...And then at the very last second, I had a near-miss with potential power going out. We had a storm, we had previously lost power for a week, so I instantly panic-sleeped my computer. Oh well. I made it now tho! Anyway, will be late for bed for work tomorrow, so hey, may as well be making a blog.

I've had an incredibly productive weekend. Did waste some time on TFT and League, but still made good progress in minecraft, and, notably: actually finished my art project!!!

I finished my new profile picture/avatar for twitter, twitch, discord, and youtube!

This is an image that is me.
It's an artistic depiction of me, taken from a selfie of me.
I wanted to art-ify that selfie, but have it retain the realism of the selfie.
And then I wanted it to identify who I am.
​The lesbian hair, because I am a lesbian.
The transgender shirt, because I am trans.
The gay mask/necklace because I do be gay and they are easily recognizable as such.
The hazel eyes because that's my eye color.
The plurality necklace is, as far as I can tell, the plurality pride flag for a median system, which is what we are.
And then we have the nametag to show our name, Bree (short for Brianna Danielle Lewis), with our pronouns she/her. And it's the autistic pride flag because we are autistic.
​The second necklace (as well as subtle colors throughout) has our blue, our red, our yellow, our white, and our black in it, the colors of the five groups in our brain.

It's an image that is just...it's me.
It can't fit literally everything, obv. No bipolar disorder, no anxiety disorder, no ADHD (this one I kinda wish we could fit in).

But it is a perfect encapsulation of most of who I am, in a single image, that allows people at just a glance to tell who I am, what's important about me, and is essentially a visual way to instantly tell what I am.

So.

It's me.

And I love it.

Artistically it is the best thing I have ever drawn. Which means it advertises my talents, too.

It's just.

​It's everything I was hoping to make.

There's little imperfections. But it is as good as I can do.

​And I am happy with my work.

I don't really have anything on mind in particular. Lots of random things, need to brush teeth, need to shave, have a change in work schedule, am working a shift tomorrow as a sub that I thought I was going to work originally so it's no change anyway, haven't gamed today, probably just a bunch of random stuff.

Doing better mentally overall, but not resting as much as I should on a Saturday, maybe.

I guess I'll risk mentioning that I am working on a new profile picture for my twitch, twitter, and discord. I've become a little more cations ever since learning that there's art thieves going around trying to claim credit for the ideas of others by literally completing their art before they finish it and such, but like.

I'll risk it. Nobody reads my blog, anyway. So like. By the time an art thief would come along to try, I'll have presumably long-since finished it. Or, they'll try to steal from the unfinished product too soon and later my version has radical differences proving mine came first. Or whatever.

My point is, it's probably safe to share this.

The thing I wanted to comment on is the mask. The mask. Because WHOAH. The MASK.

Do you see how good it is????

Like--the shading's not perfect, I'm not quite sure how to fine-tune it but realize I might need to adjust it to be better. So that part, could use some adjusting.

But the rest of the mask is just...like...WHOAH. It's so good!

Do you know how hard it is for me as an artist to be proud of my art???

I'm proud of that mask! It's SO good. Like, the more I look at it the better it looks. It looks EXACTLY like the genuine article does. So I nailed it.

Still got a ton of work to do, mind you. Gotta do what I did for the mask, to the collar.
Gotta do what I did to the mask and will do to the collar, to the shirt.
Gotta add in the skin.
Gotta add in the hair.
Gotta work on details.

But like.

I already have done a huge thing with that mask and it is good.

Like--I like the eyes. Hazel eyes are notoriously difficult to draw, having a mixture of gray, green, blue, brown, and gold in them, with the exact color changing in the light. (And yes, I'm quite certain it's those five, we've seen all five in our lifetime under different lighting.) Trying to capture that in art is notoriously difficult.

But like--while I really like the eyes and I feel like we nailed it, my perfectionist self-doubting self may fine-tune them some more later.

The mask?
The lighting/shadows, maybe. But beyond that, it's just...it's perfect. And I love it.

Mostly "no thoughts head empty" but also, family is over for family night, massively distracting, and my head is just...

...I've had thoughts but I don't know any of them right now, not really.

I had a thought right now that I might get around to, but let's review today accomplishment-wise. We did a fair amount of progress on art. We did a youtube upload of a vod and scheduled some extra ones. (Not the amount we wanted to tho. We wanted to schedule a full week.)

So like, given that this is a short day for us, that's pretty good, to be honest. It's not as much as we want, we didn't get to watch the latest paranormal detour video outside the premiere (we watched the entirety of the premiere live, but because it was live, we missed a few details here and there that we need to watch the video to catch), we didn't finish the collar on our drawing, 

But we're happy with the day overall.

It's a good day. Not great. But good.

I did have a thought earlier tho, that I feel I should express.

"You will be alone, you will be by yourself, you will not have another, you will not obtain fame, you will not obtain fortune, none of those things are in your future--and you need to be okay with that."

Not exactly the wording used, but it was not a negative. The message was more like. A prevention of the negative. A need for acceptance. A need for acknowledging the bad in us, but also, that the dreams we have are just dreams, that realistically speaking, we won't obtain them and we need to be okay with not having obtained them.

​I got the vibe it wasn't a doomsaying of "don't try". That it wasn't saying to give up altogether. But more like, that I need to be okay when trying doesn't amount to much. There's nothing wrong with the failure. I will never obtain those things, and need to be okay with that, but not trying to obtain them would still be a mistake, if that makes sense?

