BACK ON TRACK! But just barely, I was considering not doing anything cause I still genuinely have nothing to show here lol, and on top of that my timeline for the big redesign being unveiled is looking a bit later than I wished. I'm trying to take it all in stride though, working on this site is genuinely so fun, it puts a lot of interesting skills to use, but at the same time I do have other hobbies and with how much I've put specifically into this, sometimes to the expense of my mental health, it's good to switch it up. Like, you gotta remember that your hobbies are just that and there isn't like too much of a reason to fret over self-imposed deadlines.
That to say, I have one measly little thing this time, and that is a paste over of something new from the redesign: My Inspiration Corner!
This came to me when I was mulling over some things I could add to the journal besides essays I wasn't writing. I'm gonna try to work on low-pressure blogs to get myself in the writing mood and to make sure the stuff on here is personable so it yknow, gets done. It's sometimes very hard for me to remind myself this is a hobby and a personal thing and not some curated brand space. I like calling 'Gracest-Galaxy' a brand in like a for funsies 2010s kids-putting-productions-in-their-channel-names way, but this ain't a studio, it's just a place for me to say things I wanna.
Either way, it is back to the redesign and other hobbies mines from here. Since June was when I was originally planning on dropping that redesign, if it's not done by then I'll try to be more descriptive of what I'm doing and where I'm at. Ciao till then!
HELLO! Break from pace this month with updating on the 2nd Sunday of the month for a few reasons. For one, it was my BIRTHDAY last weekend :3! And related to that, I decided to take a break from my site because ever since my last update I've been working on Gracest-Galaxy like a madman, and lowkey burnt myself the hell out so I just needed some time away from that deadline again.
Now you may be thinking, what interesting things have I worked on so much throughout March? Well, the answer is nothing much visible on this site, because I've been hammering away at a site-wide redesign offline! I'm basically working on rebuilding the design and structure from the ground up to look more website-y and professional, cause I still feel too much of the stink of Carrd on this one, and so far I've very very happy with where things are going! There'll be a good amount of new content alongside everything here still remaining, and I'm LOOKING to have this update launch in June, which would be something like an anniversary for this thing. So because of that, most of my focus has shifted to that, and in turn its working on this site a bore for motivational reasons and also cause like DAMN the CSS here is messy, it feels really good to start over lmao. Expect spaghetti code and no major additions for a while unfortunately.
But there is one small new thing: I have officially moved the Kirby Headcanon Lore Bible to its own URL at Onions-Kirby-Lore.Neocities.org! I didn't have time this month, but for next month I think I'll strive to quickly update its CSS to mesh with the site redesign, which would be a lil sneak peak at what I've been cooking...
Next month I will try to update on time even if there isn't much to talk about, and hopefully the one after that, there'll be something really huge to go over :).
YO YO YO WHAT IT IS MOTHERFUCKERS! GUESS HOW MUCH GETS DONE WHEN YOU HAVE A RANDOM BURST OF CREATIVITY!!
There's a bunch of stuff to go over, so I'm gonna try to be more brief and organized than my updates often am.
THE NEW CHARACTER. The first post-launch addition to the character Gallery has been made in the form of Onion Thing! As I said before, this character would be different from most other entries, thanks to her being a 3D sona. It was both a blessing and a curse because my skills getting 3D poses to look dynamic is shaky, but as well, it's not attached to my current drawing burnout, so I was able to get things done ^_^.
THE JOURNAL SECTION. Something I teased back during December, but has finally come to fruition. It wasn't much more to put together, but I just had to solidify a few features and add the last of the stuff I was missing from the biggest article there right now. It's not a lot, two archives of social media posts and one of a fanfic, but I wanted to get it out while I was in the mood. I have plans for original stuff written for it, as well as a way to blend it with other writing/essay-heavy sections of the site, and I'm hoping having it sitting there for all to see will motivate me for that and give me more ideas!
