It's been like 4 years since my last journal, so I figured I'd give an update after spamming some art onto the page last night.

It's been quite a long haul getting out of the low confidence slump, and lots of other habits began to fill the time void that the low confidence carved out. I've been purging myself of recent Internet trends, especially ones revolving around the slot machine user interface (e.g. refresh the page to get a new infinite-scroll stream of randomized content delivery), and that's been freeing up a lot of time.

I've also been disengaging from the news outside the Wikipedia front page's "In the news" box. It's good to stay informed, but most news sources have adopted a habit of stoking fears of being uninformed for ANY length of time. Reading every new thing that pops up after a major event becomes a pattern of clawing for more dopamine. I'll have none of it. It all feels like a gambling addiction to me, and seems to produce the same withdrawal symptoms.

If you feel like you don't have time for anything, start timing your habits and figuring out what activity (especially idling activity) is filling up that time. You know you'll have been successful when you find boredom again. The Internet never wants you to be bored. It must occupy as many of your precious minutes as possible to increase ad revenue and engagement. I feel that the toxification of Twitter and social media in general has elevated FA's status as a relevant social network again. Imagine a website that wishes to show you content in an organized and efficient fashion! Whaaaat?? A grid of links on a page?? Indexing?? No doomscrolling? What is this madness?? I'll take the clunky UI if it means getting slightly more genuine-feeling interaction.


I'm streaming more often now on https://www.twitch.tv/swishchee. Thanks to Rocket fox for showing me the way to get a working 3D model for vtubing! I had to replace the old one I had that used facerig. I'm still stretching my creative brain on composing recent art so I can renew some of the carefree feelings I had early on regarding drawing, before encountering some bad influences.

I've also been using VRChat way more, and have been doing lots of 3D modeling that doesn't really show up here. I'm honestly not sure where I'd be putting it! Screenshots rarely do the stuff justice. I have been making worlds there, though. I originally built tons of 3D environment stuff back in the Second Life (and even Activeworlds) days. You can find me as swishchee on VRChat. I also have been doing half of my sketching over there in the form of those 3D pencils.