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I think I've been discovering a lot lately. Mostly about myself, sometimes about the world. I recently finished reading a book called "Ratha's Creature" and it was one of the best books I've read in a long time! It's a young adult xenofiction book, the first in a series, and it is one of the few xenofiction books I've found with a female protagonist. And recently, I also read the newest book in the Wings of Fire series, "The Hybrid Prince", which was also very good and reignited my love for the series.

Reading these books has been a discovery that, I don't really like Warrior Cats. I sort of just...gave up on reading some time ago, because my interest in Warriors was so strong, yet I didn't really like the books. My focus on the series wouldn't be broken, and now I can see what a mistake that was! I have discovered a whole new world, silly as it sounds, and I couldn't be more excited! When I'm not just reading some heavily flawed childrens' books, but well-written, interesting (young) adult books (Wings of Fire is a childrens' series too, but it is still interesting to me somehow!), suddenly I'm reading again, and I feel stupid. For quite a few years now I just, never put down Warriors because I was so obsessed with it? Was I so obsessed that I wouldn't give other books a chance?

And on top of this, after finishing Ratha's Creature, I found myself almost immediately drawing fanart! I have never done that with anything except for Warriors, and I can feel my inspiration slowly coming back to me. Turns out, perhaps Warriors just isn't the most inspiring series for me. I have fond, nostalgic memories, but right now, what I need is the new, and the material that is, well, not aimed at pre-teens.

Feeling: Hopeful, stubborn, excited
Listening To: Renegades - X Ambassadors

For the past while, maybe a year or two, I've been having more and more trouble with art in general. It gets harder to draw, I feel very dissatisfied with my art, and I don't often have the motivation to draw. I don't feel excited, I have no ideas, it just doesn't feel right. Occasionally I'll be in a more creative mood, but that mood either doesn't last long enough to finish my drawing, or it burns me out quickly.

Honestly, I think I am dealing with just straight-up artistic burnout. And it's hard, because drawing is supposed to be my main passion, but right now I'm doing other random arts, like crochet, needle felting, and bracelet-making. They're fun! I'm lucky I have the resources to be able to do these things. But I miss drawing! I feel so wrong when I'm not able to draw.

Sometimes I look back at my collection of all of my art, at my earliest years in digital art, 2012-2015. I miss the passion I had in those years, how quickly I learned and improved because of not just how often I drew, but because I would see the art of other people and feel inspired, in awe, and eager to be like them. This first image is from January 2013, and the second is from January 2014.

Granted, a large part of this improvement is simply just from moving from MS Paint to Photoshop/Paint Tool SAI (I forgot which I used for the second drawing). And of course, eventually, you are going to plateau in progress, especially if you don't actually keep learning. And I've fallen off of learning, and to be honest, I never liked learning to draw. I just wanted to be good at drawing Warrior Cats. I just liked drawing. Perhaps I'm not as much of an artist as I have long thought myself to be, but I can't shake the sadness at this burnout I'm experiencing.

Feeling: Nostalgic, frustrated
Listening To: Nothing right now

I was having a lot of trouble trying to figure out how to make these blog posts toggleable, but then I found out that I can do it very simply with jQuery! I hadn't learned it yet, but I learned just enough to figure out how to add this function to the blog! Now I wanna learn more jQuery lmao, I wonder what else I could simplify with it? I also need to figure out how to make the arrows change to down-facing arrows when a post is expanded, and back to side-facing arrows when they're hidden...

Feeling: Happy!
Listening To: Nothing right now

I made this website almost a year ago now, and I've gotten better at web programming since then, and I've learned a lot. Now that I'm getting around to updating more things here, I'm realizing how incredibly annoying I made my code! It's hard to fix certain things because I made them very...specific, and not in a good way, so it's a massive pain in the ass. This is why I'm probably going to just recode my entire index page, and if I run into similar issues on other pages, those as well. I'm honestly excited to get to it tomorrow or whenever I get to it (it's 2 AM as I'm writing this lol), I'm having a lot of fun coding this website!

Feeling: Good but sleepy
Listening To: One Piece Season 2 OST :D

I managed to finish the code for this section of my website! Well, not finish it, but I at least completed the blog sorting mechanic! I still have to figure out how to make each of these posts expand/close, but that's for another day I think. For now, this works just fine.

Feeling: Good!
Listening To: One Piece Season 2 OST ^_^