WIP Website & HANGRY & rawdogcomics
I'm still working on a revised version of alorafane dot com! Also I've been on a diet, which has felt awful! And I discovered a webcomic on Reddit which rapidly grew a large community.
I’ve been busy recently working on a revised version of my Alora Fane website. It’s taking ages! Mostly because I keep getting bogged down by heavy ‘what’s the point?’ feelings - the usual stuff - but also because I’m using a modern web development framework called Laravel to make it, which I’m still in the process of learning. I started learning it in late February and have made a couple of practice projects with it, but it seems like I’m constantly running into things with this that I never encountered while working on those.
I’ve been asking ChatGPT for help throughout the process - I’m not ‘vibe coding’, but I ask specific questions and it usually tells me specific functions that I’m unfamiliar with - which makes me reflect a lot on how all programming will be done going forward. I also keep going off on tangents with it, though, which wastes whatever time its help saves.
The website (which isn’t yet online, to be clear) currently has five pages: About, Blog, Games, Music, and Art. All of them work as of this Wednesday, but what I need to do now is populate them with content. I’m planning to use the site as a kind of archive of all the stuff I’ve made over the years, all in one place.
(Well, much of what I’ve made, anyway; chances are I won’t fill the Art section with the pervy stuff much of my digital sketchbook seems to be full of.)
While the Art page will contain images I’ve uploaded directly to the site, the Music one will use embeds from YouTube and/or Bandcamp. As such, I should hopefully finally be adding more music to the YouTube channel I set up for that purpose ages ago (though I’ve said - and meant - this several times without anything coming of it, so WE SHALL SEE).
I exported over all my blog posts from the old site, and added links to the ones here on Substack among them in a combined list; a big improvement from the embed widget crudely plonked there on the currently online version of the site!
I’ve been having to look back through a bunch of those old blogs to ensure everything’s working as it should be (eg formatting, embedded media). That’s been embarrassing! Seeing how much I go on and on about my mental health issues, how much I talk about plans - for my life or for creative projects - that never manifest, going around and around in circles, a vortex…
I’m intending to use the site as a portfolio if I ever try to get actual employment, but I’m very aware of how different it is to the sleek marketing pamphlet type portfolios that only stress a person’s skills or their employer-friendly positive traits…
I also copied over the About section from the old site (though I need to update the end bit), which only exacerbates the presentation of myself as a broken weirdo.
But then again, present-me hates the imagined-me who’s had this honest expression stomped out of him by the need to conform for protection against people low in openness and agreeableness. Ehh.
I’d like to be able to finish this website and put it online soon! But I’d also like to be able to fly or read minds or whatever. SO WE SHALL SEE. Whether I learn to read flies’ minds in the next couple of weeks. Yes. I can’t wait to learn about the locations of the tastiest local dollops of dog dung!!
I’m not planning to include any interactive elements on that site like commenting - so then I don’t have to worry about account authentication, trolls, etc - though I’ve been getting the feeling while working on it that it might feel really hollow if there’s no way for people to interact with it at all? (Other than viewing/listening to the art and music.)
Posting a blog entry and getting no indication that anyone read it at all might just get disheartening… though while going through a list of my posts here on Substack to copy links to, I could see the percentage of people who’d opened the email for each one. It’s usually about 50% for most posts, interestingly, but some important personal ones were as low as like 20%, which stung. I get it and would probably be one of the people who didn’t open the emails myself, but still. Seeing our personal appeal - and how much others care about us - put into numbers like that does hurt.
Which is another reason maybe it’s best to not include comments, view counts, etc on the new version of the site, I suppose.
Though I’m not exactly expecting to be trying to attract people to the site anyway? Am I? What am I intending for it? Just a portfolio for potential employers? An archive of my stuff mostly for myself and a handful of people who’ve been following me for years? Are either of those worth the time and effort I’m putting in, when I could/should be doing so much else??
Or so my mind’s been going around and around for the past two or three weeks, hence the slow progress.
Chances are I’ll just keep posting blog entries here anyway, only including them as external links on that remade personal site when it’s done.
On another note, I’ve been FAT AND HANGRY recently. I weighed myself for the first time in a year, and noticed my BMI was in the Overweight range for the first time in my life. I suppose being skinny has always been a big part of how I saw myself, so I didn’t like that, and wanted to try to change it with a diet.
I’d been eating three regular meals a day: breakfast, a big meal around 11am, and a smaller one around 4pm. So, I thought, I’ll just cut the smaller one out entirely! That’ll work!! I think I was vaguely remembering reading about intermittent fasting once, and how the longer you went between meals, the more fat your body burned, or something?