SPLATOON INTEREST PAGE. In light of my recent playing habits and the release of Side Order, Splatoon has re-entered my heart again, and to commemorate I decided to prop up an interest page for it! Its in-depth isn't a priority right now, and its Fan-Works one is comically barren, but I did need somewhere to gush over a few of my favorite things about it! For the Fan-Works section however, as things are going, I do have one idea for a video I could make that would technically belong to that section. If you're a Splatoonhead I hope you enjoy what's there rn.
KIRBY MINISITE ADDITIONS AND FUTURE. Nothin' huge, but I did add a lil something to the section for the first time in forever - a headcanon backstory for a fave and an update on the goings on of my brain in relation to my RTDL streams. Besides the headcanon stuff, with the actual structure of the mini site, I've been considering doing what I did with the Mini Gallery, and making it its own site-site. I felt a bit off for doing it cause it's history and purpose is kinda linked with Gracest-Galaxy, and the Mini Gallery is only seperate out of paranoia, but I think it's about time I start abusing my Neocities premium and use up some internet real-estate. If that happens, I may stop really updating about it here, which may be for the better as it changes on a different wavelength in a way. Either way, that's something for the future!
ALSO FOR THE FUTURE, are thoughts on the structure of this whole site. Not in a functional sense, but more aesthetic. If you can't tell, my website is based off the bones of my original carrd (which I believe has since been hacked and retooled by a crypto freak), and I think it shows a bit too much in its design... I don't spend enough time looking at other sites in the wonderful world of Neocities, but the few I have have given me ideas for how to better orient certain aspects of the site. Mostly cosmetic stuff like the font size and divider sizes that nonetheless can add a lot to the feel of the place. Another thing to is possibly putting this progress report on the main page, either that or having a pop-up for new stuff, cause I feel it's rather out of the way.
It would take a bit more R&D before I commit to all that, as it would take some major CSS overhauls, but if I do... you'll probably hear me declare it in a future update, and I'd shoot to have it implemented in May - around the anniversary of the sites launch.
Hopefully as the weather gets warmer and my brain reconstitutes itself for the spring I'll keep up some of this energy! I still have free time and now even more ideas for what to do with it for this site.
Hello! This update will be rather brief and lowkey, because to be honest, I did absolutely zilch this month. Unfortunately this is not because I'm having awesome times at college, as that's been postponed till fall for me, it's simply that I didn't get to anything I wanted to do. January was a very slow month for me, but now that school is not on the docket for another 6 months or so, I do want to refocus more attention here.
I do have one thing to show off, which is the Gracest Gallery Mini Site! This time not a mini-site that is PART of Gracest-Galaxy, but it's own! This totally was not something I made in 4 hours because a family member asked to see my website and I was scared of them seeing all my gay shit!!
Paranoia project or not, I do actually have plans for this thingy. G-G's gallery originally was broken up by year as it is for the Mini Site now, and when I had them broken up by year, I had plans for doing yearly overviews, and some other more in-depth stuff. Because I wanted to make sure I got what I REALLY wanted done for the main site, I dropped some of that stuff, but now I could rework it back into the Mini Site! Over time though, because I'm not super motivated for that right now, but one day lol! There's also a question in the back of my mind of weather the Kirby Lore Mini Site will similarly get its own domain, but for now I'm fine with it being a weird tumor of the main one.
Like I said, my main focus now is the Character Gallery, which I'm having the same trouble with I had before with just a general art block stopping my progress. But I am determined! The first character I want to do is just a bit more of a challenge than the last ones :3c, so I'm trying to use that excitement as motivation.
And one last note on hopefully upcoming things, February will be the anniversary month of Kirby's Return to Dreamland Deluxe, on the 24th specifically. If you've seen my rambles on the Kirby Lore Minisite, you'll know I have very strong opinions on that game, so I've been looking for an excuse to replay it and the original. HOPEFULLY, if nothing silly happens, I'll resume streaming for those two games around the 24th! I'm also looking to have a better microphone by then, so that'll be nice too.
So in conclusion, not much last month, but hopefully a bit more this one!
HAPPY NEW YEAR! As always I update on the first Sunday of every month (even if that means updating a whole week into the month (which actually saved my hide)).
