhere, but had to turn back because the fire had gotten that section of road shut down. Somehow, this was happening after I had investigated a cabin where a child had died and I had to hold a water  bottle that was drugged so powerfully, just touching it caused you to hallucinate. My father was getting a massage at the same time. This cabin was located at one end of the road I ended up driving down, I think I wanted to tell someone about it?

I had a different dream a few nights ago that involved fishing live power cords out of a swimming pool, also enormously big - I remember I couldn't see the far edge when I tried to look across it, it just vanished somewhere off into the sunny horizon. Not the worst pair of dreams I've had by a long shot, but the monumentality of the spaces, paired with the need to handle things I knew were dangerous seem to present a theme.

Maybe I feel nervous about my inability to predict the future. I'm not sure.  

So my plan was to finally get around to talking about Maggio, since I got completely distracted with Bloom and the book's connection with Kipling, but I am currently under a heated blanket and a little too cozy for putting in any deep thoughts about books right now. Honestly, I also want to find out if something goes horribly wrong for Warden and his amour, Mrs. Holmes (Dana Holmes, her husband, is his boss) in this chapter or not. I've been anticipating it for a while, and as crazy and probably a functional alcoholic as Milt Warden is, I kind of hope he ruins Dana Holmes's whole day. Aside from his blatant policies of favoritism and the fact that he gave his wife Gonorrhea, he also thinks the best way for a modern man to rule is through suppression and fear. He thinks this because someone smarter and far more terrifying told him so, and he liked the idea. 

Yeah, pity this in a time before divorce was fairly easy and not socially consequential. Dana's a prick, and his first Sargent giving his wife better than he ever did (and then some) is entirely deserved. I'm sort of hoping Milt destroys his life completely, somehow, before it's all through. 

I'm still working on my flower in my sketchbook, and frankly, this it turning into another one of those sketches that's actually a finished work, that just happens to live in my sketchbook. It's another one that combines ink and acrylics, and I'm still really digging the look. I could've had it done already if I'd come back to work on it after I got home, but my wrist wasn't really up for that. I love my crow quill, but I need to find a slightly nicer handle for it, I think. Or maybe just one of those squidgy grips stuck on its existing handle. Yeah, I think I have one of those running around, actually.

Once the flower's done, I might put it in my finished section rather than my sketchbook, supposing I don't accidentally mess it up. 

I got my new fountain pen in today, a hongdian black forest fountain pen, which was very kindly recommended to me by someone whose fanfiction I read, Drakonis, who knows a lot about the hobby. Even with my wrist talking to me, I couldn't resist trying it out, and just at first blush, I'm quite happy. It came in black, my favorite color, and the slightly heavier weight of it it, I guess with the metal body, feels very nice to hold. My other fountain pen was surprisingly easy on my hands, and this one is, too - it's the lack of pressure needed to write, I think - and overall is a definite upgrade from my speedball, which is not actually that bad, price considering, it just wasn't quite what I had learned I wanted. 

All my fan-sketchpages are still uploaded and ready to go up on my website, and I still need to make the pages for them. I think probably I'll either get that done sometime this week, or, more likely, the weekend. It takes a few hours and is just fiddly enough that me trying to do it after a full shift is a good way to do something goofy and accidentally leave it up for the entire world to see.

I said a while ago that I thought this latest chapter of Where you Belong would be eleven to twelve pages, but after having gotten back on the old (hobby) horse, I'm thinking it's going to be more like  thirteen to fourteen, which is still reasonable so long as I don't think about how that's probably ~ 6500 words of text in its rawest form. I tend to blather a lot in my writing, and since this is my roughest draft, I just kind of let it be. A big part of revising for me is mostly just cutting things out. 

This arc is actually going to have two parts, I think. The first is Valerie being forced into an undead slice of life episode where she's going to make at least one small child cry, and the other is going to be more action-y, touching on something I've already brought up, but not in detail: A portal run. In fandom, a lot of people use portals for crossover stuff, but I've always felt they were under explored just as a way to explore just how crazy "life" can get. 

In my personal headcannon, anything that is pulled out of an alternate universe continues to operate based on its progenitor space's rules, and since those rules are infinitely varied, things can get pretty wild. I don't know what kind of things I want to throw at them, but I've been playing with a few ideas:

1. A universe that is actually one thing, its apparent separateness is an illusion brought on by the viewer's inability to perceive the correct number of dimensions. It responds to anything that tries to remove a part of itself with violence and hate. 
2. A post-apocalyptic society, where everything living has died, an artificial intelligence deliberately upkeeps the species home planet as though everyone is about to return home. It sings itself to sleep with the sounds of everything that once was. 
3. A society of meat lego people, interchangeable body-parts, right down to the personality and the brain, are regularly swapped out on the basis of buy, sell, or trade. The flesh is mutable and so is your soul. 
4. A place where arachnids evolved to be the dominate species. They communicate through giant, vibrating strings that span across the stars.

I really don't know, I haven't done the details that far out yet. What I am pretty sure of is that I want it to tie back into or at least echo the main theme: Belonging and not belonging, where you are Vs. where you want to be. 

