Month: November 2023

Welcome to a very special Monday edition of Bottom of the Deck, which only exists because last week was so busy that I didn’t get a chance to type up anything.

The day job took up the majority of my energy last week, so I won’t dwell on it too much; the weekend was far more enjoyable, so let’s focus on that instead. It was my fiance’s birthday, and the celebrations took up both Saturday and Sunday; while my social batteries were completely drained by the end of it, it was a good time all around. We got to see a lot of friends and family, went out for dinner one night while ordering in on the other night, and there were three separate cakes throughout; all in all, fun times. Given how hectic the year has been, it was a great prelude to the holidays; Americans have Thanksgiving, we have a birthday that just happened to line up with the Black Friday weekend, so it evens out.

We also have some good news on the house-hunting front, and just in the nick of time too; like I mentioned last month, my fiance has landed her learnership as a student teacher for next year, which means we have to move closer to the school where she’ll be practising. While we continue to wait for a potential purchase to eventually come through, we have taken matters into our own hands by looking for a place to rent, and it looks like we may have found the perfect spot. This place checks off all our boxes for location, pet accommodation and affordability; we were practically ready to take it sight unseen, but we scoped it out tonight just to confirm, and are now eagerly awaiting a contract. Fingers crossed, over the course of December we’ll be able to start transferring our belongings across, so that come January we’ll be moved in and ready to take on the next stage of our lives. Plus, with a new residential address all but confirmed, I can finally take my job hunting seriously; once I can definitively say where we will be based, I can put out my feelers in a focused radius, and look for something that is more convenient for my income, my commute and my mental health. 

While life seems to finally be progressing, creativity is still in a bit of a holding pattern; it’s been hard to maintain with everything else, and at this rate the Fifth Ace Showcase might only return next year, depending on how busy December is. There’s always a lot of social obligations over the holidays, so squeezing in some “me” time can be tricky, and I don’t intend to burn myself out like I’ve done in the past. Most nights lately I’ve been playing Minecraft, Stellaris, or more recently Deep Rock Galactic to destress; funny how my game choices seem to involve digging, space, or digging in space. On the other hand, some days my creativity runs away in different directions than I want it to, and I splurge it out in the form of free writing or conceptual art just to empty my head a little; here’s a little something my brain decided to throw out last week:

It’s probably a fantasy story, it might be sci-fi, I’m not sure yet. The basic premise is that a pair of twins on opposite sides of a conflict clash for the final time, and only one of them walks away; the survivor is heavily scarred and amnesiac, and does not know which of the twins they are. Do they want to know? What happens when the people who think they know, come for them? I plotted out a first chapter, but I’m not sure where the story might go from there, or when I’ll get around to actually telling it; this is what my brain does instead of focusing on existing ideas.

So that’s what I’ve been up to instead of getting blog posts out on time; I don’t know if I’ll post again this coming Thursday, it all depends just how much can happen in the next three days. Otherwise, we’ll be back on the regular blogging schedule next week once again.

Ciao for now.

Okay, let’s not be lazy about it this week; I’ll actually talk about stuff this time.

I know, I know, still no art in sight; I’ve doodled some stuff here and there, but nothing directly related to the website; chalk it up to the regular excuses and let’s move on to other stuff.

I’ve been thinking a lot about social media lately, and the requirements that it takes to become noticed on various platforms. The tricky thing is that each website tends to play by its own rules and algorithms; YouTube famously changes up their style every few months, Instagram is so invested in promoting Reels over pictures in order to compete with TikTok, and who knows what kind of horrific slurs you have to spout to even be spared a second glance on Twitter these days. For me, the latest challenge is Bluesky, and the tricky thing about this new platform is that it has no algorithm at all. There’s no magic bullet, no quickfire method of rapidly gaining followers, nothing to exploit to be seen; the only way is to post, repost and interact with others constantly and consistently, just like it used to be on other socials way back when. In other words, to gain ground on this social media platform, you have to be social. *thundercrack*

Social interaction has always been a hit-or-miss thing with me; I’m introverted by nature, and have a very limited pool of social energy that I prefer to spend on people close to me. I can handle small groups, which is why board games and TTRPGs work for me, but if I have to do it for more than a couple days in a row, I can get burnt out. Now picture trying to socially engage with hundreds to thousands of potential people in order to build a community that you deliberately want to see everything that you post online; you can see how that can be exhausting. Even trying to engage on an individual basis can be tough; I never want to come across as parasocial, even if I am genuinely not, but that’s the anxiety talking again.