December was very productive, due in large part to the pressure of getting things I had always wanted done by the turn of 2024, that being THE CHARACTER GALLERY, BAYBEE!!! It's such a dream to see it up and running even in its very limited form!
Right now, it showcases the main protagonists of my two most important original stories, Neonverse and Moxietale (both still working titles I hate lol). While Moxie's story is abandoned and therefore will have it's entire plot filled in as characters come along, Neon's is very much still active and has been undergoing a lot of concept work lately! I wanted to give a thorough outline of what the character and series is about, so the pages cover some major plot beats, but hopefully not too much that it sounds spoiler-y. The Inspirations description also ended up being surprisingly fun to write, I find peaks into creative processes and journeys very insightful from others, and I hope it makes my characters a bit more engaging too.
The creation of the character gallery in general has also been very rewarding, and basically came out just as I'd hoped and then some. I even added some last minute touches like an alternative image expansion that uses the built in portrait, it was the most CSS I'd done since I renovated the Main Gallery. And speaking of which - that's been updated for the New Year as well! It's diverse in medium between 3D and 2D projects, and even has some of my lame attempts at graphic design in Inkscape ^_^. Hopefully those graphic design skills will bleed into the site.
The Journal section I teased last time unfortunately isn't quite done. In the middle of the month as I was running out of free time I had to choose between that random fancy and the stuff that had been a big dream of the site for months, and I feel I chose wisely. It's still certainly on the docket, but I won't be making anymore hard promises, as one of my resolutions for the beginning of this year is to cool down on the website stuff. It got a little too stressful for me combined with work, and on top of that, I'll be starting school soon, so I'd rather not let it distract me from those. What I will shoot for though is maybe to have a single new character for the gallery every month or so, I feel like that's an easy goal, especially if I shoot for some of the grab-bag characters in the currently dormant "Miscellaneous" series. On top of that, I'll always come back and fiddle with stuff from time to time, including that Journal infrastructure.
One last note I'd like to go out on is some of the stuff among the 2024 pieces! Among all the new 3D art you'll notice some new reoccuring characters! Well, technically not really if you've seen my Kirby gijinkas. They're from one of my Kirby fan AU/project things called Baseball AU, which you can read about on the Kirby minisite here. It'll probably eventually get its own series page, cause its very dear to me and a big part of WHY I began learning 3D! Stuff about them, and Neonverse (the other big game concept), and such and such I'm very much looking forwards to expanding upon on this site in the coming year :]. It's really becoming a creative treasure for me!
History somewhat repeated itself as last time, but I did get something really big done about in the middle of the month rather than at the end - THE SONIC AND FINAL FANTASY IN-DEPTHS ARE FINALLY DONE!!! They've been under construction for so long it's kinda embarrassing! But I randomly got super inspired to write for them and pumped out some really beefy essays.
My magnum opus is the Kuja In-Depth, as is expected for the best character ever written*. The scope of the Final Fantasy essays especially made me want to return to those of the Kirby In-Depth and redo them, but I only got around to the one on Kirby Super Star, though I am still planning on redoing Galacta's and the Overall. The Kuja In-Depth is actually a lite version of a video essay idea I've had for a while, and I'm planning on a similar approach for the Galacta one, so hopefully it'll be a banger.
Besides a whole ass new essay also written for the Kirby Lore Minisite and some much needed progress on the General Lore, a lot else for this site has just been speculation on what to do... The biggest idea I'm still working on is the Toy.House-like Character Gallery, which is all done structurally, I just need to do the artwork for it -_- which is getting harder and harder to get myself to do. But also during the month there was a scare about Tumblr possibly entering a twilight stage that made me archive it and come up with a new fun idea! That being to add some of my best essays from there onto this site. My focus on essay texts this month may've been motivated by that idea honestly.
