2025-12-02
Now with 500% more web shenanigans, and 25% less actual art
I feel like if you asked me where each month is heading towards in terms of what larger projects or ideas of mine would wind up finished (or at the very least having achieved massive amounts of progress on), this month would've been the bizarre outlier where all the clerical, artistic-adjacent things got tidied up. The biggest focus by far this month was my website, hands down. The second biggest focus was doing some hardcore cramming for an event that was sprung on me that I impulsively decided to do something special for, but you'll have to keep reading for details on that.
If you're wondering why this is late, I had a date with some dinosaurs, but also I've been oddly nauseous the past week, and have been failing to strike the right balance of productivity and relax time
First things first, I'm going to be very slowly (or maybe just in one shot) swapping past, present, and future images from being hosted on external third party sites, and instead hosted here. My habit of using imgbb has its origins in originally writing blogs on SpaceHey, and needing to host my stuff somewhere externally.
I hesitated on doing this here, as while InterServer claims that my bandwidth is "Unlimited", I know for a fact that is not true, unlimited anything is a myth, they just don't want you to be able to see how far you can push a system before they have to push back. This caused me to look into what would actually be the best way to store and share potentially really large images with minimal loss of information, and all the gritty nuances it all comes with.
I remember hearing a couple people joke about .webp as an image format be annoying and pointless at a couple points in time, but could find no solid claim against its use, while plenty of people cited it as being a pretty good way to save on storage space for hosting content on the web. So, here we are, the very first .webp in this blog. I'm going to skim over the really dry details that come with being an artist that tends to draw things in RBG24, all I'd really want one to know is that lossless .webp ≠ lossless conversion from .png to .webp, but that the compression loss when compared to .png to .jpg is worth it
This then presents the awkward question of "alright, most things support .webp, but your site's pretty compatibility-focused, shouldn't there be a fallback ?"
Good question, me. Yes, it's what my mind went to first, and why I intend to have .webp be the attempted default to render for the viewer, but to have the original .png as a fallback. Above is how things will be done going forward, and below is how I used to do things
"Does ANY of this matter whatsoever ?"
I mean... kinda ! It's important to do things right, and think about the optimal paths and methods towards something that's optimized. At least, it's important to me and the quality of work I put out there, and breaking that knowledge down somewhere publicly feels like a good thing. Basically, my blog, I'll talk about the fun quirks of it as I please
Actual art stuff ! ...Kinda. Cursors can be art, right ?
I went trawling through the blogs of other friends (a page that is coming sooner rather than later that showcases some of these, the fabled "CoolZone") to see the cool things they decided to do, and custom cursors was one I'm quite surprised I never even gave a passing thought to, even though I know for a fact I had seen them before.
These cursors aren't final, and it's likely I may redo them completely at some point (that clipping on the upwards cursor's glow is...not great, it'll do), but for the time being, they work. The caret is unlikely to ever see actual use, due to CSS not really defining what is and isn't text in such a way that allows me to utilize it, but I wanted to make one anyway, possibly as a free cursor pack that anyone can use. Didn't really base them off anything, just kinda doodled in a low resolution until things looked good
Custom error pages have been on my to-do list for a while. I'll paraphrase-quote myself from the 29th
"It's like...something fucked up. It doesn't matter to me whose fault it was, you're not supposed to be here. But, "here" is a place, the concept of "here" is always a place, tangible or otherwise. So, why not depict it ? The illusion that art seeps so deeply into a site's existence, that even ripping down the walls just reveals more, and that's fucking fantastic to me, there's so many emotional ideas you can explore with that."
Will I do one for each error page ? I wouldn't exactly throw money down on it, but I'd have to be in a real particular mood to take on something like that. Maybe in the future. Direct links to 404 and 500 respectively
Art ! Real, raw, painfully intricate art that I've had to compress down to cram into 1000x500px. Higher res version available here (reduced from 90.2MB in .png to 3.7MB in .webp)
%20-%20Skyway.webp){kind=link}
An impulsive one-shot drawing, where I was completely and fully possessed by the inextinguishable desire to draw for nearly an entire day straight, a desire to push the peak of my skills further, and have a massive piece to look back on and feel personal pride in, artistic exsanguination.
There's so much I really truly love about this piece, and the plans I have for it as a test piece for future ideas. My process involves a lot of working on the background first, layering colors on top of colors, deliberately erasing instead of masking in areas, duplicating and offsetting layers, smudging the shit out of everything, and getting mileage out of every last goddamn pixel. Lure the viewer in with smaller details that make them want to inspect closer, then bash them over the head with detail and intricacy as they realize the scope of it.
Originally, the sky was intended to be a nighttime sky, but I opted to do something kinda rare, and seek outside perspective from someone else, and they were very much in love with a bright white sky that decimated out some details I had set earlier. Absolutely fine by me, I still have all the working layers saved for alternate versions in the future, or very cool project ideas, who knows...
THE MAIN EVENT
So, last month's post talked a bunch about Team MAIL, my weird war with Shiox25 (different blog post I will do soon-ish), and the significance of mail. While I can't explicitly prove that my passion for mail is what caused the most recent event that took place to be focused around mail, I can spend terrifying amounts of time collecting and cataloging mail I receive for S-S-S.
During the event, I wrote probably close to a triple digit amount of mail, and sent it out into the world, along with hunting down any mail I would see in listings, in the span of a week. This resulted in me receiving 38 pieces of mail from 26 unique save files, which is frankly wild to me that I was able to grab and digitize so much mail in that span of time.
I did not pace myself particularly well on this project, and any screenshots I will show are not the final planned asset, this is just as far as the month took me. Fun things associated with good times shouldn't be worked on under stressful headspaces
The final plans for this board are to light up the outer perimeter, light up the sign showing the event name, possibly have something fun happen on Zubat interact, and create a unique trail for these pieces of mail. Possibly also a sign somewhere that messes with text rendering instead of texture rendering, so I can lock down another solid way of saving on render performance once ingame.
I really hope that more mail-based events happen in the future, as the side by side comparison of "A few months collecting mail" vs "Mail-based event in the span of a week" is kind of incredible, and makes me wonder exactly where the limits are on mail that can be stored in a single world without having abysmal performance. The cool thing about this project actually, is now that we're in December, I can actually end up talking more about it next month, which is good, this one deserves a little more time to cook
Oh by the way, this blog has kinda forced me to confront some tough inefficiencies in my typing speed and style. I don't know what you'd consider standard practice, but my style up until this point has been be using 4-6 fingers at a time, and half-intuiting where keys are, half glancing down and assuming I got the letters right.
Works well for general chatting, and in a rush I can still smash out my usual 80WPM like this, but the more typing I want to do, and kinda have to do, the more and more this style creates this tangible friction I really want to just blast away with proper technique. In school, I routinely learned little, expect for how to exploit systems to still get a good end result. Meant that as an adult, I had to learn how to actually learn, and makes processes like this just...really annoying, something that I wish I could've corrected much earlier. No point in wondering about the past though for something this trivial.
Feel like I'm missing something huge this month, but blanking in the details...
One month left. I've been consumed by a feeling recently of 2025 not being real, given how much surreal stuff has happened in my life that I would've called you insane for claiming will happen, and then likely would've been weirdly spiteful and bitter towards you for being hopeful. But still, I'm here, I'm chasing something I want, and making gigantic strides in the process.
I don't know what the last month will hold, if anything at all. maybe I'll just chill for a whole month, maybe I'll get back into a crazy groove and have a bunch of stuff done. I'm just happy to be here, doing what I do, and learning how to pace myself in the process
🧡