Posted: 2026-04-06
Desc: Best one yet
In last month's episode, our intrepid, shark-shaped hero ended the post with the ominous screenshot of Furality's confirmed date. Furality, if unaware, is a VRChat convention that last year, wound up being something I sunk 17 hours a day into working on things for. It was kinda fifty-fifty a mix between "I love when I'm able to get into a flow good enough that I can do marathons like that" and "fuck I'm so out of my depth that I can't afford to waste time"
Now that a whole year has passed, somehow the planned workload and ideas don't feel as cataclysmically suffocating. Now it's more like someone put a pillow on my face, and is only applying mild pressure to it.
How incredibly considerate of this non-existent person
Biggest thing out of the way first, a categorical fuckton of site updates, quite possibly the most it will have in the next year or so.
As it turns out, working on that shader made parsing HTML and CSS feel nowhere near as suffocating as it once did, and from the 3rd to the 11th, my day was reduced almost entirely to wake, code, sleep. Wake, code, sleep. It was maybe a little psychotic, but having a web presence feels very foundational to me, it's how the average person might lurk on what I do, and being able to move through each problem and idea with immediate feedback on what does and doesn't work is...truthfully, addicting.
I also optimized my own site to work on mobile, too. Every accessible page, I wanted to at least look passable if one were to open it on their phone. While I basically never use my phone, I also recognize that no matter how you try to split the statistics up when it comes to "What percentage of devices is even considered a mobile device", the question quickly became irrelevant when I realized that, I'd look fairly silly and hypocritical if I talked a big game about going the extra mile for optimization, yet my own site was not optimized for mobile
A tip that made this so much less of a headache to deal with than it potentially could have become; The hotkey to force a Firefox (or Chrome apparently ?) window to display in a typical mobile aspect ratio is ( Ctrl + Shift + M ).
So, I set out on the tedious (at first) task of going through all pages, and updating their CSS so that again, pure minimum, they didn't look outright broken. Ideally I wanted to have all of them looking great, but I wanted to give myself a strict baseline to adhere to before really trying to push my own design skills far enough to get pages looking acceptable enough to my own excessive standards.
On one hand, the manic rushing I did to get everything at a baseline "decent" level for mobile appearances means that no page was left behind, and everything is functional. On the other, some pages I think could use some touching up at some point in the future, and feel incomplete in that distinct way that trying to do everything yourself kinda forces upon the looks of certain projects.
My focus more and more has been about the compromises needed to have something complete enough for it to serve its function, because overfocusing on getting everything perfect risks burning massive amounts of time on ideas that simply don't pan out. Some ideas deserve perfection, necessitate it because of their very nature. Others, finding compromises is the wise decision, and I think my site is finding a good inbetween presently
(Side note, spell check thinks that should be spelt as "in-between", but it doesn't feel right to me. I often make really insignificant judgement calls on grammar based on what feels right, over what follows the rules best. Adds a bit of distinct spice to my peculiar word sludge)
There's also a new page that, back when I was way more active in gen 4 Pokemon stuff, and was very hyper and passionate about Team MAIL stuff (I still am, but the group's shifted to a quiet period, as life has us all preoccupied, but we will have our time in the sun one day) including a shiny tracker that my...
Is compatriot the right word ? Last paragraph break has me tangled on my vocab now, and I want a word that gives a sense of camaraderie...
...my friend, Key made a long while ago, and I was in awe of. They went through the process of converting it to simple HTML, and I edited it further to use some more modern CSS details along with both of us doing our best to cite past sources on where the icons and layout came from.
I like the idea of having a bunch of other small, miscellaneous pages scattered about this domain for other side projects or passions that I won't feel weird about them potentially collecting dust
I also decided to do a bit of personal writing about the models I've spent the most amount of time working on, because apparently when you spend such a long time deconstructing, reconstructing, and thinking about the small details of a model's design...well, if you're me, you end up mentally writing out a bunch of head lore that typically wouldn't be worth the effort to spend the time and energy writing down.
Difference this time is, to a degree, my reconstructed models have three vectors to them. Self-expression with how others see me, technical practice in how models are made, and as a showcase of my abilities. These can all fuse together in a way that made me feel like writing out a bit of cryptic lore makes sense, and is in fact worth that effort. Here's the page if you don't want to dig around my main site to find it. Eventually I will have more logical navigation buttons across all pages everywhere, but that's a task for future me
There's also another addition to the "Error codes as strange locations drawn by me" series that I guess I'm committed to at this point. It's definitely my favorite of the three thus far, and I wouldn't object to drawing them all one day, regardless of if they'd be printed or not. Just makes me happy to think of this site as a digitally physical place one could explore and exist in for a little while.
Here's the full-res version. I think in the future, I'll likely do these in 4k, then downscale them to 1080 for the site, as I believe all three were done in 1080 because that's what my monitor was last month, RIP my Asus VG248QE from FEBRUARY 2014, you served me well, and I will hopefully revive you from your ashen DisplayPort one day. Now that I'm one of the strange 4k OLED owners, it feels like 4k should be my standard going forward. passive thought for me to digest.