This would be far more simple to get up, because the easiest part for me is the programming, its art and new creative stuff that is draining, but this would be an archive of pre-made stuff. I would still prefer to keep my focus on the Character Gallery, as I'd like to see it in some state by New Year, but these are kind of in two different fields - programming and art. So who knows, maybe you'll see that along side the Character Gallery next month (hopefully not one and not the other).
I may even get to that stuff tonight, so this update is a bit less of a ceremonious "see you next time" and more the obligatory peak at the drawing board as I'm just gettin' started. Since the next scheduled update would be NEXT YEAR technically, I may do an intermediate update if I have anything, so look out for that.
So I'll be totally upfront... I didn't even touch this thing till like the last full week of October lmaoooo. I remembered at the last minute I promised to optimize the gallery, and found it to be an interesting but kinda boring and laborious process. Thank god for batch file converters and image resizers and the like, cause otherwise this site woulda just had to chug on every load of the gallery.
Actually, the scary thing is that I can't really tell how well it worked yet. For the non-gallery images I downsized them as they're just glorified stamps, but due to both the scope of the gallery and the fact I want those images to stay crispy, I didn't scale them down, only converted them to webp. HOPEFULLY it will help, even though on top of everything I also FINALLY got the images to be less spaced out, but that means that now are more loaded at a time... Oh well, if it's bad I still have another month.
The biggest new attraction now is my new and improved About Page on my Interests! Before it was just about favorite characters as a general "heres who I'll kill you over" in the rather basic style reminiscent of carrds of yore, but now it has quite a bit more depth. It now has favorite songs, movies & shows, video games, AND EVEN MORE CHARACTERS! Having a more thorough list is kinda surreal, I know what I like but also have a hard time putting them all into perspective, so I guess this will remind me how clashing some of my tastes are lol.
In October I tried to get back to streaming like I promised, and I got in the groove for a good week or so before I got really burnt out outta nowhere, but I'll try not to let it get to me. It's depression season for me, but hopefully rotating between multiple different hobbies will keep me busy. I thought I would finally tackle learning Python and/or C# this month, but I hit a roadblock. Not because they're hard... it's just.... really boring to learn a new programming language... Especially now that I have a good grasp of Javascript, everything else is basically the same with slightly different syntax when you first start. So for now that's what I'm spending my time on in the world of programming.
Honestly, with the year reaching the beginning of it's final stretch, I gotta say already that I'm pretty proud of what I've gotten done. Very specifically, with my learning of coding and 3D, my pipe dreams of making original games are becoming possibilities! Which is super super exciting! And something I want to eventually lay out on this website. I said before that a Toy.house style character gallery was in the works maybe for New Years, I believe? IDK about that now that the date's more in perspective, but it will be a priority with the gallery stuff done.
FELLAS. September was a very productive month. I'd been playing hot 'n' cold with Javascript for the past couple of months, but this past one I fully broke down and learned how to use it for site modification. And I am super proud of the result!
My Gallery now has a search feature! It's not super sophisticated, and if it breaks it breaks (feel free to message me about it), but it fuckin' works! You can now search through all ~140 of my pieces either by name or dedicated tags, and it will give you what you're lookin' for!
This was a monumental undertaking for me, because all the JS I had learned before mostly centered around game creation. I had to learn sooo much about the system so I could make this from scratch. There are tons of free tools and widgets you can use for this sorta thing out there, but I want my site to be as self-sufficient as possible. I even made a lil' bit of slideshow code for the commissions announcement. It was insane how easily it came to me after going through the gauntlet with the search function.
In tandem, to make up for the gallery now being one big page with everything on it, I made its so that images load lazily in order to quicken things. Even when they were separated into separate years the page would crawl along, and the "loading attribute = lazy" thing fixed most of the problem even for my new gallery. In the future I would like to optimize it even more by having the thumbnails be smaller, but with how the big image feature works right now, it'll be a bit of a hassle. (I may even go for the dreaded Webp format, cause I mean, I don't want anyone downloading my art anyways lol?)
In less exciting news, in the process of this update I had to redo a lot of folder names and anchor links because of Neocities and it's "hidden folder" nonsense. It was very annoying, and I still have ghost folders with nothing in them buried on my site's page -_-...
