Blog :D

14 Dec 2023

school's really freaking tiring, but I'll make it! christmas break is coming up and that's fantastic, if only I didn't have a massive pile of work that urgently needs to be done before hand :'(

I'm sooo excited to not have school for a while bc I just want to play some video games and maybe do some other thing (like write some short stories or smth!) but probably just play video games based on my track record...

Speaking of writing short stories, I wrote one! (this was actually quite a while back... november, in fact) it was for a short story contest hosted by my school, and I won! (there were only like 6 submissions so it's not super impressive) and it was published in the school newspaper, which came out a few weeks ago :))
I've been meaning to "publish" it on this website, but just haven't gotten around to it for some reason, hopefully it's won't be too long. It's just getting everything sorted so that I can make it in the first place I guess. We'll see!

- evie

15 Dec 2023

i write an essay about factorio lol

having a blog is also kinda strange now. like anyone could read this. it's the World Wide web and it's not called that for no reason!
so yeah--and I probably should have mentioned this in the first post I made, but I'm extremely new to this and really don't know what I'm doing, so bear with me while I try and get the hang of it, and I hopefully will lol.

I don't really know what to talk about, so I'll talk about video games, because that's what's generally on my mind (other than other weird nerdy stuff) (and by nerdy I mean like english math and stuff. I'm just weird lol) (I'd probably be less weird if I was nerdy in the sense that I just really like media and stuff lol).
I've been playing factorio recently, and it's probably one of the best games that I have ever played! the gameplay loop is just so unique compared to pretty much any game that I've ever played, in that it's not particularly rigid, but still really solid, if that makes any sense at all. basically what I mean by this is that while a game would normally have something like, grind monsters to get money, use money to buy better gear, use better gear to grind more monsters, and repeat, factorio kind of differs in my eyes.
so, essentially, there's two main driving forces in factorio: the first being research, which is just the games progression system. you have to research new technology in order to craft them, and since the "ultimate" goal of the game is to get off the planet by launching a rocket, you have to go through almost the entire research tree before you can officially beat the game. in order to do this research, though, you have to use what are called research packs, which are made from other various resources and items, typically ones unlocked in the previous pack's tech. in the early game, you can typically get by with just crafting the packs yourself, it quickly gets out of hand, and so you automate the process, constructing factories intricately laid out in such a way that everything is automated (more on this later). The result of all this industry, though, as with the real world, is pollution. the processes of mining resources and constantly generating electricity isn't exactly the most environmently friendly, after all. of course, this wouldn't be a problem if you were the only one there, but, of course, this brings in the second (and arguably most influencal) driving force, being the natives.
They're actually called "biters" (but natives is more fun and ominous imo) and these guys are basically little bug things that live on the planet and were there long before when we (the player character and a human) crash landed on the planet. They just so happen to really not like pollution, in that they will try and kill you if they start smelling it. so either killing all the local biters or defending yourself from attacks end up being a biiig priority, lest your entire base get overrun.
what this leads to is you trying to expand your base, designing automation, dealing with biters, making defenses, and probably more that I'm forgetting right now. Kind of the motto of the game is, fittingly, "The factory must grow," and that's exactly what you do. everything you do is in pursuit of this goal, and the multitudes of ways that it can branch out is kind of beautiful. For example: say, I want to grow my base, issue is, there's a lot of biters around. I could take them out, but that wouldn't really be worth the effort, so instead I opt to build some sturdy defenses, of which flame thrower turrets, which use oil, are excellent at. issue is, these flame thrower turrets need engines, and I need a ton of them. so i decide to expand my engine production. I do so, but find that it's not running at full tilt because it's sucking up too much of my iron supply. to fix this, I expand my smelter stack so I have a higher throughput of iron ore to iron bars. issue is is that, while slightly better, the issue still isn't completely solved because now it's using my entire iron ore supply. to expand this, I need to add more miners at a iron ore patch, but my current patch is almost completely full, and so I need to find another patch if i want more miners, so I have to venture out and protect a new area. After dealing with some biters, I clear out a near iron ore patch, which i then fill with miners and belts, but now I have the issue of transporting it back to my base. While is could just use a reeeeaaly long belt, I don't exactly want to do that, so instead I use trains (I love trains <3) which means that now I have to research trains, possibly automating rail production until I can build a rail. I build a station, and start building my rail, and, whoops, there's a massive lake in the way! this is an issue because I'd like for the train route to be as short as possible, and while I could just go around and it probably wouldn't affect much, I'm extra, so i automate landfill production and build what's essentially a bridge (but really a dam) that my train goes over. I build a new station at my base, automate the train scheduling, and boom! likely several hours later, new iron ore supply to my base! now I connect it up to my furnace stack, and now we have a surplus of iron ore, which is then converted into a surplus of iron bars being used by a bunch of various things, but most importantly the engine supply, so now i have a surplus of engines being fed in the flame thrower turret crafters and so now we have plenty of turrets to defend our walls! now i can get to building my defense systems!
This is basically the entire game, and while it probably sounds tedious and annoying, it is anything but! How the game kind of meanders and backtracks on occasions and doing one things leads to so many more is probably what i'd call the games biggest strength, and it's steam reviews are no lie. and when you're building everything yourself, the feeling of accomplishment when you finish something and get to watch it function smoothly is just amazing. It's a game that if you're not careful, you might find yourself playing for countless hours and not even notice. I've done it many times. It's gameplay loop of growing the factory, and growing the factory having sooo many other things relying upon it (because you're the entire chain, from source to end product) creates this just amazing loop of.. well.. growing the factor, and it's amazing!
Factorio is just amazing and it's probably one of the best games that I have ever played.

