I was planning to fit a blog in somewhere after finishing all the planned sections of my site, but then I accidentally had thoughts before I planned to.
Written on: 11/08-26 - expanded on: 19/08-26 and 20/08-26
I recently had some minor surgery, and I've been having some lingering pain since then. Working through the pain kinda sucked, so I decided to simply take a break.
This gave me some time to take a step back and reflect on what my site has become since I made it 4 months ago.
First off, I am really happy to have discovered pixel cliques. I used to enjoy drawing, back in the day. But then, when I was around 14 or something, I started to compare myself to my classmates in art class. Some of them were WAY better than me. That kind of made me lose hope of being good at art, so I lost passion and stopped doing it.
Fast forward to July this year, and I'm sitting here with a very nice little site with barely any views except for my friends. So I decide I need to get my site out there somehow. I had recently stumbled upon Sundae News.(Shoutout to chaotic goode) An idea took shape. I make art. People see it while surfing. They get curious. Boom. Views. There was only one problem, or more accurately, a skill issue. I'm not great at art. But I did make some website assets using Animal Crossing's custom pattern feature. So I decided to draw an ice cream in game. The drawing tools in game are kinda bad, so I had a built-in excuse if it looked bad. Having an excuse let me convince myself that it was fine to submit my art, and that I didn't suck.(I did in fact suck, but that's not important)
The next major step came with the Kitty Friends pixel club. The template was pretty small, so I figured I may actually be able to put aside my crutch of the ACNL drawing tools and make some actual pixel art. It turned out pretty fine. And it made me look back at my other pixels. They sucked. The ACNH drawing tools are bad, and I used them as an excuse to get away with making bad art.
I remember thinking "Oh no I submitted bad art to Sundae News, she's gonna think I suck. I need to redeem myself." So I found a funny image of a scuffed Sonic the hedgehog popsicle, and mixed it with Animal Crossing. Enter the Nook Treat. She seems to like it. Finally, validation. I actually start believing my art is good.
And that's pretty much where I'm at today. I've come to accept that, while there are people who are better than me, my art is pretty neat and worth sharing. Nice little happy ending there.
W2SC is the first time I've been driven by passion in a long long time. As a kid, I put effort in at school because I was very gifted and got a lot of praise and validation from it. But I never really gave it my all. In high school, when they let us have laptops, I installed a gameboy emulator. In a couple years of math class, I beat Pokémon Emerald 3 times. Still got top grades too. It's hard to be passionate when you can succeed without caring. I started uni back in 2016, but dropped out after a couple months because my depression was real bad back then. 4 years later, I tried again, mostly to escape the painful feeling of worthlessness after being depressed and useless in my room for 4 years. Self hatred and the fear of being useless served as a decent motivator, but it was draining. Then I got my degree, and I made a website because I felt like I had to have one to improve my résumé and land a job.(didnt work tho) My first website was ass. I just made it so it existed, my heart wasn't in it.
I guess I've put a lot of passion and effort into several video games, like Animal Crossing, The Sims 3, Fire Emblem, and a few others. But that doesn't feel like it counts. Sure, I get passionate, but it's not like I create anything worthwhile from it except the memories. W2SC might be the first time I've passionately created something since I drew stuff as a kid. It feels nice. When I surf the web, I see cool features or layouts and imagine how they would look on my site. When I see a cool thing in a game I play, I think back to all the pixel cliques I've seen and wonder if I could maybe draw it as an ice cream, window, or maybe an egg. It's kind of taking over my life a bit, but in a good way.
To add to the previous section, there is a significant flaw within me, born from that whole 'gifted kid' thing. Being the guy who succeeds all the time was nice for a while, but the big problem was that I eventually became the 'success guy'. My teachers kept telling me how smart I was, and because people kinda want to find their place in the world at that age, I made being good at stuff a part of my identity.
And there's the issue. What if I make a new part on my website and it isn't better than the last one? The success guy woudn't do that, right? So I'm paralyzed. I start the next page of the cyber brochure, and it's kinda good. But then I look at the cool Windows 98-style frame I made for the brochure, and my cool paperclip guy, and I realize that my last update was great. And if the success guy made a great update, why would he go back to making an update that's just good?
I hate it. I hate the success guy. It's brain poison. I make something good and the success guy throws it away. I sit down to work and spend the next several hours trying to convince the success guy that this attempt is even worth doing and won't just be thrown away at the end of the night.
My hope is that writing this down and sending it out there into the world will help. So here it is: The success guy is just some delusion I can't seem to exorcise. It's bs, and I'm perfectly capable of underdelivering, just like everyone else. And even if I do underdeliver, it doesn't matter. I have a damn code editor. I can just make a version 2 that looks better. It's fine to upload my work on here even if it isn't perfect.
Welp, I've written it down, so that's the easy part out of the way. Now comes the hard part of actually believing it. Wish me luck.
I was going to write about having 6 whole followers, but then I opened Neocities today for the first time in a couple days, and it's 8 now. I'm basically a legitimate nanocelebrity at this point lolmao.(or maybe a picocelebrity. Femtocelebrity?)
Anyways, it's the most followers I've ever had on anything, and I think I might be a bit too excited about it. Whenever there's a new comment in my guestbook, I get super excited and struggle to sleep the following night. When my follower count hit the massive number of 1, I was so excited I put on music and danced around outside for almost an hour. I still celebrate whenever that number goes up, but at least I've managed to cut it down to just 30 minutes per new follower, teehee. I hope I'll get used to it eventually.
I did a funny little stunt a few weeks back where I made a section of my website called /buriedthoughts. The word depression on the main page is slightly greyed out and links to it haha. Don't bother going there, It's just some dumb trauma dump. But to me personally, It's pretty significant, because a couple days later, I started thinking about how long it had been since the last time I got overwhelmed by depression. Back at my worst, I would have a depressive episode like that several times a week, and I struggled to get out of bed most days. As time passed, the depressive episodes slowly grew less and less frequent, and the last one I had was sometime during job hunting, months ago.
I still have bad days where I feel like shit, and I probably always will. But compared to how it used to be, my life is pretty much all blue skies.(not literally my hometown is very rainy)
I'm no good at motivational speaking, but this is probably where I'd tell you to look at my example and realize that there is hope for life to get better, no matter how terrible things seem right now. Life gets better, you're not alone, and all those other clichés. I think those clichés are stupid. But you know what I think isn't stupid? You. You've got this.
All in all, these months of working on the site have been very fun, and probably good for my mental health. Shoutout to Eni for introducing me to Neocities.