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my characters can be expertly designed or they can be part of something that comes out before i die! i can work tirelessly to make everything match the way i see it in my head and slowly come to hate every second of the process or i can finish something and gain the experience i need to actually make something good!! my ideas will never measure up to the picture of perfection i think of when i see the things that inspire me!!! they don't need to be perfect, they just need to fucking exist!!!!
i don't know how this naive 20 year old who inhabits my brain with precious little experience and NO portfolio gets the nerve to be so choosy about what they consider done.
i look at the stuff my favourite artists made when they were 20. guess what? it's on par with my work, the only difference is they finished and published it and i haven't. well. i'm trying. i can't deny i'm getting better. i'm slowly getting closer to making something you could call a "finished work." i'm stumbling into it, feeling my way through, blindly. that's how everyone does it. why do you think nobody ever gives perfectly actionable advice to artists in any medium? it's because that shit doesn't exist (and anyone trying to sell it to you is lying)! every artist that ever existed has only ever been operating on the sum total of every artistic experience they've had. it's invisible and intangible. so everyone is fine. there's no such thing as innate talent. if you spend too much time thinking about how your work lacks something that everyone else's has, you're eventually going to trick yourself into giving up. who's that going to help?
the hardest part for me was always finding an idea that's worth committing to, but i think i've got that down now, now that i kind of know what kind of person i am and what kind of art i like. yeah, that's a pretty important thing, isn't it? i can't blame myself for not having been able to think of anything worthwhile when i didn't know even the most basic things about myself. once i had things i wanted to say about experiences i've had, that's when i started thinking of art i could make that i could actually claim as my own without feeling embarrassed.
oh right, that thing i said in the last post, "(my art) couldn't be therapeutic even if i tried, i take it too seriously." ...maybe i can try harder. i think i just have to draw stupid shit more often. and somehow let go of the insistence that it has to look good all the time. and post it sometimes, if it's okay? the more i think about it, the more i'm convinced doing anything but that would make me a bit of a hypocrite lmao. sometimes i forget i have the power to make my process less painful, should i just decide to put in the effort to do that. i've found having artists friends helps with that. i get so much joy from talking about art, and then i think "if i want to talk about art with them more, i'll have to make more art..."
everyone should talk about their art more often. why torture yourself by working on it in the dark all the time?? nothing compares to the excitement i feel when a friend sends me a wip. like.. i get exclusive access to your unfinished art???? that makes me feel so special. please scream all your ideas at me.
alright, now it's time to vomit out a bunch of stuff about my hyperfixations.
mao sasagawa released his album last month!! it's his best work yet. if you have any interest in japanese music at all, you have to listen to it. right now. here it is. and after you're done listening, give him all your money.
i listened to the album at midnight the day it came out in my timezone. new zealand time is so far ahead of the rest of the world, i must have been one of the very first to listen to it. i was so struck by it, i immediately started writing a blog post about it, which is currently sitting at around 4000 words (including the side tangents), but then i reached a point where i'd have to rewrite a huge chunk of it because my feelings toward his new album deepened so much that the conclusion i wrote was already out of date... so then i got exhausted. oh well. i accept my disordered work flow. there's no point in working myself to the bone for something that's just meant to be fun.
oh, and on the topic of music!! i only just found out hitorie released one of wowaka's unreleased songs earlier this year. it has his vocals and everything. fuck, i live under a rock. I CAN'T BELIEVE I NEVER FOUND OUT ABOUT IT?? hitorie was my favourite band through all of high school???? wowaka was my favourite vocaloid producer when i was a kid??????? i cried so many times thinking about how i'd never hear a new wowaka song, and now you're telling me they released a song he wrote and sang in 2025, 6 years after his passing, i just.................... fuck. hearing a new wowaka song for the first time in years, i forgot just how unique he was. nobody writes lyrics like he did, and nobody sings like he did either. he was so incredible at creating imagery with his word choices. there is no way to describe the way his music makes me feel. anyway, the song is called NOTOK, and it's so.. just.. everything. AGH... it reminds me of the songs on iki, my favourite hitorie album. i still listen to that album in its entirety like twice a year. it means a lot to me.
listening to hitorie again and rereading the lyrics as a (very young) adult, i'm always struck with realisations about why i actually liked this band so much as a kid. so much of their music is about embracing yourself and healing from your inability to live up to the expectations other people placed on you, discarding them, learning to be happy for your own sake for the first time. i had no concept of that as a kid. i'm only now starting to learn what it means to do that for yourself. listening to hitorie was the only thing i could do to feel at peace for a lot of my adolescence. yes, i'm very normal about the bands i like. i remember listening to RIVER FOG, CHOCOLATE BUTTERFLY and thinking "what the hell... so there are other people who feel like me." (i would not discover mao sasagawa for another 2 years, so this was a revelation.) that song is one of their more depressing ones. it doesn't have an uplifting message, it kind of just wallows in hopelessness for all of its 5 minutes. it makes sense why it was my favourite for so long. you have to be taught that having hope is allowed.
these days, my favourite hitorie song might be LACK. it's a song about trying to rebuild yourself, accepting the fact that you're currently an incomplete person, and struggling to get along with others because of that fact. it's a pretty angry and defensive song, but at its core, it's full of hope and self acceptance. whenever i listen to it, i'm convinced wowaka is the single coolest person to have ever existed. his songs have so much frustration in them, but he always seemed to channel it into something that could have a positive impact. that's so admirable...
OH AND ONE LAST THING, that reminds me of my favourite post-wowaka hitorie song, stereo juvenile, which is all about learning to love yourself and accepting the fact that a lot of people will think you're annoying and stupid just for being yourself. that song's so fucking good.
okay, that's probably enough screaming. i'll get back to the programming trenches now. and hanging out with my friends. and talking about art.