So how am I doing after the last post? All I can say is I'm taking it one step at a time. I go up and down alot, and that makes having a steady project schedule difficult. But I promised a lighter post, so here it is!

Good news is that I've finished my first colored digital illustration in (literally) several years.

A picture of my character, Aurelia. She's wearing a red leather duster jacket with lots of buckles and belts. She has brown skin, long black hair, a single silver cross earring, black sunglasses pushed down her nose so that we can see her brown eyes, and in her left hand she's holding a pistol pointed downward. She's standing in front of a gray urban wasteland. She also has black leather pants with silver studs.

It took a little under two weeks to finish? It was many, many hours of work. First to get the lines done, then laying down base colors, then highlights and shadows, then cleaning up any stray lines or color strokes I missed as I went. I thought about illustrating a background and coloring that too, but I just didn't have the energy for it. The background was a royalty-free image from pixabay called "Apocalypse Post Apocalyptic Wasteland" by frozenstarro. I seem to recall color illustrations like this taking a long time for me to finish even when I was a kid, but I wanna say it didn't take me quite as long. I was drawing all the time when I was a teenager, and I had a lot more expendable time. Trying to do this with kids and responsibilities is a bit more difficult, plus I'm out of practice. I think my next piece may just be black and white, just so that I can put this out faster. It'll give me a chance to practice my line shading, anyway. (Though, I did do some line shading on this piece too, just not too intense.) I may upload a higher resolution of this on DeviantArt, that way you can see more details. I had to upload a smaller file just so that Neocities wouldn't perish from the effort of loading it.

The character I drew is for a strange post-apocalyptic cassette/fairy-punk story I've been kicking around in my head for a while. Her name is Aurelia. She's human, latina, and pansexual. I've got general ideas for the story itself, but nothing I'm willing to share quite yet. More of my efforts have been in trying to understand who Aurelia is and what her world is like. I definitely have a vibe and atmosphere in mind, though. Something like a cross between The Crow, Johnny Mnemonic, Mad Max, Escape from New York, and The Warriors. But with fantasy races. Y'know, like elves and dwarves. (Though, come to think of it, I'm using more of my original races than the Tolkien standard stuff you usually see.) I've been thinking one way to combine that project with my site project would be to make a world-building page. It'd be a nice reference for all the things I keep imagining, and it would make it far less likely for me to forget stuff if I have to shelve the work for a while.

Another big inspiration I've been using is music. I have a playlist I've been using to get into the mood and visualize things. Mainly gothic, post-punk, and some hard rock, like The Cult and Sisters of Mercy. A few prog pop, alt rock, and experimental songs, as well. Think Deftones, hemlocke springs, and Iniko. Honestly, I have alot of industrial and alt electronic, like Combichrist, Skinny Puppy, and VNV Nation. There's sprinklings of other things too, I suppose. I guess a better summary of the playlist is that it's moody as fuck. If you want to give it a listen, it's on Spotify.

For now, I'd like to focus on doing some more text-based content for the site. I have a movie lined up for review called The Ice Pirates. It came out in 1984, and if you thought Prayer of the Rollerboys was bad... man, this sounds so much worse! It has some recognizable talent in it, thought! Anjelica Huston, Ron Perlman, John Carradine... That may have to just wait, though. For now, just watch the trailer to see what I mean.

I'm already partway through the start of a review/retrospective series on The X-Files. I started typing up a summary of the opening moments of the pilot, and from there I was going to relax on the play-by-play to just point out my favorite moments and maybe talk about interesting facts or contrasting details from then and now. I have the first season on DVD, and it includes deleted scenes from the pilot episode, too. I realize that maybe this is less productive than challenging myself with a more ambitious coding project, but for the moment it's all I feel I have the energy and will for. Originally I'd wanted to do this as a kind of podcast, but while I have decent recording equipment and software, I lack the space and time to do that. So I'm settling for this.

Speaking of practicing coding... I DID borrow a book from the library on Javascript, I just haven't really sat down to look at it. I've been thinking I should focus on HTML and CSS instead, though. Partly because Javascript is just waaay more abstract and complext to me, and also because HTML and CSS have more immediate applications I can try to use. Did I talk about that already on another post? Whatever, I'm talking about it again. I absolutely want to learn more, but sometimes it's worth it to just solidify topics you've already covered, too. I've done a few pages now that, for the most part, is using a bunch of stuff I've learned already but I still had to "fix" because on testing something broke. That just tells me that I need to work on my discipline for closing tags and spotting mistakes quicker. I also want to keep practicing making contextual code that gives meaning to what I'm doing instead of just reaching for the things that technically do what I want, but fails to give my code any situational significance. Like the article and section HTML elements, for example. The paragraph element does what I want in most situations, but the article and section elements would give more MEANING to my code. Know what I mean?

I'm hoping I can get out of this funk so that I can resume doing cool stuff on the site. One of the goals I have is to do more sections of the site that breaks away from the header and two column layout I've got going on. I think that'll be fun to do with the Keanu Reeves and Castle shrine I'm still planning. The world-building section I was thinking of starting would also be a good candidate for this, too. I have plans, guys! I just don't always have the pep and vim to get them done.

That's basically everything I have in the works for the moment! I'm not sure what the immediate future will bring in terms of time for projects. My son will be going to school close to the end of the month, but I have doubts that will necessarily make doing things easier, especially because I still have my toddler to take care of. Without her big brother to play with, that may relegate much of my project time to when she takes a nap... But those seem to be getting a little shorter. She used to nap for damn near four hours, now I'm lucky if she does three.

I guess only time will tell! One day at a time, right? If you made it this far, thank you for reading!