uhm... yeah... I think this block of text kind of demonstrates my opinion on this game sufficientlly. I'm looking at this in my text editor, and something tells me that I wasn't exactly supposed to write an entire essay professing my love for factorio... Oh well! good thing I'm not the one who has to read it!
but yeah, tldr, if you want one, is that factorio is an amazing game with a very unique gameplay loop and I love it. do play. I recommend.
maybe in the future I'll not write an essay for my blog post bc I don't know how sustainable this is... (i don't consume enough media for this!). anyways, that's all for now! <3

- evie

16 Dec 2023

School, valorant, and music!

The school week's over; it's saturday! and winter break is basically right around the corner now! next week isn't a full week (I think it's only two days) so I'm basically done for the semester :))
(btw, technically, as i write this, it isn't the 16th anymore, but rather already the 17th because I'm up far too late.

But today was pretty nice! Really lazy but nice. I have so much work that needs to be finished (including two essays!) before the end of the semester, and there's like barely any more time to do. so what did I do? actually sit down and do my work before doing anything else? Nope! I played faaar too much Valorant with my friends. I was with my friends though, so it was worth it. I'll just have to devote a lot of tomorrow to it though (or i might just end up not doing it with my track record... not that i don't want to, just that I'm really bad about actually getting myself to do work.)

Other than spend an impressive amount of time playing valorant, I also did something that was somewhat productive! I spent some time this morning, and inbetween all the valorant, learning some music writing/composition. It's been a dream of mine to make my own music for a long time, but I've just never really gotten around to actually, y'know, pursuing that dream. that is, until i found this absolutely amazing tumblr post that actually gave me, for the first time, a sort of low barrier to entry way (i.e. not requiring thousands of dollars of music plugins and equipment to get started) to actually go about learning some of the skills required to make music. If this is something you also would like to do, I'd recommend reading through this post linked, it's not very long but I found it extremely useful :)
I'm really excited to learn more! It might become a fixation of mine for a little bit, but I would really like to keep it around for a while (hopefully my brain obeys) because it is something that I would really like to pursue at a much higher level! I play some instruments (saxophone, piano, and flute, if you're curious. and I want to learn so many more [mainly guiatar]) so I have some musical background, but I just don't know how to apply it in a way to actually produce something unique (I think it's more of a unique skill though, so I guess that makes sense), especially not in a way similar to the music that I listen to and want to make myself, as I play concert music mainly but listen to like emo and post-hardcore or whatever. music is just so cool and I am really excited to learn more :)

I should really probably start writing these at proper hour, but y'know...
well, I guess I'll head to sleep now...

- evie

18 Dec 2023

break, grades, site updates, and writing...

woah, only one more day before winter break? (well, technically two, but I'm skipping the last one bc it's only a two hour and and I don't feel like it lol) amazing.

