my journal

June 30th 2024

artfight starts tomorrow and i still just don't feel ready for it. i'm trying not to expect or hold myself to my participation last year; doing an entire six fullbody pictures with full shading and a full detailed background was actually a lot of work and i'm trying to make sure my brain actually accepts that. trying to make sure i can be okay with maybe only doing one or two attacks, and / or attacks with simple backgrounds and coloring or something. i want to do more... i wish i could, but this year has just been so immensely difficult. it's almost entirely changed me as a person internally, in a lot of ways for the worse, which is still strange to experience and makes holding myself to standards of "at least try not to be a shitty person" to be even more draining of my energy than they were before.
i don't want to be shitty to people. i want to be kind and patient with everyone. but it's so hard when it feels like the same is only rarely given to you by life in return, and all of the tiny, miniscule pinch of energy you have left to live your life has to be spent trying to reverse the effects of what often feels like everything and everyone trying to make you into the worst version of yourself.

i'm trying. and sometimes trying means you have to accept that you can't do what you wanted to do, or have to do it in a lesser way. i want to give my all to art fight again, i hope by some miracle i'll find a reserve of energy for art and will be able to just let it absorb me. i just can't expect it of myself either, as much as i badly want to match and even exceed my contributions last year.

dreading the new wow expansion a lot less now that i have a new laptop, that not only runs wow on much better graphics settings but has an enormous hard drive that i won't feasibly for the life of the laptop run into the situation i did on my older much smaller hard drive laptop, that being fucking windows updates and also wow updates crowding the laptop and eating up literally all my space. i guess my old laptop's hard drive is only 250gb but man, that still feels like a lot of room. my entire set of personal files (which live on an external disk) don't even take up half that much. i really hate how bloated software has become... hard drive space is cheaper and more available than ever so nobody fucking bothers to optimize anything.

this is a laptop specifically meant for games though, so the older laptop being the a workstation tablet kind of laptop i'm still keeping for art. someday i hope to extend its life with a linux install, as i really don't want windows 11 on that old-ass machine. i've been waffling on it for now partially because my "messing with software" anxiety is quite extreme, but also partially because of executive dysfunction garbage and nothing is pressing on me to do it Right Now. i'm sort of hopeful the eventual end of service life for windows 10 will press me at least on the executive dysfunction front to actually learn how to install linux on something.
i'm not too worried about it for now, though. i do have some concerns with how annoying getting pen pressure drivers to work will be, but that's probably my biggest worry with the whole thing. i already use krita which is made for linux so i have zero concerns with the compatibility of my art software.

idk.
i just wish the actions of other people don't constantly steal my ability to feel like existence is worth any of the effort. i'm trying very hard to keep going. i really am. but it is always a fight, always an uphill struggle, and so often i just wish i could rest my bones for a while, as unrealistic as that is. there is never a day when nothing is asked of you, never a day you don't have to spend energy just to exist at all in.
i want to have a life worth living in. i just wish i didn't have to spend every moment fighting tooth and nail for even the smallest joys to reach that.