Personally, I think I lack the technical skill to really pull such a large, complex story off - I think I have something like 20 - 30K written in roughs, on top of what I already have published, and if I had to guess the total length of the fic, it would be somewhere in the 200/k range, with three to four distinct arcs. On the same hand, I have to get better somehow, and if there's anywhere to write an overly ambitious OC-ridden epic, as based on a show from the early 2000s, fanfiction is the place to go. 

I really, really want to start revising and releasing chapters at this arc's halfway point rather than when its fully complete, but I'm still not sure if giving into temptation is a good idea or not.

I had labor day off yesterday, which was unexpectedly nice. I ended up checking on my work, just in case, though. I've never been quite able to get over the paranoia of accidentally getting myself in trouble by missing a day, somehow.

I used the free time to hit up my local antique mall, which I quite enjoyed, and almost convinced myself to pick up a couple of books before remembering how many I had at home that I was yet to finish. The Maltese Falcon still needs its last few chapters polished off, and I need to get back into From Here to Eternity on top of that. It took over 400 pages, but Prewitt's finally going to jail. Supposedly some of the stuff that's set to occur there is based off things the author really saw, and I've been doing my best to avoid spoilers, so I'm curious about how it's going to go.

I'm trying something new for my fanfiction writing - getting up about thirty minuets earlier than I otherwise would, and just using that time between getting up and getting ready to sit down at my typewriter and have at it as best I can. I'm not a fan of getting up early, but I can't seem to establish a good routine for writing late at night. I really feel if I can nail down a habit, and do it in a time and place where I won't self-foil from avoidance, I'll finally start really making headway on finishing this arc. 

I'm getting way ahead of myself to even think about it, but I want the next arc to be a large scale portal run, where Valerie and a bunch of yetis dive into another world and raid it for money. Technically, it's more like arc two-and-a-half, but I don't think I'll be able to hold back on posting that long. That 2024 last post date kills me a little harder every month. 

I've also started experimenting with loose-leaf paper, my fountain pen, and playing with bits and pieces of the story in non-linear order, sort of writing down dialogue and  scenes I really want to happen without fussing so much about linearity. I'm an intensely linear person, so this is pretty different for me, but it is fun to play around with my pen. 

I do wish I would stop blowing through my capsules so fast. I need to either grab a syringe to refill them, or knuckle down and purchase a different pen that uses a siphon rather than capsules. My current pen, being a speedball, is too small for a converter, or so the internet tells me.

On a related note of trying to get more done by loosening up, I'm fairly close to finishing my next webpage, which should be dedicated to unfinished and sketchbook-y artwork. The hard part, truly, is just uploading my stuff, which I actually have a fair amount of. Once  I finish its dedicated page, I'll probably need a day just to load up my backlog into the site. 

There's Some Danny Phantom themed sketches in there, too, which need to be stuck in my fandom page, now that I think about it.

Today is the first day of my vacation. I leave tomorrow, and don't really need the extra day to pack, so I've pretty much have the day to myself. 

I don't really plan on bringing my acrylics and ink with me, on the basis that they are bundlesome to carry and turn into horrifying messes when inadequately packed, which I worry about constantly, so maybe I could work on some of my real-media art for one last day. 

My typewriter is likewise unpackable. I don't know it's exact weight, but I'd ballpark it as somewhere in the range of thirty to fourty pounds. spending the rest of my day hammering away at as much of my rough draft as I can would be appealing. I've got page ten halfway done, and could probably manage to finish page eleven, maybe even twelve before my focus gives out.

I'll see how it turns out.

In terms of what I plan to do while on vacation, I have hopes to bring some of my hard copy drafts with me, specifically, the next chapter of Where You Belong and that one Tucker-centric oneshot I don't have a name for, yet.It would be nice if I could get one published, and the other into its first digital draft. 

Truth be told, I had really wanted to finish all of what I'm calling "the small town arc" before publishing more of WYB, which is why there's been such a long delay between my last publishing date and now, despite my having written over three chapters ahead in first drafts.

While I did (and do) have an outline, enough always changed between my summarized plans and what I ended up writing that I always felt like I was trying to catch up to myself when I was publishing chapter by chapter. Focusing on having several chapters, real chapters, with dialogue and description and all that jazz, drafted out, even when they're horrible, mis-spelled abominations that I hammered out at 2:00AM, just seems to work a lot better for me. 

On the other hand, man, I feel bad for not uploading in so long, and given this is my one week a year where I have the free time to do it, I'm seriously considering just knuckling down and polishing chapter eight until I'm willing to let other people see it. 

Aside from that, I have no particular plans. Art may or may not happen, and I'll probably keep posting here, if only because I'm deliberately trying to make it both routine and easy. 

But man, I wish I could bring my typewriter. It's just so heavy.

Well, it's been a while. Fell off the study wagon a bit ago, and I'm still trying to pick things up.

I haven't quite formulated a plan yet, but didn't want this account to just keep lying fallow, either.

May post some pictures here in a bit