It's quite sad that I've got an apt chance to use that old pun/joke in a title, but it is well and truly appropriate as there's no other way of saying it; I've dropped the ball again on blogging.

This blog was designed to be daily.

I ran the blog daily, sometimes more than once daily, for...well it started slipping some time in 2021 so like...6-6.5 years?

What the hell happened to me where what I did without fail religiously for 6, maybe six and a half, years, suddenly became something I'm lucky to not slip up on?

I kinda suck.

That said.

At least I've been fairly productive.

I literally did a ten hour stream yesterday.

TEN hour stream!

Granted. Quality wasn't high at the start and tanked after my family got up.

But ten hours of streaming is like...a lot.

Granted, it's not without consequences.

For our Thanksgiving celebration today, I ended up getting only ~3 hours of sleep, and not the highest of quality sleep because I slept in the room everyone was talking in, with all the noises of phone calls, cleaning, etc.

While tiredness isn't an issue for me, potential sickness is.

I made a bit of a miscalculation when I streamed that long:
I thought that the main issue with me not getting a good night's sleep would be things like,
Throwing off my sleep schedule;
Making me dead tired;
Making me exhausted;
Messing with my circadian rhythm;
Things like that, where I would struggle with lucidity, but otherwise be fine and recover quickly.

Turns out that I forgot the most important thing sleep is for:
Keeping you from getting sick.

I didn't get zero sleep, so I might not get sick, but I need to be really careful.

It doesn't matter how little contact I've had with things that could make me sick; if I don't get the bare minimum amount of sleep my body needs, it can succumb to illnesses that it by all rights should have great ease in repelling just by virtue of the body needing sleep to combat sickness.

So, uhhhh...oops?

I am many things; smart is not among them.

That's also a contributing factor to me being unable to stream tonight.

I also have labwork tomorrow, at a scheduled time.
Which means that I have to get up at a certain time--earlier, if I want a shower, too!

I might've been able to stream if it was just one of these two, but added up, probably both smarter and safer not to, both for my body's health and​ for safety tomorrow.

Is unfortunate, but hey, we all make mistakes sometimes and must live with the consequences of them--in my case, being that I need to take extra self-care steps tonight to prevent issues down the line.

​Sometimes, being responsible sucks.

I can get a bit grumpy when playing TFT and go on rants, but the rants help me feel less tilted at the game and when I can say what I am doing without bitterness in my voice, it's a wonderful thing to do.

And, hey! We reached a new high tonight!

Still not at Platinum, but we're at Gold I again, at 38 LP!

It's mostly been off the back of Academy comps with a side of Yordle comps. Now, I'd like to emphasize: I don't try to force those comps. In fact, I prefer not to, because I know that they are highly contested. It's just that often, I legit don't have any other choice.

I've had absolute garbage luck at rand'ing Void mutants and the few times I did, I either didn't have the items for Cho'gath or couldn't get mutants on my bench early enough to run it so was forced to run other things.

Because if given the choice, I would run Mutants every game just because they're my favorite comp.

I've also had a lot of rotten luck in general mind you, but not running my favorite comp is among the least of the unluckiness I have had.

Still, tho, new high is exciting!

I've fallen down in the latter in spite of it being a new high tho.

I was in, what, top 5% before?

Now it's top 9% in spite of being at a higher LP--because it took me too long to get there.

We'll see if I can get into Platinum and if that helps me.

​But that'll wait until tomorrow. As it's 7:30, I need bed.

Just, not much. I've been feeling both short on time and dead tired for the last couple of hours, even though it's only now 3 am.

I've put in some plans for things, done a little bit here and there, but not committed to doing much of anything.

I did some work on my civ 3 mod again, tackling the tech tree. It's, well...right now a total mess, because restructuring everything to get it right will take a looooot of time.

Restructuring the tech tree is probably the third-largest part of the project, behind updating the civilopedia (second) and building the map (number one). So, it's...going to take a long time to actually get right. My notes are reasonably good, but not perfect, and I need to refer to the base scenario for some better idea of unit placements with me keeping things to where they should be.

