2024 Was a Year and Now its Over

2025 January 01

Its December 31st in the North American west coast (edit: at the time of me starting writinghappy new year!! lol), which means 2024 is all but over in most of the world, and my little timezone is stubbornly holding onto what's left. I'd say its like me, but at this point I've resigned to let it end and move on.

Seriously, where does the time go!!! 😭

I'm gonna try to make this not that much of a downer (emphasis on try), but needless to say this year just completely flew by me, and not in a good way! If you've been keeping up or know me, you'll known halfway through 2023 I lost my cushy job (on pride month no less >.>) and as it turns out my industry is half exploding. Since then the weeks have turned into months, and now into a year and a half. I've fallen apart multiple times in multiple ways, and lately the despair has only piled on the more I struggle to find anything to try and stay afloat and ease the burden on my partner. Seems to be a common experience these days...

BUT lets put the sad stuff aside (for now...) and try to focus on what all I did get to do this year! I had so much time to myself cooped up in my hikkineet cave, did I use it wisely? eh... I experienced a lot of art this year!Of course, we can't call it 'consuming content', obviously. But also I guess we shouldn't be silly and call everything 'media' either? look, its gonna sound awkward no matter how we phrase, y'know what I mean: watched/read/listened to games, anime, manga, music, etc etc We can start there~

The Media Thread!

2024 was the first year I kept a media thread going on my twitter. For those who don't know, a media thread is this microblogging thing where you periodically update a thread with shows/movies/books as you watch them, basically compiling a little diary of everything you went through that year! Its pretty fun, I originally started it just kinda going along since I've seen everyone do it for years, and only made it... 2 weeks into january before I had already turned the task of updating the media thread into a backlog of stuff I needed to do. I kept note of stuff, but I was never on the pulse of updating as I watched and before I knew it it was too much to dump all at once.

しかし！TL Note: BUT! towards the end of april I saw this video about killing backlogs. Its very good even as I mostly felt this way already, and IIRC one of the main points at the end was that instead of focusing on the obligation of getting through a list, its better to just keep track of and focus on what we do do, so we can look back on it later. That's really what's great about media threads, because now in almost 2025 I have a whooole thing to look through and easily see what all I experienced, its super cool! Which is to say yes, I got off my ass and went through months worths of logs, and kept updating since then... until the point where I quit twitter. I hadn't thought to mirror the thread on bluesky! So I've kept it up in private since, lol, but its there!

My philosophy has generally been to put anything and everything I feel like in there, even beyond obvious stuff like games/anime/manga. Youtube videos that resonate with me? why not! Essays? hell yes! Conventions? sure~ I should go back and put cohost, the site, in there LMAO. I'm specially happy I get to put small, short experiences that might get lost in the shuffle down somewhere. There's so much I went through this year its wild to see, and I get a lot of memories looking back. One struggle I have is having something to say about everything, even limited to 280 characters, but its alright. I don't have all the time in the world to write deeply about everything and I don't need to really, its enough to know I experienced it and had thoughts on it at the time.

One thing I'm realizing looking back is, how much music I listen to!! I think I'll talk about it in the new year, but I'm kinda very late in realizing I'm totally into music and always have been, and its taken listing out all these music videos to make me realize it. I mean, who isn't into music, right? but I always felt a bit like, it was never a deep fandom-like endeavour of mine, or it was adjacent to other media like games, so it didn't count. But here I am knee-deep in a whole subsection of Japanese music, imagine that.

I meant to go over the thread and bring out the year's highlights and faves, but I'm realizing that will that take too long even if I stick to the best of the best SO in the interest of time, I'll save it for a separate post. Look forward to that if you care!

Watch Girls Band Cry, play Junko, Sylvie games rock and life's too short to not read problematic age-gap yuri.

I streamed some streams

I streamed a lot this year, probably the most I have so far?!

I started streaming sometime like, 2 years ago now when I first dedicated myself to Guilty Gear Strive. It started out on a whim, but I've found it to be really satisfying, even to a small audience. I don't have any big influencer aspirations or desire to hustle the fun away, but its still something I always want to make more time for. I think it really fits with the way my brain works, similar to twitter/bsky where I can just have my own space to show myself to others without having to be like, tied down to a discord call and struggle to speak up. Its also a great motivator to get through some gamesbut it can also backfire and become a 'I can't touch this unless I'm on stream' backlog...lol. And, its just a great way to express myself.
I want to make it a point to stream more next year, and finally get together an avatar I drew (more on that soon!) instead of this years old picrew. Again, I don't have capital V Vtuber aspirations, but I can't help but find a lot of allure in the potential and expression these sort of things bring. Maybe you can think of it as a little girl playing store y'know, its fun to do some of the motions, but I'm not actually selling anything- oh no I need to pay for rent I might have to even if I don't want to...Did you know: I'm 5 followers away from qualifying for affiliate

The biggest set of streams this year was, by far, my playthrough of Demon's Souls! The original, on PS3, as it should be!

