I definitely could have gone for a better Year of the Rat, but I guess I should have known that I'm not allowed to have nice things. :p Kinda sucks when you just want a whole year to just end already. So I guess the take away is "fuck arbitrary dates and ceremonies decided by people hundreds of years ago" and I'll just make every day rat themed because you fuckers can't stop me, lols.

Speaking of dates though... October's almost here... been doing a thing for that like three years in a row now? Not expecting to do it this time around though. Probably because Damien isn't either and I was kinda bandwagoning that whole thing with friends like that, so... if we're not doing it together, then it feels like there's less incentive. I tried getting an early start on it anyways to work myself up to it and see how it felt but... that derailed in all of a day. XD So imma just call that off now and keep going at whatever pace I want.

I do have an off again on again project going though... I started up a "Character 100" like humbug's done over time. Mostly just to refine my existing characters and make new ones so I can have my own cast of characters to pull from when I want to draw things. The thought process being that maybe if I don't have to keep relying on other people's characters for my projects and thus don't have to worry about skirting the edges of what any given person likes and dislikes, then I can have more fun just doing exactly what I want. But... I don't have a very extensive cast to really do that with yet, so... this is me trying to build up to it and make characters I can actually see myself caring about, so it'll have the same feeling and attachment as I have with other people's characters. That'll probably take a bit longer to really work out though. I've had problems growing attached to random characters I just make in the past. So like, I was trying to build several of the ones I was making up by also putting them into a table top game I was GMing for but... I kinda hit a wall with that and had to cancel it because I couldn't manage it the way I wanted. Which means I've lost the vehicle for fleshing out these characters and will have to think of something else for that now... <.<;; On the plus side though, it means I don't have to hide unrevealed NPCs from players anymore, so I can actually start posting those characters.

And the ones that weren't being used as NPCs but I haven't posted yet anyways... Or literally anything else lately that I did and then haven't posted because... I don't even have an excuse anymore? I just haven't done it. I don't know why. I just didn't think about it.

Which has been my long winding ramble to say things are still happening... and I'm gonna post em... I just... haven't? I dunno. The world is weird and distracting right now. I'm hoping it will chill the fuck out soon but... I'm not hopeful. Honestly, I'm probably terrified it's gonna get worse. Because it keeps doing that. And it really needs to fucking stop that. We all need time to breath.