I kind of wanted to write up something with an overarching theme to it but honestly? I’m in a mood to just babble. These are meant to be like weekly blog posts but idk if I can actually keep that up.

I often stop myself from writing down my feelings because I tend to write as I think, which means there’s an endless supply of run-on sentences, repeat sentences, and paragraphs that suddenly turn into a different topic completely (I’m so sorry if you’ve ever heard me try to stay coherent on stream ┐('～`;)┌ )

Alright on with the post (warning, it’s wordy because so much has happened recently lol. It was supposed to go up a week ago but, again, my confidence in writing is maybe a good 4/10)

Whats up, Minty? (the IRL part of the blog)

Life thus far has been… well, a bit difficult. Not in a “My well being is immediately in danger” sort of way, but more in the “Depression and Impostor syndrome make it a little difficult to wake up every morning” sort of way.

Picking up more hobbies has helped a little as well as setting up a schedule for streaming so I don’t spend every moment I’m not actively doing something sleeping.

I actually have been actively checking out books from my local library too in order to like… have something else to read I guess? Picked up a book in Spanish (it’s meant for people looking to learn Spanish when they’re working as an attorney or lawyer, I wanted it to brush up on Spanish words I don’t use regularly… but also there might be some irl things I might need to translate for so…. Tee hee,) a book in French and a book in Japanese.

I want to pick up my French studying again since I don’t want to waste four years of French again. I want to at least be ok enough that I can ask for directions and stuff lol. When will I go to France? Who knows! But it can’t hurt to know more than two languages.

Thinking of finally starting up my Japanese studying too. Both my siblings study/studied Japanese so I want to be able to pick some stuff up properly.

I also went out somewhat recently! My twin and I went to this!

We like ballet a lot and admission was only $20 for four different ballet performances! It was really interesting!

To be honest, we mostly went because we were so morbidly curious about the ballet performance based off of Genshin Impact.

It was an incredibly wonderful performance! The first part started off a little slow but it ended up being a lot of fun! I was jamming out in my seat and the dancers looked like they were having fun.

I think the second performance was my favorite. It had more mellow and natural visuals to it compared to the first performance, it was a good wind-down without going too slow that the audience gets bored. The color palette matched the performance too, everyone changed into deep green outfits for the dance that meshed really well with the lighting they went for compared to the neons and strobe-ey lights from first performance.

The third performance was the one inspired by Genshin Impact. I will admit here, I don’t know anything about Genshin Impact (never played) but it looked like everyone in the performance had a lot of fun! It was the only performance to have some narration as well as some really nice “fight” choreography. I don’t know how close it is to actual plot points of Genshin, but the music was really cool!

The fourth and final performance was the main event for the show. It followed more of what classic ballet was like and it was so beautiful! I was a big fan of the costuming for this number (it could very well be they were just using whatever they had, since it’s all students and not a professional dance company, but everyone looked so beautiful!)

I think next time there’s an event like this, I’ll make the effort to go again. I hope more people support student productions like this because the quality was really good and pretty affordable for a ballet performance!

However the day did end up being quite long because we took the train to get up to the university. The train ride was fun, but I didn’t expect the wind to be so strong it was knocking things over and for it to suddenly start snowing pretty badly.

I was punished for my naive belief that it would not snow and I only wore sneakers and a light hoodie… Needless to say, I won’t underestimate the weather predictions again, had to shamefully ride the train home completely soaked and chilled through the bone. Wah.

Currently Consuming

Wasn’t actually sure where to fit this, but here’s stuff I’ve been playing/reading that I didn’t want to fit in the irl part of the post too much.

I recently finished reading Dungeon Meshi/Delicious in Dungeon. I was gonna gush about it here but I’m making a separate blog post about it instead lol, so that’s something to look forward to!

Other than Dungeon Meshi, I also read "Tsuma, Shougakusei ni Naru" or "If My Wife Became an Elementary School Student", which, sounds SO FUCKING SUS…

BUT.