Probably best to tackle that after sleep tho, so did as much as I could tonight, and probably going to bed.

Sadly, it does happen sometimes. Where in spite of having time, I end up not getting anything done. I don't really know what happened to my time. What was I doing? I had to have been doing something, I didn't do literally nothing in that time.

Like, I know I was multitasking. As in, listening to 1-2 streams...but doing something else on top of those streams.

But like.

I genuinely can't remember what it was.

It wasn't anything on steam; at the time, it wasn't anything on League (I did waste some time later getting my 50 daily blue essence since I kinda want another rune page for when First Strike goes live since I believe First Strike will genuinely be very good on Ashe); it wasn't Civ 3; it wasn't minecraft; it wasn't nothing, so I was doing something, but I legit don't know what it was I spent time on.

I know I put some time into mafia to try and do daily stuff there but like...that was some of my time, not all of it.

It's almost 3 am here and I've been home since like 8:45 or so.

Like, I estimate I took 45 minutes for League and ~2-3 hours for mafia, but...where the heck's the rest of that time? What on earth was I doing for the remaining like...2-4 hours?

It's genuinely baffling. I legit don't know what happened to my time.

So whatever it was I did.

It certainly wasn't something memorable enough for me to remember doing it.

Meaning I did basically nothing.

Oh well.

It does happen. Not every day is a good day.

It's not like it was a total wash. I did complete my "Dumb Ways to Die: 2021 edition" outline, which previously was missing 2 ways to die. (I thought I had 16, but it was 18, so I bumped it up to 20 today. Which is around the amount of the original video.)

But like. I know I only have 5-7 hours' worth of free time after work when I work the next day (5 if I go to bed as soon as humanly tired, 2 am; 7 if I go to bed at the latest time safe for a full nights rest, 4 am), but...

...5-7 hours is still a LOT of free time. And I feel like I can account for, legitimately, genuinely, less than half of it.

What the heck did I do? I remember doing so little.

Ah well.

While I didn't get much done today, I did lay the foundation for something that I want answers for in Phyrra and Cyrus. (Basically, one of the characters has some fluidity to them but it is purely in how they present, not in their gender, and I don't know the term for that but surely there is a term.)

So, payoff will be there later. Just, not yet.

It's nearly 7 am and if I write a lengthy blog that'll take me to like 7:15-7:30ish bedtime which is alarmingly late...
...But if I don't write a long blog I risk losing thoughts that I'd express in a blog and it's a return to copout blog entries I've made and loathed that I needed to rely on countless times.

Hmm, it's a tough decision, but ultimately, I think I value sleep more than the blog entry. I've got some making up to do, juggling everything is difficult but I am trying to do my best.

I can't go into full details, but as it is public that it was me I can at least mention this much; today made at least one consequence of a screwup I did yesterday official. (It is possible there may be further repercussions down the line. Given it was an accident and it was unintentional, I am obviously hoping there won't be, but given the nature of the offense and how I was already on thin ice before, it's definitely possible that I could face further punishment down the line for the messup. It'd suck, but I cannot say it'd be unwarranted, because I did genuinely screw up, so the punishment I received is the absolute minimum. I do mean it when I say I will count myself lucky if it is the only punishment I get because I mean it when I say it was worthy of being punished, accident/unintended or not.)

Basically, while I still cannot share the full story, I can go into the basics. On the site I play mafia on, I was in a mafia game. I believed myself to be within the rules with my posting--a first clarification in the rules, there was extenuating circumstances which led me to believe that I was still within them thanks to a case of unfortunate events. (In short, a private communication was similar, but much shorter, to the public communication. I believed, erroneously, that the private communication was just a shorter summary of the public communication. It was not.)

This led to the rule needing to be clarified a second time, and I received a minor punishment for the first with it being expected that future violations of the rule would give no such leniency because after both rule clarifications, the policy was as unambiguous as possible.

So how did I screw up?