I also guess I like Alienware now. Strange timeline to be in, this shit better not fail on me 3 years later
Around the 12th, I had finally done the last addition that I wanted. "Site preview" using
<meta> tags, the final bow on top of a ton of site adjustments to make the whole thing just...exist better.
In a technical sense, meta tags are for boring shit like SEO, click-through-whatevers, and interslice-margin-profit-attention-metric-thingies. The only thing I cared about was that image preview, that when I sent my site, or a page on my site to someone on something like Discord (or Fluxer...were we supposed to switch to Fluxer ?), they could see a little preview of the page that I set, with custom text I typed out.
Felt like something akin to a deal with the techno-devil, but it was mildly funny to me that per OpenGraph's technical specifications, Twitter still is very much Twitter, and not X. Doubly funny that Facebook became Meta, which I think has nothing to do with them being called meta tags, given OpenGraph has been around since 2010
When I actually got these dumb tags working, and saw the little preview pop up when I sent a link, when I knew how it worked, it all hit me at once.
It...looked real. Looked proper, looked like the kind of thing that a well-established site would have. I did that. I did all of this. I've been at this for...over a year now
%20-%20Sight.webp){kind=link}
Imagine you are climbing an infinitely high tower. Sometimes, you can progress inside, you don't have to deal with scaling the outer walls. Other times, you have to get out on the ledge and be brave enough to climb with your bare hands. You're climbing this tower because you know for a fact that up high enough on one of those floors is something you need to continue to exist, akin to life-saving medicine
This climb can take years, and progress can be glacially slow at times, but every once in a while, there's a floor that's suitable to rest on, to catch your breath and to safely process the breathtaking view below, the visual tracking of your progress this high up. The more you climb and look down over and over, the easier the height is to process visually
%20-%20Ledge.webp){kind=link}
This time though, when you sit on the ledge, and look down to assess how far you've come, having long since conquered a once-starting out fear of heights from doing this for so long...
There's nothing. You can't see where you started from anymore, you've lost the main way to track progress. You're too high up to see the ground anymore, but you're still far away from the reason you started out climbing this tower. You've now lost the main way you were able to process how far you've come, and you still don't know for certain how high up your goal is.
The paralyzing fear suddenly hits you all at once, freezing you in place like the view outside a plane in a rainstorm, crystallizing to your consciousness and creeping into and around your skin. Panic, sheer panic. You can't move...
%20-%20Ice.webp){kind=link}
But, you have no choice. You can't just sit there, frozen and stunned, you've been on this journey for too long to quit. Quitting isn't an option, it wasn't an option you allowed yourself when you started out on this.
So, you breathe. You allow the ice to permeate through you. In the moment, you take a mental note of this feeling, and you make sure you don't forget it. Because, every time you look back down again, you know it'll creep back up, and you know you'll have to be prepared to de-ice it from yourself to continue on. Once the ice has reached maximum saturation of your existence, you begin to thaw it from yourself, allowing the path above you to shine brightly through your ice, and gradually thaw it
This was roughly what I felt upon posting a link to my site on Discord, and seeing that I could set a little embedded preview with a preset color. In the spectrum of shitty, panicked feelings, I fall firmly on the stressed side of the spectrum, with anxiety being a rare feeling. I know precisely what the issues are, and I do my best to alleviate them despite their sheer volume, and the negative feelings they give me, that's stress. Anxiety is the uncontrollable hurricane of dread and long-term doom about short-term fires.
Still, sharks don't like waiting around, they prefer to keep moving. So, I keep climbing through the rest of the month, carrying the jagged crystal shards of frosty paralysis in the back of my mind as a self-reminder to find other ways to reward myself on the climb up, because it is truly cool how far I've come, but I've started to lose my grip on the reality of what I've been able to achieve since the beginning.
But as I climb, I take a moment to deliberately try to relax and do nothing, to variable success. I do have an interesting breakthrough though, one of the last aspects I have yet to conquer
To be a modern day artist that relies on others, a creator whose time and skills can be paid for, requires those "others" to know who the hell you are.
Social media is not my strong suit. I just...didn't grow up with the right pathways tuned to it to really grasp it on an instinctual level that others seem to have, and I think that's fine, that angle I don't think needs to be worked on. But, I do need to become more...known, and that requires exposing myself more socially.
Given my work primarily focuses around 3D, with the superscript attached that I have to think about 3D from a VR angle...well, I've been aware how strange it can appear that, my time working on projects outside of VRChat outnumbers my actual time ingame about 12 to 1. So, I used one of my social skills I can rely on to some consistency, and asked my friends the following...
"Effectively, I am trying to make a squad that can back me up and cut some of the social friction, and act like a buffer between me and the rest of the world, if that makes sense and doesn't sound too strange"
I...was assembling a squad
This is, I think one of the more daunting angles that an aspiring freelance artist has to accept if they wish to be successful, the one that feels as if some are simply born with the ability to socialize.