I used to want to try and post something online every single day; that quickly went nowhere, partially due to workloads and partially because I couldn’t always find something significant to say on a daily basis. This is the primary reason I only blog once per week; there’s only so many times I can say the same thing over and over, especially if I’m in a creative rut or at a roadblock in life. Also, given how much I angst on here, I feel like I’m slipping into a habit that I’ve wanted to avoid: constant negativity. In the early days of my online presence, I tried never to post anything overly critical, or scathing, or negative in any way; if you can’t say something nice, shut the hell up, basically. There’s already so much bad stuff out there, I wanted to make sure that if I posted anything, it wasn’t going to contribute to the negativity. However, my ever-growing cynicism being what it is, any negativity that I wanted to avoid was inevitably turned inwards, and that was the perfect recipe for angst. In the year that I’ve been back on this website, I made every effort to haul myself out of the negative self-image that I wanted to leave behind, only to gradually turn around and start soaking my feet in it again.

I’m going to do better; I’m going to get myself properly motivated, I’m going to post stuff that makes people happy, and I’m going to turn my self-image back around to something positive. And in case I need a little extra motivation, there’s always Batman:

Ciao for now.

I don’t have much to say this week, so I’m going to let this song sum it up:

It’s meant to be about 2020, but it might as well be about my feelings in general lately; hopefully the weekend, and some D&D tomorrow night can help shake off the funk.

See y’all next week.

Ciao for now.

It’s November! And the Christmas decorations are already going up! What the hell is wrong with people?! It’s a dead horse joke at this point, but I refuse to let anyone think that this is normal…

In terms of art, not much to say this week; the Fifth Ace Showcase may still be a while in coming due to outside factors, but I might start throwing up some filler art here and there if I have to. If I can’t get to the stories, I can at least draw stuff that is fun to look at. I’m not going to dwell on this lest I sound like a broken record, so let me talk about something else that happened this past week.

Last Friday, my fiance and I scored a couple of free tickets for the Five Nights at Freddy’s movie, in exchange for her dressing up in her Foxy animatronic outfit and doing some on-site advertising before the show. As always, she was a huge hit, frightened the pants off several people and got quite a few photo ops in the process; I had a massive smile on my face watching from the sidelines as she was in her element, it’s always a joy to see. The movie itself was a lot of fun; I can’t really judge it as a horror movie, since they aren’t my preferred genre of film, but it was filled with references and easter eggs for the fans of the games, which I count myself among even if I’ll never play one of them myself (Let’s Plays and lore videos are more my speed). Horror in general isn’t something I usually gravitate towards, which made the whole experience very unique for me.

One of the big things that I’ve noticed changing through the years is the level of audience engagement in the cinema. Growing up, I was always told to quietly enjoy the movie and not interrupt anyone else’s experience; there would be the occasional group laugh at something funny and maybe some applause at the end, but that was about it. I know cinemas tend to get more rowdy in some other countries, but it’s not something that usually happens here; this is something that seems to have evolved over time. I saw it first when I watched Avengers: Endgame on the opening weekend; the cinema was packed, and every big reveal and dramatic moment was accompanied by cheers and screams, and some of them I freely participated in (you can’t blame me for whooping out loud when Captain America picked up that hammer). I figured, “Okay, that’s to be expected, it’s a story that’s been building for twenty three films, of course people will be excited.” But it’s something I noticed in FNAF as well, and I don’t think I can put it all down to fan excitement; there were certainly people laughing and cheering for fun references and cameos, but there’s something overall different about watching a horror movie in the cinema.

There’s that stereotype of people watching horror films and yelling advice to the characters on screen, all the “don’t go in there!” or “don’t touch that, nonono!” going on as they stumble into the deathtraps. Guess what? Stereotypes exist for a reason: that actually happens. I was so worried that we might be making too much noise, or speaking over other people’s experience, but it’s actually sort of expected in that setting; literally everyone was doing it, because part of the experience was the freedom to do so. We all know something terrible is going to happen to the characters, we can feel the tension building and we see the deathtrap looming, and by vocalising it, we connect with everyone else feeling the same thing. Watching a horror movie in the cinema is a surprisingly community-minded process, which I didn’t expect at all; whenever I notice easter eggs in a movie, I tend to chuckle quietly to myself and roll with it, but in a horror movie, if you don’t wince and go “ooooooooh!” out loud in unison when someone gets bitten in half by a murderous animatronic, you’re doing it wrong. I doubt that this will turn me into a horror-aficionado, but I had a good time; again, I don’t know how to judge FNAF as a horror film, but as a fan experience, it was a lot of fun.

That’s all I really have for this one; our D&D game that was set for tomorrow got pushed back a week, so I’m going to keep brainstorming characters for that; for some reason, all the ones I’ve been coming up with have low intelligence scores. Maybe I’m just tired of trying to be smart in-game, let me be a doofus for a change.

Ciao for now.