Well, I was typing a post made that I believed to be within the rules between the first clarification and the second. I was unable to post it before the second clarification, and the initial draft of said post, while it'd have been fine if posted prior to the second rule clarification, was not okay to post after the second rule clarification.

I knew this.

So I revised the post, to make it fit within the clarified rule.

I double-checked it; I triple-checked it; I was absolutely sure that I had fixed it, fixed the post typed before the rule clarification to fit within the guidelines set after--and to be fair, true to the Spiderman Homecoming 90% meme, the post did in fact mostly fix the original issues! I caught most of them!

...Most, but not all;

I missed...one.

I missed one spot, that violated the rule that was clarified a second time.

It was, obviously, accidental! It was, obviously, unintentional! I did revise the original post and tried to remove the rule violating aspects of it...but missing one spot? Completely and totally my fault. And I had already been warned and punished for the rule violation.

Again, to reiterate--this is completely and entirely my fault. It wasn't deliberate, but not being deliberate does not mean it didn't happen. It did. Accidental or not, it still transpired; unintentional or intentional, it still occurred. And once it did, once I failed to spot it, once I had broken the rule that I was immediately told not to break again, I needed to face the consequences, face the punishment for it.

It sucks, but when you screw up, it does carry consequences. I literally have nobody to blame but myself. The punishment I have received is the least amount of punishment I could possibly receive. (So if I receive more, while that'll suck, it'll still be warranted. I cannot argue against punishment. I can explain the circumstances behind it and I can explain my viewpoint but my viewpoint is that whatever punishment I get will be justified, not be too harsh, and be absolutely what I deserve because of my mistake because again, mistakes carry consequences and I made one. Knowing I made a mistake and regretting that I made it cannot undo it so all I can do is live with the consequences of my error.)

I obviously can't explain more than that (this much should be acceptable), but that was one thing which happened today; action punishing me for the mistake I made yesterday night. I knew it was coming, obviously; there was no way to possibly justify not punishing the action because it's a cut and dry clear unambiguous situation with no other possible resolution, with no other possible punishment to give.

Knowing it was coming, knowing it was justified, didn't mean it doesn't sting tho. It absolutely does. And it was one of the first things I woke up to see today. Not the way I really wanted to start my day, but I had to face the music sooner or later because again. I messed up, so there were going to be consequences to having screwed up. Unfortunate as the accident may have been, regrettable as the unintentional breach was, punishment was unavoidable because there was no possible leniency to be given and it was warranted and justified and if the punishment I got is all I get then I am in fact to be considered lucky.

Still sucks tho and again. Starting my day that way? Not exactly pleasant.

There was some good to counterbalance that, tho.
Today for the 4th of July I got to wear another dress! I took a shower, which I desperately needed, and changed into the dress. My family, who were all there, were by and large (being who they were)...less than impressed. Nobody said anything but when all of them realized I wasn't wearing my favorite (because it's long enough to basically act like a dress) T-shirt and was in fact wearing a dress that gave me notable curves, I managed to catch them having some rather...unfortunate expressions on their face.

Suffice to say, most of them did not approve of my apparel of choice.

And, yes. There was in fact tension to be had, there. Conversations were mostly natural but there were still occasional pauses--this is normal enough, but in this case the pauses seemed "different" to me somehow, in a way that felt directly resultant from me.

​Then there's again the fact that the entirety of my family aside from my younger sister deadnames me and misgenders me actively...and also the self-loathing every time I respond to the deadname rather than telling them "that's not my name".

Again, nothing really specific to the date in question, but something that there's a disconnect between what I tell myself and what goes on in reality. I tell myself, "every time they deadname me, I will tell them 'that's not my name'". Every time they actually deadname me (well, almost; I do occasionally have the smarts to not respond at all), I respond out of habit.

After all, I've used my deadname for 27 years in real life. It's literally instinct to me, especially from voices I know, in tones I know, asking questions that are normal from them. As someone with autism, inertia is unfortunately, working against me here; I've built up 27 years of inertia ingrained within me to instinctively respond to them on demand when they use my deadname.