I feel like most people would be glad right now, becuase they're about to be able to not have to go to school for a while, and I am excited for that aspect, but also, my grades are in the dumpster right now and I'm kind of frantically trying to get work done because I'm still holding onto the dream of perfect grades and all that (it's only a matter of time...). sometimes I wonder why I put in all the effort I do, because, like, it's probably not going to matter in the end, but also I'm scared that it will or something and I've done it for this long and so it feels like a shame to mess it up now. sorry if this isn't coming out sensibly, It's really late and I need to go back to finishing an essay but I wanted to write a blog post first (which I probably shouldn't but oh well, here I am) so I'm not really in the best state to be writing really nice, well worded blog posts.

some site update stuff! I'm currently working on the art/writing channel. I'm working building all the stuff to put stuff onto it, and then I'll probably put the short story I mentioned in the 14th's blog post on it so you can subject yourself to it's horrors (take that comment how you want; it's a choose your own adventure book or something, but with puns...). I might also put some poetry on it, but like, my poetry is reeeally bad and i don't know if I want to put all of it on a public site like this, so I'll probably only put a handful here.

This might actually be some good motivation to write, just to fill out the site and stuff.
...I should probably set up a comment section of some sort so feedback is even possible... (I'm not sure if I'll get the traffic to make that worth it though...)

- evie

22 Dec 2023

New writing pages + music I've been listening to :)

I just added a bunch of pages including the first story to be "published" here!! Getting all the pages to work smoothly was kind of a nightmare, but I got it figured out :D
And if you read the short story there, I am so sorry lol; it's not good in the slightest (at least that's what I think). Again, I am just a person who likes reading and writing (though I don't find myself actually doing it very often) and am definitely not a professionally writer, so read at your own risk.

Formatting the thing for html was pretty interesting, and I discovered the beauties of ctrl+f and "select all"!! it's so much faster than manually going through and changing things so they actually display properly. Wish I had of figured that out before I had already gone and done half of it lol. But yeah, I hope you don't hate the theme of the story page because I was trying to do something completely different at first and when that did work, backpedalled until I landed on what you see now.

The "writing" page (the one I called my "catalogue") was also really interesting to set up. if you look at the code, it's kind of a mess of divs, but somehow it works? it didn't really want to behave at first, and there were divs that I had to add that I'm not entirely sure why, but it seems to work so I'm just not going to question it and hope it doesn't break somehow.
I also added a little dropdown thingy to give a little summary or background of the stories, so you're not entirely reliant upon the title, and i think it works pretty well! though it kind of was the source of all my pain trying to build it. But yeah! I think it overall turned out really well, and I'm really happy with it. I just won't really have any stuff that I could put on it for quite a while because I don't really write much, though I do want to (maybe I should work on that...), so yeah. enjoy. ig.

I should mention, I almost always listen to music while I code, and I listened to quite a few albums for the first time that I thought were quite good while coding those pages, and I wanted to share them here! :)
The first, and I'm not sure how I haven't listened to this one before now, given that I have heard about it several times, is American Football by American Football. (btw, these are spotify links.) I honestly don't have much to say about it since i wasn't really paying too much attention, but it was definitely quite good and worth the listen! I also listened to Diary by Sunny Day Real Estate. The vocals were especially good (just looked it up and it's apparently jeremy enigk on vocals, so props to him). The last album I listened to was clarity by Jimmy Eat World, and it was pretty good overall. The album had a lot of really long instrumental solos, which are cool, though one song is pretty much 16 minutes of instrumentals with some light vocals interspersed, which is not bad at all, until the end where there was a really high-pitched ringing that just hurt my head. that one thing almost ruined the album for me so idk.

anyways, yeah, stay tuned for me to maybe write something else? idk.

- evie

27 Dec 2023

Christmas and javascript :)

it's been a little bit! I've been attempting to learn Javascript (I'm using a random yt tutorial that moves at like a snails pace, but it's going alright) inbetween visiting with family and practically driving across the US to visit family lol. It's been really fun though; it's nice to see my family after quite a while :)

Christmas also passed! woah. My family is just weird, or, really, I'm just weird, so I just got money from my family members rather than actual items, which is likely because they don't really know what I want plus I can combine it get something bigger for myself. No one in my family is particularly wealthy, so I didn't get much (which is fine!) but I am going to look into possibly getting myself an electric guitar, which would be really cool given that it's something that I've wanted for, like, half my life. I'm just worried that I won't be able to get a very good one with how much money I have, but I'll see.

