For one, 2023 was still a rather slow year productivity-wise. In spite of attempts to break back into drawing art, various complications including my hardware setups not exactly working out pushed back a lot of plans- from the out-of-nowhere overheating of my drawing tablet (that somehow doesn’t have any form of venting) to the sudden failure of my refurbished Mac’s hard drive (…again) and the laptop I received for productivity (namely, game development) not exactly working as such for anything except for the smallest and most minor of projects. With all of these inconveniences piling up, a lot of my interior drive and motivation stalled or stopped completely as summer dragged on, summer became autumn, and before you know it I was time to prep for two big conventions that season. And while I still managed to get by with smaller projects and even finish a few, most of the bigger things I had planned (sketches, illustrations, fanart, etc) just didn’t happen. Doubly so when my mother would end up hospitalized again in June due to a fracture in her foot, which was mis-diagnosed and mis-treated as an infection at first, and she wouldn’t fully recover from the fracture until the tail end of November, directly before the holiday season would truly begin.
With my inner morale still not being at its greatest, I spent 2023 treading along with smaller, less stressful projects and plotting ahead for the future, taking notes and writing documents on the current state of my Aozora’s Adventure project of original characters and the many character and game concepts I’ve written for it over the years. Reaching the point where I likely have enough characters and game concepts to create a full series, I’ve been more selective and picky on what gets into the project lately, especially with the character roster’s sixth and final arc still in active development and some holes from earlier arcs that began in the 2010's being slowly patched up. As for the games, well, that’s still up in the air, as none of them have begun any form of active development apart from the concepts and I feel stingy on doing them out of order for reasons too lengthy to list here. While I still would like to give Aozora and his friends their own series of video games, the state of my morale puts me in no position to go learn gamedev at this time, and a part of me wants to grind out fleshing out and/or finishing up the concepts so when the time does indeed come, I’ll have a much better understanding on what I plan on doing, where to cut back, and etc.
For most of 2023, my source of online entertainment came in the form of video game streams on Twitch, and as the year came to a close I began to brainstorm picking up a headset and getting into live-streaming games on a set schedule. It’d be a way I could share the kind of games I enjoy the most, bringing to the limelight obscure, forgotten titles, while still exposing myself to newer games and getting a chance to meet and interact with a wide audience. Of course, the schedule would change over time as I get more comfortable with streaming and the audience grows. I do want to try out some test streams later into the year to try out the streaming equipment I’ve been gathering since 2022 (no joke) and I’ll be sure to keep everyone in the loop on when they’ll happen. As for other social medias, I’ve still been using the same lot of sites despite intends to break away from social media late last year under fears of it being too distracting for my work force. After much thought, I stopped considering it at the root of my problems, since it’s more everything else that’s been stopping me in my tracks (though I’d argue watching Twitch streams all the time is just as guilty of bring a distraction for me as social media is).
The future venture into game streaming will likely get its own blogpost in the next few months as I wanted to keep this particular blog entry focused on multiple subjects and there’s still quite a but if research and asking around I need to do on the side. And speaking of game streaming, I had also considered, quite numerous times in fact, getting into creating Youtube videos featuring me talking about particular subjects in the video gaming space that I feel could use a second opinion, or in cases when a game stream wouldn’t do it justice to show off or talk about a game, category, or franchise and needs a more focused, in-depth look. Quite a few topic ideas came about during these periods of brainstorming, including comparisons between two games and unbiased thoughts on each of them, as well as overviews of a set of games in a particular series or themed collection. Whenever these will actually happen is still up in the air, and there may still be some pieces of video equipment I may need to acquire and/or familiarize myself with, especially in regards to voice work and gathering footage of the topics I want to cover.
Another big focus for 2024 I want to lean on is not so much for productivity but more-so for my own personal gain. While I put it on the wayside for a bit due to the poor weather conditions in December (and I mean really poor, just count all the days rain or thick fog enveloped the northeast this month) and the holidays being just around the corner, I want to return to improving my own physical health in my times away from the computer. Go on walks, touch grass, tour some shopping malls, and work towards strengthening my legs for another big and eventful year of conventions. And hey, some classic arcades opened last year, so I want more of an excuse to take these trips and be able to survive standing up for lengthy amounts of time... or sitting in comically small stools.
With that all said, there are still a few small leftover projects hanging loose, some from the 2022 season that I originally carried over into 2023. Thankfully there aren’t many, but it’ll likely be a bit of time before I get to deciding to work on these projects again— I got sick with a sinus infection the week before Christmas this year and ended up quite run down that weekend, but thankfully I recovered enough to enjoy Christmas and seeing the extended family once more. I’ll likely give myself a few weeks into 2024 to warm back up, as the Christmas burnout is well, not a figment of your imagination, especially when you’re still recovering from the aftermath of being very sick and not being able to do much aside from prep for the holidays.
So how will 2024 fare? Will it be the big comeback year I’ve been aiming for since the start of the 2020’s? Will I finally get comfortable with drawing art again? What about the impending streaming career? Or even the future of this very blog? Well, we’ll see.
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