the sun's so bright it leaves no shadows, only scars

[muladhara]

After reading through Maggie Stiefvater's tumblr, I am even more convinced that A Bad Thing is going to happen to Adam in The Raven King :(

(The way she says "it's ok I'm sure he's fine!" makes me veeeeeerrry suspicious).

I don't want anything awful to happen to any of them, but one of them - barring an asspull on Ms Stiefvater's part (or a really clever something or other) - is doomed by canon ANYWAY.

Also I want to reread the books when I have a stack of books out of the library to read anyway. (IDK about anyone else, but I always feel a weird sense of guilt when I get a book out of the library and then take it back without having read it).

~

Finally found a free test to work out my personality type and apparently I am an INFP-T. WHATEVER THAT MEANS. It does seem kind of accurate but certainly not the degree where I'm sitting here thinking "oh yeah, that's 100% me!" because it isn't. I am side-eyeing it hard.

~

Anyway, round up of the year, because it's that time of year, right?

# I nailed all my goals bar one. I didn't manage to play a Kirby (because crippling indecision about which to play, etc). But I did learn to make chutney (easy, but tedious), though I wouldn't say my pixelling is any better, and my music composition is laughable.

But the point is that I'm learning.

I don't know what I'd like to do next year, except maybe actually finish a story or something.

# I read THREE WHOLE BOOKS by Maggie Stiefvater, after strongly vowing never to read one of her books EVER AGAIN. I also recced them to approximately five other people. I am now waiting on tenterhooks until The Raven King comes out, and making bets with myself on how it will turn out. See above for more on that.

# I opened a Redbubble store, and also a Big Cartel one (which has Expensive Things in it).

# I drew, a lot. I think I've done the most drawings this year than in any other since about 2009 when I was ceaselessly drawing in shitty sketchbooks. I'm on my fourth sketchbook for this year, and that's A Thing, let me tell you.

# I also started painting again, and I am VERY happy about that.

# My German comprehension levelled up, and that's awesome

# I read about Halo, and it sparked off some stuff in my brain, and now I have a whole other part to my sci-fi story. Similarly, while I'd been working on the magical girl story, reading the Raven Cycle books did a similar thing for that (though walks in the woods also helped with that as well).

So, actually, I did even more writing this year than I did last year (or have done in a long time), and that's awesome.

# I started and ended the year by thinking about making my own games. This is nothing new, although nothing I've thought about since 2008, when I spent some time messing about with RPG Maker. I think it's something I'd like to have a go at at some point, but I don't really have any ideas for anything I can use as a story. Yet.

(Because I think I'd make interactive text - to that end, I did start messing around with Twine, but came up with the same problems. Also it'd require me to learn CCS to make it look interesting and uuuuggggghhhh *drags hands down face*)

# tl;dr version: it's been an OK year for me. Not too bad, but it could've been better. On the other hand, it was a VAST improvement on the shit show that was 2014.

Comments

[lassarina]

I'm glad 2015 was reasonably good to you! ♥

[muladhara]

It was! And man, so am I.

[lobeliar]

I'm glad your year has gone pretty well! Small steps and big steps are both worth being proud and happy about.

I longingly look at Twine every so often; I've seen some pretty cool stuff made with it, and it seems far more accessible than some of the other tools I saw available before it showed up a while back.

[muladhara]

Thank you! I hope that yours did, too.

Twine is REALLY easy to use, and I say this as someone who has problems with a lot of game engines that people say, "Oh but this is SO SIMPLE!"* There's literally one thing you need to do to link your texts together, and off you go (I mean, yeah, there's learning CSS later if you want interfaces and stuff, but for sheer easiness, boy it really IS easy). I've already got a working, half-finished story done in there, and I knocked it up in about an hour (most of that time was spent just typing the thing). It's definitely worth tinkering with to see how you like it.

*e.g. The Knytt engine is supposed to be simple, but I found it counterintuitive. RPG Maker is OK from what I remember, but you need to know how to code from the offset (and I can't remember if it's a language unique to the engine or one you can use elsewhere), and I understand that's the case with the majority of game engines.

[halley]

Sounds like a productive year to me! Good job. Also I love that you're drawing so much, four sketchbooks is a awesome number. It's pretty motivating too because I've been meaning to work on this painting set I've had sitting in my room for years :"D I was cleaning and finally pulled it out and now I think I should actually do something with it tomorrow.

[muladhara]

Thanks! I think it was! Four is the most sketchbooks I've ever filled in one year - some of that is down to size (some had less pages than others), also I was determined to draw as much as possible.

Oohh, will you share the results if you do use the art kit? (you're totally not obligated to, though).