JavaScript is also kind of interesting. It doesn't seem to be super complicated, taking it very slowly, but I can definitely see how it can get very complicated, and very messy, very quickly. I'm excited to learn more about it so that maybe eventually I can implement some right here on this webpage! (not like I have anywhere else to use it lol)
The main motivation behind it is actually because I want to see if I can construct a comment section for my writing so that I can see people's reactions to my horrible writing! This and also some other cool stuff that I can do to make my webpage extra shiny, which is another note: my site isn't very shiny. it's very... clean, smooth. idk about it. I think I might go redesign the whole thing again, but I don't really feel like going through all that right now (I mean, I still have to make the home page match and, y'know, make the about me page? that might be a tad more important lol)

- evie

1 Jan 2024 !

What's this? 2023's over?

How did that happen? When did that happen? well, last night, and because the earth completed another orbit. woo, let's go earth. very special of you, doing the thing you've been doing for billions of year, yep yep.

I promise I'm sane. so... uhhh... what was I saying?

Oh right! New year! 2024! 2024 is a cool number. round. divisible by four. and eight. and fourty four. and eighty eight as well, actually. cool number. I like it. hopefully the year is just as cool!

I'm hopefully that this will be a good year for me. A lot will happen, and I look forward to the opportunities, challenges, and growth that I have ahead. maybe I'll look back on this and wonder what I was thinking, but I'm being hopefully and I'll try my hardest to make it the best year for me yet.

I hope everyone else (especially you reading this!) has a fantastic year with many great things to come :D

- evie

19 Jan 2024

woopsies, forgot to blog for nearly a month...

ya. don't know how that happened... I actually do. took a little break for a bit, went back to school after winter break, got distracted with school, had fun with that for two weeks, it ended up snowing the next week, played a bunch of games and didn't really pay attention to my website. and here we are. anyways, figured I'd pop in to say "hey, hi, I'm still here" but it's kinda 2:30 am (it's actually the 20th...) so I'm gonna head to bed now. There will probably be some more updates in the near future though!

P.S. or whatever, I'll probably make a more detailed post tomorrow, because I have some cool stuff I want to talk about :D
bye for now!

- evie

22 Jan 2024

oh right, kinda forgot

I meant to make a longer post to elaborate on the other one...

tbh, i really intended to, but then i played minecraft... and then valorant... and then it was 2 am. and i don't normally fancy writing a blog post at 2 am lol. so here we are!

so basically, as you may know, i live in the middle of nowhere in a southern state. we aren't very accustomed to snow. well, i mean, it's not unheard of or anything, it's just not something we get very often, so we don't have the infrastructure to deal with it. combine that with living in a place with a lot of road and very little people for that amount of road there is, and you have the perfect storm for a fairly small amount of snow to shut down most stuff, especially school.

last monday, it snowed, quite a bit. I think it was around 5 inches? may have been a bit more than that though. because our counties method of handling snow is just to wait until it melts off, and it didn't go above freezing once until today, we missed the entirety of last of school, and we've missed two days into this week as well. it's kinda amusing because we went back to school, was there for just a week, and then got snow and kinda another free break.

It's been great though! I thought initially that i'd get stuff done, code more here, read some books, stuff like that. of course that didn't happen lol. instead i just played a ton of minecraft (I went back to an server I used to play on and it's been really fun!) cyberpunk, and valorant.

section two, or something: bread

I made bread today!

photo of a sliced beguette on a cuttingboard

Kinda felt like making a baguette for whatever reason, and so I found a recipe, followed it, and it turned out pretty well! had to make what's called "poolish", basically half and half water and flower with a little bit of yeast, the day prior to ferment for a bit, then I just do the normal bread stuff and add flower, water, salt, more yeast, mix it, let it rise, parse it out into pieces, shape it, and then finally bake it! I put some water in the oven as well to add some steam, because that's apparently important to make sure the baguette rises well and gets a good crust. It was kinda hectic because i was following a recipe from a youtube video that didn't have a text version, so I was like watching the video to see what he did, writing down the info, then trying to replicate it as best as I can. it was fun though, and the result was tasty :)

I should mention that all of this was done with the help of my father, and for whatever reason, he wants to try and make another batch tomorrow, so we made some more poolish earlier which'll be ready tomorrow morning. Hopefully tomorrow it'll actually come out even better, which it probably will, becuase there are definitely some things that we did or didn't do that can be improved on. plus, it'll likely take a fraction of the time that it took us to make today's batch tomorrow because we already know what we're doing and won't have to constantly reference the video or other sources lol. It's going to be fun :)

I really love baking, it's such a fun activity to do, you get to mess with dough, which is always fun, and then you get tasty food in the end! in this case, a fresh beguette! I haven't really baked much recently, which is a shame because I really enjoy it, so hopefully I'll start doing it more now! My family actually got a stand mixer quite a while ago, though when we got it was right about when we stopped baking so much, so it hasn't really seen much use, which is just kinda sad. maybe it'll see more use now though!