I suppose my go-to way to describe it would be the ending of Socrates Jones: Pro Philosopher. (Note: we received an on-the-nose tarot/oracle as typing this which was genuinely the "embrace the flow of life" card, so like: it was genuinely 100% on the nose reaffirming we're right here. But, I digress.)
Basically at the end of that game, it more or less says, "there is no definition of morality, but the search for one is still worth pursuing", essentially. (Need to replay the game to remember it more specifically.)

In this context, it's the same basic idea.
No, I'm not going to get any of the things that I want.
But I need to be okay with that.
And then still try for them anyway.
Because the attempt to do so is something worth living for.

I'm not sure if I'm wording that well. I have the concept in my head and I know the concept in my head is right, but finding the words for it isn't easy. It's a message of acceptance and being okay, of being realistic but also idealistic. (Just got another tarot/oracle card reading confirming that I am on the right track, dealing with effectively: "do it anyway".)

Basically: I need to not expect to succeed. I need to not think I will. I need to know that I likely will fail, and be okay with it. To have peace with the failure, acceptance of it. The realism part of that. But that I should remain idealistic. Not get delusions of success, but rather, my idealism is more in keeping to try in spite of knowing there will be a high chance of failure.

If I don't try at all, success is a guaranteed 0%. But I need to be okay with knowing that my dreams of success aren't going to magically manifest. They need work and even with that work they almost definitely won't work out. It's a reading that is telling me that I need to keep going, but with an acceptance of myself.

​I am flawed. I am going to not succeed. I have issues. I won't manage to amount to much of anything. And this is okay. This is acceptable. I know what I am doing is right. I know that my mindset is headed in the right direction. I need to remember this, moving forward. What I wrote today. Because it's so easy to cave in.
​It's easy to get lost in the delusions of the future, which makes actually manifesting the future nearly impossible, as well as increasing disappointment when it doesn't. It's easy to get lost in despair of having not accomplished things and feeling like you never will. It's so easy to become lost and get overwhelmed by the pain.

I need to remember what I had revealed to me tonight. It's a lesson I've taught myself before, but I couldn't hold onto it. I need to have it stick this time. A shift in mindset and approach that sticks. I am okay with living the life of mediocrity and loneliness.

Well, no. Not really. I'm not okay with it, but I am okay with it, and need to be okay with it.

Emotionally, I am not okay with it. How could I not feel the pain of isolation and loneliness? How could I not feel crushed by my own failures to manifest my dreams? The emotional sting of knowing I am the only one to blame for my shortcomings is one that I can't freely discard. Emotions are emotions, feelings are not things that you can rationally discard.

In that sense, I am not okay with it.

But rationally, I am, and I need to keep that mindstate. To calm my emotions. To reassure my emotions that it's okay. I'm okay. And I am. I am okay with being on my own. I am okay with my ideas dieing with me. I am okay with never having the company of others in a more direct way. I am okay with never achieving my dreams of being a teacher, a mother, an influencer, a writer, a content creator. Those are things I am unlikely to ever obtain, and I need to be okay with this.

And, largely, I am. I just need to remember that I am, and that I'm okay. I'm no great beacon. I need to be okay with being who I am. Now, I do need to take caution. I should not fall into apathy. I should not be careless. I should not be reckless. If I am too okay with who I am, I'll end up progressively becoming a worse and worse person. Some checks/balances are needed in order to ensure that I don't become despicable without having noticed.

It's easy to lose sight of important things, so I can't forget who I am. Which is why I need to strive to be better. I need to keep doing what I do, in the aim for being better. To keep doing what I do, in the hopes of achieving what I want to. Keep doing what I do, in order to strive for the dream. But to be able to accept I won't reach the ideal.

Betterment is a process where I may never get any better. I may end up exactly the way I am now, and I need to accept that, and be okay with that. That 20 years from now I may be precisely where I am right now. Alone and without having succeeded. But I should still try anyway, because the trying helps stop me from being worse.

I need to accept who I am, and accept who I become, and accept I won't be who I want to be. But still try to be who I want to be.

I hope that makes sense. It's not a bad thing. I'd say it's actually a good thing.
​I just need to hold onto it.

OBWe've got very little to show for today.
No game progress in any game. Not Stardew Valley, not Dreamlight Valley, not any grinding in Epic Battle Fantasy 5 or Final Fantasy VII, not doing anything in Chrono Trigger, not building anything in minecraft, having no win in League of Legends, negative LP progress on TFT...nothing to show for today.

We've been going back and forth on whether to stream tonight or not, and it looks like the final answer is going to be "no", in part because we're not really sure what we would stream. We don't have a strong drive. We should work on our story. Or if nothing else, work on the art for our new profile picture. Or if even that's too much, minecraft. Maybe even just playing tft. Anything.

Well we're not gonna do that.

We did do a reorganization of our discord servers we're in to be more neat/organized, but we didn't do the title fairy thing we wanted to do, nor have we typed out the things we think would be healthy to type out in our journal. (Today we did learn a funny/interesting fact tho: apparently the real-life journals we used to write? The ones where we never wrote anything important until the second, third, or even fourth page? ...Apparently, that thing we thought was just an us thing, is not just an us thing, and a bunch of people did it.)

And for that matter, we haven't actually copied that journal into a google doc.

Nor have we worked on any other story idea.

We did write down some things for the art project, and hey, after this blog, maybe we'll manage to squeeze in some work on it (I wouldn't count on it--in fact I'd explicitly bet against it), but we didn't actually work on it today.

