2022.11.22, 11:57am

i've been away from home for almost a week. my thanksgiving plans got a bit interrupted due to getting a bad cold — i'd planned a 2-step trip where i'd visit some friends in the city for a few days and then go upstate to visit other friends for our annual friendsgiving get-together, but being sick has stalled the second half of those plans, so i'm staying in the city for a few more days and then heading home. unfortunate, but spending 9-10 hours on a train with a super stuffy nose seems like hell, so it's probably for the best!

i lived in the city for seven years and only moved away a few months ago, so this is my first time back. even sick, it's really nice to be back here — it's amazing how instantly it felt like home. even carrying a giant suitcase, 3 people asked me for directions in the subway within a half hour of me being back in the city, which makes me feel good about still looking like a local, haha. i'm getting the hang of things in my new city, slowly but surely, but this city is where i became an adult and figured out some really important aspects of myself, so i think it'll probably always be home for me.

i got to visit my old roommate and his cat (which used to be my cat, too — she was born under the kitchen table in our terrible first apartment, and my roommate kept her when i moved away, but she hasn't forgotten me and immediately started meowing at me when i walked in, which was super nice) while i've been here too. i'm really looking forward to being able to get a cat at some point once i'm back home — i've been waiting since i knew i'd be travelling for most of this month, but i miss having a little creature in my house!

the friends i'm staying with have poetry magnets on their fridge, and i've immediately ordered some for myself, too. i don't write poetry myself very often anymore, but it's really fun to play around with rearranging words in magnet form into something pretty!

(i tried to figure out how to give each word a bit of random rotation on here to really emulate the fridge poetry effect, but then i remembered i do have actual work to be doing today, and probably shouldn't dive into javascript for something that will almost certainly be a one-off. there was probably a simpler way to code these as-is, but i'm being responsible and not going to spend more than 20 minutes on it. if i decide to post more stuff like this once i get my own set of magnets, maybe i'll figure out all of that then!)

today i very badly need to get some comic pages inked — since i've been sick, i'm a bit behind on the smaller deadlines i've set for myself leading up to the actual big deadline that's been set by my editor, so i need to get caught up on that!

(but also, if you followed the link i posted on twitter to this website and are a comics person reading this: of course i'm totally caught up on all my deadlines don't worry about it i'm super professional etc. i promise i'm good at my job and you should hire me.)

i kind of want to figure out some code to add little deviantart-style "currently reading/watching/listening to/feeling/etc" widgets to the bottom of these journal posts. you guys remember those? i spent my middle/high school years obsessively on deviantart, and it feels like a good vibe for these. i'm being very responsible and not going to try to code that now, but maybe that'll be a little project for if i can finish enough comic pages today.

i've also been working on helping a friend code a website for their writing portfolio! it's nice to be able to make things for someone else. i almost never draw things for people as gifts, so being able to use a thing i'm somewhat good at to make something unique for someone else isn't something i get to feel very often, and it's very cool!!

2022.11.14, 9:27am

setting up this page! i've been really bad with getting distracted by coding rather than doing my actual work lately — coding seems to activate the ol' adhd hyperfocus brain without fail, even though i struggle to get into that state while doing art or any of my other actual jobs. sometimes i think maybe i should've gone to school for web design instead to take full advantage of that, but i do really like making comics, too!

anyways, i got a firefox extension to limit my time on certain websites so i don't spend more than 2 hours or so on coding this per day. i finally have the basic layout pretty set in stone, at least, so the hard parts of coding are done! now i just need to figure out what kind of pages i want to add!