So far, good to bad is two to two if you count 'good dress' and 'shower' as two separate goods.

​More in the bad; I had only one meal tonight and it was two hot dogs. Admittedly, hot dogs with chili and bacon, but my normal hot dogs in a night? Four. I didn't have breakfast; I didn't have S'mores (I couldn't stomach them), I didn't have hamburgers, and I had half my normal amount of hot dogs. (I also didn't have corn on the cob but I never have corn on the cob unless there's melted butter with the butter-spread-stick and the hold-corn-without-mess-prongs, which we had neither of.)

I did have a plate full of barbeque chips, which by my estimate is somewhere in the .75 give or take .25 range for meals (as in, could be as small as half a meal's worth, could be as much as a meal's worth; it was a lot of chips but individual chips aren't that filling), but given 2 hot dogs is half of my normal meal, that meant tonight the maximum amount you could say I had was 1.25 meals' worth of food.

You're meant to have three.

And while I admit, I was more thirsty than hungry.

So a lot of the time, I wasn't hungry at all.

A fair amount of the issue was digestion. I wasn't feeling 'full', I was feeling like I couldn't stomach more food.

Normally, this is easily solved by, ahhhh...so to speak, emptying the system. Using the bathroom productively and flushing from the system something more than fluids. But I couldn't do that all of tonight, which meant, to my body, I had too much within me in spite of often wanting more.

I suspect the issue was circadian rhythm based.

My circadian rhythm is all out of whack, due to my rather not-the-best sleep schedule, but as of late, I've had a sleep schedule that is at least somewhat consistent if unorthodox; going to bed in the 5-7 am range, and then waking up in the 1-4 pm range. Today I was woken up a full 40 minutes earlier than I was planning, which I suspect may have contributed.

Unusual sleep schedule that's maybe not the best for digestion anyway + disruption to that sleep schedule via being woken up early + me not having food immediately (it took 1-3 hours or so for me to get the food) = suspected culprit for me having had less room. Also, maybe being thirsty all day may have contributed, with my only fluids being coffee (which isn't zero-calorie so does have some fill value even being liquid in nature).

Basically, lots of things could've caused it, hard to say the exact culprit, maybe multiple adding up, but it happened so that means I had less than optimal.

​Later in the night though, I decided to stream...
...And I got my first-ever raid! It was amazing! It was mostly lurkers aside from the broadcaster, but the broadcaster who raided me remained active for the vast majority of the stream and they and I had a fair number of similarities so I really enjoyed chatting with them and bonding with them.

Which means my night has ended on a bit of a high note. So, so​ glad I decided to stream on what amounts to a whim!

Anyway, bed now.

We'll have to see what tomorrow brings.

I've actually been having a lot of dreams worthy of recording as stories recently, and last night had at least two that were incredibly coherent, filled (they were mostly with a start middle and ending where I could manually fill in the gaps), basically worthy of being a Phyrra and Cyrus tier of story that came from a dream that I could flesh out into a real world.

Unfortunately.

I've been unable to motivate myself to actually.

Be new.

Be creative to something new.

All I want.

All I want to do.

Is revisit the old.

Old, and old, over and over again.

And I bet my depression certainly doesn't help.

That said.

I AM trying my best to do my best.

I'm doing not enough and feel like doing ten things. League, tft ranked, tft hyper-roll, chrono trigger, stardew valley, minecraft. I don't have the time to do them all in a day, best I can do is like 2-4 out of the six.

And the more I am to the higher end, the more likely it is that it came at the cost of daily stuff I should be doing daily. Like emails, mafia stuff, staying on top of webcomics, even rl health stuff.

​I'm also finding myself going to bed earlier and waking up at the same time or later. Like, I'm dead tired now at 4:20 am. That's an hour or two earlier than the time I normally would be dead tired, and yes, I am writing this just before I am going to go to bed.