Speaking of today, work was interesting, and we felt fairly competent at working. There's just one problem: we didn't work out at all. We felt like we were shutting down. We felt forced into eating a full meal because we were developing really bad hand tremors, as well as losing vision from lightheadedness. It sucked to give up on that. We didn't run (not that we're really doing running anyway--2 minutes is only 1/5th of a mile), we didn't work out, we did nothing physically.

Nor did we do anything hygiene-wise. No shower, no brushing teeth, we're letting ourselves rot and decay at an alarmingly fast rate.

All in all, not a lot to show for today, but not nothing.

​That said, I suppose we DO have more time to talk about why we are so determined to live for at least a year longer.

Now, obviously: we intend to live forever.
There's never going to be enough time in our lives. So we would love to have an infinite amount of it.
The world might have certain parts of it actively trying to revert dozens (or even hundreds) of years' worth of progress, but OVERALL, it's still objectively true that the world becomes overall a better place to live over time. Comparing now to 50 years ago, I would always choose to live now rather than 50 years ago. And that is 90+% likely to be true 50 years from now. 50 years from now is over 90% likely to be a better time than right now is. So I want to be there for that better time. I never want to be gone when the world keeps making so many advancements and progress.

​OBVIOUSLY, that's not actually scientifically possible. We can't actually live forever. We intend to! But realistically speaking, science simply isn't advanced enough to allow for that to happen. The closest we could ever get is becoming a ghost after death. (Which, granted, is near-guaranteed to happen. Our family isn't going to bury us under our preferred name of Brianna "Bree" Danielle Lewis. And since the people we know online won't know we're gone, that's not one but TWO compelling reasons for not moving on. Can't move on if not at rest/peace and being buried under the wrong name guarantees that; can't move on with lingering attachments and not having been able to say goodbye to online communities and let them know would be another. BUT I DIGRESS.)

We still feel it's worth striving to live forever, but when we inevitably don't, we're hoping to have lasted at least 80 years if nothing else. To live a long, full life that experienced as much of the world's progress as was humanly possible, to have shared as much of our ideas as we could, to have brought as much of the next generations up as possible, guiding and mentoring them as a voice with lifetimes' worth of experience.

That's not too unreasonable to ask. Genetically it should be possible, since my family on at least one side tends to live to their 90s or higher.

However, as much as we want to live forever, or at the very least live for a very long healthy happy time of 80+ years:
Realistically speaking, with our lifestyle and genetics, there's a very high chance we die before then.

We have an hour-long drive one-way to work every single work day, and this commute is largely on highways, including a highway that is one of the most dangerous in the state. We also often don't get nearly enough sleep. Combine these two, and all it'd take is one drifting-off-too-long instance for disaster to strike. It almost happened to us once before (January 2014), it could happen again literally any time we get behind the wheel which is twice daily per work day adding up to over 10 times per week we risk death.

It doesn't matter if you dodge the bullet 999/1000 times. It only takes one bullet landing to be lethal.
Same concept for driving. Every day, there is that risk. It only takes one manifestation of that risk to end my life for good. There would be precious little I could do to prevent it. One momentary lapse, one momentary blacking out, one momentary zoned out, where I drift too far off into dreamland, where I get too sleepy to keep active track of my, well...tracks, and BAM! A likely lethal crash.

​I apologize for the morbidness of this, but this is, sadly, the grim truth. Every time I drive it has a chance to be the last time I do anything, because of where I am driving and how exhausted I get especially behind the wheel, alarmingly enough. (Yes we're trying to get the necessary amount of sleep, but even if we succeed, that doesn't guarantee a lack of exhaustion. The whole, "we can be tired with 4 hours or 14 or anywhere in-between" issue.)

​So, there's a fairly high chance we die behind the wheel, or in the aftermath of such an event at the very least. We don't want to. We would never deliberately do so. Obviously, we want to live. We don't want to die. We don't want to crash. We want to live forever, or at least 80 years, so a car crash is not the way we want to go out. But being realistic: we are not gods. We are not reality warpers. We don't have infinite luck. We are not invincible. It only takes one unlucky day for us to die, it only takes one bad day for us to get killed. Not because we wanted it, but because of sheer happenstance being against us in the most disastrous way possible.

​Is it an inevitability? Well, no. Most people spend their entire lives driving without dieing from it. Statistically speaking, it doesn't happen often. It happens to the smallest fraction of drivers. But I am at a higher risk of being one of said casualties thanks to the length of the commute, roads on the commute, and my mental cognitive functions while driving being inconsistent in dangerous ways.

So most won't die from a car crash--yet, it's still a genuine hazard for me.

Even if a car crash doesn't get me, what probably will is cancer. My family has a long, long history of cancer on both sides of the family pretty sure, and I have dozens of brown spots on my body. Yes, dozens. Most of them quite large, but with plenty of small ones too. I did a count once and I am fairly certain the number is above 40, putting me at basically the highest risk of getting skin cancer.

Cancers of various kinds run in the family, but I am young enough that I don't really get screened for cancer. While I get medical visits, those visits come only once every few months and are for things entirely unrelated to general health, so it's quite likely that if I got cancer, it wouldn't be diagnosed until it was too late.

I'm willing to bet between car crashes and cancer that one of the two is going to be what claims my life. Obviously, I will fight tooth and nail to prevent either from happening. We're not gonna let it happen. We're not gonna let ourselves die. We are going to fight to the bitter end, biting and swinging. We have zero plans to let this early demise manifest and every intention to manifest the world where we live forever (or at least for a very long time).

