Catching Up
NOV 2nd, 2023
hey there!! sorry its been a minute, school has a way of keeping you busy apparently!
how are you? hopefully well, it's unfortunately been a pretty eventful past few months in the world since ive put anything here. i hope youre all safe, warm, and well loved.
since it's been a minute, let's break it down like last time.
Website Update
she's all spruced up for winter! do you like the decorations? october and december are some of my favorite months of the year! october slipped by me, so i thought id try and catch the snowy season early.
lots of little things have changed - some wording on some pages, an update to refelct my birthday (which was great, by the way! a sweet little party with some friends and absolutely no alcohol is exactly how i wanted my 21st to go :] ), some new additions to a few other pages, and some new art!
wow!! i made the original back in early June of this year, and the updated one a few days ago. i love getting to look back and see how my art evolves over time, and self portraits are especially fun because i get to see how ive changed over time! i got a haircut, first from my friends and then from my mom, so it's longer and i have bangs now! :]
the site's birthday is coming up in january, so look out for something fun near then! :D
Life Update
alright, so we established i had a birthday and i'm 21 now! wow! nothing's really changed, since im not into drinking or anything else, but it is nice to see that ive made it this far! heres to more!
besides that, lots of school! in my main animation class, we're given a new assignment every monday to be finished by the end of the week on sunday, and its been such a good learning experience!
here's a fun one, we were supposed to create a sort of rube goldberg machine / obstacle course and animate a ball traversing it! i had plinko and those little ball-drop arcade games in mind while making this one!
for other classes, i'm taking a really interesting one on the history of greek sculptures! lots of awesome stuff in there, my professor is very eccentric and very cool :] i'm also taking a scriptwriting class that focuses on wrtiting for animation, like cartoons and movies and stuff!! so helpful and so cool, ive already learned so much! i think drawing and writing take up equally huge parts of my heart!
Bed Update?
alright, i promised i'd tell this story the next time i updated, so here it is:
this happened this summer when i was down visiting my family. my hometown usually does its pride events in september (for whatever reason), but a local group of drag queens wanted to host an event in june! it almost didnt happen, since this was the time that a lot of places started placing drag bans and my home state isnt exactly the most progressive, but i was surprised to find they had explicit permission to go ahead and host it! even if some of their sponsors were terrible and dropped them last minute, they made it through and hosted a fantastic event!
during the event they had live music, vendors selling art and food, and a bunch of wonderful drag performances by lots of very talented queens! towards the end, one of the main queens came out to give a very kind heartfelt speech, and announced the charity that she was starting to help support lgbtq+ people local to my hometown! (a quick note, i would be more specific and name people and the charity here, but i'd like to wait to make a bigger shoutout on my social media's once their charity is fully set up! i'll be sure to talk about it here once they do!)
this was right around the time i was getting ready to leave for college and move into my new place with my friends, and i was still working out how i would afford everything else i would need on top of a bed and a bedframe. my mom (who was with me at the event) told me that i should talk to the queen after the event about it, but i felt guilty using resources that somebody else might have needed more than me, so i gave a halfhearted "haha yea maybe" and left it there.
if theres two things about my mom that are true, its that she loves randomly messaging people on facebook and that shes good at asking for what she wants. turns out she had been talking to the main presenter after the fact, talked about how much she loved the show and the message, and then brought up the fact that i was juggling my finances getting ready to move out to college. before either of us knew it, she was in my dms asking for an amazon list of whatever i needed!
needless to say i was incredibly humbled and thankful for their generosity!! i did my best to find a bed and bedframe that were cheap but not going to break immediately, and hesitantly sent them their way. in just a few hours, i got an email that the organization had bought it for me! i expressed my thanks as much as i could without sounding like a broken record, and was told that the only repayment they would take was for me to shout them out once they were ready!
experiences like that remind me of how genuinely kind people are, especially people who are united by a community full of others like them who have spent so much of their lives faced with constant hostility and suffering. im only here today because of the continued love and support of people who wanted nothing more than to see me live happily, and for that im forever doing my best to repay the favor <3
What's Next?
okay, this post has kind of gotten a lot longer than i thought it would, so i'll try to keep this short(ish):
plan on more frequent updates! im planning on making a blog post at least once every two weeks, with room for more if i feel like it! id also like to tinker with the website just as frequently, but no promises on that one - school is a lot!
there's still lots to do with the site, from shrines to fleshing out the other various pages, and i have lots more ideas for fun projects to take on! i'm still scratching the surface of html and css, but i hope to get a little more adventurous with some fun stuff for you guys to do!
to close off, i'd like to say that it is very weird looking back, at least for me. this website is already almost a year old! how wild is that? i look back at something as recent as the last post on this blog and have trouble recognizing that past version of me. i know i struggle with dissociaiton, so im sure that doesnt help things, but im sure you can relate to just how quickly we grow as people and shed who we used to be, in some way. frankly, it's hard for me to leave some things up. i've always had a bad habit of "fresh starts" where i delete and scrub clean past versions of me. for this website though, im intentionally doing the opposite. i want to see how i change, how the website changes, and i want to take you along for that change, if you'll have me.
stay safe and warm out there, friends on the web! i'll see you soon!
> Auden [he/they]
The Final Stretch
NOV 15th, 2023
hi there!! it's already mid november, which (for me) means finals are fast approaching!!
it feels like im already in the thick of it -- my final animation for my studio course, my final essay for my literacy course, my final assignment for my art history course, and my final script for my scriptwriting course!! i'm doing my best to triage, but they all have similar due dates because they're supposed to be our last assignments, so it's more like im juggling!! '^^
here's a look at my most recent assignment! for the assignment before, we took a video of ourselves walking and then animated it (no rotoscoping, just matching the timing of the steps to your reference video). then, for this assignment, they asked us to iterate on our last walk and give it to a character! i had a lot of fun, and i learned a lot about walk cycles! i had never done one until this point, so definitely a useful assignment!
our final is more open-ended - it has to be longer than 15 seconds, but shorter than 30, it must have a beginning, middle and end, and you have to try and show everything you've learned over the semester! im writing this blog before critiques happen, but i'm really liking the idea i have so far! :]
besides that, i haven't been up to too much! november seems to be the time where my mental illnesses really like to act up (depression, anxiety, the works), so i've just been focusing on getting my assignments for school done on time and the best that i can do them!
i did, however, find my hacked 3ds!! i've been looking for it high and low, and it ended up being in an obscure spot between my bedside table and my dresser drawers. of course! anyway, tons of fun games on there, including the original catz! soooo much nostalgia, especially the theme song! playing it really makes you realize how advanced nintendogs was, but it's very charming in its own way!
what else... i watched slimecicle, ranboo and sneegsnag play wolfquest randomly, and i've been getting into playing it with all of my friends! i've always been a wolf kid, so it really is a fun time running around with friends. plus, taking care of the pups can really be nerve-wracking, especially if you're bad at video games (<-- this guy)!!
my wolf "Heden" in a den with his and "Bright's" (my friend's wolf's) pups! tradgedy struck soon after this, but just enjoy the cute puppy picture!!!
alright, that's all for now! go do something fun with a friend, and have a good day! <3