This was such a huge endeavour and one of the highlights of the year. The souls style of games from FromSoftware are ones I've been meaning to get into for the longest time, and I was really happy to start here. Demon's Souls kicks fucking ass, its SO fucking sick, and whatever quality of life or "improvements" later entries bring isn't gonna change that. Its just as playable today (thank you Archstones) as its ever been, which is lots! I'll keep banging on this drum, go meet games where they're at and they'll pay it forward tenfold. I definitely get it and have the bug for more, so Dark Souls...eventually!

I also had my first collab stream! joyce-stick kindly offered and I took her up on it, it was lots of fun! Its certainly different than solo streaming, and I'm still trying to sort myself out before I do another, but hopefully more will come.

Shoutouts to the mad dash marathon where I spent 6 hours of an afternoon rushing through the final story arc of the Revue Starlight mobile game before its service ended! I think I might actually miss this game, even if my time with it was short, thats a testament to the series' style and character that it pulls through even past the format. (fuck the format though)

And I can't think of a better way to close out the major streams this years than finally getting to play through Junko for Halloween. Junko is incredible, P.Yoshi is a genius, and I WILL finish writing about this game even if it kills me and its a new year by the time I do.

The gender is...going steady

So this is may be weird, or may be totally normal, but ever since I started my transition, the end/start of a year has been a pretty good marker to check back in on my progress. I've said it before, but I basically spedran through the first couple years and made so much progress on myself in all sorts of ways, most everyone I know knows the me I built in that time, even myself. Its maybe natural then, that things would slow down, but it still feels a bit melancholy not having much to report this year compared to past ones. I've just, been here, as cute as I was at the start of the year-which is admittedly VERY cute! I'm not gonna complain.
I got off progesterone cause I wasn't sure if it was doing anything, but also cause I couldn't afford it anymore. That's I think really the problem, this feeling that I could've done so much more if I hadn't been drowning. There's so many selfies I didn't take, I haven't had a hair cut since the summer, I'm lucky if I shave a given month... BUT I've lined up some exciting stuff starting next year, if you follow me on bsky you probably knowsnip snip.

Mirai in a bunny suit, of course

Mirai is not in her final form, not yet! We can go even further beyond, and I intend to this year!

Getting back into fighting games!!

I talked about this last time, so I'm not gonna go over it all over again, but thanks to my lovely wife's hyperfixations I've found myself getting back into Guilty Gear Strive and making progress on it again! So much so I've now become part of a lovely local community. This is after I more or less swore off Fighting Games the year prior, or at least the community side of things, a feeling that was reinforced many times throughout the year. This episode is something I more or less kept to myself, and I'm not sure, even now, if I could or want to articulate the details. Needless to say I've done a lot of work to get over a lot of my fears and found a lot more support, so I'm in a much better place to enjoy fighting games than I was at the end of 2023 and most of 2024!

Strive Floor 10

Social media collapse

(This section uh, kinda out of hand. I welcome you to skip it) ↓

I think one of the biggest themes this year has just been, the total collapse and deterioration of all the online spaces I frequent, haaah.

Not even sure where to start, I don't need to tell you what all's been going down on the dead bird site, I'm sure most people grew sick of it long ago. I've been lamenting this all from the start, I've no love for platforms, but its hard to deny how much the connections I've made and ways I've expressed myself on them have changed my life for the better, even through all the bad. I know, this has more to do with the people themselves than any stupid website, but seeing the ways in which I connect to those people fall apart and everyone scatter (or just disappear from public space) is still not fun.

It doesn't help that everyone's just been in this, neverending precarious state, even as we move around all over, nothing seems to yet settle right. I was proactive on getting accounts setup wherever I could when this all started a couple years ago, and one of those was on the newly-born Cohost. I would link Cohost, but as you know, its dead!! It died this year, very predictably given the state of its financials and very poor planning, but the hole it left behind is still tragic for a variety of reasons.Sorry, anytime you bring up cohost around people who weren't on there, some feel the need to be smug about it or remind people it 'wasn't that good' and maybe they're right, I was on the front lines bitching, but that's not the point! Its already DEAD, what more do you need? It lost, and shit like Threads lives. I'm not here to tell you every site should be like the ill-advised cohost, or that the admins were geniuses, I'm just SAYING they hit upon some things in this experiment, and you can't blame people for missing those or feeling a ways about social media after being there. Even as someone who criticized it plenty while it was still a thing, and never used it as much as other sites (again, it had conceptual issues), it still feels indicative of the state of things. Cohost, in retrospect felt like a public conversation and a trial run for an alternative, and whoever is at fault or whether it had lasting potential, it still feels like it was cut short. Clearly naivety of this kind can't survive in our world, but like I said on there at the end, At least y'all actually talked about it (I had to archive this myself)

However, the real site that's defined 2024, for both better and worse has been Bluesky. A true successor to rival Twitter.