I am still going to sleep until like 2, or 3, or even 4 pm. In spite of going to bed 1-2 hours early, I will wake up at the same time or later.

Sleeping literally 12 hours is something which has been happening to me as of late.

It's possible my body is short on vitamins or something, but if I had to wager a guess, most of this tiredness and long sleep is due to depression.

That said.

I am doing what I can.

While I'm largely dead inside for most things, some things in my more manic moments have actually been inspired--for instance, I actually think that I might have it in me to draw Elemental Ruby.

Elemental Ruby.

I'm pretty sure I've blogged about her before.

But it was a long long time ago because I don't really talk much about Red Hood Rider in spite of having not lost my desire to make it. (My desire to make it has only grown, rather than shrunk.)

So to refresh your memory.

Elemental Ruby is Ruby Scarlett Ventrella, canonically after the end of her titular series, Red Hood Rider. She first gains access to the form ~10 years after the ending of the story, and by the time she passes the mantle of Elemental Rider of Light on to the next generation (small spoiler there, but one which canonically makes an appearance before the end of the series anyway so it's not much of a spoiler that it happens as I am not revealing the how), her vampiric powers have grown to the extent where she keeps the form permanently, albeit losing the actual light-aspects of it, with her simply mimicking the appearance of the light powers while using pure darkness ones.

Elemental Ruby is Ruby's final, and ultimate, super form, combining aspects of her previous super forms. She has footwear of the arbalest armor super mode, with her boots literally made of the crossbow (also allowing her to jump on air and accelerating her jumps). On her thighs as thigh bands she has blades that are her darkness staff's bladed section, acting as both arrows and knives/shortswords.

Her skirt is a strapless, shoulderness, backless dress which prominently shows off her stomach. (Dresses in real life might be able to do 2/4, potentially 3/4, but all four would probably be beyond the realm of possible. Fortunately for Ruby, she has magic.) It also has slits at the thighs to allow for greater range of movement.

Ruby's right arm is covered in tendrils of darkness, with a red gem sticking out of the 'glove' on the back side of the hand. Her left arm is covered in threads of light, with a gem that I believe is colored white, and these threads also form a hard-light construct of a bow.

Erupting from near the shoulderblades, she has two wings/capes that combine the properties of feathered wings and malleable, pliable, fabric-like capes in that they provide flight but are flexible, can cover her back, fold in, are fully controlled by her, and take from her Archangel form. The right wing is white, the left wing is black, and they can shoot feathers like arrows/knives, and are very very long. (I think like 20 feet long?)

Her hair is alternating strands of black and golden hair, and is ankle-length, going all the way down. Her mask when she chooses to wear it...well, that I don't remember off the top of my head because I didn't want to draw the masked version of her, I wanted to draw the unmasked version of her.

Basically, it's an incredibly detailed, nuanced, elegant, gorgeous, animated form--one I previously said that I could draw maybe one piece of it at a time but that was it. That I'd never be able to draw the whole thing at once.

Well, sans the mask (which I don't perfectly remember and don't actually have the inspiration/vision to draw as it was specifically her unmasked self I thought about), I actually think that I could draw her that way now.

Yes, really.

I think I could pull it off.

I'd just need to actually start drawing.

Something I've not done recently because there's so much to do in a day.

So much to do, so little time, and I waste most of it on games.

But at least I haven't dropped another day, been doing work every day.
The two main things I've been working on; trying to get details done on Phyrra, and also trying multiple times to get the aesthetic of Kaze down--I thought that Kaze would be literally the easiest character in the cast to draw. He's a shade. Living shadow that lashes out strikes of air, slicing, dicing, piercing, thrashing, ripping, pulling, twisting, throwing, just, air itself in the form of a shadow.