I'll post some pictures of the results (and maybe the process too if i remember?) tomorrow, and we can judge if it improved from today! honestly debating on posting the entire recipe as well, along with it. maybe a new art channel for recipes, becuase baking is kinda an art? idk, we'll see! maybe I'll become your new cookbook! (If I seriously end up doing that, take those recipes with a massive grain of salt, I am not a professional in any sense lol). I'm actually not sure about the legality of that? is it illegal to repost someone else's recipe? I mean, I'll probably post the video title I got it from as well, but is the reposting of that content okay? I'd assume so, as long as I give credit. Are recipes even copyrighted anyway? (quick google search later, recipes are not coprightable, so ig i probably wouldn't even have to give credit if I didn't feel like it. that's interesting. though I probably would because it'd be nice so people get an actual professional as well, rather than stupid ol' me)

anyways, I actually do have to get up kinda early tomorrow, despite not having school, becuase I was a dumby and started fermenting my dough too early, which means the time that it'll be ready is a bit earlier than I anticipated. that's alright! I'll just be up baking at ten waking up the family :D (not really, they'll probably be awake by then)
so yeah! good night :)

- evie

24 Jan 2024

more. bread.

kinda forgot about making an update post... again... (I said I'd talk about this yesterday, but kinda just didn't) and I don't really feel like getting the pictures off of my phone right now (maybe I'll put them somewhere later, just not right now). Basically went mostly to plan, woke up, started making some bread, let it rise, shaped it, let it rest again, and then baked it. pretty simple, right? well, not quite.

so, I'm not a professional baker, or really even a good baker, but I know, mostly just because I've heard, rather than experience, that having correct proofing for your bread is crucial to the end product, as you'll end up with a severly worse product with overproofed bread. I've heard that it majorly affect the flavor, as the yeast is allowed more time to snack on the dough, and the dough won't rise correctly (for a reason I'm not so sure on) in the oven.

so, why is this important? because this means that you're pretty much on a timer from when you start making the bread, from my understanding. almost like a rhythm game (terrible analogy, but whatever), you have to do the right things at the right time. yesterday, I did quite a poor job doing the right things at the right time. probably the biggest issue was at the end while I was actually baking because I made a batch of 6 baguettes, and cooked them, for twenty five minutes, 2 at a time. this means that while the first batch were right about correctly proofed (that batch was really good btw, though the scoring and steam could have been a lot better), the second, and especially third batches were considerably overproofed, from just sitting there waiting for the previous batch to be done. they just didn't turn out right and didn't rise like I expected them to. it could have been a lot of things, but I'm pretty sure that it was due to the over-proofing, or at least that was a large part of it.

while this sounds bad, the bread wasn't actually bad, it just fell way short of what it could have been. I also learned a ton about making baguettes from this as well. it was great. i got to make a ton of mistakes and learn from those (it wasn't just the proofing that went wrong, though I feel as though that was probably the most major). I'll keep at it, and who knows, maybe I'll have mastered the art of baguettes at some point :D

oh, btw, i should mention, we went back to school today! "fun". Oh well, I'm just hoping that my english teacher doesn't kill me with how much work that she assigns. and she apparently expected for us to continue reading our book over our little snow break, which I don't think any of did, so we're all like 100+ pages behind where we should be. I'll probably catch up... eventually...

other than that though, it's pretty good. none of my teachers are nearly as insane with their assignments so at least theres that. I also got to see my friends again, which was really nice. two of them are actually dating now! I'm really happy for them, bc they seem like a really good fit to me, but I have to admit that I'm kinda jealous... idk, being single is kinda depressing, though at the same time I don't really want a girlfriend? it's kinda strange. probably some internalized transphobia there, but whatever. plus I know that I just don't have the energy to be able to sustain a relationship. anyway, I'm happy that they're happy :D

um, yeah, that's about it from me today. oh wait! check out Newgrounds Death Rugby! they're a really good band in my opinion and deserve more attention :)

aaand, I need to go to bed... o/

- evie

25 Jan 2024

did I complain about my english teacher yesterday?