I got on bluesky pretty early, all things considered, on the last quarter of 2023. At the start it was just, another place I had to make an account on in-case it would wind up being where everyone wentSpoilers: it kinda did. I didn't really have many expectations around it, I knew it had some sort of model similar to mastodon's (which I had/have mixed feelings on, but was at least glad to see work towards getting away from centralized social media) but was at the time not yet open that waySpoilers: it still ISN'T, not truly, not just cause of the temporary invites. I saw Bluesky for what it seemed to be, an offshoot from ex-twitter employees, Jack's baby, etc. Literally just a twitter clone with invites and less features. Me and a friend remarked constantly at the frustration that it of all places seemed to be where tides might be going.
Bluesky was small, barely anyone was in there, bar the friend who invited me, whoever I invited, some lefty e-celebs and a buncha protocol nerds. A lot of the people that were there were cool though, the leanings were all very queer, because of course they were, who is poster enough to be there? It takes a certain kind of person to be on the ground floor of this stuff. That smallness and unique userbase became kind of its killer feature at the time, it was a lot quieter and more intimate, and in the wake of twitter killing its short-lived circles featureGOD I miss circles so much I inadvertently wound up treating it like a private alt account. I spoke with zero filter, the kinds of things I would use an alt for on twitter cause I knew the discourse there would be rancid and I was paralyzed by fear of cancellationI'm not fucking talking about celebrity cancellation, I'm talking about Hot Allostatic Load, getting punished for being a weird transgender. This in turn attracted a lot of like-minded people, and before I knew it, my bsky was magnetized around a community that, for the first time in my online life, I actually felt comfortable being all of me around. It turns out, a lot of us are out there, queer and weird, burnt out from the camps of old, and the break from twitter to bluesky seemed to be the catalyst for everyone coming together.

Was there drama? of fucking course there was drama, there always is, there still is. I'm not here to paint a rosy picture, or recite all the you-had-to-be-there lore. The site comes with various tools, the idea was that every bit of the social media stack is its own, separate element that anyone could run someday, and they started out by trying to support an outsourcing of moderationalso algorithmic feeds, WE'LL GET TO FEEDS. Blocks on bluesky are "stronger" than twitter's by virtue of severing links, and every account is capable of building out their own shareable blocklists. There's also labeler services people with resources can run, they can go through and label accounts and posts as having certain content, and users can subscribe to them and use them to hide and curate their experience. Bluesky comes in with default, built-in labels and warnings, for things like nudity, porn, etc. They even extended this out to the infamous racism sliders, letting you tune whether or not you wanted to see things like "rude" posts, scams, "extremism", etc.

There's a lot that could be said about all of this, but in there lots of people saw potential. There's this ideal and dream we always chase, of a platform that is as permissive as possible with safety in mind, but that provides all manner of content flagging and curation tools so that no one ever has to come across something that upsets them. So that those with weird, unsavory tastes can just say as such and not be exposed to those who would be upset by it and harass them for it. Someone set up an opt-in blocklist, like look, here we all are, you can block us and we'll be glad if you doThis of course, didn't really go anywhere, the offer is never taken. People operate on disgust, not on 'not my thing but you do you' like we all wish.

But did I mention its all public?
Yea for uh, nerd reasonsI now actually understand the various nerd reasons, I am being dismissive on purpose cause a deeper understanding of the protocol and intent behind it has not given me anything but false hopes most every aspect of bluesky has to be publicly available, just for like, any of it to work, even if the site/app itself doesn't communicate it. This means likes of course, but it also means blocks, lists, and blocklists. You could set up a website that makes looking this stuff up a breeze, have a most blocked account leaderboard if you want.

So while more noticeable, the turbo kinkster radical queers are still a minority, and the majority of people, while cooler aren't that cool, and some are the hella lame twitter types who turn into republicans when they see a t-girl tweet about piss or whatever. Its still, to this day, common to see people thrown into unhinged blocklists that lump together anything from a nazi and abuser to someone who liked an anime girl once. People have never stopped coming at each other for sport, as always, some are here for the sake of the fight, instead of fighting cause they have no choice. You can't mind your own business with your buds when someone's going word searching for people to get angry at.
Same as it ever was though, we're all kinda used to it, and that block do be nuclear at least. Its manageable, to a small degree, in that its a known quantity, and there's ways to invite less attention.