Anyway, that went fine for about a week! Then I crashed horribly and had a ton of alarming physical symptoms - and felt really irritable, in a way I usually don’t - which ChatGPT told me was due to poor blood sugar regulation. So I had to revise my approach a lot. Now I’m eating three meals again, just with smaller, healthier portion sizes.
I’ve still been obnoxiously tired much of the time though. It’s really getting in the way.
About a year ago, I was similarly tired all the time and saw a doctor, which led to a prescription for folic acid supplements… but then the medication stopped after like a month, with no repeat prescription? So whatever deficiency I had back then has presumably returned.
Apparently you can get folic acid supplements at the supermarket without a prescription, so I got and will try those… The label says they ‘help to support maternal tissue growth during pregnancy’, so I wonder how big my boobs will be in a while. Or maybe it’s my unborn child who will be born busty.
(ChatGPT reassured me that it is indeed the child that benefits from a pregnant mother’s folic acid, though in the growth of its neurons or something, apparently. HOW INTERESTING.)
I’m subscribed to r/comics, r/webcomics, and similar things over on Reddit, and see comics from those pretty much every day. For whatever reason, most seem poorly drawn, in a way that shows a lack of skill rather than intention. Most of them have content that doesn’t appeal to me.
One stood out for its unique psychedelic visual style and bizarre humour; it was several steps above most of the stuff there. The creator - u/rawdawgcomics - also posted bizarrely often, claiming in comments to draw three comics a day.
His comics quickly became popular, and he started his own subreddit, r/rawdawgcomics, which was created about two months ago and which already has 23k members. Posts there regularly get thousands of upvotes, too.
Here’s a recent example of one of his comics:
Surely no further explanation is needed.
Most of them seem to be about this gay couple: an arsehole dog and a ‘twink’ rabbit. Many of the comics are just them being a couple, in a way I can’t exactly relate to as someone who’s been alone for many years now. Or they’re sexual in a ‘kinky’ way that doesn’t resonate with my preferences or experiences. So the content’s usually not really my kind of thing.
The reason I’m mentioning this though is because I’ve been watching the community grow around the comics and creator with curiosity. Lots of people take interest in the characters (what are their last names? How did they meet? What’s their favourite sex position??), and people regularly post fan art of them that they’ve clearly put a lot of effort into. Even though the comics themselves don’t present that much content to work with.
The gay and furry angles seem to appeal maybe to younger demographics for whom identity and sex have been big parts of their experience growing up, maybe? In a way that my stuff probably doesn’t.
The creator also engages with the community in a way that’s brusque and memey; very unlike my long detailed rants about my personal issues. His work suggests his mind’s not exactly healthy, but he doesn’t really go into the specifics with words.
And the result - at least from what I’ve seen - is the rapid growth of a friendly, supportive community who love engaging with the art he’s putting out.
He does produce art very frequently, though; that’s definitely a factor.
Anyway, I suppose it’s hard not to compare, as a creator myself who’s had more painful experiences building a community around my work in the past. Makes me think how I should have done things differently, or how I could do them differently were I to try to break out of my shell in future. Which I probably should.
(While I’m mentioning comics on Reddit, I personally prefer this one in terms of actual content.)
There have been a few developments in the world of UFOs/UAPs recently, several hearings and whistleblower interviews and the like. I’ve tried to watch or read some of what’s going on, but it’s all hearsay about the minutiae of military bureaucracy that just makes my mind turn off.
I want to know things like this! How did life evolve on a world other than Earth? Are we similar? Very different? Are they even life as we know it??
I’m far less interested to read that “the contract number ‘HHM402-08-C-0072’ in the first image [of a supposedly leaked powerpoint presentation] corresponds to a contract awarded to BAASS by the DIA in 2008. This contract was specifically for BAASS to conduct research and investigations into UAPs and related phenomena as part of AATIP”.
A sign in the background of one of the hearings was for something called the UAP Disclosure Fund, whose logo looks like this:
HOW INTERESTING. It’s even got Fracture destroyed and everything! Surely this means Alora Fane is actually real and UAPFOs are it; that’s the solution everyone’s looking for. Of course. And they’re all piloted by Elarna.
Wait, are the Elarna even one of Alora Fane’s races anymore?? Also, am I still using Alora Fane as a setting?? I’ve been wondering about that while adding art etc to this website revision, since my most recent plans for Dreamons aren’t necessarily set in the mediaeval fantasy version of the world I previously imagined, and I’m not even sure what the races of Alora Fane are anymore since I tried to revise them in late 2022 but they weren’t well-received. Ehh. Maybe I should think about that at some point.