I'm a certified welder now. I took to it pretty quickly once I actually got myself in classes to learn. Now I'm newly certified and looking for a job. It's definitely not something I ever saw myself doing, but I'm glad I am doing it. It's given me some hope for my future back, hope I didn't realize was gone. Or maybe hope that I didn't know I could get back.

I've been making slow but steady progress to my life in other ways too. My student ID got me free bus rides so I was out and about in the city more and that was pretty refreshing to the stagnation I felt before. That benefit's gone now, but I've already got a bus pass again that I paid for since I need to haunt the library. Being able to go out and enjoy the city also really invirgorated my energy to write. Mostly it's all still handwritten and I've got to get myself to transcribe it. Which is not exactly fast work, but it is training my editing eye. And the writing process is helping me just get my ideas out since I'm not editing as I go when I write by hand. Some of those stories have already been transcribed and posted (those being Extinguish and By the River) and I'm hoping the rest can be up before the end of the month. Not least because Art Fight starts in July and I really want to be able to spend my June free time making more references.

Another thing I'm hoping to manifest before the end of the month is my essay on transgender themes in Danny Phantom. It's a project I've been rolling around for around a year now and working on for real for about half that (looks like I dropped mention of it in my last blog post and it shows up in my planner about a month before that). I've rewatched the whole show, written my notes, compiled an outline, and started a couple drafts. After writing it my planner or bullet journal constantly for months, it feels good that I might be able to finish it finally.

And I'd be basically nowhere with that essay without learning to use that bullet journal though. And if I hadn't been introduced to pomodoro timers thanks to Tati's TaTimer. Going back to school for welding definitely helped with setting up some structure, but I've found a lot of success with them even outside of school. Maybe the fact I have destroyed my YouTube recommendations with ambient soundscape videos also says something. I found those kinds of soundscapes and lo-fi or breakcore mixes to be good background noise too. Very beneficial to my brain to have a lot of layers of audio to keep itself distracted and allow me to actually focus on whatever I'm reading or writing. And, funnily enough, through those videos eventually video game themed pomodoro timers started to crop up. The worst part is how well they work. Of course, I have a bias towards TES games and their soundtracks, which YouTube definitely knows, so the first ones I got recommended were Study With Me in Skyrim (this one specifically).

Somehow I actually use the Youtube playlists feature now. Apart from when I tried to be a YouTube Let's Player, I've never had so many playlists I actually used. I've got a playlist of pomodoro timers (Skyrim and Animal Crossing New Horizons are popular games for these), a playlist of soundscapes (though most of the pomodoro timers supply these themselves), multiple playlists of BGM (lo-fi, classical music, and breakcore), and a playlist of stream VODs I've watched dozens of times so I put them on low volume and they fall into background chatter like at a cafe. Before the most use the feature got was made then immediately abandoned character playlists and one aggregate playlist for ripping MP3s (the very reason I failed to use YouTube playlists to make character playlists).

Among the progress I've made in my personal projects, I've also been able to pick away at updating my website again! Small edits to code here, making a new page there. I'm hoping to actually finish up my Bitter Bark page with information about the world, and get some of the character pages set up as well. It helps that Art Fight is happening in a few months, I'm actually in the mood and mindset to make art lmao