But what about moderation? What's the ToS say? What are the mods acting upon?

Basically, same as twitter even in spite of all the moderation tools, no one being hurt by it. Kink art, posts and such are a no-go, but you could basically get away with it provided no one took issue with it. All those labelling tools in fact just seemed to be for the small moderation team to use, to have automated tools throw labels at and hide accounts in lieu of a suspension. You can't actually label yourself anything but the few suggestive image labels, they only just recently let you label gore, lmao. In less funny consequences, the amount of Palestinian outreach and discussion seems to be miniscule compared to twitter's. Because bsky automoderation labels most accounts looking for support as spam, and the default settings hide it all.

So yea, people and artists would get suspended, if you got too many eyes on you you could get mass reported for calling someone your sister in a flirty tone. Posts would be removed, and the team wouldn't tell which it was or even why.

Again, it sucked, it always has, but it was a known kind of suck. You could even try to cope, there's ways around it and lines to keep in mind, etc. But at the end of the day, its not like any of us were getting any sympathy, we'd yell at the void and no one would care, but we were still there at least. Most importantly, the protocol was there, the promise of a decentralized future was there. Sure, bsky sucks, but AtProto is cool sooner or later we'll be able to spin up our own alternate AppView or whatever, we won't have to rely on or be bound by bsky the corporation, but still be able to interact with everyone in the network, in a much better way than you would on mastodon/ActivityPub. This is what bsky is being set up for, "the corporation is a future adversary" or whatever they said.

Turns out, its hard to not be on there, surrounded by all the tech nerds and all the promises and not buy into what they're selling a little. Things need to change, to get better, the tech will have to as well, maybe we can start there, maybe we can help influence it. Its an open source protocol! So many of the contributors are vulnerable queer people looking for an alternative, will bluesky pay it forward?no

Bsky grew steadily, people would come in waves as twitter broke down. I found myself spending more and more time on it. I was mirroring my every twitter post on there. I was feeling more and more comfortable with the people there, my posts where gaining more traction, more meaningful traction with people who I actually cared about, my following was growing, but I could tell everyone coming in was cool with me. I made SO many friends, friends I didn't have to hide anything with, more than I ever thought would be possible. Incredibly kind people of all types who appreciate me.

Meanwhile, twitter sucked more and more by the minute. The site was breaking every other week, the discourses kept getting progressively unhinged, bots ran fucking rampant, paid bluechecks ruined the replies of every big post. At this point I was just begging for the site to die so I could move on. The circle I built up on bsky was great, but there was still way too much art and fandom stuck on twitter. Still, it was a matter of when, not if, I would ditch twitter in full.

Then the election happened.Also that whole AI training terms of service thing which got a lot of artists moving

During and after the U.S. election there was a massive exodus of twitter, the biggest ever.

So many people made this jump, more than ever, bluesky felt real, like this place had legs. It was certainly looking much better then twitter, at this point, why stick around? I made the jump, stopped regularly checking twitter and finally made bsky my main platform, it had been for a while, truly.

I got scared at first of all the new people and eyesI did actually wind up making an alt, not out of fear of my following, but as a general precaution with how much attention my main was getting. As we'll see this was a good idea, lmao, but it still sucks to have to watch what you say, but things seem to be holding up, the site's architecture was resilient in spite a few hiccups. Things were looking up, I was kind of getting excited?? Maybe this can work, maybe I can just enjoy social media for once. Okay yea, there's a lot of really obnoxious types coming in, but they're all generally aligned against people like MuskThe WHY and HOW always matters... so it can't be that bad, and I stick to my friends and never have to see them.

Bluesky, despite what a lot of people kept wishfully saying, has algorithmic feeds. Another "open" aspect is letting people create and share them, so you're not just stuck with the platform's equivalent of For You, the now dreaded Discover. Feeds like OnlyPosts, which filters out retweets, or Quiet Posters which surfaces accounts you might've missed, are legit good ways to keep up and work around the limits of a chronological timelineThough I realize, this is just as much in part a failure in the lack of any sort of filtering or customization of the following feed. A repost toggle, a mutual followers toggle, an images only toggle could do with a fraction of the effort what many of these feeds, which have to live on random people's servers, do.. Or you could just stick to following, its fine.

Lots of people, foolishly, tried to direct others and the "site culture", we don't post like this here, we don't do this here, we block and move on, etc etc. All, very silly and with no legs. The site has grown too big, you couldn't do this before, let alone now. The way the site is setup, will more easily influence the culture than any posting initiative.