We strive for life, we push for life, we want to live and will fight to do so. But heroic willpower only goes so far to fight off instant killers or slow deaths. The truth is that no matter what our mind says, if we actually were to be stricken by one of those two, we wouldn't be able to survive indefinitely the way we promise we would. It sounds grim, it sounds glum, it sounds pessimistic and cynical, but it's a sad truth:
We are not immortal, no matter how much we see ourselves as being so. If we have something lethal happen to us, we will die from it.

So we have to try our utmost to avoid letting that happen.

In part because we've got such strong reasons to live.

Part of it is the aforementioned "the world is awesome" aspect--the world is awesome and while it certainly may not seem that way from the 2018-onwards era, objectively OVERALL it does, in fact, become a better place to live in. No matter how much the lowlifes of society try to regress it, progress HAS marched on, slowly, gradually, bit by bit becoming more dominant.

The human race as a whole is sick and tired of the white Christian cisgendered heterosexual patriarchy born from Imperialism + Colonialism dominating the world and whitewashing/erasing/etc. things that should never have been forgotten. I know it seems like the patriarchy is winning now with how much they have managed to roll back and revert--but they are fighting a battle I firmly believe they WILL lose.

I get the value in naysayers and doomsayers warning about just how bad the rollbacks to rights are--and they're not wrong. Without constant vigilance to bigotry, that hatred will take root and have a platform to take over. But I am not so hopeless/cynical/jaded as to think they have already won. No, they are a minority in society trying to pass themselves off as being the majority. The actual majority can, and will, win out in the end, as long as we are able to keep pushing forward bit by bit to make the progress the world has made.

I'm not going to pretend the risk isn't there. It is, it's very much real. If we're not careful, then bigotry WILL win and the world will become overall well and truly worse and worse. Nor am I really qualified to talk more in-depth about this. But I firmly believe that, overall, the world IS trying to change for the better. It's two steps forward, one step back, but we can do it.

And I want to be there not only to help, but see the results.

This is one reason to want to live. Just to experience the growth of the world, and to see the future unfold in the present to build a better world. I want to live to see that happen.

But there's more.

I want to live to get my ideas out into the world. The longer I live, the more time I have to do so.
I want to live to help as many people as I can in my life. The longer I live, the more people I help.
I want to live to have the best most enriched most fulfilling life possible for a transwoman, maybe even living to see (and test) medical breakthroughs in the field.

​But in the more immediate future.

I want to live because the world does not yet as a whole know that I am a girl.
Everyone online does.
I have come out to everyone in real life and am living daily as a girl.

But the world as a whole doesn't know--those who know me online don't know me offline, and those who know me offline are, largely, not truly accepting of me being a girl. They love me, they tolerate me, but they don't truly accept me, understand me, respect me, etc. Not as a girl, at least.

I'm like 90+% sure my extended family has no idea that I am a girl. My grandmother sends gendered gifts to our family each Christmas. In spite of being out for over half a year last Christmas, I received the 'male' gift rather than the female gift. Which tells me that me being a girl was not conveyed to my extended family.

​Fortunately, my younger sister's wedding is next year, and my extended family is invited.

Yes, I have other reasons for wanting to live until then.
My younger sister is family and I love her.
My younger sister is the only family member who has truly accepted me and respects me as a girl, helping me, aiding me, supporting me, every step of the way. Correctly naming me, etc. She has put in the time and effort to be everything family should be for a girl like me who had to come out.

The rest of my family, to varying degrees...ahhh, hasn't. I don't want to be too harsh on them because I love my family, but the best descriptor I have for most of my family (barring my younger sister) is, "I love them, but I don't really like them, and I expect this is probably mutual".

There is genuine love for my family, and I know they genuinely love me; the proof is in their actions in spite of their beliefs. But they are deeply flawed in their treatment of me, and I am a pretty lousy person who is high in upkeep even without being a girl. They have genuine reasons to not really want to think fondly of me, and that's aside from them not truly accepting that I am a girl.

So I don't want to be overly harsh on them. I love them, after all, and part of that love is not wanting to badmouth them. Still, it's a fact that they don't call me by my name consistently (my mother does it to me when my father isn't around and if she remembers to; my younger sister always does. But the rest, they do not); they don't call me by my name when I'm not around even if my father/brother aren't around (I've heard my mother and older sister use my deadname when they were alone), so like: they don't really see me as Bree.

Not really.

I don't want to hold it against them. I don't want to be overly harsh and criticize them too much. I'll say for the sake of clarity that I have talked to them about this, so it's not me airing out thoughts in my blog that I never did to them. I told them what the damage of refusing to use a name for me at all is (deliberately using a neutral term when you KNOW the preferred term is still misgendering--if you know someone is a she/her, deliberately using they/them is considered malicious misgendering, as an example), so it's not that they don't know. They do.

It's just that my younger sister is the only one who has done what someone should​ do for family coming out and actually listened to the requests, wishes, etc. of the family member coming out in full, rather than just in part. But this description sounds too harsh on them. I don't want to paint them in worse light than is true.

​They do make some efforts. It's just that I've told them what efforts they should be making beyond those, and it's still only 'some', except from my younger sister who makes all the efforts. I don't want to hold it against my family, because they clearly love me and they did put at least some work in. Yet, it's factually true that it's not the amount of work they should put in, and also factually true that I told them this.

They are not in the dark about what I want, what I would prefer, etc. I have let them known. I have made my thoughts clear. I have tried my best to educate them, to inform them, to give them the resources necessary for them to understand. But I can't make them listen to me, I can't make them listen to my requests. And I can't blame them for not doing so.

After all, I have plenty of demands unrelated to my gender. (Largely from neurodivergencies like my autism, but that's beside the point.) I understand them seeing all of the demands and feeling it's unreasonable to live up to everything I ask of them.

