November is upon us, and with that the two most polarizing months I’ve had in a long time finally came to an end.
To backtrack a little bit, coming off of August there was a lot of stuff cooking in the proverbial pot, the culmination of which was going to be the publication of a number of projects which were in development for a couple of months. Starting off in early September I have launched this very site which was a big step since it was not only a significant upgrade from my previous homepage, but also an opportunity to create a place to keep track of all past and future projects in a single, organized location. The reception was good and in the process I’ve gained some practice with the latest version of WordPress and ways of customizing it – which while perhaps not the most useful of skills on the market – was a welcome addition nonetheless.
Then came the second site – a fanpage dedicated to Jennifer English and Aliona Baranova, mostly to help organize their content and event log on a single website. Unlike my personal site, that one was built using Bootstrap 5 and to be quite frank, it was much more of a bumpy road towards what ended up a rather dissatisfying result in my eyes, despite gathering rather positive response from everyone else. For what its worth, it was my first proper venture utilizing Bootstrap so I guess it could have been worse, and some lessons were definitely learned in the process… with all of that being said, while the design felt “meh”, the biggest issue was optimization largely caused by inclusion of links to various streams and youtube VODs aswell as LCP which tanked the PageSpeed score from 90s to 30s (oof!). While it would be fixable with various replacements and optimization methods, it would also have to sacrifice the auto updates to displayed playlists which was kind of the whole point, so for now I left it as is – despite the score, site appears to be running well enough and unless I’ll learn some new tools or find a clever workaround, it’ll have to do for now. It serves it purpose anyway so, eh!
So, following that magnificent disaster came the long-dreaded event in my life: apartment renovations. It was long overdue to upgrade the cluttered, dusty mess that I lovingly called a home studio to bring it into 21st century, since nothing was really done to it in over a decade. With some help we repainted the whole room from the sickly vomit green I was stuck with for years to “ahh cool modern white”, got new furniture, and some new gear while I was at it, including a fresh new microphone (yes, I got Blue Yeti so I can be just like everyone else) and some other less important items to help organize. Long story short, the entire second half of September was spent on chopping up old shelves from 1970s and deciding which shade of grey I want the new carpet to be, but it was worth the results. Maybe it’s not perfect, but it’s nice to have a bit of refresher and I’m not gonna lie, it feels nice, cozy and fresh which is perhaps what my mind needed desperately for years.
October was a bit more of a mixed bag, finishing off the work on renovation I jumped straight into some video editing work which I volunteered for. It took about 2 weeks to record, edit and revise the project which I believe is still yet to be put out into the public, so I will revisit this topic once I’ll be given a green light to do so, but in general it was a fun little endeavour which as it is usually the case, I think could have been ultimately done better and wasn’t entirely as fulfilling as I was hoping it to be, but then again it’s rare for me to look at any project I’ve done and be fully happy with it so I think it was just about as good as it can be in that context.
October was also a great time to be a Critter since we got the new season of Legend of Vox Machina from Critical Role aswell as some absolutely banging new streams which I was privileged to tune into live – something I haven’t done in a really long time, but oh boy was it a perfect time to join in on the fun. Aside from enjoying the chaos of Campaign 3, TLoVM and the return of Narrative Telephone which is still one of my favourites, I did plenty of clip editing on my second channel which resulted in a pretty nice boost in viewership and engagement – something I didn’t quite expect but I guess I struck at the right time. Overall, as a fan of the show and these lovable idiots, we’ve been eating good this month and I couldn’t be happier to have been a part of it!
As far as gaming goes, I got to finally try out Witchfire which was a nice surprise aswell as put my old unused Game Pass Ultimate key into action to give Black Ops 6 a chance – which was perhaps an even bigger surprise for me – but I will probably dive into these two another time, in separate articles.
With all that being said, there wasn’t much for me to say on the negative side but truth be told – while I had some good times and made some progress in web design, video editing and making pizza, it wasn’t quite all roses. Without going too deep into the specifics, my chronic depression seems to be proportional to both amount of success I find, and lack thereof. It’s not rational but few things related to mental health are. I don’t want to get too grim so I’ll leave it there, but it sucks when you feel like you climbed your way out of the well, only to find that well was located on the bottom of a dark cave.
It will probably get better with time as it usually does, probably after I scour the edge of mental breakdown. In the meantime, I will be working towards putting certain things behind me so I can move on and focus on things that have the highest potential of having a positive output. For starters, I should probably make better use of this blog and I already do have some interesting ideas on how to do that. Unto the breach!