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↗)

January 1, 2026

Reflection: I ended up doing much less than I planned. There were eleven days where I did nothing because I was busy or sick. With my previous cringetober drawing challenge, there were days when I was busy but I still pushed myself to spend five minutes drawing something crappy, but the inherent low-key nature of December Adventure meant I didn’t feel too pressured to keep up a streak.

I wish I had more time to myself over the holidays to work on stuff, but I enjoyed all my time offline so I can’t be too upset. Mostly I wish I had more time off—I’m back to work in four days, which fills me with dread. I’m not ready! There’s still more I want to do!

I’ve enjoyed making tiny updates where I could. Hopefully I can spend twenty minutes here and there and have an active changelog of website tweaks this year.

If you’ve been following along, thank you :-)

December 31, 2025

Worked on writing a bit more of my media recap; grew tired of it, and started writing a personal projects recap post instead! lol. I posted a list on Mastodon yesterday and that was going to be it but it seems I want to keep procrastinating, so it is turning into a slightly longer blog post. Mostly I think I’ll just add some images.

I think I’ll write a December Adventure wrap-up entry tomorrow. It’s almost 10pm now so the new year is almost upon me. Good night!!

December 30

I can sense my energy flagging…but I can’t let those demons win!!

I still haven’t really figured out how I want to write my recap. I’ve written bits and pieces, but it’s not cohesive. I feel like I need it to be different and good (whatever that means) compared to last year’s. I’ll be disappointed if I do the same thing again. But I think the only way for me to figure out what this ideal post looks like is by writing it. The only way out is through!! Or whatever!!

I am very tired and sleepy so this update is kind of a shitpost. ~~Apologies.~~ NOT APOLOGIES THIS IS MY OWN LOW-KEY LOG IT’S FINE THERE ARE NO RULES

December 29

Nothing! I spent the day hanging with friends and it was fantastic.

December 28

Tweaked the CSS on this page a bit: changed the title font to Sfizia for no reason other than that I bought it and don’t use it enough, and changed my bullet points to be pink instead of green, for the contrast.

December 27

I started writing my media recap in vscode! up til now, it’s existed only in figma, obsidian docs, and my sketchbook. I was getting stuck trying to pixel push and figure out a design I liked, so it feels good to switch focus and do some development instead. It’s definitely not getting finished before New Years—it’s gonna be an early January thing. I’ve been busier than expected over the holidays and I’m trying to be okay with that! I have greatly enjoyed my time offline! My deadlines are self-imposed and not real!
I wrote and published my outtakes post, which I actually had wanted to do at the end of 2024 but didn’t (so meta). I threw in some aspirational goals at the end. I have so many things I want to do and end up losing track of them all. Maybe I actually need some kind of project management system—even just a minimal one might help me.

December 26

I was sick!

December 24 + 25

merry crimmus!

December 23

Did zero creative project stuff but I did have a great day doing day off activities: enjoyed coffee in the morning; went to three grocery stores via the beautiful skytrain and some walking; saw some dogs, including two very big ones; went on a short run; today was bright and the sky was pink and purple at sunset; picked up a package; went out to dinner; did some reading; took a nap; trying a new recipe; ate an orange. all my dishes are done.

December 22

Messing around in Figma still. Part of me wants to add in a little data viz, for funsies.

Figma mockup of some charts. One compares some film stats, like live action vs animated movies, or first-time watches vs rewatches. Another is a bar chart showing a five-star ratings distribution, where most movies are 4 or 5 stars, but even more are not rated. I wrote a note about how this is more about how a movie being good is what compels me to rate it.

I was searching for a monospace font to use for this—something vintage! Like it was printed on a punch card! And then I went down a rabbit hole of vintage-looking papers and textures, but I think that’s not the vibe I want. Next year, maybe. But anyway, this is Courier Prime, because I was like, why don’t I just use Courier. And then the sans serif at the top is Futura PT, because why not just use Futura. Maybe I should write the whole blog post in Times New Roman.

(I won’t, I’m pretty decided on Livory because I’m an oldstyle serif enjoyer, but I should do something with system fonts at some point…)

December 21

Looking at what they call “”“design inspiration”“”…………………

December 20

It’s the first day of my holiday break, and I’m excited to finally have time/energy to work on personal projects :D

On this website: I fixed how I display my star ratings on my watchlist and books page—the filled in star ★ was smaller than the outlined star ☆ which just looked goofy. Now they are uniform with a handy dandy font-family: system-ui!
Also styled the <code> stuff on this page now
Working on my media recap, which continues to exist in a hilarious state of vapourware. I don’t even have screenshots to share because they suck.

December 19

Nothing!

December 18

Nothing!

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).