I read it off of a passing recommendation on twitter. The premise is that a man and his daughter are living very unfulfilling and sad lives ever since his wife died in an accident ten years ago. Suddenly a miracle happens in the form of his wife, who re-incarnated and is in the body of an elementary school girl, suddenly regaining the memories of her past life and pulling them out of the depressive state they’ve both been living in ever since her death.

I won’t say anymore than that because I really don’t want to spoil too much but, it was a very silly and bittersweet story about dealing with grief and how to move on from the death of a loved one. It already has a drama based off it but this year it’s getting an anime adaptation?

I might end up watching it but I can’t stand most anime fans on a good day and I’m sure people are gonna be Weird about this series. Let’s hope I’m wrong this time (I won’t be, but one can dream.)

Aside from that, I started playing Wandering Sword!

It’s a Wuxia inspired rpg that can be played either turn-based or with real-time battle. I’ve only barely scratched the surface of this game but I can’t understate how BEAUTIFUL this game looks! The characters are all charming and the scenery and nature are so pretty, I just want to wander around and stare at it all day lol.

The game play is really fun too, though I will admit I think I need to sit down and properly read how I am allocating stats (something I’m notoriously bad at, but I know it’s gonna help with boss fights) and recruiting more party members. I haven’t tried the real-time battle mode yet, mostly because I prefer turn-based since I like to give myself time to think before I act, but so far this game has been really fun! It makes me want to watch some wuxia shows again… might poke my bestie to see if shes up for re-watching some stuff again soon.

Internet Ramblings

Recently there’s been a bit of a shake up in the internet world, namely Tumblr making a lot of really stupid decisions as well as the CEO being a complete Ass (this really isn’t anything new but man it sucks that its happening at all.)

Among the awful Tumblr choices, there has also been discussion around AI again as well as how to protect your artwork against AI scraping.

I’m going to be real with you guys, I kind of already let my thoughts out about AI and AI protection in a past blog post, but I’m going to echo what I said a bit from back then.

I don’t think there’s really a way for us to stop people from scraping our work and feeding it into the generative AI machine. At this time in the internet’s current life cycle, anything can be fed into the machine if someone tries hard enough.

Even stuff like Glaze and Nightshade have their limits and inadvertently exclude some artists that maybe don’t have the best graphics cards at the moment (although I think that if you can use these tools, you should!)

Despite this though, I don’t think artists should give up posting their art anywhere. I think you should use the tools we have available to protect yourself, but more importantly, I’m always a huge advocate of watermarking your work. I Know it can look really off-putting but hey, I still think it’s best option for keeping people who want to claim your work as their own away from your art as well as making it easier for people to find the true artist behind the work when stuff ends up on the internet.

Things look and feel bleak but I don’t think people should give up. That’s pretty much where I fall under for now.

Stuff I’m working on

Speaking of art, I’ve been slowly working on different things. I’ve been toying with the idea of re-doing my sona little again (the fun little character you see plastered all over this site lol) and have been toying with the idea of giving her more draconic features. I think I’ll probably have something more set in stone soon now that I have a better idea of what I want.

Going back and re-designing characters from over a decade ago has really opened up the doors for the kind of stuff I want to do again.

I also started picking up a bit of pixel art! Which I admit, I’m not the best at but it’s been refreshing to work on when I don’t have the patience to keep working on painting.

I’ve been messing with Krita again as well! I still don’t fully trust Clip Studio Paint to continue to be a useful tool all artists can use in the future (i’m still a bit salty about their change to a subscription service, partially anyways) and have been wanting to learn how to use more programs again in order to keep my options open as well as give other artists a better insight into how different programs function. I might end up downloading Paint Tool Sai again too to mess around in but we shall see.

Ok that’s all folks!

Next time I’ll try to make these more of a weekly thing instead of a -checks notes- three week summary lmfao