December Adventure

goal: work a little on some creative project every day. for me that’ll include this website (like styling this page!), drawing, or other art things.

(about the december adventure↗)

December 17

Felt mostly very sleepy and distracted by the looming holidays. How did I manage to do anything on a workday evening before? All I want to do right now is stare into space and daydream.

December 16

Flipping through one of my art books: SKETCH by Terada Katsuya. It’s like 500 pages long so I’ve never gone through it all, just flipped through it randomly from time to time. It’s presently on my desk because I moved it off my bookshelf when reorganizing.

Art book open to show two ink drawings, featuring floating heads wearing intricate headpieces made of machinery, nature, and animals. It's intricately drawn, with hatching that conveys depth and texture.

Something I really like about his work is how precisely he draws the details, as well as how he inks texture. For example, in the drawing on the right, the man’s beard is detailed with so many lines, but it’s cohesive. Every line has a purpose. In the left drawing’s beaver (?), you can see the texture of the fur, the volume/shape of its body, and the depth of the leaves it’s sitting on.

I feel terribly amateur in my ink hatching in comparison—you know, sometimes just doing whatever and fudging it. There are greater heights to reach!! This is a level I aspire to.

December 15

I bought a binder and some sleeves to store my artwork! Muji A5 binder, fits my 6x8in art.

A binder laid open to show two of my Hades ink drawings stored in clear plastic sleeves.

December 14

Put together this year’s version of art vs artist! always a good feeling when I have a lot of works to choose from.

A 3 by 3 grid of 8 drawings and 1 selfie. The drawings include a mix of ink sketches, digital paintings and sketches, and a comic snippet.

December 13

Wrote my first weeknotes in five months :-)

December 12

Nothing! I sleep.

December 11

Originally nothing because I went to bed early, but then I couldn’t sleep so I wrote some weeknotes in my notes app. Maybe I can publish one more before the end of the year lol.

December 10

Decided to clean up my copypasta page a bit, which made me cringe because I made it several years ago and it’s kind of a mess. Hilariously enough, I’ve been bad about using this page—apparently I added a non-breaking space to it 2.5 years ago and then completely forgot and have still been googling it anyway and suffering for it. Lol, lmao.

Anyway, like my lorem ipsum page, this is an entry in my ‘specialized tools so I don’t have to google annoying shit and fight ads and bad web design and clickbait etc.’ arsenal (population: 2). Nevermind that this is, at best, mid web design.

Whatever. I made it more compact so it would be less annoying to scroll, fixed a couple of completely wrong Mac shortcuts (lol), and changed the font. It now falls back to system-ui if there’s no Tiempos Text glyph, so the arrows are less fucked up on Mac. (On Windows? idk I’ll find out later when I boot up my PC I guess.) It sucks on mobile, but that doesn’t matter because I use this on desktop. I also updated its template to use my new and improved site layout.liquid instead of being a completely one-off custom page.

Okay, this has been productive!!!

On the media recap front, I daydreamed about it and got an idea (which I forgot about until this moment, so now I’m writing it down), of which I am rich in. So many Ideas™, I’m like an ideas man.

I should use some non-breaking spaces to fix this page but maybe that’s a task for tomorrow me.

December 9

more pixel pushing. Copy and pasted baz luhrmann’s name and for a moment thought i somehow 🤏 emsmollen’d 🤏 the font by pasting. but no those characters are just like that coincidentally

Mockup of the text ‘Romeo + Juliet. 1996. Directed by Baz Luhrmann.’ The characters in Baz Luhrmann’s name are noticeably more condensed than the preceding words ‘Directed by,’ as if it’s in different font style.

December 8

Pondering how to structure my recap. My 2024 recap had clear categories (film/tv, music, games, books); this year could go the same way, but there are some items that span multiple categories. For example:

Batman covers film, tv, podcasts (now that I type that out, I realize I forgot completely about podcasts in yesterday’s TOC lol), and comics
Hadestown is the sole theatre entry; do I make a new category for it or give it its own section? the category would be more for consistency than actual organizing purposes…
Stardew Valley involves the game as well as the concert
KPop Demon Hunters is the movie and the soundtrack
Baseball is a Sport (in the tv category I suppose), but then its influence reaches to rewatching Moneyball and stuff.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

December 7

Picked up my calendar and it’s predicatably mid! I printed three copies on three different types of paper and the colours all turned out different. Maybe I do need to whip out the ol’ pantone swatch book.
Playing around with fonts, typography, and colours in Figma for my media recap. There’s probably a sensible, linear way of going about this—write it, then put together the visuals—but I am not doing that in favour of doing whatever I feel like at the moment. I suppose that’s the fun of trying to be all multimedia with it. If I get bored of one thing, I can hop to another.

Mockup of my table of contents in two different fonts, styled in green text on a dark green background. The contents are: Introduction, Film & TV (& sports), Theatre (AKA Hadestown), Music, Games, Books (mostly comics), Conclusion, and End notes.

December 6

Finally placed an order for my December calendar (previously mentioned Dec 1)—unfortunately, I did no further work on it since, so I really could have ordered it earlier, but alas. I decided to just print what I had. I have so many other things I want to work on and the anxiety of this was taking up too much brainspace.
Still in the early stages of planning the 2025 media recap. I sat in a cafe and doodled a bunch, and it’s all very vague right now. I need to also start writing it, beyond the stray bullet points I’ve written throughout the year. It’s kind of exciting, and kind of intimidating.
Also thinking about apartment decorating and such, which is a much more fun (though expensive) pursuit.

December 5

Nothing! I was out.

December 4

Feeling unwell, so I rest.

December 3

Quick sketch to commemorate my return to the Destiny 2 mines. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll have a chance to work on some longer term project.

Ink sketch of my Destiny warlock, wearing the cat ears helm, Vow chest armour, and holding a cup of coffee.

December 2

Fixed the list styling on this page where on iOS Safari (typical) the ◆diamond◆ marker was too big. I yeeted it and replaced it with a ✦sparkle✦ instead.
Nothing else! One of those days.
Also discovered that the ↗ symbol renders differently in Firefox vs Safari, so I have solved this by formatting it in a <code> block for that nice, predictable monospace rendering. Which I shan’t be styling here, because I need a task for tomorrow.
Thinking about making my own SVG icons for miscellaneous things like this around my site, similar to how I fantasize about making my own handwriting font, drawing impractical amounts of spot illustrations, and animating things with GSAP.

anyway here is a screenshot comparison. I spent longer editing this together than the actual css I fixed above. That’s how the December adventures, I guess.

Comparison of how the unicode arrow pointing northeast, to indicate outgoing link, renders differently: in Firefox it's normal, in Safari and Arc it's twice as long, in iOS Safari it's an emoji, and in a monospace font it's normal. My thoughts on this are: finally, some good fucking food (firefox), why long boi, chill out (Safari and Arc), LOL GFY (iOS Safari), and nice (monospace).

December 1

Drew a silly little comic and posted to mastodon (this was funnier in my head…alas)
Worked a bit on December calendar project (prev wip here)…really dissatisfied with it! I need to call it done and place an order within a couple of days though, the longer I delay, the fewer days I will have to enjoy it.
Styled this page! Added some colours and changed the font (Pliego by Madrilenian Typographic Manufactures).