probably. I probably did. oh well! apparently she expected us to read while we were out for snow, and like, come on. there's snow outside! do you think we'll be reading 19th century literature for school (I might read some unrelated lol)? apparently she did. and what's worse is that we probably h [accidentally just deleted my entire blog for a second lol] we probably have a test tomorrow over the reading that we had to do last week, so now I'm staying up too late trying to read what I think that I'll need for tomorrow. idk, maybe it is my fault, but still kind of annoying.

was thinking earlier, on a completely unrelated topic, how wild it is to me that some people listen to artists without listening to their entire albums? idk, the fact that some people just listen to a playlist where the songs are all out of context is just strange. like, the artist didn't just make an album to be a compilation of songs they wrote (usually). typically there'll be a theme, or rise and fall of energy, often with transitions between songs that make the whole album a cohesive piece, which is just something you don't get in playlists. I like my playlists as well, but i feel it's important to listen to it in it's intended context first. anyways, that's all. listen to your music however you like, I just think you're strange.

- evie

8 Feb 2024

gonna take a break

hey there! wanted to make a little post to say that I've kinda lost motivation for this site. I feel like I've really accomplished most of what I wanted to (sorry about me page lol) so I'm struggling to find things to do, other than writing this blog, which i'll probably do from time to time. I don't want you to take this as a goodbye though!! I'll still be here. If I have something I want to share, or something i want to add to the site, I'll be back, and I see that as quite likely in the future. Just not right now.

I'm actually learning JS right now, but it'll probably be a bit until i'm very proficient at it. There's quite a bit that I'd love to do with javascript, I'm just not good at it right now to really attempt any of it. I'm sure that I'll be back once I am though!

okies, that all i have to say. I know it's not super surprising, given that I've haven't updated this blog in over a week and have been pretty intermittent with it even then, but I wanted to be transparent about what to expect from me, which is not much. bye for now! though I'm sure it won't be long :)

btw, if you wanna chat, my dms on tumblr are open (links in the links page :)

- evie

10 Feb 2024

New Blog format!!

I uhh.. yeah. i said that i was taking a hiatus because I didn't know what to do with the site anymore, and LITERALLY THE NEXT DAY i get inspiration from another site (this site, if you wannt check it out; it's very good!!) that had a page with a box that changed content when you pressed a button. After a lot of research (mostly just me struggling how to put into words what i was after) I found out about a way that you can use the z-index in css (didn't even know it existed before yesterday lol) to create the same or similar effect. I don't think that's how they did it, but it seemed to work for me. it didn't really want to behave, but I got it to work eventually, though it's probably still quite jank. future me may be annoyed at present me...

I just find it absolutely hilarious that I announce that I won't be making any major changes to my site for a bit and then immediatly make major changes to my site. whether this'll continue, I'm not sure, but we'll see :)

- evie

13 Feb 2024

site stuff ig. (can't think of a better title...)

I'm kind of getting second thoughts about how I did the blog. It's probably fine? idk, i probably just need someone to tell "no no it's fine" and i'd stop worrying about it, but I feel like it might feel kinda clunky? if you have some construstrive criticism, I'd be very appreciative! I do feel like it feels a little too, like, official? idk, I'd like it be more comfy, and with the site format that I've put on myself, it doesn't really do that I think. Which kind of makes me wonder if I should just do away (at least partially) with the nav bar that's on all the pages (well, save the about page that's... uhh, it's there, for some reason) becuase it sort of locks me into one kind of theme of a page and while that can be good, I'm not sure if I really like that...

again, if you have some feedback, please let me know! I'm really clueless when it comes to this sort of thing so i'd love to hear what any of you think! There's also a bunch more that I'd like to do with site. a short list may include:

make about me page (ugh)
remodel home page (kinda related to the navbar thing?)
make some graphics for this site (super time consuming and I'm bad at pixel art, but its really rewarding)
actually finish the links page (it's been sitting in it "temporary" state for a good bit now...)
might be it actually?