But, I'm having fun! I'm learning about the backend, thinking about how, on paper, I feel like it has more potential than mastodon'sIts like RSS but for social media! Every account is a website! no glorified discord servers, real portability, no having to self host an entire social media site!. The big problem is, its not actually open yet, you and I can't actually run the full bluesky stack on our own, you can't meaningfully exist independent of bluesky infrastructure. The network, for all its promises, is solely on their hands. You can host your own user data, but you're still having to talk through their AppView and Relay, etc, most of which are not only expensive to run if you did, there's no real incentive yet for anyone else to do so.

Whatever you can say about Mastodon, from the start, you've been able to run your own instances. It wasn't a promise, it was day one.

They'll get there one day though! The team has a lot on their plate, what with all the growth, gotta clean up a lot of spam accounts coming in.

We're flying close to the sun, and the wax is starting to melt.

OH MY FUKING GOD THE MODS
TRUST AND SAFETY MY FUCKING ASS

This has already gone on wayy too long, this fucking nonsense is too fresh I'm not even sure if its worth litigating all over again.

Basically, bluesky expanded the moderation team rapidly to keep up with the growth, and every issue that was there got magnified tenfold, to the point where most people, even outside of this pervert niche, got affected.

One day I wake up to find a mutual's been suspended for seemingly no reason, her accounts pretty big, so everyone starts making noise. Then more people start getting suspended, everyone around me people start dropping like flies, all hell breaks loose. These are well known accounts, that have been here for a year or more, that have until now not been deemed to be breaking rules. Plenty in other circles and spaces, its impossible to tell if people actually broke rules or if mods have gone insane. By the end of the day people start getting reinstated after a ton of emails asking for appeals. Emails start being sent out, with bluesky accusing people of interacting with accounts engaging in actual crimes, and reinstating with a FINAL WARNING. Are they conflating art with reality now? Why would interacting with an account be good criteria, there's a warning system? since when??

Eventually they stop sending those emails out, most people are reinstated, not everyone mind you, to this day plenty are still locked out. The trust and safety account makes some thread about how they ran some automated system to try and clear out spam and harmful content, and it was maybe a bit overzealous. But its been reversed, just a little oopsie and accusation of crimes targeted at a lot of vulnerable queer people, no big deal?? Not even an apology, or acknowledgement for the emails. A lot of people take this to mean the suspensions where justified, that people had it coming, despite blueksy themselves admitting this was all a mistake, how can they be trusted to have made a fair judgement when they had to roll back this many suspensions? Why is everything a full account nuke now? I hope you made a backup, I hope you own your rotation keys to verify it, and I hope one day you can have alt infrastructure to work with.

Oh but this is just us weirdoes getting affected (it wasn't), the next fucking bullshit was in the news so I don't even have to summarize it!

Why the fuck is Jessie Singal still allowed on this goddamn platform??

What do you mean now you're all about the free speech maximalism, and how you can't persecute a well known harasser unless they break your rules on your site?? You're gonna go to fucking bat for this asshole, make vague threads about it all, then he's gonna turn around and call the website shit anyways cause everyone rightfully blocked his ass??

Do I need to tell you the head of trust and safety got caught liking porn on his main account, suspended the person who broke the news, then reinstated them like 4 hours later cause everyone made fun of him?

Well now you know, that happened.

Needless to say, my opinion of the platform took a nosedive. Again, its not like I had love for it, but I was certainly entertaining the possibility of the technology. But incidents like this prove its all fucking moot, when an overzealous moderation team can undermine it all. I ranted plenty about it on there, but yea. Its just another fucking big site like every other, with a spicy API.

THE DISCOVER FEED IS GOING TO GET SOMEONE KILLED
IF IT HASN'T ALREADY

The mods are still unhinged and in desperate need of a PR team and lawyer to look over their email copy, but how about that Discover feed eh???

The Discover feed sucks, its bluesky's answer to For You and it attempts to cater to your tastes, once it can divine them, which it can't, and it won't listen no matter how often you say "show less". It'll throw in people you follow, sometimes, but just as often it'll be a completely random roulette of posts. Yea, you'll get milquetoast, vapid social media engagement bait, but you'll also get a bunch of insufferable #resist liberals, and just a lot of..random ass posts, from accounts outside your network, with a few interactions, and no relevance to you.

Okay so it sucks, but who even uses that shit?

The new users do

Because its the default!!! So everyone's fucking dad has flooded the site, and is being randomly served up your posts meant for your in-group of followers!!



