Medications for ADHD and bipolar was the best thing to ever happen to me. Often I would lose things: they’re not in their logical places; they’re not in their illogical places; they’re not even visible. It’s like I’m being gaslit. Once I’d finally find them, they were either in plain sight the whole time, or they were under a pile of papers in the furthest corner of the house. To describe this, I started saying, “The mean ghosts are playing tricks on me again.” This happens a lot less and at a much lower intensity. It’s easier to make a conscious effort to place things in easy to see places and actually form systems of organization to iterate upon.

I’m better able to be patient and slow down. My outlook is now less like construction, a task that I build once and don’t think about it again until something needs repair; and more like gardening, a slow, persistent task that results in a little improvement every day. Developing gardener-brain was always a disproportionate struggle to the point of inability; but now that I get it, I finally have the patience to reapproach almost everything I gave up on with a new, deliberate focus.

It’s almost 4AM on a Sunday morning. The hospital has me on-call and monitoring the monthly maintenance– a task which consists of periodically refreshing the SQL query I wrote after each dozen minutes to see if their servers have rebooted so I can tic a box. If they’re stalled out for whatever reason, I tic a different box or reboot it myself. Normally, I’d be complaining– pissing, whining, and moaning; in fact, I’ll probably be in that state after I the inevitable failed attempt at sleep tonight; but for now, I’m actually pretty happy. It gave me the chance to finally finish overhauling my website for the nth time. But I’m even more proud of my progress than usual.

My computer science journey has taken me to a lot of places I’d never thought I’d see. Most of what I do all day now is develop and refine the solutions to logic puzzles. It’s honestly refreshing that I’m never truly done: new tools come, old ones disappear forever, and existing tools get updates that inevitably break something. I’m glad I’m a gardener.

This website used to mean very little to me. It was nothing more than a way to show my work to employers who would never hire me. But… why does every social media account I have include this site in my bio? Why did I do that?

The site began to mean something once I took it out of Adobe Muse and hard-coded the it myself. I barely knew programming outside of basic UX training. I had the audacity to think I could use PHP, a new language to me at the time, to keep my format “simple.” I thought I could easily replace large sections of frequently repeated code (such as the header and footer) by using separate files of code chunks and referencing them. I thought it would be easy. Silly me. After many hours upon days of spinning my wheels and banging my head against a wall, I just hard-coded every page in HTML. I didn’t have many pages to write, so it wasn’t too much of a problem. The simplest solution was the best solution in this case. But now I’m actually producing content at a persistent pace. It’s impractical to continue hardcoding like I have been.

For the past few months, I have been trying to figure out how to put my curated Ai artwork on the site. There are a lot of images and I knew there had to be a better way: a way with less potential mistakes; a way that I didn’t have to keep fucking repeating myself– copying and pasting the same code chunks 100+ times. And what about my writing? And what about my zines? And what about And what about And what

I asked ChatGPT. It suggested a few things, including PHP. Nope. Next please. I didn’t have the vocabulary to describe what I wanted, but ChatGPT helped me deuce that I wanted a “static site generator (SSG).” I don’t remember the suggestions other than the one I decided to use: Jekyll– a formatting setup based in Ruby (my favorite language) and is specialized for content sites like mine. “Content is King.” It was a way to create templates, reusable code chunks to include, and … wait… this is exactly what I was trying to do way back before the pandemic. Have I really improved this much in just a few years? This total site conversion became my obsession for the month.

And it’s finally done. This is actually my first post here using just the markdown front-end. It’s freeing that I can just copy and paste this post into an .md file and not really have to worry about anything. I have finally worked so hard, I can be lazy. Feels nice :)

I’m no longer using my site as a portfolio to be used for the sake of employment or commission work. The art industries have been nothing but huge letdowns (other than game design, interestingly enough). So now this site, the one that carries my name, will be treated as something just for me. Sometimes it feels as if I’m talking to myself on here, but that’s okay. I prefer it to the deafening silence from clients I would inevitably disappoint.

Anyway, I noticed I started writing more lately. Prose seem to flow more naturally to me than digital brush strokes. Probably because it’s the only art form I’ve done that hasn’t yet been commodified. As things come out, the library will expand further.

Which brings me to the obvious structure change: “Updates” became the “Library.” These may act like an update log or as structured writing, depending on how spicy I get. I just know that I am a lot more free to write whatever I want with these changes. Let’s see what happens next…

The website's mini-overhaul is finally done! Here's what I did:

• I replaced the difficult to use interface for multi-image pages. I was overthinking and over-designing a simple gallery. Sorry about that...
• I am constructing the pages for my Ai generated art. Admittedly, there are a lot of images I'm sorting through, so it'll take some time. If enough people like them, I'll post a large pile of extras including lots of novelty Shreks.
• The profile picture is finally updated. I haven't had short hair in years lol.
• Lots of little UI tweeks to make it better on phones (hopefully).

Thank you once again for your patience and support <3

The 2020s are turning out to be harder than I thought they ever could be. I needed a break for just moment. But then all at once I experienced an ego death. Soon after I came out to myself as a queer bisexual and began using entheogens.

It's now hip to say, "time isn't real," but lately it hit home. Over the past couple years, I was experiencing something resembling being a teenager all over again; but instead of learning to navigate the world of girls, it was navigating the world of boys. Even worse was the question, "bi man or bi woman?" I found that the question itself was a false dichotomy and unfair to even ask.

So now the question is, "How can I capture this through my art?" Well it's kind of weird isn't it; no longer recognizing myself in the mirror. For a while, it was like looking at a twin brother: a hairy, sloppy, masculine dwarf; handsome though. The medication made me very aware of my brain chemicals and the fact that they were being manipulated. The entheogens were making my aware of my skin, my muscles, and my electric flow. I could feel everything while understanding that I am, in some ways, a slave to the chemicals that allow me to be "me." I needed to express that. I needed it.

A Tower of Flesh and Bone began its outline process. The story of what it means to become meat was needling my brain. I needed to know what it looked like. I know it's a touchy subject for a lot of people, but I found that my favorite tool for the job has been AI generated rendering tools. Utilizing prose as the prompts have generated results that I literally could not imagine: the hive and its surreal complexity; the Blood Fields and its meaty masses spurting up from the soil's veins; and, of course, the Tower of Flesh and Bone with its mysterious presence amidst it all.

Now I do plan on inking over these images and treating them like references; but I do not want that to delegitimize how powerful this tool has been to help me visualize this world. Every generated batch teaches me about this place and I cannot wait to discover the stories that come from it during my writing process. In fact, I would argue that it is all inseparable as one influences the other in a self-feeding loop.

I'm very excited.