It's not actually too much, and if I had limitless motivation, it could keep me going for quite a while, but, unfortunately, I'm human. I'm kinda stressed over school rn so not really anything off this list will probably happen (at least quickly) in the near future. lost track of where i was going with this, but yea, that's all from me.

I'm off to do school work, I suppose.

- evie

14 Feb 2024

Merry Valentines day!

Valentines day is an odd holiday. I'm not sure that I quite get it. just stopped typing to look it up, and apparently it's a traditional christian feast day to honor a martyr?? I'm not sure how that's associated with love and romance but okay. but yeah, people ask others to be their valentine (normally their partners? I think? honestly not quite sure) and then give them chocolate or other gifts as a sign of their love (or care?) i think? I'm not quite sure. I've never had a "valentine" so I'm probably the last person to be talking about this. It was kinda sad to watch other people, especially my friends, who have girlfriends and boyfriends be all romantic, but it's alright I suppose.

Anyways, I don't really have much else to say. Just wanted to do something since it's Valentines day and all :)

- evie

24 Feb 2024

Language learning is kinda weird

I have an odd relationship with languages, I think. I fluent in English, just because it's my native language, but I also know from a bit to a tiny bit of Japanese, Spanish, German, Dutch, and Korean, which i'd say is probably more than the average person? Yeah, I'm a very indecisive person, and languages are not exempt from that. What seems to end up happening for me learning a language is that I stick with it for a bit (usually around a month or two?) and then either burn out, lose interest, or, in the case of Japanese, get swamped with anki cards bc i missed a day (lol). Japanese, Spanish, and German are definitely the three that I know the most of, and am at roughly the same level in all three, as far as I can tell, which is not much. Pretty much just enough to catch a word here and there and maybe understand a simple sentence, but not much more. So yeah, not great, especially considering that I've been trying to learn a language for around 2-3 years now (which I should honestly be at least somewhat fluent in at least one language, if I actually stuck with just one language, by now).

I can definitely say (from experience) that learning a language is pretty much entirely about consistency. My progress in japanese has been incredibly slow just because I'm terrible at sticking with things, but it's been a lot easier with Spanish because I was forced into a school class for it (it's the only language my school offers) and so I have an hour of language practice built into my weekday that I don't have a choice about. It's been a similar thing with German because I've pretty much entirely used Duolingo for it, and the stupid streak system has kept me coming back to German, which has actually been really beneficial. I highly doubt that Duolingo is very good for German, but it certainly seems to be far and away better than what they have for Japanese (seriously, if you are learning Japanese through Duolingo, go and buy a textbook meant for self-teaching [I have Japanese From Zero, for example, which seems to be quite good] instead. Duolingo explains NOTHING and so actually having good explanations for Japanese grammar will help you immensely), and it seems to have worked pretty well for me, save for the confusion that comes with the app because it doesn't explain grammar. With Japanese, similar to Duolingos streak, what kept me going was that I had an anki deck that I'd do daily, which would keep me fresh on vocabulary, and I didn't want to miss a day doing that. Issue with this is that this completely backfired on me when I (inevitably) missed a day because then I'd end up having to review the cards from both the day I missed and the current day, which caused me to put it off even further and it just snowballed from there. This ended up in me leaving the whole langauge enirely for a while, until I got up the motivation to conquer the (now hundreds) cards I needed to review, which I then kept for a little bit, but then I missed another day and history repeated itself.

My tips for language would probably be as follows:

focus on consistency
find something to keep you coming back (maybe even if you have to stoop to duolingo)
avoid putting too much pressure on yourself

Which, to be clear, is just what I think works for me... somewhat. this certainly isn't the best way to go about it, and it might not work for someone other than me, butt I feel like this is primarily where I personally tend to struggle. To me (and I'd imagine many others?) the primary goal of language learning (at least as in actual process) is just to stick with it, and if the way your learning isn't conducive to that, you probably won't learn much, or anything. hopefully this is helpful to you (which it is quite likely not to be bc I'm probably just weird)

But yeah, I'm still learning how to manage with my own brain. It's surprisingly difficult to do difficult high investiment tasks such as language learning just because I kinda have to fight my brain. I do think that I've made quite a lot of progress and hopefully will be able to do a lot better in the future! I'm thinking about trying to restart my Japanese learning endeavors because Japanese is just such a cool language and I miss it, so we'll see!

But yeah, that's all I have to say,
see you again in another week and a half :) [this is at least mostly a joke]

- evie