[image or embed]

— 🌻 Psychedelic Mycelia Madoka Magica (@puellameiberu.bsky.social) November 28, 2024 at 8:56 AM

It started out as just a thing big accounts complained about, but the longer it goes on the more it starts to hit everyone that being put on the Discover feed is a curse. These people aren't usually rude or bigotted, but they're mind-numbing, redditors eager to restate your joke or tell a worse one, people missing all context but still feeling the need to come in. Dared to post about common topics like politics, technology, or games? here comes the flood. Complete strangers commenting on my post about getting sushi for dinner, WHY ARE YOU HERE?????

Look through the replies of any dril post and despair, at least on twitterGetting 'For You'd and flooded with bluechecks IS a thing on twitter of course but it manifests way differently there, and the more effective algorithm means you generally have to do a lot of numbers or get really discoursey to get hit. Plus, its as easy as having a link in your post for it to be limited in reach haha they charge you money for being like this.

And if you're weird, god forbid you get eyes like these on you. How many people are being wrongfully suspended, or exposed to the kind of people who will put you on death threat blocklists (which won't get the creators suspended??) because of this stupid feed?

There's the mild hope here, unlike on twitter, that we can be listened to. Site is still early days, it has developers, a vague philosophy of user choice. This is pissing off everyone who posts regularly, but it feels like getting our hopes up in vain, while on twitter you can just accept Musk will only bother if it means he can replace server data with doge pngs.
It was a thing we knew was bad, we've mentioned it before, that we want a way to opt-out of algorithmic feeds. The old guard of unsalted people would complain about how much anime and furry site was on the site, asking for ways to hide it, cause subculture queers are cool and popular and get thrown into feeds of boring people. I post expecting it to go out to my followers, who choose to follow me, but I didn't consent to my posts being broadcast out to every new user! How am I gonna post about being transgender if I run the risk of some bigot who doesn't realize the posts aren't addressed to them coming across me? For the crime of being a long term user, and daring speak to my audience, I have to worry about posting or sharing anything at all, lest it escape containment in milliseconds.

Its not that we don't want to post publicly but there's a difference, between being able to hang out at the mall and talk to your friends, and having a bunch of strangers randomly listen and butt in like you're a standup act.

So, fuckinnnng bluesky man. Sorry about all that, maybe it was cathartic for you, maybe it was just stupid drama. I was having a good time! I still mostly am, again, the people are what matter (assuming they don't get driven off...), but the bullshit is tiring.

At this point I just feel numb to it all, burnt out, I don't know if I can care. I'm not going anywhere, but I'm also not getting invested, trusting or even mildly going to bat for any platform at this point. You'll say its obvious, you'll smugly tell me you never did, and I thought I didn't but I suppose I still had room to fall. Its my fault for caring about the assignment, even from a distance, and thinking anyone anywhere did. There's zero incentives for those with the power to execute these things to do it right, or at least try to, so they never will. My friends matter, the rest is just red tape.
So yea, I quit twitter, but I'm also gonna go back to it this new year, in a limited capacity. Everywhere sucks, whats it matter? That's where the majority of the Magical Girl Raising Project fandom is, both in Japanese and English, and I care about that and those people and I miss them so I'll be there for that. And I'll be on bluesky because that's where my main social circle is at, in spite of the moderators and the feed's best efforts. I resent that I have to keep juggling all these stupid sites, but maybe that's just the new standard, and how it'll have to be.

You'll see me online in 2025, but I'm not giving any of these sites a break, cohost at least had the grace to die.

The thing is that I am a soapbox style yapper, I have steam I need to vent without having to consider private social dynamics so when you tell me we should all ditch public social media and stick to discords you're telling me to suffocate

— ✧Mirai✦ (@starrymirai.moe) December 19, 2024 at 8:21 PM

Maybe one day I can stop living online, but for now its just my lot. If grass could fix me, it would've.

Making my house of starry cards

So in, happier stuff?? The other thing I did in the wake of the kind of nonsense outlined above was... make this site!!

This site has enough entries about itself as it is so I'll keep it short, but yes, its great to have a space like this for myself in the even of anything happening, and I'm having a lot of fun with it. Neocities is technically a platform still? but I have my domain and there's plenty of options to self host. The site itself is portable cause after all, I built it!!

So expect more updates throughout the new year, and for more fun changes to the layout on here. Have you given Mirai a ride on your cursor yet? ↖ Go pick her up off her card if you haven't~
mirai

I became an artist! Or rather, realized I've been one

I think the backhalf of the year for me has been characterized by me finally picking up, picking back up, and making commitments towards various skills and hobbies I've always flirted with. One of the biggest one of these is art and drawing!

mirai

Its maybe no surprise, looking at my social media feed, that art and illustration is something I engage with a ton. Drawing, sketching and doodling is something I've done since I was young, but for one reason or another I always considered myself not-quite there yet. Maybe at some point growing up, I realized there were much better people than me, making commitments I hadn't, and that it was something beyond me at the moment. I didn't think it was impossible, but it was always this process of "one day I'll learn™" that never came to fruition. I pursued an art career, but came at it from a technical angle, and while it was a good fit for me, I was dancing around the kind of expressions that I truly want to do and speak to me. The sketchbook was always within reach, I've had an entire digital art setup for years, sometimes I'd go at it a little, get something I like, but still feel lost, it was all a fluke in my mind, and anytime I tried to look at resources it didn't click.