For the Kirby Minisite there isn't too much new this time around, but things are still cooking. You can see deets about it on that Updates Page.
It's been a hot minute, and other than some routine updates for the Kirby Lore page, there isn't much news on the site itself. There's still plenty in the works, like a second gallery structured like a toy.house, and I've even thought of maybe setting up an askbox or comment like section. When those will come at the pace I'm on, who knows.
Even though I stopped streaming for a bit after my last announcement, I did pick back up and finished the first part of the Kirby Marathon. I got interrupted by a family vacation, but I'm planning on doing a quick bonus stream sometime this week, and then starting up again in October. The perfect time of the year for the infamously spooky Dark Matter Trilogy. I'm planning on uploading the full VODs of the streams, as well as edited down versions on my channel, which I'm aiming to formally revive by New Years (wish my procrastinating ass luck)!
In more personal news, I paused my Disney Marathon due to running out of notebook pages, but I took up something more interesting in the meantime. My biggest original project, Neonverse has been in need of a rewrite for a while, and I finally got back around to that sometime in July. It's been going very fun since then, and soon I'll have art and notes to share from it. I was even inspired to dive an inch deeper into Javascript in an attempt to rough out a gameplay concept.
Neonverse also inspired me to revisit somethings from around the time in my life it's based on. Chiefly, Steven Universe, which has recemented itself as my favorite animated TV show, it is so fucking good! Reexamining the works that most inspired me around the time Neonverse is based on is officially on the docket for the experience of the rewrite now, and I think next is Undertale and/or Super Mario 3D World. I'll likely be playing them alone or with friends instead of on Twicth. But if you follow me on Tumblr, you'll probably see my opinions on such and such about it.
So another month of trying to relearn site coding from the ground up had come to it's conclusion. I had finished relearning CSS and HTML, and all that was left was to dive into Javascript! Buuuut... I got too bored, I am not a coding nut, but HTML and CSS are rather special because of how instantly constructive you are. When I do Javascript and half the lessons are doing background shenanigans and remembering math equations my brain starts to fall out. Which isn't too bad, I do have basic knowledge of it from the class that inspired me to recreate my CARRD from scratch, so if I'm ever truly pressed to add Javascript to this site I won't be totally lost.
Because of this pause I haven't done anything revolutionary to the site lately. The Kirby Lore Site got some cute aesthetic updates with the navigation dividers and scrollbars, but that's about it on that. My Disney marathon has slowed a bit as I'm bad at catching up on the essays and a friend has been out of town. But it has been a very fruitful watch with these less impressive films.
MORE RELEVANT HOWEVER IS THAT I'VE STARTED STREAMING! On Twitch.tv/Regina_Stellarum I've started a Kirby Marathon I've been meaning to for many months now! It's not high quality and I'm still getting used to commentating but it's been refreshing to just START something I've wanted to. The schedule about now is Monday, Wednesday, and Friday sometime in the afternoon. Eventually I'll add my Twitch page as a link in the Where to Find Me section, but for now it's a pretty down-low thing, and it's mostly to satisfy a need for Kirby replays I've had for a while.
After half a month of fiddling around and relearning HTML & CSS from scratch I reformatted a lot of CSS in the background and decided to do a hard reset of the site. Probably won't look like much changed (besides the fact you can actually window this site without it imploding), but a lot of work went into making background stuff more professional. AND I STARTED THIS JOURNAL!
Also during the month, I started doing a weekly marathon of Disney films. This week I'm on Bambi (1942) and Victory Through Air Power (1943). I'm entering the thick of the package film era, and I want to make sure I don't skip over them in service of the flashy Disney classics. I also try to write a small essay about each one, but I've been falling a tad behind on that, OH WELL!
I'd also like to highlight that on my Kirby Headcanon Minisite I have something similar to this, but that one is very specifically about all things Kirby related. I'll bring up updates that effect that sub-site here, but for in depth explanations you'll have to look there.
When I officially soft-launched the website and made a post about it on Tumblr.