Abstract, Incommunicable Thoughts

It's the absolute state of being Kat, I guess.

There's a certain mindset I used to go into on my first failed run of going through college, where I'd kinda just lock in with a certain degree of enthusiasm for my classes and do all the shit I needed to do pretty much instantly.

These days, I'm finding myself looking upon my workload with a measure of lethargy. I'm damn exhausted, everything makes me want to tear my hair out. The kind of tired that sleep doesn't fix.

The good news about this continues to be that I'm getting that locked down.

You see, I'm not much of a gambler. Yes, I could rely on heavy statistics take a chance on a three percent player edge, but that is still only three percent. I've played X-COM, I've seen what happens in worst-case scenarios! The problem is the amount of risk I've taken by virtue of rebuilding things in the explicit way I'm doing things. Hypothetically, I could 100% every single one of these courses and have my degree in practically no time at all; The problem is I also need to deal with plenty of outside factors.. including my worst enemy: myself.

To stymie any fears or whatever else (especially for myself), I think I can do it. I need to redevelop the mindset that I've lost and make it better, is the thing.

Art and Design as Emotional Blockade Ablation

Those of you in the know understand that I've taken up digital art and design as a hobby to help shed some emotional load when I can't really communicate it easily. I've done all of it without any tutorials and I'm slowly building up an artstyle. For example, I've built all of my overlays on Twitch myself using like three shapes in inkscape, and they all came out surprisingly well, if a little unrefined. Previously, I restricted from saying that I'm much of an artist, but I think I've found a rhythm that works for me and that makes me pretty happy about it, even if it starts to feel like work and I have to take a break from it for a bit. To this point, I've been debating getting a drawing tablet for character design.

A large portion of my design work has been abstract 3D and tech-influenced 2D. These are all metalheart-esque in my eyes but I wanted something that was definitively me, so it's taking a long time to develop said art-style and I want it to show many degrees of influence from many different angles. But that's not the point. The point is that my brain is incredibly weird and adversarial sometimes, and there are many concepts bouncing around in my head that are both inherently abstract and undeniably solidified. I've been working with abstract shapes and metaphor because it's come rather naturally. Drawing a character is oddly difficult for my brain to parse these days. So I haven't really had a proper outlet for those concrete thoughts in that sense. I'm not entirely sold on the idea of diving deep into it just yet... because honestly there are plenty of things that money and time should go to over this at the moment, but it's fun to think about at the moment.

Bitterness/Exhaustion Manifold

Feeding into a large part of the above is 'settling' for temporary solutions when I had little ability to actually do things right the first time. I quite dislike that I pigeonholed myself in this way on multiple fronts, and I'm going to work to resolve these. A really good example is this blog's propensity to use Nikola, a CMS which I actually quite enjoy using, but my understanding is that Gitlab isn't fully supported with it, hence my overreliance on Github for hosting at this stage. I still think static site generation is the way to go, and I'm starting to look into seeing how one might be able to make Gitlab support at least vaguely better and generating some spicy themes for it that look good and act well. The current theme I'm using was an experiment in modified templating, and whilst that worked.... sort of, I am a lot more inclined to make something a little more unique for me, for others. The trick continues to be energy allocation, something I can't easily spare these days. I'm also looking into replacing Abricotine as my markdown editor, if for no other reason that it's no longer under development and requires a rewrite, which makes me pretty disappointed. Half-debating shelling out for Typora but ehhhhhhh.

Oh also I need an actual about page and I just haven't gotten around to it yet. Stay tuned. There will be many changes in the years ahead.

ActivityPub Ingress Module

I admit I've been avoiding social media for awhile now generally, with the last couple of dominoes to fall doing so about a month ago, where I experienced a pin-drop moment and just overflowed with bitterness. Whilst I recover from that, some of you will know that I'm on the fediverse as well with an account on infosec.town. I've mostly stopped posting there because eh generally my existence doesn't warrant interaction. I tend to cater primarily to a hyper-niche audience, and that has so many downsides it's insane. But if I try to appeal to a wider audience, is that really me? When I started engaging with the fediverse, a mission of mine was to explore social-media-as-protocol as myself, rather than masking up all of my hobbies and interests in place of events and outrage. This seems to have had a fairly limited effect, unfortunately, and I'm still working through it. I'm debating swapping instances, but I'm unsure if that'll actually do anything for me... the instance itself isn't really the base issue.

Maybe I just have to find my people, still.

If it begins, it almost surely will end

Somewhat recently, I've talked about how things have continued moving apace, and things thus continue to do so. I've reached my inflection point: welcome to convergence.

I'm still not sure what lies ahead, but what I do know is that I'll continue to give everything I can, even when it waxes and wanes, to make something for myself. The pieces are moving into place. Good streaks almost never last in my experience, but with some resilience, I'm going to push through and make it count.

I won't fuck it up.