Finally have the frame of mind to want to share something - I've lately been feeling pretty crappy honestly, overwhelmed with work and health stuff. I just spent like 3 hours trying to optimize the aesthetics of my phone, both inside and out, because I was thinking that I'm pretty sure a major reason I've been feeling crappy has to do with interacting with stuff I don't want to interact with online, so I spent some time making a way to surround myself with only things I like.

Recently I've come to think of myself as a person whose primary love language is gift giving/receiving. Of course I think all five love languages are incredibly important! But I've realized that the physical, tangible aspect of material goods is something I find really comforting: while all other aspects of love are arguably more ephemeral, physical manifestations of one's love for you, knowing they're thinking of you, etc. can be ever present in my line of sight, and to me they emit this aura, like a buff in a video game, of warmth and happiness. Again I stress that I love all aspects of love, but I think things that are corporeally "there" (not just physical sensation, but also things that encompass smell, or yes, aesthetic/visual aspects in the virtual online world) have this persistence and permanence to some extent that makes me really happy.

The two main things that I think have influenced me this way, other than just inherent sort of personality, are this:

It shows a girl sitting in a pink frilly room and says, "I bought something cute for the first time in my life.", referring to the black dumbbell she is holding. In the next image it is pink and bedazzled and the text says, "But I made it look cute."

Apparently this is from a short film called Miztterr Rokoko/Mister Rococo; I always thought it was from Kamikaze Girls.

When Marie Kondo first got big during Covid, to be honest, as a maximalist who loves stuff, I thought it was a bit dumb and/or condescending. But after some time, I realized I was misunderstanding her. In my own way, I'm pretty sure I still am, in that, I will always love stuff, I would never be minimalist lol, BUT what has been really helpful for me and where these two images synergize is this:

I do find that I feel and live and function best when I am surrounded by things that make me happy. And when I say that out loud, clearly that sounds perfectly reasonable, I think! However, I feel a lot of people get hung up on things they take issue with, like materialism, frivolousness, childishness, what they perceive to be hoarding, etc. But for me, emphasis on my happiness and pleasure in life, basically hedonism, I think has been my most important and core philosophy. For me, this doesn't mean constantly engaging in purely leisurely pursuits and that it's the ONLY thing that matters, but for me, if I don't have things around me that make me happy and feel loved and like there is beauty in the world, I can't even take the next step to do schoolwork, eat healthy, exercise, etc. And while that may sound childish to some, redirecting back to the first image, I can simply make things in my life cute - it doesn't have to take a lot of money or whatnot!

TLDR, I think romanticizing and cuteifying my life is the most important value for me to keep in order to live my life healthily and do all that I should be doing. Here's a picture of my phone case that I just made by supergluing a bunch of buttons to a case:
The photo inside is me and my Sasa on my 26th birthday :3

Thanks for reading all of this! I know the good people of Neocities totally know what's up when I say all this... but I've just been feeling down interacting with basically Internet trolls for a few days who seem disgusted at the idea of taking pleasure in the little things. I can't stand people who think the best way to live is pure asceticism...

Long time no update! :P School has been kicking my ass tbh. But I'd really like to come noodle around here again soon, I even added it to my year's vision board hehe.
Wishing new year's luck and possibilities for everyone!

Happy (belated) Halloween :) Just wanted to share some pics of me and Sasa yesterday, we were old Internet themed essentially hehe, I'm frutiger aero and he's emo :p

I honestly ate way too much candy...

Went to the beach yesterday and felt really peaceful. I've been recurringly struggling for a bit with feelings of insecurity and instability despite the fact that my life is in a better spot than it has been for a long time... I think it's because of the unfamiliarity of stability and real love to me, but in that moment at the beach, I thought about the grains of sand; under a microscope, they look so huge and detailed and complex. I thought about what it would be like if I was a bug, like an ant, and the sand would be huge to me, and I would see that level of detail with my naked eye. I thought about what a gift it is to be a human, so complex and with a consciousness.

Video I took.

Sand under a microscope.

Built up this site between last last night and through today too. Couldn't stop thinking about it, even in my sleep. So much in my life is so different now. When I made my old site, my life was in a very difficult spot - sustained discomfort for a few years, actually, but having come to a head in March 2023. The old site was a way for me to distract myself and also do something I'm "good at" that I can feel proud of, and actually, it worked well for that purpose, and I'm really happy I did it. That being said, I'm also aware that there was still a strong undercurrent of "fronting" at that time - doing things because I wanted to look a certain way rather than so-called "true desire". I know that these terms can be hard to define - after all, how can I say the current version of this site is completely divorced from wanting to have or project a certain aesthetic appearance? That being said, I know in my heart that my old site was built from desperation to try to reach my "true self", whereas now I feel vastly more clear headed and lucid of what my true desires, goals, and so forth are. Overall, I found building this new site vastly more comfortable - I can't deny that partly it's thanks to the more prebuilt nature of the template I'm using, although I did make lots of edits drawing upon the html of the old site - the entire notebook background image here I edited in Photopea, lol.

I've noticed so many changes in everything ever in my world. It's not to say my older site, with its comparatively more brutal, gloomy medieval theme, has no place in my heart and identity anymore - it definitely does and always will! That being said, I simply realize I don't feel a constant sort of gloom and doom as I did before (for reasons that are obvious to me, but maybe not necessary to spell out here), and I'm just not all that invested in "the darkness" anymore. I used to have an active academic path in areas like white nationalism and other kinds of political extremism because the extremity and harshness of the terrain had a magnetic draw for me. It feels funny to think how much of that had to do with just... my worse mood overall. But now, I find myself pretty disinterested in engaging with those kinds of things - I'm in love for the first time, and my world is bright, full of color and life, and I just want to do things that make me happy.