They love me so they do what they feel is appropriate for that love. I can't realistically expect more, so I don't want to be harsh on them.

But my younger sister, she has already done what she should, and did accept me from the onset.

​I want to pay that back by supporting her at her wedding, to be there for her as her family.

And there's more.

My extended family will be at the wedding. Not all of them. But not none of them. And some of them is all it takes. Some of them, seeing me there, as a girl, is all it takes. Me being a girl has not been conveyed to my extended family, pretty sure. (I mean since the wedding's not until next year, we have this Christmas to test my theory again, but I'm not optimistic at anything changing from last year.)

All it will take for them to see, and be forced to acknowledge, me as a girl...is for them to be there, and me to be there.

Since the wedding is next year, that means I need to live until next year at absolute minimum.

It's my desire to manifest this into reality.
I want to live forever so bad that I don't want to ever have the plug pulled from me. If I'm braindead and my heart has failed, I don't want them to cut life support on me. I don't care if there's no brain function; I don't care if my heart has stopped; I don't care if the doctors say there's a 0% chance that I will survive, that the doctors say I have died.

SOMEHOW, I would find a way to live, if given the medical assistance to do so. This is, sadly, likely never going to be relevant because whenever I do inevitably lose consciousness for the last time, the doctors won't have access to my will that I am stating now, they won't know that I have zero intention of letting them let me die. That I intend to find a way, no matter how clinically/medically impossible, to pull through the impossible situation and actually live.

The doctors will give up on me far before I do, and if my family is there, they'll likely let the doctors pull the plug on me--against my will, mind you. My will to live is so strong that even with no brain function, even with no heart beating, if I was kept medically going in spite of having no signs of life, I would find a way to eventually fight back to life. Flatlined heart/brain won't stop me.

The doctors will certainly believe that it will--that I would be dead dead, a corpse, a goner, that I was gone, the moment that there is both a lack of heart/brain function. But I know that if given sufficient time, I would be able to recover. All it'd take is them not pulling the plug on me.

My will to live is that strong.

Because I want to live forever.

And even if I don't live forever--
I need to live for that event, if nothing else.

The wedding needs to be something I attend.

After that, I'll still have plenty of reasons to live, mind you.
But that is the most pressing.
I need people to know that I am a girl.
I need to live.

​I just have to.

Always with too little to show for the day.

Today I didn't do everything I intended for Disney Dreamlight Valley, did absolutely no League, and did absolutely no TFT.
I didn't write, nor did I do minecraft in spite of receiving four hours' worth of inspiration from watching someone incredibly talented and entertaining who had genius ideas.

I have a need to do League and Disney Dreamlight Valley off-stream, but a need to do Teamfight Tactics, Minecraft, and Writing onstream.

With my new shift, I need to do day streams on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays, as well as night streams on Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, as well as continuing my Sunday streams.

Right now, having Worlds going on interferes with that--either I watch worlds or I stream; I can't do both because that would get me banned. So I have to pick and choose, and Worlds gives loot drops; streaming...doesn't. (Not unless it's TFT I guess.)

Butstill. I need to get into that.

I have more ideas for emotes, and I know I can make them. I know they would be good.
I have ideas for channel points rewards and icons and such.
I have ideas for stream stuff.

I just need to push through and get it.

Yet, I also have done a lot of wasting time.

And I also need to take care of my hygiene. I'm still not brushing my teeth in spite of having seen the consequences of that. (I'm due for five fillings--which puts me out nearly $750. An expense I very much did not want to pay.) I reek, from having not showered in weeks, maybe even a month, maybe longer. (I've attempted showers, but they were botched. None were properly done.)

There's so much I need to do.

And yet so little time for it.

I need to keep up my workouts, too.

All in all.

I'm busy.

And that doesn't even cover going over my blogs and porting them over to the wix mirror/backup blog.
I'm doing a good job of posting each entry twice, once on weebly and once on wix, but the old entries I've only done the one day worth of work, nothing more.

So I've got all these things in need of being done.

And not actually having done them.

Heck, I need to work on getting past streams up on Youtube.

And making a pinned Socials tab is something I wanted to do on twitter ever since Monday (well, much before that, but on Monday I told myself I'd actually do it--haha yeah right adhd brain, like you could really pull that off).

​All of the things I need to do, just aren't getting done.

Last night I had a dream which, after the fact, I struggled to stabilize into a story, but eventually, I managed to have it solidify into something resembling a webcomic-worthy tale.

Basically, in a Resident Evil like world (one of the three main characters is, loosely, based on Wesker, albeit with a different backstory, with him looking similar and even having tentacle powers), there was a team working at this universe's equivalent of Umbrella Corporation.

The young protagonist is a 21-year-old intern, still in college, but seen by people as being incredibly dumb. He's incredibly clumsy and while he means well, he constantly makes mistake after mistake after mistake. And it's not just bumping into things he shouldn't, it's also in him having ideas that end up leading to unforeseen bad consequences.

He's in a team with a 26-year-old redheaded female scientist (yes, with green eyes, with her hair being kept in a ponytail as being fairly short but still warranting being like that), who has been with the corporation on the team since she graduated college, which was a slight while ago but not a long while ago. She's the official assistant. (Although later she becomes far more action-oriented.)

They are in service to a veteran scientist. When he was younger, he was a field agent, being just hired muscle that was smart enough to work on the scene with highly sensitive material of all types. He was genetically modified prior to this, and during his fieldwork, infected with an experimental virus. He survived, most did not. The corporation bribed him to keep this a secret by basically making him an executive of the company. Not the highest ranking, but high up the chain of command.