A few months ago I was going some house cleaning, going through an old box of stuff I had left at my dad's place when I first moved out. Stacks and stacks of paper, sketchbooks, school notebooks, loose post-its. Drawings upon drawings, going back to my youngest years, through all levels of school. I remember it all of course, I was there, but seeing it all at once, the collective power of it.

Going through stacks and stacks of old doodles makes me realize I used to draw a lot more than I give myself credit for, and how much I really liked it.

I should draw more, fuck, what happened

— ✧Mirai✦ (@starrymirai.moe) August 4, 2024 at 7:29 PM

Fuck
What the fuck have I been doing?
What kind of denial have I been living under??

I love drawing, of course I do, I've always been drawing, even if I've pretended I haven't for the last couple years. I want to draw, I want to do art, I always have and always will. Not for money, not for fame, for myself. A whole world of expression, an entire language that communicates in ways words and language never could, one I've been listening to my whole life. I have things to say with it, even if its as mundane as "look at this adorable anime girl", and I've just been sitting here wallowing in not instantly knowing how to speak it. Just do it girl, do it and keep doing it and never look back.

So I have been!!! And I've never been happier. Two things that helped get the ball really rolling after this realization:

  • Getting a proper work environment

    One of my biggest hurdles, one I've known of for years, is how hard it is to get me to start the process of drawing. The easiest way to ensure you can do something, is to make it as frictionless as possible. I still have to work through a lot of mental friction, but there's no reason I should have physical friction.

    Back in the old days of moving into this apartment, having a roommate and limited desk space meant my display tablet lived in a desk drawer until I was ready to draw, at which point it would take over my entire desk, including my keyboard, and make the act of multitasking impossible. It was a commitment just to get going.

    Okay, but the roommate moved out! I got a proper office out of it, and got myself a massive desk knowing this, finally, the tablet could live out in my desk 24/7!!...

    Out....
    Under my dual monitor setup...
    Behind my keyboard...
    All the way in the back of my desk. Where, for years, it lived as a third monitor for youtube videos, and nothing else.

    old desk

    Dummy!! It wasn't until this moment that I realized, years later, how bad this setup was. Never mind that I had no desk space because of it, I had to reach out and lean over just to get to my tablet. I also realized, that maybe I don't like display tablets?? I had a regular drawing tablet I got from college, and like many I thought getting a display tablet would be a "direct upgrade" since it'd be more like traditional. Turns out there's tradeoffs, for one, I feel limited by the 16:9 aspect ratioThese things used to be 16:10!!! We forgot the old ways, AGAIN aaaaa (xp-pen remembered recently though). Secondly, its nowhere near as mobile or portable as a sketchbook unless you get a standalone tablet, or an insane monitor arm (or a proper fuckhuge cintiq). There's also the fact that, the ergonomics kinda suck. Digital art's ability to separate the input from the display is actually a plus, you can free yourself from the constraint of having to shrimp down into your art surface, and while the disconnect between hand and display takes some getting used to, its far from impossible. You also don't have your hand in the way! wow

    new desk

    So another desk rejigger it is! hahaha, I pulled it out from there and brought it out to the front. I brought out a portable monitor I had cause I still like having a youtube monitor. It can take up less space, cause I raised my monitors. Suddenly I have all this desk space and play room, and my keyboard can go out back. I still have my art macro pad I made forever ago out of a numpad and its much easier to work with.
    Now I'm using the tablet flat, and not even looking down on it lmao. I can unplug it whenever I want and get my desk back, that runs the risk of friction but it hasn't been as much of an issue, and most of the time I just type over it plugged in lol.
    I even figured out I could share my igpu and gpu ports to have everything display at once!! Though I just duplicate the main monitor onto the tablet, so whenever I'm drawing, and I want to do something with precision, I can shrimp down to it and use it that way.

    Anyway, its absurd, its very me, its not the final form but I love watching my setup evolve and growing into it. I wanna try and get one of those under-desk laptop racks so its super easy to take in and out next, lol.