The aesthetic I drew from could be summed up as from two sources; Kazeshini from the filler arc of Bleach, combined with a Darkness Elemental from Dragonfable.
A male, but incredibly effeminate form--very thin, pretty short, but still recognizably masculine, and yet a being who is mostly formless. White eyes and an occasional slasher smile, but no nose, no ears, no form beyond shadows that flicker like black flames. Recognizable arms and legs, with a recognizable chest, but for this to be bathed in shadows that make it not look like human skin. Anthropomorphic enough to still appear to be arms, legs, a torso, a head, but with enough obscurity to not give clearly defined edges. Where you can't tell where 'skin' begins because there is none to speak of. Where the shadows bleeding off of Kaze don't give a center of mass, because there is no center of mass.

I've tried multiple times to nail the aesthetic, but every time came up with frustrating failures. So I ended up biting the bullet and actually googled for the reference images from the two main sources of inspiration for Kaze.

And there you have it. (Yes, I did have to refer to an image of kazeshini not from the show itself, because none of the images from the show gave me the references I was looking for.)

The Darkness Elemental on the left, from Dragonfable, was one of the main aesthetics I was going for with the look. See the face, the shoulders, the chest? and the look on the arms (albeit, the arms on the darkness elemental are much much too big when it gets to the firsts)? That somewhat-transparent, wreathed in black darkness that oozes the aura of a blaze?

Now just give it the more anthropomorphic shape of kazeshini on the right, and you've got Kaze. This image shows perfectly the proportions of what I want Kaze to be--the thin, but still masculine, chest, with the approximately right proportioned arms and head, with the slasher smile and the killer eyes. (Bonus; this image has hair which looks a bit like the black flame-like aesthetic I am aiming for, at the forehead.)

It should be so easy to draw. Pencils provide the perfect medium to do it--you can nail the aesthetic of a living shadow, of flame-like wind sheathed in darkness, just by using pencil mark after pencil mark after pencil mark.

But it's still so darn hard to nail.

Still, tho.

​I'm trying!

Slow and steady, but it's something. Every day doing work, no matter how little, means every day work is being done. Small steps, little things, maybe not the best of things, maybe not as much as I could do, but better than nothing and that's something I'll take.

In this case, decided to follow through on what I said yesterday. I tried to draw Phyrra's secondary weapons yesterday without references.

Phyrra's primary weapon is a longsword--well, a longsword that is proportional to her size. That is to say, if she were to grow to an adult size, and the longsword were to scale identically to her, it would be a longsword. As in, it is proportional to her as a longsword. It is a longsword for her. For an adult, not quite sure what that'd be. I used a google reference image of a broadsword, but heck if I know what a good sword type would be for something that by is wielder would have the aesthetic of a longsword.

Her secondary weapons are a series of multiple (about 2-4) shortswords, each with no guard (which I always think of as being the hilt, in spite of the hit being what you grab the sword by), which past the first episode, she can control with a combination of telekinetic magic and wind magic. Which for an adult, would probably be long daggers. (Think like Sting and similar being Hobbit-sized swords; for the people those weapons were designed to be used by, those were daggers, not swords.)

Turns out that you can actually find some very good references in like 30 seconds of searching, 'hiltless sword' (in spite of, as I mentioning, it not being no hilt I was looking for; I was looking for blades with no guard). Apparently, the aesthetic I was looking for is common in older Viking swords? (When you think of Viking swords, you probably don't think of them as having no guard. You think of them as having the Riders of Rohan sword, like this look, more or less. Or maybe you think of them as having a longsword. But the images I found had almost zero guard, which is what I was searching for.)

So I got some good tracework images to have as a reference. Mine are probably too long proportionately, and need to thus be shortened a bit, but I got the aesthetic right, and with the aesthetic right, easier to make!

...And thus, technically speaking, not on today, but like. It was 12:45 when I did it, if it weren't for daylight savings time, it would've been on today anyway.

So I did get some more done, albeit basically nothing. (Just sketching out Phyrra's daggers. The plan here is more or less, sketch out her sword, sketch out her daggers, sketch out her gloves, sketch out her other clothes, etc., sketch out her face, then retry putting them all together.)

I was feeling really, really uninspired today so I didn't do much, but hey, I got some work done so...not doing nothing, therefore, deadline remains!