So with this position, he retired from fieldwork and began to work in the lab, convinced that he could achieve the dream of immortality for himself, and potentially, the world (but he admits that the latter is an afterthought). He's 55 but appears to be about 32, in peak physical condition, because his aging has been greatly slowed. He can survive in many conditions, including the vacuum of space.

One day, the young protagonist makes a coffee that he believes the scientist will like, laced with some nanites that would, in theory, be harmless if they didn't work but if they worked could help the scientist. This was done with extensive work on his part, where he thought it was a genius idea.

When he accidentally broke the glass, the coffee with the nanites managed to splash into a vial with a genetically engineered virus--and the two combined. The team was blamed for this, made public enemies and fled. They were not realistically able to claim they weren't, either. The scientist was up to no good, the intern wouldn't be able to prove lack of malice, and the assistant was just loyal to the scientist.

Basically, it's not like the big bad corporation was framing innocent people. They had their hands dirty and knew what they were doing was shady-at-best. So they become hunted by the public for causing an outbreak of a plague that mutates humans into monsters, a semi-intelligent living growing disease. It doesn't cause an apocalypse because it's not the first outbreak to have happened, but it does periodically cause local outbreaks at random that kill plenty, mutate others, and require constant vigilance and specialized task forces to put down.

Having caused the worst outbreak in recorded history, the trio fled to an underground railway as their first base. (It's later revealed that the scientist also brought along an AI with them, this AI program is not exactly benevolent but she is still loyal to the scientist which makes her benevolent to the protagonists.)

They build this base up considerably and make good use of it, but the protagonist/intern eventually messes things up by accidentally triggering an alarm that would alert those looking for them to their exact location. Desperate, they have only one escape avenue: a teleporter not meant to transport living people, which transports them to a space station that is an abandoned weapons satellite.

The scientist, however, had come prepared, having injected the two others with nanites that would allow for the transportation to be successful, and also upon arrival, allow for them to have a form of artificial gravity. The station, being in space, has no gravity, but the floor is a specialized magnetic field, which all the items on the space station are attracted to with the approximate force of gravity, so items have the same weight they'd have on earth in effect.

And with those nanites in them, that allows for the protagonists to have weight in a weightless environment.

With the assistance of the AI, the protagonists are able to retrofit the satellite from something that is a single compartment not designed for humans to be on (it's literally basically just the internal parts with spare parts, effectively a small storehouse of bits and pieces), into a proper space station, with rooms, a dining hall, and work stations.

This is accomplished through harnessing a ton of energy and stored matter to make what amounts to effectively an advanced 3-D printer of sorts, where they rearrange matter from one form into another and recycle everything, to create food, water, air, and the materials needed to expand the station.

The webcomic details this journey but also displays the issues they run into. The scientist basically sets his two companions to work on effectively a crash-course of advanced scientific concepts neither was really familiar with. The assistant only had a bachelor's degree and the intern didn't even have that, and they were launched into forcefully learning things that even those with a PhD would struggle with.

Which, essentially, forced them to get smart, and be creative in troubleshooting. Lots of issues crop up, and at times, the protagonists need to leave the station and go back to earth, where their presence even for that short time stirs up a great amount of trouble and solidifies the view of the public that they are, essentially, supervillains.

The issues include needing to save the ai, running out of material, irreparable damage to something power-related, and later-on after the assistant has a daughter, saving that daughter who was born with nanites that began to rapidly age her. (They save her when she is physically around 10, stabilizing her.)

The concept is two parts resident evil, one part supervillain story, and one part sci-fi slice of life, covering both bio-engineered things and advanced technological things.

It's a bit of a complex thing, but the idea formed and I like it.

Will never make it, mind you. I will never have the time for every project I want to make, and this one is near the bottom of the barrel priorities-wise.

But I like it and it's worthy of being made. It's worth making, so I'm sad I won't be able to.

Ah well.

At least I blogged about the basics behind it.

​(Also, half an hour late to leave......)

Well, to explain: I actually had work today. Instantly, that means that the day is automatically more productive from an adulting perspective than a normal Saturday is (since those are normally my day off).

So, that being there is something that I spent productive time on.

​Of course, subjectively, not productive since it's not furthering any of my goals aside from "continued employment" (which, to be fair, is a good goal to have, it's just not really a goal as I think of goals being).

I had a streamer who normally doesn't stream today but who I try to catch every stream of, streaming today which ate up 80% of the day. This is not really productive, but since I watch them every Tuesday Thursday Friday and Sunday, catching (most of) their stream and doing what I normally do there, was worth it overall.

That streamer played Stardew Valley and it was mentioned about "have you 100%ed it yet", and I haven't, but I know the two things I need to do: fishing and mining. (Mostly, monster-slaying.)

I'm still working on Stardew Valley farm stuff. I want to reorganize my things so that every single item I'm stacking multiple of has their own chest (maybe multiple) in a logical location, and that things I'm not stacking but are related, are grouped as well. I also want more farm animals, to max out my barns.

Beyond that, I want to optimize the beach farm, to make it be as space-efficient as possible, matching the efficiency of the greenhouse.

But mostly?

Mostly, I've done everything I want to. Wife and kid maintenance needs to be done daily, but I've completed basically everything else, and achieved everything I set out to do, pretty much. (I might have a golden walnut or two not found, but I'll check that next time I do a save file check.)

So I figured, "yaknow what, why don't we start progressing the two things I haven't?", so...I did exactly that! I caught 2/5 of the base legendary fish. In one day.

It's not complete, obv, but it's progress at least!