  • Squares squares squares

    I saw a series of tutorials from BaROQUE on twitter that emphasized using squares (not even boxes half the time) and keeping things like, actually dirt fucking simpleI think so much art advice focuses on construction but forgets it too is a skill you have to build up, hence the classic cases of 'draw the rest of the fucking owl', and for some reason this clicked with me in a way that years of oval construction never did! Its honestly not a bulletproof technique or whatever, and I've got a lot to learn, but just having something that worked for me in getting decent results means I draw more, which is the point!

    There's more but you can like, look through their media tab. Running the images through Google TL is more than enough to get most of it all

do your best mirai

So yea, drawing's fun! Another thing I've greatly enjoyed is pinksea. I'm not gonna let my souring on bsky get in the way of how cool this project is (even if part of the coolness is its AtProto integration...). Its oekaki, built into the social media I'm already using! I somehow seem to always gravitate towards these low resolution, limited drawing tools, flipnote, paint, etc. Its such a fun, low stakes playground, and the limited tools keep me both honest and let me just... draw things a little janky and move on instead of endlessly tweak, much like traditional art. Plus, the aesthetic is great.

hop on pinksea

Feel free to look through my pinsea gallery! I wanna do more of them this year too, of course.

If you wanna look through art I've posted, I made a bsky account focused entirely on posts like that (and selfies hehe) since I know my media tab is full of nonsense lol.

I'll be totally honest, I haven't drawn as much in December, so part of me is a little scared? but I know I shouldn't be, I've had a lot on my plate, but stuff like this isn't as easy to forget or let go off lol. I still struggle and chafe against learning material, but I'm gonna keep doing my best and having fun with the process.

I'm sure you've also noticed a recurring character, that's me! The magical girl, Mirai of Stars!! I'm working on a character sheet for her and I think I'll have a writeup going over the concept and design process, so that's another promise this year! A personal avatar like this is something I've wanted for years, and its so nice to see her come to fruition under my own hands.

ミライが日本語を勉強します

Right at the end of the year, so maybe it doesn't count for much, but I also got back into properly studying JapaneseMaybe no wonder drawing took a backseat in December, hmm!! A lot of what I just said about art could apply here, but this is, an actual language!! It goes without saying, as a fan of all kinds of art from Japan, that Japanese is something I've also flirted with for the lognest time. I actually have a major leg up on this fact, and that is: I actually took 3 years of Japanese back in High School. Does that mean I know Japanese? no, lol, it was High School! Bless my teacher, but I surely didn't put in the work required. It does mean though, that basic things like kana I have all but down, and I have spent the last decade since constantly exposed to Japanese in the form of anime, music, and posts from all the Japanese artists I follow.

You can't just soak up a language without some effort though, so for the longest time I've just had these loose fragments with no real way to coalece and form real brain connections. These fragments have just been there, begging to materialize. This year my sisteryea its a kink thing Alice got started on her language learning with the help of this resource. I kept this on hand for the mythical time I would get around to making the effort, and sometime on December I just decided FUCK IT and got going!!

So far most of what I've done is go through Anki cards to get some vocabulary down, and I'm in awe at how well the system works in that matter, and half wondering what else I can learn with it. I've also, as per the guide's reccomendation, been going through Cure Dolly's Organic Japanese, which is seriously breaking my brain and making so much confusing textbook grammar click in for its logical reality. She's seriously a miracle worker, every lesson I feel my brain expand massively.

As far as immersion goes, as it turns out, I've been doing it all along!! Most of my immersion isn't even anime, which is there, but music and posts. I'm already in the habit of having a youtube mix of music videos running in the background most of the time I'm on my computer, and listening to music whenever I go out and do chores. I'm also always checking for lyric translations and english covers of any songs I get super into, so I already have a ton of word/meaning assosciations built up. The nature of music and repeated choruses just adds onto it. Extensions like yomitan are a blessing as well, making looking up individual words/kanji a breeze as I come across them. Works on embedded youtube subs yes, but also just, every Japanese post I see on bluesky!! I'm finding myself understanding and reading so many sentences, without ever having to hit a full translation button.

I'm really happy with my progress so far, and this is just the beggining! Every day I add more words and concepts to my vocuabulary, and as I go about my day I find myself understanding more and more. I still have a long long way to go before I can just enjoy untranslated media as I please (or even, post in JP), I know, but its encouraging to know I've set myself on the path, and keeping at it hopefully won't be hard.

Onto the Future

Do I need to tell you this post got out of hand? I'm ready to hand this all in and move on lol. You can probably guess what my resolutions and hopes for this year are, just keep at it with everything I've picked up this past year, and also get myself out of this hole I found myself in. I'm not gonna go without a fight, I will blind you with my brilliance, just you fucking wait 2025.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!! 🎉

If you read this far, or any of it, thank you, and I hope you have a wonderful year. I'm going to do my best to, and I hope you keep and eye one me.

未来年よろしくお願いいたします
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