I argue the opposite, and that for the average person, socializing is akin to drawing. Some get a ton of unrestricted, occasionally encouraged experience very early on, and their skill gets mistaken for talent. Others have to build it up and work on it as an adult, recognizing that for what they want to do, they have to be willing to make mistakes. Willing to push past painful interactions like imperfect sketches that one can see the initial intent of, and improve.
So naturally, I joined a few massive servers where I could slip in to lurk without being noticed, and started collecting info on meetup times, events, and the private postings of other people's projects. I even saw a couple people lamenting that their friends were too busy to be commissioned. Suddenly, that immeasurable peak I was climbing towards didn't feel so immeasurable anymore, and I found myself able to relax
It was at this point that I found myself completely derailing the main focus of these posts, but still felt that this was an important angle to document, just on the slim chance that at some point in the future, I get asked about how I got to wherever I end up, and this specific decision to section out my time for general socializing ends up being an important one.
It also ties into the final major things I worked on. If I was to exist more in VR, then I wanted to bring both my models up to a higher level of quality than where they currently resided. Both Aqua, and Hue
Probably the coolest buzzer-beater finish I managed to pull off before the month was over, was getting both models to have functioning weekday complications that used entirely different techniques. On the left is animating the W offset of a texture that has each day of the week printed on it, so when VRCOSC communicates to VRChat, and my model, it knows what part of the animation to set it to based on what value is returned for VRCOSC/Date/Weekday/Normalised.
The right is much simpler. Technique is the same, animation data translated to a position, but this time I don't have to do any weird UV offset shenanigans, I can animate it near identically to the hands of the watch, and simply rotate a hidden wheel inside the watch so that only the printed date is shown. Also allows me the possible future idea to have an inbetween animation for if you watch it tick over to the next day at midnight...
I'm kinda sequence breaking things at this point, because the second half of the month was a bit of a haze of cleaning up the three major projects I wanted to look decent. S-S-S, AE-CH-AQ-V2, and finally "releasing" AE-CH-HUE-V1. Or at least, making a massive chunk of progress on how I want it to look and behave when I use it.
I've used the Hue model before in the past, as I think visually it seems a lot more approachable than my Aqua model, even if I resonate and identify far more with Aqua, but there's nothing wrong with having different appearances for different occasions. It's all just me in the end.
I still feel like it's somewhat in the "feeling ideas out" phase, and that there's lots that I want to refine, but around the end of the month, I was getting a little more used to troubleshooting models by just sending it, using it live, and seeing what's off, because having an active mistake be witnessed gives me more drive to correct it quicker, especially when it's something small.
The stickers throughout I've had done for a long while, but they were really the only significantly edited part of the base model for me
I also pushed out the officially official 0.2.0 update to my VRChat world, S-S-S, which was months overdue. All about cleaning up loose projects.
I've found that what I tend to enjoy most in worlds, and existing in VR, does in fact create a divide between me and those I know. I really have a lot of emotional value in soaking up the atmosphere and view of a world, feeling like I can exist in a vulnerable state to think, to be. The majority by comparison, seems to put value in being able to fidget, to do things, and an inability to sit still.
Not a critique, I'm also a somewhat fidget-y person, but it's only when I'm working on something, not really when I'm relaxing. It's something to keep in mind when potentially trying to think from other people's perspectives on what they value, as It doesn't seem particularly hard to appeal to both, just that views, ambience, and atmosphere come more naturally to me
I've also had to get in more vector practice than I was expecting, mostly to do with UI for radial menus on models ingame, but also vector art and assets are something I have a slightly elevated passion for, while also being a medium I consistently struggle with, especially when it comes to less being more, and simpler ideas having a bigger impact over passionately throwing everything at a viewer.
Most of it was largely just experimenting and seeing what I liked, what I didn't. Bottom left was an Audiolink toggle icon (I really love whatever motif you call surrounding rounded rectangles around an object, very Super Mario Sunshine-adjacent by pure accident, I want to redo this one even better), top left was the icon for adjusting the hue of a model ingame (for a while, I didn't get why anyone would ever use a conical gradient for anything, but I definitely get it now), right side was to lock ear physbones on my Aqua model (turned out okay), and dead center was a new group logo I wanted to do for Team MAIL (everyone loved it)
Near the end of the month, I found myself hitting such an incredible stride in getting tasks done without needing to step away to avoid burnout, that actually writing about this month fell behind my internal objectives significantly, and I had basically forgotten that in the same month, I worked on my site. This had to be by far the most productive month thus far, and trying to word it all was a somewhat humbling challenge. This month felt...somehow short, but also incredibly long.
Next month is going to be wild, and I'm not quite sure how I'm going to go about documenting it, given a focus on more social skills. Maybe it'll just be me talking about emotions some more, or maybe a ton of technical strides will need to be made, now that I plan to exist more in VR.
Probably the latter, if I were to guess. Above all else though, I feel a lot more in control, a lot less panicked and worn down.
I feel good.
🧡
- Aethena, 2026-04-06