So, like.

Productivity-wise, not much done, but it wasn't nothing!

Today was also the 1-year anniversary of my having come out as a girl in real life to my family.

It had some fanfare to the occasion, but was mostly, not noteworthy. That's kinda disappointing, I admit. It was something that to me, is a very big deal, but like...there's no festivities to it.

I was trying to celebrate it with an art piece, but...

...This was meant to be just the background.

It was meant to have a complete drawing of me in it, with text having my name in it, too.

I started at the beginning of the month.

I barely got this much done.

So like.

I didn't get the fanfare done myself, so the lack of fanfare is mostly my own fault.

Ah well, it is what it is.

It's a huge event to me, but there's more to celebrate than just today, there will be future celebrations as long as I live.

I'm literally doing nothing with it.

The stars are aligning for me to have creativity.

So with everything going my way in terms of scheduling, I should be able to make something of it, right?

Right?

...As it turns out, no.

I couldn't figure out what I wanted to stream today, so I didn't stream, in spite of promising that I would stream. I've gathered a lot more attention to myself in the last couple of months, so if I got back into streaming, there's a fairly high chance I'd have people actually show up, which would get me to my goals.

But to get to those goals I'd need to actually stream, and I didn't.

I even opened XSplit to stream.
I didn't stream tho.

I have wanted to write a twitter thread or blog post about why my handle on twitter is, in contrast to where it is everywhere else (rBree2), why my handle there is The_Descended. And how I have had the inspiration to work a lot on that. (Speaking of which, mental reminder to myself to not forget about the rules of ghost procreation and Aria's brother's true middle/last name and Aria's true middle/last name and how I did the math wrong on Aria's age.)

I have the idea to work on the characters page and the art there, and I know I can do it.

I just need to actually do it.

I've wanted to work more on the Civ 3 mod, but never have made the time for it.

I've wanted to beat the Time Devourer in Chrono Trigger, and even told myself I'd do that today. I didn't.

I've wanted to continue the grind in FFVII. I didn't.

I have a bunch of blogs that I want to make, and my notes keep on piling up.

From yesterday, we've got an RPG game that combines from at least nine different sources. (Dungeons & Dragons all, Adventure Quest + Dragon Fable classes/monsters, MARDEK RPG all parts, Epic Battle Fantasy all 5, Majesty 1/2 Heroes/Items/Monsters, Gauntlet Dark Legacy characters/items, SaGa 1/2/3 all, Chrono Trigger all, Final Fantasy all.)

I've got notes for The Descended, and a lot on Davos specifically.

Today I had something to do with plurality that I want to vent about.

I've got a mafia article to finish writing.

I've got a mafia game to finish designing.

I've got a Team Fortress 2esque Wild West game idea to talk about.
I've got a Demonic Possession J-RPG game idea to talk about.

I've got to record/make twitter posts that I have had for months.

I've got an ambitious story idea ideally told in manga form about a Sci-Fi/Fantasy setting where it's basically a Fantasy setting set in the far future where it's effectively Star Wars, but more fantasy, with magic instead of the force and Paladins instead of Jedi and Death Knights instead of Sith and Light Blades instead of Lightsabers.

I've got an ambitious world idea which combines aspects of Marvel, DC, and other comics, and yet puts my own unique spin/twist on them.

I've still got that Power Rangers ramble to make.

I've got stream stuff to do.

I've got a song to finish writing, then perform.

​I have a bunch of art stuff that I want to do, notably, an art piece of me to complete by the 25th, which will be the one-year anniversary of my having come out.

I need to ask someone who made a gift piece of art of me if it's okay to use/share elsewhere.

I have all of that to do, and so, so, so much more.

And yet I did none of that.

I did do a couple things. I checked medical stuff, which I needed to do.
I made progress in Castle 4-0 in minecraft.

But most of my day was spent wasting time on League of Legends.

Granted, I'm progressing Challenges quite nicely, and it's actually fun!

It's just that.

I'm literally at 4:15 am and counting, and have done...nothing.

I'm not living.

I'm not making good use of my time.

I'm not doing tangible work of any time, or progressing any of my goals.

I've done nothing.

And again.

The stars literally aligned to give me the free time to have a chance to accomplish something.

I'm never going to get a better chance than this.

And yet I squandered it.

I haven't even done hygiene!

It's a miracle I've not forgotten my medication, at this rate.

But like.

I have so so so much that I have the potential to accomplish.

I have done none of it.

Not even the very-important-thing of the IRS mail I received that's a big scary thing I need to talk to work HR about.

​And don't get me wrong.
I get it.

I'm depressed.
Badly so.

But the things I did today were largely me running away from my problems.

It's not that I did them to have fun.

I did them to escape from the responsibilities I have.
I knew it was for that purpose when I started them.
And I knew it after I finished them.

That I was in a bad slump, and needed to do something in that time because it's impossible to do truly nothing.
But my reaction to being in the slump was to do the things that are as close as I can get to doing nothing.
I knew that going in, and I know it after.

I knew I would regret it going in, and sure enough I regret it after.

Yes, I am genuinely having fun playing League.

But I know that it is the worst possible usage of my time.

I genuinely can't think of a worse usage of my time. I can't sleep to waste the amount of time that game wasted. I can't listen to streams, just streams, for the amount of time that game wasted. So like.

What could I do which would possibly be even less productive?

Literally nothing.

I chose the least productive thing to do, effectively just to kill my mind and just...well, I've ceased to function already due to the depression, but I gamed the worst waste of time just because I didn't want to do anything to counter the depression and did the activity which most feeds into the depression.

