i haven't really bothered with my personal website since the big overhaul. i could be rewriting my interests page or updating my projects page or studying other sites to make mine easier to navigate or overhauling the theme since i'm not really vibing with the black & white anymore but i just haven't had the motivation to do any of that in the past 2-3 months. i haven't had much motivation to create at all, honestly.
being creative feels like such an uphill battle when consumption is all you've known your whole life. of course i pretend i'm making stuff in my head every single day, but it's so hard to get myself to draw anything. writing something that isn't a ramble is getting easier but if the whole thing takes more than an hour or 2 to write i lose interest by the next day.
oh yeah, i've been posting a lot over on tumblr. it's just a more convenient place to go when i need to get something off my chest. if i'm writing something for neocities it has to be serious, it has to have structure, and it has to be personal because i know nobody is ever going to read this.
which kinda sucks because all i do these days is yap on tumblr about osu tournaments, cook up some stats that'll get noticed by a dozen people at most and reupload tournament vods onto youtube. those last 2 are actually notable points of growth because i only began posting stats onto reddit 2-3 weeks ago & i didn't start actively reuploading my vod archive until last month, when i had the idea of compiling every mrekk vs maliszewski match into one playlist.
that involved me having to download vods to clip matches out of because not all of them were uploaded as standalone videos, which led to me reuploading all my roundtable 2 vods onto youtube because up until then the only vods available were 720p versions downloaded from bilibili rather than the 1080p versions i had all along, and that led to me reuploading a bunch of other vods that aren't available anywhere else including full circle, roundtable open 2026, and maliszewski streams. i even reuploaded oceanic cup vods because i saw that mrekk wasn't making twitch highlights past ro16. he did reupload them onto his 2nd channel but they're unlisted & so far you can only see the playlists for ro16 and qf.
and reposting my spreadsheets onto reddit has led to at least 1 twitch chatter mentioning it while i was watching maliszewski so that's the closest i'll ever come to being a celebrity. well, until i grind art and get so good at art i will only use my powers to draw maliszewski fanart even though i'd get so much more clout if i just drew popular anime characters and– ok i need to stop myself.
see, i never feel like i'm doing enough. every time i get something done i feel like i should do even more of that tomorrow, and if i failed to do something i beat myself up over it. i spent the past 2 days downloading vods while making sure said vods didn't have any missing segments and now that i'm done with that all i can think about is how i ruined my sleep schedule in the span of those 2 days. i was going to sleep at a normal time before that & i can go back to sleeping like normal now but i guess i'm going to beat myself up for letting it happen in the first place even though it was necessary.
right now i'm kinda mad at myself that i haven't reuploaded maliszewski's latest 2 vods or re-edited the vods with missing footage yet, but if i get that done i'll still be mad at myself for not reading more and not drawing more and not setting a time limit for watching youtube on my phone already. gosh, i really should rework my thoughts column into an embedded webpage or something. it just never ends
i know exactly what i mean when i say "i need to read more" and "i need to draw more" but somehow my brain still gets confused and decides the best solution is to just do nothing about it rather explicitly state what i already know to myself so i can hide behind the excuse that "i was being too vague with myself" and continue to be vague so i can continue to do nothing about it and arghhhhh i just keep being like that and i know how to stop being like that but i'd rather be mildly frustrated all the time yet content with the idea that there's nothing i can do rather than do something and get extremely frustrated for a bit before making it through feeling satisfied
i don't think i know what it means to study. i did graduate high school but i never felt like i was studying? i was just doing mandatory homework, occasionally explaining things to myself so i get it, and sometimes i'd have to memorize things so i'd close my notes and try to recall a chunk of it in my head then checking again. all i do these days is do research for an essay/video script i'll never write or come up with ideas i'll never actually turn into a video. sometimes i make interesting connections in my head between new & old knowledge but it very rarely amounts to anything.
i do see the irony as i was writing all that. i was doing retrieval practice and elaboration without even knowing what they were. i could've used all that time i spent watching youtube to study whatever subject i wanted to learn, which is also something i beat myself up for whenever i remember i have the capacity & the tools for learning.
but for the most part i resign to consuming video essays because it's easy and it makes me feel like i'm learning a little bit every rewatch. and maybe i am, but i could be learning so much more in the same amount of time if i gave even the slightest fuck and opened a textbook again. just because i effectively dropped out of college doesn't mean i'm not allowed to put effort into studying anymore.
i don't know why i keep wordlessly reinforcing that to myself but i feel like it's because i want to stop trying. i just want to give up and no longer have to put effort into anything for the rest of my life even as i daydream about the person i could become but never will because i don't want to put in the effort required to become that person.
i don't know why it's scared of effort, either. is it gifted kid burnout? a terminal anxiety of constantly making sure i'm being perceived favorably? a need to distance from my past self as much as possible, including abandoning the handful of good habits i had?
every time i write one of these posts i inevitably end up trying to find a deep-seated reason for something i could be working on instead, but then when i make plans to do that i inevitably get distracted by other shit and get frustrated at myself for not taking action, then i spend 2 hours trying to get to the core issue of why i'm not doing the thing only to realize that i should just start doing the thing. maybe if i wasn't always on my ass about improving as much as possible every single day i could've saved myself a whole lot of time and effort rambling to no end.