Holy cow, we’re in the December times already; where has this year gone?
It’s been a hot minute since I checked in here, and stuff has been happening in that time. First and foremost: we got the lease! We’ve signed, we’ve paid, and we’re moving into our new place! It’s a good thing that we’re also paid up in our current residence until the end of the year, which means we can take our time to clean up and transfer all of our stuff across without rushing around. We’re going to have more floor space, which means we can have a real dining table again, as well as our L-couch that has been in storage for five years because we couldn’t fit it anywhere else. There’s space for our desks, our board game shelf, and somehow ourselves as well; I am going to be so glad to have a kitchen that I can stand in and move more than a single step to the side. There will be some adjustments to make; our cats are going to have to acclimate to a new space, which will likely take a few weeks for Sparrow especially, and despite a slightly reduced rental fee, we will have to pay for our own electricity and gas heating now; our costs will more or less balance out, just distributed differently. The biggest shift is going to be the extended commute to work, at least an extra 15-20 minutes both ways, so the sooner I find a different job the better.
My weekends have been filled with social obligations lately, and this weekend will be no different; it’s Japan Day on Saturday, so we’ll be going out to experience some culture. It’s a natural attraction to the cosplay crowd; there are going to be a lot of anime characters wandering around, though the best I’ll be able to manage is my Japanese Spider-Man T-shirt. While going out and seeing friends can be fulfilling, as an introvert it leaves me very drained, as I mentioned last week; my social batteries especially take a lot of hits during the holiday season. It’s not all bad though; at a birthday party this past weekend, I found a new potential D&D group (purely theoretical, no confirmation yet), and just chatting about my preferences as a DM got me thinking about my homebrew world again. I’ve been absorbing quite a few third-party D&D content creations lately (the less said about mainstream D&D the better, really) and it’s helped me brainstorm a bunch of new ideas, or put different spins on old ideas that could do with a good dusting off. Whether or not I get to put these ideas into practice is a whole other fettle of kish, but they’re nice to think about in the meantime, and it keeps the creative juices flowing.
Speaking of creative juices, I’ve been trying to get into the groove of communicating with people on social media, Bluesky in particular; like I’ve said before, to grow a social media account, I actually have to be social, and what better way to do so than communicate through the language of art? I’ve taken the slower year-end work days to get some art practice in, using some of my favourite artists’ original characters to try out new techniques; I’m looking into greyscale colouring and rendering in particular, as that’ll be easier on my wallet if I ever get my comics in print again. Here’s a couple of fanart pieces that I’ve done in the past week, featuring Big Help by psudonym and Charlie by Yung Khan:
The original creators both expressed their thanks for my efforts; it’s a nigh-universal truth that creators love seeing sincere fanart of their characters, and if I can make people happy while experimenting and improving my art, all the better.
Think that about covers it for this week; if I’m not completely wiped out by next week, I might have more stuff to show for it.
Ciao for now.