The depression is bad.

And I am doing nothing about it.

I've felt bored out of my mind in the last two days, but the truth of the matter is, I've rejected literally every opportunity I was given to do anything satisfying.

So I am left here to rot.

Because I am wasting my life.

Why can't I just.

Do something?

Anything?

What makes it so hard for me to exist?

I haven't investigated the game I've been playing recently either.

I'm doing nothing.

This blog is the most productive I've been all week, and it's just a rant about how I've not been productive all week.

​So that really says something about how pathetic I am, doesn't it?

I can't even read comics/novels/TVTropes/etc. to satisfy my urges.

Nothing I am doing is working.

I just want to be something resembling anything right now.

But I'm not.
​And I never will be.

Or at least, mostly finished it. First, let's show a couple of the extra work in progress states.

And now, the "final" image:

Now, it's not perfect.

At the top, the hair is too "thick", extending too far out. The hair basically has a straight trajectory from the top in a diagonal line to the bottom--it should be more of a curve, going from where it is at the bottom in an upward curve that ends around the ears or so. So basically, the hair at the head should start at around where the black tentacle shoulder is, falling straight down from there and then curving out to the final location, rather than the much further forward starting spot seen.

I forgot to draw the toes, and also left out drawing fingernails.

I didn't add what's the term? Line width? Line depth? Stroke width? I'm drawing a blank on the term to use, but basically, making the lineart get thicker and thinner at different points rather than being uniformly thick.

This is a more "casual" look at Elemental Ruby, so I didn't have the different eye colors, the red claws or swirling vortex on the tentacle side or the mask on her face. (The idea I wanted to draw was a midway point between her being in battle form and relaxed form. Relaxed form is Future-Ruby in her default state eventually; combat/battle form is the fully combat-oriented Elemental Ruby as originally envisioned.)

The light fibers look more like lightning than they do strings of pure light; the anatomy, proportions, and perspectives are all a little bit off. There are a bunch of things that could be better if I spent time fixing them, and others I don't know how to fix.

The darkness tentacles don't really come through and the hair being alternating strands of black and gold I also didn't quite convey perfectly, aside from the flow of the hair not being perfect.

That, aside from the issues I pointed out in my blog post from yesterday. The pose I'm not 100% happy about.
The proportions, anatomy, and perspective are all not quite right. There's a lot of funky things that are a little "off", that aren't quite right. Its anatomical flaws are definitely present, among them being the thinness and length of her legs as well as the shape of her torso.

I'm not sure I like the lip/lipstick. I wanted it to be visible on her vampire grin, but I'm not sure it comes off properly.

The blade thigh bands are too low, and should be higher up.

The arm covered in light fibers, I actually don't know how to draw, and it shows.

The light fibers look a lot like lightning, and I'm not sure how to convey that they are fibers made of light rather than jolts of lightning shooting out.

The alternating hair between gold/black I didn't get to be my vision perfectly; the capes/wings don't quite work as I want them to; the dark tendrils don't look like dark tendrils; the light fibers don't look like light fibers, both on the arm and on the extensions; everything that was "hard" to do on the image, I ended up not actually matching my vision.

But I took a look back at the spot where I originally envisioned Elemental Ruby and how I did compared to my original vision there. Some things, just changed: the default dress color at some point shifted from red to black. The second hair color to alternate with black at some point shifted from brown to gold. The wing/capes swapped color sides at some point (I think this was for better symmetry?).

And other things were left out as part of this not being part of the vision for what I wanted to make. I didn't want fully full casual Elemental Ruby, the default look for Future-Ruby, but I also didn't want to draw the full combat-ready Elemental Ruby that would include the mask, claws, swirling vortex, etc. so this was my go-to for an in-between, a partial combat form where Ruby has summoned darkness around her right arm, fibers around her left arm, and wings, but hasn't fully powered up, a sort of "display" of power without really putting power in, as it were.

So like. I rate this as being about 80% effective. It's not 100% my vision. It's not what I was hoping to make. But it gets darn close, for an image that I said I couldn't make circa three years ago. Now, granted. I did it entirely digital, when I really wanted to do sketches of it. (And to be fair, I think I can in fact do partial sketches of it and then stitch them together digitally.)

But it's still passable in conveying most of the idea that I was hoping to convey.

So remember this?

This was me attempting to draw Elemental Ruby, as in, Ruby Scarlet Ventrella, protagonist of Red Hood Rider, in her ultimate/final form, so ultimate that it is only unlocked after the story has actually ended.

It was good!

It was really good.

But I thought I could do better.

​So I made the decision to start over with a different approach.

Now, it's not perfect.
The pose I'm not 100% happy about.
The proportions, anatomy, and perspective are all not quite right. There's a lot of funky things that are a little "off", that aren't quite right. Its anatomical flaws are definitely present, among them being the thinness and length of her legs as well as the shape of her torso.

I'm not sure I like the lip/lipstick. I wanted it to be visible on her vampire grin, but I'm not sure it comes off properly.

The blade thigh bands are too low, and should be higher up.

The arm covered in light fibers, I actually don't know how to draw, and it shows.

The light fibers look a lot like lightning, and I'm not sure how to convey that they are fibers made of light rather than jolts of lightning shooting out.

But overall?

Overall, it's going incredibly well.

I'll need more layers for the skin, and everything left for me to draw is insanely hard. The alternating hair, the darkness tentacles, and the wings are all going to be tremendously difficult for me to figure out how to display.

But I was inspired, and overall, I am already insanely proud of what I have done so far. So, I've done a lot today and I am proud of my work.