eyy, it's the homestuck number. happy 4/13 everyone.
unsurprising to everyone, things are still hard. lost my insurance and still have no replacement, medical bills piling up, having to cancel future medical appointments. body weirdness and problems looming over me more and more, and i have no answers since i have no insurance to get the tests needed to figure out what kind of condition(s) i have and how to fix them. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
this country is made to murder people, bled dry to feed the ultra-rich and they don't even need it. i detest the entire machine i'm forced to be a part of.
anyway. building this website remains my solace, though sometimes it's hard to feel like what i'm building is as worthwhile or interesting as other peoples' sites. sometimes i browse neocities, though not very often anymore due to the overabundance of css animation hell that made me realize my photosensitivity is worse than i thought. but there are websites that seem expertly put together despite their rainbow barf graphics (said affectionately) and their css animation hell backgrounds (said exasperatedly.) i won't link to them, i'd rather not draw attention to them in the sense i don't want people to be unwilling participants in my weird dissection of both their websites and myself. but they just feel so much... better than whatever i'm doing. all these artists and real webdevs who do web development professionally as their job, and do it well, and then come to neocities to make their snazzy personal websites.
i don't begrudge them or anything, and honestly often i don't even want what they're doing with their websites for my own, i just find their ideas interesting and their artwork skillful. but there's always this nagging feeling writhing under my skin as i browse, that feeling that i don't measure up. that nobody will look at their websites and then think mine is anything worth their time.
i don't even want to need the validation of random people. i suppose humans are hard-wired to seek comfort and validation from their social group, but i just want to make my website for me. and both the nature of my species and also my many, many fucked up experiences have forced me to care at least somewhat, as making sure i fit into other peoples' acceptance was critical to my survival for decades, crushing myself to fit into their boxes even though it killed me to have to do.
i don't know, i didn't even want this to go that deep, and it's kind of an aside anyway. i'm just kind of tiredly unfond of looking at other peoples' fancy websites and feeling inferior even though i don't think my own website is inferior. i guess it's partially the dilemma of i do like a bit of slow animation over some things but not to the extent most people use it, it bothers my eyes so much if not used very carefully.
i feel this with my art too, and it's part of why i just stopped drawing entirely aside from artwork for this site. part of, a facet of many, many problems that have made me loathe doing artwork for a very long time now, but it was always a dual-edged sword of both hating my own mediocrity and hating how little anyone seemed to care about my work. it was crushing to spend a year and a half deep studying anatomy, working hard against my inability to visualize anything in 3D at all, to encapsulate the entire human form in my mind, and just. there was so little reaction. the difference between this and my website work is i feel pretty comfortable with where my website is and like if i wanted to be a bit more advanced with it i feasibly could within a timeframe that feels satisfactory. meanwhile with art, i never feel like i make headway that matters. you can study anatomy deeply but still have years to go on linework, sense of form, use of color, use of positive and negative space, how the eye flows around an entire piece... i'm just tired of it all. i just wish i could wave my arms around a bit and make a picture appear exactly as it does in my head.
ironically, it's so much fucking easier to do that with my site. my layout was written from a blank css file by me, from a simple vision of a layout i wanted in my head. i just did it, and after a few fixes it just worked. why can't art be like that? god, i fucking hate art so much.
anyway. this keeps getting off topic. it's just bewildering and annoying to have this feeling like i don't measure up to others' work when the logical part of my brain is like no, i like my site the way it is best, i don't even want it to look or act like this site at all. i don't want to change my site to be like theirs. theirs is nice, but i like mine best.
i guess it's really rooted at the feeling of never measuring up to others' judgment. maybe that's all it is. and i'm used to that, i've been disappointing pretty much everyone around me since i came out of the womb just by being myself, so it's nothing new. it's just tiring. tiring to feel like what you have to offer isn't what people want. and you don't even want to rely on other peoples' judgment and acceptance, you just want to be happy with yourself regardless of what other people think. but it's just so exhausting.
bleh.
oh well.
in better news, today i discovered WoW's battle pet system for the current expansion had a secret new feature, which is a lot of the wild caught pets in the overworld have alternate rare colors, with 1 shade being incredibly rare at a 1% spawn rate.
i had accepted i would probably spend quite a while looking for the black-furred variant of the treeflitter but after maybe the fifth battle there she was!
(image enlarged so you can see her better. graphics are kinda wonky because my PC is 6 years old with a very modest card even when it was new, and i intentionally moved her to an area without grass objects to make her even more visible.)
her name is Midnight, and i'm very excited to have her. i may hunt for the other shiny rare pet colors later, but casually. this was the one i really wanted, and i'm glad she came to me so readily.